Narabedla Ltd

by Frederik Pohl

  It was a moving speech. Norah Platt and Maggie Murk were crying openly as he left.

  There wasn’t any cast party that night, either. When I suggested to Tricia that at least the actual human beings of the cast might get together she said, “Oh, I don’t know if that’s a good idea, Nolly. This is turning out to be kind of a jinxed tour, wouldn’t you say?”

  “Not for me,” I told her, squeezing her hand to show her what I meant. “I think it’s just great.”

  But in the long run I had to admit that she was right.

  CHAPTER

  36

  From then on, the tour went all downhill. By the time we finished our remaining engagements on Ptrreek we were glad to leave. We were even gladder when we stepped out of the box at the next planet, which was called Hrunw, because the first thing we saw was Binnda’s ugly, friendly face grinning worriedly up at us, with the bright green tongue licking out at us in welcome.

  “Oh, Binnda darling,” Norah Platt cried, flinging herself at him. Tiny as she was, Norah was about the only one of us who could do that without knocking him over. But all the rest of us gathered around, ignoring the natives and the Kekketies and the place we had come to. It hadn’t been the same without little Meretekabinnda there.

  “I can’t stay,” he said at once. “Really, I shouldn’t have come at all, but how could I stay away?” And then he added, almost sobbing, “Oh, my dears, how nasty things are! Everyone at everyone else’s throat. There hasn’t been anything like this since that awful business with the Bach’het, and where it will end … But come, let’s find a place where we can sit down and drink a little of this good The Earth whiskey”—he was waving a bottle in each three-fingered hand—“and you can tell me how things have been going.” A place wasn’t hard to find. Binnda simply led us to what looked like a green lawn just a few yards away. It was unpleasantly squishy, as though it had recently been rained heavily on, although there was a warm, small sun in the sky. While the Kekketies struggled away with our baggage, Binnda listened to our stories.

  There was plenty to tell him, because after he left we’d had one kind of trouble after another on the tour. Floyd Morcher flatly refused to kiss Sue-Mary Petticardi when it was his turn to play Don Ottavio to her Donna Anna—because that was an immoral act, he said, but more probably because he was upset. The reason he was upset was that Eamon McGuire had got away from him long enough to tie one on, so that he turned up for his fight scene with me roaring drunk. Bart Canduccio had had a terrible screaming fight with Ugolino Malatesta when he’d tapped on Norah Platt’s door to console her over the difficulties Ephard Joyce was in and found Ugolino doing the job already. Worst of all, after our last Pagliacci there was something approaching a riot when a Ggressna—not Barak—tried to come to the performance and the Ptrreek had just about mobbed him.

  “Yes, yes,” Binnda said sadly, “there is so much hostility everywhere now. But, please, tell me about the operas, my dears! How have the performances gone?”

  “Oh, very well,” I assured him. “That part’s been fine. I took three calls after Don Giovanni last night, and Tsooshirrisip gave us all medals.”

  “We all took curtain calls,” Morcher added. “They didn’t care about the kissing.”

  “Wonderful, wonderful,” Binnda said, brightening as one of the Kekketies approached with a tray of glasses. “Will you pour, please, Norah? No, not for Eamon, if you don’t mind; Eamon, you really must confine your drinking to when you aren’t singing. And your Neptune? Was that well received?”

  McGuire assured him that, really, the artistic affairs had gone very well. We all did. And when the drinks had been passed around we each lifted our glass—they weren’t glass; they were made of something more like the inside of an oyster shell—and Binnda proposed a toast. “To your continuing success, my dears! And now”—he beckoned to one of the eight-foot natives, standing by—“let me introduce Mr. Nyoynya, who will be your impresario while you are here on Hrunw. I will return if I possibly can, but… well, things are really quite worrisome just now. Mr. Nyoynya will take excellent care of you, I’m sure. And I’ll be with you in my thoughts always. And—oh,” he said sorrowfully, “I do hate farewells! But I must go. Good-bye, all of you.” And he turned and marched back to the box and was gone, leaving us in the care of an eight-foot creature that smelled of fish and resembled nothing as much as a shrimp made of Cellophane.

  I’d read my book on the Hrunwians before we got there.

  It told me that this new planet was named Hrunw. It didn’t say how to say that word, and so it took me a lot of work before I could pronounce it well enough to satisfy even the opera company, much less the Hrunwians themselves. I came close by working my lips, the way my grandmother used to do when she was adjusting her dentures, and making a sound like a Hell’s Angel jazzing up his engine at a stoplight.

  Hrunw was even hotter and wetter than the Ptrreek place. The Hrunwians (which is not at all what they called themselves, but that I never did learn to say) did not live in skyscraper cities. They didn’t live on the land surface of the planet at .all. The kind of places the Hrunwians liked to live in were warm shallows without much tidal flow, and so their biggest communities floated in lagoons around volcanic islands in their oceans. They didn’t use go-boxes to get around their low-rise, wickerwork cities. (Didn’t anybody build with steel and stone on these planets?) They didn’t use cars, either; transportation was walking, swimming, or riding in flat-bottomed airboats, with huge propellers at their sterns, along the canals of the cities. When we saw our “theater” we all groaned. It didn’t have a roof. It was an outdoor arena, like a football stadium chopped in half. The Hrunwians were quite ugly to look at, with their transparent shells and tentacled eyes and nasty little clawed limbs, and when Eamon McGuire peered out at the audience before our first Don Giovanni, he muttered, “Bloody webfeet, they smell like fish.”

  Actually they did, a little. But after Eamon’s third curtain call—the sounds of an enthusiastic Hrunwian audience were about like a few thousand people slapping clumps of wet seaweed together—he came offstage in a glow, declaring, “At least the bloody fish know good singing when they hear it. That calls for a drink!”

  Eamon got almost as many curtain calls as I did. I thought he was milking them a little, stalking ponderously around the stage in his stone-statue makeup, but I didn’t say anything. I did not begrudge the old man his success, and anyway I was still the one that was getting three and a half percent of the gross.

  The Hrunwians had never heard of the institution of the cast party, and Binnda wasn’t there to educate them. So McGuire didn’t get his drink, at least not where I saw it.

  Right after the Don performance, Tricia and I settled down in our room to wait for our dinner. It was officially “our” room now; we’d given up the his-and-hers, because the troupe knew all about us anyway and certainly the Hrunwians didn’t care. The walls were wicker. I could hear Maggie and Sue-Mary murmuring to each other in the room next door. It was jungly humid and hot, but it was at least almost to a human scale, and there was a real bed.

  That was a big plus. It almost made up for the food they had served us, which was a kind of a fishy stew, vaguely resembling bouillabaisse, followed by something like fish fritters and ending with a sweet chocolate-looking pudding that also tasted of fish.

  “Well, we’re only here for six performances,” I said to Tricia when the Kekkety had taken away the dishes. “We won’t starve in that time.”

  “Things are bound to get better,” she told me, doggedly cheerful, but that was a very, very bad guess.

  I suppose, really, we had all just been together too long.

  Everybody was in a crabby mood. Morcher was on Eamon McGuire’s case about sneaking drinks before breakfast. Tricia was hostile toward Floyd, because he had “church” services after breakfast (how could he know if it was Sunday?), and although Norah, the Italians, and three or four others attended he had kept her out. (“But I always
go to church at home,” she told me indignantly. “In Texas everybody does.”) Sue-Mary and Maggie Murk had a low-voiced fight because the Spanish bass had made advances to Maggie, and when Sue-Mary dragged Maggie away he began hitting on plump little Eloise Gatt. Who was being true to the man she wrote letters to, back on Narabedla, and slapped de Negras to convince him of it.

  We were getting on each other’s nerves.

  It wasn’t just us humans. The larger affairs of the Fifteen Associated Peoples were a constant worry. Outside of the always-present Eyes of the Mother, scurrying around everywhere, there wasn’t a single foreign alien anywhere in sight on Hrunw. “They’ve all gone home,” Norah told us wisely. “It was the same when it was the Bach’het situation that got them all stirred up. Sometimes I think they’re as bad as human beings.”

  “But the bedbugs are still here. I see them all the time,”

  I pointed out.

  “They’re the Eyes of the Mother. They have to be allowed anywhere they want to go; it’s the Tlotta-Mothers that run the peacekeeping program, don’t you see?”

  “So at least there’s one race they all trust,” I offered, and everybody laughed.

  “Trust? Trust the Mothers?” Tricia giggled. “They’re the last ones anybody would trust!”

  “It’s because they’re so curious,” Sue-Mary Petticardi explained. “They want to know everything. But they don’t threaten anybody, because the Mothers don’t move anywhere—they can’t—and their neuter males just do what their Mother tells them. And their sexed males—well, I’ve never seen one of their sexed males, but as I understand it they’re nothing but animated sexual organs. Like some other people I know,” she said, giving de Negras a poisonous look.

  “What you have to remember,” Norah explained, looking around cautiously, “is that none of them trusts anybody. They’d all do anything they could get away with. And they’re always squabbling among themselves.”

  “A lot like some other people I know,” I agreed.

  It was getting to be a pretty gritty existence. I could hardly remember that wonderful triumphant feeling of only a few days before. Depression was taking over. I hadn’t even bothered to count the house for Don Giovanni. It was time for us all to go home … but we couldn’t do that.

  When we got to the theater the next morning Conjur Kowalski was stalking angrily around the stage, Purry trotting after him beseechingly. “Do you know what they have done to us?” he demanded of Tricia. “They have canceled us. They don’t want us to do our thing for them.”

  Purry tried to placate him. “It’s only your opening number they want to cancel, Mr. Kowalski,” the little ocarina piped apologetically. “They do want the operas performed.”

  “But we are not in the operas,” Conjur said savagely. Since I was, I tried to be objective about the problem. “Maybe they have a short attention span here, you know? Even a short opera like Pagliacci is enough for one evening, maybe.”

  “Enough!” Conjur barked. “So if it’s enough, how come they’re putting in a bunch of creepy critters to replace us?”

  “Mr. Kowalski is talking about the Drummers,” Purry explained. “They come from a protected planet, just like yours. They’re really quite popular on some planets.”

  “I don’t care who they are,” rasped Conjur.

  I tried peacemaking again. “After all,” I pointed out, “you two are on straight salary anyway, so what difference does it make?” He looked at me in a way I didn’t like, so I tried a different tack. “It’s all Binnda’s fault,” I declared. “He’s supposed to be with us just to handle situations like this.”

  “Damn freak,” Conjur said bitterly.

  Tricia said soberly, “Binnda can’t really help it if he isn’t here, can he? With all the troubles he’s got over this Andromeda thing? Oh, heck! I have a bad feeling about the way things are going, you know?”

  And Conjur reached out a great hand to clutch my shoulder. “Tomorrow,” he said. “You and me and de Negras, Nolly. We’re going to the zoo.” And he stalked away without another word.

  After I was made up as Tonio I sneaked out into the auditorium to watch the Drummers. In my opinion, the local Hrunwian impresarios were well within their rights in deciding that one batch of protected-planet primitives doing their rudimentary artistic endeavors was all they could ask their customers to sit still for. (Or, in the case of the Hrunwians, lie still for, as they watched the performances stretched out at full length on pallets.) We were on Hrunw, after all. On Hrunw we did what the Hrunwians wanted us to do, or we did nothing.

  I didn’t try to persuade either Tricia or Conjur of that.

  The three of us watched the performance from pallets in the audience—the Hrunwians didn’t bother to install seats for visiting dignitaries. Maybe they didn’t consider us dignitaries. Tricia and Conjur were muttering resentfully to each, other as the show began, and I didn’t blame them. It wasn’t any riveting spectacle to my taste, either. The Drummers were round-bodied, crustacean-looking little beasts, like fiddler crabs, and what they performed was a kind of musical mutual flagellation. They hopped and skipped around to their own music, which they produced by slapping each other’s hard, horny shells with their hard, horny claws. As different parts of their shells gave out different sounds when struck, they did produce a kind of music.

  I suppose I’ve seen more boring shows, but not often. Certainly not when I knew what I was getting into. Tricia settled down to a kind of bored attention. Conjur was not even looking at them; he was stretched out on his pallet, staring at the backs of his clasped hands.

  Neither was very good company.

  I twisted around curiously, trying to get an idea of how many were in the audience. It was hard to tell from our position, but there seemed to be at least five thousand. I did some quick accountancy. The Hrunwians did use money, which helped; but their currency had been falling on the Polyphase Index. As best I could figure, I was only going to get a little over half as much for this Tonio as I had been getting on the Ptrreek planet.

  You win some, you lose some. It was just one more reason for wishing this tour over so we could get to a richer planet.

  Conjur was still staring blackly at his hands. I leaned over to him and whispered, “What was that about a zoo?”

  He didn’t look up. “We’re goin’, my man,” he said. “Tomorrow.”

  That was all I could get out of him. When I opened my mouth to ask why he was so hot for the zoo, Tricia poked me from the other side. “Leave him alone,” she whispered. “He’s in one of those moods. Anyway, the zoo’s kind of fun. You’ll see.”

  When the Drummers were finished they got a fair amount of applause (or the squishy Hrunwian sound that was their equivalent). I thought, listening carefully, that it was certainly not as much as Eamon had got in his curtain calls— not to mention me—but probably just a tad more than Tricia and Conjur had been given on the Ptrreek planet.

  So maybe the Hrunwians had been right to make the substitution, but naturally I didn’t say that. Anyway, I had to hustle backstage to get ready to sing.

  Pagliacci was another triumph. But there wasn’t any party. Most of the cast simply went to their rooms, and I began to count the days until the tour would be over and we would be back in friendly, human Narabedla.

  The next day’s opera was Idomeneo. Right after breakfast Conjur rounded up all of us who weren’t involved in the performance, like third-graders on a class trip, to go to the zoo.

  Mr. Nyoynya had supplied us with transportation. We all piled into one of those flat-bottomed airboats, with the huge propeller thrusting us along the smelly canals of the basketwork city.

  It was still hot and muggy, and the dead-fish smell was worse. Our Hrunw driver expertly slalomed past stopped boats and around the heads of swimming Hrunwians. They didn’t even glance up as we passed. Neither did Conjur Kowalski. Considering that the whole thing was Conjur’s idea, he didn’t seem very interested in looking at the scenes we pas
sed. He spent the trip poring over a map, scowling silently to himself.

  When we got to the zoo our driver called something, and Purry translated it quickly as, “Hold on, everybody, please!” Luckily we all did. The boat didn’t stop at the water’s edge; it slid right up on the bank, bumping to a jolting stop. We got out and looked around.

  The zoo was immense. It surrounded the dead-ended canal, which had terminated in a wide pool with dozens of other airboats drawn up on the bank or zipping along recklessly across the water. There must have been thousands of Hrunwians around, strolling, gaping, hurrying from one attraction to another; couples and groups and even families. (I explained to myself that I shouldn’t be surprised that even alien monsters had families.) There didn’t seem to be any cages, though that, I thought, might have been because of the clumps of feathery trees that almost encircled the pool, obscuring the view. But I didn’t hear any roaring of giant jungle beasts, either. “So where are the elephants?” I asked Tricia, following her toward a gap between two clusters of shrubs.

  “They don’t have elephants,” she told me. “How could they? Elephants are too big to get on the yacht. But don’t worry. They have plenty of bigger things, and some of them have teeth and claws like tigers.”

  “Oh, really?” I said, smiling. “Where are those?”

  She stopped and pointed. “Well, there’s one now.”

  And indeed there was. It was bright green, scaly, and at least elephant size. It had teeth sharper and longer than Dr. Boddadukti’s, and, like Dr. Boddadukti when I first saw him, it was sinking them into the throat of an orange-spotted creature with long antelope horns, the size of a horse.