The Fresco

by Sheri S. Tepper

  While she was packing, however, she switched on the TV and was surprised to find she could get nothing but news. Submitting to the inevitable, the fact that something extraordinary had happened eventually penetrated her self-absorbtion. Putting two and two together to make five and a half, Merilu decided the FBI had had something to do with it, and that Chad was probably in it up to his neck, which was why he had been so distant lately. At that point, she slid the half-packed suitcases under the bed and called her mother.

  “Before I go back to Missoula with you, Mom, I got to give him a chance. I think he’s in trouble!” A not unpraisworthy part of Merilu’s credo was that women stood by their men when the men were in trouble.

  “Now you’re sure, honey-bun? You don’t know what he’s been up to. He could have a woman on the side, you know. He could be mixed up in drugs. The FBI, they must come upon a pile of drugs, doing the work they do. Or money. Gracious, isn’t a day we don’t read about laundering money, though I’ve never been able to figure out why it’s against the law. Ever since I found out it was illegal, I’ve just ironed mine and Daddy’s. Mostly for the collection plate, you know. Just a little swipe with a hot iron will get rid of most germs, and it flattens the bills out nice, too. Sometimes I press it between two pieces of wax p—”

  Her daughter interrupted, “Mom, have you seen the TV?”

  “Why, no, dear. I’ve just been sitting here having a nice manicure and pedicure. Is there something special on?”

  “You better turn on the TV. I mean, it makes me think probably Chad isn’t up to any of the things you mentioned. It’s something else. Something worse. Chad probably wanted to talk to me about this the whole time, and he just couldn’t. Chad’s going to thank me for giving him a chance to get outta this town. When people find out what his FBI’s been up to, he’ll wish he’d left a long time ago.”

  Merilu then called Chad’s office, to be told by the receptionist that he was in a meeting and couldn’t be disturbed. Two subsequent calls brought the same reply. Merilu nodded wisely each time. She bet he was in a meeting, all right. Everybody in the world would be having meetings, not that it’d do them any good!

  Came suppertime, Merilu fed the boys, read to them for a while, then put them to bed. She bathed in scented bath foam, did her hair the way Chad liked it, and pulled the suitcase from under the bed in order to retrieve the negligee set he’d given her for their last anniversary. At nine o’clock, she was gorgeous. At eleven, she took the latest Danielle Steel to bed with her. At midnight, she took off her eye makeup and the peignoir and made herself a milk punch. At one o’clock on Friday morning she turned off the light.

  At three, when Chad tiptoed in and began moseying around in the bedroom, opening doors and drawers, she came alert with astonishing speed, switched on the light, and immediately grasped at the idea that had floated to the top while she was dozing.

  “Chad! I’ve been talking to Momma, and I’ve decided if you won’t transfer to Missoula, I’m taking the boys and going without you.”

  Though she had intended this threat to make him think about things, he turned in her direction as though he hadn’t really heard her, his eyes fixed and concentrated on something in the far away. “Good idea, honey,” he said in a distant voice with a weird reverberation in it, almost like an echo. “They won’t let me go right now, of course. Not that I’d want to until we find out what the hell is going on. But your getting away right now, yes, that’s a really good idea. This city’s going to come apart.”

  Mouth open, shocked into momentary silence, she watched as he continued doing what he’d been doing when she turned the light on. Packing an overnight bag. In Merilu’s mental attic, the idea of Jerusalem and Washington coming apart and Chad acting weird began to resonate. It’s the end of the world, she thought. That’s why all this is happening. And she hadn’t been to church in months.

  He snapped the case shut, took it in one hand, and came to give her a perfunctory kiss on the cheek.

  “I don’t know when I’ll get back here. Be sure to lock up when you leave. Tell your mom and daddy hello for me. I’ll be in touch.”

  He threw her a bonus kiss and was out the door. A moment later she heard the front door slam, the car start up and drive away. Only then did her waking mind remember its earlier preoccupation. Chad hadn’t acted like a man who was involved. He acted like a man who was absolutely in the dark and almost afraid to know what was going on.

  22

  bert shipton

  FRIDAY

  Late Friday morning, a guard rattled the bars of Bert’s cell and told him he had a visitor.

  “That’d be my wife,” opined Bert, with obvious relief. Good old Benita. You had to give her credit, by God. She was a good old girl.

  “Not unless she has a bigger mustache than my wife,” said the guard, unlocking the cell and standing aside. He and Bert knew one another in the relationship of miscreant and warder, one that had been renewed periodically over the last several years. “I’ve met Benita, and this guy’s not her.”

  Bert, confused, shambled after the guard into the visitors’ room where he took a seat opposite a stiffly upright man garbed in a three-piece suit and an air of unassailable rectitude.

  “Bert Shipton?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Mr. Shipton, my name is Prentice Arthur. I’m with one of the national security agencies, and I flew in this morning particularly to talk to you. We’ve just recently become aware that your wife has become involved with some very…well, they’re foreigners, actually, people who may be very dangerous. I doubt very much she even realizes what trouble they may cause, but we’re very worried about her. If you can tell us how to reach her—just so we can protect her—we’d be glad to offer you some help in your present situation.”

  “I don’t know where she is,” Bert responded in a guarded voice. “She left last Saturday. Left me a note. Said she’d be in touch later.”

  Arthur nodded. “We’re aware you don’t know where she is right now, but you may be able to help us find her. We’d be happy to help you out with your bail, if you’d like to assist us.”

  “Bail?” He thought about this long enough to flavor it with his usual bias. “Well, if you’d like to include a little something for my time and effort, I might be able to help you.”

  His mustache hiding a lip sneeringly lifted at one corner, the visitor said, “Of course. A hundred a day for your trouble.”

  Bert smiled, disclosing teeth evenly coated with ocherous velour. “Happy to be of help to my country,” he said, puffing a miasma into his visitor’s face.

  “We’ll take care of it,” said Arthur, not breathing as he turned his face aside. “Here’s my card. We’ll call you at your home tonight.”

  “Yeah, sure,” said Bert, with another smile, from which his visitor hastily averted his eyes. “I hate to mention it, but I’m…a little short right now. And since my car’s…out of commission, I’ll need a little cash to get home.”

  “I’ll leave some money with the people up front.” The visitor rose and left, while Bert watched him every step of the way. So little old holy-cow Benita was in trouble! Benita was never in trouble. With some effort, he focused on the card which gave him no information except the name, Prentice Arthur, Security and, in the lower left corner, an Albuquerque phone number. Now why in hell did a national security suit have a local number?

  Half an hour later, supplied with a hundred dollars in twenties, Bert headed unerringly for the nearest bar. When he soared out, two hours later, who should he run into but one of those fags his wife worked for.

  “Good afternoon, Bert,” this person said. “I got a postcard from Benita today. Seems she’s taken a new job in Denver. We’ll miss her. Nice to see you. Bye.” The person, conscious of being watched, then walked to the corner, and when around the corner and unobserved, vanished.

  Bert hadn’t been able to bring the face quite into focus. Which one was it? Was it Goose or was it the
other one? Never mind which one. So she was in Denver. Sure, that made sense. Not too far away to take the bus. When he’d talked to Carlos this morning, Carlos said she’d taken a bus wherever she was. Bookstore job made sense, too, sure, big city like that had lots of bookstores. And Carlos said it had to be someplace on mountain time.

  Well, so there he was, he already had it half figured out! He sure as hell wasn’t going to tell Mr. What’s-his-name about Denver, though. Not when they were paying him a hundred a day to find her. Wait a week. String him along. A hundred a day was too good to pass up.

  Across the street, in the front seat of a large van, Prentice Arthur asked, “Dink, who’s he talking to?”

  Dink flipped through a notebook. “Looks like the guy that runs the bookstore where the target used to work. Rene Guselier, usually called Goose.”

  “Did you pick up the conversation?” asked Arthur, over his shoulder.

  “Got it,” said a disembodied voice from the back of the van. “The woman’s got a job in Denver.”

  “He didn’t say what kind of job?”

  “No mention. Wouldn’t it be another bookstore? That’s the only place she’s ever worked. How many can there be? Denver’s a sports town, isn’t it? Sports fans don’t read, do they?”

  “Their wives probably do,” said Arthur. “Since they have a great deal of time on their hands. Get us on the next plane to Denver.”

  As the car pulled away, the voice asked, “Didn’t you tell the guy you’d meet him this evening?”

  Prentice Arthur shook his head. “Look at him! By evening he won’t be in condition to meet anyone. It’s only a two-hour flight if we have to come back to pick him up.”

  “Morse still wants the family?”

  “Well, before I left Washington, I managed to convince him that since he really wants the woman, the man and the kids will be more use to us helping find her than they will be locked up somewhere. The way Morse wants to disappear people left and right, you’d think this was Argentina!”

  While the men in suits were on their way to the airport, the subject of their surveillance managed to locate a cab, more by luck than effort, and went home, arriving there at five. It was an hour earlier in California, he told himself foggily. Carlos would be home, but Angelica wouldn’t. Good time to call.

  The phone rang a dozen times before Carlos answered. “Yeah.”

  “Hiya Carlos. How’s everthing?”

  “Dad? Are you out of jail?”

  “I am oh-you-tee out. This guy from some federal office, he bailed me out. He says your mom’s been makin some…dangerous friends. That’s a fuckin kick, huh? Mama moocow, with dangerous friends.”

  “What are you talking about, dangerous friends? She’s got a job in Denver.”

  “I know that. How did you know?”

  “I figured it out. She said she took a bus, and she was on Mountain Time, so I figured Denver. You know, big city, lots of places to work. Then I ran into Mr. Marsh, Walter Marsh, on my way home this afternoon. Funny thing, there he was, right in front of me when I came out of the union. He said he was in town at a booksellers’ convention. Him and Goose got a postcard from her. From Denver. After he left, I thought, wow, maybe he has her address, but when I went chasing after him, I couldn’t find him.”

  “…sright. S’what the other one said. Postcard from Denver. So, anyhow, the guy from the whatever it is, he bailed me out. I’m gonna help find her.” He giggled. “Not too fast. They got me on the payroll, so not too fast. If they call you, you don’t know. They’ll pay you, f’you play it right.”

  “Right, Dad. Thanks for the tip. Now you’d better have a nap.”

  “Right. Right.” He hung up and staggered off to the bedroom. Funny. Usually beers didn’t hit him like this. Musta been all those days without any. Out of shape, that was it. Days in jail could leave you out of shape.

  And in California, Carlos hung up the phone, frowning to himself. What the hell did “dangerous friends” mean? She’d said she’d gone out to dinner the other night, with people she’d met on the bus. She’d been delayed getting back. But she’d just met those people. How could other people know she had dangerous friends if they didn’t even know where she was? And where the hell had Walter Marsh disappeared to? He’d chased after him within ten seconds and the guy had just vanished!

  And where could he find this guy who was willing to pay him?

  23

  from chiddy’s journal

  At one point in our careers, Vess and I were assigned to the offices of the Confederation, where we were to represent the Pistach people in working with other races. We of the Pistach have a unique place in the Confederation as we are the only race that is largely undifferentiated at birth, the only one that selects persons to perform specific functions on the basis of ability. Alas, such is not the case with certain other races, some of whose diplomats would be better employed turning compost on a swamp planet.

  The variety found within the Confederation is interesting. There are, for example, the Credons, a differentiated people, though their differentiation happens before they are hatched, rather as it does to your bees and ants and termites. What they are when they are hatched is what they will continue to be: egg layer, fertilizer, light worker, heavy worker, engineer, thinker, and fighter. They have no differentiation equivalent to diplomat or representative, and they are inclined to send whomever is standing about at the time. When they send thinkers to work with us, we manage to cooperate, but when they send workers or engineers, our functioning is less felicitous. Their first question is always, “What are you for?” A question which persons of other races may find some difficulty in answering.

  Another differentiated race is the Oumfuz, which is as close as we can get to pronouncing the gulp they use for a label. They are a swamp-living race, one that cannot work in dry or high-gravity situations. They are born either grubbers, workers, or reasoners, a deeply philosophical group, much concerned with the thoughts and plans of other races and how those have changed over time. The Oumfuz create no artifacts. The grubbers feed both themselves and the reasoners, whose philosophies are communicated orally to one another. In fact, the great library on Pistach-home contains the only recordings extant of Oumfuz thinking. They were crystallized by one of our explorers and are being slowly translated by a team of athyci who speak Oumfuzziza, though they admit that no Pistach can ever really understand the Oumfuz.

  An interplanetary people who do not themselves build or maintain ships are the Flibotsi, a joyous winged race, not winged as we are, at intervals, depending upon our selection, but capable of flight during their entire lifetimes. Whenever I am around them, I am reminded of panel eight of the Fresco, The Birth of Kasiwees, for in that panel he is surrounded by little winged forms, rejoicing at his birth. So do the Flibotsi rejoice, almost constantly. They work well with swimming or flying peoples, particularly those who are not troubled by purpose. Quite frankly, the races untroubled by purpose are by far the happiest! The Flibotsi, I must confess, find the Pistach stodgy, and we, whose humor is mostly language dependent, do not much appreciate the purely physical fun of which the Flibotsi are capable, what you on Earth call slapstick.

  The Thwakians are an aquatic race who build tunnel complexes beneath their seas, where they tend submarine gardens. The Vixbot are among my favorite aliens because of their choral singing, which puts that of any other race to shame—though in truth, your symphonic orchestras would be good competition for them. The Inkleozese—well, the interesting thing about the Inkleozese is that we and they descended from a common interstellar ancestor. Many of their characteristics are similar to ours. Instead of depositing their eggs in nootchi, however, they lay their eggs in the bodies of domestic animals, quodm or geplis or nadgervaks. After a lengthy parturition, about thirteen of your months, the young chew their way out of the animal, which, since the young Inkleozese secrete substances that control bleeding and stimulate healing in the host, almost always fully recovers. />
  The Inkleozese have an inborn love of order and correctness, and because they are an elder race, with widely recognized wisdom, the Inkleozese are our monitors. Even among the aged athyci of Pistach, the Inkleozese are recognized as having excellent though rather elucubrative ideas. Our philosophers struggle with their logic and, having done so, are amazed at the clarity and good sense of their thought. The rules of Tassifoduma were constructed largely by the Inkleozese, and they will visit us while we are with you, as the Confederation has assigned them the duty of reviewing work done between two or more races to assure compliance with Neighborliness.

  The Xankatikitiki, the Fluiquosm, and the Wulivery are starfaring predators, not the only ones by far, but the only ones in this sector of the galaxy. Despite their predatory natures, they too have agreed to the principles of Tassifoduma in order to benefit from our association. They have made a treaty with us, promising not to invade or harvest from planets that are part of the Confederation or those that are being helped toward membership.

  The Xankatikitiki are warriors, furry and small, about the size of your middle-large dogs, but very fierce, supplied by nature with weapons superior to those found on many technological worlds. They hunt in small packs or family groups and their manner is consistently ferocious. Whenever I meet with them, they remind me of panel eleven in the Fresco, where the fierce Pokoti attack the peaceful Jaupati.

  The Fluiquosm are lone hunters. They are what you might call chameleons, so nearly invisible as to make locating them difficult. Their females have hypnotic abilities and both sexes are vampiric in nature. The Wulivery are stalkers; vast, invulnerable, and voracious.

  These three races, though fearsome, have generally avoided incursions upon others. The few lapses by the Fluiquosm seem to have been spurred by curiosity, not hunger, and the Wulivery are split into so many tribes that they always have trouble with their communications, so that orders issued by their Sn’far, or Council of Elders, do not always reach the lower levels in time to avoid intrusion. Still, they are always contrite when these things happen, and we manage to work things out. I must confess, however, that the three predatory races constitute a voting bloc in the Confederation that continues to press for more freedom of action on the part of individual members. Don’t you find that predators are those who most often assert absolute rights to personal freedoms?