“Is for all of us a difficult time,” sighed Canduccio. “This affair with the Xseni and the Mnimn, who knows when it will be settled?”
“What affair?” I asked, perking up.
Norah explained, “Oh, it’s been quite a turly-burly. The Xseni and the Mnimn have a claim to some planet, which they could solve easily enough, except that the Bach’het want it. Well, one feels sympathy for the Bach’het, after all—poor things, they don’t have a planet of their own anymore—but there are only about a million of them, and the Mnimn are really terribly overcrowded. Meretekabinnda’s a Mnimn, you know—the little one who was at your audition?—and he’s had to go home to do something about the negotiations. I expect he’ll be back soon, but it’s created quite a stir, I assure you. It’s sent the Polyphase Index into a real spin.”
Sam Shipperton had used that term. “I don’t know what that means,” I said.
“Oh, heavens, I don’t think I can explain the Polyphase Index to you,” she said.
“It’s something like the Stock Exchange,” Joyce offered.
“It’s more like the budget debate in the House of Lords, I think,” Norah said doubtfully. “Ask Mr. Shipperton, next time you see him. It just means that the … well, money— it’s not really money, but it comes to the same thing—is becoming harder for Narabedla to get.”
“Is business of Fifteen Peoples, in actuality,” Canduccio offered with a shrug.
“Like the peacekeepers and the Andromeda thing and all that,” Ephard Joyce amplified.
I put the wineglass down in order to concentrate. “Peacekeepers? You mean they’ve got people on Earth to keep the peace?”
“No, no, Nolly,” Norah said crossly, rubbing her hip. She winced slightly as she got up to refill Canduccio’s glass. “What do they care what happens on Earth? The peacekeepers are, basically, the Tlottas—the Eyes of the Mother, mostly; surely you’ve seen them. They’re the way the Fifteen Peoples have of keeping tabs on each other so they won’t have a war—a very good thing, too, believe me.”
“Like on-site inspection?” I hazarded. But Norah had never heard of on-site inspection.
“You see,” she said, “the Fifteen Peoples have very strict rules about what they can do. Travel between planets, for instance. They, well, they don’t really trust each other all that much, do you see? Narabedla here doesn’t count. It’s like what your people call a free-fire zone. But no one can go onto anyone else’s planet without a, well, I guess you’d call it a visa. It has to spell out exactly who they are and what they’re there for. Especially us; no contract, no tour. So you’ll really have to sign with Sam Shipperton before you go anywhere, you know.”
I was tired of saying that the only where I wanted to go was home. “And what’s the Andromeda thing you mentioned?”
But Norah didn’t know much about it, except that all the Fifteen Peoples were taking a great interest in it, and that was a good thing because it took their minds off territorial disagreements.
“Is a kind of spaceship, you understand?” Canduccio offered.
“Heaven knows, they have plenty of those,” said Norah. She put the decanter down and stood holding the table for a moment, as though in pain.
“My dear Norah,” Ephard Joyce said in alarm, “I think you mustn’t put your operation off much longer.”
“You do look a little pale, dear lady,” piped Canduccio. She smiled wanly at us. “It’s nothing that a good night’s sleep won’t cure, I’m sure.”
I know an exit cue when I hear one. “That sounds like a good idea for me, too,” I said firmly, getting up, “Thank you very much for the dinner, Norah. And for the book, Signore Canduccio—and for the pleasure of your company, Mr. Joyce. It’s been a pleasure to meet you. No, don’t bother to come with me—I can find my way home!”
“Well, if you’re sure,” sighed Norah; and Canduccio said, “Buona notte” and Ephard Joyce, escorting me to the door, patted my shoulder and said, “And don’t forget about the mime parts, old man.”
CHAPTER
13
It occurred to me on the way home that I had made a mistake at Norah’s house; I should have followed up on their talk about Malcolm Porchester and the other dissidents. How was I going to make allies if I didn’t find out who the prospective allies might be?
You can’t do everything at once, I told myself. First find out what this place is like. Then figure out how to get out of it. So when I came to the corner with the ghastly statue, I detoured to stroll along some of the other streets. There was no one in sight, though there were lights in some of the little houses.
They seemed to keep a normal, Earthly day-and-night clock on Narabedla. The bright blue sky was gone. There were still clouds overhead, but almost invisible against a faint twilight glow. There was plenty of light to walk by. With my belly full of Norah’s medium-bad home cooking and medium-all-right brandy, I didn’t hurry.
After all, I had no one to go home to. All I had was the little maroon book under my arm. I was looking forward to that, but it could wait while I sorted out the sensations and concerns whirling around in my head.
Not counting the peculiar sky, the unusual feeling of lightness on my feet, and the occasional peculiar passerby (twice one of those little bedbug things scuttled past me at high speed), I might have been strolling somewhere on Earth. Somewhere pleasantly warm, with flowers scenting the air and trees and shrubbery everywhere.
The place was seductive. Everybody said so.
Still, if this was Heaven, then I was Lucifer, the angel who couldn’t get along in Heaven and wanted out. I wanted out, too, in spite of the fact that the more I saw and heard of this moonlet called Narabedla the more heavenly features it seemed to have.
For one, there were, as I had been told, some hundred other human artists to share Narabedla with. Nearly all of them were obviously well traveled, cosmopolitan, sophisticated. If it turned out that, as everyone said, there was simply no way for me to get back to the Earth and these people had to be my only neighbors for the rest of my life, at least they would be more interesting than the nurses and U.N. employees I’d shared an apartment building with in New York. Nearly all the Narabedla artists were young and healthy. Or, anyway, like my recent dinner companions, so remarkably well preserved that their calendar ages didn’t matter. Nobody on Narabedla coughed. Nobody had disfiguring facial scars or missing limbs. Nobody puffed and wheezed and ran out of breath when he walked a few steps, or had to pull a little oxygen tank along behind him to keep his lungs going. And nobody looked any older than Norah Platt, which is to say not much older than any normal Earth-bound woman wondering whether or not she wanted to give birth to one more child before menopause stopped her clock.
Of course, I wasn’t an artist anymore. Shipperton had made that clear.
Still, there were plenty of nonsinging jobs around an opera company. I could direct. I could mime, if there were any mime parts (and the hell with Ephard Joyce). I could conduct, if what’s-his-face Meretekabinnda or some other creepy didn’t rank me out of it. Worst come to worst, sure, I could sit in the box at the front of the stage and prompt.
Conscientiously trying to give Narabedla a fair shake, I tried to remember when I had ever in my life been in a nicer place than this one.
There had been one or two memorable ones. The Negresco, for one. Then, when I was an opera singer I stayed once in a hotel in California that didn’t have rooms. It had bungalows. Each one had bedroom, sitting room, kitchen, and bath; there was a Jacuzzi for every bungalow and a swimming pool in every cluster. There was also maid service and twenty-four-hour room service; there were television, radio, and tapes; and, if you asked the bellboy in a way that didn’t make him suspect you were the Man, there was your choice at any hour of any of the prettiest whores in Beverly Hills.
Even when I was a budding opera star that hotel was too rich for my blood. I kept the bungalow just one night—long enough to receive and suitably impress two newspaper interviewe
rs. Then I retreated to the Quality Inn at the airport for the rest of my stay.
I had to admit that Narabedla was even better. And it didn’t cost three hundred dollars a night, either.
Studied critically, there were flaws to be found in this Paradise. That imitation “sky” was not very convincing when you took a careful look. The ground I walked on did curve slightly—having been made aware of it, I could see the gentle slope upward that disappeared where trees and shrubs met roof. And yet those plants were pretty nice in themselves. For trees there were orange, apple, plum, fig, weeping willow, birch, and a dozen others, half of them in flower, half of the rest bearing fruit. For bushes and vines there were grape, blackberry, forsythia, lilac, boxwood, hibiscus—I didn’t know the names of most of them. There were cleared spaces between buildings here and there, and some of them had fountains and rippling brooks, with little farm-garden plots where good things grew: tomatoes and pineapples and sweet onions you could pull out of the ground, rinse off, and nibble with pleasure. The air was a balmy seventy-eight degrees, even at “night,” and there were occasional gentle breezes.
It was really a remarkably nice place to be.
I would have to be crazy to want to get out of it. But I did want that, all the same.
When I got to my house—or, more accurately, Malcolm Porchester’s house—the TV-looking thing they called a “skry” was flashing.
It had a screen like a television set, all right. It was that screen that was blinking on and off, with a gentle lavender radiance.
Since Ephard Joyce had told me it was not only something to do with data bases but also something to do with communications, I could easily surmise that the flashing was some sort of attention signal. What I was supposed to do about it I had no idea. There was no dial with channel numbers, no on/off switch, nothing that looked at all helpful.
On the other hand, I didn’t really care. If someone were trying to call me it could, I thought, only be Sam Shipperton. One of these days I would no doubt have to learn the thing, but not now. Whoever wanted me could damn well wait. It was what I wanted that was important, and what I wanted right now was—
Well, that got a little complicated. I wanted a lot of different things. I wanted to go home. I wanted to be in my own apartment, so I could duck across the street to the health club and get aerobic, and then swim fifty laps in the little pool. I wanted to talk to Irene Madigan and find out what had happened to her. I wanted to talk to Marlene and reassure her. I wanted—well, I wanted some things very badly, including the things the mumps had taken away from me a dozen years before; but as none of those wants were in my power to satisfy just now, what I proposed to do was settle down with a good book.
Namely the book Bartolomeo Canduccio had given me. So I checked Porchester’s fridge. Yes, there was a six-pack of ale in it, and he’d only warned me off his liquor, not his brew. The ale was a Brit brand I didn’t recognize, but when I popped the tab it tasted just fine.
I settled down with A Guide to Narabedla and the Fifteen Associated Peoples for a nice, late-night read. It was an attractive book. Although the texture of the pages was odd, the color printing was magnificent. (And Canduccio had said he’d taken it off the thing called a “skry.” So it was a kind of duplicator, too. I wondered if Henry Davidson-Jones had had anything to do with the new full-color copiers Marlene had been after me to get for the office.)
A can and a half later I had discovered that the “Fifteen Associated Peoples” were all exceedingly nonhuman, not to say often disgusting-looking. There were really more than fifteen of them—there was an appendix for non-“Associated” races—but it was the big Fifteen who mattered. They were the major powers, each of them an alien race that had agreed to enter some sort of joint compact.
The only thing that I could see that they had in common was that they were all extraordinarily homely. There were the Ggressna, like Barak, whom I’d already met; there were the Mnimn, with three-cornered mouths, no noses, and rubbery limbs. There were creatures that looked like shrimps (only with transparent shells, so the innards showed through) and creatures that looked like pterodactyls. According to the specifications in the text, most of them were more or less human-size—well, within a couple of feet, anyway—but the only ones that looked anything like people were the ones called the J’zeeli. What they looked like were baboons with scales like pine needles instead of fur. They averaged about fourteen feet tall, with compound eyes and a sort of Mohawk of those needly scales across the top of their heads, and generally weighed (the text said) the equivalent of sixty Earthly pounds.
The text about the J’zeeli said they were originally from the planet of J’zeel (small hot planet around a small orange-colored star); there were 1,800,000,000 of them on J’zeel itself and another few billion on other planets they had colonized. (It didn’t say what I found out later—that they smelled like a mixture of cinnamon and cat box, and the only Earthly entertainment they cared much about was hymns, marching songs, and musical-comedy numbers.)
According to the “Brief History of the Fifteen Associated Peoples” in the book, the whole shebang had got started something over 3,200 years ago, when a race called the Bach’het and a race called the Duntidons had been fighting a sort of slow, long-range war with conventional spaceships over interstellar distances. (Their two stars were only about a light-year apart, but they must have been really mad at each other to go to that trouble.) Then they were visited by the Ggressna, who had a sort of interstellar go-box that made things go a lot faster—well, the history ran twenty pages. I put it aside for later.
Besides the Fifteen there were a dozen or more other nonhuman beasties who were less important. (It didn’t say why.) Some of them, like the Kekkety folk, weren’t important at all; they were just around for the convenience of the others.
One of the unimportant species described was the human race.
When I came to that part I set the book down and worked on the ale for a while. I was offended. I mean, the human race had a lot of faults, sure, but it had done some pretty terrific things—skyscrapers, jet planes, atomic power plants, heart transplants—yes, and books and plays and the Mona Lisa and Beethoven’s Ninth, for that matter. I didn’t like seeing it brushed off by a bunch of things that looked like they’d come from the bottoms of cereal boxes. “Screw you and all your tentacles, wings, and creepy legs,” I said out loud.
Which had an unexpected effect.
The skry thing stopped flashing. The screen lighted with a steady, gentle lavender, and a sweet, sexless voice said, “Welcome home, Mr. Stennis. Tricia Madigan called. She would like you to call her back.”
It seemed my voice had turned the damn thing on. “Tricia Madigan?” I said out loud, and that did it, too.
“One moment,” said the genderless voice. The screen paled. A moment later I heard Tricia’s voice say “What is it?” and at the same time an image took form on the screen.
I was looking at Tricia Madigan again. She wasn’t quite naked this time; she had a towel around her body and another around her hair, and she looked as though she’d been doing her nails.
“Oh, sorry,” I said.
She grinned at me, unsurprised. “I didn’t think you’d call back,” she said. “Well, anyway. I thought after those old farts bored you to death you might like to have me give you the quick two-dollar tour of Narabedla?”
“Tour?” I said.
“Right,” she said, nodding. “Just give me a minute to dry my hair and throw something on. Meet you at the square by the Execution in ten minutes, ’kay? See you there.” And the screen went to no color at all.
She had said ten minutes, but actually I was there in five. Of course, Tricia Madigan wasn’t.
I told myself that it was silly for me to leave my nice (borrowed) house in the middle of the night to meet this rather uninhibited woman, everything considered (and I mean everything). On the other hand, I told myself, it wasn’t really all that late. And I did want to talk to
her about her cousin. And it couldn’t hurt to get a tour. And she really was a great-looking lady, with silvery-blond hair (well, it was, I was sure, whatever color Tricia Madigan wanted it to be) and the kind of body you’d expect on a Texas baton-twirler … and what was wrong with looking, even if I couldn’t usefully touch?
So I strolled around the square, taking the environment in. A youngish couple passed, arm in arm, arguing with each other earnestly in low voices, barely responding to my nod as they went by. I looked around the square—not at the repellent monster-murdering-man centerpiece of it—just trying to make sense of what I saw. Each of the streets that radiated from the square was a different style and period of architecture. There were thatched-roof cottages, like Norah Platt’s. There were high-rent-district ranch houses, like the one I had borrowed from Malcolm Porchester. There were townhouse condo rows, streets of brownstone fronts, white frame houses with the kind of porches you see in old Andy Hardy movies.
Somebody had put a lot of effort, not to mention money, into creating these residential streets on a moon of a planet many light-years from Earth. Just for the sake of having some entertainment? 1 could hardly believe it. What sort of wealth and power did these weird-looking aliens have, that they could squander it like that?
I looked up at the “sky” for help, but there was no help there. It was, I realized, a lot like the “sky” I’d seen in Henry Davidson-Jones’s office in the World Trade Center— for the very good reason, no doubt, that it was designed by the same bizarre kind of people. It was almost comforting when, reluctantly, I turned at last to look at the agonized face of the man being crushed by the monster in the statue. At least the man was human. The monster definitely wasn’t. Wasn’t even a snake. As I looked closer I saw that it was more like a kind of wingless dragon; it had short, stubby limbs with claws like Velcro that gripped the hapless human figure, and fangs an inch long, poised only inches from the man’s throat.