David Hartwell - Year's Best SF 17

“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.

My mother grew up in northern Nigeria and had traveled with her parents all over the Middle East before the Great Change. She’d told me about how black Africans were often treated in these places, but I’d never encountered it with the Arabs I met in Nigeria. My mother said it was an old, old, old problem, stemming from the trans-Saharan slave trade and before that. I only half-believed it was real. But I knew the words abeed and abid, the Arabic singular and plural forms for black or slave. Ugly, cruel words.

“What is it you’re doing here?” he suddenly asked again, once he had all his things in his satchel. “How did you know to be here?”

“I didn’t,” I snapped.

“Then get out of here,” he said. “Didn’t you hear it on the news? You people never know what’s best for you!”

“You know what? I’m here to see what’s in that ship, so stay out of my way!” I said. He stepped forward. I stood my ground. He glanced over my shoulder at the ship.

“We’ll see,” he said. He flew up into the air and eventually descended behind some trees.

“Don’t mind him,” I muttered to Plantain, who was yards away, preoccupied with a patch of fennel she’d found near a tree. “I’m not going anywhere.” I returned to my spot on my mat and sat staring at the ship, listening. Waiting.

Seven hours later, I woke to Ahmed crouching over me, a rock in his raised hand. Every part of my body flexed. I stayed still.

He had the wild look of someone about to do something terrible in the name of those who raised him. I stared at him, willing him with all my might to look into my eyes. Look, I demanded with my mind. It was my only chance. If he didn’t, he’d kill me, I knew … and it was not going to be a painless, quick death. I strained for his eyes. Look, now! PLEASE!

He looked into my eyes.

He looked for a long long time.

His face went from intense to slack to horribly troubled. He dropped the stone beside my head. He whimpered. Tears welled in his eyes. I smirked. Good. To look into the eyes of a shadow speaker is to court madness. Or so the rumor went. All I knew was that people who looked right into my eyes for more than a second were never the same afterward.

He sat before me, his hands not over his eyes but over his ears, terror on his face. I began to feel a little ill. Not guilty. No. I hadn’t done anything. I was actually awash in rage. He’d been ready to cave my head in and now while he grieved over whatever he was grieving, I wanted to kick his teeth in. He wasn’t paying attention to me. He was just sitting there holding his head. I could do it. But to do such a thing was not in me; it was evil. Unlike him, I couldn’t murder. But he’d almost brutally killed me. My conflicted feelings made my stomach lurch.

Naked faced, he started weeping. His eyebrows crinkled in, his mouth turned downward, and his eyes narrowed as he wept softly.

“Look at me! I deserved to be robbed and beaten by your people!” he sobbed. “They should. …”

I didn’t know what to say, so I didn’t say anything.

“Fisayo,” he whispered. It was odd to hear him speak my name. The sun was just coming up. “I …”

There was a loud hissing sound and we both looked toward the ship. A door had appeared on its side. The shuttle was finally opening.

Wiping his face with the heel of his hand, Ahmed got up. I scowled at him as I got up, too, wishing he’d stop his sniveling.

“Get it together,” I snapped. “Goodness.” He nodded, sobbed loudly, but then quieted a bit.

He was still weeping as we approached the shuttle. The sunlight was quickly bathing the desert. In the Sahara, the sun rises fast and steady. Even in a spontaneous forest. As we walked, I noticed many of the trees and bushes in the forest had disappeared or were withering, and the pond had gone foul and brackish.

“Will you stop it?” I whispered. I didn’t know why I was whispering but it seemed right. “Tell me what we should expect. Do you have information about how many are on board?”

He brought out his e-legba, clicked it on, and read for a moment. He took a deep breath. “Your eyes are evil,” he whined.

I scoffed. “It’s not my eyes, Ahmed. It was you.”

He sniffed loudly. “It says here that there are …” His voice cracked. He sniffled again. “There are supposed to be thirty-one people on board.”

As the sunlight and the heat increased, the vines on the shuttle quickly dried and began falling off, leaving the shuttle exposed. The door that had opened gave way to darkness inside. I could only see the wall, as the passageway went directly to the right.

“Why isn’t anyone coming out?” I asked.

As we moved closer, Ahmed pulled himself together … at least he stopped weeping. “So really,” he asked. “Why are you here?”

I hesitated. Then I shrugged. “I just happened to be a few miles away when I heard about it on my e-legba.”

He wiped at his eyes again. “You’re not here to steal from them?”

“No! Of course not!” I was getting more nervous the closer we got; it was good to talk about something else. “You were going to kill me.”

“I was.” He paused. He frowned as more tears began to dribble from his eyes. “I … I’m sorry.” He rubbed his temples. “I don’t think you’re human.”

“I don’t think you are either.”

We were standing at the door. Inside the shuttle, the walls were plush red and busy with buttons, small blank screens, and other things. To the right, the corridor went well into the ship. Ahmed sobbed loudly. He turned to the side, pressed a finger to his left nostril, and blew out a large amount of snot. “I’m sorry,” he said, looking distraught again, his voice strained as he tried to hold back more sobs.