Narabedla Ltd (42 page)

The Hrunwians had never heard of the institution of the cast party, and Binnda wasn’t there to educate them. So McGuire didn’t get his drink, at least not where I saw it.

Right after the
Don
performance, Tricia and I settled down in our room to wait for our dinner. It was officially “our” room now; we’d given up the his-and-hers, because the troupe knew all about us anyway and certainly the Hrunwians didn’t care. The walls were wicker. I could hear Maggie and Sue-Mary murmuring to each other in the room next door. It was jungly humid and hot, but it was at least almost to a human scale, and there was a real bed.

That was a big plus. It almost made up for the food they had served us, which was a kind of a fishy stew, vaguely resembling bouillabaisse, followed by something like fish fritters and ending with a sweet chocolate-looking pudding that also tasted of fish.

“Well, we’re only here for six performances,” I said to Tricia when the Kekkety had taken away the dishes. “We won’t starve in that time.”

“Things are bound to get better,” she told me, doggedly cheerful, but that was a very, very bad guess.

I suppose, really, we had all just been together too long.

Everybody was in a crabby mood. Morcher was on Eamon McGuire’s case about sneaking drinks before breakfast. Tricia was hostile toward Floyd, because he had “church” services after breakfast (how could he know if it was Sunday?), and although Norah, the Italians, and three or four others attended he had kept her out. (“But I
always
go to church at home,” she told me indignantly. “In Texas
everybody
does.”) Sue-Mary and Maggie Murk had a low-voiced fight because the Spanish bass had made advances to Maggie, and when Sue-Mary dragged Maggie away he began hitting on plump little Eloise Gatt. Who was being true to the man she wrote letters to, back on Narabedla, and slapped de Negras to convince him of it.

We were getting on each other’s nerves.

It wasn’t just us humans. The larger affairs of the Fifteen Associated Peoples were a constant worry. Outside of the always-present Eyes of the Mother, scurrying around everywhere, there wasn’t a single foreign alien anywhere in sight on Hrunw. “They’ve all gone home,” Norah told us wisely. “It was the same when it was the Bach’het situation that got them all stirred up. Sometimes I think they’re as bad as human beings.”

“But the bedbugs are still here. I see them all the time,”

I pointed out.

“They’re the Eyes of the
Mother.
They
have
to be allowed anywhere they want to go; it’s the Tlotta-Mothers that run the peacekeeping program, don’t you see?”

“So at least there’s one race they all trust,” I offered, and everybody laughed.

“Trust? Trust the
Mothers?”
Tricia giggled. “They’re the last ones anybody would trust!”

“It’s because they’re so curious,” Sue-Mary Petticardi explained. “They want to know everything. But they don’t threaten anybody, because the Mothers don’t move anywhere—they can’t—and their neuter males just do what their Mother tells them. And their sexed males—well, I’ve never seen one of their sexed males, but as I understand it they’re nothing but animated sexual organs. Like some other people I know,” she said, giving de Negras a poisonous look.

“What you have to remember,” Norah explained, looking around cautiously, “is that none of them trusts
anybody.
They’d all do anything they could get away with. And they’re always squabbling among themselves.”

“A lot like some other people I know,” I agreed.

It was getting to be a pretty gritty existence. I could hardly remember that wonderful triumphant feeling of only a few days before. Depression was taking over. I hadn’t even bothered to count the house for
Don Giovanni.
It was time for us all to go home … but we couldn’t do that.

When we got to the theater the next morning Conjur Kowalski was stalking angrily around the stage, Purry trotting after him beseechingly. “Do you
know
what they have done to us?” he demanded of Tricia. “They have
canceled
us. They don’t
want
us to do our thing for them.”

Purry tried to placate him. “It’s only your opening number they want to cancel, Mr. Kowalski,” the little ocarina piped apologetically. “They do want the operas performed.” 

“But we are not
in
the operas,” Conjur said savagely. Since I was, I tried to be objective about the problem. “Maybe they have a short attention span here, you know? Even a short opera like
Pagliacci
is enough for one evening, maybe.”

“Enough!” Conjur barked. “So if it’s enough, how come they’re putting in a bunch of creepy critters to replace us?” 

“Mr. Kowalski is talking about the Drummers,” Purry explained. “They come from a protected planet, just like yours. They’re really quite popular on some planets.”

“I don’t care
who
they are,” rasped Conjur.

I tried peacemaking again. “After all,” I pointed out, “you two are on straight salary anyway, so what difference does it make?” He looked at me in a way I didn’t like, so I tried a different tack. “It’s all Binnda’s fault,” I declared. “He’s supposed to be with us just to handle situations like this.”

“Damn freak,” Conjur said bitterly.

Tricia said soberly, “Binnda can’t really help it if he isn’t here, can he? With all the troubles he’s got over this Andromeda thing? Oh, heck! I have a bad feeling about the way things are going, you know?”

And Conjur reached out a great hand to clutch my shoulder. “Tomorrow,” he said. “You and me and de Negras, Nolly. We’re going to the zoo.” And he stalked away without another word.

After I was made up as Tonio I sneaked out into the auditorium to watch the Drummers. In my opinion, the local Hrunwian impresarios were well within their rights in deciding that one batch of protected-planet primitives doing their rudimentary artistic endeavors was all they could ask their customers to sit still for. (Or, in the case of the Hrunwians, lie still for, as they watched the performances stretched out at full length on pallets.) We were on Hrunw, after all. On Hrunw we did what the Hrunwians wanted us to do, or we did nothing.

I didn’t try to persuade either Tricia or Conjur of that.

The three of us watched the performance from pallets in the audience—the Hrunwians didn’t bother to install seats for visiting dignitaries. Maybe they didn’t consider us dignitaries. Tricia and Conjur were muttering resentfully to each, other as the show began, and I didn’t blame them. It wasn’t any riveting spectacle to my taste, either. The Drummers were round-bodied, crustacean-looking little beasts, like fiddler crabs, and what they performed was a kind of musical mutual flagellation. They hopped and skipped around to their own music, which they produced by slapping each other’s hard, horny shells with their hard, horny claws. As different parts of their shells gave out different sounds when struck, they did produce a kind of music.

I suppose I’ve seen more boring shows, but not often. Certainly not when I knew what I was getting into. Tricia settled down to a kind of bored attention. Conjur was not even looking at them; he was stretched out on his pallet, staring at the backs of his clasped hands.

Neither was very good company.

I twisted around curiously, trying to get an idea of how many were in the audience. It was hard to tell from our position, but there seemed to be at least five thousand. I did some quick accountancy. The Hrunwians did use money, which helped; but their currency had been falling on the Polyphase Index. As best I could figure, I was only going to get a little over half as much for this Tonio as I had been getting on the Ptrreek planet.

You win some, you lose some. It was just one more reason for wishing this tour over so we could get to a richer planet.

Conjur was still staring blackly at his hands. I leaned over to him and whispered, “What was that about a zoo?”

He didn’t look up. “We’re goin’, my man,” he said. “Tomorrow.”

That was all I could get out of him. When I opened my mouth to ask why he was so hot for the zoo, Tricia poked me from the other side. “Leave him alone,” she whispered. “He’s in one of those moods. Anyway, the zoo’s kind of fun. You’ll see.”

When the Drummers were finished they got a fair amount of applause (or the squishy Hrunwian sound that was their equivalent). I thought, listening carefully, that it was certainly not as much as Eamon had got in his curtain calls— not to mention me—but probably just a tad more than Tricia and Conjur had been given on the Ptrreek planet.

So maybe the Hrunwians had been right to make the substitution, but naturally I didn’t say that. Anyway, I had to hustle backstage to get ready to sing.

Pagliacci
was another triumph. But there wasn’t any party. Most of the cast simply went to their rooms, and I began to count the days until the tour would be over and we would be back in friendly, human Narabedla.

The next day’s opera was
Idomeneo.
Right after breakfast Conjur rounded up all of us who weren’t involved in the performance, like third-graders on a class trip, to go to the zoo.

Mr. Nyoynya had supplied us with transportation. We all piled into one of those flat-bottomed airboats, with the huge propeller thrusting us along the smelly canals of the basketwork city.

It was still hot and muggy, and the dead-fish smell was worse. Our Hrunw driver expertly slalomed past stopped boats and around the heads of swimming Hrunwians. They didn’t even glance up as we passed. Neither did Conjur Kowalski. Considering that the whole thing was Conjur’s idea, he didn’t seem very interested in looking at the scenes we passed. He spent the trip poring over a map, scowling silently to himself.

When we got to the zoo our driver called something, and Purry translated it quickly as, “Hold on, everybody, please!” Luckily we all did. The boat didn’t stop at the water’s edge; it slid right up on the bank, bumping to a jolting stop. We got out and looked around.

The zoo was immense. It surrounded the dead-ended canal, which had terminated in a wide pool with dozens of other airboats drawn up on the bank or zipping along recklessly across the water. There must have been thousands of Hrunwians around, strolling, gaping, hurrying from one attraction to another; couples and groups and even families. (I explained to myself that I shouldn’t be surprised that even alien monsters had families.) There didn’t seem to be any cages, though that, I thought, might have been because of the clumps of feathery trees that almost encircled the pool, obscuring the view. But I didn’t hear any roaring of giant jungle beasts, either. “So where are the elephants?” I asked Tricia, following her toward a gap between two clusters of shrubs.

“They don’t have elephants,” she told me. “How could they? Elephants are too big to get on the yacht. But don’t worry. They have plenty of bigger things, and some of them have teeth and claws like tigers.”

“Oh, really?” I said, smiling. “Where are those?”

She stopped and pointed. “Well, there’s one now.”

And indeed there was. It was bright green, scaly, and at least elephant size. It had teeth sharper and longer than Dr. Boddadukti’s, and, like Dr. Boddadukti when I first saw him, it was sinking them into the throat of an orange-spotted creature with long antelope horns, the size of a horse.

All that I saw at first glance, but what I mostly saw was that it was not in a cage. It was no more than half a dozen yards away, and there was nothing between me and it … except two tiny, glassy Hrunwian young, so little that they wore nothing but a sort of transparent diaper around their transparent bodies, holding tight to each other’s claws and feelers as they gazed up in fascination at the horrid spectacle.

I will say to my credit that my first impulse was to sweep Tricia out of the way and dash in to rescue the little Hrunwians. I didn’t have to do that. I heard a bass bark of laughter from Eamon McGuire, and then Norah’s silvery giggle. And then I began to understand.

“Oh,” I said, over my shoulder, not quite sure enough of my ground to turn and face them. “They’re in slow time, aren’t they?”

“It gave you a real thrill right at first, though, didn’t it?” Tricia grinned affectionately. “All the big things are slowed. That way they aren’t going to hurt anybody, and if one of them starts out of the zoo, hey, the keepers just turn it around again when they close down for cleaning.”

The two little Hrunwians had turned around at the sound of our human voices. Now they were staring at us, their little mouths gaping in astonishment. When I spoke to them they darted around behind the monster, peering out at me cautiously as I reached out to touch it. It felt slick and slightly warm—very much the way the “statue” of Dr. Boddadukti had felt while he was busy executing poor Jerry Harper. “All right,” I said, taking my hand away. “Enough of this. We’re scaring the kids. Let’s go look at some other beasties.”

There were plenty of other beasties to look at. The Hrunwians didn’t bother having any of their own animals in their zoo, or if they did I didn’t see them. Everything I saw was an exotic. Big ones with claws, big ones with wings and fangs, big ones that were hairy and muscular, like six-legged gorillas, big ones that I had never imagined even in a nightmare—all in slow time, moving millimeter by millimeter along the lanes or across the open spaces. And there were tiny ones in cages or pools or glass cubicles, hideouser than the big ones, and probably more dangerous because they weren’t slowed at all. There seemed to be a section for each planet, though I had no idea which was which until Tricia tugged me around a corner and displayed the Earth quarter. An African lion was poised before me in soundless mid-roar. A zebu bull was frozen in the act of cropping grass. There was a cage of snakes (unfrozen), and a case of ants, and a mouse corral, with two or three hundred little rodents scurrying and playing around behind a transparent, hip-high fence. “Look,” whispered Tricia, pointing to a family group of Hrunwians, the parents besieged by their three little ones. The parents (I
supposed
they were parents) conferred for a moment, and then indulgently put a few coins into a box, and all three of the little kids hopped over the fence.