There was a slow knock at the door and I nearly jumped to the ceiling. Then I froze, listening with every part of my body. Other than the sound of my voice, I hadn’t heard a thing from them since that first twenty-four hours. The knock came again. The last knock was hard, more like a kick, but not near the bottom of the door.
“L . . . leave me alone!” I screamed, grabbing my edan. My words were met with a hard bang at the door and an angry, harsh hiss. I screeched and moved as far from the door as my room would permit, nearly falling over my largest suitcase. Think think think. No weapons, except the edan . . . and I didn’t know what made it a weapon.
Everyone was dead. I was still about forty-eight hours from safety or being blown up. They say that when faced with a fight you cannot win, you can never predict what you will do next. But I’d always known I’d fight until I was killed. It was an abomination to commit suicide or to give up your life. I was sure that I was ready. The Meduse were very intelligent; they’d find a way to kill me, despite my edan.
Nevertheless, I didn’t pick up the nearest weapon. I didn’t prepare for my last violent rabid stand. Instead, I looked my death square in the face and then . . . then I surrendered to it. I sat on my bed and waited for my death. Already, my body felt as if it were no longer mine; I’d let it go. And in that moment, deep in my submission, I laid my eyes on my edan and stared at its branching splitting dividing blue fractals.
And I saw it.
I really saw it.
And all I could do was smile and think, How did I not know?
* * *
I sat in the landing chair beside my window, hand-rolling otjize into my plaits. I looked at my reddened hands, brought them to my nose and sniffed. Oily clay that sang of sweet flowers, desert wind, and soil. Home, I thought, tears stinging my eyes. I should not have left. I picked up the edan, looking for what I’d seen. I turned the edan over and over before my eyes. The blue object whose many points I’d rubbed, pressed, stared at, and pondered for so many years.
More thumping came from the door. “Leave me alone,” I muttered weakly.
I smeared otjize onto the point of the edan with the spiral that always reminded me of a fingerprint. I rubbed it in a slow circular motion. My shoulders relaxed as I calmed. Then my starved and thirsty brain dropped into a mathematical trance like a stone dropped into deep water. And I felt the water envelop me as down down down I went.
My clouded mind cleared and everything went silent and motionless, my finger still polishing the edan. I smelled home, heard the desert wind blowing grains of sand over each other. My stomach fluttered as I dropped deeper in and my entire body felt sweet and pure and empty and light. The edan was heavy in my hands; so heavy that it would fall right through my flesh.
“Oh,” I breathed, realizing that there was now a tiny button in the center of the spiral. This was what I’d seen. It had always been there, but now it was as if it were in focus. I pushed it with my index finger. It depressed with a soft “click” and then the stone felt like warm wax and my world wavered. There was another loud knock at the door. Then through the clearest silence I’d ever experienced, so clear that the slightest sound would tear its fabric, I heard a solid oily low voice say, “Girl.”
I was catapulted out of my trance, my eyes wide, my mouth yawning in a silent scream.
“Girl,” I heard again. I hadn’t heard a human voice since the final screams of those killed by the Meduse, over seventy-two hours ago.
I looked around my room. I was alone. Slowly, I turned and looked out the window beside me. There was nothing out there for me but the blackness of space.
“Girl. You will die,” the voice said slowly. “Soon.” I heard more voices, but they were too low to understand. “Suffering is against the Way. Let us end you.”
I jumped up and the rush of blood made me nearly collapse and crash to the floor. Instead I fell painfully to my knees, still clutching the edan. There was another knock at the door. “Open this door,” the voice demanded.
My hands began to shake, but I didn’t drop my edan. It was warm and a brilliant blue light was glowing from within it now. A current was running through it so steadily that it made the muscles of my hand constrict. I couldn’t let go of it if I tried.
“I will not,” I said, through clenched teeth. “Rather die in here, on my terms.”
The knocking stopped. Then I heard several things at once. Scuffling at the door, not toward it, but away. Terrified moaning and wailing. More voices. Several of them.
“This is evil!”
“It carries shame,” another voice said. This was the first voice I heard that sounded high-pitched, almost female. “The shame she carries allows her to mimic speech.”
“No. It has to have sense for that,” another voice said.
“Evil! Let me deactivate the door and kill it.”
“Okwu, you will die if you . . .”
“I will kill it!” the one called Okwu growled. “Death will be my honor! We’re too close now, we can’t have . . .”
“Me!” I shouted suddenly. “O . . . Okwu!” Calling its name, addressing it so directly sounded strange on my lips. I pushed on. “Okwu, why don’t you talk to me?”
I looked at my cramped hands. From within it, from my edan, possibly the strongest current I’d ever produced streamed in jagged connected bright blue branches. It slowly etched and lurched through the closed door, a line of connected bright blue treelike branches that shifted in shape but never broke their connection. The current was touching the Meduse. Connecting them to me. And though I’d created it, I couldn’t control it now. I wanted to scream, revolted. But I had to save my life first. “I am speaking to you!” I said. “Me!”
Silence.
I slowly stood up, my heart pounding. I stumbled to the shut door on aching trembling legs. The door’s organic steel was so thin, but one of the strongest substances on my planet. Where the current touched it, tiny green leaves unfurled. I touched them, focusing on the leaves and not the fact that the door was covered with a sheet of gold, a super communication conducter. Nor the fact of the Meduse just beyond my door.
I heard a rustle and I used all my strength not to scuttle back. I flared my nostrils as I grasped the edan. The weight of my hair on my shoulders was assuring, my hair was heavy with otjize, and this was good luck and the strength of my people, even if my people were far far away.
The loud bang of something hard and powerful hitting the door made me yelp. I stayed where I was. “Evil thing,” I heard the one called Okwu say. Of all the voices, that one I could recognize. It was the angriest and scariest. The voice sounded spoken, not transmitted in my mind. I could hear the vibration of the “v” in “evil” and the hard breathy “th” in “thing.” Did they have mouths?
“I’m not evil,” I said.
I heard whispering and rustling behind the door. Then the more female voice said, “Open this door.”
“No!”
They muttered among themselves. Minutes passed. I sunk to the floor, leaning against the door. The blue current sunk with me, streaming through the door at my shoulder; more green leaves bloomed there, some fell down my shoulder onto my lap. I leaned my head against the door and stared down at them. Green tiny leaves of green tiny life when I was so close to death. I giggled and my empty belly rumbled and my sore abdominal muscles ached.
Then, quietly, calmly, “You are understanding us?” this was the growling voice that had been calling me evil. Okwu.
“Yes,” I said.
“Humans only understand violence.”
I closed my eyes and felt my weak body relax. I sighed and said, “The only thing I have killed are small animals for food, and only with swift grace and after prayer and thanking the beast for its sacrifice.” I was exhausted.
“I do not believe you.”
“Just as I do not believe you will not kill me if I open the door. All you do is kill.” I opened my eyes. Energy that I didn’t know I still had rippl
ed through me and I was so angry that I couldn’t catch my breath. “Like . . . like you . . . killed my friends!” I coughed and slumped down, weakly. “My friends,” I whispered, tears welling in my eyes. “Oooh, my friends!”
“Humans must be killed before they kill us,” the voice said.
“You’re all stupid,” I spat, wiping my tears as they kept coming. I sobbed hard and then took a deep breath, trying to pull it together. I exhaled loudly, snot flying from my nose. As I wiped my face with my arm, there were more whispers. Then the higher pitched voice spoke.
“What is this blue ghost you have sent to help us communicate?”
“I don’t know,” I said, sniffing. I got up and walked to my bed. Moving away from the door instantly made me feel better. The blue current extended with me.
“Why do we understand you?” Okwu asked. I could still hear its voice perfectly from where I was.
“I . . . I don’t know,” I said, sitting on my bed and then lying back.
“No Meduse has ever spoken to a human . . . except long ago.”
“I don’t care,” I grunted.
“Open the door. We won’t harm you.”
“No.”
There was a long pause. So long that I must have fallen asleep. I was awakened by a sucking sound. At first I paid no mind to it, taking the moment to wipe off the caked snot on my face with my arm. The ship made all sorts of sounds, even before the Meduse attacked. It was a living thing and like any beast, its bowels gurgled and quaked every so often. Then I sat up straight as the sucking sound grew louder. The door trembled. It buckled a bit and then completely crumpled, the gold plating on the outside now visible. The stale air of my room whooshed out into the hallway and suddenly the air cooled and smelled fresher.
There stood the Meduse. I could not tell how many of them, for they were transparent and when they stood together, all I could see were a tangle of translucent tentacles and undulating domes. I clutched the edan to my chest as I pressed myself on the other side of the room, against the window.
It happened fast like the desert wolves who attack travelers at night back home. One of the Meduse shot toward me. I watched it come. I saw my parents, sisters, brothers, aunts, and uncles, all gathered at a remembrance for me—full of pain and loss. I saw my spirit break from my body and return to my planet, to the desert, where I would tell stories to the sand people.
Time must have slowed down because the Meduse was motionless, yet suddenly it was hovering over me, its tentacles hanging an inch from my head. I gasped, bracing myself for pain and then death. Its pink withered tentacle brushed my arm firmly enough to rub off some of the otjize there. Soft, I thought. Smooth.
There it was. So close now. White like the ice I’d only seen in pictures and entertainment streams, its stinger was longer than my leg. I stared at it, jutting from its bundle of tentacles. It crackled and dried, wisps of white mist wafting from it. Inches from my chest. Now it went from white to a dull light-gray. I looked down at my cramped hands, the edan between them. The current flowing from it washed over the Meduse and extended beyond it. Then I looked up at the Meduse and grinned. “I hope it hurts,” I whispered.
The Meduse’s tentacles shuddered and it began to back away. I could see its pink deformed tentacle, part of it smeared red with my otjize.
“You are the foundation of evil,” it said. It was the one called Okwu. I nearly laughed. Why did this one hate me so strongly?
“She still holds the shame,” I heard one say from near the door.
Okwu began to recover as it moved away from me. Quickly, it left with the others.
* * *
Ten hours passed.
I had no food left. No water. I packed and repacked my things. Keeping busy staved off the dehydration and hunger a bit, though my constant need to urinate kept reminding me of my predicament. And movement was tricky because the edan’s current still wouldn’t release my hands’ muscles, but I managed. I tried not to indulge in my fear of the Meduse finding a way to get the ship to stop producing and circulating air and maintaining its internal pressure, or just coming back and killing me.
When I wasn’t packing and repacking, I was staring at my edan, studying it; the patterns on it now glowed with the current. I needed to know how it was allowing me to communicate. I tried different soft equations on it and received no response. After a while, when not even hard equations affected it, I lay back on my bed and let myself tree. This was my state of mind when the Meduse came in.
“What is that?”
I screamed. I’d been gazing out the window, so I heard the Meduse before I saw it.
“What?” I shrieked, breathless. “I . . . what is what?”
Okwu, the one who’d tried to kill me. Contrary to how it had looked when it left, it was very much alive, though I could not see its stinger.
“What is the substance on your skin?” it asked firmly. “None of the other humans have it.”
“Of course they don’t,” I snapped. “It is otjize, only my people wear it and I am the only one of my people on the ship. I’m not Khoush.”
“What is it?” it asked, remaining in the doorway.
“Why?”
It moved into my room and I held up the edan and quickly said, “Mostly . . . mostly clay and oil from my homeland. Our land is desert, but we live in the region where there is sacred red clay.”
“Why do you spread it on your skins?”
“Because my people are sons and daughters of the soil,” I said. “And . . . and it’s beautiful.”
It paused for a long moment and I just stared at it. Really looking at the thing. It moved as if it had a front and a back. And though it seemed to be fully transparent, I could not see its solid white stinger within the drapes of hanging tentacles. Whether it was thinking about what I’d said or considering how best to kill me, I didn’t know. But moments later, it turned and left. And it was only after several minutes, when my heart rate slowed, that I realized something odd. Its withered tentacle didn’t look as withered. Where it had been curled up tightly into itself, now it was merely bent.
* * *
It came back fifteen minutes later. And immediately, I looked to make sure I’d seen what I knew I’d seen. And there it was, pink and not so curled up. That tentacle had been different when Okwu had accidently touched me and rubbed off my otjize.
“Give me some of it,” it said, gliding into my room.
“I don’t have any more!” I said, panicking. I only had one large jar of otjize, the most I’d ever made in one batch. It was enough to last me until I could find red clay on Oomza Uni and make more. And even then, I wasn’t sure if I’d find the right kind of clay. It was another planet. Maybe it wouldn’t have clay at all.
In all my preparation, the one thing I didn’t take enough time to do was research the Oomza Uni planet itself, so focused I was on just getting there. All I knew was that though it was much smaller than earth, it had a similar atmosphere and I wouldn’t have to wear a special suit or adaptive lungs or anything like that. But its surface could easily be made of something my skin couldn’t tolerate. I couldn’t give all my otjize to this Meduse; this was my culture.
“The chief knows of your people, you have much with you.”
“If your chief knows my people, then he will have told you that taking it from me is like taking my soul,” I said, my voice cracking. My jar was under my bed. I held up my edan.
But Okwu didn’t leave or approach. Its curled pink tentacle twitched.
I decided to take a chance. “It helped you, didn’t it? Your tentacle.”
It blew out a great puff of its gas, sucked it in and left.
It returned five minutes later with five others.
“What is that object made of?” Okwu asked, the others standing silently behind it.
I was still on my bed and I pushed my legs under the covers. “I don’t know. But a desert woman once said it was made from something called ‘god stone.’ My father s
aid there is no such . . .”
“It is shame,” it insisted.
None of them moved to enter my room. Three of them made loud puffing sounds as they let out the reeking gasses they inhaled in order to breathe.
“There is nothing shameful about an object that keeps me alive,” I said.
“It poisons Meduse,” one of the others said.
“Only if you get too close to me,” I said, looking straight at it. “Only if you try and kill me.”
Pause.
“How are you communicating with us?”
“I don’t know, Okwu.” I spoke its name as if I owned it.
“What are you called?”
I sat up straight, ignoring the fatigue trying to pull my bones to the bed. “I am Binti Ekeopara Zuzu Dambu Kaipka of Namib.” I considered speaking its single name to reflect its cultural simplicity compared to mine, but my strength and bravado were already waning.
Okwu moved forward and I held up the edan. “Stay back! You know what it’ll do!” I said. However, it did not try to attack me again, though it didn’t start to shrivel up as it approached, either. It stopped feet away, beside the metal table jutting from the wall carrying my open suitcase and one of the containers of water.
“What do you need?” it flatly asked.
I stared, weighing my options. I didn’t have any. “Water, food,” I said.
Before I could say more, it left. I leaned against the window and tried not to look outside into the blackness. Feet away from me, the door was crushed to the side, the path of my fate was no longer mine. I lay back and fell into the deepest sleep I’d had since the ship left Earth.
* * *
The faint smell of smoke woke me up. There was a plate on my bed, right before my nose. On it was a small slab of smoked fish. Beside it was a bowl of water.
I sat up, still tightly grasping the edan. I leaned forward, and sucked up as much water from the bowl as I could. Then, still holding the edan, I pressed my forearms together and worked the food onto them. I brought the fish up, bent forward and took a bite of it. Smoky salty goodness burst across my taste buds. The chefs on the ship fed these fish well and allowed them to grow strong and mate copiously. Then they lulled the fish into a sleep that the fish never woke from and slow cooked their flesh long enough for flavor and short enough to maintain texture. I’d asked the chefs about their process as any good Himba would before eating it. The chefs were all Khoush, and Khoush did not normally perform what they called “superstitious ritual.” But these chefs were Oomza Uni students and they said they did, even lulling the fish to sleep in a similar way. Again, I’d been assured that I was heading in the right direction.