Muezzinland (26 page)

Chapter 19

The solar train struggled on to Ouarzazate Town. Now they were entering the foothills of the Atlas Mountains there was greenery to look at amidst a landscape of rolling hills, cliffs, and unmarked wells filled with gently mutating genetic debris. Ahead, Nshalla noticed higher, more jagged peaks, and, now visible as a serrated grey line, the Atlas themselves. They had been reassured that the pass was open, but they remained apprehensive. As they approached their destination they saw around them tangled bushes of dark green, growing thorny and thin. On some, goats munched, balancing precariously at the ends of branches. From such trees aether aerials grew like parasitic growths, hardened by sun and the threat of goats into shiny brown excrescences.

They were now in the country of Djebel Sarhr. Ouarzazate Town was a place of stone buildings, sunken markets and frenetic activity. They disembarked from the solar train and at Tichka Club Salam on Avenue Mohammed V rented two rooms, one for Khadir, the other for the women. Nshalla aimed for luxury, knowing what they were about to attempt, hoping Mnada would be lulled into a sense of security.

They spent the first night relaxing and the next day browsing the markets for hooky software. On the second night Nshalla arranged for a mild sedative to be put into Mnada's mint tea, which she took up to the shared room. Gmoulaye and Khadir went out into town to buy a lump of bioplas. Preparatory to the act of hypnosis, Nshalla chatted with her sister about the beauty of the local landscape, describing the paleness of the snow-capped mountains, the strength of the trees, the ruddy colour of the earth under the setting sun, all against the tinkling sonic drops of a Western post-ambient trip. Mnada was sent into a hypnagogic state, and her eyes began to narrow as her mind relaxed. The mint tea was all drunk. She lay on her bed, a pillow beneath her head.

Nshalla tip-toed into Khadir's room. "How did you get on?" she asked.

"It wasn't cheap," said Gmoulaye.

"Of course not," Nshalla replied. Bioplas was not something found under hedges, like mushrooms.

"It cost us a whole gold ring," Khadir said ruefully. "There was only one place that had any. The man was very suspicious, asking us what we wanted it for and all the rest of it, but we swayed him with the quality of our money."

"My ear-rings," Gmoulaye muttered.

"It's in a good cause," said Nshalla, "and there's no reason why we can't sell the bioplas back to the merchant afterwards."

"At a considerable loss," Gmoulaye pointed out.

"I'll make it up to you," Nshalla said through gritted teeth.

"Let us get on with our work," said Khadir. "Is Mnada ready?"

"Yes."

Mnada was heading for sleep. Khadir wove an aetherial blanket around her so that her dreams would not be noticed by the gods—wherever they were—then hypnotised her with his soft voice. After a few minutes of resistance to the mesmeric pull she went under suddenly, and Khadir relaxed.

"What now?" Nshalla asked.

Khadir first told Mnada, "Go to sleep. You are safe. Dream any dream you like." He then turned to Nshalla and said, "Now I must meditate here." He walked to the opposite corner of the room and sat on the bare floor. "The aetherial blanket should appear random, and this I must concentrate on. Patterns get noticed. You both sleep next door. Leave now—I will wake you at dawn."

Nshalla could not sleep. She lay awake, listening to the rhythmic breathing of Gmoulaye, wondering what the bioplas was doing next door. A few hours after midnight she dozed off.

At dawn she was awakened by movement in her room. Khadir, wearing only his sports trainers, stood stretching before the window, spreading both his arms and his wings, the ends of which touched opposite walls of the room.

"Did anything happen?" Nshalla asked him.

"Yes. But I am not sure what."

They accompanied him into the other room. Mnada still slept. Nshalla approached the bed and picked up the lump of bioplas.

Mother.

It was an exact likeness.

"How did this happen?" she asked herself.

Khadir replied, "It is odd."

Gmoulaye looked at the head and said, "You cannot tell for certain that is the Empress. She looks exactly like her daughter."

Nshalla shook her head. "Look at the ear-rings. They're hers—mother's. Mnada never wore anything like them. And look at the little gold fillet on the cloth headband, that's her mark of rulership. It's mother."

"I do not see how it could be," said Gmoulaye. "Mnada cannot be her own mother."

"We have answered one question with a far harder one," said Khadir. "Naturally, I did not expect Mnada's inner image to be her mother. In fact, such a thing is impossible."

"It isn't impossible, it's happened," Nshalla said crossly.

Khadir nodded. "We should delve deeper—"

"Wait," Nshalla interrupted. She recalled what Msavitar had said when he babbled what he knew in the Timbuktu lane. "Mother wants Mnada to be a psychic image of herself, a copy. Could this head be the proof that she succeeded? Msavitar said that Mnada had biograins put in her skull the moment she was born."

"No," Khadir said, "this cannot be complete proof. Although we have plumbed some of the depths of Mnada's subconscious, we cannot be certain that there is not some deeper area, cut off even from unconscious understanding."

"What about the biograins?"

Khadir considered this. "It is illegal across the civilised world to put biograins into a child's head before the age of five."

"Mnada spoke of a secret aether in her childhood room," said Nshalla. "There mother saturated her with special broadcasts. She
has
somehow convinced Mnada from a very early age that Mnada is herself—the Empress."

Khadir shook his head. "Impossible in practice. The human mind is far too complex simply to be moulded into a predetermined shape. Besides, it has an inbuilt drive to freedom and individuality. Yet what we have here is an exact replica. There must be another answer. Let me think awhile."

He thought. He had one idea.

"But it is risky," he said. "If this room were insulated from the aether I might be able to detect subtle emanations from Mnada's relaxed mind. I could pass these on to you." He examined the walls of the room. "Fetch rolls of aluminium foil," he said. "We will construct a Faraday Cage and make the attempt."

They did as they were bid. Soon Khadir was kneeling at Mnada's bed, his head close to hers, Nshalla and Gmoulaye sitting on the floor nearby, waiting.

The plan took an hour to work. Nshalla amused herself by watching her crinkled reflection in the foil-covered walls. Later, she noticed that her reflection had changed colour; now it was crimson. An eerie music entered her sensorium. Gmoulaye had elephant ears.

 All was set. Her mind was now receptive to the proto-symbols of human experience. Mnada was still dreaming.

Suddenly the walls of the room curled around to spin into Khadir's head. He was the conduit between Mnada's dreams and Nshalla's mind, and she understood that she must watch him.

Khadir pulled them through the spinning torus of aluminium-wall-room that circled his belly, so that, through his navel, he, Nshalla and Gmoulaye all entered the environment of Mnada's dream. Not her actual dream, Nshalla thought, rather a reconstruction of it made by Khadir in his own lucid dream.

Nshalla found herself in lightly wooded land just outside Accra.

Khadir walked to her left. Gmoulaye walked to her right.

It was not quite as she knew it. Instead of trees she saw rolled up newspaper scrolls glowing brown, their boles covered with the pictsym for 'free' picked out in neon red, like hordes of radiant butterflies. These technological trees had words for leaves and concepts for branches. Nshalla understood without thinking that their roots would be emotions.

Neither sister understands why their freedom has been taken away from them. It seems to them that their mother keeps their freedom in her pocket, Mnada's in particular, as if it is some wild beast that might spring out and ruin the formality of the occasion. Dull-eyed incomprehension leads to moping depression, fits, tiredness, a gloom that even the brilliance of the Accran sun cannot shift. The formality is a cage, and because they are exposed to the possibilities of life outside the palace—outside Accra, even—they understand that they are caged, which makes it worse. But they are so powerless. They feel at times little more than palace servants.

The sky was pastel blue dotted with peppermint green clouds. A few canvas vultures circled a pile of smoking baboon corpses. Nshalla walked over and inhaled deeply the smoke that smelled of camphor, causing the vultures to scatter, very annoyed, and sing in operatic voices. "Take heed more of the underlying than the particular," advised Khadir.

"Where are we?" she asked him.

"You tell me. Mnada is your sister."

"It looks like land outside Accra. I haven't been there for years."

Khadir surveyed the land, then said, "We must find your sister. She will be here somewhere. Then perhaps we can sink down into her deepest recess."

"Is that her over there?" asked Gmoulaye.

Holding hands, they all ran over to a large bombax tree that looked as if it had a face carved in its bark, and sure enough the rough marks emulated the face of Mnada. Nshalla stood on tip-toe to kiss the bark lips.

The green man appeared.

Before her sat another Khadir, lotus style, but he had Mnada's eyes and when he spoke it was with Mnada's voice.

"Hello."

Nshalla jumped back a pace.

"The eyes are the reservoir of humanity," hissed the first Khadir into Nshalla's ear.

Nshalla knew this. She said to the figure before her, "Is that you, Mnada?"

In reply the hybrid Mnada-Khadir expanded, like an anti-sun of darkness becoming a giant green star, and then they were falling like leaves into a well of earth and water…

The earth and water cleared like the snow of a detuned TV channel to reveal the bottom of a pond, on which they stood. Nshalla looked up to see the sun winking in and out, then back into existence, as conscious objects drifted through the dreaming mind of her sister.

Mnada does not question the isolation of the metallised room. That room, she later discovers, sends all outside electromagnetic waves to earth. She is shielded from the aether. But another aether, subtle, of the Empress' making, suffuses the room. As an infant she is influenced by it. As a child she is influenced by it. When she experiences the real aether she has been trained so well that many of its subliminal messages bypass her thinking mind and sink straight into her subconscious, like grenades sinking to the bottom of a bog.

"Here she is then," said Khadir, indicating the new Khadir, who had joined them.

"That isn't my sister," said Nshalla.

"But it is."

"It's
not.
This is a demi god of the Sahara Desert called Khadir—it's you."

Khadir laughed. "It may appear so to you. But in actuality this is Mnada, the deeper Mnada, that perhaps even she does not know about."

Nshalla simply did not understand how this could be. Perhaps Khadir was talking symbolically, implying that Mnada had repressed qualities in herself not unlike qualities exhibited by the real Khadir—his easy humour, for instance. She shrugged, unwilling to argue, and replied, "I'm sure I could be wrong in my interpretation.

"Why don't you ask Mnada yourself?" suggested Gmoulaye.

Nshalla turned to the first Khadir and said, "I know you're Khadir."

In reply a video window expanded out of Khadir's right eye to reveal a desert scene, Araouane at night, with Mnada running across the desert, and a moist, green, naked Khadir growing out of the sand like a young shoot of spring.

Nshalla understood the message—a unity of Khadir and Mnada—but it confused and frightened her. "You're not Mnada," she said.

Silence.

Nshalla felt a consuming paranoia overcome her and she shrank away from them all, hiding behind a clump of pondweed. It was then that she noticed something strange floating through the water at her side. It appeared to be a bubble. She peered at it, and fancied that there was an eye inside the bubble, before a change of perspective allowed her to comprehend the entirety. She was looking at the business end of an aetherial wormhole.

Her fear-quickened mind recalled the actuality of their situation, in a hotel room, in Ouarzazate Town. Khadir's lucid dream must be leaking into the aether outside Tichka Club Salam. Somebody had noticed. That somebody had their eye at the far end of the wormhole created by a parabolic aerial.

She entreated Khadir, "Stop this! Wake up!"

Horror distorted his face. He took her hand then grabbed Gmoulaye and made a tremendous leap out of the pond, so that in a few seconds they were airborne and rocketing towards the sun. Then the sky shattered and Nshalla found herself collapsed on the floor of the hotel room, dribbling, limbs aching, uncertain what was up and what was down.

Gmoulaye also lay prostrate. Khadir shouted, "Get up! Mnada, awake!"

Nshalla struggled to her feet, then fell to the floor. "What is it?" she managed to ask.

"Faro and Muso Koroni have been following my lucid dream by using an old satellite aerial. Out, out, and hurry!"

He lifted Nshalla and Gmoulaye and tucked them under one arm, grabbing Mnada and pulling her out of the room. At the end of the corridor lay a balcony, and this he ran at; then all was rushing wind as he launched himself off the top floor and into the air, wings roaring as they powered his ascent. Nshalla was too confused to do anything.

But he was too easy a target in flight. Seconds later the three women were huddled in a back alley, Khadir standing above them, wings outstretched as if in protection.

Violent travel was replaced by cool darkness. The shock had brought Nshalla out of trance. Khadir turned to her and said, "We need a quick way out of here, but one not obvious. Any suggestions?"

"No," Nshalla replied, grateful that she did not have to think of anything. She just wanted to be saved again.