The Memory of Earth (9 page)

On the beach, he had been able to run for shore. Where did you run to get away from the Oversoul?

You didn’t. You couldn’t hide, either—how could you disguise your own thoughts so even you didn’t know what you were thinking?

The only choice he had was to try to find out what the Oversoul was, to try to understand what it wanted, what it was trying to do to his family, to
him
. He had to understand the Oversoul and, if possible, get it to leave him alone.

There would be no point in going back to Mother’s house so late in the school day. Explaining himself would probably take up what little time was left. Making excuses could wait until tomorrow.

Or maybe Nafai would never go back. There was a thought. After all, Mebbekew didn’t go to school. In fact he didn’t do
anything
, didn’t even come home if he decided not to.

When had that started? Was Meb already doing that sort of thing at fourteen? Well, whether he was or not, Nafai could start now and who was going to stop him? He was as tall as any man, and he was old enough for a man’s trade. Not Father’s trade, though—never the plant business. If you followed
that
trade long enough, you started seeing visions in the dark beside desert roads.

But there were other trades. Maybe Nafai could apprentice himself to some artist. A poet, or a singer—Nafai’s voice was young, but he could follow a tune, and
with training maybe he could actually become good. Or maybe he was really a dancer, or an actor, in spite of Mother’s joke this morning. Those arts had nothing to do with going to school—if he was supposed to pursue one, then staying on with Mother was a waste of time.

That notion possessed him through the afternoon, carrying him south at first, toward the inner market, where there would be songs and poems to hear, perhaps some fine new myachik to buy and listen to at home. Of course, if he stopped attending school, Mother would no doubt cut off his myachik allowance. But as an apprentice there’d probably be some spending money, and if not, so what? He’d be doing a real art himself, in the flesh. Soon he would no longer even
want
recordings of art on little glass balls.

By the time he reached the inner market, he had talked himself into having no interest in recordings, now that he was going to be making a career out of creating the real thing. He headed east, through the neighborhoods called Pens and Gardens and Olive Grove, a few narrow streets of houses between the city wall and the rim of the valley where men could not go. At last he came to the place that was narrowest of all, a single street with a high white wall behind the houses, so that a man standing on the red wall of the city couldn’t see over the houses and down into the valley. He had only come this way a few times in his life, and never alone.

Never alone, because Dolltown was a place for company and fellowship, a place for sitting in a crowded audience and watching dances and plays, or listening to recitations and concerts. Now, though, Nafai was coming to Dolltown as an artist, not to be part of the audience. It wasn’t fellowship he was looking for, but vocation.

The sun was still up, so the streets of Dolltown weren’t
crowded. Dusk would bring out the frolicking apprentices and schoolboys, and full dark would call forth the lovers and the connoisseurs and the revelers. But even now, in late afternoon, some of the theatres were open, and the galleries were doing good business in the daylight.

Nafai stopped into several galleries, more because they were open than because he seriously thought he might apprentice himself to a painter or a sculptor. Nafai’s skill at drawing was never good, and when he tried sculpture as a child his projects always had to have titles so people could tell what they were supposed to be. Browsing through the galleries, Nafai tried to look thoughtful and studious, but the artsellers were never fooled—Nafai might be tall as a man, but he was still far too young to be a serious customer. So they never came up and talked to him, the way they did when adults came into the shops. He had to glean his information from what he overheard. The prices astonished him. Of course the cost of the originals was completely out of reach, but even the high-resolution holographic copies were too expensive for him to dream of buying one. Worst of all was the fact that the paintings and sculptures he liked the best were invariably the most expensive. Maybe that meant that he had excellent taste. Or maybe it meant that the artists who knew how to impress the ignorant were able to make the most money.

Bored at last with the galleries, and determined to see which art should be the channel for his future, Nafai wandered down to the open theatre, a series of tiny stages dotting the broad lawns near the wall. A few plays were in rehearsal. Since there was no real audience yet, the sound bubbles hadn’t been turned on, and as Nafai walked from stage to stage, the sounds of more distant plays kept intruding into every pause in the one close at
hand. After a while, though, Nafai discovered that if he stood and watched a rehearsal long enough to get interested, he stopped noticing any other noises.

What intrigued him most was a troupe of satirists. He had always thought satire must be the most exciting kind of play, because the scripts were always as new as today’s gossip. And, just as he had imagined, there sat the satirist at the rehearsal, scribbling his verse on paper—on
paper
—and handing the scraps to a script boy who ran them up to the stage and handed them to the player that the lines were intended for. The players who weren’t onstage at the moment were either pacing back and forth or hunched over on the lawn, saying their lines over and over again, to memorize them for tonight’s performance. This was why satires were always sloppy and ill-timed, with sudden silences and absurd non sequiturs abounding. But no one expected a satire to be
good
—it only had to be funny and nasty and new.

This one seemed to be about an old man who sold love potions. The masker playing the old man seemed quite young, no more than twenty, and he wasn’t very good at faking an older voice. But that was part of the fun of it—maskers were almost always apprentice actors who hadn’t yet managed to get a part with a serious company of players. They
claimed
that the reason they wore masks instead of makeup was to protect them from reprisals from angry victims of satire—but, watching them, Nafai suspected that the mask was as much to protect the young actor from the ridicule of his peers.

The afternoon had turned hot, and some of the actors had taken off their shirts; those with pale skin seemed oblivious to the fact that they were burning to the color of tomatoes. Nafai laughed silently at the thought that maskers were probably the only people in Basilica who could get a sunburn everywhere
but
their faces.

The script boy handed a verse to a player who had been sitting hunched over in the grass. The young man looked at it, then got up and walked to the satirist.

“I can’t say this,” he said.

The satirist’s back was to Nafai, so he couldn’t hear the answer.

“What, is my part so unimportant that
my
lines don’t have to rhyme?”

Now the satirist’s answer was loud enough that Nafai caught a few phrases, ending with the clincher, “Write the thing yourself!”

The young man angrily pulled his mask off his face and shouted, “I couldn’t do worse than
this
!”

The satirist burst into laughter. “Probably not,” he said. “Go ahead, give it a try, I don’t have time to be brilliant with
every
scene.”

Mollified, the young man put his mask back on. But Nafai had seen enough. For the young masker who wanted his lines to rhyme was none other than Nafai’s brother Mebbekew.

So this was the source of his income. Not borrowing at all. The idea that had seemed so clever and fresh to Nafai—apprenticing himself in an art to earn his independence—had long since occurred to Mebbekew, and he was
doing
it. In a way it was encouraging—if Mebbekew can do it, why can’t I?—but it was also discouraging to think that of all people, Nafai had happened to choose Mebbekew to emulate. Meb, the brother who had hated him all his life instead of coming to hate him more recently, like Elya. Is this what I was born for? To become a second Mebbekew?

Then came the nastiest thought of all. Wouldn’t it be funny if I entered the acting profession, years after Meb, and got a job with a serious company right away? It
would be deliciously humiliating; Meb would be suicidal.

Well, maybe not. Meb was far more likely to turn murderous.

Nafai was drawn out of his spiteful little daydream by the scene on the stage. The old potion-seller was trying to persuade a reluctant young woman to buy an herb from him.

Put the leaves in his tea
Put the flower in your bed
And by half past three
He’ll be dead—I beg your pardon,
Just a slip of the tongue.

The plot was finally making sense. The old man wanted to poison the girl’s lover by persuading her that the fatal herb was a love potion. She apparently didn’t catch on—all characters in satire were amazingly stupid—but for other reasons she was still resisting the sale.

I’d sooner be hung
Than use a flower from your garden.
I want nothing from you.
I want his love to be true.

Suddenly the old man burst into an operatic song. His voice was actually not bad, even with exaggeration for comic effect.

The dream of love is so enchanting!

At that moment Mebbekew, his mask back in place, bounded onto the stage and directly addressed the audience.

Listen to the old man ranting!

They proceeded to perform a strange duet, the old potion-seller singing a line and Mebbekew’s young character answering with a spoken comment to the audience.

But love can come in many ways!

(I’ve followed him for several days.)

One lover might be very willing!

(I know he plots her lover’s killing.)

The other endlessly delays!

(Listen how the donkey brays!)

Oh, do not make the wrong decision!

(I think I’ll give this ass a vision.)

When I can take you to your goal!

(He’ll think it’s from the Oversoul.)

No limits bind the lover’s game.

(A vision needs a little flame . . .)

No matter how you win it,

Because your heart is in it,

You’ll love your lover’s loving still the same.

A vision from the Oversoul. Flame. Nafai didn’t like the turn this was taking. He didn’t like the fact that the old potion-seller’s mask had a wild mane of white hair and a full white beard. Was it possible that word had already spread so far and fast? Some satirists were famous for getting the gossip before anyone else—as often as not, people attended the satires just to find out what was happening—and many people left the satires asking each other, What was that
really
about?

Mebbekew was fiddling with a box on the stage. The satirist called out to him, “Never mind the fire effect. We’ll pretend it’s working.”

“We have to try it sometime,” Mebbekew answered.

“Not now.”

“When?”

The satirist got to his feet, strode to the foot of the stage directly in front of Meb, cupped his hands around his mouth, and bellowed: “We . . . will . . . do . . . the . . . effect . . . later!”

“Fine,” said Meb.

As the satirist returned to his place on the hill, he said, “And
you
wouldn’t be setting off the fire effect anyway.”

“Sorry,” said Meb. He returned to his place behind the box that presumably would be spouting a column of flame tonight. The other maskers returned to their positions.

“End of song,” said Meb. “Fire effect.”

Immediately the potion-seller and the girl flung up their hands in a mockery of surprise.

“A pillar of fire!” cried the potion-seller.

“How could fire suddenly appear on a bare rock in the desert?” cried the girl. “It’s a
miracle
!”

The potion-seller whirled on her. “You don’t know what you’re talking about, bitch!
I’m
the only one who can see this! It’s a vision!”

“No!” shouted Mebbekew, in his deepest voice. “It’s a special stage effect!”

“A stage effect!” cried the potion-seller. “Then you must be—”

“You got it!”

“That old humbug the Oversoul!”

“I’m proud of you, old trickster! Stupid girl—you almost fixed her.”

“Oh, it’s nothing much to take
her
—
you’re
the master faker!”

“No!”
bellowed the satirist. “Not ‘take
her
,’ you idiot! It’s ‘
take
her,’ emphasis on
take
, or it doesn’t rhyme with
faker
!”

“Sorry,” said the young masker playing the potion-seller. “It doesn’t make
sense
your way, of course, but at least it’ll
rhyme
.”

“It doesn’t have to make sense, you uppity young rooster, it only has to make money!”