Fahad stared at her over the rim of his teacup. His eyes were black stones. He’d only admitted her after half a dozen pleas.
She smoothed the heavy silk of her shalwar pants where they fell over her hips and down to brush the ornate carpet. Lamps burned on the small, shin-high tables set around the room, casting warm light on the man’s rich furnishings. She remained near the door, a respectful distance from him as indicated by their unfamiliarity.
“Forgive me for intruding,” she said. “I’ve come with a concern about your bride.”
Those black eyes flashed, and he rose from his seat on a low, cushioned bench.
Daliya raised her chin to keep from taking a step back. “I’m afraid that there may be ill will towards—”
His hand shook and tea sloshed over the rim of his cup. Daliya recoiled instinctively upon seeing searing liquid hit his skin.
“How dare you!” Fahad said. “A cripple all her life, and you come here to poison my affection towards her? You should be ashamed.”
A cripple? She backed closer to the door. “No, no. I’m …”
Fahad’s shoulders drooped, and his clenched fists loosened, but his glare pierced. “Then what? You came to question the suitability of my marriage?”
Daliya licked her lips. This wasn’t unfolding as she’d planned, not at all. “Fahad, let me start over,” she said. “I create memory boxes. Personalized nanite viewers that display scenes of the brides’ homes. We coordinate with the families and give them to the girls as surprise gifts when they arrive.”
He returned to his seat on the bench. Daliya exhaled, relieved despite the tension in the man’s body.
“I didn’t mean to give the wrong impression,” she said. “Fahad, the scenes sent for your bride were … gruesome. I can’t imagine why a family would do this to their daughter.”
A direct gaze met hers. “You really aren’t aware of the situation on her world?”
Daliya shook her head. “I was a shaadi bride, thirty years ago. When I spend too much time investigating the girls’ backgrounds, it tends to unearth too many memories of everything I left behind.” She cut herself off, surprised at having said so much.
He rested one ankle upon the other, a sign that her confession had put him at ease. Fahad’s brows drew together, and he steepled his fingers beneath his chin. “Shaadi is hard for both genders. I was fourteen and in love with every girl that glanced at me when I was selected as a groom. But I had to save myself for a bride who wouldn’t arrive for fifteen more years.”
“My husband spoke of similar things.” She smiled. “We were lucky, though. Love came easily.”
“Spoke?”
“He died ten years ago. Pancreatic cancer that spread too quickly for the nanosurgeons to excise.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Thank you. I miss him.”
“You miss your homeworld too, I’m sure.”
She nodded. “But this is my home now.”
He adjusted one of the cushions behind his back. “It sounds like your children were blessed with a happy household.”
“I … we weren’t able to conceive. Genetic difficulties.”
Fahad looked to the side. An incompatibility that nanosurgery and fertility treatments couldn’t correct was exceedingly rare. “Again, I’m sorry. It seems I’ve asked all the wrong questions.”
“Don’t be. There are plenty of children on every world who need love. I give it where I can.” She thought of Keef’s bright eyes, of the other orphans who laughed and played games in the city’s alleyways. In a way, she did consider them family. The only one she had.
From outside, she heard the bleats of taxi horns and the shouts of the roving food sellers. Fahad’s heavy drapes muffled the sounds, but down here in the city center, nothing could shut out all the noise.
He tapped his fingernail against the porcelain of his teacup. “Rabeea sent me messages. Each year from her tenth birthday until she entered neathspace at twenty-five.”
Daliya raised her eyebrows. Most brides that were selected so young tended to hide from their future.
Fahad reached into a compartment in an ottoman that stood in front of him. “Let me show you.”
He extracted a viewsheet and held it up for her. A pinch at the edge of the sheet, and a girl’s image appeared. She sat shrouded in a heavy veil, and when she spoke, the silk wavered with her breath.
Her words carried a thick accent, common with the linguistic drift between planets. “I know you must hate me. You can’t stand the idea of marrying someone you didn’t choose. But I think of you fondly. I wonder who you are, what kind of things will make you happy.”
Daliya stood and moved closer. She crouched in front of the viewsheet, glanced back and forth between Fahad and the girl in the picture. “Her voice is so young.”
“Watch. This is her first message.” He traced the line of her shoulder with a fingertip. “I wasn’t even born when she sent these words off to our distant star. Hard for me to conceive of that sometimes.”
The girl reached down and grasped the fringe of her veil. Her voice quavered. “This will make you hate me even more, but you’d find out eventually. Better to get it over with.”
She lifted the silk and revealed a face that might have been beautiful if not for the obvious paralysis at the midline and the deep, deep sadness in her eyes. She smiled, and half her face rose into a grimace while the other sagged, limp.
Fahad pinched the sheet to turn it off and laid it face down on the ottoman. “She had a stroke when she was three years old. One arm curls across her chest, unusable. When she does walk, she limps and falls often.”
Daliya shook her head, perplexed. “But nerve damage is one of the easiest nanosurgeries—”
“Not if you live on her backwards, intolerant, feeble-cultured rock of a planet.” Fahad slapped his hand on the bench. “They claim that changing a body—no matter how broken—is sacrilegious.”
“That’s terrible.” Daliya’s knees cracked when she stood. She’d need to schedule an appointment for joint repair soon.
“I received this message not long after I was chosen for shaadi. In those early years, I grew to respect Rabeea very much.” Fahad looked at his hands. “Love … I don’t know. This girl”— he tapped on the back of the viewsheet—“is not the woman Rabeea became. She’s bitter. Scarred and afraid. But it’s my duty to marry her and care for her the best I can.”
Daliya felt more lost than ever. She fiddled with the loose ends of her dupatta.
“Fahad, I would like to review the messages, with your permission. Maybe just a selection of those that aren’t too personal.”
He pushed the viewsheet toward her. “Anything to help her start a better life here.”
She tucked it into her knapsack. “Thank you. I’ll bring it back when I’m finished.”
Daliya wore these things into neathspace: a thin gold ring that had been her grandmother’s, her finest shalwar kameez, and the net of silver wire and gemstones that draped her head. In her arms, she carried letters from her family, penned on tissue-thin paper, and a lock of her mother’s hair. Her pockets held three smooth stones from the streambed behind her home and a chunk of plaster pried from the wall of the family kitchen.
One kilogram for clothing and possessions. Because of the massive energy needed to insert a body into neathspace, she was allowed nothing more.
She shivered as she walked. A silver trail shimmered beneath her feet, an illusion the hypnotist trained her to visualize lest she become disoriented by the void around her. She tried to speak only once; her words were eaten by the silence. When she cried, her tears wobbled in the air and then arrowed off in all directions.
After what seemed to be about three days walking, she found the portal back to truespace, a curtain of black rain. She stumbled through into a sensory swamp. Sm
ells, noise, lights so bright she retched. And then the realization. Deep down in the crevices of her heart, she understood that her mother was dead already. Forty light-years away, buried under a cairn in the rocky valley behind their home. Some things a daughter just knows, a defiance of the apparent laws of the universe.
She sank to the floor of the portal station and began to mourn.
Rabeea stared out from the viewsheet, twelve years old and foregoing all attempts at modesty. No dupatta draped her hair. A tattoo of a snake curled across the paralyzed side of her face. The older woman next to her had to be her mother. She cradled Rabeea’s hand gently in hers.
“It was a birthday present to myself. They’ll make me remove it, of course.” Rabeea sneered. “The tattoo, I mean. Removal is one of the five allowable—sacred, they say—reasons for nanosurgery. My ugly face will—”
Rabeea’s mother tugged a strand of hair behind her daughter’s ear and whispered something to interrupt the girl’s self-hate. Daliya was relieved to see that Rabeea’d had that much at least. Someone had loved her.
“Anyway, my father is in trouble because I did this and he won’t punish me for it. The others, the shaadi officials, tell me that I was chosen in order to teach your world that the natural order must be respected. I must remain a cripple. But I tell you this, husband. I hate them more than you must hate me.”
The viewscreen went dark when the message ended. Daliya stood and crossed her quiet apartment. She brushed aside the curtains and peered down at the bustle below. Why would a society do something like that to a child?
She thought of the regular messages sent from her home. So different. Ammi’s words were compressed love shipped forty light-years across the galaxy.
Though she knew her mother had been dead by the time Daliya stepped out of neathspace, Ammi’s first message arrived just a week after Daliya, bound by the speed of light to give the illusion that the words were fresh, just spoken. Over the years, Daliya had watched her mother age. She’d learned of Qirat’s marriage and the birth of her children. And now, although the videos showed an old woman speaking to a daughter who left a lifetime ago, time had not dulled the love in her eyes.
As always when she thought of the news from home, Daliya had to swallow back the knowledge that someday the messages would just stop. The woman on the screen spoke with a querulous voice. She squinted dimming eyes. Daliya could only hope that, once her mother passed, another relative would send the news of how she died. And even though it made her feel unfaithful, she hoped that once she finally knew, she might be able to finish her grieving. Maybe she could stop living for a weekly illusion of family.
She returned to Rabeea’s messages, flipping forward. At sixteen, the girl hid behind a veil again. A toddler sat on her lap, tugging at the cloth. “My brother, Jari,” she said, inclining her head toward the boy. “Anyway, there’s not much to say. The government deleted the database of nanosurgery programs, even the five sacred ones. Whatever hope I had that I might arrive on your world as a whole person is gone. I’m sorry.”
Eighteen-year-old Rabeea simply sat and cried beneath her shroud.
Daliya stopped the recordings. They weren’t giving her any insight as to how she should proceed. She drummed her fingers on her knee. What if the memory box images were intended to comfort Rabeea? A reminder of how terrible her old situation had been. But that didn’t seem right. The family had to know that Rabeea would never forget the horrors of her world. Reminding her just seemed cruel.
There was, of course, the irregularity with the package’s origin. Perhaps it hadn’t come from the family at all.
Daliya rewound to Rabeea’s first message and advanced the video to show the girl’s uncovered face. Above intense green eyes, the girl’s brows arched high and delicate like the wings of a bird. A precious face that deserved so much more than she’d been granted.
Just as she was about to power off the viewscreen, the resemblance hit her. She pulled a nanite viewer out from a storage drawer in the base of her divan and inserted the data capsule.
She flipped quickly through the scenes sent from Rabeea’s homeworld. The other panoramas she hadn’t yet viewed were similar to the first three. Violent. Grotesque. Daliya’s mouth was dry when the final scene coalesced.
A man stood in front of the camera, badges on his shirt shining. He raised a hand-drawn sign.
Remember your duty, Rabeea. We will know if you forsake it.
She flipped back to the beginning and peered closely at the man who swung from the limb. Yes, there was something about the line of his jaw, his high-arched eyebrows. A similarity, if vague, to the girl in the messages.
The scenes were a threat of violence upon Rabeea’s family, sent by her oppressors, meant to control her even after she arrived at her new home. But how could anyone know, from fifteen light-years away, whether she was faithfully executing her so-called duty? Any information sent back to her homeworld could be falsified. They must be counting on twenty-five years of conditioning to their oppression to keep her in line.
Daliya cradled her head in her hands. She would not inflict these images on the girl. That was an easy choice. The more difficult challenge would be convincing Rabeea that the zealots on her homeworld no longer had a hold on her.
Rabeea limped out from the neathspace portal, empty-handed and clothed in simple linen. Daliya hustled forward. She placed the memory box in the girl’s hands and then cupped her cheeks in her palms. A copper plate with an inscribed poem sealed the empty data capsule port.
“You are free,” Daliya whispered.
Rabeea stared back, silent. After a few moments, Fahad stepped from the circle of attendants who monitored neathspace exits and moved to support his bride. Though she refused to lean on him while she walked, Daliya thought she saw a flicker of relief on the girl’s face.
She joined the pair on their journey back to Fahad’s home. He’d insisted that Rabeea have a chance to relax away her first afternoon in peace. She could retire to her temporary housing at dusk, waited upon by the flock of attendants granted to shaadi brides. In the meantime, a single chaperone—Daliya—sufficed to ensure propriety as they were yet unwed.
The rickshaw jolted on cracked pavement. As they moved between the city’s districts, the smells changed from cookfires to the tang of textile dyes to the ozone scent of the electric trams speeding upon rails as they whizzed above. Though the journey by tram would have taken a quarter the time, Fahad wanted Rabeea to have a chance to feel the texture of her new world.
Once inside Fahad’s apartment, Daliya watched the awkward but beautiful moments of the pair’s quiet courtship. He reached out and tucked the hair behind her ear. She knocked a pillow onto the floor and his hand covered hers when they both reached down to grab it.
Perhaps they’d be as lucky as she and her husband had been. Daliya sighed, realizing it would be better to confront the issue of Rabeea’s homeworld now so that the developing mood would have the rest of the afternoon to thrive. “Rabeea,” she said. “I told you that you were free when you exited neathspace. Do you believe me?”
The girl dropped her gaze and tugged her dupatta forward. It was already wrapped tight around her face, well past her hairline and showing no neck. Daliya wanted to reach out, but she stayed herself, choosing instead to adjust her own headscarf. She cherished the garment for the way it enveloped her like a hug, the way it connected her to a culture and religion that spanned the stars. Rabeea hid within hers.
Fahad met Daliya’s eyes and then touched his bride’s hand. “We know about the threats to your family.”
The half of Rabeea’s face that wasn’t paralyzed twisted. “Then you know that I’m not free. I love them more than anything. They were punished enough each time I rebelled at home.”
“But you’re not home anymore. We’re not like the people of your world. No one here will betray you to them.” Dal
iya laid her hand on the girl’s knee.
Rabeea’s lip quivered, but she grasped a handful of linen trouser leg and spoke. “Look outside.”
Daliya moved to the window and nudged the heavy drape aside with her shoulder.
“They’ll be across the street,” Rabeea said. “Two or three. Just watching.”
Indeed, a pair of young, mustached men stood in front of the apartment building opposite. They wore drab clothing and angry stares.
“They call themselves Soldiers of Sanctity.”
“How … I mean, why are they here?” Fahad joined Daliya at the window.
“Free, private access to interplanetary communications is one of your freedoms that my people”—Rabeea spat the word— “hate. It doesn’t stop them from using it to recruit. The recruits then use it to send information back. It’s been fifteen years since I left … my brother will be old enough to wed soon. I’ll have nieces and nephews someday. Innocent children. And they’ll have babies of their own. No matter how long it takes for word to reach my home, someone will suffer if I do not obey.”
“We can hide … leave the city for somewhere more private,” Fahad said.
“No, they’ll assume that a disappearance is an admission of guilt. My father spent a year jailed as punishment when he wouldn’t condemn the school paper I wrote attacking the nanosurgery restrictions. What would they do to my family if I disobey my entire purpose?” Rabeea looked down at her palms.
Daliya turned aside to give the couple a moment’s privacy while Fahad wiped a tear from his bride’s cheek. She smoothed the folds of her dupatta and pinched the fabric between thumb and forefinger, thinking. Those fanatics couldn’t be allowed to continue to hurt the poor girl. But Rabeea was right about the flow of information. It would be impossible to screen outgoing messages for harmful information if these so-called soldiers were determined to report.