The Year's Best Science Fiction: Twentieth Annual Collection

by Gardner Dozois

  “That, Jalila, is the Pain of Distance—the sense of every potentiality. So that womankind may pass over the spaces between the stars, every tariqua must experience it.” The wind gave an extra lunge, flipping the book shut. Jalila reached forward, but the tariqua, quick for once, was ahead of her. Instead of opening the book to release the ant, she weighed it down with the same chipped old stone with which Kalal had played on his solitary visit to this qasr.

  “Now, perhaps, my Jalila, you begin to understand?”

  The stone was old, chipped, grey-green. It was inscribed, and had been carved with the closed wings of a beetle. Here was something from a world so impossibly old and distant as to make the book upon which it rested seem fresh and new as an unbudded leaf—a scarab, shaped for the Queens of Egypt.

  “See here, Jalila. See how it grows. The breathmoss?”

  This was the beginning of the Season of Autumns. The trees were beautiful; the forests were on fire with their leaves. Jalila had been walking with Pavo, enjoying the return of the birdsong, and wondering why it was that this new season felt sad when everything around her seemed to be changing and growing.

  “Look. ...”

  The breathmoss, too, had turned russet-gold. Leaning close to it beneath this tranquil sky, which was composed of a blue so pale it was as if the sea had been caught in reflection inside an upturned white bowl, was like looking into the arms of a miniature forest.

  “Do you think it will die?”

  Pavo leaned beside her. “Jalila, it should have died long ago. Inshallah, it is a small miracle.” There were the three dead marks where Ananke had touched it in a Season of Long Ago. “You see how frail it is, and yet ...”

  “At least it won’t spread and take over the planet.”

  “Not for a while, at least.”

  On another rock lay another small colony. Here, too, oddly enough, there were marks. Five large dead dots, as if made by the outspread of a hand, although the shape of it was too big to have been Ananke’s. They walked on. Evening was coming. Their shadows were lengthening. Although the sun was shining and the Waves sparkled, Jalila wished that she had put on something warmer than a shawl.

  “That tariqua. You seem to enjoy her company. ...”

  Jalila nodded. When she was with the old woman, she felt at last as if she was escaping the confines of Al Janb. It was liberating, after the close life in this town and with her mothers in their haramlek, to know that interstellar space truly existed, and then to feel, as the tariqua spoke of Gateways, momentarily like that ant, infinitely small and yet somehow inching, crawling across the many universes’ infinite pages. But how could she express this? Even Pavo wouldn’t understand.

  “How goes the boat?” she asked instead.

  Pavo slipped her arm into to crook of Jalila’s and hugged her. “You must come and see! I have the plan in my head, but I’d never realized quite how big it would be. And complex. Ibra’s full of enthusiasm.”

  “I can imagine!”

  The sea flashed. The two women chuckled.

  “The way the ship’s designed, Jalila, there’s more than enough room for others. I never exactly planned to go alone, but then Lya’s Lya. And Ananke’s always—”

  Jalila gave her mother’s arm a squeeze. “I know what you’re saying.”

  “I’d be happy if you came, Jalila. I’d understand if you didn’t. This is such a beautiful, wonderful planet. The leviathans—we know so little about them, yet they plainly have intelligence, just as all those old myths say.”

  “You’ll be telling me next about the qasrs. ...”

  “The ones we can see near here are nothing! There are islands on the ocean that are entirely made from them. And the wind pours through. They sing endlessly. A different song for every mood and season.”

  “Moods! If I’d said something like that when you were teaching me of the Pillars of Life, you’d have told me I was being unscientific!”

  “Science is about wonder, Jalila. I was a poor teacher if I never told you that.”

  “You did.” Jalila turned to kiss Pavo’s forehead. “You did. ...”

  Pavo’s ship was a fine thing. Between the slipways and the old mooring posts, where the red-flapping geelies quarreled over scraps of dying tideflower, it grew and grew. Golden-hulled. Far sleeker and bigger than even the ferries that had once borne Al Janb’s visitors to and from the rocket port, and which now squatted on the shingle nearby, gently rusting. It was the talk of the Season. People came to admire its progress.

  As Jalila watched the spars rise over the clustered roofs of the fisherwomen’s houses, she was reminded of Kalal’s tale of his father and his nameless mother, and that ship that they had made together in the teeming dockyards of that city. Her thoughts blurred. She saw the high balconies of a hotel far bigger than any of Al Janb’s inns and boarding houses. She saw a darker, brighter ocean. Strange flesh upon flesh, with the windows open to the oil-and-salt breeze, the white lace curtains rising, falling. ...

  The boat grew, and Jalila visited the tariqua, although back in Al Janb, her thoughts sometimes trailed after Kalal as she wondered how it must be—to be male, like the last dodo, and trapped in some endless state of part-arousal, like a form of nagging worry. Poor Kalal. But his life certainly wasn’t lonely. The first time Jalila noticed him at the center of the excited swarm of girls that once again surrounded Nayra, she’d almost thought that she was seeing things. But the gossip was loud and persistent. Kalal and Nayra were a couple—the phrase normally followed by a scandalized shriek, a hand-covered mouth. Jalila could only guess what the proud mothers of Nayra’s haramlek thought of such a union, but, of course, no one could subscribe to outright prejudice. Kalal was, after all, just another human being. Lightly probing her own mothers’ attitudes, she found the usual condescending tolerance. Having sexual relations with a male would be like smoking kif, or drinking alcohol, or any other form of slightly aberrant adolescent behavior, to be tolerated with easy smiles and sympathy, as long as it didn’t go on for too long. To be treated, in fact, in much the same manner as her mothers were now treating her regular visits to the tariqua.

  Jalila came to understand why people thought of the Season of Autumns as a sad time. The chill nights. The morning fogs that shrouded the bay. The leaves, finally falling, piled into rotting heaps. The tideflower beds, also, were dying as the waves pulled and dismantled what remained of their colors, and they drifted to the shores, the flowers bearing the same stench and texture and color as upturned clay. The geelies were dying as well. In the town, to compensate, there was much bunting and celebration for yet another moulid, but to Jalila the brightness seemed feeble—the flame of a match held against winter’s gathering gale. Still, she sometimes wandered the old markets with some of her old curiosity, nostalgically touching the flapping windsilks, studying the faces and nodding at the many she now knew, although her thoughts were often literally light-years away. The Pain of Distance; she could feel it. Inwardly, she was thrilled and afraid. Her mothers and everyone else, caught up in the moulid and Pavo’s coming departure, imagined from her mood that she had now decided to take that voyage with her. She deceived Kalal in much the same way.

  The nights became clearer. Riding back from the qasr one dark evening with the tariqua’s slight voice ringing in her ears, the stars seemed to hover closer around her than at any time since she had left Tabuthal. She could feel the night blossoming, its emptiness and the possibilities spinning out to infinity. She felt both like crying, and like whooping for joy. She had dared to ask the tariqua the question she had long been formulating, and the answer, albeit not entirely yes, had not been no. She talked to Robin as they bobbed along, and the puny yellow smudge of Al Janb drew slowly closer. You must understand, she told her hayawan, that the core of the Almighty is like the empty place between these stars, around which they all revolve. It is there, we know it, but we can never see it. ... She sang songs from the old saharas about the joy of loneliness, and the lo
neliness of joy. From here, high up on the gradually descending road that wound its way down toward her haramlek, the horizon was still distant enough for her to see the lights of the rocketport. It was like a huge tidebed, holding out as the season changed. And there at the center of it, rising golden, no longer a stumpy silo-shaped object but somehow beautiful, was the last of the year’s rockets. It would have to rise from Habara before the coming of the Season of Winters.

  Her mothers’ anxious faces hurried around her in the lamplight as she led Robin toward the stable.

  “Where have you been, Jalilaneen?”

  “Do you know what time it is?”

  “We should be in the town already!”

  For some reason, they were dressed in their best, most formal robes. Their palms were hennaed and scented. They bustled Jalila out of her gritty clothes, practically washed and dressed her, then flapped themselves down the serraplate road into town, where the processions had already started. Still, they were there in plenty of time to witness the blessing of Pavo’s ship. It was to be called Endeavor, and Pavo and Jalila together smashed the bottle of wine across its prow before it rumbled into the nightblack waters of the harbor with an enormous white splash. Everyone cheered, Pavo hugged Jalila.

  There were more bottles of the same frothy wine available at the party afterward. Lya, with her usual thoroughness, had ordered a huge case of the stuff, although many of the guests remembered the Prophet’s old injunction and avoided imbibing. Ibra, though, was soon even more full of himself than usual, and went around the big marquee with a bottle in each hand, dancing clumsily with anyone who was foolish enough to come near him. Jalila drank a little of the stuff herself. The taste was sweet, but oddly hot and bitter. She filled up another glass.

  “Wondered what you two mariners were going to call that boat. ...”

  It was Kalal. He’d been dancing with many of the girls, and he looked almost as red-faced as his father.

  “Bet you don’t even know what the first Endeavor was.”

  “You’re wrong there,” Jalila countered primly, although the simple words almost fell over each other as she tried to say them. “It was the spacecraft of Captain Cook. She was one of the urrearth’s most famous early explorers.”

  “I thought you were many things,” Kalal countered, angry for no apparent reason. “But I never thought you were stupid.”

  Jalila watched him walk away. The dance had gathered up its beat. Ibra had retreated to sit, foolishly glum, in a corner, and Nayra had moved to the middle of the floor, her arms raised, bracelets jingling, an opal jewel at her belly, windsilk-draped hips swaying. Jalila watched. Perhaps it was the drink, but for the first time in many a Season, she felt a slight return of that old erotic longing as she watched Nayra swaying. Desire was the strangest of all emotions. It seemed so trivial when you weren’t possessed of it, and yet when you were possessed, it was as if all the secrets of the universe were waiting. ... Nayra was the focus of all attention now as she swayed amid the crowd, her shoulders glistening. She danced before Jalila, and her languorous eyes fixed her for a moment before she danced on. Now she was dancing with Kalal, and he was swaying with her, her hands laid upon his shoulders, and everyone was clapping. They made a fine couple. But the music was getting louder, and so were people’s voices. Her head was pounding. She left the marquee.

  She welcomed the harshness of the night air, the clear presence of the stars. Even the stench of the rotting tideflowers seemed appropriate as she picked her way across the ropes and slipways of the beach. So much had changed since she had first come here—but mostly what had changed had been herself. Here, its shape unmistakable as rising Walah spread her faint blue light across the ocean, was Kalal’s boat. She sat down on the gunwale. The cold wind bit into her. She heard the crunch of shingle, and imagined it was someone else who was in need of solitude. But the sound grew closer, and then whoever it was sat down on the boat beside her. She didn’t need to look up now. Kalal’s smell was always different, and now he was sweating from the dancing.

  “I thought you were enjoying yourself,” she muttered.

  “Oh—I was ...” The emphasis on the was was strong.

  They sat there for a long time, in windy, wave-crashing silence. It was almost like being alone. It was like the old days of their being together.

  “So you’re going, are you?” Kalal asked eventually.

  “Oh, yes.”

  “I’m pleased for you. It’s a fine boat, and I like Pavo best of all your mothers. You haven’t seemed quite so happy lately here in Al Janb. Spending all that time with that old witch in the qasr.”

  “She’s not a witch. She’s a tariqua. It’s one of the greatest, oldest callings. Although I’m surprised you’ve had time to notice what I’m up to, anyway. You and Nayra ...”

  Kalal laughed, and the wind made the sound turn bitter.

  “I’m sorry,” Jalila continued. “I’m sounding just like those stupid gossips. I know you’re not like that. Either of you. And I’m happy for you both. Nayra’s sweet and talented and entirely lovely ... I hope it lasts ... I hope ...”

  After another long pause, Kalal said, “Seeing as we’re apologizing, I’m sorry I got cross with you about the name of that boat you’ll be going on—the Endeavor. It’s a good name.”

  “Thank you. El-hamadu-l-illah.”

  “In fact, I could only think of one better one, and I’m glad you and Pavo didn’t use it. You know what they say. To have two ships with the same name confuses the spirits of the winds. ...”

  “What are you talking about, Kalal?”

  “This boat. You’re sitting right on it. I thought you might have noticed.”

  Jalila glanced down at the prow, which lay before her in the moonlight, pointing toward the silvered waves. From this angle, and in the old naskhi script that Kalal had used, it took her a moment to work out the craft’s name. Something turned inside her.

  Breathmoss.

  In white, moonlit letters.

  “I’m sure there are better names for a boat,” she said carefully. “Still, I’m flattered.”

  “Flattered?” Kalal stood up. She couldn’t really see his face, but she suddenly knew that she’d once again said the wrong thing. He waved his hands in an odd shrug, and he seemed for a moment almost ready to lean close to her—to do something unpredictable and violent—but instead, picking up stones and skimming them hard into the agitated waters, he walked away.

  * * *

  Pavo was right. If not about love—which Jalila knew now that she still waited to experience—then at least about the major decisions of your life. There was never quite a beginning to them, although your mind often sought for such a thing.

  When the tariqua’s caleche emerged out of the newly teeming rain one dark evening a week or so after the naming of the Endeavor, and settled itself before the lights of their haramlek, and the old woman herself emerged, somehow still dry, and splashed across the puddled garden while her three mothers flustered about to find the umbrella they should have thought to look for earlier, Jalila still didn’t know what she should be thinking. The four women would, in any case, need to talk alone; Jalila recognized that. For once, after the initial greetings, she was happy to retreat to her dreamtent.

  But her mind was still in turmoil. She was suddenly terrified that her mothers would actually agree to this strange proposition, and then that, out of little more than embarrassment and obligation, the rest of her life would be bound to something that the tariqua called the Church of the Gateway. She knew so little. The tariqua talked only in riddles. She could be a fraud, for all Jalila knew—or a witch, just as Kalal insisted. Thoughts swirled about her like the rain. To make the time disappear, she tried searching the knowledge of her dreamtent. Lying there, listening to the rising sound of her mothers’ voices, which seemed to be studded endlessly with the syllables of her own name, Jalila let the personalities who had guided her through the many Pillars of Wisdom tell her what the
y knew about the Church of the Gateway.

  She saw the blackness of planetary space, swirled with the mica dots of turning planets. Almost as big as those as she zoomed close to it, yet looking disappointingly like a many-angled version of the rocketport, lay the spacestation, and, within it, the junction that could lead you from here to there without passing across the distance between. A huge rent in the Book of Life, composed of the trapped energies of those things the tariqua called cosmic strings, although they and the Gateway itself were visible as nothing more than a turning ring near to the center of the vast spacestation, where occasionally, as Jalila watched, crafts of all possible shapes would seem to hang, then vanish. The gap she glimpsed inside seemed no darker than that which hung between the stars behind it, but it somehow hurt to stare at it. This, then, was the core of the mystery; something both plain and extraordinary. We crawl across the surface of this universe like ants, and each of these craft, switching through the Gateway’s moment of loss and endless potentiality, is piloted by the will of a tariqua’s conscious intelligence, which must glimpse those choices, then somehow emerge sane and entire at the other end of everything. ...

  Jalila’s mind returned to the familiar scents and shapes of her dreamtent, and the sounds of the rain. The moment seemed to belong with those of the long-ago Season of Soft Rains. Downstairs, there were no voices. As she climbed out from her dreamtent, warily expecting to find the haramlek leaking and half-finished, Jalila was struck by an idea that the tariqua hadn’t quite made plain to her; that a Gateway must push through time just as easily as it pushes through every other dimension ... ! But the rooms of the haramlek were finely furnished, and her three mothers and the tariqua were sitting in the rainswept candlelight of the courtyard, waiting.

  With any lesser request, Lya always quizzed Jalila before she would even consider granting it. So as Jalila sat before her mothers and tried not to tremble in their presence, she wondered how she could possibly explain her ignorance of this pure, boundless mystery.