Narabedla Ltd

by Frederik Pohl

  I was halfway out of the pool by then. “Well,” I said, “he does have a nice voice, but he hasn’t had any operatic training, you see. Also Leporello and I have to disguise ourselves as each other, so he has to look at least a little bit like me. Conjur just doesn’t.”

  The bedbug moaned at the Mother, who moaned back. “Then what are you going to do about it?”

  “Binnda’s working on it,” I told them. “He’s had a couple of ideas.” I hesitated, because I hadn’t liked the sound of some of them, but the bedbug was insistent.

  “State for the Mother what the ideas were,” it commanded.

  “If I can. Of course, he could transpose the role for a different voice, but that wouldn’t be authentic. Then he said something about, ah, recruiting a bass from Earth.” The word I wanted to use was “kidnapping,” but I didn’t think it was tactful. “That would take too long, he said. Or he thought he could have Dr. Boddadukti alter the voice of a tenor—there are a couple of them that are available, but that might take a while, too. The last thing he said was—I’m not sure I know what he meant—we could buy a bass from the Ossps.”

  The bedbug chirped at me in dismay, and when it translated what I had said the Mother’s tentacles flailed the pool into froth. I jumped back to avoid being splashed, pleased I wasn’t in the pool anymore. The bedbug said severely, “The Mother reminds you that that sort of trade with the Ossps is interdicted! She will speak to Meretekabinnda about it herself. Under no circumstances is he to make use of any services from the Ossps! Now come, I will escort you back to your quarters.”

  “Oh, my dear boy,” said Meretekabinnda reproachfully when I saw him in the rehearsal hall, “how could you possibly have said that to the Mother? I wasn’t serious about buying a bass from the Ossps.”

  “I didn’t know that,” I said. “I only told her what you’d said to me.”

  “But I was only thinking out loud! Anyway,” he said, cheerful again, “I’m happy to tell you that the problem is solved. Señor Manuel de Negras will join us this afternoon, and he will sing Leporello.”

  I asked suspiciously, “Have you, ah, recruited him from Earth?”

  “No, no. He has been—how shall I explain it? He has been unavailable. In reserve, so to speak. It’s a complicated political matter, my boy, but now, with the probe going so well and everyone in a sort of era of good feeling I’ve been able to secure his services. Here, look.” He spoke to the wall skry, and it obediently displayed the face of a man in flamenco costume gazing belligerently out at us. “Señor de Negras was originally recruited as a folk singer and dancer, it is true. However, he has the trained voice; he studied in Barcelona and at the Paris Opera.”

  I studied the flat, peasant face. “He doesn’t look much like me,” I objected.

  “Oh, more than you think, dear boy,” Binnda twinkled. “At any rate, he’s about the same height and build, and that’s all that matters for the disguise scene, isn’t it? Believe me,” he added earnestly, “he is quite satisfactory.”

  “Then why didn’t you get him right away?”

  “Because,” Binnda said patiently, “there were political problems, didn’t I just say so? Now! Before the rest of the cast arrives I would like to show you some of the theaters where we may be playing—as you will see, there are some technical difficulties we will have to face.”

  So he wiped the Spanish bass off the skry and began to display theaters, as the other singers trickled in. The first one he showed me looked, actually, a little like the old Radio City Music Hall in New York. It was a great, open, bright auditorium with a vast stage. The chief point of difference from the Music Hall was that the entire ground-floor seating area had no real seats in it, being a shallow lake of water. “This will be built on the Tlotta planet,” Binnda announced. “The water, of course, is for the Mothers. Do you like it? I designed it myself, but, unfortunately, it is not finished yet. Neither is this one.” He showed a quite handsome, quite traditional opera auditorium, all finished in white with gold trim. It looked more like the Kirov in Leningrad than anything else.

  “It’s a real opera house,” I marveled.

  “Oh, yes, exactly! Or it will be. This one is on my own planet, and I had hoped to open there—but,” he added sadly, “because of the political questions we won’t have it finished for some time.”

  “What political questions?” I asked.

  “Nothing that is not now mere history,” he said cheerfully, “I hope. Now, look at this! Hopeless, don’t you agree?”

  The skry was showing an open-air amphitheater, like the Baths of Caracalla bred to the Hollywood Bowl. “Can you imagine the acoustics?” he demanded with distaste. “They will destroy the sound, and this one is even worse.”

  The next one was almost Greek, a Spartan, empty open stage with tiers of bare seats rising around it. Binnda gazed at it in despair. “Do you see the problem? This is a Ggressna theater! Barak’s people, you know? On his planet, where it rains all the time. Can you imagine trying to sing in the open, with raindrops falling into your mouth every time you open it?” He shook his shoulders morosely and sighed. “If only we could have something like Bayreuth. That wonderful hall! Nothing straight in it, no boxes to swallow the sound—”

  “And no seats fit to sit in,” put in Eamon McGuire, coming up to us with Floyd Morcher in trail.

  Binnda blinked at him. Most of the company was gathered around us now. He seemed embarrassed. “But,” he said reproachfully, “comfort does not matter. None of your theaters have seats that are right for me, you know. It is music that matters. And we had better get to it! Gather around me, everyone, while I show you what we are going to do for our Don Giovanni!”

  What we were going to do for our production of Don Giovanni was—I’ll put it as conservatively as I can—wonderful.

  I’ve always felt that it was just about impossible for anyone to put on a perfect Don Giovanni on Earth. The technical problems are terrible. Both Mozart and his librettist, Lorenzo Da Ponte, were very casual about where they set their scenes. Act One of the opera alone calls for five different sets—a courtyard, a square, a country place, a garden, and the interior of a palace, and they switch around faster than any human stagehands can move them. In a place like the Met, with all its built-in elevators and turntables, it’s possible—barely possible—to reset the scenes without totally destroying the pace of the performance, but most houses don’t even try. They tend to ignore Da Ponte’s directions and have Giovanni meet Donna Elvira in the same place where he stabbed the Commendatore, because the directions are too hard to follow. Da Ponte didn’t care. In Mozart’s time the audiences didn’t, either. They were quite content to have the curtain rung down while the singers did their arias, with probably half a dozen encores. That gave the eighteenth century stagehands time to sweat the new set into position behind the curtain. It is a matter of record that the singers often complained bitterly about grunts and bangs and crashes that came from the other side of the curtain to punctuate their high notes, but they didn’t complain much. They liked having the stage all to themselves, so they could milk all the bows the customers were willing to tolerate.

  On Narabedla almost the whole set was one of their hologrammish things. Problems of moving furniture simply didn’t arise.

  A few props and settings had to be “practical,” because we had to use them—the stone horse for the Commendatore to sit on when he’s a statue, and the garden gate that Donna Anna locks in the first act, for instance, because Leporello has to bang against it. Everything else was only light.

  Then there was the music. Da Ponte’s libretto calls for three separate orchestras, which hardly any Earthly impresario can afford. Binnda could. He had three separate Purries tootling away, one in the pit and one on each side of the stage, but you couldn’t see the Purries. All you could see was the unreal, hologrammed musicians.

  Even a Purry is limited in what instruments he can duplicate, so Binnda allowed a little technology there, too
. Some of the sounds were fiddled electronically so that we got the right timbre for violins, clarinets, kettledrums— whatever. It worked. Even the sound effects. The thunderclap in Act One was loud enough, and real enough, to jolt me. And it came, Binnda pointed out proudly, with a genuine Van de Graaf-spark lightning bolt that seared right across the stage.

  When Binnda had finished demonstrating the sets for our third opera there was a patter of applause. Gratified, he bowed, waving those snaky arms deprecatingly. “I am so delighted that you approve,” he said modestly. “I had only hoped to provide staging that would be equal to your talents.” He stretched himself upright, peering past us into the rear of the hall. “Ah,” he said, the green tongue licking out of the ugly little mouth with pleasure, “our remaining artist has arrived! Ladies and gentlemen, may I present our second bass, Señor Manuel de Negras!”

  Manuel de Negras was younger than I thought from his picture. He didn’t seem to be much more than twenty, tall for a Spaniard, very dark, with a solid, strong face that, every once in a while, broke out in a smile of pleasure as he looked around at the rest of us. When we shook hands he apologized to me, in Spanish, for having no English, and in English I apologized to him far my lack of Spanish. But both of us had a little French and Italian, naturally. When Binnda insisted on beginning at once to run through the first act of the opera, de Negras reading his lines from a script, we were able to say what we had to say to each other.

  The man did have a good, rich, humorous bass voice, just right for Leporello. I was pleased when, halfway through the second scene, I was offstage long enough to go down into the audience seats and watch him deal with my discarded sweetheart, Donna Elvira.

  Tricia had come by to see what was going on, and I sat next to her. “Do you know this guy?” I whispered to her. “Everybody else seems to.”

  “Never saw him before,” she said. “Listen, is he saying what I think he’s saying?”

  He had reached “Madamina: il catologo e questo” where he tells Elvira about all the women I’ve had—a hundred and forty in Italy, two hundred and thirty-one in Germany, and so on. “I guess so,” I told her. “He’s adding up all my ladies for her.”

  She looked at me with interest. “So you play a real superstud, right?”

  “It’s the story of Don Juan, after all,” I told her. “And Leporello there is my servant, and his greatest wish is that he could run up the same score for himself.”

  “For Manuel de Negras, too, I bet,” Tricia offered, looking up at him. “After where he’s been, I mean.”

  “I thought you said you didn’t know him.”

  “Well, I don’t. Before my time. But I know where he’s been the last ten years or so, didn’t you? They put him away for trying to hijack a trip home, like Jerry Harper. Binnda just got him out of slow time.”

  CHAPTER

  27

  With our last singer in place, we began rehearsing in earnest. Ten hours a day, every day; and it would have been longer hours than ten if Binnda himself hadn’t been happily dashing off every now and then to congratulate the Ptrreeks, or with other Mnimn to be congratulated by the Hrunwians or the Quihigs, on how well each had done their respective parts in launching the Andromeda probe. “Purely ceremonial events,” he confided to me as he came back from one more exchange of compliments, “but, oh, how good it is to have everyone friendly with each other again! Not counting the Ossps, of course. Now let’s get busy on Act Two!”

  That was the best part of all. When my voice was better it was not only better, it was fine. Binnda was delighted. Malatesta was proud. Norah Platt, once again bounding about like a twenty-year-old, was smug. (“I told you Dr. Boddadukti would make it all well, dear!”) Floyd Morcher actually admitted he liked the way I did the Prologue, and even the other baritone stopped looking hostile and only looked glum.

  If I was good as Tonio, I was even better as Don Giovanni. I looked the part—boots, cloak, plumed hat, sword at my side; it’s a swashbuckling role, and I played it like Errol Flynn. I sang the part—forgive the immodesty—I sang it as well as any Don I’d ever heard. After the first fully staged run-through Binnda would have kissed me if I’d let him. “My dear boy,” he cried, peering up at me and resting one of those scaly, three-fingered hands on my chest—he couldn’t quite reach my shoulder—“you are ideal!”

  I didn’t dispute him. I thought he was right.

  The only, very small fly in the ointment was in the acting. I was having trouble trying to find the right interpretation of Don Giovanni as a person. There are a thousand questions about the Don that aren’t answered in Da Ponte’s libretto. They start at the very beginning—has he really made it with Donna Anna, or did she fight him off? What is his relationship with his servant, Leporello?—is there friendship between them, or does the Don simply use him as a veritable Kekkety? When he invites the statue of the dead Commendatore to dinner is he bluffing, or really fearless? What I wished for was a good, theatrical, human director to help my acting interpretation of the role. I didn’t have one. When I asked the closest thing I had to that, my coach, Malatesta, he simply sighed and said in English, “Knoll-a-wood, merely sing-a the lines.” When I asked Binnda he shrugged his upper torso and told me that I could choose any interpretation I liked, because none of the audiences would ever have seen any other. When I said that I really had to know what motivated the Don, Binnda thought for a moment, checked the skry to see if he had any ceremonial mutual congratulations to go to, and then agreed to come over to my place that evening for some of my good The Earth whiskey.

  It was a welcome break for me, too. With two major roles to get up, plus a full day of rehearsals every day, plus vocalizing with Ugolino Malatesta and, when I could find the time, an hour or so working out in Conjur’s gym, there wasn’t much left of my days.

  There wasn’t nearly enough left, because there was so much more that I wanted to do. There was my house to refurnish, my neighbors to meet, the rest of the opera troupe to get to know. Not counting all the questions about Narabedla itself, and about the Fifteen Associated Peoples and their multitudinous relationships and activities that I still hadn’t answered. I did from time to time remember to think of Marlene and Irene Madigan and my abandoned clients back on Earth. I remembered them with affection. I sincerely hoped that they were all well and happy, but I can’t say I did any of those things very often. There was simply too much in the here and now.

  The probe launch to the Andromeda galaxy that we had watched on the skry had been bloody awesome. As technology it was so vastly beyond anything human that I could hardly take it in. Just to start with, these people harnessed stars to their purposes! They set them working the way I might turn the ignition key in a car. More than that, it was the incredible scope of the project that made my eyes widen and my breath come short, for they were starting something that would not come to an end for three million years.

  And the Andromeda launch was only the newest and farthest-ranging of their probes; they had already sent off robot exploring sailships to fifteen other external galaxies and star clusters, including a dozen major galaxies I had never heard of. (Purry told me human beings had never seen them, because they lay on the far side of the core of our own galaxy.) A thousand other probes were on their way to the unexplored corners of our own galaxy, to the core, to the far edges of the galactic rim, to the spherical halo of stars outside the galactic disk. Many, of course, had long since arrived at their destinations. Some had found wonders (binary pairs, with one dense little star sucking the blood from its larger, more tenuous sister; black holes; nova shells). Some had found more practical treasures; they had identified sixteen planets with life, suitable for colonization or (like Earth) for supplying trade goods (like us). Another dozen planets were not life-friendly—yet—but they were seeding them with dust or chemicals or organic matter so that someday, maybe in a thousand years at best, they too could be colonized. There were eight other stars which had not yet developed planets; each h
ad a sort of Saturn-ring disk of uncoalesced particles around it. Perhaps each of them, in a million years or so, might have started developing a solar system if left alone. They weren’t left alone. One or another of the Fifteen Peoples, usually several of them in partnership, were busily shuffling those particles around to make a screen around the parent stars, to trap all their escaping energy to make power for their other enterprises. In a dozen places they were busy coagulating clouds of interstellar gases. Why? To make sunshades. To stop the radiation from supernovae that might otherwise threaten inhabited places on the far sides of the clouds. In the empty space between the stars they had constructed a thousand immense space telescopes—mirrors a thousand miles across, radio antennae forty times as big— to study the stars and systems they had not yet reached with a go-box.

  And that was only the astronomical part. I could understand that—some of it. I could even understand, a little, some of the biological things they did, like making the Kekketies, and Purry, and a hundred other creations that did the work none of the Fifteen Peoples cared to do. I don’t mean that I could understand how they did it, but what they did was simple enough to comprehend. But—mathematics! Molecular biology! Nuclear particle physics! Even Purry couldn’t explain any of that to me. He couldn’t even find the words in English that might translate some of the ideas, whether I then could understand the ideas or not, because such words did not yet exist on Earth. There was no need for them. The things the words referred to had not yet been discovered.

  When Meretekabinnda showed up I tried some of the questions on him. He seemed tickled by the fact that I was interested in such things. “You’re really quite peculiar, Nolly,” he said affectionately. “Most of our guest artists from your The Earth don’t care much for scientific things.”

  “They’re performers,” I explained. “Singers don’t get worried about anything farther away than their press notices and the state of their vocal cords.”