The Year's Best Science Fiction, Vol. 20

There was a boat, hauled far up from the water, longer and blacker and heavier-looking than the feluccas, with a sort-of ramshackle house at the prow, and a winch at the stern that was so massive that Jalila wondered if it wouldn’t tip the craft over if it ever actually entered the water. But, for all that, it wasn’t the boat that first caught her eye, but the figure who was working on it. Even from a distance, as she struggled to heave some ropes, there was something different about her, and the way she was moving. Another alien? But she was plainly human. And barefoot, in ragged shorts, and bare-breasted. In fact, almost as flat-chested as Jalila still was, and probably of about her age and height. Jalila still wasn’t used to introducing herself to strangers, but she decided that she could at least go over, and pretend an interest in-or an ignorance of-this odd boat.

The figure dropped another loop of rope over the gunwales with a grunt that carried on the smelly sea breeze. She was brown as tea, with her massy hair hooped back and hanging in a long tail down her back. She was broad-shouldered, and moved in that way that didn’t quite seem wrong, but didn’t seem entirely right either. As if, somewhere across her back, there was an extra joint. When she glanced up at the clatter of shingle as Jalila jumped the last groyne, Jalila got a proper full sight of her face, and saw that she was big-nosed, big-chinned, and that her features were oddly broad and flat. A child sculpting a person out of clay might have done better.

“Have you come to help me?”

Jalila shrugged. “I might have done.”

“That’s a funny accent you’ve got.”

They were standing facing each other. She had grey eyes, which looked odd as well. Perhaps she was an off-worlder. That might explain it. Jalila had heard that there were people who had things done to themselves so they could live in different places. She supposed the breathmoss was like that, although she’d never thought of it that way. And she couldn’t quite imagine why it would be a requirement for living on any world that you looked this ugly.

“Everyone talks oddly here,” she replied. “But then your accent’s funny as well.”

“I’m Kalal. And that’s just my voice. It’s not an accent.” Kalal looked down at her oily hands, perhaps thought about wiping one and offering it to shake, then decided not to bother.

“Oh…?”

“You don’t get it, do you?” That gruff voice. The odd way her features twisted when she smiled.

“What is there to get? You’re just-”

“-I’m a man.” Kalal picked up a coil of rope from the shingle, and nodded to another beside it. “Well? Are you going to help me with this, or aren’t you?”

The rains came again, this time starting as a thing called drizzle, then working up the scale to torrent. The tides washed especially high. There were storms, and white crackles of lightening, and the boom of a wind that was so unlike the kamasheen. Jalila’s mothers told her to be patient, to wait, and to remember- please remember this time, so you don’t waste the day for us all, Jalilaneen-the things that they sent her down the serraplate road to get from Al Janb. She trudged under an umbrella, another new and useless coastal object, which turned itself inside out so many times that she ended up throwing it into the sea, where it floated off quite happily, as if that was the element for which it was intended in the first place. Almost all of the feluccas were drawn up on the far side of the roadway, safe from the madly bashing waves, but there was no sign of that bigger craft belonging to Kalal. Perhaps he-the antique genderative word was he, wasn’t it?-was out there, where the clouds rumbled like boulders. Perhaps she’d imagined their whole encounter entirely.