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Chapter 26

 

 

When the last of the rubbery transparent stuff over my scars had been absorbed, I had to submit to the Mother's questing tentacles again.

The second time in that smelly, shallow pool wasn't quite as bad as the first. It was bad enough. The trouble with the Mother was that her appetites were not in circuit with her mind. She really had no control over her feeding reflexes—or of her excretory reflexes, or of her egg-laying, which went on forever. When something edible came within range of her questing tentacles she ate it. You couldn't blame her, any more than you could blame someone with digestive problems for breaking wind in church.

Knowing all that, and knowing that sometimes she made mistakes in identification, I approached her very cautiously. The little chocolate-brown bedbug that had brought me chittered warnings to me from the edge of the pool, but I didn't need them to be careful.

It was an English-speaking bedbug, and quite conversational. As I was being probed it translated the Mother's coos and moans for me. "The Mother," it informed me as, naked, I waded toward her restless tentacles, "is quite pleased that two of the operas are by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, whose work she enjoys."

I stopped, as far from that brightly colored barrel of a body as I dared. The tentacles reached out for me. "So do I love Mozart. Very much," I said, wincing as the tentacle tip reached for my mouth.

"She has enjoyed watching your rehearsals on the skry," the bedbug went on, raising itself on a couple of its legs to peer down at me. "Be most careful now!" I couldn't answer, with the tentacle slithering down my throat, while the pale eyes of the Mother regarded me opaquely. The bedbug went on, "She hopes that the difficulty with casting the Leporello role is solved quickly. She does not wish Don Giovanni to be canceled." He paused to listen, while the Mother cooed gently and the tentacles slid out of me again. "You may come out," it finished. "The Mother says you are quite recovered, and asks why your Earth human Conjur Kowalski cannot sing Leporello."

I was halfway out of the pool by then. "Well," I said, "he does have a nice voice, but he hasn't had any operatic training, you see. Also Leporello and I have to disguise ourselves as each other, so he has to look at least a little bit like me. Conjur just doesn't."

The bedbug moaned at the Mother, who moaned back. "Then what are you going to do about it?"

"Binnda's working on it," I told them. "He's had a couple of ideas." I hesitated, because I hadn't liked the sound of some of them, but the bedbug was insistent.

"State for the Mother what the ideas were," it commanded.

"If I can. Of course, he could transpose the role for a different voice, but that wouldn't be authentic. Then he said something about, ah, recruiting a bass from Earth." The word I wanted to use was "kidnapping," but I didn't think it was tactful. "That would take too long, he said. Or he thought he could have Dr. Boddadukti alter the voice of a tenor—there are a couple of them that are available, but that might take a while, too. The last thing he said was—I'm not sure I know what he meant—we could buy a bass from the Ossps."

The bedbug chirped at me in dismay, and when it translated what I had said the Mother's tentacles flailed the pool into froth. I jumped back to avoid being splashed, pleased I wasn't in the pool anymore. The bedbug said severely, "The Mother reminds you that that sort of trade with the Ossps is interdicted! She will speak to Meretekabinnda about it herself. Under no circumstances is he to make use of any services from the Ossps! Now come, I will escort you back to your quarters."

 

"Oh, my dear boy," said Meretekabinnda reproachfully when I saw him in the rehearsal hall, "how could you possibly have said that to the Mother? I wasn't serious about buying a bass from the Ossps."

"I didn't know that," I said. "I only told her what you'd said to me."

"But I was only thinking out loud! Anyway," he said, cheerful again, "I'm happy to tell you that the problem is solved. Senor Manuel de Negras will join us this afternoon, and he will sing Leporello."

I asked suspiciously, "Have you, ah, recruited him from Earth?"

"No, no. He has been—how shall I explain it? He has been unavailable. In reserve, so to speak. It's a complicated political matter, my boy, but now, with the probe going so well and everyone in a sort of era of good feeling I've been able to secure his services. Here, look." He spoke to the wall skry, and it obediently displayed the face of a man in flamenco costume gazing belligerently out at us. "Senor de Negras was originally recruited as a folk singer and dancer, it is true. However, he has the trained voice; he studied in Barcelona and at the Paris Opera."

I studied the flat, peasant face. "He doesn't look much like me," I objected.

"Oh, more than you think, dear boy," Binnda twinkled. "At any rate, he's about the same height and build, and that's all that matters for the disguise scene, isn't it? Believe me," he added earnestly, "he is quite satisfactory." 

"Then why didn't you get him right away?"

"Because," Binnda said patiently, "there were political problems, didn't I just say so? Now! Before the rest of the cast arrives I would like to show you some of the theaters where we may be playing—as you will see, there are some technical difficulties we will have to face."

So he wiped the Spanish bass off the skry and began to display theaters, as the other singers trickled in. The first one he showed me looked, actually, a little like the old Radio City Music Hall in New York. It was a great, open, bright auditorium with a vast stage. The chief point of difference from the Music Hall was that the entire ground-floor seating area had no real seats in it, being a shallow lake of water. "This will be built on the Tlotta planet," Binnda announced. "The water, of course, is for the Mothers. Do you like it? I designed it myself, but, unfortunately, it is not finished yet. Neither is this one." He showed a quite handsome, quite traditional opera auditorium, all finished in white with gold trim. It looked more like the Kirov in Leningrad than anything else.

"It's a real opera house," I marveled.

"Oh, yes, exactly! Or it will be. This one is on my own planet, and I had hoped to open there—but," he added sadly "because of the political questions we won't have it finished for some time."

"What political questions?" I asked.

"Nothing that is not now mere history," he said cheerfully, "I hope. Now, look at this! Hopeless, don't you agree?"

The skry was showing an open-air amphitheater, like the Baths of Caracalla bred to the Hollywood Bowl. "Can you imagine the acoustics?" he demanded with distaste. "They will destroy the sound, and this one is even worse."

The next one was almost Greek, a Spartan, empty open stage with tiers of bare seats rising around it. Binnda gazed at it in despair. "Do you see the problem? This is a Ggressna theater! Barak's people, you know? On his planet, where it rains all the time. Can you imagine trying to sing in the open, with raindrops falling into your mouth every time you open it?" He shook his shoulders morosely and sighed. "If only we could have something like Bayreuth. That wonderful hall! Nothing straight in it, no boxes to swallow the sound—"

"And no seats fit to sit in," put in Eamon McGuire, coming up to us with Floyd Morcher in trail.

Binnda blinked at him. Most of the company was gathered around us now. He seemed embarrassed. "But," he said reproachfully, "comfort does not matter. None of your theaters have seats that are right for me, you know. It is music that matters. And we had better get to it! Gather around me, everyone, while I show you what we are going to do for our Don Giovanni!"

 

What we were going to do for our production of Don Giovanni was—I'll put it as conservatively as I can—wonderful.

I've always felt that it was just about impossible for anyone to put on a perfect Don Giovanni on Earth. The technical problems are terrible. Both Mozart and his librettist, Lorenzo Da Ponte, were very casual about where they set their scenes. Act One of the opera alone calls for five different sets—a courtyard, a square, a country place, a garden, and the interior of a palace, and they switch around faster than any human stagehands can move them. In a place like the Met, with all its built-in elevators and turntables, it's possible—barely possible—to reset the scenes without totally destroying the pace of the performance, but most houses don't even try. They tend to ignore Da Ponte's directions and have Giovanni meet Donna Elvira in the same place where he stabbed the Commendatore, because the directions are too hard to follow. Da Ponte didn't care. In Mozart's time the audiences didn't, either. They were quite content to have the curtain rung down while the singers did their arias, with probably half a dozen encores. That gave the eighteenth century stagehands time to sweat the new set into position behind the curtain. It is a matter of record that the singers often complained bitterly about grunts and bangs and crashes that came from the other side of the curtain to punctuate their high notes, but they didn't complain much. They liked having the stage all to themselves, so they could milk all the bows the customers were willing to tolerate.

On Narabedla almost the whole set was one of their hologrammish things. Problems of moving furniture simply didn't arise.

A few props and settings had to be "practical," because we had to use them—the stone horse for the Commendatore to sit on when he's a statue, and the garden gate that Donna Anna locks in the first act, for instance, because Leporello has to bang against it. Everything else was only light.

Then there was the music. Da Ponte's libretto calls for three separate orchestras, which hardly any Earthly impresario can afford. Binnda could. He had three separate Purries tootling away, one in the pit and one on each side of the stage, but you couldn't see the Purries. All you could see was the unreal, hologrammed musicians. Even a Purry is limited in what instruments he can duplicate, so Binnda allowed a little technology there, too. Some of the sounds were fiddled electronically so that we got the right timbre for violins, clarinets, kettledrums—whatever. It worked. Even the sound effects. The thunderclap in Act One was loud enough, and real enough, to jolt me. And it came, Binnda pointed out proudly, with a genuine Van de Graaf-spark lightning bolt that seared right across the stage.

When Binnda had finished demonstrating the sets for our third opera there was a patter of applause. Gratified, he bowed, waving those snaky arms deprecatingly. "I am so delighted that you approve," he said modestly. "I had only hoped to provide staging that would be equal to your talents." He stretched himself upright, peering past us into the rear of the hall. "Ah," he said, the green tongue licking out of the ugly little mouth with pleasure, "our remaining artist has arrived! Ladies and gentlemen, may I present our second bass, Senor Manuel de Negras!"

 

Manuel de Negras was younger than I thought from his picture. He didn't seem to be much more than twenty, tall for a Spaniard, very dark, with a solid, strong face that, every once in a while, broke out in a smile of pleasure as he looked around at the rest of us. When we shook hands he apologized to me, in Spanish, for having no English, and in English I apologized to him for my lack of Spanish. But both of us had a little French and Italian, naturally. When Binnda insisted on beginning at once to run through the first act of the opera, de Negras reading his lines from a script, we were able to say what we had to say to each other.

The man did have a good, rich, humorous bass voice, just right for Leporello, I was pleased when, halfway through the second scene, I was offstage long enough to go down into the audience seats and watch him deal with my discarded sweetheart, Donna Elvira.

Tricia had come by to see what was going on, and I sat next to her. "Do you know this guy?" I whispered to her. "Everybody else seems to."

"Never saw him before," she said. "Listen, is he saying what I think he's saying?"

He had reached "Madamina:il catologo equesto" where he tells Elvira about all the women I've had—a hundred and forty in Italy, two hundred and thirty-one in Germany, and so on. "I guess so," I told her. "He's adding up all my ladies for her."

She looked at me with interest. "So you play a real super-stud, right?"

"It's the story of Don Juan, after all," I told her. "And Leporello there is my servant, and his greatest wish is that he could run up the same score for himself."

"For Manuel de Negras, too, I bet," Tricia offered, looking up at him. "After where he's been, I mean."

"I thought you said you didn't know him."

"Well, I don't. Before my time. But I know where he's been the last ten years or so, didn't you? They put him away for trying to hijack a trip home, like Jerry Harper. Binnda just got him out of slow time."

 

 

 

 

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