A cigarette seemed like a very fine idea. She excused herself and left the room. Irwin Lowell was saying something about mass being missing from the Hyperion Object, which seemed to have been converted directly to momentum by some unknown process. She lit up by the window at the end of the corridor, opened it and leaned out. Day had begun while she had watched the drawings of the things in the sky. Five floors down, Tom M’boya Street was busy with the early morning traffic. She saw a man in Arab dress pushing a little wooden cart along the edge of the street. It looked like a dog kennel on castors. Gaby knew from experience that if you looked inside it you would see a crouching woman, veiled and robed so that only her eyes showed, but they glittered brightly in the darkness. Directly beneath the window a policeman was trying to break up a fight at a bus stop. A crowd of matatu touts was gathering and taking sides. Gaby exhaled cigarette smoke into the street. Shouting voices rose around her. People died in these street fights. She accepted that, as she accepted the woman with unknown deformities who lived in a box on wheels, or the legless beggar who pushed himself past Miriam Sondhai’s house every day on a trolley with a block of wood in each hand. Kenya had brutalized her. Cruelties and sufferings that would have been intolerable in London confronted her at every step, and she ignored them. In this, Tembo and Faraway had succeeded. Gaby McAslan had become African. What they had seen in her as the capacity to learn this was her essential brutality. Looking from the fifth floor window, she felt more sister to the people on the street than those she had left in the conference room. They were a tough people down there. They were a resourceful people. They had successfully made the jump from Iron Age to Information Age in two generations: they were used to their world ending every couple of decades or so. The Chaga might be eating Africa, but it could not eat African-ness. They begged their alms and cooked their food and fought their fights and caught their matatus because they knew that in the end their African-ness would eat the Chaga.
She finished her cigarette, flicked the butt into the street and went back to the conference.
Irwin Lowell was fingering his bootlace tie again.
‘We have pictures just come through image processing from the Chandrasekahr telescope of the moments immediately preceding the advent of the Hyperion Object.’
Animation would have rendered it more slickly and realistically, but the grainy CCD images captured the intellectual chill of deep space. Gaby shivered in her gorgeous dress. Cold translucent shapes tumbled slowly against the soft blur of overloaded stars, locking together into fans and arcs of an immense disc. Gaby realized with a shock that the fragile, chiming fans must be tens of kilometres long. This was engineering on a scale so large the imagination had to step back and back until the perspective made it human-sized.
They were talking now about re-tasking the Gaia space-probe, which had been sent out on the heels of Tolkien to plumb the mysteries of the Hyperion Gap. NASA were trying to rig together a high-acceleration propulsion unit that would rendezvous with the probe, dock and put it into orbit around the great disc. They had pretty little animated schematics to show how they would do it. All lines and dots and arrows.
I was right to tie my life to the lights in the sky, Gaby McAslan thought. The Ford drivers, the Markys and Hannahs with their beautiful homes and beautiful children could no longer rely on the external universe being too big and remote to touch their internal lives. The universe was coming to them as much as to the man she had seen wheeling his wife in her wooden cart up Tom M’boya Street, or the matatu touts fighting at the bus stop, or the laid-back policeman or the food sellers setting up their sidewalk stalls. But the street people would be ready. They knew intimately that the universe is a place at best indifferent, at worst hostile. They would not flee screaming the sky is falling! the sky is falling! when they learned what had happened out at Saturn, what would be happening over their heads in six years. Six years is a long time under the eye of God. Much can happen. They would be ready, and if the sky did fall, they trusted that their arms were strong enough to hold it up.
19
The pink stretch limo had been behind her since she turned out of Miriam Sondhai’s drive. It made no attempt to hide, it could not have easily, even among Nairobi’s UN and diplomatic plates. Many UNECTA staff lived in Miriam’s district, stretch limos in all colours were commonplace, but never so pink as this. Gold-tint mirror glass, and a flying-vee aerial on the back. Very cyberpunk. And following her. It ran keepie-lefties and jumped lights to keep itself in her rearview.
They were still digging up the junction of University Way and Moi Avenue. Bi-lingual signs thanked drivers for their patience in co-operating with the Ministry of Transport’s five-year road-improvement scheme. A five-year plan, when in four years there would not be any roads to improve: Gaby suspected the digging paralysing Nairobi was a cabalistic deal between the City Fathers, contractors and a syndicate of newspaper sellers, snack vendors and windscreen washers.
The man with the Stop/Go sign was letting them through two at a time this morning.
‘Bastard!’ Gaby shouted as he flicked his sign to red before she could jump him.
Suddenly there were three men in her ATV. Two in the back, one in the front. They had Afro hairstyles, platform soles, ankle-length leather coats and big smiles.
‘Haran begs the pleasure of your company,’ said the one in the front. ‘Please follow the limousine.’ He nodded to the road mender, who turned his sign immediately to green for Go. The pink Cadillac pulled out and passed. Gaby tucked in behind it. It led her to the Cascade Club. The place had not long closed. It looked weary with all the house lights on, like an aged, aged prostitute who has to go out to the shops and shrinks from the naked sunshine. The air was close and humid, breathed through many sets of lungs. Down in the pit women were diligently scrubbing mould off the white tiles. It smelled, Gaby thought, exactly like the Pirates of the Caribbean in EuroDisney.
The posseboys did not take Gaby up to the glass-floored office, but by a circuitous route past staff toilets and store-rooms filled with shrink-wrapped pallets of alcohol to a wide, covered balcony around a lush courtyard garden of palms, bananas and creeping figs. Higher palm fronds overhung the balcony rail. Waiters in white jackets carrying silver trays attended a number of immaculately laid tables. The patrons were all African or Indian. Haran’s table was apart from the others and overlooked a flaccid fountain. A silver coffee set, two cups and a PDU were arranged on the linen cloth. A lift of his finger dismissed the posseboys. Haran rose from his cane chair, lifted the head of his fly-whisk and bowed slightly to Gaby.
‘Ms McAslan. A delight to see you again. Please, sit, have some coffee. Esther.’
A young black woman moved from where she had been standing behind Haran and pulled a chair out for Gaby. She was dressed in a black leather bikini over a sheer mesh bodystocking. Black knuckle-studded biker’s gloves matched black biker’s boots. Gaby recognized the uniform of Mombi’s possegirls. She wore a lot of heavy jewellery, but, unusually, no neck-chains, only a mismatched choker that seemed to have been woven from strands of iridescent fibre. In place of a pendant, a small printed circuit board with a single red LED eye nuzzled in the hollow of the young woman’s throat.