The second time she told him there was something special she wanted to try. He grinned in the lazy, contented hunting-cat way of sated men who still have an appetite for more. In the tent was plenty of rope. Gaby offered a prayer to the totemic spirits of Oksana Telyanina as she quickly tied Shepard to the fly-sheet pegs. He laughed a lot despite the hardness of the ground.
‘You won’t be doing that in a minute, laddie,’ Gaby said, swinging herself on top of him and pushing her ginger pubes against his chin. Ten minutes later he was making the horrible loud cat noises. Ten minutes after that he was begging. Ten minutes after that he was in an altered state of consciousness, eyes fixed on the ridge pole, every muscle taut as piano wire. Ten minutes after that Gaby had mercy and let him come. Exhausted, elated, aching, she kissed him on the nipples and curled up beside him, nestling into the warmth and the hardness and smell and comfortable man-ness of him. Nestled there, she fell asleep. She woke in the pre-dawn dark, remembering with horror that Shepard was still tied up.
He was too stiff and sore to take the Mahindra out on the dawn safari. The warden who drove smiled a lot. So did his colleagues as they served the steak and champagne breakfast. Before dinner that evening, Shepard took Gaby out far in the Mahindra.
‘Something special I want you to see,’ he said.
The cool had driven the haze and dust back into the earth and in the space between the day and the things that hunt by night, it unfolded around Gaby. Shepard steered the Mahindra along a wildebeest track older than any of the ways of humans. The migration had been following it for a hundred thousand years. Headlights caught eyes out in the gloaming; stragglers on the primeval way west to the greening plains of the Mara. Gaby had never seen a sun so huge, resting on the edge of the world. Shepard stopped the car in the middle of the great plain.
‘Watch and wait,’ he said.
The twilight deepened into indigo. Summer stars appeared over the plains of Africa in the dark east.
‘Did you ever go out at night and look up at the stars and see them very small and close, little dots of light?’ Gaby whispered, echoing Shepard’s posture. ‘And then your perceptions turned inside out and you realized that they were unimaginably huge and distant and it was you who was very small and insignificant, and knowing that was like a sacred thing, that you were tiny, but alive and they might be huge and magnificent, but they were dead and because of that you were infinitely greater and more important than they could ever be?’
‘Where I come from the sky is like the land; big, exhilarating, endless,’ Shepard said softly. In winter, on nights when the wind that comes down from Canada is so cold and dry it freezes the breath in your lungs, the constellations glitter like ice. On nights like that you can fall into the sky, and keep falling for ever between all those ice-cold, frozen stars.’
‘That’s what I can’t forgive the BDO for,’ Gaby said. ‘It takes the stars away from us. They aren’t distant and numinous, but close, living, intelligent. I don’t like the idea of someone else being in our sky, making us small.’
‘See over there?’ Shepard pointed. ‘Just to the left of Antares. About two degrees.’
‘Ophiuchus?’
‘You know your way around the sky. That’s where they come from. Came down the UNECTA hotline yesterday morning. The gas clouds in Rho Ophiuchi, out on the edge of the Scorpius loop. Since we floated the hypothesis that the Chaga-makers may have evolved in space, the orbital telescopes have been analysing the spectra of deep-space molecular clouds. All the raw material for life is out there; hydrocarbons, amino acids, RNA. It was from deep-space clouds that the first buckyballs were deduced. We’ve been getting spectra of complex fullerenes from Rho Ophiuchi that are as near as dammit the same as
‘Peter Werther told me that this is not the first time we’ve been in contact with them,’ Gaby said. ‘First contact was at the very dawn of humanity, out on these plains about three, four million years ago.’
‘They could be all through the Sagittarius arm in that time. God knows how long they have been travelling, how old they are, where they originate from.’
A line of deep red clung to the western horizon under a front of purple cloud. The silence was immense.
‘Shepard,’ Gaby whispered. ‘You’re scaring me.’
‘I’m scaring myself,’ Shepard said. ‘You’re right. The stars aren’t ours any more. They never were. Something got there before us, before we even existed.’
‘I suppose we could hold hands and whistle
She saw Shepard’s face crease to laugh, then he suddenly pressed a forefinger to her lips.
‘Shh. They’re here. Look.’
They came out of the darkness beneath the shade trees, the big lioness first, head held high, nostrils flared, mouth open, tasting the night. Then came two younger females, moving wide to cover the queen’s flanks. Behind them came the cubs. There were nine of them in two litters; some were noticeably larger and more capable than others. They followed the chief lioness in a loose Indian file, foraging two or three steps out of line to sniff a thorn bush or wildebeest turd. An old female with sagging jowls and loins brought up the rear.
The pride passed within ten feet of the front of the Mahindra. One of the cubs sat down, stuck its rear leg in the air and licked its crotch. The matriarch looked at the glowing horizon and the 4x4 with its spellbound passengers and moved on. The cubs followed. The lions vanished into the great darkness.
‘The rangers have been watching them,’ Shepard said. ‘They told me where to find them. They’ve lost two, one to hyenas, one that got pushed off the teat. But I think they’ll make it now.’
‘Shepard,’ Gaby McAslan said. ‘Thank you. That was a real privilege.’
‘Wasn’t it?’ Shepard said. He started the car and drove back along the ancient wildebeest track beneath the huge bright stars of the southern hemisphere.
‘Tell me about your children,’ Gaby asked. ‘Your cubs.’
Their names were Fraser and Aaron. Fraser was thirteen, Aaron just turned eleven. Fraser was the one graced with charisma. The world would always come to his fingertips without him ever having to reach out to it. Aaron would have to work hard for everything he wanted, but in spite of that, or maybe because of it, Aaron was the one whose name the world would know. Fraser would make hearts, break hearts and be happy. Aaron’s happiness would always be bought, and so more highly valued. Facing Gaby’s jealousy of others who had a deeper and prior demand on him, from a life and relationship she could neither share nor erase, Shepard said that the boys had been the only good thing to have come out of his marriage.
‘We marry young,’ he said, ‘the people of the plains states. The winter people. Something deep in the psyche, a need for someone to shelter you from the big sky, a pair of nice warm feet to share your bed. She met me at a skate meet. I was in my soph year at Iowa State, majoring in biochemistry with minor biophysics. And speed-skating. She had sass: she came right up to me, congratulated me on my win and said I had the cutest thighs she’d ever seen. Also, I had the most visible underwear line she’d ever seen. Also, she’d been a fetishist for guys in tights ever since Christopher Reeve made her believe a man really could fly.
‘We got married next spring. It was too soon, we were too young. But how do you know that when you’re only twenty? You’re not even sure what you are, let alone what you want. But the world forces us to take all the big decisions before we have the wisdom to make them right. Education, career, relationships, what you are to do with the rest of your life: half your life’s big decisions are made before they allow you to do as trivial a thing as vote. You can raise a family but they won’t allow you to buy a drink in a bar.
‘We got married in the hot flush, wet-dream, can’t eat, tear-each-other’s-clothes-off stage of love. We never imagined it would change; when it did, we thought it was dying. That’s when we decided to have Fraser. Rather, that’s when Carling decided to have Fraser. No, that’s mean. We did a good thing for a bad reason, and of course it didn’t work out the way we’d planned, so we screwed up tighter inside ourselves, scared that all that was holding us together was the kid. We had just moved to UCSB to begin my PhD when Aaron was born. Carling had got bored with playing great earth-muffin by then and found a job in an architect’s office. All the money went straight into child care, but it was away from barf and
