Rosewater

by Tade Thompson

  By dusk it is over and everyone goes home. I scan the xenosphere, but other than the fading memories of bystanders … nothing.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  The Lijad, Unknown: 2055

  ‘Err …’ I say.

  I am staring down the barrel of a shotgun in what is undoubtedly the Lijad. I am only slightly confused and disoriented. This is exactly what I want. Well, maybe not exactly. The girl with the gun in my face is Oyin Da, the Bicycle Girl. Behind her, older guy, is the Professor, Aloy Ogene who led me here. None of the scenarios in my head involve being on the ground wondering if a shooter can miss at this range.

  ‘He has no weapons, Oyin Da,’ says Ogene.

  ‘I have no weapons, Oyin Da,’ I say. I maintain eye contact with her like I’ve heard animal trainers say, because I have no idea what she may or may not do to me.

  ‘Who are you?’ she asks.

  Her name means ‘spilled honey’ in Yoruba. Her mind churns like a choppy sea, but with clarity. I don’t know how I know this. Something has changed in me, or in my abilities. I have shown occasional flashes of this before, but it’s more consistent all of a sudden. I know, for example, that she is not going to kill me, that she has never killed a human, though she is good with the shotgun.

  ‘I am going to stand up,’ I say. I tell her because she still seems twitchy.

  ‘No, you will stay there until I am satisfied,’ she says.

  ‘He is unarmed,’ says Ogene again.

  ‘Can I at least pick this meat off myself? I’m a bit disgusted and this shirt is expensive.’ I pick the contents of the shopping bag off one at a time. I get an image of my father teaching me how to butcher a goat, cutting the belly open lengthwise and identifying all the parts. Except my father never did that. The memory belongs to one of the other men standing around. With other people’s thoughts in my head I am distracted, can’t concentrate. This is not going to be easy.

  ‘You will tell me your name,’ says Oyin Da. She speaks funny, strange as if she is reading from a book.

  On impulse I tell her the truth. ‘I will. My name is Kaaro. I am a thief and I’ve been asked to find you.’ I tell her everything. While I talk I am amazed that I can pick thoughts out of her brain like ears of corn. They float on the ether, visible, tasty morsels with weight and character and odours. It’s difficult to explain if you have never experienced this. I can feel her relax. No, that’s someone else, off to the right of me, one of the women with the shopping. She owns the bag of meat cutlets. Owned. She is wondering if any cutlets can be salvaged. There are children in the Lijad and there has been some difficulty keeping them all fed.

  I sample the others, but I am addicted to Bicycle Girl’s thoughts. There is aclarity, a lack of guile, a beauty mixed with an untamed playful expansion of possibilities and alternatives. She has four trains of thought going at the same time. She is truly egalitarian and holds Ogene in high esteem.

  The place I find myself in is just the antechamber of the Lijad. It is a rectangular space half-filled with a grotesque machine. It’s a true Frankenstein’s Monster, with parts cobbled from different eras and swapped out from pilfered components. It works, but only with frequent intervention from Ogene, Oyin Da, and some other men and women, which I sense is a kind of joyful labour for all of them, filling them with a sense of achievement that emanates throughout the room. The area is surprisingly dark, although some of the control panels glow in warm green and red hues. I absorb the Lijad in a combination of what I can see and what I derive from the thoughts of the people around me and the information arrives in a mishmash of knowledge which I have trouble sorting.

  In spite of the gun I detect no malice in Oyin Da. Quite the opposite, actually. It seems she thinks of the threat as a kind of screening to new inhabitants, although she is undecided about what to do.

  ‘Why does this Section Forty-five want me?’ she asks.

  ‘I do not know, but I don’t think they want to give you a medal,’ I say. She is unafraid of the government. Not even a twinge of anxiety.

  She tilts her head to Ogene. ‘Have you heard of this organisation?’

  ‘Not Section Forty-five, but I’ve heard of what might have been the parent department back when ignorant people were killing children they called witches decades ago.’

  There is more, but Ogene keeps it to himself because he does not want me to know what he knows. I pluck it out of his head anyway.

  What became S45 started in the mid-noughties as a rescue operation, of all things. By 2006 there had been several lynchings of children and teenagers. They were either beaten to death by a mob or necklaced. The killings were instigated by church pastors who declared the children witches. In some cases, the only sign of witchcraft was albinism. The pastors could not be arrested because they were popular in the community and popularity equals votes, even in a country with widespread election rigging. The world watched mobile-phone footage of mob action with horror and Nigeria was, once again, a laughing stock in the international community. The president wanted something done.

  The first actions were simple church surveillance assignments. Agents were placed in or recruited from the congregations and the messages from the pulpit analysed. Overt interest in spirituality was not enough; such beliefs were ubiquitous in Nigeria. An interest in exorcism, particularly the violent variety that tried to beat or starve a demon out was the kind of thing Section Forty-five was tasked to root out. A potential child in danger would be identified as possessed and targeted by the pastor with the cooperation of parents. Section Forty-five agents would whisk the child away in the night.

  This operation was so successful that the local superstition laid the blame at the feet of Satan. The Devil was a thief, stealing away the children instead of allowing the children of God to cast out the demons. This did not matter. Deaths were down, children were saved, and nobody suspected government involvement.

  Then the departmental focus shifted to other anomalistic phenomena.

  Ogene loves Oyin Da like a daughter. He also seems to love his wife Regina even though he is fucking one of the Lijad women. One of the other women in the thinks I might be a danger to her daughters and mentally urges Oyin Da to shoot me. She does not.

  Oyin Da swings the barrel up, eyes still on me. She is interesting to watch. At first glance what you notice about her is her massive Afro-puffs which look like twin dark moons frozen in orbit behind her head. A neat parting bisects her hair in the exact middle. But there’s more. Her eyes are restless, alighting on everything in the visual field several times, but at the same time able to focus on me. She has a large mouth, but thin lips. She is skinny, and her body movements are a mixture of complete stillness interspersed with bursts of hyperkinetic activity, as if she takes time to contemplate, then acts decisively. She also talks like she’s reading text from a book. Precise, correct, but strangely without affect.

  She thinks it must be uncomfortable on the floor and wants an excuse to let me up. I smile. I decide I like this thought-reading business.

  ‘What’s funny?’ asks Oyin Da.

  ‘Nothing. I just thought there would be Lijadu Sisters music piped all through this place,’ I say. I sing a few bars of a song I heard on Nimbus.

  Oyin Da gives Ogene a look, and I know that the name was his idea. ‘Search him,’ she says.

  As they manhandle me I note that there are no windows here, and apart from the lights of the machine there are fluorescent tubes at various intervals. There is a strong smell of burning metal, the kind you get in welder’s shops, although nothing is on fire. I suspect a machine such as this requires a lot of ongoing work.

  ‘There are no weapons on him,’ says one of the men who search me. He is disgusted by the meat stench.

  ‘I told you,’ I say.

  ‘Yes, you did,’ says Oyin Da. ‘What am I to do with you?’

  ‘If there’s a threat we need to move in a direction away from it,’ says Ogene.

  ‘Shall we not under
stand the threat first?’ asks Oyin Da.

  ‘I’m not a threat,’ I say.

  ‘Not you. Section Forty-five.’ Oyin Da’s mind is as elegant as a French horn, thoughts moving in whorls and evoking fresh mint leaves. ‘Take the shopping in. Some of the children will be getting hungry soon. And get me the implant scanner.’

  They sit me down and place a black device that’s shaped like a toilet seat around my neck and it beeps when it crosses my chip at the root of my neck. Oyin Da sits across looking at a holofield display. ‘At least you’ve been where you say you’ve been,’ she says.

  ‘Will you people stop looking at me like I’m some variety of snake, then?’

  ‘You are some variety of snake,’ says Ogene. ‘You’re the first uninvited person who has ever been here and you confess to tracking us for the federal government.’

  ‘Yes, but I’m here now and I don’t want to expose your location.’

  ‘You could not even if you wanted to,’ says Oyin Da. ‘We are not in a location per se.’ More like a potential of location, the different spaces between various heres. The Lijad exists with Schrödinger’s Cat in a dimension of several unknowable probabilities.

  She leaves the panel and starts pushing com controls. Ogene moves to her side and whispers. This is so easy, this thought-awareness. He is concerned that she might be walking into a trap and that it would be energy expensive keeping a window open for as long as it would require to find out. She says it will be all right, but what she is thinking is that being a finder, I will guide them and help them escape when the time comes. She has granted me a limited amount of trust. This fills my belly with warmth.

  ‘Give him a change of clothes,’ says Oyin Da. She code-switches into Yoruba where her speech is not so devoid of emotion. ‘I’m not going to see potential adversaries smelling of meat.’

  ‘Touch these clothes and you die,’ I say. ‘Meat or no meat, this shirt is Pierre Cardin. I’d rather stink.’

  There is a flowering of thoughts from all of them following my comment, each of them wondering how I came to be so absurd. I feel absurd, but then I realise that actually I don’t, but I’m aware of emotions from around me. I am confused, but in a good way.

  ‘Let’s see what the council thinks,’ says Oyin Da.

  They march me out of the control room into what should be open air, but isn’t. It’s dark, but not like night. I look up and see that the sky is artificial. About a hundred feet up there appears to be a vault of some patchy material held up with metal ribs. Both the material and the ribs are variously coloured, like found material. The ribs end on both sides of the horizon, but are held up with poles sunk into the ground at intervals. I wonder what is outside the vault, and when the people walking with me think of the sky there is an undercurrent of trepidation. There are light bulbs at intervals on the ribs, but they are not lit.

  Behind me, the building that houses the portal machine is an ugly block of concrete with some slit windows near the flat roof. What is unusual is there are scores of bicycles sunk into the concrete, wheels removed, chains linking pedals to small generator devices, cables trailing into the roof like artificial cobwebs. There are so many that the roof looks hairy from a distance.

  ‘The cycles,’ I say. ‘Is that art?’

  Oyin Da snorts. ‘An earlier version required a kick start of power at a time we were not connected to the national grid.’

  I see a succession of images from her. A black and white photograph showing a shirtless white man in the foreground with several black men behind him, and the block in the background. The flip side of the photograph has the words Bicycle Boys on it. The image shifts to Oyin Da working on both blueprints and the manifest machine. There is an image with all the boys riding the bikes to infinity, generating some current, firing up the machine.

  I see a catastrophic explosion after which there is no blue sky, nor clouds, but a kind of warped space, a twisting, churning abyss that drives people mad and necessitates the building of the vault.

  Oyin Da nudges me. ‘Are you all right? You seem preoccupied.’

  ‘I’m … fine. It’s just a lot to take in.’

  ‘It’s best if you don’t see this place like a village. Think of it as a vehicle,’ says Ogene. In his mind he worries that I will go berserk if I happen upon a gap in the vault, of which there are many.

  Along the path there is a brightly lit area of artificial light for growing crops. This farm is untended right now, but I can see the work that has gone into it. Not a weed in sight, and tight ridges and furrows. I smell fertiliser and compost, although I am unsure if this is the memory of the smell picked up from someone around me.

  We pass empty school houses, the buildings locked. From several people I receive the image of virtual reality pods for each pupil, scavenged and retrofitted. The people here are proud of the education they offer their children. They have a version of local Nimbus, limited by their lack of consistent connection to the world, but Ogene and others have servers that are updated when the Lijad reality intersects with ours.

  There are gymnasiums, again empty. My sense is that I have arrived at their agreed night time. The ersatz day is for sixteen hours and they turn on the lights which nobody in the Lijad really likes.

  We come to a village hall. News of my arrival has spread by gossip. I can literally feel the wave of information, a data front spreading throughout the village. There are about fifteen hundred people here, all curious about me. At least they aren’t thinking of killing the stranger.

  They have a council of thirteen elders and Oyin Da puts a case, my case to them patiently. It is possible one of the elders is her biological father, but this does not come as a clear thought, perhaps because she is concentrating on convincing them to let her go with me to confront S45.

  They ask me some clarification questions, then I am sent outside while they debate. I make friends with some free range livestock. I idly wonder if it ever rains here, and some children stand a yard away and stare at me, one boy sucking his thumb and smiling around it. It takes the council twenty minutes to decide.

  ‘Well?’ I ask Oyin Da.

  ‘We’re going,’ she says.

  Oyin Da and I arrive in the room where I was initially ensconced at S45. I can only hope that Femi Alaagomeji is in the building somewhere. The room is empty and dim. There are no documents on the desks. Neither Oyin Da nor I can activate the work stations on the tables. I read from her that she would be able to do it, given time, but she is curious about other things. The door is unlocked, and unsurprisingly there are no guards behind the door like the last time I was here. The corridors hold silence close like a sick child. It’s like the kind you get in really high level banks, the result of expensive sound proofing.

  ‘How do we go about finding this Alaagomeji person?’ asks Oyin Da.

  ‘I can think of two ways. We can keep walking along these corridors until someone accosts us and takes us to the leader. Or I can find a fix on her and lead us.’

  ‘Is she here?’

  ‘I don’t know yet. It’s taking me time to acclimate after the journey in the Lijad. Let’s just walk. It’ll kick-in soon.’

  She has many questions about me, about my abilities. She does not ask them because she is focused on the matter at hand.

  ‘You can ask,’ I say. ‘I know you’re curious.’

  ‘So, you can find anything?’

  ‘Not anything. If an aircraft breaks apart above a jungle I can’t find it because a person did not leave it there. There has to be some thought behind it. It’s the thoughts that I find, not the object.’

  ‘And do you know how?’

  ‘No. It’s the usual supernatural stuff. Psychics have always existed.’

  ‘That is nonsense,’ says Oyin Da. ‘There is what exists and what does not. There is what is known and unknown. What you call the supernatural is just the intersection of what exists and is not known. Once it is known it becomes less magical, trust me. It just need
s more observation and the application of rigorous scientific method.’

  ‘Do you know how I can do it? The science of it?’

  ‘No.’ But she has ideas. ‘When you do whatever it is that you do it is clear that you are accessing data of some kind. That means that the data or information exists somewhere in a place that not everyone has access to. In fact, only a tiny minority are aware of it, those we call psychics or witches. The two lines of enquiry I would pursue would be how the data is stored and how you access it.’

  I am about to respond to this when I sense Femi. I know exactly where she is with such certainty that I experience the Finder’s Passion again, although it is difficult to tell if what I feel is because of my sexual attraction to Femi.

  ‘Let’s go,’ I say.

  I take us through passageways and up flights of stairs. These have locks and access pads in some cases, but are open at the time we reach them. We pass some people, but they are not soldier-types and appear to be preoccupied with their own troubles. They barely spare us a glance. I start to move faster and resist the temptation to grab Oyin Da’s arm. She keeps up and keeps quiet. The first soldier we see is outside the conference room that is our destination. I watch from the end of the hallway.

  ‘She’s in there,’ I say.

  ‘Then we must go in,’ says Oyin Da.

  ‘They might take us into custody.’

  She turns to look at me. ‘You do realise that I got Professor Ogene out of Kirikiri Prison, right? Do not worry. I cannot be held and you can find your way out of anywhere.’ She smiles and with her wide mouth it reminds me of something I read in a book. If the ends of her smile reach all around her head will the top fall off? Through the Looking Glass. Lewis Carroll. I am definitely through the looking glass here.