Kirinya, page 19
‘She should not have to.’
Silence for a time.
Gaby shivered, then said, ‘I thought it was a good trade; all the fucking things for the information.’
‘So that was how you bribed Constanz.’
‘Ah, shit… I thought maybe, one big, bad night, and I’d be out of it. Out the far side. Clear. Jesus, right now, if you were a patch user, I’d kill you for one. And if you didn’t have one, I’d cut out your liver and eat it. It builds up in the liver, did you know that?’ Her muscles clenched. The shaking began. Gaby barely pressed the words out through chattering teeth. ‘Fuck… If I didn’t want to die so much, I’d be amazed at the things my body is doing to me.’
‘You don’t want to die.’
‘Trust me in this: I’m forty-five; if I only had about thirty, forty years left, maybe I could handle that, but to feel like this, be like this, indefinitely…’ She cried out as cramp stretched her tendons like violin strings. ‘Water…’
She downed less than half of the six cups Faraway brought her. ‘Sorry, sorry,’ she would whisper as she slopped water over him. The shakes passed. Faraway laid Gaby out on the bed.
‘Faraway.’
‘What?’
‘That question you asked me on the beach?’
‘Yes.’
‘I think you have your answer now.’
‘Gaby.’
‘I can’t. I’m not. Just…just don’t ever talk about this to me again.’
Faraway sat on the edge of the bed looking at his reflection in the dark window. After a time he heard a sigh and turned round to see that Gaby had curled up into a foetus. Her thumb was in her mouth. Her breath was short and fast. Faraway combed her hair back from her face. Her eyes rolled wildly under their lids. Staring at terrible things.
Staring at terrible things. Faraway challenged his reflection until it surrendered with the approaching dawn. Grey light filled the little wooden room. The hulls of the townships were masses of darker darkness. They rested in the night to feed: ground-penetrating tendrils beneath Sub-One’s belly siphoned up minerals and organic material to convert to fuel.
‘Hey.’
‘How long have you been awake?’
Gaby was curled on her side, facing Faraway.
‘A while. Looks like it’s going to be a lovely day.’
‘Yes, I think so,’ Faraway said. ‘How do you feel?’ ‘Like a warthog shat in my head. Stupid. Embarrassed. Guilty as all fuck. I’m sorry, Faraway.’
‘It’s all right.’
‘No it’s not. I think I said that last night, didn’t I?’
‘You said something else, about working with me.’
‘I remember I said don’t ever talk about that to me again.’
‘You did. I’m sorry.’
In the growing light, substance separated from shadow. People were abroad on the plain, engineers checking the motility units; surveyors charting the day’s march of the Fwa nation. Giraffe moved through light bush; in silhouette they seemed like vowels from an organic alphabet. Zebra grazed, nose to earth. A kilometre east, Township One slowly raised its vast front left boot. It took a step. Back left lifted, slid forward. By steady five metre paces, the townships followed the rains.
Silent fans gave no warning of approach. Suddenly the airship was half the sky of the man and woman in the little cabin. It hung fifty metres off Sub-One’s prow. Its passenger could be clearly seen standing by the port window: a black man in a white robe.
Cimarron.
‘No,’ Faraway said. ‘You should not be here, so soon. What has happened?’
Kariokor lifted, revealing the Harambee roundel on its belly. It came in for landing on Sub-One. Faraway leaned back, stretched tight muscles in his neck.
‘There is a Luo proverb,’ he said. ‘Never judge a day by its dawn.’
37
The morning Corrupt Carmine died she shaved and oiled her head. She put on her most attitudeful footwear and a red polymer box jacket she loved very much. Then she cleaned her large white teeth, slid her serious shades up her nose and went to collect her sawn-off Landrover from the car pool, where Useless Moses was supposed to have fixed the sticking front brake. He had not. It made a whistling grating noise as she drove down the dirt road from Samburu base to the airfield. The flight crews and the aeronautical advisors gave her sympathetic looks as she drew up to collect the ministerial briefcase she was to take to Marsabit. Today her route would incur a lengthy detour, south-east to Kinna, down on the edge of terminum. In old Kenya it had been a game lodge; now years of disuse and decay were returning it to soil. She often drove out of her way to this place. In its collapsing dining room she conducted the secret meetings between the UNHCR and the Missionaries of the Harambee.
Corrupt Carmine had been a Harambee agent for three years.
On the day she died she did not go to Kinna. She did not get through the gate on to the Marsabit road. Today there were soldiers on the wire gate, and a KLA hummer parked right across the road. Corrupt Carmine stood up in her Landrover and tried to bluff the soldiers out of her way, then joke them. They did not move. It was then that she knew that they knew.
They slashed her tyres with bayonets.
She tried to run then, but footwear that is good for attitude is bad for running. The boy soldiers brought her down on the main runway like hunting dogs. They yipped and howled in anticipation. The aircrews and advisors turned away.
By the time the soldiers had brought her to the hummer they had stripped her down to her boots and her shades. They spread-eagled her across the hood of the vehicle, they tied her open with tow hawser. They tied her face up. They wanted her to see what they were doing. There were twenty soldiers. Each took five minutes to rape her, each had two turns. The second time some of the soldiers wanted to try new things, like bottles and gun muzzles and bayonets. There was a big cheer when the guard dog was brought up.
When the boys and men and dog had all taken their turns, the soldiers took Corrupt Carmine round to the back of the hummer. They bound her hands with hawser, then ran a length to the tow bar on the back of the vehicle. A thirteen-year-old in purple combat gear took her shades. They were too big for his pinched face. They left her her boots. She would need them.
The US military hummer as supplied to the Kenyan National Liberation Army has fifteen forward gears. This enables it to drive long distances over rough terrain at low speeds that would shred the gear-boxes of civilian 4×4s. They took Corrupt Carmine out along the Losesia road. Twelve kph. A comfortable jog. After five kays she was still running so they went cross-country. They took her through acacia scrub. After three more kays they saw she was no longer upright, so they increased speed to thirty. After half an hour they hit the East African Highway. It was good, fast road that went straight back to Samburu, so they pushed the hummer up to its maximum eighty-five.
An hour after setting out the hummer returned to Samburu. At the end of the steel hawser was half a woman. Serious boots, feet, shins, legs, did not exist. A bloody stump of spine, abraded to sharp point, protruded from a lower abdomen glistening with black flies. The soldiers unhitched what remained of Corrupt Carmine and took it to the camp. There they hung her by her wrists from the wire. The people who lived there needed an example. As a final touch, the kid in purple combats was ordered to give Corrupt Carmine back her shades. He set them on her face, but in the absence of a nose they kept falling off, so after five tries he decided God was telling him something, and kept the glasses himself.
Antinka had completed the preflight checks. The fans were powered up. Kariokor was ready to cast off from the roof gardens of Sub-One. His lower left hand hovered over the sensor ready to retract the loading ramp and seal the belly doors. Then the mad m’zungu woman with the tattoos came running through the rum-cane waving her arms and shouting.
Fans dropped to idle. Faraway met Oksana at the foot of the ramp, in the shadow of the curving hull.
‘Faraway, take me with you.’
‘Why?’
Cinemascoped on her eyelids, Oksana saw Corrupt Carmine the last morning Dostoinsuvo flew into Samburu, sunlit and grinning in disbelief at the tits of the Hungarian porno women. She saw the girl warrior on the Gichichi road, the wave, the smile before she disappeared into deep forest. She thought, if you were an isopath, you would see what I am seeing, you would feel what I am feeling, and that would answer you.
Oksana said, ‘Carmine was my friend.’
‘There is no place for personal feeling in the diplomatic service,’ Faraway said.
‘Like you and Gaby?’ Oksana said.
‘What could you do?’ Faraway said after a time.
‘I could fly,’ Oksana said. ‘I’m a fucking soldier, I can’t make things up on my own, I need orders. I need it like it was in the UNECTA days. Someone tells me what to do, go here, do that, take that there, bring that back, I do it. No questions, no hesitations, no complaints, it’s done. Jesus and Mary, you need couriers, you need someone to run errands for you.’
‘Can you fly one of these?’
‘No.’
‘What can you fly?’
‘Aeroplanes.’ Proper, God-honest, heavy-lifting, brute force aerodynamics aeroplanes. Turbo-powered, fuel-swigging, noisy, brash, busting aeroplanes. That you could take up and put down and would love you and do anything for you. That would drop you out of the sky if you ever fucked with them, that were always dangerous that way, and so exciting, because it was a love affair based on lust, not trust.
‘If we had fixed-wing aircraft, I could certainly use you.’
‘Is that a promise?’
Faraway considered a moment.
‘Yes, it is.’
‘An aeroplane will be provided.’
Faraway was much amused.
‘But I will need you to take me to Kirinya.’
‘That is reasonable. How long do you need to pack?’
Oksana held up a small leather backsack.
‘Right. Then we go to Kirinya.’
The ramp was closing even as Oksana sprinted up it.
38
The proposition was so outrageous that Anansi flipped up the dark lenses over his glassless glasses to scrutinize its finer points.
The café balcony clung to the curved face of the tenement like a cummerbund around a full belly. It overlooked the intersection of the main roads from Kanja and Nembure. Throngs of people passed through the junction and paused to talk and trade news and change matatus and shop and eat or drink from the many stalls. Oksana Mikhailovna thought, it is good to have a city around me again; lost among people, their voices, their smells, their public pettinesses. The maître d’ in his impeccable white shirt had cleared a couple from the table in the corner for Anansi and his guest. Whispers and nods quelled complaints. Coffee came at once, with crisp almond fingers.
Anansi the spinner bent over the scroll of sketches weighed down at the corners with empty espresso cups and the repro Alessi coffee-maker. He smiled wryly.
‘When I said that Mombi owed you a favour, I hadn’t imagined that you meant an aircraft.’
‘Is my credit no good in this town?’ Oksana said.
‘Mombi never welshes,’ Anansi said in his immaculate Russian. ‘As you know, manufacturing costs are never a problem, though I think we will need to build this thing in situ. The difficulty is that it presents certain, ah, design challenges.’
‘Surely you’re man enough for them,’ Oksana teased.
‘Please,’ Anansi said. He had grown a small belly in the months since Oksana had last seen him. Business was huge now that they had won the coffee war. Only five Uplanders had been killed, and they had all been members of the rival family, thus legitimate targets. The new war was with a group running buckyware out of Kirinya over the front line. Mombi had already lost control over several processor packages. The Runners enjoyed heavy protection. Destroying them would be troublesome.
Everywhere is war, Oksana thought, aspirant dog-soldier of the Harambee.
‘You do want it exactly like this.’ Anansi sipped his coffee.
‘As much as possible.’ High tail, high-wing, engines over wing. Big empty belly, carry anything, anywhere, like a mother. Dostoinsuvo reborn.
‘I can see there being a problem with the VTOL capacity. We wouldn’t have access to Ukrainian aeronautical engineering designs, I doubt even the old Nairobi university databases would carry that information. I’ll have to go to Nawa to get it out of the North, and she will cost.’
‘How much?’
Anansi held out his hand. Oksana took it. She felt her eyes widen at the feel of the wealth in Anansi’s buckybrain; contrasted with her own poverty.
‘Hm,’ Anansi said. He stirred his coffee with his almond crisp. ‘I understand you are trained in Siberian shamanism. This is something that interests me very much; the similarities and differences between African and Siberian shamanism. The idea of a universal spiritual language intrigues me. Would you be prepared to discuss this with me, here, for an hour a day, until the aircraft is made?’
‘This is your price?’
‘I will shake Nawa, and you will give me an hour of your time.’
‘Shamanism.’
‘Yes.’
‘No subtext, no ulterior motive, no fucking me about?’
Anansi flipped up his dark lenses.
‘Would I?’
Yes, she thought, but not that way.
The first fake Lexus took Lenana and her new partner L’Oriente to the sports ground in Kiamutugu where Oksana had flown away on God Speed!/James Bond: the Killer! Zul had been an early casualty in the war against the Runners. Foreknowledge of the future could not save her from an assassin who was a brother precognitive. Zul and her killer had hunted and hidden through the moiré pattern of intersecting predictions until he stepped out of the least probable of futures and gutted her from sternum to clit. L’Oriente dressed in black rubber catsuits and was fast. Very fast. Neural accelerators pumped her reaction speed to five times human norm. She and Lenana went to every door. Favours were called in. Manners enforced. The big cats were most effective at that. Goalposts were taken down, footballs confiscated, children told, politely but unrefusably, to play down someone else’s street while the hardware team set up its things that looked like diseased tree stumps in the centre circle and watched them spin their cocoon.
The second Lexus took Anansi and Oksana Telyanina to Nawa the ware-woman. She lived in a courtyard garden with fountains and blue tiles and formal plantings in Moorish style. Nawa was a tall, wire-thin Galla in her late twenties. Her short cropped hair was bleached white. Her cheeks were pocked by childhood diseases. She sat at a tiled table among flowering shrubs and served mint tea while her visitors explained what they required of her. Then she shook Anansi’s hand and went to do her work. As she rose from the table Oksana saw what the bushes had concealed: the thick, flesh-coloured umbilicus hooked into the base of her spine by a gnarl of neural taps.
Her orthobody crouched on its muscular, corpse-blue chicken-legs in a bower of climbing roses and japonica. As Nawa stepped out of her silk dress, it opened to receive her. Lips of flesh sealed, the neural implants plugged her into Planet Net. The symbiont took a step forward on its clawed feet. Oksana thought of the shuffling townships of the Fwa nation. She thought of the hut of Baba Yaga loping through the forest on chicken legs, hunting children. She could not look at Nawa’s scarred, pretty face cowled in folds of red flesh.
The ware-woman closed her eyes.
‘We can go now,’ Anansi said. ‘She is out there.’
Nawa had the schematics down from Kiev before Oksana was back at her cheap guest house. The Lexus squeezed a cell memory from its nervous system. While slipping it into the breast pocket of his jellaba, Anansi almost managed to martyr most of a religious procession toting a black madonna around its parish. Oksana had forgotten his formidable driving.
‘Now I evolve paradigms and then let them kill each other,’ Anansi said. ‘We should have a fit survivor by morning. Remember, first discourse, eleven o’clock. The maître d’ is holding a table.’
But what they talked about the first session was what Anansi was doing that could build a vertical take-off repro Antonov transport aircraft out of soil and shit. ‘In diamond,’ he added. ‘It’s cheaper. And safer.’
It was a Darwinian thing. Anansi spun codes into fullerenes, machine DNA, replicated them, mutated them, set them down in an arena. Design solutions the size of molecules fought and fucked and traded and cannibalized each other until the one that most efficiently fitted the parameters survived.
‘The design parameters are the environment,’ Anansi said. ‘The population evolves to fit it. Normally, that would be it, I’d let the things loose in a reactor, but complex machinery is more a symbiosis of parts: this is just the airframe, I’ll have to generate separate blastulas for the control and power systems and graft them on to the skeleton.’
‘You’re not a engineer, you’re a gynaecologist,’ Oksana said.
‘And a gardener as well, a primer and grafter of nanocarbon bonsai, if we’re going to martyr metaphors. Now, could we talk about this idea of the world-tree?’
‘You eat too many of those almond roll things,’ Oksana said.
Anansi had told Oksana that there would be nothing to see for several days, activity was on the atomic level, but she took a mopedcab over to Kiamutugu that evening. The minders—two short-contract local boys over-enamoured with the big guns they had been given—nodded her in. She pressed hands and face to the two-metre sphere of semeny liquid in the centre of the web of beam and girders and imagined she could see the seethe and heave of reproducing buckies.
‘The characteristic of the world-tree is that it is constantly renewed,’ Oksana told Anansi at their next meeting. There was political unrest in the streets; a group of men carrying home-painted Harambee banners were noisily confronting a second, bannerless group. ‘It is eternal return; souls are born on its branches like fruit; the place of the dead is beneath its roots, they are drawn up through the roots and reborn. Our lives are written on its leaves, when a leaf falls, a man dies. Its branches hold up the sky—the twenty-seven heavens, though the worlds are only close in the sense that different branches of a tree are close because they grow from the same trunk.’
