Seasons Between Us

by Alan Dean Foster

  “How are you doing, Keegan?”

  “Good, sir.” The young man seemed to contort himself into a tesseract fold to disappear.

  “Sir. I like that.” Hakeem extended his hand and Keegan, though reluctant, shook him up.

  “My grandson here’s been struggling in school. Can’t seem to get out of his own way. The teachers keep coming down harder and harder on him.”

  “It’s like they gunning for me,” Keegan piped up, finding his voice.

  “I know the feeling. It was that way with my son. I had to pull him from that damn fool school. Teach him at home,” Hakeem said.

  “Well, that’s what I thought,” Q said. “I figured you up here with this bookstore, putting out those newsletters and articles. I didn’t know if Keegan could . . . I thought he might do and learn better alongside you and your boy. I mean, you up here spouting all of this knowledge and history and economics shit. Figured it might be good for him to see it in practice. You get kids like him. Hell, you were kids like him.”

  “Heh,” Hakeem said.

  “That a no?” Q asked.

  “Nah, it’s . . . cool.” Hakeem stroked his chin. “Just something I hadn’t considered.”

  “Well, I think it’s a great idea.” The porch door clattered behind Ms. Jywanza, who carried out a tray of coffee cups. “In fact, I have a nephew I’d been thinking of inviting over here to do the same thing.”

  “We could do it from right here,” Hakeem said. “Our school. Our centre of operations.”

  “On your porch?” Ms. Jywanza asked.

  “A wise woman told me that if you listen, the universe will take you somewhere.” Hakeem walked the length of the porch. “There was this group of activists who formed a society named after Thmei, the Egyptian goddess of truth and justice. They called their work, Thmei Research. I always liked that. This will be the space for our school. We can call it the Thmei Academy.”

  “Let’s do this, then.” Ms. Jywanza sipped her coffee.

  “Just like that?”

  “Just like that,” she said. “We’re not teenagers getting high while laying on the roof of your car. We don’t have a lot of time left to play around.”

  “Well, shit.” Hakeem raised his cup to Q and Ms. Jywanza. “To the Thmei Academy.”

  STAGE FIVE: Redeployment

  “I want to make a real difference.” I passed the joint to Dona. I had parked my ‘98 Oldsmobile near one of the main shelters at Bertha Ross Park. We stretched out along the hood of the car, passing smoke between us. It was our favourite place to think.

  “What do you want to change first?” Dona said through pursed breath.

  “Everything. We’re trapped into all these human constructs.” Getting high always made me more philosophical. I only saw in possibilities. “Race. Religion. Money. Nationalism.”

  “First step, change the construct.”

  “Just like that?” I asked.

  “Just like that.”

  “I went to this workshop at the Madame Walker Building. The speaker made the argument that the main issue facing black men was employment. That we needed to fix that in order for us to see ourselves as men.”

  “I thought the silver bullet was education,” she said.

  “I guess that was last week.” I took the offered joint back. “Before I went to Purdue, I thought I had it all figured out. Go to school. Study engineering, get a high paying job . . .”

  “. . . become a perfect cog in the capitalist machine,” Dona said.

  “It’s a model built to exploit us. Now I want to do better. Dream bigger. We can’t just do things the way they’ve been done. That’ll only bring us right back here. We need to change the paradigm rather than try to fix something out of our control.”

  “That’s the thing about plantations: if you escape, there are always people and systems in place ready to send you back,” Dona said. “We all have been traumatized. That’s what the system does. We need to create a retreat place. Carve out space, allow us freedom of thought. Somewhere we can just recover ourselves.”

  “An Uponyaji. A time of healing.”

  “Listen to Mr. Fancy-Pan-Africanist’s vocabulary. Bet you had to dig deep on that one.” She cocked her mouth to the side and released a thin plume of a smoke. “Healing time. I like that.”

  Hakeem rode through the heart of the Citadel, the capital of First World, in a hover lift. The small craft was barely large enough for him, Ms. Jywanza, and three of their students. People scurried about in preparation, still about the business of salvaging First World. Hakeem had never been off planet before. Having been invited to Ghana to speak and then to First World, he’d been overcome with speechless awe. He rocked back and forth. Ms. Jywanza patted his arm. He wiped the clamminess of his hands against his pants.

  Morpheus announced. When the figure appeared as a holo-projection, its features remained largely blank. Amorphous.

  “He even sounds like you,” Ms. Jywanza said.

  “Well, it was either me or Keegan. I wasn’t convinced Keegan was done with puberty and I didn’t want an AI whose voice cracked.”

  “That’s cold, man,” Keegan said. “And it’s Khamal now.”

  “My bad, brother Khamal. Everyone’s due a slip up. Especially at my age. No disrespect meant.”

  Khamal nodded, not quite hiding an all-too-pleased-with-himself smile.

  “All I know is that it’s just like you to design a system where you get to hear your voice bossing people around all day,” Ms. Jywanza said.

  “Support. Morpheus is a support AI,” Hakeem said. “Alright brother Khamal. Show us around.”

  Hakeem had time to collect himself as Khamal tasked Morpheus to tour them about to see the work in progress. First World, the abandoned lunar colony, was undergoing reclamation. Its inhabitants operated under a special charter from the now-defunct U.N. which was why so many of the young people referred to anything related to Earth as O.E. (Original Earth).

  Hakeem envied them. So young, at the beginning of an adventure. He could only sit on the sidelines to observe and advise.

  “We’ve been studying your work,” Khamal said. “We want to centre First World’s philosophy of operation under an umbrella of African-centred consciousness. We’re calling the first phase the ‘Ujima Experiment’.”

  “An African-centred consciousness is more than just performative politics.” Hakeem eyed the people watching them drive by. The nods. The smiles. “It’s about becoming more intentional and more strategic in how we move through the world. We need to let go of the mindset drilled into us by others’ definition of being black on O.E. That can’t be our measure.”

  “But how do you allow for some ideas and mindsets needing to die while looking for new ways of doing things?” Khamal asked.

  “That’s an excellent question. Someone’s been paying attention when I wasn’t looking. Y’all will have to forgive me. The Khamal I knew was always looking for any excuse to create a disturbance and shake up the old system, so I have to be careful how I answer this.” Hakeem tilted his head in consideration, watching Ms. Jywanza take in everything. “I keep coming back to the ideas of allowing ourselves time to heal. An Uponjaji. A time for healing.”

  “Giving ourselves space and time to heal all the hidden corners of ourselves,” Ms. Jywanza mused. “Figure out what it means to forgive those who hurt us and to move forward on our terms.”

  “We need to put our energies into a system that’s all about how we grow and harvest community,” Hakeem said. “We can do healing work here, beginning by valuing each other wherever we are. We learn to speak of our sabhu, the language of the soul.” Hakeem slumped in his seat. “Woo, that’s all I got for today. Y’all done wore me out.”

  “You’ve done good work,” Ms.
Jywanza whispered. “This is your legacy. Where you belong.”

  Hakeem wasn’t done yet. Maybe he could stick around. Tell the story of their community like an ancient griot. Maybe their calling, their sabhu, was among the stars.

  He could wait and see.

  Author’s Notes to My Younger Self: Always have a growth mindset, a posture of constant learning to continue to challenge yourself. Live from a place of abundance. The people around you are gifts. Begin where you are, use what you have, to do what you can to make the world a better place. Daydreaming is a valuable skillset. Nurture it and always imagine the possibilities in you, your community, and the world.

  The Hidden Knowledge Society

  Bogi Takács

  Anyunak

  No one thought the Soviet occupation of Hungary would ever end.

  No one except my grandfather, that is; he looked at me right after I was born, and said, “These kids will see the regime fall.”

  Some of my family laughed at him, others tried to hush him. “The walls have ears, Jani.”

  “Even on the maternity ward?” he countered.

  He passed away soon after; he didn’t see his prophecy come true in just a few years’ time.

  “Hidden knowledge is everywhere,” I whispered to Tamara, my best friend. I pushed myself into the space between the sofa and the bookshelf, wiggled until I managed to crouch down and reach into the farthest corner. I pulled out a large hardcover Bible and made my way back to her.

  We sat on the woollen carpet. It tickled my nose just to look at its thick white tendrils, and it scraped against my bare legs. I tried to pull my bicycle shorts down, but there was just no helping it. Yet I didn’t dare sit on the sofa—what if the adults came in and saw us reading the book? They always said I was “precocious” and “an advanced reader,” but I understood the book wasn’t meant for me.

  “This is amazing, you’ll see,” I told Tamara, keeping my voice down. “The beginning and the end parts are the best. We can read the beginning . . .”

  Tamara wrinkled her nose. “What about the end?”

  “That’s also really good.” I was worried she’d find this boring. I was so desperate to keep her attention. I felt boring. I was a clumsy girl, and all I could do was sit and read. I flipped through the Bible. “The Book of Revelation, by the apostle John. It has all sorts of monsters and the end of the world.”

  This finally seemed to interest her. She leaned forward, seemingly unbothered by the scrappy carpet, and whispered so loudly I winced. “Does it have aliens? I saw on TV that the Bible had aliens. There was a show about Uri Geller and, and aliens.”

  “I can read it to you.” I was sure she’d complain she could read herself, that we were second-graders already, but she didn’t; she nodded eagerly. I could never guess what she was about to say.

  We didn’t even get a whole page in when we heard the living room door creak. I spun around and saw a dark shape moving behind the translucent, knotty glass—Great-Grandma, always dressed in black.

  I shoved the Bible under the sofa and hoped this didn’t count as some kind of sacrilege.

  I snuck back later, pulled out the now-dusty Bible and sneezed. I didn’t tell Tamara, but I felt skeptical about this book. Grandma told me the Bible was a sacred book copied from generation to generation without a single letter being changed. Yet there was a whole paragraph printed twice on the very first page of Genesis, and some typos too. Maybe this wasn’t a very high-quality Bible. I read all the front matter and it had an explanation that this Bible had been verified to be an accurate teaching of the Catholic Church. Published by the Saint Stephen Society.

  I knew Saint Stephen as King Stephen from school. He was the first Hungarian king. Our teacher didn’t like to say “Saint,” and I thought this was similar to how some people said “Saint Nicholas,” while other people said “Father Frost.” Father Frost and his granddaughter, Little Snowflake. I didn’t know the Catholic name for Little Snowflake, and when I asked Mom, she laughed.

  I was sure I wouldn’t find Little Snowflake in the Bible, but I went on reading. I could read very fast. Last year in first grade, I was asked to correct the other kids when they were reading out loud. Everyone hated me after that. I preferred to read by myself.

  Maybe I could find the aliens. There was Moses, who was almost as interesting. And the tablets of commandments he received. Then he threw them down because he was angry, and he had to go back to get another set. This cheered me up for some reason, and I made a drawing of Moses breaking the tablets in the back of the April issue of Laughter, Children’s Humour Anthology, where there was an empty white page.

  I smuggled the Bible to under my bed so it would be easier to read before sleep. But the very next day I got to the part where the Commandments said not to make a graven image. Maybe I did wrong by drawing Moses. My Moses was definitely an image, and I had been so proud of him.

  I cautiously showed Moses to my mom over dinner.

  “This is a great drawing,” she said, poking at her pasta with her fork.

  “Isn’t it a . . . problem?”

  “Why would it be a problem?” She turned back to reading Hungarian News—she always read this newspaper, never People’s Freedom. “This is a free country now. The Russians are gone.”

  I glommed a large clump of pasta into my mouth, the spaghetti slick from the cheese melted onto it. I didn’t care what the Russian army thought of my drawing. I cared about what Moses would have thought. If Mom didn’t even understand this much, it would be pointless to ask her about aliens.

  “Tomorrow is October 23. There is no school because of the national holiday,” our teacher, Mrs. Margit, said. “Does anyone know what we’re celebrating?”

  I knew! I was so proud of myself. I raised a hand. I wished I could raise both hands.

  “Yes, Zsuzsi?”

  “We’re celebrating the anniversary of the 1956 Revolution!” Mom had explained it was all right to call it a Revolution now, not a Counter-Revolution. The Soviet occupation was over.

  “No!” she yelled, her face paling. “We’re celebrating the new Constitution of 1989!”

  “But Auntie Margit . . .”

  “It’s Mrs. Teacher, please. You’re not in kindergarten anymore, to call everyone your aunties.” She looked about to give me a black mark in my notebook. I slid down in my desk.

  “But, Mrs. Teacher, please? They wrote the new constitution on this day because this is the same day the 1956 Revolution started—to memory, memorialize—” My tongue twisted in a knot.

  She glared at me. “I don’t want to hear any talk of the Revolution. Revolution, Counter-Revolution, who knows what will happen next year?”

  When I got home, Mom was exhausted from work, her curls hanging in big lumps around her head, and I felt bad about pestering her—but I had to ask. These days I only saw her in the evenings. She was peeling a small orange. “Would you like one?” She offered me a slice.

  I shook my head. I hated the way oranges felt in my mouth. The mushy orangey bits and the white tendrils connecting them. Brrr. Instead, I tried to explain what happened in school. This seemed more interesting to her than Moses. She made a face and put down her orange. “You know, this is exactly why they are changing all the street names from names of Communists to names of rivers and streams. Because if the Communists come back after a few years, the street signs won’t need to be changed again. No one will be bothered by a street named after the Danube.”

  I liked that Mom took me seriously. Maybe now it was finally time to raise the question of aliens. “Mom? What do you think about aliens in space?”

  “Now where did that come from?” She resumed fussing with her orange. I couldn’t fathom how she could eat it, but she also ate plums, which were even more disgusting.

  “I was just wondering.
Mom.”

  She was already looking away from me.

  “Mom! I was wondering if aliens existed.”

  “I’m sure they do, somewhere out there,” she said. “Space is vast.”

  “But what about flying saucers?”

  “That’s so the newspapers have something to write about that’s not politics.” She finished the orange and wiped her mouth. “The same thing with Uri Geller. Though that’s a bit more complicated.”

  She didn’t explain about the complications.

  “Uri Geller is Jewish,” Grandmother said. “And he’s from Israel, of all places.”

  “He’s Hungarian,” I complained. “They said so on TV. They also said he can find oil in the ground while he’s flying above in a plane.”

  “So? They say all sorts of things on TV these days.” She yanked at her plastic house robe, adjusting it. It was shaped like a flower-print sack and it never quite seemed to fit her. “Now it’s allowed to say that he’s Hungarian. For now.”

  “I decided I’m going to learn Hebrew,” I said. “I want to read the Bible in the original.”

  She almost tore off one of the large pockets sewn onto her home dress. “I hope you haven’t told any of your classmates about that.”

  Tamara and I crouched under the shade of a craggy tree.

  “Arise, founders of the Hidden Knowledge Society,” I declaimed, and we stood. Tamara looked skeptical. “We don’t need to make a blood pact, right? It’s allowed to make a pact without the blood?”

  I thought Ancient Hungarian blood pacts were kind of cool, and my favourite part of our Reading textbook was the colour paintings of Hungarian history. The seven chieftains, ready to slice their arms open. I shook my head, chasing away the image. “It’s allowed to make a pact without the blood,” I murmured, then raised my voice again. “We pledge to investigate and uncover hidden knowledge! Like UFOs! The Bible! Telepathy! The ghost of Sándor Petőfi, author of Arise O Hungarian! Um . . .”