Chaga

by Ian McDonald

  ‘I thought I was in the shit,’ Gaby said. ‘Shouldn’t you be helping him with your magic briefcase?’

  ‘This battle he insists on fighting himself,’ Johnson Ambani.

  The Norfolk’s Indian food was outstanding, the beer wonderful. Faraway propositioned Gaby behind a mound of samosas and the sewn-up thing inside tore a little more because she understood for the first time that all Faraway’s jokes and innuendos and double-and-single entendres had been constructed to conceal the truth that he was crazy about her.

  He and Tembo came with T.P. to the airport.

  ‘Why do the bookstalls sell so many novels about terrorist hijackings and air crashes?’ Tembo asked. Then he said, ‘Go with God, Gaby McAslan. I will pray to Jesus that you return safely, and come back to us. I know this will happen. Jesus’s blood never failed me yet.’

  Faraway said nothing but hugged her and turned away so she would not have to see anything as uncool as emotion on his face.

  ‘Be clever, my girl, and let who will be good,’ T.P. said. ‘What’ll you do?’

  She did not answer, because just them the ground-side stewardess called for the final passengers for the flight to London Heathrow to proceed immediately through passport control.

  The booking computer had been kind. It had given her a row of three seats all to herself. She looked out of the window as the plane climbed. The 747-400 banked and she glimpsed the Nyandarua Chaga through rents in the rain clouds. From ascent altitude it was a huge many-coloured carpet laid over the hills and valleys of the White Highlands. Gaby watched it until the veils of high alto cirrus closed over it and she could see the places with the oldest names in the world no more. She drank and slept the rest of the eight hours to Heathrow.

  She came through London immigration in the dawn hours and booked a shuttle ticket to Belfast. There was nothing in London for her to go home to. There was everything in Ireland. She bought people alcoholic presents and waited in the cafeteria for her flight to be called, drinking grapefruit juice. She watched the aircraft come in to land and thought about the shaman called Oksana Mikhailovna Telyanina and her plane called Dignity.

  The commuter flight was a third full. She gave herself a window seat and watched for landmarks as the feeder jet followed the line of the coast in to the city at the head of the lough. It crossed the narrow finger of the Ards peninsula, turned above Donaghadee—she recognized the Copeland islands, and the lighthouse on its stone pier. She saw the Watchhouse on its little headland by the harbour, and the autumn brown of the Point.

  Her father met her at the airport. He had bought a new car: a Landrover 4×4. Paddy the black dog was in the back. Sonya was in the front. More than cars had changed. Gaby pleaded tiredness as her reason for having little to say on the drive home.

  Reb and Hannah and a slightly sheepish Marky were at the house to greet the returning heroine. Hannah’s oldest, in her very best junior Laura Ashley frock, stared aghast at her Auntie Gaby. The new baby cried because Paddy started to bark.

  After the lunch, Gaby begged time alone, and pulled on her Africa boots and a weather-proof coat and went out on to the Point. She walked the way she had walked the night she thought the stars had called her name. They too moved in circles, but their orbits were slower and grander and more subtle than human lifetimes could sense. She stood at the edge of the land looking out to sea. The wind stirred the fields of winter barley behind her. She had forgotten how cold this land was. It penetrated all her layered tropical-weight clothing. The sea was choppy, breaking in frantic little white folds of foam, constantly re-absorbing itself. She picked a flat stone from the shore and skimmed it out to sea. Two, three, four bounces. She skimmed another one. Three, four, five. Six was her personal record. She did not beat it, or even equal it, today.

  Hannah and Marky had gone home by the time Gaby returned from the Point, but Hannah came back to the Watch-house that evening: sisters together. Hannah was wearing a little black dress. Gaby knew the significance. The alcoholic presents were drunk. The sisters reminisced and embarrassed their father in front of Sonya about his inevitable shortcomings as a parent. Then Hannah got the tape out, and the microphones, and Reb whisked Gaby upstairs into the spare black body and mini that fitted and no more. Dad and Sonya shouted impatience as Gaby dashed on makeup. There was a round of applause as the soul sisters took their mikes and their positions.

  ‘Wait for it,’ Reb said and Gaby smiled as the introduction played, because it was the one to the song that said when you feel that you can’t go on, all you had to was reach out and someone would be there. She pushed out a hip, lifted one arm, two, three four, and in.

  Finis Africae

  53

  On the south side of the sky it is February 9, high summer as the Gaia probe goes into a highly eccentric pole-to-pole orbit of the Big Dumb Object and is captured by the object’s small intrinsic gravity, a moon of an ex-moon. In the months since The Scream, the Big Dumb Object has rolled from a twelve hundred kilometre diameter disc into a hollow parabolic cup three hundred kilometres deep, open to space at the forward end. The artifact is spinning at a rate of one revolution every twelve minutes. The mathematics of maintaining an orbit around an object that is constantly changing shape have never been performed before, but the Flight Control crew are confident in their computers and Gala’s reserves of reaction mass.

  The highest point of the probe’s course, over the middle section of the elongated cup-shaped object, is fifty kilometres. Closest approach, over the open end, is two-and-a-half kilometres. In astronomical terms, that is a French kiss.

  The thing devours comparatives, shrivels superlatives. Gala’s first full frontal of the interior cavity, shot from thirty kilometres out, shows the largest enclosed space ever beheld by humanity. It is like looking into a pit one hundred and fifty kilometres wide and three hundred deep. You could drop all seven of Dante’s circles of hell, and all the other hells of the great hell describers, into that pit and never see them again.

  The rim of the cavity is ringed with a forest of stalagmites (some argue stalactites) nine kilometres deep. Each stalagmite, or stalactite, is twelve kilometres high. Like teeth, a junior data processor at Gaia Control comments in the coffee line. After that no one ever looks at the BDO without seeing a planet-eater, heading earthwards, jaws wide open.

  Spectroscopic analysis reveals a thin CO2 atmosphere clinging to the inside of the cylinder. As far as the cameras can see into the interior cavity, it is carpeted with the characteristic coralline forms of climax Chaga: an entire geography, an undiscovered country. Later passes confirm early glimpses of objects in the zero-gee vacuum of the BDO’s spin axis. They are two hundred kilometres down-shaft. Computer enhancement shows them to be spherical, slightly under three hundred metres in diameter and bearing a strong resemblance to the delicately beautiful glass shells of terrestrial microscopic diatoms. The objects are in motion. One after another, they are accelerating along the BDO’s axis. On February 18, the first leaves the BDO’s open mouth. An hour later, the second object emerges. Three hundred and twenty-seven such diatoms are launched from the BDO in the next thirteen days. One comes within a hundred metres of Gaia. In astronomical terms, that is more than just a French kiss. That is deep throat. The ejected objects move to a position one hundred thousand kilometres ahead of the Big Dumb Object and scatter into a disc three thousand kilometres across. The namer of names at NASA christens it The Swarm. Their purpose becomes apparent when Asteroid M113C, an erratic orbiter whose return leg from beyond Jupiter would have brought it within three thousand kilometres of the Big Dumb Object, suddenly disappears. Gaia’s sensors, at the extreme limit of their range, disclose the presence of fifteen smaller bodies occupying M113C’s orbit. In gross defiance of celestial mechanics, they are all moving out of that orbit to rendezvous with The Swarm.

  In Washington, the disappearance of M113C hangs questions over those last-minute improved-design fuel tanks that had been flown up to Gaia and jettison
ed around the orbit of Mars. Operation Defend Freedom may be nothing more than a gesture of defiance.

  As the Big Dumb Object approaches Earth’s picket-line, it rolls into a cylinder three hundred kilometres long by one hundred and fifty broad. The dark end—the remote explorers have devised their own terminology—is sealed. On its far side is a terrifying icescape of bergs and floes the size of Balkan nations and icicles tens of kilometres long: the BDO’s fuel store; mass directly converted to energy and momentum. At the other end—the bright end—the encircling teeth have fused together into a solid ring. The hole at its centre is dwindling. Estimated time to closure is one hundred and five days. Gaia’s keyhole on the world within shrinks, frustrating the exomorphologists and the xenobiologists: fascinating changes are taking place inside the cylinder. Atmospheric pressure is twenty times that when Gaia went into orbit: O2 production is increasing exponentially. Annular mountain ranges have appeared, each sixty kilometres apart. They are growing upwards at one hundred metres a day. In time they will divide the inner chamber into five segments.

  On December 28, an order is transmitted from the office of the President of the United States of America to Mars space. The jettisoned fuel tanks blow off their outer casings, revealing small thrust manoeuvring systems. A carefully controlled burn takes them out of Mars space into an intercept course with the Big Dumb Object. Balanced on top of the propulsion units are five megaton MIRV warheads. They are aimed to fly straight into the open mouth of the Big Dumb Object, arm themselves and detonate simultaneously against the rotating shield wall of the dark end.

  The new name for the nuclear assault on the BDO is Operation Eye of Needle.

  Between 02:30 and 17:08 of March 16, the United States of America fights and loses its first interplanetary war. In an expensively commissioned battle suite under the Pentagon, the Joints Chiefs of Staff and the Chief Executive of NASA watch the numbered icons on the big Matsui wall screen disappear one by one as the Swarm senses, intercepts and destroys the missiles. At 18:03 the President is called at his golf club and told the news. No damage has been inflicted on the enemy. Friendly casualties are one hundred per cent.

  On April 23, Gaia completes its forty one thousandth orbit of the Big Dumb Object and the aperture in the bright end closes, sealing in its wonders and horrors and secrets.

  54

  The house stood by the edge of the water. It was tall and straight, with a red tile roof and peeling white walls. Palm trees closed it in on three sides, on the fourth shaved grass in the English lawn style ran down to steps beside the inlet. The windows of the white house had shutters that would not close because they had been painted to the walls. The higher windows had balconies that the house’s guests had been instructed not to use because they were rusted through. From the high windows on the water side you could see all the way up Kilindini Harbour to Port Reitz. This was the view the woman was looking at this morning, from the very highest window, just under the red roof tiles. Her arms were bare, and folded on the sill, and she was resting her chin on them. She was watching the Likoni ferry, which crossed the harbour to the south mainland only a hundred yards from the house. The ferry was a big ugly bath of a thing, puffing black diesel smoke as it swung across the narrow water. It ran its ramp onto the concrete landing place. Even before it had come to halt, people and vehicles were swarming off the ferry onto the steep road up to the city. The woman watched an overloaded bus growl along behind a huge wooden push-cart laden with margarine cans. The men were having difficulty shoving the cart up the slope and were asking passers-by to help them. The woman could hear the bus’s angry horn, blaring. Meanwhile the ticket sellers were dancing between the vehicles waiting to board the ferry. They danced so swaggeringly and cleverly that the woman reckoned that, despite the apparent impossibility of the task, no fare ever went uncollected by them. The first vehicles were rolling down the slope as the last trucks were coming off in spurts of diesel smoke.

  On the other side of the water, the passengers were already tailed all the way up the road. As the ferry made the four hundred yard crossing, the woman saw a convoy of white military vehicles come over the brow of the hill. Sandwiched between them were black Mercedes limousines with tinted windows: state cars from the South Coast hotels the government had requisitioned. The convoy swung on to the wrong side of the road and drove past the waiting passengers and nimble fare collectors to the water’s edge. Soldiers with blue helmets got out of the military vehicles to hold back the people on the road and to channel the traffic coming off the ferry into a single line. The convoy was first onto the ferry. From the high window, the woman watched them cross the water and escort the black government Mercedes up the hill and out of sight.

  Then she looked beyond the ferry, into Kilindini Harbour, with the stacks and cracking towers of the oil refinery behind. She looked at the refugee hulks careened along the shore, and the aprons of rafts and pontoons and boats surrounding them that had reduced the harbour to a single narrow channel. It would not be long before the boat towns closed on either side and you would be able to walk from Mombasa to Kilindini. A haze of blue wood smoke hung over the floating town of the boat people. The trees that once had come down to the waterside on Kilindini shore had long since been hacked down and carried away for fuel. The woman had heard that the boat people were walking as far as Diani in search of firewood. She had also heard of some boat people exacting a wood tax from those who had to cross their boats to reach their own. She had also heard that the police were shooting anyone trying to cut firewood around the government hotels.

  They would take the best beaches for themselves, the woman thought. And the best rooms, and leave her a top floor room in a guest house with no elevator, no air-conditioning, plumbing that functioned only erratically, a ceiling fan that did not function ever, lizards on the walls, balconies that would drop you sixty feet to the ground if you stepped on them, shutters that would not shut out the light and the heat when you wanted to sleep in the siesta time, and the best view in all Mombasa.

  ‘It’s good to be back,’ Gaby McAslan said. She turned from the window to the man on the bed. The man on the bed smiled. He was comfortably sprawled in the casual exhibitionism of a man who has just had sex, looking at the woman.

  ‘It is good to have you back,’ Faraway said. ‘At least, I am glad to have had the chance to find out that it is red down there too.’

  Gaby sat on the bed beside him and kissed him. He held the kiss, moved her hand toward his swelling penis.

  ‘Things to do, Faraway. Got to go down to Diani Beach and grease a few palms to get this security clearance. Three days wasted, sitting around on my ass, while Nairobi vanishes.’

  ‘I would not say wasted,’ Faraway said. ‘And it was not always your ass you were sitting on. Come on, I want to do this thing again.’ He picked up the Walkman headphones and the pair of black tights. Static hissed through the Walkman earphones: the radio had been tuned to white noise. ‘Devil! When you put the phones on and blindfold me, so that I cannot see, cannot hear; only feel, only touch, it is like I am nothing but an enormous penis. Miles and miles of f’tuba.’

  ‘That’s what it’s meant to do. Tactile enhancement through sensory deprivation.’

  ‘Where do you learn such tricks?’ Faraway folded his hands behind his head and watched her dress.

  ‘Do I have to be taught them?’

  ‘I always said you were a devil woman. You have corrupted my soul. I am damned.’

  ‘You are an idle bastard. Station Managers are meant to have clearances sorted out in advance.’

  ‘Deputy Station Manager. I was promoted beyond my competence. I tried to warn them, but it is the curse of bureaucracies. Listen, woman; while you are buying drinks for civil servants in beach bars, this idle bastard will be trying to arrange transport for us to Nairobi, liaising with the new regional headquarters in Zanzibar, and explaining to T.P. Costello why his special assignment reporter is still stuck in Mombasa. Such hard wor
k deserves a reward, if not an apology. Tonight.’ He held up the black tights and the Walkman headphones. Gaby hit him with a pillow. She took his car keys.

  In the line for the ferry she realized that the slit on the sarong skirt showed far too much thigh to the ticket boys and the lace-up boots were clearly the work of a frustrated foot fetishist, but the animal skin print fashion tickled the primeval hunter-gatherer in the back of her brain. Faraway had assured her it was this season’s fashion as he outfitted her in the dollar shops along Moi Avenue with replacements for the heavy winter clothing she had brought from her cold northern civil war. Faraway’s idea of fashion was something that allowed him to look at a woman’s legs. Gaby slid the dark glasses up her nose as she drove down onto the ferry. Not even time for an eye-job. Actually, she thought, the shades were cooler.

  Hot climate clothes. Hot climate car. Hot climate music on the radio, that sounded good, that sounded right. It had never sounded like that anywhere else she had heard Kenyan music. Tropical fruits had been like that too: when you got over laughing at the price, you found they never tasted as good as they had when you bought them from Kariokor market or a wooden stall by a roadside bus stop. And the fabrics and the fashions and the furnishings only looked right under equatorial light. But even the wrongness of those things had been enough to bring her back to the place where they were right. Smells especially. Wood smoke. Charcoal. Shit and diesel. Tropical fruit. Dry earth, cow dung. Blacktop after rain. Night-blooming flowers. Instant Africa. You never leave it, because it never leaves you. Africa is in the heart. That is why you have sex with Faraway. He has always been the faithful one, the one who sent funny, rude letters and presents on your birthday, that found you wherever in the world you had been sent. He was the one who came all the way to London on the chance that it might be more than just friendship, but London had not been the place for that, nor Ireland, where you took him to show him to the people and places you drew your power from—he had complained all the time about how cold it was, how cold. However special, those had not been the places. This was. The heat made it right. The light made it right. The smells and sights and sensuousness of the ancient Arab island city made it right. Kenya was the place where friends could transform into lovers, with no regrets.