Narabedla Ltd (26 page)

Tricia brightened. “Sit down, fellows,” she said, and headed for the wet bar. She didn’t ask what we wanted. She just started pouring, while Conjur stalked into the bathroom and slammed the door and I looked around.

Conjur’s pad was no bigger than my own, but the plan was entirely different. He didn’t have a big living room and a little bedroom. He didn’t have any living room at all, except for a kind of little foyer with two chairs and a communications skry, but his bedroom took up a good deal more than 50 percent of the square footage of the apartment. The bed was round. It was also huge, big enough so that big Conjur could stretch out in it easily in any direction, with adequate room for another person (or four or five of them) besides. It was elevated on a platform a foot above the rest of the room, with the bar conveniently next to it at one point and what looked like about a ten-thousand-dollar stereo rig at another. And off in one corner, next to the bathroom door but not even screened, was a Jacuzzi big enough to hold parties in.

“Neat,” I said morosely, taking the glass of J & B and ginger ale from Tricia.

“Aw, cheer up, hon,” she said, depleting her own glass. She climbed up to sprawl on the huge bed, as though she had been there a time or two before, and looked at me in a friendly, chiding way. “You’re not sitting down,” she said. “You’re all snaggle-toothed and mean, and you’re gonna totally kill this party.”

“Do you blame me?” I demanded.

“Who’s blaming? But that thing with Jerry, hey, it happens, so why don’t you just drink up and get mellow,” she ordered. Then she raised her voice. “Damn you, Conjur,” she called. “Are you ever coming out of there or what?” The door opened and Conjur appeared. He had removed his shoes and they were in one hand; his pants had come off, too, and they were folded over the other forearm. What he still had on was a sort of Mexican-looking lightweight open-necked shirt and pale green jockey shorts. He hung the trousers up in a closet, neatly arranging the creases to match, and pulled on a pair of jogging shorts while he talked. They were partly green, too, pale green and white, and they were just about the right color to go with his caf6-au-lait skin. He had the longest legs I had ever seen on a human being, and they were solid muscle. “He right, woman,” he growled at Tricia. “You don’t be blamin’ him for feelin’ real low right now.”

“Oh, knock off the damn jive talk,” Tricia complained. She looked at me. “He was a speech major at CCNY, back home,” she told me. “He just does that to put you on.”

“I be doin’ that way ’cause I
be feelin’
that way,” Kowalski rumbled. Actually, in his normal voice he sounded like a speech major—a really good one, with natural talents. Conjur Kowalski had one fine, deep, round speaking voice. If the present incumbent ever gave them up, he could have done the Seven-Up commercials just as well. He glared at his drink and said, “Jerry Harper was a damn fool, okay, but they didn’t have to do him like that.”

“We’re not going to talk about Jerry Harper,” Tricia commanded. “How do you like Conjur’s place, Nolly?”

“It’s neat,” I said again.

“Yeah,” he said darkly, “but I tell you this, my man, I would trade it all for two rooms near One Twenty-fifth Street and maybe a contract with the Knicks.”

“We’re not going to talk about that, either,” said Tricia. “We’re just going to get relaxed and talk about having fun. You ever play any basketball, Nolly?”

“In college, but I was too short.”

“Maybe you could throw some baskets with Conjur sometime. He still works out in the gym every day. In case he gets back, you know.”

I was tom between two cues there—“in case he gets back” and “gym.” 

“Gym” won out, and when I asked it turned out that, yes, Conjur had a gym. His own gym, he pointed out. He paid for it out of his earnings, and anybody else who wanted to use it had to pay for the privilege. Sometimes people did. It had a basketball court and a running track, not to mention all the Nautilus machines. I got right to the point. “I don’t have any money,” I said.

Conjur looked concealedly pleased, like a used-car salesman who sees an eighteen-year-old heading toward the Stingray with the bent frame. “You could get an advance on your contract,” he said.

“I don’t have a contract. They just snatched me.” 

“Shee-it,” said Conjur thoughtfully, and Tricia said: “But they can’t do that. I mean, sure, they can snatch you if they want to, what can you do about it? But they can’t make you go on tour. That’s a real strict law. The funnies don’t want each other kidnapping their people, so they have a rule that nobody travels to any of the planets without a voluntary work contract. You go talk to Sammy Shipperton; he knows he can’t ship you off to the Ptrreek planet without papers. Make him give you a contract.”

“Then you sure can use my facilities, Nolly,” said Conjur graciously. “You shoot some baskets with me, I’ll maybe give you something off.”

“Fine,” I said, but I’d been distracted again. “What’s this about the Ptrreek planet?”

“Nobody told you about the Ptrreeks?” Conjur demanded.

“Nobody told me about
this
place,” I said, disgruntled as I thought of it, “except Tricia started to give me a quick tour once, only—”

There was a moment’s silence there, because I remembered how the quick tour had ended. So did Tricia. She said kindly, “You’ve seen a picture of it on the skry, haven’t you?”

“Well, yes, but—”

“Show the man,” Conjur ordered. “I’ll fresh up these drinks.”

And so Tricia Madigan took me over to the communications screen and summoned up a map of Narabedla. It very nearly took my mind off the sad fate of Jerry Harper, because it was pretty to look at—a sort of semitransparent illuminated, hologrammish model—and it answered a lot of questions. Narabedla, it turned out, wasn’t really shaped like a soup can. More like a can of tuna fish, cylindrical but pretty squat. It wasn’t very big, as moons go—no more than ten miles in diameter, maybe six miles through the axis of rotation. Even so, when I tried to do the arithmetic in my head, it came out a lot larger than it needed to be to house four hundred human beings on what was no more than a tenth of an acre for each little house.

“They built all this just so they could have a bunch of human beings performing for them?” I asked.

“Aw, no,” rumbled Conjur Kowalski. “It
been
here, you know? They had some other use for it, like.”

“Like what?”

“Oh, hell, Nolly, how would I know? It was just something they didn’t need anymore. Maybe like a naval base for wars or something—they used to have them, you know, until they figured out nobody wasn’t going to win any anyway. So when they started importing artists from the Earth they just cleared out a little corner of it, and here we are.”

“I don’t know much about their wars,” I said, led away on another trail of thought and one that was far from attractive. If there was one thing I knew for certain about the people who had created Narabedla, it was that I didn’t want their technology applied against the Earth in any way.

“You ain’t
gonna
hear from me,” said Conjur, “because I don’t know nothin’. Ask old Floyd Morcher; he keeps digging into all that stuff, only what’s the use? They don’t do it no more anyway. Where’s that liquor at, Trish?”

I made another mental note to myself, along with the one about seeing Sam Shipperton to talk contract, and studied the airy model that hung before my eyes.

It would be useful, I thought, to get around Narabedla. But Tricia explained that for that I didn’t need a map. Most of the English-speaking human beings were within easy walking distance of my own house. The ones that weren’t were only a go-box jump away, and from there it was never more than a five-minute walk to anywhere at all—anywhere we were allowed to go to in the first place, at least.

“But we can’t go off Narabedla.”

“Well, only on tours. When somebody’s with us.”

“But the aliens can go to Earth? Binnda said he’d been there.”

Conjur shrugged. “Some of them do. The ones that can dress up to look human, anyway. You ask why? I dunno why. Well, they’re all ape-shit to do it, only for all different reasons. There’s the Ggressna, like Binnda, they just want to see what’s coming down. There’s the Mother, who would give her funny-looking little ass to go, only how can she? First she’s sessile—that means she can’t move much herself,” the speech major explained to me, “and second can you imagine what would happen if she turned up on Times Square? There’s the Ossps, and they got
bad
reasons. Happen they had their way they’d be there right
now,
you know what I’m saying?”

I was afraid I did. I felt a little chill on the back of my neck, thinking about what one of those high-tech alien races could do on Earth if it chose to. “And so it’s against the law?”

“What kind of law are you talking about, man? There’s no
law.
The Ggressna can’t tell the Ossps what to do, no way. If an Ossp really wanted to go to the Earth nobody could stop him. Only he’d be in trouble, ’cause they’ve all signed the deal that says they won’t interfere. See,” he said, stretching—it was like a lion stretching—“the thing is, they can’t let it be
known.
Otherwise it costs them. When Binnda goes to like Carnegie Hall he’s living real dangerous. If anybody catches him and it makes the TV news, then he’s in the deep shit. That’s a violation of the Fifteen Peoples agreement, you see what I’m telling you? They come down on him
hard.
It’d
cost
him—not just him, but all the Ggressna. So he takes a chance. But if he don’t get caught, why then there’s no problem. He’s got off on what he likes to do, and nobody’s going to complain.”

“And the Mother lets him go, because he comes back and tells her everything. She likes that,” Tricia put in.

I remembered the question I had intended to ask Norah Platt. “But I thought the Mothers were the peacekeepers.” 

“Yeah? That’s right, what about it?”

“But I thought that meant everybody trusted them, you know?”

“Man,” said Conjur, looking pained, “nobody here trusts
nobody.
It’s just like they can make you real sorry if you do something you shouldn’t.”

“And get caught at it,” Tricia added, freshening up our drinks.

I tried a different tack. “How would they know?” Conjur blinked. “Say what?”

“How would anybody here know if, for instance, Binnda got caught in Carnegie Hall?”

“Why, man, that would certainly make it onto the network news, don’t you think? And of course all the radio and TV from Earth is monitored all the time. There’s about a million funnies that keep tabs on everything that’s broadcast from Earth. From all the other planets that they don’t mess into, too.”

“They’re
spying
on us?” I cried.

“Who said spying? I mean, what in the world would they need to spy for? No, they’re just interested. It’s like they’ve got all these researchers, you know? Like people who study Earth customs, and, I don’t know, people in the entertainment business, they pick up the shows and sell them, like. Like movies? Only of course they aren’t movies. Anyway, there’s no way it wouldn’t get known all over if somebody on Earth came across a live Ggressna at the Met, or maybe a Duntidon walking down like State Street. It’d make all the papers, wouldn’t it?” He hesitated. “And that’s not all they’re looking for, Nolly.”

“Oh?”

He rocked his head back and forth for a moment. “No,” he said, “there’s worse than that. You know, some of these funnies are not so damn funny. Some of them’s got real nasty attitudes about other species. If some of those birds got onto Earth there’d be
bad
times.”

By then we were on the fourth or fifth drink, and I was actually beginning to like the combination of Scotch and ginger ale. We were all three sprawled out on the big, round bed, heads propped on elbows, about as relaxed as I had been since the moment I arrived on Narabedla.

Naturally something had to come along to spoil it.

What the spoiler turned out to be was a scratching on the door, and when Conjur let the visitor in it turned out to be one of the Mother’s little bedbugs. It made straight for me. “Dr. Boddadukti is ready for you now,” it piped, nudging me toward the door With its hard, warm little head. “Come! It is time to prepare for your repair.”

I
n one way, I didn’t really mind the interruption. The party at Conjur Kowalski’s pad had reached the point where I was pretty sure that fairly soon somebody was going to lay somebody, and I didn’t see a role for me in that. So it was time to go.

In another way I was pretty uptight. Not scared. Tense. The feeling lasted all the while the bedbug led me through the go-box and along a sort of corridor. It wasn’t a street. It even had a roof, and there were closed doors along the sides of it, though there were no furnishings. I didn’t ask questions. It didn’t speak again. Then I began to hear distant sounds of singing, and when the bedbug came to an open door it butted me inside.

The room inside was almost as bare as the corridors, apart from a bank of skry (I assumed they were skries) monitors that flickered with pretty colored lights on the wall. There, on a pure white, sterile-looking couch, were Purry and Norah Platt. They were not uptight at all. They were amusing themselves by singing “Greensleeves” together. At least Norah was singing, with a surprisingly decent contralto, while Purry was doing a real neat job of a piano and violin accompaniment.