The Night Masquerade (Binti, #3)(40)

Made the Zinariya more.

They left an edan. No instructions. No purpose. But it could make you more, if you let it. I’d found it.

I don’t know how long I was watching it rotate, as I climbed deeper and deeper into the tree. Mwinyi would later tell me that he’d been in the Star Chamber; they’d been eating and Okwu had been telling him a story about a Meduse meeting of chiefs long ago that had gone horribly wrong. “We knew you were off somewhere brooding,” he said.

The ball was rotating faster and faster now with my current, humming with the trees. The hairs on my arms rose with the charge in the air. My okuoko slithered about me at my sides and back, old otjize still flaking from them to the floor. Then I was in space!

Infinite blackness.

Weightless. Flying.

Falling a bit.

Catching myself.

Then flying again.

I wanted to scream and laugh; I had become something more again. This time, I was so changed that I could fly through space without dying. I could live in open space. I moved through Saturn’s ring of brittle metallic dust. It pelted our exoskeleton like chips of glittery ice. It felt pleasant, so I flew faster, resisting the urge to do barrel rolls because of Mwinyi and Okwu. New Fish was quiet, letting me take the lead. This was my mission. My purpose. And it was fantastic.

Living breath bloomed in me from the breathing room where I currently sat, the whirling golden ball humming with the trees. The metallic dust grew thick like a sandstorm and I stopped as some of it whirled before me in a way that reminded me of the golden ball.

“Who are you?” a voice asked. It spoke in the dialect of my family and it came from everywhere.

“Binti Ekeopara Zuzu Dambu Kaipka of Namib, that is my name,” I blurted before I let myself think too hard about what was happening. “No,” I said. “My name is Binti Ekeopara Zuzu Dambu Kaipka Meduse Enyi Zinariya New Fish of Namib.” I waited a few moments and then decided to ask, “Who are you?”

“We are…” And for a moment, I heard nothing. Then the sound of their name split and split like a fractal in my mind. It was like the practice of treeing embodied in one word. Their name was an equation too complex, too various and varied to mentally fix into place, let alone put into a language that I was capable of uttering. It was beautiful and my joy in just letting it cartwheel and bounce about my mind was reflected in the color New Fish shined in the metallic storm of Saturn’s ring.

When I could finally speak, I said, “You’ve called me here. Why? What is it you want?”

The rush of debris swirled before me into a funnel shape now.

“Did we call you here?” it asked, its voice almost playful.

“You did.” I focused hard on the funnel, their name still in my mind vying for attention.

“That ball belongs to a people we’ve met. They only leave it to be found by those they feel should find them. They pack it between pieces of beautiful metal like a gift.”

“What is it?” I asked.

“What do you think it is?”

I could see New Fish’s light grow purpler with my annoyance. “You called me,” I repeated. “Why?”

“Okay,” it said. “We called you, yes. Through your zinariya object.”

“I’m here now, finally. What do you want?”

There was a long pause. The dust swirled and swirled and for a moment, I was sure I saw a flash of red-orange light. I didn’t bother wondering who these people were or where they had come from or what they even looked like. If I was meant to find out, I would. If not, then I would not. If there was one thing I had learned in all my strange journeys it was that what would be would be and sometimes you wait to see. And this was fine, because at least I’d gotten to the bottom of the question of my edan and that odd vision and what was there was just as strange as I had imagined.

“Tell us about Oomza Uni,” the voice said.

I was so shocked that I couldn’t answer. Then I said, “What?”

“You are a student at Oomza Uni, no?”

“I am, but—”

“That is why we called on you. We want an opinion on the university that comes from someone like us.”

“But … like you? How am I—”

“We’re people of time and space. We move about experiencing, collecting, becoming more. This is the philosophy and culture of our equation. There’s no one of our kind there, yet we hear it is the finest university in the galaxy. There is plenty we could learn from there and we’d like to apply. But first, we need a true recommendation of the place from someone we trust. We trust you.”

“So you’ve known I would eventually be … what I now am, so you sent for me?”

“Yes. We are many things. What is your opinion of the university?”

“Well … I left my home to attend, nearly died on the way, and when I got there, it turned out to be the best expe rience I ever had as an academic. Excellent professors, excellent students, and excellent environment. It’s the perfect place for me.”

There was a pause and then it said, “Thank you.”

And just like that, the dust and debris of Saturn was simply dust and debris again. A recommendation, that’s all they needed. It was so … anticlimactic. Not that I was complaining.

For a few moments, I enjoyed the sensation of space and the flecks and larger chunks of stone bouncing off of New Fish’s body. Then I had an idea and used one of New Fish’s large pincers to catch two fist-sized stones tumbling about. As New Fish, I could “taste” the dust and stones and they had a tanginess that reminded me of the life salt scraped from the leaves of Undying trees and the sandstone from which I made my astrolabe. I stored them in one of New Fish’s many outer crevices. When I returned to myself, the golden ball was on the floor, the trees were quiet, and Mwinyi was standing over me, a perplexed look on his face.