Changa

by Ian McDonald

  He shook his head, clicked his tongue in disappointment.

  ‘And you were doing so well.’

  ‘No, I’m genuinely interested.’ She tried to adopt a posture she hoped said in fullerenes, not you.

  ‘Well, seeing as you did the best piece from that press conference, I’ll let you into a little secret. We’re re-inventing organic chemistry from the bottom up. We can analyse and map the basic molecular structure of the Chaga, but to describe anything as complex as its symbiotic biology, or even the associations of fullerene-machines that are analogous to terrestrial cells, we’ve got a long hike to go on that. Damn things evolve so quickly they may always stay two jumps ahead of any containment tactics.’

  ‘That’s what you’re researching? Ways to kill it?’

  They passed close to Jake Aarons holding court in the middle of a group of television journalists. He stood head and shoulders above his peers. He saw Gaby, frowned; saw Gaby with Shepard, looked puzzled; worked something out for himself and grinned impishly.

  ‘I suppose that’s what they ultimately want to do. If it had come down back at home, we would have called out the National Guard, cordoned the thing off, evacuated everyone and as like as not quietly nuked it. Not that that would have done any good, in my opinion. Pax Americana or not, they can’t very well go around nuking other people’s territory, but the military can’t think in any other terms than enemies, invasion, containment and counter-attack. They’ve been trying napalm down in Ecuador, but that’s always been Washington’s back yard. Biggest drop since Vietnam. No effect whatsoever: the stuff’s as near as possible fireproof. You burn maybe a couple of dozen acres, then the rest starts to super-secrete fire retardents, foams and CO2. It’s back at full climax within a week. This thing thinks.’

  ‘I take it you don’t subscribe to the military philosophy.’ The Ambassador made his mint juleps mighty strong, or was it the effect of Ozark Mountain bourbon on a sea-level girl at White Highland altitudes?

  ‘Doesn’t matter a damn whether I agree with it or not. It won’t work.’

  ‘Is this on the record?’

  ‘You’re recording?’

  Trays of chicken wings passed. Shepard scooped a fistful. Gaby ate greedily from her carmine-nailed fingers and wiped them greasily on her glossy, sheer thighs. These mint juleps were a mighty fine drink at altitude indeed. You saw the glass with those bits of greenery stuck in it like Arab tea and you thought it could not possibly be serious but then you took your first sip and the mint and the sugar and whiskey fused and it was the best damn drink in the universe to sip when you were gatecrashing the social event of the season in a pirate dress you could barely afford with a boss who thought you were the Sad Lost Girl of his golden years and the only real white man in the country eating chicken wings and talking about buckyballs and napalm while the altitude smeared Vaseline over the lens of your life making everything soft-focus and distant so that for a moment you were Scarlett O’Hara on the lawns of Tara and what is he saying? why is he looking at me? does he seriously expect an answer? and woosh! the first salvo of fireworks saved her.

  There were gasps. There were oohs. There were screams as the rockets detonated high above the Ambassador’s residence and dropped silver rain. The Ambassador’s children danced and shouted. A second barrage rose, shedding sparkling stars, and a third. A big wump from behind the shrubs provoked more screams as the mortar shot its load half a mile into the Nairobi night. It blew in a deafening multiple orgasm of novas. Car alarms chorused in answer, shocked awake by the pressure-wave. A cascade of red, white and blue fell down the sky.

  ‘That was a big one!’ Gaby shouted over the din of the lesser lights. ‘I love fireworks, but I hate the noise. When I was a kid my Dad took me to the Christmas fireworks at Belfast City Hall. They shouldn’t have let them off in such a confined space; it was like Sarajevo; rockets shooting all over the place. But beautiful. That’s what I love about them, wonderful and frightening at the same time.’

  ‘Do you ever think they’re like a life?’ Shepard shouted. Rockets were zipping up on all sides, setting fire to the sky. ‘The long, slow rise, the sudden brilliant, brief explosion into glory, the long fall into darkness.’

  ‘If you’re going to talk depressing, I’m having another mint thingie.’

  ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘Probably not. So, what do they call you?’

  ‘They call me Shepard.’

  ‘Nothing else?’

  ‘Doctor.’

  ‘They call me Gaby’. Any more of this mint thingie and she would be flying up like one of the Ambassador’s rockets and her head would explode in a star-burst of flying red hair. ‘You know, you could do me an enormous favour.’

  ‘A journalist’s favour? Can I afford that?’

  ‘I just need you to check something for me. There’s a diary, belonged to a woman had an affair with a UNECTA man; Dr Peter Langrishe.’

  ‘I remember him, and her.’

  ‘It might still be in Ol Tukai, and I really need it to prove something to someone. Could you . . .’

  The big mortar tube boomed and screamed another one skyward. The blast rattled the windows and the beer bottles in their bath of ice. The just-silenced car alarms started up again. Gaby frowned, bent her head to one side, imagining she could hear another noise as the sky rained stars. A sound like a hundred cellular telephones ringing at once.

  It was not the effect of altitude and mint thingie. It was a hundred cellular telephones ringing at once. Creeping paralysis seized the hootenanny as partygoers pulled phones out of purses, night bags, inside pockets, robes, sporrans. Shepard put his finger in his ear and nodded to the chirping voice of the phone. Guests were already streaming up the patio steps toward cloakroom and cars.

  ‘You’ll excuse me if I abandon you in mid-julep,’ he said. ‘There’s a general UNECTA alert in operation. Seems destiny is calling.’

  ‘What?’ Gaby shouted at his receding back. ‘What’s happening?’

  He turned on the bottom step.

  ‘I shouldn’t be telling you this.’

  ‘Tell me!’ Gaby screamed among the beer bottles and the julep glasses and the wing bones of chickens. The fireworks fountained upward, dying unheeded.

  ‘Hyperion’s back.’

  ~ * ~

  18

  Gaby reckoned this was the first time the conference room had been full since SkyNet had set up its East Africa station on Tom M’boya Street. Though it was three-thirty in the morning, every section was represented. The coffee maker was on overtime too. It smelled threateningly of overheated beans.

  Under the big screen, T.P. Costello finished his third cup and pushed it from him across the table, nauseated. He was in a poor state for a live video conference. At some point his solo trip through love and regret had cast him up on the Ambassador’s bathroom floor, unconscious, a half-drunk mint julep gripped in his fist. His snoring had alerted the domestics. Gaby and Jake Aarons had barely managed to get him to a taxi when the word came through from head office that UNECTA and NASA would be issuing a joint statement at one-thirty Greenwich Mean Time.

  In the front row, Gaby had not had time to change her Chanel-pirate dress. It stank of stale smoke, spilled bourbon, spicy chicken marinade and woman-sweat, but the way the fabric moved around her made her feel a million feet tall. One should be dressed for epochal events.

  The SkyNet symbol on the wall screen dissolved into the NASA logo. Still have not got rid of that terrible old 1970s typography, Gaby thought. The colophon was in turn replaced by the face of Irwin Lowell, Director of the Huntsville Orbital Astronomy Centre. He looked like the photographs of that old science-fiction writer her dad had liked: Isaac Asimov. Gaby had never been able to read more than ten pages of his stuff.

  ‘On behalf of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, you are most welcome to the Orbital Astronomy Centre.’ He talked like he looked, like forty miles of bad road. ‘Our findings are largely o
f a technical nature, so we have extrapolated the following graphic sequence from them which will clarify the nature of the object we have discovered in the Hyperion Gap.’

  The sequence opened with a shot of Saturn and its rings. Stock footage, Gaby thought. Bottom of the video vault. Then she noticed that this was not the standard image. A dark line bisected the planet from top to bottom. As Gaby watched, the dark line thickened, but in the absence of any frame of reference she could not judge whether it was millimetres wide or painted down the zero meridian of the second largest planet in the solar system. Then the point of view moved and the thick black line opened into a huge ellipse and then into a solid disc, mottled with a thousand chaotic colours, rotating around its central axis.

  ‘To give some indication of scale, we’ve included a schematic of the Unity space station for comparison,’ Irwin Lowell said in his down-home accent.

  Gaby peered but could not see it. The resolution clicked up, and clicked up again, and again, and again until the edge of the disc seemed like a straight line against the stars. There it was, silhouetted against a patch of Pantone 141, the web of orbital construction beams and environment modules and solar arrays and manufacturing cores, seeming no bigger on the three-metre screen than a spinning spider.

  Reality caught in Gaby McAslan’s throat. Everyone knew the proud boasts. A city in space, a complete community a kilometre and a half across. Man’s first stepping stone to the stars.

  ‘The object is slightly over twelve hundred kilometres in diameter,’ Irwin Lowell said. ‘Our measurements indicate that it is twenty kilometres thick at the rim, decreasing to five at the centre. This, we think, is to offset the object’s tendency to collapse inward under its own gravitational attraction into a more stable form. The centripetal force generated by the spin, which is one revolution every three point five three hours, also helps maintain gravitational stability. On a related point, the moon Hyperion formerly had a highly erratic axis of rotation; that has been corrected. From its high stability alone, we must conclude that this object could not possibly have formed naturally.’

  Earth replaced Saturn on the screen. The Indian sub-continent, from Cape Comorin to Bombay, was obliterated by a featureless grey circle. The lower limb of Sri Lanka protruded from the south eastern quadrant, to the north the great provinces of the old Mugal Empire struggled free. In the shadow of the Hyperion Object lay five hundred million lives, Gaby thought. The grey disc did not look like the presence of a vast, incomprehensible thing, but the absence. Five hundred million people; their mighty, ancient cities; their gods and avatars that were among the first to rule the dreams of humans: taken into the greyness and annihilated. It was like the satellite photographs with which she had adorned her Chaga-shrine; the neat, stamped-out circles of colour stuck across the map of the tropics, but more frightening in its blank greyness than the gaudiness of the alien mosaics.

  Irwin Lowell re-appeared, super-imposed over the map. Gaby could tell from his face that he was about to impart an unpalatable truth. Understanding this, she knew what he would say. The Earth map was not a comparison. It was a promise. The thing was moving.

  ‘Our data confirms that at some time in the process of reconfiguring the former moon, a momentum was imparted to the Hyperion object sufficient to cause it to break free from the Saturnian satellite system.’ He fingered the metal clasp of his bootlace tie. Scared men who cannot let it be seen that they are scared communicate their fear by such small self-touchings. ‘Our projections indicate that the object is on a course into the inner solar system.’ An animated orrery replaced maimed India. The planets slid on their ordained wires. A red rogue line curved inward from the ringed bead of Saturn. It looped around the gravitational field of Jupiter, through the asteroids, past the orbit of red Mars. The blue opal of Earth opened up into its component pair. The red line slipped through the cosmic needle’s-eye between Earth and Moon and was wound into a geostationary skein around the Equator. ‘The calculations are fairly exact. The Hyperion Object will arrive in earth orbit in slightly over five years. Five years and ninety-eight days, to be exact.’

  There was murmuring in the conference room on Tom M’boya Street. What brutal things we have become, Gaby thought. So inured to miracles and wonder that we greet several hundred billion tons of reconstituted moon headed down our throats with a ho and a hum. She fiddled with the almanac function of her PDU. Worlds collide on September 27 2013. I wonder if that will be before or after lunch? But they would not do that. They would not sow their Chaga-seed across the planet and let it grow and flower, only to smash it all into nothingness with their hammer from the sky. Seize that, Gaby McAslan. Hold it to you. It is the only hope you have. Not just your present, but now your future is in the hands of these Chaga-makers.

  A cigarette seemed like a very fine idea. She excused herself and left the room. Irwin Lowell was saying something about mass being missing from the Hyperion Object, which seemed to have been converted directly to momentum by some unknown process. She lit up by the window at the end of the corridor, opened it and leaned out. Day had begun while she had watched the drawings of the things in the sky. Five floors down, Tom M’boya Street was busy with the early morning traffic. She saw a man in Arab dress pushing a little wooden cart along the edge of the street. It looked like a dog kennel on castors. Gaby knew from experience that if you looked inside it you would see a crouching woman, veiled and robed so that only her eyes showed, but they glittered brightly in the darkness. Directly beneath the window a policeman was trying to break up a fight at a bus stop. A crowd of matatu touts was gathering and taking sides. Gaby exhaled cigarette smoke into the street. Shouting voices rose around her. People died in these street fights. She accepted that, as she accepted the woman with unknown deformities who lived in a box on wheels, or the legless beggar who pushed himself past Miriam Sondhai’s house every day on a trolley with a block of wood in each hand. Kenya had brutalized her. Cruelties and sufferings that would have been intolerable in London confronted her at every step, and she ignored them. In this, Tembo and Faraway had succeeded. Gaby McAslan had become African. What they had seen in her as the capacity to learn this was her essential brutality. Looking from the fifth floor window, she felt more sister to the people on the street than those she had left in the conference room. They were a tough people down there. They were a resourceful people. They had successfully made the jump from Iron Age to Information Age in two generations: they were used to their world ending every couple of decades or so. The Chaga might be eating Africa, but it could not eat African-ness. They begged their alms and cooked their food and fought their fights and caught their matatus because they knew that in the end their African-ness would eat the Chaga.

  She finished her cigarette, flicked the butt into the street and went back to the conference.

  Irwin Lowell was fingering his bootlace tie again.

  ‘We have pictures just come through image processing from the Chandrasekahr telescope of the moments immediately preceding the advent of the Hyperion Object.’

  Animation would have rendered it more slickly and realistically, but the grainy CCD images captured the intellectual chill of deep space. Gaby shivered in her gorgeous dress. Cold translucent shapes tumbled slowly against the soft blur of overloaded stars, locking together into fans and arcs of an immense disc. Gaby realized with a shock that the fragile, chiming fans must be tens of kilometres long. This was engineering on a scale so large the imagination had to step back and back until the perspective made it human-sized.

  They were talking now about re-tasking the Gaia space-probe, which had been sent out on the heels of Tolkien to plumb the mysteries of the Hyperion Gap. NASA were trying to rig together a high-acceleration propulsion unit that would rendezvous with the probe, dock and put it into orbit around the great disc. They had pretty little animated schematics to show how they would do it. All lines and dots and arrows.

  I was right to tie my life to the lights in the sky, Gaby McA
slan thought. The Ford drivers, the Markys and Hannahs with their beautiful homes and beautiful children could no longer rely on the external universe being too big and remote to touch their internal lives. The universe was coming to them as much as to the man she had seen wheeling his wife in her wooden cart up Tom M’boya Street, or the matatu touts fighting at the bus stop, or the laid-back policeman or the food sellers setting up their sidewalk stalls. But the street people would be ready. They knew intimately that the universe is a place at best indifferent, at worst hostile. They would not flee screaming the sky is falling! the sky is falling! when they learned what had happened out at Saturn, what would be happening over their heads in six years. Six years is a long time under the eye of God. Much can happen. They would be ready, and if the sky did fall, they trusted that their arms were strong enough to hold it up.

  ~ * ~

  19

  The pink stretch limo had been behind her since she turned out of Miriam Sondhai’s drive. It made no attempt to hide, it could not have easily, even among Nairobi’s UN and diplomatic plates. Many UNECTA staff lived in Miriam’s district, stretch limos in all colours were commonplace, but never so pink as this. Gold-tint mirror glass, and a flying-vee aerial on the back. Very cyberpunk. And following her. It ran keepie-lefties and jumped lights to keep itself in her rearview.