The outer edge of the discontinuity was as sharply defined as its inner. The land on the far side was a many-coloured forest canopy; like flying over a Persian carpet, Gaby thought. A very old and moth-eaten carpet, riddled with holes which permitted intriguing glimpses of another carpet-canopy beneath. Analogy, she thought. Our languages do not have the names for what these things are, so we are forced to speak of them in terms of what they seem. The unrolling magic carpet was lifted up and torn in many places by conical mounds pushing through from beneath. Gaby thought of the Devil’s Tower, or the inselberg rocks of the sub-Kalahari. The scale and suddenness was about right, but these up-swellings were dark-red, striped with burnt orange meanderings like dead Martian watercourses. Shepard banked around the nearest mound. Light glittered at the summit: a single crystal protruded from the peeled-back Chaga-flesh. The crystal was perfectly transparent and the size of a Unit at Tsavo West.
‘They’re an emerging feature,’ Shepard said. ‘Within the last six months. Some taxonomist at Ol Tukai christened them Crystal Monoliths and unfortunately the name’s stuck. And before you ask, no, we have absolutely no idea what they are or do.’
‘Shepard.’
‘Yes?’
‘Shepard, don’t talk. You don’t have to talk. I don’t have to know.’
Gaby did not want to hear voices speaking names. Names cut this precious thing of hers into pieces and parts and functions and hypotheses. While it was one unspoken thing it was the undivided mystery that had drawn her from the summer night on the Point to this front seat in a UNECTA microlyte. Dismembered by names, the mystery bled out of it.
To the sound of the electric engine and the wind over the wires, they crossed from the land of the Crystal Monoliths into a land of knife-edged ridges standing above the forest roof that meandered crazily, twining around each other like mating snakes until they fused in a knot of arretes and canyons. On the far side of this escarpment was a zone unlike any they had yet seen. The microlyte flew above a terrain of ribs and spars and buttresses. Grasping at similes, Gaby thought of the intricate girder-work of the new architecture, or again, microscope photographs of the structure of human bones. Even analogy could not describe this Chaga: it was like this, but it was also like this, with a seasoning of that too, but in the end, none of them.
The cells between the spars and piers were filled with bubbles, some an indistinguishable froth, others large enough to have swallowed the microlyte. Their skins strained painfully against the rib-work. Bubbles were white, skeleton was blue. A Wedgwood landscape. They were flying over an enormous Willow Pattern plate.
This was one of those things you see only because you are looking for an instant in the right direction. She saw a dirty white bubble down to her right swell and split. The ripped skin wrinkled back and released a puff of dusty vapour like the smoke of mushroom spores in dry autumns. Things moved in the dust that looked like spindly insect-octopi clinging to silver balloons. They chilled her in a way that the alien landscapes unfolding before her had not. These incomprehensible landscapes were their place. They knew no other. Gaby McAslan was the alien here. Then the wind from off the mountain carried them away. Outcrops of straight-boled trees with domed tops appeared in gaps in the lattice where bubbles had burst and seeded. As the microlyte flew on, the stands of trees joined together into the now-familiar chaos-patterned forest canopy. A few minutes flight ahead a wall of pseudo-coral lifted above the canopy of domes. Its top was hidden by the raft of clouds that clung to the mountain. They were on the slopes of Kilimanjaro now.
After long silence, Shepard’s voice whispering in Gaby’s earphones was a shock.
‘That’s the Citadel. We think it’s where your friend Peter Werther was kept.’
‘And beyond the Citadel?’
‘Beyond the Citadel we cannot go. This thing doesn’t have the ceiling.’
The microlyte banked across the face of the wall of tubes and pipes and fans. I’m glad the microlyte doesn’t have the altitude to penetrate those clouds, Gaby thought. They are the Cloud of Unknowing that hides God who, like the Chaga, is beyond the power of language to describe. I’m glad that the aliens – if they exist in any form we can recognize – remain hidden in their fortress from the cameras of humans.
She remembered an old sci-fi movie from her father’s video library. At the climax, the huge luminous starship of the aliens had floated in across the mountain to meet humanity’s representatives. It had touched the earth, and opened its doors. In a glow of light, the aliens had come out. And it had killed the movie. Run a spear into the side of the sense of wonder and let out gasoline and Diet Coke. There had been wee ones with oval eyes and no noses, like aliens in abduction magazines, that ran around twittering. Then there was a big long spindly one with arms and legs about eight feet long. He had to bend to get under the door. Gaby McAslan had thought that was most pathetic. They negate gravity, cross entire galaxies in city-sized starships filled with light, and they can’t design a door that opens wide enough.
Show us miracles and wonders, but not the little man behind the curtain pulling the levers and shouting into the microphone. If they ever penetrate the mystery up there, I hope there is another behind it, Gaby thought. And another beyond that, and beyond that, so that we never dispel the Cloud of Unknowing.
Shepard had set a different course back to Kenya, one that took them close to a ChagaWatch balloon, many miles lost beyond terminum. Shaggy lilac moss had colonized the bag so that it looked like some imaginary hairy air-monster. The ground cable was crusted with growths like paper wasps’ nests, though far larger than any wasp Gaby had ever fled from. As Shepard banked the microlyte around the blimp, Gaby noticed flickering activity around the hexagonal cell mouths. What ever they were, they shone with the iridescence of humming birds, but moved with the mechanical buzzing dart of insects.
‘Good to see Ol’ Faithful’s still with us,’ Shepard said. ‘But I don’t think she’ll last much longer. The cable goes and they drift away into the Chaga.’
‘How old is it?’ The microlyte went round again.
‘About three years. We haven’t had a picture out of her in fourteen months, though the caesium batteries are still putting out current. Biggest ecological armageddon since the end of the dinosaurs, but mention radioactivity and it’s mass pants-pissing among the environmentalists.’
They swooped away from the lost outpost of the human world. Gaby could make out the brown shore of Africa like a line of islands on the horizon of a dark ocean. Shepard opened up the engine and headed for home.
24
She briefed Shepard on last things in the Mahindra jeep out to the landing field. He would let her know when anything happened with William? Yes. He would corroborate her story if her banks and credit card companies got sniffy about replacing her plastic? Yes. He would write a report for her insurance company? Yes, if she thought it would do any good. He would back her up if the shit hit the fan with T.P.? Yes. He was sure UNECTA would swing behind her and not leave her persona non grata with the United Nations?
‘I think you can be pretty sure of that,’ he said as the Mahindra hit a rut and bounced all four wheels in the air. ‘In fact, I think I could give you my personal guarantee on it. You see…’
‘This is going to be an off-the-record, isn’t it? The gazelle, mind the fucking gazelle!’
He minded the fucking gazelle.