by Paula Guran
They brought the next ten of us forward. I stood there in front of the ditch, smelling the blood and stink behind me, and knew that these men and boys, the ragged line of distant mountains, the smell of dead men’s shit in the air . . . that this was what my senses would hold in the last moments of my life.
When I heard the boy count “moja,” I began a prayer I knew I would never finish. I heard “mbili.”
There was no “tatu.”
Before he could speak that word, gunfire exploded all around me. I watched the guards, my executioners, flinch in horror to realize that they were the targets. From around us, hidden behind rocks and in pits covered with cloth and sand, leapt a dozen desperate men and women, all armed, all firing at the guards. Rebels, who had waited at the execution spot, probably avenging loved ones.
The children screamed and ran, dropping their guns.
If the rebels had arrived a breath sooner, the previous ten would not have died.
If the rebels had arrived a breath later, the bullets would have taken me. My nightmare would be over.
The rebels came too late.
The rebels came too soon.
What I did know was that I was still alive. I ran east. I knew where I could find the People, and I came to you.
I was blessed again. I met Sinas, a goatherd whose family camps two days’ walk from here. He knew your people, Qutb.
He knew how to bring me home.
A moon after Cagen came to us, white and black soldiers arrived in three Spiders and asked questions about him. They showed us his face on paper; a pho-to-graph.
Cagen hid in my hut, a blanket over his head, but even if they’d caught a glimpse of him, they might not have known who he was. He did not look like the black-skinned white man in the photograph. His hair grew longer, a regal mane. He was learning our ways and language, was dressed as one of us, and he had lost the disgusting fat that whites wear like a second and third skin. We laughed when the soldiers were gone.
Cagen was safe.
But were we?
Soon Cagen built his own hut, but with no wife to share it, it must have been a lonely place. Marriageable girls tried to catch his eyes and gave him secret smiles, but Cagen rejected them with kindness and kept his own company.
I began to teach him again, and his sadness touched me. I taught him things I had withheld from the other men who had come to me, because it would be too much knowledge for an ordinary man to keep.
This is how Cagen, an outsider, became my apprentice. He was more interested in the old stories than my own sons. This went on for moons, and then one night when four of our boys had reached manhood, I performed the Starlight ceremony for them all. I invited Cagen to join.
We walked out into the tall grass, where each man created a circular clearing for himself in the stalks. The boys, and Cagen, each took their Go: a handful of cactus and nettle grindings, chewed until it was mush in their mouths, then spit out. This has been the Way for all of time.
Then, they all lay on the ground, in the midst of their circles. The first time passes in silence. Then, they all thrashed and made animal sounds, barking up at the moon and speaking in the unknown language. The Go plants take away the human, awaken the animal self. The man who returns from this journey knows his totem animal, and thereby earns a name.
When dawn was nearly upon us, and I knew that each of them had seen their animal selves, I gave them Return: a ball of cactus root and a moss that grows only beneath the poison grub plant. I pushed one thumb-sized ball into each of their mouths, so that they would come back to the world.
Cagen rolled over, vomited, and then sprang to his feet. His eyes were alight while the other boys still moaned. Only the strongest warriors wake with fire.
“I saw,” Cagen said, an excitement in his voice that I had not heard since his first days among us. “I know what I have to do. We have to go back.”
“Go back?”
His fingers dug into my shoulders so strongly that I thought the cactus was still upon him. “What Go did to me . . .” His fingers dug into my arms. “Was what the machine did to me. Qutb, you’ve shown me how I can hook in and stay sane.”
I stared. “Your mind is still sleeping.”
“No,” he said. “My mind is awake, for the first time in my life. My heart. I’m going back, whether you help me or not. But if you love me, you’ll help me . . .” He paused, tongue flickering across cracked lips. “Give me Return.”
We two stared at each other. I knew what he wanted, and why.
At long last, I nodded.
I would take him to Modimo’s Hand again.
Although the machine hid from us, we knew where it rested. We would never forget the place; not until our sleep at life’s end, when everything is forgotten unless your grandchildren call your name and sing you stories.
We stood just outside the metal tortoiseshell, and I reached into my medicine bag to pull out the ball of mushrooms and moss called Return.
“I give you this, and you take it of your own free will,” I said. I did not want to give him false promises. “I cannot protect you, but perhaps our gods can.”
Cagen took the ball. As he chewed, we sat outside the machine, in its wavering shadow. Within minutes, Cagen began to sway. When he stood and walked, his step was unsteady. I almost reached to help stand him upright, but I did not move. Like all men, Cagen had to learn to walk by himself.
Cagen did not look at me. Instead, his eyes saw only the ship’s open door. He crawled inside.
I thought of my wife waiting. My cave, and the unfinished pictures.
Cursing myself for a fool, I climbed into the machine behind Cagen. The door closed as soon as my foot was inside, leaving no time to consult the gods. No time for wiser thinking.
I stared at the floor beneath my weathered, cracked, sandaled feet as I stood in that machine, to be certain I was really there.
Cagen did not hesitate before he lay in the net. He flinched, but did not scream when the metal snakes chewed into his flesh, into the back of his skull.
He closed his eyes and cried out, his lips curled.
And he waited.
Cagen jerked his body forward slightly, and the machine lurched like a waking snail. Cagen’s eyes remained closed, as if he were sleeping, but his lips curled in the coldest smile I have ever seen.
A great humming sound surrounded us, like a swarm of bees large enough to cover the clouds.
Lurching again. I heard rocks slide off the metal shell. Felt the machine rise up beneath me. I sat on the floor between coils—I would not lie in a net, no!
The machine tilted left and then right. Then leveled.
Then the floor of the machine vanished from sight. I saw the rocks shadowed beneath us. The humming quieted. The rocks fell away from our feet. We rose up.
I stood on the sky, and I from there I saw the hunger in Cagen.
Cagen hungered for love. But more, he hungered for the kill.
And as the machine flew, I am not ashamed to say that I was afraid. I could feel the floor but not see it. I was looking down on the ground far below us, as high as birds fly, my stomach flipping all the while because it thought I was falling from a great height. It took all my strength not to spit up like an infant.
I sat on the floor between the coils and chanted.
The machine flew and flew. We entered a cloud, and all about us was whiteness.
I had sat in a cloud! This was a story my grandfather would love to hear.
Cagen’s eyes were wide, and filled with blood and fear, but the machine flew on.
And then it came down near a great nest of barbed fences. The machine brought us to rest on the earth softly; this time, I did not sway from side to side.
The door suddenly opened, and I knew it was my time to get out. I tried to hold Cagen’s gaze, but his eyes were sightless as they stared out from the head-piece of twisted metal vines.
I left the machine, and the door sealed Cagen inside.
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Outside, for the first time, I saw the machine standing, alive and terrible. Standing high on three unfolded legs, with two snakes reared up to make bent arms, the machine looked less like the Spiders and more like a mantis. The Trickster, Kaggen. Mantis, who aided the People since the People came onto the Earth.
The Mantis took long steps toward the webs of fences. Behind the fences, enough people to fill many villages stared and screamed. When they ran in a frenzy, I could almost hear the bones breaking as the weak and small were trampled by those who were quicker, and more able. Such is always the way.
Soldiers screamed as well, but with better cause: A river of fire shot from the Mantis’s mouth, and snakes of fire wove themselves through the lines of soldiers, touching one and then the next. In an instant, a dozen armed men died. As they did, the machine’s skin rippled. Cagen’s face appeared, an unimaginable size, twisted with pain and thoughts I could never dream. It was a horror, but still the face of my friend. The eyes were vast and empty. His mind was gone. Cagen’s insane face howled, and the metal disk belched fire once again.
The scream of an alarm filled the air. Cagen slaughtered those men, so that I had to turn my eyes. With the guards dead or fleeing, the prisoners tore the fences and fled in every direction.
I think I saw the woman at the same moment Cagen did.
How did I know she was the one?
Because where so many others were running away, this woman stood watching the machine despite her fear. It towered above her like a walking god, but she did not waver. She looked up into the face, and knew what he was.
She jumped as if waking from a dream and screamed. She stood in a corner against walls made of brick, afraid to run. Suddenly, a soldier ran to the woman. He was a young man, with a hunter’s strong body, and a good face. Screaming in Kikuyu, he howled up at the machine, putting his own body between it and the woman. All the while he screamed at the machine, tears watered his face. He believed he would die for her.
The machine paused, and Cagen’s eyes—the things that looked like Cagen’s eyes—blinked. Its legs folded, so that its face came closer to the woman.
She pushed the soldier back, came to stand between the soldier and Cagen. She spoke up to him, but I could not hear her words. She seemed strong and beautiful.
I finally made out one word. “No,” she kept saying. But instead of screaming like the soldier, she spoke as gently as if he were standing against her ear. “No.” And then I made out another word. “Cagen. No. No. No.”
She knew Cagen. And she loved another.
The machine sank to its knees. He saw what I saw: his woman had survived, as he had begged her to. But in doing so, she had lost her heart for him.
Cagen did not have time to grieve for his woman. A second machine approached.
This one was like Cagen’s, not like the little Spiders that carry men across the grass and through the sky. It was a metal disk, and then a white man’s face appeared across the curve of the shell. The white man looked . . . twisted. The muscles in his face strained. The eyes inhuman with bloodlust. Whatever the machine had done to this man, I prayed that Cagen could resist.
The two machines circled like angry baboons. Guards and prisoners alike fled as the two machines came to grips, like our men’s dances when they are inviting one another to wrestle.
As their snake-arms entwined, their metal skins glowed, and the air around them sizzled with their energies. I fled, knowing that this sight was not for mortal eyes. It was the battle of gods, something that no man should witness.
Before I ran, I saw Cagen’s woman and the guard flee with their hands clasped.
It took me ten days to return to the People. After a time, when I was ready to see that day again in my memories, I told my people what I had done, and seen.
We were in danger, and we knew we must move on and find a lonelier place to camp. We could afford talk of nothing else. The days were long and hard.
Some nights, I heard distant explosions, or the sounds of gunfire. Sometimes, screams drifted in the wind.
And then one day, the Mantis appeared.
It stumbled as it walked. At first, I believed I had not yet shaken sleep from my eyes. Many nights, I had dreamed of Cagen’s return. Sometimes, in my dreams, he was a friend. In others, he brought fiery death to my people. After all, as everyone knows, a Mantis will sometimes eat its young.
The machine I saw that day was not like the one that came in my dreams. It moved as if it was confused. The machine rocked, stopping.
Suddenly, liquid fire spat out. A goat bleated, eaten by flames. Boiling blood and steam filled the air. My people hid themselves, terrified. Had my nightmare come true?
It was Cagen. I could not see his face on the machine the way I once had, but I knew. So afraid I could barely walk, I went out to the machine.
The metal curve of the machine shifted, and finally Cagen showed himself to me. And then it looked like me, Qutb. He made me look older than I think of myself, but it was me. Then it was a metal disk again.
It sank to the sand. And opened.
Cagen crawled out, his naked body covered with fresh scars. He looked thinner than the frailest of us, as if he had not eaten in at least a moon.
He crawled to me, and rested his cheek upon my sandaled foot.
We dragged the machine to Shadow Cave. Grass ropes and men and boys pulling for three days. There, deep within the rocks, it will never be found. The ancestors stand watch over it for us.
We use Cagen’s listening machine, and I hear men talking in Swahili and Kikuyu about the strange events. They say the slaughter in Dar es Salaam, in this place around us Cagen called Tanzania, was stopped by a machine. The machine is talked about again and again. It did not rest after Dar es Salaam, fighting in other places whose names I had never heard. Again and again, I hear them give thanks to the unknown hero.
I smile as I listen. And I cry an old man’s tears of gratitude.
After the first nights, we moved Cagen to a hut outside the camp so he would not frighten the children with his screams. I do not know what he sees and hears. I think he dreams of the spaces between the stars.
I never fully understood this American with brown skin, and now he does not understand himself. He stares into the night with sightless eyes. He cannot feed himself. But we drum for him, and feed him herbs, and walk with him, and slowly, he returns.
And I know that if the soldiers ever come to hurt us, he will remember who he is. He will remember what the gods made him and why they gave him to us, and to all men who only wish to walk in freedom. I remember praying that we could stay away from the madness that came from beyond the sun. Or that if it came to us, as it had to Dar es Salaam, there would be a way to survive as we have survived droughts. Then I saw the true madness: not from the sky lizards, but from other men. And prayed ever harder.
The gods heard. They sent us Kaggen, the Trickster. And as Trickster, he came masked as a student, that he might reveal himself as teacher. He is Cagen, my friend. When he is healed, I may ask him if he will take my name. He has no father. It would be good.
My name is Qutb, which means “Protector of the People.” The name is more true to Cagen.
A hero, who stands between the People and the sky.
“OUR TALONS CAN CRUSH GALAXIES”
BROOKE BOLANDER
This is not the story of how he killed me, thank fuck.
You want that kind of horseshit, you don’t have to look far; half of modern human media revolves around it, lovingly detailed descriptions of sobbing women violated, victimized, left for the loam to cradle. Rippers, rapists, stalkers, serial killers. Real or imagined, their names get printed ten feet high on movie marquees and subway ads, the dead convenient narrative rungs for villains to climb. Heroes get names; killers get names; victims get close-ups of their opened ribcages mid-autopsy, the bloodied stumps where their wings once attached, baffled coroners making baffled phone calls to even more baffled curators at lo
cal museums. They get dissected, they get discussed, but they don’t get names or stories the audience remembers.
So, no. You don’t get a description of how he surprised me, where he did it, who may have fucked him up when he was a boy to lead to such horrors (no one), or the increasingly unhinged behavior the cops had previously filed away as the mostly harmless eccentricities of a nice young man from a good family. No fighting in the woods, no blood under the fingernails, no rivers or locked trunks or calling cards in the throat. It was dark and it was bad and I called for my sisters in a language dead when the lion-brides of Babylon still padded outside the city gates. There. That’s all you get, and that’s me being generous. You’re fuckin’ welcome.
However, here is what I will tell you. I’ll be quick.
He did not know what I was until after. He felt no regret or curiosity, because he should have been drowned at birth. I was nothing but a commodity to him before, and nothing but an anomaly to him after.
My copper feathers cut his fingertips and palms as he pared my wings away.
I was playing at being mortal this century because I love cigarettes and shawarma, and it’s easier to order shawarma if your piercing shriek doesn’t drive the delivery boy mad. Mortality is fun in small doses. It’s very authentic, very down-in-the-dirt nitty-gritty. There are lullabies and lily pads and summer rainstorms and hardly anyone ever tries to cut your head off out of some moronic heroic obligation to the gods. If you want to sit on your ass and read a book, nobody judges you. Also, shawarma.
My spirit was already fled before the deed was done, back to the Nest, back to the Egg. My sisters clucked and cooed and gently scolded. They incubated me with their great feathery bottoms as they had many times before, as I had done many times before for them. Sisters have to look out for one another. We’re all we’ve got, and forever is a long, slow slog without love.
I hatched anew. I flapped my wings and hurricanes flattened cities in six different realities. I was a tee-ninsy bit motherfuckin’ pissed, maybe.