Alif the Unseen (34 page)

“Fine,” said Alif, with a confidence he did not feel. NewQuarter was stalking back and forth at the top of the dune, rubbing his temples.

“Road,” he said. “That’s not a proper road. I’ve never seen a white road. Why is the road white?”

Alif peered down at it: the road was paved with blocks of milky crystal that picked up the shifting colors of the sky. It reminded him of something.

“Quartz!” he exclaimed. “Like the Old Quarter wall in the City.”

The man nodded. “Quarried from the same mountain, in fact. Quartz is favored by the djinn. One of our people built your wall, many centuries ago.”

“Sidi Abdullah al Jinan,” said Sheikh Bilal, and broke out in a wheezy chuckle. “The genie who brought religion to the City. I confess I always assumed he was a myth, and that
tomb where they keep his turban a clever way to pump more money out of tourists.”

“A fellow’s turban is a serious thing,” the man said gravely.

“Oh, of course,” said the sheikh. NewQuarter looked from one to the other and squawked with hilarity.

“I’m not going anywhere,” he said, sitting down in a puff of luminescent powder. “Not one more step. Take me home. I want a good meal and a bath with overpriced salts
from some exploited indigenous locale. I want my old life, by God. You understand that, surely?” He looked up at Alif in desperation.

“Not the thing about the salts,” said Alif, “but about your old life, yes. You won’t get it back,
bhai,
not ever. Even if you could snap your fingers and
teleport back to your flat, you couldn’t avoid being changed by this. That’s the price you pay for thinking you’ve got an angle on things, that you’ve managed to figure out a
way around the ordinary world because you’re so clever. God help you if it’s true.”

“I admit that my plans for heroism had serious flaws,” said NewQuarter with a glare, “but the genies are entirely your fault.”

“ We aren’t dead,” said Sheikh Bilal, “so I am tempted not to find fault with either heroism or genies.
Yallah,
boys, let’s go.”

“Yes, let’s,” said the man. “As I’ve been trying to tell you, it isn’t safe out here.”

Alif followed him down the dune toward the road, with NewQuarter and the sheikh close behind. As they stepped onto its glassy surface, the road seemed to straighten, and the winding valley
between dunes became a sculpted, planned channel. The road reached toward the horizon with military perpendicularity. It was less of a road, Alif thought, and more of a triumphal march or
processional, the work of people who desired to impress. It had an abandoned air now, a melancholy elegance made stark by the strange light and the silence of the dusty hills.

“Once upon a time,” said the man, walking at a brisk pace, “you’d never see this road so empty. I suppose it isn’t really empty even now—for there are things
in heaven and earth that we can’t see either, and are known only to God. But for argument’s sake: Irem is not the place it used to be.”

“Why’s that?” asked NewQuarter, scuffing the surface of the road experimentally with one foot.

“I’m afraid it’s mostly your fault,” said the man, without malice. “It was left to Adam to tell all the birds and beasts and angels and djinn their rightful names,
but his heirs have forgotten many of them. Irem is passing out of memory.”

“I thought djinn are supposed to like abandoned places,” said Alif.

“We like places abandoned by men,” said the man, “not by history. You should have seen Irem five hundred years ago, when our peoples still acknowledged one another. Caravans,
poetry competitions, trade in all manner of bizarre knickknacks you third-borns kept inventing. It was a sight to be seen. The toilet—now that will never be equaled. We all thought the toilet
was pretty hysterical.”

“I would love a toilet just now,” said NewQuarter.

“You have such an odd relationship to your environment,” mused the man. “Such a paranoid relationship. You seem intent on existing in smaller and smaller spaces, filled with
more and more gadgets, with the mistaken impression that this will give you more control over your lives. There’s something a little impious about it.”

“Nothing wrong with gadgets,” muttered Alif.

“No, except that they’re not magic,” said the man, “and a lot of you seem to believe they should be.”

Silence followed this observation. They walked for what seemed to Alif like a very long time, though the ineffable position of the sun and moon made time difficult to tell. This depressed him,
and again he was hounded by the feeling that he did not belong here and had traded one kind of danger for another. He longed for a full day of sun followed by a full night without it, and wondered
how something so basic should come to be denied to him. He felt there must be some lesson locked up in his celestial dislocation, first in the Hand’s lightless cell and then in the Empty
Quarter, but he could not determine what it was.

A quiet sound was the first hint he had of trouble. The desert of the djinn, like the banal one he knew, was silent, lacking water or trees or the critical mass of living things necessary for
noise. So a sound was something. It was innocuous in and of itself, like the distant cry of a fox or some other small plaintive creature. But their guide stiffened when he heard it, halting in
midstep on the quartz road.

“You must be very calm,” he said, his own voice low and deliberate. “Do not cower or run, and do not under any circumstance answer its questions.”

NewQuarter opened his mouth to respond, then clapped it shut, eyes bulging as he stared at the thing that had appeared in the road.

It was a beast, though unlike any other animal Alif had ever encountered: massive, reddish, indistinct, a bloodstain on the pale paving stones. Fur hung down in clumps over the goatish pupils in
its gas-blue eyes. There were no teeth in its primitive jaws; instead, row after row of knives receded into the darkness of its gullet. It was a child’s nightmare, the fantasy of a mind too
innocent to encompass human evil, but capable of imagining something far worse. Alif heard a high, thin cry, and was mortified to realize he had made it.

“
Banu adam,
” the beast said in a voice like grinding metal. “
Banu adam
on the road to Irem.”

“They’re nothing,” said the man. “A couple of children and an old man.”

“That’s three more things than nothing,” said the beast.

“Not to you,” said the man. “To you they are nothing. Let us pass.”

The beast gave another foxlike cry, all the more terrible to Alif because it was so soft and seemed to come from somewhere else.

“If they’re in here, it means someone out there is looking for them,” it said. “That’s the only reason for three third-born not-nothings to be on the road to Irem
at such an hour in history, when the war drums of the Deceiver are all their kind remember of the unseen.”

“So? That still doesn’t mean they’re worth anything to you.”

Alif detected an edge in their guide’s voice.

“But they are worth something to
someone,
” said the beast, lumbering toward them, “and that makes them interesting.” It stopped in front of NewQuarter, who had
gone as white as his robe.

“Tell me, mud-boy, how would you like to die?”

“At the age of ninety,” said NewQuarter shrilly, “on a bed made of money in a villa overlooking the sea, while at least three wives beat themselves bloody with
grief.”

The beast roared with laughter.

“Imbecile,” hissed their guide. “I told you not to answer its questions.”

“I’m
sorry
!”

“Let the boy speak.” The knives in the beast’s mouth rang as it smiled. “What’s your name, little friend?”

To Alif’s horror, NewQuarter seemed on the verge of replying. Alif seized his arm and jerked him back.

“Not your name,” he breathed. “For God’s sake, not your name.”

The beast’s gaze shifted, alighting on Alif’s face.

“So. This one knows a thing. Or two.” It snapped its mouth shut, the knives in its jaws slamming together like a trap.

“He doesn’t know anything.” The man glared at Alif with unconcealed fury.

“I’m an idiot,” Alif agreed meekly.

“No. This one has a tang about him.” The beast sniffed the air near Alif’s neck. “Copper wire and rare earth elements and electricity. He barely smells of mud at all.
Why are you here, chemical man?”

“I’m—” Alif fought the terror that made answering seem like the easiest way out. He retreated into the things that he knew. Diminishing helixes and parabolas appeared in
his mind, and he remembered that one could avoid faulty output by adding a new input parameter.

“Who wants to know?” he hazarded. When the beast merely blinked, he grew bolder. “Why should I answer your questions if you won’t answer mine? Why should my friend give
you his name if you won’t give him yours?”

The beast gaped at him, looking almost hurt.

“I liked them better when they were forgetting,” it said in a small voice. Seeming to shrink, it shuffled off the road into the dust, fading slowly from view. For several moments the
only sound was labored breathing. Sheikh Bilal was shivering visibly, his eyes vacant. Alif slipped a supporting hand under his elbow.

“That was well done,” said their guide in a mollified tone.

“But I didn’t do anything at all,” said Alif.

“You answered questions with questions. That’s more presence of mind than most
banu adam
would have in front of a demon.” He laughed. “The look on its
face—like a fox chasing a rabbit when suddenly the rabbit turns and bares its teeth.”

“That was a demon?” NewQuarter reeled in a circle, clutching his head. “Oh, God, oh, God.”

“Yes, a demon.” The man gave a musical sigh and continued down the road at a faster pace. “In times of ignorance they grow bolder.”

NewQuarter’s high, unbridled laugh made Alif nervous.

“Who knew demons were such cowards?” he said in a manic falsetto. “Alif chased it away by looking at it funny.”

“They are cowards,” said Sheikh Bilal quietly, breaking his silence. “As the Enemy of Man is a coward. We are not meant to fear them because they are powerful, but because we
ourselves are so easily misled.”

They walked for what seemed to Alif like a very long time, though the altered paths of the sun and moon, which seemed to revolve around the sky without rising or setting, made it difficult to
tell. A glimmer on the horizon was the first sign of the djinn city. As they grew closer, Alif saw slender pillars of the same mineral that made up the road, rising to some indefinite height above
the dunes. They were illuminated by a light whose source was unclear and appeared to generate from within the pillars themselves, casting shadows of amber and pink across the dust. A large, arched
gate was visible among the pillars, carved with geometric patterns resembling starbursts. The road ran beneath it, into the city itself.

As they approached, Sheikh Bilal and NewQuarter fell into an awed silence. Alif became nervous. Figures began to appear on the road around them, most of which seemed not to notice the human
migrants in their midst: some were simple shadows, walking upright and independent of any surface; others, like their guide, were blurred amalgams of man and animal. One creature made Alif fall
back with a cry of alarm: it was the height of a two-story building, hairless and muscular, with a torso that fell away into mist as it moved along the road.

“What—what is—”

“It’s a
marid,
” said the man, his tone disinterested. “Like the lamp genie from your Aladdin stories. Don’t worry, you’re much too puny to be worth
his bother.”

Alif was not comforted by this reassurance.

“The ones you should be worried about are the
sila,
” said their guide. “You won’t find a
marid
hiding in your basement, but the
sila
can take
many forms, and they like to live around human beings. They’re all female, you know. They might look less terrifying but they’re twice as dangerous. Remember that when you go
home.”

“As if we see female spirits every day,” snorted NewQuarter. Their guide shrugged.

“You probably do.”

As they approached the first pillars of the city, the activity around them increased and Alif could hear a low murmur of voices speaking in a language—or languages—he could not
understand. He was reminded of the cacophony of voices in the Immovable Alley, and thought at once of Sakina.

“I think I know a way for you to get rid of us,” he said, turning to their guide. “Do you know a woman, an information-trader in the Immovable Alley, whose name is
Sakina?”

The man started in surprise.

“You’ve been to the Alley? Who took you? Why?”

“It was Vikram. He was trying to source something for us,” Alif hedged, hoping the man did not share Vikram’s uncanny ability to read into half-truths.

“You seem intent on getting into a lot of trouble,” said the man, though his tone was admiring. “I don’t know this Sakina woman but it would be easy enough to track her
down. Let me stash you somewhere first, and then see what I can sniff out.”

He led them under the archway and into a teeming thoroughfare. Quartz buildings lined the street, their windows covered in wooden tracery like mansions in the Old Quarter of the City. Whether
they housed dwellings or shops Alif couldn’t tell; their inhabitants were screened behind the wooden window-lattices and visible only as interruptions in the light that spilled out into the
street. Around them, Irem bustled with nameless activity, none of it clearly identifiable to Alif as commerce or socializing or work: just speech and movement. There was, he thought, a numb quality
to it all. It was as though the city remembered the pageantry of its former self and, failing to replicate it, had lapsed into indifference.

“In here.” The man ushered them through the wooden double doors of a large, square building. Inside were long tables where a scattering of strange figures sat in conversation. There
was a tall, slim, coal-orange individual who looked like a moving candle flame, two women with the heads of goats, and a creature the size of a large toad that sat on the table itself, gesticulating
with a pair of fat glistening hands. Their voices rose in laughter and died down again, backlit by a bluish fire burning in a metal grate at one end of the room. The grate was molded to look like a
man and a woman engaged in an act Alif himself had never performed. As he watched, unable to look away, the fire dancing behind the carvings seemed to animate them, bringing them to lurid life and
throwing their images across the ceiling.