The Year's Best SF 08 # 1990

by Gardner Dozois (ed)

  “You sound very proprietorial.” I was amused that the mystery should prove to have so obvious a solution. My sister had simply become absorbed in her work. It was understandable that she should.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “I must admit…”

  For a moment, lost in the profound beauty of the vision, I did not realise she was crying. Just as I had as a little boy, I moved to comfort her, having no notion at all of the cause of her grief, but assuming, I suppose, that she was mourning the death of an important piece of research, the loss of her colleagues, the sheer disappointment at this unlucky end to a wonderful adventure. It was plain, too, that she was completely exhausted.

  She drew towards me, smiling an apology. “I want to tell you everything, Paul. And only you. When I have, that’ll be it. I’ll never mention it again. I’ll get on with some sort of life. I’m sick of myself at the moment.”

  “Bea. You’re very tired. Let’s go home to Europe where I can coddle you for a bit.”

  “Perhaps,” she said. She paused as the swiftly risen sun outlined sunken buildings and revealed more of a structure lying just below the surface, some dormant juggernaut.

  “It’s monstrous,” I said. “It’s the size of the large complex at Luxor. But this is different. All the curved walls, all the circles. Is that to do with sun worship?”

  “Astronomy, anyway. We speculated, of course. When we first mapped it on the sonavids. This is the discovery to launch a thousand theories, most of them crackpot. You have to be careful. But it felt to us to be almost a contrary development to what was happening at roughly the same time around Abu Ghurab, although of course there were sun-cults there, too. But in Lower Egypt the gratification and celebration of the Self had reached terrible proportions. All those grandiose pyramids. This place had a mood to it. The more we sifted it out the more we felt it. Wandering amongst those light columns, those open courtyards, was marvellous. All the turquoises and reds and bright yellows. This had to be the centre of some ancient Enlightenment. Far better preserved than Philae, too. And no graffiti carved anywhere, no Christian or Moslem disfigurement. We all worked like maniacs. Chamber after chamber was opened. Gradually, of course, it dawned on us! You could have filled this place with academic people and it would have been a functioning settlement again, just as it was before some petty Pharoah or local governor decided to destroy it. We felt we were taking over from them after a gap of millennia. It gave some of us a weird sense of responsibility. We talked about it. They knew so much, Paul.”

  “And so little,” I murmured. “They only had limited information to work with, Bea…”

  “Oh, I think we’d be grateful for their knowledge today.” Her manner was controlled, as if she desperately tried to remember how she had once talked and behaved. “Anyway, this is where it all happened. We thought at first we had an advantage. Nobody was bothering to come out to what was considered a very minor find and everyone involved was anxious not to let any government start interfering. It was a sort of sacred trust, if you like. We kept clearing. We weren’t likely to be found. Unless we used the emergency radio nobody would waste an energy unit on coming out. Oddly, we found no monumental statuary at all, though the engineering was on a scale with anything from the 19th dynasty—not quite as sophisticated, maybe, but again far in advance of its own time.”

  “How long did it take you to uncover it all?”

  “We never did. We all swore to reveal nothing until a proper international preservation order could be obtained. This government is as desperate for cruise-schoomer dollars as anyone…”

  I found myself interrupting her. “This was all covered by hand, Bea?”

  “No, no.” Again she was amused. “No, the ship did that, mostly. When it brought me back.”

  A sudden depression filled me. “You mean a spaceship, do you?”

  “Yes,” she said. “A lot of people here know about them. And I told Di Roper, as well as some of the kids, and the Sufi. But nobody ever believes us—nobody from the real world, I mean. And that’s why I wanted to tell you. You’re still a real person, aren’t you?”

  “Bea—you could let me know everything in London. Once we’re back in a more familiar environment. Can’t we just enjoy this place for what it is? Enjoy the world for what it is?”

  “It’s not enjoyable for me, Paul.”

  I moved away from her. “I don’t believe in spaceships.”

  “You don’t believe in much, do you?” Her tone was unusually cool.

  I regretted offending her, yet I could not help respond. “The nuts and bolts of keeping this ramshackle planet running somehow. That’s what I believe in, Bea. I’m like that chap in the first version of The African Queen, only all he had to worry about was a World War and a little beam-engine. Bea, you were here alone and horribly over-tired. Surely…?”

  “Let me talk, Paul.” There was a note of aching despair in her voice which immediately silenced me and made me lower my head in assent.

  We stood there, looking at the sunrise pouring light over that dusty red and brown landscape with its drowned architecture, and I listened to her recount the most disturbing and unlikely story I was ever to hear.

  The remains of the team had gone into Aswan for various reasons and Bea was left alone with only a young Arab boy for company. Ali worked as a general servant and was as much part of the team as anyone else, with as much enthusiasm. “He, too, understood the reasons for saying little about our work. Phil Springfield had already left to speak to some people in Washington and Professor al-Bayumi, no close relative of the inspector, was doing what he could in Cairo, though you can imagine the delicacy of his position. Well, one morning, when I was cleaning the dishes and Ali had put a record on the gramophone, this freak storm blew up. It caused a bit of panic, of course, though it was over in a minute or two. And when the sand settled again there was the ship—there, on that bluff. You can see where it came and went.”

  The spaceship, she said, had been a bit like a flying saucer in that it was circular, with deep sides and glowing horizontal bands at regular intervals. “It was more drum-shaped, though there were discs—I don’t know, they weren’t metal, but seemed like visible electricity, sort of protruding from it, half on the inside, half on the outside. Much of that moved from a kind of hazy gold into a kind of silver. There were other colours, too. And, I think, sounds. It looked a bit like a kid’s tambourine—opaque, sparkling surfaces top and bottom—like the vellum on a drum. And the sides went dark sometimes. Polished oak. The discs, the flange things, went scarlet. They were its main information sensors.”

  “It was organic?”

  “It was a bit. You’d really have to see it for yourself. Anyway, it stood there for a few minutes and then these figures came out. I thought they were test-pilots from that experimental field in Libya and they’d made an emergency landing. I was going to offer them a cup of tea when I realised they weren’t human. They had dark bodies that weren’t suits exactly but an extra body you wear over your own. Well, you’ve seen something like it. We all have. It’s Akhenotan and Nefertiti. Those strange abdomens and elongated heads, their hermaphroditic quality. They spoke a form of very old-fashioned English. They apologised. They said they had had an instrument malfunction and had not expected to find anyone here. They were prepared to take us with them, if we wished to go. I gathered that these were standard procedures for them. We were both completely captivated by their beauty and the wonder of the event. I don’t think Ali hesitated any more than I. I left a note for whomever returned, saying I’d had to leave in a hurry and didn’t know when I’d be back. Then we went with them.”

  “You didn’t wonder about their motives?”

  “Motives? Yes, Paul, I suppose hallucinations have motives. We weren’t the only Earth-people ever to go. Anyway, I never regretted the decision. On the dark side of the Moon the main ship was waiting. That’s shaped like a gigantic dung-beetle. You’ll laugh when I tell you why. I still find it funny.
They’re furious because their bosses won’t pay for less antiquated vessels. Earth’s not a very important project. The ship was designed after one of the first organisms they brought back from Earth, to fit in with what they thought was a familiar form. Apparently their own planet has fewer species but many more different sizes of the same creature. They haven’t used the main ship to visit Earth since we began to develop sensitive detection equipment. Their time is different, anyway, and they still find our ways of measuring and recording it very hard to understand.”

  “They took you to their planet?” I wanted her story to be over. I had heard enough to convince me that she was in need of immediate psychiatric help.

  “Oh, no. They’ve never been there. Not the people I know. Others have been back, but we never communicated with them. They have an artificial environment on Mercury.” She paused, noticing my distress. “Paul, you know me. I hated that von Daniken stuff. It was patently rubbish. Yet this was, well, horribly like it. Don’t think I wasn’t seriously considering I might have gone barmy. When people go mad, you know, they get such ordinary delusions. I suppose they reflect our current myths and apocrypha. I felt foolish at first. Then, of course, the reality grew so vivid, so absorbing, I forgot everything. I could not have run away, Paul. I just walked into it all and they let me. I’m not sure why, except they know things—even circumstances, if you follow me—and must have felt it was better to let me. They hadn’t wanted to go underwater and they’d returned to an old location in the Sahara. They’d hoped to find some spares, I think. I know it sounds ridiculously prosaic.

  “Well, they took us with them to their base. If I try to pronounce their language it somehow sounds so ugly. Yet it’s beautiful. I think in their atmosphere it works. I can speak it Paul. They can speak our languages, too. But there’s no need for them. Their home-planet’s many light-years beyond the Solar System which is actually very different to Earth, except for some colours and smells, of course. Oh, it’s so lovely there, at their base. Yet they complain all the time about how primitive it is and long for the comforts of home. You can imagine what it must be like.

  “I became friends with a Reen. He was exquisitely beautiful. He wasn’t really a he, either, but an androgyne or something similar. There’s more than one type of fertilisation, involving several people, but not always. I was completely taken up with him. Maybe he wasn’t so lovely to some human eyes, but he was to mine. He was golden-pale and looked rather negroid, I suppose, like one of those beautiful Masai carvings you see in Kenya, and his shape wasn’t altogether manlike, either. His abdomen was permanently rounded—most of them are like that, though in the intermediary sex I think there’s a special function. My lover was of that sex, yet he found it impossible to make me understand how he was different. Otherwise they have a biology not dissimilar to ours, with similar organs and so on. It was not hard for me to adapt. Their food is delicious, though they moan about that, too. It’s sent from home. Where they can grow it properly. And they have extraordinary music. They have recordings of English TV and radio—and other kinds of recordings, too. Earth’s an entire department, you see. Paul,” she paused, as if regretting the return of the memory, “they have recordings of events. Like battles and ceremonies and architectural stuff. He—my lover—found me an open-air concert at which Mozart was playing. It was too much for me. An archaeologist, and I hadn’t the nerve to look at the past as it actually was. I might have got round to it. I meant to. I’d planned to force myself, you know, when I settled down there.”

  “Bea, don’t you know how misanthropic and nuts that sounds?”

  “They haven’t been ‘helping’ us or anything like that. It’s an observation team. We’re not the only planet they’re keeping an eye on. They’re academics and scientists like us.” She seemed to be making an effort to convince me and to repeat the litany of her own faith; whatever it was that she believed kept her sane. Yet the creatures she described, I was still convinced, were merely the inventions of an overtaxed, isolated mind. Perhaps she had been trapped somewhere underground?

  “I could have worked there, you see. But I broke the rules.”

  “You tried to escape?” Reluctantly I humoured her.

  “Oh, no!” Her mind had turned backward again and I realised then that it was not any far-off interstellar world but her own planet that had taken her reason. I was suddenly full of sorrow.

  “A flying saucer, Bea!” I hoped that my incredulity would bring her back to normality. She had been so ordinary, so matter-of-fact, when we had first met.

  “Not really,” she said. “The hippies call them Reens. They don’t know very much about them, but they’ve made a cult of the whole thing. They’ve changed it. Fictionalised it. I can see why that would disturb you. They’ve turned it into a story for their own purposes. And Sheikh Abu Halil’s done the same, really. We’ve had arguments. I can’t stand the exploitation, Paul.”

  “That’s in the nature of a myth.” I spoke gently, feeling foolish and puny as I stood looking down on that marvellous construction. I wanted to leave, to return to Aswan, to get us back to Cairo and from there to the relative sanity of rural Oxfordshire, to the village where we had lived with our aunt during our happiest years. She nodded her head. “That’s why I stopped saying anything.

  “You can’t imagine how hurt I was at first, how urgent it seemed to talk about it. I still thought I was only being taught a lesson and they’d return for me. It must be how Eve felt when she realised God wasn’t joking.” She smiled bitterly at her own naiveté, her eyes full of old pain. “I was there for a long time, I thought, though when I got back it had only been a month or two and it emerged that nobody had ever returned here from Aswan. There had been that Green Jihad trouble and everyone was suddenly packed off back to Cairo and from there, after a while, to their respective homes. People assumed the same had happened to me. If only it had! But really Paul I wouldn’t change it.”

  I shook my head. “I think you were born in the wrong age, Bea. You should have been a priestess of Amon, maybe. Blessed by the Gods.”

  “We asked them in to breakfast, Ali and me.” Shading her eyes against the sun, she raised her arm to point. “Over there. We had a big tent we were using for everything while the others were away. Our visitors didn’t think much of our C-Ral and offered us some of their own rations which were far tastier. It was just a scout, that ship. I met my lover later. He had a wonderful sense of irony. As he should, after a thousand years on the same shift.”

  I could bear no more of this familiar modern apocrypha. “Bea. Don’t you think you just imagined it? After nobody returned, weren’t you anxious? Weren’t you disturbed?”

  “They weren’t away long enough. I didn’t know they weren’t coming back, Paul. I fell in love. That wasn’t imagination. Gradually, we found ourselves unable to resist the mutual attraction. I suppose I regret that.” She offered me a sidelong glance I might have thought cunning in someone else. “I don’t blame you for not believing it. How can I prove I’m sane? Or that I was sane then?”

  I was anxious to assure her of my continuing sympathy. “You’re not a liar, Bea. You never were.”

  “But you think I’m crazy.” All at once her voice became more urgent. “You know how terribly dull madness can be. How conventional most delusions are. You never think you could go mad like that. Then maybe it happens. The flying saucers come down and take you off to Venus, or paradise, where war and disease and atmospheric disintegration are long forgotten. You fall in love with a Venusian. Sexual intercourse is forbidden. You break the law. You’re cast out of Paradise. You can’t have a more familiar myth than that, can you, Paul?” Her tone was disturbing. I made a movement with my hand, perhaps to silence her.

  “I loved him,” she said. “And then I watched the future wither and fade before my eyes. I would have paid any price, done anything, to get back.”

  That afternoon, as we returned to Aswan, I was full of desperate, bewildered concern for
a sister I knew to be in immediate need of professional help. “We’ll sort all this out,” I reassured her, “maybe when we get to Geneva. We’ll see Frank.”

  “I’m sorry, Paul.” She spoke calmly. “I’m not going back with you. I realised it earlier, when we were out at the site. I’ll stay in Aswan, after all.”

  I resisted the urge to turn away from her, and for a while I could not speak.

  15 Whereat Serene And Undevoured He Lay …

  The flight was leaving in two days and there would be no other ticket for her. After she went off, filthy and withered from the heat, I rather selfishly used my whole outstanding water allowance and bathed for several hours as I tried to separate the truth from the fantasy. I thought how ripe the world was for Bea’s revelation, how dangerous it might be. I was glad she planned to tell no one else, but would she keep to that decision? My impulse was to leave, to flee from the whole mess before Bea started telling me how she had become involved in black magic. I felt deeply sorry for her and I felt angry with her for not being the strong leader I had looked up to all my life. I knew it was my duty to get her back to Europe for expert attention.

  “I’m not interested in proving what’s true or false, Paul,” she had said after agreeing to meet me at the Osiris next morning. “I just want you to know. Do you understand?”

  Anxious not to upset her further, I had said that I did.

  That same evening I went to find Inspector el-Bayoumi in his office. He put out his cigarette as I came in, shook hands and, his manner both affable and relaxed, offered me a comfortable leather chair. “You’ve found your sister, Mr Pappenheim! That’s excellent news.”

  I handed him a “purse” I had brought and told him, in the convoluted manner such occasions demand, that my sister was refusing to leave, that I had a ticket for her on a flight and that it was unlikely I would have a chance to return to Aswan in the near future. If he could find some reason to hold her and put her on the plane, I would be grateful.