So I take pleasure in seeing how this or that enclave has grown. I was delighted at Oberon, and when I return, if ever, I'm sure it will delight me again to see the wheel complete.
But Luna is a little different. Luna is, and always will be, "home." Unstable as my early childhood was, numerous as my "homes" might have been, it was always Luna, the fabulous Golden Globe, that I hailed from. There's a bit of snobbery in that, something like the way the residents of New York, London, Paris, or Rome might have felt. All roads lead to the Big Apple, as it were. If you're from somewhere else, you're from nowhere. If you can make it here, you can make it anywhere.
But the other part is the same, I suspect, whether you hail from The City or from Catfish Row, from the Golden Globe or from Bottom. You sort of wish it would stay the same. You'd like to go back and find something familiar.
You'd like to think you can go home.
You can't, of course. Even if the old hometown is stagnant as a played-out mine, it's gotten older, and so have you. You look at it through different eyes. The ivy on the old castle walls has grown thicker, the paint on the old shack has peeled off. More likely, the old castle has been torn down to make room for a housing development, and the shack... well, you can't even locate where it was. It gives you a certain feeling of transience.
My whole life has been transient. When I go home, I want to return to something solid.
Fat chance. I spent my first few hours wandering aimlessly through the broad commercial corridors of King City, a place I used to know like Act One of Julius Caesar, always just a little bit lost.
I spent a few hours training and slidewalking to various haunts from my past, finding most of them either no longer there or so changed as to be almost unrecognizable. It had been a good many years since I had dared return to Luna, and even that had been a rash chance on my part. After that many years, even if the place is still there and not much altered physically, the people are different. Where's that old gang of mine? Moved, most often. Hanging out somewhere else. So I moved on, too, on to the Rialto.
For drama in the English language, the de facto tongue of our time, when you think Theater District, you think Broadway. London may have eclipsed it in some ways, in some eras, but it never had the glitter. Shortly pre-Invasion, the theater scene in Miami was certainly one to reckon with. But how many songs can you think of about Collins Avenue?
No, the Great White Way was the theater Mecca... until The Rialto came along.
It had to be that way. Luna is by far the most populous of the inhabited planets. King City is the biggest city in Luna, three times larger than its nearest competitor. Our civilization is blessed or cursed with more leisure time than any in history. The urge to find something to do can get a little desperate. The living theater was never going to give movies and television much competition for the leisure dollar, but even a tiny fraction of the Lunarians' vast disposable income was enough to support a broad boulevard two miles long and bespangled with more theatrical jewels than the Tsarina's Tiara. When the "day" lights dimmed overhead and the marquees lit up, the street didn't so much glitter as explode in colored light.
I strolled down the avenue, hands jammed in my pockets, wishing for a fedora hat and a studio cloudburst so I could be Gene Kelly singin' in the rain. I wanted to hoof it through the shoeshine parlor like Fred Astaire in The Band Wagon. I was George M. Cohan, a Yankee Doodle boy. I was a brass band, a wild Count Basie blast, the bells of St. Peter's in Rome, and tissue paper on a comb. If I had a home, this was it. The center of the universe.
Oh, I'm not saying it was all familiar. Twenty years earlier a fever of renovation had swept down The Rialto like a demented dervish, and not all the changes were to my liking. The street was now lined with lampposts pretending to be gaslights; some spavined city planner's idea of "quaint," I shouldn't wonder. A lot of the old neon—a quaint vision I did like—had been replaced with higher-tech lighting effects that tended to overload the senses. But these things come and go; I can live with them. The important thing was the theaters themselves, dozens of them, strung out or bunched together, flashing into the artificial "night" the names of old friends and new arrivals: A Doll's House, Twelfth Night, Padlock, Into the Woods, Forget-Me-Not, The Wild Woman, School for Scandal. Oh, and the human friends, too, though you never could tell. You could figure that, even fifty years later, most of them would still be alive, in the physical sense. Professionally, it was another matter. It's a cruel trade. Some thought destined for glory by their own generation could be forgotten very quickly. Others who had labored hard for three, four, five decades became overnight sensations.
Legends? Our time doesn't produce a lot of them. It's a lot easier to become a legend if you die, close the book, and let the legend makers get to work. Mere stardom can be conveyed willy-nilly and last no longer than a soap bubble. So no one is going to chisel your name in stone until everyone's sure you're not coming back to be an embarrassment.
About half the theaters on The Rialto had achieved landmark status. You might buy and sell the structures, but you couldn't tear them down and the names were there forever. The rest were up for grabs. I wasn't familiar with this "Golden Globe" house and I had forgotten the address as the months went by, but I recalled thinking it couldn't be far from the site of my last appearance as Sparky: the late lamented John Valentine Theater.
I was right. It was in the neighborhood. Like everything else, the neighborhood had changed, but I knew approximately where I was.
I walked up and down in front of it. It had been so long since I'd played in a real Rialto theater I just wanted to get a feel for the place again. I liked what I saw. Something called Two Problems in Logic was playing, a title I wasn't familiar with, though the writer and director were both known to me. Only two players were listed, one with her name above the title, and I had never heard of either of them. That was depressing.
Pushing one of the brass-and-glass doors, I entered a long, thick-carpeted lobby in lavender and ecru. Spaced along the walls were posters from past productions at the Golden Globe. I gathered the house specialized in new works by established playwrights, though there was the occasional old war-horse guaranteed to put butts in seats, and a few revivals of faded stars who'd only had the one hit, reprising the role for the ninety-ninth time.
Finally I came to the back of the theater itself, and looked down a long aisle to the stage.
There was something oddly familiar about it.
I walked down a few rows and looked around. Even more familiar.
I hurried back to the lobby, paused to get my bearings, and followed a branching corridor that led to the rest rooms. Just beyond them was a bank of fire exit doors. My heart was hammering as I banged through one of them, setting off a distant alarm. I found myself outside on a side street, around the corner from the main entrance. It was a narrow way, not quite an alley, and just off to my left was a small park with a gazebo that, other than a fresh coat of paint, had not changed in seventy years.
The Golden Globe was the John Valentine Theater.
I staggered into the park and collapsed on a bench.
Memories.
"En garde!" Valentine shouted, and slashed at his son's face.
It was a backhand stroke, and the tip of the blade drew a red line on Kenneth's left cheek. There was no more pain than from a razor cut. He touched his cheek with his free hand and looked at the blood on his fingers.
"I said en garde, sir," Valentine said. "Raise your weapon."
Kenneth slowly did so.
"Are you ready this time?"
He nodded.
"Then fight, damn you." Valentine slashed again, not quite as quickly. Kenneth parried the move, felt the clash of blade up through his wrist. And here, the blade was coming at him again, and he parried once more, and again, and again... and his father's blade tore through the fabric of his sleeve. This time he felt some pain, and a wet heat as blood ran down his arm.
"Again." And once more the sword was flashing in his face. He got the blade up just in time. But no sooner had he fended off the first thrust than another was coming at him. And another, and another.
Parry, riposte. Sixte, seconde. The words flew around in his mind, mocking him. I'll bet you wish you'd studied now, they said. Frantically, he tried to remember, but it just wasn't there. If you had to think about it, you were already too late. Your body must simply respond. Thinking was for the attack, and it would be a long time before young Kenneth was ready for that. The best he could do was try to keep his blade up, try to keep it between his body and the slashing, hungry steel that had a life of its own. That's what it had to be. His father could not be trying to kill him.
He felt pain again. This time it was his hip. A thrusting wound, this one hurt more than all the others put together. Others... how many were there now? Five? Six? He had lost count.
He was blinded by sweat. He stopped, turned his back, wiped his face with his sleeve. Then he turned around and tried to smile.
"I yield!" he shouted. "The first lesson has gone badly for me, I admit it. But I'll work all night, and you'll see a new man for lesson number two." He dropped his sword. "Now, do you want to do some blocking on that scene? Maybe we should get Tybalt in here to help."
"Pick up your weapon, sir."
"Father, I—"
"Your weapon, sir!"
Slowly, Kenneth reached down and took the bloody hilt.
"En garde." And once more the blade flashed.