Sunspot Jungle

by Bill Campbell

  The burden of being this leader was placed upon him before he even knew how to walk. Like another swarm of bees surrounding him, Lalibela grew up between the pressure of his parents and the jealousy of extended family members and his older siblings. He often just wanted to run away, and when he was old enough, he did, as much as he could. Roha at the time overlooked a forest. It was like beachfront property over an ocean of treetops. Lalibela loved to submerge himself in the trees, observing and learning from nature all around him. As a child he was captivated by the complexity of simple things. Patterns in spider webs. Roots of trees that grew above the Earth. Neither his imagination nor his body could be contained. Not by anyone’s tradition, expectations, or beliefs.

  He was the youngest child, and his mother’s favorite son, whether she would admit it or not. His imagination was a threat to the establishment, and aside from his mother, the royal family despised him for it. He simply wasn’t motivated by power even when it was what his mother wanted him to have. Out of jealousy, when Lalibela’s older brother Kedus Harbe inherited the throne, one of his first acts as King was to secretly have Lalibela poisoned.

  It was an herbal potion that came with a plate of shiro, and instead of killing Lalibela it put him to sleep for three days. The visions and dreams he had during that time was something that would come to define his life, even more than the bees had.

  In a state close to death, Lalibela was transported through space and time. His spirit traveled light years to other worlds, where he saw technology that hadn’t been invented yet and Ethiopians that were taking care of multiple planets. He saw people’s faces he had never met from parts of Ethiopia he had never seen, and everywhere he went he was with this eclectic group of farmers, scientists, and artists. They felt like family he had never met, and with them he felt like he could fly. From the stars he traveled back to the Roha highlands overlooking that ocean of treetops, but things were different now; and there was a magnetic focus on the volcanic rock underneath his birthplace. He saw the spaceport that would be built there, literally carved into the mountain with water passageways connecting every building. It was a new foundation, and as such it would be called Addis Yerusalem.

  When he finally awoke, he was in a room with only his mother by his side.

  “Gebiye, you keep talking in your sleep. What is it you see?”

  “Emaye … I’ve seen what I must do. It’s like three heavens just opened up and became one. In the stars, on the Earth, and within ourselves.”

  “My son has died and come back to life!” his mother wept.

  He never bothered explaining more of his dreams to her or even blaming his brother for this near-death journey. He didn’t want to get in another fight, and he still didn’t want to be the leader his mother wanted him to be, the leader his brother feared. He just needed to build what he saw and find the people he saw in those visions. It was as if he never knew why he was alive until he almost died.

  መንኮራኩር ፡ mä·n·ko·ra·ku·r

  (noun)

  1. (Ge’ez) A spaceship.

  ARBA MINCH. 1159 E.C. (1166 AD)

  Lalibela learned the beauty his culture truly holds by spending time on a farm in the South. He was undercover, starting to grow a beard, and no one recognized him as a member of the royal family. The kindness of strangers in these parts of the country both broke and strengthened his heart on a daily basis. He was invited to eat in the homes of people who barely had anything, who offered him everything they had and took it as an insult if he refused. He realized being raised as royalty had isolated him from the experience of having true friends.

  The farmers he stayed with were beekeepers as well, which he took as a sign that he must be on the right path. From the farmers he learned how to work the land, and from the bees he learned how to use the stars and the curve of the Earth as a guide. Every day felt like seven, and he had never felt so alive. His best friend during this time was the farmer’s daughter, Kibra. She made trips selling food at the market on a regular basis and had become an expert mathematician. In her spare time she experimented with inventing new tools.

  “Why are you always following me to the market?” Kibra asked with a half-smile one day. “Don’t you have something better to do?”

  “Anything I could be doing would be better with you,” Lalibela responded without hesitation, “but if you want me to go, I’ll go.”

  “No, I want you to stay.”

  Kibra was the first person Lalibela shared all his visions and dreams with, and in time the visions blossomed and became their dream together. He was the first person who ever challenged her. She was the first person to fully see him. She was much smarter than him, but he had more ambition. Somehow they made a perfect team. And they were completely in love.

  The young couple spent most of the next decade with their hands in the dirt, honey in their tea, experimenting and traveling throughout the Ethiopian countryside. Compared to his upbringing in Roha, everything in the countryside was so new. He looked at the world as if he was seeing it for the first time, and this helped Kibra see things differently as well. Together they unlocked potential in one another. They worked hard and played harder, until the work felt like play.

  Everything in the villages was shared, from food and resources to labor. If just one person yielded a good crop, no one went hungry. The idea of just having a single occupation was foreign. A farmer with a science lab in a gojo who also happened to be an expert krar player was a very natural thing. In fact, everyone sang and played music. This simple but rare combination of people following their passions, innovating and learning from the arts, science, and nature fed into an entire Ethiopian renaissance completely contained and isolated to itself. While the Crusaders were violently expanding from Europe and Saladin was defending Egypt and pushing back, Ethiopia turned inwards and expanded from a growth inside that took them all the way to the stars.

  Every technological leap that happened in this time period started in a small village or on a farm. Kibra worked with a group of craftspeople, masons, and beekeepers to develop the first computer. She taught them a system of complex multiplication that she was able to do in her head, which became the foundation of the coding system that their computers were based on. She worked with Lalibela to assemble materials based on the structures built by bees in a beehive. Soon what they created was able to function as a calculator, predict weather, and to replicate itself.

  Kibra and Lalibela’s relationship was like a quiet nucleus in the center of this renaissance. It wasn’t Lalibela or Kibra alone that made anything happen, but it was the connection they shared that transformed each of them as well as everyone they interacted with. They saw each other and believed in each other’s dreams enough to make what seemed impossible completely real.

  ROHA HIGHLANDS. 1174 E.C. (1181 AD)

  Fifteen years later, when Lalibela finally returned from the countryside to Roha, it was not to claim the throne. It was only to propose the idea of building a spaceport. As sure as bees are vital to life on planet Earth as pollinators, Lalibela thought outside of the planet and dreamed of pollinating the stars. He arrived with Kibra and a whole community of friends who had become family.

  Lalibela’s mother shed tears of joy when her son returned, and all of Roha had a celebration. It was her joy that kept him safe. His brother Kedus feared that Lalibela had come to take his place as king, and that night he secretly ordered one of his guards to cut Lalibela’s throat while he slept. What Kedus didn’t know was that this particular guard had grown especially fond of Lalibela’s mother and was so happy to see her ecstatic and full of joy. He couldn’t stand to be the one to take away her joy, so that night the guard cut Kedus Harbe’s throat instead.

  A day of celebration was followed by a time of mourning, and no one ever knew why or by whom Kedus Harbe was murdered in the middle of the night. The only one who truly mourned was his mother, as he was as ruthless to the people as he was to his own brother.


  Lalibela was then offered the throne, but he didn’t want it. His mother tried to pressure him, but it had no effect. A conversation with Kibra was the only thing that could change his mind.

  “If you take the throne, you won’t have to do things the way they’ve been done before,” Kibra reasoned. “Ethiopia needs a new kind of leadership. The kind that isn’t power-hungry.”

  “I agree that Ethiopia needs a new kind of leadership, but how do we center the needs of the farmers here in the capital?” Lalibela questioned. “Before I ran away and met you, I never even saw what really made this country what it is.”

  “That perspective you have now is why this moment is important. And the fact that you don’t want to dominate is another reason I fell in love with you. You won’t be alone here anymore,” she reassured him.

  “So you’ll still marry me?” Lalibela asked.

  “How is this even a question in your mind?” Kibra smirked.

  With new leadership and an influx of newcomers from the countryside, the energy in Roha grew electric. The people believed Lalibela traveled with angels since the people he came with were able to do things they had seen no human do. Even now, 800 years later, people still say the spaceport in Roha was built at night by angels. They will say it was built by angels before they will say it was anything but a church. The spaceport was built by regular people inspired to create something for more than themselves, and that creative spirit has always had a way of keeping people up at night. They built machines that cut through rock like butter, and amongst eleven structures formed a launch pad for starships that was loosely based on the mechanics of lily pads and frogs.

  Lalibela and Kibra led Ethiopia together. Never losing touch with the countryside, the capital was transformed inside and out. There were more than a few villages with aspirations to see the heavens, and people traveled from as far as West Africa and India to take flight from the Roha spaceport. The country was flourishing, and Roha became a cosmopolitan center.

  “Let’s go see the future,” Lalibela proposed the idea to Kibra one day. “If we are to have children, I want to see the world their great-great-great grandchildren are to inherit.”

  “Why not?” Kibra chuckled, amused by her partner’s spontaneity. “How about the year 3000?”

  Ethiopian engineering by this time had gotten to a microscopic level, and again, based on a bee’s perception, the farmers and scientists had found a way to slip through the very fabric of time. It started when they realized bees could perceive movements at 1/300th of a second versus human’s perception at 1/50th. Once they developed instruments that could perceive movements and navigate as fast as the bees, it wasn’t as complicated to fine-tune the perception even further. Soon they found pockets in space at a submicroscopic level where matter appeared and disappeared seemingly at random. When they realized that simply observing these anomalies was actually changing how they occurred, they were able to communicate with the pockets and little by little slip right through the space-time continuum. Time travel was always possible and is actually always happening, but in Ethiopia most people just use it to make the good moments last longer.

  ረአይ ፡ ra’· əy

  (noun)

  1. (Amharic) vision.

  2. a revelation.

  GONDAR. The year 3000.

  “Have you ever heard those stories of when we were people?” a young dragon asked the other while dancing in flight and playing catch with a ball of fire. “They say we were creative. Even all the ruins below us were structures that we built, and we used to live inside of them. Now we only destroy. Destroy just so it can be rebuilt, someday when we become human again.”

  “If our descendants ever become human again,” the other dragon interjected.

  The air felt like an oven. The sky was black, and small fires were everywhere, burning all that was left of what could have been a city. The whole world looked like the inside of a volcano.

  A blue light emerged, and the air rippled as Lalibela and Kibra stepped through a space pocket. A hot wind rushed across their faces as they looked up to see several enormous creatures descending from the sky. Dragons landed all around them, shadows dancing over green scales and piercing eyes. One dragon stepped front and center. It crouched down to a human level and spoke in a voice both calm and massive.

  “Human time travelers. Welcome. Earth is now our home. We were here before your reign on the planet, and we rose again after.”

  “After?” Lalibela trembled.

  “We have studied your ruins and the stories you left behind. It is apparent to us that humanity did not have to end its time on Earth in the way that it did.”

  “I don’t understand … what happened? Where are we? Is this Ethiopia?” Kibra asked.

  “This is what you left. If you wish to prolong your existence on the planet, you must begin to understand that you, all humans, and all life on Earth are inextricably linked. You are all one organism. Even us now, you are a part of us, and we are a part of you. There is no separation.”

  “That makes sense to me, scientifically speaking,” Lalibela agreed.

  The dragon’s nostrils flared. “Yes, time travelers always say they understand. Your ego is a problem. As a species, the stories you left tell of division and hierarchy. You constantly fought wars with each other while exploiting resources you knew would make the planet inhospitable for generations to come. You must act on what you say you understand if you wish to travel back to this time and see what your people could have done. The atmosphere isn’t safe for you now. It is clear to us that something went horribly wrong for you in the 21st century.”

  “Why are you helping us?” Kibra asked, visibly frightened.

  “You are the children of dragons, and we are what you will eventually become. There is no more time for you here. Go back and get what you lost.”

  The other dragons who hadn’t said a word suddenly exhaled in unison, and a ring of fire surrounded the two time travelers. They had no choice but to step through another space pocket into the past, immediately.

  ROHA HIGHLANDS. 1180 E.C. (1187 AD)

  “Lalibela, I think our most important work is here in the present,” Kibra reasoned. The immensity of what she had seen convinced her the whole idea of time travel was ineffective.

  Lalibela’s childhood habit of running away to explore was kicking in again. “But you heard that dragon, you saw their world! We can do something. We have to go to the 21st century.”

  “Then go if you must. I’ll still be here when you return. I don’t want you to go, but I don’t want to hold you somewhere you don’t want to be either.” Her heart ached, but she meant it.

  Lalibela’s first trips to the future were brief, but they became longer. The amount of time he was gone from the present was time that he really missed. He could never go back exactly to the moment he left. Kibra eventually did give birth to a son, Yetbarak, who grew up knowing more stories of his father than the actual person. Lalibela became a wanderer in time, so obsessed with this idea of saving the future that he never saw what it was causing him to lose. Kibra raised their son, led the country, and she completed the most extensive construction project Roha had ever seen. The love between Lalibela and Kibra never diminished even as the distance between them increased. Lalibela existed in all time, and no time, while the world continued on its path. Slowly, pieces were lost, drifting like petals on water.

  In a few generations’ time, all Kibra and Lalibela had built was remembered only as religious folklore.

  ADDIS ABABA. Present Day.

  Lalibela still didn’t know exactly what to say or who to say it to. Even as a king, he looked at the palaces and knew the true power wasn’t there. He wandered the noisy streets and felt desperation in his bones. A need to touch earth and feel water but deeper than that was a need to tell people what he knew. Every now and then someone would ask for his blessing but most just saw him as a crazy old man. History may have regarded him as a saint, but alone, h
e was no hero.

  On this day, a child saw Lalibela emerge from a space pocket in the busy Addis Ababa streets. The young girl stared at the man who had appeared from nowhere. He turned, and she saw his face.

  “Gashe, I know you,” she said out loud, voice trembling. “I thought you were only a legend,” she said softly as she moved closer towards him.

  Lalibela looked down at her, sadly. She was very thin and wore a T-shirt with an image of Thomas Sankara and the words “Invent the Future” written across in Amharic: “ወደፊትን መፍጠር.” She had a look of hunger in her eyes but also, he realized, of determination.

  Then she boldly reached out a hand to grab his. A burst of blue light filled the air around them.

  “This is strange,” Lalibela murmured. “I have not felt this for centuries. Not since my people remembered how to slip through time. I have traveled on my own for so long, trying to make things right. But I am not strong enough. Perhaps, multiplied by two …”

  The girl stared up at him without speaking. The minutes stretched, the light spiraled, and Lalibela’s heart sank. She does not understand, he thought. It was a mistake.

  “Well,” she said impatiently, “are you going to show me how to move through time, or do I have to figure it out on my own?”

  Lalibela smiled at her, a bright star in the midst of so much chaos. Her fire reminded him of one that burned now in the distant past.

  “Let me tell you a story.” Lalibela held the child’s hand, and together they walked out of time.

  The Copper Scarab

  K. Tempest Bradford

  The herd of chariots that carried Amatashteret and her entourage away from the capital toward the grand pyramids towering on the horizon departed just as the Kheper-dawn lit the sky enough to travel safely at speed. Behind them, a cloud of sand obscured the buildings falling under the horizon, and after a short time, they all stopped looking back wondering if they’d be followed. Amatashteret was sure Yacob-Hur wouldn’t bother coming after her even if she hadn’t asked permission to take this trip as she should have done.