“What is this?” I asked, laughing, as I stepped up to it. The size of my dorm room, it was oval shaped with a sheer texture like a tinted bubble. I poked at it. “It feels like silk. Do you spin silk? That’s beautiful!”
The Bear walked around it and then entered through an opening I hadn’t noticed before.
“The Bear isn’t going to know what silk is, Binti,” Haifa said, following the Bear inside.
“Ancient Meduse used to carry these,” Okwu said, following Haifa. “We called them tinana, ‘in-body outside-home’.”
I stood there for a moment, then grabbed my satchel and went inside. The tent’s ground was spongy and I paused, immediately reminded of the Meduse ship. I put my satchel down beside me and sat down. I looked up at the sky, which I could see right through the membrane more clearly than with my naked eye.
“Some sleep then we head back to the shuttle before the sun comes up,” Haifa said. “Binti, no arguing.”
“I’m not.” I turned to gaze at the fire, which was still raging.
“Well, just in case, you better start treeing or something, because if you freak out again, we will all definitely die out here,” Haifa said.
Okwu was hovering before my satchel. “What are you doing,” I asked, twisting to look up at it. Then my satchel twitched and right before my eyes, not four feet from my face, Okwu brought out its stinger. Now I was screaming for a second time in less than 24 earth hours, and I did it so loudly that I tasted blood in my throat. I stared at its stinger in horror as I rolled over and scrambled on my hands and knees to the other side of the tent. The Bear joined me there, hairs on her body shuddering against my arm. Haifa was on her feet, fists raised.
“I am protecting you, Binti,” Okwu said. Its stinger was still out. White as a giant tooth, sharp because it was not only stinger, but also giant knife. My satchel kept twitching and Okwu leaned toward it.
“Maybe something crawled into it from outside,” Okwu said.
“Do you have to have that . . . that thing out?” I asked. I let myself climb into the tree, grasping at the soothing equation of f(x) = f(-x).
My satchel twitched again, this time enough to move the entire thing. “Binti,” Haifa said. “You saw Zerlin, correct?”
“And two of her friends, yes . . . I did,” I said. “In Math City, just outside the building my professor’s office is in.”
“Were any of them near your satchel? At any time? Even for a second?”
I thought about it. The clarity of the tree made it easy to play it all back. “Yes, sort of. Zerlin. She came up next to me, when I was trying to put out my skirt. Come to think of it, I thought she was trying to steal my satchel.”
Suddenly, Haifa raised her voice in a battle cry. She ran at my satchel, grabbed it and ran then leaped out of the tent. She tumbled and threw the satchel toward the fire. It landed just far enough to not burst into flame.
I ran out. “My otjize’s in there.” Still treeing, I was calm enough to take it all in. Okwu and the Bear came out, too.
“Yeah, well, I still should have thrown it right in the fire because something else is in there, too,” Haifa said, still breathing hard. “Alghaza . . . invaders. Burrowing Oomza insects who when they get in your dorm room will turn everything upside down when they can’t find a way out of the room immediately. Zerlin probably put them in there. It’s something students like to do to new students. She deserves to be hit with many shoes.”
I blinked with surprise. Then I burst out laughing. Back home, “deserving to be hit with many shoes” was an expression I only heard the elders use.
My satchel twitched violently and then in the firelight, a rip appeared in the side. They were large like scarab beetles and even in the firelight I could see that they were a bright metallic green with golden legs. Six of them emerged from my satchel, all in a line. They moved, then stopped, moved then stopped, all in unison, as if hearing and dancing to some sort of music. Their insectile feet ground on the sand loudly enough to hear from where I stood as they emerged from my satchel one by one.
Crunch crunch crunch . . . crunch crunch crunch . . . crunch crunch crunch. When the last insect came out, on the third crunch, it hooked its leg to my satchel and with incredible strength for an insect of this size, flipped my satchel over a yard away.
“What’ll they do now?” Haifa said. “I saw someone’s dorm room infested with these and they went right to turning the place upside down. What if there’s nothing to turn upside down?”
The bugs began to trudge around the fire in a strange procession. For over five minutes, they crunch crunch crunch stopped crunch crunch crunch stopped. Okwu lost interest and went back into the tent where it hovered low, resting.
“Are they going to do that all night?” Haifa groaned. Then eventually she went back into the tent, too. The Bear and I stayed and watched. The Bear, like me, was a mathematics student and I knew she saw it, too. The insects walked and stopped in a series of three walks to one stop. They stayed an exact distance from each other. And they moved around the fire that was so precise that after a while there was a deepening groove of circular perfection.
Then, just like that one of them opened its wings and slowly, very very noisily flew off into the darkness beyond the firelight. The noise was so loud that I could still hear it when another decided to do the same thing. “Haifa, Okwu, look!” Then another one slowly flew off. And another. The last one walked a full circle around the fire and then it too flew off. Judging from the buzzing noise, the others had waited for the last one to join them. Then gradually, their noise faded into the darkness along with their shiny bodies.
“So that’s what alghaza do when out in the open!” Haifa said, looking up off into the darkness of the desert.
“A bird can’t fly in a cage?” I said. It was one of my ex-best friend Dele’s favorite quotes. The Bear and I looked at the night sky for a little longer and when nothing else buzzed or glinted in the firelight, we went into the tent. I fell asleep minutes after drinking a cup of capture station water. I slept deep and I slept well. The desert always has the answers.
* * *
I woke to the sound of my astrolabe buzzing softly from inside my satchel. I opened my eyes to the first sun shining through the sheer material of the Bear’s tent. I was resting my head on my satchel and the sound was annoying. “Quiet,” I whispered. “I’m up.” My astrolabe stopped buzzing.
Feet away, the Bear stood, snoring softly and beside her Haifa was sprawled out, also deep in sleep. I wiped my eyes and rolled onto my back and stretched. Something was on my toe. I gasped when I looked. A sand-colored small bat-like creature with a wide head that reminded me of a camel was looking back at me. In its strange mouth, it carried a golden alghaza eggshell it must have fished from my satchel. It snapped it up as it eyed me, its furry body warm on my toe. I grinned, slowly sitting up. “You’re an usu ogu!”
Taking care not to move my leg, I slowly reached into my satchel and brought out my jar of otjize. The creature cocked its head; it didn’t seem to fear me at all, which was no surprise. Usu ogu were said to be quite intelligent and this one clearly understood that none of us were a threat . . . or maybe that eggshell was just that delicious. I opened the jar and dipped a finger inside. I brought my edan from my pocket and rubbed the bit of otjize on the point of the edan with the spiral that always reminded me of a fingerprint. Slow circular motions. I dropped into mathematical trance, a cold stone in cold water; I climbed into the tree, splitting and multiplying. I aimed my blue current into the edan and on its own, it connected with the usu ogu.
It turned to me. “You smell of smoke. You must be a spirit.”
“I’m Binti,” I said. “Who are you?”
“Usu ogu are usu ogu,” it said. “It only matters what I do.”
“And what do you do?” I asked.
“I fly.”
> And with that, it flew into the air, circled the tent once, turned sideways and zipped through the closed tent flap. My current broke from the usu ogu the moment it was outside. The flap opened again, this time wide. “Simple-minded foolish thing,” Okwu said, as it entered. “Of course, it matters who you are.”
I laughed, got up and shook the rest of the alghaza eggshells from my satchel. I gathered them up and took them outside. They glinted beautifully in the sunshine; even the eggs of alghaza hinted that the creatures were supposed to be outdoors. No wonder they were so destructive when they hatched in dorm rooms. I paused and looked at the ash of last night’s makeshift sacred fire.
Back home on Earth, the sacred fire was never allowed to burn out. It was the burning path to the Seven. Here on the university planet known as Oomza Uni, my path to the Seven had to be different. I touched the tip of my sandal to the ashes. My sacred fire will be this desert, I thought. It never stops burning, even at night the sand is warm beneath the surface. I can always come here when I need to. And my community will be my friends. Who else would come into the desert with me? That is love.
I dropped the eggshells onto the ash and brought out my edan. “Are you alive? Will you hatch and then make trouble for me like an alghaza?” I asked it. Then I chuckled and put it back in my pocket. I didn’t think about those two questions for a long time.
“Five, five, five, five, five, five,” I whispered. I was already treeing, numbers whipping around me like grains of sand in a sandstorm, and now I felt a deep click as something yielded in my mind. It hurt sweetly, like a knuckle cracking or a muscle stretching. I sunk deeper and there was warmth. I could smell the earthy aroma of the otjize I’d rubbed on my skin and the blood in my veins.
The room dropped away. The awed look on my mathematics professor Okpala’s face dropped away. I was clutching my edan, the points of its stellated shape digging into the palms of my hands. “Oh, my,” I whispered. Something was happening to it. I opened my cupped palms. If I had not been deep in mathematical meditation, I’d have dropped it, I’d not have known not to drop it.
My first thought was of a ball of ants I’d once seen tumbling down a sand dune when I was about six years old; this was how desert ants moved downhill. I had run to it for a closer look and squealed with disgusted glee at the undulating living mass of ant bodies. My edan was writhing and churning like that ball of desert ants now, the many triangular plates that it was made of flipping, twisting, shifting right there between my palms. The blue current I’d called up was hunting around and between them like a worm. This was a new technique that Professor Okpala had taught me and I’d gotten quite good at it over the last two months. She even called it the “wormhole” current because of the shape and the fact that you had to use a metric of wormholes to call it up.
Breathe, I told myself. The suppressed part of me wanted to lament that my edan was being shaken apart by the current I was running through it, that I should stop, that I would never be able to put it back together. Instead, I let my mouth hang open and I whispered the soothing number again, “Five, five, five, five, five.” Just breathe, Binti, I thought. I felt a waft of air cross my face, as if something passed by. My eyelids grew heavy. I let them shut . . .
* * *
. . . I was in space. Infinite blackness. Weightless. Flying, falling, ascending, traveling through a planet’s ring of brittle metallic dust. It pelted my skin, fine chips of stone. I opened my mouth a bit to breathe, the dust hitting my lips. Could I breathe? Living breath bloomed in my chest from within me and I felt my lungs expand, filling with it. I relaxed.
“Who are you?” a voice asked. It spoke in the dialect of my family and it came from everywhere.
“Binti Ekeopara Zuzu Dambu Kaipka of Namib, that is my name,” I said.
Pause.
I waited.
“There’s more,” the voice said.
“That’s all,” I said, irritated. “That’s my name.”
“No.”
The flash of anger that spurted through me was a surprise. Then it was welcome. I knew my own name. I was about to scream this when . . .
* * *
. . . I was back in the classroom. Sitting before Professor Okpala. I was so angry, I thought. Why was I so angry? It was a horrible feeling, that fury. Back home, the priestesses of the Seven might even have called this level of anger unclean. Then one of my tentacle-like okuoko twitched. Outside, the second sun was setting. Its shine blended with the other sun’s, flooding the classroom with a color I loved, a vibrant combination of pink and orange that the native people of Oomza Uni called “ntu ntu.” Ntu ntu bugs were an Oomza insect whose eggs were a vibrant orange-pink that softly glowed in the dark.
The sunlight shined on my edan, which floated before me in a network of current, a symmetry of parts. I’d never seen it disassemble like this and making it do so had not been my intention. I’d been trying to get the object itself to communicate with me by running current between its demarcations. Okpala claimed this often worked and I wanted to know what my edan would say. I had a moment of anxiety, frantically thinking, Can I even put it back together?
Then I watched with great relief as the parts of my edan that had detached slowly, systematically reattached. Whole again, the edan set itself down on the floor before me. Thank the Seven, I thought.
Both the blue from the current I still ran around it and the bright ntu ntu shined on Okpala’s downturned face. She had an actual notebook and pencil in hand, so Earth basic. And she was writing frantically, using one of the rough thick pencils she’d made from the branch of the tamarind-like tree that grew outside the mathematics building.
“You fell out of the tree,” she said, not looking up. This was how she referred to that moment when you were treeing and then suddenly were not. “What was that about? You finally had the edan willing to open itself.”
“That’s what it was doing? That was a good thing, then?”
She only chuckled to herself, still writing.
I frowned and shook my head. “I don’t know . . . something happened.” I bit my lip. “Something happened.” When she looked up, she caught my eye and I had a moment where I wondered whether I was her student or a piece of research.
I allowed my current to fade, shut my eyes and rested my mind by thinking the soothing equation of f(x) = f(-x). I touched the edan. Thankfully, solid again.
“Are you alright?” Professor Okpala asked.
Despite medicating with the soothing equation, my head had started pounding. Then a hot rage flooded into me like boiled water. “Ugh, I don’t know,” I said, rubbing my forehead, my frown deepening. “I don’t think what happened was supposed to happen. Something happened, Professor Okpala. It was strange.”
Now Professor Okpala laughed. I clenched my teeth, boiling. Again. Such fury. It was unlike me. And lately, it was becoming like me, it happened so often. Now it was happening when I treed? How was that even possible? I didn’t like this at all. Still, I’d been working with Professor Okpala for over one Earth year and if there was one thing I should have learned by now it was that working with any type of edan, no matter the planet it had been found on, meant working with the unpredictable. “Everything comes with a sacrifice,” Okpala liked to say. Every edan did something different for different reasons. My edan was also poisonous to Meduse; it had been what saved my life when they’d attacked on the ship. It was why Okwu never came to watch any of my sessions with Okpala. However, touching it had no such effect on me. I’d even chanced touching my okuoko with my edan. It was the one thing that let me know that a part of me may now have been Meduse, but I was still human.
“That was isolated deconstruction,” Professor Okpala said. “I’ve only heard of it happening. Never seen it. Well done.”
She said this so calmly. If she’s never seen it happen before, why is she acting like I did something wrong, I wo
ndered. I flared my nostrils to calm myself down. No, this wasn’t like me at all. My tentacle twitched again and a singular very solid thought settled in my mind: Okwu is about to fight. An electrifying shiver of rage flew through me and I jumped. Who was trying to bring him harm? Staining to sound calm, I said, “Professor, I have to go. May I?”
She paused, frowning at me. Professor Okpala was Tamazight, and from what my father said of selling to the Tamazight, they were a people of few but strong words. This may have been a generalization, but with my professor, it was accurate. I knew Professor Okpala well; there was a galaxy of activity behind that frown. However, I had to go and I had to go now. She held up a hand and waved it. “Go.”
I got up and nearly crashed into the potted plant behind me as I turned awkwardly toward my backpack.
“Careful,” she said. “You’re weak.”
I gathered my backpack and was off before she could change her mind. Professor Okpala was not head professor of the mathematics department for nothing. She’d calculated everything probably the day she met me. It was only much much later that I realized the weight of that brief warning.
* * *
I took the solar shuttle.
With the second sun setting, the shuttle was at its most charged and thus its most powerful. The university shuttle was snakelike in shape, yet spacious enough to comfortably accommodate fifty people the size of Okwu. Its outer shell was made from the molted cuticle of some giant creature that resided in one of the many Oomza forests. I’d heard that the body of the shuttle was so durable, a crash wouldn’t even leave a scratch on it. It rested and traveled on a bed of “narrow escape,” slick green oil secreted onto a track way by several large pitcher plants growing beside the station.
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