Weeks passed, and though I became fairly good at reading and speaking Arabic, I couldn’t write it or think in it. Aisha couldn’t invite me to her home, nor come to mine, but occasionally she’d let me walk with her almost as far as Startown, on the condition that I stayed on the other side of the road. The only people who ever saw us were the razorvine clearing patrols, and they must have mentioned it to Dad, because one evening e said, with all the casualness of a sun going supernova, “Some al-Goharans volunteered for the clearing crews today, want MacLeod and me to teach them how to handle the lasers.”
No one spoke. I just stared at my dinner and kept chewing. MacLeod was Morgan’s mother, and I wondered if e’d put them up to this.
“I don’t know whether they were getting bored, or whether they just liked the idea of killing something,” Dad continued, “but there were at least a dozen of them. There’s nothing else happening at the moment, so we said yes.”
“Maybe they want to thank us for our hospitality,” replied Mum, mildly.
“Or maybe they don’t want us coming any closer than we have to,” said Dad. E seemed remarkably calm about the idea of armed al-Goharans: of course, the lasers have genescanners and safety switches built in, so you can’t actually aim them at a human, and bouncing them off a mirror is much trickier than the thrillers make out. Dad wasn’t setting me up to be murdered, but I wondered what e thought would happen to Aisha. Kris looked from one to the other. “Why would they thank us for that? It’s free. I mean, if we said no, the Stigs would stop coming here, right?”
Dad shrugged, and turned er attention back to er soup. Rene’s eyes bugged. “No more Stigs? You mean no new games?”
“Relax,” I told er. “It’ll never happen. It’s in the treaty the Stigs signed before they gave us Avalon and Terranova—that a ship would visit every human world every solstice, so we could always go back to Earth, or out to any new worlds...”
“Okay,” said Dad. “What do you think would happen if, say, the al-Goharans landed and discovered that there was no mosque at Startown, or no food or water, or no cyberfac? Would the Stigs still keep coming?”
“The Stigs would,” I replied, “but the al-Goharans might not…” My voice faded out, and we stared at each other in silence until Mum said, softly but pointedly, “None of us understand the Stigrosc well enough to know what they’d do. Or the al-Goharans, for that matter.”
Aisha heard about the al-Goharan crews that same night, and the next day she asked me not to accompany her home again, in case her father heard about it and ordered her to stay away from the school altogether. On daVinci, that would be considered probable cause for a charge of child abuse, but I decided not to tell Aisha that: I was still wondering what I should say when she leapt up, and volunteered for the basketball game, on the sole condition that whatever team she was on would be the girls. I stayed on the sidelines and watched. Despite the gravity, she moved beautifully, like a gazelle with breasts.
To my irritation, this became a set routine for a few weeks: we’d be talking about something, when suddenly she’d stand up and join in one of the games. She wasn’t quite as fast as Teri, and she had trouble allowing for the gravity when she had to throw the ball any distance, but she knew how to use her height and her reach, so she was always selected, while I usually had to sit back and watch. On days when it was too wet for basketball, she would sit in the classroom and watch the rain through the roof. “This is wonderful,” she murmured. “Our buildings are made the same way as yours are—though the ceilings are higher—but they’re designed to keep the sunlight out; I don’t think this would ever have occurred to us. Even when it’s not raining, I love watching your clouds, all the shapes, the way they move…”
I’ve never been that enthusiastic about rain myself, but I nodded. “You should see it in winter, when it thunders—but I guess you’ll be gone before then...”
“Yes,” she said, still beaming, and then, unexpectedly, “It’s my birthday tomorrow.”
“Happy birthday. How old will you be?”
“Twenty-seven: that’s about, oh, nine and a half of your years.”
I hesitated, then plunged in. “Of course, you could stay here.”
She stared at me, and then shook her head sadly. “My father would never let me, Alex.”
“So don’t ask er.” There was a shocked silence as I did the math. “In half a year, you’ll legally be an adult—”
“Not on al-Gohara—”
“Right; you’re not on al-Gohara. You’re on daVinci, and subject to daVincian law—so you might as well enjoy its benefits. When’re you considered an adult on al-Gohara, anyway?”
She looked away, as though she was fascinated by the way the rain trickled down the windows. “On my wedding night,” she said, finally, very softly.
“What?”
“Of course, most women don’t really treat you as an adult until you have a child of your own. Boys are legally considered men after puberty—do you know about puberty?”
I grimaced, and nodded, remembering my first and (so far) only period, before I had my contraplants inserted. “Sure,” I croaked. “Is this part of your religion, or—”
“Some of it,” she replied. “Some of it is tradition, I guess. Our ancestors weren’t just Arabs; they came from every continent on Earth, and they brought a lot of different traditions with them.” She shrugged. “My mother used to say it was intended to keep the birthrate up—we can’t breed as fast as you can—but she may have been joking, I don’t really know.”
We sat there in silence for nearly a minute, before I asked, “Is this what you meant when you said that there was more to being a woman than… well, having female parts, being able to get pregnant…”
She nodded. “Well, it’s also important not to have—male parts, or you’ll never be trusted around the women. If you were to come to al-Gohara, the men wouldn’t want to know you, and you’d be barred from places that were only for men and only for women, and you certainly wouldn’t be able to marry. Men are permitted to marry non-Muslims, but women can’t, so even if one wanted to… it’d be the worst of all possible worlds.” She turned to look at me, and I noticed that she was on the verge of tears. “For you, that is. For us, it’s—”
“Home?”
“More than that. It’s… a world we created for ourselves.” She looked down, and then scrambled to her feet and rushed out into the rain, looking at the sky, letting the rain run down her face. I just sat there and watched her, trying to think of the right thing to say, and finally I walked out behind her, stood within arms’ reach but too scared to touch, saying nothing, nothing, nothing.
Weeks passed, and we spent them saying nothing, until Cori was giving us a lesson in xenology. Aisha was as fascinated as I was, possibly more so; unlike the rest of us, she’d actually met Stigrosc and Chuh’hom and Nerifar. Cori was becoming slightly bogged down in the details of Nerifar triads, thanks largely to Teri’s love for asking unanswerable questions, when Morgan interrupted to ask, “Nerifar don’t have any religions, do they?”
“No,” replied Cori, er relief apparent. “They have a complicated ethical code, which is almost entirely concerned with sex and food, but because they don’t believe in owning any more than they can actually carry—which isn’t much—it’s short enough for most of them to memorize.”
“Like a hafiz,” I interjected. Cori looked blank. “Someone who’s memorized the complete Qur’an,” I explained.