The sea was dazzling. The speed was brilliant. The sky was full of clucking helicopters. Gaby seized a rail and stood up. She pushed back her hood and let her hair blow out behind her so the faces behind the helicopter windows would see it and know who was down there in boat three. Thank you, Shepard. Thank you, God. Thank you, aliens swimming in the molecular clouds of Rho Ophiuchi. Thank you, T.P. Costello, for trusting me not to fuck it up. Thank you, life.
Tembo was videoing the two lead boats. Faraway clambered unhappily over the seats and tapped Gaby.
‘I have London on the link.’
She nodded and screwed the phone deeper into her ear. Geostationary static burbled. A studio director in Docklands came on line to count her in. Instinctively, Tembo turned the camera on her as Jonathan Cusack said: ‘We’re going back live to our reporter at East Seven Five, Gaby McAslan. So Gaby, exactly where are you?’
And in.
‘I’m on a landing boat from East Seven Five on my way to Foa Mulaku itself. This rather fetching little number I’m wearing is the latest UNECTA biological isolation suit, so we can get close to the object without having to go through decontamination. The scientists who will hopefully be making the landing are in the boat immediately ahead of us: emergence is estimated in—’ Shepard had one hand splayed and two fingers of the other upheld ‘—seven minutes.’ The lens closed up on her face. Faraway was holding a sign with YOUR NIPPLES ARE SHOWING felt-markered on it. ‘I’m going to ask one of the crew here what the exact plan is.’ Out of shot, Shepard was scissoring his hands, eyes wide with panic. Gaby avoided him and sat down beside the helmsman, a sunburned Scotsman with a black 6 on the red front of his suit. Crouching in the bottom of the boat, Faraway handed her a microphone with the Sky Net box on it. Tembo pulled back out to frame them both. Painfully conscious of her nipples, Gaby said, ‘Excuse me, could you tell the viewers your name?’
‘Gordon McAlpine,’ the helmsman said, watching the other boats throttle back as they came over the emergence zone. He cut his speed to match.
‘So Gordon, could you tell me what’s going to be happening?’
‘The idea is that we make a visual survey of the surface and pick potential landing sites – we’ve no real idea of how high it will rise out of the water; some of the locations that look good on the sonar map may prove to be inaccessible. The research teams and the recording crew will go in first; only when it’s safe will we run up beside them.’
‘So a landing is a definite probability.’
‘Nothing is a definite probability in this business.’
Back to the studio, the director whispered.
‘Thanks, Gaby,’ Jonathan Cusack said. ‘We’ll be returning to Foa Mulaku as information comes in, but if I might turn now to our studio guests, Dr Fergus Dodds of the British Oceano-graphic Survey, and Lisa Orbach, our resident Chaga expert, for their comments…’
Nice one, Gaby, the unknown director said. Don’t go ‘way, now.
She patted Gordon the helmsman on the back. They exchanged thumbs-ups. The boats cut their engines and bobbed on the swelling deep dark water of the Equatorial Channel. The press helicopters wheeled raucously overhead, waiting, waiting.
A single Scottish voice called out across the face of the waters.
‘Thar she blows!’
‘Faraway!’ Gaby yelled.
‘I have them already,’ the tall Luo said.
Going to you, Gab said the London director.
‘And we’re returning to East Seven Five where Gaby McAslan tells us something is happening,’ said the unflappable Jonathan Cusack.
‘It certainly is,’ Gaby said without a break. ‘It’s show time.’
It had started as a swirling of water, like current around rocks in a shallow river. Now the surface was punctured from below by sharp spines, dozens of them, arranged in rings and rings of rings. Only when their points were three metres above the surface did the spines begin to gradually flare outward. The knotted holdfast bases of the crowns of thorns emerged. Now the uppermost folds of the formations that looked like monstrous human brains broke the surface tension. Sea water ran trickling and gurgling through the fissures as the massive white structures loomed ever higher over the flotilla of small craft. The pinnacles of the crowns of thorns were now thirty metres above sea level and still Foa Mulaku pushed itself up from the deep. A structure was becoming evident. This was not an island, but a society of islands: white brain-formations surrounded by halos of high thorn coronets, linked to each other by a web of blue and red buttresses that were now surfacing, strand by dripping strand.
All this Tembo captured on his Chaga-proof camera and Gaby talked like she had never talked before; the wonder she felt in the presence of such events, and the fear, and the awe, and all the things the camera could not convey, and the way this thing out of the sea smelled and the huge deep noises that came from far down in its roots in the Equatorial Channel.
The boats started their engines. They moved slowly into the dripping labyrinth of arches and buttresses. The bright water beneath their hulls was brilliant with fish. Foa Mulaku creaked and clicked as it dried in the sun. Emergence had ceased: the thing that lived in the sea had entered a new phase of evolution. The white domes were splitting along their fissures. Objects shaped like tight-balled fists, but the height of two humans, were pushing from the cracks.
‘Hand-trees,’ Shepard prompted. Gaby repeated his words to London. The boats probed deeper into the heart of the alien archipelago. Above them, the white fists opened their fingers one by one. Gaby became aware that hers was the only voice speaking in the dripping, creaking basilica of Foa Mulaku and moderated her tone to a reverential whisper. This was a holy place. A drowned cathedral, Moon’s diary had called the Chaga. This was the place for which those words were properly written. Sagrada Familia after the deluge. But it had not drowned. It was risen. Venus on the half shell. The dragon in the sea, wakened.
Gordon the helmsman spun the wheel. ‘We’re going in,’ he said. The lead boat had already run up onto the shelving apron of the nearest fissure dome. The UNECTA recording boat followed it.
‘The Chaganauts are just making sure their face plates and respirators are secure before landing,’ Gaby whispered, pleased with her freshly-minted neologism. ‘Just to let you know back in London that if we go ashore I’ll have to put mine up and we’ll lose voice contact. They’re stepping on to the surface now.’
Shepard waved Gordon the helmsman to land.
‘They’re unloading experimental equipment from the boat,’ Gaby said. Tembo was lying across the benches with the camera resting on the prow for stability. ‘As you can see, the UNECTA camera crew has now landed as well. Our own boat is moving in, it looks likely that we’ll be making a landing, and I may be allowed to step onto the surface of Foa Mulaku.’
Now the studio had gone silent.
‘The hand-trees,’ Shepard tapped Gaby on the shoulder. ‘Look.’
Tembo reacted beautifully. He is a hell of a camera-man, Gaby thought. His God has given him a mighty gift.
The white hands were fully open now but that was not what had excited Shepard’s attention. It was that they were all aligned, like pieces of a mosaic, into a wide, shallow bowl pointed into the south-west quadrant of the sky.