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Chapter 34

 

 

When we got back to Tricia's room that night I paid full attention to Tricia Madigan for the first three-quarters of an hour or so, but later on, while she was rubbing skin cream or something on her face, I got out the paper and pencil.

Morcher had sounded as though he knew what he was talking about, but what accountant would believe a client's arithmetic? So I started over. Eight thousand "people" in the audience meant eight thousand tickets sold; I didn't think the Ptrreek did comps or press passes or twofers. At the equivalent of one-fourteenth ounce for each ticket, that meant about thirty-five pounds of the vegetable stuff pledged, of which three and a half percent was mine. Call it twenty ounces for me. A pound and a quarter, which was equal to, say, half an ounce of the mystery metal, or twenty ounces of gold. Which was worth, at—what was gold now? somewhere over $400 an ounce?—about, my God, eight or nine thousand dollars.

Eight thousand dollars.

But that was more than fifteen times what Floyd Morcher had estimated. True, he was a tenor, not a CPA, and he could easily have put a decimal point in the wrong place.

Accountants had been known to do that, too; so I went over it again, and refined it a little more, and still came out with the same figure. I couldn't be absolutely sure of it, because somewhere there should have been a conversion from troy to avoirdupois ounces that I wasn't sure how to make. But eight thousand dollars a performance was still pretty close, pretty close.

I scowled at the figures, and then I had an idea. "Tricia?" I called. "What do you know about Floyd Morcher?"

She didn't look around. "What's to know? He's a godder. He's trying to save Eamon McGuire's soul, or anyway keep him from getting drunk all the time. He doesn't like me because I'm a scarlet woman, and he absolutely hates our nice lez couple, Sue-Mary and Maggie."

"No, I don't mean that kind of stuff. I mean, do you know how long he's been on Narabedla?"

"Oh, gosh, hon," she said, wiping off the surplus goo and coming over to me. "I don't have a clue. He was here for ages before I got here."

"But how many ages?" I persisted. "Maybe fifty or sixty years?"

"Could be something like that, I think. I remember him saying something about Herbert Hoover once. Why do you want to know?"

"Because he was talking about gold at thirty-five. Gold hasn't been thirty-five dollars an ounce since the U.S. government called it all in, way back in Franklin D. Roosevelt times."

"Yeah? So?"

"So I guess Floyd's older than I thought," I said, "So I'm richer than I thought." I reached out to pull her into my lap, grinning down at her. "You want to know how rich? If I sing three times a week, that's all, I take in about a million and a quarter dollars a year."

"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 chittering 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!"

 

 

 

 

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Framed