Narabedla Ltd (40 page)

“That’s really neat, hon,” she said, kissing me in congratulation. And then she said the same thing Morcher had said: “But what are you going to spend it on?”

The next morning, breakfast was set up for the human opera troupe in a small building just a step away from the “hotel.” It took us a little while to find it. Everybody else had been steered to it the morning before, but that was the morning Tricia and I had elected breakfast in bed.

By the time we arrived, everybody else was eating. It all smelled good. The place had been furnished with three or four human-sized tables, obviously whipped up on short notice for us, and there was a buffet table presided over by four Kekketies acting as short-order cooks.

After we got our food I led Tricia to a small table for ourselves. “Actually,” I said, tasting what I had ordered, “they don’t make a bad omelette, Trish.” They were definitely real Earth eggs, cooked in real Earth butter, undoubtedly imported specially for us celebrated artists.

She didn’t answer. She was stretched halfway around in her chair to talk to Norah Platt, who was disconsolately toying with a soupy soft-boiled egg behind us. She was sitting by herself and looking as though she’d been crying. When Tricia turned back she was shaking her head. She told me, “They did it to him, hon. Ephard’s in slow time.”

“Pity,” I said, reaching for the toast. It was still quite warm. “I wonder what the weather’s like. Did you remember that I’m singing Don Giovanni tonight?”

“No, but listen,” she said. She sounded serious. “Do you know what Norah says? She says you put the idea in his head, talking about what a hit he’d be on Broadway after a century or so.”

I did vaguely recall some such conversation. “I never thought he’d take it seriously, though,” I explained.

“I believe that. Look, Norah’s pretty upset. I think I’ll sit with her for a while.”

“You’re a sweet kid,” I told her, and meant it. I was surprised that Norah was taking it so hard. I knew that Malatesta and Bart Canduccio were competitors for her favors, but I hadn’t known that Ephard Joyce was in the running.

I left Tricia with Norah Platt. Outside of the hut I saw Conjur, wearing a big floppy hat and squinting morosely up at the bright blue morning sun. I told him about Norah and expressed my surprise that she was so upset about Ephard Joyce.

“Well, Knollwood,” Conjur rumbled, “they all been here a
long
time. Ain’t no man that’s going to last a hundred years, is there? I think they kind of take turns, you know? Only it’ll be a goodly time before Ephard gets another turn at the lady, where they put him now.”

“It won’t seem long to him.” I smiled. I’d already figured out that less than half an hour in slow time equaled a year outside.

“It will seem
real
long,” Conjur growled. “Knollwood, why do you talk about things you don’t know anything about? Did you talk to Manuel de Negras yet?”

“Not much,” I confessed. “I’ve been pretty busy. Tonight I’m going to sing Don Giovanni, you know.”

He sighed. “Talk to the man. Get your Purry to translate. You’d really be interested, I promise you that.” He passed a hand over his face and added, “You know what it’s like in slow time? You never forget where you are. When you’re in the place you know damn well how long it’s being outside. You know it’ll be ten or twenty years before you get out, and nobody’s hardly going to remember you.”

“That would be an annoyance,” I admitted, “but it doesn’t sound terrible.”

“What’s terrible,” he said patiently, “is wondering whether they’re ever going to let you out at all.”

“But they always do, don’t they?” I said, to reassure him. He sighed. “Knollwood,” he said, “you better get out of this sun. It’s frying your pitiful little brains.”

Six hours later, in plumed hat and boots and sword and
cape,
I was dragging my weeping Donna Anna, Sue-Mary Petticardi, out of the purely illusory castle door on the stage before an even fuller house of delighted Ptrreeks.

I had that
made.
I had never been in better voice. The Spanish bass was a grand Leporello. Old Eamon McGuire was a perfect proud Commendatore, and died magnificently when I stabbed him. The girls were wonderful, fiery Donna Elvira, icy Donna Anna, sultry Zerlina; but I rather thought, and got the impression that all of them thought, I was the most wonderful of all. I
was
Don Giovanni—courage of a lion in combat, guile of a serpent in seduction. It was the starring part in the finest opera ever written, and I was playing it to the hilt.

The audience agreed.

At the end I was dragged to a furiously flaming Hell by a chorus of demons. That was one of Binnda’s brightest ideas; the hologrammed demons were actually programmed to resemble the ugly and unpopular race called the Ossps, half lizard, half bat, all hideous. The crowd roared. They kept on roaring all through the sextet that ends the opera, and when I came out for my first bow those fourteen-foot insects stood up for me.

The day had started well. There’d been a little letdown here and there, mostly professional jealousy, I thought, but it had definitely been a good day; and now it was ending with the kind of triumph I had hardly even dreamed of. When Binnda trotted out with the night’s roses, in his beautifully comic opera suit, I decided my life was just about complete … and, of course, that’s when it happened.

The misty “curtain” had just begun to gather around us when, without warning, it vanished.

The applause stopped as though chopped off. Binnda made a sound of surprise. So did I, while members of the audience, halfway to the aisles, paused to look back.

A harsh bright light snapped on to surround us. It seemed to be a hologram pattern, but I couldn’t make out what it was; we were actually inside it.

A strident Ptrreek voice began a bass cluttering from nowhere, addressing the audience. Twitters and rumbles of consternation came from all over the hall. I looked wonderingly at Binnda, whose three-cornered mouth hung open in horror.

“Oh, my dear boy,” he moaned, wringing his three-fingered hands. “What a terrible thing to happen just now!”

I guessed. “Has Ephard Joyce done something serious?”

“Joyce? No, of course not, it has nothing to do with your The Earth. It’s far, far worse than that. It’s the Andromeda probe, my dear Nolly. It’s lost synch, and it’s headed for destruction!”

I
don’t know if the theater ever did empty that night. When we left there were still a thousand or more Ptrreek roaming the aisles and chittering to each other, as the big skry rehearsed the disaster over and over, and when we got to our hotel lobby there was more of the same.

The lobby, of course, was not really any more like a hotel lobby than the “hotel” was like a human hotel. It didn’t have couches, registration desks, or bellhops. It was a largish open space with six or eight cloudy spheres spotted around it, hanging in air. They were the Ptrreek equivalent of skries, and people (or at least Ptrreek) used them the way passengers waiting at an airport would use the coin-operated TV sets, or visitors to a Ramada Inn would use the house phones. They weren’t being used for telephoning just now. The place was full of tall, cloaked Ptrreek, waving their powdery arms and chittering among themselves as they gathered around the globes.

I took Tricia’s elbow and drew her to one of them to see what was going on. It wasn’t easy to hear the voice coming from the skry—the Ptrreek muttering almost drowned it out—but that didn’t matter, because none of us could have understood it anyway. It wasn’t much easier to see the skry itself, either. The fourteen-foot Ptrreek weren’t transparent, and even when we caught glimpses past them we were handicapped by our size. The stay was at Ptrreek level. We midget humans had as much trouble seeing as a three-year-old trying to watch his big brother’s video game.

Wherever we looked, each skry showed the same scene. You didn’t have to understand Ptrreek to know that what we were seeing was on-the-spot news coverage of the Andromeda probe disaster.

“Thank heaven,” I murmured to Tricia, “that it isn’t
our
problem.”

Norah Platt, standing next to her, overheard. “Oh, Nolly,” she said sadly, “don’t you think it is? Anytime the Fifteen Peoples get into an argument their minor joint projects are going to suffer. And of course we’re about as minor as any project could be.”

“Oh, it can’t be that bad,” I said comfortingly. “They loved us. Didn’t you hear the ovation they gave us?”

“Let me put it a different way,” Tricia said. “Do you hear these Ptrreek?”

She had a point there. There were hundreds of Ptrreek in the lobby, and although the things they were saying to each other were incomprehensible, they were clearly furious.

I shrugged and complained, “I wish I knew exactly what was going on.”

“Just look,” Tricia ordered.

Actually, it was clear enough. I already knew that the probe had lost its synchronicity with the flare from the pulsar. What the skry showed was the detail, slowed down and enhanced. We could see the searchlight-beacon of energy from the star fall slowly behind the orbiting spiderweb. The huge, flimsy light-sail probe wasn’t meant for such rough treatment. It tipped and crumpled in upon itself, and each time they saw that happening every Ptrreek in the audience simultaneously emitted a sort of high-pitched, chirping groan.

“Well, hell,” I said, “I see that they’re upset, of course, but I bet they get over it. Space launches have gone sour on Earth, too.”

“Not like this,” Norah said direly, and went on to explain. What made this one particularly nasty was that the Andromeda probe was a high-level cooperative effort, involving almost all of the Fifteen Peoples in one way or another. The Ggressna had supplied the filmy probe itself. The J’zeel had done the instrumentation, with some contributions by, of all people, the Duntidon. The Ptrreek were the ones who had supplied the apparatus that controlled the magnetic field of the neutron star; they were the ones everyone blamed first, because that gave them operational control of the launch. But that just made them madder, because not all of the instrumentation was Ptrreek. The Ptrreek blamed the J’zeel, the J’zeel complained that the B’kerkyi data on the star’s natural magnetic fields was faulty, the Duntidons assailed the Ggressna for making the probe so weak, and they all blamed Meretekabinnda’s Mnimn, who had had general supervision of everything. Everybody was mad at everybody else.

“Look at Binnda,” Tricia said, nudging me.

I hadn’t seen him come in. It wasn’t easy to see him now, because he—and a Purry—were encircled by a score of the Ptrreek, leaning down to chirp furiously at him. Reinforcements of Ptrreek were lunging toward him to join in, like the kind of argument you used to see around the speakers’ stands in Union Square.

“Poor guy,” Tricia whispered. “Maybe we ought to help him out.”

I wasn’t sure he needed it. He had blown a fuse. He stood there, bellowing up at the huge, expressionless insect faces towering ten feet above his head. What he was saying I couldn’t tell, because it wasn’t in English. It wasn’t in the Ptrreek language, either, because the Purry was kept busy translating back and forth, from clicks and whistles into grunts and roars.

Whether he needed help or not, he was getting it. Norah had already started determinedly toward the scene, and Malatesta was with him. Tricia tugged at my arm, and we joined them.

We were not only outnumbered but vastly outclassed. I wished I hadn’t skipped my workout the last few days. It seemed to me that the chances were substantial that somebody was going to get physical, and what were a handful of tiny humans and an even tinier Mnimn going to do against a couple hundred fourteen-foot Ptrreek?

But they let us through. When we dragged him away, still shouting, they didn’t follow. They just turned back to the skries.

“But really,” Meretekabinnda gasped, “it is
incomprehensible!
Everything in the probe was
tested.
It’s not possible that our engineering failed.”

“Well, something did,” I offered cheerfully.

He gazed sadly at me, the three-cornered mouth hanging limp. “Oh, my dear boy, what a
catastrophe.
I must go at once and communicate with the coordinators.” He started away, then turned back to grasp my hand. “By the way,” he added, “you were
splendid.”

And then he was gone, and the rest of us headed up to our rooms.

There wasn’t any party that night.

We went to bed early. I didn’t mind that, but, surprisingly, we went to sleep early, too.

When we came down the next morning there was no Binnda, no Barak, no “foreign” aliens visible at all, only Ptrreek. In spite of our recognized status as, well, as “sweethearts,” Tricia turned down the idea of a quiet table for two at breakfast. She found a place to sit next to Norah, still grieving over her slowed-down Ephard Joyce, and I took the table with the sopranos and our recently speeded-up-again Spanish bass, Manuel de Negras.

It wasn’t the happiest breakfast I ever had. I didn’t blame Tricia for wanting to try to comfort Norah Platt, but I missed having her next to me. The sopranos were no help. They were having a lively conversation with de Negras, but unfortunately they were having it in French. It would have been interesting enough if my French had been up to following it, because he was telling them about his six hours (or fourteen years, depending on how you looked at it) in slow time, but they were going too fast for me. And by the time I got settled down even my scrambled eggs were cold.