So Long Been Dreaming (52 page)

Acolmiztli regards me with suspicion.

“He is still here?”

“He a smart man,” Jami says, his voice soft and guarded. “He know when a battle turn.”

The Azteca laughs, then folds his arms and glares at the men around him.

“The battle
is
turning. Soon I’ll get to be going home, as things settle down.”

“Lucky us.”

“The antidote?” I ask Jami. “Where is it?” I’m scared of another attack, of puking something really important out.

“The antidote?” Acolmiztli asks. “Come on, Jami. Can’t you give this poor man the antidote? Doesn’t he know what the antidote is?” Acolmiztli laughs at me and the sound makes me clench my hands. “All those nasty little metal bits inside of you that talk to each other and to your ships, all those little ghosts running around inside your heads, those intelligent machines, they’re all dead now. There is no antidote. You’ll live. Oh yes, you’re just fine. You just don’t have any metal inside of you. You’re just like Jami, or me, here. That’s what he meant when he said we all have the antidote.”

I’ll live. But I know what the result in space will be. All those battle formations of space ships swarming back through the wormhole in retreat, their bows milliseconds away from each other, will collide and destroy each other.

There will be mass confusion. Systems failures. Anyone up in orbit was a sitting duck. Anyone whose life depended on advanced machinery was dead.

“There is a story I tell, that my father told, and his father before him,” Acolmiztli says. Reflections from the wall of water behind me dapple the wall in front of me. “Horse and Stag came into quarreling once, long ago, and Horse went to a Hunter for help in taking his revenge against Stag. Hunter said yes, but only if you let me put this piece of iron in your mouth that I may guide you with these pieces of rope. And only if you let me put this saddle on your back that I may sit on you while I help you hunt Stag. The horse agreed and together they hunted down the Stag. After this, the horse thanked the Hunter, and asked him to remove those things from him. But Hunter laughed and tied him to a tree, then sat down and had himself a very good meal of Stag. You see what I am saying?” Acolmiztli looks at me.

“No, what are saying?”

The half-grin on his lips flitters away.

“Who’s really riding whom here?” Acolmiztli asked.

Jami has sat near me, but at an angle so he can look at both of us.

“You drunk,” Jami says.

“Do either of you realize how many people are going to die today?” I yell. I’m shaking, angry with everyone. I had been convinced I was here to land and perform a duty under the Tai’s direction, stripped of that leadership, then told I was infected. I had thought I would die, but now I’m alive.

I’m a mess.

“Yes,” Acolmiztli says. “I’m going to go outside and watch.” He stands up and leaves the room.

Jami leans forward and grabs my forearm.

“Please,” he hisses. “Tell me you still go help me.”

I turn and look at the lady in the tank, who is staring back at me.

“Who is Acolmiztli, really?” I ask.

“He the brother to the Azteca Emperor,” Jami says. “Here in case the Emperor get attack by you League. Now that The League falling, he go leave soon as he can.”

I swallow.

“Okay. Where are we moving her?”

“She lives in sea water,” Jami says. The ocean is not too far from here. “She knows that if we can get her out, that I have told people around the coast to help her out with whatever she needs.”

He’ll have a cart filled with seawater waiting for me outside. I just have to get her out and to the sea.

I know no sign language. I stand in front of the tank and wonder what will happen when I try to take her out.

“And,” I whisper to myself, “how do I make you understand that I’m going to help you out? Set you free?” There is an ocean and a small beach nearby that Jami tells me is easy to get to. There is a dirt road that leads from this place straight to it.

“Will you even want to be free?” She has been in a watery cage like this for all her life. She might only be able to conceive of that being her world. Would it be right to set her free?

And if I do, am I not making enemies with the most powerful Azteca? I’ve seen what they can do. Can Jami’s people do anything to protect me? I doubt it, but they’ve survived with Azteca so far.

Sound shakes me free. The pane of glass in front of her is covered in mud and silt and she writes something with her index finger.

I don’t understand what it says.

She frantically scribbles another line.

It is meaningless to me. But she looks at me, clasping her hands together, pleading. That I can understand.

This is the right thing to do.

Through a gap in the silt on the glass I tap to get her attention.

“Get back.” I mime the motion, waving her back. She disappears in the gloom of the tank.

I’m still wearing exoskeleton armor, and the helmet section slides up with a quick slap of my palm. The glass shards that hit me when I fire the tangle gun at point blank range don’t slice me to shreds.

The lukewarm water and silt, however, drench me. She slides towards me.

She weighs more than I thought, or I’m weak. Her mossy hair drapes over my shoulder. The smell of seaweed fills the room. I stumble over broken glass with her in my arms and gently lay her into the cart filled with water that Jami has outside as he promised.

Then comes the pushing run towards the beach, water slopping out over the sides.

Occasionally she pokes her head out to look at me.

Palm trees rustle and shake. My feet crunch on dirt. A dog barks.

The trail turns down. The beach isn’t far. I can hear the rhythmic surf, and the wind starts to lift sand into the air and into my eyes.

At the end of the trail I pick her up again, lift her out of the cart and run over the sand, almost tripping, until I’m wading into the salty water. She wriggles free of me.

For a second we stare at each other, then she’s gone, a shadow beneath the waves. Was there gratitude? I don’t know. It isn’t important. I did what I did.

I strip off the exoskeleton, piece by piece, and throw the useless carcass out into the waves.

Overhead the rumble of engines makes me look up and see a machine climbing from the house into the sky. It is brightly painted with geometric shapes, much like I would expect an Azteca flyer to be. It speeds off into the distance like an angry mosquito.

Jami hands me a towel and a drink when I walk through the door. He sits down at a wooden table and looks at me.

“She leave?” he asks.

“Yes.” I nod slowly.

“You’d hope she would stay?”

“I don’t know. It doesn’t matter. It’s done. Acolmiztli?”

Jami smiles. “He gone back to his brother.”

I take a deep breath and put my hands on the table. “What am I going to do now?” I ask Jami.

He grabs my hands.

“That one small act of liberation,” he tells me, “that little bit of freedom you got her, will have more of an impact than all you ship, you missile, and all you soldier. Understand?”

No, I didn’t.

“That lady, her name Necahual. It mean ‘survivor.’ All this time she been surviving, but that ain’t good enough. Now she can have a whole coast, where fishermen will know to feed her. Because surviving not enough. You can’t just survive, Kiyoshi. You must do better than that. And right now The League just surviving. Like you.

“So you just the beginning. The League, we have a lot to offer them too. Along with the Azteca. How to accommodate and incorporate. We been learning how to do this since Mother Earth when we were all islanders.” He slaps the table. “And we get better and better. Most places, always they get caught up in ruling, dominating, becoming greater, and then falling apart.” Jami leans forward. “We learn how to stay outside that, man. It ain’t easy,” he says. “Always a struggle. But for a much greater good.”

I pull my hands free.

“So what do I do right now?” I ask. “How do we start all this?”

Jami leans back in his chair. “For now, just to talk to me, man. Don’t look for information, or try to resolve anything, or figure it all out. Just talk.”

I relax a bit. “And tomorrow?”

Jami smiles. “There’s going to be a lot of work tomorrow. A whole lot of it. We go be very busy.”

“Jami?” I remember something from earlier. “That old book you’d asked me if I’d read, what was the name of it again?”

“
War of the Worlds
,” he said. “By H.G. Wells.”

I roll the name around. “Yes, that was it. You think it’s important I should I read it?”

Jami looks up at the sky. “Maybe. You might appreciate it more now, I think.”

There is one last thing I want to ask about. “And what of these aliens on this planet, the
Teotl
?”

“There aliens, yeah. But they belong here. The only real alien right now is you,” Jami laughs. “And soon we go teach you how to belong.”

I freeze my face. I’m nervous about this. All my life I’ve been scared of the other, fighting them, forcing them out of The League.

“Tomorrow,” Jami says. “One step at a time, we show you how.”

I breathe again, slowly, savouring the air.

It’s more than just surviving.

Final Thoughts
Uppinder Mehan, co-editor

I had crossed de line of which I had so long been dreaming.
I was free; but dere was no one to welcome me to de land of freedom.
I was a stranger in a strange land.

– freedom fighter Harriet Tubman, describing the first time she set foot on land where she was not a slave

Harriet Tubman’s quotation above spells out an assumption that she, Moses, and Heinlein’s Michael Valentine all might share when she refers to herself as a “stranger in a strange land.” She may be free now that she has crossed the line dividing the North from the South in nineteenth-century U.S. but she has little sense of herself as a free person and of the free land she finds herself in. It strikes me that many of us who might call ourselves postcolonial are in a similar situation.

Perhaps the strictest definition of a postcolonial person is one who is a member of a nation that has recently achieved independence from its colonizers, but by shifting from the adjective “postcolonial” to the noun “postcoloniality” a more inclusive and I think truer definition comes into play. Postcoloniality includes those of us who are the survivors – or descendants of survivors – of sustained, racial colonial processes; the members of cultures of resistance to colonial oppression; the members of minority cultures which are essentially colonized nations within a larger nation; and those of us who identify ourselves as having Aboriginal, African, South Asian, Asian ancestry, wherever we make our homes.

Some of the stories in this anthology might be categorized as science fiction, some as speculative fiction, and some as fantastic but they all broaden their labels. The simple binaries of native/alien, technologist/pastoralist, colonizer/colonized are all brought into question by writers who make use of both thematic and linguistic strategies that subtly subvert received language and plots. One of the key strategies employed by these writers is to radically shift the perspective of the narrator from the supposed rightful heir of contemporary technologically advanced cultures to those of us whose cultures have had their technology destroyed and stunted. The narrators and characters in these stories make the language of the colonizer their own by reflecting it back but using it to speak unpleasant truths, by expanding its vocabulary and changing its syntax to better accommodate their different world-views, and by ironically appropriating its terms for themselves and their lives. Postcolonial visions are both a questioning of colonial/imperialist practices and conceptions of the native or the colonized, and an attempt to represent the complexities of identity that terms such as “native” and “colonized” tend to simplify.

Coming back to Harriet Tubman and company, postcolonial writing has for the most part been intensely focused on examining contemporary reality as a legacy of a crippling colonial past but rarely has it pondered that strange land of the future. Visions of the future imagine how life might be otherwise. If we do not imagine our futures, postcolonial peoples risk being condemned to be spoken about and for again.