Changa

by Ian McDonald

  ‘You!’ Gaby yelled.

  ‘Me!’ Shepard agreed. He came to her through the tide of news people. Faraway shouted. He had found a place with an unparalleled view of the Maldive Ridge Object: a crow’s-nest on East Seven Five’s main communications mast. Tembo manoeuvred himself up, connected up his camera and shot background footage. As Faraway let a hand down to pull Gaby up. Shepard said, quickly and quietly, ‘Move in with me. I want to sleep with you, wake up with you, breakfast with you, perform acts of personal hygiene with you.’

  ‘Jesus, Shepard, you pick your moments,’ Gaby said as she scrambled up the mast.

  ‘Is that an answer?’ Shepard shouted up. But Gaby was already contemplating the thing in the sea. It required a trick of looking to see it, like the pictures that had been fashionable when Gaby had been in her early teens that looked like so much multi-coloured spaghetti but, if you looked past them, were supposed to magically resolve into 3-D leaping dolphins or dinosaurs. The trick here was like that, of looking not at the surface but beneath the lap and shiver of the water so that the patterns of light and dark and colour and joined together and became a picture.

  It is not much like a wedding cake, Gaby thought. It is not much like anything other than what it is, what its makers have designed it to be. If it has makers, if those round white brain-like things just beneath the surface are not natural forms, if those deep fissures and meandering blue ridges are not just accidents of evolution, if those spines down there are not something that once had a meaning and function on some world among the gas veils of Rho Ophiuchi, but here, eight hundred light years away, is an empty remnant.

  ‘The dragon in the sea,’ Tembo said reverently. ‘It is written in the Book of Ezekiel.’

  It is written in pages far older than those, Gaby thought. It is written in the racial memory, in the same genes that enable babies to swim before they learn the fear of water. The Kraken. The Midgard serpent. The sea-gods and mermaids and treacherous she-spirits of the ocean. The thing that lives in the sea.

  The public address system whined feedback. A Scottish accent announced seat allocations in the recreation room on level three in five minutes. Gaby fought for a place in the line for the woman sitting at a table with a PDU and a box of badges issuing seats on the spotter helicopters. She came to the table and gave the names of her team members to the helicopter woman. ‘She won’t be needing a seat,’ a voice said in her ear and before Gaby could protest that it was seat or job, had drawn her aside to a quiet place among the pushed-together pool tables. Journalists awaiting their turn stared.

  ‘I’m probably going to regret this,’ Shepard said. ‘Grab your team, come with me.’

  ~ * ~

  30

  ‘There is no way I am ever going to fit into this.’ Gaby McAslan held up the red and silver suit with the big black numbers front and back.

  ‘It stretches,’ Shepard said. He had already pulled his over his swimwear. He ran his thumb up the seals.

  ‘It smells,’ Gaby said. ‘Who was the last person inside this?’

  ‘It smells of you. It’s made from synthetic skin, the same stuff they graft on to burns victims, with a few chemical tricks we’ve learned from the Chaga and a colour scheme so the helicopters can find you if you fall overboard. The fullerene machines have never touched human flesh, so the perfect material for an isolation suit is skin. Or would you rather another night in decontam?’

  ‘Lois Lane is not the one who puts on the tights in the phonebooth,’ Gaby complained as she put the thing on. It did stretch. It was quite comfortable. She would have welcomed a gusset, but presumably men had designed the suits and never gave thought to Visible Sanitary Towel Lines, let alone having the fanny cut off you. They checked suit numbers with the out-lock controller and went down to the jetty.

  ‘Hey! Nineteen!’ Faraway shouted, reading the number on Gaby’s chest. He made a yelping noise like a hunting dog in heat.

  Tembo was busy in the third boat with a Chaga-protected camera with UNECTAsie’s horns-and-yin-yang logo on the side. Faraway wired Gaby as she took her seat.

  ‘We are transmitting back to a satellite link on the rig and they will relay it to London.’ He fitted the plug into her ear and eased her hair back under the protective hood. His touch was very gentle. The other boats had already cast off. In the first was UNECTA’s own recording team. In the second was the landing party. Two last crew jumped into the third boat. They frowned at the SkyNet team. Shepard looked at them as if to challenge their right to query him and waved for the off. The helmsman pushed the throttle up. The little surf boat stood up in the water and skidded out from the shadows under East Seven Five into the light.

  The sea was dazzling. The speed was brilliant. The sky was full of clucking helicopters. Gaby seized a rail and stood up. She pushed back her hood and let her hair blow out behind her so the faces behind the helicopter windows would see it and know who was down there in boat three. Thank you, Shepard. Thank you, God. Thank you, aliens swimming in the molecular clouds of Rho Ophiuchi. Thank you, T.P. Costello, for trusting me not to fuck it up. Thank you, life.

  Tembo was videoing the two lead boats. Faraway clambered unhappily over the seats and tapped Gaby.

  ‘I have London on the link.’

  She nodded and screwed the phone deeper into her ear. Geostationary static burbled. A studio director in Docklands came on line to count her in. Instinctively, Tembo turned the camera on her as Jonathan Cusack said: ‘We’re going back live to our reporter at East Seven Five, Gaby McAslan. So Gaby, exactly where are you?’

  And in.

  ‘I’m on a landing boat from East Seven Five on my way to Foa Mulaku itself. This rather fetching little number I’m wearing is the latest UNECTA biological isolation suit, so we can get close to the object without having to go through decontamination. The scientists who will hopefully be making the landing are in the boat immediately ahead of us: emergence is estimated in—’ Shepard had one hand splayed and two fingers of the other upheld ‘—seven minutes.’ The lens closed up on her face. Faraway was holding a sign with YOUR NIPPLES ARE SHOWING felt-markered on it. ‘I’m going to ask one of the crew here what the exact plan is.’ Out of shot, Shepard was scissoring his hands, eyes wide with panic. Gaby avoided him and sat down beside the helmsman, a sunburned Scotsman with a black 6 on the red front of his suit. Crouching in the bottom of the boat, Faraway handed her a microphone with the Sky Net box on it. Tembo pulled back out to frame them both. Painfully conscious of her nipples, Gaby said, ‘Excuse me, could you tell the viewers your name?’

  ‘Gordon McAlpine,’ the helmsman said, watching the other boats throttle back as they came over the emergence zone. He cut his speed to match.

  ‘So Gordon, could you tell me what’s going to be happening?’

  ‘The idea is that we make a visual survey of the surface and pick potential landing sites - we’ve no real idea of how high it will rise out of the water; some of the locations that look good on the sonar map may prove to be inaccessible. The research teams and the recording crew will go in first; only when it’s safe will we run up beside them.’

  ‘So a landing is a definite probability.’

  ‘Nothing is a definite probability in this business.’

  Back to the studio, the director whispered.

  ‘Thanks, Gaby,’ Jonathan Cusack said. ‘We’ll be returning to Foa Mulaku as information comes in, but if I might turn now to our studio guests, Dr Fergus Dodds of the British Oceano-graphic Survey, and Lisa Orbach, our resident Chaga expert, for their comments . . .’

  Nice one, Gaby, the unknown director said. Don’t go ‘way, now.

  She patted Gordon the helmsman on the back. They exchanged thumbs-ups. The boats cut their engines and bobbed on the swelling deep dark water of the Equatorial Channel. The press helicopters wheeled raucously overhead, waiting, waiting.

  A single Scottish voice called out across the face of the waters.

  ‘Thar she blows!’r />
  ‘Faraway!’ Gaby yelled.

  ‘I have them already,’ the tall Luo said.

  Going to you, Gab said the London director.

  ‘And we’re returning to East Seven Five where Gaby McAslan tells us something is happening,’ said the unflappable Jonathan Cusack.

  ‘It certainly is,’ Gaby said without a break. ‘It’s show time.’

  It had started as a swirling of water, like current around rocks in a shallow river. Now the surface was punctured from below by sharp spines, dozens of them, arranged in rings and rings of rings. Only when their points were three metres above the surface did the spines begin to gradually flare outward. The knotted holdfast bases of the crowns of thorns emerged. Now the uppermost folds of the formations that looked like monstrous human brains broke the surface tension. Sea water ran trickling and gurgling through the fissures as the massive white structures loomed ever higher over the flotilla of small craft. The pinnacles of the crowns of thorns were now thirty metres above sea level and still Foa Mulaku pushed itself up from the deep. A structure was becoming evident. This was not an island, but a society of islands: white brain-formations surrounded by halos of high thorn coronets, linked to each other by a web of blue and red buttresses that were now surfacing, strand by dripping strand.

  All this Tembo captured on his Chaga-proof camera and Gaby talked like she had never talked before; the wonder she felt in the presence of such events, and the fear, and the awe, and all the things the camera could not convey, and the way this thing out of the sea smelled and the huge deep noises that came from far down in its roots in the Equatorial Channel.

  The boats started their engines. They moved slowly into the dripping labyrinth of arches and buttresses. The bright water beneath their hulls was brilliant with fish. Foa Mulaku creaked and clicked as it dried in the sun. Emergence had ceased: the thing that lived in the sea had entered a new phase of evolution. The white domes were splitting along their fissures. Objects shaped like tight-balled fists, but the height of two humans, were pushing from the cracks.

  ‘Hand-trees,’ Shepard prompted. Gaby repeated his words to London. The boats probed deeper into the heart of the alien archipelago. Above them, the white fists opened their fingers one by one. Gaby became aware that hers was the only voice speaking in the dripping, creaking basilica of Foa Mulaku and moderated her tone to a reverential whisper. This was a holy place. A drowned cathedral, Moon’s diary had called the Chaga. This was the place for which those words were properly written. Sagrada Familia after the deluge. But it had not drowned. It was risen. Venus on the half shell. The dragon in the sea, wakened.

  Gordon the helmsman spun the wheel. ‘We’re going in,’ he said. The lead boat had already run up onto the shelving apron of the nearest fissure dome. The UNECTA recording boat followed it.

  ‘The Chaganauts are just making sure their face plates and respirators are secure before landing,’ Gaby whispered, pleased with her freshly-minted neologism. ‘Just to let you know back in London that if we go ashore I’ll have to put mine up and we’ll lose voice contact. They’re stepping on to the surface now.’

  Shepard waved Gordon the helmsman to land.

  ‘They’re unloading experimental equipment from the boat,’ Gaby said. Tembo was lying across the benches with the camera resting on the prow for stability. ‘As you can see, the UNECTA camera crew has now landed as well. Our own boat is moving in, it looks likely that we’ll be making a landing, and I may be allowed to step onto the surface of Foa Mulaku.’

  Now the studio had gone silent.

  ‘The hand-trees,’ Shepard tapped Gaby on the shoulder. ‘Look.’

  Tembo reacted beautifully. He is a hell of a camera-man, Gaby thought. His God has given him a mighty gift.

  The white hands were fully open now but that was not what had excited Shepard’s attention. It was that they were all aligned, like pieces of a mosaic, into a wide, shallow bowl pointed into the south-west quadrant of the sky.

  ‘Look at the angle,’ Shepard whispered into Gaby’s ear through the red and silver stretch hood. ‘I’ll just bet that’s twenty degrees.’

  Gaby had set her life by the stars above Ballymacormick Point. She understood immediately.

  ‘The hand-trees seem to have formed themselves into what looks like a satellite dish,’ she told the studio. ‘As far as I can tell, they’re aimed along the ecliptic; in layman’s terms, that’s the astronomical plane in which the orbits of the planets lie. And we’ve landed. Gordon has run the nose of the boat up on to the shore. I’m holding off putting on my face plate for as long as possible so I can keep talking to you. I’m getting signals from the UNECTA personnel who have just gone ashore to stay where I am, but I’m certain that as soon as they make sure it’s safe, they’ll let me go over.’ And I am going to have a killer line for that moment, Gaby thought. As great as one small step for a man, a giant leap for mankind. Except I am not going to fuck it up like Armstrong. But Jesus, the first thing the world’s going to see is my silver ass going over the side. Boldly going where no woman has gone before and all they are going to remember is my cellulite.

  Shepard left the main party to examine where the white brain-dome rose from the apron. He had a black 9 on the silver back of his suit. Gaby noted that his thighs did not seem to have lost condition since the photograph on his Arab desk had been taken. He reached a gloved hand to touch the mound. The surface puckered like a face frowning and shot out a polyp of white material. Shepard pulled his hand back. The polyp trembled, creased and folded itself into a hand, the exact double in size and shape of Shepard’s. Video cameras swung to bear. Tembo focused in like a sniper. Shepard cautiously brought his hand to within millimetres of the mimic. He opened his fingers, brought them together. The duplicate copied his movements. He cocked a thumb. The Chaga-thing cocked a thumb. He pressed his palm firmly against the alien palm.

  And Gaby screamed and tore at her earphones under her hood as the hiss of the satellite link became a roar of noise and pain and Foa Mulaku thundered at the stars.

  ~ * ~

  31

  The moped-cab driver thought it was the funniest thing he had ever seen. Three journalists shouting at each other like deaf old fools. He laughed about it all the way to the Addu Reef Hotel where the foreign scientists had called the conference. When the journalists asked him the fare he spoke quietly so they would have to ask him again and again. The humour was well worth the tip it cost him.

  ‘Asshole,’ Gaby McAslan said as she entered the crowded foyer and left her bag with the receptionist. Her ears were still ringing. The doctors on East Seven Five had assured her that no permanent damage had been done when Foa Mulaku sent its message skyward, but not even the Sepultura Concert she had sneaked Reb into when she was fifteen, which she had thought was the loudest thing she would hear short of Doomsday, had lingered so long in the inner ear.

  The Addu Reef Hotel had been designed to look like an ethnic fisher village. It stood on stilts ankle-deep in the lagoon. Its guestrooms, which the richer and quicker news corporations had monopolized, were clustered in little communities at the ends of boardwalks. Ethnic fisher villages did not come with en suite bathrooms or fully equipped gymnasiums. Ethnic fisher villages did not have vibrating beds filled with thermostatically controlled fluorescent gel, or glass windows in the floor to watch the fish, or packets of ribbed condoms and leaflets on safe sex in the rattan bedside cabinets. Ethnic fisher villages did not have rattan bedside cabinets.

  UNECTA had taken over the night club to stage its press conference. The staff had arranged the bar seats in a semi-circle and set up a table in front of the DJ’s mixing desk. Most of the seats were already taken. Faraway added a SkyNet logo to the thicket of microphones taped to the conference table. Recognizing him, heads turned to seek out Gaby McAslan and bent together to whisper.

  ‘Nice angle, Gaby,’ Paul Mulrooney said, brushing past her on his way back from the bar with a glass of something amber.


  ‘That’s Shepard’s line,’ said a woman with a UPI badge she did not even know. Journalists snickered into their drinks. Gaby found a place in the middle of the back row of seats. Faraway guarded her left flank, Tembo, with the tripod, her right. Still someone managed to bump into her from behind and drop into her lap a crude cartoon of a kneeling man with an enormous penis fucking a crouching woman dog-fashion. The woman had long hair coloured in red ball-pen and a talk bubble coming out of her mouth saying, ‘Gaby McAslan, SkyNet News, with another exclusive.’

  Tembo snatched the paper away, rolled it into a ball and put it in his mouth. He focused his camera, chewed and swallowed without comment.

  The UNECTA team came in. R.M. Srivapanda, just off the sea-plane from East Seven Five, took the chair. To his right was a very upright African man in a severe black and white suit. Gaby recognized him as Harrison Muthika, Press Secretary from Nairobi. To Srivapanda’s left was an Asian woman who was introduced as Mariko Uchida from UNECTAsie’s Space Sciences Division. UNECTAfrique’s Peripatetic Executive Director was conspicuously absent.