“I believe that. Look, Norah’s pretty upset. I think I’ll sit with her for a while.”
“You’re a sweet kid,” I told her, and meant it. I was surprised that Norah was taking it so hard. I knew that Malatesta and Bart Canduccio were competitors for her favors, but I hadn’t known that Ephard Joyce was in the running.
I left Tricia with Norah Platt. Outside of the hut I saw Conjur, wearing a big floppy hat and squinting morosely up at the bright blue morning sun. I told him about Norah and expressed my surprise that she was so upset about Ephard Joyce.
“Well, Knollwood,” Conjur rumbled, “they all been here a long time. Ain’t no man that’s going to last a hundred years, is there? I think they kind of take turns, you know? Only it’ll be a goodly time before Ephard gets another turn at the lady, where they put him now.”
“It won’t seem long to him.” I smiled. I’d already figured out that less than half an hour in slow time equaled a year outside.
“It will seem real long,” Conjur growled. “Knollwood, why do you talk about things you don’t know anything about? Did you talk to Manuel de Negras yet?”
“Not much,” I confessed. “I’ve been pretty busy. Tonight I’m going to sing Don Giovanni, you know.”
He sighed. “Talk to the man. Get your Purry to translate. You’d really be interested, I promise you that.” He passed a hand over his face and added, “You know what it’s like in slow time? You never forget where you are. When you’re in the place you know damn well how long it’s being outside. You know it’ll be ten or twenty years before you get out, and nobody’s hardly going to remember you.”
“That would be an annoyance,” I admitted, “but it doesn’t sound terrible.”
“What’s terrible,” he said patiently, “is wondering whether they’re ever going to let you out at all.”
“But they always do, don’t they?” I said, to reassure him. He sighed. “Knollwood,” he said, “you better get out of this sun. It’s frying your pitiful little brains.”
Six hours later, in plumed hat and boots and sword and cape, I was dragging my weeping Donna Anna, Sue-Mary Petticardi, out of the purely illusory castle door on the stage before an even fuller house of delighted Ptrreeks.
I had that made. I had never been in better voice. The Spanish bass was a grand Leporello. Old Eamon McGuire was a perfect proud Commendatore, and died magnificently when I stabbed him. The girls were wonderful, fiery Donna Elvira, icy Donna Anna, sultry Zerlina; but I rather thought, and got the impression that all of them thought, I was the most wonderful of all. I was Don Giovanni—courage of a lion in combat, guile of a serpent in seduction. It was the starring part in the finest opera ever written, and I was playing it to the hilt.
The audience agreed.
At the end I was dragged to a furiously flaming Hell by a chorus of demons. That was one of Binnda’s brightest ideas; the hologrammed demons were actually programmed to resemble the ugly and unpopular race called the Ossps, half lizard, half bat, all hideous. The crowd roared. They kept on roaring all through the sextet that ends the opera, and when I came out for my first bow those fourteen-foot insects stood up for me.
The day had started well. There’d been a little letdown here and there, mostly professional jealousy, I thought, but it had definitely been a good day; and now it was ending with the kind of triumph I had hardly even dreamed of. When Binnda trotted out with the night’s roses, in his beautifully comic opera suit, I decided my life was just about complete … and, of course, that’s when it happened.
The misty “curtain” had just begun to gather around us when, without warning, it vanished.
The applause stopped as though chopped off. Binnda made a sound of surprise. So did I, while members of the audience, halfway to the aisles, paused to look back.
A harsh bright light snapped on to surround us. It seemed to be a hologram pattern, but I couldn’t make out what it was; we were actually inside it.
A strident Ptrreek voice began a bass cluttering from nowhere, addressing the audience. Twitters and rumbles of consternation came from all over the hall. I looked wonderingly at Binnda, whose three-cornered mouth hung open in horror.
“Oh, my dear boy,” he moaned, wringing his three-fingered hands. “What a terrible thing to happen just now!”
I guessed. “Has Ephard Joyce done something serious?”
“Joyce? No, of course not, it has nothing to do with your The Earth. It’s far, far worse than that. It’s the Andromeda probe, my dear Nolly. It’s lost synch, and it’s headed for destruction!”
CHAPTER
35
I don’t know if the theater ever did empty that night. When we left there were still a thousand or more Ptrreek roaming the aisles and chittering to each other, as the big skry rehearsed the disaster over and over, and when we got to our hotel lobby there was more of the same.
The lobby, of course, was not really any more like a hotel lobby than the “hotel” was like a human hotel. It didn’t have couches, registration desks, or bellhops. It was a largish open space with six or eight cloudy spheres spotted around it, hanging in air. They were the Ptrreek equivalent of skries, and people (or at least Ptrreek) used them the way passengers waiting at an airport would use the coin-operated TV sets, or visitors to a Ramada Inn would use the house phones. They weren’t being used for telephoning just now. The place was full of tall, cloaked Ptrreek, waving their powdery arms and chittering among themselves as they gathered around the globes.
I took Tricia’s elbow and drew her to one of them to see what was going on. It wasn’t easy to hear the voice coming from the skry—the Ptrreek muttering almost drowned it out—but that didn’t matter, because none of us could have understood it anyway. It wasn’t much easier to see the skry itself, either. The fourteen-foot Ptrreek weren’t transparent, and even when we caught glimpses past them we were handicapped by our size. The stay was at Ptrreek level. We midget humans had as much trouble seeing as a three-year-old trying to watch his big brother’s video game.
Wherever we looked, each skry showed the same scene. You didn’t have to understand Ptrreek to know that what we were seeing was on-the-spot news coverage of the Andromeda probe disaster.
“Thank heaven,” I murmured to Tricia, “that it isn’t our problem.”
Norah Platt, standing next to her, overheard. “Oh, Nolly,” she said sadly, “don’t you think it is? Anytime the Fifteen Peoples get into an argument their minor joint projects are going to suffer. And of course we’re about as minor as any project could be.”
“Oh, it can’t be that bad,” I said comfortingly. “They loved us. Didn’t you hear the ovation they gave us?”
“Let me put it a different way,” Tricia said. “Do you hear these Ptrreek?”
She had a point there. There were hundreds of Ptrreek in the lobby, and although the things they were saying to each other were incomprehensible, they were clearly furious.
I shrugged and complained, “I wish I knew exactly what was going on.”
“Just look,” Tricia ordered.
Actually, it was clear enough. I already knew that the probe had lost its synchronicity with the flare from the pulsar. What the skry showed was the detail, slowed down and enhanced. We could see the searchlight-beacon of energy from the star fall slowly behind the orbiting spiderweb. The huge, flimsy light-sail probe wasn’t meant for such rough treatment. It tipped and crumpled in upon itself, and each time they saw that happening every Ptrreek in the audience simultaneously emitted a sort of high-pitched, chirping groan.
“Well, hell,” I said, “I see that they’re upset, of course, but I bet they get over it. Space launches have gone sour on Earth, too.”
“Not like this,” Norah said direly, and went on to explain. What made this one particularly nasty was that the Andromeda probe was a high-level cooperative effort, involving almost all of the Fifteen Peoples in one way or another. The Ggressna had supplied the filmy probe itself. The J’zeel had done t
he instrumentation, with some contributions by, of all people, the Duntidon. The Ptrreek were the ones who had supplied the apparatus that controlled the magnetic field of the neutron star; they were the ones everyone blamed first, because that gave them operational control of the launch. But that just made them madder, because not all of the instrumentation was Ptrreek. The Ptrreek blamed the J’zeel, the J’zeel complained that the B’kerkyi data on the star’s natural magnetic fields was faulty, the Duntidons assailed the Ggressna for making the probe so weak, and they all blamed Meretekabinnda’s Mnimn, who had had general supervision of everything. Everybody was mad at everybody else.
“Look at Binnda,” Tricia said, nudging me.
I hadn’t seen him come in. It wasn’t easy to see him now, because he—and a Purry—were encircled by a score of the Ptrreek, leaning down to chirp furiously at him. Reinforcements of Ptrreek were lunging toward him to join in, like the kind of argument you used to see around the speakers’ stands in Union Square.
“Poor guy,” Tricia whispered. “Maybe we ought to help him out.”
I wasn’t sure he needed it. He had blown a fuse. He stood there, bellowing up at the huge, expressionless insect faces towering ten feet above his head. What he was saying I couldn’t tell, because it wasn’t in English. It wasn’t in the Ptrreek language, either, because the Purry was kept busy translating back and forth, from clicks and whistles into grunts and roars.
Whether he needed help or not, he was getting it. Norah had already started determinedly toward the scene, and Malatesta was with him. Tricia tugged at my arm, and we joined them.
We were not only outnumbered but vastly outclassed. I wished I hadn’t skipped my workout the last few days. It seemed to me that the chances were substantial that somebody was going to get physical, and what were a handful of tiny humans and an even tinier Mnimn going to do against a couple hundred fourteen-foot Ptrreek?
But they let us through. When we dragged him away, still shouting, they didn’t follow. They just turned back to the skries.
“But really,” Meretekabinnda gasped, “it is incomprehensible! Everything in the probe was tested. It’s not possible that our engineering failed.”
“Well, something did,” I offered cheerfully.
He gazed sadly at me, the three-cornered mouth hanging limp. “Oh, my dear boy, what a catastrophe. I must go at once and communicate with the coordinators.” He started away, then turned back to grasp my hand. “By the way,” he added, “you were splendid.”
And then he was gone, and the rest of us headed up to our rooms.
There wasn’t any party that night.
We went to bed early. I didn’t mind that, but, surprisingly, we went to sleep early, too.
When we came down the next morning there was no Binnda, no Barak, no “foreign” aliens visible at all, only Ptrreek. In spite of our recognized status as, well, as “sweethearts,” Tricia turned down the idea of a quiet table for two at breakfast. She found a place to sit next to Norah, still grieving over her slowed-down Ephard Joyce, and I took the table with the sopranos and our recently speeded-up-again Spanish bass, Manuel de Negras.
It wasn’t the happiest breakfast I ever had. I didn’t blame Tricia for wanting to try to comfort Norah Platt, but I missed having her next to me. The sopranos were no help. They were having a lively conversation with de Negras, but unfortunately they were having it in French. It would have been interesting enough if my French had been up to following it, because he was telling them about his six hours (or fourteen years, depending on how you looked at it) in slow time, but they were going too fast for me. And by the time I got settled down even my scrambled eggs were cold.
I wondered what I was going to do with my day.
The night’s opera was Idomeneo again, meaning both Tricia and I were off. It would have been a good time to do some sightseeing in the Ptrreek city, but when I leaned over to suggest it to Tricia she shook her head. Not while the blue sun was up, she said; she sunburned too easily. Not after it had set and only the red sun was in the sky, either, because then the opera would be on, and we owed it to Binnda to show up to watch it. I’d been complaining I hadn’t been getting any exercise anyway, she pointed out, so why didn’t I catch Conjur and find a place where the two of us could work out?
So I did.
We settled down in the place where we’d been having the cast parties; the room had been stripped bare after it had been cleaned up. It wasn’t like Conjur’s private gym, but he’d persuaded Binnda to include a basketball and a few other odds and ends with the theatrical baggage. We played a little racketball (no lines, no court, but plenty of room to swing in the high-ceilinged Ptrreek room) and went a couple of rounds with the big gloves to work up a sweat, with Ptrreek drifting in and out to stare at us. While we were jogging around to cool out Conjur panted, “Were you listening to Manuel at breakfast?”
“More or less,” I said. “It sounded like a lot of nothing to do. I wonder how poor Joyce is making out.”
“Screw poor Joyce,” he said dispassionately. “Did you catch the part about the girl?”
I tried to remember and failed. “What girl?”
“Talk to him again,” he advised. “But don’t tell Tricia.” Then he stopped, wiped sweat off his face, and said, “That’s enough for today. Is that Tsooshirrisip coming in? I’m going to see if he can tell me where I can find a real shower.”
But we didn’t have any language in common with the Ptrreek. I went out to look for someone to translate, but by the time I found Purry and came back Conjur was gone. I asked Tsooshirrisip anyway, and he was amused at the notion. “In the kitchens,” he advised me, through Purry, “there may be sprays to clean things. No doubt you can get under one of them if you wish.” I started to thank him, but Purry interrupted. “Mr. Tsooshirrisip has more to say,” he told me. “Mr. Tsooshirrisip wishes to tell you how much he enjoyed your Don Giovanni last night, and regrets that the terrible news about the probe so badly spoiled the evening for everyone.”
“Oh, really?” I smiled up at the looming insect face. “Thank him for that, too.” The Ptrreek might be an ugly alien monster that smelled like dead roaches, but he was the first person of any description to offer any consolation for my thwarted triumph. I didn’t need to be soothed. But it had been a real downer, and I certainly would have appreciated it.
Tsooshirrisip was still going on, and Purry translated. “Mr. Tsooshirrisip thought the absolutely best part of the show was when you killed the old human and he returned from the dead. In the Ptrreek culture they have never evolved the human idea of ‘ghosts,’ and he thought it was quite amusing. Also the presentation of Ossps as what you call ‘devils.’ ”
I kept the smile on my face, though he hadn’t said a word about what the opera was really about, namely the singing.
I said politely, “Thank him again, but tell him, please, that I can’t take any credit for the Ossps. That was entirely Meretekabinnda’s idea.”
But when Purry translated that, the Ptrreek spread his forearms angrily and sputtered what Purry rendered as, “Do not mention that Mnimn’s name, Mr. Tsooshirrisip says. On this of all days, he says. It is entirely their fault that the good work of all the rest of the Fifteen Associated Peoples has gone for naught.”
“Oh, but really,” I began, but Purry stopped me. “Please,” he begged. “It is not a good time to disagree with him. Also there is more he is saying.”
“What’s that?”
“Mr. Tsooshirrisip points out that there is an old saying among his people, which he wishes they had borne in mind when they entered into the compact for the Andromeda probe. The saying is, ‘When you have a Mnimn for an associate, you don’t need an opponent.’”
We saw nothing of Binnda all that day, but when we got to the theater for the performance of Idomeneo he was waiting backstage, complete in his monkey suit, the green tongue working nervously in the hideous little mouth. “What a day!” he greeted us morosely. “Conferences,
conferences— I shouldn’t even be here now, but I have a duty to you all and to the audience. And at least,” he finished, peering out at the auditorium, “it seems we will have a good house. I was afraid … But no, of course the people who appreciate opera will not hold the unfortunate destruction of the probe against us. Go take your places, everyone, please. I don’t want to start late.”
Until that moment it hadn’t occurred to me to worry about what effects the probe accident might have on our performances, but as Tricia and I found our high-chair seats I began to.
Still, the performance went beautifully. Malatesta and Floyd Morcher outdid themselves, and so did everyone else in the cast. When it was over the Ptrreek applauded it wildly.
“I guess everything is going to be all right,” I said to Tricia, climbing up on top of my chair to see better while the cast took their curtain calls. There were a lot of them. I was delighted to see it, even though they had almost as many as we’d had for Don Giovanni the night before. And then Binnda came trotting out from the wings in his white-tie outfit, modestly appearing for the final curtain call—
And the applause stopped cold. It shut off as though a switch had been turned. Every Ptrreek stopped clapping, and the only applause in that whole theater came from the hands of the humans of the opera company.
The Ptrreek were decent enough to show their admiration for the talents of us primitive Earth artists, but they were not now going to clap for a Mnimn.
I did not think an alien could weep, but Binnda’s voice was choking as he called us all together after the performance. “My dear colleagues,” he croaked, “you saw what happened tonight. For the good of the show, I don’t think I should conduct again. I’ve asked our estimable Mrs. Norah Platt to fill in for me for tomorrow’s performance of I Pagliacci. In any case, I must return for consultations about this terrible business. That is the bad news. The good news,” he went on, “is that even the Ptrreek can’t deny that you are all superb. The tour will go on. Tsooshirrisip”—I noticed that it wasn’t “Mr. Tsooshirrisip” anymore—“will continue to make all the necessary arrangements, and I hope I can join you again at some later time. At least when we get to Hrunw.”