Narabedla Ltd (30 page)

Joyce pursed his lips. “I see,” he said.

Tricia and Conjur had drifted over to listen. “You stirring some more revolution?” Conjur asked—jokingly, I assumed.

“Oh, no. I admit you were all right, that’s all. It’s impossible to go back.”

“Of course,” Joyce echoed. But at least he’d forgotten to be surly about the fact that I wasn’t helping him get a mime part in the opera troupe.

As he drifted away I patted Tricia’s shoulder welcomingly. “You two are looking pretty fine on the dance floor,” I said, and then got down to business. “Conjur? Did you say you had a gym?”

“Yeah?” he said suspiciously.

“Well, I’d like to work out in it, if that’s all right with you.”

“Twenty bucks an hour. ’Less you want to work out with me, then it’s free.”

“Work out? You mean shooting baskets?”

“Yeah, well, what I’d rather is a couple easy rounds,” he grinned, putting his fists up. “We could use the big gloves, nobody gets hurt. Just to get the old blood flowing, you know what I’m saying?”

I looked him over, ten inches taller than I was and twenty pounds heavier. And all muscles. “I think I’ll pay the twenty dollars,” I said.

Tricia was looking me over thoughtfully. “So it’s true,” she said. “You did finally sign a contract.”’

“And he’s got a new house,” Norah put in.

“And you’re all invited to my housewarming,” I said. Tricia, frowning, said, “But there’s really only one house vacant now, isn’t there?”

And Norah said, “That’s what I was trying to tell you, Nolly. It must be the one that used to be Jerry Harper’s.”

It was Harper’s house, all right. Sam Shipperton confirmed it when I stopped by to pick up the keys.

When I opened the door and let myself in it had a bare and empty smell. There was furniture there—table and chairs, couch and coffee table; big king-sizer in the bedroom, knotty-pine chests—but there wasn’t anything
but
furniture. No clothes in the closets, no food in the refrigerator, no pictures on the walls. The only thing that showed anybody had ever lived there was a stain on the kitchen carpeting, where somebody had spilled something, and a Kekkety was busily scrubbing away at that.

I don’t believe in haunted houses. It was good I didn’t, I thought, because otherwise I might have thought taking over the home of an executed man could have been bad luck.

I didn’t spend any time worrying about it. I sent the Kekkety over to the house I had borrowed from Malcolm Porch-ester for my clothes. While he was gone I scribbled out a shopping list, food and drink for the larder, and by the time Ugolino Malatesta showed up to check my voice I had a pot of coffee on the stove. “But no!” Malatesta cried when he saw what I was drinking. “Coffee is acid! For your voice it is tea you should drink, quite hot and sweet, or best of all a little wine!”

“They’re acid, too, aren’t they?” I grinned.

But I humored him. I’d already stocked up on a Chianti that he sniffed and pronounced acceptable, and after a glass apiece we set to work.

He started me slow, with mid-range vocalizing, and it was half an hour before he would let me stretch to the limits of my range. Much less actually
sing
anything.

But then he did. And when he heard, he beamed.

I wasn’t surprised. I didn’t need Malatesta to tell me that my voice was back, all of it. I by-God
knew
that it was all there. Vocalizing in front of a mirror, with Malatesta gently touching cheek and throat and jawbone, grinning as he did, I could
feel
the rightness. I didn’t look as though I were straining, because I wasn’t.
“Cantare, allora,”
he said finally, contented, and sing I did. Audition songs. Snatches of arias. The kind of thing I did in the shower, when no one was there to hear. Everything I remembered I tried that afternoon for Malatesta, while he nodded and grinned at me. Snatches of “Glory Road” in the style of Lawrence Tibbett. Lieder I’d learned from records by Dietrich Fischer-Diskau. A few bars of Wagner, something from
Boris Godunov,
some of the Tonio from
I Pagliacci.

And they all came out just the way I wanted them to.
“Bella, bella,”
Malatesta cried, with the fond delight of a coach whose student has surpassed him.
“Voi avete urn voce bellissima, Knoll-a-wood!”

And so I had. With the help of Binnda and Barak and the Mother, not to mention the good monster-doctor Boddadukti, I had the voice I had always dreamed of, and it was all
mine.

I don’t think that ever in my life I have been happier than I was that afternoon, on the second moon of the seventh planet of the star Aldebaran.

When a mild-mannered accountant is suddenly transformed into an opera star—never mind whether it’s on Narabedla or in New York—it keeps him
busy.
Every hour was full. When I wasn’t picking out the furniture for my new house, I was vocalizing with Ugolino Malatesta. When I had time from either, I needed that time just to learn my way around my new home. With Purry and the skry I learned to tell the difference between a Hrunwian and one of the Tseni, and how to order records from Earth for my new stereo, and what to say to the Kekketies when I wanted my morning eggs over easy instead of scrambled.

I cannot tell a lie about it. I was having a ball. Best of all was the time I spent with Binnda, going over the plans for our new opera company’s first tour. He had promoted me to something like assistant managing director, and together we went over the casts.
Idomeneo
was easy; we had Malatesta to sing the Idamante, and Canduccio, Morcher, and the Russian, Dmitri Arkashvili, for the three tenors. Eloise Gatt for Ilia, Sue-Mary Petticardi for the Electra, and Eamon McGuire as Neptune’s voice.

The cast for
I
Pagliacci
was no problem, either, because we already had everybody necessary right on hand:

Canio: Floyd Morcher.

Tonio: Me.

Nedda: The pretty little Valley Girl soprano, Maggie Murk.

Beppe: Dmitri Arkashvili.

Silvio: The other baritone, Rufus Connery.

It was the
Don Giovanni
that was the headache. There was only one tenor part, so our tenors could alternate in the role and rest their voices, but we needed all three of our sopranos and both our baritones. The hard part was that we had to have a second bass. Eamon McGuire was fine for the Commendatore, but who was going to sing the very important role of my servant, Leporello?

Binnda, Malatesta, and I borrowed Sam Shipperton’s office with the wall-sized skry to check out the available talent. There simply wasn’t any. One of Shipperton’s group, Dick Vidalia, had a bass voice, all right, but it was a hoarse, heavy-metal kind of rasp that made Malatesta shudder. “Better,” he declared, “that we transpose the register and I sing this myself!”

“But, my dear Ugolino! That is not how Mozart wrote the opera,” Binnda declared, his bright green tongue flapping in dismay.

“Could Purry fill in?” I offered.

That was even worse. Binnda drew himself up to his full height, reaching almost to Malatesta’s chest. He stated firmly, “We will use only
human
artists or we will use none at all. Excepting choruses, I mean,” he added.

“What about choruses?”

He twisted his nonexistent shoulders—I took it as a shrug. “We have just so many native human singers,” he said, sounding a little defensive. “So we must make some compromises. Of course, the chorus parts are not very demanding. I thought for a moment of drafting all the surplus humans here to fill in as what your The Earth people call ‘spear-carriers,’ eh? But they do not have voices, after all, so why not simply use animation?”

“You mean holograms?”

“As your The Earth expression has it, yes. They will be quite satisfactory. Simply you will have to be careful not to walk through any of them on stage. Of course, that means that everyone will have to double for the choruses. Then we’ll record your voices and use the optical simulations in performance—and, oh, my dear friend,” he cried, beginning to glow, “wait till you see the finale of
Don!
We’ll have the devils screeching at him as he descends into hell, and do you know what I’m going to use for devils? Ossps!”

I tried to remember which were the Ossps—the ones that looked like a cross between a lizard and a bat, I decided. True enough, they looked nastier than any devils I had ever seen on stage, but there was a question in my mind. “Won’t that hurt the feelings of any Ossps in our audience?” I asked.

He stared at me incredulously. “Ossps? In one of our audiences? Ho-ho-ho, my dear boy! That is extremely funny! No, no, we are not likely to have any Ossps attending our performances—nor, indeed, would we have anyone else in the audience if they did.”

We didn’t find our missing bass that day, because Meretekabinnda had to hurry off to take part in the Andromeda probe launch. There was so
much
to do, he declared feverishly—and happily. He wanted to go over the theaters we would play in with me. He wanted to run through
I Pagliacci
again, and maybe make a start on the
Don.
He wanted me to make sure Sam Shipperton double-checked for any bass singers we might have missed.

But more than any of those, he wanted to be on hand for the ceremonies of the probe launch, and so he tootled off and left us to our own devices.

What Malatesta wanted was another coaching session, but I had a better idea. “Let’s wait a while, please,” I urged. “I’m getting pretty far out of shape, and I’d like to try out Conjur Kowalski’s gym.”

He acknowledged that a young singer needed his physical strength, and so I made a call on the skry and Conjur agreed to meet me there.

When I say it was a gym, I mean a
gym.
It was a combination of the gymnasium of a well-to-do suburban high school and the New York Athletic Club. He had the complete Nautilus machines, as promised. He had a double-barreled sauna, steam on one end, dry heat on the other. He had Indian clubs and weights and rings and those horsey things gymnasts vault over, and the horizontal bars to go with them; he had basketballs and softballs and bats and gloves; he had assorted sizes of shorts and jockstraps and shoes for every sport; and the whole thing, not counting the room itself, had to have set somebody back twenty or thirty thousand bucks.

The “somebody” was Conjur Kowalski himself. He’d imported every item, paid for out of his earnings on the Narabedla circuit. “So what else would I spend the money on?” he puffed, doing leg-curl sit-ups on the slantboard. “Anyway, I get some of it back from rentals. You ready to shell out the twenty bucks an hour?”

“My pleasure,” I said, as off-handedly as any opera star who had just signed a really good contract.

“Shee-it, man!” he said in disgust. “I was hoping you’d want to work it out. I need a little competition, you know? Only not shooting baskets, what I want is some
competitive
sports. Some
body-contact
sports, you know what I’m saying?” He got up from the board and began ratta-tatting the punching bag with his bare fists.

“Another time, maybe,” I said, not meaning it. “Can I start on the Nautilus machines?”

But an hour on the machines, and skipping rope, and working out on the bars made my body feel almost as good as my throat did. What the hell, I said, and agreed to put the gloves on with him—big, soft gloves, and face protectors, too; but he gave me three hard rounds. He had the reach on me and the weight and the height, and hitting him in the body with the marshmallow gloves hardly even made him grunt. I had to admit that he won all three rounds, but the third one was at least close.

When we packed it in and soaked in his little steam room for a while, Conjur was actually friendly. “You got to quit cocking your shoulder for your right, Nolly,” he said, looking like an Arab ghost in the huge white towels draped around him. “I can always see it coming, and then you’re off balance for a counterpunch. You want to try again tomorrow?” 

“No,” I said.

He laughed. “Then it’s still twenty bucks. For the first hour, I mean.” He got up and stood under the cold shower in the corner, howling as the water hit him. When he came back he was looking thoughtful. “Listen, Nolly,” he said, “I got an idea. After we get a good sweat going here, how about if we jump down to the outside level and swim a few laps in the pool?”

“Too bad you don’t have a pool of your own,” I said.

“I thought of it,” he said. “Ain’t worth the price. Anyway, the one with the waterfall’s nicer. Tricia’s probably there right now.” He gave me a friendly poke. “How come you don’t go after that? It’s Class-A stuff, my man.”

“You ought to know,” I said. I didn’t intend to have an edge on my voice, but it was there and he heard it.

“Don’t be gettin’ tight-ass, Nolly,” he ordered. “She do what she want to do, that lady. I got no claim.” He looked at me, struck by a thought. “You did get your tools all sharpened like they said, didn’t you?” I shrugged and didn’t speak. “Well, see,” he said, floundering as though he were trying to be tactful, “what I want to say is you don’t have to worry whose lady she is. She ain’t mine, for a fact. Trish, she’s a sweet chick, but she’s, you know, she’s
white.
I got no hate against no whites. But there ain’t any nice colored ladies here, you know what I’m saying? It be gettin’ time for me to get
serious.”