Ian McDonald - Chaga

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.