Chaga

automatic weapons with the brutal ease peculiar to African soldiers, as if they were bags of vegetables. Oksana placed her hand affectionately on the fuselage. ‘This is mine. She is not beautiful, but I love her. Do anything, go anywhere for me. Good as any man. Better, maybe. Does not need Serbski Jeb to keep her true to me.’

A Cyrillic word was spray-stencilled under the cockpit windshield.

‘What does it say?’

‘Is her name. Dostoinsuvo. Means “dignity”. Come, I show you something.’ Oksana opened the hatch. Steps unfolded, alerted by her handprint. Gaby followed her up into the cockpit.

Oksana cleared a mail order catalogue for a Californian New Age store from the vacant co-pilot’s seat. Dostoinsuvo’’s flight deck was a shrine to credit card shamanism. Leather sacks like sun-dried scrotums hung from the cockpit window. The hatch glass had been streakily stained with glass paint to portray images of the Ancestral Tree. Thumbnail icons looked down from between the redundant ceiling switches with the beatific indifference peculiar to Orthodox saints. Colour photocopies of mandalas were gunge-tacked to the back of the flight deck door; crystals of various hues and spiritual properties rested in niches in the command board. The bleached skulls of Oksana’s totemic animals were glued along the upper edge of the main console, which had been sprayed with green car paint that was peeling under the partial pressurisation. Tiny chimes glittered and tinkled in the draught from the air-conditioning vents; the virtual reality helmet was adorned with painted reindeer horns.

‘Is like explosion in magic shop, but I love her,’ Oksana said. ‘She takes me high, to the places of the spirits, and collects the power of the high places on her wings so I can bring it back to earth. Do not laugh, Gaby. You do not feel it, you do not have the power in your genes.’

I am not laughing, Gaby thought. It is the most real thing there is. It is the thing that makes you want to do what you want so bad you would die if you could not do it. But you cannot touch it or hold it, for the moment you start to think about what it is, you turn away from the thing that produces it and you kill it. You can only find it when you do not seek it, you can only see it when you look away from it. It is pure being. Dhyana. It dwells in the cockpit of an An72F at twenty thousand feet as comfortably as in the nested fan-folds of information and video in a complex multimedia news overlay, but it will only come as an uninvited guest.

Oksana slipped her hand into the manipulator glove, flexed it in imagined flight and pointed through the window at the aircraft standing opposite Dostoinsuvo. It was unlike any other on Weelson Airfield: long, low, lean, mean, wings swept-back, nose uplifted to the stars. It seemed to stab the night.

Ts beautiful, no? Beautiful bird,’ Oksana said. ‘Tupolev 161. Executive jet variant of old Soviet Blackjack bomber. UNECTA priority transport. After-burning Kuznetzov turbofans: she will do Mach 2.2 at fifteen thousand metres. Swing wing. Take you anywhere in the world. Of course, they will not let Oksana fly this. For men only. Big macho thing. Penis with wings. But some day, some day, Oksana Mikhailovna will be in captain’s chair up there. My ambition, Gaby. See? Both poor unhappy frustrated women. You with Chaga, me with big supersonic dick. But when we are happy, let us not forget this, Gaby. When we have dreams, and men, do not let them come between us, no? Men come, men go, friendship goes on.’ She held out her hands. Moved by the Siberian woman’s honest inarticulacy, Gaby clasped them in her own hands. ‘Any time you want, any time you need, any time, I will be there. When he is gone – for they all go, in the end – you come to me. I will not go.’

They sealed Dostoinsuvo behind them and went back to the Elephant Bar; the Siberians were singing songs from the shows: ‘Thumbelina’, in astonishingly close harmony. They were not drunk yet. They all had little pumps whirring away in their right arms.

13

The rain woke Gaby ten seconds before the PDU on the bedside table paged her, which was ten seconds before Mrs Kivebulaya knocked and entered with a pot of exceptionally strong coffee.

‘You have ten minutes to drink this and get dressed before Jake Aarons gets here,’ she said. ‘I think after last night you might need it.’

Gaby screwed her eyes against the white agony of the bedside light. She felt vertiginous, dehydrated, feverish.

‘What time is it?’

‘Quarter past four.’

Quarter past four? Jake Aarons? Ten minutes?

‘All the news agencies are mobilizing,’ Mrs Kivebulaya said. ‘There is something happening, I do not know what. You have just enough time to drink this, put on a face and get out, my dear.’

The rain was so heavy, Gaby was soaked through in the few yards between hotel porch and SkyNet Landcruiser. It was only when she had fastened her seatbelt and Jake Aarons had driven off that she wondered how Mrs Kivebulaya knew something big was happening before the news companies.

‘You smell like the Tusker brewery,’ Jake Aarons said. He had ad no more warning than Gaby but he was smart, shaved, groomed, professional. Gaby suspected the mental cameras never stopped rolling on his life.

Only the news agencies and the military were abroad in the city this morning. Gaby had never seen so many soldiers. Entire divisions were on the move, rolling in slow, heavy convoys forty, fifty vehicles long through the deserted streets. Military policemen in streaming UN white raincapes held the civilians up at intersections to let the trucks through. They looked oddly insubstantial, like watery white ghosts, seen from the warmth and instrument glow of the Landcruiser. Uhuru Highway was gridlocked with armoured personnel carriers. Something had broken down up by the railway bridge. Jake Aarons smiled at the saturated blue-helmets waving him to standstill with red flashlights and took the 4x4 on to the central reservation. Big all-terrain tyres chewed municipal flowerbeds and lawns to red mud.

‘We’ve got a live one. A biological package. Came down about four hours ago in the Nyandarua National Park.’

‘Jesus, Jake…’

‘They’ve been tracking it for days, seems. Knew exactly where it was coming down, but the bastards back there,’ he nodded in the direction of the Kenyatta Centre, ‘didn’t want the press in on it until they’d secured the area. Of course, nothing moves in this burg but we don’t hear about it, so the moment the wagons started to roll, we got suspicious and they had to come out with it. If they’d told us before the event, that would been the biggest story since the Resurrection, but they’re flying us up there for nothing, so it’s churlish to complain.’

Gaby recalled Oksana’s premonitions and the heady smell of aviation fuel. Jake took the keepie-leftie outside the National Sports Stadium at fifty. Gaby felt the back end begin to aquaplane and grabbed a handhold.

‘It missed Mount Kenya by a hair and came down just west of Treetops. Nyeri’s fucked. That’s why you can’t move for troops. The UN’s mobilizing everything it’s got for a mass evacuation. They’ll never do it, this isn’t rounding up a few thousand Wa-Chagga banana growers into resettlement camps. It’s one of the most densely populated parts of Kenya up there. In the end, why bother? What it comes down to is the big veto power members don’t like the idea of First Contact with aliens being in the hands of what they consider a bunch of bloody savages. When John Alien comes walking out of the Chaga, they want the first human he meets to be a big beautiful blond Aryan US or Russian Marine with a very big gun. Kenyan politicians are getting fed up with being Uncle Tommed and want UNECTA research resources directed toward human interaction with the Chaga. Your Werther piece gave them ammunition – it isn’t an automatic death sentence in there.’

They had left the military machine behind now. The only vehicles on the road were news company 4 x4s, hurtling along the avenue in waves of spray. On either side the townships huddled in the dark beneath the spring rain.

‘Nairobi’s dead,’ Gaby said, sobering up rapidly.

‘It’s only forty miles north of here. How long’s that, three, four years? The Nyandarua Event and the Kilimanjaro Chaga have the city in a pincer.’