The fight took seconds. Forty-five seconds to cross the Karman line.
Forty-five seconds for Cele to cave the Pan-African’s chest in.
I am dying.
I am using micro-sized force fields to keep some of my blood in, but that won’t save my life.
It’s cold.
Black-Power feels it too.
My mind can keep the platform up here long enough to freeze his blood.
We both die.
Check, mate and fuck you, brother.
Elizabeth...
Elizabeth...
The remnants of the geodesic dome fell to the earth as a meteor shower, red hot chunks of titanium, which set off forest fires and destroyed houses. Families watching the bout on television found their living rooms torn asunder with scant warning. There was no advantage to being outside as crowds pressed against the one-mile security cordon were subjected to the shower and people were reduced to flaming, pulped flesh. A cruise liner traversing the lagoon took a hit to the bow and burned furiously and rich passengers and less-rich crew took to the lifeboats. Those who chanted for blood mere minutes before ran for cover wherever they could find it. Despite the carnage, the sky looked beautiful with bright orange and yellow streaks.
Seventy-one people lost their lives.
The Pan-African’s body burnt up in re-entry, lacking a force field to protect it.
Black-Power was frozen, then burned, then broken against the Earth’s surface. His suit was carbonised and the skin blackened and peeled off.
Trees still blazed around him. He tried to stand but his muscles would not obey. He remembered being struck by lightning three times during his descent, each hit like the accusing finger of God.
He could not cry—his tear ducts were gone. He could barely see. His harm-resistant eyelids had been able to protect his corneas only so much. The left was scorched, but the right had better light perception.
He sensed someone close by.
“Are you proud of yourself, old man?” said Thembeka. “A little fratricide to prove you still have lead in your pencil?”
“Thembeka...”
“He was kin to us. I could feel it...”
Black-Power could not see her clearly but he felt the rage coming off her. He tried to speak, coughed instead. The fire had gone down his throat. He could rasp, though.
“Thembeka, fuck off. We are not related to you, Tope and I.”
She edged close to his ear. “Were, asshole. You mean ‘we were not related’ not ‘are’. Tope is dead, remember?”
The pain threading his nerves intensified and he gasped, clutching at air.
“Shit, Black-Power, you’re an absolute fucking mess,” she cradled his head then; held him.
“Thembeka,” he croaked, “I’m sorry.” All he could smell was burning, and the all consuming pain threaded itself tighter and tighter into his body, constricting his throat.
“Shhhhh,” she said, “I can hear you. So... you did love him, once.”
“Yes,” he said, “once.”
Black-Power wished he could cry. Instead, he managed a painful croak. Thembeka poured some water onto his lips and tongue. He coughed his thanks.
“You forgive me?” he managed.
“No,” she said, “it’s not that easy.”
A strange weather formation over Africa.
Several listening posts were already turned towards the continent as a precaution in case the bout between superhumans developed complications, so it was well documented. The clouds seemed to be on fire, but it later became clear. A wormhole terminated there and left a ship, some said a shuttle.
It looked like a grand, black metal spider. It flew as if light, but the earth reverberated when it touched down above the spot where Black-Power lay against Thembeka.
The woman tensed for battle.
“At ease,” said Black-Power. “I... I know this ship, or it’s like. I remember now. It’s me they want.”
Two constructs emerged, shining ones like Biblical burnished brass men. Black-Power struggled to his feet and accepted the inhibitor bracelets, starting to go with his gaolers.
“What are you?” asked Thembeka.
“A criminal,” croaked Black-Power. “Protect them, Thembeka. Protect the people. I always wanted to...”
“When you weren’t trying to forcibly copulate with them,” she said, but the fire was gone from her eyes, “what was your crime?”
He looked down. “...Forcing myself sexually on others, amongst other things.”
She laughed then. And cried. But she did not ask what the other things were.
He held out his blackened mask. “Please, carry on, you will do better than me.”
“I don’t need that,” she said, “I won’t hide behind that. But, is there any chance I could get your rainbow cape, the one you never fought with?”
“Phulani told you, the bastard,” Black-Power cracked a painful smile, “Sure—sala kathle, Sister.”
“Goodbye to you too, Detective.”
Black-Power’s last words floated over his shoulder, as he entered the ship: “Umuntu Ngumuntu Ngabantu.”
Thembeka smiled—a human becomes human, through being with others. “Not bad pronounciation for a kwerekwere,” she said.
Black-Power’s laughter echoed on, long after the ship’s doors closed.
The ship rose, the burning cloud phenomenon happened again, and then it was over.
“...And then it was over,” said Thembeka. “That was the end of Black-Power, returned to interstellar incarceration somewhere left of the I-don’t-give-a-fuck solar system.”
Elizabeth Kokoro stopped typing and saved the document. She switched off the recorder.
“You were in love with him,” said Thembeka. “I can feel it.”
“I think I loved them both,” said Elizabeth. “And hated them too.”
They both laughed until they cried.
“What are you going to do?” asked Thembeka.
“A book. The Last Pantheon. You just helped me finish it and I already have a publication deal secured. What of you?”
Thembeka went to the window and opened it.
“Fight crime,” she said. “What else is there for people like us?”
The curtain fluttered—Elizabeth caught a last rainbow flash of colour.
Thembeka was gone.
Tade Thompson lives and works in the UK, though he is Yoruba. His most recent works include the novel Making Wolf and the story ‘Child, Funeral, Thief, Death’ in Apex Magazine. He is an occasional visual artist.
Nick Wood is a Zambian born, South African naturalised clinical psychologist, with over a dozen short stories previously published in Interzone, Subterfuge, Infinity Plus, PostScripts, and Redstone Science Fiction, amongst others. Nick has also appeared in the first African anthology of science fiction, AfroSF – and now with this collaborative novella follow-up with Tade Thompson here in AfroSFv2. He also has a book pending with NewCon Press (2016), entitled Azanian Bridges, exploring a current but alternative South Africa, where apartheid survived. Nick has completed an MA in Creative Writing (SF & Fantasy) through Middlesex University, London and is currently training clinical psychologists and counsellors at the University of East London in England. He can be found: @nick45wood or http://nickwood.frogwrite.co.nz/
Hell Freezes Over
Mame Bougouma Diene
1: Hell or High Water
They still talk about the storms...
The bleak landscape stretching behind had nothing on the thunderclouds looming ahead of Ari, and in another few minutes darkness would merge with darkness in a frenzy of hail and ball lightning. He recalled a vague saying about unstoppable forces and immovable objects. In his experience there was no such thing: everything moved eventually; everything could be shaken, torn off, and ripped to shreds. As for unstoppable forces, they stopped too, eventually, and when they did, they left nothing unmoved. He shook his head wondering who the idiot who had thought that u
p was, and how it had stuck. Different times, probably, and milder winds. Standing by his side, Adi, as if to prove a silent point, had not moved.
In a few minutes it would not matter; in a few minutes the storm would start, and in a few months the winter.
The waters called him, they called her, and they called all of them. Awake and in their sleep, the Fish were the waters.
The Moles’ efforts had proven fruitful, or so they claimed. The tunnels of the Divine Undertaking were nearing completion, and the caves would offer a luxury undreamed of on the surface. But few dreamed anymore. Neural synapses would fire at night just as they always had, but you cannot dream if you do not have a past, and you cannot dream if you cannot bring the future to life—when tomorrow is another whirlwind, and the future an endless field of ice...such are not dreams, but fantasies in the void, and in the void there is despair.
He stretched his arms and leaped over the cliff, the friction building up static against the electrically charged air of the storm, and his head closed in on the blue-black waters with barely a splash.
Only the Fish truly Dreamed... Neptune have mercy on their souls.
We have been tried by Water and tried by Ice.
We have been carved by its shards,
And moulded by its flows
As Neptune’s tribulations pass,
The power of Hades grows.
Knowing that the Time of Neptune would soon pass, revealing Hades in all of his glory, ushering in the return to the Cave—before humanity wandered into the light and was blinded to reason by the sun—was little comfort from the disdainful looks of the Moles sitting across the aisle. Their time was close, and they knew it. One day, soon now, Hell would freeze over, and it would be their turn to rule in Hades’ glory.
The scriptures could not mute the snickering, and even the vision of Hell stretching endlessly outside the church window could not dampen their heckling.
The priest was formal, and the Blank Book of Scriptures, its pages untainted and its message clear, was unequivocal. Millions of years past, a man-shaped demon named Plato, son of the wretched Socrates, Scion of Hell, had led to the fore an Age of Reason, dragging Man from the comfort of the Cave, and into the blinding lights of purgatory.
Upon the surface, man had first experienced the Time of Mars, when wars wrecked the world and billions perished as Hell shaped itself at Man’s pleasure. Then came the Time of Hermes, and for a period Man flourished, striking a balance between his aspirations and Hell. In the Time of Narcissus, Man had forgotten his humble beginnings and the comfort of the Cave, and sought his own reflection in the light, his mirror image in Hell. The Time of Neptune had cleansed the world, and Hades would lead us back to the Cave.
Ari shook himself awake, and for a few seconds, the world blended with the Dream before washing it away. Those early moments, growing longer by the day, threatened to rip his sanity apart. As the dreams grew more vivid with each passing night the fragile balance grew more delicate. One day, he knew, like all the other Fish before him, reality would merge with the Dream, and the Dream would win.
“Ari, Ari...”
Jonah had grown accustomed to the dull look in his son’s eyes, and the light that grew slowly, alerting him to his return. Just as he had grown accustomed to that same look in his father’s eyes, back when he was too young to understand himself. Long before Ari grew accustomed to, recognised, and finally understood, that same look in his own. All the Fish Dream Fish Dreams.
“Ari...”
Stepping into life from the Dream felt like defeat in victory, almost fratricide. There was comfort in the Dream, perhaps the comfort of the Cave. Perhaps. Fish were chosen, after all, chosen to rule under Neptune, and had for five hundred years. Who else would dream of the Cave and know it in their souls?
Ari’s sharp intake of air, and sudden rising bolt upright, brought light back to his eyes. He looked around, weighing up his surroundings, making sense of the world as he had known it before going to sleep. Before he Dreamed.
“Father.”
His voice was firm and his grip solid, much to Jonah’s relief. He should not Dream so young, not with such intensity, but he was one of a generation who sought glory in unfathomable depths, ever darker crevasses, ever more dangerous valleys and canyons and towers. A generation for whom the darkness beneath, the endless echo of whale song, was the melody of the Cave and the enticing murmur of Neptune.
“You’re awake. Good. Your mother left some food for you on the table. We need to make the coast before the storm, and we’ll have to stay longer beneath than usual.”
Ari sensed the tension in Jonah’s voice. “It’s fine, Father,” he reassured him. “Once we’re under we can wait out the storm; we’ll be needed once it has passed.”
Jonah did not respond. Instead he stared out of the window to the cliffs and the thunderclouds creeping over the ocean. He turned and stepped through the doorway. “The storm is a harbinger, Son, and winter is but weeks away...”
“I know, Father.” Ari said and looked up, but Jonah had left the room.
The Moles had started work early. Lines of Beasts hauled equipment from Fish coastal outposts to the Colony, coordinated by a few Mole overseers. A storm could lay weeks of work to waste in a matter of minutes and last for days. There was a time when the Fish would have exerted explicitly imaginable violence had the Moles failed in their task and suffered setbacks in the Divine Undertaking.
Ari looked down to the other Fish waiting for his father by the cliff. Only a few had shaken themselves awake but he saw Adi looking over the edge to the ocean, turning her back to it, spreading her arms wide and bending backwards over the edge as if about to dive.
A stone hit him in the shoulder, and a young Mole stood there grinning at him. Times had changed. As the Divine Undertaking progressed, and the Dream took ever-larger numbers of Fish over the edge, the balance of power had shifted, and respect for the Fish dimished. Now they served only a purpose, and that purpose would not last the winter.
His father reached out and patted him on the shoulder. Let it be, his expression told him, let it be...
They had been prouder than this once. The Fish dared the depths of the seas for months at a time going through towns and cities long submerged. They’d exposed themselves to unknown amounts of radiation and chemical pollutants over generations, swimming the rising waters for food, materials for construction, power sources for the water filters and storage units, and eventually, for machinery geared towards the Divine Undertaking. But those days were gone; the Dream would take over unless the Moles could exact their vengeance first.
His shoulder hurt, his pride a flimsy thing fainter than reality, but he let it be.
He reached the cliff and sidled next to Adi. Caught in the rising winds behind her, and the crash of the waves hundreds of feet below, she did not hear him place a hand behind her back before pulling her back from the edge.
“Aaaaaah!” she opened her eyes, “Ri...”
Her eyes re-focused slowly, and he realised the Dream was taking over her much faster than him. One day he would not be there on time to tease her and no one would stop her fall.
“We’re up for a few days, it sounds like,” she said matter-of-factly.
Her left eye still bore a small scar below it, an acid burn from a poisoned tentacle. It had seemed trivial at the time, but she had barely survived the infection.
Ari nodded. “When have you ever lied?” he said.
Adi laughed. She loved the depths, their darkness, unexpected poisonous glows and the whisper of giant beings—Neptune’s titanic children inside which the legendary Jonah, his father’s namesake, had once slept and brought forth the truth of the Cave.
It took a few more minutes for the rest of the Fish to gather by the cliff. Once they were equipped with their suits, propulsion engines, food and energy packs, and fin-shaped oxygen and waste-recyclers on their backs, they resembled the creature they were named after. Not that they would
have known—no one in the colony had seen fish before. Only giants and monsters ruled the seas, only the name remained. Fish dove and swam, Moles dug and burrowed.
Not so long ago, a hundred years at most, there would have been a crowd gathered to see them off. But as the Time of Neptune grew longer, the storms stronger, the winters harsher and more unpredictable, the ice encroaching over more land each year, and with the Dream taking away sanity, authority, and lives, those numbers dwindled.
Jonah stood atop a stone to address the crowd of gathered Fish, and the few on-looking Ants and Bees. “Morning! You’ve all shaken yourselves out; get ready to stay that way! You ain’t blind! You can see it coming just as I do! In all things the mission comes first!
“I have split you into two teams; David will sort you out, and tell you where to go! We have two objectives: fuel for the water filters, and power sources for the Divine Undertaking! The Ants have given me very specific directions as to the kind of power sources they require, so be careful!
“You know the works! Keep your com-units on, communicate findings to each other as necessary!”
Adi raised a hand. “Jonah! This is not a storm, I mean it is, of course it is, but... this feels like winter. A bad one.”
“Don’t be silly, Adi. We’re heading south-southeast. Winter is not for a few months; until then, we have to gather as much fuel as we can. But you’re right, the storm will last more than a few days, bet your life on it, and we may have to travel quite far so save on your food and energy packs.” He paused to stare back at the clouds. “Just to be safe, keep your eyes open for unusually cold currents and signs of early icing on the way back north. We won’t be much use to anybody if we’re trapped under... David?”
Jonah’s second stepped up to the stone dividing the Fish into two groups. Ari was sent to gather fuel, Adi, autonomous power sources.
The Fish lined up along the cliff, and one after another, in intervals of twenty seconds, leaped off, daring the incoming juggernaut to smash them against the crag, and answering the water’s siren call with a kiss on her dark and glowing lips.
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