‘I remember him, and her.’
‘It might still be in Ol Tukai, and I really need it to prove something to someone. Could you…’
The big mortar tube boomed and screamed another one skyward. The blast rattled the windows and the beer bottles in their bath of ice. The just-silenced car alarms started up again. Gaby frowned, bent her head to one side, imagining she could hear another noise as the sky rained stars. A sound like a hundred cellular telephones ringing at once.
It was not the effect of altitude and mint thingie. It was a hundred cellular telephones ringing at once. Creeping paralysis seized the hootenanny as partygoers pulled phones out of purses, night bags, inside pockets, robes, sporrans. Shepard put his finger in his ear and nodded to the chirping voice of the phone. Guests were already streaming up the patio steps toward cloakroom and cars.
‘You’ll excuse me if I abandon you in mid-julep,’ he said. ‘There’s a general UNECTA alert in operation. Seems destiny is calling.’
‘What?’ Gaby shouted at his receding back. ‘What’s happening?’
He turned on the bottom step.
‘I shouldn’t be telling you this.’
‘Tell me!’ Gaby screamed among the beer bottles and the julep glasses and the wing bones of chickens. The fireworks fountained upward, dying unheeded.
‘Hyperion’s back.’
18
Gaby reckoned this was the first time the conference room had been full since SkyNet had set up its East Africa station on Tom M’boya Street. Though it was three-thirty in the morning, every section was represented. The coffee maker was on overtime too. It smelled threateningly of overheated beans.
Under the big screen, T.P. Costello finished his third cup and pushed it from him across the table, nauseated. He was in a poor state for a live video conference. At some point his solo trip through love and regret had cast him up on the Ambassador’s bathroom floor, unconscious, a half-drunk mint julep gripped in his fist. His snoring had alerted the domestics. Gaby and Jake Aarons had barely managed to get him to a taxi when the word came through from head office that UNECTA and NASA would be issuing a joint statement at one-thirty Greenwich Mean Time.
In the front row, Gaby had not had time to change her Chanel-pirate dress. It stank of stale smoke, spilled bourbon, spicy chicken marinade and woman-sweat, but the way the fabric moved around her made her feel a million feet tall. One should be dressed for epochal events.
The SkyNet symbol on the wall screen dissolved into the NASA logo. Still have not got rid of that terrible old 1970s typography, Gaby thought. The colophon was in turn replaced by the face of Irwin Lowell, Director of the Huntsville Orbital Astronomy Centre. He looked like the photographs of that old science-fiction writer her dad had liked: Isaac Asimov. Gaby had never been able to read more than ten pages of his stuff.
‘On behalf of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, you are most welcome to the Orbital Astronomy Centre.’ He talked like he looked, like forty miles of bad road. ‘Our findings are largely of a technical nature, so we have extrapolated the following graphic sequence from them which will clarify the nature of the object we have discovered in the Hyperion Gap.’
The sequence opened with a shot of Saturn and its rings. Stock footage, Gaby thought. Bottom of the video vault. Then she noticed that this was not the standard image. A dark line bisected the planet from top to bottom. As Gaby watched, the dark line thickened, but in the absence of any frame of reference she could not judge whether it was millimetres wide or painted down the zero meridian of the second largest planet in the solar system. Then the point of view moved and the thick black line opened into a huge ellipse and then into a solid disc, mottled with a thousand chaotic colours, rotating around its central axis.
‘To give some indication of scale, we’ve included a schematic of the Unity space station for comparison,’ Irwin Lowell said in his down-home accent.
Gaby peered but could not see it. The resolution clicked up, and clicked up again, and again, and again until the edge of the disc seemed like a straight line against the stars. There it was, silhouetted against a patch of Pantone 141, the web of orbital construction beams and environment modules and solar arrays and manufacturing cores, seeming no bigger on the three-metre screen than a spinning spider.
Reality caught in Gaby McAslan’s throat. Everyone knew the proud boasts. A city in space, a complete community a kilometre and a half across. Man’s first stepping stone to the stars.
‘The object is slightly over twelve hundred kilometres in diameter,’ Irwin Lowell said. ‘Our measurements indicate that it is twenty kilometres thick at the rim, decreasing to five at the centre. This, we think, is to offset the object’s tendency to collapse inward under its own gravitational attraction into a more stable form. The centripetal force generated by the spin, which is one revolution every three point five three hours, also helps maintain gravitational stability. On a related point, the moon Hyperion formerly had a highly erratic axis of rotation; that has been corrected. From its high stability alone, we must conclude that this object could not possibly have formed naturally.’
Earth replaced Saturn on the screen. The Indian sub-continent, from Cape Comorin to Bombay, was obliterated by a featureless grey circle. The lower limb of Sri Lanka protruded from the south eastern quadrant, to the north the great provinces of the old Mugal Empire struggled free. In the shadow of the Hyperion Object lay five hundred million lives, Gaby thought. The grey disc did not look like the presence of a vast, incomprehensible thing, but the absence. Five hundred million people; their mighty, ancient cities; their gods and avatars that were among the first to rule the dreams of humans: taken into the greyness and annihilated. It was like the satellite photographs with which she had adorned her Chaga-shrine; the neat, stamped-out circles of colour stuck across the map of the tropics, but more frightening in its blank greyness than the gaudiness of the alien mosaics.
Irwin Lowell re-appeared, super-imposed over the map. Gaby could tell from his face that he was about to impart an unpalatable truth. Understanding this, she knew what he would say. The Earth map was not a comparison. It was a promise. The thing was moving.
‘Our data confirms that at some time in the process of reconfiguring the former moon, a momentum was imparted to the Hyperion object sufficient to cause it to break free from the Saturnian satellite system.’ He fingered the metal clasp of his bootlace tie. Scared men who cannot let it be seen that they are scared communicate their fear by such small self-touchings. ‘Our projections indicate that the object is on a course into the inner solar system.’ An animated orrery replaced maimed India. The planets slid on their ordained wires. A red rogue line curved inward from the ringed bead of Saturn. It looped around the gravitational field of Jupiter, through the asteroids, past the orbit of red Mars. The blue opal of Earth opened up into its component pair. The red line slipped through the cosmic needle’s-eye between Earth and Moon and was wound into a geostationary skein around the Equator. ‘The calculations are fairly exact. The Hyperion Object will arrive in earth orbit in slightly over five years. Five years and ninety-eight days, to be exact.’
There was murmuring in the conference room on Tom M’boya Street. What brutal things we have become, Gaby thought. So inured to miracles and wonder that we greet several hundred billion tons of reconstituted moon headed down our throats with a ho and a hum. She fiddled with the almanac function of her PDU. Worlds collide on September 27 2013. I wonder if that will be before or after lunch? But they would not do that. They would not sow their Chaga-seed across the planet and let it grow and flower, only to smash it all into nothingness with their hammer from the sky. Seize that, Gaby McAslan. Hold it to you. It is the only hope you have. Not just your present, but now your future is in the hands of these Chaga-makers.