The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2018

by John Joseph Adams

  What it is, Solomon doesn’t know, but it doesn’t matter. He’ll dismantle the golem and it’ll die with her. There will be a heap of wood, leather, metal, and string. There’ll be some metal hinges, some green oranges. He’ll toss it all over the cliff edge. He feels a little stronger suddenly, purposeful. He’ll dress and put his books in a sack. He’ll hire a cart.

  The loneliness of the fleeing poet. The road before him, the dust, the cart rattling, the bones pained. The loneliness he is well accustomed to, traveling by himself, wandering bookstalls at night, reading texts he procures from the darkest, dustiest stacks. He will write two hundred verses in mourning for the golem, he decides. He’ll write of her smooth skin and fragrant hair, her green eyes and sharp teeth.

  He hears the golem moving, and turns to find her quite close to him. She hasn’t listened to his request. Why has she not given him the name? Is the magic flawed?

  Solomon clasps his golem’s wrist, groping for her jaw hinge, but the golem’s golem is there, standing on his arm. It stabs the splinter into the poet’s hand, deep into the vein at the top.

  “You are my thing!” Solomon shouts at her. “My wife!”

  She says nothing. There’s only that high song from the ash, and the golem, moving the bow across the strings in her stomach. Red threads. A web, Solomon thinks. A spider.

  Solomon runs for the door, but almost instantly he’s too ill to run, too ill to walk. He falls, shaking and vomiting, feeling his body dismantling itself from the inside out. He’s made of hinges and all of them are bending, all the doors inside his body too far open, his heart dropping through staircases, his kidneys swollen, his eyes watering and blasting agony. His skin is shedding and he is a snake. His hinges are rusting and he’s alone on a rainy road, floodwater rising. The loneliness of the poet muted. His hands are claws. His mouth feels thick and his throat is closing.

  17.

  Qasmūna goes to him. She is built to serve, to defend, to protect, and her protections include the cessation of misery. She gives Solomon the juice of bitter oranges in a green glass cup, gently, a drop at a time from her finger. This is all there is left to do. She knows that much.

  His heart thunders, but after a time he’s quiet.

  She picks him up from the floor and carries him, not gently. Now he’s only a body, not a master. She ferries him from the house, and with her hands she digs a grave in the garden beneath the roots of a fig tree.

  This not-loneliness in this garden. The company of trees, the conversation of birds, the discussions between wasps and fruit. The pollen of flowers and the high pallor of clouds. She looks up and breathes in. She spits out the inadequate nutshell and takes a twig from the tree. She works the twig into the space in her mouth, behind the name of God.

  The tiny golem watches her, prepared to defend her city, prepared to do what it is golems do. As she pushes her new tongue into place, a door opens in her chest.

  The golem’s golem places itself inside the compartment there, a compartment that has previously been perfectly empty, and the hinges close.

  Qasmūna’s heart beats. The strings of her instrument vibrate.

  She speaks a word.

  18.

  A season passes, and the walled garden grows wild.

  The fig tree bears fruit, and the carpenter’s mother crosses over the wall and onto the poet’s land to pick before the birds and bats can eat them. She can see slender yellow bones bending up from the soil beneath the tree, fingers, and a jaw, long since picked clean by animals. The earth is especially dark here, a bright russet soil, and the bones are beautiful, like jewelry lost after a night’s dancing. The carpenter’s mother steps barefoot on the dirt and packs it down, leaving it smooth.

  She reaches up and plucks figs, dropping them into her smock. The figs are heavy and green, their centers scarlet. The carpenter’s mother eats one as she stands in the garden, looking out toward the country that was hers before this one.

  She hums a song about marching through sand, a song about homecoming after war. The song can only be played on the rabāb, and the tune runs counter to the music, a twisting blade sung at night while the washing’s being wrung. When she was a girl, all the women sang this song at once, and when the men returned from wherever men went, they were nervous at the patterns the women’s feet had made in the dust, the way they’d danced together beneath the moon.

  Months have passed. The carpenter’s mother knows nothing of where Solomon ibn Gabirol has gone. He walked in one day, and surely he walked away the same. His kitchen was full of coins for a time after he disappeared. Then the coins went into the carpenter’s mother’s apron as payment for a cabinet.

  She knows nothing of where the holy men have gone, either. She saw nothing late in the night all those months ago, beneath a moon like a blossom. She heard no music playing, no mournful joyful strings, no echoing resonance and thrum. Those songs were unfamiliar to her. They sounded nothing like wandering fountains in the desert, nothing like shining things made of metal and silk.

  The carpenter’s mother never saw a woman walking out from the house of Solomon ibn Gabirol, her feet clattering across the stones of the street. A stranger to Málaga! She didn’t see that woman lifting five men and throwing them tenderly, one by one, from the cliff, nor did she see her digging here, beneath the fig tree.

  She didn’t see the woman step off the rock path and walk down to the harbor. Nor did she see her open a door in her abdomen and remove a thousand pages of words, sections from poems, scribbled lines and wishes. She didn’t see her tear these until each word was left lonely and then begin to rearrange them.

  She didn’t see this, the carpenter’s wife would swear, if anyone asked her. No one will ask her. She’s an old woman, and must know little of the world. She’s been here too long to read and too long to write. Too long to know anything of the world of magic.

  But how quickly that wooden woman went, arranging poem after poem, the words of the poet who called her from the trees taken and changed. She took all the poet’s words and made new things with them, a line on the sand.

  When she was finished, she looked up at the old woman standing on the cliff.

  The old woman, of course, saw nothing.

  She didn’t watch the wooden woman place herself in a boat, take the oars in her strong hands, and begin to row.

  Surely no mother of Málaga would let a murderess of so many men, all the intellectuals of this part of the coast, all of the holy, and a philosopher-poet too, surely no carpenter’s wife would let a murderess go free.

  19.

  On the night the golem left Spain, after it was fully dark, the carpenter’s mother climbed down the rocks to the shore. This much was true. She would say it, if she were asked.

  The poem on the sand was written in a language she could read, and she thought for a moment about the market stalls in her homeland, the words scrolling over her fingertips, the things made by her father and brothers, brought to life by her own blood and spit.

  In dreams she inlaid a mother-of-pearl woman with coral, camel bones, ebony eyes. In dreams she breathed into the woman’s lips and sent her to kill those who would sell a talented daughter to wed a lowly carpenter on the southern coast of Spain. Her life is no horror, but it is no glory either, and who would imagine that a carpenter’s wife would be full of poetry, full of spells, a maker of women? She could cause a fountain to spring from the desert, and here she is, sold, sold and spelled, daughter to a magician long dead. She’ll never go home again, because the water will refuse her.

  She read the poems Qasmūna left for her. Some had already caught the wind and blown out into the salt by the time she’d made it down the cliff, but two remained.

  O gazelle, tasting leaves,

  here in the green of my garden.

  Look at my eyes. Dark and lonely,

  just as yours are.

  How distant we are from our beloveds, and how forgotten

  Standing in the night,
>
  Waiting for fate to find us.

  The carpenter’s mother looked up, listening to the song coming over the water. She ate a fig and tasted the wasp that had pollinated it, the bones of the poet that had fed it. The second poem was shorter.

  The garden is filled with fruit on the vines, but the gardener

  refuses to brush a finger over the skin of even one piece.

  How sad it is! The season of splendor passes,

  and the fruit that ripens only in darkness

  Remains lonely.

  The gulls followed the wooden woman into a new life, out from Spain and over the sea, but that is nothing the carpenter’s mother will admit to knowing. She’s merely an old woman sitting in the dark, listening to the sounds of a creature made of ash and one made of wood, singing their way away.

  She sits there a long time beneath the stars before she writes the poems onto a piece of cloth, before she walks barefoot down the road to another town with them, before she puts them into the hands of a song-seller.

  “Where did these come from?” the seller asks.

  “A woman,” she tells him. “Qasmūna.”

  “Who is her father?” he asked. “Who is her husband?”

  “She has neither,” the carpenter’s wife said, knotting the scrolls with red silk thread. “Will you buy them?”

  Coins are never lonely. They clacked and rang out, and the carpenter’s wife held them in her palm, though soon they’d disappear like the kind of shining moths which land for only a moment to drink, before lighting again into the night.

  Historical Note

  The legend of the wooden golem created by the Andalusian Hebrew poet Solomon ibn Gabirol (1021–ca. 1058) is much less known than that of Rabbi Loew and the Golem of Prague, perhaps because Ibn Gabirol’s golem was a (rare) female golem brought to life not as a defender but as a housemaid and likely bedmate. The historic Ibn Gabirol was a complicated and brilliantly prolific intellectual figure, a reclusive misanthrope who suffered from a skin disease, possibly cutaneous tuberculosis. His poetry is filled with feelings of ostracization and rage relating to same—he complains about jealous enemies, among other things—though he also wrote rapturous and religiously ecstatic poems regarding the planets, the gardens of the sky, and laughing lightning. In the accounts, Ibn Gabirol was forced to destroy his hinged golem after being accused of fornicating with her. The legend typically comes up in discussions of personhood in Jewish law—and the debate in Hinge is typical of that discussion. The Sefer Yetzirah, in which mystical information related to golem creation is traditionally thought to be found, was a significant influence on Ibn Gabirol’s work, and he translated sections of it. The Banū Mūsā’s Book of Ingenious Devices was written in the ninth century and contains instructions for creating a variety of automata. The legend of Ibn Gabirol’s murder and burial beneath a fig tree is historical, though used to new ends here.

  The rabāb is a stringed instrument still played all over the world, an ancestor of the violin (which wasn’t invented until after the period in which this story is set). It came from North Africa via trade routes to Spain in the eleventh century, and there’s a very nice drawing of a more pear-shaped variant included in the Catalan Psalter, ca. 1050. There’s also a version of a rabāb in a fresco in the crypt of Sant’Urbano alla Caffarella, near Rome (ca. 1011), and that version looks almost exactly like a modern violin, including S-shaped soundholes. The tones of the rabāb are said, even in early accounts, to mimic those of a woman’s voice.

  Bitter oranges, a primary crop in Málaga, have recently been discovered to have effects similar to those of the banned diet-aid ephedra—their extract, often marketed as a stimulant, can cause strokes and heart attacks. The pale yellow wood of the bitter orange tree is so hard that it is made into baseball bats in Cuba. The golem’s golem, composed of ash and a name written on parchment, is a far more traditional golem than the wood-and-hinges creation said to have been made by Ibn Gabirol (the only golem of that composition in the history, so far as I can tell), but that one is my invention.

  Qasmūna (or Kasmunah) bat Isma’il was an eleventh- or twelfth-century Andalusian Jewish poet. Her name is likely derived from the Arabic diminutive of the Hebrew root qsm, meaning charming and seductive. Charming, in this case in the literal sense—magical. It may also be derived from the Arabic male name Qasmun—someone with a beautiful face. Her two extant poems (my loose translations from the original Arabic) are in the text. She is one of only two documented Spanish Jewish female poets in the period, the other being the Wife of Dunash. Qasmūna bat Isma’il’s biography is unknown, though there has been plenty of speculation—the daughter of a scholar, the daughter of a well-known poet, or, in this case, something else entirely. Regardless, her poems are erotic, and steeped in the natural world.

  Maureen MCHugh

  Cannibal Acts

  from Boston Review: Global Dystopias

  There’s a difference between dissection and butchering. Dissection reveals, but butchering renders. I’m a dissector, professionally, pressed into service as a butcher. I mean, I was a biologist. Am a biologist.

  The body in front of me is a man. I know him, although not very well—there aren’t that many of us so I know pretty much everybody. His name is Art. He looks much smaller, positively shrunken, laid out in the kitchen, and very, very white. I haven’t seen many naked male bodies, but I am intimately acquainted with Art’s. I have washed him. I’m not attracted to men when they’re alive, much less when they’re dead, but I feel a weird protectiveness toward Art. I’ve felt the soft spot in his skull from the fall that killed him. I have washed around his balls and the curled mushroom of his penis. I have cradled his hard and bony feet.

  Now I tie a rope around his ankles and hoist him. This is a commercial kitchen with big steel counters and a Hobart dishwasher. The pulley in the ceiling is new. It sounds easy—“I tie a rope around his ankles and hoist him”—but I am not very strong these days and just one pulley means I’m hauling his whole weight. I don’t know what Art weighs. He used to weigh more; we all used to weigh more. I am so tired, my fingers are cold. I’m seeing spots when I pull hard on the rope.

  Kate has taken to calling the town Leningrad, which is lost on most of the people here. It’s because we’re under siege in this stupid little Alaska excuse. It’s got an airstrip, a coast guard base, an army listening post, a dozen houses, and it’s surrounded on two sides by water—the ocean at our back and a river called Pilot’s Creek on one side. The army listening post was monitoring the Russians, of course, which is probably where Kate got the idea of Leningrad.

  So anyway, I get Art hanging, fingers just sweeping the floor. The dead are limp. Heavy. One of the locals used to hunt when there was anything to hunt. Eric Swetzof is a long-bodied, short-legged native Unagan. Maybe, he says, he and his wife are the last Unagan left alive. He told me the steps to field-dressing a large animal.

  Eric is not going to eat Art. There is a group of people who have declared themselves to be noneaters. Eric says he understands the people who have voted to eat and he doesn’t judge them, he just can’t. Can’t cross that line.

  I understand him too. I stand in front of a human with a good knife. “Blade at least four inches long,” Eric said. “You want a real handle on the thing, and a guard. When the knife hits bone it can turn and you can end up cutting yourself.”

  I used to like to cook. I’ve cut chickens into parts. I’m familiar with the way a joint shines white with ligament and tendon. What hangs in front of me is an animal. I am an animal. I don’t believe there is something particularly special about bodies and I don’t believe in souls, the afterlife, or the resurrection of the dead. I tell myself that this is a technical challenge. It’s a skill I have some parts of and I will learn the rest as I go.

  I am not sentimental.

  I put a plastic tub underneath Art to catch blood and viscera.

  It’s still very hard to open his throat. His viscera are lu
kewarm.

  I’m so hungry.

  Butchering has gotten me out of manning the defenses today. We all have to man the defenses, but I’m nearsighted and terrible with a gun. Luckily, there isn’t much shooting, because neither side has much in the way of ammunition. They are mostly men, as best we can tell, a lot of them fairly young. Maybe thirty of them, some still in ragged military fatigues. They are in the sharp green hills, waiting us out. They have a couple of boats, Zodiacs, but we sank one when they first attacked and now they either don’t want to risk them or they are holding them until we’re too weak to fight back.

  Or maybe they’re getting too weak to fight.

  I find Kate on Beach Road. It runs along the beach, of course, and then turns inland and runs to the airstrip. It’s cloudy and soft, it rains all summer here. The air off the water smells wrong. It should smell of fish and salt, that slightly rank and pleasant stink of ocean, but instead there’s a taste to it, like nail polish or something. Organics. Esters and aldehydes.

  Kate is sitting cross-legged with a paperback on one knee and a rifle next to her. Technically she’s on sentry, watching the ocean, but we’re sloppy civilians. Does the distinction even matter anymore? She’s taller than me—a lot of people are taller than me. I’m 5'4". She’s rangy; a long-legged, raw-boned woman with large hands and feet. She’s originally from New Mexico, but she’s an Anglo with light hair and blue eyes.

  I am still surprised when I see her in glasses. She has worn contacts as long as I have known her. She was always going to get corrective eye surgery. Too late now.