The Long List Anthology 2

by Aliette de Bodard

  • • • •

  I give myself credit: I was calm. My hands were steady. I didn’t bat an eye when I took the yellowed envelope from Merchant Bashir’s hands.

  “It is yours,” said Bashir. “The envelope, the secret, the burden.” He wiped his face with the hem of his kameez. “Fifty years I carried it. Allah be praised, today it’s passed on to you.”

  A burden the mountains couldn’t bear settles on me tonight.

  I shivered a little.

  “It’s cold,” Bashir said. “I will turn the heat on and leave you to peruse the contents of the envelope alone. I’ll be in the tea stall two shops down. Take as long as you wish.”

  “You kept your word,” I said softly. “You didn’t open the envelope.”

  Bashir nodded. “I asked Sharif how in God’s name he could trust me with it when I didn’t trust myself. A secret is like a disease, I said. It begins with an itch in a corner of your flesh, then spreads like cancer, until you’re overcome and give in. He just smiled and said he knew I wouldn’t open it.” The rug weaver dabbed a kerchief at his grimy cheeks. “Maybe because he had such faith in me, it helped keep wicked desire at bay.”

  Or maybe he knew you wouldn’t, I thought, holding the envelope, feeling my pulse beat in my fingertips. Just like he knew the name of the rightful owner decades before he was born.

  My name.

  Through the back window I watched Bashir tromp down the street. The mist had thickened and the alley was submerged in blue-white. A steady whine of wind and the occasional thump as pedestrians walked into trash cans and bicycle stands. A whorl of fog shimmered around the streetlight on the far corner.

  I turned and went to the counter. Picked up the envelope. Sliced it open. Inside was a sheaf of blank papers. I pulled them out and a small object swept out and fell on the floor. I reached down and picked it up, its radiance casting a twitching halo on my palm.

  It was a silver key with a grooved golden stud for a blade, dangling from a rusted hoop.

  Impossible.

  My gaze was riveted on the golden stud. It took a considerable amount of effort to force my eyes away, to pocket the key, rise, and shamble to the storeroom.

  It was dark. Fog had weakened the daylight. Broken looms with their limp warp strings and tipping beams gaped. I crossed the room and stood in front of the brass trunk. The padlock was tarnished. Round keyhole. I retrieved the key and stared at it, this centuries-old gold stud—if one were to believe Gramps—fused to a silver handle.

  The instruction was clear.

  I brushed the dust away from the lid. A floral design was carved into it, wreathed with grime but still visible: a medallion motif in a gilt finish with a Quranic verse running through its heart like an artery.

  “Those who believe in the Great Unseen,” I whispered. In my head Baba smiled and a row of pine trees cast a long shadow across Gramps’s tombstone where I had last read a similar epitaph.

  I inserted the Mughal key into the padlock, turned it twice, and opened the trunk.

  • • • •

  A rug. A rolled-up kilim, judging by its thinness.

  I stared at it, at the lavish weave of its edges that shone from light within the rolled layers. Was there a flashlight inside? Ridiculous idea. I leaned in.

  The kilim smelled of sunshine. Of leaves and earth and fresh rainfall. Scents that filled my nostrils and tapped my taste buds, flooded my mouth with a sweet tang, not unlike cardamom tea.

  My palms were sweating despite the cold. I tugged at the fat end of the rug and it fell to the floor, unspooling. It was seven by five feet, its borders perfectly even, and as it raced across the room, the storeroom was inundated with colors: primrose yellow, iris white, smoke blue. A bright scarlet sparked in the air that reminded me of the sharbat Mama used to make during Ramadan.

  I fell back. Awestruck, I watched this display of lights surging from the kilim. Thrashing and gusting and slamming into one another, spinning faster and faster until they became a dancing shadow with many rainbow arms, each pointing earthward to their source—the carpet.

  The shadow pirouetted once more and began to sink. The myriad images in the carpet flashed as it dissolved into them, and within moments the room was dark. The only evidence of the specter’s presence was the afterglow on my retina.

  I breathed. My knees were weak, the base of my spine thrummed with charge. A smell like burning refuse lingered in my nostrils.

  What was that?

  A miracle, Gramps spoke in my head softly.

  I went to the carpet. It was gorgeous. Multitudes of figures ran in every shape around its edges. Flora and fauna. Grotesques and arabesques. They seethed over nomadic symbols. I traced my finger across the surface. Cabalistic squares, hexagrams, eight-pointed stars, a barb-tailed scorpion. A concoction of emblems swirled together by the artisan’s finger until it seemed the carpet crawled with arcana I’d seen in ancient texts used mostly for one purpose.

  Traps, I thought. For what?

  I peered closer. The central figures eddied to form the armature of a tower with four jagged limbs shot into the corners of the rug where they were pinned down with pieces of glass. Four curved symmetric pieces, clear with the slightest tinge of purple. Together these four quarter-circles stuck out from the corners of the kilim as if they had once belonged to a cup.

  They shimmered.

  “What are you,” I whispered. The carpet and the embedded glass said nothing. I hesitated, the soles of my feet tingling, then bent and looked inside the upper right shard.

  A man looked back at me, his face expressionless, young, and not mine.

  “Salam, beta,” Gramps said in Urdu, still smiling. “Welcome.”

  • • • •

  The age of wonders shivered and died when the world changed.

  In the summer of 1963, however, an eighteen-year-old boy named Sharif discovered a miracle as he panted and dug and heaved an earthen pot out from under a rotten eucalyptus stump.

  It was night, there were no streetlamps, and, by all laws holy, the dark should have been supreme. Except a light emanated from the pot.

  Sharif wiped his forehead and removed the pot’s lid. Inside was a purple glass chalice glowing with brightness he couldn’t look upon. He had to carry it home and put on dark shades before he could peer in.

  The chalice was empty and the light came from the glass itself.

  Trembling with excitement, the boy wrapped it in a blanket and hid it under the bed. The next day when his parents were gone, he poured water into it and watched the liquid’s meniscus bubble and seethe on the kitchen table. The water was the light and the light all liquid.

  The fakir had warned the Mughal princess that the secret was not for human eyes, but since that fateful night when the boy had first glimpsed the eucalyptus jinn, saw his fetters stretch from sky to earth, his dreams had been transformed. He saw nightscapes that he shouldn’t see. Found himself in places that shouldn’t exist. And now here was an enchanted cup frothing with liquid light on his kitchen table.

  The boy looked at the chalice again. The churning motion of its contents hypnotized him. He raised it, and drank the light.

  Such was how unfortunate, young Sharif discovered the secrets of Jaam-e-Jam.

  The Cup of Heaven.

  Legends of the Jaam have been passed down for generations in the Islamic world. Jamshed, the Zoroastrian emperor of Persia, was said to have possessed a seven-ringed scrying cup that revealed the mysteries of heaven to him. Persian mythmakers ascribed the centuries-long success of the empire to the magic of the Cup of Heaven.

  And now it was in Sharif’s hand.

  The Mother of Revelations. It swept across the boy’s body like a fever. It seeped inside his skin, blanched the marrow of his bones, until every last bit of him understood. He knew what he had to do next, and if he could he would destroy the cup, but that wasn’t his choice anymore. The cup gave him much, including foreknowledge with all the knots that weave th
e future. Everything from that moment on he remembered already.

  And now he needed to conceal it.

  So Sharif left for the rest of his life. He went to Mansehra. Found the Mughal princess. Married her. He made her very happy for the rest of her brief life, and on a sunny Friday afternoon he took his goggling, squalling son with him to pray Juma in a mosque in the mountains, where he would stay the night for worship and meditation.

  Even though he knew it was the day appointed for his wife’s death.

  There was no thought, no coercion, no struggle. Just the wisdom of extinction, the doggedness of destiny that steered his way. He and his son would return to find their family incinerated. Sharif and the villagers would carry out their charred corpses and he would weep; he was allowed that much.

  After, he took his son to Turkey.

  For years he learned rug weaving at a master weaver’s atelier. His newfound knowledge demanded he rein in the Cup of Heaven’s contents till the time for their disclosure returned. For that he must learn to prepare a special trap.

  It took his fingers time to learn the trick even if his brain knew it. Years of mistakes and practice. Eventually he mastered the most sublime ways of weaving. He could apply them to create a trap so elegant, so fast and wise that nothing would escape it.

  Sharif had learned how to weave the fabric of light itself.

  Now he could return to his hometown, seek out the shadow of the eucalyptus tree, and prepare the device for imprisoning the cup.

  First, he designed a kilim with the holy names of reality woven into it. Carefully, with a diamond-tipped glasscutter, he took the Jaam-e-Jam apart into four pieces and set them into the kilim. Next, he snared waves of light that fell in through the workshop window. He looped the peaks and troughs and braided them into a net. He stretched the net over the glass shards and warped them into place. He constructed a brass trunk and etched binding symbols on its lid, then rolled up the kilim and placed it inside.

  Last, a special key was prepared. This part took some sorting out—he had to fetch certain particles farther along in time—but he succeeded; and finally he had the key. It was designed to talk to the blood-light in one person only, one descended from Sharif’s line and the Mughal princess’s.

  Me.

  • • • •

  Incredulous, I gazed at my dead grandfather as he told me his last story.

  His cheeks glowed with youth, his eyes sharp and filled with truth. His hair was black, parted on the left. Maybe the glass shone, or his eyes, but the effect was the same: an incredible halo of light, near holy in its alienness, surrounded him. When he shook his head, the halo wobbled. When he spoke, the carpet’s fringe threads stirred as if a breeze moved them, but the voice was sourceless and everywhere.

  “Today is the sixteenth of November, 2013,” he had said before launching into narration like a machine. “You’re twenty-eight. The woman you love will be twenty-five in three months. As for me”—he smiled—“I’m dead.”

  He was telling me the future. Prescience, it seemed, had been his forte.

  And now I knew how. The Cup of Heaven.

  “Is it really you?” I said when he was done, my voice full of awe.

  Gramps nodded. “More a portion of my punishment than me.”

  “What does that mean? What other secrets were in the cup? Tell me everything, Gramps,” I said, “before I go crazy.”

  “All good stories leave questions. Isn’t that what I will say?” He watched me, serious. “You should understand that I’m sorry. For bringing you here. For passing this on to you. I wish I’d never dug under that tree. But it is the way it is. I was handed a responsibility. I suppose we all get our burdens.”

  The air in the room was thick and musty. Our eyes were locked together. He lured me here, I thought. My hands were shaking and this time it was with anger. Rage at being manipulated. All those stories of princesses and paupers, those lies he told for years while all the time he knew exactly what he was doing and how he was preparing me for this burden, whatever it was.

  Gramps’s spirit, or whoever he was in this current state, watched me with eyes that had no room for empathy or guilt. Didn’t he care at all?

  “I do, son,” he said gently. He was reading my mind or already knew it—I wasn’t clear which—and that angered me more. “I haven’t gotten to the most important part of the story.”

  “I don’t care,” I said in a low voice. “Just tell me what was in the cup.”

  “You need to know this.” His tone was mechanical, not my gramps’s voice. The person I knew and loved was not here. “The Jaam gave me much. Visions, power, perfect knowledge, but it cost me too. Quite a bit. You can’t stare into the heart of the Unseen and not have it stare back at you.”

  He swept a hand around himself. For the first time I noticed the halo wasn’t just hovering behind his head; it was a luminescent ring blooming from his shoulders, encircling his neck, wrapping around his body.

  “It wasn’t for me to decide the cup’s fate, so I hid it away. But because the Unseen’s presence ran like a torrent from it I paid more than a man should ever have to pay for a mistake. I was told to dig up the secret and hide it, not to gaze at its wonders or partake of its mysteries. My punishment hence was remembering the future and being powerless to prevent it. I would lose everything I remembered about the love of my life. Starting from the moment I dug under the eucalyptus, I would forget ever having been with your grandmother. My lovely, luckless Zeenat.

  “Once the task was complete and I handed over the trunk to Bashir, my memories began to go. With time, my mind confabulated details to fill in the gaps and I told myself and everyone who’d ask that I had married a woman who died during childbirth. By the time we moved to America, all I remembered was this nostalgia and longing to discover a secret I thought I’d never pursued: the pauper princess and her magical jinn.”

  When he stopped, the outline of his face wavered. It was the halo blazing. “What you see before you”—with a manicured finger Gramps made a circle around his face—“is an impression of those lost years. My love’s memory wrenched from me.”

  He closed his eyes, letting me study the absence of age on his face. If he were telling the truth, he was a figment of his own imagination, and I . . . I was crazy to believe any of this. This room was a delusion and I was complicit in it, solidifying it.

  Maybe that was why he forgot. Maybe the human mind couldn’t marry such unrealities and live with them.

  “What about the journal? If you forgot everything, how could you draw? How could you write down details of your life?”

  Gramps, his apparition, opened his eyes. “Senility. When my organic memory dissolved, fragments of my other life came seeping back in dreams.”

  So he wrote the journal entries like someone else’s story. He had visions and dreams, but didn’t know whose life was flooding his head, filling it with devastating images, maybe even ushering in his death earlier than it otherwise might have come.

  I leaned back and watched the threads of the carpet twist. The woven tower shot into the sky with hundreds of creatures gathered around it, looking at its top disappear into the heavens.

  “I want to see the cup.” My voice rose like a razor in the dark, cutting through the awkwardness between us. “I want to see the contents.”

  “I know.” He nodded. “Even such a warning as you see before you wouldn’t deter you.”

  “If the cup’s real, I will take it with me to the States, where historians and mythologists will validate its authenticity and . . .”

  And what? Truly believe it was a magical cup and place it in the Smithsonian? The cup’s secret isn’t for human eyes, Gramps had said. But what else are secrets for if not discovery? That is their nature. Only time stands between a mystery and its rightful master.

  Gramps’s fingers played with the halo, twisting strands of luminosity like hair between his fingers. “You will have the secret, but before you drink from it,
I want you to do something for me.”

  He snapped his fingers and threads of light sprang from the halo, brightening as they came apart. Quickly he noosed them until he had a complicated knot with a glowing center and a string dangling at the end.

  He offered it to me. “Pull.”

  Warily, I looked at the phosphorescent string. “Why?”

  “Before you gaze inside the cup, you will have a taste of my memories. After that you decide your own demons.”

  I reached out a hand to the glass shard, withdrew, extended it again. When my fingers touched it, I flinched. It was warm. Slowly, I pushed my hand into the glass. It was like forcing it through tangles of leaves hot from the sun.

  The string reddened. Its end whipped back and forth. I pinched it, pulled, and the light string rocketed toward me, the brilliant corpuscle at its center thrashing and unraveling into reality.

  I gasped. A fat worm of peacock colors was climbing my hand, wrapping itself around my wrist.

  “Gramps! What is this?” I shouted, twisting my arm, but the creature was already squirming its way up my arm, its grooves hot against my flesh, leaving shadows of crimson, mauve, azure, muddy green, and yellow on my skin. I could smell its colors. Farm odors. Damp foliage. Herbal teas. Baba’s truck with its ancient vomit-stained upholstery and greasy wheel covers. My mother’s hair. Sara’s embrace.

  I shuddered. The worm’s body was taut across the bridge of my nose, its two ends poised like metal filings in front of my eyes.

  “These,” Gramps said, “are the stingers of memory.”

  The worm’s barbs were like boulders in my vision. As I watched them, terrified, they vibrated once.

  Then plunged into my eyes.

  • • • •

  In the cup was everything, Gramps said. He meant it.

  What the teenage boy saw went back all the way until he was destroyed and remade from the complete memory of the universe. From the moment of its birth until the end. Free of space, time, and their building blocks, the boy experienced all at once: a mausoleum of reality that wrapped around him, plunged into which he floated through the Unseen.