Narabedla Ltd (44 page)

“I couldn’t ask Tricia to do that!” Conjur didn’t answer, just waited me out. I tried a different tack. “What would they do with the stuff if they got it?”

Conjur jerked a thumb at the bat. “You want to ask him that question?”

“Uh, no,” I said.

Because I didn’t have to. There could only be one reason. The Ossps were the genetic wizards. They would know what to do with genetic materials. Human sperm and human ova could be converted into human babies even on Earth, with in-vitro fertilization and some kind of host mother. I had no doubt these creatures could do as well. As to what purpose they wanted human babies for …

I didn’t want to ask that question even of myself.

I said stubbornly, “I need to think it over.” The Purry translated. The bat was silent.

I said, “I’ll let you know my decision.” More translation. More silence.

I said, “I’m going to leave now. Come on, Conjur.” And I turned and retraced my steps.

They didn’t stop us, though my shoulder blades crawled as I retraced my steps. I blundered out the door into the warm, wet Hrunwian day, with Conjur right behind me.

We didn’t talk on the way back. Conjur didn’t offer any conversation; he just stalked along, face like carved ebony, not even looking at me. And I was busy trying to decide if I really wanted to go back to Earth—and to wonder if I were willing to help the Ossps in whatever nasty business they had in mind—and, most of all, to figure out just how to put the proposition to Tricia Madigan.

I
will positively
not
—you have got some terrific nerve just for asking—do
that,
” said Tricia, eyes blazing, face twisted in repugnance.

I said, “But poor Irene—”

“No, not even for Irene! We’ll get her out some other way. Don’t even talk about it.”

“But if we just got back home we could—”

“No! Do you know what the Ossps would
do
with that stuff?
No,”
she said, and got up out of our bed and, clutching a dress in front of her but otherwise bare, stalked out of our room to hunt up some other place to spend that night.

And left me behind, tumescent and angry. She hadn’t even given me a chance to argue.

If she had let me I would have explained to her that I had had plenty of time to think the matter over carefully. She didn’t. I couldn’t blame her for having some reservations about the Ossp’s proposition. I had plenty of my own. I certainly was not keen about cooperating in whatever it was that the Ossps wanted to do with human semen and ova. I knew the Ossps’ reputation. The first thing I did was check in the book Canduccio had given to me to make sure, and, yes, they were the galaxy’s specialists in genetic manipulation.

It infuriated me that she could think I would participate in such a plan without careful study and, if possible, some sort of guarantee from the Ossps. I wasn’t lighthearted about the prospect of permitting human babies—who would be my own children, after all!—to be generated in some alien laboratory, for purposes I did not want even to imagine.

So she had no right to go off in a huff that way, without even letting me explain. It was simply
unfair.

I was steaming.

The funny thing was that the more I steamed the more I began to think that this particular offer, while not a very good one, was quite possibly the only offer of its kind I was ever going to get.

It had been easy enough for me to decide I didn’t want to go back to Earth as long as it was impossible.

Now it wasn’t impossible anymore. Only very, very— well—
risky.

I asked myself: Did I really want to go back to Earth? Loud and strong the answer came back:
Yes.
Not just for my own sake. For the sake of all the captive humans on Narabedla—never mind that most of them didn’t seem to object to their enforced captivity—and especially for the sake of bringing to justice Mr. Henry Davidson-Jones and all his crew.

Then, I asked myself, was I willing to do whatever had to be done to get there? There wouldn’t be any easy choices, I told myself. Nobody was going to help me escape simply out of the kindness of his heart—even if he had a heart, about which, in a number of cases, I was doubtful. I would have to take risks. I would have to do things that were—well— I admitted it to myself, morally objectionable. Was I serious enough to accept that?

The answer was yes.

So then, I explained to myself, I should put qualms aside. The end would justify the means. You couldn’t fight against the hordes of Attila the Hun by the rules of the Marquis of Queensberry.

At that time, in that mood, all those things made sense to me—not least, I think, because Tricia had left me not only angry but frustratedly horny.

It was a second puberty. True, I wasn’t exactly a youth; but my glands were reborn, and they were flooding my bloodstream with all the itches of fresh testosterone. I was ready to join a street gang, fire-bomb a police station, charge a machine-gun nest; I was the typical rough, randy, riotous young male, looking for a turf to fight for.

In a calmer mood I would have been more rational. For starters, I would have forgotten all about the Ossp ambassador and started trying to enlist help from nicer sources. For starters, there was no doubt that everybody in the opera troupe would want to help get Irene Madigan out of the freeze. United, we could almost certainly cajole Sam Shipperton into finding her some kind of a job—she’d been at least an actress, or anyway almost an actress, hadn’t she? Then we should be able to find even more potent allies. Among us we should be able to persuade Binnda to help. Maybe Barak. Possibly Tsooshirrisip, or some other of the aliens—if they could get their minds off the crisis caused by the probe accident long enough to do something constructive. And then there was the consideration that, after all, I wasn’t really doing so very badly in the Narabedla captivity. I was
singing.
I was getting
rich.
Before long there was every prospect I would
be famous.

None of that deterred me. I wasn’t thinking along constructive lines.

The funny thing was that I knew all this was happening. I knew who I was. I wasn’t any comic-book superhero. I was L. Knollwood Stennis, CPA and opera star, a steady, mature (fairly mature) adult human being. That knowledge changed nothing. My glands had taken over. I sat there, with my legs dangling over the edge of that lumpy, empty bed, plotting ways to talk Tricia into donating a few ova for the cause—after all, what other use did she have for them? … or, failing that, trying my luck at recruiting Sue-Mary or Maggie Murk … or, failing that, wilder stratagems still, like getting my costume sword out of the
Don Giovanni
prop bin and putting it to the throat of that nasty little batty bit of business, the Ossp ambassador, and forcing him to get me into the go-box to Earth… and then, once I was back home, leading squads of cops and FBI agents on a raid of Henry Davidson-Jones’s yacht, to do hand-to-hand battle with his troops and Kekkety servants and guards.

I think I would have been happy for a city to loot. But Narabedla would do until one came along.

I fell asleep in such musings of combat … and woke up to find they were real.

I wasn’t alone in my bedroom anymore. It wasn’t Tricia Madigan who was there. It wasn’t any human at all. The people dragging me furiously out of my bed, with their damp, chill, scratchy claws, were Hrunwians, whistling and chirping angrily. The one talking to me in English wasn’t even a Hrunwian. It was one of the Mother’s little bedbugs, rearing up on its hind legs to shrill at me, “Knollwood Stennis! You are under arrest! You have violated your terms of employment and must leave this planet at once!”

Ten minutes later I was being shoved into the big longdistance go-box. There wasn’t any nonsense about being allowed to take my personal belongings. I was still in my pajamas. The Hrunwians giving me the bum’s rush did not seem to be opera fans. They didn’t let go of me, and they weren’t gentle. When they released me from their wet, cold grip it was only to turn me over to a clutch of the Mother’s bedbugs. “Get in,” shrilled the English-speaking one, while a couple of others butted me inside and another scuttled up into the little overhead cubicle to gaze down at me.

The trip didn’t take long, but it was long enough for me to realize that I was in the deep stuff. “Where am I going?” I asked. I didn’t expect an answer, and didn’t get one. But when the door opened there was Binnda, waving his ropy limbs in despair.

“Oh,
Nolly,”
he cried. “How
could
you do this to me? Have you no loyalty to the company? Trafficking in germ plasm with the Ossp?—and you
know
what they will do if they get it! And—oh, my dear boy!—what about our
season?
We won’t be able to do anything but
Idomeneo!”

I didn’t answer any of that. I hardly heard it, because I was staring around. The first thing that caught my eye was a batch of Kekketies at a silvery machine that looked ominously familiar. The second was even more familiar. It was Conjur Kowalski, seated in a chair.

He didn’t look up to greet me.

He didn’t move at all. His face showed anger, apprehension and disgust, and his eyes glared wearily at nothing. And would go on glaring in just that way for a good long time, because I didn’t have to touch Conjur, and feel the slicky, oily
something
that surrounded him, to know that he was captured in slow time.

“Oh, God,” I said.

Binnda hissed in despairing agreement. “There’s a chair for you, my boy,” he pointed out. “I suppose you might as well sit down.”

I managed to ask, “How long?”

He twisted his upper body, as though shrugging. “Who can tell? Conjur admitted the whole thing—of course, once that Eye had been absorbed by its Mother, there wasn’t any way to hush it up, anyway. And with everything in such a chaotic state … Ah, well,” he finished, “we’d better get on with it.” He leaned forward to give me a sad hug, then got quickly out of the way as the Kekketies began fussing with their machine.

“Anyway,” he said consolingly, “everyone knows you are quite ignorant, even for an aboriginal from Earth. Perhaps that will be taken into consideration.”

And that was the last I heard from him, because he, and everything around him, disappeared.

W
hat does being thrown into slow time feel like?

It feels like nothing much at all, except that everything around you goes crazy. There was a quick flash of orange-yellow light. Then something went wrong with my eyes. The Kekketies disappeared. Binnda was gone, leaving only a faint blur of motion to show where he had been. Something slammed against my shoulders, knocking me brutally against the back of my chair. I felt as though I were in a rocket liftoff as, chair and all, I was moved—moved again—set down. No, not
set
down, I was
dashed
down, chair and all.

And I stood up out of the chair and looked around, as Conjur did the same thing from the chair beside me.

I was in a place I had never seen before. It was a big room, maybe thirty feet square, furnished like the ambulatory patients’ lounge in a rather nice hospital. It seemed really quite incongruously pleasant, considering what it was. Two elderly men were playing gin over in a corner, pausing to look up at the new arrivals, namely Conjur and me. Ephard Joyce was sitting on a couch, his head buried in his hands. There was a table along one wall with sandwich materials and a coffeepot, and a plump young man wearing a gold-braided uniform that looked as though it had come from World War I was lifting a cup to his lips. Corridors went off the room, and I could see, through an open door, a little bedroom with a tall, dark woman sitting on the edge of the bed and yawning.

I say I saw all this, but only in the way that you see a movie set on TV when you’ve just switched into the channel. I didn’t make a careful examination of it. I was too busy looking at a young woman in shocked conversation with a short Oriental man. She (as best I remembered) looked very much like Irene Madigan.