Home (Binti, #2)

by Nnedi Okorafor

Okwu being Okwu—a Meduse of rigid cold honor, focus, and tradition—loved the program. The problem was that Okwu hated its professor and Professor Dema hated Okwu. Okwu was Meduse and Professor Dema, a human woman, was Khoush. Their people had hated and killed each other for centuries. Tribal hatred lived, even in Oomza Uni. And today that hatred, after simmering for a year, was coming to a head.

Her astrolabe was attached to a clip sewn into her suit. As with the astrolabes of almost every student in my dorm, I’d tuned up its design and performance and now hers shined like polished metal and operated in a way more suited to her meticulous plodding way of thinking.

The day I met her, after asking me many questions about my okuoko, she’d told me that though she’d always been female, she’d been born physically male. Later, when she was thirteen, she’d had her body transitioned and reassigned to female.

A person who looked like a two-foot-tall version of a praying mantis clicked its powerful forelegs. In a sonorous voice, it said, “Humans. Always performing.”

“Tell Okwu I send my insults!”

Heh

Similar to the Meduse, in my family, one does not go to a stranger and spill her deepest thoughts and fears. You go to a family member and if not, you hold it in, deep, close to the heart, even if it tore you up inside.

Familiar

The great size of the Oomza West Launch Port was secondary to the great diversity of its travelers. Back at Kokure, almost every traveler and employee was human and I had been the only Himba in a sea of Khoush. Here, everyone was everything . . . at least to my still fresh eyes.

“When you face your deepest fears, when you are ready,” she’d said. “Don’t turn away. Stand tall, endure, face them. If you get through it, they will never harm you again.”

Meduse don’t understand the human condition; my emotional pain would only irritate Okwu when it couldn’t make my pain instantly better.

“I will wash this off soon,” it said. “It’s not good to feel this pleased with life.”

Hah

I hadn’t told my family about my hair not being hair anymore, that it was now a series of alien tentacles resulting from the Meduse genetics being introduced to mine; that they had sensation and did other things I was still coming to understand.

Nothing was asked of Okwu and Okwu was pleased, preferring to menacingly loom in the background behind me. Okwu was happiest around human beings when it was menacingly looming.

The Meduse worshipped water as a god, for they believed they came from it. This was the root of the war between the Meduse and the Khoush, though the details had long been blasted away by violence and death, and then angry, most likely incorrect, tales of heroism or cowardice depending on the teller.

The house was passed down through the women, and my mother—being the oldest daughter in her family and the only one born with the gift of mathematical sight—had been the clear inheritor of it when her mother passed.

“See Papa! You were supposed to take over the shop, so he could sit down and be proud. We’re all very happy to see you, Binti. But you should be ashamed of yourself. Your selfishness nearly got you killed!” Now she was pointing her index finger in my face. I could hear my heart beating in my ears. “Then what would Papa do? And . . . and even if you die, the world will move on. Who are you? You’re not famous.”

I was trying to like her

Vera, who grandly sucked her teeth, as she looked me up and down with disgust. “You’re so ugly now, Binti,” she said. “You don’t even sound the same. You’re polluted. Almost eighteen years old. What man will marry you? What kind of children will you have now? Your friend Dele doesn’t even want to see you!”

Hate

All I could see was my sister’s otjize-covered face with her long silver earrings that clicked to enunciate her words and her elaborate sandstone and gold marriage necklace that meant more to everyone here than my traveling to another planet to be a student at the greatest university in the galaxy.

The gift on my bed caught my eye. I unwrapped it and unfolded the silky wrapper, matching top and veil inside it, all the deep orange color of otjize. “Beautiful,” I whispered. Lovely light weather-treated material that would make walking in the desert under the noon sun like standing in the shade.

Sounds beautiful

“You’re too complex, Binti,” he said. “That’s why I stayed away. You’re my best friend. You are. And I miss you. But, you’re too complex.

Imagine saying that to be insulting, like

Around me was blinking electric green light. It was clusterwink snail season and the water was full of the spawning bioluminescent baby snails, the tiny creatures each flashing their own signals of whatever they were signaling. It was like wading into an overpopulated galaxy.

Pretty

As I sat there, watching Okwu dance with its god, I thought about how strange it was that for me to swim in water was taboo and for Okwu such a taboo was itself a taboo. I remember thinking, The gods are many things.

I moaned, breathless with terror. My oldest brother, father, and grandfather had seen the Night Masquerade at different times in their lives.

“You people are so brilliant, but your world is too small,” the old woman who was my father’s mother, my grandmother, said. “One of you finally somehow grows beyond your cultural cage and you try to chop her stem. Fascinating.” She looked at my father. “Don’t you remember what happened with your father?” She straightened up. “Your daughter, my granddaughter, has seen the Night Masquerade.”

Dancing was like moving my body in the way that I saw numbers and equations move when I treed. When I danced, I could manifest mathematical current within me, harmonizing it with my muscles, skin, sinew, and bones.

However, I still didn’t know much about my okuoko. I didn’t understand how they affected me. How they connected me to the Meduse, especially Okwu. Why I could feel sensation through them. Why they writhed when I was furious. What I knew was that I could sense Okwu when I was on Math City and he was in Weapons City, which were hundreds of miles away and that I had once had a very weak but definite sense that the Meduse Chief who was planets away was checking up on me.

“I saw how you looked at us,” he said. “Just like every Himba I have ever encountered, like we’re savages. You call us the ‘Desert People,’ mysterious uncivilized dark people of the sand.” I wanted to deny my prejudice, but he was right.

“You Himba are so inward-looking,” she said. “Cocooned around that pink lake, growing your technology from knowledge harvested from deep within your genius, you girls and women dig up your red clay and hide beneath it. You’re an interesting people who have been on those lands for generations. But you’re a young people. The Enyi Zinariya are old old Africans.

Why don’t I ever want to do what I’m supposed to do?

Ahh

“It’s in the Collective,” he said, glancing at me. “That’s the Enyi Zinariya’s memory that we all can touch.”

In the stories of the Seven, life originated from the rich red clay that had soaked up rains. Microorganisms were called into active being when one of the Seven willed it and the others became interested in what would happen. That clay was Mother, otjize. I was clay now.

“The Enyi Zinariya won’t come with us?” I asked. She only looked at me. Then she said, “We’d come if there was a fight to fight.” I didn’t ask her what she meant. Above, the owl circled.