Narabedla Ltd

by Frederik Pohl

  Once inside my house he got right to work. The language problem was small; there was no chitchat. He was a businesslike and hardworking teacher.

  I was glad of his impersonal attitude. I would not have known how to take him if he had tried intimacy. When I looked at Malatesta, what I saw was myself. There was nothing effeminate about him; he didn’t give off that aura of sexual interest that I sometimes got from gays. When we were working, which was almost all of that long, hard five-hour first session, he wasn’t a person at all. He was a teaching machine. He stood me before my mirror and had me watch my mouth move, peer at the vibrations of my Adam’s apple, pour out the vowels on the scale: “Ah ah ah ah ah ah ah. Ee ee ee ee ee ee ee …” endlessly up and down the full span of my register. And always instruction. “You must sing,” Malatesta instructed, “off the top of your voice. It is the second most important rule of singing, that.”

  And all the other rules followed. Never shout. (Certainly not when I was singing, for that was a horrid, wolfish sound; but never at any other time, either, because that strained the vocal cords.) Keep the throat always warm. (If I were to visit the planet of the Quihigs, for example, I must always wear a natural wool scarf around my neck, always, because the Quihigs lived on a world of frequent chill drafts.) Get plenty of sleep. (A tired voice was a bad voice.) Always start the day’s vocalizing in the middle register—it is time enough to reach for the upper and lower notes when the voice is warm, not before. Swallow at least four ounces of heavy cream, better still olive oil (but I must secure my own supplies of olive oil, he could not spare any of his) before each performance. Never press the voice when it is not right; it is better to cancel a performance than to give a bad one. Do not smoke! (Yes, he admitted, even that young fellow Caruso enjoyed an occasional cigar—one had heard his records, of course—but see what happened to Caruso, dead of throat cancer in his prime.) And, above all, to breathe one must always be sure to open up the bottom of one’s throat, because that (at last) was Rule Number One.

  And as I was singing my scales Malatesta was walking around me, studying my posture, watching my eyes to see if I was straining. He touched me all over with his papery hands, touched the breastbone, the cheekbones, the larynx, the lips—he even reached into my mouth and placed a feathery-light fingertip on my front teeth to feel if I was getting maximum reinforcement from the hard resonators in the skull. “It cannot all come from the throat, but,” he instructed, “you must use your sounding boards to make the tone come out full and pure, have you understood?”

  I had understood. I was even grateful. I was beginning to feel like a singer again.

  I hardly remembered I was on Narabedla.

  If there was anything wrong with Malatesta as a coach, it was only that some of his ideas seemed a few centuries out of date. I don’t mean his sense of anatomy or his recipes for voice production. They were as good as any I had ever heard, in all my early years of teaching and practice. It was his ideas on performance that sounded peculiar. He insisted that I fill my lungs at every chance; that I take in all the air I could, so that I could release it in song with ease and comfort. That part was all right; but Malatesta was never satisfied unless he could actually hear me gasp from all the way across the room. I tried to object to that. Modem audiences, I told him, did not like to hear their singers suck air, no matter what it had been like in 1767. He laughed at me. “Modem!” he jeered. “But these audiences here, they are completely primitive! They are not in the least modem, those ones!”

  How noisily the air entered my lungs, he insisted, did not matter at all. What was important was how it sounded when it came out—smooth, effortless, brilliant, with no change in quality from the bottom of my range to the tricky As and even Bs at the top.

  Conversation wasn’t difficult as long as he stuck to singing and talking about singing. That much Italian vocabulary had stayed with me. It was harder when we took a break and I got up the nerve to ask him about his, ah, condition.

  He didn’t take offense. He seemed to think it was perfectly normal to discuss his castration; only he would only do it in his native language. He was willing to speak fairly slowly, with good diction and using simple grammatical forms; even so, when he said, “Ogh’anno, quattro mille ragazzi di dodici anni”—he made a scissoring gesture with two fingers of his right hand—“tsit, tsit, e dopo sono tutti castrati come me,” I had to rehearse it for a moment before I understood he was telling me that four thousand boys got gelded every year. Then, when I must have flinched, he grinned. “Hai paura, tu?”

  He was asking if the idea scared me. It did, though I didn’t tell him why I had such a personal interest in it. I asked, “Ma, perche?”

  He shrugged. “La chiesa I’ha detto, hai capito?” And when I frowned, he repeated, “La chiesa.” And then, making a sign of the cross, “Il Bibolo.”

  “Ah,” I said. “The Bible.” It took a while, because my operatic Italian was not up to theological discussions, but it developed that what he was trying to tell me was that the purpose of this wholesale gelding was religious. It seemed there was an injunction in the Bible that forbade women singing in church, so the only adult sopranos they could have in their eighteenth-century choirs had to be manufactured. Boys were available, yes. But boys did not have the lung capacity, the muscles, the breath reserve of a grown-up. So they cut the ducts to the testicles to save the voices, and the choirmasters, piously deploring the horrid practice of child castration, never hesitated to employ the results.

  Later on I tried to check up on what Malatesta had told me. It wasn’t easy to find the right verse in the Bible. For that matter, it wasn’t easy to find a Bible on Narabedla, until I thought to borrow one from Floyd Morcher; but I finally did locate it. I Corinthians 14-34. The key sentence was, “Let your women keep silence in the churches.”

  Four thousand a year … Narabedla suddenly did not seem so bad.

  For five hours I tried to please him. Then I begged for rest. “Ma, che cosa adesso?” he demanded.

  I said apologetically, “I’m tired. It’s difficult, after all this time.”

  He stared at me in amazement. “You call this difficult? But if you could only know! As a child at the Conservatorio Sant’Onofrio I each morning must rise two hours before the sun to work. All day to work! To sing, study, work till eight o’clock in the night—it is in that way that one becomes a truly skilled singer!”

  I said humbly, “But, maestro, I have not practiced in many years.”

  I thought he was pleased at the “maestro.” He sniffed, but then he said, “Then, all right. Now! Let us have a simple drink together, and then I will leave you for this first lesson. Camerriere!” One of the Kekketies popped out of the kitchen, listened to Malatesta’s quick order, in Italian so rapid-fire I could catch none of it, and returned in a moment with cups of hot, honey-sweet wine.

  And all this time, five long hours of it, I had hardly remembered that I was on Narabedla, or that a few yards from my door a hideous monster was ponderously thrusting its fangs into the throat of a human being, or that I was to undergo surgery soon, or that Marlene Abramson and Irene Madigan, back on Earth, were endangered and worried.

  I was singing.

  Even Malatesta no longer seemed like a wretched victim of a barbarous mutilation. He was simply a colleague. He took as much pleasure as I did in the task of getting me ready to sing again. When he sank back, inhaling the steam from the cup, tasting it slowly and pleasurably, smiling at me out of those old, shrewd eyes—he was not only my maestro, he was very close to being my friend.

  By the second glass he was boasting of his own exploits. He had studied with the great Farinelli; he had sung leads in Venice, Naples, and Vienna, in operas by Sarti, Galuppi, and Paisiello. (To him, Mozart was one of the new kids on the block. He hadn’t been born until Malatesta’s career was long over.) But when I tried to get him to tell me how he had come to Narabedla he suddenly became unable to understand me. To change the subject he went so far
as to try a little English on me: “Is good, this wine, Knoll-a-wood, is that not true? And with the ladies is also very good, you understand?”

  I nodded appreciatively to show that I understood, although in fact I didn’t. “It is too bad,” I said, as delicately as I could in the Italian that was only slowly coming back to me, “that such opportunities do not arise for you.”

  He gazed at me indignantly. His comprehension had cleared up as though by magic. “But for why should such opportunity not arise? Can I not make the love?”

  I goggled at him.

  “No, in truth!” he insisted. “One retains the essential instrument, is that not so? To become a father, all right, I agree, that cannot be, but to penetrate the charming parts of some fine woman, yes, certainly! One does so quite often, my dear Knoll-a-wood, with many beautiful ladies, not excluding the extremely charming Madam Norah.”

  Norah Platt? My eyes bulged. He gazed at me with a perplexed expression. Then he understood. Or remembered. “Ah, Knoll-a-wood,” he cried. “But you are the one who— You suffered the malady which— Even though you possess the small jewels— But not to be able …” His voice trailed off and he gazed mournfully at me. “Ah, my poor little man,” he whispered, and set down his empty glass, and patted me on the shoulder in the manner of somebody who is commiserating for a misfortune so terrible that it cannot be named aloud, and left.

  And I was back in Narabedla, with all my worries, fears, and angers intact enough to make that night, too, one that was short on sleep.

  CHAPTER

  20

  The next morning I woke early. I ran a mile round and round through the silent, empty streets, while the make-believe sky overhead paled and warmed and turned into morning sunlight.

  Running is good for thinking. There isn’t anybody to talk to. There isn’t any phone to ring, or radio or TV (or skry) to interrupt. By the time I’d run my mile I had made a mental list of all the questions I wanted answered, and all the halfanswers I needed explained. As soon as I’d showered and dressed I sat down with the book and the skry, trying to fill in the gaps in what I knew. It was time to get serious.

  First, about the go-boxes, particularly the interstellar variety: could I use them?

  Neither book nor skry answered that for me. It wasn’t that the skry was unwilling to display any information I asked for; it was that the information about go-boxes was incomprehensible to me. The only solid fact I retained was that, yes, every interstellar box was operated by one of the “Eyes of the Mother”—the little bedbug things that were all over. What were the Eyes of the Mother? They were the unsexed “workers” that came from the eggs the real Mother had laid when she had not been recently visited by a male.

  No help there; so what about the special transportation system the Kekketies used? I found no answer to that. I did find an awful lot about the Kekketies. The little brown “men” were called jur-Kekketies, and they apparently only existed on Narabedla itself and on Henry Davidson-Jones’s yacht. Then there were the din-Kekketies, like Purry; they were smart robots that could do all sorts of specialized things (like make music, or translate languages) for the needs or pleasures of people (like me, or for that matter like any of the Fifteen Associated Peoples). There were also the ftan-Kekketies, which ran the farms and supervised some kinds of machinery; they came in a variety of shapes, because form followed function and the ones that, for instance, worked underwater looked more or less like octopuses.

  There was also a special kind called the kai-Kekketies which apparently didn’t do anything much but grow, whereupon they were “harvested” by the ftan-Kekkety “farmers.” I didn’t pursue that subject very far. I didn’t want to know exactly what kind of roast I had eaten at Norah Platt’s dinner party.

  The Kekketies, it seemed, were indeed robots, but not the kind that you bought in a toy store. They were organic robots—more or less the kind Karel Capek had meant when he coined the words, I supposed. And they were a fairly recent innovation in the lives of the Fifteen Associated Peoples. They had been pioneered by the Ossps, who had been admitted to membership as one of the Peoples only a couple of hundred years ago.

  That was going nowhere useful. I got up, poured myself another cup of coffee, and started along a different line. What was this Bach’het trouble that had stirred the Fifteen Associated Peoples up?

  According to Canduccio’s book, the Bach’het were one of the four founding members of the Associated Peoples. The Duntidons (I knew who they were, all right) and the Bach’het (they looked more or less like eight-foot-long anteaters, and they communicated by flashing colors on their hindquarters, like fireflies) had come from planets of a pair of long-period double stars, and they had been fighting an interstellar war for a hundred years or more when Barak’s people, the Ggressna, discovered them. The Ggressna had already begun exploring interstellar space with robot probes, and either the Bach’het or the Duntidons, the book didn’t say which, had destroyed the probes, though not before information had been returned to the Ggressna.

  A couple of hundred years later the Ggressna came back. By then they had discovered the go-box, so once their probes got to the Bach’het and Duntidon systems they had quick two-way transportation. Also they had made contact with the Tlotta—the Mothers and their workers and males—who were pretty smart, too.

  Then (I skipped over some of the details) the Duntidons and the Bach’het acquired go-boxes of their own. The Bach’het launched an attack on the Duntidons; the Duntidons responded by blowing up the Bach’het star.

  That ended the war. The only Bach’het to survive were the few remaining from the invasion forces. The Duntidons didn’t come out of it too well, either, because a year or so later, when the shock wave radiation from the Bach’het nova reached their own planet, their unprotected biota got pretty well fried.

  The Ggressna didn’t care for people blowing up other people’s stars. Their first impulse was to wipe out the Duntidons. The Mothers dissuaded them; and so they offered the Duntidons membership in a federation, on condition that they submit to antiwar control and inspection; and that was the beginning of the Associated Peoples. Then (skipping to the present) the few remaining Bach’het, now multiplied to a million or so and living in scattered colonies on other people’s planets, wanted a homeland of their own, and so they had laid claim to a recently discovered planet.

  That was the Bach’het affair. It had taken me half an hour to find it all out, and it was getting close to time for Norah Platt to come by to escort me to the day’s rehearsals.

  What had I learned?

  Nothing very useful, as far as I could see. The big question was whether I could get home. The bedbugs were the key to that, I decided; and so I went back to the Tlottas.

  By the time there was a scratching at my door I had learned a lot about the Tlottas. They were the peacekeepers of the Associated Peoples. The bedbugs, the “Eyes of the Mother,” had the free run of everything, everywhere. They saw everything, and reported back to their Mothers; and the Mothers were insatiably curious.

  I had a question for Norah when I opened the door, but it wasn’t Norah who was gazing up at me cheerfully. It was my little ocarina friend, Purry. “Good morning, Mr. Stennis,” he caroled. “I hope you had a pleasant night?”

  “Marvelous,” I said. “Where’s Norah?”

  “I’m sorry to say that Ms. Platt isn’t feeling well today,” he informed me, “so I’ve come to take you to the rehearsal.”

  “It’s on, then?”

  “Oh, yes, Mr. Stennis. Meretekabinnda finished his business with the committee on the Andromeda probe. He specially asked me to tell you that he’s counting on you to be there this morning. He has a surprise for you.”

  “A surprise?”

  “Actually,” said Purry happily, “two surprises, but I think it’s all right for me to tell you one of them. He’s got the sets for Idomeneo, and he’s really anxious to have your opinion of them.”

  So once again the opera s
inger took over from the dedicated dissident in my mind. I got to the rehearsal hall eager to find out what the “surprise” was, and then even that faded in my mind as I saw what was going on. I was entranced at what was happening there.

  They were running through the whole of Idomeneo, as before. But it was not like any first run-through I had ever seen on Earth. In my experience, no one on Earth would have had a costume yet. In early run-throughs you’re likely to get your Brünnhilde in a miniskirt and your Queen of the Night with curlers in her hair. The Commendatore doesn’t come through a trapdoor out of hell. He ducks under the outstretched arm of a stagehand to deliver his doom-laden lines. And, of course, they do it all on a perfectly bare stage.

  That’s how it goes on Earth.

  On Narabedla that (as with most other things) was very different. The principal singers all did have costumes; they were busy getting into them when I got there. Those remote-control clothes-producers had been busy all night, I supposed, and gaudy threads indeed they had produced. Mozart would have been delighted.

  And then there were the sets.

  The sets! But “sets” is the wrong word. On Narabedla they didn’t use the conventional flats and backdrops. What they used were something very like holograms. You could see them. You couldn’t touch them; there was nothing there to touch, nothing but light. When Binnda commanded, “Sets on!” they sprang up out of nowhere. I moved around the sets, staring at them. They were utterly solid-looking. And really three-dimensional; from out in the audience seats, or even from any corner of the stage itself, they looked incredibly and opulently real.