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 Porch-ester’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.
CHAPTER
11
I slept on top of the bedclothes, fully dressed. There was only the one bed. It smelled of Tricia Madigan’s perfume and of faint, private aromas, and I just did not choose to get in between those recently used sheets. I’d gobbled down the rest of the biscuits and fruit as soon as Malcolm Porchester was gone, and I might have slept longer if I hadn’t heard rustlings in the other room.
While I was waking up, making up my mind to investigate the sounds, I heard my name called.
It was the voice of Norah Platt, my accompanist from the day—or was it the night?—before. When I peeked through the bedroom door I saw that she was standing primly in the front doorway, waiting to be invited inside, but there were two others present in the house who had not waited for an invitation. They appeared to be the same sort of small, brown men, Oriental-featured, that Shipperton had called “Kekketies.” They had skinny, muscular legs sticking out of khaki shorts. They didn’t bother to look at me. One of them was running a vacuum hose across the Persian carpet. The other was clattering dishes in the kitchen. The table had been cleared and the room picked up, and as soon as I was out of the bedroom both of the men ducked silently past me into it to begin stripping the bed.
“Good morning, Mr. Stennis,” Norah Platt said politely. “I hope I’m not intruding. I thought you might like some help settling in.”
“You never had a better thought,” I told her.
Norah Platt was a tiny thing, no more than five feet tall. Her hands were in proportion. I wondered how she could span an octave on the keyboard, though she had seemed to have no trouble when she was accompanying me in my debut before the weirdies. That time she had worn a high-collared, long-sleeved evening gown. This morning she was wearing a decorously knee-length pleated skirt and a less decorous halter top. She filled it quite well.
Looking at her, it was hard to believe that this woman had been alive during the lifetime of George Washington. Apart from the fact that she was smoking a slim cigar, she looked like anyone’s favorite staying-young grandma.
She acted like a grandmother, too. She began talking at once. She told me that she was aware I hadn’t had much sleep and hated to wake me, but Mr. Shipperton had come up with an idea about what to do with me; no, she didn’t know what it was, but he’d tell me all about it. As for “settling in,” she knew what kind of assistance I needed before I knew it myself. I certainly wouldn’t have to make my own bed, because the Kekkety folk would take care of all that.
“You know,” she said, waving toward the little brown people, “the servants. They’re called Kekketies. They come with the house. All mod cons, you know. No, they don’t talk, but they’ll understand when you give them orders. If you want something special, just tell them, or leave a note for them on the fridge.” On the subject of clothes: “I’ll help you choose a wardrobe this afternoon, if you like. There’s no dress code here. A lot of the men just wear shorts. Or less.” On the subject of food: “I’ll make a basic list of supplies for you to give the Kekkety folk. Do you cook? So many men do, now. There are quantities of ready-cooked things available if you order them, and the Kekketies will do you a meal if you like. They’re not bad on anything in the standard cookbooks. I think it’s nicer to make my own. Of course,” she added apologetically, “it’s not like Home, is it? If there’s something in particular you fancy—a particular brand, perhaps—you’ll have to order it, and that can take weeks. Also, you’ve got to pay for it out of your earnings, and of course at present—well, I’m sure you’ll have plenty of earnings once you get started. I mean, if you do get started. Can you eat kippers?”
I perceived that it was not an irrelevant question. The servant in the kitchen had not just been doing dishes. Food smells were coming from it, and one of the little men padded silently past us to deal with them. “I supposed you would want breakfast,” Norah apologized, “so I took the liberty of instructing them to make you something. There wasn’t all that much to choose from in Malcolm’s larder. I hope it’s what you can eat.”
It was, actually, very little like anything I would have ordered for myself. There was a very large pitcher of what tasted exactly like fresh-squeezed orange juice—that was the good part—but there was an equally large thermos pitcher of what I hoped would be coffee but turned out to be strong, dark tea. There was a rack of thinly sliced toast (quite suitably, Englishly, cold) and something that, Norah said regretfully, “Isn’t a real kipper, but it’s not bad, actually. I eat the things myself when I can’t get the authentic article from Home.”
It was close enough to a real kipper to fool me. I’ve never liked the things enough to have much practice with them. I managed to get some of it down and filled up on cold toast and orange juice, while Norah consented to accept a cup of tea, talking away as I ate.
When I dawdled over the last of the cold toast she got up, wincing a little, and courteously took a seat on the couch before lighting up another cigar. She shifted position two or three times before she found one she liked on the couch. “It’s the damp,” she said, trying to settle herself comfortably. “Old bones, you know.”
I had already noticed that the air was distinctly soggy. They kept the humidity that way, she explained, for
the convenience of some of the “natives”—“Poor Barak, for instance, he does dry out so, and some of the others rather need to stay in water all the time. And there’s more oxygen in the air here, they tell me, though I’ve long since got so accustomed to it I don’t notice things like that. You do understand what Narabedla is like? I mean physically?”
I didn’t. She tried to tell me. “It looks rather like a soup tin, one might say—or a series of tins, one within the other. We’re in almost the outermost shell. There are two shells that are principally for artists like ourselves, when we’re not on tour, and then there are five or six others for natives. Some of them do require such special conditions, poor dears.”
“Oh, yes,” I said. “The poor dears. But look, that sounds more like a spaceship than a moon.”
“It does, doesn’t it? They say it used to be a moon, though, and then somebody, I think it was the Aiurdi, but it might’ve been one of the others, rebuilt it. Oh, not for us! But then they didn’t need it for whatever it was meant to be in the first place, and now they let us have it. Well, part of it. But I mustn’t keep on jabbering away! You’re to be in Mr. Shipperton’s office in half an hour, so I won’t make a real visit of it this time, but I’m at Fifteen, The Crescent, and I’d be delighted to offer you dinner tonight. Perhaps a few friends might join us? There are some very nice people here—although not usually,” she added, with a disdainful little smile, “on this particular street. Nolly? If you’d rather not come to dinner …”
I realized I’d been staring into my teacup. Norah must have thought I was trying to think of a good way out of accepting her invitation. “Oh, sorry, Norah. I was just thinking about—about…”
“Of course,” she said with sympathy. “One is always— what shall I say?—pensif, a bit, just at first. But usually one isn’t brought here if there’s a wife and kiddies or anything of that sort?” The tone of her voice made it a question.
“There isn’t anyone like that,” I said, “but I do have friends, and I’m a little worried about them.” I told her about Marlene and Irene Madigan, and my worry that Henry Davidson-Jones would do something unpleasant to them if they got curious about me.
“Oh,” she said, nodding, “Irene Madigan. That would be the cousin of our Tricia. She’s a silly young thing, but there’s no real harm in her.”
It took me a moment to realize she was talking about Tricia, not Irene. “Anyway,” I said, “I don’t want them kidnapped too. I’ve got to get back before they get into trouble.”
Norah puffed cigar smoke at me sympathetically. “Yes, we all feel that way at first.”
I said forcefully, “I’ll go right on feeling that way! These people have no right to abduct human beings, or trick them into coming here. I don’t care how pleasant this place is, it’s a prison, and I’m going to get out.”
“Nolly, dear, it’s simply not possible to get back, you see. I know it’s quite a wrench at first—”
“It’s a crime.”
She said crossly, “Well, of course it is, if one takes that point of view.” She stubbed her cigar out vigorously, then smiled. “I sometimes wonder,” she said, all bright-eyed and accommodating again, “if there’s something in the air in this house. Malcolm Porchester used to go on saying that sort of thing, too. And he wasn’t the first. Of course, Malcolm’s never tried to do anything serious about it—what is there that one could do, really?—but he did go on endlessly on the subject. Well, Nolly,” she said practically, “mustn’t keep Mr. Shipperton waiting. You know the way to his office? Second left past the Execution—and don’t forget dinner tonight. Sevenish, if that’s convenient for you.”
Norah Platt hadn’t left me a whole lot of time, but there was enough for a quick shower. I took it. I needed it. I was irritated by the fact that I didn’t have time to get aerobic first—I hate to bathe and then work up a sweat—but there wasn’t anything to keep me from taking another shower later on, if I found some way to work out.
The discontented (but not deprived) Malcolm Porchester hadn’t left me much of a wardrobe that fit, but there were clean socks and underwear at least, and I helped myself. He had, after all, put only his whiskey, his books, and his Fortnum and Mason packages off-limits.
All this made me, I thought without guilt, probably a little late for my next go-round with Sam Shipperton, but why should I worry about inconveniencing a kidnapper? So I didn’t rush to his office. I took time to smile at a couple of passersby (who smiled back affably enough, but kept on going on their own errands), and to look around this soup-can sort of a moon I was living on.
Having been clued in, I saw that Norah Platt’s description of the moon called Narabedla might well be accurate. Looking back down the ill-named “Riverside Drive” I thought I could see that the road did, in fact, seem to curve up slightly at the end. It was hard to tell, because the street dead-ended at a cluster of trees. In fact, anywhere I looked I could see no farther than a few dozen yards, never more than fifty or so, before something blocked the view. There wasn’t any sun in the sky, either. There wasn’t even any sky. What had looked like blue sky with fleecy clouds was actually a ceiling no more than twenty feet over my head. As soon as I studied it closely I could see that it wasn’t real. I didn’t study the grisly sculpture Norah Platt had called “the Execution,” because I didn’t like looking at it, and besides I wasn’t enjoying my sightseeing. I was too busy rehearsing what I wanted to say to Shipperton.
He didn’t give me a chance. “You’re late,” he greeted me affably, “but that’s cool; Barak won’t be ready for us for a little while yet. Did you ever conduct?”
He caught me off balance. “Conduct what?”
“Conduct an opera, naturally. You certainly can’t sing. Sorry, but you just don’t have the voice anymore. Well, maybe the natives wouldn’t know that, but we have a reputation to maintain, you know. But Jonesy sent along a lot of stuff about your career when you were in opera, and Barak’s taken an interest in you. That’s what we have to do now, go and talk to Barak. Then if he’s still interested, and if Meretekabinnda and the Mother go along, you might fit in. Somehow. Not singing, naturally. What I thought of was conducting, maybe, but there’s always the chance that Binnda’ll want to do that himself. That would be out then, of course, but there must be something you could do. I hear they have prompters that don’t sing at all, just keep the real singers going—”
“Hold it,” I said. “What are you talking about? What do you mean, prompter?”
“Isn’t that what you call them? I mean some little job you could do. You must know something about opera.”
“Shipperton,” I said, nettled, “I know a lot about opera, but you’re going too fast for me. Back up. Who are these people you’re talking about?”
“What people?”
“Well, this mother, to start with.”
“Not ‘this mother,’ the Mother. The Tlotta-Mother, to be exact. And Barak and Meretekabinnda. They’re the bookers, who else? And the tour managers, and the impresarios. Even Neereeieeree—”
“Who?”
He repeated it slowly, and more distinctly. It sounded like a five-syllable whinny. “Neereeieeree. He’s one of the ones you sang for. He said he might be interested in an opera company. He’s Aiurdi. I don’t guess you know what that means, but they’ve got three whole planets, not counting colonies, so there’d be a whole tour right there if Neereeieeree said yes.”
That diverted me from my purpose for a moment. “He liked my voice?”
“He thought your voice sucked,” Shipperton said patiently, “but you don’t have to sing, do you? There’s never been a whole human opera company here, and Binnda’s been talking about wanting one for a long time. Of course, it isn’t up to him, but if Barak gets behind it, and the Mother doesn’t object—hell. Let’s take one thing at a time. Now, don’t interrupt for a while, okay? Here’s what we have to do—”
“Shipperton,” I said, “it’s no use telling me not to interru
pt, because I’m not going to do anything until I get some answers. Are you telling me that Davidson-Jones makes his money out of what, in effect, is white slavery?”
Shipperton stared at me. “Boy, you’re some kind of a weirdo, aren’t you? Listen, Nolly, don’t even mention that. Most of the Fifteen Peoples would throw up at the thought of having sex with a human being.”
“I don’t mean that kind of white slavery.”
“I know what you mean. Jesus, pal, get off this kick. Narabedla doesn’t do anything terrible. Nobody’s a slave. Oh, sure, when they sign a contract they maybe think they’re going to Buenos Aires or Saudi Arabia instead of here, but they sign up to do a job. And they do it. And they get the pay. What’s wrong with that? Davy can’t put an ad in Variety to say what he’s doing, you know. He’s not allowed to let people on the Earth know about the other civilizations.”
“What do you mean, ‘allowed’?”
“I mean by the terms of his trade franchise contract. Not just the artists; there’s all the commodity stuff, and that’s a lot bigger. The Fifteen Peoples are real strict about that contract. They don’t want people on Earth to know about them. So he has to comply with the terms of the deal, same as you artists.”
“I didn’t make any deal!”
“Well, if you want to be technical, no, you didn’t,” he conceded. “On the other hand, if you’d come along in the regular way you probably wouldn’t have had any contract to sign, because they probably wouldn’t have accepted you. You just aren’t good enough. You’re just a wimp that got in the way, understand? You’re stuck here.”