Narabedla Ltd

by Frederik Pohl

  It was unearthly. It was exactly the kind of adventure I had dreamed about when I was ten years old, watching Forbidden Planet and The Thing on late-night television, when my parents had left me with an indulgent sitter. I, Lawrence Knollwood Stennis, was actually walking around on the surface of a planet of another star, many light-years from home! Even Narabedla had been nothing like this.

  A couple of Ptrreek, talking to each other next to one of the cars, had interrupted their conversation to peer at me. It was time to move on; I gave them a friendly wave and turned away, walking fast.

  It was sultry hot, and the effort made me pant; it even made me choke a little from time to time. Something in the air, maybe? Mold spores or pollen or whatever? I kept on walking rapidly anyway. Binnda would not have taken us to a place where there was any real danger—I was pretty sure—but I didn’t exactly know how the Ptrreek felt about having a short, hairy alien creature wandering around their town, even if he was a star in a visiting opera company.

  Twenty minutes later, I still didn’t know how they felt about it. Definitely, they hadn’t mobbed me for autographs. They hadn’t exactly ignored me, either. A couple of them had seemed to be taking my picture. A few others, now and then, had paused in their way from wherever they had been to wherever they were going to lean down and chirrup at me in their wholly incomprehensible language. They didn’t sound hostile. They didn’t seem to care that I couldn’t understand them, either. They just chirruped for a moment, straightened up, and went on their way.

  Of course (I told myself) the Ptrreek were full members of the Fifteen Associated Peoples. Funnies of any variety would hardly be startling to them. They’d no doubt seen them all. They were seeing aliens even then, because among the hordes of Ptrreek I passed there were a couple of Mnimn, like Meretekabinnda (though neither one was Binnda himself, and they paid no attention to me), a Barak-like Ggressna waving its silvery arms at a couple of the Eyes-of-the-Mother bedbugs, a Duntidon Mumping along at a great rate, and four or five others even odder. None of them seemed to notice that I was in any way unusual. Ptrreek was a busy and cosmopolitan place.

  I liked it.

  I was really euphoric, I think. Even the mantislike Ptrteek, with their gay, flowing cloaks and their inquisitive, thrusting horsey heads, seemed like possible customers rather than potential foes. And in any case, I was no longer up in that tower, whose motion made me think of an unfortunate January cruise I’d once taken in the Caribbean, when there was a gale-force storm and there hardly ever were any takers for the ship’s six lavish meals a day.

  That turned out to be an unwelcome train of thought.

  For “cruise” made me think of “yacht,” and “yacht” made me think of missed opportunities.

  I stood still on the side of that Ptrreek street, in the shadow of one of those clusters of reedy buildings, thinking. I really could have done it, I thought. If I had realized I was on Earth I could have done something. Some derring-do, swashbuckling thing in the style of Conan, Rambo, James Bond—for that matter, in the style of the Don Giovanni I played with such bravura on the opera stage. Sneak-punch Shipperton? Hold a knife to the throat of Henry Davidson-Jones? (I supposed there might have been a knife, or at least a letter-opener, somewhere around his desk.) Take hostages, find a gun, and shoot my way out?

  It wasn’t impossible.

  It all sounded like TV heroics as I thought about it, but it was at least an outside chance that somehow I could have overpowered Davidson-Jones and made him do something— if I’d known where I was. At least I could have tried.

  But then I would not be here, with audiences waiting to applaud me and pretty Tricia showing every sign of wanting to show appreciation of her own.

  Back in my still-swaying room, Binnda poked his head in to announce that we were leaving for the theater in ten minutes. “All right,” I complained, “but this place makes me seasick.”

  “Oh, really, Nolly?” He considered for a moment, peering up at me. “I suppose we could get you some sort of shots if you like.”

  I vetoed that quickly. “I’d rather be seasick. It’s just that I’m a little worried about my performance.”

  “As you wish, Nolly. The theater’s at ground level, anyway, so that won’t be a problem.” Then he got serious. “Nolly? Have you seen anything of Ephard Joyce?”

  I blinked at him. “Was he supposed to be with us?”

  “Not at all! No, we have no place for him in the company. But there’s some confusion about how many people made the trip here, and according to the Ptrreek somebody who looked like Joyce came in earlier, with the theater props.”

  “He really wanted to do some mime with us,” I remembered.

  “Then perhaps he’ll come to the theater,” Binnda said gloomily. He shook himself and sighed. “Well, I mustn’t upset our star, must I? Tell me, is everything satisfactory? Have you admired your view?”

  “Oh, is there a view?” I asked acidly. There were picture windows, all right, but the lowest sill was a good four feet over my head.

  “You simply need to stand on something to look out,” he explained. “Really, it’s an honor to be given a suite so high up in the building!” He came closer, peering at me. “Do you know what I think? I think you’re a little edgy, dear boy. A case of opening-night jitters, wouldn’t you say?”

  I considered that possibility, and then discovered another one concealed inside it. “What opening night? I thought we were just going to rehearse today.”

  He looked shocked. “Rehearse again? But we’ve already been rehearsing! For weeks! No, no, this is going to be our very first actual performance. Our gala debut, my boy! You cannot believe how excited the Ptrreek are to have us here. They’re all agog to hear our Pagliacci—and you’re going to sing the Tonio for them tonight!”

  CHAPTER

  31

  The “theater” wasn’t exactly on the ground, it was under it, and it wasn’t exactly the kind of theater I had expected. We came into it from above, so I could see the whole layout at once. The stage was the first thing that caught my eye. It wasn’t the standard opera-house arrangement, and it wasn’t exactly theater-in-the-round, either; the stage was thrust out into the audience, like a strip-teaser’s runway, and as the theater was filling there was a sort of hologrammic newsreel going on. Binnda chuckled and nudged me, pointing at it. What it showed was the familiar diagram of the Andromeda probe launch, the pulsar’s beam of energy pushing the bright ring of the spidery spacecraft farther and farther away. That dissolved to show a couple of Ptrreek arguing earnestly about something, and then that too dissolved and I was looking at pictures-of Malatesta in the robes of the King of Crete, and of Sue-Mary Petticardi singing Electra, and abruptly of me—me as Don Giovanni— waving my sword and bobbing my plumed hat as I invited the statue of the dead Commendatore to dinner. I couldn’t help it. I laughed out loud. I hadn’t expected an opera performance to start with snatches of coming attractions.

  But then I took another look at that stage and stopped laughing. Those early arrivals moving into slant-board seats weren’t human beings. They were Ptrreek. Twice human size and more; which meant that my perspective had to shift a gear. The place was huge. Bigger than any opera house I had ever sung in by far; and in a little while I would be all by myself out there, singing the Prologue, with all those thousands of alien eyes on me.

  Binnda’s remark had not after all been laughable. Stage fright was a distinct possibility.

  It had been thirteen years since I’d sung before an audience. Worse than that, I was the one who would start the show. Tonio’s prologue sets the scene for everything that follows. If he fails, everybody fails; and this time that “he” was me.

  I had plenty of time to think about that in my dressing room while one Kekkety made me up and another helped me into my costume. I hardly noticed what they were doing. I wasn’t even aware, really, of how odd my dressing room was, more like a closet than a room, though with a twenty-foot ceiling. I wa
s concentrating on vocalizing while they did me, listening critically to my lost and regained voice.

  It sounded pretty good, but would it hold up through the entire opera?

  They say that having the jitters before a performance is a good sign. I hoped it was true.

  Ready or not, I opened the door of my dressing room and made my way through the unfamiliar, high-ceilinged passages to the wings. Because of the construction of the stage there wasn’t much room there, but most of the cast was there already, strolling around by themselves as they silently mouthed their lines or watching the first half of our double bill on stage.

  I had heard the music as I was approaching. I Pagliacci is a short opera, and so we had Tricia and Conjur warming them up for us to the strains of 1940s dance-band tunes. In spite of the cramped space, it wasn’t as cluttered as the backstage of a regular opera house—well, it wasn’t a real opera house. There wasn’t any tangle of weighted cables to fly the flats up into the rafters. There weren’t any flats; the scenery was all optical, except for the parts we actually had to stand on or lean against or use.

  So I could see well enough. The music was coming from Purry, pumping his heart away out of sight of the audience in a funny mixture of heavy-metal rock with a big-band sound. Conjur Kowalski was on stage doing a solo number to it, spinning around on the back of his neck like a kid dancing for quarters in front of the Fifth Avenue library. He was alone on the stage, but I could see Tricia in the far wing, waiting to come on. I leaned forward to peer out at the audience. It was a big, big hall, and it had filled up. It was loaded with Ptrreek as far as I could see—rows and clusters of them, hunched in their places, with their fluffy cloaks in every color of the rainbow. In the distance they looked like the colored sprinkles on a birthday cake, but what they smelled like was the same old cockroach.

  Somebody tugged at my leg. I looked down at one of the Mother’s bedbugs. “Mr. Stennis?” it piped softly. “Have you seen Mr. Ephard Joyce today?”

  I shook my head, and it scurried away toward the practical furniture that would go on in the first act of Don Giovanni, as Conjur finished his solo. There was a sort of clicking, rustling sound from the audience as he took a bow—I supposed it was applause—and Purry switched to John Philip Sousa. Out of the wing came Tricia, stepping high in her Texas Cowgirl suit to the strains of “El Capitan.” She did a fast three minutes of baton twirling, got her applause, and left.

  Then the stage dissolved in polychrome light, like a kaleidoscopic rainbow fog; I couldn’t see a thing, but when it cleared there was a whole 1940s big band at the back of the stage.

  It almost looked real, for a minute. It did look real; the only way I knew it was not was that I knew we hadn’t brought along twenty-five musicians and a boy and a girl singer. (I was partly wrong about that.) The musicians had to be more of those neat Narabedlan holograms. They were good ones, too, because someone who knew the period had had to choreograph the way the trumpeters stood up, rocking back and forth with their mutes in their hands, the vibraphonist tap-tapping up and down the bars, the drummer tossing his sticks in the air between riffs. Of course the music was all Purry again, tootling out a medley that began with “Take the A-Train” and segued into a slow introduction to “Stardust.” The boy singer stood up to do that number; then a fast “String of Pearls” and then it was the girl singer’s turn.

  That was a surprise, because she turned out to be real. The girl singer was Maggie Murk, from our own company. She hadn’t said a word to me about her solo, which was a sultry, bluesy rendition of “Temptation.”

  When the set was over I applauded along with everyone else. Next to me Ugolino Malatesta was patting his thin, dry hands together as enthusiastically as anyone. “Brava, brava!” he called as Maggie came offstage. (On the other side the “boy singer” also got up and left, but when he reached the wings he merely disappeared, like any other hologram.)

  “That was great,” I told Malatesta.

  “And you will be even more great,” he informed me. “A wonderful day! If only that cretin Joyce had not got himself into trouble.”

  “Did they find him, then?”

  “No. That,” he sighed, “is the trouble. If they found him they would rapidly put a stop to his foolishness, but as it is he is no one knows where, doing no one knows what. But look, now they dance again!”

  And the synthetic band started up as Purry launched into “Tuxedo Junction” and segued into “In the Mood” and four or five other grandfather’s-day hits as Tricia and Conjur came jitterbugging out onto the stage.

  They’d changed costumes. Tricia was wearing a bright red miniskirt with tiny, sequined red panties that flashed every time she moved. Conjur had his zoot suit on again, with the lapels that would have made two ordinary suits. They were works of art, both of them.

  I was born too late for the big-band era, and all I knew about zoot suits and jitterbugging is what I’ve seen on the late-night movies. But I have to say they set my feet to tapping and my body to twitching.

  And, as a matter of fact, a little bit to itching, too. Every time Tricia flung herself around I felt that long-lost little hint of a tingle in my groin. I didn’t know quite how to feel about it—part Welcome home and part Jesus, is it real?, and all of it was pretty good. It took my mind right off being nervous, right up to the time when the (purely optical) rainbow curtain came down, and Conjur and Tricia took their last bows, and Binnda came flapping toward us from the dressing rooms, crying, “Places! Ladies and gentlemen, places, please! The curtain is going up!”

  That took care of the possible stage fright, because Binnda broke me up. The whole cast broke out in giggles. He didn’t just come in, he made an entrance. He had got himself up in an opera-impresario suit that would have done credit to Rudolf Bing on the first night of a Met season, with full white tie and tails, and what looked like ten-carat rubies in his shirt studs, and at least an inch of starched, snow-white cuffs that showed at his wrists. Well, at where his wrists would have been, if he’d had any. We all broke out in applause.

  “Thank you, thank you,” he beamed, delighted. “But please, it is time to begin the opera. Get ready, my dear Nolly!” And he hurried off to take his place on the conductor’s stand.

  It surprised me that there were no intermissions. I suppose the Ptrreeks had better bladder control than human beings. Certainly the stagehands didn’t need the time of an intermission to reset the stage, because most of that was accomplished by a quick flick of a switch somewhere.

  For whatever reason, intermission there was none. Three minutes later Binnda was in place and Purry started the overture. The “curtain” went up (or, it would be better to say, evaporated). And there I was, sticking my head out through the dissipating rainbow cloud to address a horde of thousands of weird-looking alien monsters.

  We were a smash.

  I was a smash. We took ten curtain calls. I got one all to myself, and the last one with the Canio, Floyd Morcher, and then Binnda came trotting up from the improvised conductor’s box, all spiffy in his version of white tie and tails, and dumped two huge bouquets of red roses (well, they weren’t exactly roses, but I knew what he meant) at our feet. “Splendid, dear boy!” he whispered, wringing my hand. “They love you! You too, my dear Floyd,” he added.

  But I was the one whose hand he held in his own scaly claw as together we turned to bow a lingering farewell to the audience, all the Ptrreek towering over their seats as they rubbed their spiny limbs together in the buzzy kind of sound that was (yes, really was) their version of applause, and the rainbow mist began to gather for the final curtain.

  CHAPTER

  32

  Of course, there was a cast party after the performance. Binnda wouldn’t have omitted anything as traditional as that.

  Tricia picked me up to go there together. She was wearing a sheath dress with the skirt slit almost hip-high along one side, and high heels that made her exactly my height. She had done her hair in a sort of bun on one
side of her head, and all in all she looked pretty spectacular. When I told her so she thanked me as though no one, ever, had said anything like that to her before.

  I thought it was going to be a real good party.

  The place for the party was in another tower of our cluster. To get there we had to walk through one of the aerial bridges that linked the clumps, a transparent tube, twenty feet or more in diameter, limber enough to flex a little as the towers swayed. It was like walking through a plastic soda straw. It twisted and swayed disconcertingly, and the only good thing about it was that we could at last see the view Binnda had told me about. The Ptrreek city was ring-shaped, like a Jell-O mold, with a clear space in the middle. The blue sun had set long since, but it wasn’t dark. The bigger, dimmer, deep scarlet sun was still in the sky, and, if anything, it was hotter than the blue one had been. But when we got to the room where the party was being held it was cold. Evidently it had been chilled as a compromise so that six or eight different kinds of aliens could be comfortable in it. There were a couple of dozen Ptrreek towering over everyone else, with their bright-colored cloaks wrapped around them. I saw Binnda talking to Barak, loudly and with a lot of waving of arms and tentacles, as they headed toward a cluster of other aliens in a corner.

  The humidity was high, too. It felt like a Christmas party in the Coney Island Aquarium, with the doors left open. I was glad I had worn a jacket. I wondered how Tricia was doing in her slit skirt, but she didn’t seem to mind. “Now what are they doing?” she demanded, looking over to the corner of the room where eight or ten Ptrreek and as many other aliens were gathered around something. It wasn’t easy to see past the huge Ptrreek, but as they moved I caught a glimpse of a large skry, showing that same old Andromeda probe. It seemed to be still on course, and the aliens were doing a lot of congratulatory screeching, chirping, barking, and yowling at each other.