Kevin Anderson: The Mammoth Book of Nebula Awards SF

The tiny legs twitch and kick in my hands.

Abdel Jameela’s wife howls in my head. They are drawing on my magic. Something pulls at— The voice falls silent.

I let go of the legs and, before my eyes, they begin to grow. As they grow, they fill with color, as if blood flowed into them. Then fur starts to sprout upon them.

“There is no strength or safety but in God!” I try to close my eyes and focus on the words I speak but I can’t. My head swims and my body swoons.

The spell that I cast on my poor husband to preserve him — these hidden hooves of his nurse on it! O, my surprising, wonderful husband! I hear loud lute music and smell lemongrass and then everything around me goes black.

When I wake I am on my back, looking up at a purple sky. An early morning sky. I am lying on a blanket outside the hovel. I sit up and Abdel Jameela hunches over me with his sour smell. Farther away, near the hill-path, I see the black shape of his wife.

“Professor, you are awake! Good!” the hermit says. “We were about to leave.”

But we are glad to have the chance to thank you .

My heart skips and my stomach clenches as I hear that voice in my head again. Kitten purrs and a crushed cardamom scent linger beneath the demon’s words. I look at Abdel Jameela’s legs.

They are sleek and covered in fur the color of almonds. And each leg ends in a perfect cloven hoof. He walks on them with a surprising grace.

Yes, learned one, my beloved husband lives and stands on two hooves. It would not be so if we hadn’t had your help. You have our gratitude .

Dazedly clambering to my feet, I nod in the she-ghoul’s direction. Abdel Jameela claps me on the back wordlessly and takes a few goatstrides toward the hill-path. His wife makes a slight bow to me. With my people, learned one, gratitude is more than a word. Look toward the hovel .

I turn and look. And my breath catches.

A hoard right out of the stories. Gold and spices. Jewels and musks. Silver and silks. Porcelain and punks of aloe.

It is probably ten times the dowry Shireen’s father seeks.

We leave you this and wish you well. I have purged the signs of our work in the hovel. And in the language of the donkeys, I have called two wild asses to carry your goods. No troubles left to bother our brave friend!

I manage to smile gratefully with my head high for one long moment. Blood and bits of the old man’s bone still stain my hands. But as I look on Abdel Jameela and his wife in the light of the sunrise, all my thoughts are not grim or grisly.

As they set off on the hill-path the she-ghoul takes Abdel Jameela’s arm, and the hooves of husband and wife scrabble against the pebbles of Beit Zujaaj Hill. I stand stock-still, watching them walk toward the land of the ghouls.

They cross a bend in the path and disappear behind the hill. And a faint voice, full of mischievous laughter and smelling of early morning love in perfumed sheets, whispers in my head. No troubles at all, learned one. For last night your Shireen’s husband-to-be lost his battle with the destroyer of delights .

Can it really be so? The old vulture dead? And me a rich man? I should laugh and dance. Instead I am brought to my knees by the heavy memory of blood-spattered golden hooves. I wonder whether Shireen’s suitor died from his illness, or from malicious magic meant to reward me. I fear for my soul. For a long while I kneel there and cry.

But after a while I can cry no longer. Tears give way to hopes I’d thought dead. I stand and thank Beneficent God, hoping it is not wrong to do so. Then I begin to put together an acceptable story about a secretly wealthy hermit who has rewarded me for saving his wife’s life. And I wonder what Shireen and her father will think of the man I have become.

Saladin Ahmed was born in Detroit. He has been a finalist for the Campbell Award for Best New Science Fiction or Fantasy Writer and the Harper’s Pen Award for Best Sword and Sorcery / Heroic Fantasy Short Story. His fiction has appeared in magazines and podcasts including Strange Horizons, Orson Scott Card’s InterGalactic Medicine Show, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Apex Magazine , and PodCastle , and has been translated into Portuguese, Czech, and Dutch. His fantasy novel Throne of the Crescent Moon is forthcoming from DAW Books. His website is www.saladinahmed.com.

FROM THE AUTHOR: When Apex Publications decided to publish a collection of my award-nominated short stories, I asked the readers of my LiveJournal if they could help me come up with an appropriate title. My high school friend Andrew Marc Greene suggested the title I Remember the Future as a fitting one for the type of stories I tend to write. I agreed, but that meant writing a new story with that title as well. I kept running the phrase “I Remember the Future” over and over in my head, but no story idea came to mind. And then on the afternoon of Tuesday, March 18, 2008, we heard the news that Arthur C. Clarke had died. (Oddly, because Clarke lived in a time zone farther east, he died on Wednesday, March 19, but those of us living in the West heard the news on Tuesday. It’s almost like time travel.)

Late that night, as I stared into a mirror and thought about how the last of the Big Three was gone, I suddenly realized what this story had to be about. I quickly shared the idea with my wife, Nomi, and then jotted down a bunch of notes so I wouldn’t forget it. I also called Janna Silverstein, since I needed to tell another science fiction and fantasy writer about the epiphany I just had, and it was too late to call anyone on the East Coast. “I Remember the Future” is about an elderly science-fiction writer named Abraham Beard (the name is a joke between my high school friend Charles Ardai and me, as we both have used it for writers or editors who are characters in our stories). Abraham has spent his life writing of various hopeful futures, and he is disappointed that none of them have come to pass. He reaches out to his adult daughter Emma, to connect with the future one last time, but Emma and her own family are moving away, and she rejects his overtures as being too little, too late. From Emma’s perspective, her father spent far too much of his life pursuing his writing career with his head lost in the clouds and too little time connecting with his family. Abraham acknowledges this in the story when he says, “I consider once again telling her what I’ve told her before: that times were tough, that money was tight, and that Sheila and I both had to work to support Emma properly. But then I recall the many times I shut the door of my home office on Emma to meet a deadline, and I realize that the chance for apologies and explanations has passed far into the mists of time.” As the story ends, Abraham connects with his other progeny, the characters he created in his infinite worlds.

The story is somber but hopeful. I had fun writing the selections from Abraham’s own novels that I worked throughout the narrative, as I had to capture the feel of science fiction from the various decades of the twentieth century. The story also tackles head-on the minor controversy that nowadays many science fiction and fantasy writers are looking to the past more than to the future; the story suggests that we should embrace that past rather than reject it. As Shakespeare said in The Tempest, “What’s past is prologue.”

“I Remember the Future” isn’t my first foray into recursive science fiction meant to honor those writers who came before us; my Hugo nominees “Cosmic Corkscrew” and “Paying It Forward” also show my interest in this theme.