But Dunia’s children thrived. That much can be said. And almost three hundred years later, when the Jews were expelled from Spain, even the Jews who could not say they were Jews, the great-grandchildren of Dunia’s great-grandchildren climbed onto ships in Cádiz and Palos de Moguer, or walked across the Pyrenees, or flew on magic carpets or in giant urns like the jinni kin they were. They traversed continents and sailed the seven seas and climbed high mountains and swam mighty rivers and slid into deep valleys and found shelter and safety wherever they could, and they forgot one another quickly, or remembered as long as they could and then forgot, or never forgot, becoming a family that was no longer exactly a family, a tribe that was no longer exactly a tribe, adopting every religion and no religion, all of them, after the centuries of conversion, ignorant of their supernatural origins and of the story of the forcible conversion of the Jews, some of them becoming manically devout while others were contemptuously disbelieving. They were a family without a place but with family in every place, a village without a location but winding in and out of every spot on the globe, like rootless plants, mosses or lichens or creeping orchids, who must lean upon others, being unable to stand alone.
History is unkind to those it abandons and can be equally unkind to those who make it. Ibn Rushd died (of old age, or so we believe) while traveling in Marrakesh barely a year after his rehabilitation, and never saw his fame grow, never saw it spread beyond the borders of his own world and into the infidel world beyond, where his commentaries on Aristotle became the foundations of his mighty forebear’s popularity, the cornerstones of the infidels’ godless philosophy, saecularis, which meant the kind of idea that came only once in a saeculum, an age of the world, or maybe an idea for the ages, and which was the very image and echo of the ideas he had spoken only in dreams. Perhaps, as a godly man, Ibn Rushd would not have been delighted by the place history gave him, for it is a strange fate for a believer to become the inspiration of ideas that have no need of belief, and a stranger fate still for a man’s philosophy to be victorious beyond the frontiers of his own world but vanquished within those borders, because in the world he knew it was the children of his dead adversary, Ghazali, who multiplied and inherited the kingdom, while his own bastard brood spread out, leaving his forbidden name behind them, to populate the earth.
A high proportion of the survivors ended up on the great North American continent, and many others on the great South Asian subcontinent, thanks to the phenomenon of “clumping,” which is part of the mysterious illogic of random distribution; and many of those afterward spread out west and south across the Americas, and north and west from that great diamond at the foot of Asia, into all the countries of the world, for of the Duniazát it can fairly be said that, in addition to peculiar ears, they all have itchy feet. Ibn Rushd was dead, but he and his adversary continued their dispute beyond the grave, for to the arguments of great thinkers there is no end, argument itself being a tool to improve the mind, the sharpest of all tools, born of the love of knowledge, which is to say, philosophy.
NICK WOLVEN
No Placeholder for You, My Love
FROM Asimov’s Science Fiction
1
CLAIRE MET HIM at a dinner party in New Orleans, and afterward she had to remind herself this was true. Yes, that had been it, his very first appearance. It seemed incredible there had been anything so finite as a first time.
He was seated across from her, two chairs down, a gorgeous woman on either side. As usual, the subject had turned to food.
“But I’ve been to this house a dozen times,” one of the gorgeous women was saying. “I’ve been to dinner parties, dance parties, even family parties. And every time, they serve the wrong kind of cuisine.”
She had red hair, the color of the candlelight reflected off the varnished chairs. The house was an old house, full of old things, handmade textiles and walnut chiffoniers, oil paintings of nameless Civil War colonels.
“Is that a problem?” said the young man on Claire’s left. “Why should you care?”
“Because,” said the redhead, pursing her lips. “Meringue pie, at an elegant soiree? Wine and steak tartare, at a child’s birthday party? Lobster bisque at a dance? For God’s sake, it was all over the floor. It seems, I don’t know. Lazy. Thoughtless. Cobbled together.”
She lifted her glass of wine to her mouth, and the liquid vanished the instant it touched her tongue.
The man who was to mean so much to Claire, to embody in his person so much hope and loss, leaned over his soup, eyes dark with amusement. “It is cobbled together. Of course it is. But isn’t that the best part?”
“And why is that, Byron?” someone said with a sigh.
Byron. A fake name, Claire assumed, distilled from the fog of some half-remembered youthful interest. But then, you never knew.
Whatever the source of his name, Byron’s face had the handsome roughness earned through active living. Dots of stubble grayed his skin. A tiny scar divided one eyebrow. His smile made a charming pattern of wrinkles around his eyes. It was a candid face, a well-architected face, a fortysomething face.
“Because,” said Byron, and caught Claire’s eye, as if only she would understand. “Look at this furniture, the chandelier. Look at that music stand in the corner. American plantation style, rococo, Art Nouveau. Every piece a different movement. Some are complete anachronisms. That’s why I love this house. You can see the spirit of the designers here. A kind of whimsy. It’s so personal, so scattershot.”
“You’re such a talker, Byron,” someone sighed.
“Look at all of you,” Byron said, moving his spoon in a circle to encompass the ring of faces. “Some of you I’ve never seen before in my life. And here we are, brought together by chance, for one evening only. You know what? That delights me. That thrills me.” His gesture halted at Claire’s face. “That enchants me.”
“And after tonight,” said the redhead, “we’ll go our separate ways, and forget each other, and maybe never see each other again. So is that part of the wonder for you, Byron, or does that spoil the wonder?”
“It does neither,” Byron said, “because I don’t believe it.”
His eyes settled on Claire’s. Again he smiled. She had always liked older men, their slightly chastened air, their solemn and good-humored strength.
“I don’t believe we’ll never see each other again,” Byron said, looking at his spoon. “I don’t believe that’s necessarily our fate. And you know what? The truth is, I wouldn’t mind living in this house forever. Even if they do serve alphabet soup at a dinner party.”
He lifted his hand to his mouth and touched his spoon to his lips. And instantly the liquid disappeared.
When they had cleared the table, the entertainments began. There were board games in the living room, a live band on the lawn. Stairs led to a dozen shadowy bedrooms, with sad old beds, and rich old carpets, and orchids in baskets on the moonlit windowsills. In town, the music of riverbank revelry scraped and jittered out of ramshackle bars, and paddleboats rode on the slow Mississippi, jingling with the racket of riches won and lost.
Byron borrowed a set of car keys from the houseboy. Claire followed him onto the porch. The breath of the bayou was in the air, warm and buoyant, holding up the clustered leaves of the pecan trees and the high, star-scattered sky. Sweat held her shirt to the small of her back, as if a hand were there, pressing her forward.
“Shall we take a ride?” The car keys dangled, tinkling, from Byron’s upraised hand.
“Wait,” said Claire, “do that again.”
“This?” He gave the keys another shake. The sound tinkled out, a sprinkling of noise, over the thick green nap of the lawn.
“It sounds just like it,” Claire said. “Don’t you hear it? It sounds just like the midnight chime.”
“Oh, God, don’t talk about that now. It’s not for hours.” Byron went halfway down the porch steps, held out a hand. “We still have plenty of time to fall in love.”
At a corner café where zydeco livened the air, a young couple argued at a scrollwork table.
“But how can you define it? How can you even describe it?” The woman’s arm swung as she spoke, agitating the streetlights with a quiver of silver bracelets.
“Well, it’s easy enough to define, anyway.” The man made professorial motions with his hands. “It was simply a matter of chemistry.”
“But how would that be any different from, say, smell?”
“Oh, it wasn’t, not really. Taste and smell. Love and desire. All variations on the same experience.”
The couple lifted fried shrimp from a basket as they spoke, the small golden morsels vanishing like fireflies on their lips.
“It can’t be so simple,” the woman said. And the man leaned over the table, reaching for her face, and turned it toward his lips. “You’re right. It’s not.”
“I used to have those kinds of conversations,” Byron sighed. He grasped the old maple knob of the shift, and pulled away from the curb.
They drove out of town onto rural dirt roads, where moonlight splashed across the land. In a plank roadhouse, a dance party was underway, a fiddle keening over stamping feet. Parked in the dirt lot, soaked in yellow light, they conducted the usual conversation.
“Now, me?” Byron said. “Let me tell you about myself. I’m a middle-aged computer programmer who enjoys snuggling, whiskey, and the study of artificial environments. I have a deathly aversion to crowds, and I’m not afraid to admit it. I’m nowhere near as handsome as this in real life, and I can assure you, I’ve been at this game a very long time.”
His face dimpled as he delivered his spiel, not quite smiling. Claire laughed at his directness. Byron thumped a short drumroll on the wheel.
“And you?”
“Oh, me?” Claire said. “Me? I’m no one.”
“That’s an interesting theory.”
“What I mean is, I’m no one anyone should care about. I don’t even care about me.”
“That can’t be true.”
“I guess not. I guess what I mean is, I don’t care who I used to be.” Claire watched the figures dance in the building, the plank walls trembling as shadows moved like living drawings across the dirty windows. “I care what happens to me now, though. I care about nights like this.”
Her lazy hand took in the dancers, the stars. Byron sat back, nodding.
Claire surrendered. “I don’t know. There’s an interesting woman back there, somewhere. A scholar, a geneticist. But it’s hard to believe, nowadays, that she ever existed.”
“Tell me about this geneticist,” he said.
“Well.” Claire afforded him a smile. “What do you want to know? She looked like me. She talked like me. She loved all the things I love. She loved rainy windows and Scrabble and strong tea. She loved her body, because she had a nice one, and she loved to take long baths with organic soap, and she loved the idea that one day, far in her future, there might be someone to share those baths with her. Mostly, I think, she loved the idea that she could find a man who didn’t care about any of those things. A man who would simply take her hand and say, ‘Let’s go.’ ”
The fiddle stopped. The dancers halted. The shadows on the windows settled into perfect sketches: honey-colored men and women with open, panting lips.
“She was young,” Claire said. “And she was lonely.”
Byron nodded. “I understand.”
Someone threw open the roadhouse door. A carpet of gold rolled down the steps, all the way up the hood into the car, covering Claire in mellow light. Byron studied her. She knew what he was seeing. A beautiful blonde, a perfect face, a statue of a body with cartoon-sized eyes.
“But you’re not,” he said. And after a moment, he clarified: “Young. Not anymore. Are you?”
“No,” said Claire. “Not anymore.”
They drove to town along a different route, on dark, swampy roads where alligators slithered, grunting, from the wheels. On a wharf lined with couples and fishing shops, they stood at the wood rail, looking over the water, waiting together for the midnight chime. A gas-powered ferry struggled from shore, heading northeast toward a sprawl of dark land.
“I don’t care,” Byron said. “I don’t care if you were a biologist. I don’t care if you love Scrabble or tea. I don’t care about any of that.” He held out a hand. “Let’s go.”
The couples on the wharf had fallen silent, waiting. The very twinkling of the stars seemed to pause. Still, the ferry strained and chugged, heading for a shore it would never reach.
“Say it,” Claire said. “You say it first, then I’ll say it, too.”
“I want to see you again,” Byron said.
She took his hand. Before she could respond, the midnight chime sounded. It came three times, eerie and clear, like a jingle of celestial keys. And Byron and the river and the world all disappeared.
2
Claire didn’t see him again for a thousand nights.
It felt like a thousand, anyway. It may have been more. Claire had stopped counting long, long ago.
There were always more nights, more parties, more diversions. And, miraculous as it seemed, more people. Where did they come from? How could there be so many pretty young men, with leonine confidence and smiling lips? How could there be so many women arising out of the million chance assortments of the clubs, swimming through parties as if it could still be a thrill to have a thousand eyes fish for them—as if, like the fish in the proverbial sea, they one day hoped to be hooked?
Claire considered them, contemplated them, and let them go their way. She dated, for a time, a very old, handsome man whose name, in some remote and esoteric way, commanded powerful sources of credit. His wealth opened up new possibilities: private beaches where no one save they two had ever stepped, mountain lodges where the seasons manifested with iconic perfection, pink and green and gold and white. But they weren’t, as the language ran, “compatible”; they were old and tired in different ways.
She met a girl whose face flashed with the markings of youth: sharp earrings, studs, lipstick that blazed in toxic colors. But the girl’s eyes moved slowly, with the irony of age. Theirs was a sexual connection. Night after night they bowed out of cocktail hours, feeling for each other’s hands across the crush of dances. Every exit was an escape. They sought the nearest private rooms they could find: the neon-bright retreats of city hotels, secret brick basements in converted factories. The thrill was one of shared expertise. Both women knew the limits of sex: what moves were possible, what borders impermeable. They cultivated the matched rhythm, the long caress. Sometimes Claire’s new lover—whose name, she learned after three anonymous encounters, was Isolde—fed delicacies to her, improbable foods, ice carvings and whole cakes, a hundred olives impaled on swizzle sticks, fruit rinds in paint-box colors, orange and lime, stolen from the bottomless bins of restaurants. It was musical sport. Isolde perfected her timing, spacing each treat. Claire eased into a languor of tension and release, her body shivering with an automatic thrill. As the foods touched her mouth, one by one, they flickered immediately into nothingness—gone the instant she felt them, like words on her tongue.
A happy time, this. But love? Every night they were careful to say that magic phrase, far in advance of the midnight chime.
“I want to see you again.”
“I want to see you, too.”
And so the nights went by, and the dates, and the parties, spiced with anticipation.
Soon, Claire knew, it was bound to happen.
The end came in Eastern Europe.
“We could have been compatible, don’t you think
?”
They were reposing, at that moment, in a grand hotel with mountain views, somewhere west of the Caucasus, naked in bed while snow flicked the window. Isolde lifted a rum ball from a chased steel tray, manipulating it with silver tongs. She touched it to the candle, collected a curl of flame, brought the morsel, still burning, to her mouth, and snuffed it out of existence, fire and all, against her tongue.
Claire clasped her hands around a pillow. “Do you think so?”
Isolde seemed nervous tonight, opening and closing the tongs, pretending to measure, as with calipers, Claire’s thigh, her knee.
“Don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying we are compatible. I’m only talking about, you know. What might have been.”
Beyond the window, white flakes swarmed in the sky, a portrait of aimless, random motion.
“We’re attracted to each other,” Isolde said. “We have fun. We always have fun.”
“That’s true. We always have fun.”
“Isn’t that what matters?”
“Nothing matters,” Claire said. “Not for us. Isn’t that the common consensus?” She made sure to smile as she said it, lying back with her hands behind her head.
Isolde seemed pained. “I’m only saying. If things had been different. We might have worked. We might have . . .” She blushed before speaking the forbidden phrase. “We might have made a match.”
Claire felt her smile congealing on her face. She marveled at that—watched, in the oak-framed mirror atop the dresser, as her expression became an expression of disgust. “But things aren’t different. Wouldn’t you say that’s an important fact? Things are exactly, eternally what they are.”
“Eternally. You can’t know that.”
“I can believe it.” Claire sat up, looking out the window, where snowfall and evening had blanked out the sky. “If you want to know what might have been, just wait for the midnight chime. You’ll get a thousand might-have-beens. A thousand Romeos and Juliets. A thousand once-upon-a-times.”
The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2016 Page 18