Alif the Unseen

by G. Willow Wilson

  Alif hesitated, suddenly self-conscious.

  “I’ve seen him,” he said in a quiet voice. A shudder ran down his back. He did not know how to speak about the Hand except with intimacy, drawing on the grotesque bond between jailer and prisoner. “I know his name.”

  NewQuarter leaned forward, setting his elbows on the scuffed wooden table, eyes bright.

  “At last. Oh, this is a good day. Who is he?”

  “Abbas Al Shehab.”

  To Alif ’s surprise, NewQuarter began to laugh.

  “Impossible,” he said. “Not Abbas. I know the man—he’s my uncle-by-marriage’s third cousin, or maybe a second cousin once removed. One or the other. Anyway, he doesn’t have it in him. He’s a geek, like us. I don’t think I’ve ever seen him standing somewhere other than in a corner, trying and failing to make charming conversation. I didn’t think you could be born Arab and not inherit that skill. He must have been swapped at birth with some dour mountain Turk or something. Unmarried, if you can believe it, though he’s plenty rich. That’s how bad it is. No, Abbas couldn’t say boo to a dog if his life depended on it.”

  Indignation and shame warred in Alif ’s chest. He found he didn’t like to talk about the Hand now, though the man had once been a mainstay of his conversations with City malcontents.

  “I know what I know,” he said stiffly.

  “I don’t doubt that you’ve—that in prison, you—I just wonder if you’ve got the name right, that’s all.” NewQuarter fiddled with a piece of bread between erratic fingers. Alif ignored the younger man’s tipsy, earnest attempt to catch his eye.

  “Anyway,” continued NewQuarter when the silence grew awkward, “Leaving aside the question of identity. I’m not the most durable person on earth—if the Hand had gotten me in a room and so much as nicked my chin with a close shave, I’d have rolled over on everyone. You. RadioSheikh. GurkhaBoss. I couldn’t live with that constant reminder of my own spinelessness, so I quit.”

  Alif was touched in spite of himself. “You’re not spineless,” he said. “You came and boosted me from prison in the middle of the night. In a BMW.”

  “I did do that, didn’t I.” NewQuarter brightened. “Good for me. Now I’m just as fucked as the rest of you. I’m not even scared. This green stuff must be working.”

  Sheikh Bilal nudged the offending glass away from NewQuarter’s hand. The shadow arrived again with three cups of water and set them down on the table.

  Eat, it said, The food won’t hurt you. I’m not interested in having a trio of human corpses on my hands. It floated back toward the other end of the room.

  Alif turned his attention to the platter in front of him: it contained, or so he was fairly confident, stewed meat and saffron rice, along with a cooked green that might have been spinach. A pile of warm flatbread sat beside the food on the edge of the tray. Tearing a loaf in half, he scooped up meat and rice and took an experimental bite. The flavors of cardamom and pepper and gamey meat bloomed on his tongue.

  “Goat,” he said. “Or at least, that’s my guess.”

  “A relative of one of those ladies at the other table, maybe,” muttered NewQuarter.

  Sheikh Bilal pulled back his sleeve and tucked in without further prompting. NewQuarter leaned forward and sniffed before plucking a single piece of meat from the stew. Chewing it, he nodded his approval. They ate in silence. At intervals, they smiled somewhat wryly at each other, enjoying the camaraderie of dislocation, like tourists stranded together at some nameless outpost. At the table across the room, the toad was gathered up by the presiding shadow and deposited in a heap outside the door; his table companions continued their conversation without any appearance of either sympathy or distress. Alif caught NewQuarter’s eye and made a face. NewQuarter snickered, ducking behind one hand when one

  of the goat women looked at him sharply.

  After filling his belly—which did not take long, leading him to wonder if his stomach had shrunk during its prison hiatus—Alif was sleepy, warmed by the spices in the food. He leaned back against the wall and let his eyes drift shut.

  “I wonder if there’s such a thing as a bed in this pile,” he muttered. He heard fingers snap. NewQuarter called out to the

  shadow, demanding to know whether it could provide them with a place to sleep. Alif smiled without opening his eyes, hoping the return of NewQuarter’s imperiousness meant he was feeling better. A hand shook his shoulder: he rubbed his eyes, rising, and shuffled after Sheikh Bilal and the shadow toward a staircase at the back of the room. At the top of the stairs was a hallway lined with doors painted the same range of colors as the sky outside: dusky rose, dark blue, lavender. Set in the milky quartz wall, the effect was like looking through nothing into the sky itself; Alif had to blink several times to make the scene resolve itself into something he could fathom.

  You may take the blue room, said the shadow, bowing them through the midnight-colored door. Inside was a small room with an oil lamp in the window and a few sleeping mats against the wall. The ceiling was painted to look like an arm of the Milky Way; silverpainted stars popping and fading in the lamplight.

  The shadow wished them goodnight. Alif barely heard it, his mind already thick with sleep. He kicked off his sandals and lay down on the nearest mat, pulling down his head cloth and wrapping it around himself like a blanket. NewQuarter yawned conspicuously. Alif heard the low murmur of Sheikh Bilal’s voice in prayer and the scrape of the man’s feet as he knelt in supplication. The familiar words comforted him. He was asleep before the sheikh saluted the angels to his right and left.

  * * *

  “Alif ? Is that really you?”

  There was a scent like jasmine, and beneath it, something more bestial. Alif rolled on to his back and blinked sleep-encrusted eyes: a tawny, feline figure hovered over him, looking concerned. He propped himself up on his elbows. It was Sakina, her dark braids looped atop her head, gold dangling from her ears. She set a cloth bag on the floor beside her.

  “You look half-dead,” she observed. “What happened?” “Prison,” he said, at a loss for some more elegant way to put it. Her sympathy and alarm were so obvious that Alif found his throat closing, and began to suspect there were parts of his mind and his body that were truly unwell. The glory of his rescue felt as profound as ever, but beneath it lay the damage of the dark and all that had kept him company there. A small, frightened sound escaped his throat.

  “No, please don’t get upset—I’m sorry. Here.” She rummaged in her bag and produced a vial of thick purplish substance, pressing it into his hand. “Take a sip of that.”

  Obediently, Alif uncorked the vial and tipped it back between his lips. The viscous liquid tasted of honey and dark fruit, leaving behind an herbal tang. A pleasant sensation, like the anticipation of a holiday, put distance between his waking mind and the residue of his three-month night.

  “That’s nice,” he said, “What is it?”

  “An elixir against heartache,” said Sakina, showing a row of delicately pointed teeth. “Keep it.” She crossed her legs beneath her and sat. Alif felt his cheer increasing as he looked at her; she was proof that he was not without resources, even now.

  “You know that Vikram is dead,” she said in a lower voice.

  The effect of the elixir faltered for a moment.

  “Yes,” said Alif. “He knew he was dying when I left him—he’s the only reason the convert and Dina didn’t end up in jail, like me. He saved them.”

  Sakina’s smile was melancholy. “Poor Vikram,” she said. “He could be quite unpredictable and dangerous—you didn’t know how dangerous, or you’d never have traveled with him. But when he felt like it, he was capable of noble things.”

  Alif remembered the fatal wound in Vikram’s side and touched his own, feeling a twinge of imagined pain.

  “He lived a long life. A very long life—as long as an age of the earth, it seemed. I imagine that by helping you he was hoping for a chance to die on his own terms. He
knew the history of that manuscript you’d gotten your hands on. The people who come into contact with it do not tend to die in contented old age.”

  “I lost it,” said Alif, head drooping. “The Alf Yeom. I lost it.”

  Sakina’s eyes went wide.

  “Lost it? How? Who has it now?”

  “I have no idea who could have taken it. The Hand doesn’t have it. Sheikh Bilal doesn’t have it. I was holed up in Basheera, using it to code, and then everything went to hell—”

  Sakina leaned forward and pressed her hands together beneath her chin, fixing Alif with an urgent, sun-colored stare.

  “Say that again. What do you mean you were using it to code?”

  Alif struggled for the right words to explain.

  “I figured out what Al Shehab—we call him the Hand—wanted to do with it. He believed all those mystics who’d been trying to understand the Alf Yeom for centuries were going about things from the wrong end. He thought that since the book can be understood as a symbol-set, there was an obvious application for computing. He thought, in other words, that he could use the Alf Yeom to create a totally new coding methodology, a sort of supercomputer built out of metaphors.”

  Sakina sat back and studied Alif in a way that made him slightly uncomfortable.

  “And you did it,” she said. “You made it work.”

  “Sort of. The code was only viable for a few minutes before the computer I was using crashed. You have to remove too many parameters to work like that. It causes a lot of errors. Computers are like angels—they’re built to obey commands. If you give them too much interpretive leeway they get confused.”

  “Hmm.” Sakina worried the end of one of her braids with a claw-tipped finger. “I’m impressed you’re willing to admit as much. Most people who become convinced that kind of power is within their grasp stop believing in the possibility of failure. I’m also worried that the book is now out in the open, and more of your kind will attempt to use it for the same ends. Not all of the beni adam are as farsighted as you.”

  Alif twisted his hands anxiously. Behind him, NewQuarter and Sheikh Bilal were stirring on their sleeping mats.

  “I’ll find out who took it,” Alif said, lowering his voice. “And when I do I’ll get rid of it.”

  “I don’t have the authority to tell you what to do with it,” said Sakina with a slight wince. “But I don’t like the idea of getting rid of books. That manuscript is a legacy of your race, for good or ill.”

  “Mostly ill,” said Alif.

  “Even so. The Alf Yeom is not evil in and of itself—for the jinn it is history. Like so many things, it becomes corrupt in the hands of man. But if we were to destroy all the things that man has made corrupt, the earth would be barren in a day.”

  “I wouldn’t be destroying the Alf Yeom,” Alif pointed out. “Just the manmade copy. The jinn will still have all of theirs. You’ll lose nothing.”

  Sakina responded by looking away, as though considering some eldritch facet of their conversation. Though she had complimented him on his intellect, Alif felt outmatched even by her silences. He attempted to steer her back toward his most immediate concern.

  “Vikram said he was taking the convert and Dina here to the Empty Quarter. Do you know—is there any way to find out if they made it, or where they might be if they did?”

  Sakina roused herself from her reverie.

  “We could look for them,” she said, “But I have to tell you, Alif, any beni adam without a protector in the Empty Quarter is not likely to survive for long. You’re not meant to be here, and your minds are not equipped to interpret what you see. It’s taxing on the sanity of all but the most spiritually elite. You’ll start to feel the undertow of this place yourself soon enough.”

  “Then we have to go now.” Alif was haunted by the image of Dina undone by madness. He needed to see her.

  “Go where?” NewQuarter sat up, rubbing his frowzy head and yawning.

  “To find my friends,” said Alif, “They may have been stranded here after everything went down at Al Basheera.”

  “Good God, you brought a woman.” NewQuarter noticed Sakina for the first time. He hastily ran a hand through his sleep-tousled hair.

  Alif introduced NewQuarter and Sheikh Bilal, who stuttered out a greeting while arranging his rumpled head cloth, still not fully awake. Sakina smiled at them, seeming not to notice their furtive glances at her eyes and teeth and hands. When they had made themselves presentable, they followed her downstairs into the main room of the bar, or inn, or whatever it was; the tables were less populated now, and only a few uncanny patrons could be seen around them. The candle flame from the night before appeared to be passed out at its table, sleeping off the contents of the empty glass dangling from its flickering hand. The shadow that had served them—if it was the same shadow—reappeared with bowls of a steaming white liquid that turned out to be hot honeyed milk, along with a plate of bread. Alif ate with a better appetite than he had had the day before.

  “How do we pay this guy?” he asked Sakina as he tore into a piece of bread, realizing he had no currency of any kind, nor any knowledge of whether the jinn used currency to begin with.

  “If you can’t pay with things, you could pay with skills,” said Sakina, motioning to the shadow.

  “Well wait a minute,” said Alif, looking from the shadow to Sakina, “My skills are more or less limited to computers—I’m not sure how much help that is to an, ah, to a—”

  Effrit, said the shadow, I’m an effrit. And I’ve got a two-year-old Dell desktop in the back that’s had some kind of virus for ages. The screen goes black five minutes after I turn the damn thing on. I have to do a hard reboot every time.

  Alif felt a new vista of serendipitous opportunity open before him.

  “You’ve got internet in the Empty Quarter?” he asked in an awed voice.

  Cousin, said the shadow, We’ve got WiFi.

  * * *

  It took Alif no more than fifteen minutes to debug the effrit’s machine. The problem was an old and very clunky spyware applet he had seen before, one that had slipped past a suite of antivirus software that was out of date. Alif removed the program and ran a few updates.

  “I’ve deleted all your cookies just to be safe,” he told the shadow, “So the sites you visit frequently may need to reinstall them. That’ll happen automatically. Just make sure you keep your antivirus software up to date—there are new definitions almost every day, so you don’t want to fall behind.”

  I’ve heard cookies are dangerous, said the shadow.

  “They’re not. You can’t get a virus without executable content, which cookies don’t have. But the spyware geeks like them because they’re a fast way to collect your information, so that’s what a lot of phishing programs target first. Just keep your software current— including browser updates—and you should be fine.”

  Thanks. The shadow floated over the keyboard as Alif stood, and began, as far as he could tell, to check its email. Alif was pleased with himself. He turned to grin at NewQuarter and the sheikh, who lurked in the doorway of the back room to which the shadow had led them, looking dubious.

  “Wow akhi,” said NewQuarter, “I’m impressed you just sat there and did that. I’m not sure I could string two coherent sentences together with a telepathic special effect hanging over my shoulder.”

  “It’s still there,” said Alif, hoping the shadow had not heard. “Yes, I see that. Can we go now?”

  Come back again soon, said the shadow, with a hint of what felt

  like sarcasm. Alif thanked it with more flourish than was probably necessary, attempting to make up for NewQuarter’s rudeness, and hurried back out into the main room where Sakina was waiting.

  “I think we should start by consulting someone whose job it is to know what goes on in Irem,” she said. “I can only imagine that your friends are here in the city—Vikram would not have left them out in the wastelands. You’ve seen what it’s like out there.”


  “I thought it was rather beautiful,” said Sheikh Bilal. “I think so too,” said Sakina, “But I wouldn’t want to be out there alone for any length of time. There are older and stranger things than I prowling the dunes.” She shouldered her bag and led them out the door into the street. The sky above was a brilliant rose color, like the most exquisite moment of sunrise stretched and spread from horizon to horizon. The moon sat heady and blue—nearly full, Alif noticed—just above the flat roofs of the buildings around them. Sakina followed a path known only to herself, ducking down alleys that ended in tiny squares overgrown with jasmine or dotted with pools of still water reflecting the moon; jewel-like places that Alif could only stare at for a moment before hurrying to keep up. He heard Sheikh Bilal murmur in appreciation at the scenery as he walked along behind him.

  “A marvel,” the sheikh said. “Truly, the work of the Lord of Worlds surpasses all our puny understanding. You know, I read once that the human mind is incapable of imagining anything that does not exist somewhere, in some form. It seemed a paltry enough truth at the time—I thought, of course it must be so, since in a sense everything we will ever discover or invent has, in the eyes of God, already been discovered and invented, as God is above time. Seeing this, though, I begin to understand how much more profound that statement is. It does not simply mean that man’s innovation is entirely known to God; it means there is no such thing as fiction.”

  Alif grinned, buoyant with the euphoria of the place.

  “Puts a different spin on that conversation we had about the stupid fictional pork,” he said.

  “Have you changed your mind, then?”

  “I’m not sure. I’m still hard-pressed to give a damn about World of Battlecraft.”

  “I’m not,” said the sheikh in a more serious tone. “If a video game does more to fulfill a young person than the words of prophesy, it means people like me have failed in a rather spectacular fashion.”

  Alif slowed his steps to walk beside the sheikh.

  “You’re not a failure, uncle,” he said, the words awkward and insufficient in his mouth. “It’s only that we don’t feel safe. A game has a reset button. You have infinite chances for success. Real life is awfully permanent compared to that, and a lot of religious people make it seem even more permanent—one step the wrong way, one sin too many, and it’s the fiery furnace for you. Beware. And then at the same time, you ask us to love the God who has this terrible sword hanging over our necks. It’s very confusing.”