“All the way to the shuttle station?” I said, with a laugh.
“I’ve been studying all day,” she said. “I need the exercise.” She was wearing a tight green body suit made of a material so thin that I could see the bulging muscles on her long graceful arms and legs. 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.
Haifa was much taller than me and one of those people who found motion so easy that she couldn’t resist moving all the time. 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. She’d joked that this process took longer than my getting stung in the back with a stinger to become part Meduse. “But it’s why I get to be so tall,” she’d bragged.
Every morning, she jogged several miles and then lifted logs at the lumberyard up the road. “The better to compete with people from other places,” she now said, stepping to my pod. “Not easy being a human in the weapons department; we’re so weak. Plus, I owe you,” she said, gesturing to her astrolabe.
She started rolling my pod before I could say “yes,” her thick black braids bouncing against her back. As she went, I swiped otjize from my forehead with my index finger, knelt down and touched the finger to the red Oomza soil, grounding the otjize into it. “Thank you,” I whispered. I ran to catch up with Haifa, clutching my satchel to the side of my long silky red-orange wrapper.
“You think your family is going to like your new hairstyle?” Haifa asked, as she pushed and rolled the pod over the rocky path. A large succulent plant pulled in one of its branches as we passed it.
“It’s not hair,” I said. “They’re—”
“I know, I know,” she said, rolling her eyes. “Can’t believe you allowed the Meduse to do that to you. Now you’re Himba and one of those freaks. But I suppose it’s better than dying.”
I chuckled. “Much better.”
“How come you’re going home so soon, anyway?” she asked.
I stepped over a particularly large stone. “It’s just time.”
She looked over her shoulder at me as she rolled my pod. “Why isn’t that monster here to help you? Does he know you’re going?”
I rolled my eyes. “I’m meeting Okwu at the launch port.”
“How did it score top of the class on the quarter final? I hear it paid off the professor.”
I laughed, nearly jogging to keep up now. “Don’t believe everything you hear.”
“Or just carry a big gun at all times so that people will always tell the truth,” she said, giving the pod a push.
About a hundred meters from the shuttle station, Haifa decided to outdo herself by picking up my pod and sprinting with it. When she reached the front of the shuttle station, she put the pod down, did a graceful backflip, and gleefully jumped up and clicked her heels. A few people waiting at the shuttle platform applauded with whistles, flashes of light, and slapping tentacles. Haifa took a dramatic bow for them. “I am amazing,” she declared, as I walked up to her.
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.”
The shuttle arrived, gliding on the smooth green oil path, and the five people waiting crowded quickly onboard. I was last to board, pinching my nose to avoid the blood smell of the pitcher plants. Haifa loaded my pod inside for me, gave me a tight hug, and leapt through the large round shuttle window near the entrance like a missile. Moments later, the shuttle got moving; it never waited for long. “Tell Okwu I send my insults!” Haifa shouted as the shuttle passed her. She started to run alongside the shuttle and for a moment, she kept up.
“I will,” I said.
“Safe travels, Binti! No fear, Master Harmonizer, you belong in space!” Haifa shouted and then the shuttle left her in its wake of blasted air, which blew her thick braids back. Holding on to the rail beside me, I turned and watched as we sped away from her. She did one more flip and waved enthusiastically. Then she was gone because we’d reached the day’s cruising speed of seven hundred miles per hour.
I stood there for a moment, feeling the usual moment of lightheadedness as the shuttle stabilized its passengers, and then I quickly went to my assigned window seat. I had to squeeze past two furry individuals and they protested when my otjize rubbed off on their furry feet and one of my okuoko brushed one in the furry face.
“Sorry,” I said, in response to their growls.
“We’ve heard about you,” one said in gruff Meduse. “You’re a hero, but we didn’t know you were so . . . soily.”
“It’s not soil, its—” I sighed and smiled and just said, “Thank you.” Both of their astrolabes began to sing. They grabbed them and began another conversation among themselves and four others projected before them in a language I didn’t understand. I sat down and turned to the window.
Fifteen minutes later, when we stopped in Weapons City, I met up with Okwu, who was coming from a meeting with its professor; somehow the two hadn’t killed each other and I was thankful. One day the Meduse and the Khoush will get over themselves, I thought. The treaty was a good start.
An hour later, we arrived at the launch station. And that’s when I began to feel ill.
*
The three university medical center doctors who’d examined me said I was suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder because of what happened on the ship last year. For the first few weeks, I was okay, but eventually I started having nightmares, day terrors, I’d see red and then Heru’s chest bursting open. Sometimes, just looking at Okwu made me want to vomit, though I never told it this was happening. And then there were the random instances of intense focused fury that invaded my usually calm mind.
Eventually, Okwu and I were ordered by the departments of mathematics and weapons to see therapists. Okwu never mentioned how its sessions went and I didn’t ask. You just don’t ask a Meduse about such things. I doubt it told any of its family, either. In turn, Okwu never asked about my sessions.