Life on Mars

by Jonathan Strahan (Ed)

  I chuckled. Everything on Naija News was “breaking news.” Drama was the bread and butter of Nigerians. Even our news was suspenseful and theatrical. It was why our movies were the best and our government was the worst. I laughed. I missed home.

  “Make sure you listen to what I am about to say, o! Then turn to those beside you and tell them! Tell everybody,” the man stressed. Spit flew from his mouth, hitting the camera lens as he spoke. He wiped his brow with a white handkerchief. I could see individual beads of sweat forming on his forehead. “This is no laughing matter, o!”

  “Let me guess,” I muttered. “Another farmer! has lost his flock of goats in a spontaneous forest. Someone’s house! is infested with a sparkling lizard. Another boy! turned into a giant yam.” I smiled, ignoring my chapped lips. This kind of “breaking news” happened all the time.

  “It’s heading this way right now!” the anchorman said. He clumsily held the microphone and wiped his brow again. He switched to Igbo. “This is utterly unbelievable!”

  I laughed loudly. So unprofessional! How many of his viewers would understand that?

  He coughed, smiled sheepishly, and switched back to English. “A space shuttle carrying people from the Mars Colony is going to land in the Sahara, o! These people had been on a spacecraft for months! Cooped up like chicken! It landed on the moon. From there they got on to the space shuttle to return to Earth. Communication with the shuttle has been spotty but we know where it will land.” He moved closer to the camera, turned his head to the side, and opened his eyes wider. “If you encounter it, do not approach. Biko nu, stay away! Help will arrive. Officials will be there in two or three days! Don’t—”

  The picture distorted and the sound cut off. From far off came a deep boom! I felt the vibration in my chest, like a huge talking drum. Plantain growled. “Shh.” I patted her hump. “Relax.”

  She stopped and I jumped off, looking to the south. I saw nothing but sky and sand for miles. A startled desert fox family was running across the sand about two miles away. I looked into the sky with my sharp eyes. There. About fifteen miles away.

  “Oh,” I whispered.

  Within seconds, it zoomed overhead like a giant white eagle. Plantain groaned loudly as she dropped to the sand. I knelt beside her, craning my head and shielding my eyes from the dust it whipped up. It was flying so low that I could have hit it with a stone. This was the first flying aircraft I’d ever seen. I watched it land a few miles away, sliding to a stop in the sand.

  It was a snap judgment, though it came from deep within me. “Let’s go see!” I said to my camel, climbing on. “Before all the ambulances, government officials, technicians, and journalists show up!” I was in the middle of nowhere. It really would be days before anyone got here. I couldn’t believe my luck. People from Mars!

  As we headed there, I felt a pinch of embarrassment. I wondered if those onboard knew what we had done to ourselves here on Earth while they were away. People had been living on Mars for decades before the Great Change. We should have been super advanced like the people in those old science fiction books, jumping from planet to planet, that sort of thing. Instead we had destroyed the Earth because of stupid politics and misunderstandings.

  I wanted to go inside the shuttle and breathe its trapped air. After so many years, that air wouldn’t be Earth air. I am a shadow speaker. My large catlike eyes, my “reading” abilities, they’re extraordinary, but they are all because of the Great Change, aka stupid human error. I’m as tainted by nuclear and peace bombs as one can get. I was born this way. But those on that ship hadn’t been here when it happened. They were untouched. I wanted to see and touch them. And I wanted to read them.

  Some of them were probably born on Mars. What had it been, over forty years since anyone last heard from the colonies?

  “Faster, Plantain!” I shouted, laughing.

  “I don’t believe this,” I muttered, my heart sinking.

  Already, a small spontaneous forest had sprung up around the shuttle, enshrouding it with palm trees, bushes, and a small pond to its left. Vines had even begun to creep up the sides of the shuttle. I guess this was the Earth’s way of welcoming it home. The sun was now completely down and there were several sunflowers opening up near the bottom of the ship.

  Plantain slowed her stride when we reached the trees. An owl hooted and crickets and katydids sang. An instant oasis in the middle of the Sahara. Yet another result of human idiocy. I’d known spontaneous forests all my life, but their spontaneity and inappropriateness always bothered me. It wasn’t hard to imagine a time when this was not normal.

  I looked around cautiously, ready for anything. I couldn’t tell if this was the type of forest that was full of stuff like stinging insects and rotten fruit or stuff like succulent strange vegetables and colorful butterflies. We passed a tree heavy with rather normal looking green mangos. That was a good sign.

  The shuttle was about the size of an American football field. It took us a while to amble all the way around it. Not one opening. It was night, but I could see perfectly in the dark, another shadow speaker privilege. I knocked on the ship’s white metal skin. No response. Minutes passed. Nothing happened.

  I was exhausted. We’d been traveling for hours before seeing the ship. I’d been so excited that I hadn’t eaten or been hydrating myself properly. Stupid. Suddenly, all at once, my neglect disarmed me. I fell to my knees, weak. Plantain trotted to the small pond and started drinking. Eventually, Plantain returned to me, gently clasped the collar of my dress with her teeth, dragged me to the water, and dumped me in the shallow part.

  I laughed weakly. The water was cold. “Okay, okay,” I said, pushing myself up. Cupping some of the water in my hands, I looked closely at it, searching for bacteria or strange microorganisms that might make me sick. The water was wonderfully fresh and clean, so much better than the water my capture station pulled from the clouds. I drank like crazy.

  After having my fill, I laid my mat under a tree, sat down, and ate some bread and dried goat meat as I gazed at the ship. Don’t they want to come out? I wondered. They had to have been on that shuttle for weeks. I brushed my teeth and lay down. As I drifted off to sleep, I thought, Tomorrow.

  I woke an hour later to Plantain’s soft warning grunt. I opened my eyed to a star-filled sky. Something was humming and splashing in the pond. I listened harder. It sounded like a person. Finally. Someone’s come out, I thought, sitting up. But the shuttle looked as it had an hour ago, no openings anywhere. Maybe the door’s on the other side? I crept to the pond for a better look.

  He was standing thigh deep in the water wearing only his blue pants. As he waded deeper in, he hissed with pain. The way he moved, with his hands out, it didn’t seem like he could see in the dark at all. I stood up for a better look. His things were on the ground, closer to me than him. A ripped satchel, a tattered blue shirt, and a silver, very sharp looking dagger.

  Quietly, I snuck to his things. I was about to reach for his dagger when he suddenly stopped. He was up to his belly; his back to me. He whirled around and before I realized what was happening, he flew at me. Fast like a hawk! I leapt to the side, grabbing his satchel. Items fell from its large opening.

  He landed and snatched another small dagger from his wet pocket. Then he eyed me with such rage and disgust that I stumbled back. He addressed me in Arabic, his dagger pointed at me. “Filthy abid bitch,” he spat. “I’ll slice your belly open just for touching my things.” His wet face was scratched up, and one of his eyes was nearly swollen shut. There were more fresh scratches and bruises on his arms and his chest.

  I blinked, understanding several things at once. First, he’d been recently beaten. Second, he was a windseeker, one born with the ability to fly, a product of the Great Change, tainted like me. Third, this meant he could not have been from the ship.

  I was so appalled by his mauled condition and his words that I just stood there. He took this as further evidence that I couldn’t possibly underst
and him.

  “Allah protect me,” he said, lowering his dagger. “Can this night get any worse?” He looked my age, had skin the color of milky tea and a hint of a beard capping his chin. And he had the usual windseeker features: somewhat large wild eyes and long onyx black hair braided into seven very thick braids with copper bands on the ends.

  “What is wrong with you?” I asked in Arabic, regaining my composure. He looked obviously shocked that I could speak his ohso-sacred language. Most black Africans in Niger spoke Hausa or Fulanese. I deliberately looked him up and down and slowly enunciating my words said, “There are no slaves in these lands.” Abid meant slave in Arabic.

  “Hand me my things,” he demanded. “Now.”

  Instead, I read him. I was close enough to him. The first thing was the scent of turmeric. I tasted something spicy, garlicky . . . a dish called muhammara. Ahmed, that is his name. He’s from . . . Saudi Arabia.

  He flew this far? I wondered as I swam within his past, seeing, hearing, tasting, touching, smelling. I was me but I was him. Duality. My heart was slamming in my chest as it always did when I read people.

  As fast as I could, I soaked information from him like a sponge.. . . From a lavish home. The seventh of five sons and four daughters. All normal. Except him. Ahmed’s father loomed large to me. Larger than Ahmed. Father did not smoke or drink. Father prayed five times a day. Father hated spontaneous forests and the fact that the way to the nearby village was not always the same whenever he walked there. Father owned three black African slaves and he often cursed their black skin and burned hair.

  Father hated how the quality of the air was different. And he constantly dreamed of Mars. The new world, a fresh world, the place of his birth. He was an important man in the crumbling local government. Too important to have a windseeker son, one of those strange troublesome polluted children. Ahmed understood that Father thought him ruined.

  As I looked into Ahmed, I heard him step toward me. When in a reading state, I’m basically helpless. I can’t pull out of it quickly. One day, I will learn to not be so vulnerable.

  Looking into Ahmed, I was surprised to find poetry and gentleness, too. Ahmed loved salty olives. Short, curvy women. The beaded necklaces around the necks of black-skinned women he’d see working at the market. The open sky. Music moved him. His quiet mother, whose hands were always writing adventure stories in the notebook she hid from Father . . .

  It came as it always did. In disorganized fragments, details, like a sentient puzzle more concerned with the shape of its pieces than putting itself together.

  The day Father drove him away was the day news came about his grandfather on the shuttle returning to Earth. The first since the Great Change. Ahmed had assumed he’d never see Grandfather. During the celebration of the news, Father had turned to Ahmed. Had sneered at Ahmed. Father was ashamed of the bizarre son he’d have to present to his father whom he hadn’t seen since he was four years old. Ahmed ran away that night. A windseeker must fly . . . not even Father’s heavy hand and words could change that.

  “You abeed are the lowliest of all Mankind,” Ahmed was telling me. “A polluted abid . . . you are an aberration of the devil.” These wicked words against the compelling melancholy of his past made my head ache. I fought to pull myself from him. A last fragment came to me, just before he shoved me to the ground . . . As Ahmed flew from the only home he’d ever known, he received a message on his e-legba. From Grandma. The attachment she’d sent took up half the space on his hard drive. Coordinates, linked tracking applications, schedules . . . for Grandfather’s space shuttle arrival. “Meet him,” Grandma’s message said. “He will love you.”

  “Stop it!” he shouted, shoving me so hard that my breath was struck from my chest. I fell to the sand.

  “Your father drove you away,” I said, quickly getting up. I backed away from him and dusted the sand from my long dress. My heart was still pounding as I fought for breath. “Yet . . . you speak to me . . . with the same words that you fled.”

  “You’re Nigerian,” he growled, looking a little crazed. “I can hear it in your accent! You all are nothing but thieves!” He pointed to his pummeled face. “Who do you think did this to me? They didn’t just take my money, they tried to put a virus on my e-legba to empty my bank account! Double thievery!”

  His motions, again, were so quick. Before I realized it, he’d grabbed a flashlight from the ground and flashed in my face.

  “Ah!” I exclaimed, shielding my sensitive eyes, temporarily blinded. He clicked it off. “What are you doing here?” He began using his feet to gather to himself the other items that had fallen from his satchel.

  For a few seconds, all I could see was red, figuratively and literally.

  “Give me my bag,” he snapped, when I didn’t respond to his stupid question. I threw it at him, more things falling out of it. He glared at me and I glared back.

  My mother grew up in northern Nigeria and had traveled with her parents all over the Middle East before the Great Change. She’d told me about how black Africans were often treated in these places, but I’d never encountered it with the Arabs I met in Nigeria. My mother said it was an old, old, old problem, stemming from the trans-Saharan slave trade and before that. I only half-believed it was real. But I knew the words abeed and abid, the Arabic singular and plural forms for black or slave. Ugly, cruel words.

  “What is it you’re doing here?” he suddenly asked again, once he had all his things in his satchel. “How did you know to be here?”

  “I didn’t,” I snapped.

  “Then get out of here,” he said. “Didn’t you hear it on the news? You people never know what’s best for you!”

  “You know what? I’m here to see what’s in that ship, so stay out of my way!” I said. He stepped forward. I stood my ground. He glanced over my shoulder at the ship.

  “We’ll see,” he said. He flew up into the air and eventually descended behind some trees.

  “Don’t mind him,” I muttered to Plantain, who was yards away, preoccupied with a patch of fennel she’d found near a tree. “I’m not going anywhere.” I returned to my spot on my mat and sat staring at the ship, listening. Waiting.

  Seven hours later, I woke to Ahmed crouching over me, a rock in his raised hand. Every part of my body flexed. I stayed still.

  He had the wild look of someone about to do something terrible in the name of those who raised him. I stared at him, willing him with all my might to look into my eyes. Look, I demanded with my mind. It was my only chance. If he didn’t, he’d kill me, I knew . . . and it was not going to be a painless, quick death. I strained for his eyes. Look, now! PLEASE!

  He looked into my eyes.

  He looked for a long long time.

  His face went from intense to slack to horribly troubled. He dropped the stone beside my head. He whimpered. Tears welled in his eyes. I smirked. Good. To look into the eyes of a shadow speaker is to court madness. Or so the rumor went. All I knew was that people who looked right into my eyes for more than a second were never the same afterward.

  He sat before me, his hands not over his eyes but over his ears, terror on his face. I began to feel a little ill. Not guilty. No. I hadn’t done anything. I was actually awash in rage. He’d been ready to cave my head in and now while he grieved over whatever he was grieving, I wanted to kick his teeth in. He wasn’t paying attention to me. He was just sitting there holding his head. I could do it. But to do such a thing was not in me; it was evil. Unlike him, I couldn’t murder. But he’d almost brutally killed me. My conflicted feelings made my stomach lurch.

  Naked faced, he started weeping. His eyebrows crinkled in, his mouth turned downward, and his eyes narrowed as he wept softly.

  “Look at me! I deserved to be robbed and beaten by your people!” he sobbed. “They should. . . .”

  I didn’t know what to say, so I didn’t say anything.

  “Fisayo,” he whispered. It was odd to hear him speak my name. The sun was just
coming up. “I . . .”

  There was a loud hissing sound and we both looked toward the ship. A door had appeared on its side. The shuttle was finally opening.

  Wiping his face with the heel of his hand, Ahmed got up. I scowled at him as I got up, too, wishing he’d stop his sniveling.

  “Get it together,” I snapped. “Goodness.” He nodded, sobbed loudly, but then quieted a bit.

  He was still weeping as we approached the shuttle. The sunlight was quickly bathing the desert. In the Sahara, the sun rises fast and steady. Even in a spontaneous forest. As we walked, I noticed many of the trees and bushes in the forest had disappeared or were withering, and the pond had gone foul and brackish.

  “Will you stop it?” I whispered. I didn’t know why I was whispering but it seemed right. “Tell me what we should expect. Do you have information about how many are on board?”

  He brought out his e-legba, clicked it on, and read for a moment. He took a deep breath. “Your eyes are evil,” he whined.

  I scoffed. “It’s not my eyes, Ahmed. It was you.”

  He sniffed loudly. “It says here that there are . . .” His voice cracked. He sniffled again. “There are supposed to be thirty-one people onboard.”

  As the sunlight and the heat increased, the vines on the shuttle quickly dried and began falling off, leaving the shuttle exposed. The door that had opened gave way to darkness inside. I could see only the wall, as the passageway went directly to the right.

  “Why isn’t anyone coming out?” I asked.

  As we moved closer, Ahmed pulled himself together . . . at least he stopped weeping. “So really,” he asked. “Why are you here?”

  I hesitated. Then I shrugged. “I just happened to be a few miles away when I heard about it on my e-legba.”

  He wiped at his eyes again. “You’re not here to steal from them?”

  “No! Of course not!” I was getting more nervous the closer we got; it was good to talk about something else. “You were going to kill me.”