The Mammoth Book of the Best of Best New SF

by Gardner Dozois

  “She’s not a witch. She’s a tariqua. It’s one of the greatest, oldest callings. Although I’m surprised you’ve had time to notice what I’m up to, anyway. You and Nayra . . .”

  Kalal laughed, and the wind made the sound turn bitter.

  “I’m sorry,” Jalila continued. “I’m sounding just like those stupid gossips. I know you’re not like that. Either of you. And I’m happy for you both. Nayra’s sweet and talented and entirely lovely . . . I hope it lasts . . . I hope. . . .”

  After another long pause, Kalal said, “Seeing as we’re apologizing, I’m sorry I got cross with you about the name of that boat you’ll be going on – the Endeavor. It’s a good name.”

  “Thank you. El-hamadu-l-illah.”

  “In fact, I could only think of one better one, and I’m glad you and Pavo didn’t use it. You know what they say. To have two ships with the same name confuses the spirits of the winds. . . .”

  “What are you talking about, Kalal?”

  “This boat. You’re sitting right on it. I thought you might have noticed.”

  Jalila glanced down at the prow, which lay before her in the moons-light, pointing toward the silvered waves. From this angle, and in the old naskhi script that Kalal had used, it took her a moment to work out the craft’s name. Something turned inside her.

  Breathmoss.

  In white, moonslit letters.

  “I’m sure there are better names for a boat,” she said carefully. “Still, I’m flattered.”

  “Flattered?” Kalal stood up. She couldn’t really see his face, but she suddenly knew that she’d once again said the wrong thing. He waved his hands in an odd shrug, and he seemed for a moment almost ready to lean close to her – to do something unpredictable and violent – but instead, picking up stones and skimming them hard into the agitated waters, he walked away.

  Pavo was right. If not about love – which Jalila knew now that she still waited to experience – then at least about the major decisions of your life. There was never quite a beginning to them, although your mind often sought for such a thing.

  When the tariqua’s caleche emerged out of the newly teeming rain one dark evening a week or so after the naming of the Endeavor, and settled itself before the lights of their haramlek, and the old woman herself emerged, somehow still dry, and splashed across the puddled garden while her three mothers flustered about to find the umbrella they should have thought to look for earlier, Jalila still didn’t know what she should be thinking. The four women would, in any case, need to talk alone; Jalila recognized that. For once, after the initial greetings, she was happy to retreat to her dreamtent.

  But her mind was still in turmoil. She was suddenly terrified that her mothers would actually agree to this strange proposition, and then that, out of little more than embarrassment and obligation, the rest of her life would be bound to something that the tariqua called the Church of the Gateway. She knew so little. The tariqua talked only in riddles. She could be a fraud, for all Jalila knew – or a witch, just as Kalal insisted. Thoughts swirled about her like the rain. To make the time disappear, she tried searching the knowledge of her dreamtent. Lying there, listening to the rising sound of her mothers’ voices, which seemed to be studded endlessly with the syllables of her own name, Jalila let the personalities who had guided her through the many Pillars of Wisdom tell her what they knew about the Church of the Gateway.

  She saw the blackness of planetary space, swirled with the mica dots of turning planets. Almost as big as those, as she zoomed close to it, yet looking disappointingly like a many-angled version of the rocketport, lay the spacestation, and, within it, the junction that could lead you from here to there without passing across the distance between. A huge rent in the Book of Life, composed of the trapped energies of those things the tariqua called cosmic strings, although they and the Gateway itself were visible as nothing more than a turning ring near to the center of the vast space-station, where occasionally, as Jalila watched, crafts of all possible shapes would seem to hang, then vanish. The gap she glimpsed inside seemed no darker than that which hung between the stars behind it, but it somehow hurt to stare at it. This, then, was the core of the mystery; something both plain and extraordinary. We crawl across the surface of this universe like ants, and each of these craft, switching through the Gateway’s moment of loss and endless potentiality, is piloted by the will of a tariqua’s conscious intelligence, which must glimpse those choices, then somehow emerge sane and entire at the other end of everything. . . .

  Jalila’s mind returned to the familiar scents and shapes of her dreamtent, and the sounds of the rain. The moment seemed to belong with those of the long-ago Season of Soft Rains. Downstairs, there were no voices. As she climbed out from her dreamtent, warily expecting to find the haramlek leaking and half-finished, Jalila was struck by an idea that the tariqua hadn’t quite made plain to her; that a Gateway must push through time just as easily as it pushes through every other dimension. . . ! But the rooms of the haramlek were finely furnished, and her three mothers and the tariqua were sitting in the rainswept candlelight of the courtyard, waiting.

  With any lesser request, Lya always quizzed Jalila before she would even consider granting it. So as Jalila sat before her mothers and tried not to tremble in their presence, she wondered how she could possibly explain her ignorance of this pure, boundless mystery.

  But Lya simply asked Jalila if this was what she wanted – to be an acolyte of the Church of the Gateway.

  “Yes.”

  Jalila waited. Then, not even, are you sure? They’d trusted her less than this when they’d sent her on errands into Al Janb. . . . It was still raining. The evening was starless and dark. Her three mothers, having hugged her, but saying little else, retreated to their own dreamtents and silences, leaving Jalila to say farewell to the tariqua alone. The heat of the old woman’s hand no longer came as a surprise to Jalila as she helped her up from her chair and away from the sheltered courtyard.

  “Well,” the tariqua croaked, “that didn’t seem to go so badly.”

  “But I know so little!” They were standing on the patio at the dripping edge of the night. Wet streamers of wind tugged at them.

  “I know you wish I could tell you more, Jalila – but then, would it make any difference?”

  Jalila shook her head. “Will you come with me?”

  “Habara is where I must stay, Jalila. It is written.”

  “But I’ll be able to return?”

  “Of course. But you must remember that you can never return to the place you have left.” The tariqua fumbled with her clasp, the one of a worm consuming its tail. “I want you to have this.” It was made of black ivory, and felt as hot as the old woman’s flesh as Jalila took it. For once, not really caring whether she broke her bones, she gave the small, birdlike woman a hug. She smelled of dust and metal, like an antique box left forgotten on a sunny windowledge. Jalila helped her out down the steps into the rainswept garden.

  “I’ll come again soon,” she said, “to the qasr.”

  “Of course . . . there are many arrangements.” The tariqua opened the dripping filigree door of her caleche and peered at her with those half-blind eyes. Jalila waited. They had stood too long in the rain already.

  “Yes?”

  “Don’t be too hard on Kalal.”

  Puzzled, Jalila watched the caleche rise and turn away from the lights of the haramlek.

  Jalila moved warily through the sharded glass of her own and her mothers’ expectations. It was agreed that a message concerning her be sent, endorsed by the full, long, and ornate formal name of the tariqua, to the body that did indeed call itself the Church of the Gateway. It went by radio pulse to the spacestation in wide solar orbit that received Habara’s rockets, and was then passed on inside a vessel from here to there that was piloted by a tariqua. Not only that, but the message was destined for Ghezirah! Riding Robin up to the cliffs where, in this newly clear autumn air, under grey skies and te
aring wet wind, she could finally see the waiting fuselage of that last golden rocket, Jalila felt confused and tiny, huge and mythic. It was agreed though, that for the sake of everyone – and not least Jalila herself, should she change her mind – that the word should remain that she was traveling out around the planet with Pavo on board the Endeavor. In need of something to do when she wasn’t brooding, and waiting for further word from (could it really be?) the sentient city of Ghezirah, Jalila threw herself into the listings and loadings and preparations with convincing enthusiasm.

  “The hardest decisions, once made, are often the best ones.”

  “Compared to what you’ll be doing, my little journey seems almost pointless.”

  “We love you so deeply.”

  Then the message finally came: an acknowledgment; an acceptance; a few (far too few, it seemed) particulars of the arrangements and permissions necessary for such a journey. All on less than half a sheet of plain, two-dimensional printout.

  Even Lya had started touching and hugging her at every opportunity.

  Jalila ate lunch with Kalal and Nayra. She surprised herself and talked gaily at first of singing islands and sea-leviathans, somehow feeling that she was hiding little from her two best friends but the particular details of the journey she was undertaking. But Jalila was struck by the coldness that seemed to lie between these two supposed lovers. Nayra, perhaps sensing from bitter experience that she was once again about to be rejected, seemed near-tearful behind her dazzling smiles and the flirtatious blonde tossings of her hair, while Kalal seemed . . . Jalila had no idea how he seemed, but she couldn’t let it end like this, and concocted some queries about the Endeavor so that she could lead him off alone as they left the bar. Nayra, perhaps fearing something else entirely, was reluctant to leave them.

  “I wonder what it is that we’ve both done to her?” Kalal sighed as they watched her give a final sideways wave, pause, and then turn reluctantly down a sidestreet with a most un-Nayran duck of her lovely head.

  They walked toward the harbor through a pause in the rain, to where the Endeavor was waiting.

  “Lovely, isn’t she?” Kalal murmured as they stood looking down at the long deck, then up at the high forest of spars. Pavo, who was developing her acquaintance with the ship’s mind, gave them a wave from the bubble of the forecastle. “How long do you think your journey will take? You should be back by early spring, I calculate, if you get ahead of the icebergs. . . .”

  Jalila fingered the brooch that the tariqua had given her, and which she had taken to wearing at her shoulder in the place where she had once worn the tideflower. It was like black ivory, but set with tiny, white specks that loomed at your eyes if you held it close. She had no idea what world it was from, or of the substance of which it was made.

  “. . . You’ll miss the winter here. But perhaps that’s no bad thing. It’s cold, and there’ll be other Seasons on the ocean. And there’ll be other winters. Well, to be honest, Jalila, I’d been hoping – ”

  “ – Look!” Jalila interrupted, suddenly sick of the lie she’d been living. “I’m not going.”

  They turned and were facing each other by the harbor’s edge. Kalal’s strange face twisted into surprise, and then something like delight. Jalila thought that he was looking more and more like his father. “That’s marvelous!” He clasped each of Jalila’s arms and squeezed her hard enough to hurt. “It was rubbish, by the way, what I just said about winters here in Al Janb. They’re the most magical, wonderful season. We’ll have snowball fights together! And when Eid al-Fitr comes . . .”

  His voice trailed off. His hands dropped from her. “What is it, Jalila?”

  “I’m not going with Pavo on the Endeavor, but I’m going away. I’m going to Ghezirah. I’m going to study under the Church of the Gateway. I’m going to try to become a tariqua.”

  His face twisted again. “That witch – ”

  “ – Don’t keep calling her that! You nave no idea!”

  Kalal balled his fists, and Jalila stumbled back, fearing for a moment that this wild, odd creature might actually be about to strike her. But he turned instead, and ran off from the harbor.

  Next morning, to no one’s particular surprise, it was once again raining. Jalila felt restless and disturbed after her incomplete exchanges with Kalal. Some time had also passed since the message had been received from Ghezirah, and the few small details it had given of her journey had become vast and complicated and frustrating in their arranging. Despite the weather, she decided to ride out to see the tariqua.

  Robin’s mood had been almost as odd as her mothers’ recently, and she moaned and snickered at Jalila when she entered the stables. Jalila called back to her, and stroked her long nose, trying to ease her agitation. It was only when she went to check the harnesses that she realized that Abu was missing. Lya was in the haramlek, still finishing breakfast. It had to be Kalal who had taken her.

  The swirling serraplated road. The black, dripping trees. The agitated ocean. Robin was starting to rust again. She would need more of Pavo’s attention. But Pavo would soon be gone too. . . . The whole planet was changing, and Jalila didn’t know what to make of anything, least of all what Kalal was up to, although the unasked-for borrowing of a precious mount, even if Abu had been virtually Kalal’s all summer, filled her with a foreboding that was an awkward load, not especially heavy, but difficult to carry or put down; awkward and jagged and painful. Twice, now, he had turned from her and walked away with something unsaid. It felt like the start of some prophecy. . . .

  The qasr shone jet-black in the teeming rain. The studded door, straining to overcome the swelling damp, burst open more forcefully than usual at Jalila’s third knock, and the air inside swirled dark and empty. No sign of Abu in the place beyond the porch where Kalal would probably have hobbled her, although the floor here seemed muddied and damp, and Robin was agitated. Jalila glanced back, but she and her hayawan had already obscured the possible signs of another’s presence. Unlike Kalal, who seemed to notice many things, she decided that she made a poor detective.

  Cold air stuttered down the passageways. Jalila, chilled and watchful, had grown so used to this qasr’s sense of abandonment that it was impossible to tell whether the place was now finally empty. But she feared that it was. Her thoughts and footsteps whispered to her that the tariqua, after ruining her life and playing with her expectations, had simply vanished into a puff of lost potentialities. Already disappointed, angry, she hurried to the high-ceilinged room set with blue and white tiles and found, with no great surprise, that the strewn cushions were cold and damp, the coffee lamp was unlit, and that the book through which that patient ant had crawled was now sprawled in a damp-leafed scatter of torn pages. There was no sign of the scarab. Jalila sat down, and listened to the wind’s howl, the rain’s ticking, wondering for a long time when it was that she had lost the ability to cry.

  Finally, she stood up and moved toward the courtyard. It was colder today than it had ever been, and the rain had greyed and thickened. It gelled and dripped from the gutters in the form of something she supposed was called sleet, and which she decided as it splattered down her neck that she would hate forever. It filled the bowl of the fountain with mucuslike slush, and trickled sluggishly along the lines of the drains. The air was full of weepings and howlings. In the corner of the courtyard, there lay a small black heap.

  Sprawled half in, half out of the poor shelter of the arched cloisters, more than ever like a flightless bird, the tariqua lay dead. Her clothes were sodden. All the furnace heat had gone from her body, although, on a day such as this, that would take no more than a matter of moments. Jalila glanced up through the sleet toward the black wet stone of the latticed mashrabiya from which she and Kalal had first spied on the old woman, but she was sure now that she was alone. People shrank incredibly when they were dead – even a figure as frail and old as this creature had been. And yet, Jalila found as she tried to move the tariqua’s remains out of the ra
in, their spiritless bodies grew uncompliant; heavier and stupider than clay. The tariqua’s face rolled up toward her. One side was pushed in almost unrecognizably, and she saw that a nearby nest of ants were swarming over it, busily tunneling out the moisture and nutrition, bearing it across the smeared paving as they stored up for the long winter ahead.

  There was no sign of the scarab.

  5

  This, for Jalila and her mothers, was the Season of Farewells. It was the Season of Departures.

  There was a small and pretty onion-domed mausoleum on a headland overlooking Al Janb, and the pastures around it were a popular place for picnics and lovers’ trysts in the Season of Summers, although they were scattered with tombstones. It was the ever-reliable Lya who saw to the bathing and shrouding of the tariqua’s body, which was something Jalila could not possibly face, and to the sending out through the null-space between the stars of all the necessary messages. Jalila, who had never been witness to the processes of death before, was astonished at the speed with which everything was arranged. As she stood with the other mourners on a day scarfed with cloud, beside the narrow rectangle of earth within which what remained of the tariqua now lay, she could still hear the wind booming over the empty qasr, feel the uncompliant weight of the old woman’s body, the chill speckle of sleet on her face.

  It seemed as if most of the population of Al Janb had made the journey with the cortege up the narrow road from the town. Hard-handed fisher-women. Gaudily dressed merchants. Even the few remaining aliens. Nayra was there, too, a beautiful vision of sorrow surrounded by her lesser black acolytes. So was lbra. So, even, was Kalal. Jalila, who was acknowledged to have known the old woman better than anyone, said a few words that she barely heard herself over the wind. Then a priestess who had flown in specially from Ras pronounced the usual prayers about the soul rising on the arms of Munkar and Nakir, the blue and the black angels. Looking down into the ground, trying hard to think of the Gardens of Delight that the Almighty always promised her stumbling faithful, Jalila could only remember that dream of her own burial: the soil pattering on her face, and everyone she knew looking down at her. The tariqua, in one of her many half-finished tales, had once spoken to her of a world upon which no sun had ever shone, but which was nevertheless warm and bounteous from the core of heat beneath its surface, and where the people were all blind, and moved by touch and sound alone; it was a joyous place, and they were forever singing. Perhaps, and despite all the words of the Prophet, Heaven, too, was a place of warmth and darkness.