This the youth did. They arrived at a huge tent on the edge of the settlement, close to date palms but far from any wells. There, a young woman dressed in a hooded indigo robe stood waiting. Nshalla looked with curiosity at the paint on her forehead, cheeks and chin, peppermint green spots surrounded by white, all linked by dotted red lines.
The woman spoke in hesitant New-Oriental. "You are the travellers sent by my husband?"
"Yes," Nshalla replied. "We're sorry to burden you, but we've nowhere to stay."
"You are my guests," the woman firmly replied. "I'm Budur."
In the silence of her mind, Nshalla gave thanks to Ataa Naa Nyongmo for this stroke of good fortune, and for the pleasant manners of this Tuareg woman.
Inside, the tent was spacious. Budur introduced them to the old woman, two youths and three children who sat around, but it was clear that only she had been educated enough to speak a language other than her native one. "We will set up a little tent outside ours," she told Nshalla, "but you shall eat an evening meal with us, and maybe enjoy music and dancing."
At this Gmoulaye perked up, standing her djembe upon the raffia flooring, placing upon that the mbira and her percussion oddments. "A musician," Budur said, eyes wide with appreciation.
Nshalla nodded to Gmoulaye. They had been accepted.
The meal consisted of vegetable stew eaten with unleaven bread. After this Budur's husband Abdoulles, who seemed in a fractious mood, departed, but other members of the family arrived, curious to see the foreigners, and soon a musical party was in full swing. Gmoulaye became feted. Nshalla watched from the tent corner.
Budur came to talk with her, and Nshalla managed to swing the conversation to rumours of a shapeshifter. Budur related what she knew with raised eyebrows. "I heard from my mother that it re-entered town this very night."
Nshalla groaned inwardly, fearing Mnada's capture, yet also relieved that her sister was so close.
"But that is rumour," Budur added. "It's been horrible."
She seemed unwilling to reveal more. Nshalla tried a little persuasion. "I've come from far away. Tell me, it won't hurt."
"Far off?"
"Though we're negroes, I'm the daughter—"
"You're a negro too? But your maid…"
Nshalla hesitated. Budur must have noticed the chestnut skin around her eyes, and had assumed that the darker-skinned Gmoulaye was her servant. Carefully, Nshalla said, "Gmoulaye and I are both free women, not imrad vassals. I'm the daughter of an Empress."
Budur gasped. "I thought you seemed sophisticated for a negro. You're royal!"
Nshalla hissed a warning. "Don't tell anybody. Now… this shapeshifter?"
"We're poor, Princess Nshalla, very poor."
Nshalla looked into Budur's eyes, then laughed. It was funny, though unexpected. From her pocket she drew the first object that came to hand, a purse of cowries. Here they would be useless. "These are magic cowries of Ghana," she said. "If you keep them safe, never looking at them, they'll bring you good luck. The cowrie is after all the eternal symbol of womens' parts. But if you look at them, the gaze of those big eyes of yours will burn off the magic. Quickly, now, hide them under your robe before your children see what's going on."
Budur did as she was bid, then continued, "The shapeshifter has been here for a couple of days now, a woman I believe it is. It skulks around the town and steals food and water. That's how we know it's real, and not a spirit or a jinn. The men haven't dared hunt it."
"Haven't they?"
"But they have sent for a sorcerer. He's due soon. He'll kill it."
Budur's certainty worried Nshalla. Mnada was a real woman. She could be killed. "But you said it comes and goes?"
"My mother said it had been seen sprinting north, a giant with flat feet and tangled hair. But if it's still in Araouane, the sorcerer will kill it. Last night, it spat on the mosque."
Flat feet and tangled hair. Nshalla recalled childhood days at the palace in Accra, remembering how their mother used to scold them for not combing their hair with their gold and ivory afro-brushes. Some palace servants were beaten for this carelessness. And how the Empress shouted when she taught Mnada how to walk like royalty. In her mind's eye Nshalla imagined her sister as a gigantic, flailing woman. This identity, drawn from the depths of Mnada's terrified child-soul, was just part of the truth of her pain. Nshalla knew there was much more to come. Mnada had wanted to sculpt: but she was not a man, so the Empress would not let her. Mnada wanted to run: royal heirs glided. Mnada wanted to shout, sing, breathe oh, so deeply: this was not becoming of Ghana's heir. But above all, Mnada, her sister, was somehow to become a simalcrum of her mother. Nshalla, understanding more of the aether, recalling more of her childhood, now felt a great revulsion at the sadistic behaviour of her mother. If it was true that the Empress required a psychic copy of herself, then this was a crime of immense proportions. And yet the one body to which a petition could be sent, the Aetherium, was sat upon by the Empress herself. That made Nshalla feel powerless.
She also understood the true horror of her sister's name. It was her mother's name. Doubtless no other name had even been considered. Mnada's name was a symbol of her mother's offence.
Nshalla looked again into Budur's limpid eyes. "Is it safe to go out at night around here?"
"I wouldn't. Some men drink too much."
Nshalla nodded, but knew she would go out anyway.
At midnight the festivities died down and Nshalla dragged Gmoulaye away to their tent. They decided to explore the north of the settlement.
The moon was setting. Apart from pockets of jollity, silence had settled upon Araouane, and it was dark and cool. But after an hour of searching they gave up. Nobody had accosted them, but neither had they seen anything, just old men peeing against walls and youngsters out enjoying illicit liaisons.
Just as they decided to return to their tent Gmoulaye hissed and shrank against a moonlit wall. Nshalla bent down, so that she and Gmoulaye were just two more shadows amongst the sacks of refuse. "What?" she whispered.
Gmoulaye indicated the sprawling building of breezeblock and corrugated steel that stood across the sandy way. Illuminated by the light of a single lamp Nshalla saw a creeping shadow, twenty metres away and apparently unaware of them. For some seconds she thought it must be a dog, so low was its body and so sure its movement, but then she saw flecks of red in the light, and she knew it must be Mnada. That dyed hair was unmistakeable.
She whispered to Gmoulaye, "We'll watch for now, then follow her. We mustn't frighten her away. If I can, I'll try to speak with her."
Gmoulaye nodded, stroking the canoe of Ashiakle in a gesture of hope for their plan.
Mnada stopped at a door and after a minute managed to crack it; through the still air they heard the tinkle of a lock being forced. The door opened and the shadow vanished.
Immediately they ran across the sand to the door, looking left and right to see if they had been spotted. The lane was empty. At the door Nshalla peered through a crack, to see inside an open space filled with huge crates, machinery, tables with laboratory glassware, and many other objects, all illuminated by an orange nightlight. And there was Mnada, upright now, investigating the contents of the warehouse.
"What do we do now?" Gmoulaye hissed.
"Wait until she's out of sight, then follow. Agreed?"
A single nod was her reply.
When Mnada disappeared behind the chaotic crates in the centre of the warehouse, they entered and hid behind a metal table. Nshalla sniffed the air. Something took her back to her childhood, to the dreaded I-C-U Tompieme, the plastic advisor feared by everybody. She shivered. It was as if something in the air smelled of him.
"What?" Gmoulaye whispered.
"Nothing. Just the smell of hot plastic. It reminds me of…" Nshalla tried to make that mental connection between the smell and the android. "Him! It smells of
him.
"
"How?"
"Perhaps the chemicals in this place," said Nshalla. "Don't worry, he's not here. What is this place?"
"Not a warehouse for storage," Gmoulaye said. "They are making something here."
"But what?"
A sharp crack made them duck and fall silent. Mnada must have knocked something. They waited for five perilous minutes before daring to speak again. "Shall we move on?" Nshalla asked.
Gmoulaye shook her head.
So they waited. They waited for another hour, hearing nothing, seeing nothing, until they could bear it no more and they decided to explore for themselves. Mnada, it seemed, had departed through another door. But they discovered more than they bargained for.
Something—some
thing
—was being made in this place. The smell of plastic skin was in fact the smell of bioplas. Bioplas was like clay, but it moved as if it was a giant amoeba, sending out pseudopodia, forming holes and bulges, squirming and squelching. Nshalla knew that because it was a biomagnetic plastic, miniscule changes in the aether caused by their presence, or by a transputer broadcasting to the aether, would cause it to move, even shape itself. From this material, developed in Zimbabwe where sculpting was a sacred art, all the most advanced mobile creations were made: everything from morphic machines to androids so perfect they were difficult to distinguish from real people.
But here. What were they making here? There were scores of vats, crates upon crates of transputers, all operational, all linked to massive solar batteries, and in the centre of the building a single, huge vat shaped like a thirty metre trough that had been wound into a spiral. It was empty, but it was clearly meant to hold something.
Nshalla paused to look once more at her surroundings. The walls had been metallised and they seemed furry, thousands of shiny strings like rats' tails hanging down. Suddenly she realised. "We're inside an earthed cage," she said. "There's an artificial aether in here, divorced from the real one outside, and those strings are its aerials."
"I thought my mind felt strange," Gmoulaye replied.
"The real aether has no influence here. What are they trying to do?"
Gmoulaye pointed to a table on which a model lay.
A multi-coloured snake.
In moments Nshalla had the entire picture. "Don't you see, Gmoulaye? They're making their god."
"Who are?"
"The virtual people around here, the ones who emerged from the Songhai culture. Assane Atangana is one of them. They're actually making a real Sajara, the Rainbow-god himself, out of bioplas and metal and transputers." Appalled by her realisation, Nshalla was nonetheless shocked by the thought that next came to her. "It'll be a massive serpent! It'll be run by gigantic architectures of software. If it becomes a reality it could never be stopped. In the real world it will consume everything in its path, while the transputers that source it will be so complex they couldn't possibly be hacked."
Gmoulaye seemed to understand only a part of this. "And your sister is involved with this?" she said.
Nshalla frowned. "Yes. But how?"
Chapter 11
In the morning they asked Budur what the purpose of the transputer-filled building was, but she knew little, explaining that it was thought to be a workshop for some of the local Songhai mystics who had shamanic communion with the spirits of the desert. Nshalla glanced at Gmoulaye when she heard this, understanding immediately the link between the hawatif and these mystics. Virtual people could not work with somatic components. They would require human hands.
She needed to discuss options with Gmoulaye. "We're going out of the settlement for a couple of hours," she informed Budur. "Maybe we'll have a little nap. Could we take a bottle of water?"
Budur filled a leather sack with water, then chided them for their naiveté. "Nobody should sleep in the desert. In particular, you should avoid all trees."
"Trees contain spirits," Gmoulaye agreed, nodding to herself.
"Exactly," said Budur. "Long ago, a young girl slept under a tree, and the jinn living in it came down to have his way with her. She conceived the hero Musa Jinni. Musa it was—accompanied by his woman friend—who slayed the Hira, a terrible elephant monster." Budur chuckled. "As it turned out, managing his friend was the more difficult task. He even tried binding her with magic chains, but she broke free, though eventually he made chains strong enough. But then a second Hira came. Now, Musa's friend was formerly an elephant spirit, so she changed into elephant form and waited by the local water hole, stealing four hairs from the Hira's tail as it drank so that she might have power over it. Musa received the hairs from his elephant-friend and showed them to the Hira, whereupon it lay down, ready to be killed."
"And the moral of this is?" asked Nshalla.
"Never sleep in the desert under a tree. Never lose a hair from your head."
With this invaluable advice, they departed Budur's tent to find a quiet spot where they could discuss their plans. They rested in a dusty space between a hill and a grove of thorny bushes. Nshalla was full of ideas. "We've got to stop this. I'm not just saying so because my mother is at the bottom of it, but I feel in my bones that something very bad is about to happen."
"I feel the same," Gmoulaye said, "but we are foreigners of no account here, with no local knowledge. What can we do?"
"We've got to stop Sajara being made. Luckily only one god is being manufactured—"
"Yes, but
how,
Nshalla?"
"We can't ask Assane because he has something to do with it, even if he is working against my mother. No, we must act ourselves. Tonight we'll go back into the workshop and examine the control transputers. Maybe we could infect the software, put viruses on their optical drives. There's bound to be a few colonies lurking in the local web."
"Do you believe your mother is making gods to further her plans?" asked Gmoulaye.
"Possibly. As yet, we don't know who's working with who. We need to find out more about these local mystics."
"Ask at the mosque."
Nshalla shook her head. "Neither the virtual people nor the mystics are moslems, they belong to the old religions, the tribal ones."
"Watch again at the workshop door?"
"No. If we're noticed it could put an end to our freedom here."
Gmoulaye considered this. "Then let us see what we discover inside tonight. We must act before the sorcerer comes to kill Mnada."
Night came. Around midnight they were checking the door Mnada had earlier forced. Neither she nor any of the locals made any appearance as they cracked the lock and entered the workshop.
Inside all was quiet, banks of equipment lit orange by the nightlight, constellations of indicator lamps twinkling in an artificial milky way that stretched from nearby vats into the gloom of the further wall. As on the previous night, both women felt a subconscious twinge in their minds when they entered the artificial aether, as though their thoughts had been bathed in fresh water. Nshalla paused to listen for other intruders, but the workshop was empty.
"Look!" hissed Gmoulaye, already at the spiral vat. Nshalla walked over. It had been filled with bioplas.
For a few moments she surveyed the vat and its contents, her nose twitching from the strong odour of the techno-clay. There was alot of bioplas here. She tried to imagine what a forty metre, hundred tonne, artificial godlike snake might do. She could not imagine what it might do.
"This is big," she said. "Not the snake. Though it is. This whole affair is big. The organisation behind it must be the best."
"Your mother…" said Gmoulaye, leaving the rest of her thought unspoken.
Nshalla nodded. Her mother had access to every technology in the civilised world. Crates from the Pacific Rim arrived at the palace every month.
"I'm not sure now I want to get involved with this," she said.
Gmoulaye stiffened. "We have to, if only for the sake of your precious sister."
Nshalla sighed. "Yes, I suppose so." The forces against her, personified by her mother, seemed vast, and she knew some of the confidence of the past weeks had been knocked out of her. But then she recalled the piteous face of Mnada in the Timbuktu street, and her resolve returned. She had to save her sister.
"All right," she said, trying to make her voice sound determined. "We're certain now that my mother is making artificial deities, or at least encouraging their manufacture. Assane and the virtual people are against it… or are they? We have to find out. And we have to find out about these shamanic mystics."
"I do not like Assane Atangana," said Gmoulaye. "Mystics first."
Nshalla shook her head. "Software first."
They examined the control transputers but immediately encountered a difficulty. There were no input devices. Nshalla had never before encountered such a system, but Gmoulaye had. "This whole room is aether orientated," she explained. "In my home village we had portable transputers like these, though much less sophisticated of course. They work by focussing aether signals from lucid dreamers, usually through a dish receiver. At home, only the local shaman was able to use such devices. City women rarely come across the systems because they are tribal in origin." She looked around the room, then concluded, "In a small, closed environment like this, dish receivers are not necessary."
"Then we're stuck," Nshalla said. "We'll have to attack the problem outside."
"There is one alternative method," said Gmoulaye. "We could try to broadcast a mmoatia into this aether."
"A what?"
"A terrifying spiritual being plucked from the forests outside Accra. I have the memory of one stored in my database." She stroked the pearly ear-ring on her right earlobe. "Mmoatia are like fragments of a nightmare. If we broadcast one it could easily introduce an inconsistency into the local aether, and so damage the creation of Sajara."
Nshalla agreed it should be tried. Connecting the ear-ring to a transputer, Gmoulaye called up the mmoatia then released a copy of it. They departed the workshop and returned to their tent, to sleep through the rest of the night.
But in the morning their plans began to go awry.
The first they knew of trouble was when a group of children ran through the central, sandy lane of the settlement crying about an elephant. Mollified with mango sweets and cans of Diet Cocoa, they calmed, but then a young man appeared also telling of a great shadowy elephant in the desert north of Araouane. As Budur pointed out, elephants were not natural desert animals.
"It might be the Hira," Gmoulaye said.
For a minute they considered this possibility, before a shadow appeared over a nearby house and possibility turned to certainty.
"It
is
the Hira!" Budur shouted. She turned to run.
Nshalla stood transfixed as the unnatural cloud darkened, became compact, then began to swing a gigantic trunk. Its tusks flashed as if they were made of stainless steel. The Hira approached. It was making straight for them.
"It's aetherial," Nshalla said. "We're somehow inside the local tale. We can stop it if we know what we're doing."
Gmoulaye was trembling. "The tale," she stuttered. "We have to kill this Hira."
"Yes. And then the second Hira. But we'll do it." Yet Nshalla knew it would be difficult for Gmoulaye, since her tribe's totem was the elephant.
Already the phantasmagorical elephant was before them, a mist of mathematical sigils evaporating from its hide, tusks so sharp they sliced waste paper fluttering through the air, trumpeting its defiance of them. Its polished black eyes glared at them, and for a fraction of a moment Nshalla knew she had seen those eyes before.
It attacked. Although versed only in the fundamentals of aetherial combat, Nshalla prepared herself. This would not be easy.
So she was astonished when her first imaginary swipe—the timid thrust of a plastic sword that she remembered using in her childhood—caused the Hira to collapse like a great bale of maize, then sink into the earth as if it was just muddy water. Nshalla stared at the ground as the shadows cleared to reveal dirty sand.
Gmoulaye was at her side. "That was too easy."
But the locals did not think so. In seconds Nshalla was surrounded by cheering children, laughing women, and men waving improvised weapons of wood and plastic. "Hurray for Nshalla!" they cried as she was carried off to a tent. In minutes a feast of wild rice and vegetables was laid out. The morning departed, and the party flowed on until the sun set.
Assane greeted them in private as evening arrived, dancing out of the aether. "Well done, Nshalla," he said.
Nshalla, not a little suspicious, said nothing, waiting to see where he wanted to take the conversation.
"You fought the Hira with courage," he continued. "The locals think well of you, and may even help us locate Mnada."
"Before they kill her," Nshalla remarked bitterly.
"So she is still in the vicinity?" Gmoulaye asked.
"Oh, yes. But her chaotic—you might almost say mad—personality is making it hard for us to track her. But we know she is hiding somewhere in Araouane. It is just a matter of time. And then we shall learn more of the Empress' plans."
"Indeed," Nshalla confidently said. "But what of your own plans? You were formed from a local culture, Assane, and suspicious people might think you were behind the Hira… and other things."
"Other things?"
Nshalla looked him straight in the eye and said, "The worshippers of Sajara. We know there are shamanic mystics of the Songhai hereabout. Who are they?"
"I will endeavour to find out," Assane replied.
Nshalla grunted her disapproval, but said nothing. Knowing he was lying, she had confirmed that he and the other hawatif were involved in the creation of the real Sajara. It was just a matter of finding the connection, and that now meant finding the somatic component of the plan—the Songhai shamen.
"Just one last thing," Assane said. "There is a transputer disturbance in the area." He paused to consider his words. "Like a bad kernel inside a shell. I think it is the ecology of viruses that we suspected might have caused the gender attack on you, Nshalla. Will you now allow me disinfect your transputers?"
"No," Nshalla said. "We can do that. Gmoulaye has a copy of InVitrioDisinfect in her ear-ring database."
"As you wish." And with that, he vanished.
"Fascinating," Nshalla mused. "Now we know much more. He suspects us. The key is these Songhai shamen. But how will we recognise them?"
"If they live in the desert we will never find them," Gmoulaye said.
Nshalla sat in the sand by her tent and took out her transputer, accessing the Songhai material, then displaying it. "Look," she said. "Sajara is the sky god, the rainbow god, manifesting as a multi-coloured snake. But he is also represented as a forked tree with a white ram. Tomorrow we'd better search the whole settlement for symbols. The shamen must come into Araouane for water. We'll spot them."
"All right," Gmoulaye said, "but we have little time. There is still the threat of a local sorcerer coming to kill Mnada."
"I've thought about that," said Nshalla. "I think such a sorcerer would be one of the local shamen. The fact that it's now been a few days since Mnada began upsetting the locals means he's either very distant, or not happy about showing himself."
"Or he is very expensive," Gmoulaye countered. "Let's get some sleep tonight."
"No. I want to begin searching now."
Gmoulaye scoffed at this idea. "It is far too dark for a thorough search. We were warned about the local men taking advantage of us."
"Are you afraid of a few old men?" Nshalla said. "I suppose you tribal women do live under the masculine shadow. Not like us."
Gmoulaye's face showed her anger at this patronising remark. "I may only be a tribal woman, Nshalla, but I know as much as you about a woman's role."
Nshalla just looked down her nose. "Oh, really?"
"Yes!"
"Well, regardless of what you think, I'm going out to search for the shamen."
"I am your friend, Nshalla. Listen to me. I must stop you. We are at a critical point in our plans and a single mistake would be disastrous."
Now Nshalla felt angry. "Are you saying I'm so incompetent I'm going to make a mess of a simple search?"
"I'm saying—"
Nshalla turned and entered the tent, where she grabbed a rope from beside her belongings. She tied a weight to it.
Gmoulaye had followed her. "What are you doing?"
Without a word Nshalla whirled the rope around so that the weight span around Gmoulaye's body, and in seconds she was tied up. Furious, Gmoulaye jumped up to Nshalla, but Nshalla ran to the flap at the side of the tent.
"That'll keep you quiet for a while," she said. "If I want to search, I
will
search."
Gmoulaye struggled. Nshalla had not secured the rope, so it was soon loose. Brow furrowed, she found a lighter cord, and as the first rope began to fall from Gmoulaye she used it to make a better job, tying the ends together, then using the first rope to bind Gmoulaye's feet.
"It is the tale," Gmoulaye whimpered as Nshalla made to leave the tent. "Don't go, Nshalla. We are friends."