Mike Resnick - I, Alien

Hah. And again hah. Ever seen a Xee wizard work? No, of course you haven’t, ever since what happened on Kabongo they’re banned from performing off-world, and you better be glad of it or you might be permanently blind and deaf and paralyzed like all those poor devils on Kabongo. I understand the insurance lawyers are still appealing the judgment, but that’s not much help to Mr. Smart Guy. Who had broken one of the most basic rules: never book an act you haven’t personally seen.

Or take what happened to a very dear friend of mine only last year. One day he gets a call from Keshtak 37, over in the next arm, wanting a whole lineup of acts, price no object. Seemed the Emperor of the Oomaumau had passed away, and they wanted only the best for his funeral festivities, which would go on for weeks because the Oomaumau believe in giving a ruler a first-class sendoff.

So my friend is naturally very pleased to get to handle something that big, and as soon as the contract is signed he starts calling around, seeing who’s available. But then he happens to do a bit of research, to see what kind of acts the Oomaumau might like, and finds out something extremely disturbing. The Oomaumau, it develops, have another unusual mortuary custom: the performers at the royal funeral are given the honor of accompanying the Emperor to the Hereafter, so his spirit shouldn’t get bored.

Yes, that’s right. Well, not strictly speaking; they just bury them alive beneath the royal mausoleum.

My friend is not really to blame for not knowing about this, which is not well known outside learned sociological circles because the last time an Emperor died on Keshtak 37 was well before the memory of any living person on this world. Long-lived race, the Oomaumau, especially the royal family… but ignorance, as they say, is no excuse before the law, and the contract had already been signed.

And the Oomaumau were not about to let my friend out of it. Though he tried hard enough, went so far as to travel personally to Keshtak 37 to plead for a release. He was so desperate he even got an audience with their spiritual leader, the Papa Oomaumau, at the great temple of the goddess L’vira. No go. A contract is a contract and if he reneges, they tell him, he will find himself up to his nictitating membranes in litigation with the Emperor’s attorneys.

Yes, that was what my friend asked. Turns out it’s not at all unusual for dead people to file lawsuits on Keshtak 37. Don’t ask me.

My friend doesn’t know what to do, but then while he’s there, he picks up another bit of information. The only entertainers who don’t get interred with His Imperial Awesomeness are the ones who perform so badly that they are deemed unworthy of the honor. Yes. On Keshtak 37, when you stink at the Palace, you don’t die at the Palace.

So my friend rushes back here and starts calling in all the lousiest acts he can find. Which takes very little searching, because every agent knows plenty of hopeless no-talent losers; they come around begging you to represent them, and they’re so persistent and so pathetic you take their names and information down just to get rid of them and then they call you every few days for the rest of your life wanting to know when you’re going to get them some work.

In almost no time my friend has assembled a collection of the worst stinkeroos in this part of the galaxy. Tone-deaf musicians, stumblebum dancers, comics unfunny enough to induce suicidal depression, he’s got them all. He said he had to open the office windows to air the place out after they all left.

No, he didn’t tell them. He felt bad about that, but it really wouldn’t have done to let them in on what was going on. Entertainers and artists, you see, are very touchy people that way, and the bad ones most of all. The worse they are, the greater they believe they are and the harder they believe it. If he’d told them the truth, they’d have been furious, and chances are they’d have walked out on him.

So off they went to Keshtak 37, and—ah, yes, I’m seeing this look on your face, you’re way ahead of me, aren’t you?

That’s right. The thrill of finally getting a professional gig, and a prestigious offworld one at that, got them so worked up they barely needed a ship to get to Keshtak 37; they could have gone into warp by themselves. And by the time they went on at the Imperial Palace, they were so inspired that they performed, all of them, better than they’d ever done in their lives.

Or ever would again, in what little was left of them… my friend was very upset. Not that anybody would miss that particular bunch, but the Oomaumau buried their paychecks with them and he never did collect his cut.

But listen, don’t misunderstand, I’m not disrespecting my colleagues. It’s not like I’ve never made any mistakes myself. How I only wish…

Let me tell you about the comic.

Or rather tell you what happened, I can’t really tell you about him. Can’t do justice to his talent with a simple description, you’d have had to see him in action to fully comprehend just how great he was. And yes, great I said and great I meant. All these people like to think of themselves as “artists,” but in his case it was the simple truth. A genuine comic genius is what he was, and he could just maybe have been the greatest ever, if only—but I’m getting ahead of myself.

I found him working open mike night at a cheap club down in the Ginzorninplad district. He’d just gotten into town, worked his way here from his home-world aboard a worn-out old tub of a bulk freighter, and he didn’t have much more than the clothes on his back. I watched his act and then I caught him backstage and signed him up, just like that. And said some very sincere prayers to Hnb’hnb’hnb for granting me the privilege.

I got him a few local gigs and he did just fine, even got some good ink from the critics. But you know this town; an outsider has a tough time getting accepted. Especially an outsider from, and I don’t mean this in any derogatory way, a different-looking race. I hate to say that, but it’s true.

So when this opening turned up for a long offworld tour, I advised him to go for it. Oh, it wasn’t much of a booking—the world was a pretty backward sort of place, off in a distant arm of the galaxy where hardly anybody ever went even to visit, and the pay was worse than lousy.

But I didn’t really have anything else for him at the moment; things were slow, all the best clubs were booked up solid. And I figured this was a chance for him to get some experience, develop his material, and practice his technique out in the sticks without having to worry about bombing because even if he did have a bad night nobody who mattered would ever hear about it. Meanwhile I could work on lining up something better for him.

Well, what can I say? It seemed like a good idea at the time, I should hit myself repeatedly with the nearest blunt object.

Don’t get me wrong, it’s not that he went into the sandbox or anything like that. On the contrary, they loved his act—or at least they loved him; right away, almost as soon as he arrived, they started making a big fuss over him. In no time at all he was playing to packed houses.

You understand, he was sending back regular reports, keeping me up on what was going on, and every time I heard from him, he sounded more amazed. People followed him around on the street, came up to him wanting to meet him and trying to touch him, and before long he even had his own fan club. In fact there were about a dozen of them who took to traveling around with him, seeing to his needs, just like he’s a big superstar.

But what was really strange was the way the audiences reacted to his act. Nobody ever laughed. He’d do his funniest routines, stuff that would make a Rhrr laugh, and they’d just sit there staring at him with these very serious faces and nod and look at each other and nod some more, like he’d just said something wise and profound.