“For your infection. It needs treatment.”
With great deliberation, he filled his mouth with phlegm and spat in the sand at her feet. “I do not need your Western medicine!”
She shrugged, returned the tube to her pocket, and turned to leave. This was the moment she would turn her back on him, fearing nothing, and walk away.
He said, “What now?”
She hesitated. “What do you mean?”
“You have told the police about me, where I am?”
“I’ve told them nothing,” she said. “But I think Josef Makumbi might. He is in jail now, and in time he will be questioned by the police, and in fear I think he will tell them everything.”
She smiled at the sudden flare of alarm in his eyes, and it filled her with satisfaction.
He stepped towards her, his intent obvious. She held her ground, did not flinch as he came within half a metre of her and tried to raise his arm.
His inability to carry through the action that his will dictated, the thwarted expression on his face, was almost comical to behold. He began to shake.
She peered at him. “Go on, Ali. Try it. Hit me. That’s what you would like to do, isn’t it?” She shook her head. “The days when you could dominate with violence are gone, Ali. Goodbye.”
She turned, a feeling like jubilation swelling within her, and walked away.
She was halted by another cry, but this one was not from Ali.
His wife had emerged from the hut, a plastic carrier bag clutched in her right hand.
She surprised Sally by saying in English, “You are leaving Benali?”
Sally nodded. “I’m going to Kampala.”
The woman hesitated. Ali stared at her, a look of terrible realisation dawning in his eyes.
At last his wife said, “Please, take me with you. I wish to leave.”
Ali shouted something in Arabic, took a step towards his wife. She flinched, cowering and bringing her arm up to protect her face. Ali stood over her, frozen, and tears tracked down his face, trickling into the runnel of his scar.
Slowly, Sally stepped forward and took the woman’s arm. “Come with me,” she said softly.
Silent, eyes fixed in fright on her husband, the woman nodded. Sally drew her away, along the track from the river towards the road and the hill where her car was parked.
Behind them, Ali cried out. He was giving chase, calling out almost incoherently. His cries drew an audience of faces which emerged from the huts on either side and stared at him, which enraged him further.
They reached the car and Sally opened the passenger door and the woman, clutching her scant possessions to her chest, slipped inside.
Ali stood beside the car, ranting now, attempting to reach out but each time finding his movement restricted like a puppet whose controller was suffering a fit.
Sally climbed in behind the wheel and started the engine. Beside her, the woman pulled down her veil and spoke quietly to her husband through the open window. Ali opened his mouth to reply but, this time, no words came.
Sally looked at Ali, and their eyes met. He spat, “You will not win!”
“This is not about winning or losing,” she said. “It is not a contest.”
They left the village of Benali and headed south.
They were silent for a time, and then Sally asked, “What did you say to him?”
The woman stared ahead. “I simply told him that I have never loved him, and that every day with him I dreamed of escaping,” she said, then went on in almost a whisper, “Four days ago he told me what he was going to do to the people he took from the medical centre — to two doctors. He was proud and boastful, but when he came back here yesterday he was quiet, and he said nothing about what had happened.”
“We escaped, my colleague and I.”
The woman smiled. “Escaped, like I am doing now.”
They drove on in silence, and a little later Sally asked, “You have money? Will you be okay in Kampala?”
“I have saved a little. I will be fine. In Kallani I trained to be a secretary. I can use a computer and many programs, though for many years I have mended fishing nets and suffered my husband’s beatings.”
Sally slowed down and held out her hand. “I’m Sally,” she said.
The woman smiled and took her hand. “I am Zara,” she said, “and I am very happy to be leaving.”
Sally smiled. “I know exactly what you mean, Zara,” she said.
She accelerated, heading south towards Kampala, and smiled as she considered the new life awaiting her in England.
CHAPTER EIGHT
ALLEN CAME AWAKE instantly. He knew exactly where he was and experienced no sense of dislocation. He looked across the aisle at the two facing seats, and then at the one beside him. They were empty. He wondered if the others had been awoken one by one so that, for whatever reasons, they could not confer.
A golden strip pulsed on the floor before him, the only light in the darkness. He stood and followed it, stepped from the plane and found himself in an identical darkness, illuminated only by the golden strip that extended for perhaps five metres before him. He followed it, walking steadily. The odd thing was that, as he went, the length of the strip remained the same; he had the peculiar sensation of walking on a treadmill.
Another odd thing was that he was not in the slightest apprehensive or even overawed. He was aboard an alien starship, he told himself, experiencing that which no human being, other than those who had accompanied him aboard the plane from Uganda, had experienced before. Yet he felt only an intense curiosity. He wondered if the Serene were responsible for this state of mind, too; they had the capability of inhibiting the act of violence in human beings, after all. Perhaps they were dictating his feelings now… and what about his thoughts?
That way, he realised with a smile, lay madness.
He must have been walking for five minutes. He stared into the darkness but could make out nothing, and the glow in the floor revealed nothing of his surroundings either. He realised, then, that although he had carried his holdall aboard the alien plane, he had left without it.
A minute later the glow stretching out before him became shorter, then vanished. He came to a halt in the absolute darkness and waited. Again he felt no fear.
Seconds later he felt something touch the back of his legs; some slight force applied pressure behind his knees; quickly, and involuntarily, he fell into a sitting position. He was caught by something soft and accommodating, like the world’s most comfortable armchair. He sat back, his head against softness, his arms outstretched on some kind of rest.
Then the darkness lifted slowly.
He was seated in what might have been some kind of vast amphitheatre created from the soft, black substance which cradled him — cradled him, he saw, and thousands of others. To either side, and above and below, he made out men and women of all races. Like him, they were staring around in awe. His nearest neighbour, a young Indian woman, was perhaps three metres away, a distance sufficient to make casual conversation difficult. She caught his eye and smiled briefly, and Allen smiled and shook his head in complicit wonder.
The amphitheatre swept around in a vast ellipse, dotted with representatives of humanity ensconced in the sable padding.
He felt an immense emotion — joy and privilege — swell in his chest.
Only then did he turn his attention to the well of the amphitheatre. A glow resided there, like a pool of molten gold, and he knew where he had seen it before: emanating from the nose-cones of the conjoined starships. He guessed, then, where he was; the amphitheatre was somehow formed from the front sections of each of the eight Serene starships.
The Nexus?