"Charles L. Grant - Glow of Candles, Unicorn's eye" - читать интересную книгу автора (Grant Charles L)

for exposure, and the cash, that I needed.
"Listen, Gordy," she'd said, "these kids will know you for the rest of their lives! Not by
name, but they'll recognize your face! They'll want to see you on stage-if that's what you're
still after--on the comunit channels, the cinema bowls. You'll have it made, you idiot. You can't
pass this up."
And, to be honest, I hadn't. But neither had I forgotten the near-empty houses I had
played to when I had managed to wheedle permission to leave those joyhall holovid arenas and
cinema bowls.
Near empty.
Partially full.
There had been five in which I was an understudy. I didn't much care. It was live, actors
and audience, and I drifted from one theater to another waiting for the chance to get in on the


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action. But they all folded in less than a month, the audiences deserting them long before the
last curtain. Drifting in, stalking out, curious more than anything, and no one bothered to wait
for the players who slunk from their failures from unlocked stage doors. Several times I tried to
ask someone just why he was leaving, but never got an answer that cured the question.
Finally, when I cornered one of the directors and demanded to know why her play was a
failure, she only snapped an arm toward the gap that was the stage and shrugged. "I guess we're
running out of gimmicks. We need a new one. I don't know. The way things are going, I don't really
care."
The Storm's Eye had three dozen sets, and auditorium
seats that slowly tilted back to focus audience attention on a holovid simulation of the typhoon
threatening the actors on stage.
Great World Yearning had catapults and springboards, trapezes, and a 360-degree stage.
Blessing had four orchestras, three tenors, waterfalls, ceilingatorms, a marching band,
rehearsals for the audience's instrument parts, and a prominent reviewer who insisted on getting
every name in the theater for his comprehensive critique.
Take This Crown had seventy-nine speaking parts and four burnings at the stake.
Where Hath God Raged had a planetarium, an espernarrator, and a colonist from the Moon.
Three playwright/producers had created them all. And when the last one gave up hope, I
took the slip marking the deposit to my account and wandered from theater to theater. Something, I
knew, had died in both artist and observer. Then, taking the easy way out, I managed to locate and
assault with tears and fists all three of the creators one by one. All in darkness, I sought out
those so-called playwrights, and after each attack I fled until my lungs burned me to a halt.
My justification at the time was simple: They were murderers, of something I could not yet
understand. They had been part of a conspiracy to kill off words.
I wandered, waiting to be caught for my crime, listening for the accusing scream of a
WatchDog swooping angrily beneath the Walkways, netting me, lifting me, locking me away.
I had to have been mad to have done it. But there were no still and small voices directing
my attacks, no sudden blind fury that drove me to the call of insanity that guided my hand, only
those questions, all beginning with why? and the knowledge that the playwrights had been midwives
to disaster, had birthed disasters before, and were part and parcel of what I knew was the dying
of a dying art.
Yet there was no feeling of catharsis.
I had done it.