The Fresco

by Sheri S. Tepper

  The nanobots had been designed to be impervious to refining processes. They didn’t show up on scanners. They didn’t show up on anything manmade except electron microscopes, and even then, only if someone knew what to look for. Their supersonic howls were detectable by the wrist sniffers, of course, but wrist sniffers could not be taken apart for examination. Any attempt to do so resulted in a foul stench and a puddle of unpleasant and rapidly evaporating goop.

  The drug-bots were designed to penetrate wrappings, they were programmed to move out of the drugs into the clothing of the carrier, into the hair and body of the carrier, into the vehicles the carrier used, into the money the carrier received. If there were no drugs in the environment, they could not replicate, and their life spans were designed to be short, thus eliminating the possibility of innocent persons being identified as carriers. They were designed to take particular actions in response to specific signals. With a wary eye on the economics of the situation, neither Vess nor Chiddy had ordered them to do anything else, yet.

  28

  incident in virginia

  MONDAY

  Late Monday evening, an armored truck made its way down a lonely country road in Virginia, headed toward an abandoned farm that was owned, ostensibly, by a widow in Baltimore. The woods behind the house were cut by the arcs of three concentric fences, an outside, slightly saggy one of rusty barbed wire, a second one of tight electrified mesh, and a third, the one nearest the house, of high-tension cables and electrified chain link with concertina wire at the top. This latter barrier, invisible from the road, began at a ramshackle shed connected to one side of the farmhouse, circled into the forest, and came out at a dilapidated annex at the other side. The splintery boards and flaking paint off the farmhouse hid a reinforced concrete bunker at the entry to a large storage area buried in the hillside. What one saw from the approach was an assemblage of rotting rail fences outlining weedy fields that ran up the slope to the house, its sagging roof part and parcel of the whole, sorry picture.

  Dink was driving, with McVane beside him. Briess, a small man with a ratty mustache, was standing in the tall, armor-plated body of the truck. Arthur was on urgent business elsewhere, but his place had been taken by a sound technician and half a ton of equipment designed to detect every physical manifestation that might occur when they arrived at the ramshackle house.

  “We stay in the truck, right?” Dink asked, as he came to the last turn in the driveway.

  “We stay in the truck,” agreed McVane. “If these creatures are what we think they are, they’ve had appetizers in Oregon and an entree in Florida, and I’m not offering to be dessert.”

  “What’s your guess?” asked Dink, braking the van to a halt and shutting off engine and lights. “About what they want?”

  “They’re obviously a competing group,” said McVane. “A rival clan, or nation, or political party. A rival world, or association of worlds. The voice that spoke to me said the Pistach aren’t the only ones. This implies we’re being given a choice between the way the Pistach are shoving us and something else. They want to make a deal.”

  “For what?” breathed Briess from the hatch leading into the truck body. “Hunting rights?”

  “Something like that,” admitted McVane. “We could tolerate that. Hell, China’s got enough surplus people to keep ’em busy for a few thousand years. If their offer’s good enough.”

  “You don’t know how many of them there are,” said Briess, through a grilled hatch behind the seat. “Or how much and how often they eat. You don’t know if they have a preference in taste. Like Europeans, or Americans.”

  “I doubt we taste any different,” grunted McVane. “If they preferred light meat, they’d be talking to somebody besides us.”

  “How long until?” asked Briess.

  McVane consulted the illuminated dial of his watch. “Ten minutes. I didn’t allow much extra time. It’s boring to sit around waiting for stuff to happen.”

  “Crack that window so we can hear,” said Dink. “Get a little fresh air in here.”

  “Keep it closed,” barked McVane. “Turn on the recirculating air conditioner if you have to, but keep everything closed. Physically, we’re probably no match for these creatures, and it’s remotely possible this is a trap…”

  “I thought you said it would be perfectly safe!” erupted Dink.

  “I said a trap was remotely possible, Dinklemier. Calm down. If you want to listen, turn on the exterior mikes.”

  The mikes were turned on to admit a soothing murmur of light wind, the rustling of dried leaves, the flap-flap of a strap of harness hanging on the fence, the flutter of a tattered white towel that was inexplicably clipped to the wash-line beside the house.

  “What’s that doing there?” asked McVane, nodding at the towel. “I thought the place was abandoned.”

  “It’s meant to look abandoned,” Briess corrected him. “The towel means there was nothing dangerous here when the crew looked the place over shortly after sunset. The whole area has been under surveillance from across the valley since then.”

  They sat. “Did you locate the intermediary’s kids?” McVane asked.

  Dink grunted. “They’re being watched. We can pick them up any time. The same with the husband. We can pick him up any time. He doesn’t know where his wife is.”

  “Neither do the children,” said Briess. “But the boy is willing to try and find out. Seems he’s got a girlfriend who likes money.”

  “Don’t they all,” murmured McVane. The rustling and flapping went on as the minutes passed, ten, twelve, fifteen.

  “They’re late,” said McVane.

  “On the contrary,” said a voice through the speaker. “We arrived here when you did.”

  Those in the truck straightened up and peered in all directions. There was nothing visible.

  “Show yourselves,” said McVane.

  “Rather not,” said the voice in a toneless, mechanical voice. “Rather just do our business, get on with our lives, you know. Too much formality stifles us, doesn’t it you? Warriors and hunters don’t need it.”

  “You are a…warrior race,” said Briess, through the inside microphone.

  “Oh, indeed.”

  “You speak English?”

  “We’re speaking through a translator. We buy them from the Pistach. Good manufacturers, the Pistach. Stodgy as all get-out, everything just so, but perfectionists do make good merchandise.”

  “They say they’re here to help us,” offered McVane. “Isn’t that true?”

  “Well, help is as help is. If you do it their way, you’ll learn to get rid of some of what they call your native barbarism; you’ll become more civilized, which is also what they call it; and you’ll keep everybody reasonably happy by eliminating a lot of what makes life interesting. Maybe that’s help. For us, it’d be deadly dull. We’re highly selfish and individualistic. We revel in the unexpected. We lust after the hunt. We’ve given you a looking-over. We think you’re more like us than you are like them.”

  “And?” breathed Briess.

  “Our view is that those who sign up for somebody’s free course in social engineering ought to have a choice. If you sign up with us, we make a deal. We get to hunt on this planet. We’ll set a game limit that won’t overstress the population, though right at first you’ll need a hell of a lot of weeding out. We can use our young ones for that. You know kids. Always hungry.”

  “And what do we get out of it?” Briess asked, surprised at the dryness of his throat.

  “You get your population problem solved without having to argue about sex or religion or human rights. Let people have as many offspring as they want, the young ones are juicier anyhow. We prefer to maintain a large gene pool by eating only third birth order or higher persons, so we won’t be reducing you by much.”

  “We can handle our own population problems,” growled Briess.

  “Never in a million years,” said the voice, the translator managing to imply a c
huckle. “Not with all your taboos. Aren’t you sick of them? By Gharm the Great, between your religions and your laws, you can’t have a good gang rape without being hauled up short! That’s what you get with a differentiated society like the Pistach. Everything smoothed out, ironed over. Well, with us, it’s different. You let us hunt, we’ll do you favors, give you some technology that’ll advance you a few centuries.”

  “You’ll restrict your hunting by agreement?” asked Briess. “How would that work?”

  “First, you can tell us where the hunting should be done. Second, you can tell us what individuals or groups you’d like eliminated. Political foes, maybe? Certain foreign elements? Certain dictators that’ve been hard to handle? Just imagine, you want it, it happens, but nobody can trace it back to you!”

  “If we make a deal with you, do we still get to join this Confederation the Pistach keep talking about?” asked Dink.

  “Go ahead and join, just don’t tell the Pistach about our agreement. You can go ahead and become neighborly. It won’t hurt you. But…on the side, when you get bored, we’ll take you hunting with us.”

  There was a long silence. Briess asked, “Won’t the Pistach find out about it?”

  The voice made a grating noise they interpreted as laughter. “With all your terrorists and warfare and tribal conflicts. Not so they can prove it.”

  Briess said, “We’d like to talk about this, a bit.”

  “Take your time,” said a voice. “Take all the time you need. Meantime, just to illustrate our goodwill, give us a few names. We’ll find the being or beings, wherever it is or they are, and we’ll either make them disappear or deliver them to you. Just to show how useful we can be.”

  Silence in the van. It was McVane who spoke at last. “A woman named Benita Alvarez. The intermediary for the Pistach envoys.”

  “Dead? Dismembered? Or delivered?”

  McVane started to speak, but Briess reached through the opening to put a hand on his shoulder, silencing him.

  “Delivered,” said Briess. “It has to be done surreptitiously, no alarms, no havoc, no wreckage. She has to disappear, and she has to be in good condition. Call one of us when you’ve got her.”

  “Where is she?”

  “If we knew that, we wouldn’t need you,” said McVane.

  “Excellent,” purred the voice, losing some of its mechanical edge. “We enjoy a challenge. She has family, perhaps?”

  “A husband in Albuquerque. A son and daughter at school in California.” He fumbled for a pocket notebook and read off Angelica’s address, Carlos’s address, Bert’s address.

  The voice purred again. “We may need to use her family as bait. We’ll let you know when we have her, and we’ll bring her here.”

  The voice went away. The other men sat silently while the technician fiddled with his dials and screens. “Here’s something in infrared,” he said at last, pointing at his monitor.

  They got into the back to see what he had, an image of something or things tall and tangled, looming at the side of the ramshackle house. And something smaller but numerous on the ground between the armored car and the house. And something else, that they couldn’t at all make out, more an absence than a presence.

  Dink gulped, saying in a slightly panicky voice, “I’m not sure I like this…”

  “We’ve made alliances before,” said McVane. “Hell, we had an alliance with Stalin once.”

  “There’s a difference,” murmured Briess. “I doubt Stalin ever looked at us and imagined how we’d taste served rare, with sauteed mushrooms.”

  Dink started the car and eased it into motion, turning in a wide loop to put them back on the isolated road. “First thing we have to do is tell Morse about it,” he murmured. “Let’s see what he has to say.”

  29

  from chiddy’s journal

  In a previous entry I have mentioned the Pistach colony on Quirk. It was only three or four years after our visit there that Pistach-home received astonishing news. The people on Quirk had rebelled against their sequestration, had seized a supply ship—no great feat as it was not armed or staffed to repel a boarding party—and subsequently had used that ship to ferry a large fraction of the planetary population to some unknown destination. What was most intriguing about the story was the name of the leader: T’Fees. More exactly, T’Fees the Tumultuous, or so those remaining on Quirk averred. Those who had chosen to remain on Quirk included the lazy, the elderly, the infirm, and the quite mad, but even the maddest among them claimed T’Fees had taken the title of Tumultuous before leaving the planet.

  Pistach-home was abuzz with rumor and speculation. Where could the Quirkers have gone that was any better suited to them than Quirk? Quirk had been designed for the eccentric, the unconventional, the idiosyncratic, the bizarre. Where else could such people go and be allowed to live in acceptance and peace? We assumed they would want peace. We always assume that living, breathing, sensible creatures want peace.

  The Departure from Quirk became what you on Earth would call a Nine-Day Wonder, fascinating, but not enduringly interesting. There were some songs written, some artwork done, some poems composed with the rebellion of Quirk as the theme. None of them truly captured the event to make it live in our minds. People soon quit talking about it for though it was unusual, by our standards, it was also distant and it did not affect Pistach-home. It was a happening staged by the insane on a world the sane regarded little.

  Even we who had known T’Fees did not worry over it long. There were too many other duties and responsibilities that required our attention. Since Vess and I had been away on missions for some time, we were scheduled to spend the next year or so in duty at the House of the Fresco. All athyci are expected to spend time there in order to renew our spiritual balance. Teachings by the commentators over the years stress the importance of infusing oneself with the aura of the Fresco, with the awe and reverence evoked by the rites conducted there.

  It was while I was on Fresco duty that the House of Cavita, my ancestral house, was honored by a request to donate genetic material for a mating among the five imperial houses. When a child is planned among them, each house gives genetic material to the mating but, also, to prevent excessive inbreeding, one outside source is required, preferably an athyco from a blameless lineage. Our family records had been audited for the past twelve generations without revealing one misjudgment by a Cavita selector, one reversed decision by a Cavita athyco, one artwork created by a Cavita proffi that was considered inferior. Our line seemed to be without stain. At the time, dear Benita, I confess that I had feelings of ebullience and self-regard over this matter. Since being here on Earth, I have become more likely to see humor in it. I have the feeling, if I told you we had twelve generations without stain, you would say to me, Oh, poor thing, how dull!

  It was, in fact, worse than dull. While the request to provide genetic material is a great honor, it requires an equally great interruption in one’s life. Athyci are not physically able to reproduce. Therefore, an athyco asked to do so must undergo temporary transformation. This process is painful and lengthy, taking the better part of a year before one is restored to oneself. It was during this time that I became personally acquainted with breeding madness and clump lust and the other terrors and compulsions routinely faced by inceptors. They, so it is said, do it eagerly, without a qualm. For me, it was traumatic, not while it was going on, of course, but after it was over. As a matter of principle, I did not ask for memory deadening during the incidents. Athyci are expected to welcome all experiences as a way of learning what others experience and how they cope with events. I found the memories agonizing, however. If I had been Earthian, I would have blushed to recall them, wishing them gone, and worse: wishing dead all other individuals—the inceptors, the receptors, the nootchi—who had witnessed the events. It is a grave error to wish others gone, dead, passed over, but I committed it a hundred times during the following year on Pistach-home.

  Since being here, I hav
e learned to value the experience as it helped me understand Earth people better than I could otherwise have done. They, too, are often suffused by shame at what reproductive nature has compelled them to do. They are reminded, and they cringe. They wish to forget.

  I know, for example, that your young people—and those of mid years, also—often cannot help the sexual foolishness they commit, and assisting them in this matter would be wise. I know your rapists cannot help what they do, but I also know they cannot be allowed to do it. Since the physically stronger half of your race are inceptors, and since they are disproportionately represented at various levels of government, they have elevated inceptorhood above all other states of being, holding it above even the right to live. Inceptorhood is so holy that it forbids changing rapists into campesi or even proffi, though they would be happier so. You may kill a rapist, but you may not change him into something noninceptorish. It is a great trouble in your society, one Vess and I are at present much concerned with.

  Which is beside the point. After a period of convalescence, I continued my term at the House of the Fresco, and it was there that a second trauma occurred. I was reminded of it anew by something you said not long ago, Benita, about the Sistine Chapel.

  I have spoken of the grime that covers the interior of the House of the Fresco, most of it deposited as soot from candles and oil lamps, thousands of which are burned by worshippers and seekers after truth and pilgrims from Pistach’s far-flung worlds. It would be heresy to clean the Fresco, yes, but the room that contains it has to be cleaned at least annually. A large scaffolding is erected, and teams of proffi and athyci come in to wash down the inside of the dome, the pillars, the wall space above and below the Fresco, and finally the floor itself. At the time of which I speak, the Chapter of the Fresco House had recently ruled that the traditional cleaning utensils—animal skins and a ritual soap made from wax plants and scented with flowers—could be replaced by a more convenient and effective cleansing agent. The new stuff was a grime specific solvent, and we were given large jugs of it, each labeled Danger, do not drink, with a picture of a dried thorax and crossed leg armor.