"The Great Game"
4th Shendredie, 9 (2188)
Rivkah Of Unity
The new motion capture virtual reality headsets our communications technology guys have developed are strange. Put it on and suddenly my vision sees black until Mum answers, and suddenly we are hundreds of light years away on Earth.
Mum stands at the edge of a vast canyon with a river cascading down, spray rising from a roaring waterfall on the opposite side that is so thick it blocks the view. I join her.
She's not wearing her usual Xenayan clothes; instead, she wears a dress. It's ancient - white, with a faded crown of red, a cascade of beads of many colours around the sleeveless shoulders, with a cloak around her waist of vibrant patterns. It's been altered a few times.
She looks at me, then turns to the waterfall. I can only just hear her. "aManz' aThunqayo."
"What?"
"This place. The smoke that thunders."
"I don't quite understand."
She turns back to me. "Rivkah, when you asked me to tell you what I was talking about when I said the phrase 'the great game', this is what I wanted you to see. Not the poems of the Great Powers declaring their own glories, but to a real location, a real people, their lives irrevocably altered by the machinations of the Great Powers. These waterfalls have many names in the languages of the various native tribes that inhabit the land. My ancestral people, amaNdebele, called them aManz' aThunqayo. But they were themselves later arrivals, and before them the Tonga knew them as Shungu na mutitima, and the Lozi knew them as Mosi-oa-tunya. And these names are all about the pulverising torrent, the spray that boils into the sky, the roar of the crashing waters. But, only the name given by some European coloniser for a queen of some faraway land who turned up late has truly international recognition."
She's practically spitting derision. "Where are you going with this Mum?"
She turns back to me. "Simple. We must not repeat the fate of Mthwakazi. On my world, the sad tale of the invasion of vastly more powerful empires, like the Prikki and Arishkan, played out thousands of times. Only a vanishingly small number had the native group survive independent. We must be one of them."
"What would they want with our little planet?"
Her eyes close. "All it takes is one Cecil Rhodes to decide he wants our world and to name it after himself, or one empire thinking they can use us as a pawn on their board."
The thought chills me. "What can we do to stop them?"
A spear - a short stabbing spear, with a wide iron tip - flies into her hand. She flaunts a few strikes, before discarding it for the Olinbar pistol she took from the ship captain. "The only thing empires respect - force. Diplomacy would be nice, but war is the continuation of politics by other means. Lobengula thought he was protecting his people even as he sold their lives away at the negotiating table, betrayed by those he trusted. But the players of the great game care nothing for the lives of others. Not even those of their own people, their lives to be spent as manpower. They do not care about agreements unless it suits them. They care only for power."
And I thought MSI were bad enough. "This is putting a rather downwards tone on things Mum."
She sits in the long grass. A tear falls. I sit beside her. "I am afraid Rivkah. I am afraid to repeat the mistakes of the past." Images of Grepp and Ossuhphuhr appear. "I am afraid our Moffats are already here."
I start thinking of options. But surely Mum has examined them? And if her conclusion leads her to fear...
That isn't good.
No.
I am not afraid.
They come here, I eat them. "Mum. Snap out of it."
She looks at me, and smiles. "You have ideas?"
"Yeah. But first. Just curious - what's with the dress?"
She runs a hand through the beads. "This is the Lobola celebration dress that originally was made for Yehoshua's Ndlovukazi, a very long time ago. A few HaMaadimi women wore it after her, the last being my mother."
"That's a wedding dress then."
She nods slowly. "Well, an equivalent."
It sparks an idea. "So how did Yehoshua differ then? I mean, I've seen the Holocron. Let's face it, he's closer to Heinrich than to you."
She nods as she examines her dark skin. "In more ways than you think, as Yehoshua's ancestry is north Germanic tribes. But what Yehoshua did differently was he came with no real agenda except to marry his Ndlovukazi. He waited for and worked within the Zimbabwe political process until the Yabuntu Iriphubliki became possible, and even then operated on the kind of inspirational consensus that I rely on."
I pause while I collect my thoughts. In an ideal world, we would just be left alone. But we can't really be left alone as we've been noticed. So, we have to rely on other areas.
I look at Mum again. "We need to find out exactly where Ossuhphuhr stands."
She nods, and the call disconnects.
