Budayeen Nights: Stories

moddy-and-daddy technology. Some of us make a valuable practice of entering and exiting certain consensual realities. The rest of us — well, how many ways are there of hiding?”

“One,” I said. “Just one good way. The rest is merely waiting until you’re caught.”

Firon laughed brightly and pointed a finger. “Exactly! Exactly so! And what are you doing? Or I? Can we tell?”

I sat back down wearily. I didn’t want another white death, which I interpreted as a bad sign. “What do you want then from me?” I asked.

Firon stood and towered over me. “Just this, and listen well to me: We know who you are, we know how vulnerable you are. You must let us continue to make our small, almost inconsequential financial transactions, or we’ll simply reveal your identity. We’ll reveal it generally, if you take my meaning.”

“I take it precisely,” I said, feeling old and slow. Firon and his associates were threatening to expose me to my large number of enemies. I did feel old and slow, but not too old and slow. Firon, this young would-be tyrant, was so certain of his power over me that he wasn’t paying very close attention. He was a victim of his own pride, his own self-delusions. I took the nearly full bottle of gin and put it in the bottom drawer. At the same time, I took a small but extremely serviceable seizure gun — the one that used to belong to my second wife — from my ankle holster and I showed it to him. “Old ways are sometimes the best,” I said with a wry smile.

He sank slowly into the red-leather chair, a wide and wobbly grin on his face. “In the name of Allah, the Beneficent, the Merciful,” he said.

“Praise Allah,” I said.

“Now what?” asked Firon. “We’re at one of those famous impasses.”

I thought for a moment or two. “Here,” I said at last, “how’s this as a solution? You’re ripping off people in the CRCorp building who’ve become my friends, at least some of them have. I don’t like that. Still, I don’t have a goddamn problem with you and Musa and whomever else works with you pulling this gimmick all over town. You don’t turn my name over to Shaykh Reda, and I let you guys alone, unless you take on my few remaining friends. You do that wrong thing, and I’ll hand you right to the civil authorities, and you know — Musa sure as hell knows — what the penalties are.”

“We can trust you?”

“Can you?”

Firon took a deep breath, let it out, and nodded. “We can live with that. We can surely live with that! You’re a kind of legend among us. A small legend, an ignoble kind of legend, but if you were younger, our age….”

“Thanks a hell of a lot,” I said, still holding the seizure gun on him.

Firon got up and headed for my inner door. “You know, CRCorp knew about us from the beginning, and let us be. Shaykh il-Qurawi and the others just wanted to test out their security measures and their alarm programs. You care more about those people in that building than they do.”

“Somebody’s got to,” I said wearily.

“Peoples’ lives are their own, and there are no corporations, man!” He made some sort of sign with his hand in the gloomy outer office. I recalled what it had been like to be his age and youthfully idealistic.

Then he was gone.

Introduction to The City on the Sand

In some ways, this is the ultimate tale of Budayeen Nights.

In every other tale of the Budayeen, while the action is going on, the presence of Emst Weinraub is more or less implied, sitting at his cafe table, watching what goes on without the faintest idea of what’s actually going on. You can almost see him out of the comer of your eye.

This is another one printed here from George’s file copy, not the version actually published in F&SF — and this story was later expanded upon to make up George’s novel Relatives. It was the first appearance of the Budayeen, and one of the few works in which it, and the nameless City, are described: the Chinese quarter; the canal with its restaurants, bars, casinos (i.e. Canal Street in New Orleans, which was named after a canal that was never dug); the marketplace and miniature golf facilities; and the bizarre replica of Singapore built by a crazed millionaire. (On St. Charles Avenue in New Orleans stands a 1960s copy of the mansion “Tarn” from the film Gone with the Wind.)

“The city was the final hope of those who truly needed to hide.”

As was — and is — New Orleans.

The hiding place to which George fled from the noise and stress of New York in the early seventies; the place where he returned after the final disaster of his last marriage in Los Angeles.

We see a day in the life of the Budayeen, through the eyes of lost, shabby, and hopeless expatriate Ernst Weinraub (or Weintraub). We meet, for the first time, Monsieur Gargotier, proprietor of the Fee Blanche; see Sandor Courane in one of his few nonfatal roles; hear tell of Marid’s favorite hangouts, the Solace and Chiriga’s. We see the ubiquitous Arab boy, here called Kebap (“Roast Beef), though he has other names in other tales, coming and going like a troublesome little ghost.

Weinraub himself like Sandor Courane, was one of George’s generic recurring heroes, appearing in a number of early stories before he was supplanted by Courane. In most of them, Ernst is the ultimate square- jawed hero, but without Courane’s doomed and hapless charm; maybe that was Ernst’s point. In this tale he has been sawed and filed down to being a legend in his own mind: aloof in his self-conscious dreams, mocked at by the street folk, losing himself deeper and deeper into his alcoholic fantasies. He wants to be a writer and wants desperately to be noticed, but he only pretends to write — a fate that befalls and befell many writers who get seduced by the “New Orleans lifestyle.”

I suspect George had met a number of Ernsts in New Orleans — I know he was friends with Tennessee Williams’s houseboy, to whom he lived next door for many years. (I still have the smudged and blotted napkins bearing the outlines of trilogies never written, in George’s spiky block-print hand, including the outline of the fourth Budayeen novel, Word of Night.)

Weinraub has tried — as George tried for so many years — “to write…short, terse essays about the city…” But “he couldn’t seem to capture the true emotions he experienced…the pervasive sense of isolation, of eternal uncleanness, of a soul-deep loss of personality….”

But where poor Ernst failed, George succeeded dazzlingly. This is very much a Budayeen night: a night on which nothing in particular takes place. The nameless city simply winds its accustomed way through another turning of the sterile Earth. Everyone in it goes about their own obscure business like the characters in the Dylan song “Mr. Tambourine Man,” observed by a failed poet who has nowhere left to go.

— Barbara Hambly

The City on the Sand

IN EUROPE, THERE WERE ONLY MEMORIES OF GREAT cultures. Spain, Portugal, Italy, France, England, Carbba, and Germany had all seized control of the world’s course and the imagination of the human race at one time or another. But now these great powers of the past were drifting into a cynical old age, where decadence and momentary pleasures replaced the drive for dominance and national superiority. In Asia, the situation was even worse. The Russias struggled pettily among themselves, expending the last energies of a once-proud nation in puerile bickerings. China showed signs of total degeneration, having lost its immensely rich heritage of art and philosophy while clinging to a ruthless creed that crushed its hopeless people beneath a burden of mock-patriotism. Breulandy was the only vibrant force east of the Caucasus Mountains; still, no observer could tell what that guarded land might do. Perhaps a Breulen storm would spill out across the continent, at least instilling a new life force in the