pulsated. The water moved, animated. The meaning behind their name, wajinru, chorus of the deep, was clear.
Many wajinru lived far apart, alone or with friends or mates in dens of twenty or twenty-five people. The wajinru had settled the whole of the deep but were sparsely populated. While there was the occasional larger group who lived together, up to fifty or one hundred, there was nothing like the cities Yetu had seen in her rememberings.
For a people with little memory, wajinru knew one another despite the year-long absence. They didn’t remember in pictures nor did they recall exact events, but they knew things in their bodies, bits of the past absorbed into them and transformed into instincts. Wajinru knew the faces of lovers they’d once taken, the trajectory of their own lives. They knew that they were wajinru.
Because they tended to live so far apart, when they did gather en masse, it was an occasion of great celebration. Everyone shouted their greetings, swam in excited circles, joined together to dance a spiral. Soon, what had started as something intimate between two or three spread to twenty, then suddenly a hundred, five hundred, then all five thousand or six thousand of them. They moved spontaneously but in unison, a single entity.
It was this same energy Yetu would use to share the History with them.
“I’m relieved you’re here,” said Nnenyo, Yetu’s care-maid during the Remembrance. When Yetu required everyone to hush, he would tell everyone to hush. When she needed stillness, he’d make everyone be still. If words didn’t work, he’d compel them softly with his mind: a little nudge that felt to most like a mild, compulsive urge. A cough. A sneeze.
Few had such power of suggestion, but he was getting on, almost a hundred and fifty years old. The average wajinru lifespan was closer to one hundred, and while it wasn’t impossible to live for so long, Nnenyo was the oldest wajinru in a long time. He’d learned to harness the electrical energy present in all wajinru minds. That was why he’d been elected to oversee the historians. He was the one Yetu was to inform about the next historian when she discovered who might be capable of taking on the task, and he was the one who’d facilitate the harvesting of memories from Yetu to her successor when the time came. If he was unable, one of his many children would take on the task.
“I’m sorry for the delay. I—”
“Bygones. You are here now. That is what matters. I have a surprise for you,” Nnenyo said.
“I don’t like surprises,” said Yetu. She found it difficult enough managing the quotidian and routine.
“I know,” he said. “But I couldn’t help it. I’m an old man. Allow me my whims.”
Yetu let his words wash over her fully despite herself. The warmth of his tone settling even if the raw sensation of it stung.
Nnenyo was decent. Though he preferred a life in the moment, free of the past, like other wajinru, he recalled more than average. Were it not for his age, he would’ve been the historian to replace the previous historian, Basha. Yetu was the next best choice.
“So? What is it, then? What’s my surprise?” she asked quietly. She needed to save her strength and didn’t want to waste energy projecting her voice.
Nnenyo had no trouble feeling Yetu’s words despite the surrounding bustle of conversation. Yetu was focusing every bit of her energy on picking his words out of the onslaught of information pressing against her skin. “Ajeji, Uyeba, Kata, Nneti, now,” he called with a sharp whistle that pierced through the water.
Yetu wanted to vomit the various food items Amaba had stuffed her with to strengthen her for the Remembrance. Her skin was an open sore, and Nnenyo’s call had salted it.
“I apologize,” said Nnenyo.
“Do not make such sharp sounds around her,” said Amaba, who’d been working quietly near Yetu, minimizing movement in order to lessen the disturbance to Yetu. “Can’t you see how it stings her?”
Amaba pampered Yetu now, but it hadn’t always been like that between them. Yetu’s early days as a historian were marked by endless discord with her amaba. It was only in adulthood that their relationship had settled. Thirty-four years old, Yetu’d matured enough to predict and therefore avoid most quarrels.
That didn’t mean there wasn’t still hurt. Unlike Amaba, Yetu remembered the past and remembered well. She had more than general impressions and faded pictures of pictures of pictures. Where Amaba recalled a vague “difficult relationship,”