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Shine Page 31

by Jetse de Vries


  Child never saw another Nora. Finding a friend or a grappa on a Nora had been a childish thing to believe, she knew. And she was used now, to being alone. Grappa was back there, still circling the old gyre, his red kayak going round and round. It seemed like a thing she’d dreamed, that Grappa had been with her. She began to doubt that he truly slept, because she’d packed the paddle in the kayak, and he would have come for her by now. But maybe the gyre creature wanted to keep him.

  She sat with her back to the cooking drum—still warm from her last meal—and paged through the book, faded, torn, musty. There were land animals: cat, horse, and others whose names she’d forgotten. There were things like clock, chair, space elevator, ship with masts, and skis.

  She fell asleep in the warm afternoon. When she jerked awake she saw a whale.

  No, something too big for a whale.

  The horizon had a black lump that didn’t move. It got bigger.

  THEY WERE CLOSING in now, people in little boats, staring at her and Nora. Children too, pointing at her. The shore drew near. She saw trees dark against the sky, and farther inland, wooden buildings with windows and smoke drifting from what might be cook fires. It was where Nora had been taking her, following whatever trail the nanobots could sense, whether the taste of soil or smoke borne on the wind.

  Dozens of little boats. The people in them kept their distance, chattering and looking past Nora, as a bigger ship came around the headland toward her. Many oars came out, and they beat up and down together. She thought the sailors would come on board Nora, but instead they used spikes to secure ropes to her and began pulling her to shore. Then Nora was caught up in waves rolling onto the beach, and, with people pulling from the land, Nora creased into the sand with a heavy smack.

  For the last time Child went down into the den. Looking around at her possessions, she picked up the book and Grappa’s hat. Before she left, she pressed her forehead against the soft, rewoven refuse of the wall. “You never needed those trawlers, did you? Got the garbage out of the water all on your own.”

  Back on top, she saw a growing crowd of people on land.

  The people turned to watch two large creatures approaching from down the beach. The creatures stopped some distance away, pointing at Nora. Then Child saw how it was people riding horses.

  It was time to go. Child stuck wood staves into the derm and looped a fishing net over it, trying to snarl it so that it wouldn’t slip. Then she used the net to climb down.

  Her feet landed in shallow water. Surrounded by a crowd that gently urged her forward, she walked closer to the horses with people on them.

  One horse rider was a woman. She had yellow hair pulled back into a knot at her neck, and wore clothes with bright colors. She leaned forward, saying, “Your name, child?”

  “Yes.”

  “Where did you come from?”

  Child tried to answer truthfully. “A North Pacific ocean gyre.”

  “Who made your clothes?”

  “Nora.”

  The woman turned to the man next to her, also on a horse. “She is a gift to us.”

  He nodded. “But what is that?” He looked past Child, down the beach.

  Child turned. There was Nora, pulled up on the sand. From here, Child saw how Nora had lovely smooth sides coming to a point in front. In back, a blade jutted out and down into the waves as they crested into the shallows. Strangest of all, the side of Nora that Child could see had a beautiful moving circle on it, traveling round and round, sparking like sometimes the nanobots did. Then she saw how it was a picture of the ocean gyre, because a small red dot rode on the circle, slowly, slowly moving like a kayak on a softly turning wheel.

  “What is that thing?” the man repeated.

  “It’s a ship,” Child said. “Her name is Nora.”

  And it was a ship, more than ever, more than she had ever guessed. Nora had made herself beautiful so people would want to bring her onto the land. So at last her task could be finished, to get the bad things out of the ocean forever.

  The woman smiled at her. “Would you like to pet my horse?”

  Child came closer, putting her hand on the creature’s nose, feeling its soft warmth.

  At this, the people began to press closer, putting their hands on Child’s clothes and exclaiming, but friendlier now that the woman had let her pet the horse.

  A boy about her age pointed at Child’s ankles, where her pants had puffed up from being in the water.

  “Life vest,” Child told the child.

  Nearby, where a tree leaned over the beach, a dark-headed tern flew in, settling onto a branch. It flapped white wings, tucking them close, keeping watch.

  They died, each species, one by one. Cats then owls; owls then ants. They died.

  But now look.

  They rise, each species, one by one. They rise.

  —Penelope Friday—

  Paul Kishosha’s Children

  Ken Edgett

  AND ONCE AGAIN it is through the wonderful internet that I found—probably because Ken found out about Shine—an exciting new writer.

  The email exchange Ken and I had over several of his @outshine submissions is quite typical of how the Shine anthology progressed at large: initially, Ken sent tweets that were quite nice, but fell outside of @outshine’s remit (which is basically the same as for Shine: optimistic, near-future SF). As with a lot of initial Shine submissions, they were mostly about humanity getting into space. Now while I certainly don’t mind us getting into space, I had to insist that we—humanity—need to solve the problems we have on Earth, as well.

  So, as his tweets became ever better aimed, I finally accepted one (which is printed after the story). I hope and suspect it also helped him write the story below, a fantastic tale of hope, which—among other things—seems to say: why can’t we do both? Solve our current problems on Earth and go to space?

  I guess it’s what we can expect from an optimistic Mars geologist...

  ONE DAY, JOE the Martian was making the engine for his flying space ship. The year was 2074. He and his family were getting ready for a trip. All of a sudden, Joe’s son had blown a circuit in the space ship! His son was injured. He had broken a leg. A big bubble formed on his leg.

  15 February 2006

  I WAS DOODLING on the little Marriott-provided notepad when my cell phone vibrated. Oh good, I thought, I can step out for a cigarette. The speaker, a fortyish female JPLer that I didn’t know, droned on about the development schedule for a Titan mission that would never leave the ground. As I left the conference room, I flipped open the phone and pressed the ‘send’ button.

  “Kishosha,” I said as I headed through the hallway toward a double glass door and Pasadena sunshine.

  “Paul—”

  Happiness? I switched from English to Kisukuma. “Happy? Why are you—” I stepped outside and tried to hold the phone between shoulder and chin while I fumbled for my cigarettes and lighter.

  “It’s mother. She is asking for you.”

  I had the cigarettes in one hand, lighter in the other. But I stopped short of taking one from the pack. “How long does she have?”

  “I—I don’t know. How soon can you be here? If I tell her, perhaps she will hang on...”

  I was supposed to be explaining NASA’s planetary protection policies after lunch. “If I can get a flight this evening, I can be there on Friday—wait, is she in the hospital?”

  “No, no, we are home. The doctors can’t do anything at this point.”

  “Tell mother I love her. And I am coming.” I hit the ‘end’ button and stuffed the phone, cigarettes, and lighter into a single pocket inside my jacket.

  I returned to the conference room and my laptop and used it—and the hotel’s wireless—to arrange a flight. LAX to Mwanza by way of Amsterdam and Kilimanjaro. It was going to cost me, but I’d saved for just this sort of thing.

  After packing up the laptop and its cord, I pulled Harold Franz out into the hall, explained what was
going on, and handed him a thumb drive with my viewgraphs on it. Harold would give my talk. As my counterpart at JPL, he pretty much knew the spiel, anyway.

  THE MARTIAN FAMILY could not go on their trip. Joe tried an experiment to cure his son faster. Now he tried it on his son. It worked and now the space ship was fixed and the family left. Soon they landed on planet Jupiter. They decided to stay there for the night. Joe’s little girl always goes off on her own at night. That night she found a fun activity. She called it Drop-the-Rock-in-the-Canyon.

  24 February 1980

  THE WHOLE FAMILY had gone to bed. It had been an exhausting Sunday of worship, song, and fellowship at the church. My favorite part of Sunday Mass came afterward—the potluck dinner. My uncle Azimio, one of my mother’s brothers, was visiting for a few days. He didn’t come to Mass, but he did show up after Father Mtambalike gave the blessing so he could share in the feast of chicken, fish, rice, ugali, cassava, beans, mangoes, and so forth. The fish were very fresh, caught early in the morning on Lake Victoria.

  While everyone was sleeping that night, uncle Azi and I hiked out away from the home, into the cotton fields. The sky was brilliant with stars and a high, gibbous moon illuminated from the west.

  He lit a cigarette. He offered me one but I was only nine years old. I said no.

  “Do you see that bright red star over there?” He pointed into the eastern sky as a mosquito buzzed near my ear. “That is Mars.”

  “Mars?” I wondered.

  “It is another world.” In the moonlight, I could see his face as he blew smoke from his nostrils. “A world like we live on, only smaller and farther from the Sun.”

  “How do you know? What is it like, there?”

  “It is a cold, desert world.”

  “A cold desert?” I doubted that a desert could be cold. “Does anybody live there?”

  He put his arm around my shoulder and we continued gazing at the red star. He said, “The Americans landed two machines there—they found no one.”

  “Well, maybe they were looking in the wrong place,” I suggested.

  Uncle Azi laughed a deep, happy laugh. “Perhaps. But I’ll tell you this: The first human beings on Earth were Africans. The first human beings on Mars, too, could be Africans.”

  AFTER THE NEXT 99 years they landed on Pluto. It was cold there. Quickly, they saw a leopard frozen solid! It had a tag, it read: African leopard put here in the year 2080. The Martians put him in the space ship. Soon he came back to life. They trained him. They named him Beauty.

  5 March 2006

  THE SKY WAS overcast and the temperature and humidity were fairly comfortable for late summer in Tanzania. I was having a cigarette out by mother’s old truck. I heard from behind me, in Kiswahili, a boy saying, “Uncle Paul, are you alright?”

  I turned around and there was my sister’s eldest son, Enos. He was thirteen or fourteen. He was carrying a football under his left arm and a battered folder in his right hand. One of mother’s dogs—I didn’t know his name—trailed him.

  I pulled the cigarette from my mouth. “Sure, uh, Enos,” I looked at him, then down at the dog, then at my cigarette. “I am fine. I was just thinking about how I need to go into town and get some more of these,” I held out the cigarette.

  “Mother says they’re bad for you.”

  “She’s right,” I winked.

  At first, Enos didn’t seem to know what to say. Then he looked like he remembered why he had come to find me. He set the ball down on the ground and then waved the folder at me and said, “Mother found this in the house, while she was going through Grandmother’s things.”

  “And?”

  “In here are some stories you wrote.” He handed the folder to me.

  I opened it and looked inside.

  I’d forgotten about these! “Did you read them?”

  “I did, yes,” Enos looked uncertain, perhaps worried that he shouldn’t have.

  “And what did you think?”

  “Well, not bad, for a kid,” his eyes sparkled. “And I liked your drawings. How old were you?”

  It was shortly after Uncle Azimio’s 1980 visit. “Nine. Maybe ten, something like that,” I replied. “I did them for my spelling homework.“

  “So, that explains the underlined words.”

  “Indeed.”

  I flipped through the folder while the cigarette hung from my lips. There were five stories in all, each one illustrated with pencil and crayon. They detailed the adventures of Joe the Martian as he visited the many worlds of our solar system. As I looked at these forgotten treasures, I realized how much this effort—this spelling homework activity—must have influenced my career choices. All the way to NASA Headquarters.

  Something slipped from the folder and fell to the ground.

  Enos picked it up and dusted it off.

  The book!

  Enos opened it and began to read a random page out loud, in Kiswahili, “There were faint marks on one wall. ‘What’s this?’ Jim asked. ‘It’s a Martian painting. Most of the paint has flaked off this one, but in some of the others they’re still in good shape. The dry climate preserves everything.’” He stopped, flipped through the pages, pausing at some of the illustrations, and said, “I was looking at this, earlier, too. Someone translated the whole book.”

  Hand-written in the language of the Waswahili, the translation was crammed into the narrow spaces between the English sentences. I told him, “Yes, yes, I remember this very well. The Lost Race of Mars, written—oh, I think almost fifty years ago—by a man in the U.S., Robert Silverberg. Uncle Azi—your grandmother’s brother—he found this book among donated goods at a church in Arusha.”

  Enos continued flipping through the yellowed, paperbound kid’s book while the dog sniffed around my ankles. I dropped my spent cigarette and stamped it out.

  “Who translated—”

  “Uncle Azi. He knew I couldn’t read the English. I’ll tell you though, later on, it helped me learn English to see the words right there, with Kiswahili on the same page.”

  Enos handed the book to me and I put it back in the folder while he said, “Do you want to kick this ball around?” Then, more eagerly, “Are you going in to town today? To get those cigarettes?”

  “Would you like to come along?”

  We sent the dog home and made our way down to the road, passing the ball back and forth. At the road, we continued playing with the ball for about twenty minutes before we were able to flag a dala dala for a ride into town.

  ONE DAY JOE went for a walk. He was anxious to see the rocks that grow. Joe said, “This is a cold day.” Sure enough, it was cold outside. When Joe came to the growing rocks, some were in a type of triangle shape. Over Beauty they kept a hot light so he could keep warm.

  16 March 2006

  “WHEN ARE YOU going back?” the schoolteacher, a young Asian from Canada, asked me. Her name was Kelli Pak. I think she was hoping I could take some things to her family.

  “I’m actually not going back,” I explained, “I’m going to close out my work, remotely, and then I’ll be staying here.”

  Mother, on her deathbed, had made me promise. “Paul, my beautiful son,” she’d said, “Don’t go back to the States. Tanzania needs people like you. Stay here and find a wife. Have some children. Tend to your siblings and their children and their grandchildren, when they come. Take that wonderful education of yours and use it here.”

  How can you refuse your mother’s dying wish?

  And so, here I was, in a school just outside of Mwanza. It was run by missionaries from a megachurch in Alabama. The headmaster had a brother at NASA Marshall, and people around here talk. And so I was invited to come speak to the children at the school. “Tell them what you do. Tell them about the planets,” the headmaster said in English. “They’ve never seen a Sukuma scientist who works in the States. They will enjoy hearing about what you do.”

  Kelli Pak’s children were six, seven, and eight years old. They looked nice a
nd clean in their little uniforms.

  “Welcome and good morning, Doctor Kishosha!” they said in unison, in Kiswahili, as I was introduced.

  “Good morning, children!” I smiled.

  I looked at the teacher again. She was cute, but a bit young—maybe twenty-three—and a bit too small and thin for my taste. She nodded a bit as if to say, “Go ahead, the class is yours.”

  “Uh—As Miss Pak explained, I, uh, work for NASA. The U.S. space agency.”

  A boy shouted, “Are you an astronaut?”

  Another added, “Have you been in space?”

  “Miss Pak said you went to space,” a girl said.

  I looked at the teacher. She nodded again, indicating, “Continue.”

  “Well, no, I’m not an astronaut.”

  Everyone sighed with disappointment.

  “But I am here to tell you about the planets. Other worlds.”

  They seemed to lose interest after that. I began rattling off the names of the planets, but the kids were looking out the window, or at Miss Pak, or at their notebooks.

  What did I know about talking to little kids?

  Miss Pak came over to me and put her right hand up on my left shoulder. I turned toward her and she motioned that I should lean down to match her height. She whispered in English, “Try another approach.”

  Flustered, I didn’t know what to do.

  Then it hit me. Worth a shot, I figured.

 

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