The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2016 (23 page)

Dunia was deeply offended. “You mean,” she said, “that because we are not married our children cannot bear their father's name.”

He smiled his sad, crooked smile. “It is better that they be the Duniazát,” he said, “a name that contains the world and has not been judged by it. To call them the Rushdi would be to send them into history with a mark upon their brow.”

Dunia began to speak of herself as Scheherazade's sister, always asking for stories, only her Scheherazade was a man—her lover, not her brother—and some of his stories could get them both killed if the words were accidentally to escape from the darkness of their bedroom. So Ibn Rushd was a sort of anti-Scheherazade, Dunia told him, the exact opposite of the storyteller of the
Thousand Nights and One Night:
her stories saved her life, while his put his life in danger. But then the caliph Abu Yusuf Yaqub was triumphant in war, winning his greatest military victory, against the Christian king of Castile, Alfonso VIII, at Alarcos on the Guadiana River. After the Battle of Alarcos, in which the caliph's forces killed a hundred and fifty thousand Castilian soldiers, fully half the Christian army, Abu Yusuf Yaqub gave himself the name al-Mansur, the Victorious, and with the confidence of a conquering hero he brought the ascendancy of the fanatical Berbers to an end and summoned Ibn Rushd back to court.

The mark of shame was wiped off the old philosopher's brow, his exile ended. He was rehabilitated, undisgraced, and returned with honor to his old position of court physician, two years, eight months, and twenty-eight days and nights after his exile began, which was to say, one thousand days and nights and one more day and night; and Dunia was pregnant again, of course, and he did not marry her, of course, he never gave her children his name, of course, and he did not bring her with him to the Almohad court, of course, so she slipped out of history—he took it with him when he left, along with his robes, his bubbling retorts, and his manuscripts, some bound, others in scrolls, manuscripts of other men's books, for his own had been burned, though many copies survived, he'd told her, in other cities, in the libraries of friends, and in places where he had concealed them against the day of his disfavor, for a wise man always prepares for adversity but, if he is properly modest, lets good fortune take him by surprise. He left without finishing his breakfast or saying goodbye, and she did not threaten him, did not reveal her true nature or the power that lay hidden within her, did not say, I know what you say aloud in your dreams, when you suppose the thing that would be stupid to suppose, when you stop trying to reconcile the irreconcilable and speak the terrible, fatal truth. She allowed history to leave her without trying to hold it back, the way children allow a grand parade to pass, holding it in their memory, making it their own; and she went on loving him, even though he had so casually abandoned her. You were my everything, she wanted to say to him. You were my sun and moon, and who will hold my head now, who will kiss my lips, who will be a father to our children? But he was a great man destined for the halls of the immortals, and these squalling brats were no more than the jetsam he left in his wake.

It is believed that Dunia remained among human beings for a while, perhaps hoping against hope for Ibn Rushd's return, and that he continued to send her money, that maybe he visited her from time to time, and that she gave up on the horse business but went on with the
tinajas.
But now that the sun and moon of history had set forever on her house, her story became a thing of shadows and mysteries, so maybe it's true, as people said, that after Ibn Rushd died his spirit returned to her and fathered even more children. People also said that Ibn Rushd brought her a lamp with a jinni in it, and the jinni was the father of the children born after he left her—so we see how easily rumor turns things upside down! They also said, less kindly, that the abandoned woman took in any man who would pay her rent, and every man she took in left her with another brood, so that the Duniazát, the brood of Dunia, were no longer bastard Rushdis, or some of them were not, or many of them were not; for in most people's eyes, the story of her life had become a stuttering line, its letters dissolving into meaningless forms, incapable of revealing how long she lived, or how, or where, or with whom, or when and how—or if—she died.

Nobody noticed or cared that one day she turned sideways and slipped through a slit in the world and returned to Peristan, the other reality, the world of dreams whence the jinn periodically emerge to trouble and bless mankind. To the villagers of Lucena, she seemed to have dissolved, perhaps into fireless smoke.

After Dunia left our world, the voyagers from the world of the jinn to ours became fewer in number, and then they stopped coming completely, and the slits in the world became overgrown with the unimaginative weeds of convention and the thornbushes of the dully material, until they finally closed up, and our ancestors were left to do the best they could without the benefits or curses of magic.

But Dunia's children thrived. That much can be said. And almost three hundred years later, when the Jews were expelled from Spain, even the Jews who could not say they were Jews, the great-grandchildren of Dunia's great-grandchildren climbed onto ships in Cádiz and Palos de Moguer, or walked across the Pyrenees, or flew on magic carpets or in giant urns like the jinni kin they were. They traversed continents and sailed the seven seas and climbed high mountains and swam mighty rivers and slid into deep valleys and found shelter and safety wherever they could, and they forgot one another quickly, or remembered as long as they could and then forgot, or never forgot, becoming a family that was no longer exactly a family, a tribe that was no longer exactly a tribe, adopting every religion and no religion, all of them, after the centuries of conversion, ignorant of their supernatural origins and of the story of the forcible conversion of the Jews, some of them becoming manically devout while others were contemptuously disbelieving. They were a family without a place but with family in every place, a village without a location but winding in and out of every spot on the globe, like rootless plants, mosses or lichens or creeping orchids, who must lean upon others, being unable to stand alone.

History is unkind to those it abandons and can be equally unkind to those who make it. Ibn Rushd died (of old age, or so we believe) while traveling in Marrakesh barely a year after his rehabilitation, and never saw his fame grow, never saw it spread beyond the borders of his own world and into the infidel world beyond, where his commentaries on Aristotle became the foundations of his mighty forebear's popularity, the cornerstones of the infidels' godless philosophy,
saecularis,
which meant the kind of idea that came only once in a
saeculum,
an age of the world, or maybe an idea for the ages, and which was the very image and echo of the ideas he had spoken only in dreams. Perhaps, as a godly man, Ibn Rushd would not have been delighted by the place history gave him, for it is a strange fate for a believer to become the inspiration of ideas that have no need of belief, and a stranger fate still for a man's philosophy to be victorious beyond the frontiers of his own world but vanquished within those borders, because in the world he knew it was the children of his dead adversary, Ghazali, who multiplied and inherited the kingdom, while his own bastard brood spread out, leaving his forbidden name behind them, to populate the earth.

A high proportion of the survivors ended up on the great North American continent, and many others on the great South Asian subcontinent, thanks to the phenomenon of “clumping,” which is part of the mysterious illogic of random distribution; and many of those afterward spread out west and south across the Americas, and north and west from that great diamond at the foot of Asia, into all the countries of the world, for of the Duniazát it can fairly be said that, in addition to peculiar ears, they all have itchy feet. Ibn Rushd was dead, but he and his adversary continued their dispute beyond the grave, for to the arguments of great thinkers there is no end, argument itself being a tool to improve the mind, the sharpest of all tools, born of the love of knowledge, which is to say, philosophy.

NICK WOLVEN

FROM
Asimov's Science Fiction

1

C
LAIRE MET HIM
at a dinner party in New Orleans, and afterward she had to remind herself this was true. Yes, that had been it, his very first appearance. It seemed incredible there had been anything so finite as a first time.

He was seated across from her, two chairs down, a gorgeous woman on either side. As usual, the subject had turned to food.

“But I've been to this house a dozen times,” one of the gorgeous women was saying. “I've been to dinner parties, dance parties, even family parties. And every time, they serve the wrong kind of cuisine.”

She had red hair, the color of the candlelight reflected off the varnished chairs. The house was an old house, full of old things, handmade textiles and walnut chiffoniers, oil paintings of nameless Civil War colonels.

“Is that a problem?” said the young man on Claire's left. “Why should you care?”

“Because,” said the redhead, pursing her lips. “Meringue pie, at an elegant soiree? Wine and steak tartare, at a child's birthday party? Lobster bisque at a dance? For God's sake, it was all over the floor. It seems, I don't know. Lazy. Thoughtless. Cobbled together.”

She lifted her glass of wine to her mouth, and the liquid vanished the instant it touched her tongue.

The man who was to mean so much to Claire, to embody in his person so much hope and loss, leaned over his soup, eyes dark with amusement. “It
is
cobbled together. Of course it is. But isn't that the best part?”

“And why is that, Byron?” someone said with a sigh.

Byron. A fake name, Claire assumed, distilled from the fog of some half-remembered youthful interest. But then, you never knew.

Whatever the source of his name, Byron's face had the handsome roughness earned through active living. Dots of stubble grayed his skin. A tiny scar divided one eyebrow. His smile made a charming pattern of wrinkles around his eyes. It was a candid face, a well-architected face, a fortysomething face.

“Because,” said Byron, and caught Claire's eye, as if only she would understand. “Look at this furniture, the chandelier. Look at that music stand in the corner. American plantation style, rococo, Art Nouveau. Every piece a different movement. Some are complete anachronisms. That's why I love this house. You can see the spirit of the designers here. A kind of whimsy. It's so personal, so scattershot.”

“You're such a talker, Byron,” someone sighed.

“Look at all of you,” Byron said, moving his spoon in a circle to encompass the ring of faces. “Some of you I've never seen before in my life. And here we are, brought together by chance, for one evening only. You know what? That delights me. That thrills me.” His gesture halted at Claire's face. “That enchants me.”

“And after tonight,” said the redhead, “we'll go our separate ways, and forget each other, and maybe never see each other again. So is that part of the wonder for you, Byron, or does that spoil the wonder?”

“It does neither,” Byron said, “because I don't believe it.”

His eyes settled on Claire's. Again he smiled. She had always liked older men, their slightly chastened air, their solemn and good-humored strength.

“I don't believe we'll never see each other again,” Byron said, looking at his spoon. “I don't believe that's necessarily our fate. And you know what? The truth is, I wouldn't mind living in this house forever. Even if they do serve alphabet soup at a dinner party.”

He lifted his hand to his mouth and touched his spoon to his lips. And instantly the liquid disappeared.

When they had cleared the table, the entertainments began. There were board games in the living room, a live band on the lawn. Stairs led to a dozen shadowy bedrooms, with sad old beds, and rich old carpets, and orchids in baskets on the moonlit windowsills. In town, the music of riverbank revelry scraped and jittered out of ramshackle bars, and paddleboats rode on the slow Mississippi, jingling with the racket of riches won and lost.

Byron borrowed a set of car keys from the houseboy. Claire followed him onto the porch. The breath of the bayou was in the air, warm and buoyant, holding up the clustered leaves of the pecan trees and the high, star-scattered sky. Sweat held her shirt to the small of her back, as if a hand were there, pressing her forward.

“Shall we take a ride?” The car keys dangled, tinkling, from Byron's upraised hand.

“Wait,” said Claire, “do that again.”

“This?” He gave the keys another shake. The sound tinkled out, a sprinkling of noise, over the thick green nap of the lawn.

“It sounds just like it,” Claire said. “Don't you hear it? It sounds just like the midnight chime.”

“Oh, God, don't talk about that now. It's not for hours.” Byron went halfway down the porch steps, held out a hand. “We still have plenty of time to fall in love.”

The car waiting for them was an early roadster, dazzling with chrome, large and slow. Byron handled the old-fashioned shift with expert nonchalance. They slid past banquet halls downtown, where drunkenness and merriment and red, frantic faces sang and sweated along the laden tables. Often they pulled to the curb and idled, and the night with its load of romance rolled by.

At a corner café where zydeco livened the air, a young couple argued at a scrollwork table.

“But how can you define it? How can you even describe it?” The woman's arm swung as she spoke, agitating the streetlights with a quiver of silver bracelets.