Narabedla Ltd Read online

  “Never mind,” I said. “Let’s get to the food and drink. We can hear the man sing while we’re eating.”

  So Purry did what was necessary to get the recordings going—actually, Canduccio wasn’t half bad, if you like Mozart—and I drifted into the kitchen to see what was in the refrigerator.

  “But don’t you want something made for you?” asked Purry in surprise. He didn’t wait for an answer. “Kekkety folk, dinner for Mr. Stennis,” he ordered; and almost at once the little door that I’d thought was a broom closet opened and one of the silent little men came out. “And what would you like, Mr. Stennis?” asked Purry. “Something quick? There are premade meals in slow storage; I know that Mr. Shipperton always likes the what he calls macaroni and cheese casserole—”

  “Fine,” I said. “Get something for yourself, too.”

  “Oh, no,” Purry said, sounding surprised. I didn’t argue, because I wasn’t really listening. I had been watching when the little Kekkety came out, and what he had come out of was something that looked like a closet. No doors. No windows. It was a go-box.

  When Purry had given the order to the servant, who disappeared into the box to get it, I said, “Isn’t that a go-box? Can’t I use that one, instead of going to the one on the corner?”

  “Oh, no, Mr. Stennis. Human beings can’t operate the Kekkety things.”

  “Why not?”

  “Weil …” He hesitated. “They simply can’t. The controls are not set for them, you see.”

  “But the Kekkety—” I did a slow double take. “Aren’t they human?”

  Purry shrilled in surprise, “Certainly not, Mr. Stennis! They’re no more human than I am. They’re made. They’re what I believe you call ‘robots.’”

  I did a double take. “You are a robot?”

  “Certainly, Mr. Stennis. An organic robot. I thought you knew.”

  “But you can talk!”

  “Yes, Mr. Stennis. I’m din-Kekkety, you see. I have language capacities installed. The servant Kekkety simply have not been made with that capacity. Ah, your meal is arriving; would you care to wash up first?”

  When I came out of the bathroom my dinner was all ready, and a table had been set in the larger room. Set for one.

  Purry didn’t seem to mind. He chattered on while I was eating. “As to this question of ‘unemployment,’ as you call it. I’ve queried the skry about it, to see what might happen if you do not actually sign a performance contract.”

  I sat down, sniffing the casserole appreciatively. “So what’s the word?”

  “I’m not sure, in your case, what would be done. There have been human beings who weren’t artists; there still are, three or four of them. Mr. Shipperton, of course, and an associate of his who helps with bookings on other planets— he’s away now. Also there used to be a human man who worked on the farms—I don’t mean that he did the actual farming, of course. The ftan-Kekkety do that—oh, you’ve never seen ftan-Kekkety. Well, they don’t have language capacity either, but they aren’t made to look human. They’re purpose-designed, you see, like me. But anyway, this human man was employed to help choose the varieties of things to plant, and he tested all the protein sources to see if they were to human tastes.”

  “I don’t think I’d make a good farmhand,” I grumbled, finishing off the macaroni casserole. There was a fresh fruit cup for dessert.

  “Then there was another man who volunteered for one of the probes. I do hope you won’t want to do that, Mr. Stennis.”

  “What probes?”

  “The long-distance ones,” he explained. “Not a really long one. I don’t mean anything like the Andromeda probe, just a two-thousand-light-year one.”

  I stared at the little thing. “And somebody volunteered for that? For God’s sake, why?”

  Purry said, “I believe he was hoping that by the time he got back the human race would have been allowed to join the Fifteen Associated Peoples, Mr. Stennis.”

  “Two thousand years! That’s a lot of patience. And is it likely that that will happen?”

  “Oh, Mr. Stennis,” he said plaintively, “I know nothing of such things. Such matters are decided by the Associated Peoples, and they are quite careful. They’ve had some bad experiences, you know. In any case,” he finished, “you seem to be through with your meal. Shall we continue the tour? Or would you like to meet some of your human colleagues? There should be a number in one of the refreshment places.”

  So we started a good old-fashioned pub crawl, me and my little pet ocarina.

  No one asked for payment, just as Purry had promised. I started with a beer or two, and began to feel the effects fast. My jet lag, or I guess I should call it my go-box lag, was still hovering around, and by the time I had visited three “refreshment places” with Purry, and had a drink or two in each of them, it all began to blur on me.

  I did get to meet a lot of my human colleagues, though. Purry introduced me to a dozen, and most of that dozen introduced me to others—even if I hadn’t had the drinks, I couldn’t possibly have retained them all. We stayed in the English-speaking area, but even there there were a couple of hundred people, and I met a large fraction of them. There was a middle-aged black woman who wanted to know how the Dodgers were doing, and a youngish, serious-faced man who wanted to know if I was right with God. There was a pair of xylophonists, male and female, who had just come back from a three-planet tour and were full of stories about the kinds of places that passed for hotels on the road. There was a trombone player who wanted to tell me all about the Andromeda probe, and probably did; but as I was talking to three other people at the same time I can’t say I followed what he was saying very closely.

  I did see a couple of familiar faces. Tricia Madigan looked in on one of the places as I was listening to a long spiel about how the Aiurdi really liked break dancing but the Ossps couldn’t stand it; she was with a tall, skinny black man, and though she waved at me she didn’t come in. And Ephard Joyce was sitting sullenly at the bar in one of the places. He turned and looked me full in the face. He must have heard that I’d failed my audition, because he cut me dead.

  Purry got me home.

  I don’t think I could have made it by myself. He took me as far as the door, looked up at me anxiously, then excused himself.

  I got my clothes off and myself into my neatly made bed, and closed my eyes. My head was full of strange people and strange things, but there were some familiar worries still bobbing about in my brain. Their names were Irene Madigan; and my good and faithful Marlene; and, a little bit, all of my other clients, any one of whom, lacking my good offices, might be even then strangling in the coils of a particularly savage I.R.S. audit.

  There was one other thing I was thinking about as I fell asleep.

  A dozen or more of the people I talked to in the bars were female, and I was quite aware that never once had any of those women come on to me.

  I was pretty sure I knew the reason why. Sweet Tricia had not delayed in spreading the word that poor old Nolly Stennis had no balls at all.

  CHAPTER

  16

  When I woke up the next morning I had some hard thinking to do. It wasn’t, or at least it wasn’t directly, about how I could get out of this place and back home.

  What it basically was was curiosity. I wanted to know things, and as soon as Purry came through the door I said, “No grand tour today. What I’d like to do is just ask you some questions.”

  He reared back on his little legs, gazing up at me. “Of course, Mr. Stennis,” he said, but sounding a little puzzled. “What kind of questions?”

  I was ready. The little list was all in my head. “Well, to start out, the go-box. How does it work?”

  “Certainly, Mr. Stennis,” the little ocarina said agreeably. “To begin with, the local go-boxes will take you into any permitted area of Narabedla. You simply enter, announce your destination—”

  “No, that’s not what I mean. I mean, what makes it work? What is the scientifi
c principle behind it?”

  “Oh, I wouldn’t know that, Mr. Stennis,” he said in dismay. “My skills are merely linguistic and musical. I suppose we could find the kind of data you want on the skry—”

  “Do it,” I said. I watched with satisfaction while the little ocarina clambered up in front of the skry and began chirping out orders.

  Hard thinking in the early morning had given me a plan, and it came in three parts. First, I wanted to go home. Second, in order to get home I had to find out where the weak parts were in Narabedla’s security system. (Whatever that was. I hadn’t seen any signs that anybody was worrying much about security.) Third, as long as I was going home, why not take something with me? Out of all this wonderful technology there had to be something that I could take back to Earth.

  Not the go-box, however.

  It took Purry half an hour of hard work to come up with anything I could understand, and then it wasn’t any use. “The problem, Mr. Stennis,” he said sadly, “is that the basic technological principles do not have any equivalent on your planet.”

  “You mean it’s something we haven’t discovered yet? Like electricity or the steam engine?”

  “I suppose so,” he said doubtfully. “The closest I can come is to that it relates to something that your scientists call ‘Einstein-Rosen separability,’ but what that is I don’t know.”

  Neither did I, but I wrote down the name all the same; maybe the library would have something about it. “Spaceships, then,” I ordered.

  “Oh, the Peoples don’t use spaceships! Off-planet transportation is just another sort of go-box.”

  “I thought you said something about probes?”

  “Ah,” said Purry, gratified. “Of course. The go-boxes can’t work until there is a terminal for them, and the probes provide the terminals. Just a moment.”

  But that took a lot more than a moment, too-. It wasn’t that Purry was trying to keep anything from me. It wasn’t that he was stupid, either—well, he was a musician, wasn’t he? And I’d never met a musician anywhere who knew much about simple arithmetic (that was what they paid their accountant for), much less things like Einstein-Rosen separability. Purry didn’t have any trouble finding out all the answers to all my questions through the skry. The trouble came later, because then he had to try to find English words for the answers, and, a lot of the time the English words apparently did not exist.

  As to spaceships—yes, certainly, there were two kinds of them for voyages on routes where go-boxes had net yet been installed. There was the kind they used for relatively short trips—from planet to planet, or to quite nearby stars—and they were “rockets.” Well, not ordinary rockets; it took Purry a lot of sweat to find the term for the fuel they used, and it came out as “antimatter.” Then there were the longdistance probes. One was just about to be launched to some very far-off place—ultimately Purry found a name for that place, “Galaxy M-31 in Andromeda.” Those were light-sail ships. They required a special kind of light to propel them, though, and Purry hunted a long time before he came up with the word “pulsars.” “They’re a special kind of these pulsars, though,” he said dismally, and he couldn’t find any way of telling me what made them special.

  The same with “slow time.” The same with the “skry.” The same with, for that matter, Purry himself, and the Kekkety folk, and all the other “robots.”

  After two hours of that sort of frustration I possessed a number of words, but nothing that I could see a way to build back on Earth. (I imagined myself going to NASA: “Okay, folks, here’s how you explore Pluto. First you fuel your ship with antimatter—you don’t have any antimatter? Well, get some! Then you put a go-box on the ship—what do you mean, you don’t know how to make a go-box? Why, it’s just a matter of Einstein-Rosen separability, after all!”)

  I wasn’t really sorry when the skry lighted up to show Sam Shipperton looking out at me. He looked annoyed as he said, “Nolly, come on in. I need to talk to you.”

  Shipperton glowered at me over that flickering, flashing desk. “I’m expecting a call about you, Stennis,” he said. “What kind of a call?”

  “It might be good news, but first we have to talk. You’ve got a problem.”

  “Sure I do. The problem is you kidnapped me.”

  He winced. “Will you shut up about that for a minute? That’s not your big problem. Your big problem is this woman Marlene Abramson. She’s going to find herself right down the tank if you don’t do something fast.”

  I sat down on the chair next to his desk, suddenly alert. Was something happening back on Earth that might help me get out of this? I kept my face calm, and all I said was, “You don’t even offer me coffee first?”

  “Get yourself some goddamn coffee if you want it! But pay attention,” he called to my back as I rose to do so. “You know what she’s done? She’s been to the FBI!”

  I poured the coffee before I answered. “Well,” I said judiciously, “yes, I suppose it’s the FBI that a person would call in about a kidnapping. ”

  “Don’t make jokes!”

  “That wasn’t a joke, Shipperton,” I said, sitting down. “I’m talking about real kidnapping, and maybe murder, too.”

  “Murder!” He gave me a stare of incredulous dislike. “Now what are you talking about?”

  “Jerry Harper, for one. And then, when you took Tricia, you provided a corpse to substitute for her. You murdered some innocent woman just to cover it up.”

  “Oh, hell, Stennis, you’ve got some crazy ideas, you know that? Harper was convicted of murder himself—not by Narabedla Limited, or the Fifteen Peoples; it was a jury of the other artists right here. And that body that was substituted for Tricia came right out of the morgue. Some unclaimed hooker; it was lucky one was there, otherwise they’d have had to do it some other way. But murder’s absolutely out of the question, believe me. Narabedla has never taken a human life. That’s rule number one.”

  I sneered, “Are you trying to tell me that Davidson-Jones wouldn’t be willing to kill somebody to protect his position? Say if he made some big goof and wanted to keep the weirdos from finding out about it?”

  He looked puzzled, then shook his head. “Stennis,” he said patiently, “the rule against murdering human beings doesn’t come from the Fifteen Peoples. Most of them wouldn’t care one way or the other. It’s Jonesy’s own rule, and he wouldn’t break it. Now look,” he said, beginning to build up steam again, “let’s cut out all this crap. We’ve got to do something about this woman! She’s blown the whistle on Henry Davidson-Jones, accused him of, Jesus, three counts of kidnapping, one of attempted murder, and—you’re not going to believe this!—even a violation of the civil-rights statutes, because she says he abducted you and prevented you from getting back to New York in time to vote in some cockamamie primary election there. My God, Stennis! What kind of a woman is this? I never even heard of some of the things she’s charged Jonesy with!”

  I took a sip of my coffee and sat down again. I didn’t even try to make my voice sound sincere when I said, “Gosh, that’s really a shame.”

  He glared at me. “Damn straight it is! If she doesn’t knock it off it’ll be just too bad for her! Think this thing through, Nolly. First place, there’s no way she can hang anything on Jonesy. How could she? He’s got the money, he’s got the lawyers, he’s got real good friends in important places. All she can do is make a little trouble.”

  “I can see that,” I agreed. “So then why are you all in an uproar about it?”

  “Because,” he gritted, “we don’t want trouble. David-son-Jones doesn’t have to have trouble. He can take steps. Is that what you want him to do?”

  I thought that over. I had a pretty good idea of what the steps might be, and Shipperton was right, I didn’t want them taken. On the other hand, I didn’t want to cave in too quickly. “I wouldn’t mind having Marlene here for company,” I said, not very honestly.

  “What company? Is she a tap-dancer maybe? Or plays the kaz
oo? No, Nolly, if Mr. Davidson-Jones had to bring her here the only thing we’d be able to do with her is put her in slow time, and, honest, it’d be like having a stiff for company. Cripes,” he went on, sounding injured, “maybe that’s what I should’ve done with you in the first place. Here I am knocking myself out trying to find work for a busted-down baritone, with the critics getting tougher all the time, and what do I get for it? So what are you going to do?”

  I didn’t like what he was saying, but there was a certain amount of truth to it. I parried. “What do you want me to do?”

  “Send her a postcard!”

  That came out of left field. I blinked at him. “A what?”

  “A postcard,” he said. “This here is a postcard. I want you to write something on it so she’ll know it’s you. Tell her that everything’s all right, you’re just taking a little time off to think things over. And we’ll send it to her.”

  I picked up the card he had tossed at me. It had a picture on the front of some beat-up row houses with some beat-up types lounging in front of them, and under the picture were the words: Hi, mate, the best of Scottish luck from the Gorbals.

  I said, “What’s a gorbal?”

  “What do you care? It’s a neighborhood in Glasgow. That’s where you’re supposed to be now. See,” he explained, “we sort of laid a false trail after they, uh, picked you up in Nice. We got somebody to use your Eurailpass as far as Paris, then he bought a flight from De Gaulle to Heathrow, then a train to Glasgow, and stayed at a couple of hotels. He used your American Express card, so that’s cool, but we want Marlene to get somebody to check all this out, otherwise what’s the use? So write a nice little card for her. Say, ‘Dear Marlene, I just had to take a little time off. Don’t worry. I’ll be in touch later.’ Only put something in so she’ll believe it’s actually from you.”

  “She never will!”

  “Nolly,” he said patiently, “make her believe it. Or do you want her here in slow storage?”