“Maybe this is you adopting the colonizer mentality. You expect Nigeria to be a”—Céline chuckles—“what is that old phrase . . . ‘shithole country’?” Her chuckle turns into a full-throated laugh. “Even when you lived there, the technology far surpassed much of what was in the Colonies. You said it yourself. Those few times you did speak about where you came from, you showed me pieces of what was maybe the most advanced country on the planet. I mean, you were developing technology to simulate regional spacetime phenomena with the gravitational pull of a black hole and using that to combat forest fires! Your country is in the process of terraforming land that les blancs had said would be uninhabitable for at least another century. And you come back now, after four, five years away and expect to see bullet holes in the buildings and craters from shelling in the roads. There can be such a thing as peace, Ifeoma.”
“You’re just saying that because you’re going to be a colonial administrator and you want your job to be easy.”
“Perhaps. Or perhaps I am right because I am right.” There’s an edge of fatigue to Céline’s voice that wasn’t there before.
Ify smirks, then turns her back to the youth outside the mall and stares out over the darkening water. Fireflies dance over it, winking in and out of sight. Ify resists the temptation to light up their entire trajectories and track their movements. Let this natural wonder, at least, be preserved. “Is that what I am supposed to tell the committee, then? When they ask me how to cure these refugee children of their mysterious disease, I will tell them I couldn’t find a cure because there was too much peace?”
“Well, where are they coming from? The children.”
Ify squints. Although many state functions happen in Abuja, this isn’t where most refugee applications are processed. Preliminary research told Ify that. No, that happens further south. She walks herself through the intake process at the hospital. First, she receives the refugees from the shuttle, then she records their background information—as much as they can bear to remember—then she sets them up with treatment. Some of the cyberized will have been damaged either prior to or during their travel, some of the Augments as well. As a result, extracting information from them by way of download is difficult—in some instances, impossible. So they had developed the consent protocol to allow for a deeper dive into the braincases of cyberized refugees and those with Augments. Once permission is given, then technicians and doctors can get all the information they need, create a record in the government database, and move on to the next. For those red-bloods among them who had managed, against all odds, to flee war and devastation and make their way to the Space Colonies in one piece, bureaucracy and mystery await them. No matter how pressing their needs, they don’t have an outlet anywhere on their person, nor do they have a router in their brain that outside devices can connect to. There is no easy way to know them. So they have to wait.
Looking back at the process now, Ify lets herself feel a pinch of pain in her heart. So much of how she has designed her program has been with efficiency as the guiding principle. Get those who have been harmed in the care of the galaxy’s best hospital as quickly and securely as possible. And every quarter, she’s been asked for her numbers: number of admissions, number of discharges. And always, it has been the numbers. With the refugees, always the numbers. Maybe if she’d paid more attention, she could have stopped this. Could have prevented it.
“Are you avoiding a solution because you have to walk through some pain to get there?”
Ify knows Céline doesn’t mean to be flippant about it, but she asks herself how Céline could possibly know what Ify’s been through, what she’s done. What she would have to face if she were to do exactly what Céline is suggesting.
The wind blows softly on her back, and she closes her eyes. And there she is again.
A dark, dank room. Two men walk in from around a corner. Her fingers clench into fists where they’re bound to a chair. The men wear all black and don’t bother hiding their faces. Their hands are gloved.
Static.
The first is stretching his gloves on his hands. “Let’s talk about that higher purpose of yours.”
Static.
The man is holding bees buzzing in his hand, their metal shells gleaming.
Static.
Hissing through her teeth, “Please, please, please no more.”
Static.
A knife comes out of a man’s vest pocket, cuts away her pant legs. And the bees swarm her legs and burrow beneath her skin and—
She gasps when she returns to the lake. It takes her several moments to realize where she is, that she’s not in an underground chamber being tortured, that she’s not Peter, that she’s not being strapped to a chair while another version of herself—another Ify—waltzes through the aboveground facility with a government official at her side. She dashes away tears. No. No, there has to be another way. She can’t go back to that facility.
She can’t.
* * *
■ ■ ■ ■ ■
The thoroughfares of Abuja glow with neon light. It still startles Ify how much Mandarin there is in the signage, like it is gobbling up the English. The signs of Chinese investment in the recovery of this place are evident, but there’s a further penetration. Foreign smells wafting from roadside restaurants, foreign chatter overheard in the streets and alleyways. A mixture of fashion trends she doesn’t remember: kaftans tailored to look like tangzhuang jackets with straight Mandarin collars, cheongsam in bright multicolored prints.
A shout rises above the music. Ify dismisses it, part of the chaos of urban nightlife, until she hears it again, followed by an unbroken string of Cantonese. Suddenly, she hears English mixed in, then she recognizes that voice: Grace.
She breaks off into a sprint, crashing through people on the side of the road, not bothering to apologize, nearly tripping over a sizzling hot dish outside a restaurant stall. Grace. As she gets closer, she looks for the crowd that will have inevitably gathered, but nothing has broken the steady stream of Abujans. The shouting is getting louder, less insistent, more frightened. Ify hurries until she sees large men on either side of Grace, one holding her arm in a vise grip while the other has his finger pressed against his temple, face angled to the sky. Like he’s talking with a commanding officer. They wear all black, black visors over their eyes, and stand a full head taller than the tallest person for miles. Their boxy, muscled frames tell Ify that they are Augments, if not fully cyberized. They don’t carry guns but have shocksticks and wrist restraints hanging from their hips.
“What’s going on?”
Grace sees Ify, and Ify’s heart drops at the bottomless fear in her assistant’s eyes.
“Let her go! What’s the meaning of this?”
The officers, with the pattern of the Nigerian flag emblazoned on their shoulders, ignore Ify. One of them slips wrist restraints from his hip. All thought leaves Ify as she smacks them away. In one swift motion, she puts herself between Grace and the arresting officer, forcing him to look down at her. For a long second, he’s silent.
“I am an Alabastrine official on diplomatic business, and this is my assistant, and you will unhand her now.” She can feel herself being scanned, both officers instantly pulling up her credentials on their retinal displays. For several moments, no one moves. Not Ify, not Grace, not the police officers made of steel.
Then the officer holding Grace lets her go, and she falls onto the ground. “Grace Leung was found in violation of Article 263, subsection 10, of the penal code, relating to violations of memorial integrity—”
“Memorial integrity? What?”
“According to witness and surveillance reports. Punishment to comprise a fine of 250,000 naira or five years’ imprisonment—”
Grace lets out a whimper, and Ify shouts, “What?!”
“Subject to the ultimate judgment of the state magistrate.”
Outrage overpowers any fear Ify feels, and she raises herself up to the machine. “As Alabastrine officials, we are outside your jurisdiction and therefore not subject to your penal code.” She spits the words out, hating herself even as she does. What does she look like, using her status as an outsider to trample on her own country’s laws? Still, she looks around for anyone to stop and at least pay attention to the commotion. Someone to lend a hand or to record the encounter on a device in case anything were to happen. Someone to leap in and help. But it is as though she and Grace are invisible. As though there is no one but them and the police. Them and these machines.
The second officer, who has so far been quiet, puts a hand on the shoulder of the first, and the two exchange a wordless gaze, no doubt communicating an entire conversation between them. It shocks Ify to see so human a moment happen between the men, snapping the illusion that they are nothing more than chunks of unthinking metal.
When the first officer looks back, he seems to relax. “Enjoy your stay in Nigeria, Ms. Leung.” They turn, almost in unison, to walk away.
“My ID!” Grace shouts.
The first officer turns back around, fishes a card out of his pocket, and holds it out to Ify. By now, Grace is standing, if hunched over and brushing the dust off herself.
Ify snatches it out of the man’s hand and glares at him, unblinking, until the two officers vanish into the crowd.
When Ify is certain they’re out of earshot, she whirls around. “What were you thinking? Are you stupid? Are you trying to get us killed? Do you have any idea what could have happened to you?” It’s as though so much of the anger she’s tried to suppress is now spilling out of her. She catches herself when Grace’s composure breaks and her bottom lip begins trembling.
“I’m sorry, Doctor,” she manages through the beginning of sobs.
Then Ify sees it. The terror shaking Grace’s bones against each other. The resolve and clinical discipline washed away by fear. And she brings Grace into her arms. “It’s okay.”
Grace cries into Ify’s shoulder, and they stand there for several minutes, Ify smoothing Grace’s hair, an island of quiet in the sea of people rushing around them. “I thought I could conduct some research.”
“Shh. It’s okay.”
Grace looks up at Ify. “I didn’t do anything, Doctor. I swear.”
“It’s okay. I’m . . . I’m sorry for losing it. I just . . . it’s been a long time since . . . well, I’m not used to being back is all.”
“But, Doctor, all I was doing was collecting stories of the war.”
“We don’t have to do any more work tonight. Let’s just go home and rest.”
“But wait!” She breaks away from Ify, and that resolve is back.
Ify moves closer so that they can speak in whispers. “It’s normal for people not to want to talk about their trauma.”
“That’s the thing. I’d done all my research previously. When I asked them about the war, they had no idea what I was talking about.”
“Maybe some of them were far from the worst of it. There’s an explanation, Grace. Let’s go.”
“But, Doctor, no one knew about the war. I spoke with over a dozen people before the police came.”
Ify frowns. “Where were these people?”
Grace steps out of the mouth of the alley where they’ve stood and points up and down the street. Ify looks up into the sky, and as the maglev cars pass by, ambling up and down their flightlines, she sees them. The orbital surveillance drones. There are surely more embedded in the buildings and perhaps more strung throughout the air, too small to see with the naked eye. And they all would have seen Grace.
They all might have heard her too.
“Come on,” Ify says, grabbing Grace’s arm and pulling them back into the rush of crowds, zigzagging a path the long way back to the apartment. Ify knows it’s foolish to hope, but maybe they will have spent at least a moment or two outside the sightlines of the surveillance drones thickening the air above Abuja.
CHAPTER
22
Sometime when we are walking, I am seeing what is in front of me and sometime I am not.
Sometime, there is being forest with heavy leaf that is blocking us from the sun and there is being chirping and growling and rumbling of bird and animal and even there is being slow stomping of shorthorn, and baby wulfu is playing and we are climbing over root that is sticking up from ground or we are crawling under low branches or tree trunk that has fallen. And sometime, I am seeing boy and girl in front of me with dirty shirt that is being inside out and there is being gun over their shoulder. And I am seeing big man we are calling Commandant at front of the line and we are stopping in some place and creating hologram to trick people who are coming so that we are later killing them and stealing from them. Then I am seeing forest again with Oluwale and Uzodinma and the others who are walking with us.
In the beginning, there is no pattern to when we are stopping and sitting down and finding our peace.
But when we are sitting down, I am practicing looking for rememberings and sorting them. I am practicing organizing them, and it is becoming easier for me to be finding which I am having after Enyemaka are rescuing me from pile of corpses and which are coming from before then. I am knowing now that some of these rememberings are not mine. They are belonging to other people and being given to me. Some of these remembering is colored with red and others with yellow. But the ones with the girl I am calling Ify are blue-green. There is sometime being full color to them, but always there is blue-green at the edge. Like hologram but fuller. Maybe realer.
Sometime, it is early in the morning while grass is still wet with dew and insect buzzing is not yet as loud as it is going to be, and this is when we are sitting and finding peace. Sometime, the sun is already shot up into the sky fast fast before we are stopping to sit and look at our rememberings to find our peace. And sometime, it is when the sky is dark and the stars have come and maybe there is moon and maybe there is not that we are sitting down and looking through our memories and learning and finding our peace. Even when I am finding thing that is paining me or making me to be sadding, I am feeling like I am finding my peace. I am thinking this is what Xifeng is wanting. I am also knowing that I am having remembering I am downloading from her trailer inside my braincase, and I am knowing that it is living in me. If they are destroying trailer and burning everything inside, then I am only evidence that the people we are burying ever died. I am only evidence that people we are burying ever lived. We are observer or history writer. This is being data. These are being people, but this is being data.
Because of what Oluwale is teaching me about finding specific rememberings, I am learning how to be separating and organizing them in my brain. It is like making rows of graves and putting data into each and marking each grave to tell me what is inside it. And I am organizing by person, so this person is getting this row, and this person is getting the next row, and I am learning that I am even having inside me rememberings from people in same family, brother and sister, mother and son, father and father’s sister, so I am grouping them together as well.
“Like this,” Oluwale is telling me one day, and he is drawing spiral in the mud with his finger. It is spiraling outward and outward and outward, and he is then pressing his finger into points in the lines. “This is how people know each other in my memories. They are connected. Everyone is connected to each other. Sometime, it is not being evident how they are connected, so I put them over here.” He digs his finger into spot in the mud far from spiral. “But it is my project, seeing how everyone in my rememberings is connected. Sometime, it is because they are family. Sometime, it is because they are warring with each other. Sometime, it is because they are walking by in the street, and they see each other, and they are falling in love, but they are never seeing each other again. It is small small connection, but it is still connection, so they ar
e going here.” And he draws a line from the faraway point to the spiral, then continues making the spiral until it touches the faraway point.
I am crouching and wrapping my arms around my knees when I am watching him do this.
“Uzodinma does it differently,” he is telling me.
“How?”
“He has made a spiderweb.” Oluwale takes his hand out of the mud and his fingers break apart at the joints into tinier connected pieces. These are scrambling fast fast in the mud so that where there was being spiral there is now complicated spiderweb. Pattern. “Each person is connected to a number of people. And each moment in that person’s life is connected to all these other moments.”
I am staring at the drawing Oluwale is making, and I am feeling wonder blow up like balloon in my chest. I am having picture of spiderweb in my head and thinking of point and how point is getting smaller and smaller and smaller and more and more specific, so that when you are seeing it from far away it is like a star in the sky and every point where spiderweb is connected is like star in the sky. This is what I am thinking when it is nighting in the forest and I am looking at the sky. I am thinking I am looking at data. At rememberings.
It is being night and I am sitting next to Uzodinma and he is just finishing finding his peace and I am looking at his eyes change as he returns here from wherever he was being before. I am wanting to ask Where are you coming from? but I am knowing that we are the same in a very important way so I am asking Where are we coming from?
He knows that I am not using my voice, so he is knowing everything that I am meaning when I am asking this. There is being no expression on his face when he is saying, “I do not know.”
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