Clarkesworld: Year Six

by Aliette de Bodard

  Best thing to do would be to step aside. He was head of the household, it was his call. She ought to do as he said, because her place here wasn’t secure. A month ago that might not have mattered, but now—she wanted to stay, she had to stay.

  And if she stepped aside, leaving Toma free to enter the shed, what would she tell Andi afterward?

  She swallowed the lump in her throat and found words. “I know disaster can still happen. I know the droughts and storms and plagues do still come and can take away everything. Better than anyone, I know. But we have to start building again sometime, yes? People like Andi have to start building, and we have to let them, even if it seems useless to the rest of us. Because it isn’t useless, it—it’s beautiful.”

  He stared at her for a long time. She thought maybe he was considering how to wrestle her away from the door. He was bigger than she was, and she wasn’t strong. It wouldn’t take much. But she’d fight.

  “You’re infatuated, that’s all,” he said.

  Maybe, not that it mattered.

  Then he said, “You’re not going to move away, are you?”

  Shaking her head, Stella flattened herself more firmly against the door.

  Toma’s grip on the hammer loosened, just a bit. “My grandparents—has Andi told you about my grandparents? They were children when the big fall came. They remembered what it was like. Mostly they talked about what they’d lost, all the things they had and didn’t now. And I thought, all those things they missed, that they wanted back—that was what caused the fall in the first place, wasn’t it? We don’t need it, any of it.”

  “Andi needs it. And it’s not hurting anything.” What else could she say, she had to say something that would make it all right. “Better things will come, or what’s the point?”

  A weird crooked smile turned Toma’s lips, and he shifted his grip on the hammer. Holding it by the head now, he let it dangle by his leg. “God, what a world,” he muttered. Stella still couldn’t tell if he was going to force her away from the door. She held her breath.

  Toma said, “Don’t tell Andi about this. All right?”

  She nodded. “All right.”

  Toma turned and started down the trail, a calm and steady pace. Like a man who’d just gone out for a walk.

  Stella slid to the ground and sat on the grass by the wall until the old man was out of sight. Finally, after scrubbing the tears from her face, she followed him down, returning to the cottages and her work.

  Andi was home in time for supper, and the household ate together as usual. The woman was quiet and kept making quick glances at Toma, who avoided looking back at all. It was like she knew Toma had had a plan. Stella couldn’t say anything until they were alone.

  The night was clear, the moon was dark. Stella’d learned enough from Andi to know it was a good night for stargazing. As they were cleaning up after the meal, she touched Andi’s hand. “Let’s go to the observatory.”

  Andi glanced at Toma, and her lips pressed together, grim. “I don’t think that’s a good idea.”

  “I think it’ll be okay.”

  Andi clearly didn’t believe her, so Stella took her hand, and together they walked out of the cottage, then across the yard, past the work house, and to the trail that led up the hill to the observatory.

  And it was all right.

  If the Mountain Comes

  An Owomoyela

  François and Papa were outside, discussing what to do if the water rose. I was in, scrubbing blood from the walls with a palmful of sand.

  That was the summer Enah came to our village. He’d led a donkey, and the donkey pulled a cart with tools, a flowering lilac, and a barrel of fresh water. The barrel made Enah richer than the doctor, richer than the preacher. Richer than anyone but us, and he meant to change that.

  I heard footsteps crunching the cracked earth outside, but I assumed it was a pumpyard guard until Papa went silent and his dogs went barking mad and I looked to see why. There they were, in the dry riverbed: Papa and François and the Rottweilers all glaring at Enah, who approached as though he feared nothing. He had skin as dark as François; he walked barefoot, and smiled. People weren’t in the habit of smiling at my father.

  Enah and Papa exchanged a few words, then turned and came into the house with the dogs keeping pace. “Make us tea,” Papa said, and I was banished to the kitchen. I boiled the water and measured the leaves, and brought out the teapot and the cups, several of them chipped. I poured for my father first, then Enah. Enah didn’t say anything. Not even to acknowledge such luxury.

  “In the next months, I’m going to sink my pumps another ten meters into the ground,” Papa was saying. “I can bring more water up and provide it even more cheaply to the people of this village.”

  “The people of this village do not want to pay for something the world provides freely,” Enah said. Papa snorted, boar-like.

  “Not so freely. My grandfather would have called this a drought; I call it the state of things. It rains perhaps thirty days a year. Your program might work where you’re from, but here, it’s foolishness.”

  Enah shrugged. “There was a river here once,” he said, and sipped the steaming tea.

  “That mountain to the east was a volcano once,” Papa said. “The world changes.”

  “And we are often the ones who change it.” Enah shrugged again. “That’s what I’ve promised them, Mr. Wolfe: there was a river here once and there will be again.”

  They sat watching each other for a moment, these two men, Enah small and strange with laughter lines around his mouth and forehead, Papa solid and strong with anger carved into his brow.

  “There is a house here now,” Papa said. “A family. A dozen workers. Water pumps. You’d have us all vanish?”

  “No, no,” Enah said. “I’d have you go up the bank, join the rest of your town. It must be lonely down here.”

  It was lonely down there.

  Ever since Mama died, Papa and I went around with a higher awareness of mortality. His mortality, mostly. Papa wasn’t a young man, and death was something we expected with half a head. Death was like rain—uncommon, but it would come.

  So ever since Mama died, I had a bag packed, and I was ready to run away. I knew I couldn’t survive on the riverbed without Papa, though I didn’t know where I could go. Up to the village, if they’d take me, but what would I do? Set bones, or forage in the brush, or whore myself?

  Or I could set off. See what lay beyond the horizon, and beyond the horizon beyond that. Water would be the problem—so heavy, so necessary, and something that unlike the people of the village I had never learned to go without.

  The riverbed had been parched for as long as I could remember, its dirt cracked and peeling like thick and brittle plates. You could throw them toward the bank, and watch them burst into plumes of dust. Our family drilled deep and sucked water from the earth, and it was enough to keep us wealthy, by our own, dusty standards of wealth.

  Papa sent Enah away. Then he went out to the pumpyard, and I ran out after our visitor. “Wait!”

  Enah turned and looked at me. “We weren’t introduced,” he said.

  “I’m Lena,” I said. “Lena Wolfe. You say you can bring the river back?”

  He looked up and down the riverbed. The town was clustered on the bank, and my grandfather’s home and his father’s home connected the town and our farm like the dots of an ellipsis. My family had always followed the water.

  “Let me ask you something,” Enah said. “Why is it you think these people don’t seek their fortunes elsewhere?”

  I shrugged. “This is home,” I said.

  He nodded. “It’s their home, and it’s still possible to live here. If it is possible to live, many will stay where they’ve buried their parents, and where they’ve dug the wells with their hands, and laid the cobblestones. And besides, the sun is hot everywhere. Water is precious everywhere.” He tapped the ground with one foot. “What is the name of this river?”


  The name dried up when the water did. I think Papa knew it. I think it was written on the old maps, but we didn’t use the old maps. “It doesn’t have one.”

  Enah turned to look at me, and his eyes were as sharp as a carrion bird’s. “That’s sad, isn’t it?” he said. “I’ve brought waters to desert arroyos, Lena. I can make this river flow again. And when the waters flow again, your town will name it.”

  He reached out to touch my cheek, and I stepped back. Ordinarily, no one would touch me—I’d have a dog, like Papa’s dogs, to dissuade anyone from coming too close. Not then, though. Papa had killed my dog that morning.

  “There will be enough water to grow hyacinths here,” Enah said.

  “What are hyacinths?” I asked.

  I went to the pumpyard to draw water to pay the guards’ salaries. I hated going to the pumps, but they were locked so the guards couldn’t draw their own. The men who guarded them, with old automatics and new machetes, looked at me as though only my father kept them from leaping on me like wolves.

  Only my father. So much in my life was because of my father, or only my father. Because of my father, I would never die of thirst. Only my father aimed to keep life and death in a birdcage on his accounting desk.

  When I’d filled the jugs and dragged the heavy handcart back to Papa’s office, I saw Papa yelling at François. Almost-yelling. Papa only barely raised his voice, but it felt like a shot from a cannon.

  “By God, they won’t have their way!” Papa was saying.

  François, a braver man than most, said “God is not always merciful to our needs.”

  I’d never heard him speak back to Papa before.

  “I don’t care about God’s mercy,” Papa said. “Who has mercy? He doesn’t. I don’t. And you least of all.” His voice became harder, like stone. “Go find whoever brought this troublemaker to our village. Make sure they don’t bring any more trouble our way.”

  François stood with his jaw muscles bulging. He must have been biting down hard.

  “Well?” Papa said, and raised his hand as though to strike him. “Go on! Go!”

  François turned and walked outside.

  Papa turned to me, and I stared at him. Then he sighed, and clicked his fingers twice. One of the dogs perked his ears, ready for commands.

  “You should take Brutus,” Papa said, though neither of his dogs will obey anyone but him. “Jaime’s bitch is about to pup; we’ll train up another dog for you soon.”

  “I’d rather have Mogul back,” I said.

  Papa was not a man who showed sadness, but sometimes, I could catch a softness in his eyes. Only for me. “They never live once the bloody coughs start.”

  “You never treat them,” I said.

  “We are all dying, Lena,” he said, and started out past me. “If I kill them a week before their time or five years before their time, what does it matter?” He stopped at the doorway to touch my cheek. “You are the only one I will fight to keep alive.”

  Papa would fight anything. Fighting was the only life he knew.

  When my mother came down with the cough, he fought the doctors. He fought the dust which rolled in through the windows. He even fought my mother’s body. When she died, he seemed like a man who’d lost a public match—pride smarting, eyes burning, looking to prove himself back up.

  By that summer, when the dogs were sick, he’d take a machete and lop off their heads. Maybe he thought it was winning if he didn’t watch them dwindle away.

  I went to fill the drip-irrigators. I passed the side path leading to the gate, where François was sharpening his machete, his skin gleaming in the sunlight in contrast to my own. François was as strong and dark as Mogul once was, and I was as tan and useless as the dirt on the riverbed.

  “Where’s your dog?” he demanded.

  “He was sick,” I said.

  François said, huh, and went back to sharpening.

  “What did you mean,” I asked him, “that God is not always merciful?”

  “You know what I meant. The world doesn’t work the way we’d like it.”

  “But why did you say it?” I asked. “Why God?”

  François shrugged one corded shoulder. “A saying came to mind. A story my parents told me.”

  Papa never told me stories. Mama had, but Mama was gone. “Tell me,” I said.

  François grimaced. I think he wanted to be rid of me. He didn’t speak much, and especially not to me. Still, my father paid him, and paid him twice as much as anyone else on the water farm, so he indulged most things.

  “The Prophet Mohammed was told to prove the greatness of God,” François said. “He shook his fist at a mountain and said ‘Come here, mountain, so I may pray on you!’ The mountain didn’t come. The Prophet turned to his people and said ‘If that mountain had come, it would have crushed us. So you see, God is merciful. I’ll go to the mountain and thank God for sparing his foolish children.’”

  I chewed on that. “So if the river comes, God won’t stop the water from flooding our home?”

  François shrugged.

  “Why aren’t you Muslim?” I asked. “You still remember those Islamic stories. Weren’t your parents Muslims?”

  François put the finishing edge on his machete and stood up. “You’ll learn one day that you can’t always do what your parents want you to,” he said. He looked over at the edge of the river, up toward the village on the lip. “My parents would be disappointed in what I do. Besides.” He rested his machete on his shoulder. “It’s not right to profess what you don’t believe.”

  I didn’t believe in a God, either. My father prayed, but never told me who he prayed to. Mama had been a Catholic from an old sect. I usually found François the most sensible of all of them.

  I took two gallons of water, separated into quarts, up the bank to the market. The people there watched me, many of them angry, but not as hungry as the guards we kept sweating and rich on the farm. Papa said people resented the rich, and that it shouldn’t bother me.

  François had followed me up and I wondered if my father had told him to be my dog until I had a new one, but then he went on his way and I put him out of my mind.

  The noise of the market quieted as I passed by, and resumed again in pitched whispers, and the stares were more furtive. Because I didn’t have my dog, or because of Enah?

  I found Jaime, who was at least kind to me, under a frayed sunshade, fixing small electronics. A rickety contraption of rods and wires with a metal dish in the middle was perched on the edge of his table, with a radio tied into it.

  “What is that?” I asked, and he flashed me a grin.

  “Listen to that,” he said, and turned the radio on.

  There weren’t many stations nearby—there was the Christ Channel, and the staticky weather for a city climates away. And then there was this, a violin, a channel I’d never heard before.

  I strained forward into the music. “Is it a new station?”

  “Just far away,” Jaime said. “But with that antenna, I can focus in on it.” He turned up the volume as high as it would go. I closed my eyes and breathed it in.

  The song ended, and someone spoke in a foreign tongue. “Papa says you have a dog ready to pup,” I said.

  Jaime nodded. “Any day now. The best of my stock.”

  “We’ll want to buy a boy,” I said. “If there’s one you don’t keep back for breeding, reserve it for us.”

  He looked at me quizzically. “I noticed you didn’t have Mogul with you.”

  He didn’t ask, What happened? And so I didn’t tell him, even as the words pressed on the back of my tongue. I didn’t say how his entire body had shaken when he sneezed, how blood had sprayed out from his nostrils to paint the living room walls. “He was sick,” I said. And they never live once the coughing starts.

  Jaime understood. “Tell your Papa that these dogs are companions and workers, not pieces of equipment he can use up and replace.” There was no heat to his tone. We were his best cu
stomers, and sometimes his only customers for months at a time.

  Beside him, the man on the radio stopped talking and a new song started up. “Jaime,” I asked. “Why don’t we make anything that beautiful?”

  Jaime shook his head. “What do you mean? Don’t you see the soapstone carvings Elise does? Hear Luc singing to his rabbits? See the mats Camille weaves out of the grasses? There are beautiful things all over the village.”

  “Yes, yes,” I answered, but my head was full of the violin, my mind’s eye captured by the curves of its wood. I had only seen pictures in old books. “But why don’t we make anything that beautiful?”

  Jaime sighed. “Because beautiful flowers don’t grow on dry clay, girl,” he said, and I felt myself drop in his estimation. “When we’re not too busy scraping by, we’ll go to another city just to buy a violin. Or perhaps you should ask your father to buy one for you.”

  The words stung, so I turned to leave.

  I bought rabbit meat from Luc, and wild garlic and scrawny tubers from strange old Abed. Traded water for soap, for thread, for a tin of white paint to cover the blood I hadn’t been able to scrub away. Then I started back down toward the water farm, but Enah caught my eye.

  He was sitting on the edge of his cart, at the lip of the river bank, leaning down to draw pictures in the dirt with a stick. He was surrounded by villagers, and all of them watched him like a prophet. I drew nearer.

  “. . . and when that is done,” he was saying, “there will be water to last you between rains, and we can turn our attention to healing the river. We’ll dig percolation trenches, to let water return to the aquifer.”

  By then people had noticed me, and they were muttering. I’d decided it was time to go when Enah looked up and motioned me forward.

  “It’s all right,” he said. “Come up and see.” He looked to the villagers, and before they could say anything he said, “The water we’ll bring is for everyone; go ahead and let her in.”

  “She’ll just tell her father,” one of them said. I didn’t look to see who.

  “I’d tell him myself if he asked me,” Enah said. “Come up, Miss Wolfe.”