"Kenneth, you know my feelings on this matter. I only wish someone had killed him twenty years earlier. Someone else. God knows there were enough people who wanted to. And if I were serving as the judge, you'd go free. But from what I've read about the evidence they have, it will work out as some degree of manslaughter. Five to twenty years. Have you given any more thought to turning yourself in?"
Polly had suggested that fifty years ago. Even with her pitifully short allotment of years, she felt it was better to serve the time than to stay on the run. Get it over with.
There was a lot of wisdom in that, except for one thing. I couldn't do the time. I think I'd rather die. I smiled again, and shook my head.
"Then have you given any more thought to... the other thing."
She was speaking of the insanity defense. It was quite a narrow defense these days, but having an imaginary playmate, hearing voices... there was a good chance that would work.
I had not told Polly about Elwood. I'd spoken to no one about him, ever. But I had hinted at a few things one drunken night, and I think she had sensed a lot more. Not much gets by Polly, and during the years she had spent when we were closer than brother and sister I'm sure she had seen and heard some things she was too discreet to talk to me about.
Again, there was wisdom in the suggestion, except for one thing. I'd rather go to prison. Call it stupid pride if you wish. I'd never talk about Elwood, certainly never in a court of law, especially not to let him take the blame for my actions.
"No," I said. "That's out of the question."
"Then we're back to the first question. Do you have a name?"
I had several, of course.
My post-Sparky career had consisted of three sorts of jobs. Working from Pluto outward, I simply used my own name. Extraditions from those worlds to the inner planets were spotty at best, and arrests on fugitive warrants practically nonexistent. From the J-Trojans, the belt, Mars, and inward, I usually concocted a one-time-only identity, good for the length of the run, then abandoned. And I moved carefully. But from the S-Trojans to Neptune I had been able to foster half a dozen more substantial identities, even build a certain reputation for some of the names. I had citizenship papers that would withstand a moderately rigorous check. In two of the identities I had even paid some local taxes!
I tried out three of the names on Polly. She carefully considered each, and shook her head. She knew everyone in the inner planets, and quite a few from the outers; if the name hadn't registered with her, then it had zero drawing power on Luna. Though this wasn't to be a star turn—the big name in this production would be Polichinelli—it never hurt to have some name recognition.
"How about Carson Dyle?" I asked. She perked up.
"Now him, I've heard of." She rattled off half a dozen of "Carson's" credits. "That's you?" I lowered my chin modestly. "That's a name I can work with then. I'll send it to publicity tomorrow. That is, if everything's in order with him."
"Give me a day to do a few checks," I said. "Carson may owe a little money here and there. You know how it is."
She smiled, and shook her head. "No, I don't, but if old debts is all that stands in the way we're okay. You'll start drawing salary tomorrow; you can just pay them off. Unless..."
"It's not much," I assured her. "Called away suddenly, no time to clear up a few obligations—" She held up a hand and I blushed. There was no need to sugarcoat anything with Polly. "Well, if that horse hadn't stumbled in the final turn, I had fully intended to pay it all off. Carson has a weakness for the ponies."
She laughed, and so did I, after a while. But it is a sobering thought that I had made a mess not only of my own life, but of most of my alter egos as well.
"So where are you staying?"
"I haven't settled on lodgings as yet," I admitted.
"Then I think it best if you stay right here."
I looked around the tiny cabin, and I trust I concealed my dismay.
"I wouldn't want to impose...."
"Behind that door over there, mon cher, is a narrow stair that leads to an attic bedroom. It's small, but you can stand up in the middle. You'll have your privacy, and the best breakfasts and suppers in Bayou Teche."
I said nothing.
"That used to be my bedroom, Kenneth, until it got to be too much of a chore to climb the stairs every night. Now I sleep on the couch over there, and it suits me fine."
"What about this place, anyway?" I asked. She knew what I meant.
"The Bayou? I've always longed for the Earth. I felt all my life that I was born in the wrong era, the wrong place. On Earth, I'd have been a forest creature, a wanderer. And now that I'm old, I'm a creature of the night. I love the night, and you get a lot of it here."
There didn't seem to be anything to say to that. So I raised one last objection—not very strenuously, because the idea of a cozy attic room was beginning to appeal to me.
"I'm not sure you'd be safe, with me hanging around," I said.
"You let me worry about that. If your Charonese nemesis comes sniffing around, we'll see how he deals with eighteen-foot alligators in the dark."
"Izzy could probably kill alligators with one hand. But maybe the mosquitoes would suck him dry while he was doing it."
Rehearsals began the next day.
My heart wants to go into great detail about it, but my mind knows there is no point in trying. Any production in the live theater merits a book of its own. There is always exhilaration and disaster, feuding and fistfights and fornication. Half the cast usually hates the other half. At some point the set designer or the lighting director storms out of the theater and has to be wheedled back to work. In the last week, as dress rehearsals loom, there is despair. On opening night there will be at least two nasty crises, the one you half expected, and the one that sprang out of nowhere.
And then the curtain rises... and usually the whole mad enterprise works. Nine times out of ten, anyway. There's no guarantee that anyone out there in the dark likes it, but it has all somehow come together. You and your fellow troupers have created something.
Then comes the final curtain on the final night, and everyone moves on. For a while you had a play. For a while it was a living, thundering thing, and now it's gone. It exists only in the memories of those who made it happen, and those who came to see it. You can't pop a chip into your player and watch it again, you can't rewind to your favorite scene. If you want to see it again you have to assemble a hundred creative and cantankerous egotists, scream and weep and laugh and sweat and work yourself and everybody else to a state near the edge of hysteria, and hope that once more the magic will happen.
It is a glorious madness.
And, like the man said, you had to be there.
Most accounts of the rehearsal and presentation of a work of drama end up sounding like a riot in a kindergarten. A very special kindergarten, attended only by the most precocious, self-centered, hyperactive, and vicious little five-year-old brats. Brats who are used to having things their own way and expect more of the same, now, or brats who have always felt they should have been catered to all their lives, never were, but intend to make up for lost time now.
It is the nature of the beast. Whether the production is full of talented people or people who simply think they are talented, an ego is the only thing that is an absolute constant in show business. Without one, you never pursue the Muse of performance at all.
Basic law of physics as formulated by Sparky: One ego is the only psychological particle that can exist peacefully. Two egos equal warfare. Three or more egos constitute a nuclear reaction. They ought to give me the Nobel Prize for that.