Everywhere: Volume I of the Collected Short Stories and Novellas of Ian R. MacLeod

by Ian R. MacLeod

  “Down here at the Al Janb, they’d say we were primitive and mad. Perhaps that was how we wanted to be. But all the machines at the clinics do is try to recreate the conditions of a real human womb—the voices, the movements, the sound of breathing… Without first hearing that Song of Life, no human can ever be happy, so what better way could there be than to hear it naturally?.”

  A flash of that dream-image of herself being buried. “But the birth itself—”

  “—I think that was something we all underestimated.” The tone of Pavo’s voice told Jalila that this was not a subject to be explored on the grounds of mere curiosity.

  The tideflower beds had solidified. You could walk across them as if they were dry land. Kalal, after several postponements and broken promises, took Jalila and Nayra out one night to demonstrate.

  Smoking lanterns at the prow and stern of his boat. The water slipping warm as blood through Jalila’s trailing fingers. Al Janb receding beneath the hot thighs of the mountains. Kalal at the prow. Nayra sitting beside her, her arm around her shoulder, hand straying across her breast until Jalila shrugged it away because the heat of their two bodies was oppressive.

  “This season’ll end soon,” Nayra said. “You’ve never known the winter here, have you?”

  “I was born in the winter. Nothing here could be as cold as the lightest spring morning in the mountains of Tabuthal.”

  “Ah, the mountains. You must show me sometime. We should travel there together…”

  Jalila nodded, trying hard to picture that journey. She’d attempted to interest Nayra in riding a hayawan, but she grew frightened even in the presence of the beasts. In so many ways, in fact, Nayra surprised Jalila with her timidity. Jalila, in these moments of doubt, and as she lay alone in her dreamtent and wondered, would list to herself Nayra’s many facets: her lithe and willing body; the beautiful haramlek of her beautiful mothers; the fact that so many of the other girls now envied and admired her. There were so many things which were good about Nayra.

  Kalal, now that his boat had been set on course for the further tidebeds, came to sit with them, his face sweated lantern-red. He and Nayra shared many memories, and now, as the sails pushed on from the hot air off the mountains, they vied to tell Jalila of the surprises and delights of winters in Al Janb. The fogs when you couldn’t see your hand. The intoxicating blue berries which appeared in special hollows through the crust of the snow. The special saint’s days—If Jalila hadn’t known better, she’d have said that Nayra and Kalal were fighting over something more important.

  The beds of tideflowers were vast, luminous, heavy-scented. Red-black clusters of geelies rose and fell here and there in the moonlight. Walking these gaudy carpets was a most strange sensation. The dense interlaces of leaves felt like rubber matting, but sank and bobbed. Jalila and Nayra lit more lanterns and dotted them around a field of huge primrose and orange petals. They sang and staggered and rolled and fell over. Nayra had brought a pipe of kif resin, and the sensation of smoking that and trying to dance was hilarious. Kalal declined, pleading that he had to control the boat on the way back, and picked his way out of sight, disturbing flocks of geelies.

  And so the two girls danced as the twin moons rose. Nayra, twirling silks, her hair fanning, was at grace as Jalila still staggered amid the lapping flowers. As she lifted her arms and rose on tiptoe, bracelets glittering, she had never looked more desirable. Somewhat drunkenly—and slightly reluctantly, because Kalal might return at any moment—Jalila moved forward to embrace her. It was good to hold Nayra, and her mouth tasted like the tideflowers and sucked needily at her own. In fact, the moments of their love had never been sweeter and slower than there were on that night, although, even as Jalila marvelled at the shape of Nayra’s breasts and listened to the changed song of her breathing, she felt herself chilling, receding, drawing back not just from Nayra’s physical presence, but from this small bay beside the small town on the single continent beside Habara’s great and lonely ocean. Jalila felt infinitely sorry for Nayra as she brought her to her little ecstasies and they kissed and rolled across the beds of flowers. She felt sorry for Nayra because she was beautiful, and sorry for her because of all her accomplishments, and sorry for her because she would always be happy here amid the slow seasons of in this little planet.

  Jalila felt sorry for herself as well; sorry because she had thought she had known love, and because she knew now that it had been a pretty illusion.

  There was a shifting wind, dry and abrasive, briefly to be welcomed, until it became something to curse and cover you face and close your shutters against.

  Of Jalila’s mothers, only Lya seemed at all disappointed by her break from Nayra, no doubt because she had fostered hopes of their union forming a powerful bond between their haramleks, and even she did her best not to show it. Of the outside world, the other young women of Al Janb all professed total disbelief—why if it had been me, I’d never have… But soon, they were cherishing the new hope that it might indeed be them. Nayra, to her credit, maintained an extraordinary dignity in the face of the fact that she, of all people, had finally been rejected. She dressed in plain clothes. She spoke and ate simply. Of course, she looked more devastatingly beautiful than ever, and everyone’s eyes were reddened by air-borne grit in any case, so it was impossible to tell how much she had really been crying. Now, as the buildings of Al Janb creaked and the breakers rolled and the wind howled through the teeth of the mountains, Jalila saw the gaudy, seeking and competing creatures who so often surrounded Nayra quite differently. Nayra was not, had never been, in control of them. She was more like the gaudy carcass over which, flashing their teeth, their eyes, stretching their limbs, they endlessly fought. Often, riven by a sadness far deeper than she had ever experienced, missing something she couldn’t explain, wandering alone or lying in her dreamtent, Jalila nearly went back to Nayra… But she never did.

  This was the Season of Winds, and Jalila was heartily sick of herself and Al Janb and the girls and the mahwagis and the mothers, and of this changing, buffeting banshee weather which seemed to play with her moods. The skies, sometimes now, were entirely beautiful, strung by the curling multicoloured banners of sand which the winds had lifted from distant corners of the continent. There was crimson and there was sapphire. The distant saharas of Jalila’s dreams had come to haunt her. They fell, as the trees tore and the paint stripped from the shutters and what remained of Pavo’s arches collapsed, in an irritating grit which worked its way into all the crevices of your body and every weave of your clothes.

  The tariqua had spoken of the pain of nothing, and then of the pain everything. At the time, Jalila had understood neither, but now, she felt she understood the pain of nothing all too well. The product of the combined genes of her three mothers; Loving Ananke, ever-curious Pavo, proud and talkative Lya, she had always felt glad to recognise these characteristics mingled in herself, but now she wondered if these traits hadn’t cancelled each other out. She was a null-point, a zero, clumsy and destructive and unloving. She was Jalila, and she walked alone and uncaring through this Season of Winds.

  One morning, the weather was especially harsh. Jalila was alone in the haramlek, although she cared little where she or anywhere else was. A shutter must have come loose somewhere. That often happened now. It had been banging and hammering so long it began to irritate even her. She climbed stairs and slammed doors over jamming drifts of mica. She flapped back irritably at flapping curtains. Still, the banging went on. Yet all the windows and doors were now secure. She was sure of it. Unless…

  Someone was at the front door. She could see their a swirling globular head through the greenish glass mullion. Even though they could surely see her as well, the banging went on. Jalila wondered if she wanted it to be Nayra; after all, this was how she had come to her after the moulid; a sweet and needy human being to drag her out from her dreams. But it was only Kalal. As the door shoved Jalila back, she tried not to look disappointed.

  �
��You can’t do this with your life!”

  “Do what?”

  “This—nothing. And then not answering the fucking door…” Kalal prowled the hallway as the door banged back and forth and tapestries flailed, looking for clues as if he was a detective. “Let’s go out.”

  Even in this weather, Jalila supposed she owed it to Robin. Then Kalal had wanted to go north, and she insisted on going south, and was not in any mood for arguing. It was an odd journey, so unlike the ones they’d undertaken in the summer. They wrapped their heads and faces in flapping howlis, and tried to ride mostly in the forest, but the trees whipped and flapped and the raw air still abraded their faces.

  They took lunch down by a flatrock shore, in what amounted to shelter, although there was still little enough of it as the wind eddied about them. This could have been the same spot where they had stopped in summer, but it was hard to tell; the light was so changed, the sky so bruised. Kalal seemed changed, too. His face beneath his howli seemed older as he tried to eat their aish before the sand-laden air got to it, and his chin looked prickled and abraded. Jalila supposed this was the same facial growth that his father Ibra was so fond of sporting. She also supposed he must choose to shave his off in the way that some women on some decadent planets were said to shave their legs and armpits.

  “Come a bit closer—” she half-shouted, working her way back into the lee of the bigger rock beside which she was sitting to make room for him. “I want you to tell me what you know about love, Kalal.”

  Kalal hunched beside her. For a while, he just continued tearing and chewing bits of aish with his body pressed against hers as the winds boiled around them, the warmth of their flesh almost meeting. And Jalila wondered if men and women, when their lives and needs had been more closely intertwined, had perhaps known the answer to her question. What was love, after all? It would have been nice to think that, in those dim times of myth, men and women had whispered the answer to that question to each other…

  She thought then that Kalal hadn’t properly heard her. He was telling her about his father, and a planet he barely remembered, but on which he was born. The sky there had been fractalled gold and turquoise—colours so strange and bright that they came as a delight and a shock each morning. It was a place of many islands, and one great city. His father had been a fisherman and boat-repairer of sorts there as well, although the boats had been much grander than anything you ever saw at Al Janb, and the fish had lived not as single organisms, but as complex shoals which were caught not for their meat, but for their joint minds. Ibra had been approached by a woman from off-world, who had wanted a ship on which she could sail alone around the whole lonely band of the northern oceans. She had told him that she was sick of human company. The planning and the making of the craft was a joy for Ibra, because such a lonely journey had been one that he had long dreamed of making, if ever he’d had the time and money. The ship was his finest ever creation, and it turned out as they worked on it that neither he nor the woman were quite as sick of human company as they had imagined. They fell in love as the keel and the spars grew in the city dockyards and the ship’s mind was nurtured, and as they did so they slowly re-learned the expressions of sexual need between the male and female.

  “You mean he raped her?”

  Kalal tossed his last nub of bread towards the waves. “I mean that they made love.”

  After the usual negotiations and contracts, and after the necessary insertions of the appropriate cells, Ibra and this woman (whom Kalal didn’t name in his story, any more than he named the world) set sail together, fully intending to conceive a child in the fabled way of old.

  “Which was you?”

  Kalal scowled. It was impossible to ask him even simple questions on this subject without making him look annoyed. “Of course it was! How many of me do you think there are?” Then he lapsed into silence. The sands swirled in coloured helixes before them.

  “That woman—your birthmother. What happened to her?”

  “She wanted to take me away, of course—to some haramlek on another world, just as she’d been planning all along. My father was just a toy to her. As soon as their ship returned, she started making plans, issuing contracts. There was a long legal dispute with my father. I was placed in a birthsac, in stasis.”

  “And your father won?”

  Kalal scowled. “He took me here, anyway. Which is winning enough.”

  There were many other questions about this story which Jalila wanted to have asked Kalal if she hadn’t already pressed too far. What, after all, did this tale of dispute and deception have to do with love? And were Kalal and Ibra really fugitives? It would explain quite a lot. Once more, in that familiar welling, she felt sorry for him. Men were such strange, sad creatures; forever fighting, angry, lost…

  “I’m glad you’re here anyway,” she said. Then, on impulse, one of those careless things you do, she took that rough and ugly chin in her hand, turned his face towards hers and kissed him lightly on the lips.

  “What was that for?”

  “El-hamdu-l-Illah. That was for thanks.”

  They plodded further on their hayawans. They came eventually to a cliff-edge so high that the sea and sky above and beneath vanished. Jalila already knew what they would see as they made their way along it, but still it was a shock; that qasr, thrust into these teeming ribbons of sand. The winds whooped and howled, and the hayawans raised their heads and howled back at it. In this grinding atmosphere, Jalila could see how the qasrs had been carved over long years from pure natural rock. They dismounted, and struggled bent-backed across the narrowing track towards the qasr’s studded door. Jalila raised her fist and beat on it.

  She glanced back at Kalal, but his face was entirely hidden beneath his hood. Had they always intended to come here? But they had travelled too far to do otherwise now; Robin and Abu were tired and near-blinded; they all needed rest and shelter. She beat the door again, but the sound was lost in the booming storm. Perhaps the tariqua had left with the last of the Season of Rockets, just as had most of the aliens. Jalila was about to turn away when the door, as if thrown by the wind, blasted open. There was no one on the other side, and the hallway beyond was dark as the bottom of a dry well. Robin hoiked her head back and howled and resisted as Jalila hauled him in. Kalal with Abu followed. The door, with a massive drumbeat, hammered itself shut behind them. Of course, it was only some old mechanism of this house, but Jalila felt the hairs on the nape of her neck rise.

  They hobbled the hayawans beside largest of the scalloped arches, and walked on down the passageway beyond. The wind was still with them, and the shapes of the pillars were like the swirling helixes of sand made solid. It was hard to tell what of this place had been made by the hands of women and what was entirely natural. If the qasr had seemed deserted in the heat of summer, it was entirely abandoned now. A scatter of glass windchimes, torn apart by the wind. A few broken plates. Some flapping cobwebs of tapestry.

  Kalal pulled Jalila’s hand.

  “Let’s go back…”

  But there was greater light ahead, the shadows of the speeding sky. Here was the courtyard where they had glimpsed the tariqua. She had plainly gone now—the fountain was dry and clogged, the bushes were bare tangles of wire. They walked out beneath the tiled arches, looking around. The wind was like a million voices, rising in ululating chorus. This was a strange and empty place; somehow dangerous… Jalila span around. The tariqua was standing there, her robes flapping. With insect fingers, she beckoned.

  “Are you leaving?” Jalila asked. “I mean, this place…”

  The tariqua had led them into the shelter of a tall, wind-echoing chamber set with blue and white tiles. There were a few rugs and cushions scattered on the floor, but still the sense of abandonment remained. As if, Jalila thought as the tariqua folded herself on the floor gestured that they join her, this was her last retreat.

  “No, Jalila. I won’t be leaving Habara. Itfaddal…Do sit down.”

 
The stepped from their sandals and obeyed. Jalila couldn’t quite remember now whether Kalal had encountered the tariqua on her visit to their haramlek, although it seemed plain from his stares at her, and the way her grey-white gaze returned them, that they knew of each other in some way. Coffee was brewing in the corner, under a tiny blue spirit flame which, as it fluttered in the many drafts, would have taken hours to heat anything. Yet the spout of the brass pot was steaming. And there were dates, too, and nuts and seeds. The tariqua, apologising for her inadequacy as a host, nevertheless insisted that they help themselves. And somewhere there was a trough of water, too, for their hayawans, and a basket of acram leaves.

  Uneasily, they sipped from their cups, chewed the seeds. Kalal had picked up a chipped lump of old stone and was playing with it nervously. Jalila couldn’t quite see what it was.

  “So,” he said, clearing his throat, “you’ve been to and from the stars, have you?”

  “As have you. Perhaps you could name the planet? It may have been somewhere that we have both visited…”

  Kalal swallowed. His lump of old stone clicked the floor. A spindle of wind played chill on Jalila’s neck. Then—she didn’t know how it began—the tariqua was talking of Ghezirah, the great and fabled city which lay at the centre of all the Ten Thousand and One Worlds. No one Jalila had ever met or heard of had ever visited Ghezirah—not even Nayra’s mothers, yet this tariqua talked of it as if she knew it well. Before, Jalila had somehow imagined the tariqua trailing from distant planet to planet with dull cargoes of ore and biomass in her ship’s holds. To her mind, Ghezirah had always been more than half-mythical—a place from which a dubious historical figure such as the Sainted Joanna might easily emanate, but certainly not composed of solid streets upon which the gnarled and bony feet of this old woman might once have strode…

  Ghezirah—she could see it now in her mind, smell the shadowy lobbies, see the ever-climbing curve of its mezzanines and rooftops vanishing into the impossible greens of the Floating Ocean. But every time Jalila’s vision seemed about to solidify, the tariqua said something else which made it tremble and change. And then the tariqua said the strangest thing of all, which was the City At The End Of All Roads was actually alive. Not alive in the meagre sense in which every town has a sort of life, but truly living. The city thought. It grew. It responded. There was no central mind or focus to this consciousness, because Ghezirah itself, its teeming streets and minarets and rivers and caleches and its many millions of lives, was itself the mind…