Speaking of decontamination, they still won’t let me talk to William. The closest I can get to him is a woman’s face on the other side of a thick glass panel in a steel door, and she says they are awaiting the results of further tests on the poor kid’s viral symptoms. All that stainless steel and blinding white: it’s like a Douglas Trumbull movie in there. Tractor One, which is the main ingress/egress port to Tsavo West, is designed to blow free in case of a major incident, while the rest sprints away at its top speed of three miles per hour. Tractor One is virtually a city within a city. Up on the other side of the level from the place where they kept me there is a facility for Away Teams; the ones who actually go into the Chaga and bring samples back. They’re totally isolated, like divers on oil-rigs who live in decompression tanks for months on end. I suppose they make their own entertainment, like Oksana on those long, cold Siberian winter nights. One night was enough for me. The thing that impressed me most about Tractor One – and this says a lot about my mind – is that it’s the first tee on Tsavo West’s one-hole golf course. You drive from the landing grid over to the sun-deck on Tractor Two and then it’s a five or seven iron to the astro-turfed green on the service platform three-quarters the way up the side of Tractor Three. If you hit it into the Chaga, it’s out-of-bounds, but you have to buy everyone a drink. I suppose golf balls in the Chaga are no stranger than golf-balls on the moon, though my heart agrees with Mark Twain: golf is a good walk spoiled. Except at Tsavo West it’s a good abseil spoiled. Which they do as well, after climb-racing each other up the sides of Tractor Two. You can watch them from the rooftop hot tubs. Presumably while taking a jot or two of home-grown weed.
The good ship Tsavo, and all who sail upon her. The ironic thing is that her Captain, the good Dr Shepard, seems quaintly out of place in all this. All around him things are doing, becoming, while he simply is. That’s all. He is. Separate, yet without him, none of this would be. The still centre from which all energy emanates.
He’s dinnering me tonight; tomorrow I am promised a treat. Something unforgettable. Please, Shepard! I’m too old for all that not being able to sleep at night and finding my food doesn’t taste right and I’m not hungry anyway and my mind wandering to visions of his face and discovering whole irreplaceable chunks of my day have vanished. I don’t want to let myself fall in love again, I’ve outgrown that, really, God, I don’t want to write him love letters and knit him sweaters and all that stuff in songs because it makes you feel like for a few moments in your whole life you are the most alive thing on this little blue planet.
Oh God. He’s here. Already?
23
When she saw the treat in the morning, Gaby McAslan said, ‘No way, Shepard. You are not getting me up in that thing. Never.’
The big two-seater was parked off the main strip in front of the portable cabin that was Tsavo West’s air-traffic control centre. The microlyte was a delicate, beautiful insect of spars and wires, spreading its iridescent solar wing to soak in the savannah sun.
‘You deserve to see the Chaga as it ought to be seen,’ Shepard said. ‘With the eyes of God.’ He jumped into the rear seat and fastened the helmet. ‘Once-only offer, never to be repeated.’
‘All right, all right,’ Gaby shouted. Better death than disgrace before Shepard. ‘I’m coming.’
The propeller became a silver blur behind Shepard as Gaby wiggled into the cockpit, fitted safety harness and helmet.
‘How long have you been flying?’ she asked as the microlyte rolled on to the main strip.
‘Since yesterday,’ Shepard said. The engine hum became an irate hornet drone. ‘Old joke. I’ve had my licence two years. Honest. You’re safe with me.’
Yes, but not too safe, Gaby thought.
The little aircraft bounced over the rough airstrip and quite unexpectedly was airborne.
‘Oh shit,’ Gaby moaned as she saw directly in front of her a few centimetres of green and black GRP fuselage and a lot of bright morning sky. Shepard took the microlyte up to a hundred metres.
‘Elephant!’ he said in Gaby’s ear-phone. Twelve of them, moving out of heavy scrub: three bulls with their attendant females and calves, dusted with the red earth of the Serengeti plain. The microlyte’s solar-powered engine was so silent their over-pass did not even disturb the white ox-peckers from the elephants’ backs.
‘Chaga’s the best thing ever happened to them,’ he said, circling for a better look. ‘Poachers won’t come within twenty miles of terminum. Elephant and rhino numbers have been increasing steadily since the Kilimanjaro Event. Our Away Teams have even found family groups as deep as five miles beyond terminum, on the edge of the Great Wall formation. Paul Orzabal up at Ol Tukai started a study of terrestrial species adapting to the Chaga, but it got dismantled along with the rest of the station.’
They passed over Tsavo West. People in the roof gardens waved. Sunlight glittered from the hot tubs. A Tai Chi class was practising on the Tractor One landing platform.
‘What’s this about dismantling Ol Tukai?’ Gaby asked.
‘They need a station to monitor the Nyandarua Event but the budget won’t run to a new base, so they’re airlifting what’s airliftable and taking the tractor units north by road, going cross country along the line of the Ngong hills to avoid Nairobi. Tinga-Tinga and Moshi are all being relocated to one hundred and twenty degrees of separation. We began course corrections last night.’
The green and black microlyte crossed terminum. Eddies of warm air spun out from the hidden heart of the Chaga buffeted the wing. Shepard took them down. Gaby gripped the cockpit coaming, telling herself she was too enthralled to be terrified. The fractal tessellations of the mosaic-cover bubbled into reefs of pseudo-coral and the open white fingers of the hand-trees. The Great Wall rose sheer before them.
‘Shepard!’ Gaby shrieked as the microlyte bounced on a rising thermal and hopped over the edge of the Great Wall in a single bound. ‘You bastard, don’t you ever scare me like that again.’
Shepard chuckled in the way that men do to themselves when they have done something they think impresses a woman.
‘There’s always an updraft along the edge of the Great Wall,’ he said. ‘You can rely on it. All kind of strange and useful vortices above the Chaga.’
‘Strange vortices killed Denys Finch-Hatton at Voi,’ Gaby said.
‘Voi’s notorious for them. Ask any UNECTA pilot.’
They flew on toward Kilimanjaro over a plateau of dark crimson hexagonal tiles the width of the microlyte’s solar wing. Gaby glanced over her shoulder, past Shepard smiling behind his pilot’s shades, but it was not the reassurance of his face she was seeking. She could not see the comforting, man-made cubes of Tsavo West. She could not see anything of the human world, but a horizon of tarnished gold.
The roof of the Great Wall broke up into chaotic terrain of land-reefs and pseudo-corals, piled hundreds of feet high on top of each other, spilling like melted ice-cream; strawberry pink, chocolate, honeycomb-pistachio-piña-colada. From this they passed abruptly into a zone where the vegetation was translucent and formed a roof of glittering bubbles. Dark shadows hinted at massive formations far below. The line of transition was exact, as if a circle had been inscribed with compasses on the Chaga.
‘The Loolturesh Discontinuity,’ Shepard said. ‘It’s about five miles wide and goes all the way around the mountain.’
‘What is it?’ Gaby asked.
‘We don’t know. It’s on the edge of our Away Teams’ range. But it’s expanding outward with the rest of the Chaga. Fifty metres every day.’