A Fire in the Sun

by George Alec Effinger

  She looked at me over the rim of her whiskey glass. "You already heard everything," she said.

  "I don't think so. How sure are you that this French sailor was my dad?"

  She took a deep breath and let it out slowly. "His name was Bernard Audran. We met in a coffee shop. I was living in Sidi-bel-Abbès then. He took me to dinner, we liked each other. I moved in with him. We came to live in Algiers after that, and we were together for a year and a half. Then after you was born, one day he just left. I never heard from him again. I don't know where he went."

  "I do. Into the ground, that's where. Took me a long time, but I traced Algerian computer records back far enough. There was a Bernard Audran in the navy of Provence, and he was in Mauretania when the French Confederate Union tried to regain control over us. The problem is that his brains were bashed out by some unidentified noraf more than a year before I was born. Maybe you could think back and see if you can get a clearer picture of those events."

  That made her furious. She jumped up and flung her half-full glass of liquor at me. It smashed into the already stained and streaked wall to my right. I could smell the pungent, undiluted sharpness of the Irish whiskey. I heard Saied murmuring something beside me, maybe a prayer. My mother took a couple of steps toward me, her face ugly with rage. "You calling me a liar?" she shrieked.

  Well, I was. "I'm just telling you that the official records say something different."

  "Fuck the official records!"

  "The records also say that you were married seven times in two years. No mention of any divorces."

  My mother's anger faltered a bit. "How did that get in the computers? I never got officially married, not with no license or nothing."

  "I think you underestimate the government's talent for keeping track of people. It's all there for anybody to see."

  Now she looked frightened. "What else'd you find out?"

  I let her off her own hook. "Nothing else. There wasn't anything more. You want something else to stay buried, you don't have to worry." That was a lie; I had learned plenty more about my mom.

  "Good," she said, relieved. "I don't like you prying into what I done. It don't show respect."

  I had an answer to that, but I didn't use it. "What started all this nostalgic research," I said in a quiet voice, "was some business I was taking care of for Papa." Everybody in the Budayeen calls Friedlander Bey "Papa." It's an affectionate token of terror. "This police lieutenant who handled matters in the Budayeen died, so Papa decided that we needed a kind of public affairs officer, somebody to keep communications open between him and the police department. He asked me to take the job."

  Her mouth twisted. "Oh yeah? You got a gun now? You got a badge?" It was from my mother that I learned my dislike for cops.

  "Yeah," I said, "I got a gun and a badge."

  "Your badge ain't any good in Algiers, salaud."

  "They give me professional courtesy wherever I go." I didn't even know if that was true here. "The point is, while I was deep in the cop comp, I took the opportunity to read my own file and a few others. The funny thing was, my name and Friedlander Bey's kept popping up together. And not just in the records of the last few years. I counted at least eight entries—hints, you understand, but nothing definite—that suggested the two of us were blood kin." That got a loud reaction from the Half-Hajj; maybe I should have told him about all this before.

  "So?" said my mother.

  "The hell kind of answer is that? So what does it mean? You ever jam Friedlander Bey, back in your golden youth?"

  She looked raving mad again. "Hell, I jammed lots of guys. You expect me to remember all of them? I didn't even remember what they looked like while I was jamming them."

  "You didn't want to get involved, right? You just wanted to be good friends. Were you ever friends enough to give credit? Or did you always ask for the cash up front?"

  "Maghrebi," cried Saied, "this is your mother!" I didn't think it was possible to shock him.

  "Yeah, it's my mother. Look at her."

  She crossed the room in three steps, reached back, and gave me a hard slap across the face. It made me fall back a step. "Get the fuck out of here!" she yelled.

  I put my hand to my cheek and glared at her. "You answer one thing first: Could Friedlander Bey be my real father?"

  Her hand was poised to deliver another clout. "Yeah, he could be, the way practically any man could be. Go back to the city and climb up on his knee, sonny boy. I don't ever want to see you around here again."

  She could rest easy on that score. I turned my back on her and left that repulsive hole in the wall. I didn't bother to shut the door on the way out. The Half-Hajj did, and then he hurried to catch up with me. I was storming down the stairs. "Listen, Marîd," he said. Until he spoke, I didn't realize how wild I was. "I guess all this is a big surprise to you—"

  "You do? You're very perceptive today, Saied."

  "—but you can't act that way toward your mother. Remember what it says—"

  "In the Qur'an? Yeah, I know. Well, what does the Straight Path have to say about prostitution? What does it have to say about the kind of degenerate my holy mother has turned into?"

  "You've got a lot of room to talk. If there was a cheaper hustler in the Budayeen, I never met Him."

  I smiled coldly. "Thanks a lot, Saied, but I don't live in the Budayeen anymore. You forget? And I don't hustle anybody or anything. I got a steady job."

  He spat at my feet. "You used to do nearly anything to make a few kiam."

  "Anyway, just because I used to be the scum of the earth, it doesn't make it all right for my mother to be scum too."

  "Why don't you just shut up about her? I don't want to hear about it."

  "Your empathy just grows and grows, Saied," I said. "You don't know everything I know. My alma mater back there was into renting herself to strangers long before she had to support my brother and me. She wasn't the forlorn heroine she always said she was. She glossed over a lot of the truth."

  The Half-Hajj looked me hard in the eye for a few seconds. "Yeah?" he said. "Half the girls, changes, and debs we know do the same thing, and you don't have any problem treating them like human beings."

  I was about to say "Sure, but none of them is my mother." I stopped myself. He would have jumped on that sentiment too, and besides, it was starting to sound foolish even to me. The edge of my anger had vanished. I think I was just greatly annoyed to have to learn these things after so many years. It was hard for me to accept. I mean, now I had to forget almost everything I thought I knew about myself. For one thing, I'd always been proud of the fact that I was half-Berber and half-French. I dressed in European style most of the time—boots and jeans and work shirts. I suppose I'd always felt a little superior to the Arabs I lived among. Now I had to get used to the thought that I could very well be half-Berber and half-Arab.

  The raucous, thumping sound of mid-twenty-first-century hispo roc broke into my daydream. Some forgotten band was growling an ugly chant about some damn thing or other. I've never gotten around to learning any Spanish dialects, and I don't own a Spanish-language daddy. If I ever run into any Columbian industrialists, they can just damn well speak Arabic. I have a soft spot in my liver for them because of their production of narcotics, but outside of that I don't see what South America is for. The world doesn't need an overpopulated, starving, Spanish-speaking India in the Western Hemisphere. Spain, their mother country, tried Islam and said a polite no-thank-you, and their national character sublimed right off into nothingness. That's Allah punishing them.

  "I hate that song," said Indihar. Chiri had given her a glass of Sharâb, the soft drink the clubs keep for girls who don't drink alcohol, like Indihar. It's exactly the same color as champagne. Chiri always fills a cocktail glass with ice and pours in a few ounces of soda—which should be a tip-off to the mark: you don't get ice in your champagne in the real world. But the ice takes up a lot of space where the more expensive stuff would go. That'll cost
a sucker eight kiam and a tip for Chiri. The club kicks three bills back to the girl who got the drink. That motivates the employees to go through their cocktails at supersonic speed. The usual excuse is that it's thirsty work whirling like a derwish to the cheers of the crowd.

  Chiri turned to watch Janelle, who was on her last song. Janelle doesn't really dance, she flounces. She takes five or six steps to one end of the stage, waits for the next heavy-footed bass drum beat, then does a kind of shrugging, quivering thing with her upper body that she must think is torridly sexy. She's wrong. Then she flounces back the other way to the opposite end of the stage and does her spasm number again. The whole time she's lip-synching, not to the lyrics, but to the wailing lead keypad line. Janelle the Human Synthesizer. Janelle the Synthetic Human is closer to the truth. She wears a moddy every day, but you have to talk to her to find out which one. One day she's soft and erotic (Honey Pílar), the next day she's cold and foulmouthed (Brigitte Stahlhelm). Whichever personality she's chipped in, though, is still housed in the same unmodified Nigerian refugee body, which she also thinks is sexy and about which she is also mistaken. The other girls don't associate with her very much. They're sure she lifts bills out of their bags in the dressing room, and they don't like the way she cuts in on their customers when they have to go up to dance. Someday the cops are going to find Janelle in a dark doorway with her lace pulped and half the bones in her body broken. In the meantime, she flounces in time to the ragged screams of keypads and guitar synths.

  I was bored as hell. I knocked back the rest of my drink. Chiri looked at me and raised her eyebrows. "No thanks, Chiri," I said. "I got to go."

  Indihar leaned over and kissed me on the cheek. "Well, don't be a stranger now that you're a fascist swine cop."

  "Right," I said. I got up from my stool.

  "Say hello to Papa for me," said Chiri.

  "What makes you think I'm going there?"

  She gave me her filed-tooth grin. "Time for good boys and girls to check in at the old kibanda."

  "Yeah, well," I said. I left the rest of my change for her hungry register and went back outside.

  I walked down the Street to the arched eastern gate. Beyond the Budayeen, along the broad Boulevard il-Jameel, a few taxis waited for fares. I saw my old friend, Bill, and climbed into the backseat of his cab. "Take me to Papa's, Bill," I said.

  "Yeah? You talk like you know me. I know you from somewhere?"

  Bill didn't recognize me because he's permanently fried. Instead of skull wiring or cosmetic bodmods, he's got a large sac where one of his lungs used to be, dripping out constant, measured doses of light-speed hallucinogen into his bloodstream. Bill has occasional moments of lucidity, but he's learned to ignore them, or at least to keep functioning until they go away and he's seeing purple lizards again. I've tried the drug he's got pumping through him day and night; it's called RPM, and even though I'm pretty experienced with drugs of all nations, I never want to take that stuff again. Bill, on the other hand, swears that it has opened his eyes to the hidden nature of the real world. I guess so; he can see fire demons and I can't. The only problem with the drug—and Bill will be the first to admit this—is that he can't remember a goddamn thing from one minute to the next.

  So it wasn't surprising that he didn't recognize me. I've had to go through the same conversation with him a hundred times. "It's me, Bill. Marîd. I want you to take me to Friedlander Bey's."

  He squinted back at me. "Can't say I ever seen you before, buddy."

  "Well, you have. Lots of times."

  "That's easy for you to say," he muttered. He jabbed the ignition and pulled away from the curb. We were headed in the wrong direction. "Where did you say you wanted to go?" he asked.

  "Papa's."

  "Yeah, you right. I got this afrit sitting up here with me today, and he's been tossing hot coals in my lap all afternoon. It's a big distraction. I can't do nothing about it, though. You can't punch out an afrit. They like to mess with your head like that. I'm thinking of getting some holy water from Lourdes. Maybe that would spook 'em. Where the hell is Lourdes, anyway?"

  "The Caliphate of Gascony," I said.

  "Hell of a long drive. They do mail orders?"

  I told him I didn't have the slightest idea, and sat back against the upholstery. I watched the landscape slash by—Bill's driving is as crazy as he is—and I thought about what I was going to say to Friedlander Bey. I wondered how I should approach him about what I'd found out, what my mother had told me, and what I suspected. I decided to wait. There was a good chance that the information in the computers linking me to Papa had been planted there, a devious means of winning my cooperation. In the past, I'd carefully avoided any direct transactions with Papa, because taking his coin for any reason meant that he owned you forever. But when he paid for my cranial implants, he made an investment that I'd be paying back for the rest of my life. I didn't want to be working for him, but there was no escape. Not yet. I maintained the hope that I'd find a way to buy my way out, or coerce him into giving me my freedom. In the meantime, it pleased him to pile responsibility on my unwilling shoulders, and gift me with ever-larger rewards.

  Bill pulled through the gate in the high white wall'around Friedlander Bey's estate and drove up the long, curved driveway. He came to a stop at the foot of the wide marble stairs. Papa's butler opened the polished front door and stood waiting for me. I paid the fare and slipped Bill an extra ten kiam. His lunatic eyes narrowed and he glanced from the money to me. "What's this?" he asked suspiciously.

  "It's a tip. You're supposed to keep that."

  "What's it for?"

  "For your excellent driving."

  "You ain't trying to buy me off, are you?"

  I sighed. "No. I admire the way you steer with all those red-hot charcoals in your drawers. I know I couldn't do it."

  He shrugged. "It's a gift," he said simply.

  "So's the ten kiam."

  His eyes widened again. "Oh," he said, smiling, "now I get it!" "Sure you do. See you around, Bill."

  "See ya, buddy." He gunned the cab and the tires spat gravel. I turned and went up the stairs.

  "Good afternoon, yaa Sidi, " said the butler.

  "Hello, Youssef. I'd like to see Friedlander Bey."

  "Yes, of course. It's good to have you home, sir."

  "Yeah, thanks." We walked along a thickly carpeted corridor toward Papa's offices. The air was cool and dry, and I felt the gentle kiss of many fans. There was the fragrance of incense on the air, subtle and inviting. The light was muted through screens made of narrow strips of wood. From somewhere I heard the liquid trickle of falling water, a fountain splashing in one of the courtyards.

  Before we got to the waiting room, a tall, well-dressed woman crossed the hall and went up a flight of stairs. She gave me a brief, modest smile and then turned her head away. She had hair as black and glossy as obsidian, gathered tightly into a chignon. Her hands were very pale, her fingers long and tapered and graceful. I got just a quick impression, yet I knew this woman had style and intelligence; but I felt also that she could be menacing and hard, if she needed.

  "Who was that, Youssef?" I asked.

  He turned to me and frowned. "That is Umm Saad." I knew immediately that he disapproved of her. I trusted Youssef's judgment, so my first intuition about her was most likely correct.

  I took a seat in the outer office and killed time by finding faces in the pattern of cracks in the ceiling. After a while, one of Papa's two huge bodyguards opened the communicating door. I call the big men the Stones That Speak. Believe me, I know what I'm talking about. "Come in," said the Stone. Those guys don't waste breath.

  I went into Friedlander Bey's office. The man was about two hundred years old, but he'd had a lot of body modifications and transplants. He was reclining on cushions and drinking strong coffee from a golden cup. He smiled when I came in. "My eyes live again, seeing you O my nephew," he said. I could tell that he was genuinely pleased.

&
nbsp; "My days apart from you have been filled with regret, O Shaykh," I said. He motioned, and I seated myself beside him. He reached forward to tip coffee from the golden pot into my cup. I took a sip and said, "May your table always be prosperous."

  "May Allah grant you health," he said.

  "I pray that you are feeling well, O Shaykh."

  He reached out and grasped my hand. "I am as fit and strong as a sixty-year-old, but there is a weariness that I cannot overcome, my nephew."

  "Then perhaps your physician—"

  "It is a weariness of the soul," he said. "It is my appetite and ambition that are dying. I keep going now only because the idea of suicide is abhorrent."

  "Perhaps in the future, science will restore you."

  "How, my son? By grafting a new zest for living onto my exhausted spirit?"

  "The technique already exists," I told him. "You could have a moddy and daddy implant like mine."

  He shook his head ruefully. "Allah would send me to Hell if I did that." He didn't seem to mind if I went to Hell. He waved aside further speculation. "Tell me of your journey."

  Here it was, but I wasn't ready. I still didn't know how to ask him if he figured in my family tree, so I stalled. "First I must hear all that happened while I was gone, O Shaykh, I saw a woman in the corridor. I've never seen a woman in your house before. May I ask you who she is?"

  Papa's face darkened. He paused a moment, framing his reply. "She is a fraud and an impostor, and she is beginning to cause me great distress."

  "Then you must send her away," I said.

  "Yes," he said. His expression turned stonelike. I saw now not a ruler of a great business empire, not the controller of all vice and illicit activity in the city, but something more terrible. Friedlander Bey might truly have been the son of many kings, because he wore the cloak of power and command as if he'd been born to it. "I must ask you this question, O my nephew: Do you honor me enough to fill your lungs again with fire?"

  I blinked. I thought I knew what he was talking about. "Did I not prove myself just a few months ago, O Shaykh?"