His eyebrows rose. “I’m the only one who could get you here safely on my own.”
We stared into each other’s eyes and I knew he wasn’t telling me all of it. I waited. And waited. When it was clear he wasn’t going to speak, I blurted, “If Okwu called on its people, it’s the Khoush-Meduse War all over again.”
He looked away. “Maybe.”
“What if no one is left?”
“I don’t—”
“You know you don’t have to say it to say it to me,” I said. “And, Mwinyi, I came back with a Meduse, the Khoush nearly killed both of us the minute we stepped off the ship, why would they leave it at that?” I stepped over to Rakumi, my legs feeling like someone else’s legs. The number five was in everything and I was glad. I patted Rakumi’s neck. “And why would Okwu not fight back? It wanted a reason to use the weapons it made at Oomza Uni, the same place the Khoush brought the chief’s stinger. Okwu hadn’t forgotten anything. And the Khoush have always been jealous of the Himba; why not find a reason to burn down Osemba’s oldest home?” I shut my eyes, whispering, “Z = z^2 + c.” When my heart rate had decreased, I said, “All because I came home.”
“Binti,” Mwinyi said. “It wasn’t your homecoming, it was a matter of time.”
I was listening to his every word, from deep in the tree, but in my heart, I burned.
“Ouch!” Mwinyi hissed. I felt the electric shock all over my body, but mainly in one of my okuoko. Rakumi bucked and groaned loudly, turning an eye toward us to see what was going on. “Why does your hair do that?”
I frowned, staring ahead. “It’s not hair.”
“What?”
“When I was on the ship, the Meduse, they did this to me.”
“Sorry,” he said. “I’m sorry… I didn’t… can I ask you… why… why did you let them—”
“I didn’t let them!” I shouted. My eyes were hot with tears. I needed to get home. “But it was done. I couldn’t turn back.” The world had started exploding again. If I looked behind me, I knew I’d see the tunnel that was often there, the one that led to the alien mind of my other people. I wanted to scream. I was too many things and my family was charred bones in the ruins of my home… five five five five five five five. I sat down right there in the sand beside Rakumi’s front leg. I climbed higher up the tree and stayed there.
Mwinyi climbed back on Rakumi. Minutes later, I got up and did the same. And for the next hour, we were quiet again. Tears fell from my eyes as I stared at the open desert ahead. I had to drink more water than usual because of it. The number five flew around me like a swarm of gnats at sunset. And behind me loomed the tunnel, I knew. Every so often, I felt Mwinyi shift about as he moved his hands this way and that, speaking to whomever he was speaking to. I didn’t care; I wasn’t interested in talking to those who were behind us.
“What’s that?” we both said at the same time. Mwinyi was looking at the stones, I was looking at the smoke.
“Stop!” I screamed. “Oh stop! Rakumi, stop!” When the camel kept walking, I started climbing down. Mwinyi grunted deep in his throat and Rakumi stopped just as my sandaled feet reached the sand. I landed hard and bent low, then I started running. We were still miles away. As I ran, I heard my anklets clicking and I was reminded of the sound of my sisters and mother moving about the Root and of Himba women dancing during Moon Fest.
I stopped among the stones and fell to my knees as I stared. The Root. No, not just the Root, the part of Osemba closest to it too. Burning, crumbling, attacked. Even from here, I could smell the smoke. Billowing up from burning or burned homes and buildings. I could not see exactly what, but I knew Osemba enough to know where things were.
“As we were coming, I was dying,” I whispered, my hands pressed to my mouth, my eyes wide and dry as the hot breeze blew. They hadn’t just destroyed the Root. They’d taken much of Osemba, too?
I felt Mwinyi’s hand on my shoulder as he knelt beside me. I inhaled and exhaled, focusing on each breath, just as my therapist had taught me. I calmed some. “When I first left here,” I said quietly, wringing my hands, “I left on a ship called Third Fish. It was… she was alive.”
“Bigger than a whale?” he asked.
“What?”
Mwinyi only shook his head. “Not important. Tell me about your Third Fish.”
“Miri 12s,” I said, trying to focus on the image of the Third Fish in my mind, instead of what I saw ahead. “They are probably the finest technology, finest creature, this planet has ever produced. What else can leave Earth with nothing but itself and travel through space? But it all happened in Third Fish. Everyone was killed by the Meduse. I nearly died in there. When I came back here, I happened to get Third Fish again for the journey. I stepped onboard Third Fish and I felt such a… comfort. I wish I were on her now, her peacefulness swallows everything bad.”
We were at the place where I’d found my edan; the group of gray stones jutting out from the ground like flattened old teeth. This was where I had practiced treeing and prepared for my Oomza Uni interviews. The stones were large enough to sit on and arranged in a wide semicircle that opened west, facing my hometown. Mere feet away, beside one of the stones, was the spot where I’d dug up my edan.
I looked at this place and suddenly I saw that the ground around it shimmered as if sprinkled with flecks of gold. Mwinyi seemed to see it too. I wasn’t ready to stand up, so I crawled there, grinding sand into my red skirt, feeling it enter the bottoms of my sandals as it stripped away the otjize on my knuckles. I didn’t care about any of it. I sat down at the spot where I’d been, where I’d dug up the edan, back when my life had been simple, and looked at the speckled ground. Mwinyi came and stood over me.
“The shimmer isn’t physically there,” he said. “The zinariya is showing it to us.”
I touched the sand where the sparkles were, rubbing it between my fingers. No matter how hard I tried, and no matter how real the gold flecks in the sand looked, I could not touch them.
“It was there,” he added, kneeling down beside me. “A long time ago.” And as if his words cued it to happen, the world expanded again, but this time, I didn’t feel as if it would repel me into space. Instead, it was as if the sand around us was disappearing, all of it shifting away, and as it shifted, I… we, both Mwinyi and I, lowered. Mwinyi grabbed my arm and I knew that he too was seeing it happen. We both looked around as the stones seemed to grow taller and wider and then their bases became shiny thick very solid gold, as did the ground beneath us. A large imperfect circle about the size of the Root emerged, the semicircle of gold-based stones in the center. I ran a hand over the smooth surface that shined so brightly in the sun we both had to squint and shade our eyes. It was warm.
Mwinyi grasped my arm more tightly and said, “Don’t move. It’s alright.” If he had not done this, I’d have fled for my life, and my confused perspective of what was now and what was decades ago was so skewed, I probably would have run right into one of the stones.
These People had limbs, two arms and two legs, each over twenty feet long and thin like the trunks of palm trees. Their bodies were smooth and long. And they looked made of solid gold. They walked with a slow grace that suggested fluidity. Gold was malleable when it was warm, and they were solar, their form of life might have been energy akin to the currents I could call using mathematics.