Narabedla Ltd (37 page)

And the synthetic band started up as Purry launched into “Tuxedo Junction” and segued into “In the Mood” and four or five other grandfather’s-day hits as Tricia and Conjur came jitterbugging out onto the stage.

They’d changed costumes. Tricia was wearing a bright red miniskirt with tiny, sequined red panties that flashed every time she moved. Conjur had his zoot suit on again, with the lapels that would have made two ordinary suits. They were works of art, both of them.

I was born too late for the big-band era, and all I knew about zoot suits and jitterbugging is what I’ve seen on the late-night movies. But I have to say they set my feet to tapping and my body to twitching.

And, as a matter of fact, a little bit to itching, too. Every time Tricia flung herself around I felt that long-lost little hint of a tingle in my groin. I didn’t know quite how to feel about it—part
Welcome home
and part
Jesus, is it real?,
and all of it was pretty good. It took my mind right off being nervous, right up to the time when the (purely optical) rainbow curtain came down, and Conjur and Tricia took their last bows, and Binnda came flapping toward us from the dressing rooms, crying, “Places! Ladies and gentlemen, places, please! The curtain is going up!”

That took care of the possible stage fright, because Binnda broke me up. The whole cast broke out in giggles. He didn’t just come in, he made an entrance. He had got himself up in an opera-impresario suit that would have done credit to Rudolf Bing on the first night of a Met season, with full white tie and tails, and what looked like ten-carat rubies in his shirt studs, and at least an inch of starched, snow-white cuffs that showed at his wrists. Well, at where his wrists would have been, if he’d had any. We all broke out in applause.

“Thank you, thank you,” he beamed, delighted. “But please, it is time to begin the opera. Get ready, my dear Nolly!” And he hurried off to take his place on the conductor’s stand.

It surprised me that there were no intermissions. I suppose the Ptrreeks had better bladder control than human beings. Certainly the stagehands didn’t need the time of an intermission to reset the stage, because most of that was accomplished by a quick flick of a switch somewhere.

For whatever reason, intermission there was none. Three minutes later Binnda was in place and Purry started the overture. The “curtain” went up (or, it would be better to say, evaporated). And there I was, sticking my head out through the dissipating rainbow cloud to address a horde of thousands of weird-looking alien monsters.

We were a smash.

I
was a smash. We took ten curtain calls. I got one all to myself, and the last one with the Canio, Floyd Morcher, and then Binnda came trotting up from the improvised conductor’s box, all spiffy in his version of white tie and tails, and dumped two huge bouquets of red roses (well, they weren’t exactly roses, but I knew what he meant) at our feet. “Splendid, dear boy!” he whispered, wringing my hand. “They love you! You too, my dear Floyd,” he added.

But I was the one whose hand he held in his own scaly claw as together we turned to bow a lingering farewell to the audience, all the Ptrreek towering over their seats as they rubbed their spiny limbs together in the buzzy kind of sound that was (yes, really was) their version of applause, and the rainbow mist began to gather for the final curtain.

O
f course, there was a cast party after the performance. Binnda wouldn’t have omitted anything as traditional as that.

Tricia picked me up to go there together. She was wearing a sheath dress with the skirt slit almost hip-high along one side, and high heels that made her exactly my height. She had done her hair in a sort of bun on one side of her head, and all in all she looked pretty spectacular. When I told her so she thanked me as though no one, ever, had said anything like that to her before.

I thought it was going to be a real good party.

The place for the party was in another tower of our cluster. To get there we had to walk through one of the aerial bridges that linked the clumps, a transparent tube, twenty feet or more in diameter, limber enough to flex a little as the towers swayed. It was like walking through a plastic soda straw. It twisted and swayed disconcertingly, and the only good thing about it was that we could at last see the view Binnda had told me about. The Ptrreek city was ring-shaped, like a Jell-O mold, with a clear space in the middle. The blue sun had set long since, but it wasn’t dark. The bigger, dimmer, deep scarlet sun was still in the sky, and, if anything, it was hotter than the blue one had been. But when we got to the room where the party was being held it was
cold.
Evidently it had been chilled as a compromise so that six or eight different kinds of aliens could be comfortable in it. There were a couple of dozen Ptrreek towering over everyone else, with their bright-colored cloaks wrapped around them. I saw Binnda talking to Barak, loudly and with a lot of waving of arms and tentacles, as they headed toward a cluster of other aliens in a corner.

The humidity was high, too. It felt like a Christmas party in the Coney Island Aquarium, with the doors left open. I was glad I had worn a jacket. I wondered how Tricia was doing in her slit skirt, but she didn’t seem to mind. “Now what are they doing?” she demanded, looking over to the corner of the room where eight or ten Ptrreek and as many other aliens were gathered around something. It wasn’t easy to see past the huge Ptrreek, but as they moved I caught a glimpse of a large skry, showing that same old Andromeda probe. It seemed to be still on course, and the aliens were doing a lot of congratulatory screeching, chirping, barking, and yowling at each other.

Tricia sighed. “What we need is a drink, Nolly,” she said, and waved an arm. One of the little Kekketies came trotting across the dance floor, where Norah Platt and Malatesta were moving slowly to Purry’s music. As the Kekkety took our order Eamon McGuire approached me, his hand stuck out to shake.

“You were fine, Stennis,” he rumbled. “Are you getting drinks? Yes, I’ll have something too—a double vodka, if they’ve got it.”

They had it. They had all sorts of Earth liquor, and Earth food, too. As the Kekkety came back with our drinks Floyd Morcher materialized beside us. “You don’t really want that drink, Eamon,” he said.

The bass looked rebellious. Before he could answer, Tricia tugged at my sleeve. “Let’s get something to eat,” she said, pulling me away. She whispered, “Morcher’s assigned himself to keep Eamon off the sauce, but, hey, I’d just as soon stay out of it. Anyway, there’s Conjur by the buffet.” Actually two buffets had been laid out along one wall, one of them at Ptrreek height and invisible to me, the other spread out on what I suppose the Ptrreek thought of as benches, but were actually at about eye level for us tiny humans. Conjur grinned at us. “Can you see what they’ve got?” he asked. “There’s sliced ham, and there’s caviar, and there’s maybe potato salad—pretty close, anyway—and I think that stuff in the back is knishes, but I don’t know if they’re any good or not. I think the ham’s real. I don’t guarantee anything else.”

“What’s the pink stuff in the bowl?”

“You try it and tell me. Anyway,” he added, “congratulations. You knocked ’em dead. How much you making on this?”

I blinked at him. My incarnation as opera star had so far submerged the accountant persona that I’d almost forgotten that I had a financial stake in our success. “You know about my contract?”

He nodded. “Three and a half percent of the gross. Everybody knows that one now, Nolly. You be gettin’
rich.
You got old Samuel duckin’ and hidin’ when one of us comes near him, ’cause everybody else wants a new contract now, too. So I guess we forget all that other stuff? You know? What we were talking about, down by the waterfall? Now that you signin’ on for permanent party here, I mean?” Tricia swallowed a mouthful of caviar to say, “Please, Conjur, don’t start that business again.”

“I ain’t starting nothing,” he protested. “I’m just makin’ a comment on the passing scene, you know?”

“I haven’t forgotten,” I told him stiffly. “It’s just that nothing has changed, has it?” And I didn’t wait for an answer; I took Tricia by the arm and led her out onto the dance floor.

But what I said wasn’t really true. I had forgotten. And at that moment, still glowing from my applause, with Tricia Madigan light and warm in my arms, I didn’t want to be reminded of anything about the planet Earth.

The party was slow to pick up momentum, largely because all the aliens were knotted around the Andromeda skry. But at last Binnda remembered the reason for the party and came over to the buffet with Barak. He was happily waving his arms about as he greeted me.

“What a night!” he cried, the green tongue flickering joyously in and out of the hideous little triangular mouth. “I can hardly believe that everything is going so well! The probe is locked in again—oh, it was worrying us there for a moment, because it looked as though we were losing synchronization—and, of course, Nolly, you are the star of the evening!” He raised himself as high as he could to look over the buffet. He spotted the pink stuff and took a plate. “Did you
hear
the applause you got? You were a real sensation, my boy!”

I saw an opportunity and pressed it, “About that. How many people were at the performance tonight, do you know?”

“Oh, nearly eight thousand, I think,” he said, ladling pink slop onto his dish.

“And what was the take?”

He paused and looked up at me. “The take?”

“The box-office receipts. The money that I’m supposed to get three and a half percent of,” I explained.

The three-cornered mouth worked irritably. “My dear Nolly! I know nothing of such things! Sam Shipperton will explain it all when we return, I’m sure. And, really, my boy, how can you trouble me with this at this time? This is one of the happiest days in my life, what with your performance and the way the Andromeda probe is going—”

“Yeah,” I said, sticking to the point. “But Shipperton isn’t here to ask anything. Can’t you tell me roughly what the box office was in U.S. dollars?”

“Absolutely not!” Then he relented. “If you’re really curious, you could ask Floyd Morcher; he’s always been interested in such things.”

“Morcher?” I asked, startled.

“Yes, of course Morcher. It’s that ‘church’ of his. He what he calls ‘tithes’ to that religious thing on your The Earth, and he is always checking the Polyphase Index to see how much they’re getting.”

He upended the dish and poured slop into his mouth to put an end to that subject. I peered around but didn’t see Morcher. Then Barak, disdaining the food, reached out with a silvery tentacle to remind me he was present. “Good-performance,” he belched in my face, “even-if-not… Busoni
Turandot.”

I took the tip of the tentacle he offered me; I suppose it was meant as a handshake. “Maybe we’ll do that one later,” I said, hoping not. I appreciated the congratulations, but his breath was as bad as his public-toilet-in-a-bus-terminal body odor.

“Especially-liked … dark-and-light-skinned-persons … calisthenics,” he added. “They-do-more-now?”

Well, you don’t expect a silvery starfish to have good taste. But all the same! Imagine preferring jitterbugging to
Pagliacci
! “I’ll suggest it to them,” I promised, in order to get away. “I see Conjur over there, talking to Ugolino.” When I got there I found that actually it was Ugolino who was doing the talking. He was telling our new bass, de Negras, and a couple of Ptrreek about the good old days when he was primo soprano for the court of the Cardinal d’Especcio in Mantua. Purry was busily translating his Italian into Spanish for de Negras’s benefit and English for Conjur’s and chirps and squeaks for the aliens. To do it he had to use one set of holes for each language, giving an entire new meaning to “simultaneous translation.” It was an extraordinary performance.

I hated to interrupt it, but I felt obliged to relay Barak’s request. Conjur shook his head. “Maybe later,” he grunted. “Ugo’s keeping Mr. Tsooshirrisip here happy right now, and, you know, it’s kind of interesting. So why’d you leave, Ugo?”

“Ah, there was this
woman,”
Malatesta piped ruefully when that was translated. “I had with her a small affair of the heart, which her protector, the cardinal, took amiss. It was necessary to depart, for health. One did not want a dagger in the ribs, have you understood? And in Milan there was a lawsuit concerning some jewels, and one did not wish to go to Rome—not Rome! There in Rome the singers were kept locked up for the whole season, so they would not catch a cold or perhaps there too be a target for an assassin, for Rome was not a cultured place at the time! So here I am.” He peered over my shoulder at Norah, just coming back into the room. “Any word of our friend?” he asked.

She said sadly, “They think Ephard has left this planet, but that’s all I know.”

“How can he be such an idiot! Ah, you would think at their ages they would have learned something, he and Canduccio! I wish them no harm, but really …” He put his arm around her, which made her look pleased. “It is simply their jealousy, of course,” he chuckled, in the manner of any rooster who has beaten out the other roosters to the hen.