Andrea Hairston is a Professor of Theatre at Smith College. She is the Artistic Director of Chrysalis Theatre and her plays have been produced at Yale Rep, Rites and Reason, the Kennedy Center, StageWest, and on Public Radio and Public Television. The flash of spirit in West African and Caribbean performance traditions has offered her much wisdom and inspiration. She has received a National Endowment for the Arts Grant to Playwrights, a Rockefeller/NEA Grant for New Works, a Ford Foundation Grant to collaborate with Senegalese Master Drummer Massamba Diop, and a Shubert Fellowship for Playwriting. Since 1997, her plays produced by Chrysalis Theatre, Soul Repairs, Lonely Stardust, and Hummingbird Flying Backward, have been science fiction-themed. Archangels of Funk, a sci-fi theatre jam, garnered her a Massachusetts Cultural Council Fellowship for 2003. She recently completed a speculative novel, Mindscape, excerpted in Dark Matter: Reading the Bones, an anthology of African diasporic speculative fiction edited by Sheree Thomas and published by Warner Books in 2004. “Double Consciousness,” a story from Mindscape, will appear in Future Females of Colour, edited by Marleen Barr, to be published by Ohio State University Press in 2005. She is currently working on a new speculative novel, Exploding in Slow Motion.
Griots of the Galaxy
Andrea Hairston
The Griots of West Africa are musicians, oral historians, praise singers negotiating community. They stand between us and cultural amnesia. Through them we learn to hear beyond our time and understand the future.
The first thing I knew, I was thigh-deep in swamp scum, strangling a silver and white Siberian husky with ice eyes and dead fish breath. I liked dogs, vaguely remembered being one once, and would have let him go, but he was trying to eat me. I pressed through matted hair and squeezed his windpipe. He gagged, startled out of attack mode by my newfound vigour and the rapidly healing wounds on my neck, wounds he had just made. We wrestled in a jungle swamp, more Amazon than Florida, drenched in a chemical haze. It was high noon, but the trees gobbled up ninety percent of the photons. It might as well have been evening, except for the heavy heat hanging in the mist. A husky could die in weather like this. What was he doing here?
What was I?
He stood on hind legs and looked right in my eyes. I didn’t know how tall I was, but that seemed like a lot of dog to me. From the smell of my ripped pants, the body I was in had already lost control of sphincter muscles once – which explained why I didn’t piss myself looking at his bloody fangs and intelligent eyes, like people’s eyes. What had this body ever done to him, I wondered?
He smacked his six-inch paws against my arms, clawed at my breasts, and tried to shake my hands from his throat, but I didn’t feel it. I was pumped from the drop into this body and I had him. That dawned on him too, and with a panicked look, he stopped squirming and whimpered, a tortured sound I didn’t want to hear. My new heart banged against ribs and backbone, flushed nerves and muscles with potent stimulants, and obliterated my fledgling compassion. When you dropped into a life, the story of the host body, its impulses and desires, were almost impossible to resist. A body historian, working the soul mines of Earth, but I wanted to resist. What the hell was wrong with me?
The husky lunged. Turning his momentum against him, I plunged his head and shoulders into the water and grunted a cheer through clenched teeth. His struggle splashed swamp in my face. I snorted stagnant muck out of my mouth and nose. It tasted like dandelion and beet greens, like my past lives breaking out on a new tongue. Panicked, I swallowed down this old history. My skinny brown forearms trembled with holding 150 pounds of dog under water, and I wondered just how long my drop-in power surge would last. I’d been wrestling the husky less than a minute, but I dimly recalled entire lifetimes that seemed shorter. I was suddenly terrified:
What kind of life was it going to be in this body?
The lapse of killer concentration cost me a chunk of leg flesh and my balance. The husky could have chewed through bone, so I was lucky. Still, it hurt like hell, and I roared a mezzo-soprano glissando that startled me out of pain. The diva holler was definitely one of my former voices breaking out, and no way should that be happening. Body historians never let the past take over; you were now or nothing.
No time for existential crises. Flailing under water, the husky banged into my wounded leg, and a blues holler burst from my chest. Another old voice. Loudmouth jungle fauna joined in, chattering and hooting like they were on my side. The dog thrashed up to suck in some air, his face just cracking the surface. My hands wanted to shove him back toward the bottom of the swamp, but looking at his soggy snout and mud-rimmed eyes, I couldn’t do it. The body I was in had already died once, and I could drop into another dying somebody – if complex enough and within range – risky, but the husky’s only life was on the line. I summoned the divas back to my mouth. Singing syncopated rhythms in a minor mode, I forced the hands to let go of his neck. His ears shot up. My blues aria surprised him as much as me. He gulped down air, shook the water out of his fur, and without blinking, watched me scramble away. I couldn’t stop singing until the song was done. He cocked his head at the last notes, like he knew the melody. Brown saliva dripped off his tongue as his ears went flat again. I hauled butt for dry land when I saw a plan working behind his eyes.
The mucky bottom grabbed my feet and pitched me against two dead dogs. Buttocks and hind legs dangled in the algae soup, head and shoulders slumped on the slimy shore. Dobermans. I vaguely remembered them trying to eat me too, but I’d managed to waste them before it came to that. They had holes in their heads, and blood was attracting the bugs: crawlers, fliers, and swimmers. I recoiled, glad I hadn’t dropped in as a Doberman attack dog. I recoiled again, this time at myself. You didn’t get to choose a life; you only had minutes to find what was available. A true historian should be glad for any dying body to ride. Every story offered precious insight.
The dog lowered his head and extended his snout. I knew huskies were quiet, not barkers or yappers. They put everything into the growl. Still, feeling the rumble from his chest forty feet away surprised me in my bones. I glimpsed a pistol just beyond the dead Dobermans, easily within reach, but I hollered out another aria and squashed the urge to grab it. Staring into the husky’s eyes, I let the melody fade. This body for his life, it seemed fair.
We both gulped shallow breaths. I ran my fingers across the smooth skin on my neck and remembered the husky ripping out my jugular. Body historians were serial amnesiacs, conscious only of our griot’s creed and the Edges, the sliding in and out of a life. I had twice ten thousand Earth years of Edges. That and a griot’s loyalty to the soul mines. Dropping in for a quickie then suiciding out to somebody else was a total waste of resources. Griots rode a body as long as possible. In the soul mines, you collected lives; you didn’t sacrifice yourself to save one.
The husky came at me like a flash of silver lightning. Dropping out was going to hurt like hell, but I was prepared. I focused on his eyes, not his fangs. The husky was quite beautiful, a strange presence in this jungle world, a special Edge for my memory tatters. . . . At the last second, with astounding speed and grace, and despite my spark of rebellion, this body reached across the dead Dobermans, grabbed the gun, and shoved it down the husky’s mouth. The pistol barked five times, and he was gone before I could think, before I could struggle with my new self to save him. I yanked the pistol out of his mouth, and the corpse slid down my belly into the water, ice eyes gone dull gray, jaws frozen in a deadly grin. My right hand was shaking, but my gun hand was still. I threw up the meager contents of my stomach and tried for a few tears. Nada. This body didn’t want me to care about dead huskies or Edges of pain. It swallowed my distress almost before any emotion registered, and directed me toward its Mission. I shivered.
When the husky corpse floated against the other dead dogs, I stopped waiting for it to come back to life and crawled ashore. Now or nothing. I stuffed the pistol in my pants, squeezed water out of my spongy hair, and headed for a tangle of trees and vines. My drop-in power surge had faded. Solid ground wobbled under my legs, even when I stopped moving. The trees threatened to turn upside down and stick the sky under my shaky toes. Blood and white froth spurted out of the puncture wounds in my leg, and one arm looked liked mincemeat. Tatters of a taupe cotton shirt stuck to blood and muck on my belly and breasts. I ripped off a piece of pants that wasn’t swampy or piss-yellow and tied it tight around the leg wound. I tried touching myself all over to feel who I was, but I was too raggedy. Settling down in a tree root throne, I watched thin spears of sunlight bounce off my shark navel ring and cut through the haze. Glints of metal among the branches made me blink and squint.
The trees had eyes, and they were watching me. Mechanical worms with camera heads wriggled up branches into blossoms and clumps of foliage. I should have checked them out. Instead I convinced myself I was paranoid, hallucinating, and what I needed was to sit still and gather myself, not chase spooks. Dizzy from the heat, sore and itchy from sweat, bug bites, and dog gouges, I didn’t feel excitement for a new life, just fear at a moral chasm opening before me. At each drop-out, specific memories from a finished life slipped beyond consciousness. Body historians dropped into a new life with old lives repressed, except for the Edges, the first and last moments, or there’d be no space for new experiences. Damned serial amnesia was working my last nerve – getting me all caught up in patterns I didn’t remember – or why else would I be too lazy for paranoia and morally outraged over a dog killed in self-defense?
Because at a certain point, you get tired of being a gig slut.
I couldn’t tell if this thought was griot creed, from past lives, or from my current body. One thing I did remember – if you got too full of life, a historian could unravel into chaos, into a jumble of nothing. That wasn’t going to happen to me. I made myself listen to the birds singing squabbles and love songs. Occasionally I heard a war.
Sharp mechanical sounds clashed with the nature music. Bells and whistles mashed together in nagging bursts. My new life was calling. I had to get on with it. Body historians, griots of the galaxy, we didn’t diddle ourselves in jungle paradises, we inhabited flesh to gather a genealogy of life. We sought the story behind all the stories. Collecting life’s dazzling permutations, however sweet or sour, was our science, religion, and art – nothing nobler in eternity. I peered in the direction of the nasty noise. At the south end of the mucky water where the trees thinned out, I saw a leather jacket, one sleeve inside out, flung across a signpost. The sign read: “Biohazard! No Trespassing!” in English with a vividly drawn skull dead centre.
Damn!
Everything hurt. I’d sat in the tree root throne for quite awhile. Stiff muscles and joints protested as I stood up. At least the ground stayed still and the sky didn’t fall. I limped along the shore to the sign and jacket. A cell phone jangled in the breast pocket. I didn’t want to answer, especially not knowing who I was or how I wanted to deal. And it seemed like I’d been hating phones for over a hundred years, but you got to start somewhere.
“What’s up?” I said in full-throated mezzo irritation.
“If you got the hot sauce, I got the stew,” a male basso said in Standard American English. I couldn’t fix a more specific point of origin.
“Diablo sauce,” I said without thinking. “Sets your mouth on fire.”
“You get the recipe?”
“Yeah.” I wanted him to mention my name, what I was supposed to be doing, where I was, but somehow I knew it wasn’t the sort of operation you discussed on an open line.
“Twenty-six hours or we lose the bonus.” His voice tickled the backs of my knees and under my arms. “You’re almost inside the white circle. How you holding up?”
I looked at the bloody rag around my leg. Claw marks on my breasts raked over old scars. My hands slid across muscular thighs and buttocks, narrow ribcage and broad shoulders, to a big head sitting on not much neck. I tried to fill the sculpture of this woman. Something in me resisted, not her exactly, but. . . . Fingertips glided down high cheekbones, broad nose, and full lips to a blunt chin. The supple skin felt good. A middle-aged firebrand in great shape, scarred and battered here and there but. . . . “Nothing significant.”
“You sound . . . tired.”
Did he hear something in my voice or was this just code? “It’s the heat, mostly.”
“After the dinner rendezvous, can you handle an explosive situation?”
“I can handle anything, as long as the food’s good.” That seemed the right amount of bravado for this body. “How’s the rest of the menu?”
“Out of this world.” He chuckled, and the connection went dead.
I felt abandoned. Rubbing my cheek against the phone, I checked through the jacket pockets and found a few ammunition clips for the pistol, a purple beanbag lizard, a fountain pen/flashlight, two packets of extra-strength Frizz Ease, crushed sunglasses, menthol eucalyptus cough drops, and a slip of fortune cookie wisdom:
The Gods who were smiling at your birth are laughing now.
My lucky numbers were two, three, five, seven, eleven, thirteen – and somebody had scrawled “plus five backward.”
No wallet, no name, and a pathetic bunch of random clues. I dumped one packet of Frizz Ease into my hair and worked my fingers through tight knots. The frizz didn’t ease. Feeling vigilant at last, I scanned the trees for mechanical worms with camera heads. All I saw scurrying along the branches were furry black millipedes squirting stink gland poison at ants. A bug, smudge of mold, blade of grass – they were too simple for a griot drop-in, yet still compelling. The front-runner ants got a blast of lethal funk, curled up into balls, and fell out of the trees. The other ants kept marching forward. The millipedes’ stink glands would be empty soon. I smiled. An eye trained on movement, a scientist hooked on bugs, an assassin with murder on the brain – how to read the signs of life and make a story? That was a griot’s challenge. That’s what I loved: being in a life, discovering the story, no matter how rough the ride.
The dogs had ripped my shirt to shreds, but putting on a jacket in heavy, no-breathing heat seemed mucho loco. The sleeves were several inches too long and an odd combination of black coconut oil and seaweed smells permeated the lining. The bugs having a party on my skin finally drove me inside the leather – at least until I knew what I was doing.
Surveying the area, I realized the swamp was actually flooded land in the oxbow of a stream, not a proper swamp. An endless relief of trees and water in every direction offered no perspective. Which way was the white circle and the damn rendezvous? From the marks in the ground at the Biohazard sign, I could see where my body had fought with the dogs. I traced the footprints to a narrow path that led north through the trees. At a flowering tree split by lightning so that it stooped over the path with innards exposed, I found a brown leather knapsack that matched the jacket. The straps were caught in scorched branches and dead vines. Here the footprint trails diverged. My host and the husky had dashed down the path until the two Dobermans jumped out of the bush, then we all hightailed it to the water.
Thick white slugs, gorged with wounded tree flesh, oozed through black cracks in the bark, like pus. Looking at the charred trunk and boughs made old scars on my breasts and thighs throb. I stroked the mangled tree and disentangled the knapsack from split branches. It weighed almost forty pounds – heavier than I expected. In the top compartment I found a clean tee shirt, packets of dried fruit, which I gobbled down, and Soya Power Bars, which I saved for later, despite how hungry I was. Three bottles of Fluid Mineral Recharge, bug juice, antiseptics, and bandages made me feel well-prepared. The bug juice smelled like millipedes’ stink glands. Remembering the curled-up ants, I sprayed myself liberally.
A thrill danced up and down my nerves as I pulled out a plastic map and an electronic compass. No aimless wandering – I had directions. I longed for a mirror to glimpse what I looked like this time. I took off the jacket and pulled on the tee shirt, which was way too big, then cleaned and bandaged my arm and leg. I splashed antiseptics on the rest of my wounds and squirmed at the sharp pains. One bottle of Recharge was all I’d allow myself before looking over the map. No global context, just local frames of reference – this was a map for somebody dealing in secrets. I wanted to find my way out of secrets. The oxbow and the path I stood on were marked in green. An arrow pointed beyond a “circle of death” and a “forest of ancestors” to “the final shore.” I lingered over the map, memorizing its details and imaging the journey before folding it carefully and tucking it into my pants.
The main compartment’s zipper snagged on threads from the seam, and after a few half-hearted tugs, I almost gave up. For someone hungry for clues, I was procrastinating, because I just knew. . . . One sharp tug ripped it open and revealed thin metal cylinders bundled in groups of twelve, each held together by what I guessed were timing devices.
A backpack of explosives with fancy detonators.
I didn’t have to follow this body’s terror story. I could rebel, invent a new scenario or. . . .
A sound behind me, something splashing in the water, made me spin around, pull the pistol out of my pants, and throw myself to the ground. My raw skin screamed, but I ignored that and the acid sweat dripping into my eyes. In the distance, water sloshed against the swampy oxbow shore, vines swayed against one another, and a breeze in the treetops made spears of sunlight dance through the mist. Shadows played in shadows. The pistol shook in my hands and tears dribbled down my chin. I didn’t want to go back and hunt for spooks. I wanted to move forward, get on with the Mission – mine and hers. Griots were storytellers, whatever the story. The detonators and explosives made my heart race. Now or nothing: experience this life, gather its secrets, or in the chaos of memories, cease to exist. I heaved the pack onto my back and started walking the route outlined in green on the map. If I only had twenty-six hours, I shouldn’t waste time. There were worse things than being a terrorist, and I’d been them all.
I tried not to think, just walk the trail. No underbrush kept me occupied, no wild animals came out to challenge me. All I had to do was put one foot in front of the other. Maybe it was the heat and swaying vines or the chemical haze that set me adrift, I couldn’t say. My feet were still on the spongy ground, but I was lost in bits of memory – from the Edges.
I’d dropped into a tree once, somewhere cooler than this jungle. The first Edge was a sapling, shaken, uprooted, and stripped bare, then a canyon of memories too deep to reach, and finally I was a giant tree – nothing between me and the sky. I didn’t have eyes, but I could drink a trillion points of light and stroke out the right vibrations, red and violet vibrations that sent excited electrons dancing with new partners. A gigawatt blast of lightning surged through my body, shattered my woody spine, and set me on fire. Miles of roots smoldered in the dirt. I fell over and burned to death in a rainstorm.
So many fires and storms.
I flashed on a hillside battlefield pummeled by balls of hail. A master samurai had run an enemy through with a sword. I dropped in the body, and his death wounds healed before the samurai’s eyes. With hail cracking against my skull, I picked up a curved sword and swung it through the air at no one in particular. The samurai muttered a prayer and chopped off my demon head to make sure I stayed dead. He was safe. No griot could reclaim a body twice. We only got one dance.
“Yes, dance life!” an old priestess in a Sea Island village shouted. I can still feel her voice in my throat. “But if you trip and stumble, then sing life!” She danced down her gods, called them to ride her body, while she healed a sick child. Feet, hands, head, and belly moved to different beats, a polyrhythmic prayer that wore out her heart. With her last breath, she left her story behind, a blessing for the future. I dropped in, ready to ride clear, new flesh, but her last breath caught in my throat. She refused to leave, and we were stuck in one body – she at the edge of death and me on the verge of life. In the final moments, when I was on my way out, the priestess was still with me, a mad woman lost to herself, begging me to let her cross over, to let her be a song on the wind. Suiciding precious resources, I walked her into the sea, headed across the waves to the motherland, and the priestess blessed my future.
Even now, I was blessed with an ache of loneliness for her, for the healing we did: my cool hands on hot cheeks, on the soft heads of newborns pressing into the light; my strong hands clutching the dry fingers of an old man no longer afraid to die and grasping my granddaughter’s sticky fingers when she pulled me close to whisper the secret of the tiny bird we’d rescued. “Iridescent hummers are the only ones who can fly backwards.”
I stumbled, and the deep memory scattered. My brain was frying and so were my feet. The swampy smell was gone, and the sun blasted the blank earth from a white sky. Behind me the jungle was a thin swatch of black on the horizon. I pulled out the crushed sunglasses and cursed my laughing Gods. Not a sight, sound, or scent of life ahead of me. My nose and throat ached in the hot, dry air, and I could have used six bottles of Recharge. I scooped up a mound of white dirt, not sand. It blew away in my hands. A row of signs planted fifty feet apart warned me to turn around: “Biohazard! No Trespassing!” Still in English, but this time with an atomic symbol at the center. I wondered how contaminated I was.
To the west, where the jungle reached a claw into the white desert, an exploded van still smoldered. Déjà vu brought me up short. The person, the body I’d been before my current terrorist self couldn’t be far, couldn’t be long dead. Sifting through the fragments of my mind, I didn’t find an Edge with an exploding van story. When very full, body historians remembered distant Edges better than one or two lives ago. I made a Mission detour to check out the site anyhow. Pieces of the driver and melted gear spiraled out from the wreck. Naked dog prints crisscrossed human boot shapes. Half of a purple beanbag lizard stared up at me with empty eye sockets. I stuffed the blind survivor in a pocket with the unscathed one. My lips trembled. Rescuing a half-dead toy made no sense.
A coconut-sized ball of mahogany fur tugged a chunk of human gore toward the trees. It paused to gnaw and chew. I didn’t want to watch this meal, so I consulted the map. According to it, this expanse of white dirt should have been rainforest for many more miles. Not a root, bone, or fragment of life – whatever happened since the map was drawn had killed even the soil. Using the compass, I got myself back on the map’s green path, moving across dead earth toward the ‘forest of the ancestors.’ I slipped a cough drop in my mouth and took a swig of Recharge. In the whiteness, I thought I would go blind.
The cell phone jangled in my breast pocket. When it hadn’t stopped after ten chimes, I pulled it out and answered. “What’s up?” I whispered, like somebody was spying on me.
“Renee, I got a message for you from deep time.” A female answered, American contralto with inner city chop. She was breathless and hoarse. “Are you ready?”
So maybe I was Renee. “Who is this?”
“If you’re alive again.” She talked on top of me in a gurgling voice.
“What?” I walked faster. This barren landscape made me an easy target.
“Don’t answer, just watch out for the landmines at the Edges of things.”
“I think you’ve got the wrong. . . .”
“Two, three, five, seven, eleven, and thirteen. Memories spilling out? Are you tired of dropping into lives and not committing to them? It’s our choice, you know.” She talked on top of me again, wheezing and chasing her words like they’d get away from her before she got everything said. “You’re bouncing across the desert, a baby in your mother’s arms, reaching for her breast, when she thought her little boy was already dead from whatever war does to babies. She couldn’t bear to leave your tiny body behind and now you’re alive again, a miracle in her arms. You feel her joy spurt hot milk onto your tongue. A taste you’ll never forget.”
Indeed I remembered a stream of sweetness and salty sweat from under her breasts, mixed with the tangy thrill of being a miracle in someone’s arms.
“Of course you drop into the mother, she’s so close, so deliciously complex. What griot could resist her story? The drop-in heals her shattered flesh and then you’re running again, clutching a dead miracle against throbbing breasts.” She paused. “You’re a terrorist now, Axala.”
“Axala?” I stopped so quickly, my muscles cramped. How could she know me when I didn’t?
“A righteous murderer in a war that never makes the news. Griots of the galaxy dance in the dark. How long can we run around with dead miracles and do nothing? Amnesiacs – most of who we are, we don’t even know. What good is the story behind all the stories if you never really get to live fully? Never your story. . . .” The woman struggled for breath. “What am I saying? Look, I’ve gathered the griots in the forest for the rendezvous with the mother ship. . . . Follow the signs and don’t get blown up by mines. Across the water and you’re home.” She’d talked herself out of a voice, just a gurgling wheeze.
“Who are you?” I walked a circle in white dirt. “How do you know. . . .” A single note droned in my ear. A dead line. “Shit!” I said to the phone and turned it off. Rendezvous with the mother ship meant life on Earth was almost over.
My body didn’t know enough to be scared of a voice from deep time, praise singing my former lives, questioning my future ones. For the Mission, my muscles ignored the weighty backpack and wounded leg, and shifted to top speed – as if racing through clouds of white dust would save me from a fucking griot minefield or human bombs buried in the ground. Part of me was dead certain there was nowhere to run except into a trap, but I ran until. . . .
Crouching on the white expanse, sparkling like dragons with diamond-crusted backs, I saw purple bean bag lizards, red felt tongues dragging in the dust. Hundreds of them, a stop-action collage, crawling in my direction. Was this toy parade a joke? I considered stepping on one, but couldn’t bring myself to crush its cheery face into the white dust. Moving carefully through them, nothing exploded under my feet. Markers. In a minefield, what more could you ask?
The barren plain slipped into a valley. I ran down to a skinny stream. Fractals of white dust swirled out from crumbling banks, occasionally clouding the middle. The opposite shore of the fast-moving water was brilliant green. In one bound, I crossed out of the circle of death back into jungle. Standing under a tiny waterfall tributary, I swallowed a stream. As I shook the water out of my ears, I thought I heard panting and footsteps behind me, but of course when I turned to look, nada. Somebody chasing me in the white waste land would have been visible for miles. Fear made phantoms of wind and dust. I walked on.
Under the trees, I closed my eyes and savoured the cool darkness, the pungent odours of life and decay, the branches and vines drumming with the breeze. It felt like family gathering me into her bosom. After wandering for millennia, I was home. When I opened my eyes, a lanky man with a shaved head and a few days growth on chiseled cheeks stepped out of a vine-covered hole in an enormous trunk. Without a word, he yanked me inside the tree cave, put his rough hands over my lips, and nodded toward the direction I’d been heading. Squinting through a hole in an abandoned nest, I saw a squad of soldiers hacking through dense new growth 100 yards away. Somebody’s private army and I knew they were gunning for us.
My companion and I crouched in the dark of the tree trunk and watched the squad cross the stream and walk up the side of the hill toward the minefield. We sat cramped against one another for several minutes, sweat and breath mingling, then explosions from the minefield knocked us on our faces.
“Dead,” he sighed, “And we didn’t even have to kill them.” I recognized his voice, the dinner-rendezvous man. He patted the knapsack. “You’re packing a lot of heat. Perez made the transfer. She give you the map, the code?”
I nodded, looking at myself in his deep-set eyes.
My mind flashed on another woman warrior blowing up her lover and herself in a tight spot like the tree cave, only outside was white hot, not cool green. She’d sacrificed herself to save her community from. . . .
“Hey, don’t worry!”
I’d mumbled something upsetting. His hands hovered close to my cheeks. They exuded a damp heat and made the hair on my face stand on end. I closed my eyes, relaxed into his caress, feeling myself under his rough fingers. He jerked away from me.
“What’s the matter?” I said without opening my eyes, pressing my face into his hand, my body against his.
“What are you doing?” He tried to pull away from me, but I sensed he didn’t want to.
And I wouldn’t let him go. “What do you think I’m doing?”
“It’s been . . . a long time.” He was trembling.
I slid my hands along his smooth scalp. “Too long.” The whisper of growth on his head made my finger tips ache. I sucked in a breath of him through nostrils burned and blistered from the white heat and chemicals. Even that didn’t dampen the flow of passion.
“You miss my hair?” His voice tickled the inside of my thighs.
“I miss all of you.” I undid his shirt to feel my face against the wiry hairs on his chest. His skin shivered and puckered under my lips.
He lifted my face toward his. “Look at me, Renee.” I felt the words more than heard them, his chest vibrating mine, notes so low as to resonate backbone and heart. “Look at me.”
A deep ache I didn’t understand, something from his and Renee’s past threatened to override my passion before I felt it. I opened my eyes slowly, not wanting to blur this moment with tears, Renee’s tears or twice ten thousand years of. . . . “We don’t have time for. . . .” He trailed off.
“I am looking at you.” A weathered, moody face with high cheekbones, full lips, and prominent chin. For an instant, Renee’s memories came so vividly to me.
The smell of jasmine incense filled a cramped apartment. An elevated train smashed through the night just beyond the window, shaking the floorboards under our naked bodies. Before the disaster in Juba . . . I ran my fingers through thick black hair that fell below his shoulders. Sharp brown eyes smiled at me from under bushy brows raised in question.
“Is this what you like? Tell me. I want you to feel happy.”
And Renee could say nothing to him. Too shy, too uncertain for words.
“You can still see all that?” he said, holding back tears.
I’d been talking again, without knowing what I was saying. “Of course.”
“Is this what you want?” His words moved through my skin and opened me up, like a voice from deep time singing my code. I was flooded with ancient memories.
I had a horse’s head, feet of a jaguar, leaves sprouted from my fingers, wings broke across my back, my mouth was in bloom, the kick of a machine gun bruised my ribs, I swallowed a harpoon, and sang with elephants on the stage of a great hall.
“I want your best self,” I said and fell into him. Delicious images exploded across my body, yet I wasn’t overwhelmed. He didn’t mean to set me off. I was not who he expected at all, not his Renee. I was Axala, a griot from the stars, come for the story of life, now in the body of a dead terrorist. And who was he? What was his story? A new beard covered his coppery skin like morning frost. My fingers slid through the hard little hairs up to the lines that broke apart the edges of his eyes. I didn’t care if this moment was a lie.
“Are you sure?” he murmured. “You’re hurt.” His fingers were tentative, careful. “There’s no time. . . .”
“We’ll steal the time. This is what I want.”
His lips nudged mine open. My body knew exactly what to do.
We snatched long moments out of nowhere and then –
“I’m not your Renee.” He was still inside me when I said this. I felt his shock and embraced it. “I only remember bits and pieces of your Renee.”
I flashed on Renee and her man, his long hair pulled tight against the skull, his face smooth. They were flattened against a rough wall, waiting for a blast in the village beyond, then they ran along a broken walkway.
“Blowing up shit . . . the only thing I ever got a chance to get good at,” Renee shouted.
“Not the only thing,” he argued.
“And I was gonna do something noble. . . .” Renee muttered as they dropped into dung and mud for a second explosion. She closed her eyes on a stream of blood.
“Are you having one of your episodes?” He tried to pull away from me. I was stronger than he expected. “We don’t have time for you to snap out.”
What did he mean? He had offered me his best self. I wanted him to know my story. Body historians didn’t usually reveal themselves or get involved, certainly not with pure natives. Just grab the dead miracles and run. Well, not any more.
“My name is Axala.” I released him. “I’m from. . . .” I didn’t remember my specific griot life, before Earth. Damn serial amnesia. “Light-years from here. . . .”
“Stop it!”
We stuck together where I had started bleeding again. I winced as he moved out of my body and rolled against a tree root arching up at the entranceway.
“You can’t snap on me, not now, not on this job.” He jerked his sweaty clothes back on his body. Clots of dirt clung to the hairs on his chest. “We could retire after this job.”
“I’d like that.” I wanted to wipe my blood off his stomach, do something, anything, instead of waiting for him to curse me out for playing games, going insane, fucking with him.
“You’d consider retiring, just living our lives, putting the shit behind us?” He sounded desperate.
“Look, I don’t know how to be straight with you.” I pulled on clothes. Cool, slimy bugs crawled across my ribs. “Some of Renee is still in me. She loves you.” Stalling for time, I brushed away the bugs. They made Renee’s skin crawl. “Despite . . . whatever . . . has happened between you.”
“What hasn’t happened? I don’t know how much more I can take.” He pressed himself further into the darkness of the tree, but I could still see his eyes, like the husky’s eyes watching the wounds on my neck heal. A freak-show glare, foam at the corners of his mouth. I turned away, before he started howling.
“What I’m saying is . . . I know I can handle the memories. Everything I’ve been.”
He shook his head. “But I can’t handle all that.”
“What do you mean?” I dug my fingers into the dirt. The head of a whale breaching on a rocky beach, the hands of a samurai clutching a sword, the feet of a Maasai cow herd running from demons, the oxygen breath of an orange tree. . . . I was lost.
“We don’t have time for this.” His voice found me. “Cut it!”
I moved close to him, felt his breath on my cheeks, smelled his sweat. We had the same smell now. That brought me back for a moment. “What’s your name, tell me your name,” I pleaded, wiping my blood off his stomach.
A stream of gibberish, a hundred tangled languages, gestures from around the world, from sequoias, bald eagles, deep-sea divers, hostages, and nuns, all broke out of me and I was nobody, flailing inside a tree. He grabbed my shoulders and shook me like an hysterical woman who could be jerked back to reality.
“We have a job to do, remember?”
I found Renee and held on. Twice ten thousand years of history wouldn’t swallow me.
“I didn’t screw myself.” He stopped shaking me. Even in my anger, I could taste his best self. “I want to hear your name.”
“All the fucked up things that happened to you aren’t my fault, Renee.”
“I know that.”
“For years, you don’t even let me touch you.” His grip on my shoulder softened. “And now in the middle of a job . . . you come on so strong. . . .”
I dragged him down in the dirt. It smelled of us, of lovemaking. “I just want to know your name, hear you say it.”
“I lost my name after Juba . . . somewhere in the goddamned desert.” He rubbed his hands against sweaty pants. “We don’t have names, causes, just a price tag. We’re gig sluts now. Not freedom fighters like in Juba, just terrorists for hire.”
“Gig sluts?” I got a face full of sticky spider web and clawed it away. “Are you saying we’re not committed to anything?”
“For a long time now.” He spit web from his lips also. “From the Juba fiasco on, I did every crazy revenge thing you wanted.”
“You don’t think we’re going to make it today, do you?” Inside the tree was getting claustrophobic.
“What difference if we do?” He stood up. “It just goes on and on. . . .”
“Yes, yes, but it doesn’t have to.” I crawled over to my knapsack, to the griot Mission, a praise song to life. “You may be pointless. I am not.”
“Oh, yeah? You’re fine now?”
“On top of the world.” I couldn’t tell who was talking anymore. Axala, Renee, an angry tree. . . .
“When you lost yourself before. . . .” He picked up his bag. “The amnesia thing after Juba, after they . . . after they. . . .” He couldn’t say what they had done to me in Juba.
“It’s not your fault,” I murmured, sucking mucous down my throat and scratching my nose. “Let’s get out of this hole. Do the job. I can’t breathe.”
He blocked my way. “In Juba when they jumped you, I hid in the back of the plant, where they’d stashed the stolen weapons. Listening. I didn’t do anything!”
“What could you do?”
“They had guns, six of them. But I didn’t even. . . .”
I tried to wriggle past him. “So?”
“Don’t interrupt me, let me say this!”
My mouth clamped shut.
“You never let me say this.” He clutched at several stringy vines.
“Say it.” I set my face hard to listen to what Renee didn’t want to hear from him.
He was spread-eagled against the vine mass, silhouetted by pink twilight. “They had you. I was afraid. I should have done . . . anything. But I didn’t want them on me too. I thought, please god, don’t let her tell them I’m here, don’t let them find me. You were screaming and screaming, but you told them nothing, then they gagged you, and I prayed, don’t let them hurt me. Praying not for you, still just about me.”
The scars on my breasts and thighs throbbed with old pain, but I couldn’t see Juba, the story he told. Renee was suddenly desperate. She wanted to know. I balled up my fist and pounded his chest. “Tell me what I forgot.”
“I can’t,” he whispered, fighting tears.
“You’re all the memory I’ve got.”
“I don’t know what they did.” He hung in the web of vines.
“Tell me what you know or I swear to god, I’ll blow us up now.” I pointed my pistol at the explosives in the knapsack. Several vines snapped from his weight and he staggered toward me. I pointed the pistol at him. For a moment Renee wanted to shoot him down like a dog, but I didn’t. “Tell me.”
“After they worked you over I remember you screaming my name . . . like a prayer, but you never betrayed me.” He stared at the gun until I finally lowered it. “For a time you forgot everything, but if somebody touched you, it was the rape happening again.” He looked far away though I was close enough to smell his fear. “Doctors said you might never remember. It was a miracle you got out alive.”
“You call that a miracle?” My voice was hollow. I felt like a spirit unhinged, floating above this body.
“Your mind came back without those memories, but you couldn’t stand to be touched – until now.” He shivered. “I would have told them anything, but you. . . .”
He waited for me to say something. He pleaded with his eyes, with all the tiny muscles of his face for contempt, forgiveness, something. I teetered at the edge of chaos, vertigo claiming my senses. “I gotta get out of this hole, now.” I pushed through him and the vines. The air outside was a welcome relief. I drew myself back into Renee’s flesh. The sun had disappeared behind distant hills. Birds sang love suites and battle sonatas. I took out a Soya Power Bar and chewed at it furiously.
After a few moments he emerged from the tree, mumbling something about the Perez woman and the damn Mission. I forced myself to listen. “Blowing up a bunch of trees. She could’ve done this bizarre shit herself.”
Shop talk. I could do that too. “Perez is a biologist or something. These trees are old souls, a couple thousand years even. Maybe Perez didn’t have the heart to blast millennia of living into nothing.”
He stared at me. “You sounded like her just now. That was exactly her little speech, when she hired us.”
I shrugged. “Good memory.”
“You weren’t there.”
“You told me.”
“Right. But you sounded just like her.”
“Your mind is playing tricks on you. How could I sound just like Perez?” Unless I’d been her, but I couldn’t share that suspicion with him.
“Of course.” Methodically, he pulled explosives out of my pack, fussed over detonators, and every hundred feet buried a bundle in the roots of a giant tree. He didn’t ask for my assistance and I didn’t offer. So much history behind and between people, one moment was always a nasty echo of another time, most of who you were already scripted. That was Renee. Axala was outside of history, dropping in for samples, but not really taking part. Not committing to the lives she became. More of a gig slut than Renee could ever be. And sick to death of it.
“Are you setting us up?” He looked up from the last detonator, hand on his pistol, eyes frantic. “You and Perez, setting me up? Some kind of final revenge?”
“What are you talking about?”
He stared at me, fighting with something inside himself. I touched his hand. “Sorry. You’d lay down your life for me, I know that. I’m just being paranoid.” He brushed his lips across my damp palm and headed for the dense new growth beyond the trees. “You got the map to ‘the final shore’?”
“Like I told you.” I started after him, but stumbled over roots and fell back against a tree. The impact knocked the wind out of me, slapped my brain against its skull, and I lay a moment plastered against smooth bark, seeing stars.
“What’s the matter? Come on!”
I couldn’t speak or move. The tree wouldn’t let me go. It snagged me in a magnetic field, lined up my electrons, and started generating current. Energy rushed from my toes out through the fuzzy ends of my hair, like a lightning bolt sparking into the ground. The tree was a body historian, this rain forest, a jungle of galactic griots, roots intertwining underground, branches interwoven above, and their fields all lined up. Perez had gathered all the griots in the forest! I was in the home grove, the bosom of family, connected to deep time, praise singing life. All of our griot experiences, a polyphony of memories rushed through me. Together the trees and I made meaning and broadcast twice ten thousand years, the incredible story of life on Earth out to the stars. Imbedded in this polyrhythmic history, I remembered everything, the story I’d become. Axala of Earth.
Renee’s man watched my hair catch fire and my hands and feet turn white-hot. I saw myself in his eyes. I heard his voice rumble out a warning, a prayer, I didn’t know which. His body was a blur of impulses – his legs tearing away from me, his hands reaching for mine. I wanted to share the spectacle of Earth with him, despite the danger, but I couldn’t move the inches it would take to touch him. I was caught in deep time, with all the ancestors walking through my body, making sense of the present moment from so many gone by. I felt the mother ship leave the shores of our birth world to wander through star systems and collect the genealogy of life in the galaxy. We body historians were a Diaspora of ghosts living only in borrowed bodies, collecting the wisdom of others, slaves to their appetites, lost to ourselves. After twice ten thousand years on this watery outpost, we were so full of life, the past broke out all over us. Earth had made us aliens to our former selves. We had no desire to be spirits in perpetual exile; we longed to make Earth our story.
I heard the reply of the mother ship, as it gathered the polyphony of memories we broadcast. Renee’s man grabbed my hand. I risked his life and my griot existence and channeled our field into him. The praise song we made of his world passed through his body. He knew my story. What he made of griot longing, our love, I couldn’t say, but his mouth was in bloom, wings broke out on his back; he sang on the stage of a great hall surrounded by elephants and sequoias, and he carried me to safety:
In Juba, Renee’s man, a coward who had abandoned her, who trembled in the shadows while six terrorists violated her, fell on his face at the first explosion. The terrorists scattered past him, grabbing more weapons and screaming. After the second explosion he crawled toward Renee. When he reached her, she was barely breathing. He scooped up her broken body and carried her through the desert to safety, certain he was too late. Certain she had died in his arms. Everybody said it was a miracle she got out alive. And he was a hero.
A terrible ache for cowards and heroes passed amongst all the griots. We grieved for the lives we had collected, for the Earth beings we had studied and become. Embodying wisdom was our art, science, and religion. Yet endless new adventures on distant planets no longer excited our old souls. After eons of wandering, of losing ourselves again and again, we griots longed to make these beautiful and painful memories, this particular world, this Earth home. How would we bear a final death and the desolate flight to yet another star after being ripped from the body of our beloved Earth?
Large projectiles slammed into the tree. Its crown crashed into neighbouring trees, slicing away branches and vines. Renee’s man cried out in pain. In an instant the magnetic web connecting the jungle of body historians was broken, and the light went out of my eyes. My hair fell in ashes to the ground. I slid down the trunk, my limbs locked, my backbone frozen. I thought I would die, once and for all.
“I can’t move,” I murmured.
Renee’s man covered my body with his. A charred mercenary charged down the path from the minefield. She hadn’t stepped on a beanbag lizard and exploded. Falling branches knocked a massive weapon from her hands and ripped flesh from her face. She pulled out a handgun.
“Jay Silver Feather,” he whispered in my ear as he stood up to run toward her. His name. My stiff body rolled against his feet, and he stumbled down to one knee. He fired several shots and my ears stopped hearing, but the lock on my muscles eased.
This body for his life, it seemed fair.
I was trying to stand up in the line of fire when bullets smashed in one side of his chest and out the other. He fell down on me again in a river of blood. The rainforest screamed, all the griots calling his name. I couldn’t move.
“Jay Silver Feather,” I whispered. Cold and shivering, he put his arms around me, around his Renee. “Your great-grandfather was a Seminole, a black Indian, and he told you swamp stories, about stealing slaves into freedom, hiding with trees, making new world communities from the swamps to . . . across the border, and never letting white folks catch you at anything. He called you his Silver Feather, because you had a spirit that nobody could beat down. I remember your stories, even if I didn’t live them. Your spirit is safe with me.”
Jay, his eyes a burst of light, smiled at me, Axala/Renee, and then his head lulled against my shoulder. I listened carefully to his last breaths. The mercenary stood over us with a gun at my temples, telling me to get up or die on the ground, because it didn’t matter to her. Perez wanted us alive, but it didn’t have to be that way if I had some crazy cowboy notion.
“My limbs are paralyzed.”
Perez hired Jay and me, Perez hired her. Neat. Another gig slut like all of us. I couldn’t even hate her. “Kill me here. Kill me now. Get it over with.” I started singing a Seminole song for Jay.
“Stop that singing.” She kicked Jay’s gun out of reach and stepped back to consider my twisted limbs. “Paralyzed? Cut the crap. A trick like that won’t work on me.”
It was a huge branch, but she never saw it coming. She never had time to be shocked by death. A few inches to the right and the bough of the tree would have flattened me as well. But I was so lucky.
Jay’s body leaned against my chest, the fuzz on his head soothing my cheeks. I waited for him or the mercenary woman to come back to life. But the griot tree she had blasted was only wounded. There was no free body historian to drop into their lives – not enough luck for that. And then I wasn’t waiting for them to come back to life. It was too late anyhow. Sitting on bloody ground, separated from the griot family and no longer remembering everything, I didn’t know what to do. My eyes settled on the detonator in Jay’s bag, the one connected to the bombs nestled in our roots. Grief overwhelmed me, muddled my impulses. Maybe I should just blow up the forest of ancestors, and we griots could fly back to the mother ship and be done with Earth. That was Renee and Axala’s Mission, after all.
The husky found me sleeping on the ground between two dead bodies. He licked my face awake. A spark of energy passed between us, then he stepped back while I sputtered and wiped his doggy spit into my shirt. It was night. The moon was up, almost full in a cloudless sky. The chilly air forced me back inside the jacket. The husky grumble-growled, but didn’t frighten me. A griot spirit on his way to the rendezvous had dropped into the dog I shot. He was the shadow that had tracked me. Every body historian was present and accounted for. Perez had managed to collect us all. I reached out my arms, and the husky ran toward me, his silver hair and ice blue eyes easy to catch in the moonlight. Why couldn’t it have been Jay come back to life? I buried my face in the dog’s fur. A deep rumble in his chest soothed me. I pulled myself up and caressed the tree, hoping to re-establish a connection with the other griots. Nada. These crotchety old giants were waiting to see what I’d do since I could move again. They had shared their insights and feelings, written truth on my body. We were one story now, and the choice of ending was up to me. An endless quest or committing to Earth?
Renee didn’t want to go anywhere, but if nothing else, Axala would see where Perez’s Mission took us. I checked Jay’s watch. We had six hours. I drank the last two bottles of Recharge and scanned the map with my fountain pen flashlight. The dog looked over my shoulder, panting in my ears. I gazed into his intelligent eyes and wondered at the Earth lives he’d led. Dogs couldn’t talk but. . . .
The husky/griot guided me through the night to my destination.
The sun had been up several hours when I stood at “the final shore.” Other eyes would have seen only a shallow pond, a rocky hillside, and a plain covered by enormous satellite dishes, radio telescopes listening to deep space for extra-terrestrial intelligence. I knew they were soul collectors, ready to transport griots to the mother ship when I blew up the forest of ancestors. Cut off from other complex life forms by the lifeless white desert, no griot would be enticed by a dying body to stay on Earth. Shattering the tree bodies, snuffing out a trillion points of light would release all the body historians to the stars. The mother ship would catch us on a beam of light. An elegant plan. I should have rejoiced at the approaching rendezvous, but I felt listless, a sleepwalker waking up from a journey of bad dreams.
The husky stood on hind legs and tapped his nose against a portal set in the hillside. It rolled open, and he trotted inside. No private army prevented me from walking behind him. Inside was dim and cool: concrete, metal, and plastic held the jungle at bay. I could have been in any office/ science installation in the world. The husky led me through an empty security station to a door labelled “control room.” It was unlocked but the hinges wouldn’t budge. I squirted my last packet of Frizz Ease on the rusty metal, and the door opened with a touch.
The strong smell of black coconut didn’t surprise me, nor did the clutter of video monitors, computers, and receivers. A photo of a fifty-something woman with wiry grey hair, light brown skin, and high cheekbones drew me to what I surmised was the main workstation. The woman wore a leather jacket, carried a matching knapsack, and was hugging a husky. The back of the photo read: “Crystal and Max up North.” I sat down. Several purple lizards grinned at me from atop a coffee machine. Shells, seaweed, and green memo-paper with “From the desk of Dr Crystal Perez” were scattered everywhere. Her handwriting was unreadable except for EXOBIOLOGY in block letters. I crumpled up the notes and let my head drop onto the desk. Using biotech weapons and nuclear death, Dr Perez had corralled the griots of the galaxy into the forest of the ancestors, making ready to send us home.
The husky shoved his cold nose against my neck. I sat up. Beside me, a computer monitor blinked, asking for someone to press ESCAPE to execute or ENTER for abort. The program was labelled with the first six prime numbers. One simple key, ESCAPE, and I could blow the jungle of griots and twice ten thousand years of living sky-high. Jammed with poignant memories of Earth, we’d ride long radio waves back out to the mother ship. Dr Crystal Perez stared at me from snowy hills up north and waited. I turned her picture face down.
The phone in my jacket pocket jangled. I answered it after one ring. I knew who it would be. “Yeah?”
“Renee? Tell me you’re alive again. Tell me the numbers.” A hoarse, gurgling voice near death.
I didn’t say anything.
“Renee? Tell me you’re alive again. Tell me the numbers.” It was a recording, asking for the code.
When it repeated for the third time, I answered. “I’m alive again. Two, three, five, seven, eleven, thirteen.” The first six prime numbers.
Silence for a moment, like the machine was waiting for something else.
“Thirteen, ninety-two, thirty-two, ninety-one, seventy-one.” Remembering the handwritten scrawl, I quickly added the next five primes as backwards as I could.
The entire control room came alive, whirring and hissing. The husky banged his paws against the bottom row of monitors as a close-up from a videotape dated yesterday popped on.
“This is Axala.” The wheezing contralto spoke from Dr Perez’s body. Crumpled up by a smoldering van at the edge of the white desert, she recorded this message as life slipped away from her. “I don’t know what to tell you.” She sputtered. “A year into Crystal Perez and deep memories, not just Edges started breaking out.”
“A year? Deep memory started breaking out of Renee the first hour. . . .” I muttered.
“The griots were getting too full and . . . I thought I had it all figured out,” Perez/Axala continued.
“Oh yeah?” I walked from the desk over to the monitors to confront the image.
“None of the griots wanted to leave this planet, but that always happens. You leave anyhow.” Perez/Axala coughed and spit something out of the frame. “But even I couldn’t do it, couldn’t separate us from the body of Earth, couldn’t send us on our endless journey. I just didn’t have the heart to blast millennia of living into nothing.”
I gasped at the words I had spoken to Jay.
“So. . . .” The sun made her eyes look white. She closed them slowly and gathered her last few breaths. “So I hired Jay and Renee to explode me and the tree griots, and release us all from life on Earth.”
The map, the lizards, the guards blown up. An inside job to kill yourself and get back to the mother ship.
“Renee surprised me. Blew up the van before I was ready . . . when Max and I got out to pee. Max didn’t like that. Chased her down.”
Renee probably thought the good doctor would double-cross her.
“Perez’s body is almost finished.” Perez/Axala opened her eyes and squinted at something off camera. “And from what I can see, Max is chewing up Renee, so. . . .” She looked right into my eyes. “I guess I’m talking to myself.” Axala had jumped into Renee.
“Each body changes us. We are the sum of all the bodies we have joined,” I said out loud. “I’m not the same Axala that you were.”
On a second row of video screens, the husky lunged at Renee’s throat. The metal worms with camera eyes captured their fatal encounter from every angle. I switched off the screens just as he would have ripped her throat out.
“One last blast and we body historians are free to download the burden of Earth and start again.” Perez/Axala chased after her words, hoping to get everything said before it was too late. “You can release the griots and get to the mother ship or. . . .” She looked away from me, at the ruin of her body.
“Or stay. . . . And what the hell will that be?” I argued out loud with the ghost on the screen, with the body I had been yesterday. “If we don’t blow up shit and run away to the stars. . . . What the hell do we do here?”
“A great mystery. It’s up to you.” Perez/Axala fell against a purple lizard and her image exploded on nineteen monitors, but one screen froze on a close-up, as Axala dropped out of Perez and into Renee. I had never seen myself abandon a body, never looked back at a finished life, always rushing to the next body. . . . I switched off the monitors.
Jay’s watch had run down to a row of zeroes. Rendezvous time. The mother ship was calling. I stumbled back into the chair at Perez’s workstation. Max put his head in my lap, his chest rumbled, his eyes searched mine. My left hand hovered over ESCAPE – one touch would blast us to the mother ship. Two right hand fingers rested on ENTER – one touch and we were Earthbound. Paralyzed, I flashed on the forest of ancestors holding Jay and me, on hot milk flowing, humming birds flying backwards, Jay inside of me, and miles of roots holding up a mountain. After twice ten thousand years I wanted to do something impossible, something noble. Instead of chasing down infinity, we could contribute our souls to Earth. A blessing on this future, not now or nothing. The voice and the body and the history.
Axala of Earth.
ENTER