Changa

by Ian McDonald

  ‘Been thinking about me while I was away?’

  ‘Nothing but.’

  ‘So what are you doing up here?’

  ‘Whisking you off on a date. You’ve got a change of clothes with you?’

  ‘Yes, casual and work. I not only look like a horse, I smell like a horse.’

  ‘You’ll smell worse where I’m taking you.’

  She stepped back to give him the sideways quizzical look from under her hair she knew no man could resist.

  ‘You always this insistent?’

  ‘Always.’

  She went to the changing rooms to pick up her bag. Oksana Telyanina was unlacing her boots.

  ‘You, him, yes?’ she asked, making a fiki-fiki gesture with her left forefinger penetrating circled right thumb and forefinger.

  ‘I haven’t even got to kiss him yet,’ Gaby said, changing her footwear.

  ‘He is very cute. Man like this, many woman want to baboon. You want to keep him, remember: Serbski Jeb.’ Oksana mimed pulling a knot tight around a compliant limb. Gaby threw her empty water bottle at her, went out and slung her sports bag into the back of the UNECTA Mahindra in which Shepard was waiting. Shepard placed his palm on her thigh and drove off.

  ‘Where are you taking me?’ she asked, not recognizing the trend of the streets.

  ‘Like I said, on a date,’ Shepard kept his hand firmly on her thigh all the way out of Nairobi, through Keekorok and Olorgesaile and the towns to the west.

  ‘This is some date,’ Gaby said as the metalled road gave way to red earth.

  ‘Something to celebrate,’ Shepard said.

  ‘You got the job.’

  He punched a fist into the air.

  ‘Up, up and away with UNECTA-man! Permanent jet-lag. Permanent Montezuma’s Revenge. Can quote by heart any inflight magazine in the world. I’ll have to buy another suit. There’s a Indian tailor down by the City Market can make you anything in twenty-four hours. He might even run to all-enclosing blue suits.’

  ‘You’d know about that, speed-skater.’

  ‘Gaby, I can’t wait. I cannot wait for them to ask me to go somewhere and solve something. Sometimes you actually do get what you want in this life.’

  ‘I know,’ Gaby said. ‘Sometimes, karma takes a holiday and everyone gets what they want rather than what they deserve. The new East Africa Correspondent for SkyNet Satellite News greets the new UNECTAfrique Peripatetic Executive Director.’

  They drove on into the huge west.

  ‘We’re going to the Mara,’ Gaby said.

  ‘There’re things I want you to see before they’re gone forever,’ Shepard said.

  The red earth road became two tyre tracks on a green, watered plain speckled with many trees. The great wildebeest migration had come in the shadow of the rains to this land. They were like a brown river, meandering, breaking into tributaries and backwaters and loops so wide and lazy the migration seemed to stagnate into a swamp of grazing individuals. But they could not stop, any more than a river could refuse the gravity that drew it to the sea. The Mahindra pushed onward across the great plain. Gaby made Shepard stop on the top of a long ridge that commanded a wide green valley filled with animals. She took her visioncam from the sports bag and stood up in the back of the jeep, panning slowly across the panorama.

  ‘It won’t catch it,’ Shepard said.

  ‘I know,’ Gaby said in her football socks and shiny shorts and green and yellow shirt with McAslan: 9 on the back and the SkyNet globe on the front. ‘We never think that all the beauty will go too.’

  ‘Changed into another kind of beauty,’ Shepard said.

  ‘A terrible beauty, as Yeats said,’ Gaby said.

  The camp had been made between two acacias near the bank of a seasonal tributary of the Mara river. There were two tents, a canvas shittery, a safari shower made from an oil drum and a nozzle, a fire, a table with two folding chairs and three Kalashnikov-armed game wardens with a battered Nissan Safari.

  ‘We’re in the tent on the right,’ Shepard said.

  ‘“We’re”?’ Gaby queried.

  ‘Well, you’re welcome to the one on the left, if you’d prefer. The guys won’t complain. Evening game drive is at five pm. Dinner after dark. If you need a shower, ask the guys. They’re discreet, which means you won’t actually catch them looking at you.’

  One of the wardens came with them in the Mahindra as game spotter. The other two went in the other direction in the Nissan: ‘To shoot dinner,’ Shepard said. He drove the jeep himself, following the spotter’s directions to plunge headlong into seemingly impenetrable bush or down impossibly steep bluffs.

  ‘You love this, don’t you?’ Gaby shouted.

  ‘I was born eighty years too late,’ Shepard shouted back. ‘I wish I could have lived in the days of the Union Jack and tiffin at the Norfolk and whiskies at the Mount Kenya Safari Club where women weren’t allowed in. The days of Lord Aberdare and Baron Von Blixen and White Mischief, when there was just the land and the animals moving upon it, and the scattered tribes and their cattle.’

  ‘But you love the Chaga as well.’

  ‘That’s the dilemma. I love them both, but one will not let the other survive.’

  The sun had set by the time they returned to the camp under the acacia trees. The night was as clear and infinitely deep as only African nights can be. The wardens had killed successfully, and set up a table by the camp fire. There was white linen, good crystal and Mozart on a boombox CD player.

  ‘You’ve put a lot of planning into this,’ Gaby said, showered and dressed in her office uniform of jodhpurs, boots and silk, which was as formal as she could be. ‘What would you have done if I’d said no?’

  ‘Kidnapped you,’ Shepard said, in the one creased linen suit she had seen on him that first day in Kajiado, which was as formal as he could be. He poured wine. The wardens brought antelope steaks. Afterwards, there was whisky. Gaby rolled the cut glass tumbler between her hands and asked, ‘Can I do that interview now?’

  ‘Here? Now? For SkyNet?’

  ‘No.’ She looked at him over the rim of the tumbler, which was another man-trick she had taught herself. ‘For me. I want to know who you are, Shepard. I want to know teeny-bop things: what star sign you are, what your favourite colour is, what you like to drink.’

  ‘Taurus. Green: the exact shade of your eyes. Three fingers of Wild Turkey with a little ice and a tablespoon of branch water.’

  ‘Favourite music.’

  ‘You’re listening to it.’

  ‘If you were an element, what would you be?’

  He paused, momentarily taken aback by Gaby’s change of tack.

  ‘You mean hydrogen, helium, lithium?’

  ‘More primitive than that. Earth, air, fire, water.’

  ‘Earth.’

  Yes, you are, Gaby McAslan thought, lighting a cigarette from a candle.

  ‘What colour are you?’

  ‘I’ve already told you that.’

  ‘You’ve told me your favourite colour. I’m asking you what colour you think you are yourself.’

  He pondered a moment beneath the slow-turning stars.

  ‘A kind of faded terracotta; the exact shade my mother’s herb pots used to turn after two summers on the sunny side of the porch.’

  Yes, you are telling me the truth, thought Gaby McAslan.

  ‘What season are you?’

  ‘This is a funny way to conduct an interview.’

  ‘It’s the only way to conduct an interview if you want to find anything valuable.’

  He was silent for the space of three sips of whisky.

  ‘Fall,’ he said. ‘Fall in Nebraska, which is all silver and gold; silver of frost, gold of Hallowe’en pumpkins in back yards and yellow tomatoes on the vine and bare fields of corn stubble and a yellow edge to the horizon under the purple snow clouds that come down from the Dakotas. A fall that is the cold of evenings when you make a fire and your whisky catches the light and the h
eat of it, that is just like the line in the song about when the wind comes whistlin’ down the plain, and gets into the eaves and you hear the roof shingles rattle but you’re in no hurry to worry about them, not just yet.’

  My God, Gaby thought, I am about to have sex with a Frank Capra movie. No, that is unfair. You would speak with as much love of the Watchhouse and the Point in its different seasons and moods.

  ‘Wood, fabric, pottery or metal?’

  ‘Pottery.’

  ‘Baroque, Classical, Romantic, Modern?’

  ‘Classical. You’re not taking this down.’

  ‘I am taking this down, where it matters. Circle, square, triangle?’

  ‘A sort of slightly rounded square. Or a slightly squared circle.’

  ‘Plains, mountains, forests or islands?’

  ‘Plains. With the aforementioned wind whistlin’ down them. And the corn as high as an elephant’s eye.’

  ‘What kind of car are you?’

  ‘Something pretty much like I drive already. Maybe one of those old British Landrovers that you could drive forever over any kind of surface in any conditions and it would always forgive you. But with the tail fins, fenders and white-walls off one of those 1950s cars you used to see in old rock’n’roll movies that looked about the size of Rhode Island. If that makes sense.’

  Perfect sense. You are getting it now, Shepard. I knew you would. And I am getting you.

  ‘What kind of animal are you?’

  He sighed.

  ‘Something big and wise, that can see a long way across the plain, like a giraffe, but not silly like a giraffe. Not a herd creature. I’ve never been a team player.’

  I know that, speed-skater.

  ‘But not solitary, like a leopard is solitary. A lion. That’s what I am.’

  ‘Which sense are you?’

  He put down his glass. She had him now. The last question would make it irrevocable. Expectation was a warm whisky glow inside her.

  ‘Touch,’ he said and got up from his folding chair and took her hand very gently and led her to the tent on the right.

  ‘Are we safe?’ Gaby asked.

  ‘The wardens keep watch,’ Shepard said, misunderstanding.

  ‘I warn you, I make horrible loud cat noises.’

  ‘Everything makes horrible loud cat noises out here.’

  ‘All right then,’ she said and pulled him down on top of her on the ground sheet.

  The second time she told him there was something special she wanted to try. He grinned in the lazy, contented hunting-cat way of sated men who still have an appetite for more. In the tent was plenty of rope. Gaby offered a prayer to the totemic spirits of Oksana Telyanina as she quickly tied Shepard to the fly-sheet pegs. He laughed a lot despite the hardness of the ground.

  ‘You won’t be doing that in a minute, laddie,’ Gaby said, swinging herself on top of him and pushing her ginger pubes against his chin. Ten minutes later he was making the horrible loud cat noises. Ten minutes after that he was begging. Ten minutes after that he was in an altered state of consciousness, eyes fixed on the ridge pole, every muscle taut as piano wire. Ten minutes after that Gaby had mercy and let him come. Exhausted, elated, aching, she kissed him on the nipples and curled up beside him, nestling into the warmth and the hardness and smell and comfortable man-ness of him. Nestled there, she fell asleep. She woke in the pre-dawn dark, remembering with horror that Shepard was still tied up.

  He was too stiff and sore to take the Mahindra out on the dawn safari. The warden who drove smiled a lot. So did his colleagues as they served the steak and champagne breakfast. Before dinner that evening, Shepard took Gaby out far in the Mahindra.

  ‘Something special I want you to see,’ he said.

  The cool had driven the haze and dust back into the earth and in the space between the day and the things that hunt by night, it unfolded around Gaby. Shepard steered the Mahindra along a wildebeest track older than any of the ways of humans. The migration had been following it for a hundred thousand years. Headlights caught eyes out in the gloaming; stragglers on the primeval way west to the greening plains of the Mara. Gaby had never seen a sun so huge, resting on the edge of the world. Shepard stopped the car in the middle of the great plain.

  ‘Watch and wait,’ he said.

  The twilight deepened into indigo. Summer stars appeared over the plains of Africa in the dark east.

  ‘Did you ever go out at night and look up at the stars and see them very small and close, little dots of light?’ Gaby whispered, echoing Shepard’s posture. ‘And then your perceptions turned inside out and you realized that they were unimaginably huge and distant and it was you who was very small and insignificant, and knowing that was like a sacred thing, that you were tiny, but alive and they might be huge and magnificent, but they were dead and because of that you were infinitely greater and more important than they could ever be?’

  ‘Where I come from the sky is like the land; big, exhilarating, endless,’ Shepard said softly. In winter, on nights when the wind that comes down from Canada is so cold and dry it freezes the breath in your lungs, the constellations glitter like ice. On nights like that you can fall into the sky, and keep falling for ever between all those ice-cold, frozen stars.’

  ‘That’s what I can’t forgive the BDO for,’ Gaby said. ‘It takes the stars away from us. They aren’t distant and numinous, but close, living, intelligent. I don’t like the idea of someone else being in our sky, making us small.’

  ‘See over there?’ Shepard pointed. ‘Just to the left of Antares. About two degrees.’

  ‘Ophiuchus?’

  ‘You know your way around the sky. That’s where they come from. Came down the UNECTA hotline yesterday morning. The gas clouds in Rho Ophiuchi, out on the edge of the Scorpius loop. Since we floated the hypothesis that the Chaga-makers may have evolved in space, the orbital telescopes have been analysing the spectra of deep-space molecular clouds. All the raw material for life is out there; hydrocarbons, amino acids, RNA. It was from deep-space clouds that the first buckyballs were deduced. We’ve been getting spectra of complex fullerenes from Rho Ophiuchi that are as near as dammit the same as Tolkien observed at Iapetus. Only these are about eight hundred light years in toward the centre of the galaxy. If we allow the Chaga-makers a generous one per cent light-speed expansion rate, we’re looking through our telescopes at a civilization at least one hundred thousand years old, and probably a lot older.’

  ‘Peter Werther told me that this is not the first time we’ve been in contact with them,’ Gaby said. ‘First contact was at the very dawn of humanity, out on these plains about three, four million years ago.’

  ‘They could be all through the Sagittarius arm in that time. God knows how long they have been travelling, how old they are, where they originate from.’

  A line of deep red clung to the western horizon under a front of purple cloud. The silence was immense.

  ‘Shepard,’ Gaby whispered. ‘You’re scaring me.’

  ‘I’m scaring myself,’ Shepard said. ‘You’re right. The stars aren’t ours any more. They never were. Something got there before us, before we even existed.’

  ‘I suppose we could hold hands and whistle Thus Spake Zarathustra,’ Gaby suggested.

  She saw Shepard’s face crease to laugh, then he suddenly pressed a forefinger to her lips.

  ‘Shh. They’re here. Look.’

  They came out of the darkness beneath the shade trees, the big lioness first, head held high, nostrils flared, mouth open, tasting the night. Then came two younger females, moving wide to cover the queen’s flanks. Behind them came the cubs. There were nine of them in two litters; some were noticeably larger and more capable than others. They followed the chief lioness in a loose Indian file, foraging two or three steps out of line to sniff a thorn bush or wildebeest turd. An old female with sagging jowls and loins brought up the rear.

  The pride passed within ten feet of the front of the Mahindra. One of the c
ubs sat down, stuck its rear leg in the air and licked its crotch. The matriarch looked at the glowing horizon and the 4x4 with its spellbound passengers and moved on. The cubs followed. The lions vanished into the great darkness.

  ‘The rangers have been watching them,’ Shepard said. ‘They told me where to find them. They’ve lost two, one to hyenas, one that got pushed off the teat. But I think they’ll make it now.’

  ‘Shepard,’ Gaby McAslan said. ‘Thank you. That was a real privilege.’