Narabedla Ltd

by Frederik Pohl

  It was chirping in English, but so shrill and so fast that I couldn’t quite make out the words. “Yeah, yeah,” Shipperton said absently, glowering down at me. “I’ll take care of it.”

  There was a final admonitory burst of chirping from the bedbug. Then it hopped down from the table and scurried out the door.

  “So they say,” Shipperton said sourly after it. Then to me: “What a mess. You’ve turned up at a bad time, Stennis. But come on in, while I figure out what the hell to do with you.”

  I was still half asleep. I had no better ideas, so I followed, munching on the sandwich and staring around.

  In my time I’ve been in any number of booking agents’ offices. Never one like that. Like any agent, Shipperton had a big desk. It didn’t resemble any regular desk. It wasn’t mahogany or bleached oak or knotty pine or any of those other trendy things. It wasn’t wood at all. I didn’t know what it was. Most of the desk was ebony black, but the top of it was, I suspected, one huge computer screen. It was a mosaic of small, square images. As Shipperton absently reached out and tapped on one or another of them, they flickered and flowed, faster than my eye could follow. They meant something to Shipperton, though, because he was staring at them disconsolately.

  The rest of the furnishings were standard enough—well, some of them were. Somewhat standard. That is, he had the kind of impressive-expensive furniture that you’d get in the office of a really big-time agent, or a small-timer willing to invest the money to look big. There was the traditional casting couch, huge, deep blue, and upholstered in what looked and felt like real leather. There were a chair and a hassock to match, and a coffee table with a vase of fresh-cut flowers between two tastefully displayed sheaves of magazines. The magazines were dentist’s-office regulars—National Geographic and People and so on, with Variety and the Hollywood Reporter mixed in. All recent issues, too. The flowers were harder to be sure of. One kind was lilacs. Another might have been hibiscus, and another I didn’t recognize at all, but collectively they smelled sweet. There was a deep, figured rug, maybe Persian. And there were no windows at all.

  The reason there were no windows was that every inch of wall space was filled with small, square pictures, from about hip height to the ceiling.

  I thought at first they were photographs. Silly me! They were more of those computery kinds of things, because I saw that as Shipperton played with his desk top some of them blurred and changed. The one good thing was that they were all of people. Human people. Most of the pictures were of people I’d never seen, but then I recognized the sweet old face of Norah Platt. It occurred to me to see if I could find Woody Calderon among them, but Shipperton didn’t give me time.

  He took his attention off the desk top and gave it to me. “What a day,” he said morosely. “The Polyphase Index is still dropping, in spite of everything, and what I just had to tell the Mother was that your audition was a bust.”

  I had already made up my mind to say what I wanted to get off my chest regardless of anything this man might have to say. I plunged right in. “Shipperton, I was brought here by force and against my will. That’s kidnapping, and that makes you an accessory to a capital crime. And—” I stopped in the middle of my planned speech, having taken in what he had just said. I finished, “What do you mean, my audition was a bust?”

  He said sourly, “A bust. As in forget it. I thought for a minute that I might talk some of them into letting you sing for them, like any regular artist. But you stank. So that’s out; and now what am I going to do with you?”

  I opened my mouth. Then I closed it again. I’d made my protest; it was on record, for whatever that was worth— certainly not much. I didn’t really have anything more to say.

  Sighing, Shipperton got up and went to a little desk at the side of the room; it opened and revealed a coffeepot with cups. He filled two of them and shoved one at me before he sat down again. “I wish they hadn’t dumped you on me right now,” he complained. “Things are still real tense over that colonization thing with the Bach’het, and everybody’s pretty tired of song recitals anyway. No,” he warned, as I started to open my mouth, “don’t give me an argument right now. Just keep it down while I think.”

  I didn’t see any alternative to that, and besides I wanted to finish my sandwich. So I did.

  Whatever Shipperton was, he didn’t look like a traditional booking agent. He wasn’t one of the female ones in a tailored suit, and he wasn’t one of the fat and fifty ones with a big cigar. Shipperton looked to be about thirty-five. He was wearing a plaid lumberjack’s shirt with the sleeves rolled halfway up his forearms, showing a blue tattoo of a peace sign. He had a strong, long nose, and red sideburns to go with his red hair. The hair came down to his shoulders. He pulled restlessly at a strand of it as he said, “You can’t tap-dance or anything, can you?”

  I almost choked on the last of my sandwich. “No, I can’t tap-dance! Let’s get to the point. I was knocked out and kidnapped, and I want to go home right away.”

  “Forget that,” he snapped. “That’s just out. O-u-t, out. You know, I really hate it when I have to do orientation. They’re suppose to take care of that on Earth.” On Earth echoed awfully in my mind. So it was all true, then! “So just listen up. First, you can start out by forgetting about American kidnapping laws, Stennis. You’re not in the United States now.”

  I stuck to my guns—unloaded though they might be. “Henry Davidson-Jones is. Sometimes, anyway. He’ll have a lot to explain to the cops as soon as Mar—”

  I swallowed the rest of Marlene’s name … a little too late, maybe.

  “You were going to mention a name?” he asked politely.

  “Woody,” I said promptly. “Woody Calderon. Where is he?” Shipperton looked puzzled, and I amplified: “He’s a cellist. You snatched him maybe three, four months ago.”

  “Oh, that guy.” Shipperton nodded and reached for his desk top. “Let’s see if I can skry him for you.” When he touched things on the desk top, it turned into a mosaic of panels, like the one on his walls. Each little square had an image—a piano, a woman’s face straining in song, kettledrums—there were dozens of them. Shipperton put his finger on the one that displayed a cello.

  At once nearly all the wall pictures disappeared. The few that remained expanded and turned into human faces with cryptic numbers and figures around them.

  Woody Calderon’s sad, smiling, ineffectual face looked at me out of one of the pictures. As Shipperton did something else, the other pictures disappeared and next to Calderon appeared a drawing of an alien. It was a sort of sticklike, praying-mantis parody of a more or less human, or anyway biped and erect, figure.

  “Woody Calderon, right,” Shipperton said. “He’s fine. He’s on tour with the Ptrreek right now. He ought to be back here in—let’s see—well, maybe a week. It might be more than that; depends on whether Barak wants him for anything. Friend of yours?”

  “A very good friend,” I said belligerently. “I was the one who reported him missing to the police.” That was a stretch of the truth, but, I thought, worth putting in on the chance that it might worry Shipperton.

  It didn’t at all. The word “police” didn’t even register. He just said, “Well, your friend Calderon’s doing all right for himself here. He’s made a good adjustment. He’s done three tours already—all modem stuff that the other cellists never learned—and he’s got a nice cash balance in his bank account to show for it. Now, let’s talk about you.”

  “The only thing about me is I want to go home!”

  “But we can’t let you do that, Stennis,” he said gently. “Get used to the idea, will you? You’re on Narabedla for good. There’s no sense in getting on my case about it. I don’t have anything to say about it; I can’t go home either.”

  He didn’t sound as though that bothered him. “Well, who can do something about it?” I demanded.

  “Nobody on Narabedla, that’s for sure. Nobody human, anyway, and, believe me, I promise you none of
the others care. But look,” he said reasonably, “will you listen while I tell you the score? You’re an extra. We didn’t try to recruit you. We didn’t want you. We’re just stuck with you, and your tryout didn’t impress those guys. As I see it, you’ve got no place here.”

  “That’s fine with me! Send me home.”

  He just shook his head.

  In the clear, cool glow of hindsight, I can see that Sam Shipperton wasn’t at all a bad man. He didn’t even look like a villain. What he looked like was any midwestern liquor-store dealer, settling down to a career after having his fling with the counterculture, bothered by some unexpected business worry on his weekend off. His clothes were California casual; he had beige Adidas on his feet, and when he got up to refill his coffee cup I could see the authentic leather label on the hip pocket of his Levi’s. He put the cup down and sat on the edge of his desk, looking at me with wary cordiality. “What they suggested for a second choice,” he said, “was that you be employed administratively. Administratively my ass! Sometimes they’re real stupid back in the home office. I’m the only administration we’ve got here, not counting natives, and there isn’t enough work to keep me busy, really. So—”

  “Hold it a minute,” I ordered. “You’re going a little fast there. If that was the second choice, what was the first?”

  “Ah, well,” he said, sounding embarrassed, “we can forget that one. It really was not a good idea.”

  “What was it?”

  He looked uncomfortable. “They suggested slow storage.” I blinked at him and he explained. “They slow you down, you know. Just keep you on ice, so to speak—oh, not real ice! You wouldn’t feel a thing, it’s just that if we woke you up five or ten years later you’d only think a couple of hours had gone by.”

  “I don’t like hearing that ‘if’ in there. What do you mean, ‘if’ you woke me up?”

  He said defensively, “Well, that’s kind of the point, isn’t it? What would be the use of waking you up? What would be different in ten years? If we could find something for you to do then, we could find it now.” He looked at me seriously. “But you should remember that slow storage is always an option, Stennis. So don’t screw yourself up trying to do it to us, okay? Because you’re the one that’ll get screwed. Keep in mind that we’re not running some white-slave gang. Narabedla Limited’s a perfectly legitimate import and export business—legitimate by local standards, anyway, and it really doesn’t matter what it is by any others, does it? The Fifteen Peoples get what they want. Narabedla Limited gets what it wants. And the artists get, really, not so tacky a deal at all. There’s money to be made, and there’s fun to be had. You’ll see. Of course, most of the people who come through volunteer for it, you know. They know what they’re getting into—well, they sort of do, anyway; maybe we weren’t all up front with them about the geography, like. They’ve got talents that they can sell here for a better price than at home, they get well paid, there’s no problem—anyway,” he clarified, “after the first shock there isn’t. Maybe right at first they’re pretty pissed off. But when they see what a sweet deal they’ve got— What’s the matter?” he asked irritably, as I cut him off in the middle of his sales pitch.

  I reminded him, “You said I failed the audition.”

  “Oh, yeah.” He thought for a minute, brushing his hair out of his eyes to look at a Patek-Philippe watch on his wrist. “Well,” he said, coming down, “I’ll have to see what I can do about that, won’t I? All right. Get out of here and let me work. I’ll talk to Binnda again. Maybe he’ll have some ideas. Right now you probably ought to get some sleep. There’s a vacant house you can use; I’ll get a Kekkety guide to take you over, and— Now what? No more complaints about being kidnapped, you hear me?”

  “Not about my being kidnapped. I just want to know what happened to the woman I was with. Is Irene Madigan here?”

  “No, you were the only one to come through lately. She isn’t here. And, Jesus, I hope it stays that way.”

  CHAPTER

  10

  What Shipperton called a “Kekkety guide” turned out to be a silent, slim little person who looked more than anything else like one of the deckhands from Henry Davidson-Jones’s yacht. He didn’t speak. He just led me along some pleasant little streets with occasional pedestrians nodding to us as we passed. All very homelike, in an Andy Griffith kind of way, and all the time I was trying to get a handle on the terrible crazy confusion that had replaced my dull, pleasant, normal life.

  I knew that I wasn’t exactly unique.

  I knew that in the history of the human race many, many millions of people have been snatched without warning out of their normal lives into some strange new captivity—college professors taken by terrorists in Beirut, farm girls abducted into the brothels of the big cities, Africans captured for the slave trade, Europeans shanghaied onto Moorish galleys. Well, sure. Such things happened. But they didn’t happen to me. Although I’d worried about a lot of things in my life, I’d never worried about the right one, because it had never occurred to me that I might someday become a simple export commodity with nothing to say about it.

  I still had plenty of worries. I worried about what had happened to Irene Madigan. I worried about what Marlene was going to do when I didn’t show up. I worried about how my clients would survive without me.

  I worried a lot, too, about myself. I didn’t want to become a member of Narabedla Ltd.’s large clientele of touring artists dedicated to presenting Earthly performing arts to entertain the cognoscenti of the Fifteen (alien) Peoples and their twenty-two inhabited planets. All the same, I didn’t like having failed the audition.

  Before Shipperton sent me off with the Kekkety guide he let me run sketchily down the artists’ list. It was formidable. Not counting Norah Platt, the ancient pianist. Woody Calderon, the cellist, and Irene Madigan’s cousin, Tricia, the baton-twirling one, there were six sopranos, three mezzos, eleven tenors, four other baritones or bass-baritones, two basses, and a boyishly slight, pale-skinned castrato, all of whose pictures were on Shipperton’s walls. That was just the singers. There were also violinists, pianists, harpists, percussionists, sitarists, harpsichordists, and a scrawny ebony-black man who played the djidjeraboo. There were jugglers, acrobats, gymnasts, unicyclists, half a dozen black guys who had once been a kind of generic imitation of the Harlem Globe Trotters, and a man who drew in chalk on sidewalks; a glassblower specializing in instant animals; two heavy-metal and one punk rock group (but their war paint, dreadlocks, and Mohawks were wasted on the audiences here); there was a lion-tamer with six lions and a man with a flea circus; and a man who imitated bird calls; and two mimes; and a small but otherwise first-rate ballet company; two break dancers, and a Jamaican who played steel drums.

  Obviously Narabedla Ltd. had been doing a lot of business over a long, long time.

  And those were just the artists who, being human, had originated on the planet Earth, Shipperton explained. He told me that his office didn’t handle the nonhuman others. He said he was really glad of that.

  The Kekkety guide got me nearly to where I was going before I came out of my fog long enough to look around.

  “Hold on a second,” I ordered, pausing. We were in a quiet kind of intersection in what almost might have been a small town back on Earth. There were four different streets leading away from the little square, which was a star-shaped plot with a couple of flowering fruit trees. What caught my eye was one of the ugliest statues I had ever seen. The statue was life-size. It was a man, a very human and terrified-look-ing man, and a monster. The piece looked a little like the Laocoon group, except that there was only one man in the coils of the monster, and the monster was a lot worse-looking than any terrestrial snake.

  “A bronze general on a horse would’ve been a lot nicer,” I told my little guide. He peered up at me curiously, but didn’t respond.

  I turned away from the hideous statue and gazed around at the intersecting streets. The first street on the right ap
peared to be a sort of Greenwich Village mews, with gaslights and wrought-iron gates. The next looked like a little English village that the local historical authorities wouldn’t let anybody change, thatched-roof houses with diamondshaped glass panes in the windows.

  When I started toward the third the guide tugged encouragingly at my arm, and I followed him into it. The street looked like one of those Southern California hillside places with buildings pressed tight against each other, poised between brush fire and mud slide, except that these dwellings didn’t have any carports. (Why would they? I hadn’t seen any cars.) The fifth house on the right had a scarlet door with a lion’s-head knocker, framed by two lemon trees in fruit. The other thing it had was a little swinging sign that said:

  Malcolm’s Place 14

  Riverside Drive

  There wasn’t any river for it to be on the side of, I observed, and while I was staring at the door the guide turned and trotted away.

  I was on my own. One of the little black bedbugs paused in scurrying along the street to gaze at me. It didn’t linger. Evidently I wasn’t very interesting. I reached out for the doorknob.

  It disconcerted me to find that it was locked.

  Shipperton hadn’t said anything about a key. He certainly hadn’t given me one. 1 looked under the doormat hopefully ; no key there. There was no one in sight to ask for help, or even advice.

  Apart from being really worn out, I think I was by then so numbed by the shocks and weirdnesses of the previous twenty-four hours that the reasoning and competent part of my brain had just thrown up its hands and gone to sleep. (The rest of me urgently wanted to follow its example.) I couldn’t think of anything to do about the problem. I simply stood there for a minute or two, contemplating the door, until without warning it was opened by a tall, surfer-looking young woman who said, “If you want in, why don’t you knock instead of just rattling the dam doorknob?”