Year’s Best SF 15 (5 page)

Staggering a little, his knees protesting, he steps through the door.

After three universes he finds the place.

It is peaceful. There is a rock rising from a great turquoise sea of sand. The blue sand laps against the rock, making lulling, sibilant sounds. In the high, clear air, winged creatures call to each other between endless rays of light. He squints in the sudden brightness.

He closes her eyes, buries her deep at the base of the rock, under the blue, flowing sand.

He stands there, breathing hard from the exertion, his hands bruised, thinking he should say something. But what? He does not even know if she's Muslim or Hindu. When she spoke to him earlier, what word had she used for God? Was it Allah or Ishwar, or something neutral?

He can't remember.

At last he says the Al-Fatihah, and, stumbling a little, recites whatever little he knows of the Hindu scriptures. He ends with the phrase
Isha Vasyamidam Sarvam
.

Tears run off his cheeks into the blue sand, and disappear without leaving a trace.

The farishta waits.

“Why didn't you do something!” Abdul Karim rails at the shadow. He falls to his knees in the blue sand, weeping. “Why, if you are truly a farishta, didn't you save my sister?”

He sees now that he has been a fool—this shadow creature is no angel, and he, Abdul Karim, no Prophet.

He weeps for Ayesha, for this nameless young woman, for the body he saw in the ditch, for his lost friend Gangadhar.

The shadow leans toward him. Abdul Karim gets up, looks around once, and steps through the door.

He steps out into his drawing room. The first thing he discovers is that his mother is dead. She looks quite peaceful, lying in her bed, her white hair flowing over the pillow.

She might be asleep, her face is so calm.

He stands there for a long time, unable to weep. He picks up the phone—there is still no dial tone. After that he goes about methodically cleaning up the drawing room, washing the floor, taking the bedding off the divan. Later, after the rain has stopped, he will burn it in the courtyard. Who will notice another fire in the burning city?

When everything is cleaned up, he lies down next to his mother's body like a small boy and goes to sleep.

The sun is out. An uneasy peace lies over the city. His mother's funeral is over. Relatives have come and gone—his younger son came, but did not stay. The older son sent a sympathy card from America.

Gangadhar's house is still empty, a blackened ruin. Whenever he has ventured out, Abdul Karim has asked about his friend's whereabouts. The last he heard was that Gangadhar was alone in the house when the mob came, and his Muslim neighbors sheltered him until he could join his wife and children at her parents' house. But it has been so long that he does not believe it any more. He has also heard that Gangadhar was dragged out, hacked to pieces and his body set on fire. The city has calmed down—the army had to be called in—but it is still rife with rumors. Hundreds of people are missing. Civil rights groups comb the town, interviewing people, revealing, in clipped, angry press statements, the negligence of the state government, the collusion of the police in some of the violence. Some of them came to his house, too, very clean, very young people, burning with an idealism that, however misplaced, is comforting to see.
He has said nothing about the young woman who died in his arms, but he prays for that bereft family every day.

For days he has ignored the shadow at his shoulder. But now he knows that the sense of betrayal will fade. Whose fault is it, after all, that he ascribed to the creatures he once called farishte the attributes of angels? Could angels, even, save human beings from themselves?

The creatures watch us with a child's curiosity, he thinks, but they do not understand. Just as their own worlds are incomprehensible to me, so are our ways to them. They are not Allah's minions.

The space where the universes branch off—the heart of the metacosmos—now appears remote to him, like a dream. He is ashamed of his earlier arrogance. How can he possibly fathom Allah's creation in one glance? No finite mind can, in one meager lifetime, truly comprehend the vastness, the grandeur of Allah's scheme. All we can do is to discover a bit of the truth here, a bit there, and thus to sing His praises.

But there is so much pain in Abdul Karim's soul that he cannot imagine writing down one syllable of the new language of the infinite. His dreams are haunted by the horrors he has seen, the images of his mother and the young woman who died in his arms. He cannot even say his prayers. It is as though Allah has abandoned him, after all.

The daily task of living—waking up, performing his ablutions, setting the little pot on the gas stove to boil water for one cup of tea, to drink that tea alone—unbearable thought! To go on, after so many have died—to go on without his mother, his children, without Gangadhar…Everything appears strangely remote: his aging face in the mirror, the old house, even the litchi tree in his courtyard. The familiar lanes of his childhood hold memories that no longer seem to belong to him. Outside, the neighbors are in mourning; old Ameen Khan Sahib weeps for his grandson; Ramdas is gone, Imran is gone. The wind still carries the soot of the burnings. He finds little piles of ashes everywhere, in the cracks in the cement of his courtyard, between the roots of the trees in the lane. He breathes the dead. How can he regain his heart, living in a world so wracked with pain? In
this world there is no place for the likes of him. No place for henna-scented hands rocking a child to sleep, for old-woman hands tending a garden. And no place at all for the austere beauty of mathematics.

He's thinking this when a shadow falls across the ground in front of him. He has been sitting in his courtyard, idly writing mathematical expressions with his stick on the dusty ground. He does not know whether the knife bearer is his son, or an enraged Hindu, but he finds himself ready for his death. The creatures who have watched him for so long will witness it, and wonder. Their uncomprehending presence comforts him.

He turns and rises. It is Gangadhar, his friend, who holds out his empty arms in an embrace.

Abdul Karim lets his tears run over Gangadhar's shirt. As waves of relief wash over him he knows that he has held Death at bay this time, but it will come. It will come, he has seen it. Archimedes and Ramanujan, Khayyam and Cantor died with epiphanies on their lips before an indifferent world. But this moment is eternal.

“Allah be praised!” says Abdul Karim.

Robert Charles Wilson
(www.robertcharleswilson.com)
lives in Toronto, Ontario, in Canada. Wilson's first novel, A
Hidden Place,
was published in 1986. Since then he has written more than a dozen novels, including
Spin,
which received the Hugo Award, Germany's Kurd Lasswitz Prize, and the French Grand Prix de l'Imaginaire. Among his other works are
Darwinia, Blind Lake,
and
The Chronoliths.
His most recent novel is
Julian Comstock: A Story of 22nd-Century America
(2009). He published two especially distinguished SF stories in 2009, of which this is one.

“This Peaceable Land; or, the Unbearable Vision of Harriet Beacher Stowe” appeared in
Other Earths,
edited by Nick Gevers, a paperback anthology of original stories that is in our opinion one of the best anthologies of the year. Set in the southern U.S., in an alternate late nineteenth century, it takes place in a universe in which the U.S. Civil War was avoided. It is the first of several alternate universe stories in this volume.

“I
t's worth your life to go up there,” the tavernkeeper's wife said. “What do you want to go up there for, anyway?”

“The property is for sale,” I said.

“Property!” The landlady of the roadside tavern nearly spat out the word. “There's nothing up there but sand hills and saggy old sheds. That, and a family of crazy colored people. Someone claims they sold you that? You ought to check with the bank, Mister, see about getting your money back.”

She smiled at her own joke, showing tobacco-stained teeth. In this part of the country there were spittoons in every taproom and Bull Durham advertisements on every wall. It was 1895. It was August. It was hot, and we were in the South.

I was only posing as an investor. I had no money in all the baggage I was carrying—very little, anyhow. I had photographic equipment instead.

“You go up those hills,” the tavernkeeper's wife said more soberly, “you carry a gun, and you keep it handy. I mean that.”

I had no gun.

I wasn't worried about what I might find up in the pine barrens.

I was worried about what I would tell my daughter.

 

I paid the lady for the meal she had served me and for a second meal she had put up in a neat small box. I asked her
whether a room was available for the night. There was. We discussed the arrangements and came to an agreement. Then I went out to where Percy was waiting in the carriage.

“You'll have to sleep outside,” I said. “But I got this for you.” I gave him the wrapped dinner. “And the landlady says she'll bring you a box breakfast in the morning, as long as there's nobody around to see her.”

Percy nodded. None of this came as a surprise to him. He knew where he was, and who he was, and what was expected of him. “And then,” he said, “we'll drive up to the place, weather permitting.”

To Percy it was always “the place”—each place we found.

Storm clouds had dallied along this river valley all the hot day, but no rain had come. If it came tonight, and if it was torrential, the dirt roads would quickly become useless creeks of mud. We would be stuck here for days.

And Percy would get wet, sleeping in the carriage as he did. But he preferred the carriage to the stable where our horses were put up. The carriage was covered with rubberized cloth, and there was a big sheet of mosquito netting he stretched over the open places during the night. But a truly stiff rain was bound to get in the cracks and make him miserable.

Percy Camber was an educated black man. He wrote columns and articles for the
Tocsin
, a Negro paper published out of Windsor, Canada. Three years ago a Boston press had put out a book he'd written, though he admitted the sales had been slight.

I wondered what the landlady would say if I told her Percy was a book writer. Most likely she would have denied the possibility of an educated black man. Except perhaps as a circus act, like that Barnum horse that counts to ten with its hoof.

“Make sure your gear is ready first thing,” Percy said, keeping his voice low although there was nobody else about—this was a poor tavern on a poor road in an undeveloped county. “And don't drink too much tonight, Tom, if you can help it.”

“That's sound advice,” I agreed, by way of not pledging
an answer. “Oh, and the keeper's wife tells me we ought to carry a gun. Wild men up there, she says.”

“I don't go armed.”

“Nor do I.”

“Then I guess we'll be prey for the wild men,” said Percy, smiling.

 

The room where I spent the night was not fancy, which made me feel better about leaving my employer to sleep out-of-doors. It was debatable which of us was better off. The carriage seat where Percy curled up was not infested with fleas, as was the mattress on which I lay. Percy customarily slept on a folded jacket, while my pillow was a sugar sack stuffed with corn huskings, which rattled beneath my ear as if the beetles inside were putting on a musical show.

I slept a little, woke up, scratched myself, lit the lamp, took a drink.

I will not drink, I told myself as I poured the liquor. I will not drink “to excess.” I will not become drunk. I will only calm the noise in my head.

My companion in this campaign was a bottle of rye whisky. Mister Whiskey Bottle, unfortunately, was only half full and not up to the task assigned him. I drank but kept on thinking unwelcome thoughts, while the night simmered and creaked with insect noises.

“Why do you have to go away for so long?” Elsebeth asked me.

In this incarnation she wore a white dress. It looked like her christening dress. She was thirteen years old.

“Taking pictures,” I told her. “Same as always.”

“Why can't you take pictures at the portrait studio?”

“These are different pictures, Elsie. The kind you have to travel for.”

Her flawless young face took on an accusatory cast. “Mama says you're stirring up old trouble. She says you're poking into things nobody wants to hear about any more, much less see photographs of.”

“She may be right. But I'm being paid money, and money buys pretty dresses, among other good things.”

“Why make such trouble, though? Why do you want to make people feel bad?”

Elsie was a phantom. I blinked her away. These were questions she had not yet actually posed, though our last conversation, before I left Detroit, had come uncomfortably close. But they were questions I would sooner or later have to answer.

I slept very little, despite the drink. I woke up before dawn.

I inventoried my photographic equipment by lamplight, just to make sure everything was ready.

 

It had not rained during the night. I settled up with the landlady and removed my baggage from the room. Percy had already hitched the horses to the carriage. The sky was drab under high cloud, the sun a spot of light like a candle flame burning through a linen handkerchief.

The landlady's husband was nowhere to be seen. He had gone down to Crib Lake for supplies, she said, as she packed up two box lunches, cold cuts of beef with pickles and bread, which I had requested of her. She had two adult sons living with her, one of whom I had met in the stables, and she felt safe enough, she told me, even with her husband absent. “But we're a long way from anywhere,” she added, “and the traffic along this road has been light ever since—well, ever since the Lodge closed down. I wasn't kidding about those sand hills, Mister. Be careful up there.”

“We mean to be back by nightfall,” I said.

 

My daughter Elsebeth had met Percy Camber just once, when he came to the house in Detroit to discuss his plans with me. Elsie had been meticulously polite to him. Percy had offered her his hand, and she, wide-eyed, had taken it. “You're very neatly dressed,” she had said.

She was not used to well-dressed black men. The only blacks Elsebeth had seen were the day laborers who gathered on the wharves. Detroit housed a small community of Negroes who had come north with the decline of slavery, before Congress passed the Labor Protection Act. They did
“the jobs white men won't do,” for wages to which white men would not submit.

“You're very prettily dressed yourself,” Percy Camber said, ignoring the unintended insult.

 

Maggie, my wife, had simply refused to see him.

“I'm not some radical old Congregationalist,” she told me, “eager to socialize with every tawny Moor who comes down the pike. That's your side of the family, Tom, not mine.”

True enough. Maggie's people were Episcopalians who had prospered in Michigan since before it was a State—sturdy, reliable folks. They ran a string of warehouses that catered to the lake trade. My father was a disappointed Whig who had spent a single term in the Massachusetts legislature pursuing the chimera of Free Education before he died at an early age, and my mother's bookshelves still groaned under the weight of faded tomes on the subjects of Enlightened Marriage and Women's Suffrage. I came from a genteel family of radical tendencies and modest means. I was never sure Maggie's people understood that poverty and gentility could truly coexist.

“Maggie's indisposed today,” I had told Percy, who may or may not have believed me, and then we had settled down to the business of planning our three-month tour of the South, according to the map he had made.

“There ought to be photographs,” Percy said, “before it's all gone.”

 

We traveled several miles from the tavern, sweating in the airless heat of the morning, following directions Percy had deduced from bills-of-transfer, railway records, and old advertisements placed in the Richmond and Atlanta papers.

The locality to which we were headed had been called Pilgassi Acres. It had been chartered as a business by two brothers, Marcus and Benjamin Pilgassi of South Carolina, in 1879, and it had operated for five years before the Ritter Inquiry shut it down.

There were no existing photographs of Pilgassi Acres, or any of the institutions like it, unless the Ritter Inquiry had
commissioned them. And the Final Report of the Ritter Inquiry had been sealed from the public by consent of Congress, not to be reopened until some time in the twentieth century.

Percy Camber intended to shed some light into that officially ordained darkness.

He sat with me on the driver's board of the carriage as I coaxed the team over the rutted and runneled trail. This had once been a wider road, much used, but it had been bypassed by a Federal turnpike in 1887. Since then nature and the seasons had mauled it, so the ride was tedious and slow. We subdued the boredom by swapping stories: Percy of his home in Canada, me of my time in the army.

Percy “talked white.” That was the verdict Elsebeth had passed after meeting him. It was a condescending thing to say, excusable only from the lips of a child, but I knew what she meant. Percy was two generations out of slavery. If I closed my eyes and listened to his voice, I could imagine that I had been hired by some soft-spoken Harvard graduate. He was articulate, even for a newspaper man. And we had learned, over the course of this lengthy expedition, to make allowances for our differences. We had some common ground. We were both the offspring of radical parents, for example. The “madness of the fifties” had touched us both, in different ways.

“You suppose we'll find anything substantial at the end of this road?” Percy asked.

“The landlady mentioned some old sheds.”

“Sheds would be acceptable,” Percy said, his weariness showing. “It's been a long haul for you, Tom. And not much substantial work. Maybe this time?”

“Maybe.”

“Documents, oral accounts, that's all useful, but a photograph—just one, just to show that something remains—well, that would be important.”

“I'll photograph any old shed you like, Percy, if it pleases you.” Though on this trip I had seen more open fields—long since burned over and regrown—than anything worthy of being immortalized. Places edited from history. Absences
constructed as carefully as architecture. I had no reason to think Pilgassi Acres would be different.

 

Percy seldom spoke out loud about the deeper purpose of his quest or the book he was currently writing. Fair enough, I thought; it was a sensitive subject. Like the way I don't talk much about Cuba, though I had served a year and a half there under Lee. The spot is too tender to touch.

 

These hills were low and covered with stunted pines and other rude vegetation. The road soon grew even more rough, but we began to encounter evidence of a prior human presence. A few fenceposts. Scraps of rusted barbwire. The traces of an old narrow-gauge railbed. Then we passed under a wooden sign suspended between two lodgepoles, on which the words
PILGASSI ACRES
in an ornate script were still legible, though the seasons had bleached the letters to ghosts.

There was also the remains of a wire fence, tangled over with brambles.

“Stop here,” Percy said.

“Might be more ahead,” I suggested.

“This is already more than we've seen elsewhere. I want a picture of that sign.”

“I can't guarantee it'll be legible,” I said, given the way the sun was striking it, and the faint color of the letters, pale as chalk on the white wood.

“Well, try,” Percy said shortly.

So I set up my equipment and did that. For the first time in a long while, I felt as though I was earning my keep.

The first book Percy had written was called
Every Measure Short of War
, and it was a history of Abolitionism from the Negro point of view.

The one he was writing now was to be called
Where Are the Three Million?

 

I made a dozen or so exposures and put my gear back in the carriage. Percy took the reins this time and urged the horses
farther up the trail. Scrub grass and runt pines closed in on both sides of us, and I found myself watching the under-growth for motion. The landlady's warning had come back to haunt me.

But the woods were empty. An old stray dog paced us for a few minutes, then fell behind.

 

My mother had once corresponded with Mrs. Harriet Beecher Stowe, who was a well-known abolitionist at one time, though the name is now mostly forgotten. Percy had contacted my parents in order to obtain copies of that correspondence, which he had quoted in an article for the
Tocsin
.

My mother, of course, was flattered, and she continued her correspondence with Percy on an occasional basis. In one of his replies Percy happened to remark that he was looking for a reliable photographer to hire for the new project he had in mind. My mother, of course, sent him to me. Perhaps she thought she was doing me a favor.

Thus it was not money but conscience that had propelled me on this journey. Conscience, that crabbed and ecclesiastical nag, which inevitably spoke, whether I heeded it or not, in a voice much like my mother's.