Narabedla Ltd

by Frederik Pohl

  All that I saw at first glance, but what I mostly saw was that it was not in a cage. It was no more than half a dozen yards away, and there was nothing between me and it … except two tiny, glassy Hrunwian young, so little that they wore nothing but a sort of transparent diaper around their transparent bodies, holding tight to each other’s claws and feelers as they gazed up in fascination at the horrid spectacle.

  I will say to my credit that my first impulse was to sweep Tricia out of the way and dash in to rescue the little Hrunwians. I didn’t have to do that. I heard a bass bark of laughter from Eamon McGuire, and then Norah’s silvery giggle. And then I began to understand.

  “Oh,” I said, over my shoulder, not quite sure enough of my ground to turn and face them. “They’re in slow time, aren’t they?”

  “It gave you a real thrill right at first, though, didn’t it?” Tricia grinned affectionately. “All the big things are slowed. That way they aren’t going to hurt anybody, and if one of them starts out of the zoo, hey, the keepers just turn it around again when they close down for cleaning.”

  The two little Hrunwians had turned around at the sound of our human voices. Now they were staring at us, their little mouths gaping in astonishment. When I spoke to them they darted around behind the monster, peering out at me cautiously as I reached out to touch it. It felt slick and slightly warm—very much the way the “statue” of Dr. Boddadukti had felt while he was busy executing poor Jerry Harper. “All right,” I said, taking my hand away. “Enough of this. We’re scaring the kids. Let’s go look at some other beasties.”

  There were plenty of other beasties to look at. The Hrunwians didn’t bother having any of their own animals in their zoo, or if they did I didn’t see them. Everything I saw was an exotic. Big ones with claws, big ones with wings and fangs, big ones that were hairy and muscular, like six-legged gorillas, big ones that I had never imagined even in a nightmare—all in slow time, moving millimeter by millimeter along the lanes or across the open spaces. And there were tiny ones in cages or pools or glass cubicles, hideouser than the big ones, and probably more dangerous because they weren’t slowed at all. There seemed to be a section for each planet, though I had no idea which was which until Tricia tugged me around a corner and displayed the Earth quarter. An African lion was poised before me in soundless mid-roar. A zebu bull was frozen in the act of cropping grass. There was a cage of snakes (unfrozen), and a case of ants, and a mouse corral, with two or three hundred little rodents scurrying and playing around behind a transparent, hip-high fence. “Look,” whispered Tricia, pointing to a family group of Hrunwians, the parents besieged by their three little ones. The parents (I supposed they were parents) conferred for a moment, and then indulgently put a few coins into a box, and all three of the little kids hopped over the fence.

  Whistling and chirping in joy, they ran after the scurrying mice. Then each of them picked up one mouse by the tail and swallowed it. I could see the little animals writhing and struggling as they went sliding down those transparent digestive tracts.

  “Let’s get out of here,” I said. “Now the kids are scaring me.”

  I had been talking to Tricia, but I got an answer from Conjur Kowalski, though I hadn’t even seen him come up. “Good idea, Nolly. You come with me now, I got something that will interest you.”

  “Fine,” I said, taking Tricia’s arm, but he shook his head.

  “You go keep the others company awhile, Trish,” he ordered. “This is private between Nolly and me.”

  “Oh, really?” I said. He was looking quite tense about something. I glanced at Tricia, who shrugged good-naturedly and turned away. “Well, why not? Where is it?”

  “Right down here,” he said, marching ahead.

  I followed, wondering what kind of freak was worth taking special notice of in this collection of freaks. A giant amoeba? A talking serpent? Maybe a captive human colony, trapped in slow time for the entertainment of Hrunw?

  It was a human, all right. It was our bass, Manuel de Negras, chatting with Purry in front of a spiked, dinosaur-looking kind of creature in slow time. He turned to us without surprise; evidently he had been expecting this meeting.

  Conjur didn’t waste any time. “Ask him to tell us about the people he was in the slammer with,” he ordered Purry. The little ocarina obediently translated it into Spanish, and the bass shrugged and began a long recital.

  “There were more than forty people,” Purry began. “Some had been there for nearly three days—that would be, Senor de Negras says, almost two hundred years. The oldest was an Englishman who—”

  “No, not all that,” Conjur interrupted. “Just the last one who came in right before Binnda sprang him. The girl. Tell him about the girl.”

  “Señor de Negras says that is correct,” Purry reported. “There was a young woman. She arrived only a short time before he was released—far less than a minute. He didn’t have any chance to speak to her.”

  I scowled at Conjur, beginning to be uneasy. “What’s this all about?” I demanded.

  He shook his head at me. “Ask him what she looked like,” he ordered.

  And Purry came back with the answer. “She had red hair and blue eyes. She was quite tall. Almost as tall as you, Nolly, Señor de Negras says. She was quite upset, but he only heard her say one thing.”

  “And what was that?”

  Purry put the question and turned back to us. “Señor de Negras says, she said, ‘Is Nolly Stennis here? Or Tricia Madigan?’”

  I swallowed hard.

  Conjur turned and looked at me for a moment. “All right,” he said, nodding. “Thank the man for me, Purry. Nolly? Let’s you and me take a little stroll.”

  I was having trouble with my breathing. “But that sounds like Irene,” I told him.

  “Well, my man,” he said, pulling me after him, “you know, that’s what I was kind of thinking myself. Shut up a minute.”

  One of the little Eyes of the Mother bedbugs was scurrying past. He waited until it was gone, looking around. There was no one but Hrunwians and zoo animals in earshot.

  I was in shock. Irene Madigan! I hadn’t exactly forgotten that she existed, but it had been a good long time since she had turned up anywhere in the conscious part of my memory. When Conjur opened his mouth again to speak, I cut him off. “Why didn’t you tell me?” I demanded.

  “And did I not?” he growled. “I been tellin’ you, go talk to that Spanish cat. How many times do I got to say it? But no, not you; you been so fat and happy, countin’ up your dough and playin’ poker-poker with little oP Trish, who could talk to you?”

  “I thought Davidson-Jones had taken care of her,” I complained.

  “Well, he did, didn’t he? His way. And what’re you gonna do about it? Now here we get right to the point, Knollwood. You remember the dude I was tellin’ you about, back in the waterfall pool?”

  I hadn’t taken him very seriously, but I hadn’t forgotten, either. “You said there was somebody who might be able to get me back to Earth,” I said. “But—”

  “No ‘but,’ my man,” he said savagely. “There is. He’s here. Not half a mile away. You want to talk to him or you don’t?”

  “Well, I—I guess … Well, sure, I’d like to talk to him, only—”

  “Then let’s do it, all right?”

  “All right,” I echoed, not at all sure I meant it. “I’ll go get Tricia—”

  “No,” he said, taking my arm. “We’re leavin’ old Trish out of this one. It’s you and me that’s got to see the Man, Knollwood. The lady can stay here. Better if she does. But us two got to get going.”

  CHAPTER

  37

  Conjur was walking fast along the squishy duckwalks of the Hrunw city. He seemed to know where he was going, and he didn’t want to talk.

  I gave up trying. It took all my efforts to keep up with those long legs, and anyway I was concentrating on the idea of Irene Madigan, thrust into slow time. Of course, I told myself, I barely kn
ew the woman. Anyway, I wasn’t responsible for her problem—if anything, it was the other way around. Anyway, what could I do about it?

  Conjur paused for a moment to look at his map, and I caught up. “Where are we going?” I demanded, panting.

  “You’ll see when we get there,” he rasped, glancing around, as though trying to locate landmarks.

  “Yes, but what does this have to do with Irene Madigan?” I persisted. He didn’t answer. He just gave me a smoky, unfriendly look and started off again.

  I followed. By then I didn’t have much choice, because the zoo was far behind us and I was lost. Occasionally one of the locals would whistle and squeak at us, but Conjur ignored them and plowed right on.

  We jumped over a couple of narrow canals, and hurried along the side of one larger one, filled with the airboat Hrunwian traffic. “Pedestrians”—by which I mean the locals— hurried vigorously along pathways of what looked like board overlaid with something more or less like straw matting. That was what we walked on. It got tiring, because the resilient surface gave a little at every step, like walking on piles of mattresses, but (Conjur growled at me when I complained) we didn’t have far to go.

  It wouldn’t have been a bad walk if it hadn’t been so sticky-hot, and if the place hadn’t stunk so. It wasn’t exactly a dead-fish smell, though that seemed to be in it. It was mostly a waterfrontish kind of mixture of salt sea, washed-up garbage, and sewer outlet. Pedestrians got fewer, except for one or two of the Tlotta bedbugs.

  Then Conjur stopped, gazing across the wider canal at an unusually solid-looking building on the far side. It seemed to be made of something that resembled stone, unlike the Hrunwian reed igloos. Conjur looked at it, then at his map. Then he swore softly.

  “That’s it,” he told me. “The Ossp embassy.”

  “The what?” I demanded, startled. I had heard of the Ossps. They were the ones everybody loathed, and what were we supposed to be doing with Ossps?

  “It’s the place we’re going to,” he said, looking up and down the canal. There was no bridge in sight. He swore again. Then he began untying his shoes and said, “Get ’em off, my man.”

  “Do what?”

  “Take off the shoes and the pants,” he explained. “There’s where we got to be. You can keep ’em on if you want, but we got to wade.”

  We did.

  The water was neither deep nor cold. Wading it was easy enough to do, though we had to wait for a lull in the boat traffic to splash across. The bottom was sticky mud with something sharp stuck in it, like shells—I hoped they were shells—but it didn’t come much over our knees. On the other side we pulled our pants and shoes back on and marched up to the stone building.

  A creature like a reptilian kind of bat appeared at the door. It looked us over silently for a moment. Conjur took a deep breath. “Wait for me here, Nolly,” he ordered, and shoved past the Ossp. It squawked wamingly at him, then hurried after him, slamming the door.

  I did what I had been told to do. I waited.

  I waited for quite a long time, and there wasn’t a moment of that time that I enjoyed. First, what was I doing here? Nobody had ever forbidden me to speak to an Ossp, hit then nobody had ever thought there was any likelihood I would. And certainly they had some kind of a bad reputation. Second, where was I? I had no hope of finding my way back even to the zoo, much less to the rest of the opera company. Third, what was Irene Madigan going through just then in her slow-time captivity? (Not to mention a stirring of the almost forgotten worries about Marlene Abramson back on Earth; was she going to show up there, too?)

  And I was attracting attention. A pair of Hrunwian swimmers poked their heads out of the canal to whistle at me. I shrugged at them. I had no idea what they were trying to say, but it didn’t sound friendly. One of the Mother’s bedbugs scurried past, pausing to elevate itself on its hind legs and stare at me before proceeding on. I didn’t like that. I supposed that the Hrunwians had some sort of equivalent of police, and that sooner or later a Hrunwian cop would stroll by and say the Hrunwian equivalent of, “What are you doing here, sir?”

  I didn’t think I had any good answer.

  I didn’t like the idea of going inside the Ossp embassy, either, but it was better than standing there in the watery Hrunw sunshine. So I was glad when the door opened again.

  The Ossp was there, and next to him a Purry. I thought for a moment the Purry was my own friend, but it wasn’t. It was smaller and darker, and its English was oddly accented. “You are Knollwood Stennis,” it stated. “You will come to the ambassador now.”

  The ambassador was waiting for me in a sort of a passage, too narrow to be called a room. It was hanging from a kind of clothes tree, and it wasn’t alone. A pair of other Ossps were with it—these squatting on the floor instead of hanging from a rack—and so was Conjur Kowalski, leaning dourly against the wall. The place was dimly lit, with that all-over luminescence that didn’t seem to come from any particular place, and, although it didn’t have that Hrunwian smell of dead fish, it smelled far worse. It smelled like the bottom of a parrot cage.

  “You’re on,” said Conjur. “The ambassador is willing to make a deal.”

  “What kind of a deal?” I demanded, but he just shook his head and pointed at the Purry, busily translating our conversation into a burst of clicks and musical-saw whines.

  There was a quick exchange between the big bat on the clothes tree and one of those on the floor. Then the big bat clicked and whined back, glaring at me, and the Purry said, “The ambassador from Ossp speaks. You will give him some things that are of no value to you. Then he will see that you get transported back to your planet called ‘Earth.’ ”

  I turned and looked at Conjur. He didn’t look back. He was standing there, holding the top of another of the coat trees, like a subway straphanger, staring vacantly at the ceiling. He didn’t say anything.

  I said to the Purry, “What are these things the ambassador wants?”

  Clicks and metallic moans. Then the Purry said, “First you will be provided with suitable containers. You will ejaculate semen into these. Second, you will—”

  I found my voice. “Hold it!” I yelled. “What was that first part again?”

  Conjur crackled at me. “Don’t argue with them, Nolly! Just listen to what the man says.”

  “But—”

  “Listen.”

  So I listened. The Purry went on imperturbably, “Second, you will procure an Earth-aboriginal female for the same purpose. When we have our specimens you will be conducted back to your planet.”

  I goggled at the Purry, then at the bat. “An Earth female— For the same p—Conjur!” I yelled. “What the hell are they talking about?”

  “What they talking about,” he said, “is, you beats your meat into a bottle for them, then you gets Trish to help out, then they sends you home.”

  “But—” I squeezed my eyes shut, shaking my head. It didn’t get things clarified. “But that’s not how it works with women!”

  He said seriously, “Nolly, listen to me. They know that. They understand all about human reproduction, that’s why they want the specimens. Do you want to go home or not?”

  I gaped at him helplessly. He stood leaning against the coat rack, patiently waiting for an answer. The ambassador wasn’t doing anything at all except to restlessly fold and unfold its wings, though the Purry was translating it all and I could feel the bat’s bright little eyes watching me. I said, “Why me?”

  “ ’Cause they don’t want no black jizzum,” he said bitterly.

  I said weakly, “Oh.”

  “Yeah,” he said. “Oh. What they wants is good old WASPy come. You think I didn’t try?”

  “But… even if I did … I mean, they want a woman’s ova, too? How could I handle that?”

  “Trish,” he said succinctly.

  “But—” I began, but he was losing patience.

  “You can stand there and talk all day, my man,” he said, “only that gets
nothing. Make up your mind. You want to go home or you don’t want to go home? ’Cause here’s your chance if you do.”

  “I couldn’t ask Tricia to do that!” Conjur didn’t answer, just waited me out. I tried a different tack. “What would they do with the stuff if they got it?”

  Conjur jerked a thumb at the bat. “You want to ask him that question?”

  “Uh, no,” I said.

  Because I didn’t have to. There could only be one reason. The Ossps were the genetic wizards. They would know what to do with genetic materials. Human sperm and human ova could be converted into human babies even on Earth, with in-vitro fertilization and some kind of host mother. I had no doubt these creatures could do as well. As to what purpose they wanted human babies for …

  I didn’t want to ask that question even of myself.

  I said stubbornly, “I need to think it over.” The Purry translated. The bat was silent.

  I said, “I’ll let you know my decision.” More translation. More silence.

  I said, “I’m going to leave now. Come on, Conjur.” And I turned and retraced my steps.

  They didn’t stop us, though my shoulder blades crawled as I retraced my steps. I blundered out the door into the warm, wet Hrunwian day, with Conjur right behind me.

  We didn’t talk on the way back. Conjur didn’t offer any conversation; he just stalked along, face like carved ebony, not even looking at me. And I was busy trying to decide if I really wanted to go back to Earth—and to wonder if I were willing to help the Ossps in whatever nasty business they had in mind—and, most of all, to figure out just how to put the proposition to Tricia Madigan.

  CHAPTER

  38

  I will positively not—you have got some terrific nerve just for asking—do that,” said Tricia, eyes blazing, face twisted in repugnance.

  I said, “But poor Irene—”