“And in four years, they will graduate at the top of their class, just like you.”
“I hear the playing in your voice, Céline. Four years is a long time. Plenty of time to work, to grow, to become myself. Though the Biafran War is over, other wars continue. All over Earth, it is the same. Pain and death and destruction. Here in space, you can find peace. Your struggles will not chase you here. And if there’s anything I can do to help these people move on, I will do it.” She realizes she’s grown serious, so she forces a smile. Any mention of the war she had fled prompts memories of her arrival in Alabast all those years ago, alone, wrapped in a rug in the cargo hold of a space shuttle, shivering, with dried tears streaking her face, constantly asking for her sister, Onyii. She scoops up the memory and tosses it into a mental lockbox out of habit. She turns to Céline. “I must get back. Medical directors get even less leave time than their subordinates.”
Céline smiles, and in it, Ify sees all the camaraderie that has built up between them over their four years studying and living together. Céline had come from Francophone West Africa only a year before Ify’s arrival and had lived with an Alabast family but was the only Earthland African in their neighborhood unit. She’d only spoken in occasional snatches of story about what she’d had to endure from her white classmates, from her white neighbors, from the authorities—always white—who would hound her family and check her immigration status. It had not been easy. But it had made Céline the perfect companion for Ify. Four years had made them family, so close that they shared every defeat and, together, basked in every victory.
“J’suis fier de toi,” Ify says, without the aid of her translator. I’m proud of you.
“Ah, look at you, meeting me where I live.” Céline shows her teeth, then pulls Ify into a soft but strong embrace. When she breaks away, she says, “Promise me you will visit. You will not find better fried plantains in all of outer space.”
Without warning, tears brim in Ify’s eyes. “I promise.”
CHAPTER
2
I am telling this story to you, but I am telling it to myself too. I am telling it to myself because it is important to be remembering. That is what the robot say who pull me from underneath the mountain of bodies where it is so hard to breathe that my chest is paining me fierce. It is like knife in my chest over and over and over, and I am not knowing for how long I am lying like this. But I am remembering that the first thing I am seeing is tiny hole of light coming from sky. Everything is shadow, and this is how I know I am being covered. And I am first thinking that this is what night is. That it is just blackness with tiny hole of light. But it is bodies. Many bodies piled on top of me. And then I am remembering the bodies are falling away. It is sounding like someone is dragging their foots on the dirt road, then it is sounding like a shirt rustling in wind, like someone is wearing a shirt too big for them and running down dirt road, and when I think of this thing, I am thinking that the person wearing this shirt should be giggling. I am liking the sound in my brain.
As more and more body is coming away, I am seeing that light is bigger. Big big. So big it is paining my eyes to look at. I am wanting to raise my arms to block out the light, but I cannot move them because there are more bodies on top of them.
I am not hearing any words anywhere, not even wind, just crunching of stones and rustling like clothes and shuffling like feet wearing slippers on road until many bodies tumble away at once and I am seeing blue and white and gold and red, and I must close my eyes because it is too much. And air is feeling cold on my skin because there is no more pile of smelling bodies crushing me. But air is also paining me like many many knife on my skin. It is burning, and I am hearing sizzle like meat is cooking.
Then, hand is pulling me out of where I am lying and I see robot for the first time. It has arms and legs and a big round chest like an upside-down belly. It has no lips, just two lines on the sides of its face for where the plates are coming together. They are like grooves, and I am wanting to reach and touch them, because some memory in my bones is wanting me to do this, but I cannot raise my arm, because I am too weak.
Robot is raising me up and down so that my feet just touch the ground, but when it is letting me go to stand on my own, I am falling like sack of yams. Small small stones on ground are digging into my cheek, and I am trying to push myself up. But I must try many many times before I am able to sit on my knees. And that is when I am seeing them.
Many many robots. Not like army of robots. But family of robots. They are all looking the same, and they are the only thing I am seeing in this place that is moving. Not even beetle or blade of grass is moving here. Only the light in the eyes of the robots. That light is like single bar of white moving back and forth. I am thinking that this is how they are speaking to each other. With light.
My teeth are chat-chatting but I am sweating like it is second skin, and, even though there is quiet everywhere, there is noise like jagga-jagga inside my head. Like train is running back and forth between my ears.
One robot is walking to me with crunch-crunch footstep and is lowering themself to me. And long wire is coming out of its back and I am seeing that it is hose, because it is opening at its end and sliding past my teeth and into my mouth. And water is swimming down my throat.
I am coughing so hard my chest is paining me again, but I am wanting water, so my body is scrambling like mouse to take hose, and I put it to my mouth and it is feeling like entire world—like sun and earth and sky—is smiling on my body, because pain is leaving me.
Another robot is close to me and it has a different hose. I am thinking I will be drinking more water, but this one sprays me in shower so hard it is knocking me back on ground. It is like raining all over my body, but pain is leaving me, and I am smiling, and suddenly, I am seeing vision of child in too-big shirt running down dirt road. The shirt is flapping like flag is wrapping around them, and there is water everywhere in this vision, and the child is shining with the rain. Suddenly, I am back in the desert and all around me is dead bodies, but I am feeling like it is raining on my body, and I am hearing sound, and it is me giggling and giggling and giggling.
CHAPTER
3
Without Céline in one of the window seats or in a desk chair, Ify’s private first-class cabin in the shuttle heading back to Alabast seems cavernous. Ify has shut the windows and adjusted the interior lighting for the perfect amount of brightness to keep her awake and focused on her work.
She sits cross-legged on her king-size bed (again, too big) with a series of tablets arrayed in a semicircle around her, holographic images and charts springing up from them in glimmering blue. In one display, a three-dimensional diagram of a human brain rotates with annotations spitting out from it, noting which part of the brain controls which functions. On another tablet, she scrolls through a number of memory disorders: amnesia, hyperthysemia, Korsakoff’s syndrome. With each, a part of the first image grows red. On a third tablet, a newscaster drones through the catalog of daily updates on Alabast: the upcoming graduation ceremony for the latest class of students at the Institute and the preparations being made on the street level, the rising rate of homeownership given the recent influx of Colonists from the Nordic bloc Colonies. A small blip of news about an attack involving a recent immigrant from one of the outposts that served as home to fourth- and fifth-generation Earthland refugees from what was once Southeast Asia on Earth. It bothers Ify how the descendants of some Earthland refugees tend to live only among their own, as though clinging to the memory of the tragedy that befell their ancient homes is some act of bloody solidarity. Wars, rising waters, invasions, nuclear disasters. Too many catastrophes to count. Carnage caused by other humans and by the Earth itself. You’ve already left Earth behind, Ify wants to tell them, leave behind the past as well. She thinks back to the people of Centrafrique and the half-built structures, how so much of the capital seemed under construction, all gilded in possibility. Glowing with potential. Be like them, she wants to say to them, to those other migrants from Earthland who insist on speaking Ixcatec or Mayan in honor of a homeland that’s now nothing but deforested, irradiated desert. Be like them, she wants to tell those from the Russian Federation who insist on building monuments in their Colonial enclaves to heroes that, in Ify’s mind, should remain lost and forgotten.