The Mammoth Book of SF Stories by Women (3 page)

In closing, let me say, as Marx does, that “one has to leave philosophy aside.” You must inure yourself against these pernicious novels about cockroaches
and spaceships (and did you mention dragons? All dragons are either Freudians or fascists), for they can only lead you to a totalizing anthropogenetic attitude
toward the world. Concentrate on the real work that needs to be done, Comrade.

(For all that, let me thank you for the sweaters. I can only hope you did not buy them in that cursed cesspool of superexploitation, SM Shoemart. It is getting
quite cold here in America, hivemind of evil, and it has been increasingly impractical for me to fly out without any sort of protective covering.)

Long live the Philippines! Long live the Revolution!

SOMADEVA: A SKY RIVER SUTRA

Vandana Singh

I am Somadeva.

I was once a man, a poet, a teller of tales, but I am long dead now. I lived in the eleventh century of the Common Era in northern India. Then we could only dream of that fabulous device, the udan-khatola, the ship that flies between worlds. Then, the skydwelling Vidyadharas were myth, occupying a reality different from our own. And the
only wings I had with which to make my journeys were those of my imagination …

Who or what am I now, in this age when flying between worlds is commonplace? Who brought me into being, here in this small, cramped space, with its smooth metallic surfaces, and the round window revealing an endless field of stars?

It takes me a moment to recognize Isha. She is lying in her bunk, her hair spread over
the pillow, looking at me.

And then I remember the first time I woke up in this room, bewildered. Isha told me she had re-created me. She fell in love with me fifteen centuries after my death, after she read a book I wrote, an eighteen-volume compendium of folktales and legends, called the
Kathāsaritsāgara
: The Ocean of Streams of Story.

“You do remember that?” she asked me anxiously upon my
first awakening.

“Of course I remember,” I said, as my memories returned to me in a great rush.

The
Kathāsaritsāgara
was my life’s work. I wandered all over North India, following rumors of the Lost Manuscript, risking death to interview murderers and demons, cajoling stories out of old women and princes, merchants and nursing mothers. I took these stories and organized them into patterns of
labyrinthine
complexity. In my book there are stories within stories – the chief narrator tells a story and the characters in that story tell other stories and so on. Some of the narrators refer to the stories of previous narrators; thus each is not only a teller of tales but also a participant. The story-frames themselves form a complex, multireferential tapestry. And the story of how the
Kathāsaritsāgara
came to be is the first story of them all.

I began this quest because of a mystery in my own life, but it became a labor of love, an attempt to save a life. That is why I wove the stories into a web, so I could hold safe the woman I loved. I could not have guessed that fifteen centuries after my death, another very different woman would read my words and fall in love with me.

The first time
I met Isha, she told me she had created me to be her companion on her journeys between the stars. She wants to be the Somadeva of this age, collecting stories from planet to planet in the galaxy we call Sky River. What a moment of revelation it was for me, when I first knew that there were other worlds, peopled and habited, rich with stories! Isha told me that she had my spirit trapped in a crystal
jewel-box. The jewel-box has long feelers like the antennae of insects, so that I can see and hear and smell, and thereby taste the worlds we visit.

“How did you pull my spirit from death? From history? Was I reborn in this magic box?”

She shook her head.

“It isn’t magic, Somadeva. Oh, I can’t explain! But tell me, I need to know. Why didn’t you write yourself into the
Kathāsaritsāgara?
Who,
really, is this narrator of yours, Gunaādhya? I know there is a mystery there …”

She asks questions all the time. When she is alone with me, she is often animated like this. My heart reaches out to her, this lost child of a distant age.

Gunādhya is a goblin-like creature who is the narrator of the
Kathāsaritsāgara
. According to the story I told, Gunādhya was a minion of Shiva himself who was
reborn on Earth due to a curse. His mission was to tell the greater story of which the
Kathāsaritsāgara
is only a page: the Brhat-kathā. But he was forbidden to speak or write in Sanskrit or any other language of humankind. Wandering through a forest one day, he came upon a
company of the flesh-eating Pishāch. He hid himself and listened to them, and learned their strange tongue. In time he wrote
the great Brhat-kathā in the Pishāchi language in a book made of the bark of trees, in his own blood.

They say that he was forced to burn the manuscript, and that only at the last moment did a student of his pull out one section from the fire. I tracked that surviving fragment for years, but found only a few scattered pages, and the incomplete memories of those who had seen the original, or been
told the tales. From these few I reconstructed what I have called the
Kathāsaritsāgara
. In all this, I have drawn on ancient Indic tradition, in which the author is a compiler, an embellisher, an arranger of stories, some written, some told. He fragments his consciousness into the various fictional narrators in order to be a conduit for their tales.

In most ancient works, the author goes a step
further: he walks himself whole into the story, like an actor onto the stage.

This is one way I have broken from tradition. I am not, myself, a participant in the stories of the
Kathāsaritsāgara
. And Isha wants to know why.

Sometimes I sense my narrator, Gunādhya, as one would a ghost, a presence standing by my side. He is related to me in some way that is not clear to me. All these years he
has been coming into my dreams, filling in gaps in my stories, or contradicting what I’ve already written down. He is a whisper in my ear; sometimes my tongue moves at his command. All the time he is keeping secrets from me, tormenting me with the silence between his words. Perhaps he is waiting until the time is right.

‘I don’t know,’ I tell Isha. ‘I don’t know why I didn’t put myself in the
story. I thought it would be enough, you know, to cast a story web, to trap my queen. To save her from death …”

“Tell me about her,” Isha says. Isha knows all about Sūryavati but she wants to hear it from me. Over and over.

I remember …

A high balcony, open, not latticed. The mountain air, like wine. In the inner courtyard below us, apricots are drying in the sun in great orange piles. Beyond
the courtyard walls I can hear men’s voices, the clash of steel as soldiers practice their murderous art. The king is preparing to battle his own son, who lusts for the
throne and cannot wait for death to take his father. But it is for the Queen that I am here. She is standing by the great stone vase on the balcony, watering the holy tulsi plant. She wears a long skirt of a deep, rich red, and
a green shawl over the delicately embroidered tunic. Her slender fingers shake; her gaze, when it lifts to me, is full of anguish. Her serving maids hover around her, unable to relieve her of her pain. At last she sits, drawing the edge of her fine silken veil about her face. A slight gesture of the hand. My cue to begin the story that will, for a moment, smooth that troubled brow.

It is for
her that I have woven the story web. Every day it gives her a reason to forget despair, to live a day longer. Every day she is trapped in it, enthralled by it a little more. There are days when the weight of her anxiety is too much, when she breaks the spell of story and requires me for another purpose. Then I must, for love of her, take part in an ancient and dangerous rite. But today, the day that
I am remembering for Isha, Sūryavati simply wants to hear a story.

I think I made a mistake with Sūryavati, fifteen centuries ago. If I’d written myself into the
Kathāsaritsāgara
, perhaps she would have realized how much I needed her to be alive. After all, Vyāsa, who penned the immortal
Mahābhārata
, was as much a participant in the tale as its chronicler. And the same is true of Vālmīki, who
wrote the
Rāmāyana
and was himself a character in it, an agent.

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, Guna dhya’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 confidence 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 Sūryavati.

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
Kathāsaritsāgara
. 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.