“Binti? Can you hear me now?” Mwinyi shouted.
“Huh?” I said, resting a hand on the soft floor.
“You nearly killed us!” Mwinyi said.
“She nearly killed you. Not me,” Okwu said. “And I caught you. You are fine.”
Mwinyi frowned angrily at Okwu.
“Sorry,” I said. When I stretched my legs, I had to use some effort because the bottoms of my legs were adhered to New Fish’s surface with some kind of mucus. This was why I hadn’t been thrashed around like Mwinyi. I pulled some of the gummy substance from the backs of my legs and dress. “Can you become me as I became you?” I asked New Fish.
“It is not that you became me. I’m a Miri 12, it is how we connect. But no, I would not connect with you in that way. You don’t have the capacity.”
I was too tired to address New Fish’s quiet condescension.
“The final thing I must tell you is that if we were on Earth, because you’ve taken so much from me to live, you and I can never be too far from one another.”
I yawned. “Why? What would happen?”
“I don’t know.”
“How far is too far?”
“I’m not sure,” she said. “When my mother sent me, she couldn’t answer every question I had. With all the shooting near the launch port, I was more worried about getting shot down on my way to you.”
“It’s alright,” I said, standing up. I didn’t have the energy to wonder about this, either. Not at the moment. Plus we were in space and I wasn’t going to move away from New Fish any time soon. And where were we going now, anyway? I needed to rest first.
CHAPTER 10
Stones of Saturn
“We’re going to go through Saturn’s ring,” I said hours later, after a long nap. “I’m not discussing it. Then we turn around and head to Oomza Uni, as you planned.”
“Okay,” was all Mwinyi replied.
Okwu said nothing, nor did New Fish. I turned back to the large window feeling satisfied with myself. I’d been ready to argue with all of them and it was nice to get what I wanted so easily.
After waking from my nine hours of sleep, I’d connected with New Fish again. This time, I did it on my own. New Fish might have been asleep, for I didn’t sense her presence at all. It was just me out there as a living ship. I felt the air in my breathing chambers, the strength in my body. I even felt Mwinyi standing in the corner, moving his hands about as he talked to several people in the desert on Earth and Okwu in the room below. Okwu was not talking to the other Meduse on Earth, it was observing. When connected to New Fish, I brought all my skills with me. I considered attempting to tree while connected, but decided against it. The results of treeing were affected by size, and who knew what I’d call up.
As I floated out there in space, enjoying the absolute quiet, I gazed at Saturn. We were near enough to see its shape and rings. Saturn was close enough to reach within hours, even if New Fish took her time. This was when I’d decided we should go.
“My mother says edans are unpredictable,” New Fish said now. “She said yours especially could have its own consciousness.”
But I wanted to see. Had to see. After all I’d been through, I needed to get to the bottom of this mystery. “I don’t care,” I snapped. “We are going even if I have to hijack you and force you to fly there.”
“You can’t,” New Fish said.
“I’ll try,” I said.
“Go ahead,” New Fish goaded.
“Only if I have to,” I said.
“Ugh, will you both shut up?” Mwinyi snapped, taking his hands from the floor. “No one’s fighting you on this, Binti. No need to be like that.”
Okwu vibrated its dome and blew out so much gas that both Mwinyi and I started coughing.
I got up and went to the breathing room where I’d lain for days. I picked up the Night Masquerade costume. Then I went down to another of New Fish’s breathing rooms. I’d felt this one when I was connected to New Fish. When I went inside, the light in here was very similar to the midday desert sun and when I saw the trees, I knew why. There were ten of them, some were saplings, several were small nearly matured trees, and one of them was fully matured, reaching the ceiling and bending a bit to the side. Undying trees! The saplings looked recently potted inside the flesh of New Fish, and the mature one had roots that extended down into New Fish like nerves. The floor was slightly transparent and I could see the roots going deep. These trees had all been growing while New Fish was in utero.
Not for the first time, I wondered if Third Fish was also psychic. And did that mean New Fish was too? There were other plants here that I recognized from Osemba as well. Plants that were usually peopled with land crabs, lizards, and other creatures because these plants attracted insects and smaller life forms. They attracted life. The floor here was dry, even coated with a layer of sand in some places. I touched the trees’ leaves, which were all rough with what the Himba called “life salt,” a pinkish grainy substance that healers used to cure and treat all sorts of ailments.
I tasted it now and it invigorated my tongue. When I’d first found my edan, my father brought it to his tongue to taste what kind of metal it was. He hadn’t been able to identify it, but he’d said it tasted like life salt. I laid out the Night Masquerade on the floor and looked at it. The smiling side of its many-masked head stared back at me. I shivered with residual disbelief that this was the costume of the Night Masquerade, that it was a costume. I sat down facing its head. Then I brought out the edan pieces and the golden ball.
I brought the ball to my face and looked at its fingerprint-like surface closely. Then I held up my left hand and looked at my fingerprints. Had the print on my left middle and index fingers always matched the ones on the ball? I’d never compared them before I’d lost my left arm, so who knows. But now they matched perfectly and this didn’t surprise me. Nor had the presence of Undying trees.
Holding it on the palm of my right hand, I touched my index and middle fingers to their spots on the golden ball and immediately it began to hum and vibrate. “Okay,” I whispered, placing it on the floor before me. If it weren’t for the sand, the ball would have begun to roll away. Softly, I whispered, “(x—h)2 + (y—k)2 = r2” and the equation floated from my lips in a way that reminded me of the zinariya. It was even my color of red. I chose the equation for circles because it was all coming back around and around and around. And the equation stretched into a circle as I let myself tree, surrounding me before it faded away.
The moment I called up a thick strong current, blue like Okwu, the Undying trees in the room began to vibrate too. It was the same way they reacted to lightning storms back home. As I led the current to the golden ball, the trees’ vibrations had become so fast and steady that they began to hum. Slowly, the ball rose. It hovered before my eyes, a foot away, and began to slowly rotate.
As I climbed higher up the tree, I thought about the Zinariya. They’d come to a quiet part of Africa, where the people lived very close to the desert. Close and isolated enough that the people in those small communities knew how to keep a secret. And thus, the rest of the world never knew of the tall, humanoid gold people who loved the way the sun reacted with Earth’s atmosphere there. They saw this small patch of Earth as a vacation spot and the people they met didn’t mind. Their friendship started with a girl named Kande. In many ways, she was like me. What Kande started had eventually made the people in this small town more.
Made the Zinariya more.
They left an edan. No instructions. No purpose. But it could make you more, if you let it. I’d found it.
I don’t know how long I was watching it rotate, as I climbed deeper and deeper into the tree. Mwinyi would later tell me that he’d been in the Star Chamber; they’d been eating and Okwu had been telling him a story about a Meduse meeting of chiefs long ago that had gone horribly wrong. “We knew you wer
e off somewhere brooding,” he said.
The ball was rotating faster and faster now with my current, humming with the trees. The hairs on my arms rose with the charge in the air. My okuoko slithered about me at my sides and back, old otjize still flaking from them to the floor. Then I was in space!
Infinite blackness.
Weightless. Flying.
Falling a bit.
Catching myself.
Then flying again.
I wanted to scream and laugh; I had become something more again. This time, I was so changed that I could fly through space without dying. I could live in open space. I moved through Saturn’s ring of brittle metallic dust. It pelted our exoskeleton like chips of glittery ice. It felt pleasant, so I flew faster, resisting the urge to do barrel rolls because of Mwinyi and Okwu. New Fish was quiet, letting me take the lead. This was my mission. My purpose. And it was fantastic.
Living breath bloomed in me from the breathing room where I currently sat, the whirling golden ball humming with the trees. The metallic dust grew thick like a sandstorm and I stopped as some of it whirled before me in a way that reminded me of the golden ball.
“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 blurted before I let myself think too hard about what was happening. “No,” I said. “My name is Binti Ekeopara Zuzu Dambu Kaipka Meduse Enyi Zinariya New Fish of Namib.” I waited a few moments and then decided to ask, “Who are you?”
“We are . . .” And for a moment, I heard nothing. Then the sound of their name split and split like a fractal in my mind. It was like the practice of treeing embodied in one word. Their name was an equation too complex, too various and varied to mentally fix into place, let alone put into a language that I was capable of uttering. It was beautiful and my joy in just letting it cartwheel and bounce about my mind was reflected in the color New Fish shined in the metallic storm of Saturn’s ring.
When I could finally speak, I said, “You’ve called me here. Why? What is it you want?”
The rush of debris swirled before me into a funnel shape now.
“Did we call you here?” it asked, its voice almost playful.
“You did.” I focused hard on the funnel, their name still in my mind vying for attention.
“That ball belongs to a people we’ve met. They only leave it to be found by those they feel should find them. They pack it between pieces of beautiful metal like a gift.”
“What is it?” I asked.
“What do you think it is?”
I could see New Fish’s light grow purpler with my annoyance. “You called me,” I repeated. “Why?”
“Okay,” it said. “We called you, yes. Through your zinariya object.”
“I’m here now, finally. What do you want?”
There was a long pause. The dust swirled and swirled and for a moment, I was sure I saw a flash of red-orange light. I didn’t bother wondering who these people were or where they had come from or what they even looked like. If I was meant to find out, I would. If not, then I would not. If there was one thing I had learned in all my strange journeys it was that what would be would be and sometimes you wait to see. And this was fine, because at least I’d gotten to the bottom of the question of my edan and that odd vision and what was there was just as strange as I had imagined.
“Tell us about Oomza Uni,” the voice said.
I was so shocked that I couldn’t answer. Then I said, “What?”
“You are a student at Oomza Uni, no?”
“I am, but—”
“That is why we called on you. We want an opinion on the university that comes from someone like us.”
“But . . . like you? How am I—”
“We’re people of time and space. We move about experiencing, collecting, becoming more. This is the philosophy and culture of our equation. There’s no one of our kind there, yet we hear it is the finest university in the galaxy. There is plenty we could learn from there and we’d like to apply. But first, we need a true recommendation of the place from someone we trust. We trust you.”
“So you’ve known I would eventually be . . . what I now am, so you sent for me?”
“Yes. We are many things. What is your opinion of the university?”
“Well . . . I left my home to attend, nearly died on the way, and when I got there, it turned out to be the best experience I ever had as an academic. Excellent professors, excellent students, and excellent environment. It’s the perfect place for me.”
There was a pause and then it said, “Thank you.”
And just like that, the dust and debris of Saturn was simply dust and debris again. A recommendation, that’s all they needed. It was so . . . anticlimactic. Not that I was complaining.
For a few moments, I enjoyed the sensation of space and the flecks and larger chunks of stone bouncing off of New Fish’s body. Then I had an idea and used one of New Fish’s large pincers to catch two fist-sized stones tumbling about. As New Fish, I could “taste” the dust and stones and they had a tanginess that reminded me of the life salt scraped from the leaves of Undying trees and the sandstone from which I made my astrolabe. I stored them in one of New Fish’s many outer crevices. When I returned to myself, the golden ball was on the floor, the trees were quiet, and Mwinyi was standing over me, a perplexed look on his face.
“What was that all about?” he asked.
“Not as much as I expected,” I said with a laugh as I got to my feet.
CHAPTER 11
Ntu Ntu Bugs and Sunshine
New Fish landed in the yellow grassy field where I’d had my first Oomza Uni class—Treeing 101. The large field was between the Math, Weapons, and Organics Cities, and it was typically vacant. This day, there were a couple Meduse-like people with nets, probably catching ntu ntu bugs to study. The moment we landed, one of them roared and floated off, while the other puffed out gas and watched as a university shuttle glided up and waited for us to come out.
I said nothing as Mwinyi and Okwu moved down New Fish’s walkway. In Okwu’s excitement and Mwinyi’s hesitation, they’d both forgotten. I was fine with this; I preferred to deal with the anxiety on my own. Well, as on my own as I could be now.
“Walk slowly,” New Fish said as I paused at the exit.
“I can’t do anything else,” I said, trying not to think about how naked I was. I had no otjize on my skin. The hot entrance into the atmosphere had been different this time because my connection to New Fish made me feel the discomfort of the heat. And the shift from New Fish’s internally balanced gravity to that of Oomza Uni’s still left me a bit weak and dizzy. The grass was so yellow that it practically glowed in the shine of Oomza Uni’s two suns. I could smell the scent of the soil, grass, and the ntu ntu bugs who lived in the grass.
I heard Okwu speaking to someone further out and Mwinyi had taken his shoes off and bent down to touch the ground. His eyes were shut. I began to walk down the walkway. New Fish had said that I wouldn’t be able to go far from her because I was technically a part of her now. However, she didn’t know what “far” meant. Did this mean I couldn’t leave the ship? That I couldn’t go more than a few yards? We were about to find out. And what would happen if I went too far?
My feet touched the grass and I exhaled, looking back at the ship. I paused as I gazed upon her for the first time. She was bigger than the Root, but had the same natural grace. I smiled to myself. This was because both New Fish and the Root were alive. She wasn’t shaped as much like a shrimp as her mother. She looked more like a water creature I couldn’t name; she was bulbous in body that reminded me of the translucent Meduse ships. And here in the atmosphere and sunshine, her purple-pink flesh was detailed with thick lines of gold that rimmed the openings of fins and ran around both her sides. And she had eye
s! How had I not known that she had enormous bright golden eyes? When I thought about looking through her eyes at Saturn, I could have sworn that I saw colors I couldn’t name. So this made sense. Those glorious eyes looked at me now as I moved away from her, walking backward toward the Oomza shuttle and representatives who’d come to meet us.
“You are alright?” New Fish asked.
I nodded, grinning.
Slowly, I walked to the Oomza representatives, two crablike people, one with a rose-colored exoskeleton and the other green. Both of their bodies were wrapped in blue Oomza Uni cloth. Both had their astrolabes hanging from golden chains at the base of their left fore-claws and from their astrolabes came their cheerful voices.
“Welcome back, Binti,” both proclaimed.
“Thank you,” I said. “I hope our landing here wasn’t too much of an issue. We didn’t want everyone to make a big fuss at the launch port.”
“It is what it is and we know you do what you do,” the rose one said. “And your ship is small and living, so it’s good for the grasses.”
“President Haras says she can stay here for now,” the green one said. “It would like to meet with you, Okwu, and the Mwinyi immediately.”
“Just ‘Mwinyi’ is fine,” he said, looking up from where he squatted with his hands to the soil.
“Mwinyi,” the green one said. “We will drive you all. Your ship can rest, graze . . . does she need something else?”
I looked at New Fish. “Should I? Can I?” I asked.
“I can fly with you.”
And that’s how we did it. With New Fish flying directly above. It was Oomza Uni, such a thing may not have been a common sight, but it probably wasn’t bizarre here. Few things were.
Binti, The Complete Trilogy: Binti ; Home ; The Night Masquerade Page 32
