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The Play And The Thing




When the guest came in, I had just knelt behind the counter in the lobby to try to fix the log-in computer.

Hearing steps, I dropped the data gems and circuit nodes and stood up, thinking as I did so that I would give the poor tourist the fright of his life, shooting up from my hidden recess like a jack-in-the-box.

But I couldn't tell whether I'd frightened him or not. No earthling could. Though he was mostly humanoid — he had a head, body, two arms, two legs, a trunk — his face looked like a kid's modeling-clay attempt at a human face.

Spheroid, it had two black-button eyes, two holes for a nose, two holes for the ears, a lipless gash for the mouth; and it was light green, the color of leaves in spring. No hair. It had been a long time since I'd seen an alien in Stratford-upon-Avon.

They had come by the dozen when I was a kid, and my father the proprietor and manager of the Swann-Of-Avon, our then-prosperous hotel.

Bird aliens, reptile aliens, insect aliens, even tall, mobile sentient bushes from Proxima Centauri, they'd all paraded through Stratford, and I'd seen them all before I was even ten.

They had come and seen the sights, and gone to the Royal Shakespeare Theater, and taken their spaceships home, leaving me to wonder how a hermaphrodite slug from Proxima Centauri could enjoy Romeo and Juliet.

But, little by little, they'd stopped coming, leaving the occasional alien visitor as an oddity.

Still, a guest was a guest, was a guest, and that too an oddity, these days.

So I smiled wide at modeling-clay man and said, in my best slow-and-carefully-enunciated-voice, "Hello, do you wish to check in?” Of course, I didn't even know if he could hear — though he had those conveniently placed holes on the side of his face, much less that he had a concept of speech — I'd seen aliens communicate through sound, telepathy, sign language, even colored light flashes.

But the gash-mouth opened and closed, forming remarkably clear English, with remarkably little accent. "Yes, I need lodgings."

I wiped my hands on my pants, keeping my smile broad and reassuring. 

In every guide book to the universe, they always referred to the non-aggressive gesture of humans, and I wanted him to know that the messy process was not a form of aggression. Because checking in should have been a matter of his putting his finger in the hole of the check-in computer, getting assigned a room, and being given directions to it.

But that had been back when the check-in computer worked, months ago.

I grabbed a pad from my littered counter, and thumbed it on, then onto a new file — and away from the letter my sister had sent me from Proxima 20, telling me she'd found the land of milk-and-honey. "What is your name, please?" I asked.

He looked puzzled, giving the impression of raising the eyebrows he didn't have. "I am—" The gash-mouth opened and closed, closed and opened, in silence. "I am he-who-comes-to-see," he said, at last.

All right. Was that their word for "tourist"? Whatever. I scribbled the name down on the pad, and a room assignment, room three.

Fortunately, I didn't need the assistance of the check-in computer to tell me what rooms were empty. All of them were, except the little apartment at the back of the ground floor, where I lived in spacious solitude.

I assigned he-who-comes a room on the ground floor, too, because the lev-it, like the computer, had given up the ghost some months ago and I wasn't even sure how the top three floors fared, or if they were still livable. The autumn rains, last month, had leaked into rooms one and two, which led me to believe the rooms above them had to be sieves.

"Do you wish to know our rates?" I asked my guest, surprised he hadn't asked.

He waved his green hand. "No.” He pulled something from the depths of his light-green tunic, and dropped it on the counter with a rattle. "I'll be staying a week, and this is my payment."

"This" was Proxima gems — their encoded form of currency. Small, and transparent, like marbles with golden flecks within, they had a recognizable enough pattern to be known, even without a computer to read them. But I knew enough about Proxima — my sister having immigrated to one of its colonies — to know that they didn't encode currency below ten thousand hydras. And any human child, throughout the universe, knew that the Proxima hydra was the strongest currency in the human worlds, and the fastest-climbing one.

I picked up the smooth, cool spheres, running them through my hand, like the proverbial miser with his treasure. Only, it wasn't so much the treasure that I caressed. Visions of a working computer and lev-it danced in my head.

My smile at the alien had become a manic grin as I walked from behind the counter and said, trying not to giggle, "If you'll follow me, sir, I'll show you to your room."

He didn't run when he saw the hallway — molded ceramite, the colors that had been ingrained into it long-since faded to a colorless petroleum-jelly colorlessness. He didn't run when he saw the room: small, with a sagging bed, a tiny dresser, and a one-person fresher whose appliances had seen better days. "The massager doesn't work, but the flusher does, and the air jets are kind of slow, but they will dry you," I said, keeping my grin wide. Oh, please, please, let him stay. The gems jangled in the pocket where I'd put them and I imagined myself already their proprietor. I didn't want to have to give them back.

He-who-comes nodded, slow and sagely.

I dared go on, "And the face recognition lock on the door doesn't work, either, but you can have the pass-key.” I handed him the small wand. If I got another guest, this might be a problem, but if I got another guest in the next week, it would also be a miracle. I'd never had more than one guest at a time in the last twenty years, and more often than not I had no guests at all.

He-Who waved his eight-fingered hand, and turned his back.

I took this to be my dismissal, and walked back to the check-in computer, my heart singing.

Staring down at the mess of nodes and gems, I wondered if I should give it up for a bad job, and wait until I had enough money to summon a computer doctor. But the gems, though in my pocket, were not definitely mine, and I didn't want to lose time on the computer.

Besides, fixing the computer gave me something to do, something other than standing at the door of my hotel and staring out at the melancholy, empty streets of Stratford-upon-Avon.

I remembered in my childhood, those streets had been thronged with tourists from the most remote colonies, their panoply of clothing and skin colors making the street seem like a circus.

I remembered standing at the door and watching.

But even back then, my father had told me that what I remembered as a flood of tourists was no more than a meager trickle, compared to the days of his childhood.

As more and more people left Earth for space, no one stayed behind except the old, the feeble, the scared. And no one came back. They'd found better pastures.

I thought of my sister's letter, in the pad, and grimaced. When it wasn't her, it was my brother, asking me to join him in Arcturus. My brother — my twin brother — Polydeuces, was a computer technician.

I sighed, staring at the mess on the dusty wooden floor behind the check-in desk. I wished I were one. Instead, my father had trained me to follow his footsteps — and the footsteps of my grandfather, and my great-grandfather, and my great-great grandfather before him, as innkeeper at the Swann-of-Avon.

I started assembling nodes, as I best remembered their configuration, though my visual memory had never been any great shakes.

The modeling-clay face peeked in on me, as its owner bent over the counter. "I'll be going to visit the birthplace and the Gildhall schoolroom," he said. "Guidebook says that's where Shakespeare was born and spent a portion of his childhood. Is this right?” He waved a weird-looking spherical pad at me. 

On the shimmering surface of the pad, glowing characters writhed and entwined like tortured earthworms. "The birthplace and the Guildhall are the places of Shakespeare's childhood."

He waved again, that odd-motion of his eight fingers.

I grabbed the pad, and sent a quick message to Welty, down the road. One of the other ten people left in Stratford, Welty must be ninety if he was a day, and he was the official curator of the birthplace and the guildhall. Twenty years ago, he'd kept them open every day, but his advancing age and the dearth of tourists had made him open only on demand. Well, this was demand, and when my alien got to Henley Street to see the old Shakespeare house, I didn't want him to think it was closed most of the time.

So I told Welty to look sharp, and told him the alien seemed to have plenty of money and be free with it.

I went back to my assembling the nodes. One of them had been burned out — as I expected — and it was one of the principal memory ones. I was hoping that if I switched one of the secondary ones to that spot, it would take care of it.

You couldn't buy these nodes anymore. Perhaps, if this came through and the alien stayed the full week, and the gems truly became mine, I could ask my brother to send me a new check-in computer from Arcturus.

Just then, the pad trilled. I had mail. It must be Welty, telling me he had received my message.

But as I thumbed the pad on, I saw it was a letter from my brother, instead. "Cas," he said. "If you wish to come and visit, Marisha and I would be happy to show you around. Marisha and the kids send their love. Marisha says her sisters would love to meet you. Best, Pol."

Marisha's sisters would love to meet me, would they? And Pol would love to show me around Arcturus.

I glared at the broken-down nodes, the mess at my feet.

Damn.

Why could Pol never understand that I didn't want to leave Earth — that I couldn't leave, even if I wanted to.

Our father, and our grandfather and our great-grandfather before him, had all lived here, one after the other, for five hundred years — all the way back to the twenty-first century, when a Bard-struck ancestor had bought the hotel, changed its name to the family name, and settled down to write what would be the ultimate Shakespearean biography. He'd never written it, but he had left an enduring legacy, nonetheless, a long trail of Swann men, extending through the mists of time.

I'd been born in that apartment at the back of the hotel. My son would— I shook my head. Nearing forty and not having found a woman to marry, I should probably give up on the idea of a son. Although, maybe someday a nice female tourist....

My hands were sweaty and I wiped them on my pants, making the gems jingle in my pocket.

Ten gems of at least ten thousand hydras each was a hundred thousand hydras. Enough to buy a passage aboard a spaceship to Arcturus. I shook my head. No. My family had tended the Shakespeare cult for generations. It would yet become profitable again.

I looked around the shabby hotel lobby, with its moldy wood paneling, its foot-worn wooden floor. With ten thousand hydras I could refurbish the place, so that when any tourists came they'd come here first. And they'd tell their friends. And then maybe a nice lady-tourist would come in...I grinned at the thought.

I was still grinning when a child tripped through the door. I started out from behind the counter to meet him. On Earth, children were even rarer than aliens.

Before I could recover the power of speech, he — a boy, about eight, maybe ten, with a thin face, dark curls and intense brown eyes — oozed towards the desk. I don't know how else to describe his approach, which was neither a run nor a walk, but a flowing of his lower — breech-and-stocking-encased — body. He wore Elizabethan boy's attire in dull grey.

"He isn't there," the creature-boy wailed. His face melted, changing shapes like wax in the hot sun. His features went from intent and smart to dull and heavy, then to playful and impish. His eye-color fluttered pale blue to dark blue, dark blue to brown, to black, then blue again. His hair wavered between light brown and dark brown, then black.

I retreated behind my desk.

It followed me, putting forward a hand to the counter, and holding it there. "I've felt the feel/thought of people passing through, but not his feel/thought. He's not there. I came across the galaxy to meet him, this man-with-words that humans talk about, but he isn't here."

I stared down at the counter. The small, child-like hand had eight fingers.

I looked up at the small face, now melting into familiar modeling-clay outlines. The pale-green face climbed up and up and up, as the body grew to my guest's outlines.

A shape changer. And he'd expected to meet Shakespeare? "Uhm...," I said. The ten gems in my pocket got lighter, as though ready to take flight. "William Shakespeare has been dead for over a thousand years."

He nodded vigorously, now fully-alien face bobbing up and down like a mutant jack-o'-lantern. "I know his body is gone, but his impression is gone too. I could not find it. Only thoughts/opinions of other people coming through. No man. No impression-before-the-impression.” The gash-mouth opened and closed. "Not even in the place of his birth."

"Uhm...," I repeated, proving by my eloquence that words had indeed departed Stratford-upon-Avon. "You know, half of his birthplace burned, years ago and no one knows for sure... maybe that was the half he was actually born in. And no one is sure he attended the school, or that it was there. Maybe he was home-schooled, or had a tutor. Maybe his parents were wealthier than we thought."

"You mean you don't know?" he asked.

"No.” I shook my head for emphasis, before thinking whether he might not understand the gesture. His gestures had been so human. "In his day there weren't many records kept," I said.

"Oh," he said, in a very human way. "You didn't have a Come-See attached to him when he died?"

A camera? "No. They didn't—" I stopped short of telling him they hadn't been invented. That would have meant telling him all of the technological progress of humanity, at least if he should prove slow in understanding things. "No one knew he would be this famous," I said, instead.

He nodded, sagely. "Places...do you have other places he might have been? He was?"

I didn't even want to consider which of the two homes — Anne Hathaway's or Mary Arden's might be the true one. I remembered reading in a Shakespeare biography that one of them was almost surely spurious, but I couldn't remember which. So I gave him careful directions to New Place and its gardens, being careful to tell him it was ruins — I didn't want him disappointed. He had said that this made no difference, and trooped out, a gallant modeling-clay man in search of Shakespeare thoughts/feelings. Whatever that might be, I prayed that he find them and that I could keep the gems. I would have the lev-it fixed and go see how much of the upper floors could be salvaged. I would install larger, better-equipped freshers. I would buy a new check-in computer. I'd get my brother to advertise Stratford-upon-Avon and the fine Swann hotel in far-off, rich Arcturus. I'd turn it all around.

Impatient, restless, I slipped my pad into my pants pocket and went out the front door, following my guest.

But where he turned left, on Sheep Street, I turned right, down to Waterside Street, with its fine view of the ancient Clopton Bridge, which Shakespeare surely had known.

I never tired of the Stratford landscape that I'd known all my life. Walking, without paying much attention past the late-twentieth-century centennial fountain, that depicted two swans in a mating dance, I walked down onto Southern Lane, past The Other Place Theater.

The Avon flowed tranquilly, in eddies of pale blue, and the trees on its margins made a fine display: the golden oaks set against the vivid evergreens that retained their summer coloration. Up Oldtown Street, I passed Hall's croft, the fine Tudor Mansion, and along Church Street, I made it to Chapel Street, and back home to Sheep Street, where the dilapidated early-twenty-first Swann Hotel glared at me with its colorless molded-ceramite facade.

As I walked, I imagined this street thronged with tourists, once more. I would advertise in Arcturus and Proxima first, since I had relatives there, and then I would trust word of mouth to spread it further. Through Stratford-upon-Avon's renaissance, Earth itself would be born anew. People would come from distant worlds to see the cradle of humanity and some would stay. Not so many that Earth became as burdened as it had been in the late twenty-first century when the space diaspora formed, but people enough to make the abandoned towns flourish anew.

A trill from my pad, and I brought it out. Another message from my brother. The Lyceum near him was looking for a teacher who could tell the young children about life on Earth. The best candidates so far were a man who had left Earth at twenty, and my brother, who had left Earth at twenty-two but had no interest in teaching. Pol was sure that if I applied— 

I thumbed the pad off. I wasn't going anywhere. Earth would flourish anew, and I with it. Ah. Pol could come to me if he wished.

In my mind, I designed the advertisements. I'd need to tell the colonials as much about Earth as about Shakespeare — and I'd better attach bits and pieces of recorded Shakespearean plays to those advertisements, his words being the best advertisement.

The gems jangling in my pocket, I stopped at the door to my hotel, as Shakespeare himself oozed towards me. Or at least a portly— no, consumptive— no, just inspiration-devoured— no, haggard and tired, gentleman in Elizabethan clothing, made for me as though his feet moved on casters.

Before I looked down at the eight-fingered hands, I knew that this was my guest, and before he opened his mouth, I could foretell the wail that would follow.

"He isn't—" he started.

"There?" I asked, disbelieving, my hand going into my pocket and clenching on the ten gems. Mine. Mine. I needed them to make Earth flourish.

He shook his head. His hair color wavered between salt-and-pepper and dark brown. "Not there, not in these streets. Nowhere I find him. Are you sure he lived here?"

A twinge of doubt tweaked my mind for the first time in centuries. What if those who said the Earl of Oxford had written the plays were right? But no, it couldn't be. They'd been discredited too long ago. I nodded. "We are sure."

"But his thought/feel has been washed out, then," the guest said. "And I can't see how it can be. How many people have visited this place?"

My turn to open my mouth and close it, in stellar imitation of a fish drowning on air. "Many," I said. "Millions used to come every year."

He sank back, as his body, slowly, regained its play-dough impression. "But then it's all gone," he said. "He's all gone. He-who-comes-to-see can't see. There is nothing here for me. I shall leave, for London where they say in the tower..."

I didn't hear the rest of it. The gems in my pocket were now very light. He wouldn't stay the week.

The disgraceful thought that I could keep the gems, anyway, crossed my mind, but I shook it. Not only would it be dishonest, but stupid, too. Aliens had their ways of punishing breeches of contract, and some of those could be fearsome.

I shook my head, put my hand in my pocket, brought out the gems. "Here, then," I said. "Since you won't stay the week."

He nodded, reached over. His hand snatched the gems from my hand. The brush of his eight fingers was icy, almost burning in its coldness.

I watched him ooze down the street, now fully a modeling-clay man.

He would have a shuttle parked somewhere. Or perhaps he would teleport. No matter. He would leave.

And my dreams left with him.

Sighing heavily, I went back to the entrails of my pulled-apart computer, and tried to put it together. Not that it mattered. My next guest might be ten days from now. Or a year.

My pad blurped.

I turned it on. The screen glowed at me:  "Cas, I have checked and there's a flight leaving London for Arcturus at ten-forty-five tonight. Why don't you come and check out the place. If you decide to stay, you can have a job and can buy a house in no time at all, and Marisha's sisters really want to meet you. Pol."

I turned it off.

I couldn't leave, could I?

My ancestors had lived here long enough for their particles to be part of the soil and water. My existence — all that I was — was interwoven with the Stratford landscape: the blue-flowing river, the Sir Hugh Clompton Bridge, the quiet sultriness of Anne Hathaway's cottage, the monuments to Shakespeare, the various theaters now used only for holographic projections of the plays, but still used, nonetheless.

In my mind, the alien wailed, "He isn't here."

But how could he not be here, in a town that was so imbued with his presence?

Getting up, off my knees, I walked out the front door, again.

Outside, I almost collided with a beaming Welty. Or with the advance prong of his walker-balancer that he tilted forward at a perilous angle. "I've done it, Cas," he told me. "Or your alien did. Ten thousand hydras for showing him the birthplace and the guild-chapel. Enough to join my daughter in Centaur 2."

Oh. Welty would be leaving, then. The birthplace and the guild-chapel, the Shakespeare foundation building, would all be abandoned. I don't know what I told Welty.

In a numb fog, I walked down Sheep Street and stopped by the brass-and-steel memorial fountain. The two swans raised their heads in their mating dance, still, as I always remembered them, but when had they got so corroded and time-worn?

People had washed out the Bard's thoughts and presence, with their impressions of the Bard.

Tears filled my eyes, and I blinked at the swans' rusted necks.

The Swanns of Avon were about as rusted, as corroded.

And what had we been preserving, all this time? Just a faded memory, a nothing, an opinion of an opinion of an opinion?

He-who-comes-to-see had found nothing.

Maybe I stood sentry to an empty tomb.

My pad beeped. I turned it on.

"Cas, I've made reservations for you in the shuttle. I'll unmake them if you tell me to, but I want you know I'll be glad to pay your ticket, if you only come. There's a new world out here, waiting for you."

I stared at the pad a long time.

I looked up from it, at the swans and the aged buildings behind them, the oaks and ever-greens by the river, and they all seemed to have the thin transparency of painted scenery. I'd heard that in Arcturus they had multicolored trees, and that golden birds flew among them. All of a sudden, I wanted to see those trees and those birds, wanted to experience something that my ancestors hadn't seen or felt.

I understood my brother and my sister. They might have loved Stratford as much as I did, but maybe they'd felt that it was worn thin, like a sea-rolled pebble.

It seemed to be a device peculiar to Shakespeare that his plays often contained another play within them: Hamlet, The Taming Of The Shrew, A Midsummer Night's Dream....

Perhaps I'd been living only in the play within the play, in my worn hotel, in my worn town.

I wanted to see the rest of the stage.

I found a stylus in my pocket. "Thanks, Pol," I wrote on the pad. "I'll catch that ship."


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Framed