Chaga

by Ian McDonald

  ‘Shh. They’re here. Look.’

  They came out of the darkness beneath the shade trees, the big lioness first, head held high, nostrils flared, mouth open, tasting the night. Then came two younger females, moving wide to cover the queen’s flanks. Behind them came the cubs. There were nine of them in two litters; some were noticeably larger and more capable than others. They followed the chief lioness in a loose Indian file, foraging two or three steps out of line to sniff a thorn bush or wildebeest turd. An old female with sagging jowls and loins brought up the rear.

  The pride passed within ten feet of the front of the Mahindra. One of the cubs sat down, stuck its rear leg in the air and licked its crotch. The matriarch looked at the glowing horizon and the 4×4 with its spellbound passengers and moved on. The cubs followed. The lions vanished into the great darkness.

  ‘The rangers have been watching them,’ Shepard said. ‘They told me where to find them. They’ve lost two, one to hyenas, one that got pushed off the teat. But I think they’ll make it now.’

  ‘Shepard,’ Gaby McAslan said. ‘Thank you. That was a real privilege.’

  ‘Wasn’t it?’ Shepard said. He started the car and drove back along the ancient wildebeest track beneath the huge bright stars of the southern hemisphere.

  ‘Tell me about your children,’ Gaby asked. ‘Your cubs.’

  Their names were Fraser and Aaron. Fraser was thirteen, Aaron just turned eleven. Fraser was the one graced with charisma. The world would always come to his fingertips without him ever having to reach out to it. Aaron would have to work hard for everything he wanted, but in spite of that, or maybe because of it, Aaron was the one whose name the world would know. Fraser would make hearts, break hearts and be happy. Aaron’s happiness would always be bought, and so more highly valued. Facing Gaby’s jealousy of others who had a deeper and prior demand on him, from a life and relationship she could neither share nor erase, Shepard said that the boys had been the only good thing to have come out of his marriage.

  ‘We marry young,’ he said, ‘the people of the plains states. The winter people. Something deep in the psyche, a need for someone to shelter you from the big sky, a pair of nice warm feet to share your bed. She met me at a skate meet. I was in my soph year at Iowa State, majoring in biochemistry with minor biophysics. And speed-skating. She had sass: she came right up to me, congratulated me on my win and said I had the cutest thighs she’d ever seen. Also, I had the most visible underwear line she’d ever seen. Also, she’d been a fetishist for guys in tights ever since Christopher Reeve made her believe a man really could fly.

  ‘We got married next spring. It was too soon, we were too young. But how do you know that when you’re only twenty? You’re not even sure what you are, let alone what you want. But the world forces us to take all the big decisions before we have the wisdom to make them right. Education, career, relationships, what you are to do with the rest of your life: half your life’s big decisions are made before they allow you to do as trivial a thing as vote. You can raise a family but they won’t allow you to buy a drink in a bar.

  ‘We got married in the hot flush, wet-dream, can’t eat, tear-each-other’s-clothes-off stage of love. We never imagined it would change; when it did, we thought it was dying. That’s when we decided to have Fraser. Rather, that’s when Carling decided to have Fraser. No, that’s mean. We did a good thing for a bad reason, and of course it didn’t work out the way we’d planned, so we screwed up tighter inside ourselves, scared that all that was holding us together was the kid. We had just moved to UCSB to begin my PhD when Aaron was born. Carling had got bored with playing great earth-muffin by then and found a job in an architect’s office. All the money went straight into child care, but it was away from barf and Sesame Street. I had to work nights to get the hardware time, Carling was Ms Nine-to-Five, so I ended up running all over town in this hulk of a yellow Volvo we called The Pig, getting groceries, picking up from school, dropping off at daycare and trying to sleep, eat, read, vacuum and relax in between. Which I suppose is great for father-son bonding but not for a marriage. Certainly not a marriage. Four hours of overlap leaves a lot of leeway for infidelity. I’m getting mean again. And bitter.’

  ‘She cheated on you?’ A hail of meteorites kindled away to nothing in the sky above the Mara plain. You could see forever in that sky, Gaby thought. Outwards and inwards. And backwards, on these nights that were so still and warm and close you could hear the continent breathing.

  ‘With her boss in the architecture firm. All the clichés. That’s what rankled most. It was all the clichés. You imagine that your life partner, your lover, the mother of your children, should be able to surprise you, even in that. Not her. All the clichés. She kept the kids. She couldn’t keep the man, though. I said I wouldn’t get mean and bitter, but this still gives great and deeply petty pleasure. All the time she was cheating on me with him, he was cheating on her with a woman he met in a leather club. All the time Carling was standing in front of the judge saying how this man had the lifestyle that would mean the best possible future for her children, he was swinging from Miss Rawhide’s ceiling by his balls. I laughed to bust a gut when I heard that.’

  ‘Do you miss the boys?’

  ‘I miss them like I would miss my right arm. When they aren’t here I feel like I’m only partially complete. They come out twice a year, stay for a week at Easter, longer in late summer.’

  ‘Is this a warning?’

  ‘I suppose it is. Not so much of when they’re here as when they go.’

  ‘You’re presuming a lot about this relationship.’

  ‘When you get to be a divorced fortysomething twelve thousand miles from your kids, you learn not to play at relationships. It’s a quantum affair. On or off. Everything or nothing. No games, Gaby.’

  ‘I don’t play games, Shepard.’

  ‘You do.’

  ‘Not with you.’

  ‘Games players can’t stop.’

  ‘Shall we end it here then?’ Gaby asked, temper flaring like a sudden consuming savannah fire.

  ‘That’s what I mean, Gaby. Games. What do you want?’

  ‘I want you, Shepard.’

  ‘I want you too. I want this red-haired, green-eyed Celtic fury with her incomprehensible and barbarous accent and her freckled skin that is like a little girl’s and her body that is like the wisest, most sinful whore in hell’s and her too-quick temper and her pride and her ambition and her recklessness and her childishness and her selfishness and her generosity and her bravery and her exuberance.’

  ‘You men talk the biggest load of oul’ shite.’

  ‘But it’s guaranteed fresh shite every day.’

  The table was laid for dinner back at the camp. The rangers stood by. Gaby ducked into the tent and emerged with a bundle of fabric.

  ‘Present for you. Quid pro quo. Old football tradition; swapping shirts.’ Shepard unfolded the bundle, frowned a moment at the print of the masturbating nun on the front and her confession, now washed almost illegible. He smiled, stood up, unbuttoned his shirt and removed it. Before he could slip on the T-shirt Gaby placed a hand on his chest and drew him, as if it were magnetized, into the tent on the right.

  They did not do the Serbian thing that night, but what they did do was so very good and so very long that they almost forgot about the things behind them in the cold past, and the long fingers with which they touched their lives.

  27

  It cost NASA more to buy off the satellite company whose launch window it appropriated than to charter the HORUS orbiter to lift the propulsion unit to Unity. The hope was to recoup it all and more when the Gaia probe went into orbit around the BDO and pictures started to come in. The news services had placed bids already. So the project directors told the financial managers. None of them had ever thought that First Contact would be mediated by accountants.

  This was the mission plan. The manoeuvring unit would rendezvous with Gaia out in the marches of Jupiter, har
d-dock and fire its engines to swing the probe on to a path that would take it into polar orbit around the Big Dumb Object. The disc’s spin would bring every part of its surface under the scrutiny of Gala’s sensors.

  Eight hours before launch from Unity a fleet of unmanned USAF single-stage-to-orbit freighters launched from Edwards Air Force Base, together with a specialist team in a military shuttle. Revisions had been made to the payload calculations. Extra reaction mass tanks were needed, of a new and more efficient design. None of the multi-national crew of Unity believed this as they watched the delta-vee of the USAF shuttle dock with the Interceptor in its assembly orbit, turn its black refractory belly to the stars and disgorge space workers in exo-skeletons and spider-walking Canada arms from its cargo bay. New and more efficient designs; with stars and bars on their sides, that required military specialists to fit?

  The USAF shuttle de-orbited with seconds to spare. Safe distancing thrusters burned blue. The Gaia interceptor moved into launch orbit. At fifty kilometres the main engine lit. The hydrogen flame vanished into the big night. As the interceptor crossed the orbit of Mars it jettisoned the last-minute military fuel tanks and flipped into deceleration mode. This piece of information, alone of all others relating to the flight of the interceptor, passed through a little-known NASA hierarchy directly on to the desk of the President of the United States.

  28

  Miriam Sondhai told Gaby McAslan that she had a visitor when she returned, elemental and glowing, to the old missionary house. She was most surprised to find T.P. Costello sitting on the creaking leather sofa, drinking Miriam Sondhai’s chai. She had been crazily expecting it to be her sister Reb, come out to Kenya on the same whim that carried her through the rest of her life, to see what Gaby had done with the star tapestry.

  Gaby’s ready bag was on the coffee table.

  ‘Well, now you’ve finished banging the balls off UNECTA’s shiny new peripatetic Executive Director, maybe SkyNet’s new East Africa Correspondent wouldn’t mind earning her grossly inflated salary,’ T.P. said.

  ‘You’ve been through my things,’ Gaby growled. The bag was badly packed with impractical underwear and few cosmetics. ‘You’ve been fondling my panties, T.P. Costello. Probably sniffing them.’

  ‘Needs must. I’ve got a job for you.’

  ‘Send Jake. He’s senior East African Correspondent.’

  ‘Jake’s sick.’

  ‘You don’t get sick in this job.’

  ‘He’s sick,’ T.P. answered. His face was as fixed and unreadable as a Kabuki mask. ‘You have ten minutes to get that football gear off, stop yourself smelling like a trapper’s jockstrap and look like a professional newswoman. Ten minutes, then I’m dragging you as you are to Kenyatta. You’ve a flight to catch. Your passport’s in there too, don’t worry. And a tube of factor eight. You’re going to need it in the Maldives.’

  ‘The Maldives?’

  ‘Foa Mulaku’s bubbled up.’

  ‘You can tell a man packed this bag,’ Gaby said, rummaging in it for shower things. ‘No tampons.’

  29

  Beyond the reef, the bottom fell away and the water changed from the pale green of inshore where you could see the shadows of the little coral fish cast on the silt to an ultramarine blue of such transparency that you could look over the rail and imagine the blue-on-blue of the deep water hunters, endlessly seeking, a thousand feet down. The SeaCat passed through the gap in the reef and throttled up. The island dwindled to an edge of coral sand and green palms, then to a line of darkness on the sea, then was lost beneath the horizon. The big catamaran had once ferried holiday-makers between the islands of the Seychelles, but UNECTA had chartered it to service its Indian Ocean bases. Now it ferried the world’s media. There were three hundred reporters with their knightly entourages on the catamaran this bright August morning. The bar had never done such good business.

  Team SkyNet was on the rear sun-deck, preparing for a satellite link-up with London.

  Faraway miked Gaby up, Tembo tried camera angles: ‘not in direct sunlight, your eyes go dark and viewers will not trust you if they cannot see your eyes.’ Gaby looked at the birds flocking and diving above the churned wakes. The sea is one thing, she thought. Unitary. Whole. It would be morning over that part of the one sea that broke around the Point. Dad would be back from his morning walk, Reb would have the espresso maker bubbling on the Aga. The early satellite news would be on as background to their coffee and Marks and Spencer’s brioche. Paddy would be underneath the table, thumping his tail to every word that ended in a ‘y’ sound. Suddenly, shockingly, Gaby would burst from the screen in their morning, live with her news of incredible things in exotic locations. It is one thing, the sea, and it is a big thing. Bigger than anything you can bring to it. No human care can match its transcendent unity. Why fear, then, when all things come out of and return to the sea?

  ‘I am patching you in now, Gaby,’ Faraway said. She nodded. The voice of Jonathan Cusack, The World This Morning’s anchorman, was whispering in her ear: ‘And now we have on the satellite link our new East Africa Correspondent, Gaby McAslan.’

  East Africa Correspondent, Gaby McAslan. Me! Help me!

  Tembo gave her a mark. She brushed hair away from her face. The transmit light went and Jonathan Cusack said, ‘So, Gaby, just what is going on out there in the Indian Ocean?’

  For a quarter of a second Gaby thought she was going to throw up live on prime-time.

  ‘Well, Jonathan, I’m on the press boat to East Seven Five, UNECTA’s permanent floating observation platform at the Foa Mulaku object. We should arrive in just over an hour, about one-thirty our time.

  ‘So what will be happening when you get out there?’ Jonathan Cusack asked, nine thousand miles away. Gaby pushed her hair from her face again. Faraway grimaced and made a throat-cutting gesture with his thumb.

  ‘To fill in a little background: Foa Mulaku, or, to give it its proper name, the Maldive Ridge Object, was the fourth biological package. It came to rest about six thousand feet down in the waters of the Equatorial Channel. By the time UNECTA located the site, the package had colonized a nine-kilometre radius of sea bed eighty kilometres to the north-east of the island of Gan. What makes the underwater Chaga forms so very different from the terrestrial manifestations is that once they’ve established themselves, they grow upward rather than outward. Foa Mulaku has taken scientists by surprise by coming to its final emergence state much more quickly than predicted—they were originally talking about mid-November, now it’s certain that it will come out of the sea some time in the next few hours.’

  ‘Can you give us some idea of what we will be seeing?’ Jonathan Cusack asked. I used to fancy him, Gaby thought. He was my number-one media fantasy figure. Now that satin-and-sabres voice is whispering in my ear.

  ‘UNECTA have built a fairly detailed sonar model: Foa Mulaku is like a chopped-off cone with its base on the sea floor and its uppermost sections twenty metres beneath the surface. The cone is made up of a number of distinct levels piled on top of each other—imagine a giant wedding cake. Over the past month Foa Mulaku has increased its growth rate to forty metres per day, and we expect the upper structures to break the surface in the next five hours.’

  ‘We’ll be going back to the Maldives live as the situation develops; in the meantime, Gaby McAslan, thank you.’

  She held the smile until Tembo marked her out and the transmission light was extinguished. There was applause and encouraging shouts from the reporters who had ambled out of the bar to watch the baptism of fire. Paul Mulrooney, CNN’s Man in Africa, brought her something with rum and ice cubes in it.

  ‘Pissed my pants, first live link I did,’ he said. ‘Looked straight into the camera and talked about a cholera epidemic in a Rwandan refugee camp with it running down my leg and over my shoes. Thank God they only see you from the waist up.’

  The course display monitors placed around the passenger areas showed that the SeaCat had passed the halfw
ay point and the journalists began to move to the fore deck for their first glimpse of East Seven Five’s gantries. By sea as on land, UNECTA had been forced to buy creatively. A few well-placed bribes had beaten the Indonesian breaking-yard’s offer on the de-commissioned Royal Dutch/Shell exploration rig. The submersibles and remote equipment had been beachcombed from the hundred mile wrecking yard that was the east coast of Scotland after North Sea Oil. Half of East Seven Five’s crew were redundant Aberdonian off-shore men who mingled uncomfortably in the accommodation blocks with the laid-back researchers from Woods Hole Oceanographic Centre.

  As the SeaCat moved in to East Seven Five around a Beriev seaplane refuelling from a tanker pontoon, inflatable Gemini craft burst from between the legs of the rig and furiously circled the catamaran.

  ‘Greenpeace protesters,’ Paul Mulrooney said. ‘I don’t know what they’re blaming UNECTA for, they didn’t invent the thing.’ As the rubber boats made a final circle and dashed toward an ancient Greek ferry with a rainbow painted on its bow that was moored a mile west, he shouted, ‘Go and sail your stupid little boats around Iapetus, or the Rho Ophiuchi gas cloud, if you want someone to protest at.’

  R.M. Srivapanda, East Seven Five’s director, was waiting on the pontoon to receive his guests. He was a dark, patient Tamil wearing one of those round-collared suits that look so well on Indians and so poorly on any other race. The left cuff was tucked into a pocket: Gaby recalled from T.P.’s rushed airport briefing that he had lost his lower left arm in a close encounter with a boat propeller while diving off Sri Lanka. All he needed was a white Persian cradled in his one good arm and twenty women in red catsuits with machine guns to be a criminal mastermind from a James Bond movie, hell-bent on world domination from his Indian Ocean base. Except James Bond was waiting up on Level One, in the mêlée of tripods, satellite dishes and correspondents pouring out of the elevator cages in search of the best locations. He had the smug expression a man would wear if he had license to go anywhere and do anything in the name of UNECTA.