‘About what the UN is doing here? Something. We all have our sources; I would not wish to compromise mine so close to its centre. You!’ He turned, pointed at whichever one of the UNECTA followers-on in white fell beneath his finger. ‘Fetch Ms McAslan a cup of very strong black coffee. You were my trump card, Ms McAslan. My finger of God. When I found out that the UN were detaining a Western journalist in contravention of the Kenyan Constitution, and the UN’s own convention on human rights, it was very easy to swing the international media behind me. They are all up there, behind the wire, howling for you, Ms McAslan.’
The Unit 12 staffer brought the coffee. Gaby tried to sip it as Dr Dan wheeled his political circus on down the corridor.
‘They wouldn’t let me see any television news. You don’t know what it’s been like down here, Dr Dan.’
‘You are the lead story on all the channels. Even then, Mohammed al Nur tried to invoke UN immunity and dismissed my writ of
‘Allegedly,’ Johnson Ambani said.
‘Allegedly. But I am still sure that he would not like the video we made of him in the room in the Hilton with the Giriama woman and the Doberman to find its way into the hands of the prurient and corrupt western press. I am told it was quite a technical challenge getting him, the woman and Doberman in focus at the same time.’
Gaby suppressed a guffaw. Not even Unit 12 Level White was sealed and aseptic enough to keep out the infectious bizarreness of everyday African life.
‘They made a bad mistake in trying to disappear you, Ms McAslan. But it would have been a worse mistake to let you go, having seen what you have seen.’
‘The camera!’ Gaby shrieked. The strong black coffee had burned away the dope like the sun the morning mist. ‘They took my camera; it’s all on it, everything, about Jake and the Treetoppers and the Wa-chagga and the Breeding Pit. Everything.’
Dr Dan nodded to Johnson Ambani who opened his briefcase and took out another paper.
‘This is an authorization to sequester material evidence,’ he explained as Dr Dan signed it without reading. He gave the paper to one of the woman lawyers in the entourage. ‘Could you take this to administration and have them find and give you Ms McAslan’s camera?’ She ran off, ungainly in tight skirt and heels.
‘And the diaries,’ Gaby shouted after her. ‘Mine and the Moon diary, they’ve got them both.’
‘That is already taken care of, Ms McAslan,’ the lawyer Ambani said. He went into his magic briefcase again and produced two plastic bags stamped with biohazard symbols and UNECTA’s crescents-and-mountain. ‘We found these with the rest of your personal possessions.’
Russel Shuler the anti-Shepard was waiting at the top of a wide ramp that curved down to the zone below White Level Three.
‘Turn about is fair play, Russ,’ Gaby said tapping the badge on her dirty sweatshirt. ‘This time I get to do the debriefing.’
‘It’s too big for you,’ Russel Shuler said to her. ‘It’s too big for anyone. We’re not ready for it yet. Believe me, I am not the enemy here.’
The Zone White workers remained up above as Russel Shuler led the delegation down the ramp. The wall colour changed to red half-way down.
‘Zone Red is our maximum isolation and observation area,’ Russel Shuler said. ‘While I understand that all parts of this complex are to be made open to you, and that my staff here are to render you every possible assistance, I must advise you to consider hard the implications of making public what you see here.’
‘Dr Dan,’ Gaby whispered as Russel Shuler led them along the musky, mouldy-smelling red corridor. ‘Shuler’s right. The Chaga, it changes people. Not just mentally or emotionally: physically. It uses the HIV virus as a vector into cells to reprogram the genes. It can change living tissue.’
Warm air spiralling up from deep in the coil of tunnels rattled the Enquirers’ identity badges.
‘Nevertheless they are our people down here, whatever changes have been done to them,’ Dr Dan said. ‘Whatever they look like, whatever they have become, we shall see what is to be seen.’
Russel Shuler circled the politicians and lawyers around him outside a door that had been painted, Gaby thought, exactly the colour of hell.
‘Ladies and gentlemen, you are now on Zone Red Level One. This is the area in which we hold those HIV- altered patients whose adaptations are largely neurological. In many cases, their faculties and abilities seem quite superhuman; in almost all, they are impossible to explain or quantify.’
He opened the hell-coloured door.
The room was furnished as lavishly as a luxury hotel. A radiantly beautiful Nilo-Hamitic woman was sitting cross-legged on the king-sized bed, cats-cradling with the laces of her training shoes. She smiled to her visitors but did not speak.
‘Sarai is a manipulator of probabilities,’ Russel Shuler said. ‘We’ve tested her using electron tunnelling quantum effect experiments; somehow – God knows how – she can affect quantum world-line collapse so that the outcome is always in her favour.’
‘Excuse me, but I do not understand,’ Dr Dan said.
‘Put crudely, in quantum theory, if you flip a coin, it is not either heads or tails, but a state of both heads and tails until the act of observing the face of the coin collapses those possibilities into a single certainty. Either heads or tails. What Sarai does is make sure that it is always the side she calls. The outcome is always in her favour.’
‘She makes her own luck,’ Dr Dan said.
‘Like us coming to this place, now,’ the Assemblyperson for Nanyuki said.
‘Everything serves her purposes,’ Russel Shuler said.
Sarai smiled powerfully and folded her cat’s-cradle inside out.
In the next room, a very thin man was sleeping in foetal position. The rise and fall of his chest was so slow and shallow Gaby doubted for a time that he was breathing at all.
‘He goes into sleep at the start of the October rains,’ Russel Shuler said. ‘He wakes again at the start of the March rains. His metabolism slows to a crawl. Like hibernation, except that in low-energy sleep the aging process is suspended. From our point of view, his life-span is greatly expanded.’
From his own point of view, it is as short and fragile as any of ours, Gaby thought. Too few sleeps and wakings.
She read the name on the next room.
‘Here,’ she said to Russel Shuler. ‘I want to see who is in here.’
‘Please excuse me,’ a voice called over a rhythmic creaking. ‘I will not stop because you won’t be staying very long, and if I stop I will not come third.’
William Bi sat on an exercise bike, pumping the pedals hard. He was dressed in stained red sweat shorts and cropped sweatshirt. On a flat wall screen a garishly animated cyclist raced across a poster colour road toward an ever-receding horizon.
‘Hello, Gaby,’ William said without taking his eyes off the screen or breaking his rhythm. He was as thin and young and androgynously beautiful as Gaby remembered when the dirigible lifted them from the burning Nissan ATV on Chaga’s edge. ‘I thought I’d be running into you here.’
‘William, I’m sorry. I never meant this to happen.’
‘Sarai is the only one can make happen what she wants to happen. But I can see what she makes happen, so I am content.’
‘William’s time sense has been altered,’ Russel Shuler. ‘He lives in a longer present moment than we do. What we perceive as the present is about six seconds. William’s present is about three and a half minutes, both forward and back, with limited pre- and post-cognition up to about half an hour.’
‘I think you should call the maintenance people,’ William said, leaning over the handlebars of the exercise bike. He had overtaken the first computer cyclist, and was coming up on the rear wheel of another. ‘The air conditioning plant is going to give you trouble again in about ten minutes.’
Russel Shuler took an intercom from inside his Nehru jacket and made a call.
‘He’s almost always right,’ he said when he had finished talking to the engineers. ‘We’ve had to stop
