Malê Rising

[Jonathan Edelstein]

Lobeco, SC
September 1961

​

Caroline began cooking at three, and she put up the flag at five thirty.

The first fi pulled up outside at a quarter to six and a couple of tourists got out. Caroline sized them up as they climbed the steps to the veranda: forties or fifties, office job somewhere, Northeastern from the look of them. She opened the door a minute before they would have rung the bell, and said “Come on in, I’m Caroline.”

“I’m Fred and this is Nora,” the man said – definitely New York or New Jersey. “Dinner’s on?”

“Sure is.” The flag was up, and that had meant one thing ever since tourists started coming this way by fiacre: that anyone who cared to stop by and pay could have a seat at the table.

“Your family here?” asked Nora, handing over a five-dollar bill.

“No, just you and me. Dining room’s that way.” Caroline led them in to where the table was already set: a sweetgrass basket in the center with napkins and utensils; peanut stew with chicken and okra; fish fry with rice; cornbread and greens; a salad from the kitchen garden. There was no menu – people who came to house restaurants ate what the family ate – but she liked to make more than one thing so no one would get up hungry.

“Let me get you something to drink. Lemonade? Sweet tea? Beer?”

“Lemonade for me, beer for him.”

Caroline went to the kitchen, brought back the pitchers and poured, and then she took a helping of stew herself and sat down at the table. “What’s bringing y’all here?”

“The festival.” Fred looked surprised that it could be anything else, and in truth it was the answer Caroline had expected. St. Helena Island always threw a party to celebrate the Sea Island Republic’s declaration of independence back in the Civil War, and with the hundredth anniversary this year, they were doing something special. The Sea Islands’ independence had been brief, but it was heroic, and here in Gullah country, people still felt it.

“You’ll have a good time, trust me. Make sure you try…” But the doorbell cut the conversation short, and Caroline got up to bring two more tourists to the table.

More people drifted in over the next hour: the next-door neighbors and the widower from up the street, a lone tourist all the way from Wisconsin, a family from Virginia. Caroline sat and chatted when she could and got up and served when she had to. It was a good mix and they all seemed to get along: once they got talking about the festival, she hardly needed to put a word in to keep the conversation going.

At seven, when the Virginians came in, she thought about taking the flag down. Twelve people was all that would fit in the dining room. It was a nice night and she could sit a few more on the veranda, but she’d have to cook more and she liked to have everyone in one place when she brought out the pecan pie and the banjo.

She considered a bit – another few dollars wouldn’t hurt – but it didn’t take long to decide. She got up to take the flag down, or at least she was about to get up when she heard a man’s voice in the door, saying “I’ll have the roast loblolly, please.”

Caroline knew that voice, and when she looked up, she knew that face.

“King of Mali, Sam, what the hell are you doing here?” She gave the guests an embarrassed smile – she never cussed in front of other people if she could help it – but then she turned back to the man standing in the door, and her look would have left him for dead if he’d had any shame.

“The flag’s up, ain’t it?”

“It’s up for everyone but you, Sam. Beaufort’s about twelve miles that way – someone there’ll feed you.”

“Can’t use some more company?”

“I could have used your company a lot of times the past seventeen years,” said Caroline, but suddenly, the heat of anger turned to something cooler. “Tell you what, Sam, I cooked dinner for you that day you never came home, so I reckon you’ve got one meal waiting. I don’t want to make a scene in company, so if you sit in the kitchen I’ll serve it to you. And then you get gone.”

For a second, Sam looked like he wanted to say something else, but then he shut up and let Caroline lead him to the kitchen. She sat him under the militia rifle and Arabic calligraphy and across from the Freedmen’s Circle calendar, dished him out some stew and rice, and went back to take care of the customers.

She was in the kitchen a couple more times before the guests left, and each time, Sam didn’t say a word and paid attention to his meal. She hurried the guests out faster than she’d planned – pie, yes, but no banjo playing tonight – and when the last one was gone, she walked in again and found him still there.

She stood for a moment, hands on her hips, and finally sighed. “All right, Sam,” she said, “if you won’t leave like a decent soul, you can at least help do the dishes.”

“At your command, ma’am,” said Sam, and he disappeared into the dining room to clear the table. After, he scraped off the dishes, washed them in the sink, and handed them to Caroline to dry: it became a rhythm, and after a while it was almost like old times.

“The kids gone?” he asked a few minutes later.

“You’d know if you’d stayed,” Caroline answered. “But Yusuf married that Camara girl and he’s working at the drugstore, and Sharon’s in college in Freetown.”

“Sierra Leone?”

“Yes, studying to be a teacher. These days, she calls the speech Afro-Atlantic instead of Gullah.”

“They do get ideas over there, don’t they? And you, Carol? You doing all right? Cookin’ for money…”

“Oh, I’m fine, Sam. I just do this weekends. I like cooking for a crowd, that’s all, and with the children grown, this way I have someone at the table.” She gave him a very pointed look. “Tell me. Why the hell did you come back? What did you think you’d find?”

“I came for the festival, like everyone else.”

“You know exactly what I mean. Why’d you come here? Plenty of hotels in Beaufort where you could have stayed, if all you wanted was to join the party on St. Helena.”

Sam started to answer, then stopped, then started again. He was holding a dish, and he put it back into the suds. He stood there, and Caroline looked deep into his face: it was older now, with both of them in their forties, but it was still the one she remembered, with dark expressive eyes and the Rice Coast written on its features.

“I don’t know, Carol,” he said at last. “I really don’t know. Just that I drove up here from Mobile, and all the way, I kept seeing your face. I haven’t been back to South Carolina all this time, and I still can’t think of it without remembering you. No place is ever home like the first home, I guess.”

“There was a time when you were happy enough to take off to a second one,” answered Caroline, but her voice had gone from harsh to resigned. “Khadija – that was her name, wasn’t it? You still with her?”

Sam shook his head and laughed – it was painful laughter, but a laugh all the same. “That lasted about five years, and one night I came home and she wasn’t there. After, there was a woman or two, but never for very long.” He handed Caroline the last spoon and sank into a chair beside the recipe books. “You?”

“For a while, I was too busy raising the kids alone. But after… same thing. A man here, a man there. I thought about getting married again once, but it didn’t happen.”

“Aren’t we supposed to get better at this when we grow up?”

Caroline couldn’t help it – she laughed. “That’s what I keep telling Sharon.” She took a chair across from his. “Beer?”

“Don’t mind if I do.” He got up and found the beer himself. “You going to the festival too?”

“I already been. I’ll go again, but not tomorrow - I’ve got things to do.”

“Circle things?”

“That’s what the plans were. I was supposed to teach a French class down at the Circle hall. But that’s canceled now that there’s gonna be a shout for Anne Marie.”

A shock came over Sam’s face. “Anne Marie’s dead?”

“She’s been fighting Congo fever for years. It’s been coming for a long time.”

“I can’t believe it. Anne Marie.”

“I know what you mean,” said Caroline – Anne Marie had been the life of the Lobeco Circle even when they were in school, and she’d seemed indestructible. “I don’t know who’ll keep things together now – I’m surprised the shout got arranged without her to organize it.” They both laughed again, the laughter of two people who’d grown up and who knew that life sometimes tasted bitter.

Sam got up suddenly and disappeared down the hall – Caroline knew what for. She started putting the cups and utensils away, and with her mind on the task, it came as a surprise to see him standing in the doorway again. He was smiling, and it looked like he’d been there a while.

“You still can stop a clock, Carol,” he said.

“The hell,” she began, but she never got the words out of her mouth. She wasn’t sure if she should be angry, especially since she’d been thinking that Sam didn’t look half-bad himself for forty-two.

“Don’t think you can buy my forgiveness with lies,” she finally said.

“It’s no lie, Carol, but I do wish you’d forgive me anyway. I did wrong.”

“I forgave you long ago. We all make our mistakes.”

“No, Carol, that’s not it. You weren’t a mistake for me. You were the one right decision I made. But we were what – eighteen, nineteen when we got married? Everyone says to get married young so the Congo fever won’t get you, and the Circle practically marched us to the altar when they saw we were together, but I wasn’t man enough yet to handle being married to anyone. Then there was Yusuf and Sharon, and…”

“I know. Not like I handled things much better. But like you said, we’re supposed to get better at this when we grow up – I wish you’d given it that chance.”

Sam sat down again and the silence lengthened, but it had become a companionable rather than a hostile silence. “I’d like to go to Anne Marie’s shout tomorrow,” he said.

“You’ll be welcome, I’m sure.”

“Allah carry her soul up high,” he said. It was the first line of a spiritual, and he sang the second: Caroline took her banjo down as she’d been planning to do hours before and finished it with him. She couldn’t sing worth a damn, so she played a harmony to his voice: her fingers found the strings naturally as they’d done at Circle dances a long time ago.

“If you’re staying for the shout,” she said, “you shouldn’t go to Beaufort this late. I’ll get you a blanket and pillow and you can sleep downstairs. Downstairs, mind you – if you come knocking at my door, out on the street you go.”

“Yes, ma’am,” he said, and saluted. She laughed again and showed him where the linens were.

“We’ll go to the shout together?” he said.

Her lips started to form a no, but she turned around instead and was halfway up the stairs before she looked down.

“Ask me tomorrow.”

 

[Jonathan Edelstein]

Punjab, March 1896

When the British officer rode up, Vandan Kaur was working in her upper field.

She wondered for a moment why a soldier would come to her gate – had the war reached even here? – but then she saw. There was only one British officer who was black as coal and wore the uniform of the 36th Sikhs, and she was calling his name even before she ran to meet him.

“Ibrahim!” she called again as he swung down from his horse, and a moment later they had fallen into an embrace. It had been nearly two years, and his face looked different – twenty-two could be a lifetime older than twenty, if the time between had been spent at war – but the smell was the same, and so was the feel of his hands caressing her back. For a minute, two, three, it seemed the months of separation had vanished.

“It’s been so long,” she said, stepping back so she could memorize his face again.

“So long, so far, but the 36th is home again. They’ve sent us back to the frontier.” He reached back to his horse and untied the trussed lamb and laying hens that had complained all the way from the market. “And these are home now too,” he said, and as if to prove his point, they began exploring Vandan’s yard.

“I’ve got another present for you later,” he added. He didn’t, she noticed, mention money, though she could see that he was dismayed at the poverty of the farm. He’d given her five hundred rupees once, which had bought her out of prostitution and paid for this land; she hadn’t taken an anna from him since.

“Later, we’ll see,” she said. “Where are they sending you on the frontier?”

“My company” – of a sudden, she noticed that he’d become a captain – “they’re sending us to someplace called Saragarhi.”

She tried to place that in her mind. “This isn’t on your way there, is it?”

“In a general sense,” he admitted, “but not directly.”

“Won’t they miss you?”

Ibrahim shook his head. “They sent me ahead with Anil and a few of the sowars to scrounge from the markets. The market here’s as good as any other.”

She smiled in spite of herself. “Supplies are short?”

“Of course they are. If it were otherwise, the natural order of things would fall apart. Haven’t you heard?” And before she could answer, he’d broken into song.

The men who inhabit the Horse Guards
Do battle with paper and pen
And theirs is the absolute power
Of what goes abroad, where, and when.

“A regiment marching through jungle?
Then thick winter coats they will need!
A camel patrol in the desert?
Send oats so their horses can feed….”

It went on from there, the story of a supply officer who accidentally sent the right thing to the right place and chased it across oceans and battlefields to take it back. By the time the tale reached its tragic ending, Vandan was laughing uncontrollably. Ibrahim had always been able to do that, even when she’d been a whore in an Amritsar brothel.

But I’m not that anymore, she recalled, and there’s work to do. Still laughing, she led Ibrahim up the slope from her house. He was a city boy, she knew, and he’d never farmed, but some tasks required only a strong back and willing hands, and clearing the stones from her new field was one of them. They worked together for a while in companionable silence; once, Vandan heard Ibrahim begin a rhyme about a farmer who grew stones for the market, but evidently unsatisfied, he trailed off. No doubt he’d finish it later.

“Where did you go?” she asked when they broke for the noon meal. “I heard they sent you to Siam.”

“Siam, Cambodia, Cochin-China – there, and Samoa after.”

“Samoa?” The other countries, at least, Vandan had heard of, but that one was beyond her imagining.

“An island kingdom in the Pacific. They sent a company’s worth of us there to train the king’s soldiers and watch for the French navy.”

“Was there fighting there?”

“A little. Some French marines one time… everyone has some nobles in their pocket, and everyone tries to overthrow the kings that support the other side. They never told us, but part of our job was to make sure the king stayed on our side, and to replace him if he didn't.”

Something in Ibrahim’s voice sounded different – cynical. He’d never been cynical before. He’d known of the foibles of the world, but he’d laughed at them. He still did – the supply-officer’s ballad was proof of that if anything was – but there was something else in him as well. The war, and the games of kings, had changed him.

“There must be stories.” She cast the words into the air to stop the direction that his – and her – thoughts were drifting. “In Samoa.”

“I was named after a story there. They called me the west-wind person. They have a hero named Tui who married the four winds, and that was how the earth was peopled. They said the west wind must have given birth to the Africans.”

Ibrahim smiled at the memory, but Vandan didn’t see, because her imagination was suddenly afire. What might it be like to marry the winds, to soar above the earth without limit, to leave nothing behind but the cool caress of the breeze? Maybe Ibrahim, the mystic traveler, might know. She could only wonder and question.

Another question occurred to her. “Did you have a woman in Samoa?”

Ibrahim looked at her carefully, and nodded slowly as he realized that her question was an unjealous one. “Yes,” he said, and then, “I thought I’d find you here with a man.”

“Who would marry me? After what I was?”

“Can’t they see what you are, what you will be? What you have always been?”

“In the village, people talk.”

“Leave the village, then…”

“And go where? To your country? You’re promised to another.”

“Maybe not there,” he said, though his eyes told her that he wished she would go to Africa and let his family take care of her, “but a city. Delhi. Bombay. No one there will know, unless you tell them.”

Vandan laughed again, but her laughter held notes of resignation and despair. “Listen to me. What I am, what I will be – here, on my own land, I decide. If I go to the city, my destiny will be in others’ hands. I’d sell the farm, but how long would the money last? I might not find work – I might have to be a maid or a whore again. I’ll stay here, with what is mine.”

He nodded, conceding the point. “You’re right,” he said. But she wasn’t sure he understood. Such understanding came hard for a man whose nature was to marry the winds – even one who now could feel their bitterness.

They started work again a little later, and they labored together and told stories until it was time to cook supper. Vandan slaughtered a chicken, and Ibrahim cooked it with flatbread and dhal in the pit in the yard, and rather than go into the dark of the mud-brick house, they sat against the walls and watched the stars rise as they ate.

At length Ibrahim reached into his pack and withdrew two things. The first was a photograph, taken in Phnom Penh soon after he’d been made a captain; the second, a hardwood charm carved in the shape of a star. Vandan knew from the crudeness of the carving that Ibrahim had made it, and she bent her head so he could hang it around her neck.

“It’s made from iroko wood,” he said. “From my country – from a garden my grandmother loved dearly. The Yoruba say that there are spirits in the iroko tree; maybe one of them is the spirit of God.” He began to murmur something, and when she strained to hear, he was saying, “When God dances, His shadow is in the tree; each ring in its heart a holy word; each pattern in the bark a divine memory…”

She leaned in and listened. Ibrahim never liked to recite his religious poetry loudly, and its reverence was the opposite of the verses he wrote about the war; she remembered him telling her how his father had called such poems his love songs to God. There was something new in this one – he’d learned a fascination for dance, for movement, maybe for the marriage of the winds – but its cadences were the ones she recalled. Maybe some part of him was still untouched by war.

“Am I in any of your verses?” she asked, though she knew the answer.

“A woman is too great a mystery,” he answered.

“More of a mystery than God?”

“The greatest of His mysteries. You are the part of Him that is a treasure beyond my imagining.”

Vandan remembered the first time he’d said such things and how, knowing who she was, she’d struggled not to laugh, but the second time, or maybe the third, she’d realized he meant them. Now, she wanted to hear them again. Ibrahim was as much a mystic about the pleasures of the flesh as he was about everything, and she – herself not yet twenty-one, herself a veteran of many battles – wanted to be the object of worship and to lead him again to those pleasures.

He proved willing, soon enough, to go where she led.

After, they lay together, still under the stars, her head cradled on his chest. “How long will you stay?” she asked.

“Three days. They’ll miss me after that. I’ll come again on the train when I get leave.”

“Three days,” she repeated. She hadn’t realized until that moment how much she missed his physical presence, how much she wanted someone beside her when she slept. She hoped, suddenly, that he had given her a child. A child would be someone to care for, a shield against breaking her vow to stay here and make a future on her land. Loneliness might drive her to the city in the end, even though she’d been still more alone in Amritsar. A child – she and a child might be companions to each other…

“Tell me a story,” she said, hoping one might banish the thought. He considered for a moment – would he tell a tale of Siam or of Cochin-China? – and then began another one altogether, a story of slaves forbidden to speak, who won their freedom but found they had lost their voice.

“That’s a written story,” she said. She couldn’t read or write herself, but she knew the cadences of stories that were read as opposed to those that were told, and she could tell that Ibrahim was reading from memory rather than simply remembering. A moment later, she realized something else. “You wrote it.”

“Yes,” he admitted, and the starlight framed an embarrassed smile. “It was too much for a song…”

And too personal, she realized. Ibrahim’s story had much of his religious poetry in it – the mysticism, the fascination, the search for the divine – but it also had that edge of bitterness she’d noticed before. It was his story, the story of his nation – the story of a people who’d been given a cynical game of empires rather than the noble cause they’d wanted and dreamed. It was the story of someone who could never quite marry the winds, but who was still searching, always searching...

“It’s called ‘The Silent Ones,’” he said, but she might have known that before.

“Let us break the silence,” she answered. “For three days, we can look for the winds together.”

He nodded and gathered her in. “For three days,” he said, “we will live as if three days is all we have.”

 

[Jonathan Edelstein]

Lisbon, 1943

Alvaro Kalanga had nearly finished breakfast when Police Major Ferreira came calling.

He heard the knock and went to the door to send his visitor away, but then opened it a crack and saw who was there. He unfastened the chain and opened the door wider, standing in the doorway just enough to block entrance without seeming disrespectful.

“I have to go to work, Dom Vicente,” he said. “Can it wait?”

“I’ll give you a note. This is important.”

Alvaro hesitated only a second; unlike some patrons, Ferreira only said something was important when it really was. “Come in then. I have coffee.”

The major walked to the table, sat down as if it were his own, and poured a cup of coffee from the pot. He liked it the way Alvaro did, without milk. He drank slowly, savoring the bitterness, and looked toward the open window.

“Close that,” he said, and as Alvaro obeyed, “I need you to fix something for me.”

“Something African,” Alvaro guessed.

Ferreira nodded. “I’m sorry to trouble you with it, but your mother…”

Alvaro waved away the rest of the apology; he knew who his mother was. “It’s not political, is it?”

“No, no. I know your politics.” In that, too, Ferreira was unlike many other patrons. “It’s… on second thought, let’s go downstairs. The walls have ears in these buildings.”

Alvaro, bemused, followed the major out of his apartment, stopping at the landing to lock the door. Three flights down, the streets were coming alive for the morning. Ferreira led the way silently to the end of the block and turned left; the two of them walked up a narrow street that wound steeply uphill, past buildings painted in sun-bleached pastels or covered in chipped tile. Maybe someday, Alvaro thought as he had many times in the past, it might be his tile on the walls.

There were people on the street too, and others hanging halfway out the windows above, and the air was alive with conversation. Alvaro wondered why Ferreira had taken the meeting down here; the walls might have ears, but the streets had even bigger ones. Then he saw people pointing at them and understood. The major wanted them to be seen together, wanted people to know that anything Alvaro might do was backed by his authority. That did mean something important; it also might mean something dangerous.

“It’s muti,” Ferreira said, pitching his voice low. They turned another corner to a small hillside park. “Someone’s selling it to the women, and people are complaining about being witched with it.”

Alvaro stopped suddenly. “What makes you think I have anything to do with muti?”

“I know you don’t. But your mother was from Lunda, and…”

“Yes.” Muti was something they did in the central African protectorates. It meant medicine, but it was also magic, and some called it witchcraft. “You want to know who it is? So you can tell the priests, stir things up against all the Africans?”

Ferreira reached up and smacked Alvaro on the forehead. “No, you idiot, I want to keep things from getting stirred up. There are a lot of country people in this district, people from the mountains. They believe in witches just as much as the people in the kingdoms do, and if one of them gets sick and thinks an African witch did it...” He trailed off and let Alvaro imagine what might happen after that – what had happened a few times in other neighborhoods and cities.

“You don’t even have to tell me who it is,” he continued. “Just stop it. I’ll make it worth your while. Maybe I can even get you back into the university.”

Alvaro doubted that, but he also knew that if Ferreira gave his word, he would try. And there were other ways the major could repay him.

“Let me go to work,” he said, and Ferreira took that as a yes.

#​

The restoration of the Castelo São Jorge, along with the railroads and the planned neighborhoods, was one of the Novo Reino’s pet projects, a showcase for how proud and wealthy Portugal had become under its rule. There was no love lost between Alvaro and the Novo Reino, but he had no quarrel at all with restoring the country’s history, especially since that meant he had a job.

He sat on the wall with his workmate Manuel, looking down at the city and sharing a flask of vinho verde while the foreman called a ten-minute break. “I don’t like this,” he said.

“He’s your patron.”

That, Alvaro conceded, did say it all. When he’d come to Lisbon to study, his father’s patron in Luanda had recommended him to Ferreira. The major had found him an apartment, and when he’d been expelled from the university and spent six months in prison for separatism, Ferreira had arranged for him to keep the apartment and work as a laborer at the castle. He might be in disgrace with the government and the faculty, but the oaths between him and Ferreira were personal and Ferreira had kept them. Which meant that when the major asked him to do something, he did it – in the Novo Reino, it was that or be an orphan.

“Then where do I start with something like that?” he asked. “It could be anyone in the city.”

“Ask someone who would know. A charm-woman. Surely there’s one here who knew your mother.”

“My mother was Catholic. She never worked charms.”

“She came from one of the families, though. There will be people here who know her name. And even the Catholics go for charms sometimes – even the Portuguese do.”

That much, Alvaro knew all too well, and Manuel’s idea wasn’t a bad one. “I do know someone in the old city…”

“I thought you might.” Manuel laughed and swallowed the last of the wine, and the foreman called them back to work.

At noon, when they broke for three hours, Alvaro wandered down into the Alfama. The streets here were even narrower than in his neighborhood; they’d been here since the Moors ruled and they wandered according to their original plan. Alvaro threaded his way through steep alleys and stairs, dodging the peddlers and meatpie-sellers and the motor-wagons that somehow made their deliveries without knocking down any walls.

“Watch yourself, Moor,” a policeman said when he didn’t get out of the way fast enough. He bit down a reply as he realized the officer had spoken without malice, that his “Moor” was the casual insult of someone who’d forgotten it was an insult. There was no need to tell this man that his father’s family had been Catholic for four hundred years and that they’d been noble before they ever met the Portuguese. And if I did tell him, what then? That was how I went to prison.

There were things that needed to change, Alvaro thought, but they wouldn’t change now, and the thought carried him around the corner to another stairway. The door of Mãe Teresa’s building was halfway down, and Teresa herself was leaning out the second-story window having an animated conversation with the Portuguese woman across the way. In Lisbon as in Luanda, it seemed to be a law of nature that upper-story women were either mortal enemies or best friends, and Mãe Teresa had no enemies.

“You came to see me?” she called – she had a preternatural sense for customers.

“Yes.” She would ask his business next, he knew, and he searched for a way to explain it in a way that wouldn’t tell the whole street what it was. Finally, he switched to Chilunda and said “I need to speak to you in this language.”

Mãe Teresa nodded quickly and motioned him to the door. He wasn’t surprised she understood; she was from Bissau somewhere, not Angola or even Mozambique, but charm-women knew all the languages, and she knew that when the son of a Kongo nobleman spoke Lunda, his business was sensitive.

Inside, Teresa had already set out a pot of tea. She’d been weaving before she stopped to talk to her neighbor; a half-finished piece of raffia cloth was on the loom, arranged in concentric diamond patterns of yellow, black and red. Mãe Teresa made dresses as well as charms; many of the African women wore them so they’d have something to remind them of home. She was wearing one of them herself now in a pattern Alvaro had never seen, along with a brilliant hair-tie that shimmered with silver thread.

He studied that pattern as well as the one on the loom; he was bursting with questions, but no one talked business at Mãe Teresa’s before they were finished with tea. To calm himself, he began sketching the pattern instead, drawing it as if it were on building tiles, rearranging it so that it formed a nine-tile symmetry.

“You like the design?”

He nodded, saying nothing. The tiled buildings in Portugal had been a fascination of Alvaro’s since he’d first seen them, and he dreamed of making them with African patterns – why shouldn’t there be such tiles in the neighborhoods where people from the colonies had settled? He’d have preferred a Kongo design, but failing that, there was nothing wrong with one from Bussau…

He looked up and saw that Teresa was waiting for him to finish his cup. “I’m sorry for taking your time, mãe…”

“Don’t worry. I like when you draw. It takes you to another place, I can see.” Her voice suddenly dropped a register and she spoke Chilunda. “And why did you come to see me – something also from another place?”

“I need to know if someone is doing muti here. My patron is worried it will cause trouble.”

“The police major?” Mãe Teresa sank into a chair and thought. “I’ve heard of that, yes. My customers know to come only to me, but a couple of them have heard things from their neighbors and they’re worried that someone will witch them or steal their children. My Angolans believe all kinds of things about people from the kingdoms.”

“So do the Portuguese.”

“I know. Your major is right – if any of that gets into the wrong place, it could be trouble with the police, trouble with the Church. We’ve got enough of that already.”

“Do you know who he is? Have you heard a name?”

“They call him ‘the doctor’ – yes, I know that doesn’t help. But they say he’s from Yeke.”

Alvaro nodded; that, at least, was a start. There weren’t many people from Yeke in Portugal; the Portuguese miners who went to work there and the local women they married tended to stay, and those from the country lacked the patronage to move overseas. But there were always some who came to learn, or to buy and sell, or to escape from the provinces where the law ending forced labor was still a cruel fiction.

“Anything more? What nation is he? When did he come?”

“The first I don’t know, except that he isn’t Luba. The second – I also don’t know for sure, but I’ve only heard of him in the past two or three months.”

That fit – three months might be just enough time for ‘the doctor,’ whoever he was, to establish himself enough to have a Portuguese clientele.

“Thank you, mãe.” He reached into his pocket but she waved him down.

“Remember me to your police major,” she said, speaking Portuguese again – an appropriate language to talk about patronage and connections. “And if you want, I can show you another pattern.”

#​

Back at the castle, there was more work to do. They were training Alvaro for a stone cutter’s job, but he was still classified as general labor, and many wagons had arrived with supplies to unload. There were stones from the quarry to manhandle off the wagon-beds, and there was mortar, and there were tiles.

Alvaro carried a load of them to the corner where the painters had set up shop. He put them down on a makeshift table and picked one up, studying the underglaze and running his fingers along the base pattern. He must have studied it a little too long, because the foreman saw him and shouted, “you’ve got work to do, Moor.”

“He asked me to take him on as an apprentice once,” the foreman said to another worker as Alvaro turned to leave. “He’s Angolan – I might as well try to teach a monkey.”

The words stung less than when Alvaro had first heard them, but not much. If he’d been a Mozambican, the foreman might have taken him on – in the mythology that the Portuguese had created about their colonies, the Mozambicans were the artistic ones, the musicians and sculptors. Angolans were workers, farmers, soldiers – the stolid, religious people who were the backbone of the state. Alvaro was all that, but he also thought he might be more.

“Let it go,” Manuel said – he was from back-country Angola himself and he’d heard. “You make good designs, but they don’t hire us. You should never have asked him – you gave him a hold on you.” Manuel shook his head, disclaiming any such weakness himself.

“What about people from Yeke?”

“They probably wouldn’t hire them either.”

“No, no – I mean the one I have to find. The mãe says he’s from there. Do you know anyone?”

“Why would I know anyone from Yeke? But I could ask in the barraca – that’s where they’d probably be.”

"Yes, can you ask when you get home?” The barracas – the shantytowns on the outskirts of the city – were where many of the Africans lived: Manuel’s home was there, and a newcomer from Yeke without access to the patronage networks would most likely be there too.

“I’ll have to be careful – I could get in trouble there if they find out I’m asking about police business. And it might cost me.”

Alvaro nodded and brought out the ten escudos that Mãe Teresa hadn’t let him give her. There were some favors that friendship alone wouldn’t buy, and Manuel probably would need to spread some of it around. Then another wagonload of stone pulled up and he went back to work.

#​

The last whistle blew two hours later, and Alvaro went to pray at the cathedral. It wasn’t his regular church, but it was close by, and at times like this he found it inspiring. King Afonso had ordered the first stone laid in the same year that the Christians had taken Lisbon from the Moors, and it had been finished almost a hundred years later. He could imagine himself in the workers’ place, feel their faith that the cathedral would be completed even though they wouldn’t live to see it. His work – his real work, the cause he’d gone to prison for – was much the same, and tangled in Portuguese notions of Africa as he now was, the church was a reminder that such things wouldn’t last forever.

“You look troubled, my son,” he heard, and he saw that a priest had come to the bench where he was kneeling. “Have you come to pray for someone who is ill?”

For a moment, Alvaro thought of telling the priest what he was looking for – priests learned things, and those in the cathedral more so. But who knew what he might make of that question? If he thought that Alvaro himself was seeking magical remedies – or, worse, that he was practicing them – there could be trouble. The Church couldn’t bring criminal charges anymore, but Alvaro might suddenly find that no one would sell to him and that even Ferreira couldn’t keep him in his job.

“I’m praying for my mother,” he said instead. “A muti doctor put a curse on her and she’s very sick.” He asked God silently to forgive the lie, and realized as he did that he wasn’t being completely untruthful. Witchcraft had killed his mother – not because she practiced it or was cursed with it, but because his father’s family had refused to believe that a Lunda woman with her name wasn’t a witch, and because their shunning had eventually sapped her will to live.

Not entirely to Alvaro’s surprise, the priest recognized the word “muti.” “That’s an evil thing,” he said. “They say it comes from the heathens in São Miguel barraca. It belongs to the devil, and if your mother’s faith is strong, she will recover. Is her faith strong?”

“Yes, Father.” That was no lie at all – his mother had loved God more than anyone he knew. “Can you give me some prayers for her to say?”

“I will,” the priest said, and did so; afterward, he knelt next to Alvaro and said a short prayer himself. “Do you want to confess?”

“Not now, Father – I do confession at Santa Clara in Pena.”

The priest said nothing, but Alvaro could see him stiffen. “Dias,” he murmured as he stood up, and he gave Alvaro a disapproving look. The priest at Santa Clara was indeed a follower of Cardinal Dias: he was Angolan, and he believed as the Archbishop of Luanda did that Portugal must treat its African subjects as citizens. Alvaro, a separatist, thought he didn’t go far enough; this priest, looking from the other direction and wary of the currents that were sweeping the Church from the west and south, saw a Moor who didn’t know his place.

There were still many stones to be laid before the cathedral was finished.

Alvaro waited until the priest had found another person to attend and then stood up himself; his inspiration was gone, but Manuel’s guess that the muti doctor came from the barracas was confirmed and he now knew which one he should start with. Tomorrow, he thought, he would go there. It would be dangerous to just walk in and ask questions, and he ran through a mental file of people he knew; there was another charm-woman there, and if he mentioned Mãe Teresa’s name – or maybe his mother’s – then she might tell him something…

These thoughts carried him to his own neighborhood, and so preoccupied was he with averting tomorrow’s danger that he almost failed to see the one that approached now. He turned a corner onto a narrow street, buildings looming over him in the gathering darkness, and a change in the shadows suddenly alerted him to the presence of people behind him. He risked a glance backward and saw three men following. Any doubt as to whether they were there for him vanished when they noticed his glance and quickened their step; ahead, two more men, African like those behind, appeared in the next intersection.

Alvaro thought furiously. He’d already let them get too close; there was no easy way past them, and here in Pena, no one would intervene. Major Ferreira’s name, whatever magic it might work in the daytime, was likely to be more curse than blessing with these people.

He felt the men behind him break into a run and he did the same. The two ahead of him stepped in to block his path. An alley flashed past – a dead end, and something chittered mockingly from the shadows – and as Alvaro picked one of the men ahead to attack, he saw the other move to intercept him…

Suddenly he turned on his heel and doubled back. He hoped he hadn’t telegraphed the move, and indeed he hadn’t; the first of his pursuers kept coming at full tilt, and Alvaro spun and drove a fist into his face. Before the man could recover, Alvaro seized him by the arm, barely noticing the intricately knotted ropes that he wore around his wrists, and flung him into the two who followed. He felt a blow to the head from behind and then another – the two men from the intersection had caught up with him – but then he was past the pursuers and sprinting back the way he came.

He kept running. They had regrouped and were chasing him again so he ran, not stopping even when the street wound steeply upward and his lungs screamed in pain. He was running away from his home, but there was no help for it; he seemed to be distancing his pursuers but he wasn’t certain, and he knew that if he stopped for a moment, they’d be on him.

A light appeared up the street, and Alvaro felt a sudden relief; by sheer accident, or maybe by providence, the Inhambane shebeen was in the path of his flight. He would be protected inside; there would be many witnesses who knew him, and strangers would no more dare attack him there than they would at the cathedral. He put on a final burst of speed, his entire body straining with the effort, and dashed inside just before the fastest of the men behind could tackle him. The man looked inside, raised a knotted arm to Alvaro, and kept going.

#​

Deep in the Inhambane, almost no one noticed Alvaro’s entry. The light dimmed to almost nothing two meters from the door, and the sound of the band playing on the jerry-built stage masked the commotion outside. The music played on as if nothing had happened, because to the people listening raptly at the candlelit tables, nothing had.

Amália, the young Portuguese woman who waited tables when it wasn’t her night to sing, did see him – it was her job to see him. “Alvaro!” she began, but her voice faded as she looked closer. “You’re bleeding. What happened?”

“I went looking for a doctor.”

“Doctors are supposed to fix you when something happens.” She pushed him into a chair, poured rum on a clean rag and wiped the blood from his head, ignoring his wince as she rubbed alcohol into the cut. “What kind of doctor does that?”

“Not one you want to know,” he said. “Not one I’d want to know if I had a choice.” He pointed to the stage, where the band was finishing a fast zambo number that might have come straight from Lourenço Marques. “When does Luis get done?”

“Three more songs. Here, I’ll bring you some wine.” Amália pointed him to an empty corner table and, a few minutes later, brought a bottle of vinho verde.

Alvaro let the shadows and music surround him. The zambo song was followed by a slow, melancholy fado, with Luis’ Portuguese guitarist taking a turn at the microphone. After that, another zambo, and then a morna from Cape Verde that had been written for a woman’s voice but which Luis sang surprisingly well. The band took its bows, and Alvaro almost didn’t notice when Luis, evidently tipped off by Amália, came to sit beside him.

Alvaro poured a second glass from the bottle. “Who’s that?” he asked, motioning toward the singer who’d taken Luis’ place.

“Senegalese – here from Paris. The students like him.” Alvaro followed Luis’ eyes through cigarette smoke to the students at the front tables, most of them Portuguese and many of whom had rings from French or German universities. He’d spoken to a few of them on occasion; they always talked about how repressive and provincial the Novo Reino seemed after Paris and Berlin, and they liked hearing the music they’d come to know there.

Some of them were pounding on the tables. “Dias! Dias!” they shouted, and Alvaro realized that though the new singer was from Senegal, the theme of his song was Portuguese. “It is time for a new day to last forever, when all of us stand before God together…”

“Speaking of which,” Alvaro said to Luis in Chilunda, “I’ve got business from the kingdoms. A Yeke doctor in São Miguel – do you know him?” Luis was Lunda and a freethinker; muti wouldn’t scare him.

“The muti man,” Luis answered, and Alvaro exulted inwardly. “No, I haven’t seen him, but…”

“But what?” The Senegalese singer had launched into something loud, something called “The Knot,” and whatever Luis had said was too low to be heard.

“The knot, just like he said.” Luis was smiling at the coincidence. “I heard they brought him.”

Alvaro had never heard of anyone by that name, but there was something naggingly familiar about it. The singer had begun another verse in which the knot was drawn in light rather than tied, and suddenly he made the connection.

It wasn’t the song and it wasn’t the rope that Alvaro remembered – it was the tiles. He’d learned, years ago at the university, that many of the earliest Portuguese tiles followed a knotted pattern, and that the pattern had originally come from the Moors. And he knew who in the colonies had adopted that pattern as their own.

It was political after all.

#​

“You told them,” Alvaro said to Manuel the next morning at the castle.

“I swear I didn’t. I asked around last night like I said, and I mentioned it to Dom Fernando. He’d want to know about something like that. He must have passed it on.”

“Fernando?” Alvaro repeated, but more in resignation than anger. He couldn’t fault Manuel for telling his patron; as he’d admitted himself the previous morning, without a patron you were nothing. “But why would he…”

“He’s the boss of Dias’ party in São Miguel,” Manuel said, obviously trying to think it through. Alvaro nodded; he already knew that much. Oddly enough, political parties operated more freely in the barracas than anywhere else in metropolitan Portugal; as far as the Novo Reino was concerned, the shantytowns didn’t exist, so it took much more to catch the censors’ attention. And whichever party controlled a barraca could recruit workers and collect tithes for its cause.

In other places, such control might be decided by elections, but in the barracas that would be a step too far even if the bosses were truly interested in them. Which most of them weren’t…

“He’s working with the Catholic Liberals now and against the separatists,” Manuel was saying. “The socialists are trying to stay out of the way, and I thought the Knot was too, but maybe they’ve worked something out with Dom Fernando, or they’re trying to.”

“Maybe. But why would they bring in a muti doctor from Yeke?”

“Dom Fernando didn’t tell me that. He didn’t tell me he knew the man at all.”

Alvaro got up from the wall and looked down at the city again. “Then I need to find out. The more this goes outside the barraca, the more trouble for all of us. I’m going - tell the foreman Major Ferreira will take care of him.”

“It’s too dangerous.”

“I know,” Alvaro said, thinking of the stones left to add to the cathedral and how close it might be to tumbling down. “But I’m sick to death of being careful.”

#​

The streets of the barracas, strangely enough, were wider than those of the Alfama or Pena. Roma people had camped at the edges of the city since time out of mind, but most of those who lived there today, barring a few bewildered Timorese, were from the African colonies, and by the time they came, motor-wagons had already been invented. So the houses of clapboard and corrugated metal, and the open sewers on each side of the streets, were set far enough apart for wagons to pass.

Alvaro counted himself fortunate never to have lived in a barraca – university students didn’t stay there, and even after he’d gone to prison, he’d had a job and a strong patron. But he’d been there before. Africans, especially those who had politics, could hardly avoid going to the barracas sometime; there were things that could only be said there and imports that were sold nowhere else. So when he got off the back of a delivery wagon and stepped carefully around the sewers and the piles of refuse, he knew where he was going.

This shebeen had no name and it was made of the same materials as the houses, but Alvaro could hear the music half a street away. It was a fado like none he’d heard before, as slow and mournful as any that were played in the sailors’ taverns but one that borrowed its rhythms from central Africa, and as he stepped inside, he saw that the singer was half Luba and half Roma. He was instantly sure that her parents’ families had disowned them, and he wondered how they’d even said enough to each other to decide to marry. He remembered his father and mother, and remembered that all things came from God.

He took a table by the door and called to the waiter. “Bring me a bottle of red wine,” he said, “and send someone to where the Belloists meet. Tell the boss I’ll wait for him here.”

“Dom Agostinho?” the waiter asked incredulously. “Are you crazy? No one just asks Dom Agostinho to come meet him.”

“I’m asking now.”

“And who the hell are you?”

“Tell him I’m coming from Police Major Ferreira – he’ll know I’m not lying. Tell him I’m here to stop trouble, not start it.”

“It’s your funeral.” The waiter opened the wine bottle and disappeared out a back door. Alvaro sat and drank and listened to the singer. She was good; she was haunting, she was better than this place. So many others also were. Stones for the cathedral.

Ten minutes later, Dom Agostinho came in.

He was from Mozambique, Alvaro could tell; from the north, where the coastal peoples had learned of Islam from the Yao. He was no Muslim, though; he wore a cross along with his knot. A Belloist Catholic – well, the Mozambicans were supposed to be the creative ones.

Alvaro took refuge once again in audacity. “I thought Belloists weren’t supposed to be political,” he said.

“Are we? We’re building a self-contained community here, all Africans together – separate from all the factions.” Alvaro was skeptical, but Dom Agostinho’s face grew animated as he explained, and it took him a second to realize that he was talking to the person who’d sent him a peremptory summons. He sat and poured himself a cup of wine. “Tell me,” he said, “why I shouldn’t leave your body somewhere on the hill.”

“Does Dom Fernando know you brought a muti doctor here?”

“Dom Fernando…”

“No? You held something back when you went to him for a deal? He does know now, and it’s a problem for you. Maybe I can stop that.”

“I can stop it myself. That’s not enough to let you walk out of here.”

“You brought him to do what – scare the separatists and the Catholic Liberals, make them come over and work for you? Very apolitical… but did you know that he’s seeing Portuguese women on the side?”

That finally made Agostinho put his glass down. “He’s doing what?”

“He’s selling muti to the Portuguese in Pena – maybe other parts of the city too. That’s why the major sent me here. Someone thinks her neighbor got witched by a Yeke doctor – the police come, the priests come, the mobs come, trouble for all of us. São Miguel has been burned out before. It can happen again, destroy everything you’re trying to build.”

“What do you care? You’re a separatist.”

Somehow, it didn’t surprise Alvaro that Dom Agostinho knew about him. “It will take all of us together to bring the Novo Reino down.”

“Maybe so.” Agostinho looked uncommonly thoughtful as he poured more wine. “The doctor – I never told him to go outside São Miguel. I’ll make sure he stays.”

“Major Ferreira will make sure. And me – do you know who my mother was?”

“Yes. That’s why you’ll go home tonight instead of the graveyard.” The Knot boss waved a hand at the singer in back of the shebeen. “Tell your major that if he wants to show his gratitude, he’ll get her a booking in the city. And you – don’t come back.”

“I hope I don’t have to.”

#​

“I’m sorry,” Major Ferreira said. “I went to the university but I couldn’t do anything. They said you can’t go back – the order is from the government.”

“I didn’t think you could, Dom Vicente.”

“There will be something else. I pay my debts.”

Alvaro sat on a bench; they were in the same hillside park they’d been in two days before, and the smell of cooking drifted through the air as food-sellers set up for the morning. “There may be something else you can do,” he said. “Do you know any tilemakers?”

Whatever the major had expected Alvaro to say, it obviously wasn’t that. “Are you any good?”

Alvaro took his sketchbook out of his pocket and held it out silently. Ferreira flipped through it, and disbelief changed to… something else.

“I know someone in Bairro Alto,” he said slowly. “He has a small shop and his apprentice just left.”

“Does he like Angolans?”

“He’ll take you on if I tell him to.” Alvaro caught the silent warning: the rest would be up to him. A stone for the cathedral, maybe.

“It’ll pay less than you’re getting now at the castle,” the major continued.

“I can live with that.”

“Maybe you can. And I pay my debts. Go to work today and go to him tomorrow morning.”

The two men shook hands and Alvaro walked downhill toward home. They’d need everyone together to bring the Novo Reino down, he’d said; maybe the major could be part of that as well.

That was something he might learn tomorrow.

 

[Jonathan Edelstein]

Kampala, 1903-04

Kintu and Nambi by Gloria Ssali​

#​

In the mornings, Rózsa swept up at Kovacs’ bakery next to the Nakawa synagogue; in the afternoons, she cleaned and carried for Musoke the carpenter by Nsambya hill; at evening she helped her Aunt Gitta with the laundry they took in. At night she went down to the docks and played the flute.

Aunt Gitta didn’t want her to: there was always more to do at the house. But playing the flute by the water was the only thing Rózsa had left from the old country. Before the world had erupted in war, before Hungary had torn itself apart, she’d taken the flute her father had bought her and practiced in a park by the Bega. Sometimes her mother and sister came and listened.

Her father was dead in the great war, her mother and sister in the civil war. The park on the Bega was rubble along with much of the rest of Temesvár. But Rózsa still had the flute.

She played Hungarian dances and Yiddish laments. Sometimes she played Aunt Gitta’s favorite songs, though her aunt wasn’t there. Sometimes she played her mother’s. And as she learned which ones the fishermen at the harbor liked best, she played them too.

It seemed that every week or so, another fisherman would stop to listen for a while before he took his dory out for the night. One of them, a captain named Mayanga with a crew of three, stopped by almost every day, clapping his hands and doing his best to sing in Hungarian. That only added to the others’ merriment, but when he came back the next day, he’d always learned another word from one of his customers.

“Come back in the morning before you go to work,” he said one day. “I’ll give you some fish to bring to your family.”

Rózsa understood only some of that. She knew he was speaking Luganda – she’d been in Kampala long enough that she could tell the Luganda that people used in conversation from the Swahili used for trade – but thus far she’d learned enough of it to do her job and not much more. But she recognized “give,” “fish” and “family,” and when she returned to the beach at sunrise, Mayanga clapped again and handed her a couple of fat catfish.

There were two more the day after, and after that, Aunt Gitta no longer complained.

On another day, one of Mayanga’s crew brought a drum – “my little brother’s,” he said, and this time Rózsa understood – and he sang a fishing song, a praise-song to Mukasa of the Lake and his bounty. “Can you play this?” he asked, and at the second verse, Rózsa raised her flute and joined him.

Their boat came back the next morning full of fish. “Good luck,” Mayanga said, and gave her three.

There were other songs they sang at the harbor and in the city, and Rózsa began to notice them. She would hear them making deliveries for Kovacs or listening to Musoke’s men at their work, and she committed them to memory, beating time when she thought no one was looking, imagining fingerings on an invisible instrument. She played sometimes at the carpenters’ workshop now, and she sang to give herself comfort while helping Aunt Gitta with the washing.

And one day, a courtier in a flame-red kanzu came to summon her to play for the king.

#​

Kampala was built on seven hills; six of them were crowded with shrines and marketplaces and the houses of the rich, but on Mengo Hill there was only the Lubiri. The great palisaded enclosure loomed over Rózsa as she followed the courtier through winding streets of thatched roundhouses and workshops, and it loomed larger as they climbed the straight royal road to the palace gate.

Inside, past the ceremonial guards with decidedly unceremonial Enfield rifles, was a city within the city: storehouses and outbuildings, gardens and fields, all centered on the great house at the summit. Even to Rózsa’s untrained eye, the palace was new: it was a low, two-story adobe building constructed in the Zanzibari style, as unlike the traditional outbuildings as Rabbi Kasztner’s new synagogue in Nakawa was to his old one in Budapest. It was there, in silence, that the courtier led, and it was there that Rózsa followed.

The throne room occupied nearly all the first story, and there was no mistaking who the king was. Kayondo, thirty-third Kabaka of Buganda, wore a broad turban and a blue embroidered robe over his kanzu, and he sat on a carved wooden throne flanked by his two wives. He was nearing fifty if not past it, and as Rózsa made her obeisance, his face betrayed a humor that contrasted with the setting.

To his right, Rózsa saw, was the Lukiiko, the privy council: the government ministers, rural chiefs and military commanders who had always been a part of it, and the rich merchants and educated civil servants who had come to it in the past twenty years. The council had been in session – the papers scattered across the mat made that clear – but now they were busy with cups of banana beer and bowls of ugali and chicken in a sauce of groundnuts and sesame, and they were listening to the royal musicians’ praise-song.

That, finally, was what dragged Rózsa’s attention from the scene before her. She had heard many of the common Luganda songs by now, but none of the courtly sort, and the entertainers at the king’s left hand were an orchestra like none in Hungary. There was a wooden amadinda xylophone with three players, each playing his own interweaving melody; there were lyres and eight-stringed ennanga harps; there were wooden pipes and four kinds of drums.

The song was about a battle; Rózsa could tell that much. Her Luganda was better now than when she’d first started playing music at the harbor, but the lyrics were archaic and they were sung in a poetic meter she didn’t recognize. The battle had been fought at a place called Nsiisi, and there an ancient Kabaka had overcome Buganda’s enemies; she strained to understand the details, and it came as a shock when the song suddenly ended and Kayondo spoke to her.

“Bárányi Rózsa nnyabo,” the king said. “They say you have a kind of flute we haven’t seen, and that you play it well. Play for us.”

“What song, your Majesty?”

“You told me – what is its name?” said Kayondo, looking to his right at the only white man in the Lukiiko. Rózsa knew who that was – all the Hungarians knew who Colonel Weisz was. He’d finished his six years of service in the Kabaka’s army, but he still advised the king on military matters just as Nagy the Magyarab had become minister of trade.

“It’s called ‘The Rooster is Crowing,’ your Majesty.”

Kayondo laughed. “We have many roosters that crow here. Do you know how they crow in the Magyar lands, Rózsa?”

She did. Every Hungarian Jew did. She took her flute out of its case – the metal instrument itself caused no small amount of fascination among the assembled Baganda – and began to play. It was set to a Transylvanian folk melody, but the Kaliver Rebbe who’d written the lyrics had slowed it to a pace suited for reflection and prayer – or for a royal court. Why has the Messiah not come? the song asked, and it answered, we have been exiled from our country for our sins. And Rózsa, who had come in exile even to Buganda, had no better answer than that.

Colonel Weisz, who had heard the song before, had a strange look in his eyes when it finished, and the other courtiers applauded and cheered. Rózsa wondered what to say now, but the decision was taken from her when the musicians resumed playing. “Akasozi Baamunaanika,” this one was called – the Baamunaanika hill – but it was a song in praise of the king. “Since I have entered his service, I have never eaten food without sauce,” the singers chanted, and the melodies of the amadinda and the harp wove around them.

The cool metal of the flute remained in Rózsa’s hand, and without thinking, she raised it to her lips and played again. There was something unusual about the melodic line, something that made it difficult to improvise a harmony, but she went where the music took her. Some of the courtiers joined in with clapping hands and stamping feet, and for the first time, she noticed a man in his twenties in a plain white kanzu, sitting cross-legged behind the musicians and watching her keenly.

That song, too, came to a close. For a second there was silence, and Rózsa wondered if she had done something wrong: she’d heard that some songs were sacred among the Buganda, and that some were for women while others were only for men. But a moment later, Kayondo smiled broadly.

“So, Rózsa, you have seen my bakazannyirizi – do you want to be one of them?”

Now, she was speechless in a different way. “I have to work at the bakery,” she said, stalling, “and at Musoke’s wood-shop…”

“Didn’t you hear the song?” The king was laughing. “Those who serve me never eat food without sauce. I will pay you better than Kovacs does, I can assure you.”

Aunt Gitta would want her to take the job, Rózsa knew, and she nodded slowly.

“Good! The music-master can show you the storerooms.” He looked sharply to his left. “Senyange!” he called, and the young man who Rózsa had noticed before rose smoothly from where he sat.

“Come with me,” he said in quite passable Yiddish, and turned to the door without another word.

#​

“Where did you learn that language?” she asked when they were finally in the storehouse where the instruments were kept.

“Colonel Weisz showed me,” Senyange answered. “I can use it to trade with the Germans. They make very good instruments in Germany.” He laughed, and his smile was infectious.

“Do you know Hungarian too?”

“A word here, a word there,” he said in that language, and then switched back to Luganda. “Mmanyi kaseera Magyar.”

Rózsa smiled again – she wondered if it was the first time since the wars began that she’d smiled twice in one day – and her eyes wandered to a stack of parchments that shared a table with the harps. “Is this music?” she asked.

“Oh, yes.” Senyange picked up the top sheet and turned it over so she could see. “These are our notes. You divide the octave into seven parts, but we divide it into five.”

So that was what had seemed strange about the court musicians’ songs. She raised her flute and imagined fingerings that might make those notes, and at Senyange’s nod, she tried them.

“Our forms aren’t hard once you get to know them.” He began to explain the amadinda melodies, the interlocking lines played by the stickmen, the series of subtly different repetitions in multiples of twelve. “And you have to fit the music to the words – you know that in Luganda, the tone is part of the meaning?”

“Yes,” she said uncertainly. She did know that Luganda was tonal, but that was one of the things about it that was most alien to the languages she knew, and she still found it difficult.

“So for a rising tone, you need a rising note.” He trailed off, seeing that she was still unsure, and searched through his pack for another paper. “Like this,” he said, and her eyes barely registered that the words on the paper were Hebrew. “The trope notes – each of them is a different tone, and all the tones together make the song…”

She heard him, and then the letters on the page did register. “That’s Hebrew!” she said. “Where did you get it?”

“At the synagogue, of course. I am a Jew.”

There was a stool near where Rózsa was standing, and she sank into it gratefully. There was not a trace of anything she recognized as Jewish in Senyange’s face: his skin was smooth and dark brown, his features broad, his hair cropped close. “Ethiopia,” she said, grasping at straws – there were Jews in Ethiopia, so she’d heard. “Did you come from Gondar?”

“No – I am Muganda, and my ancestors for a hundred generations are Baganda.” His eyes were merry and she could see he was tempted to leave it at that, but he took pity on her. “My father was minister of finance to Kabaka Mutesa. When the king joined all the religions in order to end the religious fighting, my father was one of those who became Jewish to give him a quorum when he prayed as a Jew. There are many of us now.”

Suddenly she remembered – yes, she had heard of the Buganda Jews. The Hungarians had kept apart from them, but they heard things and they talked. Colonel Weisz had even married one, hadn’t he?

“Yes he did,” Senyange said, and Rózsa realized she had spoken out loud. She flushed in embarrassment, suddenly wondering what the Baganda Jews might think of the foreign Jews who hadn’t sought them out.

“Did it work?” she asked hastily. “Ending the religious fighting, I mean.”

“The fighting only started again after Mutesa died, and now Kabaka Kayondo is doing the same thing, so judge for yourself.” Senyange clasped his hands behind his back as another thought occurred to him and crossed the room to a window. Rózsa looked past him and saw that the window looked out on a small man-made pond: that it was, in fact, by the water.

“It’s Shabbat tonight. Come to our synagogue. You can play your song there.”

“There’s music in the synagogue?” No synagogue Rózsa knew had instrumental music, though she’d heard that some of the German ones had organs.

“Oh,” Senyange said, and he drew the word out long with laughter. “Come and you’ll see.”

And she did. There were drums at the synagogue on the slopes of Nakasero hill. There were lyres. There were ram’s horns. There was dancing when the Torah was removed from its hardwood ark and carried seven times around the congregation. And when Rózsa played “The Rooster is Crowing” again to Jews who had never known exile, there were, on more than one face, tears.

They feasted afterward in the synagogue gardens, and Senyange brought her to the elders’ mat where Colonel Weisz and his wife Miriam Kabonesa sat with the rabbi and the senior men and matrons. “I hope we see you again,” Miriam Kabonesa said – she was bold for a Muganda woman. “When András wrote to your rabbi and said that Jews were welcome here, he meant it.”

“There may be different opinions about what ‘here’ means,” Weisz answered; his voice was sardonic, and Rózsa caught the edge of what he meant but wasn’t sure of the center. “But I also hope we see you again.”

Sometimes they did. Sometimes Rózsa still went with Aunt Gitta to Rabbi Kasztner’s synagogue, but on other days she accompanied Senyange to Nakasero. It seemed, in fact, that she accompanied the young music master quite often; on some occasions, as when the royal musicians played before the court, his presence was silent, but when they rehearsed and composed new songs, the room was filled with conversation. Sometimes, she stayed to finish a song after the others had gone home, and they would talk for hours in Luganda and Yiddish and something that resembled Hungarian, conversations that ranged across Europe and Africa and four thousand years of history.

In time, she learned that others also talked, and that she and Senyange were the subject.

 

[Jonathan Edelstein]

Kintu and Nambi series, Gloria Ssali​

Not all the talk was in whispers and not all of it was malicious. “You’re a lucky one,” said Mayanga the fish-captain – Rózsa still went down to the fishing-harbor sometimes, and Mayanga still clapped his hands and sang when she played. “To catch the eye of someone from the royal court – he’ll take good care of you.”

“He’s beautiful,” confided Birungi, who cleaned the precincts where the court musicians worked. “He will give you many children.” And even Kovacs the baker nodded his head and smiled when he saw her, and said “it’s not so bad to live in a palace.”

But more agreed with Aunt Gitta when she said that Rózsa and Senyange had nothing in common, and with Rabbi Kasztner when he said “that one isn’t a Jew.”

“Of course he is,” Rózsa answered, but she was less puzzled by Rabbi Kasztner’s warning than with the assumption that she and Senyange would marry. Everyone seemed to think so – some might approve and some might disapprove, but they all agreed on that. Only Rózsa wasn’t sure.

Every day now when she met Senyange at the musicians’ storeroom, she looked at him and wondered. He was a companion at work, yes, even a friend, but a husband? She searched under the numbness of war and exile and wondered if, maybe, there was something more.

When they played for the court, when they rehearsed new songs, she imagined herself married to him. She imagined them in a house together; she imagined children; she imagined herself in his bed, his musician’s hands caressing her and making her cry out in pleasure. It was hard sometimes for her to keep her attention on the music; she felt a warmth inside her, like feeling returning to a numbed limb, and instead of songs for the king or the men of the Lukiiko, she composed praise-songs to him in her mind. “Since I came into his home, I have never had a day without happiness…”

“Who are you singing to?” he asked one day, and she looked up into his laughing face and realized she had sung her praise-song out loud. She flushed deeply and could not speak, and that was all the answer he needed.

“To me? I don’t deserve such praise. But I’ve thought of songs for you.”

She was silent for a long moment, and he waited patiently for her to speak. “They say we will get married,” she said. “Everyone says it.”

“Do you say it?”

“I don’t know. But do you?”

Now it was his turn to be silent. “I was going to ask my uncle to negotiate with your Aunt Gitta for me. But only if you wanted it.”

“I…” She wanted to marry him, she knew, but war and loss and exile were still pushing her away. “I still don’t know.”

Senyange took one of her hands in both of his. “Sometimes, when we want answers to the questions of the soul, we go to the Ssese Islands. The lubaale live there, and the journey to see them sometimes tells us what we want to know.”

Rózsa wasn’t surprised to hear him talk of the lubaale – she’d long since learned that while the Baganda Jews might have no gods before God, their ancestral guardians existed below Him as they had existed beneath the creator deity of their fathers. And she wasn’t certain that a journey could tell her what she wanted to know – her exile from Temesvár and then from Hungary altogether had raised more questions than it had answered – she’d heard that Colonel Weisz had gone to the islands once and had found something that resembled peace.

“We can go,” she said, and then she asked, “tomorrow?”

And so, the next morning, they walked down from the Lubiri to the square that had become Kampala’s importers’ market, to where Ntege’s motor-wagon was waiting. Senyange had told her Ntege’s story on the way down the hill; like many young men during the Great War, he’d crossed Nalubale to enlist and seek his fortune, and he’d somehow returned with both the Iron Cross, Second Class and the Legion of Honor. He’d also got his hands on a surplus motor-wagon and a load of spare parts, spent his accumulated pay shipping them to Zanzibar, and got them across country in one piece. And now, with his French and German medals pinned to his kanzu, he stood welcoming passengers for the run to Entebbe.

The seats that Ntege had built into the back of the motor-wagon were already full, so Senyange spread a blanket on the wooden trailer that was obviously locally made. He took her hand to help her climb onto the trailer, and he kept it in his as the wagon pulled out of the market-square onto the Ntebe road.

A cheering crowd followed the wagon for the first mile or two; it was still a new thing in Kampala, and the people made a procession of its departure, walking alongside it and singing praises to Ntege and his fortunate passengers. The procession dispersed as the city fell away, and the wagon sped up as it drove past farmsteads and fishing villages. Nalubale’s waters sparkled in the distance, and the passengers opened packages of pounded yam and bottles of banana beer.

Inevitably, someone called for Rózsa to play her flute, and Senyange, the traitor, joined in the chanting of her name. She surrendered and played a dance she’d learned once from a Rom who’d passed through Temesvár, and as she did, it seemed that the journey really was changing her; the weight of Kampala’s busy streets and its eighty thousand people fell away.

It took an hour and a half to reach Entebbe, and Rózsa jumped off the trailer with the other passengers and followed Senyange to the beach. By the docks, Ntege negotiated for cargo to take back to Kampala, and a hundred meters further down the beach, Senyange bargained with a fisherman who was going to the islands. A moment later, the bargain made, he motioned to Rózsa and held the boat steady as she climbed aboard.

The passage across Nalubale took them even farther from the city; they were alone apart from the silent fisherman, with no noise but the calls of the shorebirds, and Rózsa realized that she couldn’t remember how long it had been since she’d known such silence. Senyange must have seen something in her face, because he said nothing: he let the silence lengthen, let the peace spread through her undisturbed.

The first of the islands were drawing close now, green jewels rising from the waters of the lake. Now Senyange did speak, telling Rózsa which one had the shrine to the guardian of the storms, which was home to a mosque, which to a synagogue.

“Are we going there?” she asked. “To the synagogue?”

“If you want. If you think the answer is there.”

She started to say yes, but then she saw another island nearer to them, one that was too small for a village and that had no boats drawn up on the beach. That was what she wanted, she realized – more privacy, more silence, more time for she and Senyange to be alone together. “That one,” she said, and a few minutes later, the fisherman had brought them to the beach, promising to return in two days.

It was early afternoon; they made camp, talked of small things for a while, swam together in the salt water and returned to build a fire as evening fell. They ate grilled fish and ugali and, from somewhere, Senyange produced another jar of banana beer. It was night when they had finished and they spread the blanket where the beach met the forest, and then she no longer had to imagine how his caresses might feel.

“Do you know the answer now?” he asked as they lay together after.

“Yes, I do,” she answered.

#​

The week after they returned, Senyange’s uncle went to see Aunt Gitta. She sat him at the table without offering coffee or a meal, listened to him in silence, and started to send him away, but then he mentioned the bride-price. His family had thousands of cattle and lands that grew coffee and cotton, and the portion on offer was handsome.

Gitta paused with harsh words unsaid. The gifts Rózsa gave from the food and clothing she was allowed as a court musician were already enough to live on, and with the bride-price as well, Gitta would no longer have to take in washing. She could retire, she might no longer have to live like an exile…

“Have some coffee,” she said, and she invited Senyange’s uncle to come again.

On his second visit, the uncle brought Colonel Weisz. Rózsa and Senyange were at the table – it wasn’t customary, but sometimes customs were made – and Aunt Gitta, in the dress she’d brought from Budapest, served not only coffee but a dobos torte she’d spent most of the day making. The bargain began in earnest.

“They love each other…” Weisz said.

“What does that matter?”

“… and they can take good care of each other.”

“That matters, yes,” said Aunt Gitta. The Colonel, with his Miriam Kabonesa, might speak of love, but this would be a marriage, not a novel.

“They have an allowance from the court,” Senyange’s uncle said, “and I will set aside for their support…”

There was a rustle as the cloth over the doorway was pushed aside, and Rabbi Kasztner ducked under the lintel and entered the house. “I heard you invited him back,” he said. “Are you really thinking of this?”

“They want to marry…” Gitta began, seemingly oblivious to her own words of a moment before.

“That musician isn’t Jewish.”

“His mother and father are Jews,” said Rózsa.

“They just decided to be Jews. That doesn’t make them Jewish according to the law. So their son isn’t Jewish either, and if you marry him, your son will be a mamzer.”

Rózsa shrank from that word – it meant “bastard,” only more so – but Senyange threw his head back and laughed. “A mamzer can only be the child of two Jews, no? So if you say I’m not Jewish, then our child can’t be one.”

“It’s a forbidden marriage, and your child will be the child of a forbidden marriage.”

“It wasn’t forbidden to Colonel Weisz. And it isn’t forbidden to me.”

Senyange rose halfway from the floor, and Rózsa was suddenly afraid that he and the rabbi would come to blows. “In the Baganda synagogue,” she said hastily, “we are both Jews. The marriage wouldn’t be forbidden there, under their law.”

“You can’t just become a Muganda, any more than a Muganda could just become a Jew…”

“Why do I need to be a Muganda to marry under Baganda law? We live in their country.”

Rabbi Kasztner sank to his knees and looked around the room, seeing that everyone, even Gitta, was against him. “Yes,” he said. “We live in their country. So I will go to their court to prevent this.”

#​

The case should have been heard in the Lubiri, but too many people wanted to come. The Hungarians came because the case involved two of their own; the Baganda came because the Hungarians were new and they sensed that this trial might determine their future. And some came simply because they knew Rózsa: Kovacs, Musoke, Mayanga and his family. Enough people made their way up Mengo hill that the hearing was moved by general agreement to the royal lake.

The Lukiiko sat at a long table by the lakeshore. By now, Rózsa had played for them many times, but they looked different – forbidding – now that they were sitting in judgment on her. She knew that their decision would likely be final: in theory, the Kabaka could overrule the Lukiiko even when it sat as a court, but Senyange had told her that this happened rarely.

But there was suddenly no time for fear, because the chancellor, Luwemba, rapped on the table. “Rabbi Kasztner,” he spoke into the silence, “will you take oath according to your faith?”

“I speak first?” the rabbi answered.

“This is your lawsuit,” said Luwemba mildly. “You will speak first.”

Rabbi Kasztner nodded and submitted to the oath. “Rózsa’s marriage to Senyange is prohibited by our people’s law, and I ask the court to forbid it.”

Kasozi, a rural chief from the north, nodded. “That makes sense,” he said. “Different nations do have different laws.”

“What law of yours forbids the marriage?” Luwemba asked.

“A Jew can only marry another Jew. And by our law, Senyange is not a Jew. His parents weren’t born Jews and didn’t undergo a conversion, and so they aren’t Jewish and neither is he.”

“But they are Jewish according to their own law.”

“The Baganda Jews have their law, but we have ours.”

“They do say,” said Mugerwa, the governor of schools, “that religious men can disagree. I have seen it in the Jewish writings – some of the ancestors saw the law one way and some another. If the Magyar Jews have a different law from our Jews, then maybe we should respect it.”

Kasozi raised a hand. “If they had, would they be Jewish under your law?”

“They would, if the conversion were done properly.”

“And would Senyange, if he did? And would you perform the conversion? And then, could they marry?”

The rabbi stood in silence for a moment, and Rózsa could almost see the thoughts that were fighting each other in his mind. “Yes,” he said finally, drawing out the word. “You must know that we don’t accept converts as easily as the Christians or Muslims do. A convert must be sincere and he must have a good reason for wanting to become Jewish, and marriage alone is not enough reason. But Senyange has followed what he saw as the Jewish faith all his life, so his sincerity is clear. I would accept him for conversion classes.”

Though it wasn’t her turn to speak, Rózsa began to form words: why should Senyange have to convert to a faith he had followed since birth, and why should her rabbi have to approve him? But Luwemba, sensing an easy way to give everyone what they wanted, silenced her and called on Senyange to take oath.

“Senyange ssebo, would you take these classes and become Jewish according to Magyar as well as Baganda law?”

“If that’s what I need to do to marry Rózsa, then…”

“Wait,” Mugerwa said. “Rabbi, you said that you will recognize no one as a Jew unless they convert according to your law. What about the Kabaka?”

“The king? Of course he isn’t Jewish.”

A stir went through the Lukiiko and the assembled people as well. “And could he take your classes?”

“Of course he could. But…” The rabbi’s voice faltered. “They say he belongs to all the faiths. To be Jewish according to our law, he would have to give up all other gods.”

Now the consternation was audible, and it built for a long moment as the members of the Lukiiko conferred among themselves.

“We respect the laws of each nation,” Luwemba said. “But above all those laws is the Kabaka’s law and the Kabaka’s peace, and there will be no peace if the king cannot act as a bridge between the faiths. We cannot give judgment that recognizes your conversion laws, because that would risk a return of the wars.”

It took a moment for Rózsa to realize what that meant. “Then we can’t marry?”

“I didn’t say that. Different nations have different laws, but if a person leaves one and joins another, he can take its law upon himself. Both you and Senyange are Jewish under the law of the Baganda Jews; will you become a Muganda rather than a Magyar and live under that law? Rabbi Kasztner can speak the law for the Magyar Jews, but if you are a Muganda, his law will not apply to you.”

Rózsa was silent. What was asked of her seemed, somehow, even more than what had been asked of Senyange. The words Rabbi Kasztner had spoken at Aunt Gitta’s came back to her: could someone become a part of another people the same way she might change citizenship or even faith? But at the Lukiiko table, Colonel Weisz was looking at her and nodding slowly; she realized how much of a Muganda he had become, and how much she already was.

“I will,” she said. The words hung in the air and she still couldn’t believe she had said them, but there was no taking them back.

“Then let judgment be given,” said the chancellor, and the court adjourned.

#​

They were married by the water as Rózsa wanted, at the Nakawa beach where she had played her flute and come to the notice of a king. She and Senyange stood under the wooden canopy that Musoke had made, between the posts carved with images of Hungarian and Baganda ancestors. They were royal servants, so the Kabaka married them, and they said the words he told them to say and faced the cheering congregation after Senyange broke the glass.

When the ceremony was done, she walked down the beach, her hand in Senyange’s; there was a party waiting for them, but she needed this moment to be alone. It felt that she was walking away from a people as well as a marriage, and she was uncertain of what the future might bring.

“You don’t need to be,” Senyange said. “You are a Muganda now, but you have Magyar ancestors, so you will always be close to them. You have gained a nation and a family, not lost one.”

Rózsa nodded wordlessly: the words would be a comfort if she could bring herself to believe them. She looked out at Nalubale’s calm waters, and she knew somehow that she would believe them someday even if she didn’t now. She took Senyange’s hand again and let him lead her toward the celebration.

“Did you bring your flute?” he said. “We have a wedding song to write.”

 

[Jonathan Edelstein]

Sampson County, North Carolina
October 1888

“It’s bad, Chief.”

George Henry White began to nod at the returning scout and then looked at him sharply. He’d known it wouldn’t be good, with smoke still rising from the village up ahead and the gutted church steeple visible even from here. But the look on the scout’s face spoke of something more.

“How bad, Tom?”

“You’ll see.”

A few minutes later, George did see. The village had no name on the maps – it was one of those places where freedmen had settled down after the war, with a name given by its citizens but none the county cared to notice. It would never have one now. Most of the houses were burned and there were bodies on the ground – at least twenty that George could see before he lost count. A few of them were night riders, but most were black men and women lying where they’d fought. And…

The girl lying where George got down from his horse had been eight or nine years old, and she wouldn’t get any older. She’d been killed a few hours ago like the others and her body had stopped leaking, but her clothes were horribly bloodstained and the bullet that killed her had blown half her head away. He had a daughter about that age.

He forced himself to look up. The rest of his volunteers had also dismounted and were looking around, and most of them – black and white – had the same look on their faces that the scout had. Mike Dowling, a white boy from Vanceboro who’d turned seventeen a month ago, was on his knees retching and crying at the same time. Of those nearby, only Jim Kabbah, who’d come up from the South Carolina low country, surveyed the scene evenly.

“Just like ’63,” he said. “No quarter in the Rising either.”

“But that was the war,” said Tom the scout. “This is an election.”

“Same thing,” Jim answered. “Who’s in charge.”

George remembered something he’d read once about war being politics by other means, and wondered if this might be where they met. The Bourbons were panting to take the state back from the Republicans and populists who’d won in ’84, and they thought white supremacy was their ticket. That was bad enough when it was just words, but it was worse when the night-riders started ambushing candidates and burning farms, and it got worse than that when Ben Tillman’s boys streamed across the Georgia border and other Redeemers came in from Virginia and Tennessee.

Up in the Second District where George lived, black folks were thick enough on the ground to fight back, and veterans from South Carolina had come to fill their ranks. Things were still pretty normal in the cities too, with the county seats full of state militia, and out west in the mountains, the brawls were no worse than usual. But here… the state militia couldn’t be everywhere, and there were too many black towns to patrol but not enough to be a majority. It was places just like this, where the coalition had won the last state house election by a few hundred votes and the same number of missing black smallholders could throw the next one to the Bourbons, where the night riders did their worst.

Someone had to get volunteers down here, so George Henry White, representative of Craven County in the North Carolina Senate, had raised a troop. And now, he realized, he had to lead it.

“Any survivors?” he asked.

The troopers who’d taken a look around the village were returning, and all of them shook their heads. “They’re all long gone,” one of them said – Robert Yancy, George remembered. “They took what they could and ran. Probably won’t stop till they get to Raleigh.”

George nodded; refugees on the road were what had brought them here in the first place, and the tent camps up in the Black Second and by Raleigh and Wilmington were filling up. “No one to tell us which way they went, then.”

“The folks on the road didn’t know either.”

“They weren’t here for the end. I was hoping someone would be.”

“I can track ‘em,” Mike said. He was looking better now, but his voice still burned with rage at the people who’d done this; like many of the white men in the troop, he'd joined because of exactly such atrocities. “Pop says I can follow good as a hound.”

“You can go ahead and try,” said George. “Not sure even a hound could find ‘em now, though – they’ve been gone for hours and they’ll be hard to follow once they get to the road. Son of a bitch.” He didn’t like to cuss, but he’d been hoping to get ahead of the bastards rather than guess where they’d hit next.

“I’ve got ways, Chief.” Mike swung back up on his horse, and George waved to the others to get mounted and follow. They rode out of the village through fields the night-riders had trampled, lost the trail at a small stream, picked it back up when Mike spotted tracks on the other side a quarter-mile up the bank.

“Looks like they headed toward the Black River road,” Tom said, looking ahead across stony ground. George looked the same way. The tracks would be easy enough to follow until the road, but after that, he wasn’t sure. Others would have traveled that road since, though maybe Mike had a way to pick out the ones they were looking for.

He started to ask, and then realized that Mike wasn’t crossing the stream at all but was on his knees looking at something else. Mike got up and walked about a hundred feet down the bank, and then he saw something and went to his knees again. “Something here,” he said, and an instant later, from inside a stand of brush, George heard the faint whimpering of a child.

The whimper turned to a cry of terror as more of the volunteers came up and whoever was in there realized she’d been found. “Best if you go in, Chief,” Mike said. “She sees my face first, she’ll probably lose her speech altogether.”

There were times Mike was a lot smarter than his years, and this was one of them; George nodded and crawled into the bushes. He heard another cry and a desperate scramble backward, but then he saw the child’s face, and at the same instant, she saw his. Her eyes registered a black face about her father’s age, and she suddenly was calm.

Her name was Mary, and they got the story out of her a few minutes later after Jim and a couple of the other South Carolina people had made her some tea and given her bread and dried beef. She’d been outside when the night-riders came, and she’d gone to hide in the same bushes where she hid from her brothers where they were playing games. She hadn’t known the riders would leave that way, and it had been pure terror when she heard their horses’ hooves splashing in the stream and their voices not ten feet away. But like George’s own girl, she’d had presence of mind, and after a little more calming, she remembered what they’d said.

“They got a house on the South River somewhere near here,” she said. “I heard them talking about it. That’s where they hide out in the daytime.”

“Sounds like the Higgins place,” said a white man who’d joined the troop locally; George knew him as Emery, but unlike the men who’d been with him all the way from Craven County, he didn’t know his last name. “Only place by the river big enough to hide twenty or thirty of the bastards.”

Mary hadn’t heard of Higgins one way or the other. “Take me home now?” she asked.

It didn’t seem like the right time to tell her. “You come with us now,” George answered. “We’ll take care of that later. Did you hear them say anything about where they’re going tonight?”

“Somewhere by Garland. A village a mile or two from the town. They said something about meeting up with other people there.”

George drew in his breath; two groups of night-riders at once might be too much to handle. “Best if we take ‘em one at a time,” he murmured to himself, and then clapped Mike on the shoulder. “Still don’t know if you’re as good as a hound, but looks like you found them for us after all.”

#​

When they got to the Higgins place two hours later, he was sure - if the horse tracks leading inside the house didn’t say so, the gunshots fired from the upper-story windows certainly did. He reined to a halt behind a stone wall two hundred yards from the manor house and took cover, and the others did the same. None of them had been hit, but they weren’t getting any closer without a fight.

“So what do we do now?” he said, again at a murmur but this time one that carried. George was in charge of his troop because he was on the state legislature and had bought their guns and kit, not because he was a soldier. He knew he didn’t want to assault a house with six hundred feet of open lawn to its front and sides and a river at its back, but maybe some of the veterans had ideas.

“If we can get to those sheds over there,” Jim said, “it’s a hundred feet to the house, but we’d be broadside to ‘em the whole way, and we’d have to get there across open ground. I wouldn’t recommend it.”

“Be nice if we had a couple of six-pounders,” said Tom.

“Be nice if we had a brace of Gatlings too,” Emery answered, “but unless there’s one in the shed, all we got is what we have.”

“We got ‘em treed, at least,” Mike said.

“Ties us up too, and in the meantime, their buddies’ll murder more people by Garland.”

“Wouldn’t take many of us to bottle ‘em up here, though.” Jim was looking thoughtful. “They’ve got the same problem breaking out that we’d have breaking in – ten of us along the wall could keep ‘em where they are, and the rest of us could go take care of their friends.”

George considered briefly. “I still don’t like it,” he said. “We don’t know how many men are in the other group, and we could get slaughtered if we split up. Tom!” he called. “Ride up to the courthouse and find the militia. Tell ‘em there’s a troop of the bastards holed up at the Higgins place and we need more men.”

Tom rode off, and for a couple of hours there was nothing to do but talk and play cards and try to keep Mary calm. A few of the volunteers stretched out behind the wall and caught some sleep. The house was quiet too, and George wondered if the men inside were doing the same things; even murderers had to eat and sleep when they weren’t committing murder.

It was getting toward one in the afternoon when Tom returned, and he had a militia lieutenant with him but no one else. “Can’t spare anyone right now, I’m afraid,” the officer said. “We’ve got trouble ourselves up north, and we have a tip that someone might try to bomb the courthouse. If you hold on here, we’ll try to get a troop to Garland by night…”

“You’ll try?” George repeated.

“That’s the best we can do, Mr. White. I’ll recommend it. But we’re stretched pretty damn thin.” A trace of a smile crossed his face. “We do have some mail for you, though.”

“Mail? What the hell good is that gonna do us?”

“Don’t know,” the lieutenant said, withdrawing a packet from his saddlebag. “But the post office heard your boys were down here.”

George took the packet by instinct and, in spite of himself, looked for his name. He was hoping for something from his wife, but he had to be satisfied with a two-day-old New Bern Journal. He scanned the front page briefly, and it seemed there was still an argument raging in Washington; with a Democrat in the White House, the federal government wasn’t about to send troops to help the state militia, but the Republicans in Congress weren’t going to let the army come in against them. Meantime, Governor Adams had extended the state of insurrection by another month and promised that everyone in the tent camps would get to vote, but sorting out which ballots went where and getting them past the bushwhackers wasn’t easy…

“Got my call-up notice,” Jim said, shaking George out of his concentration. “They called up the Circles in South Carolina. Just patrols and standby for now, but…”

George didn’t need Jim to finish that sentence. Most of the white folks in South Carolina had got used to the way things were – even happy about things like Robert Smalls’ farmers’ bank and crop insurance – but if there were ever a time for the others to make trouble, it was now, and the statehouse wanted to make sure they didn’t get ideas.

“Bet Miss Harriet’s happy,” Tom said. “She’s got a bigger army now than the president.”

“Could use some of them up here,” answered George, but he thought better of that even before he was done speaking. If organized militia crossed the border from South Carolina, that would give Georgia and Virginia the excuse they needed to send their militia in, and that was how the war started back in ’61, wasn’t it?

And that thought – how a skirmish or two could so easily become a war – brought George back to the here and now.

“Give me a handkerchief,” he said, and tied it to the bayonet of his rifle as he looked toward the house. He stood up slowly, wary of guns in the windows, and got up on the stone wall.

“Y’all in the house,” he called. “We got you trapped here and the state boys are on their way. If you come out now, we won’t string you up for what you did last night – my word of honor as a senator. You don’t come out, and we’ll take care of your buddies in Garland and then we’ll take care of you.”

There was silence for a few seconds; George saw shadowy movement inside the house and wondered if he was about to be shot at. But then a window opened and someone shouted out of it in a deep Georgia accent.

“Like hell you will. If the state boys were coming, they’d have already came. We’re staying right where we are, and y’all had best stop play-acting and be gone by the time we go out tonight.”

The window slammed and George climbed down. It had been worth a try. But now he was faced with the same problem that had confronted him when he got here – how to reduce a fortified defensive position over two hundred yards of open ground.

He sat, back against the wall, and tried to put himself in the place of a West Point cadet who’d been assigned a tactical problem. What would Louis Hairston have done with this in one of Bill Walker’s books? But if you were a dime-novel author, you could make things come out all right, while here it was up to God. A frontal assault or an attack from the sheds were out as Jim had said, and the only other way he could see…

“Could we come at ‘em by water?”

Jim raised himself on his elbows, risked another look at the house, and began to nod slowly. “Less than fifty feet on the water side, and the ground isn’t too steep. We did that a few times in the Rising.”

“We did that in Thomas Day’s army too,” said Reuben Ackie. He’d come all the way from Liberia, but he spoke with a North Carolina accent; he’d been born not far from where George was, but his father hadn’t been white enough to pass when the free blacks were expelled in ’47. He’d been with Day’s brigade in the Civil War and he’d fought in Liberia’s own civil war afterward, and now he was giving it a third try. “If we can find some boats, we might catch ‘em napping. Only thing is, if they see us in the boats before we land, we’ll be sitting ducks.”

“Some boats a couple miles up the river at the Taylor place,” Emery said, and everyone began chiming in at once.

“All right,” George said a few minutes later, raising a hand for silence. “I’ll take Emery and twenty men up to Taylor’s. Jim, you’re in charge of who’s staying. Wait about half an hour and start shooting up the house. Keep ‘em looking your way.”

“Who knows – maybe we’ll hit something.”

“Couldn’t hurt.” George got up on the wall again, handkerchief flying. “Last chance, gents,” he called. “I’m riding out now with the state lieutenant, and we’re coming back with a whole company. If you’re still in there when we get back, you’ll get no mercy.”

There was no reply from the house, and George murmured again that it had been worth a try. He saddled up, waited for the others to join him, and waved to the lieutenant, and they rode off together.

#​

They found three boats in the Taylor boathouse; two of them floated, and the third was close enough to patch up with some tar. They took the tar too, and George set some of the men to coating the ends of sticks with it. Old man Taylor watched it all from his window and George could see in his eyes that he wanted to shoot, but he didn’t dare. “Hope you drown,” he shouted; George gave him no mind.

They pushed downriver with muffled oars, sticking as close to the swampy shore as they could. They heard the Higgins place before they saw it; the sound of gunfire told that Jim was indeed keeping the night-riders busy. George paddled a little faster and the house appeared around a bend in the river. He could see the river side of the estate from where he was; the ground was rough and broken by swampy pools, but there was a retaining wall for cover and the distance to the house wasn’t far. A couple of minutes and they’d be there…

A shot rang out and George heard it whistle past him, and a moment later, there was another. Evidently not everyone was on the other side of the house; the night-riders had kept men on watch, and they’d seen the boats.

“Pull hard!” George shouted, all thought of surprise gone. He wrenched on the oars, but the boat handled like a damn tub, and it seemed to take forever to pull into shore. The gunfire was slow at first but became thicker as more men rushed to the water side, and now they were getting the range. Tom cried out and pitched over the side, his oar-stroke unfinished; Reuben shouted and there was blood on his arm, but he kept pulling.

A couple of the troopers fired back from the boats, aiming at the upper-story windows where the gunfire was coming from. Emery wrapped his rifle in oilskin and dove into the river, his outline barely visible under the water as he swam for shore. George couldn’t swim; he crouched as low as he could and prayed.

The boat scraped bottom. They were still a few feet from shore, but that would have to do. George jumped out and ran, hoping that the gunfire from Emery and the couple of others who’d made shore would be enough to protect him. The ground was soft beneath his boots and the mud sucked at him as the bullets crackled. The noises around him seemed to merge and he saw things in flashes: a night-rider’s body hanging halfway out a second-story window, Mike grunting with pain as a bullet hit him and dragging himself forward, the muzzle flash from Reuben’s rifle.

There it was at last: George felt the retaining wall’s presence more than he saw it, but he threw himself down and savored the moist ground and cool stones. He took stock and saw that everyone but Tom had also made the wall; all of them were somehow still alive, though some were wounded. The gunfire from the house was murder, though, and they wouldn’t be so lucky if they tried to charge the rest of the way.

He gauged the distance to the nearest window: about twenty-five feet. It would have to do. He lit one of the tarred sticks with a match, raised himself up and threw it like a spear, falling back behind the wall even as he let go. He heard, rather than saw, breaking glass and the crackle of flames. The other troopers followed; he saw Mike throw a flaming stick and reach for another, and saw Emery draw back his arm but fall backward, the throw unfinished, as a bullet caught him in the chest.

But now cries of fear were added to the noise within the house, and so was the neighing of terrified horses. Dear God the horses – George had forgotten up to now that the night-riders had brought their horses right into the house rather than risking them being cut off in a stable. He heard one kicking at a door, followed by an inhuman scream – whether from horse or human, he didn’t know – as the flames rose higher.

There was gunfire from the other side of the house again, and George realized that Jim and his people must be making the frontal assault that would have been suicide a few minutes before. He wished he could see how it was going, but the night-riders’ fire was becoming spotty and panicked, and if the same thing was happening on the other side, the charge would go home. Jim was a veteran; George would have to trust that he knew what he was doing.

The next thing he heard was more shouting and broken glass in the front; evidently Jim’s troopers had got there. The flames grew higher and suddenly joined together, and the whole house was burning.

An offering, George thought. A burnt offering for a burned village. It was barbaric and brutal and it felt like the Lord’s vengeance.

Someone flung himself out a second-story window and landed heavily on the ground. Mike shot the night-rider where he lay. He remembered what had happened last night. In the front of the house, someone shouted “I surrender!” and was answered with a single shot.

For a moment, George nodded. He remembered what Jim had said about the Rising back in ’63 – no quarter asked and none given. But then anger replaced agreement. This wasn’t the Civil War. They were fighting for the law here, and what would they be if they broke it? Was that what they wanted Mary to see – two massacres in one day?

He stood up, ignoring the gunfire that was still coming from a couple of the windows. “Take prisoners!” he shouted, making his voice carry across the grounds. “Take prisoners, God damn it! We’ll take ‘em to the jail in Clinton and they can have a trial before the sheriff hangs ‘em!”

He wasn’t sure the troopers would obey - he’d raised the troop, but he hadn’t been tested as the leader until today, and some of them were veterans where he wasn’t. Their blood was up, and he was risking it all trying to restrain them. But then another night-rider ran out, and the troopers shouted at him to get on the ground instead of shooting. A fourth one followed, and the others who were still alive came out a few seconds later, and the flames rose to heaven as the troopers found rope to tie them.

#​

They found a cart in one of the sheds and put the prisoners in it, and George detailed Mike and a couple of the walking wounded to take them into town. Mary, uncomprehending but willing to trust, went with them. Maybe the county would be able to find her a new home when all this was over. If not, maybe George would head back north with another child.

There wasn’t time to think about that now. It was getting late in the afternoon, there was another bunch of night-riders heading for Garland, and George would have to get there first if he planned to surprise them. He watched the cart go, made sure his troopers were ready, and signaled them to ride.

They were a different group of people from what they’d been that morning: filthy with soot and mud, clothing torn and bloody, and ready for another fight. And, George realized, so was he. He’d become a soldier at thirty-five, and his troopers with him.

Well, if he was a soldier, they said soldiers were only as good as their last battle, and there was another one waiting a few miles away. The road to Garland stretched in front of them, and the election seemed as far as the next lifetime.

 

[Jonathan Edelstein]

Marie Camara, Guide to American Civil War Monuments, Chapter 41, South Carolina (Atlanta: Memorial, 2016)

​

The Arch of the Rising, along with the Black Marianne in Charleston harbor [1], is an iconic monument of South Carolina, instantly recognizable throughout the world as a symbol of the state. It has been the backdrop for thousands of political speeches, rallies, and memorial services, and is both a mandatory stop for official visitors to Columbia and the place where six governors have taken the oath of office.

A monument to the Great Rising [2] was first suggested soon after the end of the Civil War, with proposed designs ranging from traditional equestrian statues to abstract Gullah-inspired emblems of freedom. But the politics of the immediate postwar era were unfavorable to this idea. The Robert Smalls administration [3] feared that its campaign to reconcile poor whites to black rule, and the state’s still-fragile civic peace, would be endangered by a public symbol of triumph. Although Smalls and his successors encouraged local communities to build their own monuments and made funds available for this purpose, the proposal for a statewide memorial site was shelved.

For the first generation after the war, therefore, the Rising was remembered mainly by the Freedmen’s Circles, most of which built shrines to their own heroes and their own dead. Many of these sites exist today, and some, like the bayonet-leaved Iron Tree at Yemmassee and the rough-cut Whitehall Family lifting each other out of the symbolic captivity of a stone plinth, are visually striking. The Rising, in South Carolina’s civic mythology, has always been a participatory revolution – a story of families and communities choosing the ground where they made their stand [4] – and these early memorials were both consistent with that myth and part of its creation.

Toward the end of the nineteenth century, however, the political equation changed. The older generation of Rising veterans was beginning to die out, and there were increasing calls for a statewide monument that would symbolize the revolt to those who knew it only as history. The violent 1888 election in North Carolina in which thousands of Rising veterans took part in the successful defense of the biracial Republican-populist government [5], and the beginnings of a new Underground Railroad into the Redeemer states [6], fostered the notion that the Rising and all it stood for were something South Carolina should proclaim to the world. And at home, with the first stirrings of opposition to the increasingly ossified Republican and Circle establishment [7], the state government warmed to the idea of a shrine that would re-dedicate the state to revolutionary values.

In 1891, at the suggestion of Governor Robert Elliott, the South Carolina legislature appropriated funds to purchase land in what was then the outskirts of the state capital and build a statewide monument to the Rising. The memorial park and sculpture were designed by George King, a Charleston architect who had been born a slave in Beaufort, and were completed and opened to the public on New Year’s Day 1896.

The park consists of a nine-acre seasonal garden – honeywort and sweet alyssum in winter, an array of native wildflowers for spring and summer, and pink autumn-blooming sweetgrass – surrounding a lake. Unusually for its time, the garden is designed to look unsculpted, with large stones left in place and shade trees in groves rather than lines. And on an island in the center of the lake, reached by a stone bridge, is a 108-foot marble-clad arch in the shape of an inverted Y with sweeping ribbed abutments that suggest Islamic architecture and Gullah basket-weaving. An eternal flame has burned under the arch since the dedication ceremony, accompanied at night by green and white floodlights.

The Arch was controversial during the first decades of the twentieth century, symbolizing what many saw as the state government reaching for cultural hegemony. Harriet Tubman, during her independent campaign for governor in 1920, pointedly declined to speak there. But with the dawning of a new era in South Carolina’s politics, the monument’s soaring and awe-inspiring form won the people over, and by 1930, it had assumed the iconic status it holds today…

# # #​

Civil War Veterans’ Monument… Affectionately named “The Ramparts,” the Veterans’ Monument across from the state capitol in Columbia is South Carolina’s first Civil War memorial, completed in 1866 toward the end of Robert Smalls’ first full term as governor. The monument, uniquely among war memorials of that era, embodies the delicacy of reconciliation and the difficulty of remembering all the war dead, even the fallen Confederate soldiers, without valorizing the Southern cause.

The Ramparts are exactly that: four ramparts of unpolished red-brown stone meeting at a central plinth. Each length of stone remembers one of the Civil War armies: one for the Union soldiers, one for the Confederates, one for the battalions of the Rising, and one for the armies of the Gullah republics [8]. The reliefs on the Confederate rampart – a soldier embracing his wife and children as he leaves for the battlefield, a nurse tending the wounded, a burning farmstead, loved ones kneeling by a grave – emphasize the sacrifices of war over battle scenes, and the other ramparts are carved with similar themes.

At the center, a soldier from each army jointly supports a broken staff, holding it up together so that the palmetto flag of South Carolina can fly at its summit. This design subtly rejects the idea, common to monuments elsewhere but which the bitterness of the Rising would not allow, that the soldiers were brothers during the war – hence the broken staff – but affirms that all have a part in the rebuilding. That message is softened only somewhat by the inscription carved around the top of the plinth - "To all the people of South Carolina who fought and died during the Civil War: may the earth be a soft pillow for your rest" - which also carefully fails to mention any one cause or sense of shared comradeship.

The Confederate battle flag, along with the flags of the United States, South Carolina and the Sea Island republics and the green and white standard of the Rising, flies at the entrance to the memorial; this is the only place in Columbia, and the only publicly owned site in all of South Carolina, where a Confederate flag is displayed.

Not all former Confederate soldiers appreciated the Ramparts when it was constructed; at the time, the upstate counties were still heavily Democratic, and the more restive parts of their population saw the monument less as a symbol of reconciliation than one of subordination. In 1871, the United Confederate Veterans of South Carolina erected their own monument, a cast-iron statue of an unknown soldier, on private property in Abbeville, and for years this statue served as a rival gathering place. But as the die-hard Confederates left for greener pastures and the remainder got used to (and in some cases came to appreciate) the new order, the Ramparts’ central location made them the natural location for memorial gatherings. By the 1890s, veterans of all four armies held annual Remembrance Day services at the site, separately but peaceably, and in 1928, the last survivors and their descendants held the first joint remembrance ceremony. Though their causes could never be reconciled, the sacrifices of war had indeed proven to be a foundation for common memory…

# # #​

Longstreet Statue in Edgefield… Although military historians consider James Longstreet one of the best battlefield generals in the Confederate army, for many years his memory was virtually erased in the states where the Confederacy was held most dear. When the Edgefield County Historical Society commissioned South Carolina’s Longstreet statue in 1920, one could find a memorial to him in Zanzibar where he led colonial troops during the Great War, but not in Louisiana where he had commanded the Reconstruction-era militia or in Georgia where he lived during his retirement.

The South Carolina Longstreet memorial was nevertheless the second one built in the United States. The first, in Mississippi, was erected in 1889 on the site where he led the successful defense of Jackson against an attempted Redeemer takeover, depicting him on horseback in the uniform of the state militia. The statue at the Edgefield courthouse near Longstreet’s birthplace also shows him mounted and armed, but he is wearing civilian clothes. He is not riding to battle, but instead leading a family out of the darkness of Jim Crow and into safety.

The statue was inspired by Longstreet’s role in Harriet Tubman’s postwar Underground Railroad, on which his Georgia house was a station from 1898 until his death in 1905. His participation in the Railroad was just becoming known in 1920, and also, the ratification of the 1919 civil rights amendment [9] and the fierce resistance that was sweeping Georgia and the other Jim Crow states [10], made the time ripe for the citizens of Longstreet’s birthplace to send a message to those of the state where he had died fighting the Redeemers. The fact that Edgefield County was on the Georgia border and that its freedmen had fought off Redeemer raids during the 1870s made the message all the more pointed; it is entirely by design that Longstreet’s equestrian image faces away from Georgia and that he is leading his charges out of that state.

The struggles of the 1920s would eventually pass, though, and by 1942, Georgia too was ready to remember Longstreet. In that year, the Hall County government commissioned a monument to him in a public square in Gainesville. This statue too is equestrian, and is the only one of the four in which the general is depicted in Confederate uniform…

# # #​

Tubman Museum… There are no statues of Harriet Tubman in South Carolina; she opposed them when she was alive and forbade them in her will, and even ninety years after her death, few state politicians are brave enough to oppose Miss Harriet’s wishes. Her homes, however, are another matter. She had four during the time she lived in South Carolina: the Congaree swampland where she commanded a battalion of the Rising; the modest Columbia house where she oversaw the early Freedmen’s Circles; the South of Broad townhouse in Charleston she owned when she represented the low country in Congress; and the home on St. Helena Island where she lived during the years of her retirement and returned as often as she could when she was governor.

Tubman herself had no particular desire to preserve her homes for history: she sold the Columbia and Charleston houses when she was done with them and willed the one on St. Helena Island to the neighbor family who cared for her in old age. But the people of South Carolina were another story; within a few years after Tubman’s death in 1922 [11], her homes – especially the Congaree encampment which had become a state park in 1921 and the St. Helena Island house where she was buried – had become places of pilgrimage [12]. In 1948, the state finally made it official: the government bought the three houses and designated them, along with the Congaree site and a room in the state capitol that held an exhibit on her childhood and escape from slavery, as a collective Tubman Museum.

To those looking for Civil War monuments, the branch of the museum that is of most interest is the one in the Congaree; the other locations focus on periods earlier and later in Tubman’s life. The Congaree site (which is actually one of many places where Tubman’s battalion camped during the constantly-moving conflict of the Rising) is a faithful recreation of an 1863 guerrilla camp with exhibits on weapons, tactics and the struggle for survival. The main collection contains materials on Tubman’s campaigns and her role in the Free South Carolina Convention, including rare letters and photographs.

In recent decades, however, the emphasis of this collection has shifted away from Tubman herself and toward the men, women and children who served as fighters and in the Rising’s labor battalions. The museum’s aim is to document, as much as possible, each family who lived and fought in the Congaree, and more than a thousand of them have been featured in rotating exhibits. The iconography of South Carolina’s Civil War memory is shifting once again toward the war as participatory revolution, and given Tubman’s views on the matter, this would likely not displease her…
_______

[1] See post 1040.

[2] See post 386.

[3] See post 486.

[4] See post 1281.

[5] See post 1273.

[6] See post 2941.

[7] See posts 1273 and 3365.

[8] See posts 367 and 386.

[9] See post 3324.

[10] See post 4591.

[11] See post 4215.

[12] See post 4628.

 

[Jonathan Edelstein]

Amadou Ba was a hundred and nineteen since the Eid, and Mariama, his motor wagon, wasn’t much younger. He’d built and rebuilt the wagon a hundred times over: he’d added solar batteries and an exhaust scrubber, jerry-rigged a waste-heat harvester, replaced worn parts with new ones he’d machined himself. He knew it as well as any animal, and sometimes it could be as temperamental as one.

Today was one of those times. It was hot even for the Sahara – fifty-six in the shade – and even with the coolant mix Amadou had put in that morning, the engine was constantly on the verge of overheating. He’d had to rebalance the load, take the hills on battery power, call a dozen halts to let the beast cool down, and once, to pull over and plug into the solar farms for an emergency charge. A camel couldn’t have been more contrary, and to Amadou’s fading memory, none of those he’d known in his childhood ever had been.

But Mariama could still cover as much ground in two hours as a camel could in a day, and now, with evening coming and the heat starting to fade, the destination was near. The road was winding down from stony hills, past the endless hectares of solar and wind farms, and below, the oasis was in sight.

It was a small oasis, not large enough for permanent settlement – a pool and a stand of date palms, nothing more. It would be a welcome haven for two or three nights, though, and Amadou wasn’t the only one of his Shelterer tribe whose heart rose at the sight. He eased Mariama into low gear, took the slope carefully, and ground to a stop at the oasis’ edge with an hour to spare before sunset.

The rest of the tribe pulled in behind him – eighteen motor wagons, a hundred people and about the same number of sheep – and began the ritual of unloading and pitching tents. Amadou got his own shelter down from the wagon’s back before anyone could stop him; he was the oldest of the band but he wasn’t dead yet, and while he accepted more help than he used to, he was damned if anyone was going to accuse him of not working.

“Stop that, jadde,” said his granddaughter Alimatou, coming up behind from where her own family’s wagon was grounded. She wasn’t the only one saying so either – at Amadou’s age, the price of not wanting to be caught slacking was being reprimanded for working too much – and after token protest, he let her finish setting the tent up and taking down his supplies.

“Where are your tools, jadde?” Alimatou said. “I’ll need them for Salif – it’s his first time out to the farms.”

“I’ll get them for you tomorrow…”

“No, tonight. It’s looking like tomorrow will be an inside day – best to get the work done while we can.”

Amadou nodded his agreement. When he was a child, the tribe had made its rounds in Mali and cared for the plantings at the desert’s edge; now, far to the north, it was one of those that maintained the Consistory Environmental Section’s energy farms. In exchange, its customary rights to the oases and desert roads were inviolate and the electricity it took from the farms was free – and when the windmills mixed the air and the solar panels’ waste heat made the nights warm and moist, the plants that grew in the open spaces were theirs to cultivate and harvest.

“In the cab,” he said. “I’ll get them down.” But as he went do so and Alimatou moved to forestall him, their attention was seized by another tribe coming down to the oasis from the north.

He didn’t recognize them, but that was nothing unusual. There were many Shelterer tribes that moved among the three million square kilometers of energy farms, and even more that roamed the six million square kilometers that had yet to be installed. When the project was done fifty years from now – only the Consistory could plan in such terms – the Sahara would produce eighty-four terawatts of power, and the desert people – Shelterers, Tuaregs, Bedouins, Moors – would be its customary owners…

“Amadou!” called Dawudu, this year’s ra’is, interrupting Amadou’s train of thought. “Will you greet them? Our fires are theirs.”

Again, Amadou nodded. He was neither ra’is nor imam, but as the oldest, there were still some things he was expected to do. “Give me your arm,” he told Alimatou as he realized how tired he was, and set off for the other end of the oasis where the newcomers were making camp.

His own campsite was coming to life around him: fires blazing outside tent-flaps, families renewing conversations where they’d left off in the morning, excited children racing thirsty sheep to see who would get to the pond first. None of them showed signs of alarm. The ownership of oases might have been bitterly contested once – battles had been fought over them, and generations-long lawsuits waged – but the same arbitration that had made the Environmental Section’s use of the Sahara subject to its residents’ customary rights had recognized an ulema to oversee its management, and that council had declared the oases open to all. There were strict limits on their use, and those were litigated before the ulema as much as grazing and water rights had once been, but with neither Amadou’s tribe nor the newcomers staying more than a couple of days, they were unlikely to be tested.

Something alarmed Amadou all the same as the newcomers’ encampment drew close. They were poor, in a way that poverty had rarely meant since his childhood. They had no motor-wagons; their clothing and tents were threadbare; the animals were gaunt and the people nearly as much so; few of them were over seventy. If Amadou had crossed paths with this tribe before, they had fallen on bad fortune since, and they were obviously too proud to take zakat even if it killed them.

An old man – no doubt the oldest in his tribe – came out of one of the tents and walked to where Amadou was standing just outside the camp. “You are welcome here,” he said, and Amadou let Alimatou lead him across the invisible threshold.

“Come share our shelter and our meal,” Amadou answered. “Our fires are your fires.”

The other man’s response wasn’t what Amadou expected. Invitations such as he had delivered were a rite of meeting, and their acceptance was equally a ritual. What should have followed was an offer to contribute to the feast, to which, with a tribe as poor as this, Amadou would agree to the smallest extent consistent with their honor. Just as customary law made the Sahara a gift economy writ large, the ritual of hospitality made it one writ small.

But there was no acceptance and no offer of food or fuel. “I will come,” the old man said instead. “Those who want to come will come. But the others will stay, and don’t be surprised if there are quarrels over it.”

“Whoever comes will be welcome,” Amadou said – a hundred questions flashed through his mind, but none of them were his to ask. “And the first portion will be yours…”

“Ismail.”

“Ismail,” he repeated, and returned to his camp in much confusion.

An hour later, as Amadou leaned on Mariama’s right front wheel and finished a cup of tea, Ismail crossed the threshold; with him was the other tribe’s ra’is, who introduced himself as Youssou, and a scattering of followers. They were families, as they should be, but some of them looked incomplete to Amadou’s eyes; fathers without their sons, children without parents, husbands without wives. From the number of tents in the other campsite, they might be half their tribe.

What followed was as ritual dictated. The tribes exchanged greetings; young people brought out couscous and joints of lamb to serve their elders before they ate; old men and women inquired after each other’s animals and grandchildren and brought each other up to date on weddings and births. But after a few moments, Amadou realized that another set of polite inquiries wasn’t being made, and that their guests were carefully looking away from parts of the camp. And it all became clear to him, because what they weren’t looking at was the machines.

Decades ago, in Amadou’s childhood, his father had made fun of the Belloist parties in Mali’s parliament: how could anyone who claimed to abjure politics share in the government of a state? The jokes were funny then. They no longer were, because Amadou’s tribe had made the same compromises.

The tribe had shunned modern technology once, as all Shelterers did. But that had changed as the world did: as the summers became hotter, as the places where nomads could live grew steadily smaller, as open space grew scarcer even though the world’s population was declining. By the time Amadou had grown to manhood, “no technology” had become “only as much as we need to survive,” and by the time he was a grandfather, it was “as much as we need to keep living apart from settled people.” They had accepted motor-wagons, air conditioners, nanomedicine, solar panels and biofuels – better that than to become unable to live in the desert and be thrown on the charity of the world they had left.

The Shelterers’ ideal was still the same as the Tall dynasty had envisioned – a righteous society of peasants, herders and scholars – but as the Belloists had redefined politics, they had given new meanings to “peasant,” “herder,” and ultimately “scholar.” Alimatou wasn’t the only one in the tribe who’d been to university.

But not all the Shelterers felt as Amadou’s people did, and the way their guests looked down at any mention of machinery screamed their disgust louder than any words. When Ismail asked Amadou to walk with him to where the date palms stood, what he said came as no surprise.

“Some of us – my own son – will call us apostates for coming to you tonight.”

“But?”

“But we can’t go on as we have. You saw our camp – we can be poor, but when our children cry out for something to eat and old people die of heatstroke, that’s something more than poverty.”

Ismail fell silent, but something told Amadou he wasn’t finished, so he stood and waited. Behind them, the feast was ending and Alimatou was leading the maintenance crew out to the energy farms. Amadou’s eyes followed them and Ismail’s followed his, and he could see the moment when the other man remembered that beyond the date palms were three million square kilometers of windmills and solar panels.

“There are things my ra’is can’t talk about with yours,” Ismail said at last. “But some of us will join you tomorrow, and I hope you will welcome them.”

“Better that than a settlement?”

Ismail nodded. “I thought I would join you myself – what would someone my age do in a town? – but when I saw your machines, it was too much. Some of the younger ones might make the change. They won’t like it, but they’ll get used to it if their other choice is to live with the ones like my son.”

“Yes.” The young were both the most adaptable and the most fanatical; some would join Amadou’s tribe, but others would pretend that nothing needed to change until the desert sand covered their bleached bones.

“Make sure your ra’is accepts them,” Ismail said and walked back to his camp; Amadou spread a blanket on Mariama’s flatbed and counted stars until he fell asleep.

The morning sun awakened him, and he could tell that Alimatou was right about this being an inside day. An hour after dawn, the temperature already stood at fifty-two, and the Radio Sahara forecast called for it to reach sixty in the afternoon; with the night’s moisture still in the air, that was killing heat even at rest. Even with all the Environmental Section had done to keep the temperature down – even with everything that governments up and down the scale had done – there were a few days like that in the desert every year. The communal air-conditioned tent was open, and everyone who wasn’t in it would soon be; only the most necessary work was done on days like this, and only as much of it as couldn’t be avoided.

Amadou, in his old age, had come to like inside days more than not; air conditioning made them more comfortable than the old ways of evaporation cooling and drying the air, and they were days with the whole tribe under one roof, days to study and sip tea and tell stories. He found a cushion near where Alimatou and her crew were assessing the night’s work, settled in with a book of Usman dan Fodio’s poems, and wondered when the first members of the other tribe would come to the tent and how furtive their steps would be.

What he heard instead were gunshots.

It took him a moment to recognize the shots for what they were; it had been sixty years and more since the tribe had last known battle. Younger men, quicker to react, were running for weapons; parents hustled children out of the tent and toward the uncertain cover of the motor wagons.

“Hold!” shouted Dawudu. “They’re not attacking us. It’s all inside their camp.”

Again, everything suddenly made sense. Amadou could imagine what had happened: die-hards catching family members as they made ready to sneak across; words exchanged; accusations of heresy and treason; quarrels becoming too heated for words or even fists. A way of life was ending on the north side of the oasis, and such things never went quietly.

“We should stop it,” Amadou said.

“It isn’t our fight…”

“Some of them were coming to join us. They are ours already. It is our fight.”

Dawudu didn’t look convinced. Amadou could appeal to the whole tribe, but it would take time for a consensus to form, especially with the ra’is on the other side. By then, the fight would likely be over…

An explosion cut off whatever he’d planned to say next – one, and then another and a third.

Those weren’t coming from the other camp, and Alimatou realized what was happening a second before Amadou did. “The farms!”

That, too, made sudden sense – in Amadou’s young manhood, the most fanatic of the Shelterers had attacked the plantings and irrigation works, and in the early days of the Consistory’s Sahara project, terrorists had razed solar panels and bombed windmills. But who would do so on a day that would kill the unprotected in an hour?

People who don’t care if they live or die, his mind answered. People who see their way of life ending, and want only to take something with them.

Maybe that was what had started the shooting – maybe the moderate ones had been the first to fire, to prevent their countrymen from doing what they what they now did. And if so, then it was doubly Amadou’s fight, because the ulema had decreed that such acts were haram and that all the desert had a duty to stop them.

The tribe seemed to come to that realization all at once. The young people, already armed, threw on the cooling suits that Alimatou had designed, clothing that would protect them and conserve their moisture in the heat of the day. They flung the tent door open and ran toward the gunfire and rising flames, hurrying to join the battle.

No one called on Amadou to fight; he had long since passed the age for such things. “Get everyone out!” Dawudu ordered instead. “Children and old people into the wagons, and get them out of danger. Leave two wagons for us. We’ll catch up when it’s done.”

Amadou obeyed. It was the work of a few minutes to get the children into their suits and onto the wagons, and a few more to break down the tents and throw them on the flatbeds. The wagons would carry more than they had the day before – people were running across from the other side, children in their arms – but those very people sped the work.

Mariama’s engine rumbled to life, and Amadou picked out a path that led away from the explosions; the wagon was temperamental as always, but he knew how to handle it, and his repairs held. The other wagons followed behind, all but two, leaving the battlefield to the fighters.

The gunfire continued, but as Amadou led the way up the hillside, the shots became farther between. He knew that the struggle would continue long after the fighting was done; his mind’s eye saw the fighters from both tribes building firebreaks and desperately trying to contain the damage. That would be so even now that the first aircraft were arriving, the emblem of the Tree of Ténéré declaring their allegiance as they dropped water and foam on the fires.

The loss would be great, no doubt. But the tribe was stronger than yesterday, and it would rebuild.

 

[Jonathan Edelstein]

Karl Mwila was bargaining with a customer for a swarm of fireflies when he saw Daliso walking toward his stall.

His eyes flashed to her for only a second, but they still betrayed him: the customer sensed his distraction, heard the new urgency in his bargaining, and bore in for the kill. The contract was settled at a price that was profitable but well below what Karl had hoped to get, and when the customer took his leave, he walked off with a swagger.

Daliso was smiling when she came into the stall; she, too, had seen what happened. She ignored the chairs, sat on a wrecked sidewalk-cleaning bot that Karl was tinkering with, and kept smiling.

Half a minute of that was all Karl could take. “All right,” he said at last. “You obviously know you cost me eight hundred marks, so will you do me the courtesy of telling me why you cost me eight hundred marks?”

Daliso still had the smile on her face. “Come have lunch and all will be revealed.”

She got up and made to leave. For a moment, Karl thought of not following her. But he was hungry, and when someone from the Consistory Space Section came calling, it wasn’t in his nature just to let her walk away. He stood up, set his alarms, and followed in Daliso’s path.

She led the way through the warrens of the gear market, past the piles of parts, the jobbers bargaining over custom machines, the smell of solder and welding fumes, the muttered curses over impromptu repairs, the tourists looking wide-eyed at a place where they could have anything made but that they couldn't quite call polite. Karl almost understood the last of those: he’d studied in Berlin and spent his Wanderjahre in Shanghai and Dakar, and in all those places, they hid their machines behind walls and lived in the carefully-fashioned illusion that their world operated itself. But only almost. The Bazembe didn’t care for that illusion – they liked to see their machines work, to see inside them, to take them apart and put them back together – and Karl was a Muzembe to the core.

The labyrinth opened into a small plaza, and they bought fish with ndiwo from one stall, German cucumber soup from another, shake-shake beer from a third – street food was another taste the Bazembe still had. A family was vacating a table nearby, and they seized it before anyone else could and took the edge off their hunger. For a few moments, Karl sipped his beer and gazed up at the thousand-meter towers of the center city and the High Gardens strung like spiderwebs between them. That neighborhood had been Kanini once; now it was called Mutanda after the world of Chishimba’s imagination [1], and not for the first time, he wondered how consciously the architects of the previous century had had that world in mind.

Daliso saw where he was looking. “At least that far,” she said. “Maybe farther.” Karl looked down and saw that she’d unwrapped the datacloth from her wrist and laid it on the table, and that the circuits woven into its fibers were pulsing.

She made a pass with her hands and an image of the solar system appeared between them; another pass and it zeroed in on a speck of light outside the orbit of Mars; a third and the speck resolved to an irregular object hurtling through space.

“I’ve seen asteroids before,” said Karl. “Pretty, but not worth eight hundred marks.”

“If it were an asteroid, I might agree. But it’s in hyperbolic orbit – it came from outside the solar system. And when we matched its vector of origin against our stellar-trajectory database, it came from…” – she made another pass, and the image above the table was replaced by an F9 sun with six planets – “here.”

Now, Karl leaned in and touched the star with a hesitant hand. Yes, he knew that system. They’d discovered it when he was a child, with two terrestrial planets in the habitable zone and a gas giant in just the right place to send water to them. And at the memory of water, something else flashed through his mind about the image he’d just seen.

“It’s rock, not ice,” he said.

“Yes. It’s an inner-system object. And that’s what I need you for.”

“A probe? I’m flattered, Daliso, but you know I don’t work on that kind of scale…”

“No, not a probe. A component. Something to tell what’s dead from what was never alive.”

Karl put his beer down. “You think there might be living material on that object – fossils.” He didn’t know what the odds of that were – a fraction of one percent would be his guess – but the Kazembe branch of the Space Section dealt in probabilities of that order on a daily basis. “But surely you can already find organic material, DNA... And if you need something custom, you have contractors for that. I’m not a biologist…”

“Yes, yes, and I know. And we have more… traditional components to do exactly that. But if there are life forms on that object, they might not resemble anything we know. They might not be carbon-based. They might code with something other than DNA. Maybe a traditional component wouldn’t recognize them – maybe it would destroy them while it’s looking for something more promising.”

“So you want something non-traditional,” said Karl. It wasn’t a question, it was a statement of fact; at some point during the conversation, without quite knowing it, he’d become fully committed.

“Yes. Something from the gear market – something from you.” Daliso was smiling again, but it wasn’t the same smile as before; she was no longer the cool Space Section mission planner but the neighbor who’d gone on bamwana cha chembe encampments [2] with him when they were both children. “Something that defines life from first principles and looks for its traces.”

“And how should it do that?”

“It’s up to you. Design something, build it, test it. Let us know when you’re done.” She dispelled the star and its planets with a wave and put her hand on the datacloth, and he put his own hand next to hers, sealing the contract. “You’re on a draw and expense account as of now, and I’ve added eight hundred marks for your trouble.”

Daliso’s smile was back to what it had been at the beginning, and Karl flushed. “Don’t worry about it. The man didn’t get the better of me nearly as much as he thought he did.”

“I’m sure he didn’t.” She looked at him with frank curiosity. “What did you sell him?”

Karl pulled a small, buzzing thing of metal from his pocket, and Daliso saw that it had been fitted with jerry-built wings. “A thousand of these – to fly around and flash colors, make scenes in the air, act out stories. He says they’re for his daughter, but I suspect he’ll use them more than she will.”

“He never grew out of imagining?” Daliso nodded. “A true Muzembe. Build me something that imagines life.”

#​

Between customers – the Space Section didn't pay that much, and there were things that citizen sharing credit couldn't buy – Karl made one machine and then another. When he was finished, two weeks after the meeting with Daliso, he rented a motor-wagon and took them to the wilderness.

The wagon drove him out of Ndola on the main Barotseland road, through the southern and western suburbs and the fringing farmland. He turned off the highway a hundred kilometers from town, where the farms had long since given way to miombo woodland, and soon afterward the road was nothing but a dirt track.

He had to drive himself the rest of the way; the off-road trails weren't on most rental vehicles' maps. He hadn't driven in years, but the skill returned quickly and the joy even more so, and he took the rutted track slowly, making way for migrating impalas and listening to the vervets' chirping calls. He came to a stretch of broken pavement by a watering hole and a herd of brown cattle whose ancestors might have belonged to his, and two kilometers further up the road, a village that the woodland had spent the past fifty years reclaiming.

He grounded the wagon at the village’s edge and prepared to make camp. It was far from the first such ruin he’d seen, and they never failed to put him in an elegiac mood. There were a million fewer people in Kazembe now than there’d been a hundred years ago, and unlike the Basotho or the Boers, the Bazembe didn’t cling to the countryside. Once, villages like this had dotted the country, but nearly all of them were gone, and that part of the country not devoted to agriculture or mining was a wildlife preserve. We owe it to the animals, Karl supposed – the elephants’ and big cats’ recovery from their brush with extinction at mid-century was painfully slow – but there were houses here that nobody tended and stories that no one remembered anymore.

He wondered sometimes if humanity even needed the stars – if an aging and dwindling race filled less of the earth every year, what need had it of the worlds beyond? He’d met plenty of people who thought that way during his Wanderjahre. But he was a Muzembe, and the Bazembe still dreamed of the stars and always would. There was a reason why, despite being one seventh of one percent of the people who lived on earth, they were nineteen percent of those who’d left it.

With that thought still in mind, Karl unloaded his machines from the wagon bed and began setting them to their tasks. The first, which he had somewhat blasphemously named Lesa, was equipped with as many definitions of life as he could find, but had been carefully wiped clean of all knowledge of any specific life form. The second, Luchyele, was the opposite: it was trained to know and recognize all living things known to science, but knew nothing of life as a category. Could any of the concepts known to Lesa enable it to pick out living things unerringly, or could Luchyele, by examining life forms, find the things that all life had in common?

There was only one way to learn, and with a word of command, he sent them on their way. From the shade of a miombo tree, he watched them at their work, adjusting their instructions to ensure that they wouldn't disturb or harm the living things they analyzed. They were soon out of sight and by evening they were hundreds of meters away, but Karl stayed the night to confirm that they were working and reporting as designed. In the morning he went out and found them – Lesa was examining a blade of grass, and Luchyele contemplating a cane-rat burrow – and, content, he drove home.

It was two weeks before he called on Daliso. This time, he rented a fiacre and it drove him the whole way; the Space Section offices were at Chilengwa na Lesa lake, and the road between there and Ndola had been traveled for hundreds of years. At the near end of the lake were the inkunka – the huts – where the Wandervögel and the eagle-children, the bamwana cha chembe, had camped for the better part of two centuries, and at the far end, near the place where Kazembe had launched its first sounding rocket, were the low buildings of the Consistory campus.

The Space Section had other offices and larger ones. Karl had been to the vast complex in Paris that managed the installations in near-earth orbit and the facility at Kismayo that supplied the Moon and Mars colonies, and there were also the bureau in Washington that licensed asteroid mining and registered claims and the buildings in Singapore where the entities with interests in space kept their embassies. But Chilengwa na Lesa was the domain of the dreamers. Here were the outer-system probes with lifetimes measured in centuries; the missions planned on thousand-year calendars; the teams searching for technologies that might take centuries to develop if they ever did; the scale models of cloud cities on Venus and self-sustaining Titan habitats. Here were datacloths hung like tapestries on the walls, patterned like stylized lukasa memory-boards or scenes from the Starwind Cycle; here were engineers and visionaries walking quietly through corridors, moved to silence by the weight of time.

At the end of one such corridor was a door that bore the legend "Daliso Chibanda," and beyond the door an airy workroom. Daliso herself was at a table, tinkering with the image of a spacecraft – the probe, Karl was sure, that the Consistory would send to the extra-solar object.

"Your component will go here, if you have one," she said, indicating a space between two sensor suites. "Do you have one?"

"Yes. I'm not sure how much good it will do, but I have one."

Daliso perched on the back of a chair – smiling, this time, like the Mona Lisa – and motioned him to the sofa. "So tell me."

"Lesa and Luchyele cross-referenced well enough," Karl said. "They each found what the other knew. But the commonalities they found all had to do with what life does, not what it is. Growth, metabolism, reproduction – if there's something on that object that doesn't have anything we would recognize as cells or organs, and if we can't trace its parts through any known evolutionary line, how would we know if it did any of those things?"

Daliso nodded. "But?"

"There are ways that might work in some cases. Evolution, for instance – if there's more than one type of possible life, we can look for signs that one evolved from the other. And if there isn't more than one, or we can't find common threads… Luchyele thinks that all life has to have some kind of coding mechanism. It didn't come up with any certain way to tell coding from random complexity, but there are some kinds of patterns that it thinks are more likely than not. I'm not sure if it's what you asked for, but it's better than nothing."

"Better than nothing, yes. And better than I'd hoped for. Can you have a finished component for me in ten days?"

"So soon?" Karl asked. If he'd known that the launch timetable was so close… but no, maybe it was better that Daliso hadn't told him. She'd obviously been prepared to do without the component if necessary, and a rush job would have been worse than nothing. So, rather than waiting for an answer, he nodded.

"Good," she said. "And when you have time, keep working. I'll continue your contract, and maybe we can have something better for the next object we find. There will be one, sometime between now and forever."

#​

It was six months before Karl heard from Daliso again. He'd gone to bargain for some antique computer parts, and the message was waiting when he returned to his stall: "meet me at home."

He had to unfold his datacloth to find where home was for her: they'd lived next door to each other when they were children on the Northrise, but he'd long since lost track of where she lived. The address that came up was in Mutanda, and an hour later, Karl joined the crowd of returning commuters waiting for the elevators at Mailo Tower.

Daliso had four rooms on level 122 with a panoramic window looking out at the mountains – space wasn't at a premium in Ndola and hadn't been for decades, so the rooms were spacious and comfortably furnished. All the same, they didn't stay long. "It's too nice an evening to stay inside," she said, not brooking dissent. "We'll go up to the garden."

Go up they did, to the highest of the High Gardens, set on a bridge eight hundred meters above the city. It was laid out formally in a style that suggested Asia, with acacias and imported flowers adding scent to the mild breeze. There were other scents too, and they followed one to a stall where they bought glasses of Riesling and skewers of beef; the beef didn’t come from a cow, but it was crafted, as carefully as any machine in the gear market, to taste like the meat that villagers might have cooked in the days of Kazembe's first kings.

They sat, looking down to the northern suburbs and the hills beyond, and Karl waited to learn Daliso's news. She would tell him in her own time, he knew, and after they had spoken of inconsequential things for a while, she did. "There was nothing," she said - she spoke lightly, but the disappointment was plain. "Nothing that even might have been alive, or else life so far beyond what we can imagine that it might as well not be."

"It was always a small chance…"

"It was. And the next time, we'll know more."

"Next time," Karl repeated. "But this time…" He reached into his pockets and cast a double handful of the metal fireflies into the air, and then two more handfuls after that. They glowed and swarmed, forming an image of the object from beyond the sun, flashing with patterns that Luchyele and Lesa had thought might carry the codes for life. One pattern followed another, creatures growing and changing and evolving into forms beyond fantasy. They stood – Daliso smiling like a child now – and the swarm encircled them, and they remained until the lights faded and it disappeared into the unknown.
________

[1] See post 6033.

[2] See post 4746.

Art: Julie Dillon, The Future of Human Aging (2014)

 

[Jonathan Edelstein]

The biodesigner from Ilorin was out of central casting. A hundred and eighty centimeters, plain and tall as an iroko with eyes the color of its bark and deep as its roots. Silk tunic, trousers and gele in indigo neo-adire, sandals that changed shape with the ground, datacloth flowing across the shoulders and tied loosely near the waist. She could have been in a movie, except for one thing – she was old.

You never see an old person from Ilorin in the films. No producer would admit to believing that they’ve really cracked the code for eternal youth, but maybe in their heart of hearts they do, or maybe they think the rest of us do. And maybe they’re not wrong.

Granted, there are reasons. They do a lot more gene editing in Ilorin than is legal in most of the States, and their modifications include some of the traits that make aging more visible. Their bodies are also even more full of nannies than ours are, and some of theirs are custom-made microorganisms rather than machines. But they die at a hundred or a hundred and ten like the rest of us – their record is 125, but so is ours – and even now some of them show their age more than others. And the woman standing before me now was old – if you looked at her face, you knew it, and if you looked at her eyes, you were sure.

But I couldn’t look too long – I had a job to do, even if it was the kind of job that’s given to the newest person on the project when he really needs to be doing something else. “Welcome to Tanana, Senhora…”

“Amina,” she said. There wasn’t any trace of age in her voice. “Amina bint Laila bint Asma’u Abacar. And I’ve been here before. This has been one of my projects for seventy-five years.”

Damn it, Raven, you could have told me. Yes, now I knew who I’d been sent to greet – one of the directors-general of the Consistory Environmental Section, lords and masters of a tenth of the world’s GDP and more jobs like this one than could be counted. And this had been one of her personal proposals in another life, a project she’d designed and had a hand in since before my parents were born.

All the gene-edits and nannies in the world hadn’t managed to cure embarrassment, and I wasn’t sure which was worse, the embarrassment itself or the realization that I’d been set up for it. Somewhere, my boss was enjoying this far more than he had any right to do.

“I’m sorry…”

Amina held up a hand. “No need. I know Dimitri. You're one of his lesser victims."

"Dimitri" puzzled me for a moment until I remembered it was the name Raven used when he had to be official about things. The sense of recognition lasted for a moment and then brought me up short again. Raven was local, from one of the narodnik settlements on the Kenai Peninsula. Those towns are as traditional as it gets, and folk culture is one of their cherished constants, but Raven wasn't Mitya or Dima or any of the other things you'd expect him to be called. I'd never thought about it before, but there was probably a story to that.

Right now, though, I was standing at the front gate with someone who it wouldn't do to keep waiting. "This way," I said, although I'm sure she knew, and we walked to where the new designs were waiting.

#​

The project began two thousand meters under the sea, in the cold methane seeps that we began to explore early in the last century. Down there, methane-oxidizing archaea and sulfate-reducing bacteria enacted a two-step symbiosis; the archaea ingested methane and excreted sulfates, and the bacteria broke the sulfates down into bicarbonate, bisulfide and water. Someone figured out how much methane would bubble to the surface if not for those microorganisms, and at a time when climate change was still a new priority, those figures were noticed.

If microbes could break down hydrocarbons under the sea, why not here in the Arctic, where the warming permafrost was a crisis in waiting? The lakes here are the weak point – the existing methanotrophs are efficient enough to oxidize almost all the methane that comes to the surface through the soil, but much less so in the anoxic lake sediments – so anaerobic water-living symbionts could be just what we needed. We couldn’t just use the ones we found on the ocean floor – the seasonal temperature changes would kill them – but we could use them as a template and design our own. Or, should I say, Amina could.

The microorganisms she built were the first ones ever synthesized rather than edited. There was some cheating involved – she did some of her building from parts, and a passing Methylobacter might recognize pieces of its DNA – but what in this world is truly original, whether in science or in art? It had been a labor of fifteen years with many trials and many errors, but at the end they’d lived: two symbionts that could bury themselves in the lake bottoms and ensure that the methane seeps never made it to the air. They’d performed well in quarantined tests… and for sixty years, they’d stayed in quarantine.

“We can make them mutation-averse, but we can’t make them mutation-proof on the time scales we need them to be,” Raven had told me when I first came here – it was nothing I hadn’t heard before, but there was a briefing that he had to give and I had to get. “And we can’t guarantee that they won’t crowd out existing bacteria or show up in the water supply. It doesn’t matter how many simulations we run – they won’t let them out of the cage until we can say that they won’t spread out of control or start releasing poisons a hundred years from now.”

He didn’t name the first they in that sentence, but his voice made plain who he meant: the same people who thought that Ilorin had discovered the fountain of youth. It hadn’t been the right time to tell him that I still had enough of my parents in me to share those concerns. Once a creation was loose in the world, it was beyond its creator’s control: the story, and the fear, were as old as the ancient Prometheus or Mary Shelley’s modern one. Let the methane-eaters remain safe in the lab until we knew they would be safe outside it.

Making them safe had been the work of the past six decades – it had been some of my earliest work at William and Mary and then at Potosí. The microbes had been taken apart and put together again, rebuilt to be three-step symbionts with other microorganisms that lived only in Arctic freshwater, redesigned with built-in environmental limits. Other advances had come from that work, and some of them were now living in the deep permafrost under the protection of hundreds of meters of earth. But none of its products were safe enough for the lake bottoms – or maybe none were safe enough until today.

We were gathered in the main presentation room – Raven, Amina, the others on the team, myself – with the lights dimmed and the ceiling datacloth inert. Raven stepped back and motioned me to stand apart, and with a word – “David” – he signaled me to begin.

For a moment, I had no words to answer him, and the embarrassment I’d felt at the gate came back redoubled. Raven began to frown, but he was cut off by Amina’s smile.

“I also had a boss once who thought the youngest one should speak for the team,” she said, “and I know how much of the work is yours. Come, show me.”

And I did. I moved my fingers and the datacloth came to life – I’d always been much easier with sign-controls than with voice – and with another motion, a schematic of a microorganism filled the center of the room. I focused on a particular part of it, and as the scale grew smaller and the symbol- and color-coding more refined, I heard Amina draw in her breath.

I’d done so too – in fact I’d done so two times, once when Dr. Yadav at William and Mary had introduced me to the idea, and once when I first realized it was practical. But I’d thought a biodesigner from Ilorin, one step from the fair folk, would be immune. But she wasn’t. She was staring at the single knotted hexagonal lattice-tube where a double helix should be.

“As you can see, we’ve developed another molecular chain to hold the genome,” I said. “It doesn’t code as efficiently as DNA, but it’s good enough for prokaryotes, and it doesn’t vary between individuals – every microorganism that descends from this model would be identical. Without DNA, they can’t become parasites. And we’ve keyed each model to the environment of a specific lake bottom, and outside that environment, the bonds dissolve and the microbe dies.

“I can show you…” I began, but Amina stepped in herself, fingers moving too quickly for me to follow as she focused on structures and bonds and examined embedded codes with the eye of someone who had been studying them for ninety years. I could see minute by minute how they were becoming familiar to her, how she found what she was looking for more quickly and precisely, how the codes became a story to her, albeit one written in a new medium. But something in her eyes didn’t change.

#​

“Living things, but not part of a common nature,” Amina said. We’d gone down to a gravel bank by the river and found a fallen tree to sit on; it was late in the day, but at this time of year there was never really any darkness. “Symbiosis, but no sharing.”

She didn’t say more than that, but she didn’t need to – like any apprentice biodesigner, I’d been steeped in Belloist bioethics since before the university. The filmmakers might portray people from Ilorin nearly as fair folk, but they didn’t keep secrets like the land of faerie did – their principles were stated and the debates in their ulemas, legislatures and academic councils were laid bare for all to see. Chief among them was that nothing should be made, or changed so much, that it was no longer part of a single community. They would make no genes that could not be shared – a rule that more than one Malê student at Potosí had cited to me as proof that genetic modification bans were futile. “Banning gene-edits is like banning the wind – they’ll come to your country in the second generation even if you don’t let them in the first.”

What I didn’t say then, and what I wasn’t sure I should say now, was that not everyone would be part of that second generation. No one knew that better than I did – I’d grown up in a sapientist family, and I’d seen the negotiations and exchanges of genetic profiles that my brother and then my sister had done before they married. They would consider Amina an allohuman – a person, a child of God to be honored like all His other children, but no longer a member of the same species, and not to be married lest one’s own children lose the attributes unique to humanity.

Sapientists were a minority in America but an influential one in several states. They’d headed up the campaigns to restrict genetic editing – I remember the “One Humanity” sign my parents had given me to hold, at a demonstration in Columbus when I was a child – and they were part of the reason why our symbionts had been held in the lab so long. And the same thing that made Amina unsure of our new design would be what made them comfortable.

“If they can think of our microbes as biological tools,” I said at last, “something separate from nature and incapable of joining it, then they won’t think of them as a threat to it.”

Amina nodded. She’d no doubt been thinking along the same lines; she may have started as a researcher, but as she rose through the Consistory ranks, she had to become a politician, and she was used to dealing with others’ fears.

“Of course they share,” said Raven. He was a politician too, a project head, and he was speaking to Amina, but he was also using the voice he used to persuade himself – formal, almost stilted, as if he were making a presentation for his own ears. “They don’t have to share genes to share community. The way they live will make the world a better home for all life.”

“That’s the narodnik in you,” Amina answered. “But the microbes break continuity – the narodnik in you doesn’t mind that?”

“The narodnik in me does,” Raven admitted – his parents had been as strong in their beliefs as mine, and they’d raised him to believe that humanity, life, the world were an organism to be nurtured from past to future. “But the Dena’ina in me…”

Raven. I remembered the stories I’d heard when I’d gone down to Valdez for a long weekend – Raven the creator, but also the trickster and the changer, the transformer who would change animals and things and cultures and sometimes himself. And the man who’d been baptized Dimitri Kurin called himself Raven, not Dima or Mitya.

“They will live their fullest,” he said, “and they will help us live ours, because we made them to.”

It was funny, I thought, how Raven and my parents might come to accept our microbes from opposite directions, and I could see that Amina, too, was tempted. She was silent, but she was thinking of what else she might design. If there could be two kinds of genetic coding, there could be many – we might build creatures to live in environments where we never could, or to live in our bodies and do things that were beyond the bionannies we had now. The Malê hadn’t unlocked the fountain of youth, but that didn’t mean they didn’t yearn for it.

“It’s a good thing we won’t have to decide today,” she said at last. “And a good thing it won’t only be our decision.” I nodded my agreement and, after a moment, so did Raven; if we were going to create not only new life but a new kind of life, then no one faith, no one philosophy could give us the answer. We would all have to decide what community meant.

Our symbionts had been seventy-five years in the making; maybe it would be another seventy-five before they lived free in the lake bottoms. Maybe they never would. They were potential life now. But I’d also been potential life once.

Amina stood, plain and tall as an iroko, and turned back toward the gate. I knew where she was going and I followed. There was a universe that might come alive someday, and we both wanted to see the futures where it multiplied.

 

[Jonathan Edelstein]

The village was on the north side of the canal: thirty adobe houses with patterned tile roofs, storage sheds and barns, low stone walls marking off the alpacas’ enclosure, gardens planted around stands of alder trees. At first glance it appeared timeless. A traveler from two hundred years in the past might have been startled by the canal and the alder groves, but would otherwise have recognized it as one of a thousand poor altiplano settlements.

Carmen Yarhui, who’d grown up in a village like this, knew it wasn’t. She knew well that the plumbing and electrical fixtures inside the walls were as modern as any in El Alto or La Paz, that the furnishings and household goods came from the four corners of the world, that the livestock and crops were the product of a hundred and thirty years of genetic modification. The alpacas’ wool was as soft and warm as qiviut and had brought wealth to villages like this one, and the harvest yields were three and four times what the time traveler would have expected.

The two people waiting outside the gathering hall were proof of that if anything was. Carmen had met them both before: Nayra Sánchez, the headwoman of the ayllu that managed this village, and Inti Aguado, the mallku of the next settlement north. They were both prosperous-looking, and Nayra was decidedly non-traditional; her jeans and Aran sweater contrasted with Inti’s pegged trousers and vicuña scarf. More to the point, both of them were surrounded by images from the datacloths tied at their waists, comparing crop prices and discussing new quinoa mods while they waited for Carmen to arrive and start the main event.

“Come in with us,” Nayra said when Carmen got out of the fi. She didn’t waste time with preliminaries; those would take place in the community hall where both ayllus were assembled. It would be she and Inti who would agree – or disagree – with whatever mediation Carmen offered, but proceedings like this were done in everyone’s sight.

The hall was a few steps away, and most of adults from both villages were indeed inside. They left off their conversations at Carmen’s entrance and kept a respectful silence as their two mallkus crossed to a pitcher of chicha at the far side of the room. Nayra and Inti raised the pitcher together and poured three libations – one to Pachamama, one to the huacas of the two ayllus, and one to Jesus Christ – and passed the rest around; only when all had partaken did they activate the large datacloth on the floor.

The dispute was easily explained. “The forest by the Challpa reservoir has doubled in the last ten years,” Nayra began, and the datacloth became a map that showed the old and new forest boundaries. That was no surprise; the treeline had risen seven hundred meters in the past century, and pioneering trees moved closer to it every year. “Our herds grazed there…”

“And now they graze here,” Inti said, pointing to a stretch of pastureland north of the traditional boundary. “They’re mixing with our herds, pushing them north, and they’re interfering with the vicuñas’ route to the watering hole.”

“We’ve offered compensation…” Nayra began, but Carmen held up a hand; in the five years she’d worked for the Audiencia del Altiplano, she’d seen many disputes like this one. She asked a few more questions, plotted the answers on the map, clarified some points, drew a line of her own.

“Let’s try it this way,” she said. “Both ayllus will have joint rights to the forest – say, seventy percent for this village and thirty for yours.” Inti and Nayra both nodded, although Carmen could see that they would quarrel over the percentages; the alders that were populating the altiplano had been engineered to have oil-bearing seeds and every village had equipment for distilling salicin from the bark, so forestry rights were something of value. “This land” – she drew another circle – “will be available to both for grazing, with the ayllus jointly responsible for maintaining the canals. We’ll leave a migration path for the vicuñas here, and you’ll share the shearing rights – let’s say seventy-thirty the other way.”

Carmen was right – the two mallkus did argue percentages, and Inti wanted the joint pastureland increased to compensate for the expanded wetlands that left less room for his village’s herds. Every concession came with a price and the bargaining was sharp, but it was clear from the outset that both villages accepted the general framework; indeed, Carmen got the strong feeling that her solution was much like what they’d have come up with themselves.

This isn’t their first mediation either, she recognized, and I’m sure they had a good idea what I’d bring to the table. Still, she knew that her part was important. If the solution came from her – if it were a judicial order – it would have the force of customary law, and even more importantly, neither ayllu could gloat about getting the better of the other. They both had to live together, and the resentments caused by bad bargains could last generations.

This way, if it goes wrong, they can blame me. But for the moment, it seemed that both sides were satisfied; after a few more rounds of discussion regarding water rights and future forest management, the agreement was sealed, and the datacloth registered the successful mediation with the database in El Alto. The maintenance machines and agricultural credit balances would start reflecting the deal immediately.

The ayllus adjourned to the feast that had been prepared outside – another sign that they’d anticipated that the mediation would succeed – and Nayra carved a portion of vat-lamb for Carmen to go with the chicha and the spiced quinoa mush that they'd made into a couscous with imported vegetables. From the number of chicha barrels that had been brought out, Carmen guessed the celebration would last the rest of the day. They let her excuse herself after twenty minutes, but she was still glad the fi drove itself.

#​

It was a short ride to Municipal Airstrip One, where a nine-seater plane was waiting to take her on the next stage of her journey. The pilot climbed steeply and banked north at six thousand meters; the day was clear and the altiplano was laid out below them.

Carmen would never get tired of this view. She liked seeing everything at once, everything together; the villages and towns, the migrating herds, the expanding forests, the lakes and marshes teeming with bird life, the high plains crisscrossed with thousands of canals and reservoirs that joined with the natural river systems. The view was also a reminder of why the canals were necessary. The snow line, like the tree line, was hundreds of meters higher than it had once been, and the glaciers were noticeably smaller than they’d been even when Carmen was a child, let alone a century ago. The altiplano had warmed more than the lowlands and rainfall had increased, but without the glaciers to regulate the rate at which water was released, its people had to use artificial means to prevent erosion and protect the wetlands. A hundred years ago, the ayllus had begun reviving the pre-Inca system of canals and catchments; since then, they had expanded many times over and were the lifeblood of the lagoons and terraced farms.

It was all part of the Audiencia’s remit now, and had been for the past sixty years – the Consistory, the Andean Community, the Bolivian and Peruvian governments, and the council of ayllus all had a hand in it. The wetlands had recovered, the growing alder forests added nitrogen to the soil, and these days, the altiplano could almost be called lush in places, but it was a lushness that had to be maintained. The highlands now were a carefully tended garden.

The thought carried Carmen all the way to a bumpy landing at the Puno provincial airfield and the ride through town to the Inca Uyo site. The waters of Lake Titicaca were lapping at the town; some of the streets nearest to the docks had already been sealed and converted to canals, and more were in the process. Temperatures had been stable for forty years but the increase in rainfall was permanent, and the port towns were either relocating or adapting.

Others were making the same choice, which explained why Carmen was here this afternoon.

“You can see the retaining walls,” said Marco Chávez, the superintendent of the Inca Uyo archaeological preserve. Carmen had a moment’s difficulty following his words; on the Peruvian side, people spoke traditional southern Quechua rather than the Quechumara creole that was common in highland Bolivia. “It’s not going to be enough. The soil underneath is being undermined, and unless we can raise the site, we’ll have to move it or else leave it behind.”

Carmen nodded. This too was far from a unique problem. More than one archaeological site on Lake Titicaca’s shores was now an artificially-elevated island, and more than one had been moved inland. Inca Uyo was a small site, a low wall surrounding a field of mushroom-shaped standing stones, but the ground it was on would be difficult to raise, and doing so might damage the more fragile structures, not to mention whatever was still underground. Moving the site inland one stone at a time would be safer and would allow time for exploration of the foundations, but the budgeting and approval process would have to start soon…

“What do the people here prefer?” she asked when she was done with her inspection.

“They’re of two minds. Some of them are all for moving it. Others don’t want it disturbed – they’d rather let the lake take it over than relocate it.”

That wasn’t unique either; in fact, it wasn’t even new. Titicaca’s water level had changed before, and there were prehistoric sites that had been underwater for centuries. People had found ways of studying them, and no doubt, people would still come to Inca Uyo even if the lake drowned it. But…

“And there’s another thing,” Marco continued. “The people who don’t want the site moved – most of them are with the tavarista party.”

Ah, thought Carmen, it will be political. But at the end of the day, everything was. Marco had been right to bring her here now; there would have to be a referendum before the Audiencia could ratify a site plan and appropriate a budget, and that meant there was even less time to get things started.

“Are they around – can I meet with them today?” she asked.

Marco nodded and motioned toward a back street. “They’ll be at the coffeehouse this time of day – nobody goes back to work until three. The Audiencia is buying the coffee, I assume?”

“Of course.” No doubt both factions would be sharing the early-afternoon break, and Carmen could take their temperature before making recommendations to the Audiencia about the alternative plans to be put forward, which local boards would be involved in planning, and how many surrounding districts would participate in the voting. No one would mind if she bought a few rounds of coffee in exchange for that; the cost wouldn’t even be a rounding error by the time all was said and done.

#​

All roads on the altiplano led to El Alto sooner or later, and Carmen’s plane made its approach to the airport at seven o’clock. Darkness was gathering and the city was alight from the airfield all the way to the cliffs that led down to the Choqueyapu valley and La Paz.

Carmen had lived in El Alto for a decade, since her first year at the university, and still didn’t feel entirely at home there. The city was on the altiplano but not completely of it. The houses and public buildings might be painted in bright Aymara colors with windows and brickwork in patterns that suggested birds or ancient gods; the neighborhoods might be arranged around communal gardens; but it was a city of a million, not an ayllu or even a collection of them. It was the capital of the altiplano region and the home of the Audiencia’s offices, but it had the impersonality of a large town. No one met Carmen at the airport, no one guided her through the swirling hurried crowds, and she rode the rest of the way to her office alone.

She didn’t plan to stay long. She made a few entries in the database to update her reports, and looked to see if any matters had been called to her attention for the following day. Finding none, she called up a schematic of the region to see if any problems had reported themselves.

The map that glowed above her desk datacloth was the counterpart of the view from the plane; it showed the pipes and drains, the salinity and erosion monitors, the maintenance devices that kept the land the way it was. These were the unseen gardeners laid down over the course of six decades, and there were more of them every year – Carmen had placed some of them herself.

It looked like she might have to recommend some more. There were drainage problems west of Oruro, which were minor now but would do damage if they weren’t controlled. There were also a couple of alarms above the snowline where the water catchments had become insufficient. Carmen noted them, routed a report to the construction department, and sent another to budgeting.

That finished her work, and she realized that she was hungry and that she ought to find some dinner at her neighborhood cookhouse, but another part of her wasn’t quite ready to end the day. She dimmed the lights in the office and looked deep into the schematic, letting her eyes follow the patterns in the map. If she looked long enough, she’d learned, she would forget what those patterns represented, and they would become a work of art, a beauty of the garden that could only be seen this way.

At school in the village and later at the university, Carmen had learned of the other gardens, all the regions where the ecosystem had become a project of generations. She wondered if anyone right now might be looking at their region the same way she was at hers, tracing the garden paths that lay unseen below the earth. She realized she would never know, but the thought was somehow comforting.

It was time to go home, but she would stay in her garden a few minutes more.

 

[Jonathan Edelstein]

The fast ferry took me from Auki to Morobe Harbor, and there was a train that went as far as Mount Hagen. I had to take a cargo airship the rest of the way, and looking down from the passenger cabin, I could see why.

The earth here looked like it had been folded – plunging valleys and knife-edge mountains, fast streams and jungles that it didn’t make sense to build roads through even now. Sometimes I could see old airstrips that the forest hadn't entirely reclaimed, but no one could build enough airfields for every tribe that needed one, and they weren't much use for cargo service. Better to use the airships – all they needed was a mooring post, and no one here was in a hurry.

I'd been told the trip would take eight hours, but it was longer than that – there was an unscheduled stop to deliver a shipment of seed editors and another for a medical airlift. While they were hooking the stretcher up to the hoist and getting the medical compartment ready, I climbed out onto the top of the cabin and looked over the village. And what a village it was. The highlanders didn’t hide their modern amenities behind traditional designs like we did at home. They built fantasias – houses with white roofs twisted like leaves, wooden false walls behind glass, designs that looked like growing things and were as elaborate as their mining and bioprospecting royalties would allow. Every village I’d passed was like that – each outdoing the other, and each somehow fitting with its carved ancestral poles and thatched meetinghouse.

I wondered, as the airship lifted off again, what the city would be like – a fantasy of fantasies? A part of the landscape as natural as the forests and mountains? It was all those things, but I didn’t expect it to be a fortress.

It was near dusk when the airship landed, and the city wall glowed red – a wall built for defense, even though the city was less than a hundred and fifty years old. Much of the city was now outside it – there were far more people living here now than the wall could hold, and houses and gardens had grown around it like vines – but the gate was still guarded, and the shields that the highland tribes had donated to Akmat Ipatas as tribute still hung below its battlements.

Bandar Damai, the city was called – city of peace, in the Malay creole that was the highland traders' tongue – but evidently peace was something it had had to fight for.

The thought carried me from the mooring field to the queue at the gate and to the guard, face spotted with white paint, who took my documents. "Your name?" he asked.

"Tautai," I answered, although my passport would have told him just as quickly.

"Last name?"

"I only have the one." The biggest town on Malaita had ten thousand people, and we'd never needed family names to tell each other apart.

"But here you need two," the guard said. "We'd lose you else. Do what the tribesmen do when they come in – just pick one. You can put it down again when you leave."

I struggled to follow his words – the creole was mostly Malay, but it had some German, a hint of Dutch, and borrowings from the trading peoples of the highlands. I could speak German and Malay, but both at once were another story, and the other parts of the language were entirely foreign. Still, his meaning was clear.

"Tautai… Tuan," I said.

The guard laughed, a laugh that came from somewhere between the belly and the heart. "You've got big plans for yourself, have you?"

"I hope so."

"Big plans," he said again. "Very well, Lord Tautai – whatever you're looking for in Bandar Damai, I hope you find it."

#​

I needed to find a room, but the city found me first and I had no choice but to surrender. The neighborhood immediately inside the wall – cream-colored houses with smooth curves and the sheen of ceramic – gave way to the center city and the panoply of humanity.

I was far from the only foreigner – Bandar Damai drew seekers like a magnet, whether from the next valley or the other side of the world. Many were young, stopping for a while during their Wanderjahre. Others were looking for designer drugs or – not always unrelatedly – spiritual experiences that could be found only here. There were wildcat miners in from the mountainsides, apprentice bioprospectors, musicians looking for influences – and those who dreamed of making a killing at the one bioexchange that the Consistory didn't manage. A few wanted to test the very bounds of being human.

I was a seeker myself, come to that, though I still wasn’t sure quite how far I wanted to go.

The stream of people seemed to be going somewhere, and I followed it into an octagonal square with a park and reflecting pool at the center, a twenty-meter hardwood mantis standing above the pool, and eight public buildings at its sides. They seemed familiar for a moment in a way I couldn't place, and then I did place it – they were shaped like the village meetinghouses with steep peaked roofs and wooden facings. But they were higher in front than in back, the walls were concrete and the roofs were tile, and while the paintings on the wood panels facing the square were done in traditional style, their subject matter was decidedly modern.

I circled the square, looking for the building whose facing was painted with a stylized double helix, and suddenly there it was. I stood amid the people coming in and out, even at this hour, and looked up past the panel and the roof to the evening’s first stars. Maybe what was inside would take me there.

I stood there until the spell broke and went looking for a meal. I didn’t have to look far; in a place just off the square, I found a table by the back wall, a plate of mumu, and a bottle of beer. I didn’t have to look much farther to see that I was one of the only people there with food on his table. Some were drawing on hookahs or sharing a betel nut; others sought more exotic disengagements from the world. I saw a waiter lean down and whisper to one of them, and then take a cheek swab and carry it through the kitchen door.

I’d heard of this, and when I looked again at the menu, I knew the stories hadn’t been lies. After the list of food and drink was a list of sensations – name what you wanted to feel, and a drug tailored to your DNA would be brought to your table. I motioned to the waiter, but at the last second I hesitated; I wasn’t sure what I wanted to feel right now, so I settled for some flavored kif instead.

I sat and I smoked and I dreamed. The Starwind Symphony was playing in the background, one of the more otherworldly Bazembe compositions of the last century, but my dreams were more inner than outer space: biological treasures hidden in the forests, microbes to put to use, medicines to be distilled at the touch of a gene. I dreamed of things undiscovered, things that could be my gift to my village, things that could make me Tautai Tuan in truth.

There were no lords in Malaita, but the guard had misunderstood, or maybe I’d misspoken – what I’d meant to say was “captain.”

Once, in Hui’ehu’s time and after, Malaita and its federate islands were ruled by their captains – the men, and soon enough the women, who commanded others’ loyalty and respect and were raised to office by their followers’ acclamation. That wasn’t the case any longer – referenda and the council-of-councils now did most of what the captains would have done a hundred years ago – but captains were still respected, and the captains still chose the admiral. And I wanted to be admiral one day.

Therein was the problem. Before captains were called captains, they were called Big Men, and Big Men showed that they were big by giving things away. But what was there to give away now that everyone was rich? A person couldn’t become a captain now by giving a house or a bride-price or a tractor; no one needed captains for those things anymore, which was why the council-of-councils had taken much of their power. Knowledge could be a gift, but the standard for that was also much higher than it used to be – once, a person could become a captain by going to Australasia and coming home with a degree, but now Malaita had universities of its own, and I was only one of many who had graduated from them. If I were to bring home a gift of learning, it would have to be a treasure.

I listened and I smoked and I dreamed of treasures here.

#​

In the morning I went looking for some. I didn’t go to the bioexchange itself – I couldn’t begin to do the kind of trades that were done there. The people with seats on the exchange were tribal agents, representatives of governments and universities, pharmaceutical and agricultural collectives – people who had billions to spend. My destination was the streets and stalls in back of the exchange, the domain of the brokers and expediters who took the rights that were traded in the big building and broke them down into sub-licenses and shares.

The one I found was named Kere, a highlander born and raised from the look of her, and now the occupant of a small second-story office three blocks from the square. She smiled much as the guard had when I told her the second name I’d chosen; she didn’t tell me hers.

“Buying or selling?” she asked after I’d done the credit transfer for an hour of her time.

“Buying. I hope.”

“Microbe shares? Sales territory? Experimental license?”

I shook my head. “Information, if you have it. I want to know what’s being prepared for offering on the exchange – what isn’t being offered yet.”

She looked suddenly wary. “A poacher?”

“No, no.”

“A prospector? You want to go into the country and negotiate with the tribe directly – get a piece of the harvest?”

“No, not a prospector.” Even for someone like me who had a botany and mycology degree, a bioprospector’s license required five years of education – you had to learn not only what to look for but how to search for it in ways that didn’t harm anything else. “But yes, I want to talk to the customary owners about development rights. An experimental license directly from them, limited to the Malaita Confederacy…”

Kere held up a hand. “You aren’t the first to have that idea. It’s more expensive than you think, and more dangerous. But let me see.” She made a pass over the datacloth on her table. “My intelligence file… these are the recently reported discoveries, if you want to look at them. And if you have the credit.”

I made another credit transfer, noting my diminished finances with alarm. She responded with a grand gesture of invitation. I accepted and spoke to the datacloth – I’d always preferred verbal commands to the hand signs – and images appeared. Microbes, molds, fungi, insect species with secretions of potential interest; I looked at the schematics for each and pulled up what had been reported about them. The information about most of them was dismayingly incomplete, and the schematics didn’t show anything that looked like something I could develop with my training… and then I saw it.

It was one of the fungi; there was more information about it than most of the new finds, and someone – the prospector who’d found it, or maybe the agent preparing it for offering – had done a computer simulation of one of its derivatives. I saw the formula for the derivative, and almost before I called up the simulation, I knew what it would show. We – the human “we” – had been dancing for decades around the edges of a drug that would facilitate the rerouting of neural pathways, something that could break the tyranny of habit and allow adults to learn as quickly as children. There were drugs and techniques that went partway. But if the simulation were even close to correct, this fungus could enable us to go much farther.

I’d need partners, of course. The time was long past when anyone could develop a drug alone; I’d need lab space, a source of supply, specialist employees, and all those things were expensive. But if I could buy the rights – if I had the experimental license for Malaita and if I were the one who incorporated the development company – these wouldn’t be impossible to get, not with that simulation to show the investors. That could be my gift, my treasure. But before that…

“Why isn’t this on sale already?” I asked. “There’s usually an offering plan by the time this much work has been done, isn’t there?”

“Often,” Kere answered. “But sometimes not. That one’s still a risky proposition, you know – there’s a simulation, but computers can’t really simulate the complexity of the human brain. The tribes sometimes look for multiple uses before they sell or wait until there’s better data. And with this fungus… ah, I see. There are two tribes fighting over the rights, and one of them wants more control than usual. Non-standard packages of rights take longer to prepare.”

“Aren’t the rights the same?” I’d read about the New Guinea exchange’s biological treasure-trove law before I left home – that’s how I knew that there were opportunities here that couldn’t be found in Belém or Kampala or Hyderabad – but maybe my research had been incomplete.

“That’s only mostly true,” said Kere. “When the tribes established the exchange, they did agree on what rights could be sold and how they’d be put up for sale, but customary owners have latitude over whether to sell all or some of the rights and how to administer the licenses. The tribe that’s developing this one… yes, they’re Yali, and the Yali like to keep a lot for themselves.” She smiled, and I was suddenly sure that she was Yali herself.

And if she was… “If I went there – went to the ones who registered first – do you have an idea what their price would be?”

“A mantis, are you?” I remembered the mantis statue in the square, and wondered what she meant by that. “Maybe I have heard something. Unofficially, of course.” She let the silence linger for a moment and named a price.

The price was entirely reasonable from the tribe’s point of view, especially given the early stage of development – if a discovery is still unproven and might not yield rich returns, it’s only natural for the owner to want more money up front in addition to royalties. But from my point of view, it was impossible. The savings I’d set aside for this, and the amount I could raise on short notice, weren’t nearly enough, and I suspected that there wasn’t much room to bargain.

I rose from the table, and I suspected that just as I wasn’t the first to come to Kere with this idea, I wasn’t the first to leave with dashed hopes. But if so, she didn’t show it. “When you find the money,” she said, and the when didn’t escape my notice, “come back, and I’ll make your deal.”

[to be continued]​

 

[Jonathan Edelstein]

Art: Clem Ritchie​

[Continued from post 7299]

#​

Kere's words were kindly meant, but they gave me no confidence. She'd told me to come back when I had the money, and that was the problem, wasn't it? If I went home and returned to my job with Auki municipal biocontrol, I'd have to work for a decade before I could meet the asking price, and by then, the chance would be long gone. And I couldn't think of any other way to raise that kind of money in a hurry – banks weren't gamblers, and a cooperative wouldn't be enough even if I brought in everyone I knew. Maybe I could go to Yali country and offer to work out the cost, but that was the gift problem all over again – what skills did I have that they would value so highly?

I went to other brokers. Maybe there were other, better-hidden treasures; maybe there were more conventional rights that I could afford to bring home. By the end of the day, I was sure there weren't. There were items that came cheaper, but none that showed even the promise of being a treasure I could share.

At twilight I wandered out of the brokers' district, through the back streets and the neighborhoods near the wall. I was in one of the more settled parts of the city, a district of highland merchant families that had come from their valleys a century ago, modest houses built around fire-pit courtyards. The street wound past the smell of roasting vat-pork and the sound of conversation and into a small square planted with palm trees and tropical gardens; around it were an Ahmadi mosque, a Buddhist temple, a meetinghouse and a metro station.

People were flowing into the meetinghouse, and a sign said that a bangsawan of Akmat Ipatas was about to begin. There were worse things I could do with the evening than learn the story of the city's founder, and so I followed them.

There were no seats inside, but someone had scattered cushions on the floor; nearly everyone knew each other, so they gathered the cushions in familiar piles and continued the conversations that had begun outside the door. I didn't have such a group to join, so I found myself next to the only other foreigner, who introduced himself as Sergio Almeida and bore the stamp of all Portugal's nations.

"I studied civil engineering at Luanda," he whispered, "and I'm on my Wanderjahre – a job here, a project there. I'm working with the water department here, and in my spare time…" But whatever he'd planned to say next was cut off as the bangsawan began.

It didn't go as I'd expected. The highlanders used the Malay word for plays about their great people, but among the Malays, a bangsawan was an opera. Here there were no words; the story was told entirely through dance and through the music of hollow bamboo pipes. And all the dancers were dressed as mantises.

The mantis had been a headhunting symbol once – that was plain from the dances that showed Ipatas' earlier years. When he led raids, the actors struck and struck, biting down at the images of prey insects that stood in as enemy warriors, and in the next scenes when Ipatas had become chief of his tribe, the insects' heads adorned the wall.

But then it changed. Ipatas stood in ceremonial dress and addressed the quarreling chiefs, persuading them with hands and arms that they must face the Germans in the lowlands together, and at the critical moment, as the beating on the bamboo pipes grew louder, his mantis-head struck and he seized the prize of unity. Then the background took the image of the German government house and Ipatas wore Western clothes, and when the diplomatic dance grew discordant and it looked like he might fail, he struck again and held aloft the prize of peace. And when he marked the truce-paths and laid the city's foundations, he struck and seized wisdom from the very clouds before taking on the tasks of rulership.

Finally he stood by himself, old, blind, making his last journey to the mountains. The music of the bamboo pipes grew soft, and for the first time, the players spoke: strike first, strike first, strike first…

Was that what Kere had meant, when she called me a mantis?

The chant and the music died away together, and both audience and players went to sit around the feast that was being laid. I hesitated to join them; I realized that this was a religious pageant for them, an act of ancestor-worship, and the feast afterward wasn't something an outsider should take part in lightly. Sergio must have seen my hesitation, because he took me by the arm and led me out to the square. "Let's go get some real food," he said, and, the bangsawan's spell broken, I went with him.

Real food proved to be a fish restaurant on the other side of the city – something that might once have been an expensive proposition in the highlands, but fish could be grown from a vat as easily as meat – with a menu that was part Goa, part Mozambique and part Lisbon. A waiter put bacalhau stew on one side of the table, nsima with fish sauce on the other and kingfish curry in between; Sergio poured the beer and talked about mining.

“There’s gold all over the place out there,” he said. “Ancient stream beds on every mountainside.” He laid a datacloth on the corner of the table that was empty of food, and an image sprang up: mountains and valleys, with broken red lines tracing their way down the slopes. “I bought some satellite time, did some remote imaging, you see? These are where the old streams are. I’ve marked the ones most likely to have gold, maybe platinum-group metals too – none of them are worth the mining companies’ time, but one person with some rented equipment? Give it a few months – when I get tired of the waterworks, I’m buying a permit and going out there. You should go too. There are plenty of streams to spare.”

I leaned over in spite of myself. The kind of money I could make by wildcat placer-mining would be pocket change to a big company, but if I got very lucky, it might be enough to lock up those development rights. I motioned to the datacloth – I did use hand signals this time, and almost spilled my beer – and another set of dotted lines overlaid the image; the approximate boundaries of the tribes' territories.

Almost at once, something jumped out at me. The darkest of the broken red lines, the ancient watercourse that Sergio's imaging algorithm had judged most promising, was owned by the same Yali tribe that was preparing the fungus for offer on the bioexchange. Strike first, I remembered, and surely, coincidence though this was, the map had to be telling me something…

"I'd be careful about that one," Sergio said. "That tribe and this one" – he pointed to the next territory down the valley – "are at war."

War. We of Malaita had been a warlike people once. Before Hui'ehu's time, villages and Big Men had fought each other, and even after, our trading ships could turn pirate at the drop of a hat. We'd raided the New Guinea lowlands and skirmished with Roviana, and the last exchange of fire between a Roviana ship and one of ours was less than seventy years ago. But war was nothing that my generation or my parents' had experienced.

"Kere told me they were fighting over the rights," I murmured, "but she didn't say she meant that literally."

Sergio nodded. "It's very formalized – people aren't often killed. But outsiders like us don't know the rules, and we don't know what treaties we might break just by being there. And there are stories… they say the warriors have changed themselves, that they're more than human." He shook his head clear. "I'm going to that other mountain – maybe the computer says point-seven-nine rather than point-eight-six, but I don’t want to get caught in the middle of a battle."

I ate some nsima, washed it down with a long pull of beer, and agreed. But those broken red lines stayed in my mind, and again I heard the choral chant, strike first.

#​

The airship that carried me out of Bandar Damai two days later was smaller than the one that had brought me, and it had only one other passenger, a tribesman returning to his home in the far west. It had a landing frame and didn't need a mooring post; it could drop me halfway up a mountain, and I'd hired it to make a detour from its route and do just that. My return passage plus the permit and the equipment rental had just about taken my remaining funds; the Yali sold mining permits cheaper than bioexchange rights, but cheap, in the highlands, was a relative term.

The airship followed one of the truce paths that Akmat Ipatas had decreed, and when I mentioned it to my fellow passenger, he told me why. "The air above the paths is truce ground too – if there's fighting, no one will attack us there." He gave me a sharp look. "You're going to war country, I hear. Mark where the truce path is, and if you get in trouble, run for it – once you're there, it's worth a banning to harm you."

It was late afternoon when I arrived and near nightfall by the time the unloading was done, and I made camp by a stream that ran two hundred meters from its ancient course. I lay awake that night, looking up at the stars and listening to the bird-calls. The next morning, I set to work.

The people who’d rented me the equipment had told me that once I set it up, the mining would be automatic, but I learned quickly that they’d lied. I had a machine for digging and drilling and another one for smelting, but I had to rig the sluice myself and run a channel from the stream to feed it. The work was hard at this altitude, in the cloud forest a thousand meters higher than Bandar Damai. It was three days before I was ready to begin mining; by then I was as exhausted as I’d ever been, and I knew that under the environmental plan I’d filed, I’d have to fill it all again and replant it before I left.

No doubt that was why I was alone here – the clerks at the mining office had told me that a few people went out each month, but I had this mountain to myself. There might have been a gold rush if Sergio had done his imaging two hundred years ago or even a hundred and twenty, but the world was too rich for that now. There were easier ways to make money than digging it out of the mountains, and maybe it only made sense to people who wanted to live alone or were looking for adventure – or to people like me, who were working on deadline.

Maybe it was even more than that – maybe wildcat mining only made sense to me because I came from a cargo-cult people. We were long past the beliefs that had built Hui’ehu an empire, but the cargo cults were still part of our civic ritual, and somewhere deep in our collective unconscious, the notion that wealth came to those who made the right motions was still there.

After a week of making those motions, I still hadn’t found the wealth. I’d dug up and down the streambed in the places that the algorithm recommended, but had found nothing other than dirt and stones. Sergio had said that there was an 86 percent chance to find gold here, but that meant there was a 14 percent chance of coming up empty, and at week’s end I was sure that would happen… but then, on the evening I was ready to give up, I struck gold.

The nuggets were three meters down, shining like stars of the underworld. Sergio had been right about the platinum-group metals too; they had a silvery tinge and assayed about three percent palladium. They followed a streambed that ran at a slight angle from the one Sergio had mapped – my best guess was that there was a layer underneath the one his imaging had found, but I didn’t really care. The ritual had worked; the cargo was arriving.

Through all this time, I’d looked for signs of war, but aside from a couple of drones overflying the camp, I’d seen none. I’d heard movement in the bushes at night, but when I crept out to check, the shapes that resolved in my infrared glasses were feral pigs, not warriors. I’d bought permits from both of the tribes that claimed this territory, and gold wasn’t what they were fighting over; I hoped that would be enough to stay out of the fighting.

Still, I felt safer after I flared down a passing airship and put the fruits of my labor into the purser’s hands; his commission for selling it in Bandar Damai was even more ruinous than the tribes’ royalties, but the money would be in the bank. I’d been in the mountains a month and was almost a third of the way to meeting the asking price; maybe Kere would have a fee to earn after all.

The attack came two days later.

It was a restless night – there had been many of those – and I’d given up on sleep. I left camp and wandered downstream toward a rocky outcropping where I would sometimes sit and look down to the valley. I doubted I’d see very far that night – the moon was new and a fog was settling on the cloud forest – but it was a good place to sit and think.

I was halfway there when I heard movement, many footsteps coming up the mountain. The sound was still distant, but when I put the night-vision glasses on, the shapes of the thermal signatures were unmistakably human. There were sixteen of them, moving purposefully and carrying weapons. A war party.

Run for the truce path, I remembered, but the nearest one was all the way down in the valley, and on a night as dark as this, that would be a good way to break my neck. Better to take cover where I was. There was a stand of bushes nearby and I dove into it and flattened; the ground was wet and chilly and drops of condensation fell on my head, but in the night and fog, and without infrared equipment, they’d never find me. I concentrated on keeping still and waited for them to pass.

The footsteps grew closer, and then they suddenly stopped. I raised my head as little as I could manage and saw them clustered ten meters away, gesturing and arguing. One of them pointed, and my heart stopped as I realized he was pointing directly at me. He broke from the group and marched unerringly to the edge of the bushes where I was, and the others followed.

I saw him raise a spear, and I saw something else: he had no infrared glasses. He’d seen me naturally. I remembered what Sergio had said about warriors who had changed themselves, and I remembered how I’d dismissed it at the time; those words sounded very different now.

“Nomin,” I said – friend, one of the few Yali words I’d learned. I got to my knees slowly, hands above my head to show I was unarmed, and then to my feet.

“Trespassers aren’t friends,” said the man who’d found me; he said it in Yali, and when he saw I didn’t understand, repeated it in the traders’ language.

“I have permits.”

“Maybe from those bugs over there” – he pointed – “or those forest grubs. But not from us.”

All at once I knew what must have happened. A third tribe had joined the war, maybe after finding the new fungus on its territory, and was showing its strength. And one way to show strength would be to wreck a mine that the other two tribes had permitted, and maybe to wreck the miner.

Outsiders don’t know the rules, Sergio had said, and we don’t know what treaties we might break just by being there. He’d left one thing out: outsiders didn’t know when they might become targets that no one would miss.

Someone called out a word that I didn’t understand, and the war-leader turned away from me for a moment and argued with him. I suspected I wouldn’t enjoy finding out what happened once that argument was finished. I would have to break past them; they looked fit and strong, but I was taller and faster, and that way I’d at least have a chance to make it to the truce path. I tensed, made ready to run…

And there was shouting and crashing through the underbrush, there was whistling of spears, there were ash-covered warriors in the fog, there was consternation as the war party turned to face a new enemy. I didn’t know who’d joined the fight – whether the new arrivals came from one of the tribes I’d bought mining permits from or whether they were yet a fourth faction – but this was my chance. I ran at the nearest of the war party. He thrust his spear at me but I dodged past it, seized the shaft with both hands, and slammed the blunt end into his stomach. He was strong, very strong, but he hadn’t expected me to put up a fight, and I dashed past him as he recovered his wind.

I was face to face with the war-leader now. He’d knocked down one of the new warriors, and he was flush with triumph and battle-rage. He shouted and lunged, and I knew I couldn’t outfight him if I met him on his terms. Strike first flashed through my mind, and I remembered the wrestling I’d done as a child; I ducked under his blow and threw myself at his feet, pulling back to take his legs out from under him. He kicked out and I felt a sharp pain. I pulled again and fell heavily beside me. I looked for an escape; then something hit the back of my head and I knew no more.

#​

I woke in a house. The house was a single room ten meters square, with glass walls and a glass skylight occupying most of the ceiling. There were beds, although mine was the only one occupied at the moment; there were cabinets of medical supplies, the kind of diagnostic machines typical of a doctor’s office in Malaita, and behind a patterned curtain, an operating theater. There was also a woman, perched on a stool and looking down at me.

She was about sixty, wearing medical scrubs, short like most of the Yali but giving an appearance of compact strength. Her eyes were keen; I remembered the warriors who’d found me in the darkness and wondered what those eyes could see.

“Back among us, are you?” She gave me a crooked smile. “You had a bad concussion and a glorious bump on your head, and you broke a few ribs, but you’ll get better. I checked your nannies, and they’re well along the way to healing you – your nannies are as good as ours, and ours are used to patching people up after wars.”

At that moment, my head and chest didn’t feel like they were well on the way to healing, but I thanked her.

“Ninim ar,” she said. “You, Tautai, are very welcome.”

I felt a flash of surprise that the doctor knew my name, but I shouldn’t have. The mining office would have given the tribe my name when they sold me the permit – and, seeing my surprise before I could hide it, she added, “you’re the one Kere told us about.”

“But I lack courtesy – and to a man who made himself one of our warriors, too.” Her voice betrayed a touch of irony and more than a touch of amusement, but there was also something more. “I am Tayi, and you are our guest for as long as you want to be.”

I didn’t want to be anyone’s guest. I wanted to be back at my mining camp. But neither my current state of repair nor the now-three-cornered war would allow for that. I took the bowl of soup that Tayi offered and looked out at the fantasia houses, the gardens, the children at play and their parents on errands.

Soon enough – sooner than I should have – I went out to join them. I wasn’t up to working yet, but I could sit with the elders in the doorway of the meetinghouse and share their betel nut and conversation. They spoke the traders’ speech well, but it pleased them to teach me Yali. It pleased them, too, to tell stories – sometimes lies about their youth, but more often tales of the ancestors who’d made the land, tamed the beasts and fought great battles. “Nothing like the pillow-fights the young ones have today. It’s so easy for them, with all they’ve been changed…”

A while later, I was well enough to work. The old man who tended the thermal-depolymerization plant enlisted me to bring his charcoal to the composting machines that the tribe used to make terra preta. One of the elder women, the chief forester, took me to the white oak grove whose genes she’d spent a lifetime modifying, and showed me the chemical baths and pressure cooker that would make their wood as strong as steel.

Tayi caught me while I was unloading the cooker and scolded me like a wayward child.

“If you won’t rest, at least do something that won’t break your ribs again. Come with me. You can be schoolteacher for a day. The children have never met anyone from Malaita, so tell them – keep them and you out of trouble.”

And I did tell them – about our history, our customs, our ships, our plants and fungi and microbes. Tayi had come back by that time, and I noticed that she listened with real interest.

“Kere was right – you do know some things,” she said. “She said you were looking for treasure. Do you want to see more? There are more spirits in the forest than our ancestors ever dreamed.”

“And in your warriors?”

“Our warriors, all our children – we make them strong and keen. You don’t?”

“We do, but…” A thousand lectures from my bioethics classes came rushing to mind. “We respect human limits.”

Tayi laughed. “What are human limits? Didn’t you hear the old men talking? The ancestors who made the land – what were their limits?”

I wondered what my bioethics professors would have made of that, but Tayi’s voice rang with sincerity, and I realized that Sergio had gotten his stories slightly wrong. The highlanders weren’t making themselves more than human; they just had a more fluid idea of what humanity was. And if the fungus Kere had shown me lived up to its promise, if adults could be made capable of learning like children, how much would our idea of humanity have to change?

“I’ll show you things tomorrow,” she said. “Tonight – tonight they’re coming to talk peace.”

“Peace?”

“What else? We’ve tested our strength enough, we’ve had time to frame the dispute, and the battle at your camp made everyone realize things had gone far enough.” The laughter was back in her voice. “Not only a warrior but a peacemaker, you are.”

And as a peacemaker, I was bidden to the feast. The speeches before the meal marked the opening of formal talks, but it was obvious that behind-the-scenes negotiations had been taking place throughout the war, and indeed that the third of the Yali tribes had been talking even before it joined the fighting. Outsiders don’t know the rules, Sergio had said, and I wondered if that tribe had attacked my camp precisely because it had to be in the war in order to join the peace. The war had been a test of strength and a real threat, and that had helped set the terms, but it had also been a ritual; maybe the Yali were a cargo-cult people too.

That night I dreamed of a mantis, so swift and so dexterous that it could seize molecules from the fungus and arrange them into an elixir of learning. The next morning, I was summoned to the chiefs’ hall.

Tayi was there, and I wasn’t surprised; it had been obvious for some time that she was a power in the village. There were six others, seated in a row below the masks that hung on the wooden false wall.

“You’re so eager to work,” she said, “so maybe we have work for you to do. You were there for the speeches last night, so you know that the three tribes are going to start our own development company. Why sell those rights when we can invest in them here? Each of the tribes will sit on its board, but we also need someone to manage it – maybe someone who’s from a different country altogether.”

For the first time since I’d come to the highlands, I was without words.

“We’ll pay for you to study for your bioprospector’s license. The company will be set up by then. Come back help find, help develop, and if you stay fifteen years, and if you still want it, you can have the Malaita license for all the company’s products, free of royalties.”

The silence lengthened. I knew I could go back to the mining camp, and in a few months, if the deposit held out, I’d have enough to buy the development rights that Kere had offered. What Tayi had put on the table would take twenty years. But I would come away with much more, and with a bioprospector’s education and years of experience, I would be much more. I would still have a gift to bring home, a treasure to give away… if, after all that time, a captaincy was still what I wanted.

If not, then my gift would be for others.

Strike first.

“An ari nindi,” I said finally – it is to my liking.

“Fano,” said Tayi. “Good.” And her six fellow chiefs rumbled agreement.

There would be more discussion later, a ritual of negotiation to be gone through before the final terms were set, but the datacloth hung from the ceiling had recorded everything, and the contract was made.

#​

The guard who checked my passport at the city gate was the same one as the first time, and he asked the same question.

"Tautai Belalang," I said. Not lord or captain, but mantis.

This time he didn't laugh.

 

[Jonathan Edelstein]

Colleton County, SC
November 1864 to March 1866

Art: Winslow Homer, Dressing for the Carnival​

For twenty days, through the death throes of a war, Raymie Johns walked home.

He’d left his blue coat up by Rocky Mount. He reckoned he wouldn’t have any more need of it now that the battles were over, and besides, he was passing through Rebel country and they might not look kindly on it. He had a shirt and trousers he’d taken from an abandoned farm that would do him just as well. He kept his hat, though, and he kept his Springfield; the same people who wouldn’t look kindly on a federal uniform might also look unkindly on him without it.

He had to use the Springfield a couple times. The battles were over, but not all the fighting was; the raids were still happening, the country swarmed with Reb deserters, and the farmers – the ones who the raiders hadn’t burned out – were jumpy. He found a traveling companion part of the way – a sergeant in the Colored Troops who, like him, hadn’t waited to be discharged – but they parted company west of Wilmington, and from there on to the state line, it was moving by night, hiding in the underbrush by day, and hoping to God some stray dog wouldn’t give him up.

He crossed into South Carolina just outside Tabor City. He could walk tall from there and the going got faster, but the scenes that met his eye were as bad or worse. He’d heard stories of the Rising even before he made it to Union lines and put on a uniform and he’d heard more in the army, and they all agreed on one thing: it was damn bad. There weren’t just burned farms in the lowcountry; there were burned fields, and some of them weren’t replanted even now. He walked through gutted towns, slept in barns that still smelled of death, shared the road with women and even children who had hard soldiers’ faces, heard stories of crop raids and bushwhacking from preachers in church and men in patched-up saloons.

But there was a different kind of story when he got to Whitehall.

Over the campfire one night, a buckra sergeant from Maine had told him the story of Ulysses. The part that always got to him was how the dog and the nurse recognized Ulysses even though he’d been gone twenty years – he suspected, though the New England man never told him, that Eurycleia had been a slave, but that scene got to him anyway. And now he was the one who’d been away from home near on twenty years – he’d been sold away when he was eight – but damned if the guard at the gate wasn’t Samuel who’d lived next hut over when they were children, and damned if Sam didn’t drop his gun right there and shout “it’s Raymie back!”

The others at the gatehouse – that was new, as was the earthen rampart that surrounded what had been Whitehall Plantation and was now the Whitehall Circle – knew Raymie too. They were of an age, they’d played and worked together once, and between then and now, they’d all grown up slaves and turned into soldiers. One of them threw his arms around Raymie and all of them slapped him on the back, and more than one said “I’ll be goddamned.” Sam called to one of the boys playing just inside and said, “Go get Mariam – get her fast, it’s a homecoming!”

Mariam. Raymie didn’t recognize that name. But he did recognize the woman who came to the gate a few minutes later, running faster than the child who’d found her could keep up. Raymie had heard other people call her Mary before he got sold off. But he knew her face like she knew his, and the name she was called was the last thing that mattered.

“Mama?” he said, and then there he was, a grown man bawling his eyes out, feeling her arms go around him, feeling every minute of those eighteen missing years, and for that moment, going on to eternity, it was all he’d ever dreamed.

#​

He’d had a notion that, since the Rising, everyone lived in the big house. They didn’t. He could see that as soon as he stepped in the gate – as vast as the big house had seemed when he was a child, it didn’t have near enough room for everyone. They called it the people’s house now and had school and church and the Circle’s offices there, but everyone still slept in the quarters and his mother’s hut was the same one it had always been.

He sat up late that night talking with her and his sisters Jasmine and Lily – one of the things he learned was that he had sisters. He slept a troubled sleep on a mat borrowed from one of the neighbors, trying to understand why the place he’d been born didn’t yet feel like home. In the morning when they went out to work, he didn’t follow, and everyone left him alone; he slept again, a bit better this time, and spent the afternoon with his memories until it was time for the homecoming shout.

They’d had shouts in Mississippi too, deep in the woods – the buckra had tried to stop them but never could. This one was the same but different. Everyone was in a circle stomping and clapping their hands and some of the prayers were what he remembered; there were prayers of thanksgiving and reunion everywhere, and he knew some of the praise-songs they sang here as well as those he’d learned down south. But with everyone on the lawn of the big house, he couldn’t help looking around like a hunted animal, and some of the people were praying in a language he didn’t recognize. He’d heard those stories too – that the Gullah people on the islands had a teacher they followed from somewhere called Mali, and that they’d brought those teachings with him during the Rising. It didn’t seem like everyone had listened, but a good quarter of the people had, and from all Raymie could tell, his mother was one of them.

It didn’t feel right, that voice speaking a language he didn’t understand, that body swaying and clapping and praising a different God from the one he’d learned of at her knee. It didn’t feel right when the feast was laid and her smile went away for just a second when he cut a portion of ham. Sam must have noticed, because he took Raymie out to dance with the girls, but the music wasn’t what he’d got used to in Mississippi and hard as he tried, that didn’t feel right either.

The next morning they brought him to the big house to talk about a job. The Circle’s clerks had taken over the master bedroom – that was right, that was damn right – and one of them, a young woman in a homemade gray dress, looked up from a ledger book and motioned him to a chair.

“Raymie?” she said. “How do you spell that?”

“Don’t know,” he answered. He’d tried to learn his letters a couple times in the army but it had never taken very well, and he couldn’t remember how they’d spelled his name in the regimental paybook. “Spell it how you want. Raymie Johns.”

The clerk – Sarah, she said – found a blank page in her ledger and wrote it down. She had a fine hand. Raymie had heard that reading and writing came easier to younger people, and Sarah was practically a child; that must be why she could write so well even though she couldn’t have been learning long. She looked up and started to smile, but she must have seen something in his face; she straightened and paused, still friendly but all business.

“What did you do in Mississippi?”

“Worked the fields when I was a child. Then they taught me to cut stone.” He fell silent for a moment, wondering if his time in the army counted as an answer to that question. “I soldiered too,” he said, deciding that it was.

“We all soldier here,” Sarah said – was she including herself in that? Maybe. Young as her face was, there was a veteran’s look in it like Raymie had seen too many times on the road home. “You’ll find that out tomorrow, I expect. Do you want to cut stone here?”

It was a new thing, someone asking Raymie what he wanted. “It’s what I know how to do. You got something else for me?”

“There’s field work. We all do some of that – I’m in the Wednesday and Saturday crew, and every day at harvest time. You can do it all the time if you want. Or you can prentice if there’s a trade you want to learn and someone to teach you.”

“Reckon I’m too old for that, I think. I’ll stay with the stone if you don’t mind.”

Sarah made an entry in the ledger and underlined it. “I’ll tell Roger – he’s the boss stonemason since we came home from the Rising – and he’ll call on you if he needs you. We’ll have to find a field gang for you till then, I’m afraid.”

“Don’t be afraid. I know how to do that too.”

Now she did smile. “Go to the west rice field then and ask for Tammy. She’ll find something for you to do.”

Raymie figured that was an invitation to take his leave, so he did. The west field wasn’t far and it was obvious who the boss lady was. “You’ve grown so since you got sold south,” she said, and then, “I remember your mama cried for days.” Did she think that would be a comfort to him? “Anyway, we’re workin’ this part of the field today – you remember what to do?”

He did and he didn’t. He’d worked this field and the others at Whitehall from three years old to eight, but that was a long time ago, and in Mississippi he’d picked cotton rather than growing rice. He did enough things wrong in the first hour that Tammy set him to weeding like he was a child again; she didn’t say anything and neither did anyone else, but he knew they knew and his eyes burned.

He’d thought that field work might be different as a free man, and it was – they’d enrolled him in the Circle right after the shout and told him he was part owner of Whitehall now, and it did feel different working in a place he owned. And there were no whips, and everyone, man and woman, bantered and spoke their minds freely as they worked. But he was working in a gang with a boss shouting across the field to all and sundry, and somehow, the fact that the boss was Tammy rather than some buckra didn’t make as much difference as it should. He’d had twenty-odd years to get tired of people shouting at him that way.

Supper was at a long table in the courtyard where his hut was, and Sam slapped his back again and said “looks like you’ll have to prentice after all.” The words were kindly meant, but Raymie couldn’t share the laughter, and when his mother laughed too, just for a second, it felt like treason.

Next morning at four, there was another voice shouting his name and the shape of a man in the doorway. “Get on up!” he shouted, not seeming to care if he woke Raymie’s whole family, though by some miracle, none of them did wake. “You got a gun already, so let’s get you a pack and you can come on the patrol.”

Sarah had given warning, but that didn’t make it any better to be rousted out of bed when it was still night and still cold. “You the captain?” Raymie said. “You gonna court-martial me if I don’t get up? Do I call you sir like I called the buckra officers?”

The man – he was at least six foot three, Raymie realized, and looked like he could pull a plow without a horse – put his hands on the door frame and stayed where he was. “Name’s Tom and you can call me what you please,” he said, “but you’re in my patrol and you’re comin’ along.”

A buckra sergeant – the same one who knew about the Odyssey – had told Raymie about the better part of valor. “Just wait a bit,” he said, and he dressed hastily and slung his Springfield over his shoulder.

There were eighteen others waiting outside with Tom with machetes on their belts and a motley array of weapons on their shoulders – a couple others had Springfields, some had Enfields or Mississippi rifles, and a few still had muskets they’d probably taken from the big house or some other plantation gunroom they’d captured in the Rising. They wore armbands instead of uniforms, and one of them had a spare that he handed to Raymie in silence. But it was clear, both at the storeroom where the packs were kept and when they passed the gatehouse on patrol, that they were a platoon and that Tom gave the orders.

“Ammed here, he’s your sergeant,” Tom said, “and Billy’s your corporal. We patrol on Mondays and we drill with the whole Circle four times a month. We were all together in the Rising – this plantation and the four others out that way were a brigade – but you had some hard fighting in Mississippi and Virginia, so you should fit in fine.”

Again he did and again he didn’t. He fell into the rhythm of the march easily; this was something he really did know how to do. When a raider showed up – lone scouts still did sometimes come this far, looking for weak points – he was the first to see, and with a single well-aimed shot, he made sure the Reb’s comrades would never hear his report. After that, the others treated him pretty much as one of themselves, and their praise when the patrol camped at noon was like wine. But when they got to telling stories of the Rising, Raymie realized they were still part of a brotherhood that he was not, and that their war had been a harder one. Even at the worst times, his war had rules; the only rule in theirs was woe to the conquered.

That war had made them into a nation, man, woman and child. He’d been somewhere else when that nation was formed, and he wondered if he could ever become a citizen.

#​

“You’ll start liking it after a while,” his mother said. They were sitting outside after sunset; her arm was around his shoulder as it had been every moment that was possible since he got home, and her touch was still the balm it had been that first day. Up to that moment neither of them had said anything; all they’d done for an hour was sit and watch the sky get darker and the stars come out.

“I don’t hate it now, Mama.”

“Come on, Raymie, I ain’t blind. We don’t do things like you do. But we don’t do things like we used to do either. The war changed us all, and it just took a while to realize this way was for the better.” She took his face in both hands and looked deep into his eyes. “God’s change comes when people change,” she said – he’d been home long enough now to recognize that as a verse from that strange Bible of hers.

“I’ll try, Mama.”

He tried. He did try. Sometimes he even succeeded for a while. He got the hang of rice cultivation again with amazing speed, calling back half-remembered childhood skills until he earned even Tammy’s praise. He went to the shouts and dances, and he started walking out with Sam’s sister Rose. He took his turn leading the drills – as a veteran of the regular army, he had things to teach – and he tried a couple of the evening classes before deciding that they didn’t much interest him.

But it still wasn’t home, and it was still too much like the Mississippi fields and the army all at once, especially since there wasn’t much stonework going these days so he stayed in the rice fields most of the time. There were still too damn many people telling him what to do. And when the whole Circle met to decide who to support for governor and the state legislature, his fascination with the idea that he could vote met up with the realization that once the debate was over, everyone was expected to vote for the winner. Lockstep – that was another word he’d learned from that Maine sergeant, and there was too much of it here.

“Why don’t you talk to some of the other homecomers?” Tom said right after the meeting. “You’re not the only one. Maybe they got some tricks they can show you.” And Raymie did talk to a few – even took a walk to the next Circle over – but they didn’t have any tricks, or at least none that they could put into words. It just got better after a while, that was all, except for the ones who thought it didn’t get better and were thinking about leaving.

After a few of these conversations, Raymie wondered if time might be the key after all, but not in any way that was helpful. The homecomers who’d got back before him – some of them had found their way to South Carolina during the Rising itself – had come to a society in formation and been part of its forming. He’d come to one with its ways already set.

“Then why don’t you talk to Callie?” Tom said. Callie had been a root-doctor when Raymie was sold south; she was a granny-griot now and everyone listened to her. She wasn’t the oldest woman in the Circle – she was just a bit this side of sixty, or maybe a bit that side – but she was the only one left who’d actually been in Africa at an age where she could remember it, and there were stories about what she’d done in the Rising. She was a conjure woman, some people said; nonsense, said others, but they still spoke of her as if she was.

She lived at the other end of the quarters, and Raymie paid a call on her one evening as she was finishing the day’s basket-weaving. He wasn’t sure what he expected – magic spells, maybe, or mystic incantations – but what he got was a cross-examination that was almost clinical, as if Callie were a lawyer in a Charleston courtroom or a general interrogating a spy.

“You’re afraid we want to make you in our image?” she said. “Then make us in yours.”

“How do I do that?” he asked. “There’s a thousand and more of you, and one of me.” But he was reminded of his own thought of a few days earlier, that it was easier to join a society you had a hand in forming.

“Cut some stone, maybe. You don’t have to wait for the next time Roger calls you. Find a block somewhere. Tell a story for everyone to see.”

Raymie shook his head, but in days to come, he kept thinking about it. In his free moments, he wandered the back end of Whitehall, the part that was too hilly to plant, and seeing if any of the stones there struck him. He talked with his mother and Tom and Rose about what shape he might carve, what story he might tell. A monument to the Rising? A statue of a Union soldier? But the one wasn’t his story and the other wasn’t theirs.

“Just start cutting,” his mother said, and he didn’t have any better ideas. He found a block of veined granite of truly heroic size half-buried in the hillside, and when he wasn’t working, he dug it out some more and started carving the bottom into a plinth. Wasn’t that always how a statue started? Maybe by the time he finished that part, he’d figure out what went on top of it.

Day by day and he still didn’t know, but the work and the drills didn’t bother him quite as much. He wasn’t remaking Whitehall in his image, but maybe it helped just to have something that no one was telling him how to do. When Tom and Sam and Tammy cracked jokes about how the statue of nothing was going, he gave back in kind. His mother didn’t joke, didn’t ask, just said that verse again about God’s change.

He wasn’t sure how long it took – summer at least, maybe the beginnings of fall – before he realized the stone above the plinth was starting to take her shape. Without quite knowing it, he’d carved the rough outline of a woman’s body on the part of the rock closest to the hill, stooped and careworn, half kneeling and half rising. The body didn’t have a face yet, and he imagined it for a moment as his mother might have looked after he was sold – a face, as Tammy had told him, streaked with days of tears.

But the story hadn’t ended there, had it? It didn’t end with loss; it ended with what had been found. Raymie carved another shape, the upper body of a boy half-buried in the plinth, reaching out his hand so the woman could pull him up. The boy’s other hand reached out to a third form, a young girl; she to a man, and he to the woman. Four shapes making the full circle; a family, each pulling the other out of captivity and despair.

“All of us together,” Rose said, and maybe that’s what it was – the four shapes rising from the plinth were everyone at Whitehall. All of a sudden Raymie realized what story he was telling – it was the one he’d heard at all the shouts and the meetings, from the pastors and imams, from the field-bosses and soldiers, all of how the Rising had been everyone rising together. Maybe he’d been part of that too when he ran to Union lines and put on the blue coat, even though he’d been far away. Maybe he didn’t have to like everything here, maybe he didn’t have to accept everything for their story to become part of his.

He felt like it all was becoming his story. Until they took it away.

It happened when the last of the winter of ’65 was going and the spring of ’66 was putting out shoots, when Raymie was about done with the rough work and was ready to start the fine. By that time everyone knew about the Whitehall Family – Raymie hadn’t named it but Callie had, and the name had stuck – and Raymie often had an audience when he went out to work on it. About a dozen were there that day – the field workers had quit for the day an hour before, and supper was still an hour away – when that clerk Sarah came running and told him he was wanted at the big house.

He wondered what on earth they’d want him for; Sarah didn’t know. And his questions weren’t answered when George Sims, who’d become chair of the council after last month’s Circle elections, greeted him at the door and brought him to an upstairs room. The rest of the council was there along with a couple of men who Raymie didn’t recognize. They were wearing suits, those men, and it had been a long time since Raymie had seen someone wearing a suit.

“Sit down, Raymie,” George said, and motioned him to a chair. “Heard about the work you’ve been doing back there, and the new council thinks maybe it’s time we built us a memorial. You’ve made a good start, but we reached out to Charleston and found these two – fine sculptors, been to school for design. They think it could be improved a bit.”

One of the sculptors reached into a satchel and rolled out a sheet of paper. It was big – big enough for Raymie to see the drawing on it from all the way across the table – and it changed Raymie’s design a lot more than a bit. In the drawing, the plinth was cut deep so the Family could stand all the way out of it. They were shown in a more heroic pose than Raymie had carved, with the man armed, and where Raymie had planned to leave the cutting rough, the sculptors’ design was chiseled fine.

“Can you do it that way, Raymie?” George said. “We can make it your full-time job, so you won’t have to work on anything else till it’s done.”

Raymie got up from the chair. He looked down at the drawing again and didn’t say a word. He was suddenly on the edge of tears – he, a grown man, and he fought them hard so he wouldn’t break down right in front of the council.

“That a yes?” George was smiling – he really thought he was doing Raymie a favor, he couldn’t see what was wrong. A couple of the others on the council did see, and it looked like one of them was starting to say something, but the sculptor who’d unrolled the drawing – George still hadn’t introduced him – spoke first.

“You see, your design’s no good,” he said. “The proportions are wrong, and the poses aren’t correct for any of the schools of statuary…”

“They’re correct for my school of statuary,” Raymie said, his voice tight and controlled. “I don’t want your job, George. I’ll finish it on my own damn time. And if I see you touch it” – the sculptor had soft hands, he probably hired stonecutters to do the work he designed, but right then Raymie didn’t care – “I’ll take this chisel and hammer it into your goddamn skull.” He turned to the door, shaking off one council member’s hand on his shoulder as another got between him and the sculptor, and stormed out the door.

He was never quite clear on what happened after that. He remembered going downstairs and out of the house, with Sarah following and swearing that she didn’t know. He remembered George coming down after him, the council and the sculptors in tow; he remembered loud words in front of a gathering crowd; he remembered his mother and Rose and Tammy screaming something although he couldn’t recall what; he remembered the moment when he swung on George and knocked him down. George was no fool and he’d been in the Rising like everyone else, but he wasn’t looking for the punch and he hit the ground heavily.

Everything stopped then, and there was silence until George got up and filled it. “We had about enough of you, I think,” he said. “I’m calling a meeting now and you’re out of here.”

“Go ahead, call your damn meeting.” Raymie knew the rules – George might be boss, but the only way to kick someone out of the Circle was by majority vote. Maybe George was too mad right now to care, but Raymie didn’t think he’d win.

Or maybe it didn’t matter anyway. Maybe Raymie had had enough too. Maybe he’d just tell the meeting to take their Circle and put it where the sun didn’t shine.

“Fine,” George said. “You asked for it. Let’s call the meeting right now…”

“You’ll do nothing of the kind.” It was Callie, coming out of the crowd, standing between Raymie and George. “No meetings – not tonight, not tomorrow. Come on, Raymie, you and me are gonna talk.”

George could still have called the meeting. Those were the rules. But while he’d been brave enough to fight the Rebs and campaign for the council, he wasn’t brave enough to say no to Callie. She took Raymie’s hand and led him away.

“Well, that was a disgrace,” she said when they were back at her place in the quarters. She’d been silent up to then, and Raymie hadn’t said a word either. “Believe me, if I knew George was gonna bring in some high-yellow sculptor who got sent to some art school in Paris, I’d have said something. And I’m saying something now. I like the story you’re telling. Go finish the Family – I promise that anyone else who touches it will do so over my dead body.”

Raymie shook his head. “It’s finished. I reckoned I’d leave it rough anyway. But it ain’t mine anymore.” Now the tears he’d been fighting came. “Nothing here’s mine – George made that damn clear. Whatever part of me was born here is dead. I’m going.”

Callie, who’d been facing the window, spun back around and took his face in both her hands. The touch was so like his mother’s that he felt as if he’d been struck by lightning.

“There’s part of all of us that’s dead,” she said slowly. “You can’t go through all this” – she took her hands off his face and spread them to include the quarters – “and a war on top of it without dying some. But the part that doesn’t die keeps growing, like a branch on a stump. You can still grow here.”

He shook his head again. “Think I’ll go out west, qualify on some land. Buckra sergeant said the government’s giving it out free, and I figure that’s the only way I can live without everyone else trying to live my life for me.”

“On the plains? You sweet, sweet child. You’ll go broke dryland farming, if you don’t die first. And Rose sure won’t go out there with you – she’s got too much sense, even if you don’t.”

She pointed him to a chair. “Let me tell you what I heard from Columbia the other day. A lot of people are like your mother was – missing family who got sold south, not knowing if they’re alive or dead. The Freedmen’s Bureau says is helping to find them, but it can’t do enough. So Miss Harriet wants to hire some people, go down south, find them where they are, bring them home. No one’ll be lookin’ over your shoulder down there, and you’ll have your mama and me and Rose to come back to. You want it? Miss Harriet won’t say no to me.”

“Bring people home?” Raymie said, and Callie nodded. “Bring people home so they can end up like me?”

“Bring people home so they can have a chance. So their families can have a chance.”

“I’ll think about it. Tell you tomorrow.” But Raymie already knew what he’d say in the morning.

#​

Mama and Rose said goodbye to Raymie at the gate. He had his Springfield and his pack, and a new shirt and a new horse. “I’ll be back soon,” he said. “Be home soon.” But they wrapped their arms around him tighter, and for that moment, going on to eternity, it was all he’d ever dreamed.

 

[Jonathan Edelstein]

There was a tree twenty thousand miles above the earth, and it grew like nobody’s business.

Tatiana’s parents had planted it fifty years ago, when Gajah Mada Station was new and when the Majapahit – the inner fluoride-nanoglass torus through which the beanstalk would one day be threaded – had just been designated a public park. The debate on the park resolution had been close, so the winning side made damn sure it stuck – they moved heaven and earth, quite literally, to bring soil and seeds up through the lock, and they made a ceremony of the planting. They’d watched every day for the seedling to emerge, and fifty years ago today, it had.

And it grew. Trees on earth could only grow so tall before they could no longer lift water to their branches and leaves, but here there was no gravity to set limits. And with no up and no down, its branches sought the sun in all directions. A silver birch might reach twenty-five meters down below, but in twenty years this one grew to fifty, in thirty years to a hundred. After fifty, this single Siberian birch was taller than any redwood, broader than the largest banyan. It occupied most of the Majapahit and the station’s citizens knew its major branches as city-dwellers might know streets; everyone knew which were lovers’ retreats and which were the ones where families picnicked among chittering insects and the shouts of freefalling children.

It had a name – it had many names, as many as it had branches. Yggdrasil was the most common; a Danish engineer named Vestergaard had used it first and everyone did now, whether or not the Aesir and Vanir had ever visited their homelands. But everyone had their own names for it too, and Tatiana’s parents had named it years before Vestergaard had – Tunya, god of the universe.

They’d carved an image of Tunya forty years ago on one side of the main trunk, and they’d made the shape of Tunya-Ava, the Universe-Mother, on the other. They, and Tatiana after they’d retired and gone home, had deepened the carvings as the tree grew, added detail, tended them as a private act of worship. The tree was a worship-place now for all the Mari who visited the station – even for some who weren’t Mari – but it had belonged to her family first. She couldn’t remember a time when she hadn’t prayed there.

But she didn’t know what prayer to say today. She’d spent the morning gathering seed pods, and she sat against the trunk now looking through branches and glass at the earth and stars, and no prayer came to her. What prayer could she say, when both earth and tree were things she would see only one more time?

#​

She wanted to stay forever, but she couldn’t – the shuttles to the surface departed twice a day, and if she didn’t get up, the next one would leave without her. The docking bay wasn’t far and the staff were efficient; Tatiana was in her seat, with the seeds in her pocket, almost before she’d finished realizing that it was time to go. She slept, and woke at Pontianak Terminal.

As always, the gravity was what she felt first. Gajah Mada’s outermost ring – Srivijaya, where people lived – was spun to half a gravity, but the sensation of weighing sixty kilos rather than thirty was both startling and unpleasant. She was most of the way across the terminal before she could shake it off.

The second thing that struck her was the price. She queued up behind the onward-travel kiosks in the concourse and, with deft finger movements, zoomed the world map to her destination; there was a few seconds’ pause while the kiosk plotted a route and made its queries about tickets, and then a flashing number on the screen: 196,831.50. She looked at the number in shock – that was two months’ salary – but then she realized that the kiosk must have read her Mari identity card and given the price in rubles.

She’d become used to thinking in dollars and had to mentally translate, but when she did, the figure was much more reasonable. She could probably make the trip for less if she took a less direct route, and with the kiosk as intermediary, it was sometimes possible to haggle, but the savings wasn’t worth the extra time, and she would soon have little need of money. She swept her hand across the screen in an affirmative gesture; somewhere, her bank account was debited, and a diagram appeared on her wrist datacloth that was both a ticket and a schematic map of where to go.

The map took Tatiana to a waiting room where a flight to Singapore would leave in two hours; from there, she boarded another flight to Moscow and a third to Kazan, caught a hovercraft up the Volga to Kakshania where she changed for another up the Izi Kakshan to Yoshkar-Ola, and finally the Great Mari Republic Central Bus 47, which took her east into the countryside and left her at a shelter ten kilometers outside Shernur. From there, it was catch-as-catch-can. The kiosk had arranged a ride from a farmer for the last leg of the journey, but as sometimes happened, he had discovered more urgent commitments; Tatiana’s datacloth registered a refund of eighteen hundred rubles and contacts for several other people who might provide transportation.

She thought of calling one of them. But the nearest was half an hour away, she had only seven kilometers to go, and her pack was light. And it was the afternoon of a Mari summer day with endless skies above and endless meadows all around. She started down the track and let her eyes dwell on fir copses by glacial kettle lakes, ancient motor-wagons filled with hay, brightly-painted houses with carved windows, animals grazing amid solar collectors.

At last there was a lane that led to a wooden house, little different from the others, and a sign at the turning that said “Eshpai.” The door was already opening when Tatiana turned off the track, and her father – his datacloth alerted by hers – stood in the doorway waving his hand.

The house was 250 years old and Vadim Eshpai a third its age. At a meter sixty-two, he was a throwback to the twentieth century; his hair was sparse and gray, his hands gnarled, his face inherited from a distant Muscovite ancestor. He’d put on weight since his retirement but looked fit, and he came to meet Tatiana halfway up the lane.

They embraced, and he must have felt something, known that this time was different. “It’s soon then?” he asked, but it wasn’t really a question.

“Yes. In nine days.” It was strange, Tatiana thought, how the prospect of departure was becoming real only now. She had watched the habitats on Callisto grow for half a decade, seen through the eyes of the machines that were building them, seen those machines respond to her commands, but only in the days just past had she understood that she really would be leaving, that she would be on the ship that took humanity to the outer system at last. Even when she’d seen the last of the xenon pumped into the fuel tanks and the last of the supplies loaded, it hadn’t quite been real… until it was time to gather seeds from the tree.

She stepped back from the embrace, pulled the pouch from her pocket, and pressed it into her father’s hand. “Is Ava inside?” she asked.

Vadim nodded. “She’s working on flower mods again. She already wants to plan next year’s garden.” A picture of a woman bent over her datacloth, deaf to the world, came unbidden to Tatiana’s mind; this had been how her mother had spent much of her spare time on the station as well. And when she followed her father to the workroom at the back of the house, it was just as she had pictured.

Natalia Eshpai was not so preoccupied that she didn’t notice her daughter’s entry, and as she turned on her stool, her face formed a gentle smile. Where Vadim’s face was the map of Moscow, hers was that of Kazan, the marriage of steppe and taiga; she was tall and straight, topping Vadim by ten centimeters as she stood and rested her hand on his shoulder. She was the one Tatiana had always taken after, and as always after a long absence, Tatiana felt that she was looking into a mirror.

“Sit down,” Natalia said. “Look at the cloth and I will show you.”

Tatiana sat on the stool, and Natalia transferred her hand from Vadim’s shoulder to hers. With her other hand, Natalia made motions above the datacloth and conjured up a tree.

It was a silver birch – the smooth white bark and the shape of the leaves put that beyond doubt. But the leaves were much broader than any earthly birch, the better to capture sunlight just four percent as strong. Their color was subtly different, stained slightly blue from the more efficient chlorophyll, with darker, fractally patterned veins. The branches spread wide, presenting as much surface area as possible to the pallid sun, The trunk was thin and wiry; it would stand straight as any tree in the one-eighth gravity of Callisto, but if need be, it could be trained like a vine.

It was beautiful – where Vadim had studied biodesign as an engineer, Natalia had gone to university at Ilorin and learned it as an art. She had made a worship place.

Tatiana reached her hand into the image – her datacloth didn’t have the enhancements that would convert it directly to sensation, but she could feel it anyway. It seemed she could smell it as well, the image changing to an springtime scene, the tree hung with fragrant catkins, the pollen a harbinger of seeds in the making – Tunya’s children, the seeds of distant worlds.

“This is the edit?’ she asked, but that too wasn’t a question.

Natalia nodded. “The primary one. It works in all the simulators, but your father and I worked up some alternate patterns just in case. You brought the seeds… good, I’ll take them to the shed tomorrow. You’ll be here a few days – there’s plenty of time to put the edits in.”

They stayed together in silence a few more moments before Vadim dismissed the image and broke the spell. “It will be evening soon,” he said. “We should eat.”

The resolution was adopted by unanimous consent, and the three adjourned to the kitchen. Tatiana’s parents had always liked to cook with their hands rather than letting machines do it for them; even on Gajah Mada, they’d improvised a kitchen, and some of her earliest memories had been helping them prepare family meals. Those memories came back through her hands, through her nose, as she chopped marinated vegetables and pickles; beside her, Vadim made vat-lamb stew with potatoes and mushrooms and Natalia made layer after layer of koman-melna wheat pancakes and honey-cakes for after.

They were all hungrier than they realized, or perhaps more afraid of conversation than they would admit, because for a while they had eyes only for the food. When conversation did come, though, it flowed freely. All of them had two homelands and all had been away from one for a long time, and they were eager to share news and gossip. And from there, the talk turned to Callisto, and Tatiana grew animated as she spoke of exploring Jupiter’s moons, following up on what the probes had discovered on Europa and Io, taming the outer system for the expeditions that would follow.

But they all knew what remained unspoken. The Consistory Space Section wasn’t going to send a mission out on a two-year journey just to turn around and come back. The six hundred members of the Callisto expedition had signed up for thirty years; they would be as much settlers as explorers.

In thirty years, Tatiana would still be in her prime. But Vadim and Natalia had married late. Both of them were in their eighties, and while living to a hundred was common these days, far fewer people lived to a hundred and fifteen. And after thirty years, a place became home. Many settlers never returned.

Tatiana wanted Callisto more than anything. She’d prayed many times at Tunya’s trunk that she would be selected. But now that her prayers had been answered…

“There will be a service at the grove tomorrow,” Vadim was saying. “The whole district, and two others besides.”

“The kart called one?” Tatiana asked. She was genuinely surprised; village services at the sacred groves happened four times a year, and the next one wasn’t until harvest time.

“No. The priest will be there, but all of us called for it. We’re sending one of our own to the heavens, and she’s bringing a god with her – how could we not send her off with a blessing?”

The pouch of seeds on the workroom table, a god? But that was what they were. Tatiana’s workmate Midori had said there were kami already waiting for them on Callisto, and maybe there were gods there too – but Tunya could only go there if he were carried and planted.

“We’ve had a long time to plan this," Natalia said, and Tatiana heard the reassurance in her words – we know you are going, we are proud of you, we bless you and send you with a gift.

“But I haven’t,” Tatiana answered and suddenly fought tears. Her departure had become real too late; she would be sent off tomorrow as the bearer of a god, and she still didn’t know what prayer to say.

#​

The next day dawned early; this far north at this time of year, it was only dark for a few hours. Vadim roused Tatiana at six and after a bowl of kasha, they went out to fix one of the fertilizer plants. For a bioengineer who could take apart and put together life forms like they were children’s toys, Vadim was hopeless with machinery; he could understand how it worked, but anything on a scale he could see was too big for him to manipulate. Fortunately, he’d always had Natalia, and in this too, Tatiana took after her mother.

The work was done by noon and Tatiana walked through milling geese and ducks and found Natalia in the shed working on the seeds. She’d made a few changes to the design – that always happened when a project moved from the simulators to actual life – but they were minor; the genetic patterns that flickered above the editor while Natalia did the fine-tuning were, to her untrained eye, impossible to distinguish from those she’d seen the afternoon before. And now Natalia was blind to the world, so Tatiana sat and watched until the work was done, finding the patterns a calming distraction as she had found the farm-work.

At fifteen, the seeds were finished. There was time for a quick meal, and then it was an hour’s walk to the sacred grove.

Half the district was already there, gathered in a stand of old-growth birch and linden in front of the loaves of bread and bowls of kvass; more than one called greetings. The kart was there too in his traditional white tunic and cap. He also wore a cross, and he wasn’t the only one. Many of the people assembled at the grove had gone to church that morning or to the mosque two days before; Tatiana herself had been baptized, as had her parents. The hundred and forty gods of the Meadow Mari weren’t jealous ones; they knew their people would always return to them.

The smell of cooking spread across the grove – it was still tradition to offer a goose to the gods, even if it was now a vat-goose rather than one of those from the Eshpais’ yard. The kart intoned the ritual words of the sacrifice and invoked the gods’ blessing on the gathering. Kugu Yumo, the chief god, was first as always; in the kart’s invocation, Tatiana recognized threads of Tolstoy’s Christianity and Abay Qunanbauli’s jadidist Islam. The Mari might always return to their gods, but they were good Tolstoyans, good anarchists; they never let those gods limit them.

The kart’s axe and hammer struck, concluding the prayer, and the next gods to be named were pointed ones – Kava, god of the skies; Keche of the sun; Shudyr-Shamich of the stars; and of course, Tunya.

“Trees are Tunya,” the priest said, breaking from his formal prayer-voice and touching the century-old birch at the center of the grove. “Their branches are in the skies, their trunks in the earth, their roots in the underworld. And their seeds can carry life to the ends of the universe. It was a seed of this tree that grew into the great tree of Gajah Mada station, and now a seed of that tree will go among the planets. Who knows where its children will go – maybe to the stars?”

He turned to where Tatiana stood. “Let the carrier of our gods be protected. Let no evil touch her. Let evil melt away like the dawn and the dusk, like the mist and the dew. Let no evil touch her unless it first outruns the forest elk, makes butter from a hare’s milk, cools it with the gale’s wind, serves it on golden plates with golden spoons…” The litany of impossible tasks went on to its conclusion and the axe and hammer struck again, and then it was time for embraces and congratulations and feasting.

It was late, even for a summer evening, when the family began the trip home. A mild breeze was blowing; the sky had turned indigo; the stars would be out soon; the meadows and forests buzzed with life. Tatiana felt a sensation she didn’t recognize, and suddenly she knew: a contentment deeper than she had ever imagined.

“You look at peace,” Natalia said. “Did you find your prayer?”

“Yes. But not any of the kart’s prayers.” They walked in silence for a moment past a rocky knoll. “Or maybe it was. It was the impossible tasks, you know. We have always called upon evil to do the impossible before it touches us, and the same with sorcery – er-kechym kunam posharen kertesh, tunam iže posharen kertse.” When the sorcerer is able to bewitch the morning sun, only then let him bewitch me. “But we can bewitch the sun and stars now, and I have been bewitched by them.”

“We brought you to them,” Vadim said. “Are we the sorcerers?”

“All of us are. We embrace the impossible tasks now, because they have made us.” A prayer formed in Tatiana’s mind, and slowly she said it aloud. “Let Tunya’s light bathe us until we can outrun the light. Let Shudyr-Shamich hang his stars in the sky until we can go to visit them. Let Kava open the sky to us, that we may pray to her in every part of it. Let Uzhara’s dawn be a dawn of learning and discovery for all humanity.” It was a sentiment, Tatiana felt, that Tolstoy and Abay would approve, and she was sure Tunya did too.

They had reached the lane and they turned to walk the last hundred meters to the house. The grove was just visible to the west in the twilight shadow, and above it, Jupiter had risen in the western sky. Tatiana couldn’t see Callisto, but she knew where it would be, and she felt for the seeds in her pocket one more time.

Soon they would take root there, and so would she.

 

[Jonathan Edelstein]

“Good morning, Ibrahim,” the datacloth said. “It’s zero three forty-five, second December 2100, thirtieth Ramadan 1524. It’s eight degrees outside, clear with occasional clouds. You have twenty hours and fourteen minutes left to vote in the carbon balance referendum…”

“Khara, shut up,” said Ibrahim, rolling off his futon and fumbling for his clothes. He must have been too tired after iftar last night to take the datacloth off voice. But maybe it was for the best; Antarctic seasons blew his sleep cycle to hell at the best of times, and without the voice alarm, he’d have slept through breakfast for sure.

He’d almost done that anyway. The sun never set here in December, and no one could agree whether to use Mecca, Cape Town or Christchurch time, so the compromise – the consensus, although it had taken plenty of shouting to get there – was that the fast began at four. He had fifteen minutes to shower, pray and eat, and he suddenly wished the damn cloth had woken him at three thirty instead.

The shower was easy. The datacloth – damn it to the tenth generation – had learned Ibrahim’s habits well enough to know that he’d want to do that first, and by the time he got to his feet, the sound of rushing water had already started and steam was coming from the stall. The hot water shocked him awake and it took only a moment to wash clean, and then he threw on the clothes he’d dragged from the dresser and stirred some lingonberry and sea-buckthorn into last night’s fufu for sahur. That done, he knelt vaguely to the north and said a quick fajr – a perfunctory fajr, his mother would have told him, but she wasn’t here – and walked out the front door. It was three fifty-nine.

Outside, the sun was low in the eastern sky and the breeze carried the smell of the sea. After the heat of the shower and the closeness of the apartment, the air felt fresh and bracing. Ibrahim would never have imagined, growing up in Ilorin, that he would go outside in eight-degree weather in only his street clothes, but unlike the summer’s endless days and the winter’s unrelieved nights, he’d long since become used to that. Eight degrees with the sun in his face felt life-giving, and the bright colors of the apartment blocks and the berries and ornamental mosses in the community garden made it more so. The earliness of the hour was forgotten; he was alive to the world.

He turned left at the main street, past the assembly-field at the Plaza of Pines with its moss border in the blue, green and white of the Consistory Environmental Section; past the low public buildings and university campus in airy arctic-modern style; through the tangle of warehouses and garages that ringed the port; and finally to the docks. The Sea-Gardener was waiting at the end of one of the Consistory piers. His graduate assistant, Wojciech, was also there, running diagnostics.

Wojciech looked up at the sound of Ibrahim’s footsteps. “Everything green,” he said. “The kids will be here in a few minutes.” And then, after a moment’s pause, “did you vote yet?” He didn’t even wait for Ibrahim to shake his head before saying, “Me neither. Can’t seem to decide.”

“No one can,” Ibrahim answered. He knew that wasn’t true – more than three billion votes had been recorded already – but then he realized it was true of the people in his section and most of those he knew in similar sections elsewhere. The people like him – the ones who actually worked maintaining the carbon balance day to day – were having the hardest time deciding whether to change it.

“We know how much this will cost,” Wojciech said – Wojciech always could read his thoughts. “Keeping the climate where it is costs a tenth of the world’s GDP. How much more to change it back – but how much not to?”

That was it in a nutshell, wasn’t it? The referendum question was simple enough: should it be the goal of the Consistory Environmental Section to restore as far as possible, no later than 2200, the climate that existed prior to the onset of anthropogenic climate change? But both alternatives carried the potential for enormous costs, not all of them in money.

He started to say something – Wojciech seemed to be looking for a serious answer – but was cut short by the sound of children’s voices. A dozen of them were coming down the dock with the day’s duty teacher, Maryam, in tow. The younger ones were running and chattering with excitement even though they must have been up since three. Ibrahim knew the students competed to be assigned to the Sea Gardener on their public-work days, although he wasn’t vain enough to think it was because of him.

He greeted Maryam as the children swarmed up the gangway and found their favorite vantage points for departure. The two of them had been at the university together for a couple of years; they’d gone different places during their Wanderjahre, but they’d both fetched up here at around the same time, and for most of the past month, they’d seen each other at iftar. She returned the greeting and finished herding her charges aboard; he double-checked the diagnostics and made his way to the controls. He made sure that Wojciech had finished untying, checked the time on the bridge readout – four forty-two – and cast off.

Outside the harbor, the boat swung north up the coast. Ibrahim let his eyes rest on the carpet of hairgrass and yellow pearlwort flowers that started a kilometer away, rising past stands of feral berries to rugged, mossy cliffs. There were snow-capped mountains in the distance, but the cliffs and strand had none; this part of the peninsula had been ice-free in summer since before Ibrahim was born, and the lines of glacial erosion were starting to be replaced by runoff channels. For forty years, since the climate had stabilized, it had been the Consistory’s policy to keep it that way. Now that might change…

“I voted yes!” said one of the students – Catherine, he remembered, one of the second-years. He wondered for a moment if the school had held a mock vote, but then he recalled that the age threshold had been waived for this referendum. And why not? This wasn’t an election for town council or world chamber or the governing board of the Antarctic Legatum Humanitatis – it might set the direction of the planet for as long as the students were likely to live. For Catherine to have a vote almost made more sense than for Ibrahim to vote on a project whose end he would never see.

“How come?” asked Maryam. She was never one to miss a chance to teach, Ibrahim remembered.

“My mother says it’s for the animals,” Catherine answered, “and the sea.” Ibrahim, still looking out at the coast, nodded silently. Those were the reasons for a yes vote that he, too, found most persuasive. Temperatures and carbon dioxide levels might have stabilized, but that didn’t mean the planet was done changing; sea levels were projected to keep rising for another fifty years, and just because the elephants and big cats and apes had barely made it didn’t mean that the world had stopped losing species. And in a world where biodiversity was wealth…

“But what about the animals and plants that have adapted to the new climate?” Maryam pressed, and there was the most persuasive case for a no. The natural environment – the human environment too – had just survived a major disruption; what would a second one in the space of two centuries do? Would a hundred-year timetable be enough to cushion the impact, or would returning to the baseline kill as many species as leaving it had done?

“And what about the life where there was none before?” said another of the students. Yes, that too was something to consider in a place that had been green for only half a century, and even more so as the Sea Gardener drew closer to its destination. Below Ibrahim now, visible through shockingly clear water, were the vast beds of seagrass that had been introduced here – that had been engineered here – to sequester carbon. And on the coastal verge, now only three hundred meters distant, the inlets that threaded through the penguin rookeries were a tangle of low, woody plants whose genetic stock included both Arctic willow and temperate mangrove.

He anchored the boat at the first of the day’s inspection sites. “Suit up!” he called, and the students ran to the diving-suit lockers as he went to get his own. This was why the children fought for this assignment, and it took only a moment before everyone was assembled at the rail.

“All right,” Ibrahim said when the excitement had died down. “Who can tell me what we’re looking for?”

One of the sixth-years, Mei, raised her hand first. “Dieback?”

“Yes. You’ve got the historic figures for all the marine animal populations in the suit display – if any of them are declining, we need to know. We also need to make sure the penguins and seals have a path to their hunting grounds. That can change every year, so if they’re not here, we need to know where they’re going. Anyone else?”

“Changes in the water?” asked Catherine.

“Yes, all that carbon the seagrass is trapping has to go somewhere. Your suits can test that too – look for any changes in the pH, oxygen levels, nutrients… And make sure you’re all back here in thirty minutes. The water temperature is minus two, and even with the suits on, you can get hypothermia if you stay much longer than that. We’ve got all your locations, but we don’t want to have to pull you out. You understand?”

The students chorused their assent, but they didn’t really care about the water temperature; they wanted to explore. And Ibrahim couldn’t really blame them. There was an initial shock of cold as he followed them into the water, but it went away quickly – nothing could really be cold to someone who’d worked a season on the winter maintenance crew at the highland solar farms – and once it passed, he was conscious only of the swaying forest of seagrass and the fish swimming through rippling green-tinted light. These waters had always been rich with life, and it had adapted well to the grass, which was now food source and dwelling-place.

He swam to the bottom, twenty meters down; here, decaying seagrass supported mats of bacteria and the sea-worms and krill that fed on them. Some of the bacteria, too, had been introduced from the Arctic to minimize the release of sequestered carbon when the seagrass decomposed, and Ibrahim ran his tests to make sure it was doing so. A couple of readings were slightly high, but within the range of random variation and well within acceptable levels; he routed them to the Environmental Section database but without any alarms.

So much effort, balancing the native species with the invasive ones and the engineered ones. This was no longer really a natural ecosystem or even a garden; it was a factory, and it would have to become even more of one if the referendum passed – at least until the climate restoration was far enough along for these waters to become icebound again. But maybe, if the vote passed and the project succeeded, it would be possible to let go…

Or would it, even then? A line that the other Ibrahim had written – the ancestor that Ibrahim was named after – came suddenly to mind. It was near the end of The Silent Ones, just after their speech had been restored – I have learned so many things for which our words were not made. The past was a lost country; to restore it was to go from one arbitrary point to another, and the force of all that had happened between then and now would push it inexorably onward.

Ibrahim wondered what his ancestor would have thought of the referendum. Was the arbitrary point of a century ago worth returning to, and which way would the weight of change move it from there? But there was no way to ask. The other Ibrahim was two hundred years dead, cut down at twenty-two by an Afghan sword at Saragarhi, and the idea that the climate was in humans’ power to change would have seemed to him like purest fantasy.

But he might have known how to approach it, at least. The dead Ibrahim was more of a Belloist than the living one, and far more of a mystic; he had instinctively understood the world as community, and his fascination with movement would have told him which way that community could run and which way it would stumble. Without that instinct, though, how could anyone know? By letting everyone in the community speak and counting their votes, Ibrahim guessed, and that just brought his question back to where it began. I have learned so many things for which these words were not made.

With a start, Ibrahim realized he had been underwater for twenty-eight minutes. He surfaced carefully and swam to the boat as quickly as he could, but not in time to avoid the children’s laughter.

“Yes, I’m the late one,” he said. “I need to listen to myself better. Go warm up – it’s an hour to the next site.”

There was more laughter at his expense, but the students hurried below, leaving only Wojciech and Maryam on deck. It was ten after six and Wojciech reached for the coffee-maker, then remembered who he was with and faltered.

“Don’t let us stop you,” Ibrahim said. “And the way you make coffee, just the smell of it should last me until iftar.”

Wojciech looked to Maryam to see if he had her permission too and, satisfied, started the brewing. “Did you find an answer down there?”

“I think I at least found the question.”

“Maybe you’ll decide after dhuhr,” Maryam said.

Ibrahim nodded. They’d probably be back in port for dhuhr, and he wouldn’t have to hurry it as he had hurried through fajr. He might be in the right frame of mind after, and he wanted to cast his vote before the Eid began.

Or maybe he was there already. Maybe he had found an answer, or at least his answer. He would wait until dhuhr, but he didn’t think he’d change his mind.

The only way the world could go was onward, and he hoped humanity had learned enough.

 

[Jonathan Edelstein]

Diane Hairston sold jewelry in the old Gowanus Mill subway station. She could have got a spot in the new one – she’d been on the vendor list long enough – but why work five hundred feet underground? The new subway had been dug deep into the bedrock where rising water levels wouldn’t affect it, and though the stations were well-lit and full of art, Diane still thought they felt like a tomb. In the old station, the water might stand a foot below the platform, but the city had replaced half the ceiling with clear glass, the walls were covered with vines, the tunnel was lit blue from the glowworms that someone had introduced thirty years ago and no one had been able to get rid of. It wasn’t an antiseptic catacomb; it was a vital place with earthy smells and the buzz of living things, a place where she could work and feel inspired.

Like she did right now, in fact. At the moment, rain was hammering hard on the street above, making patterns on the glass ceiling, heralding the tropical storm that would hit the city in the next hour. Most of the other stalls had closed already and those that hadn’t were being broken down the rowboats that did the glowworm tours were tied up at the other end of the platform, and Diane wondered, as she had throughout the afternoon, whether she ought to close up shop herself. But her fingers danced to the rhythm of the rain, twisting wire into a new pattern, touching it to the pathfinder that mapped and bored nanotubes on and just below its surface, filling them with the fluids that would change patterns and colors as they caught the light. And when the pendant was made and she looked up, a customer was leaning over her stall.

“Thank God you’re here!” the customer said. “I didn’t think I’d find anyplace open before I got home.”

Diane took in the woman in front of her – a decade younger than she was; more or less the same mix of Africa, Europe and Asia; carefully dressed in a way that suggested she followed fashion. Carefully and expensively dressed – someone who lived in the sleek Manhattan towers and had everything, down to her body, custom-made.

“Forgot someone’s birthday?”

“Oh, no,” the customer answered. “There’s a storm party – on the roof, under the dome. I need something that will catch the lightning.”

“A storm party?” Diane repeated. She’d been to a few of those, back before motherhood. She’d never been one of the people who cared to see and be seen, but this customer plainly was.

She held up another spool of wire, and the customer nodded. The wire was plain copper, but that didn’t matter; when gold and platinum were something everyone could afford, it was uniqueness that made the difference. Something new, something made for the day, something no one else would have – that was worth taking a chance on Gowanus Mill with slashing rain and rising winds outside.

Diane shaped the wire quickly, with the expertise of twenty years - a thunderbolt in copper superimposed on a spiral pattern in steel, with the nanotubes mapped fractally into millions of branches and filled with fluid that would react to electric charges in the atmosphere. It was done in fifteen minutes; the customer nodded again and smiled as it changed hands, and her datacloth registered a debit of twelve hundred dollars in favor of Diane. And she was gone, vanished through the doors that led to the elevator and the new station below.

And now it really was time to pack up. Diane saw that she was the only one left, and outside, it was beginning to thunder. That lady wouldn’t have had time to check many more places, she thought; hope she isn’t too late to the party. And then she closed up shop as fast as she could, and hurried to the street before she was too late.

Maybe, she thought a moment later, she’d already waited too long. The rain outside was being driven almost sideways now by winds that must already be forty miles an hour. Diane had plenty of practice with high winds – tropical storms hit New York a lot more often than they used to, usually three or four a year – but Ninth Street was practically a wind tunnel now, and she staggered and fought for balance in the blinding downpour.

At least she had only three blocks to walk – two streets east to Ennis, then off the raised platform of Ninth and into the district where twentieth-century streets had become twenty-first century canals. Her home was on the next corner north, where the Ennis and Eighth Street canals met, and there was a railing on the sidewalk that whole way. She was almost to the place where she could make the turn off Ninth, and then the world exploded.

#
​

Later, Diane would swear that she heard the explosions go off, but at the time, with the wind screaming in her ear, she could never be sure whether she heard them or only felt them. She wondered why she was suddenly looking up to the thunderclouds, and realized she’d been thrown down on her back without knowing it. The ground was shaking as if in an earthquake – earth, she thought, to add to air and water – and even before it subsided, she heard the alarms begin. It took a moment longer for her to realize that one of the alarms was coming from her datacloth.

She pulled herself to her feet – thankfully, she was unhurt – took shelter in a doorway, and unwound it from around her neck. Report to nearest City Reserve base immediately flashed across its surface, and then, please acknowledge callup and state your location.

“Acknowledged,” she said. She didn’t yet know what had just happened, but if she was being called up, it must be bad. “Ninth and Ennis, Gowanus Mill 78.”

Report to base Ninth and Revel flashed across the cloth, but Diane had already started to make her way there – she knew where the closest reserve base was, even if she’d only had to go there three times in twenty years. It was back the way she’d come, past the subway and over the Gowanus Creek bridge to where the old factories were. She was getting more used to the wind, but it was still hard going, and it seemed she had to fight for every block.

She messaged her son as she passed the station – called up, not sure when I’ll get home. A moment later, she got a message back: me too. Her son was still fifteen, but the emergency medical classes he’d taken put him on the reserve-eligible list.

Go with God, Roger. I love you. Now Diane was sure something terrible must have happened; the city had never in her lifetime called up under-eighteens. At least Roger’s list was limited to non-dangerous duty.

Her own reserve status had no such restriction.

She reached her destination a few minutes later; past the factories that had become apartments and those that had become studios and those that had become nanodesign plants was the one that was now a reserve base. The old loading gate was open and a cheery light came from inside; Diane joined the line of people climbing the steps. The warmth of the factory floor was a blessed change from outside, and someone had already put on a coffee pot; she drew herself a cup, took a chair and waited. She suspected she wouldn’t have to wait long.

She didn’t. She’d had time for just a sip of coffee when Teitelbaum walked down the floor calling her name. She knew who he was from the couple of times they’d met at City Reserve socials, and she’d have recognized him even without that; there weren’t too many people in this part of Brooklyn who wore the full black coat and hat with beard and payot, although she had to admit that on a day like this, that style was more appropriate than most.

“Right here, Avi,” she said – his rank was captain, but few City Reserve members saw much sense in being military about things. She got up and followed him to a small office off what had once been the production floor, and he motioned her to another chair.

“Sit down,” he said. “I think you’ll need to be sitting down. Has anyone told you what happened yet?” He didn’t wait for her to shake her head. “Someone blew the breakwaters.”

Diane took a second to understand, but then she drew in her breath. There had been a seawall along the Atlantic shore for sixty years, but that was only the smallest of the city’s storm defenses; its real protection from storm surges was the system of anchored breakwaters that extended three miles from shore. If someone had blown them up, or even blown some of them up, right in time for the worst storm of the year…

“How did they get bombs in there? How did they get past the security?”

“We’re figuring that out, and when we do, some heads will have a long way to roll. They didn’t beat all the security – there are at least six bombs we know of that didn’t explode – but the corridor to Coney Island and West Rockaway is open, and there’s major damage along the approach to Far Rockaway.”

“That’s…” Diane trailed off, unable to finish the sentence. That put tens of thousands of people in the way of the storm surge, and although there were backup drains on shore, they weren’t built to take the full force of the Atlantic in fury.

“Not good news. And some even better news – we’re now expecting the wind to hit hurricane force. Which is why we’ve got a Dragonfly for you.”

Suddenly it all made sense. Diane had loved the Dragonfly ornithopters as long as she could remember and she’d been licensed to fly them since she was twelve, and although ‘thopters were a minor key in civil aviation, there were a few things they were good for, and rescues and high winds were two of them. A Dragonfly wasn’t very fast and couldn’t carry much, but it didn’t need space to take off and land, it could climb straight up when it had to and hover when it was needed, and it had a flexibility and responsiveness that no helicopter or fixed-wing aircraft could match. And with a hundred thousand people in harm’s way, the city was going to need a lot of them.

“This is the evac zone,” Teitelbaum was saying, and Diane saw that he’d conjured a map of the city in the air above his datacloth and painted a part of it red. “You’ll be bringing people to the shelters. I don’t have the assignments, but once you get up there and they patch you into the net, they’ll tell you where to go. You know where we keep them?”

She did, and that was a dismissal. Back on the floor, knots of other people were moving out as they got their marching orders, on their way to stand up the field hospitals and evac shelters, load supplies on the motor-wagons, or help the sanitation crews manhandle the debris-removal machines. Diane walked past them – through them when she had to – to a back hallway, the ancient freight elevator at its end, and the roof.

The roof platform was dotted with four-winged Dragonflies in the green and white of the City Reserve, with a parapet shielding them from the worst of the wind and rain. A few other people, evidently on the same list Diane was, were pre-tripping their ‘thopters. One of them raised a hand to acknowledge her arrival; she returned the salute, found the nearest free one and did her own checks as quickly as she could.

Then she took the controls, and the Dragonfly leaped into the storm.

#​

She climbed fast and climbed high. The leading edge of the eyewall had reached the city now; the wind speed gauge read eighty miles per hour, and in these conditions, she needed height so that a sudden downdraft or crosswind wouldn’t smash her against a building or into the ground. She found an updraft and rode with it into the midnight-dark sky, fighting to keep the ‘thopter steady as rain slashed across the windshield and storm-tossed tree branches struck it from the side.

It’s like sailing, her first instructor had told her a long time ago. You’ll get where you’re going a lot faster if you use the wind than if you fight it. And a Dragonfly’s wings could be adjusted more finely than any sailing ship. Diane put the AI pilot on backup – it wasn’t made for conditions as chaotic as this – and caught the feel of the wind with the sureness of thirty-five years of flying. Her hands moved instinctively across the controls, taking in a wing here and bending one there, changing the wing speed, steadying the ‘thopter amid the maelstrom.

She keyed the net. “Six Four Four outbound.”

“Roger, Six Four Four,” came an answering voice a moment later. “We’ve got you patched in. We’ve got an evac for you in West Rockaway. Sending the coordinates now.”

It took a few more seconds for the assignment to be painted on her map, but she had already turned south and begun searching for a band of wind she could follow. For the first time, she noticed the lights of other Dragonflies, dancing in the air above the city like lightning bugs. She swung west briefly to catch a favorable wind and saw other lights, white and steady this time, from the roof-domes of Manhattan’s towers.

She remembered her customer and the storm-pendant she had made – had that only been two hours ago? – and wondered if she was watching the Dragonflies from one of those domes. The people at that party are getting an even better show than they’d hoped for, she thought, but then, to be fair, unless they’ve been called up themselves. Everyone not already in an emergency-service job was on at least one reserve list, even if only for auxiliary labor. Some of the guests in those roof-domes would have left early. Maybe Diane’s customer was now wearing the pendant as a good-luck charm in a field hospital or out on a repair crew. I’d say a prayer for her if I knew her name, Diane thought, and said a prayer anyway for everyone out there.

The ‘thopter was on a southwest heading now, approaching the salt marsh and the inlet to Grassy Bay, the winds high but steady. Diane could see the scattered lights of the Rockaway peninsula on the other side of the bay, and beyond them, in the far distance, a shadowy barge towing a replacement breakwater into place and the moving lamps of a repair crew on another jetty.

Suddenly there was a much brighter light – a flash that seemed almost to come from underwater – and the barge was listing badly and drifting toward shore. A bomb? A mine? Evidently the six bombs the police had found weren’t all of them, and Diane wondered again how anyone had got them past both human and AI security. And I hope that barge is unmanned.

But there were more immediate things to worry about. She was over Rockaway now and took the Dragonfly down to five hundred feet, scanning for the house she was supposed to evacuate. The air was alive with other ‘thopters, some in City Reserve colors and others in those of the police or fire department, darting down to make their rescues and back up into the storm.

An alarm sounded and she saw that a house just below was illuminated on her windshield map; it was her turn to dart down. This low, the ‘thopter swayed and danced in the crosswinds and she fought to hold it to its course. As she did, she saw that the storm surge had already overtopped the seawall; the streets were under what looked like three feet of water and rising fast.

She hoped she wouldn’t have to land there. Dragonflies could float, but the thought of picking up evacuees while the ‘thopter was being tossed by both air and water was daunting. And fortunately, this evacuee knew what to do. He was on the roof, a bearded man of forty, a bag of necessities under one arm and a young daughter sheltered in the other. She touched down in the shelter of the parapet, and both of them jumped in.

“Anyone else?” she said.

The man shook his head. “My husband’s a cop. He’s probably up there with you.”

“Fair enough.” The Dragonfly leaped into the air again. Diane looked back and saw that the girl was staring out the window in fascination, seemingly without fear of the storm. The man wasn’t doing nearly as well.

“They’re saying it was the Humanity Preservation League,” he said, in tones that suggested he was trying to distract himself as much as inform Diane. “On the radio – they’ve claimed responsibility.”

That makes sense again, in a sick way. The Humanity Law that the city had passed the year before, recognizing as human anyone with genetic stock from the genus Homo, however altered and no matter combined with nanomachines or biomechatronic parts – had made it a target of the more extreme anti-allohumanists. But Diane had never imagined that they would – or could – mount an attack like this…

She couldn’t think too much about that now, though. A tree trunk whipped through the storm, dead in her direction. She dove under it, praying that she could do so fast enough; an instant later, she felt the wet slap of branches and leaves on the Dragonfly’s fuselage as the trunk passed just overhead. The child in the back screamed in delight; her father said nothing, but his white face and clenched knuckles were eloquent.

“Don’t worry,” Diane said. “We’re almost there.” And at that very moment, her map lit up with the location of the evac center, on the Brooklyn side on higher inland ground. She let the AI pilot guide on it while she concentrated on the crosswinds, and then the Dragonfly was down.

“Will you take me back home?” the girl asked.

“I think we’ll take the subway,” her father answered; he thanked Diane and got down from the ‘thopter. He looked ready to kiss the ground.

“Six Four Four light,” Diane told the net, taking to the air again.

“Got it, Six Four Four.” It was a different dispatcher this time. “We need you to go to Coney Island. We’ve got an injured worker on a storm drain maintenance crew, needs a pickup. Sending coordinates.”

“Roger.” Coney Island was less than two miles from where Diane was, but she’d be flying through crosswinds practically the whole way. What followed was by far the worst flight of the night; the storm became turbulent and chaotic as it flowed around the Gravesend arcology, and her only warning of downdrafts was the sight of debris being flung to the ground in front of the Dragonfly seconds before the same would have happened to her. She would wonder later whether she should have taken that as a premonition.

At last the shoreline lay ahead, and the green linking light of her destination. She would have to land on the street this time, and she made a careful descent, checking the water levels and looking for someplace safe and sheltered.

She had just found a landing site when the bomb went off.

It came from the very maintenance tunnel where she’d been sent to make the pickup. It wasn’t a big bomb, not by the standard of the ones that had taken out the breakwaters, but the tunnel entrance channeled the blast upward. It spun the Dragonfly sixty feet above and tossed it into the air, and then the wind smashed it down. There was no time to fight; the cabin filled with foam, and the ‘thopter caromed off the side of a warehouse and hit the ground hard.

#​

The first thought to flash through Diane’s mind was that she was alive. The second was that foam or no foam, it hurt like hell. The third was that now there would be two people to pick up.

The foam was dissolving and draining as it was supposed to do after impact, and Diane tried moving her limbs; all of them answered, and nothing seemed to be broken. She was a bit groggy and would have a collection of bruises, but overall, she was lucky. At least, she thought, by certain standards of luck.

“Six Six Four down,” she said. If the comms were working – and wasn’t that a happy thought? – the dispatchers would pick up the signal and send someone to get her. In the meantime…

She could wait. Or she could go to the tunnel and see if she could still help get the injured worker out – no, she ought to do that. If nothing else, she could report back on the condition of the tunnel. The dispatchers would want to know.

She unstrapped and climbed out of the Dragonfly slowly, feeling the shock of cold water on her legs as she lowered herself to the street. The water wasn’t as high here as in Rockaway – more of the breakwaters in this section must be intact – but it was still two feet deep and concealed an uneven surface beneath. She was by the wall of a pumphouse about a hundred feet from the tunnel entrance and she kept a hand on it for support as she pushed into the wind and rain.

The entrance door was blown to hell, but the steps down were still there, and there was a railing to hold onto amid the rushing water. It was three feet deep when she got to the maintenance level, and it was rising steadily; the grill that opened to the storm drain was clogged, or maybe the drain itself was. An alcove, partly sheltered from the blast, held hoses, pumps, drills, borers, and other tools of the trade. The passage to the maintenance catwalk would probably be in the other direction, and it was… but when Diane trained her pocket-light on it, it was filled with rubble. The bomb had collapsed the passage. The workers were on the other side.

Getting that guy out just got a lot harder. And it would get harder still when the access room flooded. Bad enough that the rescuers would have to drill their way through, but if they had to do it underwater…

They won’t take very long to get here – there are enough reservists called up that the dispatchers aren’t triaging. But “not very long” might not be soon enough.

If there were something she could do… there was no way she was shifting that rubble herself, but some of the borers in the alcove looked usable, and as a reservist on callup, she had the emergency access codes. Fire one up, point it in the right direction…

And risk collapsing the rest of the ceiling, maybe the part the maintenance crew is standing under? There wasn’t any way to know which parts of the rubble might be unstable, which ones might bring the whole place down when they were moved…

Or maybe, Diane realized suddenly, there was.

She still had her jewelry tools. Including the one that mapped nanotubes – the one that found pathways through wire and ceramic that wouldn’t compromise their integrity. She’d never imagined using it on something this size, but they said it could find a path through anything.

There was only one way to know. She set the size parameters, pointed it at the rubble, waited while it analyzed the material – cement and steel rebar – and took images; she didn’t know whether they were thermal, sonic, X-ray or all three, but they seemed to satisfy. This will make a hell of a necklace, she thought, and then, all at once, the pathfinder sounded completion and a projection of the rubble appeared above it. The image was an eerie green, with a twisted path marked in red: the safe route through.

From there, of all God’s miracles, things worked. The emergency codes worked. The borer worked – it lifted itself from the water and took the pattern. It lined up, dripping, on the tunnel entrance – above the water line, though maybe not for long – and began its work; it was remarkably fast for equipment that must have sat on the alcove floor for fifty years, and it was only a minute before it fell silent.

Now, Diane had to get herself across. The borer might have cut a tunnel, but it hadn’t smoothed the surface; that was good, because it gave her handholds to pull herself inside, and bad, because it left the rubble rough and sometimes even jagged. She wasn’t more than a foot along before she was sure she wouldn’t get to the other side with all her skin, and by the time she was halfway, she was quite sure.

It was only eighteen feet, though, and soon enough, she saw what was on the other side. A catwalk stretched into the gloom along one side of the fathomless cavern of the storm drain, ending at another collapse about a hundred feet away. Two maintenance workers were still trying to clear it; the other two, a man and a woman, knelt beside a prostrate figure with a bandaged leg lying on the platform. All of them were drenched from the water pouring through the drain, but at least they were in no danger of drowning in it; the catwalk grill let it pass to the depths of the holding tank below.

Of course, drowning isn’t the only peril. The catwalk had partly detached from the wall, either in the initial collapse or the subsequent explosion, and it creaked ominously when Diane set foot on it. A few feet farther on, the grill had broken through, with jagged pieces of steel pointing downward into a twisted hole.

Diane just about had time to take in the scene when the woman on the catwalk – a Mohawk whose family might have been in construction trades for two hundred years – looked up and took in her presence. “We were wondering what all that noise was,” she said, and her face, careworn as it was from the events of the last few hours, had a hint of a smile.

“They sent me to pick him up,” Diane said, nodding at the man on the floor. “I’m not in the best circumstances right now, but there’s about four feet of water in the other room and rising. Do you think we can get him out?”

“I don’t know. Jim’s leg isn’t broken, but he tore it to the bone when he stepped through the catwalk. I’d hate to drag him through that tunnel.”

“I don’t think we have much choice, Sophie,” said Jim, his voice drawn but clear. “If we don’t get out now, I don’t know when we will. Wrap a few more layers around my leg and I can make it.” He grimaced. “I hear they got good doctors in those field hospitals.”

Sophie still didn’t look as if she liked the idea – Diane could hardly blame her – but she also realized there weren’t any better options, and she nodded. “Nnamdi! Xiomara! Drop those tools and let’s get Jim into that tunnel. One in front pulling, one behind to keep his leg clear.” She turned back to Diane. “Why don’t you go first and help lift him out on the other side?”

Something about Sophie’s voice commanded instant obedience, and before she could really think about it, Diane was in the tunnel again feeling her way back. After what seemed much too long a time, she was in the anteroom again; a moment later, Nnamdi came out backwards with his arms locked through Jim’s shoulders, and together, they lifted him and guided him the rest of the way out.

Xiomara came through next, then the man whose name Diane had never learned, and Sophie last of all. They could almost float Jim at this point, and the water did make it easier for them to carry him all together.

“Ready?” asked Sophie.

“Yes,” Diane said, but then, “wait.” She’d felt a couple of loose pieces of rubble at this end of the tunnel, and on a whim, she reached in and took them – a chunk of rebar and a piece of cement that had worn unaccountably smooth. If she was going to make the tunnel into a storm-jewel, she might as well do it, and two were as easy as one.

And then it was time – it was well past time. It took all their strength, even with the railing to anchor on, to pull Jim up the stairs against the rushing waters, but after that, they only had to fight a hurricane, and it got easier. They made it to the downed Dragonfly and did their best to fit into the cabin; the ‘thopter might be crippled, but at least it was warm.

“Six Six Four to base,” said Diane. “I have the injured worker and the maintenance crew, but the ship is down. Do you read?”

For a moment, there was silence, but then a voice crackled from the other end. “We read you, Six Six Four. We sent someone to look for you after you lost signal.”

“We’re gonna need two. Do you have my location?”

“That’s negative. We lost you when you went down.”

“You will in a few seconds.”

Sometimes, thought Diane, the old ways are best. She pulled the flare gun out from under the seat, leaned out of the cabin, and fired three flares into the storm. And a moment later, the dispatcher said, “we got you, Six Six Four. Two incoming.”

And two did come. Sophie and Nnamdi lifted Jim into the first; Diane took her place with the others in the second. She felt the leap into the air, reached by instinct for controls that weren’t there, and then remembered she was a passenger and settled in for the ride.

Diane wasn’t a good passenger. She’d never been one. She felt uncomfortable in a ‘thopter without her hands on the controls, and she had to keep fighting the impulse to tell the pilot what to do. After a while, she thought it best to close her eyes and just listen. The pilot had the radio on, and she hadn’t had a chance to listen to the news since the whole thing started; the newsreader’s voice was soothing against the wind and rain, even if the words he was speaking were not.

… 62 confirmed dead in the first terrorist attack on the city in thirty years… hundreds being treated for blast and storm injuries… police believe that all bombs have been found… unprecedented callup of 200,000 City Reserve members…

Yes, Diane thought, I think I know that part pretty well.

… 91 percent of people in the evacuation zones have reported safe or been taken to shelters, rescue efforts are ongoing…

It’s ongoing all right, thought Diane. It would be ongoing for her in fifteen minutes or so – they’d have a shower and change of clothes waiting at the field hospital, maybe a hot chocolate, and then they’d send her out in another Dragonfly. Nine percent to go.

…This attack will not deter our city, a voice was saying – Diane took a moment to recognize it as the mayor’s. We will continue to be a home to all humanity…

And then the Dragonfly landed, and she realized they were at the Red Hook field hospital and that the other ‘thopter had touched down just before.

The stretcher crew was getting Jim out of the other Dragonfly already; they must have been waiting. With a shock, Diane realized that her son was one of them, but she had no time to call a greeting before they hustled their patient inside. They let Sophie follow, but motioned the others to wait where there was room.

“What should we do?” Nnamdi said.

“I don’t know,” Xiomara answered. “Go dancing?”

The answer wrenched a laugh out of Diane for the first time in hours. Maybe the storm parties were still going on; maybe the famous underground clubs were open, but getting there from here wasn’t happening. There certainly wasn’t a dance floor in the space off the main entrance that had been made into an evac shelter, and she was only interested in finding that change of clothes and shower.

But she never found out where they were. Before she could go further into the shelter, she heard a voice calling “Mom!” and saw Roger running toward her, still in scrubs. Someone must have told him I was here, she thought, and reached out to embrace him; only after did she notice how alarmed he was at her torn clothes and the condition of her face.

“You’ve got blood on you and cuts all over,” he said. “Someone’s got to take a look at you.” Without brooking dissent, he took her hand and led her across the partition to the field hospital, shouting for a doctor.

The nearest doctor came running and examined Diane right where she was; peering into her eyes, palpating, moving her limbs, taking her blood and loading it into a portable nanny reader. “Nothing broken or torn,” she said after a moment. “Some internal bleeding, but the nannies are taking care of it, and they’re not reporting any organ damage. You’ve got a minor concussion and you’ll look like a Chandrasekhar painting for a few days, but nothing lasting.”

That was what Diane had figured, but it was good news all the same.

“Even so, I think you’re done for the night,” the doctor said. “No sense taking any chances.” Diane protested briefly for honor’s sake, but her heart wasn’t in it and the doctor could tell. Her fingers flickered above a datacloth, opening Diane’s callup file and marking it “MEDICAL RELEASE.” “I’ll call a cop to take you home. And you” – she turned to Roger – “are going with your mother. You’re released too.”

It was a measure of Roger’s concern that he didn’t protest at all.

#
​

“You look like you’ve been through a war,” said the cop outside. He looked like he’d been through one himself, and he looked inordinately grateful to just be driving someone home.

Neither of them, or even Roger, had much to say during the ride; down Ninth, over the bridge, and into the canal at Ennis. The police car’s wheels retracted when it entered the canal and it skimmed the water the rest of the way to Diane’s house. Here, in a place sheltered from the storm, the water seemed unnaturally calm, and the cop easily kept the car steady as she got out and onto the sidewalk.

Home. A door, a light, someplace warm and dry where she could stay. And a shower that was far too long delayed.

“Should I make dinner, Mom?” Roger asked as Diane headed upstairs.

“Have you eaten?”

“They gave us food at the hospital.”

“Then don’t worry – I’m not really hungry. But make a hot chocolate, with caramel. And remember to make two.” Roger was a good kid, but sometimes he cared so much he forgot to take care of himself.

She waited for his acknowledgment and went the rest of the way upstairs to the shower that was just off her bedroom. She ran the hot water and began lifting her shirt over her head; she wondered what was so heavy in the pockets, and then remembered the two pieces of rubble she’d taken from the maintenance tunnel. She let the shirt fall back and held them in her hands, the cement in one and the rebar in the other, weighing them, imagining how she might shape them.

Storm jewels, she thought. Tomorrow she would touch them with the pathfinder, and they would branch in a million million directions.

 

[Jonathan Edelstein]

Portugal
July 1808

Art: Dora Hathazi Mendes​

The fort on the hilltop was the oldest thing Paulo had ever seen. It loomed in the gathering twilight amid a stand of pines, its walls in partial ruin, weathered enough to seem one with the boulders on the hillside. Paulo knew how people aged, how ships aged, how crops aged; the fort had stood long enough for stone to age.

The lessanos in Bahia – the imams of Paulo’s youth – had said there were things older still, that the Indians had built cities and temples long before the coming of the Prophet. But if there were such things, the jungles had claimed them. Paulo had never seen one.

“There should be a trail,” said Silva, the sergeant of the twelve caçadores who’d marched all day from Guarda and come to a halt beneath this hill. The fort was their destination. Centuries of soldiers had guarded the mountain passes from that tower, and they would be the latest. Portugal had risen against France, and though the great battles would be fought further south, someone still had to give warning if the French tried to enter the country this way.

There was a trail – Moreira, the forester’s son, found it. It ran straight for a while up the gentle lower slopes, and then became a switchback among the pines and boulders. From there they climbed single-file, Silva and Moreira in front of Paulo and Costa, the sailor, just behind.

“Damn this pack,” Costa said as the trail became steep; he was a small man, and he also liked to complain. Paulo said nothing, but he also felt the weight of his pack and musket. He had never fired the musket in anger. He had been a soldier four weeks.

Silva looked back and hissed for silence, and they climbed, hungry and tired, to where the trail ended just below the hillcrest. The gate of the tower stood before them, its arch partly crumbled, darkness beyond.

“Moorish work,” Silva muttered, and made the sign of the cross. So did several of the others. Even this long after the wars, the Moors were still regarded with superstitious dread, enough so that Paulo had learned to hide carefully the fact that he was a Moor himself. Half his fellow soldiers were praying men and he prayed when they did, but he prayed in silence, never mentioning Olorum-Ulua the Creator, never taking the black meteorite that was his Kaaba from his pocket.

Dread or not, though, the Moors were no longer in the fort, and the caçadores filed inside. Beyond the doorway was a single, circular room with the remains of a ladder leading upward to the roof, another rotting ladder leading down a dark hole to a cellar, and a single large stone that was embedded in the ground and had been cut to form a rough table.

“Moreira! Abacar! Go cut some wood,” said Silva. “We need to make another ladder so we can keep a good watch. No, two of them.”

Paulo took the spare axe and followed Moreira outside. In the moonlight, the traces of Fulani ancestry on Moreira’s face – his grandmother’s family had been sailors, and Portuguese mariners had been visiting Africa for a long, long time – stood in relief. Paulo wondered how many of the other caçadores realized they likely had Moorish ancestors themselves, and not only from the long-ago occupation. He could see which of them might have had Kongo forebears, who had a trace of Igbo blood, and who might have some of the same Fula ancestors he did. But that, too, wasn’t something he could mention out loud.

Instead, he and Moreira found some pine saplings for the ladder poles and another from which rungs could be made, and they worked quickly together as they’d become used to doing in the past month. They brought the wood inside to where others were waiting with hammer and nails, and threw their own packs down to reach the food inside.

“Do you see the table?” asked Costa. Someone had lit a candle while Paulo was outside, and the guttering flame illuminated wilted flowers and small polished rocks that had been placed in a hollow on the tabletop.

“The girls come here to pray for husbands and babies,” Costa said, and laughed. He wasn’t one of the praying men – he liked to say that church was for women and that men should stick to the taverns. “Maybe they should pray to São Hilario. He’s the one who warms up all the girls who die virgins, isn’t he? Makes the nuns proper brides for Christ.”

A couple of the others laughed along with Costa. Most didn’t. One shouted that it was blasphemy; he looked ready to fight, and he wasn’t the only one. In the north, people fought over things like that. Paulo tensed; he had no side in a fight between the priests’ Catholicism and the peasants’, but any dispute over religion might end up involving him, and then it would be all against one.

Praise God, though, Silva didn’t want a fight over religion either. “Shut up, Costa,” he said. “In fact, why don’t you put up that ladder” – the poles and rungs had been nailed together now – “and take the first watch. Come down when I say so. Maybe I’ll leave you up there all night.”

Costa looked ready to argue, but Silva was six foot two and had shown that he wasn’t afraid to use his fists. He took the ladder, leaned it carefully into the hole, and disappeared onto the roof.

“And you, Abacar,” said Silva – maybe he too realized that in this moment, Paulo was a possible source of tension. “Take the other ladder and a candle and take a look in the cellar. See if anything’s down there that we can use.”

Paulo obeyed. It was clear, though, that no one had used the cellar in decades, maybe even centuries. As Paulo moved the candle around the room, he saw rusty tools, rotting chests, scraps of what might once have been clothing, chicken bones, a broken sword. There was nothing here that would be of use to anyone.

But there was writing. Someone long ago had carved “MARIA” into the walls – the name of a wife or daughter, or maybe of the Virgin. There were other names and a few short phrases; Paulo had learned some of his letters in his years of merchant sailing, and he could make out a few of the words although not enough to make sense of them. And there were also words written in another way entirely.

Moorish writing. The lessanos had told Paulo that the Holy Koran was written in that alphabet; one of them, who’d visited the sugar plantation where Paulo had grown up a slave, had had a necklace inscribed with a passage from that very book. But the lessano couldn’t read it – he hadn’t been able to read at all – and Paulo, too, couldn’t tell whether the Moorish words carved in the cellar wall were holy scripture or the names of soldiers or their lovers.

He tried anyway. He brought the candle close and spent a few moments looking at the carvings, hoping that if he looked long enough, he could make sense of them. But neither Olorum-Ulua nor any of his aligenum – the jinn – had any revelations to impart, and at length Paulo made his way carefully back up.

To his surprise, Costa was there too, and was whispering urgently to Silva. “There’s someone out there,” he said, “someone with a spyglass down on the road.”

“A Frenchman?”

“How would I know? All I saw was the glass. He was hundreds of yards off.”

Silva swore under his breath. “All right. Moreira, Abacar, Soares – come up with me.” He began climbing the ladder; one at a time, the others followed.

Above, the four men lay prone on the roof, out of sight of the road, and looked down through the holes in the crumbling parapet. Paulo saw no movement, heard no sound but the nightjars and insects – but suddenly, there it was. A glint in the moonlight, the unmistakable shape of a spyglass; Paulo saw it only for a moment, but there could be no doubt.

“He’s in the woods on the other side of the road,” he whispered. Silva nodded; he had also seen.

“Should I shoot him?” Soares asked. That wasn’t the absurdity it would have been from any of the other caçadores; Soares was a hunter born and raised, and he carried the rifle he’d inherited from his father. A soldier with a musket might have an even chance of hitting an enemy seventy yards away; Soares had already proven one day on the march that he could hit a target at four hundred.

But Paulo still shook his head. “It’s night,” he said. “Too far even for you, I think. And if you miss, he’ll know exactly what he came to find out.”

Soares bristled for a moment but then nodded. At the same time, Silva looked at Paulo sharply; Paulo had never spoken up this way before.

“Do you have any better ideas?” he whispered.

Paulo was silent for a long moment; he did have an idea, but he wasn’t sure how the sergeant would take it, and he weighed whether to speak. Finally he did. “You know I was a slave in Brazil, right?”

“Yes. So?”

“I know how they chase after runaways.”

Now it was Silva’s turn to be silent and weigh up what to do. He said nothing, but it was clear what he was thinking: that if Paulo was here rather than on a plantation in Bahia, he must have known the trackers’ ways well enough to make good his escape.

“All right. Come down with me. You’ll take four men – Moreira and Soares, and Carvalho and Sousa know the forests too. You’ll tell them what to do. I’ll tell them that whatever you say comes from me. But you’d better catch him.” This will be your first and only chance to gain my trust remained unspoken.

If so, then so. Paulo put a hand to his Kaaba stone and uttered a prayer: Olorum-Ulua, let me not forget what I have learned. And downstairs, he became the teacher. He made the other four men black their faces and hands with charcoal – “now you can look like me,” he said – and made sure no place was left unpainted. He blacked up the musket barrels too, theirs and his own. He tied down or discarded anything that might rattle. And last of all, he took off his boots and looked pointedly at the others’ feet.

A short time later they began making their way down the trail, keeping low, moving slowly. Paulo stopped sometimes to go to the ground, watch and listen. The man with the spyglass was good, but not quite good enough; Paulo could see that he was still there, and as they got closer, he saw more movement from further back, the shape and size of a horse.

An officer – who else would the French have sent to spy out these roads?

He raised his fist above his head, calling for a halt. “He hasn’t seen us yet,” he whispered. “When we get to the road, you go around and in back – if he runs, make sure he doesn’t get to the horse. I’ll go straight at him.”

The next moments were as tense as any in Paulo’s life, almost as if he were a runaway slave in the jungles of Bahia again. But this time he was the hunter, not the quarry; this time he was in command. He watched Soares and Carvalho slip across the road; he waited for any sign of awareness from their prey; finally, when he was ten seconds past sure he’d waited too long, he signaled Moreira and Sousa, leaped to his feet and charged.

After that it was almost too easy. The man with the spyglass – he was a French officer, in the full uniform of a major – had no time to react. He really had been unaware, and he was just starting to reach for a weapon when Paulo, and then the other two, knocked him over. Paulo punched him to keep him off balance and seized his hands, holding them so Moreira could tie them with a length of rope. Behind, Carvalho and Soares had untied the horse and were leading it back to the road; Paulo jerked the officer to his feet and motioned for him to follow.

He’d expected that he would have to half-drag and half-carry the Frenchman back to the fort, but once he’d recovered from shock, the officer walked willingly enough under his own power. In fact, he was almost cheerful about the situation. “I hope the army learns its lesson,” he said in fluent Portuguese. “Make a professor into a spy, and this is what you get.”

“You’re a professor?” Paulo asked. In the moonlight, the officer’s face was weathered and his hands callused from the reins; they were not a professor’s hands.

“I studied in Paris before the revolution, and I taught for a while too, until all the wars. I studied literature – the Arabic poets, can you believe it?”

Paulo came to a sudden halt. “You speak Arabic? Do you read it?”

“Of course! When I was with the Emperor in Egypt and the Holy Land – then I had something useful to do. And a more comfortable place to do it in – a palace in Cairo, a serai in Jaffa, even a command tent was more congenial than these mountains. And the dancing girls were certainly more congenial than you gentlemen, meaning no offense.”

In spite of himself, Paulo laughed.

“But I am remiss in not introducing myself. I am Berrien. Your officer will take my parole, I am sure?”

“There is only a sergeant. He’ll decide what to do.”

Berrien kept up the stream of conversation all the way up the trail. He was more talkative than any three of the caçadores, telling stories – most of which Paulo judged to be outrageous lies – about his campaign with Napoleon in Egypt. He fell silent only when they came to the top at last and Paulo led him through the gate.

It felt different to Paulo, walking through the doorway this time. It was different to be returning as a leader of men, a captor with a prisoner. It was different to return to cheers, to Silva’s slap on the back and call of “well done,” and to know he was a trusted man. Even when Costa called out that São Hilario would save a girl for Paulo because of this, that was different from the way Costa had bantered with him before, and besides, the lessanos in Bahia had promised him houris if he followed the ways of the Prophet. He felt triumphant; he felt as he imagined drunkenness might be.

But there was still something else, something shameful. After a moment, Paulo realized what it was; he’d used the tactics he’d learned from the slave-chasers in Bahia, and when he’d caught Berrien, he’d felt a chaser’s triumph. He felt shamed that something he’d learned from such men had brought a sense of victory. But if he had these skills, shouldn’t he use them for the men who were now his comrades?

His thoughts were interrupted by the soldiers arguing over what to do with Berrien. A couple wanted simply to kill him – wasn’t that what soldiers should do to the enemy? But the others shouted them down. The others understood instinctively that there were rules, and that there would be penalties both earthly and divine if the rules were broken. “Kill a prisoner and his ghost will haunt us all our lives,” Costa said, and his dread was real.

“No, we won’t kill him,” Silva said. “That would be murder. Two of us will take him to Guarda tomorrow and he can give his parole to the officers there.”

“Should we question him at least?” asked Moreira.

Silva thought for a while but then shook his head. “I’ve known officers. He won’t talk. We’ll keep him in the cellar tonight and take him to Guarda in the morning.” He turned to Paulo. “You caught him, Abacar – take him down.”

Paulo motioned to Berrien and helped him carefully down the ladder. “Take some bread,” he said, “and this canteen is half-full of water. It should last you until morning.” But then he held his candle close to the wall and asked Berrien the question that had been in his mind since the French officer had said he could speak Arabic. “Can you read this?”

Berrien leaned in closely; he hadn’t expected the question, but now he too saw the letters carved in the wall, and considered them with a historian’s fascination. But he shook his head. “That just says ‘Ahmed,’” he said. “A soldier’s name, no doubt.”

Paulo moved the candle. “This – a soldier’s name too?”

“No, not this.” Berrien was laughing. “It’s a complaint about stale bread – it condemns the baker to hell. Soldiers’ complaints were no different in the days of the Moors, I see.”

The candle flame flickered on another part of the wall, where a longer phrase was inscribed. “And this?”

“This – yes, this is something different. ‘Knowledge without action is arrogance,’ it says. A maxim of the Imam Shafi’i, I believe. One of your Moors was a devout man.”

Costa wouldn’t have liked him, Paulo thought, but that was nothing the French officer would understand. There were other things he wanted to know about that Moorish soldier, but Berrien wouldn’t know that either, and he wasn’t even certain what questions he should ask.

“Good night,” he said instead, and after Berrien repeated the unexpected benediction, he climbed back up the ladder and pulled it up behind him.

The flames were guttering out in the main room of the tower, and half the soldiers had gone to sleep, their snoring drowning out the low voices of Silva and Carvalho as they played at dice. Paulo found an unoccupied section of wall and lay on his back, using his pack as a pillow. He closed his eyes, letting the sounds of the room go out of focus, waiting for sleep. But sleep would not come.

Knowledge without action is arrogance. Maybe that was the answer to the shame he’d felt earlier in the night. If he had knowledge, if he had a skill, it was arrogant not to use it.

But how should he use it, if he wanted to use it justly? Maybe that was knowledge too. What did Paulo know about the justice of the world? He knew the grace of Olorum-Ulua and the teachings of the Prophet. And, he realized, he knew evil – he knew slavery.

He knew that. It would be arrogance not to act on it. And the other things he would need to know before he could act?

He put his hand on his musket, which still had never been fired in anger.

He would learn.

 

[Jonathan Edelstein]

We know Paulo Abacar the Liberator. We know Paulo Abacar the poet, the soldier, the statesman, the visionary. We have his writings, his battlefields, his histories. But Paulo the man is an enigma. We know nothing of his childhood, not even the name his parents gave him. We know so little of his youth, his maturation; it is almost as if he sprang forth fully formed that January day in 1835 when the Malê of Bahia rose against their masters.

Many people have tried to puzzle out this enigma – Paulo was a seeker and he inspired other seekers, and some of them sought him. But they can do no better than guess. We know the things Paulo made, but we do not know, and we will never know, the things that made him.

But at the end of the day, do we need to know that? A man is what he has made, and we see what Paulo Abacar made in everything around us. And I know, I see, nothing that he hasn’t made.

For me – I am Paulo Abacar’s descendant, and for me, he made the world.

Laila Abacar (1959-2074)
Coordinating Representative of the Union of Nigeria
Speech on the 200th anniversary of the taking of Sokoto
April 2040