Nnedi Okorafor - Lagoon

The city takes its name from the Portuguese word for “lagoon”.

The Portuguese first landed on Lagos Island in the year 1472.

Apparently, they could not come up with a more creative name.

Nor did they think to ask one of the natives for suggestions.

And so the world turns, masked by millions of names, guises, and shifting stories.

It’s been a beautiful thing to watch.

My designs grow complicated.

She slices through the water, imagining herself a deadly beam of black light. The current parts against her sleek, smooth skin. If any fish gets in her way, she will spear it and keep right on going. She is on a mission. She is angry. She will succeed and then they will leave for good. They brought the stench of dryness, then they brought the noise and made the world bleed black ooze that left poison rainbows on the water’s surface. She often sees these rainbows whenever she leaps over the water to touch the sun. Inhaling them stings and burns her gills.

The ones who bring the rainbows are burrowing and building creatures from the land and no one can do anything about them. Except her. She’s done it before and they stopped for many moons. They went away. She is doing it again.

She increases her speed.

She is the largest predator in these waters. Her waters. Even when she migrates, this particular place remains hers. Everyone knows it. She was not born here but after all her migrations, she is happiest here. She suspects that this is the birthplace of one of those who created her.

She swims even faster.

She is blue-grey and it is night. Though she cannot see, she doesn’t need to. She knows where she is going. She is aiming for the thing that looks like a giant dead snake. She remembers snakes; she’s seen plenty in her past life. In the sun, this dead snake is the color of decaying seaweed with skin rough like coral.

Any moment now.

She is nearly there.

She is closing in fast.

She stabs into it.

From the tip of her spear, down her spine, to the ends of all her fins, she experiences red-orange bursts of pain. The impact is so jarring that she can’t move. But there is victory; she feels the giant dead snake deflating. It blows its black blood. Her perfect body goes numb and she wonders if she has died. Then she wonders what new body she will find herself inhabiting. She remembers her last form, a yellow monkey; even while in that body, she loved to swim. The water has always called to her.

All goes black.

She awakens. Gently but quickly, she pulls her spear out. The black blood spews in her face from the hole she’s made. She turns away from the bittersweet tasting poison. Now they will leave soon. As she happily swims away in triumph, the loudest noise she’s ever heard vibrates through the water.

MOOM!

The noise ripples through the ocean with such intensity that she tumbles with it, sure that it will tear her apart.

Then the water calms. Deeply shaken, she slowly swims to the surface. Head above the water, she moves through the bodies that glisten in the moonlight. Several smaller fish, jellyfish, even crabs, float, belly up or dismembered. Many of the smaller creatures have probably simply been obliterated. But she has survived.

She swims back to the depths. She’s only gone down a few feet when she smells it. Clean, sweet, sweet, sweet ! Her senses are flooded with sweetness, the sweetest water she’s ever breathed. She swims forward, tasting the water more as it moves through her gills. In the darkness, she feels others around her. Other fish. Large, like herself, and small… so some small ones have survived.

Now, she sees many. There are even several sharp-toothed ones and mass killers. She sees this clearly now because something large and glowing is down ahead. A great shifting bar of glimmering sand. This is what is giving off the sweet, clean water. She hopes the sweetness will drown out the foul blackness of the dead snake she pierced. She has a feeling it will. She has a very good feeling.

The sun is up now, sending its warm rays into the water. She can see everyone swimming, floating, wiggling right into the glowing thing below. There are sharks, sea cows, shrimps, octopus, tilapia, codfish, mackerel, flying fish, even seaweed. Creatures from the shallows, creatures from the shore, creatures from the deep, all here. A unique gathering. What is happening here?

But she remains where she is. Waiting. Hesitating. Watching. It is not deep but it is wide. About two hundred feet below the surface. Right before her eyes, it shifts. From blue to green to clear to purple-pink to glowing gold. But it is the size, profile and shape of it that draws her. Once, in her travels, she came across a giant world of food, beauty and activity. The coral reef was blue, pink, yellow and green, inhabited by sea creatures of every shape and size. The water was delicious and there was not a dry creature in sight. She lived in that place for many moons before finally returning to her favorite waters. When she traveled again, she was never able to find the paradise she’d left.

Now here in her home is something even wilder and more alive than her lost paradise. And like there, the water here is clean and clear. She can’t see the end of it. However, there is one thing she is certain of: what she is seeing isn’t from the sea’s greatest depths or the dry places. This is from far, far away.

More and more creatures swim down to it. As they draw closer, she sees the colors pulsate and embrace them. She notices an octopus with one missing tentacle descending toward it. Suddenly, the octopus grows brilliant pink-purple and straightens all its tentacles. Then right before her eyes, it grows its missing tentacle back and what looks like boney spokes erupt from its soft head. It spins and flips and then shoots off, down into one of the skeletal caves of the undulating coral-like thing below.

When a golden blob ascends to meet her, she doesn’t move to meet it. But she doesn’t flee either. The sweetness she smells and its gentle movements are soothing and non-threatening. When it communicates with her, asking question after question, she hesitates. It doesn’t take long for her apprehension to shift to delight. What good questions it asks. She tells it exactly what she wants.

Everything is changing.

She’s always loved her smooth, grey-blue skin but now it is impenetrable, its new color golden like the light the New People give off. The color that reminds her of another life when she could both enjoy the water and endure the sun and air.

Her sword-like spear is longer and so sharp at the tip that it sings. They made her eyes like the blackest stone and she can see deep into the ocean and high into the sky. And when she wants to, she can make spikes of cartilage jut out along her spine as if she is some ancestral creature from the deepest ocean caves of old. The last thing she requests is to be three times her size and twice her weight.