The Apex Book of World SF 2 (22 page)

 

We get work at the
palace, which makes Ataa proud and Abjit jealous, and there we meet Bhatar. He
is like a fire-shadow: dark, long, and quick. Caste marks shadow his eyes, for
he is cousin to the King. He is sixteen. Nira and I are eleven now, and it
doesn't seem so old.

Sometimes Bhatar
comes with us when we run messages, which breaks caste law. He says he doesn't
care about castes and who are we to question the King's cousin? He says the
mist has nothing left to scare him with. It took his sister, and the thing that
came back tried to kill him. He unmade it; he says it wept and begged with his
sister's voice. He was eleven then. Like us.

I think he is brave.
Nira says he is reckless.

Bhatar unmakes the
mist with a whirling, stomping dance. Where he hits the ground even the dead
market grows more real; gleaming brassware clunks when we tap it, and we smell
rotten fish and mangoes and the sea. Bhatar tries to teach us, but we cannot
keep his rhythm any more than he can keep our tune. He says that may be for the
best; songs break culture law. I say, "Is everyone a lawbreaker?" Nira and
Bhatar have no answers.

With dance and song
together we thin the mist to haze, till one day the sun breaks through. We do
not expect it to hurt. While we blink away tears, the mist pulls over us once
more.

Bhatar grins and
hugs me. "We'll do it again," he says.

I say, "How does
lawbreaking thin the mist?"

 

On the day we dance
back the royal gardens and bring sunlight streaming down over the whole palace,
the mist pulls away to reveal two gardeners and a palace servant. Adults. I open
my mouth, do not know what to say; but the mist keeps rolling back behind them,
back and down, leaving the hilltop bare to the sun. I point. From above, it
looks like a silent white ocean.

 

The next time we
meet, the same three adults come trailing hopefully after the children. Bhatar
starts to teach them the dance. He is seventeen. Nira and I are twelve, and the
adults look more like him than we do.

There was a pavilion
in the gardens, made of painted wood and slate, where Bhatar fought his sister.
It became forgotten. But he remembers, so we learn it for a meeting place.

Mist and rushes grow
so thick that Bhatar must dance the path into being. His first step sinks in
past the ankle, but Nira and I know better than to scream, and his second step
comes down on slate paving, and his third. Octagons and squares tiled together.
His seventh step finds the boards of a wooden bridge all painted red. We
follow, fifteen people of nine different castes, singing what he has shown us
into memory.

The pavilion is eight-sided,
red with black beams and yellow rails and grey slate floors. Painted on each
wall is a palace-caste man at work. The roof is fringed yellow silk. Sun shines
through it, though mist pours down the walls.

 

Bhatar starts
sounding like the adults he talks to. Nira and I have work, so we don't hear
everything he says. But he takes me aside and says that the mist is our fear. "I
think it will grow, Shaya of the questions," he says, "until we stop hurting
one another." Worry lines his forehead and his eyes.

 

Nira thinks he is
wrong. But though there are forty-one of us now, of thirteen castes, she says
this only to me and to Hemal.

 

When I am fourteen,
though Nira is still thirteen, Abjit pulls me into a dusty corner and kisses
me. I start crying. I know what happens to lawbreakers.

 

"Don't be a baby,"
Abjit says. "I'm going to marry you."

I snatch my hand
away, run to Nira. "What happened?" she says.

I tell her. She
pulls back, her lips smiling upside-down. "I don't want you to kiss Abjit," she
says. "If you must kiss a boy, kiss Bhatar."

I lean forwards. Her
lips are softer than his, and warmer, and her breath is sweet. I feel her
upside-down smile melt.

 

Nira and I walk
hand-in-hand to the pavilion the next day. Hemal holds the mist thick around
us.

 

Bhatar is not there.
Nobody is. We wait, each with an arm around the other; then Nira tries dancing
again. Watching her, I make my first song. A love song to my dearest friend,
its hesitant rhythm following her dance and the sunlight that catches on her
hair. I find myself smiling as I sing.

We are kissing again
when the children come running up. Their sandals are loud, slap-slap, on the
solid path and bridge. We pull apart.

"You're kissing,"
says one.

"You're
girls
," says another.

"Where's Bhatar?"
says Nira.

They fall silent.
And stay silent, until the pavilion is full of sweaty, shifting, wordless
bodies. I say, "Where's Bhatar?"

"He spoke to the
King, his cousin," says somebody. Uwati, who is sixteen and often with him. "We
brought sunlight into the court, pushed the mist far away. Bhatar said we must
teach everyone to sing, to dance, but the king said that was noisemaking and
public gathering, and did Bhatar mean to teach the rabble not to heed the law?"

"He told the King
that the law brought the mist," says Yash. "Fear of the law and the killings."
Yash is old. He is tall and thin and has a beard, and children. But now he
looks frightened. "He told the King that the law must change."

I look around. We
are fewer than we were.

"And?" says Nira.

Uwati says, small
and thin in the silence, "And he's dead. So is everyone who tried to help him.
It was so fast…"

There was no mist
for Bhatar to become. He danced it away. It lurks around us now, and from it
Hemal starts crying. The others shift, uneasy, and draw closer to the pavilion's
sunlit centre. Do they hear her?

A child I do not
know says, "The rest of us ran."

"What should we do?"
Yash asks us.

Nira looks at me. I
shake my head, tears hot in my eyes. What do I know? Only that Bhatar is dead.

Nira says, "Let's
hide now, meet another day. They will come for us. But they won't come far into
the mist."

 

Lying to Ataa and
Abjit makes me feel as flat and distorted as a shadow on the door screen. Who
is the girl Ataa hugs and calls eldest child? Not me. He would not hug a
lawbreaker. He would call the King's men.

 

For I have taken
Bhatar's role. Even Ratit, who joins us when Nira and I are both fourteen,
looks to me. He brings us to fifty-three people from all twenty-four castes.
Ratit is twelve. He dances well, and he is the King's youngest son.

We meet in different
streets each day, call the sun down to different castes. People look up into
the blue beyond the mist, tears streaming down smiling faces. They call us
God-sent; they call us Sunbringers. And when we run, scattering before the King's
men, hiding in Hemal's mist, they lie. The city protects us.

We share songs when
we hide. Hemal knows weaver's songs and potter's songs and the marching chants
of the King's men, though she does not remember that she was my
jal-amaa
.
We can see through her, now, and she has no bruises and no caste marks.

Sometimes Nira
teaches us a song nobody knew.

Other people
remember the red bricks and blue door of Nira's house, but inside it is gone to
shifting grey. Except for what she remembers: the black and white rug with its
jagged toothy stripes, stairs as blue as the door, her room at the top. We go
there to love each other. The stairs sink and wobble, but her room is steady
and her blanket is warm soft yellow. And her smile is bright with the sunshine
that fills me.

"Can the law lie?" I
ask one day. The law says we cannot love each other.

"Maybe that's how it
brings the mist," says Nira.

"We lie."

"We pretend," she
says. "We know what's real."

We pretend all the
time at home. We let Ataa and Abjit love shadow-girls. But we do not become the
shadow-girls because we each remember the other.

 

Amaa's skin grows
grey. Mist-burnt. We remember her, but she forgets. She calls us both Hemal,
and the little ones, too. She remembers us only at midday, when sunlight
filters bright through the mist.

 

I cry about this
sometimes. Ataa does not, though he looks like he wants to. He still says the
law protects us. He says the Sunbringers just push mist around, making
everything worse for hardworking people. He is not alone. One day the
hardworking people catch Yash with bottles and bricks.

His sons cry when
they dance.

"I want to show her
sunshine," I tell Nira. "Before we lose her." As we lost Bhatar and Yash.

She says, "They
would stone us." They. We are no longer rememberers.

"We can do it when
the workers are not home," I say. "Who else will tell? We'll give them
something to remember."

We are Sunbringers.

 

Sixty-one of us
dance in the street of the rememberers the next day. Only children watch us,
and the old, and the mist-sick. They are silent through our song, angry,
huddled together—until sunlight pours into the street and paints it in colours
they had forgotten. Until they see blue sky, as dry and hot as coconut rice.

 

Then we are dancing
all together. Amaa dances, too. Grey fades from her skin, and she knows me. I
beam at her, full of light, and dance away to kiss Nira. And Amaa stops.

The dance stumbles,
fades around her. Mist trickles in. Nira and I back away from the glitter in
her eyes. Our sunlit friends gather to us, behind us. Four neighbourhood
children run over to our side.

"What are you doing?"
says Amaa. "Caste-mixing is bad enough, but girls with girls…what
are
?"

Uwati says, "We
should run, before they call the King's men."

I say, "No." Holding
hands, standing tall, Nira and I face the sun. Our shadows fall away behind us.
Ratit takes my other hand and holds his hand out to Uwati. My baby sister Rimi
comes toddling to Nira. I say, "We should dance."

Mist gathers into
Hemal, and she starts to sing.

 

Nothing Happened in 1999
Fábio Fernandes
 
Fábio Fernandes teaches
creative writing, scriptwriting, and game writing at Pontifícia Universidade
Católica de São Paulo, Brazil. He is the author of one novel in Portuguese,
Os
Dias da Peste
, and his short stories, as well as articles on science
fiction, have appeared in several languages.

 

Humankind discovered time
travel in the early twenty-second century.

 

It wasn't on
purpose, as it were. As happens with many scientific discoveries, sometimes you
are looking for one thing, then another gets in the way with results you are
most definitely not expecting. Take Viagra, for instance. Or antigravity
associated with superconductors.

The time travel
process was discovered during experiments in locative media and augmented
reality applied to elevators.

Anyway, it happened
at a very interesting time in History. The human race had suffered a long
period of wars, diseases and, even though it was far from global peace and
understanding, now it seemed to be entering, if not a golden age, at least a
time to start dreaming and making plans. A post-virtual environment embedded in
anti-gravitational elevators as part of an ambience designed to soothe and
distract people during the long rises and falls through the more-than two
hundred floors of the arcologies seemed as good a place as any to give this age
a jumpstart with such an invention.

As it were, the
environment turned out to be not only a virtuality, but also a time
displacement device that took its occupants to a very different set of
co-ordinates from those originally expected. Suffice it to say that, when the
doors of the elevator opened, the dumbfounded passengers were no longer in
Kansas—at least not in 2113 Kansas anyway (for the building really was located
in that American state) but in a shabby building in 1999 with a mere fifty
floors.

After a few minutes
of absolute confusion and, in some cases, total denial, the discombobulated
denizens of the future returned to the elevator and told it to get them back to
where they had come from. Fortunately, it was able to do so.

The First Prototype,
as this elevator is called today, is on permanent exhibition at the
Smithsonian—but not before the post-virtual environment was carefully dissected
and examined in search of what caused it to behave so unexpectedly. Something
to do with quantum teleportation, apparently, but the details were never
disclosed to the public. (Perhaps, as some media pundits said, because even the
scientists didn't know how the hell such a thing happened.)

Be it as it may,
time travel rapidly became a fad, and—who would have expected that?—a sort of
escape valve for the stressed citizen. People cherished the idea of travelling
to a fine, quiet time, not to any turning point in History where they could be
attacked by terrorists or die in an earthquake, for instance. Nobody tried to
alter the past in order to change the future.

One of these Safe
Years—as they were called—was the very first year reached by the elevator:
1999.

(Now, there were
some dissenters who argued that even 2001 could be considered a Safe Year, in
every city other than New York, but the majority preferred to stay on the safe
side.) It was a year when anything could have happened—except that it didn't.

Again, dissenters
begged to differ—they said that it all depended on whose view it was, for in
1999 the following things happened: a 6.1 Richter scale earthquake hit western
Colombia, killing at least 1,000; a fire in the Mont Blanc Tunnel in the Alps,
killed 39 people, closing the tunnel for nearly 3 years; a magnitude 5.9
earthquake hit Athens, killing 143 and injuring more than 2,000. Another quake,
this one Richter 7.6, killed about 2,400 people in Taiwan; not to mention the
Kosovo War.