Muezzinland (12 page)
"I don't deny you helped us," Nshalla said, "but we owe you nothing."
Fretting, Moustapha turned to Gmoulaye. "Will you follow your friend? Is she the leader, and you the follower?"
Gmoulaye shrugged. "I'm the assistant," she said.
Moustapha sighed and walked away, allowing Nshalla to turn to Gmoulaye. "I've a secret," she said.
Gmoulaye grimaced. "I am not sure I want to hear it."
Irritated, Nshalla went to her pack and unrolled her bedroll. "Don't, then," she said, lying on her side. She slept fitfully that night.
Next morning, grumpy and already feeling the heat of the sun, Nshalla prepared her pack for departure. Knowing they were taking a risk she remained silent, communicating with Gmoulaye only in brief, meaningful glances. Gmoulaye seemed resigned to the affair.
But Moustapha had a surprise for them. He persuaded them to walk into the centre of the oasis after they had filled their waterskins at the well. "I want you to meet somebody," he said.
They walked between tiny fields of maize, skirting olive groves and lime bushes. At a central grove, Arabian lemon squash was being drunk by two gandurah-clad men sitting on a log. Moustapha stopped in front of them and stood between Nshalla and Gmoulaye, taking their hands in his. The men looked up. Through the slits in their headscarves Nshalla could see cold eyes.
"Do you know these men?" Moustapha asked.
Nshalla shook her head. Some inner sense was foretelling trouble, and she squirmed in Moustapha's grip.
One of the men stood and held up a piece of white polythene. "Do you know this man?" he asked. As he said this, an image flashed upon the polythene: Msavitar. His blood-spattered face.
Nshalla jumped, then realised that she had advertised her guilt. Quick as thought she winced and looked away, saying, "Ugh, that's horrible! Did you have to shock us like that?"
"You know who this is, I believe."
Moustapha's grip was now very tight. "Certainly not," Nshalla said. "Do we, Gmoulaye?"
"I have never seen him before."
Casually, the man sipped the rest of his lemon drink, smacking his lips, then smiling, enjoying his minute of triumph. "Unfortunately," he said, "you were seen entering Timbuktu by one of our guards. We are from Timbuktu, and we think we know why you left so abruptly."
Moustapha, who had been trembling for some time, could not restrain himself. "I found them!" he said. "I kept them here at the oasis, and I claim the reward."
Nshalla quailed. "Reward?"
Moustapha turned and grinned. "Much money!"
The game was up. Nshalla flung back her arms and ran a few steps backwards, calling, "Gmoulaye! Gmoulaye!"
One of the men grabbed Moustapha and held him, though he screamed and wriggled, while the other took from beneath his gandurah a narrow nosed rifle. Nshalla saw this and desperately looked for cover.
She did not need to. With the sound of a desert whirlwind and a smell of ozone a silvery tunnel manifested in the desert air, and from its luminous centre two dancing figures emerged. One was Assane.
"Down the tunnel," he called. "Quickly."
"You'll die in the desert!" Moustapha shouted. His voice warbled and fizzed, so that it was hard to understand. "You'll die! Come back. Murderers!"
Nshalla grabbed Gmoulaye's arm. Looking back, she saw the three men weirdly distorted, as if by layers of celophane, saw too that the oasis had shrunk, as if seen through a lens. The leader was trying to shoot them, but his darts followed spiral paths, then fell spluttering to the sand. Nshalla understood that in reality they followed straight line trajectories; everybody's perceptions were being altered by the aether. She turned and ran, careering down the tunnel until the oasis behind her was a green pinprick at the end of a vast mirror, and she stepped out at the end, as if off a step into the hot desert. Instantaneously all was real. All was normal. The oasis was a few hundred metres behind her. Gmoulaye stood at her side.
Assane hovered up ahead. "Come along," he said. "I'll guide you away from the pursuit."
"How did you do that?" Nshalla asked.
Assane answered without looking around, and symbols rushed out of his mouth and past his head, as if blown by some abstract wind caused by his motion. "We superimposed a Mandelbrot Set upon the aether so that they could not hit you with missiles. You were at the focus of the equation, which is why you saw a tunnel around which there was chaotic distortion. Now hurry."
They ran on. Luckily, Moustapha had detained them after they had packed, so they had water, food, and their equipment. But Sidi Maktar was sixty kilometres away. There, they would have to find water.
After a fifteen minute run Assane indicated low cliffs over the lip of a hill. "Go there and hide amongst the boulders," he said. "My friends and I have to mislead the pursuit."
He vanished. There was a faint
pop.
While hiding at the cliffs, Gmoulaye confronted Nshalla. "Just who was that?"
Nshalla explained the whole story, concluding, "He's an enigma to me, but he's saved us and he knows alot."
Gmoulaye was unconvinced. "Once, Msavitar saved us—the rat."
"Assane is different."
"I am!"
He was at their side. "Gmoulaye, I am Assane Atangana and I am pleased to meet you. Your great trek has caused much interest in the virtual community."
Nshalla told Assane, "I've just explained about my mother."
Assane nodded, as if accepting a bitter bargain. "Everything I told you is true," he said. "Would that it were simpler. But it is complex." He shrugged. "Such is life."
Gmoulaye, as was her wont, expressed her cynicism. "You sound like my father. Yet you are unreal. A ghost." She turned away, and said, "Do not look at me, do not steal my soul. I have powerful magic against evil spirits."
Loftily Assane replied, "I am not evil."
Nshalla thought she caught a chink in his urbanity. "Are you a force for good? And why are you always dancing?"
"Virtual people can only exist in places where there are few people and few aether aerials. There are other virtual communities in the Kalahari, in Antarctica, and in the Gobi Desert. But here, we evolved in an Aphrican environment. We gained our independence, our identity, by feeling what lay around us. We struggle to create our communal identity." He paused for a moment, and Nshalla saw a curious gleam in his eyes, such as she had seen in the eyes of shamen in Ghana. Then he said, as if hardly aware of their existence, "Soon, will we find our own gods at last?"
There was silence for a few minutes, and Nshalla considered the words Mnada had uttered in Timbuktu concerning the arrival of the gods. Similar words. Then Assane roused himself, and said, "The pursuit has gone west. Go north now, until sunset. At dusk I will return."
So they walked for three hours until the sun's heat was too great. Sheltering against the bole of a dead tree they drank and ate. For two hours they rested, fatigued by the heat, watching dust storms and shimmering mirages, before carrying on. As the sun set Assane guided them to an outcrop of sandstone where they made camp. There was enough dead wood about to cook, but not enough for heat.
That night, on watch, Nshalla took her transputer and searched its data base for information on dancing gods. She found nothing—at least, nothing of immediate relevance. An electronic ripple from the search engine brought up information about one of the local religions, that of the Songhai of Eastern Mali, whose god Sajara, the Rainbow-god, had the appearance of a multi-coloured snake and who spoke to his believers through the medium of dancing priests. Reminded of the first appearance of Assane, and of Mnada's and Assane's words concerning the arrival of gods, Nshalla felt she was at last on to something. But what?
There were other problems to consider. The appearance of the two men from Timbuktu and their escape from custody brought home to Nshalla the depth of her crime. It took fear to make her realise what she had done. Up to now she had been in shock, mentally blanking out her deed, ignoring too the consequences, but now that those consequences had caught up with her she felt naked, and lost in the world.
In particular she could not demonise Msavitar in order to justify her deed. Half of her wanted to be like Gmoulaye, who called him a rat and spoke of him as if he really was one, but the truth percolated through her thoughts, and she remembered that he had acted on their behalf, even if self-interest was his initial motivation. Over and over she replayed in her mind what he had said. Had he really meant to kill her? She could not tell. She wanted to believe that he had, as Gmoulaye so obviously did, but she remembered the fear in his face when she turned the tables and in her panicky fury held the knife to his throat. Defenceless, a coward, he had died. She wondered if there would ever be any justification for her act.
So the night passed in contemplation.
Northward they stumbled, across the stony reg desert of Mali's outreaches. Assane appeared at dawn and dusk like the spirit of a whirlwind. Gmoulaye, who could not overcome her tribal attitude to aetherial creatures, would not speak to him, though she would look at him as long as she held her amulets up for him to see; this afforded her protection. On the second night out from Timbuktu she made a charm from pieces of twig and a skin shrugged off by some snake of the desert, tying the components together and soaking them with her saliva and a drop of blood. After that, she seemed happier in Assane's presence.
Assane directed them. Sidi Maktar, he said, was twenty kilometres north. They would make it in one day. This was just as well, for their waterskins were becoming empty. Nshalla made a mental note to buy more skins at Araouane. If they reached that settlement.
As the sun fell to their left they saw ahead a green smudge against the yellow. Assane told them it was the oasis. It looked normal enough, quiet, deserted in fact, for their were no camels or even tracks in the sand to show where any had walked. Even the desert was silent.
Nshalla questioned Assane. "How far away is Mnada?"
"She is close," he assured them. "Perhaps a day away. Her aether aura is terribly distorted and we cannot map her. But keep going. You must find her."
Chapter 10
Towards dawn, as Nshalla lay half awake watching the desert from the edge of Sidi Maktar Oasis, she noticed a faint mist rising off the surface of the nearest pool. At first she thought nothing of it, since the air was not warm, and she knew that water behaved oddly when it was cold. But the mist crept in sinuous loops out of the oasis into the desert, a slinky, suspicious entity. She followed, watching from behind a palm as the thing paused, stopped, then curled into itself to become an orb. She noticed that it had enveloped an aether aerial shaped like a cactus.
Alert for danger, she approached. It was like stalking a fox or some other wary beast of the desert.
Then the mist pounced. In seconds she was smothered. She tried to run away, but it stuck to her like the candyfloss she had eaten as a child. She screamed for help, but the glutinous cloud ate her words.
Then it was gone. She stood panting on top of the hill beside the oasis. It was over. But she caught a glimpse of human eyes glowing in the air as the mist dissipated, and she wondered why they struck a chord in her memory.
She began to run back to the oasis. She paused. Something was not quite right with her body. It felt disconnected, loose; different. There was something at her thigh. She looked under her gandurah to see three black objects between her legs. Perplexed moments passed, and then she realised she was a man.
Panicking, she tore off her gandurah and the wrap underneath. Half naked, she tried to run away from herself. Her clothes lay discarded like an earlier, dead Nshalla. Again she looked at her groin, and still the things were there.
Her feelings seethed as with trembling hands she tried to slough off her own skin, pushing at her thighs, now so muscular, trying to pull off the hairs on her arms. She wiped her mouth and stubble grazed her skin. Her breasts were gone. Her nipples were shrunken and numb. Her belly was repulsively muscled.
She fell to her knees on the sand, forcing herself to become calm, asking herself over and over what had happened, trying to convince herself that she was a woman.
She raced over to her clothes and put them on, so she could not see the most obscene of the evidence. She made a thong of her wrap so her new organs would not flop against her thigh and remind her of their existence. She had to return to her old self.
This was an aether trick. If the aether did one thing to human minds it was express and manipulate identity. Somebody nearby was manipulating the aether so her perceptions were altered. Surely not Gmoulaye. Assane? No, she would have recognised his face in the fading mist.
She was a woman. She was a
woman.
She must keep her thoughts off manhood. Off the idea of intimacy with a woman… the idea filled her with revulsion.
Groaning, she sank again to the sand, trying to make herself small, as small as possible, so that her old self would be squeezed into existence and the new growths squeezed out. She tried to push herself into the old mould.
Shape was a manifestation of identity. When she was young, she appeared tubby. Round. This aetherial image expressed the truth about her feelings for herself, feelings created by her mother's lack of interest in her and by her own envy of Mnada, her marvellous sister. She transformed herself into something that, she felt, was unloveable. Only when her nanny brought everlasting, unconditional love did the old, insecure Nshalla turn into a slimmer person. It took a wise woman to love through that barrier. Thanks to that nanny, Nshalla developed inner certainty, forged in part from a stable relationship, in part from her own aptitudes, a certainty that made her realise that fatness or slimness were not important.
As she twisted on the moonlit sand she remembered all these things, and tried to integrate them into her thoughts. Somehow she had to fight the aether. Truth could smash illusion. The belief necessary to do this could only be founded upon truth.
And she knew one thing. She could only live with being a man if she never again saw another human being, if she drifted alone through the desert, eating dates and oranges and drinking clear water from oases, walking at night, sleeping during the day buried underground like a sand mole. Yet her identity was forged from innumerable human contacts. She was a woman, biologically, yes, but more importantly, socially.
Immediately she ranged her thoughts over the things women could do that men could not. Bitterly, she considered the many social restrictions, before visualising childbirth in her mind's eye. She glanced over the sand to the oasis. Like a distant log, lit red by embers, Gmoulaye lay sleeping by the fire.
What to do? She had to find the answer from within herself.
Then find out who was the enemy…
Nshalla sped over the hill and fell in sensuous abandon upon pure sand. Remembering what she had learned about herself in earlier years, she began a ritual, guessing it, imagining it, consolidating what she felt about herself without touching her new male self, so that all which was female and within her came to the surface like water from a natural spring, and the male dross was washed away. The sand became warm. When she lay face down it enveloped her, and she seemed to sink into its depths.
Without her noticing, she changed. The transmutation was made. Her inner self won through because she experienced the truth about herself, that she was female and human at the same time. Gasping, she relaxed.
A tremendous triumph surged through her. Skipping and shouting, she raced back to the oasis. She did not care that Gmoulaye woke, face puzzled, then irritated, asking what was going on. Nshalla expressed her delight at victory, then collapsed exhausted at Gmoulaye's side, and explained.
Assane unexpectedly joined them as she spoke. "I did not dare interrupt," he said, "though I saw the rogue entity entice you. I was not quick enough."
"Who was the face?"
"A peculiar man with shining black eyes."
Nshalla said, "We've got to find out who, because whoever he is, he's nearby." She gazed at the empty desert. "Yet we're alone."
"To kill a body is easy," Gmoulaye remarked, "but to kill a spirit is difficult."
"Do you mean I was attacked by an aether entity?"
"Possibly," Gmoulaye answered, "but almost certainly with a physical base near here." She too paused, then added, "And yet we are alone."
Assane said, "He attacked you culturally through the aether, riding a local Tuareg myth like an Arab rides a horse. He manifested as Maghegh, a jinn of the Sahara who had seven sons. Maghegh has the power to travel like the Tuareg using the stars as a guide, to appear at dawn as if out of the nocturnal desert, and to send people mad. He is most famous for impregnating seven virgins who selfishly lay to sleep by an oasis pool, despite the wise words of their marabout protector. That was why you were attacked through gender."
"He tried to send me mad by changing my perception of myself."
"Yes. It was a particularly clever ruse, since the cultural resonance of the Tuareg myth made him even stronger. Yet it was by reinforcing your female identity that you defeated him. He hoped your inner self would be insecure, uncertain, selfish. It obviously is not."
Nshalla smiled, pleased with herself despite the trauma. "I'm glad that's true."
Assane mused on. "This man assumed you would be like him, that is, selfish and uncertain. It sounds as if he is something of a villain. Tell me, do you have any aetherial object with you that you acquired in Timbuktu?"
"Just the two transputers," Nshalla answered.
Assane considered this reply for some minutes, then said, "They may be infected with an ecology of viruses responding to local myths. You must disinfect them. I will bring the appropriate application programme."
This they agreed to.
"We must reduce the distance between yourselves and Mnada," Assane concluded, "who is perhaps already in Araouane. That settlement is two days away. If Mnada goes north beyond Bouraga Oasis, a day north of Araouane, we shall have a trackless chase across the desert on our hands. It's time to hurry!"
Dawn was breaking. They packed as quickly as they could, then, taking directions from Assane, began to trek north. Soon the gravel reg had changed to dunes. Behind them, Assane danced off into invisibility.
"We must not travel by night, even if we are in a hurry," Gmoulaye said. "The Tuareg are famed for their nocturnal skill. It is what the name means."
"We shan't," Nshalla said. "Tonight we'll rest up and keep close to the fire. Whatever happens, I won't leave it."
"I hope that is a promise."
"It is."
They walked on. At noon, while they rested and ate amidst a grove of dead trees, Assane appeared to redirect them, for they had strayed to the west. He reported, "Mnada is haunting the edge of Araouane. If you can reach her before she leaves, she may listen to you. Then we may learn some interesting things."
"What is she doing?"
"Stealing food and water, haunting the locals, changing from ghost to giantess to robber bandit."
After Assane had gone, Gmoulaye asked Nshalla, "What do you think this shapeshifting means?"
"I'm sure Mnada is undergoing a traumatic identity crisis. All the repressed hopes and dreams and ambitions, all the desires, they're all coming out of her subconscious like a geyser and being transmitted by the aether. She's acting out everything that mother never let her be. She was restricted from the day she was born. No human being can stand that. In one sense it's positive, because she's trying to find out what she could be—who she is. But I learned alot when I was younger. People like that are usually too unstable to become sane. They're too damaged." She thought back to the brief conversation in Timbuktu, then concluded, "I suppose I must have sparked it off when I met her."
Gmoulaye remained silent, and Nshalla knew she was thinking of how far they had come. She hugged Gmoulaye, and said, "I'm glad I brought you. You give me hope."
Gmoulaye smiled at this spontaneous outburst. "I can't say I am enjoying myself, but…"
They trudged on. Evening arrived and they camped on open dunes, there being no other shelter. The night was quiet. In the morning Assane danced out of the sunrise and pointed them in the correct direction. But he seemed uncertain.
Nshalla guessed why. "Has Mnada left Araouane?"
"We don't know exactly. She has not stirred the aether recently. Keep going, however. You will make Araouane by sunset."
He hesitated. "Yes?" Nshalla said.
"Do not forget that the virtual community cannot yet appear in public places. Stay out of the way of the locals."
He rode off. "Did you hear what he said?" Nshalla asked.
Gmoulaye frowned.
Nshalla looked around, as if for a spy. She was looking for Assane, but he had vanished. "From now on," she told Gmoulaye, "we speak only in Gan. No lapsing into New-Oriental."
Gmoulaye nodded like a sage. "So what was it that he said?"
"He said they can't
yet
appear in public. The hawatif are up to something. They want to appear in public places. Perhaps they do want to become real people and worship these gods we keep hearing about." She considered this possibility. "Perhaps that's the cause of the struggle between my mother and the Aetherium. Nobody would want virtual people becoming powerful, nor would they want gods to manifest. Think how much the virtual people could control. The aether is global."
"But what can we do?"
"There are two keys to all this. We've got to find Mnada. She must know something. This urge to find Muezzinland
must
mean something."
Gmoulaye nodded. "And the other key is the hawatif and their gods."
They hurried on. Whirlwinds loosed by some larger duststorm sent sand into their eyes and mouths, making their teeth grate. The sand slipped and sank under their feet as they walked. There were no outcrops of rock in sight, but the dunes rose and fell in a greater pattern, and they came across sebkha flats, salty crystalline in the sun where some seasonal river had flowed to its end. In places, lines of stringy grass grew, a tussock every few metres, but, apart from animal tracks, there was no other sign of life.
Camel tracks and discarded drink cans began to appear as the afternoon waned. Soon they saw ahead a cluster of brown Tuareg tents, set around more permanent buildings of stone and brick. Date palms grew amidst other vegetation, but there was no open water. This was a settlement founded on artesian wells.
Wrapping themselves well to avoid attention, they entered Araouane. Nshalla realised it was a place of the past when she saw a sign
Araouane
in both pictsym and Arabic script. There were no streets as such, just wide lanes of sand between the buildings and the clusters of tents set around huge wellheads of stone. The place had a shanty feel. It looked poverty stricken, deteriorated, but most of all it looked deserted. Nshalla, not knowing where they could go—two women travelling alone—stood awhile in thought.
This was the last Tuareg stronghold, for Bouraga Oasis was Berber occupied. Nshalla wondered if she could trade on her link with Moustapha Cisse. Perhaps he had come here.
In the centre of town stood a building on which a plastic pictsym sigil had been glued, shaped as an onion. This sigil meant 'mosque.' At the door a youth sat.
"Is there a clerk with whom we could speak?" Nshalla asked.
"Take your shoes off," he replied in faultless New-Oriental.
They were led into the cool interior of the building. Fans rotated in the roof. At a desk sat a snoozing man dressed in long grey robes and a white skull-cap. Evening prayers were beginning inside the mosque.
Nshalla said, "Excuse me?"
He woke. "Yes?"
Nshalla bowed as respectfully as she could, and asked, "Is the marabout Moustapha Cisse known to you?"
He seemed startled. "Yes," he eventually replied. "But who are you?"
"We are wards of his, crossing the Sahara. At Touerat Oasis he had to turn back to Timbuktu. We need shelter for the night."
The man nodded. "I'll call my wife," he said, clearly wanting nothing to do with them. Tapping and then speaking into the transputer that lay on his desk, he made arrangements. Then he said, "Ahmed H'mari will take you to my home."