After the Flare

by Deji Bryce Olukotun

  They went to inspect the shipping container, where Wale fished around among the shovels, PVC boxes, sample bags, and brooms until he found a three-wheeled wheelbarrow with an electronic box in the middle and a handle for the operator to push the thing forward.

  “Metal detector?” Bracket asked.

  “No,” Seeta said, perking up. “Much better than that. A GPR. Ground-penetrating radar. That’s exactly what we need. It can give us a better acoustic image than my instruments at the spaceport.”

  “Quiet!” Clarence hissed. The bodyguard cupped his hand to his ear, and Bracket too could hear an engine in the distance.

  “Nanjala’s spinning up the plane,” Wale guessed.

  “No, boss, that’s a truck.” He rushed up a nearby embankment and raised the scope again. “Two trucks,” he said. “Moving fast.”

  “Coming this way?” Bracket asked.

  “No, they’re heading to the plane.”

  “Police?” Seeta asked hopefully.

  “No, must have seen us land.” Clarence shook his head. He fingered the trigger of the rifle. “Out of range too. Come on. Time to go. I can carry you, boss.”

  “I won’t be carried like some invalid,” Wale declared. He raised his cane over the site, waving it about like a staff, for what purpose, Bracket couldn’t tell. Then they all ran back through the bush, moving as quickly as they could in the stifling heat, Seeta pushing the GPR before her.

  “I’ll distract them,” Clarence said, peeling off into the bushes. “Keep moving!”

  They kept running through the bushes, twisting this way and that as the path meandered, until, finally, the runway opened up before them, the plane already powered on, with the stepladder ready to accept them. But the two trucks were headed that way too and would reach the plane sooner. Bracket could make out the militants more clearly now, about ten on each vehicle, and see their bright red armbands.

  Then a man in one of the trucks suddenly exploded out of his seat, flying into the dirt. The second truck kept barreling forward until the windshield spiderwebbed and the truck drifted to the side as the driver slumped over, dead. Clarence had fired only two shots.

  “Go, Wale! Go!” Bracket shouted.

  The Jarumi leapt out of their trucks as the scientists barreled up the stairs into the cabin, Bracket helping Seeta lift the GPR into the cargo hold. Nanjala released the brakes and the plane inched forward, moving slowly, Clarence running alongside until he could climb onto the stairs, and he pulled the hatch closed with the militants firing wildly in their direction. Now the jet was rocketing ahead on the runway and took off at what felt like an impossible angle. Seeta lifted open the arm of the lounge chair to remove her seat belt, and Bracket desperately copied her as the plane banked sharply once, then twice.

  They all looked out the windows as the militants’ trucks shrunk in the distance, and soon the men were specks and hardly seemed a threat at all. Nanjala banked again over Lake Chad, and Bracket could see the silver water scintillating in the late-afternoon sun, a flock of spoonbills white on the surface as the birds rose up and descended again to the water.

  They flew in silence for a while as they recovered themselves, and the plane climbed to its cruising altitude. When they leveled out, Bracket moved to the bathroom to clean off the stench of Ahmat’s body, rubbing his hands compulsively under the warm water.

  When he came out, he accepted Clarence’s offer of a Guinness, slurping it down as much for the cold as the alcohol. But instead of the drink calming him, Bracket grew angry. Clarence had known that they were in danger the moment they had landed. So had Wale. And the scientist hadn’t warned them.

  “Wale,” Bracket growled, “you knew full well that the Jarumi were in the area when you invited us out here. Your own researcher was murdered in cold blood, and you risked all our lives without so much as an afterthought. How do we know this isn’t some crazy vanity project?”

  He hadn’t meant for it come out as an accusation, but the stench on his hands—still there after washing them—had removed any pretense at being polite.

  “Vanity project?” Wale asked in disbelief. “This isn’t a vanity project. What about you, Dr. Chandrasekhan, do you think it’s a vanity project?”

  “I’m with Kwesi on this, Wale,” Seeta admitted. “I’ll grant you that it’s interesting scholarly research. But it doesn’t seem worth the risk, if you ask me. And certainly not worth our risk. It’s a lot of speculation.”

  Wale threw his cane to the floor in frustration. “Vanity project!”

  Bracket moved to pick it up for him. He felt an intense electric shock when he touched it. “Damn!”

  “You shouldn’t touch that,” Wale explained.

  “What is that thing?” Seeta asked.

  He lifted the cane above his head, ignoring her. “I’ll show you why this isn’t a vanity project.”

  The cane emitted a thin beam of light that slowly expanded into three interlocking beams that swirled around, meeting in the middle in a 3-D image near the cabin ceiling. Wale twisted the cane in his hands, causing the lights in the cabin to dim.

  The image crystallized into an ancient Chinese manuscript with stylized renditions of mountains and a fisherman in a turgid sea.

  “This was recorded in a court during the Song dynasty,” Wale said, “around the year eleven hundred. See that red streak in the top left-hand corner? What do you suppose that is?”

  “Could be a stain,” Seeta said, “or a rainbow.”

  “Have a look at this one from Al-Andalus in Spain.” With a subtle shift of the cane that Bracket couldn’t perceive, the image swapped. This one was a landscape of rolling hills. Again, there was a streak across the sky, this time blue. “That is from Xàtiva, a town near Valencia. And this is a carving from ancient Harran.” He flipped through several more images, noting the peculiar streaks or arcs in each of them.

  “You’re saying these marks were all recorded around the same time,” Bracket guessed.

  “Not around the same time!” Wale hissed. “On the exact same date. It was likely an aurora from a coronal mass injection. Charged particles colliding with the atmosphere.”

  “A solar flare?” Seeta asked.

  “The most powerful solar flare in recorded history, much larger than the Carrington event in the eighteen hundreds.”

  Bracket was beginning to sense it now, Wale’s wild speculations coalescing into a sort of deranged logic. He felt the plane descending again, headed now back to the spaceport.

  “I believe that this flare may have given rise to a new civilization,” Wale said. “Within a few decades, an advanced Iron Age culture appeared in northern Nigeria that merited being recorded on astrolabes thousands of kilometers away. The Nok weren’t simple traders. They were much more than that! They were extraordinarily tall and powerful warriors who could easily defeat their enemies. They could leap enormous distances! They had the power to melt stone. That is what I am looking for. I’m talking about a civilization that once possessed technologies as great as our own. A civilization forged right here in Nigeria that captured the imagination of kings and queens living on the other side of the world.”

  Bracket felt his skin tingle. Extraordinarily tall. The ability to leap enormous distances. He peered over at Seeta and could see that she was thinking the same thing. Together, they’d seen that.

  “I think the first flare ignited the civilization of the Nok,” Wale continued. “And the second flare—the very one that brought you here to Nigeria—may have unearthed it once again. I don’t know why, or how, but something must have changed. These artifacts have been buried for a millennium and now you found them again.”

  “They’re here,” Seeta said.

  “Well, possibly,” Wale said, misunderstanding her. “I’m confident in my findings. But you’re right that it’s still only a theory that requires more archaeological evidence. If we could correlate this specimen to the accounting methods I described—”

  “Yo
u don’t understand, Dr. Olufunmi,” Seeta explained. “We’ve already found your evidence. The Nok are still alive.”

  CHAPTER 19

  The cryogenically cooled fuel shrunk the titanium walls of the rocket like a candy wrapper as the Masquerade pointed skyward. It was the real ship, finally rolled out into the fresh air, a Nigerian spaceship powered by Indian rockets. It wasn’t a pathetic little capsule perched atop a rocket like the red nose of a clown. The Masquerade was a starcraft.

  Bracket heard the countdown, then the ignition, and saw the white flame burn blue and the torrent of cool water rush down to protect the rocket against its own flames. The bolts blew off the trusses and the Masquerade lifted into the air in a hurricane of fire.

  The antenna array swiveled to track the launch, downlinking huge quantities of data for the rescue mission. The Masquerade would be traveling fifteen thousand kilometers per hour when it separated from the rockets, which would return to Earth to land again. The starship, meanwhile, would orbit the planet two times before touching down on the airstrip. There was no one on board.

  “Show a little humility,” Josephine had warned Bello, when he complained that the test launch would be unmanned. “We’re not going to send a crew into space on an untested machine. We’ll follow the Soviets. They launched the Buran shuttle without a crew and with no press watching. The Americans launched the Columbia without a single test mission and three thousand journalists observing—and it could have killed them all. They lost half a dozen heat tiles on liftoff alone.”

  Watching the launch from two kilometers away, Bracket’s skin tingled as the Masquerade sailed clear of the cloud layer. All around him the scientists were cheering openly, some hugging, while others, like him, said nothing. Beside him, Wale shook his head with tears in his eyes.

  “We did it,” he whispered. “We finally did it.”

  But Bracket remained quiet—the mission wasn’t over yet. He had watched the Challenger space shuttle explode on television, when African American astronaut Ronald McNair had been incinerated before his eyes. He remembered the white burst, the tiniest error multiplied into a fireball of doom, and how his mother had locked herself in her room for two days. The Indians too had lost one of their own in the Columbia disaster, when Kalpana Chawla had died.

  Seeta was positioned much nearer to the rocket, and when she had clearance from Josephine, she rushed in to examine the platform with her acoustic instruments to find any evidence of damage. Here and there, long streaks of soot snaked up the angled exhaust basin, curling over the lip and singing the grass. Six thousand degrees of exhaust had emblazoned the basin in flame and then been deluged with three million liters of water.

  Inside the Nest, he found Josephine surrounded by half a dozen directors, who were all celebrating. He could see the ends of her orange-tipped dreadlocks beginning to fray.

  “Bello?” Bracket whispered to her.

  She shook her head and stepped inside her privacy cone, which folded around her before he could say anything more.

  He returned to the pool deck just as the two rockets returned to their platforms, executing a perfect landing to more cheers.

  It’s happening, Bracket thought. The dream became real.

  But as he passed by the hyperbaric chamber, he saw that it had been sealed shut. Santander, the biologist, was lying on a plank along the wall. He lurched up when Bracket knocked on the glass.

  “What are you doing in there, Santander?” he asked through the intercom.

  Santander’s eyes were red and swollen. For once, Bracket seemed to have his full attention, when the diver was normally enveloped in a newscloud.

  “I’ve got decompression sickness, Kwesi,” Santander responded thro-ugh the comm. “I surfaced too quickly after I heard a noise in the pool.”

  “What did you hear?”

  The diver looked too scared to continue, lowering his voice for fear someone might overhear him. “It was as if someone was calling for me.”

  So he had heard it too, Bracket realized with terror. “You could understand it?”

  “Not the words, but the meaning. It was a longing—a lamentation, as if someone had lost something.”

  “Could you communicate with it?”

  “No, it couldn’t hear me. I haven’t been back in the water. Doctor said I can’t dive for a month.”

  Bracket could see how despondent the diver had become, because he would almost certainly miss all the simulations for the rescue mission. He’d be stuck in the hyberbaric chamber with nothing to keep him occupied as everyone else focused on the launch.

  “Tell you what, Santander,” he said, trying to appear calm. “I could use some help. I need some information.”

  “The doctor told me I had to stop downloading the news. It’s not good for me.”

  “I’m sure she’s right – but make an exception for me, will you? Can you drop in and scrape whatever you can about Nurudeen Bello over the past few days? I want you to look at the Loom, Naijaweb, and any local mesh networks. Whatever you can find.”

  “I can do that!” Santander replied excitedly, relieved to have a purpose again. “Whatever you need! You want me to scrape for Bello, or something else too?”

  “Bello. Anything about him. This information is top priority.”

  It felt almost cruel to be asking for it. Telling a newshound that information was top priority was like dangling fine wine in front of an alcoholic.

  “I’ll drop in right away.”

  “Thanks, buddy. Hang in there.”

  CHAPTER 20

  “It was too risky for you to use the Songstones outside,” Durel said. “You could put us all in danger.”

  “They didn’t follow me here,” Balewa argued.

  “The police didn’t follow you, but you’ve been seen and now you’ve raised their suspicions. They’ll be watching for us. We told you to leave the stones alone.”

  “Now the Jarumi might know,” Abir added.

  “They don’t know,” Balewa said. “No one knows where the Jarumi are anymore. Not since the bombing.”

  Durel stoked the glowing coals at the base of her teakettle. She had bought a new one after Balewa had crushed the last tea set with her Songstone. “Now you’ve done the exact opposite, Balewa. It was foolhardy for you to use the Songstone in the first place.”

  “I don’t think you should have taken such a risk either,” Abir said. Balewa turned to look at Abir, wondering why she hadn’t spoken out sooner. Had she lost her trust too?

  Durel poured out the tea among the women, dropping in flecks of sugar. They sipped slowly as it steamed from their small silver cups. Balewa’s pregnancy was making it more difficult to sit for long stretches, but she had been blessed with a strong back, and at least the morning sickness had subsided. Not long ago she would have had trouble drinking tea at all. The Songstones had given her inner strength, a fortitude she had not felt since before they fled to Kano—although her newfound confidence also meant she found herself arguing more often with the other women, who preferred to keep the hierarchies of the clan, especially since some of them weren’t as adept at bringing the stones to life.

  “This is excellent tea, Durel,” one of the women said, politely trying to change the topic of conversation.

  “We sold plenty of medicine this week. I thought we deserved better tea for once.”

  “Even if the Jarumi found a Songstone,” Balewa said, pressing her point, “they wouldn’t know what to do with it.”

  “Can you please drop this for once, young lady?” Durel snapped. “Your stones are what ruined the tea set that I received from my mother-in-law. I scrimped and saved to buy a new one, using money that we could have spent on finding our children.”

  “Yes, we’ve spoken about the stones enough,” another agreed. “You’re too reckless with them. They’re dangerous.”

  “You’re about to have a baby,” Durel insisted. “You should concern yourself with that, not with these stones all the
time. You could hurt yourself.”

  That’s exactly what I want, Balewa thought. She still had no desire to raise the child of her rapist, who might be born with similar eyes or nose, or some other feature that would always remind her of what had happened. How could she love such a creature?

  “I’m merely saying that if the police saw me we shouldn’t be too concerned.”

  “Then why are they still looking for you?” Abir pointed out.

  Balewa was trying to understand why Abir had turned against her. Normally they vouched for each other and stood strong against the critical snipes of the other women. She felt as if she was losing her closest friend.

  Feeling even more alone, she retreated to one of the remote chambers to sing softly to herself. By now she had grown familiar with the figures painted on the wall and strung the various pictures into a kind of story in her mind in order to calm her nerves. One of the figures in the drawing had big breasts and long tresses and was surrounded by a group of people.

  That one was the musician, Balewa decided. Beautiful melodies would have poured from her mouth. People would have adored her and sought out her companionship.

  Farther down the wall, the same figure appeared again, holding something in her hand. This time, lines zigzagged from her head like lightning, and the other people seemed to be running away from her.

  It’s because she found a stone like me, Balewa thought. Before, her people had thought that woman had only a pretty voice, and now they knew the power of her Songstone. Balewa wanted to be like the woman, to unleash a strength that the others would be forced to respect.

  Soon they will respect me instead of mocking me for my suffering. They’re no better than I am. Just because they gang up on me doesn’t make them right.

  Consoling herself, she hummed some soft notes, trying out a new melody in her throat, a dark one that meandered through a somber minor scale.