They would not wait long. Gaby saw the hostile skyline of coral fingers and hand-trees rising in isolated stands above the shanty rooftops. A mile to the north, a copse of Loolturesh balloons hovered over the encircling slums.
For some this was enough to overcome their fear or their poverty or their inertia. By car, by bus, by truck, by matatu, by moped taxi or ox cart or hand cart or donkey, by bicycle, by foot, they would take their things and their lives on to the road. The outbound lanes of the airport highway were a slow procession of the dispossessed, fifty feet wide, ten miles long, grinding along between lines of guarding soldiers.
‘Hm?’
‘I said, have you heard that Shepard’s back?’ T.P. asked.
‘I’ve heard.’ She wanted it to sound like it meant no more to her than the return of some other journalist she respected but knew only through his work. She wanted it to sound like that to Faraway. Shepard had never written to her, never tried to contact her, to give her a chance to explain or apologize or say can we start again. So why did her heart kick her every time she heard his name and thought of him back in this dying city? Because she loved him. She did not love Faraway. She had given him sex for his loyalty and friendship and goodness, but not love. They had all been right, all the ones who had said she was a monster. ‘So, what’s he been doing?’
‘Over in Uganda and Zaire mostly, getting his hands dirty. UNECTA didn’t want to lose him, so they demoted him to fronting a trans-terminum research team working out of Kilembe. Getting a lot of respect: most of those patent new-gene food staples the agribusiness corporations have cut from Chaga sources come out of work done by Shepard’s team. Then last week they find his replacement as UNECT
The Landcruiser slammed into an emergency brake. T.P.’s knuckles were white on the wheel. Both feet were flat to the floor. He threw the wheel and missed by inches the UN truck that had stopped dead in the middle of the highway. Gaby untangled herself from the back of T.P.’s seat, opened her mouth to yell at him, and saw it.
It was coming in across the shanty town from the north, far off the glide path of any aircraft, and low, very low. Too low for safety. It was big, and it was coming fast. If it did not hit the road, it would not be by much. If the truck had not stopped, it would have been hit. The thing passed overhead in a rush of air. It seemed to hang over the Landcruiser. Gaby could feel the cool shadow of its wings. There was something of the bat in it, and something of the hang-glider or microlyte, she thought, but also the predatory streamlines of a multi-role combat aircraft.
God, but it was big.
The people on the far side of the highway threw themselves flat as the thing seemed to dive at them. It puffed gas. Its wings warped. For all its size, it was as light as a leaf. It lifted up above the shanties at the edge of the road, gained a few hundred feet of altitude and banked.
The sudden hammer of helicopter rotors was almost shocking. The machine came up from behind a ridge to the south of the road: a Hind B assault helicopter. It scraped the tin can chimney tops, pulled a high-gee turn and went after the intruder.
Everyone was standing up now, watching the helicopter close with the flying thing. There was a burst of chain gun fire and everyone cheered. Another, more cheering. A third and the great bat-glider-jet came apart in a dozen spinning pieces that smashed into the shanty town. Gaby saw shards of wing and tail and streamlined fuselage go cartwheeling up into the air together with sheets of corrugated metal and pieces of wood and shredded plastic.
But the squatter town people on the highway were cheering like it was a carnival, or the Pope had come. Gaby got out of the car and looked toward the crash site, shading her eyes with her hands. The helicopter wheeled in triumph and came across the airport road in a storm of dust and turbine roar.
‘I didn’t think they’d be that big,’ she said.
‘Do a hell of a lot of damage when they hit, but it’s only the poor of the parish so the UN doesn’t worry,’ T.P. said, standing beside her. Soldiers were running up the shanty-town dirt streets, fanning out in a search pattern. ‘Their job is to keep the access to the airport open, that’s all. That’s the closest one’s got in weeks. They’re losing their touch, but at least the helicopter downed it before the payload became active. They’re like crop-dusters, spraying Chaga-spores all over the damn place.
‘You think the doodlebugs are impressive, you should see the Hatching Towers. Dozens of the things, up on the edge of terminum, about three hundred feet high. The doodlebugs grow in pods at the top. They hatch, stretch their wings – just like butterflies, I can show you the footage – and then drop off the tit and glide away. The Kenyan army – what hasn’t deserted yet – is up there blasting away at them with artillery. Of course the Chaga grows them back as fast as they blow them away, but they’re at least slowing them up. The helicopters usually get what’s left. I’m surprised they let one get this close to the airport. One hit there and the whole UN program is fucked.’
‘Where did it learn to build a thing like that?’ Gaby said.
‘From us. Where do you think?’ T.P. restarted the car. Gaby looked long at the isolated plantations of alien Chaga growing out of the human landscape. Biological packages. Winged seeds, like the paired helicopters of the sycamore, sent spinning in their hundreds by the equinoctial gales. Beautiful weeds, her father had called sycamores. They pushed everything else out; took the place over.
And that greatest winged seed of all, the Big Dumb Object, was only three months from Earth.
‘I’ll drop you at Faraway’s,’ T.P. said dodging the military traffic as he headed for the golden towers of Nairobi. ‘If you can make it, we’ll be at the Thorn Tree. There are folk there looking forward to seeing you again. Otherwise, UN Press centre, tomorrow at eight-thirty. Jesus, it’s good to have you back, Gaby. What is it?’
She did not answer. She was getting used to the weight and feeling of a gun in her hand.
56
Tembo greeted Gaby with unrestrained Christian joy and showed her videoprints of his new daughter, aged ten months. Her name meant After-the-Rains. Gaby said it was one of the most beautiful names she had ever heard for a child, but she had been born under the bitter star of the dispossessed. She had already lost one home, and the temporary prefab she had been rehoused in was five days from terminum. You could see the land corals and fan trees from the front door; two streets away. When they got to one street away, Tembo and his family would leave. He did not know where for. He hoped it would be Zanzibar. That was why he had come to the UN Press Conference in the Kenyatta Centre Conference Hall; because today General Sir Patrick Lilley, Supreme Commander East Africa Land Forces, passed out the exit visas to Kenyan nationals.
T.P. Costello had reserved a block of seats half-way down the centre aisle.
‘Missed you at the Thorn Tree last night,’ he said to Gaby.
‘Better things to do,’ she said, unable to hide the grin.
‘Tell me you’re not banging Faraway.’
‘I’m banging Faraway. And for your information, he bangs exceedingly loud, and long.’
‘Slut.’
She did not tell him about the sensory deprivation thing with the blindfold and the white noise, because he would have misunderstood. It was partly for the totality of skin on skin. The rest of it was to shut out the constantly hovering helicopters and the bursts of gunfire from the streets and the distant thud of the artillery up in the northern bourgeois districts, futilely shelling the edge of the Chaga. To shut it out and forget that Shepard was out there on those streets she did not know any more. To pretend, in the silence and the blindness, that this body under her was any body, this skin any skin, any colour she wished.
The conference hall fell silent. A tall, sandy-haired white man in desert camouflage fatigues had taken the place behind the lectern. He studied his notes, pushed his glasses up his nose and surveyed the rows of news people. Gaby thought of wire-haired fox terriers. General Sir Patrick Lilley. Sandhurst Class of ‘85. Active service in
