Narabedla Ltd (13 page)

I already had my mouth open to ask for more information about Davidson-Jones the Peacekeeper, when Norah’s last remark caught me and I wanted to point out that they certainly were not
my
weapons; the delay cost me my chance. Canduccio, nose buried in his brandy glass, lifted it to say ominously, “Anyway, is
wrong.
Cannot return to the Earth never, for because if one disobeys Mr. Davidson-Jones or those who represent him is very serious. Forget not Jerry ’Arper.”

“Jerry Harper was something quite different!” Joyce protested. “He wasn’t simply a malcontent, he actually—” 

“Oh, please!” Norah begged. “Let’s not talk about poor Jerry Harper. We’re all friends here. We don’t have to think about troublemakers like Jerry, or that foolish young black man, or, well, actually your Malcolm Porchester.”

“Personi cattivi,”
snarled Canduccio.
“Simila di
Ugo Malatesta.”

He was looking at Norah Platt when he said it, but she just pursed her lips tolerantly. Joyce replied for her. “Oh, not at all, my dear Bartolomeo,” Joyce argued. “Malatesta’s an odd one, no doubt about it, but he’s not a
revolutionary.
”

“What’s wrong with Malcolm Porchester?” I asked. Norah said unhappily. “Oh, dear. I did want this to be a pleasant dinner. Do we have to talk about unpleasant subjects? Ephard, why don’t you tell Nolly about your wonderful inspiration of playing mime roles in his opera company?”

So the hook was planted, and for the next little while I had to listen to Ephard Joyce’s explanation of how the alien audiences just didn’t seem to want an evening of Shakespearean soliloquies or human poetry-reading anymore, and did I think I might want my opera company
—my
company!—to do, perhaps, something adventurous?

“What kind of adventurous?” I asked.

It was Canduccio who replied. “We ’ave seen many of your new works on the to-talk-and-to-see machine, eh? Is very interesting, this one
The Medium.
Is by Giancarlo Menotti, who is of course Italian.”

“I had hoped,” Norah sighed, “that we could give it here sometime. It has only four singing parts.”

“And no chorus,” Canduccio added, and Joyce explained his own thinking on the subject. It seemed to him, he said, that it might be an interesting challenge for him to play the nonsinging role of the mute boy? When I told him that neither Shipperton nor Barak had shown much interest in twentieth-century music, it was Canduccio’s turn to explain modestly how his tenor was particularly appropriate for Mozart or any of the early Italians, and he certainly hoped we might work together on something like
Idomeneo
—with, of course, a real tenor, not one of those wretched castrati like his much-loathed neighbor, Ugolino Malatesta.

I can’t say I paid close attention. I had managed to open my book in my lap and between encouraging smiles at whoever was speaking to go on doing so, I was sneaking glances at the bizarre nightmare figures called the “Fifteen Associated Peoples.”

Norah caught me at it. To get my attention she asked, “Cigar, Nolly?” offering them around out of a tiny silver humidor. I declined; so did Canduccio, not surprisingly— tenors don’t like to rasp their vocal chords any more than they have to—but Ephard Joyce lighted up along with Norah. And, as she rose to bring over a little china ashtray, Joyce watched her walk.

“My dear Norah, you’re limping again,” he said accusingly.

“I’m sorry. One tires in the evening. The doctors do wonderful things here, but—” She gave a pretty shrug and changed the subject. “Nolly? Did I give you enough to eat? I’m afraid it wasn’t Scottish lamb—it’s something local— but actually it was quite nice, didn’t you think?”

“It was lovely,” I said, exaggerating only slightly—it would have been good enough if only cooked a bit more. “Are you sure you’re all right?”

“Oh, quite all right. ” Then she added, with a deprecating shrug, “Dr. Boddadukti has promised to do me again as soon as he’s, ah, free. ” The others nodded judiciously. “He’ll have me right again in no time, once I make up my mind to it. But one puts it off as long as one can, doesn’t one? I mean, one never knows what they might find. Meanwhile it’s simply a nuisance. ”

“Is for all of us a difficult time,” sighed Canduccio. “This affair with the Xseni and the Mnimn, who knows when it will be settled?”

“What affair?” I asked, perking up.

Norah explained, “Oh, it’s been quite a turly-burly. The Xseni and the Mnimn have a claim to some planet, which they could solve easily enough, except that the Bach’het want it. Well, one feels sympathy for the Bach’het, after all—poor things, they don’t have a planet of their own anymore—but there are only about a million of them, and the Mnimn are really
terribly
overcrowded. Meretekabinnda’s a Mnimn, you know—the little one who was at your audition?—and he’s had to go home to do something about the negotiations. I expect he’ll be back soon, but it’s created quite a stir, I assure you. It’s sent the Polyphase Index into a real spin.”

Sam Shipperton had used that term. “I don’t know what that means,” I said.

“Oh, heavens, I don’t think I can explain the Polyphase Index to you,” she said.

“It’s something like the Stock Exchange,” Joyce offered.

“It’s more like the budget debate in the House of Lords, I think,” Norah said doubtfully. “Ask Mr. Shipperton, next time you see him. It just means that the … well, money— it’s not really money, but it comes to the same thing—is becoming harder for Narabedla to get.”

“Is business of Fifteen Peoples, in actuality,” Canduccio offered with a shrug.

“Like the peacekeepers and the Andromeda thing and all that,” Ephard Joyce amplified.

I put the wineglass down in order to concentrate. “Peacekeepers? You mean they’ve got people on Earth to keep the peace?”

“No, no, Nolly,” Norah said crossly, rubbing her hip. She winced slightly as she got up to refill Canduccio’s glass. “What do they care what happens on Earth? The peacekeepers are, basically, the Tlottas—the Eyes of the Mother, mostly; surely you’ve seen them. They’re the way the Fifteen Peoples have of keeping tabs on each other so they won’t have a war—a very good thing, too, believe me.”

“Like on-site inspection?” I hazarded. But Norah had never heard of on-site inspection.

“You see,” she said, “the Fifteen Peoples have very strict rules about what they can do. Travel between planets, for instance. They, well, they don’t really trust each other all that much, do you see? Narabedla here doesn’t count. It’s like what your people call a free-fire zone. But no one can go onto anyone else’s planet without a, well, I guess you’d call it a visa. It has to spell out exactly who they are and what they’re there for. Especially us; no contract, no tour. So you’ll really have to sign with Sam Shipperton before you go anywhere, you know.”

I was tired of saying that the only where I wanted to go was home. “And what’s the Andromeda thing you mentioned?”

But Norah didn’t know much about it, except that all the Fifteen Peoples were taking a great interest in it, and that was a good thing because it took their minds off territorial disagreements.

“Is a kind of spaceship, you understand?” Canduccio offered.

“Heaven knows, they have plenty of those,” said Norah. She put the decanter down and stood holding the table for a moment, as though in pain.

“My dear Norah,” Ephard Joyce said in alarm, “I think you mustn’t put your operation off much longer.”

“You do look a little pale, dear lady,” piped Canduccio. She smiled wanly at us. “It’s nothing that a good night’s sleep won’t cure, I’m sure.”

I know an exit cue when I hear one. “That sounds like a good idea for me, too,” I said firmly, getting up, “Thank you very much for the dinner, Norah. And for the book, Signore Canduccio—and for the pleasure of your company, Mr. Joyce. It’s been a pleasure to meet you. No, don’t bother to come with me—I can find my way home!”

“Well, if you’re sure,” sighed Norah; and Canduccio said,
“Buona notte
” and Ephard Joyce, escorting me to the door, patted my shoulder and said, “And don’t forget about the mime parts, old man.”

I
t occurred to me on the way home that I had made a mistake at Norah’s house; I should have followed up on their talk about Malcolm Porchester and the other dissidents. How was I going to make allies if I didn’t find out who the prospective allies might be?

You can’t do everything at once, I told myself. First find out what this place is like. Then figure out how to get out of it. So when I came to the corner with the ghastly statue, I detoured to stroll along some of the other streets. There was no one in sight, though there were lights in some of the little houses.

They seemed to keep a normal, Earthly day-and-night clock on Narabedla. The bright blue sky was gone. There were still clouds overhead, but almost invisible against a faint twilight glow. There was plenty of light to walk by. With my belly full of Norah’s medium-bad home cooking and medium-all-right brandy, I didn’t hurry.

After all, I had no one to go home to. All I had was the little maroon book under my arm. I was looking forward to that, but it could wait while I sorted out the sensations and concerns whirling around in my head.

Not counting the peculiar sky, the unusual feeling of lightness on my feet, and the occasional peculiar passerby (twice one of those little bedbug things scuttled past me at high speed), I might have been strolling somewhere on Earth. Somewhere pleasantly warm, with flowers scenting the air and trees and shrubbery everywhere.

The place was seductive. Everybody said so.

Still, if this was Heaven, then I was Lucifer, the angel who couldn’t get along in Heaven and wanted out. I wanted out, too, in spite of the fact that the more I saw and heard of this moonlet called Narabedla the more heavenly features it seemed to have.

For one, there were, as I had been told, some hundred other human artists to share Narabedla with. Nearly all of them were obviously well traveled, cosmopolitan, sophisticated. If it turned out that, as everyone said, there was simply no way for me to get back to the Earth and these people had to be my only neighbors for the rest of my life, at least they would be more interesting than the nurses and U.N. employees I’d shared an apartment building with in New York. Nearly all the Narabedla artists were young and healthy. Or, anyway, like my recent dinner companions, so remarkably well preserved that their calendar ages didn’t matter. Nobody on Narabedla coughed. Nobody had disfiguring facial scars or missing limbs. Nobody puffed and wheezed and ran out of breath when he walked a few steps, or had to pull a little oxygen tank along behind him to keep his lungs going. And nobody looked any older than Norah Platt, which is to say not much older than any normal Earth-bound woman wondering whether or not she wanted to give birth to one more child before menopause stopped her clock.

Of course, I wasn’t an artist anymore. Shipperton had made that clear.

Still, there were plenty of nonsinging jobs around an opera company. I could direct. I could mime, if there were any mime parts (and the hell with Ephard Joyce). I could conduct, if what’s-his-face Meretekabinnda or some other creepy didn’t rank me out of it. Worst come to worst, sure, I could sit in the box at the front of the stage and prompt.

Conscientiously trying to give Narabedla a fair shake, I tried to remember when I had ever in my life been in a nicer place than this one.

There had been one or two memorable ones. The Negresco, for one. Then, when I was an opera singer I stayed once in a hotel in California that didn’t have rooms. It had bungalows. Each one had bedroom, sitting room, kitchen, and bath; there was a Jacuzzi for every bungalow and a swimming pool in every cluster. There was also maid service and twenty-four-hour room service; there were television, radio, and tapes; and, if you asked the bellboy in a way that didn’t make him suspect you were the Man, there was your choice at any hour of any of the prettiest whores in Beverly Hills.

Even when I was a budding opera star that hotel was too rich for my blood. I kept the bungalow just one night—long enough to receive and suitably impress two newspaper interviewers. Then I retreated to the Quality Inn at the airport for the rest of my stay.

I had to admit that Narabedla was even better. And it didn’t cost three hundred dollars a night, either.

Studied critically, there were flaws to be found in this Paradise. That imitation “sky” was not very convincing when you took a careful look. The ground I walked on did curve slightly—having been made aware of it, I could see the gentle slope upward that disappeared where trees and shrubs met roof. And yet those plants were pretty nice in themselves. For trees there were orange, apple, plum, fig, weeping willow, birch, and a dozen others, half of them in flower, half of the rest bearing fruit. For bushes and vines there were grape, blackberry, forsythia, lilac, boxwood, hibiscus—I didn’t know the names of most of them. There were cleared spaces between buildings here and there, and some of them had fountains and rippling brooks, with little farm-garden plots where good things grew: tomatoes and pineapples and sweet onions you could pull out of the ground, rinse off, and nibble with pleasure. The air was a balmy seventy-eight degrees, even at “night,” and there were occasional gentle breezes.