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reached forward, but the tariqua, quick for once, was ahead of her. Instead of
opening the book to release the ant, she weighed it down with the same chipped
old stone with which
Kalal had played on his solitary visit to this qasr.
"Now, perhaps, my Jalila, you begin to understand?"
The stone was old, chipped, grey-green. It was inscribed, and had been carved
with the closed wings of a beetle. Here was something from a world so
impossibly old and distant as to make the book upon which it rested seem fresh
and new as an unbudded leaf -- a scarab, shaped for the Queens of Egypt.
-=*=-
"See here, Jalila. See how it grows. The breathmoss?"
This was the beginning of the Season of Autumns. The trees were beautiful; the
forests were on fire with their leaves. Jalila had been walking with Pavo,
enjoying the return of the birdsong, and wondering why it was that this new
season felt sad when everything around her seemed to be changing and growing.
"Look...."
The breathmoss, too, had turned russet-gold. Leaning close to it beneath this
tranquil sky, which was composed of a blue so pale it was as if the sea had
been caught in reflection inside an upturned white bowl, was like looking into
the arms of a miniature forest.
"Do you think it will die?"
Pavo leaned beside her. "Jalila, it should have died long ago.
Inshallah, it is a small miracle." There were the three dead marks where
Ananke had touched it in a Season of Long Ago. "You see how frail it is, and
yet..."
"At least it won't spread and take over the planet."
"Not for a while, at least."
On another rock lay another small colony. Here, too, oddly enough, there were
marks. Five large dead dots, as if made by the outspread of a hand, although
the shape of it was too big to have been Ananke's.
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Ian R. MacLeod - Breathmoss
They walked on. Evening was coming. Their shadows were lengthening. Although
the sun was shining and the waves sparkled, Jalila wished that she had put on
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something warmer than a shawl.
"That tariqua. You seem to enjoy her company...."
Jalila nodded. When she was with the old woman, she felt at last as if she was
escaping the confines of Al Janb. It was liberating, after the close life in
this town and with her mothers in their haramlek, to know that interstellar
space truly existed, and then to feel, as the tariqua spoke of Gateways,
momentarily like that ant, infinitely small and yet somehow inching, crawling
across the many universes' infinite pages. But how could she express this?
Even Pavo wouldn't understand.
"How goes the boat?" she asked instead.
Pavo slipped her arm into to crook of Jalila's and hugged her. "You must come
and see!
I have the plan in my head, but I'd never realized quite how big it would be.
And complex. Ibra's full of enthusiasm."
"I can imagine!"
The sea flashed. The two women chuckled.
"The way the ship's designed, Jalila, there's more than enough room for
others. I never exactly planned to go alone, but then Lya's Lya. And Ananke's
always--"
Jalila gave her mother's arm a squeeze. "I know what you're saying."
"I'd be happy if you came, Jalila. I'd understand if you didn't. This is such
a beautiful, wonderful planet. The leviathans -- we know so little about them,
yet they plainly have intelligence, just as all those old myths say."
"You'll be telling me next about the qasrs...."
"The ones we can see near here are nothing!
There are islands on the ocean that are entirely made from them. And the wind
pours through. They sing endlessly. A different song for every mood and
season."
"Moods! If I'd said something like that when you were teaching me of the
Pillars of Life, you'd have told me I was being unscientific!"
"Science is about wonder, Jalila. I was a poor teacher if I never told you
that."
"You did." Jalila turned to kiss Pavo's forehead. "You did...."
-=*=-
Pavo's ship was a fine thing. Between the slipways and the old mooring posts,
where the red-flapping geelies quarreled over scraps of dying tideflower, it
grew and grew. Golden-hulled. Far sleeker and bigger than even the ferries
that had once borne Al Janb's visitors to and from the rocket port, and which
now squatted on the shingle nearby, gently rusting. It was the talk of the
Season. People came to admire its progress.
As Jalila watched the spars rise over the clustered roofs of the fisherwomen's
houses, she was reminded of Kalal's tale of his father and his nameless
mother, and that ship that they had made together
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Ian R. MacLeod - Breathmoss in the teeming dockyards of that city. Her
thoughts blurred. She saw the high balconies of a hotel far bigger than any of
Al Janb's inns and boarding houses. She saw a darker, brighter ocean. Strange
flesh upon flesh, with the windows open to the oil-and-salt breeze, the white
lace curtains rising, falling....
The boat grew, and Jalila visited the tariqua, although back in Al Janb, her
thoughts sometimes trailed after Kalal as she wondered how it must be -- to be
male, like the last dodo, and trapped in some endless state of part-arousal,
like a form of nagging worry. Poor Kalal. But his life certainly wasn't
lonely. The first time Jalila noticed him at the center of the excited swarm
of girls that once again surrounded Nayra, she'd almost thought that she was
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seeing things. But the gossip was loud and persistent. Kalal and Nayra were a
couple --
the phrase normally followed by a scandalized shriek, a hand-covered mouth.
Jalila could only guess what the proud mothers of Nayra's haramlek thought of
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