the interior cavity, shot from thirty kilometres out, shows the largest enclosed space ever beheld by humanity. It is like looking into a pit one hundred and fifty kilometres wide and three hundred deep. You could drop all seven of Dante’s circles of hell, and all the other hells of the great hell describers, into that pit and never see them again.
The rim of the cavity is ringed with a forest of stalagmites (some argue stalactites) nine kilometres deep. Each stalagmite, or stalactite, is twelve kilometres high. Like teeth, a junior data processor at Gaia Control comments in the coffee line. After that no one ever looks at the BDO without seeing a planet-eater, heading earthwards, jaws wide open.
Spectroscopic analysis reveals a thin CO2 atmosphere clinging to the inside of the cylinder. As far as the cameras can see into the interior cavity, it is carpeted with the characteristic coralline forms of climax Chaga: an entire geography, an undiscovered country. Later passes confirm early glimpses of objects in the zero- gee vacuum of the BDO’s spin axis. They are two hundred kilometres down-shaft. Computer enhancement shows them to be spherical, slightly under three hundred metres in diameter and bearing a strong resemblance to the delicately beautiful glass shells of terrestrial microscopic diatoms. The objects are in motion. One after another, they are accelerating along the BDO’s axis. On February 18, the first leaves the BDO’s open mouth. An hour later, the second object emerges. Three hundred and twenty-seven such diatoms are launched from the BDO in the next thirteen days. One comes within a hundred metres of
In Washington, the disappearance of M113C hangs questions over those last-minute improved-design fuel tanks that had been flown up to
As the Big Dumb Object approaches Earth’s picket-line, it rolls into a cylinder three hundred kilometres long by one hundred and fifty broad. The dark end – the remote explorers have devised their own terminology – is sealed. On its far side is a terrifying icescape of bergs and floes the size of Balkan nations and icicles tens of kilometres long: the BDO’s fuel store; mass directly converted to energy and momentum. At the other end – the bright end – the encircling teeth have fused together into a solid ring. The hole at its centre is dwindling. Estimated time to closure is one hundred and five days.
On December 28, an order is transmitted from the office of the President of the United States of America to Mars space. The jettisoned fuel tanks blow off their outer casings, revealing small thrust manoeuvring systems. A carefully controlled burn takes them out of Mars space into an intercept course with the Big Dumb Object. Balanced on top of the propulsion units are five megaton MIRV warheads. They are aimed to fly straight into the open mouth of the Big Dumb Object, arm themselves and detonate simultaneously against the rotating shield wall of the dark end.
The new name for the nuclear assault on the BDO is Operation Eye of Needle.
Between 02:30 and 17:08 of March 16, the United States of America fights and loses its first interplanetary war. In an expensively commissioned battle suite under the Pentagon, the Joints Chiefs of Staff and the Chief Executive of NASA watch the numbered icons on the big Matsui wall screen disappear one by one as the Swarm senses, intercepts and destroys the missiles. At 18:03 the President is called at his golf club and told the news. No damage has been inflicted on the enemy. Friendly casualties are one hundred per cent.
On April 23,
54
The house stood by the edge of the water. It was tall and straight, with a red tile roof and peeling white walls. Palm trees closed it in on three sides, on the fourth shaved grass in the English lawn style ran down to steps beside the inlet. The windows of the white house had shutters that would not close because they had been painted to the walls. The higher windows had balconies that the house’s guests had been instructed not to use because they were rusted through. From the high windows on the water side you could see all the way up Kilindini Harbour to Port Reitz. This was the view the woman was looking at this morning, from the very highest window, just under the red roof tiles. Her arms were bare, and folded on the sill, and she was resting her chin on them. She was watching the Likoni ferry, which crossed the harbour to the south mainland only a hundred yards from the house. The ferry was a big ugly bath of a thing, puffing black diesel smoke as it swung across the narrow water. It ran its ramp onto the concrete landing place. Even before it had come to halt, people and vehicles were swarming off the ferry onto the steep road up to the city. The woman watched an overloaded bus growl along behind a huge wooden push-cart laden with margarine cans. The men were having difficulty shoving the cart up the slope and were asking passers-by to help them. The woman could hear the bus’s angry horn, blaring. Meanwhile the ticket sellers were dancing between the vehicles waiting to board the ferry. They danced so swaggeringly and cleverly that the woman reckoned that, despite the apparent impossibility of the task, no fare ever went uncollected by them. The first vehicles were rolling down the slope as the last trucks were coming off in spurts of diesel smoke.
On the other side of the water, the passengers were already tailed all the way up the road. As the ferry made the four hundred yard crossing, the woman saw a convoy of white military vehicles come over the brow of the hill. Sandwiched between them were black Mercedes limousines with tinted windows: state cars from the South Coast hotels the government had requisitioned. The convoy swung on to the wrong side of the road and drove past the waiting passengers and nimble fare collectors to the water’s edge. Soldiers with blue helmets got out of the military vehicles to hold back the people on the road and to channel the traffic coming off the ferry into a single line. The convoy was first onto the ferry. From the high window, the woman watched them cross the water and escort the black government Mercedes up the hill and out of sight.
Then she looked beyond the ferry, into Kilindini Harbour, with the stacks and cracking towers of the oil refinery behind. She looked at the refugee hulks careened along the shore, and the aprons of rafts and pontoons and boats surrounding them that had reduced the harbour to a single narrow channel. It would not be long before the boat towns closed on either side and you would be able to walk from Mombasa to Kilindini. A haze of blue wood smoke hung over the floating town of the boat people. The trees that once had come down to the waterside on Kilindini shore had long since been hacked down and carried away for fuel. The woman had heard that the boat people were walking as far as Diani in search of firewood. She had also heard of some boat people exacting a wood tax from those who had to cross their boats to reach their own. She had also heard that the police were shooting anyone trying to cut firewood around the government hotels.
They would take the best beaches for themselves, the woman thought. And the best rooms, and leave her a top floor room in a guest house with no elevator, no air-conditioning, plumbing that functioned only erratically, a ceiling fan that did not function ever, lizards on the walls, balconies that would drop you sixty feet to the ground if you stepped on them, shutters that would not shut out the light and the heat when you wanted to sleep in the siesta time, and the best view in all Mombasa.
‘It’s good to be back,’ Gaby McAslan said. She turned from the window to the man on the bed. The man on the bed smiled. He was comfortably sprawled in the casual exhibitionism of a man who has just had sex, looking at the woman.
