Chapter 13
It occurred to me on the way home that I had made a mistake at Norah's house; I should have followed up on their talk about Malcolm Porchester and the other dissidents. How was I going to make allies if I didn't find out who the prospective allies might be?
You can't do everything at once, I told myself. First find out what this place is like. Then figure out how to get out of it. So when I came to the corner with the ghastly statue, I detoured to stroll along some of the other streets. There was no one in sight, though there were lights in some of the little houses.
They seemed to keep a normal, Earthly day-and-night clock on Narabedla. The bright blue sky was gone. There were still clouds overhead, but almost invisible against a faint twilight glow. There was plenty of light to walk by. With my belly full of Norah's medium-bad home cooking and medium-all-right brandy, I didn't hurry.
After all, I had no one to go home to. All I had was the little maroon book under my arm. I was looking forward to that, but it could wait while I sorted out the sensations and concerns whirling around in my head.
Not counting the peculiar sky, the unusual feeling of lightness on my feet, and the occasional peculiar passerby (twice one of those little bedbug things scuttled past me at high speed), I might have been strolling somewhere on Earth. Somewhere pleasantly warm, with flowers scenting the air and trees and shrubbery everywhere.
The place was seductive. Everybody said so.
Still, if this was Heaven, then I was Lucifer, the angel who couldn't get along in Heaven and wanted out. I wanted out, too, in spite of the fact that the more I saw and heard of this moonlet called Narabedla the more heavenly features it seemed to have.
For one, there were, as I had been told, some hundred other human artists to share Narabedla with. Nearly all of them were obviously well traveled, cosmopolitan, sophisticated. If it turned out that, as everyone said, there was simply no way for me to get back to the Earth and these people had to be my only neighbors for the rest of my life, at least they would be more interesting than the nurses and U.N. employees I'd shared an apartment building with in New York. Nearly all the Narabedla artists were young and healthy. Or, anyway, like my recent dinner companions, so remarkably well preserved that their calendar ages didn't matter. Nobody on Narabedla coughed. Nobody had disfiguring facial scars or missing limbs. Nobody puffed and wheezed and ran out of breath when he walked a few steps, or had to pull a little oxygen tank along behind him to keep his lungs going. And nobody looked any older than Norah Platt, which is to say not much older than any normal Earth-bound woman wondering whether or not she wanted to give birth to one more child before menopause stopped her clock.
Of course, I wasn't an artist anymore. Shipperton had made that clear.
Still, there were plenty of nonsinging jobs around an opera company. I could direct. I could mime, if there were any mime parts (and the hell with Ephard Joyce). I could conduct, if what's-his-face Meretekabinnda or some other creepy didn't rank me out of it. Worst come to worst, sure, I could sit in the box at the front of the stage and prompt.
Conscientiously trying to give Narabedla a fair shake, I tried to remember when I had ever in my life been in a nicer place than this one.
There had been one or two memorable ones. The Negresco, for one. Then, when I was an opera singer I stayed once in a hotel in California that didn't have rooms. It had bungalows. Each one had bedroom, sitting room, kitchen, and bath; there was a Jacuzzi for every bungalow and a swimming pool in every cluster. There was also maid service and twenty-four-hour room service; there were television, radio, and tapes; and, if you asked the bellboy in a way that didn't make him suspect you were the Man, there was your choice at any hour of any of the prettiest whores in Beverly Hills.
Even when I was a budding opera star that hotel was too rich for my blood. I kept the bungalow just one night—long enough to receive and suitably impress two newspaper interviewers. Then I retreated to the Quality Inn at the airport for the rest of my stay.
I had to admit that Narabedla was even better. And it didn't cost three hundred dollars a night, either.
Studied critically, there were flaws to be found in this Paradise. That imitation "sky" was not very convincing when you took a careful look. The ground I walked on did curve slightly—having been made aware of it, I could see the gentle slope upward that disappeared where trees and shrubs met roof. And yet those plants were pretty nice in themselves. For trees there were orange, apple, plum, fig, weeping willow, birch, and a dozen others, half of them in flower, half of the rest bearing fruit. For bushes and vines there were grape, blackberry, forsythia, lilac, boxwood, hibiscus—I didn't know the names of most of them. There were cleared spaces between buildings here and there, and some of them had fountains and rippling brooks, with little farm-garden plots where good things grew: tomatoes and pineapples and sweet onions you could pull out of the ground, rinse off, and nibble with pleasure. The air was a balmy seventy-eight degrees, even at "night," and there were occasional gentle breezes.
It was really a remarkably nice place to be.
I would have to be crazy to want to get out of it. But I did want that, all the same.
When I got to my house—or, more accurately, Malcolm Porchester's house—the TV-looking thing they called a "skry" was flashing.
It had a screen like a television set, all right. It was that screen that was blinking on and off, with a gentle lavender radiance.
Since Ephard Joyce had told me it was not only something to do with data bases but also something to do with communications, I could easily surmise that the flashing was some sort of attention signal. What I was supposed to do about it I had no idea. There was no dial with channel numbers, no on/off switch, nothing that looked at all helpful.
On the other hand, I didn't really care. If someone were trying to call me it could, I thought, only be Sam Shipperton. One of these days I would no doubt have to learn the thing, but not now. Whoever wanted me could damn well wait. It was what I wanted that was important, and what I wanted right now was—
Well, that got a little complicated. I wanted a lot of different things. I wanted to go home. I wanted to be in my own apartment, so I could duck across the street to the health club and get aerobic, and then swim fifty laps in the little pool. I wanted to talk to Irene Madigan and find out what had happened to her. I wanted to talk to Marlene and reassure her. I wanted—well, I wanted some things very badly, including the things the mumps had taken away from me a dozen years before; but as none of those wants were in my power to satisfy just now, what I proposed to do was settle down with a good book.
Namely the book Bartolomeo Canduccio had given me. So I checked Porchester's fridge. Yes, there was a six-pack of ale in it, and he'd only warned me off his liquor, not his brew. The ale was a Brit brand I didn't recognize, but when I popped the tab it tasted just fine.
I settled down with A Guide to Narabedla and the Fifteen Associated Peoples for a nice, late-night read. It was an attractive book. Although the texture of the pages was odd, the color printing was magnificent. (And Canduccio had said he'd taken it off the thing called a "skry." So it was a kind of duplicator, too. I wondered if Henry Davidson-Jones had had anything to do with the new full-color copiers Marlene had been after me to get for the office.)
A can and a half later I had discovered that the "Fifteen Associated Peoples" were all exceedingly nonhuman, not to say often disgusting-looking. There were really more than fifteen of them—there was an appendix for non-"Associated" races—but it was the big Fifteen who mattered. They were the major powers, each of them an alien race that had agreed to enter some sort of joint compact.
The only thing that I could see that they had in common was that they were all extraordinarily homely. There were the Ggressna, like Barak, whom I'd already met; there were the Mnimn, with three-cornered mouths, no noses, and rubbery limbs. There were creatures that looked like shrimps (only with transparent shells, so the innards showed through) and creatures that looked like pterodactyls. According to the specifications in the text, most of them were more or less human-size—well, within a couple of feet, anyway—but the only ones that looked anything like people were the ones called the J'zeeli. What they looked like were baboons with scales like pine needles instead of fur. They averaged about fourteen feet tall, with compound eyes and a sort of Mohawk of those needly scales across the top of their heads, and generally weighed (the text said) the equivalent of sixty Earthly pounds.
The text about the J'zeeli said they were originally from the planet of J'zeel (small hot planet around a small orange-colored star); there were 1,800,000,000 of them on J'zeel itself and another few billion on other planets they had colonized. (It didn't say what I found out later—that they smelled like a mixture of cinnamon and cat box, and the only Earthly entertainment they cared much about was hymns, marching songs, and musical-comedy numbers.)
According to the "Brief History of the Fifteen Associated Peoples" in the book, the whole shebang had got started something over 3,200 years ago, when a race called the Bach'het and a race called the Duntidons had been fighting a sort of slow, long-range war with conventional spaceships over interstellar distances. (Their two stars were only about a light-year apart, but they must have been really mad at each other to go to that trouble.) Then they were visited by the Ggressna, who had a sort of interstellar go-box that made things go a lot faster—well, the history ran twenty pages. I put it aside for later.
Besides the Fifteen there were a dozen or more other non-human beasties who were less important. (It didn't say why.) Some of them, like the Kekkety folk, weren't important at all; they were just around for the convenience of the others.
One of the unimportant species described was the human race.
When I came to that part I set the book down and worked on the ale for a while. I was offended. I mean, the human race had a lot of faults, sure, but it had done some pretty terrific things—skyscrapers, jet planes, atomic power plants, heart transplants—yes, and books and plays and the Mona Lisa and Beethoven's Ninth, for that matter. I didn't like seeing it brushed off by a bunch of things that looked like they'd come from the bottoms of cereal boxes. "Screw you and all your tentacles, wings, and creepy legs," I said out loud.
Which had an unexpected effect.
The skry thing stopped flashing. The screen lighted with a steady, gentle lavender, and a sweet, sexless voice said, "Welcome home, Mr. Stennis. Tricia Madigan called. She would like you to call her back."
It seemed my voice had turned the damn thing on. "Tricia Madigan?" I said out loud, and that did it, too.
"One moment," said the genderless voice. The screen paled. A moment later I heard Tricia's voice say "What is it?" and at the same time an image took form on the screen.
I was looking at Tricia Madigan again. She wasn't quite naked this time; she had a towel around her body and another around her hair, and she looked as though she'd been doing her nails.
"Oh, sorry," I said.
She grinned at me, unsurprised. "I didn't think you'd call back," she said. "Well, anyway. I thought after those old farts bored you to death you might like to have me give you the quick two-dollar tour of Narabedla?"
"Tour?" I said.
"Right," she said, nodding. "Just give me a minute to dry my hair and throw something on. Meet you at the square by the Execution in ten minutes, 'kay? See you there." And the screen went to no color at all.
***
She had said ten minutes, but actually I was there in five. Of course, Tricia Madigan wasn't.
I told myself that it was silly for me to leave my nice (borrowed) house in the middle of the night to meet this rather, uninhibited woman, everything considered (and I mean everything). On the other hand, I told myself, it wasn't really all that late. And I did want to talk to her about her cousin. And it couldn't hurt to get a tour. And she really was a great-looking lady, with silvery-blond hair (well, it was, I was sure, whatever color Tricia Madigan wanted it to be) and the kind of body you'd expect on a Texas baton-twirler . . . and what was wrong with looking, even if I couldn't usefully touch?
So I strolled around the square, taking the environment in. A youngish couple passed, arm in arm, arguing with each other earnestly in low voices, barely responding to my nod as they went by. I looked around the square—not at the repellent monster-murdering-man centerpiece of it—just trying to make sense of what I saw. Each of the streets that radiated from the square was a different style and period of architecture. There were-thatched-roof cottages, like Norah Platt's. There were high-rent-district ranch houses, like the one I had borrowed from Malcolm Porchester. There were townhouse condo rows, streets of brownstone fronts, white frame houses with the kind of porches you see in old Andy Hardy movies.
Somebody had put a lot of effort, not to mention money, into creating these residential streets on a moon of a planet many light-years from Earth. Just for the sake of having some entertainment? I could hardly believe it. What sort of wealth and power did these weird-looking aliens have, that they could squander it like that?
I looked up at the "sky" for help, but there was no help there. It was, I realized, a lot like the "sky" I'd seen in Henry Davidson-Jones's office in the World Trade Center—for the very good reason, no doubt, that it was designed by the same bizarre kind of people. It was almost comforting when, reluctantly, I turned at last to look at the agonized face of the man being crushed by the monster in the statue. At least the man was human. The monster definitely wasn't. Wasn't even a snake. As I looked closer I saw that it was more like a kind of wingless dragon; it had short, stubby limbs with claws like Velcro that gripped the hapless human figure, and fangs an inch long, poised only inches from the man's throat.
It suddenly looked almost familiar.
It took me a minute to remember where I'd seen it before: In the little maroon book Canduccio had given me. This murderous thing was, I was nearly sure, one of the Fifteen Associated Peoples.
I didn't like the implications of that. What was the statue meant to show? That we little Earth people were at the mercy of the weirdies? And if so, did they have to show it so graphically? The statue was a work of art. I did not think I had ever seen human despair, horror, and fear better portrayed in any piece of sculpture. Considered as a work of art, once I had psyched myself into doing that, it was breathtaking.
It was also scary, and I was not sorry when I heard the light tap of Tricia's footsteps.
She was wearing high-heeled shoes that made her just my height. She was also wearing very short pink shorts and a very tight pink top, and she looked just as good with her clothes on as off. She said, "Having fun? Come on, I want to show you something. If we go now we'll get there while we're darkside, so you can take a look before the sun gets around." She did not wait to see if I understood her. That was well enough, since I didn't. She just took my arm cozily into hers and led me toward that little go-box structure that looked like a comfort station.
As we were entering, she looked back at the statue and said, "Poor Jerry."
I stumbled. It wasn't that I tripped going into the cab; I stumbled over my own feet. I lurched against Tricia as she was starting to speak to the go-box control; she felt nice and warm, and she smelled even better, and she didn't pull away. But my mind was on something else. "Wait a minute," I said, making a connection. "Jerry? Is that, uh, that thing back there—is that Jerry Harper?"
She nodded sympathetically. To the cab she said politely, "Take us to the Lookout, please."
I swallowed. No wonder they called it Execution Square! And what kind of a place was I in, if they executed people by letting them get eaten by monsters, and then put up statues to commemorate it? "What—what did he do to deserve that?"
"Oh," said Tricia, thinking it over and biting her lip to help the process along, "I guess you could say he really did deserve it. I mean, he killed four people."
"Killed! Four!"
She nodded sadly. "He went kind of crazy, you know? In a way, the whole thing was Jonesy's fault. He should've checked Jerry out a little more carefully; He wasn't married, all right, but, hey, what he didn't tell Jonesy was that he was having the heck of a hot secret affair with his ex-music teacher's wife, you know what I'm saying? And after he got out of slow time—"
"He was in slow time?"
"Well, but when he wound up here on Narabedla he wanted to get back to her. Blew his stack when he found out he couldn't. He wrecked a whole theater on Neereeieeree's planet. Then they put him in slow time, I guess—I mean, all this was long before my time. So when he got out he found out ten years had passed, and she probably didn't even remember his name anymore, you know? So he started acting up again. Some of the guys tried to reason with him—well, they didn't just reason with him; one of them beat the hell out of poor Jerry because, hey, he made real trouble for the rest of us, you know? So Jerry just waited for his chance and set fire to their house while they were asleep. Really stank the place up for a week," she said fastidiously, "all that burned meat, until the air changers got it cleared up. It's okay now, though. Since then they've done something that fireproofed all the houses; and here we are on the Lookout. Watch your step getting out!"
And the door opened, and Tricia, smiling back at me, stepped out—
"Jesus Christ!" I yelled. "Watch it!" Because what she was stepping out onto was nothing.
I mean, nothing. Nothing at all. Under her feet I could see empty space. A sprinkling of stars and a few brighter things that might have been moons—and nothing. She looked exactly as though she had walked off the side of a space satellite and was getting ready to fall into infinite blackness.
Tricia turned. In the light from the go-box door I could see she was laughing at me. "Scary, huh? Come on"—stamping her foot—"there's a floor here, all right. Glass or something, I guess, but you won't fall through."
When I managed to force myself to follow her, one tentative step with most of my weight still on the foot that was in the go-box, then another . . . why, indeed she was right. There was a floor. A kind of a floor. I couldn't see it. It wasn't just glass; it was something reflectionless, a lot more transparent than any glass. But it was hard and firm underfoot.
When I looked down, it was like peering over the edge of a diving platform poised over infinity, except that you couldn't even see the diving platform. Behind us the go-box door sighed closed, shutting off the interior light. The only illumination left was starlight. A lot of starlight—I could make out Tricia's features in it—because there were, I would guess, about a million stars down there, ranging from next to invisible to brighter than anything I had ever seen before.
"Let's see," said Tricia, glancing around with professional appraisal. "You know anything about astronomy? Neither do I, but I've had this explained to me about a jillion times. Those bright ones over there, they're called the Hyades. You can see them from the Earth, they tell me. Can't say I ever did, but then . . . Then there's that sick-looking little red one up there, see where I'm pointing? That's the companion star. Did you know Aldebaran was a double? That makes two of us, but there it is. You can't see that one from the Earth. It's too faint. Then we've got—let's see . . . one, two—yeah, we've got three planets showing right now. Can't see our own planet itself; it must be toward the star. I'm no expert on the planets, but that big one is Elizabeth, I'm pretty sure, and the one next to it ought to be Anne. The other one might be Maude. Or maybe Caroline. You know who named them? Norah Platt. She couldn't pronounce the names the locals gave them, so she named them after some of the queens of England. Wouldn't you know? How do you like it?"
I just said, "Jesus."
I couldn't honestly say I "liked" it. It was too huge and too awe-inspiring to "like." But it certainly reached right down into the place where I kept my little soul and opened it up to the drafty winds of the universe.
There were some cobwebby things that glinted starlight now and then. "What are those?" I asked.
"They're solar-power collectors," she explained. "How do they work? Aw, hey, Nolly, how would I know that? They get like sunlight—only I guess you'd call it starlight; it comes from Aldebaran—and they turn it into electricity, and that's what they run Narabedla on."
I squinted past them at something else that glinted, tiny and far away. "And that thing?"
"That's some other thing they've got. This place used to be for space probes, you know? I mean, this was where the people lived; that other thing is, like, another moon. It's where the probes launched from. That's what Conjur says, anyway."
I gazed around.' 'Which of the Fifteen Peoples comes from Aldebaran?"
"Oh, none of them. This was just a kind of neutral territory they used." She paused, looking me over appraisingly in the starlight. "Nolly? You know, you've got pretty good pecs for a singer."
"I'm really an accountant."
"Whatever. You know what? I guess I kind of like you."
I noticed that my hand was holding hers.
There are a lot worse things in this world (or whatever other world you may happen to find yourself on) than being told by a pretty girl in the starlight that she likes you. It brightens the air, it makes the senses tingle, it causes you to feel warm all over . . .
Unless.
Unless you've got your mind full of a million other things, including the particularly savage murder of a fellow human being (even if he was a killer himself) by a particularly gruesome monster, which event some bizarre creatures from another planet have erected a statue to commemorate.
And unless you're filled with anger and confusion over your recent kidnapping to a place that, a week earlier, you wouldn't have believed could possibly exist.
And unless you happened to have had, at the age of twenty-five, a particularly savage case of the mumps.
I let go of Tricia Madigan's hand.
I didn't really want to, because it felt good. It also felt strange, because I had got out of the habit of holding women's hands, or women's anythings. It even felt worrisome, in that sadly familiar way that any kind of normal man-woman come-on felt worrisome to me; the come-on was nice, but there wasn't any follow-up to come after the come-on. I changed the subject. I said, "Tricia, you know your cousin Irene's been going crazy, worrying about you."
There was a pause, then she looked at me. "Oh," she said. "I didn't know you knew Irene."
I said bitterly, "Do I ever know Irene." I told Tricia about Irene and her crusade, and about chasing all over Monte Carlo and Nice with her, and about Marlene, and about my attempts to beard Henry Davidson-Jones in his lairs at the World Trade Center and the Negresco.
She listened, watching my face carefully in the dim light. All she said was, "Gee, Nolly."
"Yeah. Gee. I'm afraid that she isn't going to quit looking for you. I'm afraid she's going to wind up here herself."
Tricia thought for a moment. "I hope not. I mean, for her sake. I just love Irene, I really do, Nolly, but I don't know if she could make the adjustment here. She's a real tight-ass about some things."
"About things like Henry Davidson-Jones's practices of kidnapping and murder, you mean?"
"Like murder? Oh, no, Nolly." The look she was giving me now was a lot like the look you give a little kid who refuses to go to sleep because he thinks there's a bear under his bed. "He never did murder, honest. Jonesy's not such a bad guy. If you mean Jerry Harper, hey, it wasn't Jonesy that sentenced him, you know. We did it ourselves, all legal and proper. Why, we had a real trial, with a jury and everything, because it was really bad of him to set fire to those poor guys. Ask your pal Ephard Joyce. Ephard was on the jury himself. Now . . . hold on," she commanded, looking down. "Here's what I wanted you to see. Look!"
I found myself squinting into a sudden bright orangey light that grew behind her. It was like morning sun streaming through a window, only about a hundred times brighter. I turned and, down below, past Tricia's pretty feet, there was a sudden corner of light that rolled into view and widened and became a sun, too bright to look at.
"That's it," Tricia crowed, shielding her eyes with her hand. "That's Aldebaran." And, "Darker, damn it!" she called, and the transparency under our feet obligingly grayed itself like photosensitive sunglass lenses, so I could look right at the thing. I could feel the warmth of it on my face.
Tricia grinned at me, pleased. "That's it," she said. "That's the whole show. Too bad we didn't get a chance to see the planet itself, but it must be coming up after the star now—and anyway," she added, prettily smothering a tiny yawn, "I'm not going to keep my little old head off the little old pillow forever, so do you want to go ahead with the rest of the tour or not?"
I looked down at the dimmed-out stellar disk below me. That thing is really the star Aldebaran, Nolly, I told myself. You're really here.
And then I said to myself, Go ahead, Nolly. Make the adjustment. And out loud I said, "Lead on, Tricia. Let's see it all."
In the little go-box, Tricia explained the transportation system to me. "There are lots of these things," she said, "and they go all over. Some of the places you can't go to, though. They'll take you anyplace in our sector, or where the foreign human artists live, like the Italians, the Russians, Chinatown, all that. I don't go there much, but there's nothing to stop you. And you can go to the shell, where we just were, so you can look at the stars whenever you like. Just say 'Lookout.' If you want to go to any of the funny-people levels—I mean, you know, the creepy-crawlies and all—you have to go with somebody who's authorized, like Sam Shipperton. And there's places you can't go at all, like the jump station, naturally. What's that? Oh, that's what you came here on, Nolly. It's what they call a matter transmitter, okay? But you can come here to this place anytime," she finished as the door opened. "I come here a lot. I usually take my showers here. You'll see. It's neat."
She was wrong about that.
It was not a bit neat. It was the opposite of neat. It was a green and jumbled jungle of vegetation of all kinds. It was illuminated with pinkish light from the ceiling panels; the light cast no shadows, but it was enormously flattering to Tricia.
Who certainly didn't need any flattery anyway. Who was looking all pink and pleased as she watched me staring around, half laughing as she saw my jaw drop. There was plenty to stare at. Stubby trees whose crowns spread against the roof panels, vines that swung from the trees, bushes, flowers, purple moss that had little scarlet blossoms in it, hedgelike shrubs that were full of pretty white and yellow berries. The place smelled jungly. It sounded that way, too. There were chirpings and whickerings and soft, sobby moans, and distant yowls that made me glad they were distant. "There's nothing here that can hurt us, Nolly," Tricia smiled. "Come along, I'll show you where I shower when I get tired of the one at home."
It wasn't really untamed jungle after all. There were paths in it. I followed Tricia's prettily waving hips down one of them, while she chattered over her shoulder. She named a dozen kinds of edible fruits and berries—half of them I'd never heard of, which was reasonable enough because the things with those names didn't grow on Earth. I didn't retain them, anyway. I was listening to a sound—a watery sound, like a forest creek running fast over rocks—that I hadn't heard at first because my attention was all on pretty Tricia. The sound got louder.
The path opened up into a glade. A few yards in front of us was a pond. At the far end of the pond, seeming to come out of the ceiling itself, was a waterfall.
That was the sound I heard, but it didn't sound exactly like any waterfall I'd ever encountered before. It sounded somehow gentler and slower, and the reason for that was that it was gentler and slower.
I understood that. Even at this level, I felt a little lighter than I'd been accustomed to back home on Earth, and so did the water. It fell in a leisurely, comfortable way, and splashed only gently when it hit the surface of the pond.
"Pretty?" Tricia asked, smilingly sure of the answer.
I obliged her. "It's very pretty. I have to admit that Narabedla's about the prettiest and nicest place I've ever been—anyway, in terms of amenities. I mean, there was this hotel in Beverly Hills . . ." And I told her about what had been my previous high-water mark for luxury, and added, "The only thing we don't seem to have here is the whores."
Tricia said demurely, "On the other hand, why would you need them?"
I found that we were holding hands again. I didn't remember how that had happened. More than that, she'd loosened a button or two in her blouse, and very visible was much of Tricia.
I backpedaled. Fast. I said, "I was just joking, Tricia." She listened attentively, absently stroking my arm. "I mean," I explained, "really, there's a lot missing here. Freedom, for instance."
She squeezed my elbow in affectionate disagreement. "Oh, no, Nolly, you're wrong about that. Believe me. You've never been so free. You can do anything you like here—well, hey, not hurt anybody—you wouldn't want to be like Jerry Harper, would you? You can't kill anybody, or rape anybody; you could get in a fight, maybe, if both you and the other guy wanted it, because that happens, you know? But not anything like deliberate, or mean. I mean, what would be the point? Whatever consenting adults, you know, want to do—"
"I'm talking about being free. Free to go home, damn it!"
She shook her head regretfully. "Aw, shit, Nolly," she sighed.
I started to amplify, but she got in ahead of me. "Forget about going home, Nolly," she advised. "Look on the bright side, for heaven's sake. What'd you have back home? Did you have anything half as good as you've got here? You're never going to get real sick, you know. You're going to live a heck of a long time—look at people like Ephard Joyce and that witch, Norah Platt. Course," she went on reasonably, "it isn't all free, exactly. You have to earn it. You have to do your thing for the cash customers if you want any special privileges or charge cards or anything, but, what the hey, that's what artists like to do anyway. Isn't that true? They like to perform. Why else would anybody be a performer? And you've got real good friends here, or anyway you will have as soon as you get over this tight-ass stuff." She gazed at me for a moment. "Tell you what," she said. "You ought to put all this stuff on hold till you can talk to Jonesy himself, next time he's here, just sit down with him and—"
"He comes here?"
"Well, of course he comes here, for gosh sake. What did you think? Every couple months, anyway. So now lighten up, will you?"
"But—"
"Butting's for bulls," she said kindly, opening the rest of the buttons on her blouse. "Come on. Let's have fun. I'm going to get under the shower."
So she did.
She threw the blouse in one direction and the skimpy shorts in another. I hadn't thought there would be anything under them but Tricia herself, and there wasn't. She dived into the pool, swam a dozen strokes, and came up under the waterfall.
"Come on, kidlet," she gasped, mouth full of water. "It's nice and warm, just what you need to chase the collywobbles away."
It would have taken a real trained-from-childhood eunuch, not a well-remembering one like me, to say no to Tricia Madigan. I took off my clothes—my own tired ones and the ones I'd borrowed from Malcolm Porchester's wardrobe—and I dived in after her. I was dimly aware that I was laying up a larger store of humiliation and regret for later, but I firmly turned off the voice inside my head that was trying to tell me so.
The pool and the waterfall were everything she'd promised.
The splash of water on my head was not only gentle, it was tepidly warm. It didn't beat down on me. It caressed me. Tricia was laughing as she splashed perfectly superfluous handfuls of water at me, and in a minute I was laughing, too . . . up to when we began touching each other. She took hold of me, smiling sweetly. Then she looked up into my eyes in surprise and uncertainty.
"My goodness, Nolly," she said, "you're not a priest or anything, are you?"
Unhappily, I said, "No, no, nothing like that."
"Or maybe you've got a secret pash back home that you're carrying a torch for, like Jerry Harper?"
I shook my head. Then I backed away a little, wiped the water out of my eyes, and said, "There's something I ought to tell you about. Do you know anything about the kinds of things that happen if you catch mumps when you're a grownup man?"
And, oh, well, that was about the end of that.
Tricia was perfectly cheerful and friendly as we went back to our own level. But she went to her house and I went to mine, and it was a while before I saw Tricia Madigan again.