The crowd cheered wildly.
‘End of days is here!’ Matha preached. ‘Have you not seen the winds of change rushing over our lands? Have you not seen the burning winds of Lucifer and Mammon? Bending heads and breaking backs across the world? In USA! In UK! In USSR! In China! And now even here in Zambia! Can you not see that the lion is war? That the calf is for fattening, because it is for slaughter? The third beast – it is the dictator in every land from Russia to Kenya, Zimbabwe to India. It is the face of man! On the body of a demon!’
Naila ran to Joseph and hugged him – forgive me, that hug said – and kissed him on the lips. ‘We did it!’ she shouted into his ear over the booming of Matha’s speech.
‘Did what?’ He gestured at the crowd. ‘Started a new church?’
She looked up into his eyes, eerie emerald in the crowd’s Bead light. ‘We got them here.’
‘Ya.’ He gestured at the billboard behind them, its half-message, its giant SO. ‘And for what?’
‘For that!’ She gripped his face with both hands and turned it towards the glimmering lake of Bead lights. He shook his head within the vice of her palms.
‘What do you want to say to them, Joseph?’
He looked at her. He swallowed. ‘I want to tell them that our minds are free, even if our hands are tied by poverty,’ he said, gaining confidence. ‘That we can innovate! We can—’
‘—horse is conqueror!’ Matha was hollering. ‘The red horse is murderer! The black horse is scales, the moneyed banker! And the pale horse, oh, the pale horse of death—’
A cry rang out: ‘Police!’ Matha broke off. Night had fallen and it was hard to see. Jacob pointed across the crowd at a flurry in the swimming constellation. There was a staccato echo: ‘Police, police, police,’ called the people. Uniformed men and women were blundering in from the sides, holding their weapons aloft. The crowd wriggled like a mess of worms as people tried to turn, to run, to stay – all at the same time.
Naila looked around. Joseph was frozen, staring at his unspoken speech. Jacob was squatting at the front edge of the stage with his gogo, who was conferring with her congregants below. The Weepers were a dark clot in the midst of the lights – they wore all black and many of them had missed the government roll-out of free Beads while they were in prison.
Matha cast her hand forward and they dispersed, spreading like inky tentacles from the stage, each sinuous line moving towards those who had infiltrated the rally. The officers were yelling and swinging. The Weepers were humming and swaying. Naila ran towards the steps, where she met Joseph and Matha. Jacob was still crouched at the edge of the stage. His eyes met hers just as he jumped down into the mass of people.
* * *
Some said that if the SAC security forces hadn’t arrived with their bullying guns, their shouts and their shoves, the Kalingalinga rally would have stayed peaceful. Respectful. No one even knew what they were there to protest! Others said that Matha Mwamba was the one who had disturbed the peace, incited the violence, that she had unzipped her bomber jacket and bared her breasts like Mama Chikamoneka. They swore that, right before she sent The Weepers back into the crowd – their wrists locked in front of them, demanding to be arrested – Matha had said: ‘Burn it down.’
Naila’s feet hit the ground just as it began to tremble. For a moment, she thought it was an earthquake, like the one The Change had brought in 2017. But the vibration was not coming from below. It was blasting from above – surpassing, total. The crowd was immersed in it, sounds were lost in it, the air was glitching with it. People stopped running and pushing and stood where they were, shocked by its sheer volume. Then their Beads shut off, all of them, all at once. Everyone stood in the blaring dark, their hands over their ears, their eyes looking up.
Naila saw the night sky vanish. It was so sudden that she gasped. It was like the stars had fallen to the earth, blossoms shaken off by a mighty wind. Or like a great black sack had swept across the sky and caught them up. Or like the sky had always been an onyx scroll with white Braille letters, and it had just swiftly rolled up tight. Something was up there above them in the sky, moving over the face of the crowd, blocking out the heavens. All around was the swell of that fierce, quivering vibration. A dark immensity lowered.
A wheezing grunt, a shriek of hinges, a crash of thunder – more than one – five or six in succession, some near, some far. The earth bucked the crowd off its feet. Naila landed on a woman, who scrambled out from under her and grabbed her son, who had toppled nearby with the impact. The gushing vibration abruptly ceased. The thing hovering above them had settled onto the ground – the slams had been its feet, hundreds of yards apart.
Then there was light. A blinding cone of it blasted down from the darkness above. The light captured the upturned faces of the crowd, their fallen bodies in unwieldy tangles. Human sounds started to come back to life: people called out to each other, men moaned in their bruising and wounding, babies cried, grandmothers shouted, women said tuleya, mwebantu! Car alarms wailed, honked, beeped, accompanied by the smash and tinkle of broken windows.
Then a new sound. At first Naila thought it was the congregants again, humming their way through the crowd. But this was closer to a ringing, the electric sound of pylons growing steadily unbearable. It looked like smoke was pouring through the air, cutting in and out of the cone of light. People shouted and the mother next to Naila pointed. Her boy nodded. Mulilo, he said. Fire.
But there was no burning smell, no searing heat, no flame. The smoke’s syrupy sweep through the cone of light reminded Naila of a starling murmuration. It swung around, its ringing sound drawing near, then far, flooding thick, spiralling wide. Its outer edge swept past her and she saw tiny buzzing bits within it. Not smoke, microdrones. She heard the mother say it. Udzudzu.
Naila felt the cumulative touch of them on her face and neck – a whispering feeling, as if a furry wind were passing by. Then she felt the gentle needling. A dozen twinges, a hundred, a thousand, each no more painful than a normal mosquito bite. The swarm – they were Jacob’s Moskeetoze, she was sure of it, the ones he’d sold to the government – had landed upon the crowd and begun to puncture them.
In and out of the blueblindingwhite cone of light, people ran and stumbled. Their clothes grew black under the swarm, as if turning to cinder. The boy beside Naila grew hairy with drones. His mother tried beating them off, but they bounced right back, or onto her instead. Naila cried out, for Jacob, for Joseph, for Daddiji – Where is he? Where? – and felt a queer tickle on her tongue and a webby film on her teeth. She hooked her fingers inside her mouth and pulled out a dozen tiny drones. She spat, then shut her mouth tight.
Everything went silent – everyone had stopped shouting once they realised the drones would fly into their open mouths. The swarm was so thick, the air so feverish with it, that Naila couldn’t see. She cupped a hand into a visor, and still she felt the scrape of thin legs and wings on her corneas. Finally she wiped her eyes with her fingers and shut them too.
If the drones had been sent to subdue the crowd, they had served their purpose. Everyone was still, eyes closed, mouths closed, shoulders raised, arms wrapped around their bodies. Such a quiet conquest, a dark blanket cast over the people, gently chewing into them, bites stippling across the expanse of their skin. Minutes passed. Then the muffle began to loosen.
The swarm rose and swung again into its measured spirals, moving slightly faster now, as if lighter. Naila realised what this meant: the drones had not come to extract something from their bodies but to deliver something – Joseph’s Virus vaccine, she was sure of it, the one he had made with Musadabwe – administered via the tiniest plentiest injections. Mission accomplished, the drones skittered up into the cone of light. The brightness gulped them steadily and then cut to black, as if the throat of light had choked.
The crowd stirred uneasily in the dark. People touched their skin instinc
tively, anticipating itch or ache, hunting for bumps, seeking a bodily script to read. All they found were painless welts, which would subside by the next morning. The effects of the mass vaccination would come later. Virus immunity for all. Black patches for many, nothing a little Ambi won’t fix. But, for the next generation – the descendants of the vaccinated – there would be another illness entirely.
Just as the crowd began to gather in clumps of wonder and worry, everyone’s Beads flashed on again. There was a collective chorus of relief. It was over. Was it over? Not quite. Again the shuddering blast – a redoubled earthquake or the distant pounding of Mosi-o-Tunya – and the people covered their ears, some with their forearms this time, crouched on the ground. No more, please. Nakana. Then a tremendous earthly flinch – more than one, a succession of five or six, some far, some near – as the macrodrone lifted off its feet.
In the light of the Beads, which seemed a dull glow after that harsh spotlight, Naila saw the thing’s legs this time: massive curved arcs cutting through the night – two to the north and four in the distance. They lifted up and away from Kalingalinga, which was somehow still standing. The vibration dissipated as the great beast – the shape of a giant mosquito – rose up and flew away, restoring the constellation to the sky. The scroll of the night unrolled, flat as it ever was, its uneven Braille twinkling down. The black sack scattered its loot of light back across the universe again. And the vast night tree under which we all stand bloomed with stars once more.
Oldest friends, ancient enemies, neighbourhood frenemy foes. We’re perfectly matched, Mankind and Moz. We’re both useless, ubiquitous species. But while you rule the earth and destroy it for kicks, we loaf about, unsung heroes. We’ve been around here as long as you have – for eons before, say the fossils.
When man took up tools, we were right there beside you. When you left Broken Hill, we tracked you. Reckon the great men littered in our wake, or the wake of the fevers we carry: Dante. Vespucci. The King of Siam. De Gama. Three of the Medicis. Oliver Cromwell. The twelve-day pope. Lord Byron. Livingstone, of course. Behold the might of the mite!
There’s naught like a nemesis for truth, they say, and this story does have a lesson. Your choice as a human may seem stark: to stay or to go, to stick or strike out, to fix or to try and break free. You limit yourselves to two dumb inertias: a state of rest or perpetual motion.
But there is a third way, a moral you stumbled on, thinking it fatal, a flaw. To err is human, you say with great sadness. But we thinful singers give praise! To the drift, the diversion, that motion of motions! Obey the law of the flaw! If errare humanum est indeed, then it follows that si fallor, sum.
As the Gnostic Gospel of Philip opined: ‘The world came about through an error.’ He probably meant God, but for good old Lucretius, this was a matter of matter. When atoms plummet like rain through the void, they deflect – oh, ever so slightly, just enough that their paths divert. From this swerve, called the clinamen, come collision and cluster, both the binding and fleeing of matter. Stephen Hawking once said, ‘Without imperfection, neither you nor I would exist.’ Every small stray opens up a new way, an Eden of forking digressions.
Don’t forget the catch like Naila did, though: error slips through your hands if you grasp her. Error is slick and slimy and rich and she begets more errors at random. She’s a real coquette, she’ll take your bet – and fortune’s forever behind her.
The Dam
The Vulture, a fishing boat, swung to her anchor with barely a shudder and was at rest. The wind had dropped, the water was calm, and being bound for Mlibizi, the only thing for it was to sit at the bar on the lower deck and wait for the day to turn. Lake Kariba stretched before them like the expanse of an ocean. Water and sky seemed welded together without a joint, and in the luminous evening, the other boats seemed to stand still in white clusters of sharp corners and varnished planes. A haze hung over the low shores, which ran out to land in vanishing flatness. The clouds were growing dark in the distance, condensing into a mournful gloom, over the largest man-made lake on earth.
Mai was their captain and host. The three of them affectionately watched her back as she stood at the rails looking out. On the whole boat, none of them had even half her authority. She was their pilot, trustworthiness personified. It was hard to remember that their work was not out there in the melting surface of the water, but behind them, within the brooding face of the dam. Between the members of the SOTP, there was, as would be expected by now, a revolutionary bond. Besides holding their efforts together through long periods of stagnation and fear since the rally, it had made them tolerant of each other’s flaws – and convictions.
Joseph had bagged the only cushion on deck and was lying under the only blanket. Jacob, eager to get started, had already taken out the box of microdrones, and was toying architecturally with them. Naila sat cross-legged, leaning against the base of the bar. Her cheeks were sunken and had a sallow tinge. Her back was so straight, she had a severe aspect, and with her arms dropped, the palms of her hands outwards, she looked like an idol. Mai, satisfied that the boat would not stir, made her way back and sat amongst them. They exchanged a few words lazily. Afterwards there was a silence and, for some reason or other, they did not speak about the next stage of the plan. Still tired and wired from the previous night’s mission, they felt meditative, fit for nothing but placid staring.
The sun set, dusk fell upon the lake, and lights began to appear inside the holds. A guard tower, a three-legged thing erect on a mud-flat, shone intermittently in the distance. Here and there, you could see the jagged outlines of bare branches emerging from the surface of the lake, the drowned trees of Gwembe Valley still reaching for the sky.
‘And this also has been a dark place.’
Joseph’s remark was not at all surprising. It was accepted in silence. None of them even took the trouble to grunt. And presently he continued, very slowly.
‘I was thinking of the olden days, when the British first came here, a hundred years ago. Imagine the feelings of a local chief – what is the Tonga word? – a muunzi, chased suddenly to the north; run over the land across the region in a hurry and put in charge of one of these settlements that the white men – a lot of useless men they must have been, too – had built for 60,000 villagers in a month or two. It must have seemed like the end of the world, the soil full of lead, wood that burns too much smoke, ground hard as a rock. Chased from the Zambezi, without stores, under orders. No riverbanks, no marshes, no trees. The Tonga became scavengers, nothing to eat for a fishing culture, nothing but dirty water to drink. No bukoko beer, no escape. Scattered, a people lost in a wilderness, like a needle in a stack of hay. Cold, swamp, storms, disease, isolation. Death skulking in the air, in the water, in the bush. People dropping like flies.
‘Oh, yes – the Rhodesians did that to the Tonga people! Did it very hastily, too, no doubt, and without thinking too much about it either, except to brag that they had pushed it through in time at least – the building of the Great Kariba Dam! And maybe they were encouraged by keeping their eyes on the chance of a promotion to the Federation government at Salisbury at some point, if they had good friends in London and survived the political situation. But what of our young Tonga, banished after training to be a prefect or a tax-gatherer or a trader even, wanting to mend his fortunes? Sent into exile, marched through the bush, put in some inland settlement. He must have felt the savage conditions, utterly savage, closing around him, squashing that yearning that stirs in the spirit, in the minds, in the hearts of all men. There was no preparation for such misery. He had to live that way without understanding why, which was just as detestable. But it had a fascination, maybe, that started to grow. The fascination of oppression – the growing regrets, the longing to escape, the powerless disgust, the surrender, the hate—’
‘Mind you,’ Naila cut in, lifting one arm from the elbow, the palm of the hand outwards, so that, with her l
egs folded under her, she had the pose of a Buddha preaching in American clothes and without a lotus-flower – ‘mind you, what ruined this country was efficiency – the British worship of efficiency. The first settlers weren’t smart or royal. They were not kings. The empire was a frikkin sham. They were colonialists, and for that you only need brute force – nothing to boast of when you have it. Power’s just an accident that depends on the weakness of others. They grabbed what they could get for the sake of it. Robbery plus violence, aggravated murder on a big scale, and bloody bazungu going at it blind – men tackling men in the dark. The conquest of Africa, which meant stealing it from those with a darker complexion and flatter noses, is an ugly thing, men. Even worse was the idea at the back of it, not curiosity or love, but just belief in an idea – something they set up, and bowed to, and sacrificed us to—’
She broke off. Flames had begun gliding on the lake: small green flames, red flames, white flames, pursuing, overtaking, joining, crossing each other, then separating slowly or hastily. It was the lights from the fishing boats that continued to pass in the deepening eve upon the lake. They looked on anxiously – had they done all that was needed to be done?
* * *
After the Kalingalinga rally, they had watched the video footage from the news drones over and over, trying to see when things went wrong, when they took that unaccountable turn for the worst. The problem was that everything went black at a certain point – the moment night fell and everyone’s Beads cut out and the macrodrone covered the crowd with its vast, vibrating shadow.
‘Why did we pose a threat?’ asked Joseph. ‘They didn’t even know what we were protesting.’
The Old Drift Page 64
