by Ian McDonald
~ * ~
35
He paid the taxi and followed the sounds of voices towards the sea. They were playing football on the hard sand down by the tide line. Piled T-shirts were goals. From the cover of the trees, Shepard watched them run and shout. After Rutshuru it was like the play of angels. He felt that he had turned his back on a dark, looming continent and the monstrous, incomprehensible things that grew in its heart, and was looking out toward the transcendent, healing sea.
The boys wore only surfing shorts; Gaby was in an olive green thong back swim suit. She had a smear of fluorescent blue zinc oxide cream on the upper slope of each bare cheek. The boys wore the cream like war-paint across their nose, eyebrows and tiny nipples. Fraser took the ball off Gaby with a decidedly dirty sliding tackle, turned and blasted it at Aaron in goal. It was still rising as it went past him. As Aaron ran to fetch it, sending white sea-birds flapping up before him, Gaby and Fraser did a victory dance, shuffling their feet in the sand and shouting Ooh, ah, Cantona; say ooh-ah Cantona. Shepard was transfixed by the jigging blue stripes on Gaby’s ass.
‘Dad!’
Aaron hit him like a well-taken penalty. He had not seen him coming up across the sand. The ball rolled away toward the lapping tide. The others stopped in mid war-dance and came running.
‘You’re back early,’ Gaby said. ‘Fallen Angel not take as long as you’d thought?’
Shepard winced, as if inner scabs had torn.
‘You could say that.’ His children clamoured for his attention. He scooped them into an embrace. ‘You seem to be doing all right,’ he said to Gaby.
‘Californians would say I was getting in touch with my inner child. I call it playing.’
‘Dad!’ Aaron shouted. ‘Gaby taught us a football song!’ To the tune of ‘Stars and Stripes Forever’, he piped, ‘Ryan Giggs, Ryan Giggs, Ryan Giggs; Ryan Giggs, Ryan Giggs, Ryan Giggs.’
After that it never stopped being good.
In the afternoon they walked out to the reef with masks and flippers. Gaby pretended to be terrified of the boys’ stories of sea-snakes that came curling around your legs and bit you and you swelled up and went black and your face exploded all in thirty seconds. There was still no food in the banda so they went again that evening to the Kikambala Continental Dining Room. The Giriama waiter gave them a special table on the verandah where they could see and hear the sea and drink Heineken and laugh a lot. The boys were too excited to put themselves to bed and as there was no television or even Voice of Kenya radio it was decided that everyone was to do their party-piece. First of all Shepard sang the Periodic Table to the tune of Gilbert and Sullivan’s ‘I am the Very Model of a Modern Major-General’. After the concluding line about these are all the elements of which we know at Harvard, if there’s any more of them they haven’t been dis-cah-vered, he added, ‘actually, there are about thirty but most of them are just numbers.’
‘Plus fullerenes,’ Gaby said.
‘They’re not elements,’ Aaron declared.
The boys played the old King of Siam trick on Gaby, where she had to kneel before Aaron while Fraser made her say ‘O-watanna-Siam’ faster and faster until she was saying ‘Oh what an ass I am’, which is a trick everyone knows but she went along with it anyway. Then Shepard and his sons did a clod-hopping soft-shoe shuffle to ‘In the Mood’ to which they forgot the words and ended going dah-da-da da-dada, dah-da-da dadada.
‘Your turn,’ Aaron said to Gaby.
Among the debris of previous residents, most of which had been either alcoholic, narcotic or pornographic, Gaby had found an old Spanish guitar. She had reset it from its odd African suspended tuning. She sat on the wicker sofa, tucked her hair behind her left ear and sang first an old Irish Song about nostalgia for places that were now obliterated by farms, junked vehicles, trailer camps and hacienda-style holiday bungalows. Then she sang a song she had always loved about all the lies a man tells a woman and the freedom she finds when walks away from them. None of the males spoke for some time after she had finished. Then Shepard said, ‘I didn’t know you could do that.’
‘My Dad was of the opinion that every civilized human should be able to cook, draw, play a musical instrument, and sing in tune,’ Gaby said. ‘Me and the sisters used to make up soul groups. Put on the little black dresses and do the Motown classics to this karaoke tape we had.’
‘OK troops,’ Shepard declared. ‘Bed. Fishing boat’s coming early.’
They went without a murmur.
Later, when the moonlight through the louvred window turned the mosquito net to a pavilion of light, Gaby said, ‘Shepard, your kids are all right.’
‘Yeah. They are, aren’t they? I know I do it all wrong; it’s not all guys together, they shouldn’t be drinking beer, and they shouldn’t be ogling you in that swimsuit - which they do, believe me. They’re just kids, I should let them be kids. Every time I promise myself this time I’ll just be Dad and not King of the Wild Frontier and Indiana Jones, but then I see them and they deserve so much, and I want them to have everything that I have, see what I see, touch what I touch, hear what I hear, taste what I taste, feel what I feel.’
‘Ogle what you ogle.’
They lay a time side by side in the big ebony bed that had been brought by dhow from Pemba a hundred years ago.
‘Gaby.’
‘Shepard.’
‘What do you know about Fallen Angel?’
Gaby leaned out of bed to take a cigarette from the packet on the wicker bedside table.
‘It’s a plan to capture, isolate and analyse a biological package before it releases its cargo.’
‘How do you know this?’
She breathed smoke into the glowing apex of the canopy.
‘It’s a security issue. Between me and my sources. So where did the angel fall?’
‘Zaire. Eastern Zaire; place called Rutshuru. We knew one was coming - we’d had the thing on deep-space tracking for several weeks - but not where it was coming to: you never can be sure because of variations in the aero-braked descent.’
‘Except that it’s always within plus or minus one-and-a-half degrees latitude,’ Gaby said.
‘We picked a number of locations based on hit probabilities that covered a radius of two flying hours; that way when the package began descent we could get our mobile units to the target. As it was, it came down within half an hour of the base at Kilembe in western Uganda. All our mobile units relocated to Goma where the UN left an airfield and relief base from the Rwandan civil war. The helicopters were airborne before the thing hit the ground. The Sikorskys picked the thing up before it was even cool. They called me in Nairobi and laid on the Tupolev. I was the only passenger. Mach 1.8, all for myself. A guy could get used to this.’
Penis with wings, Oksana had called the supersonic priority transport.
‘I got there just as they were bringing in the thing in the inert gas pod. The theory was that the memes, the fullerene-machines, whatever the hell you want to call them, would not be able to replicate in a chemically inactive atmosphere. The labs were all set up - the engineers had been busting their buns - floodlights, power, the inflatable domes where the researchers would be working on the capsule. You’ve seen glove boxes where you put your hand through a wall to work in a biologically hazardous environment. We took it a stage further; we had complete suits connected to the outside by concertina tunnels.
‘The team suited up - they were French, a good crew, I knew some of them from Tsavo and Tinga Tinga - and went in. They opened the capsule with a diamond blade cutter - you’ve seen schematics, you know what the packages look like.’
Like things I used to find washed up on the shore, Gaby thought. Egg-purses, seed-cases, or the recursive chambers and vaults of mollusc shells. But cast up from a deeper and darker sea than the one that breaks around my childhood.
‘They took it apart like a medical operation - or defusing a bomb. That may be a better analogy. Each step very slow, very careful, very
deliberate, all explained and recorded and documented before they moved on to the next. They spent an hour describing the process of cutting the outer heat-skin and peeling it back: analysis showed it be a kind of composite polymer wood with certain attributes of a flexible ceramic. Perfect ablation material. As they found it, the carapace was in an early stage of decay; it must become porous to allow the contents to escape.
‘Think of an orange - those elongated fluid-filled cells packed into segments - and you’ll have some idea of the interior of the package. But dark red, almost crimson. A particularly brutal blood orange. It was getting light by the time they removed the first cell for sampling. Each was about the length of my forefinger and terminated in a complex tangle of light-sensitive fibres.’
‘Nerve endings?’ Gaby asked. ‘Like a brain, is that what you’re implying?’
‘Seed and brain cells combined. The pod can program its own contents, change the specifications of the memes to manufacture different forms.’
‘No Bug-Eyed Monsters saying “Take me to your leader”.’
‘We’d done scans, taken X-rays, gamma-flash photographs. The structure was uniform throughout. We weren’t expecting any Bug-Eyed Monsters. For which I’m very glad; I was the nearest thing to a leader there.
‘I don’t know how it happened.’ A green lizard ran over the wall and clung, head down, under the window ledge. ‘Maybe the inert atmosphere wasn’t as pure as we’d thought, or the engineers rushed the job. First thing I knew that something was wrong was Dominique Ferjac thrashing around in her suit like a fish on a line. She must have sprung a leak, oxygen atmosphere had blown out into the inert chamber and the fullerenes had started to reproduce. The suit was like cheese-cloth in seconds. I should have pulled the plug then but the others wanted to get as many samples as they could inert-bagged and cycled through the lock to the outside. They didn’t know it would blow like that. None of us knew it would blow like that. We should have guessed; the thing needs to spread its spores as far and fast as possible. While we got Dominique out of the suit and into the decontam tank, air had been leaking into the inert atmosphere and when it hit a certain percentage, the capsule went off like a geyser. Like fucking Old Faithful. The bubble went red. It caught the team: we could hear them on the radio shouting for us to get them out, but everything was coming apart around us. The last thing we heard before we lost communications and the bubble collapsed was someone shouting sauve qui peut, sauve qui peut.
‘I almost went in there to get them. I was at the seal door on the outer bubble when one of the army officers pulled a gun on me and told me that if I broke the contamination seal he would shoot me on the spot. It was fucking chaos, Gaby. Fucking chaos, I still can’t believe everything came apart so fast. Somehow the army got the area cleared before the bubble blew, but we still lost the team, one of the Sikorskys and God knows how much equipment. Have you ever seen a grass fire, Gaby, that moves faster than a man can run?’
‘Down on Strangford Lough the tide is like that across the flats. I once saw it outrun a poor bastard dog.’ Gaby watched the smoke coil upward from her nostrils. ‘I can still see the paws, trying to push against the current, and its nose, held up out of the water. I remember its owner, frantic, but there was nothing she could do.’
‘It moved like that tide,’ Shepard said. ‘It moved like fire. Like fire, it consumed what it touched and left everything changed behind it. God alone knows how I made it to the Tupolev - I was last on. Last on. They pulled the door behind me and took off. Twenty seconds after we started to roll, the steps went. It was that close. From the air I could see the whole airfield; it was like one of those satellite photographs in miniature: this circle of hideous colour a mile wide stamped on the green hill country.’
‘You all right, Shepard?’
‘I’m all right. Now.’ He took the cigarette from Gaby’s lips and placed it between his own. Gaby’s heart kicked with sudden strange eroticism. ‘I thought I’d given these things up years ago. You never do really quit, do you? As soon as we regrouped back at Kilembe I sent a skinsuit team back for survivors. We got the team - they’re still decontaminating at Kilembe. But Dominique died, Gaby. She’s dead. The filtration and pumping system on her tank went down. She suffocated in there, Gaby. Alone. Trapped in the dark. Couldn’t do a thing about it.’
‘You’re not to blame, Shepard.’
‘I was senior officer, and all I did was run around flapping my arms and shouting while Dominique Ferjac died. I didn’t know what to do, Gaby. Something happened that I hadn’t prepared for and I couldn’t make up an answer on the spot.’
‘Who does know what to do, Shepard? It’s an alien world out there, it doesn’t obey our rules and laws or follow our management policies or research strategies.’
‘It doesn’t make me feel any better.’
‘It isn’t meant to. It’s a token of solidarity, from one person up to the eyes in shit to another. Because, as you said, at least it’s guaranteed fresh shit every day. And by the way, these things give you cancer.’ Gaby took back the cigarette, smoked it down to the dog end and stubbed it out on the floor. She rolled against Shepard, moved her hand over his flank in the way he liked so much he could barely stand it. ‘If that didn’t make you feel better, how about this?’
He smiled.
‘A little.’
‘How about this then?’ She did a thing he liked even more, that he could just bear.
‘Better.’
‘This?’ She moved her mouth down to do the thing he liked so much it almost killed him.
‘Best,’ he moaned, and took her long hair in his hand and pulled her head gently up to look at him. ‘One last thing. Your friend, Peter Werther. He was right. The Chaga has known us for a very long time. In the sample we managed to get out from the Rutshuru package, we found human genes. Or rather, proto-human genes. They differ from ours in a couple of small but significant chromosomes. We’ve done geneline analyses and generational backtracking and we think that we have the genes of Australopithecus, an ancestor of homo sapiens that lived and died on the plains of east Africa four to four-and-a-half million years ago.’
‘Heeeere’s Lucy!’ Gaby said, laying her head on his belly.
‘Heeeeere’s Gaby,’ Shepard said, and moved her head back to the place where it pleased him so much.
~ * ~
36
The plane took them away and there were too many chairs at the table and too few pairs of shorts in the washing machine and the rear seat-belts in the Mahindra were too neat and too tight and too unused in their housings. He was disconsolate. He had warned her he would be like that, but it did not make it any better for either of them. She was disconsolate too. They had been the best days. Snorkelling on the reef. Fighting over the last chapatti at dinner. Football on the white coral strand at sunset. Haggling for dreadful antiques in the Mombasa markets. Learning the tricks and secrets of tropical fruit. To the Mara. To the SkyNet offices, where Gaby sensed there was something too welcoming and smiling in the faces behind the desks. Especially the women’s. Gaby had not brought Shepard and his children as trophies of sexual victory, she was not aware of having fought a war of conquest, but she imagined the whispers running around behind her back like vermin. To the Elephant Bar, on the final night, where Oksana and all the Siberians who could not get drunk stood the boys on a table, drank toasts to them and carried them round the bar on their shoulders, singing ‘Consider Yourself’ from Oliver. The Siberians who could not get drunk were very into musicals.
And then they were gone and nothing was good. Gaby and Shepard bickered in Shepard’s ugly, under-lived-in apartment like two cats sharing a food bowl, until he went to Zaire to try to salvage the Goma debacle and she went to Tom M’boya Street to find that the whispers had mated and bred looks, and mutters, and little gatherings that always broke up when she walked past. There were snide post-it notes stuck to her videophone; she would return from the toilet to find crude animations of h
er and Shepard fucking on her terminal screen. No one admitted to these crimes when she stood and accused the room. The women barely acknowledged her, even her first ally Ute Bonhorst, and most of the men regarded her with polite distaste, like a leper in a candy shop. The Africans treated her as they always had, Jake Aarons was as comradely and at the same time distant as ever, and T.P. Costello held himself above office pettiness. Abigail Santini went out of her way to be friendly. Identifying the source of the infection, Gaby prepared her revenge.
She knew she would find them all at the particular table in the Thorn Tree: T.P., Jake, Mohammed Siriye from Editorial, Abigail. There had to be witnesses. Gaby got a drink from the bar and joined them on the patio. Nods. Greetings.
‘Isn’t that your ex-house-mate over by the jukebox?’ Abigail Santini asked. ‘That Somali woman?’
‘Why, so it is,’ Gaby said. She waved. Miriam Sondhai waved back, feigning surprise.
