“You must learn to get used to things…” Lywa her bondmother said to her with genuine irritation late one afternoon when she’d come back without the tool she’d been sent to get early that morning, or even any recollection of its name or function. “This or any other world will never be a home to you if you let every single thing surprise you…” But Jalila didn’t mind the surprises, in fact, she was coming to enjoy them, and the next time the need to visit Al Janb arose for a new growth-crystal for the scaffolding, she begged and pleaded to be allowed, and her mothers finally relented, although with many a warning shake of the head.
The rain had stopped at last, or at least held back for a whole day, although everything still looked green and wet to Jalila as she walked along the coastal road towards the ragged tumble of Al Janb. She understood, at least in theory, that the rain would probably return, and then relent, and then come back again, but in a decreasing pattern, much as the heat increased, although it still seemed ridiculous to her that no one could ever predict exactly how, or when, Habara’s proper Season of Summers would arrive. Those boats she could see now, those fisherwomen out on their feluccas beyond the white bands of breaking waves, their whole lives were dictated by these uncertainties, and the habits of the shoals of whiteback which came and went on the oceans, which could also only be guessed at in this same approximate way. The world down here on the coast was so unpredictable compared with Tabuthal. The markets, the people, the washing, the sun, the rain, the aliens. Even Hayam and Walah, Habara’s moons, which Jalila was long used to watching, had to drag themselves through cloud like cannonballs though cotton as they pushed and pulled at this ocean. Yet still there was a particular sight which surprised Jalila more than any other as she clambered over the ropes and groynes of the long shingle beach which she took as a shortcut to the centre of the town when the various tides were out. The air was fishy and stinking. A few months before, it would have disgusted her. It still did, but there were many sights and compensations.
Today, Jalila was studying a boat, which was hauled far up from the water and was longer and blacker and heavier-looking than the feluccas, with a sort-of ramshackle house at the prow, and a winch at the stern which was so massive Jalila wondered if it wouldn’t tip the craft over if it ever actually entered the water. But, for all that, it wasn’t the boat which had first caught her eye, but the figure who was working on it. Even from a distance, as she struggled to heave some ropes, there was something different about her, and the way she was moving. Another alien? But she was plainly human. And barefoot, in ragged shorts, bare-breasted. In fact, almost as flat-chested as Jalila still was, and probably of about her age and height. Jalila still wasn’t used to introducing herself to strangers, but she decided that she could at least go over, and pretend an interest in—or an ignorance of—this odd boat.
The figure dropped another loop of rope over the gunwales with a grunt which carried on the smelly breeze. She was brown as tea, with her massy hair hooped back and sticking in a long sweat tail down her back. She was broad-shouldered, and moved in that way which didn’t quite seem wrong, but didn’t seem entirely right either. As if, somewhere across her back, there was an extra joint. When she glanced up at the clatter of shingle as Jalila jumped the last groyne, Jalila got a proper full sight of her face, and saw that she was big-nosed, big-chinned, that her features was oddly broad and flat. A child with clay might have done better.
“Have you come to help me?”
Jalila shrugged. “I might have done.”
“That’s a funny accent you’ve got.”
They were standing facing each other. She had grey eyes, which looked odd as well. Perhaps she was an off-worlder. That might explain it. Jalila had heard that there people who had things done to themselves so they could live in different places. She supposed the breathmoss was like that, although she’d never thought of it that way. And she couldn’t quite image why it would be a requirement of any world that you looked this ugly.
“Everyone talks oddly here,” she replied. “But then your accent’s funny as well.”
“I’m Kalal. And that’s just my voice. It’s not an accent.” Kalal looked down at her oily hands, perhaps thought about wiping one and offering it to shake, then decided not to bother.
“Oh…?”
“You don’t get it, do?” That gruff voice. The odd way her features twisted when she smiled.
“What is there to get? You’re just—”
“—I’m a man.” Kalal picked up a coil of rope from the shingle, and nodded to another beside it. “Well? Are you going to help me with this, or aren’t you?”
The rains came again, this time starting as a thing called drizzle, then working up the scale to torrent. The tides washed especially high. There were storms, and white crackles of lightening, and the boom of a wind which was so unlike the kamasheen. Jalila’s mothers told her to be patient, to wait, and to remember—please remember this time, so you don’t spoil the day for us all, Jalilaneen—the things which they sent her down the serraplate road to get from Al Janb. She trudged under an umbrella, another new and useless coastal object, which turned itself inside out so many times that she ended up throwing it into the sea, where it floated off quite happily, as if that was the element for which it was intended in the first place. Almost all of the feluccas were drawn up on the far side of the roadway, safe from the madly bashing waves, but there was no sign of that bigger craft belonging to Kalal. Perhaps he—the antique genderative word was he, wasn’t it?—he was out there, where the clouds rumbled like boulders. Perhaps she’d imagined their whole encounter entirely.
Arriving back home at the haramlek surprisingly quickly, and carrying for once the things she’d been ordered to get, Jalila dried herself off and buried herself in her dreamtent, trying to find out from it all that she could about these creatures called men. Like so many things about life at this awkward, interesting, difficult time, men were something Jalila would have insisted she definitely already knew about a few months before up on Tabuthal. Now, she wasn’t so sure. Kalal, despite his ugliness and his funny rough-squeaky voice and his slightly odd smell, looked little like the hairy-faced werewolf figures of her childhood stories, and seemed to have no particular need to shout or fight, to carry her off to his rancid cave, or to start collecting odd and pointless things which he would then try to give her. There had once, Jalila’s dreamtent postulated, and for obscure biological reasons she didn’t quite follow, been far more men in the universe; almost as many had there had been women. Obviously, they had dwindled. She then checked up the word rape, to make sure it really was the thing she’d imagined, shuddered, but nevertheless investigated in full holographic detail the bits of himself which Kalal had kept hidden beneath his shorts as she’d helped stow those ropes. She couldn’t help feeling sorry for him. It was all so pointless and ugly. Had his birth been an accident? A curse? She began to grow sleepy. The subject was starting to bore her. The last thing she remembered learning was that Kalal wasn’t a proper man at all, but a boy—a half-formed thing; the equivalent to girl—another old urrearth word. Then sleep drifted over her, and she was back with the starlight and the crystal trees of Tabuthal, and wondering as she danced with her own reflection which of them was changing.
By next morning, the sun was shining as if she would never stop. As Jalila stepped out onto the newly formed patio, she gave the blazing light the same sort of an appraising what-are-you-up-to-now glare that her mothers gave her when she returned from Al Janb. The sun had done this trick before of seeming permanent, then vanishing by lunchtime into sodden murk, but today her brilliance continued. As it did the day after. And the day after that. Half a month later, even Jalila was convinced that the Season of Summers on Habara had finally arrived.
The flowers went mad, as did the insects. There were colours everywhere, pulsing before your eyes, swarming down the cliffs towards the sea, which lay flat and placid and salt-rimed; a huge animal, basking—or possibly dead. I
t remained mostly cool in Jalila’s dreamtent, and the haramlek by now was a place of tall malqaf windtowers and flashing fans and well-like depths, but stepping outside beyond the striped shade of the mashrabiyas at midday felt like being hit repeatedly across the head with a hot iron pan. The horizons had drawn back, the mountains, after a few last rumbles of thunder and mist as if they were clearing their throats, had finally announced themselves to the coastline in all their majesty, and climbed up and up in huge stretches of forest into stone limbs which rose and tangled until your eyes grew tired of rising. Above them, finally, was the sky, which was always blue in this season; the blue colour of flame. Even at midnight, you caught the flash and swirl of flame.
Jalila learned to follow the advice of her mothers, and to change her daily habits to suit the imperious demands of this incredible, fussy and demanding weather. If you woke early, and then drank lots of water, and bowed twice in the direction of Al’Toman whilst she was still a pinprick in the west, you could catch the day by surprise, when dew lay on the stones and pillars, and the air felt soft and silky as the arms of the ghostly women who sometimes visited Jalila’s nights. Then there was breakfast, and the time of work, and the time of study, and Ananke and Pavo would quiz Jalila to ensure that she was following the prescribed Orders of Knowledge. By midday, though, the shadows had drawn back and every trace of moisture had evaporated, and your head swarmed with flies. You sought your own company, and didn’t even want that, and wished as you tossed and sweated in your dreamtent for frost and darkness. Once or twice, just to prove to herself that it could be done, Jalila had tried walking to Al Janb at this time, although of everything was shut and the whole place wobbled and stank in the heat like rancid jelly. She returned to the haramlek gritty and sweaty, almost crawling, and with a pounding ache in her head.
By evening, when the proper order of the world had righted itself, and Al’Toman would have hung in the east if the mountains hadn’t swallowed her, and the heat, which never vanished, had assumed a smoother, more manageable quality, Jalila’s mothers were once again hungry for company, and for food and for argument. These evenings, perhaps, were the best of all the times which Jalila would remember of her early life on the coast of Habara’s single great ocean, at that stage in her development from child to adult when the only thing of permanence seemed to be the existence of endless, fascinating change. How they argued! Lya, her bondmother, and the oldest of her parents, who wore her grey hair loose as cobwebs with the pride of her age, and waved her arms as she smoked and drank in curling endless wreathes of smoke and steam. Little Pavo, her face smooth as a carved nutmeg, with her small, precise, hands, and who knew so much but rarely said anything with insistence. And Jalila’s birthmother Ananke, for whom of her three mothers Jalila had always had the deepest, simplest love, who would always touch you before she said anything, and then fix you with her sad and lovely eyes, as if touching and seeing were far more important that any words. Jalila was older now. She joined in with the arguments—of course, she had always joined in, but she cringed to think of the stumbling inanities to which her mothers had previously had to listen, whilst, now, at last, she had real, proper things to say about life, whole new philosophies which no one else on the Ten Thousand Worlds and One had ever thought of… Most of the time, her mothers listened. Sometimes, they even acted as if they were persuaded by their daughter’s wisdom.
Frequently, there were visitors to these evening gatherings. Up on Tabuthal, visitors had been rare animals, to be fussed over and cherished and only reluctantly released for their onward journey across the black dazzling plains. Down here, where people were nearly as common as stones on the beach, a more relaxed attitude reigned. Sometimes, there were formal invitations which Lya would issue to someone who was this or that in the town, or more often Pavo would come back with a person she had happened to meet as she poked around for lifeforms on the beach, or Ananke would softly suggest a neighbour (another new word and concept to Jalila) might like to pop in (ditto). But Al Janb was still a small town, and the dignitaries generally weren’t that dignified, and Pavo’s beach wanderers were often shy and slight as she was, whilst neighbour was frequently a synonym for boring. Still, Jalila came to enjoy most kinds of company, if only so that she could hold forth yet more devastatingly on whatever universal theory of life she was currently developing.
The flutter of lanterns and hands. The slow breath of the sea. Jalila ate stuffed breads and fuul and picked at the mountains of fruit and sucked lemons and sweet blue rutta and waved her fingers. The heavy night insects, glowing with the pollen they had collected, came bumbling towards the lanterns or would alight in their hands. Sometimes, afterwards, they walked the shore, and Pavo would show them strange creatures with blurring mouths like wheels, or point to the vast, distant beds of the tideflowers which rose at night to the changes of the tide; silver, crimson, or glowing, their fronds waving through the dark like the beckoning palms of islands from storybook seas.
One guestless night when they were walking north away from the lights of the town and Pavo was filling a silver bag for an aquarium she was ostensibly making for Jalila, but in reality for herself, the horizon suddenly cracked and rumbled. Instinctively by now, Jalila glanced overhead, expecting clouds to be covering the coastal haze of stars. But the air was still and clear; the hot dark edge of that blue flame. Across the sea, the rumble and crackle was continuing, accompanied by a glowing pillar of smoke which slowly tottered over the horizon. The night pulsed and flickered. There was a breath of impossibly hot salt air. The pillar, a wobbly finger with a flame-tipped nail, continued climbing skyward. A few geelies rose and fell, clacking and cawing, on the far rocks; black shapes in the darkness.
“It’s the start of the Season of Rockets,” Lya said. “I wonder who’ll be coming…?”
2
By now, Jalila had acquired many of her own acquaintances and friends. Young people were relatively scare amid the long-lived human Habarans, and those who dwelt around Al Janb were continually drawn and repulsed to each other like spinning magnets. The elderly mahwagis, who had outlived the need for wives and the company of a haramlek and lived alone, were often more fun, and more reliably eccentric. It was a relief to visit their houses and escape the pettinesses and sexual jealousies which were starting to infect the other girls near to Jalila’s own age. She regarded Kalal similarly—as an escape—and she relished helping him with his boat, and then their journeys out across the bay, where the wind finally tipped almost cool over the edge of the mountains and lapped the sweat from their faces.
Kalal took Jalila out to see the rocketport one still, hot afternoon. It lay just over the horizon, and was the longest journey they had undertaken. The sails filled with the wind, and the ocean grew almost black, yet somehow transparent, as they hurried over it. Looking down, Jalila believed she could glimpse the white sliding shapes of the great sea-leviathans who had once dwelt, if local legend was to be believed, in the ruined rock palaces of the qasrs which she had passed on her journey down from Tabuthal. Growing tired of sunlight, they had swarmed back to the sea which had birthed them, throwing away their jewels and riches, which bubbled below the surface, then rose again under the Habara’s twin moons to became the beds of tideflowers. She had got that part of the story from Kalal. Unlike most people who lived on the coast, Kalal was interested in Jalila’s life in the starry darkness of Tabuthal, and repaid her with his own tales of the ocean.
The boat ploughed on, rising, frothing. Blissfully, it was almost cold. Just how far out at sea was this rocketport? Jalila had watched some of the arrivals and departures from the quays at Al Janb, but those journeys took place in sleek sail-less craft with silver doors which looked, as they turned out from the harbour and rose out on stilts from the water, as if they could travel half way up to the stars on their own. Kalal was squatting at the prow, beyond that ramshackle hut which Jalila now knew contained the pheromones and grapplers which were needed to ensnare the tideflowers
which this craft had been built to harvest. The boat bore no name on the prow, yet Kalal had many names for it, which he would occasionally mention or curse without explaining. If there was one thing which was different about Kalal, Jalila had decided, it was this absence of proper talk or explanation. It put many people off, but she had found that most things became apparent if you just hung around him and didn’t ask direct questions.
People generally pitied Kalal, or stared at him as Jalila still stared at the aliens, or asked him questions he wouldn’t answer with anything other than a shrug. Now that she knew him better, Jalila was starting to understand just how much he hated such treatment—almost as much, in fact, as he hated being thought of as ordinary. I am a man, you know, he’d still remark sometimes—whenever he felt Jalila was forgetting. Jalila had never yet risked pointing out that he was in fact a boy. Kalal could be prickly and sensitive if you treated him as if things didn’t matter. It was hard to tell, really, just how much of how he was due to his odd sexual identity, and how much was his personality.
Everywhere: Volume I of the Collected Short Stories and Novellas of Ian R. MacLeod Page 7