Octavia's Brood: Science Fiction Stories From Social Justice Movements

by Walidah Imarisha

  “But where will we go? We haven’t come up with anything yet. And the thought of starting all over again—” West trailed off.

  Wild spoke up in her deep scratchy voice. “We will go towards the edge of the red sky to look for Holdan, Nuroh, Elda, and the rest of the U.P.s. It’s our only hope. If we can find them, we might be able to come back and fight.”

  “Leave? You can’t be serious.” Prolt looked at Wild incredulously. “Southing is our home. We built it into what it is. We transformed it and poured our hearts into this city. We can’t just abandon it. We have to stay and fight for it. And what about the rest of the U.P.s? We tell them they have to leave too?” Prolt snorted, shaking his head as he continued. “And besides, Holdan left years ago. I thought we were done with him. Even if he’s alive, he doesn’t deserve to be found. And if Nuroh and Elda’s team had found him or any of the U.P.s that went with him, they would have come back and let us know. We don’t even know what is beyond the red sky. There may not even be vegetation. How will we survive without the biospheres? You’re going to lead a whole city of cripples across an unknown planet? There’s no way. I’m not going to just give up my home to those bastards.”

  Wild had moved closer to the circle, and she held steady. “We can send a team out to go and look. We don’t all have to leave. Some of us can stay here and guard Southing. The Arrivals are stronger and younger, far more mobile than most of us. They can scout the land and come back. We’ve dealt with the soldiers before, we can do it again.”

  “Separate?” West shook her head. “That is certain death. We can’t separate. The only way we will make it is to stay together. The Arrivals are too young to go out alone with no water and food.”

  “Of course we will give them food and water to travel with. We will prepare them,” Wild sternly pushed back.

  “Nuroh, Elda, and the rest of them left five years ago. What’s to say that the Arrivals will be able to come back in the next handful of months?” Prolt countered.

  “And we? What do you mean, we? We haven’t decided on anything yet.” West turned to Rex, demanding answers.

  “No one’s decided anything yet,” Rex said, raising her hands, looking directly at Wild, who was sitting up defiantly in her chair now. “But I haven’t heard another suggestion of what we should do.”

  Everyone knew she was right. No one knew what to do, and even though Wild’s idea was extreme, it was the only viable option they had heard. They all remembered the massacres and the camps. They all remembered Hollow before Southing. No one wanted to relive that, and it felt like an imminent future that none of them wanted to admit, let alone face. Rex was right: no one knew how long they had, and if the soldiers came before they were ready it would be too late.

  Southing had become a home for so many of them, after such horror, that no one had thought it would end. After the initial batch of soldiers had been killed off, it felt like they were finally free from the Perfects. Finally able to live again. The work of transforming the stations they had been brought to into places they could inhabit with pride and ease felt like a way to heal from all they had suffered through. They built new adaptations for their chairs, lifts, canes, crutches, braces, and their UnPerfect bodies, without thought to what was allowed or having to rely on the Perfects to do so. They experimented with their wildest dreams and ideas, making pulleys and slides and inventing new tools. No one could imagine leaving.

  • • •

  Seva sat quietly on the couch, sadness running through her like a slow, steady river. Her heart hurt. She loved Southing, and the thought of leaving was enough to make her consider searching for Holdan. She had never had a home like this, never lived somewhere with people who loved her. She could still remember her childhood spent at institutions after her parents had committed her and never returned. Being shuffled back and forth with no say, the beatings, the punishments, the meds, and the terrorizing silence. She had wanted something so much better for their kind—they all had—and now it seemed so hopeless.

  She was the youngest of three, born to Perfects, the only U.P. in her family. Her parents had tried to raise her for three years before finally giving up. After what seemed a lifetime of hoping they would visit, days spent sitting at the east-facing windows looking for any sign of them, she had reluctantly given up. They weren’t coming back for her, and she would never see them again.

  She didn’t know where they were now and didn’t care. Sometimes she thought about her sisters and wondered what her parents must have told them when they came home from school to find her gone. And the next days and weeks and years—what did they say?

  The night she first met Al Dwhin and Rex, they had helped her escape from the institution. That night they had asked her if she had a family she wanted them to take her to, and without hesitation she said no. She told them to take her wherever they were going and that she wanted to help free other U.P.s too. She joined their revolutionary work and never looked back.

  Working at the receiving center fed a part of her soul that had died at that east-facing window. Welcoming new U.P.s to Southing was a kind of tenderness she had never known. She felt for the Arrivals, traveling all that way from Earth as tiny babies, so far from where they came from, so full of questions. She knew what it was like to live with that kind of longing always at the back of your heart. But she also knew Southing was a far better experience than they would ever have had if they had been kept on Earth. She knew the other side, and it was impossible to tell them.

  • • •

  Dear U.P.s,

  If you are reading this, you have survived too and we are waiting for you. Somehow, you have survived the soldiers’ return to Southing. We never wanted to leave, but it was the only way. We couldn’t stay; we had to leave to try and find a way to return. Southing was our home and one day it will be again.

  There is no time left. The soldiers are coming and I fear we will not make it through this final battle. Tomorrow we leave for the other side of Hollow, towards the edge of the red sky in the hopes of finding other U.P.s, in hopes of surviving. It is our last attempt to save Southing and the world we have built here, the world the Perfects want to destroy.

  My name is Ona and I am writing this to you from inside Southing. I am an Arrival and have lived in Southing all my life, from the moment I landed on Hollow as a baby sent from Earth, until tomorrow morning when I will leave for the first time.

  I have been raised by the Earlies, who have taken me in, raised me and taught me everything I know. They are the architects of Southing and what it has come to be. They were all part of the last great revolution on Earth and were brought to Hollow as a punishment, as a last resort.

  They have told me of their time on Earth and the glory days of the revolution when they thought they had won and the people finally seized the government, Perfects and UnPerfects working side by side for liberation. Wild tells of her chair rolling next to Jean’s long strides, escaping the soldiers, taking each turn and alley in unison, moving with the wind and rain, instead of against it. And the quick backlash, when the revolution was broken and fell. When the New Regime took hold after just a week and forced the U.P.s into the camps, it killed them one by one before finally sending those still alive here.

  They will never tell you this history, but I want you to know how the Earlies came to Hollow and built Southing into a land we could finally call our own. Free from the Perfects and Earth. I want you to know the magnificence of Rex as she swings and glides, twisting and turning on her crutches with such grace and strength. I want you to feel the tenderness of Seva’s heart, the determination of West and the warmth of Al Dwhin’s smile.

  Our history is all we have and the Perfects will work to erase it. Southing was never meant to be, and it must live on, it must never be forgotten. We will return here one day.

  If the Perfects come and all is lost, remember these names: Rex, Wild, Seva, Jay Lu, Prolt, Al Dwhin, Nuroh, and West.

  Follow the edge of th
e red sky and look for us. We will keep our eyes to the horizon for you.

  We will find each other and build Southing anew,

  Ona

  ላሊበላ ፡ አለመ ከ ገብርኤል ቴዎድሮ

  Lalibela

  Gabriel Teodros

  ላሊበላ: la·li·be·la

  (noun)

  1. Town in northern Ethiopia famous for its eleven monolithic rock-cut buildings (how they were built is unknown).

  2. (Amharic) Given name meaning “even the bees recognize its sovereignty.”

  Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, Present Day

  The key was hidden in plain sight. In twisted metal and shapes within shapes. In fractals and complex geometric patterns people just accepted as religious symbolism. They called it a cross, but it was no crucifix. The truth was buried generations deep and kept there by nothing but a common belief. Most people wore a variation of it around their neck. Some had it sewn into fabric. Like the history of all humanity, it was buried in Ethiopia under nothing but a thin layer of dust.

  His appearance started as a tiny piece of metal that appeared in the rubble on the side of a road. Insignificant, barely noticeable. The metal multiplied itself and then multiplied itself again, growing in the same pattern of what people would then recognize as a Meskel. Soon it stood upright, and it grew taller and taller as a light bled through every opening in the pattern. When it was tall enough for him to pass through, an old man appeared from the light, holding the cross. When he was fully present, the light was gone. He seemed out of time, wearing all white the way a monk would.

  Cars sped by, people walked past, and donkeys carrying wood moved about, seemingly oblivious to a human that had just appeared out of thin air.

  “You can’t expect us to wait forever!” a young man yelled at the elder in the overcrowded Addis Ababa traffic. “Move on, or get out of my way!”

  Gebre Mesqel Lalibela had had quite the journey and was understandably shaken up. In his time, Ethiopian technology allowed his people to build computers, teleportation devices, starships, and even a spaceport in the highlands of Roha. There people lived in buildings on top of buildings that were all carved from a single rock. There were many people he loved whom he’d had to say goodbye to as they went on trips to distant galaxies, knowing he might never see them again. Yet nothing he had seen then compared to the chaos surrounding him now. In this new Capital of the country he had ruled over eight hundred years earlier, what he saw made him wish that time machines had never been invented.

  The air now smelled like black pepper and the sky was covered by smoke that didn’t move, making it hard for him to breathe. The streets were crowded with vehicles that coughed up this poison, and with people and animals, and he couldn’t see how they all fit together. There were huge palaces, and there were people crawling and even sleeping on the busy street.

  He leaned on the cross like it was the only thing holding him up, and he thought, “How have we become so close and so distant at the exact same time?”

  መሰቀል፡ mes·kel

  (noun)

  1. (Ge’ez) Processional cross used in church services, as prayer sticks, for exorcisms, and in time travel, of four basic styles with hundreds of variations.

  Roha Highlands, 1141 EC (AD 1148)

  Lalibela’s mother had often spoken of a swarm of bees that had surrounded him just after she gave birth. Her heart had stopped for a moment, thinking her baby would be stung to death, but the swarm, although blanketing her child, had mysteriously left him untouched. This was a signal to her that Lalibela was not hers alone. He would do great things. He would even lead the country. The bees had recognized his sovereignty.

  The burden of being leader was placed upon him before he even knew how to walk. Lalibela grew up between the pressure of his parents and the jealousy of extended family members and his older siblings, which was like another swarm of bees surrounding him. He often wanted to run away, and when he was old enough he did, as much as he could. Roha at the time overlooked a forest. It was like beachfront property over an ocean of treetops. Lalibela loved to submerge himself in the trees, observing and learning from nature all around him. As a child he was captivated by the complexity of what seemed at the surface to be simple things. Patterns in spider webs. Roots of trees that grew above the Earth. Neither his imagination nor his body could be contained. Not by anyone’s tradition, expectations, or beliefs.

  He was the youngest child and his mother’s favorite son, whether she would admit it or not. His imagination was a threat to the establishment, and, aside from his mother, the royal family despised him for it. He wasn’t motivated by power, even when it was what his mother wanted him to have. Out of jealousy, when Lalibela’s older brother Kedus Harbe inherited the throne, one of his first acts as king was to secretly have Lalibela poisoned.

  It was an herbal potion that came with a plate of shiro, and instead of killing Lalibela it put him to sleep for three days. The visions and dreams he had during that time would come to define his life even more than the bees had.

  Close to death, Lalibela was transported through space and time. His spirit traveled light years to other worlds, where he saw technology that hadn’t been invented yet and Ethiopians who were taking care of multiple planets. He saw faces of people he had never met, from parts of Ethiopia he had never seen, and everywhere he went he was with an eclectic group of farmers, scientists, and artists. They seemed to him to be family he had never met, and with them he felt like he could fly. From the stars, he traveled back to the Roha highlands overlooking that ocean of treetops, but things were different now, and there was a magnetic focus on the volcanic rock underneath his birthplace. He saw the spaceport that would be built there, carved into the mountain, with waterways connecting every building. It was a new foundation, and as such it would be called Addis Yerusalem.

  When Lalibela finally awoke, he was in a room with only his mother by his side.

  “Gebiye, you keep talking in your sleep. What is it you see?”

  “Emaye. I’ve seen what I must do. It’s like three heavens just opened up and became one. In the stars, on the earth, and within ourselves.”

  “My son has died and come back to life!” his mother wept.

  He never bothered explaining more of his dreams to her or even blaming his brother for this near-death journey. He didn’t want to get in another fight, and he still didn’t want to be the leader his mother wanted him to be, the leader his brother feared. He just needed to build what he saw and find the people he had seen in those visions. It was as if he had never known why he was alive until he almost died.

  መንኮራኩር ፡ män·ko·ra·kur

  (noun)

  1. (Ge’ez) Spaceship.

  Arba Minch, 1159 EC (AD 1166)

  Lalibela learned the true beauty of his culture by spending time on a farm in the south. He was undercover, starting to grow a beard, and no one recognized him as a member of the royal family. The kindness of strangers in this part of the country both broke and strengthened his heart on a daily basis. He was invited to eat in the homes of people who barely had anything, who offered him everything they had and took it as an insult if he refused. He realized that being raised as royalty had isolated him from the experience of having true friends.

  The farmers he stayed with were beekeepers as well, which he took as a sign that he must be on the right path. From the farmers he learned how to work the land, and from the bees he learned how to use the stars and the curve of the earth as a guide. Every day felt like seven, and he had never felt so alive. His best friend during this time was the farmer’s daughter Kibra. She made trips selling food at the market on a regular basis, and she had become an expert mathematician. In her spare time she experimented with inventing new tools.

  “Why are you always following me to the market?” Kibra asked with a half-smile one day. “Don’t you have something better to do?”

  “Anything I could be doing would be better with yo
u,” Lalibela responded without hesitation, “But if you want me to go, I’ll go.”

  “No, I want you to stay.”

  Kibra was the first person with whom Lalibela shared all his visions and dreams, and in time the visions blossomed and became their dream together. He was the first person who ever challenged her. She was the first person to fully see him. She was much smarter, but he had more ambition. Somehow they made a perfect team. And they were completely in love.

  The young couple spent most of the next decade with their hands in the dirt, honey in their tea, experimenting and traveling throughout the Ethiopian countryside. Compared to his upbringing in Roha, everything was so new. He looked at the world as if he was seeing it for the first time, and this helped Kibra see things differently too. Together they unlocked potential in one another. They worked hard and played harder, until the work felt like play.

  Everything in the villages was shared, from food and other resources to labor. If just one person yielded a good crop, no one went hungry. The idea of just having a single occupation was foreign. A farmer with a science lab in a gojo who also happened to be an expert krar player was a very common thing. Everyone sang and played music. The simple but rare combination of people following their passions, innovating and learning from the arts, science, and nature, fed into an isolated Ethiopian renaissance, completely self-contained. While Crusaders were violently expanding from Europe and Saladin was defending Egypt and pushing back, Ethiopia turned inward and grew in a way that took them all the way to the stars.

  Every technological leap during this period started in a small village or on a farm. Kibra worked with a group of craftspeople, masons, and beekeepers to develop the first computer. She taught them a system of complex multiplication that she was able to do in her head, which became the foundation of the coding system their computers were based on. She worked with Lalibela to assemble materials based on beehives. Soon what they created was able to function as a calculator, predict weather, and replicate itself.