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

by Walidah Imarisha

  Kibra and Lalibela’s relationship was like a quiet nucleus in the center of this renaissance. It wasn’t Lalibela or Kibra alone that made anything happen. It was the connection they shared that transformed each of them as well as everyone they interacted with. They believed in each other’s dreams enough to make what seemed at first impossible completely real.

  Roha Highlands, 1174 EC (AD 1181)

  Fifteen years later, when Lalibela finally returned from the countryside to Roha, it was not to claim the throne. It was only to propose the idea of building a spaceport. As sure as bees are vital to life on Earth as pollinators, Lalibela thought outside of the planet and dreamed of pollinating the stars. He arrived with Kibra and a whole community of friends who had become family.

  Lalibela’s mother shed tears of joy when her son returned, and all of Roha had a celebration. It was her joy that kept him safe. His brother Kedus feared that Lalibela had come to take his place as king, and that night he ordered one of his guards to cut Lalibela’s throat while he slept. What Kedus didn’t know was that this guard had grown especially fond of Lalibela’s mother and was happy to see her ecstatic and full of joy. He couldn’t stand to be the one to take away her joy, so that night the guard cut Kedus Harbe’s throat instead.

  A day of celebration was followed by a time of mourning, and no one ever knew why or by whom Kedus Harbe was murdered in the middle of the night. The only one who truly mourned was his mother, as he was as ruthless to the masses as he was to his own brother.

  Lalibela was then offered the throne, but he didn’t want it. His mother tried to pressure him, but it had no effect. A conversation with Kibra was the only thing that could change his mind.

  “If you take the throne, you won’t have to do things the way they’ve been done before,” Kibra reasoned, “Ethiopia needs a new kind of leadership. The kind that isn’t power-hungry.”

  “I agree that Ethiopia needs a new kind of leadership, but how do we center the needs of the farmers here in the capitol?” Lalibela questioned. “Before I ran away and met you, I never even saw what really made this country what it is.”

  “That perspective you have now is why this moment is important. And the fact that you don’t want to dominate is another reason I fell in love with you. You won’t be alone here anymore,” she reassured him.

  “So you’ll still marry me?” Lalibela asked.

  “How is this even a question in your mind?” Kibra smirked.

  With new leadership and an influx of newcomers from the countryside, the energy in Roha grew electric. The people believed Lalibela traveled with angels since the people he came with were able to do things they had seen no human do. Even now, eight hundred years later, people still say the spaceport in Roha was built at night by angels. They will say it was built by angels before they will say it was anything but a church. The spaceport was built by regular people inspired to create something for more than themselves, and that creative spirit has always had a way of keeping people up at night. They built machines that cut through rock like butter, and eleven structures formed a launchpad for starships that was loosely based on the mechanics of lily pads and frogs.

  Lalibela and Kibra led Ethiopia together, never losing touch with the countryside. The capitol was transformed inside and out. There were more than a few villages with aspirations to see the heavens, and people traveled from as far as West Africa and India to take flight from the Roha spaceport. The country was flourishing, and Roha became a cosmopolitan center.

  “Let’s go see the future,” Lalibela proposed to Kibra one day. “If we are to have children, I want to see the world their great-great-great-grandchildren are to inherit.”

  “Why not?” Kibra chuckled, amused by her partner’s spontaneity. “How about the year 3000?”

  Ethiopian engineering by this time had gotten to a microscopic level, and again based on a bee’s perception farmers and scientists had found a way to slip through the very fabric of time. It started when they realized that bees could perceive movements at one three-hundredth of a second versus human’s perception at one-fiftieth. Once they developed instruments that could perceive movements and navigate as fast as bees, it wasn’t as complicated to fine-tune things even further. Soon they found pockets in space at a submicroscopic level where matter appeared and disappeared, seemingly at random. After they realized that simply observing these anomalies was actually changing how they occurred, they were able to communicate with the pockets and, little by little, slip right through the space-time continuum. Time travel was always possible, and is actually always happening, but in Ethiopia most people just use it to make the good moments last longer.

  ረአይ ፡ ra’·əy

  (noun)

  1. (Amharic) Vision.

  2. Revelation.

  Gondar, Year 3000

  “Have you ever heard those stories of when we were people?” a young dragon asked the other, while dancing in flight and playing catch with a ball of fire. “They say we were creative. Even all the ruins below us were structures that we built, and we used to live inside of them. Now we only destroy. Destroy just so it can be rebuilt someday when we become human again.”

  “If our descendants ever become human again,” the other dragon interjected.

  The air felt like an oven. The sky was black, and small fires were everywhere, burning all that was left of what could have been a city. The whole world looked like the inside of a volcano.

  A blue light emerged, and the air rippled as Lalibela and Kibra stepped through a space pocket. A hot wind rushed across their faces as they looked up to see several enormous creatures descending from the sky. Dragons landed all around them, shadows dancing over green scales and piercing eyes. One dragon stepped front and center, crouched down to a human level, and spoke in a voice both calm and massive.

  “Human time travelers. Welcome. Earth is now our home. We were here before your reign on the planet and we rose again after.”

  “After?” Lalibela trembled.

  “We have studied your ruins and the stories you left behind. It is apparent to us that humanity did not have to end its time on Earth in the way that it did.”

  “I don’t understand. What happened? Where are we? Is this Ethiopia?” Kibra asked.

  “This is what you left. If you wish to prolong your existence on the planet, you must begin to understand that you, all humans, and all life on Earth are inextricably linked. You are all one organism. Even us now. You are a part of us and we are a part of you. There is no separation.”

  “That makes sense to me, scientifically speaking,” Lalibela agreed.

  The dragon’s nostrils flared. “Yes, time travelers always say they understand. Your ego is a problem. As a species, the stories you left tell of division and hierarchy. You constantly fought wars with each other while exploiting resources you knew would make the planet inhospitable for generations to come. You must act on what you say you understand if you wish to travel back to this time and see what your people could have done. The atmosphere isn’t safe for you now. It is clear to us that something went horribly wrong for you in the twenty-first century.”

  “Why are you helping us?” Kibra asked, visibly frightened.

  “You are the children of dragons, and we are what you will eventually become. There is no more time for you here. Go back and get what you lost.”

  The other dragons, who hadn’t said a word, suddenly exhaled in unison, and a ring of fire surrounded the two time travelers. They had no choice but to step through another space pocket into the past, immediately.

  Roha Highlands, 1180 EC (1187 AD)

  “Lalibela, I think our most important work is here, in the present,” Kibra reasoned. The immensity of what she had seen convinced her that time travel was useless.

  Lalibela’s childhood habit of running away to explore was kicking in again. “But you heard that dragon. You saw their world. We can do something! We have to go to the twenty-first century.”

 
; “Then go if you must. I’ll still be here when you return. I don’t want you to go, but I don’t want to hold you somewhere you don’t want to be either.” Her heart ached, but she meant it.

  Lalibela’s first trips to the future were brief, but they became longer. The time he was gone from the present was time that he really missed. He could never go back exactly to the moment he’d left. Kibra eventually gave birth to a son, Yetbarak, who grew up knowing more stories of his father than the actual person. Lalibela became a wanderer in time, so obsessed with this idea of saving the future that he never saw what it was causing him to lose. Kibra raised their son, led the country, and completed the most extensive construction project Roha had ever seen. The love between Lalibela and Kibra never diminished, even as the distance between them increased. Lalibela existed in all time and no time, while the world continued on its path. Slowly, pieces were lost, drifting like petals on water. In a few generations, all Kibra and Lalibela had built was remembered only as religious folklore.

  Addis Ababa, Present Day

  Lalibela still didn’t know exactly what to say or who to say it to. Even as a king, he looked at the palaces and knew true power wasn’t there. He wandered the noisy streets and felt desperation in his bones. A need to touch earth and feel water, but deeper still was a need to tell people what he knew. Every now and then someone would ask for his blessing, but most just saw him as a crazy old man. History may have regarded him as a saint, but alone he was no hero.

  On this day, a young girl saw Lalibela emerge from a space pocket in a busy Addis Ababa street. The girl stared at the man who had appeared from nowhere. He turned, and she saw his face.

  “Gashe, I know you,” she said out loud, voice trembling. “I thought you were only a legend,” she said softly, as she moved closer toward him.

  Lalibela looked down at her sadly. She was very thin and wore a T-shirt with an image of Thomas Sankara and the words “Invent the future” written in Amharic: ወደፊትን መፍጠር. She had a hungry look in her eyes, but he also saw determination.

  Then she boldly reached out a hand to grab his. A burst of blue light filled the air around them.

  “This is strange,” Lalibela murmured. “I have not felt this for centuries. Not since my people remembered how to slip through time. I have traveled on my own for so long, trying to make things right. But I am not strong enough. Perhaps, multiplied by two—”

  The girl stared up at him without speaking. Minutes stretched, the light spiraled, and Lalibela’s heart sank. She does not understand, he thought. It was a mistake.

  “Well,” she said impatiently. “Are you going to show me how to move through time, or do I have to figure it out on my own?”

  Lalibela smiled at her, a bright star in the midst of so much chaos. Her fire reminded him of one that burned now in the distant past.

  “Let me tell you a story,” Lalibela said. He held the girl’s hand, and together they walked out of time.

  Little Brown Mouse

  Tunde Olaniran

  A little after three in the morning, Thomas burst out of the house into the cool night air and down the front steps toward the quiet suburban street. Tripping on the last step, he fell painfully onto his right shoulder and elbow, rolled onto his back, and then tumbled, gasping and wincing, into the grass by the curb. His thoughts ran incoherently and his muscles tensed, expecting violence, feeling animalistic fear. He felt like a little brown mouse.

  • • •

  When he was about eleven, almost twelve years ago, Thomas had caught a mouse in the attic, trapping it under a shoebox as it zoomed out from under a box spring he had moved. Instead of killing it right away or letting it loose outside, he dumped the mouse into a plastic food container in the kitchen then sealed the container with a lid. The mouse pawed the walls of its makeshift prison frantically. Thomas stood at the sink, opened the lid just enough to fit the faucet inside, and turned on the water, watching the container fill up with the mouse trapped inside. He looked into the mouse’s dark eyes, watched its struggle to escape. Death came for the little brown mouse, but Thomas didn’t feel a sense of control—or much of anything. He just watched the mouse float.

  • • •

  Now he looked up from the ground, gasping like a little brown mouse, dark eyes staring wide at the door of his house.

  Nothing. Five fast beats of his heart. Nothing.

  His heart beat faster. Nothing. A sliver of iridescence in the black, there it was. A nightmare unhinging itself from behind his eyelids and stepping over the scuffed wooden threshold of the mahogany front door. Thomas couldn’t move or speak. His teeth ground together. The sliver fanned into an arc as it came closer.

  “What is it? What is it?”

  Thomas’s nightmare spoke to him from beneath her veil. Her eyes were beautiful and terrible, and he knew they would see him no matter where he ran or hid. Red and gold layers moved like water, and she floated toward him. The fan of long, shimmering spines atop her head grazed the doorway, trembling delicately.

  “What is it?” she repeated.

  The woman was suddenly upon him, hands tightly gripping Thomas’s head, her thumbs pressed against his temples. A wave of heat radiated through his body, remembering his nightmare, the liquid filling his lungs, foaming out of his mouth. His eyes squeezed open and shut, and he wondered how reality could betray him. Thomas felt the dirt under his head soften as they both sank slowly into the ground. The woman looked down at him peacefully as Thomas realized that this was his death.

  “Tommy, what are you doing out here?” It was not the woman’s voice. Whose voice was that? Thomas opened his eyes to see Ange staring down at him. Her expression was perplexed, faintly irritated. Her car was still running in the driveway, the idling engine and faint thudding bass from her radio breaking the silence.

  “Tommy! What is going on? What are you doing?”

  He wasn’t dead. His body was aboveground. The strange woman was gone. Had she ever been there? Thomas still felt her pressure on his face. His mouth worked silently, his ragged breathing slowed in Ange’s protective presence. Though his body warned that the partition between nightmare and waking life had fallen, Ange’s firm gaze made him clumsily put them back up, a tin shanty roof against the elements, against his experience. That’s what Thomas did best: push things away, ignore them, deny them. He refused his sister’s extended hand and rose from the lawn. Patches of grass torn from the ground scattered as his clenched fist opened. The air now felt cold, chilling the sweat on his face and neck.

  “Leave me alone, Ange.”

  Thomas turned toward their house and carefully climbed the steps. Years ago, he’d played and hidden beneath them, protected by their sturdy wood. Now they creaked and bowed under his weight. The foundation was missing large chunks of its beige and gray brick. The entire house seemed smaller, old, and darker. He hesitated at the door, and Ange shoved past him, reaching under the lampshade on the foyer table and flooding the doorway with light. Thomas held his breath and looked over his shoulder, afraid he’d see the woman again. Ange stared at him.

  “Will you close the door? It’s freezing.” Ange’s tone had lost even a faint trace of concern. She looked at him like she did when they were younger and his episodes would consume her days, when time would stop because of Tommy and his problems. He knew that she blamed him for their mother’s death. He knew because he blamed himself. It was his fault. Everything was always his fault. He and Ange had been close when they were very young, but leading up to the accident, his episodes made it impossible for them to connect. He wanted, more than anything, to talk with her like they used to do before she became popular, with all of her friends and secret late-night phone calls with boys and—

  “Wait. What is that? Tommy, what happened?” Ange was still staring at him, and now her brows furrowed as she took a step closer.

  “On your face—”

  Thomas turned to look in the foyer mirror. Below his eye was a mark, som
e kind of stain. An iridescent blue stain, chalky and dried. Thomas recognized the color from his nightmares, from choking on the liquid as it rose from his throat like bile and blood. An unnatural color.

  “Nothing,” he mumbled, “it’s nothing. Forget it.”

  Wiping the smudge away, he slammed the door shut and locked it, neglecting to use his sleeve as a barrier between his skin and the handle. As he touched it, foreign memories forced their way into his mind. Ange’s friends at Shad’s Bar downtown, drinking and laughing and shouting over the music, reaching for Thomas’s hand and dragging him onto the dance floor. No, those weren’t his friends. And that was not him, that was Ange. That was Ange’s night—and Ange’s mind.

  Thomas swallowed hard, stepped back from the door, and ran upstairs past Ange. The shock of his nightmare, how real it felt, was distracting him from his usual focus, his careful control of these problems. Thomas felt safe enough with Ange home to pretend that she was a hallucination.

  • • •

  After the death of the little brown mouse, something had changed for Thomas, or inside Thomas, or in the world around Thomas—he wasn’t sure which. It was just different. He’d read books about extrasensory perception, but they did nothing to explain what he was experiencing. The world got silent for Thomas. He could still hear, and people still spoke, but that sense of space (or lack thereof) shifted. He stopped needing to tune people or things out. They simply seemed silent, no matter the sound. Until he touched them.

  The first time the world exploded, he was eating dinner with Mom and Ange at his sister’s favorite pizza place for her birthday. The most mundane, ridiculous thing: passing a glass of water. When it reached his hands from the server’s tray, a burning knife buried itself into the back of Thomas’s head. He was in three, four places, filled with strangers doing things to him, saying things to him that he couldn’t understand. His mouth foamed and his arm stiffened, flinging the glass across the table. It shattered on the floor. Mom jumped up and tried to hold him still while he spasmed. At her touch, Thomas was suddenly looking into the mirror of their downstairs bathroom while his mother’s reflection carefully applied mascara and then picked pills from the dark blue sweater she was wearing for Ange’s birthday dinner.