On many worlds we have permission to land at a variety of arbeiter huddles, but this world had only this single major human population center. The town has no name, of course. We humans gave up naming things long ago, abandoning that habit along with our culture, politics, arts, history, hope, and sense of self. No one in the troupe or among the arbeiters and doles here had a clue as to who had named the Archon keep Mezel-Goull, which apparently meant “Devil’s Rest,” but the name seemed appropriate. It sounded appropriate, even if the words actually had no meaning.

The hulking mass of Archon steel and black stone dominated an overhanging cliff about six miles north of this plateau upon which the humans were housed. Through binoculars, I could see the tall slits of tower windows glowing yellow while pale white searchlights stabbed out from the keep and up to the highlands, then probed down over the human escarpment and across the Muse, then swept out to the sulfur sea. None of us from the troupe had ever been to the keep, of course—why would humans, other than dragomen (whom most of us do not consider human), have any business with Archons? They own us, they control our lives, they dictate our actions and fates, but they have no interest in us and we usually return the favor.

There were twenty-three of us in this Shakespearean troupe called the Earth’s Men. Not all of us were men, of course, although we knew through stage history that in the Bard’s day even the women’s roles were acted by males.

My name is Wilbr. I was twenty SEY old that day we landed on 25- 25-261B and had been chosen for the troupe when I was nine and turned out to be good enough at memorizing my lines and hitting my marks to be on stage for most productions, but by age twenty I knew in my heart that I would never be a great actor. Probably not even a good one. But my hope remained to play Hamlet someday, somehow, somewhere. Even if only once.