Narabedla Ltd

by Frederik Pohl

  The pool and the waterfall were everything she’d promised.

  The splash of water on my head was not only gentle, it was tepidly warm. It didn’t beat down on me. It caressed me. Tricia was laughing as she splashed perfectly superfluous handfuls of water at me, and in a minute I was laughing, too … up to when we began touching each other. She took hold of me, smiling sweetly. Then she looked up into my eyes in surprise and uncertainty.

  “My goodness, Nolly,” she said, “you’re not a priest or anything, are you?”

  Unhappily, I said, “No, no, nothing like that.”

  “Or maybe you’ve got a secret pash back home that you’re carrying a torch for, like Jerry Harper?”

  I shook my head. Then I backed away a little, wiped the water out of my eyes, and said, “There’s something I ought to tell you about. Do you know anything about the kinds of things that happen if you catch mumps when you’re a grownup man?”

  And, oh, well, that was about the end of that.

  Tricia was perfectly cheerful and friendly as we went back to our own level. But she went to her house and I went to mine, and it was a while before I saw Tricia Madigan again.

  CHAPTER

  14

  I didn’t have Tricia’s company, but I wasn’t without feminine companionship. I had Norah Platt. Right after breakfast the next morning she was waiting decorously behind the closed door of my bedroom while I, stripped naked, was exercising—sitting, standing, doing sit-ups and jump-ups, jogging in place, turning, bending—in front of my skry. From tiny projectors over the screen rays of bright blue light stretched out to fasten on shoulders, neck, knees, wrists, ankles, and elbows, marking the positions of all my joints and extremities as I moved. I wasn’t doing it just for the exercise. I was being fitted for a new wardrobe; and when the machine politely thanked me and turned its lasers off and I was dressed again, Norah came out to help me pick out the kind of clothes I wanted.

  The process left me with some doubts. “You sure this stuff is going to fit? When I go to a store they measure me instead of just taking my picture.”

  “My dear boy! The skry has measured you. And there aren’t any stores. You do that sort of thing right here.” She commanded the screen to display an assortment of slacks, shirts, underwear, shoes, socks—everything the well-dressed man-about-Narabedla might need. It didn’t take me long to make my selections, mostly because I wasn’t planning to stay long enough to wear them all.

  But what I told Norah was that I didn’t want to impose too much on her generosity. She seemed to appreciate that. “Of course, dear boy,” she said, half apologetically. “The clothes do cost money, and you don’t actually have any, do you? You really should work those details out with Sam— but for now, anyway, I’m glad to let you charge some things to my account. Heavens! I can’t spend all I earn anyway, can I? And when you’re singing lead roles …”

  I stopped in the middle of pouring myself a cup of coffee. “But I won’t be singing at all, Norah.”

  She looked startled. “I beg your pardon?”

  “I thought you knew. I failed the audition. My voice is gone.”

  “Well,” she said, biting her lip, “true, you weren’t up to your best the other night, were you? But still—”

  “Norah,” I said, “that was my best. Shipperton says I can’t sing. He says maybe they’ll find something else for me to do, but singing, no.”

  “Oh,” she said. “I see.” I waited, while she thought for a moment. I couldn’t tell what she was thinking about— maybe that I wasn’t such a good credit risk, after all, and it might be a good idea to cancel the orders for some of the clothes. But after a minute she sighed and said, “Well, that’s going to be a bit too bad for Ephard, I suppose. He was really hoping that you’d be able to fit him in somewhere in the troupe, but if there isn’t going to be a troupe, or if you’re only going to be …”

  She trailed off there. I filled in for her. “Shipperton said maybe I could be a prompter.”

  “Oh, my,” she said, shaking her head. “That sounds grim, doesn’t it? You see, Nolly,” she explained, “most of us are artists. There isn’t really much for anybody who isn’t, well, talented, to do.”

  “Not even sweeping the streets?”

  “Of course not, Nolly! The Kekketies do that sort of thing, don’t they? Of course, now and then one of the artists just doesn’t seem to draw the audiences anymore, like poor Ephard, or he gets a bit too old—the dancers, for instance— but that doesn’t happen very often, of course.”

  “Then what do they do?”

  “Oh,” she said vaguely, “different things.”

  “Like slow time?”

  She jumped. “Oh, I hope not! No, there might be some sort of work …” She paused, lost in thought. Then she glanced at her watch, and stood up.

  “But I can’t think what,” she said as she left.

  I moved out of the way of the two silent little copperskinned Kekkety creatures cleaning up the remains of the breakfast I had shared with Norah, trying to think what my next move should be.

  What do you do when you’re left to your own devices, in a house on the moon of a planet you never heard of before?

  Sure, the most important thing is obvious. You try to figure out how to get home.

  But how do you do that? I opened the front door of 14 Riverside Drive and gazed out. The street was empty, as usual. There was nothing to stop me from going out and reconnoitering the area; but what would I be looking for?

  What I needed to begin with was information. Know your enemy. That was the right prescription for the situation, and there was no better place to acquire that knowledge than in the book Bartolomeo Canduccio had given me.

  I went back to where I had been when Tricia Madigan interrupted my studies.

  It was hard work. There was an awful lot to learn about our genial hosts of the Fifteen Peoples, the aliens for whose pleasure we were there in the first place. Canduccio’s book was helpful only up to a point. It let me know that although there were fifteen fully participating species, only eight or nine of them had any interest at all in watching any human beings perform anything. I learned the names of a few more of them. (I don’t say I learned to pronounce the names right away.) I learned that the creature named Neereeieeree (I had trouble remembering the name, but not the appearance), who had been one of my first auditors, was an Aiurdi, which is to say a creature like a round, radially symmetrical beetle, with spikes sticking up from its back, covered with a mosaic of scales that change color depending on its mood. I learned that the Quihigs were the Pekingese-sized ones that had heads like a hammerhead shark, hopped on two hind legs like a kangaroo, and had a long, forked tail that (the book told me) they swatted enemies with when provoked. I reminded myself to make it a point not to provoke any.

  I say that I learned all that, but actually most of it just flushed through my mind and out of it again. Not much was retained. Anyway, in the back of the book there was a section about Narabedla itself, and that was more immediately useful.

  I don’t mean “useful” in that it gave me any practical ideas on what to do, only that it helped fill some of the gaping voids in my knowledge of what the hell was going on. For instance, I learned that Narabedla’s gravity was actually centrifugal force derived from the fact that the whole megilleh was spinning, but you couldn’t tell the difference except sometimes in the inner ear. It was only about 70-odd percent of Earth normal, even down at the Lookout level. That was so that the aliens who might want to visit Narabedla (as any number of them apparently did, for reasons not necessarily connected with the Earth import-and-export business) would be able to get around; some of them weren’t used to much physical weight. In the upper levels, where most of the nonhumans stayed when visiting Narabedla, the apparent gravity ranged down almost to zero. The air pressure (I learned) was about equal to, say, Mexico City’s, the equivalent of being a mile and a half up. The reason my lungs hardly knew the difference was that the par
tial pressure of oxygen and carbon dioxide had been increased. It was soggy, though. I had noticed that the air was pretty damp, and that was because the water-vapor content was at least twice what I was used to.

  I closed the book and sat back, thinking. Or trying to.

  I noticed that the house was very still. I got up and peered into the bedroom—no one there; into the bath and kitchen— and no one was in either of those. The Kekketies were gone.

  It occurred to me that it was funny that I hadn’t seen them leave. The kitchen was neatly scrubbed and everything put away. Did they have a back way out?

  That didn’t seem likely. There was, it was true, a narrow door next to the refrigerator, but it looked more like a broom closet than an exit to the outside world. I couldn’t open it. I supposed it might be where Malcolm Porchester kept his really choice liquor.

  “Funny,” I said out loud.

  And from the front door a sweetly musical voice replied, “Mr. Stennis? I hope I’m not disturbing you. What’s funny?”

  And when I turned and looked, there in the doorway was something quite funny indeed; it was my ocarina-shaped “orchestra” from the day before, the thing Barak had called Purry. ‘

  Although Purry had opened the door, it—I’d better start calling him “he”—he had been too polite to come right in.

  I hesitated, too. It wasn’t politeness. I just didn’t know how you addressed a creature with no visible face, that stood knee-high on jointed legs that stuck out like a Dr. Seuss drawing of a caterpillar. “Well,” I said at last. “Hello.”

  “Thank you,” said the creature, taking it as an invitation. It slipped inside and shut the door behind it with one of the legs. “I guess you’re wondering why I’m here,” it said. I mean, he said. “Barak sent me. He thought you might want a little help settling in.”

  Settling in again! I temporized. “Well, Norah Platt’s been very good about it,” I said. “Shi’s the one who—”

  “Oh, I know Norah Platt,” Purry informed me. “She has her own work, though, and I’m—well, I’m at your service. Plus it’s really a privilege for me to spend time with you, Mr. Stennis. I’ve admired Earth music ever since I was first assigned to it.”

  “Thank you,” I told the ocarina.

  “So would you like me to show you around? Do you have any questions you’d like to ask? Can I help in any way?”

  “If you’re sure it’s not too much trouble …”

  “No trouble at all! Barak has instructed me to serve you.”

  “But isn’t that an imposition on Barak?”

  “Oh, no, Mr. Stennis! I assure you, it’s quite all right. He has plenty of others to serve him, and in any case just now he is involved quite deeply with the Bach’het affair.”

  It was a good offer. “I’ll take my book,” I said.

  “Oh, yes, of course,” Purry said courteously. “You will find it very useful in preparing to visit some of the planets of the Fifteen Associated Peoples—that is, if you do.”

  “If? But I thought that was something I didn’t have any choice about,” I offered.

  The little ocarina hesitated. “Not a choice, exactly, no,” he said. “But let’s hope that’s what happens.”

  CHAPTER

  15

  I’ve explored a lot of interesting places with the help of native guides, one time or another, but usually the guides have been singers or musicians. Or at least human. A guide like Purry was a whole new thing for me.

  He was as much a musician as any of them, as a matter of fact. Purry didn’t need an instrument to play on. He was an instrument. All those tuned orifices on his body could produce the sounds of almost any instrument, even a human voice. (I admit he was a little fuzzy, like a Moog synthesizer, on the strings and percussion.) Moreover he seemed to know the scores of at least a hundred operas by heart—if he had a heart—not to mention any number of art songs, arias, spirituals, and instrumental pieces. He had a beautiful voice, too. That is, he had hundreds of beautiful voices whenever he chose to use them, but the one he normally spoke in was a sweet, high tenor that would have done well for Enrico Caruso.

  When I got a chance I asked Purry why the Fifteen Peoples bothered with importing artists from Earth at all, when he was as good as any. “Oh, but that wouldn’t be real, Mr. Stennis,” he piped, shocked. “No, no. None of the Peoples would settle for an imitation—well, except perhaps the Ossps.” Anyway, he went on, the sound frequencies weren’t the whole of a performance, were they? Weren’t they? Oh, certainly not, he declared, trotting along beside me on his stilty little legs. The sound was only a part. It was the totality, the gestalt, that mattered. Especially for some of the Fifteen Peoples, whose senses were not necessarily the same as those of humans—much more sensitive in some areas, he told me, and how could a mere reproducer like himself match not only the sounds, but the sight, the body temperature, the very smells of human performers? Not to mention that when he played an overture, say, he played it exactly as written, while us humans all put our own little spin of interpretation on it, and wasn’t that really what art was all about?

  Ocarina or not, I liked the guy.

  The first thing he did was ask me what on Narabedla I wanted to see. I couldn’t answer that. I didn’t know what that was. I only hoped I’d recognize it when I came across it, so I told him to shoot the works; and he did.

  We started out by walking the streets of the local human community. There were a couple dozen of them, all interlocking, none of them more than a couple of hundred yards long. It wasn’t just houses. There was a library—“With a lot of your Earth newspapers and magazines, Mr. Stennis, although of course you can get them on your skry without going out of your house.” There was a sort of restaurant/bar/soda-shop; we peered into it, and Purry introduced me to a couple of people sitting there, but they were a man and a woman, busy on a conversation of their own, and they didn’t seem interested in talking to me. There were little parks and a pleasant (though oddly curved) pond. There were go-box stations at half a dozen of the intersections, so no one needed to walk very far except for the.fun of it; and when Purry shepherded me into one of them I found myself again on the lowest level—the one they called Lookout.

  Although I’d already been there, it looked different. There was something big in that immensity of empty sky beneath our feet that hadn’t been there before, and Purry told me that it was that seventh planet that we were on the second moon of. It was a huge one. It looked a lot like pictures I’d seen of Jupiter, a great, bright, swirly, cloudy thing with no detectable surface. “And nobody lives there?” I asked, just checking.

  Purry hesitated. “Well, Mr. Stennis,” he said playfully, “that depends on what you mean by a body, doesn’t it? None of the Fifteen Peoples do, certainly. They’d die; it’s all poison gases and very high pressure. Still, there are living things there of some sort, I believe. Quite primitive ones. There are in most places. We could check it out on the skry if you like?”

  I shook my head, watching the big thing follow its star down under the side of our moonlet. When they had both set I said, “There’s an awful lot I need to check out on the skry. Maybe we should go back to my place.”

  “Oh? But really, Mr. Stennis, we can find a skry almost anywhere.”

  “We can’t find food just anywhere,” I pointed out. “I’m beginning to get hungry.”

  “Oh?” He sounded puzzled as he looked up at me. “But there are places where food can be bought. If you remember, I showed you one. The refreshment place. But I thought you said you didn’t want anything.”

  “It wasn’t so much I didn’t want anything as that I couldn’t pay for anything,” I explained. “I don’t have any money.”

  “I see,” he said doubtfully. Then he made a sort of faint puffing sound out of several of his orifices, like the dying gasps of a pipe organ when the pump has been turned off. I took it to be a sigh. “No, I don’t see,” he confessed. “What is ‘money’?”

  By
the time we got that threshed out I was getting really ravenous. “Money” as a medium of exchange for normal goods and services meant nothing to Purry. You did what you were supposed to do, you used what commodities you needed, and that was that. Nobody kept books. When I mentioned Norah Platt’s fondness for imported kippers Purry saw the distinction at once. “Oh, yes, to be sure,” he agreed. “For off-planet things, yes, of course, there is a medium of exchange. That is basically determined by the Polyphase Index in transactions among the Fifteen Associated Peoples—that is to say, by what you would call ‘barter.’ But for you Earth artists there are special arrangements, as set out in your contract for services.”

  “But I don’t have a contract for services, Purry!”

  “Yes,” he conceded, “the situation is unusual in that way. It doesn’t affect food, drink, and lodging, however. Shall we go to the refreshment place?”

  But I wasn’t ready for that. We wound up back at my place, where I discovered that the skry was flashing its gentle lavender attention signal again. Purry commanded, “Mr. Stennis’s messages, please.” There turned out to be three of them. A quick word from Sam Shipperton to say that Meretekabinnda was expected back in the morning, though why he was telling me that I wasn’t sure. The skry’s own sweet, sexless voice to tell me that the garments I had ordered were completed and already in my bedroom closet. And a message from Bartolomeo Canduccio to let me know that several of his recitals were in the skry’s data-stores, and if I would like to hear how he sang I had but to order them up.

  “There,” I said, “is a man who doesn’t know that I’m unemployed.”

  “I beg your pardon?” said Purry, looking uncertainly up at me.