European television journalist and the news vans are ten deep on the football pitch on the other side of the road. Gaby grimaced as she remembered T. P.’s cardinal sin: she was the newsperson who had become the news. As the government cars approached a few cameras flashed. A stampede began toward the gate. Blue helmets opened the gate a crack and pushed through to hold the reporters back.
‘Keep driving,’ Dr Dan said. ‘Do not stop. If you run one down, I will vouch for you.’
Johnson Ambani did his best to obey his client, but the reporters overwhelmed the blue helmets and poured in around the Landcruiser. Lenses were shoved against the windows. Flashes bounced round inside the car. Voices clamoured, hands thrust microphones and disc recorders.
‘Moon,’ Gaby said. Time and space were running out. ‘I need to know. The story the diary doesn’t tell. Your story, yours and Langrishe’s.’
‘You don’t stop, do you?’ Moon said. ‘Professional unto the last. You get the exclusive.’
‘This is for me, and me alone. I need to know how the story ends. You owe me this. I can guess some of the bits that were cut out of the diary, but I don’t know how it ended. I don’t know if you ever found Langrishe.’
Moon looked at the rain falling on the high savannah for a time. She could not sit straight in the seat because of the thing on her back.
‘Yeah, I suppose I do owe you. Found Langrishe? I suppose so. Found something that used to be Dr Peter Langrishe.’
‘Changed.’
Moon laughed.
‘Most definitely. But not like those poor bastards in Unit 12. It wasn’t disease-engendered. Like this thing of mine, it was something the forest grew. Up there in the Citadel, there are things like bodies in search of souls. And when they join, they join forever. Can you understand what I am telling you?’
‘Obi-men. Orthobodies. Langrishe went into one of those?’
‘This a story or an interview? Yes. He hid it from me at first, when he came to me out of the cloud forest up on the mountain. He would come to me by night, or hide himself in the fog; never let me see him too closely. Just the voice, ranting on and on about evolution, about how he had found the aliens, how the Chaga was their tool for expanding humanity into a truly galactic species. He was right, he had found his aliens; they were him. He was them.
‘He showed me what he had done to himself. He thought he was glorious. Magnificent. I saw an abomination. A travesty. The denial of all my love for him; that he would do such a thing so lightly, without thought for anything but himself. All I had ever been was a donkey to nod at his theories on “the alien”, and a pair of ever-open thighs. Do you know what it is like to be betrayed by the thing that is the sum purpose of your life?’
I am learning, Gaby McAslan thought.
‘I wanted to run from the sad, sick thing, back to my world, my people, my life. But I couldn’t leave him, not like that. I still loved him. You can hate the sin but love the sinner. He was a monster, but many women have loved monsters. Monsters on the outside and monsters on the inside.
‘He wanted me to become like him. I wouldn’t do it. He used all the old emotional blackmails: we could share a deeper love in new bodies, he could not love me fully in my baseline form. New humanity, same old bitchy tricks. He had an orthobody prepared for me; showed it to me, did everything short of physical force to make me go into it. When I refused absolutely, he drifted away from me. He turned to others like him; I went to live among the Wa-chagga at Nanjara village. I needed human faces, human voices. But I needed Langrishe too – I couldn’t leave him. Everything that I had loved was still there, intact, enclosed in that alien body. What’s the psychologists’ term? Approach/avoidance conflict? So when the foragers went out from Nanjara into the high forest, I went with them, to meet with Langrishe.’
‘Why?’ Gaby asked.
‘The ones back at Unit 12 all asked that same question. To have sex with him,’ Moon said. ‘Sex was all we had left. He could walk out of the orthobody – the thing had him on an umbilicus. Twenty feet of freedom. Freedom enough for a fuck. And all the ones at Unit 12 had that same disgusted expression, darlin’.
‘Then he trapped me. It was easy for him to do – the orthobody’s nervous system was an extension of the forest, he could manipulate the Chaga almost any way he wanted. That was how he had always been able to find me. We fucked, I slept like I always did afterwards, and the next thing I knew I woke in some Citadel wall bolt-hole bare-ass naked, completely hairless, two months of my life erased and something not at all nice hooked into the base of my spine.
‘He had the audacity to be furious. It was not what he planned for me. The Chaga had subverted him, diverted me away from the orthobody into which he had schemed to implant me. I knew then that I had been catastrophically wrong, so wrong I could not see how wrong I was. There was nothing left of Langrishe inside that atrocity, except obsession. That was all there had ever been, the need to sacrifice everything, even me, to his lust for the alien.
‘I knew I had to escape from the Chaga entirely; he would always be able to find me, defeat me, bring me to him. In time he would change my body as he wished. A hunting party from Kamwanga found me at the foot of the Citadel. I persuaded them to take me to Nanjara where I knew the people. I needed supplies, yes, but I needed evidence even more. I needed the diary. From Nanjara, the foraging party took me outward: they were headed to a meeting with a Tactical safari squad, for an extra cut on the deal, they could smuggle me through the UN military cordon around terminum. They didn’t understand that I wanted to be found by the military. I wanted to be taken to a UNECTA base. I wanted to be debriefed on what was going on up there in the Citadel. I wanted them to read my diary, then see the evidence growing in the middle of my back and cut it off me with scalpels.
‘I left them before the rendezvous point, made my own way to terminum and through to the outside world. Of course, I got spotted and picked up by an airborne patrol. They took me to Ol Tukai, the base where Langrishe had worked. While I was bound up with his new incarnation up on the mountain, it had found itself a set of tracks, got up on them and gone mobile. I gave them the diary. I told them the things I had seen in the heart of the Chaga. I showed them the thing on my back. They did tests. They did scans. They drafted reports and told me that the thing was unlike any other living organism they had ever encountered and that it would be an offence against science to do what I wanted and cut it out of me. There was a medical facility they wanted to send me to, where there were scientists who would look into the thing more closely and see if there was any way of removing it without killing it and leaving me hemiplegic.’
Moon laughed again.
The Landcruiser had stopped at an army checkpoint. Johnson Ambani sighed and took the last piece of paper from his briefcase and gave it to a barely deferential soldier, dripping and miserable. He had North African looks, bored and bad-tempered in October rains. The soldier saluted and told Johnson Ambani how far south he could safely drive.
The government car moved on, toward terminum.
‘You had to get away from Langrishe, but now you have to go back,’ Gaby said. ‘After all that he did to you, after all he would do to you.’
‘Not any more,’ Moon said. ‘I learned things about myself in Unit 12. It’s very good for that. They give you a lot of time for self-discovery. Years of it. About all there is to do, self-discovery. I learned to love this thing on my back. I have to. It’s not me, but it’s part of me. Like an eternal pregnancy: a piece of something separate but intimately connected; something that needs me. Like Langrishe needs me. That was why he wanted to change me: so that he would not have to make his journey into what he is becoming alone. It scares him; I realized that, down in Unit 12. He isn’t sure he can cope with what he is being made into. He needs me, he needs the solidity of a love that doesn’t have to be exactly as he is, but will walk with him wherever he goes. He needs me to anchor his humanity, to tell him he is still human, still capable of being loved.’
‘And do you love him?’ Gaby asked.
