by Kage Baker
I didn’t know what a crossword puzzle was then but the old man must have been coming there for years, maybe ever since it all went down, years and years he’d been working his way through all those magazines and papers, hunting down every single puzzle and filling in every one. He was dropping a stub of a pencil now as he got to his feet, snarling at us, showing three brown teeth. His eyes behind his glasses were these huge distorted magnified things, and full of crazy anger. He came over the paper-drifts at us fast and light as a spider.
“Fieves! Ucking kish! Ucking fieving kish!”
Sunny screamed and I screamed too. Frantically she shoved all the books she could into her skirt and I grabbed up most of what she’d missed, but we were taking too long. The old man brought up his cane and smacked it down, crack, but he missed us on his first try and by then Myko had drawn his wooden sword and put it against the old man’s chest and shoved hard. The old man fell with a crash, still flailing his cane, but he was on his side and striking at us faster than you’d believe, and so mad now he was just making noises, with spittle flying from his mouth. His cane hit my knee as I scrambled up. It hurt like fire and I yelped.
Myko kicked him and yelled, “Run!”
We bailed, Sunny and I did, we thundered down the rest of the stairs and didn’t stop until we were out in the last chamber by the street doors. “Myko’s still up there,” said Sunny. I had an agonizing few seconds before deciding to volunteer to go back and look for him. I was just opening my mouth when we spotted him running down the stairs and out toward us.
“Oh, good,” said Sunny. She tied a knot in one corner of her skirt, for a handle, and had already hoisted it over her shoulder onto her back and was heading for the door as Myko joined us. He was clutching the one book we’d missed on the landing. It was The Lilac Fairy Book and there were a couple of spatters of what looked like blood on its cover.
“Here. You carry it.” Myko shoved the book at me. I took it and wiped it off. We followed Sunny out. I looked at him sidelong. There was blood on his sword too.
It took me two blocks, though, jogging after Sunny through the rain, before I worked up the nerve to lean close to him as we ran and ask: “Did you kill that guy?”
“Had to,” said Myko. “He wouldn’t stop.”
To this day I don’t know if he was telling the truth. It was the kind of thing he would have said, whether it was true or not. I didn’t know what I was supposed to say back. We both kept running. The rain got a lot harder and Myko left me behind in a burst of speed, catching up to Sunny and grabbing her bundle of books.
He slung it over his shoulder. They kept going, side by side. I had all I could do not to fall behind.
By the time we got back the Show was long over. The crew was taking down the stage in the rain, stacking the big planks. Because of the rain no market stalls had been set up but there was a line of old people with umbrellas standing by Uncle Chris’s trailer, since he’d offered to repair any dentures that needed fixing with his jeweler’s tools. Myko veered us away from them behind Aunt Selene’s trailer, and there we ran smack into our moms and Aunt Nera. They had been looking for us for an hour and were really mad.
I was scared sick the whole next day, in case the old people got out their guns and came to get us, but nobody seemed to notice the old man was dead and missing, if he was dead. The other thing I was scared would happen was that Aunt Kestrel or Aunt Nera would get to talking with the other women and say something like, “Oh, by the way, the kids found a library and salvaged some books, maybe we should all go over and get some books for the other kids too” because that was exactly the sort of thing they were always doing, and then they’d find the old man’s body. But they didn’t. Maybe nobody did anything because the rain kept all the aunts and kids and old people in next day. Maybe the old man had been a hermit and lived by himself in the library, so no one would find his body for ages.
I never found out what happened. We left after a couple of days, after Uncle Buck and the others had opened up an office tower and salvaged all the good copper they could carry. I had a knee swollen up and purple where the old man had hit it, but it was better in about a week. The books were worth the pain.
They lasted us for years. We read them and we passed them on to the other kids and they read them too, and the stories got into our games and our dreams and the way we thought about the world. What I liked best about my comics was that even when the heroes went off to far places and had adventures, they always came back to their village in the end and everybody was happy and together.
Myko liked the other kind of story, where the hero leaves and has glorious adventures but maybe never comes back. He was bored with the Show by the time he was twenty and went off to some big city up north where he’d heard they had their electrics running again. Lights were finally starting to come back on in the towns we worked, so it seemed likely. He still had that voice that could make anything seem like a good idea, see, and now he had all those fancy words he’d gotten out of Roget’s Thesaurus too. So I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised that he talked Sunny into going with him.
Sunny came back alone after a year. She wouldn’t talk about what happened, and I didn’t ask. Eliza was born three months later.
Everyone knows she isn’t mine. I don’t mind.
We read to her on winter nights. She likes stories.
Best known for her “Company” series, Kage Baker’s other notable works include the novel Mendoza In Hollywood and “The Empress of Mars,” a 2003 novella that won the Theodore Sturgeon Award and was nominated for a Hugo Award. In 2009, her short story “Caverns of Mystery” and her novel House of the Stag were both nominated for World Fantasy Awards. Baker died on January 31, 2010. Later that year, her novella The Women of Nell Gwynne’s was nominated for both Hugo and World Fantasy Awards, and won the Nebula Award. Based on extensive notes left by the author, Baker’s unfinished novel, Nell Gwynne’s On Land and At Sea, was completed by her sister Kathleen Bartholomew and published in 2012.
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After the End—the Great Change—the laws of physics no longer apply, barriers between worlds have disintegrated, and children (called meta-humans) are born with strange abilities. Dikéogu, a sixteen-year-old Nigerian and a fledging rainmaker who can control the weather, has escaped slavery and is in Timia, a city in Niger, the country directly north of Nigeria.
TUMAKI
Nnedi Okorafor
Dikéogu Audio File Series
begun April 8, 2074
Current Location: Unknown Region, Niger
Weather: 36º C (98º F), N.I.U.F. (Not Including Unpredictable Factors)
This audio file has been automatically translated from the Igbo language.
Tumaki
I found the electronics shop two blocks from my hotel. All I needed to do was go in the opposite direction of the market.
The small store was packed with all sorts of appliances and devices. A few were from Ginen, like the solar powered e-legba that was part machine and part plant and the very small unhealthy-looking glow lily. Most everything else was very much from earth. Thin laptops, standard e-legbas, all kinds of coin drives, batteries, and hardware like bundles of wiring, piles of microprocessors, digicards, and every kind of tool imaginable. It was a tinker’s dream. It was my nightmare. Way too cramped. I planned to be quick.
To make things worse, the place was air-conditioned. The minute I walked in, my skin instantly started to protest. I wrapped my hands around my arms as I stepped up to the counter. A woman stood behind it. At least I thought it was a woman. I’ll never get used to burkas. Maybe it’s the southeastern Nigerian in me but those things are creepy.
About fifty percent of the women in Niger wore them. Most are made out of stiff cotton and a cotton screen covers the women’s faces. You can barely see their eyes. These women, especially when you see them walking down the street at dusk or dawn, scare the hell out of me. They look like ghosts, all silent and mysterious. No, I�
��ve never liked burkas.
“Yes?” she asked. Okay, so I had been standing there staring. I never knew whether I was supposed to speak to these women or not. And since I couldn’t see their faces, I was even less sure.
“I . . . ”
She sighed loudly, rolled her eyes and held out a hand. It was a careful hand. My mother would have described it as the hand of a surgeon. Her nails were cut very short, the palm of her hand slightly calloused. Her fingers were long and they moved with a precise care that reminded me of a snail’s antenna.
“Hand it here,” she said.
I gave her my broken e-legba.
She turned it over, tapping the “on” button. The damn thing only whimpered. Never have I been so embarrassed. All e-legbas do that when they’re broken. There are different whimpers, weeps, moans, or groans depending on the type of breakage. What kind of obnoxious engineer programmed them to do that? It’s bad enough that the thing is broken. Why should a machine act like a whiny child?
“What’d you do to it?” she asked. As if my e-legba was some living creature.
“It’s a long story,” I said.
She turned it over some more between her antenna-like fingers and laughed. “This is practically a toy,” she said. “This is your only personal device?”
“It’s a prime e-legba,” I insisted, indignant. “An electrical god of the best kind.”
She laughed her condescending laugh again. “A lesser god, if a god at all. With a weak solar sucker, sand grains in the fingerboard, a faulty and cracked screen, and probably a smashed-up microprocessor.”
It gave a sad pained groan as if to stress her points. I wanted to grab and hurl it across the room. What do I need it for anyway? I thought. But in the back of my head, I knew I wanted to watch my mother’s news program. And I had a copy of My Cyborg Manifesto on it, a much-needed Hausa/Arabic dictionary, and it picked up a fairly decent hip-hop station whose signal seemed to remain strong wherever I went.
“I can fix it, though,” she said after a while.
“You?”
She looked up, her dark brown eyes full of pure irritation. I stepped back, holding my hands up. “I’m sorry,” I said. “I . . . my mouth is what it is.”
“It’s not your mouth that bothers me,” she said. “It’s your brain. My mother owns this shop. Not my father. Does that surprise you, too?”
I didn’t respond. It did surprise me.
She nodded. “At least you’re honest.” She paused cocking her head as she looked at me. Then she brought my e-legba to her face for a closer look. As she inspected it, she talked to me. “My mother’s an electrician. She taught me everything I know. My father’s an imam. He tries to teach me all he knows, but there are some things that I cannot digest.” She laughed to herself and looked up at me. “You’re not Muslim, are you?”
“No.”
She grunted something that sounded like, “Good.”
“But you are, right?” I asked.
“Sort of,” she said. “But not really.”
“Then why do you wear that damn sheet?” I asked.
“Why shouldn’t I?”
“Because you don’t want to,” I said.
“You don’t even know me.”
“Do I need to? A sheet is a sheet.” I saw her eyes flash with anger. I kept talking anyway. “Doesn’t matter if you look like a giant toad with sores oozing puss. You shouldn’t . . . ”
She pointed a long finger in my face like a knife. “You have got to be . . . ” She stopped. I saw where her eyes flicked to. The black tattoos on the bridge of my nose from my time as a slave on the coca farms. I could tell she got it. She understood my obsession with free will.
“My mother and I are electricians and this town is dominated by patriarchal New Tuareg ways and even stronger patriarchal Hausa, Old Tuareg, and Fulani ways. People here still . . . expect things. My mother and I play along. My father, well, he prefers us to play along, too. Everyone’s happy.”
“Except you have to live under a sheet.”
“Business is business,” she said with a shrug. “It’s not so bad. I get to be an electrician who is female.” She looked me in the eye. “Plus, sometimes I don’t want people looking at me.”
That was the excuse my close friend Ejii often gave whenever she wore her burka. I didn’t buy it from Ejii and I didn’t buy it from this girl.
“Well, other people’s problems should be their business, not yours.”
“In an ideal world, certainly,” she said. “So can you pay?”
“Yes.”
“In full?”
“Yes.”
She paused, obviously deciding whether she could trust me. She brought out a black case and opened it. Her tools were shiny like they were made for surgery on humans not machines. She started to repair my e-legba right there. It was a simple gesture, but it meant a lot to me. She’d noticed my tattoos, considered them, yet she trusted me. She trusted me.
Minutes later, a woman came in also draped in a black burka. Her mother. I was about two feet away from her daughter. It was too late to step back from the counter.
“As-salaamu Alaikum,” the woman said to me, after a moment’s pause.
“Wa ’Alaykum As-Salām,” I responded, surprised. She glanced at my tattoos but that was all.
People came in and out of the store. Her mother helped customers, sold items, chatted with them. But I was focused on the electrician fixing my e-legba. I ignored my claustrophobia and the freeze of the air-conditioning. I didn’t want to leave. I didn’t want to move.
She had my e-legba in pieces within three minutes. She tinkered, fiddled, replaced and tinkered some more. After about a half hour, she looked up at me and said, “Give me a day with this. I need to buy two new parts.”
“Okay,” I said. “I’ll see you tomorrow then.”
From that day on, that store became my second home. Her name was Tumaki.
Poetry
My e-legba was nothing to Tumaki. She could take apart and rebuild the engine of a truck, a capture station, a computer! She could even fix some of the Ginen technology. You should have seen what she did to that pathetic glow lily that I saw the first day I was in the shop. She got that plant to do the opposite of die. Once, she tried to explain to me her theory of why nuclear weapons and bullets no longer worked on earth. She started talking physics and chemistry. I remember nothing but the intense look on her face.
She was a year older than me and planned to eventually attend university. I wasn’t sure if she liked or just tolerated me. When I was around her, I couldn’t stop talking.
“We just use pumpkin seeds,” she told me one day while she worked on an e-legba. We were talking about how to make egusi soup.
“See. That’s where you people go wrong when you make the soup,” I said.
“Us people?” she said, as she unscrewed some tiny screw.
“You people. Yeah. You know, those of you who live here in Timia,” I said. I shrugged. “Anyway, Nigerians call it egusi soup for a reason. Because we use egusi seeds. Goat meat, chicken, stock fish, fresh greens, peppers, spices, and ground egusi seeds. What they serve in the restaurants here is a disgrace.”
“Fine, we’ll call it pumpkin soup, then,” she mumbled, as she placed another screw. “Makes no difference to me.”
“Ah ah, I miss the real thing, o,” I said, thinking of home. “With pounded yam and a nice glass of Sprite. Goddamn. You people don’t know what you’re missing.” I wished I could shut up. I didn’t want her asking me any new questions about home. All I’d told her was that I was from Nigeria.
She only glared at me and loudly sucked her teeth. I grinned sheepishly. I was just talking, totally drunk on her presence. No matter how much rubbish I talked, though, she never got distracted enough to lose track of what she was doing. She could listen to me and work on a computer like she had two brains. Tumaki was genius smart. But she was also very lonely, I think. I figured this might have been w
hy she didn’t tell me to get lost. Maybe it was also why only two weeks after I met her, she did something very unlike her.
I was half asleep when I heard the banging at my hotel room door. It was around two a.m. I don’t know how I heard it, as I was outside in deep REM sleep on the balcony. It was rare for me to sleep this well.
When the banging on the door didn’t stop, I got up, stumbled across the room, no shirt on, mouth all gummy, crust in my eyes, smelling of outside and my own night sweat, barely coherent. I opened the door and came face to face with a black ghost. Death had come to finally take me. That thing from the fields outside the cocoa farms I’d escaped was back.
My eyes widened, my heart slammed in my chest. If my mind hadn’t finally kicked in and my eyes hadn’t adjusted, I’d have summoned an entire storm into the hotel room to fight for my life. Then Tumaki would have learned the secret I’d kept from her just before that secret killed her.
“Tumaki?” I whispered, stepping back. I ran my hand over my dreadlocks. They were probably smashed to the side. I must have looked like a mad man.
She laughed. “How’d you guess?”
A thousand emotions went through me. Delight, pleasure, excitement, horror, fear, confusion, worry, irritation, fatigue. I slammed the door in her face.
“Shit!” I hissed, staring at the closed door, instantly knowing it was the wrong reaction.
She banged on the door. She was going to wake my neighbors. I quickly opened it. “What the hell are you doing?” she snapped.
“Trying to save my neck,” I said.
She sucked her teeth loudly. “Let me in,” she demanded.
Oh my God, I have no shirt on, I realized. My heart pounded faster. I looked down both ends of the hallway. I saw no one. But who knew who might have been listening or peeking out. I grabbed her arm and pulled her in. “You could get me killed by coming here,” I whispered. I didn’t know what to do with myself. Tumaki’s family was highly respected. She was the imam’s daughter! No girl went to a guy’s hotel room in the middle of the night! Period. Especially not to meet a guy like me. Especially if anyone suspected that I was a meta-human.
