Chaga

Cars were tailed twenty back at the airport entrance while blue-helmets checked accreditations. A white soldier with his head shaved within a millimetre of the bone waved the SkyNet Landcruiser through. Rain fell in strict diagonals through the sodium floods. Staff in UN white with clipboards ran around trying to find the owners of the vehicles that had been abandoned at the edge of the taxiways. CBS. STAR. Tass. UPI. Those were the names on the 4x4s. Jake drove along the perimeter road until he saw SkyNet logos. A blue beret tried to move him on.

‘Fuck off,’ he said under the thunder of a taxiing jet, smiling sweetly.

All of SkyNet East Africa were gathered around the open tailgate of T.P.’s Landcruiser from where he tried to direct strategy. Gaby nodded to Tembo, fastening the velcro seal of his waterproof camera cover. Faraway, who could see over any crowd, waved back. Abigail Santini caught Gaby’s eye and smiled politically. Antonovs passed slowly, throwing up swathes of sound and spray from their Coanda Effect engines. Gaby had never heard anything so loud.

‘Right, we’re all here,’ T.P. bellowed. ‘Jake, with me and the camera crew. Everyone else, you know what you’re doing. When we get down, there’ll be transport to meet us. For Christ’s sake don’t get split up. What’ll you do?’

The ritual reply was lost in the scream of a big Tupolev lifting off into the rain. Women in wet combats and blue berets were already shepherding the non-Anglophone correspondents and their camera teams to a waiting Antonov. Turbofans powered up. Gaby scraped wet hair out of her eyes.

‘T.P.! What about me?’

He could not have looked more confused had his car spoken to him.

‘Jesus. Gaby. Yes. Important job for you to do. As well as the Tolkien fly-by, there’s a press conference been called down in Kajiado regional H.Q. Jake was scheduled to cover it, but with this blowing up, well, it’ll have to be an on-liner. You and Ute take a car and cover it for me, will you? The office will patch me through to Nyeri if it’s anything cosmos-shaking. I’m relying on you, Gaby. What am I doing?’

Abigail Santini was beckoning from the passenger door of the airplane. Both engines were up to speed, the pilot was checking flaps and ailerons.

‘You’re not taking me.’

‘Someone has to mind the shop. It’s a big thing I’m trusting you with, Gaby. What is it?’

‘Fuck you, T.P. Costello!’ she shouted but the words were obliterated by a passing aircraft. ‘This is not fair.’

He turned half-way to the plane to wave bye-bye.

‘This is not fucking fair!’

The door closed behind him. The Antonov moved off its stand. There were Cyrillic letters stencilled under the cockpit window. Dignity. Slip-stream blew Gaby’s hair into her face, plastered her wet clothes to her body.

‘You owe me for this, Costello.’

She watched Oksana turn the Antonov on to the main runway. The aircraft went up very quickly, very suddenly, like a high jumper. She watched it climb until its lights were lost in the rain clouds, then went back to the 4x4 and realized she did not have a clue how to get home again.

14

One and a quarter billion kilometres distant, a voice whispered and something woke to life. You could call it an angel and not be far wrong. It was attenuated, diaphanous. It had golden wings. It flew through unending darkness. It had a fragile beauty, but it was strong; it had come far, flown fast. Like the angels of Yahweh, its only thought was to do the bidding of its master. Like them, it was a messenger.

Six years before, the voice had given it a mission and set it on its long, curving course. The voice had spoken again and sent it to sleep. In its sleep it flew on, into the big dark. Now it had come so far that the voice took over an hour to reach it.

NASA space-probe Tolkien awakened and readied itself for its task. Its obedience had not been diminished by its long flight and sleep. Camera booms were deployed, lenses trained on the object of enquiry. Solar wings of crumpled gold foil unfolded, though so far from the sun they could only supplement the nuclear batteries. Thruster pods cleared their throats; experiment packages were readied. Twenty different senses were tuned to the still-invisible target. Tight-beam communication dishes sought the distant bright speck of Earth.

Like an angel, the robot had no curiosity and no will. It was not distracted by the titanic beauty of Saturn. Gaudy rings and the eye-catching opal swirls of gas storms the size of continents could not tempt it from its duty. The Iapetus fly-by must be done right the first time. Celestial mechanics allowed one shot and one only.

It had flown far, it had flown fast, but Events had overtaken it. First the Hyperion Event, for which a new vehicle had been commissioned and tasked six months behind Tolkien. Orbital mechanics had been less friendly to it: the relative positions of the planets off whose gravities it caroomed like a billion dollar eight ball meant it would arrive in the Hyperion Gap two years after Tolkien rounded Saturn and fell into the great dark. It too had been overtaken: the Kilimanjaro Event had eclipsed both space missions. No need to cross the solar system for a ten minute peep at the mysterious and alien. The mysterious and alien was approaching across the plains of Africa and the selvas of South America and the rainforests of the Indonesian archipelago at fifty metres every day.

Ten hours from Iapetus Tolkien commenced long-range mapping. Analysts studied the pictures squeezing from their colour printers, but the black moon held its secrets close. The NASA scientists had waited six years. A few hours more was nothing. You learned patience in space science. There would be better later. Perilune would bring Tolkien within five hundred kilometres of the satellite’s surface at a relative velocity of sixty kilometres per second. Detail began to resolve at T-3600. Back- scatter from Saturn and the light of a sun so distant it was no more than a brilliant star showed the visible surface to have a highly complex, almost fractal structure. At T-2000 the infra-red cameras produced their first heat-maps of the facing hemisphere. As one wit was to comment, the infra-red profile of Iapetus was indistinguishable from that of a pepperoni pizza. Localized hot-spots floated on a sea of semi-liquid crustal matter overlain with a web of cooler unidentified material. Scattered across the temperature-landscape were small, hard, round concentrations of cold. Like black olives.

Whatever the meaning of these structures, Iapetus was a good sixty Kelvins warmer than it should have been.

The high-resolution cameras at T-500 showed new mysteries. The CCD images slid out of image enhancement line by line. The scientists watched. They saw canyons ten kilometres deep filled with liquid that could not possibly remain in that state in an environment like that of Iapetus. They saw obsidian atolls lift ringwalls thousands of metres above the surface of the moon. They saw these atolls bristle with black filaments hundreds of metres long. They saw nets of black tendrils creep laboriously across the granulated black surface. They saw black flowers the size of cities slowly blossom. They saw sheer black surfaces open like wounds and things for which language has no names grow forth. They saw black jellyfish the size of Pacific nation states rise from the hot spots into the wisps of nitrogen atmosphere. They saw slow waves cross oceans of restless black scales. They saw pylons like skyscrapers push from the crusted surface and unfold into sprays of black feathers. They saw the black feathers ripple in a wind that could not exist, and turn toward the distant, unseen sentience of Tolkien. Black. All black.

They could not comprehend it, but they knew what they were seeing. They knew where they had seen this before, but they did not dare say.

At T-0 Tolkien released its surface impact probes. As Bilbo, Frodo and Sam fell toward Iapetus, Tolkien spun on its axis and raked the satellite with a fan of single-shot X-ray lasers. Spectrum analysers read the light from the wounded moon while atmospheric, gravitic and electromagnetic data streamed back from the artillery-shell sized surface probes. Then Tolkien went into occultation behind the moon and the stream of information was