by Ian McDonald
‘Five to travel,’ he announced to the woman in UN white at the desk, who did not care if people jumped the queue as long as her ticket out was safe in the back pocket of her pants. She checked the exit visas and tapped information up on her screen. She took such a long time doing it that Gaby wanted to drag her out of her little booth and press any key, every key, that might do something. The woman studied the words on her screen for a long time, and the visa for a longer time. She took Tembo’s passport and examined it for the longest time. She checked the names of wife and children against the passport and the exit visas and the screen. She checked the photo badges against the passport and the visa and the screen. Then she gestured for them to put their bags on the scales. Baggage allowance on the relief flights was one piece each, adult and child. Tembo and Mrs Tembo had managed to reduce it all to two big cases, which they dragged, and a backpack for Sarah. Etambele had not wanted to be left out, so she had a backpack too, a little cloth one Mrs Tembo had sewn together. It held her dolls’ clothes, one dress and her washing things. Gaby did not think she could be so merciless with personal possessions. Take little, leave little, lose little was her professional motto. The UN woman looked at the bags, but did not move to weigh or tag them.
Gaby was about to scream.
Faraway was about to hit the woman with the camera.
Tembo was fidgeting from foot to foot.
Mrs Tembo was transfixed with a dread that had begun with the Skateboard Kid and would not end until she breathed in the clove breezes of Zanzibar.
Sarah and Etambele looked about to burst into tears.
The woman at the desk rattled through a box of rubber stamps, picked one and looked it. Then, so suddenly that everyone almost missed it, she stamped the visas, tagged the bags and printed out boarding cards.
Tembo beamed as if Jesus had touched his brow. Mrs Tembo hugged him, her children, Faraway, and even Gaby. Faraway shepherded people and bags through the departure gate.
Down on the field, the big Antonov mass lifters were wing-tip to wing-tip, winding black threads of refugees into their cargo bays. Blue-helmets with clip-boards waved the people along the edge of the apron. Gaby’s hair blew in the hot back blast from the taxiing airlifters. Tembo and Faraway fought with the suitcases. Mrs Tembo pressed the precious boarding passes closer to her than even After-the-Rains. Sarah and Etambele struggled determinedly onward with their back packs.
A blue helmet stopped the line while a plane moved off its stand onto the taxiway. He checked Tembo’s exit visa and Gaby and Faraway’s press cards and sent them to the next aircraft. It was a little An72F. It had a Cyrillic name stencilled on its side. Dostoinsuvo. Gaby knew it would be all right now. She could trust them to Oksana’s care, the shaven-headed, shaman-angel of the turbofans. A woman was standing at the foot of the tail ramp collecting boarding passes. And Gaby realized that this was it. They were leaving her. She hugged Tembo.
‘You are the best goddam cameraman I ever worked with,’ she yelled. ‘I will miss you like death.’
‘There is no death,’ Tembo yelled back. ‘Jesus has beaten it, ten nil. We will meet again, as surely.’
‘Thank you for saving us once, and then saving us again,’ Mrs Tembo said.
That is the way to think of it, Gaby thought. Twice-saved. That way your ordeal and the Black Simba kid’s death do not go for nothing.
Faraway hugged Mrs Tembo, who pretended to be scandalized, and the children, and then Tembo. He held his dear friend a long time, like a man does who knows he will never see this dear friend again.
‘It will be good in Zanzibar,’ he shouted. ‘It is like paradise down there in the spice island. Maybe not your paradise, but my paradise. Sun, sand, cool palms, cool beer, warm nights, hot hot big-breasted women who smell of cinnamon and cloves. Listen, I can hear them weeping for your great gift, Tembo.’
Tembo and his family gave their cards to the woman and they went up the ramp into the belly of the big plane and Gaby could not see them any more. She and Faraway stood back and waited for the plane to fill and the ramp close. They shut their ears to the astounding blast of Lotarev engines lighting up at once. Dostoinsuvo moved off its stand. Until now, Gaby had not been certain Tembo and his family were safe. She waved, knowing it was supremely unlikely she would be seen. The plane turned at the end of the runway, made its run and took off.
‘Ah,’ Faraway said, watching the smoke trails turn over the distant towers of Nairobi. He sounded like a man who has felt part of his body die.
‘You’ll see him again; you’re his Deputy Station Manager, for goodness sake.’
‘I will not see him again. I am not going to Zanzibar. I have been decided on this for a long time, Gaby. I told you that night at Tembo’s, when he and I tried to make an African out of you: when the time came, I would take my chances with the Chaga. I am not leaving. The Chaga is the future. It is Kenya as she should be. I want to be part of that. Tembo has children to fear for; he has made the right choice for him. But me, what kind of future could it be without the incomparable Faraway?’
‘You pick your moments, man.’
‘Some things there is never a good moment to say.’ He smiled. Gaby could not resist it. ‘Surely you know that the only reason I stayed so long is because I thought I would get the chance to fiki-fiki the woman of my dreams. So I go to the new world happy now, because how many men in this world have made the woman of their dreams howl like a jackal?’
‘You.’ She play-punched him.
‘Gaby, I know you do not love me. I do not need you to love me. I am happy, like I said. It does not hurt me that you still love Shepard—I have seen you try to hide the look on your face every time his name is mentioned. I heard you shout his name when the bomb went off on Jogoo Road. At least you had the good manners not to shout it when my bomb went off inside you. Listen, I am such a great guy, I will tell you where you can find him. He is at the Kenyatta Conference Centre. They are clearing out every last trace that UNECTA was ever there. Hurry. You may still catch him before he leaves for here.’
She found herself running.
She found herself pounding through the incongruously deserted arrivals hall, a running woman with ten cleaners waltzing polishing machines over the mosaic floor.
She found herself struggling into her colour-of-the-day vest as she hooted her way through the evacuees outside the main gate. She hoped she had not killed anyone as she rammed the zebra-striped Landcruiser toward the open sunflower of the Kenyatta tower.
Two Polish Sokol utility helicopters flanked the entrance to the Centre. White UN trucks were scattered around them. A mobile crane was trying to lift the bronze UNECTAfrique emblem off its plinth. People bustled like city-building termites in and out of the doors with trolley-loads of documents and filing cabinets. The cordon of soldiers stopped Gaby half-way across the square.
‘Press,’ she said, waving her DF108 in the soldier’s face and pointing to her orange jacket. He politely barred her way. Incredible, that nations gave people like this licence to kill in their name. She emptied a golden stream of Krugerrands out of her purse into her hands. ‘All right. How much?’
Two did it.
She grabbed a civilian loader by the arm, swung her around, sent her armful of document folders spinning across the coloured tiles of the square.
‘Dr Shepard. Where is he?’
The woman frowned. Gaby left her to her scattered files and arrested a tall Sikh with a UNECTA badge pinned to his turban.
‘Dr Shepard. I have to find him.’
‘Fifteenth floor.’
This time, as on that first morning when she had stood awed in this cavernous foyer and felt she was a member of a great invisible communion, no one gave Gaby a second look. She pressed the elevator button, pressed it again, hit it three times as if that would make it come any faster, but all it did was go up and keep going up, so she took the stairs. After five flights she slumped against the window, gasping. The thought of Shep
ard finishing up there and pressing the elevator button to go down gave her strength for another five. Panting, heart smashing against her ribs, she leaned her forehead against the glass. She could see the imperceptibly curving event horizon of terminum across the northern suburbs. The pillars of the hatching towers, each as tall as the Kenyatta building, receded into the distance like the watch towers of some monstrous rampart. Like Jake before him, Faraway was bound for that. Did it have to take all the men she cared about? Tembo. She had done right by Tembo, in the end. Children made things different, difficult. She saw columns of smoke rise up across the city. Things burning down there. Killings. She thought about the vengeance the Black Simbas had visited on Haran and his posse. She had seen the smoke go up from the Cascade Club when they torched it, but she did not know what had happened to Haran. She hoped he was dead, and that Mombi had survived to make it across the line into the coloured country beyond.
She closed her eyes, willed her heart to slow it’s beat.
Shepard.
She kicked open the door to the fifteenth floor and fell through it.
‘God,’ she whispered, ‘I’m dying.’ She picked herself up and ran along the curving corridor, opening each door she came to and shouting ‘Shepard!’ into the room. Every room was the same; a pie-wedge of carpet, glass wall and abandoned tube steel office furniture.
‘Shepard!’
She could have missed him. She could have been round this corridor a dozen times. Where were all the people? The Sikh had said they were up here, clearing out fifteen. They had moved on. They had moved down. Elevator well. They might still moving stuff into the elevators. Check there. She did and saw the sliding doors close on an elevator-load of civilians laden with cardboard boxes. At the front. Right between the closing doors. Looking right at her.
‘Shepard!’
He recognized her. His eyes widened in surprise. He opened his mouth to speak. He started forward. And the doors sealed in front of him. Gaby wailed and hit the call button with the heel of her hand. The illuminated numbers above the door rapidly diminished, stopped abruptly at eight. Gaby rushed out of the elevator lobby back to the stairs. Fifteen. Fourteen. Easier to go down than up, but not much. There’s a lot of gravity in that central stairwell. Don’t look down between the handrails. Thirteen. Twelve. Turning on to eleven, she saw it out of the window and stopped dead.
The big bat-winged thing came in silent as a secret wish across the smoky skyline of Nairobi. It did not seem natural in the air; it seemed to fight and dodge the air currents, side-slipping and swooping and warping its leather wings. It flew by defiance, and thus Gaby knew, with fundamental certainty, that it was going to hit the tower. It was going to hit the tower two levels below her, on the ninth floor. She knew she could not make it. She stood on the eleventh floor landing and watched the thing swell to fill her vision. Bat wings obliterated the view. She cried out and covered her face. The thing hit the Kenyatta tower like an artillery shell. Gaby reeled toward the big drop at the centre of the stairwell as the building shuddered. She stared into the abyss and threw herself back. Clangings and distant crashings of falling objects rebounding from the stairwell walls came from beneath. Gaby ventured as close as she dared. She could hear a high-pressure hissing; water lines broken, or the doodlebug releasing its spores?
The thing had demolished outer and partition walls and had wedged itself into an office adjoining the stairwell. From tenth to eighth floors the stairs did not exist. Sulphur yellow flowers were already breaking out across the concrete walls; the carpet of the shattered office was bubbling into a stew of pseudo-fungi. Slimy ropes of Chaga stuff hung down the stairwell. Already it would be working on the elevator cables. There was no other way down. She was trapped.
Towering un-ferno.
She thought that was a pretty good joke to think up when you are climbing for your life from voraciously devouring Chaga. Up. It was the only way. The only hope. By twenty-two, her legs were screaming. She stumbled into an office that looked over Parliament Square. The cordon of soldiers were running to their carriers. The convoy of trucks was forming up and moving up. The helicopters had started their engines. She picked up a tube steel chair and smashed the window. No one looked up. She threw the chair out. No one saw it fall.
‘You cannot leave me here!’ she yelled. ‘Shepard, you cannot do this to me!’
He had seen her. He knew she was here. He would be watching to see who came out of the foyer. He would not abandon her. What would he do? He could not come up the tower to rescue her. Helicopter.
She climbed, delirious with exertion and pain. The top. To the top. Top of the world, Pa. Girl Reporter In Skyscraper Rescue Thriller. She could not remember how many floors there were in the Kenyatta Conference Centre.
The stairs ended on her and she opened the door. Sun. Light. Wind. Heat. Altitude. Vertigo. She was in the centre of the central flower at the top of the tower. Steel petals inclined away from her. Don’t look at the edge. Don’t look up. Don’t look down. Then what do you look at?
A helicopter lifted past, close enough for her to feel the down-draught. It turned to the west, toward the airport. Gaby took off her orange press jacket and waved it over her head.
‘See me, you fuckers! It’s me. I’m still here. Come and get me. Come on, Shepard, don’t let me down now.’
Gaby waved her orange jacket and shouted and shouted and shouted.
Florida Storm Warning
62
The crab ran along the tide line, hunting. It scuttled in and out in time to the gentle run and flow of the foam-edged water. Its legs left little pin-point prints in the white sand. The sand was not native to this place. It had been brought, like the rest of the long, narrow peninsula, by truck from another place. It was part of the contract that the builders environmentally enhance the two-mile strip of land-fill trash. Between the white sand and the edge of the grass, you could see the bones of the thing: the cans and the cars and the twenty million black plastic refuse sacks. That was what made it such a good place for the crabs, and the gulls, and the waders in the shallow water between the peninsula and the shore.
Nothing on the tide today. Not even a rotting condom washed up from the resort hotels down the coast. The crab ran up the beach to clamber through the trash line. It was a big bastard; its shell was the size of your hand, and the colour of a hard dick. It wore its fighting claws the way a punch-drunk middleweight gone to fat wore his gloves. The crab gobbled with its feeding mandibles and tasted it. It darted sideways and tugged at something wedged under the creased black belly of a trash sack. A rat had died here and rotted. The crab tore and tore. It tore a leg right off with its battle claws.
The gull had been watching the big crab from a hover twenty feet up, waiting for its moment to swoop and steal. It saw the crab wave the rat leg in its claws. It dived. It crawked in its throat at the crab, flapped its wings, stabbed with its beak. It was bigger, smarter, meaner; all the crab had was a thick shell and dumb obstinacy. It held on. The gull danced after it, pecking. The crab backed all the way up on to the grass. The crab could go as easily backwards as forwards or sideways. The gull did not let up. The crab led the gull across the tough, salt grass. At the edge of the concrete it made its stand. The gull stabbed and weaved. The big crab held up its fighting claws and circled.
Suddenly all the birds in the tide water flew up at once in a clatter of wings. The crab fought his corner. The gull paused in its assault and put up its head. It sensed the disturbance that had made the others take to the wing. It gave a fuck-you caw and jumped into the air. The crab was too dumb and too greedy and too short on senses to learn from what had spooked the gull. It chewed its rotting rat leg. It was only when it felt the rumble through its legs that alarm penetrated the dumbness. It ran, chewed leg held high. It looked for crevices and crannies. There were none in the tough grass of the artificial peninsula that would hide a crab this big. It reversed on to the concrete. It was that dumb.
The w
heels missed it, but the fire got it. Three thousand degrees of liquid hydrogen combining with liquid oxygen cindered it: the blast bowled the wisp of chitin ash down the runway.
The circling birds came down, flock by flock, into the shallow water in the lee of the peninsula. In the big trailer park a mile to the south, the people whooped and cheered and applauded as the vapour trail of the HORUS carrier body curved skyward.
‘Ten miles out, fifty thousand feet,’ said a fat man with a beard in an ugly hat and a T-shirt with Fort Lauderdale in ’10: World SF Convention printed on the front. He was watching the sky with a pair of binoculars.
‘Carrier separation in mark twelve minutes,’ said an equally fat, bearded man wearing an equally ugly hat. His T-shirt had a picture of an old-style space shuttle and the words National Astronautics Society: Per Ardua Astra. He had a radio jacked into his ear.
The people followed the HORUS upward. There were five thousand of them in the trailer park this day. Thousands more watched from other approved viewing areas, or the beaches, or the off-shore pleasure cruisers. But the serious ones, the true BDO freaks, were at the trailer park. It was like a festival. There were licence plates from forty-eight states of the Union and beyond on the ass-ends of Winnebagos, RVs, trailers greater and lesser, station wagons, pickups with tents in the back, monster trucks, motorcycles. A nomad village of tents had grown up along the dune side of the park. Family-sized trailer tents, one man pup-tents. Folding gas barbecues, sterno stoves, camp-fires of scavenged driftwood carefully ringed with stones. Boots set outside for the night. Terracotta beer coolers evaporating in the shade. Awnings, wind breaks, sun-shades.
It was a festival of space. Like all the best festivals, it was free. The acts up on the big stage were the daily HORUS launches, but like any festival worth going to, it was down in the tent and trailer town, among the sex and drugs and booze and free philosophy and easy conversation, that the real action was found.