by Gavin Chait
As the young women of the towns rush to the young ones, warm milk and porridge ready with what must seem to be only coincidental good timing, the young men are already preparing their objections.
But as the cries of hunger give way to snorts and burps of happy contentment, the young men can only stand and stare in wonder at such glowing-cheeked serenity. The image of their wives cradling tiny vulnerable bodies, a look of joy, wonder and love on their rapturous faces as the bright spring sunshine makes flesh radiant and all about the tangy scent of life.
Three months of painstaking and carefully calibrated planning has led to this moment. An orchestration of nature, the women of two kingdoms, the nuns of the order, and the children themselves.
As they behold the tableau within the glowing light, the morning waits. As the hearts of baby and prospective mother stay their beat. As prospective fathers breathe the impossible scene.
The question: will the miraculous be accepted? Will it be believed that a capricious wind will snatch up laundry and orphans and deliver their soft payloads so perfectly to couples so clearly suitable to accept them?
The young men, their hearts frozen with regret and loss and the stench of death of so many comrades, stare in confusion and pain. They feel the moment and the choice: a world of ice and cold, or a world of laughter and light.
And they choose. Embracing their loves and accepting their new lives.
Afterwards there was much suspicion of the nuns, but it was impossible, after all. Indeed, it came as no surprise that the wind itself came to be seen as the arbiter of the eventual reconciliation between the two kingdoms and earned its new name.
And now, with the death of the last of the children of that wind after a long and joyous life untouched by war or regret, the tale of how the Stork got its name can finally be told.
It is a tale of strength, of danger, of planning, of comradeship and of bravery.
It is the tale of the conspiracy of women.
***
‘That is ridiculous!’ howls Oleg Deripeska from where he leans against the open door frame in the great kitchen.
‘Hush,’ says Katerina Esplanova where she sits rapt, the sun shining brightly on to her round red face and her eyes sparkling.
‘Yes,’ says the prim Irina Mabadov, who is reading from the recently released book, the pages spread open on the stained wooden table before her.
The room is full as people gather to listen to Irina’s reading. All the women glare at Oleg and, shamefaced, their young men follow suit.
Oleg splutters. ‘But it is preposterous,’ but quietly and then, downcast, lapsing into silence.
Settled again, Irina continues, her clear, husky voice resonating and filling the room with drama of days gone by.
9
The people of Ewuru are silent as Samara completes his tale. They are unsure that the story is even over.
There is emotion, and few are unaffected by this. They live within the borders of a failed state: a region subjected to unwarranted cruelty for centuries. Warlords and militia exercise random and unpredictable violence out beyond the town. People in the lands outside the free villages of the Akwayafe do not nurture life, honour life, and the soil there is poisoned.
They relate to the despair that follows conflict. And they love their children.
Many find that they are holding their young ones tightly as Samara speaks, fiercely protective.
But this is not a story. Not anything as they know it.
It has set a scene, described a place, and filled it with people and sounds and texture. Who is the hero? What was the triumph?
Samara nods in the stillness.
‘My father called these samara. I was never sure, as a child, whether he named them after me, or whether I was named after them. He never told me. He would always just smile and tell me, “You’ll know one day,” when I asked.’
He drinks from the jug of water at his side. Lights around the periphery of the amphitheatre shine on to the stage, insects clouding the brightness. Shrill chirps of frogs and night birds, and the distant heartbeat of the river.
The audience exhales, everyone realizing that they have been holding their breath. A few have a prickling sensation: the discomforting sense of being confronted by their own moral doubts.
While it may not have been a story like the ones they know, they have experienced something. An emotional quickening of the heart.
‘My father called them samara because they are like the propeller seed. They have the means to take flight, to be carried far and to take root and grow where they land. He intended that they offer lessons without preaching, and that they be beautiful. None must be a complete story, as no seed is a complete tree.
‘When I was a child, he told these stories only to me. Then, eighty years ago, he started telling them to the children of his friends. They are easy to remember, short enough to hold in one’s soul. Easy to make your own and tell again to others. Soon everyone knew his tales. We would hold gatherings, like this one, and my father would tell his samara. The gatherings became festivals. Many people would present their own samara.’
Samara is silently weeping. ‘Each year my father would present a new tale. We never knew what he would come up with next. I do not have this talent. I am an ordinary man. I remember listening with my family, seeing how much my father was loved by my people. I felt such pride and joy.
‘He used to call the festivals “Sowing the Seeds”, because people would take the stories and complete them on their own. The stories would grow in meaning through the retelling and through memory.’
He takes another sip of water. ‘My father ended his life twenty years ago. I still do not know why. This –’ his voice trembles, ‘– this was my favourite of his stories. It reminds me of why we must not make war. It fills me with joy for those who are precious to me.’
Samara sits quietly, lost in memory. ‘I thank you for listening.’
10
‘Wait,’ says Joshua, his breath in short gasps.
He and Samara have been running in the jungle outside Ewuru, parallel to the river. This is the third day, each day going a little further and a little faster. The path through the jungle is a tangle of fallen branches, buzzing and biting insects, rotting vegetation and bare, twisting roots. All hazards to the unwary.
They settle into a walk so that Joshua can recover. The humidity amongst the trees is sweltering. The trees sweat. Joshua, with his hands on his hips, breathing hard, is dripping, a sticky stream running under his collar and pouring through an already drenched shirt. Samara is dry, his trousers and shirt unmarked as if he has newly put them on.
Joshua, deliberately slowing his breathing, shakes his head. He breaks away from the path, heading down the bank to the river. He slips off his shoes and shirt and buries his head in the water. Cupping his hands, he drinks.
The water is warm and heavy with silt and tannin draining out of the forest. The river is wide here, perhaps thirty metres across. A tree-covered island rises out of the centre, the pressure of the current raising a ridge of water that crests and breaks in slow syncopation.
Mud has caked on the bank, cracking into dry plates, rimed with mineral salts. Yellow and blue butterflies, like so many gossamer leaves, kaleidoscope up and down, some licking at the crust while others bobble for position above.
On the far bank, a troop of monkeys emerges. Black, dog-like snouts, brown-grey fur and walking on all fours. Their hind legs are shortened under narrow hips, and their backs slope up to broad shoulders. The biggest male barks, baring wicked-looking canines.
‘Those are drill? I thought they were extinct?’ asks Samara.
Joshua is still rinsing his head and shoulders. He squeezes water out of his tightly curled hair and wipes his face, then looks up.
‘We use the genetic library from the sphere. Our university began reintroducing indigenous species about twenty years ago.’
Samara slowly crouches, not wishing to start
le the drill. ‘Yes, the sphere were always meant to be a complete snapshot of everything that is known about Earth. It would be there. I never expected that it would be used in this way. Not out here. Symon was right. There is something unusual about your people.’
Joshua stares at him, questioning, guarded.
‘What are your people doing, Joshua?’ he asks.
‘We make our own way. There are no countries south of the Sahara and no one knows what happens outside the connect. How we suffer,’ says Joshua, his voice terse.
Samara puts up his hands, palms facing Joshua. ‘I am not your enemy, Joshua. I will not interfere.’ He pauses, looking again at the drill, now returning to the forest. ‘Everywhere I travel, all I see is broken. No one builds. No one thinks for tomorrow. There are no dreams.
‘In your people, though, I see something different. You are not just cycling through the same day. You are building. Your village could almost be modelled after one of the small orbital cities. You honour learning, stories, beauty.
‘I am sorry if I have intruded, Joshua. I have no wish to cause you concern,’ he says, compassion in his tone and posture.
Joshua wonders, how far do I trust this man? He makes a decision and grapples for ways to explain. He looks at the island, the wave before it. ‘Do you see the trees, Samara?’
‘Yes, mahogany, iroko, obeche, sapele wood and walnut. I would not expect such variety on one small island?’
‘That is Tait Island. My great-grandfather took pictures of this place when he came here. There was nothing. The trees were logged and dragged away. Oil pipelines criss-crossed the forest. Pirates broke those pipes to steal the oil. Great lakes of black filled the swamp and clogged the river, killing trees and fish and life. There were fires. Smoke filled the sky from many small refineries.’
Joshua is staring at Samara intently.
‘My great-grandfather, also Isaiah, went to university in Abuja. The big men still ran the country. They made their money out of oil bunkering. I have his diary, and he wrote about the journey by road.
‘He went with another boy from Zango, his village on the Gagere River. The first two boys to go. Everyone was very proud. You understand, the journey was only 450 kilometres by road, yet it took three days. Every few kilometres, a roadblock with soldiers. Hundreds of people selling goods to the buses. Children sitting next to their parents.
‘So many people gathered together were a target for Boko Haram and other terrorists. The roadblock needed its own security, its own soldiers for protection.
‘All along the highway, long rows of half-built petrol stations, weeds growing in the cracks in the concrete forecourts. Even so, soldiers guarded them. Politicians would syphon fuel and keep it in the tanks underground. Then they sold it over the border where there were no fuel subsidies and pocketed the difference. There were half-built hotels, stadiums, all with grass growing through the foundations. Everything was corrupt.’
His voice is sour, his face filled with contempt.
‘Two village boys in the big city. They were angry with what they saw but did not know how to fight it.
‘The printers were already in Abuja: first plastics, then metals, then cellulose. It was expensive, a novelty, and the equipment was beyond our villages. As the two boys began their studies, people began building the first cities in the sky. Such technology became cheaper. Affordable even here. Suddenly oil was not so valuable. The big men started to fight and now there is no Nigeria, just a region governed by militia and random violence.’
A gust of wind breathes through the trees. Otherwise, the forest is still.
‘When was this?’ asks Samara.
‘It was about a hundred and fifty years ago. When was your city built?’
‘We started about a hundred and fifty years ago. My father was amongst the first children born in orbit. My mother was brought up as a child.’
Joshua looks across the water. ‘Violence, war, we knew how to survive. But the land stopped being fruitful. The climate changed. The soil became barren. People fled the countryside for the cities. Zango was abandoned. The resources were scarce and many died. Then, when we thought things could get no worse, there was fire in space.’
Joshua is silent for a few moments, lost in thought. He does not notice Samara’s distress at the mention of the war in orbit, source of the debris that falls to earth. He picks up a stick, makes patterns in the water. He has been crouching for a while, so he stands and looks about for a place to sit. A tree has fallen on the bank, and he goes and leans against it. The roots stick out vertically, clotted earth still hanging on tenaciously.
‘No one wanted what our nation had to sell, and we could not afford to buy anything anyway. There was nothing left for anyone in the cities, but there was less in the rural areas. That is the state of this place called Nigeria. It is much the same north and south.
‘My great-grandfather had seen that things would not improve without some decisive act. After he graduated, he formed a pact of Ekpe with others and they set out, back into the wilderness. He was already old when they finally rebuilt the abandoned ruins of Ewuru. My grandfather took over from him. The first settlers worked as a community, saved as a community. They bought the sphere, a few fabricators. Their dream, his dream, was a string of independent cities along the Akwayafe.’
A fish jumps out of the water, the swirl and ripples swallowed by the currents.
‘Their plan was simple. Re-establish the towns, become self-sufficient and provide nothing to the militia. Starve them into the cities and let them die there. Each village needed to be large enough to be self-sufficient, and densely populated enough to be capable of self-defence. The first high-end fabricator they purchased was the DNA printer. We solved our technology problems. The physical has been easier than the spiritual.
‘The founders of Ewuru did not want rule by voting. They saw how that was used for corruption and violence against the losers. We returned to the old ways of consensus and paternal rule. We know that is not perfect. Our people are changing, we struggle with integrating new arrivals, but we are still unsure how we should govern differently.’ He shrugs.
Samara is listening intently, crouching on his heels alongside the river.
‘We are outside the connect and must conduct our own research. The university was built around the sphere, and soon we started to specialize. The safety and stability of the village has permitted people to pursue their own interests. Twenty years ago, one of the teachers encouraged the students to reimagine our world. My wife was then a girl. She came to this island. She printed seeds and planted them here, making this island a new beginning.’
Joshua’s face softens as he remembers the day Esther proudly brought a group of students and teachers here. Her apprehension and joy, showing how the trees were growing well and that birds were returning to nest from where they had been hiding, waiting for just such an opportunity.
‘She was such a quiet girl. We could never have imagined what she was doing. She was fifteen. I fell in love with her that day.
‘If you want to know more, you should speak to her. She engineered the microbes that have restored the soils. She now runs the research group that is gradually rehabilitating the forests. It was one of her team, fifteen years ago, who began reintroducing animals, birds and the drill.’
‘They use the sphere?’
‘Yes. We could not have achieved so much without the techniques and knowledge it holds. It is not in the university any more. Too many people need to consult it. Its broadcast range is not far, but many people can sit in the market and work.’
‘As far as I can make out, the sphere looks as if it has been in this village for, what, over one hundred years?’
Joshua nods, lifting himself off the trunk and retrieving his shirt and shoes.
‘No wonder you have no information on our cities. You will have received no updates. We broadcast throughout the connect.’
‘It is not a secret?’
‘No, we are happy to share.’ [Except] ‘Oh, yes, except for dark fusion technology.’ [Because] ‘Well, we’re worried you’ll blow yourselves up.’ Samara looks bashful. ‘We don’t trust Earth-based engineers any more.’
‘We are not short of energy,’ says Joshua, perhaps a tad tartly.
‘For your current needs, but it takes vast stores of energy to produce the nanobiological devices that make the symbiotic intelligences. And gravity. And, well, many things.’
[And.] ‘And artificial intelligence. There are no details on how to manufacture these. We will not permit a new class of slaves.’
Joshua grimaces but Samara seems not to notice.
A heron flies slowly up the river. It lands on the island shore, focusing on an eddy of water in the shadows of an overhanging branch. Ever so slowly, it moves until its head is in line with a cluster of leaves. It waits, patiently, then thrusts into the water. As it comes up, it points its beak to the sky, swallowing its catch.
‘What happened to your great-grandfather’s friend? You said there were two boys?’
‘We do not know. He did not join us in Ewuru.’ Joshua looks at the sky. ‘We should return,’ he says. ‘I am happy to swim back?’
‘It is about seven kilometres along the river? Tell you what, you swim, I’ll see if I can hold my breath the entire distance.’ And then Samara crouches and springs in a giant arc, before slicing cleanly into the water ten metres off the bank.
Joshua waits, hoping to spot some trail of bubbles. Then he knots his shoes into his shirt, ties this around his neck and scrambles into the water. The current is swift and pushes against him as he angles across the river to the centre.
He allows the water to carry him, enjoying the slight coolness. He wonders if he will see river dolphin today. They are not native, but his wife likes dolphins.
The river is calming, and he needs to relieve his tension. Samara has thrown the village into turmoil. Already a small group of students have started studying artificial intelligence, hunting in the vastness of the sphere’s knowledge for hints on where the breakthroughs may come. He is not sure this is a good idea. Samara’s warning is also in his mind. Others have started looking at energy-dense weapons. Also not something he is comfortable with.
