The Alchemists of Kush

by Minister Faust

  Raptor slipped away for a glass of pop so he didn’t pass out and break his head open in front of everyone like a kot-tam punk.

  4.

  Raptor pressed the button. The explosive exploded.

  —massive hiss and whoosh—

  —and all forty-two of the young Alchemists stared at nothing.

  The rocket’d shot up so quickly, none of the young Alchemists had even seen it move.

  Then they all looked up, jabbing at the tiny line against the cold blue morning sky, suddenly poofing a parachute like an instant mushroom for a slow, slow return to earth over the field, well inside the forest line.

  Jackal: “Da-a-a-a-yum.”

  “Supreme, bruh!” said his beat-producer Senwusret.

  “Geo!” giggled Ãnkhur.

  Raptor’d just thought the rocket was going to lift off slowly, like the space-shuttle. But it was all over before he’d had a chance to enjoy it.

  But so what? Saturday sunrise, and sky like sapphire, air cold but moist and sweet. A few dozen Street Falcons outside the city, roosting at the Strathcona Wilderness Centre, Friday night till Sunday afternoon.

  Launching rockets from the middle of the field, and late March with the snow just gone, and they were mudstuck on every footstep.

  Moon’d said: no mp3 players. Learn to hear again. That sunrise, their only soundtrack was the chirping of birds. Wasn’t a car engine in hearing distance, not even from the highway.

  Sbai Seshat, always a genius at pushing the right bureaucratic buttons and getting City funding to run Falcon programmes, got them this place, a massive cabin-style fortress forty minutes out of town where three-dozen kids from Kush had come to learn Alchemy.

  First time camping ever, for most of them. Except for kids such as Raptor who’d grown up in camps.

  Brother Moon led the applause. “Who’s next?”

  Jackal leapt. Slid his rocket’s launch lug onto the pad’s guidance rod, then inserted the electric match into the black-powder motor.

  And what a rocket. Three times the size of Raptor’s—a triple stage beauty like the Saturn Vs that took Americans to the moon, except that Jackal’s was so tricked out it was funkadelic.

  On one side of the black body, flaming, graffiti-style logo:

  Jackal Is Still Numba 1!

  On the other side, Gothic Germanic script:

  Lift This Mutha UP!!!

  Four fins, and on each side, a colour sticker he’d digitally designed and printed. Each one a different take on his own face: scowling, sobbing, cheering, smirking and more.

  Jackal: “Yo, check this out.” Everyone pre-emptively looked up.

  Jackal pressed the ignition button.

  The rocket shot up above the trees and blew itself to fiery bits.

  People didn’t know what to say.

  Jackal said, “Da-a-a-a-yum.”

  Everyone broke up howling, cracking wise and whip-snapping wrists.

  Sbai Seshat: “I hope your rap career does what that rocket just did.” More hyucks.

  Raptor heard Thandie fake-whisper to her orbit of boys, “Wonder if he does that with his girlfriend.” They laughed while she smiled. Jackal didn’t hear it, but Raptor saw Yibemnoot scowling.

  Moon questioned Jackal until they’d figured out the problem: Jackal had painted his rocket after it was all assembled, thereby inadvertently glueing together the vehicle’s three stages.

  Furious at himself for not having inspected it, Moon carefully went over the remaining fifteen rockets (all single- and two-stagers) before he cleared any for launch.

  When all those were done, Moon’s lawyer friend, Sbai Maãhotep (Raptor was still used to calling him Bamba, the name he’d met him under), unpacked their rockets out of Maãhotep’s car.

  Then teens oo-ed and aw-ed: Maãhotep’s looked like a real Saturn V, as tall as he was and painted white-with-black detailing just like the NASA giant.

  Moon’s looked alien to everyone, so he explained that his was a rare Soviet Soyuz-style model rocket, orange accents on a green body. Both Maãhotep’s and Moon’s had cameras, and Moon said they’d all get to see the footage when they recovered their rockets.

  The thought of little tiny cameras inside those rockets made Raptor’s mind gyroscope, as if he were a Micronaut riding those rockets himself.

  Raptor’d never seen a day like it.

  When he was growing up in camps in four countries, it was always hot outside, there was never enough food, and danger could come from anywhere: other displaced people, raiders such as the Janjaweed gunmen outside the Sudanese camps, or in other countries, nationals who resented their presence and hunted them like coyotes.

  But the Wilderness Centre’s wooden fortress was clean and handsome. Friday night was a blast. First “sleep-over” he’d ever had. Crazy conversations with a dozen or more people at a time, spinning in every direction for hours. (Something called “nature walks”: way better than marching thousands of kilometres from one camp to another.)

  Saturday dawn: Daily Alchemy, then rockets with the blessing of the sun. Then pancakes and sausages and eggs and toast.

  They’d branched into different laboratories over the day led by the four sbaiu: martial arts with Moon, African histories with Maãhotep, ethics shen-ring and role-playing with Seshat.

  Outside, it was alternating shifts of archery and hiking led by Sbai Nehet. She was a Poli Sci doctoral candidate. Long braids clasped with a cowrie shell band, and cheekbones and biceps so cut she looked an orisha. Ãnkhur said, “Half the girls wanna be her, and half the boys wanna do her.” (Finger-snapped.) “That’s out.”

  Lunch: hamburgers or vegetarian stew plus fries. Dinner: meat- and meatless gumbo and greens.

  And everyone was happy.

  Hit Raptor like a sweet chinook: couldn’t remember ever having said those words about anybody, in any place, at any time.

  In the corner, sopping up gumbo with Somali moofo bread, Moon whispered: “Bruh, notice all the extra-street Street Falcons staring at you all day, hanging on everything do, listening to everything you say?”

  Raptor realised: this had been going on so long that it didn’t even register on him any more. Habituated to it, like he’d read in that Psych text.

  “Know what that is?” said Brother Moon.

  Raptor waited.

  “That’s power, bruh. And what did Spiderman say?”

  Wearily: “‘With great power must also come great responsibility.’ Yeah, but Brother Moon, I mean, what? You expect me to be a role model to them? Is that what you’re saying?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’m just a kid!”

  “Not to them, you’re not. Did Hru get to say, ‘I’m just a kid’ when he was out there in the Savage Lands?”

  “No, but—”

  He nodded towards four of the streetest of the youth. Dawud, Junior, Ahmed, and Francois, ages fourteen through nineteen. They smiled back, puffed up a bit. At being noticed by Brother Moon and the Supreme Raptor.

  Raptor had to admit he’d been expecting these roughnecks to break into fights any minute with themselves, with other Falcons, with wildlife. But all day they’d been acting like they’d just come from church and were heading off to mosque.

  “Look at them,” said Moon. “Them boys are so street they aint got asses—they got asphalt!” Raptor chuckled. “Doesn’t matter you don’wanna be a role model. Geometrically, soon as they’re looking at you like that, you are one. Transformed?”

  Reluctantly: “Transformed . . . but—”

  “So how do you help them cast off their lead and pyrite idols?”

  “‘I grasp the golden chain to elevate myself from the Swamps of Death,” he recited. Then, with more conviction: “‘Where I have cast wanderers in the waters to drown, I will battle crocodiles to place my chain in their hands, so that those who have sunk down may elevate themselves.’”

  “Supreme.”

  Outside. Wooden deck. Cold air of sunset. Falcons chilled out
sipping mugs of double-sweet, double-thick, dark hot chocolate. Specifically, fair trade hot chocolate.

  In her cute French accent, Sister Sekhmet (lead name, Crystal) had presented on how more than forty per cent of the world’s cocoa came from her Ivory Coast. And that there, the cocoa barons literally enslaved children to harvest it.

  Falcons: stunned and furious. Tens of thousands of kids from Côte d’Ivoire and neighbouring countries lured or trafficked in, picking cocoa beans on modern plantations, chained in a modern Savage Lands.

  Sekhmet explained nearly every chocolate product they’d ever eaten or drank had one secret ingredient: the slavery of their own brothers and sisters.

  Falcons swore one after the other they were done with chocolate, and soon they were in chorus on the ninth verse of the Nub-Wmet-Ãnkh:

  By the sunrise, let us create hope, joy and justice, to make stand those who weep, to reveal those who hide their faces and to lift up those who sink down.

  In doing so, we will all rise nearer to the Supreme!

  Blushing, Sekhmet told them they didn’t have to quit chocolate forever. There was fair trade. Sbai Seshat brought out trays of steaming mugs full of the surprise beverage, the plan all along.

  But Sekhmet warned: just because they could buy something evil-free didn’t mean mean the battle was over. They still had to drain the Swamps. They still had to transform lead into gold for the hundreds of millions who spent billions on slavery so that all the children in chains could be free.

  “Yo, Jackal,” said Senwusret, sipping and slurping.

  Sen and his two Golden Eye partners, cold-lamping on the edge of the deck. The snow-skinned lake turning blue in the dusk.

  Sen: “Still gonna drink that nasty chocolate milk outta damn Tupperware containers?”

  Raptor laughed so hard he splattered hot chocolate all over himself. Then all three of them were howling. He’d never been much for laughing, least of all at himself, but hearing Sen crack on Jackal for his chocolate milk weirdness was seriously hilarious.

  Got round to talking crew business, how they were gonna grow Golden Eye into something serious. Gigs. An EP. Maybe an album. And of course a tour.

  Jackal’d already let Sen take over scratching so he could learn how to make beats himself. Now he wanted to step up beside Raptor on the mic.

  “Dude, fuh real, I’m like totally transforming my lyricality! I’m geo!”

  He spat a few rhymes, just enough to make them want more. Raptor and Sen applauded, magnetising the attention of other Falcons.

  “Picture it, dude,” Jackal said to Raptor, “you’re Talib, I’m Mos, and Sen’ll be Hi-Tek!”

  Raptor smiled. “No, I’m Run, you can be DMC, and Sen’s Jam Master Jay!”

  Sen: “Naw, man, my whole thing is, you’re Salt, you’re Pepa . . . and I’m Rick James!”

  They all laughed.

  After dinner, but before the movie extravaganza of School Daze and Lumumba, Moon returned to the city for his night shift at the Hyper-Market.

  So Brother Maãhotep stepped up. Other Falcons knew him well, but Raptor didn’t. The man always looked put-together: even out here at the wooden fortress, he was collared in a shirt and snug sweater.

  Looked almost like Raphael Saadiq in one of his retro-1962-ish videos. Ãnkhur called him “a sharp-looking brother.” Girls whispered and giggled about him. Boys were impressed by his lawyer-hood. One said, “Good to we have one on our side for once.”

  Maãhotep showed them a ten-minute torrented video, a documentary about a decade-long Soviet experiment from the ’sixties or something to domesticate foxes. In the last two thousand years, it was one of the only successful attempts to domesticate generations of a species.

  Onscreen: Russian lab coats handling silver fox kits (Raptor loved that word—they weren’t cubs, but kits, like model rockets you could build).

  After ten generations of selective breeding among the least aggressive kits, suddenly the little foxes erupted with a range of totally unexpected behaviour and features: floppy ears, spotted and patchy coats . . . they barked, they trusted humans, they could be trained to perform tricks. They began looking like dogs, dogs being far more wolf cub than wolf.

  In shenu, they revolved again and again around these transformations, X-raying them on every orbit.

  Raptor hung back, not out of alienation but fascination. The Falcons weren’t like kids from school, clueless and clued-out. They were magnetised inside this Biological Alchemy (Maãhotep’s phrase). Maybe if they weren’t constantly being injection-fed MTV/MuchMusic bling and videhoes, some of them’d dream of becoming scientists instead of . . . whatever the hell it was they dreamed of (he realised he didn’t know because he’d never asked them).

  Maãhotep gave his own X-ray. The Soviet scientists theorised these less aggressive foxes had lower levels of adrenalin, which was itself connected to melanin and a range of other hormones, which produced all the changes including in hair colour.

  “So tell me,” said Maãhotep, “what the effects were: positive, negative and neither.”

  A bunch agreed that increased intelligence was the main benefit, but they split on whether lowered aggression was. Some said gentleness helped them get along better, but others said it made them easier to capture.

  They also split on appearance. Some loved the range of beauty, but the moment someone else said, “It’s like they lost their identity,” eyes went neon around the room as to why Maãhotep’d shown them the video.

  “Ho’d up, Brother Maãhotep,” said Francois, the sixteen-year-old Rwandan street youth who’d traded his French accent for Young Jeezy’s. “Are you like, like, sayin that . . . the foxes’re us?”

  “Am I?”

  Ãnkhur cut in slowly, doing her own geometry while she constructed her sentence: “And are you saying that, well, this old experiment was like . . . slavery? Because we changed colours? And learned new things?”

  Yibemnoot: “You mean new tricks? Or that we even just got tricked? I seriously don’t think Brother Maãhotep is saying slavery or colonialism was good for any of us!”

  More, shooting around the shenu. Maãhotep, finally: “Think. Domestication hurt these foxes in certain ways, and in other ways it helped them. So. If the foxes could decide, which way should they go?”

  Revolving, X-raying, transforming . . . .

  Maãhotep, near the zenith: “Now, in school, that’s where you’d stop. Get you to debate whether it’s good or bad for a fox to be domesticated, and leave it there.

  “But we’re Alchemists. We don’t play that here. That kind of either/or thinking goes against our teachings. It’s Leadite thinking, taught by Pyrites to keep Leadites unreflective and unconductive. So use your Alchemy.”

  Ten seconds passed while eyes probed the rafters.

  “S,” said Raptor at last. “Simultaneity.”

  “Geometrical, brother. A thing can be two things or even many things at the same time, even things which seem to contradict each other, or which actually do contradict each other.

  “The foxes gain from both ways, and they lose from both ways. So what should they do?”

  Yibemnoot: “Take the best. And even just lose the worst.”

  Jackal: “Don’t just find somebody else’s way. Make your own way.”

  “Which means we, right here in this room, need to learn where to discard a metaphor,” said Maãhotep. “Because models lie. They’re bigger than what they’re modeling so they exaggerate, or they’re smaller and ignore too much detail.

  “So where does this parable of the foxes break down for us?”

  “Well, my whole thing is, we were never animals,” says Sen. “We were scientists. Civilisers.”

  “That’s supreme geometry,” said Maãhotep. “So in the model, it wasn’t you who was the scientist. That man was. He captured you, ran experiments on you, caged you, either where you lived back home or took you from there to bring you here, like the Devourer of Souls swallowing you up and sp
itting you out in the Savage Lands, in order to make you and others believe you’re animals. Savages.

  “And some of them—and you can see it in some of our behaviour today, some of us—still do believe that. Is that geometrical?”

  Around the room they nodded, muttering: “That’s geo.”

  “And some of you are so used to that,” said Seshat, “you’re not even surprised when your own parents whip you.”

  Around the shenu: uh-ohs and oh-no-she-didn’ts magnetised to guffaws and I-hear-thats.

  Seshat: “And you’ll even defend getting licks from your parents, and call White kids wusses or sissies cuz you think you’re so tough because you took licks. But look at them. Look at everything they own. They’re running the planet! Did they get licks? Not most of the ones in charge.

  “But you, you’re gonna defend getting licks in your own homes? If you like licks so much, why not just defend getting licks from the cops, too?”

  “Or prison guards,” said Raptor.

  His street-clan took notice. Francois said, “Or security guards.”

  Yibemnoot threw in, “Or occupying armies.”

  “We’re beat to the bottom and summa us wanna brag about it,” said Seshat. “Maybe we oughta do the geometry on that!”

  Raptor stared at the ceiling from his second-tier bunk. Exhausted and energised. S: Simultaneity.

  Two hours of ripping on getting licks, split down the middle, no resolution and finally too late for movies. Fast clean-up. Then the bunks.

  Staring up into wood in darkness.

  Below him, Jackal. Snoring like a fleet of lawn-mowers.

  Too bad. Out here, outta the city, inside this wooden fortress at night in the dark seclusion, maybe he could’ve told Jackal . . . .

  Drown that.