Chaga

62

The crab ran along the tide line, hunting. It scuttled in and out in time to the gentle run and flow of the foam-edged water. Its legs left little pin-point prints in the white sand. The sand was not native to this place. It had been brought, like the rest of the long, narrow peninsula, by truck from another place. It was part of the contract that the builders environmentally enhance the two-mile strip of land-fill trash. Between the white sand and the edge of the grass, you could see the bones of the thing: the cans and the cars and the twenty million black plastic refuse sacks. That was what made it such a good place for the crabs, and the gulls, and the waders in the shallow water between the peninsula and the shore.

Nothing on the tide today. Not even a rotting condom washed up from the resort hotels down the coast. The crab ran up the beach to clamber through the trash line. It was a big bastard; its shell was the size of your hand, and the colour of a hard dick. It wore its fighting claws the way a punch-drunk middleweight gone to fat wore his gloves. The crab gobbled with its feeding mandibles and tasted it. It darted sideways and tugged at something wedged under the creased black belly of a trash sack. A rat had died here and rotted. The crab tore and tore. It tore a leg right off with its battle claws.

The gull had been watching the big crab from a hover twenty feet up, waiting for its moment to swoop and steal. It saw the crab wave the rat leg in its claws. It dived. It crawked in its throat at the crab, flapped its wings, stabbed with its beak. It was bigger, smarter, meaner; all the crab had was a thick shell and dumb obstinacy. It held on. The gull danced after it, pecking. The crab backed all the way up on to the grass. The crab could go as easily backwards as forwards or sideways. The gull did not let up. The crab led the gull across the tough, salt grass. At the edge of the concrete it made its stand. The gull stabbed and weaved. The big crab held up its fighting claws and circled.

Suddenly all the birds in the tide water flew up at once in a clatter of wings. The crab fought his corner. The gull paused in its assault and put up its head. It sensed the disturbance that had made the others take to the wing. It gave a fuck-you caw and jumped into the air. The crab was too dumb and too greedy and too short on senses to learn from what had spooked the gull. It chewed its rotting rat leg. It was only when it felt the rumble through its legs that alarm penetrated the dumbness. It ran, chewed leg held high. It looked for crevices and crannies. There were none in the tough grass of the artificial peninsula that would hide a crab this big. It reversed on to the concrete. It was that dumb.

The wheels missed it, but the fire got it. Three thousand degrees of liquid hydrogen combining with liquid oxygen cindered it: the blast bowled the wisp of chitin ash down the runway.

The circling birds came down, flock by flock, into the shallow water in the lee of the peninsula. In the big trailer park a mile to the south, the people whooped and cheered and applauded as the vapour trail of the HORUS carrier body curved skyward.

‘Ten miles out, fifty thousand feet,’ said a fat man with a beard in an ugly hat and a T-shirt with Fort Lauderdale in ‘10: World SF Convention printed on the front. He was watching the sky with a pair of binoculars.

‘Carrier separation in mark twelve minutes,’ said an equally fat, bearded man wearing an equally ugly hat. His T-shirt had a picture of an old-style space shuttle and the words National Astronautics Society: Per Ardua Astra. He had a radio jacked into his ear.

The people followed the HORUS upward. There were five thousand of them in the trailer park this day. Thousands more watched from other approved viewing areas, or the beaches, or the off-shore pleasure cruisers. But the serious ones, the true BDO freaks, were at the trailer park. It was like a festival. There were licence plates from forty-eight states of the Union and beyond on the ass-ends of Winnebagos, RVs, trailers greater and lesser, station wagons, pickups with tents in the back, monster trucks, motorcycles. A nomad village of tents had grown up along the dune side of the park. Family-sized trailer tents, one man pup-tents. Folding gas barbecues, sterno stoves, camp-fires of scavenged driftwood carefully ringed with stones. Boots set outside for the night. Terracotta beer coolers evaporating in the shade. Awnings, wind breaks, sun-shades.

It was a festival of space. Like all the best festivals, it was free. The acts up on the big stage were the daily HORUS launches, but like any festival worth going to, it was down in the tent and trailer town, among the sex and drugs and booze and free philosophy and easy conversation, that the real action was found.

The people were moving away from the viewing stage. The chase planes were coming in to land on the two-mile artificial peninsula jutting out into the ocean. The hyperbola of smoke was blowing away on the breeze from off the sea. Clouds clung to the horizon; a tropical storm was moving out there in the Atlantic. The meteorological satellites were tracking its progress up the Gulf Stream. The odds were slightly over evens that it would come ashore. Heavy weather warnings were in force from Fort Lauderdale to Daytona Beach. If it hit Kennedy, it would shut down the HORUS launch program for days, and the free festival down in the trailer park. The name of the tropical storm was Hilary.

‘Launcher separation successful,’ the man with the ear radio said. ‘Isaac Asimov is climbing into transfer orbit. Unity rendezvous in twenty-seven minutes.’

His fat friend smiled and nodded sagely.

Gaby McAslan walked back to the SkyNet news van. It was a good angle; the incongruous fusion of Right Stuff and Hippy Chic. The guys in the van much preferred it to the hotels where the rest of the world news were bivouacked. But then, Gaby reckoned they got action every night, in the back of their SkyNet US van. Right now the men were comparing the tape unfavourably with those of previous launches.

‘Night ones are best,’ said the one who called himself Rodrigo. ‘Whole fucking place lights up like a fucking Christmas tree.’

‘Here’s that stuff you asked for,’ said the other, whom Rodrigo called The Man, though he was years younger. ‘What you doing with this anyway?’

‘My job,’ Gaby said, and took the minidisc recorder and pin-head mike. Pin-head Mike would be a better name for The Man than The Man. They were both jerks. Not for the first time since coming to cover the BDO story, Gaby wished she had her Kenya team with her. That could not be; both her men were prisoners of the Chaga; Faraway literally, Tembo in that he had been refused a visa to enter the United States. Potential biohazard threat from exposure to mutagenic substances, the Consulate in Zanzibar had said. You are a black African was the truth. The race and fear barriers were going up already. Gaby had been closer than Tembo to Chaga virons in the last days of Nairobi, but she was the right nationality, the right race, the right colour not to get turned back at the yellow line.

In her room in the Starview Lodge across the lagoon, Gaby wired up and pulled on the ugly uniform she had bribed from the chambermaid at the Kennedy Ramada. She checked herself in the mirror. The recorder was invisible. She had reception call her a taxi to the Ramada. The SkyNet car would have been dangerously obvious. The driver dropped her at the staff entrance.

UNECTA had come in force to Kennedy Space Centre to stage-manage humanity’s close encounter with the Big Dumb Object. They overwhelmed the capacity of NASA’s launch facility. A dozen hotels, motels and travel lodges as far south as Canaveral had been seconded to house the overspill of BDO people and their inevitable entourage of media and society hangers-on. The Kennedy Ramada was the hub of UNECTASpace’s operations. No press or celebrity sniffers here. The doormen and bell-boys had the scent of a journalist’s soul, and the men in suits they summoned had hard hands. Now that Ellen Prochnow – Chief Executive of UNECTASpace – had taken residence in the Presidential suite, the hard hands had been backed up with big guns. Which was the reason Gaby Mc Asian in her bribed chambermaid’s uniform was hurrying through the kitchens and store areas before someone realized they did not recognize her.

The material had been hard-picked – a hint, a clandestine meeting, a file copied, a database hacked – and painstakingly assembled, but Gaby now had the evidence to put to Ellen Prochnow. UNECTASpace was part-funding Operation Final Frontier with pay-offs from biotech corporations and the armaments manufacturers, seduced by the prospect of developing weapons systems from Chaga biological packages. The humane bomb that destroys the enemy’s ability to wage war without harming humans. Winnable wars. All the letters, faxes, interviews, depositions, codes and passwords were on the disc in her breast pocket. Care to comment, Ms Prochnow?

Gaby nodded to Gloria, her inside woman, in the corridor to the service elevator.

‘She is in, I assure you,’ Gloria whispered.

Her husband has probably already snorted the two thousand dollars up his nose, Gaby thought. Was the makeup a little too heavy around the left eye? Cover. You need cover. She ducked into the laundry room and grabbed a hanger-trolley of clothes ready to be returned to their owners.

‘Next car, please,’ she told the room-valet waiting on the next floor up. All Irish people can do convincing American accents. The illuminated numbers blinked on and off above the door. Gaby amused herself by looking through the clothes on the rail.

She hit the emergency stop button.

Gaby took the hanger down and examined the garment closely. The print on the T-shirt was faded from years of washing, but it was clearly a teenage nun with her habit up, luxuriously masturbating.

Gaby sat in the corner of the elevator for a full minute, staring at the T-shirt while the call button lights flashed. She put the T-shirt back on the rail, went down to ground, pushed the trolley through the lobby to the reception desk and asked for a pen and paper.

‘Give that to Dr M. Shepard, please,’ she said. She left the trolley by the desk and went out the front door, past all the staring political-space-BDO-Chaga people. She had caught a glimpse of a television in the public lounge. A glimpse was enough to identify Ellen Prochnow’s unmistakable First Lady of Space styling, and the words Live Relay in the bottom right corner.

Thanks a lot, Gloria.

63

Another country, another press conference. So many amphitheatres of seats, so many tables and chairs and carafes of water and nervous scans of the seventh row and the clear of the throat before the ‘Good morning, ladies and gentlemen.’ Getting old, Gaby McAslan. Getting cynical. Getting weary. One last big miracle and wonder and that will do me, all right? Getting lonely, in your seventh seat of the seventh row, with all these faces around you that you know so well, but who never become more than faces.

Has he got that note yet?

No. Don’t think about that. Think about Rodrigo and The Man going to get her that contact with the Pink Underground. That would be a hell of a story to break. The symbs were breeding sub-cultures like clap in a brothel; it was politically inevitable that there would be gay communities springing up in the vast Chagas of Ecuador and southern Venezuela. Not surprising that there should be a secret underground railroad funnelling white norte homosexuals across terminum. No homophobia or persecution there. No fear of the Scourge.

Weeks could pass now without thinking about Jake Aarons.

She thought about Shepard again. It is only two hours since you left him that note. He probably hasn’t got it yet, yet alone meditated on his response. Just what is he doing down here anyway?

Ellen Prochnow was taking this press conference alone. She had never been shy about being seen on the pale blue screen. That was a Chanel suit. Style never goes out of fashion, Coco had said.

God, what if Shepard didn’t show?

Ellen Prochnow did the scan of the seventh row. Hi. It’s me, the one with the red hair, right? You don’t know me yet, but by the time Any Questions is over, we’ll be better acquainted. A whole lot better. Ellen Prochnow did not do the nervous throat-clear. She was a professional.

‘Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen.’ The half-smile was very good. ‘Welcome to Kennedy Space Centre for the briefing on Operation Final Frontier Mission 88. Most of you probably know who I am—’ small laughter ‘—but for those who have been on some other planet than this or the Big Dumb Object, I am Ellen Prochnow, Chief Executive of UNECTASpace, and I’ll be introducing you later to the crew and expedition team of Mission 88, the HORUS Arthur C. Clarke.’

How many biotech salarypersons among them, Ellen? Gaby thought. How many weapons analysts?

‘First, the latest on our Big Buddy up there. As of 11:30 GMT September 18, the Big Dumb Object is in a trailing position to Earth at a range of seven hundred and twenty thousand kilometres, slightly under three times the distance between the Earth and the Moon. The Swarm has dropped into a trailing position 15,000 kilometres behind the BDO and we are assuming it has become dormant. Estimated Time To Earth Orbit is two hundred and fifteen hours thirty-eight minutes. Achieved Earth Orbit will be on Thursday September 27 at 10:22 GMT; that’s about twenty past five in the morning EST, or Last Jack Daniels and Then I’ll Get Some Sleep, Florida Journalists’ Time.’

Don’t smile at your own jokes, Ellen.

She rattled through the reports on the state of the Big Dumb Object. What little Gaia could photograph through the five slit windows that ran the length of the cylinder indicated that the ring mountain baffles had solidified into partition bulkheads five kilometres thick, though gravitometric analysis seemed to indicate the presence of large spaces up to three kilometres in diameter inside the walls. Gaia was being re-tasked for low-level passes over the window slits to attempt to map the interior prior to human exploration. Yes, alien intelligences were a possibility. Even the Chaga-makers themselves. So was Harvey the six-foot invisible white rabbit. Any more questions?

Not yet, Gaby thought. Wait until the Great White Major Toms are smiling for the cameras before you pull out your j’accuse.

‘You can pick up the latest releases from Gaia and the Hubble and Chandrasekahr telescopes at reception on the way out,’ Ellen Prochnow said.

‘I’d like now to introduce you the crew and mission team of the space plane Arthur C. Clarke. This will be Mission 88 of Operation Final Frontier, HORUS launch thirty-four from Kennedy Space Centre. Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Commander Phillippa Gregory, orbiter pilot Damon Ruscoe, Flight Engineer McAuley Trudin of the Arthur C. Clarke, and her mission team.’

People applauded. Gaby expected them to come on in a high-kicking chorus line, but it was just another load of smiling, waving bald-headed astronauts in white coveralls with UNECTASpace’s crescents-and-Earth logo on breast and back. The shaved heads were something to do with preventing hairs drifting around Unity, Gaby had heard. The station was already well over capacity, and Final Frontier people were being shipped up faster than the space engineers could bolt new sections on and fill them with air. Gaby liked the idea of the success or failure of First Contact hanging from a stray, free-floating pube. The hairlessness suited the blacks much better than the whites, who all looked grim and refugee-like. So which is the weapons expert? Gaby thought, leaning on her folded arms and watching the mission team shuffle out from the wing and form a semicircle behind Ellen Prochnow. You, big black man with the happy expression? You, little white woman with the look of naked terror on your face? You, Captain Lantern-jaw Marine-face with the much-too-nice-eyes that give it all away?

You?

You.

‘You,’ Gaby breathed at the twelfth coverall from the end. ‘You cannot do this to me, not here, not now.’

64

There was a launch that night. It was only an SSTO freighter -they barely gave the things mission numbers, they were that lacking in glamour – but it made a lot of noise and sent up a mighty impressive pillar of flame across the lagoon. The space-junkies and rocket-fetishists who had not gone across the causeway to Trailer Park were crowding around the Starview Lodges telescopes on the upper level to ooh and ah. Gaby had the terrace bar to herself. The other journalists derided her for her choice of the hippy, dippy, New-Agey Starview Lodge over less eclectic expense account hotels down the coast and across the lagoon. Gaby stayed here because Gaby liked the vibes and the clientele. It reminded her of Africa. It reminded her of the Watchhouse. Its keel had been laid the same year that Unity’s had been welded together in low orbit, and it had grown in symbiosis with the renascent space age. Nowhere else did they hold nightly BDO-viewing parties, as socially and aesthetically charged as any Japanese cherry-blossom-watching picnic. And there were no news people.

‘Expecting someone?’ Nice Eddie, the bar boy she did like, asked her.

‘Hoping someone,’ she said and sucked her piña colada and watched the faintly luminous pillar of cloud from the rocket launch blow away on the wind from the ocean. It was getting up; Tropical Storm Hilary must be dithering between strange attractors out in the Bahamas. Gaby waved her swizzle stick in the air. Come, storm, come. If a butterfly’s wings in Beijing could summon up a hurricane, surely a swizzle stick with a Saturn Five rocket on the end at the Starview Lodge could command Hilary to storm hard against this coast, rock this wooden ark of a hotel on its moorings, rage over all the HORUSes and launchers and SSTO over the water and press them to the ground, and blow Shepard back to me. Blow me hours, blow me days of him, before he gets into his rocket and flies away from me.

He was taking his time coming. But he was still politely late.

Gaby sought out the BDO in the sky. That bright star in the belly of Pisces, resting on the edge of the world. How would it look when it went into orbit? They were talking about a position half-way between the earth and the moon. She looked at that great light in the sky and tried to calculate apparent diameters. A bright blur. Maybe even a recognizable cylinder. It would go through phases, like the moon. It was a moon. Fourteen day orbit.

What will it look like to Shepard, in Unity, or on High Steel, that hair-raising surf-shack of girders, solar panels and environment tanks they had built out there the final stepping stone to the BDO. Too big to be a space ship; a planet on your doorstep. That was probably the only way to look at it and stay sane.

She ordered another piña colada from Constantin, the bar boy she did not like. He was impolitely late now. And he had managed to shaft her question to Ellen Prochnow. Stand up and play Wicked Witch of the Seventh Row in front of the man you begged to come and see you to tell him how sorry you are, how you’ve changed, how you’ve found him in your thoughts every day.

Bamboo wind chimes clocked against each other. Blow wind, come to me. Listen to me, I cannot lose him to cosmic irony.

Up on the telescope deck they were talking passionately about centrifugal gravity.

‘Any messages for me at reception?’ she asked Nice Eddie.

‘Not last time I looked.’

‘Could you look again?’

He looked again. There were still no messages.

‘He’s late,’ Nice Eddie said.

He is three piña coladas late, Gaby thought. Three piña coladas late is looking-like-he-isn’t-going-to-show late. It’s he-doesn’t-want-to-see-you late. It’s this-is-the-end-of-it-Gaby-McAslan-late. The fourth piña colada is the longest one, the one over which you work out what you are going to do with the rest of your life now. It would need to be the longest one Emilio at the bar ever shook. She did not have a plan if he did not come. It is a terrible universe, she thought, that such tiny moment, such atoms of decision, are the fulcrums on which whole lives and futures swing. Strange attractors of the soul; like that storm she had tried to charm with her swizzle stick.

He was not-going-to-show late now. He was never-going-to-show late.

‘He didn’t turn up,’ Nice Eddie said as she picked small change out of her purse to leave as a tip.

‘Doesn’t look like it, Eddie.’

She stood up to leave. And there he was, asking directions at reception. The girl was pointing right at her. The strength went out of her legs. She sat down, suddenly terrified. She realized that she did not know what to say to him.

She found herself scrabbling in her bag for cigarettes that had not been there for five years.

‘Gaby?’

‘Oh. Hi.’ Caught, flustering. ‘Sit down, oh sit down; Eddie, a Wild Turkey with branch water, isn’t that what it is? and I’ll have another piña colada, I did remember right, didn’t I? It is Wild Turkey?’

‘You remember right.’

She found she was doing anything but look at him. She forced her eyes towards him. He is not a man who suits having no hair, she thought. It made him look like an impostor of himself. He had bought a new outfit, one of those Indian-inspired two-pieces that were the fashion. It did not flatter him much either, but he looked comfortable in it.

The hideous idea that a woman had bought it for him froze her heart.

‘I like what you’ve done with your hair,’ Gaby said, trying to restart.

Shepard ran his hand over his scalp.

‘Still a bit grey and scaly. I like what you’ve done with yours.’

Gaby smiled self-consciously and touched the soft curls.

‘Got fed up with the old Joni-Mitchell-sings-Big-Yellow-Taxi look.’

‘Shorter suits you,’ Shepard said. ‘I’m sorry I’m so late, I’m sure you thought I wasn’t coming. They sprang a surprise meeting on us. Seems Hilary out there has decided she’d like a vacation on the coast and they wanted to warn us in case they had to push the launch date forward.’

‘Can they do that?’ Nice Eddie brought the drinks. Shepard paid for them in Space Centre scrip.

‘Personally, I don’t think so. They’ve rescheduled the Gene Roddenberry launch, which is Mission 86, for oh-nine-thirty tomorrow but the speed this storm’s coming, I don’t think they’ll even make that. Forecast says it’s due to hit about twenty miles south of Canaveral around oh-seven-hundred.’

Oh, Shepard, they’ve got you talking like them, Gaby thought.

‘You weren’t on the flight roster,’ she said. ‘It was a hell of surprise finding you in the line-up at the press conference.’

‘Hell of a surprise finding myself in that line-up.’ Shepard took a long draw from his drink. The wind was stronger now, lifting the paper coasters, rattling the paper lanterns. It is blowing in from Africa, Gaby thought. ‘Every mission specialist has a back-up. Day before yesterday, Carl Freyer went down with some mystery virus he caught off a hotel air-conditioning system – that’s the risk you run when you exceed the capacity of your quarantine accommodation – and they need someone with specialisms in Chaga nanochemistry and in-field experience. They gave me five days to get my stomach muscles up to high-gee lift-off standard. Four hours a day in the gym, the rest in centrifuge training, practising suit manoeuvres in the water tank, or team building. I can hardly move, I am so stiff and sore.’

‘You’re actually on the expeditionary force.’

‘Not the First Wave. Not the ones who go up to the door, knock, and then wait and see if anyone answers. I’ll be going through with the Second Wave; Teams Yellow and Green, once the beach-head is established.’

‘I can’t imagine what it will be like.’

‘Neither can I. The boy from the plains states, up on the Final Frontier. Riding the High Steel. Scares the fuck out of me, Gaby.’

Scares the fuck out of me too, Gaby thought, listening to the rattle of the wind chimes and the voices from the deck above. All the things I want to say, I need to say, I have practised for four years and nine months, are in here and all that comes out is shallow, bland, polite, pleasant drinks conversation. I’m scared to say them, Shepard. I’m scared to have my words rip you open again.

‘How did you know I was at the Ramada?’ Shepard asked.

‘Journalistic cunning.’ No, she would tell nothing but the truth tonight. ‘I was trying to sneak up to Ellen Prochnow’s suite – I’ve evidence I want to present to her that arms corporations are pay-rolling Final Frontier for seats on the shuttles and first refusal of the expedition findings. I didn’t get to see her, but I did find a certain well-remembered T-shirt.’

Shepard laughed. It had changed with the years. It was a dark, wise laugh now, with old blood in it.

‘And by the way, thanks for sending the helicopter back for me,’ Gaby continued. ‘It saved my ass.’

‘I remember an old riposte to that quite well,’ Shepard said. ‘I couldn’t leave you stuck up on top of the Kenyatta Centre with the Chaga climbing up underneath you.’

‘Never got a chance to thank you. By the time I got to the airport, you were gone. So my ass thanks you now.’

Shepard raised his glass to her.

‘I accept your ass’s thanks. What the hell were you doing up there anyway?’

‘Came to see you,’ Gaby said. Came to tell you I was sorry, that I was wrong and bad and cruel and hurt you because I was hurt and that I wanted it all back the way it was when it was right and good and dirty; that she did not say.

Shepard hesitated. He is going to change the subject, Gaby thought.

He changed the subject.

‘Was it bad, afterwards?’

‘Yes. At the end, very bad. It was killing, all killing; killing for the sake of killing. They threw everything they had at the Simba Corridor, but the Black Simbas held it open for two months. Half a million people went up it into the Chaga before they pulled it in after them. Faraway – do you remember him? The tall Luo with the dirty mind – he stayed with me until the very end.’

‘I remember him,’ Shepard said. The look on his face was that of a man taken by his memories to a place he does not wish to go.

‘When they started shelling the airport and the UN stopped the relief flights and it was really scary, he got me out. We managed to put a call through to the coast before the net crashed; then he drove me cross-country at night, through the skirmish lines, to a place where they could put down a plane to pick me up. Do you remember Oksana Telyanina?’

‘Was she the one who was some kind of mystic; a shaman, was that it?’

She was the one said she could put an An72 down anywhere, Gaby thought, and she could. After the night of bouncing across the hostile bush, never knowing when they were going to run into another armed scouting party and whether they would run out Krugerrands before they ran out of people they had to bribe; it had been incomparable glory to see that ugly, beautiful jet coming out of the dawn light, down on to that dirt road, and the red dust pluming out behind it. It took more than natural power to fly like that. It took more than natural friendship to grant a favour like that.

‘And Faraway?’ Shepard asked.

‘He stayed behind.’ She saw him, with the dawn light full on him, standing on the hood of the 4x4, waving ecstatically as Dostoinsuvo made her take-off run. Smiling. He had been smiling, even at the end. ‘But he’s all right. He’s doing good. He’s some kind of mover and shaker in the new nation. When the East African teleport came back on line – the Green Net, they call it – he got in touch with me. The thing’s up to handling data transmission. Some folk get love letters. Faraway sends me lust faxes.’

‘I can’t imagine what it’s like in there,’ Shepard said. ‘That sounds strange coming from someone who’s seen as much and been as deep as any other human. It’s the tourist thing, nice to visit, but I can’t imagine living there.’

‘They say there are hundreds – thousands – of independent, self-sufficient communities all across what used to be the White Highlands. If you don’t find what you want in the place you’re at, you take a few like-minded friends, find a spot that suits you and the thing will grow you a customized village. The Ten Thousand Tribes is the current sound-bite.’

‘But we lost Nairobi. Tsavo, Amboseli, the Mara. Kilimanjaro, Kirinyaga, the Rift Valley. All gone. I miss them. I’m not certain that what we’ve been given in exchange compensates. How long before Mombasa goes?’

‘It’s got a couple of years.’ And Kikambala, and the banda there, and the beach where your children played, and the reef where they swam, when it was as good as it could ever get. You are not talking about the Chaga taking things away. You are talking about time, and change. You are talking about death. She knew that if she did not say them now, the things would go unspoken forever, and it would be as dead for them as if he had thrown her note away and never come to the Starview Lodge.

She laid her hands on the table, palms up. They were trembling.

‘Shepard, I’m sorry. I hurt you. I was crass, insensitive, selfish, treacherous, crazy; I was a hundred different sins that night, all of them deadly.’

‘You found the one wound, and you went right for it.’

‘I always do. It’s a talent of mine. It makes me good at football and terrible at relationships. I can’t help it, I probably won’t ever be able to stop it, pressing them where it hurts most. But I don’t do it deliberately. Shit, Shepard, it only works on people I love.’

‘Like now?’

‘Does this hurt?’

‘Does it ever not?’

‘How long is ever?’

‘Four years and nine months and I forget the days.’

‘Oh shit,’ Gaby McAslan said. ‘I think I’m going to have to cry now and my mascara will smudge and everyone will know. Did you really think of me all that time, Shepard? You can lie to me about this. I won’t mind, but try and make it sound convincing.’

‘Who’s lying?’ Shepard said.

‘Liar,’ Gaby whispered. ‘Do you forgive me?’

‘Long ago.’

‘Then why the fuck,’ Gaby said, in a voice so low it could hardly be heard over the rising wind, ‘did it take you four years nine months and you forget the days to tell me?’

‘A thousand stupidities. A thousand mistrusts. A thousand fears. Men are emotional cowards.’

‘You were scared? Of me?’

He said nothing. Fair comment, she thought.

‘That’s a pretty lame excuse, Shepard.’

‘What’s yours?’

‘I didn’t know if you would talk to me, let alone forgive me.’

‘Me, forgive you? But when I saw you that instant in Nairobi, in the Kenyatta tower…’

‘When I came looking for you.’

‘Exactly.’

They looked at each other over the table. The wind from out of Africa set the candle flames bickering in their glass jars and bamboo blinds billowing.

‘Do you remember in old Tom and Jerry cartoons when Spike the dog used to do something dumb?’ Gaby asked.

‘And his head would turn into a braying jackass’s?’

‘Exactly.’

‘Hee haw hee haw.’

‘I am going to cry now,’ Gaby McAslan announced.

While they made fools of themselves and each other, the voices from the telescope deck had grown louder, as had the noise from the main bar, which had gradually filled until all you could see were people’s backs pressed against the glass. Suddenly someone discovered there was an outside, and the doors slid open and the people inside poured out outside. They rushed to the rail. They seemed to be expecting an event.

‘Robert A. Heinlein’s coming down early because of the storm.’ Shepard had to raise his voice. As he spoke, miles of runway lights went on across the lagoon. Pentagrams and hexagrams of power, section by section. A hush fell over the space-watchers. ‘Is there some place quieter we could go?’ Shepard asked. ‘Someone’s bound to recognize my hair-style and want to talk to me about space.’

‘There’s my room,’ Gaby said. ‘It’s down by the pool. No one goes there, it’s not on the space side of the hotel. We don’t have to go into my room; we can just sit around the pool if you like.’

They agreed to sit on the edge of the pool with their feet in the water. Gaby listened to the stratospheric rumble of the chase planes up on the edge of the storm, hunting the in-coming shuttle with battle radar.

‘How can you contemplate this?’ she asked. She watched the circles of ripples spread out from her gently moving ankles and interfere with each other.

‘They say it’s just like a bus with wings.’

‘That pulls four gees, with five hundred tons of high explosive up its ass.’

‘If you got the chance, you’d do it too.’

Without a second thought, she said to herself.

‘Aaron’s coming down for the launch,’ Shepard said.

‘How old is he now?’ Gaby asked.

‘Almost sixteen. Terrifying amount of growing in four and a bit years. He likes me to think he’s coping well, he’s cool, he can tough it out, but he’s overcompensating. He was at the age when children use their bodies instinctively when it was taken from him, and he tries to make up for the loss with wheelchair sports: archery, basketball. He wants to train for a marathon. He pushes himself too hard – he’s just a kid still.’ Shepard emptied his glass and set it to float in the pool. The ripples carried it out into the deep water. ‘There’s an operation they want to try. It’s something they’ve developed in Ecuador from symb technology. They can splice symb neural fibres on to human nerve endings. If it works, he would walk again, run again. Be like he was. He won’t admit it, but he’s scared of it. I think he likes to be extraordinary. I think he’s afraid to go back to being an ordinary archer, an ordinary basketball player, an ordinary long distance runner. Is that a terrible thing to say about your son?’

‘Shepard, I don’t know what to say about Aaron, and Fraser. It just seems… wrong. That most of all. Wrong; an offence against nature. It’s not meant to happen like this. Parents aren’t supposed to outlive their children. Parents aren’t supposed to bury them and grieve for them and try and live the rest of their lives while thinking every day about what they should have been doing, where they should have been, what they should have achieved and experienced.’

‘It was the clothes that killed me,’ Shepard said. ‘Going through the closets, gathering all the things he used to wear; the shirts and the pants and the T-shirts and the shoes and the underwear. I couldn’t see them without seeing him in them; all these clothes he had chosen because he liked the shape or the colour or the pattern or the fashion, that he loved to wear. Laying them out and thinking, he won’t change into this T-shirt any more, or put on these short pants, or decide he feels like wearing this hat today. Things for which he has no more use. I gave them all away. I couldn’t even bear the thought of Aaron in them as hand-me-downs.

‘It’s like a fire underground, Gaby, that’s been burning down there in the dark for years, that dies down in one place and you think maybe it’s gone out, but it’s just moved somewhere else. There are coal-mine fires in Pennsylvania that have burned down under the earth for whole lifetimes.’

‘I envy you that fire,’ Gaby said. ‘Really. Truly. My ovaries kick me every time you mention their names, Shepard. I goggle at babies in buggies. I linger in children’s clothing stores; the sad woman by the 0 to 6 months who’s too scared to pick up and feel that cute little red dress. My biological clock is saying “Hurry up now, it’s time.” Looming thirtysomethinghood. I always envied you your kids, did you know that, Shepard? I used to think I envied their claim over you; now I know it was that they were kids that I envied. I’m tired of having nothing outside of me to care about.’

The wind was blowing hard now, flapping their clothes, ruffling the surface of the pool into wavelets that swamped the whiskey glass and sent it to the bottom of the deep end.

‘Gaby,’ Shepard said, ‘come and swim with me.’ His voice was thick with want. He stood up, took off his Indian-style suit that did not really flatter him. His body was as hairless as his head. ‘It’s how we train for freefall. Swim with me, Gaby. I love to see women in water. Women swimming.’

Dizzy with anticipation, Gaby stripped down to her panties and followed Shepard into the pool. He was waiting for her in the deep water where the whiskey glass had sunk. She swam towards him, pleasuring herself in the slide of water past her body. So wet women do it, Shepard? She trod water beside him.

‘Shepard, in all those years, was there ever anyone else? Is there anyone else now?’

‘No one who it would break me to lose. You?’

It would be too complicated to explain about Faraway, and she had still not clarified her feelings about the thing with him. It had seemed like a breaking of something or a curing. A healing. A whole-ing.

‘No,’ she said.

The HORUS orbiter Robert A. Heinlein passed over the Starview Lodge, and the man and the woman treading water in the deep end of the pool, with a mighty rushing sound. It thumped down on the main runway across the lagoon. Gaby heard the space watchers at the back of the hotel cheer and clap. She wriggled herself close to Shepard, tucked her fingers into the waistband of his shorts.

‘All body hair?’ she asked, innocently.

‘Let’s find out,’ he said.

Gaby yelled with laughter. The wind gusted and boomed around the Starview Lodge’s many eaves, and the water of the pool became a dance of droplets as the rain came striking down.

65

Aaron came down from Minneapolis on the second day of the storm. He made it in an hour before they closed the airport. Gaby hardly recognized the lean, fit, almost-sixteener in a wheelchair. He remembered Gaby. He seemed glad to see her. His memories of her were all good; he happily shared them with Gaby as she drove the hire car through sheets of gusting rain to the Ramada where Shepard had reserved a room. She wondered how he would take the news that she was moving into the Ramada at the same time.

Tropical Storm Hilary’s visit to the coast would not be soon forgotten. She blew in to the south, moved north, thought about heading back out to sea for a day or two, then decided she liked the south and went down there again. She left behind her a litter of gutted trailer parks, snapped palm trees, felled billboards, roofless Pentecostal churches, de-awninged gas stations, shorted power lines, breached sea defences, scuttled pleasure cruisers, Pearl-Harbored marinas and thirty-foot yachts in supermarket parking lots. In the five days of her progress, she dumped three months’ rain on the dry coast.

Gaby McAslan never looked at a swizzle stick again without a prick of awe at the power eight inches of fluorescent plastic could wield.

As she had prayed, Hilary wrecked the HORUS launch program. When the wind dropped beneath forty, the occasional SSTO struggled toward the grey clouds, cheered on by space junkies in waterproofs and plastic rain sheets. The UNECTA hotels filled up with newspersons drinking out the storm and shaven-headed Final Frontiersmen moping nervously around the corridors in their UNECTASpace white sweats, like a convention of Bad Ass Buddhists. Gaby spent as much of the storm as she could in bed with Shepard. When she could not be there, she took Aaron to look at rockets in the rain, or view the launches with Rodrigo and The Man, or watch the figures in bulky white space suits way down in the deep water training tank, or moving in the Virtual Reality simulators like old men practising Tai Chi.

‘Quick Gab, infect me with something nasty but non-lethal,’ Shepard said as the television weather girl declared that tropical Storm Hilary had bottomed out and was filling from the south, wind speeds were dropping and the whole system was predicted to spin itself to nothing over Bermuda.

‘You’re right about Aaron,’ Gaby said, rolling herself up in Shepard’s sheet. ‘He tries too hard.’

‘You’ve noticed it,’ Shepard said from the bathroom. He was plastered from head to toe in UNECTASpace depilatory cream. Yellow storm light shone through the cracks in the racing grey rain clouds.

‘When I’ve been out with him, yes. Everything is too much. Nothing is relaxed, natural. Shepard, I don’t think it’s himself he’s doing it for. I think it’s you.’

‘What do you mean?’ he shouted over the sound of showering.

‘Remember, back in the Mara, when you said that Fraser would be the one would make hearts and break hearts and everything would come to his fingertips, but Aaron would have to work hard for everything he wanted to achieve, but because of it, the world would know his name?’

‘You’ve got a long memory.’

‘I think living up to that expectation is the most important thing in his life. Everything he does is to prove to you that it is worthwhile for him to be alive while Fraser is not – that he can be not just Aaron, but Fraser too.’

Shepard stepped out of the bathroom. He looked more alien than ever, naked, smooth, wet.

‘Oh no, Gaby.’

‘It’s the damage that we do and never know, Shepard.’

He shook his head, and started to pull chin-ups on the shower rail.

On the television news, the anchorman reported that the Swarm’s new position fifteen thousand kilometres behind the BDO and inactive status were now confirmed. ETTEO was now one hundred and twenty-two hours twenty-seven minutes.

They ate that night at the Starview Lodge, because the food was great and undersubscribed and there was no better place to watch the Ursula K. Le Guin come down out of orbit. The space-junkies were soft people and gave Aaron a place right at the rail. As they watched the landing lights come on block by block, Shepard said, ‘I’m sorry about the Unit 12 thing, Gaby. I did my best.’

‘I know. T.P. told me that you’d leaked it to Dr Dan. You didn’t have to resign for me, though. It scared me. Shepard; that’s why I was so insane that night. For the first time, I was utterly helpless. I couldn’t do anything to stop them. I was disappeared. I was annihilated. I was an un-person. Nothing. It was like being dead, Shepard.’

The spectators all began to cheer as they caught sight of the black delta of the orbiter in the clear yellow evening sky that had come behind the storm.

She knew that would be the last evening. They called him at midnight for the pre-flight medicals, tests, briefings. Gaby and Aaron said all the goodbyes they needed to say in the hotel lobby. The mission co-ordinator was getting ratty because they were taking so long to say them.

‘Mind Aaron.’

‘Aaron can mind himself.’

‘I never asked; where do you go after AEO?’

‘Back to Tanzania. T.P. Costello has talked UNECTA into taking me on one of your deep patrols. I’m going in to see these Ten Thousand Tribes, meet the people of the future, get their faces on television.’

‘I’ll be in touch when I get back.’

‘And how long will that be?’

Shepard shrugged. ‘Ask the Evolvers. But when I do, I’d really like to see Ireland with you; the places you talk about; the Watchhouse, the Point, and your people too.’

‘Go with God, speed-skater.’

‘I’ll write.’

‘Ha ha.’

‘Watch me.’

The minibus door slammed.

Gaby and Aaron ate and drank and talked in the hotel bar until they could see dawn streak the sky outside the glass lobby. There was no Heineken, but Gaby reckoned Aaron would be all right on Miller. It was the right kind of drink for a kid whose father was about to rendezvous with an alien artifact. They found some time just before dawn that they got on fine for a son and a lover.

In the morning they talked with Shepard in the White Room on a videophone. Both agreed that he looked petrified. They did not repeat the farewells of the night before. Farewells did not carry over videophone, and anyway, to them he had already left the planet.

Shepard had got them complimentary passes to the Executive Viewing Area inside the Space Centre. Gaby fought with a NASA official about access for Aaron’s wheelchair and intimidated him into giving them seats next to the Presidential box, which today was occupied by Ellen Prochnow. Gaby noted this, and also the neat NASA binoculars everyone was given. She wondered how many pairs they expected to get back.

It was a good day for a launch, hot and clear. High pressure had come in on the tail of Hilary. Some pools of rainwater still stood on the grass beside the taxiway but the main strip had been dried during the night by special vehicles. Heat haze boiled off the concrete. The HORUS was a dark, predatory shadow, as improbably elongated as a hunting insect, moving within the shiver of the haze. It glided from the big hangar, along the taxiways to the end of the main runway and turned.

At ‘I minus sixty seconds on the big count-down display, the tractor unit disengaged and dashed like a photophobic beetle for its blast-proof bunker. The digits clicked down on the big counter. Everyone resisted the temptation to count along with the final five. This was not New Year. The clock reached zero.

A mile and a half down the runway, nothing happened in response to this.

Then Gaby screamed because it seemed to her as if the spaceship had exploded in a ball of smoke and flame. Then she saw a black shape hurtling out of the fire towards her. The tricks of the heat haze were dispelled. It was big. It was fast. It was riding on a tail of fire, coming right at her. Gaby’s heart leaped as the carrier body passed in front of the stand and, quite unexpectedly, quite improbably, quite magically, lifted into the air.

The noise was louder than anything she had ever heard in her life. She could scream her head off and no would know. She did. She watched, roaring in exuberance, the launcher go up, and keep going up, in a beautiful asymptotic curve, the HORUS orbiter clinging to its back like a thrilled child. The smoke blew away on the wind from the south, but the space ship kept climbing, over the artificial peninsula of the launch runway, over the tide water waders and the gulls and the big crabs, over the space-freaks and the rocket-fetishists down in Trailer Park, over the day-trippers in the jolly boats, over the green water of the Gulf Stream, still climbing. Nothing could bring it down now.

‘Ten miles out, fifty thousand feet,’ said the fat, bearded man with the ugly hat in the T-shirt with Fort Lauderdale in ‘10 on it.

‘Carrier body separation in mark twelve minutes,’ said the other fat bearded man, with the equally ugly hat and the T-shirt with the old-style shuttle on the front.

In the executive viewing stand the people who had seen all this before were leaving for their corporate hospitality suites, but Gaby McAslan’s face was still turned to the sky. She watched the brilliant speck of the rocket exhaust until it disappeared into the high blue.

‘Fucking hell!’ she shouted to Aaron. ‘Bloody fucking hell! Wasn’t that the greatest thing you ever saw?’

‘Are you crying?’ Aaron asked.

‘Of course I am,’ Gaby said. Then she saw Ellen Prochnow gather her entourage around her and head to the door of the presidential box. Fumbling in her handbag, Gaby ran along the row of seats, tried to get over the low partition wall.

‘Hey! Excuse me! Ms Prochnow! Could you spare me a wee minute of your time?’