"Draw your own moral from this, Sparky. And remember, at the center of the cult of personality called stardom there is just a big empty hole. Awards don't matter. Acclaim doesn't matter. Only your craft matters."
We were already sore and a bit cranky from a day and a half at one gee. When the lifeboat engine fired it hit hard, and we didn't have the padding we'd used aboard Hal. But it wasn't a terribly long boost. The first lifeboat fell away—really nothing more than an engine and fuel tank, after Hal modified it in his repair shop. By the time the second one fired Luna was looming much larger in my window. This was a bit gentler, but still rough.
The lifeboat engine coughed out its last while we were still ten meters above the surface. Considering that all the calculations had been done at the orbit of Uranus, I would call this cutting it close. We dropped, and hit with a jar and a crunch of metal. There was a faint hiss audible from the cabin, a sound no Lunarian likes to hear, but we were in our suits, and the boat's tripod landing gear kept us from falling over.
We struggled to our feet, wrestled our luggage into the lock, and stepped out onto the surface. There was no one but Poly to hear my first words, but I set them down here for the sake of history.
"That was one heck of a giant leap for an old actor."
I was home.
ACT 5
KING LEAR
ACT I SCENE I
(from The Five-Minit Bard)
King Lear's Palace
Enter Lear, Goneril, Regan, Cordelia, Gloucester, Kent
LEAR: Hey, you! Go get Burgundy and the Frog! I'm an old fart, and I'm pooped. I'm outta here.
GONERIL: Gimme the kingdom, 'cause I love you and kiss your royal ass.
REGAN: Me, too, Daddy, but twice as much!
LEAR: What about you, sweets?
CORDELIA: You're cool, Pops.
LEAR: Well, fuck you! You don't get nothing. You two bitches split it up.
KENT: You're fuckin' up, big man.
LEAR: Fuck you, too! Screw!
(Exit Kent; Enter Duke of Burgundy and King of France)
BURGUNDY: No cash? Fuck me! I don't want her, then!
FRANCE: I'll take her.
CORDELIA: Cool!
LEAR: Take the bitch, then. I'm outta here.
(Exit Lear and court)
FRANCE: Let's screw.
CORDELIA: Cool!
(Exit France and Cordelia)
GONERIL: He's one nutty old fuck!
REGAN: Let's fuck him over.
GONERIL: Okay.
(Exit Goneril and Regan)
EDMUND: (aside) I'm one double-crossing bastard!
(Exit)
There are seasons in the life of a Shakespearean actor, natural milestones he can expect along the path of his career. The two most important are Romeo and Lear.
Romeo is a young man's game. Impetuous and energetic, thunderstruck by the storms of puberty, stunned by love. It's not a part for the mature, though God knows it's been played by enough codgers. As I've just related, Romeo was a disaster for me. I don't have much affection for the role.
Macbeth is on his way up. Hamlet and Henry V are vigorous and youthful. Othello and Julius Caesar are in the full flower of their careers.
There are innumerable other roles an actor can essay—a few he can find himself stuck in as a second stringer or a comic. But if one has hopes of being written in the annals of the great, if one aspires to acquire the mantle of Burbage and Olivier, then the capstone of his career will be Lear.
Lear.
In the seventy years since my days as Sparky, the closest I had ever come to playing Lear was in an engaging little trifle called The Five-Minit Bard, a small part of which is set out above.
Oh, the fun we had. The premise was simple: all Shakespeare in one night, no play longer than five minutes. Each was done in a different style. Hamlet as if by Gilbert and Sullivan, with a patter song and a happy ending. All's Well That Ends Well as rewritten by Beckett, with performers sitting in chairs, muttering bits of dialogue and abandoning the project after three minutes. Richard III the radio serial, one-minute episodes with sound effects scattered through the performance. Henry VI, all three parts, narrated by a super-rapid square-dance caller and done as a ballet a la Copland.
And A Midsummer Night's Dream as played by Sparky and his Gang, with guess who as Puck/Sparky. No one ever suspected.
Some were a lot shorter than five minutes, or the night would have run three hours, much too long for comedy. Timon of Athens: a man walks to center stage and says, "Nobody gives a damn about Timon of Athens," and walks off. Titus Andronicus: all cast members line up onstage, and at a signal, begin hacking at each other with swords, blood bladders spraying high-pressure Max Factor Red #2.
Then there was King Lear, as if done by the turn-of-the-century Rude Theater. Most critics hated 5MB, but it was a long-running hit. I played dozens of parts, including Lear.
I say these things in an attempt to explain why, after an absence of more than thirty years, I was returning to Luna. I had been there only twice since my hasty departure from Romeo. Things had been all too hot for me the last time I left—misunderstandings not affected by any statute of limitations—and I'd sworn a mighty oath never to return. Things would be even hotter now, with Isambard and the whole stinking planet of Charon on my trail, possibly already waiting for me. I didn't pretend they'd have any more trouble finding me here than they had at Oberon. If I had a brain in my head, I'd be hopping the first tramp free-faller to points unspecified and mysterious. I'd be doing the thing I had become so good at: losing myself in the vast spaces of the solar system.
But I never even thought of that, and the reason was simple.
Lear.
Not only Lear, but Lear staged by the greatest director of our time, my long-ago sidekick and onetime best friend—only friend—Kaspara Polichinelli.
And by now Polly probably didn't have a lot of time left.
Almost from the first blast at Oberon, I had been absorbed with the question of where to land when we reached Luna. Adept though I am at producing false identification and talking my way through any difficulties, simply setting down at the King City Spaceport in a spent lifeboat was bound to draw unwanted attention.
But I had some advantages. By the nature of space and of space travel, "border patrol" around a place like Luna is an iffy proposition. Radar and computers can certainly track all the millions of approaching, departing, and orbiting vehicles in the vast sphere, one thousand miles from the surface, that the lawyers have defined as Lunar territorial space. But having done that, what do you do next? Allow landings and takeoffs only at designated spots, like major spaceports? Ten million weekend orienteers, campers, and renters of shorthoppers would raise quite a howl about that one. Not to mention a million freeholders living in self-sufficient isolation, scattered over the entire Lunar surface. Should we ask these folks to hoof it to the nearest train? Allow only surface transportation to hiking trails and camp resorts? No, Lunarians will surrender certain of their civil rights, just like anyone else, if the reason is strong enough. If people are blowing up spaceships with bombs, they will submit to searches before boarding a spaceship. But ban private hoppers, orbiters, or even deep-space RVs... to stop smugglers? To keep a lid on illegal immigration? 'Fraid not, Senator.
So. How about employing sophisticated computer programs to keep track of deep-space arrivals, matching these up with vehicle transponder codes and criminal rap sheets and travel patterns and godknowswhatelse, and following suspicious ships to ask a few questions and conduct a quick Gestapo-style shakedown?