CHAPTER
1
Centrafrique, Outer Alabast Colony:
2181
Wesh? Je suis enjaillé de toi. Ça avance ndank-ndank. Je wanda . . . deuxieme bureau . . . Il est sorti nayo nayo. Je vais te see tomorrow.
The words mingle and the voices echo inside the receiving station, shuttles docking with a whoosh and clank, passengers alighting with their checkered nylon-canvas bags. Ify squints and touches her temple, activating the Whistle, the communication device linked to the Augment embedded into the base of her neck, and flips through the languages in her translation software—Arabic, Wolof, Finnish, French. Yet it all comes to her as gibberish. A riot of words to mirror the mess of colors before her in Porte Nouveau, the capital city at the center of Centrafrique and, according to Céline, the brightest jewel in the crown of Outer Africa’s future. Ify looks to her friend, who grins at the bustle of the city on the other side of the receiving station’s entrance, at the Adjogan drums and singsong blaring from street speakers, the teenage boys—all arms and legs—lounging on hoverboards with dishes of chicken yassa balanced on their chests, chuckling and speaking around mouthfuls. The scotch bonnet peppers are so hot Ify’s eyes start to sting from several hundred paces away. Someone shouts a string of words, and Ify hears “shoga,” and two older men—cyberized—walk over to an old woman crouched over a misfiring broadcast transmitter. The men walk with the ease of people in love. The taller one gazes admiringly at his partner, who stoops to help the woman fix her BoTa and hear the rest of the football match. Farther down the broad thoroughfare, Ify sees the spires of chapels and the domes of mosques and, past that, the tops of what look like broad-based swirling cones with antlers sticking from their tops to absorb solar energy. Centrafrique Polytechnic Institute.
“What are they speaking?” The whole time, Ify has been scrolling through languages. Xhosa, Mande, Sandawe, Vandalic. “Is it French?”
Céline turns her smirk on Ify and slaps her shoulder with the back of her hand. “Ah-ah! You think these people would sully their tongues with such a bankrupt language?” Then she laughs and loosens up, her eyes softening into an apology. “It is everything. You know how we Africans are. We don’t choose, we collect.” She mimes opening a cupboard and picking out ingredients. “Some onions, some olives, okra, sofrito, and whatever else is in the cupboard.” Then she mimes pounding on a surface. “Grind up some maggi cubes.” She spreads her arms. “Then throw it all in the pot.” A glint of seriousness flashes like a comet in her green eyes. She lowers her voice to a kind murmur. “When was the last time you saw this many Africans in one place, eh?”
Shame warms Ify’s cheeks.
Céline puts a gentle hand to the back of Ify’s neck. “Come. Let me show you the rest of my kingdom.” After a beat, she starts giggling.
And Ify does too.
“Spend too much time around those whites in Alabast and you’ll forget who you are.” Céline says it with a smile to soften the rebuke.
Together, they leave the shuttle-receiving station behind. The deeper they walk into Porte Nouveau, past the communities that have sprouted up around the massive, shimmering, raised pentagram-shaped prism that somehow manages to accommodate traffic from railway trains, maglev matatus, and space shuttles, the less the city seems like chaos and the more it feels like something familiar. Something ordered. A feeling of recognition hums in Ify’s bones, and a single word whispers in her head.
Home.
* * *
■ ■ ■ ■ ■
The lights are off in the room that is to be Céline’s new office. For now, the room is barren, a white box cast in shadows so deep that her skin and Ify’s both glow blue. Behind Ify, Céline paces its length, fingers tapping her chin. With a thought, Ify adjusts the temperature of her bodysuit a few degrees warmer than the room’s temperature. Ease floods into her and loosens muscles tensed against the soft chill of the central air conditioning.
“I think my desk will go here.” Céline stands in the room’s center. “With two chairs here in front of it. And a chaise longue by the wall there. And plants! Plenty of plants.” She turns to see Ify staring out the floor-to-ceiling windows at the stars outside. “Ah, Ify. Never one for interior decoration, eh?”
Ify’s mind jolts back to the room with a start. She throws a smirk over her shoulder, then returns her gaze to the inky jewel-studded black outside. “There’s no Refuse Ring.”
Céline joins her. “We’re not like Alabast,” she says with pride. “Outer space, ce n’est pas une poubelle.” Pride fills her face. “It’s insulting to treat space like our waste basket. Our compost is harvested into energy that powers the Colony. In case the sun were ever to die, we’d be safe. And, well, you know how I feel about plastics.”
Ify remembers the horror that had stricken Céline upon watching their classmates at the Institute in Alabast drink from one-use plastic bottles, toss away their plastic iFlexs as soon as an upgrade was available, even seal their dead in metal coffins lined with a special plastic supposedly meant for preservation before being shot out into space to join the rest of the Refuse Ring that circled the Colony. They never finish what’s on their plates, Céline had said to Ify, over and over with a mournful shake of her head as they walked from class to class. Even the campus transports were riddled with plastics.
“And the Gokada hoverbikes I saw on the way here?” Ify asks, remembering the motorbikes laden with two, sometimes three passengers, weaving their way around bigger matatus and sometimes even city trains, all noise and rude shouts and giggling responses, cutting through the otherwise well-ordered traffic. Powered by some bootleg energy source she couldn’t detect. “More jujutech?” she jokes, invoking those items, objects, and wonders that seemed to make science and magic indistinguishable.
“Eh, sometimes a city grows faster than you can regulate it.”
Ify keeps her gaze on space. “You sound more than ready to become a Colonial administrator.”
“Four years I’ve trained and studied. But I will not do like they do in Alabast. For once, Centrafrique will have an administrator who looks like them, who understands them. Not one who constantly tries to fit them in an Alabast-sized cercueil. Their coffins are too small for us anyway. And you? You’ll continue in medicine?”
“Doctor, lawyer, or engineer,” Ify says, laughing. “Those are the only career options for us. Anything else is a failure to the tribe.” She resists the temptation to adjust her Whistle and have the mix of languages around her translated into something she can understand. “But I’ve grown to like it.” She smiles. “I think it suits me. The refugee population in Alabast is only growing. And someone needs to care for them. Like you, I think it is important that they are cared for by someone who understands their struggle.” She squints. “Someone who understands where they are coming from.”