by David Bowles
Brando sprayed liquor out in a coughing fit.
“What?” Modupe began banging him on the back.
“That's the weirdest and most incredible thing I've ever heard! Esperanto-speaking Mormons? Wow, love to talk to those guys.”
“You’re Italian: think they’d be enthused by the idea?”
This time Brando was able to laugh a little at himself.
“Wow. Terego. Okay that makes, what, four systems the Consortium’s found that were settled by emigrates from human space?”
“Yup. Exciting for me, by the way. My research focuses on how religion has evolved on those worlds, in isolation from the rest of us. Now I get to add Terego.”
Brando turned his attention back to the news. The second item was on the Kinguyama massacre: an interview with Monchu Koroma, the Pathwalker pilot who'd brought the pilgrims to the surface.
“Something must be done,” he said for the cameras. “Protect our people, our little siblings that come here to get closer to the Eight. It's the muwanani samadan, folks that got no respect for enlightenment, those infidels, those soulless animals...”
The story abruptly cut away to other details of the massacre and interviews with a few survivors.
“That,” Modupe pointed out, “was Tenshi's pa. Brother of Prefect Koroma, who I hear has designs on the top position, the ratowanin. Archon. Already spinning things against us, did you notice? That's the Dominian extremist way: all bad things on Jitsu stem from off world. Looks like you came here just in time to be vilified.”
D'Angelo shrugged. “Can't be any worse than the gormless family I left back on Earth. Rather be vilified by a stranger or an enemy than by my own blood, anyhow.”
And oddly enough, despite the confusion and strangeness of the day, Brando went to sleep that night feeling as if he’d finally, after twenty-five years of wandering, found his way home.
CHAPTER 5
“Sajana! Sajana!”
Tenshi turned from roofing work she was overseeing. Only her workers called her boss, so she wasn’t surprised to see Hari Kan dashing toward her. Just eighteen, Hari—who was from Tenshi’s hometown of Kinguyama—had looked up to her his entire life. This fair was his dream job, he had told her again and again.
He wasn’t very good with his hands, unfortunately.
What now? Tenshi groaned. She didn’t notice any immediate construction disasters anywhere on the fairgrounds, but real distress clouded Hari’s features as he slowed, panting.
“It’s Giya Ana Gizensha,” he managed to say. “She’s been killed.”
Tenshi was flooded with contradictory emotions: her first impulse was to feel relieved. Gizensha had been a co-conspirator in the abduction of Tenshi's twin, as well as one of the harshest teachers at the congretation’s sikoro when the girls were being indoctrinated as children. Her taunts and threats had been part of what pushed Tenshi to leave her hometown for the grueling but mentally freer existence of the restoration crews.
“What happened?” Tenshi demanded. “Was anyone else hurt?”
“Don’t know,” Hari gasped. “Minjun got an alert on his lenses. I ran to tell you.”
Patting him briefly on the shoulder, Tenshi rushed to her onsite office and used her terminal to call Meji Pishan, one of the more respected Pathwalkers from Kinguyama. A supporter of the social reforms Tenshi advocated, the omedeyo had recently experienced gnosis and the Archon had declared them an arojin. Their thin, kindly face and robe-draped shoulders emerged from the flat horizontal surface of the screen in a life-like holo projection.
“Bishaberu, Tenshi-shi. Good to see you. Assume you heard the news.”
“Yes, Arojin-zin. A shame, even if I hated her. She was our giya, no matter what. Well, yours.”
Pishan gave a gentle shake of their head. “And she wasn't the only one killed. Eleven pilgrims were slaughtered. Many teyopanjin, including your Aunt Maryam, witnessed it all and then were trapped inside with the dead bodies for hours.”
The news of the pilgrims' death opened a gaping hole in Tenshi's heart. Her eyes watered. She could sense Meji’s incredulous expression even as she averted her gaze to compose herself. Like many reformists, the wise omedeyo considered her the toughest person on Jitsu.
“My appa brought them? The pilgrims?”
“Yes. He's in town right now, coordinating things with your uncle, uplinking with other flights to assure them it's just a fluke, not a spree. Look, Tenshi, I’ve got to go. Call you tonight at your flat?”
Tenshi nodded and thumbed the terminal asleep. Her father and her uncle. Working together as always. Keeping the community together. What a laugh. What really happened, what had always happened, was that Santo used Monchu and dozens of other gullible Pathwalkers to further his own interests under the guise of ensuring his people's enlightenment.
Her attempts as a preteen to make her father see the true nature of his brother's plans had never gotten her more than blows. You feel that? He would ask as he struck her. That's the real world you love so much. When her mother would sob at the sight of Tenshi's mottled bruises, he was fond of pointing out the fleeting nature of the flesh and the need to mortify it. Bajingan. Bastard.
Of course, Santo fed Monchu's innate violence and encouraged him to direct it toward toward his family. Any resentment the younger sibling might have felt throughout the years at his younger brother's rise within the theocracy was remolded and reborn as raging disappointment in the unworthiness of his wife and daughters. Tenshi still vividly remembered all the times when her natural penchant for creation was seen by her father as a willful determination to shame him before the community.
When she was five, she'd been gathering large stones scattered around their dwelling—never house, never home—and fitting them together as they seemed to want to fit. They had taken on the form of a roughly cylindrical tower, nearly a meter in height. Santo had approached her as she was placing the last stone.
“Nan tikaseru?” What are you making?
“Minara.” A tower.
Sighing, Santo had gone inside to speak to her father about this worrisome waste of time. It was the summer after her first year at sikoro. Tenshi had been reported multiple times for spitting out the sacrament (she hated the cotton-headed, zombie way it made her feel) and for not sitting still during meditation. Her parents had been thoroughly embarrassed at their daughter's sinfulness, especially given her twin's embrace of every nuance of Dominatudan doctrine and practice.
“Infidel!” Seeing the tower, her father’s foot had drawn back to kick it over.
“Wait, Brother,” Santo had urged with a smirk. “Our little chickadee has indeed sinned. She's spit in the face of Domina herself, preferring to build temporary objects rather than construct a soul for herself. Let her show her repentance by tearing the edifice down on her own.”
Tenshi's heart had leapt in her chest as if trying to burst out and kill her uncle, fueled by adrenaline-heavy hate. That word he used—poyito, chickadee—how she despised him for it and the things it implied: weakness, lack of a soul, utility for others. It was how he wanted her to view herself. She refused. She was a gayona, a fighting hen, and she'd tear him to pieces someday, she swore.
But that day had been one of defeat. Broken and with no other recourse, Tenshi had pushed the tower over, its constituent rocks rolling off in the dust like the heads of miniature friends she'd betrayed to the guillotine. Her parents had made her spend the rest of the day staring at a large kleinball, hoping she’d open herself to true self-knowledge, take the first step on the path to ra-Yindawo.
She had fallen asleep.
Tenshi realized that Pishan would now likely take over as giya, and she'd be able at last to get a parcel of land within the community. She had one in mind, a 400-sqaure-meter tract overlooking the barren beauty of the desert that so reminded her of the wastelands of Jitsu’s south pole. There, at the desert’s edge, she hoped to one day build a home and a family, become an influence on the lives of the
people in her community. With a giya like Pishan, perhaps others would realize she was no infidel; she was a true Pathwalker, just one who viewed self-knowledge as just as dependent on the self's phenotypic extension into the physical world as it was on the exploration of what went on within one's mind.
Walking away from the terminal with these thoughts swirling in her head, she realized she should call her mother. She turned and trudged back, thumbing the display on.
“Meiru yegachu,” the terminal intoned.
Knew it: she already called me, left a message.
Tenshi highlighted her mother's name on her agenda with a calloused thumb and connected. Inyoni Onamata answered right away, her fallen shoulders and haggard features lifting listlessly from the console surface. Her long gray hair was pulled back, as always, in a severe braid that trailed down into the innards of the terminal.
“Jambo, Tanim,” Inyoni said, her face lighting up a bit.
“How are you, Umma?” Tenshi used Baryogo, her custom when speaking with older family members.
“Terrible. I just got off the phone with your Aunt Maryam. She's devastated. You ought to call her later. She saw the whole thing, the poor woman. Unspeakable: their brains destroyed, no hope of gnosis. Don't know whether she'll ever recover.”
“Of course she will. It's a tragedy, but we must be strong, stick together. Get through this as a community.”
“People will use this as an excuse, you know.”
“Yes, I've thought of that already, mother.”
“They're blaming it on the reformers.”
“Extremist foolishness. No one will believe we did this.”
Inyoni blinked incredulously. Tenshi guessed her mother was surprised that she’d included herself with a group of believers, radical as their viewpoints might be. The irony was not lost on Tenshi: years ago she'd cursed Dominian theology as an insane parasitic strategy for “lazy-arse bastards” to live off people “too stupid to feed themselves correctly, much less discern when they're being screwed like cheap whores.”
For Inyoni, hearing her daughter saying we in connection with the Path was likely miraculous. Tenshi would have smiled had she not felt so angry.
“Maybe not. But reform policies have brought a lot of outsiders here, and it could be argued that the policies are indirectly responsible.”
“Shite. You're right. We've got to do something to anticipate and quell this.”
“What can you do? Santo will speak soon, and everyone...”
“Damnit, mother, why do you have to be so defeatist? Your whole life, all you've said is 'I can't... What about this? What about that? What if I seem too material? What if the teyopan ostracizes me?' Whine, whine, whine. I've got news for you, Inyoni... the teyopan never accepted you. Thanks to Apa and Santo and your own inability to defend yourself, you were marginalized from the beginning.”
Why do I always get so pissed at her? Why do her stooping shoulders and bent neck always draw this venom from the depths of me?
“Now, if it had just been you, whatever. Your life. But you were supposed to be defending Samanei and me, and you just let those bastards do whatever they wanted with us! They walked my sister out the door of that box you live in, and you didn't do a thing to stop them!”
“I tried to hide her condition from them, you know that. But in the end, they were just too much for me. I'm only one person: how could I possibly hope...”
“That's just it: you never hoped. You acted like you were different from them, you told me that there was more to self-knowledge than being doped up all the time, but in the end, you bent to their will. Another cow in the herd, another pair of unfocused, dead eyes.”
Inyoni's gaze watered up. “You really hate me, don't you.”
Not even really a question. An affirmation. Tenshi felt something loosen in her chest.
“No, Umma. I don't hate you. I—I don't know what I feel right now. You mentioned laying the blame. Santo's in Kinguyama right now, isn't he? I'll bet he's trying to capitalize on this massacre, the unscrupulous jagen. He wants to do to Jitsu what he did to us, only on a bigger scale. When they took Samanei from us, he got his first real taste of power, and he's been pretty ravenous ever since. Something tells me he won't stop till he eats us all up. Unless I can figure out a way to stop him.”
“What will you do?”
“I'm not sure. I just have a feeling this fair will be the key.”
“Will you come visit? The town might be ready for a little reconciliation after this tragedy.”
“I'll wait a while, let reality set in, let them understand how this world,” Tenshi gestured about her, “has powerful influence in their lives. Pishan will help underscore this, I bet. Besides, I don't want to seem like an opportunist, even if I kind of am. Good thing is, it’s an opportunity for all of us: to become people, not cattle who think they're better than people while all the time they're being fattened for the slaughter.”
Tenshi clicked off and began contacting several people she knew would be attending the fair’s inauguration. The meeting she set up with them would finally, she hoped, be the catalyst for a reformer/off-worlder coalition strong enough to combat the rhetoric of the Dominatudan. They’d met many times before, in small groups and as a larger team, but given the high tensions of the moment, she felt sure she could at last goad them into action. She'd be sure to invite Pishan tonight when he called her. His support was vital.
Tenshi’s conscience got the better of her. She contacted her Aunt Maryam to see if she was okay, half expecting to leave a message. Inyoni's younger sister, however, thumbed on right away. Her expressionless face blinked into existence suddenly: she'd stepped into the broadcast beam rather than connecting within it.
“Tenshi, soburinim, good to hear from you. It is a harrowing time for Jitsu, and she needs you joined to her children.”
Tenshi rolled her eyes. Maryam might be respected in Kinguyama because of her husband, but the woman was vapid and not at all elocuent. The clichéd rhetoric on her lips was suspicious. Something was not quite right, beyond the heap of cadavers in the middle of the teyopan. Tenshi decided to draw out whoever was coaching her beyond the broadcast beam.
“May your yearning soul touch the Eight in this trying time. Remember that the evils of this false reality are many, but the truth a singular path from your soul to ra-Yindawo. No matter how terrible the things you've seen, whatever they may've done to you, know that it's all an illusion, every blow, every blast, every spattered bit of...”
Maryam's face began to fall, her eyes blinking fast, her breath coming in gasps. She suddenly winked out, and in her place appeared the chiseled visage of Santo, slate eyes and gray stubble standing out against his normally smooth obsidian skin.
“Bishaberu, chickadee. Appreciate you cheering the sister up. Good of you.”
“Baryogo shikaburaro wa, aburonim.”
“Think we better speak Standard. Too many years with off-worlders: your control of our language is not like it used to be. Don't want to make you uncomfortable, embarrassed if you don't know a word or something. We can speak your proud new language, what. Universal. Unifying. Standard. One size fits all.”
“You want to speak Standard, you want to feel in control, fine. All the same to me. Language is just a tool, not a defining characteristic or a touchstone. Let's not turn the kleinball round and round: you disapprove of me; I think you're a power-hungry sociopath.”
“Showing the claws, eh? Very well. I know you lack the desire I feel for a completely enlightened Jitsu.”
“The opposite: I'm the one wants folks enlightened, not in the dark about the corruption of their leaders.”
“Ah, I see. The trauma of your childhood, still it affects you. Parents who never got you on the right path, let the false reality damage your mind, ruin your ability to form a soul.”
“Don't talk to me about trauma. Any trauma I have, I got it from you and your sick manipulation of my weak parents. I don't get what you w
ant. Why worry with me if I'm an animal with no hope for gnosis?”
“Chickadee, we all have roles in this momentary play, waiting for the curtain to fall, plunge the physical world into oblivion when the Eight are renewed. Yours is desperate repentance, useless for your own salvation but inspiring to others that need an extra push. You studied early Christianity with Professor Oduyoye. The Book of Revelations. Fallen Babylon, that's you. The little chickadee that had everything but a soul. Your buildings will crumble, but the Path remains.”
“You are the soulless one, man who doesn’t make a move without calculating the power it might give you. But remember, Santo, I knew you when you were Mr. Nobody, sucking stupidity from a tube like the rest of the fools. Also remember, big rooster boy, that I ran you out of our house when I was thirteen. Snapped my fingers at you as I screamed, and you left, you let a little chickadee run your sorry arse out of the ‘dwelling,’ your tail feathers dragging the ground, your cockscomb all deflated. Remember that, you bastard, when you start preaching your bullshit at me. I know what you are.”
Santo was visibly taken aback by this memory; he swallowed heavily as if to control himself, a vein in his temple belying his facade of composure.
“Since you embrace the Grey Prison of physicality, you'll never understand what it’s like to turn your back on that false reality. Want it or not, you're going to be used for the enlightenment of others. You can't escape that destiny.”
Tenshi managed a smile despite the thundering of blood in her head.
“At last. Right about one thing, kenabuji. Just not the way you imagine. And now, if you don't mind, it’s time I disconnected.”
She thumbed the display off and relished the distortion of Santo's face as he slipped into oblivion. Returning to the task of finishing the fairgrounds, her every movement was infused with energy and decision, as well as a certain controlled violence, as if she were trying to scrape Santo's image away from her mind by dint of sheer adrenaline and creativity, the two human qualities that, if , she might consider divine.
