Muezzinland (21 page)

It grew cold at nights. Frost patterned the morning sand, though it was evaporated in minutes by the sun.

In her role as a kahina, Gmoulaye began to receive impressions of an event in the near future. Perhaps she was just taking in subliminal changes of the aether, but something was unsettling her, and she seemed to think it would come from the sky. "You're just worried about the frost," Nshalla would say in an attempt at light-heartedness.

They made Boubout Oasis. It had been devastated by genetically modifed locusts and was a wasteland, though water remained. The inhabitants lived by growing crops under acres of humidifying plastic, so that the oasis looked like a billowing sea of mirrors. One of the four mushrooms nearby was a biohazard zone and had been partially encased in rock-foam, though this itself had been eaten away by bacteria accidentally released from another mushroom. Discovering this, Nshalla and Gmoulaye found themselves reluctant to eat or take food from the oasis. They were forced to take water, though they did not want to.

Gmoulaye accessed local maps on the optical web. Tounassine Oasis lay six days north. Beyond that lay the great emptiness of the Hamada Tounassine, and then the Atlas Mountains. It looked bleak.

They were told that it was bleak. Nobody from the oasis had been further than three days into the desert. Occasionally an autocopter would arrive at one or other of the mushrooms, but nobody else. With subdued thanks they departed Boubout Oasis.

For a few moments on this first night they thought all their plans were going to fall around their ears. They both contracted upset stomachs; fortunately nothing more serious than nausea and griping. More worrying was the arrival of clouds on the evening wind, which made stellar navigation difficult, until, some hours later, they cleared and the frosts returned. But Nshalla thought she detected a hesitancy in Gmoulaye's step.

As the night progressed a curious stillness came to the air. Gmoulaye stopped, looked into the heavens, and pointed at the moon.

There was a dark fingernail across it.

Nshalla was not worried, since she knew what an eclipse was. But Gmoulaye, linked to the moon, saw it as a terrible omen and refused to take even one step forward.

In vain Nshalla tried to explain. Soon a distinct crimson colour lay across the lunar face, and later the whole disk was transformed.

Gmoulaye lay on the sand and shut her eyes.

Then Nshalla began to notice misty shapes, distant, circling down, as if on thermals of coldness.

They were floating from the moon. There were hundreds, some just pinpricks of ruddy light, others misty forms like trees with faces, animals with auto exhaust pipes for tusks, or masks with shining teeth. A chorus of unearthy howling began to infiltrate the air, making Gmoulaye look up, gasp and shiver, then cover her head.

Nshalla knew that all over Aphrica eclipses were omens of evil. She realised that the aether was creating shapes from cultural data. But even though she knew this, her heart quailed and her feet wanted to run, particularly as some of the spirits were taking an interest in them and skimming across the desert at top speed, leaving wakes of heavy, black smoke.

Nshalla hugged Gmoulaye and tried to make her look. "What are they, what are they?" she asked.

Then the spirits were upon them. At first they were curious, whirling around and laughing in combustion engine voices, singing violent songs, disintegrating then reforming like bacteria in a petri dish. Nshalla would wince as they rushed by, but none of them attacked.

One did. Nshalla received the briefest impression of I-C-U Tompieme's sly face, then he was at her.

His strategy took the form of delusions designed to attack various parts of her brain through the biograin hierarchies that formed her auxilliary lobes. First came waves of lights intended to overload the signals passing between the hemispheres across the corpus callosum. When that failed, for Nshalla simply shut her eyes, he tried a new tactic: light and sound. With voices from her past and her childhood he tricked her into opening her eyes, and when he did he sent massive bursts of light at her, hoping to induce a fit. Nshalla felt dizzy, but remained alert.

She realised that as yet she could do nothing. What could a woman do to strike a ghost? In between attacks she tried to grasp a cultural or personal answer, much as Msavitar had when he was attacked on the riverboat. And yet there was some hope. Whatever the hardware had been that had supported I-C-U Tompieme, it was not here now; this was a long-distance attack, a last despairing effort.

Nshalla marshalled her thoughts, focussing on that flicker of hope.

I-C-U Tompieme's next attack was more subtle. With flicker-frame speed he edited together emotional segments of her past plucked from her public memories, then presented them to her. In some cases her feelings were still raw under the veneer of acceptance, and she could not help but feel anger, tears, fear, and once, when she watched herself taunted by her mother, real fury. The stress of holding these reawakened emotions was awful, but she held tight the lid and refused to succumb to him.

He released the pressure. Nshalla relaxed. She peeked out of the aether chaos to see if Gmoulaye was safe. Her friend was crouched on the sand, apparently deep in thought.

Then I-C-U Tompieme tried to destroy her hypothalamus. A cycling memory wove itself into the space around her, strong as mesmerism, demanding that she let it enter her mind. It was a grim Western scene, all collapsed bunkers and street urchins. The horror of it was its strength. It demanded to be experienced. For some moments Nshalla stood like a hare caught in light, before, with a physical effort, she struck it out of her sensorium.

"Gmoulaye!" she called. "Help!"

Then Nshalla noticed an old woman hobbling across the sand towards them. The crone raised her hands and there was a bolt of light from the heavens that struck I-C-U Tompieme's head and split it. From the sundered skull the images and corporate logos of a dozen transputers leaped, the fundamental identities of the machines that had co-operated to create the intelligence that was I-C-U Tompieme. Now their bioware had been melted. It was over. The images fell to the ground in drifts of crimson dust.

The crone was gone. All that was left was a stone, black and meteoric, sizzling on the sand.

So I-C-U Tompieme's troubled presence was smashed into electronic fragments. Nshalla and Gmoulaye walked on, and the sense of foreboding was much reduced.

With little water and less food they began to falter in their efforts to reach Tounassine Oasis. They drifted across the sand of the Ouahila, some nights progressing no more than ten kilometres, on others managing twenty. The appearance of nocturnal cirrus clouds reduced Gmoulaye's ability to intuit direction. They began to flounder.

On the fifth night their water ran out. Gmoulaye thought Tounassine Oasis might be ten kilometres away… or it might be twenty. Nshalla climbed the highest dune and looked north, but she saw no lights.

They were exhausted. They had rations for a day.

Next day they were unable to find shelter. Nshalla found it impossible to sleep in the heat. If she covered her head to reduce the glare she suffocated. Wherever she lay was uncomfortable. Greeting the sunset with weak cheers, they trudged on.

~

Gmoulaye was a kilometre out at the end of the journey. Off to the east Nshalla saw a cluster of pink lamps. Gasping, they made the palmerie edge, where a boy noticed them, and, seeing their plight, brought bottles of water from a pool. He spoke no more than a score of New-Oriental words, but was able to communicate the fact that they would not be attacked or ejected from the oasis. After a while two women, out looking for their children, discovered them, and they were taken to a tent.

It was a Moorish place run by a cabal of harratin freed men. The sunna of Islam was their map of life. As women, Nshalla and Gmoulaye were tolerated, the fact that their entrance had been dramatic and their story bizarre counting in their favour. They were offered a small tent on condition that they would wear veils, would not insult the Prophet, and would never seek to tell tales to the children.

They remained at the oasis for two days. On the third night they set out again.

It was going to be touch and go. They had enough water for ten days. Little food could be spared by the harratin of the oasis. This left rations for a week.

And what faced them? If they made it across the Hamada Tounassine they could expect new countries, strange and probably unwelcoming peoples. Nothing familiar at all. The town of Mengoub was a week and a half away, high up, in the country of Haut Plateau du Dra.

They departed with heavy hearts.

~

Wandering across the desert at night gave Nshalla a strange sense of pleasure in her own existence. She was able to pretend that the rest of the world was insubstantial compared with the dunes and the starry sky, and the silvery frost that formed on the sand. It was an almost alien landscape.

The lack of food and water brought her close to mental states of hallucination. It did not help that they could only walk at night, sleeping, as best they could, during the day. This unnatural reversal made them both feel uncomfortable, though Gmoulaye was able to mitigate her stress with the sensation she felt of communing with Al-Uzza. But for Nshalla the future became an apparently endless stretch of time.

Next day passed, and the next. On the eighth day they reached their last pack of rations. There was enough water for two days.

They struggled on, but despite the clear weather Gmoulaye felt that her intuition was leaving her. Hunger and thirst were confusing her mind. Pin sharp understanding was becoming fuzzy logic. When the stars wheeled across the sky they did not move as grand clockwork, rather they conspired to make Gmoulaye dizzy and lose track of where she was heading and what time it was. When she took to using heartbeats as a timing device, Nshalla knew their hours were limited. It was all or nothing.

The land started to rise and become plains of bare rock. It was a stark landscape, bare of vegetation, scoured by streams of sand, glittering here and there with quartz inclusions. Ahead lay a great plateau.

They saw nobody. No mushrooms stood against the sky. There was no camel dung, no fragments of human rubbish.

On the tenth day they drank the last of their water. Now hours remained. Dehydration would soon claim them. They were upon the plateau.

That night a hard frost fell over them. Their limbs seemed to seize up, and they adopted a mechanical style of walking that spoke of waning hope and waning strength. But still they climbed.

Then, at dawn, Nshalla saw lamps ahead.

It was Mengoub.

Hope drove them into a final effort. Approaching the town they cried out when they saw women with mules. The women hesitantly approached, offering water when they saw their condition. Nshalla and Gmoulaye drank.

They were alive.

They had crossed the Sahara.

~

Mengoub was a sprawling town, a collection of districts linked by rocky lanes, clusters of granaries and donkey paddocks. Yellow tussock grass grew amidst stones and rocks, and everywhere there lay a sandy dust. The people were sinewy, wearing dull robes and sandals. Few spoke New-Oriental, and those that did were clerks and pictsym artists working in the mosques.

One woman, Sajimira, the wife of a local gold merchant, took pity on them and invited them into her house. Her husband was a meek man given no opportunity to protest. Gmoulaye curried favour by playing musical instruments with the children, while Nshalla sat in a corner and recovered, alternately drinking sips of water and wiping her filthy brow. She dozed as the day passed.

She understood that they would probably not see much of Assane now they had crossed the Sahara. Although he had some influence outside his natural zone, it was little enough. She felt pleased. He had used them for his own ends, just like her mother had. Nshalla told herself she would never bear that burden again.

Their host was rather vain. Nshalla asked to borrow one of her mirrors. As afternoon waned she went out with Gmoulaye into the streets of Mengoub, first making sure their robes and headscarves were properly set.

"Where are we going?" Gmoulaye asked.

"We're looking for a woman with long red hair."

Nshalla asked in the square and by the mosques. After an hour they reached the western quarter, and there, at an impromptu market, Nshalla heard the rumour that she had been waiting for. They began to walk with care, examining everybody.

Turning a corner Nshalla saw a figure up ahead at a well. Wisps of hair escaped from a dusty headscarf. The form of the figure, the set of the head, the attitude of the body all pointed to one woman.

With Gmoulaye at her side, Nshalla crept up to the well. Stopping a metre behind the woman, she took the mirror from beneath her robe.

She coughed once. The woman turned and stared at her own image in the mirror: fascinated.

"Found you!" said Nshalla.