After the Flare

by Deji Bryce Olukotun

  “Looks like you fixed that windshield, Max,” Bracket observed.

  “A friend fixed it for me.”

  “You mean friends fix things for you too?”

  “All the time, Kwesi. I’m saving to buy a new truck.”

  Inside the cab of the pickup, he could see that Max had brought his boy with him, an almond-eyed kid about five years old who buried his face in his father’s armpit, looking sleepy.

  “He wants to see the launch,” Max said.

  “Might sleep through it,” Bracket replied, and laughed.

  Police lights flashed as a car moved slowly through the crowd. The Wodaabe women ducked behind Max’s pickup truck, but they were mistaken—the police car was merely leading an entourage of mounted horsemen, the riders looking resplendent in their royal-blue-and-crimson turbans. The Emir of Kano’s face was obscured by a veil as he passed by with his bodyguards and royal coterie, an impressive display of power. Bracket was surprised to recognize the trader Ibrahim Musa spurring his own horse along too—the man had never spoken of his connection to the royal family. The emir waved to the crowd as he made his way through the procession to the front gates of the spaceport, the clip-clop of horses continuing until the caravan disappeared inside the gates.

  “You should probably get going, Max,” Bracket said.

  “All right, oyibo.” He gently snapped a seat belt around his son, who had fallen asleep.

  The Wodaabe women huddled in their wrappers against the swift cold of the Sahel as Max started the ignition. Bracket was turning away from them when Balewa beckoned to him with her finger. He stepped closer and he saw that she was carrying something in her hand: an amulet, no, a rock. A Songstone. She handed it to him. Then she and the other Wodaabe women were riding away as the crowd parted around the truck, on their way now to find their children.

  Fingering the Songstone in his pocket, Bracket paced quickly back to Naijapool, where his staff were eagerly awaiting him. Five Naijanauts were resting below in the suit-donning room, and the divers were carefully scrubbing and checking their equipment. For now, they would all be watching the rescue mission from afar. He climbed the stairs to the operations room and joined the others at their posts. Flipping on the various screens, he saw Josephine hooked in to her command chair in the Nest, her movements swift and focused as she manipulated the menus before her. On the comms he heard her checking with the various directors at the station. Another feed showed the Masquerade itself, and a different one displayed the astronauts strapped into their chairs, the form-fitting seats upholstered in goatskin, cow leather having been shunned by the Hindu staff. The interior of the spacecraft was painted in bright colors, with patterns borrowed from various cultures across Nigeria.

  The countdown began, slow and measured, Josephine pausing long enough to give each director an opportunity to abort the mission if anything indicated a safety hazard. T-minus...3...2...1...

  And she continued on until you could see the Naijanauts vibrating as the rocket lifted them skyward. Bracket felt the entire building shake with the tremendous energy of the launch. In the corner of the image, the mission clock was inset into the wall: 1:08. The G-forces pinned the astronauts back as they ran through the safety checks. One Naijanaut—a Yoruba man, with a sculpted, taut-skinned face and dark lashes—smiled as they accelerated quickly beyond the sound barrier. 2:34. The feed ran through various angles as the first rocket stage detached. The Yoruba man let out a whoop of joy. Soon they had passed out of view of the naked eye. 5:56. The second rocket detached. And now it was just the Masquerade rushing out alone along the blue horizon.

  The spark started as a blip, almost like a ghost pixel that hung on the screen for too long. It erupted into a white light that lit up the interior of the craft in a hail of static. The astronauts began jerking violently in their seats. Josephine began bellowing orders: “Seal valve 26-7!”

  “Can’t do it remotely!”

  “Mission commander,” she said. “Seal valve 26-7. Manual!”

  A young Naijanaut reached out against the colossal forces of gravity to unstrap one of her buckles, which flung backward over the seat. Now she was pushing her shoulder away from her berth and reaching up and…there! She had switched the valve and stopped the hissing air just as the Masquerade freed itself of the atmosphere.

  “Damage report!” Josephine barked.

  The crew indicated that two rivets had blown off a starboard-side porthole. The window had remained in place and was properly sealed for the moment, but it had also bent under the friction, losing its structural integrity.

  “Engineering—will it survive reentry?”

  “No,” came the reply.

  “Find me a solution! We need to seal that now! Kwesi,” she added, her voice oddly calm, “get ready to put your team in the pool. Masquerade, follow your workplan. We’ll send new orders for reentry in sixty minutes.”

  On-screen, Masha Kornokova was dangling from a tether in her space suit outside her living module of the station, awaiting the arrival of The Masquerade. Through her helmet you could see her face made gaunt from more than a year of rationing and weight loss. Her healthy cheeks were now stretched tight against her jaw.

  The astronauts on the rescue crew put on their helmets and depressurized the spaceship, allowing Kornokova to ingress through the cargo bay of the Masquerade. One of the Naijanauts unstrapped to welcome her and fasten her into a berth. They could be seen cheering widely, reaching over to pat her on the back, or giving her arm a playful squeeze.

  The sight of Kornokova alive and well filled Bracket with elation. Like most staff, he’d seen her alone in the cold recesses of the station for months on end. But there she was, ready to return to Earth.

  Except they couldn’t return home now—not without risking the spacecraft and everyone’s life with it. The lost rivets were a unique design that had no replacements on the station or the spaceship. After scanning a schematic, one of the Indians in the Nest located an extruder in the exposed Kibo module, a 3D printer that had only been used for experiments before the module was damaged by space debris.

  “What do we know about the printer?” Josephine asked.

  “All we know is that it was custom made for the station by Daihatsu.”

  “That’s it? Can someone get ahold of JAXA?”

  The Comms team tried to hail someone from the Japanese space agency, to no avail. “They appear to be offline,” they reported.

  “I know someone who can help,” Bracket chimed in over the comms.

  “Who?” Josephine asked.

  “Give me five minutes.” He hurtled down the steps to the dive equipment room, where he found Santander, whose head jerked to and fro as he was immersed in his newsfeed. “We need your help.”

  “Three hundred million tune in to watch botched space rescue. I’m not allowed to dive, Kwesi.”

  “Not to dive.” Bracket explained what he needed as Santander removed his glasses and his eyes refocused on the room around him.

  “I can find it,” the newshound nodded decisively, “but I need full privileges to run a proper search. Let me out of the Loom. I need access to all the international networks. They’ve got to turn off their firewalls.”

  “Josephine?” Bracked called in. “Did you catch that?”

  “We’ll make it happen,” she said. “Someone get me Bello.”

  The politician set to work calling in favors to diplomats and business associates around the world, until the national networks in Nigeria, Kazakhstan, Argentina, Malaysia, Japan, and even China began to lower their firewalls one by one. Freed from all restrictions, the newshound plunged in, scraping the networks at blazing speed, hopping across borders until he found a former Japanese astronaut posting pictures of his pet papillon on a local microblog. Soon the astronaut was explaining the specifications of the extruder from the Kibo module in minute detail, with Santander translating it for Josephine in near real time.

  “What’s its application?” Jos
ephine asked.

  “Machine parts,” he replied. “We printed wrenches and hand tools with it.”

  “Will it be strong enough for reentry?”

  “We never tested for that—the machine is designed to work in microgravity.”

  “I need an answer. Will it be strong enough?”

  “In theory, yes. The polymer is rated to seventeen hundred degrees celsius.”

  “That’s our best shot. Run the simulation, Kwesi.”

  Bracket sprinted to the pool deck. Five minutes later, the Naijanauts and the divers were in the water. Bracket coordinated their simulation from the operations room as Josephine uplinked a modified workplan. Soon she disappeared into her privacy cone. She was fully jacked in now, linked to all the mission directors through haptic feedback that would vibrate as status reports came in.

  In the tank, the divers placed a mock-up of the extruder in the Kibo module. A Naijanaut had to enter underwater, then she had to carry the 3D printer back outside the station to the Masquerade through the cargo bay, where the crew would bring it to room temperature for it to function properly. The first underwater attempt failed, as the damaged Kibo module didn’t allow the astronaut to enter from earthside. So they improvised a hook that allowed the Naijanaut to wrest back the damaged canvas of the module to create enough room for an EVA pack to slip inside.

  “Something’s inside the module,” one of the Naijanauts shouted on the comms.

  A silver streak flitted through the water.

  “Just a fish,” a diver said. “Must have been living in there.”

  “Ignore it,” Bracket ordered. “Won’t hurt you.”

  “How did it survive down here?” the Naijanaut asked.

  “Forget about it. Focus.”

  Bracket was feeding orders back to Josephine, as they continually corrected and refined each maneuver. They ran the simulation four times in a row until they had perfected each twist of the rivet, each hiss of gas from the EVA pack, Bracket’s underwater team performing with passion and intense concentration.

  And then it was happening two hundred kilometers above them. Already friction was wrenching away the solar panels of the ISS, which would soon begin its deorbital fall to the planet. The silicon wafers rippled under the force. They watched as the Naijanaut in space pushed through the Kibo module, grabbing the 3D printer. And then she was winding herself back along the station, clipping on hook after hook, as Earth slid away beneath her. She passed the extruder through the airlock for the crew inside to print out the rivets. An hour later, three tiny red rivets in hand—one extra, in case one floated away—the Naijanauts spacewalked outside the ship to fix the porthole, bolting it down.

  Once the Naijanauts were safely back onboard, the pilot maneuvered to the underside of the station to correct its orbit, pushing the creaking hulk up five full kilometers away from the atmosphere. Now the spacecraft fired its booster to begin the descent back to Earth. The pilot angled the craft so that its tiles would absorb the tremendous heat of reentry, pitching the nose slightly to deflect heat away from the damaged porthole. Soon it was gliding expertly through the atmosphere. They were coming home.

  All eyes were on the porthole. They would know soon whether they had secured it. Everyone watched as the cameras began to rattle. It seemed to be holding. But then the rivets! The rivets were becoming pliable, gummy even. A drop began to form, like a red protoplasm reaching out from the glass. Then the comms cut off.

  A hush went over the operations room as Josephine ordered all chatter to stop.

  In the ensuing silence, Bracket found himself humming a song, an old song pulled from his memory, the song of the Wodaabe and the Nok before them. He felt the Songstone warm in his pocket, thinking: This could be our lodestar. This is what they need up there.

  And then he heard the cheers erupt as the Masquerade returned into view.

  “We’re okay!” the Naijanauts confirmed over their comms. “We’ve made it!”

  Masha Kornokova, though weak and shaken, was kissing the camera lens, pointing at a rivet, which had solidified as it cooled, dangling from the porthole like a question mark.

  “Josephine!” she was shouting, flicking the hardened rivet with her glove. “Josephine, I’m coming home!”

  And still Bracket heard the song. He felt it inside him now. There. There was the source of the kingdom. There was the coiled-up, thigh-burning sprint. The rush of air around the brow. The beats surging in the blood. The dream that would sling them forward.

  EPILOGUE

  Ten years later

  The Masquerade III slowly approached the River, the colossal space station that was anchored far beyond the Earth-moon system in a gentle equilibrium. Kwesi Bracket watched the liquid plays of light and color flowing through the station as the craft began to decelerate.

  The River was made up of two parallel banks that undulated for thirty kilometers in a twisting helix. Between the Banks, barges ferried equipment powered by Noktech, riding on currents of pressure. Lattices of solar arrays branched from towers into the darkness like trees.

  Seeta was strapped into a berth beside Bracket, busily reviewing a design for the latest thruster, a miniature version of the propulsion system that had carried them so rapidly from the spaceport in Kano. She was wearing a gold-and-violet sari-top suit that she could cinch open or closed for airflow.

  “Have a look,” Bracket said, pointing out the porthole.

  She picked up her head briefly before returning to the blueprint on her Ivy-fone, which was curled around her upper arm. “I’ll relax more when I know these idiots won’t blow themselves up. They’ve confused miniaturization with replication. The physics change at scale. You can’t shrink down a design and expect it to work exactly the same.”

  The space station in the distance was in effect a giant mining machine, where chunks of asteroids were hauled in at the source of the River to be pushed downstream by cometsmiths. By the time the asteroids emerged at the far end, all usable materials had been extracted, stabilized, and prepared for shipment back to Earth. The rest would be jettisoned carefully to the far reach of the system or sent for extrusion.

  On approach, the station appeared nearly vertical to their own position in the starship. Bracket and Seeta had envisioned a horizontal approach vector in their original concept, like a seaplane landing on water, but fuel efficiency ruled out such comfort. The Masquerade III would follow the optimal path to dock. The varying routes also allowed Bracket a chance to observe the station from different angles each time he made the journey: the soaring telemetry spires, the photon shields, the circular clusters of habitats, and the steady stream of traffic maneuvering through the Banks. Compounding the visual puzzle, the entire helical structure swiveled on its long axis to induce artificial gravity. The twisting motion made his mind reel as he searched for a place to anchor his vision.

  “I think I’ll take a canoe down to the Compound,” he decided.

  “Are you feeling nauseous again? That’s why I don’t watch when we dock. Makes me bloody vomit.”

  “Might help if you could spin me some music.”

  “I already battened my equipment away, Kwesi. I’ve been through three pairs of earbuds because they keep floating off.” She squeezed his hand. “Next time I’ll remember to leave some out.”

  “I’d appreciate that. I can’t help myself from watching the station. Anyway, I think I’ll stop in to say hello to Sybil on the way down to the Compound.”

  “You just want her to prescribe you some antinausea pills.”

  “Won’t complain if she has them.”

  Seeta ordered her Ivy-fone to climb onto the wall so she could get a better look at the blueprint specifications displayed on each of its leaves. “You know she’s dating someone, right? A nurse.”

  “She didn’t tell me.”

  “Go easy on him. He’s a sweet kid.”

  “Sweet I can handle. That tends not to be her type.”

  “She’s not a stu
dent anymore, Kwesi. She’s on her own.”

  It was true. His daughter had developed a proud independence during the Flare that had won her a medical fellowship at the River without Bracket needing to pull any strings.

  They waited as the Masquerade III tethered itself to one of the Banks, feeling the subtle shift in rhythm that indicated the spacecraft had docked, and he immediately exited with Seeta to avoid getting stuck in the queue for the airlock—the starship, stretched to its physical limits by Noktech, now accommodated some fifty passengers, most of them scientists, with some prosperous sightseers among them. These would ride down the River in a luxury tourist yacht, stopping at ports along the way, and then either take a countercurrent back to the dock or lift off again from the catchment area at the far end, which was called the Basin.

  They were greeted at the elevator by an official crier.

  “Presenting Chief Bracket,” the young woman announced.

  “It’s Kwesi.” He didn’t like the title that Nurudeen Bello had conferred on him.

  “My mistake, sir. Presenting Chief Kwesi Bracket.” Before he could correct her, she scanned Seeta’s biometrics: “Presenting Ambassador of Sound Seeta Chandrasekhan.”

  “Thank you, young lady.”

  The Indians had allowed Seeta to choose her own title for herself.

  The elevator brought them down to the level of the River, and Bracket felt the added weight of his space suit as the microgravity kicked in. Seeta stepped out of the airlock into a diplomatic shuttle to zoom ahead straight to the Compound without making any stops. He waited to board a canoe tended by a sullen woman with a bright green-and-orange Kente wrapper.

  “Where are you going?” she asked.

  “Medical.”

  She had the glazed eyes of someone who’d been chewing synthetic cathinone. Station employees used khat to stave off their appetites on long shifts.

  “Medical Port will take an hour. We’ve got eight more stops.”

  “I’m not in any hurry.”

  “Ten cowries.”

  He flashed his badge. “Diplomat.”