The Fresco (35 page)

“I was worried that Morse might talk about the Inkleozese,” she murmured. “That really was a conspiracy, of sorts, between the Pistach and the Inkleozese themselves, but Morse is pretending it never happened.”

“Right. If he acknowledges they impregnated him, someone may commiserate with him, or grin at him, or laugh behind his back, and he couldn't take that.”

“He's going to have to deal with it sooner or later.”

“Maybe denial is the only way he can function at all,” said Chad. “The whole business has to be pretty traumatic.” He got up. “We'd better go back and see if they're continuing or recessing.”

They were continuing. Morse was gone, the vice chairman of the committee had taken over, and he did want to know about the Inkleozese.

“I saw them on TV,” Benita said. “When everyone else did. Also, the envoys told me about them. Evidently their specialty is to serve as monitors and observers for the Confederation.”

“Are they female?” the vice chairman wanted to know. “And if so, why were only females sent here?”

Three members of the committee leaned forward when he asked the question, focused intently on Benita. She said,
“The envoys said all the diplomatic and professional Inkleozese are female. Most of their race's artists and craftsmen are male, however. Males and females in their race have different skills. The females work better with persons and the males with things.”

“So they say,” snorted a burly committee member.

“Well, it's possible the envoys are prejudiced,” she granted. “Or the Inkleozese themselves. For generations, our national legislature was made up of men only, most of whom thought women were brainless. Some of them still think so.”

“But the Pistach envoys are male?” the same man asked intently.

“No, sir. They are not. They are nonreproductive members of their race, which has five or six different types or genders in it, like ants, or bees.”

“Then they're gay!”

“Sir, a worker bee is not gay. It is simply nonsexual.”

“Worker bees are females,” asserted a man at the end of the table. “I raise bees, I know.”

“Worker bees aren't lesbians, and Pistach aren't gay. They're nonsexual.”

They went on, not for long. Several men on the committee seemed to be convinced that God could imagine no more than two sexes, that the devil had come up with a third, that every being in the universe had to be one of those three, and therefore Vess and Chiddy had to be gay. Finally they started asking questions about the Pistach home world and the Pistach themselves, questions that could equally well have been asked about Sodom and Gomorrah. She had to tell them she didn't know the answers.

“They don't talk about their home world a great deal. They mention it from time to time, but I've never gained a clear idea of their world and how it works. Actually, I have a clearer picture of the predator worlds than I do the Pistach, because the envoys talk more about the predators.”

The committeemen looked at each other, with no idea what else they might ask her. After a spate of whispering, they excused her and Chad escorted her downstairs where he had asked the aggravation of reporters to wait.

“The senators seem to be stuck on the idea the Pistach are gay, which they're not,” she said to the waiting microphones. “Senator Morse seems to be stuck with the idea that I'm part of some conspiracy, which I'm not. The committee became very upset when I told them the predators might have made a side agreement with someone associated with their committee.”

“Agreement for what?” called a man from the back of the group.

“A formal agreement to hunt people here on Earth,” she said in her most innocent voice. “They could just go on poaching, but they really want a formal agreement for their own legal protection at the Confederation level.”

She answered shouted questions for about ten minutes, then Chad got her away with the help of six men in suits who barricaded her from the reporters as they got her out a back door. Then they went to the White House where she was sneaked up the back stairs into the family quarters where the president and First Lady were waiting for them.

“Well,” said the president to Benita. “So much for anonymity, Benita.”

“And so much for calming the committee down,” said the First Lady, shaking her head. “A couple of our party are on the committee. They told us it was quite a show.”

Benita said, “Keeping me anonymous was a lost cause from the beginning, Mr. President, ma'am. I got to the point I wasn't interested in calming them down.”

“Chad says you've had some personal experience with the predators,” murmured the FL.

“Not one I'd care to repeat, ma'am.”

Chad took a chair by the window. Benita was gestured to the chair opposite the president, who leaned forward, fixing his eyes on hers.

“Benita, we're in trouble here, and we need your help.”

She folded her hands in her lap as he went on:

“We have assumed the Pistach are beneficent. They've told us so; the things they've done for us have measurably helped without harming anyone. We would prefer to believe them, and we've gone along with them when they told us
the predators are a separate people, races that eat other intelligent life and who do not, therefore, eat Republicans. Or newsmen.”

She laughed dutifully. He was trying to be funny and charming, but his eyes were troubled as he went on.

“If, however, I am coldly rational as my aides suggest is necessary, I have to admit there could be another explanation for what's happening. All these ETs could be one people who are capable of taking different shapes in order to fool us.”

“It doesn't sound impossible,” Benita said. She didn't believe it, but it wasn't impossible.

“All right. Then let's suppose for a moment they are all one people, and they want to invade Earth and prey on our population. How would they do that?”

She thought for a moment. “They might send envoys to offer us candy and chuck us under the chin and say kootsie-coo.”

He actually smiled, though only a little. “They might, yes. Then they could move in and start hunting us while keeping us pacified by telling us the predators are really a different set of people and so on and so on.”

“And while this is going on,” said the First Lady, “still more of these creatures pick up some of our congressmen and political columnists and impregnate them with what we are told are infant members of their race. The impregnation could just as well be some kind of disease or parasite that will turn us into passive livestock.”

“And they're clever,” remarked Chad. “They pick only members of the opposition political party so that the administration would be less inclined to object.”

The president nodded. “And, by the time we work ourselves around to doing something about it, they have us whipped.”

He sat back and stared at her, switching his glance to Chad, who said, “You think Chiddy and Vess are a Trojan horse?”

“Or you think I am?” Benita asked, hearing her voice tremble.

The president shook his head. “You're not a Trojan horse knowingly, Benita. I don't believe for a minute that you could be. But…let's say that scenario is correct. What kind of woman would the envoys look for? Someone trusting. Someone…ah, patient…”

“Long suffering,” said the FL pointedly and a little indignantly. “Someone who'd put up with a lot before she got really angry, if ever. Someone who'd go along with the way things were happening, without having hysterics or throwing a fit…”

“All the time telling herself it couldn't be true,” Benita finished for her, flushing an angry red. “And you really think I'm that kind of person?”

“You've showed endless patience and forbearance in the past,” she said. “Although, from what you did today, that may no longer be true. Be that as it may, we've never had a satisfactory answer to the question, why you? Why not General Wallace? Why not the president himself, or, if he's too surrounded by Secret Service people, then why not the Chief Justice or the Speaker of the House?”

“Because those particular people are all men,” Benita said angrily. “And the Pistach didn't want a man. They were making a particular point when they chose me, an unknown, because any woman who's known for anything will already have enemies. The minute a woman, including the president's wife, tries to do something significant, even if it's for the good of the citizenry, everybody puts her down as being a woman who doesn't know her place. People love their heroes and heroines, but they love them in their assigned roles. Move outside those roles, and the public loves to make them stumble.”

The president frowned. “I had hoped we had grown more tolerant and understanding than that.”

Benita shook her head. “We like to think people are tolerant and understanding, but mostly we aren't, and there are a lot of men who think of women as a kind of speaking livestock.”

The FL said, “So the Pistach picked you because…?”

“Because nobody knows me, or anything about me. I've
done one really stupid thing in my life, and that was to marry the wrong man. Get past that and I've had an utterly unremarkable and very…chaste kind of life. Never used drugs, never smoked. My drinking is limited to an occasional beer in the summertime, or a glass of wine with Thanksgiving or Christmas dinner. I've never been able to afford dissipation. I haven't had the time or the money to support controversial causes. The same goes for love affairs. The only men I've been at all close to over the years are gay, and they were my bosses. Believe me, McVane has known who I am for weeks, and if there were anything in my past to stir a scandal, it would be on the front pages by now, like a Jackson Pollock painting, all squirt and dribble! And if McVane had information he could use, then Morse would have it. There are no issues in my past for me to get past except that I'm a woman.”

“I agree with you,” agreed the FL. “I've been trying to explain to my husband, that your being a woman is really what sticks in their craw.”

“All the people I talk to think the envoys are male,” said the president, sitting back and frowning. “Every domestic politico I talk to, every foreign diplomat who calls me, all of them, every damned one says ‘him' when he refers to an envoy.”

“They aren't male,” Benita said, turning to the FL. “That's why they did that Indian woman business at dinner.”

“But with you,” she said, “what do they appear as?”

They appeared as different things, but she had to admit, Chiddy took his human male form more often than not. She said as much, and the president and FL looked at one another meaningfully.

“What?” she demanded.

“People say that you probably react to them as a woman would to a man. That your relationship with them is subtly different than it would be if they were female, or sexless.”

“People?”

He looked uncomfortable. The FL said, “Profilers. Think people. Analysts. FBI.”

“Chad's been spying on me?” she said, glaring at him.

“No,” he said abruptly.

The FL said, “He refused to spy on you. He has only passed on what you've said about the Pistach. The people over at the FBI who attempt to make—”

“A sow's ear out of a silk purse,” Benita interrupted angrily. “They're trying to imply something sexual?”

The president leaned back in his chair. “Quite frankly, I don't think they know what they're trying to imply. They simply have a situation they don't understand, one that won't fit any pattern they're accustomed to, and they can't help me with the current problem!

“We need…we're going to have to have something more than just the envoys' word that they're beneficent. You told Chad the Pistach have gone home at least once during their visit here. That means either that home is very close, which we don't believe, or that they have a method of travel…”

“Polarized space,” she said.

All three of them looked at her in confusion.

“Chiddy told me about it,” she said, trying to remember what he'd said. “Space is full of these little tiny thingies—Chiddy calls them umquah—all spread out, evenly distributed, like layers of marbles in a tray, only marbles would have little spaces among them, and the umquah shape themselves to fill all the spaces, and they're infinitely small. All together, they fill the universe, and they repel matter and energy, joining together to squeeze matter or energy out. Chiddy said I should think of it as though gravity wasn't an attractive force but a repulsive force. It's as though matter doesn't attract other matter, it simply gets squeezed together by the umquah, and the more matter there is in one place, the more umquah are displaced to do the squeezing, so they can squeeze harder. When they squeeze out clumps of matter, they become compressed and curved around it, and they're always trying to straighten out and spread out evenly.

“When an umquah gets touched by a photon, say, it and its neighbors squeeze it out, so it gets passed along. Each umquah touches more than one other, of course, so when
ever one squeezes something out, it can start up a wave form. Sometimes it just squeezes around and around, in a tiny circle; sometimes it squeezes things across the universe.”

“I see,” said the president.

“I doubt it,” she said. “Because I don't, and neither does Chiddy. He says it's impossible to explain without the math, and he doesn't do that kind of math.”

“And you know Chiddy was telling you the truth?”

“No. Of course not, though I can't think why he would lie about it. It's possible they don't know what they're talking about. It's possible I'm not quoting them correctly. I'm not a scientist and neither are they. They're diplomats. Foreign Service types. Maybe Chiddy just made it up when I asked how they travel so quickly.”