Chaga

by Ian McDonald

  ‘You’re actually on the expeditionary force.’

  ‘Not the First Wave. Not the ones who go up to the door, knock, and then wait and see if anyone answers. I’ll be going through with the Second Wave; Teams Yellow and Green, once the beach-head is established.’

  ‘I can’t imagine what it will be like.’

  ‘Neither can I. The boy from the plains states, up on the Final Frontier. Riding the High Steel. Scares the fuck out of me, Gaby.’

  Scares the fuck out of me too, Gaby thought, listening to the rattle of the wind chimes and the voices from the deck above. All the things I want to say, I need to say, I have practised for four years and nine months, are in here and all that comes out is shallow, bland, polite, pleasant drinks conversation. I’m scared to say them, Shepard. I’m scared to have my words rip you open again.

  ‘How did you know I was at the Ramada?’ Shepard asked.

  ‘Journalistic cunning.’ No, she would tell nothing but the truth tonight. ‘I was trying to sneak up to Ellen Prochnow’s suite—I’ve evidence I want to present to her that arms corporations are pay-rolling Final Frontier for seats on the shuttles and first refusal of the expedition findings. I didn’t get to see her, but I did find a certain well-remembered T-shirt.’

  Shepard laughed. It had changed with the years. It was a dark, wise laugh now, with old blood in it.

  ‘And by the way, thanks for sending the helicopter back for me,’ Gaby continued. ‘It saved my ass.’

  ‘I remember an old riposte to that quite well,’ Shepard said. ‘I couldn’t leave you stuck up on top of the Kenyatta Centre with the Chaga climbing up underneath you.’

  ‘Never got a chance to thank you. By the time I got to the airport, you were gone. So my ass thanks you now.’

  Shepard raised his glass to her.

  ‘I accept your ass’s thanks. What the hell were you doing up there anyway?’

  ‘Came to see you,’ Gaby said. Came to tell you I was sorry, that I was wrong and bad and cruel and hurt you because I was hurt and that I wanted it all back the way it was when it was right and good and dirty; that she did not say.

  Shepard hesitated. He is going to change the subject, Gaby thought.

  He changed the subject.

  ‘Was it bad, afterwards?’

  ‘Yes. At the end, very bad. It was killing, all killing; killing for the sake of killing. They threw everything they had at the Simba Corridor, but the Black Simbas held it open for two months. Half a million people went up it into the Chaga before they pulled it in after them. Faraway—do you remember him? The tall Luo with the dirty mind—he stayed with me until the very end.’

  ‘I remember him,’ Shepard said. The look on his face was that of a man taken by his memories to a place he does not wish to go.

  ‘When they started shelling the airport and the UN stopped the relief flights and it was really scary, he got me out. We managed to put a call through to the coast before the net crashed; then he drove me cross-country at night, through the skirmish lines, to a place where they could put down a plane to pick me up. Do you remember Oksana Telyanina?’

  ‘Was she the one who was some kind of mystic; a shaman, was that it?’

  She was the one said she could put an An72 down anywhere, Gaby thought, and she could. After the night of bouncing across the hostile bush, never knowing when they were going to run into another armed scouting party and whether they would run out Krugerrands before they ran out of people they had to bribe; it had been incomparable glory to see that ugly, beautiful jet coming out of the dawn light, down on to that dirt road, and the red dust pluming out behind it. It took more than natural power to fly like that. It took more than natural friendship to grant a favour like that.

  ‘And Faraway?’ Shepard asked.

  ‘He stayed behind.’ She saw him, with the dawn light full on him, standing on the hood of the 4×4, waving ecstatically as Dostoinsuvo made her take-off run. Smiling. He had been smiling, even at the end. ‘But he’s all right. He’s doing good. He’s some kind of mover and shaker in the new nation. When the East African teleport came back on line—the Green Net, they call it—he got in touch with me. The thing’s up to handling data transmission. Some folk get love letters. Faraway sends me lust faxes.’

  ‘I can’t imagine what it’s like in there,’ Shepard said. ‘That sounds strange coming from someone who’s seen as much and been as deep as any other human. It’s the tourist thing, nice to visit, but I can’t imagine living there.’

  ‘They say there are hundreds—thousands—of independent, self-sufficient communities all across what used to be the White Highlands. If you don’t find what you want in the place you’re at, you take a few like-minded friends, find a spot that suits you and the thing will grow you a customized village. The Ten Thousand Tribes is the current sound-bite.’

  ‘But we lost Nairobi. Tsavo, Amboseli, the Mara. Kilimanjaro, Kirinyaga, the Rift Valley. All gone. I miss them. I’m not certain that what we’ve been given in exchange compensates. How long before Mombasa goes?’

  ‘It’s got a couple of years.’ And Kikambala, and the banda there, and the beach where your children played, and the reef where they swam, when it was as good as it could ever get. You are not talking about the Chaga taking things away. You are talking about time, and change. You are talking about death. She knew that if she did not say them now, the things would go unspoken forever, and it would be as dead for them as if he had thrown her note away and never come to the Starview Lodge.

  She laid her hands on the table, palms up. They were trembling.

  ‘Shepard, I’m sorry. I hurt you. I was crass, insensitive, selfish, treacherous, crazy; I was a hundred different sins that night, all of them deadly.’

  ‘You found the one wound, and you went right for it.’

  ‘I always do. It’s a talent of mine. It makes me good at football and terrible at relationships. I can’t help it, I probably won’t ever be able to stop it, pressing them where it hurts most. But I don’t do it deliberately. Shit, Shepard, it only works on people I love.’

  ‘Like now?’

  ‘Does this hurt?’

  ‘Does it ever not?’

  ‘How long is ever?’

  ‘Four years and nine months and I forget the days.’

  ‘Oh shit,’ Gaby McAslan said. ‘I think I’m going to have to cry now and my mascara will smudge and everyone will know. Did you really think of me all that time, Shepard? You can lie to me about this. I won’t mind, but try and make it sound convincing.’

  ‘Who’s lying?’ Shepard said.

  ‘Liar,’ Gaby whispered. ‘Do you forgive me?’

  ‘Long ago.’

  ‘Then why the fuck,’ Gaby said, in a voice so low it could hardly be heard over the rising wind, ‘did it take you four years nine months and you forget the days to tell me?’

  ‘A thousand stupidities. A thousand mistrusts. A thousand fears. Men are emotional cowards.’

  ‘You were scared? Of me?’

  He said nothing. Fair comment, she thought.

  ‘That’s a pretty lame excuse, Shepard.’

  ‘What’s yours?’

  ‘I didn’t know if you would talk to me, let alone forgive me.’

  ‘Me, forgive you? But when I saw you that instant in Nairobi, in the Kenyatta tower…’

  ‘When I came looking for you.’

  ‘Exactly.’

  They looked at each other over the table. The wind from out of Africa set the candle flames bickering in their glass jars and bamboo blinds billowing.

  ‘Do you remember in old Tom and Jerry cartoons when Spike the dog used to do something dumb?’ Gaby asked.

  ‘And his head would turn into a braying jackass’s?’

  ‘Exactly.’

  ‘Hee haw hee haw.’

  ‘I am going to cry now,’ Gaby McAslan announced.

  While they made fools of themselves and each other, the voices from the telescope deck had grown louder,
as had the noise from the main bar, which had gradually filled until all you could see were people’s backs pressed against the glass. Suddenly someone discovered there was an outside, and the doors slid open and the people inside poured out outside. They rushed to the rail. They seemed to be expecting an event.

  ‘Robert A. Heinlein’s coming down early because of the storm.’ Shepard had to raise his voice. As he spoke, miles of runway lights went on across the lagoon. Pentagrams and hexagrams of power, section by section. A hush fell over the space-watchers. ‘Is there some place quieter we could go?’ Shepard asked. ‘Someone’s bound to recognize my hair-style and want to talk to me about space.’

  ‘There’s my room,’ Gaby said. ‘It’s down by the pool. No one goes there, it’s not on the space side of the hotel. We don’t have to go into my room; we can just sit around the pool if you like.’

  They agreed to sit on the edge of the pool with their feet in the water. Gaby listened to the stratospheric rumble of the chase planes up on the edge of the storm, hunting the in-coming shuttle with battle radar.

  ‘How can you contemplate this?’ she asked. She watched the circles of ripples spread out from her gently moving ankles and interfere with each other.

  ‘They say it’s just like a bus with wings.’

  ‘That pulls four gees, with five hundred tons of high explosive up its ass.’

  ‘If you got the chance, you’d do it too.’

  Without a second thought, she said to herself.

  ‘Aaron’s coming down for the launch,’ Shepard said.

  ‘How old is he now?’ Gaby asked.

  ‘Almost sixteen. Terrifying amount of growing in four and a bit years. He likes me to think he’s coping well, he’s cool, he can tough it out, but he’s overcompensating. He was at the age when children use their bodies instinctively when it was taken from him, and he tries to make up for the loss with wheelchair sports: archery, basketball. He wants to train for a marathon. He pushes himself too hard—he’s just a kid still.’ Shepard emptied his glass and set it to float in the pool. The ripples carried it out into the deep water. ‘There’s an operation they want to try. It’s something they’ve developed in Ecuador from symb technology. They can splice symb neural fibres on to human nerve endings. If it works, he would walk again, run again. Be like he was. He won’t admit it, but he’s scared of it. I think he likes to be extraordinary. I think he’s afraid to go back to being an ordinary archer, an ordinary basketball player, an ordinary long distance runner. Is that a terrible thing to say about your son?’

  ‘Shepard, I don’t know what to say about Aaron, and Fraser. It just seems…wrong. That most of all. Wrong; an offence against nature. It’s not meant to happen like this. Parents aren’t supposed to outlive their children. Parents aren’t supposed to bury them and grieve for them and try and live the rest of their lives while thinking every day about what they should have been doing, where they should have been, what they should have achieved and experienced.’

  ‘It was the clothes that killed me,’ Shepard said. ‘Going through the closets, gathering all the things he used to wear; the shirts and the pants and the T-shirts and the shoes and the underwear. I couldn’t see them without seeing him in them; all these clothes he had chosen because he liked the shape or the colour or the pattern or the fashion, that he loved to wear. Laying them out and thinking, he won’t change into this T-shirt any more, or put on these short pants, or decide he feels like wearing this hat today. Things for which he has no more use. I gave them all away. I couldn’t even bear the thought of Aaron in them as hand-me-downs.

  ‘It’s like a fire underground, Gaby, that’s been burning down there in the dark for years, that dies down in one place and you think maybe it’s gone out, but it’s just moved somewhere else. There are coal-mine fires in Pennsylvania that have burned down under the earth for whole lifetimes.’

  ‘I envy you that fire,’ Gaby said. ‘Really. Truly. My ovaries kick me every time you mention their names, Shepard. I goggle at babies in buggies. I linger in children’s clothing stores; the sad woman by the 0 to 6 months who’s too scared to pick up and feel that cute little red dress. My biological clock is saying “Hurry up now, it’s time.” Looming thirtysomethinghood. I always envied you your kids, did you know that, Shepard? I used to think I envied their claim over you; now I know it was that they were kids that I envied. I’m tired of having nothing outside of me to care about.’

  The wind was blowing hard now, flapping their clothes, ruffling the surface of the pool into wavelets that swamped the whiskey glass and sent it to the bottom of the deep end.

  ‘Gaby,’ Shepard said, ‘come and swim with me.’ His voice was thick with want. He stood up, took off his Indian-style suit that did not really flatter him. His body was as hairless as his head. ‘It’s how we train for freefall. Swim with me, Gaby. I love to see women in water. Women swimming.’

  Dizzy with anticipation, Gaby stripped down to her panties and followed Shepard into the pool. He was waiting for her in the deep water where the whiskey glass had sunk. She swam towards him, pleasuring herself in the slide of water past her body. So wet women do it, Shepard? She trod water beside him.

  ‘Shepard, in all those years, was there ever anyone else? Is there anyone else now?’

  ‘No one who it would break me to lose. You?’

  It would be too complicated to explain about Faraway, and she had still not clarified her feelings about the thing with him. It had seemed like a breaking of something or a curing. A healing. A whole-ing.

  ‘No,’ she said.

  The HORUS orbiter Robert A. Heinlein passed over the Starview Lodge, and the man and the woman treading water in the deep end of the pool, with a mighty rushing sound. It thumped down on the main runway across the lagoon. Gaby heard the space watchers at the back of the hotel cheer and clap. She wriggled herself close to Shepard, tucked her fingers into the waistband of his shorts.

  ‘All body hair?’ she asked, innocently.

  ‘Let’s find out,’ he said.

  Gaby yelled with laughter. The wind gusted and boomed around the Starview Lodge’s many eaves, and the water of the pool became a dance of droplets as the rain came striking down.

  65

  Aaron came down from Minneapolis on the second day of the storm. He made it in an hour before they closed the airport. Gaby hardly recognized the lean, fit, almost-sixteener in a wheelchair. He remembered Gaby. He seemed glad to see her. His memories of her were all good; he happily shared them with Gaby as she drove the hire car through sheets of gusting rain to the Ramada where Shepard had reserved a room. She wondered how he would take the news that she was moving into the Ramada at the same time.

  Tropical Storm Hilary’s visit to the coast would not be soon forgotten. She blew in to the south, moved north, thought about heading back out to sea for a day or two, then decided she liked the south and went down there again. She left behind her a litter of gutted trailer parks, snapped palm trees, felled billboards, roofless Pentecostal churches, de-awninged gas stations, shorted power lines, breached sea defences, scuttled pleasure cruisers, Pearl-Harbored marinas and thirty-foot yachts in supermarket parking lots. In the five days of her progress, she dumped three months’ rain on the dry coast.

  Gaby McAslan never looked at a swizzle stick again without a prick of awe at the power eight inches of fluorescent plastic could wield.

  As she had prayed, Hilary wrecked the HORUS launch program. When the wind dropped beneath forty, the occasional SSTO struggled toward the grey clouds, cheered on by space junkies in waterproofs and plastic rain sheets. The UNECTA hotels filled up with newspersons drinking out the storm and shaven-headed Final Frontiersmen moping nervously around the corridors in their UNECTASpace white sweats, like a convention of Bad Ass Buddhists. Gaby spent as much of the storm as she could in bed with Shepard. When she could not be there, she took Aaron to look at rockets in the rain, or view the launches with Rodrigo and The Man, or watch the figures i
n bulky white space suits way down in the deep water training tank, or moving in the Virtual Reality simulators like old men practising Tai Chi.

  ‘Quick Gab, infect me with something nasty but non-lethal,’ Shepard said as the television weather girl declared that tropical Storm Hilary had bottomed out and was filling from the south, wind speeds were dropping and the whole system was predicted to spin itself to nothing over Bermuda.

  ‘You’re right about Aaron,’ Gaby said, rolling herself up in Shepard’s sheet. ‘He tries too hard.’

  ‘You’ve noticed it,’ Shepard said from the bathroom. He was plastered from head to toe in UNECTASpace depilatory cream. Yellow storm light shone through the cracks in the racing grey rain clouds.

  ‘When I’ve been out with him, yes. Everything is too much. Nothing is relaxed, natural. Shepard, I don’t think it’s himself he’s doing it for. I think it’s you.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ he shouted over the sound of showering.

  ‘Remember, back in the Mara, when you said that Fraser would be the one would make hearts and break hearts and everything would come to his fingertips, but Aaron would have to work hard for everything he wanted to achieve, but because of it, the world would know his name?’

  ‘You’ve got a long memory.’

  ‘I think living up to that expectation is the most important thing in his life. Everything he does is to prove to you that it is worthwhile for him to be alive while Fraser is not—that he can be not just Aaron, but Fraser too.’

  Shepard stepped out of the bathroom. He looked more alien than ever, naked, smooth, wet.

  ‘Oh no, Gaby.’

  ‘It’s the damage that we do and never know, Shepard.’