The Brides of Heaven
N. K. Jemisin
No one realized the extent of Dihya's madness until she was caught sabotaging the water supply. Even then the madness was difficult to see as she sat in Ayan's office with her hands tied and her headscarf still askew from the struggle. She did not wrap her arms around herself and rock back and forth. She did not talk or weep incessantly, or fidget. Indeed, Ayan observed, to judge by her calm demeanor and the odd little smile on her face, Dihya might have been saner than any woman in the colony. This irritated Ayan to no end.
"You never attend the evening storytellings," Dihya said. She had kept her silence up to that point. "Why not? Don't you like tales?"
"Only true ones," Ayan replied. "For example, the tale of why you broke into the purification facility."
"To save us."
"I cannot see how it saves anyone to be robbed of our only source of clean water."
Dihya shrugged. "What good is water, to us?"
"Life."
"Water makes no difference. Illiyin is covered in life. Everything grows on this planet except us."
Ayan leaned her elbows on the arms of her chair and steepled her fingers. "And that very fertility is why we purify the water, Dihya, and take other precautions. But then, you would know better than I how dangerous this world can be."
Dihya flinched, her smile fading at last, and some of Ayan's irritation turned to shame. She had meant only that Dihya was the colony's sole xenobiologist, but her words inadvertently recalled Dihya's son Aytarel, who had been the first of the children to die on Illiyin. Ayan had seen Aytarel when they'd found him, after he'd slipped out of the house to play in a disused area of the colony compound. Animals had been at the corpse, but the greater desecration lay in the contaminated puddle-water he'd drunk, and the microscopic worms in it. They had not stayed microscopic.
Dihya's eyes turned inward. Seeing Aytarel, perhaps. "Death holds no fear for the faithful," she murmured. But abruptly her expression hardened. "At least, not when the dead are respected."
Ayan shifted in her seat. "Cremation was the only way to contain the organisms, Dihya. They had already destroyed the body."
"You destroyed the body." Dihya's lip curled. "But I expected nothing better from a woman like you. You pray, you recite the hadith when it suits you, but you have no true faith. You ignore tradition—"
"Tradition?" Ayan uttered a single bitter chuckle. "Tradition is the cause of our troubles, as far as I'm concerned." Then she shook her head, rejecting that notion. It was not tradition itself that she blamed, but the decision to appease a few zealots in tradition's name.
"Were you so eager to expose yourself to strange men?" Dihya raked her a contemptuous glare, her eyes settling last on Ayan's unveiled head. "I see. No faith and no modesty."
"It was coldsleep, Dihya. Even the most proper woman would find it difficult to feel immodest in a coma." And only the most self-righteous woman, she almost added, would continue to veil when there was no one left to veil for. But to say such a thing would touch on a point of pain that no woman in the colony acknowledged if she could help it.
Abruptly she realized she had allowed Dihya to distract her. "Enough. Why did you do this?"
"Even if I tell you, you cannot understand. It's more than faith. You've never been a mother. You've never created a life."
Heat, then chilly anger, ran through Ayan. She stared down at her hands and tried not to think of the nights she'd lain alone in her temphouse bed, longing for all the things she had once blithely put off for later -- a husband, children, a life beyond her career in the diplomatic corps. She tried to remind herself that Dihya was grief-mad, clinging to rhetoric and orthodoxy because there was comfort in such rigid confines. Dihya had no idea how much her words hurt and could not be held fully responsible for them even if she did.
But Ayan's voice sounded harsh even in her own ears as she said, "Will you count worms among the lives you've created when the rest of us lie dying like Aytarel?"
Dihya stiffened. Privately and belatedly Ayan cursed her own temper; she wanted answers from this madwoman. But to Ayan's surprise, Dihya did not retort or ressume her stubborn silence. Instead she rubbed her belly — doubtless remembering Aytarel again — and then the little smile returned, more infuriating than ever.
"You cannot understand," Dihya said again. "You would rather waste the rest of your life tilling ever-smaller fields, keeping order in this graveyard. But suicide is anathema to God, and I will not sit and wait for extinction."
With that, she began her confession.
Three months earlier and five years to the day after Aytarel's death, Dihya had decided to leave Illiyin. As xenobiologist she could claim priority use of the colony's landcrawlers, so it was a simple matter to take one and head off in no particular direction. The others tried to call her back over the shortcomm before she got out of range. They needed the landcrawler, needed her expertise, needed her presence as a sister of the heart. They feared for her — mostly that she would do harm to herself. It was hard enough, they argued, when everyone was together. Solitude sounded like a death sentence.
How could Dihya explain that it was they who ground away at her spirit? Their stagnation. Their hopelessness. Ever since the landing, when they'd emerged from the coldsleep unit naked and healthy and horrified to discover that the men's unit had malfunctioned, Illiyin Colony had been dying. Oh, there'd been hope for a time, in the form of the boy-children who had shared the women's unit with their mothers: Dihya's Aytarel and two others. But Illiyin was a hard world. Though most of its life-forms were harmless to Earth biologicals, a few were compatible enough — and opportunistic enough — to be a threat. Aytarel's death was the first and worst. Then little Hassan took a strange fever which killed him in hours. Last and hardest was Saiyeed; they had tried so much to protect him. But confined at home, bored and restless, he had waited until his mother's back was turned to climb a set of shelves. With him had died their last hope.
So Dihya drove, stopping only when it grew too dark for the landcrawler's solar cells. Sometimes she got out to collect samples of some new fruit or insect, more out of habit than any scientific interest. Sometimes she hunted for meat to supplement her protein rations, taking care to say the proper rites as she cut the animals' throats and placed them in the sterilization cabinet. If anyone had been present to ask what she sought on her journey, she would have replied nothing, save perhaps the company of living things to ease the memory of her son's corpse. Growing things, unlike Illiyin Colony.
But when she found the strange, silent grove of spindly-branched trees, and the iridescent pool at its heart, she realized that she had indeed been searching for something. There, in the grove, was proof of the truth that she had been seeking in her heart ever since the landing tragedy. God had not abandoned them. He had simply waited for them to seek Him out.
A knock at the tempbuilding's door interrupted Dihya's confession. Resisting the urge to sigh, Ayan called enter, and the door opened to admit Zamra, flanked by the two other women who made up the colony's police force. With them came Umina, the imam. She looked more awake than Ayan felt, but this was not surprising; she had probably been up already, preparing to lead the dawn prayer.
"No devices," Zamra said. She eyed Dihya. "At least, none that we've yet found."
"I told you. I wasn't trying to blow anything up," Dihya said, favoring Zamra with a cold look.
"Dihya," Ayan said with brittle patience, "you have returned to this colony in the small hours of the morning, unannounced. You deactivated part of the perimeter fence to get in. You hacked the purification facility's maintenance and entry programs. Given all that, and the fact that you won't tell us why you broke in, you must forgive us if we doubt your purpose was wholesome."