The Mammoth Book of Best Short SF Novels

by Gardner R. Dozois

  In the quiet but powerful story that follows, she tells the story of a young woman who learns the painful lesson that wisdom has a price. And that sometimes that price is more than you were willing to pay.

  i

  The sun was up on the snow and everything was bright to look at 1 when the skimmer landed. It landed on the long patch of land behind the schoolhouse, dropping down into the snow like some big bug. I was supposed to be down at the distillery helping my mam but we needed water and I had to get an ice ax so I was outside when the offworlders came.

  The skimmer was from Barok. Barok was a city. It was so far away that no one I knew in Sckarline had ever been there (except for the teachers, of course) but for the offworlders the trip was only a few hours. The skimmer came a couple of times a year to bring packages for the teachers.

  The skimmer sat there for a moment – long time waiting while nothing happened except people started coming to watch – and then the hatch opened out and an offworlder stepped gingerly out on the snow. The offworlder wasn’t a skimmer pilot though, it was a tall, thin boy. I shaded my eyes and watched. My hands were cold but I wanted to see.

  The offworlder wore strange colors for the snow. Offworlders always wore unnatural colors. This boy wore purples and oranges and black, all shining as if they were wet and none of them thick enough to keep anyone warm. He stood with his knees stiff and his body rigid because the snow was packed to flat, slick ice by the skimmer and he wasn’t sure of his balance. But he was tall and I figured he was as old as I am so it looked odd that he still didn’t know how to walk on snow. He was beardless, like a boy. Darker than any of us.

  Someone inside the skimmer handed him a bag. It was deep red and shined as if it were hard and wrinkled as if it were felt. My father crossed to the skimmer and took the bag from the boy because it was clear that the boy might fall with it and it made a person uncomfortable to watch him try to balance and carry something.

  The dogs were barking, and more Sckarline people were coming because they’d heard the skimmer.

  I wanted to see what the bags were made of so I went to the hatch of the skimmer to take something. We didn’t get many things from the offworlders because they weren’t appropriate, but I liked offworlder things. I couldn’t see much inside the skimmer because it was dark and I had been out in the sun, but standing beside the seat where the pilot was sitting there was an old white-haired man, all straight-legged and tall. As tall as Ayudesh the teacher, which is to say taller than anyone else I knew. He handed the boy a box, though, not a bag, a bright blue box with a thick white lid. A plastic box. An offworlder box. The boy handed it to me.

  “Thanks,” the boy said in English. Up close I could see that the boy was really a girl. Offworlders dress the same both ways, and they are so tall it’s hard to tell sometimes, but this was a girl with short black hair and skin as dark as wood.

  My father put the bag in the big visitors’ house and I put the box there, too. It was midday at winterdark, so the sun was a red glow on the horizon. The bag looked black except where it fell into the red square of sunlight from the doorway. It shone like metal. So very fine. Like nothing we had. I touched the bag. It was plastic, too. I liked the feeling of plastic. I liked the sound of the word in lingua. If someday I had a daughter, maybe I’d name her Plastic. It would be a rich name, an exotic name. The teachers wouldn’t like it, but it was a name I wished I had.

  Ayudesh was walking across the snow to the skimmer when I went back outside. The girl (I hadn’t shaken free from thinking of her as a boy) stuck out her hand to him. Should I have shaken her hand? No, she’d had the box, I couldn’t have shaken her hand. So I had done it right. Wanji, the other teacher, was coming, too.

  I got wood from the pile for the boxstove in the guest house, digging it from under the top wood because the top wood would be damp. It would take a long time to heat up the guest house, so the sooner I got started the sooner the offworlders would be comfortable.

  There was a window in the visitor’s house, fat-yellow above the purple-white snow.

  Inside everyone was sitting around on the floor, talking. None of the teachers were there, were they with the old man? I smelled whisak but I didn’t see any, which meant that the men were drinking it outside. I sat down at the edge of the group, where it was dark, next to Dirtha. Dirtha was watching the offworld girl who was shaking her head at Harup to try to tell him she didn’t understand what he was asking. Harup pointed at her blue box again. “Can I see it?” he asked. Harup was my father’s age so he didn’t speak any English.

  It was warming up in here, although when the offworlder girl leaned forward and breathed out, her mouth in an O, her breath smoked the air for an instant.

  It was too frustrating to watch Harup try to talk to the girl. “What’s your kinship?” he asked. “I’m Harup Sckarline.” He thumped his chest with his finger. “What’s your kinship?” When she shook her head, not understanding all these words, he looked around and grinned. Harup wouldn’t stop until he was bored, and that would take a long time.

  “I’m sorry,” the girl said, “I don’t speak your language.” She looked unhappy.

  Ayudesh would be furious with us if he found out that none of us would try and use our English.

  I had to think about how to ask. Then I cleared my throat, so people would know I was going to talk from the back of the group. “He asks what is your name,” I said.

  The girl’s chin came up like a startled animal. “What?” she said.

  Maybe I said it wrong? Or my accent was so bad she couldn’t understand? I looked at my boots; the stitches around the toes were fraying. They had been my mother’s. “Your name,” I said to the boots.

  The toes twitched a little, sympathetic. Maybe I should have kept quiet.

  “My name is Veronique,” she said.

  “What is she saying?” asked Harup.

  “She says her kinship is Veronique,” I said.

  “That’s not a kinship,” said Little Shemus. Little Shemus wasn’t old enough to have a beard, but he was old enough to be critical of everything.

  “Offworlders don’t have kinship like we do,” I said. “She gave her front name.”

  “Ask her her kinship name,” Little Shemus said.

  “She just told you,” Ardha said, taking the end of her braid out of her mouth. Ardha was a year younger than me. “They don’t have kinship names. Ayudesh doesn’t have a kinship name. Wanji doesn’t.”

  “Sure they do,” Shemus said. “Their kinship name is Sckarlineclan.”

  “We give them that name,” said Ardha and pursed her round lips. Ardha was always bossy.

  “What are they saying?” asked the girl.

  “They say, err, they ask, what is your,” your what? How would I even ask what her kinship name was in English? There was a word for it, but I couldn’t think of it. “Your other name.”

  She frowned. Her eyebrows were quite black. “You mean my last name? It’s Veronique Twombly.”

  What was so hard about ‘last name’? I remembered it as soon as she said it. “Tawomby,” I said. “Her kinship is Veronique Tawomby.”

  “Tawomby,” Harup said. “Amazing. It doesn’t sound like a word. It sounds made-up, like children do. What’s in her box?”

  “I know what’s in her box,” said Erip. Everybody laughed except for Ardha and me. Even Little Sherep laughed and he didn’t really understand.

  The girl was looking at me to explain.

  “He asks inside, the box is.” I had gotten tangled up. Questions were hard.

  “Is the box inside?” she asked.

  I nodded.

  “It’s inside,” she said.

  I didn’t understand her answer, so I waited for her to explain.

  “I don’t know what you mean,” she said. “Did someone bring the box inside?”

  I nodded, because I wasn’t sure exactly what she’d said, but she didn’t reach for the box or open it or anything. I tried to thi
nk of how to say it.

  “Inside,” Ardha said, tentative. “What is?”

  “The box,” she said. “Oh wait, you want to know what’s in the box?”

  Ardha looked at the door so she wouldn’t have to look at the offworlder. I wasn’t sure so I nodded.

  She pulled the box over and opened it up. Something glimmered hard and green and there were red and yellow boxes covered in lingua and she said, “Presents for Ayudesh and Wanji.” Everybody stood up to see inside, so I couldn’t see, but I heard her say things. The words didn’t mean anything. Tea, that I knew. Wanji talked about tea. “These are sweets,” I heard her say. “You know, candy.” I knew the word ‘sweet,’ but I didn’t know what else she meant. It was so much harder to speak English to her than it was to do it in class with Ayudesh.

  Nobody was paying any attention to what she said but me. They didn’t care as long as they could see. I wished I could see.

  Nobody was even thinking about me, or that if I hadn’t been there she never would have opened the box. But that was the way it always was. If I only lived somewhere else, my life would be different. But Sckarline was neither earth nor sky, and I was living my life in-between. People looked and fingered, but she wouldn’t let them take things out, not even Harup, who was as tall as she was and a lot stronger. The younger people got bored and sat down and finally I could see Harup poking something with his finger, and the outland girl watching. The she looked at me.

  “What’s your name?” she asked.

  “Me?” I said. “Umm, Janna.”

  She said my name. “What’s your last name, Janna?”

  “Sckarline,” I said.

  “Oh,” she said, “like the settlement.”

  I just nodded.

  “What is his name?” She pointed.

  “Harup,” I said. He looked up and grinned.

  “What’s your name?” she asked him and I told him what she had said.

  “Harup,” he said. Then she went around the room, saying everybody’s names. It made everyone pleased to be noticed. She was smart that way. And it was easy. Then she tried to remember all their names, which had everyone laughing and correcting her so I didn’t have to talk at all.

  Ayudesh came in, taller than anyone, and I noticed, for the first time in my life, that he was really an offworlder. Ayudesh had been there all my life, and I knew he was an offworlder, but to me he had always been just Ayudesh.

  Then they were talking about me and Ayudesh was just Ayudesh again. “Janna?” he said. “Very good. I’ll tell you what, you take care of Veronique, here. You’re her translator, all right?”

  I was scared, because I really couldn’t understand when she talked, but I guessed I was better than anybody else.

  Veronique unpacked, which was interesting, but then she just started putting things here and there and everybody else drifted off until it was just her and me.

  Veronique did a lot of odd things. She used a lot of water. The first thing I did for her was get water. She followed me out and watched me chip the ice for water and fill the bucket. She fingered the wooden bucket and the rope handle.

  She said something I didn’t understand because it had ‘do’ in it and a lot of pronouns and I have trouble following sentences like that. I smiled at her but I think she realized I didn’t understand. Her boots were purple. I had never seen purple boots before.

  “They look strange,” she said. I didn’t know what looked strange. “I like your boots,” she said, slowly and clearly. I did understand, but then I didn’t know what to do, did she want me to give her my boots? They were my mother’s old boots and I wouldn’t have minded giving them to her except I didn’t have anything to take their place.

  “It is really cold,” she said.

  Which seemed very odd to say, except I remembered that offworlders talk about the weather, Ayudesh had made us practice talking about the weather. He said it was something strangers talked about. “It is,” I said. “But it will not snow tonight.” That was good, it made her happy.

  “And it gets dark so early,” she said. “It isn’t even afternoon and it’s like night.”

  “Where you live, it is cold as this, umm,” I hadn’t made a question right.

  But she understood. “Oh no,” she said, “where I live is warm. It is hot, I mean. There is snow only on the mountains.”

  She wanted to heat the water so I put it on the stove, and then she showed me pictures of her mother and father and her brother at her house. It was summer and they were wearing only little bits of clothes.

  Then she showed me a picture of herself and a man with a beard. “That’s my boyfriend,” she said. “We’re getting married.”

  He looked old. Grown up. In the picture Veronique looked older, too. I looked at her again, not sure how old she was. Maybe older than me? Wanji said offworlders got married when they were older, not like the clans.

  “I have boyfriend,” I said.

  “You do?” She smiled at me. “What’s his name?”

  “Tuuvin,” I said.

  “Was he here before?”

  I shook my head.

  Then she let me see her bag. The dark red one. I loved the color. I stroked it, as slick as leather and shining. “Plastic?” I said.

  She nodded.

  “I like plastic,” I said.

  She smiled a little, like I’d said something wrong. But it was so perfect, so even in color.

  “Do you want it?” she asked. Which made me think of my boots and whether she had wanted them. I shook my head.

  “You can have it,” she said. “I can get another one.”

  “No,” I said. “It isn’t appropriate.”

  She laughed, a startled laugh. I didn’t understand what I’d done and the feeling that I was foolish sat in my stomach, but I didn’t know what was so foolish.

  She said something I didn’t understand, which made me feel worse. “What did you say?” she said. “‘Appropriate’?”

  I nodded. “It’s not appropriate,” I said.

  “I don’t understand,” she said.

  Our lessons in appropriate development used lots of English words because it was hard to say these things any other way, so I found the words to tell her came easily. “Plastic,” I said, “it’s not appropriate. Appropriate technologies are based on the needs and capacities of people, they must be sustainable without outside support. Like the distillery is. Plastic isn’t appropriate to Sckarline’s economy because we can’t create it and it replaces things we can produce, like skin bags.” I stroked the bag again. “But I like plastic. It’s beautiful.”

  “Wow,” Veronique said. She was looking at me sharp, all alert like a stabros smelling a dog for the first time. Not afraid, but not sure what to think. “To me,” she said slowly, “your skin bags are beautiful. The wooden houses,” she touched the black slick wood wall, “they are beautiful.”

  Ayudesh and Wanji were always telling us that offworlders thought our goods were wonderful, but how could anyone look at a skin bag and then look at plastic and not see how brilliant the colors were in plastic? Dye a skin bag red and it still looked like a skin bag, like it came from dirt.

  “How long you, um, you do stay?” I asked.

  “Fourteen days,” she said. “I’m a student, I came with my teacher.”

  I nodded. “Ayudesh, he is a teacher.”

  “My teacher, he’s a friend of Ayudesh. From years ago,” she said. “Have you always lived here? Were you born here?”

  “Yes,” I said. “I am born here. My mother and father are born in Tentas clan, but they come here.”

  “Tentas clan is another settlement?” she asked.

  I shook my head. “No,” I said. “No. Sckarline only is a settlement.”

  “Then, what is Tentas clan?”

  “It is people.” I didn’t know how to explain clans to her at all. “They have kinship, and they have stabros, and they are together—”

  “Stabros, those are an
imals,” she said.

  I nodded. “Sckarline, uh . . . is an appropriate technology mission.”

  “Right, that Ayudesh and Wanji started. Tentas clan is a clan, right?”

  I nodded. I was worn out from talking to her.

  After that she drank tea and then I took her around to show her Sckarline. It was already almost dark. I showed her the generator where we cooked stabros manure to make electricity. I got a lantern there.

  I showed her the stabros pens and the dogs, even though it wasn’t really very interesting. Tuuvin was there, and Gerdor, my little uncle, leaning and watching the stabros who were doing nothing but rooting at the mud in the pen and hoping someone would throw them something to eat. The stabros shook their heads and dug with their long front toes.

  “This is Tuuvin?” Veronique said.

  I was embarrassed. One of the stabros, a gelding with long feathery ears, craned his head toward me. I reached out and pulled on the long guard hairs at the tips of his ears and he lipped at my hand. He had a long purple tongue. He breathed out steam. Their breath always reminded me of the smell of whisak mash.

  “Do you ride them?” Veronique asked.

  “What?” I asked.

  “Do you, um, get on their backs?” She made a person with her fingers walking through the air, then the fingers jumped on the other hand.