Narabedla Ltd Page 5

  In the days when I was a budding opera star I got a number of chances to live high on the hog. I took as many of them as I could afford. I sang in Nice, once, and stayed at the Negresco. Once. I valued the experience greatly, especially when I saw the bill. Which, fortunately, was picked up by the people at the opera festival, because if I had had to pay for it myself I would have been working that week for nothing.

  It was not likely they would remember me at the Negresco, although beyond doubt there was a card file somewhere in the hotel’s guest files with my name on it and the fact that I liked my bacon very crisp. But I remembered them very well. I played no games. I headed for a house phone, got the never-sleeping Mr. Passerine, and said, “This is Knollwood Stennis. I want to see Mr. Davidson-Jones, please.”

  “Mr. Stennis,” he said placidly, “it’s nearly midnight. I certainly can’t disturb Mr. Davidson-Jones at this time.”

  “Yes, you can,” I said. Then I took a deep breath. “I want him to tell me what happened to Irene Madigan. Not to mention her cousin, Tricia, and Woody Calderon.”

  Smooth Mr. Passerine didn’t turn a hair. “Whatever your reason is, Mr. Stennis,” he said politely—reasonably politely—“there is no way I’m going to bother Mr. Davidson-Jones now. If it is important, you can telephone in the morning. After ten.”

  And he hung up on me.

  And I had run out of programming.

  The troublesome part of all that was that well-mannered Mr. Passerine had all reason on his side. No titan of finance wants to be bothered at midnight by somebody who wants to accuse him of implausible felonies, does he?

  I looked at my watch.

  I still had time to grab a cab from the stand outside and get back to the station in time for my train to Madrid—even if one stretched imagination as far as it could go and supposed it would be on time.

  I might even have a few minutes to spare. Time enough, perhaps, for a few discreet private-eye-type questions here and there. It was at least worth trying, so I summoned up all my discretion.

  It wasn’t enough. I was not nearly discreet enough for the Negresco, which houses Arab oil zillionaires and German newspaper publishers, not to mention royalty. When I asked the reception clerk if she had happened to notice a good-looking, redheaded young woman with Cote d’Azur eyes who might have been asking for Mr. Davidson-Jones, I didn’t see her move a muscle to call anyone. She simply said, actually with a quite friendly smile, “I am sorry, sir, but we are not permitted to discuss our guests.” And then, when I looked behind me, there was the doorman in his monkey suit with a large, polite porter standing attentively beside him.

  I left with as good grace as I could manage.

  There was a taxi with a Senegalese-looking driver at the stand across the street. I waved him over.

  Then I hesitated.

  Even the best hotel may have somebody, somewhere, who will take a tip. If I could just find out from some such person which suite Davidson-Jones was in, I could pound on the door until he let me in. Or until someone threw me out, whichever came first, but how bad could that be?

  So why not try it? What was the worst that could happen? I might miss my train, of course, but that would be only an annoyance, not a tragedy. No one was expecting me at any particular time in Madrid. I would very possibly get thrown out of the hotel. I might even get punched out, by either the porter or the doorman in the organ-grinder hat. But the Negresco would probably prefer to avoid violence, and besides, in a pinch I could ask them to look up that old card-file to show that, once anyhow, I had been on their protected-species list myself.

  What the hell, I said to myself courageously.

  So I pulled two hundred-franc notes and my business card out of my wallet and handed them to the Senegalese, patiently standing by the open door of his cab. In my very best French I said, “I must go inside the hotel for ten minutes. If I am not back by then, go to the police.”

  It turned out I was in error, on at least two counts.

  The man I thought was Senegalese said in unaccented Harlem: “Shit, man, you just don’ learn.” And what he hit me with I never found out.

  And that is how I came to travel to the second moon of the seventh planet of the star Aldebaran.

  When Irene Madigan said you could hide anything at all on a yacht the size of Henry Davidson-Jones’s she was absolutely right. She just didn’t go far enough. She hadn’t imagined what the limits of “anything” might include.

  CHAPTER

  8

  I guess I’d better try to say what the second moon of the seventh planet of the star Aldebaran was.

  It was disorienting. In fact, it was very, very disorienting.

  I woke up with a lump on my head (but it didn’t hurt) and a funny feeling that I’d lost some weight. I had. I was (as I discovered later) in the outermost shell of the cylindrical, far-from-natural moonlet that had started out as the second moon of the seventh planet of the star Aldebaran, but even there the gravity, or the rotation of the thing that I felt as gravity, was only about 80 percent of what I had experienced all my previous life.

  One would think—I damn sure would have thought—that somebody who’d been knocked out, lugged aboard a yacht, shoved into one end of a black box, and dragged out of the other a million zillion miles away—I mean, you’d think that anybody like that would be hopelessly befuddled, if not blown entirely away. It wasn’t like that. It was disorienting, sure, but I knew right away what had happened. I mean, all but the details. It could have been Mars or the moon or the fourth dimension or the year 2275 A.D.—but I knew right away, no question at all, that what had happened was weird.

  Of course, at that point I didn’t see any of the really weird ones. What I saw was a redheaded hippy-looking middle-aged man whose name (I found out) was Sam Shipperton, standing over me while he read the note that had been tied around my neck. “Aw, shit,” he moaned, “they’re going crazy back there. What the hell am I supposed to do with you?”

  He did, after a while, figure that out.

  What Sam Shipperton decided to do with me was weird enough in itself. In my opera days I knew a Canadian voice coach named Daisy, who had worked for British intelligence back in World War II. She was twenty-two years old when she finished her training, not very worldly; on her first assignment they slipped her into Naples just ahead of the Salerno landings, and something went wrong with the arrangements. The safe house she was supposed to stay in wasn’t safe anymore.

  The chief of the partigiarti who was her control had a real-life career as a stage magician. He improvised; and that night young Daisy found herself on the program at the Teatro Reale, doing a strip-tease before eight hundred howling members of the S.S. Panzer Division “Heimat.” It was, she told me, very drafty.

  It was not quite the same for me when I arrived on the second moon. I didn’t have to take my clothes off for the audience Sam Shipperton put together for me. On the other hand, my audience was nothing as homelike and relaxing as Nazi soldiers. My audience wasn’t even human. There weren’t eight hundred of them, there were only six. But, oh Lord, I’d rather have faced the Wehrmacht. One member of my distinguished audience was shapeless and slimy, two were spidery, and the other three were even worse. (I mean just to look at. I’m not saying anything about the smell.)

  The man named Shipperton didn’t give me time to get set, or even to eat. These people, he said—he actually used the word “people”—were very busy, and you had to perform for them when you could, because you might not be able to get them together later on. So I performed. I chose a number at random, and for them I sang the “Catalogue Aria” from Mozart’s Don Giovanni—Leporello’s song about the Don’s many conquests.

  It wasn’t my favorite aria, not to mention that it wasn’t even in my proper range. It was just the one that I was most sure I could get through without rehearsal, because I had done it so often in the shower.

  I didn’t have a stage, just a sort of cleared space in a viny, greenh
ousy chamber, which was not at all drafty. It was closer to the temperature of a steam bath. The arrangements were as peculiar as the circumstances. There weren’t any rows of seats. One member of the audience actually sat in a kind of a chair; two hung from tree branches. A little black shiny thing that more or less resembled an oversized bedbug scurried in and perched on the piano as I sang. I was on a sort of dais, or maybe a kind of slave block, rather than a stage. Heaven knows what the lighting system was. I didn’t see any spotlights. The light seemed to come from the air around us, not from a projector, which had the effect that I could see the audience clearly—not in this case an advantage. And my accompanist was a woman named Norah Platt. She knew the Mozart score well. She’d played it in London when it was new. She looked no more than middle-aged, but she was, she told me, two hundred and fourteen years old.

  CHAPTER

  9

  Once my “audition” was over, I got ordered around a lot. For hours. By everybody. It was “Wait here,” and “Get in there,” and “We’ll be ready for you in a minute”—over and over, while I was hustled into things like elevators (only I never felt them move) and out of them into places that smelled funny and looked worse.

  I didn’t really make much sense out of what I was seeing. Two questions kept pushing themselves to the top of my mind. Neither of them had anything to do with the second moon of the seventh planet of the star Aldebaran. The first question was, would Marlene be ticked off at being left to deal with the post-filing problems of our clients? And the second was, what in the world had got into me to get myself into this fix?

  I didn’t have good answers for either of them, or, indeed, to any of the million lesser questions that kept bobbing up. I don’t remember when I noticed that I felt curiously fight. I don’t know at what point it occurred to me that I wasn’t going to get a chance to slip into a phone booth (because there weren’t any phone booths) and call the cops (because there wasn’t anything that looked like a cop, even a French one) and get rescued, because nobody seemed to care about the fact that I needed rescuing. Everybody appeared to have concerns of their own.

  When I say “everybody,” I am including some mighty strange bodies. There were other people around—people who sometimes looked at me curiously and sometimes said, “Hi.” But sometimes they weren’t people at all—didn’t even look like people—looked more than anything else like the kind of things you see on Saturday morning television.

  Of course, I wasn’t in really good shape for any of this. I was still catching up from the little difficulty in front of the Hotel Negresco. My head hurt, and I was still dizzy. After you get coshed you’re unconscious, all right, but being unconscious isn’t at all the same as a good night’s sleep. I was shaky with fatigue—well, I was shaky, anyway. Part of it was fatigue. Part of it was the dawning conviction that somehow or other L. Knollwood Stennis had got himself into worse trouble than any tax audit.

  “Don’t worry,” said motherly Norah Platt. “It will all straighten itself out after a while.”

  She had said it before, guiding me around from weirdness to weirdness. She kept on saying it. She was a tiny little woman, with a white bush of hair and a pink, horsy face. She beamed up at me with bright blue eyes as she led me along a corridor, doing her best to be reassuring.

  “Are you really two hundred and whatever it is years old?” I asked her.

  She sighed and smiled forgivingly. “Oh, Nolly—may I call you Nolly?—you’re so full of questions. Yes, I am, but it’s better if you let Sam Shipperton tell you all that sort of thing. I’m sure he will, as soon as he’s ready to see you. In there, please.” And when I went “in there” it was a nearly bare room, with a door ajar. “Sit there,” said Norah, “and wait till Sam calls you.” She bustled over to peek in the door.

  “He’s here, Sam,” she called. “Have you got his sandwiches?”

  “On the table,” said a man’s voice. It sounded impatient, and then it lowered volume as it returned to a rumbling and chirping conversation on the far side of the door.

  “Eat,” said Norah, taking the lid off a covered dish to see what was under it. Sandwiches, wrapped in a white linen napkin. She approved. “Yes, these are fresh cut, and they look quite nice, don’t they? You haven’t eaten a thing, have you?”

  I ignored the sandwiches. I said, “Who’s Sam Shipperton?”

  “But you’ve met him, dear! He’s what you might describe as our booking agent. He’s the one who arranged your audition. Poor dear man,” she said sympathetically, “you’re all confused, aren’t you? And you haven’t had any sleep, and I suppose you’re quite confused by all this.”

  “You suppose exactly right!”

  “Yes, well, it’s always easier when you come as a volunteer. Still, once you make the adjustment you’ll find it’s quite nice here.”

  “Start with that! Where’s ‘here’?”

  “Why,” she said patiently, “I’m told that this is the second moon of the seventh planet of the star Aldebaran, but’ we just call it Narabedla. Won’t you try your sandwiches? I asked for the chopped cheddar and watercress specially, but if there’s something else you’d rather have—”

  “What I’d rather have is answers!”

  She pursed her lips. “Oh, indeed? Answers to what questions?”

  “Well, to begin with, what are all these Loony-Tunes?”

  “Loony-Tunes?”

  “The funny-looking things! The creatures!”

  “Ah, the natives.” she said, nodding. “They are a bit offputting at first, aren’t they? Well, to begin with, let’s take the ones who were auditioning you. Meretekabinnda is the Mnimn—the little short one in front, you know?—he’s really quite nice, and very interested in Earth music. Then there’s Barak, who’s a Ggressna, and I think there might have been an Aiurdi and a J’zeel. I’m afraid I didn’t really pay much attention to them—it was a rather last-minute engagement, you know, and I simply didn’t look. I suppose one of the Eyies of the Mother was there as well, but they’re so small one doesn’t always see them. Well, one wouldn’t, would one? I mean, that’s more or less what makes them so useful to everyone, isn’t it?”

  I snarled, “How would I know?”

  “Yes, of course,” she said soothingly. “Is that the sort of thing you wanted to know?”

  “You left out the most important part! They aren’t human.”

  “Well, of course they aren’t human, Nolly,” she said crossly. “We don’t perform for human audiences here, do we? It’s all the Fifteen Peoples—at least, the few among them who care for such things. Binnda and the others are the impresarios. They decide whether or not a given company can perform for their clientele, do you see?”

  “I don’t!” I glared at her. “Are you trying to tell me that this whole thing is just a scheme of Henry Davidson-Jones to kidnap opera singers for a bunch of Martians?”

  “Oh, no, Nolly! Not only opera singers. And certainly there aren’t any Martians. And nobody gets kidnapped— well, your own case is quite unusual, isn’t it? And Mr. Davidson-Jones does much, much more than arrange tours for artists. But,” she sighed, “from your point of view at the present time, well, yes, I suppose you could say that. Nolly? I’m really terribly sorry, but I do have another engagement. So if there’s nothing else you need just now—”

  “I need to know what’s going on!” I yelled, but Norah just smiled serenely .

  “When you’re as old as I am,” she said, “you’ll learn to take just one day at a time.” I scowled at her. She didn’t mind. She just said, “Sit down on that nice, comfy puff, love. Eat something; you need your strength. Sam will call you when he’s ready.”

  And she left me there, in that room with not even a chair, just a sort of warm, vibrating hassock that did its best to put me to sleep.

  How do I explain what it was like to find myself, without warning, on the second moon of the seventh planet of the star Aldebaran?

  The answer is, I don’t. Not so a
nyone can really understand, anyway. I was like a chimpanzee suddenly snatched out of his African jungle home and dropped in the middle of Times Square. Nothing made sense. Everything was either scary or infuriating.

  I should have been better off than the chimp, because I was better informed. After all, I was a pretty sophisticated, reasonably well-informed human being. I had traveled all over the world. I had heard all about the things people said about life on Mars (none there) and flying saucers (all unreal) and the far stars and the universe in general. I’d even watched Carl Sagan and Frank Drake and all those other somebody-must-be-out-there people on the Johnny Carson show, explaining how they were pretty sure that there probably were almost certainly some other intelligent races in the universe, most likely … but, unfortunately, not very many of them, they would add, because they’d been listening real hard on the big radio telescopes for a long time, and what they’d heard was zilch.

  That was the big difference between me and the chimp. The poor chimp would have been astonished to find this new world possible. I, on the other hand, was triply bewildered, because I knew perfectly well it was impossible.

  So I wasn’t just angry, exhausted, and confused. I was in traumatic, if not indeed terminal, culture shock, and that was before I’d even met the Mother or seen the statue at Execution Square.

  “I said you can come in now,” snapped the voice of Sam Shipperton.

  It woke me up. I’d drowsed off on that warm, vibrating hassock, with one of the sandwiches uneaten in my hand. Sam Shipperton was standing over me, and he wasn’t alone.

  The—ah—the thing with him was not at all human.

  It was the same thing I had seen on top of the piano while I was singing, only now I could get a good look at it. What it mostly looked like was a big bedbug, the size of a dachshund. Maybe it looked a little more like one of those extinct things I used to get as rubbery plastic models out of the gum machines in Asbury Park. Those were called trilobites. This particular trilobite-looking thing was standing on the table and chirping up at Shipperton as he stood there.