Year's Best SF 17

Father hated how the quality of the air was different. And he constantly dreamed of Mars. The new world, a fresh world, the place of his birth. He was an important man in the crumbling local government. Too important to have a windseeker son, one of those strange troublesome polluted children. Ahmed understood that Father thought him ruined.

As I looked into Ahmed, I heard him step toward me. When in a reading state, I’m basically helpless. I can’t pull out of it quickly. One day, I will learn to not be so vulnerable.

Looking into Ahmed, I was surprised to find poetry and gentleness, too. Ahmed loved salty olives. Short curvy women. The beaded necklaces around the necks of black-skinned women he’d see working at the market. The open sky. Music moved him. His quiet mother, whose hands were always writing adventure stories in the notebook she hid from Father …

It came as it always did. In disorganized fragments, details, like a sentient puzzle more concerned with the shape of its pieces than putting itself together.

The day Father drove him away was the day news came about his grandfather on the shuttle returning to Earth. The first since the Great Change. Ahmed had assumed he’d never see Grandfather. During the celebration of the news, Father had turned to Ahmed. Had sneered at Ahmed. Father was ashamed of the bizarre son he’d have to present to his father whom he hadn’t seen since he was four years old. Ahmed ran away that night. A windseeker must fly … not even Father’s heavy hand and words could change that.

“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.