I am learning, Gaby McAslan thought.
‘I wanted to run from the sad, sick thing, back to my world, my people, my life. But I couldn’t leave him, not like that. I still loved him. You can hate the sin but love the sinner. He was a monster, but many women have loved monsters. Monsters on the outside and monsters on the inside.
‘He wanted me to become like him. I wouldn’t do it. He used all the old emotional blackmails: we could share a deeper love in new bodies, he could not love me fully in my baseline form. New humanity, same old bitchy tricks. He had an orthobody prepared for me; showed it to me, did everything short of physical force to make me go into it. When I refused absolutely, he drifted away from me. He turned to others like him; I went to live among the Wa-chagga at Nanjara village. I needed human faces, human voices. But I needed Langrishe too – I couldn’t leave him. Everything that I had loved was still there, intact, enclosed in that alien body. What’s the psychologists’ term? Approach/avoidance conflict? So when the foragers went out from Nanjara into the high forest, I went with them, to meet with Langrishe.’
‘Why?’ Gaby asked.
‘The ones back at Unit 12 all asked that same question. To have sex with him,’ Moon said. ‘Sex was all we had left. He could walk out of the orthobody – the thing had him on an umbilicus. Twenty feet of freedom. Freedom enough for a fuck. And all the ones at Unit 12 had that same disgusted expression, darlin’.
‘Then he trapped me. It was easy for him to do – the orthobody’s nervous system was an extension of the forest, he could manipulate the Chaga almost any way he wanted. That was how he had always been able to find me. We fucked, I slept like I always did afterwards, and the next thing I knew I woke in some Citadel wall bolt-hole bare-ass naked, completely hairless, two months of my life erased and something not at all nice hooked into the base of my spine.
‘He had the audacity to be furious. It was not what he planned for me. The Chaga had subverted him, diverted me away from the orthobody into which he had schemed to implant me. I knew then that I had been catastrophically wrong, so wrong I could not see how wrong I was. There was nothing left of Langrishe inside that atrocity, except obsession. That was all there had ever been, the need to sacrifice everything, even me, to his lust for the alien.
‘I knew I had to escape from the Chaga entirely; he would always be able to find me, defeat me, bring me to him. In time he would change my body as he wished. A hunting party from Kamwanga found me at the foot of the Citadel. I persuaded them to take me to Nanjara where I knew the people. I needed supplies, yes, but I needed evidence even more. I needed the diary. From Nanjara, the foraging party took me outward: they were headed to a meeting with a Tactical safari squad, for an extra cut on the deal, they could smuggle me through the UN military cordon around terminum. They didn’t understand that I wanted to be found by the military. I wanted to be taken to a UNECTA base. I wanted to be debriefed on what was going on up there in the Citadel. I wanted them to read my diary, then see the evidence growing in the middle of my back and cut it off me with scalpels.
‘I left them before the rendezvous point, made my own way to terminum and through to the outside world. Of course, I got spotted and picked up by an airborne patrol. They took me to Ol Tukai, the base where Langrishe had worked. While I was bound up with his new incarnation up on the mountain, it had found itself a set of tracks, got up on them and gone mobile. I gave them the diary. I told them the things I had seen in the heart of the Chaga. I showed them the thing on my back. They did tests. They did scans. They drafted reports and told me that the thing was unlike any other living organism they had ever encountered and that it would be an offence against science to do what I wanted and cut it out of me. There was a medical facility they wanted to send me to, where there were scientists who would look into the thing more closely and see if there was any way of removing it without killing it and leaving me hemiplegic.’
Moon laughed again.
The Landcruiser had stopped at an army checkpoint. Johnson Ambani sighed and took the last piece of paper from his briefcase and gave it to a barely deferential soldier, dripping and miserable. He had North African looks, bored and bad-tempered in October rains. The soldier saluted and told Johnson Ambani how far south he could safely drive.
The government car moved on, toward terminum.
‘You had to get away from Langrishe, but now you have to go back,’ Gaby said. ‘After all that he did to you, after all he would do to you.’
‘Not any more,’ Moon said. ‘I learned things about myself in Unit 12. It’s very good for that. They give you a lot of time for self-discovery. Years of it. About all there is to do, self-discovery. I learned to love this thing on my back. I have to. It’s not me, but it’s part of me. Like an eternal pregnancy: a piece of something separate but intimately connected; something that needs me. Like Langrishe needs me. That was why he wanted to change me: so that he would not have to make his journey into what he is becoming alone. It scares him; I realized that, down in Unit 12. He isn’t sure he can cope with what he is being made into. He needs me, he needs the solidity of a love that doesn’t have to be exactly as he is, but will walk with him wherever he goes. He needs me to anchor his humanity, to tell him he is still human, still capable of being loved.’
‘And do you love him?’ Gaby asked.
The Landcruiser crunched on to the stony verge. The road here ran in a long straight slope, down into the valley of a seasonal river now boiling in spate. On the far side it climbed as long and as straight up to the top of valley. Half-way up that road lay terminum.
The second government car pulled in on the opposite verge. Lucius and the Wa-chagga woman got out and stood in the rain. Sheets of water streamed down the cracked blacktop. The river was red with eroded earth.
‘Thank you,’ Moon said to Dr Daniel Oloitip. ‘I will always remember this.’ They shook hands over the back of the seat.
‘No doubt we will meet again some day,’ Dr Dan said. ‘The future seems to insist on it.’
Moon and Gaby got out of the car. Gaby held out the diary to her. Rain drops crackled on the plastic seal. Moon closed Gaby’s hand on the book and pushed it against her chest.
‘Give it back to T.P. I promised him I would get it back to him. I don’t need it any more. A new story’s starting; what happens, how it unfolds, is for no one but me to say.’ Moon peeled off the UNECTA plastic rain cape and let it fall to the ground. Rain plastered her thin vest to her shoulders and breasts.
The Wa-chagga had given their thanks and farewells and were half-way to the bridge. Moon sighed, lifted a hand in farewell and followed. Gaby watched her walk down to the river. She had gone a few yards when she paused, as if struck by an afterthought, and turned.
‘Tell T.P. I’m sorry. He’s lost out again. He can give up on me now,’ she shouted. The grey rain streamed down her face. ‘Gaby McAslan. Even if we had known each other longer, we wouldn’t have been friends, I think.’
‘You’re probably right,’ Gaby shouted back. But she watched the woman go down to the bridge and wade through the red flood waters and climb the long straight slope on the far side into terminum where Gaby could not see her any more.
50
T.P. Costello stopped the big SkyNet 4x4 outside the ugly house in the university district. It was late, dark. Even the reporters had gone home. Gaby could not see any house lights, but the Mahindra was in the drive beside her Landcruiser.
‘Go on. You need sleep. The edit can wait.’
‘Don’t want to,’ Gaby said. ‘He’ll be there.’