Narabedla Ltd

by Frederik Pohl

  And everyone who had passed that square in all those days had known it except me.

  CHAPTER

  18

  But Nolly, dear,” Norah Platt said patiently, “yes, of course it’s too bad about Jerry Harper, but what can one do? He did kill those people.”

  “You don’t have to make a public spectacle of his death.”

  “Really?” Norah pursed her lips. “Far be it from me to criticize others, but do you actually think it’s a good idea to have executions in secret? I mean, what’s the point? When I was a girl and my father took me to Tyburn for a hanging, please believe me, I resolved never ever to do anything that would put me on the gibbet. Yes, yes. I know you modem people have other customs, but have they really made any difference? To the amount of crime, I mean? No, I thought not; and Nolly, please, if we don’t get started now we’ll be late for our first rehearsal!”

  She limped with dignity out of my door.

  I followed. The thing was, I had forgotten for a moment how old Norah Platt was. As we passed the “statue” she paused to study critically the depth to which the Duntidon’s fangs were penetrating Jerry Harper’s doomed throat.

  She didn’t say anything, and neither did I.

  I was in a somewhat peculiarly fractured state of mind. There was one of me boiling with outrage at the brutal murder of a fellow human being, raging at my captivity, calculating the chances of shooting my way out of this place (but where to find a weapon?), or taking a hostage (but how did you go about that, exactly?), or somehow, anyhow, breaking out of this slavery.

  And then there was the other of me. The one whose ear tingled joyously at the word “rehearsal,” and whose heart beat faster at the thought of being restored to all those powers I had kissed good-bye.

  I don’t really blame myself for hurrying after Norah Platt to the rehearsal hall. I guess there were times—oh, say, around the end of the year 1776—when even George Washington took his mind off the worrisome work of trying to free the American colonies from King George III, because he had a houseful of Christmas guests and a lot of mulled wine to drink up. Maybe even V. I. Lenin spent some of his Zurich days sitting at a sidewalk café with a seidel of brew, checking out the girls who strolled by. It stands to reason. You can’t be a revolutionary all the time.

  Especially when you’ve got a rehearsal to go to.

  The rehearsal hall was the little theater where I had auditioned on arriving in Narabedla. Then I had been too confused to look at it very carefully. Now I saw that it was not actually a theater. A rehearsal hall is exactly what it was; there wasn’t really enough room for an audience, just a couple of rows of seats (well, they weren’t all seats; one part was a tank of water and another was a sort of artificial tree). There was a narrow stage, bare except for a piano on stage right. A plump young woman whom I had never seen before was plunking aimlessly at the piano keys.

  The rubbery-legged Binnda was standing just at the steps to the stage. He left off talking to a pretty little man with long, curled hair to hurry toward me, long arms writhing in greeting. “My dear boy, my dear boy,” he rasped, the three-cornered mouth working in what might have been a smile. “I hope you slept well? No? Ah, just the natural nervousness of the artist, of course, but you’ll be fine! Shipperton has done wonders finding artists for our troupe. He must have been up all night! Let me introduce you to some of your colleagues. This is Ugolino Malatesta, our Idamante, and Eloise Gatt over there at the piano—say hello, Eloise!—will sing Ilia.” I must have looked confused, because he took my arm—strange feeling, that rubbery, warm, snaky limb linked with my own—and walked me away. “Oh, didn’t I tell you? Shipperton isn’t the only one who was busy while the rest of you were all sleeping. I’ve chosen the operas. For our first production we’re going to mount an Idomeneo!”

  I gave him a suspicious look. “Idomeneo?”

  “Yes, exactly. Won’t that be wonderful? And the Mother is sure to approve, since she’s such a Mozart fancier!” How can you tell when an alien creature with no nose is trying to insult you? I couldn’t. I kept a firm grip on my temper and only said, “You don’t expect me to sing the castrato part, do you?”

  “Of course not, Nolly!”

  “In fact,” I said, nodding, “there’s no baritone part at all in Idomeneo, is there?”

  Binnda gave me a wounded look. “But I thought you’d understand,” he complained. “We’ll do the Idomeneo first, so you won’t have to sing until you’re, ah, ready. Then we’ll do two other productions, and of course there’ll be parts for you. Big ones!” He peered up at me to see if I was angry, then was distracted as a couple of Kekketies came trotting in with armloads of •paper. “Ah, here come the scores! Excuse me, Nolly, let me make sure they’ve got the right ones. ”

  Shipperton’s all-night labors had turned up eight or nine other human singers in the troupe. While Meretekabinnda was sorting the scores out, Norah introduced me all over again to the people he had already introduced, and to all the others present, too.

  It was a good try, but it was Camp Fire Place Lodge all over again. I was the new boy, and they were indistinguishable lumps of opera company. I did my best, rehearsing the names. There was somebody named Floyd Morcher, a short, dark, morose man in gray pants and gray turtleneck and gray suede shoes. A tenor. There was a big man, no longer young; he had a red mustache and fringes of red hair around a bald pate. He also had a conspicuously red nose; he was a bass, and he looked somehow familiar, but I missed the name because the second tenor was pulling at my arm. He was even more familiar. He was Bartolomeo Canduccio, my acquaintance from Norah’s dinner party. “I hope you did like the book,” he said, wringing my hand to remind me that he had done me a favor. There were three women, all sopranos, ranging from young and Valley Girl looking to tall, dark, and cadaverous. I told them all I was pleased to meet them, though, really, I hadn’t met them.

  But I was pleased, all right.

  The pleasure came welling up inside me. It took me by surprise. Nothing had changed. I hadn’t really recovered from the shock of Harper’s ongoing murder. I was still a zillion miles from home. I still had all the problems I’d had that morning … but I was in an opera company !

  I found myself grinning at the other singers, smiling affectionately at Norah Platt, touched by the way Binnda dashed around like the veriest human producer-director-conductor-resident genius. Not counting the weird aliens and the bizarre setting, it was so very like the first run-through of any opera company on Earth. I strolled around happily. Two of the women were engaged in an intense conversation in a corner of the stage, in almost voiceless whispers; when they glanced up at me I beamed at them. I saw Bart Canduccio walk pointedly by the castrato, Malatesta, cutting him conspicuously cold; I observed it with tolerant amusement. I was only too happy to oblige Norah when she asked me to help her sort out the acts of the piano reduction of the Idomeneo score. I was delighted when four Kekketies appeared with trays of hot tea and lemon juice for all us singers, and drank my own cup with delight.

  I was awash with good feeling. I was going to sing again!

  I almost applauded when at last Binnda climbed up on a chair, clapped his hands for attention, and cried, “Ladies! Gentlemen! Excuse me, I am the Prologue!”

  It was an operatic in-joke—it was what the clown says at the beginning of Pagliacci—and Binnda got the little titter he was aiming for. Smiling (I guessed that three-cornered mouth was smiling), he began to speak. No, to orate. He said, waving his snaky arms, “This is an historic occasion. I feel humbled by the mantle that Fate has cast on me, the mantle of the immortal Diaghilev and Rudolf Bing. Never before in the history of the Fifteen Associated Peoples have we had the grace of a complete opera company to bring your wonderful The Earth human music to our many audiences in its original, all-human, faithfully produced form. You will perhaps have heard,” he went on, his voice taking on a somber timbre, “that many of our friends among the Fifteen Peoples do not care for opera. You m
ay even hear stories that powerful influences—I name no names—are opposed to the creation of this company. Perhaps there is a little truth to that. But it is not an obstacle. It is a challenge! On us in this rehearsal hall rests the divine duty to carry on the great traditions of Mozart, Wagner, and Verdi; of Chaliapin and Caruso and Madame Schumann-Heink; of La Scala and Covent Garden and the Met; above all, of the marvelous Bolshoi Opera of Moscow from which we take our name. You have all been personally chosen by me. I know you are as fine a company as has ever been mounted in any city of your human The Earth. If we fail, it will be my failing. But if we succeed— as I know we will succeed!—then that success will be triumphantly your own. And now, are there any questions?”

  The man in gray raised his hand. “There’s no brown sugar for the tea,” he complained.

  “A thousand apologies, Mr. Morcher,” said Binnda. “That will be remedied at once. And now, if you will all take your scores, we will run through the opening of the first act of Mozart’s immortal Idomeneo.”

  “What did he mean about obstacles and objections?” I asked Norah Platt.

  “Oh,” she said absently, rubbing her knuckles, “you know. There’s always someone objecting, isn’t there. Nolly? As long as you’re not otherwise engaged at the moment, my fingers are giving me fits. Would you mind turning the pages for me while I play?”

  All opera stories are pretty dumb, but Idomeneo is a little dumber than most.

  From the point of view of any baritone it has one glaring fault—there’s no baritone role in it—so I suppose it’s possible that I could be a little prejudiced. I think not, though. The title role is the old king, Idomeneo, sung by the old tenor, Canduccio. Canduccio’s pet hate, the pale, pretty little man named Malatesta, sang the role of the king’s son, Idamante, and Eloise Gatt, one of the sopranos, was Idamante’s girlfriend.

  The story is, frankly, too silly to discuss. But on the other hand, the story doesn’t really matter, because the music is, well, Mozart. Even sight-reading on a first run-through, it was—well—beautiful. Eloise Gatt had a really sweet soprano, with that mellow cantabile swinging-along sound that goes so well in Mozart, and Malatesta …

  When Malatesta sang his first lines a shock went through me. I’d never heard a castrato sing before.

  The part Malatesta was singing was written for a castrato in the first place. Of course, I’d never heard it sung that way. Due to the twentieth-century shortage of that particular type of performer, I couldn’t have. The shortage hadn’t begun in the twentieth century. Mozaft himself had had to rescore the part for a tenor after the first production, because even in Mozart’s time it was hard to find a singer who’d let his testicles be cut off to keep his golden boy’s voice all through his life, and anyway after the first performance it was mostly given by amateur companies of the nobility. All of whom were determined to keep their gender equipment intact.

  But Binnda wanted to give it as written, and fortunately he had Ugolino Malatesta on hand to do it.

  It was pretty funny, when you stopped to think about it, to have Malatesta singing the part of anybody’s son. Malatesta was the only human on Narabedla older than Norah Platt. He spoke six languages, English as good as my own—when he was willing to use it. He generally wasn’t. He was smooth-skinned and spry and his voice was beautiful, and the single thing that gave away his age—not counting that chopping the testicles off young boys with beautiful voices had been out of style for a couple of centuries—was that he really didn’t want to make the effort to speak in anything but his native Italian.

  But his voice! It was a wonder. It wasn’t just a soprano.

  He could pull out of those old pipes a perfectly pure high C, fit for any pretty young coloratura, but the timbre was not like that of any woman who ever lived. It was unearthly. It was colder than a woman’s voice, more majestic, more detached. It wasn’t a boy’s voice, either, because no boy soprano had ever had that much lung power. The top of his range was what I would have called a falsetto in any intact male singer—but there was nothing false about it in Malatesta—and there it had no sex at all. It had nothing to do with Mimi or Cio-Cio-San. It was simply a limpid, quicksilver miracle.

  Malatesta knocked me out. If mumps had given me that voice, instead of simply wrecking my baritone, I might have learned to reconcile myself to the mumps … almost.

  The other singers were all superb, too. The two sopranos, the gaunt, dark Electra and the plump, pretty little Ilia, could have sung in any hall on Earth. When we came to the Neptune, sung by the balding redheaded man, I suddenly realized where I’d seen him before. Eamon McGuire. Of course! It had been in Santa Fe, at the open-air opera. McGuire had sung the Commendatore in Don Giovanni. A long time ago, when I was still turning up at rehearsals in the hope of a last-minute fill-in, I’d gone backstage to ingratiate myself with him on the chance that, some day, I might sing the Don opposite him. Then he had dropped out of sight, and for twenty years or so he had from time to time been the subject of one of those whatever-became-of sessions. Drank himself to death, most people thought.

  But now I knew what he had drunk himself to.

  The second tenor part was the silent gray man who had complained about the lack of brown sugar, Floyd Morcher. I didn’t have much trouble committing his name to memory because during the break he walked over to me and silently pressed a card into my hand. He turned away without waiting for me to read it. He didn’t seem to welcome conversation.

  The card said:

  Jesus can help you even here.

  I have services every Sabbath.

  At the bottom he had signed his name. I stared after him, wondering exactly what kind of help he was offering. I hadn’t forgotten there were flaws in this Paradise. I wondered what Morcher thought of people who thought a good way to punish somebody was to have him eaten alive, in public, and run the whole terrible event in slow-motion film so that it would last?

  From time to time we had an audience. They came and went, human and alien. I saw Barak—well, I smelled him before I saw him, but when I looked up there he was, burping furiously at an alien that looked like a shrimp. I saw Tricia Madigan briefly, with that huge, skinny black man I’d seen her with in the bar. He was so tall that out of the corner of my eye I’d taken him for one of the skinny, biped aliens with the pine-needle Mohawks. But when I looked closer he was human enough, and not that big—he was over seven feet, but the aliens were sometimes double that. Tricia and he watched for ten minutes or so, then Tricia blew me a friendly kiss and they went out. Half a dozen aliens drifted in to watch, and sometimes their chattering (or hissing or screeching) to each other caused Binnda to turn and wave his arm at them reprovingly. One of them was one of those bedbug things of the Mother’s, the rest were only vaguely familiar— especially one of the ones that hung from the tree.

  After an hour Binnda declared a break. The singers went off for tipple of their own—the soprano had said something revolting about a teaspoonful of olive oil—and Norah Platt offered me a cup of tea.

  “Going well, isn’t it?” she offered.

  “I suppose so. Norah? I’ve been wondering about something. How come you’re playing for us when we could have Purry do a full orchestral accompaniment?”

  All I had really meant by that was that I would have liked having Purry present—he was about the closest thing I had to a friend in that place. I had hurt her feelings. She said with indignation, “Truly, Knollwood, would you actually prefer that thing to a real, live artist? I know I’ve played a few clinkers”—I restrained myself from agreeing—“and I’m sorry for that. The old arthritis, I’m afraid. It’s rather awful today in the knuckles and the neck. And, of course, the joints. But music isn’t just technique. It’s also feeling, and how can one get that from a Purry?”

  “Don’t worry, my boy,” said Binnda, coming up from behind me. “We’ll have the full orchestra for the dress rehearsal, this is just to get us together for a preliminary run-through. How did you
like Malatesta? Simply superb voice! You don’t hear that kind of thing at the Met or Covent Garden these days, do you? And now, let’s get on to the second act.”

  And we did, and as Norah was cueing the Idamante for his first aria, I looked back at the dozen or so beings milling around in the seats, tanks, and perches. Most of them were weirdos, but a couple were human, and one of the humans was Woody Calderon.

  When Binnda declared a lunch break I jumped down from the stage and grabbed Woody before he could get away.

  He looked as cheerfully inept as ever as he pumped my hand. “Gee, Nolly, it’s great to see you! And singing, they tell me! That’s wonderful! Soon as you get over that little cold you’ve got, or whatever it is.” He grinned apologetically at me. Then he said, “I heard you were here. Gosh. I hope it wasn’t because of me or anything like that.”

  What I would have said to that I don’t know, because what can you say to a Woody Calderon? Binnda came bustling up behind us and saved me the necessity. “Why, Woody,” he called genially, “you’re back from the Xseni planet, I see? I hear you were a great success! Join us for lunch? I’ve got a simple collation laid out in the courtyard.”

  “Oh, boy,” Calderon said happily. “Come on, Nolly! You don’t want to miss this!”

  When we got outside I saw why. Meretekabinnda’s idea of a simple collation was copied closely, I was sure, from the last opera gala he had sneaked into. It was an open-air luncheon, in an enclosed courtyard. The yard was planted like an English garden. White-linened tables were spread with canapés, fresh fruit, cut-glass bowls of reddish liquid with ice floating in it—“Nothing alcoholic, dear boy,” Binnda rasped to me, “for we do have work this afternoon, don’t we?”—and those slim, tiny Oriental-looking Kekkety servants hovering around to fill a fresh plate or whisk away a used one.