“I see we are coming to understand each other,” he says delightedly. “Now, what do you think of my persuasion? Will you work with me?”
Katsuhiro unwraps the sealed crackers slowly, though his mouth is watering so furiously that he must swallow before he can speak.
“English is not my first language,” he says, pleased that he has always retained the singsong notes of his Japanese accent, though he has spoken English for some four hundred years. “I may have missed some subtlety. Perhaps you could clarify?”
Chief General Doctor Regis looks momentarily pleased, delighted to be appealed to as the specialist in English rather than being cast in the role of the benighted native. Already Katsuhiro has sensed that, despite his evident intelligence, Regis possesses in full the inferiority complex of a third world citizen when confronted with someone from the first world.
Regis clears his throat. Katsuhiro begins consuming saltines and water, trying not to eat too quickly.
“Well, Oba-san, my proposal is simple and direct. You came here to Nigeria to negotiate for Nigerian oil.”
“As a private citizen,” Katsuhiro cautions, leaving his current cracker half-eaten in a display of self-control, “not as a representative of the Japanese government.”
“I understand,” Regis says in tones that say that he fully believes that Katsuhiro is a private businessman in name alone. “My proposal is that you continue your negotiations, not with the delegation set up by this Anson A. Kridd you were to meet, but with me and my associates. I am well connected to certain powerful people in the government.”
Katsuhiro nods encouragingly, trying to decide whether he should finish all of the crackers or leave a few. He estimates that he has eaten ten. Twenty or so remain. Would he make his point if he ate fifteen more, or should he leave ten?
“These people,” Regis continues, “have connections throughout the southern part of Nigeria. With the money that would come from a foreign oil deal, they would soon be influential throughout the country.”
Katsuhiro nods, deciding reluctantly that he must leave ten crackers at least. He understands what Regis is implying. The government in Nigeria has changed hands many times since it gained independence from Great Britain in 1960. More times than not, the change of power has been by coup rather than by election. Regis has just told him that he and his allies will stage such a coup when they have financial—and perhaps other—backing from Japan.
“And,” Katsuhiro says, setting the waxed paper with twelve crackers on the desk, “if I do not agree to do business with you but prefer to honor my previous commitments?”
The glow of amiable enthusiasm that had lit Regis’s eyes fades into something cooler.
“Then what you saw in that hospital will happen to Japan. I know a dozen ways that I could sneak in the infection. True, there would be those who were vaccinated, but many who are not would die. Even the survivors would be horribly scarred.”
“I understand,” Katsuhiro says. “What is to keep you from doing this to Japan even after we have made our agreement?”
Regis looks surprised. “I want Japan for a market. An epidemic would not be in my interest. Moreover, I need you as a contact with the business interests there. If I sent the disease, you would have no incentive to work with me.”
Katsuhiro nods and sips water. The crackers are digesting nicely. He can feel the first sugars sparking his hunger-dulled brain.
“Of course,” Regis continues, “if you do not choose to work with me, I would probably try once more to convince you before sending my emissaries. Perhaps a stay in my hospital would make you aware of the fate to which you would be condemning the children of your country.”
For a moment, Katsuhiro considers stalling further. If he spent even a few days in the hospital, he could put more of those wretched souls out of their misery, get the bodies out of the water tank, perhaps find a way to escape.
Reluctantly, for he suspects himself of cowardice, he puts that idea from him. Those men and women will die no matter what he does. There is no promise that he will be able to escape, or even to make their deaths easier. And Regis is just insane enough to decide that he doesn’t need Katsuhiro after all. Then Katsuhiro would go through that hell for nothing.
At last, as if he has been calculating nothing more than his own personal advantage, Katsuhiro nods.
“Yes, Regis. I believe that I did not understand what you were proposing before. Shall we talk oil prices?”
Regis grins mockingly. “But I am surprised. The sky has not fallen, Oba-san, yet you will talk business with me!”
“Hasn’t it now?” Katsuhiro says with a mildness he does not feel. “Hasn’t it?”
Swimming fish-form, the Changer enjoys the illusion of freedom from any responsibility more complicated than getting enough to eat. Since he can assume any form he desires, the question of getting enough to eat is moot. The only decision he needs to make is what form to take. Although he can be an herbivore as readily as a carnivore, he usually chooses the latter, though not for the reasons others might think.
A herbivore is ultimately prey, and the Changer has no desire to risk his life. As far as he knows, he is the oldest living thing on Earth—he and his brother, Duppy Jonah. Far from being bored with living, life continually offers him new challenges—the latest one being Shahrazad. It is not that he has never been a parent before, but there is something about this little coyote, something he has not even permitted himself to puzzle out in full...
He suspects that he is reluctant to discover what is at the heart of his concern about Shahrazad because, like many parents throughout the ages, he doesn’t want to know the whole truth.
So today he is a large fish with a big mouth and toxic spines. He swims through the warm salt water, thinking hard about nothing but what his next meal will be and almost succeeding.
When a seal comes, summoning him to Duppy Jonah’s side, he chooses to be grateful rather than annoyed. Forgetfulness hadn’t been working as well as he could have desired.
Dismissing the seal, the Changer shifts into a triton. The shape takes no real effort for he had been sea-born long ago. During the days when many athanor had gathered in the Mediterranean basin, he had often used this shape or one similar.
Having too long been dark-haired, he gives this shape hair the color of sun-burnished bronze and tints the scales of his broad fish tail to match. His beardless features are akin to those of the young athletes who posed for statues later set in the Acropolis, but his skin has a greenish tone beneath the tan. In all this crafting, only the color of his eyes does not change. These remain coyote yellow, though whether from choice or from forgetfulness there is no one present to ask.
All this takes less time than it would take a man to change his trousers. Then, with a beat of his tail and a matching motion of his muscular arms, the Changer is on his way. He swims rapidly, but his concentration is not so absolute that he fails to enjoy the pull of the water against the light webbing between his fingers or the tickling where his long hair streams over his shoulders and along his back.
Swimming has often been compared to flying. Having recently done both, the Changer is in a position to assess those similarities and differences, but, creature of the moment as he so often is, he doesn’t. He just swims.
A taste of grit in the water is the first indication that he is drawing near his goal. This is followed by a rhythmic pinging sound. As his ears are shaped to assess underwater sounds, the Changer hears this without the muting or distortion a human would. It comes to him clearly, and so he is not surprised when he swims over the top of a ridge to see someone driving a metal wedge into a crevice in the rock. What does surprise him is who that person is.
Like him, her form is human above the waist, fish below. The scales of her tail are variegated, aquamarine near her waist, gradually darkening to shade into the midnight blue gauze of her fin. Her upper body is that of a healthy young female, the skin rosy rather than tan and untouc
hed with green. Long blond hair, caught back in an intricate clasp of gold set with cabochon sapphires, floats about her like the fronds of a sea plant only slightly agitated by her labors.
The length and motion of her hair effectively masks the mermaid’s breasts, and when she turns toward him, perhaps alerted by some small noise he has made, perhaps warned by the little fish that swim around her, the Changer sees with some disappointment that she is wearing a bikini top. Its light blue fabric doesn’t completely conceal the full swell of her breasts or the shape of her nipples. Male that he is, he approves, then he is slightly embarrassed, for he realizes who this must be.
The Changer has known that Vera was dwelling beneath the sea with Duppy Jonah and Amphitrite, but he had not expected her to be wearing a mermaid’s shape, nor to find her calmly splitting rocks, so at home in her alien form. In all his acquaintance with her, an acquaintance that stretches back to her earliest incarnation as Athena, he has never seen her as anything but human, nor has he seen her looking anything remotely as sexy as this. He wonders if Amphitrite, the Queen of the Sea and wife of his brother, had anything to do with this.
Evidently, Vera has been wearing her new shape long enough that she feels no shyness about her naked midriff or nearly bare breasts. When she turns and sees him, her face lights with the gladness of a friend meeting a friend.
“Changer? Is that you?” she calls, and her voice no longer holds the Athabascan accent that went with the Navajo form she wore as Vera Tso.
“It is,” he confirms.
“Duppy Jonah said you were coming!”
“When did he tell you?” the Changer says, swimming into the hollow.
“A couple of days ago. He said that you needed a break from Shahrazad and were going to grace us with your presence.”
The Changer grins. He has no doubt that his brother had said something very much like that. Duppy Jonah has long resigned himself to his brother’s residence on land, but he has never quite forgiven him. The Changer realizes that his brother’s complaint is somewhat justified. When the Changer settles into a shape, especially one of the animal ones he prefers, he also settles into a life natural to that shape. Thus, he can fall out of contact for years at a time.
“Where is my illustrious brother?” he asks, noting that Vera is wearing a two-tiered necklace of biwa pearls just slightly pinker than her skin. They look very good and keep reminding him of her newly apparent femininity. He wonders if the pearls are ensorceled to do precisely that, then reminds himself to be polite.
When he is in animal form, his urges are moderated by the seasons. Lately, however, he has spent too much time as a human, and there is no seasonal limit on human sexual urges—or on those of the triton, who is very human in such matters.
Vera seems unaware of his interest, and the Changer feels a flash of gratitude that Amphitrite isn’t present. There would be no fooling her.
“Duppy Jonah and Amphitrite have been called away,” Vera explains, “something to do with an athanor dolphin caught in a tuna net. I offered to go with them, but they said someone should be here to greet you.”
Amphitrite’s doing, the Changer thinks, remembering how the seal’s summons had brought him to this place. Then he shakes his head to clear it of that thought. Surely it is only raging hormones. Amphitrite would respect her friend’s perpetual virginity. Wouldn’t she?
“Thank you,” he says, “but I don’t need to interrupt your work. I can go...”
“Don’t,” Vera says, then she colors. “I mean, I’ve been here for weeks and haven’t really had anyone to show Atlantis to. The Smith was here for a while, but since he was working on the project, that isn’t the same.”
“Very well,” the Changer says. “Show me.”
“You know the reason for this project?” she asks, aware from past encounters that one never knows what the Changer will have thought important enough to remember.
“Yes,” he says. “It is meant as a refuge for the athanor if human contact doesn’t go well.”
“Right.” She guides him past where she had been working, toward a wider crevice. “The challenge was finding an area that was both stable and yet had geothermal energies that we could tap. Fortunately, Duppy Jonah...”
She goes on, talking about energy sources, masking measures, the difficulties inherent in making Atlantis airtight so that water-breathing magics would not be necessary.
The Changer listens, commenting appropriately, approving of the complexity of the design, far too aware that he is attracted to this woman. He’s going to need to do something about that, perhaps change his shape to one less warm-blooded.
Yet he regrets the necessity, even as he resigns himself to it. He has been lonely, very lonely since Shahrazad’s mother was killed. Here, he senses, could be an end to that loneliness. He wonders, as Vera’s eyes—still grey though everything else about her has changed—sparkle with the pleasure of having someone to talk with, if his attentions would be completely unwelcome...
Probably they would be, he decides reluctantly, for she has forsworn sexual relations, and he cannot imagine an intimate relationship without them.
Oh, well. If only she didn’t look so lovely and keep smiling at him that way!
Late in the morning of the fifth day since Aduke’s family had moved to their refuge, Oya comes to where the younger woman has just finished writing a letter to Taiwo.
“Walk with me,” Oya suggests after asking after all the family. “We can stop by the post office so you can mail that.”
Aduke nods. Her sisters are tending their market stall. Taiwo’s mother can watch the little children. Kehinde is shut in his private study, supposedly working. Cynically, Aduke wonders if he gets any more work done now that he has his much desired quiet. Certainly, she hasn’t seen any difference.
In any case, she is very eager to spend more time with Oya. During the four days that they have lived under the same roof, the other woman’s mystery has grown, not diminished.
Lying on her pallet in the room she shares with old Malomo and Kehinde, lulled by the sound of their breathing into almost forgetting her own aloneness, Aduke has heard strange sounds from the floor above. The little children, giggling nervously in their nursery, insist that ghosts are the source of those sounds, that theirs are the muted voices or the fragmented notes of disjointed music. Aduke is less certain, and she wonders what Oya might be doing all alone in the vastness of the third floor.
Once she had tried to bring up the matter with Taiwo’s mother, but the older woman refuses to be curious about Oya. To her, Oya is someone sent by the ancestors to help her family in their time of need. If Oya isn’t the goddess whose name she bears, then she is at least her representative.
Questioning her actions is pointless. Those touched by the orisha always did strange things, strange, that is, to those who do not understand their secrets. When one does understand, then those same actions become completely comprehensible.
So, since Aduke is left with no one she can talk to about Oya, the best thing she can do is spend more time with the woman who might or might not be an orisha and learn what she can about her.
After asking Malomo what errands need to be done, Aduke follows Oya down the factory stairs into the warehouse and then outside. They depart the building through a small door that opens into an unused side yard to avoid drawing attention to themselves. Some of their neighbors would not approve of people who live in a haunted building. For the same reason, they don’t hang their laundry outside, but string it instead in the vast cafeteria-lounge that has become their common room.
Outside, the air is hot and, for Nigeria, dry. The humidity is perhaps fifty percent. Aduke has read about places where the humidity drops to as low as five percent. She finds that difficult to imagine. Air is, in its own way, a substantial element, felt in the harmattan wind, bearing the rains, and laden with odors suspended in latent moisture.
“I can’t imagine a desert,” Aduke says aloud. “It
must be very strange.”
Oya glances at her, but with the vast reserve of composure she maintains, like oil floating to the top of a soup kettle, she doesn’t comment on the strangeness of Aduke’s words, just responds as if it is all part of a long, ongoing conversation.
“It is different,” she says. “There are weeks without rain, and the air is so dry that your lips crack and the top of your skin flakes away as if your body is returning to dust.”
Aduke imitates Oya’s composure, though she is surprised. In her colorful head wrap and bright print wrapper, her skin shining with oil and sweat, Oya seems an incarnation of West Africa. Imagining her elsewhere is as much of a challenge as imagining a desert.
Oya glances over at Aduke, her brown eyes laughing.
“I have,” she says, “done some traveling in my misspent life.”
They arrive at the post office, then go from there to drop a package at the home of a friend of Malomo, from there to the market to deliver a note to Yetunde, then Oya turns their feet toward the shrines to the old gods.
Aduke walks with her, albeit somewhat unwillingly. As hard as she has tried, she has not been able to forget the ominous pronouncements of the babalawo, nor the fear she felt when they were evicted and it seemed as if those pronouncements were coming true. Lately, she has tried hard to believe that the orisha accepted their sacrifices, that the plate of dog was enough to feed Ogun, that Shango liked the chicken and the yam porridge, that Oshun is wearing the bracelet made from twisted brass wire, that Eshu has been happy with his combination plate made from small portions of everyone else’s sacrifice, that...
She shakes her head, trying hard to put these crazy superstitions from her, but here in the Grove, surrounded by the altars and the desperate intensity of the people praying, dancing, singing, making offerings, kneeling in the dirt before the diviners, here it is hard to dismiss such faith as mere superstition.
Oya has gone over to the shrine to the orisha whose name she bears, her posture not that of a supplicant, but of a housewife checking her mail. The guardians of the shrines do not interrupt her as she fingers the offerings, not even when she unrolls the slips of paper on which petitions have been written and reads the contents. Aduke wonders if they, like Iya Taiwo, believe her specially blessed by the goddess.
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