‘It’s growing right back,’ Gaby said. But she saw how Abigail Santini smiled at her.
Dr Dan had been invited but sent his regrets that he would not be able to attend through his lawyer Johnson Ambani. He had been subpoenaed to appear before a Ministerial Committee to answer accusations that he had exceeded the remit of his enquiry.
‘I thought I was in the shit,’ Gaby said. ‘Shouldn’t you be helping him with your magic briefcase?’
‘This battle he insists on fighting himself,’ Johnson Ambani.
The Norfolk’s Indian food was outstanding, the beer wonderful. Faraway propositioned Gaby behind a mound of samosas and the sewn-up thing inside tore a little more because she understood for the first time that all Faraway’s jokes and innuendos and double-and-single entendres had been constructed to conceal the truth that he was crazy about her.
He and Tembo came with T.P. to the airport.
‘Why do the bookstalls sell so many novels about terrorist hijackings and air crashes?’ Tembo asked. Then he said, ‘Go with God, Gaby McAslan. I will pray to Jesus that you return safely, and come back to us. I know this will happen. Jesus’s blood never failed me yet.’
Faraway said nothing but hugged her and turned away so she would not have to see anything as uncool as emotion on his face.
‘Be clever, my girl, and let who will be good,’ T.P. said. ‘What’ll you do?’
She did not answer, because just them the ground-side stewardess called for the final passengers for the flight to London Heathrow to proceed immediately through passport control.
The booking computer had been kind. It had given her a row of three seats all to herself. She looked out of the window as the plane climbed. The 747-400 banked and she glimpsed the Nyandarua Chaga through rents in the rain clouds. From ascent altitude it was a huge many-coloured carpet laid over the hills and valleys of the White Highlands. Gaby watched it until the veils of high alto cirrus closed over it and she could see the places with the oldest names in the world no more. She drank and slept the rest of the eight hours to Heathrow.
She came through London immigration in the dawn hours and booked a shuttle ticket to Belfast. There was nothing in London for her to go home to. There was everything in Ireland. She bought people alcoholic presents and waited in the cafeteria for her flight to be called, drinking grapefruit juice. She watched the aircraft come in to land and thought about the shaman called Oksana Mikhailovna Telyanina and her plane called Dignity.
The commuter flight was a third full. She gave herself a window seat and watched for landmarks as the feeder jet followed the line of the coast in to the city at the head of the lough. It crossed the narrow finger of the Ards peninsula, turned above Donaghadee – she recognized the Copeland islands, and the lighthouse on its stone pier. She saw the Watchhouse on its little headland by the harbour, and the autumn brown of the Point.
Her father met her at the airport. He had bought a new car: a Landrover 4x4. Paddy the black dog was in the back. Sonya was in the front. More than cars had changed. Gaby pleaded tiredness as her reason for having little to say on the drive home.
Reb and Hannah and a slightly sheepish Marky were at the house to greet the returning heroine. Hannah’s oldest, in her very best junior Laura Ashley frock, stared aghast at her Auntie Gaby. The new baby cried because Paddy started to bark.
After the lunch, Gaby begged time alone, and pulled on her Africa boots and a weather-proof coat and went out on to the Point. She walked the way she had walked the night she thought the stars had called her name. They too moved in circles, but their orbits were slower and grander and more subtle than human lifetimes could sense. She stood at the edge of the land looking out to sea. The wind stirred the fields of winter barley behind her. She had forgotten how cold this land was. It penetrated all her layered tropical-weight clothing. The sea was choppy, breaking in frantic little white folds of foam, constantly re-absorbing itself. She picked a flat stone from the shore and skimmed it out to sea. Two, three, four bounces. She skimmed another one. Three, four, five. Six was her personal record. She did not beat it, or even equal it, today.
Hannah and Marky had gone home by the time Gaby returned from the Point, but Hannah came back to the Watch-house that evening: sisters together. Hannah was wearing a little black dress. Gaby knew the significance. The alcoholic presents were drunk. The sisters reminisced and embarrassed their father in front of Sonya about his inevitable shortcomings as a parent. Then Hannah got the tape out, and the microphones, and Reb whisked Gaby upstairs into the spare black body and mini that fitted and no more. Dad and Sonya shouted impatience as Gaby dashed on makeup. There was a round of applause as the soul sisters took their mikes and their positions.
‘Wait for it,’ Reb said and Gaby smiled as the introduction played, because it was the one to the song that said when you feel that you can’t go on, all you had to was reach out and someone would be there. She pushed out a hip, lifted one arm, two, three four, and in.
Finis Africae
53
On the south side of the sky it is February 9, high summer as the Gaia probe goes into a highly eccentric pole-to-pole orbit of the Big Dumb Object and is captured by the object’s small intrinsic gravity, a moon of an ex-moon. In the months since The Scream, the Big Dumb Object has rolled from a twelve hundred kilometre diameter disc into a hollow parabolic cup three hundred kilometres deep, open to space at the forward end. The artifact is spinning at a rate of one revolution every twelve minutes. The mathematics of maintaining an orbit around an object that is constantly changing shape have never been performed before, but the Flight Control crew are confident in their computers and Gala’s reserves of reaction mass.
The highest point of the probe’s course, over the middle section of the elongated cup-shaped object, is fifty kilometres. Closest approach, over the open end, is two-and-a-half kilometres. In astronomical terms, that is a French kiss.
The thing devours comparatives, shrivels superlatives. Gala’s first full frontal of the interior cavity, shot from thirty kilometres out, shows the largest enclosed space ever beheld by humanity. It is like looking into a pit one hundred and fifty kilometres wide and three hundred deep. You could drop all seven of Dante’s circles of hell, and all the other hells of the great hell describers, into that pit and never see them again.
The rim of the cavity is ringed with a forest of stalagmites (some argue stalactites) nine kilometres deep. Each stalagmite, or stalactite, is twelve kilometres high. Like teeth, a junior data processor at Gaia Control comments in the coffee line. After that no one ever looks at the BDO without seeing a planet-eater, heading earthwards, jaws wide open.
Spectroscopic analysis reveals a thin CO2 atmosphere clinging to the inside of the cylinder. As far as the cameras can see into the interior cavity, it is carpeted with the characteristic coralline forms of climax Chaga: an entire geography, an undiscovered country. Later passes confirm early glimpses of objects in the zero-gee vacuum of the BDO’s spin axis. They are two hundred kilometres down-shaft. Computer enhancement shows them to be spherical, slightly under three hundred metres in diameter and bearing a strong resemblance to the delicately beautiful glass shells of terrestrial microscopic diatoms. The objects are in motion. One after another, they are accelerating along the BDO’s axis. On February 18, the first leaves the BDO’s open mouth. An hour later, the second object emerges. Three hundred and twenty-seven such diatoms are launched from the BDO in the next thirteen days. One comes within a hundred metres of Gaia. In astronomical terms, that is more than just a French kiss. That is deep throat. The ejected objects move to a position one hundred thousand kilometres ahead of the Big Dumb Object and scatter into a disc three thousand kilometres across. The namer of names at NASA christens it The Swarm. Their purpose becomes apparent when Asteroid M113C, an erratic orbiter whose return leg from beyond Jupiter would have brought it within three thousand kilometres of the Big Dumb Object, suddenly disappears. Gaia’s sensors, at the extreme limit of their range, disclose the presence of fifteen smaller bodies occupying M113C’s orbit. In gross defiance of celestial mechanics, they are all moving out of that orbit to rendezvous with The Swarm.