Of course, I didn’t die.
Thirteen years later, I was standing in the Sahara, blowing thick smoke from between pursed lips, waiting for Étienne and his gang to finish loading the crates into the rear compartment of our armored transport. The Tuareg—Kel Tamasheq—warrior was smoking one of the same cigars as the kind they had brought us. He was watching his men as they squatted on the ground a short distance away, opening a portable parabolic antenna.
“I’ve been meaning to ask for a while now, but what’s with the dish?”
I had seen them bring it every time they came to trade with us. It was an antique communication device, the kind that you needed to use mechanical headphones with to hear. An unusual sight for a member of modern society, who was used to listening to her playlist of tunes on an embedded jawbone receiver.
“Huh? That? It is for sending ultra shortwave transmissions.”
“Who listens to shortwave radio these days?”
“No one. Which is why we use it to communicate with our ally on the International Space Station.”
That was a surprise. I had assumed that the ISS—a relic of the now-defunct United States of America—had been scrapped when its founding nation broke apart in the Maelstrom.
“Really? I had no idea anyone was still up there.”
“Several of your admedistrations joined together to purchase it for the purpose of cultivating astronauts, you see. They’re using it as part of a program to train particularly gifted students. One of our youths managed to beat out ten thousand other applicants—” the Tamasheq warrior slipped back his sleeve, an actor striking a pose, revealing a vintage wristwatch on his arm— “and he is passing over our heads at this very moment.”
“I’m surprised they even let him in with his background, coming from a warring state and all.”
“He grew up in Mali. He is a citizen of the Republic of Mali.
We have many allies who are citizens of many countries. It is one of our strengths as a nomadic people.”
“But what does he tell you from space? ‘I have seen the Earth, and she is blue, like our turbans’?”
The moment I said it, the young man squatting by the dish with the bulky-looking headphones held up his hand. His face had gone pale.
The warrior glared at him. “Calm yourself. What have you heard?”
“We are getting a transmission…a bogey, a surveillance WarBird he thinks, flying toward our position. Probably Nigerian. But the silhouette is strange for a surveillance bird. He says they might be armed.”
Étienne and his gang tensed. If their armistice monitoring group was caught on video trading with the Kel Tamasheq—even if they were only trading immunization patches for tobacco and alcohol—it would look very bad.
I sighed. “Now I see why you always went to such lengths to specify the place and time of our little meetings.”
They were setting the times to coincide precisely with the orbit of that museum of a space station carrying their young spy inside. While we were monitoring the Tuareg, they were watching us too.
“Yes, without the support of our friend above, we would not be able to make these trades. This is a battlefield, you know. He is our spy satellite.”
The Kel Tamasheq warrior thrust out his hand, and I placed the memorycel in it. People with WatchMe installed could use their own skin as a storage medium, transferring data merely by touching fingers for a few seconds, but the Tamasheq had demanded we bring the data inside this little rectangular crystal. Only then would they make the trade. They still only trusted things you could see with your eyes here. It was a kind of animism. Something physical had to be exchanged for there to be barter, and that was it. Even when the medium was essentially for show.
“This should work against the new infection that’s been spreading in the area. Just install it on your server and your WatchMe will block off the access routes that the disease’s prions are using.”
I should pause at this point to mention, somewhat belatedly, that the Kel Tamasheq people all had WatchMe installed too. Sorry if I gave you the wrong impression or conjured some romantic image of a primitive, pure people, unsullied by medical nanotech. The Tamasheq weren’t Mennonites or Amish. If something was good, they took it—in moderation. They were wise that way. If all it took was a brief injection, then sure, they’d install WatchMe in themselves.
So,
✦ ✦ ✦
<question>
<Q: Say you’re the Tuareg, and you’ve all injected yourselves with WatchMe and created an internal health monitoring network. So you’ve been monitoring your peoples’ health for a while, and you find this disease. What do you, as the Tuareg, do now?>
<A: You can’t do anything. No war-torn minority tribe has the money in their coffers to pay for an immunization program, even if they already have the distribution network in place. And the Kel Tamasheq medical server isn’t attached to the admedistration network either. It’s purely a local area network—an ethnic-area network, even.>
</question>
✦ ✦ ✦
We had protected their server for them on several occasions. And now, we helped them by copying immunization program patches from our base server and trading them to them in secret.
In other words, our little illicit trade was saving lives.
All with programs filched from the admedistration.
✦ ✦ ✦
<list:item>.
<i: We save lives.>
<i: We get smokes.>
</list>
✦ ✦ ✦
“The deal is made.”
“And we’re out of time.” I gathered my long hair into a ponytail. “We’ll be heading back to our ‘temple’ now, before Niger finds us here.”
The Kel Tamasheq gave a hearty laugh. “If you hate your gods so, why not come live with us, woman of the medicine people? We treat our women with much respect. Especially now when there is war, women are very precious to us.”
“Thanks for the proposal, but I’ll pass.”
“For what reason?”
“For the very reason that I’m here in the first place—because I’m a coward.”
For three or four seconds, the Kel Tamasheq warrior looked at me in silence. To show that he understood and was sorry on my behalf.
I could talk the talk, but I was thoroughly unable to leave my admedistration, to escape the society into which I’d been born. No matter how much I wanted to leave. And why was this? In a word, fear. No matter how much I hated it, I couldn’t bear to see it all go away.
It was this fear that:
✦ ✦ ✦
<list:item>
<i: Left Miach to die alone.>
<i: Left Cian and me to remain.>
</list>
I think I just wasn’t strong enough to follow Miach to the other side.
I wasn’t brave enough.
That was all the Kel Tamasheq warrior needed to hear in order to understand. His wrinkled, dark face, burnt darker by ultraviolet radiation, broke into a broad smile—a father’s smile. He stuck out his hand for a shake.
“Then we will meet at our next exchange, woman of the medicine people. If you should change your mind and wish to join us, you are always welcome.”
“At the next exchange, then, warrior of the people who speak Tamasheq.”
It was enough for me to know I had a place where I could escape.
The kindness the Tamasheq warrior had shown me was of a completely different variety from the forced charity I had grown up with. It was the sort of kindness that grew only in the harshest environments, among a people who had fought hard for their freedom against a long line of imperialists and dictators.
Both I and the warrior turned away then and walked back toward our own people.
“A little faster, ma reine!” Étienne called from the passenger seat window of the transport. I waved at him to quiet him down and went around to the other side, hopped in the driver’s seat, and gripped the wheel.