Narabedla Ltd (25 page)

That ended the war. The only Bach’het to survive were the few remaining from the invasion forces. The Duntidons didn’t come out of it too well, either, because a year or so later, when the shock wave radiation from the Bach’het nova reached their own planet, their unprotected biota got pretty well fried.

The Ggressna didn’t care for people blowing up other people’s stars. Their first impulse was to wipe out the Duntidons. The Mothers dissuaded them; and so they offered the Duntidons membership in a federation, on condition that they submit to antiwar control and inspection; and that was the beginning of the Associated Peoples. Then (skipping to the present) the few remaining Bach’het, now multiplied to a million or so and living in scattered colonies on other people’s planets, wanted a homeland of their own, and so they had laid claim to a recently discovered planet.

That was the Bach’het affair. It had taken me half an hour to find it all out, and it was getting close to time for Norah Platt to come by to escort me to the day’s rehearsals.

What had I learned?

Nothing very useful, as far as I could see. The big question was whether I could get home. The bedbugs were the key to that, I decided; and so I went back to the Tlottas.

By the time there was a scratching at my door I had learned a lot about the Tlottas. They were the peacekeepers of the Associated Peoples. The bedbugs, the “Eyes of the Mother,” had the free run of everything, everywhere. They saw everything, and reported back to their Mothers; and the Mothers were insatiably curious.

I had a question for Norah when I opened the door, but it wasn’t Norah who was gazing up at me cheerfully. It was my little ocarina friend, Purry. “Good morning, Mr. Stennis,” he caroled. “I hope you had a pleasant night?”

“Marvelous,” I said. “Where’s Norah?”

“I’m sorry to say that Ms. Platt isn’t feeling well today,” he informed me, “so I’ve come to take you to the rehearsal.” 

“It’s on, then?”

“Oh, yes, Mr. Stennis. Meretekabinnda finished his business with the committee on the Andromeda probe. He specially asked me to tell you that he’s counting on you to be there this morning. He has a surprise for you.”

“A surprise?”

“Actually,” said Purry happily, “two surprises, but I think it’s all right for me to tell you one of them. He’s got the sets for
Idomeneo,
and he’s really anxious to have your opinion of them.”

So once again the opera singer took over from the dedicated dissident in my mind. I got to the rehearsal hall eager to find out what the “surprise” was, and then even that faded in my mind as I saw what was going on. I was
entranced
at what was happening there.

They were running through the whole of
Idomeneo,
as before. But it was not like any first run-through I had ever seen on Earth. In my experience, no one on Earth would have had a costume yet. In early run-throughs you’re likely to get your Brünnhilde in a miniskirt and your Queen of the Night with curlers in her hair. The Commendatore doesn’t come through a trapdoor out of hell. He ducks under the outstretched arm of a stagehand to deliver his doom-laden lines. And, of course, they do it all on a perfectly bare stage.

That’s how it goes on Earth.

On Narabedla that (as with most other things) was very different. The principal singers all did have costumes; they were busy getting into them when I got there. Those remote-control clothes-producers had been busy all night, I supposed, and gaudy threads indeed they had produced. Mozart would have been delighted.

And then there were the sets.

The sets! But “sets” is the wrong word. On Narabedla they didn’t use the conventional flats and backdrops. What they used were something very like holograms. You could see them. You couldn’t touch them; there was nothing there to touch, nothing but light. When Binnda commanded, “Sets on!” they sprang up out of nowhere. I moved around the sets, staring at them. They were utterly solid-looking. And really three-dimensional; from out in the audience seats, or even from any corner of the stage itself, they looked incredibly and opulently
real.

When the first
Idomeneo
scene appeared 1 gasped. Even the other singers looked startled, and Binnda was in heaven. “Do you like it?” he begged the cast, almost hopping with pleasure. “Here, look at the others!” And, as one by one they flashed into being, he catalogued them for us. “The throne room is from the La Scala production, the opening of the second act is copied from Bournemouth, and the last one is taken from the Leningrad Kirov Theater; I took the original pictures myself!”

There was a murmur of appreciation from the singers— almost unanimous. The exception was the Electra. She sniffed frostily. She was the dark, cadaverous-looking one, and her name (I got Purry to remind me) was Sue-Mary Pet-ticardi.
“Idomeneo,”
she said—she had just the trace of an accent, maybe French—“is set on the ancient Greek island of Crete, not in Egypt. I recognize that throne set. It does not at all belong to this opera. It comes from
Aida.”

Binnda pouted. “In our view,” he explained, “the set is quite authentic. It faithfully represents your The Earth. Now! Places! First act! Purry, the overture, if you please!”

Norah Platt came limping in while they were still singing and sat down quietly next to me. I didn’t ask her how she was; I could see by the strain on her face that her “old bones” were giving her fits. When they had finished the run-through Binnda disappeared for a moment to confer with somebody, and I walked around, congratulating the cast. I meant every word. They had been, well, sublime.

Then Binnda came back in. “We have time,” he said, “for a quick run-through of our second opera. It will be
Pagliacci.
The Kekketies have the scores.”

That’s how I found out what the second surprise was. We were rehearsing
Pagliacci,
and I was to sing the Tonio.

“But I’m not ready, Binnda,” I complained, half happy, half struck with sudden stage fright.

“No, of course,” he agreed. “Don’t worry about it. Simply do not sing too loud. And shall I tell you the other half of your surprise? Our third opera is to be again Mozart— the Mother has requested that—and it will be
Don Giovanni,
with you singing the Don!” He grinned at me happily, the bright green tongue licking out of that horrid little mouth.

It was an ugly enough spectacle, but I could have kissed him. “Remember that you are not quite ready yet, dear boy,” he cautioned. “So if you sing too loudly it will throw the other singers off.”

“But you will be singing with the rest of them very soon,” promised Norah Platt, putting a motherly hand on my shoulder, and Malatesta echoed, in Italian, “Subito, subito cantare bellissimo, Knoll-a-wood!”

It was a heartening vote of confidence, but not unanimous. Floyd Morcher, who was singing the Canio, remained his usual isolated self, vocalizing at half voice off in one corner of the stage, and the Silvio was a man I had not met before named Rufus Connery. He didn’t speak at all, only stood there with hostile patience, waiting for the rehearsal to begin. But I was pretty sure that I knew why that was. It was not necessarily that he thought I sang like a skunk. It was just that he was the other baritone in the troupe. I had sung the Silvio to somebody else’s Tonio often enough to understand that Connery was not very likely to admire the voice of whoever was singing the larger role.

For I was the Tonio, all right. I got to open with the show-stopping Prologue; and, when we at last started, with Malatesta alternately nodding and frowning at me, signing when I should breathe and urging the top tones out of my mouth, I really did it pretty well.

I felt, almost, at home.

If there is a world composed more nearly completely of make-believe than the world of opera, I cannot imagine what it is. The stories of the operas are preposterous. The singers rarely look as though they could possibly feel and do what the roles require—the fifty-year-old Mimis and plump little Siegfrieds are chosen for voice, not plausibility. The swords are wood, the daggers are rubber, the sets are plywood and paint. (On Earth they are. On Narabedla, the sets were not even that much, being those mere immaterial shapes of light.) There is almost nothing in opera that is “real,” and yet out of all this hocus-pocus and sham comes—well—
beauty.

And anyway, although opera is a make-believe world, it is the world I had all my life wanted to live in. I actually
enjoyed
Rufus Connery’s resentment. I was pleased to make an appointment to be fitted for my costumes. I let one of the Kekkety servants make me up for my role as Tonio. The greasepaint smelled good. I was home.

It almost made me forget about the cluster of spectators I had passed in Execution Square, all watching with critical interest something I turned my head away from.

Pagliacci
is a short opera with a small principal cast—two baritones, two tenors, and a soprano. The Nedda was the pretty little Valley Girl, Maggie Murk; the second tenor, the Beppe, was Dmitri Arkashvili, the Russian who had sung the High Priest in the
Idomeneo
rehearsal; and, once again, they were all really good. Ruggiero Leoncavallo would have been pleased—if, also, totally freaked out by, for example, the likes of Binnda.

In the breaks I made it a point to chat with the Nedda and get on friendly terms—she has to hit me in the face with a whip, and I didn’t want her to mean it—and tried to do the same with Morcher and Rufus Connery, just to keep the tension down among the cast. Connery was only professionally jealous; he would get over it by and by, I thought. Morcher simply did not choose to talk.

But his
Vesti la giubba
was as good as any I had ever heard, and that catch of the breath and controlled sob when he sings “Laugh, clown” was—well—beautiful. And it was, all in all, a happy time, right up to the moment when one of the Mother’s little bedbugs skittered in to paw at Binnda for attention. When Binnda had listened to its message he clapped his snaky little hands and said:

“Ladies! Gentlemen! The Execution is finishing now! We will adjourn the rehearsals until tomorrow so that we can all go to watch the end of it!”

I don’t know why I went there.

I didn’t want to. I didn’t know exactly what I was going to see, and didn’t believe for a second that, whatever it was, I would enjoy seeing it; but everybody else was going. So I went along.

I found myself on the fringes of the Square. Maggie Murk and her tall, skinny friend, Sue-Mary Petticardi, were on one side of me, Floyd Morcher on the other. Together we were pressing forward to stare through the crowd.

It didn’t at first look much different from the quick, revolted glimpse I’d had that morning. The monster’s teeth were buried deep in Jerry Harper’s throat; the razor talons were slicing through his breast, bones and all; Jerry Harper’s face—well, I didn’t like to look at Jerry Harper’s face. I cannot enjoy the expression of agony.

The Square was densely packed with people—a good many of them not precisely people, in the human sense. Barak was there, elevated on the tips of his silvery starfish arms, the eyes roving all over and the stench as bad as ever. So were a couple of other aliens of the tall, black, praying-mantis type, and a few of kinds I had not seen before. There was a lot of conversation from the crowd, not all of it in English, or even in any human language at all. Barak in particular was gasping away in that high-energy, breathy way of his that sounded like a tire pump given voice, but he wasn’t speaking English. He lifted two of his arms commandingly to wave a space through the crowd, and a group of the little Kekkety folk came trotting through with various items—some with folded-up cloth, one carrying a glittery silver and crystal machine. They set the machine down next to the “statue.”

Barak choked out a sentence of command.

The servant at the machine did something to it. There was a quick orange-colored emission from the machine—I suppose it was light, but it seemed almost to be a glowing gas cloud—that sprang from the machine and spread to envelope the statue.

And then the statue—came alive.

It was like a stop-motion still on a television program suddenly returned to normal action. The monster’s great tail flailed about. The pointed head with the dagger teeth shook back and forth as it chopped at Jerry Harper’s throat. Sounds came out—a muffled roaring from the monster, a terrible gurgling moan from Harper as he tried to struggle away.

Then Harper went limp. The Duntidon raised its head and growled something that I knew was speech, though not in any language I had ever understood. One of the Kekkety folk silently handed it a towel, and it fastidiously began to wipe Jerry Harper’s blood off its face and talons.

Floyd Morcher said exultantly beside me, “An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, a life for a life!”

Maggie Murk said, “Oh, Sue-Mary, I think I’m going to be sick!”

The servants unrolled a sort of body bag; two of them began to stuff what was left of Jerry Harper into it, while the others began to mop up the mess on the floor of the Square.

And Tricia Madigan reached forward to tug at my shoulder. “Had enough, Nolly? We’re not doin’ no good here, and there’s going to be a bunch of people at Wanda’s Place. How about if you and I and Conjur go off and crawl a couple of bars?”

Wanda’s Place turned out to be the sort of refreshment place I had visited with Purry, but we didn’t stay there. Conjur Kowalski took one look inside and shook his head. “Too crowded,” he said. “We goin’ home.” He stalked ahead of us to the go-box, and where we wound up was at his personal pad.

Conjur didn’t say much on the way. Neither did Tricia, because she was pouting over missing the excitement of the post-execution crowd at Wanda’s Place. Neither did I, because I was trying to make sure that the queasy bustling sensation in my stomach was not going to lead to throwing up.

It is not every day that you see a helpless human being eaten up by a monster from outer space.

I concentrated my attention on Conjur Kowalski. He seemed to be as affected as I was by Jerry Harper’s messy murder, but it took him a different way. Smoldering rather than sick. Conjur had a lot to smolder with. He was six long feet and ten skinny inches tall. His hands could wrap around a basketball the way I held an orange. He threw the door to his pad open and declared, “There be the booze, lady, and we wants us some
now.”