AfroSFv2

by Ivor W Hartmann

  “It’s time to revenge,” Teacher said.

  “Vengeance serves no purpose,” Baba said. “I called you to talk about the gift our ancestors gave me and how we can use it to defend ourselves. I don’t want to talk about vengeance and bloodshed.”

  Ancestors? Kera frowned. Baba had insisted that the hissing creatures were not spirits, or gods, just people. A different kind of people. Why then was he telling these men that they were spirits? Was it to protect the secret?

  “We can’t defend ourselves without weapons,” Teacher said.

  “Even if I wanted to I can’t design weapons,” Baba said. “The spirits that possessed me are not warriors. They won’t allow me to create things that will end up killing people.”

  “What ancestors are those? Our ancestors were not cowards. They fought the British. They resisted colonisation.”

  “Well, I can’t build weapons.”

  “But we need to kill those who try to kill us.”

  “Weapons are the reason our world is a bad place,” the reverend said.

  “And you think you will just wish away the badness?” Teacher said. “Get real. Without weapons we won’t be able to defend ourselves. Never.”

  “Yes we can,” Baba said. “I can build a wall so high and so thick and so strong that not even a tank will bring it down. I can create a moat of fire outside this wall, a fire that will never go out.”

  “You talk like a madman,” Teacher said.

  “We’ve seen his machine,” the mayor said. “He can do it if he says he can.”

  Kera crept away. He wandered about in the empty streets. Even the birds seemed to be staying away from the town. The scars of the massacre glared at him. Burnt vehicles, shattered buildings, bloodstains on the pavement. On Main Street, he saw a family making their way out of town, with a few possessions on bicycles. The stupid ones, Kera thought. Katong had been the safest place before the attack. Leaving it would be jumping from the frying pan into the fire. And if Baba built the wall and fire moat, would they be safe? Probably, but not from artillery fire. The streets had too many painful memories, so he escaped to the workshop, which evoked only metallic memories.

  Baba never put a padlock on the outer gate, for the yard had nothing valuable, only scrap and immovable tools. He locked the shop, however, for it contained merchandise, household utensils, iron furniture, and he kept valuable tools in a backroom. But that day, Kera found a padlock on the outer gate, an expensive type that used a combination like a safe.

  He stared at the padlock for a long moment, and then climbed over the gate and jumped into the workshop. He found two machines that Baba must have made in the night. One looked like a chair with a wheel. Baba had cannibalised the wheel from an old green bicycle of Kera’s, which he had intended to repair and give to Okee. The chair, crafted out of iron and cushioned with red leather and sponge, had been Baba’s favourite, a piece of art that Kera’s grandfather had made many years ago. Just under the seat, but above the wheel, was a black box made entirely out of the strange glass rock. Two large sheets of leather were attached to the back of the chair. In front of the chair were a bicycle handlebar and a vehicle’s gear box. Kera puzzled over the machine until he spread out the leather and the purpose struck him. Wings. ‘I can build a flying machine.’

  The second object was a rod twice the length of his arm and just as thick, with four slide switches at the back. It had a slot at the top, with a mirror inside. When he looked into the open end of the tube, he saw a row of mirrors made from the strange glass rock, placed delicately one behind the other, and each caught the image of his eye.

  He slid the switches from one position to another. Nothing happened. He left the rod on the table, where he had found it, and crawled into the corpse of a van. He sat behind the wheel and memories of his lost family saddened him.

  The sun was high in the sky when Baba came in, alone, still wearing the welding goggles. Kera thought his skin had again grown several shades darker, and now looked as though it was smeared with grease. He gave Kera a smile, and spoke as he strode to his worktable.

  “Good you are here,” Baba said. “Have you seen that thing?”

  “The flying machine?” Kera said, but stayed in the van.

  Baba climbed onto the chair, pulled a lever and a pair of six foot wings spread out. He peddled. A whirr filled the workshop. The machine did not move, for a stand prevented the wheel from touching the ground. He peddled harder, and the wheel spun in a blur of motion. Baba kicked away the stand. Instead of the wheel falling to the ground, the machine jumped into the air. Kera gaped. In spite of all he had seen Baba do, he had not imagined it would actually fly. The wings flapped like that of a bird. Baba stayed only a few feet above the ground, within the cover of the wall, and he later told Kera it was because he did not want anyone else to see the flying machine. He circled about for a minute and landed.

  “I call it a bruka,” Baba said, laughing. “Do you want to give it a try?”

  Kera’s face tightened. He had just buried Mama, Acii, and Okee. Laughing did not feel right, and certainly flying for pleasure was immoral.

  “It’s just like riding a bicycle,” Baba said. “Give it a try.”

  Kera shook his head.

  “I built it for you,” Baba said.

  Kera did not reply. He could not bear the weight of Baba’s stare. He looked away. He felt more than he heard Baba approach. A strong perfume filled his nose, the smell grew stronger as Baba came closer. Kera turned to him in puzzlement. Baba never used any cosmetics, not even Vaseline, but now he had applied a greasy ointment. It made his skin darker, and it gave him a strong, flowery scent.

  Kera looked away, at the rusted wheel, at a spider web on the dash board. His vision blurred.

  “I wish I could also cry,” Baba said. “I wish tears could roll down my face. But the rock people touched me. I can’t sleep. I can’t get tired. I can’t eat. I pretend to eat in public, but I don’t need food anymore. And the sun burns my skin.”

  You died, Kera wept silently. You died in the cave.

  Baba put a hand on his shoulder. It felt like ice. Kera cringed away.

  “I’m not dead,” Baba said. “I’m only different.”

  Kera could still not understand. Baba surely had not forgotten Mama’s laughter, or how she sung as she ground simsim into odi, or Acii’s laughter, or how Okee loved to chase after lizards. How could he remember them and not grieve?

  “You still have Karama,” Baba said. “You can rescue him before he turns into a monster. I could have done it myself, but these changes.” He paused. “I can’t see far away things. I can’t ask anyone else to do it for I don’t want them to know about the flash gun.”

  Kera stared at the cobweb, at a trapped insect wing glimmering in a drop of sunlight. A cloud swept in and the wing lost its glow, to become just a shrivelled thing with torn edges. He heard Baba sigh, and then walk away. He looked up, to see Baba standing akimbo beside the rod on the table, head slightly bowed, maybe thinking about destroying it.

  Kera thought about the flying machine and the flash gun rod for the rest of the day, wondering how a weepy boy of sixteen could rescue an elder brother from an army of savages. He had been eight the last time he had engaged in a fight when a girl had beaten him up for stealing her mango. Karama was the tougher one, with muscles that gave him the nickname Schwarzenegger Commando. If their situations were reversed, with Kera the hostage, Karama would not have hesitated to jump into Baba’s flying machine and ride away to rescue his little brother.

  But he could not do it. How could he?

  He woke up the next morning, from another night of ceaseless nightmares, to find Baba had prepared him breakfast, but no sign of Baba. As he ate, he noticed a candle holder shaped like a dove on the kitchen table. A week before the attack, Mama had asked Baba to make her one because the clay holders she had kept breaking. She had pestered him for it, and Baba had kept giving her excuses, until the night before the attack
, when she asked Kera if he heard learnt enough to craft her one. Kera had only smiled in shyness. The dove was warm, and he thought it had Mama’s scent. Fighting back tears, he dropped it, and ran to the workshop, where he found Baba making another candle holder.

  “What do you want me to do?” he said, trying hard not to sniffle.

  Baba gave him a quick smile, went into the room behind the shop, and returned with the rod. “Did you see this?” Baba said.

  “Is that the flash gun?” Kera said.

  Baba fished a sliver of glass from his pocket and slid it into a slot on top of the rod. “It’s the safety, without it the weapon is useless. Do you know what the sun is made of?”

  “Fire?”

  “Yes. Fire.”

  Baba picked an empty paint tin from a waste bin and put it on the roof of the van. He then stood several paces away and took aim. Kera waited for a bang, for something spectacular. Nothing happened. He turned to his father with a questioning look, and in that instant he heard a faint sizzling. He turned back to the tin. It had vanished. A whiff of blue smoke wafted lazily, and then thinned out into oblivion.

  “You can’t see it in daylight,” Baba said. “If it were night you would’ve seen a bluish light.” Baba opened a chamber at the back to reveal rechargeable AA batteries. “See? I modified these so they use solar energy to produce a fire so hot that it can punch a hole through a mountain. If you have the patience you can make the mountain disappear, inch by inch.”

  Heat ray, Kera thought, recalling his favourite book, The War of the Worlds. He wondered if the hissing creature was an alien. Some theories had it that human beings originated from outer space, hence their inability to live at peace with the environment. Maybe these aliens found Earth inhospitable because of the sun, so they lived inside caves. Maybe they inhabited apes to survive, and the symbiotic relationship gave birth to humans.

  “They are not aliens,” Baba said, using the English word for he could not find an equivalent in Luo.

  Baba pulled out a weird pair of goggles from a drawer. It had two miniature tubes on the glass, one for each eye. He turned a dial, and the tubes elongated with the whir sound of a zoom lens.

  “If you wear this at the top of a mountain,” Baba said, “you’ll see ants walking at the foot of the mountain. With this and the flash gun, you can wipe out an entire army without them knowing what hit them. So you see, the mission will be easy and safe? You stay in the sky all the time and vaporise the soldiers, one at a time. When they are all dead, you fly down and bring your brother back home.”

  That night, the nightmares did not come. Instead, Kera had vivid dreams of Kibuuka, a warrior who could fly like a bird and shoot arrows at the enemy, and of Luanda Magere, another invincible warrior who was made out of stone. In the dream, Kera was a superhero with the combined ability of Kibuuka and Luanda Magere. He got flying power from his mother, who in the dream lived in the moon, and he got his stone flesh from his father, who lived in a dark cave just outside their home. He darted about in the sky, unleashing lightning onto the warlords, putting an end to wanton rape and murder and all the evils that the war had brought upon his country. The dream was so vivid that, for several moments when he woke up, he could not remember who he was.

  Are you ready? Baba said.

  The voice added to Kera’s confusion, for he was alone in the room. Kera stepped out of bed and got dressed up quickly. As he zipped up his jeans, Baba appeared at the doorway, with the eternal smile. He waved a lunch-box.

  “I packed you something to eat,” Baba said.

  “Thank you,” Kera said. “How did you sleep?” he added in greeting, and only after he had said it did he remember that Baba was not capable of sleep anymore. He wondered if he should have instead used the simpler English greeting, Good Morning, or the Swahili one, habari za subui.

  Still, Baba replied. “I slept well. Maybe you?”

  “I slept well too.”

  It was still dark when they got to the workshop. Baba had already packed the bruka in a red box, fitted with wheels. Kera rolled it out of the workshop and out of the town into the valley. It was no heavier than a bicycle. He would learn to fly it, and to shoot the flash gun, but the project had to remain a secret for Baba was in a moral quandary. Kera understood his argument, if human beings had not invented weapons the world would be a much safer place. Fist fights were savage and bestial, but surely not as apocalyptic as automatic rifles and atomic bombs. No one could know about the flash gun.

  Shortly after he left the workshop, ten men, including Teacher, the mayor, and the reverend, arrived. He could not identify all of them in the half-light, but Baba had told him who would come. They would help build a giant machine to construct a wall and a fire moat around the town. They saw Kera pushing the red box up the street, but he was too far away for them to check its contents. Several people clearing debris from the streets cast Kera curious glances, but did not ask questions.

  In the valley, he followed the stream eastward, until he was four miles from town, where he could hope for privacy. He waited until the sun was up before he took to the air.

  The first time he flew, vertigo attacked him. He went just above the trees, and nearly crashed in panic. He overcame this fear, and went higher. As Baba had said, it was just like riding a bicycle in the air. The tricky bit was getting the gear lever right. Just under the handlebars, Baba had modified the car gear box. One took the craft up. Two took it down. Three was for hovering. Four fixed the flight horizontally and allowed the craft to run on the ground. Baba called five the autopilot, it enabled the craft to move in a straight line without the rider steering or peddling. Six put the craft in reverse. Seven caused an umbrella-like parachute to pop out, to ensure safe landing in a crisis. Baba had provided a helmet to enable him to breathe in the slipstream as well as the telescopic goggles.

  For three days he practiced. He left home before dawn and returned after sunset, hiding the bruka in a cave to preserve its secret. The more comfortable he became in the air, the more he dreamed of Kibuuka and Luanda Magere co-joined to form The Flying Man of Stone. When he slept in the night, and when he took naps during the day, the dreams came with such vividness that he could not be sure they were dreams anymore. He came to believe they were trips he took to another world, where spirits prepared him to save, not just his brother, but the entire country.

  After three days, he flew as comfortably as an eagle. He would soar until he was no more than a speck in the sky, then engage the hover gear, and shoot at targets on the ground. The telescopic goggles enabled him to see rats in the fields, even from the height of a mountain peak, and the flash gun vaporised the targets with pinpoint accuracy. At first, he would burn a hole into the ground after hitting a rat, but he learnt how to do it properly. By adjusting the circumference of the rays, he could drill only a tiny hole in the rat’s head to kill it.

  He loved to watch the town from the sky, loved to admire the rooftops of Chandi. It looked like a graveyard of many childhoods. Dolls, toys, bicycle tyres, shoes, bits and pieces of children’s things had found their way onto the roofs. A red leather ball, which the sun had bleached to pale pink, had been a birthday gift from Baba when Kera turned ten. It had made him the most popular boy in the neighbourhood, for before that they had played with balls made of polythene bags or banana fibres. This one was leather, and inflatable. For months it had bounced up and down the street, flown over trees in the valley, struck rocks and bounced off the stream. It had broken many windows and earned many boys a thrashing. He could not remember how it ended up on the roof. They must have gotten bored of the imported toy and resumed playing with their homemade gadgets.

  In those three days, Baba built a wall around the town, a hundred feet high, twelve feet thick, and a moat of fire twenty feet wide. Machines replicated gas, which fed the fire with an inexhaustible supply of fuel. There were two gates, one in the west facing the city, the other in the east facing the mineral-rich north-eastern region. Since Ba
ba had refused to make a machine to provide an inexhaustible supply of food, the gates opened every morning to let farmers out, and every noon to let them back in.

  The miracle wall gave Teacher fame and power, as Baba would not take public credit for the town’s defences. Even the handful of men who helped him build the machines did not know who really was behind it. While the mayor and reverend welcomed the idea, for it kept the town safe, their Christian minds associated it with ancestral spirit worship, and hence with devil worship, so they did not openly condone the miracle wall. Thus Teacher gained a springboard.

  “Our gods have woken up,” he told the townspeople. “They’ve been asleep all these years as foreign gods laid our land to waste and turned us into slaves but now they’ve woken up. They heard our cries. They saw our suffering. They know we are tired of wars and famine so they’ve come to our rescue.”

  Teacher became a priest. A messiah. A prophet. A few people gathered at his home every evening to worship, but most of the town folk, though they acknowledged his new status as a spiritual leader, were Christians. Once the wall was up, the Anglicans asked the reverend to pray to rid it of demonic power and bless it with the blood of Jesus Christ.

  Teacher attended the service, and just before the reverend’s sermon, he gave a speech imploring the town to abandon Christianity and return to the religion of their forefathers.

  When the Catholics asked Father Stephen to hold a similar service, and to sprinkle holy water on the wall in a purification ritual, Teacher blew up. His followers disrupted the service, smashing windows and statues, and once again Teacher beat up Father Stephen.

  “I have no problem with an African priest leading the prayers,” Teacher told the congregation. “But I’ll not allow these wazungu to steal our powers! Never!”

  The night after the incident, the mayor came to see Baba. “I’m worried about Teacher,” the mayor said. “I don’t like his actions at all.”

  They were eating supper, which Baba had prepared, boiled potatoes and chicken. It tasted like nothing Mama ever cooked, but hunger made Kera wolf it all down and lick his fingers.