Tricia sighed. “What we need is a drink, Nolly,” she said, and waved an arm. One of the little Kekketies came trotting across the dance floor, where Norah Platt and Malatesta were moving slowly to Purry’s music. As the Kekkety took our order Eamon McGuire approached me, his hand stuck out to shake.
“You were fine, Stennis,” he rumbled. “Are you getting drinks? Yes, I’ll have something too—a double vodka, if they’ve got it.”
They had it. They had all sorts of Earth liquor, and Earth food, too. As the Kekkety came back with our drinks Floyd Morcher materialized beside us. “You don’t really want that drink, Eamon,” he said.
The bass looked rebellious. Before he could answer, Tricia tugged at my sleeve. “Let’s get something to eat,” she said, pulling me away. She whispered, “Morcher’s assigned himself to keep Eamon off the sauce, but, hey, I’d just as soon stay out of it. Anyway, there’s Conjur by the buffet.” Actually two buffets had been laid out along one wall, one of them at Ptrreek height and invisible to me, the other spread out on what I suppose the Ptrreek thought of as benches, but were actually at about eye level for us tiny humans. Conjur grinned at us. “Can you see what they’ve got?” he asked. “There’s sliced ham, and there’s caviar, and there’s maybe potato salad—pretty close, anyway—and I think that stuff in the back is knishes, but I don’t know if they’re any good or not. I think the ham’s real. I don’t guarantee anything else.”
“What’s the pink stuff in the bowl?”
“You try it and tell me. Anyway,” he added, “congratulations. You knocked ’em dead. How much you making on this?”
I blinked at him. My incarnation as opera star had so far submerged the accountant persona that I’d almost forgotten that I had a financial stake in our success. “You know about my contract?”
He nodded. “Three and a half percent of the gross. Everybody knows that one now, Nolly. You be gettin’ rich. You got old Samuel duckin’ and hidin’ when one of us comes near him, ’cause everybody else wants a new contract now, too. So I guess we forget all that other stuff? You know? What we were talking about, down by the waterfall? Now that you signin’ on for permanent party here, I mean?” Tricia swallowed a mouthful of caviar to say, “Please, Conjur, don’t start that business again.”
“I ain’t starting nothing,” he protested. “I’m just makin’ a comment on the passing scene, you know?”
“I haven’t forgotten,” I told him stiffly. “It’s just that nothing has changed, has it?” And I didn’t wait for an answer; I took Tricia by the arm and led her out onto the dance floor.
But what I said wasn’t really true. I had forgotten. And at that moment, still glowing from my applause, with Tricia Madigan light and warm in my arms, I didn’t want to be reminded of anything about the planet Earth.
The party was slow to pick up momentum, largely because all the aliens were knotted around the Andromeda skry. But at last Binnda remembered the reason for the party and came over to the buffet with Barak. He was happily waving his arms about as he greeted me.
“What a night!” he cried, the green tongue flickering joyously in and out of the hideous little triangular mouth. “I can hardly believe that everything is going so well! The probe is locked in again—oh, it was worrying us there for a moment, because it looked as though we were losing synchronization—and, of course, Nolly, you are the star of the evening!” He raised himself as high as he could to look over the buffet. He spotted the pink stuff and took a plate. “Did you hear the applause you got? You were a real sensation, my boy!”
I saw an opportunity and pressed it, “About that. How many people were at the performance tonight, do you know?”
“Oh, nearly eight thousand, I think,” he said, ladling pink slop onto his dish.
“And what was the take?”
He paused and looked up at me. “The take?”
“The box-office receipts. The money that I’m supposed to get three and a half percent of,” I explained.
The three-cornered mouth worked irritably. “My dear Nolly! I know nothing of such things! Sam Shipperton will explain it all when we return, I’m sure. And, really, my boy, how can you trouble me with this at this time? This is one of the happiest days in my life, what with your performance and the way the Andromeda probe is going—”
“Yeah,” I said, sticking to the point. “But Shipperton isn’t here to ask anything. Can’t you tell me roughly what the box office was in U.S. dollars?”
“Absolutely not!” Then he relented. “If you’re really curious, you could ask Floyd Morcher; he’s always been interested in such things.”
“Morcher?” I asked, startled.
“Yes, of course Morcher. It’s that ‘church’ of his. He what he calls ‘tithes’ to that religious thing on your The Earth, and he is always checking the Polyphase Index to see how much they’re getting.”
He upended the dish and poured slop into his mouth to put an end to that subject. I peered around but didn’t see Morcher. Then Barak, disdaining the food, reached out with a silvery tentacle to remind me he was present. “Good-performance,” he belched in my face, “even-if-not… Busoni Turandot.”
I took the tip of the tentacle he offered me; I suppose it was meant as a handshake. “Maybe we’ll do that one later,” I said, hoping not. I appreciated the congratulations, but his breath was as bad as his public-toilet-in-a-bus-terminal body odor.
“Especially-liked … dark-and-light-skinned-persons … calisthenics,” he added. “They-do-more-now?”
Well, you don’t expect a silvery starfish to have good taste. But all the same! Imagine preferring jitterbugging to Pagliacci! “I’ll suggest it to them,” I promised, in order to get away. “I see Conjur over there, talking to Ugolino.” When I got there I found that actually it was Ugolino who was doing the talking. He was telling our new bass, de Negras, and a couple of Ptrreek about the good old days when he was primo soprano for the court of the Cardinal d’Especcio in Mantua. Purry was busily translating his Italian into Spanish for de Negras’s benefit and English for Conjur’s and chirps and squeaks for the aliens. To do it he had to use one set of holes for each language, giving an entire new meaning to “simultaneous translation.” It was an extraordinary performance.
I hated to interrupt it, but I felt obliged to relay Barak’s request. Conjur shook his head. “Maybe later,” he grunted. “Ugo’s keeping Mr. Tsooshirrisip here happy right now, and, you know, it’s kind of interesting. So why’d you leave, Ugo?”
“Ah, there was this woman,” Malatesta piped ruefully when that was translated. “I had with her a small affair of the heart, which her protector, the cardinal, took amiss. It was necessary to depart, for health. One did not want a dagger in the ribs, have you understood? And in Milan there was a lawsuit concerning some jewels, and one did not wish to go to Rome—not Rome! There in Rome the singers were kept locked up for the whole season, so they would not catch a cold or perhaps there too be a target for an assassin, for Rome was not a cultured place at the time! So here I am.” He peered over my shoulder at Norah, just coming back into the room. “Any word of our friend?” he asked.
She said sadly, “They think Ephard has left this planet, but that’s all I know.”
“How can he be such an idiot! Ah, you would think at their ages they would have learned something, he and Canduccio! I wish them no harm, but really …” He put his arm around her, which made her look pleased. “It is simply their jealousy, of course,” he chuckled, in the manner of any rooster who has beaten out the other roosters to the hen.
The big Ptrreek issued an order, and Purry translated. “But this is all very interesting to Mr. Tsooshirrisip,” he said. “He asks that others of you tell something about your life on your own planet before you were allowed to enter the civilized worlds.”
I looked around the room. Sue-Mary and Maggie were harmonizing in “Down by the Old Mill Stream” near the neglected skry, some of the other singers were drifting toward us, and Tri
cia Madigan was nowhere in sight. At the powder room, I supposed, and wished her luck. (I’d already tried the Ptrreek idea of sanitary facilities.)
The Kekketies were bringing us fresh drinks, and I decided to stay for the stories. I already knew some of them, but the party was getting to the relaxed state when just talking was pleasant, and besides it was interesting. Every one of us had a different history, every one of us came from a different time in the recent history of the Earth, and every one of the fourteen of us had had a different reason for being there. I was the only one who had no reason of my own at all, but Floyd Morcher came close. He had signed up on the promise of finding many, many people whose souls had not been saved; he accepted Davidson-Jones’s offer in order to mission to these poor heathen, and the exact nature of the “people” he found was only the first disappointment he had encountered on Narabedla. Eamon McGuire had been on Skid Row until Davidson-Jones’s people promised him a new life and a cure for his drinking problem. Maggie Murk had been a singing teacher until, along about 1975, she got into trouble when a fourteen-year-old girl in her class blew the whistle on her for improper sexual advances. Narabedla was an unexpected way out, and she regretted nothing about coming here, because on Narabedla she had found Sue-Mary Petticardi. Who was, she said, a little over ninety years old now. Sue-Mary had been a French singer, converted to an Army whore for the Germans when they occupied everything north of the Marne in World War I. She wound up with syphilis and a shaved head. Narabedla had cured the syphilis and given her a career. She didn’t miss her family, because they would no longer have anything to do with her after the Armistice. The Kaiser’s infantrymen had left her with a great distaste for males, and when Narabedla produced Maggie for her, her life became complete. Norah Platt had been sick, too, though with tuberculosis, and when old Dr. Lafourriere came to the hospital—
I stopped her there. “Who was Dr. Lafourriere? I thought Narabedla was American?”
“Oh, heavens, Nolly, nobody was American then! Nobody important, at least. No, this was long before Henry Davidson-Jones and all those; Dr. Lafourriere was a French gentleman, quite old, even then. He’s still here, you know. In slow time, of course, but I understand he hasn’t quite died yet.”
Mr. Tsooshirrisip, following the conversation through Purry’s rapid-fire translation, put in a comment. “Mr. Tsooshirrisip points out that you humans from the planet Earth should be very grateful for being allowed to enter slow time when death is near.”
Conjur Kowalski snorted. “Oh, we be grateful, all right. You just ask Mr. de Negras here, he tell you how grateful he is.”
Purry squeaked in alarm as he translated that. Tsooshirrisip’s reply was frosty. “Señor de Negras violated our hospitality,” he declared. “He was placed in slow time because he was a danger to you all, and justly so. After all, why should he be allowed to travel to Earth when I am not?”
That put a damper on the little circle. Conjur didn’t answer him. He just clamped a fist on my forearm and dragged me over to the bar. Barak intercepted us on the way with another testy request for more jitterbugging, and Conjur grinned and shuffled his feet and said, “’Deed we will, Mr. Barak, sir, soon’s Miss Tricia gets back.” Then, a safe distance away, he screwed up his face in pain. “Damn,” he said. “You got to say it don’t smell good around that one. You know what does it?”
I said doubtfully, “A lot of these aliens smell funny. Body chemistry, maybe?”
“Not Barak. He’s uncivilized. What we’re smellin’ is his piss, Nolly. He does it all the time, ’cause he can’t sweat. So he does like a dog when he hangs out his tongue; only Barak don’t have a tongue, so he gets his cooling from evaporation in that ugly patch of fur by his dipstick, you know? He just leaks into it and lets it evaporate to cool off.”
“But it isn’t hot in here.”
“Be grateful for small mercies, because that’s why he don’t smell as bad as usual.” He picked up a glass and handed one to me. “You get a chance to talk to our señor yet?”
“Not much. I don’t speak Spanish, you see.”
“Get your Purry to help you,” he advised. “Manuel’s just out of slow time for doing what you were talking about doing, and you might want to hear what he says. Or was all that talk about getting home just talk?”
Actually, he was beginning to annoy me. I thought it over. It was all complicated in my mind, but I said, explaining it to myself as much as to him, “I’d like to go home. Sooner or later, I mean. But I wouldn’t want to die for it, or kill anybody else—not even somebody like Boddadukti.”
“Would you want it enough to take a chance?” he persisted.
“How big a chance?”
He shrugged, keeping his eyes on me.
“Come on,” I said, angry now. “Don’t crap me. Have you got some way to do it or not?”
“I don’t know,” he admitted. Then he looked around to see who might be listening and lowered his voice. “There’s ways,” he told me.
“What kind of ways?”
“Depends. There’s lots of these aliens would like to go to Earth, if they could, only right now they’re all too happy about their damn probe to get out of line. Only some of them ain’t as happy as others, you know?”
“I don’t know. Spit it out, Conjur.”
He said, “After we split this place we’re going to the Hrunw planet. There’s a dude there who might be willing to do something about it, if you want.”
I stared at him. “Are you putting me on?”
“I’m not. He might be. I never met the gentleman so far, but we could go pay him a little call if you want to.”
I hesitated. “I’d have to think about it,” I said cautiously. “Why, sure you would, my man,” he said, grinning.
“Wouldn’t want you to stick your neck out without figuring everything out first. Now I better find Trish and do some dancin’ for old Barak … but listen, Nolly. You get a chance, you do some talking with de Negras, you hear? I think you be interested.”
Barak finally got his wish. A band appeared and struck up “Rock Around the Clock” and switched to “Shaboom” in the authentic Crew Cuts style—of course, it was all Purry, piping away behind the hologrammed musicians—and Tricia and Conjur did their thing. I had another drink while I watched them, turning over what Conjur had said in my mind. It was very unlikely, I told myself, that Conjur had a lead on any plan that would work—after all, nobody had ever got back from Narabedla before, had they?
Then, when they came off, the band kept going. Conjur’s annoying persistence drifted to the back of my mind as I watched the gruesome spectacle of half a dozen Ptrreeks lumbering around the middle of the room as they tried to do what some of the opera troupe were doing. They seemed to be having fun.
I tried it myself, with Norah Platt, and then with Maggie Murk—well, not the real jitterbugging, the sort of prom-chaperone’s attempt to be one of the kids. I took time out for a little more champagne.
Then I switched to the bourbon (real bourbon) and ginger ale (the bottles had actual Schweppes labels on them) and, by gosh, it wasn’t such a bad party after all.
I even went around the floor a couple of times with Tricia, though it was obvious I wasn’t up to Conjur Kowalski’s standards. Besides, it was what she was doing for a living. When I suggested we sit the next one out she gave me a hug. “The other thing we could do,” she said, “is, hey, we could split. You want to take me home, Nolly?”
Well, there was only one answer to that. I hesitated just for a second, remembering something. “I did want to talk to Floyd Morcher,” I said.
“Oh, he’s been gone for hours—took after Eamon, trying to keep him sober. We don’t need to do that, though. Bring the bottle, why don’t you?”
Actually, we each took one. I didn’t want to try those midair passages again with all that liquor sloshing around in me, so we took the “elevator” down to the “lobby” and strolled across the now dark space (both suns were out of the sky) to ou
r own tower. Even at that hour there were Ptrreek about, some of them gathered about another skry with the Andromeda probe still looping around its star, others going about whatever business might engage a Ptrreek.’ They looked at us the way vacationing senior citizens on Earth look at conventioneers in any Hilton or Hyatt, only these particular respectable “hotel” guests were fourteen feet tall. We waved amiably at them and continued on our way.
At Tricia’s door she said, “Coming in for a minute?”
There was only one answer to that, too. We popped the cork of the first bottle—both of them were champagne—and drifted over to her window. Tricia had shoved a sort of coffee-table-sized thing against the wall. We climbed up on it and looked out. There were about a million stars in the dark sky. Tricia leaned against me. I put my arm around her, and one thing led to another.
Why, I thought in pleased surprise, it certainly looks like the operation was a complete success.
Indeed it was. Although I’d never made love in a hammock before, it worked out just fine. And I didn’t think about the missing Ephard Joyce or about the probe to the Andromeda nebula or about what to say to Conjur Kowalski if he brought up the subject of going home again or, in fact, about much of anything else outside that hot, swaying, alien room for all the rest of that long night.
CHAPTER
33
The next day was, I guess, about the happiest of my life. And Tricia seemed to second the motion.
Reason told me that going to bed with me probably was not really the most earthshaking event ever in Tricia Madigan’s experience. I knew of at least two of her quite recent lovers. She had not been sexually deprived. But reason just didn’t enter into it. For me it was—oh—it was the first glorious day of a wonderful spring, after a winter that had lasted for a dozen long years. And the funniest thing was that I felt, well, guilty. Not about the morality of it, or anything like that. About Tricia’s cousin Irene.