The Best of All Possible Worlds (38 page)

“Don’t look!” She yanked it out of his line of sight and stuffed it in her satchel.

“My apologies,” he said. He doubted it contained anything that would surprise him,
but with Delarua close bonding meant games of fake privacy and pretended ignorance.
He found it oddly endearing.

“Ready,” she said breathlessly at last. “But I still don’t see why we can’t go in
the car.”

“The car has nav installed,” he hinted with a raised eyebrow. “We neither need nor
want nav where we’re going.”

She raised an eyebrow in turn, intrigued. “Lead the way, then.”

By the time they got the horses saddled up, a faint dawn light was beginning to glow.
A few minutes’ easy walk was sufficient to take them out from under the trees at the
heart of the homestead, through the outer pastures, and onto the main road. They journeyed
for a while along their own boundary line in a silence that was companionable and
more.

Delarua spoke only once. “We’re going down to the sea.”

“Yes,” he answered aloud.

She laughed. It was an adventure to her, an adventure and a mystery all wrapped up
in anticipation. She radiated a warm, pleasant buzz, and several vivid pictures suddenly
flickered through her mind. He thought for a moment, understood, and smiled at the
compliment. She had imagined her mind would be bare before his, naked under a scorching
desert sun, with neither shelter nor refuge. Instead, it was like playing hide-and-seek
in the light and shadow of a forest, discovering and inventing a new language of double
meaning, subtlety, poetry, and image. As a linguist, she was captivated; as a lover,
she was enraptured. Nothing could be said the same way twice.

Their destination, a small bay earmarked for future Council development, was all sand
and dry, unpopulated scrubland yet perfectly suited to the purpose. Pale, shallow
water stretched for hundreds of meters up to the line where it met abruptly with depths
of dark blue ocean. Dllenahkh scanned the darker colors carefully and sighed with
relief. They were too late to witness the splashdown but in time for everything else.
He dismounted, held the reins securely, and watched the horizon. After briefly eyeing
him with curiosity, Delarua did the same.

Dllenahkh’s horse sidestepped nervously. He reassured it with a brief mental touch.

“What—what is that?” Delarua gasped.

A hectare of distant ocean was shifting. Solid grayness gradually
emerged, surging up like a wave, but slowly, so slowly that barely a ripple chased
over the water’s surface to the beach. Its center was stiff, ridged, and ponderous,
but the edges curled and fanned delicately with exquisite control.

“Is it …?” she whispered softly, her mind a racket of thoughts and emotions.

“Yes,” he confirmed. Small, unharnessed, unladen, but unmistakable.

An aperture like a blowhole appeared on the back of the leviathan. Only then did its
size become clear as a tiny human creature was ejected in a gentle rush of water to
tumble over the side and into the ocean. Eyeless yet aware, the beast carefully washed
its living cargo to shore with a lazy flap of its foremost fringe. Delarua kept her
eyes fixed in fascination on the small dot traveling inland. Dllenahkh also watched
until he sensed some other movement, another shifting patch of gray amid the blue
that made him startle and stare … but the sea calmed and kept its secret.

No longer old but not yet young, Naraldi stepped out of the gentle surf, shaking salt
water from his hair. It was just long enough to trouble his eyes, drenched-dark in
hue with a few white streaks gleaming bright. His pilot suit flashed in the sun, bringing
an image of Sayr to Delarua’s thoughts. She laughed out loud in sheer happiness, remembering,
knowing.

“Dllenahkh! Grace!” Naraldi hailed them gladly. “Have you any space in your realm
for a rootless wanderer?”

Dllenahkh felt a sensation of overwhelming, devastating déjà vu—another time, another
beach, Naraldi rising up out of the ocean to destroy the universe with a few words.
His mind had been punctured in that instant, leaving behind a fragmented, perilous
memory that could spin him into endless orbit around nothingness. For his own sake,
he had learned to forget that day. Now
his mind fractured again to take in the reality that he was standing by the sea and
hearing Naraldi’s voice, not merely without desolation but with actual gladness. Memory
and moment combined violently, and he struggled to shield Delarua from the sudden
maelstrom.

She did not look at him. She did not have to. She took firm hold of his hand and silently
gave him her storm of joy to navigate instead.

“Welcome, Naraldi!” she cried. “Welcome home!”

“Golden,” the poem quoted in the chapter “
The Faerie Queen
,” is an unpublished work by Dvorah Simon and is used with the author’s permission.

The Indian Ocean tsunami of December 26, 2004, will long be remembered for the devastation
it wrought on many coastal communities. Months later, the BBC reported on a distressing
side effect of the disaster; more women than men were killed by the tsunami, up to
eighty percent in some of the hardest hit areas. These were women at home with their
children on a Sunday while their husbands were fishing far out at sea or running errands
inland; women waiting on the beach for the fishermen to return; and women who were
not physically strong enough to hold on as the wave swept by. Representatives of aid
organizations commented on the social impact of this gender imbalance, including psychiatric
trauma in several newly bereaved men and “reports of rapes, harassment and forced
marriages coming from emergency camps around the region” (“Loss of Women Haunts Fishermen,”
BBC 2009). Professor Sivathambi of Colombo University in Sri Lanka noted, “Men are
only the bread earners. Women are the backbone of the family. Take them out and it
leads to instability” (“Most Tsunami Dead Female,” BBC 2009).

The Caribbean is to me the new cradle of humanity. It was easy for me to imagine an
entire planet just like it, with people from every corner of the world. I was also
influenced by stories of the real-life Pestalozzi Village and International Children’s
Villages founded after World War II for war orphans of all nationalities. A third
source of inspiration came from Ray Bradbury, not only his story “Dark They Were,
and Golden-Eyed,” which is referenced in the first chapter, but also “Way in the Middle
of the Air” and “The Other Foot,” which depicted African Americans of the 1950s fleeing
segregation and founding a colony on Mars.

K
AREN
L
ORD
has been a physics teacher, a diplomat, a part-time soldier, and an academic at various
times and in various countries. She is now a writer and research consultant in Barbados.
Her debut novel
Redemption in Indigo
won the 2008 Frank Collymore Literary Award, the 2011 William L. Crawford Award,
and the 2011 Mythopoeic Fantasy Award for Adult Literature and was nominated for the
World Fantasy Award for Best Novel.