So Long Been Dreaming

by Nalo Hopkinson

  “I don’t know what they did.” He hung in the web of vines.

  “Tell me what you know or I swear to god, I’ll blow us up now.” I pointed my pistol at the explosives in the knapsack. Several vines snapped from his weight and he staggered toward me. I pointed the pistol at him. For a moment Renee wanted to shoot him down like a dog, but I didn’t. “Tell me.”

  “After they worked you over I remember you screaming my name . . . like a prayer, but you never betrayed me.” He stared at the gun until I finally lowered it. “For a time you forgot everything, but if somebody touched you, it was the rape happening again.” He looked far away though I was close enough to smell his fear. “Doctors said you might never remember. It was a miracle you got out alive.”

  “You call that a miracle?” My voice was hollow. I felt like a spirit unhinged, floating above this body.

  “Your mind came back without those memories, but you couldn’t stand to be touched – until now.” He shivered. “I would have told them anything, but you. . . .”

  He waited for me to say something. He pleaded with his eyes, with all the tiny muscles of his face for contempt, forgiveness, something. I teetered at the edge of chaos, vertigo claiming my senses. “I gotta get out of this hole, now.” I pushed through him and the vines. The air outside was a welcome relief. I drew myself back into Renee’s flesh. The sun had disappeared behind distant hills. Birds sang love suites and battle sonatas. I took out a Soya Power Bar and chewed at it furiously.

  After a few moments he emerged from the tree, mumbling something about the Perez woman and the damn Mission. I forced myself to listen. “Blowing up a bunch of trees. She could’ve done this bizarre shit herself.”

  Shop talk. I could do that too. “Perez is a biologist or something. These trees are old souls, a couple thousand years even. Maybe Perez didn’t have the heart to blast millennia of living into nothing.”

  He stared at me. “You sounded like her just now. That was exactly her little speech, when she hired us.”

  I shrugged. “Good memory.”

  “You weren’t there.”

  “You told me.”

  “Right. But you sounded just like her.”

  “Your mind is playing tricks on you. How could I sound just like Perez?” Unless I’d been her, but I couldn’t share that suspicion with him.

  “Of course.” Methodically, he pulled explosives out of my pack, fussed over detonators, and every hundred feet buried a bundle in the roots of a giant tree. He didn’t ask for my assistance and I didn’t offer. So much history behind and between people, one moment was always a nasty echo of another time, most of who you were already scripted. That was Renee. Axala was outside of history, dropping in for samples, but not really taking part. Not committing to the lives she became. More of a gig slut than Renee could ever be. And sick to death of it.

  “Are you setting us up?” He looked up from the last detonator, hand on his pistol, eyes frantic. “You and Perez, setting me up? Some kind of final revenge?”

  “What are you talking about?”

  He stared at me, fighting with something inside himself. I touched his hand. “Sorry. You’d lay down your life for me, I know that. I’m just being paranoid.” He brushed his lips across my damp palm and headed for the dense new growth beyond the trees. “You got the map to ‘the final shore’?”

  “Like I told you.” I started after him, but stumbled over roots and fell back against a tree. The impact knocked the wind out of me, slapped my brain against its skull, and I lay a moment plastered against smooth bark, seeing stars.

  “What’s the matter? Come on!”

  I couldn’t speak or move. The tree wouldn’t let me go. It snagged me in a magnetic field, lined up my electrons, and started generating current. Energy rushed from my toes out through the fuzzy ends of my hair, like a lightning bolt sparking into the ground. The tree was a body historian, this rain forest, a jungle of galactic griots, roots intertwining underground, branches interwoven above, and their fields all lined up. Perez had gathered all the griots in the forest! I was in the home grove, the bosom of family, connected to deep time, praise singing life. All of our griot experiences, a polyphony of memories rushed through me. Together the trees and I made meaning and broadcast twice ten thousand years, the incredible story of life on Earth out to the stars. Imbedded in this polyrhythmic history, I remembered everything, the story I’d become. Axala of Earth.

  Renee’s man watched my hair catch fire and my hands and feet turn white-hot. I saw myself in his eyes. I heard his voice rumble out a warning, a prayer, I didn’t know which. His body was a blur of impulses – his legs tearing away from me, his hands reaching for mine. I wanted to share the spectacle of Earth with him, despite the danger, but I couldn’t move the inches it would take to touch him. I was caught in deep time, with all the ancestors walking through my body, making sense of the present moment from so many gone by. I felt the mother ship leave the shores of our birth world to wander through star systems and collect the genealogy of life in the galaxy. We body historians were a Diaspora of ghosts living only in borrowed bodies, collecting the wisdom of others, slaves to their appetites, lost to ourselves. After twice ten thousand years on this watery outpost, we were so full of life, the past broke out all over us. Earth had made us aliens to our former selves. We had no desire to be spirits in perpetual exile; we longed to make Earth our story.

  I heard the reply of the mother ship, as it gathered the polyphony of memories we broadcast. Renee’s man grabbed my hand. I risked his life and my griot existence and channeled our field into him. The praise song we made of his world passed through his body. He knew my story. What he made of griot longing, our love, I couldn’t say, but his mouth was in bloom, wings broke out on his back; he sang on the stage of a great hall surrounded by elephants and sequoias, and he carried me to safety:

  In Juba, Renee’s man, a coward who had abandoned her, who trembled in the shadows while six terrorists violated her, fell on his face at the first explosion. The terrorists scattered past him, grabbing more weapons and screaming. After the second explosion he crawled toward Renee. When he reached her, she was barely breathing. He scooped up her broken body and carried her through the desert to safety, certain he was too late. Certain she had died in his arms. Everybody said it was a miracle she got out alive. And he was a hero.

  A terrible ache for cowards and heroes passed amongst all the griots. We grieved for the lives we had collected, for the Earth beings we had studied and become. Embodying wisdom was our art, science, and religion. Yet endless new adventures on distant planets no longer excited our old souls. After eons of wandering, of losing ourselves again and again, we griots longed to make these beautiful and painful memories, this particular world, this Earth home. How would we bear a final death and the desolate flight to yet another star after being ripped from the body of our beloved Earth?

  Large projectiles slammed into the tree. Its crown crashed into neighbouring trees, slicing away branches and vines. Renee’s man cried out in pain. In an instant the magnetic web connecting the jungle of body historians was broken, and the light went out of my eyes. My hair fell in ashes to the ground. I slid down the trunk, my limbs locked, my backbone frozen. I thought I would die, once and for all.

  “I can’t move,” I murmured.

  Renee’s man covered my body with his. A charred mercenary charged down the path from the minefield. She hadn’t stepped on a beanbag lizard and exploded. Falling branches knocked a massive weapon from her hands and ripped flesh from her face. She pulled out a handgun.

  “Jay Silver Feather,” he whispered in my ear as he stood up to run toward her. His name. My stiff body rolled against his feet, and he stumbled down to one knee. He fired several shots and my ears stopped hearing, but the lock on my muscles eased.

  This body for his life, it seemed fair.

  I was trying to stand up in the line of fire when bullets smashed in one side of his chest and out the other. He fel
l down on me again in a river of blood. The rainforest screamed, all the griots calling his name. I couldn’t move.

  “Jay Silver Feather,” I whispered. Cold and shivering, he put his arms around me, around his Renee. “Your great-grandfather was a Seminole, a black Indian, and he told you swamp stories, about stealing slaves into freedom, hiding with trees, making new world communities from the swamps to . . . across the border, and never letting white folks catch you at anything. He called you his Silver Feather, because you had a spirit that nobody could beat down. I remember your stories, even if I didn’t live them. Your spirit is safe with me.”

  Jay, his eyes a burst of light, smiled at me, Axala/Renee, and then his head lulled against my shoulder. I listened carefully to his last breaths. The mercenary stood over us with a gun at my temples, telling me to get up or die on the ground, because it didn’t matter to her. Perez wanted us alive, but it didn’t have to be that way if I had some crazy cowboy notion.

  “My limbs are paralyzed.”

  Perez hired Jay and me, Perez hired her. Neat. Another gig slut like all of us. I couldn’t even hate her. “Kill me here. Kill me now. Get it over with.” I started singing a Seminole song for Jay.

  “Stop that singing.” She kicked Jay’s gun out of reach and stepped back to consider my twisted limbs. “Paralyzed? Cut the crap. A trick like that won’t work on me.”

  It was a huge branch, but she never saw it coming. She never had time to be shocked by death. A few inches to the right and the bough of the tree would have flattened me as well. But I was so lucky.

  Jay’s body leaned against my chest, the fuzz on his head soothing my cheeks. I waited for him or the mercenary woman to come back to life. But the griot tree she had blasted was only wounded. There was no free body historian to drop into their lives – not enough luck for that. And then I wasn’t waiting for them to come back to life. It was too late anyhow. Sitting on bloody ground, separated from the griot family and no longer remembering everything, I didn’t know what to do. My eyes settled on the detonator in Jay’s bag, the one connected to the bombs nestled in our roots. Grief overwhelmed me, muddled my impulses. Maybe I should just blow up the forest of ancestors, and we griots could fly back to the mother ship and be done with Earth. That was Renee and Axala’s Mission, after all.

  The husky found me sleeping on the ground between two dead bodies. He licked my face awake. A spark of energy passed between us, then he stepped back while I sputtered and wiped his doggy spit into my shirt. It was night. The moon was up, almost full in a cloudless sky. The chilly air forced me back inside the jacket. The husky grumble-growled, but didn’t frighten me. A griot spirit on his way to the rendezvous had dropped into the dog I shot. He was the shadow that had tracked me. Every body historian was present and accounted for. Perez had managed to collect us all. I reached out my arms, and the husky ran toward me, his silver hair and ice blue eyes easy to catch in the moonlight. Why couldn’t it have been Jay come back to life? I buried my face in the dog’s fur. A deep rumble in his chest soothed me. I pulled myself up and caressed the tree, hoping to re-establish a connection with the other griots. Nada. These crotchety old giants were waiting to see what I’d do since I could move again. They had shared their insights and feelings, written truth on my body. We were one story now, and the choice of ending was up to me. An endless quest or committing to Earth?

  Renee didn’t want to go anywhere, but if nothing else, Axala would see where Perez’s Mission took us. I checked Jay’s watch. We had six hours. I drank the last two bottles of Recharge and scanned the map with my fountain pen flashlight. The dog looked over my shoulder, panting in my ears. I gazed into his intelligent eyes and wondered at the Earth lives he’d led. Dogs couldn’t talk but. . . .

  The husky/griot guided me through the night to my destination.

  The sun had been up several hours when I stood at “the final shore.” Other eyes would have seen only a shallow pond, a rocky hillside, and a plain covered by enormous satellite dishes, radio telescopes listening to deep space for extra-terrestrial intelligence. I knew they were soul collectors, ready to transport griots to the mother ship when I blew up the forest of ancestors. Cut off from other complex life forms by the lifeless white desert, no griot would be enticed by a dying body to stay on Earth. Shattering the tree bodies, snuffing out a trillion points of light would release all the body historians to the stars. The mother ship would catch us on a beam of light. An elegant plan. I should have rejoiced at the approaching rendezvous, but I felt listless, a sleepwalker waking up from a journey of bad dreams.

  The husky stood on hind legs and tapped his nose against a portal set in the hillside. It rolled open, and he trotted inside. No private army prevented me from walking behind him. Inside was dim and cool: concrete, metal, and plastic held the jungle at bay. I could have been in any office/ science installation in the world. The husky led me through an empty security station to a door labelled “control room.” It was unlocked but the hinges wouldn’t budge. I squirted my last packet of Frizz Ease on the rusty metal, and the door opened with a touch.

  The strong smell of black coconut didn’t surprise me, nor did the clutter of video monitors, computers, and receivers. A photo of a fifty-something woman with wiry grey hair, light brown skin, and high cheekbones drew me to what I surmised was the main workstation. The woman wore a leather jacket, carried a matching knapsack, and was hugging a husky. The back of the photo read: “Crystal and Max up North.” I sat down. Several purple lizards grinned at me from atop a coffee machine. Shells, seaweed, and green memo-paper with “From the desk of Dr Crystal Perez” were scattered everywhere. Her handwriting was unreadable except for EXOBIOLOGY in block letters. I crumpled up the notes and let my head drop onto the desk. Using biotech weapons and nuclear death, Dr Perez had corralled the griots of the galaxy into the forest of the ancestors, making ready to send us home.

  The husky shoved his cold nose against my neck. I sat up. Beside me, a computer monitor blinked, asking for someone to press ESCAPE to execute or ENTER for abort. The program was labelled with the first six prime numbers. One simple key, ESCAPE, and I could blow the jungle of griots and twice ten thousand years of living sky-high. Jammed with poignant memories of Earth, we’d ride long radio waves back out to the mother ship. Dr Crystal Perez stared at me from snowy hills up north and waited. I turned her picture face down.

  The phone in my jacket pocket jangled. I answered it after one ring. I knew who it would be. “Yeah?”

  “Renee? Tell me you’re alive again. Tell me the numbers.” A hoarse, gurgling voice near death.

  I didn’t say anything.

  “Renee? Tell me you’re alive again. Tell me the numbers.” It was a recording, asking for the code.

  When it repeated for the third time, I answered. “I’m alive again. Two, three, five, seven, eleven, thirteen.” The first six prime numbers.

  Silence for a moment, like the machine was waiting for something else.

  “Thirteen, ninety-two, thirty-two, ninety-one, seventy-one.” Remembering the handwritten scrawl, I quickly added the next five primes as backwards as I could.

  The entire control room came alive, whirring and hissing. The husky banged his paws against the bottom row of monitors as a close-up from a videotape dated yesterday popped on.

  “This is Axala.” The wheezing contralto spoke from Dr Perez’s body. Crumpled up by a smoldering van at the edge of the white desert, she recorded this message as life slipped away from her. “I don’t know what to tell you.” She sputtered. “A year into Crystal Perez and deep memories, not just Edges started breaking out.”

  “A year? Deep memory started breaking out of Renee the first hour. . . .” I muttered.

  “The griots were getting too full and . . . I thought I had it all figured out,” Perez/Axala continued.

  “Oh yeah?” I walked from the desk over to the monitors to confront the image.

  “None of the griots wanted to leave this planet, but
that always happens. You leave anyhow.” Perez/Axala coughed and spit something out of the frame. “But even I couldn’t do it, couldn’t separate us from the body of Earth, couldn’t send us on our endless journey. I just didn’t have the heart to blast millennia of living into nothing.”

  I gasped at the words I had spoken to Jay.

  “So. . . .” The sun made her eyes look white. She closed them slowly and gathered her last few breaths. “So I hired Jay and Renee to explode me and the tree griots, and release us all from life on Earth.”

  The map, the lizards, the guards blown up. An inside job to kill yourself and get back to the mother ship.

  “Renee surprised me. Blew up the van before I was ready . . . when Max and I got out to pee. Max didn’t like that. Chased her down.”

  Renee probably thought the good doctor would double-cross her.

  “Perez’s body is almost finished.” Perez/Axala opened her eyes and squinted at something off camera. “And from what I can see, Max is chewing up Renee, so. . . .” She looked right into my eyes. “I guess I’m talking to myself.” Axala had jumped into Renee.

  “Each body changes us. We are the sum of all the bodies we have joined,” I said out loud. “I’m not the same Axala that you were.”

  On a second row of video screens, the husky lunged at Renee’s throat. The metal worms with camera eyes captured their fatal encounter from every angle. I switched off the screens just as he would have ripped her throat out.

  “One last blast and we body historians are free to download the burden of Earth and start again.” Perez/Axala chased after her words, hoping to get everything said before it was too late. “You can release the griots and get to the mother ship or. . . .” She looked away from me, at the ruin of her body.

  “Or stay. . . . And what the hell will that be?” I argued out loud with the ghost on the screen, with the body I had been yesterday. “If we don’t blow up shit and run away to the stars. . . . What the hell do we do here?”

  “A great mystery. It’s up to you.” Perez/Axala fell against a purple lizard and her image exploded on nineteen monitors, but one screen froze on a close-up, as Axala dropped out of Perez and into Renee. I had never seen myself abandon a body, never looked back at a finished life, always rushing to the next body. . . . I switched off the monitors.