Others might even be allies, and if I were ever going to get out of here, allies were what I would need.
I would have to start making friends.
So I kept my dinner date with Norah Platt eagerly.
It was indeed a home-cooked meal (more’s the pity), and she had indeed invited a few people she thought it would be helpful for me to meet. Helpful to whom, she had not said.
15, The Crescent, was one of those thatched-roof jobbers, though once you got inside it turned out to be a whole lot like the house I’d borrowed from Malcolm Porchester. It even had one of those TV-looking things. When I walked in it was filled with appetizing smells.
When I made some conventional remark of appreciation, Norah said demurely that what she was cooking was nothing special, really. As a matter of fact it wasn’t. Norah’s culinary tastes had been formed in the late eighteenth century, when English cuisine consisted mainly of equal parts of barely warmed-through meat and of pepper.
As to her friends, there were two of them. Both were male, and although they weren’t quite as old as she was, they were still plenty old enough to suit me. The older of the two was a tiny little Italian fellow, not much bigger than Norah herself. He had been born in 1822, which made him just about the right age to have been eligible to be Norah Platt’s grandson. He wasn’t, though. He wasn’t related at all, except that they had all been picked up in one of the early Narabedlan experiments at importing human entertainers. His name was Bartolomeo Canduccio, a tenor from the pre-Verdi age of Italian opera.
The other was, or said he was, a Shakespearean actor. He was a mere youth of a hundred and fifty or so. His name was Ephard Joyce, and he was markedly deferential to Canduccio—because the tenor was his senior, I supposed—and equally deferential to me—because he was looking for a favor, I supposed, though what favor I might do for a 150-year-old Hamlet was a mystery.
I was astonished at their ages. I asked, “How come you’re all so, ah, so, well—”
“Old,” Ephard Joyce supplied, beaming. “We are, aren’t we? You see, they take excellent care of us here—as you will discover, once you settle in.”
It hardly seemed worthwhile to say again that I didn’t intend to do any settling in. Anyway, Canduccio spoke up, matching Joyce’s radiant smile. “It is precisely so,” he agreed. “To be sure, at first it is discomfiting here, not true? One needs a little bit of assistance. Well, Mr. Stennis, I know this, and for that reason I have had prepared for you a little— a regalo?”
“He’s brought you a gift, Mr. Stennis,” Joyce said helpfully.
“Yes, a gift.” Canduccio handed me something flat and square and wrapped in red paper—I supposed the stuff was paper, though it felt more like silk.
Norah urged, “Open it, my dear boy.”
So I did. It was a book. A sort of a book. It was bound in maroon sort-of-leather, with lettering stamped in sort-of-gold. The printing on the cover read:
A Guide to Narabedla
and the
Fifteen Associated Peoples
The Property of
Mr. L. Knollwood Stennis, Esq.
“Do you like it?” Canduccio asked anxiously. “I had it made up especially for you, what is called ‘hard copy’ from the to-talk-and-to-see machine.”
“He means the skry,” Joyce explained, pointing to the thing that looked like a television set. “Haven’t you been told what it is for? Ah, then let me explain. You can use the machine to secure information. And dear Signore Canduccio has made some of the useful information into a little book for you, do you see? It will be very helpful to you in getting settled in.”
These people were hot on getting me settled in. It was getting on my nerves. Norah had brought in a tray of crystal glasses and a decanter, and while she was handing around an extremely sweet sherry I said politely, “Thank you very much,” and turned the thick, heavy pages.
It was a picture book. The pictures were in full color and, believe me, they were grotesque.
The Guide to Narabedla and the Fifteen Associated Peoples was a kind of atlas of weirdos. The first page I turned to showed a thing like a stretched-out gorilla, twice as tall and half as thick, with bright pink feathers instead of fur. The next was a sort of combination of polar bear and hippopotamus, that lay in shallow water with its eyes half in and half out; oh, and it had a trunk like an elephant. The third—
“Why, that’s Barak!” I said, and Norah leaned over my shoulder to see.
“Well, not Barak himself,” she said encouragingly, “but, yes, that’s what the Ggressna look like. They’re very nice, apart from the fact that they do smell a bit doggy. Mr. Canduccio’s book tells you all about them, do you see?”
I did see. For every one of these Fifteen Associated Peoples there was a sort of gazetteer text. It told me that Barak’s Ggressna came from a planet called Ggres, and according to the book the Ggressna were one of the senior members of the Fifteen Associated Peoples. The piece didn’t say just how senior “senior” was, but when I turned a page to a race called the Mnimns (ugly little things with snaky limbs and evil-looking mouths; I thought I’d seen one of them at my audition) I saw that the Mnimns had joined up, it said, on what the human calendar would have called the 11th of June, A.D. 1327.
A.D.1327. More than six hundred years ago.
It’s funny, but with all the wonders and startlements I had been exposed to, that historical date stuck largest in my mind. Six hundred years ago—when on Earth most seagoing ships still had oars, and land transportation was basically by ox-cart—these people had been flying around between the stars.
It was not easy for me to put my mind on dinner-table conversation. I tried. Everybody would like to be a good guest, and I wanted to go through the polite motions for Norah Platt. However, I also wanted, a lot more, to curl up with that book. My wants were in conflict—not to mention the wants of the other people in the room: Canduccio clearly wanted to be thanked profusely for his thoughtful regalo, and then to move on casually to whatever it was he wanted from me; Joyce wanted something, but I didn’t yet know what. What Norah Platt wanted seemed to be mostly to show off her crystal goblets and damask dinner napkins, in their yellowed ivory rings.
“Will you light the candles, please, Knollwood?” she asked, beaming at me. Reluctantly I put the book down and we took our places at the table.
Ephard Joyce said grace.
I appreciated that. It gave me a chance to think about what it would be like if I could escape and get back to home base on Earth, and bring that book with me, and maybe bring along a few other things like the secret of the “go-box” and whatever other information the “skry” thing might have to offer. That sounded like a really good way to spend a slow evening on Narabedla, and I hardly heard Joyce finish his fairly long invitation to God to bless our dinners until Norah repeated a question to me. “I asked if you were a churchgoer, Knollwood?”
I blinked at her. “Oh, not as a regular thing, anyway,” I said.
She sighed. “I do miss those nice, long Sunday services,” she said, handing around the platter of roast something. “There’s nothing like that here, of course. Oh, Floyd Morcher has his own kind of services, but they’re, what would one say, a bit intense. You haven’t met Floyd? You probably will; he has quite a nice tenor voice, too, though not really up to dear Bartolomeo’s. Still, every opera company must have at least two tenors, don’t you think?”
I sawed gamely through my very tough slice of whatever it was, beginning to relax. Of course. What dear Bartolomeo wanted from me was a chance to sing in the opera company Shipperton was organizing. “I don’t suppose I have much to say about that,” I said.
“Oh, but I’m sure you do, Nolly! Barak’s taken an interest in you, you know. A word from you could quite make the difference.”
“He didn’t act as though he liked me much,” I pointed out, remembering my interview with him.
“Oh, well,” she said philosophically, “he’s Ggressna, after all
. They don’t generally like us much. Human beings, I mean. Or for that matter, much of anyone; they tend to be a bit standoffish. Not at all like, for instance, the Mnimn, who are quite affectionate.”
I changed the subject. I looked across at Ephard Joyce. “Do you sing, too?” I asked.
“Good God, no,” he snorted, looking as though I’d asked him if he molested small children. Then he collected himself. He really loved opera, he explained, though of course the exigencies of one’s own career kept one from really seeing very many of them. (“We do have many tapes and films, though,” Norah put in.) Joyce’s own training had been theatrical, but, really, they all amounted to the same thing, didn’t they? If you knew how to hold an audience you could do it in any medium.
To my surprise, Joyce turned out to be American, though at least a century before my time. Even more surprising, he had played Polonius to the Hamlet of John Wilkes Booth. That’s right. That John Wilkes Booth. He spoke of the association with pride and, even a hundred years later, with glowering resentment. “7 didn’t shoot the President,” he grumbled. “The way the Washington newspapers carried on you would have thought I’d assassinated Lincoln myself. Actually I rather liked the man—would have voted for him, except that voting was really such a waste of time, wasn’t it? And then Wilkes did that silly thing, and, phffft, that was the end of my career.”
“What did you do then?” I asked, suddenly attentive in the presence of this man who had known the man who shot Abraham Lincoln.
“Oh,” he twinkled, “a gentleman called on me in my lodgings. He was quite mysterious about it, but what it came to was that he proposed a tour. The financial end sounded very attractive, you know. I thought it was going to be England or perhaps even Australia, but—” He waved humorously at the room around him.
I put down my fork. “You mean even then Davidson-Jones was recruiting people for this?”
“Even before then, Nolly dear,” said Norah. “Though it wasn’t then Henry Davidson-Jones, of course. No, it was the man before him, Mr. Carruthers. Davy wasn’t promoted until—when was it, Ephard?”
“Eighteen ninety or thereabouts, I think,” said Joyce uncertainly. Then, nodding, “Yes, it was eighteen ninety, all right. I remember, because I’d just celebrated my quarter-century here. Quite a party we had, eh, Norah? Half the colony joined in. Of course, we were much smaller then; Davidson-Jones has certainly expanded the trade.”
I looked at him, marveling. “And you’ve been here ever since? Don’t you ever want to go back to Earth?”
“Oh, we’re quite happy here,” he said, sounding disgruntled. “In any case, Nolly—may I call you Nolly?— what would I do back on Earth? I’m sure everyone’s forgotten me …”
He left the sentence hanging, hoping I would deny it, but I couldn’t. Instead, I pointed out, “They’d remember you real quick if you turned up now. A man who performed with John Wilkes Booth? Man, you’d be a sensation!”
“Do you think so?” he said, flattered. “Yes, I suppose that in a sense that might be true—though, of course, the thing’s impossible.”
“So you see,” Norah began, but never finished, because just then I knocked over my wineglass. It splintered on the floor, spilling the sticky sherry all over her carpet. Over her shoulder she called, “Kekkety folk, come!” Then she turned to me, smiling gamely. “No, no, it’s quite all right,” she assured me. “The servants will have it made right in no time. No, really, don’t say another word about it; accidents happen. Would you care for another slice of roast?”
Actually, nobody wanted anything more to eat. We drifted over to the other side of the room for coffee while three of the silent little servants, appearing out of her kitchen as if by magic, industriously mopped up the spill and cleared away the dishes.
It struck me strange that I hadn’t seen them come in the door. The reason, it turned out, was that they hadn’t. “They’ve got their own entrances,” Joyce explained to me. “So you won’t often see the Kekketies on the streets, for instance. And they’ll never get sick, or steal your whiskey, or ask for more wages; as you see, we’ve solved the servant problem here!”
I was getting tired of being told what a paradise Narabedla was. I said, “Everything considered, though, I’d rather be in Philadelphia.”
It was meant as a joke—that was supposed to be what W.C. Fields had ordered engraved on his tombstone—but I shouldn’t have expected these old geezers to recognize it. They not only didn’t, they took it seriously. “But really, Nolly,” Norah said, “can you possibly mean that you’d like to go back to the Earth? Oh, certainly, you have Mends there, but you’ll be making any number of new ones here. And this modem Earth frightens me!”
And Joyce said severely, “I confess that I am not well acquainted with the present Union at first hand, but we do get American newspapers here from time to time, you know. Also we have many newcomers like yourself, Knollwood. To me, the Earth seems quite frightful. Such weapons of devastation! In my time we thought Shiloh and Antietam were so awful that no one would dare wage a war again, but now you have bombs that can destroy an entire city! I shudder to think of living under such conditions. I’ll wager that if Mr. Davidson-Jones should withdraw his protection it would be only a matter of weeks until Armageddon.”
I put my coffee cup down—very carefully. “What are you talking about? What protection?”
“Didn’t you know?” caroled Norah Platt, limping over to the sideboard to fetch a brandy bottle. “Mr. Davidson-Jones does not simply recruit artists like ourselves. He has vast interests on Earth, and not simply in America. He uses his influence to keep you ferocious Americans and those barbaric Russians—though, I must say, Dmitri Arkashvili is quite nice, isn’t he?—from destroying the planet with those terrible weapons of yours.”
I already had my mouth open to ask for more information about Davidson-Jones the Peacekeeper, when Norah’s last remark caught me and I wanted to point out that they certainly were not my weapons; the delay cost me my chance. Canduccio, nose buried in his brandy glass, lifted it to say ominously, “Anyway, is wrong. Cannot return to the Earth never, for because if one disobeys Mr. Davidson-Jones or those who represent him is very serious. Forget not Jerry ’Arper.”
“Jerry Harper was something quite different!” Joyce protested. “He wasn’t simply a malcontent, he actually—”
“Oh, please!” Norah begged. “Let’s not talk about poor Jerry Harper. We’re all friends here. We don’t have to think about troublemakers like Jerry, or that foolish young black man, or, well, actually your Malcolm Porchester.”
“Personi cattivi,” snarled Canduccio. “Simila di Ugo Malatesta.”
He was looking at Norah Platt when he said it, but she just pursed her lips tolerantly. Joyce replied for her. “Oh, not at all, my dear Bartolomeo,” Joyce argued. “Malatesta’s an odd one, no doubt about it, but he’s not a revolutionary.”
“What’s wrong with Malcolm Porchester?” I asked. Norah said unhappily. “Oh, dear. I did want this to be a pleasant dinner. Do we have to talk about unpleasant subjects? Ephard, why don’t you tell Nolly about your wonderful inspiration of playing mime roles in his opera company?”
So the hook was planted, and for the next little while I had to listen to Ephard Joyce’s explanation of how the alien audiences just didn’t seem to want an evening of Shakespearean soliloquies or human poetry-reading anymore, and did I think I might want my opera company—my company!—to do, perhaps, something adventurous?
“What kind of adventurous?” I asked.
It was Canduccio who replied. “We ’ave seen many of your new works on the to-talk-and-to-see machine, eh? Is very interesting, this one The Medium. Is by Giancarlo Menotti, who is of course Italian.”
“I had hoped,” Norah sighed, “that we could give it here sometime. It has only four singing parts.”
“And no chorus,” Canduccio added, and Joyce explained his own thinking on the subject. It seemed to him, he said, that it mi
ght be an interesting challenge for him to play the nonsinging role of the mute boy? When I told him that neither Shipperton nor Barak had shown much interest in twentieth-century music, it was Canduccio’s turn to explain modestly how his tenor was particularly appropriate for Mozart or any of the early Italians, and he certainly hoped we might work together on something like Idomeneo—with, of course, a real tenor, not one of those wretched castrati like his much-loathed neighbor, Ugolino Malatesta.
I can’t say I paid close attention. I had managed to open my book in my lap and between encouraging smiles at whoever was speaking to go on doing so, I was sneaking glances at the bizarre nightmare figures called the “Fifteen Associated Peoples.”
Norah caught me at it. To get my attention she asked, “Cigar, Nolly?” offering them around out of a tiny silver humidor. I declined; so did Canduccio, not surprisingly— tenors don’t like to rasp their vocal chords any more than they have to—but Ephard Joyce lighted up along with Norah. And, as she rose to bring over a little china ashtray, Joyce watched her walk.
“My dear Norah, you’re limping again,” he said accusingly.
“I’m sorry. One tires in the evening. The doctors do wonderful things here, but—” She gave a pretty shrug and changed the subject. “Nolly? Did I give you enough to eat? I’m afraid it wasn’t Scottish lamb—it’s something local— but actually it was quite nice, didn’t you think?”
“It was lovely,” I said, exaggerating only slightly—it would have been good enough if only cooked a bit more. “Are you sure you’re all right?”
“Oh, quite all right. ” Then she added, with a deprecating shrug, “Dr. Boddadukti has promised to do me again as soon as he’s, ah, free. ” The others nodded judiciously. “He’ll have me right again in no time, once I make up my mind to it. But one puts it off as long as one can, doesn’t one? I mean, one never knows what they might find. Meanwhile it’s simply a nuisance. ”