Changa

by Ian McDonald

  Something was growing up there.

  The Tanzanian government might have succeeded in hushing the thing up, had an Earth Resources platform not been ordered to turn its cameras on equatorial East Africa. What NASA saw sent them straight to the White House to ask Mr President if he could ask the Pentagon to loan them a few minutes on the military spy satellites.

  The Tanzanians could not have kept it secret for long. Not even the Pentagon could. Not growing at fifty metres per day.

  Gaby had not noticed Sean dressing and leaving. After an hour or so she no longer noticed even the images unreeling across her screen. Here was the way to make the world know her name. Her star with her name on it, fallen from heaven. If she was true to it, it would honour her, but she must come to it. That was why it had fallen so far away, so that she would have to prove her worthiness of it. It was patient and enduring - who knew how many billions of miles it had crossed to come to her -but it would not wait forever.

  Her tutors were astounded by the enthusiasm with which she addressed her work. They did not see the shining star with her name on it; they saw only her fierce, dark determination. She was racing not against the demands of Network Journalism, but the inexorable growth of the alien flora. When the second biological package came down in the Bismarck Archipelago, to be followed a month later by the Ruwenzori Event, her pace became frenetic. Her tutors told her to slow down. She could not. The United Nations was out there now, in the form of UNECTA, poking and prying and sampling and sniffing her alien rainforest. She had to get there before it was all named and numbered and known and there was no mystery left for her to explain.

  Time and inexperience frustrated her. Trapped in grey London, she wished she were the Hundred Foot Woman who could push the dirty buildings apart until new, strange life sprang through the cracks in the street and the light of a brighter, kinder sun shone through the tear in the sky.

  Her semester project on UNECTA as agent of Western industrial neo-colonialism earned her a summer placement with SkyNet Multimedia News. It was the first step southward to the plains of East Africa. That summer she determined that she would give SkyNet no possible grounds for declining her a job when she graduated in a year’s time. She grew pale and vampirish while the rest of her class flourished in sunny climates. She cultivated relationships, not all of which ended in bed. She shook hands. She did lunches. In the end, she succeeded.

  Her father and Reb came to the graduation. First of all her year, she went up to collect her degree. When her father jokingly referred to her ruthlessness, she was startled. She had never thought of herself so. She was a frustrated visionary. The next day she moved into the glass-walled menagerie of SkyNet’s London office, among the architectural wet-dreams of Docklands. It was a Junior Compiler’s post in the Economics division, but it was another step south.

  The Chaga continued advancing outward at fifty metres a day. Gaby charted its progress on a big map of Africa on the wall of her flat. She stuck photographs round the map: elephants with the snows of Kilimanjaro behind them; aerial views of the great disc of coloured mosaic dropped onto the dun landscapes of northern Tanzania. Neither friends nor her brief lovers were allowed to see her little shrine to the Chaga. It was not that she feared them thinking she was sad, it was that it was hers and hers alone. Others would profane it.

  Beneath the towers of London she manoeuvred, she manipulated, she percolated up through the dense hierarchy of Sky Net like ground water rising in an Artesian basin. Opportunities opened; promotions appeared: she let them go. They were too easy, she was not ready. There was still the possibility of failure. That would have killed her. She would move only when victory was assured, though every day’s wait was a tap of the needle another millimetre deeper under her thumb-nail.

  Six hundred and forty taps. Six hundred and forty silent chokes of frustration. And because she had honoured her star, it honoured her. The position was a junior one: had it not been in the Nairobi Station it would have been a demotion and she would have been fatally over-qualified. It was the third step, the sideways step that took you over seas and mountains and deserts to the land of heart’s desire.

  She put in her application, called in all her overdue markers and went home to Ireland. The answer was there on the Watchhouse’s computers as she came in through the door to be greeted by leaping, wagging black Paddy and weeping, hugging Reb and Hannah.

  She had a week to get visas, injections, do research, pack bags, buy a new wardrobe and book tickets. Her father uprated her Kenya Airways booking to executive class.

  ‘If you’re not coming back, then you must go in style,’ he said. ‘It is better to travel first class than to arrive.’ Then he turned away quickly so that Gaby would not be embarrassed to see how he felt about that.

  He gave her a present at the departure gate. It was wrapped in dark blue paper patterned with stars and moons and ringed planets.

  ‘Open it when you’re airborne,’ he ordered, then hugged her and kissed her in a burly, beardy way and pushed her through the security check. When the little feederjet had levelled off and Northern Ireland was an edge of white foam on black rocks, she unwrapped the present. It was a minidisc viewcamera; a beautiful little thing, solar-charged, top of the range. Stuffed underneath it was a Manchester United scarf. It can get cold at 2000 metres, even on the Equator, said the note. Love Reb.

  ~ * ~

  3

  The rhythmic knocking woke her. Tap-ta-ta-tap tap tap. Tap-ta-ta-tap tap tap. Tap-ta-ta-tap tap tap.

  Gaby came out of sleep with a start. Purple twilight filled the room. She did not know if it was evening or morning twilight. She did not know what room this was in which she found herself, or how she was in a very big bed covered with a sticky sheet. She did not know why it was so hot.

  She fumbled out of bed and gingerly opened the door. On the old-fashioned carpet stood her suitcase. She looked left, she looked right. There was no sign of who had put it here and knocked her into wakefulness, and it was a very long corridor. She quickly stepped outside and retrieved the case. The baggage labels were exceedingly interesting. While she had slept her suitcase had been to Mauritius and back.

  ~ * ~

  4

  Gaby McAslan came out of jet lag wanting a drink. Food would have been good, but you met more valuable people in hotel bars than restaurants. Hemingway kitsch. Zebra skins on the walls, sad antelope heads begging sympathy. Spears and shields and photographs of great white hunters and their memsahibs squatting on the running-boards of ancient Bentleys, dead things at their feet. Wicker tables and chairs of course. Black staff, white clients. Feeling conspicuous in fashionable silk blouse, jodhpurs and riding boots, Gaby McAslan approached the bar. A short, solid woman with shoulder-length dull blonde hair sat on a stool talking with the barman. She wore a sleeveless plaid shirt, combat cut-offs and biker boots. She looked the only other professional in a room of Chaga hangers-on.

  ‘Excuse me, what do people drink around here?’ she asked the barman.

  ‘They drink this,’ the blonde woman said. She pushed a bottle along the bar. It had an elephant on the label. ‘Only beer with picture of factory on bottle. Old joke.’ She spoke with a pronounced Slavic accent. ‘I get you one. Moses.’

  The barman flipped up a dew-dropped bottle and uncapped it with his teeth.

  ‘Slainte agus saol,’ Gaby said to her new drinking companion.

  They clinked bottles.

  ‘Big cocks and vodka,’ the blonde woman said.

  The beer tasted nothing at all like elephant piss. Drinking from the bottle. Less than twenty-four hours in the place, and you are already sinning against T.P.’s catechism.

  ‘You have funny accent,’ said the woman. ‘Know most English accents, but yours . . .’

  ‘Northern Ireland. Norren iron, in the local dialect.’

  ‘Norren iron,’ the small woman said, making it sound almost Japanese.

  ‘Russian?’ Gaby ventured.

  ‘F
uck, no!’ the small woman exploded. She ripped open her plaid shirt. Underneath was a much-washed muscle-top with a picture of an ugly jet aircraft taking off and something in Cyrillic. ‘Siberian. Proud of it. Never forget.’

  Sibirsk, that was what was written on the T-shirt. Part of your research, Gaby McAslan. First generation Aeroflot offspring. They have the air transport franchise for UNECTA. They almost turned you into a five hundred kilometre per hour fireball this morning.

  ‘I had a close encounter with one of your comrades coming into Kenyatta airport,’ Gaby said.

  The Siberian woman sneered.

  ‘Bloody 142s. Need five kays to get down and another ten to get up. Boring boring boring. Only thing you can do on 142 is drink whole damn flight.’ She patted the aircraft on her T-shirt: a stubby, high-wing, T-tail jet with a big engine mounted over each wing-root. ‘An72 F. Now that is airplane. Take them anyplace. Anyplace at all. This town full of old white hunter wankers; talk all about old days when they go all over place in Cessnas. Cessnas. Toy airplanes. Model kits with engines. I tell you anywhere you take pissy Cessna, I take An72; proper airplane.’

  ‘You fly.’

  The Siberian woman smiled with a mixture of pride and modesty that Gaby recognized and admired. She had time for people who did their work, however lofty or low, proudly and well. It was a small sacrament, like those monks who served God by washing dishes. Dishonesty she despised; those who bought and sold, or were parasitic on others, and did not create. Only people who did something were truly human. Gaby felt herself warming to this Siberian flier.

  ‘Gaby McAslan.’

  The blonde woman stuck on the surname glottal several times.

  ‘Well, I am pleased to meet you, however you say your name. I am Oksana Mikhailovna Telyanina, of Irkutsk.’

  The barman lined up two more elephants. They clinked bottles and drank to Siberian/Ulster friendship. She drinks and dresses like a gay man, Gaby thought.

  ‘You are here for Chaga, yes? Of course, everyone is here for Chaga, one way or other. Tourist or worker?’

  ‘Worker. I’m with Sky Net. Start tomorrow.’

  ‘Good people. Jake Aarons, he is good man. Good man. Big waste. Ah, they are all good. Better than fucking UNECTA - well, Administration who tell us where we can and cannot fly.’

  ‘Death to administrators.’

  ‘And accountants. Up against wall, boom boom boom.’

  They drank to the mass liquidation of the administrative and accounting classes. The empty bottles lined up along the bar. Glass elephants on parade.

  ‘What do you think it is?’ Gaby asked, ‘the Chaga?’

  The little Siberian woman shrugged expressively.

  ‘You mean, another planet? I don’t know. Easy to talk about other planets, other worlds out in cosmos, make stories about them, make movies when they are far away. When you can see it, touch it, walk through it - fly over it - is harder to believe. Too close, understand? Maybe is one big big movie set. Industrial Light and Magic, all that. I tell you, right here in this place, is very hard to believe in aliens and other worlds, yes? Oh, meant to say, I love your hair.’ She gently stroked Gaby’s hair.

  ‘Blood of the Celts flows in me,’ Gaby said, touched.

  ‘Blood of Finno-Ugarics flows in me. Well, my father’s side, generation or so back. Mighty people, long before damn Russians. Proud people. Look.’ She pulled down the ragged neck of her Sibirsk T-shirt to reveal a tattoo of two intertwined circles on her right breast. ‘Apprentice shaman. Or should it be sha-woman?’

  ‘Sha-person? No shit?’

  ‘No shit, Gahbee UmmicAzlan. Father had no sons, so passed on mysteries to eldest daughter. Me. Oksana Mikhailovna. Already, I can fly. No problem! In time, I will heal the sick, see into human hearts, speak with voice of forest, take on spirits and shapes of animals. See.’ She moved the stretched neckline. The left breast bore a wolf-mask tattoo. ‘Maybe is why I cannot believe in aliens, other planets, colonization, all that. I know earth is still strong, can still surprise us. Most of all here in Africa, where everything is born. Ah! Moses! You are great man. What you doing afterwards?’ The great Moses set them up and kept setting them up and the two women kept drinking them and they talked men and money and football and tried to teach each other mouthfuls of Finno-Ugaric and Irish which of course ended in beer spitting and laughing because they only taught each other to say dirty things.

  ‘Go to bed, Gaby McAslan,’ Oksana Telyanina said as the line of bottles reached the end of the bar. ‘You have big day tomorrow: new city, new job, new workmates. Need sleep. Me too. Have to fly tomorrow, early.’

  ‘After all this?’

  Oksana turned her right forearm up. She tapped a swelling under her wrist.

  ‘Diffusion pump. Cleans it out of blood as fast as I drink it. Piss pure alcohol. Tomorrow I fly to Ruwenzori sober as judge. Soberer.’

  Ruwenzori. The Mountains of the Moon. The white on the map of Darkest Africa. Terra Incognita. Since the Kilimanjaro Event, the cartographers had been forced to redraw those unknown regions marked Here be Dragons.

  ‘We do this again, yes?’ Oksana said. ‘When I get back, God knows when. Me, I am only here because I am babooning. Moving out of place so friend can fiki-fiki, yes?’ She made thrusting gestures with thumb. ‘You on EastAf Teleport?’

  ‘SkyNet’s fixing it. You’ll have to leave a message so I can find you; I’m only booked in here for a couple of days. After that, I don’t know where I’ll be.’

  ‘I will find you. You’ll see. Ah, damn. Moses, are you closing that thing up already? Is too soon. Maybe we have one more, yes? Moses!’

  His gleaming teeth showed no obvious signs of distress at having uncapped fourteen bottles of Tusker.

  ‘Big cocks and vodka!’

  ‘Big cocks and vodka!’ Gaby McAslan agreed.

  ~ * ~

  5

  She woke bright, sober and decided to walk to work. Any town she visited, she needed to walk over, claim it like an animal marking its territory with a rub of musk. She crossed Uhuru Park and the highway, steering by the open flower of the Kenyatta Centre rising out of darkness into the morning light. Something growing, Gaby thought.

  She videoed the big bronze UNECTAfrique horns-and-mountain colophon in the centre of the plaza. People of all colours and races and nations hurried past her, all on the business of the Chaga. As she was. All part of this magnificent machine, unfolding the heart of a great mystery.

  She walked on.

  In three intersections she was lost. Every turning she took brought her back to the same Indian bookstore. Time was ticking away. Taxis would have been flagged down but they did not seem to prowl these streets. Nor were there any policemen to bribe for directions. It would have to be a choice between the homeboys in street-fashionable flares and patch leather jackets hanging around their good friend’s shoeshine stand, or the smart-casual, studenty types waiting for the pedestrian lights. She remembered T.P. Costello’s pointed warnings about HIV-infected hypodermics.

  ‘Excuse me, could you tell me the way to Tom M’boya Street?’

  The tallest of the student-types smiled broadly.

  ‘Certainly. In fact, we are going that way ourselves. We could walk with you; it is not really safe for a white woman to be on the streets on her own.’

  As they walked they asked her questions: was she on holiday or was she working here, where did she come from, how long had she been here, had she ever been to Africa before, what did she think of Kenya so far? Gaby’s answers were interrupted by the arrival of a friend every hundred metres or so, necessitating lengthy greetings and handshakings. Within half a kilometre, what had been three were now six. They did not seem to be making very fast progress in the direction of the SkyNet offices.

  ‘This is a quicker way to go,’ said the tall, bearded one with the expensive clothes who asked all the questions. Friend number eight joined the party. ‘I am wondering,’ the bearded one went on, ‘if maybe
, like we are helping you, you can help us. You are a journalist, an educated woman, you will understand our problem.’

  The problem unfolded over the next half kilometre. A good friend of theirs, a political science student, had got himself into trouble by speaking out against corruption in UNECTA. ‘As you know, the Americans clap their hands and our beloved government dances. They will not allow any criticism of the UN presence in our country - and so our friend is in grave danger. His life has been threatened, his wife and family have been visited, if you understand what I mean. Even we are taking a grave risk in talking to you. You will be all right, you work for a Western news agency, they will not touch you.’