She clucked her tongue against her teeth. “Ah, no, no, no. Diplomatic badges only work between eight hundred and eighteen hundred hours Earth time.”
“When did that start?”
“Last week.”
“No one tells me these things.” He fished out a cowrie to place in her purse, which extracted the value into her account. All canoe pilots worked for their wages after Nurudeen Bello had insisted on opening intrastation travel to competition, even if food, medicine, and lodging were free.
After checking the passengers’ safety tethers, the pilot began singing softly under her breath. The engine registered her voice and powered the vessel into the current. Soon it was looping back her melodic phrases as she layered on two counter-rhythms. They swiftly joined the flow of passing crafts, all of them tightly surrounded by a bluish spectral field that added to the liquid feel of the River.
Bello messaged him as soon as they pushed off.
“What is it, Nurudeen?” Bracket asked.
“We’ve got a problem with the Zuni emissary.”
“From the Pueblo Confederacy?”
“Yes.”
“I’ll be there shortly. First I’ve got to see my daughter.”
“I’m sending you a shuttle.”
“It’s too late. I’m already on a canoe. I’ll see you soon.”
“Don’t dally, Kwesi.”
“Never do.”
The pilot called out each port for the passengers to dismount: first the Fields, which also included the protein vats; the Pits, which held the recycling facilities; Exploration, for research and development; then the Forges, which contained the extruders that had built the station. Each port was painted in a different color, the Forges looking the most exuberant with their robes of silicate beads woven together in a billowing lattice that traced the path of the sun.
“Next up, the Oracles,” the pilot announced.
Bracket felt his stomach beginning to settle in the slow, meandering current. He swiveled his body to watch the Banks slide by and saw a hauler plodding along in the shipping channel with a hunk of ice fifty meters wide in its grappling arms. Behind him, he could hear the dulcet tones of the pilot’s voice as she maneuvered the canoe through the River. She wasn’t bad, he thought. Wasn’t bad at all.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I had a tremendous amount of support in creating this book. My wife, Carolynn, is the most generous editor and insightful reader I could ever have dreamed of. My literary agent, Gary Heidt, has been my advocate for some time, believing in me and constantly encouraging me to do more. Chris Heiser and Olivia Smith at Unnamed Press launched their publishing company with Nigerians in Space and patiently helped me develop this sequel into a coherent story. From the beginning, they never insisted that I write a stereotypical novel about an African village with acacia trees. Thank you for that.
And my family continues to believe in me and my strange hobby. Thanks especially to Jide Olukotun, who helped me with Nigerian Pidgin.
I was helped by several scholars. These include Professor Tamara M. Greene, an expert on ancient Harran; Sharon Thibodeau, an expert on astrolabes; Professor Ravi Rau, an expert on quantum physics; and Hilary Matfess, an expert on Boko Haram and a research analyst at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. Dr. Olufemi Agboola generously showed me around the National Space Research and Development Agency in Abuja, Nigeria, after an introduction by Dr. Wole Soboyejo, dean of engineering at Worcester Polytechnic Institute and the former president of the African University of Science and Technology. I also received assistance from the archivists at NASA, who dug up the article about the tracking station in Kano that was the genesis of much of this book. The idea of an ancient chamber that resonated with music first came to me through Antoine Seronde, who studied the temples of Egypt for acoustic resonance decades ago. I was like a kid in a candy shop (or a sea lion in a pool) at the Neutral Buoyancy Lab in Houston, where I went on a tour guided by a high school kid at the space center. Nigeria should have high school kids giving tours of its space facilities too.
I’d also like to thank the reviewers who read Nigerians in Space and praised it, or lent their critical eye to the story so that I could write this one better. This includes Tade Ipadeola, president of PEN Nigeria. And finally, thank you to the independent bookstores that have carried Nigerians in Space and coaxed readers into buying it.
Any honest author writing today owes a great debt to Wikipedia. So do I—it fulfills the promise of the open Internet. Along those lines, I’d like to thank my colleagues at the organization Access Now, including Gustaf Björksten, who provided insights into some of the technology described in the story. (The technical errors are my own.)
The following sources are listed more for your interest and further reading. This is not an exhaustive list—there are many more great works (and people) that inspired me to create this story.
El-Rufai, Nasir Ahmed, The Accidental Public Servant (Ibadan, Nigeria: Safari Books, 2013).
Gibbs, Sharon, with George Saliba, Planispheric Astrolabes from the National Museum of American History (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1984).
Krause, Bernie, The Great Animal Orchestra: Finding the Origins of Music in the World’s Wild Places (New York: Little, Brown, 2012).
Mann, Charles C., 1491: New Revelations of the Americas before Columbus, 2nd ed. (New York: Vintage, 2011).
Nuwer, Rachel, “Solar Sleuths,” Scientific American, July 2016.
Ojo, G.J. Afolabi, Yoruba Culture: A Geographical Analysis (London: University of London Press, 1966).
Onukaba, Adinoyi Ojo, Atiku: The Story of Atiku Abubakar (Abuja, Nigeria: African Legacy Press, 2006).
Popper, Nathaniel, Digital Gold: Bitcoin and the Inside Story of the Misfits and Millionaires Trying to Reinvent Money (New York: HarperCollins, 2015).
Saro-Wiwa, Noo, Looking for Transwonderland: Travels in Nigeria (Berkeley, CA: Soft Skull Press, 2012).
Smith, Mike, Boko Haram: Inside Nigeria’s Unholy War (London: I.B. Tauris, 2015).
Soluri, Michael, Infinite Worlds: The People and Places of Space Exploration (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2014).
Tanner, Henry, “African Tracking Station Set Up in Desolate Area Near Aging City,” New York Times, February 21, 1962.
Tsiao, Sunny, “Read You Loud and Clear!” The Story of NASA’s Spaceflight Tracking and Data Network (Washington, D.C.: NASA, 2008).
Tyson, Neil deGrasse, Space Chronicles: Facing the Ultimate Frontier, ed. Avis Lang (New York: W. W. Norton, 2012).
van Offelen, Marion, and Carol Beckwith, Nomads of Niger (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1983).
PHOTO BY BEOWULF SHEEHAN
DEJI BRYCE OLUKOTUN is the author of two novels, Nigerians in Space and After the Flare, and his fiction has appeared in three different book collections. He works in the field of digital rights on issues such as internet shutdowns, cybersecurity, and online censorship, and he is also a Future Tense Fellow at the New America Foundation. Previously, he defended writers around the world at PEN America with support from the Ford Foundation. His work has been featured in Electric Literature, Quartz, VICE, Slate, The Los Angeles Times, The Los Angeles Review of Books, The Wall Street Journal, National Public Radio, The Atlantic, and Guernica. He lives in Brooklyn, NY.
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