As I floated out there in space, enjoying the absolute quiet, I gazed at Saturn. We were near enough to see its shape and rings. Saturn was close enough to reach within hours, even if New Fish took her time. This was when I’d decided we should go.
“My mother says edans are unpredictable,” New Fish said now. “She said yours especially could have its own consciousness.”
But I wanted to see. Had to see. After all I’d been through, I needed to get to the bottom of this mystery. “I don’t care,” I snapped. “We are going even if I have to hijack you and force you to fly there.”
“You can’t,” New Fish said.
“I’ll try,” I said.
“Go ahead,” New Fish goaded.
“Only if I have to,” I said.
“Ugh, will you both shut up?” Mwinyi snapped, taking his hands from the floor. “No one’s fighting you on this, Binti. No need to be like that.”
Okwu vibrated its dome and blew out so much gas that both Mwinyi and I started coughing.
I got up and went to the breathing room where I’d lain for days. I picked up the Night Masquerade costume. Then I went down to another of New Fish’s breathing rooms. I’d felt this one when I was connected to New Fish. When I went inside, the light in here was very similar to the midday desert sun and when I saw the trees, I knew why. There were ten of them, some were saplings, several were small nearly matured trees, and one of them was fully matured, reaching the ceiling and bending a bit to the side. Undying trees! The saplings looked recently potted inside the flesh of New Fish, and the mature one had roots that extended down into New Fish like nerves. The floor was slightly transparent and I could see the roots going deep. These trees had all been growing while New Fish was in utero.
Not for the first time, I wondered if Third Fish was also psychic. And did that mean New Fish was too? There were other plants here that I recognized from Osemba as well. Plants that were usually peopled with land crabs, lizards, and other creatures because these plants attracted insects and smaller life forms. They attracted life. The floor here was dry, even coated with a layer of sand in some places. I touched the trees’ leaves, which were all rough with what the Himba called “life salt,” a pinkish grainy substance that healers used to cure and treat all sorts of ailments.
I tasted it now and it invigorated my tongue. When I’d first found my edan, my father brought it to his tongue to taste what kind of metal it was. He hadn’t been able to identify it, but he’d said it tasted like life salt. I laid out the Night Masquerade on the floor and looked at it. The smiling side of its many-masked head stared back at me. I shivered with residual disbelief that this was the costume of the Night Masquerade, that it was a costume. I sat down facing its head. Then I brought out the edan pieces and the golden ball.
I brought the ball to my face and looked at its fingerprint-like surface closely. Then I held up my left hand and looked at my fingerprints. Had the print on my left middle and index fingers always matched the ones on the ball? I’d never compared them before I’d lost my left arm, so who knows. But now they matched perfectly and this didn’t surprise me. Nor had the presence of Undying trees.
Holding it on the palm of my right hand, I touched my index and middle fingers to their spots on the golden ball and immediately it began to hum and vibrate. “Okay,” I whispered, placing it on the floor before me. If it weren’t for the sand, the ball would have begun to roll away. Softly, I whispered, “(x—h)2 + (y—k)2 = r2” and the equation floated from my lips in a way that reminded me of the zinariya. It was even my color of red. I chose the equation for circles because it was all coming back around and around and around. And the equation stretched into a circle as I let myself tree, surrounding me before it faded away.
The moment I called up a thick strong current, blue like Okwu, the Undying trees in the room began to vibrate too. It was the same way they reacted to lightning storms back home. As I led the current to the golden ball, the trees’ vibrations had become so fast and steady that they began to hum. Slowly, the ball rose. It hovered before my eyes, a foot away, and began to slowly rotate.
As I climbed higher up the tree, I thought about the Zinariya. They’d come to a quiet part of Africa, where the people lived very close to the desert. Close and isolated enough that the people in those small communities knew how to keep a secret. And thus, the rest of the world never knew of the tall, humanoid gold people who loved the way the sun reacted with Earth’s atmosphere there. They saw this small patch of Earth as a vacation spot and the people they met didn’t mind. Their friendship started with a girl named Kande. In many ways, she was like me. What Kande started had eventually made the people in this small town more.
Made the Zinariya more.
They left an edan. No instructions. No purpose. But it could make you more, if you let it. I’d found it.
I don’t know how long I was watching it rotate, as I climbed deeper and deeper into the tree. Mwinyi would later tell me that he’d been in the Star Chamber; they’d been eating and Okwu had been telling him a story about a Meduse meeting of chiefs long ago that had gone horribly wrong. “We knew you were off somewhere brooding,” he said.
The ball was rotating faster and faster now with my current, humming with the trees. The hairs on my arms rose with the charge in the air. My okuoko slithered about me at my sides and back, old otjize still flaking from them to the floor. Then I was in space!
Infinite blackness.
Weightless. Flying.
Falling a bit.
Catching myself.
Then flying again.
I wanted to scream and laugh; I had become something more again. This time, I was so changed that I could fly through space without dying. I could live in open space. I moved through Saturn’s ring of brittle metallic dust. It pelted our exoskeleton like chips of glittery ice. It felt pleasant, so I flew faster, resisting the urge to do barrel rolls because of Mwinyi and Okwu. New Fish was quiet, letting me take the lead. This was my mission. My purpose. And it was fantastic.
Living breath bloomed in me from the breathing room where I currently sat, the whirling golden ball humming with the trees. The metallic dust grew thick like a sandstorm and I stopped as some of it whirled before me in a way that reminded me of the golden ball.
“Who are you?” a voice asked. It spoke in the dialect of my family and it came from everywhere.
“Binti Ekeopara Zuzu Dambu Kaipka of Namib, that is my name,” I blurted before I let myself think too hard about what was happening. “No,” I said. “My name is Binti Ekeopara Zuzu Dambu Kaipka Meduse Enyi Zinariya New Fish of Namib.” I waited a few moments and then decided to ask, “Who are you?”
“We are…” And for a moment, I heard nothing. Then the sound of their name split and split like a fractal in my mind. It was like the practice of treeing embodied in one word. Their name was an equation too complex, too various and varied to mentally fix into place, let alone put into a language that I was capable of uttering. It was beautiful and my joy in just letting it cartwheel and bounce about my mind was reflected in the color New Fish shined in the metallic storm of Saturn’s ring.
When I could finally speak, I said, “You’ve called me here. Why? What is it you want?”
The rush of debris swirled before me into a funnel shape now.