The Silence

Abdulrahman Yahaya

Kẹ́mi felt like the lone baobab in a forest of neem. She sat on a fine leather seat, hugging her knees to her chest. Her head rested against the millimetres-thick silica window of her lush cabin, which also doubled as her prison. She looked at the blur of stars as they ran backwards in streams outside the starship, reminding her of rivulets of sparse rain rolling down her windowpane on a stormy Eẹ́fà night. The thought of home made Kẹ́mi’s heart wrench in her chest. Her parents and older brother were dead. Both her sisters missing in the sudden raid. Even now, she still smelled of black smoke, which she refused to wash off. Though she did not know her sisters’ fate, she believed that they were alive. Somehow, somewhere parsecs away, she believed. She had to, lest she crumbles like a sand castle in a typhoon.

The cabin door slid open and two raiders in military-style khakis walked in. She’d been summoned and must come with them at once. Kẹ́mi followed without protest. She had not spoken a word since she was forced into the ship. The babaláwos of Kepler-ẹẹ́fà taught that there was folly in speech, that words were the antithesis of the spirit’s fire, sacred and to be used sparingly if at all. And right now Kẹ́mi needed most of all to keep her fire, the path ahead so dark and uncertain. Yet teachings like this was why her people did not get along well with others in the Galactic Junta. And who could blame them. It was difficult to trust a people so guarded and withdrawn as hers. 

Even now, she could feel the hostility from these two as they marched her through the winding tunnels of the ship. She stopped suddenly, squatting to tie her shoe laces, so that one of them tripped over her. He shouted at her to get up but Kẹ́mi only looked up at him, fixing her gaze on him. She recognised him as the one who’d killed her brother. She could never forget those queer eyes, the likes of which were seldom seen on Kepler-ẹẹ́fà.

 They had been green and gold, burning in the shifting light of a smoldering pyre as he held Ayo in a chokehold, laughing as her brother’s spirit blazed with their dead on the pyre, his limp body never struggling and never screaming, even as the silence took him. The man had tossed Ayo’s body in the fire after that. Then he had walked past the collapsed hut where she hid.

Presently, he kicked at her to get up. She did. “Move it, savage,” he said, shoving her forward with his gun.

The other laughed. “You think she understands words? Just look at her.”

“Of course she understands. Don’t be fooled, new guy. They can be clever little bastards these lot.”

“Don’t know about that. Why do you think the captain raided their shithole planet anyway?”

The captain. That must be where they’re taking her, thought Kẹ́mi.

“The captain’s made a discovery beyond the outer belt. Way, way beyond. He reckons it’ll change the world, the old rascal.”

“And he needs this one?”

“Apparently.”

The other scoffed, incredulous. “But she’s a retard,” he insisted.

At the command bridge, Kẹ́mi found the captain standing over Control. The two escorts marched her forward to stand by her parents’ killer, who hugged her as though he were some long lost uncle. Kẹ́mi did not understand. But also she did not resist. “And a sweet thing, too,” the captain noted to his fellow raiders, who were trickling into the large room, a look of impending spectacle on their faces. “See how she holds no grudges?” The captain turned back to her. “You know, my girl, I have always said that your people are special. Ask my men. Ask them if I didn’t. I tell them, No one is that silent and secretive except that they’re hiding something great and terrible. Something that could break the world, eh?”

“Captain,” said the Comms woman where she sat behind a sprawling console, “the creatures are hailing our ship, sir. They’re ready for sophomore contact.”

“The creatures?”  the captain said, almost in annoyance. “No, Macer. Don’t you understand? They’re not creatures. They’re us. Yes, their features are a little mutated, but observe closely and you’ll see that they’re only human. Human!”

“Yes, sir,” the woman said simply. “Shall I give them the green light then?”

“No, a moment, Macer, for goodness sakes,” he barked, “or you’ll ruin my surprise.” He led Kẹ́mi beyond the console and onto a platform until they stood alone before the outer screen of the ship, which was shielded black. “Do you understand why you’re here?” the captain said. Kẹ́mi looked at him, expressionless. “You are here because yours are the only words Macer’s creatures seem to understand. Yorùbá, Yorùbá, Yorùbá, their bloody envoy kept saying on first contact. But I found no record of no damned Yorùbá in the Junta archives. Turns out you people are more anonymous than most realize, eh? And in light of this fateful discovery of mine, your people will soon become a most precious commodity. So you see, my girl, why I had to find and obliterate them. Before me now stands the solitary key to unlocking the origin of our species. And she is mine.” The Captain snapped his fingers and a lever was pulled, raising the black shield. “Behold,” he said in reverence. “My new world.”

Beyond the screen was the most beautiful thing she ever saw. It was blues and greens and whites but mostly blue. So much blue! It reminded her of the ribbon in Dàmọ́lá’s hair. The one she’d gotten her for her eleventh nameday. Her eleventh and her last. For there was no doubt now that her sisters were dead. Staring at the strange blue planet, Kẹ́mi was transfixed. It was as if it called to her there in the endless dark, pressing her to remember. So that within her, something answered its call.

They were ancient folktales, whispered by babaláwos around ritual fires. They bubbled to the surface of her memory, stark and unbidden. Tales of the apotheosis of all wars. A war that had ended the first civilization of mankind and records of which were long lost to the eons and the fickleness of memory. But the babaláwos remembered. The war that had claimed the lives of billions. They remembered heroes and villains, abundant rain and the bottomless hubris of men. But most of all they remembered the unmatched beauty of mankind’s first home. The oceans and the lonely moon. The savannahs and the sacred baobab. The countless birds of the air and the majestic beasts of the land. A world that seemed to her more like an artist’s reverie than something corporeal.

Kẹ́mi wept then, wanting nothing more than to show this vision to Dàmọ́lá. To sit her little sister between her legs and watch her compare her blue ribbon with the blue world below. Kẹ́mi’s fingers balled into fists. Her heart was sinking in her chest, her grief the stone dragging in it under. Slowly, sorrow gave way to anger. Anger became vengeance. And vengeance required no words. “What’s this,” said the captain, wiping her tears with a thick thumb. “I’ll have none of that. Hey, Macer, give them the green.”

Eyes flashing, she let the escort’s pocket knife slip from the sleeve of her no-color tunic and into her grasp. At close quarters, she bent her back inwards for room, swinging the knife hard and true in a long, upward arc across the captain’s throat. He fell with a loud thud, dying in the complete quiet that followed.

Kẹ́mi felt an even deeper silence return within her. It was not tense but tranquil. A silence of balance. The slow quieting of a rusted windmill when the savage winds have relented. This silence meant more than anything in the universe for her, and she would not lose it again.

She looked at the raiders below her, who stood dumfounded with weapons trained on her, a dozen red laser dots marking her slender frame. She felt no fear as she watched their hateful eyes, only a deep envy of those who have passed. Her people, resting on without her in an eternal silence. So she leaped off the platform and took them head on. Her cry was loud and feral. A final expulsion of her spirit’s fire what glowed like a hallow around her, consuming her like a burning tree struck by wild thunder.

The raiders opened fire.