by Ian McDonald
Oksana slipped her hand into the manipulator glove, flexed it in imagined flight and pointed through the window at the aircraft standing opposite Dostoinsuvo. It was unlike any other on Weelson Airfield: long, low, lean, mean, wings swept-back, nose uplifted to the stars. It seemed to stab the night.
‘Is beautiful, no? Beautiful bird,’ Oksana said. ‘Tupolev 161. Executive jet variant of old Soviet Blackjack bomber. UNECTA priority transport. After-burning Kuznetzov turbofans: she will do Mach 2.2 at fifteen thousand metres. Swing wing. Take you anywhere in the world. Of course, they will not let Oksana fly this. For men only. Big macho thing. Penis with wings. But some day, some day, Oksana Mikhailovna will be in captain’s chair up there. My ambition, Gaby. See? Both poor unhappy frustrated women. You with Chaga, me with big supersonic dick. But when we are happy, let us not forget this, Gaby. When we have dreams, and men, do not let them come between us, no? Men come, men go, friendship goes on.’ She held out her hands. Moved by the Siberian woman’s honest inarticulacy, Gaby clasped them in her own hands. ‘Any time you want, any time you need, any time, I will be there. When he is gone—for they all go, in the end—you come to me. I will not go.’
They sealed Dostoinsuvo behind them and went back to the Elephant Bar; the Siberians were singing songs from the shows: ‘Thumbelina’, in astonishingly close harmony. They were not drunk yet. They all had little pumps whirring away in their right arms.
13
The rain woke Gaby ten seconds before the PDU on the bedside table paged her, which was ten seconds before Mrs Kivebulaya knocked and entered with a pot of exceptionally strong coffee.
‘You have ten minutes to drink this and get dressed before Jake Aarons gets here,’ she said. ‘I think after last night you might need it.’
Gaby screwed her eyes against the white agony of the bedside light. She felt vertiginous, dehydrated, feverish.
‘What time is it?’
‘Quarter past four.’
Quarter past four? Jake Aarons? Ten minutes?
‘All the news agencies are mobilizing,’ Mrs Kivebulaya said. ‘There is something happening, I do not know what. You have just enough time to drink this, put on a face and get out, my dear.’
The rain was so heavy, Gaby was soaked through in the few yards between hotel porch and SkyNet Landcruiser. It was only when she had fastened her seatbelt and Jake Aarons had driven off that she wondered how Mrs Kivebulaya knew something big was happening before the news companies.
‘You smell like the Tusker brewery,’ Jake Aarons said. He had ad no more warning than Gaby but he was smart, shaved, groomed, professional. Gaby suspected the mental cameras never stopped rolling on his life.
Only the news agencies and the military were abroad in the city this morning. Gaby had never seen so many soldiers. Entire divisions were on the move, rolling in slow, heavy convoys forty, fifty vehicles long through the deserted streets. Military policemen in streaming UN white raincapes held the civilians up at intersections to let the trucks through. They looked oddly insubstantial, like watery white ghosts, seen from the warmth and instrument glow of the Landcruiser. Uhuru Highway was gridlocked with armoured personnel carriers. Something had broken down up by the railway bridge. Jake Aarons smiled at the saturated blue-helmets waving him to standstill with red flashlights and took the 4×4 on to the central reservation. Big all-terrain tyres chewed municipal flowerbeds and lawns to red mud.
‘We’ve got a live one. A biological package. Came down about four hours ago in the Nyandarua National Park.’
‘Jesus, Jake…’
‘They’ve been tracking it for days, seems. Knew exactly where it was coming down, but the bastards back there,’ he nodded in the direction of the Kenyatta Centre, ‘didn’t want the press in on it until they’d secured the area. Of course, nothing moves in this burg but we don’t hear about it, so the moment the wagons started to roll, we got suspicious and they had to come out with it. If they’d told us before the event, that would been the biggest story since the Resurrection, but they’re flying us up there for nothing, so it’s churlish to complain.’
Gaby recalled Oksana’s premonitions and the heady smell of aviation fuel. Jake took the keepie-leftie outside the National Sports Stadium at fifty. Gaby felt the back end begin to aquaplane and grabbed a handhold.
‘It missed Mount Kenya by a hair and came down just west of Treetops. Nyeri’s fucked. That’s why you can’t move for troops. The UN’s mobilizing everything it’s got for a mass evacuation. They’ll never do it, this isn’t rounding up a few thousand Wa-Chagga banana growers into resettlement camps. It’s one of the most densely populated parts of Kenya up there. In the end, why bother? What it comes down to is the big veto power members don’t like the idea of First Contact with aliens being in the hands of what they consider a bunch of bloody savages. When John Alien comes walking out of the Chaga, they want the first human he meets to be a big beautiful blond Aryan US or Russian Marine with a very big gun. Kenyan politicians are getting fed up with being Uncle Tommed and want UNECTA research resources directed toward human interaction with the Chaga. Your Werther piece gave them ammunition—it isn’t an automatic death sentence in there.’
They had left the military machine behind now. The only vehicles on the road were news company 4×4s, hurtling along the avenue in waves of spray. On either side the townships huddled in the dark beneath the spring rain.
‘Nairobi’s dead,’ Gaby said, sobering up rapidly.
‘It’s only forty miles north of here. How long’s that, three, four years? The Nyandarua Event and the Kilimanjaro Chaga have the city in a pincer.’
Cars were tailed twenty back at the airport entrance while blue-helmets checked accreditations. A white soldier with his head shaved within a millimetre of the bone waved the SkyNet Landcruiser through. Rain fell in strict diagonals through the sodium floods. Staff in UN white with clipboards ran around trying to find the owners of the vehicles that had been abandoned at the edge of the taxiways. CBS. STAR. Tass. UPI. Those were the names on the 4×4s. Jake drove along the perimeter road until he saw SkyNet logos. A blue beret tried to move him on.
‘Fuck off,’ he said under the thunder of a taxiing jet, smiling sweetly.
All of SkyNet East Africa were gathered around the open tailgate of T.P.’s Landcruiser from where he tried to direct strategy. Gaby nodded to Tembo, fastening the velcro seal of his waterproof camera cover. Faraway, who could see over any crowd, waved back. Abigail Santini caught Gaby’s eye and smiled politically. Antonovs passed slowly, throwing up swathes of sound and spray from their Coanda Effect engines. Gaby had never heard anything so loud.
‘Right, we’re all here,’ T.P. bellowed. ‘Jake, with me and the camera crew. Everyone else, you know what you’re doing. When we get down, there’ll be transport to meet us. For Christ’s sake don’t get split up. What’ll you do?’
The ritual reply was lost in the scream of a big Tupolev lifting off into the rain. Women in wet combats and blue berets were already shepherding the non-Anglophone correspondents and their camera teams to a waiting Antonov. Turbofans powered up. Gaby scraped wet hair out of her eyes.
‘T.P.! What about me?’
He could not have looked more confused had his car spoken to him.
‘Jesus. Gaby. Yes. Important job for you to do. As well as the Tolkien fly-by, there’s a press conference been called down in Kajiado regional H.Q. Jake was scheduled to cover it, but with this blowing up, well, it’ll have to be an on-liner. You and Ute take a car and cover it for me, will you? The office will patch me through to Nyeri if it’s anything cosmos-shaking. I’m relying on you, Gaby. What am I doing?’
Abigail Santini was beckoning from the passenger door of the airplane. Both engines were up to speed, the pilot was checking flaps and ailerons.
‘You’re not taking me.’
‘Someone has to mind the shop. It’s a big thing I’m trusting you with, Gaby. What is it?’
‘Fuck you, T.P. Cost
ello!’ she shouted but the words were obliterated by a passing aircraft. ‘This is not fair.’
He turned half-way to the plane to wave bye-bye.
‘This is not fucking fair!’
The door closed behind him. The Antonov moved off its stand. There were Cyrillic letters stencilled under the cockpit window. Dignity. Slip-stream blew Gaby’s hair into her face, plastered her wet clothes to her body.
‘You owe me for this, Costello.’
She watched Oksana turn the Antonov on to the main runway. The aircraft went up very quickly, very suddenly, like a high jumper. She watched it climb until its lights were lost in the rain clouds, then went back to the 4×4 and realized she did not have a clue how to get home again.
14
One and a quarter billion kilometres distant, a voice whispered and something woke to life. You could call it an angel and not be far wrong. It was attenuated, diaphanous. It had golden wings. It flew through unending darkness. It had a fragile beauty, but it was strong; it had come far, flown fast. Like the angels of Yahweh, its only thought was to do the bidding of its master. Like them, it was a messenger.
Six years before, the voice had given it a mission and set it on its long, curving course. The voice had spoken again and sent it to sleep. In its sleep it flew on, into the big dark. Now it had come so far that the voice took over an hour to reach it.
NASA space-probe Tolkien awakened and readied itself for its task. Its obedience had not been diminished by its long flight and sleep. Camera booms were deployed, lenses trained on the object of enquiry. Solar wings of crumpled gold foil unfolded, though so far from the sun they could only supplement the nuclear batteries. Thruster pods cleared their throats; experiment packages were readied. Twenty different senses were tuned to the still-invisible target. Tight-beam communication dishes sought the distant bright speck of Earth.
Like an angel, the robot had no curiosity and no will. It was not distracted by the titanic beauty of Saturn. Gaudy rings and the eye-catching opal swirls of gas storms the size of continents could not tempt it from its duty. The Iapetus fly-by must be done right the first time. Celestial mechanics allowed one shot and one only.
It had flown far, it had flown fast, but Events had overtaken it. First the Hyperion Event, for which a new vehicle had been commissioned and tasked six months behind Tolkien. Orbital mechanics had been less friendly to it: the relative positions of the planets off whose gravities it caroomed like a billion dollar eight ball meant it would arrive in the Hyperion Gap two years after Tolkien rounded Saturn and fell into the great dark. It too had been overtaken: the Kilimanjaro Event had eclipsed both space missions. No need to cross the solar system for a ten minute peep at the mysterious and alien. The mysterious and alien was approaching across the plains of Africa and the selvas of South America and the rainforests of the Indonesian archipelago at fifty metres every day.
Ten hours from Iapetus Tolkien commenced long-range mapping. Analysts studied the pictures squeezing from their colour printers, but the black moon held its secrets close. The NASA scientists had waited six years. A few hours more was nothing. You learned patience in space science. There would be better later. Perilune would bring Tolkien within five hundred kilometres of the satellite’s surface at a relative velocity of sixty kilometres per second. Detail began to resolve at T-3600. Back-scatter from Saturn and the light of a sun so distant it was no more than a brilliant star showed the visible surface to have a highly complex, almost fractal structure. At T-2000 the infra-red cameras produced their first heat-maps of the facing hemisphere. As one wit was to comment, the infra-red profile of Iapetus was indistinguishable from that of a pepperoni pizza. Localized hot-spots floated on a sea of semi-liquid crustal matter overlain with a web of cooler unidentified material. Scattered across the temperature-landscape were small, hard, round concentrations of cold. Like black olives.
Whatever the meaning of these structures, Iapetus was a good sixty Kelvins warmer than it should have been.
The high-resolution cameras at T-500 showed new mysteries. The CCD images slid out of image enhancement line by line. The scientists watched. They saw canyons ten kilometres deep filled with liquid that could not possibly remain in that state in an environment like that of Iapetus. They saw obsidian atolls lift ringwalls thousands of metres above the surface of the moon. They saw these atolls bristle with black filaments hundreds of metres long. They saw nets of black tendrils creep laboriously across the granulated black surface. They saw black flowers the size of cities slowly blossom. They saw sheer black surfaces open like wounds and things for which language has no names grow forth. They saw black jellyfish the size of Pacific nation states rise from the hot spots into the wisps of nitrogen atmosphere. They saw slow waves cross oceans of restless black scales. They saw pylons like skyscrapers push from the crusted surface and unfold into sprays of black feathers. They saw the black feathers ripple in a wind that could not exist, and turn toward the distant, unseen sentience of Tolkien. Black. All black.
They could not comprehend it, but they knew what they were seeing. They knew where they had seen this before, but they did not dare say.
At T-0 Tolkien released its surface impact probes. As Bilbo, Frodo and Sam fell toward Iapetus, Tolkien spun on its axis and raked the satellite with a fan of single-shot X-ray lasers. Spectrum analysers read the light from the wounded moon while atmospheric, gravitic and electromagnetic data streamed back from the artillery-shell sized surface probes. Then Tolkien went into occultation behind the moon and the stream of information was temporarily halted. At T-240 the probe emerged from the radio shadow and began to bit-cram full data download earthwards while there was still power in its batteries. Transmission time was twenty-nine hours, seven minutes. On the third planet out from the sun, Tolkien’s masters sifted and analysed and interpreted the information from Saturn and wondered whether to tell humanity what humanity had already guessed. The stuff, the black stuff covering Iapetus. It was Chaga.
Then the voice spoke one final time and Tolkien went silent as Saturn’s gravity whipped it like a top and spun it out of the solar system. The good and faithful angel fell faster than any human-made object toward the galaxy clusters in Virgo. By the time it felt the tug of another gravitational field, the earth would be a sterile cinder pressed close to a bloated red sun. Any voice that woke Tolkien from its Big Sleep would not be human.
15
The sun was high. The day was hot and clear. The sky was cloudless, an intense hot blue that confounds sense of distance. The rain had passed into the hot dry north. The steady wind had sucked the brief rains dry and returned the earth to dust. Today, as every day, the road was crowded with refugees. Fifty thousand people were moving on it, whole tribes were going north at the speed of a Nissan pick-up, or a cattle truck, or a donkey cart, or their own hard, bare feet. Some slapped emaciated cows on with sticks. Some tried to keep their goats from straying under the wheels. Stripped, fire-blackened hulks of vehicles littered the verges, abandoned when they broke down or simply ran out of fuel. The Kajiado road was a fifty-mile wrecking yard. Bands of thin, tall youths in T-shirts advertising fertilizer scavenged the wrecks. The little that was left they piled in the backs of only slightly less decrepit pickups. Dark specks in the heat haze that shimmered up from the open lands beyond the road were refugees striking cross-country for the highway. A tall, narrow plume of dust was a vehicle. A wide low plume was livestock. No plume at all was people on foot with all their possessions rolled up in mats carried on their heads.
White military humpies with stars-and-stripes fluttering briskly from their whip antennae hurtled as fast as they could along the road. They had no care for other road users, on foot or hoof or on wheels. They threw the dust of their passage over all equally. Every mile or so an armoured personnel carrier was pulled over onto the soft shoulder. Blue-helmets in RayBans watched indolently over the lines of refugees and rested their bare arms on their hideously powerful weapons. Far less frequent were
the aid stations of the UNHCR: a couple of Landrovers and a canvas awning under which old men with big eyes and big teeth looked you in the face and hairless dusty babies fumbled for their mothers’ withered teats. If you told them humans had sent machines to the moons of Saturn they would have laughed painfully and slapped their thin thighs.
It was a fine and beautiful day, and Gaby McAslan was driving down the road south to Kajiado. Ute Bonhorst was beside her. The top was down and the radio on. The radio played a western rock classic, as it did sometimes between the African music. The two women sang along with it. The music and the big expensive car insulated them from the epic misery of the road. Gaby’s was not a profession renowned for its compassion, and Africa had begun to brutalize her.
Past Isinya, a party of young men stood by the side of the road grouped around a dead lion.
Kajiado had grown out of the intersection of the road south to Tanzania with the railroad to the soda flats at Lake Magadi. John Wayne riding high in the saddle would have felt right at home; for its high-plains spirit, and for its vernacular architecture. The town’s shops and businesses were set back behind wooden boardwalks that followed the slope of the main street in a long shallow flight of steps. At the Masai stores at the top of the town all things needful to human being, and many things not, could be bought. A few Masai could still be found lingering in the porch; tall and beautiful and satanically arrogant. The spears they carried had each cost a lion its life. The hot wind from the plains blew their ochre robes up around them, baring their lean thighs, buttocks and genitals. Such was their pride, they did not care. At the bottom of the hill was the transit camp. There was no community in southern Kenya that did not have a transit camp attached to it like a mutated Siamese twin. Kajiado’s was smaller than most, and shrinking every day. The Chaga was too close. Townsfolk and camp people alike would be dispossessed soon. The wealthier landowners and professionals had already moved out. Every day a store would board up or shutter down, never to open again. Last week Kajiado’s only automated teller machine had been yanked out of the wall of the National Bank by a rope attached to a Peugeot matatu. There were no longer enough police to investigate the crime.