The Year's Best Science Fiction: Twentieth Annual Collection

by Gardner Dozois

  The tariqua had spoken of the pain of nothing, and then of the pain of everything. At the time, Jalila had understood neither, but now, she felt that she understood the pain of nothing all too well. The product of the combined genes of her three mothers; loving Ananke, ever-curious Pavo, proud and talkative Lya, she had always felt glad to recognize these characteristics mingled in herself, but now she wondered if these traits hadn’t cancelled each other out. She was a null-point, a zero, clumsy and destructive and unloving. She was Jalila, and she walked alone and uncaring through this Season of Winds.

  One morning, the weather was especially harsh. Jalila was alone in the haramlek, although she cared little where she or anywhere else was. A shutter must have come loose somewhere. That often happened now. It had been banging and hammering so long that it began to irritate even her. She climbed stairs and slammed doors over jamming drifts of mica. She flapped back irritably at flapping curtains. Still, the banging went on. Yet all the windows and doors were now secure. She was sure of it. Unless. ...

  Someone was at the front door. She could see a swirling globular head through the greenish glass mullion. Even though they could surely see her as well, the banging went on. Jalila wondered if she wanted it to be Nayra; after all, this was how she had come to her after the moulid; a sweet and needy human being to drag her out from her dreams. But it was only Kalal. As the door shoved Jalila back, she tried not to look disappointed.

  “You can’t do this with your life!”

  “Do what?”

  “This—nothing. And then not answering the fucking door. ...” Kalal prowled the hallway as the door banged back and forth and tapestries flailed, looking for clues as if he was a detective. “Let’s go out.”

  Even in this weather, Jalila supposed that she owed it to Robin. Then Kalal had wanted to go north, and she insisted on going south, and was not in any mood for arguing. It was an odd journey, so unlike the ones they’d undertaken in the summer. They wrapped their heads and faces in flapping howlis, and tried to ride mostly in the forest, but the trees whipped and flapped and the raw air still abraded their faces.

  They took lunch down by a flatrock shore, in what amounted to shelter, although there was still little enough of it as the wind eddied about them. This could have been the same spot where they had stopped in summer, but it was hard to tell; the light was so changed, the sky so bruised. Kalal seemed changed, too. His face beneath his howli seemed older, as he tried to eat their aish before the sand-laden air got to it, and his chin looked prickled and abraded. Jalila supposed that this was the same facial growth that his father Ibra was so fond of sporting. She also supposed he must choose to shave his off in the way that some women on some decadent planets were said to shave their legs and armpits.

  “Come a bit closer—” she half-shouted, working her way back into the lee of the bigger rock beside which she was sitting to make room for him. “I want you to tell me what you know about love, Kalal.”

  Kalal hunched beside her. For a while, he just continued tearing and chewing bits of aish, with his body pressed against hers as the winds boiled around them, the warmth of their flesh almost meeting. And Jalila wondered if men and women, when their lives and needs had been more closely intertwined, had perhaps known the answer to her question. What was love, after all? It would have been nice to think that, in those dim times of myth, men and women had whispered the answer to that question to each other. ...

  She thought then that Kalal hadn’t properly heard her. He was telling her about his father, and a planet he barely remembered, but on which he was born. The sky there had been fractaled gold and turquoise—colors so strange and bright that they came as a delight and a shock each morning. It was a place of many islands, and one great city. His father had been a fisherman and boat-repairer of sorts there as well, although the boats had been much grander than anything you ever saw at Al Janb, and the fish had lived not as single organisms, but as complex shoals that were caught not for their meat, but for their joint minds. Ibra had been approached by a woman from off-world, who had wanted a ship on which she could sail alone around the whole lonely band of the northern oceans. She had told him that she was sick of human company. The planning and the making of the craft was a joy for Ibra, because such a lonely journey had been one that he had long dreamed of making, if ever he’d had the time and money. The ship was his finest-ever creation, and it turned out, as they worked on it, that neither he nor the woman were quite as sick of human company as they had imagined. They fell in love as the keel and the spars grew in the city dockyards and the ship’s mind was nurtured, and as they did so, they slowly re-learned the expressions of sexual need between the male and female.

  “You mean he raped her?”

  Kalal tossed his last nub of bread toward the waves. “I mean that they made love .”

  After the usual negotiations and contracts, and after the necessary insertions of the appropriate cells, Ibra and this woman (whom Kalal didn’t name in his story, any more than he named the world) set sail together, fully intending to conceive a child in the fabled way of old.

  “Which was you?”

  Kalal scowled. It was impossible to ask him even simple questions on this subject without making him look annoyed. “Of course it was! How many of me do you think there are?” Then he lapsed into silence. The sands swirled in colored helixes before them.

  “That woman—your birthmother. What happened to her?”

  “She wanted to take me away, of course—to some haramlek on another world, just as she’d been planning all along. My father was just a toy to her. As soon as their ship returned, she started making plans, issuing contracts. There was a long legal dispute with my father. I was placed in a birthsac, in stasis.”

  “And your father won?”

  Kalal scowled. “He took me here, anyway. Which is winning enough.”

  There were many other questions about this story that Jalila wanted to ask Kalal, if she hadn’t already pressed too far. What, after all, did this tale of dispute and deception have to do with love? And were Kalal and Ibra really fugitives? It would explain quite a lot. Once more, in that familiar welling, she felt sorry for him. Men were such strange, sad creatures; forever fighting, angry, lost. ...

  “I’m glad you’re here anyway,” she said. Then, on impulse, one of those careless things you do, she took that rough and ugly chin in her hand, turned his face toward hers and kissed him lightly on the lips.

  “What was that for?”

  “El-hamdu-l-Illah. That was for thanks.”

  They plodded further on their hayawans. They came eventually to a cliff-edge so high that the sea and sky above and beneath vanished. Jalila already knew what they would see as they made their way along it, but still it was a shock; that qasr, thrust into these teeming ribbons of sand. The winds whooped and howled, and the hayawans raised their heads and howled back at it. In this grinding atmosphere, Jalila could see how the qasrs had been carved over long years from pure natural rock. They dismounted, and struggled bent-backed across the narrowing track toward the qasr’s studded door. Jalila raised her fist and beat on it.

  She glanced back at Kalal, but his face was entirely hidden beneath his hood. Had they always intended to come here? But they had traveled too far to do otherwise now; Robin and Abu were tired and near-blinded; they all needed rest and shelter. She beat on the door again, but the sound was lost in the booming storm. Perhaps the tariqua had left with the last of the Season of Rockets, just as had most of the aliens. Jalila was about to turn away when the door, as if thrown Wide by the wind, blasted open. There was no one on the other side, and the hallway beyond was dark as the bottom of a dry well. Robin hoiked her head back and howled and resisted as Jalila hauled her in. Kalal with Abu followed. The door, with a massive drumbeat, hammered itself shut behind them. Of course, it was only some old mechanism of this house, but Jalila felt the hairs on the nape of her neck rise.

  They hobbled the hayawans beside the lar
gest of the scalloped arches, and walked on down the passageway beyond. The wind was still with them, and the shapes of the pillars were like the swirling helixes of sand made solid. It was hard to tell what parts of this place had been made by the hands of women and what was entirely natural. If the qasr had seemed deserted in the heat of summer, it was entirely abandoned now. A scatter of glass windchimes, torn apart by the wind. A few broken plates. Some flapping cobwebs of tapestry.

  Kalal pulled Jalila’s hand.

  “Let’s go back. ...”

  But there was greater light ahead, the shadows of the speeding sky. Here was the courtyard where they had glimpsed the tariqua. She had plainly gone now—the fountain was dry and clogged, the bushes were bare tangles of wire. They walked out beneath the tiled arches, looking around. The wind was like a million voices, rising in ululating chorus. This was a strange and empty place; somehow dangerous. ... Jalila span around. The tariqua was standing there, her robes flapping. With insect fingers, she beckoned.

  “Are you leaving?” Jalila asked. “I mean, this place. ...”

  The tariqua had led them into the shelter of a tall, wind-echoing chamber set with blue and white tiles. There were a few rugs and cushions scattered on the floor, but still the sense of abandonment remained. As if, Jalila thought, as the tariqua folded herself on the floor and gestured that they join her, this was her last retreat.

  “No, Jalila. I won’t be leaving Habara. Itfaddal. ... Do sit down.”

  They stepped from their sandals and obeyed. Jalila couldn’t quite remember now whether Kalal had encountered the tariqua on her visit to their haramlek, although it seemed plain from his stares at her, and the way her grey-white gaze returned them, that they knew of each other in some way. Coffee was brewing in the corner, over a tiny blue spirit flame, which, as it fluttered in the many drafts, would have taken hours to heat anything. Yet the spout of the brass pot was steaming. And there were dates, too, and nuts and seeds. The tariqua, apologizing for her inadequacy as a host, nevertheless insisted that they help themselves. And somewhere there was a trough of water, too, for their hayawans, and a basket of acram leaves.

  Uneasily, they sipped from their cups, chewed the seeds. Kalal had picked up a chipped lump of old stone and was playing with it nervously. Jalila couldn’t quite see what it was.

  “So,” he said, clearing his throat, “you’ve been to and from the stars, have you?”

  “As have you. Perhaps you could name the planet? It may have been somewhere that we have both visited. ...”

  Kalal swallowed. His lump of old stone clicked the floor. A spindle of wind played chill on Jalila’s neck. Then—she didn’t know how it began—the tariqua was talking of Ghezirah, the great and fabled city that lay at the center of all the Ten Thousand and One Worlds. No one Jalila had ever met or heard of had ever visited Ghezirah, not even Nayra’s mothers—yet this tariqua talked of it as if she knew it well. Before, Jalila had somehow imagined the tariqua trailing from planet to distant planet with dull cargoes of ore and biomass in her ship’s holds. To her mind, Ghezirah had always been more than half-mythical—a place from which a dubious historical figure such as the Blessed Joanna might easily emanate, but certainly not a place composed of solid streets upon which the gnarled and bony feet of this old woman might once have walked. ...

  Ghezirah ... she could see it now in her mind, smell the shadowy lobbies, see the ever-climbing curve of its mezzanines and rooftops vanishing into the impossible greens of the Floating Ocean. But every time Jalila’s vision seemed about to solidify, the tariqua said something else that made it tremble and change. And then the tariqua said the strangest thing of all, which was that the City At The End Of All Roads was actually alive. Not alive in the meager sense in which every town has a sort of life, but truly living. The city thought. It grew. It responded. There was no central mind or focus to this consciousness, because Ghezirah itself, its teeming streets and minarets and rivers and caleches and its many millions of lives, was itself the mind. ...

  Jalila was awestruck, but Kalal seemed unimpressed, and was still playing with that old lump of stone.

  4.

  “Jalilaneen. ...”

  The way bondmother Lya said her name made Jalila look up. Somewhere in her throat, a wary nerve started ticking. They took their meals inside now, in the central courtyard of the haramlek, which Pavo had provided with a translucent roofing to let in a little of what light there was in the evenings’ skies, and keep out most of the wind. Still, as Jalila took a sip of steaming hibiscus, she was sure that the sand had gotten into something.

  “We’ve been talking. Things have come up—ideas about which we’d like to seek your opinion. ...”

  In other words, Jalila thought, her gaze traveling across her three mothers, you’ve decided something. And this is how you tell me—by pretending that you’re consulting me. It had been the same with leaving Tabuthal. It was always the same. An old ghost of herself got up at that point, threw down her napkin, stalked off up to her room. But the new Jalila remained seated. She even smiled and tried to look encouraging.

  “We’ve seen so little of this world,” Lya continued. “All of us, really. And especially since we had you. It’s been marvelous. But, of course, it’s also been confining. ... Oh no—” Lya waved the idea away quickly, before anyone could even begin to start thinking it. “—we won’t be leaving our haramlek and Al Janb. There are many things to do. New bonds and friendships have been made. Ananke and I won’t be leaving, anyway. ... But Pavo ...” And here Lya, who could never quite stop being the chair of a committee, gave a nod toward her mate. “... Pavo here has dec—expressed a wish—that she would like to travel.”

  “Travel?” Jalila leaned forward, her chin resting on her knuckles. “How?”

  Pavo gave her plate a half turn. “By boat seems the best way to explore Habara. With such a big ocean ...” She turned the plate again, as if to demonstrate.

  “And not just a boat,” Ananke put in encouragingly. “A brand new ship. We’re having it built—”

  “—But I thought you said you hadn’t yet decided?”

  “The contract, I think, is still being prepared,” Lya explained. “And much of the craft will be to Pavo’s own design.”

  “Will you be building it yourself?”

  “Not alone.” Pavo gave another of her flustered smiles. “I’ve asked Ibra to help me. He seems to be the best, the most knowledgeable—”

  “—Ibra? Does he have any references?”

  “This is Al Janb, Jalila,” Lya said. “We know and trust people. I’d have thought that, with your friendship with Kalal. ...”

  “This certainly is Al Janb. ...” Jalila sat back. “How can I ever forget it!” All of her mothers’ eyes were on her. Then something broke. She got up and stormed off to her room.

  The long ride to the tariqua’s qasr, the swish of the wind, and banging three times on the old oak door. Then hobbling Robin and hurrying through dusty corridors to that tall tiled chamber, and somehow expecting no one to be there, even though Jalila had now come here several times alone.

  But the tariqua was always there. Waiting.

  Between them now, there was much to be said.

  “This ant, Jalila, which crawls across this sheet of paper from here to there. She is much like us as we crawl across the surface of this planet. Even if she had the wings some of her kind sprout, just as I have my caleche, it would still be the same.” The tiny creature, waving feelers, was plainly lost. A black dot. Jalila understood how it felt. “But say, if we were to fold both sides of the paper together. You see how she moves now ... ?” The ant, antennae waving, hesitant, at last made the tiny jump. “We can move more quickly from one place to another by not travelling across the distance that separates us from it, but by folding space itself.

  “Imagine now, Jalila, that this universe is not one thing alone, one solitary series of this following that, but an endless branching of potentialities. Such it has bee
n since the Days of Creation, and such it is even now, in the shuffle of that leaf as the wind picks at it, in the rising steam of your coffee. Every moment goes in many ways. Most are poor, half-formed things, the passing thoughts and whims of the Almighty. They hang there and they die, never to be seen again. But others branch as strongly as this path that we find ourselves following. There are universes where you and I have never sat here in this qasr. There are universes where there is no Jalila. ... Will you get that for me ... ?”

  The tariqua was pointing to an old book in a far corner. Its leather was cracked, the wind lifted its pages. As she took it from her, Jalila felt the hot brush of the old woman’s hand.

  “So now, you must imagine that there is not just one sheet of a single universe, but many, as in this book, heaped invisibly above and beside and below the page upon which we find ourselves crawling. In fact ...” The ant recoiled briefly, sensing the strange heat of the tariqua’s fingers, then settled on the open pages. “You must imagine shelf after shelf, floor upon floor of books, the aisles of an infinite library. And if we are to fold this one page, you see, we or the ant never quite knows what lies on the other side of it. And there may be a tear in that next page as well. It may even be that another version of ourselves has already torn it.”

  Despite its worn state, the book looked potentially valuable, hand-written in a beautiful flowing script. Jalila had to wince when the tariqua’s fingers ripped through them. But the ant had vanished now. She was somewhere between the book’s pages. ...