The Newcomers: a novel of global invasion , human resilience, and the wild places of the planet

by Pamela Jekel

  “I see.” Jomo turned to study his son. “Did you know about this, Baako?”

  Baako met his gaze. “No, but I’m not really surprised.”

  Jomo let the silence continue for a moment and then said, “Well, if you change your mind, I’m certain Coach will welcome you back.”

  “Right.” Baako’s tone was cordial. “Miss you out there, mate.”

  “So you’ll wait in the library with Desta until practice is over?” Asha asked.

  “Sure. I could use the extra study time, actually.”

  And so the subject was dropped.

  That night, Chase sat down to write to his parents. He had been writing to them weekly for at least four months, taking the letters to school and dropping them in the outgoing mail box provided by the nuns for the refugee kids. He thought they might get to Georgia safely with the Catholic Mission seal on the outside of the envelope, and he knew his father would enjoy seeing the stamp that said the Church was somehow involved.

  “’Dear Mom, Dad, and Miranda,” he began. “I decided to drop football today. I’m tired of getting beat up out there, and everybody’s bigger than me. I could use the extra study time anyway. The truth is, I’m probably one of the worst players on the team. Good news is that I’m also one of the best students. Even with skipping me up one grade, I’m still getting all A’s. I got a chance to use the skill saw last weekend, and I repaired a stall by myself. It looks a lot better. Jomo’s going to get some guys in to put in a pond to grow algae, so we can make our own ethanol. He got the plans off the computer at the District Commission office, and I think I’m going to get to help him design it. Wish you were here to help, Dad! I’m still going to Mass every week, and the nuns are mostly nice. Father Omandi is cool. I hope you get this. I’m healthy, Mom, and Asha and Jomo treat me very well. Miranda, send me a drawing of yourself when you can. I miss you. Love, Chase.”

  He sat back and reread what he’d written. It seemed so little, for all that happened each week, the feelings he had day after day, but there was no way to get everything on paper. It had been so long since he’d heard from them, it felt like he was putting messages in bottles and tossing them into the sea, never knowing if they’d find land. It was getting hard to remember how his mother smelled, how his father’s hands looked. He could still picture their faces of course, but he wondered if that memory would finally fade, too. He looked at their picture often. Did they even look like that anymore? Inevitably, his thoughts strayed to the next question: were they even alive? But as soon as that thought floated up, he pressed it down again. They must be alive. He’d feel it if they weren’t.

  Chase knew that things in Georgia had to be terrible, because he’d found a Nairobi radio station which had occasional taped broadcasts from Voice of America. He listened to it at night or when he was working outside, and he didn’t mention what he heard to the Maathais. He knew they didn’t want him to be upset. But not knowing had been worse. The only people he talked to about the Newcomers were the other refugees, and then only when other students couldn’t hear them. They all knew more than the nuns thought they knew.

  He’d heard about the new epidemics of cholera that were sweeping through Europe, about the aliens destroying the biggest dams of the world, and he knew that some of the work camps had been closed in Switzerland and Germany because there was no more food for the workers and not enough power to keep them warm. In some countries, they had to shut the gates and put them out on the land to fend for themselves. Some of the Chinese kids had more access to computers and televisions, and they all shared what news they had.

  When he pictured his old house in Georgia, he could scarcely remember it without the ship hovering over it. It was hard to recall a time when the aliens weren’t there. After so long in Africa, he was forgetting what it was like to have that constant awareness of something literally hanging over their heads. If it had not been for his own family, what was happening in the rest of the world would seem unreal, scarcely part of his everyday life at all. He thought of them less often, he knew. He had to close his eyes and concentrate to remember Moses’ face and the high sound of his laughter. And that dimming of memory seemed to him the saddest loss of all.

  He folded the letter into an origami swan. Last time, he’d made a paper airplane. He thought Miranda would maybe smile at that. He stuffed it into the envelope, put their last address on it, and shoved it into his backpack.

  The next day, he told Coach his decision and was slightly embarrassed to realize that Coach was relieved, although he acted regretful. On his way to the library to wait out the time until Peter would be there, Chase stopped by Father Omandi’s office once more and this time, he stepped inside.

  “No practice today?” Father asked.

  “I quit the team,” Chase said.

  “Did you? Any problems?”

  “You mean, besides being no good?”

  Father grinned. “I’ve heard it said that soccer is a gentlemen’s game played by houligans. Rugby is a houligan’s game played by gentlemen. Guess you’re on the houligan’s team. Should you switch?”

  He shrugged. “I think they’d beat me up just as bad on any team out there. I guess I’m just not into it much anymore. Might as well make room for somebody who gives a—who wants it.”

  Father Omandi leaned back and made a temple of his fingers, contemplating Chase. “You know, you remind me so much of myself at your age. Searching, questioning, curious. A bit of a loner. Maybe some issues with authority.”

  “Close enough.”

  “And maybe some inner sadness.”

  “What did you have to be sad about?”

  The priest shrugged. “Never feeling part of things, mostly. No matter where I was, no matter who was with me. I’d have to confess to those feelings still.”

  “Really?” Chase sat back and looked around. His gaze fell on a stack of books on a corner shelf. They looked like books of philosophy. Some of them had the bright modern colors of new editions. “I guess I just figured that priests and nuns had it figured out, mostly. At least as far as their faith was concerned.”

  The priest sighed. “Not this priest. Maybe I’m destined to always question my faith. Maybe that’s my role, to help others find theirs and never really feel secure in my own.”

  “I guess it’s pretty hard to believe in God now, with the Newcomers taking over the planet.”

  “You’d be surprised. The truly faithful have somehow managed to fit the appearance of alien beings into their whole cosmology. Some believe it’s a test for mankind. Other’s believe it’s simply God’s way of taking out the sinners.”

  “Must have been a lot of sinners then,” Chase murmured.

  “Yes. Well, it doesn’t have to make sense, you know. Faith never does have to make sense. If it made sense, it wouldn’t require faith. God’s will covers a lot of territory.”

  Chase was surprised at the tone the conversation was taking, a little wary that the priest exposed his feelings so easily. He recalled the time he confessed to Father Omandi, remembering that when he said he felt abandoned, the priest had said he sometimes felt that way, too.

  “I remember we spoke of this before,” Father said, following his thoughts. “You were dealing with your anger and your sense of being abandoned.” He put his hands behind his head and leaned back, relaxed. “Everyone feels those emotions, Chase. You know that. We all struggle with it. Even if we have the perfect childhood, eventually most of us feel that somebody abandons us, a spouse, a friend, even God. What works for me is gratitude. Africa is a good place for that particular emotion.”

  Chase was silent for a moment. “Do you believe in God, Father?”

  “A brave question to ask a priest.” He did not answer immediately. Finally, he said, “Sometimes, I do. Sometimes I try to. Sometimes I despair of ever being able to.”

  “So what do you do? When you despair, I mean?”

  Father Omandi smiled. “Not that it always works, but I get in my car
and drive out into the bush. I feel the presence of God more there than in the chapel, I have to admit. The sense of distance and vast space out there,” he gestured out the window. “Where the land just stretches on and on out to the edge of the world, until it turns blue at the curve of the earth. And the light is brilliant and hard and clear, and every animal seems perfect in its freedom and beauty. Africa’s a perfect land for someone who can’t feel God inside a cathedral. I’m grateful for that. Did you get that feeling out on the Mara?”

  Chase nodded. “It was amazing.”

  “And you felt no despair.”

  “I felt alive. I didn’t want to leave.”

  “Then it’s a blessing you came to Africa, my son. Something to feel gratitude for, even when you wonder why it happened to you.”

  “I have to write a paper about Africa and colonialism for Sister Margaret.”

  “Oh?”

  “About whether or not Africa can take care of her own people. About ethics and whether or not Kenyans have them, I guess.”

  “Interesting topic. I’m glad to hear she’s pushing you to think about these things.”

  He grinned. “Oh, she pushes us alright. Some of the kids weren’t happy about the topic. Or the seven-hundred words.”

  “I can imagine. So when you’ve got a draft ready, I’d like to read it, if you’re comfortable with that.”

  “Sure. That’d be good.”

  “So go get some work done before your ride gets here, and feel free to drop in anytime. My door’s always open. And we’ll keep it that way.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Yeah. I’m a Catholic priest. We’ll keep the door open.”

  * * *

  The py season occupied the farm intensively from July through April of the following year, and during that long growing season, the workers picked the white flower heads every two weeks, laid them out on the drying racks, and then bagged them for the Pyretheum Bureau of Kenya’s cooperative in Nyeri. Peter ran the crews well; Jomo harvested a thousand kilograms of dried flowers per hectare which yielded about twenty-five kilograms of highly refined organic pesticide. “We’ll get another year out of this lot at best,” he said to Chase, gesturing to the fields. “We’ll have to plant again next March, if the market still holds. The PBK thinks we can ship to Australia, but I think they’re mad. Well, sod it. We’ll figure out something, I’m sure.”

  In May when harvest was over, that something became Jomo’s plan to grow blue-green algae for algafuel. He was enthusiastic about the project, and he told Chase, “Kenya used to be almost all hydroelectric but then we had terrible droughts, so we had to increase our geothermal, wind, and solar output, and thank God we did! When the aliens made their entrance, we already had more than fifty percent of our population on solar. We’ve got more solar than any other country in the world.”

  “That makes sense, so close to the equator.”

  “Quite. I’m sure you noticed all the solar panels in town.”

  “Yeah, but they don’t look like the ones we have at home.”

  “They’re smaller and cheaper, that’s why. Villages use them more to run the televisions than anything.”

  “So why are we making algae ponds?”

  “Because Kenyans love their cars. Just like Americans. And most of them are old junkers, not hybrids. There’re no natural oil deposits in Kenya. If we can make fuel, we can make money.”

  Chase read the specifications that Jomo brought home from the Internet and designed a two-trough pond system that controlled the sun exposure and minimized the space needed. He showed it to Jomo, half-expecting that his efforts would be praised and then put aside. But Jomo said, “That’s brilliant, lad! Let’s build it!” Chase felt absurdly elated.

  Now, on a level quarter-acre with northern exposure and some shade, a small crew was working under Chase’s direction, building his algae pond design. First, Chase had them build a pipeline from the house which joined another pipeline from the lower fields and fed waste water by gravity into two metal troughs. Water went into the troughs from one end and was filtered out from the other end through small-mesh screens. The filtered water was then fed by gravity to four more metal troughs which were once more filtered with smaller-mesh screens that could be opened or shut manually. Collection pipes carried the filtered water away from the house and back to the fields for irrigation. Now he had filtered waste water in four metal troughs, open to the air, exposed to sunlight about four hours each day. The directions said four hours of tropical sun was sufficient for good algae growth; too much would kill it.

  Chase then had the crews build small roofs of thick plastic over each trough, leaving six inches of exposed air moving over the water. The roofs had small grooves to allow evaporated water to collect and be channeled by gravity to collection containers at one end of each trough, rather like rain gutters. Each collection container had another plastic roof with thinner plastic, so that more sunlight caused faster evaporation, and the liquid was distilled into two more sets of collection containers. It only took six days to build the system, and Chase was able to recycle some of the corrugated metal from the barn. Jomo brought plastic containers from the py cooperative to use for collection buckets.

  The first trial run was successful. Waste water from the fields and house ran into the troughs, was filtered, ran into the second troughs, evaporated, and pure distilled water ran into one set of containers while the remaining waste water remained in the second set of plastic collection containers.

  “Brilliant!” Desta said, “So now we can purify our own water!”

  “That’s no big deal,” Chase said. “You can do that with a simple solar water purifier. The question is, can we make biofuel.”

  “That’s nothing new,” Baako said. “We’ve been making biofuel from maize and sugar for years.”

  “Yes, but it takes about five gallons of fresh water to make every gallon of ethanol with corn and sugar. Plus it takes land that could be used to grow food, so the prices of sugar and corn just go up. Here, we’re going to use greenhouses to make ethanol and clean water from carbon dioxide and algae, and we’re not even going to have to kill the algae to do it. Some companies were doing it even before the aliens got here, but they had to harvest the algae, so they had to re-grow it with every gallon of fuel they made. This algae has the ability to do intracellular fermentation using photosynthesis, turning pyruvates—that’s simple plant sugars—to ethanol and water, and it just keeps on going.”

  “How did you learn all this?” Desta asked.

  “I didn’t,” Chase said. “It was on the Internet. See?” He showed them some pages with simple diagrams showing how the photosynthesis worked with drawings of sample collection systems. “I just followed the directions.”

  “So where do you get the algae? The space ships drop it in test tubes?” Bakko asked.

  “It’s simple cyanobacteria,” Chase said. “It’s in every lake and river in Africa. Blue-green algae. Probably plenty of it in the horses’ trough. We’ll take some samples and grow what we need.”

  And so they did. The whole family went out to the river and collected samples of stringy algae, went to the horses’ trough and collected more, and then Chase put the river samples in one trough and the horse trough samples in the other. In four days, the algae grew, the sun heated the water, and condensation formed on the plastic roofs and dripped into the first set of collection containers. In six days, the first set of collection containers were half-full of water, and the final collection buckets had several cups of a clear liquid that was thicker than water. In two weeks, they had more than ten gallons, and the troughs were filled with thick algae sludge.

  “We can’t put it in the Escalade,” Jomo said, “not until we have it tested. But let’s try it on the jeep.”

  “Isn’t there some way to test it out without putting it into a car first?” Chase asked. “We could really screw up the jeep with this stuff. I mean, I followed the directions, but I could have m
essed up.”

  “Of course, of course, you’re right. What about that old generator in the barn? It runs on diesel; will it run on your concoction?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Jomo clapped him on the back. “Only one way to find out.”

  Peter pulled the generator out to the shop, lubed it up, added a small amount of diesel to be sure it worked, and ran it for an hour. Jomo and Chase took a half-gallon of ethanol to the shop and stood watching while Peter poured it into the fuel tank.

  “You do the honors, lad,” Jomo said.

  Chase flipped the ignition switch. The generator started, ran for an instant, coughed, jerked, gagged, and stopped, exhaling a puff of oily smoke. Chase flipped the ignition switch again.

  “Can you get it out of there?” Chase asked.

  “Yes, I can clean it,” Peter said.

  “What do you think is the difficulty?” Jomo picked up the gallon container of ethanol and peered at it suspiciously.

  Chase grimaced. “I’m clueless. Maybe there’s just too much water in it. I could distill it again. Maybe we have to mix it with the diesel.”

  “Did we get the wrong algae?”

  “I don’t think so. It looks just like the picture on the Internet, and we followed the directions.”

  “Nevertheless.”

  “Yeah. Okay, I’ll run it through another distillation, and we’ll try it again.”

  Chase spent the afternoon setting up another set of containers with channels and pipes to send the mixture through another distillation. The next day after school, he checked, and the newly-distilled ethanol, condensed down once more, was slowly dripping into his five-gallon plastic jug. He took a small sample and carefully set a match to it. It ignited and burned steadily. He put another small sample in his backpack.

  In chemistry class, Sister Rachel was very interested to see his sample of ethanol. She used the opportunity to lecture about blue-green algae and the directions provided on the Internet by the Newcomers. “Cyanobacteria are the most common and earliest form of life on this planet,” she said. “We’ve found fossils of colonies of cyanobacteria that date back almost three billion years, two billion years older than any other multicellular life. This is a plant formed of bacteria, rather than cells. So there’s no nuclei or organelles, you see. It was probably blue-green algae that set the stage for all life on earth to begin.”