“Put the wrench down,” he said. “I’m not going to hurt you.”
“How do I know?”
He sighed and sat on a stool, now rubbing his own temples. “You know. You both know.”
I didn’t put it down. “Please,” I said. “I’m tired of fighting.” I leaned against the controls, feeling very, very tired. “What is it about me that everyone wants to attack? I just came here to greet you people. To see.” I sighed, tears finally falling from my eyes. Why did everyone think I was evil? One of the last things my mother had said to me before I ran away was that I was wahala, trouble.
He frowned. “Did I hurt you?”
I waved a hand at him. It was too much to explain.
“I’m sorry,” he said again.
“So am I,” I said, sitting on the floor.
There was a clicking sound as the alien’s appendage screwed something in beneath the front window controls. There was a soft whirring. The creature’s body twisted up and leaned toward Arinze.
“I’m not held captive here,” he said. “They all think I am but I’m not.”
“I know.”
“It’s been ugly on this shuttle,” he said. “We had to lock them up. Were they all okay?”
I nodded.
“Good. I’m . . . I’m going to go back with it. It’s not the only one that’s been discovered by the Mars government and there were some government officials on this shuttle who will alert those here on Earth. If I don’t go with this one, to help it speak to its people, there will be a war. It tells me so. Like here. It was war, right?”
“Yes. Nuclear and something else.”
He nodded. “I have to go back.”
“You’ve never been outdoors, have you?”
“No. But . . .” he said. He looked at the creature, a sadness passing over his face. The creature was focused on getting home. “What’s happened to Earth?”
“It’s a long story.”
He chuckled. “Have you heard news of Nigeria? My grandparents are from there.”
I smiled, “Nigeria is still Nigeria.”
“One day . . .” He took my hands. “You’d better get off the ship.”
The creature moved a filament across the green virtual grid above it and the shuttle shook hard enough to make me stumble.
“Go!” Arinze said. “Hurry!”
I made for the door and then turned back. I ran to Arinze and shook his hand. “I hope you come back,” I said.
Before I ran off, quickly like a striking snake, the creature reached out and touched my forehead with a moist appendage. It was neither warm nor cold, hard nor soft, absolutely foreign. Only one image came to me from its touch: an empire of red dust in a place that looked like the Sahara desert. Here strange things grew and withered spontaneously. As they did now on Earth. The communities of these creatures were more like the Earth of now, especially in the Sahara. I breathed a sigh of surprise. Then I could feel it more than I heard it. A vibration that tickled my ears. My people do not understand Mars Earthlings, but they will understand when I tell about you, Fisayo. You are not wahala. You are the information I needed.
Arinze was pushing me. “Go!” he shouted.
I went.
I barely made it off the shuttle before it started rumbling. Plantain was there, waiting. I jumped on her and she took off. We joined the others two miles from the shuttle as it launched into the sky with impossible power and speed. I’d seen what the alien did to the shuttle when I read it, but I didn’t have the capacity to understand its science. The Igbo woman who’d wanted to come to the cockpit with me cried and cried when she didn’t see Arinze with me. Ahmed stood close to his grandfather. His grandfather had his arm over his shoulder.
Ahmed and I did not say good-bye. As they were all deciding if they should wait for officials to arrive or try to make it to the next town, Plantain and I left. There was too much to say and no space to say it. Plantain and I headed south, back home, to Jos. Crossing the Sahara to Agadez was a silly idea. I needed to have long talk with my parents.
There was other life on Mars. Even after all that had happened here on Earth, I had to work to wrap my mind around that. Allah protect Arinze and the one he’s befriended; provide them with success. There’s been more than enough wahala.
NNEDI OKORAFOR was born in Cincinnati, Ohio. She earned a BA in rhetoric from the University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana and an MA in journalism from Michigan State University. She attended the University of Illinois in Chicago, getting her MA in English in 2002 and completing her PhD in 2007.
She is the author of the acclaimed science fantasy novels Zahrah the Windseeker and The Shadow Speaker. Zahrah the Windseeker was the winner of the Wole Soyinka Prize for Literature in Africa, was shortlisted for the Carl Brandon Parallax and Kindred awards, and was a Golden Duck Award finalist. The Shadow Speaker, winner of the Carl Brandon Society Parallax Award, was a Book Sense Selection, a James Tiptree Jr. Honor Book, and a finalist for the Essence Magazine Literary Award, the Andre Norton Award, the Golden Duck Award, and the NAACP Image Award. Her children’s book, Long Juju Man, won the Macmillan Writer’s Prize for Africa.
Her most recent work is the adult magical realist novel Who Fears Death, and forthcoming is her young adult novel Akata Witch. She is a professor of creative writing at Chicago State University and lives with her family in Illinois.
Visit her Web site at www.nnedi.com.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
“Wahala” deals with a lot of heavy issues, including racism, discrimination, cultural conflict, rebellion, yearning, embracing one’s self, and. . . the apocalypse. Even when I’m writing science fiction, I like to keep the “camera” really close to my characters. In this way, I maintain realism within all the bizarreness that springs from my imagination. Nevertheless, what is most memorable for me with this story is the fact that it is my first alien story. I smile because my alien is partial to Nigerians; Fisayo’s Nigerian-ness is the reason it does not kill her. This is me paying angry homage to the 2009 film District 9, a unique, innovative alien flick that portrayed Nigerians terribly. In District 9, it was only “the Nigerians” (this is how they were dismissively referred to) who could relate enough to the aliens to closely interact with them. In the film, this made Nigerians an ugly, corrupt people; in my story, it saves Fisayo’s life. I have a habit of turning lemons into lemonade. (Oh, and in case you were wondering, wahala means trouble in Nigerian pidgin English. It’s a word I am quite familiar with and defiantly relate to.)
ON CHRYSE PLAIN
Stephen Baxter
“You haven’t even seen a picture of her,” Jonno said, panting as he pedaled.
“She’s called Hiroe,” Vikram said.
“Your bride-to-be in Hellas Basin!”
“Shut up.”
Jonno laughed, wheezing.
The flycycle dipped, and Vikram had to push harder to bring them back up to their proper altitude. It was always like this with Jonno. At fifteen he was the same age as Vikram, but a few centimeters shorter and a good few kilos heavier, enough to unbalance the cycle. He didn’t have enough breath to talk and cycle. But he talked anyhow.
Vikram didn’t mind taking the strain for his friend. He liked the feel of his legs pumping at the pedals, his breath deepening, the skinsuit snug around him, the slow unwinding of the crumpled landscape under them, the way the translucent wings above the cycle frame caught the buttery light of the Martian afternoon. He liked the idea that it was his muscles and his muscles alone propelling them across the sky.
Jonno kept on about Hiroe. “You worry too much. Just because you haven’t seen a picture doesn’t necessarily mean she looks like she was hatched by a rock bug.”
“Shut up! Where are we anyhow?”
Jonno glanced down and tapped his wristmate. “That’s Chryse Plain, I think. We just crossed the highland boundary. Wow, look at those outflow channels.” Where, billions of years ago, vast rivers had briefly flowed from Mars’s sout
hern highlands into the basin of the northern sea, cutting deep valleys and spilling megatons of rocks over the plains. “What a sight it must have been, once.”
“Yeah.”
“You don’t care, do you?”
Vikram shrugged, pedaling. “It’s all about the journey, for me. Getting the job done.”
“Checking out those weather stations at Acidalia. Getting together the credits for another A grade. You’ve got no imagination, man.”
Something distracted Vikram. Odd lights in the sky. He squinted and tapped his faceplate to reduce the tint.
“Or,” Jonno said, “you’ve got the wrong kind of imagination. Such as about Hiroe. You could always wear a disguise in the wedding photos—”
Vikram pointed. “What’s that?”
The sky was full of glowing trails.
When the plasma glow cleared from around her clamshell, and the gnarly landscape of Mars was revealed beneath her, Natalie whooped. She couldn’t help it. She’d made it. She’d dived down from orbit, lying flat on the broad disk of the clamshell, and had got through the heat of atmospheric entry, and now she was skimming through the air of another world. The air of Mars is thinner than Earth, but it is taller, and she was high, so high the world was curved beneath her. The shrunken sun, off to her left, was low and cast long shadows over the channeled plains.
And all around her she saw the contrails scratched across the sky by the rest of her school group, dozens of them on their shells.
Benedicte’s voice crackled in her ears. “You stayed on your shell this time, Nat?”
“Yes, Benedicte, I stayed on.”
“Well, we’re over the Chryse Plain, as advertised. Betcha I get the first sighting of the Viking lander.”
“Not a chance!” And Natalie lunged forward, shifting her weight, so her clamshell cut into the thickening air.
But she wasn’t used to the Martian air. She didn’t get the angle quite right. She could feel it immediately.
“Natalie, you’re too steep. Pull out. . . . I lost you. Natalie. Natalie! Oh, I think I see you. . . .”
But whatever Benedicte saw it wasn’t Natalie, who continued to fall, far beneath the rest of the group. The clamshell dug deeper into the air and started to shudder.
This wasn’t good.
“Clamshell trails,” Jonno said. He leaned sideways so he could see the sky, around the edge of the wing. “Earthworm tourists.”
They hit a pocket of turbulence and the flycycle bucked and shuddered, the rigging creaking. Vikram said, “Hey, get back in, man. I’m having trouble keeping us on line.”
“Look at those babies,” Jonno said wistfully, still leaning out. “You know, someday, if I can afford it—”
It came out of the sky, almost vertically, a bright green disk with somebody clinging to its back. Vikram actually saw a head turned toward him, a shocked face behind a visor, a mouth opened in an O. He hauled at the joystick. The flycycle’s big fragile rudder turned, creaking. It wasn’t enough. It was never going to be enough.
The clamshell cut through the flycycle like a blade through paper. The cycle folded up, crumpling, and started to fall, spiraling down toward the plain of Chryse.
Jonno groaned. Vikram saw the instrument console had jammed into his chest. Vikram couldn’t even reach him.
He tried the controls. Nothing responded, and the machine was bent out of shape anyhow. They were going down. Their best hope was that the cycle’s fragile structure would slow down their fall enough for them to walk away from the crash. But as they descended the spinning increased, and the structure creaked and snapped.
The clamshell was in trouble too. Vikram glimpsed it tumbling down out of the air.
And the rock-strewn ground of Chryse loomed beneath them, the detail exploding. Vikram braced.
Natalie took a step forward, then another. Red dust scattered at her feet.
She was walking on Mars, for the first time in her life. In the low Martian gravity, she felt like she was floating. She was on a plain of dusty sand strewn with rocks. The sun was small and low in a deep red sky, and there were long, sharp shadows cast by rocks that looked as if they hadn’t been disturbed for a billion years. She saw nothing, nobody, no vehicles or buildings. She was alone.
She wasn’t supposed to be here.
She didn’t remember climbing out of the clamshell. Just the looming ground, her fight to bring up the rim of the shell, the punch in the gut as the shell’s underside hit the ground and began to scrape through the dust. . . .
She turned around. There was the clamshell, cracked and crumpled. And a gully, hundreds of meters long, cut through the dust where she had crashed and skidded. The clamshell had a small liquid-rocket pack that should have kicked her back to orbit when she was done skimming in the air. But the small, spherical fuel tanks were broken open. It couldn’t have got her to orbit anyhow, not from here.
Her suit was comfortable, warm. She could hear the whir of the fans in her backpack. She tested her legs and arms, her fingers. Nothing broken, and her suit was working, keeping her alive. It was a miracle she’d walked away from the crash, but she had. Now she just needed to get off this rock.
“Benedicte,” she called. “Doctor Poulson? I’m down. Somewhere on Chryse Plain, I guess. . . .”
Nothing. No reply. Her suit comms were very short range. The structure of the clamshell contained amplifier boosters and an antenna . . . but the clamshell was wrecked.
She was out of touch. She couldn’t talk to anybody.
The shock hit her like a punch, worse even than the crash. It must have been the first time in her life she had been cut out of the nets that spanned Earth and moon and beyond. It was an eerie feeling, as if she didn’t exist.
But they would be looking for her. Benedicte had seen her duck down, hunting the Viking. And from orbit they ought to see the clamshell, and the trench she’d cut when she crashed. . . . But she remembered Benedicte’s last words to her. Oh, I think I see you. Benedicte thought she had pulled out of the dive. And Natalie had a habit of shutting up when she was intent on some quest, like finding the Viking.
Even Benedicte didn’t know she was missing. It might be a long time before anybody noticed she wasn’t around.
The clamshell flight wasn’t supposed to last long. She had no food, no water save in the sachet in her suit, a few mouthfuls. No shelter, save maybe her emergency pressure bag. The power in her suit wouldn’t last more than a few hours.
It seemed to be getting darker. How long was a Martian day? How cold did it get on Mars at night? She felt a touch of panic, a black shadow crossing her mind.
She turned and walked away from the shell, distracting herself.
“Well, Benedicte,” she said, “if you can’t hear me now you can listen to me later, if I’m picked up. When I’m picked up. So here I am, walking on Mars. Who’d have thought it? So what can I see? Well, the surface is very fine, powdery.” She kicked at the soil, leaving furrows. “It’s easy for me to dig little trenches with my toe. The surface crunches when I walk. The dust is clinging in fine layers to the sole and sides of my boots. . . .” She wished she could take her shoes off, press her bare toes into the sand of this Martian beach, feel it for herself.
She took a few more steps. She bounced across the surface. Moving on Mars was dreamlike, somewhere between walking and floating. “I have no difficulty in moving around, Benedicte. It’s easier than walking on the moon, actually; you don’t bounce so high. But my backpack is making me feel top-heavy, as if I might fall backward on every step. . . .”
She stopped, panting. Sunlight shone into her face, casting reflections from the surface of her faceplate. “Sunset on Mars. The sky here is different from on Earth. Oh, I should take some pictures.” She tapped a control on the side of her faceplate. The sun was surrounded by an elliptical patch of yellow light, suspended in a brown sky. It looked unreal. The sun was small, feeble, only two-thirds of its size as seen from Earth. She shivered, althou
gh her suit temperature couldn’t have varied. The shrunken sun made Mars seem a cold, remote place.
She walked farther away from the shell, letting her view pan across the landscape. “I’m walking on sand littered with rocks. There are small bubbles in the surface of the rocks. The rocks are pitted and fluted, I would guess by wind erosion. I can see smaller formations that look like pebbles. Actually this stuff is not like sand. It’s dust, very fine grained. Dust everywhere. Nothing gets rid of dust on Mars. Didn’t Doctor Poulson tell us that? There’s nothing to turn dust and sand back into rock, like on Earth. It just washes around the planet forever.”
On impulse, she bent down and picked up a pebble. She lifted it up to her face to get a closer look. The pebble was very light, so light she couldn’t even feel its weight, and she couldn’t feel its texture because of the thickness of her gloves. It was oddly frustrating. She closed her fingers. The pebble burst and shattered. She dropped the dust from her hand. It wasn’t even a real pebble, just dust stuck together somehow.
She looked back at the crumpled clamshell. A single set of footsteps, crisp in the dust, led to where she stood. They looked like the first steps on a beach after the tide went out. She felt as if the long, thin line attaching her to home was fraying, leaving her stranded on this high, cool plain.
Nobody knew she was here. She was walking around, breathing, talking. But was she already effectively dead?
Keep walking, Natalie. Walk, don’t think.
The land wasn’t completely flat, she saw now. She made out low sand dunes. And away to the west, toward the sun, she saw a line, a soft shadow in the sand. It looked like a shallow ridge.
She walked forward, toward the ridge. It was somewhere else to go.
When she climbed the ridge she found she was looking down across a shallow valley scoured out of the landscape. There was a crater in the valley floor, maybe thirty meters across. And from up here she could see something off to the north, on the horizon. Like a pile of rocks. A cairn, maybe? Something made by humans. It didn’t excite her too much. A pile of rocks wouldn’t keep her alive. But maybe she should walk over. There could be a beacon.
Life on Mars Page 9
