The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Fourteenth Annual Collection

by Gardner Dozois

  Ayudesh was walking across the snow to the skimmer when I went back outside. The girl (I hadn’t shaken free from thinking of her as a boy) stuck out her hand to him. Should I have shaken her hand? No, she’d had the box, I couldn’t have shaken her hand. So I had done it right. Wanji, the other teacher, was coming too.

  I got wood from the pile for the boxstove in the guest house, digging it from under the top wood because the top wood would be damp. It would take a long time to heat up the guest house, so the sooner I got started the sooner the offworlders would be comfortable.

  There was a window in the visitor’s house, fat-yellow above the purple-white snow.

  Inside everyone was sitting around on the floor, talking. None of the teachers were there, were they with the old man? I smelled whisak but I didn’t see any, which meant that the men were drinking it outside. I sat down at the edge of the group, where it was dark, next to Dirtha. Dirtha was watching the offworld girl who was shaking her head at Harup to try to tell him she didn’t understand what he was asking. Harup pointed at her blue box again. “Can I see it?” he asked. Harup was my father’s age, so he didn’t speak any English.

  It was warming up in here, although when the offworlder girl leaned forward and breathed out, her mouth in an O, her breath smoked the air for an instant.

  It was too frustrating to watch Harup try to talk to the girl. “What’s your kinship?” he asked. “I’m Harup Sckarline.” He thumped his chest with his finger. “What’s your kinship?” When she shook her head, not understanding all these words, he looked around and grinned. Harup wouldn’t stop until he was bored, and that would take a long time.

  “I’m sorry,” the girl said, “I don’t speak your language.” She looked unhappy.

  Ayudesh would be furious with us if he found out that none of us would try and use our English.

  I had to think about how to ask. Then I cleared my throat, so people would know I was going to talk from the back of the group. “He asks what is your name,” I said.

  The girl’s chin came up like a startled animal. “What?” she said.

  Maybe I said it wrong? Or my accent was so bad she couldn’t understand? I looked at my boots; the stitches around the toes were fraying. They had been my mother’s. “Your name,” I said to the boots.

  The toes twitched a little, sympathetic. Maybe I should have kept quiet.

  “My name is Veronique,” she said.

  “What is she saying?” asked Harup.

  “She says her kinship is Veronique,” I said.

  “That’s not a kinship,” said Little Shemus. Little Shemus wasn’t old enough to have a beard, but he was old enough to be critical of everything.

  “Offworlders don’t have kinship like we do,” I said. “She gave her front name.”

  “Ask her her kinship name,” Little Shemus said.

  “She just told you,” Ardha said, taking the end of her braid out of her mouth. Ardha was a year younger than me. “They don’t have kinship names. Ayudesh doesn’t have a kinship name. Wanji doesn’t.”

  “Sure they do,” Shemus said. “Their kinship name is Sckarlineclan.”

  “We give them that name,” said Ardha and pursed her round lips. Ardha was always bossy.

  “What are they saying?” asked the girl.

  “They say, err, they ask, what is your,” your what? How would I even ask what her kinship name was in English? There was a word for it, but I couldn’t think of it. “Your other name.”

  She frowned. Her eyebrows were quite black. “You mean my last name? It’s Veronique Twombly.”

  What was so hard about last name? I remembered it as soon as she said it. “Tawomby,” I said. “Her kinship is Veronique Tawomby.”

  “Tawomby,” Harup said. “Amazing. It doesn’t sound like a word. It sounds made-up, like children do. What’s in her box?”

  “I know what’s in her box,” said Erip. Everybody laughed except for Ardha and me. Even Little Sherep laughed and he didn’t really understand.

  The girl was looking at me to explain.

  “He asks inside, the box is.” I had gotten tangled up. Questions were hard.

  “Is the box inside?” she asked.

  I nodded.

  “It’s inside,” she said.

  I didn’t understand her answer, so I waited for her to explain.

  “I don’t know what you mean,” she said. “Did someone bring the box inside?”

  I nodded, because I wasn’t sure exactly what she’d said, but she didn’t reach for the box or open it or anything. I tried to think of how to say it.

  “Inside,” Ardha said, tentative. “What is?”

  “The box,” she said. “Oh wait, you want to know what’s in the box?”

  Ardha looked at the door so she wouldn’t have to look at the off-worlder. I wasn’t sure, so I nodded.

  She pulled the box over and opened it up. Something glimmered hard and green and there were red and yellow boxes covered in lingua and she said, “Presents for Ayudesh and Wanji.” Everybody stood up to see inside, so I couldn’t see, but I heard her say things. The words didn’t mean anything. Tea, that I knew. Wanji talked about tea. “These are sweets,” I heard her say. “You know, candy.” I knew the word sweet, but I didn’t know what else she meant. It was so much harder to speak English to her than it was to do it in class with Ayudesh.

  Nobody was paying any attention to what she said but me. They didn’t care as long as they could see. I wished I could see.

  Nobody was even thinking about me, or that if I hadn’t been there she never would have opened the box. But that was the way it always was. If I only lived somewhere else, my life would be different. But Sckarline was neither earth nor sky, and I was living my life in between. People looked and fingered, but she wouldn’t let them take things out, not even Harup, who was as tall as she was and a lot stronger. The younger people got bored and sat down and finally I could see Harup poking something with his finger, and the outland girl watching. Then she looked at me.

  “What’s your name?” she asked.

  “Me?” I said. “Umm, Janna.”

  She said my name. “What’s your last name, Janna?”

  “Sckarline,” I said.

  “Oh,” she said, “like the settlement.”

  I just nodded.

  “What is his name?” She pointed.

  “Harup,” I said. He looked up and grinned.

  “What’s your name?” she asked him and I told him what she had said.

  “Harup,” he said. Then she went around the room, saying everybody’s names. It made everyone pleased to be noticed. She was smart that way. And it was easy. Then she tried to remember all their names, which had everyone laughing and correcting her so I didn’t have to talk at all.

  Ayudesh came in, taller than anyone, and I noticed, for the first time in my life, that he was really an offworlder. Ayudesh had been there all my life, and I knew he was an offworlder, but to me he had always been just Ayudesh.

  Then they were talking about me and Ayudesh was just Ayudesh again. “Janna?” he said. “Very good. I’ll tell you what, you take care of Veronique, here. You’re her translator, all right?”

  I was scared, because I really couldn’t understand when she talked, but I guessed I was better than anybody else.

  * * *

  Veronique unpacked, which was interesting, but then she just started putting things here and there and everybody else drifted off until it was just her and me.

  Veronique did a lot of odd things. She used a lot of water. The first thing I did for her was get water. She followed me out and watched me chip the ice for water and fill the bucket. She fingered the wooden bucket and the rope handle.

  She said something I didn’t understand because it had do in it and a lot of pronouns and I have trouble following sentences like that. I smiled at her but I think she realized I didn’t understand. Her boots were purple. I had never seen purple boots before.

  “The
y look strange,” she said. I didn’t know what looked strange. “I like your boots,” she said, slowly and clearly. I did understand, but then I didn’t know what to do, did she want me to give her my boots? They were my mother’s old boots and I wouldn’t have minded giving them to her except I didn’t have anything to take their place.

  “It is really cold,” she said.

  Which seemed very odd to say, except I remembered that offworlders talk about the weather; Ayudesh had made us practice talking about the weather. He said it was something strangers talked about. “It is,” I said. “But it will not snow tonight.” That was good, it made her happy.

  “And it gets dark so early,” she said. “It isn’t even afternoon and it’s like night.”

  “Where you live, it is cold as this, umm—” I hadn’t made a question right.

  But she understood. “Oh no,” she said, “where I live is warm. It is hot, I mean. There is snow only on the mountains.”

  She wanted to heat the water so I put it on the stove, and then she showed me pictures of her mother and father and her brother at her house. It was summer and they were wearing only little bits of clothes.

  Then she showed me a picture of herself and a man with a beard. “That’s my boyfriend,” she said. “We’re getting married.”

  He looked old. Grown up. In the picture Veronique looked older too. I looked at her again, not sure how old she was. Maybe older than me? Wanji said offworlders got married when they were older, not like the clans.

  “I have boyfriend,” I said.

  “You do?” She smiled at me. “What’s his name?”

  “Tuuvin,” I said.

  “Was he here before?”

  I shook my head.

  Then she let me see her bag. The dark red one. I loved the color. I stroked it, as slick as leather and shining. “Plastic?” I said.

  She nodded.

  “I like plastic,” I said.

  She smiled a little, like I’d said something wrong. But it was so perfect, so even in color.

  “Do you want it?” she asked. Which made me think of my boots and whether she had wanted them. I shook my head.

  “You can have it,” she said. “I can get another one.”

  “No,” I said. “It isn’t appropriate.”

  She laughed, a startled laugh. I didn’t understand what I’d done and the feeling that I was foolish sat in my stomach, but I didn’t know what was so foolish.

  She said something I didn’t understand, which made me feel worse. “What did you say?” she said. “‘Appropriate’?”

  I nodded. “It’s not appropriate,” I said.

  “I don’t understand,” she said.

  Our lessons in appropriate development used lots of English words because it was hard to say these things any other way, so I found that the words to tell her came easily. “Plastic,” I said, “it’s not appropriate. Appropriate technologies are based on the needs and capacities of people, they must be sustainable without outside support. Like the distillery is. Plastic isn’t appropriate to Sckarline’s economy because we can’t create it and it replaces things we can produce, like skin bags.” I stroked the bag again. “But I like plastic. It’s beautiful.”

  “Wow,” Veronique said. She was looking at me sharp, all alert like a stabros smelling a dog for the first time. Not afraid, but not sure what to think. “To me,” she said slowly, “your skin bags are beautiful. The wooden houses”—she touched the black slick wood wall—”they are beautiful.”

  Ayudesh and Wanji were always telling us that offworlders thought our goods were wonderful, but how could anyone look at a skin bag and then look at plastic and not see how brilliant the colors were in plastic? Dye a skin bag red and it still looked like a skin bag, like it came from dirt.

  “How long you, um, you do stay?” I asked.

  “Fourteen days,” she said. “I’m a student, I came with my teacher.” I nodded. “Ayudesh, he is a teacher.”

  “My teacher, he’s a friend of Ayudesh. From years ago,” she said. “Have you always lived here? Were you born here?”

  “Yes,” I said. “I am born here. My mother and father are born in Tentas Clan, but they come here.”

  “Tentas Clan is another settlement?” she asked.

  I shook my head. “No,” I said. “No. Sckarline only is a settlement.”

  “Then, what is Tentas Clan?”

  “It is people.” I didn’t know how to explain clans to her at all. “They have kinship, and they have stabros, and they are together—”

  “Stabros, those are animals,” she said.

  I nodded. “Sckarline, uh … is an appropriate-technology mission.”

  “Right, that Ayudesh and Wanji started. Tentas Clan is a clan, right?”

  I nodded. I was worn out from talking to her.

  After that she drank tea and then I took her around to show her Sckarline. It was already almost dark. I showed her the generator where we cooked stabros manure to make electricity. I got a lantern there.

  I showed her the stabros pens and the dogs, even though it wasn’t really very interesting. Tuuvin was there, and Gerdor, my little uncle, leaning and watching the stabros who were doing nothing but rooting at the mud in the pen and hoping someone would throw them something to eat. The stabros shook their heads and dug with their long front toes.

  “This is Tuuvin?” Veronique said.

  I was embarrassed. One of the stabros, a gelding with long feathery ears, craned his head toward me. I reached out and pulled on the long guard hairs at the tips of his ears and he lipped at my hand. He had a long purple tongue. He breathed out steam. Their breath always reminded me of the smell of whisak mash.

  “Do you ride them?” Veronique asked.

  “What?” I asked.

  “Do you, um, get on their backs?” She made a person with her fingers walking through the air, then the fingers jumped on the other hand.

  “A stabros?” I asked. Tuuvin and Gerdor laughed. “No,” I said. “They have no like that. Stabros angry, very much.” I pretended to kick. “They have milk, sometimes. And sleds,” I said triumphantly, remembering the word.

  She leaned on the fence. “They are pretty,” she said. “They have pretty eyes. They look so sad with their long drooping ears.”

  “What?” Tuuvin asked. “What’s pretty?”

  “She says they have pretty eyes,” I said.

  Gerdor laughed but Tuuvin and I gave him a sharp look.

  The dogs were leaping and barking and clawing at the gate. She stopped and reached a hand out to touch them. “Dogs are from Earth,” she said.

  “Dogs are aufwurld,” I said. “Like us. Stabros are util.”

  “What’s that mean?” she asked.

  “Stabros can eat food that is aunwurld,” I said. “We can’t, dogs can’t. But we can eat stabros so they are between.”

  “Are stabros from Earth?” Veronique asked.

  I didn’t know, but Tuuvin did, which surprised me. “Stabros are from here,” he said. “Ayudesh explained where it all came from, remember? Util animals and plants were here but we could use them. Aunwurld animals and plants make us sick.”

  “I know they make us sick,” I snapped. But I translated as best I could.

  Veronique was looking at the dogs. “Do they bite?” she asked. Bite?

  “You mean”—I clicked my teeth—“like eat? Sometimes. Mostly if they’re fighting.”

  She took her hand back.

  “I’ll get a puppy,” Tuuvin said, and swung a leg over the side of the pen and waded through the dogs. Tuuvin took care of the dogs a lot so he wasn’t afraid of them. I didn’t like them much. I liked stabros better.

  “There’s a winter litter?” I said.

  “Yeah,” he said, “but it hasn’t been too cold, they might be okay. If it gets cold we can always eat ’em.”

  The puppy looked like a little sausage with short arms and legs and a pink nose. Veronique cooed and took it from Tuuvin and
cradled it in her arms. She talked to it, but she talked in a funny way, like baby talk, and I couldn’t understand anything she said. “What’s its name?” she asked.

  “Its name?” I said.

  “Do you name them?” she asked.

  I looked at Tuuvin. Even Tuuvin should have been able to understand that, the first thing anybody learned in lingua was “What’s your name?” But he wasn’t paying any attention. I asked him if any of the dogs had names.

  He nodded. “Some of them do. The dark male, he’s a lead dog, he’s called Bigman. And that one is Yellow Dog. The puppies don’t have names, though.”

  “I think this one should have a name,” Veronique said, when I told her. “I think he’ll be a mighty hunter, so call him Hunter.”

  I didn’t understand what hunting had to do with dogs, and I thought it was a bitch puppy anyway, but I didn’t want to embarrass her, so I told Tuuvin. I was afraid he would laugh but he didn’t.

  “How do you say that in English?” he asked. “‘Hunter’? Okay, I’ll remember.” He smiled at Veronique and touched the puppy’s nose. “Hunter,” he said. The puppy licked him with a tiny pink tongue.

  Veronique smiled back. And I didn’t like it.

  * * *

  Veronique went to find her teacher. I went down to the distillery to tell Mam why I wasn’t there helping. Tuuvin followed me down the hill. The distillery stank so it was down below Sckarline in the trees, just above the fields.

  He caught me by the waist and I hung there so he could brush his lips across my hair.

  “It’s too cold out here,” I said and broke out of his arms.

  “Let’s go in the back,” he said.

  “I’ve got to tell Mam,” I said.

  “Once you tell your mam, there’ll be all these things to do and we won’t get any time together,” he said.