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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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Ian R. MacLeod - Breathmoss

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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Ian R. MacLeod - Breathmoss

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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Ian R. Macleod - Breathmoss.pdf

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