The Fresco

by Sheri S. Tepper

  Morse turned absolutely white.

  “Hunt what?” cried one of the members.

  “Why, people,” she said, looking up innocently. “There are more of us here than anything else.”

  And at that point the committee room exploded, some yelling, some looking serious, some merely staring angrily at Morse while others focused their suspicion on Benita. There were only men on this committee, loud ones, and Benita put her hands over her ears. Chad leaned over to her and asked her if she wanted to take a break while they ranted at one another. She nodded. He whispered to one of the members, and they went out, Benita to the ladies’ room, Chad to a secluded corner of the corridor where he could use his phone. When Benita opened the door to come out, she saw reporters and cameramen in the hallway. She wasn’t ready to talk to them yet. They didn’t see her, and when she peeked out a bit later, they had gone.

  “They’ll be downstairs when we’re finished,” Chad said, looking into her eyes with frank curiosity. “Did you have that bombshell all ready to drop on him?”

  “Sort of,” she admitted, flushing. “I was angry at being harassed, first off, and when I got here I was even angrier at being accused of things, and I thought, well, that works both ways. Why not be the accuser instead of the accused? That contempt of Congress bit just made me furious, Chad. Just like the judge in Albuquerque. Let Morse be dropped in the you-know-what for a change.”

  They went back to the committee room. Senator Morse was pale, his lips pinched, his jaw seeming set in cement, but he managed to speak without yelling.

  “Why did you say the predators had already made contact with members of Congress?”

  She gave him her innocent look. “I said it was probable, Senator, because the Pistach told me that’s the predators’ usual mode of action. If they can get some level of government or even some individual associated with the government to make an agreement with them, like a senator or a representative or some member of the staff of a legislator, even if some other level of government or other individuals would oppose such an agreement, the matter then has to be settled in the Confederation courts, and it can take a very long time to sort out. Centuries, even. During which the predators go on hunting. The Pistach told me the predators always record such understandings…”

  Morse turned, if possible, even paler.

  “…so they have them for evidence in Confederation courts.”

  A thoughtful-looking man at the end of the table asked, “Do you, personally, know anyone who might be involved with the predators?”

  “I can’t swear to it,” she said. “But I think General McVane may be involved, along with a man named Dink Dinklemier, a man named Prentice Arthur, and a man named Briess. The man named Arthur approached my husband and the man named Briess evidently threatened my son. I also received an anonymous phone call early this morning threatening to hurt my family if I didn’t turn myself over to the person calling. I told the voice on the phone that I couldn’t because I’d agreed to appear before this committee.”

  The place blew up again. The name Dinklemier led them straight to Morse, and he became the immediate focus of their shouted questions. Someone, presumably the vice chairman, grabbed the gavel out of his hand and declared a thirty-minute recess. Chad and Benita left, Chad remarking to the man at the door that they would be in the House gallery. They sat there, watching Congress at work, Benita remarking that on that particular day, it was not exciting.

  “I’m not sure it ever is,” Chad admitted. “Why did you clue them in on the cabal?”

  “Morse knew where I was because Dink knew where I was from the predators. What he was really after was a private inquiry, just him and me, with nobody monitoring it, so he could extort information or misinformation by threatening me or my family.” She recalled Morse’s face and added, “Or by other means.”

  “What’s his motive?”

  “Oh, hell, Chad, I don’t know! Maybe he actually believes the president invited the Pistach here, or the predators. Maybe the rest of the cabal didn’t tell him they were talking to the predators, so he believes the accusation he just made. Maybe he thinks he can make a name for himself by interrogating the envoys, and he thinks he can get at them through me. Maybe he’s just pulling a McCarthy, telling big lies and getting his name in the newspapers. What’s your best guess?”

  Chad frowned. “It’s likely he’s known about the predators all along. It’s probable he doesn’t care whether the information he might get out of you is true or not so long as it includes something he can use. He’s part of a small group who would rather get the president than go to heaven. It’s deeply personal, it’s unabashed hatred, and he keeps yanking at the strings, trying to find something that will come unraveled. It’s like the independent prosecutor business. If you don’t have a case, just unlimber your fishing poles and go at it until you catch something you can blow up into a case, no matter how irrelevant it is.”

  She watched him thinking, each separate thought crossing his face like a cloud shadow, darkening and lightening, the way she had seen them do over the canyon lands, revealing, concealing. She wanted to touch his face, and the thought made her bite her lip and clench her hands. He was a married man. With young sons. He was not available. Nor was she. Nonetheless, though the urge had been a very modest one, it was the first honest-to-God even remotely sexual urge she’d had in…a very long time!

  She switched her mind to another subject. “There have to be a few honest men on that committee who know we appeared voluntarily and won’t let him get away with murder,” she murmured.

  “You mean literal murder? You think he would kill you?”

  “If he wanted to get rid of me and could do it without getting caught. He can still get me arrested on some pretext or other, like that contempt of Congress business. And once I’m in custody, something might happen to me. I’m taking Chiddy’s word that I don’t have to worry about Bert or Carlos and the girl.”

  “And you’ve made it less likely for Morse to take action by implicating a committee staff member.”

  “I hope I did,” she murmured. “Give them all something else to chew on. I was careful to say I couldn’t swear to it, so they can’t get me on perjury.”

  “Remind me never to play cards with you,” he said.

  “I was worried that Morse might talk about the Inkleozese,” she murmured. “That really was a conspiracy, of sorts, between the Pistach and the Inkleozese themselves, but Morse is pretending it never happened.”

  “Right. If he acknowledges they impregnated him, someone may commiserate with him, or grin at him, or laugh behind his back, and he couldn’t take that.”

  “He’s going to have to deal with it sooner or later.”

  “Maybe denial is the only way he can function at all,” said Chad. “The whole business has to be pretty traumatic.” He got up. “We’d better go back and see if they’re continuing or recessing.”

  They were continuing. Morse was gone, the vice chairman of the committee had taken over, and he did want to know about the Inkleozese.

  “I saw them on TV,” Benita said. “When everyone else did. Also, the envoys told me about them. Evidently their specialty is to serve as monitors and observers for the Confederation.”

  “Are they female?” the vice chairman wanted to know. “And if so, why were only females sent here?”

  Three members of the committee leaned forward when he asked the question, focused intently on Benita. She said, “The envoys said all the diplomatic and professional Inkleozese are female. Most of their race’s artists and craftsmen are male, however. Males and females in their race have different skills. The females work better with persons and the males with things.”

  “So they say,” snorted a burly committee member.

  “Well, it’s possible the envoys are prejudiced,” she granted. “Or the Inkleozese themselves. For generations, our national legislature was made up of men only, most of whom thought women were brainless. Some of
them still think so.”

  “But the Pistach envoys are male?” the same man asked intently.

  “No, sir. They are not. They are nonreproductive members of their race, which has five or six different types or genders in it, like ants, or bees.”

  “Then they’re gay!”

  “Sir, a worker bee is not gay. It is simply nonsexual.”

  “Worker bees are females,” asserted a man at the end of the table. “I raise bees, I know.”

  “Worker bees aren’t lesbians, and Pistach aren’t gay. They’re nonsexual.”

  They went on, not for long. Several men on the committee seemed to be convinced that God could imagine no more than two sexes, that the devil had come up with a third, that every being in the universe had to be one of those three, and therefore Vess and Chiddy had to be gay. Finally they started asking questions about the Pistach home world and the Pistach themselves, questions that could equally well have been asked about Sodom and Gomorrah. She had to tell them she didn’t know the answers.

  “They don’t talk about their home world a great deal. They mention it from time to time, but I’ve never gained a clear idea of their world and how it works. Actually, I have a clearer picture of the predator worlds than I do the Pistach, because the envoys talk more about the predators.”

  The committeemen looked at each other, with no idea what else they might ask her. After a spate of whispering, they excused her and Chad escorted her downstairs where he had asked the aggravation of reporters to wait.

  “The senators seem to be stuck on the idea the Pistach are gay, which they’re not,” she said to the waiting microphones. “Senator Morse seems to be stuck with the idea that I’m part of some conspiracy, which I’m not. The committee became very upset when I told them the predators might have made a side agreement with someone associated with their committee.”

  “Agreement for what?” called a man from the back of the group.

  “A formal agreement to hunt people here on Earth,” she said in her most innocent voice. “They could just go on poaching, but they really want a formal agreement for their own legal protection at the Confederation level.”

  She answered shouted questions for about ten minutes, then Chad got her away with the help of six men in suits who barricaded her from the reporters as they got her out a back door. Then they went to the White House where she was sneaked up the back stairs into the family quarters where the president and First Lady were waiting for them.

  “Well,” said the president to Benita. “So much for anonymity, Benita.”

  “And so much for calming the committee down,” said the First Lady, shaking her head. “A couple of our party are on the committee. They told us it was quite a show.”

  Benita said, “Keeping me anonymous was a lost cause from the beginning, Mr. President, ma’am. I got to the point I wasn’t interested in calming them down.”

  “Chad says you’ve had some personal experience with the predators,” murmured the FL.

  “Not one I’d care to repeat, ma’am.”

  Chad took a chair by the window. Benita was gestured to the chair opposite the president, who leaned forward, fixing his eyes on hers.

  “Benita, we’re in trouble here, and we need your help.”

  She folded her hands in her lap as he went on:

  “We have assumed the Pistach are beneficent. They’ve told us so; the things they’ve done for us have measurably helped without harming anyone. We would prefer to believe them, and we’ve gone along with them when they told us the predators are a separate people, races that eat other intelligent life and who do not, therefore, eat Republicans. Or newsmen.”

  She laughed dutifully. He was trying to be funny and charming, but his eyes were troubled as he went on.

  “If, however, I am coldly rational as my aides suggest is necessary, I have to admit there could be another explanation for what’s happening. All these ETs could be one people who are capable of taking different shapes in order to fool us.”

  “It doesn’t sound impossible,” Benita said. She didn’t believe it, but it wasn’t impossible.

  “All right. Then let’s suppose for a moment they are all one people, and they want to invade Earth and prey on our population. How would they do that?”

  She thought for a moment. “They might send envoys to offer us candy and chuck us under the chin and say kootsie-coo.”

  He actually smiled, though only a little. “They might, yes. Then they could move in and start hunting us while keeping us pacified by telling us the predators are really a different set of people and so on and so on.”

  “And while this is going on,” said the First Lady, “still more of these creatures pick up some of our congressmen and political columnists and impregnate them with what we are told are infant members of their race. The impregnation could just as well be some kind of disease or parasite that will turn us into passive livestock.”

  “And they’re clever,” remarked Chad. “They pick only members of the opposition political party so that the administration would be less inclined to object.”

  The president nodded. “And, by the time we work ourselves around to doing something about it, they have us whipped.”

  He sat back and stared at her, switching his glance to Chad, who said, “You think Chiddy and Vess are a Trojan horse?”

  “Or you think I am?” Benita asked, hearing her voice tremble.

  The president shook his head. “You’re not a Trojan horse knowingly, Benita. I don’t believe for a minute that you could be. But…let’s say that scenario is correct. What kind of woman would the envoys look for? Someone trusting. Someone…ah, patient…”

  “Long suffering,” said the FL pointedly and a little indignantly. “Someone who’d put up with a lot before she got really angry, if ever. Someone who’d go along with the way things were happening, without having hysterics or throwing a fit…”

  “All the time telling herself it couldn’t be true,” Benita finished for her, flushing an angry red. “And you really think I’m that kind of person?”

  “You’ve showed endless patience and forbearance in the past,” she said. “Although, from what you did today, that may no longer be true. Be that as it may, we’ve never had a satisfactory answer to the question, why you? Why not General Wallace? Why not the president himself, or, if he’s too surrounded by Secret Service people, then why not the Chief Justice or the Speaker of the House?”

  “Because those particular people are all men,” Benita said angrily. “And the Pistach didn’t want a man. They were making a particular point when they chose me, an unknown, because any woman who’s known for anything will already have enemies. The minute a woman, including the president’s wife, tries to do something significant, even if it’s for the good of the citizenry, everybody puts her down as being a woman who doesn’t know her place. People love their heroes and heroines, but they love them in their assigned roles. Move outside those roles, and the public loves to make them stumble.”

  The president frowned. “I had hoped we had grown more tolerant and understanding than that.”

  Benita shook her head. “We like to think people are tolerant and understanding, but mostly we aren’t, and there are a lot of men who think of women as a kind of speaking livestock.”

  The FL said, “So the Pistach picked you because…?”

  “Because nobody knows me, or anything about me. I’ve done one really stupid thing in my life, and that was to marry the wrong man. Get past that and I’ve had an utterly unremarkable and very…chaste kind of life. Never used drugs, never smoked. My drinking is limited to an occasional beer in the summertime, or a glass of wine with Thanksgiving or Christmas dinner. I’ve never been able to afford dissipation. I haven’t had the time or the money to support controversial causes. The same goes for love affairs. The only men I’ve been at all close to over the years are gay, and they were my bosses. Believe me, McVane has known who I am for weeks, and if there were anything
in my past to stir a scandal, it would be on the front pages by now, like a Jackson Pollock painting, all squirt and dribble! And if McVane had information he could use, then Morse would have it. There are no issues in my past for me to get past except that I’m a woman.”

  “I agree with you,” agreed the FL. “I’ve been trying to explain to my husband, that your being a woman is really what sticks in their craw.”

  “All the people I talk to think the envoys are male,” said the president, sitting back and frowning. “Every domestic politico I talk to, every foreign diplomat who calls me, all of them, every damned one says ‘him’ when he refers to an envoy.”

  “They aren’t male,” Benita said, turning to the FL. “That’s why they did that Indian woman business at dinner.”

  “But with you,” she said, “what do they appear as?”

  They appeared as different things, but she had to admit, Chiddy took his human male form more often than not. She said as much, and the president and FL looked at one another meaningfully.

  “What?” she demanded.

  “People say that you probably react to them as a woman would to a man. That your relationship with them is subtly different than it would be if they were female, or sexless.”

  “People?”

  He looked uncomfortable. The FL said, “Profilers. Think people. Analysts. FBI.”

  “Chad’s been spying on me?” she said, glaring at him.

  “No,” he said abruptly.

  The FL said, “He refused to spy on you. He has only passed on what you’ve said about the Pistach. The people over at the FBI who attempt to make—”

  “A sow’s ear out of a silk purse,” Benita interrupted angrily. “They’re trying to imply something sexual?”

  The president leaned back in his chair. “Quite frankly, I don’t think they know what they’re trying to imply. They simply have a situation they don’t understand, one that won’t fit any pattern they’re accustomed to, and they can’t help me with the current problem!