I inhale forgiveness;
And I will always bear scars.
The scars are mine,
And I found someone who did not know.
I saved someone that no one cared about.
He was mine,
His heart was mine,
His breath was mine.
And he was cut down by the demon,
He was killed by the believers in false gods.
Now they are mine.
Now they are ours!
The women took up the call of her words, tongue calling to tongue, the languages susurrating and harmonizing, amplifying, interfering, muffling, and then braiding into a new song over and over.
Bilqis began to shape the words of their chant. She threw in a word here or there: Future; clean; untouched; unbroken; ours.
The women echoed back: Now; unbreakable; spur-and-scarab; revenge.
The women had begun small fires to render seabutter. The palm-leaf pots they passed around sustained them that day and into the evening. They once again collapsed in place, a tiny inoculation of compound women who had spread into a colony across the agar of the seashore.
Meala lay her head in Bilqis’s lap as the sunset faded to the darkness of nightfall. Bilqis was sitting cross-legged, erect, showing no sign of fatigue. Meala gazed up at her face, dark against the dark sky, catching hints of firelight, and felt with a sudden thrill that Bilqis…Bilqis, with whom she had woven reeds, built fires, diapered babies…wasn’t human.
Was she a witch? No, more; she was more than that. A demon? No, Meala knew in her heart that she was more, and that she was good. She was goodness.
With the next dawn, the glow and flames were gone, but the spell was unbroken. The women dispersed.
By that night, there wasn’t an unrepentant circumciser left alive within a days’ walk of their seaside assembly.
Within a week, the males of the district were divided into those who lived apart from the villages and camps, and those who were healing from the sacred spur and scarab.
A month? The colony had inoculated and spread itself around the Horn of Africa, as far along the Red Sea as Cairo.
#
Bilqis rose from meditation and raised her arms. The encampments around her were arranged like the rays of the sun, all fanning from the natural pyramid of Gabal Elba, on which she made her temple—the first Mosque of Makeda.
The desert had yielded to the changes from the sea. The same conditions that brought the seabutter, changing the smell and feel of the sea like a woman’s secretions changed with pregnancy, had moistened and soothed the sere and rocky expanse of desert between what had once been Egypt and what had once been Sudan. Some said the new religion had a hundred thousand followers in Africa; some said a hundred million. Their offerings of goat meat and seabutter, bananas and yams, maize and beans, kept her full and growing fat—wanting for nothing.
Adoring Meala sat by her side, and Bilqis looked down at her face, caressed it with motherly love. “Meala, there is something I must ask of you.”
“What is it, great Bilqis?”
“I wouldn’t ask this if great Nefertiri, Elegant Lady, Generous, Charming, Sweet and Loving, Commander of Everywhere, Femme Fatale, Mother's Favorite, Savior of Jesus—didn’t will it.”
“I know, Bilqis.”
“The time has come to balance the scales on the other side of the Red Sea.”
“Yes, Bilqis. You have mentioned this before.”
“More of our sisters are being cut and cored, bleeding and dying, across the sea where more Arabs live. I have seen in my nightly travels that there are millions more, all along the seashores and across the mountains—where women are tiny and sloe-eyed, and where women are almond-eyed and shallow of hip like your one true love: all touched by the Sar Awak, the evil that had held sway for so long. They must learn to find the shining sun within, and to harness the virility among them with the spur and scarab.
“Meala, there is none among us I can trust as much as you. Will you go?”
Meala thought of her sweet Li—his straight dark hair threaded with grey, his hooded almond eyes, the smoothness of his fine-grained pallid golden skin on that one morning when she’d finally dared to press it with her own. The day he’d gone to his death.
She’d not been with anyone, even though the women all raved about sex with the men who’d had the spur put right where it would bump the partner’s clitoris. It took some time for their penises to discover their function again when the scarab was removed. They were sensitive, and moved oh, so slowly.
Apparently.
Meala had thoughts only of Li. And she considered the possibility that somewhere far to the east, she might meet a distant cousin of Li’s, some man who couldn’t replace him, but at least remind her a bit of him.
“I will go.”
Bilqis smiled as though she’d known Meala would agree.
Then she held something out to her. It was shell-like; phosphorescent in places, translucent in some, opaque in shades of green in others.
Meala took it and felt its weight. “Is it alive?”
“It is.”
Bilqis had another of the items in her other hand. She turned and walked a few steps away, then pivoted and pressed a spot on the carapace of the creature in her hand. To Meala’s surprise, the animal she herself held began to pulse with light and purr softly.
“Press the farthest spot,” Bilqis said. Meala complied.
Bilqis brought hers to her lips, and for a moment, Meala wondered if she were about to eat it. But she merely whispered, “Hello?”
Meala heard Bilqis’ voice coming from the creature in her hand. “Hello?” it said. And on one of the clear chitinous areas of its skin, the word for “Hello” in Afar appeared in the Ge’ez alphabet, then shimmered and slowly faded.
“What is it?” Meala marveled. Her node flashed the Ge’ez Afar for “What is it?” in a slightly different color, which likewise disappeared.
“It is a node. Moroccan traders brought them overland. Our best fish farmers have been growing them in tanks. They call them bioelectronics. They were invented far away, across the sea.” All her words were rapidly scrolling by on the small organic screen. “They’re implanted with a small copper coil to increase their bioelectric radio signal. I don’t understand all the science, but the technology works. They’re all on one network, and all their daughters and granddaughters will be on the same network.”
“Like a cell phone?”
“Something like that. But the network is only for this region. Once you’re out of range, the signal is lost. It may be many years, perhaps many lifetimes, before the network joins us together around the world again.”
Meala grinned. “But it’s a start!”
“It is a start. And you will be taking these devices with you when you go east.”
#
Meala stood next to the tanks with their walls of swollen reeds, holding the fresh water that grew the nodes within—just like the hull that held the sea at bay on the outside. Abiba, the node farmer on her crew, was a tall, lanky woman. Her eyes had looked off in two directions ever since she’d corrected her husband on a point of scripture one night after dinner. He had beaten her until she admitted that up was down and black was white. Abiba’s husband had slowly sickened and died after that.
If the machine sickness and the True Mother hadn’t intervened, Abiba might have been stoned as a witch for having her revenge. As it was, she had that crazed, hermitic look of those people whose complex, thoughtful conversations end in frustration with others. She lit up when she looked at her nodes—as though their elegant architecture was more real to her than the women around her.
Meala ascended the ladder to the deck and surveyed the sails, modernized Somali boats with certain modifications to them that had been burned into Meala’s brain since the day she saw Li’s ship burning on the storm-churned harbor. The crew were brave women, strong and level-headed. They’d drilled and practiced and reh
earsed every detail of the ship’s routine and of every emergency they could imagine—from being attacked by pirates to epidemics to springing a simple leak.
They were sure they were forgetting nothing, yet Meala shrank from the vastness of the water arrayed before her tiny vessel. Her first destination on the other side, out of sight, was the land known as Yemen, from whence Sheik Abdullah had sailed. She wished for a moment—but just for a moment—that she was squatting peacefully by her mother’s hearth, slicing vegetables for dinner again. But that wasn’t what Isis wanted for Meala.
Meala would face the fate Isis had spread before her with courage.
Handoff
“I think it might be better for Esther to stay here.” Alf interjected. “She can see the festivities outside.” he nodded at the front windows. Esther pulled up a chair and leaned back in it, her jacket falling open just enough for the butt of her carbine to show, and rested her feet on one of the sacks of silver.
She sighed. “This is lovely.”
Tyler stepped out of the corner where he’d been standing. “May I?” He nodded at the bags.
“Oh, I suppose so.” Esther put her feet flat on the floor, and Tyler picked up the bag of drugs first, pouring the tablets out on the desk and sorting them by type: some coated and shiny, others chalky, some round and some oval, some capsules. Most people nowadays could pick out the common brands and doses of antibiotics on sight. Even children knew how to crush them and coat the increasingly-rare items of plastic that still existed with the dust. He finished counting up the drugs, scooped them into the sack, and picked up a bag of silver coins, which he began to stack neatly on the surface of the desk.
In the meantime, Alf and Lou followed Steve and two large men in uniforms into the press room. Lou could hardly conceal his joy at seeing the gleaming, intact metal of the hulking press. He began to walk around it, but when he got to the far side and saw what was there, he stopped. “Gabe?”
The pressman was seated on a cot, his elbows on his knees and his hands hanging limply, head down. He looked up at Lou and jumped to his feet, his broad, patient face telegraphing pleasure, fear, hope, joy, and shame in rapid succession. “Lou! I thought you were dead! They made me—I would never—you’re not a prisoner?”
Lou stepped up and offered his right hand. Gabe stepped forward, but stopped short. “You’re shackled?”
Gabe looked down at the steel-banded leather strap on his ankle and the chain connecting it to the press. He flushed red.
Lou rounded on the three men. “You shackled him to the press?”
“He’s under arrest for assaulting an officer,” Steve smoothly explained.
“I’m on work release.” Gabe nodded at the press.
“This is slavery.” Lou said. “You release this man, or the whole deal is off…and we’ll see what the people in the square outside think about this situation.”
Steve’s jaw worked. The goons shifted position, menacing Lou from the rear. Lou kept his hand off his sidearm with visible effort. The band outside finished a nouveau rendering of “Clementine” and launched into “Dr. Graffenburg.” A dog barked.
Finally, Steve nodded at one of the two men. “Release him.” The man obeyed, and Gabe stepped forward and embraced Lou—to Lou’s obvious discomfort.
Lou promptly stepped back and took Gabe’s right hand firmly in his two, not reacting to the tears in the other man’s eyes. “Gabe, you’d better go see to your family. Louise thinks she’s a widow and your girls are orphans.”
Gabe didn’t even glance around. He was out the door in seconds.
“How can you claim to be operating under the Constitution and imprison a man without charges or trial?” Lou asked.
“It was a matter of national security. Congress expressly authorized—”
“Never mind,” Lou interrupted. “I know what Congress has expressly authorized over the past twenty years. Thank God that’s over and done with!” He continued to stroll around the press, noting scorch marks here and there, casting a scornful glance at the narrow cot and the chain. “Everything appears to be in order. Let’s check the ink supplies in the storeroom.”
A few minutes later, Lou stepped out on the veranda with Alf and Esther. Steve, Tyler, and the two cops stood on the other side. The music stopped; the crowd took notice and gradually assembled facing them.
Lou stepped up front and center. “My friends, let this mark the beginning of a new era. There can be no freedom more important that freedom of the press. Aside from life and liberty, there can be no right more sacred than the right to property. Today, you see those principles upheld!”
His words were met with a round of applause, whistles and cheers. “Let’s party!” yelled Alf.
The crowd returned to its revelry. Tyler and the other two carried the bags through the interior to put them in their car, hidden under a canvas cover in the rear loading dock, dusted thoroughly with antibiotics.
Waiting for the car to come around, Steve took Lou’s hand. “I trust,” he said, “that you understand the importance of the president reviewing your coverage before it is released?”
“I’m flattered that the president would want to read my little newspaper. I’ll be happy to send a copy up to him as each edition comes off the presses.”
“That’s not what I meant,” Steve said. “I would expect an opportunity to review any editorial content or reporting which affects national security ahead of publication...if nothing else, so he could have a chance to respond.”
“That sounds fair,” Lou said.
Steve let out a tiny sigh of relief. “Good, that’s settled, then. A pleasure—”
“…but it isn’t fair,” Lou concluded. “Like every other citizen, the president is entitled to respond in whatever way he likes. I will provide him a copy of every publication gratis as a courtesy. After it’s released.”
Steve smiled even more broadly, but with glinting daggers in his eyes. “Watch your back, Mr. Stonegood,” he cautioned, squeezing his hand in a vice-like grip. He broke contact and strode to the car, its Presidential Seal proudly displayed on the door.
Join US
Steve and Tyler got out of the car at the presidential compound and walked around, watching their lackeys unload the sacks of silver and precious drugs. They made sure they walked behind the men carrying the bags so none of it went missing.
Tyler nodded at the windows of the office wing. Barely visible above the high window ledges, a line of faces watched the bags coming towards them. The amount of silver in those bags would feed every person in the compound for three years. The antibiotics would keep their poor, isolated electronic equipment from becoming infected for…who knew how long? Some devices had become infected with antibiotic-resistant strains already. Security had confiscated and quietly destroyed those, but word got around, and those with sickened devices concealed them. Nobody wanted to risk the confiscation of a device that didn’t respond to the drugs.
But now that the shewanella tech was circulating, everyone wanted to buy a globe of it. They’d kept it under wraps in the workshop as long as they could, but in a community of fewer than a hundred and fifty people, there can be no real secrets. Then they tried giving each person an identical shewanella light. That kept people happy for a few weeks. Then someone figured out that the shewanella could be cultured in a bigger milieu to generate power on a bigger scale. The demand for glass globes and tubing and wicks and membranes became tremendous. The workshop had issued memo after memo advising that the materials were reserved for the extremely critical research that the top scientists of the lab were doing to refine the technology.
One night, a series of gunshots rang out at the perimeter. That wasn’t unusual, as the sentries had orders to shoot any unidentified person approaching. But a few minutes later, a pickup truck went out to the spot the shots had come from and came back with a tarp-enrobed body in the truckbed. Normally, dead intruders were taken to a nearby pit—a glaring white gouge in the lan
dscape, where they were tossed in and covered with lime, reducing their bodies to unrecognizable ash in weeks.
The few co-workers who attended the interment of the fleeing staffer confirmed that he’d had a dream of getting his hands on a shewanella radio set. He’d been a huge music collector Before, and he used to daydream at length, reminiscing about the days of being able to press a button and hear any type of music he wanted.
After that, there were two or three defections a week. About three quarters of them made it out. After the fourth funeral, the rest were consigned to the quicklime mass grave. Memos circulated reminding all remaining that these were cowards, traitors, criminals, and accusing them of theft, pedophilia, rape, spying for the enemy, attempted bribery…
So, these bags of silver gave them hope. If they got paid in real currency, they might be able to get more raw materials from locals, smuggled in along with their delicacies when deliveries of officially purchased foodstuffs were made. For that matter, the cafeterias had been stretching the meat and reducing portion sizes bit by bit. The leaner among them were getting emaciated and the enforcers were skipping workouts to avoid losing too much weight.
This money came just in time. The first thing the chief of staff did was to send his most trusted aide into town to recruit ten new security guards and equip them with guns and ammo. After all, every orderly regime needs secure borders.
Hello, Goodbye
It was a perfect day for a wedding. It was a perfect day for a funeral. Palm fronds fluttered in a light breeze. The sun shone, but the air was crisp and cool. DD, Snowbear, Akisni, Josh, and Jessica sat on the catamaran’s deck. Dressed in white from head to toe, Jeremy set the sail for the middle of the bay.
Once he’d heaved-to, they all stood together on the gently-bobbing surface.
Snowbear spoke. “Saying goodbye to a friend is never easy. Saying goodbye to a genius, even less so.
“I met Amit Viswanathan when we were both kids. He was a scared foreigner, skinny as hell and away from home for the first time. But he had a visionary mind and a basic sense of decency that drew people to him. We had some crazy times together.” he chuckled. “Whether it was hitchhiking to California or renting a big old house with a group of pals, picking a crazy thesis topic or tripping on mushrooms, he was always the sane one, the one who reminded us of the risks and then encouraged us to do what we really wanted anyway.
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