Aminat parks, takes off her shoes, and walks barefoot to the house. The security protocol picks up her RFID and lets her in. The house is dark, but Aminat chooses to leave it that way. Yaro growls once and comes to her, wagging his tail, butting her shin with his cold nose. She strokes the monster’s head briefly. She does not understand their relationship. Yaro is Kaaro’s dog and he has never properly warmed to Aminat. He sends mixed messages by dog standards.
“Where’s your master?” she asks him.
“In here.”
Yaro pads ahead of Aminat and comes to rest just beside Kaaro’s left foot. Kaaro sits at a desk, reading a book. His face is caught in the glow from the table lamp and he has that gentle smile. Aminat knows she loves this man because of how she feels each time she sees him. This indescribable feeling from the pit of the stomach that is like being sick and super-powered all at the same time. She drops her shoes near the door of the study.
“Hi,” she says.
“Hi,” says Kaaro. He gives a short wave.
“My feet are killing me. What are you reading?”
“Bill Hicks. Love All the People.”
“I don’t know who that is. Before my time, no doubt.”
“Before mine too.”
He stands and they kiss. His hands wander all over her body before coming to rest on her back. “Hmm. Aromatic vodka. How are the girls?”
“They live long; they prosper. Enough about them. How’re you?”
“I’m cool. You know, you forgot to ring your father, and he’s kind of jealous that you spoke to your mum.”
“Shit!”
“Don’t worry. I talked him down. Layi says hello.”
“We’ll go down next week.” Aminat squeezes Kaaro’s buttocks, a signal for privacy. She closes her eyes and waits.
Everything shifts. They are no longer in the house. No chance of surveillance here.
Kaaro, her lover, brings them both to a place where events roam with questionable chronology. Time is compressed or extended. Space is whatever they need it to be. He has brought them to a grassy meadow impossibly wide. It is bright and breezy. Bees flit from flower to flower. The tips of each blade of grass sway in the wind and snap, floating upwards in the air, swirling, disappearing into the sky. In the distance there are mountains, and beyond that, a colossal creature, head in the clouds, mouth perpetually open. This is Bolo, Kaaro’s mental guardian. The scene looks to Aminat like a Goya Black Painting.
“Have you redecorated?” asks Aminat.
“No, I was exploring before you came in,” says Kaaro. “I’m experimenting with the defensive properties of wide-open spaces.”
“Isn’t that dangerous?”
“Bolo will protect me.”
Kaaro is thought to be the last of the sensitives, humans with a variety of strange abilities endowed by the xenoforms. Aminat is not privy to all the information, but the xenoforms have a network of data in Earth’s atmosphere and sensitives could access it, including the thoughts of other humans and some ability to read the future. Kaaro calls himself a quantum extrapolator because Anthony, the alien avatar of Wormwood, called him that. Something happened, and the aliens decided to kill all the sensitives, though nobody seems to know why. They almost killed Kaaro, but Anthony saved him. Kaaro had worked with S45, but quit after he almost died in service. Femi Alaagomeji tries continuously to be subtle, but she wants Kaaro back at work.
Aminat strokes Kaaro’s cheek. “I love you. I just wanted to say that.”
“Don’t say it yet.” Kaaro smiles. “I need to concentrate to keep us here.”
Aminat sees a disturbance in the grass almost a mile away. An object displaces the blades and travels at great speed towards them. “Something’s coming.”
“I know. There are many of them. Do not worry about it.” Kaaro points to other directions.
There are five other similar disturbances in the foliage. They seem intent, and Aminat cannot relax the way Kaaro seems to. “Who are they?”
“Bogey men from my imagination, people I’ve encountered or make up. Since we’re in my mind they take on reality. It’s been a bastard keeping them at bay recently.”
As he speaks, his image doubles, then a ghostly version of Kaaro lifts off into the air and floats away.
“That’s new,” says Aminat. “What is it?”
“Yeah, that’s a possible me. Idle wonderings of what might have been. It’s not important.”
More versions of him break away at irregular intervals. It is distracting to Aminat, but she focuses on him. “Is it safe to talk?” she asks.
“Yes. How was Efe?”
“You know Efe. Tonight she said to me that the way to make a man crazy about you is, after having sex for the first time, to say nobody ever made you come like that. Or that you’ve had to fake it with other men. She gave a whole alcohol-fuelled lecture on this.”
Kaaro smiles. He likes her friends, or at least acts like he does.
“Kaaro, they want me to go into space,” Aminat says, serious all of a sudden.
“For real?”
“Yes. They want me to go to the Nautilus, dock, take samples of the air and biological samples from the astronauts there.”
“Or their remains. Nobody has heard from that space station for years.”
“They don’t tell us everything. Who knows if there have been supply missions all this while?”
“Do you trust them?”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, S45 is not exactly known for being truthful, or sharing. Femi is—”
“Ruthless, yes, you told me. I don’t know. I have only known for a few hours.”
One of the bandits seems to be getting incredibly close, only fifty yards away, and Aminat feels exposed and without any means of defending herself.
“Kaaro—”
A column of wood descends from the sky and crushes the intruder with an almighty bang. The ground, such as it is, shakes, and the gentle floating of the grass tips is disturbed by the shockwave. Bolo stands over them.
“I told you not to worry,” Kaaro says. “What happens next?”
“Training, I suppose. I’ve let myself go, haven’t I?”
“No fat on you, baby.”
“Yes, but I have to do six months endurance training. I have to get back to fighting weight. Tonight was a kind of farewell to alcohol.”
“And other things?”
“What do you mean?”
“Other kinds of exercise…?”
“Bring me out of this place, and we can test your endurance.”
Chapter Six
Bewon
After a twelve-minute break, the train starts chugging along again. Bewon opens his eyes briefly to confirm the motion by staring out of the window. He lets his eyes flit over his fellow passengers, before closing them again. There are three others, two girls seated next to each other, teenagers, dressed up as if going out, and an older man, about fifty, sixty, who chats with them across empty seats.
When the train stops again, one of the girls asks, “Do you think there’s someone on the tracks?” There is worry in her voice. The old man says it happens fairly often, and the girl asks if he has ever seen a dead body. He says a friend of his hanged himself once, and he discovered the body. The second girl pipes up about her mother’s boyfriend who tried to jump on the tracks, but was prevented by police. This apparently did not deter him, and a month later he was found dead near the south ganglion, burned extra crispy. This is supposed to have happened before the Ocampo Inverter station was built over the ganglia. The train starts again.
Bewon stops listening. They announce Kinshasa station, and he gets off, feeling depleted. It’s dark, and for some reason all the taxis and okadas are gone. It’s Saturday night, why would they not be there? Posters of some pop idol in the stadium, which is probably where the kids in the carriage are going, and explains the lack of transport. He decides to walk. He cannot afford a taxi, anyhow. He has returned f
rom a week-long interview in Lagos. Twelve candidates for one job. Travel and accommodation expenses borne by each, money that Bewon can scarcely spare.
A drone descends, checks his ID chip, and buzzes away in less than a minute. Bewon has an impulse to smash the next one he encounters, or smash anything.
He arrives at his flat in a foul mood. The two young men in 16a rush past him on their way out, brushing against his clothes in the narrow corridor. Bewon suspects them to be homosexuals and has half a mind to report them to the authorities, since it is illegal in Nigeria. Bewon does not like to touch the gays. They are filthy, and they love to… flaunt. That’s the word. They flaunt themselves and their filthiness. Bewon will have to do something about them some day. Report them to the authorities. He cannot remember their names, but they smile at him when they are not… flaunting and cavorting. There is a current wanted poster for a practising lesbian that flashes every time he crosses the supermarket threshold. Maybe he should make a poster of these people too.
He opens his flat and stumbles in, barking his shin on a wooden chest that he left in the living room a week ago. He swears, even though he knows he can only blame himself. He kicks the door shut, drops his travelling bag on the chest and flicks the light switch. Nothing happens. He feels his way into the flat and tries another switch. Nothing. He realises he cannot hear the fridge or anything electrical. Is this a blackout, or has his power been cut? He cannot remember if he paid his bill this month. This is infuriating because the government doesn’t pay anything for electricity. The alien provides it. The government just charges to pipe it into each house, and for the power station. Perhaps he can find an illegal tap later.
He goes to the kitchen, thirsty and needing some kind of relief. There is a puddle of discoloured water spreading from the foot of the fridge and a smell of putrefaction. He snatches a tumbler and turns on the tap. Then, in the filtered light from outside, he sees something growing out of the drain.
He leans in.
It is the shoot of a plant, pale green, barely alive, just two leaves adjacent to each other and a third rolled into a point and reaching for the stars.
No. There will be no reaching for stars.
He pinches the stalk between index finger and thumb, and yanks it free. As he drops it into his bin, he thinks it might be a bean stalk from when he last cooked. He thinks he may have washed some before leaving.
By the time he finishes his drink the growth is out of his mind.
Bewon masturbates after he showers. He likes the smell of semen to lull him into a sort of faux post-coital state, as if he has just been with a woman. He had a woman with him once, but she left. She did not understand him. He tells himself that he does not miss her, but on occasion even he knows this is not true.
He spends twenty minutes on the phone to his landlord, arguing about the electricity. He is from Rosewater. He remembers that there were no bills in the early days, just free juice from the ganglion. Damn Ocampo Inverter. It may be two days before Bewon can have power. He sits in the dark wondering how it came to this. He is still thirsty, so he returns to the kitchen, avoiding the fridge. He has a pen torch, but he’ll need stronger light to clean out whatever is rotten.
He stops at the sink again.
The plant is back.
For a minute Bewon thinks it is the same plant and he checks the dustbin to be sure.
“The fuck…”
This one is two or three inches taller than the first, and a darker shade of green. Healthier. That’s the word. A healthier shade of green. He shrugs, reaches to pull it out and yelps when he feels a sharp sting. He cannot see well in the crepuscular light, but he can feel the blood seeping out. He sticks his thumb in his mouth and sucks. He strikes a match and examines it in the flickering light. Not deep. He looks at the drain.
The plant, the new growth, has spines. Like henbane, only thicker, and distributed all over the stem and leaves.
Bewon is puzzled, but he thinks there must be a logical explanation. That weed did not just grow while he was in the bathroom jerking off. It must have coiled up within the U-bend, pressing up against the first plant. When Bewon cut the first plant, the second one unfurled. Unfurled, that was the word. It unfurled and made its way through the drain holes. Without electricity or indeed the will to work, Bewon decides he can wait until morning before removing the U-bend and emptying the crud that is clearly providing nourishment to the bean sprout. Except it no longer looks anything like a bean sprout.
Bewon pulls open a drawer and selects a serrated steak knife. He folds a strip of cardboard and uses it to grasp the stem at a point close to the drain, and he saws it free. The plant comes away easily. He is about to toss it in the bin when he has a different thought. He drops it on the floor and steps on it, twisting his foot as if killing an insect, revenge for the sting. His indoor thong slippers are not hard enough, so he uses the leg of a kitchen chair instead, squashing the plant into a green smear. He scoops the remains up and discards them. He soaks a rag, cleans the floor and throws that away too.
He washes his hands, keeping a close eye on the drain. He leaves the kitchen, but whirls and looks at the sink, sure that something would be there. Nothing. Silly.
He goes to bed. He sleeps fitfully and dreams of metamorphosing into a giant rocketship. He wakes up an hour later, and decides he does not want the rest of the plant in the house, so he takes the trash out—he looks at the sink sixteen times while in the kitchen—and places it in the communal can outside.
Then he goes back to bed and sleeps better.
Chapter Seven
Anthony
From deep beneath Rosewater, Wormwood extends a pseudopodium different from the other thousands of projections on its surface. This digit moves upwards and in a south-east direction towards the marshy and vegetation-rich soil that banks the Yemaja. This tentacle is not just travelling. Its tip is bulbous and grows larger as the miles are covered. Within that tip cells divide, differentiate and combine into tissues of increasing complexity. The bulb snatches material from its environment, helping it to advance as well as providing material for growth. Dead and decaying vegetation, soil, rock, silt, water and buried metals, plastics and construction debris are all broken down by alien enzymes and repurposed into organic carbon, oxygen, hydrogen, nitrogen, calcium, sulphur, phosphorus, sodium and trace elements with which to build a body. Primitive synapses connect at first tentatively, then with authority. Chemical messengers run to and fro, and Anthony becomes self-aware.
He cannot open his eyes for now, as there is a continuous seal, rather than an upper and lower eyelid. He feels his body under construction, glands shooting test fluids, organs shifting into position in his abdomen, bones ossifying from cartilage scaffolding. His face is connected to Wormwood by umbilical tissue, feeding him with the necessary nutrients and cocooning him within the bulb. In his inner ear he senses his motion, speed between five and seven miles per hour.
After a while Anthony’s cerebral cortex is complex enough to take over as the guiding intelligence of this body’s creation. He even allows the flawed appendix to grow at the insistence of the genetic material.
He is in water now, sluggish, murky, moving against the undertow. The pseudopodium slows down, stops. Anthony hears the underwater sounds, the gurgling and occasional splash. A fissure forms, separating eyelids and he blinks. He is still encased in a matrix from Wormwood, with no direct connection to the waters of the Yemaja. He is surrounded by darkness and he knows it is night. He is a metre below the surface of the water. He has no access to the xenosphere because of the flowing water, but he is full sized and senses the pseudopodium breaking down, Wormwood withdrawing its nourishing fluids and arteries. It loses pliability, hardens, and cracks in multiple points, finally snapping off downstream somewhere. Anthony experiences turbulence. He breaks out of the cocoon like a bird opening a shell. The cold river water is a shock, but he immediately stimulates his hypothalamus to generate heat as a counter measure. He
tears free the umbilical material attached to his nose and mouth and chest.
Anthony swims to the surface, but emerges on the south bank. The city is on the other side, so he plunges back into the river, breaking north. Visibility is poor apart from the pulsing glow of the biodome. He grows a tapetum lucidum in each eye for night vision. He is naked and has not bothered to grow the cellulose-based clothes he has used in the past.
The xenoforms attach rapidly, and in nanoseconds he is connected. They flood him with knowledge of local temperature, toxins in the air, the nearest humans, the distress of the trees recently cut, the mating calls of crickets.
Further along in the darkness he sees discarded clothing, robes. This comes from the Yemaja cult, he knows. They come to the river for their ecstasies and possession trances. He does not know why clothing would be abandoned as they are not a sex cult, but he puts on the robes, and covers his head with the hood. He cannot see the colour of his skin, but he knows it is one of the first things he needs to adjust. In the past he has come across as artificial because of the hue. Not the right shade of brown. Humans are weird.
Before he can move forward, he senses a presence approaching within the xenosphere. It is familiar and he suppresses a very human groan when he realises who it is.
“Hello, Molara,” says Anthony.
She appears in his mind’s eye in her favoured form, a black woman with massive butterfly wings protruding from her back. She is clothed in some diaphanous material, but it is like a nightgown and covers nothing. Her hair is short, like a boy’s.
“What are you doing?” she asks. “Where are you going?”
“Don’t you know?”
Molara is a sentient part of the xenosphere, but at the same time, she is generated by function. She is a data harvester, collating all the data in the xenosphere and sending them to Home in bursts. She appears to humans as a nightmare, a flowing form passing through their dreamscapes with a massive, tooth-filled maw being the only feature on her face, and billions of articulated legs with which she connects to all the minds. She can also be a succubus and had orchestrated the killing of all human sensitives. Bar one, Kaaro, whom Anthony had forbidden her to kill.
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