The Best of the Best, Volume 1

by Gardner Dozois

  “No, Jalila. I won’t be leaving Habara. Itfaddal.… Do sit down.”

  They stepped from their sandals and obeyed. Jalila couldn’t quite remember now whether Kalal had encountered the tariqua on her visit to their haramlek, although it seemed plain from his stares at her, and the way her grey-white gaze returned them, that they knew of each other in some way. Coffee was brewing in the corner, over a tiny, blue spirit flame, which, as it fluttered in the many drafts, must have taken hours to heat anything. Yet the spout of the brass pot was steaming. And there were dates, too, and nuts and seeds. The tariqua, apologizing for her inadequacy as a host, nevertheless insisted that they help themselves. And somewhere there was a trough of water, too, for their hayawans, and a basket of acram leaves.

  Uneasily, they sipped from their cups, chewed the seeds. Kalal had picked up a chipped lump of old stone and was playing with it nervously. Jalila couldn’t quite see what it was.

  “So,” he said, clearing his throat, “you’ve been to and from the stars, have you?”

  “As have you. Perhaps you could name the planet? It may have been somewhere that we have both visited.…”

  Kalal swallowed. His lump of old stone clicked the floor. A spindle of wind played chill on Jalila’s neck. Then—she didn’t know how it began—the tariqua was talking of Ghezirah, the great and fabled city that lay at the center of all the Ten Thousand and One Worlds. No one Jalila had ever met or heard of had ever visited Ghezirah, not even Nayra’s mothers—yet this tariqua talked of it as if she knew it well. Before, Jalila had somehow imagined the tariqua trailing from planet to distant planet with dull cargoes of ore and biomass in her ship’s holds. To her mind, Ghezirah had always been more than half-mythical—a place from which a dubious historical figure such as the Blessed Joanna might easily emanate, but certainly not a place composed of solid streets upon which the gnarled and bony feet of this old woman might once have walked.…

  Ghezirah … she could see it now in her mind, smell the shadowy lobbies, see the ever-climbing curve of its mezzanines and rooftops vanishing into the impossible greens of the Floating Ocean. But every time Jalila’s vision seemed about to solidify, the tariqua said something else that made it tremble and change. And then the tariqua said the strangest thing of all, which was that the City At The End Of All Roads was actually alive. Not alive in the meager sense in which every town has a sort of life, but truly living. The city thought. It grew. It responded. There was no central mind or focus to this consciousness, because Ghezirah itself, its teeming streets and minarets and rivers and caléches and its many millions of lives, was itself the mind.…

  Jalila was awestruck, but Kalal seemed unimpressed, and was still playing with that old lump of stone.

  4.

  “Jalilaneen.…”

  The way bondmother Lya said her name made Jalila look up. Somewhere in her throat, a wary nerve started ticking. They took their meals inside now, in the central courtyard of the haramlek, which Pavo had provided with a translucent roofing to let in a little of what light there was in the evenings’ skies, and keep out most of the wind. Still, as Jalila took a sip of steaming hibiscus, she was sure that the sand had gotten into something.

  “We’ve been talking. Things have come up—ideas about which we’d like to seek your opinion.…”

  In other words, Jalila thought, her gaze traveling across her three mothers, you’ve decided something. And this is how you tell me—by pretending that you’re consulting me. It had been the same with leaving Tabuthal. It was always the same. An old ghost of herself got up at that point, threw down her napkin, stalked off up to her room. But the new Jalila remained seated. She even smiled and tried to look encouraging.

  “We’ve seen so little of this world,” Lya continued. “All of us, really. And especially since we had you. It’s been marvelous. But, of course, it’s also been confining.… Oh no—” Lya waved the idea away quickly, before anyone could even begin to start thinking it. “—we won’t be leaving our haramlek and Al Janb. There are many things to do. New bonds and friendships have been made. Ananke and I won’t be leaving, anyway.… But Pavo …” And here Lya, who could never quite stop being the chair of a committee, gave a nod toward her mate. “… Pavo here has dec—expressed a wish—that she would like to travel.”

  “Travel?” Jalila leaned forward, her chin resting on her knuckles. “How?”

  Pavo gave her plate a half turn. “By boat seems the best way to explore Habara. With such a big ocean …” She turned the plate again, as if to demonstrate.

  “And not just a boat,” Ananke put in encouragingly. “A brand new ship. We’re having it built—”

  “—But I thought you said you hadn’t yet decided?”

  “The contract, I think, is still being prepared,” Lya explained. “And much of the craft will be to Pavo’s own design.”

  “Will you be building it yourself?”

  “Not alone.” Pavo gave another of her flustered smiles. “I’ve asked Ibra to help me. He seems to be the best, the most knowledgeable—”

  “—Ibra? Does he have any references?”

  “This is Al Janb, Jalila,” Lya said. “We know and trust people. I’d have thought that, with your friendship with Kalal.…”

  “This certainly is Al Janb.…” Jalila sat back. “How can I ever forget it!” All of her mothers’ eyes were on her. Then something broke. She got up and stormed off to her room.

  The long ride to the tariqua’s qasr, the swish of the wind, and banging three times on the old oak door. Then hobbling Robin and hurrying through dusty corridors to that tall tiled chamber, and somehow expecting no one to be there, even though Jalila had now come here several times alone.

  But the tariqua was always there. Waiting.

  Between them now, there was much to be said.

  “This ant, Jalila, which crawls across this sheet of paper from here to there. She is much like us as we crawl across the surface of this planet. Even if she had the wings some of her kind sprout, just as I have my caléche, it would still be the same.” The tiny creature, waving feelers, was plainly lost. A black dot. Jalila understood how it felt. “But say, if we were to fold both sides of the paper together. You see how she moves now …?” The ant, antennae waving, hesitant, at last made the tiny jump. “We can move more quickly from one place to another by not traveling across the distance that separates us from it, but by folding space itself.

  “Imagine now, Jalila, that this universe is not one thing alone, one solitary series of this following that, but an endless branching of potentialities. Such it has been since the Days of Creation, and such it is even now, in the shuffle of that leaf as the wind picks at it, in the rising steam of your coffee. Every moment goes in many ways. Most are poor, half-formed things, the passing thoughts and whims of the Almighty. They hang there and they die, never to be seen again. But others branch as strongly as this path that we find ourselves following. There are universes where you and I have never sat here in this qasr. There are universes where there is no Jalila.… Will you get that for me …?”

  The tariqua was pointing to an old book in a far corner. Its leather was cracked, the wind lifted its pages. As she took it from her, Jalila felt the hot brush of the old woman’s hand.

  “So now, you must imagine that there is not just one sheet of a single universe, but many, as in this book, heaped invisibly above and beside and below the page upon which we find ourselves crawling. In fact …” The ant recoiled briefly, sensing the strange heat of the tariqua’s fingers, then settled on the open pages. “You must imagine shelf after shelf, floor upon floor of books, the aisles of an infinite library. And if we are to fold this one page, you see, we or the ant never quite knows what lies on the other side of it. And there may be a tear in that next page as well. It may even be that another version of ourselves has already torn it.”

  Despite its worn state, the book looked potentially valuable, hand-written in a beautiful flowing script. Jalila had t
o wince when the tariqua’s fingers ripped through them. But the ant had vanished now. She was somewhere between the book’s page.…

  “That, Jalila, is the Pain of Distance—the sense of every potentiality. So that womankind may pass over the spaces between the stars, every tariqua must experience it.” The wind gave an extra lunge, flipping the book shut. Jalila reached forward, but the tariqua, quick for once, was ahead of her. Instead of opening the book to release the ant, she weighed it down with the same chipped old stone with which Kalal had played on his visit to this qasr.

  “Now, perhaps, my Jalila, you begin to understand?”

  The stone was old, chipped, grey-green. It was inscribed, and had been carved with the closed wings of a beetle. Here was something from a world so impossibly old and distant as to make the book upon which it rested seem fresh and new as an unbudded leaf—a scarab, shaped for the Queens of Egypt.

  “See here, Jalila. See how it grows. The breathmoss?”

  This was the beginning of the Season of Autumns. The trees were beautiful; the forests were on fire with their leaves. Jalila had been walking with Pavo, enjoying the return of the birdsong, and wondering why it was that this new season felt sad when everything around her seemed to be changing and growing.

  “Look.…”

  The breathmoss, too, had turned russet-gold. Leaning close to it beneath this tranquil sky, which was composed of a blue so pale it was as if the sea had been caught in reflection inside an upturned white bowl, was like looking into the arms of a miniature forest.

  “Do you think it will die?”

  Pavo leaned beside her. “Jalila, it should have died long ago. Inshallah, it is a small miracle.” There were the three dead marks where Ananke had touched it in a Season of Long Ago. “You see how frail it is, and yet …”

  “At least it won’t spread and take over the planet.”

  “Not for a while, at least.”

  On another rock lay another small colony. Here, too, oddly enough, there were marks. Five large dead dots, as if made by the outspread of a hand, although the shape of it was too big to have been Ananke’s. They walked on. Evening was coming. Their shadows were lengthening. Although the sun was shining and the waves sparkled, Jalila wished that she had put on something warmer than a shawl.

  “That tariqua. You seem to enjoy her company.…”

  Jalila nodded. When she was with the old woman, she felt at last as if she was escaping the confines of Al Janb. It was liberating, after the close life in this town and with her mothers in their haramlek, to know that interstellar space truly existed, and then to feel, as the tariqua spoke of Gateways, momentarily like that ant, infinitely small and yet somehow inching, crawling across the many universes’ infinite pages. But how could she express this? Even Pavo wouldn’t understand.

  “How goes the boat?” she asked instead.

  Pavo slipped her arm into the crook of Jalila’s and hugged her. “You must come and see! I have the plan in my head, but I’d never realized quite how big it would be. And complex. Ibra’s full of enthusiasm.”

  “I can imagine!”

  The sea flashed. The two women chuckled.

  “The way the ship’s designed, Jalila, there’s more than enough room for others. I never exactly planned to go alone, but then Lya’s Lya. And Ananke’s always—”

  Jalila gave her mother’s arm a squeeze. “I know what you’re saying.”

  “I’d be happy if you came, Jalila. I’d understand if you didn’t. This is such a beautiful, wonderful planet. The leviathans—we know so little about them, yet they plainly have intelligence, just as all those old myths say.”

  “You’ll be telling me next about the qasrs.…”

  “The ones we can see near here are nothing! There are islands on the ocean that are entirely made from them. And the wind pours through. They sing endlessly. A different song for every mood and season.”

  “Moods! If I’d said something like that when you were teaching me of the Pillars of Life, you’d have told me I was being unscientific!”

  “Science is about wonder, Jalila. I was a poor teacher if I never told you that.”

  “You did.” Jalila turned to kiss Pavo’s forehead. “You did.…”

  Pavo’s ship was a fine thing. Between the slipways and the old mooring posts, where the red-flapping geelies quarreled over scraps of dying tideflower, it grew and grew. Golden-hulled. Far sleeker and bigger than even the ferries that had once borne Al Janb’s visitors to and from the rocket port, and which now squatted on the shingle nearby, gently rusting. It was the talk of the Season. People came to admire its progress.

  As Jalila watched the spars rise over the clustered roofs of the fisherwomen’s houses, she was reminded of Kalal’s tale of his father and his nameless mother, and that ship that they had made together in the teeming dockyards of that city. Her thoughts blurred. She saw the high balconies of a hotel far bigger than any of Al Janb’s inns and boarding houses. She saw a darker, brighter ocean. Strange flesh upon flesh, with the windows open to the oil-and-salt breeze, the white lace curtains rising, falling.…

  The boat grew, and Jalila visited the tariqua, although back in Al Janb, her thoughts sometimes trailed after Kalal as she wondered how it must be—to be male, like the last dodo, and trapped in some endless state of part-arousal, like a form of nagging worry. Poor Kalal. But his life certainly wasn’t lonely. The first time Jalila noticed him at the center of the excited swarm of girls that once again surrounded Nayra, she’d almost thought that she was seeing things. But the gossip was loud and persistent. Kalal and Nayra were a couple—the phrase normally followed by a scandalized shriek, a hand-covered mouth. Jalila could only guess what the proud mothers of Nayra’s haramlek thought of such a union, but, of course, no one could subscribe to outright prejudice. Kalal was, after all, just another human being. Lightly probing her own mothers’ attitudes, she found the usual condescending tolerance. Having sexual relations with a male would be like smoking kif, or drinking alcohol, or any other form of slightly aberrant adolescent behavior; to be tolerated with easy smiles and sympathy, as long as it didn’t go on for too long. To be treated, in fact, in much the same manner as her mothers were now treating her regular visits to the tariqua.

  Jalila came to understand why people thought of the Season of Autumns as a sad time. The chill nights. The morning fogs that shrouded the bay. The leaves, finally falling, piled into rotting heaps. The tideflower beds, also, were dying as the waves pulled and dismantled what remained of their colors, and they drifted to the shores, the flowers bearing the same stench and texture and color as upturned clay. The geelies were dying as well. In the town, to compensate, there was much bunting and celebration for yet another moulid, but to Jalila the brightness seemed feeble—the flame of a match held against winter’s gathering gale. Still, she sometimes wandered the old markets with some of her old curiosity, nostalgically touching the flapping windsilks, studying the faces and nodding at the many she now knew, although her thoughts were often literally light-year’s away. The Pain of Distance; she could feel it. Inwardly, she was thrilled and afraid. Her mothers and everyone else, caught up in the moulid and Pavo’s coming departure, imagined from her mood that she had now decided to take that voyage with her. She deceived Kalal in much the same way.

  The nights became clearer. Riding back from the qasr one dark evening with the tariqua’s slight voice ringing in her ears, the stars seemed to hover closer around her than at any time since she had left Tabuthal. She could feel the night blossoming, its emptiness and the possibilities spinning out to infinity. She felt both like crying, and like whooping for joy. She had dared to ask the tariqua the question she had long been formulating, and the answer, albeit not entirely yes, had not been no. She talked to Robin as they bobbed along, and the puny yellow smudge of Al Janb drew slowly closer. You must understand, she told her hayawan, that the core of the Almighty is like the empty place between these stars, around which they all revolve. It i
s there, we know it, but we can never see it.… She sang songs from the old saharas about the joy of loneliness, and the loneliness of joy. From here, high up on the gradually descending road that wound its way down toward her haramlek, the horizon was still distant enough for her to see the lights of the rocketport. It was like a huge tidebed, holding out as the season changed. And there at the center of it, rising golden, no longer a stumpy silo-shaped object but somehow beautiful, was the last of the year’s rockets. It would have to rise from Habara before the coming of the Season of Winters.

  Her mothers’ anxious faces hurried around her in the lamplight as she led Robin toward the stable.

  “Where have you been, Jalilaneen?”

  “Do you know what time it is?”

  “We should be in the town already!”

  For some reason, they were dressed in their best, most formal robes. Their palms were hennaed and scented. They bustled Jalila out of her gritty clothes, practically washed and dressed her, then flapped themselves down the serraplate road into town, where the processions had already started. Still, they were there in plenty of time to witness the blessing of Pavo’s ship. It was to be called Endeavor, and Pavo and Jalila together smashed the bottle of wine across its prow before it rumbled into the nightblack waters of the harbor with an enormous white splash. Everyone cheered. Pavo hugged Jalila.

  There were more bottles of the same frothy wine available at the party afterward. Lya, with her usual thoroughness, had ordered a huge case of the stuff, although many of the guests remembered the Prophet’s old injunction and avoided imbibing. Ibra, though, was soon even more full of himself than usual, and went around the big marquee with a bottle in each hand, dancing clumsily with anyone who was foolish enough to come near him. Jalila drank a little of the stuff herself. The taste was sweet, but oddly hot and bitter. She filled up another glass.

  “Wondered what you two mariners were going to call that boat.…”

  It was Kalal. He’d been dancing with many of the girls, and he looked almost as red-faced as his father.