Robert Silverberg - Beauty in the Night

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Beauty in the Night

by Robert Silverberg

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First published in Science Fiction Age, September 1997

Fictionwise Contemporary

Science Fiction

Year's Best SF Pick

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ONE: NINE YEARS FROM NOW

He was a Christmas child, was Khalid -- Khalid the Entity-Killer, the first to raise his hand

against the alien invaders who had conquered Earth in a single day, sweeping aside all

resistance as though we were no more than ants to them. Khalid Haleem Burke, that was his

name, English on his father's side, Pakistani on his mother's, born on Christmas Day amidst his

mother's pain and shame and his family's grief. Christmas child though he was, nevertheless

he was not going to be the new Savior of mankind, however neat a coincidence that might

have been. But he would live, though his mother had not, and in the fullness of time he would

do his little part, strike his little blow, against the awesome beings who had with such

contemptuous ease taken possession of the world into which he had been born.

* * * *

To be born at Christmastime can be an awkward thing for mother and child, who even at the

best of times must contend with the risks inherent in the general overcrowding and

understaffing of hospitals at that time of year. But prevailing hospital conditions were not an

issue for the mother of the child of uncertain parentage and dim prospects who was about to

come into the world in unhappy and disagreeable circumstances in an unheated upstairs

storeroom of a modest Pakistani restaurant grandly named Khan's Mogul Palace in Salisbury,

England, very early in the morning of this third Christmas since the advent of the conquering

Entities from the stars.

Salisbury is a pleasant little city that lies to the south and west of London and is the

principal town of the county of Wiltshire. It is noted particularly for its relatively unspoiled

medieval charm, for its graceful and imposing thirteenth-century cathedral, and for the

presence, eight miles away, of the celebrated prehistoric megalithic monument known as

Stonehenge.

Which, in the darkness before the dawn of that Christmas day, was undergoing one of

the most remarkable events in its long history; and, despite the earliness (or lateness) of the

hour, a goodly number of Salisbury's inhabitants had turned out to witness the spectacular

goings-on.

But not Haleem Khan, the owner of Khan's Mogul Palace, nor his wife Aissha, both of

them asleep in their beds. Neither of them had any interest in the pagan monument that was

Stonehenge, let alone the strange thing that was happening to it now. And certainly not

Haleem's daughter Yasmeena Khan, who was seventeen years old and cold and frightened,

and who was lying half naked on the bare floor of the upstairs storeroom of her father's

restaurant, hidden between a huge sack of raw lentils and an even larger sack of flour,

writhing in terrible pain as shame and illicit motherhood came sweeping down on her like the

avenging sword of angry Allah.

She had sinned. She knew that. Her father, her plump, reticent, overworked, mortally

weary, and in fact already dying father, had several times in the past year warned her of sin

and its consequences, speaking with as much force as she had ever seen him muster; and yet

she had chosen to take the risk. Just three times, three different boys, only one time each,

all three of them English and white.

Andy. Eddie. Richie.

Names that blazed like bonfires in the neural pathways of her soul.

Her mother -- no, not really her mother; her true mother had died when Yasmeena was

three; this was Aissha, her father's second wife, the robust and stolid woman who had raised

her, had held the family and the restaurant together all these years -- had given her warnings

too, but they had been couched in entirely different terms. "You are a woman now,

Yasmeena, and a woman is permitted to allow herself some pleasure in life," Aissha had told

her. "But you must be careful." Not a word about sin, just taking care not to get into

trouble.

Well, Yasmeena had been careful, or thought she had, but evidently not careful enough.

Therefore she had failed Aissha. And failed her sad quiet father too, because she had

certainly sinned despite all his warnings to remain virtuous, and Allah now would punish her for

that. Was punishing her already. Punishing her terribly.

She had been very late discovering she was pregnant. She had not expected to be.

Yasmeena wanted to believe that she was still too young for bearing babies, because her

breasts were so small and her hips were so narrow, almost like a boy's. And each of those

three times when she had done It with a boy -- impulsively, furtively, half reluctantly, once in

a musty cellar and once in a ruined omnibus and once right here in this very storeroom -- she

had taken precautions afterward, diligently swallowing the pills she had secretly bought from

the smirking Hindu woman at the shop in Winchester, two tiny green pills in the morning and

the big yellow one at night, five days in a row.

The pills were so nauseating that they had to work. But they hadn't. She should never

have trusted pills provided by a Hindu, Yasmeena would tell herself a thousand times over; but

by then it was too late.

The first sign had come only about four months before. Her breasts suddenly began to

fill out. That had pleased her, at first. She had always been so scrawny; but now it seemed

that her body was developing at last. Boys liked breasts. You could see their eyes quickly

flicking down to check out your chest, though they seemed to think you didn't notice it when

they did. All three of her lovers had put their hands into her blouse to feel hers, such as they

were; and at least one -- Eddie, the second -- had actually been disappointed at what he

found there. He had said so, just like that: "Is that _all_?"

But now her breasts were growing fuller and heavier every week, and they started to

ache a little, and the dark nipples began to stand out oddly from the smooth little circles in

which they were set. So Yasmeena began to feel fear; and when her bleeding did not come

on time, she feared even more. But her bleeding had never come on time. Once last year it

had been almost a whole month late, and she an absolute pure virgin then.

Still, there were the breasts; and then her hips seemed to be getting wider. Yasmeena

said nothing, went about her business, chatted pleasantly with the customers, who liked her

because she was slender and pretty and polite, and pretended all was well. Again and again

at night her hand would slide down her flat boyish belly, anxiously searching for hidden life

lurking beneath the taut skin. She felt nothing.

But something was there, all right, and by early October it was making the faintest of

bulges, only a tiny knot pushing upward below her navel, but a little bigger every day.

Yasmeena began wearing her blouses untucked, to hide the new fullness of her breasts and

the burgeoning rondure of her belly. She opened the seams of her trousers and punched two

new holes in her belt. It became harder for her to do her work, to carry the heavy trays of

food all evening long and to put in the hours afterward washing the dishes, but she forced

herself to be strong. There was no one else to do the job. Her father took the orders and

Aissha did the cooking and Yasmeena served the meals and cleaned up after the restaurant

closed. Her brother Khalid was gone, killed defending Aissha from a mob of white men during

the riots that had broken out after the Entities came, and her sister Leila was too small, only

five, no use in the restaurant.

No one at home commented on the new way Yasmeena was dressing. Perhaps they

thought it was the current fashion. Life was very strange, in these early years of the

Conquest.

Her father scarcely glanced at anyone these days; preoccupied with his failing

restaurant and his failing health, he went about bowed over, coughing all the time, murmuring

prayers endlessly under his breath. He was forty years old and looked sixty. Khan's Mogul

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Robert Silverberg - Beauty in the Night

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