The Undying Trees grew all over Osemba. They had thick rubbery wide leaves and trunks spiked with hard thorns that had lived longer than any generation could recall. Their ancient roots were so strong and they snaked so deeply beneath Osemba that the town’s waterworks were not only built around them, they were built along them. The Undying Trees led the founders of Osemba to the only drinkable source of water for a hundred miles.
Nevertheless, the trees were strange. They vibrated so fast during thunderstorms that they made a howling sound, which permeated the city. During dry season, they produced salt on their leaves, which was used by healers to cure and treat all sorts of ailments. Life salt, it was called. The device I’d found tasted like life salt.
“It’s an edan,” my father said and I’d nodded like I’d never heard the word before. He explained to me that “edan” was a general name for devices too old for anyone to know their functions, so old that they were now more art than anything else. That’s what my father wanted it for, as a piece of art to brag about to his friends. But I insisted on keeping it for myself and because he loved me, he let me.
Now here I was walking into the desert with the Desert People. How different my life would have been if my parents had just let me dance.
Lies
By sunup, I knew the Desert People had lied.
“Can you reach your Meduse?” my grandmother asked me. We’d walked through the remainder of the night and morning. Now, it was approaching midday and we stopped until night. We stood in the shade of one of the camels, some of the others bringing out dried dates and switching on noisy capture stations to collect water. I was nearly asleep on my feet, barely able to keep my eyes open. My grandmother’s question woke me right up.
“Reach?” I asked. My eyes met Mwinyi’s, who sat a few yards away crunching on what looked like dried leaves.
“Yes, speak to it,” my grandmother said.
“I don’t know,” I muttered, looking out into the desert. “Maybe? Do I really—”
“Tell it that we will bring you back when we bring you back,” my grandmother said. “Our village is three days’ walk away.”
“What? Why didn’t you tell them this before? Why didn’t you tell me?” I’d wondered why we were still walking when they’d promised to have me back by nightfall. It had been easier to stay in denial. I groaned. I’d gone from one extreme to another, days confined on a ship, then not even twenty-four hours later, days walking through open desert.
“Sometimes it’s best to tell people what they need to hear,” my grandmother said.
“Can’t someone go back and tell them? I don’t know if I can tell Okwu anything detailed,” I breathed, my heart starting to beat the talking drum. “What if I can’t do—”
“It’s up to you, Binti,” she said, dismissively. She spoke over her shoulder as she walked to two women who’d just set out a large bowl of dried dates. “You do it or you don’t.”
My grandmother wasn’t offering me any real choice. If I didn’t come home tonight, my family would fly into panic. Again. For the second time, they would be forced to deal with my disappearance and the fact that they couldn’t do a thing about it. My mother would get terribly quiet and stop laughing, my father would work too hard in his shop, my siblings would feel an ache akin to one caused by the death of a loved one. Family. I had to reach Okwu.
However, I still didn’t know much about my okuoko. I didn’t understand how they affected me. How they connected me to the Meduse, especially Okwu. Why I could feel sensation through them. Why they writhed when I was furious. What I knew was that I could sense Okwu when I was on Math City and he was in Weapons City, which were hundreds of miles away and that I had once had a very weak but definite sense that the Meduse Chief who was planets away was checking up on me.
I could wiggle my okuoko on purpose, but I couldn’t explain to anyone how I did it. It was like moving my nostrils, I just could. In this way, while petting the shaggy fur of the camel beside me, I reached out to Okwu. I thought about it, willed it. Seconds passed. Nothing. I sighed and glanced at my grandmother, who was watching me. I looked up into the blue sky and spotted a ship from afar that was leaving the atmosphere. A mere speck. The launch port was maybe a hundred miles away. I wondered if it was Third Fish. No, I thought. Third Fish is giving birth soon.
I shook my head. Focus, I thought. Okwu. I imagined the tent my father had set up outside the Root. How it was full of the gas the Meduse breathed. Okwu was the first of its kind on Earth since the Khoush-Meduse Wars. Okwu doing whatever Okwu did in its tent when it avoided interaction with any of my family or other curious Himba. And I softly slipped my mind into a set of equations that reminded me of space and movement across small lengths of it.
Now I reached out again, my hand flat on the camel’s rump, slowly moving up and down with its steady breathing. I strained to reach Okwu and it realized this and reached for me. I felt it grasp and suddenly I felt Okwu’s mind. Sweat poured down my face and I felt all things around me tint Okwu’s light blue.
Binti, I felt Okwu say through one of my okuoko. It vibrated against my left ear. Where are you? You are far.
In the hinterland, I responded. I won’t be back tonight.
Do I need to come get you?
No.
Are you well?
Yes. The village is just far. Days away.
Okay. I will wait here.
Then just like that, Okwu let go and was gone. I came back to myself and my eyes focused on the desert before me.
“Done?” my grandmother asked. She stood behind me and I turned to her.
“Yes. It knows.”
She nodded. “Well done,” she said, holding her hands up and moving them around. She walked away.
* * *
They pitched their elaborate goatskin tents facing the desert to give everyone the semblance of privacy. Two men built a fire in the center of the tents and some of the women began to use it to cook. The soft whoosh of capture stations from behind two of the tents and their cool breath further cooled the entire camp. Soon, the large empty jug one of the camels had been carrying was rolled to the center of the tents and filled with water.
“You’ll stay with me,” my grandmother said, pointing to the tent two men had just set up for her. She handed me a cup. “Drink heavily, your body needs hydration.” Inside, the tent was spacious and there were two bedrolls on opposite sides. For “dinner” there was flat bread with honey, a delicious strong-smelling hearty soup with dried fish, more dates, and mint tea. As the sun rose, everyone quickly disappeared into his or her tents to sleep.
I was pleasantly full and tired, but too restless to sleep just yet. So I sat on my mat, staring out at the desert, my grandmother snoring across from me. Since we’d walked into the desert, the flashbacks and day terrors I was used to having had disappeared. I inhaled the dry baking air and smiled. The healing properties of the desert had always been good for me. My eye fell on Mwinyi, who’d been watering the camels and now sat out on a sand dune facing the desert. His hands were working before him. I got up and walked over to him.
He looked at me as I approached, turned back to the desert, and continued working his hands. I paused, wondering if I was interrupting. I pushed on; I had to know. Plus, I’d seen several of them talking and laughing as they moved their hands like this, so I doubted it was like prayer or meditation.
“Hi,” I said, hoping he’d stop moving his hands. He didn’t.
“You should get some sleep,” he said.
I cocked my head as I watched him. He was frowning as he pushed his blue sleeves back, held up his arms, and moved his hands in graceful swooping jabbing motions.
“I will,” I said. I paused and took a breath. I wondered what would happen if I called up a current and connected it to his moving hands. Would the zap of it make him stop? “What is this that you’re doing?” I blurted. “With your hands? Can you control it?” I waited, cringing as I bit my lip. For a moment, he on
ly worked his hands, his eyes staring into the desert.
Then he looked up at me. “I’m communicating.”
“But you do it when you . . . like now,” I said as he did a flourish with his hands. “You’re not talking to me right there. I don’t understand it, if you are. And I see people doing it while talking to other people, too.”
He looked at me for a long time and then glanced at the camp and then back at me.
“This is something your grandmother should tell you. Go ask her.”
“I’m asking you,” I said. “You all do it, so why can’t I ask anyone?”
He sighed and muttered, “Okay, sit down.”
I sat beside him, pulling my legs to my chest.
“Auntie Titi, your grandmother, is my grandfather’s best friend,” he said. “So I know all about your father and his shame. You have the same shame.”
I blinked for a moment as two separate worlds tangled in my mind. Back when I was on the ship with the Meduse, they had referred to my edan as “shame” and now here was that word again, but in a completely different context. “I don’t underst—”
“I saw how you looked at us,” he said. “Just like every Himba I have ever encountered, like we’re savages. You call us the ‘Desert People,’ mysterious uncivilized dark people of the sand.”
I wanted to deny my prejudice, but he was right.
“Despite the fact that you’re darker like us, have the crown like us, have our blood,” he said. “I wonder how surprised you were when you saw that we could speak your language as well as our three languages. ‘Desert People.’ Do you even know the actual name of our tribe?”
I shook my head, slowly.
“We’re the Enyi Zinariya,” he said. “No, I won’t translate that for you.” He looked directly at me, into my eyes, and I didn’t turn away. I wanted an answer to my initial question and I knew when I was being tested. There is nothing like being a harmonizer and looking directly into another harmonizer’s eyes. Nothing.
Everything around us dropped away and there was a sonorous melody that vibrated between my ears that was so perfectly aligned that I felt as if I were beginning to float.
“I only know what I am taught,” I whispered.
“That’s not true,” he said.
“I . . . I met one of you once,” I said.
“We know,” he said. “And was she a savage?”
“No,” I said.
“So you knew that back then.”
“Okay,” I said, shutting my eyes and rubbing my forehead. “Okay.”
He chuckled. “When we heard about what you did, we all cheered.”
“Really?”
He turned away from me, finished talking. “You should go. Get some sleep.”
“Answer my question first,” I said. “Please.”
“I did. I said we are communicating.”
“With who?”
“Everyone.”
“As you speak to me, you’re speaking to others?”
“It’s the same with your astrolabe,” he said. “Can’t you use it while you talk to other people?”
“But no one is here.”
“I was talking to my mother back in the village,” he said. “She was asking about you.”
“Oh,” I said, frowning deeply. “So you can speak like how I speak to Okwu?”
He paused and moved his hands. Then he turned to me and flatly said, “Ask your grandmother.”
I was about to get up, but then I stopped and asked, “Crown? You said I have the crown like you?”
He grasped a handful of his bushy red-brown hair, “This is the crown.” Then he laughed. “Well, you used to have it. Before the Meduse took it and replaced it with tentacles.”
I wanted to be offended but the way he said it, in such a literal way, instead pulled a hard laugh out of me and suddenly we were both giggling. When I calmed down, the fatigue of the journey hit me and I slowly got up. “What was the name of your clan again?” I asked.
“You’re Himba, I’m Enyi Zinariya,” he said.
“Enyi Zinariya,” I repeated.
He nodded, smiling. “You pronounced it well.”
“Okay,” I said and went back to my grandmother’s tent, lay down, and was asleep within seconds.
* * *
“Get up, girl.”
I opened my eyes to my grandmother’s face and the sound of the tent walls flapping from the wind. I stared into her eyes, blinking away the last remnants of sleep. When I sat up, I felt amazingly well rested. The cooling breeze of evening smelled so fresh that I flared my nostrils and inhaled deeply. I’d slept for nearly six hours.
My grandmother smiled, the strong breeze blowing her bushy hair about. “Yes, it’s a good time to move across the desert.”
The desert looked absolutely stunning, bright moonlight and the soft travel of the sand blending to make the ground look otherworldly. I could hear the others talking, laughing and moving about, and the two camels roaring as they were made to stand up. The smell of flat bread made my stomach grumble.
“Grandma,” I said. “Please, tell me why the Enyi Zinariya speak with their hands.”
Her eyes grew wide for a moment and I quickly said, “I’ve been planets away and learned about and met people from other worlds. It’s wrong that I don’t even know of my own . . . my own people.” I let out a breath as my words sunk into me. They were the truth now, a truth that had been different a day ago when I had been ashamed and quiet about my blood. Seeing the Night Masquerade had lived up to its mythology. To see it did signify immediate drastic change.
“Walk with me,” my grandmother said, then she left the tent. I followed, grabbing my satchel. As we walked away from the camp, I saw two of the men go to our tent and start breaking it down. She led me up the nearest high sand dune. When we reached the top, she turned toward the camp and sat down. I sat beside her. Below, the camp was aflutter with activity, all the tents packed up except ours. I was clearly the last to wake up.
“You’ve somehow learned the name of our clan.”
“I asked Mwinyi.”
“Having curiosity is the only way to learn,” she said. She worked her hands before her for a moment and then looked at me. “That was me communicating with your father.”
I raised my eyebrows.
“You Himba are so inward-looking,” she said. “Cocooned around that pink lake, growing your technology from knowledge harvested from deep within your genius, you girls and women dig up your red clay and hide beneath it. You’re an interesting people who have been on those lands for generations. But you’re a young people. The Enyi Zinariya are old old Africans.
“And contrary to what you all believe, we have technology that puts yours to shame and we’ve had it for centuries.” She paused, letting this news sink in. It wasn’t sinking in to me easily. All that she’d said was so contrary to all that I had been taught that I’d begun to feel a little dizzy.
“We didn’t create it, though,” she continued. “It was brought to us by the Zinariya. Those who were there documented the Zinariya times, but the files were kept on paper and paper does not last. So all we really know is what elders read and then what the elders after those elders remembered and then what the next elders remembered and so on.
“The Zinariya came to us in the desert. They were a golden people, who glinted in the sun. They were solar and had landed in Earth’s desert to rest and refuel on their way to Oomza Uni.”
I couldn’t control myself. “What?” I shrieked.
She chuckled. “Yes. We ‘Desert People’ knew of Oomza Uni before other people on Earth even had mobile phones!”
“Oh my goodness,” I whispered. I couldn’t imagine anyone on Earth back then being able to comprehend the very idea of Oomza Uni. Human beings on Earth hadn’t even had real contact with people from outside yet, and the nonhumans who had had contact with extraterrestrials never bothered to convey anything to human beings. It was centuries later and I, who had
been there, was still trying to wrap my brain around the sheer greatness of Oomza Uni.
“Our clan was even smaller and nomadic back then, and we became fast friends with the Zinariya. Though many of them left for Oomza within a few months, a few stayed with us for many years before going on to Oomza. Before leaving, they gave us something to help us communicate with them wherever they were and with each other wherever we were. They also called this ‘zinariya.’ It was a living organism tailored for our blood that every member of the clan drank into his or her system with water. Biological nanoids so tiny that they could comfortably embed themselves into our brains. Once you had them in you, it was like having an astrolabe in your nervous system. You could eat, hear, smell, see, feel, even sense it.”
How had I not been able to guess this? Not that it was due to alien technology, but that they were working with a platform. They were manipulating a virtual platform like the ones astrolabes could project! One that only the Enyi Zinariya could see and access. I felt a sting of shame as I realized why I hadn’t understood something so obvious. My own prejudice. I had been raised to view the Desert People, the Enyi Zinariya, as a primitive, savage people plagued by a genetic neurological disorder. So that’s what I saw.
My grandmother nodded, a knowing smirk on her face. “And once the zinariya was in those who drank it, the nanoids were passed on to offspring through their DNA.” She stopped talking and looked at me, waiting. Seconds passed and I frowned, anxious. I was about to ask if she’d told me all she was going to tell me when it exploded in my mind. My world went fuzzy for a moment and I was glad that I was sitting down. I shut my eyes and grasped at the first mathematical equation I could. Equations were always rotating around me like moons and this thought was soothing. Gently, I let myself tree. Then I opened my eyes, calm and balanced, and faced a very jarring bit of information.
“My father has the zinariya in him,” I said.
My grandmother was looking at me, smirking. “Yes.”