You Can Always Go Back Home

A story by MWENYA S. CHIKWA

Chitundu felt the drag of her environmental suit on her limbs. She wanted to believe it was an effect of traversing the interplanetary light-speed passageway, but from the many dour strides around her in the caravan formation, she knew it was a lie. Given the clan’s rushed evacuation from their last planet, she guessed it was inevitable. Everyone had lost so much.

At least no one died. It was an empty comfort.

As if sensing her gloom, her father waved at her, smiling, strapped to the back of the six-limbed medical transport up ahead. The sight tugged on her web of frustrations, and she directed her anger on the only outlet she knew wouldn’t fight back, her aunt, already gone. The woman had deserted the clan two planets back and settled down with an all-women dancing troupe. If she’d been here, as always, accompanying her father’s explorations, he would’ve returned safely, and the clan wouldn’t have been caught unaware by the lightning sandstorm.

For this very result, leaving the clan was selfish disgrace, no matter the elders’ explanation for her aunt’s betrayal. Finding a place one belonged? What did that even mean?

It didn’t matter. Chitundu would show her. They would rebuild again and reclaim whatever was lost. She put more effort into her stride, trying to forget that no one ever returned once they left their planet-hopping nomadic clan. Her aunt would never see—

Chitundu slipped, right through the light-speed bridge.

A billion in one catastrophe. Her injured father, forced to yield the place in the formation, looked on in horror. The other clansmen and clanswomen around her dived for her flailing arms, their expressions strained, but they couldn’t move fast enough. The dilated second blinked, and her eternal pilgrimage ended.

Everything beyond Chitundu’s helmet view turned black in an instant. Deterioration warnings rang loudly inside her environmental suit, as she drowned back into real space. Space and time stretched her particle-thin, ready to diffuse her flesh into atoms. Theoretically, a painless death, but theory was fast becoming fiction.

The bridge’s safety protocols kicked in before she could even think of screaming, and zapped her to the nearest safe world. The helmet view blinked alight with a noonday sun, illuminating murky waters beneath, rushing up to smash her face.

*

The impact punched her unconscious. When sense returned, the water was around her, pouring inside the sinking suit through invisible cracks. The suit was lost, and her chances of surviving its valiant failure were dropping by the second. Her depleted oxygen stores flashed an alarm on her HUD. She held her breath and hit the emergency release inside the suit. The outer layer fizzed open from the neck down to her pelvis, but only slightly; allowing more water in, but gave her little room for escape.

Cheeks puffed, she pried the gap wider with all her strength, forcing her head and shoulders through, only for her right leg to coil around an elastic strap. Logic told her to ease off and loosen the strap instead of kicking her leg uselessly. Clouded instinct won out, and the armour she created to protect, clung tighter with each effort at reckless abandonment. The irony of it proved too taxing on her desperate mind to give dark relief. It was hard to think, brain squeezed tight between two crashing forces— the logical sense to hold her breath and the instinctual need to swallow fresh air. Her throat went dry and tight, begging for the latter.

She almost succumbed, but her will proved surprisingly stronger than her unconscious desires, lasting long enough for luck to trump both, as somehow, the seventh kick came good and freed her from the strap. She shot for the surface, unthinking, and didn’t realise she was aiming for the shimmering floating shadows above that looked like boats, until her head popped out of the water.

“Help!” She gulped three mouthfuls, barely holding afloat.

Five faces—diverse in age—no different from her own in features and complexion, stared from the safety of two wooden boats, stone faced. They watched her beg and plead, deaf, unable to understand the universal sign for, “I’m dying over here, please help.”

They watched on until all her strength waned and her bicep muscles became rocks, which wasn’t long. She sank.

Finally, two children jumped in to save her.

*

Later that evening, sitting around a communal fire on the lake’s bank, one of Chitundu’s seemingly detached rescuers— a boy her age, explained, “umuntu nga alenwina, kumuleka mpaka amaka yapwa elyo mwamwabula,” which he then translated loosely to, letting a drowning victim lose all their strength before trying to rescue them in a bid to prevent two victims.

That cleared the water out of her ears. “You know my language.”

“You’re not the first visitor to fall out of the sky.” His word choice was archaic and verbose, forcing her mind to break the words down to her closest understanding. The approximation sounded too good to be true, as it implied an alleviation to the sudden shock of her fall and violent separation from her people. As far as she knew, there was no way back to the light-speed “passages” her nomadic people called home once falling out.

“What happened to the others? Were they like me?” She almost bit her tongue.

The boy mouthed her words, as if tasting them would aid understanding. She guessed he was doing his own approximation. He then turned to the oldest person around the fire, a big round woman, who seemed to lead their nomadic commune, and spoke in a language that eluded comprehension. The ignorance exacerbated her anxiety.

The woman chortled, slapping the wrist of the child plaiting her long hair into mukule. She spoke a language with clicks.

“Which one?” The boy translated. “One became mother to five tribes, another chased the apocalypse, others assimilated or went mad.” The elder laughed again, recalling something funny that went over Chitundu’s head, but resonated with the others around the fire, inspiring the drummers to play beats imitating a rough tumble.

Chitundu unconsciously shrunk inward at the communal laugh.

“Long story,” The boy noticed the dent in her already low demeanour and told her the short version of what she assumed was a common legend.

She still didn’t get it, and thankfully, he didn’t torture her with further explanation.

“I assume,” he continued translating the old woman’s words. “You’re more concerned with the one that built a way back home to the path beyond the eternal end.”

Chitundu’s lips quivered despite the ample warmth of the fire. “A way home?”

“According to legend.” The boy nodded, his confidence implying something much closer to obtainable fact than myth. “The name is Mwamba-child-of-Nkole by the way.” He touched his chest in introduction.

She cringed at her faux pas, and clasped her hands, one on top of the other, in greeting. “Chitundu.”

That earned a set of drum beats, set to the syllables of her name. She cracked a smile when she noticed it and the whole camp laughed. Their game to make the lost stranger smile finally won.

*

Sleep brought clarity, and with it came rationalisation. The only plausible path back to her people was creating a gate from scratch, a herculean task even for her people, who were craft masters. How then would one diasporic offshoot manage the feat alone? The technology she’d seen thus far didn’t inspire confidence. And worst of all, she’d never heard of someone returning home after falling through the bridge.

The fraying thoughts sent her out of the conical reed shelter, into the cold predawn morning. There, the fading stars winked duller than they usually did, across the many rest planets she’d visited, even though unlike the others, this planet wasn’t close to its doom.

She hummed her parents’ lullaby unconsciously; a rhyming string of advice and self-affirmations, coded in a cadence that imbued an attitude of who she ought to be in impossible times. Their distant essence prickled her skin electric with vivid memory, as she rocked her body tight. It almost broke her.

The old woman shattered her delicate balance, when she engulfed Chitundu in a thick blanket hug from behind. Chitundu thought about smacking the woman’s wrist as she had done the child the previous night, but she’d already lost control over her quivering muscles. Whispered words of comfort she didn’t need to know to understand burrowed deep and sucked on her knotted pain, as a drummer named Mukabe, sat beside them to continue the lullaby in the midst of Chitundu’s shattering cry.

* 

Mwamba emerged from the men’s conical shelter late in the afternoon, eyes red, his movements lethargic as he approached Chitundu and the others on the banks. She judged his late waking, lazy, but was too kind to utter it.

“Apologies.” He joined her in gutting fish. “I had a late consultation with the shinganga,” he explained. “And then some strange bitter goat haunted my dreams, bleating an obnoxious rage in the early morning.”

Embarrassment froze her like a malfunctioning machine. She punched him in the shoulder and sent him tumbling on his back. “I’m not a domesticated animal.”

His people erupted in mocking laughter.

“What did I say?” He whined and moaned, doubting his own translation. “I should’ve kept sleeping.”

The divers of the family group cut the commotion short, as they came out the lake, dragging Chitundu’s algae-stained environmental suit. From a glance, she knew it was dead. Fried from the fall and finished off by the water. The adults didn’t seem to care, and gathered around the thing as if it was more important than the fish meant for supper.

“It’s useless,” she mumbled.

“The craft specialists from the Island said they would need it.” Mwamba rose. “Something about it still being connected to the path, or carrying fleas that can help them plot a path back. I don’t know, I’m paraphrasing. Did that make any sense?”

“Do you mean particles,” she asked.

“Yes. Fleas,” he confirmed, reigniting hopes she didn’t know were dead.

“Who are these craft specialists? I need to speak with them,” she insisted, excited and confused, since all she heard last night was the old woman, the shinganga, Mwamba and a few drummers dancing into the night.

He scrutinised her feet. “How good is your dance?”

* 

Dance as a form of long distance communication. Ten days on and Chitundu still couldn’t fathom the feat, no matter how many ways Mwamba explained it on their way to meet the distant craft-specialists.

“Now explain it like you’re talking to a baby alien from the future,” she said.

He laughed, protective hand raised against the descending sun’s rays, before translating it to Mukabe walking beside them. The drummer smirked and hit out a beat in response. The first part took Chitundu back to the fire, when she first introduced herself. Her name. The next rhythm that followed was new, added onto with each passing day.

“What?” She watched the two siblings watching her, expectant.

Mwamba opened his mouth to speak but two jovial adult voices interrupted, declaring an end to the day’s trek. Chitundu looked up to the ample remaining daylight and bit into her lower lip. She failed to understand why the group chose to waste so much time, especially when conditions were still favourable, as none of the oldest people in the group looked anywhere near exhausted, busy matching the haphazard pace of the youngest.

Back in her tribe, they exploited time to the fullest at each opportunity. Tomorrow’s conditions are never guaranteed.

“Come,” Mwamba patted her shoulder. “I‘ll explain again while we set up the homes.”

She lingered, discontented. Mukabe eyed her and played a taunting beat. Her intention to cause further infuriation, clear.

“Shut up,” Chitundu groaned, yielding. “I’m not letting you get to me.”

Mukabe smiled, her drums thumping predator patience.

* 

Despite the denial, Chitudu fumed in silence throughout the reconstruction of the homes the group carried around, raging a one-participant internal argument about wasted time that went on into supper. She felt foolish because the group had broken from their usual migratory route, following the wild herds, to aid her plea, but nurtured habits chafed like a bad infection against her logic.

Luckily, she wasn’t the only one smouldering petty grievances that night, and hoped to go unnoticed, hidden by the more obvious gloom emanating from the usual cooking crew. They had refused to cook tonight, the result, a noticeable drop in her appetite, an outlier effect, unlike everyone else, who moaned audible satisfaction with each bite.

The usual cooking crew’s mood darkened with each satisfied exhalation, united in their disgust for the meals served. From their postures, Chitundu was sure the youngest boy among them would, at any moment, throw a bowl to the ground and cook up a new meal in challenge.

Supper’s end seemed to be building to this very moment, when the old woman, everyone called “Mayo,” sat next to her, and cut off Mwamba’s tenth explanation attempt.

“I hear you are unsatisfied with our pace,” she said through Mwamba after a quick greeting.

Chitundu wanted to hold her tongue, but felt lying would insult the elder’s effort. She swallowed before she began, starkly aware that these new faces, though no longer strangers, controlled her fate.

“Where I come from,” she stuttered and Mwamba mimicked; the neurotic accurate fool. “You push yourself while you still have the appetite. You don’t pity your body while it's hale. Like a hungry person looking for food, one has to operate at their productive limit in the best times. Anything less is a waste of potential.”

The elder nodded thoughtfully, digesting her words, then after a moment said, “But if the hungry person had food, would they choose to walk about at a pace that chewed their soles raw?”

The earnestness in her tone cleaved any harm Chitundu would’ve deciphered from the words if spoken by another. This wasn’t a rebuttal meant to debate, but an explanation of philosophy in the form of a question meant to offer a glimpse through their eyes. She didn’t need to agree with it, just understand how they saw things.

Chitundu nodded, the knot of agitation in her veins suddenly beginning to loosen.

The elder then squeezed Mwamba’s wrist as if struggling to rise. “Now pretend as if I’m explaining something important to you,” he urged, “and gulp those undercooked cassava leaves down like it’s the best thing you’ve ever tasted.”

Chitundu turned to the elder, confused, and noticed her staring at her bowl, barely touched. The elder’s own was licked clean.

“Unless you want to eat stale meals all the way to the Island, eat like you’re a starved pig.”

As a child born to a tribe that preferred scavenging dying worlds than living among the opulent close-minded planets they encountered, not wasting a meal was an elite passive skill at this point.

She devoured the meal in five gulps and drank the bowl dry. Her efficiency set off the cooking crew into a non-verbal roar; the oldest spat to the ground, the adults loudly sucked their teeth and the children glared at her as if she had slapped them unmerited.

“What did I do?” She gulped.

Mukabe answered with an obnoxious winding drumbeat, aimed at the cooking crew and earned herself a flying bowl to the head, nearly missing. She didn’t even flinch, smiled, and added further pace to the taunting rumble. The group broke into a communal chiding laugh aimed at the frustrated cooks.

“You just started the good kind of war,” Mwamba informed.

*

After supper’s commotion had exhausted itself quiet, the chorus drumbeat of unity awakened everyone to their feet. The mood was infectious, as all members of the group danced into perfectly synchronised columns around three bonfires.

Intimidated, Chitundu tried to linger on the outside with the drummers that were orchestrating the seamless jubilation, but a woman papa-ling a chuckling baby on her back tugged her in, and pointed her towards a flustered Mwamba.

“What am I supposed to do,” she mouthed to her translator, dancing across a blaze engineered by the shinganga’s chemical additions.

“Just follow your beat?” He mouthed back before splitting off into a snaking column that took him away. They clashed again, five rotations later around a different fire. The woman carrying the child switched with Mwamba, and shouted something that made everyone in earshot laugh but not break the flow. “What did she say?”

“That if I, the worst dancer, can learn, anyone can,” Mwamba groaned. “Just follow my lead and move to your beat.”

Before she could ask, Mukabe’s drums blended the opening to the beat she had been annoying Chitundu with since the first night. To her surprise, her beat seeped easily into her blood, appropriating her parents’ lullaby as a base before morphing into something strange and instinctive beyond comprehension.

Music is the ultimate form of art, she felt Mukabe and her fellow drummers boast through their skilful sound wave conjunctions that gripped her like magical puppet strings.

They told her when to shake her waist, step forward then back, angle her left leg while her right held straight, then broke forward again in a cheeky manoeuvre that defied explanation but made everyone cheer and clap. Then the sequence started over again, each time the drummers added a new twist to it, all the while drinking various dark concoctions from the shinganga when they passed the fires.

The fever of excitement ran Chitundu mad and stripped the fears she held tight not so long ago, when she’d watched the dance from the outside. It didn’t matter that she wasn’t perfect, it only mattered that she was a part of the shared communication. Dance was for everyone, Mukabe’s drumbeat urged, and asked for one more thing: her body.

She let go without hesitation. More accurately, she didn’t even notice when her body became its own entity and she became an outsider watching it from a strange far away plane. All around her, new faces as diverse and numerous as the stars entered the plane. The music dimmed, left behind in the physical.

*

Once everyone settled, the familiar crowd parted with veneration for a regal young woman, who wore a matching chitenge dress and chitambala embroidered with blue and white beads. Behind her, a circle of finely dressed elders followed.

“Chitundu,” Mwamba introduced her to the circle of mostly women. “These are the family’s chosen elders for this gathering, led by mama Kankasa, a master craft specialist in all things involving portal travel.”

The elder’s scrutinizing eyes bore a chill through her detached soul, and triggered Chitundu’s sudden need to list all her accomplishments to validate her worth. She tried to speak but her mind’s tongue twisted gibberish.

Mama Kakasa sighed. “Come lost child. Hurry like the past already gone. We have many matters to attend to in this gathering. Surely you don’t want us dancing to our deaths.”

Chitundu flinched at the comment, suddenly feeling like a burden, imagining the tremendous effort put in by these seemingly important strangers. To make it worse, in this plane her emotions were clear for all to see as starlight in the night sky.

“Don’t sour the mood, now.” Another elder specialist chided before the feeling settled. “Everyone gathered here came of their own will, eager to push their craft to the limit. Are all your kind this fragile?”

Chitundu’s beat increased tempo to match her rising temper. “How about you drop into a strange planet you’ve never known, and find out?”

The elders all laughed in synchronised glee, impervious to her wit. Their act was a degree above Mukabe’s playful antagonistic attitude already too insurmountable for Chitundu to combat. She restrained growling thoughts, dreading whatever would follow.

“At least you have heart, child.” Mama Kankasa judged, her expression still an elegant mask. “We’re going to need it if we’re to recreate this legend.”

*

The meeting that followed was so masterfully succinct that Chitundu remembered each word three months later, when she finally arrived at the Island. All her doubts were gone, the plan to build her a gateway home clear, and its working theory tighter than anything she’d expected. There was no doubt she would go home, with so many craft specialists in different fields from around the world assembled for the task. Hundreds split into ten groups to aid productivity with her at the centre of one of them, all of them reporting to mama Kankasa’s master-craft group.

Her only enemy now was time.

Ten years, Chitundu stewed at her last supper with the migratory community, on the Island’s outskirts. That was her sentence to this world, and the earliest estimate on completing the gateway to take her back home. The sentence wasn’t all that bad, a thing she was fast realising now that she had to leave the group she had come to know and trust. These nomads had sprung her back to life from her lowest and softened the trauma of forced separation from her people. In the moment, her cushioned aloneness slowly began to return.

She stared at each face about to leave her behind, wishing one would read her mind and stay. They ate on, jovially, their joy, though unintentional, a stab to the heart.

She tried her best to keep it together, refusing to break in front of mama Kankasa, and settled her blurry eyes on Mwamba, her anchor throughout this whole ordeal. His prospective absence made her weak, fractured between two warring desires; the need for assured comfort and the need to ensure the passage home got completed in time.

I have to help build the gate, she told herself. Even if it meant staying in one place during her prime years— a period her planet-hopping people demanded that one experiences a diverse range of cultures and modes of thought to prevent extreme close-mindedness. With her people, in one complete cycle of the seasons here, she would probably visit five planets. All vastly different, and not just in terms of language, physiology, and biomes, but planetary processes that the people here would think incomprehensible.

Ten years! Her chest tightened, she would be twenty-two by then. Her mind already settled on its “objective” centre. The anxiety multiplied the pain from her fast accruing losses of family and crushed her chest breathless.

“You’ll have plenty of time to see them again.” The community’s mayo sat beside her, no need to use Mwamba as a conduit anymore. The Island settlement was an annual stopping point for the group, she had reassured. “Besides, we have our own role to play in the gateway’s construction.”

Chitundu scoffed down her boiled mushrooms mixed with groundnuts, trying to prevent speech she knew would break her to tears.

Never hold it in, her parents’ memory urged later on when her bowl emptied and there was nothing left in the pots to replenish her coping mechanism, the memory finally pushed her over.

“It’s just food, child.” Mama Kankasa caught her, inconsolable, as the drumbeat of unity played a celebratory farewell rhythm behind them. Of all the people, Chitundu poured out more tears, unable to turn away the young elder’s embrace. In that moment, any comfort would do. “Don’t worry, we’ll cook you more food.”

“It’s not the food.” She tried to shout but only managed sniffles between wrenching gasps.

“I know,” Mama Kankasa said, patting her back knowingly. “And we’ll cook you more of that too, once you get settled.”

She stilled herself after gaining some control. “Why are you helping me?”

The elder looked at her as if she were a lion eating grass. “It’s what I’d expect any capable stranger to do for my lost child.”

The following morning, the elder’s promise materialised. Mwamba and Mukabe decided to take up their scheduled Island residency earlier than planned. Mwamba, already a language master craft specialist, would be teaching, translating and archiving dying languages for the Island’s voiced libraries, while Mukabe had a communication project with global ambitions.

“I guess we’re stuck together.” Mwamba smiled thinly as they watched his community disappear beyond the wild bush. His choice was still an open war on his face. Clearly, he didn’t want to be stuck in stuffy rooms this early in his life.

She gripped his hand tightly, not brave enough to let him go and face this new phase of the strangeness alone. Mukabe, on the other hand, rapped a fast-paced beat with a melancholic undertone as she walked away, communicating that they should stop wasting time and move. They had a gateway to complete.

Chitundu remained until Mwamba was ready, knowing time was the only valuable possession she could offer for this gift. Besides, what was a few hours added onto ten years anyway?

* 

The Island turned out to be a sprawling lake settlement called Samfya, neighbouring the actual island many referred to. Origin story short, the settlement spawned off a trading outpost built to satisfy the island’s craft-specialists, before it became the Island, after the craft specialists began to teach anyone willing, and the population exploded with knowledge seekers from near and far across the oceans.

It was a lonely place despite its diverse splendour of micro cultures, including an affluent one for stranded planetary outsiders. The hub, though welcoming, was an appetizing tease, never the full meal, and constantly reminded her of her parents, sisters and people. All lost, for now. Their fates and condition, always a constant superpositional dream.

Eventually, she stopped visiting the hub and withdrew to the voiced library in an attempt to prevent burdening her two companions any further by constantly triggering her homesickness.

Be in the moment, she preached to her will every time she passed the path heading to uMweshi district, where alien outlanders frequented. Can’t have Mukabe and Mwamba always looking after you when you break yourself.

Self-care, she went on until it became a habit. But it wasn’t all masochistic self-restraint and training-on-the-go about atomic relations across vast distances in her first year. She found refuge in listening to the philosophical publications in the vast voiced library on Island. The free to access knowledge depositories proved to be an infinite treasure of their own, whisking her away to the various places the settlement advertised but couldn’t fully deliver on.

The combination of work, companionship, and the library’s infinite slices of the world beyond created her grounding. Not the perfect terrain for seamless movement but enough to walk, and that’s all her people ever needed; a path.

Year two of the ten brought confidence and bleeding. The bleeding, a first of what Chitundu knew would become a cyclic release. She remembered her mother and sisters’ instructions as best as she could and prepared adequately for the day’s work on the project, now in the prototyping phase.

Taking precautions ran her late for her team’s meeting with the project leads. She could already imagine mama Kankasa’s berating as she dashed towards her collective’s workspace, housed inside three gigantic intertwining anthill-like buildings.

Symbolic buildings, the workspaces. The voiced libraries named them the place the ancient craft-specialists designed the first gate. One of their many archived blueprints, their guiding base for their current work. It was the perfect place for her collective to repeat history, break down her suit’s atomic composition and match it to the old one now lost to time.

She hoped her collective’s closeness built over the first year, in part due to a shared but relative outsider-syndrome, would prove strong enough to cover her lateness. It did, but was pointless in the end. Mama Kankasa caught her before she could even sneak into the workspace through a hidden corridor on the Smiths’ side of the hill, confirming the rumours that she was an all-knowing god.

“You’re late.” The elder’s voice zapped Chitundu’s crouched back straight. Chitundu turned and found the woman casually threading waist beads. Mukabe sat next to her, revealing her betrayal. Chitundu scowled at her friend and roommate she had sent ahead to run interference.

Mukabe shrugged and drummed a new indifferent tune in response.

“Come child.” Mama Kankasa rose from the bench. “Hurry, like the past—”

“Already gone.” Chutindu mouthed to the floor, staying put. Mama Kankasa’s sandaled feet approached and broke her view of the floor. Chitundu was too scared to look up. “I’ve work today.”

“It will still be there when you're back,” the elder reassured. “Now follow, before you make us late to your own initiation.”

* 

Who needed initiating into a biological phase one had no control over? Not Chitundu. Besides, she already knew everything the elders were teaching the other maidens— well, mostly. Maybe only a quarter, but that was equal to a full cup if she did the math acrobatics right. And math was never wrong.

Hmph! She pouted, pretending not to focus on the speakers, what a complete waste of time–

Her new favourite idol, Mulambwa, walked into the sheltered grove, and Chitundu almost squalled. The great craftswoman, named after the tenth Litunga of Barotseland, was an embodiment of the great legislative king’s ideals. Her applied works had taken her namesake’s strong humanist approach to law making, especially on theft and enslavement, and spread the laws to every royal court she was invited to advise.

As it turned out, mama Kankasa had convinced the highly sought after stateswoman to be Chitundu’s personal matron of honour for the initiation.

“I listen to your collected teachings every day.” She almost hyperventilated during their private walk through the tilled fields. “You’re the greatest living thinker.” And she would know, she had devoured most of the prominent ones during her assimilation lessons.

“I just regurgitate common sense.” The aged stateswoman sighed, uninterested. “The few good results I was fortunate enough to be part of, were just collective stubborn luck.”

“Well,” Chitundu said, her tone low. “I know many desperate worlds that could have used the stubborn luck you seem to engineer.”

The woman's eyes lit at that. “Tell me about them, if you’re willing.”

What she expected to be a one-sided lesson ended up being a discussion, diving into the difficult and ugly things not found on an open library shelf. The great thinker prodded Chitundu about her dreams beyond returning home, while sharing her own childhood aspirations, then expounded, listing those that failed, while dashing in joy from successes stumbled on along the way.

Chitundu wouldn’t get it until year eight, because she was having so much fun then, that they were deconstructing what made her type of role model; inside and out.

Initiation ended with the bestowing of Chitundu’s first waist beads. They came with additions from mama Kankasa and other female family elders. Each elder telling her a story about womanhood they thought would come in handy. The experience bonded her to them, as their equal, and filled her with confidence for the future.

*

Third year ended the first phase of gateway prototyping but left some old lingering disappointments alive.

“What ghost haunts you,” Mwamba asked as they watched the engineers and architects argue about the chosen construction site— a brown infertile field. “Did the craft specialist in your group pop your ego again?”

She grumbled in silence a little longer, guiltily savouring the attention, until she finished checking his written translations. “As if I would care what those crazy fools think.”

“Then what is this really about?”

If it was anyone else apart from him or Mukabe asking, she would have kept it to herself. But he had chosen to stay at the Island to help her adapt, when she wouldn’t have dared ask. Lying to him would only hurt her. “After initiation, I just thought mama Kankasa would be kinder, take me more seriously, maybe make me a part of the collective leading the project,” she admitted. “I can’t have someone else doing the hardest part for my sake.”

“You don’t want to put your fate in another’s hands,” he deciphered.

She didn’t argue.

“Then break it down. What does it take to lead? Mama Kankasa isn’t blind, show her that you can lead.”

She scowled, rolling up the batch of papers in her hand. 

“I’m not saying it will be easy,” he hurriedly added, afraid of a paper slap. “Start small. There’s always some organising committee looking for help prepping some ceremony around the settlement.”

She begrudgingly conceded. The fool had shockingly gained a grain of wisdom with all his new height.  Even fools get lucky, she guessed, but a growing intrusive thought at the back of her mind made her eyes linger on him, and a stupid smile creased her lips when she meant to be solemn.

He caught her staring. It took her a moment before she looked away to the evening sky. “Keep doing that and I might just remember you when I leave.”

She said the words as a warning, but as twisted luck would have it, it would be Mwamba who would leave her in the middle of year five. Chitundu overheard him and elders arguing about it when she approached the lead onsite construction shelter, to deliver her collective’s progress.

“It has to be now,” Mama Kankasa said. “While you’re young enough to absorb more of  the old languages.”

“I still have work here,” Mwamba said. “Risk assessment needs the translations to be accurate.”

“You can do that distantly,” Mama Kankasa pointed out. “Besides, Chitundu has mastered iChiBemba, Chichewa, and iChilamba. Your main reason for staying here is complete. She doesn’t need you anymore.”

Chitundu’s chest suddenly roiled hot. Who was she to decide that?

“Why get attached to someone destined to leave?” A male voice grumbled, probably tata Chanda.

That cut deep, and she had no defence for the poisoned truth.

“I don’t want to go, yet,” Mwamba insisted. There was silence. “You can’t make me.” Another suffocating silence.

“Don’t be the fool that inspires generations of hack griots to sing a tragedy,” another elder picked up. “Once the gateway kicks up, it will only accept her. What will you do then?”

“Look over your grave,” Mwamba shot back, matter-of-factly.

“Good then,” mama Kankasa cut off the elder’s reply, preventing an escalation. “You remember your chosen duty. I don’t need to remind you then why you need to make memories with your siblings across the sea. Unless you’ve changed your mind about becoming one of the clan’s caretakers?”

The words devoured Mwamba’s earlier resolve.

“It takes more effort than shared blood to keep a family together,” mama Kankasa ended the argument.

Two days later, he left for the Swahili coast with a risk assessment detachment. Chitundu overslept on the morning of his departure due to the cold, and never got to say goodbye. At least that was the reason she told herself over the project’s slow ebbing timeframe, until it became the truth. In time, she buried Mwamba’s existence in a similar box that held her family and original people’s memory.

Why attach yourself to people you can’t experience time with?

*

Organising gatherings around the Samfya region culminated with her somehow pulling off Mukabe’s marriage ceremony. Mukabe and her wife had bonded while working on a global project, aimed at creating long-range neuro-communicator arrays. In Mukabe’s targeted words, the project was meant for the cowards who believed two left feet was reason enough to avoid the beat. Everyone Chitundu knew in the clan was present— well most of them. A few had passed on. The oldest expected, the young tragic, others, like Mwamba who chose physical absence were just self-absolved fools.

The last time she had danced with him, Mwamba was across the ocean, in Maori land. His family duties were complete and he had a chance to return home a month ago. Instead, he had chosen to join an experimental collective on the global communication project, and would only come to see her depart.

A callous way to sting back if this was his revenge for all the long distant communicative dance requests she had ignored since he left. At that time, she always thought they would have more time to dance in person.

Now, as a consequence, the notable misses gave the ceremony a spice that aroused deep engagement with the rare reunion. It was while intoxicated on this emotional spice that mama Kankasa beckoned her out from a raunchy conversation with her clan sisters.

“You did good work, bringing all this together.”

The compliment struck Chitundu speechless. Mama Kankasa chuckled at the response and locked her by the elbow, before guiding her on a short walk to the gateway project’s site. The gate’s outer shell resembled an enormous baobab tree with a long oblong hole in its thick trunk. Inside the hole was the gate, a year out from completion.

“Tomorrow you’ll join the lead collective,” the elder said. “Guide us home to the finish.”

Four years already. That was her only thought. She hadn’t even noticed. In truth she had, but had just stopped counting her life in terms of the gate’s completion. The reminder suddenly shifted her perspective. She was running out of time, the one possession her forced displacement couldn’t take. And now she wondered if she’d used it right. 

“I thought you’d be happier,” mama Kankasa said.

“I am,” she said, half true. “I’m a grown woman now. I don’t jump to the sky like I used to.”

“Madness.” Mama Kankasa gracefully jumped into the air. Chitundu blinked twice, before snorting a laugh. “Now what’s your actual reason?”

Years of unresolved anxiety built up into one question. “What if I find no one waiting on the other side?”

Mama Kankasa’s long stare pierced the question’s many implied fears and didn’t bother condescending to her with false comfort. Chitundu selfishly yearned for the false tonight, and the only ones that could provide it effectively were busy, one with her marriage ceremony, the other, halfway across the planet lost to seminal work.

The thoughts boiled her mind hot. She withstood the pain well, her heart and body already grown calloused to such torture.

*

Three months from project completion, Chitundu journeyed to neighbouring Lamba country in the booming Copperbelt region to the west. She had accepted invitations to a series of initiation ceremonies, brought on by the spread of her voiced narrative observations, titled, from the eyes of an accidental planetary emigrant, a favourite for traders looking to ensnare parents with children curious about life on other planets.

Most of her philosophy-craft mentors criticised the work as overly positive drivel fit only for children, but for one with an outsider’s perspective, she never took for granted how horrible her life could have gone after landing. This planet was a hard fought miracle, one which at every turn had chosen “humanity of all” over “humanity of the few” and she wanted to make sure the people understood it. And who better else needed that than its future protectors?

An enviable goal that dissolved into worry after her last appointment left her wondering if she had just ruined some young woman’s life forever, mumbling incoherently when asked about love and intimacy.

She groaned awake in the middle of night, unable to catch sleep. Mama Kankasa’s advice about honesty echoed back to ease her fears. She could only tell what she knew and what she knew was a mess. Everyone who at one time looked at her with any serious desire eventually wavered once they learned she would leave. And the fleeting ones were only good for their embellished tales.

Good, she would say, no one gets hurt. But now, crushed by the audible silence in her free temporary room, her usual resolve proved slippery. She needed air, and with her portable voiced-library player empty of anything new, she left for the one place she knew would provide distraction akin to comfort— the local library.

At the library’s enormous gates, she found men unloading large aerial poles.

“Straight off the plane,” The night shift knowledge-guide said, excited. “It’s for the local neuro-communicator array. Just imagine, a world connected instantly.”

Chitundu sucked her teeth, tired of that global project, and unintentionally wounded the woman. “It’s not because of what you said,” She tried to explain. “It's just, I lost someone to the project.”

“My condolences.”

“Oh, he's not dead.” The woman looked confused. Chitundu didn’t bother explaining any further, and drifted her attention from the antenna poles to the crates heading into the main building. “Any interesting voices in the new batch?”

“If you like tales from distant cultures, plenty.” The woman guided her inside. “Voices from all over the world, spoken in their own tongue.” The guide sat her down and presented the recordings. Chitundu’s ears popped, eager to learn, then the woman added, “with aided translations by the great elder of the Chushi clan, Mwamba child-of-Nkole.”

She stuttered at that, looked at the data disks, and frowned. “Can I get a different translator?”

The woman’s taut smile twitched, distressed. “Well, our local translators have just started the localisation—”

“Can I listen in on the live recordings?” Chitundu’s insistence disturbed the woman into conceding.

On the way, she took the knowledge-guide’s silent judgment in stride as she followed her to the workrooms. After Mwamba made his decision to delay return, she didn’t want to hear his voice. As far as she was concerned, he could miss her departure too. Which wasn’t true, but she liked to believe it. In truth, she was afraid listening to his voice would disturb the graveyard at the back of her mind, fast growing in reaction to her looming departure. And then she’d just be more of a mess.

The mature part of her understood Mwamba’s choice to invest his time in something that big rather than in her, but it still hurt, and self-care came first.

Then the workroom’s entrance curtain swung and there he was, Mwamba, sitting half-asleep, the centre of the room, taking questions from the local translators decoding the various recordings recently brought in.

He rubbed his eyes twice when he noticed her. “And here I thought I would be the one doing the surprising.”

*

Chitundu stumbled and pulled Mwamba into a long tender embrace when words wouldn’t come. He reciprocated her warmth long enough that the library workers called an early break.

They parted into an awkward staring contest, taking each other in appreciatively, before Mwamba suddenly broke off to rummage through his chitenge travel bundle.

“Here.” He presented her with two helmets resembling her old suit’s design. “They have neuro-communicators theoretically capable of connecting people across space and time.”

She put on her set, eyebrows raised in doubt. Then two sharp pins tenderly pierced her nape, only noticing when she felt a drop of blood trickle down on her neck. Nothing that would leave a mark.

“All it needs is the right cerebral— alignment between two minds.”

The last words came as a shocking thought laced with contextual emotions too earnest to be intentional. They washed over her like a cool breeze on a hot day, and continued long after the thoughts ceased communicating Mwamba’s fears and bittersweet joys. It was like their minds were joined on the dancing plane again, where every hidden truth was laid bare, while still experiencing the physical.

Humph, that was quicker than usual. He looked surprised.

She bathed in the mental alignment’s flooding rush, no longer nervous about the settling silence between them, knowing she didn’t need to talk for him to understand how she felt in turn. Finally, even if just for the moment, she was comfortable in her turmoil, knowing she wasn’t alone in the emotional storm of her impending choice. It wasn’t the first time his presence had done so, but his long absence made the feeling as potent as alcohol’s warm caress inside her chest, filling up to explode.

This way you can always come back home when you leave.

She no longer felt so certain about the when, and in the uncertainty, wondered about her aunt and predecessor; why had she never heard anyone return to her people even though the Island’s histories specified that a functional gateway was built. Maybe, she thought, her predecessor, like her, had stumbled upon a rest home that called for an end to the eternal journey. And maybe for all the safe worlds out there, the bridge had picked just the right one to strand her on.

She smiled. There was that positive drivel again. And kissed him.