Read Online Space Opera by Jack Vance - Free Book Online Page B

eerie! I’d never imagined that one sunset could be so different from another!”
    Roger took a deep breath, walked quietly away, around the entire circumference of the ship.

     
    Dyrus Boltzen provided an unexpectedly good dinner, due, he admitted, to the fact that the supply ship had departed Sirius Settlement only about three weeks previously. “We’re close to Earth here — relatively of course — yet this is a lonely planet. Very few casuals like yourself put in. None of them, naturally, with an ambitious program like yours.”
    “Do you think that we can make ourselves comprehensible to the byzantaurs?” asked Dame Isabel. “They seem completely non-human in their attitudes.”
    “In certain ways, yes, in other, no. Sometimes I wonder at how closely our judgments mesh. Other times I’m just as astonished that we could view the same simple act from such different angles. I’ll say this much: if you want to present a program that the byzantaurs can relate to their own existence, you’re going to have to take them on their own terms.”
    “Naturally,” said Bernard Bickel. “We are prepared to do so. Can you offer us suggestions?”
    Boltzen poured wine all around. “I believe I can. Let me see. An obvious matter is color, to which they are highly sensitive. Yellow is the color of rogues and outcasts, so the unsympathetic characters should wear yellow, the hero and heroine blue or black, and those in supporting roles gray and green. There is the matter of sex: love, romance, whatever you want to call it. The ’zants have peculiar reproductive habits; in fact there are three sex processes, and each of the ’zants is capable of performing two of them, so you can see that an untold number of misunderstandings might ensue unless a certain allowance were made for this fact. They do not demonstrate affection by hugging or kissing; their sex play is a matter of spraying the intended mate with a viscous liquid. I doubt if you wish to carry similitude to quite this extent.”
    “Probably not,” agreed Bernard Bickel.
    “Well, let’s think further … as I recall Fidelio — are not certain scenes played in a dungeon?”
    “Quite correct,” said Dame Isabel. “Almost the whole of Act Two.”
    “You must remember that a dungeon is a cherished home to the ’zants. The deranged, the troublemakers are expelled to the plain, where they roam in bands: incidentally, warn your company not to wander off by themselves. The rogues are not automatically savage, but are highly unpredictable, especially when they carry their flints.”
    “Well, well, well,” said Dame Isabel slowly. “I suppose we can make scene changes easily enough: perhaps play Act One in the dungeon and the first scene of Act Two in the open.”
    “If you’re trying to get your point across, I suggest something on this order.”
    “Oh indeed we are,” declared Dame Isabel. “Why come all this way merely to confuse our audience?”
    “Why indeed?” echoed Bernard Bickel.
    “Then there’s also costuming. Do you know what the ’zants call us in their own language? Sky-lice. Exactly. Their feelings toward us are, as closely as I can gather, amiable contempt. We are a race to be exploited, a set of eccentrics who will trade intricate metal devices for fragments of polished rock!”
    Dame Isabel looked rather helplessly toward Bernard Bickel, who fingered his mustache. “I hope,” she said uncertainly, “that the performance will do something to alter their view.”
    “Again — and I don’t know if you care to go this far — but from the standpoint of your audience the production would make more sense if they could identify themselves and their own lives with the actors and the course of action.”
    “We can’t rewrite the opera,” complained Dame Isabel. “We wouldn’t be presenting Fidelio , which of course is our intent.”
    “I appreciate this; I am making no recommendations, only supplying information on which you may or may