The Fresco (42 page)

“We will keep your son,” said T'Fees. “He is not essential to anything, so far as we can see. We will hold him here until Chiddy and Vess return. Then we will send him home by some other means. A Credon ship can be paid to take him as a passenger.”

“They won't hurt him,” murmured Chiddy, close to Benita's ear. “Really.”

“I know,” she murmured in return. “But he'll try their patience severely.”

“One will ask to'eros nootch to see to your son's welfare,” said Chiddy. “All nootchi have the power of silencing children.”

She turned and went into the room where Carlos had been deposited on a sleeping mat. His face was peaceful, like a child's. She had not seen that expression in a long, long time. For several years now, whenever she'd seen him awake, she had seen only discontent and rancor. There was no reason not to leave him. Missing school was no reason. According to Angelica, he'd been cutting classes. Relationships was no reason. Miss Bigg was no longer interested.

She sighed, wiped her eyes, and returned to Chiddy. “Let him stay here if it will help matters,” she said.

Their preparations for departure were sketchy and urgent. Vess came scrambling through the shadows, Chad and Benita took their little bags and plodded toward the ship, T'Fees following closely behind them with several of his burlier rebels.

As they started to board the ship, T'Fees grasped Benita by the shoulder and turned her to face it. Him. Ter. She didn't know what it was or how to refer to it.

“We know how long the Inkleozese take to pupate,” T'Fees said. “Do not keep Chiddy and Vess past that time, or your son will be worse for it.”

“Would you hurt him, T'Fees?” she asked, gently. “Would you really?”

For a moment, it looked startled, as though it had not thought what it would do. Then it looked crafty. “You have seen on the Fresco what we are capable of.”

Two of T'Fees's aides handed Carlos out like a bale of fiber. Chad and Benita got into the ship. With a sound that was suspiciously like a sob, Chiddy closed the portholes and started them on their journey home.

TUESDAY WEEK

Shortly after they left Pistach-home, Chiddy offered Chad and Benita the sedative food and drink they had taken during the trip from Earth. Both refused.

“We have a lot of thinking to do,” Benita said. “You and Vess are obviously upset; I know our president is going to be
very
upset. I wouldn't feel I had done my utmost unless Chad and I had talked this matter over from end to end. Somehow, someone must come up with some way to prevent tragedy from happening to your people and ours!”

Chiddy didn't reply. Instead he went over to Vess, who was dithering about in an agitated manner. Chiddy put his hand on Vess's upper thorax, and the two of them simply stood there, unmoving, saying nothing, as though they had separated from the reality of now.

Chad whispered, “They don't learn how to cope with unique challenges in their own lives. They only learn the systems, and how to make the systems work.”

“They have that saying, emergencies make their own rules.”

“Even so, the rules will be things they've done before, though perhaps in a different context.” He raised his voice.
“I wish to hell I had something written about the Pistach people. Something that would give me some insight…”

Chiddy heard him and turned toward the two humans. He did it jerkily, reluctantly. “One…well, one has a journal that one began when one first talked with Benita. In it one has expressed thoughts and feelings about humankind and Pistach. One cannot say if these ideas are representative of Pistach people as a whole, but if you think they would help…”

“Oh, yes,” Benita cried. “Do let us see it, Chiddy. Or…is it written in Pistach?”

He made the expression she had grown to know as a smile, rather than as an expression of dismay or threat. “Oh, no, dearest Benita. One wrote it for you, so certainly it was written in a language you can understand. Otherwise one would be a mythologizer, a mystifier, no? Making mystic marks on sheets of precious metal or scribbling prophecies in languages long forgotten, to make oneself feel arcane and esoteric! If it is important to communicate, one does so in the language of the people.”

“Some fairly important religious messages have had to be deciphered on Earth,” Chad muttered.

“Nothing prevents a mythologizer from discovering a truth,” Chiddy said sadly, “or from misrepresenting it once he has done so, but one has always thought to find real truth emanating from many sources, written in multiple places, so to speak. Why would a communicator choose to speak or write a truth in only one place, in a language people could not understand?”

Chad cocked his head as Benita had seen him do when he was getting ready to debate a point, something he much enjoyed. “All that doesn't matter,” Benita interrupted hastily. “You wanted something written; Chiddy has something written. So let's read it.”

“One…wasn't going to give it to you until your people had qualified for membership in the Confederation,” Chiddy confessed. “Strictly speaking, one shouldn't be giving it to you at all, now. Nonmembers are not supposed to receive much information about the peoples of the Confederation, but…considering the way things are…”

He sighed heavily, the gill covers under his thorax plates fluttering in a soft chatter, like a winter wind moving through a last few dried leaves at the tip of a branch. Chiddy fetched a folder out of a cupboard and gave it to Chad, who sat down next to Benita to read it. The individual pages looked like handmade paper, and though the writing was a perfectly legible English cursive, it was somewhat crabbed and the spelling, though quite accurate phonetically, was highly original. Accordingly, the reading went slowly, and Chad and Benita grew quieter and quieter as they read on.

Chiddy's journal made it clear why membership in the Confederation was important. They could not join without Tassifoduma, and if Earth didn't get to that point, it was at the mercy of the predators. Not only the Wulivery, the Xankatikitiki and the Fluiquosm, but dozens of others, also, who lived farther toward the center of the galaxy but who would undoubtedly make the trip for such a very, very rich hunting ground.

“Remember the meeting before we left for Pistach,” Benita whispered to Chad, while Chiddy was concentrating on his dials and buttons, “when the president told me that it was of the utmost importance the envoys continue their work. He said most of the world leaders, the responsible ones, anyway, were agreed that this firm, outside pressure was bringing the positive changes no one had been able to bring about in the past.”

Chad murmured, “I was also told, confidentially, that in an environmental sense, even the predators were working to our eventual advantage. Habitat destruction is way, way down and people are talking about reclaiming eroded land rather than wiping out the last few forests in places like Madagascar. There has also been a renewed interest in population limitation, and that's something I didn't think we'd see in my lifetime.”

They went on reading, making notes, until they had to rest because it was becoming impossible to go on. Their eyes wouldn't focus. Their attention wavered.

Chiddy made his sighing sound again, which he had been doing a good deal of. “Normally the umquah push bod
ies together, just as they push planets and stars together, but when bodies move in total emptiness, the ship must generate forces to help the bodies resist disintegration. It is easier when bodies are at rest, not laboring either mentally or physically. It would be sensible to rest.”

Benita agreed. She and Chad ate something and slept a long time, and read a bit more, and slept a bit more, and conferred with one another in whispers, and read parts of the journal over again, until suddenly and all at once the hull window opened or transmuted or whatever it did, as Benita thought, and they got a look at the Earth from space.

“It's like a sapphire pendant around the throat of the sky, so beautiful,” said Benita, thinking of predators and people she cared about and all the threats and commotions that were sure to come. The hull went solid again. In only a moment, they heard Sasquatch woofing, and they were home.

Benita asked what day it was.

Chiddy referred to a complicated little device hanging on the wall or bulkhead or hull and pronounced it to be Tuesday, at eight o'clock in the morning. They had been gone only a week.

Chad left immediately, in pursuance of the plans they had made during the journey. Benita took a few moments to assure Sasquatch that she was home, that she still loved him, and that he was a good dog, then went downstairs to thank Simon for taking care of him and to ask what had happened while they'd been away.

“For five days, zip, zilch, nada, nil,” he said. “No more mysterious deaths. No more countries or cities disappearing. No shootings, no turf wars, no nothing. Peace and tranquility.” He gave her a piercing look. “Then, suddenly, two days ago, all hell broke loose.”

“What?” she cried. “What do you mean?”

“The newspapers had blanks in them. That was the first thing. Certain phrases just didn't appear!”

“Like?”

“Like ‘paid his debt to society,' or ‘took responsibility for the bombing.' Or in a quote from some prominent churchman—I forget who—talking about famines, ‘We have to
provide for the millions who are yet to be born.' I mean, that's what he said on TV, but when it came out in the paper, it was a blank except for the words, ‘We have to? Why?' in parentheses. Well, everyone was in fits about that, claiming government censorship or political interference with the free press, and then to top the day off, the predators came back. They announced it on TV. They said the Confederation would shortly confirm their right to be here. They told us they were hunting, starting now. They said the Pistach no longer have the moral authority to keep them out. There've been…well, you can imagine what there've been. Political fallout is the worst of it. The actual deaths don't amount to many, but my God, Benita…”

“Oh, Lord,” she whispered. “Those races…they knew. They were all primed to return, weren't they? I just know they were helping T'Fees all along. Chiddy wondered how in heaven they got access to all the ships and weapons they had. I'll bet T'Fees promised them he would cause a revolution on Pistach!”

Simon stared at her, owl eyed. “I have no idea what you're talking about, though I'm sure it must be extremely interesting. Are you allowed to tell me anything about
your
last few days?”

His eyebrows were up to his hairline with curiosity, but she begged off. “When it's over, I'll take you to lunch, Simon, and then I'll tell you everything. Literally, everything.”

Back upstairs, she called Angelica. Since it was apparent Benita might be outed at any moment, during the journey she had decided to tell her daughter the truth about the intermediary.

Angelica, of course, already knew, because she'd seen the news conference after the committee hearing. She had a hundred questions, which Benita answered, and a hundred more, which she couldn't.

When told that Carlos had been taken to Pistach-home and left there, she cried, “Mother! You left him there!”

“He's a hostage. Frankly, Angelica, it's difficult to think of any other role he could play as well. It doesn't require him to do anything, not even to be pleasant, and he would com
plain no matter where he was. What my…colleagues and I have to do in the next few days is extremely sensitive, and Carlos is in as disruptive mood as I've ever seen. The girl who was kidnapped with him, by the way, was his girlfriend. A Miss Sonia Bigg.”

“You're kidding.”

“I'm not in a jovial mood. Actually, it's fortunate the Pistach accepted him as a hostage, rather than insisting on one of the other of us. They won't hurt him, not at all, and we'll get him back as soon as the envoys go home.”

“They're going home?” She seemed shocked by this.

“Well, not right away. Maybe soon.”

“Oh,
no
, Mom, they've
got
to stay. They've got to get rid of those predators, and you have no idea how much things have improved. At the school! At the housing development by the bus stop! People keep talking about it! They want them to stay.”

“That's what the president told me, too. I don't have time to explain just now, because we're terribly busy. I wanted you to know I'm all right because you may not hear from me for a while.”

“Did you see Dad on TV?” she demanded.

“Yes. Just before I left,” Benita said, flushing. “He was claiming I was a sex slave to the ETs.”

“He is
so
stupid! It's embarrassing!”

“Those men you mentioned to me, Angelica? The ones who were hanging around out there? They're part of a group made up of political opponents of the president. They will do literally anything to bring him down, including making an alliance with the predators, or the Devil, if it came to that! Your father was only a minor bargaining chip in the process, a way of getting at me, and it didn't work out the way they planned. So, either they were paying him to spread around dirty misinformation, or they were paying the predators to plant ideas in his head.”

“I think it's rotten. Will you call me back when you know something? And you're telling me the truth about Carlos? I don't have to worry about him? He's all right where he is?”

“He's perfectly all right where he is.”

“I just…I think about him all the time. When we were little, you know, and you were at work, he was sort of my responsibility. Sometimes he was nice.”

Benita took a deep breath. “Angelica, I wasn't going to mention this to you, but when you and Carlos left home, I went into sort of a funk. Depression, I guess. You know that Goose and Marsh paid for good health insurance for our family, so I decided to use it and go to a shrink. We had just a few sessions.”

“You never told me…”

“I'm telling you now. Just listen. This psychologist asked me to visualize my trying to save someone who was drowning. She said to visualize the drowning person pulling my head under. She said to imagine that I struggled, and struggled, getting my head up just enough to gulp some air, but every time I did, the drowning person pulled my head under again.

“She said living with someone like your dad is like trying to save someone from drowning when what the person really wants is to drown you with him. He wants to go, but he doesn't want to go alone. She said the drowner's strongest motivation is to ‘miserate his companions,' to pull your head under, over and over until all your strength is gone and you die.”

“Mom!”

“Listen. She said once you've done everything you can to get help for the person, once the drowner has firmly or repeatedly rejected that help, the drowner has made his choice. He's deciding to be where he is, when he is, as he is. If you choose not to drown, at that point, you quit trying to save the person. You leave him where he wants to be and you stand back from him far enough he can't drag you in. That may mean far away.”

“You're talking about my brother…”

“I'm talking about Bert. I'm talking about me. I'm telling you what the psychologist told me. You haven't heard the end of it. The psychologist said that sometimes when the constant rescuer walks away, the drowner decides to swim to shore. I'm suggesting you remember it. That's all.”

“Well, I'm not giving up on Carlos.”

“You're grown up too, dear. You can make your own choices.”

She had no sooner hung up than the phone rang. Chad, saying she was expected at the White House in forty-five minutes. She took a quick shower, dug out some clean clothing, and was downstairs waiting by the time Chad arrived to pick her up.

“You suggested his wife sit in?” she asked.

“He said she would. He made it clear he's not inclined to have any private meetings with anyone. He's been walking on eggs since we've been gone. Things were in delicate balance until this predator thing—can you believe those people?—Morse is working up to some blatant, McCarthyesque attack, issuing little news bulletins that gain credence because of the source rather than the facts. I can honestly remember a time when people who worked for major news organizations had some pride in getting the story right. Now all they seem to care about is getting any story first, true or false. Morse is pretending to be outraged by it all, and by the way, he's still pretending he isn't pregnant.”