A Science Fiction Saga
Alien Mysteries by Scott Michael Decker
Series Excerpt
Tool satchel slung over her shoulder, Nosuma approached the building entrance, dressed in her digs. The loose khaki cloth did little to beautify her appearance, the drab, shapeless garb nearly obscuring her already thin physique. Boyish, she'd always been called.
The two security personnel at the door demanded her ID. They exchanged a glance and waved her through. Nosuma didn't remember seeing them the day before.
She found Doctor Kaonde in his office. “Where to, today, Doctor?”
Tugulu Kaonde looked over from a holoscreen filled with text. The image collapsed, and he pushed away from his desk. “We'll forego touring other sites for now, Doctor. We've received several threats overnight.” He gestured at a map on the wall. “I'm assigning you to Naletale, north of here, halfway up the continent. No major cities nearby, few holos, little communication with the outside world, and the native populace predominantly of the Tsoko Mutupo, the monkey.”
“The playful totem,” she said.
“And keen of wit,” he added. “Naturally, the Institute will buy out the lease you just put on that bungalow—”
“How'd you know about that?”
“The police tried to contact you at the hotel, didn't find you, and ran a trace on your rental hover. They posted a guard outside the bungalow all night, at the Institute's expense, of course.”
She frowned, wondering whether they were reconsidering their contract with her.
“Don't worry,” he said. “Your find yesterday has already brought far more attention to the Institute than any previous publicity effort to date. Donations have spiked accordingly. Anyway, you're to leave immediately.”
“My belongings at the bungalow?”
“Rufi is retrieving them. He'll be back momentarily. The three of you will make the trip overland.”
“Rufi and who else?”
“Your guard.”
She stared at him, dismayed. “What kind of threats were they, Doctor?”
He met her gaze. “Threats of death, and worse, of sending midzimu yavo to pursue you.”
Their ancestor spirits, she translated. Worse than death. The Shona believed that a person's spirit continued to influence the lives of the living and events in the community. Right after death, the spirit was dangerous and unpredictable, but did eventually settle down to guard the surviving family. The recently deceased were often invoked to pursue one's enemies.
“Hopefully, they aren't Muroyi threatening to change shape into lions to chase me across the savannah.” Mediums who channeled ancestors and solicited their advice on behalf of family or totem members were sometimes reputed to change shape while in trance.
“None of that goes on here, Doctor,” Tugulu said. “Don't listen to the old folk tales.” He pulled his holocom from his pocket. “Rufi is downstairs now. You'd better go.”
“Naletale, it is then. It'll keep me out of the spotlight, anyway.”
One of the smaller Zimbabwes, Naletale had been picked over by archeologists for all its significant finds, and now all that remained was the tedium of completing its excavation.
As she made her way from the building, the feeling of rejection wouldn't leave her. First, relegated to Babwe, a backwater planet whose excavation sites were of little significance to the profession. And now relegated to a backwater site whose significant finds had all been excavated.
A backwater site on a backwater planet.
The sting of rejection was like the lash of a scorpion's tail.
Nosuma bit back her tears, her jaw rippling.
Rufi was driving, she saw, a female guard in the back seat. She stowed her tool satchel in the trunk, keeping only her handbag with her as she climbed into the forward passenger seat beside Dr. Kaonde's assistant. “Why you, Rufi? Surely, they could have found someone else to drive me.”
“I have family near Naletale, and I needed a few days off.” Then he grinned at her. “Doctor Chaos wasn't too happy with me, strong-arming signatures in front of you that way.”
She stifled a laugh, relieved to hear she wasn't the only one causing Dr. Kaonde conniption fits. “What do you think of all this mess?”
“I think in order for you to have caused such a commotion that you must have powerful ancestors guarding you. Not only have you offended almost a tenth of the populace on Babwe, you've caused an uproar at the Institute. There's an entrenched faction in our bureaucracy adamant we've outlived our purpose and intent on closing the Institute, or at least downsizing it.”
“Proved them wrong my first day of work,” she quipped.
“And slapped a gigantic exclamation point onto your dissertation.”
She certainly had. Whatever ethnographic and historical interpretations had been affixed to the excavations at the Great Zimbabwe and all the lesser Zimbabwes had been thrown into chaos by the statuette unearthed yesterday.
Nosuma squirmed in her restraints to look at the guard in the back seat. “Doctor Nosuma Okande,” she said, sticking out her hand.
“Kwena Amakosae, and my totem is the antelope.”
“Mhara Mutupo,” she said, not surprised that the guard would volunteer her affiliation. “I'm of the Madziva Mutupo.”
Kwena's eyebrows rose. “Your clan isn't happy with you, Doctor.” She had a directness to her uncharacteristic of the Shona peoples.
“No, I suppose they aren't.”
“I would be very upset if I were told my ancestors had given birth to antelopes.” Kwena looked to be young, not more than twenty-five.
“It's said that the younger generation tends to believe less stringently in the ancestral ways than their forebears,” Nosuma said in Shona.
Kwena nodded. “Except in outlying areas with little exposure to the people who come from the sky. You speak Shona well, Doctor.”
“Thank you. Where are you from, Ms. Amakosae?”
“Mutare, Doctor Okande, near the east coast.”
“Near Vumba, isn't it? An early Khami Period settlement,” Nosuma added, “where the arrangement of granaries symbolized the distinctions between men and women, elderly and young, rich and poor.”
“The lines of ancestral authority are strictly enforced in Mutare to this day, Doctor. It can be … difficult there.”
She sensed the young woman wanted to say more. “Glad you're along. It's an eight hour trip? Perhaps you'll tell me a little more about your people.”
“I'd be honored, Doctor.”
The hover banked and turned onto the highway heading north out of town.
From her handbag at her feet, the pole sculpture peered, sitting beside her blush compact, the female face below elaborate braids looking at her sternly, as though displeased with her.
Assigned to a planet where the people revere their ancestors as though their spirits remain with us to influence our actions and our environment, she thought. Ironic that I would happen upon a teak sculpture which gives me a glimpse of the spirit world. Or some world beyond the five human senses.
In her dissertation, Nosuma had argued that modern ethnographic, archeologic, and anthropologic interpretations imposed severe limitations on researchers' views of the lifestyles, languages, and customs of the ancient Bantu peoples who'd occupied the five Zimbabwes. She'd become an expert on the Zimbabwes not necessarily out of choice, but simply that the Zimbabwes seemed the most obvious example of this type of theoretical blindness, partly because of the culture's lack of a written language, and partly because of the vacuum of information surrounding these ancient sites. Five hundred years of inoccupancy had cloaked them with a thick veil of mystery. She'd only meant in her dissertation to encourage her colleagues in the field to be more open-minded about their work in general.
In doing so, she'd succumbed to an analogous trap, that of specializing in the Zimbabwes. I wish I'd tried for a post elsewhere, Nosuma thought, the landscape rushing past the vehicle windows.
Multiple theories as to the abandonment of the sites had been postulated, each citing artifacts unearthed in various locations, some citing local legend, but none of them able in Nosuma's thinking to establish definitively the reasons these edifices were no longer in use.
She looked over her shoulder. “Kwena, what do your people say about the Zimbabwes? Why were they abandoned?”
“Vumba, our elders say, was invaded by a clan of Muroyi—yes, Doctor, an entire clan of witches—who cursed the people living within the stone walls, giving them sicknesses that no N'anga could cure, no matter what ritual was used. Before then, people did what their forebears had done, farming, stone-masonry, herding, and they were satisfied with the possessions their parents had, using their parents' gourds, living in their parents' houses. After they occupied the Zimbabwes, they yearned to do things their forebears had never done and to gather at their hearths things their parents had never had, desiring more for themselves than their mothers and fathers had ever possessed.”
“I've heard of that illness,” Rufiji said. “It's called greed.”
“I have heard that a sickness is spreading among the youth in Harare, the sickness of dissatisfaction,” Kwena said. “There is wealth all around them, and yet they demand more. It is what happens, the Vumba elders say, when too many people live in one place.”
“Why would the Creator, Mwari, curse his people for that?” Nosuma asked.
“It is not the Creator who curses his people,” Kwena replied. “Mwari only created us, and his creation is far too complex for him to worry about something so insignificant as people. We do not pray to God himself but always to the lesser clan or family spirits. Since they live in the spiritual world, they are in communication with all the other spirits, including God. Mwari has made them all and everything in this world, the good ancestral spirits and the evil ones. Therefore, it is much better to appeal to and place one's trust in the good spirits in the first place.”
“They say this about Vumba?” Nosuma asked.
“And Naletale, Regina, Dhlo-Dhlo, and the Guru Zimbabwe itself.”
“Rufi, what is your Mutupo?”
“The Tsoko, or monkey,” he replied, “the most clever creature amongst all the animals, a quick-minded, mercurial animal, agile and limber in both mind and body, unpredictable and highly intelligent. Our Mutupo reminds us to adapt ourselves to our environment, and to give thanks to the infinite miracles occurring in every moment of our lives. My father is the Svikiro, the tribal spirit medium, for the village of Shurugwi, near Naletale, a position that will come to me when he passes into the spirit world.”
Nosuma looked at him with increased respect. “Quite a bit different from what you're doing now, isn't it?”
“Au contraire, Doctor Okande,” Rufiji said. “The similarities are astounding. It will be a minor transition to intercede with Tsoko on behalf of Shurugwi after so many years of interceding with the evil spirit Doctor Kaonde on behalf of the Institute.”
Nosuma threw her head back and laughed. “And what does your Svikiro say about the Zimbabwe at Naletale?”
Rufiji looked suddenly somber, his eyes fixing to the road ahead and his hands gripping the controls. “It is a sad tale, Doctor. Are you sure you want to hear it?”
“If it wouldn't disturb you to tell it, Rufi. But if you're reluctant, surely another time or place will suffice. Perhaps your father can tell me the tale. I'm looking forward to meeting him.”
The administrative assistant nodded, looking remorseful. “It would be better if he were to tell it, Doctor Okande. I would feel … that I'm encroaching upon my father's duties, and I don't wish to speed his journey into that great beyond.”
Nosuma smiled and nodded, settling into her seat, watching the passing scenery, the rolling hills brown with late summer grasses. She glanced at her bag sitting on the floor at her feet.
The stern expression on the figurine was gone.
* * *
A jostling awoke her.
The sky was in twilight, and the first thing Nosuma noticed was the absence of motion. The near-silence was disconcerting.
“We're here,” Rufiji said.
She blinked the sleep from her eyes and climbed from the vehicle.
Kwena stood to one side of the hover, one hand near her sidearm, her eyes roving the surrounding savannah.
They were parked near a large rondavel, a mud-and-wattle structure with a thatch roof some thirty feet across. Attached to one side was a granite section, similar in materials to the mortarless walls at the Zimbabwes. Above the door was the Institute emblem, the same as that on the hover doors.
“You and Kwena will be staying here,” Rufiji said. “Shurugwi is just a mile down this road. I'd better go see my family or they'll be worried. The Naletale Zimbabwe is that direction, about two miles. I'll be by in the morning to pick you up and take you to the site.”
“Thank you, Rufi. Give my greetings to your father and your family. I hope to meet them soon.” She pulled her belongings from the back, her satchel of tools, two suitcases of clothes, a smaller valise for her cosmetics, and her handbag. All her worldly possessions.
“You're welcome, Doctor.” He got back in and the hover roared to life.
After quartering the area, Kwena helped her in with her belongings.
Unlike the outside, the inside of the rondavel looked like a conventional modern house, not terribly different from the bungalow she'd briefly occupied. The granite-walled portion was a bedroom, a window somehow fitted into a gap between bulky granite slabs, and the room adjacent to it was a bath. The large room under the thatch roof was a combined kitchen, dining, and living area, the inside walls finished with sheetrock, three light fixtures hanging from the ceiling, one near the hood over the stove. A counter jutted from one wall beside the kitchen, creating extra counter and cupboard space. The furniture was utilitarian, its fabric coarse with a dense variegated pattern covering the couch and armchair. A small bamboo dining set completed the ensemble, its glass top revealing the slightly-darkened dining-area carpet underneath. In need of a thorough shampooing, she thought. Devoid of personal possession, it exuded the same impersonal feeling as the bungalow.
“It's really only large enough for one person,” Nosuma said. “Surely they can't expect us both to occupy this tiny place.”
“I'll sleep on the couch, Doctor,” Kwena said.
“I wonder if there are better accommodations at the Zimbabwe.”
“Tents under stars, I'm willing to guess, but not much more. Don't worry, Doctor, I'll be comfortable. After all, I'm sharing a house with a wonderful person who honors me with her curiosity and compassion.”
The sting of rejection abated a bit. “Thank you, Kwena. Please, call me Nosuma. In a space as small as this, we'll probably get to know more of each other than we realize.”
“Probably. Thank you, Nosuma. I praise you to my ancestors.” She bowed.
The fleeting acceptance she'd felt at the Guru Zimbabwe returned. Curious, she thought, that it would come in these unfortunate circumstances.
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