I fail to recruit Kaaro for the trip to Rosewater. On the other hand, I find Owen Gray exactly where Femi’s intelligence places him. S45 has been tracking him since he arrived in the country as a foreigner associated with Wormwood in London, but the surveillance died down when he seemed to be living a boring life.
Small bungalow, wide yard, a picket fence, a gate.
Props for him, he doesn’t live in the gentrified suburbs. I think his neighbours are black on one side, Persian on the other. I watch the place first, and see him. Not as tall as he was, but that’s because he’s gaunt and bent over. He’s about eighty or north of that, tall, thin, hair all white, throwing his tanned skin into contrast. For me, the last time I saw him was a few days ago. Look at him now. Time rushed by and took everything from him. I hope there is enough substance to the man left to save humanity.
He must have already been an old man when he came to the city. The elderly who grew old in Rosewater tend to have healthier spines.
As I draw closer to where he stands, I hear music from inside. Syncopated drums, mostly. Owen, Owen, what is your life? Do you have children, grandchildren, cats? Are you lonely? Have you loved? Have you lost?
Before I can yell a greeting, he says, “You’re not human, are you? What are you?”
“You don’t remember me, do you? We met in London in 2012, in that church off Tottenham Court Road.”
He smiles at the memory. “St Anselm’s. The soup kitchen.”
“The soup kitchen.”
“I don’t remember you–and don’t take that personally, because I fed a lot of people in that church–but I’ve seen your kind before. What are you?”
“A ghost.”
“Yes. I have seen at least one ghost in my time. What’s your name, young lady?”
“Bicycle Girl.” She doesn’t know why she says this. She never self-identifies with that particular nom de guerre, but he makes her want to. He seems… discreet.
“And you know who I am.”
“Owen Gray, CIA.”
“Retired on account of the entire CIA being out of reach. You rhymed. Is that deliberate? It’s always nice to have an educated assassin.”
“I’m not here to kill you.”
“No?”
“Mr Gray, according to records, you entered Nigeria around 2035. You’re naughty. Your visa’s expired.”
He raises an eyebrow shot through with white. “You’d better come in, Bicycle Girl. Can you drink tea in that form?”
“I can’t interact with solid objects. Just biological, sentient beings. I can make you feel it when you touch me, I can make you hear me and smell me, but that’s just because I’m manipulating your nerve endings and brain.”
He nods. “I helped make one of you once. Not you in particular. A xenosphere ghost. We called it a quantum ghost because back then putting the word ‘quantum’ in front of everything was the thing to do with shit you didn’t understand.”
I’m amused in spite of myself. “We kind of still do.”
“Huh. I thought we’d have grown out of that. How old were you when you died?”
“Eleven.”
“And yet you say you saw me in London in 2012.”
“I… went back in time-data.”
“Fabulous, fabulous. Let’s go to the kitchen. I’m going to have some chicken feet.”
I think he means thighs or drumsticks, but no, he actually gets chicken feet. There’s an art to eating them, and he has it down pat. I try to remember, but I’ve never seen a white man eat chicken feet. He has about ten in a bowl on a tiny table. I can smell them and he hasn’t spared the chilli.
He sits, and says, “Ewa jeun.” Join me for the meal.
“You need to work on your accent.”
“I’m too old to care about being exposed as a spy and shot.”
“Can we talk about why you’re here? In Rosewater?”
He peels away the outer integument, then bites along the shaft, small, rapid nips. He eats the sweet flesh where the toes meet in a pulpy prominence. Then he strips the underside of the toes. He spits out the claws.
“Watching Wormwood, of course,” he says. “Force of habit, though. I don’t report to anyone any more, and my allies are all dead.”
“We’re trying to stop it,” I say.
“Wormwood? Good luck. The British tried to kill it. I helped. We destroyed its brain. Except it wasn’t a brain.” He crunches the bone and sucks out the fatty marrow. “I remember you now. You’re the one who told us about Anthony’s death.”
“He didn’t die. But yes, that was me. How do you remember? It wasn’t really you; it was an impression of your mind.” But I know how. Going into the past affects the memory today because the old version is overwritten with new data, data that now includes me.
“What you really want to know is if I know anything that can help you kill it,” says Owen. “Probably not, but I’ll share what I have, my notes, my reflections. I can tell you what doesn’t work.”
“Why do you like chicken feet?” I finally ask.
“Louisiana boy.”
“I see. Where did you store your observations?”
“I’ll show you in a minute. How come you’re not eleven years old? Why do you look like you’re in your twenties?”
“I didn’t know I was dead.”
“Of course. Of course. Have you ever killed anyone?”
“No. I’m not a government agent, Mr Gray.” I sound convincing, even to myself. Innocence in the rebellion is a myth, and for a moment I mourn my youth, but only for a moment.
“You’re working for one, though.”
“Have you ever killed anyone?”
“Not that I remember. I mean, I’m old, but I think I’d remember taking someone’s life.”
“Okay, good, that means I can like you,” I say. And I do like him: the slow, deliberate manner of him, the youthful look in his eyes, so at odds with the rest of his body and his shambling manner. He makes no abrupt movements, and nothing is threatening. I wonder if this is something they teach them in the CIA so they can lower their enemies’ defences. It will do no good to tell him I have killed before and intend to kill in the near future.
“Wormwood was my first and only assignment,” he says. “It’s taken a while. Not a great agent, eh?”
“What was your assignment, sir?”
“Twofold. Observe all the alien phenomena with a view to selecting what could be weaponised, then destroy the alien.”
“Did they tell you how to kill it?”
Sad smile. “I’m afraid not. I think they were going to formulate a plan based on my findings.”
“Where are your notes?”
He washes his hands and wipes the errant oil off his face, then leads me into a room near the back. It smells musty, but in the manner of a second-hand bookshop. It is stacked full of notebooks.
“Are you kidding me?”
“Memory storage can be hacked,” he says. “Besides, I wrote these over the time I’ve been in Rosewater. They were most at risk during the war, but otherwise…”
I can’t read them. I’ll have to get someone like Tolu Eleja to come in.
“This won’t work,” I say.
“Because you can’t interact with physical objects, yes, I get it.” He sits on a stool in the room, which throws up dust that smells of mould and evokes silverfish. “Why don’t you tell me what you plan to do?”
I do, sketching the bare bones of what Femi wants.
He is silent for almost fifteen minutes, holding up his hand to stop me each time I try to start a conversation.
“It could work,” he says. “But it will take time, and while you’re waiting, the aliens will develop counter-measures to nullify the effect. No, to do this, you’ll need to sacrifice your queen, and a faster method. Luckily, I have just the thing.”
He starts to look for other specific journals.
I say, “You said you’ve seen my kind before.”
“Yes.”
“Were you talking about Ryan Miller?”
Owen laughs. “You know, we were on lockdown, cordoned off in London for ten years. My group. With Miranda and Ryan and Dead Leaves. We survived to a great extent because of Ryan Miller. He knew everything–the best places to hole up, where to find discarded or misplaced weapons, when the catastrophic events were going to happen, how to sneak in and out of the cordon, which I found particularly useful because I had to get my reports out. I knew there was something odd about him.”
“Which was?” I sit on the floor and cross my legs.
“Three years after Wormwood fell into Hyde Park, I broke into his flat. I knew where he would be, you see. I found, locked away, this yellowed book full of a vast and far-reaching prediction. It seems he stole it from the British Museum. In and of itself, it was probably an antique, but Ryan had scribbled on it. Corrections, comments and the like. Things like, ‘That’s not what I said!’ or ‘Could have been clearer’, and so on. He wrote like he was the author.”
“He was,” I say.
“Yes. Father Marinementus. But I only found this out later. When I got to the seventieth page, I found a note. I unfolded it to discover a handwritten paragraph addressed to me. It said, ‘I know you’re here, Owen. Look out of the window.’ I did, and found him sitting on a derailed Northern Line train waving at me. Not a lot scares me, but my legs got all wobbly. I felt like I was in the sights of a predator, that I had been caught.”
“He was still alive after all those centuries?”
“No. And he wasn’t exactly like you, either. He entered a growing tumour on the body of a woman called Anne Miller. He talked to her from the tumour so that she did not get it taken out. He caused the tissue to grow into a baby. He said the worst experience in his entire existence was to have the intelligence of an immortal in a body whose vocal cords didn’t yet function.”
“He wasn’t angry with you for breaking into his place?” I ask.
“No, he was expecting it. I guess you don’t get offended when you know the future. He came to Nigeria in advance of Wormwood, became a street person for some reason, and died. That was the end of his life.”
No.
I stand up, move in close to his body and sniff. “You’re not telling me everything. That may have been the end of his life, but not the end of him, and not the end of your relationship.”
He grins, and slaps seven notebooks on the floor. “He’s out there, in the xenosphere, but he visits me from time to time. At times he seems to have gone mad; other times he is regretful or he brings me new prophecies. They don’t always make sense. I used to think of him as a friend, but now… there’s an edge to him. The person I knew is slowly fading away.”
“We are all fading away, sir,” I say. “What have you got for me?”
Have you asked yourself why I am telling you this? Why I deliver it in oral tradition, rather than just writing it down, or letting it get lost to posterity? I do not have to speak, and even if I do, history will still judge me, judge us.
I told you I was the wrong person to tell this story, and I still think that. But my name is Oyin Da and because of what I know, where I have been, what I can do, I have spoken of things that I wasn’t always privy to. I have told you the beginning.
What remains is the end.