Robert Silverberg - Exiled from Earth

The night old Howard Brian got his impossible yen to return to Earth, we were playing to an almost-full house at Smit’s Terran Theater on Salvor. A crowd like that one really warms a director’s heart. Five hundred solemn-mouthed, rubber-faced green Salvori had filed into the little drab auditorium back of the circus aviary, that night. They had plunked down two credits apiece to watch my small troupe of exiled Terran actors perform.

We were doing King Lear that night—or rather, a boiled-down half-hour condensation of it. I say with I hope pardonable pride that it wasn’t too bad a job. The circus management limits my company to half an hour per show, so we won’t steal time from the other attractions.

A nuisance, but what could we do? With Earth under inflexible Neopuritan sway, we had to go elsewhere and take whatever bookings we could. I cut Lear down to size by pasting together a string of the best speeches, and to Sheol with the plot. Plot didn’t matter here, anyway; the Salvori didn’t understand a word of the show.

But they insisted on style, and so did I. Technique! Impeccable timing. Smit’s Players were just about the sole exponents of the Terran drama in this sector of the outworlds, and I wanted each and every performance to be worthy of the world that kind cast us so sternly forth.

I sat in the back of the theater unnoticed and watched old Howard Brian, in the title role, bringing the show to its close. Howard was the veteran of my troupe, a tall, still majestic figure at seventy-three. I didn’t know then that this was to be the night of his crackup.

He was holding dead Cordelia in his arms and glaring round as if his eyes were neutron-smitters. Spittle flecked his gray beard.

As Howard reached that tingling line, She’s dead as earth, I glanced at my watch. In three minutes Lear would be over, and the circus attendants would clear the auditorium for the next show, the popular Damooran hypnotists. Silently I slipped from my seat, edged through the brightly-lit theater—Salvori simply can’t stand the dark—and made my way past a row of weeping aliens toward the dressing-room, to be on hand to congratulate my cast.

I got there during the final speech, and counted the curtain-calls: five, six, seven. Applause from outside still boomed as Howard Brian entered the dressing-room, with the rest of the cast following him. Howard’s seamed face was beaded with sweat. Genuine tears glittered in his faded eyes. Genuine. The mark of a great actor.

I came forward and seized his hand. “Marvelous job tonight, old man. The Greenies loved every second of it. They were spellbound.”

“To hell with the Greenies,” Howard said in a suddenly hoarse voice. “I’m through, Erik. Let someone else play Lear for your gaggle of gawping green-faced goggle-eyed aliens in this stale-sawdust circus.”

I grinned at the old man. I had seen him in this crochety bitter mood before. We all were subject to it, when we thought of Earth. “Come off it, Howard!” I chuckled. “You don’t mean to tell me you’re retiring again? Why, you’re in your prime. You never were better than—”

“No!” Howard plopped heavily into a chair and let his gaudy regal robes swirl around him. He looked very much the confused, defeated Lear at that moment. “Finished,” he breathed. “I’m going back to Earth, Erik. La comeddia è finita.”

“Hey!” I shouted to the rest of the company. “Listen to old Uncle Vanya here! He’s going back to Earth! He says he’s tired of playing Lear for the Greenies!”

Joanne, my Goneril, chuckled, and then Ludwig, the Gloucester, picked it up, and a couple of others joined in—but it was an awkward, quickly dying chuckle. I saw the weary, wounded look on old Howard’s face. I grinned apologetically and snapped, “Okay! Out of costume double fast, everyone. Cast party in twenty minutes! Kethii and roast dwaarn for everybody!”

“Erik, can I talk to you in your office?” Howard murmured to me.

“Sure. Come on. Talk it all out, Howard.”

I led the gaunt old actor into the red-walled cubicle I laughingly call my office, and dialed two filtered rums, Terran style. Howard gulped his drink greedily, pushed away the empty glass, burped. He transfixed me with his long gray beard and glittering eye and said, “I need eleven hundred credits to get back to Earth. The one-way fare’s five thousand. I’ve saved thirty-nine hundred.”

“And you’re going to toss your life’s savings into one trip?” I shook my head emphatically. “Snap out of it, Howard! You’re not on stage now. You aren’t Lear—not a doddering old man ready to die.”

“I know that. I’m still young— inside. Erik, I want to play Hamlet in New York. I want it more than anything else there is. So I’ve decided to go back to New York, to play Hamlet.”

“Oh,” I said softly. “Oh, I see.”

Draining my glass, I stared reflectively at Howard Brian. I understood for the first time what had happened to the old actor. Howard was obviously insane.

The last time anyone had played Hamlet in New York, I knew, it had been the late Dover Hollis, at the climax of his magnificent career. Hollis had played the gloomy prince at the Odeon on February 21, 2167. Thirty-one years ago. The next day, the Neopuritan majority in Congress succeeded in ramming through its anti-sin legislation, and as part of the omnibus bill the theaters were closed. Play-producing became a felonious act. Members of the histrionic professions overnight lost what minute respectability they had managed to attain. We were all scamps and scoundrels once again, as in the earliest days of the theater.

I remembered Dover Hollis’ 2167 Hamlet vividly, because I had been in it. I was eighteen, and I played Marcellus. Not too well, mind you; I never was much of an actor.

Howard Brian had been in that company too, and a more villainous Claudius had never been seen on America’s shores. Howard had been signed on to do Hamlet, but when Dover Hollis requested a chance to play the part Howard had graciously moved aside. And thereby lost his only chance to play the Dane. He was to have reclaimed his role a week later, when Hollis returned to London—but, a week later, the padlocks were on the theater doors.

I said to Howard, “You can’t go back to Earth. You know that, don’t you?”

He shook his head obstinately. “They’re casting for Hamlet at the Odeon again. I’m not too old, Erik. Bernhard played it, and she was an old woman, with a wooden leg, yet. I want to go.”

I sighed. “Howard, listen to me: you accepted free transportation from the Neopuritan government, like all the rest of us, on the condition that you didn’t try to return. They shipped you to the outworlds. You can’t go back.”

“Maybe they’re out of power. Maybe the Supreme Court overthrew the legislation. Maybe—”

“Maybe nothing. You read Outworld Variety, the same as the rest of us. You know how things stand on Earth. The Supreme Court is twelve to three Neopuritan, and the three old holdouts are at death’s door. Congress is Neopuritan. A whole new generation of solemn little idiots has grown up under a Neopuritan president. It’s the same all over the world.” I shook my head. “There isn’t any going back. The time is out of joint, Howard. Earth doesn’t want actors or dancers or singers or other sinful people. Until the pendulum swings back again, Earth just wants to atone. They’re having a gloom orgy.”