Chapter 10
What Shipperton called a "Kekkety guide" turned out to be a silent, slim little person who looked more than anything else like one of the deckhands from Henry Davidson-Jones's yacht. He didn't speak. He just led me along some pleasant little streets with occasional pedestrians nodding to us as we passed. All very homelike, in an Andy Griffith kind of way, and all the time I was trying to get a handle on the terrible crazy confusion that had replaced my dull, pleasant, normal life.
I knew that I wasn't exactly unique.
I knew that in the history of the human race many, many millions of people have been snatched without warning out of their normal lives into some strange new captivity—college professors taken by terrorists in Beirut, farm girls abducted into the brothels of the big cities, Africans captured for the slave trade, Europeans shanghaied onto Moorish galleys. Well, sure. Such things happened. But they didn't happen to me. Although I'd worried about a lot of things in my life, I'd never worried about the right one, because it had never occurred to me that I might someday become a simple export commodity with nothing to say about it.
I still had plenty of worries. I worried about what had happened to Irene Madigan. I worried about what Marlene was going to do when I didn't show up. I worried about how my clients would survive without me.
I worried a lot, too, about myself. I didn't want to become a member of Narabedla Ltd.'s large clientele of touring artists dedicated to presenting Earthly performing arts to entertain the cognoscenti of the Fifteen (alien) Peoples and their twenty-two inhabited planets. All the same, I didn't like having failed the audition.
Before Shipperton sent me off with the Kekkety guide he let me run sketchily down the artists' list. It was formidable. Not counting Norah Platt, the ancient pianist. Woody Calderon, the cellist, and Irene Madigan's cousin, Tricia, the baton-twirling one, there were six sopranos, three mezzos, eleven tenors, four other baritones or bass-baritones, two basses, and a boyishly slight, pale-skinned castrate, all of whose pictures were on Shipperton's walls. That was just the singers. There were also violinists, pianists, harpists, percussionists, sitarists, harpsichordists, and a scrawny ebony-black man who played the djidjeraboo. There were jugglers, acrobats, gymnasts, unicyclists, half a dozen black guys who had once been a kind of generic imitation of the Harlem Globe Trotters, and a man who drew in chalk on sidewalks; a glassblower specializing in instant animals; two heavy-metal and one punk rock group (but their war paint, dreadlocks, and Mohawks were wasted on the audiences here); there was a lion-tamer with six lions and a man with a flea circus; and a man who imitated bird calls; and two mimes; and a small but otherwise first-rate ballet company; two break dancers, and a Jamaican who played steel drums. Obviously Narabedla Ltd. had been doing a lot of business over a long, long time.
And those were just the artists who, being human, had originated on the planet Earth, Shipperton explained. He told me that his office didn't handle the nonhuman others. He said he was really glad of that.
The Kekkety guide got me nearly to where I was going before I came out of my fog long enough to look around.
"Hold on a second," I ordered, pausing. We were in a quiet kind of intersection in what almost might have been a small town back on Earth. There were four different streets leading away from the little square, which was a star-shaped plot with a couple of flowering fruit trees. What caught my eye was one of the ugliest statues I had ever seen. The statue was life-size. It was a man, a very human and terrified-looking man, and a monster. The piece looked a little like the Laocoön group, except that there was only one man in the coils of the monster, and the monster was a lot worse-looking than any terrestrial snake.
"A bronze general on a horse would've been a lot nicer," I told my little guide. He peered up at me curiously, but didn't respond.
I turned away from the hideous statue and gazed around at the intersecting streets. The first street on the right appeared to be a sort of Greenwich Village mews, with gaslights and wrought-iron gates. The next looked like a little English village that the local historical authorities wouldn't let anybody change, thatched-roof houses with diamond-shaped glass panes in the windows.
When I started toward the third the guide tugged encouragingly at my arm, and I followed him into it. The street looked like one of those Southern California hillside places with buildings pressed tight against each other, poised between brush fire and mud slide, except that these dwellings didn't have any carports. (Why would they? I hadn't seen any cars.) The fifth house on the right had a scarlet door with a lion's-head knocker, framed by two lemon trees in fruit. The other thing it had was a little swinging sign that said:
Malcolm's Place
14 Riverside Drive
There wasn't any river for it to be on the side of, I observed, and while I was staring at the door the guide turned and trotted away.
I was on my own. One of the little black bedbugs paused in scurrying along the street to gaze at me. It didn't linger. Evidently I wasn't very interesting. I reached out for the doorknob.
It disconcerted me to find that it was locked.
Shipperton hadn't said anything about a key. He certainly hadn't given me one. I looked under the doormat hopefully; no key there. There was no one in sight to ask for help, or even advice.
Apart from being really worn out, I think I was by then so numbed by the shocks and weirdnesses of the previous twenty-four hours that the reasoning and competent part of my brain had just thrown up its hands and gone to sleep. (The rest of me urgently wanted to follow its example.) I couldn't think of anything to do about the problem. I simply stood there for a minute or two, contemplating the door, until without warning it was opened by a tall, surfer-looking young woman who said, "If you want in, why don't you knock instead of just rattling the darn doorknob?"
She was naked. By "naked" I mean not a stitch.
The numbness that affected my brain was powerful stuff. I said politely, making no adjustment to the fact that she didn't have any clothes on at all, "I'm sorry. I thought this was supposed to be the house I was going to stay in, but I guess you live here."
"Hey, no, I'm just visiting," she said, giving me an appeasing smile. "You want to talk to Malcolm Porchester. It's his pad. He's getting his chalks together, but he'll be right out." She picked a kimono kind of garment off the back of a chair and wrapped herself in it, looking me over the whole time. Then she brushed past me, with lots of touching, giving me another smile on the way. She closed the door behind her, leaving me alone in what did not now appear to be my house at all.
Considered as a home which was apparently not to be my own, it was rather attractive. There was a Chinese silk rug on the floor. There were comfortable leather armchairs on one side, and a table and chair set on the other. The remains of a breakfast for two were on the table; they had had fruit, biscuits, and something that looked like it had been an omelette and made me realize I was very hungry. More than hungry. I deeply regretted the sandwiches I had left uneaten. My tongue was moving restlessly around the inside of my lips. I was just making up my mind to steal one of the leftover biscuits when a big, stoop-shouldered man came through the door from the other room. He was fortyish and stocky, and he wore a three-piece suit in gaudy crayon colors with tassels and brass buttons. "Oh, sorry, mate, didn't hear you come in," he said, voice soft but deep. "I was in the bog. Mind telling me who the hell you are?"
"I'm Nolly Stennis. Shipperton said this house was vacant—"
He gave me a deep scowl. "Damn the man! I've told him it's my own digs and no bloody Holiday Effing Inn. Why didn't he give you Jerry Harper's place? Still," he said, amiably enough, "that's not your fault, is it? In any case, I'm on my way to tour the B'kerkyis for two weeks, so you're welcome to sack in here while I'm gone. Malcolm Porchester's the name. Happy to know you. Make yourself at home. Just don't drink the liquor or borrow the books, if you don't mind—and if my Fortnum and Mason parcels come in, they're private property, not issue. Has Tricia left?"
I said diplomatically, "A young lady did let me in, yes. Then she went out."
"That's her. Tricia Madigan. Couldn't be bothered to say good-bye to me, could she? Well, give her a tickle for me when you run across her, and tell her I'll be back in a fortnight." And, picking up a heavy squarish case with a strap on it, he shouldered it and was gone.
Well, I thought. At least something was accomplished. If nothing else, I now knew for sure where Irene's cousin Tricia had gone.