The Year's Best SF 08 # 1990

by Gardner Dozois (ed)

  I walked past her into the complex.

  9 Fast Closing Toward The Undelighted Night …

  By the time I had spoken to a dozen or so enfants des fleurs I had found myself a guide who introduced himself as Magic Mungo and wore brilliant face-paint beneath his straw hat. He had on an old pair of glitterjeans which whispered and flashed as he walked. His jacket announced in calligraphic Arabic phonetic English: THE NAME IS THE GAME. He was probably no older than thirteen. He asked me what I did and when I told him he said he, too, planned to become an engineer “and bring back the power.” This amused me and restored my temper. “And what will you do about the weather?” I asked.

  “It’s not the weather,” he told me, “not Nature—it’s the ships. And it’s not the dam, or the lake, that’s causing the storms and stuff. It’s the Reens.”

  I misheard him. I thought he was blaming the Greens. Then I realised, belatedly, that he was expressing a popular notion amongst the New New Agers which by the time I had heard it several times more had actually begun to improve my mood. The Reens, the flying saucer people, were used by the hippies as an explanation for everything they couldn’t understand. In rejecting Science, they had substituted only a banal myth. Essentially, I was being told that the Gods had taken my sister. In other words they did not know where she was. At last, after several further short but keen conversations, in various rug-strewn galleries and cushion-heavy chambers smelling strongly of kif, incense and patchouli, I met a somewhat older woman, with grey streaks in her long black hair and a face the colour and texture of well-preserved leather.

  “This is Ayesha.” Mungo gulped comically. “She-who-must-be-obeyed!” He ran to the woman who smiled a perfectly ordinary smile as she embraced him. “We encourage their imaginations,” she said. “They read books here and everything. Are you looking for Bea?”

  Warily expecting more Reen talk, I admitted that I was trying to find my sister.

  “She went back to Aswan. I think she was at the medrassah for a bit—you know, with the Sufi—but after that she returned to town. If she’s not there, she’s in the desert again. She goes there to meditate, I’m told. If she’s not there, she’s not anywhere. Around here, I mean.”

  I was relieved by the straightforward nature of her answer. “I’m greatly obliged. I thought you, too, were going to tell me she was taken into space by aliens!”

  Ayesha joined in my amusement. “Oh, no, of course not. That was more than a year ago!”

  10 Thoughts Of Too Old A Colour Nurse My Brain

  I decided to have a note delivered to the Sufi, El Haj Ibrahim Abu Halil, telling him that I planned to visit him next day, then, with a little time to spare before my appointment, I strolled up the corniche, past the boat-ghetto at the upper end, and along the more fashionable stretches where some sporadic attempt was made to give the railings fresh coats of white paint and where a kiosk, closed since my first time here, advertised in bleached Latin type the Daily Telegraph, Le Monde and the New York Herald-Tribune. A few thin strands of white smoke rose from the villages on Elephantine Island, and from Gazirat-al-Bustan, Plantation Island, whose botanical gardens, begun by Lord Kitchener, had long since become a marvellously exotic jungle, came the laughter of the children and teenagers who habitually spent their free days there.

  Outside the kiosk stood an old man holding a bunch of faded and ragged international newspapers under one arm and El Misr under the other. “All today!” he called vigorously in English, much as a London coster shouted “All fresh!” A professional cry rather than any sort of promise. I bought an El Misr, only a day old, and glanced at the headlines as I walked up to the park. There seemed nothing unusually alarming in the paper. Even the EC rate had not risen in the last month. As I tried to open the sheet a gust came off the river and the yellow-grey paper began to shred in my hands. It was low-density recyke, unbulked by the sophisticated methods of the West. Before I gave up and dumped the crumpled mess into the nearest reclamation bin I had glimpsed references to the UNEC conference in Madagascar and something about examples of mass hysteria in Old Paris and Bombay, where a group called Reincarnation was claiming its leader to be a newly-born John Lennon. There were now about as many reincarnated Lennons abroad as there had been freshly-risen Christs in the early Middle Ages.

  I stopped in the park to watch the gardeners carefully tending the unsweet soil of the flower-beds, coaxing marigolds and nasturtiums to bloom at least for a few days in the winter, when the sun would not burn them immediately as they emerged. The little municipal café was unchanged since British days and still served only icecreams, tea, coffee or soft-drinks, all of them made with non-rationed ingredients and all equally tasteless. Pigeons wandered hopelessly amongst the debris left by customers, occasionally pecking at a piece of wrapping or a sliver of Sustenance left behind by some poor devil who had been unable to force his stomach to accept the high-concentrate nutrients we had developed at UNEC for his benefit.

  The Cataract’s entrance was between pillars which, once stately, Egyptianate and unquestionably European, were now a little the worse for wear, though the gardens on both sides of the drive were heavy with freshly-planted flowers. Bougainvilleas of every brilliant variety covered walls behind avenues of palms leading to a main building the colour of Nile clay, its shutters and ironwork a dark, dignified green, the kind of colour Cook himself would have picked to represent the security and solid good service which established him as one of the Empire’s noblest champions.

  I walked into the great lobby cooled by massive carved mahogany punkahs worked on hidden ropes by screened boys. Egypt had had little trouble implementing many of the UN’s mandatory energy-saving regulations. She had either carried on as always or had returned, perhaps even with relief, to the days before electricity and gas had become the necessities rather than the luxuries of life.

  I crossed the lobby to the wooden verandah where we were to lunch. Georges Abidos was already at our table by the rail looking directly over the empty swimming pool and, beyond that, to the river itself. He was drinking a cup of Lipton’s tea and I remarked on it, pointing to the label on the string dangling from his tiny metal pot. “Indeed!” he said. “At ten pounds the pot why shouldn’t the Cataract offer us Lipton’s, at least!” He dropped his voice. “Though my guess is the teabag has seen more than one customer through the day’s heat. Would you like a cup?”

  I refused. He hadn’t, I said, exactly sold me on the idea. He laughed. He was a small, attractively ugly Greek from Alexandria. Since the flooding, he had been driven, like so many of his fellow citizens to seek work inland. At least half the city had not been thought worth saving as the sea-level had steadily risen to cover it.

  “Can’t you,” he asked, “get your American friends to do something about this new embargo? One misses the cigarettes and I could dearly use a new John B.” He indicated his stained Planter’s straw and then picked it up to show me the label on the mottled sweatband so that I might verify it was a genuine product of the Stetson Hat Co. of New Jersey. “Size seven and a quarter. But don’t get anything here. The Cairo fakes are very close. Very good. But they can’t fake the finish, you see.”

  “I’ll remember,” I promised. I would send him a Stetson next time I was in the USA.

  I felt we had actually conducted our main business before we sat down. The rest of the lunch would be a social affair with someone I had known both professionally and as a close personal acquaintance for many years.

  As our mixed hors d’oeuvres arrived, Georges Abidos looked with a despairing movement of his mouth out towards the river. “Well, Paul, have you solved any of our problems?”

  “I doubt it,” I said. “That’s all going on in Majunga now. I’m wondering if my function isn’t as some kind of minor smokescreen.”

  “I thought you’d volunteered.”

  “Only when they’d decided that one of us had to come. It was a good chance, I thought, to see how my sister was. I had spare relative
allowance and lots of energy and travel owing, so I got her a flight out with me. It took forever! But I grew rather worried. The last note I had from her was three months ago and very disjointed. It didn’t tell me anything. I’d guessed that her husband had turned up. It was something she said. That’s about all I know which would frighten her that much. My mistake, it’s emerged. Then I wondered if she wasn’t pregnant. I couldn’t make head or tail of her letters. They weren’t like her at all.”

  “Women are a trial,” said Georges Abidos. “My own sister has divorced, I heard. But then,” as if to explain it, “they moved to Kuwait.” He turned his eyes back to the river which seemed almost to obsess him. “Look at the Nile. An open sewer running through a desert. What has Egypt done to deserve rescue? She gave the world the ancestors who first offered Nature a serious challenge. Should we be grateful for that? From Lake Nasser to Alexandria the river remains undrinkable and frequently unusable. She once replenished the Earth. Now, what with their fertilisers and sprays, she helps poison it.” It was as if all the doubts he had kept to himself as a publicity officer were now being allowed to emerge. “I listen to Blue Danube Radio from Vienna. The English station there. It’s so much more reliable than the World Service. We are still doing less than we could, they say, here in Egypt.”

  The tables around us had begun to fill with Saudis and wealthy French people in fashionable silk shifts, and the noise level rose so that it was hard for me to hear my acquaintance’s soft tones.

  We discussed the changing nature of Aswan. He said he would be glad to get back to Cairo where he had a new job with the Antiquities Department raising money for specific restoration or reconstruction projects.

  We had met at the re-opening of the Cairo Opera House in 1989, which had featured the Houston Opera Company’s Porgy and Bess, but had never become more than casual friends, though we shared many musical tastes and he had an extraordinary knowledge of modern fiction in English. His enthusiasm was for the older writers like Gilchrist or DeLillo, who had been amongst my own favourites at College.

  We were brought some wonderfully tasty Grönburgers and I remarked that the cuisine had improved since I was last here. “French management,” he told me. “They have one of the best teams outside of Paris. They all came from Nice after the troubles. Lucky for us. I might almost be tempted to stay! Oh, no! I could not. Even for that! Nubian music is an abomination!”

  I told him about my sister, how I was unable to find her and how I was beginning to fear the worst. “The police suggested she was mad.”

  Georges was dismissive of this. “A dangerous assumption at any time, Paul, but especially these days. And very difficult for us to define here, in Egypt, just as justice is at once a more brutal and a subtler instrument in our interpretation. We never accepted, thank God, the conventional wisdoms of psychiatry. And madness here, as elsewhere, is defined by the people in power, usually calling themselves the State. Tomorrow those power holders could be overthrown by a fresh dynasty and what was yesterday simple common sense today becomes irresponsible folly. So I do not like to make hasty judgements or pronounce readily on others’ moral or mental condition—lest, indeed, we inadvertently condemn ourselves.” He paused. “They say this was not so under the British, that it was fairer, more predictable. Only real troublemakers and criminals went to jail. Now it isn’t as bad as it was when I was a lad. Then anyone was liable to arrest. If it was better under the British, then that is our shame.” And he lowered his lips to his wineglass.

  We had slipped, almost automatically, into discussing the old, familiar topics. “It’s sometimes argued,” I said, “that the liberal democracies actually stopped the flow of history. A few hundred years earlier, as feudal states, we would have forcibly Christianised the whole of Islam and changed the entire nature of the planet’s power struggle. Indeed, all the more childish struggles might have been well and truly over by now!”

  “Or it might have gone the other way,” Georges suggested dryly, “if the Moors had reconquered France and Northern Europe. After all, Islam did not bring the world to near-ruin. What has the European way achieved except the threat of death for all?”

  I could not accept an argument which had already led to massive conversions to Islam amongst the youth of Europe, America and Democratic Africa, representing a sizeable proportion of the vote. This phenomenon had, admittedly, improved the tenor of world politics, but I still deplored it.

  “Oh, you’re so thoroughly out of step, my friend.” Georges Abidos smiled and patted my arm. “The world’s changing!”

  “It’ll die if we start resorting to mystical Islamic solutions.”

  “Possibly.” He seemed unconcerned. I think he believed us unsaveable.

  A little drunk, I let him take me back to the Osiris in a calash. He talked affectionately of our good times, of concerts and plays we had seen in the world’s capitals before civilian flight had become so impossibly expensive, of the Gilbert and Sullivan season we had attended in Bangkok, of Wagner in Bayreuth and Britten in Glyndebourne. We hummed a snatch from Iolanthe before we parted.

  When I got up to my room all the shutters had been drawn back to give the apartment the best of the light. I recognised the subtle perfume even as my sister came out of the bathroom to laugh aloud at my astonishment.

  11 Saw Life To Be A Sea Green Dream

  Beatrice had cut her auburn hair short and her skin was paler than I remembered. While her blue eyes and red lips remained striking, she had gained an extra beauty. I was overjoyed. This was the opposite of what I had feared to find.

  As if she read my mind, she smiled. “Were you expecting the Mad Woman of Aswan?” She wore a light blue cotton skirt and a darker blue shirt.

  “You’ve never looked better.” I spoke the honest truth.

  She took both my hands in hers and kissed me. “I’m sorry I didn’t write. It began to seem such a sham. I couldn’t write for a while. I got your letters today, when I went to the post office. What a coincidence, I thought—my first sally into the real world and here comes good old Paul to help me. If anyone understands reality, you do.”

  I was flattered and grinned in the way I had always responded to her half-mocking praise. “Well, I’m here to take you back to it, if you want to go. I’ve got a pass for you on the Cairo plane in four days’ time, and from there we can go to Geneva or London or anywhere in the Community.”

  “That’s marvellous,” she said. She looked about my shabby sitting room with its cracked foam cushions, its stained tiles. “Is this the best you get at your rank?”

  “This is the best for any rank, these days. Most of us don’t travel at all and certainly not by plane.”

  “The schoomers are still going out of Alex, are they?”

  “Oh, yes. To Genoa, some of them. Who has the time?”

  “That’s what I’d thought of, for me. But here you are! What a bit of luck!”

  I was immensely relieved. “Oh, Bea. I thought you might be dead—you know, or worse.”

  “I was selfish not to keep you in touch, but for a while, of course, I couldn’t. Then I was out there for so long…”

  “At your dig, you mean?”

  She seemed momentarily surprised, as if she had not expected me to know about the dig. “Yes, where the dig was. That’s right. I can’t remember what I said in my letters.”

  “That you’d made a terrific discovery and that I must come out the first chance I got. Well, I did. This really was the first chance. Am I too late? Have they closed down the project completely? Are you out of funds?”

  “Yes,” she smiled. “You’re too late, Paul. I’m awfully sorry. You must think I brought you on a wild goose chase.”

  “Nonsense. That wasn’t why I really came. Good Lord, Bea, I care a lot for you!” I stopped, a little ashamed. She was probably in a more delicate condition than she permitted me to see. “And, anyway, I had some perks coming. It’s lovely here, still, isn’t it? If you ignore the rubbish tips. Y
ou know, and the sewage. And the Nile!” We laughed together. “And the rain and the air,” she said. “And the sunlight! Oh, Paul! What if this really is the future?”

  12 A Man In The Night Flaking Tombstones

  She asked if I would like to take a drive with her beside the evening river and I agreed at once. I was her senior by a year but she had always been the leader, the initiator and I admired her as much as ever.

  We went up past the ruins of the Best Western and the Ramada Inn, the only casualties of a shelling attack in ’02, when the Green Jihad had attempted to hole the dam and six women had died. We stopped near the abandoned museum and bought a drink from the ice-stall. As I turned, looking out at the river, I saw the new moon, huge and orange, in the cloudless night. A few desultory mosquitoes hung around our heads and were easily fanned away as we continued up the corniche, looking out at the lights from the boats, the flares on the far side, the palms waving in the soft breeze from the North.

  “I’m quitting my job,” she said. “I resigned, in fact, months ago. I had a few things to clear up.”

  “What will you do? Get something in London?”

  “Well, I’ve my money. That was invested very sensibly by Jack before our problems started. Before we split up. And I can do freelance work.” Clearly, she was unwilling to discuss the details. “I could go on living here.”

  “Do you want to?”

  “No,” she said. “I hate it now. But is the rest of the world any better, Paul?”

  “Oh, life’s still a bit easier in England. And Italy’s all right. And Scandinavia, of course, but that’s closed off, as far as residency’s concerned. The population’s dropping quite nicely in Western Europe. Not everything’s awful. The winters are easier.”

  She nodded slowly as if she were carefully noting each observation. “Well,” she said, “anyway, I don’t know about Aswan. I’m not sure there’s much point in my leaving Egypt. I have a permanent visa, you know.”

  “Why stay, Bea?”

  “Oh, well,” she said, “I suppose it feels like home. How’s daddy? Is everything all right in Marrakesh?”