Like the death of Kennedy, or Elvis, or the
Gaby McAslan was bouncing around in her singlet and panties on her bed, very full of Australian Semillon- Chardonnay and pretending to avoid the undressing fingers of Sean Haslam, her boyfriend of eight days. He was a part-time Network Media tutor. The other part of his time he freelanced multimedia overlay for Reuters. Therefore Gaby McAslan had uncorked the uncheap Semillon-Chardonnay and invited him to bounce on her bed.
‘Do you have to have the television on?’ he had asked.
‘It’s going to distract you?’ she had asked, smothering him in winy kisses and the mahogany hair that hung to the small of her back.
She had been the distracted one. The late news presenter had had the look of a man asked to read something he could not believe. So had the correspondents in Washington and Dar Es Salaam and at the foot of the mountain. American spysat shots were incontrovertible. On the second pass the resolution was enough to show things the size of a domestic oil tank. Not that there were any oil tanks on Uhuru Peak on the Kibo snow cap. Not that there was anything remotely recognizable there at all after the impact. Gaby had knelt on the bottom of the bed, resting her chin and hands on the carved wooden footboard, watching the news coming out of Africa. She had felt the stretch fabric of her panties slip down across her rump, followed by the Inquisitive press and prickle of dick and pubic hair.
‘Go away. This is important.’
‘More important than this?’
‘A hell of a lot more important. What kind of multimedia pro are you anyway?’
The camera had taken a few vertiginous, swooping shots of something that looked a little like a multi- coloured rainforest and a little like a drained coral reef but mostly like nothing anyone had ever seen before. Then the Tanzanian soldier had put his hand over the lens and there was a scuffle of sky and camouflage and the presenter in London was saying that the
He had then shuffled his papers, looked embarrassed and gone on to the rest of the news.
Suddenly sobered and un-sexed, Gaby went to the Net. Screen after screen of information unfolded from the online news services. Schematics, stills, simulations, animations. Page after page of text. Skywatch satellites hunting for Near Earth Orbiters and Planetbusters had spotted the bolide ten days ago: an atmosphere grazer, a little out of the ordinary in that it had made three complete orbits before entry, but otherwise unremarkable. Its ion trail across the Indian Ocean had been observed by US defence systems but they no longer mistook meteors for MIRV warheads. It had impacted on the peak of Kilimanjaro, near the camp of a German hang-gliding expedition. Storms had closed off the mountain for three days. Then the stories began, from the local Wa-Chagga people and the remnants of the hang-gliding team.
Something was growing up there.
The Tanzanian government might have succeeded in hushing the thing up, had an Earth Resources platform not been ordered to turn its cameras on equatorial East Africa. What NASA saw sent them straight to the White House to ask Mr President if he could ask the Pentagon to loan them a few minutes on the military spy satellites.
The Tanzanians could not have kept it secret for long. Not even the Pentagon could. Not growing at fifty metres per day.
Gaby had not noticed Sean dressing and leaving. After an hour or so she no longer noticed even the images unreeling across her screen. Here was the way to make the world know her name. Her star with her name on it, fallen from heaven. If she was true to it, it would honour her, but she must come to it. That was why it had fallen so far away, so that she would have to prove her worthiness of it. It was patient and enduring – who knew how many billions of miles it had crossed to come to her -but it would not wait forever.
Her tutors were astounded by the enthusiasm with which she addressed her work. They did not see the shining star with her name on it; they saw only her fierce, dark determination. She was racing not against the demands of Network Journalism, but the inexorable growth of the alien flora. When the second biological package came down in the Bismarck Archipelago, to be followed a month later by the Ruwenzori Event, her pace became frenetic. Her tutors told her to slow down. She could not. The United Nations was out there now, in the form of UNECTA, poking and prying and sampling and sniffing her alien rainforest. She had to get there before it was all named and numbered and known and there was no mystery left for her to explain.
Time and inexperience frustrated her. Trapped in grey London, she wished she were the Hundred Foot Woman who could push the dirty buildings apart until new, strange life sprang through the cracks in the street and the light of a brighter, kinder sun shone through the tear in the sky.
Her semester project on UNECTA as agent of Western industrial neo-colonialism earned her a summer placement with SkyNet Multimedia News. It was the first step southward to the plains of East Africa. That summer she determined that she would give SkyNet no possible grounds for declining her a job when she graduated in a year’s time. She grew pale and vampirish while the rest of her class flourished in sunny climates. She cultivated relationships, not all of which ended in bed. She shook hands. She did lunches. In the end, she succeeded.
Her father and Reb came to the graduation. First of all her year, she went up to collect her degree. When her father jokingly referred to her ruthlessness, she was startled. She had never thought of herself so. She was a frustrated visionary. The next day she moved into the glass-walled menagerie of SkyNet’s London office, among the architectural wet-dreams of Docklands. It was a Junior Compiler’s post in the Economics division, but it was another step south.
The Chaga continued advancing outward at fifty metres a day. Gaby charted its progress on a big map of Africa on the wall of her flat. She stuck photographs round the map: elephants with the snows of Kilimanjaro behind them; aerial views of the great disc of coloured mosaic dropped onto the dun landscapes of northern Tanzania. Neither friends nor her brief lovers were allowed to see her little shrine to the Chaga. It was not that she feared them thinking she was sad, it was that it was hers and hers alone. Others would profane it.
Beneath the towers of London she manoeuvred, she manipulated, she percolated up through the dense hierarchy of Sky Net like ground water rising in an Artesian basin. Opportunities opened; promotions appeared: she let them go. They were too easy, she was not ready. There was still the possibility of failure. That would have killed her. She would move only when victory was assured, though every day’s wait was a tap of the needle another millimetre deeper under her thumb-nail.
Six hundred and forty taps. Six hundred and forty silent chokes of frustration. And because she had honoured her star, it honoured her. The position was a junior one: had it not been in the Nairobi Station it would have been a demotion and she would have been fatally over-qualified. It was the third step, the sideways step that took you over seas and mountains and deserts to the land of heart’s desire.
She put in her application, called in all her overdue markers and went home to Ireland. The answer was there on the Watchhouse’s computers as she came in through the door to be greeted by leaping, wagging black Paddy and weeping, hugging Reb and Hannah.
She had a week to get visas, injections, do research, pack bags, buy a new wardrobe and book tickets. Her father uprated her Kenya Airways booking to executive class.
‘If you’re not coming back, then you must go in style,’ he said. ‘It is better to travel first class than to arrive.’ Then he turned away quickly so that Gaby would not be embarrassed to see how he felt about that.
He gave her a present at the departure gate. It was wrapped in dark blue paper patterned with stars and moons and ringed planets.
‘Open it when you’re airborne,’ he ordered, then hugged her and kissed her in a burly, beardy way and pushed her through the security check. When the little feederjet had levelled off and Northern Ireland was an edge of white foam on black rocks, she unwrapped the present. It was a minidisc viewcamera; a beautiful little thing, solar-charged, top of the range. Stuffed underneath it was a Manchester United scarf.
