Narabedla Ltd by Frederik Pohl

himself was about the size of a collie, if you can imagine a collie shaped more or less like a starfish. Two of his arms were picking out a tune on a piano keyboard by his pillow—the music-lover at home, whiling away the moments as he waited for his guests to arrive—and four or five of his eyes swiveled toward us as we came in. Shipperton had seriously understated the case. Barak didn’t look just funny. He looked really, truly, bizarrely weird. “Come-in-come-in,” he said, in a voice that burped out the words like a series of farts, and lifted his body off the pillow on the other four of his legs so I could get a good look at him.
    I think he did that on purpose. I think Barak was vain of the way he looked.
    It takes all kinds to make up a universe. Maybe if I’d been Barak, or a female of Barak’s species, I would have thought him pretty handsome, too. I wasn’t. I didn’t. I thought he looked awful. More than anything else he resembled a sixlegged starfish who had been chrome-plated. All the “arms” (or “legs”—Barak didn’t seem to make any distinction) ended in little clusters of pulpy digits; those were what he had been playing the showier parts of Chopin’s “Fantasie-Impromptu” with. The bottom part of the body wasn’t shiny; it was hairy and not at all well kept—in fact, it was where most of the smell seemed to come from. It struck me that that was the bodily part that civilized people, or even beings, generally kept covered up. Barak didn’t, and it didn’t seem to bother him any more than the smell did.
    “Sit-down,” he belched invitingly. Shipperton picked a pillow for himself and pointed one out to me. There was something familiar about the way Barak spoke, and after a moment I figured out what it was. I’d had a voice coach who’d suffered from cancer of the larynx. As long as it was just bad he still managed to croak out scales and show me intonation. Then he had the whole larynx out. When I saw him after that he’d given up coaching. He had to. He’d had to learn to talk all over again, sort of burping out words in clusters. It was not a pleasing sound.
    Neither was Barak’s voice when he introduced himself. “Nolly-Stennis,” he coughed, “my-name-is-Barak. You-once-were … Barak-too. Is-that-correct?”
    I started to deny it, since I didn’t have any idea what he was talking about, but Shipperton hissed, “Say yes. I think he’s talking about some role in an opera.”
    Light dawned. “Oh, the role,” I said, trying to remember all the parts I’d ever sung. Then it clicked. “You mean, like, I sang the role of Barak once? The servant in the Busoni Turandot? ”
    He waved a couple of arms affirmatively. “You-were-Barak-yes?”
    “Ah, I see what you mean. Yes, I guess I was.” I reflected for a moment; it wasn’t quite true. I decided to tell the truth, if only to show this weirdo that Narabedla’s information agencies didn’t always get the facts straight. “I did contract to sing the role, yes. I rehearsed it, and I was all ready to perform, but then I got sick.” I hesitated a moment, then decided to try a joke—not one that I really thought very funny. “After that I would have been better cast as Truffaldino.”
    I could see from Shipperton’s scowl that I had lost him.
    Barak protested, “No-no-voice-is-wrong.” Then the starfish thought for a moment, while the six limbs stirred restlessly, then they folded themselves into what I took to be the equivalent of a nod. Barak laughed—I think—and said, “Ha-ha-ha-ha. Now-see-your-point. Understand. Lost-your-balls.” Even a dozen years after the fact, even when it was a silver-plated starfish that put it that way, I found myself flushing. It was bad enough to have to say such things to myself. Hearing them from somebody else was really nasty. But I only said, “That’s approximately what I meant.”
    The starfish explained it to Shipperton. “Truffaldino … chief-eunuch-in-opera.