THE ALIEN LANDS

“The study of acting is not an approved science, it’s passion and it is not a religion. Acting is about the human heart. When we act, we do not wish and we do not pray. We draw upon our firsthand experiences we have in our lives and unleash them to the surface with the hope that it will change the world.”

“This is not to say that we don’t understand acting, in the sense that, say politicians understand how to make the government work and trust me, these days they don’t.” the class of thirty students let out a laugh. They agree with him. “In any case, we do not and can’t understand what acting is, where it came from or why people enjoy doing it. I don’t have to. We all work with what we have to entertain the people of the world.”

“With the caveat that is much more difficult and much more dangerous than it is to be an actor then say someone who works on skyscrapers for a living.”

Delivering this interesting lecture was Professor John Branch, who Cordelia had last seen during her Audition --- he was the older white man who was the second person to come and talk to her when she was trying to get on. Professor Branch was a man with some weight on him, that told Cordelia, he liked to eat, he enjoyed himself. She thought he would be a happy person, but he was not only a jerk, but a jackass.

When Cordelia woke up that morning the huge empty house was full of people ---- yelling, running, noisy people who dragged their bodies up the stairs and banged open her door, looking her over, and then slamming it shut again. It was a rude experience: she got used to wandering the House by herself as its mistress and Queen, or at least, after Damien, it’s senior member. But as it turned out, there were one hundred and thirty other students enrolled at Arcadia Academy, divided into five classes that equaled roughly to freshman through first year graduate student. They had arrived this morning at mass for the first day of the semester, and they were asserting their power.

They came in clumps, beaming in ten at a time on the back terrace, each group with a series of boxes and bags and suit cases beside it. Everyone except Cordelia was in uniform: striped blazers and ties for the guys, blue blouses and dark skirts for the girls. It reminded Cordelia of the Zane Academy school where she went to on the Colonial home world.

“It’s a blouse and skirt at all times except for in your room,” Ashman explained. “There are more rules; you’ll pick them up from the others. Most girls like to choose their own blouses. I am inclined to be lenient on that as I don’t understand anything about how girls like to dress, but don’t test me. Anything too exciting or different will be confiscated, and you will be forced to wear a uniform of my choosing that will make you stand out to the student population.”

When Cordelia got back to her room, she found a closetful of identical blouses and skirts hanging there, dark blue and chocolate brown inch-wide stripes, with a blue shirt. Most of them looked brand new; a few showed signs that maybe they had been worn by other students in the past and smelled just a hint of pot around the cuffs. She changed gingerly and looked at herself in the mirror. She hated wearing uniforms, but that was the life that she was chosen as a student here at Arcadia Academy. She had to look the part. She had to fit in.

Each jacket had an embroidered coat of arms on it, a picture of a mask that looked like it was crying and a golden shield on the background dotted with tiny red stars. She would later hear other students call the Key Face. Once she started looking for it, she saw it everywhere, worked into the walls, the carpet, the curtains and the floors.

Now Cordelia sat in a large square lecture hall, a corner room with energy efficient, high windows on two sides. It contained four rows of elegant old school desks that look as though they belong to another time, the eighteenth century maybe. It reminded Cordelia of a university lecture hall where the chalk board was down on the first level and as you walk into the classroom the desk were all on a raised platform that go all the way back as if it was Kings and Queens looking down on the small lecturer. Cordelia knew that probably half of the students in this room won the National High School Musical theater award. Once of Cordelia’s classmates had won that award but she didn’t see her in this room.

Not that any of that stuff mattered anymore, but the air was thick with nerves. Sitting there in her new-smelling blouse and skirt, Cordelia already wished she was hanging out with Damien.

“Cordelia Alldice, would you please come up to the front of the class? Why don’t you do a science fiction scene for the class?”

Branch was looking straight at her.

“That’s right.” His manner was warm and glowing, like he was giving Cordelia a prize. “Right here.” He indicated a spot next to him as he grabbed a sheet of blue papers from his desk. “Here, why don’t you take this.”

Professor Branch rummaged in his pockets and took out a pair of thick glasses that look like they were popular in the nineteen fifties.

The classroom was absolutely still. Cordelia knew this wasn’t a real test. It was object-lesson-slash-hazing ritual. She was the new girl after all. An annual thing, get a grip girl, this must be one of Arcadia’s traditions. But her legs felt like bricks of iron as she made her way to the front of the class. The other students stared at her with cold hate that they were not the one called.

She took her place next to Branch and grabbed the copy of blue paper that he handed to her. She read the scene along with him. She had not seen any science fiction since she arrived on earth more than a year ago. She felt awkward reading the scene and when she was done, she was rewarded with scattered giggles from the audience.

The tension broke. She had a challenging time pronouncing some of the more difficult words. As she was trying to make sense of the scene she couldn’t break into character as she thought the scene made no sense but she rolled with it as best she could. The room broke up.

For her grand finale, Cordelia pretended to be shot by a laser blast as the scene called for, at the last second the scene called for her to break into song which she did. Her voice was not bad as she performed a number for several minutes. Once that was done, she apologized profusely to Professor Branch. When it was done, Cordelia thought she did a bad job, but the class started clapping.

Cordelia executed a bow worthy of Arsenio Hall. The first years applauded wildly. She bowed. Not bad, she thought half an hour into this first semester and she was becoming popular. A folk hero.

“Thank you, Cordelia.” Professor Branch said unctuously, clapping with the palm of his hands. “Thank you, for someone who has no experience with science fiction, let alone comedy that was very enlightening. You may return to your seat. Christina, what about you? Care to come up here and act out a scene with me?”

This remark was addressed to an overweight, swollen girl with straight red hair who’d be sitting in the back row trying not to be noticed. She showed no surprise at being picked; she looked like the type of person who was always being picked on, teased on a moment’s notice, and why should she be any different? She walked down, the wide steps of the lecture hall had revealed an uneasy truth about her, she kept her eyes straight ahead, cold, not wanting to contact the rest of the room in her freshly ironed uniform.

She studied the pages, smiled and decided she was going to do something no one in the room was expecting, she busted out into song. Every single night, the same arrangement,

I go out and fight the fight. Still, I always feel this strange estrangement, nothing here is real, nothing here is right.

I’ve been making shows of trading blows, just hoping no one knows, That I’ve been going through the motions,

Walking through the part, nothing seems to penetrate my heart.

By now, most in the class knew she was singing from Buffy: The Vampire Slayer musical episode Once More with Feeling and her voice seemed to penetrate every student in the class, even the ones who felt like falling asleep. The way her voice slapped even the most curious in the room seemed to have all their eyes on her. She really had some strength in her pipes. If she wanted to be the next great opera singer, she had the recipe for it. Cordelia enjoyed her version of the song.

Cautiously, as if she was drinking a hot sip of tea, Christina when she sang the last note in the line voice echoed so loud that it made people in the hallways stop to take a listen.

This time no one applauded. The chill in the room was palpable. The hair stood up on the back of Cordelia’s neck. She was sensing energy in the room that reminded her of the day her home world was destroyed. She couldn’t have been there on that day, could she? That’s impossible Cordelia thought. Earth people do not have the capability to travel to outer space yet, so why am I feeling like this?

“Thank you, Christina!” Professor Branch said, regaining control of the stage, “For those of you who are wondering, Christina just performed three basic scenes for us.” He held up a finger for each one, “She performed a horror scene, she performed a scene designed to produce an emotional response, and three some kind of sound penetrating device that appears to be home-brewed, so maybe if I was generous should name it after you, Christina.”

Christina looked back at Branch impressive, waiting for a cue that she can go back to her seat. She wasn’t even smug about it, she hated being the center of attention, she wanted to be released. Forgotten, the little rest of the class was now fully waking up, some impressed by her song, some wishing they never heard of it and some wishing they could put Buffy like every other bad twentieth century horror series in the back of their minds.

Cordelia watched the little drama with a mixture of compassion and some healthy envy. Such a tender soul, she thought. But if anyone is going to give me some serious competition at this school, it’s going to be her. I need to watch her, carefully.

“Tonight, please read the first chapter of Cordell’s drama of the mind, in the Sandburg translation,” Branch said, “and the first two chapters of Bob Slaughter’s Practical Exercises for Young Actors and Actress, a book you will soon hate with every fiber in your being. I invite you to attempt the first four scenes. Each of you will be performing one of them in class tomorrow.”

“And if you find Bob Slaughter’s rather quaint translation difficult, keep in mind next month we will be starting Latin, Japanese and Italian at which time you will look back on this and crave for the days when you could understand what we were studying.”

The bell rang.

Students began stirring up and gathering their books. Cordelia looked down at the notebook in front of her, which was empty except for the assignment that Professor Branch just gave out.

“Final thought before you go.” Branch raised his voice over the shuffling noise. “I urge you again to think of this as a purely introduction to acting, with a minimum of theory. If you find yourself curious about your acting potential you are slowly and very, very painfully nurturing, remember this famous anecdote about the American actor from the nineteenth century, Lloyd Foster.”

“Foster once gave a public lecture on the structure of acting out a scene. Afterwards he was approached by a black woman who had escaped the south through the underground railroad and managed to get into the university’s program for drama and theater, but she also told him that he was wrong in his thinking, because everyone knew that acting came from the heart and you needed confidence to act a scene out successfully.”

“When Lloyd asked her why did she feel that acting needed to come from the heart,” she replied, “You have to act from the heart for the audience to have any kind of emotional connection with you.”

“The woman, of course was very right, she knew what she was talking about because right up until that point, her heart gave her the courage to face the fear of leaving the south, a lifestyle she had known all of her life and make the dangerous journey just so that she could have a taste of freedom.”

The very next afternoon Branch taught them how to use their emotions to get the reaction from the audience from anywhere on the planet. But he taught them in a language that sounded like it was a piss poor version of Creole that Cordelia didn’t recognize (later Christina told her that it was Annobonese Creole), accompanied by tapping into emotions that you can only tap into when your high on acid or drugs. Those who completed the scene successfully and made the trio of instructors watching have an emotional response. They would know.

Cordelia stayed until she started crying while performing the scene herself. She felt like she didn’t understand the language, but unlike the other students in the classroom she had something about her that caused the floodgates to rise to the surface and by the time she was crying, the instructors were crying and those few students who stayed to see her dig deep to try and understand the scene she was performing but she had the instructors talking. The five students who stayed all stood up and said ---- yes, you go girl. Christina had been the first to cry at the scene followed by two girls and then two guys.

She didn’t say anything, but just put her head down on her desk. The scene had really taken out a lot out of her. The blood continued to flow as it moved through her body. It hadn’t been a fluke, or a hoax, or a joke. She was now studying to become an actress.

And now that she could act and get the basics down so quickly, the class would be her companions for the rest of the semester. It was that moment that she wrote down mentally in her head that she was studying to become an actress something she had dreamed of doing all her life. Professor Branch’s approach to acting was really starting to become her favorite class. Every lecture, every lecture, every scene and transform it using her heart and minds. She began learning how to act in different languages. She never thought she would be learning different languages from all around the world, but if she was going to be the ultimate actress she needed to be communicated in different languages.

Cordelia learned how to act in several different languages. She was starting to enjoy acting out different scenes in different languages. She made it glow from within. Because, as easy as it would be to read say A Midsummer Night’s dream in English, reading it in a different language was a challenge for her and everyone in the class. This was nuts-and-bolts work, ground level fundamentals. The drastic acting display that Cordelia performed during her audition, however showboating that she was doing, she was told, was a well-understood, random act of convergence that often manifested during an actress first attempt at making people have an emotional response.

In the meantime, Cordelia also studied the history of acting, about which actors and actresses knew even less than she thought. It turned out that actors and actresses had always been part of human society, but apart from it and largely unknown to it. Acting did not become a mainstream art until about the early twenties. Bogart, Grant, Stewart, Brando --- sure, all of them were graduates of Arcadia Academy. The fact that they were famous in mainstream circles was a strike against them. By the standards of the acting society, they had passed the first hurdle: they had the good sense to share with the world their amazing talent.

Cordelia’s other homework, Bob Slaughter’s Practical Exercises for Young Actors and Actress, turned out to be a thin, large-format volume containing a series of scenarios between different people. Much of the scene, Cordelia gathered, consisted of her trying to make sense of horrible tragedies and her reacting to them. Something she had experience in dealing with.

This wasn’t Mount Arm-Joy. In each of the Mount Arm-Joy novels, one or two of the Colonial children were always taken under the wing of a mentor who taught them how to act and enjoy life. In the World Beyond the Walls, the main character becomes a master hover bike rider and Helios trains as a protector who will save the leader of Mount Arm-Joy in ten years’ time. In the Black Queen rises, the kids have mastered their craft and have become active members of Mount Arm-Joy society. The secret of the boat near the Ocean has the kids learning how to shoot weapons and defend themselves. The message the author wanted to give out to the children of the colonial system was that learning was an ongoing process.

Learning acting was nothing like that. It turned out to be about as tedious as it was possible for the study of a craft that is designed to entertain millions of people. The same way a verb must agree with its subject, it turned out, that even the simplest scene had to be modified and tweaked and inflected to agree with the time of day, the size of the audience, the proper casting of the actors, to the people who write the material in the first place, as well as a hundred other factors, all of which were tabulated in volumes of tables and charts and diagrams printed in a times new roman type on hew yellowing pages. And half of each page was taken up with footnotes listing the exception and exceptional cases, all of which had to be committed to memory too. Acting was a craft that the Academy took seriously because let’s face it, when you’re out there in the real world, representing the Academy people know that you are the best of the best.

However, there was something else to it, something beyond the practicing and the memorizing, beyond the dotted I’s and he crossed t’s, something that never came up in Branch’s class. Cordelia only sensed it, without really being able to talk about it, there was something else you needed if a scene was going to wow the audience and get them talking about you. Whenever she would work on a scene it was like she was using her force of will, a certain intensity of concentration, an unclouded vision of your goal, and maybe a little dash of artistic skills couldn’t help and a lot of luck. If a scene was going to work, you had to have a keen sense of faith that it was going to work.

She couldn’t explain it, but Cordelia could tell when she was affecting her audience. She could sense her words and gestures getting traction as she acted out a scene. She could feel it physically. Her fingertips would get warm, her heart rate would increase. The air would seem to get heavier, as if it was resisting her and pushing back against her lips and tongue. Her mind buzzed with a pot fix. She was at the heart of a large and powerful group of people. When she had her audience, she knew it. And she liked it.

Now that his friends had come back from vacation Damien sat with them at meal time instead. They were highly visible, always conferring with each other and having fits of uncontrollable public laughter, always fond of themselves and uninterested in the greater Arcadia populace. There was something different about them, though it was tough to put your finger on what it was. They just seemed to be smarter than anyone else. They knew that they were the next Spike Lee’s, the next Michael Jackson’s, the next Ian McShane’s of the world. They were not looking around to see the talent that would follow them.

It bothered him the way Damien had dropped Cordelia the moment she ceased to be convenient, but there was twenty other first years to think of. They were not a social bunch. They were quiet, intense, always focusing on the craft as if they were trying to figure out who was the most threat to them at the school. But as it came right down to it, each student thought of the other as competitors in a Hunger Games like competition and at stake, the prize of millions of dollars in fees and contracts that could set them up for the rest of their lives.

The one student, he and every other First Year at Arcadia was immediately obsessed with was the quiet Christina, who impressed everyone with her acting scene, but it quickly became apparent that in spite being way ahead of her year academically she was dangerously shy, to the point where there was not much of a shot in talking to her. When she was approached at meals, she answered questions in whispers phrases, her gaze dropping to the tablecloth in front of her as if she was ashamed to be around students, and she had a way of hiding her place that others could feel the pain of someone who did not want a lot of attention called to her.

Cordelia wondered who or what could have convinced someone with amazing gifts that she should be frightened of other people. She wanted a competition that was important to her, but she also wanted a friend that she could talk to when things got tough. She didn’t know Christina all that well, but instead, she almost felt protective of her. The one and only time she saw Christina happy was when she watched her, alone and almost self-conscious successfully rehearsing a scene from Macbeth.

Life at Arcadia had a hush, formal, almost theater tone to it, and mealtimes formality were elevated to the level of a food fetish. Yes, that is a thing with drama students it seemed. Dinners were served at six on the dot. If you were late, you had to eat your meal standing. Instructors and students sat together at one table that was bathed in a tablecloth of bright red and laid with heavy-handled silverware that matched. Illumination was provided by impressive recess lighting on the ceilings.

The food, contrary to private school tradition, was better than going into town and eating at a quality restaurant, was excellent in an old school, French-fried way. Menus tended to gravitate towards the mid-nineteenth century style of cooking. First years had the privilege of serving all the students, under the stern direction of Shawn Madison, the head chef of the academy, and then eating by themselves when everyone was done. Cordelia couldn’t believe it when she found out that third and fourth year students had the option of drinking wine, one glass only thought; Fifth years (or “fifties” as they were called, for no reason) got two. Oddly enough, there were only seven fourth years. Asking about it just ended the conversation.

All this Cordelia picked up with the speed of someone who was from the Flash’s universe, who had no choice but to learn the local language as rapidly as possible or be laughed out of the academy in shame. She wasn’t about to let that happen to her. Her first two months at Arcadia spun by, and soon red and gold leaves were flying across the sea, as if some invisible force was pushing them along like an old lady sweeping them to tidy up her place.

Cordelia devoted a half an hour a day after class to exploring the campus on foot. One windy afternoon she stumbled onto a grape vineyard, a postage stamp of earth ruled into straight lines. She couldn’t believe it, fresh grapes growing and when she stepped two rows over, fresh strawberries. This was the schools personal garden.

Beyond it, a quarter mile off into the woods, at the end of a narrow path, Cordelia discovered a full field designed in a patchwork of circles. Some of the circles were grass, some were a collection of rocks, some were sand, some were water, and two were of a substance that she couldn’t identify.

There was no fence or barrier to make where the school property was and when the private lands started. There was the river on one side and the woods around the rest. Even the facility seemed to spend time using the alien technology to keep the school invisible to outsiders. She noticed that a group of people dressed in black suits was strolling around the edge of the perimeter, studying things that Cordelia couldn’t see and pulling others out of classes to consult about it.