Narabedla Ltd (9 page)

I knew that I wasn’t exactly unique.

I knew that in the history of the human race many, many millions of people have been snatched without warning out of their normal lives into some strange new captivity—college professors taken by terrorists in Beirut, farm girls abducted into the brothels of the big cities, Africans captured for the slave trade, Europeans shanghaied onto Moorish galleys. Well, sure. Such things happened. But they didn’t happen to
me.
Although I’d worried about a lot of things in my life, I’d never worried about the right one, because it had never occurred to me that I might someday become a simple export commodity with nothing to say about it.

I still had plenty of worries. I worried about what had happened to Irene Madigan. I worried about what Marlene was going to do when I didn’t show up. I worried about how my clients would survive without me.

I worried a lot, too, about myself. I didn’t
want
to become a member of Narabedla Ltd.’s large clientele of touring artists dedicated to presenting Earthly performing arts to entertain the cognoscenti of the Fifteen (alien) Peoples and their twenty-two inhabited planets. All the same, I didn’t like having failed the audition.

Before Shipperton sent me off with the Kekkety guide he let me run sketchily down the artists’ list. It was formidable. Not counting Norah Platt, the ancient pianist. Woody Calderon, the cellist, and Irene Madigan’s cousin, Tricia, the baton-twirling one, there were six sopranos, three mezzos, eleven tenors, four other baritones or bass-baritones, two basses, and a boyishly slight, pale-skinned castrato, all of whose pictures were on Shipperton’s walls. That was just the singers. There were also violinists, pianists, harpists, percussionists, sitarists, harpsichordists, and a scrawny ebony-black man who played the djidjeraboo. There were jugglers, acrobats, gymnasts, unicyclists, half a dozen black guys who had once been a kind of generic imitation of the Harlem Globe Trotters, and a man who drew in chalk on sidewalks; a glassblower specializing in instant animals; two heavy-metal and one punk rock group (but their war paint, dreadlocks, and Mohawks were wasted on the audiences here); there was a lion-tamer with six lions and a man with a flea circus; and a man who imitated bird calls; and two mimes; and a small but otherwise first-rate ballet company; two break dancers, and a Jamaican who played steel drums.

Obviously Narabedla Ltd. had been doing a lot of business over a long, long time.

And those were just the artists who, being human, had originated on the planet Earth, Shipperton explained. He told me that his office didn’t handle the nonhuman others. He said he was really glad of that.

The Kekkety guide got me nearly to where I was going before I came out of my fog long enough to look around.

“Hold on a second,” I ordered, pausing. We were in a quiet kind of intersection in what almost might have been a small town back on Earth. There were four different streets leading away from the little square, which was a star-shaped plot with a couple of flowering fruit trees. What caught my eye was one of the ugliest statues I had ever seen. The statue was life-size. It was a man, a very human and terrified-look-ing man, and a monster. The piece looked a little like the Laocoon group, except that there was only one man in the coils of the monster, and the monster was a lot worse-looking than any terrestrial snake.

“A bronze general on a horse would’ve been a lot nicer,” I told my little guide. He peered up at me curiously, but didn’t respond.

I turned away from the hideous statue and gazed around at the intersecting streets. The first street on the right appeared to be a sort of Greenwich Village mews, with gaslights and wrought-iron gates. The next looked like a little English village that the local historical authorities wouldn’t let anybody change, thatched-roof houses with diamondshaped glass panes in the windows.

When I started toward the third the guide tugged encouragingly at my arm, and I followed him into it. The street looked like one of those Southern California hillside places with buildings pressed tight against each other, poised between brush fire and mud slide, except that these dwellings didn’t have any carports. (Why would they? I hadn’t seen any cars.) The fifth house on the right had a scarlet door with a lion’s-head knocker, framed by two lemon trees in fruit. The other thing it had was a little swinging sign that said:

Malcolm’s Place 14

Riverside Drive

There wasn’t any river for it to be on the side of, I observed, and while I was staring at the door the guide turned and trotted away.

I was on my own. One of the little black bedbugs paused in scurrying along the street to gaze at me. It didn’t linger. Evidently I wasn’t very interesting. I reached out for the doorknob.

It disconcerted me to find that it was locked.

Shipperton hadn’t said anything about a key. He certainly hadn’t given me one. 1 looked under the doormat hopefully ; no key there. There was no one in sight to ask for help, or even advice.

Apart from being really worn out, I think I was by then so numbed by the shocks and weirdnesses of the previous twenty-four hours that the reasoning and competent part of my brain had just thrown up its hands and gone to sleep. (The rest of me urgently wanted to follow its example.) I couldn’t think of anything to do about the problem. I simply stood there for a minute or two, contemplating the door, until without warning it was opened by a tall, surfer-looking young woman who said, “If you want in, why don’t you knock instead of just rattling the dam doorknob?”

She was naked. By “naked” I mean not a stitch.

The numbness that affected my brain was powerful stuff. I said politely, making no adjustment to the fact that she didn’t have any clothes on at all, “I’m sorry. I thought this was supposed to be the house I was going to stay in, but I guess you live here.”

“Hey, no, I’m just visiting,” she said, giving me an appeasing smile. “You want to talk to Malcolm Porchester. It’s his pad. He’s getting his chalks together, but he’ll be right out. ” She picked a kimono kind of garment off the back of a chair and wrapped herself in it, looking me over the whole time. Then she brushed past me, with lots of touching, giving me another smile on the way. She closed the door behind her, leaving me alone in what did not now appear to be my house at all.

Considered as a home which was apparently not to be my own, it was rather attractive. There was a Chinese silk rug on the floor. There were comfortable leather armchairs on one side, and a table and chair set on the other. The remains of a breakfast for two were on the table; they had had fruit, biscuits, and something that looked like it had been an omelette and made me realize I was very hungry. More than hungry. I deeply regretted the sandwiches I had left uneaten. My tongue was moving restlessly around the inside of my lips. I was just making up my mind to steal one of the leftover biscuits when a big, stoop-shouldered man came through the door from the other room. He was fortyish and stocky, and he wore a three-piece suit in gaudy crayon colors with tassels and brass buttons. “Oh, sorry, mate, didn’t hear you come in,” he said, voice soft but deep. “I was in the bog. Mind telling me who the hell you are?”

“I’m Nolly Stennis. Shipperton said this house was vacant—”

He gave me a deep scowl. “Damn the man! I’ve told him it’s my own digs and no bloody Holiday Effing Inn. Why didn’t he give you Jerry Harper’s place? Still,” he said, amiably enough, “that’s not your fault, is it? In any case, I’m on my way to tour the B’kerkyis for two weeks, so you’re welcome to sack in here while I’m gone. Malcolm Porch-ester’s the name. Happy to know you. Make yourself at home. Just don’t drink the liquor or borrow the books, if you don’t mind—and if my Fortnum and Mason parcels come in, they’re private property, not issue. Has Tricia left?”

I said diplomatically, “A young lady did let me in, yes. Then she went out.”

“That’s her. Tricia Madigan. Couldn’t be bothered to say good-bye to me, could she? Well, give her a tickle for me when you run across her, and tell her I’ll be back in a fortnight.” And, picking up a heavy squarish case with a strap on it, he shouldered it and was gone.

Well, I thought. At least
something
was accomplished. If nothing else, I now knew for sure where Irene’s cousin Tricia had gone.

I slept on top of the bedclothes, fully dressed. There was only the one bed. It smelled of Tricia Madigan’s perfume and of faint, private aromas, and I just did not choose to get in between those recently used sheets. I’d gobbled down the rest of the biscuits and fruit as soon as Malcolm Porchester was gone, and I might have slept longer if I hadn’t heard rustlings in the other room.

While I was waking up, making up my mind to investigate the sounds, I heard my name called.

It was the voice of Norah Platt, my accompanist from the day—or was it the night?—before. When I peeked through the bedroom door I saw that she was standing primly in the front doorway, waiting to be invited inside, but there were two others present in the house who had not waited for an invitation. They appeared to be the same sort of small, brown men, Oriental-featured, that Shipperton had called “Kekketies.” They had skinny, muscular legs sticking out of khaki shorts. They didn’t bother to look at me. One of them was running a vacuum hose across the Persian carpet. The other was clattering dishes in the kitchen. The table had been cleared and the room picked up, and as soon as I was out of the bedroom both of the men ducked silently past me into it to begin stripping the bed.

“Good morning, Mr. Stennis,” Norah Platt said politely. “I hope I’m not intruding. I thought you might like some help settling in.”

“You never had a better thought,” I told her.

Norah Platt was a tiny thing, no more than five feet tall. Her hands were in proportion. I wondered how she could span an octave on the keyboard, though she had seemed to have no trouble when she was accompanying me in my debut before the weirdies. That time she had worn a high-collared, long-sleeved evening gown. This morning she was wearing a decorously knee-length pleated skirt and a less decorous halter top. She filled it quite well.

Looking at her, it was hard to believe that this woman had been alive during the lifetime of George Washington. Apart from the fact that she was smoking a slim cigar, she looked like anyone’s favorite staying-young grandma.

She acted like a grandmother, too. She began talking at once. She told me that she was aware I hadn’t had much sleep and hated to wake me, but Mr. Shipperton had come up with an idea about what to do with me; no, she didn’t know what it was, but he’d tell me all about it. As for “settling in,” she knew what kind of assistance I needed before I knew it myself. I certainly wouldn’t have to make my own bed, because the Kekkety folk would take care of all that.

“You know,” she said, waving toward the little brown people, “the servants. They’re called Kekketies. They come with the house. All mod cons, you know. No, they don’t talk, but they’ll understand when you give them orders. If you want something special, just tell them, or leave a note for them on the fridge.” On the subject of clothes: “I’ll help you choose a wardrobe this afternoon, if you like. There’s no dress code here. A lot of the men just wear shorts. Or less.” On the subject of food: “I’ll make a basic list of supplies for you to give the Kekkety folk. Do you cook? So many men do, now. There are quantities of ready-cooked things available if you order them, and the Kekketies will do you a meal if you like. They’re not bad on anything in the standard cookbooks. I think it’s nicer to make my own. Of course,” she added apologetically, “it’s not like Home, is it? If there’s something in particular you fancy—a particular brand, perhaps—you’ll have to order it, and that can take weeks. Also, you’ve got to pay for it out of your earnings, and of course at present—well, I’m sure you’ll have plenty of earnings once you get started. I mean, if you
do
get started. Can you eat kippers?”

I perceived that it was not an irrelevant question. The servant in the kitchen had not just been doing dishes. Food smells were coming from it, and one of the little men padded silently past us to deal with them. “I supposed you would want breakfast,” Norah apologized, “so I took the liberty of instructing them to make you something. There wasn’t all that much to choose from in Malcolm’s larder. I hope it’s what you can eat.”

It was, actually, very little like anything I would have ordered for myself. There was a very large pitcher of what tasted exactly like fresh-squeezed orange juice—that was the good part—but there was an equally large thermos pitcher of what I hoped would be coffee but turned out to be strong, dark tea. There was a rack of thinly sliced toast (quite suitably, Englishly, cold) and something that, Norah said regretfully, “Isn’t a real kipper, but it’s not bad, actually. I eat the things myself when I can’t get the authentic article from Home.”

It was close enough to a real kipper to fool me. I’ve never liked the things enough to have much practice with them. I managed to get some of it down and filled up on cold toast and orange juice, while Norah consented to accept a cup of tea, talking away as I ate.