Pink Noise - Leonid Korogodski [37]
Then it stops.
It’s dark again. You aren’t whole—you don’t feel your arms. You’re mostly a naked mind, with skin and, oddly, legs. But you don’t care. You are used to that. You’re posthuman, and your name is Nathi.
Darkness crowds you—a myriad of tendrils reaching out from every direction to lay claim on your skin. You can’t see yourself. You only feel—a musky smell; tendrils of darkness whispering all over your skin; slippery wetness probing the arches of your feet.
Where am I?
You feel a sense of urgency. A beat begins, reverberating through the darkness, pulsing like a giant heart—but outside your space, which starts contracting and expanding, urging on. You are inside a womb. You didn’t have to breathe before, but now you’re in want of air. Darkness smothers you. You must escape—escape, immediately!—out of this body of a woman, find the light.
You run—and slip over the wet, cold stones. As you break the fall, as you instinctively discover arms, the stinging water brands you, nails you to the ground as with an electrical discharge at all four points of the rectangle—hands and arms. You scream.
A shaft of light.
You rise. You’re in a cave. From a small opening above you, a surprisingly white light falls over the surface of an underground pool. You are enveloped in a symphony of smells—of earthly smells. This can’t be Mars.
The surface of the pool begins to glow from beneath. The liquid light reveals strange pictures on the walls. Alien images, half people and half animals. You recognize them. You are touched by the deep sense of antiquity. You’ve seen them once before, when you visited the land of your forefathers back on Earth. Those rock paintings had existed long before the Nguni, the ancestors of the Zulu, had set foot near the Drakensberg massif—the “Dragon mountains”—back when the land belonged still to the San, the olive-skinned aborigines.
You have a sense of superhuman power awaiting at an arm’s reach.
Enter me.
A voice…, and not a voice. Internal pull. You have been called.
I’ve chosen you, isangoma. You are mine.
That’s what you’re here for. A drop of water falls—a splashing sound, and concentric circles widen over the surface of the pool.
You stare into it—
—and know you’re not alone in the cave. There is someone behind you, watching you, watching through you—and always from behind. You turn—it follows. You whirl—but cannot shake it off. An other gaze. Your hairs stand on end.
You dive.
It’s quiet at the bottom. In the strangely fierce light, you see the great ixhanthi snake coiled over a patch of white clay. It is from its forehead that the strange light shines. A woman with enormous breasts sits near, suckling swarms of shade-snakes. Every now and then, the great ixhanthi spits into the woman, she gets pregnant and gives birth—snake after snake.
You crouch low, grab some of the white clay, rise, and draw long lines of white down your arms and legs, across your forehead and between your eyes, along your nose, over your chin, down your throat, over your chest—until the navel.
“Now I enter you,” the great ixhanthi speaks—and spits all over you and into your eyes. You cannot see. You scream.
And you wake up.
You’re blinded by the bright light and the roar of the thousands of throats. You’re in an enormous crowd. The sweat of bodies packed together mingles with the stench of fear, and with something else, much worse.
“Witch!” someone screams. And then you learn what your own fear smells like.
But you live. It is a girl ahead of you that someone pointed at. She doesn’t have the time to say a word in her defense. Fists swing, and the girl’s head bounces back to hit you on the nose. You taste blood. The girl’s body sags against you, but she is picked up and carried over the heads of the dense crowd. You hear clothes ripping, but you cannot see. You’re pressed against the iron fence by a piling mass of bodies, now “promoted” into the front row—forced to watch, your face against the iron bars. Beyond this fence—a narrow open space,