Narabedla Ltd

by Frederik Pohl

  We didn’t find our missing bass that day, because Meretekabinnda had to hurry off to take part in the Andromeda probe launch. There was so much to do, he declared feverishly—and happily. He wanted to go over the theaters we would play in with me. He wanted to run through I Pagliacci again, and maybe make a start on the Don. He wanted me to make sure Sam Shipperton double-checked for any bass singers we might have missed.

  But more than any of those, he wanted to be on hand for the ceremonies of the probe launch, and so he tootled off and left us to our own devices.

  What Malatesta wanted was another coaching session, but I had a better idea. “Let’s wait a while, please,” I urged. “I’m getting pretty far out of shape, and I’d like to try out Conjur Kowalski’s gym.”

  He acknowledged that a young singer needed his physical strength, and so I made a call on the skry and Conjur agreed to meet me there.

  When I say it was a gym, I mean a gym. It was a combination of the gymnasium of a well-to-do suburban high school and the New York Athletic Club. He had the complete Nautilus machines, as promised. He had a double-barreled sauna, steam on one end, dry heat on the other. He had Indian clubs and weights and rings and those horsey things gymnasts vault over, and the horizontal bars to go with them; he had basketballs and softballs and bats and gloves; he had assorted sizes of shorts and jockstraps and shoes for every sport; and the whole thing, not counting the room itself, had to have set somebody back twenty or thirty thousand bucks.

  The “somebody” was Conjur Kowalski himself. He’d imported every item, paid for out of his earnings on the Narabedla circuit. “So what else would I spend the money on?” he puffed, doing leg-curl sit-ups on the slantboard. “Anyway, I get some of it back from rentals. You ready to shell out the twenty bucks an hour?”

  “My pleasure,” I said, as off-handedly as any opera star who had just signed a really good contract.

  “Shee-it, man!” he said in disgust. “I was hoping you’d want to work it out. I need a little competition, you know? Only not shooting baskets, what I want is some competitive sports. Some body-contact sports, you know what I’m saying?” He got up from the board and began ratta-tatting the punching bag with his bare fists.

  “Another time, maybe,” I said, not meaning it. “Can I start on the Nautilus machines?”

  But an hour on the machines, and skipping rope, and working out on the bars made my body feel almost as good as my throat did. What the hell, I said, and agreed to put the gloves on with him—big, soft gloves, and face protectors, too; but he gave me three hard rounds. He had the reach on me and the weight and the height, and hitting him in the body with the marshmallow gloves hardly even made him grunt. I had to admit that he won all three rounds, but the third one was at least close.

  When we packed it in and soaked in his little steam room for a while, Conjur was actually friendly. “You got to quit cocking your shoulder for your right, Nolly,” he said, looking like an Arab ghost in the huge white towels draped around him. “I can always see it coming, and then you’re off balance for a counterpunch. You want to try again tomorrow?”

  “No,” I said.

  He laughed. “Then it’s still twenty bucks. For the first hour, I mean.” He got up and stood under the cold shower in the corner, howling as the water hit him. When he came back he was looking thoughtful. “Listen, Nolly,” he said, “I got an idea. After we get a good sweat going here, how about if we jump down to the outside level and swim a few laps in the pool?”

  “Too bad you don’t have a pool of your own,” I said.

  “I thought of it,” he said. “Ain’t worth the price. Anyway, the one with the waterfall’s nicer. Tricia’s probably there right now.” He gave me a friendly poke. “How come you don’t go after that? It’s Class-A stuff, my man.”

  “You ought to know,” I said. I didn’t intend to have an edge on my voice, but it was there and he heard it.

  “Don’t be gettin’ tight-ass, Nolly,” he ordered. “She do what she want to do, that lady. I got no claim.” He looked at me, struck by a thought. “You did get your tools all sharpened like they said, didn’t you?” I shrugged and didn’t speak. “Well, see,” he said, floundering as though he were trying to be tactful, “what I want to say is you don’t have to worry whose lady she is. She ain’t mine, for a fact. Trish, she’s a sweet chick, but she’s, you know, she’s white. I got no hate against no whites. But there ain’t any nice colored ladies here, you know what I’m saying? It be gettin’ time for me to get serious.”

  “Are you talking about getting married?” I asked, honestly surprised.

  “And why would I not?” he. demanded aggressively. “Cain’t do it here. Cain’t find no good black woman to hook up with, and if I could cain’t have no kids—nobody does, you know? They put something in our food or something.” Conjur had started me on a whole new train of thought. “Are you saying you’d like to go back?” I asked slowly, trying to untangle what he was driving at.

  “Effing well right I’d like to go back! Only I can’t.”

  “No,” I agreed, “nobody can.”

  “Aw, shit, man,” he said, “that’s not what I mean. I mean even if I could, I couldn’t.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “I’m talking,” he said patiently, “about how even if Sam offered me a ticket home I’d have to tell him no, thanks.”

  “That’s crazy! Why is that?”

  “I’m a deserter from the U.S. of A. Army,” he said. “That’s why I wouldn’t go along with Jerry Harper when he tried to get out. It wouldn’t work for me. See,” he said, settling the towels around his shoulders, “right before I came up here, the Army had me in this asshole boot camp in Arkansas. You ever been in Arkansas? You ever been a black man in Arkansas? Then you wouldn’t know, but there was this redneck drill sergeant, a permanent-party staff, and he was on my back every minute. So I popped him one. Then I took off for Chicago. Hitched the whole way, sweating bullets that the MPs would pick me up, looking for my draft card, which I didn’t have anymore, you know? And while I was hiding out I heard about this cat who was looking to hire basketball players, no questions asked. I didn’t ask any, either. So here I am.”

  I said, as tactfully as I could, “But really, Conjur, did you have to go that far? You could’ve reported him if it was really a race thing. I mean, even the Army has its civil-rights people—”

  “Nolly,” he said patiently, “you don’t dig what I’m saying. You’re talking now. I’m talking then. How long do you think I’ve been here?”

  I blinked at him. “I don’t know,” I admitted.

  “When I deserted was August 1940,” he said.

  That took me by surprise. I simply hadn’t thought of the possibility—no, the damn certainty—that it was not only Norah and her friends who had been here for a longish time. “That’s almost fifty years ago,” I said wonderingly.

  “You good at arithmetic,” he complimented.

  “No, but what I mean is, that’s a really long time. How would they ever connect you with some guy that deserted even before World War Two?”

  “Maybe they wouldn’t,” he said. “Maybe I could buy some papers someplace—only where would I do that? From a friend in the business? The people that hid me out would be able to handle that easy enough, but where do you suppose they’ve got to? The guy that run off from the Army in 1940 isn’t going to have any friends around now, is he?” He opened his mouth as though he were going to say something else, then shook himself. “Hell,” he said, “time’s a-wastin’. Let’s get down to the pool and get in those laps. You sweating yet? Okay, my man Knollwood, let’s go do it!”

  The pool was there, just as before, and so was Tricia. She was lounging on the side of the little pond, brushing her hair, and once again she was naked. She looked up with a friendly smile. “Hey, you guys. Listen, I was just going to start getting dressed so I could watch that, you know, probe launch thing.”

  “Plenty of time f
or that,” Conjur growled. “We got some swimming to do.”

  We peeled down and jumped in, and it was just what I needed. I did a dozen fast laps to take my mind off Tricia’s bare body. It didn’t work. My own body was beginning to have a mind of its own again.

  Or half a mind, anyway. What I saw when I pulled myself out of the pool and looked down was a lot more than I’d been used to seeing for twenty years, but it was also a lot less than enough for any practical use.

  “Hold it,” Conjur ordered from behind me. “Don’t be gettin’ out yet.”

  “Why not?” I asked reasonably.

  “Count of you and me’s going to get under the waterfall for a minute,” he said, turning toward it.

  “We are?” I asked. But he was already halfway there, so we were. I gave a perplexed glance at Tricia, who just shrugged her pretty shoulders in a way that made me decide I’d better stay in the water a while longer anyway.

  I followed, and under the gentle, slow, tepid fall Conjur stood up and said softly, near my ear, “We talk here, nobody be hearin’ us. I hope.”

  I had been about to ask him why we were doing this, but then I didn’t have to. I closed my mouth with a snap. I squinted out from under the waterfall, at the flowering plants around the pool, at the little rabbity things that were watching us out of the corners of their eyes as they munched the tops off the grasses at the water’s edge.

  It had not occurred to me that the Narabedlans, who could do just about anything they set their minds to do, might from time to time want to hear what we Earth people talked about when we thought we were alone.

  Conjur was reading my mind. “I don’t think they be listening in on us here,” he said, glancing around. “This old waterfall makes a lot of noise, and anyway there’s not many people come here much. But I wouldn’t take bets on the gym or any other place, because you might not like what would happen. You certainly will not like hanging out there in the square with old Doc Boddadukti coming at you for six or seven weeks.”

  I jumped. “Why would he be doing that to me?”

  “Because of all that stuff you been saying about wanting to trash the man and cut out of here.”

  “Oh,” I said, shaking my head, “but I’ve given up on that idea. There’s no way, is there?”

  “Suppose there was,” he said.

  I thought that over. Conjur certainly looked serious. In fact, he looked angry as he waited for me to answer.

  From the edge of the pool Tricia called, “You guys! Hey, if we want to see the launch we better get up to a skry!”

  I would have started out, but Conjur put a hand on my shoulder to detain me. “What about it?” he demanded.

  I took my time. “If there was a way,” I said, “I’d probably really like to know about it. But then I’d have to think it over. And now,” I said firmly, “let’s go see this launch thing.”

  The rehearsal hall was set up for us, with most of the opera people there and a giant skry screen filling the stage. There were Kekketies hovering around in case of need, and I ordered drinks for the three of us from one of them.

  Purry was standing beside the skry, shifting from one foot to another with pleasure. “In just a moment,” he called happily, “the transmission will begin, and I will explain what is going on for you.”

  We found seats, and the screen lighted up just as the Kekkety brought our drinks. It didn’t look like much—mostly black, with some geometric patterns.

  “What we are seeing now,” Purry informed us, “is a reconstruction of the preliminary orbiting of the probe. We are not in real time yet. The probe has been going around the neutron star for, let me see, something like four billion revolutions now, at half a millisecond per revolution—that’s something like four of your years, and for all that time the control teams have been stabilizing its orbit in preparation for the launch.” In the screen there was a long ellipse traced in light, with a bright little point that was the star just inside one end of the ellipse. As we watched the ellipse shrank and rounded.

  It was interesting, but I had something else on my mind. “Conjur?” I whispered, touching his elbow. He turned to look at me without expression. “It isn’t that I don’t care about the Earth.”

  “Check,” he said, turning back to the screen.

  Purry’s voice was saying, “Now the orbit is perfectly circular, as you see. The control ship is getting ready to create the magnetic storm on the surface of the star.”

  I said to the back of Conjur’s head, “Really, it’s like any other immigration, isn’t it? You should understand that. When your folks, I mean way back, were shanghaied into slavery from Africa, they didn’t have any choice about it. I bet they all wanted to go back home at first. But, really, aren’t you better off now?”

  “Oh, yeah,” Conjur whispered bitterly.

  “I mean, every American came from somewhere, right? But once you’ve made the change, then you can’t spend your time thinking about what it’s like back home?”

  He moved restlessly. “Watch the damn show,” he ordered.

  I did. Actually, it began to get interesting.

  “This is the probe,” Purry said, as a spidery, filmy thing took form in a corner of the skry screen. It looked like a spiderweb. “It’s fifteen, ah, miles across,” Purry went on. “Even bigger than the neutron star, but it’s all made out of very thin filament. The whole probe only weighs about two hundred pounds.” The image blinked out, replaced by a surly-looking dim red ball. “And that’s a closer look at the neutron star. You can’t see any features because it’s spinning so rapidly. Although it’s only seven miles across, it weighs as much as your sun at Earth.”

  “Wow,” I said. Conjur turned and gave me a curious look, but didn’t say anything.

  “Now,” said Purry, beginning to sound excited, “we’re almost at the critical moment! The control ship has set up its magnetic fields. Any time now they’ll energize them, and a part of the containment of the neutron star will be breached. A great jet of energy will pour out, revolving with the star. Like a giant lighthouse, but millions of millions of times more powerful, and revolving two thousand times a second!”

  I snapped my fingers at a Kekkety. “Time for another drink,” I decreed. I was beginning to get into the swing of it. It was hard to imagine that a star could be that small and yet as massive as the sun and spinning that fast. It was like watching Carl Sagan explain the universe. I hadn’t understood that, either, but it surely had been pretty to hear him talk.

  “There it goes!” Purry shouted.

  On the screen a burst of bright flame leaped out of the star and instantly became a disk of light. “They’ve got a match! The flare is locked in to the probe!” cried Purry. “Look, you can see the probe drifting outward!” And by squinting, yes, I thought I could. There was a cheer from the people around us, all of them peering as hard as I was at the faint, shadowy rim that hung in that disk of light.

  “It’s a success,” Purry announced joyfully. “Now the control ship has to keep the magnetic fields locked onto the ship—as it’s pushed away its orbit gets bigger and takes more time. It will be accelerating for a thousand years; then it will drift at eighty percent of the speed of light for more than two million more …”

  He went on, but by then no one was listening to him anymore. The Kekketies were busy filling fresh drink orders. The babble of conversation grew. Isolated words and phrases sounded over the rest—“Jesus!” and “That’s high-tech, all right” and “Holy shit.”

  I turned to Conjur. “Seriously,” I said, “do you think people like you and me could go up against that?”

  He stood up, gazing down at me. But all he said was, “Thanks for the drinks, Stennis. Come on, Tricia, let’s get out of here.”

  CHAPTER

  26

  When the last of the rubbery transparent stuff over my scars had been absorbed, I had to submit to the Mother’s questing tentacles again.

  The second time in that smelly, shal
low pool wasn’t quite as bad as the first. It was bad enough. The trouble with the Mother was that her appetites were not in circuit with her mind. She really had no control over her feeding reflexes— or of her excretory reflexes, or of her egg-laying, which went on forever. When something edible came within range of her questing tentacles she ate it. You couldn’t blame her, any more than you could blame someone with digestive problems for breaking wind in church.

  Knowing all that, and knowing that sometimes she made mistakes in identification, I approached her very cautiously. The little chocolate-brown bedbug that had brought me chittered warnings to me from the edge of the pool, but I didn’t need them to be careful.

  It was an English-speaking bedbug, and quite conversational. As I was being probed it translated the Mother’s coos and moans for me. “The Mother,” it informed me as, naked, I waded toward her restless tentacles, “is quite pleased that two of the operas are by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, whose work she enjoys.”

  I stopped, as far from that brightly colored barrel of a body as I dared. The tentacles reached out for me. “So do I love Mozart. Very much,” I said, wincing as the tentacle tip reached for my mouth.

  “She has enjoyed watching your rehearsals on the skry,” the bedbug went on, raising itself on a couple of its legs to peer down at me. “Be most careful now!” I couldn’t answer, with the tentacle slithering down my throat, while the pale eyes of the Mother regarded me opaquely. The bedbug went on, “She hopes that the difficulty with casting the Leporello role is solved quickly. She does not wish Don Giovanni to be canceled.” He paused to listen, while the Mother cooed gently and the tentacles slid out of me again. “You may come out,” it finished. “The Mother says you are quite recovered, and asks why your Earth human Conjur Kowalski cannot sing Leporello.”