Kirinya

  KIRINYA

  A Book of Two Halves

  CONTENTS

  Half-Title

  Also by Ian McDonald

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Epigraph

  Preface

  New Moon in Saturn

  1

  The Crossing

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  21

  22

  23

  24

  25

  26

  Fragile

  27

  28

  29

  30

  31

  32

  33

  34

  35

  36

  37

  38

  39

  40

  41

  42

  AK47 Hour

  43

  44

  45

  46

  47

  48

  49

  50

  51

  52

  53

  54

  55

  56

  57

  58

  59

  60

  61

  62

  63

  64

  65

  66

  Freedom Tree

  67

  Also by Ian McDonald

  DESOLATION ROAD

  OUT ON BLUE SIX

  EMPIRE DREAMS

  KING OF MORNING, QUEEN OF DAY

  HEARTS, HANDS AND VOICES

  NECROVILLE

  CHAGA

  SACRIFICE OF FOOLS

  First published in Great Britain 1998

  by Victor Gollancz

  An imprint of the Cassell Group

  Wellington House, 125 Strand, London WC2R 0BB

  © Ian McDonald 1998

  The right of Ian McDonald to be identified as author of

  this work has been asserted by him in accordance with

  the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.

  A catalogue record for this book is

  available from the British Library

  ISBN 0 575 06077 8

  Permission to quote from A Shropshire Lad by

  A. E. Housman was granted by The Society of Authors

  as the Literary Representative of the Estate of

  A. E. Housman. Lines from ‘Do not go gentle into that

  good night’ by Dylan Thomas, published by J. M. Dent,

  by permission of David Higham Associates Ltd.

  Typeset by SetSystems Ltd, Saffron Walden, Essex

  Printed in Great Britain by

  St Edmundsbury Press Ltd, Bury St Edmunds, Suffolk

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be

  reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means,

  electronic or mechanical including photocopying,

  recording or any information storage or retrieval system,

  without prior permission in writing from the publishers.

  This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not,

  by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or

  otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent

  in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it

  is published and without a similar condition including this

  condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  98 99 5 4 3 2 1

  ‘The tree of man was never quiet’

  A. E. Housman

  A Shropshire Lad: XXXI

  New Moon in Saturn

  1

  The dark was almost gone now. Morning clung to the horizon, a line of amber on ocean edge. As the woman watched, the line deepened, revealing interlaced fingers of cloud, darker on dark. Weather systems were moving far from land; ripples of indigo cloud spun out from the slow, vast spiral of the monsoon. The beach was a plane of sound; surf ponderous on the reef, running high on the fringe of the healing rains; pipe and flute of beach birds lighting and running a few quizzing steps and lifting again as easily as thought; the language of the breeze off the sea in the revenant palms and the tall, slim spires of the land corals. The music from the party ebbed and ran, now soft, now thudding.

  In the place between the sown and the sand, the woman stopped and, lightly, fearfully, touched her hands to the baby slung between her breasts.

  ‘Listen,’ the woman said.

  Impossible that the child should understand her, yet in the gaining light she saw her daughter fold up her face and fists to squeal; then relax, fall silent and still. In the same instant the wind from the ocean caught the music and blew it back in through the door of the bar. The woman and the child stood enfolded in presence. The moment stretched, the moment snapped.

  ‘Nothing,’ the woman said. She smiled for herself. ‘You’ll learn.’

  She went on to the sand. There was light enough to make out the shapes of the scuttling crabs—but not enough to avoid them. They burst under her boots in crisp, kicking thrashes. The small white beach birds came sliding off the ocean wind to pick and tear at the agonized footprints.

  ‘Look, there goes Mr Crab!’ she told her daughter, who was now frowning because it felt good. ‘And here comes Master Crab; will we get him? Yes!’

  The baby gulped air. The birds lifted and settled to rip and heave with their orange beaks.

  ‘Whoa Mrs Crabby!’ the woman said, running fast after the big mother of a hen crab, as fast as a woman with a baby at her breasts may run in soft, tide-wet sand. Mrs Crabby hid herself beneath the lap of tide foam.

  All but the brightest stars of the southern hemisphere had faded. The moon was still up, a day past new; the crescent moon of Africa, lying on its back, cradled by the open palms of the hand-trees. The moon held a star between its horns. The woman knew that a pair of binoculars could open up that big, soft star. It was a cylinder, passing through the same phases and occupations as the true moon. It was an artefact, a hollow world three hundred kilometres long, one hundred and fifty across its faces. It hung midway between earth and moon. Such truth put a catch in the breath and needle of cold in the sense of mystery.

  ‘Hey,’ Gaby McAslan said to the baby, who happened to have tilted her head back and turned her face to the moons. ‘Wave a fist to Daddy.’

  The anger was so sudden, so acid and smoking that she was paralysed for a moment. Crabs hurried around her feet. Only a moment: she walked on. Tidewater seeped out of the sand into her boot prints.

  Second moon in the arms of the first. An auspice: a time of journeys undertaken, endeavours embarked upon, courses changed, lives turned to a different wind. Astrology was among the least of human activities to have been transformed by the advent of the BDO.

  They should rename it, Gaby thought. It’s Big, it’s undoubtedly an Object, but it is no longer Dumb. We just do not know what it is saying to us.

  ‘Born with the BDO in Cancer,’ Gaby whispered to her daughter. ‘A journey begun. Death and rebirth.’

  Saturn and the new mysteries unfolding among its satellites were below the western horizon. They would be partying with one eye on the monitors at the Mermaid Café. Gaby hoped she would not have to be there to see whatever happened out there. Her life had been tied to those far, cold moons by forces more subtle and powerful than astrology. Twelve years ago it had been a different shore, a di
fferent continent. Ireland. The Watch-house. The Point. Home. A different person: the kid that had wished on a star and become Gaby McAslan, SkyNet television journalist. Gaby McAslan, exile. A different moon: Iapetus. She had gone out on to the Point that evening to be caressed by mystery, to be impregnated with sign and seal. From twelve years up with her child in her arms, she could look back at that gangly kid and see that she was not looking for a true sign, for that could have as easily pointed away from as to her heart’s desire. She had looked only for confirmation of what was already certain. Iapetus had turned black; then Hyperion had vanished in a flash of energy, but it was decided somewhere surer than in the stars that she would become a network journalist.

  ‘The older you get the more you learn, the more you learn the less certain you are, bub,’ she told her daughter. Twelve years higher, might she look down astonished at the self-assurance of this thirty-year-old?

  The upper limb of the sun was fountaining light out of the sea into the undersides of the clouds; staining them purple, crimson, black. The headland was still in shadow but highlights and glints lit Gaby’s track up through the fan-cover. She went more cautiously than the gentle climb deserved. She feared slipping and crushing the baby. The way was well trodden; the headland was a popular viewpoint for the people of Turangalila. You could see twenty kays up and down the reef. On the clearest of days you could make out the great breaches where the ships had passed through into the port of Mombasa. Now the only ships on the sea were the low, grey hulls of the quarantine fleet, pressed low on the horizon, afraid of infection. But the news from down the coast was of a great, vibrant culture growing from the stumps of dead Mombasa. The infection the quarantine ships feared was a disease of nations. It had killed Kenya, it was killing Tanzania by the minute, but the people of this coast were Africans before they were people of any nation. They were as fecund and inventive as the slow-breaking wave of alien life that was transforming their land, fifty metres every day.

  But Mombasa is gone, Gaby thought. The Mombasa I knew in those final, frantic days of the nation formerly known as Kenya. I loved that nation, I loved that land, and the Chaga took it apart. I loved a man there, far away, and it took him. Everything I loved has been taken by the Chaga: the place I drew power from, the people I loved and tormented, the ambitions and abilities that defined me.

  She paused on a steeper section of the slope.

  ‘Woo. Still haven’t got over having you, bub.’

  Her daughter blinked at the sky. Tiny, tiny red living thing. Gaby continued up the path. The sun continued up the sky.

  ‘You knocked me right out of condition, you know? If I’m going to play in the Kanamai game, I have to get back into serious training. Do some running, bit of swimming.’ She paused again, out of breath.

  The spine of the headland was thickly wooded in a mixture of alien and reconstructed terrestrial vegetation, but at the very tip it opened into a sun-burned nose of bare earth. Here Gaby set down the leather bag. She took her daughter to the edge. The headland tumbled in laps of coral rock to a low shelf where the sea ran dangerously. Over her shoulder the moons set; their brief conjunction broken.

  Good, Gaby thought. I do not want you with your eyes full of moon. I do not want another life tied to the powers in the sky.

  Gaby unlaced the papoose. Her two hands held her daughter up to the light.

  ‘Serena,’ she said, blocking out the sun with her child.

  Gaby hesitated. She needed to say something elemental, but the growing light of day embarrassed her little ritual. ‘You are my Serena,’ she said weakly. The baby kicked in her hands and she looked at her and suddenly saw that it would be the easiest thing in the world to open those hands. To let her fall. To let the waves slide the thing off the coral platform into the sea.

  Serena kicked again. Gaby shook her daughter.

  ‘You bitch!’ she shouted. ‘You little bitch! Do you know what you’ve done to me?’

  Serena began to cry.

  ‘Shut up, shut up, just shut up you little, fucking, bitch!’ Gaby shook Serena to the rhythm of her rage but she could not shake silence into the baby. Serena screamed.

  ‘It’s because of you I’m here, because of you I can’t go back, because of you they won’t let me out. All. Because. Of. You.’

  Do it. Be free. She’s not perfect. She’s not true. There are still tribes that expose the ones it touches and changes. Just open your hands. A fumble, a slip. It could happen. It would be dreadful, but only for a time. She’s not perfect.

  Gaby felt her hands tremble. Light filled her eyes. With a cry she snatched the baby girl out of the sun and pressed her close, enfolded her in her long, mahogany hair.

  ‘Oh my wee thing, my wee thing; oh Jesus oh God, I’m sorry, I’m sorry, my wee thing.’ She sank to the earth, rocked the screaming red blob, terrified by what the light had lit up within her. ‘Oh Jesus, bub, oh Christ, I’m sorry, I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. What was I thinking?’

  She remembered what she was thinking.

  When the Chaga fell from the stars to spread across half the planet, it had changed more than geography. No one had ever seen the intelligence that had conceived and constructed the biological packages that had fallen for fifteen years—it was accepted now that the Chaga-makers were unrecognizable and unintelligible to human chauvinisms on life and intelligence—but their intentions could be surmised. Not conquest, not colonization—though the Chaga, converting all in its path to its matrix, was a particularly voracious imperialism—but discourse in the only way the Makers understood; through mutual evolution. Earth’s southern hemisphere was a voice in a dialogue that crossed eight hundred light years and five hundred million years to the complex fullerene clouds in the Scorpius loop. The Makers wrote their dialectics in human DNA.

  Changed.

  There was an irony to this.

  In that other life, when she had been Gaby McAslan, East African Correspondent for SkyNet Satellite News, she had exposed that truth to the planet. Still a shudder when she thought of Unit 12, and what the United Nations had tried to hide in its labyrinth of levels and chambers. She had only escaped because friends in powerful places had pulled for her.

  Thanks, Shepard, she thought at the place where the BDO had set. And I treated you like Satan’s shit. But I do that. That’s the way I am. And where were you the next time I ran up against the UN quarantine force and its long memory for grudges? You probably don’t even know what happened, up there in that big tin can. You probably don’t even know you have a daughter named Serena. You certainly will never know what they said about her, when they brought me out of decontam that time, when there was no one there, and they showed me the results of the tests and stamped the papers and gave me over to the troops.

  Exiled.

  They could not, or would not, say what the nature of the change would be. Only that the cluster of rapidly dividing cells in Gaby’s womb would be a girl, and it had been touched by the alien.

  Gaby closed her eyes as she touched her lips to the crown of Serena’s soft skull.

  ‘I’m sorry, I’m so sorry, my wee thing.’

  She hooked Serena into the sling. Breast-warmth and heart-rhythm soothed her screams. Gaby unfastened the unitool. A twist of the shaft locked it into a short shovel. She dug until she hit cliff rock. She hoped the scrape would be deep enough to discourage scavengers.

  The leather satchel had not leaked. There were still a few soft ice crystals on the afterbirth’s liver-dark surface. Such an alien thing to keep inside you. Beautiful and repulsive, like something Chaga-grown. But she did not tip it into the hole, not yet. That would be to give part of herself to the land. She had always drawn her power from the land: her childhood expeditions to the hidden places of the Point; the wide places of Kenya, before the Chaga swept across them, now this promontory overlooking the sea. You gave yourself to the land and it let you put your roots down into it and suck its power and become definite. It made you a person
. But she did not know if she wanted to be the person Turangalila would make her. To bury the afterbirth would be to bury Gaby McAslan. She was afraid she would not recognize the life that was reborn.

  ‘Give me a sign,’ she said. The sun stood three fingers above the ocean. Light filled up the land, casting new shadows and definitions with every second. The deep water was restless, all glitter and urgencies; the reef like knuckles of earth pulling back from the dissolving sea. The air was dean and cool and smelled of the big deep. That had always been the most evocative of smells to Gaby; restless and yearning. The elements were strong here, but they had no sign to give her.

  The tide was high after moonset, lapping under the sagging shore palms. Turangalila’s boats were beached high. Turangalila itself, blended with the canopy of pseudo-fungus and land corals, gave no indication of human presence on this coast. In the early gold the Chaga-growth and the coconut palms and occasional baobabs did not seem mutually hostile, but symbiotic products of an alternative evolution track, taken back in the pre-Cambrian.

  Not such a fanciful notion, if the theories were true that this was merely the latest in a series of interventions in terrestrial evolution by the Chaga-makers.

  The tide and the trees and boats hugging them and the settlement folded into them had no sign for Gaby McAslan.

  She turned inland, to Africa, to the place where the ragged carpet of the coastal ecology lifted and tore into the stunning uplift of the Great Wall. There trees, or things that seemed like trees, rose sheer for a kilometre and a half before unfolding into a canopy of immense interlocking hexagons. The roof of the world. From here you could see that the Great Wall curved gradually inland to north and south. The formation was a curtain wall one hundred and fifty kilometres across. It occupied the whole of what had once been East Tsavo game reserve.

  Beyond the Great Wall you could not see. From experience she knew that it contained many landscapes and ecosystems nested like babushka dolls. But it was changing, adapting, moving towards humanity as humanity moved towards it. It was the evolutionary dialogue: the reconstructed palms, the neo-baobabs, the Chaga plants that were drifting towards terrestrial species, the animals that were creeping back through the coastal forests exploiting new ecological niches: symbiosis. Growing together.