Narabedla Ltd (15 page)

“Let’s see,” said Tricia, glancing around with professional appraisal. “You know anything about astronomy? Neither do I, but I’ve had this explained to me about a jillion times. Those bright ones over there, they’re called the Hyades. You can see them from the Earth, they tell me. Can’t say I ever did, but then … Then there’s that sick-looking little red one up there, see where I’m pointing? That’s the companion star. Did you know Aldebaran was a double? That makes two of us, but there it is. You can’t see that one from the Earth. It’s too faint. Then we’ve got— let’s see … one, two—yeah, we’ve got three planets showing right now. Can’t see our own planet itself; it must be toward the star. I’m no expert on the planets, but that big one is Elizabeth, I’m pretty sure, and the one next to it ought to be Anne. The other one might be Maude. Or maybe Caroline. You know who named them? Norah Platt. She couldn’t pronounce the names the locals gave them, so she named them after some of the queens of England. Wouldn’t you know? How do you like it?”

I just said, “Jesus.”

I couldn’t honestly say I “liked” it. It was too huge and too awe-inspiring to “like.” But it certainly reached right down into the place where I kept my little soul and opened it up to the drafty winds of the universe.

There were some cobwebby things that glinted starlight now and then. “What are those?” I asked.

“They’re solar-power collectors,” she explained. “How do they work? Aw, hey, Nolly, how would I know that? They get like sunlight—only I guess you’d call it starlight; it comes from Aldebaran—and they turn it into electricity, and that’s what they run Narabedla on.”

I squinted past them at something else that glinted, tiny and far away. “And that thing?”

“That’s some other thing they’ve got. This place used to be for space probes, you know? I mean, this was where the people lived; that other thing is, like, another moon. It’s where the probes launched from. That’s what Conjur says, anyway.”

I gazed around. “Which of the Fifteen Peoples comes from Aldebaran?”

“Oh, none of them. This was just a kind of neutral territory they used.” She paused, looking me over appraisingly in the starlight. “Nolly? You know, you’ve got pretty good pecs for a singer.”

“I’m really an accountant.”

“Whatever. You know what? I guess I kind of like you.” I noticed that my hand was holding hers.

There are a lot worse things in this world (or whatever other world you may happen to find yourself on) than being told by a pretty girl in the starlight that she likes you. It brightens the air, it makes the senses tingle, it causes you to feel warm all over …

Unless.

Unless you’ve got your mind full of a million other things, including the particularly savage murder of a fellow human being (even if he was a killer himself) by a particularly gruesome monster, which event some bizarre creatures from another planet have erected a statue to commemorate.

And unless you’re filled with anger and confusion over your recent kidnapping to a place that, a week earlier, you wouldn’t have believed could possibly exist.

And unless you happened to have had, at the age of twenty-five, a particularly savage case of the mumps.

I let go of Tricia Madigan’s hand.

I didn’t really want to, because it felt good. It also felt strange, because I had got out of the habit of holding women’s hands, or women’s anythings. It even felt worrisome, in that sadly familiar way that any kind of normal man-woman come-on felt worrisome to me; the come-on was nice, but there wasn’t any follow-up to come after the come-on. I changed the subject. I said, “Tricia, you know your cousin Irene’s been going crazy, worrying about you.” There was a pause, then she looked at me. “Oh,” she said. “I didn’t know you knew Irene.”

I said bitterly, “Do I ever know Irene.” I told Tricia about Irene and her crusade, and about chasing all over Monte Carlo and Nice with her, and about Marlene, and about my attempts to beard Henry Davidson-Jones in his lairs at the World Trade Center and the Negresco.

She listened, watching my face carefully in the dim light. All she said was, “Gee, Nolly.”

“Yeah. Gee. I’m afraid that she isn’t going to quit looking for you. I’m afraid she’s going to wind up here herself.” Tricia thought for a moment. “I hope not. I mean, for her sake. I just love Irene, I really do, Nolly, but I don’t know if she could make the adjustment here. She’s a real tight-ass about some things.”

“About things like Henry Davidson-Jones’s practices of kidnapping and murder, you mean?”

“Like murder? Oh, no, Nolly.” The.look she was giving me now was a lot like the look you give a little kid who refuses to go to sleep because he thinks there’s a bear under his bed. “He never did murder, honest. Jonesy’s not such a bad guy. If you mean Jerry Harper, hey, it wasn’t Jonesy that sentenced him, you know. We did it ourselves, all legal and proper. Why, we had a real trial, with a jury and everything, because it was really bad of him to set fire to those poor guys. Ask your pal Ephard Joyce. Ephard was on the jury himself. Now … hold on,” she commanded, looking down. “Here’s what I wanted you to see. Look!”

I found myself squinting into a sudden bright orangey light that grew behind her. It was like morning sun streaming through a window, only about a hundred times brighter. I turned and, down below, past Tricia’s pretty feet, there was a sudden corner of light that rolled into view and widened and became a sun, too bright to look at.

“That’s it,” Tricia crowed, shielding her eyes with her hand. “That’s Aldebaran.” And, “Darker, damn it!” she called, and the transparency under our feet obligingly grayed itself like photosensitive sunglass lenses, so I could look right at the thing. I could feel the warmth of it on my face.

Tricia grinned at me, pleased. “That’s it,” she said. “That’s the whole show. Too bad we didn’t get a chance to see the planet itself, but it must be coming up after the star now—and anyway,” she added, prettily smothering a tiny yawn, “I’m not going to keep my little old head off the little old pillow forever, so do you want to go ahead with the rest of the tour or not?”

I looked down at the dimmed-out stellar disk below me. That thing is really the star Aldebaran, Nolly, I told myself. You’re really here.

And then I said to myself, Go ahead, Nolly. Make the adjustment. And out loud I said, “Lead on, Tricia. Let’s see it all.”

In the little go-box, Tricia explained the transportation system to me. “There are lots of these things,” she said, “and they go all over. Some of the places you can’t go to, though. They’ll take you anyplace in our sector, or where the foreign human artists live, like the Italians, the Russians, Chinatown, all that. I don’t go there much, but there’s nothing to stop you. And you can go to the shell, where we just were, so you can look at the stars whenever you like. Just say ‘Lookout.’ If you want to go to any of the funny-people levels—I mean, you know, the creepy-crawlies and all—you have to go with somebody who’s authorized, like Sam Shipperton. And there’s places you can’t go at all, like the jump station, naturally. What’s that? Oh, that’s what you came here on, Nolly. It’s what they call a matter transmitter, okay? But you can come here to this place anytime,” she finished as the door opened. “I come here a lot. I usually take my showers here. You’ll see. It’s neat.”

She was wrong about that.

It was not a bit neat. It was the opposite of neat. It was a green and jumbled jungle of vegetation of all kinds. It was illuminated with pinkish light from the ceiling panels; the light cast no shadows, but it was enormously flattering to Tricia.

Who certainly didn’t need any flattery anyway. Who was looking all pink and pleased as she watched me staring around, half laughing as she saw my jaw drop. There was plenty to stare at. Stubby trees whose crowns spread against the roof panels, vines that swung from the trees, bushes, flowers, purple moss that had little scarlet blossoms in it, hedgelike shrubs that were full of pretty white and yellow berries. The place smelled jungly. It sounded that way, too. There were chirpings and whickerings and soft, sobby moans, and distant yowls that made me glad they were distant. “There’s nothing here that can hurt us, Nolly,” Tricia smiled. “Come along, I’ll show you where I shower when I get tired of the one at home.”

It wasn’t really untamed jungle after all. There were paths in it. I followed Tricia’s prettily waving hips down one of them, while she chattered over her shoulder. She named a dozen kinds of edible fruits and berries—half of them I’d never heard of, which was reasonable enough because the things with those names didn’t grow on Earth. I didn’t retain them, anyway. I was listening to a sound—a watery sound, like a forest creek running fast over rocks—that I hadn’t heard at first because my attention was all on pretty Tricia. The sound got louder.

The path opened up into a glade. A few yards in front of us was a pond. At the far end of the pond, seeming to come out of the ceiling itself, was a waterfall.

That was the sound I heard, but it didn’t sound exactly like any waterfall I’d ever encountered before. It sounded somehow gentler and slower, and the reason for that was that it
was
gentler and slower.

I understood that. Even at this level, I felt a little lighter than I’d been accustomed to back home on Earth, and so did the water. It fell in a leisurely, comfortable way, and splashed only gently when it hit the surface of the pond.

“Pretty?” Tricia asked, smilingly sure of the answer.

I obliged her. “It’s
very
pretty. I have to admit that Narabedla’s about the prettiest and nicest place I’ve ever been— anyway, in terms of amenities. I mean, there was this hotel in Beverly Hills …” And I told her about what had been my previous high-water mark for luxury, and added, “The only thing we don’t seem to have here is the whores.”

Tricia said demurely, “On the other hand, why would you need them?”

I found that we were holding hands again. I didn’t remember how that had happened. More than that, she’d loosened a button or two in her blouse, and very visible was much of Tricia.

I backpedaled. Fast. I said, “I was just joking, Tricia.” She listened attentively, absently stroking my arm. “I mean,” I explained, “really, there’s a
lot
missing here. Freedom, for instance.”

She squeezed my elbow in affectionate disagreement. “Oh, no, Nolly, you’re wrong about that. Believe me. You’ve never been so free. You can do anything you like here—well, hey, not
hurt
anybody—you wouldn’t want to be like Jerry Harper, would you? You can’t kill anybody, or rape anybody; you could get in a fight, maybe, if both you and the other guy wanted it, because that happens, you know? But not anything like
deliberate,
or
mean.
I mean, what would be the point? Whatever consenting adults, you know, want to do—”

“I’m talking about being
free.
Free to go home, damn it!” She shook her head regretfully. “Aw, shit, Nolly,” she sighed.

I started to amplify, but she got in ahead of me. “Forget about going home, Nolly,” she advised. “Look on the bright side, for heaven’s sake. What’d you have back home? Did you have anything half as good as you’ve got here? You’re never going to get real sick, you know. You’re going to live a heck of a long time—look at people like Ephard Joyce and that witch, Norah Platt. Course,” she went on reasonably, “it isn’t all free, exactly. You have to earn it. You have to do your thing for the cash customers if you want any special privileges or charge cards or anything, but, what the hey, that’s what artists like to do anyway. Isn’t that true? They like to perform. Why else would anybody be a performer? And you’ve got real good friends here, or anyway you will have as soon as you get over this tight-ass stuff.” She gazed at me for a moment. “Tell you what,” she said. “You ought to put all this stuff on hold till you can talk to Jonesy himself, next time he’s here, just sit down with him and—”

“He comes
here?
”

“Well, of course he comes here, for gosh sake. What did you think? Every couple months, anyway. So now lighten up, will you?”

“But—”

“Butting’s for bulls,” she said kindly, opening the rest of the buttons on her blouse. “Come on. Let’s have fun. I’m going to get under the shower.”

So she did.

She threw the blouse in one direction and the skimpy shorts in another. I hadn’t thought there would be anything under them but Tricia herself, and there wasn’t. She dived into the pool, swam a dozen strokes, and came up under the waterfall.

“Come on, kidlet,” she gasped, mouth full of water. “It’s nice and warm, just what you need to chase the collywobbles away.”

It would have taken a real trained-from-childhood eunuch, not a well-remembering one like me, to say no to Tricia Madigan. I took off my clothes—my own tired ones and the ones I’d borrowed from Malcolm Porchester’s wardrobe— and I dived in after her. I was dimly aware that I was laying up a larger store of humiliation and regret for later, but I firmly turned off the voice inside my head that was trying to tell me so.

The pool and the waterfall were everything she’d promised.

The splash of water on my head was not only gentle, it was tepidly warm. It didn’t beat down on me. It caressed me. Tricia was laughing as she splashed perfectly superfluous handfuls of water at me, and in a minute I was laughing, too … up to when we began touching each other. She took hold of me, smiling sweetly. Then she looked up into my eyes in surprise and uncertainty.

“My goodness, Nolly,” she said, “you’re not a priest or anything, are you?”

Unhappily, I said, “No, no, nothing like that.”

“Or maybe you’ve got a secret pash back home that you’re carrying a torch for, like Jerry Harper?”

I shook my head. Then I backed away a little, wiped the water out of my eyes, and said, “There’s something I ought to tell you about. Do you know anything about the kinds of things that happen if you catch mumps when you’re a grownup man?”

And, oh, well, that was about the end of that.

Tricia was perfectly cheerful and friendly as we went back to our own level. But she went to her house and I went to mine, and it was a while before I saw Tricia Madigan again.