The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year: Volume Nine

by Jonathan Strahan

  Not in one semester, of course. After the semester ended, all of us worked on the Cimmeria Project. It became the topic of Lisa’s dissertation: A Dictionary and Grammar of Modern Cimmerian, with Commentary. Mike focused on history. I wrote articles on culture, figuring out probable rites of passage, how the Cimmerians would bury their dead. We had Herodotus, we had accounts of cultures from that area. We were all steeped in anthropological theory. On weekends, when we should have been going on dates, we gathered in a conference room, under a fluorescent light, and talked about Cimmeria. It was fortunate that around that time, the Journal of Imaginary Anthropology was founded at Penn State. Otherwise, I don’t know where we would have published. At the first Imaginary Anthropology conference, in Orlando, we realized that a group from Tennessee was working on the modern Republic of Scythia and Sarmatia, which shared a border with Cimmeria. We formed a working group.

  “Don’t let the Cimmerians hear you talk about creating all this,” I said. “Especially the nationalists. Remember, they have guns, and you don’t.” Should I mention her cargo shorts? I had to admit, looking at her knobby red knees, above socks and Birkenstocks, that the Khan had a point. Before she left for the mountains, I would warn her to wear more traditional clothes.

  I was going to stay in the capital. My work would focus on the ways in which the historical practices we had described in “Cimmeria: A Proposal,” in the second issue of the Journal of Imaginary Anthropology, influenced and remained evident in modern practice. Already I had seen developments we had never anticipated. One was the fashion for blue hair; in a footnote, Mike had written that blue was a fortunate color in Cimmerian folk belief. Another was the ubiquity of cats in the capital. In an article on funerary rites, I had described how cats were seen as guides to the land of the dead until the coming of Christianity in the twelfth century CE. The belief should have gone away, but somehow it had persisted, and every household, whether Orthodox, Catholic, Muslim, Jewish, or one of the minor sects that flourished in the relative tolerance of Cimmeria, had its cat. No Cimmerian wanted his soul to get lost on the way to Paradise. Stray cats were fed at the public expense, and no one dared harm a cat. I saw them everywhere, when I ventured into the city. In a month, Mike was going to join us, and I would be able to show him all the developments I was documenting. Meanwhile, there was email and Skype.

  I was assigned a bedroom and bath close to our offices. Afa, who had been a sort of under-cook, was assigned to be my servant but quickly became my guide, showing me around the city and mocking my Cimmerian accent. “Heh heh!” she would say. “No, Doctor Pat, that word is not pronounced that way. Do not repeat it that way, I beg of you. I am an old woman, but still it is not respectable for me to hear!” Jafik was my language teacher as well as my translator, teaching me the language Lisa had created based on what we knew of historical Cimmerian and its Indo-European roots, except that it had developed an extensive vocabulary. As used by modern Cimmerians, it had the nuance and fluidity of a living language, as well as a surprising number of expletives.

  I had no duties except to conduct my research, which was a relief from the grind of TAing and, recently, teaching my own undergraduate classes. But one day, I was summoned to speak with the Khan. It was the day of an official audience, so he was dressed in Cimmerian ceremonial robes, although he still wore his Rolex watch. His advisors looked impatient, and I gathered that the audience was about to begin – I had seen a long line of supplicants waiting by the door as I was ushered in. But he said, as though we had all the time in the world, “Doctor Nolan, did you know that my daughters are learning American?” Sitting next to him were four girls, all wearing the traditional head-scarves worn by Cimmerian peasant women, but pulled back to show that their hair was dyed fashionably blue. “They are very troublesome, my daughters. They like everything modern: Leonardo DiCaprio, video games. Tradition is not good enough for them. They wish to attend university and find professions, or do humanitarian work. Ah, what is a father to do?” He shook a finger at them, fondly enough. “I would like it if you could teach them the latest American idioms. The slang, as it were.”

  That afternoon, Afa led me to another part of the palace – the royal family’s personal quarters. These were more modern and considerably more comfortable than ours. I was shown into what seemed to be a common room for the girls. There were colorful rugs and divans, embroidered wallhangings, and an enormous flat-screen TV.

  “These are the Khan’s daughters,” said Afa. She had already explained to me, in case I made any blunders, that they were his daughters by his first wife, who had not been Miss Cimmeria, but had produced the royal children: a son, and then only daughters, and then a second son who had died shortly after birth. She had died a week later of an infection contacted during the difficult delivery. “Anoor is the youngest, then Tallah, and then Shaila, who is already taking university classes online.” Shaila smiled at me. This time, none of them were wearing head-scarves. There really was something attractive about blue hair.

  “And what about the fourth one?” She was sitting a bit back from the others, to the right of and behind Shaila, whom she closely resembled.

  Afa looked at me with astonishment. “The Khan has three daughters,” she said. “Anoor, Tallah, and Shaila. There is no fourth one, Doctor Pat.”

  The fourth one stared at me without expression.

  “CIMMERIANS DON’T RECOGNIZE twins,” said Lisa. “That has to be the explanation. Do you remember the thirteenth-century philosopher Farkosh Kursand? When God made the world, He decreed that human beings would be born one at a time, unique, unlike animals. They would be born defenseless, without claws or teeth or fur. But they would have souls. It’s in a children’s book – I have a copy somewhere, but it’s based on Kursand’s reading of Genesis in one of his philosophical treatises. Mike would know which. And it’s the basis of Cimmerian human rights law, actually. That’s why women have always had more rights here. They have souls, so they’ve been allowed to vote since Cimmeria became a parliamentary monarchy. I’m sure it’s mentioned in one of the articles – I don’t remember which one, but check the database Mike is putting together. Shaila must have been a twin, and the Cimmerians don’t recognize the second child as separate from the first. So Shaila is one girl. In two bodies. But with one soul.”

  “Who came up with that stupid idea?”

  “Well, to be perfectly honest, it might have been you.” She leaned back in our revolving chair. I don’t know how she could do that without falling. “Or Mike, of course. It certainly wasn’t my idea. Embryologically it does make a certain sense. Identical twins really do come from one egg.”

  “So they’re both Shaila.”

  “There is no both. The idea of both is culturally inappropriate. There is one Shaila, in two bodies. Think of them as Shaila and her shadow.”

  I tested this theory once, while walking through the market with Afa. We were walking through the alley of the dog-sellers. In Cimmeria, almost every house has a dog, for defense and to catch rats. Cats are not sold in the market. They cannot be sold at all, only given or willed away. To sell a cat for money is to imperil your immortal soul. We passed a woman sitting on the ground, with a basket beside her. In it were two infants, as alike as the proverbial two peas in a pod, half-covered with a ragged blanket. Beside them lay a dirty mutt with a chain around its neck that lifted its head and whimpered as we walked by.

  “Child how many in basket?” I asked Afa in my still-imperfect Cimmerian.

  “There is one child in that basket, Pati,” she said. I could not get her to stop using the diminutive. I even told her that in my language Pati was a woman’s name, to no effect. She just smiled, patted me on the arm, and assured me that no one would mistake such a tall, handsome (which in Cimmerian is the same word as beautiful) man for a woman.

  “Only one child?”

  “Of course. One basket, one child.”

  Shaila’s shadow followed her everywhere. When she and her
sisters sat with me in the room with the low divans and the large-screen TV, studying American slang, she was there. “What’s up!” Shaila would say, laughing, and her shadow would stare down at the floor. When Shaila and I walked through the gardens, she walked six paces behind, pausing when we paused, sitting when we sat. After we were married, in our apartment in Arizona, she would sit in a corner of the bedroom, watching as we made love. Although I always turned off the lights, I could see her: a darkness against the off-white walls of faculty housing.

  Once, I tried to ask Shaila about her. “Shaila, do you know the word twin?”

  “Yes, of course,” she said. “In American, if two babies are born at the same time, they are twins.”

  “What about in Cimmeria? Surely there is a Cimmerian word for twin. Sometimes two babies are born at the same time in Cimmeria too.”

  She looked confused. “I suppose so. Biology is the same everywhere.”

  “Well, what’s the word, then?”

  “I cannot think of it. I shall have to email Tallah. She is better at languages than I am.”

  “What if you yourself were a twin?”

  “Me? But I am not a twin. If I were, my mother would have told me.”

  I tried a different tactic. “Do you remember the dog you had, Kala? She had two sisters, born at the same time. Those were Anoor’s and Tallah’s dogs. They were not Kala, even though they were born in the same litter. You could think of them as twins – I mean, triplets.” I remembered them gamboling together, Kala and her two litter-mates. They would follow us through the gardens, and Shaila and her sisters would pet them indiscriminately. When we sat under the plum trees, they would tumble together into one doggy heap.

  “Pat, what is this all about? Is this about the fact that I don’t want to have a baby right now? You know I want to go to graduate school first.”

  I did not think her father would approve the marriage. I told her so: “Your father will never agree to you marrying a poor American post-doc. Do you have any idea how poor I am? My research grant is all I have.”

  “You do not understand Cimmerian politics,” Shaila replied. “Do you know what percentage of our population is ethnically Sarmatian? Twenty percent, all in the Eastern province. They fought the Russians, and they still have weapons. Not just guns: tanks, anti-aircraft missiles. The Sarmatians are getting restless, Pati. They are mostly Catholic, in a country that is mostly Orthodox. They want to unite with their homeland, create a greater Scythia and Sarmatia. My father projects an image of strength, because what else can you do? But he is afraid. He is most afraid that the Americans will not help. They helped against the Russians, but this is an internal matter. He has talked to us already about different ways for us to leave the country. Anoor has been enrolled at the Lycée International in Paris, and Tallah is going to study at the American School in London. They can get student visas. For me it is more difficult: I must be admitted at a university. That is why I have been taking courses online. Ask him: if he says no, then no. But I think he will consider my marriage with an American.”

  She was right. The Khan considered. For a week, and then another, while pro-Sarmatian factions clashed with the military in the Eastern province. Then protests broke out in the capital. Anoor was already in Paris with her mother, supposedly on a shopping spree for school. Tallah had started school in London. In the Khan’s personal office, I signed the marriage contract, barely understanding what I was signing because it was in an ornate script I had seen only in medieval documents. On the way to the airport, we stopped by the cathedral in Shahin Square, where we were married by the Patriarch of the Cimmerian Independent Orthodox Church, who checked the faxed copy of my baptismal certificate and lectured me in sonorous tones about the importance of conversion, raising children in the true faith. The Khan kissed Shaila on both cheeks, promising her that we would have a proper ceremony when the political situation was more stable and she could return to the country. In the Khan’s private plane, we flew to a small airport near Fresno and spent our first night together at my mother’s house. My father had died of a heart attack while I was in college, and she lived alone in the house where I had grown up. It was strange staying in the guest bedroom, down the hall from the room where I had slept as a child, which still had my He-Man action figures on the shelves, the Skeletor defaced with permanent marker. I had to explain to her about Shaila’s shadow.

  “I don’t understand,” my mother said. “Are you all going to live together?”

  “Well, yes, I guess so. It’s really no different than if her twin sister were living with us, is it?”

  “And Shaila is going to take undergraduate classes? What is her sister going to do?”

  “I have no idea,” I said.

  What she did, more than anything else, was watch television. All day, it would be on. Mostly, she watched CNN and the news shows. Sometimes I would test Shaila, asking, “Did you turn the TV on?”

  “Is it on?” she would say. “Then of course I must have turned it on. Unless you left it on before you went out. How did your class go? Is that football player in the back still falling asleep?”

  One day, I came home and noticed that the other Shaila was cooking dinner. Later I asked, “Shaila, did you cook dinner?”

  “Of course,” she said. “Did you like it?”

  “Yes.” It was actually pretty good, chicken in a thick red stew over rice. It reminded me of a dish Afa had made in an iron pot hanging over an open fire in the servants’ quarters. But I guess it could be made on an American stovetop as well.

  After that, the other Shaila cooked dinner every night. It was convenient, because I was teaching night classes, trying to make extra money. Shaila told me that I did not need to work so hard, that the money her father gave her was more than enough to support us both. But I was proud and did not want to live off my father-in-law, even if he was the Khan of Cimmeria. At the same time, I was trying to write up my research on Cimmerian funerary practices. If I could publish a paper in the Journal of Imaginary Anthropology, I might have a shot at a tenure-track position, or at least a visiting professorship somewhere that wasn’t Arizona. Shaila was trying to finish her pre-med requirements. She had decided that she wanted to be a pediatrician.

  Meanwhile, in Cimmeria, the situation was growing more complicated. The pro-Sarmatian faction had split into the radical Sons of Sarmatia and the more moderate Sarmatian Democratic Alliance, although the Prime Minister claimed that the SDA was a front. There were weekly clashes with police in the capital, and the Sons of Sarmatia had planted a bomb in the Hilton, although a maid had reported a suspicious shopping bag and the hotel had been evacuated before the bomb could go off. The Khan had imposed a curfew, and martial law might be next, although the army had a significant Sarmatian minority. But I had classes to teach, so I tried not to pay attention to politics, and even Shaila dismissed it all as “a mess.”

  ONE DAY, I came home from a departmental meeting and Shaila wasn’t in the apartment. She was usually home by seven. I assumed she’d had to stay late for a lab. The other Shaila was cooking dinner in the kitchen. At eight, when she hadn’t come back yet, I sat down at the kitchen table to eat. To my surprise, the other Shaila sat down across from me, at the place set for Shaila. She had never sat down at the table with us before.

  She looked at me with her dark eyes and said, “How was your day, Pati?” I dropped my fork. It clattered against the rim of the plate. She had never spoken before, not one sentence, not one word. Her voice was just like Shaila’s, but with a stronger accent. At least it sounded stronger to me. Or maybe not. It was hard to tell.

  “Where’s Shaila?” I said. I could feel a constriction in my chest, as though a fist had started to close around my heart. Like the beginning of my father’s heart attack. I think even then, I knew.

  “What do you mean?” she said. “I’m Shaila. I have always been Shaila. The only Shaila there is.”

  I stared down at the lamb and peas in saffro
n curry. The smell reminded me of Cimmeria, of the bazaar. I could almost hear the clash of the cooking pots.

  “You’ve done something to her, haven’t you?”

  “I have no idea what you’re talking about. Eat your dinner, Pati. It’s going to get cold. You’ve been working so hard lately. I don’t think it’s good for you.”

  But I could not eat. I stood up, accidentally hitting my hip on the table and cursing at the pain. With a growing sense of panic, I searched the apartment for any clue to Shaila’s whereabouts. Her purse was in the closet, with her cell phone in it, so she must have come home earlier in the evening. All her clothes were on the hangers, as far as I could tell – she had a lot of clothes. Nothing seemed to be missing. But Shaila was not there. The other Shaila stood watching me, as though waiting for me to give up, admit defeat. Finally, after one last useless look under the bed, I left, deliberately banging the door behind me. She had to be somewhere.

  I walked across campus, to the Life Sciences classrooms and labs, and checked all of them. Then I walked through the main library and the science library, calling “Shaila!” until a graduate student in a carrel told me to be quiet. By this time, it was dark. I went to her favorite coffee shop, the Espresso Bean, where undergraduates looked at me strangely from behind their laptops, and then to every shop and restaurant that was still open, from the gelato place to the German restaurant, famous for its bratwurst and beer, where students took their families on Parents’ Weekend. Finally, I walked the streets, calling “Shaila!” as though she were a stray dog, hoping that the other Shaila was simply being presumptuous, rebelling against her secondary status. Hoping the real Shaila was out there somewhere.