Children of Ruin

by Adrian Tchaikovsky

  Alaba Station is crowded with commercial-district workers and the queues snake out to the street, but they are almost all going anticlockwise to Kehinde Station, which is closest to the Opening. I hesitate briefly before I buy my ticket. I plan to go home and change, but I wonder if it will be difficult to meet up with Bola and her husband. I have a brief involuntary connection to the xenosphere and a hot, moist surge of anger from a cuckolded husband lances through me. I disconnect and breathe deeply.

  I go home. Even though I have a window seat and the dome is visible, I do not look at it. When I notice the reflected light on the faces of other passengers, I close my eyes, though this does not keep out the savoury smell of akara or the sound of their trivial conversation. There’s a saying that everybody in Rosewater dreams of the dome at least once every night, however briefly. I know this is not true because I have never dreamed of the place.

  That I have somewhere to sit on this train is evidence of the draw of the Opening. The carriages are usually full to bursting, and hot, not from heaters, but from body heat and exhalations and despair.

  I come off at Atewo after a delay of twenty-five minutes due to a power failure from the North Ganglion. I look around for Yaro, but he’s nowhere to be found. Yaro’s a friendly stray dog who sometimes follows me home and to whom I feed scraps. I walk from the station to my block, which takes ten minutes. When I get signal again, my phone has four messages. Three of them are jobs. The fourth is from my most demanding employer.

  Call now. And get a newer phone implant. This is prehistoric.

  I do not call her. She can wait.

  I live in a two-bed partially automated flat. Working two jobs, I could get a better place with fully humanised AI if I wanted. I have the funds, but not the inclination. I strip, leaving my clothes where they lie, and pick out something casual. I stare at my gun holster, undecided. I do not like guns. I cross the room to the wall safe, which appears in response to signals from my ID implant. I open it and consider taking my gun. There are two magazines of ammo beside it, along with a bronze mask and a clear cylinder. The fluid in the cylinder is at rest. I pick it up and shake it, but the liquid is too viscous and it stays in place. I put it back and decide against a weapon.

  I shower briefly and head out to the Opening.

  How to talk about the Opening?

  It is the formation of a pore in the biodome. Rosewater is a doughnut-shaped city that surrounds the dome. In the early days we actually called it the Doughnut. I was there. I saw it grow from a frontier town of tents and clots of sick people huddling together for warmth into a kind of shanty town of hopefuls and from there into an actual municipality. In its eleven years of existence the dome has not taken in a single outsider. I was the last person to traverse it and there will not be another. Rosewater, on the other hand, is the same age and grows constantly.

  Every year, though, the biodome opens for twenty or thirty minutes in the south, in the Kehinde area. Everyone in the vicinity of the opening is cured of all physical and some mental ailments. It is also well known and documented that the outcome is not always good, even if diseases are abolished. There are reconstructions that go wrong, as if the blueprints are warped. Nobody knows why this happens, but there are also people who deliberately injure themselves for the sole purpose of getting “reconstructive surgery.”

  Trains are out of the question at this time, on this night. I take a taxi, which drives in the opposite direction first, then describes a wide southbound arc, taking a circuitous route through the back roads and against the flow of traffic. This works until it doesn’t. Too many cars and motorbikes and bicycles, too many people walking, too many street performers and preachers and out-of-towners. I pay the driver and walk the rest of the way to Bola’s temporary address. This is easy as my path is perpendicular to the crush of pilgrims.

  Oshodi Street is far enough from the biodome that the crowd is not so dense as to impede my progress. Number 51 is a tall, narrow four-storey building. The first door is propped open with an empty wooden beer crate. I walk into a hallway that leads to two flats and an elevator. On the top floor, I knock, and Bola lets me in.

  One thing hits me immediately: the aroma and heat blast of hot food, which triggers immediate salivation and the drums of hunger in my stomach. Bola hands me field glasses and leads me into the living room. There is a similar pair dangling on a strap around her neck. She wears a shirt with the lower buttons open so that her bare gravid belly pokes out. Two children, male and female, about eight or nine, run around, frenetic, giggling, happy.

  “Wait,” says Bola. She makes me stand in the middle of the room and returns with a paper plate filled with akara, dodo and dundu, the delicious street-food triad of fried beans, fried plantain and fried yam. She leads me by the free hand to the veranda, where there are four deckchairs facing the dome. Her husband, Dele, is in one, the next is empty, the third is occupied by a woman I don’t know, and the fourth is for me.

  Dele Martinez is rotund, jolly but quiet. I’ve met him many times before and we get along well. Bola introduces the woman as Aminat, a sister, although the way she emphasises the word, this could mean an old friend who is as close as family rather than a biological sibling. She’s pleasant enough, smiles with her eyes, has her hair drawn back into a bun and is casually dressed in jeans. She is perhaps my age or younger. Bola knows I am single and has made it her mission to find me a mate. I don’t like this because…?well, when people matchmake, they introduce people to you whom they think are sufficiently like you. Each person they offer is a commentary on how they see you. If I’ve never liked anyone Bola has introduced me to, does that mean she doesn’t know me well enough, or that she does know me but I hate myself?

  I sit down and avoid talking by eating. I avoid eye contact by using the binoculars.

  The crowd is contained in Sanni Square—usually a wide-open space framed by shops that exist only to exploit visitors to the city, cafés that usually cater to tired old men, and travel agents—behind which Oshodi Street lurks. A firework goes off, premature, a mistake. Most leave the celebrations till afterwards. Oshodi Street is a good spot. It’s bright from the dome and we are all covered in that creamy blue electric light. The shield is not dazzling, and up close you can see a fluid that ebbs and flows just beneath the surface.

  The binoculars are high-end, with infrared sensitivity and a kind of optional implant hack that brings up individual detail about whoever I focus on, tag information travelling by laser dot and information downloading from satellite. It is a bit like being in the xenosphere; I turn it off because it reminds me of work.

  Music wafts up, carried in the night but unpleasant and cacophonous because it comes from competing religious factions, bombastic individuals and the dome tourists. It is mostly percussion-accompanied chanting.

  There are, by my estimate, thousands of people. They are of all colours and creeds: black Nigerians, Arabs, Japanese, Pakistani, Persians, white Europeans and a mishmash of others. All hope to be healed or changed in some specific way. They sing and pray to facilitate the Opening. The dome is, as always, indifferent to their reverence or sacrilege.

  Some hold a rapt, religious awe on their faces and cannot bring themselves to talk, while others shout in a continuous, sustained manner. An imam has suspended himself from a roof in a harness that looks homemade, and is preaching through a bullhorn. His words are lost in the din, which swallows meaning and nuance and shits out a homogenous roar. Fights break out but are quashed in seconds because nobody knows if you have to be “good” to deserve the blessings from the biodome.

  A barricade blocks access to the dome and armed constables form up in front of it. The first civilians are one hundred metres away, held back by an invisible stanchion. The officers look like they will shoot to kill. This is something they have done in the past, the latest incident being three years back, when the crowd showed unprecedented rowdiness. Seventeen dead, although the victims rose during that year’s Opening. Th
ey were…?destroyed two weeks later as they clearly were not themselves any more. This happens. The alien can restore the body, but not the soul, something Anthony told me back in ’55, eleven years ago.

  I cough from the peppery heat of the akara. The fit drives my vision briefly to the sky and I see a waning gibbous, battling bravely to be noticed against the light pollution.

  I see the press, filming, correspondents talking into microphones. Here and there are lay scientists with big scanners pointed finger-like towards the dome. Sceptics, true believers, in-between, all represented, all busy. Apart from the classified stuff about sensitives and the xenosphere, most information about the dome is in the public domain, but it is amazing that the fringe press and conspiracy theorists have different ideas. A large segment of the news-reading population, for example, believes that the alien is entirely terrestrial, a result of human biological experimentation. There is “proof” of this on Nimbus, of course. There are scientists who don’t believe, but they take observations and collate data for ever, refusing to come to conclusions. There are those who believe the dome is a magical phenomenon. I won’t get started on the quasi-religious set.

  I feel a gentle tap on my left shoulder and emerge from the vision. Aminat is looking at me. Bola and her husband have shifted out of earshot.

  “What do you see?” she asks. She smiles as if she is in on some joke but unsure if it’s at my expense.

  “People desperate for healing,” I say. “What do you see?”

  “Poverty,” says Aminat. “Spiritual poverty.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Nothing. Maybe humankind was meant to be sick from time to time. Maybe there is something to be learned from illness.”

  “Are you politically inclined against the alien?”

  “No, hardly. I don’t have politics. I just like to examine all angles of an issue. Do you care?”

  I shake my head. I don’t want to be here, and if not for Bola’s invitation I would be home contemplating my cholesterol levels. I am intrigued by Aminat, but not enough to want to access her thoughts. She is trying to make conversation, but I don’t like talking about the dome. Why then do I live in Rosewater? I should move to Lagos, Abuja, Accra, anywhere but here.

  “I don’t want to be here either,” says Aminat.

  I wonder for a moment if she has read my thoughts, if Bola matched us because she is also a sensitive. That would be irritating.

  “Let’s just go through the motions to keep Bola happy. We can exchange numbers at the end of the evening and never call each other again. I will tell her tomorrow, when she asks, that you were interesting and attentive, but there was no chemistry. And you will say…?”

  “That I enjoyed my evening, and I like you, but we didn’t quite click.”

  “You will also say that I had wonderful shoes and magnificent breasts.”

  “Er…?okay.”

  “Good. We have a deal. Shake on it?”

  Except we cannot shake hands because there is oil on mine from the akara, but we touch the backs of our hands together, co-conspirators. I find myself smiling at her.

  A horn blows and we see a dim spot on the dome, the first sign. The dark spot grows into a patch. I have not seen this as often as I should. I saw it the first few times but stopped bothering after five years.

  The patch is roughly circular, with a diameter of six or seven feet. Black as night, as charcoal, as pitch. It looks like those dark bits on the surface of the sun. This is the boring part. It will take half an hour for the first healing to manifest. Right now, all is invisible. Microbes flying into the air. The scientists are frenzied now. They take samples and will try to grow cultures on blood agar. Futile. The xenoforms do not grow on artificial media.

  In the balcony everyone except me takes a deep breath, trying to get as many microbes inside their lungs as possible. Aminat breaks her gaze from the dome, twists in her seat and kisses me on the lips. It lasts seconds and nobody else sees it, intent as they are upon the patch. After a while, I am not sure it happened at all. I don’t know what to make of it. I can read minds but I still don’t understand women. Or men. Humans. I don’t understand humans.

  Down below, it begins, the first cries of rapture. It is impossible to confirm or know what ailments are taken care of at first. If there is no obvious deformity or stigmata, like jaundice, pallor or a broken bone, there is no visible change except the emotional state of the healed. Already, down at the front, younger pilgrims are doing cartwheels and crying with gratitude.

  A man brought in on a stretcher gets up. He is wobbly at first, but then walks confidently. Even from this distance I can see the wideness and wildness of his eyes and the rapid flapping of his lips. Newcomers experience disbelief.

  This continues in spurts and sometimes ripples that flow through the gathered people. The trivial and the titanic are equally healed.

  The patch is shrinking now. At first the scientists and I are the only ones to notice. Their activities become more agitated. One of them shouts at the others, though I cannot tell why.

  I hear a tinkle of laughter from beside me. Aminat is laughing with delight, her hands held half an inch from her face and both cheeks moist. She is sniffing. That’s when it occurs to me that she might be here for healing as well.

  At that moment, I get a text. I look at my palm to read the message off the flexible subcutaneous polymer. My boss again.

  Call right now, Kaaro. I am not kidding.

  BY ADRIAN TCHAIKOVSKY

  SHADOWS OF THE APT

  Empire in Black and Gold

  Dragonfly Falling

  Blood of the Mantis

  Salute the Dark

  The Scarab Path

  The Sea Watch

  Heirs of the Blade

  The Air War

  War Master’s Gate

  Seal of the Worm

  ECHOES OF THE FALL

  The Tiger and the Wolf

  The Bear and the Serpent

  The Hyena and the Hawk

  Guns of the Dawn

  Children of Time

  Children of Ruin

  Praise for Adrian Tchaikovsky

  “A novel of sublime plot twists and spectacular set pieces, all underpinned by great ideas. And it is crisply modern—but with the sensibility of classic science fiction. Asimov or Clarke might have written this. A hugely satisfying sequel.”

  —Stephen Baxter on Children of Ruin

  “Magnificent. This is the big stuff—the really big stuff. Rich in wisdom and Humanity (note the “H”), with a Stapledonian sweep and grandeur. Books like this are why we read science fiction.”

  —Ian McDonald on Children of Ruin

  “Children of Ruin is wonderful—big, thinky SF that feels classic without being mired in the past, absolutely crammed with fun ideas. Anyone who likes sweeping, evolutionary-scale stories will love this.”

  —Django Wexler

  “A refreshingly new take on post-dystopia civilizations, with the smartest evolutionary world-building you’ll ever read.”

  —Peter F. Hamilton on Children of Time

  “Children of Time is a joy from start to finish. Entertaining, smart, surprising and unexpectedly human.”

  —Patrick Ness

  “Brilliant science fiction and far-out world-building.”

  —James McAvoy on Children of Time

  “This is superior stuff, tackling big themes—gods, messiahs, artificial intelligence, alienness—with brio.”

  —Financial Times on Children of Time

  “Packed with ingenious ideas… classic widescreen space opera.”

  —New Scientist on Children of Time

  “An enormously interesting and well drawn SF novel that asks some tough questions and makes interesting extrapolations.”

  —SF Signal on Children of Time

  “Tchaikovsky is a phenomenal author, a modern powerhouse of fiction.… Speculative fiction at its best.”

  —Starburst magaz
ine on Dogs of War

  “A timely warning about the dangers of artificial intelligence and super weapons in the hands of unscrupulous powers.”

  —Guardian on Dogs of War