Muezzinland (34 page)

Chapter 26

Gmoulaye jumped as she heard the shout. She looked up. Nshalla took this last opportunity, twisting away from Gmoulaye then jumping to her feet.

"Daddy!" she cried.

"Stop fighting immediately," said Ruari.

Gmoulaye's hands fell to her side. Nshalla trembled, realising how close her escape had been.

"I'm here to rescue you," Ruari said.

"You found us?" asked Nshalla.

"Your mother sent me."

Nshalla shook her head. "Then you must have been fooled."

Ruari frowned. "I don't think so. What do you mean?"

"This is Muezzinland, and it was designed by the Empress solely for her use. She wanted to direct the civilised world. We've destroyed her interface, but now something is happening to us. And we haven't saved Mnada yet. That's our last task."

"Who is this Mnada?"

Nshalla looked at Gmoulaye, then back to the image of her father. "I used to think she was my sister, but now I'm not so sure. There's something in her brain, something that the Empress put there."

"I told you in Ouagadougou that you were my daughter," said Ruari, "and your mother has just informed me that Mnada is not mine. This I thought I already knew."

Nshalla nodded. "Mnada is a copy of the Empress. She's not properly human. We don't really know what she is."

Ruari paused, then said, "I trust you, Nshalla." He glanced around Muezzinland, then continued, "This place gives me the creeps. It feels wrong. And something came in with me, something bad. I'm not sure where it is now."

"Another evil spirit," Gmoulaye said.

"You two were fighting," Ruari declared. "You were being perverted by Muezzinland. I could see immediately that you were responding to its inhumane urges. If you are to escape, you must understand that."

"We must find Mnada and discover what she is," countered Nshalla. "If we don't, the Empress will find a way of saving herself. We've got to put an end to her plans forever."

Ruari grimaced. "Perhaps I knew less of the Empress than I thought." He looked again at the landscape, then added, "Give me a few seconds to download the statistics of this place."

He vanished.

Nshalla looked suspiciously at Gmoulaye, but she showed no inclination to violence. Then Ruari was back.

"You have just hours remaining," he told them. "Muezzinland is a vast autonomous aether within the global aether. It is sending back distorted information to you, and that's why you believe you have the abilities of gods. But all your negative impulses are also being magnified, and that explains why you were at each other's throats. This place is deadly. You have to act quickly. Assert your basic humanity. Then, if you succeed, call back Mnada." He paused, grimaced, then said, "I have an idea how your last task can be achieved. But it will be difficult and painful. Without courage, you will fail. Trust me now."

"I trust you," said Nshalla immediately.

Gmoulaye hesitated, then shrugged and said, "I do not seem to have much choice."

"I'm going to hack into the sub layers of this place," said Ruari. "Return to your human selves. Think about Mnada. I'll be back."

He vanished.

"A camp fire," said Gmoulaye.

Nshalla felt exhausted. All her fear and fury had gone, and what was left was limp flesh and a weak will. "A fire?" she asked.

"A real campfire, like that first fire we had outside Accra, among the fern trees. Remember? You lay down and stared at the stars while I played the mbira. We ate sweet potatoes."

Nshalla nodded. "You make it," she said. She walked to the nearest tree and lay down, closing her eyes.

She heard Gmoulaye making the fire. Twigs cracked and stones clacked against one another, and then there was warmth on her skin and the sound of Gmoulaye singing a Ghanaian song over the traditional otufo rhythm. This simple music took her back to the days of leaving, and she wept, for she was tired and lacking a home, with a terrible fate still poised above her head. Suddenly the power of Gmoulaye's tribal wisdom was clear, and she regretted everything she had said to hurt her friend on that score.

Through the power of memory, the song was calling back the truth about her condition. She was human. The transputers and programmes of Muezzinland told only lies. They reflected character, but never with truth. The machines and software of Muezzinland were only meant to interact with other machines and software. Nshalla suddenly found herself aching for a world without the aether, without machines of any sort; in fact, for a world in which less was known and more was felt. She realised, as she had half realised before, that the reason she had asked Gmoulaye to accompany her was the trust she had in Gmoulaye's life, albeit a trust tempered with envy. She knew then that her home was in Ghana but outside Accra.

Drying her eyes, she went to sit by the fire. Gmoulaye seemed lost in contemplation of the flames, so she said nothing.

Then Gmoulaye took a sharp breath. Her eyes glittered.

"What?" asked Nshalla.

"I have an answer."

"An answer?"

"Where did Mnada go?" said Gmoulaye. "We do not know with any certainty. But she was being transformed by the power of Muezzinland. She was effectively a god."

"She seemed to evaporate like a clearing storm," said Nshalla. "I think Sajara killed her."

Gmoulaye disagreed. "Mnada is here in some form—Muezzinland still exists. Suppose it were to rain? Would she return to us?"

Nshalla considered this proposal. It had consistency, certainly.

"What do you mean?" she asked.

"I can bring rain. My tribe have dances and rites through which we hope to encourage the formation of clouds. If I was to bring rain here, would I also bring Mnada?"

Despite the obvious tribal nature of this suggestion, Nshalla was changed enough to agree with it, even to think that it might work. Besides, she had no suggestions of any sort. Her mind and body were empty.

"Try it," she said.

Gmoulaye stood up. A slaman drum appeared, and she held it firm as she began to circle the campfire, not tapping it as yet, just circling, eyes a little defocussed, occasionally glancing up at the evening sky. Nshalla also looked up. The cloudless heavens as yet showed no stars. Muezzinland was windless and silent, as if holding its breath before the final battle, and Nshalla felt calm, yet tense. The environment was peaceful but it also held danger.

Gmoulaye was half walking half dancing around the fire, a pattering rhythm coming from the skin of the slaman. Nshalla watched. The new aura of the camp was making her sleepy, and she had to force herself to pay attention. It was the rhythmic trance-quality of the music, the fragility of Gmoulaye's melody that most affected her, pulling her into sleep like gravity itself. She wanted her head to touch the ground and her eyes to close.

She looked up at the sky. On the horizon clouds appeared, and within five minutes these clouds were above the camp. Now the possibility of success made sleep withdraw.

A few metres away she noticed a smudge in the air, like a static breath of smoke. It neither moved nor changed. Eventually, she looked away. As the clouds deepened and thickened the sky turned from blue to indigo, and the salmon tint on the horizon faded to a deeper shade of red. The first drops of rain fell.

Nshalla glanced again at the smudge, to see that drops of rain were marking it. She said nothing to Gmoulaye, not wanting to disturb the rite.

Rain tapped upon the ground. The smudge was of human height and width, and every raindrop was bringing colour to it, as if dissolving dehydrated chemicals to leave bright, new dye; randomly yet cumulatively calling into existence a hitherto invisible form. Nshalla recalled what Gmoulaye had hoped to do, and so realised that this shape could be Mnada. The dimensions were right. The theory was right. Raindrops became drizzle became a sweet shower of rain. The smudge was becoming a recognisable form, pink face and dark clothes, a static form like a painting, but clearly of something. It must be Mnada. There was not enough detail yet for a positive identification, but Nshalla knew Mnada was returning, departing the interstices of Muezzinland to take on, perhaps for the last time, a recognisably human form.

And in the real world? Nshalla instinctively knew that a struggle was taking place between the transputers of the divine and the transputers of the corporeal, a swirling confrontation of Muezzinland and Mnada, of the body and the director of the body. For one final time the databases, programme structures, and upper level hierarchies of the corporeal were reaching out to their unattainable kin in an attempt to communicate with the likes of Nshalla and Gmoulaye. Mnada was not human. Muezzinland understood this. Maybe Mnada did too. What did she feel when Muezzinland reflected a self not even recognisable as a human being? Was she transformed into the divine? Or was she debased into mere collections of number, albeit so vast they appeared to have meaning, even purpose?

How could they find out with any certainty, when Mnada herself did not know all that had happened in her childhood?

Now Mnada stood nearby, soaking wet, yet smiling, like a baby born as a mature woman. Nshalla felt both pity and revulsion.

Gmoulaye faltered in her dance. The resonant sound of the slaman skin had been replaced by a loose thud. It was all but unplayable. Gmoulaye stopped dancing, then came to sit by the hissing fire. Abruptly the rain ceased and they were left in nocturnal tranquillity, a few insects stridulating, with the innocent, yet threatening form of Mnada just visible at the edge of firelight range.

Then Ruari appeared.

All four sat around the campfire, Nshalla to the south, Mnada opposite her, with Gmoulaye to the east. Ruari's image wavered as he interacted with the heat.

He said, "An hour remains before the teeming subroutines of Muezzinland finally overcome you all and bring you face-to-face with self-destruction. In sixty minutes you have to save yourselves and either escape or destroy Muezzinland. You are inside—it won't let you go. Now, the Empress told me lies about a path. That data trail has not appeared as I thought it would, so in that respect I can't help you. But she wants you alive, Mnada—and she wants you, Nshalla, dead and gone. And somewhere in Muezzinland I can feel her agency. As yet I don't know what it is."

"Then all she has to do is find us?" said Mnada. "We can't do anything?"

Nshalla said to Ruari, "You mentioned an idea."

He nodded. "If we ignore the detail of all we have been through, one thing remains. The Empress. Muezzinland is intimately of her. It is her construction. Mnada carries the directorial hardware—we don't know more than that. Yet we cannot destroy Muezzinland simply by killing Mnada."

"Of course not," they chorused.

"Then only one option remains. Since the Empress is the source and direction of Muezzinland, we must conjure her up and slay her right here. If we do that, the aetherial link between the creation itself and the source might be broken."

"But we did that," said Nshalla. "We destroyed the red wig interface."

"That was the communications link between the Empress and those software hierarchies represented by the gods," Ruari replied. "Yes, it was vital, but it was not the entirety of Muezzinland's systems. Muezzinland is real, do not doubt that. It is a construction. But like all intelligences it exists within a framework. Gmoulaye, your framework is tribal. You are a tribal woman. Nshalla, your framework is Ghanaian. You have a cultural, human identity. But Mnada is different. Her identity was meant to be a psychic copy of the Empress—an appalling concept, but one we can't undo, since we can't turn back time."

"Then what are you saying?" said Nshalla.

"You and Mnada must conjure up the essence of your mother and confront her. It will require great courage. Perhaps it is impossible. But this campfire is only a temporary stabiliser, and less than an hour remains before you all go mad and destroy yourselves, thinking you are gods." He shrugged, then said, "I know no other way."

Mnada shook her head. "It can't be done. I'm too damaged. I'm not myself. I don't know who I am."

"It can be done," Ruari insisted. "You have to do it, and so does Nshalla since she was the control of the experiment. This is why we all exist, Mnada—because of the Empress. You she wanted as a copy of herself, but she needed genetic variation for the control offspring. In other words Nshalla had to be a child of two parents, not one. That is the only reason Nshalla exists, why I was plucked from my garrett in Lagos twenty six years ago."

"Those are the realities we must confront," Nshalla told Mnada.

Ruari nodded. "The factual realities. But it is the emotional realities that may kill you." He paused, glanced at the fire, then said, "I think I see now how all this was meant to be. Probably you've guessed yourself. The Empress will eventually die. She is sixty. She has risen to the position of undeclared leader of the civilised world, as she hoped she would, but even that is not enough for her. She wanted a kind of immortality. By abusing her knowledge and her position of power she tried to create a copy of herself, so that her ideas and her plan would be perpetuated after her physical death. But inevitably Mnada the daughter was too human, and she rebelled against the restrictions imposed on her. That was why she escaped from the palace. That was why she became the shapeshifter. Deep down, there is humanity within her. The question is, how much? We don't know. Only the Empress knows what happened."

"Nobody else?" Nshalla asked.

"I checked the records after you passed through Ouagadougou. An operation was performed by a certain Dr. Ngfanga, but he died immediately afterwards. The android I-C-U Tompieme is destroyed. Only the Empress remains, and she is forever beyond us."

"She is beyond everyone," whispered Mnada.