The Apex Book of World SF

  The Apex Book of Word SF

  Volume 4

  Edited by Mahvesh Murad

  Series edited by Lavie Tidhar

  Smashwords Edition

  Also from Apex Publications

  The Apex Book of World SF 1

  “These stories deserve to be heard!”

  —Frederik Pohl

  The Apex Book of World SF 2

  “The Apex Book of SF series has proven to be an excellent way to sample the diversity of world SFF and to broaden our understanding of the genre’s potentials.”

  —Ken Liu, winner of the Hugo Award and author of The Grace of Kings

  The Apex Book of World SF 3

  “Important to the future of not only international authors, but the entire SF community.”

  —Strange Horizons

  www.apexbookcompany.com

  CONTENTS

  Introduction / Lavie Tidhar

  Introduction / Mahvesh Murad

  The Vaporization Enthalpy of a Peculiar Pakistani Family / Usman T. Malik

  Setting Up Home / Sabrina Huang

  The Gift of Touch / Chinelo Onwualu

  The Language of Knives / Haralambi Markov

  In Her Head, In Her Eyes / Yukimi Ogawa

  The Farm / Elana Gomel

  The Last Hours of the Final Days / Bernardo Fernández

  The Boy Who Cast No Shadow / Thomas Olde Heuvelt

  First, Bite Just a Finger / Johann Thorsson

  The Eleven Holy Numbers of the Mechanical Soul / Natalia Theodoridou

  Djinns Live by the Sea / Saad Z. Hossain

  How My Father Became a God / Dilman Dila

  Black Tea / Samuel Marolla

  Tiger Baby / JY Yang

  Jinki and the Paradox / Sathya Stone

  Colour Me Grey / Swabir Silayi

  Like a Coin Entrusted in Faith / Shimon Adaf

  Single Entry / Celeste Rita Baker

  The Good Matter / Nene Ormes

  Pepe / Tang Fei

  Six Things We Found During the Autopsy / Kuzhali Manickavel

  The Symphony of Ice and Dust / Julie Novakova

  The Lady of the Soler Colony / Rocío Rincón

  The Four Generations of Chang E / Zen Cho

  Pockets Full of Stones / Vajra Chandrasekera

  The Corpse / Sese Yane

  Sarama / Deepak Unnikrishnan

  A Cup of Salt Tears / Isabel Yap

  Introduction

  Series Editor Lavie Tidhar

  WHEN WE SET out to publish the first volume of The Apex Book of World SF, the idea of a series of such anthologies was only a dream—an impossible one, it seemed then. Yet somehow, the idea resonated. People took up the book, and before I knew it I was editing a second, and then a third volume.

  The World SF anthologies have become a library, a map charting the contemporary scene of truly international, speculative fiction. So much has changed in the years since I began editing the first volume, so many more stories are now published, so many authors are making their mark, and it is wonderful to see. The books even crop up, increasingly, on various academic curriculums, and I am told have inspired other people to translate, publish, and edit works that may not have otherwise appeared.

  It has been wonderful to be a part of this for so long, with the books as well as the accompanying web site, the World SF Blog, which ran for four years, and with the World SF Travel Fund, which is ongoing. I am grateful to our wonderful publisher, Jason Sizemore, without whom none of this would have been possible, and to all the authors, translators, editors, and friends throughout the years who have helped make these books a reality.

  It was obvious to me, however, that after three books, a new set of eyes was needed, that a new voice should be heard.

  Mahvesh Murad is that new voice. A fiercely intelligent and dedicated reader, reviewer, and broadcaster from Pakistan, this is her first anthology—but far from being her last. I couldn’t be happier that she stepped in to breathe new life to this, Volume 4, and I am delighted with her choices.

  I have stayed on as Series Editor, offering, beside continuity, my support in the background—handling paperwork, forwarding reading material, providing contact, offering advice if any was needed—but this book belongs entirely to Mahvesh.

  I hope you enjoy it as much as I did.

  —Lavie Tidhar, 2015

  Introduction

  Editor Mahvesh Murad

  DIVERSITY IS A tricky word. We talk about it all the time. We talk about the need for diverse voices and diverse books but I’ve always wondered what that really means. Diverse for whom? Not for me, surely? I’ve lived in Karachi my entire life—stories from Asia are not diverse to me; they’re my childhood. Diversity is a problematic term for me, because it often seems to indicate that the inclusion of who or what the West sees as the exotic Other into Western mainstream literature is enough to make a difference. But it isn’t. And it won’t be until there is a shift of the entire status quo. So while there are stories in this book about aliens and spaceships, stories about strange beings, politics, family and love, stories about magic and power, there are, most importantly, stories with the magic and the power to change the way you see speculative fiction.

  But let me make this claim: this is not a book of diverse stories. This is a book of really great stories from all over the world, by writers who bring a new perspective that doesn’t fit in with the mainstream western status quo. These are writers who don’t care what the mainstream thinks or wants, can understand or digest. These are writers who write with a ferocity and a truth that represents their cultural heritage, their lives and our world.

  This is a book that comes as close to representing the world I know and live in, the world I am excited by, frustrated by, the world I marvel at every single day. Diversity isn’t something I need to find—it isn’t something you need to find either. It’s always been around you. Embrace it. Let it in. It has a story to tell you. The world is always bigger and better than we know.

  I’m so grateful for the opportunity to edit this volume, and so immensely grateful to each of the writers who let us publish their stories. This book belongs to each of you, to the world you are a part of and the worlds you create. These are your voices, your visions, your futures. Thank you for sharing them with us.

  Changing the status quo, shifting the centre away from the West and forcing it wider to encompass more is never going to be easy, but that doesn’t mean we don’t try. To paraphrase the Urdu poet Allama Iqbal: don’t be frightened of these furious violent winds—they blow only to make you fly higher.

  —Mahvesh Murad, Karachi, 2015

  The Vaporization Enthalpy of a Peculiar Pakistani Family

  Usman T. Malik

  Usman T. Malik is a Pakistani writer currently living in Florida. His work has appeared in Tor.com, Nightmare, Strange Horizons, and elsewhere. The following story won the 2014 Bram Stoker Award and was nominated for a Nebula Award.

  1

  THE SOLID PHASE of Matter is a state wherein a substance is particulately bound. To transform a solid into liquid, the intermolecular forces need to be overcome, which may be achieved by adding energy. The energy necessary to break such bonds is, ironically, called the heat of fusion.

  On a Friday after jumah prayers, under the sturdy old oak in their yard, they came together as a family for the last time. Her brother gave in and wept as Tara watched, eyes prickling with a warmth that wouldn’t disperse no matter how much she knuckled them, or blinked.

  “Monsters,” Sohail said, his voice raspy. He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and looked at the sky, a vast whiteness cobblestoned with heat. The plowed wheat fields beyond the steppe on which their house perched w
ere baked and khaki and shivered a little under Tara’s feet. An earthquake or a passing vehicle on the highway? Perhaps it was just foreknowledge that made her dizzy. She pulled at her lower lip and said nothing.

  “Monsters,” Sohail said again. “Oh God, Apee. Murderers.”

  She reached out and touched his shoulders. “I’m sorry.” She thought he would pull back. When he didn’t, she let her fingers fall and linger on the flame-shaped scar on his arm. So it begins, she thought. How many times has this happened before? Pushing and prodding us repeatedly until the night swallows us whole. She thought of that until her heart constricted with dread. “Don’t do it,” she said. “Don’t go.”

  Sohail lifted his shoulders and drew his head back, watching her wonderingly as if seeing her for the first time.

  “I know I ask too much,” she said. “I know the customs of honor, but for the love of God let it go. One death needn’t become a lodestone for others. One horror needn’t—”

  But he wasn’t listening, she could tell. They would not hear nor see once the blood was upon them, didn’t the Scriptures say so? Sohail heard, but didn’t listen. His conjoined eyebrows, like dark hands held, twitched. “Her name meant ‘a rose’,” he said and smiled. It was beautiful, that smile, heartbreaking, frightening. “Under the mango trees by Chacha Barkat’s farm Gulminay told me that, as I kissed her hand. Whispered it in my ear, her finger circling my temple. A rose blooming in the rain. Did you know that?”

  Tara didn’t. The sorrow of his confession filled her now as did the certainty of his leaving. “Yes,” she lied, looking him in the eyes. God, his eyes looked awful: webbed with red, with thin tendrils of steam rising from them. “A rose God gave us and took away because He loved her so.”

  “Wasn’t God,” Sohail said and rubbed his fingers together. The sound was insectile. “Monsters.” He turned his back to her and was able to speak rapidly, “I’m leaving tomorrow morning. I’m going to the mountains. I will take some bread and dried meat. I will stay there until I’m shown a sign, and once I am,” his back arched, then straightened. He had lost weight; his shoulder blades poked through the khaddar shirt like trowels, “I will arise and go to their homes. I will go to them as God’s wrath. I will—”

  She cut him off, her heart pumping fear through her body like poison. “What if you go to them and die? What if you go to them like a steer to the slaughter? And Ma and I—what if months later we sit here and watch a dusty vehicle climb the hill, bouncing a sack of meat in the back seat that was once you? What if…”

  But she couldn’t go on giving name to her terrors. Instead, she said, “If you go, know that we as we are now will be gone forever.”

  He shuddered. “We were gone when she was gone. We were shattered with her bones.” The wind picked up, a whipping, chador-lifting sultry gust that made Tara’s flesh prickle. Sohail began to walk down the steppes, each with its own crop: tobacco, corn, rice stalks wavering in knee-high water; and as she watched his lean farmer body move away, it seemed to her as if his back was not drenched in sweat, but acid. That his flesh glistened not from moisture, but blood. All at once their world was just too much, or not enough—Tara couldn’t decide which—and the weight of that unseen future weighed her down until she couldn’t breathe. “My brother,” she said and began to cry. “You’re my little brother.”

  Sohail continued walking his careful, dead man’s walk until his head was a wobbling black pumpkin rising from the last steppe. She watched him disappear in the undulations of her motherland, helpless to stop the fatal fracturing of her world, wondering if he would stop or doubt or look back.

  Sohail never looked back.

  Ma died three months later.

  The village menfolk told her the death prayer was brief and moving. Tara couldn’t attend because she was a woman.

  They helped her bury Ma’s sorrow-filled body, and the rotund mullah clucked and murmured over the fresh mound. The women embraced her and crooned and urged her to vent.

  “Weep, our daughter,” they cried, “for the childrens’ tears of love are like manna for the departed.”

  Tara tried to weep and felt guilty when she couldn’t. Ma had been sick and in pain for a long time and her hastened death was a mercy, but you couldn’t say that out loud. Besides, the women had said children, and Sohail wasn’t there. Not at the funeral, nor during the days after. Tara dared not wonder where he was, nor imagine his beautiful face gleaming in the dark atop a stony mountain, persevering in his vigil.

  “What will you do now?” they asked, gathering around her with sharp, interested eyes. She knew what they really meant. A young widow with no family was a stranger amidst her clan. At best an oddity; at her worst a seductress. Tara was surprised to discover their concern didn’t frighten her. The perfect loneliness of it, the inadvertent exclusion—they were just more beads in the tautening string of her life.

  “I’m thinking of going to the City,” she told them. “Ma has a cousin there. Perhaps he can help me with bread and board, while I look for work.”

  She paused, startled by a clear memory: Sohail and Gulminay by the Kunhar River, fishing for trout. Gulminay’s sequined hijab dappling the stream with emerald as she reached down into the water with long, pale fingers. Sohail grinning his stupid lover’s grin as his small hands encircled her waist, and Tara watched them both from the shade of the eucalyptus, fond and jealous. By then Tara’s husband was long gone and she could forgive herself the occasional resentment.

  She forced the memory away. “Yes, I think I might go to the City for a while.” She laughed. The sound rang hollow and strange in the emptiness of her tin-and-timber house. “Who knows? I might even go back to school. I used to enjoy reading once.” She smiled at these women with their hateful, sympathetic eyes that watched her cautiously as they would a rabid animal. She nodded, talking mostly to herself. “Yes, that would be good. Hashim would’ve wanted that.”

  They drew back from her, from her late husband’s mention. Why not? she thought. Everything she touched fell apart; everyone around her died or went missing. There was no judgment here, just dreadful awe. She could allow them that, she thought.

  2

  The Liquid Phase of Matter is a restless volume that, by dint of the vast spaces between its molecules, fills any container it is poured in and takes its shape. Liquids tend to have higher energy than solids, and while the particles retain inter-particle forces they have enough energy to move relative to each other.

  The structure therefore becomes mobile and malleable.

  In the City, Tara turned feral in her pursuit of learning. This had been long coming and it didn’t surprise her. At thirteen, she had been withdrawn from school; she needed not homework but a husband, she was told. At sixteen, she was wedded to Hashim. He was blown to smithereens on her twenty-first birthday. A suicide attack on his unit’s northern check post.

  “I want to go to school,” she told Wasif Khan, her mother’s cousin. They were sitting in his six-by-eight yard, peeling fresh oranges he had confiscated from an illegal food vendor. Wasif was a Police hawaldar on the rough side of sixty. He often said confiscation was his first love and contraband second. But he grinned when he said it, which made it easier for her to like him.

  Now Wasif tossed a half-gnawed chicken bone to his spotted mongrel and said, “I don’t know if you want to do that.”

  “I do.”

  “You need a husband, not—”

  “I don’t care. I need to go back to school.”

  “Why?” He dropped an orange rind in the basket at his feet, gestured with a large liver-spotted hand. “The City doesn’t care if you can read. Besides, I need someone to help me around the house. I’m old and ugly and useless, but I have this tolerable place and no children. You’re my cousin’s daughter. You can stay here forever if you like.”

  In a different time she might have mistaken his generosity for loneliness, but now she understood it for what it was. Such was the way of age: it me
lted prejudice or hardened it. “I want to learn about the world,” she said. “I want to see if there are others like me. If there have been others before me.”

  He was confused. “Like you how?”

  She rubbed an orange peel between her fingers, pressing the fibrous texture of it in the creases of her flesh, considering how much to tell him. Her mother had trusted him. Yet Ma hardly had their gift and even if she did, Tara doubted she would have been open about it. Ma had been wary of giving too much of herself away—a trait she passed on to both her children. Among other things.

  So now Tara said, “Others who need to learn more about themselves. I spent my entire childhood being just a bride and look where that got me. I am left with nothing. No children, no husband, no family.” Wasif Khan looked hurt. She smiled kindly. “You know what I mean, Uncle. I love you, but I need to love me, too.”

  Wasif Khan tilted his head back and pinched a slice of orange above his mouth. Squeezed it until his tongue and remaining teeth gleamed with the juice. He closed his eyes, sighed, and nodded. “I don’t know if I approve, but I think I understand.” He lifted his hand and tousled his own hair thoughtfully. “It’s a different time. Others my age who don’t realize it don’t fare well. The traditional rules don’t apply anymore, you know. Sometimes, I think that is wonderful. Other times, it feels like the whole damn world is conspiring against you.”