Narabedla Ltd

by Frederik Pohl

  A couple of the little bedbugs came racing through the curtain as I was peering through it, nearly tumbling me. They were carrying glassy baskets of what looked like yesterday’s Italian meatballs, wet and crumbly looking. The bedbugs chittered at me impatiently to get out of the way. I did, looking after them as they entered the room of fish tanks. Carefully they lifted the meatballs out of the glassy baskets, one by one, and placed them tenderly in a tank. Other bedbugs were fishing around in another tank, and I could see that what they were scooping out with their little nets was a brood of very small, pale golden bedbugs.

  They had to be their young. I began to see why the Mother was called the Mother. The meatball things were eggs; this room was undoubtedly a hatchery. To prove it, I saw the grown-up bedbugs gently herding the babies toward shallow pools on the lowest level, no doubt to eat and grow.

  I didn’t even notice that the debate behind me had ended until Shipperton tapped me on the shoulder. He looked both faintly annoyed and relieved. “Good news, Stennis,” he told me. “You passed.”

  “Passed what?” I demanded.

  He shook his head. “Binnda’s going to take you home, and he’ll tell you the whole thing. I haven’t got time. Jesus! You wouldn’t believe the things I’ve got to do now. Here he comes.”

  And he hurried away as the ugly little Mnimn pushed past the hanging beads. “Well done, my dear Knollwood Stennis,” the Mnimn said. His English was excellent, his voice pretty nearly human—anyway, nearly that of some human with a really bad sore throat. “I’m Meretekabinnda. I’m a Mnimn. I’m going to be your impresario.”

  That was the first time I ever actually met Meretekabinnda. I’d seen him before. He’d been one of the five very peculiar members of my audience, that first night on Narabedla, when Norah Platt had accompanied me. I told him so.

  “Yes, that’s right,” he said eagerly, pleased to be remembered. “You could’ve seen me at Nice, too, as well as other times. I’ve been on your The Earth quite often, you know! Now, Knollwood Stennis,” he said, capturing my hand in one of his very strange ones and dragging me toward the go-box, “let’s go to your house. We’ve got a lot to talk about—and, I wonder, do you happen to have anything of that good The Earth Scottish whiskey for a thirsty man?”

  Well, a “man” Meretekabinnda certainly was not. Apart from being no more than three feet tall, he had no nose, his mouth was a hideous triangular affair, his arms ended in three-fingered pudgy fists, and his little short legs were bent like a dog’s. He wasn’t naked. In fact, it wasn’t until I saw Meretekabinnda that I realized that Barak, and the Mother’s little bedbugs, had been bare—it simply seemed right and proper that weird beasties should show off their weirdness, and so when I took a good look at Binnda I was surprised to observe that he was wearing a kind of diaper with metallic spangles sewn onto it, and a kind of keys-of-the-city ribbon and medallion around his—well, not his “neck.” He didn’t have a neck, but there was enough of a shoulder to support the ribbon where the neck would have been.

  Man or not, he had some engagingly human traits. Most of all he had enthusiasm. He also had warmth—“No, no, call me Binnda, my dear Nolly,” he chattered when I tried his full name; “No need to be formal among fellow artists!”—and he had just about perfectly unaccented colloquial English, which was a big improvement over the Mother’s moans and Barak’s gasps, not to mention the twittering of the little bedbug things that had been pushing me around.

  And he was a mine of information. He talked all the way to my house. He filled me in on the Mother: “She’s a sessile female, you know. She didn’t bring a fertile Tlotta male with her, just the drones—drones? Oh, those little things you called bedbugs; they go around and do things for her. Were you frightened when she was examining you? Nothing to be ashamed of!—though you’re really a bit large for her to eat, anyway. In one bite, I mean. But she’s a really important person, Nolly, and it’s wonderful, for you, I mean, that she liked you!” On Barak: “He’s a Ggressna, poor fellow. Can’t sing at all. He loves human singing, though, and he’s the one that told the Mother about you. Not a bad guy, once you get used to the funny way he looks.” (I swallowed hard over that one.) And, as we passed Execution Square on the way to my house, in the row that looked like New York brownstone fronts: “That’s a Duntidon there, eating your friend. They’re pretty civilized—now,” he chuckled, “but they do come in handy for executions. Oh, have I said something to upset you? I’m sorry, Nolly; really, there’s nothing to worry about with the Duntidons these days, though in the old days they had a hell of a nasty war with the poor Bach’het, before they both signed up with the peacekeeping forces. But I’m boring you with all this ancient history—and here’s your house, and do you happen to have any good single-malt whiskey?”

  I didn’t. It didn’t matter. Binnda emitted a high-pitched screech, one of the Kekketies popped out of the kitchen, Binnda issued orders in a language I hadn’t heard before.

  The servant understood it all right, though. He disappeared back into the kitchen and five minutes later emerged with a tray containing the whiskey, ice, and two glasses. By then Binnda had been hopping all over the house, issuing orders to the skry (which promptly began playing symphonic orchestral music of very Earthly provenance in muted tones), peering into my closets, bouncing on my bed. “I do love human furniture,” Binnda sighed. “If one didn’t have to keep up appearances I’d have some myself. Now. Let’s talk about your career. We’ll get along without a real orchestra to begin with; Purry’s perfectly good, and the audiences won’t know the difference on the Duntidon planet—oh, now, really, Nolly! I’ve told you! They’re perfectly civilized now, most of the time!” And then he beamed. “Ah, here’s the tipple! Your very good health, Nolly, and may destiny prosper our venture—and, say, do you happen to have anything to eat in the refrigerator?”

  It took a while to get used to Binnda’s appearance, and a while longer than that to get used to watching the way he ate and drank. His table manners were foul. I have heard of a man tossing a shot of whiskey down, but I never saw it done until I saw Meretekabinnda do it. He opened that large triangular mouth, revealing the bright grass-green tongue and the strangely colored inside. He tilted his whole body back, because he didn’t have much of a neck. He threw the whiskey into it. His aim was pretty good. Only a little of it splashed on the furniture. He was less neat when he ate, because those powerful three-sided jaws ground up biscuits and cheese and potato chips so fast that crumbs flew in all directions. Especially because he never stopped talking as he ate.

  His dream was going to be realized. There would be a real opera company; rehearsals would start tomorrow.

  “Tomorrow?”

  “Oh, yes!” he cried, delighted with himself. “Shipper-ton’s finding artists right now—I do hope not all the good ones are off on tour! And we’ll call the troupe the Bolshoi.”

  “But Sam Shipperton had another name picked out,” I objected.

  He stared at me out of the piggy little eyes. “What does Sam Shipperton have to say about it? No, it’s the Bolshoi.”

  Even the Quihigs and the Ossps had heard of the Bolshoi, he explained, and they wouldn’t know that we weren’t the real thing. The orchestra would just be Purry, for the same reason. But we would have real human singers—“That’s where you’ll be so wonderful for us, Nolly, because you’re just from The Earth and you’ll be able to sing just the way they do in all the latest productions.”

  I spluttered some crumbs of my own on the carpet. “What?”

  “What what, Nolly?”

  “What the hell are you talking about? I’m supposed to be a prompter or something. I can’t sing!”

  “Oh, but we’ll fix that up, Nolly,” he protested. “Didn’t Shipperton tell you? That’s why the Mother was examining you, to see if you could be repaired.”

  “Repaired?”

  “Oh, did I forget to tell you? Sorry. She said that your defects are repairable. I mean,” he add
ed hastily, “this ‘mumps’ thing that damaged you left physical injuries to those pipes of yours, but they can be fixed. A little sculpting of the larynx and the vocal cords, open up a few constricted air passages—nothing at all, really.”

  “You mean—” I began, having trouble getting the words out.

  “Yes, yes, why not? Our ‘doctors,’ as you call them, do far more difficult things every day; ask Norah Platt. It won’t be any trouble. One or two nights in the hospital, that’s all, and you’ll be singing as well as you ever did. Probably better. And while he’s at it,” he said, “he might as well fix up your balls, too.”

  Binnda stayed for a couple of hours after that. We talked about all kinds of things. I hardly heard them.

  My mind wasn’t really on what we were doing. It was on the promise that I might have both my voice and my balls back. Was it possible that, as Sam Shipperton had promised, I was really going to like this place after all?

  Binnda helped that along quite a lot. He was a considerate, interesting, amusing person—once you got past the truly nasty way he looked. And he knew a great deal about opera.

  He was sketching out a whole season for us. Did I think a simple Pag and Cav was enough for a bill? What did I think of Barak’s idea of the Busoni Turandot? When I hesitated, trying to be diplomatic over that one, he bobbed his upper body—I think it was meant to be a nod of agreement. “Terrible idea,” he said. “We’ll forget that one. Not every opera from your The Earth is a masterpiece, after all. Of course,” he added thoughtfully, “one hates to offend a Ggressna. They’re really more or less the founding fathers of our association, as I am sure you know, but where would the Ggressna be without the Tlotta-Mothers? And the Mother happens to be a Mozart fancier.”

  I was having trouble following him. “I Pagliacci is by Leoncavallo, not Mozart,” I pointed out.

  “Yes,” he twinkled, “but, you see, I happen to like I Pagliacci. And the Mother has entrusted me with all the details.” Three programs would be plenty, he decreed. We could repeat them in different places on each planet, and certainly what we did on one planet would not be stale for another—and if we didn’t have enough qualified human singers for all the roles we could use holographic simulations— though, personally, Binnda said disapprovingly, he didn’t like to do that, except of course for crowd scenes and choruses.

  And then, as the music from the screen came to the end of Richard Strauss’s “Alpine Symphony” and started something else, Binnda raised his hand. “Listen!” he ordered.

  It was symphonic music still, but it had a violin and it sounded vaguely Scottish, with that hop-skip rhythm. I am no expert on orchestral music, but I had heard it before. “Bruch?” I guessed.

  “Yes, exactly. It is his Violin Concerto in A, Anne-Sophie Mutter as the soloist with the National Symphony Orchestra. A performance recording, not a studio. Mstislav Rostropovich is conducting,” he said proudly. “But listen!” It was just at the beginning of Mutter’s cadenza in the first movement, and somebody’s raucous cough came through loud and clear. “That was me,” Binnda said with a kind of gloomy delight. “Isn’t it terrible? But I couldn’t help it. The things you people put on yourselves! Perfumes, deodorants, I could hardly breathe! It got worse in the second movement and they threw me out.”

  I gaped at him. “You were there?”

  “Why, Nolly,” he said, superior, deprecatory, amused, “I have been to your The Earth often. Most of us would like to visit it, I mean those cultured ones like ourselves, but unfortunately their physiques are, well, unmistakable. For me it was not difficult. In some ways I look quite like a The Earth native, haven’t you noticed? Wait, I’ll show you how I did it.” He barked a command at the screen. It did not stop playing the Bruch, but the screen obediently flickered and produced a picture.

  The picture was Binnda. It was Binnda in disguise; he could have been a dwarf, or an exceptionally ugly six-year-old, wearing a shapeless trench coat and long blond hair. The nose was obviously false, of course. Maybe it wouldn’t have been so obvious if I hadn’t had the real thing right in front of me to compare. And the face looked different around the mouth; there were actual lips, not the triangular praying-mantis chompers that were Binnda’s natural state. “You wore a rubber mask,” I said, comprehending. He nodded, gratified. It was a good mask. Probably it hadn’t been studied very closely; people tend out of tact to avert their eyes from such obviously malformed faces.

  “I have been in the audience in more than thirty performances of symphonic concerts, operas, and recitals on The Earth,” Meretekabinnda said with pride.

  I asked eagerly, “Did you ever hear me sing?”

  “Oh, yes! It was in your Stockholm, in Sweden, and you sang in the local language. La Bohème. You were terrible.”

  Then it all came back to me. I wouldn’t have heard Binnda however much he’d coughed. There had been too much competition. It was October. In Stockholm. Everybody in the audience had a cold. There’s that scene where Mimi is hiding in a doorway, eavesdropping while Rodolfo is talking about how jealous he is. Then, according to the libretto, she coughs, and he discovers her. But not in Stockholm he didn’t; the whole audience was hacking away, sounding like the seal pit at the zoo, and the Mimi had to strain her lungs to be heard over them.

  Binnda was staring dreamily at his picture, waving one of those long arms in time with the Bruch slow movement. I said, unable to keep an edge out of my voice, “If you think I’m so lousy, why do you want me to sing for you?”

  He looked at me thoughtfully, the three-cornered mouth working. “Oh, Nolly, I’ve hurt your feelings, haven’t I? I’m sorry. I thought you knew you were having a bad night in Stockholm.”

  “Well, I suppose I did,” I acknowledged.

  “You won’t ever have another,” he promised. “Now, let’s get on with our business!”

  And we did. Meretekabinnda even acted out a couple of scenes with me from memory, and his memory was better than mine. Could we do The Magic Flute? he asked, and then at once wanted to hear me sing Papageno. “I’ll sing the girl,” he cried enthusiastically. “You ring your silly little bell, the three youths bring me in, you sing …”

  And I did: “Pa-Pa-Pa-Pa-Pa-Papagena …”

  And Binnda came in, vigorously croaking, “Pa-Pa-Pa-Pa-Pa-Papageno …”

  “Bist du mir nun ganz gegeben?”

  “Nun bin ich dir ganz gegeben,” he squawked back at me, and so on to the end of the silly, beautiful Mozart duet; he knew every word, though I was fumbling on most of the patter lines. “Yes,” he said, waggling his neckless head in pleasure, “you’ll do just fine, Nolly. And, once we get your plumbing back in order, maybe better than that!”

  I never had a review I appreciated more. as we went. One or two people looked out their windows curiously as we passed. I didn’t mind.

  Rehearsals tomorrow! I was a singer again—or would be; would be a real one, if Meretekabinnda’s promise was good, and I had never dreamed that would be possible again in my life.

  To say nothing of his other promise.

  Strolling back toward the Execution intersection I let myself wonder about what sort of “operation” might be involved. The Mother’s examination had been only gross, not painful. Norah Platt had boasted of the fact that she was kept in good repair, in spite of her incredible age. Sam Shipperton had sworn I would be well treated.

  There was really nothing to worry about. Was there?

  That is, I reflected, nothing for me to worry about. Not counting what trouble Irene Madigan and Marlene Abramson might be getting into … but, at worst, what would that be? Henry Davidson-Jones might, in desperation, ship them to Narabedla to shut them up; but was that so bad?

  True, there was the loss of freedom. But I was beginning to see that there were some pretty fine trade-offs for that.

  Also true, I at least had the capacity to perform—that is, to do the things the whole system was designed for. Marlene didn’t. Neither, as far as I knew, di
d Irene. They might not fit in so well. They might easily, as Shipperton had threatened, have to go into this “slow storage”—but that wouldn’t really harm them; and some day, no doubt, they could be brought out again to live quite happy lives.

  Finally true, some of the aliens were not very likable.

  I was looking at one that fit that description. It was the monster that was eating the man in the statue in Execution Square. Binnda had called it a Duntidon, and—yes! I remembered!—he’d even said that I might some day be performing on a planet inhabited by such things.

  That did not sound attractive at all.

  I stopped and looked at it more closely. In the dim light from the nighttime ceiling panels it did not look any better than by daylight. The mean-looking, slitted eyes. The talons like knitting needles. The sharp teeth that were actually pressing into the throat of the silently screaming man in its clutches …

  It took me a moment to realize that the last time I’d looked, the teeth had still been an inch or so away from the man’s throat.

  I swallowed, hearing the two words reverberate in my brain. Slow time.

  I did not want to believe what I had just thought of.

  I made myself touch the “statue.” I couldn’t quite manage it. My fingers would not quite make contact with the terrible, contorted face of the man named Jerry Harper. There was something between. It wasn’t a glass case. It felt tingly to my fingertips at the first touch. Then it felt quite painful, and I jerked my fingers away.

  Slow time.

  The statue was no statue.

  The execution had not been commemorated. It was still going on.

  In slow time, Jerry Harper was screaming, was in the talons of the Duntidon … was being murdered before my eyes … and had been, all the time I’d been on Narabedla.