was a zone unlike any they had yet seen. The microlyte flew above a terrain of ribs and spars and buttresses. Grasping at similes, Gaby thought of the intricate girder-work of the new architecture, or again, microscope photographs of the structure of human bones. Even analogy could not describe this Chaga: it was like
The cells between the spars and piers were filled with bubbles, some an indistinguishable froth, others large enough to have swallowed the microlyte. Their skins strained painfully against the rib-work. Bubbles were white, skeleton was blue. A Wedgwood landscape. They were flying over an enormous Willow Pattern plate.
This was one of those things you see only because you are looking for an instant in the right direction. She saw a dirty white bubble down to her right swell and split. The ripped skin wrinkled back and released a puff of dusty vapour like the smoke of mushroom spores in dry autumns. Things moved in the dust that looked like spindly insect-octopi clinging to silver balloons. They chilled her in a way that the alien landscapes unfolding before her had not. These incomprehensible landscapes were their place. They knew no other. Gaby McAslan was the alien here. Then the wind from off the mountain carried them away. Outcrops of straight-boled trees with domed tops appeared in gaps in the lattice where bubbles had burst and seeded. As the microlyte flew on, the stands of trees joined together into the now-familiar chaos-patterned forest canopy. A few minutes flight ahead a wall of pseudo- coral lifted above the canopy of domes. Its top was hidden by the raft of clouds that clung to the mountain. They were on the slopes of Kilimanjaro now.
After long silence, Shepard’s voice whispering in Gaby’s earphones was a shock.
‘That’s the Citadel. We think it’s where your friend Peter Werther was kept.’
‘And beyond the Citadel?’
‘Beyond the Citadel we cannot go. This thing doesn’t have the ceiling.’
The microlyte banked across the face of the wall of tubes and pipes and fans. I’m glad the microlyte doesn’t have the altitude to penetrate those clouds, Gaby thought. They are the Cloud of Unknowing that hides God who, like the Chaga, is beyond the power of language to describe. I’m glad that the aliens – if they exist in any form we can recognize – remain hidden in their fortress from the cameras of humans.
She remembered an old sci-fi movie from her father’s video library. At the climax, the huge luminous starship of the aliens had floated in across the mountain to meet humanity’s representatives. It had touched the earth, and opened its doors. In a glow of light, the aliens had come out. And it had killed the movie. Run a spear into the side of the sense of wonder and let out gasoline and Diet Coke. There had been wee ones with oval eyes and no noses, like aliens in abduction magazines, that ran around twittering. Then there was a big long spindly one with arms and legs about eight feet long. He had to bend to get under the door. Gaby McAslan had thought that was most pathetic. They negate gravity, cross entire galaxies in city-sized starships filled with light, and they can’t design a door that opens wide enough.
Show us miracles and wonders, but not the little man behind the curtain pulling the levers and shouting into the microphone. If they ever penetrate the mystery up there, I hope there is another behind it, Gaby thought. And another beyond that, and beyond that, so that we never dispel the Cloud of Unknowing.
Shepard had set a different course back to Kenya, one that took them close to a ChagaWatch balloon, many miles lost beyond terminum. Shaggy lilac moss had colonized the bag so that it looked like some imaginary hairy air-monster. The ground cable was crusted with growths like paper wasps’ nests, though far larger than any wasp Gaby had ever fled from. As Shepard banked the microlyte around the blimp, Gaby noticed flickering activity around the hexagonal cell mouths. What ever they were, they shone with the iridescence of humming birds, but moved with the mechanical buzzing dart of insects.
‘Good to see Ol’ Faithful’s still with us,’ Shepard said. ‘But I don’t think she’ll last much longer. The cable goes and they drift away into the Chaga.’
‘How old is it?’ The microlyte went round again.
‘About three years. We haven’t had a picture out of her in fourteen months, though the caesium batteries are still putting out current. Biggest ecological armageddon since the end of the dinosaurs, but mention radioactivity and it’s mass pants-pissing among the environmentalists.’
They swooped away from the lost outpost of the human world. Gaby could make out the brown shore of Africa like a line of islands on the horizon of a dark ocean. Shepard opened up the engine and headed for home.
24
She briefed Shepard on last things in the Mahindra jeep out to the landing field. He would let her know when anything happened with William? Yes. He would corroborate her story if her banks and credit card companies got sniffy about replacing her plastic? Yes. He would write a report for her insurance company? Yes, if she thought it would do any good. He would back her up if the shit hit the fan with T.P.? Yes. He was sure UNECTA would swing behind her and not leave her
‘I think you can be pretty sure of that,’ he said as the Mahindra hit a rut and bounced all four wheels in the air. ‘In fact, I think I could give you my personal guarantee on it. You see…’
‘This is going to be an off-the-record, isn’t it? The gazelle, mind the fucking gazelle!’
He minded the fucking gazelle.
‘Off the record, I may not be at Tsavo West much longer.’
Her heart lurched. It was nothing to do with Shepard’s driving.
‘UNECTA are reorganizing their research staff. In the shuffling they’ve found they need a Peripatetic Executive Director. Superman without the blue pantyhose, flying hither and yon, trouble-shooting for UNECTA wherever there’s trouble that needs to be shot. It’s based at Kenyatta Centre, but it’s essentially a field job. It’s what I want, to be in it, not perched up in that glass penthouse with a desk and twenty tons of paper between me and what’s out there. It’s the sharp edge of Chaga research, boldly going where no one has gone before.’
‘When’s the selection panel?’
‘A week ago. Modesty should preclude, but I’m the only serious contender. Conrad Laurens, the bouncing Belgian, is the only one more highly qualified, and he can count on European Union backing, but there’s a lot of anti-Francophone feeling in the General Council at the moment, and at two hundred twenty pounds, he’s going to have trouble fitting into the phone box, let alone leaping out in his Captain UNECTA outfit to save the world. So, do you think you can put up with seeing a bit more of me around?’
When the gods want to destroy you, they answer your prayers.
They drove past work teams armed with chainsaws, felling the acacias that stood in the path of Tsavo West’s juggernaut retreat. The fellers pushed up their plastic visors and waved to the speeding Mahindra. A white Antonov stood on the shaved strip, feeding from a tanker truck.
‘Shepard,’ Gaby moaned in her five-year-old-with-dental-appointment voice. ‘Don’t send me back, I don’t want to go, don’t make me go.’
He went to file her travel authorizations in the flight centre. She seemed to be the only passenger.
‘Can I see you again?’ she asked plaintively at the foot of the tail ramp. ‘I mean officially, not serendipitously. Like, um, you know, a date?’
Shepard looked momentarily perplexed. He is going to shrug, Gaby thought. I could not bear it if he shrugs. When they shrug, it means they are saying a thing to please you, not because they want to.
‘Sure. I’d like to, very much. I’ll be in touch.’ He did not shrug. ‘At the very least, I owe you that interview I promised back in Kajiado.’ The wing root engines powered up, first left, then right. ‘Don’t forget this.’ He handed her a transparent zip-lock bag containing what the Chaga had left of her possessions. They consisted of a sleeveless denim top without buttons, a Gossard wonderbra, a pair of gold earrings, a silver Claddagh ring, a steel Parker ball-pen, a packet of Camels and a set of car keys. ‘Or this.’
He handed her another zip-lock bag. This one contained the stained, dog-eared remains of a notebook bound in Liberty print. Gaby lifted the bag gingerly by the corner, suspicious of contamination. Then she realized what she was seeing.
