Binti: The Night Masquerade

by Nnedi Okorafor

  I was dead. This fact echoed through my brain, ricocheting off the walls and slamming back again and again. I was dead, I was dead, I was dead. I remembered joining the Seven. Was I even me now? I was physically more Miri 12 than human. I touched the okuoko on my head and my temples throbbed. I raised my hands and typed and pushed the message to Mwinyi with more ease than I’d experienced while on Earth. “Am I still Enyi Zinariya?” I asked. My world stayed steady and there were no voices. I didn’t look toward the window to see if there was a tunnel in space or a strange planet bouncing beside Saturn.

  “You will always be Enyi Zinariya,” he responded, his green words appearing before me in crisp letters. I touched them and they faded away like incense smoke.

  “What is Enyi Zinariya?” New Fish’s words floated at me in bright pink and I gasped.

  Mwinyi gasped too.

  “Did she send it to you, too?” I asked.

  He nodded.

  “I’ve absorbed some of you, too, Binti,” she said. And again, the room lit up with the orange-pink color.

  “The Enyi Zinariya are my tribe, our tribe,” Mwinyi said. “We got our name from the Zinariya people who visited and changed us long ago.” He cut his eyes at me and added, “You might know us as ‘the Desert People.’”

  “Oh,” New Fish said. “Yes, my mother liked to talk about Binti’s dark skin, dense hair, and old African face. She said that may be what gave Binti her fight, desert bloods. We weren’t even sure if you were really Himba.”

  “I am Himba,” I snapped.

  The room became orange-pink again, and this time stayed that way. Mwinyi rolled his eyes and said, “Yes, yes, Binti, you are Himba. No one’s taking that from you.”

  I frowned even more deeply and turned my back to him, for the moment angry and frustrated with too many things to focus on a response.

  “Can I ask you something, New Fish?” Mwinyi said.

  “Ask,” New Fish said.

  “If you were only born a few days ago, how come you can communicate so well?”

  The ship’s room flashed a soft orange-pink so pleasant that I instantly felt less annoyed. It was the same color as the ntu ntu bugs on Oomza Uni. “I have been talking to my mother for five Earth years and my mother is old, so very smart. A Miri 12 is ‘pregnant’ when she is near her time to give birth. And birth is not the beginning for us; it’s just a change.”

  Mwinyi nodded, looking amazed. “So you have been inside your mother for five years and you two talk?”

  “I’ve been all over the galaxy with my mother, who was born on Earth. But mostly to Earth and Oomza, since my mother has been doing that route since I spawned. This is why I can speak Khoush.”

  “So you were there when … did you know when the Meduse killed everyone on board your mother?”

  “Moojh-ha ki-bira,” she said. “Yes. My mother said she and I should stay quiet until we reached Oomza. That was the first time in my entire life that I had nightmares when I slept.”

  We were quiet for a few moments. Then I asked, “What was it that you were going to tell me? You said there was something I needed to know.”

  “I may have spoken too soon,” New Fish said, after a moment. “You’ve just woken. You’ve just eaten.”

  “I’m fine,” I said impatiently. “Please, tell it all to me now. I’d rather be shocked all at once. Tell me everything.” I was breathing heavily. I’d had a strange feeling as New Fish spoke to me. It was leading up to telling me something big. “Should I let myself tree first? When I do that I can handle any shock, any—”

  “No. Don’t tree. That won’t help.”

  “Why?”

  “You will see.”

  And then I did.

  Suddenly, the Star Chamber, Mwinyi, Okwu, everything was gone. I was in space. Infinite blackness was all around me, except for Saturn, pale and blue in the distance, and the sun in the other direction. The blue-pink bioluminescent light of New Fish seemed to radiate from me. With each second, I became more aware of this and then I began to fall. And as I fell faster and faster, I didn’t have any arms with which to flail and I began to panic. I started screaming. I shuddered and my scream came out as a deep groan.

  Relax, I heard New Fish say. She spoke in my head. Just be. You are safe.

  What’s … what’s happening to me? I shouted. Again, my voice was just a rumble. I could feel myself shaking, shuddering. Not myself, not my body. New Fish’s body.

  Your body too, now, she said.

  The word she’d said before came back to me, “union.”

  Your body is partially me, she said. That’s how the deep Miri brought you back. And in turn, I am partially you.

  As I relaxed, I realized that for the first time, I could do something I’d always dreamed of when I was little. I was in space with no suit, in no ship, and I wasn’t dying. This was my chance to do that for real. I let myself be New Fish and noticed that I was just floating. There was no up or down. I felt neither cool nor hot, though I felt a warmth from within and that was enough. I looked straight ahead at Saturn.

  The Seven are Great, I said.

  They are.

  How do I—

  But then I was doing it. I was flying forward. I flipped and flew what my body perceived as down. I laughed with glee and flew fast and stopped and flew faster and stopped. The feeling of floating in space made me euphoric. It was such freedom. I was doing a barrel roll when I remembered Mwinyi and Okwu were on the ship and in that moment, something odd happened. I could feel myself gradually slow down. Then I was back inside, looking down at Okwu and Mwinyi in the Star Chamber. Mwinyi was hanging on to a pole, a look of horror on his face. Okwu was simply hovering, now on the other side of the room. Then I was back in my body, sitting cross-legged on the floor in the middle of the room. I looked around, blinking.

  “Binti? Can you hear me now?” Mwinyi shouted.

  “Huh?” I said, resting a hand on the soft floor.

  “You nearly killed us!” Mwinyi said.

  “She nearly killed you. Not me,” Okwu said. “And I caught you. You are fine.”

  Mwinyi frowned angrily at Okwu.

  “Sorry,” I said. When I stretched my legs, I had to use some effort because the bottoms of my legs were adhered to New Fish’s surface with some kind of mucus. This was why I hadn’t been thrashed around like Mwinyi. I pulled some of the gummy substance from the backs of my legs and dress. “Can you become me as I became you?” I asked New Fish.

  “It is not that you became me. I’m a Miri 12, it is how we connect. But no, I would not connect with you in that way. You don’t have the capacity.”

  I was too tired to address New Fish’s quiet condescension.

  “The final thing I must tell you is that if we were on Earth, because you’ve taken so much from me to live, you and I can never be too far from one another.”

  I yawned. “Why? What would happen?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “How far is too far?”

  “I’m not sure,” she said. “When my mother sent me, she couldn’t answer every question I had. With all the shooting near the launch port, I was more worried about getting shot down on my way to you.”

  “It’s alright,” I said, standing up. I didn’t have the energy to wonder about this, either. Not at the moment. Plus we were in space and I wasn’t going to move away from New Fish any time soon. And where were we going now, anyway? I needed to rest first.

  Chapter 10

  Stones of Saturn

  “We’re going to go through Saturn’s ring,” I said hours later, after a long nap. “I’m not discussing it. Then we turn around and head to Oomza Uni, as you planned.”

  “Okay,” was all Mwinyi replied.

  Okwu said nothing, nor did New Fish. I turned back to the large window feeling satisfied with myself. I’d been ready to argue with all of them and it was nice to get what I wanted so easily.

  After waking from my nine hours of sleep, I’d connec
ted with New Fish again. This time, I did it on my own. New Fish might have been asleep, for I didn’t sense her presence at all. It was just me out there as a living ship. I felt the air in my breathing chambers, the strength in my body. I even felt Mwinyi standing in the corner, moving his hands about as he talked to several people in the desert on Earth and Okwu in the room below. Okwu was not talking to the other Meduse on Earth, it was observing. When connected to New Fish, I brought all my skills with me. I considered attempting to tree while connected, but decided against it. The results of treeing were affected by size, and who knew what I’d call up.

  As I floated out there in space, enjoying the absolute quiet, I gazed at Saturn. We were near enough to see its shape and rings. Saturn was close enough to reach within hours, even if New Fish took her time. This was when I’d decided we should go.

  “My mother says edans are unpredictable,” New Fish said now. “She said yours especially could have its own consciousness.”

  But I wanted to see. Had to see. After all I’d been through, I needed to get to the bottom of this mystery. “I don’t care,” I snapped. “We are going even if I have to hijack you and force you to fly there.”

  “You can’t,” New Fish said.

  “I’ll try,” I said.

  “Go ahead,” New Fish goaded.

  “Only if I have to,” I said.

  “Ugh, will you both shut up?” Mwinyi snapped, taking his hands from the floor. “No one’s fighting you on this, Binti. No need to be like that.”

  Okwu vibrated its dome and blew out so much gas that both Mwinyi and I started coughing.

  I got up and went to the breathing room where I’d lain for days. I picked up the Night Masquerade costume. Then I went down to another of New Fish’s breathing rooms. I’d felt this one when I was connected to New Fish. When I went inside, the light in here was very similar to the midday desert sun and when I saw the trees, I knew why. There were ten of them, some were saplings, several were small nearly matured trees, and one of them was fully matured, reaching the ceiling and bending a bit to the side. Undying trees! The saplings looked recently potted inside the flesh of New Fish, and the mature one had roots that extended down into New Fish like nerves. The floor was slightly transparent and I could see the roots going deep. These trees had all been growing while New Fish was in utero.

  Not for the first time, I wondered if Third Fish was also psychic. And did that mean New Fish was too? There were other plants here that I recognized from Osemba as well. Plants that were usually peopled with land crabs, lizards, and other creatures because these plants attracted insects and smaller life forms. They attracted life. The floor here was dry, even coated with a layer of sand in some places. I touched the trees’ leaves, which were all rough with what the Himba called “life salt,” a pinkish grainy substance that healers used to cure and treat all sorts of ailments.

  I tasted it now and it invigorated my tongue. When I’d first found my edan, my father brought it to his tongue to taste what kind of metal it was. He hadn’t been able to identify it, but he’d said it tasted like life salt. I laid out the Night Masquerade on the floor and looked at it. The smiling side of its many-masked head stared back at me. I shivered with residual disbelief that this was the costume of the Night Masquerade, that it was a costume. I sat down facing its head. Then I brought out the edan pieces and the golden ball.

  I brought the ball to my face and looked at its fingerprint-like surface closely. Then I held up my left hand and looked at my fingerprints. Had the print on my left middle and index fingers always matched the ones on the ball? I’d never compared them before I’d lost my left arm, so who knows. But now they matched perfectly and this didn’t surprise me. Nor had the presence of Undying trees.

  Holding it on the palm of my right hand, I touched my index and middle fingers to their spots on the golden ball and immediately it began to hum and vibrate. “Okay,” I whispered, placing it on the floor before me. If it weren’t for the sand, the ball would have begun to roll away. Softly, I whispered, “(x—h)2 + (y—k)2 = r2” and the equation floated from my lips in a way that reminded me of the zinariya. It was even my color of red. I chose the equation for circles because it was all coming back around and around and around. And the equation stretched into a circle as I let myself tree, surrounding me before it faded away.

  The moment I called up a thick strong current, blue like Okwu, the Undying trees in the room began to vibrate too. It was the same way they reacted to lightning storms back home. As I led the current to the golden ball, the trees’ vibrations had become so fast and steady that they began to hum. Slowly, the ball rose. It hovered before my eyes, a foot away, and began to slowly rotate.

  As I climbed higher up the tree, I thought about the Zinariya. They’d come to a quiet part of Africa, where the people lived very close to the desert. Close and isolated enough that the people in those small communities knew how to keep a secret. And thus, the rest of the world never knew of the tall, humanoid gold people who loved the way the sun reacted with Earth’s atmosphere there. They saw this small patch of Earth as a vacation spot and the people they met didn’t mind. Their friendship started with a girl named Kande. In many ways, she was like me. What Kande started had eventually made the people in this small town more.

  Made the Zinariya more.

  They left an edan. No instructions. No purpose. But it could make you more, if you let it. I’d found it.

  I don’t know how long I was watching it rotate, as I climbed deeper and deeper into the tree. Mwinyi would later tell me that he’d been in the Star Chamber; they’d been eating and Okwu had been telling him a story about a Meduse meeting of chiefs long ago that had gone horribly wrong. “We knew you were off somewhere brooding,” he said.

  The ball was rotating faster and faster now with my current, humming with the trees. The hairs on my arms rose with the charge in the air. My okuoko slithered about me at my sides and back, old otjize still flaking from them to the floor. Then I was in space!

  Infinite blackness.

  Weightless. Flying.

  Falling a bit.

  Catching myself.

  Then flying again.

  I wanted to scream and laugh; I had become something more again. This time, I was so changed that I could fly through space without dying. I could live in open space. I moved through Saturn’s ring of brittle metallic dust. It pelted our exoskeleton like chips of glittery ice. It felt pleasant, so I flew faster, resisting the urge to do barrel rolls because of Mwinyi and Okwu. New Fish was quiet, letting me take the lead. This was my mission. My purpose. And it was fantastic.

  Living breath bloomed in me from the breathing room where I currently sat, the whirling golden ball humming with the trees. The metallic dust grew thick like a sandstorm and I stopped as some of it whirled before me in a way that reminded me of the golden ball.

  “Who are you?” a voice asked. It spoke in the dialect of my family and it came from everywhere.

  “Binti Ekeopara Zuzu Dambu Kaipka of Namib, that is my name,” I blurted before I let myself think too hard about what was happening. “No,” I said. “My name is Binti Ekeopara Zuzu Dambu Kaipka Meduse Enyi Zinariya New Fish of Namib.” I waited a few moments and then decided to ask, “Who are you?”

  “We are…” And for a moment, I heard nothing. Then the sound of their name split and split like a fractal in my mind. It was like the practice of treeing embodied in one word. Their name was an equation too complex, too various and varied to mentally fix into place, let alone put into a language that I was capable of uttering. It was beautiful and my joy in just letting it cartwheel and bounce about my mind was reflected in the color New Fish shined in the metallic storm of Saturn’s ring.

  When I could finally speak, I said, “You’ve called me here. Why? What is it you want?”

  The rush of debris swirled before me into a funnel shape now.

  “Did we call you here?” it asked, its voice almost playful.

&n
bsp; “You did.” I focused hard on the funnel, their name still in my mind vying for attention.

  “That ball belongs to a people we’ve met. They only leave it to be found by those they feel should find them. They pack it between pieces of beautiful metal like a gift.”

  “What is it?” I asked.

  “What do you think it is?”

  I could see New Fish’s light grow purpler with my annoyance. “You called me,” I repeated. “Why?”

  “Okay,” it said. “We called you, yes. Through your zinariya object.”

  “I’m here now, finally. What do you want?”

  There was a long pause. The dust swirled and swirled and for a moment, I was sure I saw a flash of red-orange light. I didn’t bother wondering who these people were or where they had come from or what they even looked like. If I was meant to find out, I would. If not, then I would not. If there was one thing I had learned in all my strange journeys it was that what would be would be and sometimes you wait to see. And this was fine, because at least I’d gotten to the bottom of the question of my edan and that odd vision and what was there was just as strange as I had imagined.

  “Tell us about Oomza Uni,” the voice said.

  I was so shocked that I couldn’t answer. Then I said, “What?”

  “You are a student at Oomza Uni, no?”

  “I am, but—”

  “That is why we called on you. We want an opinion on the university that comes from someone like us.”

  “But … like you? How am I—”

  “We’re people of time and space. We move about experiencing, collecting, becoming more. This is the philosophy and culture of our equation. There’s no one of our kind there, yet we hear it is the finest university in the galaxy. There is plenty we could learn from there and we’d like to apply. But first, we need a true recommendation of the place from someone we trust. We trust you.”

  “So you’ve known I would eventually be … what I now am, so you sent for me?”

  “Yes. We are many things. What is your opinion of the university?”

  “Well … I left my home to attend, nearly died on the way, and when I got there, it turned out to be the best experience I ever had as an academic. Excellent professors, excellent students, and excellent environment. It’s the perfect place for me.”