When he finished, he looked up at me with his light green piercing eyes that seemed to see deeper into me than his scan of my astrolabe. There were people behind me and I was aware of their whispers, soft laughter and a young child murmuring. It was cool in the terminal, but I felt the heat of social pressure. My temples ached and my feet tingled.
“Congratulations,” he said to me in his parched voice, holding out my astrolabe.
I frowned at him, confused. “What for?”
“You are the pride of your people, child,” he said, looking me in the eye. Then he smiled broadly and patted my shoulder. He’d just seen my entire life. He knew of my admission into Oomza Uni.
“Oh.” My eyes pricked with tears. “Thank you, sir,” I said, hoarsely, as I took my astrolabe.
I quickly made my way through the many people in the terminal, too aware of their closeness. I considered finding a lavatory and applying more otjize to my skin and tying my hair back, but instead I kept moving. Most of the people in the busy terminal wore the black and white garments of the Khoush people—the women draped in white with multicolored belts and veils and the men draped in black like powerful spirits. I had seen plenty of them on television and here and there in my city, but never had I been in a sea of Khoush. This was the rest of the world and I was finally in it.
As I stood in line for boarding security, I felt a tug at my hair. I turned around and met the eyes of a group of Khoush women. They were all staring at me; everyone behind me was staring at me.
The woman who’d tugged my plait was looking at her fingers and rubbing them together, frowning. Her fingertips were orange red with my otjize. She sniffed them. “It smells like jasmine flowers,” she said to the woman on her left, surprised.
“Not shit?” one woman said. “I hear it smells like shit because it is shit.”
“No, definitely jasmine flowers. It is thick like shit, though.”
“Is her hair even real?” another woman asked the woman rubbing her fingers.
“I don’t know.”
“These ‘dirt bathers’ are a filthy people,” the first woman muttered.
I just turned back around, my shoulders hunched. My mother had counseled me to be quiet around Khoush. My father told me that when he was around Khoush merchants when they came to our city to buy astrolabes, he tried to make himself as small as possible. “It is either that or I will start a war with them that I will finish,” he said. My father didn’t believe in war. He said war was evil, but if it came he would revel in it like sand in a storm. Then he’d say a little prayer to the Seven to keep war away and then another prayer to seal his words.
I pulled my plaits to my front and touched the edan in my pocket. I let my mind focus on it, its strange language, its strange metal, its strange feel. I’d found the edan eight years ago while exploring the sands of the hinter deserts one late afternoon. “Edan” was a general name for a device too old for anyone to know it functions, so old that they were now just art.
My edan was more interesting than any book, than any new astrolabe design I made in my father’s shop that these women would probably kill each other to buy. And it was mine, in my pocket, and these nosy women behind me could never know. Those women talked about me, the men probably did too. But none of them knew what I had, where I was going, who I was. Let them gossip and judge. Thankfully, they knew not to touch my hair again. I don’t like war either.
The security guard scowled when I stepped forward. Behind him I could see three entrances, the one in the middle led into the ship called “Third Fish,” the ship I was to take to Oomza Uni. Its open door was large and round leading into a long corridor illuminated by soft blue lights.
“Step forward,” the guard said. He wore the uniform of all launch site lower-level personnel—a long white gown and gray gloves. I’d only seen this uniform in streaming stories and books and I wanted to giggle, despite myself. He looked ridiculous. I stepped forward and everything went red and warm.
When the body scan beeped its completion, the security guard reached right into my left pocket and brought out my edan. He held it to his face with a deep scowl.
I waited. What would he know?
He was inspecting its stellated cube shape, pressing its many points with his finger and eyeing the strange symbols on it that I had spent two years unsuccessfully trying to decode. He held it to his face to better see the intricate loops and swirls of blue and black and white, so much like the lace placed on the heads of young girls when they turn eleven and go through their eleventh-year rite.
“What is this made of?” the guard asked, holding it over a scanner. “It’s not reading as any known metal.”
I shrugged, too aware of the people behind me waiting in line and staring at me. To them, I was probably like one of the people who lived in caves deep in the hinter desert who were so blackened by the sun that they looked like walking shadows. I’m not proud to say that I have some Desert People blood in me from my father’s side of the family, that’s where my dark skin and extra-bushy hair come from.
“Your identity reads that you’re a harmonizer, a masterful one who builds some of the finest astrolabes,” he said. “But this object isn’t an astrolabe. Did you build it? And how can you build something and not know what it’s made of?”
“I didn’t build it,” I said.
“Who did?”
“It’s . . . it’s just an old, old thing,” I said. “It has no math or current. It’s just an inert computative apparatus that I carry for good luck.” This was partially a lie. But even I didn’t know exactly what it could and couldn’t do.
The man looked as if he would ask more, but didn’t. Inside, I smiled. Government security guards were only educated up to age ten, yet because of their jobs, they were used to ordering people around. And they especially looked down on people like me. Apparently, they were the same everywhere, no matter the tribe. He had no idea what a “computative apparatus” was, but he didn’t want to show that I, a poor Himba girl, was more educated than he. Not in front of all these people. So he quickly moved me along and, finally, there I stood at my ship’s entrance.
I couldn’t see the end of the corridor, so I stared at the entrance. The ship was a magnificent piece of living technology. Third Fish was a Miri 12, a type of ship closely related to a shrimp. Miri 12s were stable calm creatures with natural exoskeletons that could withstand the harshness of space. They were genetically enhanced to grow three breathing chambers within their bodies.
Scientists planted rapidly growing plants within these three enormous rooms that not only produced oxygen from the CO2 directed in from other parts of the ship, but also absorbed benzene, formaldehyde, and trichloroethylene. This was some of the most amazing technology I’d ever read about. Once settled on the ship, I was determined to convince someone to let me see one of these amazing rooms. But at the moment, I wasn’t thinking about the technology of the ship. I was on the threshold now, between home and my future.
I stepped into the blue corridor.
* * *
So that is how it all began. I found my room. I found my group—twelve other new students, all human, all Khoush, between the ages of fifteen and eighteen. An hour later, my group and I located a ship technician to show us one of the breathing chambers. I wasn’t the only new Oomza Uni student who desperately wanted to see the technology at work. The air in there smelled like the jungles and forests I’d only read about. The plants had tough leaves and they grew everywhere, from ceiling to walls to floor. They were wild with flowers, and I could have stood there breathing that soft, fragrant air for days.