Chaga

17

The house was older than the country, and very beautiful. A missionary doctor had built it strong and sound as a ship; low, square, with big windows that let light flood into the airy colonial cream and mahogany rooms, and wooden shutters to keep out the heat and the dust. The rooms held hidden delights; little cubbyholes in which newspapers from a century ago lay forgotten; niches and locked cupboards that were rumoured to contain morphine, or heroin. A deep porch enclosed the house on three sides so that there was sun on it, or shade according to your taste, at every time of day. There were red bricks steps up to it, and a red brick drive that was wide enough to take a span of oxen, which was how the doctor and his family had first come to the house.

Now a woman called Miriam Sondhai lived in the house. She was a virologist with the Global Aids Policy Unit, unravelling the molecular matrix of the HIV 4 virus. It had been the most important work in the world, until the Chaga came. Scientists had deserted to UNECTA in droves; biochemists and virologists foremost among them. Miriam Sondhai had not been seduced. She was a woman of commitment. Her skin was the colour of sun-bleached earth, her face was the fine-featured, heart-shape of the Nilo-Hamitic peoples, who are among the most noble and beautiful on Earth. She had the height and grace of a Somali or a Masai, but she was a woman of no tribe, which to an African is to be stateless, homeless, rootless. She had walked with her mother out of the chaos of Somalia, leaving behind a father and two brothers, in shallow stone graves.

Now she lived in the house and loved it as it deserved to be loved. But it was too big and expensive for her on her own, so now Gaby McAslan was parking her brand new this-year’s-model Nissan All Terrain Vehicle on the brick drive that was wide enough to take a team of oxen and putting her clothes in the mahogany closets and her beer in the refrigerator and her precious little things in the missionary doctor’s nooks and corners and the eight foot tapestry of the Zodiac her sister had sent her on the living room wall.

After four months in a single room, it was release. Gaby spread her life with wide abandon through the big, light-filled rooms. She turned the morning side of the verandah into an outdoor office. On hot nights she opened the French windows of her bedroom and pushed her bed with its soft ivory linen into the open air. She ran around the place in her underwear or less, she played her music too loud too late, left newspapers and footwear scattered where she had finished with them, blocked her landlady’s car with her Nissan ATV, ate voraciously and without regard for whose cupboard the food came from, entertained Oksana and friends with alcohol that was not hers and generally fell in love with the house too.

She did not know how close Miriam Sondhai came to throwing her out in those early weeks. Gaby had never considered that she might be difficult to live with. Self-unknowing being the besetting sin of motherless girls, Gaby blamed it on the lofty aloofness of her host. There was a deliberateness in the woman’s intense beauty, as if she had cultivated it to deflect attention from her heart. Even when she went out running in her simple red onepiece in the cool of the evening on the tree-shaded avenues, she displayed that focusedness of purpose. Everything was directed into the beautiful act of putting one foot in front of another. Nothing else mattered. She was as intense and single-minded in her work.

‘If we had one tenth of the resources the West is pouring into UNECTA, we could end the HIV 4 epidemic,’ she insisted. Gaby argued that press coverage of the Chaga focused world attention on the wider issues of Africa. ‘HIV 4 is not a wider issue of Africa. It is a central issue of Africa. Twelve million cases in East Africa: twelve million deaths. Two complete holocausts in a single generation. There are villages up north around Mount Elgon and over into Karamoja in Uganda where there is no one alive over the age of twelve. Entire villages of orphans.’ She would laugh then. She laughed like a Frenchwoman, knowingly and bitterly. ‘It is an African problem in that the West does not want to get involved because it sees Slim as a Malthusian check on African population growth. We exceed the carrying capacity of the land, so the angel of death must pass over us and divide the taken from those who are cursed to stay. It is an African problem in that it is African scientists trying to save African people from an African pandemic. It is not a gay plague here, Gaby. It is an everyone plague.’

When she spoke thus, in her beautiful, deep whisper of a voice, no one could argue with her. It would be like trying to argue with a Madonna in an icon. When she was beautiful and righteous and untouchable like this, Gaby McAslan would tell herself that all Miriam Sondhai needed was a good hard cock up her. It was because of the frictions, rather than despite them, that the two women became friends. So when the van delivered the dress, Gaby asked Miriam to help her try it on, knowing she would think it decadent.

The dress arrived in a cardboard case with rope handles and folded in yards of tissue paper. Gaby held the sensuous green silk up against her and Miriam Sondhai softened in admiration. It had come complete with shoes, underwear, hosiery and a clutch bag: Kenya’s watekni fashion-pirates prided themselves that not only were their products faster and cheaper than originals from the Chanel programs they stole, they came with the full range of accessories. The US Ambassador’s Independence Day Hootenanny demanded nothing less than a dress that would turn every head that looked Gaby McAslan’s way. If it did not make people ask, who is that red-haired woman in that dark green dress? it would be a waste of nearly a month’s salary. Given that she was not on the guest list. Given that a junior On-liner had no right to expect to be on the guest list.

Fuck protocol. Networking mattered. Haran would get her there, by the rocket’s red glare. He had promised when she asked him, her first returnable favour. What she would say to T.P. Costello, that was something he could not help her with.

Miriam helped her up with the zip and adjusted the waist so that the claw-hammer skirt swung back and the short front-piece fell between her thighs to emphasize the long lean lines of her legs. Longness and leanness was what heredity had dealt the McAslan females. They made the most of it. She caught her hair in a bow and flicked it over her left shoulder.

‘You look wonderful, for a m’zungu,’ Miriam said. ‘I hope you do not come off those heels.’

A car hooted in the drive. Gaby frowned at her reflection in the mirror, grabbed her clutch bag and dashed for the taxi. All the way to the ambassador’s residence she kept asking herself, what if, what if, what if they do not let you in? Then you get back into this taxi and go to the Elephant Bar and get drunk with Oksana. It will not be the end of the world. Oh no it bloody won’t. So why are you doing it? It will earn you nothing but a world of trouble. Because there are people there it might be good to be remembered by some day. Because where there are people like that, and free alcohol, there are stories and where there are stories there is news and where there is news there is Gaby McAslan zooming in on Extreme Close-up. Networking. You probably won’t even have time for a drink, let alone talking to Dr Shepard from Tsavo West with the Paul Newman blue eyes.

Self-unknowing, Gaby McAslan.

The cars were lined for a quarter of a mile down the road. Monkey jackets from corporate hospitality had the door-open meet’n’greet to perfection. Gorgeous frocks and rented tuxes went up the stairs to the double doors.

Do not even think of the theme from Gone With the Wind, Gaby McAslan ordered herself. Fiddle-dee-dee to that. The earth is even red, like the strong red earth of Tara.

The meeter’n’greeter slipped her a thick, gilt-edged invitation card.

‘From Haran,’ he said. Gaby passed him a discreet hundred. He touched gloved forefinger to brow. At the door a frock-coated security person scanned the bar-code on the card and checked the on-screen guest list.

‘Gabriel Ruth Langdon McAslan,’ he read. Haran had even got the hated family name right.

‘Gaby,’ she corrected and swept in. She passed through the cool, spacious residence with its slow-turning ceiling paddles and went through the French windows on to the patio. Fairy-lights and stars-and-stripes bunting were strung between the trees. Garden candles taller than Gaby had been spiked into the grass and attracted knots of people. The first of the evening’s bands were opening their set on the staging in front of the shrub azaleas, a handy trio of electric guitar, accordion and sax. Gaby felt sorry for them. It was too early, the guests too sober for their brand of vivacious shamba-dance. By tradition, the beer was kept in tin baths of ice; All-American, diplomatic-bagged in from Milwaukee. Gaby lifted a bottle. A waiter appeared and uncapped it with an opener.

‘Ms McAslan!’

‘Dr Dan!’

He shook her hand enthusiastically. Somewhere he had found a tall mint julep.

‘How good it is to see you, Ms McAslan. You have been much in my thoughts since our interesting night together.’

‘And how was the wedding?’

‘Alas, my forebodings were proved right. He was a worthless man. He abandoned my daughter after six nights for a woman wrestler. A Kikuyu woman wrestler, indeed. I fear my chances of getting my cattle back are remote; the rude boy. He has undoubtedly sold them. My daughter is pretending to be distraught but I think she is secretly relieved. She is one who likes the idea of marriage more than the state of being married. Now she has the chance to do it all again.

‘But you, my friend. You have been making a name for yourself. I very much enjoyed the “And Finally ...” stories. I could tell you one myself that I have from the very best authority, about a magical condom tattoo that protects the recipient from all known sexually transmitted diseases.’

‘I’ve moved away from my source, Dr Dan, and I’m working on more mainstream, investigative material now.’

‘Ah yes. The Werther interview. Most illuminating. It is a pity that his disappearance was not considered as newsworthy as his appearance.’

‘What do you mean? I know he’s hiding from the media.’

‘Is that what they have told you? Peter Werther did not disappear. He was disappeared.’

Guests pushed past to the bar, inspired by Dr Dan’s mint julep. Gaby recognised Der Spiegel’s On-line editor. She nodded curtly to him.

‘Disappeared by whom?’

Dr Dan smiled, shrugged.

‘UNECTA?’

‘Remember where you are, Ms McAslan.’

‘The Americans? The Ambassador knows about this?’ The Ambassador was talking by the balustrade with an animated staffer from the French embassy. Mr Ambassador was a small, impeccably dressed black man; from Georgia, Gaby recalled, which incongruously reinforced the Gone With the Wind imagery. His children were running around in their best clothes looking for excuses to set the fireworks off early. His wife stood some paces from him with an expression of diplomatic boredom. She was dressed African-style and tended more to the Maya Angelou than the Diana Ross.

‘UNECTA, Americans, what’s the difference?’ Dr Dan asked.

‘What happened?’ Gaby wished there had been room in her ludicrous little clutch bag for a PDU, or even an old-fashioned dictation machine.

‘They came at night. Helicopters, with night-imaging cameras. They were following in military spy-satellite thermal photographs. Your video footage helped them as well, but you must not blame yourself, please. It is not your fault, you did not finger him – I believe that is the expression? He made himself a target by coming out of the Chaga, for anything that comes out of the Chaga is theirs.’

‘UN troops?’

‘A joint US-Canadian force.’

‘Jesus. And Peter?’

‘I do not know. I am trying to find out. If I do not, I shall ask for an enquiry in the National Assembly. Despite the United Nations, this is still our country.’

‘How do you know this?’

‘I have always believed that the wise politician cultivates friendships in unlikely places. I count you my friend, Ms McAslan, likewise, I count many in the Traveller community. They could not go to the press directly, for they had been threatened that to do so would result in their residency permits being revoked and them being deported from Kenya.’

Gaby saw the upward glance of his eyes an instant before the hand fell heavily on her shoulder. She squawked, imagining US-Canadian air cavalry abseiling down from helicopters to take out the Irish woman with the big mouth. Her bottle smashed on the patio. The Ambassador looked across, irritated, but the serving staff were already moving to sweep up the debris.

It was worse than US-Canadian air cavalry.

It was T.P. Costello.

‘Sorry to butt in on your conversation, Dr Oloitip, but I need to have a small creative conference with my junior On-line reporter. What do I need?’

‘A small creative conference,’ Gaby said. ‘With your junior On-liner.’

‘That’s correct.’

‘We will talk!’ Dr Dan called as T.P. marched her toward the rhododendrons.

‘T.P., T.P., listen, I’ve got something very very hot; listen, T.P., they’ve vanished Peter Werther.’

‘Frankly, my dear,’ T.P. Costello said, ‘I don’t give a damn.’

The design of the gardens provided many private places for those whose party quirks precluded spectators. A fat man in a too-small tuxedo came crashing from the shrubs, fumbling at his pants. A woman Gaby knew as a senior editor at ITN fled in the opposite direction, unaware that the back of her skirt had got hitched into the waistband of her panties. T.P. dragged her into the alcove they had so hastily vacated.

‘What the hell are you doing here? I cannot turn my back for five minutes but you’re hatching some fuckwit scheme or another. What is it with you, woman? What gives? I cannot do a thing with you.’ T.P. shook her hard by the shoulders. Gaby slapped his hands away from her.

‘You do not touch me like that, Thomas Pronsias Costello.’

He looked at the ground, shamed.

‘What is the problem here, T.P.? I’m only doing what any journalist with an ounce of nous would have done, making contacts, getting stories, T.P. I’ve only gatecrashed a party -Jesus, in ancient Baghdad they had entire guilds of licensed gatecrashers – it’s not like I raped the Ambassador’s brown-eyed boy.’

T.P. Costello did an unthinkable thing. He sat down on the grass with his head in his hands. All the confidence and competence and ability drained from him like water into a dry river bed. He seemed on the verge of tears. He patted the ground for Gaby to sit beside him and gallantly swept a handkerchief from his breast pocket and spread it out to protect her lovely dress.

‘Ah God,’ he sighed. His voice shuddered. ‘Why did you have to come here?’

‘I told you, T.P.’

‘This country. This Chaga-thing.’

A new act had taken the stage. A minimal spattering of applause greeted it. Gaby had listened to enough Voice of Kenya radio to recognize one of the most promising new praise singers.

‘You’re so like her. Not to look at; she was dark; dark hair, dark skin, but like you, she couldn’t be said no to. She had to enquire, she had to push it just that little bit too far. She was ambitious, like you. She was writing a book. Oh, it was going to be the first and last word on the Chaga and the people who study it. She never finished it. I’ve got the material at home. Reams and reams of notes, photocopies, faxes, typescripts. She told me her name once, but I’ve forgotten it. Everyone called her Moon. Langrishe gave her the name. Dr Peter Langrishe. He was an exobiologist, down at Ol Tukai, before UNECTA went mobile. He was as mad as she was. You know where they met? A place like this. The Irish Embassy St Paddy’s Day ceilidh. They were insane, both of them. Jesus, Gaby, I met her off the night flight, just like you, I went through the same bloody catechism, just like you. Do you know where she lived?’

‘I can guess. The Episcopalian guesthouse. T.P., I’m not her.’

‘I know. But you do the things she did. You go to the places she went. You say the things she said.’

Gaby McAslan said nothing, but sat with her knees pulled up to her chin and her arms folded around them.

‘You loved her, didn’t you?’

‘That was the thing. No one loved the right way round. I loved her, but she loved him and he loved the obscene great thing down there. If only everyone had been able to turn around and see the thing that loved them.’ He grimaced. ‘She couldn’t hold him. I could have told her that – should have told her that. She was down on the coast putting a draft together and word came that he’d gone down in a microlyte crash over Amboseli. But she wouldn’t believe he was dead – she had me convinced she would have known if he were: mystical union or crap like that. So she decided to go after him. Last I saw of her was the microlyte I gave her taking off from the Namanga road. I should have taken an axe to the thing. But you never saw what she was like without him. You never saw her depressions, the violent rages, the hours she would spend in her hotel room, staring at the lizards on the wall. I gave her a diary the day she left to search for Langrishe. I made her promise she would get it back to me, somehow. Odds are it’s rotting with her in that green hell; but it could have made it back to shore.’

‘I could find out. At least you would know for certain, T.P.’

‘And Gaby McAslan would have the story of the decade. Gone With the Wind bangs Out of Africa. These are real lives, Gaby; real hurts, real histories, real wounds. Tread carefully around them.’ He shook his head. ‘You’re a good woman, McAslan. It’s just you’re so like her. Who are you like?’

‘Moon,’ Gaby McAslan said.

Sudden fear darkened T.P.’s face.

‘Don’t say that word. It’s too strong a word for a night like this. Do you believe in magic?’

‘I know a Siberian pilot who does.’

‘Speak a name and it will cross heaven and hell to come to you.’

‘Or silence you.’

‘Even from the dark heart of the Chaga.’

The music ended and there was more applause. Next on stage would be the St Stephen’s Church choir under Tembo’s directorship. It was a great honour to be asked to perform at the Ambassador’s Hootenanny. All week Tembo had gone about the office glowing with a modest, Christian pride. Gaby thought his achievement warranted blatant boasting, but wished him hugs, blessings and break-a-legs anyway. She could not understand his religion, but admired the quiet strength of his faith. She left T.P. to go and hear the set.

All the women wore long skirts, white blouses and headscarfs. The men wore blue kitenges over black pants and played the instruments: two drums, kiamba, sticks and what looked like a piston ring from a truck that you hit with a nine-inch nail. Their four-part harmony was electrifying.

‘Up here singing songs of Jesus while down here folk gossip, get drunk and sneak into the shrubbery for a quickie or a snort.’

Gaby had seen him approach but reckoned cool was the way to play it. In his rented suit he looked like Jimmy Stewart in Philadelphia Story, impatient to rip off the stupid, choking bow tie; or Sean Connery – the only James Bond – with his wetsuit under his dinner jacket rather than the tux under the black rubber.

‘You remember?’

‘I remember the T-shirt. And the hair.’

‘They wouldn’t let me in in a T-shirt with a masturbating nun on the front. The hair tends to go with me. So, how are your buckyballs bouncing?’

‘All over the global newsnets, thanks to you.’

‘You did say I could. As you can see, I made it here after all.’

‘So you did. I like your dress. Suits your hair. And your eyes. Can I get you something to drink?’

They moved between clusters of people on nodding terms with Shepard to one of the gingham-covered tables. The waiter straightened immaculately ironed cuffs.

‘I’ll have one of those mint thingies, please.’

While he mixed it, Gaby pretended to be on nodding terms with people she only knew from photographs.

‘So, buckyballs.’

Shepard had a beer. Gaby thought it was very him.

‘What do you want me to tell you about them?’

Anything.

‘Whatever’s new.’

He shook his head, clicked his tongue in disappointment.

‘And you were doing so well.’

‘No, I’m genuinely interested.’ She tried to adopt a posture she hoped said in fullerenes, not you.

‘Well, seeing as you did the best piece from that press conference, I’ll let you into a little secret. We’re re-inventing organic chemistry from the bottom up. We can analyse and map the basic molecular structure of the Chaga, but to describe anything as complex as its symbiotic biology, or even the associations of fullerene-machines that are analogous to terrestrial cells, we’ve got a long hike to go on that. Damn things evolve so quickly they may always stay two jumps ahead of any containment tactics.’

‘That’s what you’re researching? Ways to kill it?’

They passed close to Jake Aarons holding court in the middle of a group of television journalists. He stood head and shoulders above his peers. He saw Gaby, frowned; saw Gaby with Shepard, looked puzzled; worked something out for himself and grinned impishly.

‘I suppose that’s what they ultimately want to do. If it had come down back at home, we would have called out the National Guard, cordoned the thing off, evacuated everyone and as like as not quietly nuked it. Not that that would have done any good, in my opinion. Pax Americana or not, they can’t very well go around nuking other people’s territory, but the military can’t think in any other terms than enemies, invasion, containment and counter-attack. They’ve been trying napalm down in Ecuador, but that’s always been Washington’s back yard. Biggest drop since Vietnam. No effect whatsoever: the stuff’s as near as possible fireproof. You burn maybe a couple of dozen acres, then the rest starts to super-secrete fire retardents, foams and CO₂. It’s back at full climax within a week. This thing thinks.’

‘I take it you don’t subscribe to the military philosophy.’ The Ambassador made his mint juleps mighty strong, or was it the effect of Ozark Mountain bourbon on a sea-level girl at White Highland altitudes?

‘Doesn’t matter a damn whether I agree with it or not. It won’t work.’

‘Is this on the record?’

‘You’re recording?’

Trays of chicken wings passed. Shepard scooped a fistful. Gaby ate greedily from her carmine-nailed fingers and wiped them greasily on her glossy, sheer thighs. These mint juleps were a mighty fine drink at altitude indeed. You saw the glass with those bits of greenery stuck in it like Arab tea and you thought it could not possibly be serious but then you took your first sip and the mint and the sugar and whiskey fused and it was the best damn drink in the universe to sip when you were gatecrashing the social event of the season in a pirate dress you could barely afford with a boss who thought you were the Sad Lost Girl of his golden years and the only real white man in the country eating chicken wings and talking about buckyballs and napalm while the altitude smeared Vaseline over the lens of your life making everything soft-focus and distant so that for a moment you were Scarlett O’Hara on the lawns of Tara and what is he saying? why is he looking at me? does he seriously expect an answer? and woosh! the first salvo of fireworks saved her.

There were gasps. There were oohs. There were screams as the rockets detonated high above the Ambassador’s residence and dropped silver rain. The Ambassador’s children danced and shouted. A second barrage rose, shedding sparkling stars, and a third. A big wump from behind the shrubs provoked more screams as the mortar shot its load half a mile into the Nairobi night. It blew in a deafening multiple orgasm of novas. Car alarms chorused in answer, shocked awake by the pressure-wave. A cascade of red, white and blue fell down the sky.

‘That was a big one!’ Gaby shouted over the din of the lesser lights. ‘I love fireworks, but I hate the noise. When I was a kid my Dad took me to the Christmas fireworks at Belfast City Hall. They shouldn’t have let them off in such a confined space; it was like Sarajevo; rockets shooting all over the place. But beautiful. That’s what I love about them, wonderful and frightening at the same time.’

‘Do you ever think they’re like a life?’ Shepard shouted. Rockets were zipping up on all sides, setting fire to the sky. ‘The long, slow rise, the sudden brilliant, brief explosion into glory, the long fall into darkness.’

‘If you’re going to talk depressing, I’m having another mint thingie.’

‘Are you sure?’

‘Probably not. So, what do they call you?’

‘They call me Shepard.’

‘Nothing else?’

‘Doctor.’

‘They call me Gaby’. Any more of this mint thingie and she would be flying up like one of the Ambassador’s rockets and her head would explode in a star-burst of flying red hair. ‘You know, you could do me an enormous favour.’

‘A journalist’s favour? Can I afford that?’

‘I just need you to check something for me. There’s a diary, belonged to a woman had an affair with a UNECTA man; Dr Peter Langrishe.’

‘I remember him, and her.’

‘It might still be in Ol Tukai, and I really need it to prove something to someone. Could you…’

The big mortar tube boomed and screamed another one skyward. The blast rattled the windows and the beer bottles in their bath of ice. The just-silenced car alarms started up again. Gaby frowned, bent her head to one side, imagining she could hear another noise as the sky rained stars. A sound like a hundred cellular telephones ringing at once.

It was not the effect of altitude and mint thingie. It was a hundred cellular telephones ringing at once. Creeping paralysis seized the hootenanny as partygoers pulled phones out of purses, night bags, inside pockets, robes, sporrans. Shepard put his finger in his ear and nodded to the chirping voice of the phone. Guests were already streaming up the patio steps toward cloakroom and cars.

‘You’ll excuse me if I abandon you in mid-julep,’ he said. ‘There’s a general UNECTA alert in operation. Seems destiny is calling.’

‘What?’ Gaby shouted at his receding back. ‘What’s happening?’

He turned on the bottom step.

‘I shouldn’t be telling you this.’

‘Tell me!’ Gaby screamed among the beer bottles and the julep glasses and the wing bones of chickens. The fireworks fountained upward, dying unheeded.

‘Hyperion’s back.’

18

Gaby reckoned this was the first time the conference room had been full since SkyNet had set up its East Africa station on Tom M’boya Street. Though it was three-thirty in the morning, every section was represented. The coffee maker was on overtime too. It smelled threateningly of overheated beans.

Under the big screen, T.P. Costello finished his third cup and pushed it from him across the table, nauseated. He was in a poor state for a live video conference. At some point his solo trip through love and regret had cast him up on the Ambassador’s bathroom floor, unconscious, a half-drunk mint julep gripped in his fist. His snoring had alerted the domestics. Gaby and Jake Aarons had barely managed to get him to a taxi when the word came through from head office that UNECTA and NASA would be issuing a joint statement at one-thirty Greenwich Mean Time.

In the front row, Gaby had not had time to change her Chanel-pirate dress. It stank of stale smoke, spilled bourbon, spicy chicken marinade and woman-sweat, but the way the fabric moved around her made her feel a million feet tall. One should be dressed for epochal events.

The SkyNet symbol on the wall screen dissolved into the NASA logo. Still have not got rid of that terrible old 1970s typography, Gaby thought. The colophon was in turn replaced by the face of Irwin Lowell, Director of the Huntsville Orbital Astronomy Centre. He looked like the photographs of that old science-fiction writer her dad had liked: Isaac Asimov. Gaby had never been able to read more than ten pages of his stuff.

‘On behalf of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, you are most welcome to the Orbital Astronomy Centre.’ He talked like he looked, like forty miles of bad road. ‘Our findings are largely of a technical nature, so we have extrapolated the following graphic sequence from them which will clarify the nature of the object we have discovered in the Hyperion Gap.’

The sequence opened with a shot of Saturn and its rings. Stock footage, Gaby thought. Bottom of the video vault. Then she noticed that this was not the standard image. A dark line bisected the planet from top to bottom. As Gaby watched, the dark line thickened, but in the absence of any frame of reference she could not judge whether it was millimetres wide or painted down the zero meridian of the second largest planet in the solar system. Then the point of view moved and the thick black line opened into a huge ellipse and then into a solid disc, mottled with a thousand chaotic colours, rotating around its central axis.

‘To give some indication of scale, we’ve included a schematic of the Unity space station for comparison,’ Irwin Lowell said in his down-home accent.

Gaby peered but could not see it. The resolution clicked up, and clicked up again, and again, and again until the edge of the disc seemed like a straight line against the stars. There it was, silhouetted against a patch of Pantone 141, the web of orbital construction beams and environment modules and solar arrays and manufacturing cores, seeming no bigger on the three-metre screen than a spinning spider.

Reality caught in Gaby McAslan’s throat. Everyone knew the proud boasts. A city in space, a complete community a kilometre and a half across. Man’s first stepping stone to the stars.

‘The object is slightly over twelve hundred kilometres in diameter,’ Irwin Lowell said. ‘Our measurements indicate that it is twenty kilometres thick at the rim, decreasing to five at the centre. This, we think, is to offset the object’s tendency to collapse inward under its own gravitational attraction into a more stable form. The centripetal force generated by the spin, which is one revolution every three point five three hours, also helps maintain gravitational stability. On a related point, the moon Hyperion formerly had a highly erratic axis of rotation; that has been corrected. From its high stability alone, we must conclude that this object could not possibly have formed naturally.’

Earth replaced Saturn on the screen. The Indian sub-continent, from Cape Comorin to Bombay, was obliterated by a featureless grey circle. The lower limb of Sri Lanka protruded from the south eastern quadrant, to the north the great provinces of the old Mugal Empire struggled free. In the shadow of the Hyperion Object lay five hundred million lives, Gaby thought. The grey disc did not look like the presence of a vast, incomprehensible thing, but the absence. Five hundred million people; their mighty, ancient cities; their gods and avatars that were among the first to rule the dreams of humans: taken into the greyness and annihilated. It was like the satellite photographs with which she had adorned her Chaga-shrine; the neat, stamped-out circles of colour stuck across the map of the tropics, but more frightening in its blank greyness than the gaudiness of the alien mosaics.

Irwin Lowell re-appeared, super-imposed over the map. Gaby could tell from his face that he was about to impart an unpalatable truth. Understanding this, she knew what he would say. The Earth map was not a comparison. It was a promise. The thing was moving.

‘Our data confirms that at some time in the process of reconfiguring the former moon, a momentum was imparted to the Hyperion object sufficient to cause it to break free from the Saturnian satellite system.’ He fingered the metal clasp of his bootlace tie. Scared men who cannot let it be seen that they are scared communicate their fear by such small self-touchings. ‘Our projections indicate that the object is on a course into the inner solar system.’ An animated orrery replaced maimed India. The planets slid on their ordained wires. A red rogue line curved inward from the ringed bead of Saturn. It looped around the gravitational field of Jupiter, through the asteroids, past the orbit of red Mars. The blue opal of Earth opened up into its component pair. The red line slipped through the cosmic needle’s-eye between Earth and Moon and was wound into a geostationary skein around the Equator. ‘The calculations are fairly exact. The Hyperion Object will arrive in earth orbit in slightly over five years. Five years and ninety-eight days, to be exact.’

There was murmuring in the conference room on Tom M’boya Street. What brutal things we have become, Gaby thought. So inured to miracles and wonder that we greet several hundred billion tons of reconstituted moon headed down our throats with a ho and a hum. She fiddled with the almanac function of her PDU. Worlds collide on September 27 2013. I wonder if that will be before or after lunch? But they would not do that. They would not sow their Chaga-seed across the planet and let it grow and flower, only to smash it all into nothingness with their hammer from the sky. Seize that, Gaby McAslan. Hold it to you. It is the only hope you have. Not just your present, but now your future is in the hands of these Chaga-makers.

A cigarette seemed like a very fine idea. She excused herself and left the room. Irwin Lowell was saying something about mass being missing from the Hyperion Object, which seemed to have been converted directly to momentum by some unknown process. She lit up by the window at the end of the corridor, opened it and leaned out. Day had begun while she had watched the drawings of the things in the sky. Five floors down, Tom M’boya Street was busy with the early morning traffic. She saw a man in Arab dress pushing a little wooden cart along the edge of the street. It looked like a dog kennel on castors. Gaby knew from experience that if you looked inside it you would see a crouching woman, veiled and robed so that only her eyes showed, but they glittered brightly in the darkness. Directly beneath the window a policeman was trying to break up a fight at a bus stop. A crowd of matatu touts was gathering and taking sides. Gaby exhaled cigarette smoke into the street. Shouting voices rose around her. People died in these street fights. She accepted that, as she accepted the woman with unknown deformities who lived in a box on wheels, or the legless beggar who pushed himself past Miriam Sondhai’s house every day on a trolley with a block of wood in each hand. Kenya had brutalized her. Cruelties and sufferings that would have been intolerable in London confronted her at every step, and she ignored them. In this, Tembo and Faraway had succeeded. Gaby McAslan had become African. What they had seen in her as the capacity to learn this was her essential brutality. Looking from the fifth floor window, she felt more sister to the people on the street than those she had left in the conference room. They were a tough people down there. They were a resourceful people. They had successfully made the jump from Iron Age to Information Age in two generations: they were used to their world ending every couple of decades or so. The Chaga might be eating Africa, but it could not eat African-ness. They begged their alms and cooked their food and fought their fights and caught their matatus because they knew that in the end their African-ness would eat the Chaga.

She finished her cigarette, flicked the butt into the street and went back to the conference.

Irwin Lowell was fingering his bootlace tie again.

‘We have pictures just come through image processing from the Chandrasekahr telescope of the moments immediately preceding the advent of the Hyperion Object.’

Animation would have rendered it more slickly and realistically, but the grainy CCD images captured the intellectual chill of deep space. Gaby shivered in her gorgeous dress. Cold translucent shapes tumbled slowly against the soft blur of overloaded stars, locking together into fans and arcs of an immense disc. Gaby realized with a shock that the fragile, chiming fans must be tens of kilometres long. This was engineering on a scale so large the imagination had to step back and back until the perspective made it human-sized.

They were talking now about re-tasking the Gaia space-probe, which had been sent out on the heels of Tolkien to plumb the mysteries of the Hyperion Gap. NASA were trying to rig together a high-acceleration propulsion unit that would rendezvous with the probe, dock and put it into orbit around the great disc. They had pretty little animated schematics to show how they would do it. All lines and dots and arrows.

I was right to tie my life to the lights in the sky, Gaby McAslan thought. The Ford drivers, the Markys and Hannahs with their beautiful homes and beautiful children could no longer rely on the external universe being too big and remote to touch their internal lives. The universe was coming to them as much as to the man she had seen wheeling his wife in her wooden cart up Tom M’boya Street, or the matatu touts fighting at the bus stop, or the laid-back policeman or the food sellers setting up their sidewalk stalls. But the street people would be ready. They knew intimately that the universe is a place at best indifferent, at worst hostile. They would not flee screaming the sky is falling! the sky is falling! when they learned what had happened out at Saturn, what would be happening over their heads in six years. Six years is a long time under the eye of God. Much can happen. They would be ready, and if the sky did fall, they trusted that their arms were strong enough to hold it up.

19

The pink stretch limo had been behind her since she turned out of Miriam Sondhai’s drive. It made no attempt to hide, it could not have easily, even among Nairobi’s UN and diplomatic plates. Many UNECTA staff lived in Miriam’s district, stretch limos in all colours were commonplace, but never so pink as this. Gold-tint mirror glass, and a flying-vee aerial on the back. Very cyberpunk. And following her. It ran keepie-lefties and jumped lights to keep itself in her rearview.

They were still digging up the junction of University Way and Moi Avenue. Bi-lingual signs thanked drivers for their patience in co-operating with the Ministry of Transport’s five-year road-improvement scheme. A five-year plan, when in four years there would not be any roads to improve: Gaby suspected the digging paralysing Nairobi was a cabalistic deal between the City Fathers, contractors and a syndicate of newspaper sellers, snack vendors and windscreen washers.

The man with the Stop/Go sign was letting them through two at a time this morning.

‘Bastard!’ Gaby shouted as he flicked his sign to red before she could jump him.

Suddenly there were three men in her ATV. Two in the back, one in the front. They had Afro hairstyles, platform soles, ankle-length leather coats and big smiles.

‘Haran begs the pleasure of your company,’ said the one in the front. ‘Please follow the limousine.’ He nodded to the road mender, who turned his sign immediately to green for Go. The pink Cadillac pulled out and passed. Gaby tucked in behind it. It led her to the Cascade Club. The place had not long closed. It looked weary with all the house lights on, like an aged, aged prostitute who has to go out to the shops and shrinks from the naked sunshine. The air was close and humid, breathed through many sets of lungs. Down in the pit women were diligently scrubbing mould off the white tiles. It smelled, Gaby thought, exactly like the Pirates of the Caribbean in EuroDisney.

The posseboys did not take Gaby up to the glass-floored office, but by a circuitous route past staff toilets and store-rooms filled with shrink-wrapped pallets of alcohol to a wide, covered balcony around a lush courtyard garden of palms, bananas and creeping figs. Higher palm fronds overhung the balcony rail. Waiters in white jackets carrying silver trays attended a number of immaculately laid tables. The patrons were all African or Indian. Haran’s table was apart from the others and overlooked a flaccid fountain. A silver coffee set, two cups and a PDU were arranged on the linen cloth. A lift of his finger dismissed the posseboys. Haran rose from his cane chair, lifted the head of his fly-whisk and bowed slightly to Gaby.

‘Ms McAslan. A delight to see you again. Please, sit, have some coffee. Esther.’

A young black woman moved from where she had been standing behind Haran and pulled a chair out for Gaby. She was dressed in a black leather bikini over a sheer mesh bodystocking. Black knuckle-studded biker’s gloves matched black biker’s boots. Gaby recognized the uniform of Mombi’s possegirls. She wore a lot of heavy jewellery, but, unusually, no neck-chains, only a mismatched choker that seemed to have been woven from strands of iridescent fibre. In place of a pendant, a small printed circuit board with a single red LED eye nuzzled in the hollow of the young woman’s throat.

‘Smartwire,’ Haran said. ‘One of the first benefits of Chaga research, so we are told. Coiled long-chain molecules that contract dramatically under an electrical charge. Not quite dramatic enough to guillotine a head right off, but enough to sever the carotid arteries if I press the button. But Mombi has her own necklace on one of my boys, so everyone’s arteries will be staying unsevered, I think.’ The possegirl poured coffee. Milk was offered, sugar, sweeteners. Gaby waved them away. The coffee was exquisite. She expected no less of Haran.

‘So, Gaby, not only are we menaced by the Chaga, we now have this Hyperion event as well. I understand you have a nickname for it already, what is it, the BDO?’

‘The Big Dumb Object,’ Gaby said, noting the switch to her forename. Haran was like the Chaga, he moved slowly, but inexorably. He reached his points, disclosed his informations, changed the landscape of his relationships at his own speed, in his own time and none other. ‘From the same anonymous NASA wit who named the Iapetus probe after the author of The Lord of the Rings. This one is from the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction.’

‘My education must be incomplete,’ Haran said. ‘I have read neither of these volumes. Perhaps I should. The times are changing, Gaby, and I must change with them, or history will run me down like a chicken on the highway. There is a time for war, and a time to make peace. There are too many new faces on the street and they have grown up hungry and vicious. Their means are dishonourable: virtual sex parlours, VR-dildonics, videodrugs; their methods distasteful: blackmail, extortion, addiction, kidnapping. They place no value on human life. You can understand, my friend, that they must be shown who is the power in this town if we are to avoid general anarchy. In such times, your oldest enemy is to be more trusted than those who catch at your coat-tail and call you friend, friend.’

‘You’re putting out diplomatic feelers?’

‘We have exchanged embassies.’

‘Or hostages.’

Haran glanced at the PDU on the table-cloth. UPI NetServe menus scrolled down the screen. The hypertext expansion point blinked on the liquid rollscreen.

‘My net is coming apart in my fingers, Gaby. Every day I lose connections. People; my people, who trust me to protect them. Against the police, against my rivals and enemies, like Mombi was once, who would snap them up like a leopard a dog; yes, I can protect them from these, but against the Chaga, against those who serve it…’ Haran took a flexible minidisc from the breast pocket of his jacket. ‘Leave us, Esther. This is a private matter between myself and my client.’

She had the adolescent scowl nicely. Gaby envied her her firm ass.

The video sequence was appalling. There was no syntax, no narrative. The camera veered from side to side, faces were out of focus, or upside down or loomed to fill the screen. The soundtrack was shouting and hard breathing and the constant shatter of a hovering helicopter. You saw swooping panoramics of a dusty Kenyan town, you saw jolting images of military vehicles, as if taken by a running man. You saw white soldiers shot from expressionistic angles, you saw sun-burned faces beneath blue helmets swim into extreme close-up. You saw lines of people, and armoured personnel carriers. You saw town and soldiers and sky whirling madly around, then you heard raised, shouting white-man voices, heavily accented, and saw something that looked like a zipper, and the dark interior of a sports bag, and heard running footsteps, and heavy breathing, and the sequence ended.

‘They took his deck, all his equipment, they took the camcorder on which he shot this secretly, they even took the expensive shoes off his feet,’ Haran said evenly. ‘But they did not take the disc, and now I have it, and will make them pay for what they did to one of my posse.’

‘Who are they?’

‘Azeris. Ex-Soviets. It does not matter. They all do it. Especially the ones from the countries that are as poor, or poorer, than this. What they do not keep for themselves, they sell in the Nairobi markets. If you go down to Jogoo Road or Kariokor, you will find it all laid out on the stalls. If they do not have what you want, you can place an order and the soldiers will loot it for you from the next village they evacuate in the name of the United Nations. But you must pay more for this premium service.’

‘Haran, why are you showing me this?’

The Sheriff laid his fly-whisk on the table.

‘I am asking you as a favour to expose the ones who did this to my boy. I do not care about the others, but no one, not even the UN, touches one of Haran’s. I will not have it said that I cannot protect my own.’

‘You want me to do a report on institutional corruption in the United Nations forces.’

‘Listen well, Gaby McAslan. This is what I want. I want the men who did this to my man exposed and humiliated in every nation on Earth. I want their own sisters and mothers to close their doors to them when they go back to their homes; I want their fathers and brothers to turn away and spit when they pass for the shame they have brought their families.’

Sip your coffee, Gaby McAslan. Do not let this smooth bastard see the value of this thing he is giving you, for he has the eyes of a Shanghai jade-seller, who sets his price by the dilation of his buyer’s pupils. Already, she was listing the Must Knows and the Must Never Knows, the Faithfuls and the Faithlesses. Tembo and Faraway; she would take them, they knew the country, they knew their job, they knew discretion. They would not tell the troll bitch-queen from hell Santini, or T.P., who would give it straight to golden boy Jake. No, she would keep it secret until the moment she rolled it for Thomas Pronsias Costello in his little glass office and when syndication deals lit up the East African teleport like a stained glass window, then she would see who was talking Junior East African satellite news correspondent. Already she was rehearsing the little doxology: Gaby McAslan, SkyNet News, Kenya.

‘This does me as much of a favour as it does you,’ she said.

‘Is this not then the most excellent way to do business?’ Haran said. ‘This way, I know I can trust you to do what I ask. I will have one of my boys deliver details of the unit in question and their current location. I presume you will be at the Sondhai woman’s for the foreseeable future?’

‘For the foreseeable future.’

‘Good. I have detained you long enough. I would not want to make trouble for you with your employers, when I am in need of their good graces. I am most glad you can do this little favour for me.’

He extended a gloved hand. Gaby did not take it.

‘Haran. I need to ask a favour in return of you.’

‘You are aware that what I have asked you to do is in repayment for the favour I did you in the Independence Day thing. This will be a fresh account.’

‘I am aware of that.’

Haran folded his hands in his lap, like a priest awaiting a confession.

‘What is it you would ask me?’

‘Peter Werther.’

‘I gave you him as a token of our relationship.’

‘Dr Daniel Oloitip says he’s disappeared.’

‘One does well not to pay too much attention to what Dr Oloitip says.’

‘He says he hasn’t so much disappeared as been disappeared. By the UN. A joint US/Canadian airborne force hit the What the Sun Said community up at Lake Naivasha and took him.’

Haran studied the outspread fingertips of his gloves.

‘These are serious allegations Dr Oloitip is making.’

‘Haran, I want you to find out if this is true, and if so, where Peter Werther is.’

‘Are you asking me as a favour?’

He was looking right at her. She had never seen his eyes so clearly. They were like two spheres of lead.

‘I am asking you as a favour.’

‘Finding out and finding where are two favours.’

‘Then I am asking you as a favour, twice. And I will owe you, twice.’

Haran snapped his hands shut. The lemon-yellow leather gloves made a soft, rustling snapping, like a lizard trapping an insect.

‘I shall do what I can. I can promise no more than that. You understand that things are not so simple with the UN, or I would not have had to ask you the favour I have. My boys must be discreet if they are not to be discovered. It may be that they will find nothing. But you will still owe me the favour. Two favours.’

‘Haran, I knew from the moment I met you I would always be owing you.’

He smiled. Like his lead eyes, she had never seen him smile before. She wished she had not seen him smile now.

‘I shall have one of my boys escort you back to SkyNet. The streets are no longer as safe for visitors as they were, especially for white women. I am afraid there are thieves and conmen on every street corner.’

Gaby got up from the table. Mombi’s handsome envoy had returned with fresh coffee. Haran gently ran his gloved right hand along the possegirl’s jawline. Gaby shuddered.

20

‘Ten years ago this dusty, rutted dirt road would have been nose-to-tail with tour buses heading to the game lodges of West Tsavo National Park. Now the only vehicles that move along it are United Nations truck convoys. I counted fifty go past me ten minutes ago. Their dust still hangs in the air. And the place to which they are headed, where once Masai cattle and wild animals existed peacefully together, has turned into something from the Old Testament: an entire nation of refugees.

‘In the last census two years ago, the town of Merueshi had a population of three thousand. Today UNHCR estimates there are over one hundred thousand people camped out around Merueshi. In those two years, the Chaga has come. Terminum is just two kilometres to the south of us, ten minutes’ walk, and that, the UN says, is close enough. Everyone, and everything, is to be moved, down to the last cow and goat, the last stick of furniture.

‘From fifty kilometres around, the people have come to Merueshi to be evacuated. Some have their own transport, others were brought in by truck and bus, most have walked carrying all their worldly possessions. Now they wait to be taken north, and they wonder if the UN trucks will reach them before the Chaga does, and if they do make it out of here, what kind of life can they expect in the townships?

‘To be forced away from everything you have ever known is hard. What is intolerable is then to have even those few, precious things you have managed to salvage taken from you.

‘I’ve come to Merueshi, to the very edge of the Chaga and this scene of near-Biblical desolation, to investigate reports of widespread looting and extortion of refugees’ property. Not by criminals or gangs of bandits, those certainly exist, or even by profiteers selling space on their own truck trains, but by the very United Nations soldiers who are meant to be protecting them. I have received evidence of black marketeering in stolen goods by one particular unit of Azerbaijani soldiers under the flag of the United Nations.

‘And cut it.’

‘We’re still running,’ Faraway said behind the camera. ‘You can say it if you want to.’

‘Oh, all right then. You can edit this later. I’ll give you a mark.’ Gaby made a chopping motion with her right hand across the camera’s field of vision. ‘Gaby McAslan, SkyNet News, Merueshi, Kenya.’

‘And we are out.’

‘Did it look good? Is this sleeveless denim thing all right? No sweat stains under the armpits? If you made my ass look fat I will hang you by your balls. God, was my nose too shiny?’

Faraway doubled over with laughter.

‘You bitch just like Jake. You looked fine. You always look fine to me, Gaby. Mighty fine indeed. Two things, if you please. One, don’t swipe at flies with your hand, and two, your hair was blowing across your face. It might be a good idea to shoot it again.’

‘Jesus, Faraway. That bastard helicopter will come back. I know it. And I’m never as fresh the fourth time.’

She could see that Faraway was considering a sexual riposte, but instead he said, ‘Jake would do it again.’

‘Fuck Jake.’

She knew the look.

‘All right. We’ll do it again. Got the camp framed? I’ll give you a mark.’

‘One moment please. There seems to be a problem with the white balance.’

‘I knew it. You haven’t the first idea about that camera, have you? We should have waited for Tembo to come back. I don’t know why he trusted you with it.’

‘You trusted him with your Nissan.’

‘That’s different. He has to get the boy. I can’t go: the only white woman in fifty miles? What kind of relation is he anyway?’

‘Wife’s sister-in-law’s cousin.’

‘Blood is much thicker than water in this country.’

‘But not so thick as money. And remember, I am only doing this because you promised to let me see you with no clothes on. Five minutes. In the middle of my living room.’

‘You can’t possibly hold me to that; come on, it was five o’clock in the morning, I would have promised anything.’

Faraway grinned behind the eyepiece as the lens closed in and pulled out into a wide-angle.

‘You have always known that what I want most in the world is to undress you and then fiki-fiki you as you have never been fiki-fikied before, Gaby McAslan. Is it red down there too?’

‘Shut your gob and we’ll go for another take.’

The bastard helicopter came back. It turned high in the air and swooped down low across the camp from its station to the east. Children hid from the hammer of its blades. Women pulled sheets over their heads to protect them from the dust. Lop-eared goats plunged and kicked on their hide tethers; a shit-smeared cow broke loose and careered between the huddles of people. Men in frayed shorts, faded T-shirts and baseball caps with the names of fertilizer companies on the front shooed it away with outspread arms. The helicopter hovered a moment over the refugees, delighting in the chaos it created, then put its down nose and slid up over the low hill where Gaby and Faraway did their fourth take of the news report. Dry brown grass raged and stormed. Dust flew up in a suffocating cloud. Faraway fought with the velcro closures on the camera hood. Gaby watched her prompt notes fly away from her. Combing her hair from her face, she could clearly see the pilot in the forward cockpit raise a forefinger in an obscene gesture. Gaby screamed curses into the roar of rotors shredding air. The helicopter banked again and slid away north along the line of the road in search of others to intimidate.

‘You will have your revenge,’ Faraway said. He was videoing cut-away footage of the camp. ‘Here it comes.’ A line of dust moved across the plain: an electric blue Nissan ATV, driving as fast as the mass of people permitted. ‘I am thinking,’ he continued, following it with his lens out of the camp and up the hill, ‘that maybe this is a thing worth doing after all. Maybe this will work and we will all be Leonard and Bernstein and have our faces on the television and not behind it.’

‘Woodward and Bernstein,’ Gaby corrected. She knew his cool by now. Anything that would earn him fame and face, especially among the easy women he met in Friday night jit-clubs, he would follow with the same phallic determination that he followed those same women home to their beds. Once vanity got him started, he was kept moving by a deeply uncool, unstreet sentimentality about the world’s unfairness. Tembo had required a different tack. Righteousness roused him. He was small, but mighty for justice. As Gaby had unrolled her story, Tembo had fetched the equipment her plan required and threw his overnight ready bag into the back of the ATV. His wife had gone about her early morning tasks with the patient resignation of African women who know that they carry the whole world on their backs.

The first person Gaby had confided in was Miriam Sondhai. She needed the blessing of the sacerdotal woman.

The Somali woman had been slow to answer. It was her way, Gaby had learned. Only when a thing had permeated into her like the rain into dry earth, found its level and risen again to the surface would she speak. That evening after her run she had come out with a book to sit with Gaby on the side of the verandah that caught the best late sun. Gaby had smoked and worked at her laptop, preparing scripts. Suddenly, Miriam had put down the book and said,

‘You must do this.’ The fossil water had risen. Gaby set down her laptop. ‘You see, they rocketed the hospital for an hour and a half before the troops came in. American Apaches, that was the name of the helicopters. They said the war-lords were using it as a headquarters. They were selling the drugs from the pharmacy for arms. Always drugs, for Americans. It is their great Satan. They should fear their own love of weapons, that makes them build things like Apache attack helicopters and anti-personnel rockets. I saw them hit one of the nurses as she ran across the compound looking for cover. The way they work is to explode into thousands of flechettes. It shredded the skin and flesh from her bones. I was nine years old and I saw a woman turned into a skeleton.

‘My father got as many as he could down to the lower levels, but there were many who could not be moved; in traction, or hooked to machinery, or premature babies in incubators. Some of the nurses stayed with them all through the aerial and ground assaults. The ground troops were Pakistanis. They had UN blue helmets, they had been sent to keep the peace between the tribal factions. They came through every ward, emptied every bed. They pulled people off life-support machines, they tipped babies out of incubators. They went into the theatres and took the operating equipment. They were the ones looted the pharmacy of all its drugs. Any medical equipment they could move, they took. They loaded it into white army trucks with United Nations painted on the side. They said the trucks were for prisoners but they were not the kind of truck that could hold people securely. They came knowing what they wanted. They had it all planned. I firmly believe they made up the story about the war-lords using my father’s hospital as a base as an excuse to loot it, and so the Americans, because they are so afraid of drugs, would rocket the hospital for an hour.

‘We saw it on the satellite news months later. President Zulfikar was pinning medals to the officers who had led the raid. They all looked very clean and very smart and they stood very upright, as Pakistani soldiers do, but what the satellite news did not tell was that the medals were not for service with the UN peacekeeping forces in Somalia, but for their generous donation of ten incubators, three life-support units, two dialysis machines, an X-ray lab and a complete operating theatre to the new Benazir Bhutto hospital in Islamabad.

‘The hospital did not get the drugs. The soldiers split what they had stolen and sold it to the Americans. Some of the deaths among the UN peacekeepers were from accidental overdoses on medical-grade opiates.’

Gaby’s cigarette had burned down into a drooping curl of ash.

‘This is why you must do it,’ Miriam Sondhai said. ‘It is a bad thing when the military is a parasite on its own nation, but it is much worse when someone else’s army is parasitical on your nation, and with the blessing of the organization that is supposed to restrain the strong and protect the weak. You must do this, Gaby.’

She had her blessing. Hers was holy work. But she wished her motivations were as clean as Miriam’s expectations.

Tembo drove the ATV like a maniac. The boy he had brought was tall and thin and dressed in jeans and a T-shirt for a band that had broken up long ago. His hair was shaved so short it looked painted. He radiated that angelic, androgynous beauty peculiar to young African men and women. His name was William. He did not say very much more than that, except that he wanted his money now, thank you.

Gaby drilled him while Tembo wired him with the minicam in the strap of his shoulder bag and fitted the mikes and relay gear. In the back of the ATV, Faraway tuned receivers and monitors and gave encouraging thumbs-ups.

‘It’s simple,’ Gaby said. ‘You go in, you walk around, you see anything that looks like soldiers taking magendo, you get in close, but not too close. They won’t suspect you, there are too many people, but don’t attract attention to yourself. If they stop you and want something, offer them a thousand shillings, and if they still want more, give them this portable CD-radio. If they don’t get it, you can keep it, and the thousand shillings as well, if you can hold on to it. Now, what’s the range of the transmitter?’

‘Two hundred metres.’ His voice was soft and sexless too, a man/woman whisper.

‘We’ll be in the four by four, close by at all times. If there’s any trouble, we’ll pull you out, but I really don’t think there will be. Go in, get your stuff, come back, and you’ll get your face on satellite television. You’ll be a big star, just like Jackie Chan. Jean-Claude van Damme. A hero.’

Tembo looked at Gaby in a way that said that such was poor currency for the soul of his wife’s sister-in-law’s cousin.

They dropped the kid half a mile from the town centre. He looked back nervously. Tembo waved him on encouragingly. He worked his way into the knots of people. Gaby let him get a hundred yards ahead before following in low gear. For all the people, there were few blue-helmets. A solitary APC passed. The soldier in the front hatch saw a white woman driving and curled his tongue to touch the lower edge of his shades. For the first time the realization of what might happen if something went wrong struck Gaby. She was monstrously isolated, professionally, geographically, racially, sexually. If she fell, there would be no hands to catch her but those of men with guns.

William stopped to talk with some young men he knew sitting on the white stones that marked the forecourt of Merueshi’s solitary gas station. Gaby stopped the ATV. In the back Faraway waved his thumbs on the air. The boy’s talk was coming through loud and clear. One of the youths pointed into town. William moved on. The four by four followed.

The soldiers had set up a processing station in front of the district magistrate’s office. A funnel of parked armoured cars directed the press of people past a table where a swarthy officer with the thinnest moustache that could possibly call itself such checked names on a PDU. Beyond him were the trucks.

‘Go to it, go to it,’ Gaby shouted to her stool-pigeon. Unhearing, William melted into the crowd. ‘Damn it. Can’t see him.’ She stopped the car and peered over the back seat at Faraway’s monitors.

‘Much meeting and greeting and no magendo,’ Faraway said. ‘Wait, wait, wait.’ The jerky, wide-angle image of the shoulder-mounted minicam had caught a soldier standing talking with a bearded, barefoot man in shorts. You could see at once that the bearded, barefoot man was at his wits’ end. He pleaded with his hands. The soldier caught his eloquent hands, turned them over. The bearded, barefoot man wore a copper bracelet on his left wrist.

‘Turn to it, please turn to it,’ Faraway begged. ‘Oh, boy, if only you had some lessons in basic camera technique.’

‘But do not get too interested,’ Tembo said, mindful of his wife’s sister-in-law’s cousin’s safety.

On the ten-centimetre monitor they saw the bearded, barefoot man take off the copper bracelet and give it to the soldier. The soldier put it in one of the pockets of his combat pants and handed the bearded, barefoot man a slip of paper. The bearded, barefoot man thanked the soldier effusively with his eloquent hands. He signalled to a thin woman and four children who had been sitting on the earth close by to pick up their things. The soldier led them all away, shouting a path through the crowd. The people pushed in behind them and William’s camera caught no more.

‘One moment,’ Faraway said. He wound the disc back frame by frame. ‘There.’ In the shuffle, William had been pushed against the soldier and the unit flashes on his uniform had come into sharp focus. The alphabet was indecipherable, but the regimental badge of a stooping eagle in a blue triangle was unmistakable. Haran’s instructions had guided them true.

‘Result!’ Gaby McAslan yelled, punching the air and forgetting the low roof.

Kid William moved inward. The ATV crawled after him. The camera saw a soldier take a thousand shillings from a distraught pastor and his family. It saw three blue-helmets laugh at a desperate old man offering them the only thing he valued; an aged, aged black bicycle. They saw a boy in combats with an AK47 order a family to spread all their goods on a blanket on the ground and pick through them, taking here a brass-framed mirror, there a wedding ring. The boy-soldier was seventeen at the most.

What appalled was the blatancy at it. There was no attempt at concealment or discretion, no implication of shame or misdoing. It was a public market that ended in a slip of paper and the people who received it being taken to the trucks beyond. When a truck was full, it would drive away, the people on board pressing their hands together in thanksgiving and weeping with joy, and another would come forward to take its place.

The crowds were denser closer to the town centre. Bodies squeezed the ATV tight. The heel of Gaby’s hand never left the horn. She imagined she could smell sweet-sour fear-sweat blowing through the air-conditioning vents. A cute Azeri boy-trooper with acne pressed hands and face to the driver’s window, licked the glass, rolled his eyes.

‘Fuck off,’ Gaby growled, heart hammering in case he should catch sight of the treachery in the back seat.

‘Oh, you beautiful boy!’ Faraway exclaimed, snapping his fingers in delight. ‘He has got an officer! Contact! The officer is asking him if has any money.’

‘They don’t believe in beating about the bush,’ Gaby said.

‘I do,’ Faraway said, radiantly happy. ‘I will beat any bush with you, Gaby. William is offering him the thousand shillings. It is right in front of the lens. Tembo, my brother, your wife’s sister-in-law’s cousin raised smart children. Oh, this is beautiful. They have taken the money, but they think because he has a thousand shillings to give away, he may have more. They are asking to see what else he has. Give them the disc player, William. I wonder, Tembo, was your wife’s sister-in-law’s cousin ever in Nairobi? Maybe there is some Faraway in him. He is clever and handsome enough. Go on, take it. Made in Japan. Not European Union rubbish. Yes, they like it. That will do them very nicely, thank you William. Now, just give him the paper, and take him through to the trucks. Why will you not do this? Give him the paper, he has given you all he has, greedy m’zungu’.

‘I do not like this,’ Tembo said. ‘Can we get closer?’

‘I’ll try,’ Gaby said. ‘But these crowds.’ Do not think of the annihilation of the mob, she told herself as she navigated the ATV closer.

‘Oh Jesus Mister Christ,’ Faraway said.

Gaby glanced at the monitor. The picture was badly broken, as if the shoulder bag were being shaken violently.

‘I see them!’ Tembo shouted. He was on the edge of his seat with worry. William and the Azeri officer were playing tug-of-war with the bag containing the camera and transmitter. William turned, saw the electric blue ATV, looked right at the white woman driving it. Gaby could hear his cry for help inside and outside the four by four.

‘Jesus. We’re rumbled.’

The officer stared at Gaby with a look that passed from recognition to comprehension to hatred in a few muscle twitches. Exactly the look Raymond Burr gave in Rear Window when he rumbled Jimmy Stewart. She knew her father’s old video collection too well to have forgotten what happened next.

Tembo heaved the big heavy camcorder out of the back, switched it on and brought it to bear on the officer. The officer’s hand had been straying to his sidearm. The watching eye of the world kept it safe in its holster. In the moment’s diversion William twisted free from the officer and fled through the crowd, leaving behind the shoulder bag with the clever little camera and cleverer little transmitter. Faraway put his hands on his head in despair. It was only partly for the loss of expensive equipment.

Gaby floored the accelerator. People parted before the ATV like the waters before Moses. They passed the stunned officer, they passed the running William. Faraway flung open the rear door, seized William’s wrist and pulled him ungently in. The open door flapped wildly on its hinges. Evacuees jumped back.

‘Move move move!’ Gaby screamed at them. They moved moved moved. It was better than death. She threw the wheel from side to side, dodging by instinct alone. The loom of faces places objects was absurdly like a computer game. Only game over is gang rape if you are lucky, a bullet in the back of the head and every vulture for fifty kays around coming to the wake if you are not, she thought. The sweat she could now smell in the car was her own. Fat drops rolled coldly down the sides of her body.

She heard Tembo’s cry and spun the wheel without looking. There was a loud bang. The car lurched as it ran over something. In her wing mirror Gaby saw a dog spin across the road. Intestines sprayed from its burst stomach. Gaby wailed. The back door was still swinging and banging. Faraway did not dare risk his fingers trying to catch it.

William pushed his head between the front seats.

‘Go right here,’ he said. ‘There is an earth road goes west into the valley of the Kiboko, and then south to the Chaga.’

‘I don’t want to be anywhere near the Chaga.’

‘They will have blocks up on the roads north and east.’

Gaby slammed the Nissan into four-wheel-drive and swung off the road. The car shook. Speed on the earth road was like driving on corrugated iron. She could barely hold the wheel steady. Now we will see how good the manufacturer’s promises are, Gaby thought. Cars with factory test-to-destruction ratings of five years fell apart after ten months on East Africa’s laterite roads. You’re a long way from sweet home Yokohama now, little Nissan. God, they can probably see my dust trail from the moon. Why is it the thing you feel worst about is the dog? It was only a poor dumb mutt and if you hadn’t burst its guts it would just have been run over by a truck or left to starve in the Chaga or maybe some soldier would have taken pity on it and blasted its brains out with his AK47. So why does thinking about it spinning across the road make you want to cry? Maybe it is not the dog you are crying for, but your brilliant career that got left with tyre tracks across its belly in the middle of the Merueshi road.

Faraway stuck his face between the headrests.

‘I think it might be a good idea to go a little faster.’

‘Not without flipping this thing right over.’

‘I think you should reconsider, because I think hell is coming after us. There are two armoured personnel carriers on your tail.’

She spared a glance in the rearview mirror. A mile down the tracks were two rising plumes of dust, each with a white speck at its head.

‘Oh, Jesus,’ she moaned.

‘I know you do not believe in it, but I am praying to God for our deliverance,’ Tembo said.

‘You’ll do better than God. You’ll get on the cellphone to T.P. Costello and tell him to call the UNHCR or UNECTA or whoever the hell runs this show down here and tell them that we know what’s going on and they’d better leave us alone.’

The dirt road fought Gaby like it was trying to steal her car. Muscles were knotted up and down her bare arms with the intensity of the struggle.

‘I am afraid we are probably out of range of the cell network,’ William said coolly.

‘Well, that is just wonderful,’ Gaby said. ‘Just fucking wonderful.’

‘They do not seem to be gaining on us,’ Faraway said, peering out the still-open door and the dust billowing into the ATV. A small herd of Thompson’s gazelles scattered in every direction from Gaby’s killing wheels.

Faraway spoke something short and savage in Luo then said in English, ‘I regret to inform you that things have just become most serious.’

The helicopter came in a hammer of sound so low and loud everyone in the ATV ducked. The car plunged into a whirlwind of dust thrown up by the rotors. The helicopter turned in the air in front of them and hovered.

‘Go south!’ William shouted. ‘To the edge of the Chaga. They will not dare follow us there.’

Dare I lead them there? Gaby thought, activating the internal satellite tracker and flicking on the wipers to clear the dust-filmed windscreen.

Lazily, the helicopter drifted after them. It moved effortlessly across the sky, like a cheetah stalking a wounded impala, that the cheetah knows it can run down and kill when it finally tires of playing. Oksana had made sure that Gaby knew the specifications of every aircraft, military and civilian, in the East African theatre. Those black insect-things under the stub wings are air-to-surface missiles. That thin black proboscis is a chain-gun. Five hundred rounds a minute will shred you and your car and your friends and your story of a lifetime like pissed-on toilet paper. Five hundred rounds a minute, and all you have to bluff them with is to keep driving south, south, south.

The dirt road dissolved into high acacia plain. Flat dark clouds were rolling down from the mothermass anchored to the distant mountain, spreading slowly out across the land that shivered like liquid with heat haze. Between the two ran a line of shadow: the edge of the Chaga. Terminum. Gaby McAslan drove straight into the line of darkness at one hundred kilometres per hour.

‘They are still with us,’ Faraway shouted from the back. Flirting, the helicopter swept in to harry the little car from the left and the right. It ducked down in front of it in a shatter of engines to try to get the driver to swerve. The driver did not swerve. She drove on to that line of darkness that minute by minute was emerging from the heat dazzle into shapes, silhouettes, seductions. Like a mirage, the Chaga deceived. Its trick was to play with space so that you were always nearer to it than you thought. The darkness Gaby saw lifting out of the heat-haze was not terminum. It was the great upthrust of life she had seen and marvelled at from the baobab on the Namanga road, that the researchers called the Great Wall. Terminum was elsewhere. Terminum was right in front of them. Terminum was under their wheels.

Gaby slammed to a stop. The helicopter passed raucously overhead and pulled a high gee turn.

‘We lost the APCs a kilometre back,’ Faraway reported.

Gaby did not hear him. She stared at the edge of the Chaga, one hundred metres in front of her. One hundred metres. Two days. If she sat in this seat and did not move, the Chaga would come to her, grow around and into and through her and take her to another world. She could step out of this car and walk to it and take off her clothes and lie down in it and feel it press into the skin of her back, like the old Vietnamese torture in which they tied people over bamboo and let it grow through them.

‘Gaby.’

‘The helicopter?’ she asked.

‘It’s standing off about half a kilometre west of us,’ Faraway said.

‘Go closer,’ William whispered. ‘Their guns and rockets can shoot a long way. Get as close as you dare.’

As close as she dared was fifty metres. The helicopter held its station, the black nose of its chain-gun locked on the beetle-blue ATV.

‘Closer,’ William whispered. Gaby moved the ATV in until she could smell the musky, fruity, sexy perfume of Chaga through the vents. The helicopter gingerly waltzed a little nearer.

‘Do these bastards not give up?’ Faraway asked.

‘Closer,’ William ordered a third time and this time Gaby drove until the pods and bulbs of Chaga-stuff popped beneath her tyres and the hexagonal mosaics cracked and spilled orange ichor that blossomed into helixes and coils of living polymer. The helicopter darted in, suddenly swung high in the air so that its rotors looked like the sails of a insane windmill, then spun away and receded across the Chyulu Plain and was seen and heard no more.

‘Yes!’ Faraway shouted. Tembo smiled like a man who knows his prayers have been answered. Gaby leaned forward until her forehead touched the top of the steering wheel and tried to stop her hands shaking.

‘Go west,’ William said ‘We should follow the edge until we come to the Olosinkiran road. They are South Africans over there. We can trust them.’

Gaby put her foot on the accelerator.

And the blue Nissan All Terrain Vehicle died.

‘Oh no,’ said Gaby McAslan, turning and turning and turning the ignition, pumping and pumping and pumping the gas pedal. The diesel pressure lamp glowed at her. ‘Oh no no no no no.’

Tembo got out and put up the hood. He beckoned to Gaby. Chaga-stuff crackled and burst beneath the soles of her boots. Strange pheromones challenged her.

‘I think we have a problem here.’

Compressor, fuel lines, cylinder head wore coats of tiny sulphur-yellow flowers, like miniature cauliflower buds. As Gaby watched, not wanting to believe what her eyes were showing her, the plague of flowers spread to the oil pump, oil filter and engine block. Tendrils were rising from the open flower heads on the cylinder block, waving sentiently in the sunlight. In under a minute the engine compartment was a pulp of pseudo-coral and oily metal. A sudden bang, like a shot. The fuel cap had blown off. Yellow fungus dripped from the fuel pipe. The body panels over the fuel tank were bowed out. The tyres popped little blue blooms around their rims. Something like crystalline rust was trying to work its way along the paintwork under the protective lacquer. Gaby yelped. The synthetic soles of her heavy-duty boots were blistering. There was man-made stretch fibre in her jodhpurs, in her underwear. It would eat that.

She should have obeyed T.P.’s panties catechism to the letter.

She jumped onto the hood of the ATV to get away from the treacherous earth.

‘What is the finance company going to say about this? I only just made the first payment.’

‘I do not think you are going to get much satisfaction from your insurers,’ Tembo said ruefully.

They were saying these little things because none of them dared think about the big things. At terminum. Angry Azerbaijanis behind them. Sixty kilometres of semi-desert on either side. No food. No water. No means of communication.

‘Shit! The disc!’

Tembo seized the camera and ran as fast as he could out of the Chaga into the virgin savannah. Gaby saw the flexible disc heliograph in the sun, Tembo unbutton his pants and then Faraway asked her to please spare his friend’s dignity.

‘Just pray his digestion is good today,’ he said.

The camera he brought back was a purulent mass of lichens and pseudo-fungi. Gaby winced at the SkyNet sticker on the side as responsibility went in and opened up inside her like the Gae Bolga of her childhood legends, the belly spear that unfolded a thousand barbs and tore out your guts. Mrs Tembo and Sarah and Etambele had waved their father off that morning and Gaby McAslan could not bear the responsibility that they might never be waving him home again. They could die out here, or be vanished by the UN, like Peter Werther, which is worse than dying to those who wait outside. She had put them all into this place and did not have an idea how to get them out.

‘Could we walk?’ she asked plaintively.

‘You tell us where, we will walk,’ Faraway said. ‘After all, it is only sixty kilometres.’

‘We have no water,’ Tembo said. ‘And Gaby would burn before she went ten kilometres. Also, we have no weapons.’

‘There are lions?’ Gaby asked.

‘Leopards are more common around the edges of the Chaga. But the biggest danger is from gangs of bandits who pick over the abandoned villages. We would be safer in the hands of the Azeris than the scavengers.’

Gaby wrapped her bare arms around her knees. Her shoulders were already starting to feel hot. The Chaga had risen to ankle height. Terminum was several metres north of them.

‘So what do you suggest we do?’ Gaby asked plaintively.

Tembo looked at her, the land, the Chaga, the sky.

‘I suggest we set fire to the car.’

‘The hell with that. I worked damn hard for this car.’

‘It is lost, Gaby. The column of smoke will be visible from a very great distance. UNECTA has Chaga Watch balloons every few kilometres. They would call in an airborne patrol.’

‘And if the military see it first? Or these scavengers?’

‘They are cowards,’ William said forcefully. ‘They would not dare go into the Chaga, soldiers or scavengers.’

Gaby watched the interior of her car break out into pin-head sized scarlet blisters.

‘Do it,’ she said. ‘Torch it.’ It was only a car. The Chaga could have it. The Chaga could have the clothes on her body and leave her naked and sunburned, as long as the disc Tembo had hidden in his rectum remained inviolate.

The men opened the doors. The red beads had swollen into orange puffballs that burst into clouds of peppery dust as Gaby rummaged in the back for her spare diesel can. The metal had resisted the spores, though the cap had wedged tight around a crust of saffron crystals. Faraway wrenched it off and gave Gaby the honour of liberally anointing her own car with fuel. Before the Chaga could devour the diesel, she lit a length of tattered handkerchief with her cigarette lighter and dropped it on the driver’s seat.

The car went up in a satisfying blossom of flame. The refugees started the short walk back to Kenya. By the time they found a place comfortably far from terminum to sit and wait the ATV was burning nicely in a gobble of fire and carcinogenic black thermoplastic smoke. Gaby watched it burn. Tembo had been right. It was lost to her already, but it is one thing to have it taken from you and another to have to give it away with your own hands.

‘How long do you think?’ she asked.

Tembo shrugged. The smoke coiled into a neat twister that leaned across the edgelands towards the east.

How much burning is there in one Nissan All Terrain Vehicle? Gaby thought, watching the paint blister and flake. She thought about fire, and she thought about fear, and in her extremity she saw the land beyond Scared, a calm and watered plain where you can watch twenty-five thousand pounds worth of car burn with equanimity, even serenity, because you understand that there is no point being scared any more because it cannot help you.

‘Do you want to play a game?’ she asked the men. ‘Kill the time. How about “I Spy”? I Spy with my little eye, something beginning with…’ She quested around for a mystery object.

‘“C”,’ Faraway said and that was the end of that game.

‘All right then, what’s the most frightened you’ve ever been?’ Without waiting for the men to agree to her time-killer, Gaby told about the time in her first year in London when she had been alone down in a tube station at midnight and a white boy with a Stanley knife had taken her money off her, and her cards, and her disc-player, and her expensive shoes though they neither fitted nor suited him and then told her he was going to cut long scars that would never heal properly across her cheeks and lips and forehead and breasts if she did not go down on her knees and suck his cock behind the defunct phonecard machine on the westbound platform and who ran off leaving her things when the last train came in a gust of electricity and hot air. She had gathered up all her things and when she got off at her stop, dumped the money and the cards and the disc-player and the expensive shoes and walked barefoot to her flat. They were polluted now. They were diseased. They would never lose the taint.

‘The most scared I have ever been,’ William whispered, ‘is going into the town with your camera in my bag. I felt that everyone could see it but had agreed not to tell me. I felt like I had a disease, or another face in the back of my head that was pulling ridiculous expressions and sticking its tongue out at people, but I could never see. When that white officer wanted to look into my bag, I did not know what to do. Every thought flew from my head. It is very frightening when you know that you must do something to save yourself but you cannot think what. But what is strange is that it was the most frightening thing I can remember, but it was also the most exciting, like all the people who could see into me and knew what I was really doing were jealous and wanted to do it too. Does this make sense?’

‘It does to me,’ Gaby said.

‘The most scared I ever was was the morning I woke up convinced I had Slim,’ Faraway said. ‘I met the woman in a club. She was a strange woman on a strange journey from somewhere to somewhere that went by way of me for a night. She had long ridged scars all over her arms and the backs of her hands. Scarification, you understand? But she was not of a tribe that thinks that sort of thing is beautiful. She had an interest in orifices. She loved to push things into body openings. There was a thing she would do with a champagne bottle. She could uncork one with her lower muscles. For a woman who can do a trick like that, I will buy as much champagne as she wants, provided it is that cheap stuff from India. She liked to do things with the corks, and the wire cages too. Ah! My poor foreskin! And other parts too. But it was worth it, for she made fiki-fiki like a animal, like something in heat.

‘When I woke in the morning I could not remember very much but there was a terrible burning pain in my f’tuba. And when I pissed, man! I thought I was going to die. It was pissing fire. What had this demon woman done to me? Of course, she was not there to ask. They never are, the women who are real demons. But the pain did not go away, and I thought it was some dreadful disease, maybe even Slim, and that no matter how many bottle of champagne she could uncork with her magic lips, it was not worth the death of the incomparable Faraway. That made me really afraid, so I went to my doctor because I thought that if I did have Slim, then it would be better to know so everyone could have a big party and tell me what a grand fellow I was before I died. So, the doctor looked up my dick with a fibreoptic thing and he falls over laughing and when he can talk again, he calls in his nurse, and she looks up my dick and falls over laughing and the next thing I know the room is full of doctors and consultants and nurses and porters and people who just heard a noise going on and wondered what they were missing, all looking up my dick and falling over laughing.

‘Do you know what they saw up there that made them fall over laughing? A sliver of red chilli pepper. That demon-woman! When I was asleep she had cut a tiny little slice of chilli and pushed it up my f tuba. Orifices! Devil! It was a week before I could walk straight, let alone piss with pleasure. It is funny now, but at the time, I tell you, my friends, this Faraway was never so frightened. I thought I would die. Really, truly.’

‘Of course, you have learned nothing from the experience,’ Tembo said.

Faraway grinned his huge grin. ‘I have learned never to leave chillis sitting around my home, and that is a very wise lesson for anyone.’

‘What happened to the strange woman?’ Gaby asked.

‘I saw her at clubs a few times, dancing with some other man, but she never came near me and I never went near her. Then I heard from a friend of a friend that she had died. She was playing a game in a hotel room with two men and a gun, but I do not know if it was an accident or on purpose. My friend of a friend said he thought there was a video, but the police were keeping it to sell around. But I never saw it. It is sad that her strange journey had to end that way.’

‘The most frightening moment of my life was caused by a pair of football shorts,’ Tembo said. Gaby hiccuped with laughter, but Faraway did not and he knew Tembo like a lover. ‘I was on the St Matthew’s Church in Shikondi’s under-18 football team, but my parents were poor and could not afford to buy me the team strip all at once. So for doing well in my exams I got the shirt, and for my birthday I got the socks and boots and when an uncle became a pastor and gave everyone gifts to celebrate the event, I got the shorts. Because they were poor, they bought things that would last: the shorts were the very newest man-made fibre that would never wear out whatever you did to it. This made me think. You could throw these shorts on the rubbish heap and they would never rot away to nothing. They would always be a pair of football shorts. I would grow up, and get work, and marry if God blessed me, and have children, and the football shorts would not have changed. I would grow old, my children would marry and have children, and, if God blessed me, those children would have children, and the blue shorts, small size would not change. I would die, and be buried, and decay to bones and hair and still not one of those artificial fibres would have rotted. And then I stopped thinking about football shorts and thought about me. This would happen. It was not an idea, a maybe, an if. It was a certainty. These football shorts were a measure of my life. This me, that wore football strip and played for St Matthew’s Under-18, would one day breathe out and not breathe in again, would go cold and dark inside, would stop thinking and seeing and hearing and feeling, and stop being. It could not be escaped or got around. The most I could hope would be to delay it. I saw this, and it scared me like nothing has ever scared me. And I would have to go alone. No one I knew could go with me, or go before me and come back and tell me what was on the other side. I would go alone, and blind. That is why I found Jesus. Because he was the only one could go with me, who had been there, and seen what it was like, and could tell me what would happen. Because I need someone I can call to in the dark night when my wife and my children are sleeping and the fear of it wakes me up like something very very cold in my heart.’

Tembo looked up and out at the dusty horizon. He stood up. He stared. He shielded his eyes with his hand and peered. Gaby imagined it was Jesus he saw, coming across the dry land toward this borderland between worlds.

‘There,’ Tembo said. He pointed to the south-east. ‘There! See!’

Gaby stood up and followed the line of his finger and saw the thing he saw. It was a wink of silver in the sky, a tiny heliograph of light that the eye lost as soon as it had found it. The cloud and the plains and the heat-haze together destroyed all notions of distance: the thing could have been miles away or hovering at the end of Tembo’s finger. But it was growing bigger, and assuming a definite outline. Tembo started to wave his arms. Faraway leaped up and down in an unconscious parody of the Masai jumping dance. The thing was big, the thing was approaching from a very great distance. The thing was near.

Then Gaby knew she had caught too much sun, for the thing coming toward her out of the south east was nothing other than a classic B-movie sci-fi 1950s McCarthy-paranoia Flying Saucer. A big white flying saucer, with UNECTA written in blue on its belly.

21

It was when she was sure, absolutely sure, that the metal door was never going to open again that it did and the black woman with the French accent came into the cell with a cup of coffee with UNECTAfrique: Go: West! on the side of it and a pile of clothes. She was not wearing the isolation suit. The stuffs she had sucked out of Gaby in the night had passed their tests.

‘Do you have to watch me?’ Gaby McAslan asked, naked, sunburned, scratched and scraped and needled and furious with the high and hot anger that is really fear after her night’s imprisonment in the decontamination unit at Tsavo West.

The magic of the flying saucer had failed close up. It takes a very strong magic to work at fingertip distance. It had just been a tired old logging dirigible with Sibirsk shining through the hasty UN white paintjob, with a world-weary crew-woman who had led them up the cargo ramp and then locked them in a windowless cargo bay because she and her comrades were afraid of catching terrible and disgusting Chaga-diseases off these flotsam of the edgelands. And when they had come down a guessed thirty minutes later – no one’s watch was working -there had been no more than a glimpse of brilliant sunlight reflecting from the curve of the canopy above them as they were taken by the faceless figures in baggy white medical isolation suits across the landing grid with the mountain-and-crescents symbol of UNECTA painted on it, and down a flight of iron stairs into the fluorescent-lit corridors that smelled of hospital and thrice-breathed air. Gaby McAslan’s Tsavo West was a dead white cell with a door that melded into the wall when the woman with the French accent left. Before she went, the woman had explained that Gaby had been exposed to possible contamination by alien organisms; that she and the others, who were in adjacent cells, were undergoing the standard observation and decontamination procedure before they could be permitted into the Tsavo West biosphere.

All night, as Gaby McAslan sat on her bed with her back to the eye of the lens, her knees hugged to her chest and her hair drawn around her like a cloak, she feared for the disc, and what would happen to her if the process of sterilization extended to the footage from Merueshi stored on it. She worried and watched the digits on the clock on the opposite wall click out the length of time UNECTA reckoned it might take for a new and virulent strain of Chaga-meme to melt an Irishwoman into a blob of plastic. One thousand and five clicks, that was how many. And then just as she had forgotten where the memory of the door was, the wall opened and let in air that did not smell of dread and body odour.

‘Admit it, you get some lesbo-sado-dominatrix thrill out of locking naked women in cells,’ Gaby said, pulling on the borrowed underwear, the jeans which belonged to a shorter-legged woman, and the sweatshirt. ‘Jesus, AC Milan. Is this the best you can do?’

‘Your friends are in the restaurant down on two,’ her erstwhile captor said. Gaby almost ran as she followed the woman’s directions along the corridor of featureless doors to the external elevator. Open air. The daylight was blinding. The little chain-drive at the bottom started to whir. Gaby McAslan was lowered down the face of a six-storey office block. She had a chance for a leisurely look at this place to which she had been brought. Across the twenty-yard gap in front of her rose a second, taller unit; a ramshackle affair that looked like dozens of portable cabins piled on top of each other and fastened together with gantries and swathes of power cable. UNECTAfrique was painted on its white flank in blue letters thirty feet high. Twenty yards beyond this second pile rose a third, smaller unit that was all heavy engineering plant, solar arrays and satellite dishes. It was connected to the main block by air-bridges and walkways and curving umbilical lines, as the main block was to the one down which she was moving. But the most extraordinary feature of this miniature city on the high plains was that each of the units stood on leviathan-tracked vehicles, like the monster flat-beds that carried pre-HOTOL space shuttles from the assembly buildings to the launch pad.

Gaby hit the emergency stop button. The elevator platform jerked to a halt. It was not a trick of the elevator, everything was vibrating. If she focused at a point on the ground, she could just discern the motion, slow as the minute hand of one of her Swatchs. The tractors, the units, the moored dirigible, with everything in and on them, were moving backward in perfect synchronization with the advance of the Chaga across the Serengeti plain. Terminum was half an hour’s walk across a dry yellow plain littered with the abrupt white stumps of acacias felled to make way for the juggernaut. A group of zebras were cropping the sparse scorched grass. They looked dry and dusty, thirsty for the rains. Everything looked dry and dusty, the plains, Tsavo West, the hazy colours of the Chaga. Waiting for the rains.

The refectory took up a full quarter of Level Two. It was bright and busy and smelled of breakfasts from diverse ethnic backgrounds. Tembo and Faraway were drinking coffee in a small booth under a window with monumental views of the station and the Chaga rising toward the cloud-hidden heights of Kilimanjaro.

‘Alas, I have missed my great chance,’ Faraway said. ‘An entire night of you without any clothes on. Of course, you know that they only do it so the women can look at Tembo’s f’tuba and pray and the men look at it and feel envious.’

‘Ignore my friend,’ Tembo said gravely. ‘How are you, Gaby?’

‘I feel like everyone in this place has been watching me but isn’t going to say.’

‘It is disconcerting, the first time,’ Tembo said.

‘When you have been into the Chaga as often as we have, they know all about you and you are in and out in under two hours,’ Faraway said.

‘What about the disc, Tembo?’

The small man shook his head.

‘They did an internal examination.’

‘Shit. We have to get that disc before UNECTA looks at it.’

‘There is more, Gaby. I called my wife last night; UNECTA had already been in touch with her to let her know we were safe and well. They have also been in touch with T.P. Costello. I have been in contact with him: I have done what I can, but he wants very much to talk with you, Gaby.’

‘Fuck.’ No disc, no story, no car, no camera. No job, when she got back. Then: ‘Tembo; where’s William?’

‘I was hoping you would be able to tell me that, Gaby.’

‘He’s still in decontamination?’

‘When I asked, they told me they were carrying out further tests. They will not let me speak to him.’

‘What could he need testing for that I don’t? We were all together all the time, anything he’s picked up, we have too.’

‘Further tests, that is all I know,’ Tembo said. ‘Gaby, I am worried for my wife’s sister-in-law’s cousin.’

The black lesbo-sado-dominatrix with the French accent who had released Gaby from solitary confinement came to the booth. Faraway brightened visibly. Flirtation was everywhere.

‘Ms McAslan, the director would like to see you, if you are ready. If you will follow me, his office is in the main unit.’

‘The director.’ Right. As if one headmasterial bollocking from T.P. Costello would not be enough. ‘Okay. Might as well get it over with.’

‘Gaby. William.’

‘I’ll try, Tembo.’

‘Gaby.’ This from Faraway. The disc, he mouthed.

The black lesbo-sado-dominatrix with the French accent introduced herself as Celeste and took Gaby up the outside of the unit to a fourth-level walkway and across the gap into corridors marked with black and yellow biohazard warnings busy with people in colourful casuals who could not proceed more than a few feet at a time without meeting someone they had to tell something important. Facial hair, baggy shorts and friendship bracelets were de rigeur for the men; the women favoured hot-pants, halter tops and lots of silver. Gaby expected to see basketball hoops on the laboratory doors.

‘There are three hundred staff here at Tsavo,’ Celeste said, tormentor turned tour-guide, leading Gaby up a clattering iron staircase. Gaby practised the role of Hard-Nosed Journalist with Big Questions that Demanded Answers. She was not convinced. Oh God. T.P. Costello was going to fry her.

The Director’s office was on the penthouse level. Celeste entered without knocking. There was no receptionist, just a carpeted room filled with collegiate clutter, the inevitable computer equipment, a picture window looking out over the Chaga, a battered leather-topped desk. And,

‘You!’

‘You.’

‘You.’ Hard-Nosed Journalist with Big Questions that Demanded Answers hissed out of her in a whisper.

‘Your choice of clichés: “Fancy seeing you here”; “What’s a nice girl like you doing in a place like this?” or “We can’t go on meeting this way”?’

‘What about: “You utter utter utter asshole, I have just had the worst night of my life?”‘

‘I thought they taught you journalists about things like not using the same word more than once in a sentence. Celeste, any chance of you scaring us up some coffee and a bite to eat? If I remember decontam right, Ms McAslan won’t have had too much to eat.’ When the black woman had gone, Dr Shepard took a more conciliatory tone. ‘Decontamination is pretty scary, though. They’re a law unto themselves over there. Different division. Luckily, when I found out who they’d gotten hold of, I was able to get one of my team over there to keep an eye on you. I’m genuinely sorry you had a bad experience; but it is necessary. Back in the old days, before we got up on to our tracks, there was a contamination incident over at Tinga Tinga. Months of work down the toilet, not to mention a million dollars of equipment. So we have to be cruel to be kind. If it’s any consolation, we all have to go through it.’

His apology seemed genuine. Celeste returned with coffee and a micro-waved cheese-bacon croissant. Gaby fell on it.

When she could speak again, she said, ‘Shepard. I need to ask. One of my friends. His name’s William Bi. He’s still in there.’

‘In decontam?’

Gaby nodded. Shepard frowned.

‘He shouldn’t be. Excuse me a moment.’ He swivelled his peeling leather chair to address the server. His frown deepened. He placed a call on the videophone. While he gave monosyllabic replies to the wheedling whisper on the handset, Gaby drank her coffee and studied his desk. A man’s soul is like his desk, she had found. Except when it is like his penis. Shepard’s desk looked like the result of much rummaging in Arab markets along the coast. The wood could be ebony. There were worn gold-leaf elephants embossed around the edge of the leather top. It said much about Dr Shepard – Dr M. Shepard, according to the name sign – that he had had it brought cross-country and manoeuvred up in all those vertiginous freight elevators and along the narrow, ship-like corridors and into this office with its God’s-eye view of the end of the world. Desk decor heavy on Africana: all fine wood. Probably genuine. Small: they invited you to pick them up and enjoy the feel of their grain against your nerve endings. Half-a-dozen coffee mugs with sad black salt-pans of dried grounds in the bottom. Framed photographs of two boys, grinning, displaying several thousand dollars of orthodontistry. One about twelve, the other nine, ten. Tousle-haired, freckle-faced. All-American kids. Could be the last of an endangered species. A photograph of the younger M. Shepard, in a pink-and-lilac speed-skating suit, with that yearning pose of ready-for-the-off peculiar to speed-skaters with twelve inches of steel on each foot. Shame about the colour-scheme, but check out the thighs. Those were thighs to coat with aerosol chocolate mousse and slowly lick clean. She tried to see if he had kept them in condition.

Dr Shepard came off the phone.

‘They’re a bit concerned about some of William’s results and want to run further tests.’

‘What way concerned?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘The director of Tsavo West doesn’t know?’

‘Like I said, they’re a different administration. The decontamination and medical facilities report direct to Regional Headquarters at Kajiado. But I shouldn’t worry; it’s not unusual for folk in decontam to develop mild viral infections. We just have to make sure it isn’t something new from out of the Chaga. They usually clear up after a few days.’

‘Days.’

‘I can’t think of a better place for him to be.’

Gaby helped herself to more coffee from the stainless steel vacuum jug. No. Don’t drink it. Do it. Say it.

‘Shepard, there’s something else I have to ask you.’

In her imagination she saw figures in white isolation suits running along the neon-lit corridors of the decontamination block to hastily convened meetings in midnight conference rooms; the disc shining on the desk top while voices spoke in quick, hushed tones. She saw heads nod, hands shake, voices agree: this could only be satisfactorily ended by flames.

‘Would it, by any chance, concern this?’

A click of fingers and the disc was between them, and then on the leather desk top, like a captured sin.

‘Have you watched this?’ Gaby asked.

‘I have.’ There was not much Paul Newman in Shepard’s eyes, unless it was the Paul Newman in the scene from The Hustler where he plays Minnesota Fats.

‘You have to give me that back, it’s my property, it’s my story. You cover it up, it’ll only make it worse when the truth finally gets out. And it will, in the end, believe me. You’re either for or against me in this.’

Shepard flipped the disc on its side, held it upright by the pressure of a single finger.

‘What makes you think I’m part of a cover-up conspiracy?’

‘You’re UNECTA, aren’t you?’

‘You obviously don’t know as much about what’s going on in this country as you think. There’s little love lost between the military and the research community. The army wants the research division militarized. Because they see us a gang of fuzzy-minded, subversive, undisciplined anarchists, they would buy in expertise from the multinationals, who, if they had corporate souls, would mortgage them to dabble their fingers in the Chaga. I know of a dozen major companies; petrochemical, biotech, molecular engineering, chip design, agricultural, with lawyers on round-the-clock standby to slap patent applications on anything we bring out of there they can reproduce. It’s a bigger game than you think.’

‘You’ve seen what’s on the disc. So what do you think of it?’

‘I think it deserves a goddam Pulitzer Prize, Gaby McAslan. And I think you should bless whatever gods you journalists pray to that it found its way to this office and isn’t lying on the desk of some general back in Kajiado. Which is why I’m going to have it squirted to SkyNet, because the longer the one and only copy is in Tsavo, the more the chance that people who will be embarrassed by it will find out what it is and go over my head to get their hands on it. The military have their moles, even here. This will give fresh impetus on the whole debate of why there needs to be an international military presence in this country at all. And when the men in suits next put their heads together to talk about funding, this may be the wild card to take a trick for science rather than institutionalized paranoia.’

‘I didn’t do this as a sucker-punch in the UN’s internal street-fighting,’ Gaby said. ‘I did it because it was wrong, and people should see and know it.’ She was so wide from the truth she could not believe she had just said what she did.

‘A principled journalist,’ Shepard said, not believing her either. Gaby wished she had not lied to him. She wanted to be Ms Valiant-For-Truth to him. She also wished he had not told her the dirty things about UNECTA. She wanted him to be a rescuing angel, without ulterior motivations. ‘Could you give me SkyNet’s teleport number?’

She wrote it on a yellow sticky notelet. Shepard turned again to his computer, called up a screenful of icons. The processor accepted the disc and released it a few seconds later. It was sent. It was safe. But it was raw: the tale needed to be well told.

‘Shepard, is there anywhere in this place I could borrow a camcorder and a couple of discs for a few hours? I need to get a final report done.’

‘I think that could be arranged.’

Do this, and she might be more than safe. She might be able to win one. But one more thing needed doing first.

‘You don’t know if anyone here is a Manchester United supporter, and if so, whether they have any gear? I can’t make the most important face-to-camera of my career in a sweatshirt with AC Milan on the front.’

22

Gaby’s videodiary: supplemental.

July 16 2008

Not only did Shepard find me a camcorder, he’s let me borrow it for the duration of my visit. Tembo and Faraway have gone back on a shuttle flight to sweet-talk T.P. with the report. I’m staying – officially – until William gets out of decontam. Unofficially, because Dr M. Shepard, Station Director, thought I might like a look at the cutting edge of Chaga research. He’s assigned me an empty cabin on Tractor Two, Level Two: there’s always someone off-base on R’n’R or at a conference. At least this woman has something approaching a make-up kit. Borrowing cosmetics is like a starving man stealing food: it’s not a sin, it’s survival.

I like it. This is a good place. Ironic: it’s the nearest inhabited place to the Chaga, but it feels the furthest. I can see terminum from my porthole, but it doesn’t feel inevitable the way it does in Nairobi, or immediately threatening, as it did in Merueshi. It’s because this mobile community is one place on Earth the Chaga is not drawing any closer to.

Tsavo West. It’s like a New Age pirate ship: not for having a porthole in my cabin, or being a-sail upon a sea of grass, rigged with gantries and radio masts and satellite-dish crow’s-nests, or that Tsavo West is aggressively self-contained: the processing plant over on Tractor Three recycles every drop of water, dry sewage waste is processed to the rooftop gardens where apparently they grow killer gene-engineered hemp. It’s the people. They have a joyous single-mindedness, like surfing communities; a deeply engraved subtext that informs everything they do. I can understand why the military hates them. There is no formal structure, no imposed discipline, no uniforms – there is no need. Discipline, community, efficiency come from within, from this credo.

So, me hearties, run out the Jolly Roger, set sail for the Chaga, and be thee the Governor of Panama’s lovely red-haired daughter, ah-har-har-har?

For all the hippy chic, Shepard’s got a pretty tight set-up. Tractor Two is mostly biochemistry and molecular engineering labs and the equipment is state of the art. A guy with beads woven into his beard showed me the remote handling facility. Custom built. Nothing like it anywhere else. The virtual reality manipulators can take Chaga-stuff apart down to the component molecules and let the operators walk through the atoms. No wonder they’re so manic about contamination. The knowledge they have backed-up, but they’d never be able to replace the equipment.

Speaking of decontamination, they still won’t let me talk to William. The closest I can get to him is a woman’s face on the other side of a thick glass panel in a steel door, and she says they are awaiting the results of further tests on the poor kid’s viral symptoms. All that stainless steel and blinding white: it’s like a Douglas Trumbull movie in there. Tractor One, which is the main ingress/egress port to Tsavo West, is designed to blow free in case of a major incident, while the rest sprints away at its top speed of three miles per hour. Tractor One is virtually a city within a city. Up on the other side of the level from the place where they kept me there is a facility for Away Teams; the ones who actually go into the Chaga and bring samples back. They’re totally isolated, like divers on oil-rigs who live in decompression tanks for months on end. I suppose they make their own entertainment, like Oksana on those long, cold Siberian winter nights. One night was enough for me. The thing that impressed me most about Tractor One – and this says a lot about my mind – is that it’s the first tee on Tsavo West’s one-hole golf course. You drive from the landing grid over to the sun-deck on Tractor Two and then it’s a five or seven iron to the astro-turfed green on the service platform three-quarters the way up the side of Tractor Three. If you hit it into the Chaga, it’s out-of-bounds, but you have to buy everyone a drink. I suppose golf balls in the Chaga are no stranger than golf-balls on the moon, though my heart agrees with Mark Twain: golf is a good walk spoiled. Except at Tsavo West it’s a good abseil spoiled. Which they do as well, after climb-racing each other up the sides of Tractor Two. You can watch them from the rooftop hot tubs. Presumably while taking a jot or two of home-grown weed.

The good ship Tsavo, and all who sail upon her. The ironic thing is that her Captain, the good Dr Shepard, seems quaintly out of place in all this. All around him things are doing, becoming, while he simply is. That’s all. He is. Separate, yet without him, none of this would be. The still centre from which all energy emanates.

He’s dinnering me tonight; tomorrow I am promised a treat. Something unforgettable. Please, Shepard! I’m too old for all that not being able to sleep at night and finding my food doesn’t taste right and I’m not hungry anyway and my mind wandering to visions of his face and discovering whole irreplaceable chunks of my day have vanished. I don’t want to let myself fall in love again, I’ve outgrown that, really, God, I don’t want to write him love letters and knit him sweaters and all that stuff in songs because it makes you feel like for a few moments in your whole life you are the most alive thing on this little blue planet.

Oh God. He’s here. Already?

23

When she saw the treat in the morning, Gaby McAslan said, ‘No way, Shepard. You are not getting me up in that thing. Never.’

The big two-seater was parked off the main strip in front of the portable cabin that was Tsavo West’s air-traffic control centre. The microlyte was a delicate, beautiful insect of spars and wires, spreading its iridescent solar wing to soak in the savannah sun.

‘You deserve to see the Chaga as it ought to be seen,’ Shepard said. ‘With the eyes of God.’ He jumped into the rear seat and fastened the helmet. ‘Once-only offer, never to be repeated.’

‘All right, all right,’ Gaby shouted. Better death than disgrace before Shepard. ‘I’m coming.’

The propeller became a silver blur behind Shepard as Gaby wiggled into the cockpit, fitted safety harness and helmet.

‘How long have you been flying?’ she asked as the microlyte rolled on to the main strip.

‘Since yesterday,’ Shepard said. The engine hum became an irate hornet drone. ‘Old joke. I’ve had my licence two years. Honest. You’re safe with me.’

Yes, but not too safe, Gaby thought.

The little aircraft bounced over the rough airstrip and quite unexpectedly was airborne.

‘Oh shit,’ Gaby moaned as she saw directly in front of her a few centimetres of green and black GRP fuselage and a lot of bright morning sky. Shepard took the microlyte up to a hundred metres.

‘Elephant!’ he said in Gaby’s ear-phone. Twelve of them, moving out of heavy scrub: three bulls with their attendant females and calves, dusted with the red earth of the Serengeti plain. The microlyte’s solar-powered engine was so silent their over-pass did not even disturb the white ox-peckers from the elephants’ backs.

‘Chaga’s the best thing ever happened to them,’ he said, circling for a better look. ‘Poachers won’t come within twenty miles of terminum. Elephant and rhino numbers have been increasing steadily since the Kilimanjaro Event. Our Away Teams have even found family groups as deep as five miles beyond terminum, on the edge of the Great Wall formation. Paul Orzabal up at Ol Tukai started a study of terrestrial species adapting to the Chaga, but it got dismantled along with the rest of the station.’

They passed over Tsavo West. People in the roof gardens waved. Sunlight glittered from the hot tubs. A Tai Chi class was practising on the Tractor One landing platform.

‘What’s this about dismantling Ol Tukai?’ Gaby asked.

‘They need a station to monitor the Nyandarua Event but the budget won’t run to a new base, so they’re airlifting what’s airliftable and taking the tractor units north by road, going cross country along the line of the Ngong hills to avoid Nairobi. Tinga-Tinga and Moshi are all being relocated to one hundred and twenty degrees of separation. We began course corrections last night.’

The green and black microlyte crossed terminum. Eddies of warm air spun out from the hidden heart of the Chaga buffeted the wing. Shepard took them down. Gaby gripped the cockpit coaming, telling herself she was too enthralled to be terrified. The fractal tessellations of the mosaic-cover bubbled into reefs of pseudo-coral and the open white fingers of the hand-trees. The Great Wall rose sheer before them.

‘Shepard!’ Gaby shrieked as the microlyte bounced on a rising thermal and hopped over the edge of the Great Wall in a single bound. ‘You bastard, don’t you ever scare me like that again.’

Shepard chuckled in the way that men do to themselves when they have done something they think impresses a woman.

‘There’s always an updraft along the edge of the Great Wall,’ he said. ‘You can rely on it. All kind of strange and useful vortices above the Chaga.’

‘Strange vortices killed Denys Finch-Hatton at Voi,’ Gaby said.

‘Voi’s notorious for them. Ask any UNECTA pilot.’

They flew on toward Kilimanjaro over a plateau of dark crimson hexagonal tiles the width of the microlyte’s solar wing. Gaby glanced over her shoulder, past Shepard smiling behind his pilot’s shades, but it was not the reassurance of his face she was seeking. She could not see the comforting, man-made cubes of Tsavo West. She could not see anything of the human world, but a horizon of tarnished gold.

The roof of the Great Wall broke up into chaotic terrain of land-reefs and pseudo-corals, piled hundreds of feet high on top of each other, spilling like melted ice-cream; strawberry pink, chocolate, honeycomb-pistachio-piña-colada. From this they passed abruptly into a zone where the vegetation was translucent and formed a roof of glittering bubbles. Dark shadows hinted at massive formations far below. The line of transition was exact, as if a circle had been inscribed with compasses on the Chaga.

‘The Loolturesh Discontinuity,’ Shepard said. ‘It’s about five miles wide and goes all the way around the mountain.’

‘What is it?’ Gaby asked.

‘We don’t know. It’s on the edge of our Away Teams’ range. But it’s expanding outward with the rest of the Chaga. Fifty metres every day.’

The outer edge of the discontinuity was as sharply defined as its inner. The land on the far side was a many-coloured forest canopy; like flying over a Persian carpet, Gaby thought. A very old and moth-eaten carpet, riddled with holes which permitted intriguing glimpses of another carpet-canopy beneath. Analogy, she thought. Our languages do not have the names for what these things are, so we are forced to speak of them in terms of what they seem. The unrolling magic carpet was lifted up and torn in many places by conical mounds pushing through from beneath. Gaby thought of the Devil’s Tower, or the inselberg rocks of the sub-Kalahari. The scale and suddenness was about right, but these up-swellings were dark-red, striped with burnt orange meanderings like dead Martian watercourses. Shepard banked around the nearest mound. Light glittered at the summit: a single crystal protruded from the peeled-back Chaga-flesh. The crystal was perfectly transparent and the size of a Unit at Tsavo West.

‘They’re an emerging feature,’ Shepard said. ‘Within the last six months. Some taxonomist at Ol Tukai christened them Crystal Monoliths and unfortunately the name’s stuck. And before you ask, no, we have absolutely no idea what they are or do.’

‘Shepard.’

‘Yes?’

‘Shepard, don’t talk. You don’t have to talk. I don’t have to know.’

Gaby did not want to hear voices speaking names. Names cut this precious thing of hers into pieces and parts and functions and hypotheses. While it was one unspoken thing it was the undivided mystery that had drawn her from the summer night on the Point to this front seat in a UNECTA microlyte. Dismembered by names, the mystery bled out of it.

To the sound of the electric engine and the wind over the wires, they crossed from the land of the Crystal Monoliths into a land of knife-edged ridges standing above the forest roof that meandered crazily, twining around each other like mating snakes until they fused in a knot of arretes and canyons. On the far side of this escarpment was a zone unlike any they had yet seen. The microlyte flew above a terrain of ribs and spars and buttresses. Grasping at similes, Gaby thought of the intricate girder-work of the new architecture, or again, microscope photographs of the structure of human bones. Even analogy could not describe this Chaga: it was like this, but it was also like this, with a seasoning of that too, but in the end, none of them.

The cells between the spars and piers were filled with bubbles, some an indistinguishable froth, others large enough to have swallowed the microlyte. Their skins strained painfully against the rib-work. Bubbles were white, skeleton was blue. A Wedgwood landscape. They were flying over an enormous Willow Pattern plate.

This was one of those things you see only because you are looking for an instant in the right direction. She saw a dirty white bubble down to her right swell and split. The ripped skin wrinkled back and released a puff of dusty vapour like the smoke of mushroom spores in dry autumns. Things moved in the dust that looked like spindly insect-octopi clinging to silver balloons. They chilled her in a way that the alien landscapes unfolding before her had not. These incomprehensible landscapes were their place. They knew no other. Gaby McAslan was the alien here. Then the wind from off the mountain carried them away. Outcrops of straight-boled trees with domed tops appeared in gaps in the lattice where bubbles had burst and seeded. As the microlyte flew on, the stands of trees joined together into the now-familiar chaos-patterned forest canopy. A few minutes flight ahead a wall of pseudo-coral lifted above the canopy of domes. Its top was hidden by the raft of clouds that clung to the mountain. They were on the slopes of Kilimanjaro now.

After long silence, Shepard’s voice whispering in Gaby’s earphones was a shock.

‘That’s the Citadel. We think it’s where your friend Peter Werther was kept.’

‘And beyond the Citadel?’

‘Beyond the Citadel we cannot go. This thing doesn’t have the ceiling.’

The microlyte banked across the face of the wall of tubes and pipes and fans. I’m glad the microlyte doesn’t have the altitude to penetrate those clouds, Gaby thought. They are the Cloud of Unknowing that hides God who, like the Chaga, is beyond the power of language to describe. I’m glad that the aliens – if they exist in any form we can recognize – remain hidden in their fortress from the cameras of humans.

She remembered an old sci-fi movie from her father’s video library. At the climax, the huge luminous starship of the aliens had floated in across the mountain to meet humanity’s representatives. It had touched the earth, and opened its doors. In a glow of light, the aliens had come out. And it had killed the movie. Run a spear into the side of the sense of wonder and let out gasoline and Diet Coke. There had been wee ones with oval eyes and no noses, like aliens in abduction magazines, that ran around twittering. Then there was a big long spindly one with arms and legs about eight feet long. He had to bend to get under the door. Gaby McAslan had thought that was most pathetic. They negate gravity, cross entire galaxies in city-sized starships filled with light, and they can’t design a door that opens wide enough.

Show us miracles and wonders, but not the little man behind the curtain pulling the levers and shouting into the microphone. If they ever penetrate the mystery up there, I hope there is another behind it, Gaby thought. And another beyond that, and beyond that, so that we never dispel the Cloud of Unknowing.

Shepard had set a different course back to Kenya, one that took them close to a ChagaWatch balloon, many miles lost beyond terminum. Shaggy lilac moss had colonized the bag so that it looked like some imaginary hairy air-monster. The ground cable was crusted with growths like paper wasps’ nests, though far larger than any wasp Gaby had ever fled from. As Shepard banked the microlyte around the blimp, Gaby noticed flickering activity around the hexagonal cell mouths. What ever they were, they shone with the iridescence of humming birds, but moved with the mechanical buzzing dart of insects.

‘Good to see Ol’ Faithful’s still with us,’ Shepard said. ‘But I don’t think she’ll last much longer. The cable goes and they drift away into the Chaga.’

‘How old is it?’ The microlyte went round again.

‘About three years. We haven’t had a picture out of her in fourteen months, though the caesium batteries are still putting out current. Biggest ecological armageddon since the end of the dinosaurs, but mention radioactivity and it’s mass pants-pissing among the environmentalists.’

They swooped away from the lost outpost of the human world. Gaby could make out the brown shore of Africa like a line of islands on the horizon of a dark ocean. Shepard opened up the engine and headed for home.

24

She briefed Shepard on last things in the Mahindra jeep out to the landing field. He would let her know when anything happened with William? Yes. He would corroborate her story if her banks and credit card companies got sniffy about replacing her plastic? Yes. He would write a report for her insurance company? Yes, if she thought it would do any good. He would back her up if the shit hit the fan with T.P.? Yes. He was sure UNECTA would swing behind her and not leave her persona non grata with the United Nations?

‘I think you can be pretty sure of that,’ he said as the Mahindra hit a rut and bounced all four wheels in the air. ‘In fact, I think I could give you my personal guarantee on it. You see…’

‘This is going to be an off-the-record, isn’t it? The gazelle, mind the fucking gazelle!’

He minded the fucking gazelle.

‘Off the record, I may not be at Tsavo West much longer.’

Her heart lurched. It was nothing to do with Shepard’s driving.

‘UNECTA are reorganizing their research staff. In the shuffling they’ve found they need a Peripatetic Executive Director. Superman without the blue pantyhose, flying hither and yon, trouble-shooting for UNECTA wherever there’s trouble that needs to be shot. It’s based at Kenyatta Centre, but it’s essentially a field job. It’s what I want, to be in it, not perched up in that glass penthouse with a desk and twenty tons of paper between me and what’s out there. It’s the sharp edge of Chaga research, boldly going where no one has gone before.’

‘When’s the selection panel?’

‘A week ago. Modesty should preclude, but I’m the only serious contender. Conrad Laurens, the bouncing Belgian, is the only one more highly qualified, and he can count on European Union backing, but there’s a lot of anti-Francophone feeling in the General Council at the moment, and at two hundred twenty pounds, he’s going to have trouble fitting into the phone box, let alone leaping out in his Captain UNECTA outfit to save the world. So, do you think you can put up with seeing a bit more of me around?’

When the gods want to destroy you, they answer your prayers.

They drove past work teams armed with chainsaws, felling the acacias that stood in the path of Tsavo West’s juggernaut retreat. The fellers pushed up their plastic visors and waved to the speeding Mahindra. A white Antonov stood on the shaved strip, feeding from a tanker truck.

‘Shepard,’ Gaby moaned in her five-year-old-with-dental-appointment voice. ‘Don’t send me back, I don’t want to go, don’t make me go.’

He went to file her travel authorizations in the flight centre. She seemed to be the only passenger.

‘Can I see you again?’ she asked plaintively at the foot of the tail ramp. ‘I mean officially, not serendipitously. Like, um, you know, a date?’

Shepard looked momentarily perplexed. He is going to shrug, Gaby thought. I could not bear it if he shrugs. When they shrug, it means they are saying a thing to please you, not because they want to.

‘Sure. I’d like to, very much. I’ll be in touch.’ He did not shrug. ‘At the very least, I owe you that interview I promised back in Kajiado.’ The wing root engines powered up, first left, then right. ‘Don’t forget this.’ He handed her a transparent zip-lock bag containing what the Chaga had left of her possessions. They consisted of a sleeveless denim top without buttons, a Gossard wonderbra, a pair of gold earrings, a silver Claddagh ring, a steel Parker ball-pen, a packet of Camels and a set of car keys. ‘Or this.’

He handed her another zip-lock bag. This one contained the stained, dog-eared remains of a notebook bound in Liberty print. Gaby lifted the bag gingerly by the corner, suspicious of contamination. Then she realized what she was seeing.

‘Oh my God! You found it.’

Shepard shrugged.

‘I called in a few markers. Turned up while they were clearing out Ol Tukai prior to the move. They found it in a sealed case in the bottom of a filing cabinet that had been put into storage when Barbara Bazyn moved the security division to Kajiado. God knows how long it’s been sitting there. It’s a mess, but when you consider what it’s been through, it’s hardly surprising.’

Gaby studied the battered diary.

‘So, you came back,’ she whispered. ‘You kept your promise to T.P.’

‘What’s T.P. got to with it?’

‘He loved her. He helped her go into the Chaga to find Langrishe. He gave her the diary, made her promise to get it back to him whatever happened. Shepard, you knew them, what were they like?’

‘Insane.’

‘T.P. said that too.’

‘Obsessed. Intense. Too close to each other to be lovers.’

‘T.P. said no one loved the right way round.’

‘T.P. was right. But the diary proves nothing.’

‘Maybe not. But it gives me a weapon. Everywhere I go in this country I walk in her shadow, and I want to know why, and how, and who. And when I’ve done that, I want to exorcise her ghost so it won’t overshadow me any more.’ Gaby slipped the diary from its bag, weighed it in her hand. ‘Thank you Shepard. I owe you. And I’ll repay you, some day. What you deserve, I promise.’

‘I’ll think of something,’ Shepard said, shooing her up the loading ramp of the Antonov. ‘Now get out of here!’ He ran to the safety of the Mahindra.

She was fastening her seat belt as the plane turned into its take-off run. He was waving at the wrong window, as those who wave to aeroplanes always do. The engine noise rose to a scream. The little jet dipped its nose, shuddered down the dirt strip and threw itself into the air. The tops of the acacias and the control centre and the iridescent vees of the microlytes and the tanker truck and the dusty white Mahindra were falling away and now Tsavo West was just a few lost Lego bricks on the huge burning plain and the Chaga a dark disc curving imperceptibly out of sight.

He is like that, she thought. Most of the men she had passed through her life had been pieces of artifice. Shepard was landscape. He went out into the things around him. He curved imperceptibly out of sight. He was not a product of himself, a man become his own image. He blended into his background, became part of it, drew strength from red earth and heat and empty spaces.

The Antonov levelled off. Gaby looked out of the window. She loved to look out of airplane windows. Flying never ceased to astound her. Today a miracle happened. A sign. The clouds around the mountain moved, and grew thin, and broke, and dissolved away and there, shining in the afternoon sun, great, high and unbelievably white in the sun, and everything that Hemingway had said, but so much more, were the snows of Kilimanjaro.

Then the Antonov banked and she could see them no more. Gaby pulled the zip-lock bag containing the diary out from under her seat. From the second plastic bag she took her packet of Camels, lit one and settled back to read.

The Liberty print was stained and blotched, the binding boards black with mould. The glue had dissolved, the book was held together by its stitching. It looked like the log of a voyage to hell.

Niamh O’Hanlon, Gaby deciphered from the fly sheet. No wonder she had called herself by another name.

To every book its inscription. I have written my name in black ink inside the cloth cover but the syllables are harsh and clashing in this land of whispered sibilants and strong consonants. How much better the name Langrishe gave me: Moon; generous, looping consonants, vowels like two eyes, two souls looking out of the paper. One half of T.P.’s final gift to me: the journal, cloth-bound and intimate in Liberty print. I treasure it, hug it to me, companion and confessor. T.P.’s other gift to me I treated less kindly: black dragonfly wings shredded by the impact, struts snapped like the bones of birds. Already the Chaga is at work on it, converting the organic plastics into dripping stalactites of black slime. It is over an hour since I lost the beat of the helicopter in the undersong of the Chaga: my crash-landing must have looked sufficiently convincing for it to abandon the hunt. Forgive me T.P., but you would understand: skimming across the tree tops toward terminum with an Italian Mangusta behind me, expecting to be smashed at any second into nothingness by a thermal imaging Stinger missile, one’s options are somewhat limited. Sorry about the microlyte, T.P. But I will be good to the diary, I promise.

Gaby resented this woman she did not know for her intimacy with T.P. Costello. There was another set of footprints, another smear of woman-musk on her Kenya. If she found Shepard’s name in these dirty pages crammed tight, tight with frenzied black ink, she would feed the fucking thing to a shredder.

I told Shepard I wanted to lay your ghost, Gaby thought, but now I am the unseen shadow, arriving off the night-flight, following you through the streets of Nairobi, meeting with you T.P. Costello, Mrs Kivebulaya, Dr Peter Langrishe at the Irish Ambassador’s party. I come with you to Ol Tukai, I fly with you over the Chaga; I watch you come together and fuck in an Arab bed in a banda on the coast, I feel your jealousies and obsessions that take him in search of these mythical Chaga-builders that he loves more than you; and you, in pursuit of him. I am there when you pitch your tent in the ruins of the old Ol Tukai game lodge, I hear with you the voices coming out of the deep Chaga that you imagine to be Langrishe’s, calling you.

I am beginning to wonder if my supplies will be sufficient. I had originally provisioned for twenty days. It may take that long just to reach the lower slopes of the mountain. The riotous Chaga-life confounds my senses of time and distance: I cannot judge how far, how fast I have come. I was so certain then; now my stupidity at thinking I can find one man – who, if I am honest with myself, which I rarely am, may not even be alive – in five thousand square kilometres of, literally, another world, astounds me. The sense of isolation is colossal.

I saw a vervet monkey today, nervous eyes in the shimmering canopy. A webbed sail of ribs, like some remnant of the time of the dinosaurs, grew from its back. I did not take it for a good omen.

Two thirds down the second cigarette, Gaby decided she did not like this woman. Everything was too much with her: her descriptions, her feelings, her opinions, her experiences, her loving. She was like one of those dreadful Irish woman writers you see on late night talk shows who are terrifyingly articulate and think they have invented sex and no one else can possibly have any feeling or passion of true emotion in their lives. She is dark Gaby thought. Dark side of the moon.

The Wa-chagga may be the last proud people in the New Africa with my dearly beloved leather jacket I must look like a fetish figure from a sword’n’sorcery fantasy.

Gaby frowned and read again the lines at the bottom of the page and the top of the next. A third time, and they still did not make sense.

… the last proud people in the New Africa with my dearly beloved leather jacket I must look like a fetish figure…

She held the diary up to the reading lamp. There. So close to the spine you would only notice if you were looking. Two pages had been removed. The cut was very clean and straight. A surgical elision. Wide awake, Gaby fanned the pages against the light. Faults in the lie of the leaves indicated where other sections had been cut away. Towards the end there seemed fewer pages left than removed.

The Sibirsk pilot bing-bonged. Weelson, Nairobi in five. Cyrillic No Smoking/Fasten Seat-belts lit up. The Antonov banked sharply. The who-slashed-it of the missing paper would wait. Right now, Gaby McAslan had to worry about what T.P. Costello was going to say to her.

25

T.P. did not say anything when he met her at Wilson airfield. He did not say anything when they got into the SkyNet Landcruiser, or as he drove into Nairobi. He did not say anything as they turned into Tom M’boya Street, or when he pulled in outside the SkyNet offices. It was when he switched off the car and gave the keys to Gaby that he spoke.

‘I’m getting out here.’

‘What do I do?’ Gaby asked plaintively.

‘What you do,’ T.P. Costello said, ‘is you take this thing home, you go to bed, you sleep for eighteen hours and tomorrow when you are fresh and sharp and bright you put on your most professional clothes and you come here and you report to Jake Aarons and you ask him if there are any assignments for SkyNet Satellite News’s new East Africa correspondent. And, because you’ll need it, you keep the car. What do you do?’

As T.P. spoke, she had lowered her head until it touched the edge of the dashboard. Tears stained the thighs of the borrowed jeans.

‘You asshole,’ she whispered. ‘You fucking diseased asshole. I thought I was out of here.’

‘You almost were. You know why you are here and not at the check-in desk at Kenyatta being asked if you want smoking or non-smoking? Because it worked. That’s the only reason. Because at this very moment sub-rights are in the middle of the biggest bidding war since the Kilimanjaro Event as casters broad and narrow throw dollars and Deuschmarks at you. Because at this moment our dear friend Dr Dan is on his feet in the House demanding an enquiry into the allegations your report raised while the UN sends in its damage limitation boys to, in their words, “rotate the third Baku company out of active service”, which in our parlance is the first Ilyushin out of here. Because it’s trebles and clean consciences all round at the Thorn Tree. You took the risk. It worked. This time. You see, if you ever, ever do anything like that again without clearing with me, I will bounce you back to the bonnie Belfast so quick you’ll have friction burns on your beautiful ass. What’ll you have?’

‘Friction burns. On my ass,’ Gaby said, still not able to look up.

‘That’s correct,’ T.P. said, stepping out of the car. ‘Oh. I almost forgot. There’s no such thing as a free lunch. Your friend Dr Shepard called while you were in flight. I think you should get whatever contacts you have working on this ASAP. Your stool-pigeon William. Seems he’s been moved from Tsavo West to Kajiado centre for further tests. They’re holding him in a special isolation section. Unit 12.’

She had it. She had it all. She had been faithful to her guiding star and it had honoured her with more than she had asked of it. It had put her in front of the camera, but it had also given her a glimpse into its hidden heart that few humans had ever seen, and maybe, if she didn’t get stupid and try to play it too cool and wreck things, it had given her the man she wanted. The city, the land, surged with possibility. Something tapped on her window. She looked up. Standing on the Landcruiser’s running-board was a shaven-headed boy of nine or ten, tapping a forefinger on the glass and holding up for her to buy a model of Space Station Unity he had made out of wire coat-hangers and sliced up Heineken cans. Gaby laughed and sobbed simultaneously and remembered that she had forgotten to tell T.P. about the Moon diary.

26

From glory to glory.

T.P. had begun the great Irish football war chant Ole, Ole Ole Ole five minutes before the final whistle. The team were still singing it as they headed for the showers.

‘One nil, one million nil,’ T.P. said as he collected his winnings from his UNECTA counterpart.

It had been a memorable victory. Gaby looked forward to post-morteming the goal over much beer when the Manga Twins finished editing the video. Seventy fifth minute. Victor Luthu from accounts lofts it over UNECTA’s dreaded Nigerian mid-fielder Kojo Laing. It falls at Gaby McAslan’s feet and the left wing opens up before her like the gates of heaven. Into the box and the best cross of her life over two defenders and Tembo’s head is there, rising, to smack it into the back of the net. She jumped onto Faraway, gaudy as a macaw in his woman-impressing goalkeeper’s outfit, wrapped him in freckled arms and legs.

‘Hey Kenya! I love this man! I used to think he was a wanker, now I think he is Jesus. They throw everything at him, Faraway stops the lot.’

‘Want to swap shirts, Gaby?’ Faraway said, recovering cool.

Oksana Telyanina ran over and hugged them both. She had been seconded on to Team SkyNet. The Siberians had never enough people in the same place to field a team of their own. In her cut-offs over cycle shorts, borrowed boots and tattoos she was an intimidating left back.

‘I near peed my pants!’ she shouted. Over her shoulder, beside the corner flag, Gaby glimpsed another person.

Shepard.

‘You!’ she shrieked, throwing herself on him.

‘You look like a horse with that long hair and those tight lycra shorts,’ he whispered in her ear. ‘I would dearly love to pull them down right now and bend you over the substitute’s bench.’

‘Been thinking about me while I was away?’

‘Nothing but.’

‘So what are you doing up here?’

‘Whisking you off on a date. You’ve got a change of clothes with you?’

‘Yes, casual and work. I not only look like a horse, I smell like a horse.’

‘You’ll smell worse where I’m taking you.’

She stepped back to give him the sideways quizzical look from under her hair she knew no man could resist.

‘You always this insistent?’

‘Always.’

She went to the changing rooms to pick up her bag. Oksana Telyanina was unlacing her boots.

‘You, him, yes?’ she asked, making a fiki-fiki gesture with her left forefinger penetrating circled right thumb and forefinger.

‘I haven’t even got to kiss him yet,’ Gaby said, changing her footwear.

‘He is very cute. Man like this, many woman want to baboon. You want to keep him, remember: Serbski Jeb.’ Oksana mimed pulling a knot tight around a compliant limb. Gaby threw her empty water bottle at her, went out and slung her sports bag into the back of the UNECTA Mahindra in which Shepard was waiting. Shepard placed his palm on her thigh and drove off.

‘Where are you taking me?’ she asked, not recognizing the trend of the streets.

‘Like I said, on a date,’ Shepard kept his hand firmly on her thigh all the way out of Nairobi, through Keekorok and Olorgesaile and the towns to the west.

‘This is some date,’ Gaby said as the metalled road gave way to red earth.

‘Something to celebrate,’ Shepard said.

‘You got the job.’

He punched a fist into the air.

‘Up, up and away with UNECTA-man! Permanent jet-lag. Permanent Montezuma’s Revenge. Can quote by heart any inflight magazine in the world. I’ll have to buy another suit. There’s a Indian tailor down by the City Market can make you anything in twenty-four hours. He might even run to all-enclosing blue suits.’

‘You’d know about that, speed-skater.’

‘Gaby, I can’t wait. I cannot wait for them to ask me to go somewhere and solve something. Sometimes you actually do get what you want in this life.’

‘I know,’ Gaby said. ‘Sometimes, karma takes a holiday and everyone gets what they want rather than what they deserve. The new East Africa Correspondent for SkyNet Satellite News greets the new UNECTAfrique Peripatetic Executive Director.’

They drove on into the huge west.

‘We’re going to the Mara,’ Gaby said.

‘There’re things I want you to see before they’re gone forever,’ Shepard said.

The red earth road became two tyre tracks on a green, watered plain speckled with many trees. The great wildebeest migration had come in the shadow of the rains to this land. They were like a brown river, meandering, breaking into tributaries and backwaters and loops so wide and lazy the migration seemed to stagnate into a swamp of grazing individuals. But they could not stop, any more than a river could refuse the gravity that drew it to the sea. The Mahindra pushed onward across the great plain. Gaby made Shepard stop on the top of a long ridge that commanded a wide green valley filled with animals. She took her visioncam from the sports bag and stood up in the back of the jeep, panning slowly across the panorama.

‘It won’t catch it,’ Shepard said.

‘I know,’ Gaby said in her football socks and shiny shorts and green and yellow shirt with McAslan: 9 on the back and the SkyNet globe on the front. ‘We never think that all the beauty will go too.’

‘Changed into another kind of beauty,’ Shepard said.

‘A terrible beauty, as Yeats said,’ Gaby said.

The camp had been made between two acacias near the bank of a seasonal tributary of the Mara river. There were two tents, a canvas shittery, a safari shower made from an oil drum and a nozzle, a fire, a table with two folding chairs and three Kalashnikov-armed game wardens with a battered Nissan Safari.

‘We’re in the tent on the right,’ Shepard said.

‘“We’re”?’ Gaby queried.

‘Well, you’re welcome to the one on the left, if you’d prefer. The guys won’t complain. Evening game drive is at five pm. Dinner after dark. If you need a shower, ask the guys. They’re discreet, which means you won’t actually catch them looking at you.’

One of the wardens came with them in the Mahindra as game spotter. The other two went in the other direction in the Nissan: ‘To shoot dinner,’ Shepard said. He drove the jeep himself, following the spotter’s directions to plunge headlong into seemingly impenetrable bush or down impossibly steep bluffs.

‘You love this, don’t you?’ Gaby shouted.

‘I was born eighty years too late,’ Shepard shouted back. ‘I wish I could have lived in the days of the Union Jack and tiffin at the Norfolk and whiskies at the Mount Kenya Safari Club where women weren’t allowed in. The days of Lord Aberdare and Baron Von Blixen and White Mischief, when there was just the land and the animals moving upon it, and the scattered tribes and their cattle.’

‘But you love the Chaga as well.’

‘That’s the dilemma. I love them both, but one will not let the other survive.’

The sun had set by the time they returned to the camp under the acacia trees. The night was as clear and infinitely deep as only African nights can be. The wardens had killed successfully, and set up a table by the camp fire. There was white linen, good crystal and Mozart on a boombox CD player.

‘You’ve put a lot of planning into this,’ Gaby said, showered and dressed in her office uniform of jodhpurs, boots and silk, which was as formal as she could be. ‘What would you have done if I’d said no?’

‘Kidnapped you,’ Shepard said, in the one creased linen suit she had seen on him that first day in Kajiado, which was as formal as he could be. He poured wine. The wardens brought antelope steaks. Afterwards, there was whisky. Gaby rolled the cut glass tumbler between her hands and asked, ‘Can I do that interview now?’

‘Here? Now? For SkyNet?’

‘No.’ She looked at him over the rim of the tumbler, which was another man-trick she had taught herself. ‘For me. I want to know who you are, Shepard. I want to know teeny-bop things: what star sign you are, what your favourite colour is, what you like to drink.’

‘Taurus. Green: the exact shade of your eyes. Three fingers of Wild Turkey with a little ice and a tablespoon of branch water.’

‘Favourite music.’

‘You’re listening to it.’

‘If you were an element, what would you be?’

He paused, momentarily taken aback by Gaby’s change of tack.

‘You mean hydrogen, helium, lithium?’

‘More primitive than that. Earth, air, fire, water.’

‘Earth.’

Yes, you are, Gaby McAslan thought, lighting a cigarette from a candle.

‘What colour are you?’

‘I’ve already told you that.’

‘You’ve told me your favourite colour. I’m asking you what colour you think you are yourself.’

He pondered a moment beneath the slow-turning stars.

‘A kind of faded terracotta; the exact shade my mother’s herb pots used to turn after two summers on the sunny side of the porch.’

Yes, you are telling me the truth, thought Gaby McAslan.

‘What season are you?’

‘This is a funny way to conduct an interview.’

‘It’s the only way to conduct an interview if you want to find anything valuable.’

He was silent for the space of three sips of whisky.

‘Fall,’ he said. ‘Fall in Nebraska, which is all silver and gold; silver of frost, gold of Hallowe’en pumpkins in back yards and yellow tomatoes on the vine and bare fields of corn stubble and a yellow edge to the horizon under the purple snow clouds that come down from the Dakotas. A fall that is the cold of evenings when you make a fire and your whisky catches the light and the heat of it, that is just like the line in the song about when the wind comes whistlin’ down the plain, and gets into the eaves and you hear the roof shingles rattle but you’re in no hurry to worry about them, not just yet.’

My God, Gaby thought, I am about to have sex with a Frank Capra movie. No, that is unfair. You would speak with as much love of the Watchhouse and the Point in its different seasons and moods.

‘Wood, fabric, pottery or metal?’

‘Pottery.’

‘Baroque, Classical, Romantic, Modern?’

‘Classical. You’re not taking this down.’

‘I am taking this down, where it matters. Circle, square, triangle?’

‘A sort of slightly rounded square. Or a slightly squared circle.’

‘Plains, mountains, forests or islands?’

‘Plains. With the aforementioned wind whistlin’ down them. And the corn as high as an elephant’s eye.’

‘What kind of car are you?’

‘Something pretty much like I drive already. Maybe one of those old British Landrovers that you could drive forever over any kind of surface in any conditions and it would always forgive you. But with the tail fins, fenders and white-walls off one of those 1950s cars you used to see in old rock’n’roll movies that looked about the size of Rhode Island. If that makes sense.’

Perfect sense. You are getting it now, Shepard. I knew you would. And I am getting you.

‘What kind of animal are you?’

He sighed.

‘Something big and wise, that can see a long way across the plain, like a giraffe, but not silly like a giraffe. Not a herd creature. I’ve never been a team player.’

I know that, speed-skater.

‘But not solitary, like a leopard is solitary. A lion. That’s what I am.’

‘Which sense are you?’

He put down his glass. She had him now. The last question would make it irrevocable. Expectation was a warm whisky glow inside her.

‘Touch,’ he said and got up from his folding chair and took her hand very gently and led her to the tent on the right.

‘Are we safe?’ Gaby asked.

‘The wardens keep watch,’ Shepard said, misunderstanding.

‘I warn you, I make horrible loud cat noises.’

‘Everything makes horrible loud cat noises out here.’

‘All right then,’ she said and pulled him down on top of her on the ground sheet.

The second time she told him there was something special she wanted to try. He grinned in the lazy, contented hunting-cat way of sated men who still have an appetite for more. In the tent was plenty of rope. Gaby offered a prayer to the totemic spirits of Oksana Telyanina as she quickly tied Shepard to the fly-sheet pegs. He laughed a lot despite the hardness of the ground.

‘You won’t be doing that in a minute, laddie,’ Gaby said, swinging herself on top of him and pushing her ginger pubes against his chin. Ten minutes later he was making the horrible loud cat noises. Ten minutes after that he was begging. Ten minutes after that he was in an altered state of consciousness, eyes fixed on the ridge pole, every muscle taut as piano wire. Ten minutes after that Gaby had mercy and let him come. Exhausted, elated, aching, she kissed him on the nipples and curled up beside him, nestling into the warmth and the hardness and smell and comfortable man-ness of him. Nestled there, she fell asleep. She woke in the pre-dawn dark, remembering with horror that Shepard was still tied up.

He was too stiff and sore to take the Mahindra out on the dawn safari. The warden who drove smiled a lot. So did his colleagues as they served the steak and champagne breakfast. Before dinner that evening, Shepard took Gaby out far in the Mahindra.

‘Something special I want you to see,’ he said.

The cool had driven the haze and dust back into the earth and in the space between the day and the things that hunt by night, it unfolded around Gaby. Shepard steered the Mahindra along a wildebeest track older than any of the ways of humans. The migration had been following it for a hundred thousand years. Headlights caught eyes out in the gloaming; stragglers on the primeval way west to the greening plains of the Mara. Gaby had never seen a sun so huge, resting on the edge of the world. Shepard stopped the car in the middle of the great plain.

‘Watch and wait,’ he said.

The twilight deepened into indigo. Summer stars appeared over the plains of Africa in the dark east.

‘Did you ever go out at night and look up at the stars and see them very small and close, little dots of light?’ Gaby whispered, echoing Shepard’s posture. ‘And then your perceptions turned inside out and you realized that they were unimaginably huge and distant and it was you who was very small and insignificant, and knowing that was like a sacred thing, that you were tiny, but alive and they might be huge and magnificent, but they were dead and because of that you were infinitely greater and more important than they could ever be?’

‘Where I come from the sky is like the land; big, exhilarating, endless,’ Shepard said softly. In winter, on nights when the wind that comes down from Canada is so cold and dry it freezes the breath in your lungs, the constellations glitter like ice. On nights like that you can fall into the sky, and keep falling for ever between all those ice-cold, frozen stars.’

‘That’s what I can’t forgive the BDO for,’ Gaby said. ‘It takes the stars away from us. They aren’t distant and numinous, but close, living, intelligent. I don’t like the idea of someone else being in our sky, making us small.’

‘See over there?’ Shepard pointed. ‘Just to the left of Antares. About two degrees.’

‘Ophiuchus?’

‘You know your way around the sky. That’s where they come from. Came down the UNECTA hotline yesterday morning. The gas clouds in Rho Ophiuchi, out on the edge of the Scorpius loop. Since we floated the hypothesis that the Chaga-makers may have evolved in space, the orbital telescopes have been analysing the spectra of deep-space molecular clouds. All the raw material for life is out there; hydrocarbons, amino acids, RNA. It was from deep-space clouds that the first buckyballs were deduced. We’ve been getting spectra of complex fullerenes from Rho Ophiuchi that are as near as dammit the same as Tolkien observed at Iapetus. Only these are about eight hundred light years in toward the centre of the galaxy. If we allow the Chaga-makers a generous one per cent light-speed expansion rate, we’re looking through our telescopes at a civilization at least one hundred thousand years old, and probably a lot older.’

‘Peter Werther told me that this is not the first time we’ve been in contact with them,’ Gaby said. ‘First contact was at the very dawn of humanity, out on these plains about three, four million years ago.’

‘They could be all through the Sagittarius arm in that time. God knows how long they have been travelling, how old they are, where they originate from.’

A line of deep red clung to the western horizon under a front of purple cloud. The silence was immense.

‘Shepard,’ Gaby whispered. ‘You’re scaring me.’

‘I’m scaring myself,’ Shepard said. ‘You’re right. The stars aren’t ours any more. They never were. Something got there before us, before we even existed.’

‘I suppose we could hold hands and whistle Thus Spake Zarathustra,’ Gaby suggested.

She saw Shepard’s face crease to laugh, then he suddenly pressed a forefinger to her lips.

‘Shh. They’re here. Look.’

They came out of the darkness beneath the shade trees, the big lioness first, head held high, nostrils flared, mouth open, tasting the night. Then came two younger females, moving wide to cover the queen’s flanks. Behind them came the cubs. There were nine of them in two litters; some were noticeably larger and more capable than others. They followed the chief lioness in a loose Indian file, foraging two or three steps out of line to sniff a thorn bush or wildebeest turd. An old female with sagging jowls and loins brought up the rear.

The pride passed within ten feet of the front of the Mahindra. One of the cubs sat down, stuck its rear leg in the air and licked its crotch. The matriarch looked at the glowing horizon and the 4x4 with its spellbound passengers and moved on. The cubs followed. The lions vanished into the great darkness.

‘The rangers have been watching them,’ Shepard said. ‘They told me where to find them. They’ve lost two, one to hyenas, one that got pushed off the teat. But I think they’ll make it now.’

‘Shepard,’ Gaby McAslan said. ‘Thank you. That was a real privilege.’

‘Wasn’t it?’ Shepard said. He started the car and drove back along the ancient wildebeest track beneath the huge bright stars of the southern hemisphere.

‘Tell me about your children,’ Gaby asked. ‘Your cubs.’

Their names were Fraser and Aaron. Fraser was thirteen, Aaron just turned eleven. Fraser was the one graced with charisma. The world would always come to his fingertips without him ever having to reach out to it. Aaron would have to work hard for everything he wanted, but in spite of that, or maybe because of it, Aaron was the one whose name the world would know. Fraser would make hearts, break hearts and be happy. Aaron’s happiness would always be bought, and so more highly valued. Facing Gaby’s jealousy of others who had a deeper and prior demand on him, from a life and relationship she could neither share nor erase, Shepard said that the boys had been the only good thing to have come out of his marriage.

‘We marry young,’ he said, ‘the people of the plains states. The winter people. Something deep in the psyche, a need for someone to shelter you from the big sky, a pair of nice warm feet to share your bed. She met me at a skate meet. I was in my soph year at Iowa State, majoring in biochemistry with minor biophysics. And speed-skating. She had sass: she came right up to me, congratulated me on my win and said I had the cutest thighs she’d ever seen. Also, I had the most visible underwear line she’d ever seen. Also, she’d been a fetishist for guys in tights ever since Christopher Reeve made her believe a man really could fly.

‘We got married next spring. It was too soon, we were too young. But how do you know that when you’re only twenty? You’re not even sure what you are, let alone what you want. But the world forces us to take all the big decisions before we have the wisdom to make them right. Education, career, relationships, what you are to do with the rest of your life: half your life’s big decisions are made before they allow you to do as trivial a thing as vote. You can raise a family but they won’t allow you to buy a drink in a bar.

‘We got married in the hot flush, wet-dream, can’t eat, tear-each-other’s-clothes-off stage of love. We never imagined it would change; when it did, we thought it was dying. That’s when we decided to have Fraser. Rather, that’s when Carling decided to have Fraser. No, that’s mean. We did a good thing for a bad reason, and of course it didn’t work out the way we’d planned, so we screwed up tighter inside ourselves, scared that all that was holding us together was the kid. We had just moved to UCSB to begin my PhD when Aaron was born. Carling had got bored with playing great earth-muffin by then and found a job in an architect’s office. All the money went straight into child care, but it was away from barf and Sesame Street. I had to work nights to get the hardware time, Carling was Ms Nine-to-Five, so I ended up running all over town in this hulk of a yellow Volvo we called The Pig, getting groceries, picking up from school, dropping off at daycare and trying to sleep, eat, read, vacuum and relax in between. Which I suppose is great for father-son bonding but not for a marriage. Certainly not a marriage. Four hours of overlap leaves a lot of leeway for infidelity. I’m getting mean again. And bitter.’

‘She cheated on you?’ A hail of meteorites kindled away to nothing in the sky above the Mara plain. You could see forever in that sky, Gaby thought. Outwards and inwards. And backwards, on these nights that were so still and warm and close you could hear the continent breathing.

‘With her boss in the architecture firm. All the clichés. That’s what rankled most. It was all the clichés. You imagine that your life partner, your lover, the mother of your children, should be able to surprise you, even in that. Not her. All the clichés. She kept the kids. She couldn’t keep the man, though. I said I wouldn’t get mean and bitter, but this still gives great and deeply petty pleasure. All the time she was cheating on me with him, he was cheating on her with a woman he met in a leather club. All the time Carling was standing in front of the judge saying how this man had the lifestyle that would mean the best possible future for her children, he was swinging from Miss Rawhide’s ceiling by his balls. I laughed to bust a gut when I heard that.’

‘Do you miss the boys?’

‘I miss them like I would miss my right arm. When they aren’t here I feel like I’m only partially complete. They come out twice a year, stay for a week at Easter, longer in late summer.’

‘Is this a warning?’

‘I suppose it is. Not so much of when they’re here as when they go.’

‘You’re presuming a lot about this relationship.’

‘When you get to be a divorced fortysomething twelve thousand miles from your kids, you learn not to play at relationships. It’s a quantum affair. On or off. Everything or nothing. No games, Gaby.’

‘I don’t play games, Shepard.’

‘You do.’

‘Not with you.’

‘Games players can’t stop.’

‘Shall we end it here then?’ Gaby asked, temper flaring like a sudden consuming savannah fire.

‘That’s what I mean, Gaby. Games. What do you want?’

‘I want you, Shepard.’

‘I want you too. I want this red-haired, green-eyed Celtic fury with her incomprehensible and barbarous accent and her freckled skin that is like a little girl’s and her body that is like the wisest, most sinful whore in hell’s and her too-quick temper and her pride and her ambition and her recklessness and her childishness and her selfishness and her generosity and her bravery and her exuberance.’

‘You men talk the biggest load of oul’ shite.’

‘But it’s guaranteed fresh shite every day.’

The table was laid for dinner back at the camp. The rangers stood by. Gaby ducked into the tent and emerged with a bundle of fabric.

‘Present for you. Quid pro quo. Old football tradition; swapping shirts.’ Shepard unfolded the bundle, frowned a moment at the print of the masturbating nun on the front and her confession, now washed almost illegible. He smiled, stood up, unbuttoned his shirt and removed it. Before he could slip on the T-shirt Gaby placed a hand on his chest and drew him, as if it were magnetized, into the tent on the right.

They did not do the Serbian thing that night, but what they did do was so very good and so very long that they almost forgot about the things behind them in the cold past, and the long fingers with which they touched their lives.

27

It cost NASA more to buy off the satellite company whose launch window it appropriated than to charter the HORUS orbiter to lift the propulsion unit to Unity. The hope was to recoup it all and more when the Gaia probe went into orbit around the BDO and pictures started to come in. The news services had placed bids already. So the project directors told the financial managers. None of them had ever thought that First Contact would be mediated by accountants.

This was the mission plan. The manoeuvring unit would rendezvous with Gaia out in the marches of Jupiter, hard-dock and fire its engines to swing the probe on to a path that would take it into polar orbit around the Big Dumb Object. The disc’s spin would bring every part of its surface under the scrutiny of Gala’s sensors.

Eight hours before launch from Unity a fleet of unmanned USAF single-stage-to-orbit freighters launched from Edwards Air Force Base, together with a specialist team in a military shuttle. Revisions had been made to the payload calculations. Extra reaction mass tanks were needed, of a new and more efficient design. None of the multi-national crew of Unity believed this as they watched the delta-vee of the USAF shuttle dock with the Interceptor in its assembly orbit, turn its black refractory belly to the stars and disgorge space workers in exo-skeletons and spider-walking Canada arms from its cargo bay. New and more efficient designs; with stars and bars on their sides, that required military specialists to fit?

The USAF shuttle de-orbited with seconds to spare. Safe distancing thrusters burned blue. The Gaia interceptor moved into launch orbit. At fifty kilometres the main engine lit. The hydrogen flame vanished into the big night. As the interceptor crossed the orbit of Mars it jettisoned the last-minute military fuel tanks and flipped into deceleration mode. This piece of information, alone of all others relating to the flight of the interceptor, passed through a little-known NASA hierarchy directly on to the desk of the President of the United States.

28

Miriam Sondhai told Gaby McAslan that she had a visitor when she returned, elemental and glowing, to the old missionary house. She was most surprised to find T.P. Costello sitting on the creaking leather sofa, drinking Miriam Sondhai’s chai. She had been crazily expecting it to be her sister Reb, come out to Kenya on the same whim that carried her through the rest of her life, to see what Gaby had done with the star tapestry.

Gaby’s ready bag was on the coffee table.

‘Well, now you’ve finished banging the balls off UNECTA’s shiny new peripatetic Executive Director, maybe SkyNet’s new East Africa Correspondent wouldn’t mind earning her grossly inflated salary,’ T.P. said.

‘You’ve been through my things,’ Gaby growled. The bag was badly packed with impractical underwear and few cosmetics. ‘You’ve been fondling my panties, T.P. Costello. Probably sniffing them.’

‘Needs must. I’ve got a job for you.’

‘Send Jake. He’s senior East African Correspondent.’

‘Jake’s sick.’

‘You don’t get sick in this job.’

‘He’s sick,’ T.P. answered. His face was as fixed and unreadable as a Kabuki mask. ‘You have ten minutes to get that football gear off, stop yourself smelling like a trapper’s jockstrap and look like a professional newswoman. Ten minutes, then I’m dragging you as you are to Kenyatta. You’ve a flight to catch. Your passport’s in there too, don’t worry. And a tube of factor eight. You’re going to need it in the Maldives.’

‘The Maldives?’

‘Foa Mulaku’s bubbled up.’

‘You can tell a man packed this bag,’ Gaby said, rummaging in it for shower things. ‘No tampons.’

29

Beyond the reef, the bottom fell away and the water changed from the pale green of inshore where you could see the shadows of the little coral fish cast on the silt to an ultramarine blue of such transparency that you could look over the rail and imagine the blue-on-blue of the deep water hunters, endlessly seeking, a thousand feet down. The SeaCat passed through the gap in the reef and throttled up. The island dwindled to an edge of coral sand and green palms, then to a line of darkness on the sea, then was lost beneath the horizon. The big catamaran had once ferried holiday-makers between the islands of the Seychelles, but UNECTA had chartered it to service its Indian Ocean bases. Now it ferried the world’s media. There were three hundred reporters with their knightly entourages on the catamaran this bright August morning. The bar had never done such good business.

Team SkyNet was on the rear sun-deck, preparing for a satellite link-up with London.

Faraway miked Gaby up, Tembo tried camera angles: ‘not in direct sunlight, your eyes go dark and viewers will not trust you if they cannot see your eyes.’ Gaby looked at the birds flocking and diving above the churned wakes. The sea is one thing, she thought. Unitary. Whole. It would be morning over that part of the one sea that broke around the Point. Dad would be back from his morning walk, Reb would have the espresso maker bubbling on the Aga. The early satellite news would be on as background to their coffee and Marks and Spencer’s brioche. Paddy would be underneath the table, thumping his tail to every word that ended in a ‘y’ sound. Suddenly, shockingly, Gaby would burst from the screen in their morning, live with her news of incredible things in exotic locations. It is one thing, the sea, and it is a big thing. Bigger than anything you can bring to it. No human care can match its transcendent unity. Why fear, then, when all things come out of and return to the sea?

‘I am patching you in now, Gaby,’ Faraway said. She nodded. The voice of Jonathan Cusack, The World This Morning’s anchorman, was whispering in her ear: ‘And now we have on the satellite link our new East Africa Correspondent, Gaby McAslan.’

East Africa Correspondent, Gaby McAslan. Me! Help me!

Tembo gave her a mark. She brushed hair away from her face. The transmit light went and Jonathan Cusack said, ‘So, Gaby, just what is going on out there in the Indian Ocean?’

For a quarter of a second Gaby thought she was going to throw up live on prime-time.

‘Well, Jonathan, I’m on the press boat to East Seven Five, UNECTA’s permanent floating observation platform at the Foa Mulaku object. We should arrive in just over an hour, about one-thirty our time.

‘So what will be happening when you get out there?’ Jonathan Cusack asked, nine thousand miles away. Gaby pushed her hair from her face again. Faraway grimaced and made a throat-cutting gesture with his thumb.

‘To fill in a little background: Foa Mulaku, or, to give it its proper name, the Maldive Ridge Object, was the fourth biological package. It came to rest about six thousand feet down in the waters of the Equatorial Channel. By the time UNECTA located the site, the package had colonized a nine-kilometre radius of sea bed eighty kilometres to the north-east of the island of Gan. What makes the underwater Chaga forms so very different from the terrestrial manifestations is that once they’ve established themselves, they grow upward rather than outward. Foa Mulaku has taken scientists by surprise by coming to its final emergence state much more quickly than predicted -they were originally talking about mid-November, now it’s certain that it will come out of the sea some time in the next few hours.’

‘Can you give us some idea of what we will be seeing?’ Jonathan Cusack asked. I used to fancy him, Gaby thought. He was my number-one media fantasy figure. Now that satin-and-sabres voice is whispering in my ear.

‘UNECTA have built a fairly detailed sonar model: Foa Mulaku is like a chopped-off cone with its base on the sea floor and its uppermost sections twenty metres beneath the surface. The cone is made up of a number of distinct levels piled on top of each other – imagine a giant wedding cake. Over the past month Foa Mulaku has increased its growth rate to forty metres per day, and we expect the upper structures to break the surface in the next five hours.’

‘We’ll be going back to the Maldives live as the situation develops; in the meantime, Gaby McAslan, thank you.’

She held the smile until Tembo marked her out and the transmission light was extinguished. There was applause and encouraging shouts from the reporters who had ambled out of the bar to watch the baptism of fire. Paul Mulrooney, CNN’s Man in Africa, brought her something with rum and ice cubes in it.

‘Pissed my pants, first live link I did,’ he said. ‘Looked straight into the camera and talked about a cholera epidemic in a Rwandan refugee camp with it running down my leg and over my shoes. Thank God they only see you from the waist up.’

The course display monitors placed around the passenger areas showed that the SeaCat had passed the halfway point and the journalists began to move to the fore deck for their first glimpse of East Seven Five’s gantries. By sea as on land, UNECTA had been forced to buy creatively. A few well-placed bribes had beaten the Indonesian breaking-yard’s offer on the de-commissioned Royal Dutch/Shell exploration rig. The submersibles and remote equipment had been beachcombed from the hundred mile wrecking yard that was the east coast of Scotland after North Sea Oil. Half of East Seven Five’s crew were redundant Aberdonian off-shore men who mingled uncomfortably in the accommodation blocks with the laid-back researchers from Woods Hole Oceanographic Centre.

As the SeaCat moved in to East Seven Five around a Beriev seaplane refuelling from a tanker pontoon, inflatable Gemini craft burst from between the legs of the rig and furiously circled the catamaran.

‘Greenpeace protesters,’ Paul Mulrooney said. ‘I don’t know what they’re blaming UNECTA for, they didn’t invent the thing.’ As the rubber boats made a final circle and dashed toward an ancient Greek ferry with a rainbow painted on its bow that was moored a mile west, he shouted, ‘Go and sail your stupid little boats around Iapetus, or the Rho Ophiuchi gas cloud, if you want someone to protest at.’

R.M. Srivapanda, East Seven Five’s director, was waiting on the pontoon to receive his guests. He was a dark, patient Tamil wearing one of those round-collared suits that look so well on Indians and so poorly on any other race. The left cuff was tucked into a pocket: Gaby recalled from T.P.’s rushed airport briefing that he had lost his lower left arm in a close encounter with a boat propeller while diving off Sri Lanka. All he needed was a white Persian cradled in his one good arm and twenty women in red catsuits with machine guns to be a criminal mastermind from a James Bond movie, hell-bent on world domination from his Indian Ocean base. Except James Bond was waiting up on Level One, in the mêlée of tripods, satellite dishes and correspondents pouring out of the elevator cages in search of the best locations. He had the smug expression a man would wear if he had license to go anywhere and do anything in the name of UNECTA.

‘You!’ Gaby yelled.

‘Me!’ Shepard agreed. He came to her through the tide of news people. Faraway shouted. He had found a place with an unparalleled view of the Maldive Ridge Object: a crow’s-nest on East Seven Five’s main communications mast. Tembo manoeuvred himself up, connected up his camera and shot background footage. As Faraway let a hand down to pull Gaby up. Shepard said, quickly and quietly, ‘Move in with me. I want to sleep with you, wake up with you, breakfast with you, perform acts of personal hygiene with you.’

‘Jesus, Shepard, you pick your moments,’ Gaby said as she scrambled up the mast.

‘Is that an answer?’ Shepard shouted up. But Gaby was already contemplating the thing in the sea. It required a trick of looking to see it, like the pictures that had been fashionable when Gaby had been in her early teens that looked like so much multi-coloured spaghetti but, if you looked past them, were supposed to magically resolve into 3-D leaping dolphins or dinosaurs. The trick here was like that, of looking not at the surface but beneath the lap and shiver of the water so that the patterns of light and dark and colour and joined together and became a picture.

It is not much like a wedding cake, Gaby thought. It is not much like anything other than what it is, what its makers have designed it to be. If it has makers, if those round white brain-like things just beneath the surface are not natural forms, if those deep fissures and meandering blue ridges are not just accidents of evolution, if those spines down there are not something that once had a meaning and function on some world among the gas veils of Rho Ophiuchi, but here, eight hundred light years away, is an empty remnant.

‘The dragon in the sea,’ Tembo said reverently. ‘It is written in the Book of Ezekiel.’

It is written in pages far older than those, Gaby thought. It is written in the racial memory, in the same genes that enable babies to swim before they learn the fear of water. The Kraken. The Midgard serpent. The sea-gods and mermaids and treacherous she-spirits of the ocean. The thing that lives in the sea.

The public address system whined feedback. A Scottish accent announced seat allocations in the recreation room on level three in five minutes. Gaby fought for a place in the line for the woman sitting at a table with a PDU and a box of badges issuing seats on the spotter helicopters. She came to the table and gave the names of her team members to the helicopter woman. ‘She won’t be needing a seat,’ a voice said in her ear and before Gaby could protest that it was seat or job, had drawn her aside to a quiet place among the pushed-together pool tables. Journalists awaiting their turn stared.

‘I’m probably going to regret this,’ Shepard said. ‘Grab your team, come with me.’

30

‘There is no way I am ever going to fit into this.’ Gaby McAslan held up the red and silver suit with the big black numbers front and back.

‘It stretches,’ Shepard said. He had already pulled his over his swimwear. He ran his thumb up the seals.

‘It smells,’ Gaby said. ‘Who was the last person inside this?’

‘It smells of you. It’s made from synthetic skin, the same stuff they graft on to burns victims, with a few chemical tricks we’ve learned from the Chaga and a colour scheme so the helicopters can find you if you fall overboard. The fullerene machines have never touched human flesh, so the perfect material for an isolation suit is skin. Or would you rather another night in decontam?’

‘Lois Lane is not the one who puts on the tights in the phonebooth,’ Gaby complained as she put the thing on. It did stretch. It was quite comfortable. She would have welcomed a gusset, but presumably men had designed the suits and never gave thought to Visible Sanitary Towel Lines, let alone having the fanny cut off you. They checked suit numbers with the out-lock controller and went down to the jetty.

‘Hey! Nineteen!’ Faraway shouted, reading the number on Gaby’s chest. He made a yelping noise like a hunting dog in heat.

Tembo was busy in the third boat with a Chaga-protected camera with UNECTAsie’s horns-and-yin-yang logo on the side. Faraway wired Gaby as she took her seat.

‘We are transmitting back to a satellite link on the rig and they will relay it to London.’ He fitted the plug into her ear and eased her hair back under the protective hood. His touch was very gentle. The other boats had already cast off. In the first was UNECTA’s own recording team. In the second was the landing party. Two last crew jumped into the third boat. They frowned at the SkyNet team. Shepard looked at them as if to challenge their right to query him and waved for the off. The helmsman pushed the throttle up. The little surf boat stood up in the water and skidded out from the shadows under East Seven Five into the light.

The sea was dazzling. The speed was brilliant. The sky was full of clucking helicopters. Gaby seized a rail and stood up. She pushed back her hood and let her hair blow out behind her so the faces behind the helicopter windows would see it and know who was down there in boat three. Thank you, Shepard. Thank you, God. Thank you, aliens swimming in the molecular clouds of Rho Ophiuchi. Thank you, T.P. Costello, for trusting me not to fuck it up. Thank you, life.

Tembo was videoing the two lead boats. Faraway clambered unhappily over the seats and tapped Gaby.

‘I have London on the link.’

She nodded and screwed the phone deeper into her ear. Geostationary static burbled. A studio director in Docklands came on line to count her in. Instinctively, Tembo turned the camera on her as Jonathan Cusack said: ‘We’re going back live to our reporter at East Seven Five, Gaby McAslan. So Gaby, exactly where are you?’

And in.

‘I’m on a landing boat from East Seven Five on my way to Foa Mulaku itself. This rather fetching little number I’m wearing is the latest UNECTA biological isolation suit, so we can get close to the object without having to go through decontamination. The scientists who will hopefully be making the landing are in the boat immediately ahead of us: emergence is estimated in—’ Shepard had one hand splayed and two fingers of the other upheld ‘—seven minutes.’ The lens closed up on her face. Faraway was holding a sign with YOUR NIPPLES ARE SHOWING felt-markered on it. ‘I’m going to ask one of the crew here what the exact plan is.’ Out of shot, Shepard was scissoring his hands, eyes wide with panic. Gaby avoided him and sat down beside the helmsman, a sunburned Scotsman with a black 6 on the red front of his suit. Crouching in the bottom of the boat, Faraway handed her a microphone with the Sky Net box on it. Tembo pulled back out to frame them both. Painfully conscious of her nipples, Gaby said, ‘Excuse me, could you tell the viewers your name?’

‘Gordon McAlpine,’ the helmsman said, watching the other boats throttle back as they came over the emergence zone. He cut his speed to match.

‘So Gordon, could you tell me what’s going to be happening?’

‘The idea is that we make a visual survey of the surface and pick potential landing sites – we’ve no real idea of how high it will rise out of the water; some of the locations that look good on the sonar map may prove to be inaccessible. The research teams and the recording crew will go in first; only when it’s safe will we run up beside them.’

‘So a landing is a definite probability.’

‘Nothing is a definite probability in this business.’

Back to the studio, the director whispered.

‘Thanks, Gaby,’ Jonathan Cusack said. ‘We’ll be returning to Foa Mulaku as information comes in, but if I might turn now to our studio guests, Dr Fergus Dodds of the British Oceano-graphic Survey, and Lisa Orbach, our resident Chaga expert, for their comments…’

Nice one, Gaby, the unknown director said. Don’t go ‘way, now.

She patted Gordon the helmsman on the back. They exchanged thumbs-ups. The boats cut their engines and bobbed on the swelling deep dark water of the Equatorial Channel. The press helicopters wheeled raucously overhead, waiting, waiting.

A single Scottish voice called out across the face of the waters.

‘Thar she blows!’

‘Faraway!’ Gaby yelled.

‘I have them already,’ the tall Luo said.

Going to you, Gab said the London director.

‘And we’re returning to East Seven Five where Gaby McAslan tells us something is happening,’ said the unflappable Jonathan Cusack.

‘It certainly is,’ Gaby said without a break. ‘It’s show time.’

It had started as a swirling of water, like current around rocks in a shallow river. Now the surface was punctured from below by sharp spines, dozens of them, arranged in rings and rings of rings. Only when their points were three metres above the surface did the spines begin to gradually flare outward. The knotted holdfast bases of the crowns of thorns emerged. Now the uppermost folds of the formations that looked like monstrous human brains broke the surface tension. Sea water ran trickling and gurgling through the fissures as the massive white structures loomed ever higher over the flotilla of small craft. The pinnacles of the crowns of thorns were now thirty metres above sea level and still Foa Mulaku pushed itself up from the deep. A structure was becoming evident. This was not an island, but a society of islands: white brain-formations surrounded by halos of high thorn coronets, linked to each other by a web of blue and red buttresses that were now surfacing, strand by dripping strand.

All this Tembo captured on his Chaga-proof camera and Gaby talked like she had never talked before; the wonder she felt in the presence of such events, and the fear, and the awe, and all the things the camera could not convey, and the way this thing out of the sea smelled and the huge deep noises that came from far down in its roots in the Equatorial Channel.

The boats started their engines. They moved slowly into the dripping labyrinth of arches and buttresses. The bright water beneath their hulls was brilliant with fish. Foa Mulaku creaked and clicked as it dried in the sun. Emergence had ceased: the thing that lived in the sea had entered a new phase of evolution. The white domes were splitting along their fissures. Objects shaped like tight-balled fists, but the height of two humans, were pushing from the cracks.

‘Hand-trees,’ Shepard prompted. Gaby repeated his words to London. The boats probed deeper into the heart of the alien archipelago. Above them, the white fists opened their fingers one by one. Gaby became aware that hers was the only voice speaking in the dripping, creaking basilica of Foa Mulaku and moderated her tone to a reverential whisper. This was a holy place. A drowned cathedral, Moon’s diary had called the Chaga. This was the place for which those words were properly written. Sagrada Familia after the deluge. But it had not drowned. It was risen. Venus on the half shell. The dragon in the sea, wakened.

Gordon the helmsman spun the wheel. ‘We’re going in,’ he said. The lead boat had already run up onto the shelving apron of the nearest fissure dome. The UNECTA recording boat followed it.

‘The Chaganauts are just making sure their face plates and respirators are secure before landing,’ Gaby whispered, pleased with her freshly-minted neologism. ‘Just to let you know back in London that if we go ashore I’ll have to put mine up and we’ll lose voice contact. They’re stepping on to the surface now.’

Shepard waved Gordon the helmsman to land.

‘They’re unloading experimental equipment from the boat,’ Gaby said. Tembo was lying across the benches with the camera resting on the prow for stability. ‘As you can see, the UNECTA camera crew has now landed as well. Our own boat is moving in, it looks likely that we’ll be making a landing, and I may be allowed to step onto the surface of Foa Mulaku.’

Now the studio had gone silent.

‘The hand-trees,’ Shepard tapped Gaby on the shoulder. ‘Look.’

Tembo reacted beautifully. He is a hell of a camera-man, Gaby thought. His God has given him a mighty gift.

The white hands were fully open now but that was not what had excited Shepard’s attention. It was that they were all aligned, like pieces of a mosaic, into a wide, shallow bowl pointed into the south-west quadrant of the sky.

‘Look at the angle,’ Shepard whispered into Gaby’s ear through the red and silver stretch hood. ‘I’ll just bet that’s twenty degrees.’

Gaby had set her life by the stars above Ballymacormick Point. She understood immediately.

‘The hand-trees seem to have formed themselves into what looks like a satellite dish,’ she told the studio. ‘As far as I can tell, they’re aimed along the ecliptic; in layman’s terms, that’s the astronomical plane in which the orbits of the planets lie. And we’ve landed. Gordon has run the nose of the boat up on to the shore. I’m holding off putting on my face plate for as long as possible so I can keep talking to you. I’m getting signals from the UNECTA personnel who have just gone ashore to stay where I am, but I’m certain that as soon as they make sure it’s safe, they’ll let me go over.’ And I am going to have a killer line for that moment, Gaby thought. As great as one small step for a man, a giant leap for mankind. Except I am not going to fuck it up like Armstrong. But Jesus, the first thing the world’s going to see is my silver ass going over the side. Boldly going where no woman has gone before and all they are going to remember is my cellulite.

Shepard left the main party to examine where the white brain-dome rose from the apron. He had a black 9 on the silver back of his suit. Gaby noted that his thighs did not seem to have lost condition since the photograph on his Arab desk had been taken. He reached a gloved hand to touch the mound. The surface puckered like a face frowning and shot out a polyp of white material. Shepard pulled his hand back. The polyp trembled, creased and folded itself into a hand, the exact double in size and shape of Shepard’s. Video cameras swung to bear. Tembo focused in like a sniper. Shepard cautiously brought his hand to within millimetres of the mimic. He opened his fingers, brought them together. The duplicate copied his movements. He cocked a thumb. The Chaga-thing cocked a thumb. He pressed his palm firmly against the alien palm.

And Gaby screamed and tore at her earphones under her hood as the hiss of the satellite link became a roar of noise and pain and Foa Mulaku thundered at the stars.

31

The moped-cab driver thought it was the funniest thing he had ever seen. Three journalists shouting at each other like deaf old fools. He laughed about it all the way to the Addu Reef Hotel where the foreign scientists had called the conference. When the journalists asked him the fare he spoke quietly so they would have to ask him again and again. The humour was well worth the tip it cost him.

‘Asshole,’ Gaby McAslan said as she entered the crowded foyer and left her bag with the receptionist. Her ears were still ringing. The doctors on East Seven Five had assured her that no permanent damage had been done when Foa Mulaku sent its message skyward, but not even the Sepultura Concert she had sneaked Reb into when she was fifteen, which she had thought was the loudest thing she would hear short of Doomsday, had lingered so long in the inner ear.

The Addu Reef Hotel had been designed to look like an ethnic fisher village. It stood on stilts ankle-deep in the lagoon. Its guestrooms, which the richer and quicker news corporations had monopolized, were clustered in little communities at the ends of boardwalks. Ethnic fisher villages did not come with en suite bathrooms or fully equipped gymnasiums. Ethnic fisher villages did not have vibrating beds filled with thermostatically controlled fluorescent gel, or glass windows in the floor to watch the fish, or packets of ribbed condoms and leaflets on safe sex in the rattan bedside cabinets. Ethnic fisher villages did not have rattan bedside cabinets.

UNECTA had taken over the night club to stage its press conference. The staff had arranged the bar seats in a semi-circle and set up a table in front of the DJ’s mixing desk. Most of the seats were already taken. Faraway added a SkyNet logo to the thicket of microphones taped to the conference table. Recognizing him, heads turned to seek out Gaby McAslan and bent together to whisper.

‘Nice angle, Gaby,’ Paul Mulrooney said, brushing past her on his way back from the bar with a glass of something amber.

‘That’s Shepard’s line,’ said a woman with a UPI badge she did not even know. Journalists snickered into their drinks. Gaby found a place in the middle of the back row of seats. Faraway guarded her left flank, Tembo, with the tripod, her right. Still someone managed to bump into her from behind and drop into her lap a crude cartoon of a kneeling man with an enormous penis fucking a crouching woman dog-fashion. The woman had long hair coloured in red ball-pen and a talk bubble coming out of her mouth saying, ‘Gaby McAslan, SkyNet News, with another exclusive.’

Tembo snatched the paper away, rolled it into a ball and put it in his mouth. He focused his camera, chewed and swallowed without comment.

The UNECTA team came in. R.M. Srivapanda, just off the sea-plane from East Seven Five, took the chair. To his right was a very upright African man in a severe black and white suit. Gaby recognized him as Harrison Muthika, Press Secretary from Nairobi. To Srivapanda’s left was an Asian woman who was introduced as Mariko Uchida from UNECTAsie’s Space Sciences Division. UNECTAfrique’s Peripatetic Executive Director was conspicuously absent.

The press conference opened. Harrison Muthika spoke first.

‘I would like to thank you all for coming this evening. I regret the short notice, but once again, the aliens have taken us by surprise. As you are no doubt aware, at seventeen-oh-eight local time the emergent marine object known as Foa Mulaku emitted a phenomenally powerful radio signal.’

There were wry chuckles and someone heckled, ‘Speak up, we can’t hear you!’

Harrison Muthika smiled. ‘This signal spanned the electromagnetic spectrum between the centimetre and metre bands and lasted for two hours, three minutes and twenty seconds. The power of the signal has been estimated at one hundred and fifty megawatts.’

Murmurs. ‘How was the power generated?’ a voice with a French accent shouted. Harrison Muthika held up his hand.

‘Please. There will be an opportunity for questions at the end. This enormous burst of radio energy swamped broadcasting in the East African, Indian Ocean and Southeast Asian areas: all communications in those frequencies were silenced. The disruption to cellular networks alone has cost at least twelve billion dollars in disrupted business, not to mention feedback damage to data storage systems. Television and navigation systems went down, contact was lost with several thousand ship and aircraft, as well as the failure of air-traffic control throughout the region. It is only by the grace of God that a major air disaster was averted, though we do not yet have a complete picture: outlying sections of the East Pacific net are only now coming back on line.

‘You may be interested to know that the anonymous NASA wit behind the names “BDO” and “Tolkien” has christened this event “The Scream”.’

‘It’s Carl Sagan, isn’t it?’ an American-accented voice shouted.

‘I can’t confirm that, and I must once again ask you to keep your questions for the end. The transmission has been analysed and has been shown to consist of one hundred and eighty-seven signals, each carrying a data-transfer code at a rate of one and a quarter megabytes per second.’

Gaby did sums on her PDU. The average whodunit could fit on a floppy disc, about one and a quarter megabytes. One hundred and eighty whodunits per second, times one hundred and twenty-three minutes times sixty seconds, that’s seven three eight oh seconds equals one million three hundred and eight thousand and sixty plus an extra five hundred and sixty-one for those last three seconds and that’s an entire library of Murders in the Ballroom and Bodies in the Library.

‘We were only able to capture the last one hour and five minutes of the transmission,’ Harrison Muthika continued. ‘Neural network analysis is still coming through – the code is unlike anything we have yet encountered – but we think we have enough of a recognizable pattern to be able to extrapolate.’ A liquid crystal overhead projector threw an image on to the dance floor video screen. The swoop through the arrayed molecules would not have looked out of place in the psychotropic dance videos that usually played there. Gaby recognized the intertwined spiral staircases at once. Dance to your own DNA. ‘This is not, of course, what would have been received, it’s an approximation by our analysts. The transmitted information consisted of a three-dimension matrix of data, expressed in terms of the atomic specifications of its components.’ Molecules coiled behind Harrison Muthika like serpents mating in a baobob, the tree where man was born. ‘The DNA model is only a small part of the transmission. The remainder is fragmentary, but if we are correct, it is of enormous significance. It seems to be a complete map of the human genome.’

Hands shot up. Harrison Muthika sat down and looked to Mariko Uchida. The UNECTAsie woman took the floor.

‘You’ve probably guessed that the target of the transmission was the Hyperion Object, or BDO as we like to call it. Why the genetic code was transmitted to Saturn space is something we’ll probably only find out when the BDO gets here. However, an hour after the end of the Scream, our Miyama orbital telescope took this CCD image of the Hyperion Object.’

It looked like any grainy, blurry charge-coupled device photograph to Gaby. The universe as seen through serial-killer’s night-vision goggles. An ellipse of grey on darker grey, pierced by the burnt-out crucifixes of over-exposed stars.

‘I’ll enhance the image,’ Mariko Uchida said. It was still a light grey shape against a dark background to Gaby, but was there something about the edges? ‘Here are the images the Miyama telescope took over the subsequent five hours.’ The picture parade was like a sequence of pages torn from a badly drawn cartoon flicker book. ‘The object keeps the same face to the sun; we assume that the systems of organization there require energy to operate. I’d call them “life”, except that they’re existing in pretty hard vacuum. Note the curvature of the rim.’ The laser pointer jumped from frame to frame as the AV computer flashed up all the images in array. The edge of the disc was folding upward, like flat clay on a potter’s wheel being drawn into a wide, shallow bowl. ‘The increase in curvature is very slight, less than one per cent, but when you consider the size of the object and that this happened over a period of five hours with the BDO about sixty-five light minutes away, you can begin to imagine the scale of the forces at work here.’

She loves them, Gaby thought, these mighty forces. That smile is not part of the architecture now. She loves being dominated by the powers in the sky. She is getting soft and wet on that platform thinking about forces beyond imagining. Whoever is with her will get it good in bed tonight.

‘The changes must have started the moment the first signal of the Scream was received from Foa Mulaku. We’ve had our own extrapolations done of what the BDO might look like when it arrives in earth space.’ A sequence showed a creakily animated BDO pucker up around its rim into a conic parabola and stretch. The animation ran twice. The first time the BDO stretched into a great cosmic egg. The second time it rolled into a cylinder five hundred kilometres long, one hundred and fifty across its flats. ‘The probabilities for the second, cylindrical form are higher; fifty-eight per cent against thirty-nine per cent for the ovoid. The other percentages are covered by wild speculations from perfect cubes to space-faring Cadillacs to old men with long white beards. The cylinder model rates higher because it is a well-established format for a deep space habitat. Given that the axial rotation will increase as the BDO pulls in on itself, like an ice-skater speeding up her spin by drawing in her arms, we estimate that the internal rotational gravity will maximize to point six of a gee, which seems consistent with an internal planet-like environment. This may just be human chauvinism however; the Chaga-makers have yet to show any anthropomorphic tendencies; there is no reason why they should need to create a biosphere inside the BDO. However, the content of the Foa Mulaku transmission is significant in this context.’

‘You think the BDO is being converted into a self-contained Earth-like environment as a kind of alien embassy?’ Gaby interrupted. She heard murmuring. She heard whispers and sniggers.

‘I do,’ the Japanese woman said. ‘I believe the Hyperion Object as we see it is a universal form that has been employed many times before by the Chaga-makers in their migrations and contacts with extra-terrestrial environments. There is no evidence that humanity is a particular end-point on their journey: they may well have left the mechanisms that turned Iapetus black and produced both the biological packages and the BDO many thousand or even millions of years ago and moved on to other star systems. It is quite possible that the system was programmed to wait until intelligence was highly developed enough to stimulate it, which we have done with our probes to the outer planets.’

Peter Werther had said it knows us of old, Gaby thought. Perhaps that is why it transmitted the DNA code and the map of the human genome; to let whatever is out there know that there is still life on Planet Three, and how much the smart apes have changed since last we met.

R.M. Srivapanda was on his feet now. He waved down the raised hands with his one good hand.

‘Please, ladies and gentlemen, questions later. There is more.’ He waited for quiet. ‘For the one hundred and nine hours prior to emergence, the Maldives Ridge Object has been emitting a series of high volume, long-time base, low-amplitude sounds. We have been recording these on hydrophones; phase-shifted and compressed, this is what they sound like.’

The night club sound system was very good. It played the recording without any hiss or distortion or growl of overload. It must be great to dance to, Gaby thought. The sound started as a high-pitched musical twittering that plummeted in a deafening howl of bass notes that made Gaby think of Portuguese fado singers and Islamic muezzins. The song concluded on a rising note that ascended into the ultrasonic through frequencies that made buzzing ears ache. Gaby remembered the old National Geographic floppy disc of whale song she had played non-stop on her bedroom sound system in her teenage Green phase. Dad had finally threatened to buy dolphin-unfriendly tuna unless she stopped. Whale song. It will talk to them but not to us.

‘It has been known for some time that whales use cold currents as waveguides along which song-cycles can be directed over several thousand miles. The Maldive Ridge Object seems to be using the mid-ocean drift to the same effect. Tracking of tagged blue whales in the Indian ocean basin has revealed a strange pattern.’ He nodded to the technician behind the mixing desk. A map of the ocean basin appeared on the screen, marked with red arrows with tails of varying lengths. The arrowheads were slowly converging on the blue star of Foa Mulaku. ‘The map only shows the Indian Ocean population, but we have evidence of migrations among Balaenoptera musculus pods in the south Atlantic and Pacific. Fragments of Foa Mulaku sound have been appearing in recordings of blue whale songs as far as Hawaii: the pods are communicating it to each other along the cold current channels. At current estimates, eighty per cent of the world blue whale population will have moved into the Carlsberg Ridge/Mid-Indian Basin region within three months, and the object is still calling.’

‘Yes, but what is it saying?’ Paul Mulrooney called out. ‘And why is it saying it to them and not to us?’

R.M. Srivapanda shook his head and pursed his lips.

‘At least Greenpeace will have something to do,’ Paul Mulrooney said. ‘All those whale burgers to protect.’ The comment did not get as big a laugh as planned.

‘Very well. That is all we have to say.’ R.M. Srivapanda looked at his colleagues. They nodded. ‘So, are there any questions?’

Three hundred voices clamoured at once.

32

She saw the light of the fire and walked toward it along the beach. Crabs scuttled around her feet, always that sufficient second quick enough to avoid destruction. The moon and tide were high. The ocean ran far up the soft coral sand. She climbed over the trunks of slumped palms.

There were four of them sitting around the fire on tube steel and canvas beach chairs up close to the tree line. Marshmallows toasted on sticks over the driftwood embers. One was a dripping blob of blazing goo. Cool-boxes held the full bottles; the empties lay careened in the soft sand. Three of the people wore white T-shirts with Foa Mulaku Sun’n’ Surf Club printed on the front. The fourth had a picture of a masturbating nun.

‘Gaby!’ Shepard surged to his feet. He looked a little drunk. ‘Press conference over?’

‘Reception said you would be down here,’ she said coolly. ‘I was expecting to see you back there.’ She would be angry with him later when there were no witnesses- She rubbed the palm of her hand against his chin stubble. Purr.

‘Come. Sit. Have a beer. Sorry we’re out of chairs.’ He introduced the white T-shirts: Depak Ray, Director of UNECTAsie’s Kavieng base on New Ireland; Mariella Costas from UNECTAmerique headquarters in Quito; Dave Mortensen from UCLA Riverside’s nanotechnology unit. ‘We’re blue-skying. What if-ing. Probing the outer limits. Entering the twilight zone. Opening the X-files.’

‘So, what have you found out in the Twilight Zone?’ Gaby asked.

‘That maybe the stars are not our destination,’ Depak Ray said. ‘Human intelligence evolved as a response to a set of environmental challenges which are specific to the environmental niche we inhabit. Those whales out there swimming toward Foa Mulaku are a different solution to a different set of environmental problems. The Chaga-makers are an interstellar civilization because wherever they come from, their niche demanded that they develop space-faring. We, with our ape’s hands and ape’s eyes and our ape’s brains and our ape’s obsessions with individuality and sex, are not evolved to make that jump. If the Chaga-makers were ever individual intelligences like us, they are not now; if we ever match their achievements, neither will we be.’

‘The Chaga-makers are the Chagas?’ Dave Mortensen said.

‘Our research at Kavieng seems to support that,’ Depak Ray said. ‘For the Eastern Pacific entities – we are trying to have the word “symb” adopted as the official term, “Chaga” is too specific to Africa – we have found that all the many thousands of seemingly different species are genetically linked to each other. They are all – to borrow a term from physics – isotopes of each other. The symbs are essentially one species with many dependant variants.’

‘Isogenes?’ Dave Mortensen suggested. ‘Like dogs: cocker spaniels, greyhounds, beagles, borzois.’

‘That closely related, yes, but the variations are very much more greatly differentiated.’

‘A clade,’ Mariella Costas said. ‘Genetically related to a common ancestor.’

‘More subtle than that,’ Depak said. ‘More like a watermark in paper than a family tree.’

The beer and the tiredness were beginning to work on Gaby now. The sand looked soft enough to curl up on and throw over herself like a sheet.

‘I can’t go for this all-nurturing life-mother goddess thing,’ Dave Mortensen said. ‘These people are engineers. They can dismantle the fundamental units of the universe and build anything they damn well like out of them. The Chagas – symbs, whatever – are made things. Technology. Machines.’

‘I have a problem with such a mechanistic view of the universe,’ Mariella Costas said. Gaby could not take her eyes off her moustache. ‘In my country we believe in community; that in our coming together we become stronger than our sum as individuals. The symbs are like families, communities, clans, tribes if you will. Corporations, perhaps: they have all come together to a common purpose that could not be achieved individually, and, in a sense, they all wear the company uniform: in their genes.’

‘But if, as the name symb implies, the thing is symbiotic, then it can’t be totally self-sufficient,’ Dave Mortensen was saying now. ‘Perhaps it needs humanity to be able to move on from this star system.’

‘The Big Dumb Object seems an effective enough way to propagate the Chaga through the galaxy,’ Mariella Costas replied.

‘Perhaps there are quicker, more efficient ways,’ the American said. ‘Worm-holes, tachyons, all that spooky stuff at the edges of quantum theory.’

‘You Americans, you must always have your dreams of the frontier,’ Depak said. ‘The place beyond that draws you on. “The Stars Our Destination”: the nobility, no, the superiority, of humanity over all possible species, and of homo americanus over all other humans.’

This is what it is all about, Gaby thought. UNECTAfrique/Asie/ Amerique. It is intellectual colonialism. The white boys telling the rest of the world what to think and how to think it. All the poor and the dirty and the over-crowded and the funny-coloured. Shovel-wielding Paddies included.

‘The Chaga-makers don’t need human Big Science,’ Shepard said. ‘They’ve got plenty of their own. Do you know how they made Hyperion disappear? A quantum black hole. So JPL reckon, based or gravitational profiles just before and after the blast. Something with the mass, say, of this island, compressed into a singularity smaller than an atomic nucleus. Out in space it’s innocuous enough, maybe twinkling a bit in the high gammas as it sucks in the odd stray hydrogen molecule. Feed it with ice satellite, and in point seven five of a second it blows in a blast of very hard Hawking radiation and super-heated accretion disc plasma. Ninety per cent conversion of mass to energy. Makes comet Shoemaker-Levy’s megatonnage look like indoor fireworks.’

Gaby thought of Mariko Uchida of UNECTAsie’s Space Sciences Division; how excited she had got thinking about the BDO. Slam-dunking micro black holes was more than soft and hot and wet. It was hog-tied and gagged and crocodile clips on the nipples: total submission to the powers in the sky.

They were debating now about what humanity could hope to offer entities who manipulated the fundamental units of reality. All we can offer the Chaga-makers is what it is to be human. But that is enough. And I think that is what the Chaga-makers have come for.

She flicked off her shoes and went down to the sea. She needed to connect with the reality of water. She walked a little into the tide line, feeling the run and suck of sand under her soles. The surf on the reef was a tremor in the water. Are there sharks out there, under the moon? Gaby thought, come in with the high tide through the gaps in the reef, casting their moon-shadows over the soft marl floor of the lagoon? Do they sense me, am I a tickle of electricity along their lateral lines? There had been little sharks in the waters around the Watchhouse, and once she had seen from the Weather Room the silhouette of a great basker off the rocks around the harbour entrance. If they ever stop moving, they die. They need a constant passage of water over their gills or they drown. A drowned fish. Oksana’s totemic creature was the wolf. I should have a shark tattooed on the upper slope of my left breast, Gaby thought.

She felt his presence as a vibration in the water before he spoke.

‘Too much for you?’

‘It seems kind of abstract.’

‘Everything is, until the BDO gets here.’

‘Walk with me, Shepard.’

He took her hand. No one had done that since she was eighteen. They bred them old-fashioned in the plains states. They walked along the water line, away from the fire and the people ground it and the lights of the hotel standing over the water.

‘Shepard, were you avoiding me at the press conference?’

‘Of course not, what makes you think that?’

She studied his face by the moonlight.

‘I wouldn’t like to think that I was an embarrassment to you, professional or otherwise. I wouldn’t like to think that you had some reason to be ashamed of me, or regret something you might have done for me. I wouldn’t like that at all.’

‘I’m not ashamed of you. I’m not embarrassed by you.’

‘So when the shit starts to fly, you’ll stand by me? Because it will; this is a dangerous liaison.’

She waded into the water, enjoying the heavy lap of it up her thighs, between her legs. She drew Shepard deeper: waist deep, chest deep.

‘Of course I will.’

She pressed herself to him, undid the fastenings of his shorts.

Her hands slipped inside his underwear, caressed his balls. He came up instantly hard. She wrapped her arms around his neck, hopped up and twined legs around his waist. ‘I’m very glad to hear that. You see, I would hate to share a refrigerator, a microwave, a music system, a shower and a bed with someone I couldn’t trust.’

‘You’re…’

‘Bags are back at reception.’

‘I love you, Gaby McAslan.’

‘I love you, Dr M-for-Mystery Shepard. Oh!’ Like blind deep-sea hunters, his fingers had found their way past the hem of her bleached cut-offs, under the elastic of her panties, and on to the tip of her clitoris. He smelled agreeably of sun block and beer, but she pushed herself as far away from him as her arms would allow because there was one thing to ask him and if she let him have sex with her now she would forget. ‘Shepard.’

‘Mm?’

He had his shorts down.

‘Ooh. You bastard. That diary.’

‘Mm?’

‘Do you know what happened to it? There are bits missing. Someone has been through it with a very sharp knife and cut whole pages out.’

‘I gave it you like I got it from Ol Tukai. If anything happened to it, it was probably there.’

‘But why bother, Shepard? If the missing pages refer to something UNECTA doesn’t want known, why not just lose the diary? Incinerate it, shred it?’

‘Don’t you ever stop being the Investigative Journalist?’

‘Seems not, Captain UNECTA,’ Gaby said, as she came down on top of him in the moonlit, shark-haunted water.

33

The first time she woke because of the strange bed.

The second time she woke because of the strange room the strange bed was in.

The third time she woke because of the strange dream the strange room made her have in the strange bed.

The fourth time she woke because the videophone was cheeping at four forty-seven in the morning. She could see him in the living room, talking to the handset with his back to her. Gaby had never realized how much hair he had on his ass. She sat up in the double bed and pulled around her the tapestry of stars she had spread as a quilt. He was talking in a low voice. All she could hear were his responses to the inaudible voice of the pixelated blur on the screen.

‘Fallen Angel? Where? What’s the ETI? What kind of response time? Hold it. I’ll be there. Say ten minutes. And the units are already mobile to the site? It actually works. Good. The Tupolev?’ She could tell by the way his shoulders moved he was smiling. ‘No problem.’ He folded the screen and came into the bedroom.

‘Gab?’

‘I’m awake. What’s going on?’

He put on a bedside light. It had a leather shade perforated with patterns of African animals. Antelopes and giraffes of light cantered across the walls.

‘Something’s come up. I have to go.’

He was dressing rapidly. He pulled his ready bag from under the bed. Gaby drew the tapestry tighter around her, feeling uncomfortably vulnerable, abandoned naked in an unfamiliar apartment.

‘Go where?’

She heard him sigh as he pulled his shirt over his head.

‘I can’t tell you.’

‘You can’t tell me.’

‘It’s a security issue.’

‘I though you trusted me. That’s what you told me that night on the beach at Addu Atoll.’

‘I trust you. Please don’t ask me about it, I can’t answer. This thing, it’s not just you, it’s everyone.’

‘How long will you be gone?’

He pulled on bush boots, dashed to the bathroom to get those extra toiletries you always forget to put in your ready bag.

‘A couple of days. Maybe a week, depending.’

‘Depending?’

‘You won’t catch me out that way.’

‘Fair game for me to try to find out?’

He was patting his pockets, looking distracted, trying to remember what he might have forgotten. He glanced at his watch.

‘Christ. The car’ll be here any minute. You do whatever you like, Gab.’ He swept up his bag up and headed for the front door. Gaby followed, swathed in needlepoint zodiac.

‘Shepard, haven’t you forgotten something?’

He stopped dead.

‘Jesus H. Christ! Yes!’ When he turned round, he did not kiss her, which was what she had meant. He had the look of a man about to ask a vast favour. ‘Are you still officially on the leave T.P. gave you for Foa Mulaku?’

‘What do you want me to do with it, Shepard?’

He took a deep breath.

‘I totally forgot. Totally forgot. I need you to go down to Kenyatta Airport day after tomorrow and meet my kids off the flight from LAX.’

‘Jesus, Shepard!’

‘They always come out this time of year. There’s a banda down on the coast, just north of Mombasa, at Kikambala. Take them there; you can get the key from my office. You can do this, Gaby, it’ll only be for a couple of days.’

‘A couple of days?’

‘A week at most.’

‘Shepard…’

‘Thanks, Gaby. I knew I could trust you.’

The door slammed on any comment she might have made.

34

Gaby’s videodiary:

August 27 2008

I have died and gone to hell.

People think journalism is hard. Journalism is running about getting chased by Azeri soldiers and slapped in isolation units and having to tell the finance company why you set fire to the very expensive 4x4 they lent you the money to buy and being lifted off the street by posseboys and gatecrashing society parties and living under the iron whim of T.P. Costello and flying off at a moment’s notice to the end of the world and never getting enough sleep but always having to look good for the cameras and too much coffee and never enough sex and regular mealtimes, what are regular mealtimes? cigarettes are mealtimes. Journalism is wee buns. Parenthood is hard. And long. And thankless. And comes without an off switch, a pause button, a rewind or a volume control.

This is my bedroom at the UNECTA beach house at Kikambala. Outside, the humidity is about ninety three per cent, the temperature in the same figures, the wind is rustling the palms, the surf is crashing in the reef and whatever things creep around in the night are creeping around in the night. Including some seriously big black millipedes with red legs. This is me hiding inside my mosquito nets. Not from mosquitos. Or seriously big black millipedes with red legs, though if one gets into this room, I’ll need institutionalizing. I’m hiding from Shepard’s children. They are the spawn of Satan.

I’m just going to have a cigarette.

Where to begin? Rehearsing it in arrivals at Kenyatta. Hi, you’re Fraser and Aaron, right? Your Dad’s really sorry he can’t be here to meet you, so he’s asked me to look after you and take you down to Mombasa and make sure you have a lovely time. My name’s Gaby. I’m your Dad’s live-in lover. Went over it and over it and over it as the flight data went from due to landed to in terminal until I had it by heart and they came through the door from immigration and I couldn’t remember a single word. My name: that was about all they got. They’ve probably worked out what I am.

Adulthood edits out the trivial but significant details of being a kid, like needing to go to the jax all the time and being continuously hungry and the fact that time passes more slowly for children than for adults. I should have made sure they went in the airport. I should have bought them brunch in the cafeteria. I should not have shoved them, jet-lagged, into the Landcruiser and been past Athi River before they realized what continent they were on, let alone who I was and where I was taking them.

Cigarette two. That bad.

I tried my best. Honest, Shepard. I tried to talk to them, which is not that easy when at any moment some refugee’s goat might leap under your wheels, or a refugee’s child, or just a refugee. Whatever I said, it was the wrong thing. Good flight? They told me all about how the stewardess had seen they were two boys on their own and taken them up to the flight deck to see the pilots fly the plane. My best friend is a pilot for UNECTA, I say. Her name is Oksana, she flies one of those Antonovs, you know? Really good friend; how about some time I take you to see her and maybe she’ll take us up on a flight and you can see how she flies the plane, wouldn’t that be great, no?

Silence.

Overkill.

I try television. I try video games. I try books, comics, movies, music, the environment. I die the death. They’ve no idea what I’m banging on about. You forget how much of what you thought was your childhood is made up of capitalist product placements and pop cultural ephemera that don’t translate from country to country, let alone generation to generation. Who was it said Britain and America are two nations divided by a common language? It’s going to be the longest five hours a girl ever spent in a 4x4.

Down past Kathekani the road comes within a mile of terminum. They’re trying to keep the main links to the coast open as long as possible while Kenyan army engineers cut a temporary earth road ten miles to the north-east, but it’s mighty hairy. Tourists and sightseers all over the place like ants on a picnic wait to see Tsavo West cross the road, and maybe a peek at the Chaga. All the campervans and tents and buses, it’s like Ayers Rock, or the Glastonbury festival.

‘This is Tsavo West,’ I say to the kids, like I had produced it out of my hat. And it’s mighty impressive, looming over the city of tents and campervans and all the people who have come to watch it. ‘Your Dad used to run this place.’

‘We know,’ says Fraser. ‘He was Research Director.’

‘We know,’ says Aaron. ‘He took us here a lot of times. We know all the people there.’

Try then to impress the guys by high-fiving with the SkyNet crew down to film the crossing. Added newsworthiness is provided by a matatu driver trying to avoid the traffic jam on the road and taking a short cut under the back left track of Tractor One. There are still folk alive in the tangle of metal: they’re bringing heavy cutting gear up from Voi by helicopter. Tsavo West has a million dollars of virtual reality manipulator system, but can’t pull a casualty out of a wreck.

I’ll swear on whatever you like I saw Keanu Reeves in the crowd with this season’s babe-on-the-side in mandatory khaki and cute boots. I try to point him out to the boys but Aaron’s looking at the wrong person and Fraser says Keanu Reeves is a nush. I’m not sure whether this is good or bad. I am certainly not going to do anything so uncool as ask.

After that, I think the only words spoken until Mombasa, when I had to ask them how to get to the Nyali bridge, were, ‘I need to go to the bathroom.’ And that several times. Why did God give males bladders the size of peanuts?

Of course they know the turn off the main road at Kikambala, and which fork of the sand track through the palm trees takes you to the banda. The boys run up the steps like it’s Home Sweet Home and I unglue my knickers from the seat to which they’ve stuck and heave myself into the banda wanting drink smoke bath and ten years of solitary confinement, don’t they give you that for child murder? and the boys are in the kitchen looking at me with that dismissive yet accusing curl of the lip children instinctively know crucifies adults with assumed guilt and saying they’re hungry where’s the food?

The food? I say. The food?

So it’s off on foot up the beach for half a mile clambering over fallen palms and saying no politely but firmly to the shell and curio sellers to this place the boys know called the Kikambala Continental Dining Rooms where the fish is off the seafood is off the omelettes are off the salad might be off but the steak definitely is and the only thing that’s on is the curry which, astonishingly, comes complete with chapattis, chutneys, pilau rice, vegetable sambal, dhal and something so hot I still have the blisters on my gums and is the equivalent of a dollar fifty per head. I order cokes but Fraser says that when they’re on holiday Dad treats them like men and they have beer. By now I’ve learned not to argue with them, so it’s Heinekens all round. And they’re big enough to put themselves to bed, thank you very much.

Shepard, I need you! I am lighting cigarette number three, hiding in my mosquito nets, talking to this dumb viewcam praying please, God, tell me what we can do tomorrow! I cannot take a week of this. Did you do this on purpose, you bastard?

The door opened. Gaby leaped up, stuck her head out of the mosquito net.

‘Aaron?’

He was wearing beach shorts, multi-coloured flip-flops and a most cute little Japanese bamboo pattern yukata.

‘Gaby, is there something wrong with us?’ He spoke like a miniature Shepard. Inflections, expressions, accent. Jimmy Stewart, the next generation.

‘What do you mean?’

‘Everything you say sounds angry.’

‘It what?’

‘Like that. It sounds like you’re mad at us, or mad at something.’

‘I’m not angry Aaron. I like you and Fraser fine. I don’t know very much about you yet, but what I do know I like fine. Is it my accent? Does that make me sound angry all the time? It’s just the way people talk where I come from, we don’t think anything of it because we all sound the same to each other, but yes, I think I see how it could sound harsh and abrupt and you could think I was angry. But I’m not. It’s just the way I talk. All right?’

‘OK.’

‘Look, I haven’t started very well, I know. I’m not awfully good at this; guys’ stuff, all that. I’m not having a great time either. I want us all to get on, but it’s just I don’t know what to do with you. Maybe you could tell me what you like to do, help me a little, here.’

‘Well,’ Aaron said, ‘we’d like to swim early. That’s one of the things we like to do here. Do you like to swim?’

‘I love to swim.’

‘There’s another thing we like to do, but Dad doesn’t know about it yet because we’re still learning it.’

‘What’s that?’

‘Play soccer.’

In Gaby McAslan’s head, the crowd at Old Trafford rose as one, cheering.

‘That’s something I like to do very much too.’

‘For real?’

‘For really real. Aaron, there’s something you could help me out with.’

‘What is it?’

Look at him standing there in his flip-flops and yukata, Gaby thought, and forgive me the betrayal I am going to ask of him.

‘Do you know what your Dad’s first name is? What the M. stands for?’

‘Yes,’ Aaron said solemnly, ‘but you must promise that if I tell you, you’ll never tell anyone else as long as you live, not even Dad.’

‘I promise. Cross my heart.’

So he told her what the M. stood for, and Gaby McAslan kept her promise and never told anyone else as long as she lived.

35

He paid the taxi and followed the sounds of voices towards the sea. They were playing football on the hard sand down by the tide line. Piled T-shirts were goals. From the cover of the trees, Shepard watched them run and shout. After Rutshuru it was like the play of angels. He felt that he had turned his back on a dark, looming continent and the monstrous, incomprehensible things that grew in its heart, and was looking out toward the transcendent, healing sea.

The boys wore only surfing shorts; Gaby was in an olive green thong back swim suit. She had a smear of fluorescent blue zinc oxide cream on the upper slope of each bare cheek. The boys wore the cream like war-paint across their nose, eyebrows and tiny nipples. Fraser took the ball off Gaby with a decidedly dirty sliding tackle, turned and blasted it at Aaron in goal. It was still rising as it went past him. As Aaron ran to fetch it, sending white sea-birds flapping up before him, Gaby and Fraser did a victory dance, shuffling their feet in the sand and shouting Ooh, ah, Cantona; say ooh-ah Cantona. Shepard was transfixed by the jigging blue stripes on Gaby’s ass.

‘Dad!’

Aaron hit him like a well-taken penalty. He had not seen him coming up across the sand. The ball rolled away toward the lapping tide. The others stopped in mid war-dance and came running.

‘You’re back early,’ Gaby said. ‘Fallen Angel not take as long as you’d thought?’

Shepard winced, as if inner scabs had torn.

‘You could say that.’ His children clamoured for his attention. He scooped them into an embrace. ‘You seem to be doing all right,’ he said to Gaby.

‘Californians would say I was getting in touch with my inner child. I call it playing.’

‘Dad!’ Aaron shouted. ‘Gaby taught us a football song!’ To the tune of ‘Stars and Stripes Forever’, he piped, ‘Ryan Giggs, Ryan Giggs, Ryan Giggs; Ryan Giggs, Ryan Giggs, Ryan Giggs.’

After that it never stopped being good.

In the afternoon they walked out to the reef with masks and flippers. Gaby pretended to be terrified of the boys’ stories of sea-snakes that came curling around your legs and bit you and you swelled up and went black and your face exploded all in thirty seconds. There was still no food in the banda so they went again that evening to the Kikambala Continental Dining Room. The Giriama waiter gave them a special table on the verandah where they could see and hear the sea and drink Heineken and laugh a lot. The boys were too excited to put themselves to bed and as there was no television or even Voice of Kenya radio it was decided that everyone was to do their party-piece. First of all Shepard sang the Periodic Table to the tune of Gilbert and Sullivan’s ‘I am the Very Model of a Modern Major-General’. After the concluding line about these are all the elements of which we know at Harvard, if there’s any more of them they haven’t been dis-cah-vered, he added, ‘actually, there are about thirty but most of them are just numbers.’

‘Plus fullerenes,’ Gaby said.

‘They’re not elements,’ Aaron declared.

The boys played the old King of Siam trick on Gaby, where she had to kneel before Aaron while Fraser made her say ‘O-watanna-Siam’ faster and faster until she was saying ‘Oh what an ass I am’, which is a trick everyone knows but she went along with it anyway. Then Shepard and his sons did a clod-hopping soft-shoe shuffle to ‘In the Mood’ to which they forgot the words and ended going dah-da-da da-dada, dah-da-da dadada.

‘Your turn,’ Aaron said to Gaby.

Among the debris of previous residents, most of which had been either alcoholic, narcotic or pornographic, Gaby had found an old Spanish guitar. She had reset it from its odd African suspended tuning. She sat on the wicker sofa, tucked her hair behind her left ear and sang first an old Irish Song about nostalgia for places that were now obliterated by farms, junked vehicles, trailer camps and hacienda-style holiday bungalows. Then she sang a song she had always loved about all the lies a man tells a woman and the freedom she finds when walks away from them. None of the males spoke for some time after she had finished. Then Shepard said, ‘I didn’t know you could do that.’

‘My Dad was of the opinion that every civilized human should be able to cook, draw, play a musical instrument, and sing in tune,’ Gaby said. ‘Me and the sisters used to make up soul groups. Put on the little black dresses and do the Motown classics to this karaoke tape we had.’

‘OK troops,’ Shepard declared. ‘Bed. Fishing boat’s coming early.’

They went without a murmur.

Later, when the moonlight through the louvred window turned the mosquito net to a pavilion of light, Gaby said, ‘Shepard, your kids are all right.’

‘Yeah. They are, aren’t they? I know I do it all wrong; it’s not all guys together, they shouldn’t be drinking beer, and they shouldn’t be ogling you in that swimsuit – which they do, believe me. They’re just kids, I should let them be kids. Every time I promise myself this time I’ll just be Dad and not King of the Wild Frontier and Indiana Jones, but then I see them and they deserve so much, and I want them to have everything that I have, see what I see, touch what I touch, hear what I hear, taste what I taste, feel what I feel.’

‘Ogle what you ogle.’

They lay a time side by side in the big ebony bed that had been brought by dhow from Pemba a hundred years ago.

‘Gaby.’

‘Shepard.’

‘What do you know about Fallen Angel?’

Gaby leaned out of bed to take a cigarette from the packet on the wicker bedside table.

‘It’s a plan to capture, isolate and analyse a biological package before it releases its cargo.’

‘How do you know this?’

She breathed smoke into the glowing apex of the canopy.

‘It’s a security issue. Between me and my sources. So where did the angel fall?’

‘Zaire. Eastern Zaire; place called Rutshuru. We knew one was coming – we’d had the thing on deep-space tracking for several weeks – but not where it was coming to: you never can be sure because of variations in the aero-braked descent.’

‘Except that it’s always within plus or minus one-and-a-half degrees latitude,’ Gaby said.

‘We picked a number of locations based on hit probabilities that covered a radius of two flying hours; that way when the package began descent we could get our mobile units to the target. As it was, it came down within half an hour of the base at Kilembe in western Uganda. All our mobile units relocated to Goma where the UN left an airfield and relief base from the Rwandan civil war. The helicopters were airborne before the thing hit the ground. The Sikorskys picked the thing up before it was even cool. They called me in Nairobi and laid on the Tupolev. I was the only passenger. Mach 1.8, all for myself. A guy could get used to this.’

Penis with wings, Oksana had called the supersonic priority transport.

‘I got there just as they were bringing in the thing in the inert gas pod. The theory was that the memes, the fullerene-machines, whatever the hell you want to call them, would not be able to replicate in a chemically inactive atmosphere. The labs were all set up – the engineers had been busting their buns – floodlights, power, the inflatable domes where the researchers would be working on the capsule. You’ve seen glove boxes where you put your hand through a wall to work in a biologically hazardous environment. We took it a stage further; we had complete suits connected to the outside by concertina tunnels.

‘The team suited up – they were French, a good crew, I knew some of them from Tsavo and Tinga Tinga – and went in. They opened the capsule with a diamond blade cutter – you’ve seen schematics, you know what the packages look like.’

Like things I used to find washed up on the shore, Gaby thought. Egg-purses, seed-cases, or the recursive chambers and vaults of mollusc shells. But cast up from a deeper and darker sea than the one that breaks around my childhood.

‘They took it apart like a medical operation – or defusing a bomb. That may be a better analogy. Each step very slow, very careful, very deliberate, all explained and recorded and documented before they moved on to the next. They spent an hour describing the process of cutting the outer heat-skin and peeling it back: analysis showed it be a kind of composite polymer wood with certain attributes of a flexible ceramic. Perfect ablation material. As they found it, the carapace was in an early stage of decay; it must become porous to allow the contents to escape.

‘Think of an orange – those elongated fluid-filled cells packed into segments – and you’ll have some idea of the interior of the package. But dark red, almost crimson. A particularly brutal blood orange. It was getting light by the time they removed the first cell for sampling. Each was about the length of my forefinger and terminated in a complex tangle of light-sensitive fibres.’

‘Nerve endings?’ Gaby asked. ‘Like a brain, is that what you’re implying?’

‘Seed and brain cells combined. The pod can program its own contents, change the specifications of the memes to manufacture different forms.’

‘No Bug-Eyed Monsters saying “Take me to your leader”.’

‘We’d done scans, taken X-rays, gamma-flash photographs. The structure was uniform throughout. We weren’t expecting any Bug-Eyed Monsters. For which I’m very glad; I was the nearest thing to a leader there.

‘I don’t know how it happened.’ A green lizard ran over the wall and clung, head down, under the window ledge. ‘Maybe the inert atmosphere wasn’t as pure as we’d thought, or the engineers rushed the job. First thing I knew that something was wrong was Dominique Ferjac thrashing around in her suit like a fish on a line. She must have sprung a leak, oxygen atmosphere had blown out into the inert chamber and the fullerenes had started to reproduce. The suit was like cheese-cloth in seconds. I should have pulled the plug then but the others wanted to get as many samples as they could inert-bagged and cycled through the lock to the outside. They didn’t know it would blow like that. None of us knew it would blow like that. We should have guessed; the thing needs to spread its spores as far and fast as possible. While we got Dominique out of the suit and into the decontam tank, air had been leaking into the inert atmosphere and when it hit a certain percentage, the capsule went off like a geyser. Like fucking Old Faithful. The bubble went red. It caught the team: we could hear them on the radio shouting for us to get them out, but everything was coming apart around us. The last thing we heard before we lost communications and the bubble collapsed was someone shouting sauve qui peut, sauve qui peut.

‘I almost went in there to get them. I was at the seal door on the outer bubble when one of the army officers pulled a gun on me and told me that if I broke the contamination seal he would shoot me on the spot. It was fucking chaos, Gaby. Fucking chaos, I still can’t believe everything came apart so fast. Somehow the army got the area cleared before the bubble blew, but we still lost the team, one of the Sikorskys and God knows how much equipment. Have you ever seen a grass fire, Gaby, that moves faster than a man can run?’

‘Down on Strangford Lough the tide is like that across the flats. I once saw it outrun a poor bastard dog.’ Gaby watched the smoke coil upward from her nostrils. ‘I can still see the paws, trying to push against the current, and its nose, held up out of the water. I remember its owner, frantic, but there was nothing she could do.’

‘It moved like that tide,’ Shepard said. ‘It moved like fire. Like fire, it consumed what it touched and left everything changed behind it. God alone knows how I made it to the Tupolev – I was last on. Last on. They pulled the door behind me and took off. Twenty seconds after we started to roll, the steps went. It was that close. From the air I could see the whole airfield; it was like one of those satellite photographs in miniature: this circle of hideous colour a mile wide stamped on the green hill country.’

‘You all right, Shepard?’

‘I’m all right. Now.’ He took the cigarette from Gaby’s lips and placed it between his own. Gaby’s heart kicked with sudden strange eroticism. ‘I thought I’d given these things up years ago. You never do really quit, do you? As soon as we regrouped back at Kilembe I sent a skinsuit team back for survivors. We got the team – they’re still decontaminating at Kilembe. But Dominique died, Gaby. She’s dead. The filtration and pumping system on her tank went down. She suffocated in there, Gaby. Alone. Trapped in the dark. Couldn’t do a thing about it.’

‘You’re not to blame, Shepard.’

‘I was senior officer, and all I did was run around flapping my arms and shouting while Dominique Ferjac died. I didn’t know what to do, Gaby. Something happened that I hadn’t prepared for and I couldn’t make up an answer on the spot.’

‘Who does know what to do, Shepard? It’s an alien world out there, it doesn’t obey our rules and laws or follow our management policies or research strategies.’

‘It doesn’t make me feel any better.’

‘It isn’t meant to. It’s a token of solidarity, from one person up to the eyes in shit to another. Because, as you said, at least it’s guaranteed fresh shit every day. And by the way, these things give you cancer.’ Gaby took back the cigarette, smoked it down to the dog end and stubbed it out on the floor. She rolled against Shepard, moved her hand over his flank in the way he liked so much he could barely stand it. ‘If that didn’t make you feel better, how about this?’

He smiled.

‘A little.’

‘How about this then?’ She did a thing he liked even more, that he could just bear.

‘Better.’

‘This?’ She moved her mouth down to do the thing he liked so much it almost killed him.

‘Best,’ he moaned, and took her long hair in his hand and pulled her head gently up to look at him. ‘One last thing. Your friend, Peter Werther. He was right. The Chaga has known us for a very long time. In the sample we managed to get out from the Rutshuru package, we found human genes. Or rather, proto-human genes. They differ from ours in a couple of small but significant chromosomes. We’ve done geneline analyses and generational backtracking and we think that we have the genes of Australopithecus, an ancestor of homo sapiens that lived and died on the plains of east Africa four to four-and-a-half million years ago.’

‘Heeeere’s Lucy!’ Gaby said, laying her head on his belly.

‘Heeeeere’s Gaby,’ Shepard said, and moved her head back to the place where it pleased him so much.

36

The plane took them away and there were too many chairs at the table and too few pairs of shorts in the washing machine and the rear seat-belts in the Mahindra were too neat and too tight and too unused in their housings. He was disconsolate. He had warned her he would be like that, but it did not make it any better for either of them. She was disconsolate too. They had been the best days. Snorkelling on the reef. Fighting over the last chapatti at dinner. Football on the white coral strand at sunset. Haggling for dreadful antiques in the Mombasa markets. Learning the tricks and secrets of tropical fruit. To the Mara. To the SkyNet offices, where Gaby sensed there was something too welcoming and smiling in the faces behind the desks. Especially the women’s. Gaby had not brought Shepard and his children as trophies of sexual victory, she was not aware of having fought a war of conquest, but she imagined the whispers running around behind her back like vermin. To the Elephant Bar, on the final night, where Oksana and all the Siberians who could not get drunk stood the boys on a table, drank toasts to them and carried them round the bar on their shoulders, singing ‘Consider Yourself’ from Oliver. The Siberians who could not get drunk were very into musicals.

And then they were gone and nothing was good. Gaby and Shepard bickered in Shepard’s ugly, under-lived-in apartment like two cats sharing a food bowl, until he went to Zaire to try to salvage the Goma debacle and she went to Tom M’boya Street to find that the whispers had mated and bred looks, and mutters, and little gatherings that always broke up when she walked past. There were snide post-it notes stuck to her videophone; she would return from the toilet to find crude animations of her and Shepard fucking on her terminal screen. No one admitted to these crimes when she stood and accused the room. The women barely acknowledged her, even her first ally Ute Bonhorst, and most of the men regarded her with polite distaste, like a leper in a candy shop. The Africans treated her as they always had, Jake Aarons was as comradely and at the same time distant as ever, and T.P. Costello held himself above office pettiness. Abigail Santini went out of her way to be friendly. Identifying the source of the infection, Gaby prepared her revenge.

She knew she would find them all at the particular table in the Thorn Tree: T.P., Jake, Mohammed Siriye from Editorial, Abigail. There had to be witnesses. Gaby got a drink from the bar and joined them on the patio. Nods. Greetings.

‘Isn’t that your ex-house-mate over by the jukebox?’ Abigail Santini asked. ‘That Somali woman?’

‘Why, so it is,’ Gaby said. She waved. Miriam Sondhai waved back, feigning surprise.

‘Who’s that white woman with her? The one in lesbian chic?’

Gaby shrugged and sipped her drink. ‘Must be a friend.’ You’ll find out soon enough, she thought. When Abigail went to the toilets, Gaby took her bag and accompanied her. Miriam and Oksana left their table a moment later and followed her in. They were waiting when Abigail came out of the cubicle. It was very quick. Oksana took the right side. Miriam took the left. Gaby bent her over the basins and pulled her head up so she could see both of them in the mirror.

‘What you have to understand is that I’m with Shepard because of what he is, not what he can do for me,’ Gaby said. ‘I know you may have trouble with this mode of thinking, but you should make the effort. It really can change your outlook on life. Another thing you should understand is that I’m not envious of things I can’t have. I know you’ve been pushing your tits in Shepard’s face long before I showed up, but what you don’t seem to grasp is that men are intelligent, men can choose, men aren’t just dicks with just enough motor system attached to get them to the next pussy. If Shepard had wanted you, it would be your underwear in his laundry basket, but he didn’t, and it’s mine, and it’s going to stay that way. Now, if we’ve got points one and two, maybe we can push on to point three. You do not go around spreading stories behind people’s backs that they’re cunt-brained gold-diggers who will stop at nothing to sleep their way to a good story. Because everything I have, I got on my own merits, by my own sweat and smarts. I don’t owe anyone anything. I see what I want, I take it with my own hand. Last thing to understand: I’m a Celt, we’re a people who prefer direct action to whispering campaigns. If something riles us, we do something about it. And we are people with very, very long memories and very, very short tempers. That’s it. Speech is over. Show time.’

She took the electric shaver from her bag.

‘You would not dare!’ Abigail Santini shouted.

‘Wouldn’t I? I’m T.P.’s green-eyed girl, I’m fireproof.’

She clicked the razor on and shaved a beautiful grey stubbled strip up the back and over the top of Abigail’s skull to the forehead. Softly curled black hair fell to the washroom floor. Abigail Santini struggled and swore expressively in Italian but Miriam and Oksana held her firmly. Gaby admired her handiwork. She had originally intended to shave everything off, but a Union Jack pattern of stripes was more satisfying. Abigail Santini would be forced to shave the rest herself. She pushed her enemy’s forehead against the raised rim of the basin and readied her weapon for a second pass from ear to ear.

A gloved hand stayed hers. The back of the glove was studded with Gothic spikes. There were silver rings on the fingers. The hand took the razor from Gaby and switched it off. The ladies’ powder room was full of young black women in serious leather.

‘Leave us, please,’ said the leather girl who had stayed Gaby’s vengeance. Abigail Santini turned at the door for a parting vow of hatred. A woman in leather pouch and pads over a ribbed bodysuit pushed her ungently out into the bar. The murmur of table chatter ceased immediately.

‘I stay with my friend,’ Oksana said.

‘It’s all right,’ Gaby said. ‘I promise.’

Oksana and Miriam left. The possegirls struck poses to match their clothes. Haran entered the women’s washroom. With him was the fattest black woman Gaby had ever seen. She wore a voluminous kanga dress printed with scenes from Kenya’s political history that made her look larger still. M’zee Jomo Kenyatta, father of the nation, peered from the folds of her matching turban.

‘Your peace negotiations have progressed since we last met,’ Gaby said. Haran smiled thinly and tapped one of the leather girls with his cane. She took up sentry duty outside.

‘Mombi and I have reached a position of mutual understanding. At the moment we are engaged in a process of assimilation and rationalization of our operations and clients.’

The big woman did not speak. She had most beautiful eyes. They should not be beautiful, Gaby thought. They should be piggy and cold in rolls of fat.

‘Ten drive-by shootings in as many days is assimilation and rationalization?’ Gaby asked. Mombi laughed silently but did not speak.

‘We kill those who require killing,’ Haran said. ‘These rude boys litter the streets; we are only doing the public a service, making the city safe for honest citizens.’ He perched on the edge of the sink unit and balanced himself with both hands on the knob of his cane. ‘Concerning our arrangement. I have made some progress in both your requests. It seems that both lines of enquiry lead to the same place.’

‘Unit 12? Peter Werther’s in there as well as William?’

‘He was taken there directly from the What the Sun Said community. That is our arrangement satisfied. However, knowing you would not be content with confirmation that he has been taken, and where he has been taken to, I have been conducting further enquiries on your behalf into the nature of this Unit 12.’

‘Which you are adding to the account.’

Haran smiled. At his signal, one of Mombi’s possegirls set up a PDU on a wash-hand basin. The screen showed a green and white wireframe CAD animation of an architectural plan. It looked like three of those romantically impractical wheelie space-stations from 2002 stacked on top of each other, turning slowly in dark green cyberspace. Gaby bent to the screen, trying to decipher scales and annotations. A tiny box was balanced on top of the central spindle. She knew what it was, and the whole thing leaped into proportion.

‘We obtained the schematics for the underground structures from Nairobi Central Planning department,’ Haran said. ‘They are much more amenable to inducement than UNECTA.’

‘It’s incredible.’

‘The largest piece of civil engineering in Kenya in the past five years. I can show you the construction details and costings. They are impressive.’

‘How could they keep something this big quiet?’

‘It is not so hard when the United Nations runs your country,’ Mombi said. Her voice was high and musical, another incongruity with her huge body.

‘What is it for?’ Gaby asked. Whatever price Haran asked of her, it was worth it to bust this secret subterranean citadel wide open.

‘That is where we have run into difficulties,’ Haran said. ‘It works to different protocols and passwords from the rest of the system. My operatives cannot get direct access to it. Our information is deduced from secondary sources like revenue, accounting, power consumption, logistics. From the engineering specification, which we obtained from the firms who constructed the unit, we have concluded that it is designed to be a self-contained environment. A comparison of catering costs with wages figures reveals an interesting discrepancy. There are fifty full-time staff on the unit pay-roll – most of them have medical qualifications, significantly. The amount of consumables passing into the unit system is sufficient for many times that figure.’

‘How many times?’

‘Approximately six times.’

Three hundred people, down there under the earth, in those circular corridors, going round and round in artificial light forever. Peter Werther’s tan would have faded under the fluorescents. To him it would be just another strange place. To William, who had lived most of his life outdoors, under the sun, without walls, he would wither and despair, thinking that he would never be let out again. What had his experience of the Chaga been that they took him away and shut him up in these curving corridors?

‘Who are these people?’ Gaby asked.

‘We do not know. UNECTA keeps no lists. This place does not exist, remember.’

‘How can we get them out?’

‘You cannot,’ Haran said. ‘No one has ever come out. How can you get people out who are not officially in?’

‘Only one thing comes out,’ Mombi said. ‘Blood. Every three weeks, a consignment of two hundred and eighty-three samples is sent by courier to the Kenyatta National Hospital Department of Haematology.’

‘We know this by the shipping documents,’ Haran said. ‘One of my posse members has a relative who works in the hospital reception.’

This is how it gets done in Kenya, Gaby thought. By a relative of a friend, or a friend of a relative. They had information networking in this land long before the worldweb spun its silk lines across the globe. Blood. Two hundred and eighty-three drops.

‘Which section?’

‘The GAPU HIV 4 research section,’ Mombi said. Haran laughed. Gaby had never heard him laugh before. It was like the bark of some feral animal scavenging along the lanes and hovels of the townships.

‘For so many months, you were living in the same house as the answer to your mystery,’ he said. ‘You moved too soon.’

‘Haran’s man has gone through the records,’ Mombi said. ‘The GAPU Haematology unit has been processing samples for twenty-seven months.’

‘They are testing them for HIV 4?’

‘It seems that this is so. As my partner has said, it is difficult to penetrate the security of these organizations. We have reached the limits of what we can find out. Now you are uniquely placed to learn the truth. When you do, I hope that you will share it with me, for, unlike my friend Haran, I am a woman who loves her country.’

Haran laughed again and pushed his cane forward. At the sign, the watekni moved from their positions to the door to cover the withdrawal through the Thorn Tree bar. Mombi inclined her head to Caby as she swept out. Haran paused a moment.

‘Most uniquely placed, Gaby. The truth may be closer even than Miriam Sondhai. If UNECTA’s Peripatetic Executive Director does not know what is happening in his own organization, who does?’

He touched the tip of his cane to his planter’s hat and Gaby was alone in the women’s room.

T.P. was at the table by the street. The others had all left. He did not look like a happy owl.

‘I can’t have this, you know.’

‘T.P., T.P., listen, it’s a conspiracy…’

‘Heard it before, Gaby. Journalists report the news. They do not become the news. It’s not professional. I don’t care who started it, but I will not have the press community thinking I’m running some kind of female mud-wrestling stable. This is a disciplinary matter, Gaby. I’ll overlook entertaining heavily armed watekni in the ladies’ jax. But you do not try to turn the senior On-line editor into Sinead O’Connor.’

‘Fuck, T.P…’

‘I’m prepared to let it ride this once, provided you donate a month’s wages to a refugee aid charity of your choice.’

‘Jesus. T.P.’

‘And I want to see the receipt. A written apology wouldn’t go amiss either. You’re dangerous, Gaby. Not just to yourself -that’s par for the course for a reporter out here – but to everyone who comes into contact with you.’

‘Trust me, T.P.’

He left some shillings on the table. ‘I can’t. That’s the trouble.’

‘T.P.!’ He stopped on the step down into the street. ‘I’ve got the diary, T.P.; She’s alive. And I think I know where I can find her.’

37

In the anonymous hired Toyota pick-up, Gaby McAslan watched the figure in the red onepiece turn out of the gateway and run along the grass verge. Fifty-five minutes. She waited until the woman turned on to Ondaatje Avenue and got out of the truck.

God, what if she has got a new code for the alarm? Gaby McAslan thought as she walked down the brick drive to the front door.

Three. Eight. Four. Four. Two. Seven. Four. Nine.

And pray.

And turn.

The door opened with the silence of aged mahogany on well-oiled hinges. It was in here. Miriam Sondhai was the icon of many virtues, but not the Madonna of memory. Her attention was turned to loftier things than the numbers that define modern life. She got her cashcard swallowed every week. As she jogged across the Dental Hospital car park toward Mandella Highway, she would have the door code tucked into the tongue pocket of her running shoes. Gaby’s entire scheme rested on the theory that Miriam was similarly lax with her passwords to the Global Aids Policy Unit system.

Where to look? The filofax on the table. Too obvious. She had a bad memory but she was not stupid. Same for the PDU. The handbag, hanging from the teak and antelope horn coat rack.

All truth is in the handbag.

She would be past the new Sirikwa Hotel now, waiting at the keepie-leftie for a gap in the traffic. Forty-five minutes.

Lip gloss. Small change. Stamps. Card for the hospital car park. Keys. Other people’s things. An envelope with a Somali stamp, franked Mogadishu. Silver propelling pencil. Paracetamol. Madonnas do not need paracetamol, or feminine hygiene products. A little flat address book, corners reinforced with Scotch tape. On the cover a brown man with kohl and a curling black moustache groped under the dress of a brown woman with kohl and no moustache. Indian Erotic Art Birthday Book.

Madonnas certainly do not have Indian Erotic Art Birthday Books.

She took the book to the coffee table, flicked through the pages of exquisite tantric couplings and anniversaries. Don’t Forget above a miniature of a green-skinned woman having her vulva licked by a man with his little fingers crooked in a spiritual attitude. Underneath, long codes of letters and digits.

Thirty-six minutes. She would be coming up on the big intersection at the bottom of University Road.

Gaby pulled up the PDU’s rollscreen and hooked it to its frame. The liquid crystal-impregnated plastic blinked start-up icons at her. She stroked the touch panel and opened up the directory. The call connection to the Kenyatta Hospital was made in seconds. A cigarette would be desperately good, Gaby thought. For a fatal instant she almost succumbed. She clicked for the Global Aids Policy Unit. Password queries interrogated her. She typed in the first of the codes in the birthday book. She went straight through to the Virology Department. Jesus, Miriam, take more care. It’s a sharp-toothed world that you’re running through in your red lycra suit. Another interrogative. Try the next on the list.

Invalid password.

Number three, then.

Invalid password.

Sweaty palms moment. Three strikes and you are out. Dare she run the risk that the next code on the list would be wrong too and alert the firewall defences? Fuck it. She’d faced down Azeri BTR 60s and Hart Assault helicopters.

HBP37FFONLHJC162XC.

No wonder she wrote them down.

The rollscreen filled with icons. Miriam’s workspace volumes pulsed hot. The answer could be in them, or it could be in any of the other hundreds of nested files. Up to now it had all been balls and adrenalin. Now came the work, to the metronome footfalls of Miriam Sondhai on the streets of Nairobi.

Gaby pulled down a find menu and typed in blood and/or samples. Twenty two files found, the PDU told her. She picked the first from the pop-up menu. It was a database of cell culture samples from an ongoing experiment into the relationship between the HIV 4 virus and the nuclear material of helper T-cells.

File two. Monthly staff blood test results. Joseph Isangere; confirmed antibody reaction. Jesus.

File three: blood types and organ-donor registrations.

File four: a locked file on the results of staff blood and urine tests for drug use. They’ll let you know someone has caught the terrible thing they work with, but it’s top secret if they toke a little sensimilla of an evening to get the damned viruses and the things they do out of their minds.

Twenty-three minutes. Miriam Sondhai would be on Uhuru Highway, beating along the earth sidewalks past the bus queues and the matatu touts, the city on her left; the bleached, dismembered park on her right: liquid and beautiful as Gaby had seen her that first morning from T.P.’s Landcruiser.

File five. Open sesame.

HIV 4 test referrals. Promising. It was a hell of a database. Fifteen thousand entries. Gaby set up search parameters for Kajiado, UNECTA, Unit 12. She held her breath as the command Find any went through to the hospital. Do not think about how long it will take to come through the cell net onto the PDU, she told herself. Do not think that at the end of Uhuru Highway Miriam Sondhai is on the way back. Do not think that there may be a hundred watch-dogs set to bark at the scent of any of these parameters you have set.

The search failed on Kajiado and Unit 12, but on UNECTA it threw three hundred names at her. Some had been found under UNECTA as accommodation address or employer. The majority – two hundred and eighty-three – cited UNECTA as source of referral.

‘Result,’ she whispered. Seventeen minutes. Ticking clock, pounding feet, heaving breath, hammering heart. She could copy the data onto the discs she had brought and be safely back at Shepard’s before Miriam Sondhai stripped down for her shower. But if they were the wrong records, she would have to break in to the hospital system again.

Check your source before you commit, Gaby. A thousand hacks in the welfare line will tell you impatience was their downfall.

She displayed the list of names.

Naomi Rukavindi, formerly of Moshi, in Kilimanjaro District of Tanzania; you will do for a start. There was a bad Photo-Me image of a startled-looking woman with nice hair and grinning teeth, there were statistics of age and physiology, several entry points that could be opened by password and sheets of antibody counts and lymphocyte activity curves and immune response deviations. At the top of the screen a number indicated that this was page 36 of 36. Three-weekly samples, Mombi had said. One hundred and eight weeks. Over two years monitoring the progress of a disease that killed in six months. Gaby clicked up find first and on a hunch spread it beside page 36. The counts and the ratios and the histograms and the curves matched exactly. She scrolled through the file, graph after graph. There was no discrepancy.

‘You should be dead, Mrs Naomi Rukavindi,’ Gaby whispered.

She sampled other UNECTA referrals. The first file was forty-eight pages, the shortest three. None of them showed any deterioration in condition. Not one had died of the killer HIV 4.

The face at the top of that most recent three-page file belonged to William Bi, wife’s sister-in-law’s nephew to Tembo.

She glanced at her watch.

Five minutes.

Christ.

She unwrapped the disc she had brought, carefully stuffing the cellophane wrapper into her bag as the PDU formatted it. Copy file, she commanded and watched the sands run through the digital hour-glass while she imagined Miriam Sondhai coming up Nkrumah Avenue, past the chain-link fence around the primary school. What if the traffic has been light? What if she has not been held up at the junction of the keepie-leftie? At any moment she might hear the pad of running soles on red brick.

The copy completed. She checked the hard disc for fingerprints before shutting down. And don’t forget the rollscreen. Jesus, the thing’s still warm. She was out the door when she saw the Indian Erotic Art Birthday Book on the coffee table.

Had the handbag been open or closed? Knowing Miriam, she bet on closed. The mahogany door shut heavily. She was halfway to the car when she remembered to reset the alarm. The armed light winked at her.

Plus one minute. Into extra time. She got into the hired pickup, started it and as she glanced into the rearview to move off she saw Miriam Sondhai come around the corner in Nyrere Avenue. Go. Go. Go. She glanced into her mirror again at the turn into Ondaatje Avenue and saw Miriam swing off the footpath into her drive.

Five cigarettes and a quarter of a bottle of Shepard’s sacramental Wild Turkey stopped her hands shaking enough to load the disc into her PDU and open up the stolen database. The icon unfolded in a list view. Fifteen thousand HIV 4 referrals, arranged alphabetically, starting with Aa, ending with Zy.

Aa being for Aarons. Jake H.

38

She heard the first shot as she was jangling the wind-chimes outside the front door.

Jake Aarons had a very beautiful front door. He had swopped it with a Makonde carver for his 4x4 down on the border between Tanzania and Mozambique. It was seven feet high and seven feet wide and he had brought it all the way back to Nairobi on the top of a matatu. Jake was very happy about the deal. A new 4x4 was easily bought. No one in Nairobi had as beautiful a door. But he was not answering it this morning.

There was a second shot. Gaby gave up jangling and went around the side of the house. She found Jake Aarons standing knee-deep in the pool in the quadrangle between the house’s two wings. He was dressed only in a pair of shorts with a red maple leaf on the left flank. In his left hand was a bottle of tequila, in his right a revolver. On the pool edge stood a full-length mirror. Gaby watched Jake take a long pull from the bottle, raise the gun at the mirror and blow a hole through the reflection of his own head. There were two other holes in the mirror; at groin and chest height.

‘Jake.’

He whirled, dropped the bottle, brought the gun to bear on the bridge of Gaby’s nose.

‘Jesus, Jake!’

The tequila bottle bobbed twice and went down. Jake lowered the weapon with a sigh.

‘He’s gone, Gaby. The bastard left me. Took my money, took all my fucking money, the little bitch. He packed his things and went and took my money.’

He grimaced like a silent scream and sat on the flagstone edge of the pool. The hand holding the gun dangled between his legs.

‘How did you find out, Gaby?’

‘Jake, I’m so sorry.’

‘No, I’m sorry. What you are is well-placed for a good career move. Over to our Chief East Africa Correspondent, Gaby McAslan. Rush around with commiserations and sympathy and brown-nose rich old uncle with the legacy.’ He brought the gun out and aimed it again at Gaby. It seemed too heavy for him to hold. ‘Unwise to contemplate blackmailing a man with a gun and absolutely nothing to lose by using it.’

‘What kind of person do you take me for, Jake?’

‘The most terrible of persons: the ignorant manipulator. You play with lives, you can’t help it. You are irresistibly drawn to those who are in a position to advance you. You don’t know this, of course, and it’s your complete innocence that makes you ultimately unrefusable. That poor bastard Shepard you’re banging; have you any idea the conflict of loyalties you’re costing him? Of course you don’t, you haven’t the first idea what a monster you are, honey, and because I’m a terminal old fruit who can say absolutely anything he likes, you’re going to have to listen to it and learn by it.’

‘Hold on. T.P. doesn’t know about this?’

He laughed.

‘Oh, I have given myself away, haven’t I? Nobody knows save thee, me, the hospital and that fucking faithless bastard who said he’d stay with me always and high-tailed it with his dick between his legs when he found out that Ol’ Bwana Jake had gone down with the Scourge.’

Gaby cried out and covered her ears as Jake emptied the remaining chambers into the mirror. Birds rose from their roosts on the terracotta roof tiles with a clap of wings.

‘Do you want to know the irony of it? You probably don’t, but you’re going to hear it anyway. It didn’t even start as four. It started as a dose of three I reckon I picked up from some emergency dental work I had to get done over in Uganda a couple of years ago. Safe sex? I wrote the book on it. The condom kid, that’s me. Safe dentistry? They don’t tell you about that one. But what the hell, if you can afford the AZT, the interferon and the antibody transfusions, you won’t even get turned down for life insurance with a dose of three. The hospital keeps an eye on you and every other month or so takes a blood sample to make sure the HIV 3 virus hasn’t mutated into the HIV 4 variant. And everything was fine, until last month.’

‘Foa Mulaku.’ She had got the story because T.P. said Jake was sick. ‘T.P. did know about the HIV 3.’

‘T.P.’s known all along about the three. You misjudge him, Gaby. He may be the last honourable man in Broadcast Journalism. The hospital called me in: anomalous antibody proteins in my samples. You’re dead from the moment they say anomalous antibody proteins, but you can’t stop yourself hoping. You look for signs and wonders, like rainbows, or counting birds on power lines or monkeys on trees, or adding up bus numbers to see if they come to anything but thirteen: anything that seems like a promise of a yes. You bribe Jesus with prayers and candles; Allah too, if he’ll do the job. Even the Hindu gods down at the temple: just give me a sign. And then the letter arrives asking you to come see Dr Singh and they might as well tell you in the letter it’s four, you’re dead, because then at least you could work it out in your own private coming-to-terms, and not having to go through sessions with a Personal Trauma Counsellor sitting with her hands folded and that fucking cow-looking-over-a-gate expression that is supposed to radiate empathy and understanding. Jesus Christ!

‘And then the person you turn to for real empathy and understanding, because of all the times he’s told you he loves you, he cares for you, he’ll always be there for you, he’ll always help you and sustain you and empower you and carry you when the road gets too hard for you and all that Jonathan Livingstone Seagull/Personal Development shit, leaves you three lines on a sheet of file paper on the kitchen table saying he’s sorry, so sorry, but his life path is calling him on. Life path! Takes five thousand dollars of my money to help him down his yellow-brick life path!’

Jake threw the gun at a glossy starling standing on the paving, staring at him with its head inclined. It leaped away into the sky with a squawk.

‘So, how did you find out?’ Jake asked.

‘I got into the Global Aids Policy Unit database.’

‘Not legally, you didn’t. Who hacked it for you? Haran?’

He is in control here, Gaby thought. His sickness has given him mastery over guilt and sympathy and he knows he can make me do whatever he wants.

‘How long have you known about Haran?’

‘We all make deals with the devil. What’s he charging you?’

‘An eye for an eye. But Haran didn’t do the GAPU files. I did it myself. Stole the passwords from Miriam Sondhai.’

Jake Aarons pursed his lips and nodded. It was a combination of gestures Gaby could read well; his professional curiosity was stirring. He could not stop it any more than a kleptomaniac could stop stealing. It was his hope of salvation.

‘Stay there.’ He went into the house, wrapped himself in a bathrobe and boiled a kettle in his blue and yellow kitchen. It looked like the kitchen of a man who eats out a lot.

‘Tea? Earl Grey? Tequila’s piss. Tea is thinkin’ drinkin’.’ He brought a tray with pot and cups to the side of the pool and invited Gaby to dangle her feet in the water beside him. ‘Now, talk. Talk to me of things newsworthy, because it stops me having to think about all the things these little chips of protein in my blood are taking away from me.’ He poured two bowls. The set was Japanese, decorated under the glaze with Buddhist prayers. Gaby kicked off her boots and told him about the blood samples from UNECTA, and about the vanished William Bi and Peter Werther and the place they had been vanished to. She did not tell him that the HIV 4 victims were alive long after the virus should have killed them. She did not want to give Jake a shot at a salvation she was not sure she believed in herself.

Jake savoured his tea.

‘I think we are like the Trans-Canadian railroad builders who started at either coast and met up in the middle,’ he said. ‘Answer this: What’s the great UN lie about the Chaga?’

‘Anyone who goes deep never returns.’

‘Now listen to a story,’ Jake said. ‘Back in the early days, before the UN effort found its feet and most of the evacuation and containment strategies were left to the national governments, the Tanzanians set up camps at Moshi on the southern side of the mountain to take the Wa-chagga people who had been cleared from the higher slopes. There was a common belief then that the growth would stop when it reached the bottom of the mountain. Of course, it didn’t, so not only did the Tanzanians have several tens of thousands of Wa-chagga to evacuate from the resettlement camps, they also had eighty thousand residents of Moshi and God knows how many from the surrounding district. It’s no surprise that in the chaos they managed to lose a couple of hundred Wa-chagga. In fact, it’s a miracle they didn’t lose more. Officially, everyone from the camps is present and correct, but a little magendo buys a lot of truth. When you find out that half a tribe has got lost, you get to thinking about what else may have disappeared as well.’

‘Or been disappeared.’ Not one word of this conversation was going according to Gaby’s game plan. We have roles to play, she thought. You are the embittered, dying man seeking reconciliation with the world, I am the offerer of comfort, sympathy, solidarity and trawling for a career move. You should not be talking to me about lost tribes. You should not have that I-Spy-Story glint in your eyes.

‘Thank God the UN and WHO keep records of those they process into their camps, or I would never have found the pattern. What I found out about Unit 12 is that everyone who gets disappeared there has been in contact with the Chaga.’

Still Gaby did not tell him what she suspected about that place.

‘I got curious about where this lost tribe went when they slipped out of Moshi camp,’ Jake continued. ‘They went back to their ancestral lands. To Kilimanjaro. Into the Chaga. In deep. And they’re still there. The Black Simba safari squads have had contact with their far patrols. They’re living, deep in there, and they’re thriving. The Chaga is looking after them. And I’m going in there to find them and prove that the UN has been lying to us about what it is really like in there.’

‘How?’

‘Like you said, we all make our deals with the devil. I didn’t fancy the watekni’s terms on my soul. I like simple cash transactions. So do the Tacticals.’

‘Jesus, Jake.’

‘Posterity will show who was wise and who was not, Gaby. The posses are finished. Every day the Chaga snips a little bit more off them. The Tacticals aren’t interested in information as commodity. They’re not interested in commodity at all. They’re interested in their future. They know the Chaga will disinherit all current vested interests. All but theirs.’

Jake Aarons poured more tea.

‘Civil war?’

‘In the end, yes. But not a Rwandan-style tribal slaughter-fest. Nor even Somali war-lordism. When it comes, and it’s coming sooner than the government thinks, it’ll be a war for and against the Chaga. To stay, or to be let go. The future and the past. While the politicians are starting to question the United Nations’ article of faith in indefinite evacuation, out in the townships there are powerful factions – my own Black Simba cartel among them – in favour of mass migration into the Chaga. Their safari squads bring more than goodies back from beyond terminum. The fact that they go back and forth so readily already proves UNECTA’s obsession about decontamination as a lie.’

It’s a blind to check for HIV 4, Gaby thought.

‘You’re taking me, Jake,’ she said aloud.

‘I detect steel in your voice, Gaby. This time that red-haired Celtic charisma is just going to have to fail you. My plans are made, they have been for months. If anything, the Slim diagnosis just gave me the impetus to take my courage in both hands and do it. Strangely enough, those plans don’t include you.’

‘I’ll tell T.P.’

Jake went into the house and returned with a cellphone.

‘Tell T.P. that his Chief East Africa Correspondent has Slim? I’ll tell him myself.’ He punched in the first eight digits of T.P. Costello’s direct line. ‘He ought to know.’

‘I’ll tell him about your little expedition into the heart of darkness.’

Jake’s finger hovered over the final number.

‘Old newshounds never die, he’ll say. He wouldn’t refuse his most faithful reporter and best buddy the chance to ride into pissed old hack’s Valhalla, least of all with the story of the decade attached. Your move.’

The words came in a rush, like starlings from a shaken tree.

‘I’ll tell Shepard.’

Jake stared at Gaby for many moments. He lifted his finger from the button and set the cellphone on the tray next to the Japanese tea-pot.

‘You would too, you bitch. So, Jake, went the day well? Sure; I look for support from the man who tells me he’d lay down his life for me because I find out I’ve six months to live, and three of them as an incontinent, incompetent, gah-gah skeleton hooked into a life support unit and he runs off with five thousand dollars. Then my business colleague blackmails me. Best of days, world.’

‘You’ll have my complete silence. The exclusive will be yours, I don’t want any credit. I just want to go in there, Jake. That’s all I’ve ever wanted.’

‘And the words Chief East Africa Correspondent under your face on the Ten O’clock News.’

In time you will stop feeling guilty about what you have done, Gaby told herself. It will be just another lump of pink scar tissue from the bad you have had to do to make good. She picked up the cellphone.

‘So, do I call Shepard?’

‘I’ll call for you tomorrow, about eight,’ Jake said. ‘I’ll introduce you to the team, I’ll put your case, but the decision about whether you go or not is theirs. Whatever they decide, you will keep silent. If you betray the Black Simbas, not all the favours in Haran’s bag will save you from them. You understand me?’

‘I understand you.’

‘Tomorrow. Eight.’

39

Gaby’s text diary

Day One.

I write this diary sitting against the great baobab that is all that remains of the world I understand.

Camp One is five miles within terminum at the foot of the sudden lift of forest called the Great Wall, in a zone of transition where terrestrial life is dismantled and incorporated into Chaga life. The chaotic terrain of land corals and rotting acacias makes it a good place to hide from the spy satellites, Moran, our leader, says. Tomorrow we will go in under the canopy. That is, if it doesn’t come to us first. The Great Wall is on the move. We are camped among beige barrel-shaped objects like straw mushrooms three times my height. Every so often one will split and extrude a slender dark red bole. You can see them grow before your eyes. Some go up a hundred, a hundred and fifty feet without any sign of stopping. I wish I could have brought the visioncam. So much more easy to show than describe, but Jake guards the Chaga-proofed camera’s limited stack of pre-loaded discs jealously.

If I’ve learned anything from Moon’s diary – which I carry with me in my pack – it’s the importance of knowing where to start. So I won’t begin with the lies I told Shepard about the reporting jobs or the surreptitious gathering of my gear – the canvas back pack, the hand-tooled all-leather boots, the metal canisters for water, toiletries, sun-block, cigarettes – even the Chaga-proof steel toothbrush; or the meeting above the shop on Kamukunji Street where I was introduced to Moran and M’zee and Sugardaddy and Rose and Bushbaby.

I’ll begin with the fire-fight, because it marks a definitive transition from the familiar to the alien. We’ve been walking south towards Terminum, from the place where the Black Simbas’ humpy dropped us. M’zee; who, as his name suggests, is the oldest and most experienced in our team – sees a plume of dust south of us that is moving against the general direction of the willy-willys that blow across the Amboseli plain. M’zee glasses it and confirms: a scavenger patrol in a recycled 4x4 they’ve fitted with a heavy machine gun. We’re pinned between it and the spy satellite coming over the horizon in ten minutes. On Moran’s orders, we take cover in a dry gulch under our thermal profile quilts. These are amazing pieces of military technology: they draw body heat from the inside and redistribute it to match the average profile of the environment outside. You’re effectively infra-red invisible. My chief concern is not scavengers or satellites, but finding a scorpion creeping over me. I wait. I sweat. I dread. Then I hear the helicopters and freeze. The satellite is up, has spotted the scavengers and alerted the military. The Air Cav come right over the top of us, hover, and move off into the south. They cannot possibly hear anything but themselves, but I hold my breath until red spots balloon in front of my eyes. Just as I am on the verge of self-inflicted anoxia, the helicopters move off into the south. A few moments later, there is the distant stutter of heavy machine gun fire, the turbine shriek of helicopters taking evasive action and then the snapping, staccato rattle of Gatling fire. I feel the ground shake to a dull explosion and no more gun fire. The helicopters pass over us once again and swing away into the west.

When the satellite is down below the horizon, we roll up our thermal quilts and move quickly before ground troops come in to secure the area. I know from experience how far a column of smoke is visible in this country. Our course takes us close by the wreck: Jake begs a photo-opportunity. Moran agrees, sends Sugardaddy with us, for protection. Sugardaddy does not expect survivors, but death in the bush attracts a dangerous wake. I take shots of the smouldering shell of blackened steel and the corpses scattered on the charred ground. I’ve never seen a killed human being before.

The fire has burned the upper parts to the bones; the parts in contact with the ground are intact, down to the scraps of blue denim and cotton T-shirt. Jake says that is the way bodies burn in war. When a jackal more courageous than its packmates darts in to tear at one of the bodies, I scream, kill it, just kill the fucking thing, can’t you? Sugardaddy calmly lifts his Kalashnikov and blows the bastard thing into the bush in a shatter of bone and gut.

Moran is angry that Sugardaddy has risked security with a shot, but Sugardaddy is a Luo, like Faraway, and, like Faraway, satanically vain. Calling on the respect due his age and experience, M’zee keeps the peace between the two men, but the day will soon come when Sugardaddy and Moran will fight to the death, like pack animals. We are all jackals, out here.

We were on such high alert watching for the dust trails of soldiers coming to investigate that I only noticed we had crossed terminum when I felt a crawling sensation on my left wrist like I used to get when I was a kid and the cats slept on the bed and I imagined their fleas were creeping all over me. My Swatch was breaking out in orange pimples. I had been so careful about everything else and forgotten about the plastic watch. I dropped it to the hexagon-cover just as the strap rotted into rags and drips of digested polyethylene. My last connection with the human world was broken: time. There is no time in here; no history, no future, only the eternal now. Present, and presence: the sensation of the Great Wall at my back is that of an almost sentient mystery, crawling toward me on a billion red millipede legs.

40

Gaby’s text diary

Day Two

Time for a line while they get the boats ready

All morning we have marched through the Great Wall. If the edgelands taxed my powers of description, the Great Wall staggers me. The slender red trunks rise for five, six hundred feet before dividing and re-dividing into hundreds of branch-lets, each of which supports a single enormous hexagonal leaf. These leaves all lie in a horizontal plane so that they form a more or less continuous surface: the impression is not of being in a forest, but among the pillars that hold up the roof of the world.

‘Ecclesiastical… like being in a drowned cathedral’, my forerunner described this place in her diary. I hate to have to use another’s analogy – especially her’s – but it best conveys the feel of this place. The roof-leaves are translucent and colour the light that falls through them in a cyclorama of ancient lights, interspersed by edges of white where the sun shines through the gaps between plates. About thirty, forty feet from the ground, the trunks split into enormous aerial roots and buttresses so that we walk through an architecture of vaults and arches and piers.

Things move up in the canopy; some so fast you cannot be sure you have seen them, some so slow you cannot be certain they are moving at all. A long way off, something is twittering. Nothing earth-born ever made a noise like that.

How do I feel, moving through this cathedral-like place? Spooky: exalted. Unbelieving, as if it has all been painted by Hollywood set designers and will fall down with a crash when the wind blows strong enough. Wishing it to be real, hoping to glimpse again that thing I saw gliding between the smooth trunks that looked the size of a microlyte, but at the same time impatient to see what novelty the Chaga will reveal to me next.

We move like small, fierce vermin through this colossal landscape. As befits El Macho Honcho, Moran goes first, his trusted deputy M’zee behind him; next comes Bushbaby, then the other woman, Rose, who has not cracked one word to me since we started, then Jake, me, and bringing up the rear, Sugardaddy. Seven of us. I’m sorry. Once it got into my head it just wouldn’t go away. How could you resist the temptation to sing ‘heigh-ho, heigh-ho’?

Not forgetting the dog. Which is a shit-brown mongrel that you see hundreds of sniffing around in the townships and pissing on things and being driven off with stones. But out here, its pariah nose triumphs where man-made navigation devices fail. It’s led us straight to the cache where they have buried the canvas boats. That is because he isn’t any old pariah, Bushbaby says proudly. He’s been bred to this work. By the silent Rose, her cousin. She breeds and handles Chaga-hounds. None better, she says. I believe her. While the boys snap the boats together, I sit and moan and groan and try to ease my blisters and nipple-rub. My collar bones are rasped raw. Rose reaches up to this thing that looks like a red honeycomb growing on the root buttress under which we are sheltering. She squeezes a brightly coloured blob from one of the cells. She offers it to me and, for the first time, speaks.

‘For you,’ Bushbaby translates from Kalenjin. ‘Eat it. It will make you feel better. It is quite safe. It is forest food. Anything that is red in the Chaga will always be edible.’

Better death than nushing out, as Fraser and Aaron Shepard would say. I pop the thing in my mouth. It is the size of a finger banana, the texture of a jungle slug and tastes of cinnamon, whisky and leaf mould. Two minutes later a glow starts in my belly. As I write this, I feel I can march straight up the trunk of one of these roof trees carrying everyone on one hand. Plus the dog. I feel good, da-na da-na da-na da. It grows all over the Chaga, this stuff. The market potential would be incredible, if I could get some out. Doesn’t keep, Bushbaby tells me. Like the manna of the Israelites. Didn’t their holy food come down from heaven too?

But I notice a thing about Rose. When she gives me the forest food, I see that the little finger of each hand has been crudely amputated.

Moving out now. More when I get the chance.

(Later)

Moon can’t have come this way. I can’t find any reference in her diary to these swamps and waterways that meander through this incredible, terrifying terrain. But she wrote years ago: the Amboseli swamps would have been outside terminum. The ruins of the old Ol Tukai game lodge she describes must be days ahead of us. When you are in the Chaga, you forget that as you move inward through it, it moves outward past you.

There is a sky again. The ceiling of the Great Wall has broken up into isolated roof-trees (how hard it is to give names to things, to describe them as they are, not how they seem!) rising sheer out of what Moon describes elsewhere ‘drained coral reef’. Yes, but on the mountainous scale: The finger-corals are hundreds of feet high, the brain-corals the size of houses, hand-trees almost as tall as the parasol-sequoias, miniature Foa Mulakus, all stilt legs and horns. Most of what we pass through I can only describe by listing their mundane counterparts. Cornucopias. Organ pipes. Mug-trees. Bubbles. Light bulbs. Frozen chickens (really! About the size of a truck, and exactly that morbid shade of factory farm chicken skin). Cathedrals. Mixer taps. Windmills. Cheese graters. Pantyhose. Watch springs. Candelabras. Scramble nets. We follow the narrow, twining watercourse through a Disneyland of kitchen paraphernalia. FX by Hieronymus Bosch. Our boats are eerily silent, powered by truck-battery engines. We leave hardly a crease on the water as we move between the overhanging pipes and frills. Jake is in the lead boat with Moran and M’zee. Mere women and dogs follow, with the untrustworthy Sugardaddy’s hand on the tiller.

We are in a state of armed vigilance. The Chaga seems to suit everything that comes into it very well. Hippos are public enemy number one. They could easily capsize these snap-together canvas assault boats. Bushbaby and Rose have Uzis: the only satisfactory way to stop a hippopotamus is to put the maximum number of shells into it, in the minimum amount of time. Personally, I’d feel much happier with something with the firepower of half a regiment rather than this fifty calibre Magnum they’ve given me, even with the dandy little Chaga-proofed laser sight that I mustn’t use too often because we can’t change the power pack. Go ahead, hippo, make my day. Did I fire five shots, or did I fire six?

Some of the birds I’ve seen hunting in the shallow water seem to be carrying strange parasites like autonomous, mutated body organs.

About ten minutes ago, Rose, through Bushbaby, asked if she could braid my hair for me. I’ve been admiring hers since I met her at the pick-up point: plaited and wrapped with threads, string and wax, strung with tiny Indian bells and amber beads. Bushbaby says they’ve both been admiring my hair for as long. They can’t get over the colour. Rose unpacks her threads and wires and beads from her pack, sits behind me and sets to work. She lifts my hair. I grasp her hand, turn to face her.

‘Posse?’ I ask, holding up the maimed hand.

She nods her head. ‘Mombi.’

You see the pink Cadillacs and the zoot suits and the girls cute and pouting in nylon and leather. You never see the deputies and the law they enforce. For the first infringement, the left little finger. For the second, the right little finger. To keyboard users, this maiming is symbolic as well as functional.

They lose their patience when it comes to the third offence.

I kiss the back of Rose’s hand, never taking my eyes off her.

She’s doing a fabulous job on my hair. The beads swing and click at every move of my head. It’s more than just a pass-time or sign of personal affection. It’s a ritual. A marking. I’m one of the tribe now.

Moran is shouting back from the lead boat. We’ll camp tonight at the remains of Ol Tukai Lodge where this snow-watered swampland runs out of Lake Amboseli and we enter the Loolturesh Discontinuity. I am back in her footsteps again: Moon, Niamh O’Hanlon, my Arne Saknussen.

(Later)

Moran says he thinks there is somebody else out there.

Day Three

M’zee agrees. We are not alone in here. It’s not the Wa-chagga: their country is on the far side of the discontinuity. UNECTA explorers are a possibility. The Black Simbas have no quarrel with them, but UNECTA reports to the military, with whom all the Tacticals are unilaterally at war, so contact is best avoided. The only thing the Tacticals hate more than the military are their cartel rivals. A lot of wealth and power crosses terminum into the camps, some are realizing later than others, so they send combat teams to follow the safari squads to their source, kill everything that breathes and claim what they find for their cartel. They’re scary. The Wa-chagga nation have a treaty with the Black Simba Cartel, they will protect us from claim jumpers. But they are a day away across Lake Amboseli in open canvas boats and the first and last you will know about claim jumpers is the itch of a laser sight on your forehead and nothing ever again. Fabulous. Apocalypse Now in the Loolturesh Discontinuity.

There are things scarier than claim jumpers. Obi-men. Forest wanderers. People who have found their way into the Chaga, become trapped by it, and changed.

Changed? I ask.

No one answers.

Jake is with us in the women’s boat today. He wants footage of the lake crossing and feels he should direct the shots so we don’t waste space on our limited supply of discs. He’s never been this deep. Lake Amboseli had once been seasonal, fed by subterranean springs drawing snow melt from the mountain, evaporating in the heat of the dry season. Now it is permanent, sealed under the transparent roof of the Loolturesh Discontinuity. The roof is made of balloons fifty metres in diameter, stuck together somehow, moored about three hundred metres up on lines and gnarled hold-fasts gripping the floor of the lake. Thousands, probably millions, of balloons, as clear as glass. Shot: a receding perspective of the still waters of Lake Amboseli with infinite regress of vertical lines. Steering through the hold-fasts makes slow passage, especially when you do not know what you will find around the next knot of cables and roots.

There are things moving in the balloon canopy; things that cling to the curved undersurfaces, feeding off the occasional veils of translucent blue moss; and other things that float like animate zeppelins, steering themselves between the cables by languid ripplings of gossamer tail membranes. Jake has to tell me to stop shooting. But they’re there, they’re real. I have them.

Monkeys have colonized this vertical landscape. They run up and down the cables, fingering morsels out of the crevices between the plaited strands, cramming their faces as they watch us pass beneath. Many of them carry elegantly obscene deformities: antlers of green coral, mottlings of green and purple mould, extra sets of red arms and hands.

Changed.

She saw this, I remember. She noted this. But she draws no conclusions about whether these are pre-natal deformities or the Chaga somehow manipulating the flesh of the grown animal. No conclusions that I have read. Maybe they, like so much, are in the vanished pages.

This landscape breeds paranoia.

Jake. I am learning not to treat him as a folio of clichés. He is more alive here, with death so strong inside him, than I have ever seen him before. He manages to maintain his sartorial crispness – God knows how, I look like Jana of the Jungle after a heavy night. Even his sweat rings are precisely circular. His spirit is strong, but I fear that his body is beginning to betray him. He tires easily. And his sleep is troubled – several times a night he will cry out loud enough to wake the camp. Jake tells me he hears voices in his sleep. Mutterings in his hind brain, like someone talking in another room, loud enough for the voice to be heard but not the words it is speaking.

She wrote about spirit voices, calling her deeper into the heartlands. She imagined them to be lost, crazy Langrishe’s. Did she ever find him? Is he still out there in all those thousands of square miles of the alien?

(Later)

Camp three. Well into the weird now. I should do that doo-de-doo-doo, doo-de-doo-doo from the Twilight Zone, except everything up here does it naturally.

Up here.

Ha ha.

We’re on the far side of the Discontinuity, in the land of the Crystal Monoliths. The Land of the Wa-chagga. We hope it was their turds Dog found close by the landing where we stashed the boats. Fresh turds. About an hour or two old. Nothing lasts too long here. If they aren’t Wa-chagga, they mean that the ones who were following us are no longer following us. They’re in front of us.

Beyond the Discontinuity the terrain changes as abruptly as those old Tarzan movies where Johnny Weissmuller runs from Sahara sand straight into tropical jungle. The Crystal Monolith zone isn’t just one Chaga. It’s a whole department store of them, stacked on top of each other. Each level is a separate biosphere, with its own unique flora and fauna. The way forward is up.

Dog’s unfailing nose leads us right to the climb, a hundred or so steel pitons hammered into the main column of what looks like a Fassbinderesque Fitzcarraldo-fantasy of an oil refinery lost in Amazonia. Sugardaddy unpacks a couple of hundred yards of old-fashioned hemp mountaineering rope and body harness and goes up the pitch. It’s beautiful. Rock dancing. He hauls up Dog, who swings slowly in his harness, like a canine Foucault pendulum.

The only thing holding me to these steel pitons is the determination that I am not going to be hauled up like a side of meat. Don’t look down, they say. I have no problem with that. Rose comes up after me with almost as much style as Sugardaddy, Uzi dangling under her ass.

There’s an old American slave expression I can’t get out of my head: the Way in the Air. We are pilgrims on that Way, toward holy Zion; Ngaje N’gai, the House of God in Masai. Up here, you see that it is not so much a level as a web of spans, buttresses and branches. Imagine the organic equivalent of an LA freeway interchange and you’ve something of it. The branches are as wide as freeways. Where the spans join, you could host a full-size Cup Final with all the supporters and car parking. It’s easy to be blasé: most of what surrounds you is empty space. Get careless, and it’s four hundred feet straight down. Dog goes snuffling along the thinnest tendrils with heart-stopping nonchalance.

Only a little light filters down through the higher levels. I stop a moment to savour a rare beam of sunlight on my face. Looking up it, I see a handful of blue sky scratched by a jet contrail. This level is Monkeyland, with a few tribes of chimps (is that the proper collective noun?) thrown in. The chimps seem to rule the roost and have absolutely no fear of humans. They hoot at us from their enclaves high on the trunks, throw shit at us. Some of the bigger chimps carry the thigh-bones of large animals.

Are chimps supposed to do that?

M’zee smelled the storm coming before the first gusts drew spooky sobbings and moanings from the tier forest. We make it to a flange and set up Camp Three as the gale hits us. A big wind in the Chaga is a mighty scary thing. Everything moves. Everything tosses and sways and creaks and groans and every moment you think, Oh Jesus, it’s all going to fall apart, we are all going to die. You look for something strong and secure to hold on to, but everything is moving with you. And the wind really howls, like it is after your soul, and if it can’t get that, your body will do. It would have blown us, in our little thermal quilts, clean off the level and into four hundred feet of screaming death, were we not buttoned up. Bushbaby, Rose, me and Dog, who is lying proudly licking his erection, are bundled up in something like a cross between a secret cave and a sleeping bag that opened in a tree trunk when Moran licked it. Inside, it’s a spongy tube lit by bioluminescent patches that stretches as you push at it until there’s enough room for three women (in somewhat close proximity) and a dog. Bushbaby showed me the teat in the floor you can suck for a supply of nutrient sap. Tastes like piña colada, she says. I’m not that desperate. Yet. Above the slit door through which we squeezed, like birth in reverse, is a tennis-ball sized bud that Rose stroked to seal the membrane against the rising storm. The same trick will open it. All a tad parturitional for my liking. Peter Werther, the Chaga Adam, spoke of being sheltered in things like these. Who then was the Eve from which the Chaga learned womb magic?

Some unseen mechanism keeps us supplied with fresh air, otherwise we should all smother from a combination of sweaty, unwashed woman and dog dick. Enough for today. Bushbaby says Rose is wondering what I’m always writing writing writing at. I’m wondering too.

She woke and remembered how she knew this moment. It was the memory of winter storm nights in the Watchhouse, when the rain rattled the bedroom windows and the wind gibbered under the eaves and you curled up in your duvet, cuddled by cats, enjoying being so warm and safe and enclosed. You would wake in the hourless hours the clock did not measure to find the storm passed and, in the huge silence behind it, you would creep downstairs and into the porch to stand and lose yourself in the tremendous stillness lying across the land.

Not even Dog twitched as Gaby slipped through the door lips into the cool, clean air from the high country. The only sound in the tier forest was the patter of raindrops dripping from level to level to level, running down to earth. The slow rain glittered as it fell; the night forest shone with ten thousand bioluminescent lights. Gaby felt she had been set to walk among the stars. Exalted. Chosen. Invulnerable. She walked out along a high-arching bridge, drawn irresistibly into the mystic. At its far end, the arch joined with others in a tangled boss of cords, tubes and organ pipes. In a covert between two human-sized racks of panpipes, Gaby did a thing she had not since was ten years old, in the secret places of the Point known only to herself. She took off her clothes. She laid them in a neatly folded stack, found footholds in the pipes and climbed until she came to another arch. She found a safe roost at the edge and sat with her feet hanging over the star-filled abyss. She listened to the drip of water through the tier forest. She felt the Chaga on her skin.

She could disappear here. This arch would lead to another, and that to yet another, and take her far beyond any hope of return to the human world. Eden again. Return to animal awareness; the eternal Now, before the Fall armed humanity with consciousness and care. She did not wonder the Western industrials wanted it ring-fenced. The Chaga’s Grace Abounding was the denial of consumer capitalism. But it is an insidious Eden where everything may be had by reaching out to take. It is the determination to push your hopes and dreams through the relentless material world that makes you human. If you were to get up from this place and walk in there and never come back, the Gaby McAslan that you have made yourself become would evaporate.

She shivered, suddenly cold and naked. She got up from her pitch, climbed down through the vox humana and vox angelica and put on her clothes. As she crossed back to Camp Three, she saw a figure seated on the edge of the drop, in the same position, legs over abyss, that she had sat.

She froze.

‘You too?’ Jake Aarons’ voice said. ‘It is sacred, isn’t it?’

‘And scary,’ Gaby said. She sat cross-legged beside him, a little back from the brink. ‘It’s beautiful, it’s awe-inspiring, it’s the closest I’ve come to a religious experience, and it’s the end of everything it means to be human.’

‘Or a gate into new ways of being human,’ Jake said. ‘What the Chaga says to me is, now you don’t need to compete for resources, now all the rules of supply and demand are torn up: there is enough here for everyone so now you can experiment with new ways of living, new ways of interacting, new societies and structures and sociologies, knowing that you have permission to fail. Screw it up and it won’t cost you and your children your lives. Like America was, back in the pioneer days when all the religious communities came over from Europe because there was space for them to follow their beliefs without interference. Continual experiment.’

‘Or stagnation.’

‘Pessimist.’

‘Fuzzy-minded pinko.’

Jake laughed. It sounded very loud in the silent tier forest.

‘I have to be optimistic, don’t I? But it’s more than wishful thinking. What I’m going to say will sound to you like classic schizophrenic paranoia, but the voices, the ones inside, I know whose they are.’

‘Don’t tell me it’s God, Jake.’

‘Hell no. It’s the voice of the Chaga.’ He held up his hands, begging time to explain. ‘Don’t “Jesus, Jake!” yet. You believed Peter Werther when he said he could hear the Chaga thinking to itself. Look at this place, what is it? A web of nodes and connections, a neural network, for Christ’s sake, on the macro and micro scales. Everything connects in here. Everything thinks. Do you know what the latest theory about the Crystal Monoliths is? They’re the Chaga’s primary memory storage system. Bevabytes of information stored holographically in a crystalline matrix. Hard drives the size of skyscrapers. Somehow I’m plugged into the system too. I’m the watekni on-line cyberpunk fantasy. Direct neural connection to the data net.’

‘Jesus, Jake.’

‘Don’t try to tell me it’s all a fantasy of a sick man who will make any deal with any devil to beat the Big 4, Gaby.’

‘I’m not going to, Jake.’ Now. She had to tell him now. She took a deep breath. ‘Jake, do you remember the day I came to your place, when I learned about you from the hospital files. I learned something else. All those people in Unit 12, all the HIV 4 sufferers who have been exposed to the Chaga: Jake, they’re all still alive. They should have died years ago – you told me, the thing kills in six months, tops – but these people are still alive. There’s something in here, in this place, this jungle, that stops HIV 4. That’s why you hear your voices; it’s working its way into you.’

Jake looked at Gaby. She could not read his expression. He got up from his high place and walked away through the dripping forest. Gaby called his name but he did not look back.

41

Gaby’s diary

Day Four

Contact.

M’zee has the senses of a hunting animal. We are on the high paths, moving through a thickening fog. M’zee stops, looks up, raises a finger and circles it. The Black Simbas unsling their weapons. Safety catches click off. We are not alone. M’zee takes point with the heavy machine gun they call m’toto: The Baby. Moran covers his right flank, Sugardaddy his left. I am behind Moran, Jake behind Sugardaddy, with orders that if anything happens, to get down, stay down, keep out of fields of fire and shoot anything that comes at you. Bushbaby and Rose back-mark. Rose lets Dog off his leash to run ahead.

Every few seconds we turn and check that the faces beside and behind us are the ones we saw last time. The fog grows thicker. My shorts and top are silver with dew, but I can feel the sweat running down my sides. My saturated pack feels like it weighs eighty tons. My blisters are bleeding into my boots. My calves are wrenched with cramp from yesterday’s climb. At any moment, two hands may reach out of the fog and take my head off with a monofilament garotte. I have never felt more afraid. I have never felt more alive.

When I used to go out with Private Pete the Soldier, I would parade my offended Political Correctness when he hoped that his unit would get transferred to Bosnia because he wanted to see some action. I understand him now. My God. This place is turning me into a War Bore.

M’zee holds up a hand. Dog is standing five feet in front of him, hackles raised, lip curled.

I am in cover before Moran can wave us down. I roll into a water-filled channel where two strands of branch twine over each other. Something oozes from under my thighs. I don’t think about it.

M’zee and Moran go forward. Dog trots after them. They disappear into fog. I lie in the cold water listening for gun fire. It doesn’t come. I grow chilled. It must come. It doesn’t. It feels like hours, down in the cold ditch. A rustle of movement. I roll onto my back, grabbing for the Magnum,

‘If I were your enemy, you would be dead now,’ Bushbaby says. ‘Get up. We are moving.’

On Jake’s signal I unholster the camcorder and follow him in.

We find them in a small amphitheatre of dwarf hand-trees. The men have been crucified on the white fingers of the hand-trees. The women have been hung by their heels. The bodies have been stripped. All have been killed by a single bullet in the head. The bodies have been mutilated. The men’s penises have been cut off and stuffed in the women’s mouths. The Chaga has started to claim the corpses. The men hang like images from Medieval plague crosses: high-relief crucifixes half-fused into the flesh of the hand-trees. Gaping mouths, eyes staring out of the melt of flesh and forest. The women’s trailing fingers have elongated into tendrils that weave seamlessly into the web of cables and branch fibres.

Flies, and things like green thistle-down, rise in clouds as Moran examines the dead. He finds a tattoo on the ball of the first woman’s shoulder: an outline of a cube, the sign of Sheik Mohammed Obeid’s Children of the Hajji Cartel. He reckons they have been dead for four or five hours. It looks like they were surprised setting up an ambush for us. They were undoubtedly killed after they were strung up.

My berserker adrenalin burn has gone cold in my blood. War sickens me. There is nothing glorious about it, nothing noble. Just cruel and sad. This is a terrible place to speak your last word, think your last thought, breathe your last breath and know absolutely that the last thing you will see is the figure standing over you with the gun.

I keep thinking back to a boy in my class at uni. We were never friends, our social circles did not intersect. I only got to know him by the manner of his death. He had the worst death I can imagine. He was into cave diving; which is insane at the best of times, let alone the suicidal solo dive he made against all advice into the flooded tunnels under the Marble Arch cave system. He didn’t even learn when the piece of grit jammed a valve and blew all his air supply away and he only just made it back to atmosphere. He was certain there was an undiscovered major cavern at the end of the narrow tunnel he had been squeezing through when he got into trouble. He went down the next day to find that cavern. He never came back. They reckon the same thing happened again, but he was too far along the pipe to make it back. He died alone, under miles of rock, in the cold and the dark, knowing his air was bubbling away, knowing that he wouldn’t make it, knowing that the last, the very last thing he would ever see would be his headlamp beam shining on limestone tunnel.

The body’s still down there. It’s too dangerous to recover it. In water that cold, that far from light, it could remain intact just about forever, floating trapped under those miles of rock.

I had nightmares for weeks after I heard how he had died. It’s the scariest story I know, because it’s true.

I think of those three men and two women, dying alone, helpless, where no one will ever find them, where no one will ever know, and a shaft of ice drives deep into my soul.

Before we leave them, M’zee pauses to rip out a tremendous fingers-in-mouth whistle and yell ‘Wa-chagga!’ at the top of his voice. As we advance, he repeats the call. Eventually I distinguish an answering whistle out of the forest sound-track of unearthly whoopings and chimings and twitterings. M’zee returns a long monotone blast; a complex twitter replies. We’ve given the passwords and crossed the firewall. What wrong note, what incorrect response, did those poor bastards back there give?

The Wa-chagga await us in a large natural atrium encircled by curtain walls of woven tendrils drooping enormous folded flower buds. They number nine: six men, three women. But for the colour of their combat pants, which are Chaga purples, crimsons, lilacs, they are indistinguishable from the Black Simbas. I am a little disappointed, I had been expecting Noble Savages. One of the women’s T-shirts has a picture of the Brazilian international striker Arcangeles printed on it.

They all look very young. They all carry very big guns. They all have red-green things looped around the backs of their heads, with one tendril that goes into the ear and another that brushes the upper lip. They are a combined defence patrol/ trading mission, like the armed merchant adventurers of the age of the navigators. They are all the Tacticals are permitted to see of the Wa-chagga nation and its organic towns scattered across the foothills of Kilimanjaro. I pull the camera out to video this historic moment.

Everything goes horribly quiet.

A Wa-chagga boy with straight-bobbed dreadlocks suddenly exclaims, ‘I know who you are!’ His English is almost accentless. ‘You are from television: Jake Aarons, SkyNet News! And you are Gaby McAslan. You did all these funny end of the news stories.’

And we are deluged with hands wanting to be shaken and smiling faces and voices welcoming us and asking for an autograph and will they get on the satellite news?

Later, Mr Natty-Dread, whose name is Lucius, an Economics graduate from the University of Dar Es Salaam, shows me how it is that we are such big stars among the Wa-chagga. It may have been designed as a Daewoo microvision, but then someone ripped off the casing and half the electronics and shoved in a slab of Danish blue cheese with half a pound of fettucine verde and not only is it somehow working, it can pick up pictures from as far away as Zimbabwe. Organic circuitry, Lucius says. The Chaga can analyse any electronic circuit board and synthesize a smaller and more efficient organic equivalent. The things runs on nuts. Nuts particular to a certain plant; peel them and you have a handful of five-volt batteries. The headsets I noticed are more of the same: organic two-way radios, though most of the time they’re switched to Voice of Kenya. Lucius lets me try his. He has it tuned to the pirates along the north Tanzanian coast, who do radical dance music.

Black Simbas and Wa-chagga sit down to trade. The weapons are swiftly agreed; Sugardaddy, the Black Simbas’ chief negotiator, takes an order for ammunition. The computer software, sealed in metal cases, is taken after animated bargaining in Swahili between Sugardaddy and Lucius, who seems to be a boy of some authority. The cigarettes are set aside while their merits are weighed. The flasks of Coca Cola concentrate provoke great excitement. Sugardaddy personifies superior aloofness while fingers are dipped in the flask and sucked to make sure this is the real thing. If any people are experts on cola, it is Africans. Words are exchanged, hands slapped; all the cigarettes are accepted and the deal is sealed. The Coke, I learn, is a one-off trade; once the Chaga picks its molecules and synthesizes it, the forest will be raining Coca Cola. Will it do Diet too, I wonder?

In return, Sugardaddy gets two steel vacuum flasks. In the first vacuum flask is a powerful all-purpose antibiotic that will kill even penicillin-immune bacteria. In the second is a cure for cholera. The Chaga synthesized both. Lucius tells me that none of his people have been sick since they escaped from the camps and returned to the mountain.

‘You cannot get sick,’ he says. ‘Not with counter-agents to every disease blowing on the wind. You take them in by the million with every breath.’

Including, it seems, something that stops HIV 4 dead in its tracks.

(Later)

I rather think Lucius is trying to come on to me.

The rest of the men are sprawled around the microvision watching women’s kick-boxing relayed from Bangkok and drinking native beer. They mutter doubtless obscene comments at the screen and laugh. The women are sitting in a ring by themselves, talking in Swahili and laughing and clicking their fingers. I sit apart to write, and Lucius comes and sits himself down beside me.

‘They are crass, boorish men,’ he says, looking at the group around the television. ‘You are like me, you are intelligent, sensitive, educated.’

I ask him how intelligent, sensitive, sophisticated college boy becomes gun-toting, camouflage-wearing freedom fighter.

‘Loyalties are long and strong in Africa,’ he says. ‘When I heard what was happening to my family’s farms up on Kilimanjaro, I could not stay away, not while I might have some power to help them. I could do nothing against the Chaga, but when my people escaped from the camp at Moshi, I went with them, because I knew they would need all manner of abilities to rebuild the nation.

‘We found the Chaga at the minimum level of habitability. We were not wise to its ways, we did not trust it to feed and shelter us. Some died, the young, the very old, the vulnerable, and from their bodies the Chaga learned the needs of humans and grew them. From their flesh came the meat we eat, from their blood the water we drink, from their skin our shelters, from their bones our towns and settlements, from their spirits the light and the heat and the electricity that powers them. I say it like religious scripture. It is almost a prayer among us. You are thinking we have made the Chaga our God? Yes, in an African sense; gods who are petty, and practical, and ask you questions like, Lucius, which would you rather have, a perfect soul or a new Series 8 BMW? and do not get upset when you say a BMW. The Chaga gives us both: it weaves outside things into itself and makes them more than they are. And in doing itself, it makes itself more. Outside the Chaga is life. Inside the Chaga is life times life. Life squared.’

I press him on what he means by the Chaga making things more than they are. It echoes Jake, when he said, on the night of the storm, about the Chaga being the gateway into new ways of being human. Lucius is evasive. It is getting late, he says. The others are calling him. No they are not. What they are doing is peering in tense concentration at the Asian Babes All-Action Topless bout. But at least I won’t have to stop him trying to chat me up. Jake takes his place beside me. Topless All-Action Asian Babes hold limited appeal for him, I suppose. Getting bitchy, Gaby. Hot news. While the guys’ brains have been be-fuddled by oiled Asian titties bouncing in extreme close-up, he’s been working on them to let us visit one of their settlements. They would not agree to that under any circumstances, but he did wheedle the promise out of them to take us deeper into the Chaga to see something that they will not specify, but they think will interest us greatly.

‘When do we go?’ I ask.

‘First thing in the morning. Lucius will guide us.’

The women are talking among themselves with great animation, laughing and hiding their faces behind their hands. They must be talking about sex.

Day Five

We made our farewells in the early mist. Rose, Bushbaby, M’zee and Dog are staying to conclude business with the Wa-chagga.

We ascend steadily for about an hour. There are ways between the levels; swooping catenaries of plaited piping that anchor tiers to piers like the cables of a suspension bridge. Lucius runs up them with the cocky ease of one of these spider-men who build the Manhattan skyline. He’s trying to impress me. What it makes me want to do, encumbered by ordnance and acrophobia, clawing for every finger- and toe-hold, is knee him in the nuts. Lucius educates me in Chaga-lore: anything red will always be edible, orange is water, blue electricity, white information. Green and yellow are heat and cold; black is drugs, both pharmaceutical and recreational.

We come across a moment of lost history tangled up in the cables between worlds: the overgrown skeletons of three helicopters, trapped like insects in a web and sucked transparent. Jake rubs away the crust of pseudo-lichens and discovers Tanzanian army markings. The cockpits are a writhe of tendrils and yellow spines: I imagine picked-clean skulls, greenly grinning. Or do I imagine?

Upwards. By noon break I want to lie down and die and let the Chaga grow over me, like that lost helicopter squadron, and suck my soul up into the Crystal Monoliths that I can just begin to glimpse through the forest roof. At least Lucius can clear up a mystery before I die. I ask him if he or his people ever encountered a white woman travelling inwards alone, three, four years ago. Yes, he has. She was… Irish, like me? Yes, but not red, like you. She was dark, in complexion and spirit. A woman like this you remember. She ran into one of the foraging parties from Rongai village. They brought her in – this was when Webuye was chief, before the new regime moved for a more reclusive policy toward strangers in the forest. She asked everyone if they had seen a white man pass that way some months before. She would not stay for more than one night before she must move on inward, in search of her man.

There is another way, Lucius says, in which I am like her. We both spend hours writing in journals.

I know, I say, taking the Liberty book from my pack. This is that diary. I lay it on the cable between us. Lucius looks at it suspiciously: does it say anything about the Wa-chagga, and Rongai village? he asks.

All references to humans living in the Chaga have been cut out, I tell him. With a sharp knife.

The Wa-chagga did not do this, he says, flipping through the yellow pages.

I ask him if he knows if Moon ever found the man she was searching for. Yes, Lucius says. He was in the patrol that met her, many months later, wandering in the chaotic terrain at the foot of the Citadel. She had been near exhaustion, and deeply mistrustful. She had asked the Wa-chagga to take her to Nanjara settlement, where the people had been kind to her before, and then toward terminum. She would not speak about what she had experienced up in the high country beyond the Citadel, but it was clear that it had changed her.

After she had collected her things from Nanjara, the Wa-chagga patrol took her through the tier forest to Lake Amboseli, where they would give her into the protection of a Tactical squad, but she had broken away then and fled into the fastnesses of the Discontinuity.

So, T.P. This is how it ends. Paranoia and disillusion on the white mountain, and a love that was not so strong nor so deathless as Moon thought. Those who love too big lose too big. If it’s any consolation, Langrishe couldn’t keep her either. Funny. Sad. Terrifying: how it all keeps coming back to that one word: changed.

I’m frightened for Jake.

Upwards.

I hadn’t thought we were so high. All of a sudden we come up through the canopy on to the top of the forest. I can see. I have a horizon. I can feel sun on my skin. I have a landscape once again.

The Crystal Monoliths rise over me, as high above me as I am above the deep root forest. Their facets sparkle sun diamonds across the canopy. Before me, the web of branches and spars runs between the splayed fingers of the ridge country I glimpsed that morning Shepard took me up in the microlyte. Beyond the canyonlands, clouds rip softly on the upper ramparts of the Citadel.

The canyon country looks easy walking. It lies. The ridges are made of a porous, crumbly substance that sinks under your boots and disintegrates between clutching fingers. It took an hour to make it on to the nearest ridge top, whereupon Lucius told us with sadistic pleasure that our way lay across the forest valleys between.

Bastard.

If it’s tough on me, it’s hell on Jake. We have to stop every ten minutes for him to rest. He still hasn’t spoken to me about what I told him on the night of the big storm. I’m not pissing you, Jake. I wouldn’t. Not you.

Lucius promises we’ll be there before nightfall. We’re not. It’s nightfall by the time we start on the final valley traverse, close to midnight before he tells us we can stop, we’ve arrived.

At first I can’t see there is anything to have arrived at. Then, after a time, listening to the nights sounds of the Chaga, I realize it’s a seeing trick, like Foa Mulaku before it came to the surface. I begin to make out a pattern among the biolights in the branches, like a luminous join-the-dots picture. Suddenly they resolve and I am standing on the edge of a colossal drop looking across at walkways, staircases, rooms, gantries, houses, platforms built into an island of Chaga rising out of the deep dark root country.

Someone has built a town in the tree-tops.

42

His name was Henning Bork. He was from the University of Uppsala. With Dr Ruth Premadas, Dr Yves Montagnard and his sister Dr Astrid Montagnard, he was all that remained of the UNECTA expeditionary dirigible Tungus. They had constructed and lived and continued their work in this arboreal settlement they called Treetops for five years. They had also produced Hubert, age four. Looks four, acts four hundred, Gaby described the child in her diary. This was what happened when boffins mated; Yves Montagnard was Hubert’s father, but Gaby’s hypothesis as to the mother either flew in the face of the evidence – Ruth Premadas was a very dark Tamil – or contravened the fundamental taboo of almost every human society.

Could explain why he was such a mutant, Gaby thought.

New faces were a novelty in Treetops. Resurrecting social niceties, Henning Bork hosted a dinner party for his guests. They sat around a long, narrow wooden table on a balcony overlooking the big drop that was Treetops’ main defence. The food for the meal all came from the Chaga. Some of it Gaby could not tell from its terrestrial original; some of it tasted of this but with the texture of that, and some of it was unlike anything in her experience but, after the shock of unfamiliarity, was very good to eat indeed. Dr Premadas handed around a dessert fruit that looked like turd-on-the-cob and tasted exactly of lazy summer evenings when you do not have to go to work the next day.

‘This could be as big as chocolate if the food combines ever got their hands on it,’ Jake Aarons said

‘We discover a new food crop every week,’ Astrid Montagnard, the botanist, said. ‘We have catalogued over two hundred Chaga staples that could have a major impact on global nutrition. This is many times the number that were introduced into the Old World from the Americas.’

‘The Chaga synthesizes foodstuffs from the human DNA template,’ the Frenchman at the opposite end of the long table had said. He was a molecular biologist. ‘Nothing you find out there will ever be poisonous, or even mildly harmful. The better it knows us, the more finely tuned to our needs its provisions for us will be. I am sure our Black Simba guests have been approached by representatives of biotechnology corporations to smuggle samples through the security cordon.’

‘We have taken samples, yes,’ Moran said. ‘But I have heard that they cannot make them grow.’

‘Of course they cannot,’ Yves Montagnard said forcefully. ‘It cannot be separated from the Chaga. It is all one thing, one system. Every part needs every other part: it is a true symbiosis. Maybe they can splice the genes into a terrestrial species and get some hybrid that will grow in a field, but that is the complete antithesis of what the Chaga is about. They want another agribusiness product; out there is the end of agriculture. The end of the slavery of the plough. The end of markets and subsidies and surpluses that mean grain mountain here, famine there. Everything may be had here just by taking. It is the return of the hunter-gatherer society, which is the best nourished, healthiest and culturally adventurous on earth.’

‘You must excuse Yves,’ Henning Bork said. ‘This place reinforces idealisms, but takes away people on whom one can vent them.’

Ruth Premadas brought coffee, or what the Chaga passed for coffee. The wind gusted, stirring the hovering globes of bioluminescence, swaying the branches of the big tree that upheld the community. Gaby gripped the table as the decking shifted. Dr Premadas poured Chaga coffee without spilling a drop.

‘Do not worry,’ Henning Bork said ‘We built it to stand far worse than this. And it has stood far far worse than we ever expected. The Chaga has grown into it, made it strong.’

‘How does it come to be here at all?’ Gaby said, asking the question that the guests most wanted answered.

Henning Bork pressed his palms together as if he had been eagerly anticipating this opportunity to practise the art of after-dinner story telling.

‘The last flight of the Tungus. This is the tale.’

The Sibirsk airship Tungus had been sent out from Ol Tukai Lodge early in the second year of the Chaga’s expansion, when the mass of alien life began to differentiate into separate zones and speculations about it being a product of alien design began to solidify. Aerial photography had shown complex formations developing far beyond the reach of UNECTA’s foot expeditions. The Chaga-makers themselves might inhabit them. Aliens had been big that year.

The idea had first been used in the Brazilian selvas in the 1980s. It was very simple. A lighter-than-air transport flew in a large, lightweight folding raft, set it down on the top of the forest canopy and quickly unfolded it to distribute its weight over as large a surface area as possible. Scientists used the raft in the tree-tops as a secure base from which to study the attic ecology. When they were done, they could pack up the raft, call in the LTA and float on to another location. Now, with Western can-do and Eastern wealth, UNECTA planned to do it bigger and better. The lifting power of the Siberian logging dirigibles could transport an entire research laboratory on to the roof of the Chaga. Regularly re-supplied by airship, it could remain there indefinitely, a scientific community in the canopy.

Tungus lifted from Ol Tukai with a crew of two and four scientists equipped with accommodation, plant and supplies for five weeks, bound for a predetermined location on the northern slopes of Kilimanjaro. The airship crossed terminum and was never heard from again.

‘We did not know that the envelope of Chaga spores reached so high above the canopy,’ Henning Bork told his dinner guests. ‘We lost the first gas cell fifty metres up as we were coming in to land. We were heavily laden. When the second blew, we knew we could not make it back. Captain Kosirev was trying to soft-land the airship on the canopy when we lost all lift and came down.’

‘It was by sheer grace that no one was killed or badly injured,’ the Swede continued. ‘It was obvious that the ship could not be made airworthy again. Nor could we signal for help, the radio had been consumed by the Chaga. Of course, we did not know then that the Chaga reconstitutes what it consumes; the radio, and our experimental and analytical equipment as well.’

‘So you could call for assistance now,’ Jake Aarons interrupted.

‘Yes,’ Henning Bork said. ‘But we do not wish to. We have a self-contained, self-sustaining research community; we are constantly making new discoveries, delving deeper into the secrets of the Chaga. There is always something more to discover. This Treetops of ours is on the very edge of the Chaga’s major zone of morphological experimentation; the sector beyond this ridge country, we call the Breeding Pit. You should see it: it is the evolution engine of the Chaga; the place where all its stored genetic information is made flesh and varied. You could observe for a hundred years and never see the same thing twice. We have an observation platform up there; I will take you there tomorrow to witness it for yourselves. Maybe then, you will understand why we do not wish to leave. Why should we go back to the outside world, only to have all this taken from us and given to someone else?’

‘Professional possessiveness?’ Gaby said. That is not the reason, she thought. There is some other thing that keeps them clinging to this raft of tents and platforms in the tree top, and they have made a compact between themselves to keep it from us.

‘You continue your mission by other means,’ Jake said ‘You seem well set up here; electricity, heat, food, water. But what happened to the dirigible crew?’

‘That is a bad thing,’ Henning Bork said. Gaby saw him look at his colleagues in the way that people do who need to get their stories straight. ‘A very bad thing. They tried to go back. They could not live here, they did not find in this place the intellectual excitement that ties us to it. They provisioned themselves with what we could spare from the wreckage of Tungus; which, as you can see, we efficiently recycled, and set off across the canopy. This was a long time ago, before we programmed in the defences. The Chaga was less, shall we say, busy? then.’

‘The Chaga was smaller too,’ Moran said, sensing the insult and returning it.

‘But much more dangerous,’ Astrid Montagnard said. Hubert was seated in her lap. He stared at Gaby. The brat never seemed to blink. ‘Strange, alien, dangerous. Now the Chaga is developing toward human norms, but then in those early days, everything was being tried. Everything.’

‘They didn’t come back,’ Gaby said.

‘Yes,’ Henning Bork said. ‘We do not know what became of them.’

‘The Wa-chagga know nothing about them,’ Lucius said.

‘But they could still be alive out there,’ Jake Aarons said. Gaby understood the reason behind the question.

‘They could,’ Henning Bork said.

‘The forest sustains you and the Wa-chagga,’ Jake continued. ‘It could also sustain them, couldn’t it? Could it do more than that? Could it somehow adapt them to live more closely with it? Enter into a kind of symbiotic relationship with them, change them? You said that this Breeding Pit was the Chaga’s engine of evolution, where life is varied. Human life, human flesh?’

‘What are you driving at, Mr Aarons?’ Henning Bork asked. The wind shook the great tree again. It felt wet and cold on Gaby’s skin, like secrecy.

‘Organic circuitry,’ she said, shifting the conversation from delicate subjects, like any civilized house guest. ‘Organic television?’

‘Yes,’ Henning Bork said.

‘Organic satellite television?’

‘This too.’

‘You can get SkyNet Sport? There’s a match I’d really hate to miss.’

43

‘One nil,’ Gaby stormed at her diary. ‘Tragic. The Dagenham Girl Pipers could have put up a better defence. Bizarre, watching Alan Jeffers’ half-time analysis on a television that looks like a head of melting broccoli in what used to be the control cabin of a Sibirsk airship but is now part of a Lost Boys Fantasy Tree House in the deepest, darkest depths of the Chaga.

‘The room they’ve given me is a tent of poles and blimp skin about fifty feet down-trunk from the main centre, right on the edge of what they call The Moat. The view in the morning should be memorable, if I’m still around to enjoy it. The wind is getting up; the whole place flaps and sways like a ship in a hurricane. Full sail ahead for the heart of darkness, me hearties! A ship cast adrift in the tree-tops; like something out of your favourite childhood story. A ragged crew of bourgeoisie marooned on a desert isle, playing out their genteel rituals. Too few faces, too often seen, I sense an almost incestuous introversion. Perhaps literally. They tell much; they keep more secret, but they’ve grown naive at secrecy from too much intimacy. They make mistakes, they are clumsy with their misdirections. This room, for example. Why do I get the feeing I’m hot-bunking in someone else’s space? Someone who isn’t accounted for by Treetops crew manifest, spooky Hubert included. Something not kosher here.’

There was a polite cough from outside the door curtain. Gaby put down her pencil, closed the diary. The curtain rolled up on its drawstring.

‘Got a moment?’ Jake Aarons asked. He came in anyway. ‘I think I have a sane explanation for the voices.’

‘Not the voice of the Chaga.’

‘Yes, the voice of the Chaga. But not mystically or magically or divinely. Scientifically. The Chaga can synthesize organic circuits; you’ve watched goddam organic satellite television soccer. If it can build out there, why not in here?’ He tapped his forehead with a finger. ‘What’s this stuff in here but the cellular circuitry for an organic computer? From the moment I crossed terminum, the Chaga’s been building an organic modem in my head out of my own protein, molecule by molecule, cell by cell, strand by strand. Networking me into this immense data storage and processing system. That’s why it’s getting louder and clearer: the connections are spreading. It’s not just voices now, Gab. It’s visions – pictures, images, like snapshot memories; glimpses for the briefest second of the utmost clarity, then gone.’

‘Pictures of what, Jake?’

‘Other lives, Gab. Other worlds. Other ways of being. And of this world as well. Peter Werther was right. They’ve been here before. At the very start of humanity, and the very start of it all. Those things we have recorded in the Burgess Shale; the incredible diversity of life in the pre-Cambrian, like never before or since…’

‘They did it?’

Jake shrugged. The wind billowed the fragile room. Gaby was very conscious of the great gulf beneath her.

‘Jake, why don’t we all hear the voices and see the visions? Why is it just you?’

He grimaced painfully.

‘I have a theory about that too. I’ll not mince words: this circuitry, this organic modem growing in my head, it’s a mutation. Something is causing the cells of my body to grow in such a way as to receive electromagnetic signals from the Chaga, and trigger my own neurons in response. Something is reprogramming the DNA in those cells to grow that way. Now, that is a very difficult thing to do in a developed organism. Easy enough in the sex cells of your parents so that the offspring will express the mutation, but to get into all the necessary cells, and change their programming, then switch it on: that’s difficult.

‘Unless something is already present in the body, in the cells, in the DNA, that acts as a host. A vector. A mole on the inside of the genetic firewall to open the way for the DNA hackers.’

‘The HIV 4 virus.’

Jake grimaced again.

‘Every day during the desert campaign in World War Two, Field Marshal Montgomery would study a photograph of Erwin Rommel he kept on his desk. Not say a word, just look at it. Know your enemy was Montgomery’s motto. It won him the desert war. I know my enemy, Gab. I’ve studied all his strategies and tactics; his surprise offensives, his tactical retreats and regroupings. He’s tough – tougher than me – but I know how he works. I know what his weapons are, and on what terrain he likes to fight – right down in the chromosomes, street fighting in the DNA strands – and what camouflage he uses to outfox my immune system. But maybe I have overestimated him: maybe he isn’t the undercover death squad, maybe he’s just the Trojan horse that gets taken into the city and opens the gates to let in the real invading army. And, maybe, it isn’t an invading, destroying army out there, but foreign industrialists and investors. Maybe they don’t want to put everyone to the sword, but set up a shop here, a factory there, a resort someplace else, do a little urban renewal, stick in some new infrastructure, and by the time they’ve finished you’re a little colonial outpost of some biochemical superpower.’

‘I’m getting a little lost in analogy, Jake. You think the HIV 4 virus is some kind of catalyst that allows the Chaga mutagenic agents to work on developed cells?’

‘Catalyst,’ Jake said. ‘That’s exactly the word. That doesn’t react in the process. It fits, Gab: all the secrecy around Unit 12 and the HIV 4 victims who should have been dead year ago. All exposed to the Chaga. All entered into some kind of symbiotic relationship that stops the HIV 4 virus from developing into AIDS.’

‘You were fishing from Henning Bork at dinner.’

‘He didn’t deny it.’

‘Jesus, Jake, you said you had a sane explanation.’ The hovering biolights flared up at Gaby’s raised voice. ‘You know what this implies about HIV 4?’

‘It’s a made thing.’ Jake nodded. ‘I’ve thought of that. It certainly predates humanity, maybe most of life on earth. It’s the Chaga-makers’ engine of variation, and a hideously effective one: only those infected individuals who expose themselves to the mutagenic agents survive. Maybe it wasn’t an asteroid impact that eradicated the dinosaurs, or habitat depletion: maybe they had progressed into an evolutionary dead end and the Chaga-makers undertook a little winnowing.’

‘Jurassic AIDS?’

‘Maybe. Maybe the SIVs and HIV 1, 2 and 3 are degenerate variants of the original virus. Given the virus’s ability to switch sections of genetic material, maybe there are millions of variants of the HIV 4 virus. Scientists have always had a chicken-and-egg problem with viruses. Maybe they all came from someplace else.’

‘Lots of maybes, Jake.’

‘Are you telling me that I believe it because I want to believe it? You were the one handed me this magic bullet in the first place.’

The wind gusted up from below, bringing with it the chiming calls of unseen, unimaginable creatures. The balloon-silk walls flapped and swelled. The captive lights globes gusted around the little fabric room, casting sudden strange shadows.

Hubert climbed like an animal. Gaby’s heart almost stopped when she saw him go straight up the bole on the edge of the moat. ‘He’s born to it,’ Henning Bork assured her. That sentence means more than it says, Gaby thought. As they moved through the high canopy toward the escarpment where the Treetoppers maintained their watch post, Gaby could feel the child, up there in the dense overgrowth, stalking the slow, clumsy adults. Hidden eyes, watching. The disturbing thing was that even when the boy was back with them, she could still feel them, watching. An hour up the valley in which Treetops rested brought the small expedition to the observatory. It was a cupola of spars and silk scavenged from the wreck of the Tungus, perched on the scarp where it fell sheer to the Breeding Pit below. Henning Bork, Yves Montagnard, Jake Aarons and Gaby McAslan fitted into it like segments of an orange. Gaby tried to unsling the camcorder without injuring anyone.

‘Where’s Hubert vanished to now?’ Jake asked.

‘He’ll be playing somewhere,’ Yves Montagnard said. Gaby thought she would not be so unconcerned if it were her flesh and blood playing around such sheer drops and pitfalls. But Jake had found her something to video.

She remembered the land beneath her from the microlyte flight. She had thought it looked like a Willow Pattern plate. Now she was on the very edge of it, and it did not look like that at all. She slowly swung the camera across the spars and swelling spheres and thought it looked like something flayed and festering, all blue veins and gas-bloated, suppurating flesh straining at skeletal ribs. It looked fleshy and obscene and intimate, like a laparoscopy of a cancerous ovary.

At the limit of her zoom, at the foot of the Citadel, a bubble burst in a spurt of milky liquid and powder. Something darted from it, too far and fast for the camera to follow. She panned up the dark green rampart of the Citadel, to the clouds that hung over Kilimanjaro. Peter Werther had been brought there and set down, ass-naked as Adam in Eden. He had walked away from Eden, and the price of it was a disinfected white suite deep under Kajiado Centre, and multinational doctors measuring the advance of his own private Chaga across his body. Anything that comes out of it is theirs, Dr Dan had said. She looked at Jake, talking excitedly with Henning Bork. He fulfilled their criteria. They would claim him. They would take him down into their circular corridors and locked doors and never let him see the light of day again. She looked at Jake and feared for him. But he was not stupid. Many things, some sins, but never stupid. He knew all this as well as she, and he had made his decision.

He wasn’t coming back.

‘Some of the larger bubbles contain whole ecosystems in miniature,’ Henning Bork was saying, scanning the Breeding Pit with binoculars. ‘Like little, what is the word? dioramas, of life on other planets. Of course, it is one of our many frustrations that we cannot reach them in time to sample them; they only last a day or so before they are reabsorbed. Before we ran out of disc space, we videoed many hours’ footage of these dioramas. Frequently we cannot comprehend what we are seeing. Sometimes we cannot recognize it as living at all. Occasionally we have seen things so alien as to be horrifying. Ah! Luck is with us!’ .

He pointed over the rail. Gaby followed in on to a huge bubble a mile to the west. The skin was painfully distended against the hoops of blue ribbing. Gaby thought incongruously of sex toys an old partner of her had liked to sport. The bubble rippled, as if kicked from inside and split. White dust sprayed from the rent. The skin tore in a dozen places and collapsed. Behind the camera, Gaby now thought of ancient newsreel footage of the destruction of the Hindenburg. But cold. Without fire.

Even at highest magnification, Gaby could not tell if the thing inside the bubble was natural or artificial, organic or inorganic. City, forest; forest, machine. It looked like a city, or a forest, or a handful of stone fingers. Each was the height of a small skyscraper: the proportions of the Breeding Pit could have reduced Manhattan to a toy town in a plastic snow storm. City, Gaby decided on the basis of the regular geometric patterns on the sides of the stone pillars. They were in the shape of three-dimensional fractals of ever diminishing tetrahedrons. Terracotta red. Some of the larger formations were fifty feet in diameter, stubbled with smaller arrays of tetrahedrons. Gaby cursed the camera’s lack of resolution: the surfaces of the tetrahedron formations seemed in motion.

‘You’re right.’ Henning Bork answered her puzzled frown. ‘It’s a living fractal. Each generation of tetrahedrons grows out of the surface of its parent. Some are in the process of sporing – when the tetrahedrons reach the molecular level, they leave the parent body and migrate across the rock surface to a new seeding zone. This is a diorama we have recorded several times before. We believe it is a kind of living clay that uses chemical energy to reproduce itself from the minerals of its parent rock. A parasitic living clay, perhaps. There is evidence that terrestrial clays were a matrix for early forms of RNA molecules. Perhaps this is the end-point of a different geological RNA-based evolution.’

A warning flashed in Gaby’s view-finder. Disc change. Last disc.

The Chaga’s reconstruction of a living clay it encountered somewhere on its travels,’ Yves Montagnard added.

‘Buckyball golems,’ Jake whispered.

Hubert rejoined the little expedition on the trek back to Tree-tops. Whatever he had found out along the escarpment ridge, it had made him remember what it was to be a boy. But in her diary that night, Gaby still made insidious comparisons with Fraser and Aaron Shepard. It was not just that they were Shepard’s kids and they had been part of one of the great times of her life. Hubert was too much a child of his environment. His strangeness seemed almost genetic. Gaby closed her diary and tried to sleep, but found herself continually waking with a powerful sensation of not being alone in her little canvas cell. Each time, the only presence was her own. She would force herself back into sleep and dream of things that had watched her unseen in the Chaga canopy, followed her back to Treetops and come flapping across the air moat to smother her with flopping skin wings.

She woke with a cry.

In the room. It was in the room.

At the sound of her voice, the bioluminescents woke and filled the fabric cube with a green glow. By their light, something moved. Gaby rolled out of her hammock on to the spongy floor and grabbed her Magnum from her pack. The red seed of the laser sight wove across the billowing walls and came to rest on the forehead of a four year-old white girl with hair as black as the night outside. Her face was as thin as famine.

‘Light!’ Gaby shouted. The bioluminescents brightened. Crouching on the floor, Gaby and the girl stared at each other, tied by a thread of laser. Then the girl gave a cry, ran to the window and before Gaby could catch her or stop her or warn her, dived out into four hundred feet of moat. Gaby screamed and lunged for the window. By the dim light from the tier forest, she saw a thing very like a very large, very pale bat ghost across the gulf. It flew on webs of skin stretched between wrists and ankles. Gaby saw it light on a branch and turn a dark-eyed, black-haired smiling face to her.

44

They were arguing again in their private patois of French, English and Russian. Gaby banged a plate hard on the table. It broke cleanly along across the middle. They all looked at her.

‘Your daughter?’ she demanded.

Nothing slept soundly in Treetops. Gaby’s cries had roused the colony in less than a minute. Fearing assault, Lucius and the Black Simbas had armed themselves. There had been potentially fatal misrecognitions as the hives of bioluminescents warmed up. Order had inhered at the centre, on the bridge, around the Scandinavian calm of Henning Bork. He had given Gaby the floor to tell what she had seen. Then the arguing had started.

‘My daughter, yes,’ Yves Montagnard said. ‘Hubert’s twin. Little Nicole.’

‘If you’re Papa, then who the hell is Mama?’ Jake asked.

‘Never mind whose baby or whose twin,’ Gaby interrupted, ‘she’s fucking Batwoman. I saw her fly, for God’s sake. Peter fucking Pan.’

‘That is the nature of her change,’ Henning Bork said. ‘That is why we hid her from you. But she is a wild thing, and very curious. She would not be hidden.’

‘She’s not living in the jungle on her own, not at her age,’ Jake said. ‘Someone else is out there. You lied to us about the crew of the Tungus.’ All investigative journalists are frustrated master detectives, Gaby thought.

‘Only half lied,’ Ruth Premadas said. ‘Ludmilla is Nicole’s and Hubert’s mother. She was the airship’s co-pilot. When we learned outsiders were coming, we had her take Nicole up to the Breeding Pit Observatory.’

‘I thought my room felt lived in,’ Gaby said. ‘No wonder Hubert was so keen to come up to the Observatory with us, and go running off into the trees.’

‘But the Captain,’ Jake insisted. ‘What was his name? Kosirev? Did you tell the truth about him? That he tried to make it back, and got lost?’

‘We did. It is true. But it was worse than lost,’ Henning Bork said. ‘Changed.’

Gaby saw Jake follow his curiosity to the brink of disclosing undisclosable things about himself. Careful, friend.

‘Like Nicole, do you mean?’

‘No.’ Henning Bork sighed. ‘How can I say it? A new body, I suppose. A symbiote, a parasite? We do not have the language for what the Chaga is doing to flesh.’

‘Obi-men,’ Sugardaddy said. ‘That is what you are trying to say. I have seen them, but briefly. They move fast, for such huge things, and so silently. It is as if they command the forest to let them pass, and to close behind them and conceal their tracks.’

‘What have you seen?’ Jake asked.

Sugardaddy shook his head like an old man who finds the world has surpassed his extraordinary stories.

‘So many things that they could not all be from the same creature. Hair. Skin. Organs in transparent sacks. Great clawed feet, thighs bigger and stronger than an ostrich’s, but the finest, thinnest fingers. More like hair than fingers. The faces; I remember those best. You see the faces, in those folds of flesh…’ He shook his head again.

‘Yet they are all the same creature,’ Henning Bork said. ‘We call them orthobodies: they seem to be symbiotic organisms that can take the human body into them and mesh with the nervous, digestive and cardiovascular systems. They seem to enhance human faculties in many ways: improved health and immunity from disease, great strength and speed, extended sensory range, the ability to interact with the Chaga environment.’

‘I have seen them walk free,’ Sugardaddy said. ‘They opened up like a woman’s thing, and the people inside walked out, like they were being born. I say that because they were connected to those things by birth cords. This is what happened to your captain?’

‘Does this happen to everyone who is lost in the Chaga?’ Jake asked. You are scared, Gaby thought. You are right to be scared, if this is the price of your deliverance. No wonder UNECTA keeps those poor bastards locked up where no one can see them.

‘Not everyone,’ Yves Montagnard said. ‘The Chaga is the place of perpetual change and transformation, but the changes take many forms. For some it is attracting an orthobody – it seems that the attraction is essentially sexual between human and symbiote, the merging voluntary, almost an act of love. For others it is to be changed in the womb, by changing the genes of the parents, like Nicole and Hubert – oh yes, my son is changed, but it is not an outward change like Nicole’s gliding membranes. And some are changed in their own bodies by the symbiosis of Chaga virons with terrestrial infective viruses.’

‘HIV 4,’ Gaby said.

‘Utilizing retroviruses as carrier bodies to insert molecular information into genes had been a trend in genetic engineering research long before the Kilimanjaro Event,’ Ruth Premadas said. ‘When Ol Tukai’s taxonomists noticed mutations occurring in fully differentiated monkeys that had adapted to the Chaga environment, it seemed a fruitful line of inquiry. I was on the team set up at Kajiado centre to investigate relationships between Chaga virons and genetically hypervariable retroviruses. Just before the Tungus mission, we made the breakthrough into the SIVs – Simian Immunodeficiency Viruses – and were hypothesizing similar interactions with the human immunodeficiency viruses.’

‘The Chaga is an engine of evolution,’ Yves Montagnard said, in his Big Ideas voice. ‘It has come to move us forward as a species, perhaps as many species. Our technology has brought us to an evolutionary dead end. Biotechnology allows us to evolve in the directions in which we wish to be evolved: taller, stronger, healthier, higher IQ, more beautiful. We imagine this will be the future humanity. Absurd. If a tribe of Australopithecus had sat down to design the next evolutionary breakthrough, they would have planned something that could run faster, see further, smell better, have sharper nails to grub out insects and roots. They would not have planned talking, thinking, tool-making homo sapiens.

‘Out there is an environment as alien to us as Paris would be to Australopithecus, an environment that changes to demand new responses from us, that can generate a thousand habitat niches. We do not know what we will need to expand into the universe, so the Chaga give us the gift to diverge into a thousand, ten thousand, a million sub-species: a million seeds of humanity cast into the dark.’

‘“And say which seed will grow, and which will not”,’ Jake quoted.

‘Yes,’ the Frenchman said fiercely. ‘And maybe, because there is enough room out there, all the seeds will grow. Transhumanity. Posthumanity. Panhumanity. Any of these, all of these. On these East African plains humanity was born; it must be more than cosmic coincidence that it is on these same plains that the new humanity; the thing that comes after us, that we cannot see, will arise.’

Gaby thought of the legend of the tree where man was born, and all the races of earth returning to that ancestral baobab, with its roots in earth and its branches among the stars, to be dissolved in its hoarded waters and made anew. Sweet, seductive Big Ideas. How long their legs are, how easily they stride over us. Look, they are already over the horizon while we plough our way through the mud. How many centuries it has taken us to learn to see that people whose skin is a different colour from ours are as human as we, and now you are asking us to hug these winged children and hybrid obi-men and changelings to us. Things we may not even recognize as human, we must call brother and sister.

‘I am an uneducated working man,’ Moran said unexpectedly. ‘I do not understand these things well. I do not know about Australopithecus and evolution and what you call trans-humanity, posthumanity. All I know are my people, my home, my cartel, my family. I know my country. I know my children. I know this.’ He drew a long-bladed guerilla knife from the leather sheath on his thigh. The blade was beautiful. He was a man who could care for an edge. Moran set the knife on the commons table. ‘Tell me what this means to me. Tell me what this means for my family, my children, my nation.’

For the first time, Gaby felt some measure of admiration for Moran. He was African. He could stare into the headlights of Big Ideas, Big Science, Big Dumb Objects, without being dazzled, and ask the only question that had any meaning: what have you done for me lately?

‘Be thankful for the children you have now,’ Lucius said quietly. ‘If you believe in a god, pray for the ones yet to be born, that you may learn to love them as you love the ones that are already yours.’

‘The mutations are happening to you too,’ Jake Aarons said. ‘Just like here. That’s why you didn’t want to take us to your town.’

‘Yes,’ Lucius said. ‘This is what these ideas you barely understand mean for your family, your children, your nation, Moran. Learn from us, that they will not destroy you as they are destroying the Wa-chagga nation, by setting us against each other. In my town, Kamwanga, and in Nanjara and Usarangei and Mrao; Ngaseni and Marangu Gate too, we say that change is the nature of the Chaga, but it is never harmful or destructive, and these children who are born different because of it are to be cherished and valued just like those who are normal. It is no sin or shame or sign of the disfavour of God or the anger of the spirits. It is the way of this place.’

‘But that is not the case among the other settlements.’

‘They take the changed children as soon as they are born and expose them.’

‘Jesus,’ Gaby whispered.

‘Institutionalized infanticide,’ Jake said.

‘Yes,’ Lucius said grimly. ‘It is destroying the Wa-chagga nation. We are abominations to each other. People from Kibongo will not speak to people from Usarangei; the people of Marangu and Marangu Gate are enemies because of this. Soon, I fear, we will kill each other.’

‘The children,’ Gaby said.

‘We have asked the councils of the towns who oppose us in this to let us take the changed children, but they fear that we are breeding an army of monsters to annihilate them. So we follow the men who leave the children in the forest. If we cannot bribe them, we wait until they have gone and take the baby. But we do not save them all. We cannot save them all. We trust that the Chaga is as kind to them as to all others who have to rely on it for their lives. But it is a hope, nothing more. Of the ones we save, and of our own, there are many that do not survive. They are too deeply changed. You would tell me that they are victims of evolution, Dr Montagnard; that they are variants that do not adapt and are weeded out. I cannot be that sanguine.’

The blimp cloth curtain that hung across the doorway twitched aside. Moran and Sugardaddy drew weapons.

‘You do not need to do that,’ the figure in the door said. It spoke in a woman’s voice, heavily accented with Slavic. ‘We are no danger to you, unless you are of the party that thinks that children are abominations of God.’ A small, sandy-haired white woman dressed in cut-off combat pants and a tattered T-shirt entered the long room. A child clung to her legs; a girl child, white, naked, agonizingly thin. She had the luminous eyes in a filthy face that turn fa vela urchins into angels. The child stared at the alien bodies in the common room and pressed closer to her mother. Flaps of skin were stretched taut between wrists and ankles. Follicles puckered into gooseflesh.

‘You scared Nicole. She came to see why she had to be taken away from her home and came rushing back to me to tell me that a strange woman had pulled a gun on her. You do not need to hurt her, she will not hurt you. Why should you want to hurt her? Because she is different from you? So I have brought her back here for you to see that she is not a monster or a freak or an example of evolution in action or the first generation of the new humanity,’ the Russian woman said. ‘She is just a little girl, and Hubert is just a little boy, and they find themselves in a strange world with new and frightening abilities, and they are trying to find out how it all works and how they can live in it. They do not contemplate the mysteries of the universe or solve the Grand Unified Field equations. They sulk. They fight each other. They have tantrums. They do not like to go to bed, and they spit out their food and will not eat what we have made for them. Just a boy and girl. So, the girl can glide on her wing membranes; so, the boy can link with the thoughts of the Chaga and in his dreams pass his consciousness into animals and birds and the creatures that the forest has made: but they are not offences against God or Allah or the holy church. Nicole will say hello to you, but first you men must put your weapons away, because they are frightening my daughter.’

45

They left Treetops the next morning. Gaby was dazed from lack of sleep and too much wonder. Her sense of disbelief was gorged, like a snake that has swallowed a goat. The progress through the canopy to the rendezvous point with M’zee, Bushbaby and Rose was slow. Jake constantly fell behind and the party would have to wait while someone went back to bring him along. Moran was growing impatient with the delays and halts. The next time it happened, Gaby volunteered to be the one who went back. She found Jake several minutes down the branch, seated in a dip of cable that swept up to anchor points at the base of one of the Crystal Monoliths.

‘I reckon you’ve got ten, fifteen minutes clear before they start to look for us,’ Gaby said.

Jake Aarons smiled his sophisticated Thorn Tree Bar-smile.

‘What will you tell them?’

‘That I never found you.’

He thought about the implications of the lie for a few moments.

‘Yes, that should do it. I don’t like you having to lie to them; they’re good people.’

‘Moran is a jerk.’

Jake laughed.

‘Got a cigarette?’

Gaby did.

‘I didn’t know you smoked.’

‘At theatrically appropriate moments I do.’

He was not a comfortable smoker, but he seemed to enjoy the Camel.

‘Traditional last request,’ he said.

‘For a while I thought you’d chickened out of doing it,’ Gaby said.

‘For a while I had. They spooked me with that orthobody stuff. That’s worse than dying, that. Like a walking iron lung made out of meat. Rather take my chances with UNECTA and Unit 12 than that. What convinced me was that kid, Hubert. He was born with it, I caught it, but we’re both the same in here. We hear it. We see through its eyes. We dream its dreams. We share the same circuitry, in here, and so maybe it isn’t some desperate old faggot’s final fantasy to wave in the face of death like a karmic press card. I know that if I stop to look at it too closely, it’s insane, what I’m planning to do. But we’re humans, Gab, we can adapt to anything. We can triumph anywhere. They wrote operas in Auschwitz, for Christ’s sake. Yves Montagnard was wrong. There is only one way to be human; in here. What we wear over it doesn’t matter.’ Jake glanced at his steel Rolex. ‘Couple of minutes before the natives get restless. When it really comes down to it, Gab, what matters is that I’ll be in it. I won’t be watching, I won’t be an outsider looking in, recording, reporting, commenting. I’ll be in it. I’ll be a part of whatever story is being told here. All the rest of the world can do is watch: watch the Chaga, watch the BDO, watch the stars, watch the screen to see the television news watching it too. But I will be what is being watched. I will commit T.P.’s cardinal sin. I will not report the news, I will be the news. And if you don’t understand what a mighty, mighty temptation that is, you’re no bred-in-the-bone journalist.’

Jake exhaled the last of Gaby’s cigarette and carefully crushed the stub under his heel.

‘T.P. should know, though. I know it’s a heap of shit to hang on you, but tell him, Gab. Tell him everything. And Tembo too, because he’s a good man and I can trust him not to shoot his mouth off to some woman like Faraway would. Tell them. No one else. Oh yes. One last thing I owe you, Gab. That diary Shepard gave you. Haven’t you guessed?’

‘Humans living in the Chaga. Moon met the Wa-chagga.’

‘Gaby, Gaby, Gaby.’ No one could ever do the look of professional disappointment like Jake Aarons, that was not disappointed in your limitations, but in your failure to live up to your talent. ‘It’s not what, or why; it’s who. Who would give you an obviously maimed diary, which you were bound to investigate, when it would have been so much easier to deny it ever existed?’

‘Shepard?’

‘He’s a man. I’m a man. We do it with different targets, but down here, we’re all the same.’ He clutched his groin. The gesture was disturbingly undignified. ‘Where dick takes over, mind leaves off. He was so mad keen to get you into his bed he sure didn’t care about the consequences. Hell, he probably couldn’t even see there would be consequences through the fog of testosterone.’

‘Shepard.’

‘Time to go, I think.’ Jake stood up, offered Gaby a hand. Just like the last goodbye. These things are best done quickly. They say short, sharp pain is better than years of nagging numbness.

‘Jake.’

‘Don’t say anything, because even one word might make me not do it, and I wouldn’t want to hate you for that for the rest of my life. Don’t say anything, don’t try to follow me, don’t call out my name, don’t look at me. Just kneel down and close your eyes.’ She surprised herself by doing what he asked. ‘You’ll know when you can open them again.’ She felt his fingers lightly touch her eyelids in blessing. Someplace wonderful was a breath against her cheekbone.

She opened her eyes. He was gone. She screamed his name ten times. The Chaga did not answer. She cried a time for him, but not too long, for she must get back to the Black Simbas before they came to look for her.

46

They came down through the roof of the singing forest. The men had not believed Gaby’s story about being unable to find Jake and fearing he had fallen any more than she did, but they were male and proud and would not allow themselves to recognize that a women would dare to lie to them. Gaby blindly followed Sugardaddy through the tier forest. Her inner view-finder framed an immaculate Jake Aarons climbing the final ridge, to stand a moment to look upon the distant ramparts of the Citadel and steel himself for the descent to the mad lands below. The tension and guilt mounted to near sexual intensities. She would turn around and go after him. She would find him. It would be easy, because it was meant to be. Several times this happened. Each time, the kick inside was less brutal and in the end she knew that she could live with him gone. It was a kind of dying. That was the way to feel it. Life is made up a million small dyings and rebirths. She turned that thought over and over in her head as she came down the swooping cable.

That was how they able to take her so completely unawares.

Branches rustled. Something enormous dropped out of the sky on to her and knocked her down, knocked the breath out of her, knocked all sense and seeing out of her. The something rolled her onto her back. She gasped, choked, fought for breath, waved her hands. Found herself looking up the barrel of an assault rifle at a white man in Chaga-camouflage fatigues with a blue helmet bearing a map-of-the-world logo Gaby reckoned was important but right now could not work out why.

‘Fuck, a white bitch,’ the white man with the gun said. He had a South African accent. He seized Gaby by one hand and pulled her to her knees. While she coughed and spat, he wrenched her arms behind her.

‘Hey!’ she shouted as she felt steel links lock around her wrists. The South African with the gun pulled her to her feet. She saw three black men trying to cuff a struggling, kicking Moran. Lucius was already immobilized, Sugardaddy writhed on the path, clutching his stomach. A blue-helmet stood over him, legs apart, weapon held high, butt downward.

‘What are you doing?’ Gaby screamed as the soldier wrenched her arms painfully behind her. ‘Who the hell do you think you are?’

‘The U-fucking-Nited Nations, lady,’ the white soldier said. ‘And we don’t think it, we know it.’

There were more UN troops at the rendezvous point. M’zee, Bushbaby and Rose were prisoners, together with a Wa-chagga woman who had been left by the trading party to wait for Lucius. The South Africans had jumped them two days ago, Bushbaby told Gaby. They were a new and dangerous thing in the Chaga, a United Nations deep patrol, hunting and eliminating guerilla and subversive elements breaking their interdict. They had found the remains of the slaughtered safari squad. They had found handy culprits. There would be charges of murder, in addition to security violations, when the dirigible got them back on the other side of terminum. Bushbaby said she was sorry. She was so sorry. She had been left in charge, but they had been too fast. Too well trained. They had been all over them before she could get her hand to her gun. Moran listened to her pleas, then spat in her face and kicked her as hard as he could between the breasts. The UN soldiers dragged him away. He did not resist them, but stared at Bushbaby while the black officer called in the airship. All the time that the drone of fans emerged from the forest chatter, he glared at Bushbaby as if he could stare her dead. Rose sat on the ground with her knees pulled up against her chest rocking slowly, weeping silently.

They had shot the dog.

47

She stood in the shaft of sunlight as the door from the transfer unit sealed. A voice warned to keep away from the sides. The floor lurched and the circular platform began to descend. Gaby kept staring at the high skylight. An edge of grey cloud lay across the plane of blue. The October rains were coming. The grey concrete shaft changed colour, to green, to yellow, to blue, to white as the platform moved down it. The same voice that had warned about getting too close to the shaft sides informed the detainees that they were in the Zone White preliminary decontamination area. The platform stopped at Zone White Level Three. This deep, the skylight was a tiny square of light. Gaby looked up the shaft of light, let it play warm on her face.

The containment seal opened and people in white isolation suits came to take her out of the light. The room into which they led Gaby, the Black Simbas, and Lucius and the Wa-chagga woman was white and blindingly lit from no apparent source. Behind a long glass window, a number of people in civilian dress wearing UNECTA badges sat at a desk. A white man donned a headset, tapped the microphone a couple of times to test it was working properly and told the detainees to place their equipment on the long white table to the right. The isolation-suited figures that had brought them in opened the packs and tipped the contents on to the long white table. They sorted through the piles of possessions, bagging items of interest, dropping the remainder through a slot in the wall that Gaby knew went down to flames. She watched her thermal quilt go through the slot in the wall. She watched her spare clothes, her toiletries, her pack go down to the flames.

The searcher lifted her diary.

‘Don’t you touch that; that’s mine, my diary, you’ve no right to it! Give it back to me!’ she shouted.

The faceless figure in the isolation suit inclined its head quizzically and dropped the diary into a bag. It found the other diary, Moon’s diary. Gaby said nothing as it was bagged and sealed. Jake’s camcorder had been taken back on the airship, with the weapons. Now she had nothing to make people believe her.

‘Undress, please,’ said the man behind the glass. He had a middle-American accent. He looked a little and sounded a lot like Shepard. Gaby fixed her eyes on him as she took off her Chaga-proof boots and dropped the cropped cotton top, the purple and red Chaga camouflage pants, her bra, her panties. She kept staring at him as the people in the white suits bundled up her clothes with everyone else’s and dumped them down the slot in the wall. The man she thought of as the anti-Shepard could not meet her eyes.

‘Proceed into the next section please,’ he ordered.

Gaby did not take her eyes off him as she walked through the sliding door. That was how she missed seeing Moran leap on Bushbaby and slam her against the metal door frame. But she heard the soft splintering crack of skull on white painted steel. And she saw Rose run at Moran, her fingers curled into claws. And she saw the milling bodies, flesh and white fabric; she heard the voices yelling, in Swahili, Kalenjin and English. She saw the five white suits pull Moran away and hold him. She saw five more take Bushbaby away on the trauma cart. She saw Bushbaby spasm like she was having an epileptic fit. And she saw the glossy splash and trickle of blood on the door-frame that the white-suits quickly wiped away.

In the next zone they sat Gaby in a chair and cut away all the threads and wires and beads and plaits that Rose had woven into her hair. They cut carelessly, hacking off the bangs of hair that Gaby had not cut in seven years. She looked at the coils of red hair on the white floor and knew that she could survive this. Whatever lay behind the next door could be no greater violation.

In the same room were a number of tiled cubicles. The voice of the anti-Shepard told her to cover the lighted panels with her feet and hands. As she stood spread-eagled, two white-suits worked over her with high-pressure needle sprays. Through the steam and spray she stared at the camera on the wall with which the man with Shepard’s voice was monitoring her. She could cry here. No one would see. Tears would only be more water on her body. She should cry. But she would not while that man looked at her through the eyes of the lens.

Warm air vents dried her body and the shaggy mess of her hair. She was given a white paper robe and moved on to the next zone. The words Unit 12: Zone White were printed in blue on the back of the robe. The paper rubbed her raw skin.

In the next zone was the birthing chair.

There was a greater violation than the cutting off of her hair.

She struggled but they strapped her arms into the cuffs and her feet into the stirrups. Then they did the things with the dilators and the rubber gloves and the endoscope and the lubricating jelly.

‘You don’t need to do this,’ she kept telling the doctor who had his fist in her vagina. ‘There is no medical reason for this. You just want to humiliate me because we fucked the UN up the ass.’

Then the doctor did something that made her gasp and tear at the leather straps. He had not needed to do that thing either.

They took her to the next sector, which was a dead white room with a white table and two white chairs in it. Gaby was placed on one chair. After a time, the door slid open and the man she called the anti-Shepard entered and sat across the table from her. He was dressed in a beige linen Nehru suit. The badge clipped to his breast pocket identified him as Russel Shuler, with Access All Levels.

Gaby placed her hands on the white table and stared at the space between them. After the birthing chair, she could not look Russel Shuler in the eyes. She could not look anyone in the eyes. ‘Interview commenced twenty eighteen, October second, two thousand and eight,’ he said to the air. ‘Preliminary debriefing of Ms Gaby McAslan.’

Gaby looked up.

‘Have you got a cigarette?’

‘I’m sorry. Smoking isn’t permitted in this unit.’

‘In that case I want to see the European Union Ambassador. My treatment here contravenes the UN’s own charter on human rights.’

The man called Russel Shuler sighed and asked her to tell him everything that had happened to her in the Chaga.

‘You shot Rose’s Dog,’ Gaby said. ‘How is Bushbaby?’

Russel Shuler frowned, then identified the street name.

‘Ah. Yes. Her. I’m sorry to have to tell you this, but she died in theatre.’

Gaby closed her eyes and imagined turning the table over, picking up the white chair and smashing blindly about her until everything was in as many pieces as she was.

‘We’ll be charging the man, the one who calls himself Moran, with murder, of course.’

‘Get me the EU Ambassador,’ Gaby McAslan said quietly.

The man sighed, which was the signal for two big men in medical whites to come and take Gaby down the curving white corridor to a windowless white room with a steel toilet in one corner, a hygiene cubicle in the other, a bed as far away from the toilet as possible, a television screen on one wall and a television camera on the other. The door sealed seamlessly into the wall, as had that other door in that other white room in Tsavo West.

‘I want Shepard, get me Shepard,’ Gaby screamed until she could barely force the words from her vocal cords. Then she tore off the paper robe, ripped it into shreds and stuffed them down the steel John. She made a nest out of the bedding, folded herself into a foetal position in the middle of it and cried herself into dreams of running down curving white corridors after the ever-retreating figures of Bushbaby and Dog until they came to a brink and fell into simmering magma and Gaby could do nothing to save them because her head had been shaved and her hands tied with her hair.

She woke with a cry. The door was open.

‘Shepard?’ she said.

Three figures were silhouetted against the white corridor. They wore surgical scrubs. Between them was a birthing chair on castors.

‘You don’t need to do this,’ Gaby said as they put their machines into her and sucked their syringes of fluid out of her. ‘You don’t have to do this. You have no right to do this. No right. No right. No right.’

There was something in the needle they had given her for she slept without dreams after that, and when she next woke, it was because the door had opened again and it was Shepard standing there. Her heart leaped. She lived again. The joy burned through the sleep and the chemicals and in the clarity she saw that it was not Shepard, but his evil twin, come with a white sweatshirt and a pair of white drawstring pants because he was not brave enough to sit across a table from a naked woman.

This was the pattern of time in Unit 12. Door opening and either Russel Shuler or the birthing chair; door closing; numb, foetal sleep; well-prepared food that could have been dog shit for all that Gaby tasted of it, fiddling with the television controls, staring at twenty-year old re-runs on Voice of Kenya of Remington Steele or Oprah Winfrey. From time to time she realized that behind that screen should be news channels: CNNs, SkyNets, Foxes. Instead, she found herself looking forward to the Venus de Milo beauty cream ad. One fix was enough to have her rocking back and forth for hours in her nest of quilts, quietly singing ‘Venus de Milo, Venus de Beauty.’ It made her stop wanting a cigarette. She wanted a cigarette more than she wanted out of this white room, with its shower cubicle and steel pissoir and camera eye watching her rocking gently in her nest, singing. Sometimes she thought that whatever they gave her in the needle must be very good, that she worried so little about wanting out of Unit 12. It was life. She would adapt. She was doing very well already. Russel told her so in his debriefing sessions. But a cigarette would be perfect.

And then she would wake in the dim night light and feel the full weight of Unit 12 press down on her and she would know that the stuff had worn off, because she could recall where and what and who she was, and what had been done to her, and how long it would go on for, because they had absolute power here. Then she would beat her fists bloody on the place where the door had disappeared until the white scrubs came and she would wake wondering what she had done to her hands that they were bandaged, but not too worried, because it was almost time for Santa Barbara.

And she woke.

And there were two silhouettes in the door.

‘Ms McAslan?’ said the nearer of the dark figures. Gaby frowned in her nest of quilts. The figure spoke in a Kenyan accent. ‘May I come in?’

Gaby nodded. The figure entered. He was a tall, very black black man in a pale brown suit. His tie was very neatly knotted. He carried a briefcase. He set the case on Gaby’s bed. She backed away from it into the corner.

‘My name is Johnson Ambani,’ he said. ‘I am a lawyer. I am very happy to find you in passably good health, Ms McAslan. Could you please sign this document?’ He spread two pages on his briefcase and marked where she should sign with black Xs. He offered Gaby his stainless steel ball-pen. She stared at it as if she had been offered a snake.

‘What am I signing?’

‘Documents seconding you as consultant to the National Assembly Ministerial Special Enquiry into human rights violations on Kenyan and foreign nationals by the United Nations,’ said the second figure, a big, broad black man. In silhouette his ear-lobes were loops of stretched flesh.

‘Dr Dan?’ Gaby said, in a voice she had not used since she was six.

‘In person, Ms McAslan,’ Dr Daniel Oloitip said. ‘Now, if you would have the world see what is being hidden in this place, you will sign the papers Mr Ambani, my legal advisor, has prepared for you.’

Questions could wait. Not long, for they were very huge questions, even under the chemical smog in her head, but long enough to scribble Gaby McAslan at the black Xs without reading the print. Johnson Ambani fastened a plastic badge on Gaby’s soiled white sweatshirt. It had her SkyNet pass photograph on it and read National Assembly Ministerial Commission of Enquiry: Special Consultant.

Her hair was long and beautiful in the photograph.

‘Dr Dan,’ she said. ‘Could someone get me a cigarette?’

48

The curving white corridor was full of black men and women in dull suits. They followed Dr Dan like the tide the moon as he swept past all the white doors that were identical but for the numbers on them. Barefoot and vertiginous from the tranquillizers, Gaby kept at Dr Dan’s shoulder by momentum alone.

‘Things move slowly in this country, and they go by devious routes, but they get there,’ the big politician said. ‘Two years I have been pressing for a government enquiry into this place, but all happens in God’s time.’

‘You knew?’ Her brain had been lagged with roof insulation.

‘About what the UN is doing here? Something. We all have our sources; I would not wish to compromise mine so close to its centre. You!’ He turned, pointed at whichever one of the UNECTA followers-on in white fell beneath his finger. ‘Fetch Ms McAslan a cup of very strong black coffee. You were my trump card, Ms McAslan. My finger of God. When I found out that the UN were detaining a Western journalist in contravention of the Kenyan Constitution, and the UN’s own convention on human rights, it was very easy to swing the international media behind me. They are all up there, behind the wire, howling for you, Ms McAslan.’

The Unit 12 staffer brought the coffee. Gaby tried to sip it as Dr Dan wheeled his political circus on down the corridor.

‘They wouldn’t let me see any television news. You don’t know what it’s been like down here, Dr Dan.’

‘You are the lead story on all the channels. Even then, Mohammed al Nur tried to invoke UN immunity and dismissed my writ of habeas corpus.’ The Egyptian Chief Secretary was a leading advocate of the United Nation’s suzerainty over national government. ‘However, for a good Muslim, Mr al Nur shows a regrettable interest in women having sex with dogs.’

‘Allegedly,’ Johnson Ambani said.

‘Allegedly. But I am still sure that he would not like the video we made of him in the room in the Hilton with the Giriama woman and the Doberman to find its way into the hands of the prurient and corrupt western press. I am told it was quite a technical challenge getting him, the woman and Doberman in focus at the same time.’

Gaby suppressed a guffaw. Not even Unit 12 Level White was sealed and aseptic enough to keep out the infectious bizarreness of everyday African life.

‘They made a bad mistake in trying to disappear you, Ms McAslan. But it would have been a worse mistake to let you go, having seen what you have seen.’

‘The camera!’ Gaby shrieked. The strong black coffee had burned away the dope like the sun the morning mist. ‘They took my camera; it’s all on it, everything, about Jake and the Treetoppers and the Wa-chagga and the Breeding Pit. Everything.’

Dr Dan nodded to Johnson Ambani who opened his briefcase and took out another paper.

‘This is an authorization to sequester material evidence,’ he explained as Dr Dan signed it without reading. He gave the paper to one of the woman lawyers in the entourage. ‘Could you take this to administration and have them find and give you Ms McAslan’s camera?’ She ran off, ungainly in tight skirt and heels.

‘And the diaries,’ Gaby shouted after her. ‘Mine and the Moon diary, they’ve got them both.’

‘That is already taken care of, Ms McAslan,’ the lawyer Ambani said. He went into his magic briefcase again and produced two plastic bags stamped with biohazard symbols and UNECTA’s crescents-and-mountain. ‘We found these with the rest of your personal possessions.’

Russel Shuler the anti-Shepard was waiting at the top of a wide ramp that curved down to the zone below White Level Three.

‘Turn about is fair play, Russ,’ Gaby said tapping the badge on her dirty sweatshirt. ‘This time I get to do the debriefing.’

‘It’s too big for you,’ Russel Shuler said to her. ‘It’s too big for anyone. We’re not ready for it yet. Believe me, I am not the enemy here.’

The Zone White workers remained up above as Russel Shuler led the delegation down the ramp. The wall colour changed to red half-way down.

‘Zone Red is our maximum isolation and observation area,’ Russel Shuler said. ‘While I understand that all parts of this complex are to be made open to you, and that my staff here are to render you every possible assistance, I must advise you to consider hard the implications of making public what you see here.’

‘Dr Dan,’ Gaby whispered as Russel Shuler led them along the musky, mouldy-smelling red corridor. ‘Shuler’s right. The Chaga, it changes people. Not just mentally or emotionally: physically. It uses the HIV virus as a vector into cells to reprogram the genes. It can change living tissue.’

Warm air spiralling up from deep in the coil of tunnels rattled the Enquirers’ identity badges.

‘Nevertheless they are our people down here, whatever changes have been done to them,’ Dr Dan said. ‘Whatever they look like, whatever they have become, we shall see what is to be seen.’

Russel Shuler circled the politicians and lawyers around him outside a door that had been painted, Gaby thought, exactly the colour of hell.

‘Ladies and gentlemen, you are now on Zone Red Level One. This is the area in which we hold those HIV-altered patients whose adaptations are largely neurological. In many cases, their faculties and abilities seem quite superhuman; in almost all, they are impossible to explain or quantify.’

He opened the hell-coloured door.

The room was furnished as lavishly as a luxury hotel. A radiantly beautiful Nilo-Hamitic woman was sitting cross-legged on the king-sized bed, cats-cradling with the laces of her training shoes. She smiled to her visitors but did not speak.

‘Sarai is a manipulator of probabilities,’ Russel Shuler said. ‘We’ve tested her using electron tunnelling quantum effect experiments; somehow – God knows how – she can affect quantum world-line collapse so that the outcome is always in her favour.’

‘Excuse me, but I do not understand,’ Dr Dan said.

‘Put crudely, in quantum theory, if you flip a coin, it is not either heads or tails, but a state of both heads and tails until the act of observing the face of the coin collapses those possibilities into a single certainty. Either heads or tails. What Sarai does is make sure that it is always the side she calls. The outcome is always in her favour.’

‘She makes her own luck,’ Dr Dan said.

‘Like us coming to this place, now,’ the Assemblyperson for Nanyuki said.

‘Everything serves her purposes,’ Russel Shuler said.

Sarai smiled powerfully and folded her cat’s-cradle inside out.

In the next room, a very thin man was sleeping in foetal position. The rise and fall of his chest was so slow and shallow Gaby doubted for a time that he was breathing at all.

‘He goes into sleep at the start of the October rains,’ Russel Shuler said. ‘He wakes again at the start of the March rains. His metabolism slows to a crawl. Like hibernation, except that in low-energy sleep the aging process is suspended. From our point of view, his life-span is greatly expanded.’

From his own point of view, it is as short and fragile as any of ours, Gaby thought. Too few sleeps and wakings.

She read the name on the next room.

‘Here,’ she said to Russel Shuler. ‘I want to see who is in here.’

William Bi was the name on the door.

‘Please excuse me,’ a voice called over a rhythmic creaking. ‘I will not stop because you won’t be staying very long, and if I stop I will not come third.’

William Bi sat on an exercise bike, pumping the pedals hard. He was dressed in stained red sweat shorts and cropped sweatshirt. On a flat wall screen a garishly animated cyclist raced across a poster colour road toward an ever-receding horizon.

‘Hello, Gaby,’ William said without taking his eyes off the screen or breaking his rhythm. He was as thin and young and androgynously beautiful as Gaby remembered when the dirigible lifted them from the burning Nissan ATV on Chaga’s edge. ‘I thought I’d be running into you here.’

‘William, I’m sorry. I never meant this to happen.’

‘Sarai is the only one can make happen what she wants to happen. But I can see what she makes happen, so I am content.’

‘William’s time sense has been altered,’ Russel Shuler. ‘He lives in a longer present moment than we do. What we perceive as the present is about six seconds. William’s present is about three and a half minutes, both forward and back, with limited pre- and post-cognition up to about half an hour.’

‘I think you should call the maintenance people,’ William said, leaning over the handlebars of the exercise bike. He had overtaken the first computer cyclist, and was coming up on the rear wheel of another. ‘The air conditioning plant is going to give you trouble again in about ten minutes.’

Russel Shuler took an intercom from inside his Nehru jacket and made a call.

‘He’s almost always right,’ he said when he had finished talking to the engineers. ‘We’ve had to stop members of staff getting racing tips off him, or lottery numbers.’

‘He can see into the future and the past?’ one of the Assemblypersons asked. ‘All at once?’

‘Simultaneously, yes. I don’t think our short-time-frame minds can ever properly conceive what it must be like. Perhaps a state of permanent déjà vu for both the past and the future.’

‘She will not thank you for it,’ William said abruptly, pumping hard at the pedals. Sweat rolled down his forehead. ‘The diary. Reminds her too much of things she would like to forget.’

He passed the animated cyclist and crossed the finish line. As he had predicted, he was third.

At the top of the next down ramp, Russel Shuler said to the commissioners, ‘Down on Zone Red Level Two are the moderate physical adaptations. You may find some of them disturbing, but please do not display any negative emotion in front of the patients. Many of them are experiencing great difficulty in coming to terms with what the Chaga has done to their bodies.’

The colour of the walls in Red Level Two was several shades deeper than the corridor above; blood rather than sheer hell.

In the first room, a woman reclined on a wooden beach lounger under a ceiling of dazzling white light. She was naked, but for a polka dot bikini bottom. Her hair, her eyes, her skin were dark green. Russel Shuler told the Enquiry that she was a photosynthete. Her skin and circulatory system had been infected with complex molecules that bonded to the cells and enabled them to draw food and energy directly from sunlight, like plants. The full-spectrum tubes in the ceiling approximated normal African daylight. In the dark she would wither and shiver and die.

The woman turned her back to the National Assembly Commission of Inquiry and picked up the copy of Viva! she had set down on the floor.

Dr Dan picked the next door at random. Behind it they found a middle-aged woman on a chair with a monkey grooming itself on her shoulder and her hands on her knees. At her feet a cat sat licking its crotch. A bird bobbed on top of the dressing table mirror. The dressing table top was smeared with white bird shit. The woman had no eyes. Blank skin covered her eye sockets. She had no ears. Her skull was a smooth curve of flesh. Yet when the people came into her suite she turned her head toward them, as if seeing and hearing, and welcomed them warmly.

‘It’s the animals,’ she told them. ‘I see through their eyes, hear through their ears.’ She lifted the monkey on to her lap. ‘But they have such short little spans of attention.’

Russel Shuler explained that the woman had neurological grafts into the nervous systems of her animals. She could switch her point of view between them, and was learning to multiplex: cat sight, monkey smell, bird hearing.

‘I’ve seen this one,’ Gaby said. ‘In the Chaga: Hubert, the Treetoppers’ kid; he can share his consciousness with other creatures in the forest.’

‘Indeed?’ Russel Shuler said.

‘I must look out for him,’ the woman with the animal eyes said.

‘What is it all for?’ a woman lawyer asked as they hurried onward down the corridor, past doors they did not have time to look behind, towards the ramp to Zone Red Level Three. ‘What is the reason for these transformations?’

‘Evolution, ma’am,’ Russel Shuler said. ‘Just ways of being human. No more reason for it than the eyes on butterflies’ wings or a peacock’s tail. Every reason and no reason: it works. It’s right for its place and time.’

He addressed the Enquiry in general.

‘Before we go down to the third and final level, I must warn you that this is where the most radically changed are housed. What you see may provoke repugnance, shock, even fear. Remember that they are human. They will not harm you, they are not dangerous. They are just people; experiments in ways of being human. If any of you don’t want to come with us down to Level Three, you can get straight up to the reception area by going a couple of hundred yards back along this corridor and taking the service elevator. I’ll give you a few seconds to make up your minds.’

Mine is made up, Gaby McAslan thought. I have found only one name on my list of the disappeared. The other two are down that ramp, whatever they have become, and so I will not go back.

Russel Shuler waited his few seconds. No one turned back.

‘OK,’ Russel Shuler said. ‘One final thing. If you have anything plastic that you particularly value, you’d be advised to leave it here. In some cases, the alterations have spread beyond the individual to the environment.’

‘What does that mean?’ Dr Dan said, unfastening his badge and digital watch.

‘You’ll find out.’

They went down, leaving a small pile of identity badges, watches and pens behind them.

The first door opened on to an antechamber into which the Commissioners fitted with much jostling. In the facing wall was a long, curtained window and an airlock door. Russel Shuler picked up a microphone plugged into a socket underneath the window.

‘The temperature and CO₂ levels are too high for human tolerance in there,’ he said. ‘But I’ll get Kighoma to say hello to you.’ He spoke into the microphone in good Swahili. ‘Pray this is one variation that doesn’t take,’ he said as he drew back the curtains.

The room beyond was quite conventional. The young man who waved from the chair in which he was reading a football magazine was not. His skin was such a flat black that he seemed to have no facial features. His hair was bone white. His eyes were milky, as if afflicted with cataracts. His nose was very large and broad, his chest wide and deep. While Russel Shuler and Assemblypersons spoke with him in Swahili, Gaby observed him more closely. The dead black skin was thick and waxy; hairless, almost poreless. The milkiness of the eyes was caused by a membrane like a cat’s third eyelid that flickered back and forth between blinkings.

‘Superb adaptation to water retention,’ Russel Shuler said, observing Gaby observing. ‘The third eyelid holds in tears for recycling and keeps out dust particles and potential allergens. He doesn’t sweat, his urine is highly concentrated. He adjusts to the temperature of the environment. That skin also protects him from ultra-violet radiation and prevents ingress by airborne particles. Likewise, the nose filters and sinus mucus membranes.’

‘He’s a man for the end of the world,’ Gaby said. ‘Terminal humanity for a polluted, radiation-burned, greenhouse Earth. He can survive there, and live, and thrive. Jesus Christ.’

‘Yes, Mr Shuler, you are right, we should pray,’ Dr Dan said. ‘Pray very hard.’

Kighoma waved goodbye and went back to his football magazine.

Russel Shuler paused before opening the door of the next room.

‘You may find this one particularly disturbing. We keep the lighting low; he seems to prefer it that way, though he is adapted to wide fluctuations in light levels, as you’ll find out. It’s safest just to stand and let your eyes adapt. You may feel something move past you, very close and very fast: don’t be alarmed, Juma likes to play with his abilities, and he’s a bit of a practical joker. If you can, try not to flinch out of the way; his margins of error are very narrow.’

The dark room felt full of unseen dimensions, like a cinema where the projector has broken down and everyone is afraid to move. It was big enough to keep its own little winds: Gaby felt air currents stir the fine hairs on her arm. She sensed massive objects poised overhead. Someone coughed. The big chamber returned odd echoes. Gaby relaxed her eyes and let them unfocus; an old astronomer’s trick her father had taught her. The masses she had sensed above her were rectangular shelves and blocks, piled on top of each other like the mother of all overhang climbing walls. Walls, blocks, ceiling were covered with steel rungs. The centre of the room was filled from floor to roof with girders and pylons. These too were covered in hand holds. Post-industrial jungle gym, Gaby thought. At the same moment, she saw something flip over the edge of a cube just under the ceiling, go down the wall at such speed it was more like a fall, dash past her and hurtle up one of the central pylons to flop on to the top of the cube opposite. A black face looked down at the people below.

Hands. The thing had seemed all hands. Too many hands.

Russel Shuler called in Swahili. The face frowned, nodded from side to side: maybe yes, maybe no. Then it flipped over the precipice, swung with dizzying speed down the wall, leaped to a girder and hung there

There were cries. There were gasps. Johnson Ambani crossed himself.

The thing had looked all hands because it was all hands.

The boy could not have been more than eighteen. Apart from a complete lack of hair, he was quite normal down to the base of his rib cage. It was below there that the changes had been worked on him. He had no lower torso, no legs, no feet. In place of these was an extra pair of shoulders, arms and hands. He gripped the rungs with his upper and lower right hands. He was dressed in a blue ribbed high-neck bodysuit that allowed all his hands to move freely. Russel Shuler asked him in Swahili if he would come down and meet the Commission of Enquiry. He stood on all four hands on the floor. Gaby thought of a sleek black animal, and feared she was being racist or sexist or change-ist. The boy heaved himself onto his lower arms and stood upright, shifting his weight from hand to hand. He stood as tall as Gaby’s shoulder. He extended an upper hand in greeting to one of the legal aides. The woman danced away, then remembered her position and gingerly took it.

‘Please,’ the boy said, in faltering English. ‘I am so bored. Can you make him make them take me up there? I want to be up there. It is where I am meant to be. I am learning myself English. It is what they talk up there.’

‘Up there?’ Gaby asked, and understood in the same breath. ‘Christ.’

‘Unity space station,’ Russel Shuler said. ‘We’ve approached NASA about transferring him. Juma is adapted for life in freefall. His legs and hips began to atrophy soon after we took him into quarantine – like gangrene. We had to amputate. At the same time as the lower arms started to grow, the internal organs were reconfiguring themselves. The things that have been done to the boy’s body are terrifying. He’s a tough kid.’

‘Please,’ Juma said again, to all the Assemblypersons. ‘I am so bored.’

Gaby could not shake out of her head the image of the legless beggar who had pushed himself on his trolley, past Miriam Sondhai’s house, with wooden blocks strapped to his hands.

‘Let him go,’ Dr Dan said with vehemence in his soft deep voice. ‘Let them all go. This is no place for them. You have no right to keep them here like animals. Even my cattle are more free and respected than these people.’

And as the Masai bleed their cattle, the UN bleed their herd for their HIV-infected blood, Gaby thought.

‘Where would they go?’ Russel Shuler said. ‘Back to their people? Back to the townships and camps? Their own mothers wouldn’t recognize them as human, let alone once having been their children. How long do you think they would last, even the ones that don’t need special environments? How long before some Islamic fundamentalist mullah or apocalyptic Christian evangelical preacher condemns them as abominations of Satan and starts the purges? Your National Assembly Commission of Enquiry may have already sown the seeds of that Holocaust. All those newsmen camped out there are going to want to know what you found down here. Maybe it’s safer if the world doesn’t find out.’

‘If not now, then when?’ Gaby said. ‘Time’s against you. Time’s against all of us, because that big green machine down there is getting closer and we are all running out of options.’

‘Please,’ Juma called from the high ledges among which he had taken refuge from the arguing. ‘This is not my place. I am so bored. Take me up there.’

Russel Shuler passed the next doors. He stopped the party by a curtain of heavy plastic strips that hung across the corridor.

‘You’ll remember what I said back on Level Two about the alterations having spread to the environment. That area is beyond this curtain. There’s still a chance to go back if you want to.’

He stepped through the hanging strips. All the Commissioners followed.

The smell was almost physical in impact. It was not that it was vile or fetid; it was that its complex esters and ketones punched deep into the hind brain and touched awake memories that had slept for decades. Gaby recalled the baobab on the curve of the Namanga Road where she had first seen the Chaga, and the fragments of memory its perfume had stirred in her. Spicy sexy sweaty seductive magical mysterious Chaga perfume. There was Chaga growing down here, deep under the earth. A bluish glow, like television-light, shone from around the curve of the corridor. Russel Shuler led his guests toward it.

Gaby cried aloud. It was every child’s dream of Jules Verne’s giant mushroom forest at the centre of the Earth. The corridor was over-arched by ribs of pseudo-coral, from which hung bioluminescent fruit and clusters of red honeycomb. Fingers of damp yellow sponge dripped from the ceiling; stumps of the same material reached toward them from the floor. Organic stalactites and stalagmites. The floor beneath Gaby’s bare feet seemed to be glazed, fused bone.

‘It’s expanding,’ Russel Shuler said. ‘About fifty centimetres per day. We have a month and a half before we abandon this level. Eventually it’ll take over the whole facility. You were right, Ms McAslan. Time is not on our side.’

He placed his hand on an orange-like extrusion from a puckered mouth of muscle in the corridor wall. The lips opened with a sigh.

‘It’s all right, it won’t eat you,’ he said.

The room beyond was huge. UNECTA had never designed it this size. You could comfortably fit the SkyNet offices on Tom M’boya Street under this roof.

‘It’s been working on the rock,’ Russel Shuler explained as Gaby followed the fluted columns and cables up and up to the ceiling of bioluminescent balloons. ‘Thank God it hasn’t hit any vital systems yet.’ From the roof Gaby scanned down the piles of slumped spheres (profiteroles, she imagined) and the fifty-foot-high multi-headed florets (broccoli, she thought) and the fingers of the ubiquitous land corals, to the white man with long blond hair and a pale beard and liquid blue eyes standing at their feet (Peter Werther, she knew). Dressed in surfer shorts.

‘Good afternoon,’ he said in his soft south German accent. ‘I’ve been expecting you. Would anyone have a cigarette?’

‘Peter Werther,’ Gaby McAslan whispered.

‘Gaby McAslan.’ Peter Werther warmly shook Gaby’s and then the hands of all the Commissioners.

‘Peter,’ Gaby said cautiously. ‘When I interviewed you back at What The Sun said, you had a mark, a sign of your time in the Chaga. A piece of it growing over your body. It isn’t there any more.’

‘Tell her,’ Russel Shuler said.

‘It is still growing on my body,’ Peter Werther said. ‘It will never stop growing on my body. You see, this,’ he touched himself lightly on the chest and bowed shortly, ‘is not my body. This is only an extension of my body. Peter Werther is this room, and the next room, and the one beyond that, and the corridor from which you have entered, and the molecule machines working their way through the solid rock toward the light and the air. This is no more my body than that land coral or this light balloon, and no less. They are all aspects of me, grown out of me. My body, my mind, my personality, are all around you.

‘Are you sure you don’t have a cigarette?’

Gaby realized she had there and then quit smoking.

‘We couldn’t decontaminate him,’ Russel Shuler said. ‘Not without killing him. We’d been observing him on Zone White for ten days when the thing started to run wild.’

‘You asked me how long, do you remember? Back at Lake Naivasha,’ Peter Werther said to Gaby. ‘Not long. Twelve hours, until my skin was completely covered.’

‘We took him down to Red Three, where we had a clean medical unit.’ Russel Shuler took up the story. ‘He was comatose by then. Vital signs were going mad: it was like that thing was playing games with his physiology, testing to the edge of destruction.’

‘Russel refuses to believe me when I say that I was not in a coma,’ Peter Werther said. ‘I was dead. Again. Like I died up there on Kibo in the snow when the Kilimanjaro package came down. The Chaga brought me back then, it brought me back again. I have died and lived twice, and now, I am quite sure, I will not die a third time.’

‘They came out of the soft orifices first,’ Russel Shuler continued. ‘Eyes, nose, mouth, anus: the seeding tendrils. Then the spore fibres burst through the skin, everywhere. We had to evacuate. He was starting to absorb the bed and the monitoring equipment.’

‘Something wonderful, that is what I told you.’ The conversation was between Peter Werther and Gaby. Russel Shuler, the Commission of Enquiry, were distant spectators. ‘Is this not wonderful? How can I begin to tell you what it is like to return to consciousness, not as a man, but as a forest, a mind spread through many parts, many bodies at once? I do not think it can be told, only experienced. But I missed the sensation of being a body, of being able to move and relate my senses to direct action. So, I built this body that you see, the body I remember and like best. But I have other bodies, that I have built with special abilities for special purposes. They are not human bodies, these other Peter Werthers. Come with me. I shall show you this underworld I have become. Virgil to your Dante.’

Gaby thought of old Big Bwana White Hunter movies as Peter Werther – she could not think of him as an extension of the environment – led the Commission through his private jungle to a mouth door between balloon cables.

The second chamber was bigger than the first, and filled with dense fan vegetation. When Gaby glimpsed eyes peeping between the fronds, she asked Peter Werther if these were the other selfs he had told her about.

‘No, they are people. Victims of this place,’ Peter Werther said.

‘Arboreal adaptations,’ Russel Shuler said. ‘The most common form. There are so many of them they’re nearly a tribe.’

The parted fronds closed. Gaby heard movements, rustling in the coral canopy.

There were seven of them; three men, two women, two children. They were as agonizingly thin as winged Nicole Montagnard. Ribs visible under T-shirts. Faces of three decades of televised famine. Gaby could not bear to look at their collarbones. But they were not lethargic, painful, exhausted of life like the starved. They were healthy, energetic, quick of mind and body, right and fit. The adaptation had given them very long forearms, very long fingers, very long feet, very long curled skin tails. Holes had been cut in the backs of their football shorts to accommodate the prehensile tails. Some wore theirs coiled around their legs. The women favoured looping theirs over their arms. The children bound themselves close to their mother’s with their tails.

Tree people. Monkey people. A hundred childhood racist clichés bubbled up in Gaby’s mind. She tried to prick them with reason. Changed. Ways of being human. Old prejudices burst hard.

They had appointed the man who spoke English as the head of their small tribe. The changes had left enough of his face to identify him as Masai.

‘Dr Daniel Oloitip.’ He exchanged greetings with Dr Dan in Masai. ‘You are my Assembly Member. My elected representative. I voted for you in the last election. I am very glad to see you here, but I am wondering – we are all wondering – what are you going to do about us? When are you going to set us free?’

‘Soon,’ Dr Dan said. He looked at Russel Shuler before continuing. ‘Soon you will all be set free from here, to go back to your people, your families, your homes.’

The man laughed. It was the contemptuous laugh of the proud Masai.

‘My family will not know me, my people will not accept me, my home has been taken away by the Chaga. So we must go to the Chaga. That is freedom for us. Where else is there?’

Peter Werther took the Commissioners by another sphincter-door into the main corridor, and from there into a new Chaga chamber. This was the smallest of the rooms Peter Werther had excavated from the underpinnings of Unit 12. It was just big enough to take the ghost of a house. Gaby could think of no other likeness. The memory of a house, fleshed out of Chaga-stuff. Ghost walls of foam. Ghost floors of yielding sponge. Ghost windows of translucent yellow gauze that rippled in the air currents that blew through this underworld. Ghost door of hanging moss. Ghost curtains of creeper, ghost lights of bioluminescent bulbs. Ghost furnishings: chairs, tables, beds, grown from soft green coral.

And in the middle of the green ghost of a house sat the angel of media. This angel was a white woman, wearing a white sleeveless vest and red and purple Chaga-camouflage pants, kneeling on a meditation stool grown from the floor. Her wings were spread wide. They touched the soft walls of the ghost room. They were not feathered like the wings of Jehovah’s angels; these were sheets of iridescent gossamer, like a dragonfly’s wings, and they were full of faces. Faces of movie personalities. Faces of media celebrities. Faces of sports stars. Faces of actors in advertisements for Diet Coke and tampons. Faces of people from Africa and South America and the Pacific Rim and Europe. Faces of foreign correspondents and satellite news reporters. Gaby saw Jake Aarons’ face. Old photograph: sharp smile, sharper suit. Gaby saw her own face appear for a moment and fade into CNN’s European link man. Like the photograph in the badge she had left at the top of the ramp, her hair was long and shiny and beautiful. The angel wings flexed slowly, billowing in the media wind. The woman’s eyes were closed. Her chest rose and fell slowly, as if in contemplation. She had black, naturally curling hair that fell to her shoulders.

She opened her eyes.

‘Well, lookee here,’ she said. She had a Dublin accent. You can take the girl out of Barrytown, but not Barrytown out of the girl.

‘Moon,’ Gaby McAslan breathed.

The woman rose from her stool. Her wings folded and furled into a place on her back Gaby could not see.

‘You are Gaby McAslan,’ Moon said. She sounded disappointed. ‘I know who you are. I’ve been watching you. Following you. I know all about you.’

‘I know who you are,’ Gaby said. ‘I’ve been following you, so long, so closely. I know all about you. This is how I know it.’ She held out the ruined Liberty print diary in its transparent, UNECTA-stamped sack. ‘T.P. sends his love.’

49

The October rains had come. From horizon to horizon the sky was a plane of grey cloud. The red dust of Kajiado had turned to watery mud. Gaby splashed barefoot through it to Dr Dan’s government Landcruiser. UNECTA had been unable to spare the women any footwear, but had lent them yellow plastic rain sheets. Gaby wrapped the camera with the last testament of Jake Aarons stored on its discs in hers. Moon draped hers over the thing on her back that the long lenses at the wire were not allowed to see. All the way up in the elevator, all the way through the legal wranglings in Reception, Gaby had stared in nauseated fascination at the thing that pulsed and glowed in the small of Moon’s back where she had cut the white vest top away.

Once when she had been a kid, walking the dogs on the Point, she had come across the body of a drowned sheep that had washed up in a gully. It had been a long time in the sea; the wool had all fallen out, the body was swollen, lambent, eyes eaten out by crabs. It was not that it was that dead that had scared Gaby, it was that it looked so alien. She had come back, day after day to look at the rotting, disgusting, fascinating thing until the high tide took it out again.

The thing on Moon’s back was dreadful and wonderful in the same way. Through the transparent flesh, Gaby could see how it clung to the woman with a hundred red millipede legs, pushing neural connectors into her spinal cord, alien as a drowned sheep, feeling its way into places no lover ever could. It was an ally with astonishing capabilities: the furled wings were sheets of organic circuitry powered by light. They carried Moon through the planetary telecommunications networks: they could receive hundreds of terrestrial and satellite channels simultaneously, decode them and filter selected information into her consciousness. Television dreaming.

The two women got into the back seat, dripping on the upholstery. Gaby combed back her savaged hair with her fingers. It would grow. It would be right again. She had the pictures. They would make everything right again.

‘We go,’ Dr Dan said to Johnson Ambani, who doubled as driver. The government Landcruiser drove away from the olive monolith of Unit 12. Kenyan flags stirred damply on the wing pennons. A second Landcruiser fell in behind. In it were Lucius and the Wa-chagga woman. They had no place either in this nation, among these people. They were going south too, back to the Chaga. The Black Simbas had already been returned to Nairobi, except for Moran, who had been remanded in prison charged with Bushbaby’s murder. If convicted, he could be hanged. Gaby’s horror of ritual execution struggled with her anger at Bushbaby’s death. Nobody had needed to die.

She hated the stupidity of killing. She hated the fragility of human lives. She hated death.

The media was waiting outside the wire. Hundreds of them, waiting in the red mud and the rain. Cameras, boom mikes, long lenses. Some had stepladders pushed up against the wire. Dr Dan had played the ace of trumps. Vanish a black African HIV 4 victim and it is another entry in the WHO’s databases. Vanish a white female European television journalist and the news vans are ten deep on the football pitch on the other side of the road. Gaby grimaced as she remembered T. P.’s cardinal sin: she was the newsperson who had become the news. As the government cars approached a few cameras flashed. A stampede began toward the gate. Blue helmets opened the gate a crack and pushed through to hold the reporters back.

‘Keep driving,’ Dr Dan said. ‘Do not stop. If you run one down, I will vouch for you.’

Johnson Ambani did his best to obey his client, but the reporters overwhelmed the blue helmets and poured in around the Landcruiser. Lenses were shoved against the windows. Flashes bounced round inside the car. Voices clamoured, hands thrust microphones and disc recorders. Ms McAslan, Dr Oloitip, who what do you when will you how did you can you will you? Gaby glimpsed a SkyNet logo in the wall of technology and Faraway head and shoulders above the press. T. P. She saw T. P. She pressed her palms to the glass and shouted his name. Johnson Ambani inched forward until he had enough space to floor the accelerator. A few diehards ran after the Landcruiser. They must be freelances, Gaby thought. The car bounced over the railroad tracks at speed and turned left onto the Namanga road. The second Landcruiser emerged from the scrimmage and followed.

‘Moon,’ Gaby said. Time and space were running out. ‘I need to know. The story the diary doesn’t tell. Your story, yours and Langrishe’s.’

‘You don’t stop, do you?’ Moon said. ‘Professional unto the last. You get the exclusive.’

‘This is for me, and me alone. I need to know how the story ends. You owe me this. I can guess some of the bits that were cut out of the diary, but I don’t know how it ended. I don’t know if you ever found Langrishe.’

Moon looked at the rain falling on the high savannah for a time. She could not sit straight in the seat because of the thing on her back.

‘Yeah, I suppose I do owe you. Found Langrishe? I suppose so. Found something that used to be Dr Peter Langrishe.’

‘Changed.’

Moon laughed.

‘Most definitely. But not like those poor bastards in Unit 12. It wasn’t disease-engendered. Like this thing of mine, it was something the forest grew. Up there in the Citadel, there are things like bodies in search of souls. And when they join, they join forever. Can you understand what I am telling you?’

‘Obi-men. Orthobodies. Langrishe went into one of those?’

‘This a story or an interview? Yes. He hid it from me at first, when he came to me out of the cloud forest up on the mountain. He would come to me by night, or hide himself in the fog; never let me see him too closely. Just the voice, ranting on and on about evolution, about how he had found the aliens, how the Chaga was their tool for expanding humanity into a truly galactic species. He was right, he had found his aliens; they were him. He was them.

‘He showed me what he had done to himself. He thought he was glorious. Magnificent. I saw an abomination. A travesty. The denial of all my love for him; that he would do such a thing so lightly, without thought for anything but himself. All I had ever been was a donkey to nod at his theories on “the alien”, and a pair of ever-open thighs. Do you know what it is like to be betrayed by the thing that is the sum purpose of your life?’

I am learning, Gaby McAslan thought.

‘I wanted to run from the sad, sick thing, back to my world, my people, my life. But I couldn’t leave him, not like that. I still loved him. You can hate the sin but love the sinner. He was a monster, but many women have loved monsters. Monsters on the outside and monsters on the inside.

‘He wanted me to become like him. I wouldn’t do it. He used all the old emotional blackmails: we could share a deeper love in new bodies, he could not love me fully in my baseline form. New humanity, same old bitchy tricks. He had an orthobody prepared for me; showed it to me, did everything short of physical force to make me go into it. When I refused absolutely, he drifted away from me. He turned to others like him; I went to live among the Wa-chagga at Nanjara village. I needed human faces, human voices. But I needed Langrishe too – I couldn’t leave him. Everything that I had loved was still there, intact, enclosed in that alien body. What’s the psychologists’ term? Approach/avoidance conflict? So when the foragers went out from Nanjara into the high forest, I went with them, to meet with Langrishe.’

‘Why?’ Gaby asked.

‘The ones back at Unit 12 all asked that same question. To have sex with him,’ Moon said. ‘Sex was all we had left. He could walk out of the orthobody – the thing had him on an umbilicus. Twenty feet of freedom. Freedom enough for a fuck. And all the ones at Unit 12 had that same disgusted expression, darlin’.

‘Then he trapped me. It was easy for him to do – the orthobody’s nervous system was an extension of the forest, he could manipulate the Chaga almost any way he wanted. That was how he had always been able to find me. We fucked, I slept like I always did afterwards, and the next thing I knew I woke in some Citadel wall bolt-hole bare-ass naked, completely hairless, two months of my life erased and something not at all nice hooked into the base of my spine.

‘He had the audacity to be furious. It was not what he planned for me. The Chaga had subverted him, diverted me away from the orthobody into which he had schemed to implant me. I knew then that I had been catastrophically wrong, so wrong I could not see how wrong I was. There was nothing left of Langrishe inside that atrocity, except obsession. That was all there had ever been, the need to sacrifice everything, even me, to his lust for the alien.

‘I knew I had to escape from the Chaga entirely; he would always be able to find me, defeat me, bring me to him. In time he would change my body as he wished. A hunting party from Kamwanga found me at the foot of the Citadel. I persuaded them to take me to Nanjara where I knew the people. I needed supplies, yes, but I needed evidence even more. I needed the diary. From Nanjara, the foraging party took me outward: they were headed to a meeting with a Tactical safari squad, for an extra cut on the deal, they could smuggle me through the UN military cordon around terminum. They didn’t understand that I wanted to be found by the military. I wanted to be taken to a UNECTA base. I wanted to be debriefed on what was going on up there in the Citadel. I wanted them to read my diary, then see the evidence growing in the middle of my back and cut it off me with scalpels.

‘I left them before the rendezvous point, made my own way to terminum and through to the outside world. Of course, I got spotted and picked up by an airborne patrol. They took me to Ol Tukai, the base where Langrishe had worked. While I was bound up with his new incarnation up on the mountain, it had found itself a set of tracks, got up on them and gone mobile. I gave them the diary. I told them the things I had seen in the heart of the Chaga. I showed them the thing on my back. They did tests. They did scans. They drafted reports and told me that the thing was unlike any other living organism they had ever encountered and that it would be an offence against science to do what I wanted and cut it out of me. There was a medical facility they wanted to send me to, where there were scientists who would look into the thing more closely and see if there was any way of removing it without killing it and leaving me hemiplegic.’

Moon laughed again.

The Landcruiser had stopped at an army checkpoint. Johnson Ambani sighed and took the last piece of paper from his briefcase and gave it to a barely deferential soldier, dripping and miserable. He had North African looks, bored and bad-tempered in October rains. The soldier saluted and told Johnson Ambani how far south he could safely drive.

The government car moved on, toward terminum.

‘You had to get away from Langrishe, but now you have to go back,’ Gaby said. ‘After all that he did to you, after all he would do to you.’

‘Not any more,’ Moon said. ‘I learned things about myself in Unit 12. It’s very good for that. They give you a lot of time for self-discovery. Years of it. About all there is to do, self-discovery. I learned to love this thing on my back. I have to. It’s not me, but it’s part of me. Like an eternal pregnancy: a piece of something separate but intimately connected; something that needs me. Like Langrishe needs me. That was why he wanted to change me: so that he would not have to make his journey into what he is becoming alone. It scares him; I realized that, down in Unit 12. He isn’t sure he can cope with what he is being made into. He needs me, he needs the solidity of a love that doesn’t have to be exactly as he is, but will walk with him wherever he goes. He needs me to anchor his humanity, to tell him he is still human, still capable of being loved.’

‘And do you love him?’ Gaby asked.

The Landcruiser crunched on to the stony verge. The road here ran in a long straight slope, down into the valley of a seasonal river now boiling in spate. On the far side it climbed as long and as straight up to the top of valley. Half-way up that road lay terminum.

The second government car pulled in on the opposite verge. Lucius and the Wa-chagga woman got out and stood in the rain. Sheets of water streamed down the cracked blacktop. The river was red with eroded earth.

‘Thank you,’ Moon said to Dr Daniel Oloitip. ‘I will always remember this.’ They shook hands over the back of the seat.

‘No doubt we will meet again some day,’ Dr Dan said. ‘The future seems to insist on it.’

Moon and Gaby got out of the car. Gaby held out the diary to her. Rain drops crackled on the plastic seal. Moon closed Gaby’s hand on the book and pushed it against her chest.

‘Give it back to T.P. I promised him I would get it back to him. I don’t need it any more. A new story’s starting; what happens, how it unfolds, is for no one but me to say.’ Moon peeled off the UNECTA plastic rain cape and let it fall to the ground. Rain plastered her thin vest to her shoulders and breasts.

The Wa-chagga had given their thanks and farewells and were half-way to the bridge. Moon sighed, lifted a hand in farewell and followed. Gaby watched her walk down to the river. She had gone a few yards when she paused, as if struck by an afterthought, and turned.

‘Tell T.P. I’m sorry. He’s lost out again. He can give up on me now,’ she shouted. The grey rain streamed down her face. ‘Gaby McAslan. Even if we had known each other longer, we wouldn’t have been friends, I think.’

‘You’re probably right,’ Gaby shouted back. But she watched the woman go down to the bridge and wade through the red flood waters and climb the long straight slope on the far side into terminum where Gaby could not see her any more.

50

T.P. Costello stopped the big SkyNet 4x4 outside the ugly house in the university district. It was late, dark. Even the reporters had gone home. Gaby could not see any house lights, but the Mahindra was in the drive beside her Landcruiser.

‘Go on. You need sleep. The edit can wait.’

‘Don’t want to,’ Gaby said. ‘He’ll be there.’

‘You have to face him some time.’

‘When I can look at a chair on castors without wanting to throw up or knife someone, that’s time.’

‘That bad.’

‘Worse. He left me there, T.P. He left me to fucking rot.’

‘Soonest done, best mended.’

‘That’s a load of fucking shite, and you know it, Thomas Pronsias Costello.’

T.P. rested his wrists on top of the steering wheel and pursed his lips. Gaby knew that it was not because she had affronted him. He was trying to find a way for him to go into that house with her and face whatever must be faced. You stand by your friends, Gaby thought. You do not leave them in hell when it is in your power to save them. But this is not your fight, now. This is mine alone.

‘Why the hell couldn’t Jake tell me he had HIV 4?’ T.P. said after a silence.

‘Because you can’t stop yourself picking up others’ shit,’ Gaby said gently. ‘You did it with Moon, and she still left you. You just go on martyring yourself for people you care about.’

‘Ugly little habit. It’s a crashing cliche, but I can’t really believe he’s gone.’

‘He’s not dead,’ Gaby said.

‘I know that. Not dead but translated? Transfigured? What’s the religious expression? But it is death, of a kind. The Chaga, I mean. It’s there, it can’t be stopped, it draws closer every second of every day, it’s the end of all we recognize and understand. We can look at it and contemplate it when it’s far away, but when it starts to creep up on our lives and homes and work, when it starts to take things that mean something to us, it scares the living shit out of us. Go, get out of here. If the hacks come back and give you grief, call me. I know a policemen or two who owe me more than they owe anyone else.’

‘T.P.’ She held out the Moon diary to him. ‘She said I should give it back to you.’

‘Hell no. Complete the circle? I wouldn’t give her the satisfaction. I don’t want the fucking thing. You take it. Do what you like with it. Shred it. Burn it. Wipe your ass on it. Gaby!’ She had been about to slam the door. ‘One thing. Go easy on Shepard. He’s only a man.’

The electronic lock yielded to her touch. She went into the dark living room and set the diary on the coffee table. She went back into the hall and up the stairs. The bedroom was dark.

‘Shepard?’ she said into the darkness. ‘I want to talk to you.’ No answer. He must be hiding from her up in Zaire or down in Tsavo. That would be good. A night, a day or two all on her own to get a perspective on what she felt, then she could see him without wanting to tear his eyes out. She went downstairs again to make herself a drink. She flicked on the living room light.

Shepard was sitting in the ugly low-backed leather armchair. His feet were flat on the floor. His hands were flat on the arm rests.

‘Christ!’

‘Gaby.’

Surprise became shock became anger, vomiting upwards like black bile. She could not stop it. She did not want to.

‘You fucker,’ she said. ‘Do you know what I have been through? Do you know what they did to me? Of course you know. You’re all in it together. You’re all one big happy family. UNECTA looks after its own, doesn’t it? Like the fucking Masons; huddling together, keeping your little fucking secrets from nasty, nosy bitches. Well, it’s out now. You thought you could keep it all quiet, keep that nasty, nosy bitch locked away where no one could ever hear her. Do you know what they did to me down there? They fed me drugs. They turned my head inside out; then they strapped me into a chair and fist-fucked me. Did you laugh when they told you? Did you tell them it was no more than the bitch deserved? Do her good? Because I sure as hell didn’t see you breaking your balls to bust me out of there, Shepard. You let them have me. You let them do it all to me. You would have let me rot in there. So why didn’t you do anything? Cost you your Peripatetic Executiveship? The red-haired bitch an embarrassment to you now? Was that what they told you? On your way up the ladder, make sure you lose the Irish bit? Asks too many favours. Asking too big a favour, was it, for the man who purports to love her, to stop his good buddies ramming their rubber-gloved hands up the place he used to ram himself? Or did they beg you for a piece of the action too?

‘OK, OK. Maybe you had an excuse. Maybe it wasn’t that you wouldn’t; you couldn’t. Maybe you were over in Zaire or the Mountains of the fucking Moon and you only found out when you got back and the whole thing was blown. But you still lied to me. You deceived me. You made me think I could trust you, and then, like every other man, every other fucking man I have ever known, you betrayed me.’

Gaby picked up the diary from the coffee table. Seeing him sitting there, immobile, emotionless, she wanted to smash that passionless face with it until blood flowed and bone cracked or he made some acknowledgement of her fury.

‘Give it to me just as you found it? The fuck you did. I know, Shepard. The dumb Irish girlie worked it out. So what did you do with the missing pages? Stuffed them into some little trinket box under the floorboards, in case this scene ever happened and you needed them to placate the Valkyrie? Or did you actually have the balls to burn them? No. No.’ She strode across the room and back. She stabbed at him with an accusing finger. ‘You wouldn’t do that. Couldn’t do that. Not Mr UNECTA Shepard. Those pages are filed neatly away somewhere, in case UNECTA ever needs them. Jesus, you gutless bastard. Did you think I wouldn’t work it out? Do you think that little of me? Or were you just blinded by this?’ She grabbed her crotch, pumped it savagely back and forth. ‘You lied to me. OK. Men do that. I should have learned by now. My fault for being naive and hopeful and expecting too much of five inches of erectile tissue. But what makes you an unforgivable bastard is that you thought I was a whore. You thought if you gave me this,’ she held up the diary, ‘I’d give you this.’ She rubbed her hand between her thighs. ‘And you kept paying and getting what you thought was your for-value-received, until one day the market bulled and the price got too high and you let the whore go. Isn’t that it? Of course it is, that’s why you aren’t saying anything. That’s why you won’t look at me. Because you’re scared. Because I’m right. Because you can’t face the truth. Well, come on, Shepard. Say something. Let’s hear it. Or am I not even worth a pathetic, half-hearted excuse? Come on, Shepard. I’m waiting. What have you to say to me?’

‘There was a fax waiting for me when I got out of the disciplinary hearing,’ Shepard said, very quietly. He did not move in his chair. He did not look at Gaby. He did not look away from her. He did not register anything on his field of vision. ‘It was from home. From my folks in Lincoln.

There was a car crash. In Santa Barbara. Carling was driving. Fraser is dead. Aaron is critical in intensive care. The car crossed the centre line – the police don’t know how yet – and hit an oncoming tanker. Carling always was a shit driver. She died instantly. Fraser was the front seat passenger. He always had to ride up front. Privilege of being oldest. They cut him out but he was dead by the time they got him to the hospital. Aaron suffered massive internal injuries. His back is broken. He may not live. If he does, it’s certain he will be paralysed from the waist down. One of my sons is dead, along with my ex-wife; the other is crippled. That is what happened to me today.’

To Gaby, it was as if he had got out of his ugly leather chair, crossed the room and driven his fist wrist-deep into her belly. She could not breathe. She could not see. The world ceased to exist. She found herself standing against the wall, head thrown back.

‘Oh, dear Jesus, Shepard.’

‘Perhaps I could have borne it, perhaps in time I could look at the world around me again and see something good and rich, if there had been someone I could trust to hold me if I put my weight on her. Someone I put my life, my career, my personal and professional integrity on the line for, someone I made a dumb mistake for, once, that grew to devour me. Someone for whom I was prepared to crucify myself before the UNECTA General Council to save her from the consequences of her impetuosity, and when the General Council said no, compromised security by leaking the information to someone in a position to do something with it. But I’m stupid; you’ve told me that, you must be right. The world isn’t like that, is it? I lean, my support seems sound, I trust it with my full weight and it snaps and I fall.’ He stood up. The movement was as slow and precise as a piece of Japanese drama. ‘I’m going out now.’

‘Shepard!’ Gaby screamed.

The living room door closed.

‘Shepard!’ she screamed again.

The front door closed.

‘Shepard,’ a third time.

The Mahindra’s door closed. She heard the engine start and saw the headlights swing across the curtains. Gaby threw her head back and howled like a dying animal.

Finished.

51

Ring.

Come on.

Ring ring.

Answer it.

Ring ring ring. I know you’re there, it’s three-thirty in the morning, where else are you going to be?

The mahogany door opened.

‘Who the hell are you?’ Gaby asked the tall young black woman standing in the hall dressed in a hastily-wrapped kimono.

‘I live here,’ the woman said. ‘Who the hell are you?’

Miriam Sondhai appeared behind her.

‘It’s all right. I will take care of this.’

The young woman moved behind Miriam Sondhai but did not leave. She suspiciously studied Gaby with her arms full of crumpled star tapestry.

‘Miriam, it’s all over with Shepard. I can’t live with him any more, can I stay here?’

‘No.’

Gaby’s foot had been over the threshhold.

‘What?’

‘No, you cannot come into my house,’ Miriam Sondhai said. ‘It is not open to those who abuse its trust. I know what you did, Gaby McAslan. You are not so clever as you think, nor I so stupid. My PDU logs outgoing and incoming calls. I know I am forgetful, but not so much as not to know when I go out running. You covered up too well; if you had made it a break-in, I would never have suspected, but there was only one person knew the alarm codes. Why did you have to deceive me? Why did you not ask me for this information?’

‘Would you have given it to me?’

‘So, because you are on the side of truth and right and good, that excuses it, does it?’

‘Miriam, I’m sorry.’

‘No, you are not. You would do it again if you had to. You would break into my house, hunt through all my private, personal things, abuse the trust I have put in you. Even now, you think you can turn up on my doorstep and imagine that it is all right for you to ask me for help because you think I do not know what you did.

‘Everything I entrusted to you, you abused. So, I will give you one last trust, and then I will not be afraid that you may abuse it, because there will be nothing more of me you can take. Listen, Gaby McAslan.

‘When I was eight, my mother’s mother came up from Chisimaio to mind me while my mother was at a conference in Cairo. I was happy to see her; I loved my grandmother. I was excited when she hired a taxi and took me into town. I thought we would go shopping. But we did not drive to the markets, or the streets where the foreigners bought things with dollars and Deutschmarks. She took me to a house in the suburbs beside an Islamic school. It was the house of the teaching mullah. My grandmother introduced me to him, told me he was a very holy man and that I must do whatever he said.

‘He took me into the kitchen and made me sit on the table. Then he made me pull up my skirt and he took a razor blade and cut off my clitoris. My grandmother kept saying that this was right, it was a good thing, now men would want me and I would make a good wife and bear many children. But it would not stop bleeding in the taxi, or in the house. My grandmother was scared, but she did not dare take me to the hospital because my father would learn what she had done while I had been entrusted to her care. She wrapped sheets around me to stop the bleeding, but it would not stop and she got really frightened and ran away. The cook found me when she came in to make the dinner and took me to my father’s hospital. He called my mother, she came back on the first flight from Cairo to comfort me, but what is cut away can never be put back. Female circumcision had been the way in my mother’s family; her mother had done it to her, and she had sworn that it would never happen to her daughter. But she had been betrayed by the person she trusted. She never saw or spoke to her mother after that. On her dying bed the old woman called for my mother to forgive her, but she would not come to see her. My grandmother died unforgiven.’

The young woman put a hand on Miriam’s shoulder.

‘I was a child; I loved my grandmother. I trusted her. She took me to a man who mutilated me with a razor blade on a kitchen table. What you have done to me is no different, Gaby McAslan.’

Miriam Sondhai turned away. The housemate looked at Gaby as if she were something that had died in the porch, then closed the heavy mahogany door.

‘Fuck you, Ms Pure and Perfect!’ Gaby shouted. ‘And your fucking lesbian girlfriend too! You’re not going to get very far with her with no fucking clitoris! I don’t need you! I don’t need any of you!’

She blared the car horn peevishly all the way down the drive and along Nkrumah Avenue. It left a high-pitched echo in her head: the sound of it all coming apart. She had always thought it would all come apart with a rending crash, or an avalanche thunder, not this constant hiss of everything being destroyed atom by atom. She pushed the Landcruiser faster, faster along Nairobi’s boulevards, trying to outrun it, but you cannot drive faster than what is in your inner ear.

She cried aloud and spun the wheel. The Landcruiser shuddered. She kicked in four-wheel-drive and went up and over the central strip on to the other roadway. When it comes apart, down in the molecules, you need magic to put it back together. You need the person who told you she would be there when it all came down.

The house was a prefabricated hut set in a long row of identical temporary housing that had inevitably become permanent. Gaby could not decipher the Cyrillic name boards, but the bunches of dried herbs and sets of wind-chimes hanging from the guttering identified the bungalow. Contrail-streaked dawn was filling up the land as she tentatively knocked on the door.

‘Oksana, it’s finished.’

‘Gaby. Oh my God. Come in come in come in.’

She made tea with big whacks of vodka in it. She let Gaby rant and swear and cry and spill it out on her coir matting. She let her wear herself out with the telling of it, and then put her to bed with a sleeping pill. A timeless time later Gaby awoke, as the troubled wake in defiance of all chemical assistance, hoping that it was reality that was the dream, and that she had woken into the way things were truly meant to be. But it was not, because it is never is and never can be.

52

Dogs will bark in the night before an earthquake.

Sometimes, just before your world is hit by lightning, you are allowed to hear the rumble of the approaching storm.

It was in the face of Joshua the doorman.

It was in the faces of the people in the elevator – more assiduously avoiding eye contact than usual.

It was in the Germans by the window and the Scandinavians in Gloom Corner and the Eng. Langs, in the middle.

It was in Tembo and Faraway looking up from their desk. It was in Abigail Santini’s certain smile as she brushed past. It was most of all in T.P. Costello’s looking up, scared and guilty in his glass cubicle.

Because you can hear the coming thunder does not mean you can avoid the blast, any more than the barking dogs can stop your house falling into the chasm.

‘Gaby.’ T.P. came into the news room. ‘A wee word in my office.’

They all followed her with their eyes. T.P. closed the door and perched on the edge of his untidy desk.

‘T.P., if it’s about that report, I’m sorry if I screwed up your syndication deals, but yesterday didn’t feature for me: to be honest, Shepard and me had a big fight. Totally honest, Shepard and me are finished. I’ve been staying with Oksana; that’s why you couldn’t get in touch with me. I can do the voice-over today; hell, I’d love to, give me something to take my mind off things.’ She saw T.P. was fidgeting with and repeatedly glancing at a piece of paper on his desk-top. ‘T.P., what is that that’s so interesting?’

‘It’s a fax from UNECTA Administration Headquarters. It concerns you.’

And then the storm breaks, and it is not thunder at all, but that entropic inner-ear whine of molecules breaking apart and whirling away.

‘I’m sorry, Gab. My hands are tied. I can’t fight this, not without putting everything at risk.’

‘What is happening, T.P.? Tell me.’

‘They want you out. Forty-eight hours to leave UNECTAfrique’s field of operations.’

And when the silent lightning strikes, it goes straight and sharp through the heart and nothing survives.

‘Oh Jesus, T.P..’

‘They’re getting their revenge for the Unit 12 expose. The UN need a sacrificial goat to show the Brownnosers in the National Assembly they still have balls. Dr Dan’s swimming for his life in the political feeding frenzy and you’re a soft target. M’zungu. Filthy hack. Woman. Persona non grata. Of course, it’s voiced in the most diplomatic language, but the iron fist is that they may have to “re-evaluate their position vis a vis the international media presence”. In plain English, either you walk, or every news network gets its UN accreditation rescinded, UNECTA puts on the Great Stone face and they end up squabbling for the odd press release and maybe a conference for Ramadan, Yom Kippur and Christmas. My hands are tied, Gaby. I can’t be the man who sinks the entire East African operation.’

‘My God. I knew I hurt Shepard bad, but I never had him down for a vindictive bastard.’

‘Shepard resigned as Executive Peripatetic Secretary yesterday. Word on the inside is he jumped before he was pushed: an internal enquiry reported that while he couldn’t be directly connected to your investigation into Unit 12, his relationship with you made him a significant security risk. In fact, he had already committed several breaches of protocol and privilege.’

Gaby closed her eyes.

‘Can’t you bargain with these people, T.P.? I can’t lose this now, not like this.’

‘I’ve been haggling like a Moore Street fish-wife,’ T.P. said. ‘This is their best offer. They wanted you not just out of Kenya, but out of SkyNet. But for the fact that our beloved proprietor, Cap’n Bill, gets wet every time he sees you on screen and wants to suck your toes, you’d be finished as a journalist, here or anywhere. What would you be?’

Finished, T.P. But I already know this.

‘What am I going to do?’ she said.

‘Well, for a start, you’ve got forty-eight hours, so earn what I pay you. Give two fingers to UNECTAfrique. Finish that report. Give all those interviews I have so painstakingly lined up for you. Clear your desk and walk out of this building with a “Fuck-you-honey” look on your face, like the billion dollar babe you are.’

‘T.P., you talk the biggest load of oul’ shite.’

But she did what he said. She finished her final report, and though it didn’t change anything or make anything any easier, she managed to feel about a couple of hundred thousand dollars as she tucked the cardboard box of desk impedimenta under her arm, and that was currency enough to look Abigail Santini in the eye.

‘Gaby!’

Faraway was standing up at his work station. He smiled the famous Faraway smile and drummed his hands on the desk top. Tembo stood up and joined the rhythm. And the whole office rose and thundered hands on desks, banged chairs, rattled files, disc boxes, thumped books. In his glass cubicle, T.P. Costello raised a triumphant fist.

They hung out the windows and whistled and cheered as she walked down Tom M’boya Street to the car park.

Gaby gave an interview an hour at the Elephant Bar. It was a political choice of venue. The Thorn Tree was the journalists’ bar. The interviewers were all media people who had never noticed her before Unit 12, but were now her best friends and greatest admirers and most fervent supporters.

Between the interviews, she called Shepard. Each time she got his answering machine. When she was satisfied that he had gone back to the US to bury his son and ex-wife, she drove over to get the rest of her things. There were not many. She packed them quietly. She was glad to be out of the house. It felt as if the dying had taken wings and crossed the ocean and come to roost there. The Siberians threw her a party in the Elephant Bar that night. Many SkyNetters came, though T.P.’s official farewell lunch was scheduled for the next day at the Norfolk Hotel. The dress code had been relaxed this once, but most guests enthusiastically observed the see-knees rule. The Siberian pilots performed ‘There is Nothing Like a Dame’ from South Pacific in Gaby’s honour, complete with the acrobatic dancing Marines. Then they carried Gaby on their shoulders around the bar and across the airfield singing ‘Bloody Gaby is the Gal We Love’.

‘I knew I would lose him,’ Gaby said to Oksana, after the singers had gone back into the bar to drink much more and left them out on the strip with the aeroplanes. ‘I can’t allow myself to keep things. I was the kid who had to take all her Christmas presents apart on Boxing Day because I’d got bored with them doing just what they were meant to do and then couldn’t put them back together again.’

‘You are a bird who flies in straight lines,’ Oksana said. ‘You pick your destination, you spot your landmarks, you fly straight toward them. Me, I go in circles, because that is how the world goes. Things come close, things move apart again. This way nothing is ever lost. You will come back to this country. No one who comes here ever leaves it, in here.’ She touched the place where her breast had been tattooed with the totemic mask of the wolf. ‘And you will find Shepard again, because you have never really left him, in here.’

Aircraft lights moved in the big dark over the city. Gaby thought about the time on the coast, with the kids. The circles had been closest them, and therefore all they could do after that was move apart. But some journeys end, she thought.

She saw Fraser taking the ball off her in a sliding tackle and turning to blast it over the goal line. She tried to imagine his journey ended. She tried to imagine him dead. Something tore within. She saw Aaron coming out of the sea in his mask and snorkel, flapping over the sand in his yellow flippers. He would be in a wheelchair forever. If he lived. The thing inside tore a little more. When it tore all the way, all the things that had fallen apart inside would spill out and she would be a long, long time picking them up and trying to put them back in their places. If she was careful, it would hold until she was out of this place, away from these people she did not want to shame with the nakedness of her despair.

At T.P.’s valedictory lunch Gaby discovered more prominent friends and ardent admirers of the type who wait until the afternoon your plane leaves to tell you so. Regret was expressed about her hair, a beacon in the news community.

‘It’s growing right back,’ Gaby said. But she saw how Abigail Santini smiled at her.

Dr Dan had been invited but sent his regrets that he would not be able to attend through his lawyer Johnson Ambani. He had been subpoenaed to appear before a Ministerial Committee to answer accusations that he had exceeded the remit of his enquiry.

‘I thought I was in the shit,’ Gaby said. ‘Shouldn’t you be helping him with your magic briefcase?’

‘This battle he insists on fighting himself,’ Johnson Ambani.

The Norfolk’s Indian food was outstanding, the beer wonderful. Faraway propositioned Gaby behind a mound of samosas and the sewn-up thing inside tore a little more because she understood for the first time that all Faraway’s jokes and innuendos and double-and-single entendres had been constructed to conceal the truth that he was crazy about her.

He and Tembo came with T.P. to the airport.

‘Why do the bookstalls sell so many novels about terrorist hijackings and air crashes?’ Tembo asked. Then he said, ‘Go with God, Gaby McAslan. I will pray to Jesus that you return safely, and come back to us. I know this will happen. Jesus’s blood never failed me yet.’

Faraway said nothing but hugged her and turned away so she would not have to see anything as uncool as emotion on his face.

‘Be clever, my girl, and let who will be good,’ T.P. said. ‘What’ll you do?’

She did not answer, because just them the ground-side stewardess called for the final passengers for the flight to London Heathrow to proceed immediately through passport control.

The booking computer had been kind. It had given her a row of three seats all to herself. She looked out of the window as the plane climbed. The 747-400 banked and she glimpsed the Nyandarua Chaga through rents in the rain clouds. From ascent altitude it was a huge many-coloured carpet laid over the hills and valleys of the White Highlands. Gaby watched it until the veils of high alto cirrus closed over it and she could see the places with the oldest names in the world no more. She drank and slept the rest of the eight hours to Heathrow.

She came through London immigration in the dawn hours and booked a shuttle ticket to Belfast. There was nothing in London for her to go home to. There was everything in Ireland. She bought people alcoholic presents and waited in the cafeteria for her flight to be called, drinking grapefruit juice. She watched the aircraft come in to land and thought about the shaman called Oksana Mikhailovna Telyanina and her plane called Dignity.

The commuter flight was a third full. She gave herself a window seat and watched for landmarks as the feeder jet followed the line of the coast in to the city at the head of the lough. It crossed the narrow finger of the Ards peninsula, turned above Donaghadee – she recognized the Copeland islands, and the lighthouse on its stone pier. She saw the Watchhouse on its little headland by the harbour, and the autumn brown of the Point.

Her father met her at the airport. He had bought a new car: a Landrover 4x4. Paddy the black dog was in the back. Sonya was in the front. More than cars had changed. Gaby pleaded tiredness as her reason for having little to say on the drive home.

Reb and Hannah and a slightly sheepish Marky were at the house to greet the returning heroine. Hannah’s oldest, in her very best junior Laura Ashley frock, stared aghast at her Auntie Gaby. The new baby cried because Paddy started to bark.

After the lunch, Gaby begged time alone, and pulled on her Africa boots and a weather-proof coat and went out on to the Point. She walked the way she had walked the night she thought the stars had called her name. They too moved in circles, but their orbits were slower and grander and more subtle than human lifetimes could sense. She stood at the edge of the land looking out to sea. The wind stirred the fields of winter barley behind her. She had forgotten how cold this land was. It penetrated all her layered tropical-weight clothing. The sea was choppy, breaking in frantic little white folds of foam, constantly re-absorbing itself. She picked a flat stone from the shore and skimmed it out to sea. Two, three, four bounces. She skimmed another one. Three, four, five. Six was her personal record. She did not beat it, or even equal it, today.

Hannah and Marky had gone home by the time Gaby returned from the Point, but Hannah came back to the Watch-house that evening: sisters together. Hannah was wearing a little black dress. Gaby knew the significance. The alcoholic presents were drunk. The sisters reminisced and embarrassed their father in front of Sonya about his inevitable shortcomings as a parent. Then Hannah got the tape out, and the microphones, and Reb whisked Gaby upstairs into the spare black body and mini that fitted and no more. Dad and Sonya shouted impatience as Gaby dashed on makeup. There was a round of applause as the soul sisters took their mikes and their positions.

‘Wait for it,’ Reb said and Gaby smiled as the introduction played, because it was the one to the song that said when you feel that you can’t go on, all you had to was reach out and someone would be there. She pushed out a hip, lifted one arm, two, three four, and in.