Clarkesworld: Year Six by Aliette de Bodard & Gwendolyn Clare & Robert Reed & Xia Jia & Mari Ness & Rahul Kanakia & Michael John Grist & Sarah Stanton & Margaret Ronald & David Klecha & Tobias S. Buckell & Helena Bell & Chris Stabback & Peter M. Ferenczi & Erik Amundsen & Lumans & Alexander & Catherynne M. Valente & Carrie Vaughn & An Owomoyela & Gary Kloster & Ben Peek & Suzanne Church & Sunny Moraine & Kij Johnson & Indrampramit Das & Sofia Samatar & Lavie Tidhar & Tom Crosshill & E. Catherine Tobler & Ken Liu & Neil Clarke

Author:Aliette de Bodard & Gwendolyn Clare & Robert Reed & Xia Jia & Mari Ness & Rahul Kanakia & Michael John Grist & Sarah Stanton & Margaret Ronald & David Klecha & Tobias S. Buckell & Helena Bell & Chris Stabback & Peter M. Ferenczi & Erik Amundsen & Lumans & Alexander & Catherynne M. Valente & Carrie Vaughn & An Owomoyela & Gary Kloster & Ben Peek & Suzanne Church & Sunny Moraine & Kij Johnson & Indrampramit Das & Sofia Samatar & Lavie Tidhar & Tom Crosshill & E. Catherine Tobler & Ken Liu & Neil Clarke [de Bodard, Aliette]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-890464-27-1
Publisher: Wyrm Publishing
Published: 2014-02-19T16:00:00+00:00

If the Mountain Comes

An Owomoyela

François and Papa were outside, discussing what to do if the water rose. I was in, scrubbing blood from the walls with a palmful of sand.

That was the summer Enah came to our village. He’d led a donkey, and the donkey pulled a cart with tools, a flowering lilac, and a barrel of fresh water. The barrel made Enah richer than the doctor, richer than the preacher. Richer than anyone but us, and he meant to change that.

I heard footsteps crunching the cracked earth outside, but I assumed it was a pumpyard guard until Papa went silent and his dogs went barking mad and I looked to see why. There they were, in the dry riverbed: Papa and François and the Rottweilers all glaring at Enah, who approached as though he feared nothing. He had skin as dark as François; he walked barefoot, and smiled. People weren’t in the habit of smiling at my father.

Enah and Papa exchanged a few words, then turned and came into the house with the dogs keeping pace. “Make us tea,” Papa said, and I was banished to the kitchen. I boiled the water and measured the leaves, and brought out the teapot and the cups, several of them chipped. I poured for my father first, then Enah. Enah didn’t say anything. Not even to acknowledge such luxury.

“In the next months, I’m going to sink my pumps another ten meters into the ground,” Papa was saying. “I can bring more water up and provide it even more cheaply to the people of this village.”

“The people of this village do not want to pay for something the world provides freely,” Enah said. Papa snorted, boar-like.

“Not so freely. My grandfather would have called this a drought; I call it the state of things. It rains perhaps thirty days a year. Your program might work where you’re from, but here, it’s foolishness.”

Enah shrugged. “There was a river here once,” he said, and sipped the steaming tea.

“That mountain to the east was a volcano once,” Papa said. “The world changes.”

“And we are often the ones who change it.” Enah shrugged again. “That’s what I’ve promised them, Mr. Wolfe: there was a river here once and there will be again.”

They sat watching each other for a moment, these two men, Enah small and strange with laughter lines around his mouth and forehead, Papa solid and strong with anger carved into his brow.

“There is a house here now,” Papa said. “A family. A dozen workers. Water pumps. You’d have us all vanish?”

“No, no,” Enah said. “I’d have you go up the bank, join the rest of your town. It must be lonely down here.”

It was lonely down there.

Ever since Mama died, Papa and I went around with a higher awareness of mortality. His mortality, mostly. Papa wasn’t a young man, and death was something we expected with half a head. Death was like rain—uncommon, but it would come.

So ever since Mama died, I had a bag packed, and I was ready to run away.