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To Marie Therese Diene and her undying love.
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ChinaCorp’s planetary-harvesting ship, the Kublai Khan decelerated over Mùxīng’s moon, Mù-wèi-sān, the gas giant’s gravitational pull stabilising the ship synchronously with the moon. As it spun to a halt the ship’s reflective surface blended with the empty space around it, catching flashes of the Jovian world’s tempests of resources and the large moon’s shining frozen surface.
Standing by the glass panel in the Control Room, her black, red and blue uniform sending heat into her body against the effects of cryo-sleep, Captain Wu looked down on her mission’s target. The layered gases, broken by the Great Red Spot reminded Wu of the vegetables her mother would blend with eggs into pies.
She missed carrots—most of her crew had no idea what they were.
‘Lieutenant Arnaudeau,’ She commed into her wristband.
‘Yes Captain,’ The 1st Lieutenant responded, his French accent breaking through his Canto-Mandarin.
‘Has the Harvesting Crew recovered from cryo-sleep?’
Arnaudeau laughed. ‘As well as could be expected. Still a little sluggish, but they’re excited.’
‘Perfect. We’ll need a few more hours to lower the Great Khan into the upper atmosphere.’ She didn’t know why she had taken to calling the ship that. Perhaps because this was the first step to uniting the Solar System since the Western Chinese Empire’s Han Industries and the Eastern Chinese Republic’s ChinaCorp had agreed on the merger that ended the war.
Captain Wu shivered, unsure if she was still weary from the bone-deep cold of six months in cryo-sleep, or in apprehension of the responsibility she carried.
She retired to her quarters while the ship’s computer guided the Kublai Khan within harvesting range of a patch of hydrogen floating on the planet’s upper atmosphere.
If the corporations had merged only two hundred years ago, they could have been here much earlier; perhaps she would have known what an organic orange tasted like.
Lieutenant Arnaudeau chimed in on the com-line. ‘We’re in position, Captain.’
‘Good. Have the harvesting crew connect the pumps to the outer hull. No leaks, I hate helium on the air, and what we breathe is recycled shit already.’
‘Yes, Captain. Beginning Planetary-Harvesting now.’
Wu took her position in the ship’s Control Room. This close, the planet’s curve was invisible, only an endless sea of brown and beige gases and micro-storms merging and dissolving in peevish bursts.
The pumps spread their hungry black tentacles down from the ship, disappearing into the swirling atmosphere.
And that was it.
Six months of cryo-sleep, years of training to operate the equipment, more years of building the prototype, and now all she had to do was wait. She would have to make something up. No one would want to hear about how dull the process was.
‘The tanks are full, Captain.’ Arnaudeau informed her.
Already? Well...damn. ‘Well done, 1st Lieutenant,’ she said, thinking about the next ice-cold plunge into cryo-sleep. ‘Have the crew check the pressure on the tanks. I’ll supervise from the Control Room.’
‘Of course, Captain.’
Wu turned on the screens to the storage containers. The football field-sized tanks swirled with the colours of Mùxīng, mingling freely until the crew floating around them inserted suction pumps, pulling the different gases apart, and storing them.
‘Captain,’ Harvesting Sergeant Rahman, commed. ‘We have a minor leak, it was expected, but we’re losing hydrogen and helium, and...’
His voice drifted as a cloud of brownish-red gas hissed from the canister, passed in front of one of the screens, pulled itself together into a fist, and smashed into the face panel on Rahman’s suit.
The young sergeant gasped, tendrils of hydrogen and helium pouring into his throat and nose. The arm elongated, the gas formed a shoulder, neck, the outline of a face, and then smiled at the camera, Rahman’s corpse floating behind it.
The tanks exploded. Hundreds of gaseous beings swarmed the remaining team, tearing through their suits and bodies. Their miasmic forms changed dynamically, limbs without bodies, heads floating in shifting colours, anthropomorphic elements appearing and disappearing in a flurry of violence. More of the beings made their way into the ship’s filters, and soon Captain Wu began to feel light-headed from helium.
She scrambled for the hyper-space transmitter, ‘Kublai Khan to Earth! Kublai Khan to Earth!’
Major Perng’s familiar face appeared on the screen. ‘Captain Wu!’ He smiled, ‘Congratulations! We were expecting you to-’ His smile faded.
Wu looked behind her.
A tall, humanoid shape towered over her, its eyes an image of the Great Red Dot, its body the swirl of gases of the planet, and launched a fist into her throat.
She felt the oxygen sucked out of her, her lungs burning dry, held mid-air by the creature, and thought, Now, this is a story, and died.
Major Perng watched Wu’s body fall through the being as it marched towards the transmitter. It looked directly at him, its face firmed, forming features with a broad nose, thick lips, and almond shaped eyes. It grinned at Perng and said: ‘We were expecting you sooner.’
#
“One thing that worried me, was that all the books that I read about astronomy, whenever they mentioned the history of the subject, there was always one part missing. It was the participation of Africans in astronomy,” who said these words?’
Teacher Rakoteli pointed at the floating letters of blue-purple argon drawn against the yellow sky and the smouldering grounds of Fida. Impervious to the blinding gusts of superheated sulphur billowing through the children of her clan they shot their hands up to answer her question.
‘Thebe Medupe!’ a little girl answered, her hair glowing red and gold with neon while her body shifted in tones of brown dust broken by faint traces of water vapour.
‘Very good Seynabu,’ Rakoteli answered, though her eyes glowing a moment of purple reprove, her body and hair a uniform brown of dust held together with opaque traces of carbon, ‘but you spoke out of turn. No points for you.’
She pointed at a distracted young boy, dissolving into the storm and rebuilding himself of random elements billowed by the wind, a little lava mixed with greenish-blue gas mélanges.
‘Olumele!’ she snapped.
‘Yes, Teacher!’
‘Does what Thebe Medupe said matter anymore?’
‘No, Teacher!’
‘And why is that?’
‘Because,’ he said, dissolving completely, his voice floating over the class ‘now, we’re everywhere-’
‘Apparently, it still matters,’ a melodious baritone interrupted Olumele, who reappeared in a blast of nitrate. The voice came from a being of pure flame, emanating waves of intense cold, an ice cube dancing in his eyes.
He ran his hands through the boy’s flickering hair, the mix of gases crepitating to the flame, looking at Rakoteli who bowed her head. ‘Why humble yourself, Rakoteli?’ he asked. ‘You are Okyin Afi. Fida is yours to rule, I’m just a passer-by on your humid planet.’
‘You’re always welcome, Ogotemmeli,’ she said smiling. ‘Fida isn’t humid. Feel the static on the storm. Don’t you miss the tremor of wind on your ball of ice and flame?’ she teased, dismissing the giggling children who disappeared in puffs of vapour.
‘I wouldn’t have it any other way,’ he said, letting her wrap her gases around his ice-cold flame, freezing and melting over him. ‘The duality of Awukuda is the duality of life,’ he responded, laying a hand on her floating waist, absorbing some of the storm to sustain him on the planet.
‘Why are you here?’ she asked. ‘You seldom come anymore. Our drumbeats sound empty without your song.’
‘I’m sure others have come to perform here,’ he said.
‘Yes,’ she said, smiling faintly. ‘And you haven’t answered me.’
‘Ha! I wish it were to make children laugh and parents cry, but I’m on official duty.’ He’d missed Fida he realised. It was a world to his liking. Warm and angry. He had missed her too, fleeting though her form may be. ‘What Medupe said six hundred years ago, might still matter.’ He exhaled deeply, crystallising the air before him. ‘The Okyin Yaw has called all the High Griots to discuss the intrusion on Yawda.’
‘I know this.’ Rakoteli said, smiling faintly.
‘Yes. That’s why I waited for your High Griot to leave. I shouldn’t be here, but...’ he hesitated, they knew each other from old, and his heart didn’t lie. He was a storyteller, and he would tell her any tale she wished. ‘It’s one of my... instincts.’
‘The Xam you rant about?’ she laughed. ‘Ever since you’d trail your father peddling arcane tales, you’ve had these hunches. Well, out with it.’
Ogotemmeli smiled. Xam was always his burden. His and the other griots. ‘The Osrane are venturing into space.’
Rakoteli’s body shifted colours, gaining and losing elements—grey to green, to grey to blue, to a dark black, raging like the storm around them.
‘But the Benadan have deflected their probes for a century... No matter, they can’t harm us anymore,’ she said firmly, though betrayed by her shifting body.
‘Perhaps,’ he said, changing to warm ice, flames dancing in his eyes, soothing her with his heat. ‘We shall see what the Yawdan say.’
He turned back into flame. ‘I have to hurry. I’ll return on my way back to Awukuda, with stories for the children.’ The flame burned stronger, sucking all the cold into itself, shrunk to the size of a pebble dancing on the gales, and shot into space.
#
Where the hell do they land? Chief Technical Officer Kiania Hui Bon Hua-Figuerido thought, watching the black-breasted grouses fly by the windows of her company helithopter. The birds’ hazel wings blended with the dusty air swirling around the aircraft, the clouds filtering the sun’s bright rays to mud, only the vibrant red of the grouses’ combs marked them against the streaking particles.
The birds were from the forests of Upper Yangtze, but there were probably more trees and ponds in Beijing than anywhere in the Republic. It was hard to believe there were any left at all.
One of them slammed into her window, its face splattering against the glass. The darkened window reflected her slanted green eyes over her light-brown skin, and the bird’s blood seemed to stain her teeth. She looked a killer—she felt like one, even though she wasn’t, yet.
‘We’ll be landing in ten minutes, CTO, lots of dust in the air.’ The pilot’s voice rang through the speakers.
The thopter broke through the clouds and over Beijing.
Metal and concrete spurted from the soil. Buildings twisting and screeching like angry lianas, barring the earthy sunrays from the streets. Two-hundred and fifty million people living like roaches, and roaches living like kings. The avenues spreading from hundreds of circular plazas disappeared into a horizon barely a few blocks away.
She could see small parks, rare, tiny bursts of greenish-brown, with sickly veins of dark blue water, out of place in the ravenous beast of sewers and sweat.
The merger had gone ChinaCorp’s way, but she missed her home and the old Han Industries Headquarters in Rio, the city’s hills, and the headless Christ, his arms open over the industrial bay.
‘Landing, CTO.’
The thopter hovered above ChinaCorp HQ—three square miles of dragon-shaped spires and smooth, slanted, reflective walls; inviting the monster of the city to look itself in the eye—and landed on the central helipad, marked中國公司 of China Corporation in a cartouche.
A junior executive came to greet her as she stepped down from the machine to heavy gusts from the thopter’s wings. ‘CTO Figuerido!’ he screamed over the beating wings. ‘CEO Hans Chang would like to hear your report immediately! He’ll meet you in your lab!’
Kiania’s lab embarrassed her, but Chang walked in before she could clean off the dozens of vials and diagrams covering every unoccupied surface.
‘Always up to something, CTO.’
‘The war doesn’t wait, Sir.’
‘Never been righter, Kiania,’ he said heavily, looking around at the clutter. ‘Did your research dig out anything we can use? Fifty years, CTO. We can’t afford another loss. You know this better than most.’
Indeed, she thought.
‘So, what do you have for me?’
Kiania pressed a button on a console in front of her, opening a panel on a balcony overlooking a soccer field-sized glass box containing a large lump of gold under a thin cannon attached to the ceiling. She hit dials on the console, and the cannon shot a narrow beam of red matter into the metal.
‘See?’ she said, ‘When you ionise the beam, it vaporises the metal...’
The metal bubbled and exploded into small to microscopic particles, until it was undistinguishable from the air in the box.
‘Check the screen CEO. The gold is actually still there and when the beam vanishes...’
The beam snapped back, and the gold reformed itself.
‘That’s what we use for satellite mining. But now, if I modify the gravity pull by just this margin...’
She pushed a small button.
The beam hit the gold. The lump bubbled again, but as it exploded it shot up directly into the beam, the screen on the console registering no trace of Au in the box at all. Chang smiled.
‘I need a few more days to finish the prototype and work on the red matter. I need to enhance it, and-’
‘I think a field test is in order, don’t you?’ he asked rhetorically. ‘What would be your suggested target?’
‘Well. It’s something for your Chief Military Officers to decide, but Jīnxīng will be in closer orbit than it will be for two years. We should move fast, CEO.’
#
‘So? They’re sending their fleet to Fida?’ a voice boomed from a being of pure methane, icy smoke flowing down his neck in a boubou. ‘They have sent warships to every planet in the system for fifty years... Every year was another Yawda.’
‘It’s a very large fleet, Karamata,’ Djenaba, the Okyin Amene, interjected, interrupting her High Griot, her methane smoke body broken along her neck by icy ammonia forming intricate necklace patterns down to her waist. ‘Perhaps we should send troops to Fida.’
Sitting on the floor, Ogotemmeli watched the exchange silently. In the fifty years since the intrusion on Yawda, the Osrane had lost millions of lives, their best technology consistently overcome. Yet he felt the weariness brought on by Xam, the tug of the previous lives passed on to him, and the holes in his memory. Something was off, but he couldn’t name it.
He let his mind grow blank, looking at the palace Djenaba had called to life on the rings of Menmeneda, drawing together the dust and debris into a hut of blues and browns, colourful bits of stones forming each of the dignitaries’ home worlds spinning along the walls. A courtesy for visitors from non-gaseous worlds, even the ice giants of Yaada and Aabada appreciated it, looming over the room like massive pillars of living ice.
‘I agree with Kara,’ Abeba, the ruler of Yaada said proudly, her indigo head looming over the circle, delicate braids of methane hydrate reaching into it. ‘Rakoteli’s a relative on my mother’s side. If she needed our help, I’d have heard it first. She didn’t bother to send her High Griot, I wouldn’t worry.’
The attendees nodded, they would call on relatives first, but again Ogotemmeli had doubts.
‘What can the Osrane do to us that they haven’t done before?’ Tiwonge, the Okyin Bena and angry ruler of Benada, said dismissively. ‘ChinaCorp tried to kill us once and look at us now. They tried to drain Yawda and would probably do worse to the other worlds. Four hundred and fifty years. They’ll never learn. They can only make us even more powerful. If they attack Fida they’ll be crushed. We should let their wave smash and go on the offensive.’
‘They can always kill half of us again,’ Ogotemmeli heard himself say out loud. ‘Then half of what’s left.’
Tiwonge threw him a glare, her reddish, dusty skin pulling together into a rocky carapace.
Ishimwe, Awukuda’s Okyin Aku, laid an icy hand on the flame of his shoulder, melting and dousing each other in a blur. ‘You’re the oldest among us here, Ogotemmeli. Speak your mind.’
‘Easy to speak when Awukuda is too close to Akwesida for the Osrane to reach,’ the Okyin Bena snapped.
‘It’s interesting that since the conflict started the Akwesidan have not made their presence known.’ Ogotemmeli said. ‘They’ve... changed, since becoming pure energy. Perhaps there is something they see that we don’t.’
‘Further proof that we’ve nothing to fear,’ the Okyin Yaa said.
‘Or not,’ Ogotemmeli said and rose. ‘I’ll seek their council, with your permission.’
Ishimwe nodded. ‘You have mine,’ she said.
Djenaba nodded as well, while Abeba shook her braids, and said: ‘Why not? I trust my cousin. The Akwesidan advice couldn’t hurt.’
Tiwonge fumed.
‘I’ll return shortly. On my way, I can observe the Osrane fleet. If anything’s amiss I’ll contact the soldiers on Benada, with your permission Okyin Bena,’ said Ogotemmeli.
Tiwonge nodded grudgingly.
Ogotemmeli pushed his head to Okyin’s and vanished from the hut.
––––––––
Ogotemmeli paddled his fishing boat of space dust along the solar winds. He liked the boat; the motion of the paddle soothed his mind. It was meant for the open seas, and there was no wider sea than this.
There was something horribly off about this war. The Osrane were foolish, but perhaps his people had been too, before the red matter had shot from the satellites and modified their ancestors’ cells. Perhaps when they were trapped in flesh, they’d had bigger dreams and smaller hearts.
And yet, here they were. The other planets owed Benada a debt for keeping the Osrane subtly at bay, but if they destroyed Earth, they would turn their backs on everything they’d stood for. They’d changed so much already.
There was a piece of his father that had been passed on to Ogotemmeli when he’d dissolved into the universe. His mother had followed soon after. He was the finger and she the string, and just as many times the opposite. Their atoms had needed each other. Perhaps he didn’t let himself get close to Rakoteli for that reason. Perhaps he was a coward.
Some of the memories must still be there, all those who’d died when the sky had burned red, those who’d been scorched into the ground. Xam.
He drifted closer to Earth’s moon. He was almost a hundred now, his cells wouldn’t last much longer, fifty years maybe, but the planet had decayed since he’d seen it as a child. The heavily colonised moon, with its protective iridescent dome, artificial lake, and intricately connected towers, shone in stark contrast with the scars seared into its mother planet. The large expanses of blue were gone, shrunk to gigantic lakes, barely visible through the brownish vortexes, open air mines, and tentacular stretches of urban metal.
They’d been wise to leave. There were other worlds out there.
Ogotemmeli felt a pang of sympathy at their mad rush to pillage the rest of the system. What would he do? But something was missing. Not the water, not the ice caps, not the... the Fleet!
He let the fishing boat dissolve, and melted, bouncing from atom to atom in a mad dash to Fida.
The last of ChinaCorp’s fleet appeared, but the battle already raged. A dozen battleships were falling from orbit towards Fida, burning against its outer atmosphere. Geysers of lava reached out of others, disaggregating and reforming in space dust. The Fidan army was fighting, but they weren’t winning.
Hundreds of battleships blasted red rays at the swarming darts of rock and gas, and every time they hit the Fidan, their particles stood apart, shrunk, and vanished.
The red matter? What have they built, they’re... killing them. In fifty years, his people hadn’t suffered a single casualty.
Five destroyers lay hidden in clusters of battleships. Ogotemmeli sensed a sharp increase in energy, and one of the destroyers fired. A thick ray of red matter shot towards Fida, boring through the golden atmosphere into the planetary core.
Ogotemmeli roared. Rakoteli! His voice echoed soundlessly, his cells burned with rage, and gathered space dust in thousand-mile towers.
ChinaCorp. Feel the bite of your dragons!
The towers turned into giant, winged snakes, their jaws growing and crashing into the ChinaCorp ships.
His own cells stretched and strained with effort. A few exploded. He gathered more space dust to compensate, welding random atoms into his own.
ChinaCorp ships exploded and went out. The Fidan warriors saw help and redoubled their efforts, slipping into engines, and draining them before melting the ships’ hulls.
Ogotemmeli took out dozens more. The serpentine shapes closing in on the four destroyers getting ready to fire. He cut through the first two, then the third, the battleships disappearing into the energy propelling his dragons.
The last destroyer fired.
The thick red ray connected with the first cracking the planet’s surface into ten thousand puzzle pieces momentarily glued together with magma like a purulent wound and, exploded.
The shockwave sent a ripple through the surrounding fleet, vaporising it instantaneously. Ogotemmeli dissolved, allowing the wave through him, the release of gravity replenishing him. He would feel the other Fidan doing the same soon and hear them laughing at the Osrane.
But the void was silent. Rakoteli’s voice was nowhere to be found, her students were gone. The daring little boy and peevish girl. They were gone. All of them.
His shape snapped back, the flame and ice wrestling against each other for control. His people could kill all the Osrane anytime and occupy that drying dirtball. Was it sympathy he’d felt for them?
What have you done?! His weakened elements screamed at the disintegrated fleet.
He saw the few remaining Fidan warriors staring at the stony void hurling comets into space, their eyes wet with traces of water. They turned to salute him, then dived as one into the planet’s core before the lava melted away, binding it together with themselves, spinning and spinning until it vibrated, and their cells disappeared into a brontide and sorrowful drumbeat, beating forever where Fida once spun.
#
‘No to the war with the Elementals! No to the war with the Gods! No to the war with the Elementals! No to the war with the Gods!’
C²-Police thopters hovered between the five-hundred story skyscrapers over the crowd of Elemental Cultists, machine guns gleaming, powerful wings beating the dusty air into a dome over the demonstration.
‘You are part of an illegal demonstration!’ voice enhancers boomed from the thopters. ‘You are summoned to withdraw from the streets or we will open fire! You will be given a ten second warning! Remember to rely on ChinaCorp for your every need! Ten, Nine, Eight...’
The hundred thousand in the crowd resumed their chanting, shaking their fists at the thin streaks of sky between buildings. Others opened their coats, revealing localised seismic charges.
‘...One.’
The thopters unloaded into the screaming crowd, machine gun fire rattling down the avenue like jack-hammers. The cultists hit the triggers, ripping the streets open with sewage-filled fissures, taking the city block down with them, the thopters, and the nine hundred thousand souls in residence in a screaming storm of concrete hail and bloody dust.
The shockwave spread without further damage through central Beijing. A few blocks away, Kiania braced herself for what she thought was an after-shock from the freak earthquake that’d followed the victory against the Elementals on Jīnxīng, a few days earlier.
Her driver deactivated the shock-absorbers, restarting the engine. ‘No worries, CTO,’ the driver said. ‘Blasted cultists again. They’ll never get the point.’
‘No,’ she said, looking out the window at the cloud of debris spreading over the city. ‘But after fifty years of riots, they keep converting people, and the earthquake made things worse.’
‘Pff... The Elementals aren’t Gods. No matter what Wu’s hyper-space message showed. Thanks to you, we know they can die, CTO.’
‘And if I’d failed would you be driving me, or would you have joined the cultists?’ He shot her a dark glance. ‘I’m sorry. That was unfair, but what they are doesn’t matter, Benyamin. They were on the defensive all along, will they attack now? Can we fight a war against them, and against ourselves?’
The merger between ChinaCorp and Han Industries seemed useless now. Planetary-Harvesting was on halt, and the planet’s dwindling resources were swallowed in a conflict larger than the hundred-year battles between the hemispheres’ corporate giants. And now there were earthquakes. They’d spread from Central Africa, a 9.3 on the Lǐ shì guīmó, ripping through deep-sea mining operations, covering a third of Australia under water. 139 light seconds after destroying Jīnxīng, the exact distance between the two worlds at the time.
There has to be a correlation.
Her car slid underground a few blocks from ChinaCorp’s Headquarters, stopping after the security holoscan registered her vehicle and its passengers. She thanked Benyamin, and walked into the elevator, heading to her executive meeting on the top floor.
‘Ha! CTO,’ CEO Chang said, from the front of the table. CTOs and Chief Financial Officers from every regional branch of ChinaCorp were present, including her old Han Industries colleagues. ‘We were expecting the delay. Damned Cultists.’
‘Traffic delayed me, CEO,’ she answered. ‘It’s getting worse with the influx of population from the after-shocks.’
‘Don’t we all know it? But you have found a way to end this war. We can resume Planetary-Harvesting soon.’
‘Not if we destroy the planet again,’ CFO Balamaci intervened. ‘It did absorb the Elementals, but also cost us our fleet, and the few destroyers we had reverse-engineered with CTO Hui Bon Hua-Figuerido’s enhanced red matter.’
‘We’ve lost a lot of lives, but made definite progress, Balamaci,’ CEO Chang countered. ‘If we can keep casualties to a minimum, we can afford to destroy our next target. There’s nothing for us on Huǒxīng.’
Except maybe another earthquake. ‘We’re making rapid progress, CEO.’ Kiania answered instead. ‘But your schedule might be too fast for us. I’d also like to examine the freak earthquakes we registered after Jīnxīng; they affect all the areas where we’ve used red matter for satellite-mining.’
‘Yes, well...’ he replied, waving a dismissive hand. ‘We’ll have to build better shock-absorbers around strategic areas. But my own CTOs are certain it’s a consequence of red matter’s lingering effects on the core. They will stabilise.’
‘It’s been four hundred years, CEO,’ Kiania insisted. ‘I doubt any of this has to do with the primitive red matter developed at the time.’
‘And what do you suggest? The vengeful wrath of dead spirits?’ The rest of the room snickered. ‘You sound like a cultist. I need you focused, CTO.’
‘Of course, CEO,’ she said calmly. ‘Even if it was the red matter, it would have little to do with Jīnxīng. But the riots, CEO. The Cult spreads rumours that we’re paying the price of killing Elementals, for what was done to the places that were mined. Better investigate and squash the rumours for good.’
‘Ha! I’m glad you’re not giving into Cultish delusions,’ he answered, convinced. ‘And you’re right—we need to show the population that we’ll keep them safe. Investigate, as long as you don’t delay your work. Now,’ a hologram of Huǒxīng appeared in the centre of the room, ‘on to our next campaign...’
#
‘Destroy them now!’ Ogotemmeli yelled at the Akwesidan occupying the sun, the dark streaks of plasma trapped in the magnetic fields of the corona forming a face of orange and black flame, smiling placidly at him, while he almost tore apart with Rakoteli’s death.
How many songs could they have shared over the years? Those dead children could’ve been theirs, chasing after them, as he’d chased his parents and she’d chased him. She would’ve said he’d chased her. She’d favoured neon back then, bright reds and yellows—she’d been impossible to miss. She’d become more sombre later, but she’d always been too free-spirited for her heritage. They’d been just perfect for each other.
‘Have you forgotten where you’re from?’ he asked, exhausted and furious.
The sun laughed, solar flares exhaling from its mouth. ‘I wish any of us could forget anything anymore. And remember other things...’ the Akwesidan calling himself Ngai answered.
Ogotemmeli wished they wouldn’t do that. The Akwesidan had become so detached they hardly made sense. They had no Griots, no Okyin. They stayed warm at the heart of their star, naming themselves after old gods, oblivious to the universe.
They had forced him closer than even his Awukuda-bred cells could sustain for long, and they refused to fight. The Benadan were right, they had to go on the offensive, couldn’t the Akwesidan see that?
‘You have,’ said Ogotemmeli flatly, ‘you have forgotten everything. Xam, your friends, and family. They’ve destroyed Fida, they won’t stop until they destroy us and themselves! Send your solar flares. Just one would end the war forever! There’ll be life again! Time is immaterial to you, remember your people!’
‘Do you remember yours? Xam has guided you here, should you doubt it now? Let yourself feel, Ogotemmeli.’
‘I feel too much already... and you want me to search myself for more pain?’
‘Yes, more pain. There’s always more pain. How much more can you handle?’
A massive solar flare hit Ogotemmeli in the chest, melting his iced core, tying his atoms together with quantum voids, forcing him to break through the strata of agony, and into memory.
––––––––
Nyadzayo looked over to the hills surrounding the gold mines in the plains and laid the last stone of the towers of Dzimba-Hwe. The sun shone high above him, his sweat drying on the stones like lacquer, and gleaming like the two distant rivers of the Gokomere.
The shining white robes of the Kilwa delegation appeared at the far end of the valley—come to trade in gold—just in time to admire the Gokomere’s triumph.
‘Daddy!’ his son’s high-pitched voice called, reaching all the way up the stone tower.
Shingirayi would be a builder just like himself, and his dead grandfather whose name he carried.
‘Careful boy!’ Nyasha, his wife, admonished their son. ‘You’ll scare him, and he might fall.’
She knew it wasn’t true, but that wouldn’t get in the way of her raising Shingirayi.
He took out his knife, and carved their names—his wife, his son’s, and his father’s—into the last stone.’
––––––––
‘Run Ahmadou!’
They should have expected the Yoruba to attack them in turn. Malam wouldn’t tell her what happened on the coast. But she had heard of things. Boats larger than palaces and deep dark holes in rock where people disappeared.
She turned and punched a short, stocky, man in the face. He reeled back, surprised at how much strength she hid under her delicate features.
Her bald head caught him in the nose, sending blood into her eyes, blinding her just as she stumbled back and a sling wrapped around Ahmadou’s legs, sending him face down into the long grass.
––––––––
‘Don’t worry Haweeyo,’ Abuubakar told his sister from the payphone. ‘I have enough savings to last. I tear down walls every day, but you only get married once.’
Truth was he was heavily indebted anyway, but what did it matter?
‘They pay well in Canada, huh?’ Haweeyo asked. ‘Must be for the heating bills.’
‘Yes, and long-distance calls to Somalian villages. Gotta go, I’ll send the money in a few hours.’
He hung up, zipped his blue Northface all the way over his nose, shoved his hands into his pockets and walked away.
When he finally got his visa, he’d been worried about the culture shock—where he’d pray, all that funny French, and he’d heard there was pork in everything. He’d looked forward to tasting pork. He should’ve worried about the climate shock. They called it ‘Frette’. What they meant was -40°c.
He missed Aden, even the pollution, and didn’t see the crowbar coming as he rounded the corner.
‘Pran lajan l’rapid,’ someone said.
His left shoulder was dislocated, but he swung a hammer all day with his right. He grabbed one of the two hoods by the neck, pinning him against the wall, but his left arm was useless.
The crowbar hit again, and again, until he passed out.
––––––––
‘After a long delay, and believe me, no one is more excited than I am...’ President Dambudzo Marechera said to the crowd of United Nations delegates assembled at the African Union Headquarters in Asmara.
It was a day most had never wanted to see, none less than the CEOs of ChinaCorp and Han Industries overlooking the hall.
The Eastern Chinese Republic extended tentacles into South and Central Asia and had anchors through ChinaCorp throughout Europe and the Middle East, while the Western Chinese Empire had grown since Taiwan bought the USA’s debt and seized control of the NAFTA free trade zone and the Caribbean with Han Industries. It reached almost to Bolivia, through a loose network of protectorates and corporate buy-outs.
They would go to war. And both wanted a slice of the continent.
They’d called subsidising African farmers and manufacturers unfair competition, had accused the AU of harbouring terrorists when the Massina-Sokoto Caliphate cut access to uranium mines in the Sahara. Visa restrictions had backfired. The embargos had done nothing.
‘...so with no further delay, I am proud to announce, that Africa is now entirely self-sustainable in renewable energy!’
Both CEOs stormed out of the room, to half-hearted applause.
––––––––
‘Why did we listen to the Caliphate?’
The black vortex of clouds dominated the horizons, swirling red, high up in the atmosphere, wrecking the towers of Lagos in a shower of lightning storms.
Chinelo could hear the screams from the streets, such things happened when twenty million voices screamed at once.
Chiagozie’s hand landed on her shoulder. ‘Because they were right.’ he said, shutting the window but failing to block out the pain. ‘There was no choosing between the Republic and the Empire.’
‘We could’ve fought,’ she said. Looking out the window to the city drowned in magenta hues, the shadows of fleeing millions outlined against the burning buildings like waves of bubbling tar, crashing into each other, fighting to gain more ground.
‘We should’ve fought them,’ she finished, pointing at the sky.
‘We’ll fight them again, my love.’
Something cracked over the city, followed by a large suction, a single, deep bass note, and then an avalanche of red energy, crushing like stones through shattering glass into the heart of Lagos.
‘I love you,’ they said, turning towards the window and the incoming ray, which swallowed block after block in evaporating waves of stone and bone. Hand in hand they pulled down the blinds and let the heat take them away.
––––––––
Ogotemmeli stood alone, skin of dark brown, deep blue eyes peering out into a stormy wasteland, broken by chains of mountains and smouldering rivers of lava under a blue sky.
So that’s what’s left of our homes...
The oxygen-rich air flooded his brain with dizziness. He was cold, and weaker than he had ever been.
Where are the Osrane? Why aren’t they attacking me?
He saw himself floating over Fida, hurling dragons at ChinaCorp. Damn you, he thought at the Akwesidan. Again? Why?
He saw himself reaching, the planet overheating and cracking, as a rumble threw him off his feet, and the ground waved and split beneath him, sending ripples into the ocean bottoms.
The cracks released the hint of a broken melody, strings that vibrated there and elsewhen, the bits of now and here to the bits of then and there, just beyond the limits of his body. It battered his emotions more strongly than music had before. It was his song, he knew the notes, but they broke against his vocal chords.
He tried to pull strength out of the air. He tried to expand. He was trapped in flesh, and the anger almost ripped his mind apart. He saw the universe, and Rakoteli dying, a faint trace of argon and neon battling each other for her last wisp, it was right there, but he couldn’t reach it. Was that their pain? Always an atom away from eternity? A DNA strain away from knowing the void? He had to fill his life with everything he could take, to fill that emptiness, no matter the cost, no matter who...
No. He closed his mind to the pain and looked back on where he’d been. It wasn’t pain that tied them together...
‘Do you see now?’
The voice burned Ogotemmeli blind and tore him out of the world.
––––––––
Akwesida bloomed ahead of him, Ngai drew back the flare leaving Ogotemmeli depleted, caught in the fevers of the lives he’d touched. Xam.
‘I do. But what do I do now?’ he whispered.
‘You? You finish the song. There is a heart that always beats Ogotemmeli. It beats like the drums of dead Fida. It beats for home.’
The song was the key. To the war and to their exile.
‘Perhaps I can make the Okyin Council see...’ He hesitated, his cells too weak for him to think. ‘Tell me, Ngai, what were you before Akwesida?’
Ngai smiled. ‘I can barely remember the sound of my cows, or the taste of their milk, but I had many, and I tended them well...’ His smile faded and disappeared into the sun.
#
Kiania barged into CEO Chang’s office. The sky through the window overlooking Beijing was black with reinforcements for the Huǒxīng Campaign, and another minor quake felt like her stomach was sent lurching into her spine.
Hans Chang looked up from a pile of progress reports, his eyes red from sleeplessness. Six months into the Huǒxīng Campaign and ChinaCorp had scored impressive victories, but the elementals kept coming, running through their ships like strings of firecrackers.
She was certain now, it wasn’t tectonic; the elementals were the quakes...
‘You’re tiresome, CTO.’ He yawned. ‘What now?’
She hesitated. The Board of Executives had implied several times that her suggestions were treacherously cultish.
‘My apologies, CEO. I know how stressful times are. But I’m certain now. I’ve been comparing tactical reports against the seismic data. They’re a perfect match. I must’ve missed some, but the margin of error...’
‘Tactical reports...’ he mocked. ‘I’ve had a dozen meetings with our best seismologists, and guess what? They agree with you. Destroying the planet would have been easier, but the campaign drags on, one elemental at a time...’
‘Yes, sir. But they always start in Africa. All of them. I honestly think that...’
Hans Chang rose from his chair and walked around his desk towards the CTO ignoring her. ‘...As for you, I’m afraid that, no matter how ground-breaking your contributions to the company, I have to ask you to step down, and turn in all your research immediately.’
She froze in shock.
‘You’re too erratic. I cannot have instability among my senior staff,’ the CEO went on. ‘Return to your office-lab and prepare the handover files. You’ll receive full severance pay and a comfortable pension for your silence.’
He held out his hand.
He knows... she thought ...they all know... One genocide wasn’t enough for them yet... even if it becomes our own...
The corporations had been around for so long, they couldn’t conceive of a future they didn’t rule.
‘I’m sorry I’ve let you down CEO.’ she said.
‘We all have our limits,’ he said curtly, turning back towards his desk. ‘Remember to rely on ChinaCorp for your every need.’
#
‘He’s waking up.’
Ogotemmeli heard the voices, still caught in the hum of Xam, and felt the slab of stone he was laying on slowly freezing with nightfall. He opened his eyes to Akwesida dropping beneath the horizon. A meddling mountain range reflecting the last of the rays from its frosty peaks. He had to fix the melody before the others retaliated.
‘What happened?’ he asked, looking into the concerned flame in Ishimwe’s eyes.
‘The marabouts have been binding elements into you for days,’ Ishimwe snorted. ‘We found what was left of you drifting towards Awukuda. The few Fidan alive told us what you did. You can’t push yourself so, Ogotemmeli, none of us can. You-’
‘I have to talk to the other Okyin and griots,’ he said. ‘What I saw...’
‘The Yaadan troops are about to turn Earth into a snowball, a delegation is on its way now. The Okyin is delirious with pain. The Benadan are fanning the flames. Whatever you’ve seen won’t make much of a difference. I’m of a mind to launch an attack as well. We all respect you Ogotemmeli, but this new red matter is too dangerous.’
The Yaadan chose that moment to land around them in a ring of frozen gases.
The Okyin Yaa looked around her, and then at him.
‘Night is my favourite time to visit your world Ishimwe. I am happy to see your High Griot is alive and back from his foolish mission, but I don’t see your troops—I was expecting thousands of warriors, not healers and citizens.’
Ishimwe snorted. ‘Awukudan are all warriors,’ she said. ‘You best remember that Adeba, outnumbered and far from home.’
‘Foolishness seems evenly shared,’ Ogotemmeli said.
The Okyin Yaa’s opened her mouth to speak, but he stepped in.
‘I loved her,’ he said. ‘Since we were children, we’d been inseparable. Don’t you think I want revenge? I was there when she died. You counselled against intervening, and now you counsel an assault? You want to destroy another world? Where our ancestors are still burnt into the ground? That will kill us all, on every world, and then what?’
‘The Akwesidan told you those things?’ Adeba said, ignoring his taunts. ‘Those exact words—destroying the Earth will destroy us too?’
That’s what the melody told him, but they hadn’t said it. Some said storytelling was a lie. So, he lied. ‘Yes,’ he said, looking into her eyes. ‘Those exact words.’
She paused. The Akwesidan were the oldest of them all. Ogotemmeli watched her face strain between her emotions, her traditions, and her own mind.
‘The Osrane are already attacking Benada, we’re taking losses. The planet is safe for now, but...’ She sighed, turning to Ishimwe. ‘He has to tell the Okyin Bena himself. I will not attack... yet, but only if he joins the fight on Benada. If we are to risk the planet then his life should be on the line as well.’
Ishimwe looked at him. He was still weak, but her honour depended on this as well.
‘He will leave with you for Benada,’ she said, turning towards Ogotemmeli. ‘You loved her, it wasn’t meant to be, but you did. We cannot take your pain for granted, but if Benada suffers the same fate as Fida, then the Earth is gone. I will land on it myself and set it on fire.’
#
‘ID Please.’ The officer’s eyes popped at the rank on the ID bearer’s card. How did a girl of twenty-four become CTO? And what was she doing at a cult fair? But it wasn’t his place to ask, so Kiania stepped into the crowd of cultists gathered on New Tiananmen square.
Letting her keep her ID as a courtesy had been a bad idea, as was letting her access her lab before leaving.
She shoved her way towards the chaotic central stage where various cult leaders and agitators took turns insulting each other for their followers’ amusement.
She stepped on stage unnoticed and did the one thing she knew would catch everybody’s eyes. She stripped off her clothes and held up a syringe of red matter.
The air was warm against her chest, but the intake of breath by the crowd sucked it away, leaving her in cold silence.
Was she supposed to say something? She hadn’t planned anything beyond the theatrics.
‘Drop the needle or we will open fire!’ a voice rang out from the security thopters. ‘You have a five second warning. Remember to rely on ChinaCorp for your every need! Five...’
She slammed the needle into her buttock.
This has to work, this has to...
Her insides took fire at once. She felt her liver melt, then her right lung, then her left, and her stomach. She dropped to her knees, her hands glowing, leaving molten imprints in the metal of the stage. She tried to scream but couldn’t, her open mouth blooming red with her vocal chords burning.
Her brown hair crackled and flew off, her eyes melting down her face. No, no, no, no! And the last of her synapses exploded. The red matter ran through her, gorging each of her veins for the world’s cameras to see.
The glow shrank until only a blood-red tear floated on the breeze and disappeared.
The crowd was silent. The thopter had stopped its countdown. The air tingled with static, and a slew of raindrops hit the stage in a single line, echoing like rapid-fire, and took the shape of a translucent, naked woman, floating inches above the stage.
It worked! she thought, barely remembering the agony of the previous moments. The thopters opened fire, bullets passing through her, ricocheting on the stage and into the crowd.
Instinctively, she pulled heat out of the air, dousing the thopters in flames.
She drew the elements upon herself, becoming a single drop of water, and floated upwards into the atmosphere, while the crowd poured out of the plaza, rampaging through Beijing to another tremor.
#
‘It’s snowing on the ship, Captain!’
Captain Niimi-Feng had seen strange things since being dispatched to Huǒxīng on the Ming Destroyer; but snow falling in space was the strangest.
‘Get ready to fire!’ he commed back to his 2nd Lieutenant.
‘It’s too volatile, sir!’ Panic registered in the lieutenant’s voice. They knew what came after snow. ‘If we wait until it solidifies...’
That’s the point, the Captain thought.
‘Start loading the weapon! Keep it aimed at where the snow blows thickest!’ he barked. We’ll have a second, maybe less.
The snow coagulated with a crunch, and an icy-blue being materialised, looming over the Ming, billowing frozen winds at the ship.
‘Now!’ Captain Niimi-Feng screamed as the giant brought down two destroyer-sized hands on the ship.
The red matter blasted the creature in the chest, just as its hands were about to smash the ship, and it dissolved into the ray.
His crew exulted on the com-lines.
I’m not dying today, he thought, just as a baritone note rang against the Ming’s outer hull. Oh no... the walls around his cabin dissolved, the note vibrating him out of existence.
#
Ogotemmeli sat above the battle, playing the strings on a Kora drawn from the rusty Benadan dirt, while an ice giant disappeared to coordinated blasts of red matter.
A small note of space dust rose from his instrument, and sped towards the Osrane destroyer, gaining size and momentum, and crashed into the ship, turning all its particles and crew to vapor.
‘They’re getting better,’ the Okyin Bena’s voice rang over his shoulder.
Benadan warriors rained from their planet in clouds of magenta dust, consolidating around ships and turning to stone, crushing them to diamonds. But far too many were cut down by the red matter.
‘The Osrane don’t care how much they lose. And they hardly stand a chance,’ Ogotemmeli said. ‘They’re unrelenting. Perhaps there’s something to learn in that.’
‘Have the Akwesidan grown addlebrained?’ she asked. ‘Or do they just not care?’
A hundred gaseous rhinos in brown and beige shades, charged down the plane of the elliptic, dodging blasts of red matter that hit other Osrane battleships, disintegrating them.
‘Perhaps there is something to learn in that,’ the Okyin Bena retorted.
The beasts melted into the ships, poisoning the crew, and reforming outside as the ships collapsed to Benada’s pull.
‘Well, we can certainly destroy them,’ she said, rising, her hair a cluster of tiny golden meteorites in a halo behind her head. Something drew her attention.
‘Ogotemmeli. You’ve seen stranger things than I. What is that?’ she asked, pointing at a swirling mass closing in on Benada.
Ogotemmeli didn’t recognise the pattern of elements. It approached slowly, a swirling mist of browns, greens, and blues, a flurry of minerals reminiscent of...
‘Osrane!’ the Okyin Bena growled, launching herself at the being.
Of course! Ogotemmeli thought, shooting after the enraged Benadan queen.
Why would an Osrane do that? Was it a trap?
If he had known the flesh, perhaps an Osrane had made the opposite choice.
He released his energies, trapping the Okyin Bena in a ring of ice and fire just as she struck at the intruder.
#
The essence of former human, Kiania Hui Bon Hua-Figuerido drifted towards Huǒxīng. The memories of trees and lakes, the few holograms of falling snow she’d held on to since childhood, all drifted away from her in minute particles of H2O, chloroplast, and silica.
Her consciousness tugged her towards Earth, no matter how hard she tried to pull together.
ChinaCorp pacifier jets speckled the skies, dropping payload after payload on civilian areas. Rio was on fire. Had it only been less than a day?
A glimmer caught her eye above the planet’s curve. A full fleet of Destroyers was preparing for translation to Huǒxīng.
If the people couldn’t stand up to the company’s war machine, perhaps the strange elementals could.
Strange? Is that what I am?
Huǒxīng glowed ahead, but a storm rose from its orbit, wrapped in a golden aura, coming straight for her.
Whatever it was, she hoped it would listen first, she thought, before losing consciousness.
––––––––
‘We should kill it.’
The Okyin Yaa wasn’t the first to suggest it. The death of thousands of Yaadan had left her wary, and the mix of elements floating in the plasma bubble was an easy target for their exhaustion.
Ogotemmeli felt drawn to the bubble. The swirl of matter hummed to him. It was hard to keep his flame burning; it wanted to change, to become wood, grass, gasoline...
He placed a hand against the bubble, and dissolved into a pure cold flame, the elements inside pulling closer to him, pushing against the translucent plasma.
He drew all the heat under the dome to him.
The plasma bubble exploded.
The Osrane burst through, pulling herself together in a flurry of blended hues, and hit the ground panting.
––––––––
Kiania looked up, her jaw dropping, letting little puffs of oxygen into the Huǒxīng air.
They were all different, a chaotic mix of elements held together into ice giants, gaseous ghosts, rocky armours wrecked with storms of gas. But she was right, it was there in their shifting features, in the dress and ornaments, Luba and Oromo, Berber and Nuer, Wolof, Ndebele, and others. Those who’d survived the corporate satellite-mining, and now they had her.
‘They’re coming,’ she said desperately. ‘They’re coming.’
––––––––
‘That’s a warning,’ Ogotemmeli said, turning into flame-lit ice. He reached his hand out to Kiania. Their elements mingled, his warm ice turning her traces of auric powder to gold melting on the floor, and they merged into one. A giant of bubbling water, waterfalls in its eyes, and the breath of a forest after the rain.
Do you hear me? he thought at the Osrane girl. He didn’t know her name, but he knew her.
Yes. She answered him. She felt her own weakness in the blizzard of the man’s power, in how solid he felt, grounded in his worlds, while she was one sneeze away from vanishing. And there is also a tune. What is it?
Salvation. Or I’m a complete idiot. Why would you do this to yourself?
It’s my technology you’re fighting. None of us knew what you were. We have nothing left, we needed the resources. I understood who we were fighting, worse, the CEOs knew all along. I had to do something. I made things worse. ChinaCorp is losing it.
What happened to us? The red matter changed our ancestors somehow. Why is it killing us now?
I don’t know. Everything we mine leaves an imprint. I don’t know for sure, but the elements recognise each other, and then they vanish. Jīnxīng... What do you call the second planet from the sun?
Fida.
Fida was just a test, I didn’t know the planet wouldn’t take it, then the earthquakes started. We... She felt a change in his emotions and paused, letting his feelings for Rakoteli envelop her. I’m sorry for your loss, I truly am, but we’d been losing people for half a century. All I ever knew was the war, my father died before my birth, my mother on one of the destroyers. I guess we all try to make up for something. But what about you? You can kill us anytime, why don’t you?
The song you’re hearing? I heard it whole. I heard what your mathematics showed you. If you hadn’t killed my only love, I wouldn’t have convinced the others. You’d be dead and so would we.
The melody aligned suddenly, and they saw Earth, gleaming, blue, green, brown, and then it was gone.
Did you see-
Yes, he interrupted. Yes, I did... I think I know what to do. I will need you, but...
But we might not make it?
We won’t make it. Not in that sense.
She thought back on the carnage she’d caused and the future she’d seen and nodded.
They separated, and the humming stopped.
––––––––
Ogotemmeli turned towards his people, standing stunned.
‘For a moment, you had us all in a bind,’ Ewaso the Aabadan Griot said, his icy features twisted. ‘And... I heard something...’
‘What you heard is what the Akwesidan showed me. It ties us to them and them to us. We can’t let this war go on, we have to return somehow, we left the continent when it was broken, we have to return to heal it.’
‘Our ancestors sought elsewhere what was stolen from them. It’s when they dug their heels into what was theirs that we became an inspiration to others, and a threat to the corporations.’
‘Some of us must return, and find what we have left, only then can we leave this system, and become all that we can.’
The Okyin Bena laughed, a genuine smile lighting her eyes.
‘We’ll take care of the fleet,’ she said, the other Okyin acquiescing with resolute grunts. ‘You heal that dying planet if you can, but if we can no longer hold before you have, we will attack.’
‘If you fail so do we,’ Ogotemmeli said, turning to the other High Griot.
‘Xam,’ Karamata said.
The others chorused approval and knelt, placing their foreheads at their Okyin’s feet.
‘Your tales will be missed,’ Ishimwe told Ogotemmeli.
‘I’ve been told that once.’
‘Sing when you get there, for all of us.’
He smiled faintly and turned towards Kiania. ‘What is your name by the way?’
‘Kiania Hui Bon Hua-Figuerido.’
He moved his lips soundlessly.
‘Can’t pronounce that,’ he said. ‘Are you ready?’
‘I shot myself in the ass in public for this.’
Ogotemmeli laughed. ‘You would make a fine griot.’
They merged.
‘Gather your forces!’ the Okyin Bena yelled at the other Okyin, the ground cracking beneath her feet. ‘We’re gonna give the Osrane what they’re coming for.’
#
‘Take out as many ships as you can,’ Kiania commanded.
Six massive forces blew through the ChinaCorp fleet, slamming ships into each other, exploding bubbles of red matter absorbing industrial and organic matter alike.
Ogotemmeli heard new voices on the song, and Earth appeared in the distance. He remembered the stone towers built so many years ago.
That’s where they’d land.
They broke through the clouds over the earth.
‘Stop the carnage,’ he told the others. ‘Neutralise all ChinaCorp operations, their military and industrial bases, leave nothing, then join me.’
They broke off, and Ogotemmeli landed.
The land looked like a writhing snake, valleys and canyons of lacerations, like a slave beaten by a thousand overseers.
A dozen ChinaCorp pacifiers hit Mach 3 overhead. Kiania took over and scrambled the magnetic field around the jets.
They fell spinning and slammed their watery fist through the ground in a wide circle.
Water bubbled through the gritty soil, brown and muddy at first but the water washed out the mud. A small pond, and a few withering reeds. A start. But they would need the others.
Karamata and Afalkay, the Griot of Benada, landed and looked approvingly at the circle of Pacifiers.
‘The skies are clean,’ Karamata said, grinning.
‘So are the streets,’ added Waysira of Yaa, landing with the impact of a glacier along with Ewaso of Aabada.
‘Knocked ’em cold,’ Ewaso said, pounding an icy fist into his hand.
Maitera of Yawda landed last.
‘I might have polluted the ‘seas’ a little...’ he said, shaking his head at the blasted lands, ‘...nothing worse than what they were doing to themselves.’
The earth shook.
‘The battle has started,’ Ogotemmeli said letting drops of water flow away from their body, forming a liquid Kora and sat stringing an aqua-melodic note. ‘We know what to do.’
Waysira and Ewaso called their ice djembe and balafon, pounding deep bass, and light notes.
Another minor tremor shook.
Afalkay called a kalimba of red dirt, dissonant keys, twanging over the bass and ringing balafon.
A shekere appeared in Karamata’s hands, beads rattling a hip-shaking groove.
Maitera let his algaita appear from his breath, blowing a deep monotone in the thin tube.
They sat, the ground rising and falling in wavelets around them.
And they played.
The ground shook, and they dreamt of their families and their homes, and they played.
The melody shifted through rhythms before there were kings. Ogotemmeli hammered at the liquid strings, his voice gliding over the changing tones, trying to fall in line with all the broken notes of broken epochs.
Focus. Kiania thought. They are only one song.
He kept playing.
I am not going to last much longer, she said, feeling the last of her energy riding the tide of keys. I’m almost there. Hold on. I’m close. Just a moment, he answered,
He saw themselves play. A cascade playing a cascade, and dived back into his body, strong with his own soul and Kiania’s, and the waterfall peeled away from the head of a bald man in a blue boubou with brown skin and deep-blue almond shaped eyes, playing a kora of bones and strings of streaming blood.
They were riding the melody now, the rising ground wasn’t random at all, the streaming clouds overhead did so because they sang, and they sang because they streamed.
A halo of all their forces enveloped the griots. The earthquakes stopped. Kiania disappeared.
They all looked at each other, one with the vibration.
‘The battle is won,’ Ogotemmeli said. ‘We can go now.’
They vanished into the atmosphere.
The ice giants melted into the ground, plunging through the cracks in the rocks, where they bubbled into a geyser, crashing to the ground, and spreading towards the dried-out ocean floors and filling them.
Afalkay, Maitera, and Karamata, merged into each other, creating matter and minerals that dispersed on the air, and where the geyser landed, small seeds grew into bushes, ferns, and lianas. Their combined elements drawing from the air and the ground the substance that would renew all that had been destroyed.
Ogotemmeli’s eyes danced with all the elements of the universe, neither flesh nor soul, just music.
He struck a final chord and let the bones fall to the ground. He sung one final note, and let his arms and legs dig roots, his chest and neck thicken and elongate, the crown on his head turn into a thousand, thousand branches, and a baobab stood where Ogotemmeli’s song ended.
#
‘You need another Griot, Ishimwe,’ Tiwonge said, looking at the Earth change before their eyes.
‘So do you,’ Ishimwe retorted.
‘Do I?’ she asked. ‘And have a man argue my decisions in rhymes? No, thank you.’
Just as she said so, an Akwesidan appeared in a solar flare, radiating mid-summer warmth.
‘You’re late for the fight Eshu,’ the Okyin Yaa said disapprovingly.
‘You wouldn’t want us to join, believe me,’ he answered with a grin. ‘Where will you be going? We’ll keep watch here, as we have before.’
The Okyin looked at a star glowing brightly beyond the solar system.
‘Sigui Tolo.’ She said. ‘We used to believe we came from there once. Well, we’ll make it our home now.’
And just like that, they were gone.
––––––––
Mame Bougouma Diene is a Senegalese-American humanitarian living in Brooklyn, and the francophone/US spokesperson for the African Speculative Fiction Society. His collection of novellas Dark Moons Rising on a Starless Night came out August 2018 at Clash Books. Google him, he's got some fun stuff out there.
