Changa

by Ian McDonald

  There was one figure in the whole big arrivals hall. He was a short, stoutish, middle-aged man in the rumpled linen suit that was uniform for male East Africa staff. His black hair was receding at the front but had been let grow long at the back. It looked as if his scalp had slipped. He wore round spectacles that, with everything else, gave the impression of an owl on a long-haul holiday. Rather needlessly, he was holding a cardboard sign with Gabriel McAslan felt-markered on it.

  ‘T.P. Costello?’

  ‘Gabriel McAslan?’

  ‘Gaby.’

  They shook hands.

  ‘Is this all you’ve got?’ the short man asked. He was the Nairobi Station Chief of SkyNet News but had never lost his native North Dublin accent. Easier to take the boy out of Barry town than Barry town out of the boy.

  ‘They lost my luggage.’

  ‘It’ll turn up. That’s the amazing thing about this country. It looks like bloody chaos but things get done all the same.’

  It was even colder in the car-park than on the apron. Gaby’s breath steamed. The grey dawn light was just strong enough to make the white floods dazzling and surreal. The SkyNet logos on the sides and hood of the big Toyota Landcruiser gleamed.

  I am here, Gaby McAslan told herself as she fastened her seat-belt. This is me, this is real. No. She could not believe it. There was still a pane of glass like a television screen between her and the reality that she was in Africa.

  ‘Good flight?’

  ‘Apart from losing all my worldly goods and a near-miss with a UNECTA plane on the way down, about as good as any long-haul flight can be.’

  ‘Those bloody Antonovs,’ T.P. Costello said, sliding his credit card into the car-park reader. ‘Things should have been scrapped twenty years ago, but as usual the UN’s running the whole damn show on a shoestring. It’ll take hundreds of dead bodies before they wise up.’

  ‘There almost were.’ Soldiers in blue helmets waved them through the sandbagged permanent checkpoint. ‘I met an interesting guy, though. Could be useful. Dr Daniel Oloitip.’

  T.P. Costello laughed.

  ‘Dr Dan. He’s all right. One of the white hats, I suppose. At least he doesn’t have his head so far up UNECTA’s ass that every time it yawns you can see him singing “God Bless America”. An African problem with an African solution, he says. I agree with him.’

  ‘Except it’s an Asian and South American and Indian Ocean problem as well.’

  They were on the main road now, a good two-lane highway. Most of the street lights were still working. It was early, but traffic was heavy. A stream of taxis flowed out from the city, some with biogas compression tanks fitted into their trunks. Big gasoline tanker-trains hurtled in-bound through the morning dusk. Oil products were precious with the connections to the coast under threat. Everywhere were small Japanese microbuses with baggage-laden racks welded to their roofs. Each was filled to bursting with passengers. Some brave souls clung to the sides or hung from the sliding doors. The road surface was inches from them and the vehicles seemed to have only one speed, which was flat out, but the hangers-on were blasé enough to wave and grin and waggle their tongues at the white woman in the big Landcruiser.

  ‘Matatus,’ T.P. Costello said. ‘Something between a bus and a taxi. Cheaper than either and a hell of a lot less safe. They go all over the damn country: up mountains, across deserts, through swamps. There’re probably ones trying to make it through the Chaga. Everybloodywhere. Only use in dire emergencies.’ He braked and blared simultaneously as a green Hiace bus cut in front of him. The matatu flashed its hazard warning lights impudently and accelerated. Faces grinned in the rear window. The Lord is Thy Salvation said a sticker on the glass.

  Shanties crowded the airport road on each side. The rows of tin shacks and cardboard lean-tos stretched further than Gaby could see in the grey light. The township had been awake and busy since before dawn, as the poor must. Women lined up with plastic demijohns at the community stand-pipes or stood battered margarine cans to boil on wood fires. Some carried sacks of grain on their heads. The sacks read ‘A Gift from the People of the United States’. Some women scrubbed children in the porches of their shacks, others pounded washing and hung it out to dry. Ten thousand trickles of pale blue woodsmoke rose up and mingled in a veil that hung low on the cold morning air.

  Children were everywhere. Standing by the side of the road with fingers in their mouths, rolling heavy tractor tyres up the twining alleys, driving away leprotic dogs or mangy goats with well-aimed stones. They were thin and poorly clothed but Gaby did not see one who was not smiling.

  She wound down the window and unfolded her visioncam.

  I’d put that away if I were you,’ T.P. said. ‘Or you’ll end up with a rock up it. Not that it matters to me, but they might miss and I don’t want to have to pay for another new windscreen for this buggy. You think this is bad? I tell you, this is one of the good ones. You should see Pumwani. Jesus. Ten million people: Nairobi’s population doubles every five years. If it was me, I’d take my chances with the Chaga, but the UN says evacuate and so we evacuate. One day they’ll run out of places to evacuate to. It’s not an if, it’s a when, but they can’t see that. This is what happens when you try to apply military thinking to something totally outside its conceptual framework, like an alien colonization.’

  Traders had spread plastic sheets on the oily red earth verges and laid out their wares for inspection. Piles of misshaped oranges, unsteady pyramids of Sprite cans, knobs of maize blackened over hubcaps filled with charcoal. Flies were shooed from grilling skewers of meat with whisks of shredded newspaper. Seeing white faces, children sprang up, shimmering bangles looped over their fingers.

  ‘Karma bracelets, they call them.’ T.P. hooted savagely and swerved around a home-made water cart that was little more than an oil drum on car tyres hauled by an emaciated pony. ‘Hokum for the New Agers. They’re actually optical fibre. Grub the stuff up faster than Kenya Telecom can lay it down. Funny thing is, there are people not even five minutes into the country who’ll stop and buy one. That’s the thing about this place, there’s always someone trying to sell you some damn thing or another.’

  A white aircraft appeared over the slum. It came very low, very fast. Its wheels hung down like the talons of a bird of prey. It seemed far too huge and heavy to be kept aloft by those ridiculous wings. Gaby cringed as it passed over the highway in a howl of engines and dropped toward the threshold lights.

  ‘Was a time when all this was open bush,’ T.P. said. ‘Dead Tommy’s gazelles all over the place. No road sense. Giraffes used to saunter right across this. You stopped for them. Okay. Catechism time.’ He glanced as long at Gaby as the traffic would allow. ‘Rule one. With your complexion, never ever go out without a hat for six months at least. Melanoma you can do without. What’ll you do?’

  ‘Wear a hat.’

  lThat’s correct. Two: you’ve got green eyes, right? Wear shades. All the time.’

  ‘Don’t need to. I got an eyejob done. Pupils photochromed: it lasts a year.’

  ‘Not out here it doesn’t. You’ll get six months max with the UV levels at this altitude. Don’t forget to get them redone; crowsfeet you don’t want. Underwear.’

  ‘Cotton. No artificial fabrics. Don’t breathe.’

  ‘And what’ll you get?’

  ‘Thrush if I’m lucky. And no bodysuits either.’

  ‘That’s correct. And if you do get fungus?’

  ‘A tampon dipped in live yoghurt.’

  ‘Not likely ever to try it myself, but that’s what I’m told. Money.’

  ‘Keep it in your shoe, but always have a hundred shillings handy for mugging money. Avoid conspicuous wealth.’

  ‘Current scam is threatening you with hypodermics filled with HIV-infected blood. Whether you believe them or not is your call, but don’t trust your jabs. HIV 4 farts in the face of the Pasteur Institute and you’re home in a bodybag in six months tops. Therefore, no unprotected cock
s, white, black or any other colour. What’ll you do?’

  ‘Be a nun.’

  ‘That’s correct. And be careful about things like going to the dentist, or getting your hair cut, which you should. Half an inch all over.’

  ‘I’d sooner stick needles in my eyes.’

  ‘Be permanently hot and sticky then. Your choice. Water.’

  ‘Don’t trust it, even in hotels. Wash your teeth with bottled. No ice in drinks, peel all fruit and treat salads with extreme caution. And don’t drink beer out of the bottle.’

  ‘Those two guys.’ He pointed at two men walking hand in hand along the side of the road. ‘Gay or just good friends?’

  ‘Just good friends. African men have no problem showing same sex physical affection.’

  ‘Good girl. I think you might actually do here. Of course, culture shock never hits right away. It waits until you think you’re comfortable and feeling you know all there is to know. Then it goes for you. It can kill you. You’re booked in for three days at the PanAfric. Sorry it can’t be longer, but unlike UNECTA, we have to operate to strict commercial principles. Bad news is UNECTA’s pushed the private rental market right up into the ionosphere. Best advice is book into a cheap guesthouse and be prepared for a lot of footwork. What should you do?’

  Gaby McAslan did not answer. The sun had burned away the dawn mists. Golden light spread across the tin roofs of the shanties: in the middle distance the towers of Nairobi rose sheer from the encircling townships. Light caught their many windows and kindled them into pillars of fire rising from the dark earth. Gaby lifted her visioncam and videoed through the Landcruiser’s filthy windshield. It would not catch it; video never could catch it. The act of putting a frame around it killed the magic, but perhaps an echo might be held on the disc, enough for a moment of a moment.

  They were into the urban traffic now: private cars - 4x4s mostly - and buses, yellow and green behemoths that had never been washed, belching black diesel smoke. Their windows had been replaced by steel bars. T.P. swore expressively as one cut in front of him on a roundabout - keepie leftie in Swahili, he informed Gaby. They passed a big church and a covered market, the national football stadium and the country bus station. They crossed the railway and turned onto a tree-lined highway with parkland on one side and downtown Nairobi on the other. Gaby watched a beautiful, tall black woman in a red onepiece run along the side of the road. She moved with a liquid, unconscious grace that made Gaby feel angular and badly put together. The sun was high now. Shafts of light fell between the buildings into the avenues. T.P. turned the Landcruiser onto Kenyatta Avenue and drove against the flow of the morning traffic up a shallow valley wooded with tired eucalyptus and acacia. Pedestrians thronged the red earth footpaths where the edge of the highway had crumbled away. Posters for toothpaste adorned the bus shelters. T.P. threw the Landcruiser up a curving concrete drive that opened abruptly on the left. It led to an anonymous international-style hotel perched on the hillside.

  ‘This is you. My advice is go straight to bed and sleep it off. These overnight flights bugger your clock gene. We aren’t expecting you in until tomorrow anyway. We’ll fix you up with an EastAf Teleport account, but it takes a little time, so your PDU won’t be doing much for a day or so.’ He leaned across and opened Gaby’s door. ‘Sorry to have to boot you out like this, but I’ve got the end of the world to attend to.’ As she got out, she heard him mutter, ‘What is it with this place for Irish girls anyway?’

  The door slammed. The wheels spun. He was gone. She was alone with an overnight bag and the clothes on her back. Her feet had swollen inside her boots on the flight. A porter in a red fez arrived to carry her bag the twenty feet to Reception.

  ‘Is this all you have?’ he asked.

  The room was comforting and depressing for the same reasons. You can fly faster, higher, further, but the rooms at each end are still the same. This one seemed to have been built by a set designer for Star Trek. A batik of feeding giraffes and the Nairobi LocalNet directory were the only concessions to this being Africa. Gaby arranged her airline booty in the bathroom. There was a big insect in the upper corner of the shower cubicle. Someone had folded the toilet paper into a point. There would be a little foil-wrapped chocolate on the pillow. She would have to be careful not to fall asleep on it. She did not want to have to wash it out of her hair with the big insect watching balefully for a chance to pounce.

  She switched on the radio. Bright guitar music poured forth. The DJ rattled out swaggering pop-Swahili. Encouraged, Gaby opened the window to look at her new city. The bustle on Kenyatta Avenue had not abated. The grubby buses swung amiably along; matatus and little moped-tricycles darted impudently between. Everything was way too overloaded. Five men struggled a trolley laden with wood down the road, piling up a long line of traffic as they tried to make a right turn. A convoy of armoured vehicles in UN white came up the road from the city centre. A continuous grumble of engine noise, sirens and the ghosts of diesel and biogas drifted into the room.

  In Uhuru Park the trees were dismembered stumps, pillaged for firewood. Beyond the worn, parched green the inner city skyline began abruptly. In the high, strong light the towers that had seemed to glow with a golden inner fire now looked shabby and hard-worked. High above the sky was that clear and infinite kind of blue you see only on the hottest days. It was down at street level that it began to take on the orange haze of photochemical smog.

  Gaby fetched the camcorder and framed a tracking panoramic from the elegant white bungalows of the well-to-do across the valley from her to the concrete and glass sunflower of the Kenyatta Centre, headquarters of UNECTAfrique.

  ‘Hi, Dad,’ she said. ‘I’m here.’

  ~ * ~

  2

  Three thousand years of history gives a perspective on human truths. The Chinese are right. It is a curse to live in interesting times. World events have dangerous slip-streams in which many lives can be swept away. Gaby McAslan was one fated to follow the lights in the sky. Saturn’s moons had drawn her to London: the Kilimanjaro Event would drag her across whole years and continents.

  Like the death of Kennedy, or Elvis, or the Challenger, the Kilimanjaro Event was one of those points where world and self touch and you can remember exactly where you were and what you were doing.

  Gaby McAslan was bouncing around in her singlet and panties on her bed, very full of Australian Semillon-Chardonnay and pretending to avoid the undressing fingers of Sean Haslam, her boyfriend of eight days. He was a part-time Network Media tutor. The other part of his time he freelanced multimedia overlay for Reuters. Therefore Gaby McAslan had uncorked the uncheap Semillon-Chardonnay and invited him to bounce on her bed.

  ‘Do you have to have the television on?’ he had asked.

  ‘It’s going to distract you?’ she had asked, smothering him in winy kisses and the mahogany hair that hung to the small of her back.

  She had been the distracted one. The late news presenter had had the look of a man asked to read something he could not believe. So had the correspondents in Washington and Dar Es Salaam and at the foot of the mountain. American spysat shots were incontrovertible. On the second pass the resolution was enough to show things the size of a domestic oil tank. Not that there were any oil tanks on Uhuru Peak on the Kibo snow cap. Not that there was anything remotely recognizable there at all after the impact. Gaby had knelt on the bottom of the bed, resting her chin and hands on the carved wooden footboard, watching the news coming out of Africa. She had felt the stretch fabric of her panties slip down across her rump, followed by the Inquisitive press and prickle of dick and pubic hair.

  ‘Go away. This is important.’

  ‘More important than this?’

  ‘A hell of a lot more important. What kind of multimedia pro are you anyway?’

  The camera had taken a few vertiginous, swooping shots of something that looked a little like a multi-coloured rainforest and a little like a drained coral reef but mostly like nothing anyo
ne had ever seen before. Then the Tanzanian soldier had put his hand over the lens and there was a scuffle of sky and camouflage and the presenter in London was saying that the infection zone (he had seemed uneasy with the hastily devised terminology) was expanding outward from the site where the meteor hit Kibo at an estimated fifty metres per day.

  He had then shuffled his papers, looked embarrassed and gone on to the rest of the news.

  Suddenly sobered and un-sexed, Gaby went to the Net. Screen after screen of information unfolded from the online news services. Schematics, stills, simulations, animations. Page after page of text. Skywatch satellites hunting for Near Earth Orbiters and Planetbusters had spotted the bolide ten days ago: an atmosphere grazer, a little out of the ordinary in that it had made three complete orbits before entry, but otherwise unremarkable. Its ion trail across the Indian Ocean had been observed by US defence systems but they no longer mistook meteors for MIRV warheads. It had impacted on the peak of Kilimanjaro, near the camp of a German hang-gliding expedition. Storms had closed off the mountain for three days. Then the stories began, from the local Wa-Chagga people and the remnants of the hang-gliding team.