The streets of Startown were all but empty, but there was a soccer game in progress (if you can use soccer and progress in the same sentence) on Eagle Street two blocks from the mosque, and it had drawn quite a crowd—some of them in long-sleeved robes, some in jeans and shirts. I watched for a few minutes, scanning for Aisha, but though I noticed a few pale and beardless faces, I couldn’t see any women present at all, or anyone under fifteen. I attracted some stares, not all of them friendly, but no one questioned my right to be there.
A few minutes after the whistle blew for half-time, I heard the sound of a single, powerful voice booming from the direction of the mosque, and everyone turned and walked toward it. I followed until the last of them had disappeared inside the doors, and then headed back toward my home.
I’d reached the edge of Startown when, suddenly, it began raining. I heard doors open behind me, and laughter, and turned to see al-Goharans rushing out into the street, most of them staring at the sky and catching raindrops in their mouths as they laughed; a few even removed their skull-caps and let them fill with water before upending them over their heads. I turned about, but though I searched down every street, I couldn’t see Aisha anywhere. Eventually, after the rain stopped, I returned home, hearing the waterfed razorvine growing around me as I walked.
That evening, I began learning Arabic: the library had teaching programs for most languages, even ones that had been dead since before contact. It was a little easier than Chuh’hom Oratory, and it might even be useful.
“Why?” Aisha demanded.
“Why what?”
“Why are you learning Arabic? And why do you want me to help you?”
“Well, al-Goharans are going to be staying here after every solstice,” I replied, reasonably enough. “We should have someone here who can speak to them without an interpreter.”
“We all speak Amerish.”
“Then why do you learn Arabic?”
“The Qur’an must be read in the original; all translations are invalid.”
“What do you speak at home?”
“My mother used to call it Amerabic,” she replied, and a beautiful smile suddenly appeared on her face. “Sometimes we’ll start a sentence in one language and want to say something that’s easier in the other language, so we switch. It’s whatever language we think in—here, everyone speaks Amerish, so I think in Amerish.”
I nodded. “I went to Startown yesterday, and everyone there was speaking Arabic.”
“That’s—you did what?”
“I went to Startown. I watched the soccer game for a while; then it started raining, and everyone seemed to get a big kick out of it.”
“It doesn’t rain very often on al-Gohara,” she replied, looking at the cloudy sky with distinct approval. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen it rain like that before.”
“Then why weren’t you out dancing in it like everyone else?”
“I—” She turned to stare at me; her beautiful face turned pale, and then pink. “That’s none of your business. Anyway, I’m sure it’ll rain again before I leave, initially.”
I realized, suddenly, that all the times I thought she’d said “initially,” whether or not it made sense, she was really saying “inshallah”—“if Allah wills it.” “Oh, sure,” I replied. “Or maybe you can stop at New Seattle on your way back. Do you mind if I ask you a question?” She continued to stare, so I didn’t wait for her to answer. “Are there any other girls—or women—in Startown?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“That’s two questions....” She turned away from me, and watched the basketball game for a while. I was beginning to suspect that the reason she almost always headed for this clump of trees at lunchtime was that she liked talking to me, but wanted to make sure there were always plenty of witnesses, as though she was willing to regard me as a girl from the neck up. “Do you remember what Jai was saying last week about scarce resources and the Stigs?”
“The parts I stayed awake for.”
“What she, he—what should I call him?”
“E,” I replied, without hesitation. “We’re all ‘e,’ except you.”
“Okay. What e said doesn’t really apply on al-Gohara. There’s one resource that’s still scarce, and the Stigs control it: that’s passage to Earth. The hajj, the pilgrimage to Mecca, is one of the five pillars of Islam, but there isn’t enough room on the Stig ships for all adults to make the journey even once, so places are awarded randomly by a computer. At least, they are on al-Gohara; I don’t know how it’s done on other Muslim worlds.”
I thought about this for a moment, and asked, “And women aren’t allowed to go?”
“It’s a little more complicated than that… women are allowed to go, but not without their husbands, so unless the husband has also won a place on the ship, the woman gives it to her husband. Or sometimes to her father, or an adult son, or she can trade it, inshallah. And there are some who think the computer may not be perfectly random—”
“Trade it? For what?”
Aisha shrugged. “Favors. Prestige. Luxuries that the facs don’t make. A better marriage for her children, maybe, inshallah.”
“Arranged marriages?”
She nodded. I refrained from whistling or swearing, but it was a near thing. “Some women complain about not going, but the men just blame the Stigs for not having bigger ships: some even say they’re doing it to weaken our faith, because the Stigs won’t even let us fill the ship, just in case someone wants to leave the worlds we visit en route, which no one ever does. The imams and califas have tried petitioning the Stigs, but they don’t seem to understand about religion, and almost no one from,” she hesitated for a moment, “other worlds, the non-Islamic worlds, ever wants to visit Earth. Anyway, if the Stigrosc cared enough to want to break our faith, they could leave all of us stranded on al-Gohara forever.”
“Sounds like you’re lucky to be here.”
“Lucky?” She considered this, moving the tip of her tongue tantalizingly across her upper lip, as though tasting the air. “I’m lucky to be going on hajj, and glad I’ll be an adult by the time I’m there, but I miss having other girls around. Men are boring.”
I had to know. “How did you get a place when other women don’t?”
“My father wouldn’t leave me on al-Gohara alone.”
“What about your mother?”
“She’s dead,” Aisha snapped. “Okay? Can you leave me alone, now?”
I walked to the other side of the playing field, so I could see her and pretend I was still watching the basketball game. The game ended a few minutes later, and I saw Morgan, wearing little more than a translucent helix of swirling silver light, glance at me meaningfully before walking off hand-in-hand with Teri.
Despite that setback, I finally did persuade Aisha to coach me in Arabic, after only four weeks of mispronouncing words and hideously mangling the grammar. In a moment of random curiosity, I learnt that she was named after Muhammad’s third wife, and that her name was also Japanese for “manipulating an overly sympathetic or soft-hearted person,” a discovery that we both found hilarious.