Budayeen Nights (4 page)

It took her only a few moments to hide the laymen’s synopses in her briefcase. She then took the highly technical agendas and dropped them into the already-addressed envelopes to be sent to the Third Reich’s highest officials. She had guaranteed that the brief introductory discussion would be attended by no one. Jehan could easily imagine the response the unintelligible scientific papers would get from the political and military leaders—curt, polite regrets that they would not be in Berlin on that day, or that their busy schedules prevented them from attending.

It was all so easy. The Reich’s rulers did not hear the talks, and they did not learn how close Germany was to developing an atomic bomb. Never again was there any hope that such a weapon could be built in time to save the Reich—all because the wrong invitations had been slipped into a few envelopes.

Jehan awoke from a dream, and saw that the night had grown very old. It would not be long before the sun began to flood the sky with light. Soon she would have a resolution to her anxiety. She would learn if the boy would come to the alley or stay away. She would learn if he would rape her or if she would find the courage to defend herself. She would learn if she would be judged guilty or innocent of murder. She would be granted a glimpse of the outcome to all things that concerned her.

Nevertheless, she was so tired, hungry, and uncomfortable that she was tempted to give up her vigil. The urge to go home was strong. Yet she had always believed that her visions were gifts granted by Allah, and it might offend Him to ignore the clear warnings. For Allah’s sake, as well as her own, she reluctantly chose to wait out the rest of the dying night. She had seen so many visions since last evening—more than on any other day of her life—some new, some familiar from years passed. It was, in a small, human way, almost comparable to the Night of Power that was bestowed upon the Prophet, may Allah’s blessing be on him and peace. Then Jehan felt guilty and blasphemous for comparing herself to the Messenger that way.

She got down on her knees and faced toward Makkah and addressed a prayer to Allah, reciting one of the later surahs from the glorious Qur’ân, the one called “The Morning Hours,” which seemed particularly relevant to her situation. “‘In the name of Allah, the Beneficent, the Merciful. By the morning hours, and by the night when it is stillest, thy Lord hath not forsaken thee nor doth He hate thee, and verily the latter portion will be better for thee than the former, and verily thy Lord will give unto thee so that thou wilt be content. Did He not find thee an orphan and protect thee? Did He not find thee wandering and direct thee? Did He not find thee destitute and enrich thee? Therefore the orphan oppresseth not, therefore the beggar driveth not away, therefore of the bounty of thy Lord be thy discourse.’”

When she finished praying, she stood up and leaned against the wall. She wondered if that surah prophesied that soon she’d be an orphan. She hoped that Allah understood that she never intended anything awful to happen to her parents. Jehan was willing to suffer whatever consequences Allah willed, but it didn’t seem fair for her mother and father to have to share them with her. She shivered in the damp, cold air and gazed up to see if there was yet any brightening of the sky. She pretended that already the stars were beginning to disappear.

The square was jammed and choked with people. Soon Hilbert could see why: a platform had been erected in the center, and on it stood a man with what could only be an executioner’s axe. Hilbert felt his stomach sicken. His Arab guide had thrust aside everyone in their way until Hilbert stood at the very foot of the platform. He saw uniformed police and a bearded old man leading out a young girl. The crowd parted to allow them by. The girl was stunningly lovely. Hilbert looked into her huge, dark eyes—“like the eyes of a gazelle,” he remembered from reading Omar Khayyam—and glimpsed her slender form undisguised by her modest garments. As she mounted the steps, she looked down directly at him again. Hilbert felt his heart lurch; he felt a tremendous shudder. Then she looked away.

The Arab guide screamed in Hilbert’s ear. It meant nothing to the mathematician. He watched in horror as Jehan knelt, as the headsman raised his weapon of office. Hilbert shouted. His guide tightened his grip on the outsider’s arm, but Hilbert lashed out in fury and threw the man into a group of veiled women. In the confusion, Hilbert ran up the steps of the scaffold. The imam and the police officers looked at him angrily. The crowd began to shout fiercely at this interruption, this desecration by a European kafir, an unbeliever. Hilbert ran to the police. “You must stop this!” he cried in German. They did not understand him and tried to heave him off the platform. “Stop!” he screamed in English.

One of the police officers answered him. “It cannot be stopped,” he said gruffly. “The girl committed murder. She was found guilty, and she cannot pay the blood price to the victim’s family. She must die instead.”

“Blood price!” cried Hilbert. “That’s barbarous! You would kill a young girl just because she is poor? Blood price!
I’ll
pay your goddamn blood price! How much is it?”

The policeman conferred with the others, and then went to the imam for guidance. Finally, the English-speaking officer returned. “Four hundred kiam,” he said bluntly.

Hilbert took out his wallet with shaking hands. He counted out the money and handed it with obvious disgust to the policeman. The imam cried a declaration in his weak voice. The words were passed quickly through the crowd, and the onlookers grew more enraged at this spoiling of their morning’s entertainment. “Take her and go quickly,” said the police officer. “We cannot protect you, and the crowd is becoming furious.”

Hilbert nodded. He grasped Jehan’s thin wrist and pulled her along after him. She questioned him in Arabic, but he could not reply. As he struggled through the menacing crowd, they were struck again and again by stones. Hilbert wondered what he had done, if he and the girl would get out of the mosque’s courtyard alive. His fondness for young women—it was an open joke in Got-tingen—had that been all that had motivated him? Had he unconsciously decided to rescue the girl and take her back to Germany? Or was it something more laudable? He would never know. He shocked himself: While he tried to shield himself and the girl from the vicious blows of the crowd, he thought only of how he might explain the girl to his wife, Käthe, and Clarchen, his mistress.

In 1957, Jehan Fatima Ashufi was fifty-eight years old and living in Princeton, New Jersey. By coincidence, Albert Einstein had come here to live out the end of his life, and before he died in 1955 they had many pleasant afternoons at his house. In the beginning, Jehan wanted to discuss quantum physics with Einstein; she even told him Heisenberg’s answer to Einstein’s objection to God’s playing dice with the universe. Einstein was not very amused, and from then on, their conversation concerned only nostalgic memories of the better days in Germany, before the advent of the National Socialists.

This afternoon, however, Jehan was sitting in a Princeton lecture hall, listening to a young man read a remarkable paper, his Ph.D. thesis. His name was Hugh Everett, and he was saying that there was an explanation for all the paradoxes of the quantum world, a simple but bizarre way of looking at them. His new idea included the Copenhagen interpretation and explained away all the objections that might be raised by less open-minded physicists. He stated first of all that quantum mechanics provided predictions that were invariably correct when measured against experimental data. Quantum physics
had
to be consistent and valid, there was no longer any doubt. The trouble was that quantum theory was beginning to lead to unappetizing alternatives.

Everett’s thesis reconciled them. It eliminated Schrödinger’s cat paradox, in which the cat in the box was merely a quantum wave function, not alive and not dead, until an observer looked to see which state the cat was in. Everett showed that the cat was no mere ghostly wave function. Everett said that wave functions do not “collapse,” choosing one alternative or the other. He said that the process of observation chose one reality, but the other reality existed in its own right, just as “real” as our world. Particles do not choose at random which path to take—they take every path, in a separate, newly branched world for each option. Of course, at the particle level, this meant a huge number of branchings occurring at every moment.

Jehan knew this almost-metaphysical idea would find a chilly reception from most physicists, but she had special reasons to accept it eagerly. It explained her visions. She glimpsed the particular branch that would be “real” for her and also those that would be “real” for other versions of her, her own duplicates living on the countless parallel worlds. Now, as she listened to Everett, she smiled. She saw another young man in the audience, wearing a T-shirt that said, WIGNER: WOULD YOU PLEASE ASK YOUR FRIEND TO FEED MY CAT? THANKS, SCHRÖDINGER. She found that very amusing.

When Everett finished reading, Jehan felt good. It wasn’t peace she felt, it was more like the release one feels after an argument that had been brewing for a long while. Jehan thought back over the turns and sidetracks she had taken since that dawn in the alley in the Budayeen. She smiled again, sadly, took a deep breath, and let it out. How many things she had done, how many things had happened to her! They had been long, strange lives. The only question that still remained was: How many uncountable futures did she still have to devise, to fabricate from the immaterial resources of this moment? As she sat there—in some worlds—Jehan knew the futures went on without her willing them to, needing nothing of her permission. She was not cautious of when tomorrow came, but
which
tomorrow came.

Jehan saw them all, but she still understood nothing. She thought,
The Chinese say that a journey of a thousand li begins with a single step. How shortsighted that is! A thousand journeys of a thousand li begin with a single step. Or with each step not taken.
She sat in her chair until everyone else had left the lecture hall. Then she got up slowly, her back and her knees giving her pain, and she took a step. She pictured myriad mirror-Jehans taking that step along with her, and a myriad that didn’t. And in all the worlds across time, it was another step into the future.

At last, there was no doubt about it: It was dawn. Jehan fingered her father’s dagger and felt a thrill of excitement. Strange words flickered in her mind. “The Heisenty uncertainberg principle,” she murmured, already hurrying toward the mouth of the alley. She felt no fear.

Marîd Changes His Mind

This is, of course, the first two chapters of A Fire in the Sun, the second of the Budayeen novels. George always said he liked to start a novel with what is essentially an unrelated (or almost unrelated) short story about the character, like that first ten-minute sequence of the film
Goldfinger.

George was the first person I knew to write about clip-in personalities, long before Hollywood explored the idea in the film Strange Days, and he came back to this device many times in the Budayeen series. In many ways this story is an exploration of the Wonderful World of Moddies and Daddies.

The technology itself, he said, had been designed for treatment of neurological damage. But like all technology, it was immediately seized upon and exploited by the entertainment and pornography industries so that its original intent was almost forgotten.

In this story we also meet some of the Effinger Revolving Cast. George liked to recycle characters from story to story, sometimes disregarding entirely the fact that they might have been killed in a previous tale. In “Marîd Changes His Mind,” we encounter the tavern keeper M. Gargotier and his daughter Maddie, who are prototypical inhabitants of the Budayeen, having first made their appearance in “The City on the Sand” and who also figured in George’s caper-novel Felicia—which of course wasn’t set in the Budayeen and hadn’t the slightest thing to do with it
.

We also encounter one of the many incarnations of Sandor Courane, the hapless science fiction writer who gets killed in so many of George’s stories. This is one of Courane’s few appearances where he doesn’t die, and in fact gets to live presumably happily ever after. Courane (whom we also meet in “The City on the Sand”) is, like Marîd, a version of George himself, so of course Marîd describes him as looking a little like himself but older, plumper, and wiser. A poet, allegedly, hut not a very good one.

—
Barbara Hambly

1

WED RIDDEN FOR MANY DAYS OUT THE COAST highway toward Mauretania, the part of Algeria where I’d been born. In that time, even at its lethargic pace, the broken-down old bus had carried us from the city to some town forsaken by Allah before it even learned what its name was. Centuries come, centuries go: In the Arab world they arrive and depart loaded on the roofs of shuddering, rattling buses that are more trouble to keep in service than the long parades of camels used to be. I remembered what those bus rides were like from when I was a kid, sitting or standing in the aisle with fifty other boys and men and maybe another two dozen clinging up on the roof. The buses passed by my home then. I saw turbaned heads, heads wearing fezzes or knit caps, heads in white or checked keffiyas. All men. That was something I planned to ask my father about, if I ever met him. “O my father,” I would say, “tell me why everyone on the bus is a man. Where are their women?”

And I always imagined that my father—I pictured him tall and lean with a fierce dark beard, a hawk or an eagle of a man; he was, in my vision, Arab, although I had my mother’s word that he had been a Frenchman—and I saw my father gazing thoughtfully into the bright sunlight, framing a careful reply to his young son. “O Marîd, my sweet one,” he would say—and his voice would be deep and husky, issuing from the back of his throat as if he never used his lips to speak, although my mother said he wasn’t like that at all—“Marîd, the women will come later. The men will send for them later.”

“Ah,” I would say. My father could pierce
all
riddles. I could not pose a question that he did not have a proper answer for. He was wiser than our village shaykh, more knowledgeable than the man whose face filled the posters pasted on the wall we were pissing on. “Father,” I would ask him, “why are we pissing on this man’s face?”

“Because it is idolatrous to put his face on such a poster, and it is fit only for a filthy alley like this, and therefore the Prophet, may the blessing of Allah be on him and peace, tells us that what we are doing to these images is just and right.”

“And father?” I would always have one more question, and he’d always be blissfully patient. He would smile down at me, put one hand fondly behind my head. “Father? I have always wanted to ask you, what do you do when you are pissing and your bladder is so full it feels like it will explode before you can relieve it and while you are pissing,
just then
, the muezzin—“

Saied hit me hard in the left temple with the palm of his hand. “You sleeping out here?”

I looked up at him. There was glare everywhere. I couldn’t remember where the hell we were. “Where the hell are we?” I asked him.

He snorted. “
You’re
the one from the Maghreb, the great wild west. You tell me.”

“Have we got to Algeria yet?” I didn’t think so.

“No, stupid. I’ve been sitting in that goddamn little coffeehouse for three hours charming the warts off this fat fool. His name is Hisham.”

“Where are we?

“Just crossed through Carthage. We’re on the outskirts of Old Tunis now. So listen to me. What’s the old guy’s name?”

“Huh? I don’t remember.”

He hit me hard in the right temple with the palm of his other hand. I hadn’t slept in two nights. I was a little confused. Anyway, he got the easy part of the job: Sitting around the bus stops, drinking mint tea with the local ringleaders and gossiping about the marauding Christians and the marauding Jews and the marauding heathen niggers and just in general being goddamn smooth; and I got the piss-soaked alleys and the flies. I couldn’t remember why we divided this business up like that. After all, I was supposed to be in charge—it was my idea to find this woman, it was my trip, we were using my money. But Saied took the mint tea and the gossip, and I got—well, I don’t have to go into that again.

We waited the appropriate amount of time. The sun was disappearing behind a western wall; it was almost time for the sunset call to prayer. I stared at Saied, who was now dozing. Good, I thought, now I get to hit him in the head. I had just gotten up and taken one little step, when he looked up at me. “It’s time, I guess,” he said, yawning. I nodded, didn’t have anything to add. So I sat back down, and Saied the Half-Hajj went into his act.

Saied is a natural-born liar, and it’s a pleasure to watch him hustle.

He had the personality module he liked best plugged into his brain—his heavy-duty, steel-belted, mean-mother-of-a-tough-guy moddy. Nobody messed with the Half-Hajj when he was chipping that one in.

Back home in the city, Saied thought it was beneath him to earn money. He liked to sit in the cafes with me and Mahmoud and Jacques, all day and all evening. His little chicken, the American boy everybody called Abdul-Hassan, went out with older men and brought home the rent money. Saied liked to sneer a lot and wear his gallebeya cinched with a wide black leather belt, which was decorated with shiny chrome steel strips and studs. The Half-Hajj was always careful of his appearance.

What he was doing in this vermin-infested roadside slum was what he called fun. I waited a few minutes and followed him around the corner and into the coffeehouse. I shuffled in, unkempt, filthy, and took a chair in a shadowy corner. The proprietor glanced at me, frowned, and turned back to Saied. Nobody ever paid any attention to me. Saied was finishing the tail-end of a joke I’d heard him tell a dozen times since we’d left the city. When he came to the payoff, the shopkeeper and the four other men at the long counter burst into laughter. They liked Saied. He could make people like him whenever he wanted. That talent was programmed into an add-on chip snapped into his bad-ass moddy. With the right moddy and the right daddy chips, it didn’t matter where you’d been born or how you’d been raised. You could fit in with any sort of people, you could speak any language, you could handle yourself in any situation. The information was fed directly into your short-term memory. You could literally become another person, Ramses II or Buck Rogers in the 25th Century, until you popped the moddy and daddies out.

Saied was being rough and dangerous, but he was also being charming, if you can imagine that combination. I watched the shop owner reach and grab the teapot. He poured tea into the Half-Hajj’s glass, slopping some onto the wooden counter. Nobody moved to mop it up. Saied raised the glass to drink, then slammed it down again. “Yaa salam!” he roared. He leaped up.

“What is it, O my friend?” asked Hisham, the proprietor.

“My ring!” Saied shouted. He was wearing a large gold ring, and he’d been waving it under the old man’s nose for two solid hours. It had had a big, round diamond in its center.

“What’s the matter with your ring?”

“Look for yourself! The stone—my diamond—it’s gone!”

Hisham caught Saied’s flapping arm and saw that, indeed, the diamond was now missing. “Must have fallen out,” the old man said, with the sort of folk wisdom you find only in these petrified provincial villages.

“Yes, fallen out,” said Saied, not calmed in the least. “But where?”

“Do you see it?”

Saied made a great show of searching the floor around his stool. “No, I’m sure it’s not here,” he said at last.

“Then it must be out in the alley. You must’ve lost it the last time you went out to piss.”

Saied slammed the bar with his heavy fist. “And now it’s getting dark, and I must catch the bus.”

“You still have time to search,” said Hisham. He didn’t sound very confident.

The Half-Hajj laughed without humor. “A stone like that, worth four thousand Tunisian dinars, looks like a tiny pebble among a million others. In the twilight I’d never find it. What am I to do?”

The old man chewed his lip and thought for a moment. “You’re determined to leave on the bus when it passes through?” he asked.

“I must, O my brother. I have urgent business.”

“I’ll help you if I can. Perhaps I can find the stone for you. You must leave your name and address with me; then if I find the diamond, I’ll send it to you.”

“May the blessings of Allah be on you and on your family!” said Saied. “I have little hope that you’ll succeed but it comforts me to know you will do your best for me. I’m in your debt. We must determine a suitable reward for you.”

Hisham looked at Saied with narrowed eyes. “I ask no reward,” he said slowly.

“No, of course not, but I insist on offering you one.”

“No reward is necessary. I consider it my duty to help you, as a Muslim brother.”

“Still,” Saied went on, “should you find the wretched stone, I’ll give you a thousand Tunisian dinars for the sustenance of your children and the ease of your aged parents.”

“Let it be as you wish,” said Hisham with a small bow.

“Here,” said my friend, “let me write my address for you.” While Saied was scribbling his name on a scrap of paper, I heard the rumbling of the bus as it lurched to a stop outside the building.

“May Allah grant you a good journey,” said the old man.

“And may He grant you prosperity and peace,” said Saied, as he hurried out to the bus.

I waited about three minutes. Now it was my turn. I stood up and staggered a couple of steps. I had a lot of trouble walking in a straight line. I could see the shopkeeper glaring at me in disgust. “The hell do you want, you filthy beggar?” he said.

“Some water,” I said.

“Water! Buy something or get out!”

“Once a man asked the Messenger of God, may Allah’s blessings be on him, what was the noblest thing a man may do. The reply was ‘To give water to he who thirsts.’ I ask this of you.”

“Ask the Prophet. I’m busy.”

I nodded. I didn’t expect to get anything free to drink out of this crud. I leaned against his counter and stared at a wall. I couldn’t seem to make the place stand still.

“
Now
what do you want? I told you to go away.”

“Trying to remember,” I said peevishly. “I had something to tell you. Ah, yes, I know.” I reached into a pocket of my jeans and brought out a glittering round stone. “Is this what that man was looking for? I found this out there. Is this—?”

The old man tried to snatch it out of my hand. “Where’d you get that? The alley, right?
My
alley. Then it’s mine.”

“No, I found it. It’s—“

“He said he wanted me to look for it.” The shopkeeper was already gazing into the distance, spending the reward money.

“He said he’d pay you money for it.”

“That’s right. Listen, I’ve got his address. Stone’s no good to you without the address.”

I thought about that for a second or two. “Yes, O Shaykh.”

“And the address is no good to me without the stone. So here’s my offer: I’ll give you two hundred dinars for it.”

“Two hundred? But he said—“

“He said he’d give me a thousand.
Me
, you drunken fool. It’s worthless to you. Take the two hundred. When was the last time you had two hundred dinars to spend?”

“A long time.”

“I’ll bet. So?”

“Let me have the money first.”

“Let me have the stone.”

“The money.”

The old man growled something and turned away. He brought a rusty coffee can up from under the counter. There was a thick wad of money in it, and he fished out two hundred dinars in old, worn bills. “Here you are, and damn your mother for a whore.”

I took the money and stuffed it into my pocket. Then I gave the stone to Hisham. “If you hurry,” I said, slurring my words despite the fact that I hadn’t had a drink or any drugs all day, “you’ll catch up with him. The bus hasn’t left yet.”

The man grinned at me. “Let me give you a lesson in shrewd business. The esteemed gentleman offered me a thousand dinars for a four-thousand-dinar stone. Should I take the reward, or sell the stone for its full value?”

“Selling the stone will bring trouble,” I said.

“Let me worry about that. Now you go to hell. I don’t ever want to see you around here again.”

He needn’t worry about that. As I left the decrepit coffeehouse, I popped out the moddy I was wearing. I don’t know where the Half-Hajj had gotten it; it had a Malaccan label on it, but I didn’t think it was an over-the-counter piece of hardware. It was a dumbing-down moddy; when I chipped it in, it ate about half of my intellect and left me shambling, stupid, and just barely able to carry out my half of the plan. With it out, the world suddenly poured back into my consciousness, and it was like waking from a bleary, drugged sleep. I was always angry for half an hour after I popped that moddy. I hated myself for agreeing to wear it, I hated Saied for conning me into doing it.
He
wouldn’t wear it, not the Half-Hajj and his precious self-image. So I wore it, even though I’m gifted with twice the intracranial modifications as anybody else around, enough daddy capacity to make me the most talented son of a bitch in creation. And still Saied persuaded me to damp myself out to the point of near vegetability.

On the bus, I sat next to him, but I didn’t want to talk to him or listen to him gloat.

“What’d we get for that chunk of glass?” he wanted to know. He’d already replaced the real diamond in his ring.

I just handed the money to him. It was his game, it was his score. I couldn’t have cared less. I don’t even know why I went along with him, except that he’d said he wouldn’t come to Algeria with me unless I did.

He counted the bills. “Two hundred? That’s all? We got more the last two times. Oh, well, what the hell—that’s two hundred dinars more we can blow in Algiers. ‘Come with me to the Kasbah.’ Little do those gazelle-eyed boys know what’s stealing toward them even now, through the lemon-scented night.”

“This stinking bus, that’s what, Saied.”

He looked at me with wide eyes, then laughed. “You got no romance in you, Marîd. Ever since you had your brain wired, you been no fun at all.”

“How about that.” I didn’t want to talk anymore. I pretended that I was going to sleep. I just closed my eyes and listened to the bus thumping and thudding over the broken pavement, with the unending arguments and laughter of the other passengers all around me. It was crowded and hot on that reeking bus, but it was carrying me hour by hour nearer to the solution of my own mystery. I had come to a point in my life where I needed to find out who I really was.