Changa

by Ian McDonald

  ‘Can I sound-bite you on “buckyball jungle”?’

  ‘If you put a little “TM” superscript after it,’ Dr Shepard said. ‘Or is it an “R” in a circle? You can sound-bite anything you like. I prefer fullerene machine.’

  Gaby shrugged to say that it was not quite so aurally digestible. Dr Shepard hesitated as people do when they need to say something that will embarrass them if it is not right.

  ‘Your accent sounds familiar.’

  ‘Northern Ireland.’ She baited the hook. ‘You saved my ass once.’

  He must work it out himself.

  He worked it out himself.

  ‘The con gang. What was it?’

  ‘Persecuted students trying to escape to Mozambique. They’d got you with the Rwandan refugee one.’

  ‘God, yes. And I . . .’

  ‘You kissed me.’

  He blushed. It was a comfortable, old-fashioned thing to see in a man.

  ‘Gaby McAslan,’ he said. ‘You do those “And Finally” pieces for Sky Net On-line. I liked the one about the bicycle pump fetishists; the guy down in Dar Es Salaam who thought he’d go one better and shoved a compressed air-line up his ass and blew his colon out through his navel. You’ve caught the real spirit of Africa in those stories. Magic realism is plain old day-to-day living here.’

  ‘I’ve moved on a bit since the “And Finally” pieces.’

  ‘The Peter Werther interview. That was quite a coup.’

  ‘Thank you.’ The moment presented itself. ‘Listen, I’d very much like to do an interview with you; would you have any objections to talking over lunch? There’s supposed to be a place does very good Indian food here, if it hasn’t closed up.’

  ‘There still is. It does. The Tipsi Cafe. Regrettably, I’ll have to pass on your generous offer; straight after this they’re flying me up to the Nyandarua Impact Zone.’ He glanced at his watch. ‘In fact, they’re holding the plane for me right now. If you want an interview, it’s simplest to get in touch directly with Tsavo West.’ He scribbled a number on the back of Gaby’s hand, next to ‘buckyball jungle’. ‘Don’t wash that. I’ll be up in Nairobi for the Ambassador’s Independence Day Hootenanny, but I don’t suppose you’ll be there?’

  The very rich, the very beautiful, the very glamorous and the very influential were invited to the US Ambassador’s Fourth of July party. No one less than the rank of station head, or chief correspondent.

  ‘You never know,’ Gaby said. ‘Life’s full of surprises.’ ‘I reckoned that.’ Dr Shepard packed up his stuff in an impact-plastic briefcase and pulled an overnight bag from under the table. ‘By the way, might I say, it was an ass exceedingly well worth saving.’

  ~ * ~

  16

  The Tipsi Cafe was one of those refreshing places that surpass their reputations. The food was wonderful, generous, cheap and served unpretentiously on plastic plates. Everything tasted faintly of charcoal. Over goat sagh, lentils, two vegetable curries, chutneys and chapattis, Gaby picked Ute Bonhorst for everything she knew about Dr Shepard.

  ‘He’s forty-one, comes from Lincoln, Nebraska. His primary degree was at Iowa State in molecular biology; he graduated in 1988, did his doctorate at UCSB in biophysics and the speculative exobiology of interstellar clouds. When UNECTA received its UN charter in 2006, he was immediately head-hunted.’

  ‘I don’t want his curriculum vitae, tell me about the man.’ Gaby summoned two more Tuskers.

  ‘You have to call him Shepard. He has a first name but he never uses it and no one knows what it is. He’s divorced - it was a messy affair, I think - he has two boys who come out to stay with him twice a year. Currently he is unattached. Which makes him the most sought-after male in East Africa. Abigail Santini has been trying to get him into her bed for almost two years without any success. Are you thinking of joining the line?’

  ‘He interests me, that’s all.’ From the look she received, Gaby knew Ute did not believe her. She was not sure she believed herself, but this Shepard did seem to be the only truly solid person she had met in Africa. White person. Tembo, Faraway,

  Mrs Kivebulaya, even Haran the Sheriff and Dr Dan sweating with fear in his executive class seat; these were real, firmly rooted in the landscape, casting dark shadows. The African light was too bright for white people; it shone through them, it bleached them pale and insubstantial. Dr Shepard stood full in the light and was not annihilated by it. He threw his shadow across the land, his feet were firmly planted in it, like the Masai standing with arrogant nobility outside the stores at the top of the town.

  The decision was made while waiting at the crossing for the daily chemical train to pass. In front of the Sky Net Vitara was an open truck. Men were seated in the open back. Seeing white women in an open top car, an old man reached under his robe and began to masturbate gently, unselfconsciously. The train cleared the crossing. The truck turned left, toward Nairobi. Gaby turned right toward the Chaga.

  ‘What are you doing?’ Ute Bonhorst said, alarmed.

  Gaby pushed the 4x4 into top gear.

  ‘I’m going to see the Chaga. I’ve been three months in Nairobi working with this thing, living it, eating it, drinking it, sleeping with it, dreaming of it, and now I’m this close I’m not going to let a few miles stop me.’

  ‘We have no clearances.’

  ‘That won’t be a problem. Trust me.’

  The road south was wide and swept over the low hills of the thorn scrub country. There was not another vehicle. Gaby pressed her right foot to the floor and pushed the Suzuki to its limits. Her long frustration went out of her like a colossal sigh, months deep, and the vacuum it left was filled with the sudden vertigo that comes when you find you have the courage and freedom to do what you most want in the world. She wished this road could go on for ever; at the same time she could not wait for it to bring her to her destination.

  They ran into the checkpoint five miles south of Ilbisil. Three pig-ugly South African Defence Force APCs were pulled across the road. A black soldier in a blue helmet with green, blue and black ANC flashes on his lapels waved them down.

  ‘Good afternoon, ladies. Could you show me some identification, please?’

  He passed the driving licenses and SkyNet accreditations to an officer sitting at a camp table on the verge, eating his lunch. While the officer studied the documents, the soldier walked slowly around the car, looking at trivial things in a vaguely intimidating way, as bored soldiers at checkpoints do.

  ‘Can I ask where you’re going?’ the soldier asked, growing tired of the game of vague intimidation.

  ‘Oh, south.’ Gaby waved her hand in the general direction of Tanzania. ‘We want to have a look at the Chaga.’

  ‘Sightseeing?’

  ‘You could say that.’

  The officer wiped his mouth with a bush-camouflage napkin and came over to the Vitara. He and the soldier spoke briefly in Xhosa.

  ‘Can I see your pass authorizations, please?’

  Gaby opened her bag and with one hand folded a thousand shilling note in the way Faraway had taught her was best for bribing policemen. She slipped it palm down to the South African officer. He glanced at it and passed it back to Gaby.

  ‘That is not a pass authorization.’ The officer looked up into the sky, then at Gaby. ‘Excuse me, but could you tell me what time it is?’

  ‘You’ve got a watch on your wrist,’ Ute said.

  ‘The officer’s may be broken,’ Gaby said, unfastening her Swatch. ‘Mine keeps good time, see?’ She passed it to the officer.

  ‘Very good time indeed.’ He slipped the Swatch into a button-down breast-pocket. ‘I would give you a word of advice. For your own safety, we do not recommend that you go any further down this road than the Mile 70 marker post.’ The officer saluted and smiled beautifully. Gaby put the Vitara into gear, waved and drove off.

  ‘You bribed that officer.’ Ute Bonhorst’s innate Teutonic respect for authority was outraged.

  ‘Cert
ainly did,’ said Gaby McAslan, child of an ungovernable people.

  Beyond the checkpoint the road dipped down into a river valley and climbed abruptly. At the top of the valley side it swung to the right. The car took hill and bend easily.

  And there it was.

  Gaby pulled in under a great baobab. She got out of the car and went to the edge of the road where the land fell away to the Amboseli plains. She squatted on her heels and looked at the Chaga. The Zeiss-Leica optomolecules bonded to her corneas darkened.

  In her summer on the west coast of the United States, she had detoured to the Grand Canyon. The bus had left her at the door of one of the lodges. In the dark, low-beamed interior she had found a sign, quite small, easily overlooked, that read ‘To canyon’. Prepared for an anti-climax, she had followed it through a small door and found herself on the very brink. Twenty cubic miles of airspace gaped at her feet. She had stood, gripping the rail, for ten minutes, stunned motionless.

  The Grand Canyon had confounded all her cynicisms and exceeded all her expectations.

  The Chaga did the same. Nothing she had seen or heard or learned about it could prepare her for the physical reality. It was too real, too big. Too close.

  She felt as if she were at the edge of an ocean. There was a nearer shore but no further one. To Gaby under the baobab tree, it went on forever. The difference between the Chaga and the dry acacia scrubland in its path was more than the difference between savannah and rainforest. It was the difference between land and ocean, between sun and moon.

  The satellite photographs had shown her the Chaga on the geographical scale but they could not capture the sense of vastness and inevitability you felt when you stood before it, not looking down with the eyes of God, but out with the eyes of humans. From space it was a dark, insanely patterned roundel painted on to the map of Africa. From a baobab tree two miles from terminum, as the line of advance was formally known, it was as if a window had been opened to an alien planet. If you were to walk down this ridge and through the thorn bush and cross that line, you would be transported instantly to some terrible place galaxies away.

  When you stood in its path, you understood how completely alien it was to everything you knew. Its colours were alien. They mixed and matched with each other, but they strained the eye. They did not seem as if they were meant to be seen lit by tropical sun and set against the earth-coloured landscape of this southern land.

  Its shapes were alien. Its skyline could never be mistaken for the canopy of a terrestrial forest. It piled too high, too sharply, too steeply, as if a different gravity applied there. No growing thing was that flat, that wide, that bulbous, that angular, that convoluted. Its line offended the eye. There was something of the coral reef in it, and something of the tropical rainforest, and something of the polar berg-scape; there was something architectural and something industrial, planned and unconstrainedly chaotic. The Chaga was all these, none of these, more than these. Gaby recalled what Faraway had said on chicken-gizzard night on Tembo’s verandah. You could not see it, because there was nothing in it you could recognize. All you could see of it was what reminded you of what you already knew.

  Its smells were alien: unfamiliar musks and ketones and esters and complex lipids; the pheromones of the Chaga’s long, slow copulation with itself. It smelled of aromatics more exotic than any from the spice gardens of Zanzibar. It smelled of the fruit of Eden. It smelled of the sun-seared rocks of Mercury and the icefloes of Triton. It smelled of the body secretions of the lover of your darkest dreams. It smelled of the birth of stars, the death of galaxies and God’s armpits. It smelled of the ocean of unknowing.

  Like the sea, it had a tide. The coming in of that tide across the Amboseli plain was too slow to be seen from Gaby’s perspective, but she observed the secondary effects of the advance. Terminum was not a sharp demarcation but a zone of transition. Only what was within and without were definite. On the line, Earth and Chaga were superimposed, like some metaphysical derivation of wave-function theory. At the very edge patches of olive, purple and crimson mottled the yellowed grass. As you moved inward, the patches merged into a multi-coloured carpet interrupted by occasional clumps of grass, scrub or trees. Further still and the first Chaga forms appeared: spires and lingers of pseudo-reef emerged from the mosaic of carpet-growth and terrestrial vegetation. A mile beyond terminum only the trees remained, holding their umbrella-rib branches above the squawling mass of Chaga-life. Gaby watched tall acacias sway and fall, undermined by the voracious alien growth. A mile beyond the felling zone, only the greatest and oldest baobabs resisted the Chaga. With distance they too were lost, enveloped in swathes of tendrils and stands of pseudo-fan corals. Three miles beyond terminum an abrupt transition took place. The reef-growth exploded into smooth columns that rose sheer three hundred metres before unfolding into a dense canopy of burgundy feathers. Only the white palms of the hand-trees rose higher, opening begging fingers to the sun.

  Gaby could not see what lay beyond the great uplift of forest. It was a bright blur. Nothing more. The Chaga rose gently toward the foothills of Kilimanjaro, forty miles away. The summit of the mountain was hidden by a cap of cloud.

  It was still there. It had waited for her. She had been faithful to it, and it had heard, and been faithful to her. Her star. Her Chaga. She felt tears swell and spill down her face. Two, no more. She wiped them away and reached for the visioncam in her bag. She framed Chaga and distant, cloud-hidden mountain in the screen.

  ‘Gaby’s videodiary, May 2, 2008,’ she said. She swallowed down the tremor of emotion in her voice. ‘Well, I’m here.’

  ~ * ~

  Buckyball Jungle

  17

  The house was older than the country, and very beautiful. A missionary doctor had built it strong and sound as a ship; low, square, with big windows that let light flood into the airy colonial cream and mahogany rooms, and wooden shutters to keep out the heat and the dust. The rooms held hidden delights; little cubbyholes in which newspapers from a century ago lay forgotten; niches and locked cupboards that were rumoured to contain morphine, or heroin. A deep porch enclosed the house on three sides so that there was sun on it, or shade according to your taste, at every time of day. There were red bricks steps up to it, and a red brick drive that was wide enough to take a span of oxen, which was how the doctor and his family had first come to the house.

  Now a woman called Miriam Sondhai lived in the house. She was a virologist with the Global Aids Policy Unit, unravelling the molecular matrix of the HIV 4 virus. It had been the most important work in the world, until the Chaga came. Scientists had deserted to UNECTA in droves; biochemists and virologists foremost among them. Miriam Sondhai had not been seduced. She was a woman of commitment. Her skin was the colour of sun-bleached earth, her face was the fine-featured, heart-shape of the Nilo-Hamitic peoples, who are among the most noble and beautiful on Earth. She had the height and grace of a Somali or a Masai, but she was a woman of no tribe, which to an African is to be stateless, homeless, rootless. She had walked with her mother out of the chaos of Somalia, leaving behind a father and two brothers, in shallow stone graves.

  Now she lived in the house and loved it as it deserved to be loved. But it was too big and expensive for her on her own, so now Gaby McAslan was parking her brand new this-year’s-model Nissan All Terrain Vehicle on the brick drive that was wide enough to take a team of oxen and putting her clothes in the mahogany closets and her beer in the refrigerator and her precious little things in the missionary doctor’s nooks and corners and the eight foot tapestry of the Zodiac her sister had sent her on the living room wall.

  After four months in a single room, it was release. Gaby spread her life with wide abandon through the big, light-filled rooms. She turned the morning side of the verandah into an outdoor office. On hot nights she opened the French windows of her bedroom and pushed her bed with its soft ivory linen into the open air. She ran around the place in her underwear or less, she played her music to
o loud too late, left newspapers and footwear scattered where she had finished with them, blocked her landlady’s car with her Nissan ATV, ate voraciously and without regard for whose cupboard the food came from, entertained Oksana and friends with alcohol that was not hers and generally fell in love with the house too.

  She did not know how close Miriam Sondhai came to throwing her out in those early weeks. Gaby had never considered that she might be difficult to live with. Self-unknowing being the besetting sin of motherless girls, Gaby blamed it on the lofty aloofness of her host. There was a deliberateness in the woman’s intense beauty, as if she had cultivated it to deflect attention from her heart. Even when she went out running in her simple red onepiece in the cool of the evening on the tree-shaded avenues, she displayed that focusedness of purpose. Everything was directed into the beautiful act of putting one foot in front of another. Nothing else mattered. She was as intense and single-minded in her work.