She opened her eyes.
‘Well, lookee here,’ she said. She had a Dublin accent. You can take the girl out of Barrytown, but not Barrytown out of the girl.
‘Moon,’ Gaby McAslan breathed.
The woman rose from her stool. Her wings folded and furled into a place on her back Gaby could not see.
‘You are Gaby McAslan,’ Moon said. She sounded disappointed. ‘I know who you are. I’ve been watching you. Following you. I know all about you.’
‘I know who you are,’ Gaby said. ‘I’ve been following you, so long, so closely. I know all about you. This is how I know it.’ She held out the ruined Liberty print diary in its transparent, UNECTA-stamped sack. ‘T.P. sends his love.’
49
The October rains had come. From horizon to horizon the sky was a plane of grey cloud. The red dust of Kajiado had turned to watery mud. Gaby splashed barefoot through it to Dr Dan’s government Landcruiser. UNECTA had been unable to spare the women any footwear, but had lent them yellow plastic rain sheets. Gaby wrapped the camera with the last testament of Jake Aarons stored on its discs in hers. Moon draped hers over the thing on her back that the long lenses at the wire were not allowed to see. All the way up in the elevator, all the way through the legal wranglings in Reception, Gaby had stared in nauseated fascination at the thing that pulsed and glowed in the small of Moon’s back where she had cut the white vest top away.
Once when she had been a kid, walking the dogs on the Point, she had come across the body of a drowned sheep that had washed up in a gully. It had been a long time in the sea; the wool had all fallen out, the body was swollen, lambent, eyes eaten out by crabs. It was not that it was that dead that had scared Gaby, it was that it looked so alien. She had come back, day after day to look at the rotting, disgusting, fascinating thing until the high tide took it out again.
The thing on Moon’s back was dreadful and wonderful in the same way. Through the transparent flesh, Gaby could see how it clung to the woman with a hundred red millipede legs, pushing neural connectors into her spinal cord, alien as a drowned sheep, feeling its way into places no lover ever could. It was an ally with astonishing capabilities: the furled wings were sheets of organic circuitry powered by light. They carried Moon through the planetary telecommunications networks: they could receive hundreds of terrestrial and satellite channels simultaneously, decode them and filter selected information into her consciousness. Television dreaming.
The two women got into the back seat, dripping on the upholstery. Gaby combed back her savaged hair with her fingers. It would grow. It would be right again. She had the pictures. They would make everything right again.
‘We go,’ Dr Dan said to Johnson Ambani, who doubled as driver. The government Landcruiser drove away from the olive monolith of Unit 12. Kenyan flags stirred damply on the wing pennons. A second Landcruiser fell in behind. In it were Lucius and the Wa-chagga woman. They had no place either in this nation, among these people. They were going south too, back to the Chaga. The Black Simbas had already been returned to Nairobi, except for Moran, who had been remanded in prison charged with Bushbaby’s murder. If convicted, he could be hanged. Gaby’s horror of ritual execution struggled with her anger at Bushbaby’s death. Nobody had needed to die.
She hated the stupidity of killing. She hated the fragility of human lives. She hated death.
The media was waiting outside the wire. Hundreds of them, waiting in the red mud and the rain. Cameras, boom mikes, long lenses. Some had stepladders pushed up against the wire. Dr Dan had played the ace of trumps. Vanish a black African HIV 4 victim and it is another entry in the WHO’s databases. Vanish a white female European television journalist and the news vans are ten deep on the football pitch on the other side of the road. Gaby grimaced as she remembered T. P.’s cardinal sin: she was the newsperson who had become the news. As the government cars approached a few cameras flashed. A stampede began toward the gate. Blue helmets opened the gate a crack and pushed through to hold the reporters back.
‘Keep driving,’ Dr Dan said. ‘Do not stop. If you run one down, I will vouch for you.’
Johnson Ambani did his best to obey his client, but the reporters overwhelmed the blue helmets and poured in around the Landcruiser. Lenses were shoved against the windows. Flashes bounced round inside the car. Voices clamoured, hands thrust microphones and disc recorders. Ms McAslan, Dr Oloitip, who what do you when will you how did you can you will you? Gaby glimpsed a SkyNet logo in the wall of technology and Faraway head and shoulders above the press. T. P. She saw T. P. She pressed her palms to the glass and shouted his name. Johnson Ambani inched forward until he had enough space to floor the accelerator. A few diehards ran after the Landcruiser. They must be freelances, Gaby thought. The car bounced over the railroad tracks at speed and turned left onto the Namanga road. The second Landcruiser emerged from the scrimmage and followed.
‘Moon,’ Gaby said. Time and space were running out. ‘I need to know. The story the diary doesn’t tell. Your story, yours and Langrishe’s.’
‘You don’t stop, do you?’ Moon said. ‘Professional unto the last. You get the exclusive.’
‘This is for me, and me alone. I need to know how the story ends. You owe me this. I can guess some of the bits that were cut out of the diary, but I don’t know how it ended. I don’t know if you ever found Langrishe.’
Moon looked at the rain falling on the high savannah for a time. She could not sit straight in the seat because of the thing on her back.
‘Yeah, I suppose I do owe you. Found Langrishe? I suppose so. Found something that used to be Dr Peter Langrishe.’
‘Changed.’
Moon laughed.
‘Most definitely. But not like those poor bastards in Unit 12. It wasn’t disease-engendered. Like this thing of mine, it was something the forest grew. Up there in the Citadel, there are things like bodies in search of souls. And when they join, they join forever. Can you understand what I am telling you?’
‘Obi-men. Orthobodies. Langrishe went into one of those?’
‘This a story or an interview? Yes. He hid it from me at first, when he came to me out of the cloud forest up on the mountain. He would come to me by night, or hide himself in the fog; never let me see him too closely. Just the voice, ranting on and on about evolution, about how he had found the aliens, how the Chaga was their tool for expanding humanity into a truly galactic species. He was right, he had found his aliens; they were him. He was them.
‘He showed me what he had done to himself. He thought he was glorious. Magnificent. I saw an abomination. A travesty. The denial of all my love for him; that he would do such a thing so lightly, without thought for anything but himself. All I had ever been was a donkey to nod at his theories on “the alien”, and a pair of ever-open thighs. Do you know what it is like to be betrayed by the thing that is the sum purpose of your life?’