The Mammoth Book of SF Stories by Women (4 page)

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
Kathāsaritsāgara
are not like these tales of the Kiha. Queen Sūryavati 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 Sūryavati, 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 worlds 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 Sūryavati. 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 Sūryavati? 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 Sūryavati. 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 Sūryavati 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 Sūryavati?

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 in 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.

Samish gathered itself up, and went tiredly up the hill to find Bako, or to mourn the death of Ikla.

Bako was not there. What was there was standing just as they had left Bako, arms outstretched to the sky. She looked at them with faraway eyes, and they saw then that although the sky was clearing, the storm was still in her. Tiny sparks of lightning flashed from her fingertips. Her hair was singed.

They saw then that the storm had filled her empty spaces so completely that there would never
be Ikla again. They did not even feel
teso
. They walked away from her and prepared for mourning.

T’fan stands there still, her eyes filled with storms, her fingers playing with lightning. Her hair has singed away almost completely. She needs no food or water, and seems, in the way of storms, to be quite content. When storms come to her people they cluster around her and she comes to life, dancing
in their midst as though relatives have come again from far away. Then T’fan goes away and is replaced by something larger and more complex than we can name.

“What does that story mean, I wonder,” Isha said.

“Sometimes stories are just stories,” I told her.

“You’ve never told me what happened to Sūryavati, after you
took the next sip, told her the next tale,” she told me, turning away from
the consequences of my remark. The fact that you can’t wrest meaning from everything like fruit from trees – that meaning is a matter not only of story but of what the listener brings to the tale – all that is not something she can face at the moment. She is so impatient, my Isha.

I steeled myself.

“The Queen was distraught with grief when her son took the kingdom and destroyed his father,”
I said. “She threw herself on his funeral pyre. I could not save her.”