Null States

by Malka Older

  “Worth checking into, if only because Mishima’s intuition has an unsettlingly high success rate. We’re going to need to understand the event here a lot better if we’re going to fit it into a pattern, though.”

  Roz agrees, and after seeing Malakal off she settles in with the relationship diagram. She twists it back and forth along every axis and changes the design a few times, but she doesn’t feel any closer to insight. She needs data. She starts setting up a table with everyone on the diagram, detailing their whereabouts over the past two months to look for intersections with Al-Jabali and, perhaps more importantly, his tsubame. It doesn’t take her long to realize there are a frustrating number of gaps where trackers didn’t work or feeds didn’t exist. “There’s so little data, it’s like working in a bleeping null state here.”

  Charles looks up from the other side of the room to scoff. “Hardly.”

  Before Roz can respond, she gets a call from Maria. “Hey, could you come by the market? I think you’ll want to be in on this interview.”

  * * *

  Minzhe is, so far, not having great success in urging the interview with Fatima. His audience with the commander, Hamid Mohammed, was distinctly uncomfortable. The man was polite but laconic, rebutting any hint of the camaraderie Minzhe built so easily with the rest of the crew. Minzhe put out a couple of feelers about the interview, and the commander listened and said nothing. “Are we going to investigate the assassination?” Minzhe asked at last.

  Commander Hamid looked legitimately surprised. “Should we?”

  “Someone has to,” Minzhe pointed out, feeling ridiculous.

  The commander rose, a dismissal. “I’ll speak to the new governor about it.”

  Minzhe was relieved to get out of there, and from the half-smiles a couple of the guys give him, they have a good idea how the meeting went.

  As he found out on day one, the militiamen themselves are a friendly, jovial, mostly well-intentioned bunch, some more experienced than others. But for all their laughter and joshing around during the card games and at the teashop after work, Minzhe doesn’t allow himself to forget that one of them could be the assassin. True, it seems unlikely in a few of the cases. Yusuf looks barely sixteen and grins sheepishly at everything, and AbdelKadir clearly idolized the dead governor. But some of the older men saw quite a bit of fighting during the dying throes of the nation-state that was Sudan, and Minzhe knows there may be invisible histories and animosities at work.

  Besides, there’s the matter of the skirmishes. Ongoing armed conflict is a serious issue, not just for their immediate mission in this government but for the whole region. While acting bored and downcast at not being able to learn much, he hacks into the militia’s system and adds himself to the closed group receiving simultaneous broadcast of any deployments. Then he sets to infiltrating the closed circle of gossip.

  That is how he learns that the camel tied in front of the barracks is impounded.

  “It was a robbery,” AbdelKadir explains. Five of them are sitting in a tight circle in a tea shack in the market, the same one where they waited for the forensics. “Three guys, they were trying to take a shipment of gold from the mines in Jebel Mara to Nyala.”

  There’s nothing clandestine about the conversation, but they are sitting knee-to-knee because it is the only way for them to fit inside the tiny woven-reed shack.

  “Only three men!” Yusuf jumps in. “For a whole load of gold!”

  “Well, there were probably others waiting for them outside the town. They had five camels,” AbdelKadir points out.

  Minzhe is pretty sure everyone in town already knows this story. Everyone but the Information team.

  “Those were for the gold,” says Khaled. “Three men! Stupid. They must have thought that guns would load the gold and drive the camels for them.”

  “They had guns?” Minzhe asks, as though he were surprised.

  Uneasy glances among the men, but they’re talking about brigands, after all, and Yusuf is too oblivious to pick up on the vibe. “Big plastic guns!” he yells, opening his hands wide to demonstrate the size. “They crept up on the caravan just as they were trying to get out of the wadi, and bang! bang! bang!”

  “There might have been more than three of them there,” AbdelKadir says. “They were hiding.”

  “What happened?” Minzhe asks, unable to stop himself. Besides, appreciation for the tale is an important part of the active listening process; that’s what they tell them at SVAT school.

  “Well.” AbdelKadir knows that drawing out the story is an important part of the active telling process, and didn’t need to go to school to learn it. “The ground was too soft for the convoy to retreat quickly. The guards ducked under the wagons.”

  “They thought they were done, for sure,” Mohamed mutters.

  “Some bystanders on the town side of the wadi came running to the barracks,” Khaled says.

  “Meantime, one of the guards manages to creep up the bank, where it’s kind of steep, see, and stab one of the attackers, right in the neck!” There is a moment of silent appreciation for this feat, knife against big plastic gun. “And he takes the gun,” AbdelKadir goes on, “and starts shooting at the others!”

  “Unfortunately,” Jibrail puts in, “he didn’t know how to use the weapon right, and he shot one of his comrades in the arm.” They giggle about this, even Minzhe, guiltily.

  “But the other guards ran up and grabbed another of the bandits.”

  “The last man only managed to set free the camels, and then he climbed up to ride away on them.”

  “Just then, the militia arrived!” Yusuf trumpets out a fanfare.

  “A valiant soldier,” AbdelKadir says, elbowing Khaled in the ribs, “grabbed the harness of the last camel in the line.”

  “Sadly,” Khaled says modestly, “the robber was able to cut the line, so we were left with this one camel while he rode away with the other four.”

  “But no gold,” Minzhe points out.

  “No gold!” they agree.

  “And we captured one robber,” AbdelKadir adds.

  “What happened to him?”

  “He was extradited,” Yusuf says, and then stops very suddenly. There’s a weird quality to the silence. Minzhe looks it up surreptitiously on Information: yes, the gold mine is owned by 888.

  Even if they had forgotten who he is for a moment, they remember now.

  “And the camel?” he asks, as if he hadn’t noticed.

  “Impounded!” Mohamed says.

  “You see, no one saw the third robber. But the camel knows him. So, if he comes back into town, or even tries to claim the camel…” AbdelKadir wags his finger.

  “We’ve got him!” Yusuf cries.

  Not the most subtle of strategies, Minzhe thinks, finishing off his tea, but the bizarreness of it appeals to him. Although they’re probably going to run out of grass before the gold thief comes back. If the risk is being extradited to 888, Minzhe would keep running until he hit an ocean.

  * * *

  Roz hasn’t given Al-Jabali’s mistress much thought, except as a low-odds motive for, or agent of, murder. She first imagines her as a physical person on her hurried way to the market to meet her. Even then, it is a passive imagining, a conjuring to fill the blank in her mental rehearsal of the interview rather than a conscious consideration of what she looks like. The blurry figure wears too much lipstick, and is young and idle and either ashamed or aggressively determined not to be. This half-imagined set of stereotypes is nothing like the woman Roz meets when she catches up to Maria and Amran in a large brick building near the market hand pump.

  They are sitting in a small office—concrete floor, a small plastic-rimmed mirror stuck on a nail on the wall, a plastic table, and four plastic chairs—that is sectioned off from the rest of the building, which Roz assumes is used for warehousing whatever commodity has made this woman wealthy. For she is clearly wealthy, at least by local standards. Her toub is a dusty rose silk, with woven
patterns interspersed in broad stripes, and it is neatly arranged over a dark shirt. Her hands are hennaed with fading flowers and swirls, at least a week old by Roz’s estimation, so from before the assassination. She is wearing makeup, but it is subtle, unlike her fingernails, which are long and painted a glossy copper. Her public Information gives her name as Amal Ishag Mohamed and her age as thirty-six, which is two years older than Al-Jabali was. Where Fatima is narrow, graceful, and steely, Amal is rounded, confident, full of authority.

  Maria introduces Roz quickly when she walks in, and then continues with the conversation. “You were saying you don’t know of any enemies?”

  “Any specific enemies,” Amal corrects her. “Of course he had enemies. He had power, so it is assured. But no one specific, nothing that was of concern right now.” Roz notes sorrow in the woman’s face, but her voice is composed.

  “And there was nothing in particular bothering him recently?”

  Amal hesitates briefly before shaking her head.

  “No stress about the Information visit?” Roz asks.

  “Not that he mentioned,” Amal says evenly. “But I’m sure he saw it as an important event.”

  Maria takes the lead again. “Can you think who stands to benefit the most, either personally or politically?”

  Amal considers this for some time. “I am sure there are people who would like his position, but no one could be certain enough that they would win it to make it worth the risk.” Not even the deputy? Roz wonders. “Personally … again, I’m sure there are people in Kas who disliked him, but this was not a simple matter of an argument and knives. No, I believe this was someone from outside the centenal.” She sighs, twitches at her toub. “I do think there were those in Djabal who would have preferred the seat of power, and his attention, to be there. I don’t think there’s enough anger there for an assassination, but it’s the only possible motive within the DarFur government that I can think of. I believe the murderers are outsiders.”

  Maria gives Roz the nod, and Roz takes over. “Why did he establish the government here instead of in Djabal?”

  Amal is pensive for a moment. “It seems like such a natural decision to me now,” she says. “But you’re right; it is a bit odd. He did have a life here, you know. He had been here for, what, five or six years before Sudan fell? So, it wasn’t that he moved here and immediately ran for office.” Information annotates this with a discourse on the history of carpetbaggers in various democracies, and Roz blinks it away. “But it’s true: Djabal was his home. I could tell you he was here was because of me, and that may have been part of it but certainly not the main reason. What I think, and I’m not sure he would have recognized this himself or agreed, but I believe he was slightly—ashamed, maybe, of Djabal. He believed fervently in a resurgence of the Fur people as a nation, and he did not want that rebirth to be centered on the site of a refugee camp.”

  That, Roz reflects, tells her more about Al-Jabali than anything else she’s heard or read since she got here. “You knew him so well,” she says. “Can you tell me more about him?”

  Amal takes a deep breath, leans back in her chair, and crosses her legs, and Roz sees that her low-heeled sandal is trimmed in lynx fur.

  “What can I tell you about Abubakar?” she muses. “I am sure you’ve heard he was ambitious, but as I just said, he was far more ambitious for his people than for himself. Although I suppose it was hard to distinguish, at the end. He was a politician to the core. He loved meeting people, and remembered everyone, and he loved talking, both in person and making speeches. But he wanted to use his gifts for more than his personal glorification. He wanted to learn about innovations and try new things—that’s why he was so happy to join micro-democracy. I know some people felt that Information was the unfortunate pill to swallow in exchange for being part of this system, but he was excited about the possibilities of Information, especially recently. He talked about learning from other states and getting assistance for development.”

  Amal pauses, thinking, and Roz risks a glance at Maria and Amran, wondering if their faces, like hers, are burning with the feeling of being an “unfortunate pill.” It’s Amran’s fault, Roz thinks, knowing that it is unfair. Information is widely hated around the world, for any number of reasons: its power, its ubiquity, its terrifying and useful array of knowledge. Even so, the Information representative here, where more data and interaction are so desperately needed, should have been doing more to make their case.

  “He was very caring,” Amal says finally, her eyes meeting Roz’s again. “He was a good man.”

  Roz decides, Fuck it, she doesn’t need to be liked. “Why didn’t he marry you?”

  Amal smiles. “He didn’t marry me because I wouldn’t marry him.” Roz imagines she detects a little And they say these foreign women are so liberal smugness to the smile. “I never wanted to be a second wife. Sure, you are new and special for a while, but then maybe they go on to a third. No, it’s first or fourth for me!” She laughs. “Or nothing.” She becomes serious again. “But in truth, I was concerned that perhaps he wanted to marry me for my money. Unmarried, I felt I had a surer grip on his affections. And the arrangement suited both of us. I had no real wish to marry again, or need to. And while marrying me might have given him roots here, he did not really need that. And his wife preferred for me not to have official status with him, so”—she shrugs—“everyone was reasonably happy.”

  Amal most of all, it seems. The interview is starting to feel long, and that was a good note to end on, but Roz has one more question she wants to ask. “What was his relationship like with his deputy governor?”

  “Suleyman?” Amal’s smile warms again, fitting Roz with an unwarranted stab of annoyance. “They are very different. Suleyman is much more of Kas; he is rooted here. He believes in the Fur as a nation and supports it, but the well-being and survival of the people in this city is more immediate for him. He is focused on Kas, or at most West Darfur—what was once West Darfur.”

  “He wasn’t jealous when Al-Jabali won the governorship instead?” Maria asks.

  “I don’t think so,” Amal says. “He always seems content. And Abubakar was willing to let him take a big role in the areas he cares about.” She pauses. “Suleyman is the natural leader here. By his family, his skills. Everyone knows him. But he does not like politics as a formal thing. He does not like running for election, or promoting himself among those who do not already know and respect him. So, in a way, it was the perfect partnership: Abubakar did the politicking, and Suleyman was in a position to do what needed to be done. He would have been doing much of it anyway, you understand,” she adds after a moment. “Informally, as a leader in the community. But it would have been much harder if a foreign governmentc had won.”

  * * *

  “A foreign government,” Roz repeats, as they walk back through the market.

  “Micro-democracy is still very recent,” Maria says, adjusting her translucent scarf—magenta this time, shot through with gold—over her hair. “We know it takes time for people’s allegiances to shift away from simple geographic proximity. We’ve seen that all over the world.”

  “So, she was a random survey participant?” Roz changes the subject, nodding back at the warehouse.

  “Not only that, but she identified herself almost immediately as Al-Jabali’s mistress and invited us to come into her office to talk.” Maria glances at Amran, who nods.

  An impressive woman, although of course being wealthy helps. Roz remembers that she never saw the inside of the warehouse. “What does she sell that she made so much money on?”

  “Oil,” Amran answers before Information provides the answer in a great deal more detail: Amal has been participating in a financial transparency program.

  “So, that warehouse next to us was filled with barrels of oil?” Roz shudders, and then stops, causing a chain reaction of collisions and giggles among the trail of children who are following them. “Amran! You mentioned an explo
sion before, an oil barrel exploding. Was it there?”

  Maria looks from one to the other and starts searching Information for reference to a petrol explosion in Kas.

  “Yes,” Amran says, wary of what she might have missed this time. “Yes, that’s where it happened.”

  Roz turns to Maria. “What if the explosion was not an accident? What if it was an assassination attempt? One that failed because it tried too hard to look like an accident?” She can see that Maria has found the data on the incident. “Was Al-Jabali there at the time?”

  Maria’s eyes scan back and forth, cross-referencing his locations. “It’s—it’s not certain, that would obviously have been a private visit, so it’s not on his official schedule, but there’s a gap at that time, and”—more blinking and scanning—“yes, it matches his routine.”

  “Can you check this out?” Roz asks.

  “Amran could do it,” Maria suggests.

  “Of course she can.” Roz immediately shifts her attention to the younger woman. “Amran, can you look into that incident? Find out if the governor was in danger, how he escaped—everything you can get about what happened.” Still feeling guilty, Roz puts her hand on Amran’s arm. “Maybe you were right about the buildup to the assassination.”

  Amran flutters, nods, glances quickly at Maria, and turns, flitting back toward the warehouse.

  “What do you think?” Roz asks, watching her go.

  “The interview as a whole? It didn’t make me feel any more confident about the wife,” Maria says as they turn and resume trudging through the heavy sand toward their compound.

  Roz considers. She feels a heat headache coming on, and there is an insistent smell in the air, some kind of pungent herb, sharp with burning. Roz doesn’t have chemical tracers to check the source of the scent directly, but Information offers her a guess that it comes from talh wood and a recent dukhan. “She knew about the mistress and didn’t want them getting married. Maybe Al-Jabali was pushing back on that, or simply spending more time here.”