The Swagman considered that remark, as well as some of the other things Cain had said since leaving Altair III, and spent the next few minutes studying his new partner, comparing him to what he knew of the Angel, and wondering if Virtue MacKenzie had made the correct choice after all.

14.

Alas, Poor Yorick, I knew him well:

He can’t climb down from the carousel.

He began with dreams, with hope and trust;

Alas, Poor Yorick, they turned to dust.

His name wasn’t really Poor Yorick—not at first, anyway. He was born Herman Ludwig Menke, and he stuck with that name for twenty years. Then he joined a troupe of actors that traveled the Galactic Rim, and became Brewster Moss; word has it that he even performed for the Angel, back before he became the Angel.

Anyway, by the time he was forty he had yet another new name, Sterling Wilkes, which is the one he made famous when he almost single-handedly brought about the Shakespearean renaissance on Lodin XI. It is also the one he made notorious, due to his various chemical dependencies.

Six years later, after he’d had one hallucinogenic trance too many before a paying audience, he was barred from the stage. It was time for a new name—Poor Yorick seemed quite apt this time around—and a new profession. Since he had an artistic bent and all he knew was the theater, he turned up on the Inner Frontier as a prop manufacturer, and in the following decade he turned out a never-ending stream of counterfeit crowns and harmless guns, bogus jewels and bogus thrones, almost real stones in almost valuable settings.

He also kept a sizable number of drug peddlers in business, and when he graduated from injecting hallucinogens to chewing alphanella seeds, he was forced to supplement his income by turning his fine forger’s hand to less legitimate enterprises than the stage. As the quality of his work suffered due to his dependency, he lost his legal job and then most of his illegal commissions as well, and was reduced to selling hasty paintings of actors he had known, which were turned out during his increasingly rare periods of lucidity.

A few years later Black Orpheus came into possession of four of the paintings and instantly knew that he had stumbled onto an interesting if erratic talent.