A Circle of Celebrations: The Complete Edition (8 page)

“Look at them,” she said. Her eyes, her brain, and heart, felt as if they were filling up with the energy from the glowing jewels interspersed between gold beads. Amethysts, emeralds, and rubies, like pieces of a stained glass window twinkled in her fingers, more real than anything around them.

“We’re gonna get in big trouble,” Gib said. “Someone’s gonna see them.”

“So, what if they do? Watch.” When she let them go, they disappeared into the jungle of plastic, metal-toned strands, blending in with the cut facets like tigers lurking amid hanging vines. “These are the most perfect things I have ever seen!”

“I dunno, someone must have seen.”

“No one did,” she said confidently.

“Well, God saw,” he said. “I mean, there’s a cathedral right there!”

“Oh, come on!” She leaned up and gave him a kiss. “Forget about it. Let’s do a little more work, then we can party. We deserve it.”

Maybe Gib was right. It was hard to ignore God in New Orleans. God was as omnipresent as the drunks and the mold. She had never been anywhere with so many churches, and everything named Saint this or Saint that. She started to feel eyes on her, but most of them belonged to Blue Dog. She was creeped out by the ever-present paintings of Blue Dogs, whose haunted eyes followed her from numerous shop windows like a bad conscience. She tried not to let them bother her. They were there to have some fun, and to make some serious money.

She consoled herself with the fact that they weren’t the only professionals working that crowd. She all but stepped on a tiny woman with wrinkled tan skin in a headscarf who daubed passersby with mustard or hot sauce. When one of her victims turned to exclaim over the “accident,” her confederate, a husky young man with straight black hair and black eyes, would loom up and relieve the unlucky tourist of wallet or purse. The little woman apologized over and over in a lilting accent, while the man melted back into the crowd. Irmani had crossed paths with people like them before. They were South Americans. She tried to stay away from them. They didn’t like anyone else on their claimed turf.

“Let’s just party tonight, huh, baby?” Gib asked, after he had dumped the last few empty billfolds in the men’s room of the Café du Monde on Monday night.

“Why not?” Irmani said. She felt full of good will toward her fellow beings. She kept the Comus jewelry around her neck, camouflaged underneath a dozen or so cheap strands. It made her feel precious and special to have them there.

They jammed themselves into the crowd along Bourbon Street to watch a parade. Everyone screamed and laughed with excitement as each float loomed up in the dimness. Faces the size of a car smiled or menaced the revelers. Every parade had its own theme, kept a deep, dark secret until the day of the parade. This one, sponsored by the Mistick Krewe of Bacchus, was the Seven Deadly Sins. The girls on board “Lust” were fully clad, but wearing such sexy costumes that Gib nearly got run over leaning out into the street to stare at them. They laughed at him and threw tons of beads at him. Sheepishly, he gathered them up and gave them to Irmani, just in time for “Greed” to roll into view. Irmani grinned up at the costumed men tossing beads. They rewarded her smile with dozens of fancy beads. She gathered up handfuls. Greed had always been her patron saint.

Now that they were off duty, as she considered it, the two of them joined the throng dancing and laughing along Bourbon Street. The noise was so loud that it felt solid enough to walk on. She let it carry her. The masked and costumed figures on the floats threw her more and more beads. She danced with Gib to the raucous jazz played by live musicians on the floats, banging out of loud-speakers, and blaring out of the doors of the clubs all along the parade route.

“I never want this to end,” she said, whirling Gib in a circle until the beads rattled like falling rain. “This is the best time of my life.”

But end it always did.

On Mardi Gras Tuesday itself, the tourists began partying early, knowing it was their last chance. Irmani and Gib lifted a few wallets, and noticed they were thinner than the ones they had picked up over the weekend. Everyone was close to having spent all their holiday cash. That was okay. The two of them were done after that night. They could go home and pay off their outstanding bills, maybe get ahead a little bit while Gib looked for a job and she went back to college.

The church bells began to chime. Irmani looked up from her drink as the bonging drowned out the blasting zydeco music in the bar where she and Gib were drinking. The bands put down their instruments. Lights went out all up and down the street. Midnight. Mardi Gras was over. Lent had begun.

She knew better than to go out on the street. Police on horseback herded the crowds off Bourbon Street. For the ones who didn’t get the hint, they were blasted off the pavement by the water cannons that followed a few minutes later to clear up the fallen detritus. Irmani watched a cluster of purple, gold and green throws glitter as it turned helplessly in the flow. It was swept away. She lost sight of it by the time it passed the first streetlight.

“All gone,” she said, toasting the street with her glass. “Empty. Gone. What fills this place up when Mardi Gras is over?”

“God, maybe,” Gib said, solemnly.

“Will you stop saying that?” she asked.

They put money down and staggered out of the bar. The bartender and his busboy looked as though they were glad to see everyone go. Irmani took a deep breath and marched resolutely up Bourbon.

“Where are you going?” Gib asked, catching up with her. He spun her around. “Hotel’s this way.

“Right.”

Irmani felt an overwhelming urge to go the other way, but Gib was right. She fought the urge. Something had its hand on her shoulder. It kept trying to get her to turn back, like an uncle steering her back to the shop where she’d stolen candy.

She had trouble sleeping. Even though she had some of it underneath her pillow, she spent the night dreaming of the rest of the Comus treasure. She didn’t want it, but couldn’t stop thinking about it. She mentioned it to Gib the next morning over café latte.

“Gotta give it up for Lent,” Gib said, then giggled uncomfortably.

Irmani touched the gorgeous necklaces that lay hidden underneath her zipped up jacket. “No way. They’re mine.”

“It’s vanity.”

“I don’t care.”

Irmani couldn’t wear the gorgeous necklaces outwardly any more. Mardi Gras was over. There were still throws and masks for sale in the stores, but only a few tourists bought anything. The festival was over. Everything was dead, warn out, done. The gaiety had gone like a balloon that had been popped. Until the pin hit it at the stroke of midnight it was gorgeous. Now it was a sad rag of rubber that people couldn’t wait to throw away. She wanted to get that feeling back, but it just wasn’t there to get. Now she knew why blues music made her sad. It expressed the longing for something you desperately wanted and couldn’t have.

As they wandered around, she started to notice people on the street with a dab of black on their foreheads. They’d been to church for Ash Wednesday mass.

“Well, they’re buying into the superstition,” she declared.

Gib looked shocked. So, she admitted, was her twelve-year-old soul, who had gone through confirmation and first communion. But nothing had ever stopped her from doing what she wanted, so where was God, really?

They didn’t have to leave until late that evening. Irmani decided that even if the pickings were slim she might as well do a little business before they went. She and Gib staked out a tourist who still had that air of prosperity. He came out of a shop with a bag full of hot sauce and t-shirts, tucking his wallet back into his hip pocket. Irmani got up close behind him. When he stopped to look into a shop window, she edged nearer as if she was admiring the same display.

A hard hand grabbed her wrist and twisted it up. She cried out and dropped the wallet.

“I’m gonna call the police in just one minute,” said the big, dark-skinned man to the shocked tourist. “You pick that up and tell me if anything’s missing.”

“I didn’t do anything,” Irmani said, pushing the Jedi mind trick with all the force she could muster. “It’s all a mistake. I was handing it back to him.”

The tourist looked bemused, then grateful. “That’s nice of you, miss.”

The bouncer didn’t look so sure, but he could no longer remember why he was holding on to her. He let go. Irmani backed away and hurried off. She thought he was still staring after her suspiciously as she walked away.

“Let’s get some lunch,” Gib said, soothingly. He knew how she hated it when she blew a grab.

Nothing went just right. The steak she got with her grits grillade at lunch was solid gristle, and so was the second one the tut-tutting waitress brought to replace it. She gagged down just enough food to keep her stomach from twisting with hunger.

Irmani couldn’t get past the feeling that eyes were on her. Not only the Blue Dog’s annoying gaze, but everybody. She used her mind trick on the ones she could see, flinging the charm right and left so they would look away and not see her any more.

“I can’t stand it, Gib,” she said.

“This town don’t want us anymore,” he said. “We gotta leave. Our flight’s at eight, but we can sit in the airport for a few hours.”

There was nothing left in the hotel room that they wanted, and they had been planning to skip out on the bill anyway, so they hailed a taxi on Royal.

“Airport,” Gib said.

“Sure thing,” the driver said. He was an elderly African-American with a pale, gray-taupe complexion. “You be there before you know it.”

It seemed like every billboard they went by had a face on it. The eyes reproached her. She glanced under her jacket at her prized necklaces. They stared at her, too. Every bead had turned into an eye, but not human ones. Angel eyes. Or maybe God’s eyes.

They crossed over Rampart heading northward. Irmani felt a lurch, as though all her guts had been yanked out of her body. She leaned back, moaning. She couldn’t even close her eyes. When she did, she saw masks. Not even the colorful dominos with the curlicues and the feathers. Just the eyeholes. Empty eyeholes, swallowing her up, swallowing her soul. One mask in particular haunted her: the ivory domino from the glass case in the Presbytère. It reproached her. She was a thief. She didn’t need those necklaces to live. They weren’t hers. They belonged to Mardi Gras, and Mardi Gras was over. She couldn’t do her mind trick on the mask, because it wasn’t human. It was speaking for the unseen spirit that was New Orleans.

“What’s the matter, honey?” the taxi driver asked, his brown eyes on her from the rear view mirror. “You need me to pull over?”

She nodded, unable to speak. He jerked the car to the curb, waving the vehicles behind him to go around. All the other drivers looked at her as she staggered out and threw up in the gutter. She knew what they were all thinking, as they pierced her with their eyes: a tourist who had had too much partying, but that wasn’t it. The driver and Gib each took one of her arms and helped her to sit on the curb.

“Maybe you should give it a day, honey,” the driver said, sympathetically, patting her arm. “They won’t let you on the jet like that. Go on back. Maybe you can still get your room back. Everybody else’s leaving.”

“We gotta go back.” Irmani looked up at Gib. “God’s not letting me get away with it. I have to give it up for Lent.”

The image of the ivory mask stayed in her mind all the way back to Jackson Square. She almost crawled back into the Presbytère. The guards watched her with trepidation, but she felt as though her strength was coming back with every step she took back toward the glass case. It was locked, as she knew it would be. The only thing that stood between her and those empty eyeholes was getting those necklaces back into the display next to the tiara where they belonged.

The curator was talking to a fat and prosperous couple that Irmani would normally have marked for a bump and grab, but all she could think of was the keys in the dapper man’s pockets. She waited until he shook hands with the visitors and sent them on their way, then stepped forward.

“I found something that you want back,” Irmani said. She concentrated her talent on him as hard as she could. “I’m not responsible for taking them, you understand? I brought them back. That’s what counts. I brought them back. I gave them up.”

The curator looked bemused but pleased at the strands of gemstones and gold that lay across his palms, though later he could never say for the life of him where they had come from or who he had been talking to. He took the keys out of his pocket and locked them away on the purple velvet next to the Comus crown and the lorgnette mask.

Irmani felt as though iron bands had been unfastened from around her chest. She stood out in the nearly empty square in the bleak February sunshine and took deep breaths of damp, cool air.

“Thank God,” she said.

“What are you going to do now?” Gib asked. “We got four hours until our flight.”

Irmani looked up at the cloudy sky and sighed. “We might as well go to church.”

***

Passover

Surviving Traditions

Dr. Rachel Sternberg beckoned the rest of the xenologists into the dining hall.

“Hurry!” said the small, dark-haired woman, her eager smile framed by rosy round cheeks. “It’s almost sundown. I want to start the seder service.”

Dr. Carter Phillips, tall and broad with an amiable, weather-beaten face, glanced around the refectory. The big, rectangular, high-ceilinged room was the center of activity for the four-month-old exploration colony on the planet called Nong. The hall was attached to the north side of the gigantic greenhouse, a Lexan construct that was beginning to fill with burgeoning Terran plants. A couple of personal communication booths for recording messages to send home and a cabinet of board games were tucked in a corner behind the display cases full of the fruits of the settlers’ discoveries, like fossil formations; preserved leaves the size of umbrellas; eggs as large as watermelons; long, fragile bones; exotic plants; and a terrarium of bright blue-green insectoids that occasionally burrowed out of the peaty mass which approximated the swampy terrain outside to peer at the humans.

Usually, the thirty or so long tables that would seat the five hundred members of the Nongian exploration crew were set in three rows of ten tables each. Now all the furniture had been moved into concentric squares, leaving just enough room for the servers to wheel trays in between. Savory aromas came from the serving hatches in the wall that led from the cramped food preparation area where the robochefs worked. Carter slung his equipment bag against the wall and inhaled with deep appreciation, trying to identify the spices floating on the air.

“Are we really going to do this?” asked Debri Sultan, with a disapproving frown on her thin face. Her narrow frame towered above Rachel’s like a human exclamation point.

Rachel crossed her arms. “Yes, we are. After all, we agreed that human rights would be kept even in the reaches of space, otherwise, we’re not human any longer. Passover is an important day in my religion. We have respected yours. Now I ask you to respect mine. I hope it will help you understand our traditions better. There are so few of us humans out here. We’re all that we have.”

“We’re all scientists! These rituals have no relevance in the modern day. Why should superstitions be perpetrated beyond the orbit of Earth?”

“They’re stories and traditions,” Rachel said. Her eyes sparked and her cheeks flushed. Carter could tell that she controlled her temper with some difficulty. “The stories of our heritage. This is how we keep our history alive. I also want the Visitors to learn about as many facets of Earth traditions as possible, as I am sure you do. If you don’t want to be here, I suggest you take your dinner back to your quarters. I don’t mind if you help yourself to the
food
. I won’t see you go hungry just because you won’t participate in the community.”

Carter placed himself between the two women before Debri could retort.

“Where do you want me to sit?” he asked, keeping his voice pleasant.

Rachel looked him up and down, but hesitated before she spoke.

“Would you mind sitting at the center table? There are only eight Jews in the crew, and we need ten to form a minyan. You’ve been so supportive, I’d like to designate you an honorary member of the congregation for the seder.”

“I’d be happy to, Rachel. Thanks.”

She beamed and touched his arm. “Bless you.”

Debri sniffed and pushed past them. She went to a table at the farthest corner of the room and threw her equipment bag up against the wall next to the dishwashers. A few people followed her, all secular humanists or atheists in solidarity. They’d behaved the same way during Diwali, Chanukah, and Christmas, despite having the rest of the colony participate in HumanLight. Carter shot Rachel a rueful look and went to sit down.

“Now, if everyone will just download the Haggadah onto their tablets,” Rachel said, smiling at the assembly, “we’ll get started.”

She wore a small, blue silk skullcap pinned to her hair, as did the other seven members of the Jewish faith. Carter found one next to his plate and put it on his head. It didn’t look as though it would stay put, but it did. The other honorary Jew, Anjanette Henry, a big, busty, ebony-skinned geologist from Jamaica and devout Protestant, had pleated her skullcap and tucked it into her mass of dark hair over one ear as though it was a flower. Everyone reached for their ever-present flat-screen devices and tapped the new icon that had appeared under Documents. It opened up to display a split screen of Standard English and Hebrew. Carter scanned the English side. Syllable-by-syllable transliterations of the Hebrew prayers had been included for those like him who couldn’t read the foreign text.

He and Anjanette weren’t the only strangers at the inner table. Four of the Visitors, as most of the crew called them, were perched on the long benches across from the humans. It seemed odd to call them Visitors, since they were native to this world, and the humans weren’t, but that was the name that the commanding officer had started calling them. Carter felt a little ashamed of himself that he didn’t know any more about what was going to take place than they did.

The Visitors, eight feet tall and as skinny as ladders, with pebbled blue skin and mouths that opened vertically instead of horizontally, were always cheerful guests. With three tongues apiece, they took to new languages and musical styles like parrots. They had picked up Standard English far faster than any human had learned their language. Most of the landing party still relied on translator devices. The Visitors didn’t take that amiss. They came to regard the translators as fellow beings, and treated them with the same avuncular affection as they did the humans. They called themselves Llrrrt’dnn’iqq, a name that made sense when trilled against multiple hard and soft palates and definitely lost something in translation to the monthly reports home to Earth, hence the generic term “Visitors.”

“I feel as though I am learning something about the old world here on our new world,” Anjanette said, with a wry smile. “Look at this Passover plate—Pesach, Rachel called it.” She touched the items in the six dished compartments on the open china platter. “All of these are symbols of the will of God. Bone of the Paschal lamb, roasted egg, greens, horseradish, charoset—that’s apples, wine, and nuts—and matzoh.” The last was a stack of three flat square crackers a third of a meter across that filled the middle of the plate.

Carter broke off a corner of the top matzoh and ate it. It was dry and crumbly in his mouth.

“Doesn’t taste like much,” he said.

Rachel reached over and smacked his hand with her fingers.

“Listen and hear why,” she said, with a smile that took the sting out of the blow. “It’s part of our story.”

Although open fire wasn’t ordinarily permitted in any of the settlement quarters, an exception was made for candles for religious or celebratory purposes, as long as a fire extinguisher was close by. Rachel stood over a three branched candelabrum furnished with three white candles the length of Carter’s hand. She spread her hands above them and recited a prayer.

“Blessed are Thou, O Eternal, who has sanctified us with Your commandments, and commanded that we kindle the Yom Tov lights.”

The others chimed in, “Amen.” Carter hastily followed suit. Rachel lit the three candles.

“I want everyone to take a turn reading the explanations for the rituals,” she said, beckoning to a cluster of youngsters who had been roped in as attendants for the feast. “First, the washing of the hands.”

Two of the children, daughters of colony physician Natalie Li, brought an old-fashioned pitcher and bowl around to each of the congregants at the center ring. Carter dabbed his hands in the water and dried them on the woven towel. The white linen looked ancient, like textile displays he had seen dating back a thousand years. Embroidery in blue and red picked out the images of donkeys and flowers. He felt admiration for Rachel, who had to have packed all this gear in her shipping allowance from Earth.

Ippolita Daoud, an Israeli geologist, recited the text and prayer over eating green herbs in her guttural accent. Never good at extemporaneous reading, Carter sneaked an advance look at the file, and followed along as voice upon voice added to the explanation of the holiday of Passover. He’d never bothered with the Old Testament. His impressions, growing up in a nominally Protestant family, were that the early Jews had not really reached their pinnacle until the birth of Christ. The story of the Hebrews trapped in Egypt as a subject race proved to be painful to read, let alone voice. It gave him sympathy for the Jewish people he hadn’t really felt before. He shot Rachel a grateful glance.

“Now, the Four Questions,” Rachel said, smiling at the Visitors. “I’ve asked our new friends to participate, so they’ll learn more about my religion and culture.”

Mmm’ddk, the motherly leader of the most local family group, the Mmm’nnn’ilp, opened her sideways mouth.

“Mah nish-tanah ha lilah ha zeh, mi-kol ha laylot, shebachol ha lehlot …” she sang, her warm alto voice pure.

Carter looked surprised, but knew he shouldn’t have been. The Llrrrt’dnn’iqq had learned Standard English without a qualm. Hebrew was just another human language. The Jewish congregation answered in the same tongue. The sung prayers were in a minor key, which in his opinion, added to the melancholy of the underlying story. He had no trouble following along, but to his ears, brought up on classical and popular music, almost all of which was in major keys, Jewish prayers sounded as alien as the Llrrrt’dnn’iqq’s own trilling lingo. The only non-Jews who seemed comfortable with the prayers were of Earth-Asian descent. Carter recalled something about their traditional music being in a pentatonic scale.

“Now, we partake of the bitter herb, Maror, which reminds us of the bitterness of slavery,” Tom Rosenfield said, holding aloft a small pot of the bright fuchsia sauce like the substance on the seder plate. He spread some on a square of the matzoh from one of the baskets on the table, and ate it.

The aliens went along happily with everything. Every dish in the ritual meal had some symbolism, all of which was pointed out by various members of the small congregation. Carter tried a dab of the pink stuff. The fire on his tongue made him want to spit it out, but he swallowed instead, following it up with a drink of the unusually sweet grape wine. He had never been a fan of horseradish.

“May I have yours if you are not going to finish it?” Ddd’ohh asked. Carter always thought of the skinniest Visitor as a teenage boy. He never turned down food.

“No problem,” Carter said, pushing the small dish toward the Visitor’s long hand. Ddd’ohh lifted it to his middle tongue and lapped it with ululations of bliss from the upper portion of his mouth. Carter took another drink. At least a lot of wine was served during this celebration.

At last, which in Carter’s estimate was at least nine hours since they had begun, but in fact was only twenty minutes, Rachel put down her screen.

“Now, we have dinner,” she said, as the boxy silver roboservers emerged from the food preparation area laden with heavy rectangular pans. “Soup, gefilte fish, roast meat, carrot and prune tsimmes, kugel, salad, and, of course, more matzoh. Enjoy!”

“This is most interesting,” said Mmm’ddk, making room for the soup bowl and an adapted scooplike spoon that fit into the Llrrrt’dnn’iqq’s mouth. She ran a long manipulative digit down the computer file. “The Exodus, as you describe it. Human beings have such limited senses. Why did the Israelites not simply leave when they chose to?”

Rachel looked a little perturbed, her thin brows drawing down over her blunt nose. “It wasn’t so easy. The land itself was hostile. Egypt is one long, lush river valley surrounded by arid deserts. There would have been armed guards. The Israelites lived a subsistence life. They had little in the way of supplies or weapons. They were a captive population far from the land of their birth. They had small children and feeble elderly who would find the journey across the hostile sands difficult, if not impossible. When they left, it was in haste. The story of matzoh tells us that they had no time to cook, and no facility for storing food safely. The elders wanted to protect
all
of the people and get them safely out of Egypt. God held His hand over us and guided us safely out of Egypt.”

“Much of this seems strange and contradictory,” said Ll’ppp’rrr, the Father of Memory, or as Carter understood it, their historian. That drew a small smile from some of the group in the outer tables, until he added, “As do all of your sacred texts. Wishing for plagues does not make them exist.”

Rachel shrugged. “The Torah is full of storytelling, sometimes a long while after the fact. These texts are considered to be the word of God, received through His poor, imperfect creations, humankind. This story is historical. The Israelites were made slaves by a conquering force and made to live in a foreign land. It took miracles to free them from their oppressors. Only the plagues convinced the Pharaoh that it was no longer safe to keep the Israelites prisoners and to give them permission to leave. While there was almost certainly no possible connection between the death of Pharaoh’s eldest son and the Israelites, he came to consider them to be more of a problem than an asset, and let them go.”

“But some of the strictures seem very strange, if God is omnipotent. The marking of the doorways—could your God not tell the difference between his Chosen People and the ones he had not chosen?”

“I suppose,” Carter put in, over the embarrassed sputtering from the eight Jews, “He wanted to make sure they were obedient before he saved them. Like many things in the Bible, this might have been another test, like ordering Abraham to sacrifice his son, Isaac.”

“Humans are strange,” Ddd’ohh said, licking out another bowl of horseradish. He had pink streaks on his narrow blue cheeks. “But even most of your people do not see the importance of your stories.”

“It is in their holy books as well as ours,” Rachel said.

“So few of you agree, though.” Ll’ppp’rrr aspirated the word.