Narabedla Ltd (41 page)

I wondered what I was going to do with my day.

The night’s opera was
Idomeneo
again, meaning both Tricia and I were off. It would have been a good time to do some sightseeing in the Ptrreek city, but when I leaned over to suggest it to Tricia she shook her head. Not while the blue sun was up, she said; she sunburned too easily. Not after it had set and only the red sun was in the sky, either, because then the opera would be on, and we owed it to Binnda to show up to watch it. I’d been complaining I hadn’t been getting any exercise anyway, she pointed out, so why didn’t I catch Conjur and find a place where the two of us could work out?

So I did.

We settled down in the place where we’d been having the cast parties; the room had been stripped bare after it had been cleaned up. It wasn’t like Conjur’s private gym, but he’d persuaded Binnda to include a basketball and a few other odds and ends with the theatrical baggage. We played a little racketball (no lines, no court, but plenty of room to swing in the high-ceilinged Ptrreek room) and went a couple of rounds with the big gloves to work up a sweat, with Ptrreek drifting in and out to stare at us. While we were jogging around to cool out Conjur panted, “Were you listening to Manuel at breakfast?”

“More or less,” I said. “It sounded like a lot of nothing to do. I wonder how poor Joyce is making out.”

“Screw poor Joyce,” he said dispassionately. “Did you catch the part about the girl?”

I tried to remember and failed. “What girl?”

“Talk to him again,” he advised. “But don’t tell Tricia.” Then he stopped, wiped sweat off his face, and said, “That’s enough for today. Is that Tsooshirrisip coming in? I’m going to see if he can tell me where I can find a real shower.”

But we didn’t have any language in common with the Ptrreek. I went out to look for someone to translate, but by the time I found Purry and came back Conjur was gone. I asked Tsooshirrisip anyway, and he was amused at the notion. “In the kitchens,” he advised me, through Purry, “there may be sprays to clean things. No doubt you can get under one of them if you wish.” I started to thank him, but Purry interrupted. “Mr. Tsooshirrisip has more to say,” he told me. “Mr. Tsooshirrisip wishes to tell you how much he enjoyed your Don Giovanni last night, and regrets that the terrible news about the probe so badly spoiled the evening for everyone.”

“Oh, really?” I smiled up at the looming insect face. “Thank him for that, too.” The Ptrreek might be an ugly alien monster that smelled like dead roaches, but he was the first person of any description to offer any consolation for my thwarted triumph. I didn’t
need
to be soothed. But it had been a real downer, and I certainly would have appreciated it.

Tsooshirrisip was still going on, and Purry translated. “Mr. Tsooshirrisip thought the absolutely best part of the show was when you killed the old human and he returned from the dead. In the Ptrreek culture they have never evolved the human idea of ‘ghosts,’ and he thought it was quite amusing. Also the presentation of Ossps as what you call ‘devils.’ ”

I kept the smile on my face, though he hadn’t said a word about what the opera was really about, namely the singing.

I said politely, “Thank him again, but tell him, please, that I can’t take any credit for the Ossps. That was entirely Meretekabinnda’s idea.”

But when Purry translated that, the Ptrreek spread his forearms angrily and sputtered what Purry rendered as, “Do not mention that Mnimn’s name, Mr. Tsooshirrisip says. On this of all days, he says. It is entirely their fault that the good work of all the rest of the Fifteen Associated Peoples has gone for naught.”

“Oh, but really,” I began, but Purry stopped me. “Please,” he begged. “It is not a good time to disagree with him. Also there is more he is saying.”

“What’s that?”

“Mr. Tsooshirrisip points out that there is an old saying among his people, which he wishes they had borne in mind when they entered into the compact for the Andromeda probe. The saying is, ‘When you have a Mnimn for an associate, you don’t need an opponent.’”

We saw nothing of Binnda all that day, but when we got to the theater for the performance of
Idomeneo
he was waiting backstage, complete in his monkey suit, the green tongue working nervously in the hideous little mouth. “What a day!” he greeted us morosely. “Conferences, conferences— I shouldn’t even be here now, but I have a duty to you all and to the audience. And at least,” he finished, peering out at the auditorium, “it seems we will have a good house. I was afraid … But no, of course the people who appreciate opera will not hold the unfortunate destruction of the probe against us. Go take your places, everyone, please. I don’t want to start late.”

Until that moment it hadn’t occurred to me to worry about what effects the probe accident might have on our performances, but as Tricia and I found our high-chair seats I began to.

Still, the performance went beautifully. Malatesta and Floyd Morcher outdid themselves, and so did everyone else in the cast. When it was over the Ptrreek applauded it wildly.

“I guess everything is going to be all right,” I said to Tricia, climbing up on top of my chair to see better while the cast took their curtain calls. There were a lot of them. I was delighted to see it, even though they had almost as many as we’d had for
Don Giovanni
the night before. And then Binnda came trotting out from the wings in his white-tie outfit, modestly appearing for the final curtain call—

And the applause stopped cold. It shut off as though a switch had been turned. Every Ptrreek stopped clapping, and the only applause in that whole theater came from the hands of the humans of the opera company.

The Ptrreek were decent enough to show their admiration for the talents of us primitive Earth artists, but they were not now going to clap for a Mnimn.

I did not think an alien could weep, but Binnda’s voice was choking as he called us all together after the performance. “My dear colleagues,” he croaked, “you saw what happened tonight. For the good of the show, I don’t think I should conduct again. I’ve asked our estimable Mrs. Norah Platt to fill in for me for tomorrow’s performance of
I Pagliacci.
In any case, I must return for consultations about this terrible business. That is the bad news. The good news,” he went on, “is that even the Ptrreek can’t deny that you are all
superb.
The tour will go on. Tsooshirrisip”—I noticed that it wasn’t “Mr. Tsooshirrisip” anymore—“will continue to make all the necessary arrangements, and I hope I can join you again at some later time. At least when we get to Hrunw.”

It was a moving speech. Norah Platt and Maggie Murk were crying openly as he left.

There wasn’t any cast party that night, either. When I suggested to Tricia that at least the actual human beings of the cast might get together she said, “Oh, I don’t know if that’s a good idea, Nolly. This is turning out to be kind of a jinxed tour, wouldn’t you say?”

“Not for me,” I told her, squeezing her hand to show her what I meant. “I think it’s just great.”

But in the long run I had to admit that she was right.

F
rom then on, the tour went all downhill. By the time we finished our remaining engagements on Ptrreek we were glad to leave. We were even gladder when we stepped out of the box at the next planet, which was called Hrunw, because the first thing we saw was Binnda’s ugly, friendly face grinning worriedly up at us, with the bright green tongue licking out at us in welcome.

“Oh, Binnda
darling,”
Norah Platt cried, flinging herself at him. Tiny as she was, Norah was about the only one of us who could do that without knocking him over. But all the rest of us gathered around, ignoring the natives and the Kekketies and the place we had come to. It hadn’t been the same without little Meretekabinnda there.

“I can’t stay,” he said at once. “Really, I shouldn’t have come at all, but how could I stay away?” And then he added, almost sobbing, “Oh, my dears, how
nasty
things are! Everyone at everyone else’s throat. There hasn’t been anything like this since that awful business with the Bach’het, and where it will end … But come, let’s find a place where we can sit down and drink a little of this good The Earth whiskey”—he was waving a bottle in each three-fingered hand—“and you can tell me how things have been going.” A place wasn’t hard to find. Binnda simply led us to what looked like a green lawn just a few yards away. It was unpleasantly squishy, as though it had recently been rained heavily on, although there was a warm, small sun in the sky. While the Kekketies struggled away with our baggage, Binnda listened to our stories.

There was plenty to tell him, because after he left we’d had one kind of trouble after another on the tour. Floyd Morcher flatly refused to kiss Sue-Mary Petticardi when it was his turn to play Don Ottavio to her Donna Anna—because that was an immoral act, he said, but more probably because he was upset. The reason he was upset was that Eamon McGuire had got away from him long enough to tie one on, so that he turned up for his fight scene with me roaring drunk. Bart Canduccio had had a terrible screaming fight with Ugolino Malatesta when he’d tapped on Norah Platt’s door to console her over the difficulties Ephard Joyce was in and found Ugolino doing the job already. Worst of all, after our last
Pagliacci
there was something approaching a riot when a Ggressna—not Barak—tried to come to the performance and the Ptrreek had just about mobbed him.

“Yes, yes,” Binnda said sadly, “there is so much hostility everywhere now. But, please, tell me about the
operas,
my dears! How have the performances gone?”

“Oh, very well,” I assured him. “That part’s been fine. I took three calls after
Don Giovanni
last night, and Tsooshirrisip gave us all medals.”

“We all took curtain calls,” Morcher added. “They didn’t care about the kissing.”

“Wonderful, wonderful,” Binnda said, brightening as one of the Kekketies approached with a tray of glasses. “Will you pour, please, Norah? No, not for Eamon, if you don’t mind; Eamon, you really must confine your drinking to when you aren’t singing. And your Neptune? Was that well received?”

McGuire assured him that, really, the artistic affairs had gone very well. We all did. And when the drinks had been passed around we each lifted our glass—they weren’t glass; they were made of something more like the inside of an oyster shell—and Binnda proposed a toast. “To your continuing success, my dears! And now”—he beckoned to one of the eight-foot natives, standing by—“let me introduce Mr. Nyoynya, who will be your impresario while you are here on Hrunw. I will return if I possibly can, but… well, things are really
quite
worrisome just now. Mr. Nyoynya will take excellent care of you, I’m sure. And I’ll be with you in my thoughts always. And—oh,” he said sorrowfully, “I do hate farewells! But I must go. Good-bye, all of you.” And he turned and marched back to the box and was gone, leaving us in the care of an eight-foot creature that smelled of fish and resembled nothing as much as a shrimp made of Cellophane.

I’d read my book on the Hrunwians before we got there.

It told me that this new planet was named Hrunw. It didn’t say how to say that word, and so it took me a lot of work before I could pronounce it well enough to satisfy even the opera company, much less the Hrunwians themselves. I came close by working my lips, the way my grandmother used to do when she was adjusting her dentures, and making a sound like a Hell’s Angel jazzing up his engine at a stoplight.

Hrunw was even hotter and wetter than the Ptrreek place. The Hrunwians (which is not at all what they called themselves, but that I never did learn to say) did not live in skyscraper cities. They didn’t live on the land surface of the planet at .all. The kind of places the Hrunwians liked to live in were warm shallows without much tidal flow, and so their biggest communities floated in lagoons around volcanic islands in their oceans. They didn’t use go-boxes to get around their low-rise, wickerwork cities. (Didn’t
anybody
build with steel and stone on these planets?) They didn’t use cars, either; transportation was walking, swimming, or riding in flat-bottomed airboats, with huge propellers at their sterns, along the canals of the cities. When we saw our “theater” we all groaned. It didn’t have a roof. It was an outdoor arena, like a football stadium chopped in half. The Hrunwians were quite ugly to look at, with their transparent shells and tentacled eyes and nasty little clawed limbs, and when Eamon McGuire peered out at the audience before our first
Don Giovanni,
he muttered, “Bloody webfeet, they smell like fish.”

Actually they did, a little. But after Eamon’s third curtain call—the sounds of an enthusiastic Hrunwian audience were about like a few thousand people slapping clumps of wet seaweed together—he came offstage in a glow, declaring, “At least the bloody fish know good singing when they hear it. That calls for a drink!”

Eamon got almost as many curtain calls as I did. I thought he was milking them a little, stalking ponderously around the stage in his stone-statue makeup, but I didn’t say anything. I did not begrudge the old man his success, and anyway I was still the one that was getting three and a half percent of the gross.