‘Is this all you have?’ he asked.
The room was comforting and depressing for the same reasons. You can fly faster, higher, further, but the rooms at each end are still the same. This one seemed to have been built by a set designer for Star Trek. A batik of feeding giraffes and the Nairobi LocalNet directory were the only concessions to this being Africa. Gaby arranged her airline booty in the bathroom. There was a big insect in the upper corner of the shower cubicle. Someone had folded the toilet paper into a point. There would be a little foil-wrapped chocolate on the pillow. She would have to be careful not to fall asleep on it. She did not want to have to wash it out of her hair with the big insect watching balefully for a chance to pounce.
She switched on the radio. Bright guitar music poured forth. The DJ rattled out swaggering pop-Swahili. Encouraged, Gaby opened the window to look at her new city. The bustle on Kenyatta Avenue had not abated. The grubby buses swung amiably along; matatus and little moped-tricycles darted impudently between. Everything was way too overloaded. Five men struggled a trolley laden with wood down the road, piling up a long line of traffic as they tried to make a right turn. A convoy of armoured vehicles in UN white came up the road from the city centre. A continuous grumble of engine noise, sirens and the ghosts of diesel and biogas drifted into the room.
In Uhuru Park the trees were dismembered stumps, pillaged for firewood. Beyond the worn, parched green the inner city skyline began abruptly. In the high, strong light the towers that had seemed to glow with a golden inner fire now looked shabby and hard-worked. High above the sky was that clear and infinite kind of blue you see only on the hottest days. It was down at street level that it began to take on the orange haze of photochemical smog.
Gaby fetched the camcorder and framed a tracking panoramic from the elegant white bungalows of the well-to-do across the valley from her to the concrete and glass sunflower of the Kenyatta Centre, headquarters of UNECTAfrique.
‘Hi, Dad,’ she said. ‘I’m here.’
2
Three thousand years of history gives a perspective on human truths. The Chinese are right. It is a curse to live in interesting times. World events have dangerous slip-streams in which many lives can be swept away. Gaby McAslan was one fated to follow the lights in the sky. Saturn’s moons had drawn her to London: the Kilimanjaro Event would drag her across whole years and continents.
Like the death of Kennedy, or Elvis, or the Challenger, the Kilimanjaro Event was one of those points where world and self touch and you can remember exactly where you were and what you were doing.
Gaby McAslan was bouncing around in her singlet and panties on her bed, very full of Australian Semillon-Chardonnay and pretending to avoid the undressing fingers of Sean Haslam, her boyfriend of eight days. He was a part-time Network Media tutor. The other part of his time he freelanced multimedia overlay for Reuters. Therefore Gaby McAslan had uncorked the uncheap Semillon-Chardonnay and invited him to bounce on her bed.
‘Do you have to have the television on?’ he had asked.
‘It’s going to distract you?’ she had asked, smothering him in winy kisses and the mahogany hair that hung to the small of her back.
She had been the distracted one. The late news presenter had had the look of a man asked to read something he could not believe. So had the correspondents in Washington and Dar Es Salaam and at the foot of the mountain. American spysat shots were incontrovertible. On the second pass the resolution was enough to show things the size of a domestic oil tank. Not that there were any oil tanks on Uhuru Peak on the Kibo snow cap. Not that there was anything remotely recognizable there at all after the impact. Gaby had knelt on the bottom of the bed, resting her chin and hands on the carved wooden footboard, watching the news coming out of Africa. She had felt the stretch fabric of her panties slip down across her rump, followed by the Inquisitive press and prickle of dick and pubic hair.
‘Go away. This is important.’
‘More important than this?’
‘A hell of a lot more important. What kind of multimedia pro are you anyway?’
The camera had taken a few vertiginous, swooping shots of something that looked a little like a multi-coloured rainforest and a little like a drained coral reef but mostly like nothing anyone had ever seen before. Then the Tanzanian soldier had put his hand over the lens and there was a scuffle of sky and camouflage and the presenter in London was saying that the infection zone (he had seemed uneasy with the hastily devised terminology) was expanding outward from the site where the meteor hit Kibo at an estimated fifty metres per day.
He had then shuffled his papers, looked embarrassed and gone on to the rest of the news.
Suddenly sobered and un-sexed, Gaby went to the Net. Screen after screen of information unfolded from the online news services. Schematics, stills, simulations, animations. Page after page of text. Skywatch satellites hunting for Near Earth Orbiters and Planetbusters had spotted the bolide ten days ago: an atmosphere grazer, a little out of the ordinary in that it had made three complete orbits before entry, but otherwise unremarkable. Its ion trail across the Indian Ocean had been observed by US defence systems but they no longer mistook meteors for MIRV warheads. It had impacted on the peak of Kilimanjaro, near the camp of a German hang-gliding expedition. Storms had closed off the mountain for three days. Then the stories began, from the local Wa-Chagga people and the remnants of the hang-gliding team.
Something was growing up there.
The Tanzanian government might have succeeded in hushing the thing up, had an Earth Resources platform not been ordered to turn its cameras on equatorial East Africa. What NASA saw sent them straight to the White House to ask Mr President if he could ask the Pentagon to loan them a few minutes on the military spy satellites.
The Tanzanians could not have kept it secret for long. Not even the Pentagon could. Not growing at fifty metres per day.
Gaby had not noticed Sean dressing and leaving. After an hour or so she no longer noticed even the images unreeling across her screen. Here was the way to make the world know her name. Her star with her name on it, fallen from heaven. If she was true to it, it would honour her, but she must come to it. That was why it had fallen so far away, so that she would have to prove her worthiness of it. It was patient and enduring – who knew how many billions of miles it had crossed to come to her -but it would not wait forever.
Her tutors were astounded by the enthusiasm with which she addressed her work. They did not see the shining star with her name on it; they saw only her fierce, dark determination. She was racing not against the demands of Network Journalism, but the inexorable growth of the alien flora. When the second biological package came down in the Bismarck Archipelago, to be followed a month later by the Ruwenzori Event, her pace became frenetic. Her tutors told her to slow down. She could not. The United Nations was out there now, in the form of UNECTA, poking and prying and sampling and sniffing her alien rainforest. She had to get there before it was all named and numbered and known and there was no mystery left for her to explain.
Time and inexperience frustrated her. Trapped in grey London, she wished she were the Hundred Foot Woman who could push the dirty buildings apart until new, strange life sprang through the cracks in the street and the light of a brighter, kinder sun shone through the tear in the sky.