“They want us to open the door,” I said. I stepped up to the door. “We’re … we’re not him!” I responded in English. I turned to Ahmed and switched back to Arabic. “I told them we’re not Arinze.”
“Let’s open it,” he said.
“Okay.”
He was about to and then stopped. He turned to me, looking guilty. “You should step back.”
I understood. My eyes. Who knew what they’d think? And I didn’t want anyone looking into them.
“Okay,” I said, stepping behind him. “Makes sense.”
He touched the blue button and there we were facing about thirty sweaty dirty people all crammed at the door. Hot air wafted out. It reeked of sweat, urine, feces, and rotten fruit. Ahmed and I coughed.
Ahmed stood up straight. “We’re here to—”
“Take her down!” a man shouted in English. There was a mad rush as they all tried to lunge for me through the narrow corridor. I stumbled back as Ahmed jumped in front of me, using his body to block the way. Five men tried to shove him aside but he somehow managed to remain lodged.
“Stop it!” he shouted in Arabic.
“We can handle her!” someone said in Igbo. “Just get out of the way!”
“We’re getting off this damn shuttle!” another said in English.
“Stop!” Ahmed screamed in Arabic, pushing them back with all his might. “She’s not—she’s human!”
No one listened or maybe they didn’t understand. Everyone started shouting at the same time. Sweat gleamed on Ahmed’s face as he fought to keep himself in the passageway. I ran back several feet but I wasn’t about to leave Ahmed.
Suddenly, out of nowhere, a blast of wind flew through the passageway. It knocked me off my feet and I slid several feet back. Then everything went silent. I slowly sat up. Everyone in the passageway had been blown back into the conference room. They murmured as they sat up, rubbing their heads, arms, confused.
Only Ahmed remained, hovering, his seven long thick braids undulating as the windseeker breeze circulated his body. The passengers stared at him. I smiled broadly, though once again, I was shaking all over.
“She, we are not …” Ahmed switched to French as he landed on his feet. “We are not whatever you’ve been dealing with! Does anyone understand me? We’re here to get you out!”
“How do we know that?” some woman asked in French from behind everyone. Good, I thought. Someone understood.
“Speak in French,” I said. “I can speak that, too.”
Ahmed looked at me. I winked. I can speak six languages, Arabic, Hausa, French, Igbo, Yoruba, and English. My father liked to call me the daughter of Legba—the Yoruba deity of language, communication, and the crossroads—because I picked up languages so easily.
“Why else would we unlock the door?” Ahmed snapped. The woman translated for those who couldn’t understand.
Silence.
“Stupid,” I muttered, stepping closer to Ahmed.
“This is Fisayo and I’m Ahmed,” he said. “We’re … Do you know what’s happened on Earth since you left?”
More confused murmuring. The general consensus was that they knew something bad had happened but they weren’t sure what.
“She and I have been … affected. We’re not aliens. One of you is my … my grandfather. Zaid Fakhr Mohammed Uday al-Rammah.” Before the woman could translate for the others, Ahmed repeated himself in Arabic, listing his name, his grandmother’s name, and his village. There was a soft gasp from near the back and the crowd slowly parted, allowing a tall wizened man to come forth. He was about eighty and wore blue garments whose armpits were dirty with sweat, and a deep blue turban.
There was a long pause as the two stared at each other.
“Why do you look like a punching bag?” Ahmed’s grandfather asked in Arabic. He motioned to me. “Is this girl your wife? Have you two been quarreling?” A few people chuckled.
“Uh …” Ahmed said. “We’re …”
“Come here,” his grandfather said.
Ahmed slowly stepped up to him and the old man looked him up and down. “You don’t look like my son.”
Ahmed scoffed. “The last time you saw him he was about four years old.”
I held my breath. Then I let it out with relief as the old man smiled and laughed softly. “You are really my grandson?”
Ahmed brought a picture from his pocket. “This is you, Grandma, and my father just before they left for Earth.”
His grandfather stared at it for a very long time.
“That … monster will let us out now?” someone impatiently asked behind them.
Ahmed’s grandfather was crying. “I haven’t seen this photo in … such a long time. It’s why I came back.”
“There’s one more of us,” an African woman said in Igbo, pushing to the front. She wore jeans and a dirty purple sweater. Ahmed looked back at me and I stepped forward. The woman hesitated, glancing at and looking away from my eyes and said, “He’s being held captive in the cockpit, I think.” She pointed behind her. “It’s through the conference room.”
“Arinze,” I said.
She nodded.
“Troublesome sellout,” Ahmed’s grandpa mumbled. “Nigerians.” He spoke the name of my people like he was spitting dirt from his mouth. I frowned.
The women who’d spoken Igbo sucked her teeth loudly and deliberately. “Keep talking and see wahala, old man.”
Even when they lived and were born on Mars, people were still people.
Ahmed’s and my eyes met for a half second. Then he looked away. “I’ll go,” I said.
“I’ll go with you,” the Igbo woman said.
“It’s okay,” I told her. “I know what’s going on. Just … wait for him outside.” This time, I was the one who didn’t want to meet her eyes. I switched to English. She spoke Igbo with an English accent, so I suspected she’d understand, as would more of the others. “You all need to get off. There isn’t time. This shuttle is going to take off soon.”
“What!” a man said. “Impossible! There can’t be any fuel left. …”
People started translating for each other, and there were more exclamations of surprise.
“Who cares,” a woman said. “Show us out of here! I can’t stand being on a shuttle any longer!”
Everyone began pushing forward again. As they crammed past me, I told Ahmed, “Go with them. They need someone who knows … Earth.”
“Okay. But hurry out,” he said, taking and squeezing my hand. His other was holding the hand of his grandfather.
“I’ll be all right.”
I watched them all file down the corridor. Then I walked into the conference room to attend the strangest meeting of my life.
The conference room was spacious with a high ceiling and windows the size of the walls (which were currently covered with the ship’s protective white metal exterior). Near the back were shelves of books and three exercise bicycles. This large room was probably normally beautiful. But at the moment it was filthy and stinky. There were plastic tubs brimming with urine and feces and sacks of garbage. Had they been allowed to leave the room for anything? How long had they been trapped in there? I hurried to the door on the other side.
It easily opened and led into another passageway that was even narrower than the other one. It went on and on. I passed sealed doorways on my left and right. I frowned realizing something. Maybe the creature was allowing the doors to open. Maybe it had opened the door to the outside so that Ahmed and I could come in and rescue the people. I had so many answers, yet I had even more questions.
Finally, I reached a small round door. It felt like metal but it looked like wood. Nervous, I took a deep breath, tugging at one of my long braids. Suddenly the door slid open and I was standing before a tall very dark-skinned Nigerian man. Behind him was a round sunshine-filled room. The cockpit window must have been recently opened, for I hadn’t seen this on the outside. Every inch of wall was packed with virtual sensors,
small and large screens, and soft buttons.
In the middle of it all, manipulating the ship’s virtual controls, was the … thing. It looked like something out of the deep ocean. Wet, red, bloblike, formless. I imagined that it would have fit perfectly into the glasslike thing that had attacked Ahmed and me outside.
It smoothly pulled its many filament-like appendages in, rose up, and molded itself into an exact replica of my face, shifting and changing colors to even imitate my dark skin tone. I gasped, clapping my hands over my mouth. It smiled at me.
Terrified, I looked up at Arinze who was still standing there. “I—”
His face curled, and he grabbed me. He pushed me back and slammed me against the wall. For the third time in the last hour all the air left my chest. I grabbed at his hands and dug my nails into them. His grip loosened and I seized the opportunity to slide away.
My eyes located a wrench. I grabbed it and raised it toward one of the screens. Arinze froze and the creature melted from my shape back into a blob.
“I swear I’ll … I’ll smash this!” I screamed, utterly hysterical by this point. “May the fleas of a thousand camels nest in your hair!” I was hurting all over, shaking, full of too much adrenaline and there was a red alien in the middle of the room with appendages snaking out in multiple directions like some sort of giant amoeba! I strained to keep the tears from dribbling for my eyes. The last thing I needed was for my vision to blur. I focused on the alien, sharpening to a molecular level. … I immediately pulled back, further shaken. I hadn’t seen cells; I saw something more like metal balls.
“Please don’t break that,” Arinze said in Igbo. His accent was vaguely Nigerian, Yoruba. But not quite. How long had he been on Mars? He had to have been born there. He looked about thirty. Yet he had three short vertical tribal markings on each cheek. So they were still practicing that tradition even on Mars?
“We need that to navigate properly,” he said.
“You just nearly killed me!”
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I was … I thought you were going to hurt it. It’s … it’s like a snail without a shell until it makes a new living shell.”
I didn’t lower my wrench.
“That’s … that’s why it attacked you,” he said. “Then we realized a lot of things.” He paused. “What are you?”
“I’m human. A shadow speaker.” I shook my head. “It’s a long story.”
He stared at me. I knew he was making up his mind. I’d made mine up. If he tried anything, I’d smash the screen and then smash his head. “Arinze,” I said, quickly. “I know who you are. I know you have befriended this creature. You understand each other.”
“How do you know?” he snapped. “What can you know?”
The creature stretched a narrow filament and touched Arinze’s forehead. Affectionately. Arinze seemed to relax.
I felt a pinch of envy. I was constantly getting attacked because of what I looked like. This creature had no shape and could look like anything it wanted. And then it could create an exo-skin that it could wear or send to do what it asked … at least until it sunk into the sand on a planet with stronger gravity than it was used to. I wondered why it had chosen to make its exo-skin look like a giant bipedal grasshopper.
“It ‘reads’ things through vibration,” I said. “I am similar. I read things by closeness and focusing. I read it as it read me. You know I’m right. It has told you. Trust it.”
“Put the wrench down,” he said. “I’m not going to hurt you.”
“How do I know?”
He sighed and sat on a stool, now rubbing his own temples. “You know. You both know.”
I didn’t put it down. “Please,” I said. “I’m tired of fighting.” I leaned against the controls, feeling very, very tired. “What is it about me that everyone wants to attack? I just came here to greet you people. To see.” I sighed, tears finally falling from my eyes. Why did everyone think I was evil? One of the last things my mother had said to me before I ran away was that I was wahala, trouble.
He frowned. “Did I hurt you?”
I waved a hand at him. It was too much to explain.
“I’m sorry,” he said again.
“So am I,” I said, sitting on the floor.
There was a clicking sound as the alien’s appendage screwed something in beneath the front window controls. There was a soft whirring. The creature’s body twisted up and leaned toward Arinze.
“I’m not held captive here,” he said. “They all think I am but I’m not.”
“I know.”
“It’s been ugly on this shuttle,” he said. “We had to lock them up. Were they all okay?”
I nodded.
“Good. I’m … I’m going to go back with it. It’s not the only one that’s been discovered by the Mars government and there were some government officials on this shuttle who will alert those here on Earth. If I don’t go with this one, to help it speak to its people, there will be a war. It tells me so. Like here. It was war, right?”
“Yes. Nuclear and something else.”
He nodded. “I have to go back.”
“You’ve never been outdoors, have you?”
“No. But …” he said. He looked at the creature, a sadness passing over his face. The creature was focused on getting home. “What’s happened to Earth?”
“It’s a long story.”
He chuckled. “Have you heard news of Nigeria? My grandparents are from there.”
I smiled. “Nigeria is still Nigeria.”
“One day …” He took my hands. “You’d better get off the ship.”
The creature moved a filament across the green virtual grid above it and the shuttle shook hard enough to make me stumble.
“Go!” Arinze said. “Hurry!”
I made for the door and then turned back. I ran to Arinze and shook his hand. “I hope you come back,” I said.
Before I ran off, quickly like a striking snake, the creature reached out and touched my forehead with a moist appendage. It was neither warm nor cold, hard nor soft, absolutely foreign. Only one image came to me from its touch: An empire of red dust in a place that looked like the Sahara desert. Here strange things grew and withered spontaneously. As they did now on Earth. The communities of these creatures were more like the Earth of now, especially in the Sahara. I breathed a sigh of surprise. Then I could feel it more than I heard it. A vibration that tickled my ears. My people do not understand Mars Earthlings, but they will understand when I tell about you, Fisayo. You are not wahala. You are the information I needed.
Arinze was pushing me. “Go!” he shouted.
I went.
I barely made it off the shuttle before it started rumbling. Plantain was there, waiting. I jumped on her and she took off. We joined the others two miles from the shuttle as it launched into the sky with impossible power and speed. I’d seen what the alien did to the shuttle when I read it, but I didn’t have the capacity to understand its science. The Igbo woman who’d wanted to come to the cockpit with me cried and cried when she didn’t see Arinze with me. Ahmed stood close to his grandfather. His grandfather had his arm over his shoulder.
Ahmed and I did not say good-bye. As they were all deciding if they should wait for officials to arrive or try to make it to the next town, Plantain and I left. There was too much to say and no space to say it. Plantain and I headed south, back home, to Jos. Crossing the Sahara to Agadez was a silly idea. I needed to have long talk with my parents.
There was other life on Mars. Even after all that had happened here on Earth, I had to work to wrap my mind around that. Allah protect Arinze and the one he’s befriended; provide them with success. There’s been more than enough wahala.
Laika’s Ghost
KARL SCHROEDER
Karl Schroeder (www.kschroeder.com) lives in Toronto, Ontario, where he divides his time between writing fiction and consulting—chiefly in the area of Foresight Studies and technology. His work of forecasting fiction, Crisi
s in Zefra, was published by the Directorate of Land Strategic Concepts of the National Defense Canada in 2005. He began to publish stories in the 1990s, and he has, beginning with Ventus (2000), published seven science fiction novels and a collection of earlier stories. His most recent novel is the final Virga novel, Ashes of Candesce, published in 2012. Recently, he has begun to develop his Bruce Sterling-esque character, Gennady the Russian agent, as the protagonist of a series of stories, including “To Hie from Far Cilenia” in last year’s volume of this book. We hope for a collection of these excellent stories, including the one that follows here.
“Laika’s Ghost” is another story first published in Engineering Infinity. Laika was of course the name of the canine Russian cosmonaut who died in space prior to the first human spaceflight. Somewhere in the arid, radiated steppes of the former Soviet Union someone may have perfected the portable nuclear bomb that would destabilize the world for the forseeable future. Gennady, so cool and yet so socially timid, is forced to take along an American kid recently returned from Mars, even though it is a surefire recipe for extra trouble.
The flight had been bumpy; the landing was equally so, to the point where Gennady was sure the old Tupolev would blow a tire. Yet his seat-mate hadn’t even shifted position in two hours. That was fine with Gennady, who had spent the whole trip trying to pretend he wasn’t there at all.
The young American had been a bit more active during the flight across the Atlantic: at least, his eyes had been open and Gennady could see coloured lights flickering across them from his augmented reality glasses. But he had exchanged less than twenty words with Gennady since they’d left Washington.
In short, he’d been the ideal travelling companion.
The other four passengers were stretching and groaning, Gennady poked Ambrose in the side and said, “Wake up. Welcome to the ninth biggest country in the world.”
Ambrose snorted and sat up. “Brazil?” he said hopefully. Then he looked out his window. “What the hell?”
The little municipal airport had a single gate, which as the only plane on the field, they were taxiing up to uncontested. Over the entrance to the single-story building was the word “CTeΠHOᴦOpck.” “Welcome to Stepnogorsk,” said Gennady as he stood to retrieve his luggage from the overhead rack. He travelled light by habit. Ambrose, he gathered, had done so from necessity.
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