“No,” she says. “You don’t understand. I just came to the audition because my friends were going. And they really aren’t my friends. They’re just people I work with. I don’t know what I’m doing.”
“Okay, if you’re not an actress,” he asks her, “then what are you?”
She doesn’t answer. Yves signals for one of the golden glitter-covered cages to be moved slightly to the left.
“I probably won’t even stay with the show,” Nadia says. “I’ll probably have to leave after opening night. I can’t be trusted.”
Yves throws up his hands. “Actors! Which of you can be trusted? But don’t worry. We’ll all be leaving. This show tours .”
Nadia expects him to cut her from the cast after every rehearsal, but he never does. She nearly cries with relief.
The goat boy smiles down at her from atop his goat legs. “I have a handkerchief. I’ll throw it to you if you want.”
“I’m fine,” Nadia says, rubbing her wet eyes.
“Lots of people weep after rehearsals.”
“Weird people,” she says, trying to make it a joke.
“If you don’t cry, how can you make anyone else cry? Theater is the last place where fools and the mad do better than regular folks…well, I guess music’s a little like that too.” He shrugs. “But still.”
Posters go up all over town. They show the magician in front of gleaming cages with bears and mermaids and foxes and a cat in a dress.
Nadia’s boyfriend doesn’t like all the time she spends away from home. Now, on Saturday nights, she doesn’t wait by the phone. She pushes her milk crate coffee table and salvaged sofa against the wall and practices her steps over and over until her downstairs neighbor bangs on his ceiling.
One night her boyfriend calls and she doesn’t pick up. She just lets it ring.
She has just realized that the date the musical premieres is the next time she is going to change. All she can do is stare at the little black book and her carefully noted temperatures. The ringing phone is like the ringing in her head.
I am so tired I want to die , Nadia thinks. Sometimes the thought repeats over and over and she can’t stop thinking it, even though she knows she has no reason to be so tired. She gets enough sleep. She gets more than enough sleep. Some days, she can barely drag herself from her bed.
Fighting the change only makes it more painful; she knows from experience.
The change cannot be stopped or reasoned with. It’s inevitable. Inexorable. It is coming for her. But it can be delayed. Once, she held on two hours past dusk, her whole body knotted with cramps. Once, she held out until the moon was high in the sky and her teeth were clenched so tight she thought they would shatter. She might be able to make it to the end of the show.
It shouldn’t matter to her. Disappointing people is inevitable. She will eventually get tired and angry and hungry. Someone will get hurt. Her boyfriend will run the pad of his fingers over her canines and she will bite down. She will wake up covered in blood and mud by the side of some road and not be sure what she’s done. Then she’ll be on the run again.
Being a werewolf means devouring your past.
Being a werewolf means swallowing your future.
Methodically, Nadia tears her notebook to tiny pieces. She throws the pieces in the toilet and flushes, but the chunks of paper clog the pipes.Waterspillsover the side and floods her bathroom with the soggy reminder of inevitability.
The opening night of the Aarne-Thompson Classification Revue ,the cast huddle together and wish each other luck. They paint their faces. Nadia’s hand shakes as she draws a new, red mouth over her own. Her skin itches. She can feel the fur inside of her, can smell her sharp, feral musk.
“Are you okay?” the mermaid asks.
Nadia growls softly. She is holding on, but only barely.
Yves is yelling at everyone. The costumers are pinning and duct-taping dresses that have split. Strap tear. Beads bounce along the floor. One of the chorus is scolding a girl who plays a talking goat. A violinist is pleading with his instrument.
“Tonight you are not going to be good ,” Marie, the choreographer, says.
Nadia grinds her teeth together. “I’m not good.”
“Good is forgettable.” Marie spits. “Good is common. You are not good. You are not common. You will show everyone what you are made of.”
Under her bear suit, Nadia can feel her arms beginning to ripple with the change. She swallows hard and concentrates on shrinking down into herself. She cannot explain to Marie that she’s afraid of what’s inside of her.
Finally, Nadia’s cue comes and she dances out into a forest of wooden trees on dollies and lets the magician trap her in a gold glitter-covered cage. Her bear costume hangs heavily on her, stinking of synthetic fur.
Performing is different with an audience. They gasp when there is a surprise. They laugh on cue. They watch her with gleaming, wet eyes. Waiting.
Her boyfriend is there, holding a bouquet of white roses. She’s so surprised to see him that her hand lifts involuntarily—as though to wave. Her fingers look too long, her nails too dark, and she hides them behind her back.
Nadia dances like a bear, like a deceitful princess, and then like a bear again. This time as the magician sings about how the jaybird will be revenged, Nadia really feels like he’s talking to her. When he lifts his gleaming wand, she shrinks back with real fear.
She loves this. She doesn’t want to give it up. She wants to travel with the show. She wants to stop going to bed early. She won’t wait by phone. She’s not a fake.
When the jump comes, she leaps as high as she can. Higher than she has at any rehearsal. Higher than in her dreams. She jumps so high that she seems to hang in the air for a moment as her skin cracks and her jaw snaps into a snout.
It happens before she can stop it and then, she doesn’t want it to stop. The change used to be the worst thing she could imagine. No more.
The bear costume sloughs off like her skin. Nadia falls into a crouch, four claws digging into the stage. She throws back her head and howls.
The goat boy nearly topples over. The magician drops his wand. On cue, the mermaid girl begins to sing. The musical goes on.
Roses slip from Nadia’s dentist-boyfriend’s fingers.
In the wings, she can see Marie clapping Yves on the back. Marie looks delighted.
There is a werewolf girl on the stage. It’s Saturday night. The crowd is on their feet. Nadia braces herself for their applause.
UNDER THE MOONS OF VENUS
DAMIEN BRODERICK
Damien Broderick is an award-winning Australian SF writer, editor, and critical theorist, a senior fellow in the School of Culture and Communication at the University of Melbourne, currently living in San Antonio, Texas, with a Ph.D. from Deakin University. He has published more than forty books, including Reading by Starlight , Transrealist Fiction , x, y, z, t: Dimensions of Science Fiction , Unleashing the Strange, and Chained to the Alien: The Best of Australian Science Fiction Review . The Spike was the first full-length treatment of the technological singularity, and Outside the Gates of Science is a study of parapsychology. His 1980 novel The Dreaming Dragons (revised in 2009 as The Dreaming ) is listed in David Pringle’s Science Fiction: The 100 Best Novels . His latest SF novel is the diptych Godplayers and K-Machines , written with the aid of a two-year Fellowship from the Literature Board of the Australia Council, and his recent SF collections are Uncle Bones and The Qualia Engine.