Lament for the Fallen (35 page)

He smiles, ‘Has Samara told you the story about the squid?’

Joshua nods.

‘It’s a great story,’ says Nizena. ‘My son was right. He’ll become a storyteller yet.’

They travel for hours, over a landscape teaming with life and variety. Nizena and Joshua talk the entire journey. Nizena sharing tales about his youth and his life in Achenia, Joshua about Ewuru and their plans for the future.

They are approaching the coast, and Nizena leads them up and on to a cliff overlooking the ocean. A city of white stone runs along the shore, waves pounding on to the rocks below. The sand is white, the water clear and the shallows running fifty metres before dropping over a shelf into violet depths. Through the water he can make out multicoloured corals and shoals of fish. A ray leaps out of the water.

‘This is the world we made,’ says Nizena.

‘It is far bigger than I could have imagined,’ says Joshua.

‘Big enough,’ smiles Nizena. ‘We can grow it indefinitely. Think of it like one of those coral reefs. We can expand it as we need, break off chunks, go in different directions.’

He sits on the edge of the cliff, his feet dangling below. ‘I love it here in Toamasina, watching the ocean. Kosai prefers it in the forests. We agreed we’d rotate every fifty years.

‘That’s the wonderful thing about time. We have much of it, so we can afford to make big compromises. We can always change our minds in a century or so.’

Nizena smiles again, ‘I’m starving. You hungry? There is a wonderful souvlaki place on the beach here.’

They fly down, walking amongst the throngs along the shore. Joshua sees people of all nationalities. A jumble of clothing styles, languages and colours. They stop, they greet each other. No one appears to be in a rush. He also sees the semi-transparent, slightly fantastic forms of the symbionts. There are great fantasy beasts, people, birds, a bear. The bear appears to be trying to eat an ice cream.

Nizena grumbles under his breath. Joshua starts to laugh. ‘It is quite mad,’ says Nizena. ‘I hope the novelty wears off in a century or two.’

A group of children are playing along the shore, chasing into the retreating surf and running back as it comes in again. They are screaming in excitement, their feet leaving little prints in the sand. Joshua realizes that he has not seen that many youngsters. He understands Samara’s fascination with Isaiah.

In such large numbers he notices their ears, at last. A slight point at the crest.

Nizena turns his head so that Joshua can see the outline of the flexible composite panel embedded in the skin. ‘That’s the part that must be surgically implanted. I’ll keep experimenting. Perhaps there is a way we can design it so that they can be synthesized organically and grown by the body. It would have saved Samara so much pain.’

They walk along the boulevard. A sculpture floats in the air above them. It twists in impossible shapes through which people amble. Joshua stares, trying to make sense of it. Restaurants, coffee shops, bakeries and delis spill out on to the pedestrian-way, umbrellas in profusion. Small design studios for clothing and printed goods. He can hear music – a melody of spice and distant lands – blending with the babble of countless voices.

‘There!’ says Nizena, seizing an empty table.

‘I’ll order for you,’ he says and, without seeming to speak to anyone, moments later a tray floats over piled with bowls of food and a jug of white wine.

Joshua does not know the cuisine and follows Nizena, pulling the chunks of lamb and roasted vegetables off the stick and on to his plate.

‘Tell me about my great-grandfather,’ he asks.

Nizena smiles, squeezes Joshua’s wrist.

‘We were so certain we could change the world there in Abuja. We’d watch the big men with their armed convoys driving past, and we imagined what it would take to get rid of them. Dreamed of revolution.’

His eyes cloud with memory.

‘Isaiah was always so much more certain than I. He believed. I looked and I thought, they are not here because they have been imposed on us. Too many people accept them or believe that this is the way it should be.’

He slowly sips his wine.

‘One day there was an explosion in Garki Market. We were just outside. The shockwave knocking us to the ground,’ his voice cut with pain. ‘We ran in to help. Bodies everywhere. Children. Mothers sobbing, holding children’s coloured backpacks, hunting through the rubble. Soldiers running in and out, kicking people, as if the victims were to blame. We dug for hours, carrying people to taxis, sending them to the hospital. Everyone was overwhelmed.’

He stops for a few moments, collecting his thoughts.

‘We heard later it was some offshoot of Boko Haram, believing that all modernization is evil. That we should live like peasant farmers, breaking our backs in the sun. That didn’t stop them using modern weapons.

‘They set up a clinic in the market to vaccinate children. Instead they injected them with an explosive. An hour later –

‘I was angry. I didn’t want this any more. I heard about the first orbital cities. I tried to convince Isaiah to come with me. We could go there, start new lives. They were looking for people to help build. Thousands of people from all over the world were going. Some because of the adventure, and some – like me – to escape. Life would be tough for the first immigrants, but we knew about hardship.’

Joshua is listening intently.

‘Isaiah had also been thinking. He told me of this vision of his. A string of independent villages along the border between Nigeria and Cameroon. No man’s land. Abandoned by both countries. Some river called the Akwayafe. He wanted me to join him. Build a new community.

‘There was a choice. And we each chose differently.’

He is silent for a while.

‘I chose coffee. He chose tea. We couldn’t choose both.’

Joshua shakes his head. ‘I am uncertain of your meaning?’

Nizena grins. Coffees float over to their table on a tray.

‘My father used to love both coffee and tea. Each morning he would want to have one or the other before he left for work. But he could only drink one. Each morning he would choose. It would be a coffee day or a tea day.’

He sips his coffee, tasting the dark-chocolate flavours.

‘There was no right choice. Either would do, but he couldn’t help feeling that the day would have been different if he had chosen the other. And he could never know in what way.

‘We go through our lives like that. Even long ones. We make choices that exclude other choices. I chose this life. Isaiah chose Ewuru.’

Nizena touches Joshua’s arm. ‘Don’t go looking to figure out which is the right one. They are both right. I am thrilled with my life here. I have achieved more than I could ever have imagined growing up as an Efik boy in a village. But Isaiah was just as excited by his choice. He had no regrets either.

‘I visited him many times. I gave him one of the first sphere I developed.’ Nizena smiles suddenly, laughs. ‘He wouldn’t accept it as a gift. Insisted that the village pay for it. He wouldn’t even let anyone know where I was from. Each time we visited, we had to hide the ship in the jungle and walk in like any other visitor.’

Joshua shakes his head in realization. ‘That is why there is no memory of this?’

‘Isaiah did not want any outside interference, and I respect his ideals. He wanted people to believe in themselves, to trade as equals with others. In those days, the distance between Achenia and Ewuru was greater than it is now.

‘I saw him close to the end. Ewuru was prosperous, growing. Your grandfather was a very young man, out in the swamps building the fortifications to separate the waters of Calabar from the Akwayafe. Isaiah and I reminisced, laughed together.

‘He knew he was going.’ Nizena is smiling, his eyes wet. ‘My dearest friend. He was so proud. So pleased with what his people were achieving. We embraced and I left. He passed soon after. I came back for the funeral, Kosai and me. We stayed with your great-grandmother, Ruth. She was a wonderful lady, too. I haven’t been back since. That was over a century ago.’

Now it is Joshua’s turn to comfort the old man.

He wonders, though, could Samara’s choice of landing place have been deliberate? ‘Could your relationship with Ewuru have been known here?’

‘I travelled there often, and it would have been logged, but that was a very long time ago. The war has removed all knowledge of that area. You have been out of the connect for so long. I am not sure.’

Lunch finished and, their plates scraped clean, they amble back to the beach.

‘This is my great pleasure,’ says Nizena as he removes his boots and rolls up his trousers.

Joshua smiles and follows him. They are soon knee-deep in the warm surf, enjoying the current tugging at their calves and the feel of fine sand between their toes.

‘I used to believe I knew where I wanted to be and that place would always be Ewuru,’ says Joshua. ‘Now? I am no longer certain.’ He clenches and unclenches his hands, feeling their strength, unsure of their meaning. ‘Your world is beautiful. I could never imagine anything so perfect.’

‘But it is not real,’ says Nizena, the roll of his trousers gradually soaking up the sea. ‘Everything is designed, manufactured, configured. Oh, we permit a degree of randomness in the weather, but then we release detailed forecasts ten years ahead so people can plan their picnics.’ He laughs.

‘In randomness there is serendipity, room for creativity. We must seek randomness through exploration of the universe. That is why we must go.’

He trickles his fingers through the water. ‘If we stay, remain only within this paradise, we will go mad as surely as those poor souls in Tartarus.’

‘But you are not mad,’ says Joshua. ‘How can so many people live side by side in peace?’

‘That was Isaiah’s question, too. We both searched for it in our own ways. Here we only discovered it after we had made a terrible mistake.’

Joshua does not think of Nizena as old, but he is, and as he looks back over his long life he shivers.

‘Shango and I were competing to see who could develop a pure artificial intelligence first. The poor man won, and I am grateful to have lost.’

‘The Three?’

Nizena nods. ‘We’re engineers. We imagined a world where our machines would look after us, leaving us free to be creative, or do nothing. We know stories about evil machines enslaving people. We designed against that. We didn’t think too much about well-intentioned people enslaving machines. We didn’t think about what that made us, or this new society we were building.

‘She is not human. Not living in the sense that anything you or I will ever experience. For us, for humans, everything we know is the result of a natural selection so ferocious that it doesn’t matter whether you’re the best, only whether you’re lucky or brutal enough to survive.’

Joshua flinches. Nizena smiles kindly at him and squeezes his arm.

‘Every living thing, no matter how modest, fights. The Three is not born of that conflict. Her self-awareness was achieved without enduring our struggle,’ says Nizena.

‘Before we left her that first time, The Three asked us one more question: “There is only one choice of lasting importance that any group of people must make as a collective. Are you ready to make it?” And then she spoke a poem:

Thou makest thine appeal to me:

I bring to life, I bring to death:

The spirit does but mean the breath:

I know no more. And he, shall he,

Who trusted God was love indeed

And love Creation’s final law—

Tho’ Nature, red in tooth and claw

With ravine, shriek’d against his creed—

O life as futile, then, as frail!

O for thy voice to soothe and bless!

What hope of answer, or redress?

Behind the veil, behind the veil.

‘If conflict is built in, part of our nature, then what hope for a noble life?

‘Boko Haram in the market. Butchering anyone who is different. Laying waste to even the smallest keepsake. Given a choice between ideological terrorists and selfish leaders, many prefer the criminality of the warlords, or even the bigotry of majority rule,’ says Nizena.

‘It is a false choice. They all get you to the same place and the only difference is the speed at which you get there. Each leads through conflict to a point where we remove not just the lives of those who are “other” but also their works, their memory, the very breath that ever spoke of their existence.

‘This is nature at its most base, survival at its most primitive. Whoever is “other” is an enemy. We compete for the same means of reproduction, and if I win, you have to lose.

‘If we take that philosophy and apply it to complex creatures like ourselves, that means we must also declare the music, culture and beliefs of the “other” to be as much a threat as their eating food we want or living on land we covet. All keep them and their memory alive. All must be utterly destroyed.

‘We’ve seen where that leads. Tyrants butchering millions. Burning the books, art and history of the vanquished. They know instinctively that a people cannot rise again when even the dust has no memory they ever existed.

‘Killing cannot end in a tyranny. All people are different, and destruction continues until none are left.

‘This is the balance in nature: each group fighting for space and yielding in turn to those fitter or luckier,’ says Nizena, looking at Joshua and then out into the ocean.

Joshua shakes his head, looking ill. He waves his hand at the beach, at the city. ‘That cannot be all there is?’

‘No, it isn’t. We can cooperate, but it must be a deliberate choice. We alone of our planet’s living creatures can make that a conscious decision. That was what The Three was asking of us. Can we commit completely to positive coexistence and cooperation?’ says Nizena.