John Varley - The Golden Globe

"I once played Romeo and Juliet as a one-man show," I said. "Doubling with Mercutio won't be a problem."

The curtain was already up, and Dahlia Smithson—our fair sun, the snowy dove trouping with crows, the rich jewel in the Ethiop's ear—had yet to appear backstage. This was not a surprise. The last two nights we'd had to winch her loveliness into the balcony and tie her down to keep her from falling out.

"You're out of your mind," shouted Larry "The Leech" Crocker, our producer-director-stage manager: the wax in the Ethiop's ear. He was bug-eyed with fury, trembling, drenched in sweat... and the picture of calm composure next to Dee, the assistant stage manager, who kept pushing Larry's ragged script away from her as if it might bite.

There had been talk of bringing in an understudy in view of La Smithson's recent behavior, but this was not the Schubert Traveling Shows, ladies and germs, this was The Crocker Players, and if you haven't heard of them it's probably because you live within a parsec of civilization. We were chronically undercapitalized (read "dirt-poor") and it fell to the ASM to understudy all the female roles. And while I'm sure Dee would have provided yeoman service as Ladies Montague or Capulet, and could probably have taken a creditable swing at the Nurse, the prospect of Juliet had turned her pale green.

"I don't know all the lines," Dee wailed.

"See?" I said. "She doesn't know the part."

"You're crazy," Larry exploded. "Aren't they onstage at the same time?"

"Mercutio and Juliet never meet," I said. "I know you've put Mercutio at the Capulets' party, but the Bard doesn't demand it, and it can be solved by letting the Prince wear my costume in the scene. Mercutio is masked, and has no lines. However"—and I cupped my ear to the stage—"you'd better make up your mind. Scene two is about to begin, and Juliet is in three. I'll need a little time."

"You're crazy," Larry the Leech muttered again, then jerked his head toward the dressing rooms.

"You'll never regret this," I said.

"I regret it already."

This being a Crocker show, it goes without saying that we were a lot more than forty-five minutes from Broadway. Hell, we were just about forty-five hours from Pluto. That's how long it had taken my last message to my agent to reach the System, and an equal time for the news to reach me that he wasn't answering his phone. No big surprise there; I'd been "on the road," as it were, for almost ten years now, and my agent hadn't been answering when I left. (The question I'd wanted him to answer? Simple, really: " Who booked me into this toilet? ")

The plumbing fixture in question was know as Brementon. Who knows why? Humans have this need to name everything, no matter how little that thing may deserve it. When I saw the name on the travel itinerary it brought to mind a peaceful little hamlet. German, perhaps. Happy burghers in lederhosen , smiling frauleins in dirndls and pigtails and wooden shoes, cottages draped in swastika bunting. In reality, if they'd added "Maximum Security Prison" to the place's name they'd have been closer to the truth. About a quarter of it was a prison. We hadn't seen that part as yet, but if it was worse than the rest of the place, the mind reeled. B-town, as the players came to call it, could have provided the very definition of the word "boondock," except that the stop before B-town had actually been called Boondocks.

Brementon was a random collection of junk, natural and artificial, welded together in the cometary zone and pressed into service as a "City" by the escaped criminals, madmen, perverts, and other misfits who liked to call themselves Outlanders. Brementon, Boondocks, and ten thousand other similar wandering junkyards constituted the most far-flung "community" humanity had ever known.

As to where it was, that was something that could have mattered only to a celestial navigator. Upon arrival I'd looked for the Sun, and it took a while to find it. We were due to pass within ten billion miles of it in only four thousand years; to an Outlander, that qualified as a near miss.

It was tough to say how big Brementon was. Much of it was tied together with cables and hoses and it tended to drift around. If you'd grabbed two ends and yanked hard you might have stretched it out twenty kilometers or more, but you'd never get it unsnarled again. When I first saw it from the ship it presented a rude circular form about five kay across, like some demented globular cluster, or a picture of a spaceship a few seconds after a disastrous explosion.

One small part of this orbiting traffic-accident-in-progress was a silvery sphere called the Brementon Playhouse. It was tied to a counterbalancing ball containing the municipal sewer works, which gives a fair idea of the high esteem Outlanders held for The Arts. The balls rotated around a common center of gravity. The result was that we didn't have to play Shakespeare in free fall, as we'd done at Boondocks and several previous engagements. Friends, Romans, countrymen, throw me a tie-down ! Talk about your theater in the round.

But enough about Brementon. Let's talk about me.

I raced up the spiral stairs in the wings and slammed into Dahlia's dressing room. I paused for just a second there, breathing the intoxicating air of the headliner. I'd hate to say how long it had been since I'd rated a private dressing room. I caressed the back of Juliet's chair, then pulled it back and sat in front of the light-girdled mirror and gazed into my face and centered myself.

I'd never actually done Juliet before. No point in telling Larry that. (The one-man show? A comic skit, really, with quick changes, slapstick, clown faces, and japery, lasting twenty minutes when I was really rolling.) No point in worrying him; I knew the part. But line reading is just the starting point, of course. You must get inside the character. All good acting is played from within. I had about five minutes.

It's not enough time, of course. It wouldn't have been enough even if I'd been able to use it to do nothing but think about the part. As it was, I'd need every minute to accomplish the physical transformation. But I did use the mental time to go back over the many, many performances of Juliet I had seen, going right back to Norma Shearer in 1936. As my mind ranged back over Juliets of the past, taking a bit of business here, a word emphasis there, my hands were busy changing hatchet-faced Mercutio into a visage with cheek to shame the fairest stars in all the heavens.

Once I had my own face. Well, I still have it, of course, the specs are somewhere in my trunk, the copyright number SSCO-5-441-J54902. It's a good face, and served me well in the trade for almost thirty years. But it became the wisest course not to use it.

Thirty years ago, with unaccustomed money in my pocket following a long and successful run, I invested in every makeup gadget then known to mankind. This required, among other things, that my entire head be taken apart and rebuilt. My body harbors enough tech wizardry to qualify as a public nuisance. Radios spit static when I walk by. Compasses are thrown off true. But when the part calls for a full-body alteration in a hurry, I'm your guy. Or gal, as the case may be.

My first appearance was a logistical nuisance, really. Juliet says, "It is an honor that I dream not" when asked if she wants to be married. To which the nurse hoots, "An honour! Were not I thine only nurse, I would say thou hadst suck'd wisdom from thy teat." A guaranteed laugh line, which dear sweet Angeline Atkins vamped outrageously, as she did the entire role.

The problem was that the next scene, Act One, scene four, was Mercutio's chance to shine. What to do, what to do?