The Rosewater Insurrection

by Tade Thompson

  I’ve been in Rosewater since 2064. Like many I came here for the healing and I got it. I suffered from PF-81, one of the myriad diseases unleashed when the world lost a lot of the permafrost. I was lucky, and here I am. I spend my days reading and rereading the non-fiction of Soyinka and smoking weed. My agent thinks I’m working on a book called A is for Eternity but she’s not stupid and I’ve resisted sharing even a snippet of the first draft, mainly because the first draft only exists in my head.

  Rosewater grows the best weed in the world.

  I’m writing and recording this particular segment in a bomb shelter on Kuti Street. It is difficult to compose with the bombardment and dust dropping on my notepad every few minutes, but needs must. When I can’t write, I use a voice recorder on my phone.

  I got this particular assignment last week. I received a call from a contractor who identified himself as Fadahunsi.

  “How did you get this number? It is unlisted,” I asked.

  “I work in security. I’m calling to know if you are interested in meeting an important person for the purpose of an assignment.” He has a deep baritone, and I picture a large, muscular man, which is wrong. When I meet him, he’s barely six feet, and wiry.

  “I’m not in university any more, so I don’t do assignments.”

  “Nevertheless, he’d like to meet you.” He pronounces it “ne-vah-di-less,” the Yoruba way, with poor exposure to pop-culture. I wonder where he’s spent his life.

  “There’s a war on, in case you didn’t know. We’re being shelled. If I could get out of the city, I would, but I’m not going to travel around.”

  “I can guarantee your safe passage. I only require your discretion.”

  “I’m very discreet.” Yes. I used the lives of all the people around me and a significant number of strangers to populate my novels and you expect discretion. Of course. I’m discreet until the next novel.

  “Someone will be at your door in an hour.”

  “How do you know where I live?” But he has disconnected.

  I dress up, by which I mean I change my boxer shorts and hunt down clean clothes to wear. I haven’t worn a top for days now. I test my breath against my palm, but what bounces back is disgusting, and I have no mouthwash, so I gargle vodka, brush my teeth, and take an extra swig of the vodka for luck.

  Two soldiers arrive to take me. They wear brown and beige desert camouflage and one of them has a plasma rifle. A quad bot follows them around, the kind with a truncated head and loping movements. They have a jeep with an internal combustion engine. All the cars in Rosewater are electric and since the power went out the roads have been empty. There is the small matter of bomb craters as well. There are sporadic generators, but the real problem is fuel.

  There are checkpoints everywhere, but I’ll get back to that later. I want to focus first on the people who are running this rebellion or revolution or whatever we’re calling it these days.

  The mayor’s mansion is somewhat reduced from its former glory on approach. I think it was built in ’60 or ’61, and is the official residence and seat of government. A number of concrete barriers have been constructed, so our route in is zigzag. There’s a tower pointing to the sky, about ten feet tall, repeated at intervals, which I suspect is meant to jam or interfere with satellite detection. I’ll ask later. The building itself has suffered a direct hit or two, and while it’s still standing, I wouldn’t swear by the structural integrity. There is active reconstruction going on when I arrive and there are yellow signs directing us to safety, although I’m handed a hard hat.

  I am surprised that the mayor is right there in the battered building waiting for me. He spreads his arms like he knows me, and I am absorbed into his gravitational field. He is a big fan of Banana Identity and can he call me Walter and have I ever been to the mansion before and he hopes we can work well together, but either way can I sign his copy and let’s go downstairs where it’s more comfortable and am I hungry or thirsty? Jacques smells good and he hugs like he means it. I know he’s a politician and that getting me onside is his stock in trade, but damn, he picked the book that I thought expressed what I wanted to, and he’s just friendly enough to be the right side of smarmy. His greatest weapon, I surmise, is that he seems genuine. Maybe he is genuine, who knows. He’s definitely brave to be up where an errant bomb could take him out, but he knows this, and he knows that I know this, and that it will affect my impression of him.

  He does not introduce his entourage, but there is one strikingly beautiful woman with dead eyes who looks at me like I’m a bug, and another woman who attends to Jacques’s every word. She’s like an administrator or something. She is precise and whispers things to Jacques every few seconds. I know neither of these is his wife Hannah, and none of their body language signals suggest sexual or even flirtatious relationships.

  The stairs only go down one floor, then there’s a lift system that goes an indeterminate distance down, then we go sideways, and I understand that we’ve moved beyond the boundaries of the mansion, which I think is wise. The noise of construction is so loud that there is no point even attempting speech.

  We come to an anteroom, white walls, a side table with bottled water, glass containers, which is a nice touch considering the number of plastic garbage islands on the oceans. Jacques spends exactly five minutes discussing Banana Identity and asking me pointed questions. Well done to whoever primed him. Then he gets serious.

  “Walter, I need your help. All wars are propaganda wars. I want you to write the story of our struggle. Rosewater needs an impartial chronicle of this injustice.”

  Do I detect a strange accent on the word “impartial”?

  “Sir, I’m flattered, but I write personal pieces and my non-fiction is commentary. I don’t do reportage. No offence, but I find it boring.”

  “Just do it in your own way. There is such a thing as historical fiction, right? Do that.”

  “But,” I decide to be honest, here in this bunker, surrounded by the revolution itself, “I’m not sure I’m on board with the whole… Rosewater as a city state thing.”

  “Excellent. That makes you a disinterested party. That will lend authority to your account.” If Jacques is surprised, he doesn’t show it.

  “I don’t know, sir. This is outside my area of expertise.”

  I relent, though. Not because Jacques is a convincing motherfucker, which he is, and not because I believe in their cause, which more on that later, or because I’ll have access to all the information I want. No, the real reason I join the team is they have access to fuel and food, fast becoming problems in a city that suddenly finds itself needing generators and non-electric cars. The sprayed defoliants damaged the ecosystem and the local council dishes out food once a day, but it is obviously rationed. The flowering black market can’t keep up with demand. I say I’ll do it on a trial basis, for a week, to see if it fits me, and we agree on a fee for the week and a bonus if I decide to take the job on. My agent will kill me when she finds out. Walter, never enter into any negotiations without me. Don’t even discuss the possibility of negotiations.

  Once I sign a non-disclosure, Jacques turns me over to his assistant, Lora Asiko. My first thought is that this woman is of the Machinery. At the time I did not know the position of the Machinery on the war. I do now, but we’ll get to that.

  Turns out hers is a story I want to know. The first few hours I spend with her are dizzying because she provides me with what she calls contextual facts. These amount to the tonnage of wheat used weekly in Rosewater, for example, and the amount of potable water left and estimates of survival rates to four decimal places with Confidence Intervals and P-values. She has an eidetic memory without a doubt. Her contextual facts are an inhuman amount of data which she simply recites. When I ask her to repeat something she does it in exactly the same way.

  I demand a break, and while I sit on a sofa contemplating a painting of a housefly menacing a hibiscus, I doze off. Maybe it’s the weed comedown or stim
ulus overload, I don’t know. Either way, I’m standing in the courtyard, although this time bombs are falling all around me. I’m aware that I am dreaming, but I cannot wake myself up as incendiaries gulp the oxygen and eat everything in sight. Then I see a flying… thing, I know the name, but it’s gone. It’s an eagle and a lion. It lands in front of me. In its beak lie the remnants of some plant it has torn to pieces.

  “Who are you?” asks the animal.

  I don’t say anything. Every Yoruba child is brought up early to be wary of creatures you meet in dreams. You don’t speak to them, you don’t tell them your name, and for Olodumare’s sake, you do not tell them your mother’s name. In the Yoruba spirit world your name combined with that of your mother is your unique identifier.

  The creature skips forwards and drops the leaves at my feet. “Eat.”

  Definitely not doing that. Everybody knows that if you eat in dreams you die in real life.

  “Fine, be like that,” says the creature, and bites me on my left calf. As it tastes my blood, I am suddenly aware of my own nakedness. “Oh, right, you’re the writer. Sorry. I’m kind of busy, it’s taking longer than I thought to find Anthony. You can wake up now.”

  “What?”

  “Walter,” says Lora. I open my eyes.

  “Hi.”

  “You were thrashing about in your sleep.”

  “I was just resting my eyes.”

  Gryphon. That’s what it was. Why would I dream of a gryphon?

  “How did you meet the mayor?” I ask.

  “I’m not important. All you need to know is I came with him from Lagos because I believe in him and what he intends for Rosewater.”

  “So you’re from Lagos?”

  “I didn’t say that.”

  She’s attractive, but not in the same way as, say, Hannah Jacques who is discussed in the society pages every week. Lora, I decide, is perfectly symmetrical. Her left and right halves are perfect mirror images and, to me, pleasing. Her face is in constant enquiry, and her eyes are serious, intelligent, a lighter brown than usual. She parries all my questions about her, and in the end I just ask her for her phone number.

  “Why?” She seems genuinely surprised.

  “I’d like to phone you.”

  “Why would you want to phone me?”

  “So we can take a walk and drink shots of vodka while we yet live. If you don’t want to talk about yourself, we can talk about me. That’s my specialist topic.”

  “I already know all about you. I did a background check.”

  I shake my head. “You don’t know all about me. Do you dance?”

  “I know how.”

  “Good. Good.”

  “Can we get back to the information you need?”

  She scourges my brain with her data and when the day is over and distant explosions sound like thunder, I lie on the same sofa trying to sleep. It makes the night seem long and the darkness without moon or starlight makes me think I’ve descended into the land of the dead. I count sheep, literally imagining sheep being stalked by a screeching gryphon and running across my mind’s eye. I count them. Then I lose count. I argue with myself about whether I should start again or just pick a number and continue from there.

  Lora wakes me up. She says it’s fortunate that I joined today because there’s an important phone call which Jacques wants me to witness. It’s all very hush-hush.

  In case you’ve been living under a rock, here’s how energy works in Rosewater: early on, before the area was incorporated, people had generators and a few people used illegal taps from the national grid, with mixed results. Cross stealing by stealth flex-wire was rife. The dome was up, and there are two projections from the alien called the north and south ganglions. Ganglia? Whatever. Both of them are nerve endings, or so we have been told. They regularly crackled with electric energy and were often the source of the defensive strikes the alien made against intruders. People died walking into or around the ganglia. When Jacques took over, he started a number of capital projects, but the first thing he succeeded with was the utilisation of the electricity that the alien used to think and defend itself as a power source for the city. The invention of the Ocampo Inverter made it possible. But.

  The controller for the inverters lies in the hands of the federal government and the president switched off the lights hours before the first aerial bombardment of Rosewater. Now the ganglia just stand there like giant erections or the hand of Sango, electrocuting people with no rhyme or reason. Let’s not talk about the death cults who encourage their members to prance around the ganglia. I never saw the ganglia before Ocampo’s work, but those who were here tell me that they find the electrical activity somewhat attenuated. This might be so, but it might also be because the dome is degraded and they expect the ganglion to be less than it was.

  We’ve been in darkness since.

  So when I hear we’re going to speak to Ocampo, I get excited.

  It’s a stand-up meeting, with a hologram generator in the centre. Lora silences me with an index finger to her closed lips. Jacques stands front and centre, the glow from the generator lighting up his features and doing the same to a lesser extent for his bodyguards and the other woman in his entourage. Who is she? Her eyes flick to me when I enter, and flick away in seconds. This seems to me like a séance more than the most modern form of communication.

  The device beeps and Victor Ocampo stands before us, diminished, but jolly and bespectacled. For some reason he has the flag of the Philippines draped over his left shoulder and an old NASA logo from the 1960s sewn as a patch on his right. Someone speaks indistinctly from behind him, a female, which could be his wife, or his daughter, who knows. He comes to us from his private space station. Yes, he is that rich. The Chinese had a problem with it, wanting to regulate a Filipino in space, but he is rumoured to have pretended to only speak Tagalog and confounded the negotiators. I’ve heard all the documentation on the station is in Tagalog. He has a staff of forty keeping it running and comfortable for his family. Nobody knows how long he has been in space, and there are rumours of osteoporosis.

  “Mr. Mayor,” says Ocampo.

  “Please, Victor, call me Jack. How long have we known each other?”

  “Yes, and you gave me that hundred-year-old Scotch, didn’t you?”

  “I did.”

  “I have to tell you, it’s not the billions I made off the Rosewater deal that made me take your call. It’s the memory of that Scotch going down my throat. It was smooth.”

  “I may have more,” says Jack. I note the cadence of his voice. He is trying to manage Ocampo.

  “I’m sorry, Jack. I know why you’re calling me, and I wanted to tell you face to face that I cannot help you.”

  “Victor, do you have access to the inverters?”

  Ocampo has a pained look.

  “Can you remotely turn our lights back on?”

  “I can, but my control access is only for the purpose of servicing or maintenance should that become necessary. That is how businesses work, that’s how you sell technology. You and Miss Lora should know that.”

  “Victor, it has become necessary. The device is shut down. Isn’t it your duty to turn it on again?”

  “Jack, from my perspective, and from my consoles, I have a device voluntarily shut down. My hands are tied. I can only intervene in the event of a client request.”

  “I am requesting—”

  “You’re not the client, Jack. I reviewed the paperwork, or rather, my wife reviewed the papers and gave me the highlights. I did the work at Rosewater, but on behalf of the Nigerian government, and that isn’t you. Like I said, I’m sorry.”

  Jacques must already know that. I can’t imagine he’d take the meeting without having read everything pertinent. Lora would have prepared as well. Which means this is a gambit of some sort, a pose. Jack looks pained and rubs his left temple with the tips of his fingers. The impression he’s trying to give is of deep thought, but I know he has known what he is ab
out to say next for at least a day or two.

  “What if… what if the blueprints leaked?” Jack sounds uncertain, just enough to be charming.

  “Of the inverter? Are you kidding? That’s my livelihood. It’s proprietary.”

  “No, I mean the switch. Just the switch.”

  “I suppose—”

  Mrs. Ocampo comes into the plasma field like a curtain dropping. “This communication is over.”

  The light goes dead.

  “Your boy is good,” I say to Lora.

  Jacques is even better than I thought because an hour later a file “the size of Olumo Rock” is dropped into his private server from parts unknown. His tech experts begin to decode what is clearly the blueprints for the switch and instructions for construction. I don’t know how long it will take, or even if the necessary expertise is available in battered Rosewater, but the entire team counts it as a win. They start to source the best 3D printers still functional in the city and a language expert to translate from Tagalog.

  Sadly, there is no hundred-year-old Scotch to celebrate with.

  The next day, after an abbreviated cleaning ritual which I have now perfected, I go out with Dahun and two of his soldiers. He talks to me about the different fronts in this war as we drive around. He starts with the dome, which we arrive at in short order.

  The dome is under siege in a microcosm of what is happening to Rosewater. Ten or so flying creatures are at the dome, doing… trying to eat the dome? They are green and made of vegetation from where I’m sitting in the jeep. The dome itself, close up, looks mushroom grey, with black spots. From a distance it resembled a pimple, or a mouse-bitten piece of cheese. The soldiers and turret bots fire on the creatures, cutting each one to bits. While I watch, two fall, but from the west two new ones replace them.