AfroSFv2

by Ivor W Hartmann

  He did not stop running until he reached a small river. Being the dry season, it was down to a trickle, deep only to the knees. If he crossed it, and continued northwards up the ledge on which the burning town stood, he might meet the soldiers. Yet to the south were rocky hills bare of vegetation, some a thousand feet high. They formed a wall as though to protect Gang Yamo. To the east and to the west were vast swamps that flooded the valley during the rains. The river ran westwards from one end to the other, dividing the valley into two parts. Since the army barracks were somewhere in the west, the best option was to go east. He would have to stay in the valley until he reached the swamp and either steal a fisherman’s canoe to row his way across, or climb the ledge and hope there were no soldiers about. But such a journey would mean passing by hundreds of spirit rock shapes and scores of boulders in which hissing creatures could be hiding. That left him with only one option, to wade across the river and return to town. The soldiers might still be up there, but that was a better fate than the hissing creatures.

  Kera, a voice said.

  The voice iced through his flesh and froze his bones. He nearly fell into the water. He searched the grass, squinted at the smoke rolling lazily beside the tree trunks, enshrouding the boulders, but saw no sign of Baba Chuma.

  Kera, the voice came again, a gentle whisper, a soft and warm cooing. It was inside his head. Yet it was so clear as though his father had spoken aloud.

  Then he heard the brush of cloth on grass, gumboots crushing twigs, and a silhouette walked out of the blue haze. Baba’s hair always had streaks of grey, his hoary beard always looked like a sponge on his chin, but now white cotton covered his head, and his beard looked like feathers of a bird beaten by the rain. He had grown younger, the muscles were firmer on his biceps, and his eyes, his eyes, they shone like metal in bright sunlight.

  It could not be Baba. Kera wanted to flee, but fear made his feet sink deep into the mud, rooting him to the banks of the river.

  “It’s me,” Baba said. “Don’t be afraid.”

  Baba had a bag, a heavy bag that visibly strained the muscles of his arm. In the half light Kera could not tell its colour. It looked brown, but it could have as well been blue. It was made from animal skin, maybe a goat. Had he gotten the bag from the cave of hissing creatures?

  “I look different,” Baba said. “They touched me.”

  They didn’t touch you, Kera thought. They transformed you. He wanted to say this aloud, but he could not find his voice. A metallic ball sat in his throat. Yet Baba heard it, and gave him a slight nod.

  “They transformed me, but they are not spirits. They are just people.”

  People with tails? People who look like charcoal drawings?

  “Yes,” Baba Chuma said. “They are still people.”

  Only then did it strike Kera that Baba could read his mind. His mouth became so dry that he could taste fire. He could not feel his body anymore, only his heart beating like a madman banging his head against a brick wall.

  “The soldiers are gone,” Baba said, as he resumed walking. “The town is safe. Come with me. I need your help in the workshop.”

  Baba did not wait for a response. He lugged the goat skin bag and plunged into the river. The bag seemed to weigh a thousand kilos, though it was no bigger than the basket his mother used to take to the market.

  What is in that bag? What makes it so heavy?

  Kera did not want to follow his father. Questions whirled in his head, fuelling his terror. What kind of people could change the appearance of a man? Why had they given him the bag? What was in the bag? What work could be so urgent that he had to go to the workshop in the night? There would surely be corpses in the streets. Bodies of people they knew, of their neighbours, their friends, of his mother, of Okee, and of Acii.

  Come, Baba said, in Kera’s head. Don’t be afraid.

  Kera remembered the dreams of the drawings, and Teacher’s talk about Christianity and their ancestors. If the hissing creatures were evil, they would have killed Baba, or turned him into a terrible monster. Instead, they had only changed his hair and his eyes and made him look younger. They had given him telepathic powers and a goat skin bag with mysterious content. There was yet no sign of evil.

  Blood resumed circulating in his legs, and now he could feel the mud beneath his feet, warm and ticklish. He did not want to, but he stepped into the river, and followed Baba.

  By the time they reached Katong, complete darkness had fallen. Flames leapt high off a vocational school, painting the town orange. Opposite it, the shell of a hotel gaped. A bed sheet stuck in the rubble fluttered like a flag. Burnt vehicles littered the road. A charred hand stuck out of the driver’s window of a school van. Kera thought it might have belonged to Musta, who drove Acii to kindergarten. Only two schools, one for primary level and the other for kindergarten, had stayed open through the war. The town folk paid the teachers in kind, mostly with food. Kera’s school, a secondary level boarding school, was in another district, sixty kilometres away. It had closed as fighting spread. Apart from Musta, the van was empty. It had not picked up any children when the soldiers came.

  They avoided Main Street—where they were sure to find Mama, Okee, and Acii— and used its backstreet, an alley with wooden doors leading to courtyards, some of which were business premises but most were residences. Here, the darkness hid the identity of the dead. They saw a corpse in a gate that stood ajar. Kera luckily did not know anybody who lived in that courtyard. They found another in the gutter, choking the flow of water, and a third beside an overflowing garbage bin.

  The workshop stood at the end of the alley. The metallic gate was open and they went in. One side was a graveyard of cars that Baba hauled in to cannibalise their parts and bodies. The other side was a roofed shelter where Baba worked. Since school closed Kera had taken to helping him in the foundry.

  “There are no corpses here,” Baba said.

  How do you know? Kera wanted to ask. He only swallowed, and watched Baba lug the bag to the work table. All along, Kera had stayed behind Baba, so he would not have to see those frightful eyes. Now, Baba wore a pair of black welding goggles. Kera sighed in relief. He would not have to look into those eyes.

  Kera flicked on a switch. Several bulbs came on, drawing power from a solar charged battery. Baba opened the bag. Kera froze in anticipation, but it was only full of rocks. Not ordinary rocks, though, they looked like glass with shades of green, yellow, and black, each the size of Baba’s fist.

  “Start the fire,” Baba said, giving him one of the strange heavy rocks. “Melt it.”

  What are we going to create? Kera wanted to ask. He did not. Like a puppet, Kera followed instructions. They worked all night. Kera melted the strange rocks, as well as iron and steel, and planed timber. Towards midnight, what they were building started to take shape. At first Kera thought it would be a two-wheeled cart, roughly the size of a coffee table. They completed it as the first light of dawn appeared. It was some kind of machine. A tube, whose insides were lined with sheets of the strange glass rock, passed through a box, which had an engine. The box and tube sat on the bed of the cart. At one end of the cart, there were levers, and at the other end there were six projections that looked like arms, complete with fingers.

  What does this thing do? Kera wondered. His eyes were dry and aching, eyelids heavy with exhaustion, and muscles throbbing with a dull pain. A wind blew, stinging his nose with the smell of ash, and of bodies that had started to rot. He thought they should go to the street, to gather up his mother, Okee, and Acii, who would by now be swathed in flies. He thought they should give them a decent burial before the worms turns them into obnoxious objects. He had not thought about them all night, and even now he pushed away the horrible images, as though they were something he had seen on TV.

  Baba Chuma hooked a battery onto the machine and flicked on a switch. The machine gave a low hum. Kera stepped away, expecting it to transform into a monster and eat him up.

&nbs
p; Baba picked a hammer, and pushed it into one end of the tube. The machine sucked the hammer into the box. A rattling erupted. The machine vibrated so much that Kera thought it would fall to pieces. A light flashed inside the tube. It made Kera think of a photocopier. He thought the machine would crush the hammer, shred it, do something to it, but it came out whole at the other end of the tube. Kera frowned. What was the point of passing the hammer through the machine? He got an answer soon, and it turned his bones to ice. The light flashed again, and another hammer, an exact copy of the first, with the same scratches on its head and the same crack on its handle, popped out. Then another, and another, and another, exact replicas of the hammer fell out and piled onto the ground.

  A replicating machine?

  The technology he knew, like cars and computers, had intricate engines. Even wrist watches had a complex system. His father had built something straight out of a sci-fi movie, yet its system seemed no more complex than that of a rope pulley. It had to be magic, Kera thought as he eyed the glass rocks in the goatskin bag. He had melted only a few of them. The bag was still nearly full. Magic. Nothing else could explain it.

  Baba pulled a lever, and the machine went silent. The hammers stopped falling out. He pushed his hand deep into the tube and took out the original hammer. A smile wavered on his mouth. “They are ancient people,” Baba said. “They have survived from a very long time ago.”

  For a few seconds, Kera did not understand what Baba was talking about. Then it came to him. The hissing creatures. Ancient people, Kera thought, recalling the hieroglyphs on the cave, the rock art that was alive with timeless stories.

  “They live inside the rocks because they are afraid of the sun,” Baba continued. “It kills them. After the tank blew a hole into their home, they feared the sun would wipe them out. They asked for my help. They touched me and gave me their knowledge so that I can seal the hole, but they also want me to protect the valley. Come, let’s push this thing to the Kom.”

  Words welled in Kera’s throat, questions, warnings, suspicions, but not a sound escaped his lips. Baba rolled the replicator out of the workshop, not waiting for a response, not looking back to check if Kera was following. Kera wanted to lie on the floor and fall asleep, but again his legs moved of their own volition.

  Kera kept his eyes on the back of his father’s head, for that would save him from seeing the corpses in the alley, but he could not avoid the smell. It churned his stomach. He did not spit or vomit out of respect. He thought it was a good thing that there were no wild dogs in the area, else they would have mauled the bodies leaving entrails all over the place. There were no carrion crows either, no vultures, not only because they kept their town very clean, but mostly because the war had created hundreds of other feasting sites for the birds.

  “Wait here,” Baba said when they were out of town. He went back into town and returned shortly after with a small bag of cement and ropes, then they continued their way to Kom pa’Yamo.

  The sun kissed the valley. A breeze licked Kera’s face. Flowers blossomed and white butterflies floated over the foliage. A wood pigeon sang. The ambience pushed the sight of the burnt town, and the smell of carnage, into the distant memory of bad dreams. Kera caught himself smiling, and almost at once guilt overwhelmed him. He should not be happy on such a morning, but as they pushed the replicator up the steep slopes to the plateau, a macabre happiness gripped him. If Baba could invent a replicator, was he then not able to bring the dead back to life? Could he not invent a machine to resurrect Mama, Okee, and Acii?

  They heaved and huffed, and the replicator went slowly up and up. Whenever they stopped for a breath, they tethered it to tree trunks to prevent it from sliding back down.

  “I should have built a flying machine,” Baba said, during a break.

  What about a machine to bring Mama back to life? Kera thought, but said “An aeroplane?”

  “No. Aeroplanes pollute the world and cause climate change, but I can build a flying machine that truly imitates birds.”

  Kera saw his reflection in the dark glass of Baba’s goggles, an image painted the colour of fire by the sun rising behind him. Maybe Baba is dead, he thought, and something, that hissing creature, has taken over his body. He had never heard Baba talk of pollution, and the only English words he spoke before that morning were Hullo, Fine, and Sorry. Baba never went to formal school. He learnt how to work metal as an apprentice to his grandfather, who bequeathed to him the workshop. Yet here he was talking about aeroplanes and pollution, and saying climate change in English. How could this be his Baba? The body might be his, but inside it was someone else, or something else, something that knew about aeroplanes and pollution.

  That hissing creature.

  Bring Mama back to life, Kera said, but again it was only in his head.

  He knew Baba had read it in his mind from the way Baba’s face twitched, but Baba did not respond. He resumed pushing the replicator up the slope. Sweat glistened on his skin. Kera pulled the machine. Every muscle ached.

  There were people still hiding in the caves. Every time they passed by one, they told them that the soldiers were gone and that it was safe to go back to town. Most crept out silently and started back to their ruined home with only a mild curiosity about the replicator. No one asked aloud why they were pushing it up Kom pa’Yamo, until they reached the cave in which Teacher and the mayor were hiding.

  “Is that a gun?” Teacher said.

  “No,” Baba said.

  Teacher’s frown deepened. “What is it then?” he said.

  “Nothing,” Baba said.

  “What happened to your hair?” Teacher said. “Did you dye it? Why are you wearing goggles? What is wrong with your beard? Where are you taking this thing?”

  “You look younger!” the mayor whispered.

  “I’ll explain later,” Baba said.

  He resumed pushing the machine. Kera thought Teacher and the others would follow, but they did not. They stood still, watching, until the trees and undergrowth hid them from view.

  By the time they heaved the replicator onto the plateau, the sun had risen high and not a cloud was present to mask its heat. Baba had covered the hole in the cliff with shrubs to protect its secret, but the hissing creatures were lucky for the cliff faced north. If it had faced east or west, the sun’s rays would have poked deep into the cave, not just around the mouth.

  Kera tried to peep into the darkness. The pictures still rippled on the walls, but he could not see the tailed people, nor hear them. He could feel them though, their chilly aura, and he suspected that Baba was communicating with them using telepathy.

  Their work lasted about an hour. They replicated water, which they found in a small puddle, then stones and cement which they used to seal the cave. Now, Kera saw the other function of the machine, particularly the purpose of the six arms. They were builders. Baba manipulated them using the levers, and they piled rocks and mixed cement to seal up the hole. Lastly, Baba replicated a huge pile of rocks and stacked these up to hide the cement.

  2

  Katong town was founded in the 1930s, during the construction of the highway from the capital in the west to the mineral rich northeast, as a worker’s camp, for it was at a midway point between the two locations. After the highway was complete, Indian traders came to make money off English colonial governors and mine owners, who had set up homes so they could have a place to spend a night on the eighteen hour journey between the city and the northeast. As the town flourished, a quasi-apartheid system cropped up, with a T-junction separating the three different peoples.

  The business district had the uninhabited valley to its south and the highway to its north. Here, the Indians lived in little apartments above their shops and restaurants. On the other side of the highway were the two suburbs, separated by a road that led to farms. The English lived in grand mansions in Senior Quarters, which had churches, a recreational complex with a cinema, swimming pool, and golf course. The Africans lived in
Chandi, which translates to poverty, or misery, then an overcrowded slum with muddy pavements. While a few rich Indians had mansions in Senior Quarters, and a few poorer Europeans owned shops and restaurants in the business district, Africans could not live in Senior Quarters, nor run any economic activity in the business area. They worked the English owned farmlands, growing cotton and tea, and they supplied Indians with fresh vegetables and foods. They were servants and shamba boys of the foreigners. There were two primary schools, one for the foreigners, and the other for Africans. In the two churches, Catholic and Anglican, both in Senior Quarters, the Europeans took the front rows and the Africans occupied the back seats. Both Indians and Europeans kept to themselves, refusing to intermarry with the Africans, refusing to assimilate, and after Independence they both kept British citizenships and passports.

  This quasi-apartheid system survived until 1975, when the General assumed power through a military coup. He expelled all foreigners from the country. “You are milking the cow without feeding it,” he said. He nationalised the mines, the oil wells, and all foreign owned assets, and gave the Indian shops to Africans. He became an instant hero. Many Africans moved out of Chandi, to Senior Quarters and to the business district. Those who remained had more space for themselves. The slum evolved into a low cost suburb. “That,” Teacher once told Kera’s class, “is when we got our true independence.”

  The General ruled for twelve years, until the Americans blew up his plane as he flew to Libya. Five years of turbulence followed. One bloody coup led to another bloody coup, with the country tottering close to an all-out civil war, until one leader undid all that the General had accomplished. He gave the mines and oil wells back to the Europeans and he invited the Indians to reclaim their lost property. Riots broke out, but the President had American money to bribe the opposition to his side. Three hundred civilians died before the rest got the message and stopped rioting. The Indians and the English did not return to Katong.