by Neil Clarke
They are alien spores. The Americans want them. They can use them to build things, from nothing up. Do you understand any of this?”
“A little.”
“So be it. One last thing.”
“What?”
“You don’t carry it in your hand. You don’t carry it anywhere on you. You get my meaning?”
“I think I do.”
“There are changing rooms for the girls back of the stage. You can use one of them.”
“Okay. Can I ask a question?”
“You can ask anything you like.”
“These . . . fullerenes. These Chaga things . . . What if they—go off, inside?”
“You trust the stories that they never touch human flesh. Here. You may need this.” An object flipped through the air toward me. I caught it . . . a tube of KY jelly. “A little lubrication.”
I had one more question before I went backstage area.
“Can I ask, why me?”
“For a Christian child, you’ve a decent amount of dark,” the voice said. “So, you’ve a name?”
“Tendeléo.”
Ten minutes later I was walking across town, past all the UN checkpoints and security points, with a vial of Chaga fullerenes slid into my vagina. I walked up to the gate of the American Embassy. There were two guards with white helmets and white gaiters. I picked the big black one with the very good teeth.
“I’m from Brother Dust,” I said.
“One moment please,” the marine said. He made a call on his PDU. One minute later the gates swung open and a small white man with sticking-up hair came out.
“Come with me,” he said, and took me to the guard unit toilets, where I extracted the consignment. In exchange he gave me a playing card with a portrait of a President of the United States on the back. The President was Nixon.
“You ever go back without one of these, you die,” he told me. I gave the Nixon card to the man who called himself Brother Dust. He gave me a roll of shillings and told me to come back on Tuesday.
I gave two thirds of the roll to my mother.
“Where did you get this?” she asked, holding the notes in her hands like blessings.
“I have a job,” I said, challenging her to ask. She never did ask. She bought clothes for Little Egg and fruit from the market. On the Tuesday, I went back to the upstairs club that smelled of beer and smoke and come and took another load inside me to the spikey-haired man at the Embassy.
So I became a runner. I became a link in a chain that ran from legendary cities under the clouds of Kilimanjaro across terminum, past the UN Interdiction Force, to an upstairs club in Nairobi, into my body, to the US Embassy. No, I do not have that right. I was a link in a chain that started eight hundred years ago, as light flies, in a gas cloud called Rho Ophiuchi, that ran from US Embassy to US Government, and on to a man whose face was on the back on one of my safe-conduct cards and from him into a future no one could guess.
“It scares them, that’s why they want it,” Brother Dust told me. “Americans are always drawn to things that terrify them. They think these fullerenes will give the edge to their industries, make the economy indestructible. Truth is, they’ll destroy their industries, wreck their economy. With these, anyone can make anything they want. Their free market can’t stand up to that.”
I did not stay a runner long. Brother Dust liked my refusal to be impressed by what the world said should impress me. I became his personal assistant. I made appointments, kept records. I accompanied him when he called on brother Sheriffs. The Chaga was coming closer, the Tacticals were on the streets; old enemies were needed as allies now.
One such day, Brother Dust gave me a present wrapped in a piece of silk. I unwrapped it; inside was a gun. My first reaction was fear; that a sixteen-year-old girl should have the gift of life or death in her hand. Would I, could I, ever use it on living flesh? Then a sense of power crept through me. For the first time in my life, I had authority.
“Don’t love it too much,” Brother Dust warned. “Guns don’t make you safe. Nowhere in this world is safe, not for you, not for anyone.”
It felt like a sin, like a burn on my body as I carried it next to my skin back to Jogoo Road. It was impossible to keep it in our rooms, but Simeon in the metal shop had been stashing my roll for some time now and he was happy to hide the gun behind the loose block. He wanted to handle it. I would not let him, though I think he did when I was not around. Every morning I took it out, some cash for lunch and bribes, and went to work.
With a gun and money in my pocket, Brother Dust’s warning seemed old and full of fear. I was young and fast and clever. I could make the world as safe or as dangerous as I liked. Two days after my seventeenth birthday, the truth of what he said arrived at my door.
It was late, it was dark, and I was coming off the matatu outside Church Army. It was a sign of how far things had gone with my mother and father that they no longer asked where I was until so late, or how the money kept coming. At once I could tell something was wrong; a sense you develop when you work on the street. People were milling around in the compound, needing to do something, not knowing what they could do. Elsewhere, women’s voices were shouting. I found Simeon.
“What’s happening, where is my mother?”
“The shambas. They have broken through into the shambas.”
I pushed my way through the silly, mobbing Christians. The season was late, the corn over my head, the cane dark and whispering. I strayed off the shamba paths in moments. The moon ghosted behind clouds, the air-glow of the city surrounded me but cast no light. The voices steered me until I saw lights gleaming through the stalks: torches and yellow naphtha flares. The voices were loud now, close. There were now men, loud men. Loud men have always frightened me. Not caring for the crop, I charged through the maize, felling rich, ripe heads.
The women of Church Army stood at the edge of the crushed crop. Maize, potatoes, cane, beans had been trodden down, ripped out, torn up. Facing them was a mob of shanty-town people. The men had torches and cutting tools. The women’s kangas bulged with stolen food. The children’s baskets and sacks were stuffed with bean pods and maize cobs. They faced us shamelessly. Beyond the flattened wire fence, a larger crowd was waiting in front of the market; the hyenas, who if the mob won, would go with them, and if it lost, would sneak back to their homes. They outnumbered the women twenty to one. But I was bold. I had the authority of a gun.
“Get out of here,” I shouted at them. “This is not your land.”
“And neither is it yours,” their leader said, a man thin as a skeleton, barefoot, dressed in cut-off jeans and a rag of a fertilizer company T-shirt. He held a tincan oil-lamp in his left hand, in his right a machete. “It is all borrowed from the Chaga. It will take it away, and none of us will have it. We want what we can take, before it is lost to all of us.”
“Go to the United Nations,” I shouted.
The leader shook his head. The men stepped forward. The women murmured, gripped their mattocks and hoes firmly.
“The United Nations? Have you not heard? They are scaling down the relief effort. We are to be left to the mercy of the Chaga.”
“This is our food. We grew it, we need it. Get off our land!”
“Who are you?” the leader laughed. The men hefted their pangas and stepped forward. The laughter lit the dark inside me that Brother Dust had recognized, that made me a warrior. Light-headed with rage and power, I pulled out my gun. I held it over my head. One, two, three shots cracked the night. The silence after was more shocking than the shots.
“So. The child has a gun,” the hungry man said.
“The child can use it too. And you will be first to die.”
“Perhaps.” the leader said. “But you have three bullets. We have three hundred hands.”
My mother pulled me to one side as the shanty men came through. Their pangas caught the yellow light as they cut their way through our maize and cane. After them came the women and the chi
ldren, picking, sifting, gleaning. The three hundred hands stripped our fields like locusts. The gun pulled my arm down like an iron weight. I remember I cried with frustration and shame. There were too many of them. My power, my resolve, my weapon, were nothing. False bravery. Boasting. Show.
By morning the field was a trampled mess of stalks, stems, and shredded leaves. Not a grain worth eating remained. By morning I was waiting on the Jogoo Road, my thumb held out for a matatu, my possessions in a sports bag on my back. A refugee again. The fight had been brief and muted.
“What is this thing?” My mother could not touch the gun. She pointed at it on the bed. My father could not even look. He sat hunched up in a deep, old armchair, staring at his knees. “Where did you get such a thing?”
The dark thing was still strong in me. It had failed against the mob, but it was more than enough for my parents.
“From a Sheriff,” I said. “You know what a sheriff is? He is a big man. For him I stick Chaga-spores up my crack. I give them to Americans, Europeans, Chinese, anyone who will pay.”
“Do not speak to us like that!”
“Why shouldn’t I? What have you done, but sit here and wait for something to happen? I’ll tell the only thing that is going to happen. The Chaga is going to come and destroy everything. At least I have taken some responsibility for this family, at least I have kept us out of the sewer! At least we have not had to steal other people’s food!”
“Filth money! Dirt money, sin money!”
“You took that money readily enough.”
“If we had known . . .”
“Did you ever ask?”
“You should have told us.”
“You were afraid to know.”
My mother could not answer that. She pointed at the gun again, as if it were the proof of all depravity.
“Have you ever used it?”
“No,” I said, challenging her to call me a liar.
“Would you have used it, tonight?”
“Yes,” I said. “I would, if I thought it would have worked.”
“What has happened to you?” my mother said. “What have we done?”
“You have done nothing,” I said. “That’s what’s wrong with you. You give up. You sit there, like him.” My father had not yet said a word. “You sit there, and you do nothing. God will not help you. If God could, would he have sent the Chaga? God has made you beggars.”
Now my father got up out of his deep chair.
“Leave this house,” he said in a very quiet voice. I stared. “Take your things. Go on. Go now. You are no longer of this family. You will not come here again.”
So I walked out with my things in my bag and my gun in my pants and my roll in my shoe and I felt the eyes in every room and lean-to and shack and I learned Christians can have shanty-eyes too. Brother Dust found me a room in the back of the club. I think he hoped it would give him a chance to have sex with me. It smelled and it was noisy at night and I often had to quit it to let the prostitutes do their business, but it was mine, and I believed I was free and happy. But his words were a curse on me. Like Evil Eye, I knew no peace. You do nothing, I had accused my parents, but what had I done? What was my plan for when the Chaga came? As the months passed and the terminum was now at Muranga, now at Ghania Falls, now at Thika, Brother Dust’s curse accused me. I watched the Government pull out for Mombasa in a convoy of trucks and cars that took an hour and a half to go past the Haile Selassie Avenue cafe where I bought my runners morning coffee. I saw the gangs of picknis race through the avenues, loosing off tracer-like firecrackers, until the big UN troop carriers drove them before them like beggars. I crouched in roadside ditches from terrible firefights over hijacked oil tankers. I went up to the observation deck of the Moi Telecom Tower and saw the smoke from battles out in the suburbs, and beyond, on the edge of the heat-haze, to south and north, beyond the mottled duns and dusts of the squatter towns, the patterned colors of the Chaga. I saw the newspapers announce that on July 18th, 2013, the walls of the Chaga would meet and Nairobi cease to exist. Where is safe? Brother Dust said in my spirit. What are you going to do?
A man dies, and it is easy to say when the dying ends. The breath goes out and does not come in again. The heart stills. The blood cools and congeals. The last thought fades from the brain. It is not so easy to say when a dying begins. Is it, for example, when the body goes into the terminal decline? When the first cell turns black and cancerous? When we pass our DNA to a new human generation, and become genetically redundant? When we are born? A civil servant once told me that when they make out your birth certificate, they also prepare your death certificate.
It was the same for the big death of Nairobi. The world saw the end of the end from spy satellites and camera-blimps. When the end for a city begins is less clear. Some say it was when the United Nations pulled out and left Nairobi open. Others, when the power plants at Embakasi went down and the fuel and telephone lines to the coast were cut. Some trace it to the first Hatching Tower appearing over the avenues of Westlands; some to the pictures on the television news of the hexagon pattern of Chaga-moss slowly obliterating a “Welcome to Nairobi” road sign. For me it was when I slept with Brother Dust in the back room of the upstairs club.
I told him I was a virgin.
“I always pegged you for a Christian child,” he said, and though my virginity excited him, he did not try and take it from me forcefully or disrespectfully. I was fumbling and dry and did not know what to do and pretended to enjoy it more than I did. The truth was that I did not see what all the fuss was about. Why did I do it? It was the seal that I had become a fine young criminal, and tied my life to my city.
Though he was kind and gentle, we did not sleep together again.
They were bad times, those last months in Nairobi. Some times, I think, are so bad that we can only deal them with by remembering what is good, or bright. I will try and look at the end days straight and honestly. I was now eighteen, it was over a year since I left Jogoo Road, and I had not seen my parents or Little Egg since. I was proud and angry and afraid. But a day had not passed that I had not thought about them and the duty I owed them. The Chaga was advancing on two fronts, marching up from the south and sweeping down from the north through the once-wealthy suburbs of Westlands and Garden Grove. The Kenyan Army was up there, firing mortars into the cliff of vegetation called the Great Wall, taking out the Hatching Towers with artillery. As futile as shelling the sea. In the south the United Nations was holding the international airport open at every cost. Between them, the Tacticals tore at each other like street dogs. Alliances formed and were broken in the same day. Neighbor turned on neighbor, brother killed brother. The boulevards of downtown Nairobi were littered with bullet casings and burned out picknis. There was not one pane of glass whole on all of Moi Avenue, nor one shop that was not looted. Between them were twelve million civilians, and the posses.
We too made and dissolved our alliances. We had an arrangement with Mombi, who had just bloodily ended an agreement with Haran, one of the big sheriffs, to make a secret deal with the Black Simbas, who intended to be a power in the new order after the Chaga. The silly, vain Soca Boys had been swept away in one night by the Simbas East Starehe Division. Custom matatus and football managers’ coats were no match for Russian APCs and light-scatter combat-suits. Brother Dust’s associations were precarious: the posses had wealth and influence but no power. Despite our AK47s and street cool uniforms—in the last days, everyone had a uniform—even the Soca Boys could have taken us out. We were criminals, not warriors.
Limuru, Tigani, Kiambu, in the north. Athi River, Matathia, Embakasi to the south. The Chaga advanced a house here, a school there, half a church, a quarter of a street. Fifty meters every day. Never slower, never faster. When the Supreme Commander East African Protection Force announced terminum at Ngara, I made my move. In my Dust Girl uniform of street-length, zebra-stripe PVC coat over short-shorts, I took a taxi to the Embassy of the United States of A
merica. The driver detoured through Riverside.
“Glider come down on Limuru Road,” the driver explained. The gliders scared me, hanging like great plastic bats from the hatching towers, waiting to drop, spread their wings and sail across the city sowing Chaga spores. To me they were dark death on wings. I have too many Old Testament images still in me. The army took out many on the towers, the helicopters the ones in the air, but some always made it down. Nairobi was being eaten away from within.
Riverside had been rich once. I saw a tank up-ended in a swimming pool, a tennis court strewn with swollen bodies in purple combats. Chaga camouflage. Beyond the trees I saw fans of lilac land-coral.
I told the driver to wait outside the Embassy. The grounds were jammed with trucks. Chains of soldiers and staff were loading them with crates and machinery. The black marine knew me by now.
“You’re going?” I asked.
“Certainly are, ma’am,” the marine said. I handed him my gun. He nodded me through. People pushed through the corridors under piles of paper and boxes marked Property of the United States Government. Everywhere I heard shredders. I found the right office. The spikey-haired man, whose name was Knutson, was piling cardboard boxes on his desk.
“We’re not open for business.”
“I’m not here to trade,” I said. I told him what I was here for. He looked at me as if I had said that the world was made of wool, or the Chaga had reversed direction. So I cleared a space on his desk and laid out the photographs I had brought.
“Please tell me, because I don’t understand this attraction,” I said. “Is it that, when they are that young, you cannot tell the boys from the girls? Or is it the tightness?”
“Fuck you. You’ll never get these public.”
“They already are. If the Diplomatic Corps Personnel Section does not receive a password every week, the file will download.”
If there had been a weapon to hand, I think Knutson would have killed me where I stood.
“I shouldn’t have expected any more from a woman who sells her cunt to aliens.”