by Ian McDonald
‘Hold on. T.P. doesn’t know about this?’
He laughed.
‘Oh, I have given myself away, haven’t I? Nobody knows save thee, me, the hospital and that fucking faithless bastard who said he’d stay with me always and high-tailed it with his dick between his legs when he found out that Ol’ Bwana Jake had gone down with the Scourge.’
Gaby cried out and covered her ears as Jake emptied the remaining chambers into the mirror. Birds rose from their roosts on the terracotta roof tiles with a clap of wings.
‘Do you want to know the irony of it? You probably don’t, but you’re going to hear it anyway. It didn’t even start as four. It started as a dose of three I reckon I picked up from some emergency dental work I had to get done over in Uganda a couple of years ago. Safe sex? I wrote the book on it. The condom kid, that’s me. Safe dentistry? They don’t tell you about that one. But what the hell, if you can afford the AZT, the interferon and the antibody transfusions, you won’t even get turned down for life insurance with a dose of three. The hospital keeps an eye on you and every other month or so takes a blood sample to make sure the HIV 3 virus hasn’t mutated into the HIV 4 variant. And everything was fine, until last month.’
‘Foa Mulaku.’ She had got the story because T.P. said Jake was sick. ‘T.P. did know about the HIV 3.’
‘T.P.’s known all along about the three. You misjudge him, Gaby. He may be the last honourable man in Broadcast Journalism. The hospital called me in: anomalous antibody proteins in my samples. You’re dead from the moment they say anomalous antibody proteins, but you can’t stop yourself hoping. You look for signs and wonders, like rainbows, or counting birds on power lines or monkeys on trees, or adding up bus numbers to see if they come to anything but thirteen: anything that seems like a promise of a yes. You bribe Jesus with prayers and candles; Allah too, if he’ll do the job. Even the Hindu gods down at the temple: just give me a sign. And then the letter arrives asking you to come see Dr Singh and they might as well tell you in the letter it’s four, you’re dead, because then at least you could work it out in your own private coming-to-terms, and not having to go through sessions with a Personal Trauma Counsellor sitting with her hands folded and that fucking cow-looking-over-a-gate expression that is supposed to radiate empathy and understanding. Jesus Christ!
‘And then the person you turn to for real empathy and understanding, because of all the times he’s told you he loves you, he cares for you, he’ll always be there for you, he’ll always help you and sustain you and empower you and carry you when the road gets too hard for you and all that Jonathan Livingstone Seagull/Personal Development shit, leaves you three lines on a sheet of file paper on the kitchen table saying he’s sorry, so sorry, but his life path is calling him on. Life path! Takes five thousand dollars of my money to help him down his yellow-brick life path!’
Jake threw the gun at a glossy starling standing on the paving, staring at him with its head inclined. It leaped away into the sky with a squawk.
‘So, how did you find out?’ Jake asked.
‘I got into the Global Aids Policy Unit database.’
‘Not legally, you didn’t. Who hacked it for you? Haran?’
He is in control here, Gaby thought. His sickness has given him mastery over guilt and sympathy and he knows he can make me do whatever he wants.
‘How long have you known about Haran?’
‘We all make deals with the devil. What’s he charging you?’
‘An eye for an eye. But Haran didn’t do the GAPU files. I did it myself. Stole the passwords from Miriam Sondhai.’
Jake Aarons pursed his lips and nodded. It was a combination of gestures Gaby could read well; his professional curiosity was stirring. He could not stop it any more than a kleptomaniac could stop stealing. It was his hope of salvation.
‘Stay there.’ He went into the house, wrapped himself in a bathrobe and boiled a kettle in his blue and yellow kitchen. It looked like the kitchen of a man who eats out a lot.
‘Tea? Earl Grey? Tequila’s piss. Tea is thinkin’ drinkin’.’ He brought a tray with pot and cups to the side of the pool and invited Gaby to dangle her feet in the water beside him. ‘Now, talk. Talk to me of things newsworthy, because it stops me having to think about all the things these little chips of protein in my blood are taking away from me.’ He poured two bowls. The set was Japanese, decorated under the glaze with Buddhist prayers. Gaby kicked off her boots and told him about the blood samples from UNECTA, and about the vanished William Bi and Peter Werther and the place they had been vanished to. She did not tell him that the HIV 4 victims were alive long after the virus should have killed them. She did not want to give Jake a shot at a salvation she was not sure she believed in herself.
Jake savoured his tea.
‘I think we are like the Trans-Canadian railroad builders who started at either coast and met up in the middle,’ he said. ‘Answer this: What’s the great UN lie about the Chaga?’
‘Anyone who goes deep never returns.’
‘Now listen to a story,’ Jake said. ‘Back in the early days, before the UN effort found its feet and most of the evacuation and containment strategies were left to the national governments, the Tanzanians set up camps at Moshi on the southern side of the mountain to take the Wa-chagga people who had been cleared from the higher slopes. There was a common belief then that the growth would stop when it reached the bottom of the mountain. Of course, it didn’t, so not only did the Tanzanians have several tens of thousands of Wa-chagga to evacuate from the resettlement camps, they also had eighty thousand residents of Moshi and God knows how many from the surrounding district. It’s no surprise that in the chaos they managed to lose a couple of hundred Wa-chagga. In fact, it’s a miracle they didn’t lose more. Officially, everyone from the camps is present and correct, but a little magendo buys a lot of truth. When you find out that half a tribe has got lost, you get to thinking about what else may have disappeared as well.’
‘Or been disappeared.’ Not one word of this conversation was going according to Gaby’s game plan. We have roles to play, she thought. You are the embittered, dying man seeking reconciliation with the world, I am the offerer of comfort, sympathy, solidarity and trawling for a career move. You should not be talking to me about lost tribes. You should not have that I-Spy-Story glint in your eyes.
‘Thank God the UN and WHO keep records of those they process into their camps, or I would never have found the pattern. What I found out about Unit 12 is that everyone who gets disappeared there has been in contact with the Chaga.’
Still Gaby did not tell him what she suspected about that place.
‘I got curious about where this lost tribe went when they slipped out of Moshi camp,’ Jake continued. ‘They went back to their ancestral lands. To Kilimanjaro. Into the Chaga. In deep. And they’re still there. The Black Simba safari squads have had contact with their far patrols. They’re living, deep in there, and they’re thriving. The Chaga is looking after them. And I’m going in there to find them and prove that the UN has been lying to us about what it is really like in there.’
‘How?’
‘Like you said, we all make our deals with the devil. I didn’t fancy the watekni’s terms on my soul. I like simple cash transactions. So do the Tacticals.’
‘Jesus, Jake.’
‘Posterity will show who was wise and who was not, Gaby. The posses are finished. Every day the Chaga snips a little bit more off them. The Tacticals aren’t interested in information as commodity. They’re not interested in commodity at all. They’re interested in their future. They know the Chaga will disinherit all current vested interests. All but theirs.’
Jake Aarons poured more tea.
‘Civil war?’
‘In the end, yes. But not a Rwandan-style tribal slaughter-fest. Nor even Somali war-lordism. When it comes, and it’s coming sooner than the government thinks, it’ll be a war for and against the Chaga. To stay, or to be let go. The future and the
past. While the politicians are starting to question the United Nations’ article of faith in indefinite evacuation, out in the townships there are powerful factions—my own Black Simba cartel among them—in favour of mass migration into the Chaga. Their safari squads bring more than goodies back from beyond terminum. The fact that they go back and forth so readily already proves UNECTA’s obsession about decontamination as a lie.’
It’s a blind to check for HIV 4, Gaby thought.
‘You’re taking me, Jake,’ she said aloud.
‘I detect steel in your voice, Gaby. This time that red-haired Celtic charisma is just going to have to fail you. My plans are made, they have been for months. If anything, the Slim diagnosis just gave me the impetus to take my courage in both hands and do it. Strangely enough, those plans don’t include you.’
‘I’ll tell T.P.’
Jake went into the house and returned with a cellphone.
‘Tell T.P. that his Chief East Africa Correspondent has Slim? I’ll tell him myself.’ He punched in the first eight digits of T.P. Costello’s direct line. ‘He ought to know.’
‘I’ll tell him about your little expedition into the heart of darkness.’
Jake’s finger hovered over the final number.
‘Old newshounds never die, he’ll say. He wouldn’t refuse his most faithful reporter and best buddy the chance to ride into pissed old hack’s Valhalla, least of all with the story of the decade attached. Your move.’
The words came in a rush, like starlings from a shaken tree.
‘I’ll tell Shepard.’
Jake stared at Gaby for many moments. He lifted his finger from the button and set the cellphone on the tray next to the Japanese tea-pot.
‘You would too, you bitch. So, Jake, went the day well? Sure; I look for support from the man who tells me he’d lay down his life for me because I find out I’ve six months to live, and three of them as an incontinent, incompetent, gah-gah skeleton hooked into a life support unit and he runs off with five thousand dollars. Then my business colleague blackmails me. Best of days, world.’
‘You’ll have my complete silence. The exclusive will be yours, I don’t want any credit. I just want to go in there, Jake. That’s all I’ve ever wanted.’
‘And the words Chief East Africa Correspondent under your face on the Ten O’clock News.’
In time you will stop feeling guilty about what you have done, Gaby told herself. It will be just another lump of pink scar tissue from the bad you have had to do to make good. She picked up the cellphone.
‘So, do I call Shepard?’
‘I’ll call for you tomorrow, about eight,’ Jake said. ‘I’ll introduce you to the team, I’ll put your case, but the decision about whether you go or not is theirs. Whatever they decide, you will keep silent. If you betray the Black Simbas, not all the favours in Haran’s bag will save you from them. You understand me?’
‘I understand you.’
‘Tomorrow. Eight.’
39
Gaby’s text diary
Day One.
I write this diary sitting against the great baobab that is all that remains of the world I understand.
Camp One is five miles within terminum at the foot of the sudden lift of forest called the Great Wall, in a zone of transition where terrestrial life is dismantled and incorporated into Chaga life. The chaotic terrain of land corals and rotting acacias makes it a good place to hide from the spy satellites, Moran, our leader, says. Tomorrow we will go in under the canopy. That is, if it doesn’t come to us first. The Great Wall is on the move. We are camped among beige barrel-shaped objects like straw mushrooms three times my height. Every so often one will split and extrude a slender dark red bole. You can see them grow before your eyes. Some go up a hundred, a hundred and fifty feet without any sign of stopping. I wish I could have brought the visioncam. So much more easy to show than describe, but Jake guards the Chaga-proofed camera’s limited stack of pre-loaded discs jealously.
If I’ve learned anything from Moon’s diary—which I carry with me in my pack—it’s the importance of knowing where to start. So I won’t begin with the lies I told Shepard about the reporting jobs or the surreptitious gathering of my gear—the canvas back pack, the hand-tooled all-leather boots, the metal canisters for water, toiletries, sun-block, cigarettes—even the Chaga-proof steel toothbrush; or the meeting above the shop on Kamukunji Street where I was introduced to Moran and M’zee and Sugardaddy and Rose and Bushbaby.
I’ll begin with the fire-fight, because it marks a definitive transition from the familiar to the alien. We’ve been walking south towards Terminum, from the place where the Black Simbas’ humpy dropped us. M’zee; who, as his name suggests, is the oldest and most experienced in our team—sees a plume of dust south of us that is moving against the general direction of the willy-willys that blow across the Amboseli plain. M’zee glasses it and confirms: a scavenger patrol in a recycled 4×4 they’ve fitted with a heavy machine gun. We’re pinned between it and the spy satellite coming over the horizon in ten minutes. On Moran’s orders, we take cover in a dry gulch under our thermal profile quilts. These are amazing pieces of military technology: they draw body heat from the inside and redistribute it to match the average profile of the environment outside. You’re effectively infra-red invisible. My chief concern is not scavengers or satellites, but finding a scorpion creeping over me. I wait. I sweat. I dread. Then I hear the helicopters and freeze. The satellite is up, has spotted the scavengers and alerted the military. The Air Cav come right over the top of us, hover, and move off into the south. They cannot possibly hear anything but themselves, but I hold my breath until red spots balloon in front of my eyes. Just as I am on the verge of self-inflicted anoxia, the helicopters move off into the south. A few moments later, there is the distant stutter of heavy machine gun fire, the turbine shriek of helicopters taking evasive action and then the snapping, staccato rattle of Gatling fire. I feel the ground shake to a dull explosion and no more gun fire. The helicopters pass over us once again and swing away into the west.
When the satellite is down below the horizon, we roll up our thermal quilts and move quickly before ground troops come in to secure the area. I know from experience how far a column of smoke is visible in this country. Our course takes us close by the wreck: Jake begs a photo-opportunity. Moran agrees, sends Sugardaddy with us, for protection. Sugardaddy does not expect survivors, but death in the bush attracts a dangerous wake. I take shots of the smouldering shell of blackened steel and the corpses scattered on the charred ground. I’ve never seen a killed human being before.
The fire has burned the upper parts to the bones; the parts in contact with the ground are intact, down to the scraps of blue denim and cotton T-shirt. Jake says that is the way bodies burn in war. When a jackal more courageous than its packmates darts in to tear at one of the bodies, I scream, kill it, just kill the fucking thing, can’t you? Sugardaddy calmly lifts his Kalashnikov and blows the bastard thing into the bush in a shatter of bone and gut.
Moran is angry that Sugardaddy has risked security with a shot, but Sugardaddy is a Luo, like Faraway, and, like Faraway, satanically vain. Calling on the respect due his age and experience, M’zee keeps the peace between the two men, but the day will soon come when Sugardaddy and Moran will fight to the death, like pack animals. We are all jackals, out here.
We were on such high alert watching for the dust trails of soldiers coming to investigate that I only noticed we had crossed terminum when I felt a crawling sensation on my left wrist like I used to get when I was a kid and the cats slept on the bed and I imagined their fleas were creeping all over me. My Swatch was breaking out in orange pimples. I had been so careful about everything else and forgotten about the plastic watch. I dropped it to the hexagon-cover just as the strap rotted into rags and drips of digested polyethylene. My last connection with the human world was broken: time. There is no time in here; no history, no future, only the eternal now. Present, and presen
ce: the sensation of the Great Wall at my back is that of an almost sentient mystery, crawling toward me on a billion red millipede legs.
40
Gaby’s text diary
Day Two
Time for a line while they get the boats ready.
All morning we have marched through the Great Wall. If the edgelands taxed my powers of description, the Great Wall staggers me. The slender red trunks rise for five, six hundred feet before dividing and re-dividing into hundreds of branch-lets, each of which supports a single enormous hexagonal leaf. These leaves all lie in a horizontal plane so that they form a more or less continuous surface: the impression is not of being in a forest, but among the pillars that hold up the roof of the world.
‘Ecclesiastical…like being in a drowned cathedral’, my forerunner described this place in her diary. I hate to have to use another’s analogy—especially her’s—but it best conveys the feel of this place. The roof-leaves are translucent and colour the light that falls through them in a cyclorama of ancient lights, interspersed by edges of white where the sun shines through the gaps between plates. About thirty, forty feet from the ground, the trunks split into enormous aerial roots and buttresses so that we walk through an architecture of vaults and arches and piers.
Things move up in the canopy; some so fast you cannot be sure you have seen them, some so slow you cannot be certain they are moving at all. A long way off, something is twittering. Nothing earth-born ever made a noise like that.
How do I feel, moving through this cathedral-like place? Spooky: exalted. Unbelieving, as if it has all been painted by Hollywood set designers and will fall down with a crash when the wind blows strong enough. Wishing it to be real, hoping to glimpse again that thing I saw gliding between the smooth trunks that looked the size of a microlyte, but at the same time impatient to see what novelty the Chaga will reveal to me next.