Binti, The Complete Trilogy: Binti ; Home ; The Night Masquerade

by Nnedi Okorafor

  The floating green words said, “Sandstorm. Dog pack. Relax. Grab Rakumi’s saddle, Binti.”

  I am not a follower, but there are times when all you can do is follow. And so yet again, I submitted. This time it was to Mwinyi, a boy I had only known for a few days, of a people I’d viewed as barbarians all my life and now knew were not, my father’s people, my people.

  I was breaking and breaking and into that moment I followed Mwinyi. He led us out of that sandstorm.

  * * *

  The sun broke through.

  The air cleared of dust.

  The storm was behind us.

  I sighed, relieved. Then the weight of the sudden quiet made my legs buckle and I sank to the ground at the hooves of our camel Rakumi. I pressed my cheek to the sand and was surprised by its warmth. There I lay, staring at the retreating sandstorm. It looked like a large brown beast who’d decided to leave, when really it just happened to travel the other way. Churning, roiling, and swirling back the way we’d come. Toward the Enyi Zinariya village. Away from my dying, maybe even dead, family.

  I weakly raised my hands and moved them slowly, typing in the air. The various names of my father. Moaoogo Dambu Kaipka Okechukwu. I tried to send it. But they wouldn’t go. I rolled my head to the side in the sand, feeling the grains ground into my otjize-rolled okuoko, blue tentacles layered with sweet-smelling red clay and now sand. I tried to call Okwu. I tried to reach it. To touch it with my mind as I had days ago, now. Again, nothing.

  Then I started weeping, as the world around me began to do that expanding thing that it had been doing since we’d left the Ariya’s cavern over a day ago. As if everything were growing bigger and bigger and bigger, though it was still the same. Mwinyi said it was just my body settling with the zinariya technology that Ariya had unlocked within me, but what did that matter? It didn’t make it any better. The sensation was so jarring that I constantly felt the Earth would decide to fling me into space at any moment.

  I shut my eyes and it was as if I’d fallen again. Into my other nightmare. The nightmare from a year ago. Now I was back on the Third Fish, sitting at the dining hall table. I could taste the sweet milky dessert in my mouth. My edan was in my hand, the strange gold ball back inside the stellated cube–shaped metal shell; it was whole again. And I was gazing at Heru, the beautiful boy who’d noticed that I’d braided my otjize-rolled locks into a tessellating triangle pattern that reflected my heritage. His granite black hair was falling over one of his eyes as he laughed. He glanced at me, and I smiled. And then his chest burst open and his warm blood spattered on my face and I fled within myself, quivering, silently screaming, breaking. Everyone was dead.

  The dining hall grew red, even the air took on a red tint. There was Okwu, behind Heru. I could smell blood, as I tasted the sweet milky dessert in my mouth. Everyone was dead. I had to survive. I slowly got up, clutching the edan in my hand, and when I turned, it wasn’t a Meduse I faced but my cowering family inside the bowels of the Root. In the large room, below, where all the foodstuffs and supplies were stored.

  The smell of blood turned to one of smoke. I’d moved from one nightmare to another. My eye first fell on my oldest sister shrieking in a corner as her long, long hair went up in flames. I was coughing and then looking frantically around as I waited to smell the burning of my own flesh because flames were consuming the entire room. Now my family was all around me, my father, siblings, several of my cousins, aunts, uncles, nieces, nephews, shrieking, stumbling, thrashing, lying still as they burned. Everyone was burning, alive or already dead.

  I whimpered, my flesh feeling too hot. Let me die too, I thought, waiting, hoping, for the burning to intensify. My family. Instead, the fire consuming my family stopped biting me and shrank away. It calmed. It didn’t stink of burning flesh now. The fire smelled woodsy and the center of it looked like a pile of glowing rubies. Everything undulated and when it resettled, things looked more real, no red tint, so solid and clear that I could touch the dry ground beneath me, warm my hand at the fire before me.

  I distantly felt my okuoko writhing with anger. I reached up, grasping them, trying to calm their wriggling. All this was confusing me. I was just coming out of flashbacks of the deaths of my friends and family and now the zinariya was forcing history on me again . . .

  * * *

  The old man was named Takeagoodposition. He stood before five other old people, holding a slender pipe to his lips. The smoke smelled sweet and thick and when it blended with the smoke from the fire, it smelled awful.

  “The child is a dolt,” Takeagoodposition said. “Kande is one of those girls who would follow a lion to her death if the lion flashed a pretty grin.”

  The men in the group all laughed and nodded.

  “No, we won’t put the community in the hands of a girl; how would we look?”

  “But they came to her first,” a tall man said, his long legs crossed before him. “And let’s be honest, if those things had come to any of us, what would we have done? Fled? Fainted? Tried to shoot them? But she somehow learned to speak with them, gain their trust.”

  “Look what it cost her,” the only woman in the group said. “She is like a girl possessed, seeing things that are not there.”

  “My grandson said it was like they put alien Internet in her brain,” another elder said.

  There was more soft laughter.

  Takeagoodposition frowned deeply. “None of that matters now,” he snapped. “The Koran says to be kind and open to strangers. Let us welcome them. The girl will introduce us and we will take over.”

  “Have you seen them?” another of the men asked. “They’re beautiful, especially in the sun.”

  “And probably worth millions if we divide them into coinage,” someone remarked.

  Laughter.

  “These Zinariya, they are aliens,” Takeagoodposition said. “We’ll be cautious.”

  It was as if I were sitting with the men and woman. Listening to them talk about the Zinariya. Some movement behind a cluster of dry bushes caught my eye and I was sure I saw someone slowly back away and then run off.

  “Kande,” a woman’s voice said. It seemed to come from all around me. “She did well, for a child who liked to smoke.”

  I frowned, wanting to stop all this nonsense and scream, “What does smoking have to do with aliens?!” But then I saw something bouncing around within the circle of people. A giant red ball. It disappeared in the swirls of dust and then bounced back on the ground. It rolled up to me and flattened, shaped like a red candylike button embedded in the sand.

  I stared at it.

  “Press it.” The words appeared in front of me in neat and careful green and then faded like smoke. Mwinyi was speaking to me through the zinariya.

  I smashed the button with my fist, vaguely feeling the button’s hardness. I heard a soft satisfying click. Everything went quiet. Nothing but the sound of the soft wind rolling across the desert. I rested my forehead on the sand, weeping again.

  “Can you get up?” Mwinyi asked, kneeling beside me. “Has it stopped?”

  I raised my head and looked up at him. His bushy red-brown hair was coated with sand and the long lock that grew in the back of his head was dragging on the ground beside my knee, collecting more sand. The world behind him, the blue sky, the sun, started expanding again. But not as badly as before, nor was I seeing the death of everything I loved. But I knew of it.

  I opened my mouth and screamed, “Everyone’s dead!” I rolled to the side, grinding the other side of my head into the sand. My face to the sand, feeling its heat on my skin and blowing out sand, I wailed, “MY FAMILY!!!! I DIE! EVERYTHING IS DEAD! WHY AM I ALIVE?! OOOOOOH!” I sobbed and sobbed, curling in on myself, shutting my eyes. I felt him press a hand to my shoulder.

  “Binti,” he said. “Your family—”

  “DON’T! LEAVE ME ALONE!”

&
nbsp; I heard him angrily suck his teeth. Then he must have walked away.

  I don’t know how long he left me there, but when he pulled me to a sitting position, I was too defeated to fight him. I slumped there, the hot sun beating down on my shoulders.

  He sat across from me, looking annoyed.

  “I don’t have a home anymore,” I said. I felt my okuoko writhe on my head.

  “Ah, there’s the Meduse in you,” he said.

  “I am Himba,” I snapped.

  “Binti, they might be alive,” Mwinyi said. “Your grandmother back in my village communicated with your father in Osemba.”

  I stared at him, shuddering as I tried to hold back the flash of rage that flew through me. I couldn’t and it burst forth like Meduse gas. “I saw them trapped . . . I SAW THEM!” I shouted. “I smelled them b-b-burning!”

  “Binti,” he said. “Remember, you’ve just been unlocked! And you have that Meduse blood. I’ve heard you whimpering in your sleep about what happened last year on that ship. And we’re out here in this desert, exhausted and far from your home. You’re all mixed up. Some of what you see is communication, some is probably the zinariya showing you stuff it wants you to know, but some is delusion, nightmare.”

  I raised a hand for him to be quiet and rested my chin to my chest; I was so exhausted now. Tears spilled from my eyes. Everything I’d seen was so real. “I don’t know anything,” I softly said.

  I felt Mwinyi looking at me. “Your father said the Khoush came after Okwu,” he said. “They don’t know what happened.”

  “Who is ‘they’?” I asked.

  “Your grandmother and father. As I’m sure you know, your Okwu is a small army in itself. Your family took shelter in the Root when the fighting began.”

  “So they are in the cellar,” I muttered. “That part is true.”

  “Yes.”

  I had to process the idea that my father had spoken with my grandmother through the zinariya. “When?” I asked. “When did he talk to her?”

  “Just after you were unlocked.”

  “Just after I sensed Okwu was in trouble,” I said. “So he could be—”

  “I don’t know, Binti. We don’t know. Sometimes when the zinariya communicates, it disregards time. We’re going to find out.”

  “You could have told me hours ago.”

  Mwinyi paused, his lips pursed. “They told me not to. They didn’t think the news would help you.”

  When I said nothing to this, he said, “If you want to get home to help, we can’t waste time like this.”

  I glared at him.

  “Don’t give me that look,” he said. “Aim your Meduse rage that way.” He pointed ahead of us. “Last night, I thought I was free to do whatever I wanted. Instead, I’m here, taking you to what can’t be a place of peace. And I do care about your family; I’m doing my best.”

  I ran my hand down my face, wiping away tears, sweat, snot. I paused, realizing I’d probably also just wiped a lot of my otjize from my face too. I sighed, flaring my nostrils. Everything was so wrong. “You don’t have to take me anyw—”

  “I do and I will,” he said. “You want to know what I think?” He looked at me for a moment, clearly trying to decide if it was better to keep his words to himself.

  “Go on,” I urged him. “I want to hear this.”

  “You try too hard to be everything, please everyone. Himba, Meduse, Enyi Zinariya, Khoush ambassador. You can’t. You’re a harmonizer. We bring peace because we are stable, simple, clear. What have you brought since you came back to Earth, Binti?”

  I stared nakedly at him; the hot breeze blowing on my wet face felt cool. My okuoko had stopped writhing. I felt deflated. “I need my family,” I said hoarsely.

  He nodded. “I know.”

  I grabbed the sides of my orange-red wrapper as I looked straight ahead, toward where we were to go. Right before my eyes, the world seemed to expand, while staying the same, as if reality were breathing. It was a most disconcerting sight. I let myself lightly tree, as I took in several deep breaths. “Everything is . . . still looks as if it’s growing,” I said. I looked directly at him for the first time. “I . . . I know that sounds crazy, but that’s really what I’m seeing.”

  Mwinyi frowned at me, twirling his long matted lock with his left hand, two of the small brown wild dogs sitting on either side of him like soldiers. Then he said, “I can get you home, but I don’t . . . I don’t know how to help you, Binti. I never needed to be ‘activated’; I don’t even know what you’re going through.”

  I clutched the front of my orange-red top and whimpered, thinking of my family back in Osemba. After traveling all day, then through the night, we’d traveled much of the next day. When the sun was at its highest, we’d settled down in our tent for some rest. We’d finally fallen asleep when the sandstorm hit. “I know you think I’m too much but—”

  “That’s not what I said.”

  I cut my eyes at him. “You did. Don’t worry, it’s not the first time something like this has happened to me,” I said, shutting my eyes for a moment. When I opened them, I felt a little better. “Let’s keep going. We can travel through the night again.”

  When I tried to get up, he quickly stood and said, “No. Rest.”

  “I’m okay,” I said. “Just give me a minute and we can go as soon as—”

  “Binti, we stop. You have to rest. The zinariya is—”

  “But if they’re in the cellar . . .” I started shaking again. I wrung my hands, my heart beating fast.

  “Whatever is happening there, we can’t stop it,” he said.

  I tried to get up and he put a hand firmly on my shoulder. I wanted to fight him, but the feeling of vertigo was back and I could only roll to my side in the dirt, shuddering with misplaced outrage, my okuoko writhing again.

  “We’re making fast time, but we’re still a day away,” he said. “Binti . . . calm down. Breathe.”

  “Even with the wild animals out here? The slower we go, the more we risk—”

  “Wild animals don’t scare me,” Mwinyi flatly said, looking me so deeply in the eyes that everything around me dropped away. My okuoko slowly settled on my shoulders and down my back. The Meduse rage, which I was still learning to control, left me like cool air flees the morning sun. There is nothing like gazing into the eyes of a harmonizer when you are also a harmonizer.

  We stayed and without further exchanging words, we set up camp. I was glad when he walked off into the desert for an hour to see if he could find anything fresh to eat, the small pack of dogs following him like curious children. I needed the quiet. I needed to be alone with . . . it.

  “It’s not something to learn,” he said, over his shoulder. “It’s part of you now. Intuit it.”

  And that I understood. I sat on the woven raffia mat in the open tent. I had been studying my edan for over a year—a mysterious object I’d found in a mysterious place in the desert, whose purpose I did not know, and whose functions I had first learned of by accident. An object that had saved my life, been the focus of my major at Oomza Uni, and was now in about thirty tiny triangular metal pieces and a gold ball in my pocket. Yes, I understood intuiting things.

  I brought up my hands and used the vague virtual device that rose before me to type out Mwinyi’s name and the word “Hello” in Otjihimba. Then I envisioned Mwinyi, who was most likely on the other side of the sand dune he’d disappeared over. Before I saw him in my mind, I felt his nearness, his alertness. He was monitoring me, even from where he was; I wasn’t just guessing this, I knew it for a fact. His response appeared before me in green letters that were a different style from mine, neat but relaxed and in Otjihimba, “Are you alright?”

  “Yes,” I responded.

  Then, yet again, I tried to reach my father. “Papa,” I wrote. I tried to push the red letters as I held
my father’s image in my mind. It was as if the words were fixed onto a wall, I couldn’t send or even move them. I waved my hands and the words disappeared. I tried another five times before giving up, growing increasingly more agitated, the letters looking sloppier and sloppier. I wiped tears from my cheeks and then before my mind started going dark again, I tried reaching out to Okwu. Five times. Again, nothing.

  I rubbed my eyes and when I looked at the backs of my hands, for the first time in hours, I realized that they were nearly free of otjize. I gasped, touching my face, looking at my arms, my legs. The sand from the storm had stripped most of it away. Mwinyi had said nothing about this, or maybe he hadn’t noticed. I felt like shrieking as I fumbled with my satchel. I had about half a jar left. When I’d arrived on Earth, I’d assumed I would have time to make more.

  I gazed at the jar. The red paste wasn’t as rich as the one I could make from the clay I dug up around the Root. It was otjize different from any otjize made by a Himba girl or woman. Mine was from a different planet. I held it to my nose and sniffed its rich scent and saw the tall trees of the forest where I collected the clay, the piglike creature who foraged in the bushes. I saw the face of Professor Okpala, the large pitcher plants that grew beside the station, my classmates, like Haifa and Wan. However, I also saw the Root. And the faces of my family, the dusty roads of Osemba and its tranquil lake.

  Rubbing it onto my face, I looked out at the desert. Dry, expansive, free. I inhaled deeply, to control my breathing. No more tears that would wash away the otjize I’d just put on my face. And I did what I’d unconsciously done with my edan on the Third Fish, but this time instead of speaking to my edan, I spoke to the zinariya. And it answered. It was gentle and kind, but I didn’t have the unaffected fresh mind of a baby. I was seventeen years old, the second youngest girl in my family, who’d been tapped to be my community’s next harmonizer. I’d instead chosen to leave Earth and go to Oomza Uni and nearly died for my choice. I’d lived and then learned, so much. To engage with the zinariya was to overwhelm all my senses. In the distance, I saw a yawning black tunnel swallowing the soft light of the setting sun.