Last Plane to Heaven (18 page)

“The future,” she said without turning around or breaking step. “River has shown me a place with city things. We will care for Her daughter there, and raise the city things up again one by one.”

She walked. He followed. His feet were wet from splashing at the water's edge, but River did not seem to mind him when he was in the company of Angry Eyes. He was still afraid, but now it was a different kind of fear.

What he could not figure out was whether
his
life was the sacrifice or the gift.

*   *   *

River flows. In flowing, She is, was, and always will be. Her memory is long, and She keeps secrets until they are needed again by those of Her grandchildren who can pass by softly enough not to stir Her ancient wrath.

Like wind and rain, they rise and fall around Her.

Like wind and rain, they are needful to Her.

Like wind and rain, they are forgotten until they come again.

 

The Woman Who Shattered the Moon

About the same time I wrote this story, my very good friend the late Mark Bourne wrote what none of us then realized would be his last story, “The Woman Who Broke the Moon.” We had a very good laugh, after nervously determining we had not in fact stepped on one another. He passed away unexpectedly shortly thereafter. I have always felt this story still belonged in part to him.

I am the most famous woman in the world.

That's something to be proud of, something no one else can say. It does not matter that the European bastards have locked me up for the past forty-one years, seven months, and eleven days. It does not matter that they dynamited my stronghold and sealed off the steam vents that drove my turbines and powered my ambitions. It does not matter that Fleet Street and the American press and governments from the Kaiser's Germany to Imperial Japan have all forbidden my name from being mentioned in writing.

Despite all that, they cannot unmake me, because every night, my greatest deed glimmers in the sky, a permanent reminder that I am the woman who shattered the moon.

*   *   *

Colonel Loewe comes to see me every Tuesday. He is proper, starched and creased in his lobster-red uniform with the white Sam Browne belt smelling faintly of oiled leather. His moustache is full and curved, something that must have come into fashion after I'd been imprisoned here in this hidden fortress, as it looks silly to me. In recent times, he has grown exactly nine white hairs hidden in the auburn of the moustache. The colonel's face is sometimes as red as his jacket. I am never certain if this is exertion or anger.

We meet in a tiny room with a knife-scarred wooden table between us. The floor consists of boards ten centimeters in width. There are thirty-six of them in a row most of the time. Some weeks there are thirty-seven of them. My jailors think I do not notice these little changes. It is much the same as the patterns in the dust and cobwebs, for nothing is clean in this place except what I clean for myself. I save my old toothbrushes to scrub out the mortared joins in the stone walls of my cell.

The walls of our meeting rooms are covered in stucco, so I do not know if they are stone beneath. I see patterns in the plastering, but they are never the same, so I suspect my own imagination may be at fault.

Either that or they have many more nearly identical rooms here than seems practical simply for the purpose of manipulating a single prisoner.

This week, Colonel Loewe has brought me a chipped stoneware mug filled with a steaming brown liquid which appears to be coffee. After eleven years and fourteen weeks as my interrogator, he knows my ways, so with a small smile, the colonel sips from the mug to prove to me that it is not something dangerous or unpalatable.

I inhale the rich, dark scent. There is of course the possibility that he previously took an antidote, but even in my darkest moments I recognize that if my jailors wished to kill me, they have had ample opportunities over the decades. Whatever my final end will amount to, I strongly doubt it will be poisoning at the hands of the colonel.

“Madame Mbacha.” He always greets me politely. The coffee is a break in the routine.

I take the mug, the warmth of it loosening the painful tension that always afflicts my hands these years. The odor indicates a Kenyan bean. Another small politeness, to bring me an African variety.

“Good morning, Colonel.” I follow our ritual even as I wonder what the coffee signifies. The routine is that he asks about my work, my machines, precisely how I shattered the moon from my East African mountain fastness. In all my years here, I have never revealed my secrets, though I am sure forensic teams extracted much from my laboratories before their terminal vandalism rendered my works into dust.

Why should I offer confirmation of their abuse? Why should I give them the secrets of gravity which I and I alone discovered, after being laughed away from the great universities of Europe and America for the inescapable twinned flaws of being African and a woman?

What Colonel Loewe should say now is, “Let us review the facts of your case.” That has been his second line for the entire time he has been my interrogator. Instead he surprises me by departing from his script.

“I have news,” the colonel tells me.

I tamp down a rush of frustrated anger. In my years of incarceration I have become very good at containing my feelings. Long gone are the days when I could work out my troubles on some trembling servant or prisoner. Still, how dare he change our rules now?

“What news, Colonel?” My voice barely betrays my intensity of emotion. This cannot be good. Change is never good.

He clears his throat, seeming almost embarrassed for a moment. “Madame Mbacha, it is my happy duty to inform you that your parole has been granted by the plenary session of the League of Nations on humanitarian grounds. You will shortly be processed for release, and will be free to go where you will, within certain restrictions intended for your own safety.”

I stare at the colonel for a long moment, then begin to laugh. It is the only way I can stop the tears that threaten to well up.

Home. I can go home. The one thing I have never expected here in my imprisonment was to ever be allowed home again.

*   *   *

They bring me a newspaper with my supper. Such a thing has never before happened in my time in this prison. The change in routine intensifies my discomfort. At least the meal is consistent. I have been served the Tuesday menu. Sausage and cabbage, steamed so the meaty scent mingles with the rankness of the vegetable. Also hard brown bread. The relief cook is on duty, I can tell by the way the food is prepared. Even that is part of the routine, though his shift does vary.

I glare at the folded newsprint as if it were a rat snuck into my cell.
The Times
of London, a respectable and credible outlet. The lead story concerns ongoing negotiations over changes to fishing rights in the North Sea. Apparently the cessation of lunar tides continues to exert significant effects on marine life, as does the shortening rotational period of the Earth in the absence of lunar drag. Fish stocks have shifted catastrophically time and again in the decades since my master plan came to fruition.

At this I can only laugh. Long-dormant emotions are beginning to stir within me. To be in the world, to walk under an open sky as I have not done since the last day of my so-called trial. Why, once more I can do anything.

I give vent to a rising bubble of glee. Even with my eyes closed, I could measure this cell to the centimeter. My voice echoing off the walls gives me an aural map just as accurate as my visual observations and memories.

*   *   *

The process of my release takes several more weeks. The newspaper left nightly with my meal mentions nothing of me or my fate, though I do learn much about the state of the world. Many of those things are incredible, even to me who mastered electricity, magnetism, and gravity in the days of my youthful ascendancy. It took a combined Anglo-German army reinforced by numerous battalions of African
askari
to bring me down, in the end. Still, I had not anticipated the development of aeroplanes or thermionic valves or electronic switches. My world once consisted of iron and brass mechanical behemoths motivated by the pressure and heat of steam.

The colonel still comes on Tuesdays, but now I also have other callers. A milliner, to clothe me fit for today's street, at least its European variety. An alienist to discuss with me how people might be expected to behave. A geographer to inform me of the current state of empires, colonies, and independent kingdoms in the West Africa of my birth and upbringing, and the East Africa of the years of my power.

“Kilima Njaro is preserved by the Treaty of Mombasa,” the small, serious man with the Austrian accent informs me.

“Preserved?” I ask.

“Set aside by multinational acclamation as a natural area to maintain its beauty and bounty.” His voice is prim, though he rattles off those words as if he does not quite believe them himself.

I smile at the geographer. Already I know this unnerves him. I am history's supreme villain, after all. My deeds rewrote the night sky, triggered floods and famines that altered the fates of entire nations of people. Self-satisfied white men such as this fussy little lavender-scented Herr Doctor Professor have trouble compassing the idea that a woman born of Africa could have accomplished such mighty perfidy. Even the prosecution at my trial at one point advanced the notion that I must have been a stalking horse for some unknown evil genius of European or American origins.

So my smile, coupled with the power of my personality that has faded so little with age, disturbs this man. Much to my delight. I ask in his native German, “And this Treaty of Mombasa was signed shortly after my capture, I presume?”

He sticks to the English that my jailors speak. “Ah, in fact, yes.”

“So what they are preserving is the ruins of my stronghold. Lest some malcontent unearth the secrets of my strength and turn my lost machines against the Great Powers.” I lean forward, allowing my smile to broaden further. “Or perhaps worse, prevent European scientists from successfully publishing my research as their own?”

Now the little geographer is completely flustered. I know I have struck home. So it goes.

*   *   *

The last time I see Colonel Loewe, he speaks more frankly than anyone ever has since I was first subdued and captured on the slopes of my mountain, fleeing my besieged stronghold. It is a Tuesday, of course. Some things do not change. I, who am about to see more change than I have in decades, choose to interpret this as courtesy on his part.

“Madame Mbacha.” He once more offers me coffee.

“Colonel Loewe.” I nod, grant him that same broad smile I have used to upset some of my other visitors.

His voice grows stern. “I must inform you that as a matter of personal opinion, I am not in favor of your parole.”

Interesting.
“Thank you for your honesty, Colonel. Why do you think thusly?”

“These people at the League of Nations do not know you as I know you.” His fingertips drum briefly on the table. “They barely know
of
you, except as a rumored evil slumping into your dotage.”

Dotage!
I will show them dotage. I hold my tongue, of course.

The colonel continues. “I am well aware that even I barely know you. Always you have guarded your words as jealously as any citadel's sally port.” After a moment he adds with further reluctant candor, “Though for many reasons I wish matters were otherwise, I cannot help but admire your strength of character.”

I am near to being enchanted by his words. Flattery is one unction that has been denied to me in the more than four decades since my capture. “Do go on,” I tell him in a throaty whisper which even at my age can distract all but the most determined men.

“You and I both know full well you are slumped into nothing, especially not dotage. Age has not dimmed your fires, only brought you to a preternatural discretion. I have noted this in my reports over the years. In my judgment, you are still by far the most dangerous woman on Earth.” Another drumbeat of the fingertips. “The most dangerous
person
of either gender, in truth.

“It is hoped,” he continues, “that four decades of incarceration have mellowed you, and that what prison has failed to accomplish, the inevitable withering of time will have managed. Your release is seen as a humanitarian gesture, proposed by some of the new regimes in the tropical lands that are slowly emerging from colonial patronage. You are a hero in the tropical villages of Africa, of Asia, and of South America, Madame Mbacha.” He clears his throat, sending his moustache wobbling. “But we also both know you are still the greatest villain who ever lived.”

I wait a long, polite moment to see if the colonel is finished speaking. Then I take pity on him, for he is flushed and perspiring, obviously uncomfortable with himself.

“They are not far from wrong,” I tell him. “My years here have made of me an old woman. I do not have the funds or the equipment to embark on grand ambitions. Nor, frankly, the years.” I take brief joy in imagining his precious London burning, choking in clouds of toxic chemical fog, assaulted by clanking monsters rising from the bed of the Thames. “Whatever is in my heart must remain there, hostage to age and penury, not to mention the watchers you and yours will surely be setting to dog my every step between the door of this prison and the grave I eventually find.”

“Fair enough.” His eyes flick down to his hands as if his fingers were an unexpected novelty. Then Colonel Loewe meets my gaze once more. “If you will, for the sake of all that has passed between us these dozen years, please indulge me with the answer to one final question.” He raises a hand to forestall my answer. “This is my own curiosity. Not for any report I shall write, nothing to be used against you.”