Authors: Frederik Pohl
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.
It suddenly looked almost familiar.
It took me a minute to remember where I’d seen it before: In the little maroon book Canduccio had given me. This murderous thing was, I was nearly sure, one of the Fifteen Associated Peoples.
I didn’t like the implications of that. What was the statue meant to show? That we little Earth people were at the mercy of the weirdies? And if so, did they have to show it so graphically? The statue was a work of art. I did not think I had ever seen human despair, horror, and fear better portrayed in any piece of sculpture. Considered as a work of art, once I had psyched myself into doing that, it was breathtaking.
It was also scary, and I was not sorry when I heard the light tap of Tricia’s footsteps.
She was wearing high-heeled shoes that made her just my height. She was also wearing very short pink shorts and a very tight pink top, and she looked just as good with her clothes on as off. She said, “Having fun? Come on, I want to show you something. If we go now we’ll get there while we’re darkside, so you can take a look before the sun gets around.” She did not wait to see if I understood her. That was well enough, since I didn’t. She just took my arm cozily into hers and led me toward that little go-box structure that looked like a comfort station.
As we were entering, she looked back at the statue and said, “Poor Jerry.”
I stumbled. It wasn’t that I tripped going into the cab; I stumbled over my own feet. I lurched against Tricia as she was starting to speak to the go-box control; she felt nice and warm, and she smelled even better, and she didn’t pull away. But my mind was on something else. “Wait a minute,” I said, making a connection. “Jerry? Is that, uh, that thing back there—is that Jerry Harper?”
She nodded sympathetically. To the cab she said politely. “Take us to the Lookout, please.”
I swallowed. No wonder they called it Execution Square! And what kind of a place was I in, if they executed people by letting them get eaten by monsters, and then put up statues to commemorate it? “What—what did he do to deserve that?”
“Oh,” said Tricia, thinking it over and biting her lip to help the process along, “I guess you could say he really did deserve it. I mean, he killed four people.”
“Killed! Four!”
She nodded sadly. “He went kind of crazy, you know? In a way, the whole thing was Jonesy’s fault. He should’ve checked Jerry out a little more carefully. He wasn’t married, all right, but, hey, what he didn’t tell Jonesy was that he was having the heck of a hot secret affair with his ex-music teacher’s wife, you know what I’m saying? And after he got out of slow time—”
“He was in slow time?”
“Well, but when he wound up here on Narabedla he wanted to get back to her. Blew his stack when he found out he couldn’t. He wrecked a whole theater on Neereeieeree’s planet. Then they put him in slow time, I guess—I mean, all this was long before my time. So when he got out he found out ten years had passed, and she probably didn’t even remember his name anymore, you know? So he started acting up again. Some of the guys tried to reason with him— well, they didn’t just reason with him; one of them beat the hell out of poor Jerry because, hey, he made real trouble for the rest of us, you know? So Jerry just waited for his chance and set fire to their house while they were asleep. Really stank the place up for a week,” she said fastidiously, “all that burned meat, until the air changers got it cleared up. It’s okay now, though. Since then they’ve done something that fireproofed all the houses; and here we are on the Lookout. Watch your step getting out!”
And the door opened, and Tricia, smiling back at me, stepped out—
“Jesus Christ!” I yelled. “Watch it!” Because what she was stepping out onto was nothing.
I mean,
nothing.
Nothing at all. Under her feet I could see empty space. A sprinkling of stars and a few brighter things that might have been moons—and
nothing.
She looked exactly as though she had walked off the side of a space satellite and was getting ready to fall into infinite blackness.
Tricia turned. In the light from the go-box door I could see she was laughing at me. “Scary, huh? Come on”— stamping her foot—“there’s a floor here, all right. Glass or something, I guess, but you won’t fall through.”
When I managed to force myself to follow her, one tentative step with most of my weight still on the foot that was in the go-box, then another … why, indeed she was right. There was a floor. A
kind
of a floor. I couldn’t see it. It wasn’t just glass; it was something reflectionless, a lot more transparent than any glass. But it was hard and firm underfoot.
When I looked down, it was like peering over the edge of a diving platform poised over infinity, except that you couldn’t even see the diving platform. Behind us the go-box door sighed closed, shutting off the interior light. The only illumination left was starlight. A
lot
of starlight—I could make out Tricia’s features in it—because there were, I would guess, about a million stars down there, ranging from next to invisible to brighter than anything I had ever seen before.