“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 naïveté, 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, or wherever, 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 relax
ed, 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.
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 convince her, my dear sir, 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 bucket. “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-toman 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 Fèz, 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 Fèz, 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 Fèz 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 débris 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 re-create. 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, Dr. 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 businessman. 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 Halil.”
“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 oversweetened breakfast cakes which he ate with considerable relish. “We don’t allow these at home. All those chemicals!” There was an element of sel
f-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 over-stocked 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, doctor. There is a chance she might find happiness in London. She is spending too long in 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.”
The Best of Michael Moorcock Page 44