46
They came down through the roof of the singing forest. The men had not believed Gaby’s story about being unable to find Jake and fearing he had fallen any more than she did, but they were male and proud and would not allow themselves to recognize that a women would dare to lie to them. Gaby blindly followed Sugardaddy through the tier forest. Her inner view-finder framed an immaculate Jake Aarons climbing the final ridge, to stand a moment to look upon the distant ramparts of the Citadel and steel himself for the descent to the mad lands below. The tension and guilt mounted to near sexual intensities. She would turn around and go after him. She would find him. It would be easy, because it was meant to be. Several times this happened. Each time, the kick inside was less brutal and in the end she knew that she could live with him gone. It was a kind of dying. That was the way to feel it. Life is made up a million small dyings and rebirths. She turned that thought over and over in her head as she came down the swooping cable.
That was how they able to take her so completely unawares.
Branches rustled. Something enormous dropped out of the sky on to her and knocked her down, knocked the breath out of her, knocked all sense and seeing out of her. The something rolled her onto her back. She gasped, choked, fought for breath, waved her hands. Found herself looking up the barrel of an assault rifle at a white man in Chaga-camouflage fatigues with a blue helmet bearing a map-of-the-world logo Gaby reckoned was important but right now could not work out why.
‘Fuck, a white bitch,’ the white man with the gun said. He had a South African accent. He seized Gaby by one hand and pulled her to her knees. While she coughed and spat, he wrenched her arms behind her.
‘Hey!’ she shouted as she felt steel links lock around her wrists. The South African with the gun pulled her to her feet. She saw three black men trying to cuff a struggling, kicking Moran. Lucius was already immobilized, Sugardaddy writhed on the path, clutching his stomach. A blue-helmet stood over him, legs apart, weapon held high, butt downward.
‘What are you doing?’ Gaby screamed as the soldier wrenched her arms painfully behind her. ‘Who the hell do you think you are?’
‘The U-fucking-Nited Nations, lady,’ the white soldier said. ‘And we don’t think it, we know it.’
There were more UN troops at the rendezvous point. M’zee, Bushbaby and Rose were prisoners, together with a Wa-chagga woman who had been left by the trading party to wait for Lucius. The South Africans had jumped them two days ago, Bushbaby told Gaby. They were a new and dangerous thing in the Chaga, a United Nations deep patrol, hunting and eliminating guerilla and subversive elements breaking their interdict. They had found the remains of the slaughtered safari squad. They had found handy culprits. There would be charges of murder, in addition to security violations, when the dirigible got them back on the other side of terminum. Bushbaby said she was sorry. She was so sorry. She had been left in charge, but they had been too fast. Too well trained. They had been all over them before she could get her hand to her gun. Moran listened to her pleas, then spat in her face and kicked her as hard as he could between the breasts. The UN soldiers dragged him away. He did not resist them, but stared at Bushbaby while the black officer called in the airship. All the time that the drone of fans emerged from the forest chatter, he glared at Bushbaby as if he could stare her dead. Rose sat on the ground with her knees pulled up against her chest rocking slowly, weeping silently.
They had shot the dog.
47
She stood in the shaft of sunlight as the door from the transfer unit sealed. A voice warned to keep away from the sides. The floor lurched and the circular platform began to descend. Gaby kept staring at the high skylight. An edge of grey cloud lay across the plane of blue. The October rains were coming. The grey concrete shaft changed colour, to green, to yellow, to blue, to white as the platform moved down it. The same voice that had warned about getting too close to the shaft sides informed the detainees that they were in the Zone White preliminary decontamination area. The platform stopped at Zone White Level Three. This deep, the skylight was a tiny square of light. Gaby looked up the shaft of light, let it play warm on her face.
The containment seal opened and people in white isolation suits came to take her out of the light. The room into which they led Gaby, the Black Simbas, and Lucius and the Wa-chagga woman was white and blindingly lit from no apparent source. Behind a long glass window, a number of people in civilian dress wearing UNECTA badges sat at a desk. A white man donned a headset, tapped the microphone a couple of times to test it was working properly and told the detainees to place their equipment on the long white table to the right. The isolation-suited figures that had brought them in opened the packs and tipped the contents on to the long white table. They sorted through the piles of possessions, bagging items of interest, dropping the remainder through a slot in the wall that Gaby knew went down to flames. She watched her thermal quilt go through the slot in the wall. She watched her spare clothes, her toiletries, her pack go down to the flames.
The searcher lifted her diary.
‘Don’t you touch that; that’s mine, my diary, you’ve no right to it! Give it back to me!’ she shouted.
The faceless figure in the isolation suit inclined its head quizzically and dropped the diary into a bag. It found the other diary, Moon’s diary. Gaby said nothing as it was bagged and sealed. Jake’s camcorder had been taken back on the airship, with the weapons. Now she had nothing to make people believe her.
‘Undress, please,’ said the man behind the glass. He had a middle-American accent. He looked a little and sounded a lot like Shepard. Gaby fixed her eyes on him as she took off her Chaga-proof boots and dropped the cropped cotton top, the purple and red Chaga camouflage pants, her bra, her panties. She kept staring at him as the people in the white suits bundled up her clothes with everyone else’s and dumped them down the slot in the wall. The man she thought of as the anti-Shepard could not meet her eyes.
‘Proceed into the next section please,’ he ordered.
Gaby did not take her eyes off him as she walked through the sliding door. That was how she missed seeing Moran leap on Bushbaby and slam her against the metal door frame. But she heard the soft splintering crack of skull on white painted steel. And she saw Rose run at Moran, her fingers curled into claws. And she saw the milling bodies, flesh and white fabric; she heard the voices yelling, in Swahili, Kalenjin and English. She saw the five white suits pull Moran away and hold him. She saw five more take Bushbaby away on the trauma cart. She saw Bushbaby spasm like she was having an epileptic fit. And she saw the glossy splash and trickle of blood on the door-frame that the white-suits quickly wiped away.
In the next zone they sat Gaby in a chair and cut away all the threads and wires and beads and plaits that Rose had woven into her hair. They cut carelessly, hacking off the bangs of hair that Gaby had not cut in seven years. She looked at the coils of red hair on the white floor and knew that she could survive this. Whatever lay behind the next door could be no greater violation.
In the same room were a number of tiled cubicles. The voice of the anti-Shepard told her to cover the lighted panels with her feet and hands. As she stood spread-eagled, two white-suits worked over her with high- pressure needle sprays. Through the steam and spray she stared at the camera on the wall with which the man with Shepard’s voice was monitoring her. She could cry here. No one would see. Tears would only be more water on her body. She should cry. But she would not while that man looked at her through the eyes of the lens.
Warm air vents dried her body and the shaggy mess of her hair. She was given a white paper robe and moved on to the next zone. The words
In the next zone was the birthing chair.
There was a greater violation than the cutting off of her hair.
She struggled but they strapped her arms into the cuffs and her feet into the stirrups. Then they did the things with the dilators and the rubber gloves and the endoscope and the lubricating jelly.
‘You don’t need to do this,’ she kept telling the doctor who had his fist in her vagina. ‘There is no medical reason for this. You just want to humiliate me because we fucked the UN up the ass.’
