Грег Иган - The Year's Best Science Fiction, Volume 1

It really started with the notification two days ago. My father had passed on—as they used to say—but that wasn’t real. At least not yet.

What was real was me here in Onitsha, my hometown. Even though I’d spent my childhood wandering this city’s narrow red streets, as I slumped in the passenger well of the automated minibus, it struck me how foreign the place now seemed. How had I forgotten how compact everything was, as if it had been built to accommodate a mass of people long gone? My grandparents told me that over a century ago, more than half a million people had packed into these pristine streets. Now, it wasn’t even half that.

The minibus glided along Niger Avenue, stopping occasionally to let passengers off or allow pedestrians to cross the road. As we passed Fegge, I caught sight of the neighborhood’s ancient cement family quarters, squat-shouldered and tin-roofed, hulking next to each other like sullen children. Crossing from Main Market, with its workshops and retail outlets, into the quiet residential lanes of American Quarters, I spied children in neat uniforms walking hand in hand to their various apprenticeships. Children were rare enough in Tkaronto, and those few who could afford to give birth preferred to cluster in tower communities that would protect their precious progeny from the vicissitudes of life. Apart from major celebrations like Emancipation Day, seeing children in public was unheard of.

Throughout the trip, the lights of the historic Niger Bridge blinked on the horizon. I would have liked to go walking across it like any other tourist, streaming photos of the mighty river for my feed back West. But I’d only packed a change of clothes and some toiletries. The burial rites would begin this evening with the wake-keeping and end on the evening of the next day, after the celebratory second funeral. I had no plans of staying past then.

It could be argued that without the Catastrophe, that fraught period between the 2020s and the 2060s that scorched half the world and drowned the rest, New Biafra could never have been born. At the turn of the 22nd century, as people all over were still fleeing inland to escape the rising seas, a group of Igbo separatists took the opportunity to declare their independence from the crumbling colonial creation of Nigeria. The new state called for the return of all its children in diaspora, and my grandparents—engineers eking out a living on the shores of Old New York—were among the thousands who moved to regional cities like Onitsha, Nnewi, Awka, and Aba to answer the call.

We called it the Great Return. Anyone who could prove Igbo ancestry was granted automatic citizenship. Those with coveted skills—geneticists, engineers, and biologists—were given homes, business grants, and lucrative government posts. My grandparents and their generation cleared out the derelict infrastructure of New Biafra’s empty suburbs and towns to make way for the forestlands that now covered nearly 80 percent of the country. They reseeded those forests with bioengineered plants and wildlife, then built the massive monorail system that connects all our cities to bypass the pristine forests below. But they’d neglected one thing: While they were busy creating our new homeland, they forgot to also raise the massive families that would be needed to keep it solvent and thriving.

As they grew feeble, the burden of caring for them and maintaining the world they’d built fell to us. My age-mates, those I kept in touch with after I moved, tell me I was lucky to get out when I did. Leaving New Biafra when I was only twelve meant that I was too young to be tied down by the weight of its social obligations. They complained of having to work long hours to preserve family businesses passed down by aging parents and grandparents. They spoke wistfully of the massive payouts the government awarded to those who could birth three or more children, but few of them could carve out the time needed to cultivate such large families. Though my own life—a spacious apartment in the hills of Highland Crescent, an easygoing art research consultancy—was very different from theirs, I’m not sure I did escape. One cannot cut the invisible threads of familial indebtedness by simply running off to a distant land.

My father certainly fulfilled his filial duty. He became a ranger, protecting the bioengineered species his parents had introduced in the forests they’d prepared. As his only child, I should have done the same. I’d always liked working with the soil, so it was expected that I would go into agroecology and grow the food that would feed our people. But after what happened with my uncle… I shook my head to ward off the memory.

As the bus pulled up in front of the family home at 142 Old Hospital Road, I came out of my reverie and noticed that the rain had stopped. The house hadn’t changed since I’d last seen it three decades ago. Hell, it probably hadn’t changed in the two hundred years since it had been built in the 1920s.

It was a U-shaped complex with a central bungalow flanked by two-story apartments, one on either side. An open courtyard carpeted with moss grass, fruit trees, and wildflowers filled the space between them. My grandparents had reinforced its walls with permacrete and upgraded its interior to 22nd-century standards, but that’s where the improvements ended. After they died, the house went to my father, who’d never had much interest in technology. In the twenty years he’d lived there, he’d done nothing more than charge its batteries and replace burned-out solar cells.

Traditionally, the oldest members of the family would occupy the bungalow while their children and extended family members crammed into the two warrens of flats. If we’d restricted the apartments to blood family only, as some still did, those buildings would have stood empty. These days relatives were defined less by who’d slept with whom, and more by whose interests and personalities meshed best. I recalled the boisterous couples and polycules who’d lived in the building when I was young—all of them my cousins and uncles and aunties even though we had only marginal blood relationships to each other.

The compound was abuzz with people. Someone had set up a canopy in one corner of the open field where my friends and I had played virtual sports as children. From somewhere in the back the delicate smell of Aba rice and goat stew wafted out, making my mouth water. The building’s families had spared no expense for this event. I tried to slip in quietly, but I was immediately spotted.

“Azuka! Is that you?” screamed a voice from somewhere in the crowd. It was Auntie Chio, a close friend of my grandmother who’d lived in the building for as long as I could remember. I’d been best friends with her two granddaughters, both of whom now lived in the Eko Atlantic megacity. She was one of the few adults who’d kept in touch with me after my mother and I moved to Turtle Island.

I spotted her lithe frame dressed in her usual motley of clashing ankara fabrics as she swept out from the main bungalow. Her unlined face spoke nothing of her nearly ninety years, and before I knew it I was surrounded in her crushing embrace.

I smiled wanly. “Good evening, Auntie.”

“ Ah-ah , when did you come?” She held me at arm’s length, taking me in from head to toe, her eagle-eyed gaze missing nothing.

“Just now. I had to finish some work before I could travel.”

She nodded and gave me a look that was skeptical but sympathetic. She opened her mouth to say more, but her cry had attracted others and soon I was surrounded by people.

“Azu-nne, welcome! See how big you’ve grown, eh! So tall!”

“Come, you don’t remember me, do you? You were so small when last I saw you.”

“My condolences, my dear. It is well with you.”