Binti, The Complete Trilogy: Binti ; Home ; The Night Masquerade

by Nnedi Okorafor

  I slipped my sandals off and stepped onto the densely woven vines that made the floor of her office. I went to the place she called “the classroom”, the area in the middle of the open space that was her office. There was a small grey solid stone table here and nothing else. I dumped my satchel beside it and sat down.

  Straightening my long red orange skirt, I stretched my legs in front of me and reached into my satchel. I brought out the tiny capture station that I’d brought from home. I carried it with me everywhere because I liked the taste of the water it pulled and formed in its cup-sized bag and because it was a piece of home.

  The cool air the capture station blew at me as it pulled condensation from the clear sky felt refreshing in the hot sun. After a few minutes, the bag was full enough to fill a cup. I held the orange bag of fresh cool water to my forehead and then drank deeply from it. When I finished, I rolled up the bag and put everything back in my satchel. In the heat, the otjize kept my skin comfortable. I smiled turning my face to the sun. All my nightmares, flashbacks, and loneliness retreated. I put my edan on my lap, my astrolabe beside me and waited for Professor Okpala.

  She came back to me five minutes later. “Okay, let’s see if it’s willing to open up to you, share what it knows,” she said, clipping her astrolabe back to the cloth hanging from the side of her skintight red and green suit. She sat across from me with a tablet.

  “What do you mean?” I asked. “It’s not alive. Is it?” I frowned, remembering a lizard egg I’d once found back home. “Is it?”

  I’d found what I thought was a dried dead lizard egg in the desert and kept it in my room because I liked its soft blue color. After I’d had it for over four years, it hatched. I’d come into my bedroom that day just in time to see the tiny blue lizard glance at me and then leap from my open bedroom window. I ran over and looked down. There it was, scampering toward the desert.

  “Focus, Binti,” Professor Okpala said. “All edan are different. Settle down. Climb a bit into the tree.” She touched her tablet and it glowed a deep transparent purple. I could see what she was writing through the clear tablet: ‘Binti: First attempt’.

  I allowed myself to drop into the tree by grasping the Pythagorean theorem. I sighed, the world around me fragmenting and then both dimming the slightest bit and clarifying. I focused my attention on my edan. Somewhere in the distance my mind still quipped, But maybe it is alive. I pushed the distraction away.

  “Good,” Professor Okpala said. “Now, I’m going to ask something of you.”

  “Okay,” I said. She could ask me anything; I would know the answer.

  “Home,” she said. The word hit me hard in the chest like a stone, but I didn’t feel it. “What do you miss about it?”

  “The sand,” I said.

  Professor Okpala typed something on her tablet as she looked at me with piercing eyes. “We have sand here.”

  “It’s not the same. Different memory.”

  “Hold your edan, call up a current . . . and tell me exactly what you mean by you ‘miss the sand’. Do that as you guide the current into the edan.”

  I climbed a little higher into the tree as I thought about it. “In the evening, I would sit outside behind the Root, that’s my family’s home. I’d be wearing my long skirt over my legs, and I would plunge my hands into the sand. It was cool on the surface, but underneath was warm, like the body of a living thing. Inside, my mother would be in the kitchen cooking pumpkin soup and my father would be walking home from his shop because it was a windy evening and he loved the wind. My brother would be on the roof of the Root making sure the storm analyzer he’d built was secure and my little sister wouldn’t be home because she was out with her friends near the lake collecting matured clusterwink snails.”

  The current I ran over my edan entered the grooves and crevices and I gasped. It was doing this without me guiding it. “My friends who were more obsessed with marriage than all other things,” I said. “My best friend Dele who always knew the town rules, my classmates laughing about how they didn’t understand any of the math problems. But I understood it all and I just . . . sometimes I felt lonely.” I don’t know when I did it, but I made the current thicker. Stronger. I stared at the blue current, my eyes unfocusing. I could feel the possibility and I went higher and deeper. I stopped talking at Professor Okpala. I went with it. It was like sliding down a sand dune.

  “It . . . it wasn’t the day I left that I knew I was different. Not really. It was long before that. When I was seven years old. During school. Five, five, five, five. It was only me and I started going into the desert.”

  I felt a sting in my chest as I caught my breath. That was the moment I jumped the rails. It didn’t matter that I was treeing. It didn’t matter that I was with my professor, who was watching me closely, typing all that she saw into her tablet. I was far from home. The only Himba on an entire planet. My hair was braided into the tessellating design of my family, and not one person on this planet would be able to decode, read and understand the great weight of its importance. What did I think I was doing?

  I was alone. Lost in space. I was in a strange place. So I arrived right back at that moment. Heru’s chest. It was exploding. I was there. I grabbed my edan and held it to my chest, the blue purple current leaving the edan and rotating around my clenching hands now. It held my hand there, the muscles stiffening. I shut my eyes and I prayed to it, I am in your protection. Please protect me. I am in your protection. Please protect me.

  The memory opened up and multiplied, a living fractal.

  I opened my eyes to my professor. My nostrils flared and I smelled every scent around me—grass, flowers, and I smelled blood. The sky was red, my hands were red. Looking into the eyes of my professor, I opened my mouth wide and screamed so loudly that my throat stung. Professor Okpala jumped, but even this didn’t make her drop her tablet. With all my strength, I bashed the edan against the stone table. I bashed it again.

  “Binti!” my professor shouted, horrified. “Stop it!”

  Bash! I was still screaming. “Evil thing! I hate you! Die! Let me die!”

  “Binti!”

  Bash! “Die!”

  Professor Okpala was grabbing me. She’d finally put down her tablet. I cried and shrieked, trying to push her away, trying to smash the edan on the stone table some more. But my professor was much stronger than me and she dragged me from the stone table. My hand was bleeding and the sight of the blood made me shriek even louder. She hugged me to her. “Everything is dead!” I screamed, curling up. “Everyone is dead!”

  “Then relax, Binti. If everyone is dead, there’s nothing left to do,” she said, hugging me tighter. “Relax.”

  * * *

  I calmed down. Professor Okpala didn’t immediately dismiss me, though she told me I needed to go to the medic and have a nurse look at my hand. She’d picked up her tablet and was typing notes again while I stood near the edge of her office looking out at Math City. Despite all I’d done to it, my edan was unharmed. Not a chip or a scratch. As I gazed at the spiraling sand-colored building across from me, I held it now, tightly in my uninjured hand. My injured right hand throbbed dully.

  “Did you feel the edan open even slightly?” my professor asked.

  “What?” I asked, still facing the edge of her office. I looked down at the edan in my left hand and quickly said, “I don’t know . . . I . . .”

  “Were you even trying when . . . it went wrong?”

  “Yes,” I said. “And a part of me was still focused on getting the edan open. How does that happen?”

  “Edans are tricky powerful things,” she said getting up. “Their pull can be wildly intense. And you’re a very interesting student. But this was a failure, Binti. Our next session needs to be better.”

  She sent me on my way ten minutes later, telling me that I’d be expected at the ANE, the Alien Non-Emergency Medic Buildin
g. I left her office with a pounding headache. Once downstairs, in the lobby, I paused, feeling the tears coming like a rainstorm. I started walking when I noticed students were looking at me as they passed. I’d nearly died to get to Oomza Uni and already I was a failure.

  The moment I stepped into the sunshine, I felt better. I paused on the steps in front of the tower, students walking in and out of the building. A professor who looked like a large slug, slithered around me and muttered, “Go get drunk on the sun in the fields, student hero. This is a place of study.”

  But I needed my moment, so I dropped my satchel beside me, tilted my face up, and let the sunshine roll over me. I sighed, smiling, “Ah, I miss the desert.”

  Crack!

  I screeched and jumped, stumbling to the side, nearly tripping over my satchel. I smelled smoke, my face prickling with the rush of adrenaline. I reached into my pocket and grabbed my edan with my left hand. Smoke was rising from the hem of my skirt! I jumped again, shoved my edan back into my pocket and dropped down. I smacked at the black smoking circles in the material, ignoring the pain in my right hand. Coughing, I smacked harder until the flames were out, bits of grey ash floating up.

  Snickering.

  I looked up. Two Khoush boys were looking down at me, grins on their faces. With my peripheral vision I saw someone step up beside me from behind and grab my satchel. I snatched it back and pulled it to me, looking up. It was a girl, and like the boys and most of the humans at Oomza Uni, she was Khoush. She looked down her nose at me, smirking. I frowned. I couldn’t tell who threw the current that singed my skirt, but it was definitely one of these three.

  “Stay down,” the taller boy said. His hair was black and shiny, reaching his chest in ringlets and he wore the tight green jumpsuit that weapons majors wore if they had humanoid bodies. “You must be used to that position, doesn’t the word ‘Himba’ mean ‘beggar’?”

  I stood up. “Himba” did mean “beggar” in otjihimba. But that was an ancient coinage no one really cared about anymore. “Why would you do that?” I asked, my voice higher than normal.

  “I don’t need a reason, traitor,” he spat. “Department heads and students who don’t know any better celebrate you, but plenty of us detest you. Meduse sympathizer. You’re planets away from earth, yet you betray your own homeland. You should be ashamed of yourself.”

  “Should have died on the ship,” the other boy said. “We’d be better off. The pilot would have come up with a better plan.” This boy I knew. He was in two of my math classes and he came from one of the few Khoush villages that existed near Himba country. His name was Abd, which meant “servant” in Khoush.

  I grabbed my satchel and tried to walk away, but the two boys stepped in front of me. I groaned, looking at the girl who hadn’t said a word yet. Deeply irritated, I aimed my question at her. “What do you want?”

  “What we want,” the tall boy said. “. . . what many of us who know better want is for you to take that Meduse ingrate you brought here back into space.”

  My left eye twitched and my hands shook, the right one throbbing more because of it. Since I’d arrived, most students, professors and staff had been warm and welcoming to me. There’d even been a party thrown for Okwu and me in the walkways outside my dorm. That day, so many had surrounded Okwu, fascinated to meet a “friendly” Meduse, that Okwu had to stay at the party until it ended. Of course, these students and faculty quickly learned that though Okwu was “friendly”, it wasn’t exactly nice. I must say, it was entertaining to watch them realize this fact.

  However, there were a few who strongly opposed a Meduse presence on Oomza Uni and they made themselves known. These students (Khoush and otherwise) deeply feared Okwu, so they accosted me. It had happened a few times since my arrival on Oomza Uni. These individuals feared and or hated the Meduse; the Meduse were a powerful and principled yet warlike people and so they had many enemies. Just after orientation, in the halls of my dorm, in passing when I was in Central City, when Okwu was not with me, these particular anti-Meduse students let me know what they thought and it was always the hatred, the rage. To an extent, I understood some of them.

  For example, Abd’s family had been deeply affected by the war, as he’d angrily told me on my fourth day on Oomza Uni, during our second day of Math 101 class. Several of his family members had been killed by Meduse moojh-ha ki-bara-style, he’d told me, and how dare I expose him to the presence of one of these monsters. I was a “shameful typical silly foolish lowly Himba girl”, according to him. I didn’t agree with this, of course, but I felt his pain.

  My hand ached as I turned again, trying to step around them. I nearly bumped into a crab-like person side-walking into the building. It clicked its claws at me and then, in Meduse, said, “Leave it be, Himba hero. What’s done is done. Stop walking into people.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said, cradling my right hand. Through my tear-blurred eyes, I met the Khoush girl’s cold light brown eyes.

  “Why didn’t you stop them,” the girl asked.

  “What?”

  “You could have asked for anything during that meeting, once you got them to listen,” she said. “Why would you ask them to admit a Meduse into Oomza?”

  “I didn’t! It wasn’t even my idea. But I . . .” I blinked and shook my head. “Wait, why am I even talking to you? Get out of my way!” My head throbbed harder and I could have sworn I felt tingling in the tips of my okuoko.

  Then the three of them were staring at me with shock, as if I’d roared in the voice of a djinn or sacred snake. They were frozen there like stone. I didn’t know what I’d done, but seeing them like this gave me a deep satisfaction so profound that more tears squeezed from my eyes. When the dark wet spot appeared in the crotch of the tall boy’s jumpsuit and Abd began to hyperventilate, his mouth hanging open, I understood. I straightened up, my satisfaction deepening.

  “What are you called, girl?” Okwu asked in Khoush. It was hovering directly behind me. Then it exhaled a great puff of gas. I knew to hold my breath, but the others immediately began coughing.

  “Zerlin,” the girl replied in a high-pitched voice when her fit of coughing subsided.

  “Zerlin, Abd, Eyad, walk away from the Binti right now,” Okwu said.

  The two boys turned and shakily walked off. They didn’t run, they walked because Okwu had said to walk. Zerlin stayed. Tears now in her eyes, she said, “You shouldn’t be at this university! You killed my sister’s best friend on that ship.” She hugged herself, stumbling back. She pointed a finger at Okwu that shook so badly, it was almost comical. “Monster!”

  Okwu blew out a puff of gas and said, “It wasn’t me specifically. But we are a hive mind. If need be, we are monstrous.”

  She backed away from Okwu as Okwu floated toward her. Then she turned and ran off. When she was gone, I sat down right there on the concrete, bringing my knees to my chest. It didn’t matter if my long skirt got dirty, the hem was already burned.

  “What did you do to your hand?” Okwu asked.

  “I tried to smash my edan against a stone table,” I said, resting my head on my knees. “I was really angry and it’s more solid than it looks.”

  “I will go with you to the medic building,” Okwu said.

  * * *

  Nothing was broken, none of my fingers at least. Just bruised and swollen with one large bleeding cut that required a small flesh knit. The medic building student nurse, who looked like a large flower floating on a cloud of red mist, said I was lucky. I would have been fine with all five fingers broken if I could have smashed my edan, I thought, but I didn’t really feel this way. What happened on Third Fish wasn’t caused by the edan and the edan was why I was alive.

  The first sun was setting by the time I got out of the hospital. “Thanks for waiting, Okwu,” I said as we walked to the shuttle.

  “There were airborne links in the lobby, so I fi
nished my homework while I waited,” Okwu said.

  I had my satchel with my tablet, a capture station, some mini apples, lip oil, a palm-size container of my otjize. I needed my satchel wherever I went. But Okwu and those like it moved about not needing anything, having everything. I envied this. Okwu liked to say, “People like me are always complete.”

  I pinched my nose as we approached the shuttle. I was still getting used to these things. The shuttle tracks were made slick with a green oil called “narrow escape” that was secreted from huge black pitcher plants growing near the tracks. The plants stank of fresh blood and that smell triggered my flashbacks. I’d avoided Oomza shuttles for weeks, but swift transport busses weren’t made for 500-mile journeys that needed to be made in minutes, so I had to get over myself.

  Once on the shuttle, I was glad to easily find a seat made for someone near my size. Okwu hovered beside me with a group of other Meduse-like People. I gazed out the window as the busy sandstone towers and hive-like edifices of Central City began to retreat within moments. Then, we were zipping past the arid lands of purple grasses that surrounded Central City. I glimpsed the Oomza Station where professors met for professor-only meetings and debates, then it was gone.

  I sat back and relaxed. Beside me Okwu was chatting with another Meduse-like creature. Okwu and those who hovered and had jelly-fish like domes, filling up the open areas of the shuttle with their gasses and barely substantial bodies, always became talkative when the shuttle was moving at its fastest. I wondered if this had to do with the fact that such People were most comfortable in space and when the shuttle was zipping forth at over 500 miles per hour, this was the closest they got to that while on Oomza.

  I looked at my grimy burned skirt and wished I had a way to feel at home that didn’t require squatting in the dirt beside my dorm. I thought about when my mother would take me to the lake at night to look at the clusterwink snails when they spawned. These were my oldest memories. My mother and I had both stood there looking at the snails, and even back, at the age of four, I agreed with my mother that they looked like a galaxy. We counted the snails until the counting became something else for the both of us, from the water to outer space.