Chaga

53

On the south side of the sky it is February 9, high summer as the Gaia probe goes into a highly eccentric pole-to-pole orbit of the Big Dumb Object and is captured by the object’s small intrinsic gravity, a moon of an ex-moon. In the months since The Scream, the Big Dumb Object has rolled from a twelve hundred kilometre diameter disc into a hollow parabolic cup three hundred kilometres deep, open to space at the forward end. The artifact is spinning at a rate of one revolution every twelve minutes. The mathematics of maintaining an orbit around an object that is constantly changing shape have never been performed before, but the Flight Control crew are confident in their computers and Gala’s reserves of reaction mass.

The highest point of the probe’s course, over the middle section of the elongated cup-shaped object, is fifty kilometres. Closest approach, over the open end, is two-and-a-half kilometres. In astronomical terms, that is a French kiss.

The thing devours comparatives, shrivels superlatives. Gala’s first full frontal of 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 Gaia. In astronomical terms, that is more than just a French kiss. That is deep throat. The ejected objects move to a position one hundred thousand kilometres ahead of the Big Dumb Object and scatter into a disc three thousand kilometres across. The namer of names at NASA christens it The Swarm. Their purpose becomes apparent when Asteroid M113C, an erratic orbiter whose return leg from beyond Jupiter would have brought it within three thousand kilometres of the Big Dumb Object, suddenly disappears. Gaia’s sensors, at the extreme limit of their range, disclose the presence of fifteen smaller bodies occupying M113C’s orbit. In gross defiance of celestial mechanics, they are all moving out of that orbit to rendezvous with The Swarm.

In Washington, the disappearance of M113C hangs questions over those last-minute improved-design fuel tanks that had been flown up to Gaia and jettisoned around the orbit of Mars. Operation Defend Freedom may be nothing more than a gesture of defiance.

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. Gaia’s keyhole on the world within shrinks, frustrating the exomorphologists and the xenobiologists: fascinating changes are taking place inside the cylinder. Atmospheric pressure is twenty times that when Gaia went into orbit: O₂ production is increasing exponentially. Annular mountain ranges have appeared, each sixty kilometres apart. They are growing upwards at one hundred metres a day. In time they will divide the inner chamber into five segments.

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, Gaia completes its forty one thousandth orbit of the Big Dumb Object and the aperture in the bright end closes, sealing in its wonders and horrors and secrets.

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.

‘It is good to have you back,’ Faraway said. ‘At least, I am glad to have had the chance to find out that it is red down there too.’

Gaby sat on the bed beside him and kissed him. He held the kiss, moved her hand toward his swelling penis.

‘Things to do, Faraway. Got to go down to Diani Beach and grease a few palms to get this security clearance. Three days wasted, sitting around on my ass, while Nairobi vanishes.’

‘I would not say wasted,’ Faraway said. ‘And it was not always your ass you were sitting on. Come on, I want to do this thing again.’ He picked up the Walkman headphones and the pair of black tights. Static hissed through the Walkman earphones: the radio had been tuned to white noise. ‘Devil! When you put the phones on and blindfold me, so that I cannot see, cannot hear; only feel, only touch, it is like I am nothing but an enormous penis. Miles and miles of f’tuba.’

‘That’s what it’s meant to do. Tactile enhancement through sensory deprivation.’

‘Where do you learn such tricks?’ Faraway folded his hands behind his head and watched her dress.

‘Do I have to be taught them?’

‘I always said you were a devil woman. You have corrupted my soul. I am damned.’

‘You are an idle bastard. Station Managers are meant to have clearances sorted out in advance.’

‘Deputy Station Manager. I was promoted beyond my competence. I tried to warn them, but it is the curse of bureaucracies. Listen, woman; while you are buying drinks for civil servants in beach bars, this idle bastard will be trying to arrange transport for us to Nairobi, liaising with the new regional headquarters in Zanzibar, and explaining to T.P. Costello why his special assignment reporter is still stuck in Mombasa. Such hard work deserves a reward, if not an apology. Tonight.’ He held up the black tights and the Walkman headphones. Gaby hit him with a pillow. She took his car keys.

In the line for the ferry she realized that the slit on the sarong skirt showed far too much thigh to the ticket boys and the lace-up boots were clearly the work of a frustrated foot fetishist, but the animal skin print fashion tickled the primeval hunter-gatherer in the back of her brain. Faraway had assured her it was this season’s fashion as he outfitted her in the dollar shops along Moi Avenue with replacements for the heavy winter clothing she had brought from her cold northern civil war. Faraway’s idea of fashion was something that allowed him to look at a woman’s legs. Gaby slid the dark glasses up her nose as she drove down onto the ferry. Not even time for an eye-job. Actually, she thought, the shades were cooler.

Hot climate clothes. Hot climate car. Hot climate music on the radio, that sounded good, that sounded right. It had never sounded like that anywhere else she had heard Kenyan music. Tropical fruits had been like that too: when you got over laughing at the price, you found they never tasted as good as they had when you bought them from Kariokor market or a wooden stall by a roadside bus stop. And the fabrics and the fashions and the furnishings only looked right under equatorial light. But even the wrongness of those things had been enough to bring her back to the place where they were right. Smells especially. Wood smoke. Charcoal. Shit and diesel. Tropical fruit. Dry earth, cow dung. Blacktop after rain. Night-blooming flowers. Instant Africa. You never leave it, because it never leaves you. Africa is in the heart. That is why you have sex with Faraway. He has always been the faithful one, the one who sent funny, rude letters and presents on your birthday, that found you wherever in the world you had been sent. He was the one who came all the way to London on the chance that it might be more than just friendship, but London had not been the place for that, nor Ireland, where you took him to show him to the people and places you drew your power from – he had complained all the time about how cold it was, how cold. However special, those had not been the places. This was. The heat made it right. The light made it right. The smells and sights and sensuousness of the ancient Arab island city made it right. Kenya was the place where friends could transform into lovers, with no regrets.

She hoped.

The road south was a ten mile parking lot of UN military hardware. Soldiers whistled and cheered at the white woman in the open top car speeding past. She knew better than to make obscene gestures at them. What Faraway had heard about them shooting foragers was evidently a rumour. Everywhere were women with bundles of firewood on their heads. Maybe the men thought the soldiers would not shoot women. Maybe no one shot anyone, but the men had told the women that story anyway because they were lazy. The hotel signs on the left side of the road all carried addenda: Ministry of Agriculture, Livestock and Marketing under the Golden Beach Hotel; Ministry of Finance riveted over the Diani Reef Hotel board; Ministry of Education swinging under the Trade Winds sign. Gaby dodged scooter couriers with cardboard boxes of state documents perched perilously on the back. The Kenyan government had not been in its new home long enough to set up a computer network, and the word around town was that it was already looking for a place to move to when Mombasa fell. It would all fall in the end. SkyNet could relocate to Zanzibar, but a government cannot run out of nation to govern.

Gaby turned in at the sign for the Jadini Beach Hotel. A plastic shingle informed her that it was in fact the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. At a checkpoint hastily assembled from an oil drum filled with sand and a bent metal pole on a pivot, Gaby showed her press card and asked where to go for an application for a Form DF108. The policemen directed her along a road that went round the back of the tennis courts, past the water-sports store and the pool chlorination plant to the staff accommodation block where the department that handled DF108 applications was housed.

There was another checkpoint behind the tennis courts. Gaby showed the man her press card. The man refused to swing up his bent metal pole and let her pass. Access to this department for foreigners required a form DF108.

‘I am trying to get an application for a DF108. I can’t unless you let me in.’

‘I am sorry. I cannot let you in without a DF108. Have you tried your consular office?’

‘They sent me here.’

‘This is most irregular.’

‘Will this make it regular?’ She held up two hundred shilling notes.

‘Attempting to bribe a government official is a serious offence,’ the man said.

‘Look, you stupid man, all I need is two minutes. If you won’t let me past, then you go and get me one.’

‘Desert my post in the time of my country’s need?’

‘If you say “it’s more than my job’s worth”, you can add assaulting a government official to your charge sheet,’ Gaby McAslan said. A black Mercedes came crunching down the sand road and stopped at the other side of the barrier. The driver sounded his horn.

‘You will have to go away and apply through proper channels,’ the government official said. ‘Do not waste my time.’ The government car sounded its horn again. The official lifted his pole and saluted as the Mercedes came through. Gaby considered darting through the gap but the pole came down so fast it bounced on its welded pivot. The black car stopped alongside the Sky Net RAV. A mirrored window hummed down. A big sweaty black face looked out.

‘You should be impressed that in these corrupt times there are still people conscientious about their jobs, Ms McAslan,’ the man said.

‘Dr Dan!’

The politician summoned the government official.

‘The m’zungu is with me,’ Dr Dan said. Gaby thought she heard the official say yes, minister. The Mercedes turned among the palm trees. Gaby followed it through the barrier. The official was saluting again.

‘I thought you were dead,’ Gaby said. The tables around the pool had all been occupied by men in suits with PDUs and cases of papers, but the presence of Dr Dan cleared any number of civil servants and brought waiters swarming. ‘Politically or actually.’

‘Whisky, yes?’ Dr Dan signed the bar chitty. The glasses were etched with the coat of arms of the Republic of Kenya. ‘I almost was. Both ways. When they could not kill me politically, they tried other means. It has a long and honourable history in our country. But I do not die so easily. This much— ‘ he held thumb and forefinger an inch apart’—is as good as million miles. But now we have a new President and a new order. And a new Foreign Minister.’ He stirred his drink with his plastic giraffe. The years have been soft to him, Gaby thought. He is bigger, slower, heavier, but it is the weight of wisdom and power and slow-stalking cunning.

‘Foreign Minister,’ she said. ‘That’s how T.P. was able to get me back into the country after four and a half years in the wilderness.’

‘I could not help you when you needed me last. It was the least I could do – I do not know why there has been a problem with the DF108. But there will be no problem now. I have thought much about you, over the years.’

‘I’ve thought about this place every single day I was covering those wars. One bloody stupid little ethnic slaughter-fest after another. Freeze the ass off you in Siberia this time of year. Mother Russia’s fucked, but won’t lie back and submit to the inevitable.’

‘Mother Kenya too.’

‘What’s it like up in Nairobi?’

‘They say it is well established in the northern suburbs. The Tacticals are coming out of their townships to fight each other and the security forces. The UN pretend they are implementing an evacuation plan, but there are too many people, and there is no law, no order, and not everyone wants to be evacuated anyway.’

‘Are they really letting them go?’

A group of secretaries were cooling their legs in the pool as they ate their lunches. They kicked up the water, laughing.

‘They say a thousand a day pass through the Westlands gate alone,’ Dr Dan said. ‘Of course, they cannot control entry to it, any more than they could ever control any other part of it. Who knows how many tens of thousands cross terminum unauthorized? They tattoo them, did you know that? The UN soldiers on the gates have tattoo guns. They are instant, painless, so I am told. Once you are marked and pass through the gate, you may not return on pain of being shot.’

‘What symbol do they use?’

‘A letter E, on the back of the hand. It stands for “Exile”. It should have been a C

‘For “Chaga”?’

‘For “Citizen”.’

‘They need you, Dr Dan,’ Gaby said. ‘They need your vision and bloody-mindedness to build a proper nation.’

‘Thank you, Ms McAslan. Do you recall when we first met, on the night flight from London, that I regretted that the Chaga would not give us time to build a nation? Five years on, I can see that the Chaga is giving us the time, and the space, and the resources, to build the Kenya we should have built. A fine nation, an African nation; that is not some continuation of Western colonialism in another form, with Western legal and political and educational systems, Western values and morals. In the Chaga we can find African solutions to African problems – maybe we will find out in there that what we thought were our problems are those we have been given by the West. We can do a frightening thing: we can build a new Africa that does not owe the West anything, that does not need what the West has to sell us, that has resources and capabilities the West can only envy.’ Dr Dan looked out across the pool and the palms that led down to the beach, and to the grey hulls of the warships beyond the white water of the reef. ‘Those gunboats, that they say are there to protect us: they are no different from those letter Es the United Nations tattoos on the hands of the exiles. They are afraid of us. They are afraid of what we could become, when the nations of the New Africa become the most powerful on earth. You asked me for my vision: I have shown it to you. I hope you are content with what you see. Ah!’ A civil servant in a Hawaiian shirt and creased chino pants gave Dr Dan an envelope. ‘Excellent. Thank you.’ He handed the envelope to Gaby.

‘Your DF108.’

‘You don’t know what this means, Dr Dan.’

‘A friend for the new nation, I hope. Oh. I almost forgot to mention. An old friend of yours has come back to Kenya.’

‘Oksana Telyanina?’

Dr Dan frowned, not recognizing the name.

‘No. Dr Shepard.’

55

She flew up on an early flight in a cavernous Antonov heavy lifter. Faraway was with her. They were the only civilians. Their seats were in the middle of the centre block, far from the windows. She would not be able to see the Chaga. Gaby tried instead to get some of the soldiers to talk about their anticipation of the withdrawal from Nairobi but they were young and this was their first time out of their mother countries and they had been told to be suspicious of journalists by frightening noncommissioned officers. Gaby ended up sleeping most of the flight on Faraway’s shoulder. The white boy soldiers wondered what a white woman was doing with a black man. The black boy soldiers wondered why a black man did not find his own kind good enough for him.

T.P. Costello was waiting in arrivals, like that first time when everything was fresh and clean and thrilling and could not go wrong. He did not seem to Gaby to have changed his clothes in four and a half years. Within those clothes, his flesh had softened and slumped, his chin descended, his hairline ascended. But irredeemably a boiled owl.

‘What the hell kept you?’ he asked, because he knew she knew it was expected of him. ‘The UN’s announced its withdrawal from Nairobi. Three days and it’s open city.’

Everything that points backwards points forwards. Old Land-cruiser in the car park. New fluorescent orange zebra stripes.

‘People with big guns kept mistaking the SkyNet globe for the UN logo,’ T.P. explained.

Old catechism, new rubric. T.P. handed Gaby a sleeveless jacket the same colour as the car’s stripes. ‘Colour-of-the-day for the press corps. Don’t look at it like that, these have saved the lives of several folk you know.’ He took a canvas bag from a pocket and dropped into Gaby’s hand. She almost let it slip through her fingers; it was extraordinarily heavy.

‘What have you got in here.’

‘Krugerrands. You’ll need negotiables. Forget dollars, forget Deutschmarks, forget yen; gold is the only universally convertible currency on the streets. And something to keep it, and you, safe.’

He handed her a .45 revolver. Gaby’s little frozen wars had taught her how to handle weapons, though she detested their feel against her skin. She broke the piece. It was loaded.

‘These are Black Rhinos.’

‘You put them down, you don’t want them getting back up again.’

‘Where am I supposed to keep this? In my hand bag?’

In the back seat, Faraway laughed priapically, thinking of suggestions.

‘Goes without saying that you can’t get accommodation in this burg for love nor money,’ T.P. said, following the directions of the MPs with white gloves toward the exit checkpoint. ‘Even your old friend Mrs Kivebulaya’s guesthouse is like a sardine tin.’

‘Gaby will be staying with me,’ Faraway said. T.P. greeted the disclosure in purse-lipped silence as the soldiers waved the Landcruiser through onto the city road.

In four and a half years since she last drove along this road the squatter towns had grown to enclose the airport on all sides. Cardboard shacks slumped against the perimeter wire, used the backs of warehouses and hangars as lean-to walls. The pall of eternal blue wood smoke hung over the plastic roofs, interspersed by the occasional dense plume where a shanty was burning. The women carried their burdens of sticks and plastic basins of washing on their heads. The men sat on their heels and watched the women work. The children, with flies around their eyes and their fingers in their mouths, looked at the aeroplanes taking off over their heads. Everything was the same, but it was different. The spirit had changed. The people in the alleys, or sitting by the side of the road selling their piles of Sprite cans and karma bracelets, seemed listless and apathetic. The life had gone out of them, leaving them transparent and desiccated. Gaby understood. They were the tidewater people; the flotsam left beached now the others had all gone out on the waters; to the coast, to the new transit camps in the east and far north, to the Chaga. Of those who remained some were too scared to go. Some were too poor to go. Some did not wish to go, but would wait with what they had until the Chaga came and made them decide where to go. 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 UNECTAfrique Peripatetic Executive, Conrad Laurens the Bouncing Belgian, dead in a bedroom in the Intercontinental with three Chinese babes. So Shepard gets called back to help with the great Going Out Of Business Sale. They’ve gutted what’s left of Ol Tukai – the thing ran out of fuel so they left it beached in the middle of a drive-in cinema. Chaga’s taking the thing to pieces now.’

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 Bosnia, Somalia, Rwanda, Iraq, Peru, Pakistan. Do you think the world has forgotten that off-the-record, on-the-camera comment about leaving the bloody wogs to sort it out for themselves? Not the people in those burned-out villages and bombed-out towns, who you refused to protect because it might mean your little boy soldiers being shot at. Not the people in this hall, this country. We are all wogs; and we sort it out for ourselves. When I go onto those streets, it will not with your blue-helmeted nannies. It will be with people I and the street respect. It will be with the Black Simbas.

‘Good morning, ladies and gentlemen,’ General Sir Patrick Lilley said. ‘Nice to see so many familiar faces. Before we get on to the allocations, the usual update.’ He talks like the Last Englishman, Gaby thought. ‘Terminum of the Nyandarua symb is officially fixed today as a line of latitude Map Reference one degree twelve minutes twenty-three seconds south. Program your GPS locators accordingly. The usual caveats about wandering onto the wrong side apply.

‘Users of the Nairobi localnet of the East African teleport have been experiencing transmission breaks and data errors. We have discovered that this had been caused by the intrusion of symb organic circuitry into the optical fibre network. The Nyandarua symb seems to be integrating itself with the East African teleport. We are unable to predict the long-term consequences of this; should it pose a threat to security, we will have to seek government approval to isolate the Nairobi localnet. For the meantime, I’m afraid we’ll all just have to tolerate the interruptions and drop-outs.’

Gaby wondered his beret did not slide off his head at such an angle. Hat pins, that’s your secret, isn’t it, Sir Paddy?

‘Now, to the chief business of this press conference. I will be calling the agencies that have filed for exit visas in alphabetical order. Would those called please have their documents certified by my aide.’ Who was a fox terrier bitch. Gaby studied the faces of those who waited to hear their names called by General Sir Paddy. All were black. Most had the look of terrified resignation to the inevitable Gaby had once seen on a wildebeest pulled down by the nose and disembowelled by a pack of hyenas.

General Sir Paddy called SkyNet down, section by section. Gaby watched T.P. collect his way out of Kenya. She heard a name she did not recognize and was most surprised to see Faraway go cantering down the steps. Then she heard her own name and went down to pick up the papers and the plastic badge with her photograph on it from the fox terrier bitch. General Sir Paddy was into Transworld Television by the time Gaby had regained her seat. It was only there, seeing the hands clutching their visas and identity badges, that she realized.

‘Where’s Tembo’s? What about Tembo?’ Nobody could look at her. She yelled down at the podium. ‘What the fuck about Tembo?’ General Sir Paddy paused in his reading of the names to frown at this loud, ill-mannered, rebellious Irishwoman.

‘T.P., you have to do something. He’s got a wife and kids, for God’s sake. He’s like family, like my favourite uncle. You owe him, T.P.’

‘There’s nothing I can do, Gaby. My hands are tied on this one. Believe me, this guts me as much as it does you.’

‘I’ve heard that before, T.P.’ She made to go down to confront General Sir Lilley on his podium. T.P. Costello grasped her and spun her around with unguessed strength.

‘Get on Sir Paddy’s tits, and you fuck it up for all of us. We walk a very fine line here.’

‘Four and a half years, and you’re still feeding me the same brown-nose shit,’ Gaby said. ‘When are you ever going to realize that we don’t need these people? Faraway, Tembo, I need you. And your family, Tembo. And the keys to the Landcruiser, T.P.’

‘Where are you taking them?’

‘To get on the tits of whatever agency decides these things, until they give me the result I want.’

57

The UNHCR sent her to the OAU offices. The OAU sent her to the UNHCR but she told them they had sent her here so they suggested she try the IRC. The IRC said it could not do this thing and sent her to the EU Embassy. The EU Embassy looked at her as if she were dog shit on the mat and told her to go to the Kenyan Ministry of Foreign Affairs Office on Harambee Avenue. This was a purely internal affair, Harambee Avenue decided and sent her to the Home Affairs and National Heritage Office on Moi Avenue, where seven hundred Rastafarian pilgrims in red, gold and green, who had come to join the great exodus to the Holy Mount Zion in Africa, were camped with their children and the goats they purchased from refugees glad to part with them for hard currency. Harassed UNHCR staff in white and blue bulletproof vests were trying to move them on to the buses that would take them up the Westlands Gate to be processed through. The hard currency goats cropped the sparse grass central reservations and nibbled the tips of the smog-blighted yuccas.

As this process was going to take some time and little After-the-Rains had started to cry and Gaby’s temper was fraying, Tembo suggested a short-cut through service alleys that would take them out at the other end of Moi Avenue. There were dead bodies in the alleys behind Nairobi’s golden towers. They were swollen and waxy with gas and rot. Gaby could not avoid driving over some. She made herself listen to After-the-Rains and not the crack and pop of bursting flesh.

It was as bad as the Rastafarians outside the Home Affairs Office. Five hundred people were trying to push through the revolving doors. Policemen shaded themselves under the thorn trees, unable to take effective action. On Faraway’s suggestion, Gaby turned out microphone, camera and camera crew.

‘Could you help us get in there?’

The policemen eagerly gave up their lounging and cleared a path to the door. They managed to do it smiling to the camera. This was a pity; the camera was not running.

They fought their way to a counter clerk who sent them to a superior who referred them to an executive officer on the fifth floor in an office with a desk, a chair, a PDU and eighty cardboard document boxes who said that all press accreditation was being handled by the UN and sent them to East Africa Command Headquarters on Chiromo Road.

There was not a shop left open on all of Haile Selassie Avenue. Those that had not been looted and burned-out were shuttered. In the expensive shops, that sold watches and jewellery and other negotiables, the steel security curtains had been smashed in by ram raiders. The front end of a Suzuki 4x4 projected from the front of Sharma and Sons, Discount Jewellers. Traders had set up pitches on the sidewalks: a trestle table spread with CDs and discplayers; a plastic fertilizer sack split and opened on the ground on which bottles of Volvic mineral water were piled in little ziggurats. A man with a rifle at his side sold car batteries from the porch of the Christian Publishing Office. In the back row of seats the children were crying. Mrs Tembo held them in her arms.

‘Hush now, babies,’ she said. ‘Don’t cry, don’t cry.’

Gaby’s identity card and DF108 were inspected at five different checkpoints on the approach to East Africa Military Command. The soldiers turned out all the passengers to take up the seats to make sure they were not carrying explosives before they would open the barrier to the visitors car park. Gaby left Faraway as a deterrent to thieves and marched Tembo, Mrs Tembo, Sarah, Etambele and After-the-Rains into the reception area and demanded to see someone with the authority to issue an exit visa to Sky Net’s most valuable news gatherer and his family. After forty minutes, an adjutant was sufficiently under-busy to come and tell the civilians that they were in the wrong section of East Africa Military Command. This was East Africa Military Strategic Command. They needed East Africa Military Logistics Command, which had taken over the Church Army Training Centre on Jogoo Road.

Landhries Road had been sealed off with a barricade of wrecked cars where a doodlebug had come down on the Country Bus Station. Detour signs hand-painted on the rusted doors directed traffic along Pumwani Road. The slums had grown bigger in four and a half years; down to and over the Nairobi River. Slums never grow any smaller. They are bad when they are lived in, but worse in decay. Many of the shanties had collapsed or slumped into the river, which was a swamp of plastic, scrap metal, wood and dead things.

There was a road block up at the top of Kericho Road. Two Nissan pick-ups with anti-aircraft guns bolted into the truck bodies – picknis, as they were known on the streets – were parked nose to nose, restricting the traffic to a single line past men carrying automatic weapons. Incongruously, they were dressed in red and purple Chaga-combats under football managers’ coats. The cartel banners drooping from the pickni’s whip aerials sported the black-and-white fuller sphere of a football on a green field. Football, buckyball, Gaby thought. She knew them: the Soca Boys, one of the smaller Tactical cartels that had remained fiercely non-aligned while the others forged alliances and brokered power blocs. A show of strength; a message to the Premier Division managers that the Soca Boys could be valuable players to have on-side when the final play-offs came.

The Tacticals waved through a pick-up hidden under a pile of firewood. Gaby fished out a couple of Krugerrands. The Land-cruiser crawled closer. A smoke-belching municipal bus went through the checkpoint. Gaby had not thought they were still running.

‘Hide your guns,’ Gaby hissed. ‘You in the back, look scared.’

‘That is not difficult,’ Mrs Tembo said.

A Soca Boy in a Grampus 11 coat came to the open window.

‘Hello, m’zungu,’ he said. ‘That is a mighty colourful car you are driving. Would you like to put my face on television, news lady?’

The helicopter came in from nowhere across the shanties, hard and fast: a big Hokum gunship with UN painted on the side. At the sight of it, the Soca Boys ran for their vehicles. The helicopter turned in the air. The picknis drove off at speed. The helicopter tried to follow them through the warren of cinder-block project housing. Minutes later, Gaby passed a convoy of UN armoured vehicles coming at speed up Leman Road. In two days they would be gone from this city, but for those two days they still ruled the street and they admitted no challengers.

‘Isn’t that where you led the choir?’ Gaby asked as they passed a big red brick church with a red tin roof.

‘St Stephen’s, yes,’ Tembo said. ‘But no one is singing there any more.’

The United Nations East Africa Military Logistics Command Headquarters, formerly the Church Army training centre, was directly opposite St Stephen’s Church. Once again, identifications and authorizations were inspected, and Gaby marched the family into the reception area and refused to move them until she saw whoever was in charge of exit visas. She only had to wait thirty-five minutes this time for an aide to talk to her, Tembo and Faraway. They waited another thirty-five while the aide referred the application to his superior, and another thirty-five while the superior checked with the people down in reception and decided if he could talk to these civilians. Tembo’s wife and children sat on plastic chairs under the window of the temporary building that was the reception area and ate vending machine sandwiches and chocolate. Faraway looked out the window, drinking coffee. He is one of those men, Gaby thought, who unconsciously relax into postures that look good to women.

The superior said that he could not vet an application for an emergency visa on Gaby’s authority alone. Faraway negotiated in his capacity as Deputy Station Manager. The officer was still not convinced. Faraway called T.P. on his cellphone and gave it to the officer. Gaby looked out of the window at the soldiers sitting by the side of Jogoo Road. She saw a man in Islamic dress come up the road pushing something that looked like a dog kennel on wheels. Gaby remembered this man, this machine. There would be a veiled woman hidden inside, with only her eyes catching the light. Some of the soldiers offered the man money. He refused to accept any of it. Gaby watched him pass up the road. He is part of the Kenya that was, she thought, that I loved but cannot find any more, for it has turned alien and ugly, like a rotting slum, or a woman hidden in a wooden hutch.

Faraway had his PDU on the desk. Hardcopy documents were squeezing forth. The officer took them across the compound, past the chapel to the accommodation block where the work was done. Tembo looked from Faraway to his wife to his children. Some of the military who came and went through the reception area squatted down to talk to Tembo’s beautiful daughters.

The robed man with the wooden hutch on wheels was coming down Jogoo Road again. Gaby watched him pass again the soldiers sunning themselves. They did not offer him any money this time.

The officer was coming back across the compound now. He looked out of breath. His white face was red. He seated himself behind the counter and put two forms in front of Faraway for him to sign.

Gaby saw all the things that happened next as separate, discrete edits of experience.

She saw the beggar man in Arab dress come running up the road as fast he could. He did not have the trolley with him.

She saw the soldiers at the side of the road get to their feet as he ran past.

She saw Faraway turn from the reception desk with his biggest smile and a piece of paper in either hand.

She saw the white light, and the fireball inside the white light.

She heard the explosion. She heard it like it had blown into every cell of her body and shaken its death-noise out of them.

She saw the window of the reception cabin fly inward in a million stinging insects of glass. She saw Tembo throw wife and children down as the glass passed over their heads. She saw Faraway dive for the floor, tuck himself into a ball, arms wrapped over head. She saw the reception staff take cover behind their desks and counter as the glass rained down on them.

She seemed to be the only one standing, like the domed building in Hiroshima that was directly under Fat Boy.

Gaby could take in every detail in a flicker of an eyelid. The man in Arab dress was lying face down in the middle of Jogoo Road. The bomb had gone off a hundred yards further down. There was nothing left of the wooden trolley that had carried it. Three trucks were burning; one of the refugee buses was overturned. The bodies of the soldiers were scattered like chaff. Over everything hung a huge silence and slowness. Then the sound rushed into the still place after the bomb and there were screaming men and burning vehicles and yelling people.

‘Come on!’ Gaby shouted to her team. ‘We’ve got work to do.’

Faraway jammed the emergency visa into Mrs Tembo’s hands and ran after Gaby.

It was like she was a neutrino. She moved through the destroyed vehicles and the knots of shocked people without interacting with them, without being deflected by their confusion and suffering from her purpose. Soldiers pulled comrades from the tangled wrecks of vehicles; dragged shattered bodies away from pools of burning fuel. Gaby passed by. Scraps of meat and seared cloth were scraped into a gutter. Gaby sent the eye of the lens over them and moved on. Troopers comforted their screaming friends. A man sitting beside a soldier with no face shouted and shouted and shouted for a doctor to help his buddy. Combat medics triaged victims. Sirens wailed in the distance: ambulances, fire engines, fast approaching. In the middle of all, Gaby sent her camera eye probing. No one noticed her. The fire engines foamed down the burning vehicles. Ambulances, civilian and military, moved between the army trucks and disgorged trauma teams. Still no one saw Gaby and Faraway and Tembo. It was only when the military police came to seal the area that people saw there was a news team among them, filming the worst moment of their lives. Two white-helmets rounded Gaby and Faraway and Tembo up and pushed them beyond the edge of the cordon.

‘Fucking ghouls,’ one of the MPs said.

Gaby did not hear him. She had seen a UN jeep arrive at the centre of the destruction. A man jumped out and was saluted by a soldier, who escorted him through the wreckage and the bodies.

Gaby knew that man.

‘Shepard!’ she shouted. ‘Shepard!’

But she could not make him hear her over the sound of the sirens and the dying.

58

‘So, I must find out on the satellite news that Gaby McAslan is back in Nairobi,’ Oksana Telyanina said. The samovars still bubbled in the Elephant Bar, but a boxing ring stood where the fire pit had once burned. Framed signed photographs of woman kick-boxers competed for wall space with the icons and photographs of Russian aircraft, alongside mandalas and neo-Pagan posters. There was serious money in unlicensed kick-boxing, the Siberian woman had told Gaby. And the Elephant Bar had become the Last Chance Saloon for subcultures from all over the planet who had decided that the Chaga was their best future. Their paisley-patterned buses and dead trans-Saharan Land-rovers were piled five high in the yard across the road. Changes; even for Oksana Telyanina. Better English. Shorter hair: a quarter of an inch all over. More tattoos: her totemic tree of enlightenment had sprouted branches across her upper torso; tangling a hundred tiny iconic tattoos in its twigs. Brutal animal-print fashions that seemed to Gaby to symbolize the easy weapons and sacramental violence of Nairobi before the fall.

‘Do they know who did it yet?’ Oksana asked. They were at a table on the verandah, overlooking the rows of An72Fs. These and a few army helicopters on the far side of the field were all that were left; since Kenyatta had been closed to commercial traffic, all the big jets had moved there.

‘The Americans are trying to tell us it was some Islamic fundamentalist group, but with them its always either Islamic fundamentalists or drugs. I was there, I saw it; it was some Tactical cartel showing its rivals the UN can’t push it around. They’re getting bolder, stronger. More savage. Fifteen dead, last count.’

‘If you want to stay at my house, you know where the key is,’ Oksana said. ‘At least you will be safe, this is a protected area.’

‘Until the UN leave. Thanks, but I’m with someone else.’

‘Who?’

‘Faraway.’

Oksana tried to look wise, which is not easily done when you have only a quarter of an inch of blonde stubble on your head. For a moment Gaby thought that she might be one of the kick-boxing women in the ring tonight.

‘And is he as good as the reputation he puts out about himself?’

‘He’s keen, he’s clever, he’ll try anything, he’s got great stamina, but he lacks, ah, finesse.’

Oksana spluttered in her beer.

‘Candidate for Serbski Jeb?’

Gaby suppressed a shiver. The bondage game had gone sour for her after the birthing chair in Unit 12. Be blind, be deaf, be reduced to taste, smell, touch, but be free. She would not take or give control in sex again.

‘He’s in love with me enough.’

‘But you’re not with him.’

‘He deserves it, but I’m not in love with him at all. It’s a bad habit I’ve picked up, sleeping with friends. I convince myself that they understand, but they always take it the wrong way and hurt gets done. It’s not love, I try to tell them; it’s touching. It’s feeling good with another. It’s wanting to wake up in the morning with another body in the bed. It’s needing something to touch me, otherwise nothing will ever touch me again. Look at me; I’m heading for thirty. I’ve got grey hairs, my metabolism’s shot to hell – once I did all my best work on a diet of alcohol, nicotine and chocolate, now I even look at food and it teleports itself into my belly – it’s a toss-up which hits the ground first, my tits or my ass, and my lifestyle won’t let me settle, let alone have anything approaching an adult relationship. So I sleep with my friends, because I can trust them and need their bodies beside me in the morning, and they all fall in love with me and come apart when they find me in bed with some other friend.

‘I want to have an grown-up’s relationship of edginess and compromise and having to sacrifice get things in return you never asked for and hoping that it’ll still be there beside me in the morning to touch when the hair has all gone grey and the tits have hit the ground. I want to have things demanded of me. I want to have to work at loving. I want to stop being free.’

‘You want Shepard,’ Oksana said. A girl waiter in boxing gear brought more beer. It was not Tusker, you could not get any of the good Kenyan beers any more, but it was cold, and at least you could imagine an elephant sauntering across the runway. ‘Big cocks and vodka!’

Gaby returned the toast.

‘I saw him today at the bombing. He didn’t see me. It was like four and a half years rolled up and disappeared. I want him, I’ve never stopped wanting him, but I’m scared that if I find him, he won’t accept my apology, or me.’

‘It is all circles, like I told you last time we met in this place,’ Oksana said. ‘If it is taken from us, it will be returned to us some time. But to find your way back, you must first set out.’

‘Do you get this stuff off the insides of Christmas crackers?’ Gaby said meanly. Then, knowing she had been hurtful, she said, ‘You told me you had the gift of seeing into hearts. Look into my heart; tell me how it all fits together in there, because I don’t know any more.’

Oksana pulled her chair around to the other side of the table, leaned forward and looked into Gaby’s eyes. The Siberian woman’s eyes were blue; Lake Baikal blue, that is the deepest blue in the world, and in a blink that was not a blink, Gaby saw the ten thousand years of tundra ice that lay behind them and empowered them. It was no shit. It had never been shit. The power was real.

‘You want me to do it for you,’ Oksana said. A helicopter lifted from the far side of the airfield and passed noisily over the bar. ‘I cannot be the one who lays the way. You want him to forgive you, but you fear he will not, or cannot, because it is the hope that he will, and can love you again, that is the star that has guided your life. You have changed stars, Gaby, and you do not know that yet. You are still following the old star, and it leads you away. To follow this new star is to take the risk that it will fail, and your strength and trust with it. You see me and you wonder if I am another one of these people who cannot help be drawn to you and love you, and you are afraid of these people because you cannot stop yourself loving them a little. Even Faraway, who you say you do not love; you fear hurting him. You love him. You love me, but you are afraid of how I might reply to that. You must not be afraid of me. I love you, purely, and impurely, but my place is at your side and not underneath you and whatever you decide, I will honour.’

‘I don’t deserve you, Oksana,’ Gaby said. ‘I don’t deserve Faraway, any of you.’

‘We do not always get what we deserve. You see that?’ Oksana pointed at the dark horizon, away from the glow of the city. Gaby understood; she was pointing to a dim star among the constellations of the southern hemisphere: the BDO, three months from Earth. ‘If anything means that we do not get what we deserve, that does. The Chaga out there does. It is ours, if we have the courage to go into it, and take hold of it. Come on. It’s getting cold out here, and they have just started the first bout.’

Inside the bar, the spectators were ten-deep around the ring. A Giriama woman with scarification ridges beaded across her chin and brows was kicking the living shit out of a hauntingly beautiful Indian girl with long black hair tied back in a pony tail. The men cheered and howled and laid their collars and Deutsch-marks and Krugerrands down.

59

She was cruising south of terminum in the shadow of the hatching towers with Faraway in a Black Simba pickni. The Black Simbas had lent Gaby a driver, a body-guard and a tail-gunner. The tail-gunner stood in the back, sweeping the avenues of middle-class villas with the swivel-mounted heavy machine gun. He called himself Cool K., and wore expensive wrap-round shades. The bodyguard was called Missaluba. She resented having to mind the m’zungu woman and her tame black cock. She wanted to be in the action up at Parklands. The driver was called Mojo. He drove frighteningly fast, because he had been told he was too old for the fighting up at Parklands.

It was day Minus One. The Kenyan Army had fallen back in the night to positions among the Ngara and Northern Ring Roads, defending the downtown district. The United Nations were a ribbon of white and blue stretched for ten miles along the airport road. This was the first day for many weeks that you did not hear the helicopters hovering over you. They were all gone to guard the link to the airport. The northern suburbs had been abandoned and the Tacticals were dividing it up between themselves. Picknis chased each other along the tree-shaded avenues. The white plaster rendering of doctors’ and accountants’ bungalows was chipped away by bullets. Heavy armour manoeuvred through the gardens, bringing down trees, crushing children’s slides and climbing frames, cracking patios and terraces. Bodies floated in the swimming pools. Slit trenches had been dug across City Park. A primary school burned, set alight by skirmishers trying to dislodge a sniper. Only the golden arches stood from a shelled-out McDonald’s; the mortar duel had shifted focus to a Roman Catholic Church. Pitched battles were fought for strategically significant and heavily defended gas stations.

But for old ties, Sugardaddy would not have spared Gaby the pickni and crew. He was General Sugardaddy now, of the Starehe Centre Division, with heavy and light mechanized units and infantry under his command. His orders were to spearhead the push all the way to terminum, clearing everything from his path to establish free access to the Chaga. They were half-way there already. In the night, the Starehe Division had exterminated the Soca Boys, but the Ebonettes had dug in at the end of the Murang’a Road and were resisting forcefully. The generals of the Right and Left Divisions, whose task it was to protect the flanks, were sending what troops they could spare to aid the assault, but they were coming under heavy attack from the United Christian Front to the west and the Nyayo Alliance to the east. Terminum brought the enemy fifty metres closer every day.

While his lieutenants ordered a pickni and assembled a crew, General Sugardaddy filled out the four and a half years since Unit 12. Rose was up at the front. She did not breed Chaga dogs any more. She had command of a mechanized scouting unit. M’zee was three years gone into the Chaga.

Sugardaddy had always thought that the old man’s heart’s true home was in that other world. He had heard that M’zee was working with the new immigrants in the Black Simba towns that were growing up ten, fifteen kilometres beyond terminum. A great nation was building in there. Perhaps M’zee’s was the greater work, in the end. Moran was dead. They had hanged him for Bushbaby’s murder. On the anniversary of the hanging, Rose went to the grave, squatted and pissed on it. And he, Sugardaddy, the king of cool, was a warrior. There were only a few now who remembered him by that name, fewer who dared to use it. He wished he could go back to the years when he was that name. He was not sure he liked to be a general, and feared.

Gaby wondered if General Sir Patrick Lilley was ever visited by such doubts.

‘Since you must tell the world something, tell it the truth about us,’ Sugardaddy said. ‘It is not for greed or power or territory that we fight. It is so we can open a way to the Chaga, and hold it open so that all the people who wish to go, or have nowhere else to go, may go safely. It is our future we are fighting for. Our nation.’

Then he drove off to war in his personal pickni. Gaby never saw him again.

But it is still killing, she had wanted to say to him. There is no end to killing and the excuses men make for it. I have seen a dozen tiny wars like yours, General Sugardaddy, and heard the reasons men have made for them, and they are as convincing and as false as yours. The true reason is that men make war because men love it. The Chaga builders come eight hundred light years to learn what it is to be human and the bad news from Planet Earth is that men kill because it gets them wet.

Mojo the driver was taking the pickni into the city centre now. He did it because he could. No one would stop him. No one would even look twice at him. He could drive up and down Moi Avenue, past all the other Tacticals who, anywhere else, would blow your lungs out of your back, but not here, because even carrion dogs need somewhere to sniff and lick each other’s asses. He wanted to show off to the white bitch and her piece of meat that the Black Simbas earned respect from the street. He played lecherous bumper tag with a Lambretta scooter on which two young women were riding. He would crawl up beside them, touch his tongue to his upper lip, pass. They would dart past on the inside and wrinkle their noses at him. He finally put them behind him in the traffic on City Hall Way. Beside him, Gaby watched a young beggar on a trolley push his way long the gutter. His design was resourceful – a fruit box screwed to a skateboard. Without warning, he pushed himself out in front of the pickni.

‘The beggar!’ Gaby shrieked. Mojo floored the brakes. The kid on the skateboard disappeared under the hood ornament that had once been one of those plastic lions rampant that the middle-class with no taste put on their gate posts. ‘Oh Christ, you’ve hit him.’

The kid’s face rose over the top of the radiator grille. He was standing on his two feet. He was smiling. In his hands was a pump action shotgun. He threw himself flat on the hood, blew both barrels through the windscreen. Noise. Glass. Blood. Gaby screamed, thinking she was dead. The blood and meat sprayed over her right side were not hers.

The skateboard kid rolled off the hood to cover. A Lambretta engine squealed. There were two shotgun blasts from the back of the pickni. The scooter dashed past. The girl on the back had produced a pistol grip shotgun from her backpack. She reloaded as her driver turned the scooter for another pass. The Lambretta circled the pickni, pumping shot after shot after shot into the gun position. The rear window streamed blood on both sides. Missaluba extricated her Kalashnikov from the footwell and threw open the door. The Lambretta driver kicked it closed as she sped past. Missaluba barely avoided losing fingers and face.

A big blue Plymouth convertible drew up alongside. In it were men with Afro haircuts and big guns. The driver and passenger covered Missaluba while the men in the back seat jumped out and hauled her down on to the concrete. The skateboard kid and the shotgun girl from the Lambretta pulled Mojo’s faceless body out of the truck and dragged Gaby over the blood-slick vinyl and shoved her into the rear seat of the Plymouth. A man in the skinniest tank top Gaby had ever seen frisked her. He tutted and shook his head at the calibre of her ammunition, like a Christian Brother teacher finding a vibrator in a schoolbag. Disapproving, but impressed. Missaluba and Faraway were kneeling by the side of the pickni. The skateboard kid and the Lambretta girl pressed shotgun muzzles to the backs of their skulls.

‘Take her,’ said the front seat passenger, a bald-headed man with a drooping moustache, round shades and a long leather coat. The Lambretta girl kicked Missaluba in the kidneys and quickly cuffed her hands with plastic cable grip. She went into the trunk of the big blue Plymouth.

‘What about him?’ the skateboard kid asked. He wanted to shoot Faraway. He wanted to shoot him very much. He wanted to blow his head up like an exploded melon, spraying red flesh and black seeds of wisdom.

‘Leave him,’ the leather coat said. ‘He is tribe. We go. Now.’

The skateboard kid flipped up his board, caught it with one hand and jumped into the back of the car beside Gaby. The Plymouth smoked away from the shattered pickni. There was blood, glass, and shotgun cartridges all over City Hall Way, and Faraway standing in the middle of them in his bright orange colour-of-the-day jacket. The Lambretta picked up its passenger and wove off through the traffic.

The man with the bald head and the drooping moustache in the leather coat turned in his seat to Gaby.

‘Good morning Ms McAslan. Sheriff Haran’s regards, and he wishes you to come with us discuss your account.’

60

They took her up the front stairs. At some time a bullet had killed one of the neon waterfalls flanking the door. The bouncer did not stand outside any more, but scrutinized the street from a metal slit.

The balcony bar smelled of sweat, stale cigarettes and the high-end tang that remains when the characteristic chemicals of expensive perfumes neutralize each other. The main ceiling lights were on. You could see the cigarette burns on the carpet. Down in the white tiled pit, rows of shower heads sprayed steaming water over twenty naked men languidly soaping each other. Gaby wondered, as she always had, where the Cascade Club bought its water.

Haran was on his throne in his glass-floored office at the top of the stairs marked ‘private’ in two languages. Leathercoat and the Skateboard Kid sat Gaby in a chair facing him and stood by the door. They did not think she might try to escape. They just wanted to look scary. Haran had one of them give her a moist wipe to clean the blood and brain off her face. When her condition no longer nauseated him, he spoke.

‘I’m disappointed. Really. I have to hear from others that you are back in my country. Gaby, I would have thought you would have called on your old friend and ally before now.’

‘You killed those Black Simbas. You fucking murdered them. They never stood a chance.’

Haran sat back in his ebony throne and contemplated the woman before him.

‘We are at war, Gaby. You yourself have realized this, by choosing sides.’

Gaby turned in her chair to accuse the Skateboard Kid.

‘He wanted to shoot Faraway. He wanted to blow his fucking head apart.’

‘He is tribe,’ Leathercoat said. ‘I would not let him do it.’

‘But it was exceedingly unmannerly of him,’ Haran said. ‘My own tribal brother. Flesh of my flesh. Would you like me to have him killed, by means of apology?’

He would, she knew. It would be a cheap price for Gaby’s moral anguish.

‘I don’t want any more killing. I’m sick of killing and dying, do you understand? I’m sick of it always being the easy option.’

‘There, Simeon,’ Haran said. ‘Now you owe the m’zungu your life.’

‘What do you want, Haran?’

‘Always to the point, Gaby. Very well. The posses are finished. The East African teleport is in tatters. The network of agents, operatives and enforcers has collapsed. There is no demand for the commodity I supply any more. Therefore, according to the laws of economics, I should relocate my industry to a place where materials and markets are plentiful.’

‘You want out.’

‘I speak to you without shame or guilt. I want out. I will get out.’

‘So you’re leaving Mombi to face the shit.’

‘Mombi thinks there is a place for the likes of us in the new Kenya. I have always lacked her patriotic fervour. Perhaps I lack her vision too. But what I know is that there is no place for Haran in this new nation. I will get out. You will get me out.’

‘You blow people away in the middle of City Hall Way on the long shot that I can somehow take you out as hand luggage? Sick joke, Haran.’

He rippled his fingers. Gaby could hear the joints cracking.

‘Excuse me if I do not laugh, Gaby. The news agencies have been getting their local people exit visas from the UN. I believe it should still be possible to make a late application directly to East Africa Command.’

‘If you know so much about it, then you’ll know it’s impossible without an affidavit from the station chief.’

‘Gaby, I have refrained from mentioning this so far, but I feel I have to remind you that you were forced to leave this country with your affairs unsettled. You will recall the considerable investment I put into opening the way for you to break the Unit 12 story; an investment for which I do not think it is unreasonable to expect a return.’

‘You’re calling in your marker.’

‘You owe me, Gaby. I anticipated there would be a problem with obtaining a new visa, so I will settle for a visa that has already been issued to someone else.’

‘Now you are joking.’

‘Shall I show you how my sense of humour works? I believe I shall.’ Haran nodded to Leathercoat. He and the Skateboard Kid left the glass-floored room. They were gone some minutes. Haran sat unmoving, looking at Gaby over the tips of his touching fingers. If Gaby had had a cigarette, she would have stubbed it out in his eye socket. When she heard the enforcers’ feet on the stairs, they sounded heavy, burdened.

They came into the office with Missaluba, the Black Simba bodyguard, between them. They had stripped her down to panties and epoxied her to a large sheet of melamine. They leaned her up against the wall of the office. She struggled, but the adhesive bond was permanent. Her lips had been glued shut.

‘Remain in your seat, Gaby,’ Haran said. Leathercoat moved behind her chair to ensure her obedience. Haran opened a drawer and removed an object which he set on the top of the ebony desk. It was a heavy-duty staple gun. Gaby had seen her father use such to staple wire fences. It could drive a half-inch staple clean into a solid pine post.

‘Hurt her,’ Haran said.

The Skateboard Kid took the staple gun and went to the woman glued to the board. He pressed the muzzle of the gun to her left nipple. He pulled the trigger. The woman grunted and tried to thrash on the melamine board, but the glue held her immobile.

‘I will get out, Gaby. You will get me the visa.’

‘Oh Jesus. Oh fuck. Haran, I can’t give you anyone else’s visa, they’ve got photographs.’

‘Hurt her some more.’

The Skateboard Kid pierced the other nipple and put a staple into the palm of each hand. Gaby wailed as if the staples had been driven into her own meat.

‘Why will you not help this woman?’ Haran said. ‘Is it because she is black? Or is it that she is African, and her life is cheaper than a European’s? Or is it because she is a woman that has not had children? You must hate her very much to let her suffer such pain.’

She matters, Gaby thought, head bowed. But so do the people you are asking me to betray. All I have is a choice of evils, and I am too white, too European, too sterile in my womb, to be able to decide between them.

She looked at her feet and shook her head. Her hair fell around her face, a covering veil.

‘So. Hurt her a lot.’

Smiling, the Skateboard Kid put a neat row of staples, two centimetres apart, into the woman’s body from forehead to pubic bone. Gaby surged from her chair, roaring and raving. Leathercoat pushed her back. The Skateboard Kid was meticulous in his work. When the Black Simba girl tore the skin off her lips in a cry of agony he stopped what he was doing to staple them together. Gaby threw every name and curse at him but the Skateboard Kid kept stapling, kept smiling. He had a hard-on. When he finished the vertical line, he started on her breasts. He swore when the gun ran out of staples after the first breast and he had to reload. The Black Simba girl had stopped screaming, She hung silently from the melamine board, insane with pain.

‘Stop it,’ Gaby whispered. She could not look at the thing on the white melamine board. ‘Save her. Help her.’

‘I am afraid you have left it a little late for that,’ Haran said. He had watched the slow crucifixion impotent of interest or arousal. ‘All you can do is determine when it will stop hurting. Her death is yours. I hope you have the courage to give it to her quickly.’

Gaby looked at the young woman’s eyes. Look what you have let happen to me, Missaluba’s eyes said. Look at this good body of mine, that I loved to live in, that was so fine and useful; look at how it has been ruined because of your cowardice, so that all it can do is die. All this that has carried me through my twenty years of life is spoiled and wasted, all the things it wanted and hoped for are sold cheap, because of you.

‘Kill her!’ Gaby shouted. ‘For the love of God, kill her. I’ll get you your visa. I’ll get you Faraway’s visa. Oh Christ, forgive me.’

‘That is good, Gaby, but it is not adequate. I must have my faithful deputies to manage my new operation. There must be someone in your organization who has a group visa. Dependants? A family? Relatives?’

Gaby buried her face in her hands.

‘Tembo,’ she whispered. ‘He’s taking his family out. Oh Jesus God, what am I doing?’

‘Where can I find him?’

She wrote the address on the slip of paper Leathercoat offered.

‘Don’t hurt them. You hurt them, you bastard, and I will hunt you down and kill you as slowly as you killed her.’

Haran looked at the slip of paper and gave it to the Skateboard Kid.

‘Do not be melodramatic,’ Haran said to Gaby. ‘You will do nothing.’ To his deputy, he said, ‘This is a family man. He will be easily persuaded. You do not need to use force with him or his loved ones. The threat is sufficient.’

The Skateboard Kid left on his mission. Gaby threw her head back, imploring any God at all to burn up her soul that had been torn out by the roots. She closed her eyes.

‘Haran. Your end of the bargain.’

She heard two shots in rapid succession. They were shattering in the confined office. When she dared to open her eyes she was alone in the glass-floored room.

They left her there with her horror and fear and guilt. The doors were not locked. Her guilt kept her prisoner. She thought of the life she had ended. She had killed that woman when she let the first staple be driven into her body. She had always thought she was one of the brave and the pure, who hated violence so much they would rather die than kill. How simply her illusions had been revealed. You can kill by inaction as much as action. You can kill by silence as easily as words. You kill by good intentions and the love of friends. You can kill by deluding yourself that the devil keeps sloppy accounts.

She thought about the Skateboard Kid coming to the crowded house two streets from terminum. She saw Mrs Tembo and Sarah and Etambele and After-the-Rains. She saw the Skateboard Kid standing among them and promising hideous things, and the children shrieking in fear.

She vomited on the glass floor. She willed herself to die, if it would do any good. But it would not. Dying never did any good. Nothing came from violence but more violence. Judgement was given on Gaby McAslan: traitor and murderer.

They found her lying on her back on the glass floor next to the dried vomit, staring at the ceiling. Leathercoat and the Skateboard Kid pulled her to her feet. She went meekly with them down to the main bar and through the back ways to the terrace cafe around the courtyard garden. There were no customers today. The waiters in white jackets with silver trays were all gone. The slow ceiling fans were still, the fountains in the garden silent. Haran was sitting at a large, glass-topped bamboo table on which stood an Ethiopic scripture case; the very fine one that had cost Gaby half a month’s wages, with half a month’s wages stuffed inside it, five years ago. Mombi sat opposite him, flanked by possegirls in lace and black leather. In the between years, Mombi had grown from enormous to monstrous. She was a moon now, a satellite swathed in black silk. She nodded to Gaby as the deputies seated Gaby at the table. Leathercoat stood at her shoulder, the Skateboard Kid took a seat beside Haran.

‘You will be pleased to know that the piece of data was extracted and is currently undergoing image processing,’ Haran said.

‘So whose face did you have to stitch up the middle?’

‘As I told you, family men possess wisdom. You should have known that I would not hurt a child.’

Then what had Missaluba the Black Simba been? You are old when the wasteland warriors start looking young.

‘I have what I require.’ Haran smiled his reptile smile. ‘Your debt to me is discharged. Our relationship is ended. You are free to go.’ The Skateboard Kid held the scripture case out to Gaby.

She took a deep breath.

‘You know what he’s planning to do,’ she said to Mombi. The big woman looked sideways at Gaby, but did not speak.

‘Gaby. Be wise. Be thankful. Be free. Please leave,’ Haran said. Still the Skateboard Kid held out the scripture case.

‘You know what this piece of data is that he wanted from me?’

‘Gaby; while you were my client, you enjoyed my protection. Now you are not, and that obligation is ended. Jackson, please escort Ms McAslan from the premises.’

Leathercoat swung back the tail of his leather coat to free his gun. Gaby was quicker. She hit him in the balls with the side of her fist and as he doubled up, she pulled out his gun. She found the safety, cocked the hammer, pointed it, two-handed, at Haran’s head. The Skateboard Kid dropped the scripture case and drew his weapon. It was big. He was cool, and smiling. He could hold it on a white woman one-handed, without trembling. But he was that second too slow and that made it a stand-off and not a clean blow-away.

‘Haran, tell him to put it down. Tell him to put it flat on the table. I can kill you. I will kill you.’

‘I am pleased to say that you have surprised me, Gaby. I am impressed. But what does this prove? Maybe I will die. You certainly will. More deaths, Gaby. Needless deaths.’

Gaby licked her lips. Her tongue was so dry it clung to her lower lip.

‘You know he’s going to run out on you,’ she said to Mombi. ‘That piece of information he wanted from me; it’s an exit visa. He made me betray a friend and his family to get it. He’s going out of this place tomorrow, Mombi, on the last plane. He’s leaving you, to sink or swim. He doesn’t give a fuck, Mombi. Everything you’ve worked together to achieve, all the trust you’ve built up, it doesn’t matter to him. His own hide does. He’s getting out and you can go to hell.’

‘Gaby, you are boring me,’ Haran said. Leathercoat climbed to his feet, face contorted in testicular agony. Haran waved him away from Gaby, away from the Skateboard Kid’s line of fire. ‘She is lying, of course.’

‘Why should I lie, Mombi? He let me go, why should I stay and put myself in front of his bullets for a lie? He’s running out on you, Mombi. You can’t trust him.’

The Skateboard Kid held the gun as steady and sure as death and justice. Haran looked at the beautiful Ethiopic scripture case on the glass table.

‘Kill her,’ he said.

‘No.’ Mombi’s leather girls were hideously fast. One stood off the Skateboard Kid, the other covered Leathercoat. Gaby’s arms ached but she held the bead on the bridge of Haran’s nose. ‘I will not allow it. Give her back the visa of her friend,’ Mombi said.

‘You believe this white bitch over me?’ Haran said.

‘Yes,’ Mombi said. ‘Get her her paper or I will kill your men and the m’zungu will shoot you where you sit.’

Haran smiled. It was like the skin peeling back from a skull.

‘Fetch the visa,’ he said to Leathercoat. To Mombi he said, ‘Now you show yourself for the fool you have always been. There is nothing here for us, can you understand that?’

‘The fool is the one who thinks he can run from the Chaga forever,’ Mombi said. ‘It will catch you in the end. That is why you will stay with me, Haran. You will come with me into the Chaga. There is a new network growing in there; its mesh is fullerene carbon, not optical fibre, but it can still feed fisherman with the skill to cast it and trawl its rich catch. You will work with me, Haran. We will reclaim everything that has been taken from us. We will succeed beyond all our dreams of greatness. It is the future in there. To stay out here is to be pushed into the past. You will not make it out here, Haran. There is nothing left out here but more and more of this. You should thank me, that I still offer you this after you try to betray me.’

Leathercoat cautiously placed two sheets of paper on the glass table top.

‘Put them in the box,’ Gaby said. ‘Give the box to me.’

‘Go now,’ Mombi said. ‘Get your friend out of the country, since he has decided he must go. Haran will not harm you. You are under my protection now.’

Gaby lifted the Ethiopic scripture case one-handed and cautiously backed along the balcony. The gun was fluttering now. The pain in her right arm was incredible.

‘Go!’ Mombi ordered.

Gaby turned and ran. She ran through the back rooms, and through the Cascade Club where the bar staff washed glasses and the boys played down in the pit. She ran down the steep street stairs. She met a posseboy coming up. She shouted at him, waved the big gun. He flattened himself against the wall as she exploded out onto the street and saw a phalanx of camouflaged picknis and army surplus APCs advancing down the street.

She stopped dead. The vehicles stopped dead. The wind stirred the lion’s head Black Simba cartel banners on their pennons and aerials. The door of the lead pickni opened. A black man wearing a fluorescent orange jacket stepped out.

‘It seems that you do not need John Wayne and the 7th Cavalry to come over the hill to rescue you,’ Faraway said. ‘But I think they are going to come over the hill anyway, because they have wrongs to right.’

Gaby ran and hit him like a free kick from the edge of the box. Faraway held on to her. He had always been a better goalkeeper than his cool allowed. He whirled her away through the battle lines as the Black Simbas advanced on the Cascade Club.

‘I got it,’ Gaby said, holding up the scripture case. ‘The visa. I got it.’ Then the shakes started. Faraway just caught the scripture case in time. He took Gaby to the main street and through the crowds of spectators hoping to see blood to a coffee stall. He bought her sweet milky Kenyan chai and sat her on the kerb until she could talk through the shivering. He eased the gun out of her hand, looked at it, set it aside.

‘I got out, Faraway,’ Gaby whispered. ‘I got Tembo’s visa back. Mombi made him give it to me. Don’t let them hurt Mombi, she saved me. They can do what they like to Haran.’

The sound of heavy automatic weapon fire came from across the avenue, and was answered by the short flat barks of shotguns and hand pieces.

61

Day Zero.

The crowd outside the gates on the airport road had been the worst Gaby had ever seen, but she had managed to push the Landcruiser and its passengers through, past the soldiers who looked as if they knew that they could only hold the wire so long. She had thought that once they were inside the airport it would be all right. She was wrong. The crowd inside the departures hall was worse.

They stood in the lobby between inner and outer doors. Tembo clutched his exit visa. Mrs Tembo clutched After-the-Rains. Sarah clutched her best doll; Etambele clutched her favourite toy, which was a matted furry pencil case. They stood with their identity badges pinned to their clothes and looked at the crowd. It was almost religious; so many people so close in such a confined space. Souls wedged in a glass and concrete box, awaiting exodus, or judgment.

‘Oh my God,’ Gaby said.

Doubtless important PA announcements went unheard and unheeded over the babel of voices in the concourse. The people were too densely packed to obey them.

‘There are people in white uniforms at the check-in desks,’ Faraway said, seeing over the heads of the crowd. ‘We have the camera with us, the News Team trick might work again.’

‘With children and luggage?’ Gaby asked. She took a deep breath to prepare herself for the annihilation of the crowd. Faraway plunged into the crowd, swinging one hundred thousand shillings of video camera like a riot baton. Tembo and his family tucked into his slip-stream. Gaby took the rearguard, waving a microphone and shouting, ‘SkyNet News team! Let us through, please!’ The way Faraway smiled as he elbowed you away from the check-in desk, you would feel he was doing you a personal favour.

‘Five to travel,’ he announced to the woman in UN white at the desk, who did not care if people jumped the queue as long as her ticket out was safe in the back pocket of her pants. She checked the exit visas and tapped information up on her screen. She took such a long time doing it that Gaby wanted to drag her out of her little booth and press any key, every key, that might do something. The woman studied the words on her screen for a long time, and the visa for a longer time. She took Tembo’s passport and examined it for the longest time. She checked the names of wife and children against the passport and the exit visas and the screen. She checked the photo badges against the passport and the visa and the screen. Then she gestured for them to put their bags on the scales. Baggage allowance on the relief flights was one piece each, adult and child. Tembo and Mrs Tembo had managed to reduce it all to two big cases, which they dragged, and a backpack for Sarah. Etambele had not wanted to be left out, so she had a backpack too, a little cloth one Mrs Tembo had sewn together. It held her dolls’ clothes, one dress and her washing things. Gaby did not think she could be so merciless with personal possessions. Take little, leave little, lose little was her professional motto. The UN woman looked at the bags, but did not move to weigh or tag them.

Gaby was about to scream.

Faraway was about to hit the woman with the camera.

Tembo was fidgeting from foot to foot.

Mrs Tembo was transfixed with a dread that had begun with the Skateboard Kid and would not end until she breathed in the clove breezes of Zanzibar.

Sarah and Etambele looked about to burst into tears.

The woman at the desk rattled through a box of rubber stamps, picked one and looked it. Then, so suddenly that everyone almost missed it, she stamped the visas, tagged the bags and printed out boarding cards.

Tembo beamed as if Jesus had touched his brow. Mrs Tembo hugged him, her children, Faraway, and even Gaby. Faraway shepherded people and bags through the departure gate.

Down on the field, the big Antonov mass lifters were wing-tip to wing-tip, winding black threads of refugees into their cargo bays. Blue-helmets with clip-boards waved the people along the edge of the apron. Gaby’s hair blew in the hot back blast from the taxiing airlifters. Tembo and Faraway fought with the suitcases. Mrs Tembo pressed the precious boarding passes closer to her than even After-the-Rains. Sarah and Etambele struggled determinedly onward with their back packs.

A blue helmet stopped the line while a plane moved off its stand onto the taxiway. He checked Tembo’s exit visa and Gaby and Faraway’s press cards and sent them to the next aircraft. It was a little An72F. It had a Cyrillic name stencilled on its side. Dostoinsuvo. Gaby knew it would be all right now. She could trust them to Oksana’s care, the shaven-headed, shaman-angel of the turbofans. A woman was standing at the foot of the tail ramp collecting boarding passes. And Gaby realized that this was it. They were leaving her. She hugged Tembo.

‘You are the best goddam cameraman I ever worked with,’ she yelled. ‘I will miss you like death.’

‘There is no death,’ Tembo yelled back. ‘Jesus has beaten it, ten nil. We will meet again, as surely.’

‘Thank you for saving us once, and then saving us again,’ Mrs Tembo said.

That is the way to think of it, Gaby thought. Twice-saved. That way your ordeal and the Black Simba kid’s death do not go for nothing.

Faraway hugged Mrs Tembo, who pretended to be scandalized, and the children, and then Tembo. He held his dear friend a long time, like a man does who knows he will never see this dear friend again.

‘It will be good in Zanzibar,’ he shouted. ‘It is like paradise down there in the spice island. Maybe not your paradise, but my paradise. Sun, sand, cool palms, cool beer, warm nights, hot hot big-breasted women who smell of cinnamon and cloves. Listen, I can hear them weeping for your great gift, Tembo.’

Tembo and his family gave their cards to the woman and they went up the ramp into the belly of the big plane and Gaby could not see them any more. She and Faraway stood back and waited for the plane to fill and the ramp close. They shut their ears to the astounding blast of Lotarev engines lighting up at once. Dostoinsuvo moved off its stand. Until now, Gaby had not been certain Tembo and his family were safe. She waved, knowing it was supremely unlikely she would be seen. The plane turned at the end of the runway, made its run and took off.

‘Ah,’ Faraway said, watching the smoke trails turn over the distant towers of Nairobi. He sounded like a man who has felt part of his body die.

‘You’ll see him again; you’re his Deputy Station Manager, for goodness sake.’

‘I will not see him again. I am not going to Zanzibar. I have been decided on this for a long time, Gaby. I told you that night at Tembo’s, when he and I tried to make an African out of you: when the time came, I would take my chances with the Chaga. I am not leaving. The Chaga is the future. It is Kenya as she should be. I want to be part of that. Tembo has children to fear for; he has made the right choice for him. But me, what kind of future could it be without the incomparable Faraway?’

‘You pick your moments, man.’

‘Some things there is never a good moment to say.’ He smiled. Gaby could not resist it. ‘Surely you know that the only reason I stayed so long is because I thought I would get the chance to fiki-fiki the woman of my dreams. So I go to the new world happy now, because how many men in this world have made the woman of their dreams howl like a jackal?’

‘You.’ She play-punched him.

‘Gaby, I know you do not love me. I do not need you to love me. I am happy, like I said. It does not hurt me that you still love Shepard – I have seen you try to hide the look on your face every time his name is mentioned. I heard you shout his name when the bomb went off on Jogoo Road. At least you had the good manners not to shout it when my bomb went off inside you. Listen, I am such a great guy, I will tell you where you can find him. He is at the Kenyatta Conference Centre. They are clearing out every last trace that UNECTA was ever there. Hurry. You may still catch him before he leaves for here.’

She found herself running

She found herself pounding through the incongruously deserted arrivals hall, a running woman with ten cleaners waltzing polishing machines over the mosaic floor.

She found herself struggling into her colour-of-the-day vest as she hooted her way through the evacuees outside the main gate. She hoped she had not killed anyone as she rammed the zebra-striped Landcruiser toward the open sunflower of the Kenyatta tower.

Two Polish Sokol utility helicopters flanked the entrance to the Centre. White UN trucks were scattered around them. A mobile crane was trying to lift the bronze UNECTAfrique emblem off its plinth. People bustled like city-building termites in and out of the doors with trolley-loads of documents and filing cabinets. The cordon of soldiers stopped Gaby half-way across the square.

‘Press,’ she said, waving her DF108 in the soldier’s face and pointing to her orange jacket. He politely barred her way. Incredible, that nations gave people like this licence to kill in their name. She emptied a golden stream of Krugerrands out of her purse into her hands. ‘All right. How much?’

Two did it.

She grabbed a civilian loader by the arm, swung her around, sent her armful of document folders spinning across the coloured tiles of the square.

‘Dr Shepard. Where is he?’

The woman frowned. Gaby left her to her scattered files and arrested a tall Sikh with a UNECTA badge pinned to his turban.

‘Dr Shepard. I have to find him.’

‘Fifteenth floor.’

This time, as on that first morning when she had stood awed in this cavernous foyer and felt she was a member of a great invisible communion, no one gave Gaby a second look. She pressed the elevator button, pressed it again, hit it three times as if that would make it come any faster, but all it did was go up and keep going up, so she took the stairs. After five flights she slumped against the window, gasping. The thought of Shepard finishing up there and pressing the elevator button to go down gave her strength for another five. Panting, heart smashing against her ribs, she leaned her forehead against the glass. She could see the imperceptibly curving event horizon of terminum across the northern suburbs. The pillars of the hatching towers, each as tall as the Kenyatta building, receded into the distance like the watch towers of some monstrous rampart. Like Jake before him, Faraway was bound for that. Did it have to take all the men she cared about? Tembo. She had done right by Tembo, in the end. Children made things different, difficult. She saw columns of smoke rise up across the city. Things burning down there. Killings. She thought about the vengeance the Black Simbas had visited on Haran and his posse. She had seen the smoke go up from the Cascade Club when they torched it, but she did not know what had happened to Haran. She hoped he was dead, and that Mombi had survived to make it across the line into the coloured country beyond.

She closed her eyes, willed her heart to slow it’s beat.

Shepard.

She kicked open the door to the fifteenth floor and fell through it.

‘God,’ she whispered, ‘I’m dying.’ She picked herself up and ran along the curving corridor, opening each door she came to and shouting ‘Shepard!’ into the room. Every room was the same; a pie-wedge of carpet, glass wall and abandoned tube steel office furniture.

‘Shepard!’

She could have missed him. She could have been round this corridor a dozen times. Where were all the people? The Sikh had said they were up here, clearing out fifteen. They had moved on. They had moved down. Elevator well. They might still moving stuff into the elevators. Check there. She did and saw the sliding doors close on an elevator-load of civilians laden with cardboard boxes. At the front. Right between the closing doors. Looking right at her.

‘Shepard!’

He recognized her. His eyes widened in surprise. He opened his mouth to speak. He started forward. And the doors sealed in front of him. Gaby wailed and hit the call button with the heel of her hand. The illuminated numbers above the door rapidly diminished, stopped abruptly at eight. Gaby rushed out of the elevator lobby back to the stairs. Fifteen. Fourteen. Easier to go down than up, but not much. There’s a lot of gravity in that central stairwell. Don’t look down between the handrails. Thirteen. Twelve. Turning on to eleven, she saw it out of the window and stopped dead.

The big bat-winged thing came in silent as a secret wish across the smoky skyline of Nairobi. It did not seem natural in the air; it seemed to fight and dodge the air currents, side-slipping and swooping and warping its leather wings. It flew by defiance, and thus Gaby knew, with fundamental certainty, that it was going to hit the tower. It was going to hit the tower two levels below her, on the ninth floor. She knew she could not make it. She stood on the eleventh floor landing and watched the thing swell to fill her vision. Bat wings obliterated the view. She cried out and covered her face. The thing hit the Kenyatta tower like an artillery shell. Gaby reeled toward the big drop at the centre of the stairwell as the building shuddered. She stared into the abyss and threw herself back. Clangings and distant crashings of falling objects rebounding from the stairwell walls came from beneath. Gaby ventured as close as she dared. She could hear a high-pressure hissing; water lines broken, or the doodlebug releasing its spores?

The thing had demolished outer and partition walls and had wedged itself into an office adjoining the stairwell. From tenth to eighth floors the stairs did not exist. Sulphur yellow flowers were already breaking out across the concrete walls; the carpet of the shattered office was bubbling into a stew of pseudo-fungi. Slimy ropes of Chaga stuff hung down the stairwell. Already it would be working on the elevator cables. There was no other way down. She was trapped.

Towering un-ferno.

She thought that was a pretty good joke to think up when you are climbing for your life from voraciously devouring Chaga. Up. It was the only way. The only hope. By twenty-two, her legs were screaming. She stumbled into an office that looked over Parliament Square. The cordon of soldiers were running to their carriers. The convoy of trucks was forming up and moving up. The helicopters had started their engines. She picked up a tube steel chair and smashed the window. No one looked up. She threw the chair out. No one saw it fall.

‘You cannot leave me here!’ she yelled. ‘Shepard, you cannot do this to me!’

He had seen her. He knew she was here. He would be watching to see who came out of the foyer. He would not abandon her. What would he do? He could not come up the tower to rescue her. Helicopter.

She climbed, delirious with exertion and pain. The top. To the top. Top of the world, Pa. Girl Reporter In Skyscraper Rescue Thriller. She could not remember how many floors there were in the Kenyatta Conference Centre.

The stairs ended on her and she opened the door. Sun. Light. Wind. Heat. Altitude. Vertigo. She was in the centre of the central flower at the top of the tower. Steel petals inclined away from her. Don’t look at the edge. Don’t look up. Don’t look down. Then what do you look at?

A helicopter lifted past, close enough for her to feel the down-draught. It turned to the west, toward the airport. Gaby took off her orange press jacket and waved it over her head.

‘See me, you fuckers! It’s me. I’m still here. Come and get me. Come on, Shepard, don’t let me down now.’

Gaby waved her orange jacket and shouted and shouted and shouted.