Rosewater

by Tade Thompson

  I tell the brains of all these fine people to ignore the signal. I will be invisible, for all intents. Some of their thoughts bear malice and petty angers that hurt as they pass through me. I contain this shit.

  I walk.

  I see them waiting, impatient. They do not see me. Lorna is stretching her neck and rolling her shoulders, preparing for a fight. They hold rocks and planks and iron bars. I have been here before and the déjà vu is disconcerting. I am swimming through an acid pool, a river of venom. I am down the first flight of stairs, the second, the twelfth, stepping over the drugged kid, to the ground floor. They are staring up waiting for me. I pass between them in the courtyard. I can smell the stink of their sweat, their acrid bloodlust, and hear their heavy breathing. I feel stoned. So many minds, so many thoughts. If not that my life is in danger I would enjoy this. There are now four people between me and my exit.

  Then I cough. It bursts out of me like a hatching parasite, too sudden to suppress. It throws my concentration off.

  I am seen.

  My control does not slip so much as slide, carried away. I lose all of them. They see me instantly. There is an interval of shock where nobody does anything. They stare, I stare. I consider, in those seconds, if I should run. The nearest person to me cries out, and I hear a swing, a slice through the air. It hurts, a flowering of pain that spreads from my temple throughout my body. I fold up like a millipede and wait for the rest.

  It does not come. Instead, there is dry, hot wind, howling like a wolf. I open my eyes and do not believe what I see. There is fire in a cylinder all around me. I stand. Blood drips from my temple and I’m unsteady.

  ‘I am the light, I am the flame, I am the shining one. No one may hurt the ones I love.’

  Oh-kay. This is a hallucination.

  Layi zooms off into the sky and I am yanked off my feet after him in a kind of flame-free backwash. It reminds me of hanging on to the floater that belonged to Aminat’s husband. I see Layi’s feet. He pedals and kicks them as if he is swimming. He is barefoot and naked. Flames burst on his skin here and there, but these only provide pockets of modesty. His fleshy baton flies free. I lose sight of him as the world turns upside down. I am spinning.

  I hear his voice fading in and out. ‘I am sorry, Kaaro, but I have burnt the clothes you gave me.’

  The buffeting reduces and I am cushioned to the ground, a gentle landing. I do not know where we are or how far away we travelled from Clement’s place. We are on a flat concrete roof. Layi stands naked in front of me, no longer burning. I take off my shirt and hand it to him.

  ‘You know, we are going to be arrested as homosexuals,’ I say.

  He shrugs. ‘Thank you for the coals.’

  ‘Coals?’

  ‘I said “clothes.”’

  ‘Really? That’s odd. I heard different …’

  A gust of wind almost blows me off my feet. This must be a tall building because I see no other rooftop. Just clouds and blue sky. Sparks form playfully on Layi’s skin, but die out. There is a tower poking into the sky and communications dishes attached like barnacles, but otherwise the roof is featureless. For a while I feel stronger, but it’s only the exhilaration. I’m still sick.

  ‘I feel stupid asking this, but are you an angel?’

  He laughs. ‘My sister has been talking to you. Which is good. It means she must really like you. This is, I’m told, a family secret.’

  ‘It does explain the chain and the fire extinguishers and why they don’t let you out.’

  ‘Ahh, it is not that simple. I consent to the fettering. Sometimes I sleep walk. Sometimes I burn while I sleep. I have burnt the house down in the past. These are necessary precautions.’

  ‘So, what are you?’ I ask.

  ‘I am like you, Kaaro. I am infected with alien cells.’

  ‘Aminat says your mother had sex with an angel.’

  ‘I think she had sex with an alien, or someone infected with these cells. I am my father’s son, at any rate. I know this because I have matched our DNA. My skin is infected with the same xenoforms that grow and multiply on yours.’

  ‘I don’t produce flame,’ I say.

  He places a hand on my shoulder. It’s hot, but I do not flinch. ‘You could. From what I see the xenoforms you carry about look like neurones, elongated nerve cells. The truth is, they can be anything. The ones I carry are adapted to be intensely catabolic and shear off me, burning up.’

  ‘Do you sense the xenosphere?’

  ‘The what?’

  ‘The thoughtspace, the communal place created by the xenoforms. That’s what I call it.’

  ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ he says. ‘Let’s get you downstairs and home. I don’t think this wind is helping your cough.’

  ‘Where are we?’

  ‘The roof of a Goodhead store.’

  For a minute I think he knows, but it isn’t so. He has brought me to the store for practical reasons. We buy new clothes for him, or rather I buy them while he hides. Not out of modesty. I’m the one who tells him to hold back. I once fed myself for a week by stealing off the shelves of a supermarket like this one, just opening packets and eating things. People stare at us, or rather at Layi. Men and women are enthralled by his beauty and his otherness. I notice this, but blood still drips from my head and I’m fading. I feel fluid in my chest, but I can’t even cough it out anymore.

  ‘Shall I take you to the hospital, Kaaro?’ asks Layi in a voice that is too loud.

  My vision eddies. Reality becomes negotiable.

  Molara stands before me, but this time without her aggressive sexuality. We are in a park, and none of the Goodhead aisles with canned fish for four ninety-nine is visible. I feel good, euphoric. I have been told that when you are drowning one of the last feelings is euphoria. I am drowning in my own body fluids somewhere, so it is apt.

  ‘We’ve come to watch you die,’ she says. Her face is expressionless but there is a smile in her voice and a sense of accomplishment around her like a body odour.

  ‘“We?”’

  ‘We. I. Do you know that part of the Christian holy book, the Bible, where God refers to himself as us and I at different times? Well I, we understand it better than you.’

  ‘It isn’t hard to understand. One God, different aspects. A Sunday school kid could tell you that.’

  ‘You are not afraid of me anymore.’

  ‘Not really. I feel quite good actually.’

  ‘And you are not afraid to die.’

  ‘Not anymore. Everybody gets a turn at living and dying. When it’s your turn you can’t go to the back of the line. I feel my connection to my body loosening by the minute. I’m curious as to what comes next.’

  ‘You can live on in here, you know. At least a form of you. Your body will die.’

  ‘To become a ghost? Like Ryan Miller? No, thank you.’

  ‘Don’t be hasty. You can live here as you want, luxuries limited only by your imagination.’

  ‘Why would I want that? Why would you want that?’ I wonder how it benefits her.

  She sits down beside me. ‘We want your home, Kaaro. Your planet. We have been studying it for a long time without the need for that bothersome interstellar travel. We’re here. We have all your knowledge, your eccentricities, your emotions, and your petty little naked ape motivations. Simplistic. We did this by seeding space with what you call xenoforms, synthetic microorganisms, programmed to multiply and change form as necessary, to infect the local species and gather data neurologically, to find out how the planet is run, to be warned of the pitfalls. Is the style of politics generated by the environment or can any system work? Can the climate change be reversed? What will we do with the nuclear stockpiles? Is homo sapiens useful for anything, or will it be a nuisance? We had to answer these questions. Some of you had a different reaction to the infection. You became sensitives, quantum extrapolators. You had some access to the information store. That’s over. The Earth is ours. We no longer ne
ed you.’

  ‘So you killed all the sensitives.’

  ‘Yes. But it will cost nothing for some of you to live on in the xenosphere to remind us. Cautionary tale, maybe. It will have all the comforts.’

  ‘It will be a zoo.’

  ‘If you want to call it that.’

  I hear voices.

  Oh-two sats dropping.

  I have IV access.

  He’s blue. Get a tube in him.

  Febrile, forty-five.

  ‘They’re trying to save me. Layi must have gotten me to a hospital.’

  ‘It won’t work. Many of the others went to hospital as well.’

  ‘You say you know everything about Earth, about us. What is dying like?’

  ‘There are as many ways to die as there are humans. Some are snuffed out like an extinguished candle. For some it’s like dusk, light slowly going out and darkness conquering all senses until there is nothing left. Others experience the opposite, where reality is bleached of meaning and becomes a whiteness.’ She gesticulates as she speaks, a teacher. She seems strangely gentle.

  Beside me the leaves of a plant are covered in aphids. I flick one away and it generates a chemical smell just like in real life. ‘So you kill us all and move in.’

  ‘There is no consensus on that. The humanity question is undecided.’

  Undecided?

  He’s in respiratory failure.

  No, he’s not. You’re reading it wrong. Get Ola in here.

  Molara’s face is like a carving. All the lines are smooth and strong, unblurred by the partial erasure caused by ageing. Her skin is polished. Her mouth pushes forwards from the rest of her skull and her big lips pucker outwards, exposing redness on their inner surfaces. Like her vulva. Her eyes are sharp and pick me apart as she watches me die.

  ‘Where is Aminat? I do not wish to look at my tormentor as I die.’

  ‘I am sure she wishes she could have been here. She is pursuing those who blew up her office,’ says Layi.

  ‘Weren’t they after me?’

  ‘No, Kaaro. Aminat has her own story; she is not a supporting character of yours.’

  ‘Am I dead yet?’

  ‘I hope not,’ says Layi. ‘Look. From your window I can see the Nautilus. Do you ever wonder if the scientists resorted to cannibalism in the end? Nobody ever speculates on this. Stuck in geosynchronous orbit, money for the Great Nigerian Space Program dissipated, astronauts trapped, and nobody wonders if they ate themselves.’

  ‘I am not sure if I am awake or sleeping.’

  ‘Every year on New Year’s Eve I am allowed out. I fly around in the open because it’s fireworks night. People expect strange lights in the sky. I am free.’

  ‘I have never seen a man-shaped firework.’

  ‘You would have if you lived in Lagos, my friend.’ He goes silent, and I hear movement. ‘You have a visitor, Kaaro. Open your eyes.’

  I do. Layi is by the window, leaning against the sill, watching, still wearing ill-fitting clothes from the Goodhead store.

  I see him, then, standing in the centre of the room, at the foot of my hospital bed. He is wearing clothes, but I know them to be organic. Cellulose-based, biodegradable, something he will shed like a snake’s skin when he returns to his home. The clothes are for the sensitive eyes of humans who are apparently offended by their own genitals. He is immensely powerful, but gentle and quiet. He literally has power over life and death to an extent. He is the god of Utopicity.

  I know him as Anthony and Wormwood, and he owes me his life.

  ‘Kaaro,’ he says.

  ‘Space invader,’ I say. My voice sounds weak, even to me.

  He chuckles. ‘That was a long time ago, wasn’t it?’

  ‘What are you doing here?’

  He comes closer along the side of the bed and moves the IV stand out of the way.

  ‘I felt your light go out,’ he says. ‘I came to find out why.’

  ‘Don’t you read the alien tribune or look at the alien Nimbus or whatever the fuck you people use to keep in touch with each other. Your people have decided to execute me.’

  ‘We are not all the same, Kaaro. And there will be no execution. You are coming with me.’

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  Rosewater: 2055

  Oyin Da pushes past me towards Anthony and he focuses on her again, tracking her with his head, but otherwise remaining still. Behind me there are gasps and declamations as the people of the woods became healed. I am used to the vibration from the columns, but aware of its steady presence. Mosquitoes hum and dive-bomb me. Underneath all of that, the sound of crickets and the moving pinpoint lights of tanatana, fireflies.

  ‘Can I touch you?’ asks Oyin Da.

  Anthony smiles. ‘Often people feel this religious —’

  ‘I want to touch your skin. It looks weird, unreal. I want to know how it feels-the texture.’ Oyin Da promptly begins to prod Anthony; smart people are strange.

  It is true that Anthony’s skin rings false. He smells of crushed vegetation, like a field immediately after a plough has been through. Oyin Da squints, bends at the waist and sniffs at his clothes. Then she licks his dungarees.

  ‘You’re wearing plants,’ she says, a hint of surprise in her voice, and thoughts.

  ‘I grew them myself,’ says Anthony. Still no thoughts come from him. Perhaps he is immune to my abilities or he does not think. Which is absurd. ‘Will you tell me why you have come here?’

  I say, ‘The government sent us to find you. They want us to make friends with you —’

  ‘Speak for yourself, Kaaro. I am here to see how you live in harmony with these people,’ says Oyin Da. ‘I do not work for the government.’

  ‘Come then,’ says Anthony. ‘I’ll show you how we live and where your missing representatives are.’

  ‘Are you really an alien? From another planet?’ Oyin Da asks.

  ‘Technically I’ve been on Earth longer than both of you. By the time you were born, my organisms were already part of the biosphere. It calls into question your concept of alien, does it not?’

  Oyin Da is quiet, but I sense the thoughts in her head churning, too fast for me to follow.

  Guided by the electric light from the columns he leads us up a hillock. The broken remains of a black attack helicopter lies on its side, twisted rotor half-buried in the soil. I see no bodies. Dots of light blink on in the gloom beyond our path, all around us. They flicker and it takes a minute for me to realise they are eyes reflecting light. In the bush there are living things with short, stocky bodies trailing us. They make no sound. Their bodies glisten. Oyin Da slows down and I sense her curiosity.

  ‘Don’t touch them. That mucus on their bodies is a neurotoxin,’ says Anthony.

  ‘What are they?’ I ask.

  ‘We called them homunculi when I was in London. They were with me from the start, lived inside me.’

  Though they are humanoid, the homunculi have no real thoughts, although I do feel some impressions of instinct and emotion from them. There are no words that I can pick up, but hostility and fear are pretty easy to parse. They are of various heights and ages. There are babies suckling at the pendulous breasts of their mothers. They groom each other. They fuck. They do this while silently maintaining eyes fixed on us.

  There are dead hawks on the ground here and there. They both bleed and show exposed, damaged machinery. They are the COBS, dozens of them. I poke them with my foot, but Oyin Da picks one up, drops it, picks another, until she comes to one that is more or less intact, and stashes it in her pouch. I notice some have bites taken out of them.

  Further along the path we come to four men. Three of them stand stock still, while a fourth frantically runs, shaking, hitting, and yelling obscenities at each of his comrades, trying to get a reaction. They are clad in military garb, dark camouflage. The clothes are torn, burned in places and bloody, though none of the men appear wounded. The active man sees us approach and rails.

  ‘You
! Alakori! This is your doing!’

  He attacks Anthony with fist and boot. Anthony does not avoid the blows or fight back. He does not flinch or appear to feel pain. The military man punches himself out and collapses at Anthony’s feet. The expression on Anthony’s face is kindly, pitying.

  ‘I am sorry, Olabisi,’ Anthony says.

  Oyin Da goes to the men and examines them. ‘Who are these men?’

  ‘Helicopter crew. They were sent to kill me. Or try to kill me.’

  ‘What did you do to them?’ asks Oyin Da. She shines a torch into the eyes of each.

  ‘I healed them. They crashed. I mended their bodies, restarted the hearts. I can bring the bodies back, but once the brain has died it is impossible to do more than reanimate the corpses.’

  ‘I do not trust your answers,’ says Oyin Da. ‘How am I to believe this?’

  Anthony points to me. ‘Ask him to confirm. He’s your quantum extrapolator, after all.’

  ‘He’s not mine,’ protests Oyin Da.

  ‘What … how can I —’

  ‘Look in my mind. See the truth.’ He places a hand on my shoulder.

  I can. He is open to me and his memories wash through my mind.

  There is a farm, there are farmers, animals, lush crops which Anthony has helped to grow. There are people, smiling, supplicating, asking for healing, and Anthony obliges. They bring him offerings, votive foodstuffs, bolts of clothing, anything to show devotion. For this Anthony and Wormwood love them back.

  Then the sound of helicopter blades. There is a brief orange light, then all around ash floats like snowflakes. Trees and telegraph poles are sliced through at a height of five feet, and though there are a few minor fires, the cuts are neat, surgical. The farmhouse looks like the plaything of a giant. It has the same tidy cut edge as all the other tall structures. The stump smoulders, and looks like a joke, a playhouse, an incomplete building. The roof, the upper floor, parts of the ground floor, all gone. The walls stand for a while, then cease to exist. Windows, furniture, lamps are intact, as long as they weren’t too tall to start with. Anthony hopes his friends are safe, but is not hopeful. Behind the house the barn, the shed, and the poultry were similarly sliced and vaporised. The chickens are gone, not even leaving carcasses.