Bert growled, “I don’t have money for clothes…”
“Mr. Shipton. Listen carefully. There is an envelope in your mailbox with money in it. If you go to a bar, if you have even one drink, the deal is off! We will ask your son to introduce us to Benita. If you want the money, you must stay sober.”
Bert grunted, almost dropping the phone in his eagerness to get to the mailbox. The envelope was there, a plain white one with his name on it, containing ten one-hundred-dollar bills. Enough to keep him floating for a long while. He wavered, shifting from foot to foot, thinking of excuses he might make, like he’d been robbed of the money, or lost it…
“If you drink,” said a voice at his ear, “the deal is off! And we’re watching, so you can’t lie to us.”
Bert jumped and stared around himself, seeing nothing but heat haze, rising off the pavement in wavering lines. Like a mirage, he told himself sternly. Just a mirage. Looks like all kinds of things, but it’s only a mirage.
He took the money, put it in his wallet, and went to the barber shop, where a few moments under a steaming towel made him feel slightly better. The steam gave him the idea of going to the baths, where a much younger Bert had occasionally sobered up. After that, he went to the men’s store in the nearest mall, where he outfitted himself as inexpensively as possible, off the rack. Every dollar spent on clothes was a dollar not spent on something more fun.
The sight of himself in the mirror, shaved, shorn, and decently clad, came as a shock. He’d worn a suit when he and Benita had been married. He’d worn a suit to the kids’ high school graduations, though he hadn’t planned on being outdone by his own kids in the education department and was indignant about that. And he’d worn a suit to Benita’s mother’s funeral, though the last thing he’d wanted to do right then was spend an afternoon thinking about that old bitch. Wearing a suit meant trouble, so far as Bert was concerned. Not a good omen, not good at all.
He bought two extra shirts, plus underwear and socks. At the corner drugstore he added a razor and a toothbrush to the shopping bag. There was still a ticket to Washington to buy, and airfares weren’t cheap, as Bert had found out last year when he’d priced roundtrips to California. Angelica had invited them to come, and he’d talked Benita out of it on the grounds they couldn’t afford two tickets and he didn’t want her traveling alone.
He found a taxi outside the nearest hotel and slumped in the seat, already exhausted, his hands shaking.
“You all right?” asked the driver.
“Yeah,” said Bert.
“You get to feelin’ sick, you holler,” the driver instructed, adjusting the rearview mirror so he could keep an eye on his passenger. The man looked sick. Sort of yellowish around the eyes.
At the airport, Bert went to the men’s room and put cold water on his face. His insides seemed to be all up and down, like a roller coaster. When he opened his eyes, he stared at himself in the mirror, only to be reminded of Benita, the way she sometimes looked, when she didn’t know he was watching her. This same sort of dazed expression. Sometimes she’d stand beside her spice rack, leaning against the wall with her nose over an open jar of anise or cinnamon sticks, her eyes shut, her forehead wrinkled. Once or twice he’d opened the jars and sniffed at them. The smell was nice, but that’s all it was. It didn’t make his mouth water. It didn’t excite him any. He couldn’t fathom why she stood there the way she did, sniffing at…at what? It made him angry at her, but then, most things she did made him angry at her.
Now he had that same expression on his face. So, what was he sniffing at? The possibility of going somewhere? Doing something? It had been a long time since he’d gone anywhere, done anything. He tried to think about the going, the doing, but it was hard. Thinking was hard, lately. Just lately, he assured himself. Just this last little while. It wasn’t that he was stupid. Bert was absolutely one hundred percent not stupid. He was as smart as anybody, but just this last little while, it was hard to concentrate on anything. It could be the weed. When he was out of money, sometimes he moved a little weed for a friend of Larry’s. Not usually, not enough to risk getting caught with it, but now and then it was okay, just so he didn’t get in a pattern. Except, lately, he’d been using more of it himself, and maybe that was what made it hard to think.
After several vague moments spent standing, head down, not moving or thinking, he worked up the energy to go buy the ticket. Lucky him, the flight was leaving in twenty minutes. No baggage to check. All he had was the shopping bag. The money was in his wallet and most of the clothes were on his back. At the newsstand, he bought a canvas airline bag to put the extra shirts in, and a sports magazine, and some mints because his throat was so dry.
He only had a one-way ticket. Maybe he should have bought a roundtrip. Then again, there was no point in wasting the money. He’d have plenty of money when this was over. As he went down the concourse, he passed the first bar with only a slight swerve of footsteps in its direction. He hesitated at the next one, but the plane was leaving too soon for him to stop. As it was, he was the last person to board. The plane was half empty, so Bert had a window seat with an empty aisle seat next to him. The flight attendant came by and reminded him to put his seatbelt on. He fumbled with it, hands trembling again.
Then they made an announcement about beverage service, and his hands steadied, he licked his lips and tried to swallow, but his mouth was too dry. He couldn’t wait for the flight attendant to get to him, and he shifted in the seat. His skin felt itchy. Like it had ants crawling on it.
A voice spoke from the empty aisle seat next to him.
“Not one drink, Bert. Not one. Or we throw you out of the plane and watch you fly.”
He couldn’t see anything in the seat. His eyes confirmed vacancy, his hand, tentatively reached, encountered nothing. As frightened as he could ever remember being, he turned his eyes away, put his head back and, for the next several hours, pretended to be sleeping.
When he arrived in Washington, the voice guided him to a taxi, and the taxi to a hotel where Bert found a room awaiting him, all paid for. When he got into the room, he took his jacket off and stretched out on the bed, just for a moment, before going out on a foraging trip. The money he had left was burning a hole in his pocket. He thought about it. There was a bar downstairs. He’d seen it on the way in. He tasted the beer he was going to drink, feeling it sliding down his throat, feeling his body loosen and swim, all the tight muscles letting go…
The being who had accompanied him from Albuquerque encouraged the vision, the feeling, the quiet. It left him sleeping. He would stay asleep until he was needed. The Fluiquosm were very good at keeping prey quiet and in good condition until needed.
35
benita
TUESDAY NIGHT
Tuesday morning, Benita woke up feeling like death warmed over. She went downstairs to work, but Simon sent her back upstairs, where she remained achy and fretful all day, feeling as though she was coming down with the flu or a rotten chest cold. She went to bed early with a glass of warm milk and one of her hoarded sleeping pills. She didn’t take them often, keeping them for emergencies, when Bert was being impossible and she was too hurt or angry to sleep. She hadn’t planned to need them in Washington, but she was thankful to have a few left.
Despite the pill, she couldn’t settle. Sasquatch turned around and around on the foot of the bed until she yelled at him. He gave her an offended look, jumped off the bed, and curled up in his huge dog basket, though even there, he kept up a restless shifting and ear-pricking, as though something was bothering him. Finally, about midnight, she fell asleep with the light on, some time later rousing just enough to switch it off without interrupting the dream she was having about trekking through a jungle. Sasquatch was with her, nervously alert, woofing low in his throat the way he did when he saw a skunk or a really big raccoon or Bert with the blind staggers.
In the dream, she was worried about some kind of beast, a bear or jaguar, and she heard Sasquatc
h’s woof very clearly, so clearly that she woke up with the reality of it in her ears. There was Sasquatch in the middle of the bedroom floor, the fur on his shoulders and neck bristled up like a mane, nose wrinkled, fangs showing, the dim light reflected from his eyes as he stared up at the high windows of the bedroom that looked out on the roof of the other building, which was accessible only from the higher roof above her head. Which was, supposedly, accessible only from the elevator unless someone had a very tall ladder. The people who fixed up the apartment had covered the whole row of windows with gathered curtains of translucent muslin. The light came in, but the view was blocked, either in or out. Benita’s half-opened eyes followed the dog’s gaze to the curtains, a row of slightly lighter squares against the dark…
Slightly lighter squares across which something moved, from left to right, a slow shadow that progressed from window to window, touching each one, pushing at each one, making them creak protestingly. The shadow was a featureless blob, sometimes straight on the sides, sometimes with a hint of squirminess about it. The frames creaked, again and again, though not loudly and without yielding, for wire-glass inside steel frames doesn’t break easily. Sasquatch backed up until his rump was against the bed and went on making what was almost a whispered growl, more a mutter in his throat than a threat. He didn’t like whatever was up there. Benita didn’t either. Whatever was up there scared her spitless. The bottom of the windows were even with the roof and the panes were about five feet tall. Whatever was throwing the shadow was taller than that, as it extended all the way from bottom to top.
The shadow moved on, and almost at once she heard something rattling from the direction of the elevator hall. She almost fell out of bed as she scrambled to get there before the elevator could move. At each floor the cage was shut off by a folding metal grille that could not open unless the elevator was on that floor, to keep someone from falling down the shaft. The elevator was where she had left it, on the third floor, and the rattling was coming from the roof above her!
She opened the elevator grille, just enough to keep the elevator from departing, and looked frantically around for something to prop it with. The hall was empty, so she simply stuck her foot between the grille and the frame, holding it there while the rattling continued over her head as though something was trying to get into the elevator housing. It had an outside door, which locked automatically if one didn’t set the unlock button. Even if whatever it was got in, so long as she held the grille open, the elevator wouldn’t ascend and the upper grille couldn’t move.
The rattling was succeeded by the hum click of the controls. The thing had broken into the housing and pushed the button that summoned the elevator. The grille thrust hard against her foot, and she swore in a panicky whisper as it pinched. A smell came down the shaft, filtering out around the car, and she almost gagged at the rotten meat filthiness of it.
She was scrunched up tight in the corner of the hall where the elevator shaft met the outside wall, one foot extended awkwardly into the grille space. The only window was several feet to her left, and though she couldn’t see through it from her position, she could see the quality of light that came through it as it was repeatedly blocked by something. Dim, then brighter, then dim again, over and over, as though something hung over the parapet and looked in. Or as though something rose up from the street and looked in? That window was a good thirty-five to forty feet above the ground and at least eight or ten feet below the edge of the parapet that ran around the roof. Benita told herself she was all right, she had to be all right if she was doing arithmetic in her head.
All right or not, she was shaking. Through the open apartment door she could see Sasquatch lying absolutely flat with his head on his paws and his ears out to the sides as though he were hiding, or at least keeping a low profile. She knew he was out of the line of sight, as she was, so whatever was looking in couldn’t see anything. Then everything stopped above her and she heard a swudge, swudge, swudge going from above her head toward the front windows, the center one of which happened to be slightly open!
She scrambled to her feet and ran through the living room to the window, where she reached under the closed drapes and cranked the window shut, slammed the lock down, then ran back past a bookshelf where she grabbed a thick book and got it jammed in the elevator door just in time to hold it open as the clicking from above resumed.
Leaving it there, she returned to the living room and lay down next to Sasquatch. They cowered silently together while she distracted herself thinking of escape routes. Down the fire stairs, two flights, into the stockroom, which had doors that could be locked from inside. Or, from the stockroom into the bookstore and out the front door. But, whatever was on the roof could see the front door. And she didn’t have a car. And her phone was in the bedroom, which would put her farther from the stairs…
Tiring of the elevator fiddle, the visitors tried another gambit. A very familiar voice.
Bert’s voice. “Benita! You open this door! I need to talk to you, Benita! You come out here where we can talk! You’ve got the kids all worried about you, and I need to talk to you.”
Silence. The voice seemed to be coming from outside the front windows, which was unlikely. Though he could be yelling from the sidewalk, it didn’t sound like that, and turning her head she saw a man-shaped shadow pressed against the glass.
“Benita?” Then a clatter. “Ouch, damn it, she’s not home, if this is her place, stop that.”
Benita didn’t move, nor did the dog. The squadge, squadge, squadge was repeated several times, and then silence fell. It went on, and on, and at last Sasquatch’s head came up, then his ears. He got up and went to the elevator where he sniffed all around the door before coming back to lick her face.
What had it been outside her window? She thought of the First Lady’s remarks about the men in Oregon, the men in Florida, the guy in New Mexico. People off in the trees, and then no people. Just gone. Only bones left. Nobody saw what did it. Could something invisible cast a shadow?
She didn’t know and she didn’t want to find out. There was no one she could call except Chad, and what could he do? Take her somewhere else, put her in custody? Keep her safe? What she really needed was to talk to Chiddy, and she hadn’t seen him in person for…over a week!
She went back to bed, welcoming Sasquatch’s company close beside her. An hour later she gave up and called Chad.
He arrived in twenty minutes.
“What do you think it was?” he asked.
“Whatever’s doing all the stuff the First Lady told us about the other night! I mean, what else could it be? It wasn’t people. It, or they, were a lot bigger than people. It wasn’t anything native to Earth, that’s for sure. And whatever it was pushed Bert right up against the living room windows, and those windows are thirty feet off the sidewalk.”
She took a deep breath. “It wasn’t Chiddy and Vess because they come in here all the time, they don’t have to walk around on the roof, but I’ll bet it was some of those other races they talked about at that dinner, remember? Chiddy talked about predators who had to obey Confederation law, but only if we were in the Confederation. Remember, they said that’s why they wanted to move in such a hurry?”
He looked dazed, then angry, then gave her some news that hadn’t appeared on TV. People were still being killed. In India whole villages of them were wiped out around the perimeter of nature preserves. Also in Southeast Asia. Any activity requiring people to work out of sight in rural or primitive areas had pretty much stopped, because nobody could find crews willing to do it.
“The White House has asked the news media to report things that might concern the ETs as calmly as possible with no screaming headlines. The president told the media that nothing now happening is under the control of any person. At this point, we believe we still have influence over what may happen, but any public outcry may move events beyond our abilities even to influence them. ”
“This is getting serious, isn’t it?
” she said.
“I simply wish your two ET friends hadn’t picked right now to take off where they can’t be reached. And I wish to hell they’d come back!”
36
from chiddy’s journal
Dear Benita, I write this as we return toward your Earth from our sojourn in Pistach-home. We were not summoned home on a simple matter, as I had hoped. This was no confusion over royal egos but was, instead, a vast troubling over T’Fees the Turbulent, who has titled self Grand Something-or-other, ruler over three Pistach planets! In each case, T’Fees has moved in, talked the campesi into a fury, assaulted the more specialized castes, particularly selectors and athyci, and has begun training armies. Amazing, impossible that he should have been able to do this alone! How has this happened!
Vess and I were summoned home to answer to the Chapter about our work on Assurdo, which had resulted in this bizarre ligament of events. We self-examined our work. The only thing we might have done differently was to have regressed T’Fees, but the guidelines tell us never to do that unless necessary, and in T’Fees’s case, no one had known it was necessary. Luckily, the three planets T’Fees has conquered are low-tech planets, which means they can be easily assailed with high-tech modifiers, such as those we have used on your Earth, dear Benita. A surreptitious seeding of nanobots has been done on all three worlds. The nanobots suspended everyone on the planet, and teams from both Pistach-home and several of our high-tech worlds are even now descending to do regressions on all army trainees. We hoped to find T’Fees and his coterie, a group said to be more intelligent and active than most, but unfortunately they were not on any of the planets we invaded. How did they escape us, and where have they gone?
Our fear is that they may have taken refuge with some other race of the Confederation, not all of whom are sympathetic with our ways. Sometimes I wish we could use nanobots on other races, but all other Confederation members have defensive bots to prevent our “taking them over,” as though we would want to! Providing them with bots of their own was part of our original peace process, what Vess and I sometimes call our balance of error.
The Fresco Page 26
