The Quiet Parts Pt. 15
“Are you hungry?” Mica asks before starting their journey, and, upon her strong affirmative, he gestures a lieutenant to pass a basket filled with rubies. “They are quite easy on the teeth,” he adds kindly, so she bites the stone. It crunches between her molars and turns to jelly in the acids of her mouth. Tastes like strawberry. From that point, she cannot get enough of them. Astride her own horse (“I’m from Napa,” she reminds him. “You know ya girl went to horse camp.”) she rides alongside him at the head of the column. Some ways back Sequoia rides with one of the warriors. Their backpacks are lashed to a packhorse at the rear. Between mouthfuls of ruby, Leigh tearfully relates all that brought her to this point, minus child abduction.
“Oh, look at me,” she says, realizing she has consumed most of the stones. Bashfully she passes them to the rider behind her. “Stress eating.”
“You’ve been through a lot,” Mica replies in that soothing new voice of his. “I never trusted Stephen. He behaved like a nice guy, but I noticed some hotep tendencies. I heard him talk about red and blue pills once.”
“Enough about that jerk,” says Leigh. “Tell me how all this came to be.”
After innumerable years, Mica says, he can hardly believe himself all that has happened. One morning he woke from a peaceful slumber to find himself in the dark. Terrified, he called for help, and from the dark sounded the ring of birdsong. When he wished for light, the amber sky appeared. When he thirsted, a river sprouted at his toes. When he hungered, an apple tree grew up next to him. Thus, fed and hydrated, he felt safe for a time, but lonely. No sooner did the thought occur, a hill grew right at his feet, atoms and molecules lacing in beautifully complex geometry. At its crest, above a scape of rhodochrosite rhombs stood a person, his first comrade.
“I was a clumsy god,” Mica says with self-deprecation she knows well. Every field, plain, and forest, every avian and terrestrial creature grew from his desires. For a long time he walked, creating things, and when he came at last to a land he had not made, he knew he had reached the limits of his realm.
“There were five men in the hall,” he says. “Five lands. The stars must be aligned; you arrived on the day when the people of Summer will meet the people of the Mothership. We have lived in isolation all these years, as to let our neighbors develop in peace.”
“But what if one of them became a dictator?” Leigh points out. God he may be, but his logic needs work. “How’s isolationism going to work then?”
He sounds unconcerned. “The moment I start prescribing my will is the moment we’ve truly lost. My first decree was for Summer to be a socialist land. As we are anti-hierarchical, so are we anti-imperialist. Do you remember Tevin, the bike courier? He doesn’t have people in his realm at all; he turned into a giant brain absorbing information. Bob’s tribe are gargantuan, intelligent, telepathic slugs. And David? His kingdom is just strange.”
Leigh nods, keeps her thoughts private. Obviously he needs her guidance.
Something about the road worries her; it feels strangely tensile, especially given the mineral composition of everything else, and the heat that emanates from it makes her ankles and shins feel especially warm. Also, rather than cut straight over the land, it swivels like the structure of a mitochondria. Such queries vanish from her mind as they near the ruby head, as tall as one of the Sierras, a titan before which she brims with awe.
“The Majestical Defile!” Mica booms the name. Then, sending a shockwave of fear through her, the road trembles. From the tongue of the Majestical Defile rises the massive, flat, triangular head of a golden serpent, an Elapidae with neither eyes nor mouth. In her terror, Leigh throws an arm around Mica.
“Fear not,” he chuckles. “‘Tis but Umoja, the Golden Serpent. I would never despoil this land by building roads,” he declares, spurring his horse into the mouth of the Majestical Defile. Stalactites and stalagmites glitter all around, lighting the cavern with natural illumination. “When we need to travel, Umoja carries us there. He is really quite friendly.”
Nevertheless, Leigh cringes beneath the watchful un-gaze of the reptile. Once the last packhorse has entered the cavern, the ground trembles, and there rises a cacophonous sound that reminds her of a gecko padding on sticky setae up a wall. Glancing over her shoulder, she watches Umoja draw his scaly flanks back from over miles of land, so in turn he coils up and goes to sleep on top of them. At that same moment, Leigh realizes many more animals occupy this Defile. In the chalcopyrite cave nooks, in the highest pyrite reaches of the cathedralic head exist thousands of noisome beasts, endangered and extinct, terrestrial and otherworldly, repulsive and splendid. Roadless, the warriors disembark to lead their horses by the reins through ruby stalagmites that rise like tree trunks. The lustrous spires emanate heat, the floor of the Defile a temperate place.
Mica speaks proudly. “I didn’t want a world where beasts hunt one another. So, after much trial and error,” he admits, a touch regretful, “I adjusted everyone’s physiology to digest minerals.”
“You’re a benevolent god,” Leigh gushes, opiated by his power.
“Maybe,” he replies, in a pensive tone. “Or maybe my people have done enough farming and hunting. Mining was the most leisurely subsistence I could think of. But sometimes I wonder if I should have made us farmers, like in Africa. That was the major struggle: what do we keep from the . . . other place?” Momentarily he goes silent. Intriguing, Leigh thinks, that even godhood cannot erase four hundred years of pain. At last he says, “Everyone speaks English because I speak English. But it’s the language of death. I should make a new one.”
“How many years did it take to build this place?” she asks.
“I can’t be sure. I think we’re immortal,” he mentions, infuriatingly casual. “How long has passed in the . . . other place?”
“Almost a week.”
Around the pyrite, his laughter echoes.
From the Majestical Defile they exit down an actual road, like the sky above an amber hue, through fields of cylindrical spires that could best be described as rock farms. Ahead of them, the road elevates over a lake to the titanic, hollowed-out auger shell containing the city of Summer. Mica always did love the beach, she remembers. In the rock fields, men and women chip away with bronze tools to fill their baskets. These brown people in loose, flowing robes of vaguely Egyptian design look unsurprised at her presence; in fact, they welcome her, and though Leigh appreciates this, she grows conscious of her appearance.
“Should I cover my face?” she asks. “I don’t want to frighten anybody.”
“Time works differently here,” Mica reminds her. “The people of Summer have had years to prepare for your coming. They know you are my friend from the before times. Funny enough,” he smirks, “the most difficult part was trying to describe your color. There are no white things in Summer. So I said you were pink, like the leaves of the forest.”
“Now I know what it is like to be black in a white world,” she says somberly. This appears to impress him.
Within the city, she marvels at its many-leveled design, similar to a Mediterranean metropolis constructed from sparkling minerals, christened with the music of seagulls, shielded in the protection of the shell wall. Atop pavement smooth and never-warred, citizens lead a leisurely existence. Already she feels drawn to the placidity they exude in their domestic tasks. At her approach, they cease their communistic activities to touch the nylon fabric of her clothing. Like Jesus, she takes their hands in beneficence. Reaching at last the center of the city, the riders relinquish their mounts to the care of those who will feed and water them, and Mica ushers her to his villa. It is an impressive home with terraced gardens that flower crystals instead of plants.
From the courtyard, he escorts Leigh and Sequoia into an incensed dining area where their repast has been lain on the ovular onyx table, the choicest stones on which Leigh fills her belly. Then they join Mica and his dozen domestic companions for a communal bath, the water pumped from hot springs and fragranced with topaz chips. Conversing with the others, she learns Mica is known among his people as a righter of wrongs, a servant to the everyday trials of his thousand countrymen, keeper of their socialist principles.
What would it be like to marry a god? To never know the fear of death? Leigh plans to find out.
Such is the refraction from gemstones that wall the rooms and stand ensconced in white-brick corridors that it seems to Leigh varicolored light pours through the halls like wine to gild the many bustling about the villa. A pretty woman named Narya escorts Leigh to her quarters where a dozen dresses have been readied. She chooses a sleeveless dress with kente pattern, an ankle-length skirt with side slits, opals sewn into the lining. She feels perfectly spoiled. Sequoia chooses similar garb, the same pattern but of a more masculine cut.
Before long they stand with Mica on a jade terrace at the rear of his house. Smooth, wide, and railless, it extends some hundred feet past the city walls and fifty feet above the serene waters of the lake. At the end of the platform stands a dais with three steps, upon it an obelisk around twenty feet high. Next to the structure stands a gong doubtlessly erected for some ceremonial purpose. Patterns kaleidoscope the obelisk in such a way that Leigh almost laughs, wanting to tell Mica his magic crystal looks like a Windows screensaver. From her vantage point she can see the land extend for miles with farms, mines, and woodland homes for the fauna Mica has resurrected.
“Soon,” he eagerly intones. “The people of the Mothership.”
A metallic glint appears in the distant sky. It solidifies to the shape of six small flying vessels that resemble manta rays. Gold and bronze hues shine across their surfaces. When they come to hover over the terrace, a change comes over them; mutable as quicksilver, they morph from their cephalic shape into that of bipedal mecha.
The six robots lower with a hissing of landing gear to delicately alight upon the terrace, and their bubble-like cockpits open outward to reveal a woman at the controls of each. With regimented synchrony, the green-, blue-, and purple-haired women jump down and immediately form a V, each bearing what Leigh would describe as a laser spear. Their flight suits, red and gold, with glittering cybernetics at their breast and high-tech headbands around their foreheads, bring to mind space armor based on the Dahomey warriors of Benin. Overdressed divas.
To maintain appearances, Leigh curtsies. Grinning, Mica hurries to the apparent leader of the women, lovely, with a purple afro. She bids him wait. “Turning off my shield,” she says, pressing a button on her shoulder; a golden shimmer around her torso indicates the change. Then she throws herself in Mica’s arms. Miserably Leigh waits for them to pull apart.
“Meet Ayana,” Mica introduces her, “the Captain of the Mothership. But when you knew her, she was called Reggie.”
Maybe hundreds of years have passed yet Ayana’s smile transports her right back to Cali. In the Captain’s butterscotch hue, big eyes, curly hair, and dimples list traces of the handsome boy Leigh barely knew. This gender-swapped version of him seems pretty average for a god. More like a demigod.
“Hi,” says Ayana, embracing her. “It’s been so long.”
“You too!” Leigh greets her through a plastic grin. “You look so good. So much has happened. Terrible things. The Wicker Park Hall—”
“Shall we see the obelisk?” asks Ayana eagerly, which makes Leigh scowl. Happy as a kid at Christmas, Mica leads them up the terrace to the dais.
So, Leigh thinks, I have a rival. She decides against smothering Ayana in her sleep. Not when poison would be preferable.
They stand before the obelisk. Gravely reverent, Mica touches the surface and within it colors spiral like galaxies.
“Here I commune with the ancestors,” he intones. “As time goes on, my powers fade. It has been long since I was able to create something. But the magic that made this world has trusted me with one eternal task: Speaker for the Obelisk. Time and mortality have no sway in its facets. And I convey their wisdom. The other day, before I escorted you,” he says to Leigh, startling her because his words have put her in a trance, “I communed with Robert F. Williams—”
“He armed black Southerners during Civil Rights,” she interrupts. “He’s rad!”
Smiling, Mica nods. “And the day before I spoke a long time with David Fagin—”
“The Buffalo Soldier who went AWOL in the Philippines War and joined the resistance? I love him!”
Golden beams dance under Mica’s fingertips. “What do we take with us from that four-hundred-year exile? What are our ceremonies? Voudun? Candomblé? Santería? Something like Christianity? Or do we pretend like it never happened? Just a bad dream that flits away in the morning sun,” he says in a thin voice. Then he booms to all gathered, “Now is the time to bring the five realms together. Collective wisdom will solve these questions. I, Mica the Uniter, say it is so!”
The cadence in his voice mesmerizes like a supernal melody. Then, at the sound of pained coughing, she turns to find Sequoia, whom she has forgotten, stumbling away from the obelisk, begging water from Narya. Their behavior embarrasses Leigh.
The air grows charged. Colors coalesce in the obelisk and from its depths emerge a thin, dark face. Eyes sensitive and caring, yet determined, stare at Mica from under a woven checkered head wrap. Ayana gasps and grips the hand of Leigh who, anxious, averts her gaze from the spirit in the glass.
“Nanny of the Maroons,” says Mica. “Leader of the Jamaican maroons. She fought wars against the British . . . and won! She taught me how to build a society. Aye, and to fight! You see, one day I wished for answers to my questions, and the obelisk came to be.”
Weeping, Ayana presses her cheek to the glass. In return, Queen Nanny puts her forehead to the Captain’s and it seems they are speaking telepathically. Leigh asks Mica, “Can I go next?”
At the sound of her voice, Nanny glares open-mouthed in terror and revulsion, such that Leigh fears she will break through the obelisk and throttle her. Frozen where she stands, Leigh watches Nanny retreat to the dark.