Futures - Four Novellas Part 18

"No. No, I suppose not. It's all part of the human comedy ... or tragedy."

"We can go now, boss. It's all wound up and waiting."

"Of course. Then take me back to the quarter, Mr. Corso. I think I must tell Colonel Veeder about this security problem."

Corso paused, halfway through swinging into the pilot's sling. One hand was raised, grasping a support strut of the airframe's wide canary yellow wings, and half his face was in shadow. He gave me a level, appraising look and said, "Are you sure you want to do that?"

"The security of the diplomatic quarter is at risk. It's not only Demi Lacombe who could be using that way in and out of the parklands." When Corso did not reply, I bent and touched the bulge of the blazer, bolstered at my calf. "Get me back, Mr. Corso. I insist."

"You will get more people than her into trouble, boss."

"I will tell Colonel Veeder that your part in this was blameless. That you were under my orders."

"I'm not just thinking of myself."

"Yani Hakaiopulos will have to take his chance. I shudder to think what Demi must have done, to gain his secrets."

"I think it's more a question of what she did to him," Corso said.

"I have had enough of your impertinence, Mr. Corso. Look sharp, now. I want to get this whole unfortunate business over with."

"I don't think so, boss."

"What?"

He let go of the strut and stepped back and said flatly, "It won't take you long to walk back, even if you have to use the stairs to climb up to the quarter.

And as you always like to remind me, you have your blazer to protect you."

"Corso! d.a.m.n you Corso, come back here!"

But he did not look back as he walked away across the blackened ruins of the lawn, even when I drew the blazer and blew a dead tree to splinters. I hoped that the shot might attract one of the killing machines which patrolled the city, but although I waited a full ten minutes, nothing stirred. At last, I climbed out of the airframe and began the long walk home.

Seven Uev Veeder took my revelation more calmly than I had thought he would, even though I had taken the precaution of having arranged to meet with him in the presence of Colm Wardsmead, the nominal director of the diplomatic quarter and, therefore, of the entire city. Wardsmead was a s.h.i.+fty, self- satisfied man; although he liked to think of himself as a Medici prince, the effectiveness of his native cunning was limited by his laziness and contempt for others.

I knew that Dev Veeder despised Wardsmead, but also knew that he would not dare lose control of his temper in the director's presence.

"This is all very awkward," Wardsmead said, when I was done. "Perhaps you would care to make a recommendation, Colonel Veeder. I am sure that you would want this matter handled discreetly."

During my exposition, Dev Veeder had stood with his back to the eggshaped room, looking out of the huge window toward the s.h.a.ggy treetops of the parkland.

Without turning around, he said, "She's supposed to be doing research out there. It would be the best place for an arrest."

"Away from the excitable gaze of the diplomatic community," Wardsmead said. "I quite understand, Colonel."

He was unable to hide his satisfaction at Dev Veeder's discomfort. Veeder was a war hero and so difficult to discipline, but now Wardsmead believed that he had a stick with which to beat him.

Perhaps Veeder heard something he did not like in Wardsmead's tone. He turned and gave the man a hard stare and said, "I always do what is best, Mr. Wardsmead, not what is convenient. My men are tracking her as she makes her way back across the main dome. They will allow her to enter the back door to the quarter's parkland, and I will arrest her when she arrives."

Wardsmead swung to and fro in the cradle of his chair, hands folded across his ample stomach, and said, "I suppose the question is, once you have arrested her, has she done anything wrong?"

"Consorting with the enemy without permission is a crime," Dev Veeder said promptly. "Failing to reveal a weakness in the security of the diplomatic quarter is also a crime. Both are betrayals of trust."

"Well, there we have it," Wardsmead said.

"There will have to be a trial," Dev Veeder told him.

"Oh, now, that would be an unnecessary embarra.s.sment, don't you think? One of the shuttles is due to leave in a couple of days. We can s.h.i.+p her off-"

"There will be a trial," Dev Veeder said. "It is a security matter, and the crime was committed outside the diplomatic quarter, so it falls under martial law. She will be tried, and so will the old man."

I said, "You have arrested Yani Hakaiopulos?"

For the first time, Dev Veeder looked directly at me. I confess that I flinched. He said, "The old man was not at the hospital, but there are only so many places he can hide. Your guide, the man Corso, has also vanished. I must a.s.sume that he is also part of the plot."

I said, "Yani Hakaiopulos was simply helping Demi understand how the parklands and wilderness had been put together. Surely that's not a crime?"

Using her first name was a mistake. Dev Veeder said coldly, "You have admitted, Professor-Doctor Graves, that you did not know what they talked about. I have not arrested you only because stupidity is not a crime under either civil or martial law."

Wardsmead said, "I don't much care what happens to the two tweaks, but even if I allow you your trial, Colonel Veeder, I want an a.s.surance that Dr. Lacombe will be deported at the end of it."

Despite his amiable tone, his forehead was greasy with sweat. He scented a scandal, and did not want its taint to sully his career.

Dev Veeder said, "That depends on what I discover during my interrogation. And I can a.s.sure you, gentlemen, that it will be a very thorough interrogation.

You will come with me, Professor-Doctor Graves."

"I have already told you-"

"You will come with me," Dev Veeder said again.

He wanted his revenge to be complete.

Eight Lamelot, Mimas fell; Baghdad, Enceladus fell; Athens and Spartica on Tethys surrendered within days of each other, blasted into submission by singles.h.i.+p attacks; the vacuum organism farms of lapetus's carbonaceous plains were destroyed by viral infection; Phoebe, settled by the Redeemers, and the habitats which had remained in orbit around t.i.tan, had all declared neutrality at the beginning of the war, and were under martial law.

Within two months of the arrival of the expeditionary force from Earth, the war was almost over. Only Paris, Dione remained defiant to the end. Singles.h.i.+ps had taken out most of the city's peripheral installations. Its vacuum organism farms were dying. And now new stars flared in its sky as troop s.h.i.+ps

took up their eccentric orbits. The emergency committee of Paris voted to surrender, and the same night were a.s.sa.s.sinated by Marisa Ba.s.si's followers. Ba.s.si rallied the citizens, organized the barricades and the block captains, killed a party of negotiators in a fit of fury and &Ued his hostages too. It was an unforgivable act, a terrible war crime, yet for Marisa Ba.s.si and the citizens of Paris it was deeply necessary. It was an affirmation of their isolation and their outlaw status. It united them against the rest of humanity. I believe that Ba.s.si was tired of waiting, tired of the slow attrition of the blockade. He was bringing the war to the heart right into his city and, like the people he led, was eager to embrace it. Imagine that last day, as lights streaked across the sky as the troop s.h.i.+ps launched their drop capsules. A battery of industrial X-ray lasers tried and failed to target them; a troop s.h.i.+p came over the horizon, pinpointed the battery, and destroyed it with a single low-yield fission missile, stamping a new crater a kilometer wide on Remus crater's floor. Marisa Ba.s.si felt the shock wave of that strike as a low rumbling that seemed to pa.s.s far beneath the ground, like a subway train. He was in the street, organizing the people who manned one of the barricades. It was mid-morning. He had been awake for more than forty-eight hours. His throat was sore and his lips were cracked. His eyes ached in their dry sockets and there was a low burning in his belly; he had drunk far too much coffee. The scow had gone, and those citizens too old or too young to fight had been moved into the tunnels of the original colony. There was nothing left to do now but fight. The people knew this and seemed to be in good heart. They still believed that the Three Powers Alliance would not dare to destroy their beautiful city, the jewel of the outer system, and perhaps Marisa Ba.s.si believed it too. He felt that he carried the whole city in his heart, its chestnut trees and caf&, trams and parklands, the theater and the Bourse and the lovely gla.s.s cathedral, and he had never loved his adopted home as fiercely as he loved it now, in its last hours. The barricade was in one of the service sectors near the perimeter of the dome, with diamond panes arching just above the rooftops of the offices and warehouses. It commanded a good view of a wide traffic circle, and on Ba.s.si's orders men and women were cutting down stands of slim aspens to improve the fire lanes. Ba.s.si was working with them, getting up a good sweat, when the tremor pa.s.sed underneath. One of his young aides came running up, waving a TV strip like a handkerchief. "They got the lasers," she said breathlessly. She was fifteen or sixteen, almost twice Ba.s.si's height, and trembled like a racehorse at the off. Like everyone else, she was wearing a pressure suit. The bowl of its helmet was hooked to her utility belt. "We expected that," Ba.s.si said, staring up at her. He had shaved off his beard, cut his hair to within a millimeter of his scalp. His hands, grasping the shaft of his diamond-edged axe, tingled. He said, "What else?" "They're down," the girl said, "and coming along both ends of the ridge." "Any message from their command s.h.i.+p?" "No sir." "And we won't send one. Get back to headquarters. Tell them I'll be back in twenty minutes." "Sir, shouldn't you-" Ba.s.si lifted the axe. "I've a job to finish here. Go!" They were mostly old men and women on that barricade, and knew that they would be among the first to engage the invaders. Why did Ba.s.si stay with them?

Perhaps he was exhausted. He had brought the whole city to this point by sheer rorce of will, and perhaps he saw nothing beyond the moment when the fighting started. Perhaps he knew then that defeat was inevitable, and wanted to make a last heroic gesture rather than face the ignominy of surrender. In any case, he stayed. Once the aspens had been cleared, he went back with the others to the barricade. It was no more than a ridge of roadway which had been turned up by a bulldozer and topped with tangles of razor wire. They closed up the wire and started checking their weapons-machine pistols and blazers stamped out by a rejigged factory, an ungainly machine which used compressed air to fire concrete-filled cans. Someone had a flask of brandy and they all took a sip, even Ba.s.si's remaining aide. The flask was going around the second time when there was a brisk series of bangs in the distance, and a wind got up, swirling foliage broken from the aspens high into the air. The invaders broke into the main dome of the city at nine points, breaching the basalt skirt with shaped charges, driving their transports straight through, and then spraying sealant to close the holes. At that point, they thought they could take the city without inflicting much damage. While some of the people at the barricade latched up their helmets and checked their weapons, others were still looking at TV strips. Ba.s.si ripped the TVs from then- hands, told them roughly to watch the street. The motor of the compressor gun started up with a tremendous roar and at the same moment sleek s.h.i.+ning man-sized machines appeared on the far side of the traffic circle. The killing things moved very quickly. It is doubtful that anyone got off a shot before the machines had crossed the traffic circle and leaped the razor wire. Ba.s.si's aide ran, and a killing thing was on him in two strides, slicing and jabbing, throwing the corpse aside. The others were dispatched with the same quick ruthlessness, and then only Ba.s.si was left, drenched in the blood of the men and women who had died around him, his arms and legs pinned by one of the killing things. Once the barricade had been cleared, a squad of human troopers in sealed pressure suits came forward. Their sergeant photographed Ba.s.si, cuffed him, and ordered one of his men to take him back for what he called a debriefing. Ba.s.si knew then that he had been selected by chance, not because he had been recognized; shaving off his trademark beard had saved him. He smiled and spat on the sergeant's visor. The squad and the killing things moved on; the trooper marched Ba.s.si at gunpoint across the traffic circle toward the command post at the breached perimeter. No one knows how Ba.s.si got free, only that he was captured at a barricade in the first minutes of fighting and then escaped. Certainly, he never reached the command post. Perhaps the trooper was killed by one of the snipers which infested the city, or perhaps Ba.s.si got free on his own; after all, he was a very resourceful man. In any case, it is known that he reached the Bourse two hours after the barricade fell, because he made a brief, defiant television transmission there. I have watched this speech many times. It is the last sighting of him. He was wounded when he escaped, and the wound had been patched but the bullet was still inside him; he must have felt it, and felt the blood heavy and loose inside his belly as he spoke, but he showed no sign that he was m pain. He spoke for five minutes. He spoke clearly and defiantly, but it was a poor, rambling speech, full of allusions to freedom and idealism and martyrdom, and his steady gaze had a crazed, glittering quality. By then, most of the outlying tents and domes of the city had been captured by the invaders; even Ba.s.si's headquarters had been taken. The citizens of Paris had fallen back to the central part of the main dome. Most of the barricades had been overrun by killing things. Thousands of citizens lay dead at their posts, while the invaders had incurred only half a dozen casualties, mostly from snipers. The battle for Paris was clearly over, but still its citizens fought on. "I warn the commander of the invaders," Marisa Ba.s.si said, "that we will fight to the end. We will not let you take what we have built with our sweat and our blood. Paris will die, but Paris lives on. The war is not over." A few minutes later, the main buildings of the city were set on fire, filling the dome with smoke. A few minutes after that, the commander of the invasion force gave the order to breach the integrity of the main dome. By then, no doubt, Ba.s.si was already at one of the last barricades, armed with the carbine he had taken from the dead trooper, his pressure suit sealed. A great wind sucked fire and smoke from the burning, broken wedding cake of the Bourse; smoke rushed along the ground in great billows which thinned and vanished, leaving the eerie clarity and silence of vacuum. And then a shout over the radio, doubling and redoubling. Killing things were running swiftly across the wide lawns toward the last barricades, puffs of earth jumping around them as people started to fire. Ba.s.si drew himself up to face his enemy, no longer the leader of the free government of Paris, his fate no more significant now than any of the last of its citizens. He thought that he was only moments from death. He was wrong. LJemi Lacombe had stapled a nylon rope to a basalt outcrop at the edge of the mossy, emerald-green meadow; its blue thread fell away to the trough of black water a hundred meters below. Dev Veeder squatted on his heels and ran a gloved finger around the knot doubled around the eye of the staple, then looked up at me and said, "I could loosen this so that she would fall as she climbed back up. Do you think the fall would kill her?" "I think not. Not in this low gravity." He stood. "No. I don't think so either. Well, she'll be here soon. We'd better keep out of sight." I dabbed sweat from my brow with the cuff of my s.h.i.+rt. I had been marched quickly through the parkland by Veeder's squad of troopers, as if I had been under arrest, with no chance until now of talking with him, of trying to change his mind. I said, "Are you enjoying yourself, Colonel?" "You want revenge too. Don't deny it. She used us both, Graves." "This seems so ... melodramatic." "History is made with bold gestures. I want her arrested m the act of returning through a pa.s.sageway which presents a clear and present danger to the security of the diplomatic community. I want you to be a witness." "No bold gesture can be based on so petty a motive as revenge." Dev Veeder moved closer to me, so close that when he spoke a spray of saliva fell on my cheek. "We're in this together, Graves. Don't pretend that you're just an observer like that thing, DeHon. Be a man. Face up to the consequences of your actions." "She was only trying to do her work, Colonel. Your crazy jealousy got in the way-" "We are both jealous men, Graves. But at least I did not betray her." Veeder shoved me away from him then, and I went sprawling on the soft, wet moss. By the time I had regained my feet, he was on the other side of the little meadow, showing the four troopers where to take cover. As they concealed themselves amongst the exuberant rose briars, the sergeant of the squad took me by the arm and pulled me into the shade of the ferns which cascaded down the basalt cliff. It was hot and close inside the curtain of fern fronds. Sweat dripped from my nose, my chin, ran down my flanks inside my s.h.i.+rt. Tiny black flies danced about my face with dumb persistence. In the meadow, huge, sulfur-yellow b.u.t.terflies circled each other above the bright green moss, their hand-sized wings flapping once a minute. The sergeant, a muscular, dark-eyed woman, hummed softly to herself, watching the screen she had spread on her knee. It showed a view of the lake below the meadow, transmitted from one of the tiny cameras the troopers had spiked here and there. Tune pa.s.sed. At last, the sergeant nudged me and pointed. Centered in the screen, Demi Lacombe's silvery figure suddenly stood up, waist-deep, in black water. She stripped off her airmask and hooked it to her belt, waded to the gravelly sh.o.r.e and grasped the rope and swarmed up it, moving so quickly, hand over hand, that it seemed she was swimming through the air. I looked up from the screen as she pulled herself over the edge of the meadow and rolled onto the vivid green moss. As she got to her feet, Dev Veeder stepped out of his hiding place, followed by his troopers; the sergeant shoved me roughly and I tumbled forward, landing on my hands and knees. Demi looked at Dev Veeder, at me. For a moment I thought she might jump into the chasm, but then Dev Veeder crossed the meadow in two bounds and caught her by the left wrist, the one she had broken soon after arriving in Paris. She turned pale, and would have dropped to her knees if Dev Veeder had not held her up. "All right," he growled. "All right." The brilliant light of the suspensor lamps hung high above dimmed. I felt a few fat raindrops on my face and hands, congealing rather than falling from the humid air. The pathetic fallacy made real by Demi Lacombe's implants, I thought, and Dev Veeder must have had the same idea, because he said, "Stop that, you b.i.t.c.h," and delivered a back-handed slap to her face while still holding on to her wrist. Demi's cry of pain was cut off by a roll of thunder; I think I must have shouted out then, too, for the sergeant grasped mY arm and shook me and told me to shut the f.u.c.k up. Those were her words. A sheet of sickly light rippled overhead and the air darkened further as a wind got up, blowing clouds of raindrops as big as marbles. They hissed against the curtain of ferns above, and drenched me to the skin in an instant. Someone was standing at the edge of the rose thicket. It was one of the gardeners. I was sure that it was the one that Demi had summoned before-their shaven heads and blank expression effaced individuality, but he had the same stocky immigrant build and wary manner. At his side was a pair of tawny panthers; a huge bird perched on his upraised arms, its gripping claws digging rivulets of bright blood from his flesh. With a sudden snap, like playing cards dealt by a conjurer, the four troopers formed a half circle in front of Dev Veeder and Demi Lacombe. Their carbines were raised. The rain was very thick now, blown up and down and sideways by the gusting wind; water sheeted down the closed visors of the troopers' helmets, the slick resin of their chestplates. The gardener made no move, but the panthers and huge bird suddenly launched themselves across the meadow. Two wild shots turned every drop of rain blood red; the scream of air broken by their energy echoed off the ferny cliff. Dev Veeder was struggling with Demi Lacombe, a horrible, desperate waltz right at the edge of the cliff. One trooper was down, beating at the bird whose wings beat about his head; one of the panthers had bowled over two more troopers and the second took down a trooper as he fled. The trooper struggling with the bird took a step backward, and fell from the edge of the meadow; a moment later, the bird rose up alone, wings spread wide as it rode the gust of wind that for a moment blew the rain clear of the meadow.

The sergeant raised her carbine. I saw that she had the presence of mind to aim at the gardener, and threw myself at her legs. The shot went wild. She kicked me hard and in the Paul J. McRuley light gravity her legs flew from beneath her and she sat down. I fell flat on sodden moss, and was trying to unholster my blazer, although I do not know who I would have shot at, when the sergeant hauled me half-around by one of my arms-fracturing a small bone in my wrist, I later discovered -and struck my head with the stock of her carbine. Then the bird fell upon her.

I was dazed and bloodied and far from the meadow when Lavet Corso found me. I did not remember how I had gotten away from the troopers-perhaps the gardener had led me to my former guide-nor did I remember seeing Dev Veeder and Demi Lacombe fall, but their drowned bodies were found a day later, lying together on a spit of gravel at the far end of the dark little lake, like lovers at the end of a tale of doomed romance. Although, of course, they were never lovers.

Of that, at least, I am certain.

Corso told me that Demi Lacombe had been in the habit of using a pheromone-rich perfume to befuddle men from whom she wanted some favor or other. "A kind of hypnotic, Yani Hakaiopulos said. It does exactly what other perfumes only claim to do. He recognized it at once, and confirmed his suspicion using the hospital's equipment. He was amused at her presumption, and rather admired her ambition."

We were crouched under the billowing skirts of a cypress, while the gale blew itself out around us. The gardener sat on his haunches a little way off, staring out into the rainy dark.

"Hakaiopulos only wanted his gardens rebuilt," I said dully. My head and wrist ached abominably, and I felt very cold.

Corso said, "He'll get his chance, but not here. You know, you're a lucky man. Lucky that Veeder didn't kill you when he had the chance; lucky that I don't kill you now."

"You should get away, Mr. Corso. Go on: leave me. If Colonel Veeder finds you here -"

I did not know then that he was dead.

"I'm leaving Paris," Corso said. "I'm going to join my wife."

For a moment, I thought he meant that he was going to kill himself. Perhaps he saw it in my face, because he added, "She's not dead. None of the people who left on the scow are dead."

"It fell into Saturn."

"The scow did, yes. But before it took its dive, it traveled most of the way around the planet within the ring system, long enough to drop off its pa.s.sengers and cargo in escape pods. There are millions of ice and rock bolides in the rings. Sure, most of them have been ground down to gravel and dust, but there's a sizable percentage of bodies more than a couple of kilometers across-something like half a million."

"This is fantasy, Mr. Corso."

"My wife and the other people who escaped have made their home on one of them; that's where I'm taking my daughter and a couple of other people. I would have gone sooner, but I had work to do here, and I couldn't justify the risk of stealing a shuttle until now."

"You're saving Yani Hakaiopulos."

"Him too. We can always use a gene wizard. But there's someone else, someone more important to us than anyone else."

I said, "It was you who painted those slogans, wasn't it? You could move freely about the city because you smell right to the killing machines. He lives.

Another silly fantasy, Mr. Corso. He died with the fools he was leading."

Corso shook his head. "After he escaped, he made his way back to the main dome and rallied the last of

the barricades. We still thought then that if enough soldiers died while attempting to take Paris, we might carry the day. We were giving our lives for the city, after all, but the soldiers were dying for no more than the redemption of a loan. But you sent in killing machines, and then you blew the dome. Like most of the people at the barricades, Marisa Ba.s.si was wearing a pressure suit, and he continued to fight until he ran out of air. In his last moments of consciousness he hid amongst the dead who lay all around him. The suit saved his life by chilling him down, but lack of oxygen had already caused brain damage. After one of the corpse details found him, he was carefully resuscitated, but his frontal lobes were badly damaged. The implants keep him functioning, and one day we'll be able to reconstruct him." You have to understand that although this was the most fantastic part of Corso's story, it is the part I believe without question, for I insisted on examining the gardener myself. His hands were strong and square, with blunt fingers, yes. but so are the hands of most laborers. But I also saw the wound in his side, just under his ribs, the wound he suffered when he escaped, a wound into which I could insert my smallest finger. Corso took me as far as the edge of the parkland, and I do not know what became of him-or of his daughter, or Yani Hakaiopulos, or the gardener, Marisa Ba.s.si. A shuttle was stolen during the confusion after Colonel Veeder's death, and was later found, abandoned and gutted, in an eccentric orbit that intersected the ring system. As for myself, I have decided not to return to Earth. There are several colonies which managed to remain neutral during the uiet War, and I hope to find a place in one of them. The advance of my fee should be sufficient to buy citizens.h.i.+p. I once planned to endow a chair of history in my name, as a snub to my rivals, but using the credit to win a new life, if only for a few years, now seems a better use for it. I hope that they will be peaceful years. But before he left me to my grief and to my dead, Lavet Corso told me that his was not the only clandestine colony hidden within the ring system's myriad s.h.i.+fting orbits, and his last words still make me s.h.i.+ver. "The war's not over."

Tendeleo's Story

by Ian McDonald

I shall start my story with my name. I am Tendeleo. I was born here, in Gichichi. Does that surprise you? The village has changed so much that no one born then could recognize it now, but the name is still the same. That is why names are important. They remain. I was born in 1995, shortly after the evening meal and before dusk. That is what Tendeleo means in my language, Kalenjin: early-evening-shortly-after-dinner. I am the oldest daughter of the pastor of St. John's Church. My younger sister was born in 1998, after my mother had two miscarriages, and my father asked the congregation to lay hands on her. We called her Little Egg, That is all there are of us, two. My rather felt that a pastor should be an example to his people, and at that time the government was calling for smaller families. My father had cure of five churches. He visited them on a red scrambler bike the bishop at Nukuru had given him. It was a good motorbike, a Yamaha. j.a.panese. My father loved nding it. He practiced skids and jumps on the back roads because he thought a clergyman should not be seen stunt-ndmg. Of course, people did, but they never said to him. My father built St. John's. Before him, people sat on benches under trees. The church he made was st.u.r.dy and rendered in white concrete. The roof was red tin, trumpet vine climbed over it. In the season flowers would hang down outside the window. It was like being inside a garden. When I hear the story of Adam and Eve, that is how I think of Eden, a place among the flowers. Inside there were benches for the people, a lectern for the sermon and a high chair for when the bishop came to confirm children. Behind the altar rail was the holy table covered with a white cloth and an alcove in the wall for the cup and holy communion plate. We didn't have a font. We took people to the river and put them under. I and my mother sang in the choir. The services were long and, as I see them now, quite boring, but the music was wonderful. The women sang, the men played instruments. The best was played by a tall Luo, a teacher in the village school we called, rather blasphemously, Most High. It was a simple instrument: a piston ring from an old Peugeot engine which he hit with a heavy steel bolt. It made a great, ringing rhythm. What was left over from the church went into the pastor's house. It had poured concrete floors and louver windows, a separate kitchen and a good charcoal stove a paris.h.i.+oner who could weld hand made from a diesel drum. We had electric light, two power sockets and a radio/ca.s.sette player, but no television. It was inviting the devil to dinner, my father told us. Kitchen, living room, our bedroom, my mother's bedroom, and my father's study. Five rooms. We were people of some distinction in Gichichi; for Kalenjin. Gichichi was a thin, straggly sort of village; shops, school, post office, matatu office, petrol station and mandazi wjth most of me houses set off the footpaths that followed the valley terraces. On one of them was our shamba, half a kilometer down the valley. The path to it went past the front door of the Ukerewe family. They had seven children who hated us. They threw dung or stones and called us seewhatwethoughtofourselvesKalenjin and hated-of-G.o.d-Episcopalians. They were African Inland Church Kikuyu, and they had no respect for the discipline of the bishop. If the church was my father's Eden, the shamba was my mother's. The air was cool in the valley and you could hear the river over the stones down below. We grew maize and gourds and some sugar cane, which the local rummers bought from my father and he pretended not to know. Beans and chillis. Onions and potatoes. Two trees of finger bananas, though M'zee Kipchobe maintained that they sucked the life out of the soil. The maize grew right over my head, and I would run into the sugar cane and pretend that two steps had taken me out of this world into another. There was always music there; the solar radio, or the women singing together when they helped each other turn the soil or hoe the weeds. I would sing with them, for I was considered good at harmonies. The shamba too had a place where the holy things were kept. Among the thick, winding tendrils of an old tree killed by strangling fig the women left little wooden figures, gifts of money, Indian-trader jewelry and beer. You are wondering, what about the Chaga? You've worked out from the dates that I was nine when the first package came down on Kilimanjaro. How could such tremendous events, a thing like another world taking over our own, have made so little impression on my life? It is easy, when it is no nearer to you than another world. We were not ignorant in Gichichi. We had seen the pictures from Kilimanjaro on the television, read the articles in the Nation about the thing that is like a coral reef and a rainforest that came out of the object from the sky. We had heard the discussions on the radio about how fast it was growing-fifty meters every day, it was ingrained on our minds-and what it might be and where it might come from. Every morning the vapor trails of the big UN jets scored our sky as they brought more men and machines to study it, but it was another world. It was not our world. Our world was church, home, shamba, school. Service on Sunday, Bible Study on Monday, singing lessons, homework club. Sewing, weeding, stirring the ugali. Shooing the goats out of the maize. Playing with Little Egg and Grace and Reth from next door in the compound: not too loud, Father's working. Once a week, the mobile bank. Once a fortnight, the mobile library. Mad little matatus das.h.i.+ng down, overtaking everything they could see, people hanging off every door and window. Big dirty country buses winding up the steep road like oxen. Gikombe, the town fool, if we could have afforded one, wrapped in dung-colored cloth sitting down in front of the country buses to stop them moving. Rains and hot seasons and cold fogs. People being born, people getting married, people running out on each other, or getting sick, or dying in accidents. Kilimanjaro, the Chaga? Another picture in a world where all pictures come from the same distance. I was thirteen and just a woman when the Chaga came to my world and destroyed it. That night I was at Grace Muthiga's where she and I had a homework club. It was an excuse to listen to the radio. One of the great things about the United Nations taking over your country is the radio is very good. I would sing with it. They played the kind of music that wasn't approved of in our house. lan McDonald We were listening to trip hop. Suddenly the record started to go all phasey, like the radio was tuning itself on and off the station. At first we thought the disc was slipping or something, then Grace got up to fiddle with the tuning b.u.t.ton. That only made it worse. Grace's mother came in from the next room and said she couldn't get a picture on the battery television. It was full of wavy lines. Then we heard the first boom. It was far away and hollow and it rolled like thunder. Most nights up in the Highlands we get thunder. We know very well what it sounds like. This was something else. Boom! Again. Closer now. Voices outside, and lights. We took torches and went out to the voices. The road was full of people; men, women, children. There were torch beams weaving all over the place. Boom! Close now, loud enough to rattle the windows. All the people shone their torches straight up into the sky, like spears of light. Now the children were crying and I was afraid. Most High had the answer: "Sonic booms! There's something up there!" As he said those words, we saw it. It was so slow. That was the amazing thing about it. It was like a child drawing a chalk line across a board. It came in from the south east, across the hills east of Kiriani, straight as an arrow, a little to the south of us. The night was such as we often get in late May, clear after evening rains, and very full of stars. We all saw a glowing dot cut across the face of the stars. It seemed to float and dance, like illusions in the eye if you look into the sun. It left a line behind it like the trails of the big UN jets, only pure, glowing blue, drawn on the night. Double-boom now, so dose and loud it hurt my ears. At that, one of the old women began wailing. The fear caught, and soon whole families were looking at the line of light in the sky with tears running down their faces, men as well as women. Many sat down and put their torches in their laps, not knowing what they should do. Some of the old people covered their heads with jackets, shawls, newspapers. Others saw what they were doing, and soon everyone was sitting on the ground with their heads covered. Not Most High. He stood looking up at the line of light as it cut his night in half. "Beautiful!" he said. "That I should see such things, with these own eyes!" He stood watching until the object vanished in the dark of the mountains to the west. I saw its light reflected in his eyes. It took a long time to fade. For a few moments after the thing went over, no one knew what to do. Everyone was scared, but they were relieved at the same time because, like the angel of death, it had pa.s.sed over Gichichi. People were still crying, but tears of relief have a different sound. Someone got a radio from a house. Others fetched theirs, and soon we were all sitting in the middle of the road in the dark, grouped around our radios. An announcer interrupted the evening music show to bring a news flash. At twenty-twenty-eight a new biological package had struck in Central Province. At those words, a low keen went up from each group. "Be quiet!" someone shouted, and there was quiet. Though the words would be terrible, they were better than the voices coming out of the dark. The announcer said that the biological package had come down on the eastern slopes of the Nyandarua near to Tusha, a small Kikuyu village. Tusha was a name we knew. Some of us had relatives in Tusha. The country bus to Nyeri went through Tusha. From Gichichi to Tusha was twenty kilometers. There were cries. There were prayers. Most said nothing. But we all knew time had run out. In four years the Chaga had swallowed up Kilimanjaro, and Amboseli, and the border country of Namanga and was advancing up the A104 on Kijiado and Nairobi. We had ignored it and gone on with our lives, believing that when it finally came, we would know what to do. Now it had dropped out of the sky twenty kilometers north of us and said, Twenty kilometers, four hundred days: that's how long you've got to decide what you're going to do. Then Jackson who ran the Peugeot Service Office stood up. He c.o.c.ked his head to one side. He held up a finger. Everyone fell silent. He looked to the sky. "Listen!" I could hear nothing. He pointed to the south, and we all heard it: aircraft engines. Flas.h.i.+ng lights lifted out of the dark tree- line on the far side of the valley. Behind it came others, then others, then ten, twenty, thirty more helicopters swarmed over Gichichi like locusts. The sound of their engines filled the whole world. I wrapped my school shawl around my head and put my hands over my ears and yelled over the noise but it still felt like it would shatter my skull like a clay pot. Thirty-five helicopters. They flew so low their down- wash rattled our tin roofs and sent dust swirling up around our faces. Some of the teenagers cheered and waved their torches and white school s.h.i.+rts to the pilots. They cheered the helicopters on, right over the ridge. They cheered until the noise of their engines was lost among the night-insects. Where the Chaga goes, the United Nations comes close behind, like a dog after a b.i.t.c.h. A few hours later the trucks came through. The grinding of engines as they toiled up the winding road woke all Gichichi. "It's three o'clock in the morning!" Mrs. Kuria shouted at the dusty white trucks with the blue symbol of unecta on the doors, but no one would sleep again. We lined the main road to watch them go through our village. I wonder what the drivers thought of all those faces and eyes suddenly appearing in Their headlights as they rounded the bend. Some waved. The children waved back. They were still coming through as we went down to the shamba at dawn to milk the goats. They were a white snake coiling up and down the valley road as far as I could see. As they reached the top of the pa.s.s the low light from the east caught them and burned them to gold. The trucks went up the road for two days. Then they stopped and the refugees started to come the other way, down the road. First the ones with the vehicles: matatus piled high with bedding and tools and animals, trucks with the family balanced in the back on top of all the things they had saved. A Toyota microbus, bursting with what looked like bolts of colored cloth but which were women, jammed in next to each other. Ancient cars, motorbikes and mopeds vanis.h.i.+ng beneath sagging bales of possessions. It was a race of poverty; the rich ones with machines took the lead. After motors came animals; donkey carts and ox-wagons, pedal-rickshaws. Most came in the last wave, the ones on foot. They pushed handcarts laden with pots and bedding rolls and boxes lashed with twine, or dragged trolleys on rope or shoved frightened-faced old women in wheelbarrows. They struggled their burdens down the steep valley road. Some broke free and bounced over the edge down across the terraces, strewing clothes and tools and cooking things over the fields. Last of all came hands and heads. These people carried their possessions on Their heads and backs and children's shoulders. My father opened the church to the refugees. There they could have rest, warm chai, some ugali, some beans. I helped stir the great pots of ugali over the open fire. The village doctor set up a treatment center. Most of the cases were for damaged feet and hands, and dehydrated children. Not everyone in Gichichi agreed with my father's charity. Some thought it would encourage the refugees to stay and take food from our mouths. The shopkeepers said he was ruining their trade by giving away what they should be selling. My father told them he was just trying to do what he thought Jesus would have done. They could not answer that, but I know he had another reason. He wanted to hear the refugee's stories. They would be his story, soon enough. What about Tusha? The package missed us by a couple of kilometers. It hit a place called Kombe; two Kiluyu farms and some s.h.i.+t-caked cows. There was a big bang. Some of us from Tusha took a matatu to see what had happened to Kombe. They tell us there is nothing left. There they are, go, ask them. This nothing, my brothers, what was it like? A hole? No, it was something, but nothing we could recognize. The photographs? They only show the thing. They do not show how it happens. The houses, the fields, the fields and the track, they run like fat in a pan. We saw the soil itself melt and new things reach out of it like drowning men's fingers. What kind of things? We do not have the words to describe them. Things like you see in the television programs about the reefs on the coast, only the size of houses, and striped like zebras. Things like fists punching out of the ground, reaching up to the sky and opening like fingers. Things like fans, and springs, and balloons, and footb.a.l.l.s. So fast? Oh yes. So fast that even as we watched, it took our matatu. It came up the tires and over the b.u.mper and across the paintwork like a lizard up a wall and the whole thing came out in thousands of tiny yellow buds. What did you do? What do you think we did? We ran for our lives. The people of Kombe'? When we brought back help from Tusha, we were stopped by helicopters. Soldiers, everywhere. Everyone must leave, this is a quarantine area. You have twenty-four hours. Twenty-four hours! Yes, they order you to pack up a life in twenty-four hours. The Blue Berets brought in all these engineers who started building some great construction, all tracks and engines. The night was like day with welding torches. They ploughed Kiyamba under with bulldozers to make a new airstrip. They were going to bring in jets there. And before they let us go they made everyone take medical tests. We lined up and went past these men in white coats and masks at tables. Why?

I think they were testing to see if the Chaga-stuff had got into us. What did they do, that you think that? Pastor, some they would tap on the shoulder, just like this. Like Judas and the Lord, so gentle. Then a soldier would take them to the side. What then? I do not know, pastor. I have not seen them since. No one has. These stories troubled my father greatly. They troubled the people he told them to, even Most High, who had been so thrilled by the coming of the alien to our land. They especially troubled the United Nations. Two days later a team came up from Nairobi in five army hummers. The first thing they did was tell my father and the doctor to close down their aid station. The official UNHCR refugee center was Muranga. No one could stay here in Gichichi, everyone must go. In private they told my father that a man of his standing should not be sowing rumors and half truths in vulnerable communities. To make sure that we knew the real truth, UN- ECTA called a meeting in the church. Everyone packed on to the benches, even the Muslims. People stood all the way around the walls; others outside, lifted out the louvers to listen in at the windows. My father sat with the doctor and our local chief at a table. With them was a government man, a white soldier and an Asian woman in civilian dress who looked scared. She was a scientist, a xenologist. She did most of the talking; the government man from Nairobi twirled his pencil between his fingers and tapped it on the table until he broke the point. The soldier, a French general with experience of humanitarian crises, sat motionless. The xenologist told us that the Chaga was humanity's first contact with life from beyond the Earth. The nature of this contact was unclear; it did not follow any of the communication programs we had predicted. This contact was the physical transformation of our native landscape and vegetation. But what was in the package was not seeds and spores. The things that had consumed Kombe and were now consuming Tusha were more like tiny machines, breaking down the things of this world to pieces and rebuilding them in strange new forms. The Chaga responded to stimuli and adapted to counterattacks on itself. UNECTA had tried fire, poison, radioactive dusting, genetically modified diseases. Each had been quickly routed by the Chaga. However, it was not apparent if it was intelligent, or the tool of an as yet unseen intelligence. "And Gichichi?" Ismail the barber asked. The French general spoke now. "You will all be evacuated in plenty of time." "But what if we do not want to be evacuated?" Most High asked. "What if we decide we want to stay here and take our chances with the Chaga?" "You will all be evacuated," the general said again. "This is our village, this is our country. Who are you to tell us what we must do in our own country?" Most High was indignant now. We all applauded, even my father up there with the UNECTA people. The Nairobi political looked vexed. "UNECTA, UNHCR and the UN East Africa Protection Force operate with the informed consent of the Kenyan government. The Chaga has been deemed a threat to human life. We're doing this for your own good." Most High drove on. "A threat? Who 'deems' it so? UNECTA? An organization that is eighty percent funded by the United States of America? I have heard different, that it doesn't harm people or animals. There are people living inside the Chaga; it's true, isn't it?"

The politician looked at the French general, who shrugged. The Asian scientist answered.

"Officially, we have no data."

Then my father stood up and cut her short.

"What about the people who are being taken away?"

"I don't know anything..." the UNECTA scientist began but my father would not be stopped.

"What about the people from Kombe? What are these tests you are carrying out?"

The woman scientist looked fl.u.s.tered. The French general spoke.

"I'm a soldier, not a scientist. I've served in Kosovo and Iraq and East Timor. I can only answer your questions as a soldier. On the fourteenth of June next year, it will come down that road. At about seven thirty in the evening, it will come through this church. By Tuesday night, there will be no sign that a place called Gichichi ever existed."

And that was the end of the meeting. As the UNECTA people left the church, the Christians of Gichichi crowded around my father. What should they believe?

Was Jesus come again, or was it anti-Christ? These aliens, were they angels, or fallen creatures like ourselves? Did they know Jesus? What was G.o.d's plan in this? uestion after question after question.

My father's voice was tired and thin and driven, like a leopard harried by beaters toward guns. Like that leopard, he turned on his hunters.

"I don't know!" he shouted. "You think I have answers to all these things? No. I have no answers. I have no authority to speak on these things. No one does.

Why are you asking these silly silly questions? Do you think a country pastor has the answers that will stop the Chaga in its tracks and drive it back where it came from? No. I am making them up as I go along, like everyone else."

For a moment the whole congregation was silent. I remember feeling that I must die from embarra.s.sment. My mother touched my father's arm. He had been shaking.

He excused himself to Ms people. They stood back to let us out of the church. We stopped on the lintel, amazed. A rapture had indeed come. All the refugees were gone from the church compound. Their goods, their bundles, their carts and animals. Even their excrement had been swept away.

As we walked back to the house, I saw the woman scientist brush past Most High as she went to the UNECTA hummer. I heard her whisper, "About the people.

It's true. But they're changed."

"How?" Most High asked but the door was closed. Two blue berets lifted mad Gikombe from in front of the hummer and it drove off slowly through the throng of people. I remembered that the UNECTA woman looked frightened.

That afternoon my father rode off on the red Yamaha and did not come back for almost a week.

I learned something about my father's faith that day. It was that it was strong in the small, local questions because it was weak in the great ones. It believed in singing and teaching the people and the disciplines of personal prayer and meditation, because you could see them in the lives of others. In the big beliefs, the ones you could not see, it fell.

That meeting was the wound through which Gichichi slowly bled to death. "This is our village, this is our country," Most High had declared, but before the end of the week the first family had tied their things on to the back of their pickup and joined the flow of refugees down the road to the south. After that a week did not pa.s.s that someone from our village would not close their doors a last time and leave Gichichi. The abandoned homes soon went to ruin.