Chaga

by Ian McDonald

  ‘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. Sh
e 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.