from Kibongo will not speak to people from Usarangei; the people of Marangu and Marangu Gate are enemies because of this. Soon, I fear, we will kill each other.’
‘The children,’ Gaby said.
‘We have asked the councils of the towns who oppose us in this to let us take the changed children, but they fear that we are breeding an army of monsters to annihilate them. So we follow the men who leave the children in the forest. If we cannot bribe them, we wait until they have gone and take the baby. But we do not save them all. We cannot save them all. We trust that the Chaga is as kind to them as to all others who have to rely on it for their lives. But it is a hope, nothing more. Of the ones we save, and of our own, there are many that do not survive. They are too deeply changed. You would tell me that they are victims of evolution, Dr Montagnard; that they are variants that do not adapt and are weeded out. I cannot be that sanguine.’
The blimp cloth curtain that hung across the doorway twitched aside. Moran and Sugardaddy drew weapons.
‘You do not need to do that,’ the figure in the door said. It spoke in a woman’s voice, heavily accented with Slavic. ‘We are no danger to you, unless you are of the party that thinks that children are abominations of God.’ A small, sandy-haired white woman dressed in cut-off combat pants and a tattered T-shirt entered the long room. A child clung to her legs; a girl child, white, naked, agonizingly thin. She had the luminous eyes in a filthy face that turn fa vela urchins into angels. The child stared at the alien bodies in the common room and pressed closer to her mother. Flaps of skin were stretched taut between wrists and ankles. Follicles puckered into gooseflesh.
‘You scared Nicole. She came to see why she had to be taken away from her home and came rushing back to me to tell me that a strange woman had pulled a gun on her. You do not need to hurt her, she will not hurt you. Why should you want to hurt her? Because she is different from you? So I have brought her back here for you to see that she is not a monster or a freak or an example of evolution in action or the first generation of the new humanity,’ the Russian woman said. ‘She is just a little girl, and Hubert is just a little boy, and they find themselves in a strange world with new and frightening abilities, and they are trying to find out how it all works and how they can live in it. They do not contemplate the mysteries of the universe or solve the Grand Unified Field equations. They sulk. They fight each other. They have tantrums. They do not like to go to bed, and they spit out their food and will not eat what we have made for them. Just a boy and girl. So, the girl can glide on her wing membranes; so, the boy can link with the thoughts of the Chaga and in his dreams pass his consciousness into animals and birds and the creatures that the forest has made: but they are not offences against God or Allah or the holy church. Nicole will say hello to you, but first you men must put your weapons away, because they are frightening my daughter.’
45
They left Treetops the next morning. Gaby was dazed from lack of sleep and too much wonder. Her sense of disbelief was gorged, like a snake that has swallowed a goat. The progress through the canopy to the rendezvous point with M’zee, Bushbaby and Rose was slow. Jake constantly fell behind and the party would have to wait while someone went back to bring him along. Moran was growing impatient with the delays and halts. The next time it happened, Gaby volunteered to be the one who went back. She found Jake several minutes down the branch, seated in a dip of cable that swept up to anchor points at the base of one of the Crystal Monoliths.
‘I reckon you’ve got ten, fifteen minutes clear before they start to look for us,’ Gaby said.
Jake Aarons smiled his sophisticated Thorn Tree Bar-smile.
‘What will you tell them?’
‘That I never found you.’
He thought about the implications of the lie for a few moments.
‘Yes, that should do it. I don’t like you having to lie to them; they’re good people.’
‘Moran is a jerk.’
Jake laughed.
‘Got a cigarette?’
Gaby did.
‘I didn’t know you smoked.’
‘At theatrically appropriate moments I do.’
He was not a comfortable smoker, but he seemed to enjoy the Camel.
‘Traditional last request,’ he said.
‘For a while I thought you’d chickened out of doing it,’ Gaby said.
‘For a while I had. They spooked me with that orthobody stuff. That’s worse than dying, that. Like a walking iron lung made out of meat. Rather take my chances with UNECTA and Unit 12 than that. What convinced me was that kid, Hubert. He was born with it, I caught it, but we’re both the same in here. We hear it. We see through its eyes. We dream its dreams. We share the same circuitry, in here, and so maybe it isn’t some desperate old faggot’s final fantasy to wave in the face of death like a karmic press card. I know that if I stop to look at it too closely, it’s insane, what I’m planning to do. But we’re humans, Gab, we can adapt to anything. We can triumph anywhere. They wrote operas in Auschwitz, for Christ’s sake. Yves Montagnard was wrong. There is only one way to be human; in here. What we wear over it doesn’t matter.’ Jake glanced at his steel Rolex. ‘Couple of minutes before the natives get restless. When it really comes down to it, Gab, what matters is that I’ll be in it. I won’t be watching, I won’t be an outsider looking in, recording, reporting, commenting. I’ll be in it. I’ll be a part of whatever story is being told here. All the rest of the world can do is watch: watch the Chaga, watch the BDO, watch the stars, watch the screen to see the television news watching it too. But I will be what is being watched. I will commit T.P.’s cardinal sin. I will not report the news, I will be the news. And if you don’t understand what a mighty, mighty temptation that is, you’re no bred-in-the-bone journalist.’
Jake exhaled the last of Gaby’s cigarette and carefully crushed the stub under his heel.
‘T.P. should know, though. I know it’s a heap of shit to hang on you, but tell him, Gab. Tell him everything. And Tembo too, because he’s a good man and I can trust him not to shoot his mouth off to some woman like Faraway would. Tell them. No one else. Oh yes. One last thing I owe you, Gab. That diary Shepard gave you. Haven’t you guessed?’
‘Humans living in the Chaga. Moon met the Wa-chagga.’
‘Gaby, Gaby, Gaby.’ No one could ever do the look of professional disappointment like Jake Aarons, that was not disappointed in your limitations, but in your failure to live up to your talent. ‘It’s not what, or why; it’s who. Who would give you an obviously maimed diary, which you were bound to investigate, when it would have been so much easier to deny it ever existed?’
‘Shepard?’
‘He’s a man. I’m a man. We do it with different targets, but down here, we’re all the same.’ He clutched his groin. The gesture was disturbingly undignified. ‘Where dick takes over, mind leaves off. He was so mad keen to get you into his bed he sure didn’t care about the consequences. Hell, he probably couldn’t even see there would be consequences through the fog of testosterone.’
‘Shepard.’
‘Time to go, I think.’ Jake stood up, offered Gaby a hand. Just like the last goodbye. These things are best done quickly. They say short, sharp pain is better than years of nagging numbness.
‘Jake.’
‘Don’t say anything, because even one word might make me not do it, and I wouldn’t want to hate you for that for the rest of my life. Don’t say anything, don’t try to follow me, don’t call out my name, don’t look at me. Just kneel down and close your eyes.’ She surprised herself by doing what he asked. ‘You’ll know when you can open them again.’ She felt his fingers lightly touch her eyelids in blessing.
She opened her eyes. He was gone. She screamed his name ten times. The Chaga did not answer. She cried a time for him, but not too long, for she must get back to the Black Simbas before they came to look for her.
