Year’s Best SF 16 Read online

  So, for the first time, I will write myself into this story. Perhaps that is the secret to affecting events as they unfold. And after all, I, too, have need of meaning. Beside me, Gunadhya’s ghost nods silently in agreement.

  Isha sits in the ship’s chamber, her fingers running through her hair, her gaze troubled. She has always been restless. For all her confidences I can only guess what it is she is seeking through the compilation of the legends and myths of the inhabited worlds. As I wander through the story-labyrinths of my own making, I hope to find, at the end, my Isha, my S{ryavati.

  Isha is, I know, particularly interested in stories of origin, of ancestry. I think it is because she has no knowledge of her natal family. When she was a young woman, she was the victim of a history raid. The raiders took from her all her memories. Her memories are scattered now in the performances of entertainers, the conversations of strangers, and the false memories of imitation men. The extinction of her identity was so clean that she would not recognize those memories as her own, were she to come across them. What a terrible and wondrous age this is, in which such things are possible!

  In her wanderings, Isha hasn’t yet been able to find out who her people were. All she has as a clue is an ancient, battered set of books: the eighteen volumes of the Kathasaritsagara. They are, to all appearances, her legacy, all that was left of her belongings after the raid. The pages are yellow and brittle, the text powdery, fading. She has spent much of her youth learning the lost art of reading, learning the lost scripts of now-dead languages. Inside the cover of the first volume is a faint inscription, a name: Vandana. There are notes in the same hand in the margins of the text. An ancestor, she thinks.

  This is why Isha is particularly interested in stories of origin. She thinks she’ll find out something about herself by listening to other people’s tales of where they came from.

  I discovered this on my very first journey with her. After she brought me into existence, we went to a world called Jesanli, where the few city-states were hostile toward us. None would receive us, until we met the Kiha, a nomadic desert tribe who had a tradition of hospitality. None of the inhabitants of this planet have much by way of arts or machinery, civilization or learning. But the Kiha have stories that are poetic and strange. Here is the first of them.

  Once upon a time our ancestors lived in a hot and crowded space, in near darkness. They were not like us. They were not men, nor women, but had a different form. The ancestors, having poor sight, lived in fear all the time, and when one intruded too close to another, they immediately sprang apart in terror. It was as though each moment of approach brought the possibility of a stranger, an enemy, entering their personal domain. Imagine a lot of people who cannot speak, forced to live in a small, cramped, dark cave, where every blundering collision is a nightmare—for that is what it was like for them. Their fear became part of them, becoming a physical presence like a burden carried on the back.

  But every once in a while two or more of them would be pushed close enough together to actually behold each other dimly through their nearly useless eyes. During these moments of recognition they were able to see themselves in the other person, and to reach out, and to draw together. In time they formed tight little family units. Then they had no more need to carry around their burdens of fear, which, when released, turned into light.

  Yes, yes. You heard that right. Although they continued to live in their furnace-like world and be cramped together, what emanated from them—despite everything—was light.

  Isha’s eyes lit up when she heard this story. She told the Kiha that the story had hidden meanings, that it contained the secret of how the stars burn. They listened politely to her explanation and thanked her for her story. She wanted to know where they had first heard the tale, but the question made no sense to them. Later she told me that for all their non-technological way of life, the Kiha must have once been sky-dwellers.

  They had told Isha the story to repay a debt, because she brought them gifts. So when she explained their story back to them, they had to tell her another story to even things out. They did this with reluctance, because a story is a gift not easily given to strangers.

  Here is the second story.

  In the beginning there was just one being, whose name was That Which Is Nameless. The Nameless one was vast, undifferentiated, and lay quiescent, waiting. In that place there was no darkness, for there was no light.

  Slowly the Nameless One wearied of its existence. It said into the nothingness: Who am I? But there was no answer because there was no other. It said unto itself: Being alone is a burden. I will carve myself up and make myself companions.

  So the Nameless One gathered itself and spread itself violently into all directions, thinning out as it did so. It was the greatest explosion ever known, and from its shards were born people and animals and stars.

  And so when light falls on water, or a man shoots an arrow at another man, or a mother picks up a child, That Which Was Once Nameless answers a very small part of the question: Who Am I?

  And yet the Once Nameless still reaches out, beyond the horizon of what we know and don’t know, breaking itself up into smaller and smaller bits like the froth from a wave that hits a rocky shore. What is it seeking? Where is it going? Nobody can tell.

  I could tell that Isha was excited by this story also; she wanted to tell the Kiha that the second story was really about the birth of the universe—but I restrained her. To the Kiha, what is real and what is not real is not a point of importance. To them there are just stories and stories, and the universe has a place for all of them.

  Later Isha asked me:

  “How is it possible that the Kiha have forgotten they once traversed the stars? Those two stories contain the essence of the sciences, the vigyan-shastras, in disguise. How can memory be so fragile?”

  She bit her lip, and I know she was thinking of her own lost past. In my life, too, there are gaps I cannot fill.

  The stories in the Kathasaritsagara are not like these tales of the Kiha. Queen S{ryavati was of a serious mien, spending much time in contemplation of Lord Shiva. To lighten her burdens I collected tales of ordinary, erring mortals and divines: cheating wives, sky-dwelling, shape-shifting Vidyadharas, and the denizens, dangerous and benign, of the great forests. These were first told, so the story goes, by Shiva himself. They are nothing like the stories of the Kiha.

  Isha has so much to learn! Like S{ryavati, she is a woman of reserve. She conceals her pain as much as she can from the world. Her interaction with the Kiha is impersonal, almost aloof. Now if it were left to me, I would go into their dwelling places, live with them, listen to gossip. Find out who is in love with whom, what joys and sorrows the seasons bring, whether there is enmity between clans. I have never been much interested in the cosmic dramas of gods and heroes.

  However, the third Kiha tale is quite unlike the first two. I don’t know what to make of it.

  Once, in the darkness, a man wandered onto a beach where he saw a fire. He came upon it and saw that the fire was another man, all made of light, who spun in a circle on the beach as though drunk. The first man, warmed by the glow of the fire-man, wanted to talk to him, but the fire-man didn’t take any notice of him. The fire-man kept spinning, round and round, and the first man kept yelling out questions, spinning round and round with the fire-man so he could see his face. And there were three small biting insects who dared not bite the fire-man but wanted to bite the cheeks of the other man, and they kept hovering around the other man, and he kept waving them off, but they would go behind him until he forgot about them, and then they’d circle around and bite him again.

  Then?

  Then nothing. They are all, all five of them, still on that dark beach, dancing still.

  Isha thinks this story is a more recent origin story. She speculates that the ancestral people of the Kiha come from a world which has three moons. A world that floated alone in space until it fell into the embrace of a star. There are world
s like that, I’ve heard, planets wandering without their shepherd stars. It is not unlikely that one of these was captured by a sun. This story was told to Isha by a child, who ran up to us in secret when we were leaving. She wanted to make us a gift of some sort, but that was all she had.

  If Isha is right, then the Kiha told us the stories in the wrong order. Arrange them like this: Birth of the universe, birth of their sun, coming into being of their world.

  But these old stories have as many meanings as there are stars in the sky. To assign one single interpretation to them is to miss the point. Take the second story. It could be as much a retelling of a certain philosophical idea from the ancient Indic texts called the Upanishads as a disguised theory of cosmological origin. In my other life I was learned in Sanskrit.

  But it is also important what we make of these stories. What meaning we find in them, as wanderers by the seashore find first one shell, then another, and form them into a chain of their own making.

  Here is the start of a story I have made by braiding together the Kiha tales.

  In the beginning, Isha made the world. Wishing to know herself, she broke herself up into parts. One of them is me, Somadeva, poet and wanderer. We circle each other for ever, one maker, one made. . . .

  Sometimes I wonder if I have made her up as much as she has concocted me. If we are fictions of each other, given substance only through our mutual narratives.

  Perhaps the Kiha are right: stories make the world.

  I wake and find myself on that high stone balcony. The queen is watching me. A small fire in an earthen pail burns between us, an angeethi. Over it, hanging from an iron support, is a black pot containing the brew.

  “Did it take you too far, my poet?” she asks, worried. “You told me of far worlds and impossible things. You spoke some words I couldn’t understand. An entertaining tale. But I only want a glimpse of what is to come in the next few days, not eons. I want to know . . .”

  I am confused. When I first opened my eyes I thought I saw Isha. I thought I was on the ship, telling Isha a story about S{ryavati. She likes me to recite the old tales, as she lies back in her bunk, running her fingers slowly over her brow. I wish I could caress that brow myself.

  So how is it that I find myself here, breathing in pine-scented Himalayan air? How is it my mouth has a complex aftertaste that I cannot quite identify, which has something to do with the herbal brew steaming in the pot? My tongue is slightly numb, an effect of the poison in the mix.

  Or is it that in telling my story to Isha I have immersed myself so deeply in the tale that it has become reality to me?

  The queen’s eyes are dark, and filled with tears.

  “Dare I ask you to try again, my poet? Will you risk your life and sanity one more time, and tell me what you see? Just a step beyond this moment, a few days hence. Who will win this war. . . .”

  What I cannot tell her is that I’ve seen what she wants to know. I know what history has recorded of the battle. The prince, her son, took his father’s throne and drove him to his death. And the queen . . .

  It is past bearing.

  What I am trying to do is to tell her a story in which I am a character. If I can have a say in the way things turn out, perhaps I can save her. The king and his son are beyond my reach. But S{ryavati? She is susceptible to story. If she recognizes, in the fictional Somadeva’s love for Isha, the real Somadeva’s unspoken, agonized love, perhaps she’ll step back from the brink of history.

  My fear is that if events unfurl as history records, I will lose my S{ryavati. Will I then be with Isha, wandering the stars in search of stories? Or will I die here on this earth, under the shadow of the palace walls, with the night sky nothing but a dream? Who will survive, the real Somadeva or the fictional one? And which is which?

  All I can do is stall S{ryavati with my impossible tales—and hope.

  “I don’t know how far the brew will take me,” I tell her. “But for you, my queen, I will drink again.”

  I take a sip.

  I am back on the ship. Isha is asleep, her hair in tangles over her face. Her face in sleep is slack, except for that habitual little frown between her brows. The frown makes her look more like a child, not less. I wonder if her memories come to her in her dreams.

  So I begin another story, although I remain a little confused. Who is listening: Isha or S{ryavati?

  I will tell a story about Inish. It is a place on a far world and one of the most interesting we have visited. I hesitate to call Inish a city, because it is not really one. It is a collection of buildings and people, animals and plants, and is referred to by the natives as though it has an independent consciousness. But also it has no clear boundary because the mini-settlements at what might have been its edge keep wandering off and returning, apparently randomly.

  Identities are also peculiar among the inhabitants of Inish. A person has a name, let us say Mana, but when Mana is with her friend Ayo, they together form an entity named Tukrit. If you meet them together and ask them for their names, they will say “Tukrit,” not “Ayo and Mana.” Isha once asked them whether Ayo and Mana were parts of Tukrit, and they both laughed. “Tukrit is not bits of this or that,” Mana said. “Then who just spoke, Mana or Tukrit?” Isha asked. “Tukrit, of course,” they said, giggling in an indulgent manner.

  “I am Isha,” Isha told them. “But who am I when I’m with you?”

  “We are teso,” they said, looking at each other. Isha knew what that meant. “Teso” is, in their language, a word that stands for anything that is unformed, not quite there, a possibility, a potential.

  It is hard for outsiders to understand whether the Inish folk have family units or not. Several people may live in one dwelling, but since their dwellings are connected by little corridors and tunnels, it is hard to say where one ends and another begins. The people in one dwelling may be four older females, one young woman, three young men and five children. Ask them their names and depending on which of them are present at that time, they will say a different collective name. If there are only Baijo, Akar, and Inha around, they’ll say, “We are Garho.” If Sami, Kinjo, and Vif are also there, then they are collectively an entity known as “Parak.” And so on and so forth.

  How they keep from getting confused is quite beyond Isha and me.

  “Tell me, Isha,” I said, once. “You and I . . . what are we when we are together?”

  She looked at me sadly.

  “Isha and Somadeva,” she said. But there was a faint query in her tone.

  “What do you think, Somadeva?” she said.

  “Teso,” I said.

  Here is a story from Inish.

  There was Ikla. Then, no Ikla but Bako walking away from what was now Samish. While walking, Bako found herself being part of a becoming, but she could not see who or what she was becoming with. Ah, she thought, it is a goro being; one that does not show itself except through a sigh in the mind. She felt the teso build up slowly, felt herself turn into a liquid, sky, rain. Then there was no teso, no goro, no Bako, but a fullness, a ripening, and thus was Chihuli come into happening.

  And this Chihuli went shouting down the summer lanes, flinging bits of mud and rock around, saying, There is a storm coming! A storm! And Chihuli went up the hill and sank down before the sacred stones and died there. So there was nothing left but Bako, who looked up with enormous eyes at the sky, and felt inside her the emptiness left by the departure of the goro being.

  Bako, now, why had the goro being chosen her for a happening? Maybe because she had always felt teso with storms, and since storms were rare here and people had to be warned, there was a space inside her for the kind of goro being that lived for storms and their warning. So that is how the right kind of emptiness had brought Chihuli into being.

  Pods kept forming around Bako but she resisted being pulled in. It was because of the coming storm, because she could sense the teso with it. Nobody else could. With others it was other beings, wild things and bright eyes i
n the darkness, sometimes even the slowtrees, but only with Bako was there the emptiness inside shaped like a storm. And so she felt the teso, the way she had with the goro being.

  The air crackled with electricity; dark clouds filled the sky, like a ceiling about to come down. Everywhere you looked, it was gray: gray water, gray beings, looking up with wondering, frightened eyes. Only for Bako, as the teso built, was the excitement, the anticipation. Many had felt that before when they found their special pod, their mate-beings. The feeling of ripening, of coming into a fullness. The wild sweetness of it. Now Bako felt something like that many times over.

  Samish came sweeping up the hill where she was standing, trying to swoop her back with them, so they could be Ikla again, and the teso with the storm would become nothing more. But she resisted, and Samish had to go away. This was a thing stronger than the love-bonds they had known.

  Came the storm. A magnificent storm it was, rain and thunder, and the legs of lightning dancing around Bako. Rivers swollen, running wild over land, into homes, sweeping everything away. Hills began to move, and the beings ran from their homes. Only Bako stood in the rain, on the highest hill, and the storm danced for her.

  The teso became something. We call it T’fan. T’fan played with the world, spread over half the planet, wrapped her wet arms around trees and hills. The storm went on until the beings thought there would be no more sun, no more dry land. Then one day it ceased.