Budayeen Nights: Stories

SCHRODINGER. 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 Marid 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 Hollywood 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 “Marid 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 Marid, a version of George himself, so of course Marid describes him as looking a little like himself but older, plumper, and wiser. A poet, allegedly, hut not a very good one.

— Barbara Hambly

Marid 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 Marid, 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 — “Marid, 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 —