“So now,” he said tentatively, “can we figure there aren’t going to be any more threats and arguments out of you?”
I didn’t answer that. I didn’t have to. When I had picked up that telephone to talk to Marlene Abramson I knew what I was doing. I was making a major decision, and the decision was to stay on Narabedla.
“Would he really have killed her?” I asked.
He shrugged uneasily. “I don’t think so. He never has. But it would have been bad for her, one way or another.” He peered at me. “Are you all right?”
“What makes you ask that?”
“I don’t know. You look—you look kind of funny.”
“How should I look?” But I knew the answer to that. My conscience made it clear to me. It told me I should look like a man who had just got done ratting out on Marlene and on Irene Madigan … on aU of my friends, on my clients, on my country—and most of all on my planet and the whole human race that inhabited it.
He poured me another drink. “You know what that tombstone was?” he said, making conversation. “It was his son. Right, he was married once; only his wife and his kid got drowned on a boat. They never found the wife’s body.”
“So he just took his son’s identity?”
“Later on he did. Well, he kind of has to, now and then, doesn’t he? I mean, he stays too young to have only one identity. The way you will, here.”
“Are you giving me another sales talk?”
“Well, we really do need to get you to sign a contract, you know.”
“All right.”
He stared at me. “Really? Well, hell, Nolly! That’s fine. Just a minute, I’ve got blanks here in my desk, and you can sign—”
He broke off in the middle of the sentence, peering at my face. “What’s the matter now?” he demanded.
I finished my drink and put the glass down. My mind was made up. I said gently, “Sam, have you ever negotiated a contract with a CPA before? No? I thought not. Well, I hope you’ve still got your coffeepot. It’s likely to be a long night.”
CHAPTER
24
Narabedla was beginning to look better to me.
All it took, really, was a change of attitude on my part. I stopped thinking of Narabedla as a place where I wished I wasn’t and accepted it as the place where I was. I’d done that before. It had been the same at Camp Fire Place Lodge. After those first few miserable, homesick days I found out that I was, after all, a camper, too. In my second week I won a Shark Feather for swimming clear across the bay unaided; I placed second in marksmanship in the competition with the .22 rifles; before the end of the season I was fourth man on the relay team and in the front row of the sing-alongs around the evening campfire, and when Labor Day arrived I didn’t want to go home.
Calling Marlene had been the irrevocable step. Signing the contract had only confirmed it. I was a Narabedlan now.
On my morning run the next day I detoured by way of the little street called Rodeo Drive to inspect one of the perquisites therefrom: Rodeo Drive looked like any suburban condo development, stucco-walled townhouses with lawns and flowering trees around them under the pleasant (if make-believe) morning sky. I had no trouble finding the house that would be mine. It had daffodils in beds under the windows and marigolds in tubs by the patio in back. Shipperton hadn’t yet given me a key, but, peering through the window, careful not to step on the flowers, I saw that there was furniture in it.
That wasn’t a real problem. Shipperton had promised I could choose my own, and the contract I had finally beaten out with him provided for advances on earnings enough to buy anything that needed buying. It would be pleasant to pick out my own, I reflected as I jogged back to Riverside Drive, but I wondered what they would do with the old stuff.
Store it somewhere? Throw it away? What did they do on Narabedla with the things people discarded? For that matter, what did they do with the people when no Dr. Boddadukti could fix them up anymore?
I added those things to the long list of questions I hadn’t yet had answered. I would get all the answers sooner or later, I promised myself. After all, I had plenty of time. I was going to be on Narabedla for quite a while.
Maybe, like Norah and some of the others, for hundreds of years.
Showered, breakfasted, and dressed, I headed for the rehearsal hall.
None of the opera singers was there yet, but Tricia and Conjur Kowalski were dancing on the stage, while Binnda happily beat time from the conductor’s box. The surprise was that the music they were dancing to was World War II-era swing, and the person playing it was Norah Platt, wonderfully reconstituted out of the assemblage of cold cuts I’d seen floating in Dr. Boddadukti’s tub. She seemed none the worse for it. She glanced up as I came in, winked cheerfully, and went on hammering out a jivey “Twelfth Street Rag.” Ephard Joyce was sourly hanging over the piano, and he, too, favored me with a cursory nod. I didn’t want to interrupt. I sat down and watched the jitterbuggers.
They were worth watching. Both Conjur and Tricia were in costume, Conjur in a zoot suit with the jacket cut down to his knees and a gold watch chain flying around his ankles, Tricia in a jitterbug skirt with tiny, tight white panties that showed every time Conjur flung her over his shoulders or between his peg-topped legs. I could see that she was sweating. I could almost smell her, the sweet, healthy smell of a pretty young woman expending a lot of calories and enjoying it. Norah, spry and smiling after her operation, was grooving right along with them on the piano, sounding almost like the old Glenn Miller and Tommy Dorsey days.
And the interesting part was that while I was sitting there, watching them take the A-train and swing along in the mood, I felt something. It was right in the crotch of my sleek new pants, where I hadn’t felt much stirring for a long time. It was not really anything big, just a tingle, but it tingled in a way that suggested at least a hope that one of these days I might very well be back in the kind of action I had thought as lost as singing in the opera.
I didn’t even hear Binnda call for a break. I came to, out of my rosy glow, to find Binnda looking at me curiously. “Dear boy, are you all right?”
I sat up. “Oh, I’m fine,” I said, looking around. Tricia and Conjur were mopping sweat off their faces and arms at the side of the stage, and Binnda was standing over me. “I thought you’d be rehearsing the troupe.”
“Oh, we’ve given the troupe the day off, my dear boy. More or less on your account, you know; Dr. Boddadukti wasn’t sure how your throat would feel just at first.”
I said, with sincere pleasure, “It feels fine.”
“Really?” He thought for a moment. “Perhaps I should ask Ugolino to spend some time with you this afternoon— just to make sure, you see? And then if he says it’s all right…”
“He will,” I said positively. “I’ll be ready to rehearse again tomorrow.”
“No, no, my dear Nolly! We won’t be rehearsing tomorrow’.” he cried, sounding shocked. “Didn’t you know? Tomorrow they’re going to launch the Andromeda probe and we’ll all be glued to our skries!”
“Really? Nobody told me. I didn’t know it was such a big deal.”
“My dear boy! It is going to what your The Earth people call M-31, the Great Nebula in Andromeda! Ever so far away. We’ve never done anything this big before!” He clucked at me reprovingly. Then he said, “But you’ll see it all tomorrow. Meanwhile, go off and amuse yourself a bit, while I see if dear Ugolino can see you today.”
That was easy enough to do. I strolled over to Norah, preening myself. “Stennis,” Joyce growled, acknowledging my presence. I shook his hand, and kissed Norah’s as I told her how happy I was to see her, well, alive again.
“But of course, Nolly, dear,” she said in a reproving tone. “I told you it would be all right, didn’t I? And I understand you’ve signed quite a nice contract.”
“Well,” I said, “it’s just a matter of bargaining, you know. It’s like an income-tax audit. You push the agent just as far as you c
an. You stop right before the point where it would be easier for him to go to court than settle; that’s what I did with Shipperton. And I’ve got a new house, too.”
“What’s an income tax?” asked Joyce, but Norah was frowning.
“As far as I know,” she said thoughtfully, “there’s only one house vacant just now. On Rodeo Drive, is it?”
“That’s the one. And listen,” I said, struck by an idea, “I think I’ll have a housewarming party as soon as I get it fixed up. Will you come? Both of you, I mean?” I added, because, after all, the man was standing right there.
Joyce picked up his cue eagerly. “Yes, of course. Be delighted.” He glanced around, and, lowering his voice, added, “I’ve been wanting to talk to you about something. Do you remember the thing you said the other night—about how I could do really well if I went back now? Did you mean it?”
I blinked at him. “Oh, that,” I said, remembering. “Yes, I suppose so. I mean, well, definitely you would. If you showed up in New York you’d make the headlines, you know? Someone who actually knew John Wilkes Booth? Not to mention someone who’s been here on Narabedla! Believe me, you’d have TV news people all around you. And, of course, if you decided you wanted to play Hamlet or anything like that, you’d have to fight the producers off, because there’d be a guaranteed box office from people who’d want to see what you looked like.”
Joyce pursed his lips. “I see,” he said.
Tricia and Conjur had drifted over to listen. “You stirring some more revolution?” Conjur asked—jokingly, I assumed.
“Oh, no. I admit you were all right, that’s all. It’s impossible to go back.”
“Of course,” Joyce echoed. But at least he’d forgotten to be surly about the fact that I wasn’t helping him get a mime part in the opera troupe.
As he drifted away I patted Tricia’s shoulder welcomingly. “You two are looking pretty fine on the dance floor,” I said, and then got down to business. “Conjur? Did you say you had a gym?”
“Yeah?” he said suspiciously.
“Well, I’d like to work out in it, if that’s all right with you.”
“Twenty bucks an hour. ’Less you want to work out with me, then it’s free.”
“Work out? You mean shooting baskets?”
“Yeah, well, what I’d rather is a couple easy rounds,” he grinned, putting his fists up. “We could use the big gloves, nobody gets hurt. Just to get the old blood flowing, you know what I’m saying?”
I looked him over, ten inches taller than I was and twenty pounds heavier. And all muscles. “I think I’ll pay the twenty dollars,” I said.
Tricia was looking me over thoughtfully. “So it’s true,” she said. “You did finally sign a contract.”’
“And he’s got a new house,” Norah put in.
“And you’re all invited to my housewarming,” I said. Tricia, frowning, said, “But there’s really only one house vacant now, isn’t there?”
And Norah said, “That’s what I was trying to tell you, Nolly. It must be the one that used to be Jerry Harper’s.”
It was Harper’s house, all right. Sam Shipperton confirmed it when I stopped by to pick up the keys.
When I opened the door and let myself in it had a bare and empty smell. There was furniture there—table and chairs, couch and coffee table; big king-sizer in the bedroom, knotty-pine chests—but there wasn’t anything but furniture. No clothes in the closets, no food in the refrigerator, no pictures on the walls. The only thing that showed anybody had ever lived there was a stain on the kitchen carpeting, where somebody had spilled something, and a Kekkety was busily scrubbing away at that.
I don’t believe in haunted houses. It was good I didn’t, I thought, because otherwise I might have thought taking over the home of an executed man could have been bad luck.
I didn’t spend any time worrying about it. I sent the Kekkety over to the house I had borrowed from Malcolm Porch-ester for my clothes. While he was gone I scribbled out a shopping list, food and drink for the larder, and by the time Ugolino Malatesta showed up to check my voice I had a pot of coffee on the stove. “But no!” Malatesta cried when he saw what I was drinking. “Coffee is acid! For your voice it is tea you should drink, quite hot and sweet, or best of all a little wine!”
“They’re acid, too, aren’t they?” I grinned.
But I humored him. I’d already stocked up on a Chianti that he sniffed and pronounced acceptable, and after a glass apiece we set to work.
He started me slow, with mid-range vocalizing, and it was half an hour before he would let me stretch to the limits of my range. Much less actually sing anything.
But then he did. And when he heard, he beamed.
I wasn’t surprised. I didn’t need Malatesta to tell me that my voice was back, all of it. I by-God knew that it was all there. Vocalizing in front of a mirror, with Malatesta gently touching cheek and throat and jawbone, grinning as he did, I could feel the rightness. I didn’t look as though I were straining, because I wasn’t. “Cantare, allora,” he said finally, contented, and sing I did. Audition songs. Snatches of arias. The kind of thing I did in the shower, when no one was there to hear. Everything I remembered I tried that afternoon for Malatesta, while he nodded and grinned at me. Snatches of “Glory Road” in the style of Lawrence Tibbett. Lieder I’d learned from records by Dietrich Fischer-Diskau. A few bars of Wagner, something from Boris Godunov, some of the Tonio from I Pagliacci.
And they all came out just the way I wanted them to. “Bella, bella,” Malatesta cried, with the fond delight of a coach whose student has surpassed him. “Voi avete urn voce bellissima, Knoll-a-wood!”
And so I had. With the help of Binnda and Barak and the Mother, not to mention the good monster-doctor Boddadukti, I had the voice I had always dreamed of, and it was all mine.
I don’t think that ever in my life I have been happier than I was that afternoon, on the second moon of the seventh planet of the star Aldebaran.
CHAPTER
25
When a mild-mannered accountant is suddenly transformed into an opera star—never mind whether it’s on Narabedla or in New York—it keeps him busy. Every hour was full. When I wasn’t picking out the furniture for my new house, I was vocalizing with Ugolino Malatesta. When I had time from either, I needed that time just to learn my way around my new home. With Purry and the skry I learned to tell the difference between a Hrunwian and one of the Tseni, and how to order records from Earth for my new stereo, and what to say to the Kekketies when I wanted my morning eggs over easy instead of scrambled.
I cannot tell a lie about it. I was having a ball. Best of all was the time I spent with Binnda, going over the plans for our new opera company’s first tour. He had promoted me to something like assistant managing director, and together we went over the casts. Idomeneo was easy; we had Malatesta to sing the Idamante, and Canduccio, Morcher, and the Russian, Dmitri Arkashvili, for the three tenors. Eloise Gatt for Ilia, Sue-Mary Petticardi for the Electra, and Eamon McGuire as Neptune’s voice.
The cast for I Pagliacci was no problem, either, because we already had everybody necessary right on hand:
Canio: Floyd Morcher.
Tonio: Me.
Nedda: The pretty little Valley Girl soprano, Maggie Murk.
Beppe: Dmitri Arkashvili.
Silvio: The other baritone, Rufus Connery.
It was the Don Giovanni that was the headache. There was only one tenor part, so our tenors could alternate in the role and rest their voices, but we needed all three of our sopranos and both our baritones. The hard part was that we had to have a second bass. Eamon McGuire was fine for the Commendatore, but who was going to sing the very important role of my servant, Leporello?
Binnda, Malatesta, and I borrowed Sam Shipperton’s office with the wall-sized skry to check out the available talent. There simply wasn’t any. One of Shipperton’s group, Dick Vidalia, had a bass voice, all right, but it was a hoarse, heavy-metal kind of rasp that m
ade Malatesta shudder. “Better,” he declared, “that we transpose the register and I sing this myself!”
“But, my dear Ugolino! That is not how Mozart wrote the opera,” Binnda declared, his bright green tongue flapping in dismay.
“Could Purry fill in?” I offered.
That was even worse. Binnda drew himself up to his full height, reaching almost to Malatesta’s chest. He stated firmly, “We will use only human artists or we will use none at all. Excepting choruses, I mean,” he added.
“What about choruses?”
He twisted his nonexistent shoulders—I took it as a shrug. “We have just so many native human singers,” he said, sounding a little defensive. “So we must make some compromises. Of course, the chorus parts are not very demanding. I thought for a moment of drafting all the surplus humans here to fill in as what your The Earth people call ‘spear-carriers,’ eh? But they do not have voices, after all, so why not simply use animation?”
“You mean holograms?”
“As your The Earth expression has it, yes. They will be quite satisfactory. Simply you will have to be careful not to walk through any of them on stage. Of course, that means that everyone will have to double for the choruses. Then we’ll record your voices and use the optical simulations in performance—and, oh, my dear friend,” he cried, beginning to glow, “wait till you see the finale of Don! We’ll have the devils screeching at him as he descends into hell, and do you know what I’m going to use for devils? Ossps!”
I tried to remember which were the Ossps—the ones that looked like a cross between a lizard and a bat, I decided. True enough, they looked nastier than any devils I had ever seen on stage, but there was a question in my mind. “Won’t that hurt the feelings of any Ossps in our audience?” I asked.
He stared at me incredulously. “Ossps? In one of our audiences? Ho-ho-ho, my dear boy! That is extremely funny! No, no, we are not likely to have any Ossps attending our performances—nor, indeed, would we have anyone else in the audience if they did.”
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