“If you kidnap her, too, the FBI will really take an interest, Shipperton.”
“Right, Nolly. That’s our good reason for going to all this trouble. Your good reason is to keep that from happening to her. Write.”
I argued for another few minutes, but in the long run I did what he wanted me to do. I wrote.
I didn’t see any way out of it. I said just what Shipperton had told me, and added, “P.S., kiss Sally for me and tell her I’ll bring back some perfume from the duty-free.”
Shipperton read it carefully. “Who’s Sally?” he asked. “She’s our secretary. We always bring her something back when we travel.”
- He gazed at me darkly. Then he shrugged and whistled. One of the little bedbugs appeared. It took the card in its little claws and, holding it high, raced out the door. As it left, Shipperton relaxed.
“Now you’re being sensible,” he said approvingly. “Now comes the good news. Well, kind of good news. Barak’s back from his meetings. Any minute now we’ll be getting a call from him, and if everything’s all right we’ll be off to see the Tlotta-Mother.”
As Shipperton appeared to relax, I began to tense up again. I said, “I hate it when somebody says there’s ‘kind of’ good news.”
“Aw,” he said easily, “probably it’ll be just fine. You never know with the Mother, of course. But she’s the one with the most rank around here. She’s a Mother. So you have to get along with her—no, don’t ask, I know what you’re going to say; wait till you see her and she’ll tell you what she wants you to know.” He glanced at his watch. “But—”
“No buts,” he ordered. “Wait for the call.” Then he grinned. “If you want to talk about something else, we’ve got time. Did I ever tell you about how I got here?”
“You can if you want to,” I said.
“Aw, Nolly, just mellow down, why don’t you? I know how you feel. See, when I came here they didn’t have a place for me, either.” I stared at him and he nodded. “That’s right. Just like you—well, almost. In 1972 I was in a rock group, trying to hit the big time in Houston, Texas. They picked us up, and when we got here they didn’t want us at all!”
“Is that why you’re doing this kind of stuff instead of playing your music?” I asked.
“Hell, they did give us a try. We bombed! It was a mistake to bring us, I guess. We tried out on four or five planets, but it just didn’t work, you know?” He shrugged. “Jonesy said it was because our act was half technology, you know— electronic instruments, and makeup, and strobes and amplification. Hell, there wasn’t anything we could show these guys about technology! So Chuck Plandome, he was our keyboard guy, he caught on playing accompaniment for an Irish tenor. Our own vocalist does Gilbert and Sullivan patter songs, and Frankie and I got administrative jobs. Frankie’s on the road now. You’ll see him, maybe, one of these days.”
I got myself another cup of coffee, thinking. I decided to probe a little. “That must have been tricky, snatching four of you at once.”
“They didn’t really snatch us. It was more complicated than that. See, we were a new group, and, frankly, we had a few problems. I mean with the law. You could even say we were on the run—that was one reason why we all kept all that makeup on in public, and kept our private lives kind of secret, you know? So it wasn’t any sweat for Jonesy, just a little mistake in judgment.”
“I’m glad to hear you admit he can make mistakes.”
“Oh, hell, man, everybody makes mistakes. Jonesy’s been doing this for a hundred years, give or take. Maybe he’s getting a little stale, overconfident—I don’t know. Anyway, they took us on and then, when we got here, it was just like it is with you. The reason Jonesy made us the offer was that Frankie knew something. Frankie talked a lot, and one of the things he talked about was the Martians. ”
That stopped me. “Martians?”
“Not real Martians. That’s just what they were called where Frankie used to work. Frankie probably shouldn’t have talked about it, because I guess that’s why Davidson-Jones came after us. I mean, well, back before we formed the group, Frankie used to work for a company in the Valley. In California, you know? They were one of those biotech outfits that did things like gene-splitting and stuff, making pharmaceuticals? That’s why Frankie took a job there in the first place. He thought he might score something, but that wasn’t the kind of drugs they made. Anyway. Even where Frankie worked, in the mail room, there was this joke about the ‘Martians.’ What it meant, every once in a while an outside director would come to the company with a suitcase full of papers. They’d have a secret meeting, and he’d turn the papers over. The people that worked there said it was all top-secret stuff. Like industrial espionage? You’ve heard of that? They said these were hush-hush reports they’d got— stole, I guess they meant—from places like Hungary and China and South Africa, where they were doing the same kind of work this company did. And they’d always be good ideas that the company would follow up on, and get patents, and make big bucks. They didn’t want to say where they got them, so they’d say they were from the ‘Martians.’” Shipperton grinned at me. “So guess who the Martians really were.”
“Narabedla Limited?”
“Right on,” he said.
“My God,” I said. “Is that how Davidson-Jones gets so rich? Importing alien technology to Earth?”
“Just a little bit at a time, right,” he nodded. “Nothing revolutionary. Never anything big. Just little bits of knowhow to keep the Narabedla companies a step ahead of everybody else. They made big bundles out of it.”
So much for my idea of bringing some wonderful new technology home with me! Well, there still might be something, I thought, and put that thought aside. As long as Shipperton was answering questions, I had a lot of them to ask. “So how long have you been doing this?”
“I told you. I’ve been here since 1972. Jonesy goes back to, I think, maybe somewhere before 1900.”
“No, I mean the whole business of kidnapping artists.”
“Oh, long before my time. Hundreds of years, anyway.” He peered at me to see if what he was going to say would startle me. “You think that’s long? Look, they’ve been doing the peacekeeper thing for eight hundred years now, and the Clouds of Magellan probes go back over two thousand.”
“Two what?”
“Two thousand years, right,” he nodded, satisfied. “The Associated Peoples have been around a long, long time, Nolly. And you have to remember that Narabedla—I don’t mean just you artists, I mean the whole schmear of importing things from Earth—isn’t any more than a pimple on the ass of what they do. What do we bring in for them? Botanical specimens, art stuff—the Duntidons are crazy about Navajo blankets—a little bit of specialty foods and things. The Aiurdi drink tons of kvass. But that’s just Earth. You look at the Polyphase Index, you’ll see that the Earth sector is only about three percent of the total unincorporated-planets trade, and that’s only about a tenth of the trade they do among themselves. Only it’s not just trade; it’s the big projects that they get together on, like the probes. The Andromeda one that they’re just getting ready to launch? Well, they’ve been setting up for that since, let’s see, since I guess just about the time the Normans invaded England. And those cost. They have to sort of rearrange a whole little star to propel it—no, don’t ask me how; I don’t know. And they’ve got forty or fifty of them on the way now. Some are just to other stars, but there’s a bunch that are off to other, for God’s sake, galaxies. Like Andromeda. That’s the kind of thing their money goes into!”
“Have any of them arrived yet? I mean, to the other galaxies?”
“Oh, hell, no. The nearest one, I guess, is the one that’s supposed to take a go-box to the Lesser Magellanic Cloud, and that’s not due to arrive for something like forty thousand years yet.”
I gulped. “They’re patient people.”
“They’re nuts,” Shipperton growled. He scowled at his watch again. “The thing is,” he went on irritably,
“these are all different races, fifteen of them. They don’t all agree on anything … well, except the peacekeeping program, maybe, and they don’t have much choice about that. That’s why they got together in the first place. There were a couple of wars, a couple of stars got blown up—they figured they had to quit that, or they’d all be dead.”
“Stars got blown up?”
He nodded somberly.
“You mean they could blow up our star? The Sun?”
“In a hot minute,” he said. “But don’t worry. Why would they bother? We’re no threat to them at all. And,” he added earnestly, “we don’t want to get to be a threat, do we? As long as the human race is just a bunch of charming primitives they won’t bother us. Maybe sometime in the future, if we’re lucky, they’ll even let us join up—of course, you and I won’t live to see it. But that’s another good reason why Narabedla’s a secret. The last thing anybody who wasn’t crazy would want would be for some nut on Earth to get the idea of shipping an H-bomb or something through the go-box on Jonesy’s yacht, for instance, as a terrorist threat That’s why you won’t go back, Stennis. That’s why nobody goes back. That’s why—hold it.”
The center of his wall screen was blinking that lavender flash again, and when it cleared Barak was peering out at us with three or four of his eyes. “The-mother-will… receive-you-now,” he gasped.
“Coming right up,” Shipperton said, but Barak raised a couple of his arms to halt us. He seemed to be looking directly at me, as near as I could tell with a multi-eyed starfish.
“Knollwood-Stennis! You-will-be … extremely-courteous-and-careful,” he panted out. “Or-it-will-be-bad.” He paused for a moment. Then he said, “I-hope-yOu-don’t… taste-very-good,” and vanished.
CHAPTER
17
What I didn’t like about the situation was that Shipperton seemed pretty nervous. I could handle the fact that I had a lot to be nervous about myself. When my guide and tyrant was obviously biting his nails it made it a lot worse. “What’s this all about?” I demanded when we were in the go-box. “Am I going to audition again?”
“Audition? Hell, no.”
“Then what?” I persisted. “And what did the starfish mean about my tasting good?”
Shipperton just shook his head. “You’ll see,” he said as the door opened.
The place where we got out of the go-box was unlike any I’d seen before. It wasn’t an open street. It was an anteroom, and it smelled of fish and rot and worse. Right in front of us there was a doorway hung with strings of glassy beads. It wasn’t the only doorway off the little, stinky foyer. Another door was to our left, closed tight with a solid metal gate. A third was to our right, this one open. Through it I could see a largish room filled with stacks of what looked like fish tanks. Four or five of the little bedbugs were bustling around, but Shipperton didn’t give me time to see what they were doing. He pushed me ahead of him through the beads. We had to step over a raised sill in the doorway, and then we were in a steamy room the size of a tennis court. It was hot, close to the temperature of a sauna bath; and it contained an Olympic-sized pool, oval-shaped.
That was where most of the smell had come from. The smell emanated, I supposed, from the Mother.
I had been thinking that, really, the worst thing about all these funny-lookers was the way they smelled. The Mother changed my mind because, although she smelled terrible, she looked worse. I stood there with my mouth hanging open until Shipperton punched me on the shoulder. His voice was strained. “Come on, Nolly, get your clothes off.”
I blinked and looked at him. “Do what?”
“Get bare. Undress. Do it, man! You’ve got to get in the pool so the Mother can feel you!”
And when I looked at his tense, worried face I saw that he meant it.
All I was wearing was shorts, shirt, underwear, gym shoes, and knee-length hose. Given the right incentive, like somebody like Tricia Madigan waiting on a bed (and some hope of making it worth both our whiles), I could have been out of them in thirty seconds.
I took a lot longer than that. I was in no hurry to get into that pool, and besides I was busy looking around.
Shipperton and I were not alone in the room with the Mother. Barak was there, dancing irritably around on the tips of his six arms, and next to him was another weirdie, about belly-button tall and extremely ugly; I hadn’t met that one before, but I recognized him as a Mnimn.
Those were the “visitors.” There was more. The Mother evidently also kept “pets.”
At least, the place she lived in was full of tiny creatures. A dozen or so of them were the familiar chocolate-brown bedbugs, skittering around the rim of the pool or diving into it, but there were at least a hundred other creatures visible. Some flew around like fat little hummingbirds, dive-bombing my head, tweeting to one another as they flew; they swooped away from the glass-curtained doorway, which I supposed was meant to keep them in. Some crept around the floor like little chameleons, and I thought the raised sill was what kept them from straying. The pool itself was full of fish-shaped things and octopus-shaped things and things with no fixed shape at all, swimming about sluggishly or earnestly, like the inhabitants of any suburbanite’s tank of tropical marine life. And I haven’t yet said a word about the Mother herself.
It was the Mother I kept my eyes on as I stepped out of my undershorts and hesitated at the brink of the pool. She was bloody ugly. What she looked like, more than anything else, was a sort of sea anemone with a body the size of a barrel and tentacles that stretched four or five yards around her. She was prettily colored in her main body parts—scarlet and blue and Day-Glo orange—and her tentacles were black and white and green. I supposed she had eyes. There was a ring of pale dots around the crown of her body, but they winked not; neither did they move.
One of the lizardy things came hesitantly to the rim of the pool for a drink of water, peering into it, and I saw what the Mother used the tentacles for. A quick flurry of water and the nearest tentacle had snapped around the little animal, drawing it, twisting and squealing, into a mouth that opened in the base of the body.
The mouth closed on it, and that was the last I saw of the little chameleon.
“Go, damn it, go!” Shipperton gritted. “Just be careful! Don’t make any sudden moves—let her feel you—and do it!”
* * *
Actually, getting into the pool began to seem like a not entirely bad idea. I was not in the habit of appearing naked, even before aliens. I informed myself that they wouldn’t have brought me all this way just to be eaten. Then I lowered myself to the rim of the pool and dropped into the tepid water.
The pool was almost shoulder deep, quite warm, and smelling really bad. After jogging along the East River in New York I sometimes used to walk down to the old docks, a few blocks from my apartment, where dead fish and condoms and watermelon rinds bobbed against the pilings; it smelled a lot like that. I bounced buoyantly on the balls of my feet, trying not to breathe, keeping an eye on the Mother’s tentacles as they waved gently in my direction.
She made a sweet, soft moaning sound. Shipperton said urgently, “Get on with it, Stennis! Let her touch you—and, for God’s sake, relax.”
Relax! I did not think it was possible for me to relax in the pool with that huge, smelly thing, with smaller things bumping and nibbling at my body as I moved through the water; but I did my best.
One of the bedbugs hopped into the water and swam briskly behind me, butting me toward the Mother. Since I could see no alternative, I let it happen. I wasn’t liking it a bit, especially as the longest of the tentacles stretched out to me. It was lined with pink cups, like the suckers on an octopus’s legs, or the rosettes of leprosy. “Careful!” Shipperton cried.
The tentacle touched me.
The touch was gentle enough, but it didn’t let go. The Mother pulled me insistently toward her. Other tentacles joined in the exploration of my body, moving caressingly over my legs and arms, into my crotch, over my s
houlders into my ears, across my scalp, into my nostrils—I jerked away as one came toward my eye.
“Hold it!” Shipperton screamed. “Jesus, Nolly, that was a dumb thing to do! Don’t ever make sudden moves when the Mother is touching you!”
The tentacles, which had twitched angrily as I jerked, relaxed again. More important, that huge and inescapable mouth, which had suddenly yawned a yard from my body, closed again.
I closed my eyes and let happen what would happen.
What happened was no fun at all. One of the shorter, slimmer tentacles found my mouth, gently pressed the lips apart and slithered delicately down my throat. It was a very good thing, I thought, resigning myself to fate, that I had often been complimented by dentists on my control of the gagging reflex. I simply stood there, even when another tentacle reached around my buttocks and entered me there.
Of all the terrible things that I had, one time or another, thought might sometime happen to me, being buggered by a sea anemone had never been one of them. It wasn’t really painful. I’ve felt a lot worse from a proctoscope. It was just extraordinarily humiliating, and it went on for a long time.
Then I felt the slippery things sliding out of me. I opened my eyes. The tentacles relaxed. The Mother began cooing and moaning. Three or four of the little bedbug things began energetically pushing me away, and Shipperton, sounding relieved, said, “Okay, you can get out and get dressed now, Nolly. Wait outside. We’ll tell you what the decision is in a minute.”
And there I was, back in the anteroom, pulling my clothes on over my still wet body—nobody had offered anything like a towel—and waiting to hear my fate.
Although there was nothing between me and the Mother’s sauna but the strings of glass beads, I couldn’t see much. I could hear, all right, but I couldn’t understand any of what I heard. Barak, the Mother, and the ropy-legged little Mnimn were making all the noises of their own languages, a nasty mixture of dove-coos and gravelly whines and belches, none of which meant anything to me. I did hear Shipperton, once in a while, speaking in English. He didn’t say much, and what he did say seemed mostly to be yes-sir-no-sir-right-away-sir sorts of things.
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