All this Tembo captured on his Chaga-proof camera and Gaby talked like she had never talked before; the wonder she felt in the presence of such events, and the fear, and the awe, and all the things the camera could not convey, and the way this thing out of the sea smelled and the huge deep noises that came from far down in its roots in the Equatorial Channel.
The boats started their engines. They moved slowly into the dripping labyrinth of arches and buttresses. The bright water beneath their hulls was brilliant with fish. Foa Mulaku creaked and clicked as it dried in the sun. Emergence had ceased: the thing that lived in the sea had entered a new phase of evolution. The white domes were splitting along their fissures. Objects shaped like tight-balled fists, but the height of two humans, were pushing from the cracks.
‘Hand-trees,’ Shepard prompted. Gaby repeated his words to London. The boats probed deeper into the heart of the alien archipelago. Above them, the white fists opened their fingers one by one. Gaby became aware that hers was the only voice speaking in the dripping, creaking basilica of Foa Mulaku and moderated her tone to a reverential whisper. This was a holy place.
Gordon the helmsman spun the wheel. ‘We’re going in,’ he said. The lead boat had already run up onto the shelving apron of the nearest fissure dome. The UNECTA recording boat followed it.
‘The Chaganauts are just making sure their face plates and respirators are secure before landing,’ Gaby whispered, pleased with her freshly-minted neologism. ‘Just to let you know back in London that if we go ashore I’ll have to put mine up and we’ll lose voice contact. They’re stepping on to the surface now.’
Shepard waved Gordon the helmsman to land.
‘They’re unloading experimental equipment from the boat,’ Gaby said. Tembo was lying across the benches with the camera resting on the prow for stability. ‘As you can see, the UNECTA camera crew has now landed as well. Our own boat is moving in, it looks likely that we’ll be making a landing, and I may be allowed to step onto the surface of Foa Mulaku.’
Now the studio had gone silent.
‘The hand-trees,’ Shepard tapped Gaby on the shoulder. ‘Look.’
Tembo reacted beautifully. He is a hell of a camera-man, Gaby thought. His God has given him a mighty gift.
The white hands were fully open now but that was not what had excited Shepard’s attention. It was that they were all aligned, like pieces of a mosaic, into a wide, shallow bowl pointed into the south-west quadrant of the sky.
‘Look at the angle,’ Shepard whispered into Gaby’s ear through the red and silver stretch hood. ‘I’ll just bet that’s twenty degrees.’
Gaby had set her life by the stars above Ballymacormick Point. She understood immediately.
‘The hand-trees seem to have formed themselves into what looks like a satellite dish,’ she told the studio. ‘As far as I can tell, they’re aimed along the ecliptic; in layman’s terms, that’s the astronomical plane in which the orbits of the planets lie. And we’ve landed. Gordon has run the nose of the boat up on to the shore. I’m holding off putting on my face plate for as long as possible so I can keep talking to you. I’m getting signals from the UNECTA personnel who have just gone ashore to stay where I am, but I’m certain that as soon as they make sure it’s safe, they’ll let me go over.’ And I am going to have a killer line for that moment, Gaby thought. As great as one small step for
Shepard left the main party to examine where the white brain-dome rose from the apron. He had a black 9 on the silver back of his suit. Gaby noted that his thighs did not seem to have lost condition since the photograph on his Arab desk had been taken. He reached a gloved hand to touch the mound. The surface puckered like a face frowning and shot out a polyp of white material. Shepard pulled his hand back. The polyp trembled, creased and folded itself into a hand, the exact double in size and shape of Shepard’s. Video cameras swung to bear. Tembo focused in like a sniper. Shepard cautiously brought his hand to within millimetres of the mimic. He opened his fingers, brought them together. The duplicate copied his movements. He cocked a thumb. The Chaga-thing cocked a thumb. He pressed his palm firmly against the alien palm.
And Gaby screamed and tore at her earphones under her hood as the hiss of the satellite link became a roar of noise and pain and Foa Mulaku thundered at the stars.
31
The moped-cab driver thought it was the funniest thing he had ever seen. Three journalists shouting at each other like deaf old fools. He laughed about it all the way to the Addu Reef Hotel where the foreign scientists had called the conference. When the journalists asked him the fare he spoke quietly so they would have to ask him again and again. The humour was well worth the tip it cost him.
‘Asshole,’ Gaby McAslan said as she entered the crowded foyer and left her bag with the receptionist. Her ears were still ringing. The doctors on East Seven Five had assured her that no permanent damage had been done when Foa Mulaku sent its message skyward, but not even the Sepultura Concert she had sneaked Reb into when she was fifteen, which she had thought was the loudest thing she would hear short of Doomsday, had lingered so long in the inner ear.
The Addu Reef Hotel had been designed to look like an ethnic fisher village. It stood on stilts ankle-deep in the lagoon. Its guestrooms, which the richer and quicker news corporations had monopolized, were clustered in little communities at the ends of boardwalks. Ethnic fisher villages did not come with
UNECTA had taken over the night club to stage its press conference. The staff had arranged the bar seats in a semi-circle and set up a table in front of the DJ’s mixing desk. Most of the seats were already taken. Faraway added a SkyNet logo to the thicket of microphones taped to the conference table. Recognizing him, heads turned to seek out Gaby McAslan and bent together to whisper.
‘Nice angle, Gaby,’ Paul Mulrooney said, brushing past her on his way back from the bar with a glass of something amber.
‘That’s Shepard’s line,’ said a woman with a UPI badge she did not even know. Journalists snickered into their drinks. Gaby found a place in the middle of the back row of seats. Faraway guarded her left flank, Tembo, with the tripod, her right. Still someone managed to bump into her from behind and drop into her lap a crude cartoon of a kneeling man with an enormous penis fucking a crouching woman dog-fashion. The woman had long hair coloured in red ball-pen and a talk bubble coming out of her mouth saying, ‘Gaby McAslan, SkyNet News, with another exclusive.’
Tembo snatched the paper away, rolled it into a ball and put it in his mouth. He focused his camera, chewed and swallowed without comment.
The UNECTA team came in. R.M. Srivapanda, just off the sea-plane from East Seven Five, took the chair. To his right was a very upright African man in a severe black and white suit. Gaby recognized him as Harrison Muthika, Press Secretary from Nairobi. To Srivapanda’s left was an Asian woman who was introduced as Mariko Uchida from UNECT
The press conference opened. Harrison Muthika spoke first.
‘I would like to thank you all for coming this evening. I regret the short notice, but once again, the aliens have taken us by surprise. As you are no doubt aware, at seventeen-oh-eight local time the emergent marine object known as Foa Mulaku emitted a phenomenally powerful radio signal.’
