Sheri Tepper - The Fresco

by The Fresco(Lit)

He picked up his briefcase and left as quickly as possible.

  Outside the senator's house, where they had dropped him off, Prentice and Dink sat in the car, at the moment unwilling to move in any direction.

  "Did you know he had that rat in his craw about ET's?" Dink asked. "I thought it was only pregnant women that set him off."

  "If you mean, did I know he's afraid of little green men, no, or that he believes there's an extraterrestrial conspiracy, no. I didn't know either of those things. Maybe he had something bad happen to him when he was a boy. A movie or TV show that scared him."

  "You think?"

  Arthur said slowly, "I'd rather think that, wouldn't you? I mean, we occasionally work in rather... arcane ways. We... at least I try to avoid it, but it's the exigencies of the job. But... planning to torture family members just because they might know something... that's a little far out even for our line of work."

  "He said there'd be people dead or missing. Maybe we'd better put someone on a survey of regional and local news, tabulate any reports of people dead or missing."

  "If you do, he'll have you by the short hairs. Dink. Think a moment. Aren't there always people dead or missing?"

  "Right. Yeah. I see what you mean."

  "I hope you do, Dink. Oh, yes, I hope you do."

  From Chiddy's journal

  Before we made contact with you, dear Benita, we watched the peoples of Earth for a very long time. It was not necessary for us to learn all the languages, as we have machines to do that, but it was necessary to learn how people think. We watched the Chinese and the Africans, the Indians and Ceylonese. I was particularly interested in the nations where ruling groups had recently come to power through advocacy of specific beliefs, as for example in Afghanistan.

  For several days, I was intrigued by one particular person there, one who thought of himself as a warrior and faithful son of the Prophet. We watched his daily routines including the rituals and prayers his people engage in several times each day. Vess listened to his memories: remembered writings, oral histories, the battles he had fought and the victory his people had won. This man, whose name was Ben Shadouf, had been given a half-ruined house, badly damaged during the war. He spent part of each day rebuilding the house where he lived with his wife and his children.

  Each evening, when he rose from his prayers, he went to the inner courtyard where his wife had set out his evening meal. On a particular evening, he sat contemplating the food for a long time, then summoned his wife and pointed at the plates before him, asking for meat.

  "We had none," she murmured.

  "You have money to buy meat," he said. I watched his eyes measuring her, examining her face with what I took to be concern.

  When we first found this family, she had looked quite healthy and vigorous, as you do, dearest Benita, but she no longer did so. Now she coughed often, there were shadows around her eyes, and her hair was rough and uncared for.

  "I gave you money," he said.

  "You had no time to go with me to the market," she replied. Her eyes remained fixed on her feet. She seemed feverish and unwell. "I am no longer permitted to be on the street without a male relative."

  He gritted his teeth and waved her away, fingering the long scar that ran from his forehead down one cheek. Vess told me the man was proud of the scar, for he had killed the Russian soldier who had shot him. The bullet had nicked his cheekbone, however, and it hurt him still. Vess, feeling his mind, said the battles he had fought were more real to him than the present, more real than the victory his group had achieved. He had anticipated victory the way a starving person anticipates food. He had thought it would be satisfying, gladdening, but he found it to be only tiresome. He had agreed to the laws they would implement when the victory came, but he had not known how irritating and inconvenient those laws would be. He had not realized his wife would suffer from them.

  The woman, Afaya, could not go into the street without a male relative to protect her modesty, even though she would be covered from head to toe with only tiny mesh openings before her eyes. Afaya had told her husband that wearing the robe was like being blind. The wife of Mustapha, his neighbor and commanding officer, had tripped on the pavement and fallen, allowing her legs to be seen. She was then beaten by those who named themselves Guardians of Modesty. She had died of this beating. Mustapha had shrugged it away, for she was old and there were no children at home for her to care for, but he, too, found the new rules inconvenient.

  Vess and I puzzled over this. The woman was a receptor, of course. The men were all inceptors, except the very young ones, who would be, and very old ones, who had been. Was every one of them expected to go into breeding madness if he saw a receptor's legs? Or her face? Were they totally without self-control or a sense of shame? Seemingly so, for any woman showing her face was charged with being an erotic-stimulator-for-hire who, by showing any part of herself, had stimulated breeding madness in men and must therefore be stoned to death. Actual erotic-stimulators-for-hire, of whom there were a good many, were not stoned to death. And, most interesting of all, even while the men were doing the stoning, they knew the women they called whores were, in fact, innocent. And yet, they did it.

  We examined Ben Shadouf's irritation. He would have to hire a male servant to do the food buying for the household. He would have to sequester Afaya and his daughters to the upstairs of the house, for the servant, being unrelated to them, could not run the risk of coming into contact with them or seeing them. If his wife was not in the courtyard, where the kitchen was, she could not cook his meals! All these endless complications in order to keep his wife, a human being like himself, imprisoned from the sight and hearing of any other man! Even his consciousness of his own frustration annoyed him.

  When the wife of Ben Shadouf began coughing again, he looked up in anger. It was a strange anger, directed as much at himself as at her. Her cough had become more dangerous over the previous days. Vess and I believed she was dying. She held memories of the time before the war when she had gone to a clinic staffed by women doctors, but women were not allowed to work any longer. Their place was at home where their purity could be protected by their menfolk.

  We sought throughout the city and found the clinic, which had set up anew in a private home. It was staffed only by women who did not go out, who received shipments of medicines from outside the country and who had husbands or brothers to shop for them. Vess put the knowledge of this place into Ben Shadouf's head. We saw him thinking the women doctors were probably Americans, or influenced by Americans who were always trying to seduce followers of the Prophet to their evil ways. He worried whether he could risk defilement by going to the clinic with her, and he feared the satanic notions they would put into her head. Perhaps it would be better, he thought, to let her die and then find a new wife, one with a brother who could share the duty of protecting her.

  And yet, he loved her. We saw tears in his eyes.

  Vess and I tried to make sense of this as we watched him picking at the vegetables: lentils and onions and herbs, which had a flavorful aroma. His wife was dying, his children would be motherless, and he could not engage in any constructive action.

  Abruptly he pushed the food aside and got up. Calling loudly, he said, "I am going into the town for my meal. This food is fit only for women."

  As he left, we heard her coughing again.

  Intrigued by this episode, we sought similar confusions where religion warred with good sense. We found them in many parts of the world: in Afghanistan, Moslem against Moslem. In India, Moslem against Hindu against Christian. In Israel, Moslem against Moslem against Israelis who are against other Israelis. This particular observation saddened us, for all the pain that was in it, and it excited us, too, for it showed us there are ways in which we know we can help your world. While you are putting together your household, Benita, we are taking our first action, not in your country, where we had planned to do so, but in Afghanistan and Israel and India and so on. Your Moses, in you
r holy book, brought down plagues upon his adversaries. So Vess and I will bring down plagues upon that part of your world.

  Jerusalem-THURSDAY

  The first public notice of what was later called the Old City Absence came at 4:15 A.M. on Thursday, when a caravan of determined Ha-sidic Jews from New York approached the Old City of Jerusalem where they planned to enter via the Dung Gate on their way to securing an early and favorable position at the Wall. The valley through which they had been driving was filled with mist, making the world seem dreamlike and insubstantial, an effect which did nothing to make the sleepy driver more alert. It was only when the road before him seemed to vanish altogether that he screeched to a stop, the car swerving so that it blocked the road. The three other cars in the convoy also pulled to a halt, and the rabbi in charge of the group got out of the second one and walked toward driver number one, now out of his car and following his flashlight's yellow circle along the roadway to the point at which it disappeared infinitely downward.

  "What is it?" cried the rabbi, himself still half asleep. "What's wrong?"

  The driver's eyes stayed glued in place, though he took a backward step as he heard the rabbi's footsteps approaching.

  "What is it?" he asked again.

  "It's gone," mumbled the driver. "Everything's gone. The walls of the Old City. I can't see them. There should be some lights. Everything's gone."

  The rabbi stared along the flashlight beam. Before his feet the earth stopped at a clean, knife edge, and a great chasm opened beyond it. The chasm had no farther side that they could see, nor any bottom. The rabbi dropped to his hands and knees and crept forward until his chin was over the abyss. He lay flat and stretched one arm downward, feeling along the side.

  "Glass," he muttered. "Like it was melted. By a bomb, maybe. Smooth like glass." He pulled himself away from the edge and rose, eyes wild. "Nothing," he cried in an awed and grief-stricken voice. "Nothing there. Everything stops but the pit! It's smooth, it goes down."

  "How far?"

  "I should know how far? Farther than your light shines!"

  They went back to their vehicles. The first three cars stayed where they were while the last car in line reversed and went back the way it had come. No one among them had a cell phone, but a half mile back, they'd passed a public phone from which the frantic driver called an emergency number. His announcement was met with weary amusement.

  "Sir, you're a tourist, right? So you've probably taken the wrong road..."

  "Yes, I'm a tourist," he cried. "But the men driving the cars live here, and the man leading our caravan lives in Jerusalem! He was born here. He's lived here all his life. Will you, for God's sake, send someone to see what happened?"

  There were murmuring and the sound of voices raised in the background.

  "Where are you calling from?"

  "I have no idea," he said. "Half a mile back from where the road disappeared."

  "Where were you going, sir?"

  "The Wall. We were going to the Dung Gate and then to the Wall."

  "Stay where you are, sir."

  He rejoined his passengers, and they sat in terrified discomfort, waiting. A car went by with a flashing light. Another stopped. The driver got out.

  "You the one who called? Right. Follow me."

  They did follow, only half a mile to the place where the first car flashed its light at the edge of the abyss, its uniformed driver and passenger standing next to the rabbi, who was rocking back and forth in rapidly muttered prayer while they stared downward into nothing.

  Eventually, after lengthy radio conversations with his headquarters, the officer asked the rabbi where his group was staying and suggested they return there.

  "There's no alternate road we can take to the Wall? These people have come a long way," the rabbi objected, eyes unfocused.

  "It wouldn't matter if there were an alternate road," said the officer. "There's no Wall. The Old City's gone. All of it."

  "But... but my son, his family... they live there!"

  Lived there, silently amended the officer, taking the old man by the arm.

  For the police and the army, which was immediately called out, the rest of the night, what little there was of it, was spent putting up traffic barriers. Skid marks extending across the edge indicated the barriers came too late for some travelers.

  Afghanistan-THURSDAY

  Ben Shadouf was awakened by the call to prayer. He had overslept, not that he needed to answer to anyone for his sleeping time, merely that he had slept badly early in the night. Yesterday he had taken his concerns about Afaya to his friend, his commander, Mustapha ibn Daud, and Mustapha had told him not to take Afaya to the clinic. She would live, said Mustapha, or she would die, and in either case, that was the will of Allah.

  "I feel I am killing her," Ben Shadouf had cried. "She went to the clinic before. They helped her."

  "Only to confuse you, my friend. That is their purpose, these unbelievers. They will use anything to weaken your faith. They will use your sorrow for a wife. Your pity for a child. You must harden yourself like iron that is quenched and beaten in the fires of adversity. If our wives or children die, they die, but while they live they are pure. If we die, we die, but while we live, we are faithful!"

  Ben Shadouf came home angry. He was glad Afaya was not where he would encounter her. He did not want to see her face.

  He listened, but did not hear her. No cough. No footsteps. He heard the children, on the roof, playing a singing game. It would be safe to rise, to leave the house and find a meal in the town. Perhaps it would be as well not to come home for a while. He could ask his neighbor to have his wife check on Afaya from time to time. If she died or was unable to get out of bed, the children could be taken somewhere else. Luckily, they were still tiny. Nowhere near an age when they would need to be watched to be sure they did not let anyone see them.

  He got out of bed, washed his face and hands, and dressed himself. He visited the latrine behind the house, outside the courtyard. He did not hear a sound. Then, an upper window over the courtyard opened, its hinge screeching, and a woman leaned out. He thought it was a woman only because she did not wear a man's headdress, though she, or it, could as well be a man. A very old, very ugly man, with a huge, curving nose and a great box of a chin dotted with brown, hairy moles.

  The person leaned farther, pouring water on a plant that sat on the ledge beneath the window, and as the person leaned out, Ben Shadouf saw that he, it, was wearing Afaya's garments. But it was not Afaya. Its head was bald and wrinkled. It was hideous. He stared upward unbelieving!

  The creature saw him and smiled, opened its horrid mouth and spoke in Afaya's voice!

  "Welcome, husband. I feel somewhat better today. Perhaps you can take me to the market, to buy supplies. Perhaps you can..."

  He heard no more. His own scream of rage and terror covered anything else this horrid being had to say in Afaya's voice. Every word in Afaya's voice!

  His rage and disgust carried him in a fury to the stairs. The being was still in the room where he had seen it, her, him, the afrit, the genie, the demon who had taken his wife.

  "Where is Afaya?" he cried.

  "I am here," she said, in Afaya's voice, turning to give him a welcoming and hideous smile. She came toward him, her arms wide, and he lifted his staff to split the ugly bald skull, but the blow never landed. Instead, he felt the blow he aimed at her strike himself, riving his head so the blood ran across his eyes and he fell senseless at her feet.

  Benita-THURSDAY

  Despite her anger, partly at Carlos, mostly at herself, Benita had fallen asleep almost immediately. She did not waken until about eight on Thursday morning, when the phone rang.

  The voice was Chiddy's. "Are you all right, Benita?"

  She nodded, then realized Chiddy couldn't see the nod. "Yes," she said.

  "You were unhappy last night. You don't sound happy now."

  She didn't mean to talk about Carlos, but the words spilled
out. "My son, Carlos. He's a very manipulative person. I hoped when he went away to school, he'd grow out of it. But he's still doing it. I wish he'd just... grow up and let me alone."

  "This wish is not improper. Does your husband share this characteristic of manipulating?"

  She thought about it. "Well, yes. Until I caught onto it." Which had only taken, what? A lifetime?

  Chiddy sighed. "It is one of the tragedies of your biology, Benita. Your men and women are often insufficiently selective in the mating practices. We have noted you people do not consider that your children will have the worst traits of either parent, often to a great degree. In our opinion, women in your world who are under the age of thirty and who wish to mate should require the approval of a board of qualified geneticists and behaviorists. Alas, that is unlikely to happen. Is that all you were upset about?"

  His tone made her choke. It was so sympathetic and yet so very superior and above it all. "Well, General McVane didn't keep his word to us about not telling anyone. But the First Lady was very kind, and I don't think the media found out who I am."