The Rosewater Redemption Read online

  After a year or two of predictions better than Nostradamus’ Delphic shit, the British government hired a tight-knit staff to see how the Lander document might benefit the Empire. This tradition led to dire consequences for the village of Arodan, which was mentioned by name in the prophecies.

  The writings contained the blueprint for a machine, an engine that… well, didn’t seem to do anything, according to the scientists who pored over it, but there remained the possibility that some context was missing. In 1956, they shipped over a scientist called Conrad, along with soldiers and assorted security types. They spent the first weeks on their bunks with amoebic dysentery, shitting their bowels out. When they recovered from this, they got malaria and several of them died. It’s one of the reasons the whites did not wish to visit the interior. They were the first Caucasians my ancestors had seen close up, and they were amused to find that their shit also stank. Literally and metaphorically.

  It took two months for Conrad to get healthy enough to start work. He was a tall, skinny, dark-haired, intelligent man with sunken eyes and no appetite for food or wine. He also had no other carnal appetites that anyone could discern, but white men were known to be insane, so this was not commented on as much as it would have been if he were black.

  He built prototypes and scribbled notes and built others. He had dynamos set up from various bicycles and had the wheels elevated. Vehicles that went nowhere. Did I mention that white men are insane? The women were more sensible. They often stayed indoors, avoiding the sun that burned and peeled their skin. Conrad fiddled, tinkered and adjusted, to no avail. The machine grew to the size of a house, parts for which he had brought in on rails by box car.

  If Whitehall had known what the machine was, they’d have sent a whole battalion of scientists. As it turned out, Conrad really was insane. He was sent home in 1960, when Nigeria became independent from Britain. He was committed to the Hanwell Asylum on Uxbridge Road, released in the 1970s, and subsequently died by suicide.

  The machine languished and decayed from neglect for decades, until one day my father came upon the box car that housed it. He never knew Conrad’s history and I didn’t find out until much later. There was a photograph of Conrad with the boys who rode the dynamo bicycles to nowhere, with “bicycle boys” written in cursive on the back.

  Throughout my childhood, until I was eleven, my father worked on this strange engine. At times we would go to Ilesha or Ibadan to buy spare parts or electronic components. Understand that Rosewater did not exist at this time. Wormwood had obliterated Hyde Park and was hibernating, growing, thriving, but it had not decided to travel in the Earth’s crust to Nigeria. None of us in Arodan cared that a meteorite had landed in the heart of London, because it was so far away.

  I would come in and sit near my father, “helping”. I did my homework, set for me by my father or mother. I could not go to regular schools. For one thing, I was smarter than everybody else, and this kept me apart from my peers. I did not think they were stupid; just unfocused and… childish. I knew too much to endear me to my teachers, and while I understood the difference between slippers and court shoes, grooming was not my priority.

  “She will not marry if she keeps this up,” said an elder to my father one day.

  “I won’t marry,” I said. “I’ll never leave home; I’ll live with my parents for ever.”

  The elder was scandalised but my father shook with laughter.

  I read books, for my father did not trust the electronic words. He said you remembered less when you read off a screen, something to do with using multiple senses like tactile and olfactory when you handled a book. I never got to test his theory.

  My father corrected the blueprint of the Great Engine, but when he activated it, nothing happened. Except once. Whenever he failed, we’d go looking for new spark plugs or resistors or brand-new cables. It made no difference. My mother saw it as his hobby and did nothing except check my sestinas and my essays.

  I was learning something from my father’s work, but I didn’t know what.

  Anyway. He activated it one day, one time I wasn’t there.

  Boom.

  Explosion.

  His body completely obliterated. Nothing to bury.

  I refused to believe it. I still do not. I did not attend his funeral and refuse to speak of him to anyone even now.

  …

  …

  What’s important is that I inherited his obsession. I had to learn English first, which I did using an English–Yoruba dictionary and a Yoruba bible, both written by Bishop Samuel Ajai Crowther in the 1880s. As you can imagine, it lent my speech a certain archaic affectation. I don’t mind, although I think interactions with others have cured me of this.

  I figured out what the machine was meant to be, although I had to get a professor of theoretical physics to confirm my ideas before I acted on them.

  It was a time–space machine, of course.

  Chapter Three

  This is Kaaro, the very best of an almost extinct breed of human that can manipulate the alien planet-wide network of linked microorganisms called the xenosphere by some. You know him. He is one of the last sensitives.

  Recently, he has been suffering from nosebleeds, and his lover, Aminat, has said she wakes up with the sheets looking like he was murdered in the night. As Rosewater’s top cop, she may have murder on the mind. He counters by grasping his morning wood and saying that when he’s dead she’ll know it because this will be gone. He is unaware that corpses also have erections, and this is not the only thing he is wrong about.

  Kaaro is retired. He imagined that he would not have to get out of bed before eleven o’clock, but he can only sleep for four hours on his best days. Some nights, since absorbing the surface memories of his old boss Femi Alaagomeji, he cannot sleep at all. He does not know how she can sleep at night, but he knows why she does the things that make it hard.

  He feeds his dog Yaro from a box that is almost empty and scratches the back of the mutt’s neck absently.

  For the aliens, the xenosphere is the most important infrastructure. Homians engineered fungus-like organisms, Ascomycetes xenosphericus, or xenoforms, and released them into the atmosphere over thousands of years, forming a network. The xenoforms connect to each other and to human nerve endings, from which they can thread their way to the brain, extract information and share it with all the other xenoforms, creating a field of historical and real-time information. The data goes both ways: whoever controls the xenosphere controls thoughts, and thoughts create reality. Through a genetic quirk, some humans can access this field, and even manipulate it. We end up with a universe that is a construct, part sensory information, part memory, part imagination.

  The kitchen fades and Kaaro slips into the xenosphere. His guardian, the giant Bolo, scarred from the insurrection, thumps about as he paces the yawning fields of Kaaro’s mind. He should heal Bolo. Do the scars represent some aspect of his own mind wounded in the conflict? Jesus, once he was a carefree thief bent on drinking and fucking himself to death. Now he has actual battle scars from a war of conscience.

  He has not told Aminat what he is here to do. For one thing, he is not entirely sure he can, or wants to. He is only convinced that he should try.

  First he commands Bolo to stand over him. The long braids hang on either side of him and he is now in shadow despite there being no sun in this place. There is no real light and only a cursory adherence to the laws of physics. He doesn’t think about it too much.

  He expands his awareness to the drop-off, the free xenosphere where the new god, Koriko, gnashes her teeth, seeking the dead to devour into her Homian–Earth pipeline. The floating consciousnesses are still there, representing the people in Rosewater and beyond, blissfully unaware of their role in the communal dream of humankind. There is no sign of the god, and Kaaro feels safe to attempt what he came for.

  Back in the boundaries of his own mind, in a grassy field, he kneels, and, with his bare hands, begins to dig. The soil is soft, loamy, easy to grab to start with, but the silt-clay composition begins to increase. He digs faster, and finds himself in a hole two feet, three feet deep, in a fraction of the time it would have taken if he were in the real world. He digs. The sand he throws out forms a dust cloud that swirls in air currents that do not exist. The hole begins to excavate itself, and Kaaro is caught in a dust devil that swirls faster and faster until he is in a sandstorm. The force lifts him off his feet and flings him out of the hole into the air. Bolo catches hold of his leg and drags him down to the ground.

  A hand grasps the lip of the hole, a second hand, and a head emerges.

  A woman pulls herself out and stands in front of him, looking up at the giant, to her left, right, then finally at Kaaro. She wears the nightgown he last saw her in.

  “Kaaro,” she says.

  “Welcome back, Nike,” says Kaaro.

  She examines her hand. “Back to what? I’m dead.”

  “Yes,” says Kaaro. “And you’re probably not even you.”

  Nike Onyemaihe was an older, dying sensitive who Kaaro met in his twenties. At the point of death she emptied all her memories into Kaaro, changing his entire view of life over three days. This was the end of his misspent youth. Well, the beginning of the end.

  “Why am I here?”

  “Because… well, good news, Nike. Really good news. I’ve… I’m more experienced than ever. I’ve honed my… our gift beyond my previous imaginings. I… Last year I realised I could possess multiple people as long as they were mindless reanimates. You know what reanimates are?”

  “I do not.”

  “It doesn’t matter. You will. The point is, because of a situation we have with some aliens, I know how to bring you back to life. I can take this manifestation of y
ou, of your memories, and load it into a body. You can walk the Earth again, new body, new chances, just like the aliens do.”

  Nike is silent.

  “Errr… what do you think?”

  Her appearance is in the process of changing. She started as an elderly, gaunt woman, but her self-image is transforming to a time when she had no aches and pains, and a straighter back, longer hair. It’s not that she’s made herself younger, but healthier at her own age.

  “It’s certainly a noble thought, a noble thing to do. One wonders if you have become altruistic or soft in your old age.”

  “You should see my belly. Wobbles like jelly.”

  “I have no doubt. Thank you, but I shall have to pass on your ghoulish offer. I have no wish to live in the body of another.”

  “Wait, what?”

  “I was ready to die when I passed on, Kaaro. It was my time. I lived a full life, not perfect, but full of pleasure and pain. I’m content with what I had. Besides, you forget yourself. I know where we are. There’s a reason you shouldn’t let people in your mind and have a giant Rasta patrolling. I’m aware, for example, that even you don’t know the reason you resurrected me. Would you like me to tell you?”

  “I—”

  “You think it’s because there are no more sensitives, and that there should be. The only other survivor, Eric, is the one you drove away. You regret that now, even though it was done in the heat or aftermath of battle. This is what you think.”

  “I—”

  “But the real, deeper reason is that you want another ally in the fight against the Homians because of what you took from Femi Alaagomeji. You are scared, like you’ve always been. But there is one good thing I see in all of this.”

  “What’s that?”

  Her clothes change into a flowing dark gown, and her hair plaits itself into cornrows flat on her scalp. She begins to float in the direction of the drop-off.

  “For once, you are not just afraid for yourself, or for your lover. You are actually concerned for the whole of humanity, and that’s an improvement in your character that almost makes me want to stay and fight for you. With you. Almost.”

  She picks up speed, her gown billowing about her, granting her a wraith-like quality, and then she is gone.

  Somewhat unsatisfactory.

  At least he got some insights into his own motivation. He stands looking out of the kitchen window, the tap-tap-tap of Yaro’s wagging tail hitting the floor providing a metronome for the song of pain in his heart. The encounter with Nike twists at the core of him, stirring everything else that isn’t working in his life. He is lonely. And afraid.

  Outside the property the verdant greens and browns of Koriko’s vegetation flow over the walls of other buildings. The wind is fragrant from the flowering plants that surf the static waves of creeper vines. He resolves to pick some for Aminat, hoping that wild flowers will soften her, or at least distract her from her mission, though he knows this is futile.

  His palm vibrates; it’s Layi, Aminat’s brother.

  “Big brother! How now?” Layi is perpetually of good cheer. In anyone else his unaffected benevolence would repel Kaaro, but Layi is the real deal and nobody hates him. He channels the xenosphere in a unique way, being a firestarter. Kaaro has been helping him focus and control his abilities, important since certain mishaps have led to houses being burned down.

  “Ready for your session?”

  Chapter Four

  Lora stands outside Jack Jacques’ door, waiting with the first two of his contingent of bodyguards. They are arguing, the mayor and his wife, an occurrence that is becoming more and more common with each passing week. Lora has a short internal conflict about how to react when the mayor comes out, but he takes this away from her. He emerges too fast, and is already wheeling down the hallway by the time she can move. She falls in behind him, as do the bodyguards, power-walking because the mayor seems to have set the chair speed faster than expected. Lora wishes he had stuck with the prosthesis, but it’s his choice. He was the one who got his leg shot off.

  “Mr Mayor…”

  “Welcome back, Lora. How was your vacation?”

  “Diverting, sir.”

  “Excellent, excellent. Is that a new dress?”

  Lora has on a summer dress instead of her usual suit. “It’s a hot day. I’m trying something out.”

  She hands him his bracelet, which synchronises with his phone implant after recognising his ID chip. He never takes work home, but the engine of state does not stop running for his family life. The bracelet has eight hours of new information too sensitive to entrust to the air.

  “What have I got?” asks the mayor.

  “Your head of security is waiting outside your office.”

  “Aminat? Does she have an appointment?”

  “No.”

  “Why didn’t anybody stop her?”

  “She’s the head of security.”

  Jacques sighs. “What else?”

  “You have to inspect the Homian Resettlement Institute and—”

  “Jack!”

  Aminat has lost patience and strides towards them. The bodyguards bunch protectively, but the mayor waves his hands. “It’s Aminat. Come on. What’s the matter with you? She’s not here to kill me.”

  “Don’t be too sure,” says Aminat.

  “You need to call me Mr Mayor in public, Aminat.”

  “You gave Femi Alaagomeji back to the Nigerians.”

  “I prefer to think of it as gaining Dahun.”

  “Why the fuck do we need Dahun?”

  “We don’t. I just like him.” The mayor smiles. Lora has seen him do this before, where he is not amused but uses the smile against an opponent. He wheels past Aminat, to the statues of Orisha that precede his office. All bar one are made of rock. The final one before his door is gleaming metal, a robotic sentry that acts as the final defence for the mayor. It had to activate during the War of Insurrection, but the artist who provided the camouflage is in Nigeria now, so it hasn’t been covered in clay.

  “What do you want me to do with him?” asks Aminat, jogging to keep up with the mayor, who deliberately uses the maximum speed on his chair.

  “You don’t have to do anything with him, Aminat.” He sheds his bodyguards outside the office, then transfers to his chair behind the desk. “Maybe use him in the police. Crime is up by thirty per cent this quarter.”

  “Thirty-two per cent,” says Lora.

  “Thirty-two per cent,” says the mayor.

  “But that’s your fault,” says Aminat.

  “How is that?”

  “Don’t play games with me, Jack. Don’t play stupid.”

  “What?”

  “Why didn’t you tell me you were going to trade Femi?”

  “Didn’t Kaaro tell you?” Lora says. “From what I hear, he interrogated her the day before.”

  “You what?” Aminat looks surprised.

  “You need to work on those communication skills, abi?” Jack says.

  Aminat seems to square up and Lora feels a self-defence sub-routine pushing against her protocols.

  “How can I ease your pain?” says the mayor. Again, this is a thing he does, making fun of a person’s issue then becoming all reasonable and serious.

  Aminat points to Lora. “Ask her to leave. I want to talk to you in private.”

  “Not a chance. This woman knows more about me than my wife. She stays.”

  “Fine. I quit.”

  “No, you don’t. Come on, Aminat. You’re being petulant. You were never like that. At least sit down.”

  Aminat sucks her teeth and sits in the chair opposite the mayor, desk between them. “You asked me to do a job. I cannot do it if you keep interfering, and if you keep information from me.”

  “The crime rate isn’t on you.”

  “I know. It’s on you. You have to let me prosecute your war buddies. I know what they did for us, but they get one free pass for that. They have all used their passes. Now you bring Dahun into the mix, their leader.”