Muezzinland (28 page)
She woke at the same time as Mnada. As if by telepathy they sat up and looked at one another.
"I just had a really vivid dream," Mnada said.
Nshalla shuddered from the memory of the repulsive face. "Me too. What did you dream?"
"There was this torch on the floor, and I played with it to make it work. A man popped out—"
"Yellow skinned?"
"Yes." Mnada frowned, then shivered. "I don't like this."
"What did the man say?"
"He said, 'I am here, mistress, I am here. What is your desire?'"
Nshalla gasped. "But that's what he said to me. Did he have a twinkling suit on, and did he smell of spearmint?"
"Yes."
Nshalla gestured with her hands as she continued, "And he was this big, and you looked at him front on, slightly from the right?"
"Yes!"
"And it was dark, but his teeth shone?"
Mnada laughed. "We've had exactly the same dream…"
Nshalla urged her sister to continue. "What was your first wish?"
"Well, I looked down at you, and you looked so peaceful, and innocent, that I focussed on you. You've been so good to me. It's been a nightmare—"
"Not all of it."
Mnada nodded. "I wished for you to be less frightened of this terrible world, and to be happier. That was it. I wanted you to find happiness."
Not
quite
the same dream, then. Nshalla nodded.
Mnada continued, looking bashful, "Then I asked that you be thinner, only a little—and more… even more beautiful than you are already."
Nshalla frowned. "I'm not fat."
Mnada shrugged.
"And did you sit up at the very end, and look down on me?"
"No. What did you wish for me?"
Nshalla felt embarrassed. Argument was not what she wanted. "I wished for a bit more meat on your bones."
"You're saying I'm a scarecrow?"
"You've been thinned by travel."
Mnada sat back, annoyed. "I have not. I haven't changed."
Nshalla considered what she had heard. Somehow their subconscious minds had melded during sleep and two dreams had become one. The symbolism was not lost on her, and she understood already that the differences were clues to how they perceived one another. And there was the matter of the final difference:
a grotesque face, green, twisted, with hair bleached to white.
Now it was proven beyond doubt. Mnada was not human. Something inside her was inhuman.
Nshalla studied the land below her. Gods could detect dreams…
She hugged Mnada, feeling her sister relax. "It was only a dream. There's some truth in it, I expect, but…"
Mnada said, "The third wish. I wished it all for you. I asked that you find your place. Your home."
The sound of the word 'home' brought tears to Nshalla's face, immediate, big salty tears. "How can I find my home," she whispered, "when I hate the palace, hate Accra? I'm a nomad, and nomads don't have a home."
"You
do,
" Mnada insisted. "You
will
find it."
Gmoulaye had been listening with interest to the conversation, but now she sat alert, looking out over the edge of the basket. "What is that noise?" she asked.
Nshalla listened. A hum—distant, thrumming. It became louder. She knew what it was. "An aeroplane," she said. She hesitated. "Probably making for Marrakech."
The noise increased, and then Gmoulaye pointed towards the sun. "There it is!"
It was making directly for them. In just seconds, before Nshalla had even grasped that it might be aggressive, she saw two white flashes, and then the dirigible material ripped and they were falling to earth. Ten seconds later they were crashing through trees, then hitting the ground.
No bones broke, but they were all bruised. A hundred metres away the plane landed, expanding its wings to twice their length and cupping them, then, with its engine wheezing, landing on chicken feet of steel. The plane bounced like an old taxi as its suspension absorbed the shock, then hunched itself up into standby mode with a barrage of cracking and hissing.
A door opened and a figure emerged, dressed in a white one-piece suit, wearing a crash helmet.
Nshalla swallowed. She had an idea who this might be.
Aphrica 24-05-2130
For some days the Empress contemplated the unfortunate sequence of events that had led to her present position, without her prime advisor, missing both daughters, lacking control of the greatest technological creation of the age, Muezzinland. But she remained the undeclared leader of the Aetherium. It was not so far fetched to claim the directorship of the globe. On the final day of her period of thought, she accepted that she would have to attempt the one thing she had vowed never to do; leave Ghana, go north, and try to rescue the situation.
Ghana was unique amongst the West Aphrican countries that had emerged at the turn of the century. Without a standing army, the Empress found herself able to develop and exploit techniques of control extreme even compared with the classical dictators of the twentieth century, using a combination of her own brand of psychological terror, and the technological largesse she enjoyed as one of the five members of the Aetherium. She only made state visits to friendly countries with a common border, and then rarely.
So she was reluctant to go. But she had no choice.
A new scientific advisor had appeared in palace circles, a fat woman called Jode Benadjoud, and to this person the Empress went in order to prepare for her journey north. Two days later, on a tarmac runway just inside the palace perimeter, a gleaming white plane stood surrounded by technicians, control gear, and tanks of fuel. The Empress boarded the plane and three padded control panels swung around her body. On one, a vidiscreen showed Jode's face.
"Now your majesty," she said, "this is a transputer controlled plane designed to respond only to you. I've ensured it can never be flown by anybody else."
"You did fit the output screen from Obatala's jar-and-boat?"
"Yes, your majesty. The centre screen before you."
The Empress checked the screen, then nodded to Jode's image. "You have done adequately. When I return, make an appointment with me. I may wish to discuss promotion."
"Your majesty is too kind."
The Empress cut all links to the outside world and concentrated on the centre screen. The probability was that Mnada would be somewhere between Marrakech and Fes, which should make the search path easier. Contacting the orbital transputer, she first persuaded it to recall what they had achieved on their first meeting, before instructing it that once again she wished to locate Mnada. After a hesitation, the transputer agreed to work with the Empress.
The plane took off and sped north.
Some time passed. No search results. The difficulty was that the Empress had no idea what Mnada had done after the chaos of Marrakech; nor had she any images or even text records of Mnada's journey over the Atlas Mountains. Now she was passing over Bordj Fly Sainte Marie Oasis, and time was running out.
Before she knew it the Atlas Mountains lay ahead.
And then the breakthrough.
A datawhirl in the aether caused the magnification function to blip. As the lens performed a slow zoom-out, she saw a weather balloon, its course noted as a straight line on her retina display. Marrakech to Fes.
It had to be. Hope and a sense of impending failure drove the Empress to head for the balloon, not knowing if there were occupants, not knowing what to do when she reached it. She just hoped.
She reduced altitude to five hundred metres and closed, now a hundred kilometres off, now ten, until she was near enough to set in a circular path around the balloon. The orbital optics were useless, since the body of the balloon obstructed any view of what lay underneath, so she employed a simple boomerang jet, firing it off to take pictures, which she loaded up into the plane's memory when it returned. Black faces! The Empress saw three faces, and they were Mnada, Nshalla, and another.
Without hesitation she fired on the balloon.
It sank, and she laid in a landing manoeuvre. As the internal struts of the plane contracted and curled, a barrage of creaks echoed through the superstructure. It landed like a clawed animal, tearing the turf in its juddering, bouncing touchdown; stopping in seconds. Cushioned by heuristic suspension, the Empress pulled on her helmet, then opened the hatch and jumped to the ground.
The three stood amid the wreckage of their balloon. They stared. Perhaps they did not yet understand who had caught them.
A sense of paranoia took hold of the Empress. She had to get back home. She felt naked out here, vulnerable, a feeling she hated. Her intolerance made her lash out at her victims. "Mnada, Nshalla, stand
still.
You—the other one." She could not remember the tribal woman's name. "You there, run away. Hands where I can see them."
"Wait!"
It was Nshalla who spoke.
The Empress had suffered occasional outbursts from this child. She shouted, "Be quiet! I did not come all this way to listen to you. Mnada, come here immediately—"
Nshalla took Mnada's hand, and told her sister, "Stay put. I'm in charge here."
The Empress had never before heard such words. For a moment the shock rendered her speechless.
Nshalla addressed her with an almost royal gravitas. "Mother. We're going to Muezzinland. We know what it is—"
"You know
nothing!
Mnada, I command you to come here immediately."
Mnada did not move. Instead, with half closed eyes and loose lips, she gazed at the ground, like a child.
Nshalla put her arm around Mnada's shoulder and continued, "We're stronger than you, mother. You can't touch us up here. Go back to Ghana." She looked at Mnada, at Gmoulaye, then added, "You're not wanted here."
"Foolish little girl," said the Empress, mastering her contempt of them to produce what she hoped would be a devastating enough speech. "Muezzinland is beyond you all. You will die if you go there. Mnada knows a few facts about it, nothing more. You will both come here now. Move!"
"You've almost destroyed my dear sister's mind by putting biograins into her head so early. And we know you're on the Aetherium. All I've got to do is tell a few people and your cover would be blown away. I've got power over you. Now I'm using it. Get back into your plane and fly away."
The noise made by the Empress when she laughed could have come from a hyena. It was not a human sound. Reeling from the idiocy of what she was hearing, she found it difficult to control the feelings welling up inside her.
"This will tell you what to do," she said, feeling at her hip for the weapon—
Nothing.
She had presumed that a weapon would be there. By rights a weapon of some sort should now be available. She looked down, to see unadorned cloth at her hips and thighs.
Nshalla turned to Gmoulaye and said, "Come on. Leave her."
"Stay!" The Empress turned to the plane and put her foot on the lower rung of the cockpit ladder. There was a rifle inside—she had seen it. The girls would cower before her.
She noticed that the tribal woman was muttering something, pointing at a grove of trees. She heard a crashing sound.
She saw something coming over the top of the hill, something she had never seen before.
North Aphrica 24-05-2130
The gods looked down upon Marrakech and saw that their work was good. Arrow-like helicopters flew alongside swarms of monosails like gnats, through air made acrid by heat and spent explosives. Autogliders hung low. Inside the optical turrets of these autogliders the gods saw the glinting heads of soldier robots, oval as eggs, with white eyes and sprays of aerials like the whiskers of cats.
The city itself was bright with circling bombs looking for targets. Red flames licked the eastern quarters. Distant bass thrums told of explosions, while every so often, on the very edge of divine hearing, voices would shout, wail, or scream. The outer suburbs were choked with refugees and makeshift hospitals.
But they had found neither Mnada nor Nshalla, and this was a source of concern to them.
~
Because he had been most in contact with the human targets, Ngala, divine creator of the Bambara pantheon, agreed to address the other gods. His body was a vortex of polygenetic material created by a network of biomotors, arranged so that although the whole was loose, the hyperlinked cell masses of which his brain was composed remained constant. His voice was like a booming cheheli wind.
"We exist suspended at a critical phase," he began. "Most of us need to enter Muezzinland within days, or even hours."
The other gods groaned and stretched at the mention of Muezzinland. It tugged at them, their promised land, and a few of them strode to the nearest hill to look north east, in the direction of Fes.
"But still we do not possess Nshalla. Without her, Muezzinland will become our master, despite our possession of the Khadir-Mnada complex. I have no intention of allowing Muezzinland to control me, and I am certain you think the same. Muezzinland is to be our home, not our prison. Therefore I make the following suggestion. Those of us too distressed to plan and act must enter Muezzinland immediately, while a few of us remain outside to catch this one remaining target. Are we agreed?"
There was general agreement. Already Tanit, goddess of love and carnality, was running away, her torn gown trailing the scent of roses, while Amma and Kwoth, the other two creator gods, were preparing to move. Only Ngala's own kin, Faro and Teliko and dark Muso Koroni, remained at his feet, behind them the slithering form of Sajara.
Ngala nodded. "So is it settled. The final target shall be caught. The fractured group shall become whole, as now our distant kin leave for Muezzinland, so to enter it."
"Muezzinland! Muezzinland!"
There was a rush of air and a whirring, rustling sound as the gods broke up into their own groups.
Ngala took Muso Koroni to the cave mouth in which Khadir had been secured. The green man lay staked out under a sheet of polythene, immobilised since the light reaching him was red. Already his plastic ribbons were limp, a hint of paleness about their edges, as his botanic subsystems struggled for energy.
"Where is Nshalla?" Ngala asked him.
"I do not know."
"It is true," Ngala said, "that you do not know where she is now, since you are our captive, but you know her general location. Reveal that to me."
"You know it yourself. Marrakech."
"We sacked eastern Marrakech, where she was heading," Muso Koroni interrupted, "but we found nothing."
"I cannot be responsible for the results of your actions."
Ngala told Khadir, "We shall take you into Muezzinland, where you shall aid us in our plans."
"I would rather kill myself than enter Muezzinland. I am neither man nor god, and since I am no god, Muezzinland is not for me."
Muso Koroni gave a purring laugh. "Suicide is not an option for you."
Khadir tried to lift his head to look directly at her. "I cannot enter Muezzinland. I would prefer to die."
Ngala spoke to Muso Koroni in the tongue of the Bambara. "We
shall
control Muezzinland. Since we have been in contact with the two targets, it falls to us to capture them. But I weary of the struggle and I yearn for Muezzinland. Will you go out into the land and find this last target?"
Muso Koroni hesitated before making her answer. "I too cannot stay out here for much longer… it is a terrible trial."
There came a hissing noise. Ngala and Muso Koroni looked behind them to see Sajara, rainbow god of the sky, his technicolour hide shimmering as if wet, his dark blue eyes emitting flashes of lightning.
"I have seen Nshalla with my own eyes," Sajara told them. "I shall fetch her, since I alone of us have special interest in her." He indicated the bloated face at his neck. "This aetherial entity sucks at my soul like an electronic leech. I ask only that one god waits for me at the entrance to Muezzinland."
"I shall wait," said Muso Koroni, "but be swift."
"Thus is it agreed," said Ngala.