Read Online The Memory of Earth by Orson Scott Card - Free Book Online Page B

might be tall as a man, but he was still far too young to be a serious customer. So they never came up and talked to him, the way they did when adults came into the shops. He had to glean his information from what he overheard. The prices astonished him. Of course the cost of the originals was completely out of reach, but even the high-resolution holographic copies were too expensive for him to dream of buying one. Worst of all was the fact that the paintings and sculptures he liked the best were invariably the most expensive. Maybe that meant that he had excellent taste. Or maybe it meant that the artists who knew how to impress the ignorant were able to make the most money.
    Bored at last with the galleries, and determined to see which art should be the channel for his future, Nafai wandered down to the open theatre, a series of tiny stages dotting the broad lawns near the wall. A few plays were in rehearsal. Since there was no real audience yet, the sound bubbles hadn’t been turned on, and as Nafai walked from stage to stage, the sounds of more distant plays kept intruding into every pause in the one close athand. After a while, though, Nafai discovered that if he stood and watched a rehearsal long enough to get interested, he stopped noticing any other noises.
    What intrigued him most was a troupe of satirists. He had always thought satire must be the most exciting kind of play, because the scripts were always as new as today’s gossip. And, just as he had imagined, there sat the satirist at the rehearsal, scribbling his verse on paper—on
paper
—and handing the scraps to a script boy who ran them up to the stage and handed them to the player that the lines were intended for. The players who weren’t onstage at the moment were either pacing back and forth or hunched over on the lawn, saying their lines over and over again, to memorize them for tonight’s performance. This was why satires were always sloppy and ill-timed, with sudden silences and absurd non sequiturs abounding. But no one expected a satire to be
good
—it only had to be funny and nasty and new.
    This one seemed to be about an old man who sold love potions. The masker playing the old man seemed quite young, no more than twenty, and he wasn’t very good at faking an older voice. But that was part of the fun of it—maskers were almost always apprentice actors who hadn’t yet managed to get a part with a serious company of players. They
claimed
that the reason they wore masks instead of makeup was to protect them from reprisals from angry victims of satire—but, watching them, Nafai suspected that the mask was as much to protect the young actor from the ridicule of his peers.
    The afternoon had turned hot, and some of the actors had taken off their shirts; those with pale skin seemed oblivious to the fact that they were burning to the color of tomatoes. Nafai laughed silently at the thought that maskers were probably the only people in Basilica who could get a sunburn everywhere
but
their faces.
    The script boy handed a verse to a player who had been sitting hunched over in the grass. The young man looked at it, then got up and walked to the satirist.
    “I can’t say this,” he said.
    The satirist’s back was to Nafai, so he couldn’t hear the answer.
    “What, is my part so unimportant that
my
lines don’t have to rhyme?”
    Now the satirist’s answer was loud enough that Nafai caught a few phrases, ending with the clincher, “Write the thing yourself!”
    The young man angrily pulled his mask off his face and shouted, “I couldn’t do worse than
this
!”
    The satirist burst into laughter. “Probably not,” he said. “Go ahead, give it a try, I don’t have time to be brilliant with
every
scene.”
    Mollified, the young man put his mask back on. But Nafai had seen enough. For the young masker who wanted his lines to rhyme was none other than Nafai’s brother Mebbekew.
    So this was the source of his income. Not borrowing at all. The