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

My mother had scoffed when I told her I was coming down for the funeral. I hadn’t returned when my grandparents died; why was this burial so much more important? I couldn’t explain it. I’d always felt that I left New Biafra before I could take up my true purpose. That my life in Tkaronto was a shadow of what it could be. Perhaps I’d returned to bury more than my father.

I looked up and two women I’d never seen before were leaning into the pod, wailing and calling the dead man’s name, asking rhetorically why he had left them. I wondered how much of their performance was obscure cultural theater and how much was genuine grief.

Their wailing increased, and I wished I’d been allowed to bring my A.I. That, however, would have been considered an insult to the body, like looking into the eyes of an elder while you were being scolded. I’d forgotten how quickly my people whitewash the truth about our dead. We fear that speaking ill of them will invite death on ourselves as well.

One of the women stopped in front of me, sniffling into an old cloth kerchief. She looked to be in her mid-forties – about my age.

‘Your father was a good man,’ she said, reaching for my hands. I slid them into my pockets, just out of her reach, and she made do with patting my leg.

‘Was he?’ I tried for a tone of genuine curiosity, not the cynicism I actually felt.

‘I wouldn’t be here today, if it wasn’t for him.’

I nodded, unsure of what to say. My father had been famously generous: Everyone I’d met so far had a story of how he’d stepped in at just the right moment to change their lives. I didn’t know what to do with these tales. I suppose it was easier to give money to strangers than to give of yourself to the people closest to you.

After an awkward pause, she continued, speaking quickly as if to get the words out before her courage failed her. ‘You know, after I was raped ten years ago, nobody wanted to help me.’ I stiffened, tightening my hands into fists in my pockets. ‘Not my family, not the government, nobody. Only your father. He brought me into this house and allowed me to stay here for free until I found a place. He even paid for my marriage and my son’s apprenticeship. Me and my wife, we’re just so grateful to him.’

She pointed to the other woman, who had gone to stand by the door with a child of about ten years. He had soft brown eyes and a head of unruly curls, and he wore a miniature version of the ranger’s uniform that the dead man in the pod was wearing. I didn’t tell her about the same dead man’s reaction to my own rape thirty-three years ago – twenty-three years before her own. Instead, I smiled tightly.

‘I’m glad that it turned out so well for you.’

That’s when I saw the dead man’s shadow materialize in the corner of the room. I didn’t tell her about that either.

*

The dead man appeared again sometime during the night.

I had just struggled out of a dream. I was back in the guardhouse, its small high windows streaming an uncertain gray light into the room. Then hundreds of disembodied hands reached out of the ground to grab at me. They held me down, their fingers clutching, probing, and rubbing. I bit and clawed and slashed, but for every hand whose finger I tore off, for every palm I gouged and wounded, a new hand sprang up in its place.

It was an old nightmare, one I hadn’t had in over thirty years. When we moved to Turtle Island, my mother and our relocation broker made sure I received all the necessary therapies to deal with my trauma, but being here where it all happened seemed to have dredged everything back up.

I lay on the living room couch drenched in sweat and blinked into the semi-darkness before I saw him sitting on the armrest by my feet. In the light of the bioluminescent trees that lined the street by the back window, he looked real enough. When I sat up and turned on the lights, he was gone.

I should have been frightened, but I wasn’t. I knew he’d show up again. He and I had unfinished business.

*

He returned the next morning as I sat beneath the neem tree in the back garden, trying to hide from the unrelenting regard of the crowd of mourners inside the main house. The body was due to be interred with its tree in the front compound, and the place was choked with well-wishers. They spilled out onto the walkway beyond the house’s hedgerow fence and into the road. I was agitated, but instead of tuning into the nature sounds queued up on my A.I., I listened to the weaver birds screeching to each other in the branches above me.

I never noticed how loud those birds are.

The dead man looked up at the tree’s slim branches, weighed down by the birds’ basket-like nests. This time, I decided to respond directly.

‘You never did notice much beyond your own interests.’

I expected him to come back with an attack that cut to my deepest insecurities. It was a talent he had, and he had often used it to great effect when he was alive, but he didn’t. He just nodded sadly and put his hands in his pockets.

I suppose I deserve that.

I would have to make do with that. Even in death, he couldn’t apologize. A group of three men around the dead man’s age filtered out onto the back veranda. They joked nervously with each other, as if their laughter would somehow keep the shadow of death from falling on them too. Two of them, both dressed in the dark high-collared tunics of Biafran government salarymen,