by Ian McDonald
‘You scared Nicole. She came to see why she had to be taken away from her home and came rushing back to me to tell me that a strange woman had pulled a gun on her. You do not need to hurt her, she will not hurt you. Why should you want to hurt her? Because she is different from you? So I have brought her back here for you to see that she is not a monster or a freak or an example of evolution in action or the first generation of the new humanity,’ the Russian woman said. ‘She is just a little girl, and Hubert is just a little boy, and they find themselves in a strange world with new and frightening abilities, and they are trying to find out how it all works and how they can live in it. They do not contemplate the mysteries of the universe or solve the Grand Unified Field equations. They sulk. They fight each other. They have tantrums. They do not like to go to bed, and they spit out their food and will not eat what we have made for them. Just a boy and girl. So, the girl can glide on her wing membranes; so, the boy can link with the thoughts of the Chaga and in his dreams pass his consciousness into animals and birds and the creatures that the forest has made: but they are not offences against God or Allah or the holy church. Nicole will say hello to you, but first you men must put your weapons away, because they are frightening my daughter.’
45
They left Treetops the next morning. Gaby was dazed from lack of sleep and too much wonder. Her sense of disbelief was gorged, like a snake that has swallowed a goat. The progress through the canopy to the rendezvous point with M’zee, Bushbaby and Rose was slow. Jake constantly fell behind and the party would have to wait while someone went back to bring him along. Moran was growing impatient with the delays and halts. The next time it happened, Gaby volunteered to be the one who went back. She found Jake several minutes down the branch, seated in a dip of cable that swept up to anchor points at the base of one of the Crystal Monoliths.
‘I reckon you’ve got ten, fifteen minutes clear before they start to look for us,’ Gaby said.
Jake Aarons smiled his sophisticated Thorn Tree Bar-smile.
‘What will you tell them?’
‘That I never found you.’
He thought about the implications of the lie for a few moments.
‘Yes, that should do it. I don’t like you having to lie to them; they’re good people.’
‘Moran is a jerk.’
Jake laughed.
‘Got a cigarette?’
Gaby did.
‘I didn’t know you smoked.’
‘At theatrically appropriate moments I do.’
He was not a comfortable smoker, but he seemed to enjoy the Camel.
‘Traditional last request,’ he said.
‘For a while I thought you’d chickened out of doing it,’ Gaby said.
‘For a while I had. They spooked me with that orthobody stuff. That’s worse than dying, that. Like a walking iron lung made out of meat. Rather take my chances with UNECTA and Unit 12 than that. What convinced me was that kid, Hubert. He was born with it, I caught it, but we’re both the same in here. We hear it. We see through its eyes. We dream its dreams. We share the same circuitry, in here, and so maybe it isn’t some desperate old faggot’s final fantasy to wave in the face of death like a karmic press card. I know that if I stop to look at it too closely, it’s insane, what I’m planning to do. But we’re humans, Gab, we can adapt to anything. We can triumph anywhere. They wrote operas in Auschwitz, for Christ’s sake. Yves Montagnard was wrong. There is only one way to be human; in here. What we wear over it doesn’t matter.’ Jake glanced at his steel Rolex. ‘Couple of minutes before the natives get restless. When it really comes down to it, Gab, what matters is that I’ll be in it. I won’t be watching, I won’t be an outsider looking in, recording, reporting, commenting. I’ll be in it. I’ll be a part of whatever story is being told here. All the rest of the world can do is watch: watch the Chaga, watch the BDO, watch the stars, watch the screen to see the television news watching it too. But I will be what is being watched. I will commit T.P.’s cardinal sin. I will not report the news, I will be the news. And if you don’t understand what a mighty, mighty temptation that is, you’re no bred-in-the-bone journalist.’
Jake exhaled the last of Gaby’s cigarette and carefully crushed the stub under his heel.
‘T.P. should know, though. I know it’s a heap of shit to hang on you, but tell him, Gab. Tell him everything. And Tembo too, because he’s a good man and I can trust him not to shoot his mouth off to some woman like Faraway would. Tell them. No one else. Oh yes. One last thing I owe you, Gab. That diary Shepard gave you. Haven’t you guessed?’
‘Humans living in the Chaga. Moon met the Wa-chagga.’
‘Gaby, Gaby, Gaby.’ No one could ever do the look of professional disappointment like Jake Aarons, that was not disappointed in your limitations, but in your failure to live up to your talent. ‘It’s not what, or why; it’s who. Who would give you an obviously maimed diary, which you were bound to investigate, when it would have been so much easier to deny it ever existed?’
‘Shepard?’
‘He’s a man. I’m a man. We do it with different targets, but down here, we’re all the same.’ He clutched his groin. The gesture was disturbingly undignified. ‘Where dick takes over, mind leaves off. He was so mad keen to get you into his bed he sure didn’t care about the consequences. Hell, he probably couldn’t even see there would be consequences through the fog of testosterone.’
‘Shepard.’
‘Time to go, I think.’ Jake stood up, offered Gaby a hand. Just like the last goodbye. These things are best done quickly. They say short, sharp pain is better than years of nagging numbness.
‘Jake.’
‘Don’t say anything, because even one word might make me not do it, and I wouldn’t want to hate you for that for the rest of my life. Don’t say anything, don’t try to follow me, don’t call out my name, don’t look at me. Just kneel down and close your eyes.’ She surprised herself by doing what he asked. ‘You’ll know when you can open them again.’ She felt his fingers lightly touch her eyelids in blessing. Someplace wonderful was a breath against her cheekbone.
She opened her eyes. He was gone. She screamed his name ten times. The Chaga did not answer. She cried a time for him, but not too long, for she must get back to the Black Simbas before they came to look for her.
46
They came down through the roof of the singing forest. The men had not believed Gaby’s story about being unable to find Jake and fearing he had fallen any more than she did, but they were male and proud and would not allow themselves to recognize that a women would dare to lie to them. Gaby blindly followed Sugardaddy through the tier forest. Her inner view-finder framed an immaculate Jake Aarons climbing the final ridge, to stand a moment to look upon the distant ramparts of the Citadel and steel himself for the descent to the mad lands below. The tension and guilt mounted to near sexual intensities. She would turn around and go after him. She would find him. It would be easy, because it was meant to be. Several times this happened. Each time, the kick inside was less brutal and in the end she knew that she could live with him gone. It was a kind of dying. That was the way to feel it. Life is made up a million small dyings and rebirths. She turned that thought over and over in her head as she came down the swooping cable.
That was how they able to take her so completely unawares.
Branches rustled. Something enormous dropped out of the sky on to her and knocked her down, knocked the breath out of her, knocked all sense and seeing out of her. The something rolled her onto her back. She gasped, choked, fought for breath, waved her hands. Found herself looking up the barrel of an assault rifle at a white man in Chaga-camouflage fatigues with a blue helmet bearing a map-of-the-world logo Gaby reckoned was important but right now could not work out why.
‘Fuck, a white bitch,’ the white man with the gun said. He had a South African accent. He seized Gaby by one hand and pulled her to her knees. While she coughed and spat, he wrenched her arms behind her.
‘Hey!’ she shouted as she felt steel links lock around her wrists. The South African with the gun pulled her to her feet. She saw three black men trying to cuff a struggling, kicking Moran. Lucius was already immobilized, Sugardaddy writhed on the path, clutching his stomach. A blue-helmet stood over him, legs apart, weapon held high, butt downward.
‘What are you doing?’ Gaby screamed as the soldier wrenched her arms painfully behind her. ‘Who the hell do you think you are?’
‘The U-fucking-Nited Nations, lady,’ the white soldier said. ‘And we don’t think it, we know it.’
There were more UN troops at the rendezvous point. M’zee, Bushbaby and Rose were prisoners, together with a Wa-chagga woman who had been left by the trading party to wait for Lucius. The South Africans had jumped them two days ago, Bushbaby told Gaby. They were a new and dangerous thing in the Chaga, a United Nations deep patrol, hunting and eliminating guerilla and subversive elements breaking their interdict. They had found the remains of the slaughtered safari squad. They had found handy culprits. There would be charges of murder, in addition to security violations, when the dirigible got them back on the other side of terminum. Bushbaby said she was sorry. She was so sorry. She had been left in charge, but they had been too fast. Too well trained. They had been all over them before she could get her hand to her gun. Moran listened to her pleas, then spat in her face and kicked her as hard as he could between the breasts. The UN soldiers dragged him away. He did not resist them, but stared at Bushbaby while the black officer called in the airship. All the time that the drone of fans emerged from the forest chatter, he glared at Bushbaby as if he could stare her dead. Rose sat on the ground with her knees pulled up against her chest rocking slowly, weeping silently.
They had shot the dog.
47
She stood in the shaft of sunlight as the door from the transfer unit sealed. A voice warned to keep away from the sides. The floor lurched and the circular platform began to descend. Gaby kept staring at the high skylight. An edge of grey cloud lay across the plane of blue. The October rains were coming. The grey concrete shaft changed colour, to green, to yellow, to blue, to white as the platform moved down it. The same voice that had warned about getting too close to the shaft sides informed the detainees that they were in the Zone White preliminary decontamination area. The platform stopped at Zone White Level Three. This deep, the skylight was a tiny square of light. Gaby looked up the shaft of light, let it play warm on her face.
The containment seal opened and people in white isolation suits came to take her out of the light. The room into which they led Gaby, the Black Simbas, and Lucius and the Wa-chagga woman was white and blindingly lit from no apparent source. Behind a long glass window, a number of people in civilian dress wearing UNECTA badges sat at a desk. A white man donned a headset, tapped the microphone a couple of times to test it was working properly and told the detainees to place their equipment on the long white table to the right. The isolation-suited figures that had brought them in opened the packs and tipped the contents on to the long white table. They sorted through the piles of possessions, bagging items of interest, dropping the remainder through a slot in the wall that Gaby knew went down to flames. She watched her thermal quilt go through the slot in the wall. She watched her spare clothes, her toiletries, her pack go down to the flames.
The searcher lifted her diary.
‘Don’t you touch that; that’s mine, my diary, you’ve no right to it! Give it back to me!’ she shouted.
The faceless figure in the isolation suit inclined its head quizzically and dropped the diary into a bag. It found the other diary, Moon’s diary. Gaby said nothing as it was bagged and sealed. Jake’s camcorder had been taken back on the airship, with the weapons. Now she had nothing to make people believe her.
‘Undress, please,’ said the man behind the glass. He had a middle-American accent. He looked a little and sounded a lot like Shepard. Gaby fixed her eyes on him as she took off her Chaga-proof boots and dropped the cropped cotton top, the purple and red Chaga camouflage pants, her bra, her panties. She kept staring at him as the people in the white suits bundled up her clothes with everyone else’s and dumped them down the slot in the wall. The man she thought of as the anti-Shepard could not meet her eyes.
‘Proceed into the next section please,’ he ordered.
Gaby did not take her eyes off him as she walked through the sliding door. That was how she missed seeing Moran leap on Bushbaby and slam her against the metal door frame. But she heard the soft splintering crack of skull on white painted steel. And she saw Rose run at Moran, her fingers curled into claws. And she saw the milling bodies, flesh and white fabric; she heard the voices yelling, in Swahili, Kalenjin and English. She saw the five white suits pull Moran away and hold him. She saw five more take Bushbaby away on the trauma cart. She saw Bushbaby spasm like she was having an epileptic fit. And she saw the glossy splash and trickle of blood on the door-frame that the white-suits quickly wiped away.
In the next zone they sat Gaby in a chair and cut away all the threads and wires and beads and plaits that Rose had woven into her hair. They cut carelessly, hacking off the bangs of hair that Gaby had not cut in seven years. She looked at the coils of red hair on the white floor and knew that she could survive this. Whatever lay behind the next door could be no greater violation.
In the same room were a number of tiled cubicles. The voice of the anti-Shepard told her to cover the lighted panels with her feet and hands. As she stood spread-eagled, two white-suits worked over her with high-pressure needle sprays. Through the steam and spray she stared at the camera on the wall with which the man with Shepard’s voice was monitoring her. She could cry here. No one would see. Tears would only be more water on her body. She should cry. But she would not while that man looked at her through the eyes of the lens.
Warm air vents dried her body and the shaggy mess of her hair. She was given a white paper robe and moved on to the next zone. The words Unit 12: Zone White were printed in blue on the back of the robe. The paper rubbed her raw skin.
In the next zone was the birthing chair.
There was a greater violation than the cutting off of her hair.
She struggled but they strapped her arms into the cuffs and her feet into the stirrups. Then they did the things with the dilators and the rubber gloves and the endoscope and the lubricating jelly.
‘You don’t need to do this,’ she kept telling the doctor who had his fist in her vagina. ‘There is no medical reason for this. You just want to humiliate me because we fucked the UN up the ass.’
Then the doctor did something that made her gasp and tear at the leather straps. He had not needed to do that thing either.
They took her to the next sector, which was a dead white room with a white table and two white chairs in it. Gaby was placed on one chair. After a time, the door slid open and the man she called the anti-Shepard entered and sat across the table from her. He was dressed in a beige linen Nehru suit. The badge clipped to his breast pocket identified him as Russel Shuler, with Access All Levels.
Gaby placed her hands on the white table and stared at the space between them. After the birthing chair, she could not look Russel Shuler in the eyes. She could not look anyone in the eyes. ‘Interview commenced twenty eighteen, October second, two thousand and eight,’ he said to the air. ‘Preliminary debriefing of Ms Gaby McAslan.’
Gaby looked up.
‘Have you got a cigarette?’
‘I’m sorry. Smoking isn’t permitted in this unit.’
‘In that case I want to see the European Union Ambassador. My treatment here contravenes the UN’s own charter on human rights.’
The man called Russel Shuler sighed and asked her to tell him everything that had happened to her in the Chaga.
‘You shot Rose’s Dog,’ Gaby said. ‘How is Bushbaby?’
Russel Shuler frowned, then identified the street name.
‘Ah. Yes. Her. I’m sorry t
o have to tell you this, but she died in theatre.’
Gaby closed her eyes and imagined turning the table over, picking up the white chair and smashing blindly about her until everything was in as many pieces as she was.
‘We’ll be charging the man, the one who calls himself Moran, with murder, of course.’
‘Get me the EU Ambassador,’ Gaby McAslan said quietly.
The man sighed, which was the signal for two big men in medical whites to come and take Gaby down the curving white corridor to a windowless white room with a steel toilet in one corner, a hygiene cubicle in the other, a bed as far away from the toilet as possible, a television screen on one wall and a television camera on the other. The door sealed seamlessly into the wall, as had that other door in that other white room in Tsavo West.
‘I want Shepard, get me Shepard,’ Gaby screamed until she could barely force the words from her vocal cords. Then she tore off the paper robe, ripped it into shreds and stuffed them down the steel John. She made a nest out of the bedding, folded herself into a foetal position in the middle of it and cried herself into dreams of running down curving white corridors after the ever-retreating figures of Bushbaby and Dog until they came to a brink and fell into simmering magma and Gaby could do nothing to save them because her head had been shaved and her hands tied with her hair.
She woke with a cry. The door was open.
‘Shepard?’ she said.
Three figures were silhouetted against the white corridor. They wore surgical scrubs. Between them was a birthing chair on castors.
‘You don’t need to do this,’ Gaby said as they put their machines into her and sucked their syringes of fluid out of her. ‘You don’t have to do this. You have no right to do this. No right. No right. No right.’
There was something in the needle they had given her for she slept without dreams after that, and when she next woke, it was because the door had opened again and it was Shepard standing there. Her heart leaped. She lived again. The joy burned through the sleep and the chemicals and in the clarity she saw that it was not Shepard, but his evil twin, come with a white sweatshirt and a pair of white drawstring pants because he was not brave enough to sit across a table from a naked woman.