The Rosewater Redemption Page 3
All this time, this is what has been on her mind? This is what she carries?
“I love you,” he says. It’s not a romantic gesture or feeling. It’s what happens when you fully understand another human being, when you have complete empathy, like with him and Nike Onyemaihe, the only other person he shared brainspace this completely with. It’s knowing her history, her flaws, why her flaws exist, her pain, her suffering, her shrunken and hidden heart. It’s the love you feel for a sibling or an aunt, the kind that endures and survives adversity bruised but intact.
“I am going to be fine, Kaaro,” she says. Yells, really, to be heard above the panicking guards.
“I know,” he says.
They drag her out of the room. “I’ll be in touch.”
I know.
There, Now
Prayers to Koriko offered, borderbots stood down, opposing contingents from Nigeria and Rosewater meet at the north of the city-state boundary. Eric stands above on a gentle rise, providing oversight and overwatch. It’s evening, with a blood-red sky in the dwindling light. The tentacle idly loops around his neck and unloops. They are almost fully integrated, he and it, although at times Eric detaches from it, to feel human again, albeit for a few minutes. It scares people off, makes them think he’s alien, doesn’t matter that the tentacle was crafted by a human.
A van arrives on the Rosewater side, rolls to a stop, headlights die. The security personnel open the back and a thin Femi Alaagomeji is led out. The tentacle jerks, probably from Eric’s surge of anger, and he calms himself. This woman, this resolute, beautiful woman who saved his life, has been incarcerated and he has not been able to get her free until now. Look at what they’ve done to her. He signals his people to take Dahun to the swap. Some in the agency worried about Eric’s plan; after all, Dahun was a mercenary and the mayor has no loyalty to him. Eric thought differently, and was right. It boiled down to the kind of person the mayor values, and how he treats his people, whether they are contractors or not.
Eric has some disquiet this close to Rosewater because he knows Kaaro is in there: Kaaro the gryphon, Kaaro who warned him off the city, and who casually took control of his brain without straining himself. Too powerful to fight, even though the two of them are the last surviving sensitives and should be working together.
Eric stays this distance away from the exchange out of respect. He does not wish to accidentally read Femi’s mind.
Six hours later, outside her suite at the Hilton, wearing a bulbous, oversized hoodie to cover his tentacle, he hears the call to enter. Femi is in a purple bathrobe, hair cut even shorter and left natural. She is still bone-thin, but some tension has gone out of her. It should have, with what the government is paying for the place. A colleague of Eric’s who has been to prison says it leaves a stink that never quite goes away. That may be true for everybody but Femi. He is also aware that she has a layer of antifungals all over her skin. Nobody trusts sensitives.
“I’m ready to debrief you and catch you up, ma’am,” says Eric.
“Not necessary,” she says. “Nothing happened except they kept me in a box with no human contact. I don’t need support, and I’ve already caught myself up while I was in the bath. Do you have my orders?”
Eric taps his wrist on hers. By orders she means S45 authorisations and bona fides that were deactivated when she got captured.
“Thank you for coming to get me, Eric,” she says. “I won’t forget it.”
“Yes, ma’am.” He almost wonders if he should hug her. Almost. “What are your instructions for me, ma’am?”
“Our goal, Eric, is to save the world from Rosewater. As of now, we must consider the city a beachhead for extraterrestrial invaders. We’re the opposing force.”
“Do we have the resources?”
“The President has assured me all the resources I need will be coming my way, and the African Union and Association of Caribbean States are hearing closed-session depositions so that a coalition might be formed. But for now, it’s just Nigeria.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“We also have bedfellows.”
“Bedfellows?”
One of the bedroom doors opens and a woman walks out. In contrast to Femi, she is tall, but fleshy, and she has Afro puffs. She raises her hand to shoulder height and gives Eric a weak wave.
“Eric, meet the fugitive Oyin Da.”
Chapter One
My earliest memory is of a neighbour’s naming ceremony in the village of Arodan. I go with my father and hold his hand all the way through.
You don’t just slap a name on a Yoruba child the moment they are born. Names have significance in terms of the destiny of the individual and the alignment with the will of the ancestors. My full name is Oyindamola, although I only go by Oyin Da. It means “sweetness/honey mixed with wealth or well-being”; a good name, one that the Ifa priest said my ancestors favoured. I am not nor have I ever been sweet, but that never bothered my parents.
The ceremony takes place in the courtyard of the baby’s parents. There is a dais on which a decorated high table dominates. The parents and the baby sit, while the chairperson, a stout, intense woman called Doyin, holds forth on a microphone. My father points out a stranger just to the left of the dais with a briefcase chained to his left hand. This is a man from the government, the registrar, who has to attend all births and naming ceremonies. In the past people took children to birth registration, but things are different now.
I watch Doyin start things off with an opening prayer. Back in time, this would be an exhortation to ancestors, but with the advent of missionaries, colonialism and American-style fundamentalism, Christian prayers came to dominate in the twentieth and early twenty-first century. The Yoruba recently reverted to the ancestral theme, when the role of fundamentalists in the near-destruction of the world became clear. When stoking apocalyptic events did not lead to Armageddon or the Rapture, Immanentising the Eschaton fell out of fashion, and Christianity became either nominal or fringe.
Doyin pours out spirits to the ancestors, and the naming begins. The child has four names, agreed by everyone to be fortuitous and strong. It is given a taste of the seven flavours of life: water, salt, honey, palm oil, kola nut, bitter nut and pepper. These are just rubbed against the lips of the child, and each comes with a prayer for a long and prosperous life, using puns on the names of the flavours.
After the pepper, the registrar steps forward and opens his briefcase. He takes out a smaller case, like the kind of box you’d have an engagement ring in, and breaks a seal in full view. He hands the box to Doyin who examines it and turns to the crowd.
“I attest that this is not an Ariyo chip.” She is referring to the brand of chips so infamous in Nigeria for their dangerous malfunctions that this proclamation has become an accepted part of the ceremony.
She hands it back to the registrar, who has a jet injector ready. He picks out a chip from the box, charges the injector and places it on the neck of the baby. He fires, with that truncated hissing sound, and the crowd bursts into song and laughter. The registrar does not stick around. The baby cries and the mother whips out an engorged breast to feed him.
“Did I have one of those, Daddy?” I ask.
“Yes.”
The earliest effort of the Nigerian government to tag all citizens with ID implants was a disaster because the pilot group got toxic chips that poisoned them, first driving them mad with heavy metal, then killing them. Not all, of course, but about seventy per cent, a PR disaster since not everyone was convinced that they wanted to be chipped in the first place. It became a rallying cry for privacy advocates and delayed the ID programme by decades. Now it is a slick machine, with chipping at birth, then repositioning at ten and nineteen.
While my father drops an envelope for the new couple, I examine the baby’s neck and spot the red dot where the chip was applied.
“Come on,” says my father. “Let’s go to the forest.”
&n
bsp; My father is not typical of Yoruba or Nigerian men. He will die young, but while he is alive, each day is a surprise. For one thing, he has no trade, and that separates him out from the other village men, but when I say he has no trade, I don’t mean he is without occupation, I mean he has not settled on any one thing. He has a multitude of skills and from each day to the next he does whatever he wants. He can hunt, butcher, do carpentry, lay bricks, and his natural curiosity leads him to tinker with machines.
After checking the integrity of the traps, we head for the cashew tree and pick up the fallen nuts, piling them into a two-litre tin can. Father digs a hole and sets a fire in it, then we suspend the tin over it, allowing the flames to make contact with the can. In a few moments we both hear the hiss-pop! of the cashews roasting. The fleshy bits we gather in a bucket–it can be caustic in these amounts. Outer casing crisp and black, we crack the nuts free and I do not burn myself once. My father’s face is calm, like a pond surface. When I do something with particular verve, he breaks into a smile, but remains quiet.
Later, when we check the traps again, we have two grass-cutters and a bush rat. Father lifts me up, and places me on the bamboo bench. I giggle as he washes my feet. He cuts down fresh bamboo stems, then opens them lengthwise. He skins the animals, then chops them into bite-sized pieces, which he lays into the concavity of a portion of the bamboo stems. He squeezes out the cashew juice into the meat, then adds the nuts and whole wild chillies we picked on the way. He seals the concavity with green bamboo leaves, and repeats the whole process a second time on a different stem. He restarts the fire from before, then places the two bespoke bamboo pots inside.
“What do you want to be when you grow up?” he asks.
“Always right,” I say.
He cracks a smile, and may have chuckled briefly. “I don’t think your mother could stand being sandwiched between two know-it-alls.”
We eat the stewed meat in the bamboo grove out of bamboo bowls, sitting in the bamboo shelter he built. Shadows are longer now, and I sit in the shade of my father’s. I smell his sweat and hear his mastication and brief burps. I’m dozing when he lifts me up, and the gentle rocking of his gait on the way home sends me off to sleep.
I wake and turn, realising that we are not at home, but in the workshop, where my father tinkers on a monstrosity. I sleep off before he notices that I am awake.
My mother writes a single sentence of four hundred words in Yoruba and explains to me why it is meaningless. She teaches me that this is the essence of politics: to say much, but mean nothing. My mother is warm-hearted and soft of feature, all curves and roundness, sharp contrast to her incisive brain. She does not have an ID chip. A census-taker tried to berate her for it once and she beat him to death with verbal hypotaxis. Metaphorically, of course.
I don’t learn English until I am ten years old. By this time, my father is gone.
I have never seen my parents kiss, although for some reason, for many years I think I have. Later, when I revisit, I realise I have not. Is it just me? Is this the fiction that children who lose their parents create? Or is the past changing in subtle ways?
Arodan, our village, has a single claim to fame: proximity to twelve wind tunnels built to support the abortive Nigerian space programme. When the resources dried up, the workers simply downed tools and walked away. One day the place was a thriving anthill of activity; the next, abandoned. I have been to see the tunnels, screeched inside them, fearful of my own echo. I have been dwarfed by the giant fans, each blade five times my height. I imagine them moving, first slow, then faster than the eye can follow. The tunnels fill with imaginary air and blow my mental self away as though I am a leaf. The spaces look like the belly of a concrete leviathan, dilated from putrefying gases. I am an undigested morsel, standing alone among waste.
“Daddy, tell me about aliens,” I say.
“They are green-skinned, and they come from Mars.”
“Daddy…”
“They have spaceships made of corn husks and superglue. They have to eat a lot of beans.”
“Daddy…”
“Because theirs is a spaceflight powered by—”
“I’m going to tell Mother that you won’t tell me.”
“Aliens… aliens are only a problem in London, my little heart.”
“Have you been to London?”
“I’ve been to Birmingham, but I know what London is like.”
“What is it like?”
“London is like Lagos. It is built on the blood of others and is home to bandits and freebooters.”
“And aliens!”
“And aliens.”
My father is very strict with discipline in that I don’t get away with anything, but immediately after my punishment he is very warm and affectionate.
I deliberately transgress because of this sometimes.
Arodan as a village clutches a gentle hill, then spills down the west side to the plains, stopping at the banks of a river, a nameless tributary of the larger Yemaja. That description makes it seem large, but there is a lot of space between dwellings. This place has been resettled twice, once after a British punitive expedition razed it to the ground for some infraction lost to time, and the other time in 1956 or so, when all the inhabitants were found dead, mauled by carnivorous animals.
There has always been internal pressure to maintain a rural feel. We know each other’s families at least. Yes, we all have ID chips, but there is only a dirt road that links the motorways with Arodan, and though there are a multitude of footpaths, only one road down the hill through the middle of the village. We have some electricity, potable water from boreholes, sewerage, a post office, but that’s it. The cinema is a ninety-minute drive away, and nobody ever visits.
Which is why a stranger in town is always news.
Which is why the woman staring at me, a visitor, is both memorable and strange. My first impression of her is of a person completely at peace with herself. You get that sense even before you take in her physical presence, her lean frame, her fair skin, her light-brown eyes, her blue tie-and-dye wrap, which stops just above her breasts, her bare arms and feet. I can’t say how old she is. To me, at my level of maturity, there are only four ages: baby, child, adult and old person. She is an adult.
“Oh. You’re revising,” she says. I may have misheard. It doesn’t matter, because she disappears after that. Without drama, no sparkles, no dissolution, just there, then not-there.
I argue the memory with myself sometimes, and even consider that I may have imagined her. Nobody else saw her on that day, and even though I had never seen her before, I could not shake a feeling of familiarity.
This is one of the few things I never told my father.
Priests in red fussing around the smoking ruins of a home destroyed overnight during the thunderstorm; my father and I in the crowd that gathers to watch. It is the quietest crowd you’ve ever seen; not a soul speaks. I do. I ask who the people in red are.
“Sango priests,” says my father. “Lightning struck the house last night. Sango is the god of thunder, and any dwelling that has been brought down like this must be purified before repair.”
“They don’t seem to be purifying. They seem to be looking for something.”
My father nods. “The thunderstone, the thunderbolt calculus. The process can’t begin until they find the lithic manifestation of the lightning.”
“I don’t understand.”
“They’re going to find a pretty stone they’ll call the thunderstone, then they’re going to begin purification rites.”
And so they did.
Later that evening, while working on the engine, he tells me they aren’t really going to find the thunderstone. They will find an interesting pebble and decide it is the thunderstone. I ask why they still go through the motions. He says there is community cohesion in the old ways. Think of the poor character who has just lost their home and in addition suffers some injury or has a deceased family member. A visit from the
god makes them feel special. It makes whoever has to live in the property feel safer. I say, it’s fake safety.
“Never underestimate the effect of neurotransmitters,” says my father.
A month later he winks as he hands me a thunderstone necklace.
We should talk about the engine.
Chapter Two
I hate to bring the British into this, but it’s unavoidable. To understand the future, we need to understand the past, not just as context, but as the seeds of catastrophe.
During the British Empire’s halcyon days in Nigeria, a document created from the delirious ramblings of a priest with malaria wound its way to Whitehall. It had two hundred and fifty-six pages.
The writings first found their way into the hands of the Lander brothers, John and Richard, while they were charting the course of the River Niger, and they brought them back to the UK with them in 1831. John took them to the Custom House in Liverpool without reading them. When he joined the patronage of Lord Goderich of the Royal Geographical Society, he brought the papers with him to London and read them one evening when he was sad of heart, missing his brother Richard, who in 1832 had returned to Nigeria, where he would contract the lung inflammation that would ultimately kill him. After reading a third of the papers, John immediately called on Goderich to report what he had found. Goderich took them to Whitehall the next day.
It is unclear what happened exactly, but copies were made. One was sent to the British Museum in Bloomsbury under seal, and this is, sadly, the only extant copy.
The priest’s name was Marinementus, and he is a character to whom we shall return, but he died in a rainforest somewhere in the west of Nigeria. This was his first death, I believe. The document was a rather accurate set of prophecies. It predicted the sinking of the steamship Lexington, the Opium War, the death of American president William Harrison, the brilliant work of Ada Lovelace on the first computer program–it is said that faint shadows of code are replicated in the prophecy–and the blueprints of a machine that Babbage worked on at some point, the cannibalism of the Donner party, the Irish famine, the cholera outbreak in London, vaccination, air flight, various eclipses, lunar and solar, the two world wars, the loss of colonial power in Africa, and the descent of a meteorite called Wormwood in 2012, after which the prophecies stopped abruptly.