Changa

by Ian McDonald

  That was how they able to take her so completely unawares.

  Branches rustled. Something enormous dropped out of the sky on to her and knocked her down, knocked the breath out of her, knocked all sense and seeing out of her. The something rolled her onto her back. She gasped, choked, fought for breath, waved her hands. Found herself looking up the barrel of an assault rifle at a white man in Chaga-camouflage fatigues with a blue helmet bearing a map-of-the-world logo Gaby reckoned was important but right now could not work out why.

  ‘Fuck, a white bitch,’ the white man with the gun said. He had a South African accent. He seized Gaby by one hand and pulled her to her knees. While she coughed and spat, he wrenched her arms behind her.

  ‘Hey!’ she shouted as she felt steel links lock around her wrists. The South African with the gun pulled her to her feet. She saw three black men trying to cuff a struggling, kicking Moran. Lucius was already immobilized, Sugardaddy writhed on the path, clutching his stomach. A blue-helmet stood over him, legs apart, weapon held high, butt downward.

  ‘What are you doing?’ Gaby screamed as the soldier wrenched her arms painfully behind her. ‘Who the hell do you think you are?’

  ‘The U-fucking-Nited Nations, lady,’ the white soldier said. ‘And we don’t think it, we know it.’

  There were more UN troops at the rendezvous point. M’zee, Bushbaby and Rose were prisoners, together with a Wa-chagga woman who had been left by the trading party to wait for Lucius. The South Africans had jumped them two days ago, Bushbaby told Gaby. They were a new and dangerous thing in the Chaga, a United Nations deep patrol, hunting and eliminating guerilla and subversive elements breaking their interdict. They had found the remains of the slaughtered safari squad. They had found handy culprits. There would be charges of murder, in addition to security violations, when the dirigible got them back on the other side of terminum. Bushbaby said she was sorry. She was so sorry. She had been left in charge, but they had been too fast. Too well trained. They had been all over them before she could get her hand to her gun. Moran listened to her pleas, then spat in her face and kicked her as hard as he could between the breasts. The UN soldiers dragged him away. He did not resist them, but stared at Bushbaby while the black officer called in the airship. All the time that the drone of fans emerged from the forest chatter, he glared at Bushbaby as if he could stare her dead. Rose sat on the ground with her knees pulled up against her chest rocking slowly, weeping silently.

  They had shot the dog.

  ~ * ~

  47

  She stood in the shaft of sunlight as the door from the transfer unit sealed. A voice warned to keep away from the sides. The floor lurched and the circular platform began to descend. Gaby kept staring at the high skylight. An edge of grey cloud lay across the plane of blue. The October rains were coming. The grey concrete shaft changed colour, to green, to yellow, to blue, to white as the platform moved down it. The same voice that had warned about getting too close to the shaft sides informed the detainees that they were in the Zone White preliminary decontamination area. The platform stopped at Zone White Level Three. This deep, the skylight was a tiny square of light. Gaby looked up the shaft of light, let it play warm on her face.

  The containment seal opened and people in white isolation suits came to take her out of the light. The room into which they led Gaby, the Black Simbas, and Lucius and the Wa-chagga woman was white and blindingly lit from no apparent source. Behind a long glass window, a number of people in civilian dress wearing UNECTA badges sat at a desk. A white man donned a headset, tapped the microphone a couple of times to test it was working properly and told the detainees to place their equipment on the long white table to the right. The isolation-suited figures that had brought them in opened the packs and tipped the contents on to the long white table. They sorted through the piles of possessions, bagging items of interest, dropping the remainder through a slot in the wall that Gaby knew went down to flames. She watched her thermal quilt go through the slot in the wall. She watched her spare clothes, her toiletries, her pack go down to the flames.

  The searcher lifted her diary.

  ‘Don’t you touch that; that’s mine, my diary, you’ve no right to it! Give it back to me!’ she shouted.

  The faceless figure in the isolation suit inclined its head quizzically and dropped the diary into a bag. It found the other diary, Moon’s diary. Gaby said nothing as it was bagged and sealed. Jake’s camcorder had been taken back on the airship, with the weapons. Now she had nothing to make people believe her.

  ‘Undress, please,’ said the man behind the glass. He had a middle-American accent. He looked a little and sounded a lot like Shepard. Gaby fixed her eyes on him as she took off her Chaga-proof boots and dropped the cropped cotton top, the purple and red Chaga camouflage pants, her bra, her panties. She kept staring at him as the people in the white suits bundled up her clothes with everyone else’s and dumped them down the slot in the wall. The man she thought of as the anti-Shepard could not meet her eyes.

  ‘Proceed into the next section please,’ he ordered.

  Gaby did not take her eyes off him as she walked through the sliding door. That was how she missed seeing Moran leap on Bushbaby and slam her against the metal door frame. But she heard the soft splintering crack of skull on white painted steel. And she saw Rose run at Moran, her fingers curled into claws. And she saw the milling bodies, flesh and white fabric; she heard the voices yelling, in Swahili, Kalenjin and English. She saw the five white suits pull Moran away and hold him. She saw five more take Bushbaby away on the trauma cart. She saw Bushbaby spasm like she was having an epileptic fit. And she saw the glossy splash and trickle of blood on the door-frame that the white-suits quickly wiped away.

  In the next zone they sat Gaby in a chair and cut away all the threads and wires and beads and plaits that Rose had woven into her hair. They cut carelessly, hacking off the bangs of hair that Gaby had not cut in seven years. She looked at the coils of red hair on the white floor and knew that she could survive this. Whatever lay behind the next door could be no greater violation.

  In the same room were a number of tiled cubicles. The voice of the anti-Shepard told her to cover the lighted panels with her feet and hands. As she stood spread-eagled, two white-suits worked over her with high-pressure needle sprays. Through the steam and spray she stared at the camera on the wall with which the man with Shepard’s voice was monitoring her. She could cry here. No one would see. Tears would only be more water on her body. She should cry. But she would not while that man looked at her through the eyes of the lens.

  Warm air vents dried her body and the shaggy mess of her hair. She was given a white paper robe and moved on to the next zone. The words Unit 12: Zone White were printed in blue on the back of the robe. The paper rubbed her raw skin.

  In the next zone was the birthing chair.

  There was a greater violation than the cutting off of her hair.

  She struggled but they strapped her arms into the cuffs and her feet into the stirrups. Then they did the things with the dilators and the rubber gloves and the endoscope and the lubricating jelly.

  ‘You don’t need to do this,’ she kept telling the doctor who had his fist in her vagina. ‘There is no medical reason for this. You just want to humiliate me because we fucked the UN up the ass.’

  Then the doctor did something that made her gasp and tear at the leather straps. He had not needed to do that thing either.

  They took her to the next sector, which was a dead white room with a white table and two white chairs in it. Gaby was placed on one chair. After a time, the door slid open and the man she called the anti-Shepard entered and sat across the table from her. He was dressed in a beige linen Nehru suit. The badge clipped to his breast pocket identified him as Russel Shuler, with Access All Levels.

  Gaby placed her hands on the white table and stared at the space between them. After the birthing chair, she could not look Russel Shuler in the eyes. She could not lo
ok anyone in the eyes. ‘Interview commenced twenty eighteen, October second, two thousand and eight,’ he said to the air. ‘Preliminary debriefing of Ms Gaby McAslan.’

  Gaby looked up.

  ‘Have you got a cigarette?’

  ‘I’m sorry. Smoking isn’t permitted in this unit.’

  ‘In that case I want to see the European Union Ambassador. My treatment here contravenes the UN’s own charter on human rights.’

  The man called Russel Shuler sighed and asked her to tell him everything that had happened to her in the Chaga.

  ‘You shot Rose’s Dog,’ Gaby said. ‘How is Bushbaby?’

  Russel Shuler frowned, then identified the street name.

  ‘Ah. Yes. Her. I’m sorry to have to tell you this, but she died in theatre.’

  Gaby closed her eyes and imagined turning the table over, picking up the white chair and smashing blindly about her until everything was in as many pieces as she was.

  ‘We’ll be charging the man, the one who calls himself Moran, with murder, of course.’

  ‘Get me the EU Ambassador,’ Gaby McAslan said quietly.

  The man sighed, which was the signal for two big men in medical whites to come and take Gaby down the curving white corridor to a windowless white room with a steel toilet in one corner, a hygiene cubicle in the other, a bed as far away from the toilet as possible, a television screen on one wall and a television camera on the other. The door sealed seamlessly into the wall, as had that other door in that other white room in Tsavo West.

  ‘I want Shepard, get me Shepard,’ Gaby screamed until she could barely force the words from her vocal cords. Then she tore off the paper robe, ripped it into shreds and stuffed them down the steel John. She made a nest out of the bedding, folded herself into a foetal position in the middle of it and cried herself into dreams of running down curving white corridors after the ever-retreating figures of Bushbaby and Dog until they came to a brink and fell into simmering magma and Gaby could do nothing to save them because her head had been shaved and her hands tied with her hair.

  She woke with a cry. The door was open.

  ‘Shepard?’ she said.

  Three figures were silhouetted against the white corridor. They wore surgical scrubs. Between them was a birthing chair on castors.

  ‘You don’t need to do this,’ Gaby said as they put their machines into her and sucked their syringes of fluid out of her. ‘You don’t have to do this. You have no right to do this. No right. No right. No right.’

  There was something in the needle they had given her for she slept without dreams after that, and when she next woke, it was because the door had opened again and it was Shepard standing there. Her heart leaped. She lived again. The joy burned through the sleep and the chemicals and in the clarity she saw that it was not Shepard, but his evil twin, come with a white sweatshirt and a pair of white drawstring pants because he was not brave enough to sit across a table from a naked woman.

  This was the pattern of time in Unit 12. Door opening and either Russel Shuler or the birthing chair; door closing; numb, foetal sleep; well-prepared food that could have been dog shit for all that Gaby tasted of it, fiddling with the television controls, staring at twenty-year old re-runs on Voice of Kenya of Remington Steele or Oprah Winfrey. From time to time she realized that behind that screen should be news channels: CNNs, SkyNets, Foxes. Instead, she found herself looking forward to the Venus de Milo beauty cream ad. One fix was enough to have her rocking back and forth for hours in her nest of quilts, quietly singing ‘Venus de Milo, Venus de Beauty.’ It made her stop wanting a cigarette. She wanted a cigarette more than she wanted out of this white room, with its shower cubicle and steel pissoir and camera eye watching her rocking gently in her nest, singing. Sometimes she thought that whatever they gave her in the needle must be very good, that she worried so little about wanting out of Unit 12. It was life. She would adapt. She was doing very well already. Russel told her so in his debriefing sessions. But a cigarette would be perfect.

  And then she would wake in the dim night light and feel the full weight of Unit 12 press down on her and she would know that the stuff had worn off, because she could recall where and what and who she was, and what had been done to her, and how long it would go on for, because they had absolute power here. Then she would beat her fists bloody on the place where the door had disappeared until the white scrubs came and she would wake wondering what she had done to her hands that they were bandaged, but not too worried, because it was almost time for Santa Barbara.

  And she woke.

  And there were two silhouettes in the door.

  ‘Ms McAslan?’ said the nearer of the dark figures. Gaby frowned in her nest of quilts. The figure spoke in a Kenyan accent. ‘May I come in?’

  Gaby nodded. The figure entered. He was a tall, very black black man in a pale brown suit. His tie was very neatly knotted. He carried a briefcase. He set the case on Gaby’s bed. She backed away from it into the corner.

  ‘My name is Johnson Ambani,’ he said. ‘I am a lawyer. I am very happy to find you in passably good health, Ms McAslan. Could you please sign this document?’ He spread two pages on his briefcase and marked where she should sign with black Xs. He offered Gaby his stainless steel ball-pen. She stared at it as if she had been offered a snake.

  ‘What am I signing?’

  ‘Documents seconding you as consultant to the National Assembly Ministerial Special Enquiry into human rights violations on Kenyan and foreign nationals by the United Nations,’ said the second figure, a big, broad black man. In silhouette his ear-lobes were loops of stretched flesh.

  ‘Dr Dan?’ Gaby said, in a voice she had not used since she was six.

  ‘In person, Ms McAslan,’ Dr Daniel Oloitip said. ‘Now, if you would have the world see what is being hidden in this place, you will sign the papers Mr Ambani, my legal advisor, has prepared for you.’

  Questions could wait. Not long, for they were very huge questions, even under the chemical smog in her head, but long enough to scribble Gaby McAslan at the black Xs without reading the print. Johnson Ambani fastened a plastic badge on Gaby’s soiled white sweatshirt. It had her SkyNet pass photograph on it and read National Assembly Ministerial Commission of Enquiry: Special Consultant.

  Her hair was long and beautiful in the photograph.

  ‘Dr Dan,’ she said. ‘Could someone get me a cigarette?’

  ~ * ~

  48

  The curving white corridor was full of black men and women in dull suits. They followed Dr Dan like the tide the moon as he swept past all the white doors that were identical but for the numbers on them. Barefoot and vertiginous from the tranquillizers, Gaby kept at Dr Dan’s shoulder by momentum alone.

  ‘Things move slowly in this country, and they go by devious routes, but they get there,’ the big politician said. ‘Two years I have been pressing for a government enquiry into this place, but all happens in God’s time.’

  ‘You knew?’ Her brain had been lagged with roof insulation.

  ‘About what the UN is doing here? Something. We all have our sources; I would not wish to compromise mine so close to its centre. You!’ He turned, pointed at whichever one of the UNECTA followers-on in white fell beneath his finger. ‘Fetch Ms McAslan a cup of very strong black coffee. You were my trump card, Ms McAslan. My finger of God. When I found out that the UN were detaining a Western journalist in contravention of the Kenyan Constitution, and the UN’s own convention on human rights, it was very easy to swing the international media behind me. They are all up there, behind the wire, howling for you, Ms McAslan.’

  The Unit 12 staffer brought the coffee. Gaby tried to sip it as Dr Dan wheeled his political circus on down the corridor.

  ‘They wouldn’t let me see any television news. You don’t know what it’s been like down here, Dr Dan.’

  ‘You are the lead story on all the channels. Even then, Mohammed al Nur tried to invoke UN immunity and dismissed my writ of habeas corpu
s.’ The Egyptian Chief Secretary was a leading advocate of the United Nation’s suzerainty over national government. ‘However, for a good Muslim, Mr al Nur shows a regrettable interest in women having sex with dogs.’