'Oh, mon cher,' she said, 'you know I didn't mean anything personal by that!'
'Of course you didn't,' he said reassuringly; but all the same, the happy buzz of the day's good rehearsing was lost, the evening's edge was gone, and long before they had finished their leisurely supper, he had abandoned any plan of inviting her back to his condo for the night.
It did spoil the evening for him. Too early for sleep, too late to make any other arrangements, he wandered alone through his condo. He tried reading, but it seemed like a lot of effort. He glanced toward the bar, but his muscles were sore enough already from the day's work-out. He switched on the vid, roaming the channels to see if there was anything new and good, but there wasn't. A football series coming to its end in Katmandu, an election in Uruguay - who cared about such things? He paused over a story about a habitat now being fitted out with engines to leave the solar system: it was the one named Hakluyt and it held his interest for a moment because of that silly woman, Hillaree, with her script. It would be interesting, he thought, to take that final outward leap to another star ... Of course, not for him, who would be long dead before the expedition could hope to arrive. He switched to the obituaries - his favourite kind of news - but the sparse list held no names that interested him. He switched again to the entertainment channels. There was a new situation comedy that he had heard about. The name was Dachau, and he remembered that one of the parts was played by a woman he had slept with a few times, years ago. Now she was playing a - a what? - a concentration-camp guard in Germany in World War II, it seemed. It was a comic part; she was a figure of fun as the Jews and Gypsies and political enemies who were inmates constantly mocked and outwitted her. It did have its funny bits. Rafiel laughed as one of the inmates, having escaped to perform some heroic espionage feat for the Allies, was sneaked back into the camp under the very eyes of the commandant. Still, he wondered if things had really ever been that jolly in the real concentration camps of the time, where the real death ovens burned all day and all night.
It all depended on whether you were personally involved, he thought.
And then he switched it off, thinking of Docilia. He shouldn't have been so curt with her. She couldn't help being what she was. If death seemed comical to the deathless, was that her fault? Hadn't most of the world, for centuries on end, found fun in the antics of the dwarves and the deformed, even making them jesters at their courts? Perhaps the hunchbacks themselves hadn't found anything to laugh at - but that was their point of view.
As his attitude toward dying was his own.
He thought for a moment of calling Docilia to apologize - perhaps the evening might be salvaged yet. Then he remembered what Mosay had said about personal messages and scrolled them up.
The first one was personal, all right, and a surprise. It was a talking message, and as soon as the picture cleared he recognized the face of the man who happened to have been his biological father.
The man hadn't changed a bit. (Well, why would he, in a mere ninety-some years?) He was as youthful and as handsome as he had been when, on a rare visit, he had somewhat awkwardly taken young Rafiel on his knee. 'I saw you were in the krankhaus again,' the man in the screen said, with the look of someone who was paying a duty call on an ailing friend - not a close one, though. 'It reminded me we haven't heard from each other in a long time. I'm glad everything fait bon, Rafiel - son - and, really, you and I ought to have lunch together some prossimo giomo.'
That was it. Rafiel froze the picture before it disappeared, to study the dark, well-formed face of the man whose genes he had carried. But the person behind the face eluded him. He sighed, shrugged and turned to the other message....
And that one made him stiffen in his chair, with astonishment too sharp to be joy.
It wasn't an imaged message, or even a spoken one; it was a faxed note, in a crabbed, nearly illegible handwriting that he knew very welclass="underline"
Dearest Rafiel, I was so glad to hear you got through another siege with the damned doctors. Mazeltov. I'm sending you a little gift to celebrate your recovery - and to remind you of me, because I think of you so very often.
What the gift was he could not guess, because it hadn't arrived yet, but the note was signed, most wonderfully signed:
For always, your Alegretta.
6
Naturally, all kinds of connections and antipathies appear among the Oedipus troupe as they come together. Charlus is the sire of Docilia 's unborn child. Andrev, who is to play the Creon, is the son of the composer of the score, Victorium. Ormeld, the Priest, and Andrev haven't acted together for thirty-five years, because of a nasty little firefight over billing in what happened to be the first production in which either got an acting credit. (They hug each other with effusive but wary joy when they come together in the rehearsal hall.) Sander, the Tiresias, studied acting under Mosay when Mosay had just abandoned his own dramatic career (having just discovered how satisfying the god-behind-the-scenes role of a dramaturge was). Sander is still just a little awed by his former teacher. All these interconnections are quite separate from the ordinary who-had-been-sleeping-with-whom sort of thing. They had to be kept that way. If people dragged up that sort of ancient history they'd never get everything straight. Actually, nobody is dragging anything up - at least, not as far as the surface where it can be seen. On the contrary. Everybody is being overtly amiable to everybody else and conspicuously consecrated to the show, so far. True, they haven't yet had much chance to be anything else, since it's only the first day of full-cast rehearsal.
Although Mosay was still off scouting for locations - somewhere in Turkey, somebody said, though why anybody would want to go to Turkey no one could imagine - he had taken time to talk to them all by grid on the first day. 'Line up, everybody,' he ordered, watching them through the monitor over his camera. 'What I want you to do is just a quick runthrough of the lines. Don't sing. Don't dance, don't even act - we just want to say the words and see each other. Docilia, please leave Charlus alone for a minute and pay attention. Victorium will proctor for me, while I' - a small but conspicuous sigh; Mosay had not forgotten his acting skills - 'keep trying to find the right location for our production.'
Actually it was Rafiel who was paying least attention, because his mind was full of lost Alegretta. Now, perhaps, found again? For you never forgot your first love.
Well, yes, you did, sometimes, but Rafiel never had. Never could have, in spite of the sixty or seventy - could it have been eighty? a hundred? - other women he had loved, or at least made love to, in the years since then. Alegretta had been something very special in his life.
He was twenty years old then, a bright young certain-to-be-a-star song and dance man. Audiences didn't know that yet, because he was still doing the kind of thing you had to start out with, cheap simulations and interactives, where you never got to make your own dramatic statement. The trade was beginning to know him, though, and Rafiel was quite content to be working his way up in the positive knowledge that the big break was sure to come. (And it had come, no more than a year later.)