Null States

by Malka Older

  “Welcome back,” Maria says, leaning back and stretching her back.

  “Thanks.” Roz nods at the stringers, knowing they are reading the translated versions of her own public Information, or hearing it if they prefer that mode. “Where are the others?”

  “Minzhe talked Charles into going to the market for dinner. They should be back soon.” She looks from Roz to Malakal and back. “Did you find out anything?”

  “Nothing to make us suspect anyone in Djabal,” Malakal says. “Nothing to clear them either. I checked on Al-Jabali’s delay in meeting us. He was meeting with the centenal governor and council of sheikhs right before he came here. I spoke with three of them, separately. All agreed that it was an important but not terribly urgent meeting. None had a satisfactory answer when I asked why it had been added to his schedule only three days before.” Roughly when he would have heard the SVAT team was coming.

  “What was the meeting on?”

  “Centenal infrastructure: maintenance, and some new projects they are trying to work out. A piped water expansion, a bridge for the rainy season.” Important but not urgent. “The sheikhs said that the meeting dragged and went over schedule, and that when Al-Jabali realized he was late, he hurried out as quickly as he could without being rude.” A pause. “And you?”

  Amran says, hurriedly, “I’ve prepared a file for you with some background and updates.” She hurls it into their workspaces. “Our colleagues here are researching people that might be of interest; you will see them linked in the file.”

  “And I am updating on the battles,” Khadija puts in, with that smile.

  Odd choice, Roz thinks, and then sees a message from Maria in the corner of her vision: her husband is a local mercenary.

  Maria waits for a beat before adding her own update. “There’s growing concern about the assassination. People aren’t used to a stable government, and they expect this to lead to chaos, if not armed conflict.”

  Malakal sighs, pulling out a chair for himself. “Do they like Suleyman?”

  With a glance at Amran—Roz is impressed how hard Maria is working to include her—Maria throws up a pie chart projection. “Short answer? Yes. Sixty-eight percent approval for the governorship job, quite high. Amran has broken it down for us by sub-demographic…” Maria glances at Amran again, but the younger woman gives a tiny shake of her head, and Maria goes on. “You’ll see it in the file, but basically his core constituency, um, based on clan, I guess you could say, they see him as completely legitimate. The others would prefer their own leader but in the absence of that are generally positive on Suleyman.”

  “Okay, so that shouldn’t be a problem,” Roz says.

  “No. The problem is at the government level. No one knows who will replace Al-Jabali. There was no deputy; there was no plan for succession. The governing council announced twenty-seven minutes ago that they will hold a general election to choose the next governor, as Amran predicted yesterday.”

  “Okay,” Roz says, settling into a chair herself. An election. The best and worst part of democracy. “Any candidates so far?”

  “Only the former governor’s wife.” It is Yagoub who says this, projecting a short vid: the woman that Roz saw eight hours ago bereft and exhausted and angry. In the projection, her face is still solemn, but more thoroughly made up, and she speaks quietly and rapidly about the need to continue her husband’s work.

  There’s a moment of silence. Roz is remembering her final exchange with the widow. If she wasn’t in danger before, she very well may be now.

  “Does that sew it up?” Malakal asks the room somewhere between Amran and Yagoub.

  They look at each other noncommittally. “It depends who else runs,” Amran says.

  Yagoub nods. “She is popular in Djabal, maybe, but not so much here.”

  “Who is popular here?”

  A pause, with a few more consultative glances running between the locals.

  “Suleyman?” Malakal prompts.

  “He would do very well here if he runs,” Amran says. “But I doubt he will.”

  “He is not well known outside this centenal,” Khadija puts in. “And he will not want a job that takes him away from Kas very often.”

  “Why?” Roz asks. “Family?”

  “His authority is here,” Yagoub says, as if that explains it. “I don’t think he wants to go somewhere else. He didn’t run for head of state last time.”

  “All right, who else?” Malakal asks.

  There is another silence.

  “We can review potential candidates tomorrow night,” Roz says. She sees no reason to force the local staff into speculating if they’re not comfortable with it, and besides, she’s exhausted. “Fatima’s announcement will spur anyone else who’s interested to get in the race quickly.”

  “Or to give up on it,” Malakal mutters. He sighs and stretches. “Well, in that case, I’m off to bed. We’ll see how things look in the morning.”

  Roz wants to follow, but everyone else is still working. Besides, she needs to push forward somehow on this investigation. She sets up a projection in the middle of the room, centering an image of Al-Jabali, then drawing connections. His wife. Suleyman. The local elite that Mohamed and Yagoub have been profiling, who are mostly sheikhs and sheikhas and a few business leaders. Rival governments. Roz has no precedent on how to investigate an assassination, but this is how she’s always seen it done on interactive series and vids, and it seems like a good idea.

  “Add Sheikh Abdul Gasig,” Mohamed suggests. “He’s a rival for power in Kas.”

  “He is well known beyond Kas as well,” Amran adds. “He could indeed be a candidate for the head of state position.”

  Roz puts him in, with a double line showing a rivalry with Suleyman.

  Charles and Minzhe come in, redolent with the smell of grilled meat and—Roz’s nose twitches—possibly illegal alcohol. They certainly seem happy enough.

  “Hey,” Roz says. “How’s it going?”

  “Fine,” Charles says with a wink. “Just checking on the local mood.”

  Seeing them reminds Roz of the report Charles sent her on the garage. She slaps up a picture of the mechanic, along with the unguarded, feedless courtyard where he works. Then she adds another projection: TIMELINE. “Since the mechanic found the valve in place, we can narrow the timeline. With the caveat that he could be lying, of course.”

  “It seems possible that the garage visit itself was, ahem, engineered,” Charles says, smiling at his own pun. “Someone may have tweaked the energy management settings to make it appear that there was a problem.”

  Roz nods, feeling relieved: maybe this will be manageable after all. “So, we focus on the people who had access to the tsubame immediately before the garage visit?”

  “I’ll start with the governor’s secretary, who arranged it,” Charles agrees.

  That leaves fifty-two blank days on the timeline, with another week before the garage visit for fiddling with the energy management. This is not helping as much as Roz had hoped. Staring at the relationship diagram, she has an idea.

  “Minzhe, do you think the militia will be interviewing any of these people as part of their investigation?”

  He studies the pictures. “I doubt it. And I’m not sure I’d want them to. Most of your suspects are sheikhs in this centenal, long-term power-holders. I’m not sure the militia can be objective regarding them, and even if they could, it would sabotage their ongoing relationship.”

  “I see,” Roz says. She’s still hoping that the government can do at least some of the investigative work. It’s their job, not hers. “What about Fatima? She’s not from this centenal.”

  “She could end up being head of state,” Charles points out.

  “She was the victim’s wife. It’s reasonable to interview her even if she’s not a suspect. It doesn’t have to be accusatory,” Roz argues.

  Minzhe nods. “I think it’s possible. If they interview anyone.”

  �
��Do you think you can encourage it?” Roz asks.

  “I guess I can try.”

  “Charles, can you keep pushing, gently, on the council of sheikhs? We’re missing something in Al-Jabali’s life. I don’t know whether it’s personal or political, but the local leadership should know something about it.”

  “One other thing,” Maria says, as Charles nods. “Amran has a plan for starting the intensive SVAT work.”

  “Great,” Roz says, happy to have something she can praise. “Tell me about it.”

  “Actually, we can show you,” Maria says. “If you’re up for a short walk.”

  Roz would far rather go to sleep, but it’s only nine, and Amran seems eager, so she agrees. Minzhe begs off and heads to his hut, claiming exhaustion, but the rest of the team braves the rustle of sleeping birds in the dark mass of the tree and heads toward the market.

  Everything feels different at night, darkness drawn like a shade over the glaring heat of day. The market is dim but for the occasional loop of fluoron over a shop door, dripping its yellowy light on the men sitting below it in quiet conversation. “Up here,” Yagoub calls softly, motioning them on, and Roz sees more light creeping out from the flaps in a large tent. When they slip through the gap between the panels, Roz can see that the canvas was once white and has lettering.

  Inside, she finds a bewildering onset of noise and moving colors. It takes her a moment to orient herself and realize that this is an old-fashioned mass projection theater, like they used to have before terrorism and technology made them obsolete. The flashing images, coordinated according to an old algorithm to give everyone the best seat in the house, jangle and compete, and the mass sound oscillates between too loud and incomprehensibly blurred, but no one seems to mind. There are so many people in the tent that their substantial group can huddle into the back without attracting anything but brief glances from those they jostle as they find their spots. Most of the viewers are boys and men between eight and twenty-eight, dressed in jellabiyas or long sweat-stained undershirts, but Roz counts enough females not to be worried about accidental cultural inappropriateness. She stares, fascinated, at the kids fascinated by this entertainment. In front of her, a young boy, head shaved close, sways in time with the fight scene, spindly arms twitching.

  “They do this every night,” Yagoub whispers. “Sometimes a sports match, sometimes a vid or a series.”

  “Do they pay to get in?” Maria asks. While Yagoub explains the pricing, Roz is looking up personal projector penetration in the DarFur government: a shockingly low 9.38 percent.

  The vid has transitioned from fisticuffs to fucking, and Roz wants to move on. “So, you think—what, we do a talk here? Insert a public service newsreel at the beginning?”

  “Maybe the latter,” Maria says, observing with interest as some two hundred people watch three-dimensional simulated sex acts in close, if somewhat unaligned, proximity. “I’m not sure ‘doing a talk’ fits the ethos.”

  CHAPTER 9

  Roz wakes up sweating and wrapped in damp sheets. Her bed is supposed to have climate control, but it must have shut itself off during the night to save power. The hut is round, with a circumference not much larger than the length of her bed, and a conical roof draped with cloth to catch any falling bits of thatch. It’s dense with heat, like a warning, and Roz, still groggy, feels the pang of an old childhood fear: the Earth has been knocked off its orbit and is flying into the unlivable corona of the sun. She blinks, rubs her hand over her eyes and her wet brow. Maybe something much more prosaic has gone wrong: could the power be out? She remembers Amran’s theory of escalating disasters and comes fully awake.

  There is enough light in the room, seeping around the door edges and through the cloth-shaded window, to tell her it’s after dawn; a blink tells her the exact time: 6:38. She rolls up off the bed and cracks the door to peer into the courtyard, unable to shake her unease. The air outside is marginally cooler, and so she ends up opening the door wide and leaving it that way as she slips into her sandals and tramps stiff-legged across the sandy compound to the latrine. Dawn has indeed broken, but only barely: the sky is still dim and faintly rosy. Even outside, even before she can see the sun, the heat presses down on her. A donkey hee-haws somewhere out in the town. Roz splashes water on her face and goes to figure out the electricity situation.

  A woman that Roz guesses to be around fifty, wearing an oversized shirt and micro-crinkled skirt down to her ankles, is sweeping the tiny kitchen area behind the office. Her public Information lists her name as Maryam, and even with Roz’s auto-interpreter, the two women end up communicating mostly by sign language, partly because Maryam apparently speaks an obscure dialect of Fur that the interpreter is not familiar with, and partly because she seems to expect foreigners not to understand her. Roz comes away from the conversation pretty sure that the electricity is shut off every night, although she’s not clear on why.

  Other than Maryam, no one else is up, but Roz feels restless in the compound. Glancing nervously up at the birds still dozing headless in the tree above her, she creaks open the gate and peers out. A donkey (an Etbai) jogs by with a child on its back and a jerry can over each shoulder; down the street, two women are talking as they lug full jerry cans in the other direction. Roz edges out the heavy door, careful to shut it behind her, and walks toward the market, contemplating a variation on her earlier algorithmic question: what would it take for Information to notice the relevant overlap and point out the proximity of a water pump?

  Roz doesn’t have any purpose for going to the market other than to sample its varied sights: a miniature city of stacked tin-pot skyscrapers; an ancient, blue-painted truck unloading twine-bound bales of cloth; a small cook fire wavering the air above it, making a coffeepot burble. She feels as though she’s gone back in time.

  Even without these stupid climate-controlled clothes—by now, even she can see how they make her look like a colonialist in some old film, and she fingers a toub on display as she passes—she wouldn’t fit in. Roz’s family considers itself Sukuma, and she has one Ethiopian and one Goan grandparent, on separate sides. Her brown skin is a few shades lighter than the average here, and her features are inflected by her Horn and Subcontinent heritage, but it’s not just that. The way she walks, the way she interacts with this world—she can’t put her finger on it, but she sees how people glance at her: nothing unfriendly, but noting the differences. Every so often, she catches a word hissed at the edge of her hearing: “Khawaja!” She turns to see a boy in a dirty shift shooting a glance at her as he runs around a corner, or two women in conversation, their eyes darting at her outlandish clothes as they pass.

  Then she turns a corner and wanders smack into the graffiti wall, the cartoon wall, the politics wall, and she’s back in the real world. Or, at least, her real world. The first panel she sees is about the mantle tunnel proposal. The Mighty Vs are holding their hands up, palms out, telling everyone to hold up and slow down, while all around them cartoons of other major governments are urging, scientists are shrugging, businesspeople are offering bits, and in a tiny leftover corner, someone has already started digging—presumably a reference to the scandal from the last election, when then-Supermajority Heritage started a tunnel without approvals. Unless the cartoonist knows something Roz doesn’t.

  She wanders down the wall, soaking up the pictures, the commentary, the needling little jokes. There is a depiction of the odd, rivalrous collusion between 888 and 1China; a flowchart explaining the tax reporting process in DarFur centenals; something about a local cattle dispute she doesn’t quite get; and, yes, a panel about the forensics report. Faceless Information techs stand around a tsubame, smoke twisting up off of it, along with the smoke images of Al-Jabali and his bodyguard, rising up toward heaven. Another panel shows the funeral, the male version of course, with Suleyman prominently in attendance. Nicely done, and in a soberly realist style except for the bit about the ascension. Much more effective than text, maybe even than vid.
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  Roz is so absorbed, she doesn’t notice the café until she almost trips over a chair. It’s one of the typical chairs around here, a metal frame strung with plastic twine, and after a moment’s thought—no, she doesn’t have to hurry back—Roz sits down in it. The café itself isn’t much more than a shack, with a woven reed shade extended out from it over the tables and chairs, although the sun is still too low for that to matter. There’s a sign above the door to the shack, the name of the place in a long, almost-unbroken line of squiggles, which the translator resolves for Roz as ZEINAB’S WORLD-FAMOUS COFFEE. An annotation informs her that there is no recorded evidence of Zeinab’s coffee being known anywhere farther away than Khartoum, and Roz smiles to herself: people here still aren’t used to Information debunking their every claim. The tiny tabletop in front of her appears to be—is, Information confirms—constructed from the chainring of a bicycle. She is still examining that bit of bricolage when a boy appears at her elbow and says something incomprehensible. Roz stares at him for a moment before she remembers that her translator is off. She must still be half-asleep. She mumbles “kahwa,” which was one of the first words she picked up in Doha, and turns back to the mural.

  Roz finds the mural compelling even though she, like everyone else, has instant access to all the intel through Information. She pulls out her handheld and starts doodling some ideas about how this characteristic, whatever it is, might be transferable and scalable. Digitizable, in short.

  “Jambo! I didn’t expect to see you here.”

  Roz looks up, surprised first by the tiny cup of coffee that has appeared on her table without her noticing, and then to see the deputy—well, now the actual governor, Sheikh Suleyman, standing in front of her, his white robe glowing against the dun and red behind him. And surprised again: her translator is still off, and she heard him speak Kiswahili. She twitches her hand by her ear, flicking her translator on, which is good because his next words are in Fur.

  “I hope you slept well?” he asks, sounding a trifle worried, probably because she’s been staring at him like an automaton working very slowly through its programming for the last half-minute.