The Fresco

by Sheri S. Tepper

  “There are ways,” he said. “Dissonances one can listen for. Differences of opinion one can ferret out. Are you frightened, Benita?”

  “A little.” It was true. But the apprehension was accompanied by a bubbling feeling, as though she’d swallowed a little volcano, something that was building up toward an eruption. The feeling was vaguely familiar, and at last she tracked it back to a day in summer when Mami had taken her to the amusement park for her birthday, and she had ridden the roller coaster. Fear, and pleasure, and joy. Pure joy. It was such a lovely feeling! Why had it been such a rare one?

  The evening grew late, and Chad took off his jacket and shoes and lay down on the couch in the living room, while she stretched out on the bed, Sasquatch at her feet. They had both dozed for some little time when Sasquatch roused them with a rumbling growl and a couple of firm woofs. It was Chiddy, back again, and he had Carlos and a girl with him. Of the two, the girl was in better shape. She looked tired, dirty, and a little frightened, but she was very much herself, ready to get angry the moment she thought it wouldn’t endanger her life.

  Carlos had evidently not been so sensible. He’d been battered here and there. Benita cautioned herself and did not shriek, did not sympathize, did not question. He wasn’t hurt any worse than she had been, many times, with similar bruises darkening under his skin, and a black eye beginning to bloom.

  “Mom,” he cried, making a run for her and half knocking her down in the process. She fended him off, fighting down an urge to say, “Down, heel,” except that he’d seldom listened to her in the past and was unlikely to do so now.

  She put her hands on his shoulder to hold him up and away—hugs from Carlos had always been rare, usually confined to times he was frightened. “Are you all right, Carlos?”

  He blubbered something, “Okay. All right. Not…they didn’t…they were going to!”

  She raised her eyebrows at Chiddy, who said with considerable distaste, “The Fluiquosm and Wulivery threatened to eat him. The Wulivery do that sometimes, teasing. I think he believed they would eat him.”

  “I saw them,” he cried. “Eating people. They’ve got a storage place near the camp, and it’s all full of dead people!”

  “That’s quite true, but they were under instructions not to eat you,” said Chiddy, firmly. “Settle down.”

  “You don’t know what they were like,” Carlos screamed.

  “I know exactly what they were like,” snapped Benita. “I was eaten by a Wulivery. Stop dramatizing yourself.”

  Benita turned from Carlos to the girl, holding out her hand. “I think you were taken because you were mistaken for my daughter.”

  “Sonia Bigg,” she said. “They were determined to make me tell them I was Angelica Shipton, if that’s your daughter. As for him,” she gestured toward Carlos, “he told them to start with me, if they were going to eat us.”

  “Sonia…” Carlos wailed. “I didn’t mean that. I love you, I wouldn’t say anything like that.”

  “You’re…Carlos’s friend?” asked Benita, with a disbelieving glance at her son.

  “Was,” said Miss Bigg.

  “Well, well,” Carlos babbled, “if they were going to eat us both anyhow, it didn’t make any difference which of us was first, and I was just trying to keep them talking.”

  Chiddy saw the look of total dismay on her face and patted her shoulder soothingly. “As it happens, the predators did not at that time intend to eat either of them, and Miss Bigg is unhurt.”

  The girl said in a firm voice, “Unhurt! Hah.” She turned to Benita. “May I use your bathroom, please?”

  Benita indicated where it was, saying, “I can also lend you a clean shirt.” She turned to Chiddy, whispering, “Can you take her back where she was taken from? What about Carlos? Is it safe to send him back?”

  “She, yes. Not him, just yet. I spoke previously of needing a chaperon. I should imagine he will serve. If we take him with us, it will keep him out of circulation for a few days.”

  “What about Bert?”

  “The Inkleozese are working on him. Arranging to straighten out the misinformation that was broadcast.”

  Chad said, “You want me to arrange for Miss Bigg to get back home?”

  He accepted Chiddy’s nod and began phoning. While he was busy, the girl came out of the bathroom. Benita fetched a clean shirt for her, and by the time they emerged from the bedroom, Chad had arranged for her to be picked up. “If you need anything, a change of clothes or any necessaries, they’ll provide it, and you’ll be on a flight back to California today.”

  She thanked him, then turned to Carlos. “If you come back, don’t call me.”

  A car came, the girl departed. Chiddy asked, “Are you and Chad ready to depart?”

  Carlos interrupted to whine, “I’m sure as hell not. I don’t even have a change of underwear.”

  “We can provide whatever you need,” said Chiddy. “I need to provide proper costumes for all of you, anyhow. It is considered polite to wear garments suitable to one’s station in life.”

  Carlos glowered, obviously getting ready to explode, and Chad took him by one shoulder, asking, “How far do we go to your ship?”

  Vess laughed.

  Chiddy bowed them into the elevator. “Not far,” he said. “Not far at all.”

  45

  in afghanistan

  TUESDAY

  Mustapha ibn Daud shut his door against the noises in the room beneath him where a rancorous debate continued, without letup, as it had for hours.

  “If we do not feel lust, it is the will of Allah!” the old imam was still saying, over and over. Likely it had been decades since he had been able to feel anything of the kind, but now he championed the cause of the hideous women. “If these otherworldly afrits have changed our women, then they have done Allah’s work whether they know it or not! Nothing happens that is not the will of Allah! We are being rebuked for our lusts, which burned more hotly the more the fuel was hidden!

  “Listen to me! We refused to see our women as people like ourselves; we hid them to make them titillating, to think of them only as vessels for our lusts, servants for our kitchens, breeders of our sons! Let us free the women to walk as we do, with their faces uncovered. Let us see if this does not please Allah.”

  And, as he had done over and over, another, younger man attacked him: “Though he cannot lastingly prevail, Satan can do what Allah does not will! We are being tested! We should never change our ways! In time, Allah will restore our own to us.”

  “And if He does not?” asked the old man. “If our women continue as they are? If my sons are unable to beget children? Is our lineage to stop with this generation? Do not say we are not changing our ways. It was agreed in the Taliban that we would eschew all modern gadgetry, was it not? And yet now, we have laptops. We have telephones. These things are needed in a modern state. Why should we not have modern women, too? They can be modern and still virtuous…”

  Mustapha had held up his hand for silence, waiting until it fell. “I disagree. Our wives have been replaced by demons. Since Satan makes it impossible for us to kill these demons who have taken the places of our wives and daughters, let them go where they will! Some of our men have already gone to the Pakistan border to take women from there. We will bring women from elsewhere to serve our needs. Our ways are righteous! Our ways are proper! To protect the purity of our womenfolk—”

  “They are pure now,” shouted the old man, shaking his fist at Mustapha. “They are not demons. I have talked with them. They are our women, and they are more pure now than they have ever been! When they were hidden, they were lusted after. Now, no one lusts after them!”

  A murmur of discontent ran through the room. No man here had touched a woman for some time. Every one of them had in his house at least one woman of supreme and utter repulsiveness, a woman he gagged to look at or smell. A woman who was hideous to the senses.

  The old man spoke again. “Listen to me. You cannot deny
that the women in our houses are pure. Untouched. Let us achieve some consistency. We have said this is what we desire, that our wives and daughters be pure. That they not be raped, that they not be looked upon with lascivious eyes. Well, now they are pure, they are not raped, no one looks at them with desire, yet we complain! This causes me to wonder whether their purity was really our aim. Or did we want something else? By hiding them did we increase their erotic allure? Did we arouse ourselves with the idea of their subjugation? Is this something of which Allah approves?”

  That was when Mustapha ibn Daud had left the room in disgust. To hear a teacher of the Koran speak so! To hear their culture so disparaged! He stood in the window looking out at the silent darkness. There was something here he did not understand, an enemy he could not bring down with a gun, and it made him feel trapped and angry.

  Someone spoke at the doorway. Ben Shadouf. He came in, was offered a place to sit and did so.

  “You have heard, my wife is gone?” he said.

  “We do not speak of women,” Mustapha answered loftily.

  “Oh, but we do,” said Ben Shadouf. “We always have. We talk of the dancers we have seen. We go to prostitutes and talk of them to our friends. We talk of women.”

  “We do not talk of our wives and daughters!”

  “True. Except, when we first marry, or when we grow weary of our wives, we ask our friends if they have marriageable daughters. Young ones. Healthy ones. Frightened ones who would be sure to obey.” He spoke bitterly and his hands twisted in his lap. “I loved my wife, Mustapha. She was gentle and kind. She cooked well. She was considerate of my feelings and well being. I loved my little daughters. Their faces made a garden in my house.”

  “You love them even now?” barked Mustapha, with a laugh. “Then you are a saint.”

  “No. I am not worthy of loving her. I am not even a good man. She was ill, you know. And I would not take her to the clinic. Then the ugliness came, and I told her to go where she would. She had a disease of the lungs, and if they had not given her the medicine, she would have died.”

  “The clinic is run by foreigners! Evil-doers!”

  “Who seem to care more for our wives and our children than we do. They save their lives while we let them die.”

  Mustapha snarled between his teeth. “Caring about women is not our destiny. Our destiny is to live in accordance with the word and in duty to Allah and follow the teachings of our leaders. Besides, your wife didn’t die.”

  “No. When the clinic had healed her, she took our children and went over the mountains. A traveler brought a letter from her. She is well, but she is staying there for our daughters’ sake, so she says, for in that country, women are valued more than they are here.”

  “Then good riddance,” said Mustapha.

  Ben Shadouf rose and paced restlessly across the room. “I have been thinking of what she said. Other Muslim nations do not require what we do of women. Other Muslim nations do not use them as we do. Do not make stabled beasts out of them.”

  “Then those nations are less pure than we.”

  “You will not reconsider what we demand of them? The chadoor? The sequestration? Forbidding them to work or to learn? Forbidding them to have medical attention? Stoning them to death because they stumble, or do not hold the veil tightly enough when the wind blows?”

  Mustapha snorted angrily. “Those prohibitions are the result of days of discussion among the elders. We worked hard to get the wording exactly right. Not one word will be changed. The world may grow ugly, but I will remain constant.”

  “Then so remain,” said Ben Shadouf, leaning toward him with a glittering blade in his hand. Mustapha felt the knife before he realized it was there, felt it run into him like ice, then like fire.

  Ben Shadouf withdrew the blade, then leaned forward to speak into the dimming eyes. “So remain forever, Mustapha. I have done as you many times commanded me. I have slain a heretic who disbelieves the true way. Your eyes close as mine are opened by the imam. Now I will go in search of my wife.”

  46

  from chiddy’s journal

  Dearest Benita, as I write this you are nearby in a rest cubby, soundly sleeping. I amuse myself recalling the surprise on your face when we walked through the back of your elevator and into our ship, your astonishment at learning we had been living just the other side of the wall for all this time. It has been quite convenient and very saving on our power cells. The ship is as morphable as we, and it interpenetrated the third-story offices beside your home with its usual imperturbability. It was the presence of our ship, unfortunately, which brought the Wulivery to your windows. They smelled us out, indeed, and though they did not find our ship, they found you.

  We are furious at them, and at the other predators as well. What they did was unethical, though their sins were compounded by humans who see fit to play politics with their fellows’ lives. That is a phrase I had never heard before, dear Benita. Playing politics. It is like playing war, a game for degenerates. Statesmen should not “play” politics.

  We are at the moment, as I write, scudding along at many times light speed in a tube which is, to all intents and purposes, empty. Behind us, the fabric of space thrusts our material ship on before it, for it seeks always to exclude matter, or at least to clump it insofar as is possible. I could say that space bends behind us to push us. I could say that space ceases to exist in the direction of our movement, lining up on either side in strings of umquah. When we say such things, however, our scientists pish and tush at us, for neither is at all correct.

  I confess, I understand neither the universe nor the spacedrive. Only a few of our most intelligent claim to understand the drive, and even they did not invent it. It was made by the Jabal, aeons ago, a people who left the galaxy before our own people existed. We have only the records they left behind on many planets together with plans for their devices: spacedrives, star milkers, fusion generators, morph-engines (tiny implanted ones to change ourselves, large ones to make cities like Jerusalem seem to disappear, though it never really went anywhere) all carefully preserved for whomever came along next. Luckily for us, we emerged originally in a thickly starred part of the galaxy and with even our rather primitive stardrives, we managed to be first in line for a lot of the devices. We moved, later on, to a less thickly settled sector, one quieter, more peaceful, less liable to predatory irruptions. Other races who arrived nearer the center of things profited from discovery, as well. Sometimes we meet during the knitting of the web of universal intelligence into a more durable fabric. This is our purpose and the purpose of all intelligent life. So we believe.

  The human recording devices you brought with you are working well. They will keep track of your entire voyage, the interior of the ship, the fact that outside the ship there is nothing, not even light. We move in other dimensions of space and in the null dimension of time. When we draw near our destination, the ship will sense the complex curvature signature, one peculiar to that destination, and the emptiness in which we move will collapse to allow ordinary space-time to curve around us once more.

  We intend to take you to several planets besides our own. It will be more convincing to the people of Earth if they see several different races. Your Earth devices will record our arrival on each, our departure from each. When we get to Pistach, the devices will probably note some confusion among the Pistach people, for they do not know we are coming. No message could get to our home sooner than we ourselves will arrive. You will not be the first non-Pistach visitors on Pistach-home, but you will be the first who have not yet been admitted to the Confederation. Vess and I have discussed this. We will have to do some of what you call “fast talking.” Still, given the well-known perfidy of the predators, your difficulty will be perfectly understandable, even to the most rigid among us.

  I have no trepidation concerning your treatment. Hospitality is a virtue we have polished to a finer sheen than some other of our probities. Though we advocate toleration, we do not do
it so well as we do some other things. We are not as unselfish as an advanced race should be. We struggle to burnish all our virtues, but every now and then a rock of reality catches our feet to make us stumble. Though we advocate equality of all intelligences, still we are like most races: happiest among peoples we know well and whose ways we understand.

  If the Chapter will allow, you will be welcomed to a guest house of my family, on the Cavita home ground. It is near the House of the Fresco, and we know you will want to see that. Also, it would be pleasant to introduce you to my nootch. She will be most interested in you and in Chad and in the ways of your world. You are, functionally, more nootch than you are receptor, and she will be pleased to recognize someone of like mind and responsibility. I have provided festive red-and-yellow clothing for you, so you will, as you say, “fit in.” Chad could be introduced as an inceptor, of course, but since his “job” on Earth is to keep order and allocate responsibility, the tasks performed by our proffi caste—which also includes doctors and scholars—I intend introducing him as a proffe, dressed properly in formal brown. My evaluation of the two of you indicates you are unlikely to break out in a fit of breeding madness partway through the visit, for which I am very grateful.

  As for your son, though he is rather too old for it, we must dress him as an undifferentiated one. As such, he will be regarded with a good deal of tolerance, more than we manage under most other circumstances. Your young are not unlike ours in being demanding, eager, selfish, gauche. As our sages have said, youth builds a universe with self at the center. Carlos will not be an asset. Our position would be improved had we been able to bring an Earthian athyco with us, if there had been one who would have been accepted by all the religions, political bodies, racial constituencies and social movements on your world. Such a one could have spoken pointedly to our Confederation ambassadors, calling them to account for the depredations of the Fluiquosm, et al. No such person exists on your world, so it is left to us. Vess and I will speak, but we will have to be diplomatic. The practice of diplomacy, I have found, is sometimes like eating soup with a fork: much activity yielding little nourishment.