She stands for a while in the small space, facing the ancestral altar. Her two mothers are watching her, impassive and distant—the Long Breathers, and who’s to say she didn’t have their blessing, in the end?
Kim Anh is there too, in the holos—smiling and turning her head to look back at something long gone—the box on the altar awaiting its promised gem; its keepsake she’s sacrificed so much for. Someone—Xuan, or Le Hoa, probably—has laid out a tray with a cup of rice wine, and the misshapen gem she refused back in the teahouse.
“I didn’t know,” she says, aloud. The Azure Serpent is silent, but she can feel him listening. “I didn’t know ships could survive.”
What else are we built for? whispers The Boat Sent by the Bell, in her thoughts; and Thuy has no answer.
She fishes inside her robes, and puts Kim Anh’s gem in the palm of her right hand. They allowed her to keep it as salvage, as a testament to how much she’s endured.
The hand looks normal, but feels … odd, distant, as if it were no longer part of her, the touch of the gem on it an alien thing, happening to her in another universe.
Her tale, she knows, is already going up and down the ship—she might yet find out they have raised her an altar and a temple, and are praying to her as they pray to her mothers. On the other side of the table, by the blind wall that closes off her compartment, her daughter’s ghost, translucent and almost featureless, is waiting for her.
Hello, Mother.
She thinks of The Boat Sent by the Bell, alone in the depths—of suits and promises and ghosts, and remnants of things that never really die, and need to be set free.
“Hello, child,” she whispers. And, before she can change her mind, drops the gem into the waiting cup.
The ghost dissolves like a shrinking candle-flame; and darkness closes in—silent and profound and peaceful.
These Shadows Laugh
GEOFF RYMAN
Born in Canada, Geoff Ryman now lives in England. He made his first sale in 1976, to New Worlds, but it was not until 1984, when he made his first appearance in Interzone with his brilliant novella “The Unconquered Country” that he first attracted any serious attention. “The Unconquered Country,” one of the best novellas of the decade, had a stunning impact on the science fiction scene of the day, and almost overnight established Ryman as one of the most accomplished writers of his generation, winning him both the British Science Fiction Award and the World Fantasy Award; it was later published in a book version, The Unconquered Country: A Life History. His novel The Child Garden: A Low Comedy won both the prestigious Arthur C. Clarke Award and the John W. Campbell Memorial Award; and his later novel Air also won the Arthur C. Clarke Award. His other novels include The Warrior Who Carried Life, the critically acclaimed mainstream novel Was, Coming of Enkidu, The King’s Last Song, Lust, and the underground cult classic 253, the “print remix” of an “interactive hypertext novel” which in its original form ran online on Ryman’s home page of www.ryman.com, and which, in its print form won the Philip K. Dick Award. Four of his novellas have been collected in Unconquered Countries. His most recent book is the anthology When It Changed, the novel The Film-Makers of Mars, and the collection Paradise Tales: and Other Stories.
In the fascinating story that follows, Ryman takes us sideways in time to an island nation populated by women of another species of the genus homo, one that perhaps died off in our world, who reproduce by parthenogenesis. They famously keep to themselves, with most of the island forbidden to tourists except for an enclave run by the Disney Corporation, but now they are reaching out for scientific help from the rest of the world, allowing a geneticist to come and work with them to try to eliminate a major flaw in their reproductive system. But visiting such a place comes at a price—if you fall in love with it, you may never want to leave … but you can never really be part of that world either, no matter how hard you try.
The tourist Precinct is owned by Disney.
Though they are very careful to use the Buena Vista branding. The Buena Vista Hotel—it sounds almost local. The tourists are jammed into a thin rind of gravelly coast called the Precinct, one of two places on the island where flat ground meets the sea. There is a container port on the north side but most visas forbid visiting it. Mine did.
Many tourists stay on cruise ships, all white and gold, their lights reflecting on the water. There’s a dock, some restaurants, most of them floating. The Precinct’s streets are so narrow and they zigzag up the rock face so steeply, that the cars edge past each other’s mirrors. Turning around at the inevitable dead end is nearly impossible. There is one guarded road up the cliffs onto the plateau—at night narrow vans wobble into the town. Every parking space has a car charger.
The Custom House runs across the mouth of the canyon into the town, a wall of rust-red laterite blocks, the pockmarks ringed with edges so sharp they cut. The Foreign House is crammed next to it, looking more like a prison than a luxury hotel.
My first morning.
I bob down the dock from a merchant ship (much better food than cruise liners and the merchant marine make better company). I see one of the Colinas, holding up a sign in handwritten letters that roll like waves.
Sra Valdez
SINGLEHELIX.
She’s tiny, brown, yes bare-breasted, yes with a feather through her nose, and she looks delighted. I catch her eye and wave; she hops up and down. I have to watch where I put my eyes. But luckily (or unluckily) for me, her smile is entrancing.
She greets me traditionally, pressing her forehead against both of my cheeks.
I’d been reading the first explorers’ account En la Tierra de Mujeres from 1867. The male authors were breathlessly excited about a nation of women who didn’t wear many clothes. They cloaked their lust in classical references—“Amazonian” or “island Cleopatras.” From the text, you get visions of Edwardian actresses done up in modest togas as Clytemnestra or Medea—or maybe Mountain Girl from the Babylon sequence of Intolerance, all tomboy exuberance in a leopard skin, headband, a fiery smile—athletic gals vaulting over walls and shooting arrows.
The first engravings of Colinas Bravas were published in Faro de Vigo in 1871. The images are filtered through Western eyes—the features European, the locks flowing and curled, the dress rendered modest. But to people of the time the illustrations were a shock.
The giant sandstone-clad temple; the wooden mobile houses carried on pallbearers’ rods; the terraces up the slopes that rose like skyscrapers—within a month of the illustrations’ publication, scholars were declaring that the main city had been built by Romans or Persians or even Cambodians (all that laterite and sandstone cladding). Little brown women could not have built them.
But the texts on the walls of the temples, particularly the Torre Espiral, turned out to be in their language. It contains the words hurricano and barbeque. Which means it’s Taíno, the language of the Indians who Columbus first encountered in my own dear homeland of the Dominican Republic, where they now exist as a genetic trace. Seven hundred years before Columbus, Taíno women sailed west toward the dark continent of Europe and settled an island without a single act of genocide.
At the München Olympics, Leni Riefenstahl’s lens could not keep away from the Colinas athletes. They won ten women’s gold medals that year, the highest number per head of population of any nation. The German Chancellor Angela Herbort made full propaganda use of them, showed them off at a rally to praise the principles of “health and common ownership.”
In the full summer of the American century, the 1960 Rome Olympiad disallowed the Colinas from competition. Their lack of a reproductive cycle was said to be an unfair advantage in training. Colinas were, evidently, not quite women or quite human. The Colinas knew enough of our history to get what happens to people we say are not quite human. That’s when they created the Precinct and farmed it out to Disney. They liked the cartoons.
My host tells me her name, though I cannot pronounce or even really hear i
t. Eouvwetzixityl is one transcription (using Medrano’s system). She knows this and tells me in Colina, You say Evie.
She takes my hand, and as she leads me toward the Custom House, she starts to skip. I have my rucksack, a small wheelie with my scrubs and I’m wearing shorts and a tank top. Rumbling behind me, pushed by crewmen from Venezuela, are my battery-powered freezebox, a nanoscope workstation, and a portable extraction suite. The men are allowed only as far as the Custom House. I shake their hands and tip them—but I don’t think I will miss men.
At the gate, Evie ducks down into the window, and laughs and does a bit of a dance for the Custom guards who grin enormous gummy smiles, which they hide with their hands. There is such high hilarity that I cannot believe any work is being done. Then, out of nowhere, my passport is returned with a two-page intelligent hologram that looks like the Statue of Liberty. My enormous boxes and me are led through into the City, called simply Ciudad. There isn’t another one on the island. The Custom guards wave goodbye to me like I’m going on a school trip.
The public plaza—La Plaza del Pueblo—is crowded with tourists, many of them female couples holding hands and taking snaps. Languages swoop around me like flocks of birds—Spanish of course, but also Chinese, Danish, Yoruba, Welsh, Portuguese, and others I can’t identify. The Plaza appears vast. It rears up, rocky cliffs on either side like waves about to break. The main sandstone steps on the south face go up in layers, it is said, to a height of 80 meters. The Torre Espiral looks as old as the pyramids, like a ziggurat only conical, with wide ramps spiraling up it to the flat roof with its giant urn of fire. Tourists are no longer allowed to climb it after a German woman fell off last year. Surrounding the Plaza like a bullring are rows of shops—yes, selling tourist tat—built on two levels, with the Civil Palace on the north side and the National Library on the south next to the main steps. The Library’s twelfth-century bas-reliefs in sandstone deserve their fame—joyous scenes of everyday life, women dancing as they pound manioc, or harvesting fields, or throwing mangoes at each other from the trees. And the most famous, a woman giving birth. Beyond the Plaza at the end of the canyon, there’s a tumble of boulders, a creek, then a broccoli mass of trees rising up the slope.
Most of Ciudad is in layers on those cliff faces, covered streets winding higher and higher where visitors are not allowed. The houses burrow into the rock. The gardens grow on top of the porches of the houses below them. The effect is like looking at those improbable Art Deco miniatures of cities in silent films. I have to crane my neck at a painful angle. Along the top, wind turbines pirouette on their toes like ballerinas.
They’ve put my clinic on the ground floor of the Plaza. The sandstone archway is the color of sunset with carved concentric circles that the guidebook says are meant to look like ripples in water. The entrance is clouded with purple bougainvillea spilling down from the roof. Just inside the door is an emergency generator—the islands do import some oil. Also a desk, an operating table, my IT suite, a data projector, screen, and rows of chairs for my seminars.
I’d specified those. Nobody told me Colinas never sit on chairs.
Evie spins round and round, arms outstretched as if all this is hers. She’s so delighted I can’t stop taking hold of her hand. I should know better, but I am a woman, and I rely on her not being suspicious of me. That makes me feel guilty.
She looks human, but yes, a bit different. Her smile is too wide, her chin too tiny. The Colinas are now recognized as another species within the genus Homo. Being parthenogenetic, she ovulates maybe four times in her life. How’s this for utopia? Colinas do not have periods. They also do not mate, do not cluster into little paired units. Famously, they are supposed to lack sexual desire.
I ask her, You have children? She nods yes and holds up a finger—one. It’s customary to only have one.
Aw, what is child name?
Her smile doesn’t change but she freezes for a moment and then shakes her head and giggles. She points east and says, Quatoletcyl Mah. I know the phrase—“Sad Children Loved.”
I close my eyes with shame. Of course, that’s why she’s so delighted I’m here. I shouldn’t have asked about children. I apologize. Literally I say, I make mistake, which is about the closest their language gets to swearing.
She says, Tomorrow. Tomorrow we see child.
They have no word for he or she, and in everyday vernacular, no word for me, my, or mine. They can say I, almost like it’s a geographical location.
From somewhere a bell sounds. It moans, deeply, like it regrets something.
You leave now, she says, still smiling. Ah. Right. Closing time. She takes my hand again. Hers is sweet and insistent.
Outside thousands of sandaled feet sound like rain or applause as they make their way back to the Custom House, its gates thrown open. On the ocean only seven metres beyond the gate, the sun sits low. The square is flooded with orange, sideways light that makes the temple and terraces the color of overripe apricots. Shadows delineate every carved face or incised word sign. In this light I see that, yes indeed, the lighthouse temple is also a book, the writing in stone all the way up the giddy ramp. It tells the story of how the first Colina mother gave birth.
We know that is a myth, as is her rising out of the sea. There must have been more than one mother—genetically there are five matrilineal lines. Experts argue whether they were expelled or set off across the sea for themselves, looking for somewhere to be.
I look up at the terraces—the houses don’t have doors and the rooms are full of a wavering orange light, lit by candles. I want to see inside, be inside, those rooms. I want to know what it is like to live there. I glimpse a donkey being led down toward the main staircase. The woman riding it is brushing her long black hair.
Men are allowed into the Plaza if accompanied by responsible female sponsors. Most of the men have the same expression of delight, a clenched smile, determined to appear benign. Some of the women allow themselves to look pissed off. People traveling in tourist groups or cruise ships often do—they’re trapped with each other, and though stuffed full of sights and good food, they have no power. I am happier in my shorts with my rucksack, happier still to have a good working reason for being here.
Evie skips me all the way into the Foreign House. Someone at the entrance invisibly slips her a lei and she drapes the flowers around my neck and claps her hands. The idea of the lei is stolen from Hawaii—they cheerfully admit this. For some reason, the native House staff—in white shirts and black slacks—applaud me. I feel my eyes swell.
They know you help us, Evie says and gives me a forehead kiss. Evie smells of sunlight and honey. I have her for just a moment and she is hot and shivery under my hand. She leaps away, tossing her mane like a horse. One of the staff, looking bone-thin and European, says in perfect Spanish, “She is so proud to be your host.”
My room has purple sheets and translucent Colinas chocolate under my pillow. The penthouse suite costs $1000 a night. No loud music after 9 pm. Unless you want to be locked in with a bunch of rich foreigners getting drunk on whisky that costs $25 a shot (along with the celebs—I have the inestimable privilege of being here the same night as Tom Cruise), there are only two things to do in the House at night. You can watch movies on TV—and only those that contain not a hint of sexual violence or enacted congress. Or something a bit less virtual.
The Foreign House is the only hotel on Colinas Bravas with doors that open into both the Plaza and its harbor—the privilege of being invited or rich.
I step out into the demarcated café space in the very last of the twilight and look up. Lights dance in all the doorways and windows; shadows bend and dip and wave. Those shadows laugh.
The laughter comes from everywhere in gusts. The narrow canyon magnifies the sound and sends it echoing. Songs, too, some of them campfire-simple, some of them complex and formal like choirs, and some a massed, intoning chant like prayer. Strains of music played on reeds and strings sound like an orchestra
warming up. It’s as if each kind of sound is a different flock of swallows dive-bombing around me. Then, as suddenly as waking up, Ciudad falls silent; the candles go out. There are so many stars!
I turn. I have been observed all this while by the same staff member in American dress—a short-sleeved white shirt, slim black trousers.
Beautiful, I say, flinging up my arms. Much!
A happy hour, she says. Each night.
And she gestures for me to go back into the hotel. Later, during the night, I am comforted to hear the sshing of tropical rain on the courtyard and roof. It must have been a dream but I think I heard that staff member go on to say, We are easy to love.
It is a failing of mine that I fall in love with foreigners.
First I fall in love with a country, which means the people in it, and then usually just one of those people to be my partner, my rock, my point of entry. I always do it, and the process is delicious. Though so far, it has also always gone wrong.
I find, for example, that they sleep all the time, or fight all the time, or need a fight to feel passion, or think it’s funny to insult me. Or they simply want me to pay for everything. It ends. I go to boring home. Home is the Dominican Republic, sex-tourist destination, Caribbean island with an 11,000-foot-high mountain, miles of beaches, and a national park with hills that look like cupcakes. You’ve got to have a psychosocial problem with home to find the Dominican Republic dull.
That first night listening to rain, I imagined sitting cross-legged on the floor of one of those high cells, and going to sleep with Evie, and waking up with her at first dawn, of being allowed to stay, of being allowed to love. A harmless fantasy, I thought, and it drifted me off to sleep.
* * *
The next day, as promised, I was ready to work at 4.30 am. Getting up wasn’t difficult—the dawn song of Ciudad is famous and justly so. The people simply get up in the dark and start singing.
The Year's Best Science Fiction--Thirty-Fourth Annual Collection Page 29