You love landing into the Dreaming City. With its giant columns, sky ports, and blur of lights, it is a gleaming bauble filling the horizon. The journey weighs your bones down and roots you until the bump of the tractor tethers lock on to your Saqqara and jolt you out of your reverie. Riding the invisible conveyor, you never feel a bit of the interstellar cold, which would chill you to the bone. Instead, the sun’s rays overhead beat down upon you, causing any exertion to make you sweat. You’ve grown up in the carefully regulated confines of the Dreaming City. By your seventh year, you knew every centimeter. By your fifteenth, you knew the entire surface of lunar Muungano. You haven’t visited many planets; a run to Titan with Stacia, a brief stay in the Bronzeville outpost on the Mars settlement. Your heart still races, just an extra beat, admiring the jeweled heart of Muungano.

Still, you yearn for more. The stars call to you. If not for the Yo or Mars, then certainly Titan or maybe even worlds beyond. You dream of truly outer space and the magic of the stars.

A team of twenty drummers strike up a beat and line up at the front of the great hall of the Dreaming City. Behind them, a storm of dancers hop in place, allowing space for the drummers to proceed, before spacing out along the pathway to twirl their scarves. Green, yellow, or black, mirroring your outfit. They synchronize their movement, a formation of limbs jerking and swaying, bobbing along the syncopated heartbeat of the pounding rhythm.

Crowds of people line either side of the walkway. You’ve never seen so many of your people assembled at once. Here in this place, in this time, they echo the old ways. Their dress a sea of kente cloth, kaftans, and head wraps. Bold colors, different patterns representing the various families. Though you know it’s not the case, it seems like all of Muungano has turned out for your renaming. Once you complete the ceremony, the next step will be for you to be formally invited to the Ijo as a ranking member of the Adisa family.

A sudden dread gnaws your stomach.

Serving as the officiating elder, Bayard Anike stands up next and follows the dancers, his every step slow and considered. An oak of a man, his white, embroidered gown—with its wide sleeves—drapes over a short-sleeved, matching tunic and trousers. However, his hat echoes the colors of your wrap as do the accents on his otherwise black shoes. Bayard carries a large staff, which he raises according to his own internal rhythm, turns it on its side, as if to bar anyone from approaching.