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 partigiani 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 jet them together later on. So I performed. I chose a number it random, and for them I sang the "Catalogue Aria" from Slozart'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, greenhousy 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.