"The laborer is worthy of his hire," Booth countered with dignity, "and the player of his calls." The larger-than-life tragedy of Dane became something mundane out of daytime TV in tailored slacks, designer haircut and a Members Only casual jacket. "As Randy Colorad."
Kean sniffed. "Juveniles were always your forte."
But Booth was not finished. While Roy stared, a horrible realization dawning, the vacuous good looks of Randy Colorad aged, lined, set into the sensitive and thoughtful image of Ernst Stabler.
"No! I blew you away," Roy denied. "I saw your fuckin head go six ways from Sunday."
And again Booth stood before him. "Stabler was my finest work. Deep, thoughtful. I may consider character work henceforth. Nevertheless - John Wilkes Booth at your service."
Roy had never been that good in school, but some names stayed in the pantheon of memory. "I remember you. You shot Abraham Lincoln."
"As a soldier of the Confederacy, sir."
"Stabler was utterly fine," Coyul appreciated sincerely. "I saw new depths and colors, Wilksey. Restrained, sincere . . . impressive. One was reminded of Schofield."
"Thanks, my liege. I believed in what I was saying," Booth recalled soberly. "Futile, even laughable I might have been in life, but at least in my time life meant something. Your world is a sewer, Mr. Stride. One can almost absolve you for being one of its diseases."
"Time, Coyul," Barion put in. "Sorlij and Maj, remember?"
"Right." Coyul struck his hands together. "Wilksey, I made you a promise."
"Please, Prince: not Romeo."
"Not a whit. We'll leave that to Leslie Howard. You may remount Hamlet."
Booth went down on one knee in gratitude. "Oh, my liege. My Prince - "
"Now, now. Don't gush, there's a catch. You'll alternate Hamlet and Laertes with Ned."
"You give me leave to kill, sir." Kean bowed with relish. "After that fruity Dane, I'll eat this buffoon for breakfast."
"Will you?" Booth rose to the challenge. "Look to your own ratty laurels, you laboring-class lout."
"Gentlemen, allow me to finish." Coyul's machinations were subtler than they knew. "Ned, you'll keep Wilkes within the bounds of good taste. And he in turn will teach you to fence like a gentleman."
"And somewhat less like a dancing bear," Booth sniped.
"With less mayhem to the scenery," Coyul hoped, escorting them to the door. "Now off with you both. Don't call me; I'll call you."
"You first, Ned." Booth stood aside. "You're considerably my elder."
"Ah, well - wisdom before folly." Kean swept out, but Booth lingered expectantly, raising his eyes in supplication. "Max? It's my exit."
The musical leitmotif of genial bonhomie sparkled in the salon. Booth's amber spotlight washed over him. Satisfied, with a heave of the shoulders, he followed Kean.
"You said I ain't dead," Roy blurted. "I don't get it. What's all this about?"
"Shut up. You'll get it. Believe me, you're going to get it." Barion's tone chilled Roy to the bone. His skin began to crawl under that merciless scrutiny. The son of a bitch looked like . . . eternity.
"You bug me, mister," Barion said.
"So who the fuck are you?" Roy bluffed. "Look, I'm covered, okay? I got treaties, Topside's word. No interference. I came here to see the Prince and it's this little wimp. So no bullshit, okay? Lemme go to the top."
Barion leaned back in his chair. "You're there."
Roy took a moment to digest and discard the absurdity. God did not wear Levi's. "Not you, man."
"In your parlance, you got it. As close as you'll ever get."
"Hey, listen, I saw God close up at the White Rose Motel. He sentenced me - "
"My friend Walter Hampden," Barion admitted. "Doesn't act much now but still does an occasional God, Moses or prophet. You're not dead. Charity's not dead, nor Woody. You can go home now if you want."
"Which we would prefer," Coyul remarked with a tinge of distaste. "The twentieth century is the foulest on record; makes the fourteenth immaculate by comparison. And it has produced, in a country like America, far too many like you."
"I wasn't ready for Hitler in 1933," Barion confessed. "I really didn't know how to deal with the danger of your kind or your sick needs. We've learned since then. Stabler put it nicely, you're a disease. The worst of what I could never breed out of humans."
"Though we certainly don't want to breed it into more," Coyul extended his brother's point. "If you married Charity - grisly prospect, but she was ignorant enough to go through with it - we shuddered to think what you'd have done to each other."
"Or your children to the world," Barton finished. "Charity is a great deal more intelligent than you. A son of hers could be quite gifted in beneficial ways. On the other hand, growing up under your benevolent influence, these gifts . . ." The beleaguered Lord of Creation let the obvious point dangle. "For Charity to put you aside as a reasoned act of will or even simple good taste was too risky in a place like Plattsville, where people pair at disastrous random for lack of wider choice."
"What are you trying to lay on me?" Roy sputtered. "You ain't neither one of you what you say. Look, I ain't dumb. You saw me on TV. You saw how they loved me. They fuckin loved me. I raised my hand and changed everything."
Coyul wandered to the piano, running a scale. "We do crowd scenes well."
"No." Barion shook his head. "He doesn't believe it. He can't. Like higher math to that monkey at the water hole. His whole cosmos is drama, magic, fable. A vision of Christ and Salvation awash with melodrama, God as a white man, himself as hero. Minorities for villains. But he's going to believe it."
Barion rose deliberately and stood over Roy. "You're going to. Charity saw the truth when she was ready for it. But you, little man, you're going on cold. Coyul?"
Coyul ran an arpeggio into a Gershwin phrase. "I did this with a snake once. Ready or not, Mr. Stride - it's magic time."
His tormentors shimmered, dissolved to pure white light, became one glow as they flowed toward, into and through Roy. The last thing he clearly remembered was an instant of euphoria as that light became limitless understanding and infinite vision.
He was pure mind, pulsing in space, no division between sight and comprehension. He saw the solar system, then the galaxy dreaming through its eon-slow revolution. His view pulled back and back to encompass the unimaginably vast, wheeling universe, video-split with the movement of atoms within a molecule. Clear, painful intellect himself, he saw everything Coyul or Barion had ever seen - worlds men would not contact for thousands of years, if ever. Civilizations, concepts of God undreamable by humans. He knew horrors beyond simple brutality or destruction, complex beauties, a peace in being one with the universe, and the loneliness of being inexpressibly small, apart and insignificant.
Roy heard and understood languages whose simplest concept strained his mind to tortured sentience, heard music of a sublime, limpid simplicity. He observed the rise, flourishing and decline of noble and brutish races, watched them voyage out into space with the same greedy wonder as savages pushing log canoes toward the plunder of a neighboring island. Time spooled out, an endless film strip of still frames to which his hurtling consciousness gave the illusion of movement. Light-years, light-millenniums, light-eons. More galaxies and more beyond them, to worlds still forming, cooling, thunderous with the struggles of small-brained monsters that knew only hunger and rage.
Time and again the nascent worlds; time and again, given the narrow conditions of climate and distance from a sun, inevitably there rose one creature, manlike or utterly alien, racked for one moment/millennium with the terror and beauty of self-knowledge, drawn onward ever after, unable to retreat. And worlds beyond these, but nowhere an end. Nothing that glorified Roy Stride, nowhere a destiny in his size begun in the writings of a people he despised, attaining dramatic close in a crucifixion, endlessly vindicated in the violence of men like himself - none at least without a pathetic ending. Myriads like him came to power, shadows on film as his mind sped across time, rose, conquered, added their madness to the rubble spinning between the worlds, then died reviled or forgotten. Or worse, lampooned, made a sad or faintly ridiculous footnote in the dry histories of aberration.
Roy's cry of horror filled the universe, more horrible for the indifferent silence that swallowed it up. He wept with double pity, for himself and a knowledge of tragedy too huge for expression; whimpered in his smallness and fear, shrieked through the soundless void -
- put his hands to his face, shattered in the chair while the Devil played Gershwin and God spoke quietly to him.
"So much for the universal. Not much from your point of view. No MGM cosmos to answer the subjective hungers of your life. No denouement where God's lost will is found in the chimney naming you the Pure White Chosen One. Only worlds beyond worlds and a chance to understand in a place where death comes to all, even Coyul and I." The brothers exchanged a look of profound weariness. "After several hundred million years, that's not horror but relief."
"One tires of repetition," said Coyul at the piano.
"But what's it mean," Roy cried, agonized. "What is it for?"