Decision Point (ARC)
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pulled up around them. The house would be proof against
anything but a direct hit or near miss. Then the bricks would go
from being protectors to projectiles.
David was back, but then gone, like he’d blinked into
existence then left. Then he was back again. Then gone. Then it
was as if he was blinking. There, not, there, not, but the time
between slowly decreased and then there was a David-shaped
hole and water flooded out of it in all directions, fast and furious,
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like a river torrent after a heavy rain.
Even up the hill, it washed all the way up to Xareed’s knees,
warm water, not too cold, and then it flowed away, into the
gullies and down the hill.
There was one more mortar flash from the bottom of the old
lakebed before the rushing water arrived. The rush of the water
drowned out most noise but he thought he heard distant shouts
and cries.
He and Millie backed further up the hill until they reached
dry ground, then sat. Millie turned the flashlight off but the sound
of the water was overwhelming. Xareed could even feel it
through the ground, a thrumming vibration against the soles of
his feet and the palms of his hands.
The smell of it, wet and rich, permeated the air, turning the
normally dry, searing air into a moist and heady mix of half-
familiar smells.
“It smells like … like rain.”
“Yes,” agreed Millie. “Like rain after a long dry spell.”
*
Xareed woke to the morning light, which, magnified,
reflected off wavelets on the surface of a lake stretching two
kilometers to the far shore.
He sat up and looked around. He was above the shoreline,
barely, and his head had been pillowed on a rolled up jacket. It
was Millie’s, he realized, but he did not remember falling asleep.
He wondered if they’d taken him someplace far away, but
when he looked around, the sleeping camp was stirring. People
stood at the edge of the camp, staring at the water, taking a few
tentative steps forward, as if they thought it was a mirage that
would vanish when they walked toward it.
Maybe it was. He reached out a hand and trailed his fingers
through the water, then held them up and let them trickle into his
mouth. An empty mortar casing bobbed on the wavelets, a few
feet out from the shore, and he remembered the night before. He
imagined the rebels trying to get up the wet slopes weighed down
by their guns and mortars and ammunition, and, though he hoped
they’d made it out, he felt confident they’d had to leave the heavy
metal tools of war behind.
He got up and went to see how his family was.
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*
It could’ve been far worse. The mortar had hit in the square,
a stretch of empty dirt where people with things to trade or sell
sat in the morning and where the men sat in the evening
discussing the Qur’an. There was a small crater and shrapnel had
killed a woman across the way, but the nearest structure was
Xareed’s house.
“She’s fine,” his mother said, though she kept her arm around
his youngest sister and wouldn’t let her go play with the other
girls.
Xareed nodded. Awrala really was fine. She’d woken from
the loud noise and the weight but it really hadn’t even frightened
her. She’d been far more worried by her mother’s frantic cries
and when her mother and grandfather had pulled her from under
the pile of collapsed bricks, her mother had run her hands over
and over her arms and legs and back and front, looking for some
hurt, some wound.
Awrala was fine but it would take some time for his mother
to believe it.
They were making bricks. They’d separated out the unbroken
ones from the collapsed wall and the rest they’d thrown into the
mortar crater. Xareed spent his time walking back and forth to
the lake, carrying water and mud for the crater. His sisters trod
and stirred the sludge and his grandfather formed the bricks and
set them out in neat rows. It would take a few weeks but the wall
would be good as ever and they were making enough bricks to
add another room.
He was on his way back to the lake, his back sore and the
buckets light and empty, when Millie fell into step beside him,
looking cool and comfortable in the heat, her eyes shaded by
gleaming sunglasses. “Hallow,” she said, trying to say it like they
did locally, but she still sounded foreign-alien.
“Hello.” He tried to act relaxed but he couldn’t help looking
at her from the corners of very wide eyes.
“I wanted to thank you, for the other night. For helping us.”
He shrugged. “I have been thinking that maybe, perhaps, you
did not need help.”
She smiled. “You didn’t know that. I don’t know that, for that
matter. Who knows what would have happened?”
Xareed snorted. He knew what he thought. “You are kind.”
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“We are grateful. We could take you out of here. There is a
large community of your people in Minnesota. In the United
States.”
He had heard this. It was cold there. “How many could you
take? Could you take my sisters? My mother and grandfather?”
Millie licked her lips. “Yes.”
“How long would it take? The journey?”
She half-smiled. “No time, really. A few minutes for all of
you and your things.”
“Then you could take all of us, yes?” He sketched his arm
around in a large circle, encompassing the entire camp.
She frowned. “No. I don’t think we could. People would
come and stop us. We have enemies.”
“The rebels? The government troops?”
She shook her head. “Ah … no. That’s local. Our enemies
have a very long reach. We could take your family, though.”
He looked around. The water had changed things. There were
waterfowl on the lake. Someone had seen fish. An NGO had
gotten a food convoy through and, hearing of the lake, they’d
included seeds: maize, beans, and wheat. All over the camp
people had started gardens, putting children to work scaring off
the birds who might eat the seed. The wells were no longer dry
as the water from the lake seeped into the water table.
“We are here. This is where we have come and, thanks to
you, there is hope now. As long as the lake does not dry up
again.” He glanced at her again and raised his eyebrows.
She looked at the lake, her hands on her hips, and smiled.
“Perhaps that can be avoided.”
She flicked away and he blinked, surprised. He thought she
would’ve said goodbye.
He bent down to drag the buckets through the water and she
was back. She had a Chinese parasol, bamboo and bright blue
paper wit
h a sprinkling of red and pink flowers, and she held it
out to him. “To replace your old parasol.”
He took it without thinking, then said, “No.” He tried to hand
it back to her but she stepped back and put her hands behind her
back.
“No, it’s yours.”
His face contorted. He wanted the parasol with all his heart.
He ran up over the rise and handed it to the first person he saw,
a young girl carrying a baby on her hip.
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He went back to the water buckets and Millie looked at him,
then disappeared again, coming back immediately with another
umbrella.
This one was pink with white hyacinths. He took it from her
and gave it to an old woman washing clothes at the water’s edge.
He began walking with the buckets back toward the center of
camp.
Millie walked out from behind a tent and held out a green
umbrella. Xareed gave it to a boy chasing a grasshopper. Millie
stepped out from another corner with another parasol and Xareed
gave it to a woman weaving mats out of plastic and cardboard.
By the time they reached Xareed’s house, he’d given away
twenty-three umbrellas and a long line of people was following
them.
Millie shook her head. “You are very stubborn.”
He smiled.
“All right, you win,” she said.
“No more umbrellas?”
“Not exactly.”
*
The word spread quickly and the lines formed at the edge of
the square. There was much scrambling to keep the new bricks
from being ground into the dirt. His entire family stood there,
taking the umbrellas out of the cardboard boxes and handing
them out and giving the boxes away, too, when they were empty.
Then they would go into the mud brick house and bring out more
boxes.
“Where are they coming from?” asked his friend, Yahay.
“Your house could not hold a tenth of those boxes.”
“Where did the water in the lake come from? Where did the
water in the tanks come from?” he asked back. “It is as the poet
said, God’s Blessing are more numerous than those growing
trees. ”
*
He saw Millie one more time after the crowds had been
shown that the “miracle house” was empty once more. She was
sitting by his grandfather, helping him pat the bricks into shape,
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accepting feedback; laughing as the old man make invisible
corrections to every brick she’d formed.
Xareed crouched on his heels and watched.
Millie looked sideways at him, “Did you take one for
yourself?” She lifted her arm and gestured around. As far as you
could see, the camp had blossomed with color. People were
laughing, people were singing, and people were dancing, bright
canopies of color twisted and whirled.
Xareed smiled and stepped into the house and then came
back. The shaft was from one of the broken umbrellas—you open
enough crates and you run across some breakage—but the top
was a circle of cardboard, cut from one of the boxes.
Millie stared at it, her mouth dropping open. Then she fell
onto her back and laughed and laughed.
He stood there and watched, dignified.
In the shade.
Steven Gould is the author of Jumper , Wildside , Helm , Blind Waves , Reflex , Jumper: Griffin’s Story , 7th Sigma , Impulse , and Exo as well as short fiction published in Analog , Asimov’s , and
Amazing , and other magazines and anthologies. He is the
recipient of the Hal Clement Young Adult Award for Science
Fiction and has been a Hugo, Nebula, Prometheus, Locus List,
and Compton Crook finalist, but his favorite distinction was
being on the ALA’s list of Top 100 Banned Books 1990-1999.
Steve lives in New Mexico with his wife, writer Laura J. Mixon
(M. J. Locke) and their two daughters, two dogs, and three
chickens. He has practiced aikido and Japanese sword for the
last two decades, and has recently served two terms as president
of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America. He can
be found on Twitter as @stevengould and on Facebook at Steven
Gould .
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Our last original story written for this volume is a charming
fantasy about a young girl who innocently rescues a fairy
godmother and receives a wishing stone with one wish, which
she must then decide how to use …
G R A N T E D
By Jody Lynn Nye
The tiny woman leaned against the trunk of the beech tree,
gasping. Water ran from her fine blue dress and long golden
tresses, pooling around her delicate little shoes. She looked up at
Abigail with green eyes larger than any woman had a right to
have. In fact, she was downright beautiful.
“You saved my life!”
Abigail Baker wrung out her own skirt and the ends of her
camisole’s sleeves. The sturdy maiden’s clothes were caked with
flour, now turned to paste by the water. Her mouse-brown hair
looked like the tail of a water rat, and her hands were chafed from
climbing over the stone banks of the River Avon with the woman
in her arm. Lucky it was a warm spring day. She’d dry quickly
enough. She slipped her wooden clogs back on.
“It’s all right. Thank God I saw you fall. That bridge is
slippery, and the weir’s sucked many to their doom. Not all can
swim. I can,” Abigail added proudly.
“Well, you must be rewarded, girl!”
Decision Points
No one with any sense turned down a reward. Abigail put out
her hand for a coin.
Let it be silver, she thought fervently. To her outrage and
dismay, what the petite lady placed on her palm was a blue glass
sphere the width of her thumb.
“What’s that? I can’t spend that!”
“It’s a wish, my dear,” the lady said, kindly. “It’s worth more
than any coin.”
“Go on!” Abigail said, snorting. “Like in my nan’s stories?
I’m not a child any more. I don’t believe in wishes.”
“Oh, yes. You can have whatever you wish for.” The lady
flourished her hands, and her silken gown became as dry as a
bone and spotlessly clean. Her hair waved and flowed over her
shoulders. “I’m a fairy godmother. I was on my way to the earl’s
mansion to bless his new daughter.”
Now Abigail gasped. Magic, that was what it was! She’d
listened close to the tales, and knew all the ways of getting the
most out of a pixie, a leprechaun or a fairy. She grinned.
“Then, I wish for seven more wishes,” she said. Seven was a
lucky number. But the pebble remained cold in her hand.
“No!” the lady said, lowering her bright brows. Evidently,
she knew all the ways, too. “One wish. That is what you may
have. Don’t be greedy. That’s all the earl’s daughter will have,
too. You can have anything you ask for.”
Abigail felt a pang of disappointment.
“Just one thing?”
The lady laughed, crinkling her beautiful eyes. “You can
make the wording as complicated as you like, as long as you
remember that everything you say will come true.”
“What’s ‘complicated’?” Abigail asked, frowning. Sounded
like a word the dean of the cathedral would know.
The fairy godmother sighed.
“Never mind. If you can say your wish in one breath, I’ll
grant it. Now, I must go. The others will be waiting.”
Abigail watched the fairy shimmer her way past the masons
carving decorative capstones and segments of pillars for the new
nave in Salisbury’s grand cathedral, where she had just brought
bread from her father’s bakery for the men’s midday meal. More
than one of the workers had tried to pinch Abigail. But not one
looked up at the passing lady’s marvelous beauty. They must not
be able to see her! Magic again! Abigail clutched her marble in
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her fist.
What to do with it, what to do? she pondered as she started
toward home.
The men could see her, all right. They leered and laughed.
Big, black-haired Pieter Harwood tried for a kiss as she passed.
“You’re wet as a fish,” he said.
She pushed him back and sashayed away, swaying her hips.
The men cat-called behind her. Pieter would be a master mason
one day, then maybe she’d marry him. He was good-looking
enough.
Ah, but with the marble, Abigail could look higher than a
mason! The earl had a son, Gwillim. He looked like a frog, but
he’d be earl in his turn. If she wished for lots of gold, she could
attract Gwillim’s eye. No, that wouldn’t do. Her father would
just take it away and spend it as he chose. She might get a handful
of silver for her dowry. She’d have to be cannier than that.
Wishes at christening! Noblemen got so many better things
than ordinary folk did. Abigail threw the marble into the air and
caught it again. Here was her chance to live like a lord. The
possibilities tumbled over and over in her mind, like kittens in a
basket.
Tall, narrow, fine stone houses rose on either side of the