Muezzinland (19 page)

Chapter 14

Mines routine was simple. The day was divided into six-hour shifts. Slaves spent the first shift sleeping, the second mining at the salt faces, the third sorting, and the fourth back at the face. Because of the Islamic calendar they followed lunar weeks and months.

They were chained to bulky robots on tank treads. Each robot was aware of the shift patterns, the time of day, and more subtle factors such as the state of exhaustion and propensity to rebel of the slaves. Occasionally they would deal out beatings with their club arms. The mines themselves were overcrowded, damp, often flooded, and the air was acrid with rock salt dust and fumes from pockets of gas.

There were a few human overseers. Mostly they were geologists and foremen working uneasily alongside a few technicians, these being women covered and veiled.

Nshalla, talking at changeover times with those few fellow miners who understood New-Oriental, learned that there was no chance of escape. Nobody ever expected to see the sky again. Sleeping and living quarters were underground. Most of the slaves were local, often youths, or women divorced by their husbands in the thrice-declared fashion of Moslem men, but there were many men from nearby oases, and a scattering of foreigners who, like Nshalla and Gmoulaye, had been attempting travel. After a few days of toil she began to lose hope. The ceaseless grind of labour ate at her confidence.

And there were more insidious consequences. Underground no aether existed. There were no running aerials propagating the aether from outside. They worked in an electromagnetic vacuum, surrounded by rock at zero volts: Earthed, in a great womb of abstract nothingness. Slowly this affected Nshalla, and she began to understand why the older slaves seemed emotionally fraught, as if on a psychic rollercoaster.

Gmoulaye first pointed it out. The individual meanings formed by uncountable electromagnetic disturbances had been created by her biomagnetic lobes over a long period of time; they had evolved, like the aether, and like consciousness itself. Without the aether her brain was reverting to bare, emotional procedures, stripped of cultural meaning and so painted in broad and lurid strokes. It was as if her individual psyche, like those of the underground slaves, was withdrawing behind an event horizon, never to be seen again. Gmoulaye stressed that they would have to escape soon. Returning to the aether in a regressed condition, should that happen, would confuse their minds, perhaps returning them to a juvenile state.

Nshalla herself was becoming moody, losing concentration, forgetting fine cultural nuances, even forgetting words—finding it difficult to plan or be creative. She tried to grasp what had happened, tried to grasp the society around her. It was primitive. Likening the enclosing womb of the mines to an ancestral earth mother, a new form of patriarchy had developed in response, hating the omnipresent female, hating individual women as a consequence. Nshalla remembered the symbolic patriarchy of Volta Blanc. This was a similar development.

Escape, then.

Nshalla and Gmoulaye decided not to involve anybody else. It was too risky. But they were hampered by their lack of knowledge of the mines, and by the fact that when they had acquired such knowledge it would be too late. Nor was the fact that nobody else had escaped in recent memory encouraging.

All their belongings had been taken and put in a central store. All they carried were picks and buckets. And their chains.

Desperate for time to think, they feigned exhaustion at the end of the second shift, not a difficult task, and were hauled by their overseer robot into the recuperation cave, a cold hollow filled with decaying mattresses and old clothes ripped from the bodies of dead mineworkers. The others there were meant to be sorting rocks along a conveyer belt, but instead they lay curled up in foetal balls on piles of rags, their chains hanging from nails.

Nshalla had intended discussing options with Gmoulaye, but the unfamiliar rest period brought drowsiness, and she found herself experiencing the hypnagogic illusions of pre-sleep, unless she was asleep and dreaming. A pair of rusting railway lines from some abandoned part of the truck network was her bed, her pillow a pile of damp cloaks.

The illusions arrived in waves. They were like the sea, fantasies of people tumbling this way and that, with a rainbow foam of manufactured fripperies—packs of mahogany toothpicks, bee-venom teats, orchid shampoo—all boiling on top, just like surf. Beneath these dreamed vagaries lurked the stronger tides of cultural change and environmental decay; seaweed sticks, smart tampons, plastic wrapped sushi, and dark washes of irradiated mud and genetically tampered plankton.

She sat up. "Oh!"

She tried to recall what she had seen. It felt aetherial. She looked down.

Of course!

"Gmoulaye, Gmoulaye, wake up!"

"Ngggggh."

"Wake
up.
" Nshalla pulled and shook her friend.

"Wha?"

Nshalla whispered into Gmoulaye's ear, "These rails must be connected to the rails that leave the mine entrance. They're acting as weak aerials."

"What?"

Nshalla placed her head upon one of the rails. Sure enough, fluttering through her consciousness like a shoal of butterfly fish—all coloured and bright and slick—came feelings of strength and stability, perceived by her as the emotion of joy, understood by her conscious mind as
structure.

She was right.

Excitedly she turned to Gmoulaye, who was following her example. "You see? Faint aether vibrations. Because the rails are so long it's all a bit unfocussed, but we could use it."

Gmoulaye's face was a picture of concentration—and hope. "But for what?" she mused. "For what?"

Nshalla fretted, stuttering, "Well, we could, could do something, surely?"

Gmoulaye frowned. "Shhh!" She was thinking.

The other people in the cave, three skinny men and a group of women huddled together, were staring at them as if watching a mad play. Nshalla and Gmoulaye had been speaking in Gan. Nshalla went over to them all and in New-Oriental said, "We're going to make an escape. Are you with us?"

Nobody answered.

"It'll work," Nshalla said. "We've got a few hours before the fourth shift starts. Are you with us?"

They stared at her. The lips of one woman moved, but she said nothing. Repelled, yet pitying, Nshalla returned to Gmoulaye.

Moving her hands with precise stabbing gestures, Gmoulaye said, "These rails are connected to the outside. I can feel it. There's only one thing to do. We'll have to make an invocation."

"An…?"

"We shall draw down the moon. It is an ancient womens' rite, popular in many places, from downfallen Atlantic states to Mesopotamia. Yes, we shall draw her down and have her perform our work."

Nshalla nodded. "What will it involve?"

Gmoulaye turned away. "Let me think." She crouched down as if praying, resting her forehead on one of the rails. Nshalla waited. Some minutes passed. Gmoulaye, she knew, was formulating her plan through her new kahina persona, connecting with the aetherial outside by means of culture, stratagems and ideas forming in her mind through mental diffusion.

Then she sat up. Nshalla saw a glow in her eyes, almost cunning, as if she had devised a fabulous trick.

"Well?" Nshalla asked.

Gmoulaye hurried over to the women—there were four—and dragged them over to the rails. They protested mildly. She explained, "We will draw down the moon and she will make an escape route for all of us. You will have to place your foreheads on the rail, the
same
rail, while I follow the rite. The power of the moon will come through the aether into this cave and rescue us."

"But is the aether strong enough?" Nshalla asked. "We're underground."

Gmoulaye shook her head impatiently. "Nshalla, you have read the histories, just like me, and you know what the aether was like when it first started. A colourful toy. Unsubtle. Very weak, not an ocean at all, more like a puddle—"

"So?"

"Conscious minds made it what it is today. The totality of human minds across the world and the aether itself are a tangled loop, supporting one another." Gmoulaye took Nshalla's shoulder, and shook her. "
Remember
what you were taught. It is all about cumulative effects, cumulative evolution if you like. We will affect the aether and it will affect our six little minds in a tiny way, but through mutual interaction, through cycling iterative loops, we will make it strong enough to draw down the moon. We simply have to wait and believe."

Nshalla nodded, understanding the implications. "We'll do it." She turned to the women. "Heads down. C'mon!"

They were reluctant, but soon all six women were kneeling with foreheads upon the rail. Gmoulaye had sprinkled sand in a circle around them.

At first Nshalla felt only the twinkling sparks of cultural knowledge in her sluggish mind, dulled as it was by the emotions conjured up by their situation, but soon she felt a warmth in her head, as if she had drunk a pleasantly alcoholic drink, and there seemed to be a pale disk of bluish-white hanging before her inner eye like a lamp through fog. Over a few minutes this became a large orb, the moon, or an image of it, with what seemed to be a haughty crone's face upon it.

Gmoulaye called out, "Hold hands, everybody." They did this, fumbling towards one another without opening their eyes.

Gmoulaye intoned, "We breath so deeply, in and out, in… and out… but we inhale more than the air, we inhale the image and the meaning of our soft, silvery lady, the disk symbolic, hanging over and in front of us. With each pore in our skin, we take all into ourselves, hoping, yet certain, ensuring the circle in which we exist is a fitting place for our lady."

Nshalla could now see Gmoulaye's face in the mist. Reality was being replaced by shared aetherial consciousness. Excitement coursed through her as she realised that they already had magnified the weak aether radiation a million times purely through their conscious interaction with it.

Gmoulaye continued, "What we bring, from the heart of our minds, goes out like an infinite number of bells, echoing, out through the atmosphere, some reflected back, the rest passing out into space, to the stars, to the galaxies, to the edge of the universe… And we know that we have been heard."

A warm pain throbbed in Nshalla's body, generated from a source between her legs, or perhaps in the depths of her belly, and the images in her mind became clear; a great lunar face, a crone hanging over a plain of sand, the sky velvet black behind, the stars demoted to nothingness. Al-Uzza was very much with them.

Gmoulaye lay on her belly, legs apart, arms outstretched, and in a hoarse voice said, "I am the lamp rising from the salty sands, bringer of images, illuminator of paths, though there be an almost infinite number… I am natural, I am the beauty of the green, blue and brown Earth, mistress of what I see, sovereign of emotion and the profound knowledge contained therein that wells up from the human condition, queen of upper reaches, queen of lower reaches, the humane and the inhumane. I am the one manifestation of such concepts as have been created, white, pale, old, and very full… Listen to me! Look at me! Do not forget who you are, from where you have come, where you go, and when all is done and our time is over we shall know that we are unified, and so shall we attain understanding of the deeper mysteries of life, and achieve the mundane and the infinite."

With these words of power ringing in her mind, Nshalla saw the eyes of the crone focus upon her, like a grandmother, yet like a friend. She shivered. The glance was amicable, yet remote.

Gmoulaye concluded, "These things are now true. They will endure."

Nshalla suddenly became aware of the cave around her. The hand of the woman to her right gripped her own, damp with sweat.

Then Gmoulaye said, "By this one power acting through me, acting through us, I hereby draw down the moon, into myself, into us, according to the justice of free will and for the good of us all. Al-Uzza, enter me now, enter us all!"

Gmoulaye stood up. Nshalla opened her eyes to see a mist of lunar symbols floating in the newly created aether, fizzing from the rails themselves like bubbles out of an underwater rent.

Gmoulaye said, "I hereby draw down the moon for the purpose of walking free from this mine, with my friends, and with all the suffering people at my side who wish to go. Thank you Al-Uzza. Your potency is within me. So it will be."

There was silence. Nshalla coughed. "Is that it? Are we ready?"

Gmoulaye seemed disorientated. "Our silvery lady will help us."

Nshalla took Gmoulaye's hand and hurried to the mouth of the cave. The tunnel outside was empty, but two robotic guards stood at either end. The four women twittered nervously, though they had lost their lassitude and their eyes were bright in the flickering biolight.

Nshalla marched down to the end of the tunnel. The robot there, a massive hulk of steel and polyurethane with stereoscopic cameras, turned on its treads and surveyed them. "You are ready for the fourth shift?" it asked.

"We're going, and don't try to stop us."

The robot jerked, as if shocked. "No you are not."

It was then that Nshalla perceived the weak spot of the plan. The aetherial conjuration affected only those with biograin hierarchies; in other words, people. Machine processors were something else entirely.

She looked up and down the tunnel. Lunar debris was spitting from the rails like cooking fat. One of the women technicians glanced back, saw them, then fell to her knees in astonishment.

Nshalla shrugged. "Run!"

They dodged past the robot's club arms and ran down to the end of the tunnel. Nshalla had no idea where she was in relation to the exit.

"Gmoulaye," she said, "which way?"

Gmoulaye pointed. They ran on.

After just one more tunnel a crowd of twenty slaves had joined them, tugging overturned robots behind them, hacking at their chains with their picks.

This could get nasty, Nshalla thought. We don't want blocked tunnels.

The lunar invocation had galvanised every passage laid with a railway line. Nshalla could hear barking voices, cries of pain, shouts of encouragement. There was a subliminal crashing, as of metal being hacked apart far away.