"Good luck," Uncle Ed burbled, his head sinking beneath the water.
I had needed a little luck, and some thespian and confidence skills to talk my way past busybodies at the spaceport with too much time on their hands, but I had made it. (What had the name of Uncle Ed's yacht been? Eclair? Bonbon?? Something sweet and sticky, I remember that much.) Anyway, with visions of sugarplums—and Uncle Ed's bloated frame—dancing in my head, I had made my escape from Luna, from my father, from Sparky, from everyone who was looking to do me ill or do me good. For almost fifty years I had never shown my real face or revealed my real name. Only recently had I begun to admit once more to being "Sparky," though only in the outer planets, and found to my surprise that I was still remembered.
I had been back to Luna twice since then, when the lure of a role was just too much. I had used ironclad false identification, never the same name. All this had put a severe crimp in my career. No sooner would I start to get good notices, build up a reputation in my current pseudonym, than I'd feel the hot breath of pursuit and take off for a new venue, with a new identity. Practically speaking, no one had been looking for me for thirty or forty years now, I felt reasonably sure. But old habits die hard, and the guilty flee before the bad reviews are out.
And now I was about to return to Luna once more. Luna, the fabled Golden Globe. I could see it out the window of the lifeboat as Poly and I strapped ourselves in for the last leg of the journey. At certain distances it really does look golden, though usually I'd describe it as more of a buttermilk shade. Mount it on a gilt pedestal and you could give it out as an award.
There really had been an award called the Golden Globe once, years before the Invasion. My father had told me about it. It was handed out by a group called the Hollywood Foreign Press Association in honor of the year's best work in motion pictures.
"Not the Foreign Film Critics, you'll notice," he had told me. "Just a bunch of reporters from other countries who used to get together, forty or fifty of them, to have a dinner and hand out awards to any film people desperate enough to show up and get drunk with them. After a while, being reporters, they started giving out press releases about who'd won. On a slow news day, some papers would pick up the story. And then things snowballed. Before long, they had their own television show, full of stars, just as if the award meant something. They managed to upstage the Oscars, and the awards might as well have been given out by the Podunk Rotary Club for all they had to do with film.
"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.