The Year's Best SF 08 # 1990

by Gardner Dozois (ed)

  With a sigh of regret—at my folly, perhaps—he handed back the envelope. “I couldn’t do it, Mr Pappenheim, without risking the peace of Aswan, which I have kept pretty successfully for some years. We have a lot of trouble with Green Jihad, you know. I am very short-staffed as a result. You must persuade her, Dr Pappenheim, or you must leave her here. I assure you, she is much loved and respected. She is a woman of considerable substance and will make her own decisions. I promise, however, to keep you informed.”

  “By the mail packet? I thought you wanted me to get her out of here!”

  “I had hoped you might persuade her, Mr Pappenheim.”

  I apologised for my rudeness. “I appreciate your concern, inspector.” I put the money back in my pocket and went out to the corniche, catching the first felucca across to the West Bank where this time I paid off my guides before I reached the English House.

  The roses were still blooming around the great brick manor and Lady Roper was cutting some of them, laying them carefully in her basket. “Really, Paul, I don’t think you must worry, especially if she doesn’t want to talk about her experiences. We all know she’s telling the truth. Why don’t you have a man to man with Bernie? There he is, in the kitchen.”

  Through the window, Sir Bernard waved with his cocoa cup before making a hasty and rather obvious retreat.

  16 Your Funeral Bores Them With Its Brilliant Doom

  Awaking at dawn the next morning I found it impossible to return to sleep. I got up and tried to make some notes but writing down what my sister had told me somehow made it even more difficult to understand. I gave up. Putting on a cotton gelabea and some slippers I went down to the almost empty street and walked to the nearest corner café where I ordered tea and a couple of rolls. All the other little round tables were occupied and from the interior came the sound of a scratched Oum Kal Thoum record. The woman’s angelic voice, singing the praises of God and the joys of love, reminded me of my schooldays in Fez, when I had lived with my father during his brief entrepreneurial period, before he had returned to England to become a Communist. Then Oum Kal Thoum had been almost a goddess in Egypt. Now she was as popular again, like so many of the old performers who had left a legacy of 78 rpms which could be played on spring-loaded gramophones or the new clockworks which could also play a delicate LP but which few Egyptians could afford. Most of the records were re-pressed from ancient masters purchased from Athenian studios which, fifty years earlier, had mysteriously manufactured most Arabic recordings. The quality of her voice came through the surface noise as purely as it had once sounded through fractured stereos or on crude pirate tapes in the days of licence and waste. Inte el Hob, wistful, celebratory, thoughtful, reminded me of the little crooked streets of Fez, the stink of the dyers and tanners, the extraordinary vividness of the colours, the pungent mint bales, the old men who loved to stand and declaim on the matters of the day with anyone who would listen, the smell of fresh saffron, of lavender carried on the backs of donkeys driven by little boys crying “balek!” and insulting, in the vocabulary of a professional soldier, anyone who refused to move aside for them. Life had been sweet then, with unlimited television and cheap air-travel, with any food you could afford and any drink freely available for a few dirhams, and every pleasure in the reach of the common person. The years of Easy, the years of Power, the paradise from which our lazy greed and hungry egos banished us to eternal punishment, to the limbo of the Age of Penury, for which we have only ourselves to blame! But Fez was good, then, in those good, old days.

  A little more at peace with myself, I walked down to the river while the muezzin called the morning prayer and I might have been back in the Ottoman Empire, leading the simple, steady life of a small land-owner or a civil servant in the family of the Bey. The debris of the river, the ultimate irony of the Nile filling with all the bottles which had held the water needed because we had polluted the Nile, drew my attention. It was as if the water industry had hit upon a perfect means of charging people whatever they wanted for a drink of eau naturelle, while at the same time guaranteeing that the Nile could never again be a source of free water. All this further reinforced my assertion that we were not in the Golden Age those New New Aquarians so longed to recreate. We were in a present which had turned our planet into a single, squalid slum, where nothing beautiful could exist for long, unless in isolation, like Lady Roper’s rose garden. We could not bring back the Golden Age. Indeed we were now paying the price of having enjoyed one.

  I turned away from the river and went back to the café to find Sheikh Abu Halil sitting in the chair I had recently occupied. “What a coincidence, Mr Pappenheim. How are you? How is your wonderful sister?” He spoke educated English.

  I suspected for a moment that he knew more than he allowed but then I checked myself. My anxiety was turning into paranoia. This was no way to help my sister.

  “I was killing time,” he said, “before coming to see you. I didn’t want to interrupt your beauty sleep or perhaps even your breakfast, but I guessed aright. You have the habits of Islam.” He was flattering me and this in itself was a display of friendship or, at least, affection.

  “I’ve been looking at the rubbish in the river.” I shook his hand and sat down in the remaining chair. “There aren’t enough police to do anything about it, I suppose.”

  “Always a matter of economics.” He was dressed very differently today in a conservative light and dark blue gelabea, like an Alexandrian business man. On his head he wore a discreet, matching cap. “You take your sister back today, I understand, Dr Pappenheim.”

  “If she’ll come.”

  “She doesn’t want to go?” The Sufi’s eyelid twitched almost raffishly, suggesting to me that he had been awake most of the night. Had he spent that time with Bea?

  “She’s not sure now,” I said. “She hates flying.”

  “Oh, yes. Flying is a very difficult and unpleasant thing. I myself hate it and would not do it if I could.”

  I felt he understood far more than that and I was in some way relieved. “You couldn’t persuade her of the wisdom of coming with me, I suppose, sidhi?”

  “I have already told her what I think, Paul. I think she should go with you. She is unhappy here. Her burden is too much. But she would not and will not listen to me. I had hoped to congratulate you and wish you God Speed.”

  “You’re very kind.” I now believed him sincere.

  “I love her, Paul.” He gave a great sigh and turned to look up at the sky. “She’s an angel! I think so. She will come to no harm from us.”

  “Well—” I was once again at a loss. “I love her too, sidhi. But does she want our love, I wonder?”

  “You are wiser than I thought, Paul. Just so. Just so.” He ordered coffee and sweetac for us both. “She knows only the habit of giving. She has never learned to receive. Not here, anyway. Especially from you.”

  “She was always my best friend.” I said. “A mother sometimes. An alter-ego. I want to get her to safety, Sheikh Abu Hilal.”

  “Safety?” At this he seemed sceptical. “It would be good for her to know the normality of family life. She has a husband.”

  “He’s in New Zealand. They split up. He hated what he called her ‘charity work’.”

  “If he was unsympathetic to her calling, that must be inevitable.”

  “You really think she has a vocation?” The coffee came and the over-sweetened breakfast cakes which he ate with considerable relish. “We don’t allow these at home. All those chemicals!” There was an element of self-mockery in his manner now that he was away from his medrassah. “Yes. We think she has been called. We have many here who believe that of themselves, but most are self-deluding. Aswan is becoming a little overstocked with mystics and wonder-workers. Eventually, I suppose, the fashion will change, as it did in Nepal, San Francisco or Essaouira. Your sister, however, is special to us. She is so sad, these days, Paul. There is a chance she might find happiness in London. She is spending too long i
n the desert.”

  “Isn’t that one of the habitual dangers of the professional mystic?” I asked him.

  He responded with quiet good humour. “Perhaps of the more old-fashioned type, like me. Did she ever tell you what she passed to Lallah Zenobia that night?”

  “You mean the cause of her arrest? Wasn’t it money? A purse. The police thought it was.”

  “But if so, Paul, what was she buying?”

  “Peace of mind, perhaps,” I said. I asked him if he really believed in people from space, and he said that he did, for he believed that God had created and populated the whole universe as He saw fit. “By the way,” he said. “Are you walking up towards the Cataract? There was some kind of riot near there an hour or so ago. The police were involved and some of the youngsters from the holiday villas. Just a peaceful demonstration, I’m sure. That would be nothing to do with your sister?”

  I shook my head.

  “You’ll go back to England, will you, Dr Pappenheim?”

  “Eventually,” I told him. “The way I feel at the moment I might retire. I want to write a novel.”

  “Oh, your father was a vicar, then?”

  I was thoroughly puzzled by this remark. Again he began to laugh. “I do apologise. I’ve always been struck by the curious fact that so much enduring English literature has sprung, as it were, from the loins of the minor clergy. I wish you luck, Dr Pappenheim, in whatever you choose to do. And I hope your sister decides to go with you tomorrow.” He kissed me three times on my face. “You both need to discover your own peace. Sabah el Kher.”

  “Allah yisabbe’h Kum bil-Kher.”

  The holy man waved a dignified hand as he strolled down towards the corniche to find a calash.

  By now the muezzin was calling the mid-morning prayer. I had been away from my hotel longer than planned. I went back through the crowds to the green and white entrance of the Osiris and climbed slowly to my room. It was not in my nature to force my sister to leave and I felt considerably ashamed of my attempt to persuade Inspector el-Bayoumi to extradite her. I could only pray that, in the course of the night, she had come to her senses. My impulse was to seek her out but I still did not know her address.

  I spent the rest of the morning packing and making official notes until, at noon, she came through the archway, wearing a blue soft cotton dress and matching shawl. I hoped this was a sign she was preparing for the flight back to civilisation. “You haven’t eaten, have you?” she said.

  She had booked a table on the Mut, a floating restaurant moored just below the Cataract. We boarded a thing resembling an Ottoman pleasure barge, all dark green trellises, scarlet fretwork and brass ornament, while inside it was more luxurious than the sufi’s “harem”. “It’s hardly used, of course, these days,” Bea said. “Not enough rich people wintering in Aswan any more. But the atmosphere’s nice still. You don’t mind? It’s not against your puritan nature, is it?”

  “Only a little.” I was disturbed by her apparent normality. We might never have ridden into the desert together, never have talked about aliens and spaceships and Ancient Egyptian universities. I wondered, now, if she were not seriously schizophrenic.

  “You do seem troubled, though.” She was interrupted by a large man in a dark yellow gelabea smelling wildly of garlic who embraced her with affectionate delight. “Beatrice! My Beatrice!” We were introduced. Mustafa shook hands with me as he led us ecstatically to a huge, low table looking over the Nile, where the feluccas and great sailing barges full of holidaymakers came close enough to touch. We sat on massive brocaded foam cushions.

  I could not overcome my depression. I was faced with a problem beyond my scope. “You’ve decided to stay I take it?”

  The major domo returned with two large glasses of Campari Soda. “Compliments of the house.” It was an extraordinary piece of generosity. We saluted him with our glasses, then toasted each other.

  “Yes.” She drew her hair over her collar and looked towards the water. “For a while, anyway. I won’t get into any more trouble, Paul, I promise. And I’m not the suicide type. That I’m absolutely sure about.”

  “Good.” I would have someone come out to her as soon as possible, a psychiatrist contact in MEDAC who could provide a professional opinion.

  “You’ll tell me your address?”

  “I’m moving. Tomorrow. I’ll stay with the Ropers if they’ll have me. Any mail care of them will be forwarded. I’m not being deliberately mysterious, dear, I promise. I’m going to write. And meanwhile, I’ve decided to tell you the whole of it. I want you to remember it, perhaps put it into some kind of shape that I can’t. It’s important to me that it’s recorded. Do you promise?”

  I could only promise that I would make all the notes possible.

  “Well, there’s actually not much else.”

  I was relieved to know I would not for long have to suffer those miserably banal inventions.

  “I fell in love, you see.”

  “Yes, you told me. With a spaceman.”

  “We knew it was absolutely forbidden to make love. But we couldn’t help ourselves. I mean, with all his self-discipline he was as attracted to me as I was to him. It was important, Paul.”

  I did my best to give her my full attention while she repeated much of what she had already told me in the desert. There was a kind of Biblical rhythm to her voice. “So they threw me out. I never saw my lover again. I never saw his home again. They brought me back and left me where they had found me. Our tents were gone and everything was obviously abandoned. They let their engines blow more sand over the site. Well, I got to Aswan eventually. I found water and food and it wasn’t too hard. I’m not sure why I came here. I didn’t know then that I was pregnant. I don’t think I knew you could get pregnant. There isn’t a large literature on sexual congress with semi-males of the alien persuasion. You’d probably find him bizarre, but for me it was like making love to an angel. All the time. It was virtually our whole existence. Oh, Paul!” She pulled at her collar. She smoothed the table-cloth between her knife and fork. “Well, he was wonderful and he thought I was wonderful. Maybe that’s why they forbid it. The way they’d forbid a powerful habit-forming stimulant. Do you know I just this second thought of that?”

  “That’s why you were returned here?” I was still having difficulty following her narrative.

  “Didn’t I say? Yes. Well, I went to stay with the Ropers for a bit, then I stayed in the commune and then the medrassah, but I kept going out to the site. I was hoping they’d relent, you see. I’d have done almost anything to get taken back, Paul.”

  “To escape from here, you mean?”

  “To be with him. That’s all. I was—I am—so lonely. Nobody could describe the void.”

  I was silent, suddenly aware of her terrible vulnerability, still convinced she had been the victim of some terrible deception.

  “You’re wondering about the child,” she said. She put her hand on mine where I fingered the salt. “He was born too early. He lived for eight days. I had him at Lallah Zenobia’s. You see, I couldn’t tell what he would look like. She was better prepared, I thought. She even blessed him when he was born so that his soul might go to heaven. He was tiny and frail and beautiful. His father’s colouring and eyes. My face, I think, mostly. He would have been a wunderkind, I shouldn’t be surprised. Paul…” Her voice became a whisper. “It was like giving birth to the Messiah.”

  With great ceremony, our meal arrived. It was a traditional Egyptian meze and it was more and better food than either of us had seen in years. Yet we hardly ate.

  “I took him back to the site.” She looked out across the water again. “I’d got everything ready. I had some hope his father would come to see him. Nobody came. Perhaps it needed that third sex to give him the strength? I waited, but there was not, as the kids say, a Reen to be seen.” This attempt at humour was hideous. I took firm hold of her hands. The tears in her eyes were barely restrained.

  “He died.” She
released her hands and looked for something in her bag. I thought for a frightening moment she was going to produce a photograph. “Eight days. He couldn’t seem to get enough nourishment from what I was feeding him. He needed that—whatever it was he should have had.” She took a piece of linen from her bag and wiped her hands and neck. “You’re thinking I should have taken him to the hospital. But this is Egypt, Paul, where people are still arrested for witchcraft and here was clear evidence of my having had congress with an ifrit. Who would believe my story? I was aware of what I was doing. I’d never expected the baby to live or, when he did live, to look the way he did. The torso was sort of pear-shaped and there were several embryonic limbs. He was astonishingly lovely. I think he belonged to his father’s world. I wish they had come for him. It wasn’t fair that he should die.”

  I turned my attention to the passing boats and controlled my own urge to weep. I was hoping she would stop, for she was, by continuing, hurting herself. But, obsessively, she went on. “Yes, Paul. I could have gone to Europe as soon as I knew I was pregnant and I would have done if I’d had a hint of what was coming, but my instincts told me he would not live or, if he did live, it would be because his father returned for him. I don’t think that was self-deception. Anyway, when he was dead I wasn’t sure what to do. I hadn’t made any plans. Lallah Zenobia was wonderful to me. She said she would dispose of the body properly and with respect. I couldn’t bear to have some future archaeologist digging him up. You know, I’ve always hated that. Especially with children. So I went to her lean-to in Shantytown. I had him wrapped in a shawl—Mother’s lovely old Persian shawl—and inside a beautiful inlaid box. I put the box in a leather bag and took it to her.”

  “That was the Cairene Purse? Or did you give her money, too?”

  “Money had nothing to do with it. Do the police still think I was paying her? I offered Zenobia money but she refused. ‘Just pray for us all,’ was what she said. I’ve been doing it every night since. The Lord’s prayer for everyone. It’s the only prayer I know. I learnt it at one of my schools.”