Arbeiters and doles created a racket scrambling out of their seats to get out from under the massive, flat-bottomed gravity sledge. Archons landed their vehicles when and where they pleased and more than a few humans from 25-25-261B certainly had been crushed before this night.

But the sledge did not land. It rose to a point just below the tent roof about forty feet from the stage and hovered there. The doles and arbeiters who’d fled found places to sit in the aisles out from under the sledge’s shadow and the dangling bare feet of the dragomen and returned their attention to the stage, their faces pale but attentive.

I’m a professional. I did not miss a beat or drop a note. But I know my voice quavered as I sang the next stanza.

Sing no more ditties, sing no more,

Of dumps so dull and heavy.

The fraud of men was ever so,

Since summer first was leavy.

Then sigh not so, but let them go,

And be you blithe and bonny,

Converting all your sounds of woe

Into Hey, nonny nonny.

Gough, playing Don Pedro, did not miss a beat. “‘By my troth, a good song,’” he cried, his eyes never shifting to the sledge and Archons.

“‘And an ill singer, my lord,’” was my response. For once I was telling the truth. My voice had cracked or quavered half a dozen times in those eight simple lines of singing.

‘“Ha, no, no, faith,’” bellowed Gough/Don Pedro, “‘thou sing’st well enough for a shift.’”

My hands were shaking and I did sneak a glance at the motionless sledge and the slowly twisting dragomen hanging naked and slick-skinned and hairless and sexless beneath that sledge, the filaments from the four of their skulls running up to red sensory node bundles on the complicated chest carapaces of the eight Archons.