The Chrysanthemum Palace

~ ~ ~

COMMANDER WILL KARP HAILED FROM KANSAS City, Missouri (according to the writers, who themselves hailed from Harvard and Yale). A highly decorated gunner, he was a veteran of the Nardian Wars. Ladies man and marginal wit, he retained the chauvinistic whiff and wink of old Star Legion glory days.

Some “bible” backstory: Karp — uh, that would be me — was the son of a legendary warrior who, after a disfiguring battle wound, became the academy professor and beloved mentor of Frederick Ulysses Laughton, current fifty-something African-American captain of the distinctively ellipsoid, overmerchandized Starwatch mothership USS Demeter. Along with Laughton, I joined Lieutenant Commander Iltriko Shazuki (relatively new to the show, she’d been a minor player on Will and Grace and recently staged a satirical one-woman show at a theater on Cahuenga, playing nearly twenty characters); Major Glaston Cabott 7, the captain’s all-purpose android-de-camp (a storied second-generation player in Chicago’s Steppenwolf group, and of H-P mascot fame); and Dr. Phineas Chaldorer a.k.a. X-Ray, the Demeter’s handlebar-mustachioed Sultan of Sickbay (having made a fortune as the Prius pitchman, he was rumored to own a microbrewery and a vineyard in the Malibu Hills). I was already friendly with our congenial ensemble — most were in AA — but will maintain character names throughout, to avoid confusion.

The morning we did our usual preshoot read through, sitting around a table while the writers fine-tuned dialogue, Mr. Michelet was in subdued, if friendly, spirits. Not wishing to broadcast their relationship, Thad and Clea were careful about hanging out. They fraternized in a cordially standoffish way, as if to throw us off the scent. I found it silly because I didn’t think anyone gave a shit but since I’d concealed my own affair with Miriam, I tried withholding judgment. I was that big a person.

Michelet was a hit with cast and crew. Getting him on the show was considered a coup that raised everyone’s stock. The fact that he was a Renaissance man with a long, prestigious résumé was a balm to the large part of our troupe who felt they’d sold out, or at least lost sight of one-time lofty goals and aspirations. The gang lit up whenever he walked in the room. Even if, deep down, they knew life on the bridge was as good as it would ever get, all were warmed by his fire and its inherent promise of escape from the golden wormhole of artistically stagnant sci-fi syndication. Besides, the man had made real money out there. The actors were well versed in Black Jack’s harsh legend and recent passing, and when comfortable enough to give voice (it only took a few days), the complicatedly bereaved son found himself touched by their concise, carefully chosen words of sympathy. It was a gift of Thad’s that he could relate to the most pretentious of cast and roughest of Teamsters, snaking his way into hearts with the ease of, well, the microbial parasite that took the genial shape of a traveling circus clown in “The Ringmaster Cometh (Episode 14-321D).” Our close-knit soundstage family was ready to kill for him before filming even began.

On the first day of the shoot, I hovered at the bridge near my marks while actors took places for camera rehearsal. Clea coyly whispered to the A.D. something about Thad being “delayed” in the makeup trailer — a detail the man no doubt was aware of. (With all her caginess, I thought it oddly reckless.) The grapevine had it that our beloved guest star was of a mind he looked asinine in his facial prosthetic, and the makeup department, Emmyless for fourteen seasons running, was in an agitated funk. A couple of coproducers were dispatched to mollify Mr. M; after an hour or so, the director called “Action!” anyway.

We got as far as Thad’s entrance and were about to block the rest of the scene with a camera double when he finally appeared, stepping from the shadows in a drab ensign’s uniform, his countenance a macabre yet somehow tender dodecahedron of glinting latex planes — grand variation of Clea’s lower-caste Vorbalid mug. The utilitarian outfit, deliberately duller than those of the workaday crew (a brilliant stroke, I thought) made the physiognomy fabulously theatrical; like a peacock in a Pep Boys jumpsuit, we saw only the clipped tragedy of aborted phosphorescence. A hush fell over the stage.

“Ecce Vorbalid,” Thad proclaimed, with Lear-like abandon, beaming gregariously through the geometry of applied flesh. Not many knew what those words meant but everyone sensed that at last he was pleased. The ice was broken, and the majesty of his creation acknowledged with a burst of applause. The makeup folks, pardoned by the king, lifted their collective heads from the guillotine.

We were surrounded by windows. Not windows, really, but their facsimiles — cutouts from which one peered at “star curtains,” the crude, perennial backdrops that provided the illusion of deep space.

For those who aren’t fans of the genre,¹ let me shorten and summarize: I was poised behind Lieutenant Commander Shazuki, peering over her shoulder while the harried communicator tried to make sense of a hash of data on the plasma screen. Waiting for camera to roll, I focused on the sexy, cyclonic hair swirls on the actor’s neck and my mind went off on a jag — youngish people in the news who of late were dying of sudden, unexplained aneurysms; the catching up I had to do with TiVo (Venom ER and SeaLab 2021 were auto-deleting right and left); the spam calls I was getting on my cell phone from “pharmacies” wanting to sell me Oxycodone — when suddenly Shazuki began talking about some weird “energy ingot” which had appeared out of nowhere. She was referring to a photon probe (I couldn’t believe the writers were still using that one) that gauged the so-called ingot to be just a meter wide, “an impossibility according to all known laws of physics.” Reflexively, I told Shazuki to keep an eye on it — it was probably just expansion gas. (I always got expansion gas after a good photon probe.) At this point, Android Cabott 7, the butt, if I may, of most of my heavy-metal humor, whooshed through the central door of the bridge.²

“I’ve been monitoring your concerns from my quarters, Lieutenant Commander,” said the droid. “Status report.”

“It seems almost… sentient,” said Shazuki, eyes glued to the screen.

“I can hear… words. Almost like great populated cities—”

The captain and ship’s doctor whooshed in. The ingot was discussed. Everyone was pissed at the idea of anything fucking up our long-planned R&R on the pleasure colony Darius 9. In an unmotivated segue, the captain wondered out loud where the hell the new ensign was; the doc said Rattweil had motion sickness. I made a crack about how Legion recruiters were scraping the bottom of the barrel and the captain told me to stow it. Someone else made a disparaging jibe and the captain said, “I will not tolerate gossip or the species-ism it dresses up in. Ensign Rattweil is a Vorbalid — one of the very few, I may add, to have migrated outside that closed, repressive system. I’ll remind you such a journey is punishable by death, and not for the faint of heart. He will be afforded the respect presumed—demanded—by each and every member of the starship crew. Understood?”

Our penitent eyes were still cast downward as Thad whooshed in, cued by a second A.D.

The captain looked him over. “Feeling better, Mister?”

Thad stood in comically rigid attention. “Yes sir!”

“I hope you found our infirmary… adequate.” The captain’s mood turned lighthearted, suddenly curious about the curious new man.

“Dr. Chaldorer gave me something for my nerves.”

“A motion sickness suppository coupled with a jigger of old malt whiskey did the trick,” said X-Ray.

“I think,” said Thad, “the culprit may well have been the commissary bouillabaisse.”

“We have the finest chef in all the Legion,” the captain remonstrated. “The bouillabaisse is native to his undersea world and considered an exquisite delicacy.”

“The Vorbalidian stomach,” Thad said dryly, “is bicameral.” The crew suppressed a collective titter. “I was merely faulting my own physiolo—”

Suddenly, a jolt.³ Alarms blared as we braced ourselves against the curvaceous sides of the bridge. Lights flickered, and things went generally bat shit. The starscreen that hung above grew blank then staticky. We lurched to our posts as the ship stabilized.

“Lieutenant Commander!” shouted the captain. “What’s going on?”

“The energy ingot, sir! It’s — pulling us in!”

“Commander!” barked the captain, jarring me from an erotic reverie that had ranged, in milliseconds, from my darling Miriam to a newbie at AA to the young Judi Dench, whom I’d just seen in a seventies film on TNN. “Engage! Warp five!”

“Captain,” I shouted. “The instruments are frozen!”

“Then unfreeze them. Do it, Commander!”

“Aye, sir!—”

“Red alert! Engine room, damage report!”

“Still checking, Captain!” said the script supervisor, tucked behind a camera. (Her voice would eventually be looped.)

“Warp plasma inducers?”

“Intact. We have full power, but we’re ‘locked in.’ I’ve never seen a tractor beam of this magnitude, sir—”

“Bypass?”

“There’s no way,” said Cabott. “If we continue the attempt to free ourselves, we risk implosion.”

The captain leaned into the subwoofer-thingie to bark the patented bridge-to-engine-room “Realign the power grid!” (always a crowd-pleaser) before asking Cabott how much time we had. The android nanocalculated point-two-seven hours, at the outset.

“Will,” said Laughton, with (patentedly) urgent, almost seductive intimacy — it was the writers’ idea that whenever the shit hit the fan, crew members were to be addressed by first names—“Get us out of here.”

I tried the instruments again but they wouldn’t budge. I shouted that we were being sucked into a vortex (at that moment, hating myself as both actor and man). The captain puzzled over what—who—was pulling us — while Thad stepped forward to stare gravely at the starscreen.

“I believe,” he said, “we are being appropriated by the Vorbalidian System.”

“Appropriated? What’s the meaning of it, Ensign?”

“It’s obvious they feel that a hostile incursion on their sacred Dome is imminent.”

“But, that’s… madness!” the captain opined, a bit over the top. It was one of those days where it seemed like he was doing an impression of himself.

“If I am to read the situation correctly,” said Thad, “their behavior can have only one meaning.” The bridge grew quiet as the camera dollied in on the rubbery, fetal face of the tyro ensign, his sweaty gaze pitched upward toward blue screen. A slow-zoom intercut would later reveal the lame-ass ingot in all its hoary, kandy-kolored tangerine-flaked digital glory. “It is a declaration of war.”

Before cutting, the director bade us stare a few extra beats in varying degrees of freaked-outedness at the screen, which in postproduction would project the twisted, Alfred E. Newmanesque visage of the badasssssssss Prince Morloch, his psychotic smile glaring down at us from the garish, faux-marbleized sanctuary of the Vorbalidian Dome.

¹ You may be legion.

² The door was actually pulled open on ropes by hidden grips, with the whoosh added in post. Everything you always wanted to know about space opera but were afraid to ask.

³ Again, for the cognoscente: whenever the Demeter came under assault, an A.D. would instruct the actors to “shake”—but only the cameras moved. Also, I implore the readers to forgive excerpted “Prodigal” dialogue, for it is not my own.