I also have to be careful what I think. This is a psychofield, a thoughtspace, essentially unstable. While most people conceptualise thinking as this straightforward linear thing, I see ideas spreading out into alternatives before one is selected. In this place every notion can potentially become reality. It is inherently unsafe and only the greatest need drives me here this time.
After the guardian, I encounter hundreds, thousands of people suspended, unmoving as if in amber, eyes rolling here and there or not at all. This is everybody who carelessly thinks or does not think. They exist here in the unprotected state, passive, oscitant public, uncritical, naive. Navigation can be difficult here, but I beat my wings and soar. I fly through the school of human souls, trying not to disturb them. Perhaps some of them will dream of an eagle-lion tonight. They are not arranged with any regularity. Clumps here and there, then empty space with mathematical formulae and infinity symbols and catalogue price tags.
I fly higher than the highest floating person. I notice some quill feathers in my own wake. I don’t moult and I wonder why this happens. I’ve never lost feathers before.
I make a rookie mistake and think briefly of Aminat and I am taken to her, awash in her jumbled memories. Oddly, there is fire all around her, a black fire with dark tongues of flame that burn. I soar away from this, disconcerted. I do not want to know what she thinks unless she wishes to tell me.
There is detritus of the communal consciousness that I have to navigate. The blood and sweat of slaves in a stew of their anguish at being removed from their motherland, the guilt of slavers, the prolonged pain of colonisation, the riots, the CIA interference, the civil war, the genocide of the Igbos, the tribal pogroms, the terrorism, the killing of innocents, the bloody coups, the rampant avarice, the oil, the dark blood of the country, the rapes, the exodus of the educated class ... If I were untrained this would bog me down.
I see multiple lynched politicians, burnt in Operation Wet It, reminds me of my near-miss, I see the execution of armed robbers by firing squad on the Bar Beach, men tied to cement-filled barrels and shot to death, spilling blood, shit, and piss, taking bizarre postures in death. I see our dictators, overwhelming our lives with want and need and despair. I see —
‘Where are you going?’
I look around. A white man in a navy blue cassock stands on air in front of me. His self-image is tall and muscular, and I wonder if he is like this in life, or if this is a compensation for a deficiency.
‘I asked you a question, creature,’ he says again.
‘I’m lost,’ I say. It doesn’t pay to be too forthcoming in the xenosphere. You never know who you’re communicating with. Besides, this man seems too confident.
‘That’s not true,’ he says. ‘You’re an adept. I can see it in you clear as day. Perhaps I’ll follow your spoor and occupy your physical body. Perhaps I’ll kill you here.’
I did not quite expect to get into a fight so soon. Was this man responsible for killing the other sensitives?
‘I wouldn’t like either of those options,’ I say. I am careful not to beat my wings too vigorously so as not to alarm him. It is difficult to lie in the xenosphere. You are more naked than when you are in your physical body where you can control your breathing and fix your eyes to maintain contact. Luckily lying in the psyche is part of my training. Thieves must lie well to survive. Government agents must lie even better.
‘There are threads reaching out from you, like spider’s silk, but not from a spinneret near your anus. From all around you. I’d say you’re a finder, which means you know the way to everywhere.’
‘Who are you?’ I don’t like how easy he is unpeeling me or the way he looks at me like a rasher of bacon.
‘My name is Ryan Miller. Or it was. I’ve been called many things. Sometimes the Invisible Monk. Sometimes Father Marinementus.’
‘You’re the immortal,’ I say. ‘I studied you. I was at one of your funerals. At Esho.’
‘How is Esho?’
‘It’s been years, but they still paint the time on the clock face.’
This is not reassuring news. Ryan Miller is the first person to encounter the alien microorganisms, and the first to enter the xenosphere. He was born in the seventeenth century. His natural body and life had ended long ago, but his personality and memories are stuck here. He is a ghost, but also a demon of sorts because he can and does possess people. Nobody can manipulate the field like he can. His capriciousness is legendary among sensitives. In fact, many think he serves the xenoforms or is controlled by them. I am afraid.
He is tall, muscular, and in that twilight age of about sixty upwards where nobody can tell. His eyebrows are slightly bushy and tiny green veins play about under the skin around his eyes. While we regard each other we drift into a cluster of floating souls and he casually bats them away. They bounce off each other and spin off into the strange light that illuminates this place.
‘What is your path, little finder? What are you here for?’ He sniffs around my head, actually sniffs. Then he reaches out and plucks a feather from my wing and eats it, all with a puzzled expression on his face. His body splits in two and the newer version of him flies away without a backwards glance. I do not know how long my defences will hold against one such as him.
‘I am going to help a friend,’ I say.
‘Indeed you are. I think I will come with you,’ he says.
‘You’re helping me?’
‘I didn’t say that.’ He powers upwards and I am pulled along behind him.
I tell myself I will never return to this place, but I have said so in the past and here I am. You never know what life will throw at you. We fly past a cliff face where sheets of rock break off and fall to a ground I cannot see. At intervals Ryan Miller splits off into duplicates, faded versions of himself who drift off while becoming more solid like newborn snakes’ fangs. Colours swirl around us, lilac mostly and some yellow.
‘We’re here,’ says Miller. ‘Your friend.’
Except, it is not my friend at all. It isn’t Bola.
We land on a floating platform of earth, surfaced with asphalt, two telephone poles with wires stretched between them in a haphazard fashion. It is a fragment of street. I even know which street. Miller lands in front of me and spreads out his arms like a welcome party. In the centre of the platform is a lump that used to be human. It is a burnt mass, flesh almost carbonized, in a sitting position, with the legs folded, skull grinning, lower jaw detached. The femur points to the sky because it has separated from the knee. There are about a dozen thin metal rings around the neck of the corpse. There is a stench, there are flies, and there is the crawling of my skin.
‘You know where the rings come from?’ Ryan Miller asks.
‘When you burn someone alive with a tyre the metal rings remain after the rubber is consumed.’
‘And do you know who that is?’
‘No.’
‘That is Fadeke.’
My former girlfriend whom I condemned to die by escaping.
‘No.’
‘Yes. It’s interesting. Until just now I found you completely lacking in guilt.’
‘It wasn’t my fault.’
‘Wasn’t it? If you hadn’t stolen your parents’ and neighbours’ money would she be dead?’
I want to cry, but the gryphon seems lacking in tear ducts. A part of me wants to attack Miller. I can tell that he senses it because he looks at me.
‘Don’t,’ he says.
He sets off again in a burst of lilac and I am sucked along. Fadeke’s body fades to a dot, but not the weight it leaves in my heart.
‘Why are you doing this?’ I ask.
He twists around in flight and looks at me. ‘Maybe I’m bored, Kaaro. Or maybe I’m your Magical Negro on this journey, although I happen to be white. Or maybe I’m looking for a reason not to kill you.’
‘You may not find killing me so easy,’ I say. Careless, but right now I’m losing my traditional fear of pain.
A Chinese woman that I do not know stands before me, her head twisted in a forty-five-degree angle. A reanimate, perhaps? There is nothing around her, no street, no context. Her eyes follow me and blink with disconcerting regularity.
‘This is not a friend of mine,’ I say.
‘Oh? Odd. Why are we here then? Oh, I know. Her name is Zhang Wang. You stole her money in Lagos. She got into a taxi and thought she could pay. She could not. The taxi driver threw her out in a rough part of the city and she was knocked down by a truck and killed.’
‘I didn’t —’
‘Oh, but you did, Kaaro.’
He continues like this for a time, takes me to different people, some whom I remember faintly, others who are lost to my memory, all whom I’ve knowingly or unknowingly done wrong. I start to think this is a hell of some sort. Kaaro’s Inferno, but instead of Virgil, I have a psychopathic failed priest.
We end up at a replica of my father’s gravesite.
‘What are we doing here? This has nothing to do with anything,’ I say. It rings false even to me.
Ryan Miller is implacable. He sits on the gravestone.
‘Get off that,’ I say.
‘Why are you pretending to care?’ he says. ‘You did not attend the funeral.’
‘I was busy.’
‘Killing insurgents.’
‘I’ve never —’
‘Intelligence you provided has led to the killing of insurgents. Your talent is used for death. Just like in your father’s case.’
‘My father died of natural causes.’
‘At sixty-two, of a stroke, brought on by your felonious exploits.’
‘Stop.’
‘Your mother will die too, and it will be your fault. Your entire family line wiped out.’
‘Why are you doing this? Where’s your human kindness?’
‘I lack humanity, Kaaro. I am a construct of electrical impulses and mono-amine neurotransmitters. You know that. I might not even be that. I might be in your own mind, a manifestation of your own guilt. Maybe this is the only path to your destination.’
And at once I am standing in the courtyard of Bola’s defences, unsure if I have met Ryan Miller or not, but still shaken. I am in a temple which I remember as being made of muscle and bone. Now, it is a horror of putrefying flesh. Every step I take sinks in and pus wells up around my paws soaking my fur. I decide to hover. The walls stream with mucus and serum; red fluid sweats from the ceiling. Everything wobbles and undulates. I block out the overpowering smell and fly towards the altar which is barely recognisable. If Bola has left me a message it will be there, but the muscle fibres are broken, stripped down and folded away. The floor around it is scored. The bone core of the altar is exposed. The former rectangular structure doesn’t look to be decayed, like the rest of the temple. The breaches look like bite marks. It looks like it’s been eaten.
No, being eaten.
I am slammed by something, go into a spin, and hit the wall so hard I sink into the muscle and feel the bone crush me. The pain is exquisite and I feel the tug of my physical body in Rosewater trying to wake up. I orient myself, beat my wings, ruffle my feathers to appear larger, breathe, and listen. My claws pop out automatically and I give out a shrill which I hope sounds fearsome.
My first instinct is that it’s a robot of some kind. It is about eight feet tall and male humanoid with a metallic sheen and cubic metres of malevolence. On closer look it’s a kind of iron golem, equally impossible, but we’re in the realm of the mind. It can be whatever the imagination of its owner wants it to be. Neither does the size matter, which is why I launch at it. I hit it in the sternum with the full weight of my anger, guilt, grief, and fear. The impact shakes it and I claw through, stripping of shards of metal, digging a hole. I pass to the other side and hear its inhuman screams.
I soar higher and wrap my tail around its neck. I don’t know if the simulation breathes, but a humanoid image may have humanoid weaknesses. My fur and feathers are covered in its constituent metal and the bits melt and move like worms. I see them sink into me and pain follows. The large construct is on its knees, but I am falling, held briefly by my tail before it loosens and I hit the ground. I swipe at its thigh and gouge out a chunk of metal, but it’s desultory and I feel myself weakening. It is like being covered by angry fire ants who drill down and eat from the inside out.
I am going to die and I won’t even know why. Aminat will find me dead or comatose. After Bola, that’ll be fucking traumatic and unfair. My mother. I would have wanted to see her before dying, to say I’m sorry for Dad and everything. I abandoned my family, my responsibilities. I do not want to die. No, not just that. I want to live.
‘Then you will,’ says the voice of Molara.
She hovers, her wings beating faster than the eye can follow, and her blood leaks from her eyes, ears, nose, and mouth, dripping on the metal man with a hiss, melting him. I sense pain in my mind and the metal flies out of me into the source, but it’s too late. It is reduced to a puddle of gunk, steaming with psychic residue.
‘Hello, Gryphon,’ she says.
CHAPTER TWENTY
Lagos: 2055
With an elegant gesture, Femi hangs up and returns to the table from the window where she has been whispering. I cannot stop staring at her, and I am sure I have never seen anyone as beautiful, even on television.
‘We can’t access resources yet,’ she says. A small vertical crease between her eyebrows.
‘Why?’
‘Something to do with the COBs on a farm. Some guy got killed, but I don’t know all the details. They’re still collating the data, but what it means is we can’t get to Regina Ogene yet.’
‘You’re lying when you say you don’t know all the details, aren’t you?’
‘Yes. I just can’t tell you.’
‘Can you access records from here?’ I ask.
‘Some of them.’
‘You left something out of the pack you gave me. What exactly has Bicycle Girl been doing to irritate the President?’
‘It’s not in our remit to know,’ says Femi. She sits, takes my glass of cognac, and takes a swallow before returning it to me. Her lips leave a lipstick stain.
‘But you’ve said she’s some kind of anarchist, right. That means public displays of, I don’t know, civil disobedience, vandalism, that kind of thing?’
‘Not necessarily. What do you know about Anarchism?’
I shrug.
‘It’s not the equivalent of chaos. It’s actually a kind of socialism. Some of them can be violent and disruptive, but not all.’
‘Is Bicycle Girl violent and disruptive?’
‘No. But she does … preach. Can’t predict where she’ll turn up. She gives little speeches whipping the populace into a frenzy, then she disappears.’
‘We need to correlate dates of those events with rumours of the Lijad. If I’m right there will be overlap.’
‘I’ve heard that before. What is the Lijad?’
‘I’m not sure, but I think it’s a moveable village or town.’
Femi twists her mouth to one side. ‘Seriously?’
‘It doesn’t have to mean the movement of the buildings, roads, wells, and so on. It could be conceptual movement. I never paid much attention to it before.’
‘What’s conceptual movement?’
‘It’s nothing. I just made it up when I said it. What I’m trying to say is it may be that the idea of the village moves around.’
‘I still don’t get it.’
‘Okay, imagine villages X, Y, and Z as fixed points. Then there are three different days of the week, say Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday. On Monday, X is the Lijad, on Tuesday X reverts back, and Y becomes the Lijad —’
‘Yes.’
‘But what about the people?’
‘Yeah, well, like I said, this is just me floating ideas. I need Nimbus.’
Femi taps a spot on the underside of the table and I sense a brief hiss as ionized gas fills the space in front of me. The surface lights up and a QWERTY keyboard appears. There are sixteen free Nimbus portals and a few secure tunnels.
‘Smooth. Did you know that West Africa has the highest population of Nimbus addicts in the world? No running water in some places, but Nimbus is present.’
‘How can we afford it?’ asks Femi. She doesn’t sound interested.
‘The networks provide several pay-as-you-go deals. I think about a third are unauthorised links by Junk Jockeys.’
I touch the tunnel I want. The holoscreen expands to accommodate my destination, a clearing area that looks like an atrium with several ornate doors. When I hover over each one info pop-ups tell me how many users are plugged into that path, how much it will cost, whether I have been there before, and a list of possible cyber-risks I will be exposed to. There are no advertisements — Femi can obviously afford the good stuff. I go into a search alcove where a 3-D graphic of a steampunk robot awaits. I type in ‘Lijad.’ A pop-up message asks if I would like audio output to which I answer in the affirmative. A second warning tells me it will be insecure if another person is in the room or if a listening device is monitoring him. I dismiss these with a brushing motion.
Sixty thousand results come up with the Lijadu Sisters. I push one with my left hand and use the right to bat stray Malapps, malignant applets, caught in Femi’s security trap. I reset the cyber security to destroy without notification.
The Lijadu Sisters were twin Nigerian Jazz singers active from the late 1960s to the 1980s. Photos blossom around me and an audio clip provides a gentle background. Their music is of its time, but their harmony works well and the arrangements are influenced by rock, as in addition to bass they often have an electric guitar accompaniment. In their photos they smile the same smile. Toothy grins, deep clefts in their cheeks, real smiles that reach their eyes. These are happy, beautiful girls. As is traditional for twins amongst the Yoruba, they are named Taiwo and Kehinde. They sing in both English and Yoruba. I summon a Trawler from my Nimbus shack and task it with gathering their songs and sending them to my phone.
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