Pink Noise - Leonid Korogodski [9]
His mother, Sindi, leading their weekly miracle service. How she always looked incredible in the healer’s sunrise-blue, wading through the sky-peach of supplicants, a rolling wave of bodies bowing and rising, crying in her wake. A multitude of voices clamoring and winding to a fervent pitch. But it is she who sets the rhythm. She’s leading and not following the crowd. A touch, a glance, a word—not simply caring, but also carrying an undertone of steel. Belt sashes of pristine white lashing outward above the people sinking down to their knees, reaching the ones too far away for her to touch. And further yet—with a penetrating glance that jumps the psyche like a bullwhip’s crack. People starting as if touched by the divine, shouting or bursting into tears, rolling on the ground. And the sashes flicking to and fro—thin streaks of white. It was by watching her that Nathi learned a healer must possess a sharper edge.
Sindiswa used to be an isangoma prior to conversion, a traditional diviner-healer. It was a mark of evil times that such as she could be accused of witchcraft, for the izangoma were witch-finders, enemies of the abathakathi, evil sorcerers and witches. But there was a short distance indeed between a healer and a poisoner. The old belief that behind every serious illness or untimely death there is an umthakathi, a witch responsible for bringing it, was always running strong—for superstition feeds on people’s misfortune, the kind that they cannot control.
The gap between the rich and poor grew, including the affordability of posthuman immortality. With life and death increasingly dependent on technology, the technocratic cliques—the prototypes of wizard orders—increased their influence. The dwindling human population of the richest nations lived in a quite different, increasingly encapsulated world. It was a measure of their isolation that it fell to the amaZiyoni to colonize Mars, though the technology had been around for three centuries by then.
The old market economy stagnated. Economic crises crippled the developing world’s so-called development. As wealth production all across the world came down, standards of living plunged even below the level of a preindustrial society. Mortality skyrocketed.
When it became too much to take, witch-hunts began. So many perished—burned, impaled. But although the amaZiyoni believed in witchcraft, they did not believe that “once a witch, always a witch.” They took the accused witches in, provided they converted.
Izangoma were another matter, for they were considered to be possessed. Some thought that her indiki spirit would destroy her if Sindiswa entered baptismal waters. But she lived. Her spirit had apparently agreed to be baptized with her. She entered the waters twice.
And that was how Nathi’s mother met Xolani and became his left hand side wife, days before their exodus from Earth to build a new Zion on Mars. If anything, they built a strong and happy family. Women outnumbered men two to one in most of the amaZiyoni communities, and rivalry between co-wives was an everyday reality. But not a few times Nathi saw his father’s other, nominally senior, wife melt under one of Sindi’s crack-whip glances, when he was already old enough to understand that wasn’t rivalry.
Sindi quickly rose to the rank of prophetess, doing much the same thing that she did as isangoma—healing. She was born to that. Diviner’s calling wasn’t passed from parent to child, nor was the calling of healer, and yet every generation of his family on his mother’s side had at least one member that their ancestors’ shades had called upon.
The gift of healing was in Nathi’s blood. But, strangely, he could not recall how he became a brain doctor. For he certainly did not begin as one.
When he was twenty, the time bomb of the old Earth exploded. Global Riots toppled most of the old-style governments. The age of parahuman caste technocracy began, with its new e-World economy. In order to suppress the riots, the new rulers of the world threw open the doors of post