Chaga

‘So you did. I like your dress. Suits your hair. And your eyes. Can I get you something to drink?’

They moved between clusters of people on nodding terms with Shepard to one of the gingham-covered tables. The waiter straightened immaculately ironed cuffs.

‘I’ll have one of those mint thingies, please.’

While he mixed it, Gaby pretended to be on nodding terms with people she only knew from photographs.

‘So, buckyballs.’

Shepard had a beer. Gaby thought it was very him.

‘What do you want me to tell you about them?’

Anything.

‘Whatever’s new.’

He shook his head, clicked his tongue in disappointment.

‘And you were doing so well.’

‘No, I’m genuinely interested.’ She tried to adopt a posture she hoped said in fullerenes, not you.

‘Well, seeing as you did the best piece from that press conference, I’ll let you into a little secret. We’re re- inventing organic chemistry from the bottom up. We can analyse and map the basic molecular structure of the Chaga, but to describe anything as complex as its symbiotic biology, or even the associations of fullerene-machines that are analogous to terrestrial cells, we’ve got a long hike to go on that. Damn things evolve so quickly they may always stay two jumps ahead of any containment tactics.’

‘That’s what you’re researching? Ways to kill it?’

They passed close to Jake Aarons holding court in the middle of a group of television journalists. He stood head and shoulders above his peers. He saw Gaby, frowned; saw Gaby with Shepard, looked puzzled; worked something out for himself and grinned impishly.

‘I suppose that’s what they ultimately want to do. If it had come down back at home, we would have called out the National Guard, cordoned the thing off, evacuated everyone and as like as not quietly nuked it. Not that that would have done any good, in my opinion. Pax Americana or not, they can’t very well go around nuking other people’s territory, but the military can’t think in any other terms than enemies, invasion, containment and counter-attack. They’ve been trying napalm down in Ecuador, but that’s always been Washington’s back yard. Biggest drop since Vietnam. No effect whatsoever: the stuff’s as near as possible fireproof. You burn maybe a couple of dozen acres, then the rest starts to super-secrete fire retardents, foams and CO₂. It’s back at full climax within a week. This thing thinks.’

‘I take it you don’t subscribe to the military philosophy.’ The Ambassador made his mint juleps mighty strong, or was it the effect of Ozark Mountain bourbon on a sea-level girl at White Highland altitudes?

‘Doesn’t matter a damn whether I agree with it or not. It won’t work.’

‘Is this on the record?’

‘You’re recording?’

Trays of chicken wings passed. Shepard scooped a fistful. Gaby ate greedily from her carmine-nailed fingers and wiped them greasily on her glossy, sheer thighs. These mint juleps were a mighty fine drink at altitude indeed. You saw the glass with those bits of greenery stuck in it like Arab tea and you thought it could not possibly be serious but then you took your first sip and the mint and the sugar and whiskey fused and it was the best damn drink in the universe to sip when you were gatecrashing the social event of the season in a pirate dress you could barely afford with a boss who thought you were the Sad Lost Girl of his golden years and the only real white man in the country eating chicken wings and talking about buckyballs and napalm while the altitude smeared Vaseline over the lens of your life making everything soft-focus and distant so that for a moment you were Scarlett O’Hara on the lawns of Tara and what is he saying? why is he looking at me? does he seriously expect an answer? and woosh! the first salvo of fireworks saved her.

There were gasps. There were oohs. There were screams as the rockets detonated high above the Ambassador’s residence and dropped silver rain. The Ambassador’s children danced and shouted. A second barrage rose, shedding sparkling stars, and a third. A big wump from behind the shrubs provoked more screams as the mortar shot its load half a mile into the Nairobi night. It blew in a deafening multiple orgasm of novas. Car alarms chorused in answer, shocked awake by the pressure-wave. A cascade of red, white and blue fell down the sky.

‘That was a big one!’ Gaby shouted over the din of the lesser lights. ‘I love fireworks, but I hate the noise. When I was a kid my Dad took me to the Christmas fireworks at Belfast City Hall. They shouldn’t have let them off in such a confined space; it was like Sarajevo; rockets shooting all over the place. But beautiful. That’s what I love about them, wonderful and frightening at the same time.’

‘Do you ever think they’re like a life?’ Shepard shouted. Rockets were zipping up on all sides, setting fire to the sky. ‘The long, slow rise, the sudden brilliant, brief explosion into glory, the long fall into darkness.’

‘If you’re going to talk depressing, I’m having another mint thingie.’

‘Are you sure?’

‘Probably not. So, what do they call you?’

‘They call me Shepard.’

‘Nothing else?’

‘Doctor.’

‘They call me Gaby’. Any more of this mint thingie and she would be flying up like one of the Ambassador’s rockets and her head would explode in a star-burst of flying red hair. ‘You know, you could do me an enormous favour.’

‘A journalist’s favour? Can I afford that?’

‘I just need you to check something for me. There’s a diary, belonged to a woman had an affair with a UNECTA man; Dr Peter Langrishe.’

‘I remember him, and her.’

‘It might still be in Ol Tukai, and I really need it to prove something to someone. Could you…’

The big mortar tube boomed and screamed another one skyward. The blast rattled the windows and the beer bottles in their bath of ice. The just-silenced car alarms started up again. Gaby frowned, bent her head to one side, imagining she could hear another noise as the sky rained stars. A sound like a hundred cellular telephones ringing at once.

It was not the effect of altitude and mint thingie. It was a hundred cellular telephones ringing at once. Creeping paralysis seized the hootenanny as partygoers pulled phones out of purses, night bags, inside pockets, robes, sporrans. Shepard put his finger in his ear and nodded to the chirping voice of the phone. Guests were already streaming up the patio steps toward cloakroom and cars.

‘You’ll excuse me if I abandon you in mid-julep,’ he said. ‘There’s a general UNECTA alert in operation. Seems destiny is calling.’

‘What?’ Gaby shouted at his receding back. ‘What’s happening?’

He turned on the bottom step.

‘I shouldn’t be telling you this.’

‘Tell me!’ Gaby screamed among the beer bottles and the julep glasses and the wing bones of chickens. The fireworks fountained upward, dying unheeded.

‘Hyperion’s back.’

18

Gaby reckoned this was the first time the conference room had been full since SkyNet had set up its East Africa station on Tom M’boya Street. Though it was three-thirty in the morning, every section was represented. The coffee maker was on overtime too. It smelled threateningly of overheated beans.

Under the big screen, T.P. Costello finished his third cup and pushed it from him across the table,