Come with me.
She’d wondered what she would do, were Sang to ask that question of her again, but of course there was only one possible answer. The world had moved on; she had moved on; and only Sang remained, the inescapable remains of her history—a sixteen-year-old’s grandiloquent, thoughtless, meaningless gesture.
“You have to go,” she said, the words torn out of her before she could think. “Into space. That’s what I carved you for. Not this—this butchery.”
The ship came close enough for her to touch the exhaust ports: there was a tingle on her hands, and a warmth she’d forgotten existed—and, within her, for the first time, the baby quickened, kicking against the confines of her womb. She ought to have felt relief, but she was empty—bracing herself against the next contractions and trying to crane her head upwards to see Sang.
You need me, he said. Breath to breath, blood to blood. How else will you bear your children? Come with me. Let’s find the stars together.
“I can’t. You have to go,” she said, again. “On your own.”
You will not come with me? The disappointment, in other circumstances, would have been heartbreaking.
“Go, Sang. When this is over—go find the stars. That’s all you’ve ever dreamt of, isn’t it?”
The contractions were hitting in waves now—one barely over before the next one started. Your child is coming, Sang said.
“I know.” Someone—Akanlam—grabbed her, laid her on the ground—no, not on the ground, on the tunic she’d spread out. It was becoming hard to think, to focus on anything but the act of giving birth.
What will you do, for your other children? You need me.
She did; and yet… “I’ll find you,” she said, struggling for breath. “If I need you.” Of course she wouldn’t; even with her link to him, all she’d have to go on would be fuzzy dream-images; she wouldn’t leave Voc, wouldn’t venture among ten thousand planets and millions of stars in a fruitless search. But it didn’t matter. Sang would finally be free.
Sang was silent, for a while. I will come back, he said.
He wouldn’t. Rechan knew this with absolute certainty—Sang was the desire to escape, the burning need for flight that she’d felt during her adolescence. Once he found space, he would be in the home he’d always been meant for; and who could blame him for not looking back? “Of course,” she lied—smoothly, easily. “You can always come back.”
There would not be other babies beyond this one, no large family she could raise; not enough to fill the emptiness of the house. But did it matter, in the end? She’d had her wish, her miracle—her birth. Could she truly ask for anything else?
I am glad.
“So am I.” And it almost didn’t feel like a lie. Rechan relaxed, lying flat on her back; and she settled herself down to wait for the beautiful, heartbreaking sound of her child’s first breath.
“THE VAPORIZATION ENTHALPY OF A PECULIAR PAKISTANI FAMILY”
USMAN T. MALIK
This is Usman T. Malik’s first nomination for a Nebula Award. “The Vaporization Enthalpy of a Peculiar Pakistani Family” won the Bram Stoker Award and was first published in the anthology Qualia Nous.
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 were 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, watched 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 awfuclass="underline" 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.”