If he sees infrared, DeSpain realized, he’ll know I’ve got a bulletproof vest on … damn, damn, damn.
“Mr. Dennis DeSpain, who served time for running liquor while drunk,” the Turk said, as if identifying Dennis for all time with his previous lowest moment.
“Turk, who the State Department no longer protects,” DeSpain said, watching the heat patch resolve into two figures, one Berenice, tiny, uniformly warm across the body, the other the Turk, large, with cold blotches over the head and torso. I bet I could see him if I took the goggles off.
“I can’t see,” Berenice said. “What are you doing?”
Bastard’s lights flared infrared. DeSpain clawed the goggles away from his eyes, blinded from glare. He threw himself toward the bushes he’d seen before, pulled his gun, and tried to hear sounds, fire at sounds.
But speakers cut on, electric guitars being mutilated by band saws, microphones being run through hammer mills. “Mary and Jesus Chain,” he thought someone shouted. A chitinous foot pinned his gun hand. He tried to kick, but the damn thing had such reflexes. The Turk had him by a leg. The foot against his hand squeezed its toes until he dropped the gun. Then the alien lifted DeSpain, still blinded, and tied his legs together. Another heave and he was dangling head down on what had to have been a hook. DeSpain wondered why the alien didn’t just hook him through his Achilles tendons. Maybe Bobby’s tendons hadn’t held?
Then he heard a whuffled gunshot, a crack, and a second shot that went splat. The terrible sound stopped and he was just dangling blind there, wondering if the shots had been inside the electronic equipment or out. After a second DeSpain said, “I can’t see.”
“Figured you couldn’t.” It was Berenice. “I couldn’t for an instant myself even though I’d closed my eyes. He didn’t figure an old lady’d get him. The back of his neck cracked like a lobster.”
“You warned him I was coming.”
“Shit, Dennis, if I cut you loose, can you fall okay? If it was me up there, I’d break a hip coming down.”
“Cut me loose.”
“First, the Turk knew you’d come before I even told him. I told him so he’d let me get at his back.” DeSpain fell onto the alien’s body, which half grabbed at him. He scuttled away and tried to blink away the green blobs still blinding him. Berenice kept talking. “I couldn’t know whether I could get through the skull and I didn’t know where he had vital organs, so I went for his neck. One shot to crack him, the second to get the neuroconnectors.”
DeSpain said, “Do you know where there’s a phone in the house?”
“I’ll drive you home. I don’t want to explain the gun I used. Plastic. I used to have friends like that, smuggle them onto airplanes.”
“I could say Henry Allen gave it to me.”
“Dennis, I’ll tell everyone you saved me. Let you keep your balls on with the other distributors and I won’t have to explain this gun.”
Marie Cleans Up
I got there too late to do anything, passed the alien dead next to a hook with cut ropes. Berenice and Dennis were walking up the steps to the front door, both looking tired and sweaty.
“I killed him,” Dennis said. “In self-defense.” Berenice got the door open; maybe the alien had been so sure of himself that it wasn’t locked. We went in the house and saw Bobby’s spine, cleaned white, curved like a fish over the mantel. Berenice said, “It looks rather handsome.” Dennis shuddered. I thought it jangled between weirdly beautiful and grotesque—conceptual overload and exhaustion running my visual centers like the spine was an optical illusion.
Berenice found the phone and called the sheriff’s department. I took the phone from her and told the dispatcher, “You shits couldn’t investigate right away, could you?”
When the deputies arrived, they told Berenice to wipe the prints off the gun and help them destroy the tapes that were still rolling out in the yard where Turk had his meat hook. Dennis looked more guilty than I’d ever seen him.
“You mean you didn’t save her. She saved you?”
“Damn tapes.” I loved him then as hard as ever, nakedly happy to be alive, embarrassed for being saved by an old lady.
One of the deputies asked, “Where in the hell did she get a plastic pistol?”
The sheriff himself arrived in his business suit and after listening to a few people said to Berenice, “If you weren’t as old as you are, we’d arrest you. Marie, take her home.” They stripped Dennis of his bulletproof vest and his knife, and cuffed him.
“Take him straight to the hospital and call Dr. Tucker,” Berenice said. “The lights blinded him. If you don’t take care of him, he’ll sue.”
She never gets the keys again, I decided as I drove the Cadillac home. Berenice slumped over halfway home, asleep and drooling, looking a mess in early morning sun.
7
Aftermath for the Lawyer
Neither Marie nor Berenice woke me up when they got back. The first I heard about the second killing was at ten-thirty when Orris DeSpain called me to ask about filing separation papers.
“Marie was there again,” she said, “and your aunt. Berenice killed Turk while Dennis dangled helpless. They brought out Bobby’s spine and took it to the funeral home for burial.”
But I’d told them all to wait. “What are you talking about?” I said. Why didn’t they let me know what was going on? “Berenice?”
“Berenice. The alien turned his back on her and she killed him with a plastic explosives gun.” Orris sounded as though she’d always known Berenice was dangerous.
I’d ask Marie. Berenice would lie. “Okay, Orris, but why are you filing separation papers?”
“I’m going for a law degree at George Washington University. It makes more sense than shooting Dennis or Marie. What is this, some ballad with me as the villainess against the Nut Brown Maid?”
“Get another lawyer, Orris. I really don’t want to hear about it.” I figured she’d just called me to see what I’d known about the situation.
I got furious. Then my incision started throbbing, so I just lay back in bed, carefully bent so to relieve tension on that.
Berenice came in then and said, “I think we should tell you that your client Turkemaw is dead.”
“Orris DeSpain told me. Damn you, I told all of you to wait.”
Berenice sat down in a chair by my bed and looked at her hands, turning them this way and that. “If I’da been younger, I’da been in trouble. What if Turk’s people don’t understand? I could have been risking the planet.”
“Wasn’t it self-defense?”
“I killed him to save that Dennis DeSpain. Shit, was Dennis any better? Used the plastic gun. Never knew where that gun came from other than someone stole it. Never knew why I kept it, either.”
I said, “Don’t forget what he did to Bobby.”
She said, “I’m confused about Bobby. Isn’t he dead?”
* * *
Two days later, when I was trying to sleep in the afternoon, still using a pillow to hold the stitches in, a couple more aliens and a State Department man came by.
The other aliens were more alien than Turk. How, I wasn’t sure, but as soon as I saw the other aliens, I knew Turk had been pushing his own limits the way he pushed Dennis DeSpain’s. He hadn’t been born or bred to be human, but he was crazy enough to fake it. These new aliens wore sashes and wristbands, not blue coveralls, and looked neater than Turk had looked. And they didn’t look a bit like tourists.
“Was there a reason to kill Turkemaw?” the State Department guy asked. He wasn’t the one I’d seen with Turk earlier.
Berenice said, “I’m sorry, but he was killing humans.”
One of the aliens said, “We wondered,” so flatly I decided they had rather globally wondered and sent us Turk to see how we’d react. A test. These aliens would never explain how the test worked. No right way, no wrong way, no blame.
“Is Dennis free then?” I asked.
“Your local law is holding hi
m for the gun he couldn’t use.” The alien sounded vaguely confused, but then nobody arrested Berenice for her much-more-illegal gun, that CIA special that someone, probably a European leftist studying war in the Middle East, had stolen thirty years earlier, a talisman gun that had drifted around radical circles until Berenice stopped it when she returned to Rocky Mount.
The State Department man asked Berenice, “Do you remember who gave you that gun?”
“An old lady my age remember something like that?” Her eyes went vague, unfocused, then flickered toward me. Yes, I thought, absolutely, but nobody pushed for an answer. Both the State Department guy and the aliens stood for a few seconds looking at Berenice as though she were a monument, then left without saying good-bye.
After the door closed, Berenice said, “I’m sorry all this came at the time it did. I feel most guilty that I did enjoy it. Just a little, you understand. I hadn’t been out like that in a long damn time.”
I wished I wasn’t getting the impression she’d done the right thing. And I pitied Turk, even if he were the alien equivalent of Dennis DeSpain. Someone trickier than he let him come. “Just don’t get into more trouble until mid-August.” I decided I’d have to take care of Bobby’s kids—I’d been half responsible for him getting killed.
“I didn’t mean to get you upset. And I didn’t save Bobby, did I? All I got out of it was some more memories.” She stopped as if checking that at least those memories moved from short-term to long-term memory. “I didn’t think I could get more memories at my age. But poor Bobby.”
Neither of us saved Bobby, old aunt. The warranty on my body has expired, even if the biopsy was negative, and here we are, later in life than we imagined when we were younger. In your radical days, did you ever expect to be so old? I thought I’d skip middle age myself, but no.
Yes, I was glad she showed Rocky Mount a bit of the old young Berenice who’d run radical in the streets.
* * *
Orris filed her separation papers with commonwealth’s attorney Withold Brunner representing her. Everyone thought that bitchy of her, but she didn’t betray any of Dennis’s illegal business. But then Dennis rolled over when he heard who her lawyer was.
As Orris said she was going to do, she went to George Washington University, but instead of returning to Rocky Mount or Roanoke as a lawyer, she became a State Department officer. When she was back once, trolling for gossip about Dennis and Marie, she said, “Henry Allen inspired me to do it.”
“He seemed rather doofus to me,” I said.
“Precisely. I knew I could do a better job.”
Some time in the next year I sold the miniature Cadillac to make sure Berenice never again went adventuring and came home after signing the papers to incredible guilt. With the sale of her car or the death she’d caused or just aging in general, she never again was as clear or vigorous as the night she killed the alien. Sylvia, Bobby’s widow, helped me with her. I felt odd, no possible children of my own, but with a sudden family that I had to support. I began taking bootleggers as clients.
Marie had married Dennis when the divorce was final. He told all his buddies he did it to strengthen his alliances with his black dealers. Rumor in the rougher bars and jukes had it Berenice had been about to shoot him next when Marie saved him. My bootlegger clients kept me informed as to various twists of the county’s oral traditions.
When Marie got her chemical engineering degree a few years later, she applied for a legal distilling license for fuel-grade alcohol. They hired me to help them. We took it out in Marie’s name because of Dennis’s record.
Dennis saved Marie from becoming the officious techie I had imagined as her future when I first met her. Her white husband seemed to have made her wicked enough to be tolerant of human foibles—Berenice’s senility, her outlaw cousins. With DeSpain with her, even trout fishing probably seemed erotic and slimy dirty fun. Whatever, years after Marie got her chemical engineering degree and her legal liquor license, you could suspect she still kept a shake-baby dress or two. I hoped she didn’t think keeping a space for her outlaw side was a failing. I saw it as a sign of grace.
But poor Dennis. By the time he was forty, he was strictly legal.
We all met around Berenice’s grave sometime after he’d turned forty-three. Marie wore a light purple velveteen dress that I knew wasn’t disrespectful of the mourners of this particular dead.
Marie said, “Berenice said this color would make a white woman look yellow green. She said I ought to wear it a lot.”
I said, “She refused to believe that you’d turn out to be just another dye-house chemist.”
Marie looked at Dennis and said, “Is it so different?”
Dennis said, “We’re doing better than that, Marie.” He seemed embarrassed. He said, “Lilly, I’m sorry.”
I knew he meant for Bobby, and just nodded. But then don’t we middleclass Southerners always fail the rednecks who trust us? When Bobby was in high school, he asked his daddy’s supervisor about getting in a support group for the college-bound. The supervisor earlier had said to the social worker organizing the group, “You damn fool, you’re stealing my best future workers.” And the supervisor told Bobby he’d be happier avoiding high-class anxieties and the college-bound support group was just a scam to give the social worker a job.
Funny, how I’d forgotten that until now.
The aliens neither invaded nor gave us FTL drive diagrams. Not while I was alive, at least.
Last time we heard about Orris, she was the American cultural attaché to Angola. Time magazine printed a photo of her driving a Land-Rover out of the embassy gates with the president’s daughter. She was laughing.
DEATH ON THE NILE
Connie Willis
Connie Willis lives in Greeley, Colorado, with her family. She first attracted attention as a writer in the late seventies with a number of outstanding stories for the now-defunct magazine Galileo, and she went on to establish herself as one of the most popular and critically acclaimed writers of the 1980s. In 1982, she won two Nebula Awards, one for her superb novelette “Fire Watch,” and one for her poignant short story “A Letter from the Clearys”; a few months later, “Fire Watch” went on to win her a Hugo Award as well. In 1989, her powerful novella “The Last of the Winnebagos” won both the Nebula and the Hugo, and she won another Nebula in 1990 for her novelette “At the Rialto.” Last year, her landmark novel Doomsday Book won both the Nebula Award and the Hugo Award, as did her short story “Even the Queen”—making her one of the most honored writers in the history of science fiction, and, as far as I know, the only person ever to win two Nebulas and two Hugos in the same year. Her other books include Water Witch and Light Raid, written in collaboration with Cynthia Felice, Fire Watch, a collection of short fiction, and the outstanding Lincoln’s Dreams, her first solo novel. Her most recent book is a major collection, Impossible Things, and a new novella, “Uncharted Territory.” She has had stories in our First, Second, Fourth, Sixth, Seventh, Eighth, Ninth, and Tenth Annual Collections.
In the wry but ultimately moving story that follows, she describes, with typical panache, one woman’s dream vacation to Egypt—a trip that soon leads her on a quest for self-discovery far more profound and bizarre than anything she could ever have bargained for.…
Chapter 1: Preparing for Your Trip—What to Take
“‘To the ancient Egyptians,’” Zoe reads, “‘Death was a separate country to the west—’” The plane lurches. “‘—the west to which the deceased person journeyed.’”
We are on the plane to Egypt. The flight is so rough the flight attendants have strapped themselves into the nearest empty seats, looking scared, and the rest of us have subsided into a nervous window-watching silence. Except Zoe, across the aisle, who is reading aloud from a travel guide.
This one is Somebody or Other’s Egypt Made Easy. In the seat pocket in front of her are Fodor’s Cairo and Cooke’s Touring Guide to Egypt’s Antiquities, and there are half a d
ozen others in her luggage. Not to mention Frommer’s Greece on $35 a Day and the Savvy Traveler’s Guide to Austria and the three or four hundred other guidebooks she’s already read out loud to us on this trip. I toy briefly with the idea that it’s their combined weight that’s causing the plane to yaw and careen and will shortly send us plummeting to our deaths.
“‘Food, furniture, and weapons were placed in the tomb,’” Zoe reads, “‘as provi—’” The plane pitches sideways. “‘—sions for the journey.’”
The plane lurches again, so violently Zoe nearly drops the book, but she doesn’t miss a beat. “‘When King Tutankhamun’s tomb was opened,’” she reads, “‘it contained trunks full of clothing, jars of wine, a golden boat, and a pair of sandals for walking in the sands of the afterworld.’”
My husband Neil leans over me to look out the window, but there is nothing to see. The sky is clear and cloudless, and below us there aren’t even any waves on the water.
“‘In the afterworld the deceased was judged by Anubis, a god with the head of a jackal,’” Zoe reads, “‘and his soul was weighed on a pair of golden scales.’”
I am the only one listening to her. Lissa, on the aisle, is whispering to Neil, her hand almost touching his on the armrest. Across the aisle, next to Zoe and Egypt Made Easy, Zoe’s husband is asleep and Lissa’s husband is staring out the other window and trying to keep his drink from spilling.
“Are you doing all right?” Neil asks Lissa solicitously.
“It’ll be exciting going with two other couples,” Neil said when he came up with the idea of our all going to Europe together. “Lissa and her husband are lots of fun, and Zoe knows everything. It’ll be like having our own tour guide.”
It is. Zoe herds us from country to country, reciting historical facts and exchange rates. In the Louvre, a French tourist asked her where the Mona Lisa was. She was thrilled. “He thought we were a tour group!” she said. “Imagine that!”
Imagine that.
“‘Before being judged, the deceased recited his confession,’” Zoe reads, “‘a list of sins he had not committed, such as, I have not snared the birds of the gods, I have not told lies, I have not committed adultery.’”
The Year's Best SF 11 # 1993 Page 30