Dark Benediction

“I have. The audience knows about the human part of the cast in advance. So it doesn’t strike them as funny. There’s no jolt of discovering an incongruity. Listen to me Thorny—do your best, but you don’t dare make it better than a doll could do.”

Bitterness came back in a flood. Was this what he had hoped for? To give as machinelike a performance as possible, to do as good a job as the Maestro, but no better, and above all, no different? So that they wouldn’t find out?

She saw his distressed expression and felt for his hand. “Thorny, don’t you hate me for telling you. I want you to bring it off O.K., and I thought you ought to realize. I think I know what’s been wrong. You’re afraid—down deep—that they won’t recognize you for who you are, and that makes your performance un-doll-like. You better start being afraid they will recognize you, Thorny.”

As he stared at her it began to penetrate that she was still capable of being the woman he’d once known and loved. Worse, she wanted to save him from being laughed at. Why? If she felt motherly, she might conceivably want to shield him against wrath, criticism, or rotten tomatoes, but not against loss of dignity. Motherliness thrived on the demise of male dignity, for it sharpened the image of the child in the man.

“Mela—?”

“Yes, Thorny.”

“I guess I never quite got over you.” She shook her head quickly, almost angrily.

“Darling, you’re living ten years ago. I’m not, and I won’t. Maybe I don’t like the present very well, but I’m in it, and I can only change it in little ways. I can’t make it the past again, and I won’t try.” She paused a moment, searching his face. “Ten years ago, we weren’t living in the present either. We were living in a mythical, magic, wonderful future. Great talent, just starting to bloom. We were living in dream-plans in those days. The future we lived in never happened, and you can’t go back and make it happen. And when a dream-plan stops being possible, it turns into a pipe dream. I won’t live in a pipe dream. I want to stay sane, even if it hurts.”

“Too bad you had to come tonight,” he said stiffly.

She wilted. “Oh, Thorny, I didn’t mean that the way it sounded. And I wouldn’t say it that strongly unless”—she glanced through the soundproof glass toward the stage where her mannequin was on in the scene with Piotr—“unless I had trouble too, with too much wishing.”

“I wish you were with me out there,” he said softly. “With no dolls and no Maestro. I know how it’d be then.”

“Don’t! Please, Thorny, don’t.”

“Mela, I loved you—”

“No!” She got up quickly. “I… I want to see you after the show. Meet me. But don’t talk that way. Especially not here and not now.”

“I can’t help it.”

“Please! Good-by for now, Thorny, and—do your best.” My best to be a mechanism, he thought bitterly as he watched her go.

He turned to watch the play. Something was wrong out there on the stage. Badly wrong. The Maestro’s interpretation of the scene made it seem unfamiliar somehow.

He frowned. Rick had spoken of the Maestro’s ability to compensate, to shift interpretations, to redirect. Was that what was happening? The Maestro compensating—for his performance?

His cue was approaching. He moved closer to the stage.

Act I had been a flop. Feria, Ferne, and Thomas conferred in an air of tension and a haze of cigarette smoke. He heard heated muttering, but could not distinguish words. Jade called a stagehand, spoke to him briefly, and sent him away. The stagehand wandered through the group until he found Mela Stone, spoke to her quickly and pointed. Thorny watched her go to join the production group, then turned away. He slipped out of their line of sight and stood behind some folded backdrops, waiting for the end of a brief intermission and trying not to think.

“Great act, Thorny,” a costumer said mechanically, and clapped his shoulder in passing.

He suppressed an impulse to kick the costumer. He got out a copy of the script and pretended to read his lines. A hand tugged at his sleeve.

“Jade!” He looked at her bleakly, started to apologize. “Don’t,” she said. “We’ve talked it over. Rick, you tell him.”

Rick Thomas who stood beside her grinned ruefully and waggled his head. “It’s not altogether your fault, Thorny. Or haven’t you noticed?”

“What do you mean?” he asked suspiciously.

“Take scene five, for example,” Jade put in. “Suppose the cast had been entirely human. How would you feel about what happened?”

He closed his eyes for a moment and relived it. “I’d probably be sore,” he said slowly. “I’d probably accuse Kovrin of jamming my lines and Aksinya of killing my exit—as an excuse,” he added with a lame grin. “But I can’t accuse the dolls. They can’t steal.”

“As a matter of fact, old man, they can,” said the technician. “And your excuse is exactly right.”

“Whh—what?”