The Fresco

by Sheri S. Tepper

  Chiddy was not comforted. And so it went through panels showing the kidnapping of Mengantowhai, the rescue of Mengantowhai by Canthorel, the reprimands given to Mengantowhai by several of his own aged athyci who told him slavery and murder were wrong. It was impossible to misunderstand the panels, for many of them contained written quotations of those pictured.

  In Panel fourteen, The Fearful Faithless, the abolitionists left the planet at the head of a schism that erupted over the question of slavery. The teaching of the panel had always been that these were traitorous Pistach, afraid of the Pokoti. In Panel fifteen, The Blessing of Canthorel, which was supposed to show Mengantowhai’s work affirmed and blessed by Canthorel, it actually showed him confessing to Canthorel that he had underestimated the Jaupati’s desire for freedom, that more force and greater atrocities would be needed to put down the rebellion. This was clearly conveyed by a transcript of their conversation written down the sides of the panel, no interpretation needed. In panel sixteen, Departure of Canthorel, Canthorel left the planet after telling the Jaupati they had been greatly wronged. And, in the final panel, between the left and center doors, the one called the Martyrdom of Kasiwees, they saw Kasiwees being murdered yes, but by Mengantowhai himself. Around Kasiwees were scattered the stones and arrows of his battle, and he held a long dagger in his hand. In the upper left, they could see the last of the Pistach flying away, and in the middle foreground stood a device easily identifiable as a planet stripper, one that would destroy all life upon the Jaupati world.

  This was the story Canthorel had painted in the House of the Fresco. No matter how one looked at it, it was an accusation and a warning. It said as clearly as paint could say, “Woe and Tribulation, this is an offense before the universe, do not do this again!”

  49

  revelation

  The curator had long since given up reading the orthodox version. The room was as hushed as a tomb. Only T’Fees trumpeted on, “You see, you see, you damned interfering blobs of worthless guts! You had no right! You have no right! Pistach peace is based on a lie!”

  He threw open the bronze door and stormed out into the light of a bloody sunset, his minions behind him, leaving the observers among the guttering candles.

  “I’m hungry,” said Carlos.

  Vess rose, saying in a toneless voice, “I’ll take you back to the guest house. There’ll be food there.” They went out, soundlessly.

  Benita stood wearily and turned, looking upward at the gallery. Many of the old Pistach still leaned upon the railing, their normally bright green-, yellow-, and red-colored bodies pale.

  “They had no idea, did they?” Benita asked, almost whispering.

  Chiddy did the little rotation of the upper body that passed for a negative headshake. “We thought…we knew some things would be different. We thought they would be matters of interpretation. A wine jar versus another kind of vessel. A springtime symbol versus an autumnal one. But not this. None of us thought this.” He made the sound of Pistach laughter, harshly rasping.

  “Benita, athyci give sermon cycles at the great festivals, seventeen sermons on seventeen days, to accord with the number of panels, one sermon on each panel subject. I have done it myself. I have quoted Glumshalak’s Commentaries to explain why we do what we do. And now…now, what can I base my beliefs upon?”

  He turned and walked sadly toward the door. She started to follow him, but then detoured to her left, toward panel thirteen. Something had been bothering her about the panel in which Mengantowhai was reprimanded by his athyci. The counselors were gathered beneath a tree that had a few bare branches but was mostly leafy, with both blossoms and fruit. There were words along the bottom of the panel. She took out her little notepad and copied the words down, being thankful Pistach lettering was phonetic, not ideographic.

  She noticed there was a similar tree in the panel to the left, The Rescue, in which Mengantowhai was rescued from the Pokoti. It was the same tree, same number of branches, same shape of trunk, but this tree was completely dead. She turned to the right, to panel fourteen, The Fearful Faithless. The same tree was there as well, partly alive.

  “Chad,” she called. “Come look.”

  He came over and they walked back, counterclockwise, around the House of the Fresco. Every single panel had the same tree in it, either dead or leafing out, or in flower or fruit.

  “The two growing trees are in panels where Pistach people disdained Mengantowhai,” she said.

  Chad murmured, “And they were painted after the rest of the Fresco. See, the overlap here? You can see what was painted underneath. That’s why most of the trees are small, they’re fitted into whatever vacant space was left.”

  They had come to the first panel, and even there they found a tree. Chad shrugged and she returned the gesture. It was interesting, but they didn’t know what it meant, if anything. They went out onto the terrace where Chiddy waited in morose silence.

  “What does a fruiting tree symbolize?” she asked.

  Chiddy looked at her, sighing. “Well, it’s a sign of fruition, of course. Of something long in growth that has ripened. Like a head of grain. Or a pomego, like the ones you had for breakfast.”

  “Is that an accepted meaning among Pistach?”

  “Oh, yes. The Pistach revere edible fruit. They regard it as a great gift. The fruiting tree is carved on some of our most ancient monuments, some that go back long before the House of the Fresco was built.”

  They went back to the guest house, to an evening meal that none of them tasted, and then to another restless night. Sometime in the dark house, Benita got up to find Chad wandering about, at loose ends, as she was. They went out into the dark drenched garden, following the firefly glow of tiny lanterns to a bench that had been put there for them, one of the Pistach leaning boards laid across two stones to make it flat and low enough to sit on.

  “You know what I think,” she said to Chad. “I think that historian, Glumshalak, purposely changed the Fresco in his Compendium, diametrically changed it. And he forbid the Pistach to clean the Fresco so they’d never know.”

  “Why would he have done that?”

  “Do you ever go to church, Chad?”

  “Not often. My parents were Methodists, at least at Christmas and Easter. Merilu was reared Episcopalian, but that was more a social thing with her parents than it was religious.”

  “My mother was Catholic for weddings and burials and funerals. At other times she was a pagan I guess. She believed in spirits of the trees and mountains and rivers, not that they would do anyting for her, rather that she should be protective of them. Her father was a history professor, in Mexico. He wrote several books about the bloody gods of Mexico, and she read them all. When I was a kid, Mami told me the Mexican gods weren’t the only bloody ones, and we should never serve gods that had been invented to take the blame for everything bloody, painful, primitive and unenlightened that people wanted to do. Why did we Israelites kill every man, woman, child and beast in that city? Why, the Lord Jehovah commanded it. Why do we Spaniards steal food from these Indian people, and mutilate them, and use them as slaves? Why, we do it so they will love Christ! Why do we Aztecs torture and sacrifice people? Huitzilopotchli demands it!

  “Whether it was the Israelites invading Canaan or the Spanish invading the Southwest, or one Mexican tribe warring against another, the answer was always the same. We enslave and torture and mutilate and kill in the name of our god.

  “My grandfather said people who can learn, learn morality the way they learn everything else, by building on history. He also said that some people cannot learn from history, so they cannot change. For them, there’s only one book or tradition or whatever it’s called in their religion, and in that book God is eternal and whatever the book says God commanded two or three or four thousand years ago, God still commands today. That may be kill homosexuals or kill nonbelievers. It may say enslave your enemies. It may say mutilate or sequester women, or sell your ten-year-old daughter f
or somebody’s third wife.

  “But suppose back in A.D. two or three hundred, we had had a Glumshalak, and he had blanked out all the Old Testament. Suppose he had written a commentary that purported to tell us what was in the book, but the book itself was eliminated. Suppose the commentary was devoted to tolerance and persuasion, suppose it forbade violence. We wouldn’t have a god who kicked Adam and Eve out of the garden for intellectual curiosity, or the destruction of the whole world by flood, or the slaughtering of innocents right and left. The commentary would tell us about a God who triumphed through peace and paying attention to history instead of bloodshed and horror.”

  “You think we’d have sweetness and light?” asked Chad.

  “Maybe, if there was no bloody scripture for the evangelists to quote.”

  “It would make a big dent in self-righteousness, but it wouldn’t change human nature.”

  “It might not change human nature, but it would eliminate a whole set of alibis. I think that’s what Glumshalak did. He didn’t want his people to be bound by the cruelty and violence in their history. He wanted his people to believe they were good. So he destroyed all the records that said what was really there…”

  “How do you know?”

  “He had to have done, otherwise they’d have turned up before now. He certainly didn’t repaint the Fresco, he didn’t have the talent. That’s obvious. He forbade anybody cleaning the Fresco, and he wrote down what he thought should have been there. I think Glumshalak’s commentary made the Pistach the people they are. A good people. Not perfect, but good, because they’ve been selecting toward goodness for generations and generations. When the president told me not to let anything interfere with their coming back and finishing the job, he was saying that they’re a good people.”

  “You think the Pistach won’t go back to Earth?”

  “You heard T’Fees. I think this throws their whole interventionist policy into the toilet and leaves us at the mercy of the Fluiquosm, the Wulivery, the Xankatikitiki and the American Congress.” Her voice shook a little as she remembered the Wulivery and Morse trying to devour her. Not a good experience, either of them.

  “I hadn’t thought that far,” he said in a hollow voice.

  “There’s a problem,” she said. “You haven’t been around the Pistach as much as I have, but one thing is very clear to me and it frightens me. They’re selected for their jobs, and when one of them is selected to do a certain specific job, that one has little or none of the flexibility a generalist would bring to the same job. The Pistach pretty much go by the book.”

  “By the Fresco.”

  “Right.”

  He sighed. “What’s the significance of the tree?”

  “Just what Chiddy said: fruition, growth, change. In our Bible, Jesus says you know trees by their fruits. I think Glumshalak realized someday people might clean that Fresco. He put the trees there, to indicate why he was doing what he was doing, showing what incidents were deadly and which ones were fruitful, coding the history they should put behind them, in order that they might grow up and bear good fruit.”

  She leaned wearily on his shoulder and he put his arm around her. They sat there, deep in thought, sharing their mutual humanity in a place far, far from home.

  “Oh, that’s really nice,” said a sarcastic voice behind them. Carlos.

  She got up without haste and turned to face him. “We think there’s a tragedy coming, Carlos. Human companionship helps when contemplating tragedy.”

  “What tragedy?”

  “The possibility that the Pistach may not return to Earth.”

  “So long as they get me home, I should give a shit?” he commented.

  “You know,” said Chad, in a conversational voice, “I really don’t like your son, Benita.”

  “I know,” she said, looking into Carlos’s surprised face. “I don’t like him either.”

  “What d’ you…” Carlos gargled. “You’re still…”

  “Go to bed, Carlos,” said Chiddy, from the open door.

  Carlos made a threatening move, there was a spark, and he fell down. Chiddy said, “The euphoric wore off. His manner is partly a reaction to that fact. Put him in the ship, in the cubby.” He came to the bench. “I’ve been listening.”

  “We were talking about the Bible,” Benita said, her voice trembling a little. Her first instinct had been to go to Carlos, then to yell at Chiddy for hurting him, even though she knew Chiddy hadn’t hurt him. The Pistach lugging him away weren’t hurting him either. “What did you do to him?”

  “Silenced him for the moment,” said Chiddy. “It’s something we do with our own children occasionally. Shut their bodies down to let their minds calm themselves. I don’t have time to deal with him now. Neither do you.”

  “What’s going on?” asked Chad.

  “The Chapter have been meeting. They are adrift. They lack any sense of direction. I wish you could come talk to them, dear Benita, but they won’t listen to a nootch! Oh, if only you could say to them what I have just heard you saying…”

  “Then tell them I am an athyco in disguise,” she said. “Hell, tell them we’re both athyci. Appointed by our government to assess the help you’re giving us!”

  “They have already seen,” he said. “Your clothing. Your manner. It…they wouldn’t accept it. I can tell which way the decision is going. I came tonight, because if I wait for morning, they will have decided I may not return to Earth at all. They will have decided on nonintervention. They will forget Tassifoduma. There is something base in each of us, something we keep hidden and quiet. Now it will bubble up, like tar in a pit, and people will say to themselves, well, we are something other than we thought. We are violent, we are conquerors. We will return to the time of weapons, the time of disorder, the time of slavery. They are already saying that is what we are, and we can’t fight what we are!”

  “What you are is what you choose to be,” Benita cried.

  He choked with bitter laughter. “Oh, Benita, even as tiny ones, we are taught not to choose, not to want. Choosing is not what we do.”

  She fumbled about for a reason, finally suggesting, “But you have to take us back, Chiddy!”

  “I know. That’s what I’m saying. I have to take you back.”

  “And you have to stay on Earth a while…”

  “No, I must return at once. They won’t let—”

  “The Inkleozese! They’re still on Earth, awaiting the emergence of their larvae! They have no spaceships. You have to wait and bring them back. Otherwise you’re intervening, aren’t you?”

  “This is true,” he said haltingly. “I had forgotten the Inkleozese.”

  “And Vess has to come with you, just in case something goes wrong.” Over Chiddy’s shoulder she saw T’Fees approaching.

  “A little redundancy,” said Chad. “Every venture requires a little redundancy. She’s right.”

  T’Fees came within hearing distance. “What are you discussing?”

  “Benita says we have to go back and pick up the Inkleozese,” said Chiddy. “We really are committed to doing so.”

  “Benita is correct,” said T’Fees, after a moment’s thought. “But we will insist upon holding a hostage, just to be sure Chiddy and Vess return to their home!”

  The large Pistach came closer, peering into Benita’s face. “It is true that you must be returned to your homes and the Inkleozese must be fetched, but now that we have proved Pistach interventionism to be nonhistoric, we have no intention of letting it start up again.”

  “What do you mean, hostage?” she asked.

  “We will keep your son,” said T’Fees. “He is not essential to anything, so far as we can see. We will hold him here until Chiddy and Vess return. Then we will send him home by some other means. A Credon ship can be paid to take him as a passenger.”

  “They won’t hurt him,” murmured Chiddy, close to Benita’s ear. “Really.”

  “I know,” she murmured in return. “But h
e’ll try their patience severely.”

  “One will ask to’eros nootch to see to your son’s welfare,” said Chiddy. “All nootchi have the power of silencing children.”

  She turned and went into the room where Carlos had been deposited on a sleeping mat. His face was peaceful, like a child’s. She had not seen that expression in a long, long time. For several years now, whenever she’d seen him awake, she had seen only discontent and rancor. There was no reason not to leave him. Missing school was no reason. According to Angelica, he’d been cutting classes. Relationships was no reason. Miss Bigg was no longer interested.

  She sighed, wiped her eyes, and returned to Chiddy. “Let him stay here if it will help matters,” she said.

  Their preparations for departure were sketchy and urgent. Vess came scrambling through the shadows, Chad and Benita took their little bags and plodded toward the ship, T’Fees following closely behind them with several of his burlier rebels.

  As they started to board the ship, T’Fees grasped Benita by the shoulder and turned her to face it. Him. Ter. She didn’t know what it was or how to refer to it.

  “We know how long the Inkleozese take to pupate,” T’Fees said. “Do not keep Chiddy and Vess past that time, or your son will be worse for it.”

  “Would you hurt him, T’Fees?” she asked, gently. “Would you really?”

  For a moment, it looked startled, as though it had not thought what it would do. Then it looked crafty. “You have seen on the Fresco what we are capable of.”

  Two of T’Fees’s aides handed Carlos out like a bale of fiber. Chad and Benita got into the ship. With a sound that was suspiciously like a sob, Chiddy closed the portholes and started them on their journey home.

  50

  benita

  TUESDAY WEEK

  Shortly after they left Pistach-home, Chiddy offered Chad and Benita the sedative food and drink they had taken during the trip from Earth. Both refused.