The Voices of Martyrs

by Maurice Broaddus

“Like what?”

  “Like the inventor.”

  Knowledge Allah rapped on the large obsidian knocker. The door swung open. A poor simulacrum of a person greeted them with the smooth manner of a well-rehearsed marionette. Its inner workings whirred—pistoning brass and steel gears—over the gentle hum of whatever powered it. Its face—dull, unpainted metal—held no expression and little attempt at humanity. Wondrous and intricate, a flawless design, it projected a knowing discomfort of the other. Sleepy suddenly grew terrified of the mind of its designer. With a mime’s gesticulations, it offered to take their hat and coats and escorted them. Twin lanterns burned in empty spaces as optical receptors, a mechanical stare masking its inner workings. Its disjointed consciousness lacked imagination, the ability to create story, the power to question its being or its place in the greater scheme of things. It moved without the gift of ancestors and the weight of history. At best, it held the illusion of electric dreaming against the cold void of blackness.

  Sleepy envied its uncomplicated existence.

  The double-door entry opened into the foyer of the opulent home. An elegant, curved staircase separated the living and dining rooms on the right from the library on the left. Walls, alight with whale oil-filled lamps, created an erudite glow. A lone settee perched alongside a fireplace on the opposite side of the room. A deck of cards sat on a piece of silk atop a table. Sleepy cut the deck at random and saw a card inscribed with the number XVI over the picture of a tower struck by lightning. The building’s top section had dislodged from the rest of it; two men were falling from the crumbling edifice. Filled with sudden disquiet, Sleepy set the deck down.

  The automaton paused, like a bellboy awaiting a gratuity.

  “One nation under a groove,” Knowledge Allah said.

  A bank of books parted to reveal a maw of shadows. The automaton withdrew, closing the library door behind it. The civilized façade of the pews of books gave way to the vaulted chamber of the laboratory. Rows of workbenches lined with test tubes, flasks, and beakers gurgling over Bunsen burners. Though a langorous whir of fans vented the air, the room roiled with the cloying smell of steam and coal, hot metal and ozone. A skirling of flutes emanated from a boiler, groaned under the strain of power and settling. A lithe figure bent over a metal frame of eight, jutting arms spinning from a central mass, a mechanical arachnid contraption. Sleepy expected rolled-up sleeves, moleskin trousers, and a grimy leather apron.

  Instead, beneath a cap, goggled and draped in a lab coat, the figure welded a few more joints, testing the articulation as the work progressed, lit to a haunting blue hue behind the jet of the torch.

  Once the goggles had been raised, the inventor took a step backward and nodded. Sleepy realized he regarded a woman. A green velvet jacket beneath the lab coat, with no décolletage or hint of femininity; the inventor held the bearing of a strict governess. She admired her handiwork and snugged her gloves. Her face retained an aqua tint in the dim electric glow. Wrinkles filigreed the corners of her eyes, belying the youthfulness of her face. A product of miscegenation, she radiated the afterglow of light-skinned privilege, despite her secretive life ferreted away in her laboratory. Upon noticing them, she stepped to Knowledge Allah, and the two clasped hands.

  “You’re a lady of odd enthusiasms,” Sleepy proclaimed. He managed to hold his affable leer awaiting an introduction.

  “I don’t have time for social niceties.” She ignored his proffered hand.

  “Cooking stuff up in the lab,” Knowledge Allah said.

  “Just like ‘Yacuub,’ good sir.”

  Unabashedly vital, her high cheekbones framed an aquiline nose against her sallow complexion, tea with too much milk—just light enough to be on the fringe of polite society. With a rigidity of face and a hardness in her hazel eyes, she possessed a noblewoman’s airs. She probably had an A-level education, which meant her parents had money or connections. The mirth of aristocracy barely masked an anarchist streak. Her terrible impertinence of dressing like a man covered a repressed gaety to her Victorian effect. She polished her spectacles in a handkerchief.

  “’Bout time we got some ladies representing,” Sleepy said.

  “He rises in my estimation, Deaconess Blues.” She shook his hand.

  “It’s nice to see not all of us had to struggle.”

  “Do not talk to me about struggle while you thoughtlessly squander what money you manage to scrimp together on instruments and automobiles worth more than your hovel.” Her wan smile soured to a grim line. “My mother had been a governess, a high rank for Negroes, though she tried to program me with how it was unbecoming for a lady to fill her head with designs and equations. Though no mother would phrase it as such, she wanted me to be vapid and colorless. I had other ideas.”

  Though now he whiled away his days as a coal shoveler rather than as an artist or poet, Sleepy never fancied himself an anarchist by any stretch. Not like the deaconess who decided that she, if not the rest of society, was past male supremacy’s notions of womanhood. Her body and mind were hers to do with as she would.

  Sleepy pulled a hair from his chin, closing his eyes at the fresh sting of pain.A nervous habit anxious to remind himself that he could still feel. He didn’t know who he was—a man out of place, a crowd of one. Jamaican-born, but England-educated—through C-levels, the bare minimum for a citizen, appropriate to his station—and America employed; a one-man triangle trade. His father was a man of dreams and ideas. And causes. Sleepy joined the struggle in his youth and paved the way for the F8 through civil disobedience. “Life ought to be lived outside of yourself,” he often preached. But Sleepy’s passion for music provided release from his miserable existence, embued with anger and vitality of the dwellers of the undercity; not the staid tones enjoyed by the ranks of nobles. Sleepy tapped percussive melodies lost in the rhythms of his thoughts.

  “Am I boring you?” Deaconess Blues asked.

  “Nah, I’m just waiting to hear the deal.”

  “All in good time.”

  “Funkin’ Lesson”

  Deaconess Blues led them back to the library where her automaton had spread out the accoutrements of high tea. A silver teapot poured a heady brew. The aroma filled the room. A tray of crumpets and other delicate pastries lay before them, as the blank-faced automaton attended to etiquette in Deaconess Blues’ fragile dance of civility. Going through the motions of refined breeding, protocol—appearances were paramount—despite being excluded from upper society.

  “Are we all that’s left of the F8?” Sleepy asked. He stifled a rheumy cough, slipping a trail of gray sputum into his napkin.

  “I do not know, sir. We compartmentalize ourselves so that no one person knows too much about our organization.” Deaconess Blues tilted her head with a glimmer of maternal concern. “You look troubled.”

  “I just don’t know what we’re doing and …” Sleepy paused. “What’s the point?”

  “Has it ever struck you that we aren’t as ahead technologically as we should be?”

  “Knowledge and the reflection of knowledge equals wisdom,” Knowledge Allah said. “Knowledge and wisdom equals understanding.”

  “Then if you knowledge my wisdom, you will understand what I’m saying,” Deaconess Blues said. He nodded as if they shared the same gibberish wavelength. “Knowledge is built on the back of itself. Those who come along later stand on the shoulders of those before them. That great capitalist machine called slavery robbed mother Africa of generations of scientists, artists, and creative minds. Think of where we’d be without that holocaust.”

  “We’d have flying cars,” Sleepy said “and show tunes.”

  “We have show tunes.”

  “We’d have had them sooner, you feel me? What? A black man can’t enjoy show tunes.”

  “He isn’t ready. He still needs verbal milk,” Knowledge Allah said.

  “Then this meeting is premature. I am … resources. Not propaganda.”

  “Time is of the essence. The
Cause demanded this level of meeting.”

  “My job is to oppose the state,” Deaconess Blues scowled. “I care about the liberation of my people.”

  “Your people? You a high yella, bougie dilettante.” Sleepy shifted, uncomfortable with how defensive he sounded. Deaconess Blues remained unflustered. Strains of classical music reverberated from the large horns encircling the room, surrounding them with sound. With another dollop of chiba, the pungent sting of burnt weed sent his mind adrift among the clouds and made him much more receptive to high-flung ideas.

  An obviously delicate eater, Deaconess Blues drew a long sip then set her cup back onto its dish. “I’m black like you. I resist. I seek to end the chains and the extermination of all oppression.”

  “You don’t talk like a scientist.”

  “I am an anarchist, insurrectionist, and a scientist. A scientist searching for knowledge and proof. For truth and meaning.”

  “You’re a scientist of God,” Knowledge Allah chimed in with a tone of deference.

  Sleepy raised an eyebrow. He wondered if Deaconess Blues was one of the alchemist spirit riders whispered about, those who combined science and the ancient ways.

  “With the revolutions in engineering and science and industry, we have yet to see any in our social systems. We might as well dress up the automata in minstrel outfits and paint them with bright white eyes and red bulbous lips for how we are seen.” Deaconess Blues poured herself another cup of tea. She stirred in milk and sugar as her words settled in their ears, their eyes anxious on her, though she was unhurried. “We’ve been promised universal enlightenment, an end to war, and a rationalist utopian … as long as everyone knows their place.

  “We are at the intersection of class and race, class and sexuality, and class and gender. Any class reduction will face critical resistance. We have sold our souls in the service of commerce. We toil in the embrace of the machine and become a concubine of industry. So we rage against the machine, and we must take extraordinary steps to defend ourselves. There must develop solidarity among our people, a swell of anti-colonial resistance.”

  “I feel you. I’m angry, and I know y’all are angry, too. So, what’re we going to do about it?” Sleepy asked, not one for the intellectual stuff. “Civil disobedience?”

  “I’ve no interest in begging for scraps from our presumed master’s table.”

  “Let me lay it on you like this: blood for blood,” Knowledge Allah said.

  “Now we’re talking,” Sleepy said, stirred from his settling ennui.

  “And you know that.” Knowledge Allah outstretched his hand that was received with blitheness by Sleepy, as if he’d finally earned a spot at the table.

  “You’d be happy with any militant action,” Deaconess Blues sniffed.

  “Blowing shit up is a plan,” Sleepy said.

  “I understand your anger and how you may think of blowing shit up—given your coarse leanings—as revolutionary. But it is the beginning of a plan, not one unto itself. There must be a greater vision. There must be a catalyst for change.”

  “Niggas are in a state of emergency. Got to start wilding out.”

  “You are a ruin to language,” she said with the exacting manner of a spinster aunt.

  Sleepy chafed against her civilizing influence. The discussion, though somewhat diverting, left him with the sensation of being out of his depth. Maybe it was Deaconess Blues’ subtle condescension. Or perhaps it was the disconnection between the lofty ideas of the Cause and the practical reality of the people. Sleepy’s views boiled down to pragmatism: the theory of struggle was great only insofar as someone actually was helped. It wasn’t further argument he wanted, but action. “You rebel in your way, I rebel in mine.”

  “I dream of different but similar worlds. I dream of one where we’re free, not under the heel of Albion. There is something profoundly unwell in their sense of entitlement.” Deaconess Blues shook her head as if the very act of reflection was wasted effort. Her stiff, stately bearing was the picture of restraint. “Eating their blood sausages and tripe, their raspberry tarts.”

  “The Inventor has a plan,” Knowledge Allah said, as if reading his reluctance.

  “Oh?”

  “The plan is the paragon of simplicity. The local penitentiary …”

  “The Ave?” Sleepy asked.

  “The Allisonville Correctional Facility is a wretched place. Its serpentine bowels, and those of its ilk, incarcerate a third of our people. Little better than slave pens with us little better than beasts.”

  “Including Star Child and the rest of the F8.”

  “The Star Child is a powerful symbol of the struggle. Imprisoned for speaking of a better way. Of revolution.”

  “But the Ave is…”

  “Impregnable? No, its design bears the fruit of the very hubris of its designers. Think of it: a lone spire, defying the heavens like the tower of Babel. All the guards, knights of the realm, gathered there more as symbol than actual need. Were it to come crashing down, our brothers and sisters would be free.”

  “Oops upside their head,” Knowledge Allah said.

  “Wouldn’t they be trapped?”

  “Don’t you see? The same underground shafts that entomb them now also protect them. All we would need is a group of folks to shepherd them to safety.”

  “And something to bring down the tower itself.”

  Deaconess Blues stood up and strode to the coat rack. Donning a hat and gloves—though Sleepy distrusted the cock of her hat—she announced, “Come on. We need to be armed with a bop gun.”

  §

  “Bop Gun (Endangered Species)”

  “Citizens of the Universe, do not attempt to adjust your electro-transmitter, there is nothing wrong. We have taken control to bring you this special bulletin.” The attenuated pulse of Knowledge Allah’s voice echoed along the airwaves. “The Albion Empire bloated itself on its own myth—a proud, corpulent pustule of wealth—spreading across the land, a decadent cancer of corporate greed and industrial indulgence all in the name of national pride.

  “Washington aristocrats with vested interest in our eternal domination, governing to their interests not ours. The Empire is a corrupt federal leviathan, swollen and lazy, and we are the cheap table legs propping it up. Revolution is inevitable. We are the First Cause. In our tiers of rage, we call for direct action. We resist constituted powers through property damage. We impede the flow of goods and capital, using their system against them and making the cost of perpetuating domination prohibitive. And it is time to co-opt their instrument of military guarantor to break out the F8. There’s a party at the crossroads. Watch the skies. Freedom or Death.

  “I exist between time outside time. In the between places. I am the voice of truth in these troubled times.”

  Escaped the low ceiling of the undercity. No sunlight, only the arc of electricity from the tram. A city of shadows consuming their bodies as grist to drive the Empire forward. The trio rode in silence following the banks’ scenic greenway to the summer homes of the overcity. They quickly left the shadows of Atlantis to the sprawling suburbs of greater Indianapolis, careful to avoid the constabularies who might pull them over or otherwise detain them for not being where they were supposed to be. Deaconess Blues’ fair skin granted her passage to casual observers. Soon, they reached an immense pole barn structure on property ringed with barbed wire. A mad grin danced on her face as she activated the lock controls via a sequence of numbers punched into an electro-chirographer pad. Gears winched, and the doors trembled before parting. Inside the makeshift hanger was an airship.

  From the first day the sight of a bird in flight fired his fancy, man dreamed to one day take to the clouds, to conquer the air as easily as he conquered the land and the sea. Unlike the massive warships of Lockheed or Sir Halliburton, this one did not bristle with armaments. No mighty bombs would drop on unseen enemies or innocent school buildings nor would the blood-soaked dreams of nation states be enforced by it. A rid
ged watermelon with a hull of black with a red underbelly, gas-filled tubes ran along the outside of the ship and burned to life to ring the ship in a brackish green. A gold ankh, like an uplifted key, emblazoned its side.

  “Where did you get it?”

  “I am not a lady of unlimited resources …”

  “You stole it.”

  “We wrested it from the control of the military/industrial complex, who deemed this model a failure and relegated it to a barely guarded warehouse,” Knowledge Allah said.

  “Why didn’t you say so?”

  “Haven’t you understood, yet? We proceed on a need-to-know basis. You didn’t need to know.”

  “One man’s failure is another person’s treasure.” Deaconess Blues climbed a scaffold. “Coming inside?”

  The decks of the cabin divided into small rooms, tiny tombs in the greater sarcophagus, connected by tiny ladders Sleepy had little hope of navigating. A network of cables, ropes, and pipes ran throughout like capillaries. Pressure hissed from the valves of the Malcolm-Little engines. Mahogany bedecked the main cabin and retained the reek of stale cigar smoke. A luxurious box, a den of sorts, formed the sanctum sanctorum of noble breeding. A decanter of pear wine sat in the middle of a table spread with finger foods, as another blank-faced automaton whirred out of their way.

  Knowledge Allah reclined on a bench, a gentleman of leisure. Deaconess Blues stood before an array of membrane discs and tuning forks, lost behind the steady cadence of whirs and clicks. A wave of nausea swept over Sleepy as he imagined himself squeezing into the small window seat, staring out over the sea of land.

  “Wisdom is water. I’m about solar facts. God is the sun. It’s all about the elements,” Knowledge Allah said, a brutal curl to his lips.

  “You and your outlandish expressions,” Deaconess Blues remarked with admirable dispatch. “Your peculiar phraseology never tires.” She moved about the cabin, examining the controls with considered elegance.

  “The sundial speaks. We prepare to ride as Afronauts.”