Ian R. Macleod - Breathmoss

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Ian R. MacLeod - Breathmoss

BREATHMOSS

by IAN R. MACLEOD

First published in Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine, edited by Gardner R. Dozois, May 2002.

In her twelfth standard year, which on Habara was the Season of Soft Rains, Jalila moved across the

mountains with her mothers from the high plains of Tabuthal to the coast. For all of them, the journey

down was one of unhurried discovery, with the kamasheens long gone and the world freshly moist, and

the hayawans rusting as they rode them, the huge flat plates of their feet swishing through purplish-green

undergrowth. She saw the cliffs and qasrs she'd only visited from her dreamtent, and sailed across the

high ridges on ropewalks her distant ancestors had built, which had seemed frail and antique to her in

her worried imaginings, but were in fact strong and subtle; huge dripping gantries heaving from the mist

like wise giants, softly humming, and welcoming her and her hayawan, whom she called Robin, in

cocoons of effortless embrace. Swaying over the drop beyond into grey-green nothing was almost like

flying.

The strangest thing of all in this journey of discoveries was that the landscape actually seemed to rise

higher as they descended and encamped and descended again; the sense of up increased, rather than that

of down. The air on the high plains of Tabuthal was rarefied -- Jalila knew that from her lessons in her

dreamtent; they were so close to the stars that Pavo had had to clap a mask over her face from the

moment of her birth until the breathmoss was embedded in her lungs. And it had been clear up there, it

was always clear, and it was pleasantly cold. The sun shone all day hard and cold and white from the

blue blackness, as did a billion stars at night, although Jalila had never thought of those things as she ran

amid the crystal trees and her mothers smiled at her and occasionally warned her that, one day, all of this

would have to change.

And now that day was upon her, and this landscape -- as Robin, her hayawan, rounded the path

through an urrearth forest of alien-looking trees with wrinkled brown trunks and soft green leaves, and

the land fell away, and she caught her first glimpse of something far and flat on the horizon -- had never

seemed so high.

-=*=-

Down on the coast, the mountains reared behind them and around a bay. There were many people

here -- not the vast numbers, perhaps, of Jalila's dreamtent stories of the Ten Thousand and One Worlds,

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but so many that she was sure, as she first walked the streets of a town where the buildings huddled in

ridiculous proximity, and tried not to stare at all the faces, that she would never know all their families.

Because of its position at the edge of the mountains, the town was called Al Janb, and, to Jalila's

relief, their new haramlek was some distance away from it, up along a near-unnoticeable dirt track that

meandered off from the blue-black serraplated coastal road. There was much to be done there by way of

repair, after the long season that her bondmother Lya had left the place deserted. The walls were fused

stone, but the structure of the roof had been mostly made from the stuff of the same strange urrearth

trees that grew up the mountains, and in many places it had sagged and leaked and grown back toward

the chaos that seemed to want to encompass everything here. The hayawans, too, needed much attention

in their makeshift stables as they adapted to this new climate, and mother Pavo was long employed

constructing the necessary potions to mend the bleeding bonds of rusty metal and flesh, and then to

counteract the mold that grew like slow tears across their long, solemn faces. Jalila would normally have

been in anguish to think of the sufferings that this new climate was visiting on Robin, but she was too

busy feeling ill herself to care. Ridiculously, seeing as there was so much more oxygen to breathe in this

rich coastal air, every lungful became a conscious effort, a dreadful physical lunge. Inhaling the damp,

salty, spore-laden atmosphere was like sucking soup through a straw. She grew feverish for a while, and

suffered the attentions of similar molds to those that were growing over Robin, yet in even more

irritating and embarrassing places. More irritating still was the fact that Ananke her birthmother and Lya

her bondmother -- even Pavo, who was still busily attending to the hayawans -- treated her discomforts

and fevers with airy disregard. They had, they all assured her vaguely, suffered similarly in their own

youths. And the weather would soon change in any case. To Jalila, who had spent all her life in the cool

unvarying glare of Tabuthal, where the wind only ever blew from one direction and the trees jingled like

ice, that last statement might as well have been spoken in another language.

If anything, Jalila was sure that she was getting worse. The rain drummed on what there was of the

roof of their haramlek, and dripped down and pooled in the makeshift awnings, which burst in

bucketloads down your neck if you bumped into them, and the mist drifted in from every direction

through the paneless windows, and the mountains, most of the time, seemed to consist of cloud, or to

have vanished entirely. She was coughing. Strange stuff was coming out on her hands, slippery and

green as the slime that tried to grow everywhere here. One morning, she awoke, sure that part of her was

bursting, and stumbled from her dreamtent and out through the scaffolding that had by then surrounded

the haramlek, then barefoot down the mud track and across the quiet black road and down onto the

beach, for no other reason than that she needed to escape.

She stood gasping amid the rockpools, her hair lank and her skin feverishly itching. There was

something at the back of her throat. There was something in her lungs. She was sure that it had taken

root and was growing. Then she started coughing as she had never coughed before, and more of the

greenstuff came splattering over her hands and down her chin. She doubled over. Huge lumps of it came

showering out, strung with blood. If it hadn't been mostly green, she'd have been sure that it was her

lungs. She'd never imagined anything so agonizing. Finally, though, in heaves and starts and false

dawns, the process dwindled. She wiped her hands on her night-dress. The rocks all around her were

splattered green. It was breathmoss; the stuff that had sustained her on the high plains. And now look at

it! Jalila took a slow, cautious breath. And then another. Her throat ached. Her head was throbbing. But

still, the process was suddenly almost ridiculously easy. She picked her way back across the beach, up

through the mists to her haramlek. Her mothers were eating breakfast. Jalila sat down with them,

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wordlessly, and started to eat.

That night, Ananke came and sat with Jalila as she lay in her dreamtent in plain darkness and tried not

to listen to the sounds of the rain falling on and through the creaking, dripping building. Even now, her

birthmother's hands smelled and felt like the high desert as they touched her face. Rough and clean and

warm, like rocks in starlight, giving off their heat. A few months before, Jalila would probably have

started crying.

"You'll understand now, perhaps, why we thought it better not to tell you about the breathmoss...?"

There was a question mark at the end of the sentence, but Jalila ignored it. They'd known all along!

She was still angry.

"And there are other things, too, which will soon start to happen to your body. Things that are nothing

to do with this place. And I shall now tell you about them all, even though you'll say you knew it

before...."

The smooth, rough fingers stroked her hair. As Ananke's words unraveled, telling Jalila of changings

and swellings and growths she'd never thought would really apply to her, and which these fetid lowlands

really seemed to have brought closer, Jalila thought of the sound of the wind, tinkling through the crystal

trees up on Tabuthal. She thought of the dry cold wind in her face. The wet air here seemed to enclose

her. She wished that she was running. She wanted to escape.

-=*=-

Small though Al Janb was, it was as big a town as Jalila had ever seen, and she soon came to

volunteer to run all the various errands that her mothers required as they restored and repaired their

haramlek. She was used to wide expanses, big horizons, the surprises of a giant landscape that crept

upon you slowly, visible for miles. Yet here, every turn brought abrupt surprise and sudden change. The

people had such varied faces and accents. They hung their washing across the streets, and bickered and

smoked in public. Some ate with both hands. They stared at you as you went past, and didn't seem to

mind if you stared back at them. There were unfamiliar sights and smells, markets that erupted on

particular days to the workings of no calendar Jalila yet understood, and which sold, in glittering,

shining, stinking, disgusting, fascinating arrays, the strangest and most wonderful things. There were

fruits from off-planet, spices shaped like insects, and insects that you crushed for their spice. There were

swarming vats of things Jalila couldn't possibly imagine any use for, and bright silks woven thin as

starlit wind that she longed for with an acute physical thirst. And there were aliens, too, to be glimpsed

sometimes wandering the streets of Al Janb, or looking down at you from its overhung top windows like

odd pictures in old frames. Some of them carried their own atmosphere around with them in bubbling

hookahs, and some rolled around in huge grey bits of the sea of their own planets, like babies in a

birthsac. Some of them looked like huge versions of the spice insects, and the air around them buzzed

angrily if you got too close. The only thing they had in common was that they seemed blithely unaware

of Jalila as she stared and followed them, and then returned inexcusably late from whatever errand she'd

supposedly been sent on. Sometimes, she forgot her errands entirely.

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"You must learn to get used to things...." Lya her bondmother said to her with genuine irritation late

one afternoon, when she'd come back without the tool she'd been sent to get early that morning, or even

any recollection of its name or function. "This or any other world will never be a home to you if you let

every single thing surprise you...." But Jalila didn't mind the surprises; in fact, she was coming to enjoy

them, and the next time the need arose to visit Al Janb to buy a new growth-crystal for the scaffolding,

she begged to be allowed to go, and her mothers finally relented, although with many a warning shake of

the head.

The rain had stopped at last, or at least held back for a whole day, although everything still looked

green and wet to Jalila as she walked along the coastal road toward the ragged tumble of Al Janb. She

understood, at least in theory, that the rain would probably return, and then relent, and then come back

again, but in a decreasing pattern, much as the heat was gradually increasing, although it still seemed

ridiculous to her that no one could ever predict exactly how, or when, Habara's proper Season of

Summers would arrive. Those boats she could see now, those fisherwomen out on their feluccas beyond

the white bands of breaking waves, their whole lives were dictated by these uncertainties, and the habits

of the shoals of whiteback that came and went on the oceans, and which could also only be guessed at in

this same approximate way. The world down here on the coast was so unpredictable compared with

Tabuthal! The markets, the people, the washing, the sun, the rain, the aliens. Even Hayam and Walah,

Habara's moons, which Jalila was long used to watching, had to drag themselves through cloud like

cannonballs though cotton as they pushed and pulled at this ocean. Yet today, as she clambered over the

groynes of the long shingle beach that she took as a shortcut to the center of the town when the various

tides were out, she saw a particular sight that surprised her more than any other.

There was a boat, hauled far up from the water, longer and blacker and heavier-looking than the

feluccas, with a sort-of ramshackle house at the prow, and a winch at the stern that was so massive that

Jalila wondered if it wouldn't tip the craft over if it ever actually entered the water. But, for all that, it

wasn't the boat that first caught her eye, but the figure who was working on it. Even from a distance, as

she struggled to heave some ropes, there was something different about her, and the way she was

moving. Another alien? But she was plainly human. And barefoot, in ragged shorts, and bare-breasted.

In fact, almost as flat-chested as Jalila still was, and probably of about her age and height. Jalila still

wasn't used to introducing herself to strangers, but she decided that she could at least go over, and

pretend an interest in -- or an ignorance of -- this odd boat.

The figure dropped another loop of rope over the gunwales with a grunt that carried on the smelly sea

breeze. She was brown as tea, with her massy hair hooped back and hanging in a long tail down her

back. She was broad-shouldered, and moved in that way that didn't quite seem wrong, but didn't seem

entirely right either. As if, somewhere across her back, there was an extra joint. When she glanced up at

the clatter of shingle as Jalila jumped the last groyne, Jalila got a proper full sight of her face, and saw

that she was big-nosed, big-chinned, and that her features were oddly broad and flat. A child sculpting a

person out of clay might have done better.

"Have you come to help me?"

Jalila shrugged. "I might have done."

"That's a funny accent you've got."

They were standing facing each other. She had grey eyes, which looked odd as well. Perhaps she was

an off-worlder. That might explain it. Jalila had heard that there were people who had things done to

themselves so they could live in different places. She supposed the breathmoss was like that, although

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she'd never thought of it that way. And she couldn't quite imagine why it would be a requirement for

living on any world that you looked this ugly.

"Everyone talks oddly here," she replied. "But then your accent's funny as well."

"I'm Kalal. And that's just my voice. It's not an accent." Kalal looked down at her oily hands, perhaps

thought about wiping one and offering it to shake, then decided not to bother.

"Oh...?"

"You don't get it, do you?" That gruff voice. The odd way her features twisted when she smiled.

"What is there to get? You're just--"

"--I'm a man." Kalal picked up a coil of rope from the shingle, and nodded to another beside it. "Well?

Are you going to help me with this, or aren't you?"

-=*=-

The rains came again, this time starting as a thing called drizzle, then working up the scale to torrent.

The tides washed especially high. There were storms, and white crackles of lightening, and the boom of

a wind that was so unlike the kamasheen. Jalila's mothers told her to be patient, to wait, and to remember

-- please remember this time, so you don't waste the day for us all, Jalilaneen -- the things that they sent

her down the serraplate road to get from Al Janb. She trudged under an umbrella, another new and

useless coastal object, which turned itself inside out so many times that she ended up throwing it into the

sea, where it floated off quite happily, as if that was the element for which it was intended in the first

place. Almost all of the feluccas were drawn up on the far side of the roadway, safe from the madly

bashing waves, but there was no sign of that bigger craft belonging to Kalal. Perhaps he -- the antique

genderative word was he, wasn't it? -- was out there, where the clouds rumbled like boulders. Perhaps

she'd imagined their whole encounter entirely.

Arriving back home at the haramlek surprisingly quickly, and carrying for once the things she'd been

ordered to get, Jalila dried herself off and buried herself in her dreamtent, trying to find out from it all

that she could about these creatures called men. Like so many things about life at this awkward,

interesting, difficult time, men were something Jalila would have insisted she definitely already knew

about a few months before up on Tabuthal. Now, she wasn't so sure. Kalal, despite his ugliness and his

funny rough-squeaky voice and his slightly odd smell, looked little like the hairy-faced werewolf figures

of her childhood stories, and seemed to have no particular need to shout or fight, to carry her off to his

rancid cave, or to start collecting odd and pointless things that he would then try to give her. There had

once, Jalila's dreamtent told her, for obscure biological reasons she didn't quite follow, been far more

men in the universe; almost as many as there had been women. Obviously, they had dwindled. She then

checked on the word rape, to make sure it really was the thing she'd imagined, shuddered, but

nevertheless investigated in full holographic detail the bits of himself that Kalal had kept hidden beneath

his shorts as she'd helped stow those ropes. She couldn't help feeling sorry for him. It was all so

pointless and ugly. Had his birth been an accident? A curse? She began to grow sleepy. The subject was

starting to bore her. The last thing she remembered learning was that Kalal wasn't a proper man at all,

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but a boy -- a half-formed thing; the equivalent to girl -- another old urrearth word. Then sleep drifted

over her, and she was back with the starlight and the crystal trees of Tabuthal, and wondering as she

danced with her own reflection which of them was changing.

By next morning, the sun was shining as if she would never stop. As Jalila stepped out onto the newly

formed patio, she gave the blazing light the same sort of an appraising what-are-you-up-to-now glare

that her mothers gave her when she returned from Al Janb. The sun had done this trick before of

seeming permanent, then vanishing by lunchtime into sodden murk, but today her brilliance continued.

As it did the day after. And the day after that. Half a month later, even Jalila was convinced that the

Season of Summers on Habara had finally arrived.

-=*=-

The flowers went mad, as did the insects. There were colors everywhere, pulsing before your eyes,

swarming down the cliffs toward the sea, which lay flat and placid and salt-rimed, like a huge animal,

basking. It remained mostly cool in Jalila's dreamtent, and the haramlek by now was a place of tall

malqaf windtowers and flashing fans and well-like depths, but stepping outside beyond the striped shade

of the mashrabiyas at midday felt like being hit repeatedly across the head with a hot iron pan. The

horizons had drawn back; the mountains, after a few last rumbles of thunder and mist, as if they were

clearing their throats, had finally announced themselves to the coastline in all their majesty, and climbed

up and up in huge stretches of forest into stone limbs that rose and tangled until your eyes grew tired of

rising. Above them, finally, was the sky, which was always blue in this season; the blue color of flame.

Even at midnight, you caught the flash and swirl of flame.

Jalila learned to follow the advice of her mothers, and to change her daily habits to suit the imperious

demands of this incredible, fussy, and demanding weather. If you woke early, and then drank lots of

water, and bowed twice in the direction of Al'Toman while she was still a pinprick in the west, you

could catch the day by surprise, when dew lay on the stones and pillars, and the air felt soft and silky as

the arms of the ghostly women who sometimes visited Jalila's nights. Then there was breakfast, and the

time of work, and the time of study, and Ananke and Pavo would quiz Jalila to ensure that she was

following the prescribed Orders of Knowledge. By midday, though, the shadows had drawn back and

every trace of moisture had evaporated, and your head swarmed with flies. You sought your own

company, and didn't even want that, and wished, as you tossed and sweated in your dreamtent, for frost

and darkness. Once or twice, just to prove to herself that it could be done, Jalila had tried walking to Al

Janb at this time, although of course everything was shut and the whole place wobbled and stank in the

heat like rancid jelly. She returned to the haramlek gritty and sweaty, almost crawling, and with a

pounding ache in her head.

By evening, when the proper order of the world had righted itself, and Al'Toman would have hung in

the east if the mountains hadn't swallowed her, and the heat, which never vanished, had assumed a

smoother, more manageable quality, Jalila's mothers were once again hungry for company, and for food

and for argument. These evenings, perhaps, were the best of all the times that Jalila could remember of

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her early life on the coast of Habara's single great ocean, at that stage in her development from child to

adult when the only thing of permanence seemed to be the existence of endless, fascinating change. How

they argued! Lya, her bondmother, and the oldest of her parents, who wore her grey hair loose as

cobwebs with the pride of her age, and waved her arms as she talked and drank, wreathed in endless

curls of smoke. Little Pavo, her face smooth as a carved nutmeg, with her small, precise hands, and who

knew so much but rarely said anything with insistence. And Jalila's birthmother Ananke, for whom, of

her three mothers, Jalila had always felt the deepest, simplest love, who would always touch you before

she said anything, and then fix you with her sad and lovely eyes, as if touching and seeing were far more

important than any words. Jalila was older now. She joined in with the arguments -- of course, she had

always joined in, but she cringed to think of the stumbling inanities to which her mothers had previously

had to listen, while, now, at last, she had real, proper things to say about life, whole new philosophies

that no one else on the Ten Thousand Worlds and One had ever thought of.... Most of the time, her

mothers listened. Sometimes, they even acted as if they were persuaded by their daughter's wisdom.

Frequently, there were visitors to these evening gatherings. Up on Tabuthal, visitors had been rare

animals, to be fussed over and cherished and only reluctantly released for their onward journey across

the black dazzling plains. Down here, where people were nearly as common as stones on the beach, a

more relaxed attitude reigned. Sometimes, there were formal invitations that Lya would issue to

someone who was this or that in the town, or more often Pavo would come back with a person she had

happened to meet as she poked around for lifeforms on the beach, or Ananke would softly suggest a

neighbor (another new word and concept to Jalila) might like to pop in (ditto). But Al Janb was still a

small town, and the dignitaries generally weren't that dignified, and Pavo's beach wanderers were often

shy and slight as she was, while neighbor was frequently a synonym for boring. Still, Jalila came to

enjoy most kinds of company, if only so that she could hold forth yet more devastatingly on whatever

universal theory of life she was currently developing.

The flutter of lanterns and hands. The slow breath of the sea. Jalila ate stuffed breads and fuul and

picked at the mountains of fruit and sucked lemons and sweet blue rutta and waved her fingers. The

heavy night insects, glowing with the pollen they had collected, came bumbling toward the lanterns or

would alight in their hands. Sometimes, afterward, they walked the shore, and Pavo would show them

strange creatures with blurring mouths like wheels, or point to the vast, distant beds of the tideflowers

that rose at night to the changes of the tide; silver, crimson, or glowing, their fronds waving through the

dark like the beckoning palm trees of islands from storybook seas.

One guestless night, when they were walking north away from the lights of the town, and Pavo was

filling a silver bag for an aquarium she was ostensibly making for Jalila, but in reality for herself, the

horizon suddenly cracked and rumbled. Instinctively by now, Jalila glanced overhead, expecting clouds

to be covering the coastal haze of stars. But the air was still and clear; the hot dark edge of that blue

flame. Across the sea, the rumble and crackle was continuing, accompanied by a glowing pillar of

smoke that slowly tottered over the horizon. The night pulsed and flickered. There was a breath of

impossibly hot salt air. The pillar, a wobbly finger with a flame-tipped nail, continued climbing

skyward. A few geelies rose and fell, clacking and cawing, on the far rocks; black shapes in the darkness.

"It's the start of the Season of Rockets," Lya said. "I wonder who'll be coming...?"

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-=*=-

By now, Jalila had acquired many of her own acquaintances and friends. Young people were

relatively scarce amid the long-lived human Habarans, and those who dwelt around Al Janb were

continually drawn together and then repulsed from each other like spinning magnets. The elderly

mahwagis, who had outlived the need for wives and the company of a haramlek and lived alone, were

often more fun, and more reliably eccentric. It was a relief to visit their houses and escape the

pettinesses and sexual jealousies that were starting to infect the other girls near to Jalila's own age. She

regarded Kalal similarly -- as an escape -- and she relished helping him with his boat, and enjoyed their

journeys out across the bay, where the wind finally tipped almost cool over the edge of the mountains

and lapped the sweat from their faces.

Kalal took Jalila out to see the rocketport one still, hot afternoon. It lay just over the horizon, and was

the longest journey they had undertaken. The sails filled with the wind, and the ocean grew almost

black, yet somehow transparent, as they hurried over it. Looking down, Jalila believed that she could

glimpse the white sliding shapes of the great sea-leviathans who had once dwelt, if local legend was to

be believed, in the ruined rock palaces of the qasrs, which she had passed on her journey down from

Tabuthal. Growing tired of sunlight, they had swarmed back to the sea that had birthed them, throwing

away their jewels and riches, which bubbled below the surface, then rose again under Habara's twin

moons to become the beds of tideflowers. She had gotten that part of the story from Kalal. Unlike most

people who lived on the coast, Kalal was interested in Jalila's life in the starry darkness of Tabuthal, and

repaid her with his own tales of the ocean.

The boat ploughed on, rising, frothing. Blissfully, it was almost cold. Just how far out at sea was this

rocketport? Jalila had watched some of the arrivals and departures from the quays at Al Janb, but those

journeys took place in sleek sail-less craft with silver doors that looked, as they turned out from the

harbor and rose out on stilts from the water, as if they could travel half-way up to the stars on their own.

Kalal was squatting at the prow, beyond that ramshackle hut that Jalila now knew contained the

pheromones and grapplers that were needed to ensnare the tideflowers that this craft had been built to

harvest. The boat bore no name on the prow, yet Kalal had many names for it, which he would

occasionally mention without explaining. If there was one thing that was different about Kalal, Jalila had

decided, it was this absence of proper talk or explanation. It put many people off, but she had found that

most things became apparent if you just hung around him and didn't ask direct questions.

People generally pitied Kalal, or stared at him as Jalila still stared at the aliens, or asked him questions

that he wouldn't answer with anything other than a shrug. Now that she knew him better, Jalila was

starting to understand just how much he hated such treatment -- almost as much, in fact, as he hated

being thought of as ordinary. I am a man, you know, he'd still remark sometimes -- whenever he felt that

Jalila was forgetting. Jalila had never yet risked pointing out that he was in fact a boy. Kalal could be

prickly and sensitive if you treated him as if things didn't matter. It was hard to tell, really, just how

much of how he acted was due to his odd sexual identity, and how much was his personality.

To add to his freakishness, Kalal lived alone with another male -- in fact, the only other male in Al

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Janb -- at the far end of the shore cottages, in a birthing relationship that made Kalal term him his father.

His name was Ibra, and he looked much more like the males of Jalila's dreamtent stories. He was taller

than almost anyone, and wore a black beard and long colorful robes or strode about bare-chested, and

always talked in a thunderously deep voice, as if he were addressing a crowd through a megaphone. Ibra

laughed a lot and flashed his teeth through that hairy mask, and clapped people on the back when he

asked them how they were, and then stood away and seemed to lose interest before they had answered.

He whistled and sang loudly and waved to passers-by while he worked at repairing the feluccas for his

living. Ibra had come to this planet when Kalal was a baby, under circumstances that remained

perennially vague. He treated Jalila with the same loud and grinning friendship with which he treated

everyone, and which seemed like a wall. He was at least as alien as the tube-like creatures who had

arrived from the stars with this new Season of Rockets, which had had one of the larger buildings in Al

Janb encased in transparent plastics and flooded in a freezing grey goo so they could live in it. Ibra had

come around to their haramlek once, on the strength of one of Ananke's pop in evening invitations.

Jalila, who was then nurturing the idea that no intelligence could exist without the desire to acknowledge

some higher deity, found her propositions and examples drowned out in a flurry of counter-questions

and assertions and odd bits of information that she half-suspected that Ibra, as he drank surprising

amounts of virtually undiluted zibib and freckled aniseed spit at her, was making up on the spot.

Afterward, as they walked the shore, he drew her apart and laid a heavy hand on her shoulder and

confided in his rambling growl how much he'd enjoyed fencing with her. Jalila knew what fencing was,

but she didn't see what it had to do with talking. She wasn't even sure if she liked Ibra. She certainly

didn't pretend to understand him.

The sails thrummed and crackled as they headed toward the spaceport. Kalal was absorbed, staring

ahead from the prow, the water splashing reflections across his lithe brown body. Jalila had almost

grown used to the way he looked. After all, they were both slightly freakish: she, because she came from

the mountains; he, because of his sex. And they both liked their own company, and could accept each

other into it without distraction during these long periods of silence. One never asked the other what

they were thinking. Neither really cared, and they cherished that privacy.

"Look--" Kalal scuttled to the rudder. Jalila hauled back the jib. In wind-crackling silence, they and

their nameless and many-named boat tacked toward the spaceport.

The spaceport was almost like the mountains: when you were close up, it was too big be seen

properly. Yet, for all its size, the place was a disappointment; empty and messy, like a huge version of

the docks of Al Janb, similarly reeking of oil and refuse, and essentially serving a similar function. The

spaceships themselves -- if indeed the vast cistern-like objects they saw forever in the distance as they

furled the sails and rowed along the maze of oily canals were spaceships -- were only a small part of this

huge floating complex of islands. Much more of it was taken up by looming berths for the tugs and

tankers that placidly chugged from icy pole to equator across the watery expanses of Habara, taking or

delivering the supplies that the settlements deemed necessary for civilized life, or collecting the

returning fallen bulk cargoes. The tankers were rust-streaked beasts, so huge that they hardly seemed to

grow as you approached them, humming and eerily deserted, yet devoid of any apparent intelligence of

their own. They didn't glimpse a single alien at the spaceport. They didn't even see a human being.

The journey there, Jalila decided as they finally got the sails up again, had been far more enjoyable

and exciting than actually arriving. Heading back toward the sun-pink coastal mountains, which almost

felt like home to her now, she was filled with an odd longing that only diminished when she began to

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Ian R. MacLeod - Breathmoss

make out the lighted dusky buildings of Al Janb. Was this homesickness, she wondered? Or something

else?

-=*=-

This was the time of Habara's long summer. This was the Season of Rockets. When she mentioned

their trip, Jalila was severely warned by Pavo of the consequences of approaching the spaceport during

periods of possible launch, but it went no further than that. Each night now, and deep into the morning,

the rockets rumbled at the horizon and climbed upward on those grumpy pillars, bringing to the shore a

faint whiff of sulphur and roses, adding to the thunderous heat. And outside at night, if you looked up,

you could sometimes see the blazing comet-trails of the returning capsules, which would crash

somewhere in the distant seas.

The beds of tideflowers were growing bigger as well. If you climbed up the sides of the mountains

before the morning heat flattened everything, you could look down on those huge, brilliant, and ever-

changing carpets, where every pattern and swirl seemed gorgeous and unique. At night, in her

dreamtent, Jalila sometimes imagined that she was floating up on them, just as in the oldest of the old

stories. She was sailing over a different landscape on a magic carpet, with the cool night desert rising

and falling beneath her like a soft sea. She saw distant palaces, and clusters of palms around small and

tranquil lakes that flashed the silver of a single moon. And then yet more of this infinite sahara, airy and

frosty, flowed through curves and undulations, and grew vast and pinkish in her dreams. Those curves,

as she flew over them and began to touch herself, resolved into thighs and breasts. The winds stirring the

peaks of the dunes resolved in shuddering breaths.

This was the time of Habara's long summer. This was the Season of Rockets.

-=*=-

Robin, Jalila's hayawan, had by now, under Pavo's attentions, fully recovered from the change to her

environment. The rust had gone from her flanks, the melds with her thinly grey-furred flesh were

bloodless and neat. She looked thinner and lighter. She even smelled different. Like the other hayawans,

Robin was frisky and bright and brown-eyed now, and didn't seem to mind the heat, or even Jalila's

forgetful neglect of her. Down on the coast, hayawans were regarded as expensive, uncomfortable, and

unreliable, and Jalila and her mothers took a pride in riding across the beach into Al Janb on their huge,

flat-footed, and loping mounts, enjoying the stares and the whispers, and the whispering space that

opened around them as they hobbled the hayawans in a square. Kalal, typically, was one of the few

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摘要：

IanR.MacLeod-BreathmossBREATHMOSSbyIANR.MACLEODFirstpublishedinIsaacAsimov'sScienceFictionMagazine,editedbyGardnerR.Dozois,May2002.1.Inhertwelfthstandardyear,whichonHabarawastheSeasonofSoft\Rains,JalilamovedacrossthemountainswithhermothersfromthehighplainsofTabuthaltothecoast\.Forallofthem,thejourne...

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Ian R. Macleod - Breathmoss

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