The Best of World SF by Lavie Tidhar (best romance novels of all time TXT) 📗

(III)

My mother is an anomaly in this society. She’s one of those rare women who hold babies in their bodies instead of storing the to-be-born children in the Born Structure that sits in the centre of the city, its apex a dagger to the sky. The Born Structure processes who’ll be born and who’ll die. It’s how I was born, shaped by glass and steel. Unlike others, the lucky ones, I’ve never felt Mama’s heartbeat close to my face.

My sister swore to me that Mama’s current baby will last in the womb forever. ‘Sisi, I swear – nxu s’tru – that baby is not coming out,’ she’d said a few months ago, in her oft-confident tone.

I’d grazed passed her, muttering, ‘Mxm, liar.’

‘Come on, you’re only jealous that you didn’t get the chance to bloma in Mama’s womb,’ she’d said. ‘You know I’m right, just admit it.’

So I’d kicked her in the shin and ran.

She’d pointed a finger like she was bewitching me: ‘Jealous one,’ she’d swore. That was the last time I saw her.

Mama has been pregnant for a year this time. Water is her church. Baptismal if you think about it – crawling back to God.

I enter our horseshoe-shaped settlement, bypassing the compounds into our own made of concrete and sweat and technology no one knows.

‘Dumelang!’ the family members shout in greeting.

I used to think that before I was born, Mama and Papa probably spat fire on my skin and rubbed warm-beige of fine sandy-desert soil to give it colour, and in particular hand gestures added dung-shit – for I’m not pure – to drive away malevolent spirits, insect-demons.

But I am not born. I am a manufacture of the Born Structure.

‘Jealous one,’ sisi greets me, guarding the doorway. ‘Howzit?’

‘S’cool,’ I whisper. ‘Where’s Mama?’

‘Hae, she can’t see you now. Just put your gifts by the fire.’

I don’t move.

‘Ao, problem?’ she asks.

‘Yazi, it took me my last units – the last money I have – to get here, and you won’t let me see her,’ I say through gritted teeth.

‘Haebo! It’s not my fault you’re some broke-ass—’

I pull at my earlobes to tune her out. This means I am not allowed to stay the night here. My presence will jinx Mama’s condition.

‘Can you at least loan me some cash?’ I ask. ‘I don’t have enough to sustain me when I get home. Leaving home and disconnecting activated my spending. You know, there is no deactivation.’

Her smile tells me it was the plan all along. ‘Then you’ll be prepared for death. Your reputation dilutes our family name’s power. You understand why you must leave.’

I don’t understand how a sister I grew up playing games with hates me that much. I don’t know when she disowned me – when she stopped thinking of me as a sibling to look up to. Is it just because I’m not her biological sister? That I’m a bastard shame in the family.

‘Leave, as in… forever?’

I can’t run to anywhere. I don’t know how.

(IV)

When I leave, Mama is still too unwell to see anyone besides my older sister, the gifted one who lived in her womb for nine months. Mxm.

So, sisi stands by the door, waving, with a huge grin plastered to her face. ‘Hamba, jealous one.’

The moonlight bleaches the village into a shockingly ghostly white. Air eases out from my lungs. My oxygen levels are slowly depleting. My sky is dead, but the blue ceiling is a magnet. Our thoughts, words and feelings evaporate from our minds like torn birds pulled by that magnetic force, and they light up the sky.

Our stars are composed of ourselves.

Maybe, tonight when Mama looks at the night sky she’ll see me watching her.

On the way home I pass through a nearby village. In one house with the green corrugated roof, three women sit in the sitting room, their soles bruised with black marks.

‘Heh Mma-Sekai,’ shouts one. ‘I tell you, a child born with one leg that’s similar to the father’s and the other leg that’s similar to another man’s won’t walk. S’tru.’ True. The woman crosses her fingers, a sign to God. ‘Sethunya’s child hasn’t walked for years. I’m not surprised. Woman sleeps around. You don’t believe? These things happen, sisi.’

‘Ah, don’t say.’ One claps her manicured hands. ‘Surely, they can download software to update the child’s biological software,’ the other says.

Twins – one an albino with pinkish-copper brown hair – and one pulls a younger girl from the sitting room onto the stoep.

‘Hae! If I see you jumping the fence again, you will know me!’ shouts their mother as their shoulders shrink. She gapes when she notices me. I am the child with legs from different men. I raise the middle finger. When will everyone stop gossiping about my family? So we aren’t rich enough to buy all these gadgets to change our body size, our ethnicity, our hair – but we’re poor enough to know true happiness is not bought. We’re also poor enough to throw out one of our children because she wasn’t born naturally. We’re poor to not even care about that child, about the years that crawled into her sad heart because her father was an illicit man.

‘Shem, and she’s still so young,’ one woman whispers.

‘Kodwa, would it make it right if I was old enough to take in this crap?’ I want to ask, but I keep walking with my head folded into my chest.

The sky tenses, pisses, a hiss of warm. Air humid-empty. My lips press tight to my wrist to check the moisture. My water levels are too low. Low tear supply. There’s only a few hours before the sun temporarily dies. Before I die too.

(V)

When I get home, the skin needs a scrub. But I let my scents accumulate so I won’t forget the skin I wear. So I remember the mother who used to cradle me and sing lullabies. I will miss her.

Just when the sunlight begins to turn gold, the rain obscures the night-sky eyes into an