“Who are—?”
“Where are we? Who am I? Or perhaps you’d like to vomit again,” the woman’s voice echoed as a sing-song melody inside Lina’s head, but with shrill, skull-rattling overtones. “Makes no difference to me. It’s your dream after all. But…once you wake up…”
The strange woman brought her two closed fists up, one on either side of her head, and then suddenly splayed all of her fingers out at once. She made such a wooshing noise to accompany the gesture, that the result was Lina feeling her face being covered in a fair amount of spit.
But when Lina reached up to wipe with the back of her hand, she felt nothing there.
“Who—?”
“Oh, good, you’ve decided. Who am I? Is that what you wish to know?”
Lina nodded.
The strange woman’s face began to change in front of Lina’s eyes. For a long moment she held the face of Mentor, and then Arabel. In quicker succession came the faces of I, and the twirling woman from the rave, a woman covered in tattoos who she had never seen before, and finally the gnarled face of the old queen from Lina’s colony.
“I—I don’t understand,” Lina said.
“Well, of course not, child. You refuse to open your mind. You look right at me every day, but you don’t see me.” The strange round face was back now, the younger version, then the old. “I am all of them, and they are all me. Except for that last one. Not quite sure where I went wrong there. Well, never mind.” The woman waved her hand in the air.
Lina held her hands to her temples and doubled over with her lips pressed in a tight line.
“Sorry, too much,” said the voice. “Perhaps this.”
The old woman was gone. In her place stood the Great Tree. Not the Tree surrounded by the palace walls in Lina’s colony, but something else, something larger both in size and in presence. The branches of the Tree were old and gnarled like the old woman’s face, but its leaves and flowers were as young and vibrant as the sapling that Arabel kept hidden away in her apartment. A half-round orange sun was rising on the far horizon, casting long shadows of branches over the ground.
“You’re a tree?”
“Not a tree, child, the Tree.”
“Where—?”
“Ah yes, the next question already. You know, most people take a little more time to get their minds wrapped around the ‘not a tree, the Tree’ bit. I think it fell rather flat this time, don’t you?”
Lina grimaced and rubbed her temples.
“Sorry,” said the Tree. “Too much. I’ll slow it down.
“We are in a place once known as Mother Africa, specifically sub-Saharan Africa, just south of a little waterway that in its prime, came to be known as the Zambezi River. And I’m sure you have no comprehension of any of that, do you?”
“The air is so clean and clear. How can it be, so far into the abyss?”
“This is the way it was when my human children first came to be. See us right over there? On that plain? I’m the big tree, obviously. Hello. And all around me are my human children. See how they love me?”
Lina squinted and looked at the figures surrounding the Great Tree. They were very different than Lina, even different from the old woman she first saw in this strange fever dream. They were dancing and singing.
“This is where my people came from?” Lina asked.
“Yes. And no.” The image of the lone Great Tree on the wide, flat plain disappeared into the mist, and the young woman’s face who first greeted Lina appeared in its place. “Your most direct ancestor is the one they call the Wise Queen of the East. Come. I will take you to her land.”
The winds around Lina rushed and howled. Clouds closed in from above where before there was only clear, blue sky. Multiple forked tongues of lightening split the air, and when the thunder clapped, it was a deafening roar. Lina held her hands over her ears, leaned forward and rocked back and forth.
“Sorry, too much,” is what Lina thought she heard the Great Tree saying just before Lina hung her head, squeezed her eyes tight, and vomited.
* * * *
“My child.” The young woman smiled and Lina felt a warm hand on her shoulder. “We are here. The land of the Great and Wise Queen of the East.”
Lina blinked her eyes. Above her was the young woman’s cheerful face, beyond that was a roiling cloud of thunder.
“How can that be?” Lina asked. “Why is the storm still here?”
“This is the land of your ancestors. The cities below the clouds, in the abyss. The storm was not always here. It only came after the tribes of your ancestors began to refuse the gifts I gave them, wanting instead that which they created by their own hand.”
Lina coughed, choking on the thick air. “Why didn’t you stop them, warn them?”
“I am a Great Tree, my child, but not so great that I can bend the will of humankind.” The voice was coming from the old, wrinkled visage now. “I can teach you the map of the stars, I can give you the clouds on which to sail, but I cannot steer your skimmer, Lina. You of all people should know that.”
“Because I look at you, but do not see you? Isn’t that what you said?”
“Now you are beginning to understand.” The woman speaking to Lina had transformed into the gaily-painted twirling woman from the rave. The fact that here in Lina’s dream she was still twirling was not helping Lina’s constitution at all.
Lina turned away and vomited.
“My Queen,” said the twirling woman, who for the moment had stopped twirling and dropped to her knees to press her hand to Lina’s forehead. “Are you alright?”
“Why do you keep calling me that?”
All at once, the twirling woman stood up.
