by Ian McDonald
Behind the splash-guards the women shrieked and laughed as they swung the hoses across the caged models. One of the men had had an erection; three different women targeted it with their jets. Every so often a stream of water would slacken and collapse. Then the woman behind the triggers would hunt in her purse for more tokens and if she had none, reluctantly hand over her weapon to the woman waiting behind the spray barrier while she hurried to the change booth with her credit card. Some of the women were soaked through, expensive cocktail dresses clinging to their bodies, hairstyles plastered flat, earrings dripping. They laughed hysterically.
Faraway joined a fascinated Gaby at the rail. He had brought piña coladas. ‘Compliments of the management,’ he said. ‘There are automatic cut-outs on the hoses to stop them trying to shoot up on to the balcony. They can do what they like to the boys, or each other.’
‘I can see why Haran bought into this place,’ Gaby said, sipping her thick, semeny cocktail and thinking Freudian thoughts about water jets and a man who had used up a lifetime of orgasms in three months.
Wails of disappointment rose from the tiled pit. The hoses were all failing at once. No quantity of tokens would restart them. Muscular scene-shifters in wet-suits with the tops pulled down and tied around the waist unshackled the cages from the floor bolts and carried them away on wheeled pallets. The big white floodlights went out. A single pinspot lit the pit. In it stood a smiling black man in a naval uniform. Loud music started. The man in the naval uniform began to dance to it. Yelling, the women leaped to their hoses. In one instant he was drenched, but he was still smiling. Piece by piece, he stripped. Water dripped from his oiled pectorals. Gaby hoped the water was not too cold, amazed at the profligacy. Even the resourceful Mrs Kivebulaya had to ration showers in thirsty Nairobi and pray that the rains would be early.
A tall man in flares, a blue denim safari jacket and a floppy cap came across the crowded bar to the rail.
‘If you will please follow me, the Sheriff will see you now.’
He led Gaby and Faraway through a door marked private in English and Swahili. Gaby clung to her Ethiopic scripture case like it was her own soul. The m’tekni’s platform soles clumped on the steep stairs. Do not laugh at these people, Gaby reminded herself. They dress like a classic episode of Kojak, but they run the corridors of the Pentagon and no one sees them, they play Find the Lady with the European Central Bank. They do not hesitate to kill to protect what is theirs. There is a top-range smartgun slung crosswise for a fast pull under that denim safari jacket.
At the door to the penthouse suite a second posseboy sniffed them with a snooperwand.
‘Please excuse me,’ he said. ‘Everywhere there are government stool-pigeons wearing wires. You are clear.’
What struck Gaby first about Haran’s penthouse was the floor. It was the glass-tile ceiling of the Cascade Club. She could just make out the bright square of the pit surrounded by the dark fringe of the balcony. The big fans that kept the moist air circulating turned slowly beneath her feet. There was no other light source in the big room than what escaped from the club below. It was like walking on a pane of luminous ice beneath which lay trapped, drowned souls.
Haran sat in a massive black Makonde chair behind an ebony desk. One hand rested lightly on the carved chair arm. The other held an antelope-tail fly-whisk, the traditional symbol of authority and wisdom.
‘My cousin Faraway, isn’t it?’ The voice was soft, cultivated. ‘It is a long time since I last saw you. I hope you are well.’
‘Better for seeing you, friend Haran.’
‘Who is this m’zungu with you?’
‘My name is Gaby McAslan,’ the m’zungu answered for herself. ‘I work with Faraway for SkyNet.’
Haran rose from behind his desk. He made Faraway look small. Gaby would have felt dwarfed had he not been so thin. With the paleness of his skin—cosmetic lightening, she reckoned—and the Cuban grandee’s frock coat, cravat and wide-brimmed hat, he looked like an avatar of some long-suppressed Afro-Caribbean animist sect. He had a pencil-line moustache and a permanent collagen pout.
He bent and kissed Gaby’s hand. His nails were French manicured. There was lace at his cuffs.
‘And what do you wish from me, Ms McAslan?’ He indicated chairs for them to sit. Coffee appeared, poured by yet another m’tekni.
‘A favour. In my line of business, information is life. I’m new in your country, I don’t have the contacts, the names, the numbers, and I want to move up quickly. I’m not ashamed to admit I am ambitious: it is not a sin. What you can provide me with can make the difference between me getting what I want, and being average.’
Haran pursed his lips, steepled his fingers.
‘I presume we are talking about a long-term relationship of patronage.’
‘In the news business you never know what you will need to know next, or when you will need to know it.’
‘It is not just in the news business,’ said Haran.
Faraway nudged Gaby’s foot.
‘I believe you are something of a connoisseur, Mr…’
‘My parents named me Haran.’
‘Haran. I wonder if perhaps you could give me your opinion on this? As I said, I am not long in this country, I have little knowledge about what is of true value, but I like to think that beauty is universal.’ She unwrapped the gospel case and placed it on the ebony desk. Her hands were shaking. She willed them to stop. They refused.
Haran studied the box for a long minute.
‘You have good taste, for a m’zungu. If you like, I will check it against my collection. There is so much that is false around these days, even the expert can be deceived. You know how the master learns to detect the forgery? By studying what is genuine. That is the only way to tell the true from the false. If you will excuse me, please.’
He left with the box through a door behind him. Gaby looked at Faraway who tapped his feet, tapped his fingers nervously.
‘Have you got a cigarette?’
‘Haran does not smoke, and does not like people who smoke. Anyway, I thought you only smoked after eating.’
‘And when I get stressed.’
He would be opening the box. He would be lifting out the money, the other half of her month’s wages. He would be counting the notes. There would be a terminal in there. He would be sending his software familiars out through it into the unseen world to find who is this woman who calls herself Gaby McAslan, what is she, can she be trusted?
Gaby McAslan found herself breathing very quickly and shallowly.
Now he would be examining the box. She did not doubt that he had the expertise he claimed. He would be lifting it into the light and scrutinizing the icons and the quality of its carving and engraving. He would be scratching the wood with his long fingernails to see that the colour went all the way through and was not just tourist-curio boot-polish. He would be sniffing it to test if it smelled like nine-hundred year-old wood.
Gaby found she was holding her breath. She released it in a long sigh. Beneath her the fans threw sinister black shadows on the ceiling.
The door at the end of the room opened. Haran returned to his seat. He was empty-handed.
‘It is an exceptionally fine piece, Ms McAslan. You are a very lucky woman to have found such a treasure with your inexperience. If you do not mind, might I keep it for while? I have a friend who shares my love of African art; I know he would very much like to see your piece. I shall be in contact with you regarding our relationship shortly. I think I can say without any doubt that I look forward to a long and mutually profitable professional patronage. Now, if you will excuse me, I have other matters I must attend to. In the meantime, please accept the hospitality of the Cascade Club. I shall instruct the door staff to render you full service any time you require. A pleasant and good night to you both.’
The posseboy who had opened the door closed it behind them. Music and laughter came up the staircase from the club below. You are a bought woman
now; you are on the dark side of the street, Gaby McAslan thought. It was no strange thing. She had always been a bought woman. At least Haran’s terms on her soul seemed easy.
9
Gaby was working at the cast-iron table in the cool shade of the garden trees when Mrs Kivebulaya brought the emissary to meet her.
The messenger spoke in shanty-town Swahili. It offended his cool to speak English, though it was the lingua franca of the Net. Perhaps he disdained being at the call of a woman. Especially a m’zungu woman.
‘He has a communication for you from Haran,’ Mrs Kivebulaya translated, her professional, spiritual and social sensitivities disgraced by being expected to entertain rude boys and data-gangsters on sanctified premises. ‘A token of good faith, he says he has been told to tell you. A gift from Haran to mark the start of a new relationship.’
Haran’s messenger gestured for Mrs Kivebulaya to take the slip of paper between his fingers and give it to the white woman.
Gaby unfolded the paper. Her optically engineered pupils dilated.
On the paper was the exact location of one Mr Peter Werther. He was to be found in a New Millennium Traveller camp not thirty miles from this table. Which was a gesture of exceeding goodwill, because for the past five years the world had been of the opinion that Mr Peter Werther was a knot of rotting skin and bleached hair and grinning bone up among the snows of Kilimanjaro.
10
In Africa there are still roads that bless the driver. The road that runs from Nairobi to Nakuru is one. It climbs up through the affluent dark green suburbs of Nairobi, then the going gets steeper and it begins to wind between Kikuyu shambas of tall yellow maize and sugar cane. People walk along the cracked red edges of it with bundles of cane on their heads, or green and yellow cans of margarine and Milo. Green and yellow, too, are the matatus that whine up and down the hairpin bends, so overloaded you wonder that they can move. Up and up it goes and just when you think it will never stop and you will drive straight into the ankle of God it passes through a narrow, heavily wooded pass and the road seems to vanish. There is nothing in front of you but blue air and, a thousand feet below, the dry, sun-scorched plain of the mighty East African Rift Valley. The road clings to the contours of the hills, descending in a leisurely, African way to the valley floor and the lakes that in season are pink with a million flamingos, the Nyandarua to your right, to your left the sleeping volcanic mounds of Opuru and Longonot. And you are blessed.
On such a road you fold the top down on your SkyNet Vitara and you drive with your elbow on the top of the door and you turn the radio up and you sing and you let the wind blow back your long, red hair. Thelma and Louise had been a formative influence on the young Gaby McAslan. Her partner in crime was Ute Bonhorst, from the German language section. Gaby had been reluctant to take an accomplice, but she needed Ute’s German. She needed Ute’s silence in return for a half share of an exclusive with one of the hang-gliders who had disappeared on Kibo in the Kilimanjaro Event.
They came to the little home-made wooden bus-shelter on the very edge and stopped to look at the Rift Valley. Gaby walked to the brink, where the land fell sheer to the Kedong plain. This was a big country, a country not hedged and walled and fielded and bounded and owned, as Ireland was. This country was strong and independent and resisted the constraints of humans; it went on and on, over the horizon forever, where their small concerns ended. For the first time Gaby felt she was in Africa. Nairobi had frustrated and baffled and seduced her with its capital city extremes, sophistications, brutalities, but a city is not a country. A city is designed to walk tall in. This land reduced humans and their lives and their cars and their ribbons of dusty road to insignificance, and because you were nothing, you could dare to declare yourself, be that same bright, indivisible atom of being Gaby had felt that night beneath the summer stars on Ballymacormick Point.
Two little boys had set up a stall beside the bus-stop. The women bought charcoal-roasted maize and fresh prickly pears. The little boys were too surprised by the sight of white women to haggle over the price. Because she liked them, Gaby gave them each a ten-shilling note, which she knew was more than they made in a week. She hoped they would not get in trouble explaining to their parents where so much money came from.
The Travellers’ camp was only a few miles beyond the viewpoint, down a long dirt road that turned off the track to the Safariland Lodge and meandered along the shore of Lake Naivasha. Their wagons were pitched in the shelter of a stand of flame trees. Some were propped up on clinker blocks, wheels removed; a final surrender to the fuel shortages. These would never migrate along the world-lines again. A beautiful hand-painted wooden arch stood over the entrance to the settlement. What the Sun Said was its name.
What the sun said was dust. What the sun said was flies. The sun said heat. The sun said melanomas.
Tents and awnings billowed limply in the slow, hot air. Windchimes set on ornamental door-posts barely tinkled. Japanese fish-kites hung open-mouthed, stirring their streamer tails. Stranger fruit hung from the branches of the flame trees: things like cracked leather cocoons bound with steel wire. There were three of them, each about five feet long. They turned slowly anti-clockwise to Coriolis force. A lone generator chugged; most of the camp’s power came from silent solar panels. All the vans had small steerable dishes on their roofs: the economics of techno-nomadism was that the information revolution had made it not only a desirable life-style, but a necessary one. You followed the sun and lived the lifestyle in harmony with the planet until one day the fuel ran out and left you stranded in the heat and drought of Africa’s Rift Valley. With the Chaga approaching.
The Kilimanjaro Event had made East Africa the social navel of the planet. International Bright and Beautiful, and those who clung around them hoping that brightness and beauty were contagious, followed the planetary media circus to the plains in the shadow of the mountain. Most had moved on when Africa and things African slipped out of fashion. Some remained. They found room for their humanity to resonate in Africa’s great spaces. They made their camps under the big sky and settled into sun-warmed introversion and the evolution of white-boy ethnicity. The men of What the Sun Said were bearded and sat about with their hands dangling loosely over their knees, watching what was watchable. The women, naked to the navel, carried their babies slung at their waists and intimidated Gaby with the firm upturn of their breasts. Children in beads, feathers and zinc oxide war-paint on noses and cheekbones came running to greet the visitors. Their skins were tanned hard brown, there were flies around the corners of their eyes and mouths.
‘Are you the people come to talk to Peter?’ they asked. ‘We’re here to take you to him. Come on.’ They pulled Gaby and Ute along. Pied Piper in reverse. In one of the big, billowing saffron tents someone was playing a thumb-piano. The children brought the two women to a white awning roped to the side of a dilapidated country bus. Yee Ah! Kung Fu! said the motto painted on the side. Two caricature black men in white judo suits aimed kicks at each other’s head.
‘Here he is, here he is!’ the children clamoured. ‘Peter! They’re here! We’ve got them!’
‘Leave the talking to me,’ Gaby whispered to Ute Bonhorst.
The bus door opened. Peter Werther emerged.
This was what a man come back from the heart of darkness looked like. His face was tanned that dark brown peculiar to Teutons gone native. His hair was blond, long and worn in the community style; shaved at the sides, plaited at the back. Pale stubble made him look younger than Gaby knew him to be. He had the palest eyebrows she had ever seen. He did not affect the white-boy ethnic chic of the Sun-Saiders. He was dressed in a relaxed linen suit over a simple white T-shirt. No jewellery. No tattoos or ritual scarifications or body-piercing. His only idiosyncrasy was a leather biker’s glove on his left hand.
He greeted them with his right hand. Ute made the introductions in German.
‘Gaby McAslan. I know your work,’ Peter Werther said. His English w
as comfortable, softly accented with south German. ‘We get all the on-line services here: SkyNet, CNN Direct, News International Online. I liked your story about the genitals thief very much.’
‘I’m hoping to branch out.’ A swirl of warm wind set the black pods hanging from the trees swaying into Gaby’s peripheral vision.
‘They are into rebirthing,’ Peter Werther said, observing Gaby’s distraction. ‘Spiritual metamorphosis.’
‘There are people in those things?’
‘In sensory deprivation. They let them out after three, four days. The thing seems to be that they don’t tell you how long they are going to leave you hanging, or even if they are going to come back at all. Face the fear and pass through is the experience. I think that after three days upside down in this heat, you will believe anything you are told about yourself. There are always willing volunteers, and not just from the community.’
Ute had unfolded the camcorder and was videoing the cocoons.
‘Background,’ she explained.
‘Can we talk?’ Gaby asked Peter Werther. A fly darted at him and abruptly veered away, as if repelled.
‘Sure. That is why I have asked you to come here. But private, yes? They are private, personal things I have to tell you. Please come with me.’
Sun-Saiders waved to Peter Werther as he took the two women down to the lake side onto a wooden jetty that had been built out twenty yards through the reeds into the open water. At the end was a small wooden gazebo. Ute Bonhorst videoed flamingos. Gaby set up her recording equipment on the floor and checked levels. Water sparkled in the gaps between the boards. Peter Werther lit a cigarette.
‘Also, this is the only place they will let you smoke,’ he said, offering the pack. Ute did not smoke. Gaby declined. It would be easy to smoke too much in this job. ‘I am sure you are wondering, why this place, why these strange people with their strange rituals? Well, they are a good people, it is a good life they lead, but the real reason is simpler. They were the first people I met when I came out of the Chaga. I walked, you see. I was brought to the edge, and told I must leave now, and I just walked north. They do not ask questions, you see. They accept. If I had walked into an army patrol, or a UNECTA base, I do not know what would have become of me, but these people, in their months of travel, gave me the time and space to learn about myself, and what I have been changed into, and what it is I must do. And now I think I know, and I am ready, and these people have let me bring you into their peace and calm because they agree with me that the world needs to hear what I learned, back there.’ Peter Werther smiled. ‘I know what you are going to ask. Why am I not dead? After all, UNECTA says no one who goes into the Chaga ever comes out. I am not dead because the Chaga kept me alive. It kept me alive because that is its nature. I could have stayed there forever, in the cloud forests up on the mountain, but it would not let me stay. Someone had to come out and tell the truth about what is in there.