Up and Coming: Stories by the 2016 Campbell-Eligible Authors

by Anthology

  "Yes. That's what he did bring home."

  "I should see her. Kaweme was in my ship-clan, and we owe her something. A funeral, if nothing else."

  "The pirates got him, didn't they?" asked another trader, leaning in.

  "That was when he went looking for the lost colony. They'd found it first."

  "No, it happened on Muya, where the pirates were paying tribute to the governor…"

  Others around the table joined in with their stories until it was almost a wake for Kaweme. But it wasn't one for Mapalo, and after a few attempts to steer the conversation in that direction, Mutende realized that the sailors didn't know her. Ship-clans and ship-marriages were what mattered to them; their lives in port, and their husbands and wives there, were separate. Mapalo was as much a stranger to them as Kaweme was to Mutende.

  He finished his fourth imbote and sank into a sodden despair; he had come to the wrong place for this particular grief. But he bought his neighbor a shake-shake beer and let the sailor buy him the next one, and watched the candles flicker and listened to stories.

  There was noise by the bar and Mutende saw that a group of young men had come in; a second later, he saw that they were basambilila. The medical school had rooms near here, he remembered—a clinic, purchasing offices, a center for study of off-world diseases—and the students must have just come from class. They were high-born, too: if that wasn't clear from their clothing, it was made plain when they ordered liquors from distant worlds. If everyone at the long table emptied their pockets, they wouldn't have enough to buy even one of the cups the students held.

  Mutende never remembered standing up. He stood at the table for a long moment, his eyes fixed on the students, oblivious to the looks of concern the sailors were giving him.

  "You!" he said. "High-born fools! Are you tired yet of being dogs at the ancestors' feet?"

  A musambilila turned to look at him, surprise and anger written on his face. "Who are you calling a dog, ifilolo?" he said.

  "You scavenge for the Union's books but you don't care about the diseases that come on the ships every year. You learn the lessons your professors memorized but you don't want to learn the ones your patients teach you. Did I call you a dog? Dogs would know better than to do what you do."

  One of the students seemed about to answer, but it wasn't debate that Mutende or most of the high-born ones wanted. "An umulaye would spit on you," said one of them, and he answered, "An umulaye is worth ten of you bush-pigs." The next part of the discussion wasn't with words.

  Maybe Mutende charged first; maybe one of the basambilila did. His fist found someone's face, and he fought with hands and feet and knees, ignoring the blows that rained on him, wanting only to hurt or even kill. Blood ran into his eyes, forcing them closed; he lashed out unseeing, not caring about the pain he suffered as long as he could inflict some in return.

  From somewhere, he heard the rasp of a knife being drawn. He couldn't see where it was. Others did, though, and the shebeen-owner's men stepped in: fights were one thing but blades were another, and no one wanted the attention of the bakulama. A dozen hands pulled the combatants apart, and two of them threw Mutende out the door.

  It had begun to rain outside, and as the cool water washed over his face, Mutende realized how badly he had been beaten. He would have to find a nganga to put him back together—no, an umulaye. This was what they did well, and after he'd defended their honor, it would hardly be fair of one to refuse.

  ***

  The predawn light was emerging in the east when Mutende made it home. He planned to collapse in his bed and find a doctor in a few hours, but when he passed Mapalo's apartment, he could hear conversation inside and the cinnamon-pepper smell of a blue-leaf tisane filled the hallway. Evidently her umulaye came early.

  "I'll go to the ichiyawafu soon," she was saying. "They say it's everyplace at once, so Kaweme will be there even though he died on another world."

  "Don't speak like that," said another woman's voice. "Drink your tea."

  Mutende hesitated, but he knocked on the door.

  "Come in…oh, you've been in a fight!"

  "I'll live, mbuya."

  "Lelato should look at you. Have you met her?"

  He hadn't, and his eyes were drawn to the umulaye's appearance. She wasn't from the north country: no, she affected the dress of a free trader, with loose silk trousers and jacket in black and red geometric patterns and tight curls cropped close around her scalp. He wondered why, and then saw the tattoo of a ship-clan, weathered with age and just a shade darker brown than her face.

  "I was a ship's doctor for twenty years," she said—she must have seen him looking. "Most of the traders like awamulaye better than inganga, and I had a year's training in surgery on Chama. They take women in the medical schools there."

  "Did you know Mapalo's husband?"

  "He was in my ship-clan. He made me promise to see her if anything happened to him. When I came back to the city and learned she had the fever, I came to her."

  There was a mystery here, Mutende thought. He'd expected a peasant healer from Kabwe province, full of remedies against witchcraft and half an infwiti herself, but here was a woman who'd traveled among the stars, and who might have seen medical books that even the bakalamba hadn't read.

  "Did they teach you about the blue-leaf tisane on Chama?"

  "No, that's a folk-remedy. I learned about those too, during my fostering. I did learn more about it on Chama and in other places…but let's take a look at you." She turned to Mapalo. "Can we go upstairs?"

  "Yes, I'll be fine," Mapalo answered, and for all her earlier talk about death, she did seem to have rallied since the day before.

  "I'll come later, mbuya," Mutende said, and followed the street-doctor to his room.

  She examined him quickly and matter-of-factly, with an economy of movement that any nganga would envy. "I'll give you a lotion for the cuts and bruises," she said. "Most of them you'll just have to endure, but I'll need to stitch you up here and here. You'll have a scar or two…you're the one who's studying to be a nganga, aren't you?"

  "Yes." Somehow, from Lelato, a change of subject seemed more natural than from the mukalamba.

  "You should tell her not to take those pills."

  "They don't do her any good, but they do no harm, and they at least give her comfort."

  "Yes, they do harm her. I've seen it in other patients—the pills can make them weak. When the pills fight the fever, the weakness is worth it, but when they don't…"

  "I'd thought that the weakness came from the attacks."

  "The attacks can mask it, yes. I had my suspicions, though, so I took some patients off the pills and compared. I took them myself too, to make sure."

  "Muyanda." Said one way, the word meant a drug; said another, it meant poison.

  "The pills are both. Many medicines are—you've learned that."

  "I'll take her off them, then," he said, and then he realized something else. "You've studied cases?"

  "How else? Awamulaye are jealous of their cures, and all we know is what our fosterers tell us—for more than that, we have to learn the folk-wisdom and learn from what we see." She applied ointment to Mutende's fingers and opened his hand. "This isn't a nganga's hand," she said, surprised. "It's known work."

  "I had a mechanic's fostering."

  A sudden interest came into her eyes, as if she saw him for the first time as something other than a case. "You're a mechanic?"

  "I learned the craft and I took the oath."

  “You need to come with me, then,” she said. “There’s something I want you to see.”

  ***

  The umulaye's house was on the axial road that led along the lagoon and out of the city. Where she lived, the buildings were a single story, and the houses were surrounded by small gardens and guinea-fowl. It was still the city—buses floated past, taking people to work in the factories—but it was shading into farms, and from here, the ancient towers of the city center l
oomed like standing stones.

  She shooed aside a couple of guinea-hens and led Mutende through the door. Like Mapalo, Lelato had two rooms, and she lived in one of them: in the other were shelves of instruments, compounds, books, an examination table, even an ancient computer that ran on a generator. Instinctively, he knew that this was not typical for an umulaye, most of whom carried their tools with them on the street, and when she pointed him to what lay on the table, he was certain.

  It was the merest sliver of metal—no, of several metals. It was no more than a millimeter long and half as wide, but he could see that it had been finely machined: its surface was a maze of etched circuits, barely visible components and closely fitted parts. It was dizzyingly complex for an object of its size, and its complexity seemed to continue at a level below the visible.

  "Have you seen one of these before?" Lelato asked.

  "No. What is it—a machine?"

  "It makes machines. It makes them smaller than we can see—smaller than a cell, smaller than a virus."

  "Is this another thing you found on Chama?"

  "I only learned of it here. They made these in the days of the Union, and we're only just learning how to make them again. We're starting to use them in industry—for very fine etching, to clean impurities, to increase surface strength. But in the Union, and in the Commonwealth and the Accord, they used them for medicine."

  Mutende stared at the sliver for a long moment, trying to imagine how a long-ago nganga might have used it. "If it can clean impurities in metal," he said at last, "can it clean them in a human body?"

  "The books don't say—certainly, there was nothing in the library on Chama. But I think they can. One of those can make millions of machines a ten-thousandth of a millimeter across, and release them into the blood to clean infections. More than that, it can send machines to all parts of the body to find out what's wrong. Machines for luwuko, machines for uganga—orishas in a bottle."

  The possibilities seemed boundless, and Mutende's mind raced as he tried to imagine all the things such machines might do. "Have you tried it on Mapalo," he asked, "or on others with the fever? Have you tried to look in there to see how the pathogens have evolved, why the attacks keep returning?"

  The umulaye laughed. "You're saying all the things I said when I first learned of these things. But that tool on the table—it's designed to make etching machines. I can't change it so it will make healing machines—I don't have the tools and I don't have the skill. But you, with a mechanic's fostering…"

  "Do you know what I would have to do?"

  "I think so. For something simple. But do you have the tools?"

  That question was an easy one. "There is a machine the inganga use for fine surgery. Yes, it can do that work. We can go there today."

  They did, and none challenged their right. As a musambilila, Mutende was entitled to use the school's facilities. If he brought someone with him, that was no business but his own, and if she were an umulaye, no one had to know.

  They laid the sliver on the operating table, a speck in its vastness, and Mutende looked at the two images before him: the camera that showed how the machine looked now, and the schematic showing what it would have to become. It was a finer surgery than the one he'd done on the child, and would have been even if he hadn't still ached in the places where he'd taken blows last night. The surgery had only been a matter of cutting away: here, he had to cut and shape and replace. He replaced the tools on the machine-arm with successively smaller ones, and he set its movements finer and finer, rearranging circuits, resetting switches and machining parts that were too small to see. Day had turned to night, and night again almost to dawn, before he was finished.

  "We'll take it home now," Lelato said, "and see if it accepts data."

  "On the ichiyawafu-fever?"

  "No, I'm afraid. It will have to be a blunt instrument: something that knows what healthy cells are made of and attacks everything else. I can't be certain of anything more—not with an etching-tool to start with, and not with computers and medical books in the state they are."

  Mutende, halfway down a staircase, turned and looked back. "That's dangerous."

  "Yes. If Mapalo wouldn't be dead in a week anyway, I'd never give this to her. Even so, the choice has to be hers."

  Even the exhaustion of surgery was as nothing compared to hearing Mapalo's death sentence pronounced. "Then we will offer it to her," Mutende said. "It was made here, in a place sacred to Eyinle. Maybe it will bring her under his care."

  ***

  "Will it protect me from the imfwiti?" asked Mapalo when Lelato was finished. The umulaye had carefully explained what she planned to do and what risk it carried, and Mapalo, nobody's fool, had understood, but she was from the Kabwe country and there was one more thing she wanted to know.

  "It will help ward off the imfwiti within your body," Lelato answered. Mutende waited for his landlady to rebuke the street-doctor for saying such an absurd thing, but she nodded instead, and he remembered a north-country story she'd told him once. The peasants in her province told of witches who could make themselves any size, and who might lodge themselves in a victim's heart and use her very blood to make their magic. There were stories like that among the awantu as well—awantu who, it was rumored, had once been human—and she'd no doubt heard them from Kaweme. She nodded again, satisfied.

  "But if it goes wrong, it might also attack that which gives life," Mutende warned—always one more warning.

  "If it takes my life, it will do no more than the fever."

  "Then sit back, mbuya." Mutende held Mapalo's arm while the umulaye held the needle. It was full of sterile fluid with the sliver inside, and when Lelato pushed it in, the machine went with it. The tool Mutende had remade was in Mapalo's veins, to make medicine from her very blood.

  He had class that day in the room that had once been refrigerator and storage-closet: another session with the Book of Maladies, another lesson in diagnosis and remedy. He half-expected that the mukalamba would call him out in front of the class and expel him for fighting or sacrilege, but that didn't happen. Lesson followed lesson—biology, surgery, study of the body systems, hours in the clinics assisting the inganga with their work—and if anyone thought that Mutende's conduct was unbecoming a musambilila, they didn't say.

  On the fourth day, he noticed that his landlady's condition had begun to improve. Her lesions were clearing and she breathed easier, and she could sit and then stand without discomfort. On the ninth day, he heard her singing Kabwe-country songs while she fixed a drain, and that night, she sat outside with two of the market-women and shared an earthen pitcher of imbote.

  In his hours at the clinics and the luwuko-rooms, he took notes, comparing Mapalo's improvement to that of others who responded to treatment for ichiyawafu-fever. It seemed, day by day, that the sickness was leaving her body. On the eighteenth day, he and Lelato took her to the Mwata's Gardens for the first time since she was a child, and almost every evening now, she dragged a chair out to the street and talked and sang.

  On the thirty-second day, she died.

  It was a fever—not the ichiyawafu-fever, but the Orange Sickness that had been brought to Chambishi Port from the far western islands. Mapalo fell ill from it in the morning, and she seemed to have no resistance: it burned through her, growing worse by the hour, and all his remedies and Lelato's only slowed it down.

  "It doesn't do this to other people," he said as he and the umulaye kept watch at Mapalo's bedside. She had passed from delirium into sleep; her breathing was shallow and her appearance deceptively peaceful. "It doesn't go this fast. In the Book of Maladies…there's time for the body to fight, for medicines to work."

  Lelato was silent for a long time, and Mutende wondered if she'd heard. "I took samples of her urine and stool," she said finally. "I wanted to know which cells our nanomachines were cleaning from her body. And the cells she was passing—they're the ones that make her immune. That's where the infection was, and wh
en the sick cells were cleaned, they left her with nothing to fight new fevers. I thought her body would make new ones, and maybe in time it would have, but…" She seemed on the verge of tears, and it took her four tries before she could say another word. "There's so much we don't know."

  Neither she nor Mutende said another word that night: they watched Mapalo in silence, and three hours later, death claimed her. Lelato rose from her chair and Mutende heard a door open and close: soon after, the death-drums started beating.

  ***

  The nyinachimbela came at dawn, the old woman who was queen of the women's burial society. She and Lelato and three of the market-women washed Mapalo's body, put strings of beads around her waist and neck and arms, folded her so that her hands were on her shoulders and her knees against her chest, and shrouded her in white imbafuta-cloth. Mutende did none of this: preparing a woman to be buried was women's work. But he was one of those who carried her to the burial ground, and he joined the awenamilenda, the men's burial society, in digging the grave and laying her down with her face to the east. And he was one of those who knelt, his hands in the cool earth, and pushed the dirt back into the grave to cover her.

  That evening, after everyone had bathed in the lagoon, there was the wake: the ritual of singing and drinking and dancing. The market-women of Mapalo's street were there; her tenants and neighbors came as well, and an elder of the Hornbill clan. And there was one other: when Mutende dipped his cup into the keg of shake-shake beer, he looked up to see his mukalamba.

  "Do you see now," said the professor, "how foolish it is to seek new knowledge without a foundation?"

  "You watched," Mutende said.

  "We watched, as we watched others before you. Your uganga failed."

  Mutende, suddenly combative, looked the teacher in the eye. "She lived longer than she would have done without our uganga, and she had a better death."

  "But still it failed." The mukalamba held Mutende's gaze with his own until, slowly, the younger man agreed.

  "Learning needs a foundation," he conceded. "But trying and failing is the only way to build one." He realized suddenly what he'd wanted to say the month before when the professor had warned him against trying to surpass the ancestors. "We can't wait until we know everything the Union knew before we learn more. We must build our own foundation even if it's a different one from what they had."