‘Look at the angle,’ Shepard whispered into Gaby’s ear through the red and silver stretch hood. ‘I’ll just bet that’s twenty degrees.’
Gaby had set her life by the stars above Ballymacormick Point. She understood immediately.
‘The hand-trees seem to have formed themselves into what looks like a satellite dish,’ she told the studio. ‘As far as I can tell, they’re aimed along the ecliptic; in layman’s terms, that’s the astronomical plane in which the orbits of the planets lie. And we’ve landed. Gordon has run the nose of the boat up on to the shore. I’m holding off putting on my face plate for as long as possible so I can keep talking to you. I’m getting signals from the UNECTA personnel who have just gone ashore to stay where I am, but I’m certain that as soon as they make sure it’s safe, they’ll let me go over.’ And I am going to have a killer line for that moment, Gaby thought. As great as one small step for a man, a giant leap for mankind. Except I am not going to fuck it up like Armstrong. But Jesus, the first thing the world’s going to see is my silver ass going over the side. Boldly going where no woman has gone before and all they are going to remember is my cellulite.
Shepard left the main party to examine where the white brain-dome rose from the apron. He had a black 9 on the silver back of his suit. Gaby noted that his thighs did not seem to have lost condition since the photograph on his Arab desk had been taken. He reached a gloved hand to touch the mound. The surface puckered like a face frowning and shot out a polyp of white material. Shepard pulled his hand back. The polyp trembled, creased and folded itself into a hand, the exact double in size and shape of Shepard’s. Video cameras swung to bear. Tembo focused in like a sniper. Shepard cautiously brought his hand to within millimetres of the mimic. He opened his fingers, brought them together. The duplicate copied his movements. He cocked a thumb. The Chaga-thing cocked a thumb. He pressed his palm firmly against the alien palm.
And Gaby screamed and tore at her earphones under her hood as the hiss of the satellite link became a roar of noise and pain and Foa Mulaku thundered at the stars.
31
The moped-cab driver thought it was the funniest thing he had ever seen. Three journalists shouting at each other like deaf old fools. He laughed about it all the way to the Addu Reef Hotel where the foreign scientists had called the conference. When the journalists asked him the fare he spoke quietly so they would have to ask him again and again. The humour was well worth the tip it cost him.
‘Asshole,’ Gaby McAslan said as she entered the crowded foyer and left her bag with the receptionist. Her ears were still ringing. The doctors on East Seven Five had assured her that no permanent damage had been done when Foa Mulaku sent its message skyward, but not even the Sepultura Concert she had sneaked Reb into when she was fifteen, which she had thought was the loudest thing she would hear short of Doomsday, had lingered so long in the inner ear.
The Addu Reef Hotel had been designed to look like an ethnic fisher village. It stood on stilts ankle-deep in the lagoon. Its guestrooms, which the richer and quicker news corporations had monopolized, were clustered in little communities at the ends of boardwalks. Ethnic fisher villages did not come with en suite bathrooms or fully equipped gymnasiums. Ethnic fisher villages did not have vibrating beds filled with thermostatically controlled fluorescent gel, or glass windows in the floor to watch the fish, or packets of ribbed condoms and leaflets on safe sex in the rattan bedside cabinets. Ethnic fisher villages did not have rattan bedside cabinets.
UNECTA had taken over the night club to stage its press conference. The staff had arranged the bar seats in a semi-circle and set up a table in front of the DJ’s mixing desk. Most of the seats were already taken. Faraway added a SkyNet logo to the thicket of microphones taped to the conference table. Recognizing him, heads turned to seek out Gaby McAslan and bent together to whisper.
‘Nice angle, Gaby,’ Paul Mulrooney said, brushing past her on his way back from the bar with a glass of something amber.
‘That’s Shepard’s line,’ said a woman with a UPI badge she did not even know. Journalists snickered into their drinks. Gaby found a place in the middle of the back row of seats. Faraway guarded her left flank, Tembo, with the tripod, her right. Still someone managed to bump into her from behind and drop into her lap a crude cartoon of a kneeling man with an enormous penis fucking a crouching woman dog-fashion. The woman had long hair coloured in red ball-pen and a talk bubble coming out of her mouth saying, ‘Gaby McAslan, SkyNet News, with another exclusive.’
Tembo snatched the paper away, rolled it into a ball and put it in his mouth. He focused his camera, chewed and swallowed without comment.
The UNECTA team came in. R.M. Srivapanda, just off the sea-plane from East Seven Five, took the chair. To his right was a very upright African man in a severe black and white suit. Gaby recognized him as Harrison Muthika, Press Secretary from Nairobi. To Srivapanda’s left was an Asian woman who was introduced as Mariko Uchida from UNECTAsie’s Space Sciences Division. UNECTAfrique’s Peripatetic Executive Director was conspicuously absent.
The press conference opened. Harrison Muthika spoke first.
‘I would like to thank you all for coming this evening. I regret the short notice, but once again, the aliens have taken us by surprise. As you are no doubt aware, at seventeen-oh-eight local time the emergent marine object known as Foa Mulaku emitted a phenomenally powerful radio signal.’
There were wry chuckles and someone heckled, ‘Speak up, we can’t hear you!’
Harrison Muthika smiled. ‘This signal spanned the electromagnetic spectrum between the centimetre and metre bands and lasted for two hours, three minutes and twenty seconds. The power of the signal has been estimated at one hundred and fifty megawatts.’
Murmurs. ‘How was the power generated?’ a voice with a French accent shouted. Harrison Muthika held up his hand.
‘Please. There will be an opportunity for questions at the end. This enormous burst of radio energy swamped broadcasting in the East African, Indian Ocean and Southeast Asian areas: all communications in those frequencies were silenced. The disruption to cellular networks alone has cost at least twelve billion dollars in disrupted business, not to mention feedback damage to data storage systems. Television and navigation systems went down, contact was lost with several thousand ship and aircraft, as well as the failure of air-traffic control throughout the region. It is only by the grace of God that a major air disaster was averted, though we do not yet have a complete picture: outlying sections of the East Pacific net are only now coming back on line.
‘You may be interested to know that the anonymous NASA wit behind the names “BDO” and “Tolkien” has christened this event “The Scream”.’
‘It’s Carl Sagan, isn’t it?’ an American-accented voice shouted.
‘I can’t confirm that, and I must once again ask you to keep your questions for the end. The transmission has been analysed and has been shown to consist of one hundred and eighty-seven signals, each carrying a data-transfer code at a rate of one and a quarter megabytes per second.’
Gaby did sums on her PDU. The average whodunit could fit on a floppy disc, about one and a quarter megabytes. One hundred and eighty whodunits per second, times one hundred and twenty-three minutes times sixty seconds, that’s seven three eight oh seconds equals one million three hundred and eight thousand and sixty plus an extra five hundred and sixty-one for those last three seconds and that’s an entire library of Murders in the Ballroom and Bodies in the Library.