“Everything has to be isolated.” Mr. Shepard said.
“Is that because even out here, it will start to attack and grow?” I asked.
“You got it.”
“But I heard it doesn’t attack people or animals,” I said.
“Where did you hear that?” this man Shepard asked.
“My father told me,” I said mildly.
We went on down to Terrestrial Cartography, which was video-pictures the size of a wall of the world seen looking down from satellites. It is a view that is familiar to everyone of our years, though there were people of my parents’ generation who laughed when they heard that the world is a ball, with no string to hold it up. I looked for a long time-it is the one thing that does not pale for looking-before I saw that the face of the world was scarred, like a Giriama woman’s. Beneath the clouds, South America and South Asia and mother Africa were spotted with dots of lighter color than the brown-green land. Some were large, some were specks, all were precise circles. One, on the eastern side of Africa, identified this disease of continents to me. Chagas. For the first time I understood that this was not a Kenyan thing, not even an African thing, but a whole world thing.
“They are all in the south,” I said. “There is not one in the north.”
“None of the biological packages have seeded in the northern hemisphere. This is what makes us believe that there are limits to the Chaga. That it won’t cover our whole world, pole to pole. That it might confine itself only to the southern hemisphere.”
“Why do you think that?”
“No reason at all.”
“You just hope.”
“Yeah. We hope.”
“Mr. Shepard,” I said. “Why should the Chaga take away our lands here in the south and leave you rich people in the north untouched? It does not seem fair.”
“The universe is not fair, kid. Which you probably know better than me.”
We went down then to Stellar Cartography, another dark room, with walls full of stars. They formed a belt around the middle of the room, in places so dense that individual stars blurred into masses of solid white.
“This is the Silver River,” I said. I had seen this on Grace’s family’s television, which they had taken with them.
“Silver river. It is that. Good name.”
“Where are we?” I asked.
Shepard went over to the wall near the door and touched a small star down near his waist. It had a red circle around it. Otherwise I do not think even he could have picked it out of all the other small white stars. I did not like it that our sun was so small and common. I asked, “And where are they from?”
The UNECTA man drew a line with his finger along the wall. He walked down one side of the room, halfway along the other, before he stopped. His finger stopped in a swirl of rainbow colors, like a flame.
“Rho Ophiuchi. It’s just a name, it doesn’t matter. What’s important is that it’s a long long way from us…so far it takes light-and that’s as fast as anything can go-eight hundred years to get there, and it’s not a planet, or even a star. It’s what we call a nebula, a huge cloud of glowing gas.”
“How can people live in a cloud?” I asked. “Are they angels?”
The man laughed at that.
“Not people,” he said. “Not angels either. Machines. But not like you or I think of machines. Machines more like living things, and very very much smaller. Smaller even than the smallest cell in your body.
Machines the size of chains of atoms, that can move other atoms around and so build copies of themselves, or copies of anything else they want. And we think those gas clouds are trillions upon trillions of those tiny, living machines.”
“Not plants and animals,” I said.
“Not plants and animals, no.”
“I have not heard this theory before.” It was huge and thrilling, but like the sun, it hurt if you looked at it too closely. I looked again at the swirl of color, colored like the Chaga scars on Earth’s face, and back at the little dot by the door that was my light and heat. Compared to the rest of the room, they both looked very small. “Why should things like this, from so far away, want to come to my Kenya?”
“That’s indeed the question.”
That was all of the science that the UNECTA man was allowed to show us, so he took us down through the areas where people lived and ate and slept, where they watched television and films and drank alcohol and coffee, the places where they exercised, which they liked to do a lot, in immodest costumes.
The corridors were full of them, immature and loosely put together, like leggy puppies.
“This place stinks of wazungu,” Little Egg said, not thinking that maybe this m’zungu knew more Swahili than the other one. Mr. Shepard smiled.
“Mr. Shepard,” I said. “You still haven’t answered my question.”
He looked puzzled a moment, then remembered.
“Solutions. Oh yes. Well, what do you think?”
Several questions came into my head but none as good, or important to me, as the one I did ask.
“I suppose the only question that matters, really, is can people live in the Chaga?”
Shepard pushed open a door and we were on a metal platform just above one of the big track sets.
“That, my friend, is the one question we aren’t even allowed to consider,” Shepard said as he escorted us onto a staircase.
The tour was over. We had seen the Chaga. We had seen our world and our future and our place among the stars; things too big for country church children, but which even they must consider, for unlike most of the wazungu here, they would have to find answers.
Down on the red dirt with the diesel stink and roar of chain-saws, we thanked Dr. Shepard. He seemed touched. He was clearly a person of power in this place. A word, and there was a UNECTA Landcruiser to take us home. We were so filled up with what we had seen that we did not think to tell the driver to let us off at the next village down so we could walk. Instead we went landcruising right up the main road, past Haran’s shop and the Peugeot Service Station and all the Men Who Read Newspapers under the trees.
Then we faced my mother and father. It was bad. My father took me into his study. I stood. He sat. He took his Kalenjin Bible, that the Bishop gave him on his ordination so that he might always have God’s word in his own tongue, and set it on the desk between himself and me. He told me that I had deceived my mother and him, that I had led Little Egg astray, that I had lied, that I had stolen, not God’s money, for God had no need of money, but the money that people I saw every day, people I sang and prayed next to every Sunday, gave in their faith. He said all this in a very straightforward, very calm way, without ever raising his voice. I wanted to tell him all the things I said seen, offer them in trade, yes, I have cheated, I have lied, I have stolen from the Christians of Gichichi, but I have learned. I have seen. I have seen our sun lost among a million other suns. I have seen this world, that God is supposed to have made most special of all worlds, so small it cannot even be seen. I have seen men, that God is supposed to have loved so much that he died for their evils, try to understand living machines, each smaller than the smallest living thing, but together, so huge it takes light years to cross their community. I know how different things are from what we believe, I wanted to say, but I said nothing, for my father did an unbelievable thing. He stood up. Without sign or word or any display of strength, he hit me across the face. I fell to the ground, more from the unexpectedness than the hurt. Then he did another unbelievable thing. He sat down. He put his head in his hand. He began to cry. Now I was very scared, and I ran to my mother.
“He is a frightened man,” she said. “Frightened men often strike out at the thing they fear.”
“He has his church, he has his collar, he has his Bible, what can frighten him?”
“You,” she said. This answer was as stunning as my father hitting me. My mother asked me if I remembered the time, after the argument outside the church, when my father had disappeared on the red Yamaha for a week. I said I did, yes.
“He went down south, to Nairobi, and beyond. He went to look at the thing he feared, and he saw that, with all his faith, he could not beat the Chaga.”
My father stayed in his study a long time. Then he came to me and went down on his knees and asked me to forgive him. It was a Biblical principle, he said. Do not let the sun go down on your anger. But though Bible
