Narabedla Ltd

by Frederik Pohl

  When the first Idomeneo scene appeared 1 gasped. Even the other singers looked startled, and Binnda was in heaven. “Do you like it?” he begged the cast, almost hopping with pleasure. “Here, look at the others!” And, as one by one they flashed into being, he catalogued them for us. “The throne room is from the La Scala production, the opening of the second act is copied from Bournemouth, and the last one is taken from the Leningrad Kirov Theater; I took the original pictures myself!”

  There was a murmur of appreciation from the singers— almost unanimous. The exception was the Electra. She sniffed frostily. She was the dark, cadaverous-looking one, and her name (I got Purry to remind me) was Sue-Mary Pet-ticardi. “Idomeneo,” she said—she had just the trace of an accent, maybe French—“is set on the ancient Greek island of Crete, not in Egypt. I recognize that throne set. It does not at all belong to this opera. It comes from Aida.”

  Binnda pouted. “In our view,” he explained, “the set is quite authentic. It faithfully represents your The Earth. Now! Places! First act! Purry, the overture, if you please!”

  Norah Platt came limping in while they were still singing and sat down quietly next to me. I didn’t ask her how she was; I could see by the strain on her face that her “old bones” were giving her fits. When they had finished the run-through Binnda disappeared for a moment to confer with somebody, and I walked around, congratulating the cast. I meant every word. They had been, well, sublime.

  Then Binnda came back in. “We have time,” he said, “for a quick run-through of our second opera. It will be Pagliacci. The Kekketies have the scores.”

  That’s how I found out what the second surprise was. We were rehearsing Pagliacci, and I was to sing the Tonio.

  “But I’m not ready, Binnda,” I complained, half happy, half struck with sudden stage fright.

  “No, of course,” he agreed. “Don’t worry about it. Simply do not sing too loud. And shall I tell you the other half of your surprise? Our third opera is to be again Mozart— the Mother has requested that—and it will be Don Giovanni, with you singing the Don!” He grinned at me happily, the bright green tongue licking out of that horrid little mouth.

  It was an ugly enough spectacle, but I could have kissed him. “Remember that you are not quite ready yet, dear boy,” he cautioned. “So if you sing too loudly it will throw the other singers off.”

  “But you will be singing with the rest of them very soon,” promised Norah Platt, putting a motherly hand on my shoulder, and Malatesta echoed, in Italian, “Subito, subito cantare bellissimo, Knoll-a-wood!”

  It was a heartening vote of confidence, but not unanimous. Floyd Morcher, who was singing the Canio, remained his usual isolated self, vocalizing at half voice off in one corner of the stage, and the Silvio was a man I had not met before named Rufus Connery. He didn’t speak at all, only stood there with hostile patience, waiting for the rehearsal to begin. But I was pretty sure that I knew why that was. It was not necessarily that he thought I sang like a skunk. It was just that he was the other baritone in the troupe. I had sung the Silvio to somebody else’s Tonio often enough to understand that Connery was not very likely to admire the voice of whoever was singing the larger role.

  For I was the Tonio, all right. I got to open with the show-stopping Prologue; and, when we at last started, with Malatesta alternately nodding and frowning at me, signing when I should breathe and urging the top tones out of my mouth, I really did it pretty well.

  I felt, almost, at home.

  If there is a world composed more nearly completely of make-believe than the world of opera, I cannot imagine what it is. The stories of the operas are preposterous. The singers rarely look as though they could possibly feel and do what the roles require—the fifty-year-old Mimis and plump little Siegfrieds are chosen for voice, not plausibility. The swords are wood, the daggers are rubber, the sets are plywood and paint. (On Earth they are. On Narabedla, the sets were not even that much, being those mere immaterial shapes of light.) There is almost nothing in opera that is “real,” and yet out of all this hocus-pocus and sham comes—well—beauty.

  And anyway, although opera is a make-believe world, it is the world I had all my life wanted to live in. I actually enjoyed Rufus Connery’s resentment. I was pleased to make an appointment to be fitted for my costumes. I let one of the Kekkety servants make me up for my role as Tonio. The greasepaint smelled good. I was home.

  It almost made me forget about the cluster of spectators I had passed in Execution Square, all watching with critical interest something I turned my head away from.

  Pagliacci is a short opera with a small principal cast—two baritones, two tenors, and a soprano. The Nedda was the pretty little Valley Girl, Maggie Murk; the second tenor, the Beppe, was Dmitri Arkashvili, the Russian who had sung the High Priest in the Idomeneo rehearsal; and, once again, they were all really good. Ruggiero Leoncavallo would have been pleased—if, also, totally freaked out by, for example, the likes of Binnda.

  In the breaks I made it a point to chat with the Nedda and get on friendly terms—she has to hit me in the face with a whip, and I didn’t want her to mean it—and tried to do the same with Morcher and Rufus Connery, just to keep the tension down among the cast. Connery was only professionally jealous; he would get over it by and by, I thought. Morcher simply did not choose to talk.

  But his Vesti la giubba was as good as any I had ever heard, and that catch of the breath and controlled sob when he sings “Laugh, clown” was—well—beautiful. And it was, all in all, a happy time, right up to the moment when one of the Mother’s little bedbugs skittered in to paw at Binnda for attention. When Binnda had listened to its message he clapped his snaky little hands and said:

  “Ladies! Gentlemen! The Execution is finishing now! We will adjourn the rehearsals until tomorrow so that we can all go to watch the end of it!”

  I don’t know why I went there.

  I didn’t want to. I didn’t know exactly what I was going to see, and didn’t believe for a second that, whatever it was, I would enjoy seeing it; but everybody else was going. So I went along.

  I found myself on the fringes of the Square. Maggie Murk and her tall, skinny friend, Sue-Mary Petticardi, were on one side of me, Floyd Morcher on the other. Together we were pressing forward to stare through the crowd.

  It didn’t at first look much different from the quick, revolted glimpse I’d had that morning. The monster’s teeth were buried deep in Jerry Harper’s throat; the razor talons were slicing through his breast, bones and all; Jerry Harper’s face—well, I didn’t like to look at Jerry Harper’s face. I cannot enjoy the expression of agony.

  The Square was densely packed with people—a good many of them not precisely people, in the human sense. Barak was there, elevated on the tips of his silvery starfish arms, the eyes roving all over and the stench as bad as ever. So were a couple of other aliens of the tall, black, praying-mantis type, and a few of kinds I had not seen before. There was a lot of conversation from the crowd, not all of it in English, or even in any human language at all. Barak in particular was gasping away in that high-energy, breathy way of his that sounded like a tire pump given voice, but he wasn’t speaking English. He lifted two of his arms commandingly to wave a space through the crowd, and a group of the little Kekkety folk came trotting through with various items—some with folded-up cloth, one carrying a glittery silver and crystal machine. They set the machine down next to the “statue.”

  Barak choked out a sentence of command.

  The servant at the machine did something to it. There was a quick orange-colored emission from the machine—I suppose it was light, but it seemed almost to be a glowing gas cloud—that sprang from the machine and spread to envelope the statue.

  And then the statue—came alive.

  It was like a stop-motion still on a television program suddenly returned to normal action. The monster’s great tail flailed about. The pointed head with the dagger teeth shook back and forth as it chopped
at Jerry Harper’s throat. Sounds came out—a muffled roaring from the monster, a terrible gurgling moan from Harper as he tried to struggle away.

  Then Harper went limp. The Duntidon raised its head and growled something that I knew was speech, though not in any language I had ever understood. One of the Kekkety folk silently handed it a towel, and it fastidiously began to wipe Jerry Harper’s blood off its face and talons.

  Floyd Morcher said exultantly beside me, “An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, a life for a life!”

  Maggie Murk said, “Oh, Sue-Mary, I think I’m going to be sick!”

  The servants unrolled a sort of body bag; two of them began to stuff what was left of Jerry Harper into it, while the others began to mop up the mess on the floor of the Square.

  And Tricia Madigan reached forward to tug at my shoulder. “Had enough, Nolly? We’re not doin’ no good here, and there’s going to be a bunch of people at Wanda’s Place. How about if you and I and Conjur go off and crawl a couple of bars?”

  Wanda’s Place turned out to be the sort of refreshment place I had visited with Purry, but we didn’t stay there. Conjur Kowalski took one look inside and shook his head. “Too crowded,” he said. “We goin’ home.” He stalked ahead of us to the go-box, and where we wound up was at his personal pad.

  Conjur didn’t say much on the way. Neither did Tricia, because she was pouting over missing the excitement of the post-execution crowd at Wanda’s Place. Neither did I, because I was trying to make sure that the queasy bustling sensation in my stomach was not going to lead to throwing up.

  It is not every day that you see a helpless human being eaten up by a monster from outer space.

  I concentrated my attention on Conjur Kowalski. He seemed to be as affected as I was by Jerry Harper’s messy murder, but it took him a different way. Smoldering rather than sick. Conjur had a lot to smolder with. He was six long feet and ten skinny inches tall. His hands could wrap around a basketball the way I held an orange. He threw the door to his pad open and declared, “There be the booze, lady, and we wants us some now.”

  Tricia brightened. “Sit down, fellows,” she said, and headed for the wet bar. She didn’t ask what we wanted. She just started pouring, while Conjur stalked into the bathroom and slammed the door and I looked around.

  Conjur’s pad was no bigger than my own, but the plan was entirely different. He didn’t have a big living room and a little bedroom. He didn’t have any living room at all, except for a kind of little foyer with two chairs and a communications skry, but his bedroom took up a good deal more than 50 percent of the square footage of the apartment. The bed was round. It was also huge, big enough so that big Conjur could stretch out in it easily in any direction, with adequate room for another person (or four or five of them) besides. It was elevated on a platform a foot above the rest of the room, with the bar conveniently next to it at one point and what looked like about a ten-thousand-dollar stereo rig at another. And off in one corner, next to the bathroom door but not even screened, was a Jacuzzi big enough to hold parties in.

  “Neat,” I said morosely, taking the glass of J & B and ginger ale from Tricia.

  “Aw, cheer up, hon,” she said, depleting her own glass. She climbed up to sprawl on the huge bed, as though she had been there a time or two before, and looked at me in a friendly, chiding way. “You’re not sitting down,” she said. “You’re all snaggle-toothed and mean, and you’re gonna totally kill this party.”

  “Do you blame me?” I demanded.

  “Who’s blaming? But that thing with Jerry, hey, it happens, so why don’t you just drink up and get mellow,” she ordered. Then she raised her voice. “Damn you, Conjur,” she called. “Are you ever coming out of there or what?” The door opened and Conjur appeared. He had removed his shoes and they were in one hand; his pants had come off, too, and they were folded over the other forearm. What he still had on was a sort of Mexican-looking lightweight open-necked shirt and pale green jockey shorts. He hung the trousers up in a closet, neatly arranging the creases to match, and pulled on a pair of jogging shorts while he talked. They were partly green, too, pale green and white, and they were just about the right color to go with his caf6-au-lait skin. He had the longest legs I had ever seen on a human being, and they were solid muscle. “He right, woman,” he growled at Tricia. “You don’t be blamin’ him for feelin’ real low right now.”

  “Oh, knock off the damn jive talk,” Tricia complained. She looked at me. “He was a speech major at CCNY, back home,” she told me. “He just does that to put you on.”

  “I be doin’ that way ’cause I be feelin’ that way,” Kowalski rumbled. Actually, in his normal voice he sounded like a speech major—a really good one, with natural talents. Conjur Kowalski had one fine, deep, round speaking voice. If the present incumbent ever gave them up, he could have done the Seven-Up commercials just as well. He glared at his drink and said, “Jerry Harper was a damn fool, okay, but they didn’t have to do him like that.”

  “We’re not going to talk about Jerry Harper,” Tricia commanded. “How do you like Conjur’s place, Nolly?”

  “It’s neat,” I said again.

  “Yeah,” he said darkly, “but I tell you this, my man, I would trade it all for two rooms near One Twenty-fifth Street and maybe a contract with the Knicks.”

  “We’re not going to talk about that, either,” said Tricia. “We’re just going to get relaxed and talk about having fun. You ever play any basketball, Nolly?”

  “In college, but I was too short.”

  “Maybe you could throw some baskets with Conjur sometime. He still works out in the gym every day. In case he gets back, you know.”

  I was tom between two cues there—“in case he gets back” and “gym.”

  “Gym” won out, and when I asked it turned out that, yes, Conjur had a gym. His own gym, he pointed out. He paid for it out of his earnings, and anybody else who wanted to use it had to pay for the privilege. Sometimes people did. It had a basketball court and a running track, not to mention all the Nautilus machines. I got right to the point. “I don’t have any money,” I said.

  Conjur looked concealedly pleased, like a used-car salesman who sees an eighteen-year-old heading toward the Stingray with the bent frame. “You could get an advance on your contract,” he said.

  “I don’t have a contract. They just snatched me.”

  “Shee-it,” said Conjur thoughtfully, and Tricia said: “But they can’t do that. I mean, sure, they can snatch you if they want to, what can you do about it? But they can’t make you go on tour. That’s a real strict law. The funnies don’t want each other kidnapping their people, so they have a rule that nobody travels to any of the planets without a voluntary work contract. You go talk to Sammy Shipperton; he knows he can’t ship you off to the Ptrreek planet without papers. Make him give you a contract.”

  “Then you sure can use my facilities, Nolly,” said Conjur graciously. “You shoot some baskets with me, I’ll maybe give you something off.”

  “Fine,” I said, but I’d been distracted again. “What’s this about the Ptrreek planet?”

  “Nobody told you about the Ptrreeks?” Conjur demanded.

  “Nobody told me about this place,” I said, disgruntled as I thought of it, “except Tricia started to give me a quick tour once, only—”

  There was a moment’s silence there, because I remembered how the quick tour had ended. So did Tricia. She said kindly, “You’ve seen a picture of it on the skry, haven’t you?”

  “Well, yes, but—”

  “Show the man,” Conjur ordered. “I’ll fresh up these drinks.”

  And so Tricia Madigan took me over to the communications screen and summoned up a map of Narabedla. It very nearly took my mind off the sad fate of Jerry Harper, because it was pretty to look at—a sort of semitransparent illuminated, hologrammish model—and it answered a lot of questions. Narabedla, it turned out, wasn’t really shaped like a soup can. More like a can of tuna
fish, cylindrical but pretty squat. It wasn’t very big, as moons go—no more than ten miles in diameter, maybe six miles through the axis of rotation. Even so, when I tried to do the arithmetic in my head, it came out a lot larger than it needed to be to house four hundred human beings on what was no more than a tenth of an acre for each little house.

  “They built all this just so they could have a bunch of human beings performing for them?” I asked.

  “Aw, no,” rumbled Conjur Kowalski. “It been here, you know? They had some other use for it, like.”

  “Like what?”

  “Oh, hell, Nolly, how would I know? It was just something they didn’t need anymore. Maybe like a naval base for wars or something—they used to have them, you know, until they figured out nobody wasn’t going to win any anyway. So when they started importing artists from the Earth they just cleared out a little corner of it, and here we are.”

  “I don’t know much about their wars,” I said, led away on another trail of thought and one that was far from attractive. If there was one thing I knew for certain about the people who had created Narabedla, it was that I didn’t want their technology applied against the Earth in any way.

  “You ain’t gonna hear from me,” said Conjur, “because I don’t know nothin’. Ask old Floyd Morcher; he keeps digging into all that stuff, only what’s the use? They don’t do it no more anyway. Where’s that liquor at, Trish?”

  I made another mental note to myself, along with the one about seeing Sam Shipperton to talk contract, and studied the airy model that hung before my eyes.

  It would be useful, I thought, to get around Narabedla. But Tricia explained that for that I didn’t need a map. Most of the English-speaking human beings were within easy walking distance of my own house. The ones that weren’t were only a go-box jump away, and from there it was never more than a five-minute walk to anywhere at all—anywhere we were allowed to go to in the first place, at least.