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Chapter 18

 

 

"But Nolly, dear," Norah Platt said patiently, "yes, of course it's too bad about Jerry Harper, but what can one do? He did kill those people."

"You don't have to make a public spectacle of his death."

"Really?" Norah pursed her lips. "Far be it from me to criticize others, but do you actually think it's a good idea to have executions in secret? I mean, what's the point? When I was a girl and my father took me to Tyburn for a hanging, please believe me, I resolved never ever to do anything that would put me on the gibbet. Yes, yes. I know you modern people have other customs, but have they really made any difference? To the amount of crime, I mean? No, I thought not; and Nolly, please, if we don't get started now we'll be late for our first rehearsal!" She limped with dignity out of my door. I followed. The thing was, I had forgotten for a moment how old Norah Platt was. As we passed the "statue" she paused to study critically the depth to which the Duntidon's fangs were penetrating Jerry Harper's doomed throat. She didn't say anything, and neither did I. I was in a somewhat peculiarly fractured state of mind. There was one of me boiling with outrage at the brutal murder of a fellow human being, raging at my captivity, calculating the chances of shooting my way out of this place (but where to find a weapon?), or taking a hostage (but how did you go about that, exactly?), or somehow, anyhow, breaking out of this slavery.

And then there was the other of me. The one whose ear tingled joyously at the word "rehearsal," and whose heart beat faster at the thought of being restored to all those powers I had kissed good-bye.

I don't really blame myself for hurrying after Norah Platt to the rehearsal hall. I guess there were times—oh, say, around the end of the year 1776—when even George Washington took his mind off the worrisome work of trying to free the American colonies from King George III, because he had a houseful of Christmas guests and a lot of mulled wine to drink up. Maybe even V. I. Lenin spent some of his Zurich days sitting at a sidewalk café with a seidel of brew, checking out the girls who strolled by. It stands to reason. You can't be a revolutionary all the time. Especially when you've got a rehearsal to go to. The rehearsal hall was the little theater where I had auditioned on arriving in Narabedla. Then I had been too confused to look at it very carefully. Now I saw that it was not actually a theater. A rehearsal hall is exactly what it was; there wasn't really enough room for an audience, just a couple of rows of seats (well, they weren't all seats; one part-was a tank of water and another was a sort of artificial tree). There was a narrow stage, bare except for a piano on stage right. A plump young woman whom I had never seen before was plunking aimlessly at the piano keys.

The rubbery-legged Binnda was standing just at the steps to the stage. He left off talking to a pretty little man with long, curled hair to hurry toward me, long arms writhing in greeting. "My dear boy, my dear boy," he rasped, the three-cornered mouth working in what might have been a smile. "I hope you slept well? No? Ah, just the natural nervousness of the artist, of course, but you'll be fine! Shipperton has done wonders finding artists for our troupe. He must have been up all night! Let me introduce you to some of your colleagues. This is Ugolino Malatesta, our Idamante, and Eloise Gatt over there at the piano—say hello, Eloise!—will sing Ilia." I must have looked confused, because he took my arm—strange feeling, that rubbery, warm, snaky limb linked with my own—and walked me away. "Oh, didn't I tell you? Shipperton isn't the only one who was busy while the rest of you were all sleeping. I've chosen the operas. For our first production we're going to mount an Idomeneo!"

I gave him a suspicious look. "Idomeneo?"

"Yes, exactly. Won't that be wonderful? And the Mother is sure to approve," since she's such a Mozart fancier!"

How can you tell when an alien creature with no nose is trying to insult you? I couldn't. I kept a firm grip on my temper and only said, "You don't expect me to sing the castrato part, do you?"

"Of course not, Nolly!"

"In fact," I said, nodding, "there's no baritone part at all in Idomeneo, is there?"

Binnda gave me a wounded look. "But I thought you'd understand," he complained. "We'll do the Idomeneo first, so you won't have to sing until you're, ah, ready. Then we'll do two other productions, and of course there'll be parts for you. Big ones!" He peered up at me to see if I was angry, then was distracted as a couple of Kekketies came trotting in with armloads of paper. "Ah, here come the scores! Excuse me, Nolly, let me make sure they've got the right ones."

 

Shipperton's all-night labors had turned up eight or nine other human singers in the troupe. While Meretekabinnda was sorting the scores out, Norah introduced me all over again to the people he had already introduced, and to all the others present, too.

It was a good try, but it was Camp Fire Place Lodge all over again. I was the new boy, and they were indistinguishable lumps of opera company. I did my best, rehearsing the names. There was somebody named Floyd Morcher, a short, dark, morose man in gray pants and gray turtleneck and gray suede shoes. A tenor. There was a big man, no longer young; he had a red mustache and fringes of red hair around a bald pate. He also had a conspicuously red nose; he was a bass, and he looked somehow familiar, but I missed the name because the second tenor was pulling at my arm. He was even more familiar. He was Bartolomeo Canduccio, my acquaintance from Norah's dinner party. "I hope you did like the book," he said, wringing my hand to remind me that he had done me a favor. There were three women, all sopranos, ranging from young and Valley Girl looking to tall, dark, and cadaverous. I told them all I was pleased to meet them, though, really, I hadn't met them. But I was pleased, all right.

 

The pleasure came welling up inside me. It took me by surprise. Nothing had changed. I hadn't really recovered from the shock of Harper's ongoing murder. I was still a zillion miles from home. I still had all the problems I'd had that morning . . . but I was in an opera company!

I found myself grinning at the other singers, smiling affectionately at Norah Platt, touched by the way Binnda dashed around like the veriest human producer-director-conductor-resident genius. Not counting the weird aliens and the bizarre setting, it was so very like the first run-through of any opera company on Earth. I strolled around happily. Two of the women were engaged in an intense conversation in a corner of the stage, in almost voiceless whispers; when they glanced up at me I beamed at them. I saw Bart Canduccio walk pointedly by the castrato, Malatesta, cutting him conspicuously cold; I observed it with tolerant amusement. I was only too happy to oblige Norah when she asked me to help her sort out the acts of the piano reduction of the Idomeneo score. I was delighted when four Kekketies appeared with trays of hot tea and lemon juice for all us singers, and drank my own cup with delight.

I was awash with good feeling. I was going to sing again!

I almost applauded when at last Binnda climbed up on a chair, clapped his hands for attention, and cried, "Ladies! Gentlemen! Excuse me, I am the Prologue!"

It was an operatic in-joke—it was what the clown says at the beginning of Pagliacci—and Binnda got the little titter he was aiming for. Smiling (I guessed that three-cornered mouth was smiling), he began to speak. No, to orate. He said, waving his snaky arms, "This is an historic occasion. I feel humbled by the mantle that Fate has cast on me, the mantle of the immortal Diaghilev and Rudolf Bing, Never before in the history of the Fifteen Associated Peoples have we had the grace of a complete opera company to bring your wonderful The Earth human music to our many audiences in its original, all-human, faithfully produced form. You will perhaps have heard," he went on, his voice taking on a somber timbre, "that many of our friends among the Fifteen Peoples do not care for opera. You may even hear stories that powerful influences—I name no names—are opposed to the creation of this company. Perhaps there is a little truth to that. But it is not an obstacle. It is a challenge! On us in this rehearsal hall rests the divine duty to carry on the great traditions of Mozart, Wagner, and Verdi; of Chaliapin and Caruso and Madame Schumann-Heink; of La Scala and Covent Garden and the Met; above all, of the marvelous Bolshoi Opera of Moscow from which we take our name. You have all been personally chosen by me. I know you are as fine a company as has ever been mounted in any city of your human The Earth. If we fail, it will be my failing. But if we succeed—as I know we will succeed!—then that success will be triumphantly your own. And now, are there any questions?"

The man in gray raised his hand. "There's no brown sugar for the tea," he complained.

"A thousand apologies, Mr. Morcher," said Binnda. "That will be remedied at once. And now, if you will all take your scores, we will run through the opening of the first act of Mozart's immortal Idomeneo."

"What did he mean about obstacles and objections?" I asked Norah Platt.

"Oh," she said absently, rubbing her knuckles, "you know. There's always someone objecting, isn't there, Nolly? As long as you're not otherwise engaged at the moment, my fingers are giving me fits. Would you mind turning the pages for me while I play?"

***

All opera stories are pretty dumb, but Idomeneo is a little dumber than most.

From the point of view of any baritone it has one glaring fault—there's no baritone role in it—so I suppose it's possible that I could be a little prejudiced. I think not, though. The title role is the old king, Idomeneo, sung by the old tenor, Canduccio. Canduccio's pet hate, the pale, pretty little man named Malatesta, sang the role of the king's son, Idamante, and Eloise Gatt, one of the sopranos, was Idamante's girlfriend.

The story is, frankly, too silly to discuss. But on the other hand, the story doesn't really matter, because the music is, well, Mozart. Even sight-reading on a first run-through, it was—well—beautiful. Eloise Gatt had a really sweet soprano, with that mellow cantabile swinging-along sound that goes so well in Mozart, and Malatesta . . .

When Malatesta sang his first lines a shock went through me. I'd never heard a castrato sing before.

The part Malatesta was singing was written for a castrato in the first place. Of course, I'd never heard it sung that way. Due to the twentieth-century shortage of that particular type of performer, I couldn't have. The shortage hadn't begun in the twentieth century. Mozart himself had had to rescore the part for a tenor after the first production, because even in Mozart's time it was hard to find a singer who'd let his testicles be cut off to keep his golden boy's voice all through his life, and anyway after the first performance it was mostly given by amateur companies of the nobility. All of whom were determined to keep their gender equipment intact.

But Binnda wanted to give it as written, and fortunately he had Ugolino Malatesta on hand to do it.

It was pretty funny, when you stopped to think about it, to have Malatesta singing the part of anybody's son. Malatesta was the only human on Narabedla older than Norah Platt. He spoke six languages, English as good as my own—when he was willing to use it. He generally wasn't. He was smooth-skinned and spry and his voice was beautiful, and the single thing that gave away his age—not counting that chopping the testicles off young boys with beautiful voices had been out of style for a couple of centuries—was that he really didn't want to make the effort to speak in anything but his native Italian.

But his voice! It was a wonder. It wasn't just a soprano.

He could pull out of those old pipes a perfectly pure high C, fit for any pretty young coloratura, but the timbre was not like that of any woman who ever lived. It was unearthly. It was colder than a woman's voice, more majestic, more detached. It wasn't a boy's voice, either, because no boy soprano had ever had that much lung power. The top of his range was what I would have called a falsetto in any intact male singer—but there was nothing false about it in Malatesta—and there it had no sex at all. It had nothing to do with Mimi or Cio-Cio-San. It was simply a limpid, quicksilver miracle.

Malatesta knocked me out. If mumps had given me that voice, instead of simply wrecking my baritone, I might have learned to reconcile myself to the mumps . . . almost.

The other singers were all superb, too. The two sopranos, the gaunt, dark Electra and the plump, pretty little Ilia, could have sung in any hall on Earth. When we came to the Neptune, sung by the balding redheaded man, I suddenly realized where I'd seen him before. Eamon McGuire. Of course! It had been in Santa Fe, at the open-air opera. McGuire had sung the Commendatore in Don Giovanni. A long time ago, when I was still turning up at rehearsals in the hope of a last-minute fill-in, I'd gone backstage to ingratiate myself with him on the chance that, some day, I might sing the Don opposite him. Then he had dropped out of sight, and for twenty years or so he had from time to time been the subject of one of those whatever-became-of sessions. Drank himself to death, most people thought.

But now I knew what he had drunk himself to.

The second tenor part was the silent gray man who had complained about the lack of brown sugar, Floyd Morcher. I didn't have much trouble committing his name to memory because during the break he walked over to me and silently pressed a card into my hand. He turned away without waiting for me to read it. He didn't seem to welcome conversation.

The card said:

 

Jesus can help you even here.

I have services every Sabbath.

 

At the bottom he had signed his name. I stared after him, wondering exactly what kind of help he was offering. I hadn't forgotten there were flaws in this Paradise. I wondered what Morcher thought of people who thought a good way to punish somebody was to have him eaten alive, in public, and run the whole terrible event in slow-motion film so that it would last?

 

From time to time we had an audience. They came and went, human and alien. I saw Barak—well, I smelled him before I saw him, but when I looked up there he was, burping furiously at an alien that looked like a shrimp. I saw Tricia Madigan briefly, with that huge, skinny black man I'd seen her with in the bar. He was so tall that out of the corner of my eye I'd taken him for one of the skinny, biped aliens with the pine-needle Mohawks. But when I looked closer he was human enough, and not that big—he was over seven feet, but the aliens were sometimes double that. Tricia and he watched for ten minutes or so, then Tricia blew me a friendly kiss and they went out. Half a dozen aliens drifted in to watch, and sometimes their chattering (or hissing or screeching) to each other caused Binnda to turn and wave his arm at them reprovingly. One of them was one of those bedbug things of the Mother's, the rest were only vaguely familiar—especially one of the ones that hung from the tree.

After an hour Binnda declared a break. The singers went off for tipple of their own—the soprano had said something revolting about a teaspoonful of olive oil—and Norah Platt offered me a cup of tea.

"Going well, isn't it?" she offered.

"I suppose so. Norah? I've been wondering about something. How come you're playing for us when we could have Purry do a full orchestral accompaniment?"

All I had really meant by that was that I would have liked having Purry present—he was about the closest thing I had to a friend in that place. I had hurt her feelings. She said with indignation, "Truly, Knollwood, would you actually prefer that thing to a real, live artist? I know I've played a few clinkers"—I restrained myself from agreeing—"and I'm sorry for that. The old arthritis, I'm afraid. It's rather awful today in the knuckles and the neck. And, of course, the joints. But music isn't just technique. It's also feeling, and how can one get that from a Purry?"

"Don't worry, my boy," said Binnda, coming up from behind me. "We'll have the full orchestra for the dress rehearsal, this is just to get us together for a preliminary run-through. How did you like Malatesta? Simply superb voice! You don't hear that kind of thing at the Met or Covent Garden these days, do you? And now, let's get on to the second act."

And we did, and as Norah was cueing the Idamante for his first aria, I looked back at the dozen or so beings milling around in the seats, tanks, and perches. Most of them were weirdos, but a couple were human, and one of the humans was Woody Calderon.

 

When Binnda declared a lunch break I jumped down from the stage and grabbed Woody before he could get away.

He looked as cheerfully inept as ever as he pumped my hand. "Gee, Nolly, it's great to see you! And singing, they tell me! That's wonderful! Soon as you get over that little cold you've got, or whatever it is." He grinned apologetically at me. Then he said, "I heard you were here. Gosh. I hope it wasn't because of me or anything like that."

What I would have said to that I don't know, because what can you say to a Woody Calderon? Binnda came bustling up behind us and saved me the necessity. "Why, Woody," he called genially, "you're back from the Xseni planet, I see? I hear you were a great success! Join us for lunch? I've got a simple collation laid out in the courtyard."

"Oh, boy," Calderon said happily. "Come on, Nolly! You don't want to miss this!"

When we got outside I saw why. Meretekabinnda's idea of a simple collation was copied closely, I was sure, from the last opera gala he had sneaked into. It was an open-air luncheon, in an enclosed courtyard. The yard was planted like an English garden. White-linened tables were spread with canapés, fresh fruit, cut-glass bowls of reddish liquid with ice floating in it—"Nothing alcoholic, dear boy," Binnda rasped to me, "for we do have work this afternoon, don't we?"—and those slim, tiny Oriental-looking Kekkety servants hovering around to fill a fresh plate or whisk away a used one.

"Wow!" Woody Calderon grinned. "Smoked oysters!" They were, on top of Ritz crackers, held in place by Philadelphia brand cream cheese that had been tinted pink with paprika; there was also Beluga caviar, some other kind of crackers with more cream cheese, this time green and tasting of chives, with a little anchovy strip laid across each one, and cold shrimp that had not come out of a can, and five or six kinds of cheeses, Gouda and Edam and Brie and Port Salut and ripe, moldy Stilton. It wasn't exactly a lunch, but the rest of the cast gobbled it up, and so did Meretekabinnda.

When Woody had filled his plate I took him aside. There was a bench at the far end of the courtyard, under a flowering peach tree. I sat him down in it and said, "I've got an important question for you. Do you want to stay here?"

He choked on a macadamia nut. "Stay here? What do you mean, Nolly? We signed a contract!"

"I didn't! I was kidnapped."

"Gee, Nolly," he said remorsefully, "I heard something about that. I'm sorry. I honestly can't help thinking that it's kind of my fault, in a way. But, you know, this isn't so bad, is it? I mean, we've got work, we've got—"

I didn't want to hear the standard litany. "I want to go home!"

He stared at me through his Woody Allen glasses, honestly perplexed. "Why, Nolly?"

"We've been kidnapped, for Christ's sake! Isn't that reason enough?"

"Well, sure, there's that," he said reasonably, "but look at the good side. There's no I.R.S. here, you know. Nobody hassles me. It's not like back home, where nobody knew I was alive except the bill collectors and the critics that hated me."

I stopped for a minute, because an idea had just occurred to me. "Wait a minute," I said.

"Wait for what?" he asked defensively.

"The critics! I just thought of something. You really did get some lousy notices, didn't you? And suddenly I begin to suspect I know why."

"Well," he began, "you know how it is with critics."

I shook my head. "You know what I think? I think Henry Davidson-Jones got to some of those critics."

His jaw dropped. He forgot to swallow the latest smoked oyster.

"Figure it out for yourself, Woody." I was getting excited. "It makes sense. Davidson-Jones wants artists for Narabedla. Good ones—I mean, were you listening to those people today? They could've been stars back home! But stars have reputations, and if they've got reputations someone's going to miss them when they just disappear. Oh, sure, they cover it up—there was that fake plane crash for you. But if a lot of famous musicians all got wasted in a year, there'd be talk. He doesn't want talk."

Woody was looking at me with those unhappy, gentle sheep's eyes, trying to follow what I was saying. "He wouldn't do anything like that! Would he?"

"Wouldn't he? All he has to do is keep you from getting famous. That's easy; he gets to the people who make reputations. The critics."

"He couldn't."

"Of course he could," I said firmly, because the longer I talked the surer I became that I was right. "He could do it easily. He doesn't have to bribe them or anything, Woody, he's Henry Davidson-Jones. He says to one of them, 'Pity about poor Calderon, did you hear that sour note in the adagio?' and to another one, 'Well, young Calderon's playing a little better tonight, but you should have heard him last week in Phoenix. Pathetic.' And what critic is going to argue with the guy who underwrites the benefits and gives the prizes and pays for the scholarships?"

"Oh, my God," Woody moaned.

"So you don't owe him a thing," I finished.

"God," he repeated. I had him convinced then. I was sure of it.

But then I could feel him slipping away. He took another tiny sandwich and munched on it, thinking. "Well, maybe that's true," he said, "but it doesn't change anything, does it?"

"What do you mean, it doesn't change anything?"

"No, really," he insisted, beginning to get stubborn. "I've still got a good deal here. I don't have to do fry-chef work at McDonald's when I don't have an engagement, because Mr. Shipperton gets me all the engagements I can handle. And they pay in real money, you know. I've got a Swiss bank account, just like I was some big drug dealer! And—well, listen," he said, beginning to glow, "you know what? There's a 1753 Guarnerius cello that's coming up for auction at Sotheby's pretty soon. I don't have enough nearly to pay for any of those big old instruments, of course, but I've got the catalogue; this one's been pretty well messed up and a lot restored, and it might go for under a hundred thousand, and Mr. Shipperton says they'll advance me the price and I can pay back as I earn. I mean, a Guarnerius, Nolly! Mr. Shipperton says the folks here would like to see one anyway. Mr. Shipperton says if I want to put a bid in he'll have somebody cover the auction. Mr. Shipperton says—"

"Mr. Shipperton says 'Jump,'" I said bitterly, "and all you say is, 'How high?'"

He stopped chewing and looked at me. His eyes were hurt.

"You don't have to take that attitude, Nolly."

"There's nothing wrong with my attitude. What's the use of owning an expensive cello if nobody hears you play it?"

"I'll hear me! About a million Aiurdi and J'zeels and all those'll hear me."

"I'm talking about human audiences. Back in the U.S.A., where you belong."

"Well, see, Nolly," he said, "when I was back in the U.S.A. I didn't have any of those big audiences, did I? Now I do, and they're pretty nice people."

"Nice people don't get other people eaten up by monsters in a public place!"

"Oh, yeah," he said, nodding wisely, "you mean Jerry Harper. It's really too bad about Jerry. But, you know, he really was asking for it. You ought to remember, he started out by trying to sneak into a jump station."

"A what?"

"A jump station. A long-distance go-box. What you came here in," he explained. "The go-box thing they use to get you across space, you know? And then they put him in slow time and all and when he came out he just went ape. Blamed the people who caught him—well, they were human beings, too, and he kind of thought all us humans ought to stick together, so when they turned him in he got pretty cheesed off. But that didn't excuse burning them to death!"

I looked around. One of the Kekkety folk was coming toward us, his eyes on Woody's empty plate, but I waved him away. No one else was near.

"Woody," I said, "I want to know everything you know about these jump stations."

He looked worried. "What for?"

I said, "Because they're how you get home. I want to do that. Don't you think you owe me a little help? If it wasn't for you I wouldn't be here."

"Aw, Nolly," he said miserably, "you know I'd do anything in the world for you—"

"Not just for me. There's Marlene."

"What about Marlene?" And when I told him what Shipperton had threatened his eyes got round and worried behind the glasses. "Oh, I wouldn't want anything to happen to Marlene," he said unhappily. "But, gosh, what can I do?"

"Help me get back! Tell me how to get into a jump station."

"But there isn't any way! There are two or three of them on Narabedla, but they're all on levels you can't get to without Binnda or somebody to take you there, and anyway they're guarded all the time. Only the Tlotta drones can operate them, see? At least that's the way it is here; maybe on some of the out planets they're kind of sloppy. I mean, like a month or so ago when I came back here from the Tsigli planet they actually asked me where I wanted to go, if you can imagine."

I could imagine. My heart thumped.

I controlled my voice. "What would have happened if you'd just said you wanted to go to the Earth?"

"Oh, no, they weren't going to let me do that, Nolly," he said, shaking his head. "The drones wouldn't take me there without authorization from the Mother. Anyway, they'd have to know exactly what station you were going to. There's only one station on Earth, and that's on Mr. Davidson-Jones's yacht. You couldn't just tell them the planet. You'd have to tell them what you wanted was the yacht, do you see."

I kept my voice level. "And suppose you'd said that? That you wanted to go to Mr. Henry Davidson-Jones's yacht?"

He thought for a moment. "Why, I don't know. They'd ask their local Mother, of course, but she might not stop it. They're pretty sloppy on the Tsigli planet; it's a kind of a joke around here, you know."

I frowned. "But if it's as easy as that, why didn't Jerry Harper do it that way?"

"Oh, but that was what he was going to try next," said Woody. "Only he wanted to get even with those other guys first, you see? Which just shows you!"

"Shows me what, Woody?"

"How you really shouldn't do anything mean, don't you see? Because if Jerry hadn't burned them up he'd probably be home by now."

 

When we started again, Meretekabinnda was talking to one of the Mother's bedbugs. He came up to the stage, still talking to it, but not in English; it scurried away as I approached. "Binnda," I said, "Woody says he had a great time on the Tsigli planet. Any chance we could go there with the troupe?"

"Why not, dear boy?" he said lavishly. "After we finish the tour I'm arranging now, of course; first we keep our commitments, then we look around for new ones, don't you agree? And there's one other thing. The Mother's drone says the doctor will be free by the day after tomorrow, so we can get your pipes fixed. You'll need a bit of time for it, but then we can put off your rehearsals for a few days—"

"Now, wait a minute! I don't know about this! I have to think it over!"

"Silly boy," said Norah Platt affectionately, coming up to us. "It's nothing to worry about; I do it all the time. And honestly, Nolly, Dr. Boddadukti is about the best barber I've ever seen. As soon as he's through with—what's the matter? Oh, did I say 'barber'? Of course, these days you call them just surgeons."

"Yeah," I said. I was not impressed by Norah's recommendation. The best barber-surgeon of her time, from the days when the same man did both surgery and hair-cutting, would have been about up to the level of a present-day supermarket meat-cutter.

Norah said, "Tell you what. I'm about due myself, Nolly. I'll go in with you, and we can both get fixed up at the same time. The day after tomorrow? Yes, why not? Just don't do any heavy drinking tomorrow night, there's a good boy, because Dr. Boddadukti might think that was the normal state of your blood chemistry and you'd come out of the operation roaring drunk!"

 

 

 

 

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