The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2016 (22 page)

@CplPetersUSMC:
Ghost and Riot have both made their screen-feeds public too. Be sure to check them out. Couldn't have done it without them.

@JMitcherCNN:
So how do you think your job will change now that you have thousands of fans?

@CplPetersUSMC:
Well, I certainly won't have trouble making quorum anymore . . . ROFL. On the one hand, it feels great to have the support of so many patriotic citizens behind me. But it'll be harder to have one-on-one chats with my followers. I'll do what I can to keep that personal connection. I've already set up a private channel for Ghost and Riot, so they'll always be able to talk to me directly, no matter how much chatter is going down. How will it change the job? I guess we'll just have to wait and see.

@JMitcherCNN:
Just one more question, corporal, and then I'll let you go. Sergeant Pearson's recent court-martial has sparked a grassroots campaign to eliminate quorum altogether. Do you wish you had had more leeway? More freedom to act on your own initiative?

@CplPetersUSMC:
Well, that's a great question, Jim. A lot of the older guys in the unit complain a lot about the whole direct democracy thing, but I think I like things the way they are. Maybe if I had missed the shot I would feel differently, but it seems to me that getting your folks out of bed to vote and debating philosophy with your sister before letting a soldier take a shot—that's how it should work. That's democracy.

@JMitcherCNN:
Well said, corporal. And thank you for your service.

SALMAN RUSHDIE

FROM
The New Yorker

I
N THE YEAR
1195, the great philosopher Ibn Rushd, once the
qadi,
or judge, of Seville and most recently the personal physician to the caliph Abu Yusuf Yaqub in his home town of Córdoba, was formally discredited and disgraced on account of his liberal ideas, which were unacceptable to the increasingly powerful Berber fanatics who were spreading like a pestilence across Arab Spain, and was sent to live in internal exile in the small village of Lucena, a village full of Jews who could no longer say they were Jews because they had been forced to convert to Islam. Ibn Rushd, a philosopher who was no longer permitted to expound his philosophy, all of whose writing had been banned and burned, felt instantly at home among the Jews who could not say they were Jews. He had been a favorite of the caliph of the present ruling dynasty, the Almohads, but favorites go out of fashion, and Abu Yusuf Yaqub had allowed the fanatics to push the great commentator on Aristotle out of town.

The philosopher who could not speak his philosophy lived on a narrow unpaved street in a humble house with small windows and was terribly oppressed by the absence of light. He set up a medical practice in Lucena, and his status as the ex-physician of the caliph himself brought him patients; in addition, he used what assets he had to enter modestly into the horse trade, and also financed the making of
tinajas,
the large earthenware vessels, in which the Jews who were no longer Jews stored and sold olive oil and wine. One day soon after the beginning of his exile, a girl of perhaps sixteen summers appeared outside his door, smiling gently, not knocking or intruding on his thoughts in any way, and simply stood there waiting patiently until he became aware of her presence and invited her in. She told him that she was newly orphaned, that she had no source of income, but preferred not to work in the whorehouse, and that her name was Dunia, which did not sound like a Jewish name because she was not allowed to speak her Jewish name, and because she was illiterate, she could not write it down. She told him that a traveler had suggested the name and said it was Greek and meant “the world,” and she had liked that idea. Ibn Rushd, the translator of Aristotle, did not quibble with her, knowing that it meant “the world” in enough tongues to make pedantry unnecessary. “Why have you named yourself after the world?” he asked her, and she replied, looking him in the eye as she spoke, “Because a world will flow from me and those who flow from me will spread across the world.”

Being a man of reason, Ibn Rushd did not guess that the girl was a supernatural creature, a jinnia, of the tribe of female jinn: a grand princess of that tribe, on an earthly adventure, pursuing her fascination with human men in general and brilliant ones in particular. He took her into his cottage as his housekeeper and lover, and in the muffled night she whispered her “true”—that is to say, false—Jewish name into his ear, and that was their secret. Dunia the jinnia was as spectacularly fertile as her prophecy had implied. In the two years, eight months, and twenty-eight days and nights that followed, she was pregnant three times and brought forth a multiplicity of children, at least seven on each occasion, it would appear, and on one occasion eleven, or possibly nineteen; the records are vague. All the children inherited her most distinctive feature: they had no earlobes.

If Ibn Rushd had been a scholar of the occult arcana, he would have realized then that his children were the offspring of a nonhuman mother, but he was too wrapped up in himself to work it out. The philosopher who could not philosophize feared that his children would inherit from him the sad gifts that were his treasure and his curse. “To be thin-skinned, farsighted, and loose-tongued,” he said, “is to feel too sharply, see too clearly, speak too freely. It is to be vulnerable to the world when the world believes itself invulnerable, to understand its mutability when it thinks itself immutable, to sense what's coming before others sense it, to know that the barbarian future is tearing down the gates of the present while others cling to the decadent, hollow past. If our children are fortunate, they will inherit only your ears, but, regrettably, as they are undeniably mine, they will probably think too much too soon and hear too much too early, including things that are not permitted to be thought or heard.”

“Tell me a story,” Dunia often demanded in bed in the early days of their cohabitation. Ibn Rushd quickly discovered that in spite of her seeming youth she could be a demanding and opinionated individual, in bed and out of it. He was a big man, and she was like a little bird or a stick insect, but he often felt that she was the stronger of the two. She was the joy of his old age, but she demanded from him a level of energy that was hard to maintain. Sometimes all he wanted to do in bed was sleep, but Dunia saw his attempts to nod off as hostile acts. “If you stay up all night making love,” she said, “you actually feel better-rested than if you snore for hours like an ox. This is well known.” At his age, it wasn't always easy to enter into the required condition for the sexual act, especially on consecutive nights, but she saw his elderly difficulty with arousal as proof of his unloving nature. “If you find a woman attractive, there is never a problem,” she told him. “Doesn't matter how many nights in a row. Me, I'm always horny. I can go on forever—I have no stopping point.”

His discovery that her physical ardor could be quelled by narrative had provided some relief. “Tell me a story,” she said, curling up under his arm so that his hand rested on her head, and he thought, Good, I'm off the hook tonight, and gave her, little by little, the story of his mind. He used words that many of his contemporaries found shocking, including “reason,” “logic,” and “science,” which were the three pillars of his thought, the ideas that had led to his books' being burned. Dunia was afraid of these words, but her fear excited her and she snuggled in closer and said, “Hold my head while you're filling it with your lies.”

There was a deep, sad wound in him, because he was a defeated man, had lost the great battle of his life to a dead Persian, Ghazali of Tus, an adversary who had been dead for eighty-five years. A hundred years earlier, Ghazali had written a book called
The Incoherence of the Philosophers,
in which he attacked Greeks like Aristotle, the Neo-Platonists, and their allies, Ibn Rushd's great precursors Ibn Sina and al-Farabi. Ghazali had suffered a crisis of belief at one point, but had recovered with such conviction that he became the greatest scourge of philosophy in the history of the world. Philosophy, he jeered, was incapable of proving the existence of God, or even of proving the impossibility of there being two gods. Philosophy believed in the inevitability of causes and effects, which was an insult to the power of God, who could easily intervene to make causes ineffectual and alter effects if He so chose.

“What happens,” Ibn Rushd asked Dunia when the night wrapped them in silence and they could speak of forbidden things, “if a lighted stick is brought into contact with a ball of cotton?”

“The cotton catches fire, of course,” she answered.

“And why does it catch fire?”

“Because that is the way of it,” she said. “The fire licks the cotton and the cotton becomes part of the fire. It's how things are.”

“The law of nature,” he said. “Causes have their effects.” And her head nodded beneath his caressing hand.

“He disagreed,” Ibn Rushd said, and she knew that he meant the enemy, Ghazali. “He said that the cotton caught fire because God made it do so, because in God's universe the only law is what God wills.”

“So if God had wanted the cotton to put out the fire, if He had wanted the fire to become part of the cotton, He could have done that?”

“Yes,” Ibn Rushd said. “According to Ghazali's book, God could do that.”

She thought for a moment. “That's stupid,” she said finally. Even in the dark she could sense the resigned smile, the smile with cynicism in it as well as pain, spreading crookedly across his bearded face.

“He would say that this was the true faith,” he answered her, “and that to disagree with it would be . . . incoherent.”

“So anything can happen if God decides it's OK,” she said. “A man's feet might no longer touch the ground, for example. He could start walking on air.”

“A miracle,” Ibn Rushd said, “is just God changing the rules by which He chooses to play, and if we don't comprehend it, it is because God is ultimately ineffable, which is to say, beyond our comprehension.”

She was silent again. “Suppose I suppose,” she said at length, “that God does not exist. Suppose you make me suppose that ‘reason,' ‘logic,' and ‘science' possess a magic that makes God unnecessary. Can one even suppose that it would be possible to suppose such a thing?”

She felt his body stiffen. Now
he
was afraid of
her
words, she thought, and it pleased her in an odd way. “No,” he said, too harshly. “That really would be a stupid supposition.”

He had written his own book,
The Incoherence of the Incoherence,
replying to Ghazali across a hundred years and thousands of miles, but in spite of its snappy title it had not diminished the dead Persian's influence, and finally it was Ibn Rushd who had been disgraced, whose books had been cast into the fire, which had consumed the pages because that was what God had decided at that moment that the fire should be permitted to do. In all his writing, Ibn Rushd had tried to reconcile the words “reason,” “logic,” and “science” with the words “God,” “faith,” and “Qur'an,” but he had not succeeded, even though he had used with great subtlety the argument from kindness, demonstrating by Qur'anic quotation that God must exist because of the garden of earthly delights he had provided for mankind:
And do we not send down from the clouds pressing forth rain, water pouring down in abundance, that you may thereby produce corn and herbs and gardens planted thick with trees?
He was a keen amateur gardener, and the argument from kindness seemed to him to prove both God's existence and his essentially kindly, liberal nature, but the proponents of a harsher God had beaten him. Now he lay, or so he believed, with a converted Jew whom he had saved from the whorehouse and who seemed capable of seeing into his dreams, where he argued with Ghazali in the language of irreconcilables, the language of wholeheartedness, of going all the way, which would have doomed him to the executioner if he had used it in waking life.

As Dunia filled up with children and then emptied them into the small house, there was less room for Ibn Rushd's excommunicated “lies.” The couple's moments of intimacy became less frequent, and money was a problem. “A true man faces the consequences of his actions,” she told him, “especially a man who believes in causes and effects.” But making money had never been his forte. The horse-trading business was treacherous and full of cutthroats, and his profits were small. He had many competitors in the
tinaja
market, so prices were low. “Charge your patients more,” Dunia advised him with some irritation. “You should cash in on your former prestige, tarnished as it is. What else have you got? It's not enough to be a baby-making monster. You make babies, the babies come, the babies must be fed. That is ‘logic.' That is ‘rational.' ” She knew which words she could turn against him. “Not to do this,” she cried triumphantly, “is ‘incoherence.' ”

The jinn are fond of glittering things, gold and jewels and so on, and often they conceal their hoards in subterranean caves. Why did the jinnia princess not cry “Open!” at the door of a treasure cave and solve their financial problems at a stroke? Because she had chosen a human life, as the “human” wife of a human being, and she was bound by her choice. To reveal her true nature to her lover at this late stage would have been to reveal a kind of betrayal, a lie, at the heart of their relationship. So she remained silent, fearing he might abandon her.

There was a Persian book called
Hazar Afsaneh,
or
One Thousand Stories,
which had been translated into Arabic. In the Arabic version, there were fewer than a thousand stories but the action was spread over a thousand nights, or, because round numbers were considered ugly, a thousand nights and one night more. Ibn Rushd had not seen the book, but several of its stories had been told to him at court. The story of the fisherman and the jinni appealed to him, not so much for its fantastic elements (the jinni from the lamp, the magic talking fishes, the bewitched prince who was half man and half marble) as for its technical beauty, the way its stories were folded within other stories and contained yet other stories, folded within themselves, so that the tale became a true mirror of life, Ibn Rushd thought, for in life all our stories contain the stories of others and are themselves contained within larger, grander narratives, the histories of our families, or our homelands, or our beliefs. More beautiful even than the stories within stories was the story of the storyteller, a queen called Shahrazad or Scheherazade, who told her tales to a murderous husband to keep him from executing her. Stories told to defeat death, to civilize a barbarian. And at the foot of the marital bed sat Scheherazade's sister, her perfect audience, asking for one more story, and then one more, and then yet another. From this sister Ibn Rushd got the name he bestowed on the hordes of babies issuing from his lover Dunia's loins, for the sister, as it happened, was called Dunyazad, “and what we have here filling up this dark house and forcing me to impose extortionate fees on my patients, the sick and infirm of Lucena, is the arrival of the Duniazát, that is, Dunia's tribe, the race of Dunians, the Dunia people, which is to say the people of the world.”