The Fresco (19 page)

“Wouldn't it be easier for you to just—”

Chiddy glanced at Vess with what Benita understood to be impatience.

Vess said firmly, “Benita, please. We've already said. Please concentrate your attention. Once we've made contact and proved that we exist by allowing recordings to be made, once we've proved that we have power, as I imagine we have now done, we prefer not to talk to those in authority. Those in authority
always
want to argue. Or complain. We have never approached any planet where those in power did not want to do one or both. If we speak to any person directly, or give any reason to think we might speak to people directly, everyone in the world will want an individual audience to complain about what we've done or suggest we do something else! You, on the other hand, have nothing to argue about, and they can't argue with you because you merely deliver the message. You won't know anything except what we tell you, so bothering you is pointless.”

Fascinated despite herself, she asked, “What's the message?”

“Firstly: Two days from now, on Sunday night at ten
P.M.
, Eastern Time, we will announce over national television what we are doing here and how we will proceed.

“Secondly: Once they know we are present, the populace of a planet almost always sends us messages. The messages
are to be accumulated somewhere to be picked up. Someone will tell you where they are, and we will pick them up. Tell the powers that be that you will not transmit spoken messages. Even if you were constrained to do so, we would ignore them. This is to prevent your being inundated and our being influenced by discourtesies that might be blurted in anger, such as General McVane's outburst the other evening.”

“Are you going to rewrite our laws or something? That could make it difficult for some people.”

“No, no. Your laws will still be in effect, more or less. They'll probably be needed less as we go along, but we won't fool with them, at least not just yet. Tell the president not to worry about it. Any confusion we cause will be temporary and minimal. Tell him, also, that we will make any further announcements to the public on television, just as we will do this first time.”

“At regular intervals?”

“Not necessarily, no. Whenever we have something to say. At this time, we plan only the first announcement, and it won't be lengthy.”

They rose and moved together out into the hall, pausing there long enough for Chiddy to say, “When the government people fixed your apartment, they put in a great many listening and looking devices. We have made the ones in the bathroom inoperable, as we understand your culture to prefer. The others we left intact. However, they will show only you, fully clothed in whatever you choose to wear on any given day, moving about, reading, fixing food, whatever is appropriate to the hour when you are here. If you change clothes, the viewers will show you selecting the clothes and then going into the bathroom to change. Whatever you are really doing, they will not see. They are not seeing us here tonight. They are seeing you seated on the couch, reading a book.

“Whenever we ask you to transmit a message, you may say it appeared on your table, but it self-destructed once you had read it. We got that idea from an old TV show of yours.”

“Strange,” murmured Vess, “that we had never thought of it ourselves.”

Benita murmured, “I can understand your being enamored of old
Mission Impossible
technology, but if you expect them to believe you're using me as an intermediary, you should black out this place every now and then for a few moments. If they can see me whenever I'm here, but never see you, and if all my time is accounted for, they'll get to the point where they'll suspect I'm making things up.”

Chiddy paused, staring at his feet in a very humanish way.

“She's right,” he said. “We have never visited a moderately advanced world before, so we must adjust our methods. Should it be blackouts, or fake visits?”

“I think blackouts,” she said firmly. “I'd have to remember what was supposed to have happened during fake visits, in case they asked.”

“Very well,” said Chiddy. “We will black you out for a time whenever we are with you. As we speak, we are making a blacked-out time.”

“Now, what about if I have visitors? If Simon comes up to my apartment, or if I invite someone in?”

“On those occasions, we will let them see what is actually happening,” Chiddy said, his handsome face twisted into a slightly lecherous leer. “Unless you ask us not to.”

“That facial expression should be avoided,” she told him severely. “It is most insulting.”

“An actor named Price did it,” Chiddy replied.

“He was almost invariably the villain,” cautioned Benita. “What about my phone line? Did they tap my phone?”

“Both this phone and the ones downstairs, yes. But unless it is a call we ask you to make, they will hear only innocuous conversations. You, asking if there are tickets available for the opera. You, wondering if a retailer has an item in another color. You, ordering books. It's all being done automatically. Believe us, no one will see or hear you doing anything significant or embarrassing. You may scold or bless your children, laugh or cry, or even scratch your intimate parts in private. The only calls they will actually record are the ones you make to them.”

They waved, stepped into the elevator, and closed the
door. Though she listened carefully, she heard nothing on the roof, not even footsteps. Come to think of it, she hadn't even heard the elevator. She opened the elevator door and found it still on her floor, but empty. It hadn't gone anywhere. She fretted for a few moments, then went to the phone and placed the call, announcing herself as the intermediary and asking to speak to Chad Riley. Evidently the switchboard knew about her, for Mr. Riley was available at once. When she mentioned Afghanistan, he interrupted her.

“But, we've just learned about it.”

“About what?” she asked.

“The plague in Afghanistan. I can't talk right now. I'll get back to you.”

A surprising someone did get back to her: the First Lady, sounding equally baffled and very slightly amused. “Yes, Intermediary. We're told that all the women in Afghanistan have gone bald. Overnight. Not only that…the women…they…”

“What!” she demanded.

“They've grown long noses and long chins and hairy moles. They've lost half their teeth. Any of them past puberty are ugly as sin; even the young ones look like the Wicked Witch of the West, or that old hag in
Snow White
. Each one has a tattoo on her forehead in the local dialect that says,
The lustful who punish beauty would be wiser to control lust
. The Afghanis are claiming we did it!”

“Of course we didn't. The aliens did! They've fixed it so the Taliban won't have any excuse for covering them in robes and veils and locking them up all the time!”

“That's what the Secretary of State says. She says now that they're really ugly, they can go to the market or school or leave the house and get a job. Is that why you called, Intermediary? Or was there something from you know who?”

“Am I supposed to talk on the phone?”

“They tell me it's a secure line. The people who did up your living quarters saw to things.”

Oh, they most certainly did, Benita commented to herself before taking a deep breath and delivering the message.

Long silence. “I'll tell…the president. What do you think they're going to say on TV?”

“I haven't even a hint, ma'am. They said I can say to you anything they said to me, but in this case they didn't tell me what they have in mind. They did say the Old City still exists, that they've put it on another world…no, in another realm, is what they said. They said they can selectively put all the Jews or all the Palestinians in that same place, if they choose, and they hinted that the people in the Middle East can get Jerusalem back if they'll quit killing each other.”

“It still exists?”

“They said they didn't destroy it, just moved it. They also said to tell the president that Afghanistan is reversible, but I didn't know what they meant until now.”

Long silence. Then the FL said, “The only thing I'm sure of at the moment is there has to be a press conference. This has gone way beyond keeping to ourselves. Even if McVane hadn't broken security, there are too many things happening. If they're going to broadcast on Sunday night, we have to let the public know before then. People have to know that we're not hiding anything.”

“They also need to know you have little or no control over what's happening,” cautioned Benita. “Otherwise, you may get blamed for it. Will the president be back in time?”

“He'll be back late tomorrow afternoon.”

“Did the recordings come out? The ones you all made at the dinner?”

“You knew about that?”

“Well, they said so, remember? They said they'd allowed it.”

“The recordings came out. They don't show Indira and Lara, however. They show two sort of humanoid creatures with corrugated heads and several sets of eyes. Can you explain that?”

She thought about it. “They appeared as women in saris because we could be comfortable with that. And, probably, because they're practicing being human in order to figure us out. They wouldn't want to stir up animosity against India, however, and being two women in saris could have done that. So, they were women in saris to us, but to the
rest of the world they'll look like something definitely extraterrestrial.”

“They told you this?”

“No. I'm only guessing.”

“Very sensible for guessing. Have you seen them again?”

“They visited me here in the apartment.” She thought about telling what they'd appeared as, then discarded the notion. Everyone was confused enough. “I can't pronounce their real names, so they're using nicknames, from when they were children. Chiddy and Vess. They've promised to stick with that.”

“Well, I'd better pass all this along,” murmured the FL. “Ten
P.M.
, Eastern time, day after tomorrow. By the way, Sasquatch is en route. General Wallace had him picked up at the kennel, and he should be with you tomorrow.”

 

Sasquatch arrived on Saturday morning. The phone rang at eight, as she was having her breakfast, and an anonymous voice said somebody was waiting with the dog at the outer door. Before she unlocked and opened it, she gave the man a good looking-over, recognizing him as one of the security people present at the dinner. There was no trouble recognizing Sasquatch. He lunged through the door when she barely opened it, jerking the man at the other end of the leash off balance so that he stumbled in after the dog.

“I'm sorry,” she cried, around the mess of fur that had reared up and put his paws on her shoulders. “Are you all right?”

He picked himself up, unwinding the leash from his hand. “He's a big one. It's hard to make him go anywhere he doesn't want to, isn't it? Are you okay with him, or do you need some help?”

“I'm fine with him,” she replied, easing Sasquatch into a more suitable position, with all four feet on the ground. “Thank you for bringing him.”

“That's all right,” he said, saluting as he backed away to let the door swing closed.

As she pulled the door shut and locked, she saw him trudging away toward a station wagon parked behind the
store. Sasquatch followed her into the elevator, albeit unwillingly, where he howled until it reached the roof. There she took the leash off and allowed him to move about, sniffing and marking territory on every protruding vent pipe or aerial. He put his front feet up on the parapet, which was quite high enough to prevent anyone falling over by accident, and looked over the edge several times, commenting sotto voce when he saw something interesting, such as another dog. Then he went over to the big planter and had a drink from the pan beneath the air conditioner. Someone had hooked up the watering tubes, Benita noticed. The soil was moist and translucent green frills were coming up very quickly, already several inches high. Benita had been on the roof the day before, and she hadn't noticed anything growing then.

Sasquatch went down the metal steps onto the lower roof of the other building and went through the same routine there. When he ran out of pee, she led him back into the elevator and took him down to the apartment, where she showed him his bed, his food dish—already stocked with kibble—and his water bowl.

He roved the apartment, smelling every piece of furniture and along the edge of every rug. He found the open living room window at the center of the row, one of the two in that room that actually opened. Benita let the windows stand open when it was cool and dry outside, for the illusion of fresh air if not the reality. Sasquatch put his front feet on the deep sill and stood for a while looking at cars moving on the street below.

Finally, the dog found the bedroom. He ignored the large dog bed in the corner, leaping immediately upon her bed, where he circled twice, lay down and went to sleep.

 

On Saturday evening, the president held a press conference. He said the Earth was being visited by extraterrestrials, he explained that a recording had been made at a recent meeting, and he showed the tape, though without sound. The president explained that neither he nor the vice president had been able to be present at the hastily arranged affair, but
he introduced each of the participants, Mr. Riley from the FBI, representing the Attorney General; General McVane from the Pentagon; General Wallace, a well-known and loved representative of the American People; the First Lady, representing the president; the Secretary of State, representing the U.S. government; and the two envoys. Also, a woman he called, “Jane Doe, the intermediary selected by our visitors.”

Someone, perhaps the ETs, had morphed Benita's face and hair on the tape, making her a blonde, twenty pounds heavier, with a different nose and mouth. Benita, while being glad she wasn't recognizable, didn't appreciate the disguise. When the tape came to the after-dinner speeches, the sound came on so everyone could hear the speeches: the FL, the SOS, the general, and then the envoys. The tape stopped moments before the visitors disappeared.