Narabedla Ltd

by Frederik Pohl

  “Wow!” Woody Calderon grinned. “Smoked oysters!” They were, on top of Ritz crackers, held in place by Philadelphia brand cream cheese that had been tinted pink with paprika; there was also Beluga caviar, some other kind of crackers with more cream cheese, this time green and tasting of chives, with a little anchovy strip laid across each one, and cold shrimp that had not come out of a can, and five or six kinds of cheeses, Gouda and Edam and Brie and Port Salut and ripe, moldy Stilton. It wasn’t exactly a lunch, but the rest of the cast gobbled it up, and so did Meretekabinnda.

  When Woody had filled his plate I took him aside. There was a bench at the far end of the courtyard, under a flowering peach tree. I sat him down in it and said, “I’ve got an important question for you. Do you want to stay here?”

  He choked on a macadamia nut. “Stay here? What do you mean, Nolly? We signed a contract!”

  “I didn’t! I was kidnapped.”

  “Gee, Nolly,” he said remorsefully, “I heard something about that. I’m sorry. I honestly can’t help thinking that it’s kind of my fault, in a way. But, you know, this isn’t so bad, is it? I mean, we’ve got work, we’ve got—”

  I didn’t want to hear the standard litany. “I want to go home!”

  He stared at me through his Woody Allen glasses, honestly perplexed. “Why, Nolly?”

  “We’ve been kidnapped, for Christ’s sake! Isn’t that reason enough?”

  “Well, sure, there’s that,” he said reasonably, “but look at the good side. There’s no I.R.S. here, you know. Nobody hassles me. It’s not like back home, where nobody knew I was alive except the bill collectors and the critics that hated me.”

  I stopped for a minute, because an idea had just occurred to me. “Wait a minute,” I said.

  “Wait for what?” he asked defensively.

  “The critics! I just thought of something. You really did get some lousy notices, didn’t you? And suddenly I begin to suspect I know why.”

  “Well,” he began, “you know how it is with critics.”

  I shook my head. “You know what I think? I think Henry Davidson-Jones got to some of those critics.”

  His jaw dropped. He forgot to swallow the latest smoked oyster.

  “Figure it out for yourself, Woody.” I was getting excited. “It makes sense. Davidson-Jones wants artists for Narabedla. Good ones—I mean, were you listening to those people today? They could’ve been stars back home! But stars have reputations, and if they’ve got reputations someone’s going to miss them when they just disappear. Oh, sure, they cover it up—there was that fake plane crash for you. But if a lot of famous musicians all got wasted in a year, there’d be talk. He doesn’t want talk.”

  Woody was looking at me with those unhappy, gentle sheep’s eyes, trying to follow what I was saying. “He wouldn’t do anything like that! Would he?”

  “Wouldn’t he? All he has to do is keep you from getting famous. That’s easy; he gets to the people who make reputations. The critics.”

  “He couldn’t.”

  “Of course he could,” I said firmly, because the longer I talked the surer I became that I was right. “He could do it easily. He doesn’t have to bribe them or anything, Woody, he’s Henry Davidson-Jones. He says to one of them, ‘Pity about poor Calderon, did you hear that sour note in the adagio?’ and to another one, ‘Well, young Calderon’s playing a little better tonight, but you should have heard him last week in Phoenix. Pathetic.’ And what critic is going to argue with the guy who underwrites the benefits and gives the prizes and pays for the scholarships?”

  “Oh, my God,” Woody moaned.

  “So you don’t owe him a thing,” I finished.

  “God,” he repeated. I had him convinced then. I was sure of it.

  But then I could feel him slipping away. He took another tiny sandwich and munched on it, thinking. “Well, maybe that’s true,” he said, “but it doesn’t change anything, does it?”

  “What do you mean, it doesn’t change anything?”

  “No,really,” he insisted, beginning to get stubborn. “I’ve still got a good deal here. I don’t have to do fry-chef work at McDonald’s when I don’t have an engagement, because Mr. Shipperton gets me all the engagements I can handle. And they pay in real money, you know. I’ve got a Swiss bank account, just like I was some big drug dealer! And— well, listen,” he said, beginning to glow, “you know what? There’s a 1753 Guamerius cello that’s coming up for auction at Sotheby’s pretty soon. I don’t have enough nearly to pay for any of those big old instruments, of course, but I’ve got the catalogue; this one’s been pretty well messed up and a lot restored, and it might go for under a hundred thousand, and Mr. Shipperton says they’ll advance me the price and I can pay back as I earn. I mean, a Guarnerius, Nolly! Mr. Shipperton says the folks here would like to see one anyway. Mr. Shipperton says if I want to put a bid in he’ll have somebody cover the auction. Mr. Shipperton says—”

  “Mr. Shipperton says ‘Jump,’” I said bitterly, “and all you say is, ‘How high?’”

  He stopped chewing and looked at me. His eyes were hurt. “You don’t have to take that attitude, Nolly.”

  “There’s nothing wrong with my attitude. What’s the use of owning an expensive cello if nobody hears you play it?”

  “I’ll hear me! About a million Aiurdi and J’zeels and all those’ll hear me.”

  “I’m talking about human audiences. Back in the U.S.A., where you belong.”

  “Well, see, Nolly,” he said, “when I was back in the U.S.A. I didn’t have any of those big audiences, did I? Now I do, and they’re pretty nice people.”

  “Nice people don’t get other people eaten up by monsters in a public place!”

  “Oh, yeah,” he said, nodding wisely, “you mean Jerry Harper. It’s really too bad about Jerry. But, you know, he really was asking for it. You ought to remember, he started out by trying to sneak into a jump station.”

  “A what?”

  “A jump station. A long-distance go-box. What you came here in,” he explained. “The go-box thing they use to get you across space, you know? And then they put him in slow time and all and when he came out he just went ape. Blamed the people who caught him—well, they were human beings, too, and he kind of thought all us humans ought to stick together, so when they turned him in he got pretty cheesed off. But that didn’t excuse burning them to death!”

  I looked around. One of the Kekkety folk was coming toward us, his eyes on Woody’s empty plate, but I waved him away. No one else was near.

  “Woody,” I said, “I want to know everything you know about these jump stations.”

  He looked worried. “What for?”

  I said, “Because they’re how you get home. I want to do that. Don’t you think you owe me a little help? If it wasn’t for you I wouldn’t be here.”

  “Aw, Nolly, he said miserably, you know I’d do anything in the world for you—”

  “Not just for me. There’s Marlene.”

  “What about Marlene?” And when I told him what Shipperton had threatened his eyes got round and worried behind the glasses. “Oh, I wouldn’t want anything to happen to Marlene,” he said unhappily. “But, gosh, what can I do?”

  “Help me get back! Tell me how to get into a jump station.”

  “But there isn’t any way! There are two or three of them on Narabedla, but they’re all on levels you can’t get to without Binnda or somebody to take you there, and anyway they’re guarded all the time. Only the Tlotta drones can operate them, see? At least that’s the way it is here; maybe on some of the out planets they’re kind of sloppy. I mean, like a month or so ago when I came back here from the Tsigli planet they actually asked me where I wanted to go, if you can imagine.”

  I could imagine. My heart thumped.

  I controlled my voice. “What would have happened if you’d just said you wanted to go to the Earth?”

  “Oh, no, they weren’t going to let me do that, Nolly,” he said, shakin
g his head. “The drones wouldn’t take me there without authorization from the Mother. Anyway, they’d have to know exactly what station you were going to. There’s only one station on Earth, and that’s on Mr. Davidson-Jones’s yacht. You couldn’t just tell them the planet. You’d have to tell them what you wanted was the yacht, do you see.”

  I kept my voice level. “And suppose you’d said that? That you wanted to go to Mr. Henry Davidson-Jones’s yacht?” He thought for a moment. “Why, I don’t know. They’d ask their local Mother, of course, but she might not stop it. They’re pretty sloppy on the Tsigli planet; it’s a kind of a joke around here, you know.”

  I frowned. “But if it’s as easy as that, why didn’t Jerry Harper do it that way?”

  “Oh, but that was what he was going to try next,” said Woody. “Only he wanted to get even with those other guys first, you see? Which just shows you!”

  “Shows me what, Woody?”

  “How you really shouldn’t do anything mean, don’t you see? Because if Jerry hadn’t burned them up he’d probably be home by now.”

  When we started again, Meretekabinnda was talking to one of the Mother’s bedbugs. He came up to the stage, still talking to it, but not in English; it scurried away as I approached. “Binnda,” I said, “Woody says he had a great time on the Tsigli planet. Any chance we could go there with the troupe?”

  “Why not, dear boy?” he said lavishly. “After we finish the tour I’m arranging now, of course; first we keep our commitments, then we look around for new ones, don’t you agree? And there’s one other thing. The Mother’s drone says the doctor will be free by the day after tomorrow, so we can get your pipes fixed. You’ll need a bit of time for it, but then we can put off your rehearsals for a few days—”

  “Now, wait a minute! I don’t know about this! I have to think it over!”

  “Silly boy,” said Norah Platt affectionately, coming up to us. “It’s nothing to worry about; I do it all the time. And honestly, Nolly, Dr. Boddadukti is about the best barber I’ve ever seen. As soon as he’s through with—what’s the matter? Oh, did I say ‘barber’? Of course, these days you call them just surgeons.”

  “Yeah,” I said. I was not impressed by Norah’s recommendation. The best barber-surgeon of her time, from the days when the same man did both surgery and hair-cutting, would have been about up to the level of a present-day supermarket meat-cutter.

  Norah said, “Tell you what. I’m about due myself, Nolly. I’ll go in with you, and we can both get fixed up at the same time. The day after tomorrow? Yes, why not? Just don’t do any heavy drinking tomorrow night, there’s a good boy, because Dr. Boddadukti might think that was the normal state of your blood chemistry and you’d come out of the operation roaring drunk!”

  CHAPTER

  19

  Meretekabinnda’s idea of beginning to stage an opera was pretty straightforward. He lined up the principal singers, gestured to Norah Platt to begin, and let them sing out straight through. It was pure oratorio style, with no attempt at moving them around. After lunch I went to the seats in the back of the house and leaned back, enjoying the music. Enjoying as much as I heard of it, anyway. The thought of this Dr. Boddadukti, whoever he was, performing surgery on my one and only body, kept getting between me and the opera.

  “Catching some z’s?” said a voice from behind me. It was Tricia Madigan.

  I smelled her before I straightened up to look at her, a pretty, feminine scent of perfume and girl, mixed with a heavier, sweeter aroma of musk oil. She wasn’t alone. The sweet musk scent came from the big black guy she was with. “You don’t know Conjur, do you? This is Conjur Kowalski. You two guys ought to be friends, ’cause we’re going to be seeing a lot of each other on the tour.”

  Perplexed, I shook his hand. It was a big one. He could have wrapped it completely around mine, and I was pretty sure that if he’d wanted to he could have squeezed mine into pulp. (Nolly, Nolly, I told myself, you have got to get back into shape.) He was good-looking, too—maple-walnut ice cream colored, with a Roman nose and an Afro hairdo. “Did you say you were going to be on the tour?”

  Kowalski laughed, a deep voiced, friendly, we’re-all-in-this-together kind of laugh. “That damn Binnda, he don’t tell you nothing. We’re like your double feature, you know what I’m saying?”

  And Tricia explained, phrasing it as politely as she could, “Well, you know, Nolly, not all the funnies go ape for opera. So Binnda thought he ought to put in some extra hooks to build the old box office up. That’s us.”

  I looked from one to the other. “You’re going to sing?”

  “Aw, no, Nolly. Conjur and I do a kind of act. We started—when was it, Conj? About a month ago? There was a kind of … Well, I guess you could call it … Well, the closest thing is the funnies had some sort of little convention, as you might say, on the B’kerkyi planet—wow, is that a weird place!—you know, a conference about something or other. Anyway, they’re not that different from you and I, hon. They like to have a little fun along with their business, so Binnda brought us out there to play for them. We did our show and they loved it.”

  I looked from her to Conjur Kowalski. “What kind of show was that?”

  She gave me a look of startled amusement. “Aw, you rascal, I don’t mean anything bad. Like vaudeville, you know? I did my baton things. Conjur did mostly break-dancing. It’s not his main thing, but the old Harlem Globe Trotters don’t go over very well—”

  “Those dudes are not Globe Trotters,” rumbled Kowalski.

  “No, ’course not. Only Jonesy must’ve thought they could do the same thing when he signed them on, only it doesn’t work out here. And, hey, Conjur doesn’t get along with them too well, do you, hon? When Conjur plays anything he likes to win.”

  I scowled at her. “Is that what you’re going to do in the opera? Baton-twirling and break-dancing?”

  “No, no, not in the opera! After the opera, maybe—like, it’ll be a kind of a double feature. And anyway we’re working up a new act.”

  “Which we best go practice some,” said Conjur Kowalski, looking past me, “because here comes the Man.” The Man, in this case, was Sam Shipperton, leading a dark, short, stocky man into the rehearsal hall.

  “Sure, hon,” Tricia said, getting up. “Anyway, Nolly,” she said to me, “we just thought we’d look in on you folks to see how things were going. Come see us when you get a minute, okay?”

  “You bet,” I said, not really listening to her. Shipperton had brought his charge up to the stage, and Binnda had stopped the rehearsal to introduce him.

  “Our other tenor,” he said proudly. “Our good friend, Dmitri Arkashvili, who will sing the High Priest of Neptune. And just in time, my dear Dmitri, because we have almost reached your entrance cue.”

  “I’ve been digging them up for you as fast as I can,” Sam Shipperton complained.

  “Of course you have, of course you have. And doing a perfectly splendid job of it, too! Now, if we can resume from bar eighty—oh, dear, now what is it?”

  One of the Mother’s little bedbugs came skittering up to the piano, reared on its hind legs, and twittered at Binnda, whereupon he threw up his sinuous hands. “Take ten, everyone,” he called and hurried over to the skry at the side of the stage. He began to chatter at it, and at once it lit up with the faces of half a dozen aliens, all different.

  As I came up toward the stage to get a better look, Norah Platt addressed the bedbug. “What’s going on?” she asked.

  “I have only been told to inform Meretekabinnda he is needed,” it said. Its voice was high and twittering, but what surprised me was that it spoke English at all. (“But of course they speak anything they like,” Norah said tolerantly when I turned to her. “They’re the Mother’s.”)

  The conversation over the skry seemed agitated. “Is it something about the-rehearsal?” I asked Norah.

  She was massaging her knuckles. “Oh, who can say?” she said fretfully. “I don’t think it’s
anything to do with us, though—look, there’s a J’zeel there, and they don’t care about opera. I expect it’s some Fifteen Peoples thing, Nolly. It’ll sort itself out.”

  It didn’t take long. Binnda snapped something angrily at the screen, the skry went blank, and he came back to us, muttering to himself. He stood in thoughtful silence for a moment, then climbed up on a chair. “Dear friends,” he called, “I regret to have to tell you that my presence is required elsewhere, and so we must adjourn our rehearsal for today. I’m sorry. It’s this Andromeda thing, you know; some last-minute details to be dealt with before the launch. But I’m sure it will all be straightened out by tomorrow.” And then, as the company was stirring itself to leave, he came over to me, Ugolino Malatesta in tow.

  “What a nuisance, my dear boy,” he twinkled—it was amazing how close he could come to having very nearly human expressions on that wholly nonhuman face. “But I have a suggestion for you. It’s been quite a long time since you sang in public, hasn’t it? And one’s skills need brightening after a long layoff? Well, dear Ugolino never seems to tire, and he’s offered to coach you.”

  I blinked at him. “Coach me?”

  “Oh, not that you need it, really—but it has been years, after all, and Ugolino is so good at technique. So if you won’t take it amiss …”

  What he said made perfect sense. I told him, “I won’t take it amiss. I’ll appreciate all the help I can get.”

  “Wonderful! And now”—he made a humorous grimace— “I’m off to See if I can get the Ossps and the J’zeel to agree on a launch time!”

  Malatesta explained that his own home was pretty far away, and so we’d do better to have our first session in my own. In slow, careful, accented English, he said that, after all, the way to get started was to start, and no time was better than now. I had no objection at all.

  As we passed through Execution Square I averted my eyes from the horrid scene. This time it wasn’t deserted. There were six or eight people standing around, gazing at it curiously, like rubberneckers at a car crash. Malatesta muttered something I couldn’t understand, but I didn’t think it mattered. He was making the sign to ward off the evil eye, and I didn’t think he was talking to me. Actually, I didn’t comprehend very much at all of what he said to me for the first little while, because I made the mistake of letting him know I understood a little Italian, and that was all he needed. English vanished from his repertory. All future conversations were in Italian, and what I didn’t grasp I had to get along without.