Budayeen Nights Read online

  BUDAYEEN NIGHTS

  GEORGE ALEC EFFINGER

  With a Foreward and Story

  Introductions by Barbara Hambly

  Copyright © 2003 by the Estate of George Alec Effinger.

  Published by E-Reads. All rights reserved.

  ISBN-10: 0-7592-9670-7

  ISBN-13: 978-0-7592-9670-1

  GEORGE ALEC EFFINGER

  1947-2002

  “Foreword,” copyright © 2003 by Barbara Hambly.

  “The City on the Sand,” first published in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, April 1973.

  “King of the Cyber Rifles,” first published in Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, Mid-December 1987.

  “Marîd and the Trail of Blood,” first published in Sisters of the Night, edited by Barbara Hambly and Martin H. Greenberg, Warner Aspect, 1995.

  “Marîd Changes His Mind,” first published in Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, May 1989.

  “Marîd Throws a Party,” copyright © 2003 by the Estate of George Alec Effinger. Originally written as the first two chapters of Word of Night, the fourth Marîd Audran novel. Previously unpublished.

  “The Plastic Pasha,” copyright © 2003 by the Estate of George Alec Effinger.

  Previously unpublished.

  “Schrödinger’s Kitten,” first published in Omni, September 1988.

  “Slow, Slow Burn,” first published in Playboy, May 1988.

  “The World as We Know It,” first published in Futurecrime, edited by Cynthia Manson and Charles Ardai, Fine, 1992.

  Copyright © 2003 by the Estate of George Alec Effinger. These stories were first published in slightly different form and appear here in the author’s preferred text.

  Foreword and Story Introductions copyright © 2003 by Barbara Hambly Cover illustration copyright © 2003 by John Picacio

  Edited by Marty Halpern

  Contents

  FOREWORD -Barbara Hambly

  SCHRÖDINGER'S KITTEN

  Marîd CHANGES HIS MIND

  SLOW, SLOW BURN

  Marîd AND THE TRAIL OF BLOOD

  KING OF THE CYBER RIFLES

  Marîd THROWS A PARTY

  THE WORLD AS WE KNOW IT

  THE CITY ON THE SAND

  THE PLASTIC PASHA

  For Nell, Denise, Helen, Valerie,

  and all the others without whom

  there would be no Budayeen.

  -GAE

  Foreword

  IT ALWAYS SURPRISED GEORGE WHEN PEOPLE WOULD refer to him as a science fiction writer.

  It was a natural perception, of course, of someone who made his debut under the auspices of Damon Knight; and to the end of his days, George used a science-fiction palette to tell fantasy stories. But it wasn’t until he began writing the Budayeen novels—When Gravity Fails, A Fire in the Sun, and The Exile Kiss—that he settled fully into science fiction mode, and reinvented himself as one of the founding fathers of Cyberpunk.

  The setting of the Budayeen came about quite naturally, and is intrinsic to the writing of Gravity. George had a very dark side to his nature, a fascination with the underworld and the demimonde that came about, I think, because many of his mother’s friends were hookers and strippers back in Cleveland: he used to go and watch them dance when he was in his early teens. Maybe this was why he was so comfortable in the shadow-world of New Orleans. (I still remember my first visit to New Orleans, sitting in a bar with George, talking to the barmaid, and watching the dancer on the runway: George leaned over to me and whispered, “You’re the only genetically female person in this room.”)

  He’d hang out in the bars along Chartres and Decatur Streets, nursing a drink, talking to the girls and not-quite-girls, and playing pinball until nearly dawn. He was good friends with a lot of the denizens of that world, including a sexchange named Amber who took the wrong man home one night and ended up being beaten to death and thrown off a balcony.

  The New Orleans police being what they were, no investigation was made.

  George’s outpouring of outrage and helplessness became When Gravity Fails. He set it in the nameless Muslim city he’d invented for “The City on the Sand”—which became a pay-the-medical-bills book called Relatives—because some of the characters were based on real people, including the local Mafia boss. But when you read it, it’s obviously the French Quarter, with maybe a little of the East Village in the sixties where George lived after dropping out of Yale. Being George, he studied Islamic culture extensively, so as not to inadvertently insult those whose world it actually is. He had the manuscript read by Muslim friends, and at one point the office staff of the local Islamic Cooperative Association phoned him up to compliment him on the respect he’d shown for their faith and culture. (“But we’re liberal Sunnis,” the caller added. “I don’t know what the Shi’ites would say about it.”)

  George intended Gravity as a one-shot, but when it took off in popularity and Bantam asked him to do a second book, he found he did have another novel-length tale to tell of that universe, based around the death of his own grandfather, a Cleveland policeman who was killed in the line of duty. He said the Budayeen was the first world he’d created that had depth and richness, whose characters lived lives of their own beyond the boundaries of any individual tale. I think this is the reason the world continues to fascinate: because it is real.

  His protagonist, Marîd Audran, fascinates and charms because he, too, is real—or as real as things get in the Budayeen. George said frankly that, like the hapless science-fiction writer Sandor Courane of some of his other tales, Marîd is based on himself. It amused George that many readers take Marîd at Marîd’s own evaluation of himself: cool, clever, street-smart, sharp. But in fact, George said, if you look at what Marîd actually does rather than what he says, he is in fact cowardly, not nearly as clever as he thinks he is, and has a major drug problem which he never quite gets around to addressing.

  Like George—dearly as I loved him.

  George had a lot of trouble working during the last twelve years of his life. Drugs, chronic pain, alcohol, and depression sapped his energy and his ability to focus: there were days when he’d shove the same three or four words around the computer screen, other days when all he would do was spend hours sending long e-mails to friends, or troll around the Internet in the same fashion that he used to go down to the clubs on Chartres Street. It was heartbreaking to watch, and everyone who knew him tried everything they could think of…

  And of course, nothing worked. It seldom does.

  One of the several tragedies connected with George was how much brilliant potential was wasted: what there could have been.

  But what there is, in those three novels and the handful of short stories surrounding them, is unforgettable. Wry and strange and dark, it is a world peopled with folks whose connection with the technological marvels of the twenty-second century are by far the least strange thing about them.

  George was above all a very delicate observer of human behavior, fascinated by what people do in their lives and how they do it. The novels tell the main story. These vignettes, these fragments, fill in background to that world—in many ways the most interesting part of the world George created. They are what you see when you sit in the bars and cafes of the Budayeen in the sweltering neon darkness, watching the folks go by on the sidewalk, the way the clueless Ernst Weinraub in “The City on the Sand” watches: the way George would watch folks in the Quarter.

  This is the world of Budayeen Nights.

  Barbara Hambly

  Los Angeles

  October 2002

  Budayeen Nights

  Introduction to

  Schrödinger’s Kitten

  This is probably the best known of
George’s short Budayeen stories. It won the Hugo, Nebula, and Seiun Awards, and touches deep chords in nearly every reader, for it deals with—and conquers—deep and universal fears.

  Fear of death; fear of change; fear of somehow doing something wrong that will condemn one’s self to a horrible fate. In a way it is every child’s fear. It reconstructs Schrödinger’s philosophical image of the cat in the box—dead or saved only by the opening of the box by an observer—into an infinity of paths and variations of hope and destiny. Others have done this—notably Larry Niven in his story “All the Myriad Ways”—but to different effect.

  I think it’s what goes on in nearly every writer’s mind when they construct a story. It’s certainly how writers look at their own lives, with a dispassionate infinity of equal possibilities.

  In some worlds George became a doctor.

  In some worlds George became a ballplayer.

  In some worlds it was possible for George to live happily ever after, as we all hope we will and wish we could.

  —Barbara Hambly

  Schrödinger’s Kitten

  THE CLEAN CRESCENT MOON THAT BEGAN THE new month hung in the western sky across from the alley. Jehan was barely twelve years old, too young to wear the veil, but she did so anyway. She had never before been out so late alone. She heard the sounds of celebration far away, the three-day festival marking the end of the holy month of Ramadan. Two voices sang drunkenly as they passed the alley; two others loudly and angrily disputed the price of some honey cakes. The laughter and the shouting came to Jehan as if from another world. In the past, she’d always loved the festival of Id-el-Fitr; she took no part in the festivities now, though, and it seemed odd to her that anyone else still could. Soon she gave it all no more of her attention. This year she must keep a meeting more important than any holiday. She sighed, shrugging: The festival would come around again next year. Tonight, with only the silver moon for company, she shivered in her blue-black robe.

  Jehan Fatima Ashufi stepped back a few feet deeper into the alley, farther out of the light. All along the Street, people who would otherwise never be seen in this quarter were determinedly amusing themselves. Jehan shivered again and waited. The moment she longed for would come just at dawn. Even now the sky was just dark enough to reveal the moon and the first impetuous stars. In the Islamic world, night began when one could no longer distinguish a white thread from a black one; it was not yet night. Jehan clutched her robe closely to her with her left hand. In her right hand, hidden by her long sleeve, was the keen-edged, gleaming, curved blade she had taken from her father’s room.

  She was hungry and she wished she had money to buy something to eat, but she had none. In the Budayeen there were many girls her age who already had ways of getting money of their own; Jehan was not one of them. She glanced about herself and saw only the filth-strewn, damp and muddy paving stones. The reek of the alley disgusted her. She was bored and lonely and afraid. Then, as if her whole sordid world suddenly dissolved into something else, something wholly foreign, she saw more.

  Jehan Ashufi was twenty-six years old. She was dressed in a conservative dark gray woolen suit, cut longer and more severely than fashion dictated, but appropriate for a bright young physicist. She affected no jewelry and wore her black hair in a long braid down her back. She took a little effort each morning to look as plain as possible while she was accompanying her eminent teacher and advisor. That had been Heisenberg’s idea. In those days, who believed a beautiful woman could also be a highly talented scientist? Jehan soon learned that her wish of being inconspicuous was in vain. Her dark skin and her accent marked her a foreigner. She was clearly not European. Possibly she had Levantine blood. Most who met her thought she was probably a Jew. This was Gottingen, Germany, and it was 1925.

  The brilliant Max Born, who first used the expression “quantum mechanics” in a paper written two years before, was leading a meeting of the university’s physicists. They were discussing Max Planck’s latest proposals concerning his own theories of radiation. Planck had developed some basic ideas in the emerging field of quantum physics, yet he had used classical Newtonian mechanics to describe the interactions of light and matter. It was clear that this approach was inadequate, but as yet there was no better system. At the Gottingen conference, Pascual Jordan rose to introduce a compromise solution; but before Born, the department chairman, could reply, Werner Heisenberg fell into a violent fit of sneezing.

  “Are you all right, Werner?” asked Born.

  Heisenberg merely waved a hand. Jordan attempted to continue, but again Heisenberg began sneezing. His eyes were red and tears crept down his face. He was in obvious distress. He turned to his graduate assistant. “Jehan,” he said, “please make immediate arrangements, I must get away. It’s my damned hay fever. I want to leave at once.”

  One of the others at the meeting objected. “But the colloquium—“

  Heisenberg was already on his feet. “Tell Planck to go straight to hell, and to take de Broglie and his matter waves with him. The same goes for Bohr and his goddamn jumping electrons. I can’t stand any more of this.” He took a few shaky steps and left the room. Jehan stayed behind to make a few notations in her journal. Then she followed Heisenberg back to their apartments.

  There were no mosques in the Budayeen, but in the city all around the walled quarter there were many mosques. From the tall, ancient towers, strong voices called the faithful to morning devotions. “Come to prayer, come to prayer! Prayer is better than sleep!”

  Leaning against a grimy wall, Jehan heard the chanted cries of the muezzins, but she paid them no mind. She stared at the dead body at her feet, the body of a boy a few years older than she, someone she had seen about the Budayeen but whom she did not know by name. She still held the bloody knife that had killed him.

  In a short while, three men pushed their way through a crowd that had formed at the mouth of the alley. The three men looked down solemnly at Jehan. One was a police officer; one was a qadi, who interpreted the ancient Islamic commandments as they applied to modern life; and the third was an imam, a prayer leader who had hurried from a small mosque not far from the east gate of the Budayeen. Within the walls the pickpockets, whores, thieves, and cutthroats could do as they liked to each other. A death in the Budayeen didn’t attract much attention in the rest of the city.

  The police officer was tall and heavily built, with a thick black mustache and sleepy eyes. He was curious only because he had watched over the Budayeen for fifteen years, and he had never investigated a murder by a girl so young.

  The qadi was young, clean-shaven, and quite plainly deferring to the imam. It was not yet clear if this matter should be the responsibility of the civil or the religious authorities.

  The imam was tall, taller even than the police officer, but thin and narrow-shouldered; yet it was not asceticism that made him so slight. He was well known for two things: his common sense concerning the conflicts of everyday affairs, and the high degree of earthly pleasures he permitted himself. He, too, was puzzled and curious. He wore a short, grizzled gray beard, and his soft brown eyes were all but hidden within the reticulation of wrinkles that had slowly etched his face. Like the police officer, the imam had once worn a brave black mustache, but the days of fierceness had long since passed for him. Now he appeared decent and kindly. In truth, he was neither, but he found it useful to cultivate that reputation.

  “O my daughter,” he said in his hoarse voice. He was very upset. He much preferred explicating obscure passages of the glorious Qur’ân to viewing such tawdry matters as blatant dead bodies in the nearby streets.

  Jehan looked up at him, but she said nothing. She looked back down at the unknown boy she had killed.

  “O my daughter,” said the imam, “tell me, was it thou who hath slain this child?”

  Jehan looked back calmly at the old man. She was concealed beneath her kerchief, veil, and robe; all that was visible of her were her dark eyes and the long thin fingers th
at held the knife. “Yes, O Wise One,” she said, “I killed him.”

  The police officer glanced at the qadi.

  “Prayest thou to Allah?” asked the imam. If this hadn’t been the Budayeen, he wouldn’t have needed to ask.

  “Yes,” said Jehan. And it was true. She had prayed on several occasions in her lifetime, and she might yet pray again sometime.

  “And knowest thou there is a prohibition against taking of human life that Allah hath made sacred?”

  “Yes, O Wise One.”

  “And knowest thou further that Allah hath set a penalty upon those who breaketh this law?”

  “Yes, I know.”

  “Then, O my daughter, tell us why thou hath brought low this poor boy.”

  Jehan tossed the bloody knife to the stone-paved alley. It rang noisily and then came to rest against one leg of the corpse. “I killed him because he would do me harm in the future,” she said.

  “He threatened you?” asked the qadi.

  “No, O Respected One.”

  “Then-“

  “Then how art thou certain that he would do thee harm?” the imam finished.

  Jehan shrugged. “I have seen it many times. He would throw me to the ground and defile me. I have seen the visions.”

  A murmur grew from the crowd still cluttering the mouth of the alley behind Jehan and the three men. The imam’s shoulders slumped. The police officer waited patiently. The qadi looked discouraged. “Then he didst not offer thee harm this morning?” said the imam.

  “No.”

  “Indeed, as thou sayest, he hath never offered thee harm?”

  “No. I do not know him. I have never spoken with him.”

  “Yet,” said the qadi, clearly unhappy, “you murdered him because of what you have seen? As in a dream?”

  “As in a dream, O Respected One, but more truly as in a vision.”