Dark Benediction

Rick shook his head. “Naa, it happens all the time. A scratch or a nick’ll make a player muff a line or maybe stumble, then the Maestro catches the goof, and compensates. Maestro gets feedback from the stage, continuously directs the show. It can do a lot of compensating, too.”

“I thought the whole show came from the tape”

The technician smiled. “It does, in a way. But it’s more than a recorded mechanical puppet show, Thorny. The Maestro watches the stage… no, more than that… the Maestro is the stage, an electronic analogue of it.” He patted the metal housing. “All the actors’ personality patterns are packed in here. It’s more than a remote controller, the way most people think of it. It’s a creative directing machine. It’s even got pickups out in the audience to gauge reactions to—”

He stopped suddenly, staring at the old actor’s face. He swallowed nervously. “Thorny don’t look that way. I’m sorry. Here, have a cigarette.”

Thorny accepted it with trembling fingers. He stared down into the gleaming maze of circuitry with narrowed eyes, watched the script-belt climb slowly over the rollers and down into the bowels of the Maestro.

“Art!” he hissed. “Theater! What’d they give you your degree in, Richard? Dramaturgical engineering?”

He shuddered and stalked out of the booth. Rick listened to the angry rattle of his heels on the iron stairs that led down to stage level. He shook his head sadly, shrugged, went back to inspecting the tape for rough cuts.

Thorny came back after a few minutes with a bucket and a mop. He looked reluctantly repentant. “Sorry, lad,” he grunted. “I know you’re just trying to make a living, and—”

“Skip it,” Rick grunted curtly.

“It’s just… well… this particular show. It gets me.”

“This—? ‘The Anarch,’ you mean? What about it, Thorny? You play in it once?”

“Uh-uh. It hasn’t been on the stage since the Nineties, except—well, it was almost revived ten years ago. We rehearsed for weeks. Show folded before opening night. No dough.”

“You had a good part in it?”

“I was to play Andreyev,” Thornier told him with a faint smile.

Rick whistled between his teeth. “The lead. That’s too bad.” He hoisted his feet to let Thorny mop under them. “Big disappointment, I guess.”

“It’s not that. It’s just… well… ‘The Anarch’ rehearsals were the last time Mela and I were on stage together. That’s all.”

“Mela?” The technician paused, frowning. “Mela Stone?”

Thornier nodded.

Rick snatched up a copy of the uncoded script, waved it at him. “But she’s in this version, Thorny! Know that! She’s playing Marka.”

Thornier’s laugh was brief and brittle.

Rick reddened slightly. “Well, I mean her mannequin’s playing it.”

Thorny eyed the Maestro distastefully. “Your mechanical Svengali’s playing its airfoam zombies in all roles, you mean.”

“Oh, cut it out, Thorny. Be sore at the world if you want to, but don’t blame me for what audiences want. And I didn’t invent autodrama anyhow.”

“I don’t blame anybody. I merely detest that… that—” He punched at the base of the Maestro with his wet plop.

“You and D’Uccia,” Rick grunted disgustedly. “Except—D’Uccia loves it when it’s working O.K. It’s just a machine, Thorny. Why hate it?”

“Don’t need a reason to hate it,” he said snarly-petulant. “I hate air-cabs, too. It’s a matter of taste, that’s all.”

“All right, but the public likes autodrama—whether it’s by TV, stereo, or on stage. And they get what they want.”

“Why?”

Rick snickered. “Well, it’s their dough. Autodrama’s portable, predictable, duplicatable. And flexible. You can run ‘Macbeth’ tonight, the ‘Anarch’ tomorrow night, and ‘King of the Moon’ the next night—in the same house. No actor-temperament problems. No union problems. Rent the packaged props, dolls, and tapes from Smithfield. Packaged theater. Systematized, mass-produced. In Coon Creek, Georgia, yet.”

“Bah!”

Rick finished feeding in the script tape, closed the panel, and opened an adjacent one. He ripped the lid from a cardboard carton and dumped a heap of smaller tape-spools on the table.

“Are those the souls they sold to Smithfield?” Thornier asked, smiling at them rather weirdly.

The technician’s stool scraped back and he exploded: “You know what they are!”

Thornier nodded, leaned closer to stare at them as if fascinated. He plucked one of them out of the pile, sighed down at it.

“If you say ‘Alas, poor Yorick,’ I’ll heave you out of here!” Rick grated.

Thornier put it back with a sigh and wiped his hand on his coveralls. Packaged personalities. Actor’s egos, analogized on tape. Real actors, once, whose dolls were now cast in the roles. The tapes contained complex psychophysiological data derived from months of psychic and somatic testing, after the original actors had signed their Smithfield contracts. Data for the Maestro’s personality matrices. Abstractions from the human psyche, incarnate in glass, copper, chromium. The souls they rented to Smithfield on a royalty basis, along with their flesh and blood likenesses in the dolls.