"John Varley - The Golden Globe" - читать интересную книгу автора (Varley John)

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

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The Golden Globe by John Varley

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