'Oh, but I do know the answer, Rafiel. Mosay told me what it was. It's-'
'Go on, Cele,' he said bitterly. 'Auf wiedersehen. The answer to that riddle is "a man", but I can see why it would be hard for somebody like you to figure it out.'
Because, of course, he thought as he entered the lobby of his condo, none of these eternally youthful ones would ever experience the tottery, 'three-legged', ancient-with-acane phase of life.*
'Welcome back, Rafiel,' someone called, and Rafiel saw for the first time that the lobby was full of paparazzi. They were buzzing at him in mild irritation, a little annoyed because they had missed him at the hospital, but nevertheless resigned to waiting on the forgivable whim of a superstar.
It was one of the things that Rafiel had had to resign himself to, long ago. It was a considerable nuisance. On the other hand, to be truthful, it didn't take much resignation. When the paps were lurking around for you, it proved your fame, and it was always nice to have renewed proof of that. He gave them a smile for the cameras, and a quick cut-and-point couple of steps of a jig - it was a number from his biggest success, the Here's Hamlet! of two years earlier. 'Yes,' he said, answering all their questions at once, 'I'm out of the hospital, I'm back in shape, and I'm hot to trot on the new show that Mosay's putting together for me, Oedipus Rex.' He started toward the door of his own flat. A woman put herself in his way.
'Raysia,' she introduced herself, as though one name were enough for her, too. 'I'm here for the interview.'
He stopped dead. Then he recognized the face. Yes, one name was enough, for a top pap with her own syndicate. 'Raysia, dear! Cosi bella to see you here, but - what interview are we talking about?'
'Your dramaturge set the appointment up last week,' she explained. And, of course, that being so, there was nothing for Rafiel to do but to go through with it, making a mental note to get back to Mosay at the first opportunity to complain at not having been told.
But giving an interview was not a hard thing to do, after all, not with all the practice Rafiel had had. He fixed the woman up with a drink and a comfortable chair and took his place at the exercise barre in his study - he always liked to be working when he was interviewed, to remind them he was a dancer. First, though, he had a question. It might not have occurred to him if Docilia hadn't made him think of lost Alegretta, but now he had to ask it. He took a careful first position at the barre and swept one arm gracefully aloft as he asked, 'Does your syndicate go to Mars?'
'Of course. I'm into toutes les biospheres,' she said proudly, 'not just Mars, but Mercury and the moons and nearly every orbiter. As well as, naturally, the whole planet Earth.'
'That's wonderful,' he said, intending to flatter her and doing his best to sound as though this sort of thing hadn't ever happened to him before. Slowly, carefully, he did his barre work, hands always graceful, getting full extension on the legs, her camera following automatically as he answered her questions. Yes, he felt fine. Yes, they were going to get into production on the new Oedipus right away - yes, he'd heard the score, and yes, he thought it was wonderful. 'And the playwright,' he explained, 'is the greatest writer who ever lived. Wonderful old Sophocles, two thousand nearly seven hundred years old, and the play's as fresh as anything today.'
She looked at him with a touch of admiration for an actor who had done his homework. 'Have you read it?'
He hadn't done that much homework, though he fully intended to. 'Well, not in the original,' he admitted, since a non-truth was better than a lie.
'I have,' she said absently, thinking about her next question - disconcertingly, too. Rafiel turned around at the barre to work on the right leg for a while. Hiding the sudden, familiar flash of resentment.
'Vous etes terrible,' he chuckled, allowing only rueful amusement to show. 'All of you! You know so much.' For they all did, and how unfair. Imagine! This child - this ancient twenty-year-old - reading a Greek play in the original, and not even Greek, he thought savagely, but whatever rough dialect had been spoken nearly three thousand years ago.
'Mais pourquoi non? We have time,' she said, and got to her question. 'How do you feel about the end of the play?' she asked.
'Where Oedipus blinds himself, you mean?' he tried, doing his best to sort out what he had been told of the story. 'Yes, that's pretty bloody, isn't it? Stabbing out his own eyes, that's a very powerful-'
She was shaking her head. 'No, pas du tout, I don't mean the blinding scene. I mean at the very end, where the chorus says' - her voice changed as she quoted –
See proud Oedipus!
He proves that no mortal
Can ever be known to be happy
Until he is allowed to leave this life,
Until he is dead,
And cannot suffer any more.
She paused, fixing him with her eye while the camera zeroed in to catch every fleeting shade of expression on his face. 'I'm not a very good translator,' she apologized, 'but do you feel that way, Rafiel? I mean, as a mortal?'
Actors grow reflexes for situations like that - for the times when a fellow player forgets a line, or there's a disturbance from the audience - when something goes wrong and everybody's looking at you and you have to deal with it. He dealt with it. He gave her a sober smile and opened his mouth. 'Hai, that's so true, in a way,' he heard his mouth saying. 'N'est ce pas? I mean, not just for me but, credo, for all of us? It doesn't matter however long we live, there's always that big final question at the end that we call "death", and all we have to confront it with is courage. And that's the lesson of the story, I think: courage! To face all our pains and fears and go on anyway!'
It wasn't good, he thought, but it was enough. Raysia shut off her camera, thanked him, asked for an autograph and left; and as soon as the door was closed behind her Rafiel was grimly on the phone.
But Mosay wasn't answering, had shut himself off. Rafiel left him a scorching message and sat down, with a drink in his hand, to go through his mail. He was not happy. He scrolled quickly through the easy part - requests for autographs, requests for personal appearances, requests for interviews. He didn't have to do anything about most of them; he rerouted them through Mosay's office and they would be dealt with there.
A note from a woman named Hillaree could not be handled in that way. She was a dramaturge herself- had he ever heard of her? He couldn't be sure; there were thousands of them, though few as celebrated as Mosay. Still, she had a proposition for Rafiel. She wanted to talk to him about a 'wonderful' (she said) new script. The story took place on one of the orbiting space habitats, a place called Hakluyt, and she was, she said, convinced that Rafiel would be determined to do it, if only he would read the script.
Rafiel thought for a moment. He wasn't convinced at all. Still, on consideration, he copied the script to file without looking at it. Perhaps he would read the script, perhaps he wouldn't; but he could imagine that, in some future conversation with Mosay, it might be useful to be able to mention this other offer.
He sent a curt message to this Hillaree to tell her to contact his agent and then, fretful, stopped the scroll. He wasn't concentrating. Raysia's interview had bothered him. 'We have time' indeed! Of course they did. They had endless time, time to learn a dead language, just for the fun of it, as Rafiel himself might waste an afternoon trying to learn how to bowl or paraglide at some beach. They all had time - all but Rafiel himself and a handful of other unfortunates like him - and it wasn't fair!