Year's Best SF 17

was not normal.

I looked around cautiously, ready for anything. I couldn’t tell if this was the type of forest that was full of stuff like stinging insects and rotten fruit or stuff like succulent strange vegetables and colorful butterflies. We passed a tree heavy with rather normal looking green mangos. That was a good sign.

The shuttle was about the size of an American football field. It took us a while to amble all the way around it. Not one opening. It was night, but I could see perfectly in the dark, another shadow speaker privilege. I knocked on the ship’s white metal skin. No response. Minutes passed. Nothing happened.

I was exhausted. We’d been traveling for hours before seeing the ship. I’d been so excited that I hadn’t eaten or been hydrating myself properly. Stupid. Suddenly, all at once, my neglect disarmed me. I fell to my knees, weak. Plantain trotted to the small pond and started drinking. Eventually, Plantain returned to me, gently clasped the collar of my dress with her teeth, dragged me to the water, and dumped me in the shallow part.

I laughed weakly. The water was cold. “Okay, okay,” I said, pushing myself up. Cupping some of the water in my hands, I looked closely at it, searching for bacteria or strange microorganisms that might make me sick. The water was wonderfully fresh and clean, so much better than the water my capture station pulled from the clouds. I drank like crazy.

After having my fill, I laid my mat under a tree, sat down, and ate some bread and dried goat meat as I gazed at the ship. Don’t they want to come out? I wondered. They had to have been on that shuttle for weeks. I brushed my teeth and lay down. As I drifted off to sleep, I thought, Tomorrow.

I woke an hour later to Plantain’s soft warning grunt. I opened my eyes to a star-filled sky. Something was humming and splashing in the pond. I listened harder. It sounded like a person. Finally. Someone’s come out, I thought, sitting up. But the shuttle looked as it had an hour ago, no openings anywhere. Maybe the door’s on the other side? I crept to the pond for a better look.

He was standing thigh deep in the water wearing only his blue pants. As he waded deeper in, he hissed with pain. The way he moved, with his hands out, it didn’t seem like he could see in the dark at all. I stood up for a better look. His things were on the ground, closer to me than him. A ripped satchel, a tattered blue shirt, and a silver, very sharp looking dagger.

Quietly, I snuck to his things. I was about to reach for his dagger when he suddenly stopped. He was up to his belly; his back to me. He whirled around and before I realized what was happening, he flew at me. Fast like a hawk! I leapt to the side, grabbing his satchel. Items fell from its large hole.

He landed and snatched another small dagger from his wet pocket. Then he eyed me with such rage and disgust that I stumbled back. He addressed me in Arabic, his dagger pointed at me, “Filthy abid bitch,” he spat. “I’ll slice your belly open just for touching my things.” His wet face was scratched up, and one of his eyes was nearly swollen shut. There were more fresh scratches and bruises on his arms and his chest.

I blinked, understanding several things at once. First, he’d been recently beaten. Second, he was a windseeker, one born with the ability to fly, a product of the Great Change, tainted like me. Third, this meant he could not have been from the ship.

I was so appalled by his mauled condition and his words that I just stood there. He took this as further evidence that I couldn’t possibly understand him.

“Allah protect me,” he said, lowering his dagger. “Can this night get any worse?” He looked my age, had skin the color of milky tea and a hint of a beard capping his chin. And he had the usual windseeker features: somewhat large wild eyes and long onyx black hair braided into seven very thick braids with copper bands on the ends.

“What is wrong with you?” I asked in Arabic, regaining my composure. He looked obviously shocked that I could speak his oh-so-sacred language. Most black Africans in Niger spoke Hausa or Fulanese. I deliberately looked him up and down and slowly enunciating my words said, “There are no slaves in these lands.” Abid meant slave in Arabic.

“Hand me my things,” he demanded. “Now.”

Instead, I read him. I was close enough to him. The first thing was the scent of turmeric. I tasted something spicy, garlicky … a dish called muhammara. Ahmed, that is his name. He’s from … Saudi Arabia.

He flew this far? I wondered as I swam within his past, seeing, hearing, tasting, touching, smelling. I was me but I was him. Duality. My heart was slamming in my chest as it always did when I read people.

As fast as I could, I soaked information from him like a sponge. … From a lavish home. The seventh of five sons and four daughters. All normal. Except him. Ahmed’s father loomed large to me. Larger than Ahmed. Father did not smoke or drink. Father prayed five times a day. Father hated spontaneous forests and the fact that the way to the nearby village was not always the same whenever he walked there. Father owned three black African slaves and he often cursed their black skin and burned hair.

Father hated how the quality of the air was different. And he constantly dreamed of Mars. The new world, a fresh world, the place of his birth. He was an important man in the crumbling local government. Too important to have a windseeker son, one of those strange troublesome polluted children. Ahmed understood that Father thought him ruined.

As I looked into Ahmed, I heard him step toward me. When in a reading state, I’m basically helpless. I can’t pull out of it quickly. One day, I will learn to not be so vulnerable.

Looking into Ahmed, I was surprised to find poetry and gentleness, too. Ahmed loved salty olives. Short curvy women. The beaded necklaces around the necks of black-skinned women he’d see working at the market. The open sky. Music moved him. His quiet mother, whose hands were always writing adventure stories in the notebook she hid from Father …

It came as it always did. In disorganized fragments, details, like a sentient puzzle more concerned with the shape of its pieces than putting itself together.

The day Father drove him away was the day news came about his grandfather on the shuttle returning to Earth. The first since the Great Change. Ahmed had assumed he’d never see Grandfather. During the celebration of the news, Father had turned to Ahmed. Had sneered at Ahmed. Father was ashamed of the bizarre son he’d have to present to his father whom he hadn’t seen since he was four years old. Ahmed ran away that night. A windseeker must fly … not even Father’s heavy hand and words could change that.

“You abeed are the lowliest of all Mankind,” Ahmed was telling me. “A polluted abid … you are an aberration of the devil.” These wicked words against the compelling melancholy of his past made my head ache. I fought to pull myself from him. A last fragment came to me, just before he shoved me to the ground … As Ahmed flew from the only home he’d ever known, he received a message on his e-legba. From Grandma. The attachment she’d sent took up half the space on his hard drive. Coordinates, linked tracking applications, schedules … for Grandfather’s space shuttle arrival. “Meet him,” Grandma’s message said. “He will love you.”

“Stop it!” he shouted, shoving me so hard that my breath was struck from my chest. I fell to the sand.

“Your father drove you away,” I said, quickly getting up. I backed away from him and dusted the sand from my long dress. My heart was still pounding as I fought for breath. “Yet … you speak to me … with the same words that you fled.”

“You’re Nigerian,” he growled, looking a little crazed. “I can hear it in your accent! You all are nothing but thieves!” he pointed to his pummeled face. “Who do you think did this to me? They didn’t just take my money, they tried to put a virus on my e-legba to empty my bank account! Double thievery!”

His motions, again, were so quick. Before I realized it, he’d grabbed a flashlight from the ground and flashed in my face.

“Ah!” I exclaimed, shielding my sensitive eyes, temporarily blinded. He clicked it off. “What are you doing here?” He began using his feet to gather to himself the other items that had fallen from his satchel.

For a few seconds, all I could see was red, figuratively and literally.

“Give me my bag,” he snapped, when I didn’t respond to his stupid question. I threw it at him, more things falling from the hole. He glared at me and I glared back.