Changa

by Ian McDonald

  He was taking his time coming. But he was still politely late.

  Gaby sought out the BDO in the sky. That bright star in the belly of Pisces, resting on the edge of the world. How would it look when it went into orbit? They were talking about a position half-way between the earth and the moon. She looked at that great light in the sky and tried to calculate apparent diameters. A bright blur. Maybe even a recognizable cylinder. It would go through phases, like the moon. It was a moon. Fourteen day orbit.

  What will it look like to Shepard, in Unity, or on High Steel, that hair-raising surf-shack of girders, solar panels and environment tanks they had built out there the final stepping stone to the BDO. Too big to be a space ship; a planet on your doorstep. That was probably the only way to look at it and stay sane.

  She ordered another piña colada from Constantin, the bar boy she did not like. He was impolitely late now. And he had managed to shaft her question to Ellen Prochnow. Stand up and play Wicked Witch of the Seventh Row in front of the man you begged to come and see you to tell him how sorry you are, how you’ve changed, how you’ve found him in your thoughts every day.

  Bamboo wind chimes clocked against each other. Blow wind, come to me. Listen to me, I cannot lose him to cosmic irony.

  Up on the telescope deck they were talking passionately about centrifugal gravity.

  ‘Any messages for me at reception?’ she asked Nice Eddie.

  ‘Not last time I looked.’

  ‘Could you look again?’

  He looked again. There were still no messages.

  ‘He’s late,’ Nice Eddie said.

  He is three piña coladas late, Gaby thought. Three piña coladas late is looking-like-he-isn’t-going-to-show late. It’s he-doesn’t-want-to-see-you late. It’s this-is-the-end-of-it-Gaby-McAslan-late. The fourth piña colada is the longest one, the one over which you work out what you are going to do with the rest of your life now. It would need to be the longest one Emilio at the bar ever shook. She did not have a plan if he did not come. It is a terrible universe, she thought, that such tiny moment, such atoms of decision, are the fulcrums on which whole lives and futures swing. Strange attractors of the soul; like that storm she had tried to charm with her swizzle stick.

  He was not-going-to-show late now. He was never-going-to-show late.

  ‘He didn’t turn up,’ Nice Eddie said as she picked small change out of her purse to leave as a tip.

  ‘Doesn’t look like it, Eddie.’

  She stood up to leave. And there he was, asking directions at reception. The girl was pointing right at her. The strength went out of her legs. She sat down, suddenly terrified. She realized that she did not know what to say to him.

  She found herself scrabbling in her bag for cigarettes that had not been there for five years.

  ‘Gaby?’

  ‘Oh. Hi.’ Caught, flustering. ‘Sit down, oh sit down; Eddie, a Wild Turkey with branch water, isn’t that what it is? and I’ll have another piña colada, I did remember right, didn’t I? It is Wild Turkey?’

  ‘You remember right.’

  She found she was doing anything but look at him. She forced her eyes towards him. He is not a man who suits having no hair, she thought. It made him look like an impostor of himself. He had bought a new outfit, one of those Indian-inspired two-pieces that were the fashion. It did not flatter him much either, but he looked comfortable in it.

  The hideous idea that a woman had bought it for him froze her heart.

  ‘I like what you’ve done with your hair,’ Gaby said, trying to restart.

  Shepard ran his hand over his scalp.

  ‘Still a bit grey and scaly. I like what you’ve done with yours.’

  Gaby smiled self-consciously and touched the soft curls.

  ‘Got fed up with the old Joni-Mitchell-sings-Big-Yellow-Taxi look.’

  ‘Shorter suits you,’ Shepard said. ‘I’m sorry I’m so late, I’m sure you thought I wasn’t coming. They sprang a surprise meeting on us. Seems Hilary out there has decided she’d like a vacation on the coast and they wanted to warn us in case they had to push the launch date forward.’

  ‘Can they do that?’ Nice Eddie brought the drinks. Shepard paid for them in Space Centre scrip.

  ‘Personally, I don’t think so. They’ve rescheduled the Gene Roddenberry launch, which is Mission 86, for oh-nine-thirty tomorrow but the speed this storm’s coming, I don’t think they’ll even make that. Forecast says it’s due to hit about twenty miles south of Canaveral around oh-seven-hundred.’

  Oh, Shepard, they’ve got you talking like them, Gaby thought.

  ‘You weren’t on the flight roster,’ she said. ‘It was a hell of surprise finding you in the line-up at the press conference.’

  ‘Hell of a surprise finding myself in that line-up.’ Shepard took a long draw from his drink. The wind was stronger now, lifting the paper coasters, rattling the paper lanterns. It is blowing in from Africa, Gaby thought. ‘Every mission specialist has a back-up. Day before yesterday, Carl Freyer went down with some mystery virus he caught off a hotel air-conditioning system - that’s the risk you run when you exceed the capacity of your quarantine accommodation - and they need someone with specialisms in Chaga nanochemistry and in-field experience. They gave me five days to get my stomach muscles up to high-gee lift-off standard. Four hours a day in the gym, the rest in centrifuge training, practising suit manoeuvres in the water tank, or team building. I can hardly move, I am so stiff and sore.’

  ‘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 4x4, 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. I
s 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.