The Year's Best SF 12 # 1994

by Gardner Dozois (ed)

  “What does Kari do?” he asks.

  “Kari is married,” I say. “Her husband works, he directs a lorritank, like the one that delivers water.”

  “Did you ever have a boyfriend?” he asks.

  “I did, his name was Zard.”

  “Why didn’t you marry?” he asks. He is so innocent.

  “It didn’t work,” I say.

  “Is that why you became jessed?”

  “No,” I say.

  He is patient, he waits.

  “No,” I say again. “It was because of Shusilina.”

  And then I have to explain.

  Shusilina moved into the death house across the street, where Kari’s grand had lived until he died. Kari’s grand had been a soldier when he was young, and to be brave for the Holy he had a Serinitin implant, so that when he was old he didn’t remember who he was anymore. And when he died, Shusilina and her husband moved in. Shusilina had white hair and had had her ears pointed and she wanted a baby. I was only twenty, and trying to decide whether I should marry Zard. He had not asked me, but I thought he might, and I wasn’t sure what I should answer. Shusilina was younger than me, nineteen, but she wanted a baby, and that seemed terribly adult. And she had come from outside the Nekropolis, and had pointed ears, and everybody thought she was just a little too good for herself.

  We talked about Zard, and she told me that after marriage everything was not milk and honey. She was very vague on just what she meant by that, but I should know that it was not like it seemed now, when I was in love with Zard. I should give myself over to him, but I should hold some part of myself private, for myself, and not let marriage swallow me.

  Now I realize that she was a young bride trying to learn the difference between romance and life, and the conversations are obvious and adolescent, but then it seemed so adult to talk about marriage this way. It was like something sacred, and I was being initiated into mysteries. I dyed my hair white.

  My sister hated her. Michim made eyes at her all the time but he was only thirteen. Fhassin was seventeen and he laughed at Michim. Fhassin laughed at all sorts of things. He looked at the world from under his long eyelashes, so in contrast with his sharp-chinned face and monkey grin. That was the year Fhassin, who had always been shorter than everybody, almost shorter than Michim, suddenly grew so tall. He was visited by giggling girls, but he never took any of them seriously.

  It was all outside, not inside the family. In the evenings we sat on the floor in the middle of our three death houses and made paper flowers. We lived in a house filled with perfume. I was twenty, Larit was nineteen, but nobody had left my mother’s house, and we never thought that was strange. But it was, the way we were held there.

  So when did Fhassin stop seeing her as silly and begin to see Shusilina as a person? I didn’t suspect it. The giggling girls still came by the house, and Fhassin still grinned and didn’t really pay much attention. They were careful, meeting in the afternoon when her husband was building new death-houses at the other end of the Nekropolis and the rest of us were sleeping.

  I think Fhassin did it because he was always a daredevil, like walking on the roofs of the death-houses, or the time he took money out of our mother’s money pot so he could sneak out and ride the Tube. He was lost in the city for hours, finally sneaking back onto the Tube and risking getting caught as a free-farer.

  No, that isn’t true. The truth must be that he fell in love with her. I had never really been in love with Zard, maybe I have never been in love with anyone. How could I understand? I couldn’t stand the thought of leaving the family to marry Zard, how could he turn his back on the family for Shusilina? But some alchemy must have transformed him, made him see her as something other than a vain and silly girl—yes, it’s a cliché to call her a vain and silly girl, but that’s what she was. She was married, and it wasn’t very exciting anymore, not nearly as interesting as when her husband was courting her. Fhassin made her feel important, look at the risk he was taking, for her. For her!

  But what was going on in Fhassin? Fhassin despised romantic love, sentimentality.

  Her husband suspected, laid in wait and caught them, the neighborhood poured out into the street to see my brother, shirtless, protecting Shusilina whose hair was all unbound around her shoulders. Fhassin had a razor, and was holding off her screaming husband. The heat poured all over his brown, adolescent shoulders and chest. We stood in the street, sweating. And Fhassin was laughing, deadly serious, but laughing. He was so alive. Was it the intensity? Was that the lure for Fhassin? This was my brother, who I had known all my life, and he was a stranger.

  I realized that the Nekropolis was a foreign place, and I didn’t know anyone behind the skinmask of their face.

  They took my brother and Shusilina, divorced her from her husband for the adultery trial, and flogged them both, then dumped them in prison for seven years. I did not wait for Zard to ask me to marry him—not that he would have, now. I let my hair go black. I became a dutiful daughter. When I was twenty-one, I was jessed, impressed to feel duty and affection for whoever would pay the fee of my impression.

  Akhmim doesn’t understand. He has to go. I cry when he’s gone.

  * * *

  Finally, after twenty-eight days, I emerge from my room, white and trembling like Iqurth from the tomb, to face the world and my duties. I don’t know what the mistress has told Mardin, but I am subjected to a vague lecture I’m sure Mardin thinks of as fatherly. Fadina avoids meeting my eyes when she sees me. The girl who works with the cook watches the floor. I move like a ghost through the woman’s quarters. Only the mistress sees me, fastens her eyes on me when I happen to pass her, and her look is cruel. If I hear her, I take to stepping out of the hall if I can.

  Friday afternoon, she is playing the Tiles, and I take the cleaning machine to her room. I have checked with Fadina, to confirm that she is not in, but I cannot convince myself that she has left. Perhaps Fadina has forgotten, perhaps the mistress has not told her. I creep in and stand listening. The usual projection is on—not bismek but the everyday clutter of silks and fragile tables with silver lace frames, antique lamps, paisley scarves and cobalt pottery. The cleaning machine will not go in. I stop and listen, no sound but the breeze through the window hangings. I creep through the quarters, shaking. The bed is unmade, a tumble of blue and silver brocade. That’s unusual, Fadina always makes it. I think about making it, but I decide I had better not, do what I always do or the mistress will be on me. Best do only what is safe. I pick up the clothes off the floor and creep back and turn off the projection. The machine starts.

  If she comes back early what will I do? I stand by the projection switch, unwilling to leave even to put the clothing in the laundry. If she comes back, when I hear her, I will snap on the projection machine. The cleaning machine will stop and I will take it and leave. It is the best I can do.

  The cleaning machine snuffles around, getting dust from the window sills and table tops, cleaning the floor. It is so slow. I keep thinking I hear her and snapping on the projection. The machine stops and I listen, but I don’t hear anything so I snap the projection off and the cleaning machine starts again. Finally the rooms are done, and the cleaning machine and I make our escape. I have used extra scent on the sheets in the linen closet, the way she likes them, and I have put extra oil in the rings on the lights and extra scent in the air freshener. It is all a waste, all that money, but that’s what she likes.

  I have a terrible headache. I go to my room and wait and try to sleep until the headache is gone. I am asleep when Fadina bangs on my door and I feel groggy and disheveled.

  “The mistress wants you,” she snaps, glaring at me.

  I can’t go.

  I can’t not go. I follow her without doing up my hair or putting on my sandals.

  The mistress is sitting in her bedroom, still dressed up in saffron and veils. I imagine she has just gotten back. “Diyet,” she says, “did you clean my rooms?”

  What
did I disturb? I didn’t do anything to this room except pick up the laundry and run the cleaning machine; is something missing? “Yes, mistress,” I say. Oh, my heart.

  “Look at this room,” she hisses.

  I look, not knowing what I am looking for.

  “Look at the bed!”

  The bed looks just the same as it did when I came in, blankets and sheets tumbled, shining blue and silver, the scent of her perfume in the cool air.

  “Come here,” the mistress commands, “kneel down.” I kneel down so that I am not taller than she is. She looks at me for a moment, so angry that she doesn’t seem able to speak. Then, I see it coming but I can’t do anything, up comes her hands and she slaps me. I topple sideways, mostly from surprise. “Are you too stupid to even know to make a bed?”

  “Fadina always makes your bed,” I say. I should have made it, I should have. Holy One, I am such an idiot.

  “So the one time Fadina doesn’t do your work you are too lazy to do it yourself?”

  “Mistress,” I say, “I was afraid to—”

  “You should be afraid!” she shouts. She slaps me, both sides of my face, and shouts at me, her face close to mine. On and on. I don’t listen, it’s just sound. Fadina walks me to the door. I am holding my head up, trying to maintain some dignity. “Diyet,” Fadina whispers.

  “What?” I say, thinking maybe she has realized that it’s the mistress, that it’s not my fault.

  But she just shakes her head, “Try not to upset her, that’s all. Just don’t upset her.” Her face is pleading, she wants me to understand.

  Understand what? That she is jessed? As Akhmim says, we are only what we are.

  But I understand what it is going to be like now. The mistress hates me, and there’s nothing I can do. The only way to escape is to ask Mardin to sell me off, but then I would have to leave Akhmim. And since he’s a harni he can’t even ride the Tube without someone else providing credit. If I leave, I’ll never see him again.

  * * *

  The room is full of whispers. The window is open and the breeze rustles among the paper flowers. There are flowers everywhere, on the dresser, the chairs. Akhmim and I sit in the dark room, lit only by the light from the street. He is sitting with one leg underneath him. Like some animal, a panther, indolent.

  “You’ll still be young when I’m old,” I say.

  “No,” he says. That is all, just the one word.

  “Do you get old?”

  “If we live out our natural span. About sixty, sixty-five years.”

  “Do you get wrinkles? White hair?”

  “Some. Our joints get bad, swell, like arthritis. Things go wrong.” He is so quiet tonight. Usually he is cheerful.

  “You are so patient,” I say.

  He makes a gesture with his hands, “It does not matter.”

  “Is it hard for you to be patient?”

  “Sometimes,” he says. “I feel frustration, anger, fear. But we are bred to be patient.”

  “What’s wrong?” I ask. I sound like a little girl, my voice all breathy.

  “I am thinking. You should leave here.”

  The mistress is always finding something. Nothing I do is right. She pulls my hair, confines me to my room. “I can’t,” I say, “I’m jessed.”

  He is so still in the twilight.

  “Akhmim,” I say, suddenly cruel, “do you want me to go?”

  “Harni are not supposed to have ‘wants,’” he says, his voice flat. I have never heard him say the word “harni.” It sounds obscene. It makes me get up, his voice. It fills me with nervousness, with aimless energy. If he is despairing, what is there for me? I leave the window, brush my fingers across the desk, hearing the flowers rustle. I touch all the furniture, and take an armload of flowers, crisp and cool, and I drop them in his lap. “What?” he says. I take more flowers and throw them over his shoulders. His face is turned up at me, lit by the light from the street, full of wonder. I gather flowers off the chair, drop them on him. There are flowers all over the bed, funeral flowers. He reaches up, flowers spilling off his sleeves, and takes my arms to make me stop, saying, “Diyet, what?” I lean forward and close my eyes.

  I wait, hearing the breeze rustle the lilies, the poppies, the roses on the bed. I wait forever. Until he finally kisses me.

  He won’t do any more than kiss me. Lying among all the crushed flowers he will stroke my face, my hair, he will kiss me, but that is all. “You have to leave,” he says, desperately. “You have to tell Mardin, tell him to sell you.”

  I won’t leave. I have nothing to go to.

  “Do you love me because you have to? Is it because you are a harni and I am a human and you have to serve me?” I ask.

  He shakes his head.

  “Do you love me because of us?” I press. There are no words for the questions I am asking him.

  “Diyet,” he says.

  “Do you love the mistress?”

  “No,” he says.

  “You should love the mistress, shouldn’t you, but you love me.”

  “Go home, go to the Nekropolis. Run away,” he urges, kissing my throat, tiny little kisses, as if he has been thinking of my throat for a long time.

  “Run away? From Mardin? What would I do for the rest of my life? Make paper flowers?”

  “What would be wrong with that?”

  “Would you come with me?” I ask.

  He sighs and raises up on his elbow. “You should not fall in love with me.”

  This is funny. “This is a fine time to tell me.”

  “No,” he says, “it is true.” He counts on his fine fingers, “One, I am a harni, not a human being, and I belong to someone else. Two, I have caused all of your problems, if I had not been here, you would not have had all your troubles. Three, the reason it is wrong for a human to love a harni is because harni-human relationships are bad paradigms for human behavior, they lead to difficulty in dealing with human-to-human relationships—”

  “I don’t have any human-to-human relationships,” I interrupt.

  “You will, you are just young.”

  I laugh at him. “Akhmim, you’re younger than I am! Prescripted wisdom.”

  “But wisdom nonetheless,” he says, solemnly.

  “Then why did you kiss me?” I ask.

  He sighs. It is such a human thing, that sigh, full of frustration. “Because you are so sad.”

  “I’m not sad right now,” I say. “I’m happy because you are here.” I am also nervous. Afraid. Because this is all so strange, and even though I keep telling myself that he’s so human, I am afraid that underneath he is really alien, more unknowable than my brother. But I want him to stay with me. And I am happy. Afraid but happy.

  My lover. “I want you to be my lover,” I say.

  “No.” He sits up. He is beautiful, even disheveled. I can imagine what I look like. Maybe he does not even like me, maybe he has to act this way because I want it. He runs his fingers through his hair, his earring gleams in the light from the street.

  “Do harni fall in love?” I ask.

  “I have to go,” he says. “We’ve crushed your flowers.” He picks up a lily whose long petals have become twisted and crumpled and tries to straighten it out.

  “I can make more. Do you have to do this because I want you to?”

  “No,” he says very quietly. Then more clearly, like a recitation, “Harni don’t have feelings, not in the sense that humans do. We are loyal, flexible, and affectionate.”

  “That makes you sound like a smart dog,” I say, irritated.

  “Yes,” he says, “that is what I am, a smart dog, a very smart dog. Good night, Diyet.”

  When he opens the door, the breeze draws and the flowers rustle, and some tumble off the bed, trying to follow him.

  * * *

  “Daughter,” Mardin says, “I am not sure that this is the best situation for you.” He looks at me kindly. I wish Mardin did not think that he had to be my father.

 
“Mardin-salah?” I say, “I don’t understand, has my work been unsatisfactory?” Of course my work has been unsatisfactory, the mistress hates me. But I am afraid they have somehow realized what is between Akhmim and me—although I don’t know how they could. Akhmim is avoiding me again.

  “No, no,” he waves his hand airily, “your accounts are in order, you have been a good and frugal girl. It is not your fault.”

  “I … I am aware that I have been clumsy, that perhaps I have not always understood what the mistress wished, but Mardin-salah, I am improving!” I am getting better at ignoring her, I mean. I don’t want him to feel inadequate. Sitting here, I realize the trouble I’ve caused him. He hates having to deal with the household in any but the most perfunctory way. I am jessed to this man, his feelings matter to me. Rejection of my services is painful. This has been a good job, I have been able to save some of my side money so that when I am old I won’t be like my mother, forced to struggle and hope that the children will be able to support her when she can’t work anymore.

  Mardin is uncomfortable. The part of me that is not jessed can see that this is not the kind of duty that Mardin likes. This is not how he sees himself; he prefers to be the benevolent patriarch. “Daughter,” he says, “you have been exemplary, but wives.…” he sighs. “Sometimes, child, they get whims, and it is better for me, and for you, if we find you some good position with another household.”

  At least he hasn’t said anything about Akhmim. I bow my head because I am afraid I will cry. I study my toes. I try not to think of Akhmim. Alone again. Oh Holy One, I am so tired of being alone. I will be alone my whole life, jessed women do not marry. I cannot help it, I start to cry. Mardin takes it as a sign of my loyalty and pats me gently on the shoulder. “There, there, child, it will be all right.”

  I don’t want Mardin to comfort me. The part of me that watches, that isn’t jessed, doesn’t even really like Mardin—but at the same time, I want to make him happy, so I gamely sniff and try to smile. “I, I know you know what is best,” I manage. But my distress makes him uncomfortable. So he says when arrangements are made he will tell me.