Budayeen Nights Read online

  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.

  Introduction to

  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 Hol
lywood 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

  Marîd Changes His Mind

  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.”