Null States

by Malka Older

  What do you think? Roz asks him in a quickly typed message. At first she thinks he’s not going to look at it until the commander’s answer is over, but then she gets the response: He’s no fan, but he hasn’t kicked me off the force yet.

  Commander Hamid spins the question slightly off center by turning to defense. “It’s what I know,” he says, with an admirable humble-brag. “Information is useful for our security. We know more about what’s going on around us. Attacks have gone down since we and our neighbors became part of the system. But if Information ever works against our security needs, at that point I believe we should abdicate from the system in an orderly manner.” Roz wonders if this is a local framework, or if he’s following the debate around intervention in the K-stan war.

  Fatima waits for a long moment before speaking, and Roz feels the attention in the crowd draw taut. “I often feel as you do,” she begins. It’s the singular you; she too is speaking directly to Jibrail. “My husband was uncertain about the role Information would play, about what we give up to join with them. But as time went on, he came to see what we gain from them as well. He died believing that Information is the way forward for DarFur.”

  Died believing it, and maybe died because he believed it. Fatima meets Roz’s eyes across the room, and Roz wonders if they are thinking the same thing.

  “I hope he was right,” Fatima continues, finally. “But I will not believe until I am sure. We must watch them as they watch us. We may try their way, and learn what we can. But as always in our history, we must be ready to survive alone when we have to.”

  CHAPTER 21

  There are a few other, more anodyne questions, some projected in remotely from other centenals, and several more questionless comments that Suleyman parries before they can become too time-consuming or self-serving. The candidates are allowed one more statement, and then it’s over. Roz lingers by the exit, listening to the conversations of audience members as they walk out (lively, excited, and largely substanceless—more or less what one hopes for after a debate). When the tent has emptied out, she hurries back to the compound and her hut, and pulls out the unwieldy length of her new toub, shimmering and soft. She feels vaguely exhilarated even though she has done practically nothing all evening. She wraps the cloth over her trousers and attempts various configurations for getting it over her shoulders and head, eventually turning to a tutorial vid on Information. More or less covered, although still uneasy about the anchoring of various folds, she heads out to the party.

  The feast is held in the open area bounded by the militia barracks, the market, and two residential streets. The impounded camel has been moved behind the barracks for the occasion, and the VIP table, which is not a table but a woven mat, is settled on the close-cropped grass under the tree. The male VIP table, that is. Roz, still clinging to the loose end of her toub, is gestured over to a mat in the shadow of one of the compound walls; other mats with less-important women stretch out to either side of them, while the less-important men are across the way, nearer to the barracks.

  She can’t help shooting a glance toward the center: Minzhe, leaning his forearm on one knee, hand tilted up to protect the food curled inside, is listening to the militia commander hold forth. On the other side of the mat, Suleyman nods, with his eyes fixed on Malakal, who is gesturing expansively with his left hand; Abdul Gasig and Abdul Salim are eating side by side.

  At least here with the women, she has a chance to talk to Fatima. The widow is flanked by two of her friends, or aides, and Roz settles in across the mat from them, beside the sheikha Thoraya and catty-corner to a woman in a jewel-green toub whom Information helpfully identifies as the wife of the militia commander, also named Fatima. Halima, Information’s landlady, is at the other end of the mat, leaning on one arm as though to balance the weight of her pregnant body. Amal, Roz notices, is late or tactfully absent.

  Probably she has better food at home, Roz thinks, examining the dishes arrayed on the circular platters in the middle of the mat. The usual five ways of preparing goat; three different vegetables, all stewed into something goopy; large bowls of the porridge, aseeda; plates of the sorghum crepes, kisra; and several stacks of flat, floury bread. Grabbing a piece of bread and using it to pinch morsels of goat, Roz engages Sheikha Thoraya in casual conversation, getting through the traditional greetings and the comments on the weather (still hot) and asking what she thought of the debate.

  “Al-hamdu lillāh, it went very well,” Thoraya answers, jovial with congratulations for the Information team’s success. “There were many people there, and they listened!”

  Roz, a little surprised by the sheikha’s perspective, has a sudden inkling that she may have had something to do with the excellent attendance. “And you? Did you find it interesting?”

  “Well … There wasn’t much that was new,” she says, apologetically. “After watching all of their position vids, I mean. Of course that fool from Jebel Marra made a fool of himself, but that was to be expected.”

  Unexpected frankness, or what she thinks Information wants to hear? Roz turns to include Fatima in the conversation. “Did you enjoy the debate?”

  Fatima looks up from her meal. “Enjoy? Not really,” she responds with a smile that balances between self-deprecating and shyly honest. “I don’t particularly like speaking to crowds. But they seemed engaged, which is important. And I think it went well.”

  The perfect timbre of her answer sparks anger in Roz. All these politicians who pretend so well not to be politicians, these polished speakers who claim to hate speaking.

  “But if you don’t like speaking for crowds,” she says, trying to sound genuinely puzzled, “why do you want to be head of state?”

  “I don’t want to be head of state,” Fatima responds. “But I have an obligation to continue the work of my husband. He wanted a strong, independent Fur nation, and I will continue working toward that.”

  “What about what you want?”

  Fatima’s smile says this is a question she knows how to answer. “My husband wanted to live, I’m sure of that. This is not a situation where everyone gets what they want.”

  “Do you think you’ll be a good head of state if you don’t want the job?”

  “The best leaders are the ones who don’t want to be.” She says it with certainty and, seeing that Roz is skeptical, leans forward. “It’s not just about corruption, although that is an important reason. People who don’t want the job can become corrupt too.” She rolls her eyes as though this is obvious. The change in her personality is startling until it hits Roz that this may be the first time she has seen the woman not actively mourning. Maybe she was always like this before her husband was killed, suddenly and far away. “I have come to believe that the best leaders are those that are required to subvert some part of their personality to lead. They learn discipline, and in this way they are able to put others first.”

  “Didn’t Al—didn’t your husband want to be head of state?”

  “He wanted independence and prosperity for the Fur people first.” Fatima has shut off again, leaning back, eyes flattened.

  “Why are you so convinced we killed him?” Roz whispers. “We came here to work with him. We had no reason to want him dead.”

  “He thought you did,” Fatima says, voice low. Out of the corner of her eye Roz can see Sheikha Thoraya studiously focused on her plate.

  “He did?” Roz asks. “Why?”

  “I don’t know,” Fatima answers. Her voice crackles with frustration, and the woman next to her puts a hand on her arm. “He was nervous when he heard you were coming. He had been here in Kas and then had a trip to some of the other centenals, and he only got back the day before—but you know this, of course.” She waves her hand, as if to lighten the bitterness in her voice.

  “We can know where he went,” Roz says, as gently as she can manage, “but not what he was feeling or what he said to you.”

  Fatima shakes her head. “He didn’t tell me why. But he was un
settled, here and there, and then that urgent meeting with the sheikhs—he left straight from there.” She looks down, places her hand above her eyes like a visor.

  “I’m so sorry,” Roz murmurs, and then turns away to engage Thoraya in conversation about the likelihood that the rainy season will arrive soon. She listens to the detailed response distractedly while she surreptitiously types her notes and revises her image of Fatima. She tries now to imagine her as the supportive wife, encouraging her husband in his first campaign, helping him strategize. And then sending him off to another centenal to dally with his mistress?

  She doesn’t have the cultural frame right yet. Her unthinking gaze strays to the tree, to the mat below it, to Suleyman, holding forth with the neat gestures of his hands, his deep voice muted by the distance and the murmur of the crowd.

  * * *

  The sun has disappeared behind the low rise in the west, and the air has cooled to the point where it is pleasant to be outside, sitting on a mat under the sky. The evening prayer has just finished when Roz hears a familiar voice and turns her head to see Amran coming toward her, followed by Maria, Maryam, and Khadija.

  “We finished,” Amran says, after she’s done the round of greetings with the august women. “Any food left?”

  On cue, a woman comes by with a fresh tray of meat, vegetables, and starches. The newcomers dig in. Roz, her appetite renewed by their enthusiasm, takes a scoop from the soupy bowl of yellow-green vegetable matter with her kisra. She grimaces at the sweet-sour taste: the vegetable is bourgette, a banana-zucchini cross that Roz still finds counterintuitive. Amran, young enough to have grown up with that ingredient as an established part of her world, is helping herself to more.

  Roz has been working at eye level on and off since the conversation with Fatima. She checked for more mental-emotional scans by Al-Jabali, wondering if they can pinpoint the moment when he started feeling guilty or scared, but the scan he did after the oil barrel explosion is the only one on record. Not knowing where else to look, she goes back to the sheikh’s meeting in Djabal and studies the infrastructure projects again. It is only after staring at the numbers in one eye while people eat and laugh around her that it occurs to her: where, she wonders, did DarFur get the money for all this?

  Charles plops down next to her, breaking into her thoughts. He borrowed a gleaming jellabiya for the party and is sitting cross-legged, head tilted as he gauges the attention of others at the table. Whatever he wants to talk to her about is not classified, but private.

  “Sorry to disturb,” Charles says. “I wanted to tell you personally.”

  “What?”

  “Nejime has asked me to go to Urumqi.”

  “What!”

  “I’m sorry, Roz. I know there’s still a lot to be done here, but with the debate over, some of the pressure will be off…” Charles trails off, looking sheepish, even though he really didn’t have much of a choice.

  “No, you’re right. We can manage. But has the K-stan conflict really gotten that bad? Or…” She wonders for a moment whether he’s being sent to investigate the other suspicious death Mishima noticed.

  “You didn’t see the latest?” Charles starts to blink it up into a projection, then stops, looking around again. It’s public knowledge, but no need to advertise Information’s weaknesses, especially not here. “Shells hit a 1China centenal along the border. They landed in a meadow, only killed a sheep or two, and our analysis shows they were misses, not deliberate targeting of that centenal. But 1China has officially requested assistance from Information, and China is holding military exercises.”

  “In case our military support isn’t enough,” Roz says, going cold. Because it won’t be, not if either of the K-stans or, worse, both of them decide to attack in earnest. She feels a flicker of jealousy: it is going to be an important job, important and fascinating and global. “When are you leaving?”

  “Tomorrow morning.”

  “Be careful.”

  “You too,” Charles says, touching her shoulder as he gets up to go back to his place.

  * * *

  Roz glances around on the tail of a raucous peal of laughter from Thoraya’s side of the table, and realizes that the party is thinning out. Most of the other mats have emptied, and centenal staff are already clearing dishes. Dark has fallen, and the night feels almost cool. Roz leans back on her hands and sighs. She wishes she could lean all the way back and lie flat, staring up at the stars. A flash of white catches her eye, and she looks up to see Suleyman standing at one end of the mat.

  “Good evening, ladies,” he says, and there’s an immediate cheerful chorus of “good evening!” back from Thoraya and the other sheikhas. Roz notices Maryam trying to catch her eye, and avoids it. “A few of the gentlemen are joining me in my compound for tea, and I wondered if any of you would like to come along.”

  Roz looks up in surprise, but the sheikhas are already gathering themselves in happy agreement; this must not be untoward, or even so very unusual. Fatima and her companions decline, but then she is still grieving. Amran looks eager, Maria nonchalant. Roz finally meets Maryam’s gaze, and they share a shrug and then scramble up from the mat.

  Roz prepares herself, during the straggling group walk toward the centenal hall, for Suleyman’s … house? Hut? Most importantly, for an imagined wife (or two?), perfect and pleasant and lovely, passing out the tea. His compound turns out to be a small one, practically adjoining the centenal hall (is it a centenal property, offered to the governor? Or did he buy it after he was elected?) and the woman who appears with the round tray of tiny, gilded glasses is a servant Roz recognizes from meetings at the centenal hall. She starts to relax into her seat, a wooden bed frame strung with twine, where she is pressed between Maryam on one side and Khadija on the other; similar seats are arranged in a rough circle, and the conversation flows with the ease of a successful day and a late night.

  Roz does not hear how they get on the subject of the election blackout two years ago. The conversation finds its way to her awareness with Charles talking about working in the Lagos Hub, the disruption, the desperate attempts to figure out what happened, the waiting. “We were all trying to find things we could do to help. I remember people filming vids encouraging citizens to vote, to post once connection came back up, crunching whatever data we had every which way we could think of, doing old tasks that had been put aside for months. Huh! We even cleaned the office. Everyone wanted to be useful.”

  Minzhe was election-monitoring in a Liberty centenal outside of Harare. “Everyone was shocked at first—they definitely didn’t know it was coming, nobody knew what was going on, there were all these crazy theories—but then, like twenty-four hours in, somebody woke up and they started showing all these vids and pop-ups everywhere. The thing was”—Minzhe shakes his head—“it happened so quickly. They had all those lies ready. They were meant for something else, but then someone realized that this was an opportunity and rolled them out. They weren’t ready for that, but they were ready for something.” There is nodding and head-shaking among the Information staff. The locals are listening politely: for them, Liberty is little more than a distant villain from an interactive, a character painted on the mural wall.

  “Weren’t you in Doha?” Charles asks Roz.

  Maryam shifts in the seat next to her, remembering that time. “Yes,” Roz says. “I was counting votes.” There is a respectful silence after that, but she doesn’t elaborate.

  “I was in Juba,” Malakal says. “It was very … frustrating.” That pause speaks of the enormous effort it took to get the new centenals ready by Election Day, and the fury when those gains were threatened. Malakal raises his eyes to look at Suleyman. It’s a question, and Roz wonders if any of the rest of them would have thought to ask the locals.

  Suleyman coughs. “It was not such an important moment for us here. We’re used to blackouts. We were worried about our votes, and worried that this system we had agreed to, invested in, was failing us.” Roz h
as torn her gaze away from the governor to look at Malakal. He doesn’t wince, but his face is frozen, eyes down. “But only in terms of votes, you understand, not…” Not the world-shattering episode it was for most of them, not a remember-exactly-where-you-were-the-moment-you-heard event. “Afterwards, when we learned more of the story, we were amazed,” he says, as if to mollify those here who live and die with Information. “We wondered, too, how it might affect us.”

  There’s a silence after that, as everyone present wonders the same.

  * * *

  Even though Roz and Maryam retire immediately after returning from the sheikh’s afterparty (something which would have an entirely different meaning in Doha), they stay awake long into the night. They spend the first hour dissecting the debate and its associated events from every angle of their respective viewpoints, but once that is done, Maryam moves them on to Roz’s crush.

  “Come on,” she says when Roz resists. “I would far rather talk about that than about how miserable I am.” Roz is already crumbling when she adds, “And he is very cute.”

  How can she not give in? She takes Maryam through their recent encounters, which, spoken out loud, seem to amount to very little.

  “It is impossible,” she sighs finally. “I’m sure he’s married at least once, maybe twice, maybe three times…”

  Maryam pushes up onto her elbow to stare at her. “Are you kidding? He’s not married at all.”

  “He’s not married?”

  “Didn’t you even search him on Information?”

  “… No.” She’s thought about it many times, but always remembers how he apologized for searching her, and restrains herself. “Wait, you did?”

  “Of course I did! I have to look out for my friends.”