Kirinya, page 2
The trees and the Great Wall and the landscapes hidden behind it and the creeping animals of the coast had no sign for Gaby McAslan.
Serena’s fingers seized and tugged a coil of her hair.
‘Ah! Shit!’ Gaby said, and understood, and laughed, and tipped the quivering blood thing into the hole and quickly covered it with earth.
As Gaby went carefully back down the path to the beach she sang her daughter Motown soul classics that were old before Gaby had been born. The beach crabs were all down under the high water. The white birds that had pecked at the bloody footprints rested on the surface, top-heavy, as if the next gust might capsize them. The ribbons of dawn cloud had broken up into soft black beads, moving fast inshore under a strong wind running at a thousand metres. There would be rain on the coast before noon.
Gaby clambered over the slumped palm trunks, splashed through the sea-run around the thick red wrists of the hand-trees. She heard Hussein’s radio before she saw him at his boat, pulled up under the wall of the dead hotel. He was tuned to one of the new stations beaming out of Malindi. It played morning music, bright, intricate guitar sounds and funk-Swahili DJ-babble. Hussein was scraping polyps from his hull. He liked his boat smooth and straight and lean and long. He was a tall, hairless Giriama with a streak of mission-widow Masai, and a devout Moslem in the way that all men who go on the sea are devout. They respect God, but not religion.
‘Gaby. And Gaby’s child.’ He spoke hotel-English and hotel-German. Before the hotels were swept away he had run glass-bottom boats and snorkel tours to the reef. ‘You know, my uncle’s people used to fry it with onions and curry spices and eat it in chapattis.’
‘That,’ Gaby McAslan said, ‘is disgusting. Is the Mermaid still open?’
‘There was noise coming out of it when I went past half an hour ago.’
‘You don’t know if the Phoebe thing has happened yet?’
‘Gaby, I sail boats.’
‘Yeah, yeah. You’re taking her out today?’
‘Every day there are wetbacks and raft people want to come here, I go out.’
And they will have brought small handfuls of their treasures with them and you will ask for a something here, a something there, a token or favour to be repaid sometime never, Gaby thought. Not because you need these things—no one needs anything any more, but because freedom has a price. As if they have not already paid it to the freighter captains that put them over the side outside radar range, and pay again as they paddle and kick and swim past the blockade ships, and pay the sharks and the Portuguese men-o’-war, and pay the waves and the reef as they try to make it over into the lagoon. But they have not paid you.
‘You are a God-damn pirate, Hussein,’ Gaby said amicably.
‘I like to think of myself as an immigration service. An underground railroad in the ocean.’
‘I think the word is submarine,’ Gaby said. Hussein fed syrup to the putti-putti. The biomotor burped and began to beat, pumping air. He adjusted the pulse, then disconnected the cell battery. ‘But you be careful, right?’ Gaby continued. ‘One of these days those bastards are going to blow you right out of the water.’
‘I am Captain Stealth, I sail under their guns and they cannot see me.’
‘You put too much trust in that radar-transparent hull of yours. They may be Saudis, but they have eyes in their heads.’
‘God’s will, Gaby and Gaby’s child.’
‘Serena.’
‘Ah. That is a good name for this country.’
‘God’s will, Hussein.’
Yes, Gaby thought as she went up the path that had once taken tourists to the beach and the glass-bottomed boats. That is why you laughed on the headland when Serena gave you the sign you had not been expecting. God pulling your hair, hey, listen, after all those years of wanting and trying, you are an African. A white-skinned, green-eyed, red-haired African. And what makes you African is that you finally accept My will, whether you stay or go, whether you drop your baby from the cliff or bury your afterbirth in the earth. This is the world you have to live in, now, here. Ismillah. So laugh, because there is nothing you can do about it.
The path was not the most direct way to the Mermaid Café but the Chaga kept rearranging the shortcuts and the crumbled ruins of the hotel were treacherous. The empty swimming pool waited in there somewhere; a blue tiled pit trap. Gaby stepped through the place where the chain link fence had fallen under the weight of sulphur-yellow moulds into the tennis courts. The far service area had been colonized by bulbous blue and white growths like over-sized Chinese vases that exuded a strangely alluring musk. Clusters of minute orange crystals infecting the tramlines crunched like crab shells beneath Gaby’s boots.
The carved mermaid was nailed to a palm behind the pile of scabrous machinery that had once chlorinated the pool. She had a sluttish leer and pointed along a track that meandered between palms and crown corals. The Mermaid Café was one of those unawares buildings that you are at before you realize. When you learned the trick of picking it out of the visual chaos of vegetation, what you saw was something ludicrously like an enormous straw sombrero propped up on short stilts. It was very much more alien and clever than that: its thatch was a fine solar fur that cooled the building in the heat of the day, warmed it by night, and generated electrical current in every fibre. When you ducked under the brim and your eyes adjusted to the bioluminescent shade that is best for contemplative drinking you saw that it was more like a tree than a hat, for a thick central trunk held up the roof. Branch-ribs ran down to the brim and became the strong, bone-like stilts. Tree-hat-hut.
The Mermaid Café smelled of warmth and things growing from deep soil, sweat and the urinous hum of spilled beer. Most of the tables were still full. There were some seats at the bar that circled the trunk. The main biolumes clinging under the canopy were dull; the bar was lit by table lamps and television. The screens hanging from the central trunk were all full of stars.
‘Gab!’
Sunpig was a short podgy white American woman of middle years. She wore more than one ring on each finger. Illustrated cards lay in various patterns across her table. They bore the wide eyes, seraphic faces and blessing hands of Ethiopic icons. Sunpig’s work at Turangalila was to develop an uniquely Cha-African tarot. Everyone at Turangalila had a work; that was the dream of the place, the expression of the transforming potential of the Chaga into every field of human activity. Like most experimental artistic communities, these expressions tended to end up in the bar.
‘I did it.’
‘And?’
‘There’s an “and”?’
‘Woman with child!’ With a flick of his forefinger, Dr Scullabus directed his patrons to make way for Gaby. ‘Sit.’ She sat. ‘Drink.’ She drank the house beer set in front of her. The Doctor was tall, with bad skin but good jaw-length bleached dreads. Gaby liked Dr Scullabus hugely. He was that age when men like to give themselves names, but he had her respect. He had used the Chaga to remake himself. Before it came sweeping down the coast from the impact at Kilifi he had been a beach boy. He had worn good muscles, lycra shorts, no body hair, and fucked tourists and let them spend their money on him. When the tourists stopped coming, he fucked journalists and UN workers instead. He had never had any money so he lost nothing when the Chaga took the hotels away. His skills at getting what he wanted from people it could not change; they had earned him the Mermaid Café and his place behind the bar as supreme pontiff.
Gaby lay Serena on the bar. She blinked at the star-filled screens. It was hot under the sombrero; Gaby’s shorts and vest stuck to her. But the beer was cold. She drank it down in one go. The Doctor brewed it himself but the bottles were many many times recycled, scavenged from the overgrown trash heaps of the lost hotels of his youth.
‘You missed it, Gab.’
‘Was it cosmic?’
‘The man on the satellite news did not have any idea what he was talking about. You would have done it right, Gaby. You would have made us feel the size of the thing, and the bigness of space, and how far away it is, and how cold, and how wonderful.’
‘Doc, it’s no wonder you got so many rides.’
‘It is true, Gaby. If you had been there, I am telling you, you would have given us such big awe that it would have made our balls go tight.’
‘But I’m not.’ Gaby rolled the much-washed beer bottle between her palms. ‘I’m here. And this is another one on my endless account.’
Chaga-nomics. Quid pro quo: with Andre the Doctor would trade beer for a day’s fishing beyond the reef; for a song from Harrison, for a reading from Sunpig, for a dinner from Marilynne, for a restyle of those dreads from Musta. But from Gaby McAslan, former SkyNet East Africa Correspondent, what has she to sell?
Gaby banged the empty bottle on the bar. Serena gave a small gurgle but thought sleep better. New beer was delivered. Gaby drank it down. Breakfast of champions.
Those amputees who suffered phantom pains in lost limbs, how long before the twinges faded? Ever?
She looked at the screens. Since the dark side of Iapetus had engulfed the bright and Hyperion had vanished, heralding the advent of the Chaga, a steady stream of space probes had been sent to Saturn’s moons. The arrival of the Big Dumb Object, reconstituted from the fragments of Hyperion, in Earth orbit, had eclipsed the unmanned missions—why go to Saturn when Saturn has come to you? Then Phoebe had disappeared in a quantum black hole explosion, and the powers in the sky were moving again. Saturn satellite mission twenty-two, Wagner, had been retasked for a ring-side seat to whatever the Chaga-makers had willed for Phoebe.
It had arrived in the Phoebe Rift, two days after Serena’s birth. It had unfolded its antennae, uncoiled its sensor booms like a luna moth hatching and seen slender arcs tens of kilometres long tumbling slowly in trans-lunar space. At three thirty-five GMT the will of the Chaga-makers had become manifest: the arcs joined. The processed images from the orbital telescopes had sketched a ring three and half thousand kilometres in diameter.
They had a name for this one too. The arcs had not even joined and they were calling it Éa. Enigmatic Artefact.
One minute to fly-by. Wagner would pass through the ring within one hundred kilometres of the inner surface. The terrestrial long-baseline interferometers could resolve with greater discrimination than the space telescopes: Éa was a thread, a hoop two kilometres wide by five hundred metres deep. Wagner would have to look hard to see anything.
Expert voices were opining that Éa did not account for all Phoebe’s mass.
And suddenly there it was, swimming out of the dark as it caught the distant sun, like a bracelet of light. Somewhere, Gaby was aware that Serena was hungry. She slipped a tit out of her loose vest and picked up the grizzling child. Wagner swept through the hoop of light like a weasel through a wedding ring. Gaby glimpsed coiling white ridges, like twined intestines, valleys between bristling with stiff quills. Then stars. Wagner brought its rear camera booms to bear.
Every screen in the Mermaid Café went white.
‘Hey, Scullabus!’ someone shouted from the far side of the bar.
‘My televisions are fine,’ the Doctor said. ‘Look.’
The probe cameras had pulled out and stopped down. Éa was a disc of white light. The dazzling screens threw unfamiliar shadows into the recesses of the Mermaid Café. Darkness. Where the light had been, precisely framed by the huge ring, was a moon.
Many of the Doctor’s bottles that were more precious than what he sold in them hit the floor and shattered.
Not even the expert voices knew what to say.
The moon was a monster: rust-red, cratered and rayed. Dark mares were cracked and faulted like Japanese glaze. The satellite had a satellite. Hovering beyond the new moon’s Roche limit was a curved disc eight hundred kilometres in diameter. Its radius curvature matched the moon: its dark side trailed floes and stalactites of frozen gas tens of kilometres long. Gaby found it impossible to resist the notion that the disc was pushing the moon.
Like its predecessor, this even bigger, dumber object was inbound. Simulations drew curves on the solar system. Its destination was not Earth. In twelve years Venus would have a moon, orbiting every twenty days.
Gaby grimaced; Serena was gumming hard. She probably needs winding, Gaby thought. The incongruity of that thought with the wonder stuff on the screens almost made her laugh aloud. All it was was one dead rock going to another, but this was a human child. That was mechanics. This was the future.
What a universe you’re going to grow up in, kid.
The Crossing
2
Her name was Oksana Mikhailovna Telyanina. She had flown with the wild geese and swum with the salmon. She had run with the reindeer and stolen the eggs of eagles with the ermine. She had travelled on the wings of the wind and entered the spirits of the trees. She had become light, and the light beyond light that was the true illumination, of which all light was a shadow. She had dissolved into the waters like a drop of rain, she had been the blade of grass crushed by the hoof of the deer, and that deer that crushed it. And now all that remained were wisps of chemical ash in her bloodstream and she was a fortysomething woman sitting in an oak tree. Bare-ass naked with the first frosts only days away. Nippled with goose-flesh, but the tits were still firm, by God. A tight fortysomething woman. Keeping in shape was an element of the greater spiritual exercise.
But you are cold and stiff and vertiginous from the mushrooms. And feeling old.
And unanswered. Two days until she flew south again, back to Africa, and her spirit was still unquiet.
‘Tell me,’ she had said to the wild geese and the salmon swimming upstream to death. ‘What should I do?’ she had asked the reindeer and the ermine. ‘Is this right?’ she had questioned the wind and the trees. ‘Are you listening?’ she had asked the light and the water. ‘Is there anyone there?’ she said to the grass and the deer that trampled it. The geese and the salmon and the reindeer and the ermine and the wind and the trees and light and the water and the grass and the deer had answered fuck all.
It did not work any more. The spirit worlds were closed to her. She might as well have skulled-out on her living room carpet and read divinity into the swirling patterns of the Turkmenistani weavers. She would not have risked pneumonia and fractures from falling, stoned, out of a sacred oak.
The sky read imminent evening. She had been beyond for eight hours. Once she would have walked the branches of the world-tree for days on that much skag. It is a bad sign when it takes more and more to do less and less, she thought as she clambered down the steps cut in the trunk. She dressed quickly, bouncing up and down to shake heat into her body. There was chocolate in the backpack, and the hip flask with the last of the arak. She swigged from the flask as she took the shaman-path through the deepening twilit woods to the logging road. The stuff burned brave. For the first time she felt need of its reassurance. The spirits had closed their hands and eyes. Their protection was no longer assured. She unbuckled the strap on her bush-knife. The things that lived and killed in the dark were afoot, calling. She was glad to see the rusty Cossack 4×4 in the pull-in off the rutted road. Her hand lingered on the reindeer antlers fixed to the bull-bars. Once, an emblem of her uniqueness: look, here comes Oksana Telyanina, shamanka, now they were as embarrassing as an old school backpack covered in the names of pretty-boy bands. Fortysomething and you are still a teenager, Oksana Telyanina. You are on the downslope of your life and you still need these emblems and totems to tell you who you are.
She fished the magnet out of the glove box and pressed it to the scarred mound on her wrist. The diffusion pump control was tricky; confirmation of success was the purr of the processor as it leached the lingering traces of the trance drugs and arak out of her blood. Molecule by molecule it exposed the hollow in her life. It was many-lobed, branching like a meltwater lake on tundra.
The slot of sky filling the narrow cut of the logging road grew dark. The autumn stars appeared, a great wheel turning above the Siberian taiga. Venus seemed to hover at the road’s vanishing point: guide star into night.
It was an hour back to the highway, another two hours home.
Stone cold and sober, Oksana turned the ignition.
Venus exploded: a white flare, hard and brilliant enough to cast the shadow of the steering wheel across Oksana’s belly. She cried out with fear. She had destroyed a planet. Her power had run wild; the stars were falling through the twenty-seven heavens. The spirits in the forest would rise up and rend her soul for this. She flicked on the headlights; her wheels chewed dirt. The battered Cossack slewed on the needle-strewn surface. Eyes in the dark threw her headlight beams back at her.
Oksana floored the brakes. The 4×4 shuddered to a stop, antlers a rip of velvet from the trunk of a big larch.
On a dirt road in the middle of forty thousand square kilometres of wilderness, Oksana Mikhailovna Telyanina laughed hard at her presumption. The stars were not falling. She had seen two hundred billion tons of cometary ice enter Venus’ atmosphere at one hundred kilometres per second and convert its mass into plasma.
She banged her hands on the wheel with delight. She understood why the spirits had been silent. They had long memories, in this triangle of land between the Stony and White Tungus rivers. They had felt the hammer of God fall. And that had been a few megatons, a few hundred square kilometres of felled trees, pointing j’accuse at the epicentre. The mother that hit Venus had another fifteen hundred sisters behind her. The scientific assessments appalled Oksana’s shamanka spirit. The momentum transfer from the impacts—each enough to scour Earth as sterile as a gynaecological tool—would speed up the planet’s rotation. The new dawn would break every forty-two hours, and a new moon would sail its nights.
Tectonics and carbon cycles: each impact blasted a hefty megatonnage of the planet’s massive atmosphere into space. Tidal forces kept the inner fires burning, like Jupiter’s sadomasochistic relationship with tormented, cracked Io, or Earth’s moon with its mother mass.
