Chaga

by Ian McDonald

  ‘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 ca
n 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 m
an 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.’