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Beyond the reef, the bottom fell away and the water changed from the pale green of inshore where you could see the shadows of the little coral fish cast on the silt to an ultramarine blue of such transparency that you could look over the rail and imagine the blue-on-blue of the deep water hunters, endlessly seeking, a thousand feet down. The SeaCat passed through the gap in the reef and throttled up. The island dwindled to an edge of coral sand and green palms, then to a line of darkness on the sea, then was lost beneath the horizon. The big catamaran had once ferried holiday-makers between the islands of the Seychelles, but UNECTA had chartered it to service its Indian Ocean bases. Now it ferried the world’s media. There were three hundred reporters with their knightly entourages on the catamaran this bright August morning. The bar had never done such good business.
Team SkyNet was on the rear sun-deck, preparing for a satellite link-up with London.
Faraway miked Gaby up, Tembo tried camera angles: ‘not in direct sunlight, your eyes go dark and viewers will not trust you if they cannot see your eyes.’ Gaby looked at the birds flocking and diving above the churned wakes. The sea is one thing, she thought. Unitary. Whole. It would be morning over that part of the one sea that broke around the Point. Dad would be back from his morning walk, Reb would have the espresso maker bubbling on the Aga. The early satellite news would be on as background to their coffee and Marks and Spencer’s brioche. Paddy would be underneath the table, thumping his tail to every word that ended in a ‘y’ sound. Suddenly, shockingly, Gaby would burst from the screen in their morning, live with her news of incredible things in exotic locations. It is one thing, the sea, and it is a big thing. Bigger than anything you can bring to it. No human care can match its transcendent unity. Why fear, then, when all things come out of and return to the sea?
‘I am patching you in now, Gaby,’ Faraway said. She nodded. The voice of Jonathan Cusack,
East Africa Correspondent, Gaby McAslan. Me! Help me!
Tembo gave her a mark. She brushed hair away from her face. The
For a quarter of a second Gaby thought she was going to throw up live on prime-time.
‘Well, Jonathan, I’m on the press boat to East Seven Five, UNECTA’s permanent floating observation platform at the Foa Mulaku object. We should arrive in just over an hour, about one-thirty our time.
‘So what will be happening when you get out there?’ Jonathan Cusack asked, nine thousand miles away. Gaby pushed her hair from her face again. Faraway grimaced and made a throat-cutting gesture with his thumb.
‘To fill in a little background: Foa Mulaku, or, to give it its proper name, the Maldive Ridge Object, was the fourth biological package. It came to rest about six thousand feet down in the waters of the Equatorial Channel. By the time UNECTA located the site, the package had colonized a nine-kilometre radius of sea bed eighty kilometres to the north-east of the island of Gan. What makes the underwater Chaga forms so very different from the terrestrial manifestations is that once they’ve established themselves, they grow upward rather than outward. Foa Mulaku has taken scientists by surprise by coming to its final emergence state much more quickly than predicted - they were originally talking about mid-November, now it’s certain that it will come out of the sea some time in the next few hours.’
‘Can you give us some idea of what we will be seeing?’ Jonathan Cusack asked. I used to fancy him, Gaby thought. He was my number-one media fantasy figure. Now that satin-and-sabres voice is whispering in my ear.
‘UNECTA have built a fairly detailed sonar model: Foa Mulaku is like a chopped-off cone with its base on the sea floor and its uppermost sections twenty metres beneath the surface. The cone is made up of a number of distinct levels piled on top of each other – imagine a giant wedding cake. Over the past month Foa Mulaku has increased its growth rate to forty metres per day, and we expect the upper structures to break the surface in the next five hours.’
‘We’ll be going back to the Maldives live as the situation develops; in the meantime, Gaby McAslan, thank you.’
She held the smile until Tembo marked her out and the transmission light was extinguished. There was applause and encouraging shouts from the reporters who had ambled out of the bar to watch the baptism of fire. Paul Mulrooney, CNN’s Man in Africa, brought her something with rum and ice cubes in it.
‘Pissed my pants, first live link I did,’ he said. ‘Looked straight into the camera and talked about a cholera epidemic in a Rwandan refugee camp with it running down my leg and over my shoes. Thank God they only see you from the waist up.’
The course display monitors placed around the passenger areas showed that the SeaCat had passed the halfway point and the journalists began to move to the fore deck for their first glimpse of East Seven Five’s gantries. By sea as on land, UNECTA had been forced to buy creatively. A few well-placed bribes had beaten the Indonesian breaking-yard’s offer on the de-commissioned Royal Dutch/Shell exploration rig. The submersibles and remote equipment had been beachcombed from the hundred mile wrecking yard that was the east coast of Scotland after North Sea Oil. Half of East Seven Five’s crew were redundant Aberdonian off-shore men who mingled uncomfortably in the accommodation blocks with the laid-back researchers from Woods Hole Oceanographic Centre.
As the SeaCat moved in to East Seven Five around a Beriev seaplane refuelling from a tanker pontoon, inflatable Gemini craft burst from between the legs of the rig and furiously circled the catamaran.
‘Greenpeace protesters,’ Paul Mulrooney said. ‘I don’t know what they’re blaming UNECTA for, they didn’t invent the thing.’ As the rubber boats made a final circle and dashed toward an ancient Greek ferry with a rainbow painted on its bow that was moored a mile west, he shouted, ‘Go and sail your stupid little boats around Iapetus, or the Rho Ophiuchi gas cloud, if you want someone to protest at.’
R.M. Srivapanda, East Seven Five’s director, was waiting on the pontoon to receive his guests. He was a dark, patient Tamil wearing one of those round-collared suits that look so well on Indians and so poorly on any other race. The left cuff was tucked into a pocket: Gaby recalled from T.P.’s rushed airport briefing that he had lost his lower left arm in a close encounter with a boat propeller while diving off Sri Lanka. All he needed was a white Persian cradled in his one good arm and twenty women in red catsuits with machine guns to be a criminal mastermind from a James Bond movie, hell-bent on world domination from his Indian Ocean base. Except James Bond was waiting up on Level One, in the melee of tripods, satellite dishes and correspondents pouring out of the elevator cages in search of the best locations. He had the smug expression a man would wear if he had license to go anywhere and do anything in the name of UNECTA.
‘You!’ Gaby yelled.
‘Me!’ Shepard agreed. He came to her through the tide of news people. Faraway shouted. He had found a place with an unparalleled view of the Maldive Ridge Object: a crow’s-nest on East Seven Five’s main communications mast. Tembo manoeuvred himself up, connected up his camera and shot background footage. As Faraway let a hand down to pull Gaby up. Shepard said, quickly and quietly, ‘Move in with me. I want to sleep with you, wake up with you, breakfast with you, perform acts of personal hygiene with you.’
‘Jesus, Shepard, you pick your moments,’ Gaby said as she scrambled up the mast.
‘Is that an answer?’ Shepard shouted up. But Gaby was already contemplating the thing in the sea. It required a trick of looking to see it, like the pictures that had been fashionable when Gaby had been in her early teens that looked like so much multi-coloured spaghetti but, if you looked past them, were supposed to magically resolve into 3-D leaping dolphins or dinosaurs. The trick here was like that, of looking not at the surface but beneath the lap and shiver of the water so that the patterns of light and dark and colour and joined together and became a picture.
It is not much like a wedding cake, Gaby thought. It is not much like anything other than what it is, what its makers have designed it to be. If it has makers, if those round white brain-like things just beneath the surface are not natural forms, if those deep fissures and meandering blue ridges are not just accidents of evolution, if those spines down there are not something that once had a meaning and function on some world among the gas veils of