Dark Benediction

“It’s been done—in the sticks.”

“Yes, but the audience knew it was being done, and that always spoils the show. It creates contrasts that don’t exist or wouldn’t be noticed otherwise. Makes the dolls seem snaky, birdlike, too rubbery quick. With no humans on stage for contrast, the dolls just seem wistfully graceful, ethereal.”

“But if the audience didn’t know—”

Jade was smiling faintly. “I wonder,” she mused. “I wonder if they’d guess. They’d notice a difference, of course—in one mannequin.”

“But they’d think it was just the Maestro’s interpretation of the part.”

“Maybe—if the human actor were careful.”

He chuckled sourly. “If it fooled the critics—”

“Some ass would call it ‘an abysmally unrealistic interpretation’ or ‘too obviously mechanical.” She glanced at her watch, shook herself, stretched wearily, and slipped into her shoes again. “Anyway,” she added, “there’s no reason to do it, since the Maestro’s really capable of rendering a better-than-human performance anyhow.”

The statement brought an agonized gasp from the janitor. She looked at him and giggled. “Don’t be shocked, Thorny. I said ‘capable of—not ‘in the habit of.’ Auto-drama entertains audiences on the level they want to be entertained on.”

“But—”

“Just,” she added firmly, “as show business has always done.”

“But—”

“Oh, retract your eyeballs, Thorny. I didn’t mean to blaspheme.” She preened, began slipping back into her producer’s mold as she prepared to return to her crowd. “The only thing wrong with autodrama is that it’s scaled down to the moron-level—but show business always has been, and probably should be. Even if it gives us kids a pain.” She smiled and patted his cheek. “Sorry I shocked you. Au ‘voir, Thorny. And luck.”

When she was gone, he sat fingering the cartridges in his pocket and staring at nothing. Didn’t any of them have any sensibilities? Jade too, a seller of principle. And he had always thought of her as having merely compromised with necessity, against her real wishes. The idea that she could really believe autodrama capable of rendering a better-than-human performance—

But she didn’t. Of course she needed to rationalize, to excuse what she was doing—

He sighed and went to lock the door, then to recover the old “March” script from the trunk. His hands were trembling slightly. Had he planted enough of an idea in Jade’s mind; would she remember it later? Or perhaps remember it too clearly, and suspect it?

He shook himself sternly. No apprehensions allowed. When Rick rang the bell for the second run-through, it would be his entrance-cue, and he must be in-character by then. Too bad he was no schauspieler, too bad he couldn’t switch himself on-and-off the way Jade could do, but the necessity for much inward preparation was the burden of the darfsteller. He could not change into role without first changing himself, and letting the revision seep surfaceward as it might, reflecting the inner state of the man.

Strains of Moussorgsky pervaded the walls. He closed his eyes to listen and feel. Music for empire. Music at once brutal and majestic. It was the time of upheaval, of vengeance, of overthrow. Two times, superimposed. It was the time of opening night, with Ryan Thornier—ten years ago—cast in the starring role.

He fell into a kind of trance as he listened and clocked the pulse of his psyche and remembered. He scarcely noticed when the music stopped, and the first few lines of the play came through the walls.

“Cut! Cut!” A worried shout. Feria’s.

It had begun.

Thornier took a deep breath and seemed to come awake. When he opened his eyes and stood up, the janitor was gone. The janitor had been a nightmare role, nothing more.

And Ryan Thornier, star of “Walkaway,” favored of the critics, confident of a bright future, walked out of the storage room with a strange lightness in his step. He carried a broom, he still wore the dirty coveralls, but now as if to a masquerade.

The Peltier mannequin lay sprawled on the stage in a grotesque heap. Ryan Thornier stared at it calmly from behind the set and listened intently to the babble of stage hands and technicians that milled about him:

“Don’t know. Can’t tell yet. It came out staggering and gibbering-like it was drunk. It reached for a table, then it fell on its face—”

“Acted like the trouble might be a mismatched tape, but Rick rechecked it. Really Peltier’s tape—”

“Can’t figure it out. Miss Ferne’s having kittens.”