Narabedla Ltd

by Frederik Pohl

  It was really stupid for me to feel as though I’d been unfaithful to Irene Madigan. There had certainly not been anything between Irene and me. But I did.

  And, you know, I kind of enjoyed that feeling. It had been quite some time since I had had any opportunity to feel anything like that.

  Everything in sight was going my way. I had my voice back. I had thrilled an audience. I once again had the use of the masculinity I’d been born with, and I had pretty Tricia Madigan to use it with. Who can blame me? I didn’t have much concern with willful old men getting themselves lost, like Ephard Joyce. I wasn’t worrying about people trying to lure me into some harebrained scheme for escaping back to Earth, like Conjur. I wasn’t worrying about any possible future problems at all. I was simply exultant, and Tricia was fond enough (or just nice enough) to meet my mood, which lasted all through that day.

  It was a good long day for us, too. The troupe ware doing Idomeneo. It was the best of all possible operas for my purposes, which for that day were not entirely musical. It was too long to need Tricia’s opening number, and too lacking in baritone parts to require me.

  So we stayed in our room. We had our meals on trays. Actually, it was a close thing whether we went to the performance that night or not, because I was much more interested in our own performances in the hammock.

  But even miraculously repaired glands can do just so much in one day, and when it came near time for the opera we were there.

  When I saw the first troops of tall, cloaked Ptrreek riding the moving stairways down to their seats I made an effort to count them. Of course, that was impossible, but it seemed clear that the house (I didn’t mind discovering) was not likely to be quite as packed for Idomeneo (without me) as it had been for I Pagliacci (with me) the night before. Even so, there were thousands of Ptrreek coming in.

  Which raised a question in my mind. Just how much dough had I hauled in the night before? I knew I was earning plenty, but I didn’t exactly know what I was earning plenty of. They all paid for their seats, I was sure of that. But what did it come to in United States dollars? I couldn’t just go to the nearest currency exchange to find out. There weren’t any currency exchanges. So I asked Tricia, and she said shortly, “How would I know? I get paid by the week.”

  “Oh, sorry,” I said. Meaning, oh, so you’re a little jealous, but I’ll try not to rub it in. Then I remembered what Binnda had told me. “Floyd Morcher’s supposed to know that sort of thing. Shall we go backstage and look for him?” She shook her head. “Morcher’s not real crazy about me, you know. You go ahead; I’ll see you inside.”

  She put up her face to be kissed, and I guessed I was forgiven. When I got to the tall, skinny door to Morcher’s dressing room it sounded as though he were talking to someone inside, and when I knocked on his door he took a long time to answer. He didn’t open the door all the way. He just slid it wide enough to peer out at me. “What?” he asked, not invitingly.

  “I’m sorry to bother you,” I said, trying to look past him to see who he was talking to. There didn’t seem to be anybody there. Over his head, I could see the upper parts of his room just fine; it was built to Ptrreek height, of course. I couldn’t see anything else. I explained that everybody said he knew all about Ptrreek finances, and, well, I was sort of curious about how much I’d earned.

  He looked at me from under the cap of his costume. “Ask me later, Stennis. I don’t have time now.” And he slid the door firmly closed in my face.

  It was almost funny. It was also almost deliberately insulting. I stood there for a moment, undecided between laughing and getting mad. I finally chose curiosity. I pressed my ear to the slippery, cool door, wondering if that presumed invisible other person would say something to reveal who it was.

  That didn’t happen. What I heard was two muted bumps together—bumbump, on the floor—and then Morcher’s voice, low-pitched and passionate. It was a monologue that kept up for a long time.

  It took me a while to realize that what I had heard was Floyd Morcher dropping to his knees and raising his voice in prayer.

  I hurried back to the seat Tricia had saved for me. And then a few minutes later, when the “curtain” evaporated on the first act of Idomeneo, Morcher was singing lustily and beautifully. “So if he was praying to be in good voice,” I whispered to Tricia, “his prayer was answered.”

  She was craning her neck to see what was going on on the stage, and all she said was, “Sssh.”

  Well, she was right, and I was rebuked. I settled myself to enjoy hearing the performance.

  Hearing was about all I could do. The Ptrreek idea of an auditorium seat was a sort of slantboard, which was fine for a fourteen-foot-tall Ptrreek. It wasn’t any good for Tricia or me. The Ptrreek had considerately (for them) set aside a short row of high chairs to one side of the thrust stage for us humans, but if the high chairs had been high enough to do us any good, viewing-wise, they would have been too high to climb, sitting-in-wise. They helped only minutely. We could see nothing but the tops of the performers’ heads.

  It was also very hot in the auditorium. The air-conditioning that had been overpowering at the cast party simply didn’t exist in the theater. It was filled with their cockroachy smell, not to mention a considerable contribution from Barak, who was toe-dancing on the tips of all six of his limbs on the chair next to me.

  None of that mattered, really. Mozart made up for it all, and the performance was up to the standards of the music. Malatesta’s high, unearthly voice was absolutely superb, and so were the sopranos—so was everybody.

  When it was over I clapped in delight. There were plenty of curtain calls to clap to, though, curiously, the audience didn’t seem quite as enthusiastic over Idomeneo as they had been when I wowed them in I Pagliacci.

  This did nothing to dispel my own pleasure. I clapped louder than ever and even ventured a “Bravo!” though Tricia turned and gave me a thoughtful look.

  That evening I was in the sanitary facility attached to my room, trying to bathe, when I heard Tricia come in. Bathing wasn’t easy. The Ptrreek didn’t seem to take showers, or tub baths either. I was doing my best to sponge myself, standing on a stool to reach a thing like a hot-and-cold bubble fountain eight feet off the floor. “They caught him,” she announced from the door. “Caught who?” I asked, reaching for a towel—at least there were towels, though it had taken a special order to the Kekketies to get them.

  “They caught Ephard Joyce sneaking into a go-box,” she told me. “They took him back to Narabedla. I don’t know what will happen to him, but I guess we’ll hear all about it at the party.”

  “At the party,” I repeated, digging out my ears.

  “Of course at the party,” she said. “So, hey, come on and get dressed.”

  I finished drying myself. “I could do that,” I agreed, for the sake of argument. “If that was what we really wanted to do, I could. The other thing we could do is just stay here and have our own party.”

  She pinned at me, and she gave me a kiss, but all she said, quite firmly, was, “Get your clothes on.”

  So we repeated the trek across the wobbling passage between the towers, and there were the rest of the company and the assorted aliens, just as before.

  There was one difference. When we came in the Ptrreek greeted us with a round of their clickety-sticks equivalent for applause.

  Even though my new career was only a day old, the reflexes of the performer were strong within me. If anybody claps, you bow. So I bowed, and when I looked around to take Tricia’s hand to share the applause, she was standing facing me and she was clapping too. “But really,” I whispered to her when we were inside the room, “I think they were applauding both of us, not just me.”

  “No, you don’t,” she said grimly. “Anyway, they weren’t. No, you made a big hit, Nolly. You’d better circulate. I’m going to find a drink.”

  So I circulated among my colleagues.

  Apparently I wasn’t the only one who had noticed
that the applause for the Idomeneo had been just a little sparse. Nobody was exactly cool toward me, but of my human colleagues it was only Malatesta (who was convinced it was his coaching that had made me a star) and Norah Platt (who wasn’t in competition with me anyway) who sounded really adulatory. Even Binnda, busy explaining to Floyd Morcher and Eamon McGuire and a couple of Ptrreek that the The Earth impresario he most admired was Walter Felsenstein of the Komische Oper in East Berlin, greeted me only as “Nolly” instead of “my dear boy.”

  Norah was either really worried about Ephard Joyce or really angry at him. “Such a foolish little man,” she said irritably . “But one doesn’t want anything to happen to him, does one?” And Sue-Mary Petticardi let go of Maggie Murk’s hand long enough to lean forward and confront Norah eye to eye.

  “Foolishness is one thing,” Sue-Mary told her. “Reckless actions are another. They will put the man into slow time, yes, but how long do you think they’ll put up with this, sort of provocation? He endangers us all!”

  “Oh, no, really,” Norah protested.

  “Yes, really. Don’t forget Jerry Harper! Now that one life has been taken, how safe are any of us?”

  I intervened tolerantly. “You’re worrying much too much, Sue-Mary,” I told her. “These are civilized people, even if they do look a bit strange.”

  “Civilized people! You forget, I had four years of civilized people in the War, and they at least were human. These creatures are not civilized. They would kill each other in a minute if they could, and they certainly do not have any love for us!”

  It was an interesting discussion, but I saw Morcher drifting away from Binnda’s monologue, and I was reminded of what I wanted from him. I intercepted him. “Can I have a word with you?” I asked him. “Over by the buffet, maybe?”

  He considered the request soberly, as though I had asked to borrow money. At first I thought he was going to say no. But apparently the attractions of the buffet turned the trick. He was there before me, spearing rye bread and slices of ham. As he put together a sandwich, he asked, “What do you want?”

  “I was hoping you could explain the money situation to me,” I said.

  He grunted. Then he put his sandwich down, closed his eyes, and whispered to himself for a moment in prayer. When he opened them he took a bite of the sandwich and chewed experimentally for a moment before saying, “It’s complicated. I can tell you a little bit, maybe.”

  I moved back a little to avoid the shower of rye-bread crumbs. “That would be fine, Floyd.”

  He scooped some of that more or less potato salad onto a plate to go with his sandwich and said, still chewing, “Do you know anything about the Polyphase Index?”

  “Well, I have a sort of a general—no.”

  He rolled his eyes. “All right, then I’ll just start from the beginning. The Ptrreek and all the rest of the Fifteen Peoples don’t use money.”

  “But the audience paid something for their tickets?”

  “Yeah, in a way they did. It’s complicated. It’s all barter. The way it goes, when the Ptrreek trade with other planets, their big export is some kind of plant products they use in their so-called medicine. I know what they trade for. They trade about three pounds of the plant stuff for about an ounce of a metal that is what you call radioactive. I don’t know the name of it. The way the Ptrreek pay for tickets is each one of them commits to supply one-fourteenth of an ounce of the plants they export. That’s what you get three and a half percent of.”

  “Wonderful,” I said.

  He didn’t respond to that; he just piled another forkful into his mouth and went on through it. “So now you want to know what that’s worth, and I can’t tell you. I never heard of that metal. Maybe we don’t have it back home. The best I can say is that sometimes they trade it for gold, and when they do they get about forty times as much gold by weight. Are you following all this so far?”

  “Sure,” I said. It was almost true; I was setting up the accountancy program in my head, but Morcher didn’t wait for me to do the arithmetic.

  “So, figuring gold at thirty-five,” he said, “and with about eight thousand tickets sold, your share at three and a half percent ought to be a little over five hundred dollars.”

  “Five hundred dollars,” I repeated slowly.

  “For each performance,” he added, rolling up a slice of bread and dipping it into what might have been guacamole.

  I thought about that. Five hundred dollars a performance wasn’t exactly minimum wage, but it was nowhere near a star’s income. Even the Met, notoriously stingy about its top singers, paid a good many times that, and they didn’t have eight thousand people in the audience, either. I began to wonder if my bargaining with Sam Shipperton had been as big a victory as I’d thought.

  “But it doesn’t make any difference, does it?” said Morcher in gloomy triumph. “Because what do you have to spend it on?”

  And he scooped the last of his food into his mouth and hurried off to see where Eamon McGuire had gone.

  CHAPTER

  34

  When we got back to Tricia’s room that night I paid full attention to Tricia Madigan for the first three-quarters of an hour or so, but later on, while she was rubbing skin cream or something on her face, I got out the paper and pencil.

  Morcher had sounded as though he knew what he was talking about, but what accountant would believe a client’s arithmetic? So I started over. Eight thousand “people” in the audience meant eight thousand tickets sold; I didn’t think the Ptrreek did comps or press passes or twofers. At the equivalent of one-fourteenth ounce for each ticket, that meant about thirty-five pounds of the vegetable stuff pledged, of which three and a half percent was mine. Call it twenty ounces for me. A pound and a quarter, which was equal to, say, half an ounce of the mystery metal, or twenty ounces of gold. Which was worth, at—what was gold now? somewhere over $400 an ounce?—about, my God, eight or nine thousand dollars.

  Eight thousand dollars.

  But that was more than fifteen times what Floyd Morcher had estimated. True, he was a tenor, not a CPA, and he could easily have put a decimal point in the wrong place.

  Accountants had been known to do that, too; so I went over it again, and refined it a little more, and still came out with the same figure. I couldn’t be absolutely sure of it, because somewhere there should have been a conversion from troy to avoirdupois ounces that I wasn’t sure how to make. But eight thousand dollars a performance was still pretty close, pretty close.

  I scowled at the figures, and then I had an idea. “Tricia?” I called. “What do you know about Floyd Morcher?”

  She didn’t look around. “What’s to know? He’s a godder. He’s trying to save Eamon McGuire’s soul, or anyway keep him from getting drunk all the time. He doesn’t like me because I’m a scarlet woman, and he absolutely hates our nice lez couple, Sue-Mary and Maggie.”

  “No, I don’t mean that kind of stuff. I mean, do you know how long he’s been on Narabedla?”

  “Oh, gosh, hon,” she said, wiping off the surplus goo and coming over to me. “I don’t have a clue. He was here for ages before I got here.”

  “But how many ages?” I persisted. “Maybe fifty or sixty years?”

  “Could be something like that, I think. I remember him saying something about Herbert Hoover once. Why do you want to know?”

  “Because he was talking about gold at thirty-five. Gold hasn’t been thirty-five dollars an ounce since the U.S. government called it all in, way back in Franklin D. Roosevelt times.”

  “Yeah? So?”

  “So I guess Floyd’s older than I thought,” I said. “So I’m richer than I thought.” I reached out to pull her into my lap, grinning down at her. “You want to know how rich? If I sing three times a week, that’s all, I take in about a million and a quarter dollars a year.”

  “That’s really neat, hon,” she said, kissing me in congratulation. And then she said the same thing Morcher had said: “But what are you
going to spend it on?”

  The next morning, breakfast was set up for the human opera troupe in a small building just a step away from the “hotel.” It took us a little while to find it. Everybody else had been steered to it the morning before, but that was the morning Tricia and I had elected breakfast in bed.

  By the time we arrived, everybody else was eating. It all smelled good. The place had been furnished with three or four human-sized tables, obviously whipped up on short notice for us, and there was a buffet table presided over by four Kekketies acting as short-order cooks.

  After we got our food I led Tricia to a small table for ourselves. “Actually,” I said, tasting what I had ordered, “they don’t make a bad omelette, Trish.” They were definitely real Earth eggs, cooked in real Earth butter, undoubtedly imported specially for us celebrated artists.

  She didn’t answer. She was stretched halfway around in her chair to talk to Norah Platt, who was disconsolately toying with a soupy soft-boiled egg behind us. She was sitting by herself and looking as though she’d been crying. When Tricia turned back she was shaking her head. She told me, “They did it to him, hon. Ephard’s in slow time.”

  “Pity,” I said, reaching for the toast. It was still quite warm. “I wonder what the weather’s like. Did you remember that I’m singing Don Giovanni tonight?”

  “No, but listen,” she said. She sounded serious. “Do you know what Norah says? She says you put the idea in his head, talking about what a hit he’d be on Broadway after a century or so.”

  I did vaguely recall some such conversation. “I never thought he’d take it seriously, though,” I explained.