‘It’s the only way to conduct an interview if you want to find anything valuable.’
He was silent for the space of three sips of whisky.
‘Fall,’ he said. ‘Fall in Nebraska, which is all silver and gold; silver of frost, gold of Hallowe’en pumpkins in back yards and yellow tomatoes on the vine and bare fields of corn stubble and a yellow edge to the horizon under the purple snow clouds that come down from the Dakotas. A fall that is the cold of evenings when you make a fire and your whisky catches the light and the heat of it, that is just like the line in the song about when the wind comes whistlin’ down the plain, and gets into the eaves and you hear the roof shingles rattle but you’re in no hurry to worry about them, not just yet.’
My God, Gaby thought, I am about to have sex with a Frank Capra movie. No, that is unfair. You would speak with as much love of the Watchhouse and the Point in its different seasons and moods.
‘Wood, fabric, pottery or metal?’
‘Pottery.’
‘Baroque, Classical, Romantic, Modern?’
‘Classical. You’re not taking this down.’
‘I am taking this down, where it matters. Circle, square, triangle?’
‘A sort of slightly rounded square. Or a slightly squared circle.’
‘Plains, mountains, forests or islands?’
‘Plains. With the aforementioned wind whistlin’ down them. And the corn as high as an elephant’s eye.’
‘What kind of car are you?’
‘Something pretty much like I drive already. Maybe one of those old British Landrovers that you could drive forever over any kind of surface in any conditions and it would always forgive you. But with the tail fins, fenders and white-walls off one of those 1950s cars you used to see in old rock’n’roll movies that looked about the size of Rhode Island. If that makes sense.’
Perfect sense. You are getting it now, Shepard. I knew you would. And I am getting you.
‘What kind of animal are you?’
He sighed.
‘Something big and wise, that can see a long way across the plain, like a giraffe, but not silly like a giraffe. Not a herd creature. I’ve never been a team player.’
I know that, speed-skater.
‘But not solitary, like a leopard is solitary. A lion. That’s what I am.’
‘Which sense are you?’
He put down his glass. She had him now. The last question would make it irrevocable. Expectation was a warm whisky glow inside her.
‘Touch,’ he said and got up from his folding chair and took her hand very gently and led her to the tent on the right.
‘Are we safe?’ Gaby asked.
‘The wardens keep watch,’ Shepard said, misunderstanding.
‘I warn you, I make horrible loud cat noises.’
‘Everything makes horrible loud cat noises out here.’
‘All right then,’ she said and pulled him down on top of her on the ground sheet.
The second time she told him there was something special she wanted to try. He grinned in the lazy, contented hunting-cat way of sated men who still have an appetite for more. In the tent was plenty of rope. Gaby offered a prayer to the totemic spirits of Oksana Telyanina as she quickly tied Shepard to the fly-sheet pegs. He laughed a lot despite the hardness of the ground.
‘You won’t be doing that in a minute, laddie,’ Gaby said, swinging herself on top of him and pushing her ginger pubes against his chin. Ten minutes later he was making the horrible loud cat noises. Ten minutes after that he was begging. Ten minutes after that he was in an altered state of consciousness, eyes fixed on the ridge pole, every muscle taut as piano wire. Ten minutes after that Gaby had mercy and let him come. Exhausted, elated, aching, she kissed him on the nipples and curled up beside him, nestling into the warmth and the hardness and smell and comfortable man-ness of him. Nestled there, she fell asleep. She woke in the pre-dawn dark, remembering with horror that Shepard was still tied up.
He was too stiff and sore to take the Mahindra out on the dawn safari. The warden who drove smiled a lot. So did his colleagues as they served the steak and champagne breakfast. Before dinner that evening, Shepard took Gaby out far in the Mahindra.
‘Something special I want you to see,’ he said.
The cool had driven the haze and dust back into the earth and in the space between the day and the things that hunt by night, it unfolded around Gaby. Shepard steered the Mahindra along a wildebeest track older than any of the ways of humans. The migration had been following it for a hundred thousand years. Headlights caught eyes out in the gloaming; stragglers on the primeval way west to the greening plains of the Mara. Gaby had never seen a sun so huge, resting on the edge of the world. Shepard stopped the car in the middle of the great plain.
‘Watch and wait,’ he said.
The twilight deepened into indigo. Summer stars appeared over the plains of Africa in the dark east.
‘Did you ever go out at night and look up at the stars and see them very small and close, little dots of light?’ Gaby whispered, echoing Shepard’s posture. ‘And then your perceptions turned inside out and you realized that they were unimaginably huge and distant and it was you who was very small and insignificant, and knowing that was like a sacred thing, that you were tiny, but alive and they might be huge and magnificent, but they were dead and because of that you were infinitely greater and more important than they could ever be?’
‘Where I come from the sky is like the land; big, exhilarating, endless,’ Shepard said softly. In winter, on nights when the wind that comes down from Canada is so cold and dry it freezes the breath in your lungs, the constellations glitter like ice. On nights like that you can fall into the sky, and keep falling for ever between all those ice-cold, frozen stars.’
‘That’s what I can’t forgive the BDO for,’ Gaby said. ‘It takes the stars away from us. They aren’t distant and numinous, but close, living, intelligent. I don’t like the idea of someone else being in our sky, making us small.’
‘See over there?’ Shepard pointed. ‘Just to the left of Antares. About two degrees.’
‘Ophiuchus?’
‘You know your way around the sky. That’s where they come from. Came down the UNECTA hotline yesterday morning. The gas clouds in Rho Ophiuchi, out on the edge of the Scorpius loop. Since we floated the hypothesis that the Chaga-makers may have evolved in space, the orbital telescopes have been analysing the spectra of deep-space molecular clouds. All the raw material for life is out there; hydrocarbons, amino acids, RNA. It was from deep-space clouds that the first buckyballs were deduced. We’ve been getting spectra of complex fullerenes from Rho Ophiuchi that are as near as dammit the same as Tolkien observed at Iapetus. Only these are about eight hundred light years in toward the centre of the galaxy. If we allow the Chaga-makers a generous one per cent light-speed expansion rate, we’re looking through our telescopes at a civilization at least one hundred thousand years old, and probably a lot older.’
‘Peter Werther told me that this is not the first time we’ve been in contact with them,’ Gaby said. ‘First contact was at the very dawn of humanity, out on these plains about three, four million years ago.’
‘They could be all through the Sagittarius arm in that time. God knows how long they have been travelling, how old they are, where they originate from.’
A line of deep red clung to the western horizon under a front of purple cloud. The silence was immense.
‘Shepard,’ Gaby whispered. ‘You’re scaring me.’
‘I’m scaring myself,’ Shepard said. ‘You’re right. The stars aren’t ours any more. They never were. Something got there before us, before we even existed.’