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Chapter 30

 

 

The Ptrreek planet had a deep blue sky, almost a slate blue, with a tiny, bright blue sun in the middle of it, hammering heat down at me. And we were in a real city. It even had a skyline, and if you half closed your eyes you could almost think it looked a little bit like the canyons of Wall Street, or downtown Chicago. To make it seem a lot familiar, though, you had to close your eyes entirely, and even then, it didn't sound like anything on Earth. There weren't any taxicab horns, gears shifting, trucks backfiring. There were plenty of traffic noises that came from the wheeled bathtub things whizzing by, but the noisiest things around were the tall buildings themselves. They creaked. The Ptrreek skyscrapers weren't masonry, glass, and steel. I suppose they were something like wood.

They came in clumps, like bamboo clusters, eight or ten dark, skinny, needle-shaped towers bound together by closed passageways. The things that held them must have been loosely joined, because the clusters moved in the wind, and screeched as they moved. And all around us there were Ptrreeks, twice as tall as I was, wearing filmy, feathery cloaks in bright-spectrum colors and gazing at us curiously out of their faceted insect eyes.

As soon as I stepped out of the box I saw all this and the sudden pang of missed opportunities back on Henry Davidson-Jones's yacht receded in my mind. I was gaping around like any hayseed on his first trip to the Big Apple. It took a sharp nudge from Tricia to bring me out of it. "Watch it," she warned, and I did a little waltz step out of the way just in time to avoid being trampled by Tsooshirrisip, the big Ptrreek who had been on Narabedla with us. He loped past us to meet another Ptrreek getting out of one of the bathtub cars, the two of them chirping and barking and flapping their cloaks in what looked like joy. Then Tsooshirrisip turned and gazed at us. He beckoned to Purry, lingering modestly out of the way, and then chirped something at our company as they emerged.

Purry translated for us. "Mr. Tsooshirrisip welcomes you to the world of the Ptrreek," he piped, and added, "He also says he hopes you enjoy the clean stink of Ptrreek air after all those foul odors you have been living among; and now you are all, please, to get in the cars which have been provided for you."

I hesitated. "What about our bags?"

"Coming, coming, dear boy," Binnda called cheerfully from behind me; and indeed a procession of Kekketies was coming toward us clutching suitcases and cosmetic bags. I recognized my own. "You go in the first car with our hosts, Nolly," Binnda ordered. "I'll make sure no one gets left behind. And quickly, please! Mr. Tsooshirrisip is a very important person on this planet, and we mustn't keep him waiting!"

 

The cars were the bathtub-shaped things on wheels, and they were right funny-looking. For one thing, the wheels of the car I was directed to weren't much bigger than basketballs, and shaped the same way. For another, the things were built to the huge Ptrreek scale. Tsooshirrisip and his buddy simply strolled over to the car and stepped inside. (There wasn't any door.) Purry handled the situation by flinging himself at the side of it and scrambled up and in like an inchworm. That left it up to me.

The Kekkety with my bag heaved it aboard and waited politely for me to enter, but I could not quite see how to do that. At maximum stretch I could reach the side of the car with my fingertips. After all those workouts in Conjur's gym, I could have chinned myself out and struggled in; what stopped me was that I simply did not believe I was supposed to do that. After all, I was a visiting opera star! Cars were supposed to be user-friendly. Shouldn't there be some invisible seam that would open up and let me enter decorously? Steps that ought to extrude magically so that I could climb aboard?

There was nothing like that.

Then I felt someone encircling my legs from behind. It was my Kekkety porter, whose strength was a surprise. He got me halfway up and then one of the Ptrreek, laughing (at least, bark-chirping in what I took to be amusement), reached around with those spidery arms and lifted me the rest of the way.

That was as much crowding as they were willing to accept, though. When the Kekkety started to chin himself in after me, Mr. Tsooshirrisip pushed him off and drove away. Rapidly. The bathtub's acceleration was amazing. When it took off I went flying. I smashed into Purry, squashing a sort of organ chord of grunts out of his many apertures, and bashed my head against the rear seat of the vehicle. Which was, of course, right about at the level of my eyes.

Mr. Tsooshirrisip took his eyes off the other cars long enough to turn around and laugh. Then his partner pointed to his own head (both of them had pulled a sort of hood out of their cloaks and covered their heads with it), and then at mine and the sun. He said something which Purry translated. "He's warning you against sunburn, Mr. Stennis," Purry said. "Their blue sun is a strong source of—what is the word?—oh, yes, ultraviolet. You should protect your skin against it."

"What with?" I asked.

They had an answer to that. After Purry had debated with them a bit the smaller Ptrreek leaned back and flung a corner of his cloak over me. The texture was marvelously silky. The odor was something else again. That cockroachy aroma had seeped into the cloak, and being under it was a lot like being under a sheepdog's winter blanket, along with the dog. The other thing was that with the Ptrreek's cloak over me I could see nothing of the city. All in all, it was fortunate that our "hotel" was only a short ride away.

 

After I had "checked in" and taken the "elevator" up to my "room" in the "hotel"—but none of those words meant quite the same thing as they would have on Earth—there was a scratch at the door and Tricia came in to see me. "Hey, Nolly," she said. "How d'you like this place so far?"

"It moves around a lot," I complained. From the street I'd been able to see the tall towers swaying, but from inside it was a lot more nerve-wracking as they rocked like the tops of coconut palms in a breeze. "Outside of that it's all right, I guess. If you like sleeping in a hammock."

She, reached over and set the thing swaying. "Don't knock it. They've put them in specially for us. I mean, hey, we'd have a little trouble getting in and out of a Ptrreek bed, you know? Did you catch all the fuss when we came in?"

"What fuss?"

"The Ptrreek couldn't get our count to come out right. There's fourteen of us from Earth in the company, aren't there? Only the Ptrreek claimed they counted fifteen."

I added up on my fingers: three sopranos, three tenors, two baritones counting myself, the two basses, plus Ugolino, Conjur, and Tricia. Oh, and Norah Platt, who had come along to help in rehearsals. "Fourteen is what I make it. It's a bad mix, though—nine men for only five women."

She dimpled. 'That's the kind of odds I like. Anyway, it's going to be tough for Binnda if they don't get it straightened out. They don't want any stowaways sneaking onto their planet. The other thing," she said, turning to go, "is that Binnda says they'll be bringing us something to eat pretty soon. Room service, can you believe it? But I bet it's just because they don't want us eating with them. Then Binnda says we should rest for an hour before we go to the theater."

"How much rest can you get in a hammock?"

She laughed. "You'd be surprised what you can do in a hammock, Nolly," she told me as she left.

 

She was right about the room service. Ten or fifteen minutes later, after I'd tried to make some use of the facilities in what I supposed was the bathroom—strenuous, but ultimately successful—a silent Kekkety brought in a tray for me. It looked exactly like the kind of thing they slop the passengers with on airlines. He set it on the floor and left silently, leaving me to decide how to dine.

There wasn't much choice. The floor was about the only thing I could reach. I pulled some cushions off an eight-foot-tall thing that was more or less like a couch and sat down.

The rocking motion was better sitting down, but not much. The meal was edible enough, in a TV-dinner kind of way, but the slow, sinuous waving of the room made me wonder if I really should have eaten it.

Tricia had said I had an hour to rest before we had to go anywhere.

I didn't really need to rest. All I really needed was to get out of that swaying room for a while. So I took my courage in my hands and found my way to the elevator (not a go-box, a real elevator, even if its height was five times its diameter and I had to stretch on tiptoes to reach the control dial), and five minutes later was walking out onto the street of the Ptrreek planet.

Two suns were in the sky.

I hadn't really been prepared for two suns. I'd forgotten about the warning of potential sunburn, too, but the tiny, hot, blue one was sinking toward the horizon and it was a large, red, dim one that was rising on the other side of the sky. If I stayed in the blue-sun shadow as much as I could, I reckoned, I would be all right. . . and anyway, what was a little sunburn compared to the exploration of a whole new alien planet?

It was unearthly. It was exactly the kind of adventure I had dreamed about when I was ten years old, watching Forbidden Planet and The Thing on late-night television, when my parents had left me with an indulgent sitter. I, Lawrence Knollwood Stennis, was actually walking around on the surface of a planet of another star, many light-years from home! Even Narabedla had been nothing like this.

A couple of Ptrreek, talking to each other next to one of the cars, had interrupted their conversation to peer at me. It was time to move on; I gave them a friendly wave and turned away, walking fast.

It was sultry hot, and the effort made me pant; it even made me choke a little from time to time. Something in the air, maybe? Mold spores or pollen or whatever? I kept on walking rapidly anyway. Binnda would not have taken us to a place where there was any real danger—I was pretty sure—but I didn't exactly know how the Ptrreek felt about having a short, hairy alien creature wandering around their town, even if he was a star in a visiting opera company.

Twenty minutes later, I still didn't know how they felt about it. Definitely, they hadn't mobbed me for autographs. They hadn't exactly ignored me, either. A couple of them had seemed to be taking my picture. A few others, now and then, had paused in their way from wherever they had been to wherever they were going to lean down and chirrup at me in their wholly incomprehensible language. They didn't sound hostile. They didn't seem to care that I couldn't understand them, either. They just chirruped for a moment, straightened up, and went on their way.

Of course (I told myself) the Ptrreek were full members of the Fifteen Associated Peoples. Funnies of any variety would hardly be startling to them. They'd no doubt seen them all. They were seeing aliens even then, because among the hordes of Ptrreek I passed there were a couple of Mnimn, like Meretekabinnda (though neither one was Binnda himself, and they paid no attention to me), a Barak-like Ggressna waving its silvery arms at a couple of the Eyes-of-the-Mother bedbugs, a Duntidon lallumping along at a great rate, and four or five others even odder. None of them seemed to notice that I was in any way unusual. Ptrreek was a busy and cosmopolitan place.

I liked it.

I was really euphoric, I think. Even the mantislike Ptrreek, with their gay, flowing cloaks and their inquisitive, thrusting horsey heads, seemed like possible customers rather than potential foes. And in any case, I was no longer up in that tower, whose motion made me think of an unfortunate January cruise I'd once taken in the Caribbean, when there was a gale-force storm and there hardly ever were any takers for the ship's six lavish meals a day.

That turned out to be an unwelcome train of thought.

For "cruise" made me think of "yacht," and "yacht" made me think of missed opportunities.

I stood still on the side of that Ptrreek street, in the shadow of one of those clusters of reedy buildings, thinking. I really could have done it, I thought. If I had realized I was on Earth I could have done something. Some derring-do, swashbuckling thing in the style of Conan, Rambo, James Bond—for that matter, in the style of the Don Giovanni I played with such bravura on the opera stage. Sneak-punch Shipperton? Hold a knife to the throat of Henry Davidson-Jones? (I supposed there might have been a knife, or at least a letter-opener, somewhere around his desk.) Take hostages, find a gun, and shoot my way out?

It wasn't impossible.

It all sounded like TV heroics as I thought about it, but it was at least an outside chance that somehow I could have overpowered Davidson-Jones and made him do something—if I'd known where I was. At least I could have tried.

But then I would not be here, with audiences waiting to applaud me and pretty Tricia showing every sign of wanting to show appreciation of her own.

 

Back in my still-swaying room, Binnda poked his head in to announce that we were leaving for the theater in ten minutes. "All right," I complained, "but this place makes me seasick."

"Oh, really, Nolly?" He considered for a moment, peering up at me. "I suppose we could get you some sort of shots if you like."

I vetoed that quickly. "I'd rather be seasick. It's just that I'm a little worried about my performance."

"As you wish, Nolly. The theater's at ground level, anyway, so that won't be a problem." Then he got serious. "Nolly? Have you seen anything of Ephard Joyce?"

I blinked at him. "Was he supposed to be with us?"

"Not at all! No, we have no place for him in the company. But there's some confusion about how many people made the trip here, and according to the Ptrreek somebody who looked like Joyce came in earlier, with the theater props."

"He really wanted to do some mime with us," I remembered.

"Then perhaps he'll come to the theater," Binnda said gloomily. He shook himself and sighed. "Well, I mustn't upset our star, must I? Tell me, is everything satisfactory? Have you admired your view?"

"Oh, is there a view?" I asked acidly. There were picture windows, all right, but the lowest sill was a good four feet over my head.

"You simply need to stand on something to look out," he explained. "Really, it's an honor to be given a suite so high up in the building!" He came closer, peering at me. "Do you know what I think? I think you're a little edgy, dear boy. A case of opening-night jitters, wouldn't you say?"

I considered that possibility, and then discovered another one concealed inside it. "What opening night? I thought we were just going to rehearse today."

He looked shocked. "Rehearse again? But we've already been rehearsing! For weeks! No, no, this is going to be our very first actual performance. Our gala debut, my boy! You cannot believe how excited the Ptrreek are to have us here. They're all agog to hear our Pagliacci—and you're going to sing the Tonio for them tonight!"

 

 

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