walk spoiled. Except at Tsavo West it’s a good abseil spoiled. Which they do as well, after climb-racing each other up the sides of Tractor Two. You can watch them from the rooftop hot tubs. Presumably while taking a jot or two of home-grown weed.
The good ship Tsavo, and all who sail upon her. The ironic thing is that her Captain, the good Dr Shepard, seems quaintly out of place in all this. All around him things are doing, becoming, while he simply is. That’s all. He is. Separate, yet without him, none of this would be. The still centre from which all energy emanates.
He’s dinnering me tonight; tomorrow I am promised a treat. Something unforgettable. Please, Shepard! I’m too old for all that not being able to sleep at night and finding my food doesn’t taste right and I’m not hungry anyway and my mind wandering to visions of his face and discovering whole irreplaceable chunks of my day have vanished. I don’t want to let myself fall in love again, I’ve outgrown that, really, God, I don’t want to write him love letters and knit him sweaters and all that stuff in songs because it makes you feel like for a few moments in your whole life you are the most alive thing on this little blue planet.
Oh God. He’s here. Already?
23
When she saw the treat in the morning, Gaby McAslan said, ‘No way, Shepard. You are not getting me up in that thing. Never.’
The big two-seater was parked off the main strip in front of the portable cabin that was Tsavo West’s air- traffic control centre. The microlyte was a delicate, beautiful insect of spars and wires, spreading its iridescent solar wing to soak in the savannah sun.
‘You deserve to see the Chaga as it ought to be seen,’ Shepard said. ‘With the eyes of God.’ He jumped into the rear seat and fastened the helmet. ‘Once-only offer, never to be repeated.’
‘All right, all right,’ Gaby shouted. Better death than disgrace before Shepard. ‘I’m coming.’
The propeller became a silver blur behind Shepard as Gaby wiggled into the cockpit, fitted safety harness and helmet.
‘How long have you been flying?’ she asked as the microlyte rolled on to the main strip.
‘Since yesterday,’ Shepard said. The engine hum became an irate hornet drone. ‘Old joke. I’ve had my licence two years. Honest. You’re safe with me.’
Yes, but not too safe, Gaby thought.
The little aircraft bounced over the rough airstrip and quite unexpectedly was airborne.
‘Oh shit,’ Gaby moaned as she saw directly in front of her a few centimetres of green and black GRP fuselage and a lot of bright morning sky. Shepard took the microlyte up to a hundred metres.
‘Elephant!’ he said in Gaby’s ear-phone. Twelve of them, moving out of heavy scrub: three bulls with their attendant females and calves, dusted with the red earth of the Serengeti plain. The microlyte’s solar-powered engine was so silent their over-pass did not even disturb the white ox-peckers from the elephants’ backs.
‘Chaga’s the best thing ever happened to them,’ he said, circling for a better look. ‘Poachers won’t come within twenty miles of terminum. Elephant and rhino numbers have been increasing steadily since the Kilimanjaro Event. Our Away Teams have even found family groups as deep as five miles beyond terminum, on the edge of the Great Wall formation. Paul Orzabal up at Ol Tukai started a study of terrestrial species adapting to the Chaga, but it got dismantled along with the rest of the station.’
They passed over Tsavo West. People in the roof gardens waved. Sunlight glittered from the hot tubs. A Tai Chi class was practising on the Tractor One landing platform.
‘What’s this about dismantling Ol Tukai?’ Gaby asked.
‘They need a station to monitor the Nyandarua Event but the budget won’t run to a new base, so they’re airlifting what’s airliftable and taking the tractor units north by road, going cross country along the line of the Ngong hills to avoid Nairobi. Tinga-Tinga and Moshi are all being relocated to one hundred and twenty degrees of separation. We began course corrections last night.’
The green and black microlyte crossed terminum. Eddies of warm air spun out from the hidden heart of the Chaga buffeted the wing. Shepard took them down. Gaby gripped the cockpit coaming, telling herself she was too enthralled to be terrified. The fractal tessellations of the mosaic-cover bubbled into reefs of pseudo-coral and the open white fingers of the hand-trees. The Great Wall rose sheer before them.
‘Shepard!’ Gaby shrieked as the microlyte bounced on a rising thermal and hopped over the edge of the Great Wall in a single bound. ‘You bastard, don’t you ever scare me like that again.’
Shepard chuckled in the way that men do to themselves when they have done something they think impresses a woman.
‘There’s always an updraft along the edge of the Great Wall,’ he said. ‘You can rely on it. All kind of strange and useful vortices above the Chaga.’
‘Strange vortices killed Denys Finch-Hatton at Voi,’ Gaby said.
‘Voi’s notorious for them. Ask any UNECTA pilot.’
They flew on toward Kilimanjaro over a plateau of dark crimson hexagonal tiles the width of the microlyte’s solar wing. Gaby glanced over her shoulder, past Shepard smiling behind his pilot’s shades, but it was not the reassurance of his face she was seeking. She could not see the comforting, man-made cubes of Tsavo West. She could not see anything of the human world, but a horizon of tarnished gold.
The roof of the Great Wall broke up into chaotic terrain of land-reefs and pseudo-corals, piled hundreds of feet high on top of each other, spilling like melted ice-cream; strawberry pink, chocolate, honeycomb-pistachio- pina-colada. From this they passed abruptly into a zone where the vegetation was translucent and formed a roof of glittering bubbles. Dark shadows hinted at massive formations far below. The line of transition was exact, as if a circle had been inscribed with compasses on the Chaga.
‘The Loolturesh Discontinuity,’ Shepard said. ‘It’s about five miles wide and goes all the way around the mountain.’
‘What is it?’ Gaby asked.
‘We don’t know. It’s on the edge of our Away Teams’ range. But it’s expanding outward with the rest of the Chaga. Fifty metres every day.’
The outer edge of the discontinuity was as sharply defined as its inner. The land on the far side was a many-coloured forest canopy; like flying over a Persian carpet, Gaby thought. A very old and moth-eaten carpet, riddled with holes which permitted intriguing glimpses of another carpet-canopy beneath. Analogy, she thought. Our languages do not have the names for what these things are, so we are forced to speak of them in terms of what they seem. The unrolling magic carpet was lifted up and torn in many places by conical mounds pushing through from beneath. Gaby thought of the Devil’s Tower, or the inselberg rocks of the sub-Kalahari. The scale and suddenness was about right, but these up-swellings were dark-red, striped with burnt orange meanderings like dead Martian watercourses. Shepard banked around the nearest mound. Light glittered at the summit: a single crystal protruded from the peeled-back Chaga-flesh. The crystal was perfectly transparent and the size of a Unit at Tsavo West.
‘They’re an emerging feature,’ Shepard said. ‘Within the last six months. Some taxonomist at Ol Tukai christened them Crystal Monoliths and unfortunately the name’s stuck. And before you ask, no, we have absolutely no idea what they are or do.’
‘Shepard.’
‘Yes?’
‘Shepard, don’t talk. You don’t have to talk. I don’t have to know.’
Gaby did not want to hear voices speaking names. Names cut this precious thing of hers into pieces and parts and functions and hypotheses. While it was one unspoken thing it was the undivided mystery that had drawn her from the summer night on the Point to this front seat in a UNECTA microlyte. Dismembered by names, the mystery bled out of it.
To the sound of the electric engine and the wind over the wires, they crossed from the land of the Crystal Monoliths into a land of knife-edged ridges standing above the forest roof that meandered crazily, twining around each other like mating snakes until they fused in a knot of arretes and canyons. On the far side of this escarpment
