by Ian McDonald
UNECTA was the only business in town that was thriving. For a while; then it would have to put up its boards and shutters and go like all the others and leave Kajiado to the Chaga creeping across the railroad tracks and up the sloping main street and in through the door of the Masai stores. Until that time, Southern Regional Headquarters Kajiado was the advance position for UNECTA’s administrative arm, co-ordinating the mobile bases spaced at the four cardinal points around Kilimanjaro.
Unlike Kajiado town, the regional headquarters had been designed to be abandoned. Architecture varied on themes of pre-fabricated units, inflatable domes and the ubiquitous Kenyan cinder-block. It sprawled. Land is cheap when it is going to be taken away from you. The military had built a big, expensive base; there was a well-equipped small airport and servicing facilities for the research division’s field equipment, from Chaga-proof cameras to the tractor units that carried the mobile laboratories.
The guard on the perimeter wire fence checked Gaby’s and Ute’s identities on a PDU and sent them around the back of Kajiado’s only building to exceed two stories; a massive, windowless fifty-foot block marked Unit 12. It was a object of some significance: it had been painted olive drab and ringed round with razorwire concertinas. Kajiado Centre’s conference hall was the disused town cinema. There were still posters for the last picture show, a double bill of The Ten Commandments and Jackie Chan in Streetfight in Old Shanghai. The interior was a lurid red, which, with the curved roof and walls, made Gaby think of an open mouth. There were cigarette burns on the flip-down seats. Many of the rows were already filled. Gaby knew enough faces to recognize them all as junior staff. The major players were up at Nyandarua getting their faces on the pale blue screen.
A big UNECTAfrique horns-and-mountain symbol hung where Charlton Heston had once held up the tablets of stone. On the stage beneath it was a long table with three chairs, three notepads with pens, three carafes of water with glasses upturned over them and twenty microphones parcel-taped to the edge of the table.
Three people entered from the side of the stage and sat down. The murmur in the cinema ceased. On the left sat a Mediterranean woman in a smart suit that would very quickly get sweaty and creased in the stifling heat of the cinema. On the right sat the token Kenyan, who knew it, and said by the bored, distant way he played with his notepad and pen that he was fucked if he was going to answer any questions from the wazungu. In the middle sat the man who had come running up to Gaby McAslan at the cashpoint on Latema Road, kissed her on the mouth and thus saved her from being conned out of five hundred shillings on her first day in Nairobi.
‘The one in the middle, who is he?’ Gaby whispered.
‘Dr Shepard,’ Ute Bonhorst answered, ‘Research Director of Tsavo West.’
Gaby rested her chin on the back of the empty seat in front of her and closely watched this man pour himself a glass of water, take a sip, and look to his associates.
‘OK. If everyone’s here, we’ll make a start,’ he said. She remembered the Jimmy-Stewart Mr Middle-America accent. She remembered the luminous blue eyes. ‘There will be press releases at the back later with full technical specifications. Can everyone hear me all right? At the back?’ Ute Bonhorst shouldered a U-format camcorder with the SkyNet logo on the side. Gaby checked the battery levels on her disc recorder. ‘Good to see so many of you. Typically, we’ve been upstaged by the Chaga deciding to pull a PR coup up at Nyeri. And the Tolkien probe gave us more than we’d bargained for. So thanks for coming to see the sideshow.’ There was a murmur of polite laughter. He introduced himself and the people on either side of him. They spoke briefly. Dr Shepard then outlined the substance of the press conference.
Each of the four ChagaWatch bases fulfilled a different purpose. Ol Tukai, twelve miles to the south-east, specialized in taxonomy and classification. Tinga Tinga, retreating at fifty metres per day over the Engaruka plains towards the Ngorongoro, attempted to unravel the Gordian knot of Chaga symbiotic ecology. South of the mountain, Moshi base moved across the great empty Lossogonoi Plateau and studied the climatic and environmental effects of an alien biosphere on East Africa, and East Africa’s adaptations to it. And Tsavo West crawled through the great game reserve from which it took its name toward the fragile Nairobi-Mombasa road and rail line and delved into cellular and molecular biology. It was there that the discovery was made, down among the atoms in the country of quantum uncertainty.
There was a bridge between terrestrial and Chaga-life. It was the chemistry of the carbon atom, but the Chaga was not built on the chains and lattices of earth-bound carbon forms. Its engineering was that of the sixty-atom sphere of the Buckminsterfullerene molecule; its organic chemistry a three-dimensional architecture of domes, arches, cantilevers, tunnels and latticed skeletons.
‘The molecules are immensely complicated, hundreds of atoms in length,’ Dr Shepard said, waving the red dot of his laser pointer across the screen where wire-frame spheres cannoned off each other and convoluted molecular intestines twined and wriggled.
I bet that is the only suit he has, Gaby McAslan thought.
‘Locked into hollow cylinders, they become essentially machines for processing atoms. Molecular factories. This is the mechanism by which the Chaga absorbs and transmutes terrestrial carbon—in vegetable form, mostly, but as you all know, it’s not averse to the odd juicy complex hydrocarbon or polymer. The fullerene worms break the chemical bonds of terrestrial organic components into the equivalent of short peptide chains—analogies tend toward the biological, for obvious reasons. We’re talking, in a sense, about a form of life on a smaller scale than the fundamental units of terrestrial biology; each of these smart molecules is the equivalent of a cell. The fullerene molecules pass the broken-down terrestrial molecules through their guts, for want of a better expression, in the process adding new atoms, realigning molecular bonds; building copies of themselves, imprinting them with information. In a sense, it’s a kind of alien DNA, processing basic amino-acids and inorganic compounds into the pseudo-proteins of Chaga biochemistry.
‘Essentially, the Chaga is one mother of a buckyball jungle.’
Gaby wrote that on the back of her hand. Dr Shepard sat down. The Mediterranean-looking woman stood up. She had a French accent. Gaby did not hear one word she spoke in it. She was watching the way Dr Shepard sipped his water and inspected his fingernails and doodled on his notepad and folded little scraps of paper into origami frogs and flapping birds. She watched him scan the faces in the auditorium. His Paul Newman blue eyes met hers for an instant and passed.
You don’t know me, but I know you, Gaby McAslan thought.
After the token Kenyan had said his few words, Dr Shepard asked if there were any questions. Gaby was first on her feet.
‘OK, at the back, red-haired woman with the interesting T-shirt.’
‘Gaby McAslan, SkyNet on-line.’ Ah, maybe you do know me now, or at least wonder whether you might know me, but you are not certain. ‘From what I understand of fullerenes, they’re the dominant molecular form of carbon in deep-space hydrocarbon clouds. Does this astronomical fact have any relation to what Tolkien showed us out at Iapetus?’
If the face does not help you remember, will the voice, the accent? She did not know why it was so important for him to remember. But she wanted deeply to impress him.
‘As far back as the Kilimanjaro Event, speculative connections were being made between the Chaga and the Iapetus Occupation. It may have been a shock seeing the images that came back from Tolkien, but, to the scientific community at least, it wasn’t a surprise. What our research has proved is that we are encountering a highly adaptive and successful organism, one which, by virtue of its ability to engineer molecules, can create an ecological niche for itself anywhere it can find raw materials. The fullerene worms are quasi-stable and can rapidly switch molecular structures. In non-technical language, they can reprogram themselves to change with their environment. So, theoretically, there is no objection to them having
evolved a form that can colonize the moons of Saturn, or, if they can adapt to as inimical an environment as that, anywhere else in the universe, for that matter.’
‘So the Chaga is not native to the Saturnian system?’ Gaby asked, beating a dozen raised hands by not having sat down while Dr Shepard answered her question.
‘Certainly not Iapetus. And we would very much doubt that it originated in or around the Hyperion Gap, either. If we’d an unlimited budget and our own HORUS orbiter, or even a spare SSTO, we’d very much like to send a probe for a sneaky look under Titan’s cloud-layer, not because it may have evolved there, but because it may have used it as a way-station on the way to Iapetus, and ultimately, Earth. There’s barroom speculation about Saturn; if not the planet itself, perhaps in the ring system. The planet pumps out a lot of energy, though personally I’m not convinced it’s enough to power up so complex and energy-heavy a chemistry. Off the record, my private theory is that it does not originate from our solar system.’
Journalists were on their feet, fingers raised. Gaby sneaked in a parting shot.
‘Could this have evolved naturally?’
‘Are you asking me are the Iapetus and Earth Chagas artefacts of an alien intelligence?’
Their eyes met across a crowded Kajiado cinema.
‘Are there aliens in spaceships with lots of windows in them?’
She made him smile. It was a major triumph. He was one of those men whose smiles so utterly transform their faces they seem like two people.
‘On the strength of the evidence to hand, I’d give a reluctant “no”. No UFOs landing on the White House lawn. Well, that kind of depends on where, and whether, the Chaga is going to stop. Have you heard of Von Neumann machines?’
‘Machines that move from planet to planet building copies of themselves.’
‘The Chaga may be a highly sophisticated Von Neumann machine. Starships the size of molecules. In a sense, what is a living cell but a Von Neumann machine programmed by its own DNA? And we said earlier that the Chaga “memes”, as we call them, can be thought of as living molecules. As to whether there is a guiding intelligence behind it—I’m blue-skying here—Von Neumann machines can easily outlive the civilization that produces them. The designers of the Chaga—if they exist at all—could have become extinct a million years ago. But is there any reason why our particular brand of behaviour and problem-solving should be the sole criterion of “intelligence”? Our intelligence may be so particular to us that we cannot recognize that something truly alien may be “intelligent”. We’re all thinking in terms of little men with big heads and glowing eyes. Anthropomorphic chauvinism. Perhaps the aliens are the Chaga, or have become the Chaga, over aeons of travel. Then again, as you said, the first fullerenes were deduced from the profiles of interstellar molecular clouds, so perhaps the Chaga, or, I should say, the Chaga-memes, the fullerene-machines, are a form of life that has evolved in interstellar space. But there may be another level of chauvinism: we assume that within any sufficiently complex system, there must be intelligence. That’s how God got invented, I suspect. The Chaga may just be dumb, fecund life, with no more intelligence than the lilies of the field, or a condomful of sperm.
‘Thank you for asking that. I enjoyed your question. OK, Jean-Marie Duclos.’
Gaby did not hear the French television journalist’s question, any of the questions that followed. She had what she wanted from Dr Shepard. After the press conference, when the others were filing out and picking up their hard-copy technical releases and blinking in the bright sunlight outside, she came cantering down the steps to the front.
‘Can I sound-bite you on “buckyball jungle”?’
‘If you put a little “TM” superscript after it,’ Dr Shepard said. ‘Or is it an “R” in a circle? You can sound-bite anything you like. I prefer fullerene machine.’
Gaby shrugged to say that it was not quite so aurally digestible. Dr Shepard hesitated as people do when they need to say something that will embarrass them if it is not right.
‘Your accent sounds familiar.’
‘Northern Ireland.’ She baited the hook. ‘You saved my ass once.’
He must work it out himself.
He worked it out himself.
‘The con gang. What was it?’
‘Persecuted students trying to escape to Mozambique. They’d got you with the Rwandan refugee one.’
‘God, yes. And I…’
‘You kissed me.’
He blushed. It was a comfortable, old-fashioned thing to see in a man.
‘Gaby McAslan,’ he said. ‘You do those “And Finally” pieces for Sky Net On-line. I liked the one about the bicycle pump fetishists; the guy down in Dar Es Salaam who thought he’d go one better and shoved a compressed air-line up his ass and blew his colon out through his navel. You’ve caught the real spirit of Africa in those stories. Magic realism is plain old day-to-day living here.’
‘I’ve moved on a bit since the “And Finally” pieces.’
‘The Peter Werther interview. That was quite a coup.’
‘Thank you.’ The moment presented itself. ‘Listen, I’d very much like to do an interview with you; would you have any objections to talking over lunch? There’s supposed to be a place does very good Indian food here, if it hasn’t closed up.’
‘There still is. It does. The Tipsi Café. Regrettably, I’ll have to pass on your generous offer; straight after this they’re flying me up to the Nyandarua Impact Zone.’ He glanced at his watch. ‘In fact, they’re holding the plane for me right now. If you want an interview, it’s simplest to get in touch directly with Tsavo West.’ He scribbled a number on the back of Gaby’s hand, next to ‘buckyball jungle’. ‘Don’t wash that. I’ll be up in Nairobi for the Ambassador’s Independence Day Hootenanny, but I don’t suppose you’ll be there?’
The very rich, the very beautiful, the very glamorous and the very influential were invited to the US Ambassador’s Fourth of July party. No one less than the rank of station head, or chief correspondent.
‘You never know,’ Gaby said. ‘Life’s full of surprises.’ ‘I reckoned that.’ Dr Shepard packed up his stuff in an impact-plastic briefcase and pulled an overnight bag from under the table. ‘By the way, might I say, it was an ass exceedingly well worth saving.’
16
The Tipsi Café was one of those refreshing places that surpass their reputations. The food was wonderful, generous, cheap and served unpretentiously on plastic plates. Everything tasted faintly of charcoal. Over goat sagh, lentils, two vegetable curries, chutneys and chapattis, Gaby picked Ute Bonhorst for everything she knew about Dr Shepard.
‘He’s forty-one, comes from Lincoln, Nebraska. His primary degree was at Iowa State in molecular biology; he graduated in 1988, did his doctorate at UCSB in biophysics and the speculative exobiology of interstellar clouds. When UNECTA received its UN charter in 2006, he was immediately head-hunted.’
‘I don’t want his curriculum vitae, tell me about the man.’ Gaby summoned two more Tuskers.
‘You have to call him Shepard. He has a first name but he never uses it and no one knows what it is. He’s divorced—it was a messy affair, I think—he has two boys who come out to stay with him twice a year. Currently he is unattached. Which makes him the most sought-after male in East Africa. Abigail Santini has been trying to get him into her bed for almost two years without any success. Are you thinking of joining the line?’
‘He interests me, that’s all.’ From the look she received, Gaby knew Ute did not believe her. She was not sure she believed herself, but this Shepard did seem to be the only truly solid person she had met in Africa. White person. Tembo, Faraway, Mrs Kivebulaya, even Haran the Sheriff and Dr Dan sweating with fear in his executive class seat; these were real, firmly rooted in the landscape, casting dark shadows. The African light was too bright for white people; it shone through them, it bleached them pale and insubstantial. Dr Shepard stood full in the light and was not annihilated b
y it. He threw his shadow across the land, his feet were firmly planted in it, like the Masai standing with arrogant nobility outside the stores at the top of the town.
The decision was made while waiting at the crossing for the daily chemical train to pass. In front of the Sky Net Vitara was an open truck. Men were seated in the open back. Seeing white women in an open top car, an old man reached under his robe and began to masturbate gently, unselfconsciously. The train cleared the crossing. The truck turned left, toward Nairobi. Gaby turned right toward the Chaga.
‘What are you doing?’ Ute Bonhorst said, alarmed.
Gaby pushed the 4×4 into top gear.
‘I’m going to see the Chaga. I’ve been three months in Nairobi working with this thing, living it, eating it, drinking it, sleeping with it, dreaming of it, and now I’m this close I’m not going to let a few miles stop me.’
‘We have no clearances.’
‘That won’t be a problem. Trust me.’
The road south was wide and swept over the low hills of the thorn scrub country. There was not another vehicle. Gaby pressed her right foot to the floor and pushed the Suzuki to its limits. Her long frustration went out of her like a colossal sigh, months deep, and the vacuum it left was filled with the sudden vertigo that comes when you find you have the courage and freedom to do what you most want in the world. She wished this road could go on for ever; at the same time she could not wait for it to bring her to her destination.
They ran into the checkpoint five miles south of Ilbisil. Three pig-ugly South African Defence Force APCs were pulled across the road. A black soldier in a blue helmet with green, blue and black ANC flashes on his lapels waved them down.