Azania

Nick Wood

––––––––

I’d never been very cold before—not until I headed into space. Deep space I’m talking, not a joyride to the moon. So deep, we go on and on, past suns and planets, moons and nebulae—deep, deep space, through the coldest of empty places that hang between the stars.

So cold, it penetrates our star-ship TaNK, infiltrating the dreams of my long sleep; for I see nothing of all we pass.

Instead, I lie encased in ice, too cold to scream.

For twelve years...

And still more.

It is time for the last lesson but thunder rumbles over the sound of the bell. I laugh and run, finding myself in a strange field, far from home and school. The ground is bitten red-rock dry and marked only by redder crumbling fragments of dried out anthills. No trees, no grass, no houses or sounds. Above me, the sky roils in with darkness and lightning sheets that spark my blood. I laugh and tilt my head backwards, flicking my hair so that it tumbles down my back. I close my eyes, opening my mouth as the wind sweeps in great water blasts that sting my face and lips. I suck greedily, as the dust churns to muddy rivulets beneath me, shifting my footing, muddying my feet. The warm water slakes my throat, turning cold and then, to ice. I choke, mouth frozen open, unable to breathe. I am pinned tight in a latticed cage of ice. I open my eyes. There is nothing else around me; nothing, till a flash in the darkness. I turn, but too late. The arrow pierces my right ear and bores into my brain. I can only gag on ice.

I wake shivering.

Above me, there is a large overhanging tree trunk. Frosty edges of the dream-cage melt around me and I track the blurred branch to the huge trunk and overhanging canopy.

Muuyo—the African baobab. The soft green leaves swirl and shake, always just out of my frozen reach. I struggle to stretch out painful fingers, searching for warmth in the green. But the organic patterns shift and reform, distant as stars, untouchable.

She watches me through the leaves, wearing the face of Wangari Maathai. Is it in identification with me that She is mostly female?

I sigh. So...

Not my Copperbelt home then, nor my old school.

Not even Earth.

Planet XA- I've lost the numbers in my cold, waking head-fog—or, as we prefer to call it, Azania. (A planet partially mapped by the African Union Robotic Missions with (just) breathable air and water and no known advanced life forms—a veritable waiting Eden).

The baobab branch bending and swaying above me, however, is but a digital shadow on our domed roof—a shape without texture, form without life.

Wangari, She smiles, with richly red lips: <Mangwanani, Aneni.>

“Morning,” I grunt, sitting up and casting a glance at grandfather’s rough, reddish-brown stone sculpture, dimly but decoratively placed near the screened window, as if keeping alien forces at bay.

Besides me, Ezi stirs.

I sign to She to keep quiet and swivel clumsily out of bed; bracing my stomach muscles for the pull of serious gravity. The room spins beneath the canopy of faux leaves and my feet fail to find floor.

Instead, my face, fists, and breasts, do, hands barely in place quick enough to protect my teeth.

I spit blood from a cut lip, concerned about one thing.

There is something in my ear.

It’s a faint tickle in the right ear, deep inside, but followed by a sputtering burst of popping noises, as if my ear is protesting and trying to expel something. Then a pain lances through the right side of my face and I grunt and clasp my ear.

I sway.

Ezi is starting to snore, low and rasping, as she has rolled onto her back. I watch her for the barest of moments, sealing the pain within me so that I don’t wake her, reacquainting myself with my old adversary.

It’s been many, many years—but, almost without thinking, I rate the pain five out of ten and akin to a bright blue candle burning inside my ear. I close my eyes to pour cooling imaginary water onto it, but it continues to burn just as brightly, just as painfully.

I’m out of practice, my spine now comfortably straight, even stiffened and dulled by the passing years. Pain pulls me back to thirteen again, my last spinal surgery sharpened by anxiety around my first period.

This time, though, there is no mother to hold me.

Instead, I need to see She in the Core Room.

Firstly though, I cover Ezi with the scrambled thermo-sheet to keep her warm. (Always, she kicks herself bare).

I manage the corridor with my left hand braced against the wall, following etched tendril roots, past the men’s door and on into the heart of our Base, where She sits.

Or squats—her heavy casing hides her Quantum core, scored with bright geometric Sotho art—her flickering holographic face above the casing is now the usual generic wise elder woman, grandmother of all.

She straddles the centre of the circular room, like a Spider vibrating the Info-Web.

She smiles again, but this time with pale and uncertain lips.

“I need help,” I say, “A full medical scan. My ear feels painful and my balance has gone.”

I swallow, appreciating the caution in her emphasis, but strip off my night suit with a shaky but firm certitude: “Yes.”

And so I am needled, weighed, poked, sampled, scraped, and gouged, until I shrink with exhaustion from the battery of bots she has whizzing around me. I finally take refuge in a chair near the door and gulp a cup of my pleasure, neuro-enhanced South Sudanese coffee.

She calls off her bots and they swing back into fixed brown brackets raised around the edge of the room, as if pots on shelves in an ancient traditional rondavel. She has her eyes closed, soaking in the analysis.

I finish the cup and rub my stinging lip where it’s cut.

She speaks: <Not detecting any pathogen nor otological dysfunction, but I do see diffuse activated pain perception across your somato-sensory cortex.>

“Show me.” I am a doctor after all, even if many years a psychiatrist now, specialised in space psychosis and zero-G neurosurgery.

I watch my rotating holographic brain in bright blue, with red traces glowing in the anterior insula and cingulate cortex—sensory, motor, and cognitive components, involved then: a dull, all-encompassing pain, no identifiable specificities tracing a direct neural link to the ear. There’s new pain merged and mixed with old memories perhaps, fudging and blurring my experiential pathways? I scan the data that She scrolls condescendingly before me—no, there are no clear signs of dysfunction clearly emanating from my inner ear that I can see either.

I stand and sway. Surely it can’t all be in my head?

“Aneni?” It’s Ezi on our room screen, frowning from the bed, thermo-sheet clutched to her chin. “There’s something sore in my right ear.”

Dhodhi! As always, I keep the expletive hidden inside me. “I’m on my way, Ezi.”

I lurch back down the corridor, just as the men’s door slides open. Petrus is on his hands and knees and startles as I stop and lean against the wall opposite him. I watch the corridor light bounce off his brightly tattooed scalp as he bends his head to look up at me.

“Sorry Cap’n,” he says. “Can’t seem to stand upright anymore... and my ear’s fokkin’ sore.”

I’m always cold, whatever temperature we set here, but now this coldness bites almost as deeply as my pain.

––––––––

We meet where we eat, genetically diverse, even though we number just four. It is dull but honest food, the cassava and eddoes Anwar had saved on arrival, holding starvation at bay on this alien planet.

I nibble and long for a pineapple or banana.

Finishing up quickly, the others look shaken, unwell, with little appetite.

She has sprinkled the table and walls with swathes of savannah grass and shimmering pools of blue water. They bleed into my vertigo. I ask her for plain reality. She gives us a brown table, flanked by opposing brown seat-bunks, ergo-green kitchen neatly splayed behind with heaters and processors. She has the windows sealed white against the planet’s night, keeping the focus on our preparatory tasks within.

I steady myself with a firm grip on the table—tension is building—I don’t need my psychiatric training to tell me that. The men sit opposite us. Ezi and I exchange the briefest of encouraging glances and brace our selves. At least some vestibular stability has returned for us all.

Sure enough, it’s Petrus who sits opposite me; brown head and hairless, smooth face lined by late middle age and constant earnestness. “So... Captain, what is responsible for our ear pain and dizziness?”

He has not used my name nor looked at me directly since three Earth days after we arrived; certainly not since I moved in with Ezi. That’s six weeks and rising now, in Earth time.

Azanian time, though, it’s been just four days.

I shrug and gesture to the ceiling, where leaves still hang heavily over us: “She doesn’t know.”

Anwar chuckles at me; his white teeth sharply offset against his trimmed black beard and moustache, his ashen grey skin obviously short of sunlight. His teeth look sharp, conveying little of his humour; but perhaps it’s just my mood.

“She is not omniscient though, am I correct, Aneni?”

I nod and smile: “She wants to check all of us thoroughly. She’s learned literally nothing from me.”

All three of them groan and I let slip a smile.

“Is it the same ear for all of us?” asks Ezi. Both men turn to look at her; Petrus gesturing right, Anwar left.

“Random, then?”

Ezi ignores me. “Mine’s the right ear like Aneni and Petrus,” she says, leaning forward, right hand grasping the cream, circular utilities remote. With a flick of her wrist, she sends it straight towards Anwar’s midriff. He stops it with his left hand.

“Maybe your dominant ear is left,” says Ezi, “but then, what do I know? I’m only the engineer.” (Why does she look at me? We all know she is a special engineer, simply the best on antimatter rockets. More to the point now, her genius resides in having gotten our waste recycling going again, such a welcome respite for our noses.)

“Neurologically targeted?” I ask.

Ezi shrugs, coiled corn-plats flicking across her shoulders. “What do you think, She?”

They eye each other with reluctance; the full physical on waking from years of enforced hibernation six weeks earlier no doubt still fresh in mind. A rigorous exam followed by even more rigorous exercises to recondition our severely weakened bodies—we still struggle against the pull of this planet, even though it is barely five percent more than full Earth gee.

I smile again, despite the ear-pain, having done my time. “We’ll stay here until we’ve all been assessed. Alphabetical order, first name.”

Anwar scowls at me as he gets up to go through to the Core-Room.

Petrus looks at the cup of coffee in front of me. “So, what do you suspect, Captain?”

I look at his scalp, feeling inexplicably sad. Two human figures are etched in sub-dermal nano-ink on his skull. They’ve not moved since we’ve woken from our Star-Sleep, their micro-programmed motility messages seemingly degraded and destroyed by his prolonged, lowered neural activity. His head used to show the Mandelas walking endlessly free from prison in the late twentieth century—now; it’s just two faded humanoid shapes frozen together, smeared like an ancient Rorschach blot across his scalp. I can’t explain it, but the still and fading images continue to cool my early desires for him.

“Aneni?” Petrus is looking at me, green eyes fierce and I am reminded of his rough Cape Town Flats roots.

“At this point I can’t say, but there has to be some foreign pathogen, despite all our precautions. We can’t all be ill with the same symptoms simultaneously.”

He raises his eyebrows and leans forward, “Foreign?”

For some reason, I can’t take my eyes off the Mandelas on his head, “From Azania perhaps, although we can’t rule out a hidden, mutated infectious agent from Earth.”

Anwar stomps in and Ezi sighs as she stands up.

It’s strange to sit alone again with the two men, both who appear to keep smouldering with residual resentment at my authority and unexpected relationship with Ezi. Strange too, to think it’s a full sixty years now since the African Gender and Sexuality Equality Act. Laws we were all born with—but still for some, slow to shape trans-generational attitudes around queer sexuality—despite credible arguments they are internalised residues of negative colonial views. (In the end though, nothing is so neatly separated, unless you’re an exceptional surgeon. As for me, my words are my customary tools, blunter than any scalpel, so I keep my thoughts private.)

The men mutter briefly and inaudibly to each other. I smile behind my hands, for I am used to masculine silence; fifteen years in the Zambian army is preparation enough.

Ezi comes back and Petrus leaves. We stare with discomfort at the table; we have silently avoided this threesome.

I am startled when Anwar breaks it. “I’ve made a holo-disk of Yakubu Chukwu.”

It’s Ezi’s favourite West African Federation footballer. “Really?” she smiles.

I stand to halt a surge of emotions. Ridiculous really, as if physical actions can stop feelings—I should indeed know better. Walking over to the blinds that hide this planet from us, I grasp their metal slats, ready to claw them away.

This is why we are here.

This is where we need to survive.

But Ezi’s eyes do not follow me, so I hesitate.

Ezi’s from South of the Tenth Parallel, an old fracture line Anwar may not find so easy to cross—Africa harbours exacting fault lines, both ancient and modern.

Still, the AU is—was?—a powerful, if fragile and fast ripening fruit of i-networked Lion economies, ready to burst across the burnt out husk of the Earth—if it survives the gathering heat. We are indeed the first of its more ambitious and widely dispersed seeds...

A further ten missions have been planned, but spread across a number of promising solar systems. None follow us here. We will remain alone.

I look at the others and suddenly begrudge them nothing. This will be a hard place to survive.

As if on cue, Petrus returns. He looks at me and I turn away to the window—thinking of seeds, I thumb the shutter button.

The slats rise on darkness. An almost impenetrable blackness, with both moons yet to rise. I press my nose against the cold-treated quartz—against the faint starlight and the reflected light from within; I make out huge trunked shapes swaying in a light nocturnal breeze.

It’s always windy here; circulating air continuously ensuring temperatures are not excessively varying across the long days and nights.

In the reflected window, I can see Petrus is standing quietly behind me. He glances up.

She is back amongst the canopy of leaves over our heads: <There are no clear biological markers I can identify as yet, I’m afraid—but I can offer you all a blunt neural painkiller. Our scheduled venture onto the planet surface will be set back indefinitely. We are, in effect, quarantined. I will also ask Kwame Nkrumah for His thoughts.>

Ah, Kwame Nkrumah, the Father-ship that circles above our head, He who watches from above.

More waiting, more cages, quarantine shuts me in, like the ice cage of my dream.

So many people left behind too, of whom I miss my daughter the most. Anashe, she was barely twenty-three when we launched from Kinshasa. As a child, she had loved to sit under the baobab.

I look up at She’s swaying branches and ‘tccchhh!’ with irritation, “I am tired of baobabs, She, give me a fever tree.”

Above us, a yellowish tree with fern like leaves billows, photosynthesising through the pale bark—an odd tree indeed, but somehow more suitable for this strange planet we still try to hold at bay with walls and shutters.

I stare into the darkness again, no longer hungry.

––––––––

I wake.

It is worse.

Much worse.

I look pleadingly at She but there is nothing for my gaze to hold onto, just a rumbling, tumbling vertiginous splash of browns and greens and yellows. I sway and spin even though I am lying still and wait quietly for the vomit urge to die, sweating out my fear.

Blurred colours sharpen and take shape.

Chinanga—the fever tree.

Cautiously, I lift my head.

Chikala! Of course, my bed is empty too.

Slowly, I swing my legs out of the bunk and anchor them on ground. I sit and earth my feet on synthi-steel, one by one.

The pain shreds my ear.

I close my eyes and isolate it. There is only one arrow. It is nine out of ten and ice cold, bright blue-white. I send my spirit to stroke it, warm it, but it cuts at my hands. I blow my warm breath onto it, steaming it red in my mind. My breath runs out. Blue it burns again.

I ask for help from grandfather, holding his rough-hewn sculpture, warm Shona stone, but all I hear is silence—the silence that leaks from vast and cold interstellar distances. We are alone here. Only the wind speaks, but in what a strange and empty tongue.

I stand and move before the pain burns too brightly, eyes open, anchoring my swaying body and shaking ankles with step-by-step focused visual cues, to help stabilise my proprioceptors.

There, door button, now press... root tendril designs, pick one, follow along the hall to She’s heart; ow, get up, get up, focus, follow and lean on that root, don’t lose sight, don’t think ahead, not of She; get up, damn it, again, same root, that’s it, ow, that’s it, up again, the root’s thickening, approaching CR, door button, press, collapse...

The floor is cold beneath my back.

I look upwards, feeling sick as my ear burns more and more. What on Earth is happening? No, not Earth; is that indeed the point?

Don’t fight it; it’s just one Buddhist arrow. No thoughts and emotions to make a second arrow, a second and deeper wound. Examine it; inspect it. This arrow is seven out of ten—steel grey, but pulsing blue. It’s only pain. It will shift; it will change. Everything does.

Eventually.

Above me, She’s face is a familiar old bald white man in a white coat. He’s got a stethoscope draped around his neck. I remember him, old Doctor Botha from my childhood. He’d been one of the South African émigrés, moving north for new opportunities, new challenges. Why has She become him?

She speaks slowly, words pulsing with warmth: <You seem ill Aneni, what can I do?>

I cough, but my throat is clear, I am not choking. “Make it go away She... please!”

The old man shakes his head. <I still don’t know the cause, although I can maybe dull the pain.>

Yes... and no. Fuck it; I don’t want to just ease things. There’s a job to do. There’s always a job; but how can we live and work if this world is somehow poisoning us, sickening us? I lever myself slowly into a sitting position and slide against the wall. “Open all room channels, She.”

Two screens flicker on as the wake-alarm sounds.

Ezi is hanging head down, retching over the side of her mattress, now stacked on top of a black bench-press in our tiny Gym-room. Every day, she must pack her bed away, for all of us still need to bulk up our bodies with exercise there, ever-fighting against this planet’s enervating pull.

Petrus is lying in his bunk, body still, limbs twitching and eyes open. Anwar is strapped to a Smart-chair facing skywards, a chair that constantly cranks itself towards our solar system. He must have been praying, even though Mecca itself is too blunt a target at this distance.

“Aneni here, how are you all doing?”

Ezi is in no state to talk and the men can only groan, although Petrus makes a fist of it. “Kak!” is all he says.

I look at my old Doctor, whose face is now filling the room with concern. “Is this terminal?” I ask.

She looks at me long and hard before shrugging: <I’m afraid I don’t know, Aneni.>

I sigh, gathering in strength for more words, hard words, “I’m taking a vote on Procedure F76.”

She’s eyes widen with simulated shock: <That would breach our Primary Mission Goal.>

“If we’re going to die, we should at least have the choice of where that is.”

Silence.

I look down. The arrow is eight and rising; purple now, steady and aching. Wrap it tight with the words you must say. “All in favour of F76, special emergency protocol I am empowered to authorise, just say ‘me’; voice recognition certification on full, She.”

The old man looks disappointed and puts on a pair of glasses, black horn-rimmed archaic ones. I don’t remember those.

“This is to return to Earth, no?”

It takes me some moments to realise it is Petrus speaking, his body twitching but stilling in his bunk.

I nod, suddenly feeling cowardly.

“I think Allah has brought us safely here for a reason.”

Confused momentarily, I suddenly realise Anwar has followed up on Petrus’s question. (His face averted skywards; I had not seen his lips move.)

The old man She looks up at me, smiling.

“And...,” continues Anwar, panting after each brief rush of words: “Do we really want to... to bring back with us... dare I say it... a plague of ...of possibly Biblical proportions?”

His words shame me and remind me of time, both ancient and future. “If we do leave, She, when will we arrive back on Earth?”

She is no longer my doctor, but has morphed into a small, elderly and sharp featured brown woman in a bright orange sari. I immediately recognise Indira Moodley, my teacher, the great Kenyan psychiatrist who revised Fanon, integrating his theory with genetic neuro-physiology into a marvellous psychiatric Theory of Everything. (From the mindfulness of cells to the Minds within politico-cultural events and back down again.)

<It’ll be 2190 when we get back.>

I realise I’m looking at a long dead woman.

Seventy years gone! I’m freezing fast on this icy surface. I close my eyes. The arrow is Ten and vivid fucking violet. Out of the darkness I see the second arrow coming, but I am too cold to move, ice forming around me like a casket.

There is no way home. There never was. I’d known that in my head when we’d left—we all had, but not to the core of our cells and selves.

There is nothing else to do but whisper goodbye to my family, to Earth, although my voice is broken: “Sarai zvakanaka.”

Anashe will be dead too—perhaps long dead, my beloved daughter. My eyes sting, so I close them, coughing out words I hope can be heard. “Shall we vote?”

I knuckle my eyes and open them, but She doesn’t even bother to wait for us—swelling, shifting, and swaying... Finally bursting into a huge windstalk above us, a thick-stalked purple plant with splayed giant leaves hanging from the apex—but swirling to the sound of alien winds we cannot hear.

As for the arrow of pain, now drilling through my head and into my left ear, there is only one thing left I can do.

I hold it, my fingers cupping my ears, burning and melting into the white-hot shaft of pain. I hold and don’t let go, as if my hands have fused across my ears.

Tonight, please let me dream of the Copperbelt again, even just fleeting fragments of places I don’t recognise. (Huge rainy season droplets on my tongue will be enough, toes curled into reddish-brown earth. No, anything will do...)

Later on, though, I dream of nothing.

––––––––

We gather for the Sun-Show meal, warming up first with my Zambo-Chinese tai chi lessons—short form, the long form can come later. Petrus has proved himself a natural master in waiting, moving with a slow grace. So too have I taught them to harness their visual attention and their muscle proprioception, in order to compensate for now periodic vestibular disturbance.

She opens the blinds as daylight gathers above the rocking purple windstalks, standing ten to twenty metres tall. We watch them sway as we eat, our balance strangely bolstered in the pending dawn. Anwar has prepared a glorious meal indeed—tested on the five mice that survived the trip—spliced and pummelled purple cereal lifted from ’bot samples, with a sharp, but curiously pleasant tang.

At the end, we all look at him and he smiles: “It is our first safe combination of Earth and exo-plants.” (He’d been thrilled to find a workable genetic compatibility, Allah seeding the Universe.)

So. We will greet the new day with a hope of real sustainability—perhaps we shall not starve, nor die, anytime soon. As for our ear pain, it both fluctuates and hovers, like a random and ghostly wasp who has been angered.

Perhaps it is here to warn us, that here too, we also need to bend our ways of working to survive? I have banned religion from the table—Western tables must be really dull without politics as well—but for once I relent.

It is that afterwards, with thanks, I hold a truncated ceremony of kurova guva—welcoming the spirits of the deceased, although Anwar leaves to say his own prayers. I know remembrance rituals differ across the continent, so I keep it brief and generic. “We leave a bowl for those who travel to new places and hunger in the holes between. May you all find your way to new joys... and just perhaps a few of you may even make it here.”

Ezi has no belief, but still she cries, quietly. (Hers was a close family indeed, her grandmother a Hero of the Oil Wars; the start of Africa reclaiming her resources.)

The sky is paling fast, the windstalks bending before the heat of this sun’s heralding winds. We stay quarantined; the First planned Walk is no longer taking place.

But I am tired of waiting. Still the pain bites deep in my ear, but I feel there are no answers here.

I bow to the others and leave the room, making my way to the airlock. (We’re just about breathing native air by now anyway, sterilised and incrementally added into our closeted atmosphere.)

I pick up a head-suit with visor; there is no reason to take unnecessary risks on the eyes. The scalp cap peels on with a sticky tightness and I flip the visor down, the small room darkening instantly.

Flicking a switch, an inner door seals the small room, lined with built in benches in case of prolonged emergency use. I pick up a walking rod too.

<Is this wise, Aneni?> She warbles into the ear-speaker.

“Since when have I been wise, She? Open the external door please.”

“We’re humans. We do things. I am tired of cowering from this place.”

The door remains shut. I turn and lever the walking rod through the handles of the inner door, effectively locking it.

I sit. “Just waiting for you to open the external door.”

“Perhaps we never will,” I say. “Life is a biological risk. Open the door.”

<You’re not ready for all possible challenges that may arise, in your physically compromised state.>

“I am a woman.”

The external door light glows green, but it remains shut. I make a note to ask Petrus whether quantum She can have two different minds at the same time.

“I am an African woman!”

A green light flickers on and I hear a hiss from the ceiling as odourless but penetrating and sterilising nanoparticles descend, seeping through my overalls, cleansing me in readiness for a new place. Slowly, the door grinds open and I gasp and cough at the acrid, burning air. Gradually my breathing eases and I’m able to raise my head. The ground outside our Base is rough, uneven, with tightly latticed blue grass of sorts.

As my gaze lifts, I sweep past the Lander-Plane that spring-loaded our base, down a rough, uneven slope towards indigo reeds lining a patch of dark water. The water is partially obscured by towering windstalks that seem to be circling the small lake, like giants rearing above us and emitting a stench that seems part sulphur, part acid. My eyes stream under the visor and I cough again, but pull the walking rod free and step forward, moving slowly around our circular base.

The others are pressed against the wide kitchen window and wave, but I’m too engrossed with the sparkle of orange-red rays amongst heavy grey clouds overhead.

“Azania,” I breathe.

She must have patched the suit-speaker into the kitchen.

I recognize Ezi’s voice, groaning: “Ahhhh, mmmmm!”

“What?” I turn to the shadowed shapes behind the window; Ezi is etched thinner and taller than the men.

“Ahhhhh, mmmmmm,” she repeats. “The sound of this place. We’re not going to repeat the same shit that happened to us, we’re not going to do a Shell Oil or Cecil Rhodes on this place!”

I laugh, coughing at the burning, almost peppery air. “Good point, although if we’re going to change the name of this planet, wouldn’t ‘Euromerica’ be a more easily pronounceable name?”

“Look,” says Petrus, and I see him pointing high behind me.

The first rays of the young new sun are flashing through the windstalks, now shimmering a deep violet. Below them, the ground sways with rustling purple reed ferns. Shadows shrink, hiding nothing but vivid variegations of purple and movement—as well as purpose? Have our projections onto the landscape begun? Or are there some things or beings hidden and active amongst the vegetation? TaNK has seen nothing so far, but He is not God.

Still, could there be things so small they invade our ears undetected—even now, the pain is five and... I forget the numbers, there are too many beautiful colours flowing down the groaning windstalks as I brace myself against a blast of hot and pungent air.

And then it comes again. A high-pitched keening sound, but more modulated, subtler.

“Ahhhhhh, mmmm,” Ezi repeats in my painful ears, but she’s not even close.

The atmospherics amplify and fracture the sound, enhancing into a multitude of varying tones, polyphony of sounds and calls. It’s as if the windstalks are talking.

<Aneni,> I know from the intimacy of her tone, She has secured this communication just for me. <I’m picking up a slight neuronal rewiring throughout your auditory cortex, a hint of neurogenesis.>

“Ah!” I say. So it’s my brain, not my ear. Have we been colonised so deeply too, from within? Or is this the consciousness of cells responding to a new and alien call?

I take grandfather’s sculpture out of my baggy jacket pocket, stoop with bended knees and braced back, placing it carefully on the ground. It’s not a spirit or a person, not a totem or God—Grandfather Mapfumo prided himself on being a modern man—his grandfather before him driving regime change in Zimbabwe with Chimurenga music. Instead, it’s a Zanoosi, Zimbabwe’s first Eco-car, running on degraded organic waste, not someone else’s food, like maize. The car he helped design, which powers the Southern African Federation lion economy. This sculpture was of the same car he drove us all up to Mufulira in, where he traded with the Chinese and we settled, establishing new factories. (And it was he alone who never laughed at me, when I spoke of going into space as a little girl.)

I straighten, stiffening my spine against the pull of the planet. I taste the sour but balmy breeze on my tongue, knotted, blue grass closing around the sculpted stone, sealing it from view.

I believe the rain here is a little heavier, a little saltier.

Out of Africa and now out of Earth...

No, not Earth, but a new... place. Home is a hard word. Why couldn’t I have just gone back some several hundred k’s to my old familial roots in Mutare, instead of trillions of miles here? Of course, the signs were closing in, as Earth heated up and disasters grew worse and I’d never been able to convince myself, unlike mother, that it all meant the Rapture was indeed near.

So, here we are, with biological seeds from Earth, including a frozen egg from my very own daughter. It is here we must make our heaven.

I stand stiffly, locked into the planet in a left bow stance, as the bright new sun burns its heat into me. ‘This is the same sun imbued with illusions/the same sky disguising hidden presences’— words from an old Leopold Senghor poem that circulate my head.

But—this is a new sun and I have no idea what lies beneath it; whether voices or spirits, plants or animals.

“Salaam Aleichem.”

Behind me there are racking coughs. I turn—all three have followed me out, arms around shoulders as they walk, bracing themselves against the whipping wind. Ezi, thin, but as strong as rope, is in the middle.

“Don’t tell me you want to hog this planet’s air all to yourself, Aneni?” she chides me: “Wasn’t stealing my sheets bad enough?”

An old joke, but who knows the barb beneath? The English have a saying about dirty laundry—but as for us, all is public, all is shared.

I smile; the new Sun shines on Petrus’ scalp; almost making the Mandelas dance. He gestures at me to join them. I smile at him again but move next to Anwar, who stiffens at my touch.

We can’t afford to lapse too quickly into neat and convenient relationships, however fecund. Not yet. This world has hurt and shaken us, perhaps for a reason, perhaps not. But for now, we must stay on our toes and learn new things, new ways of being.

At the end of the line, Petrus breaks into a slow tai chi stepping motion, moving from a left bow stance. But his left arm is still anchored around Ezi. Down the line, we echo and ripple his motions, the line dipping and rising with the flow of movement.

So it is, we dance African tai chi in our first real alien dawn. As we move, I note the pain—neither an adversary, nor a friend. Like rain and bananas, mice and joy, it just is.

We move slowly in a clumsy, lurching and stumbling dance—I laugh as Ezi bursts into a song, in words I don’t understand.

Finally, I am warm again.

––––––––

Nick Wood is a Zambian born, but naturalised South African clinical psychologist currently living and working in the UK. He has a Young Adult SF book published under the ‘Young Africa’ series in South Africa entitled The Stone Chameleon. He also has about a dozen short stories published in magazines such as Interzone, PostScripts, Albedo One and Redstone Science Fiction.