Alif the Unseen

by G. Willow Wilson

  “Alif.”

  Sakina was looking at him closely. He straightened his back and handed the book over to the marid, who pressed it between his hands. It vanished. The gesture was so natural that it took Alif a moment to find it strange.

  “Where’d the book go?” he asked.

  “Away,” said the marid. “For now.”

  “But you can get it back?”

  “Certainly.”

  Alif forced the air from his lungs in a sharp breath, then inhaled again more slowly.

  “Do you happen to have another book that looks similar?” he asked the marid, avoiding its cloud-colored eyes. “Something that would convince an ordinary person at first glance? Something you wouldn’t mind me borrowing for a few days?”

  The marid made an indeterminate noise and disappeared into its house. It was gone for several minutes. Alif began to worry that he had offered it some unintended insult, and was on the verge of asking the convert as much when it reappeared. In its hands was a book bound in faded blue, looking no larger than a shred of confetti against the marid’s thick fingers. It laid the manuscript in Alif ’s outstretched arms.

  “Please be careful with this,” it said solemnly. “It is the jewel of my library. You have many versions of this book in the sighted world, but none I would call accurate, written as they were by the tribe of Adam. This one contains the only true and complete account of my cruel imprisonment by a young thief named Alla’eddin, many centuries ago.”

  Alif choked on an indrawn breath.

  “The Alf Layl?” he rasped. “This is a copy of the Thousand and One Nights?”

  “Just so.”

  “Akhi,” squeaked NewQuarter, “We’ve been shooting the shit with the lamp genie.”

  “Shut up, shut up.” Alif hugged the book to his chest and forced himself to meet the marid’s gaze.

  “Many thanks,” he said, voice cracking, “I’ll guard it with my eyes. I mean, it’s not going to be safe, exactly, considering—”

  The marid began to look displeased.

  “—But I mean, it will keep her safe,” Alif added in a rush, jerking his finger at the convert. “As long as the Hand thinks I still have the Alf Yeom, he’ll leave the rest of you alone.”

  “Very well,” said the marid, looking mollified. Alif blotted his brow.

  “Okay.” He turned to the convert. “How soon do you think we can meet with Vikram’s—with the people who owe you favors?”

  “Let’s find out,” she said.

  * * *

  Within several hours, a strange collection of creatures had gathered in the marid’s courtyard. A few were effrit, ambulatory shadows like the one whose computer Alif had debugged; a few more resembled Vikram or Sakina in their elusive, prismatic variance between human and animal and smokeless fire. Then there were some whose presence Alif could only sense, muffled invisible objects that announced themselves only by absorbing sound. The convert sat on a cushion at the edge of the fountain, back poker-straight, looking too nervous and too human to be administratrix of such a bizarre gathering. Alif hovered behind her, crossing and uncrossing his arms in an attempt to decide which pose looked more authoritative. The marid loomed over them like a banyan tree. Alif hoped its presence had the effect his own did not. He jumped when the convert cleared her throat.

  “Thank you all for coming here to see me,” she said. “I’ve called on you as a favor to a friend—Alif, standing back there—and as a result of what has happened in the Immovable Alley. Which is sort of his fault.”

  “Thanks,” Alif hissed in her ear. “Now they’re going to eat me.” “Basically, he needs protection,” the convert continued, ignoring him. “Since the man who is hunting him has allies among the jinn.”

  Allies among the shayateen, said one of the effrit, its words reverberating uncomfortably in Alif ’s skull. Not all of us are demons.

  “Yes, of course,” said the convert, “I was just speaking generally. Anyway, you don’t want these guys around, and neither do we.”

  “The solution to that is simple,” said a tall yellow-eyed man, “We hand over this beni adam, and they go away.”

  Alif resisted the urge to bolt.

  “That would be simple,” said the convert, “But then they’d win, and you’d look weak. Why give them that satisfaction?”

  “Because it would save us a lot of time and headache, frankly.”

  A ripple of laughter passed over the assembly. The convert pursed her lips.

  “Okay, okay. Let’s put it another way.You all owed Vikram favors, and as his widow, I am calling those favors in. Do this thing for me and the score is settled.”

  “I don’t know about the rest of you,” said a spare-looking woman with a pair of black, curving horns, “But I never owed Vikram a favor large enough to include my life.”

  Hear hear, said the effrit. And why should the beni adam sit on his ass while we fight his battles for him? It hardly seems fair. We’re not a bunch of mindless idiots enslaved in lamps, or milk cartons, or what have you, to be commanded by whatever third-born happens to come along.

  The convert looked back at Alif, biting her lip.

  “I’m not planning to sit on my ass,” he said indignantly. Oh? And what do you plan to do instead? Kick and scream?

  “I—”

  Alif was interrupted by the appearance of NewQuarter, who came rushing into the courtyard from the street beyond it, holding in his hands a sleek Sony laptop the width of a thick envelope.

  “Alif,” he said in a gleeful voice, “Look what I’ve got. This thing isn’t even supposed to be out of development. No, wait, that’s not the important part. I’ve been on that talking shadow’s stupendous WiFi network, and I found—but you have to admire this machine with me for a minute. Some guy was literally hawking it from a blanket on the street, along with some very pretty wireless gaming mice. I’m starting to like this place.” He sat on the ground a short distance from the convert and gave a curt not to the collection of jinn beyond her. “But look, look at this.”

  Under the cool gaze of anthropomorphic shadows, Alif stuttered an apology, and went to kneel next to NewQuarter.

  “Can’t this wait?” he muttered. “I already look like an ass.”

  “No, it can’t. Here.” NewQuarter swiveled the laptop toward Alif, displaying a pixelated blur, blocky horizontal chunks of image files and scrambled text.

  “What is it?” Alif asked.

  “That, my friend, is a screen grab from the City public utility website.” NewQuarter clicked an arrow button. Another image appeared: more scrambled images and text. “This is the University of Al Basheera homepage.”

  He clicked again.

  “The transit authority.” Another click. “The tourism board. There are dozens more like this. The whole City is digitally fucked. While we have been sitting here playing Aladdin, our little modern day Carthage has been sacked.”

  “Holy God.” Alif pulled the screen closer. “Who? How?”

  “At first I thought it was one of our people getting stupid,” said NewQuarter. “You know, trying to foment revolution by shutting off the power, or something. But everybody on the Cloud is as confused as you are.”

  “The Cloud’s all right?”

  “Of course it’s all right. I set it up myself.”

  “But if the servers are in the City—”

  “They aren’t. They’re sitting in my uncle’s basement all the way in Qatar.” NewQuarter grinned, making himself look even younger. “You see? It’s good to have an upper class snot on your side.”

  “Wow. Wow.”

  “So I was thinking,” said NewQuarter, leaning forward, “What if it’s not a black hat operation at all?”

  Alif frowned. “What else could it be?”

  “Something even more ominous. Who’s got access codes and know-how and stones to screw with all these different systems, all at once, without having to hack into anything at all?”

  Alif looked back at the
screen grab. “You don’t think—?”

  “That’s exactly what I think. What if this wasn’t meant to happen—what if this is simply the byproduct of an enormous digital manhunt? Alif, what if this means the Hand has finally fucked up?”

  A memory surfaced, carrying with it a feeling of grime and nakedness.

  “He said he had people reverse-engineering the code I created out of the Alf Yeom—I warned him. I warned him something like this could happen if he tried to use it. He didn’t believe me. He thought if he had enough processing power it would be different.”

  “If he’s got access to your code, why does he still want that book so badly?”

  “Well, look at where the code has gotten him—he probably thinks he can fix this mess if he can get his hands on the source material. He’s obsessed with the idea that I’m just dense and can’t comprehend the full magnitude of what the Alf Yeom could mean for computing.”

  “Do you suppose that’s true?”

  Alif thought of the thing in the dark, and shuddered.

  “No. That book is like getting gradually lost. You start out in a garden on a path, and it looks so easy—easier than a lot of the other paths you’ve traveled, which were hemmed in by all these if-then propositions and parameters and laws. So you walk, and the path gets rockier, and then there are gaps, and eventually you find you’re not even in the garden anymore, but out in some howling desert. And you can’t retrace your steps, because the path itself was all in your head.”

  Voices rose among the assembly of jinn. The convert gave Alif a chilly glare.

  “I could use some help over here,” she said.

  Alif got to his feet, straightening the hem of his tunic, and hurried to stand beside her.

  “I think we’re screwed,” she muttered without turning.

  The woman with black horns crossed her arms over her sylphlike chest.

  “We’ve decided,” she said. “You’re on your own. The risk is too great. We are each willing to fulfill our debts to Vikram, but not this way—if you wanted to procure something rare and precious, or needed escort to some unreachable place, that would be one thing. But we’re not willing to lay down our lives for this boy.”

  The others murmured their assent.

  “Wait,” said Alif, “What if I did something for you?”

  Like what? asked the effrit.

  Alif made a few rapid calculations in his head.

  “You know that for centuries there have been humans who tried to use the Thousand Days to gain power for themselves. They all failed. But the guy who’s after me is very close to succeeding—close enough to make a huge mess, anyway. He won’t stop with the Alf Yeom, or with the Immovable Alley. Soon enough he’ll be here in the Empty Quarter. On a computer, he’s as invisible to you as you are to the average, umn, beni adam. But he isn’t invisible to me. And he’s started making mistakes. Which means I have a chance to stop him. You take care of his invisible friends, and I’ll take care of him.”

  “How exactly do you plan on doing that?” whispered NewQuarter from behind his shoulder. Alif elbowed him in the ribs. The horned woman turned back to her brethren and began speaking in the same mutable language Alif had heard Vikram use with Azalel, and which Azalel had used in his dream. There were words he felt he should understand, but didn’t, and he strained to catch anything familiar. Finally the woman turned back to look at him with measuring eyes.

  “We’re willing to consider your plan,” she said.

  Alif let out an explosive sigh.

  “Thank God,” he said. “Okay. Let’s talk about how this would work.”

  * * *

  It was late—or at least, it seemed late; the sky had turned from pink to violet, and Alif felt he could begin to detect subtle variations between night and day—when the conclave of jinn finally left the marid’s courtyard. Alif watched them move silently through the gate, a column of uncanny foot soldiers, and prayed for the stones to carry out what he had promised to do.

  “Use this,” said the black-horned woman before she left, handing Alif a slim silver whistle. “Call us when it’s time.”

  Alif looked at the whistle with skepticism.

  “How does it work? Is it one of these things that emits a sound too high for humans to hear?”

  “No.” The woman’s expression was not complimentary. “It doesn’t emit any sound at all. You just blow on it, and we come to you.”

  Alif bit back a half dozen exasperated retorts.

  “Oh,” he said.

  The woman nodded briskly. Turning, she trotted off to rejoin the column of hidden folk leaving the marid’s courtyard, bowing to their ephemeral host on her way out. Alif took several deep breaths. The air tasted of night-blooming flowers. It made him unaccountably sad, and he wondered whether he had seen his last ordinary sunset the day he and Dina fled Baqara District.

  “We may end up fairly dead trying to pull this off,” said NewQuarter, echoing his thoughts.

  “I may.You don’t have to come if you don’t want to. You’ve done a hell of a lot for me already.”

  NewQuarter shrugged. “I burned my bridges when I drove off the road and into the Empty Quarter. I doubt I could simply go back to being a comfy royal scion now even if I wanted to. There are probably State flunkies tossing my flat at this very moment. I just hope they don’t break all my hand-painted Persian tableware.”

  “You’re a good man, Prince Abu Talib Al Mukhtar ibn Hamza.”

  “My God, you remembered the whole thing.”

  They walked toward the far edge of the courtyard, where Dina was laying out a trio of sleeping mats.

  “I hope you don’t mind staying out here,” she said. “We ladies sleep inside. It’s usually quite warm at night, so you won’t freeze.”

  “This is fine,” said Alif. He watched her move, her bare feet slim and dusty against the stone, a gold anklet flashing just below the hem of her robe. He wanted to ask her about the accusation of hypocricy that had so cut him, but lacked the courage to bring up the subject with NewQuarter lurking in the background.

  “Where is Sheikh Bilal?” he asked instead.

  “He went to the mosque earlier this afternoon,” said Dina. “He said he planned to stay until the night prayer. Which means he should be back any minute.”

  “He went to a jinn mosque?”

  “Yes, right down the street. You haven’t heard the call to prayer?”

  Alif recalled hearing a kind of high, keening song at several points throughout the day, but it did not resemble any call to prayer he had ever heard, and he had not listened closely.

  “I heard something—but it sounded more like—like singing. I think I even heard harmonies.”

  “That’s their way. They use different scales. It’s quite beautiful, once you get over the fact that it greatly resembles music.”

  The dry, Egyptian mirth in her voice made him chuckle. He relaxed a little. The courtyard gate opened again and revealed Sheikh Bilal, walking straighter than he had since their escape, his face brightened by inner repose.

  “As-salaamu alaykum,” he said.

  Alif murmured the response. “How are you, uncle?” he asked anxiously.

  The sheikh sat down on one of the three sleeping mats with a sigh.

  “Praise be to God. It will be a long while until I shall call myself well. I think perhaps too long—longer than I have left to live. But for now, I feel a great deal better than I did, and that is enough.”

  “How was the mosque?”

  “Astonishing. It reminded me of a dream I had once as a young man studying in Cairo at Al Azhar—I dreamed I went to worship at a deserted mosque in a low, green place, somewhere I had never seen, and while I was there I saw a congregation of jinn praying in just such a way as they do here. The imam was almost singing each verse he recited. Being young and pedantic, I interrupted him quite rudely, and told him he was reciting the Quran in an inappropriate way. The congregation all turned and gave me a very dirt
y look. Then I woke.

  “I felt quite ashamed of myself, thinking it had been a true vision, and I had offered terrible insult to my brothers in religion in the unseen worlds. One forgets, you know, that the urge to worship transcends our muddy understanding of the world we see. I always regretted that I was not invited back. And now I have been. You are young, so you may not understand what it feels like to be offered a second chance at my age, especially after so . . .so difficult a time, when one has seen his own death and accepted it.”

  “What do you mean by second chance?” asked Alif, conscious of an uncomfortable portent in the sheikh’s words.

  “I mean that they have kindly offered me a place here, to study and to teach. I am considering accepting that offer.”

  Alif and NewQuarter looked at one another in mute dismay.

  “But you said you didn’t want to spend time among the jinn, like the convert and Dina have,” said Alif.

  “I am exercising the prerogative of an old man and changing my mind.”

  “But why?” He could not stomach the thought of leaving Sheikh Bilal behind.

  The sheikh looked up at the sky with a small smile, violet light reflecting in his milky eyes.

  “Because I would be going back to the wreckage of a life,” he said after a moment. “They will give custodianship of Al Basheera over to some State lackey trained at a de-Islamization school, and if I am not re-arrested or killed, I will at least spend the rest of my days looking over one shoulder. As will you, unless you have some sort of plan.”

  “My plans are always ridiculous,” Alif blurted in a sudden thrall of self-doubt, “Look where they’ve gotten us. I don’t know why I can’t just solve things the ordinary way like everyone else.” “Perhaps you don’t have ordinary problems.”

  “I was a computer geek with girl issues. That sounds pretty ordinary to me.”

  NewQuarter snickered.

  “Then perhaps we don’t live in ordinary times,” said the sheikh. “I know it’s common for old people to complain about the modern moment, and lament the passing of a golden age when children were polite and you could buy a kilo of meat for pennies, but in our case, my boy, I think I am not mistaken when I say that something fundamental has changed about the world in which we live. We have reached a state of constant reinvention. Revolutions have moved off the battlefield and on to home computers. Nothing shocks one anymore. We are living in a post-fictional era. Fictional governments are accepted without comment, and we can sit in a mosque and have a debate about the fictional pork a fictional character consumes in a video game, with every gravity we would accord something quite real. You and I and the princeling can spend the night in the courtyard of a marid as calmly as we would in a hotel. It is all very strange indeed.”