Kirinya, p.33
Kirinya, page 33
Which brings me to my Flight Group. Ofé, Irya, Infana and Ren. Precog, spacer, mission commander and isopath. All women. Yay! Infana engineers, Ofé foresees, Ren flies. Irya’s time will come. If we survive. We aren’t getting up there without a fight.
I said Ren flies. The ship flies itself—it’s linked into my autonomic nervous system, leaving my higher cognitive levels free to get us out of trouble.
Maybe I’m secretly glad that I’m almost certainly not going up there. I get this suspicion that most of what goes up isn’t coming down again. Tomorrow we start training proper. Anitraséo took the sample from me about an hour ago. More blood and running. Every morning and evening. Watch me, Merina bitch.
June 5
Well, hot-shot, the Yankees are going to blow you clean out of the sky. I don’t think I’m ever going to be able to run this link. Every morning they shove me into a tank and flood it with acceleration gel, and I just panic. Okay, the stuff is an aerobic membrane, but I know I’m drowning. I crash the link. Anitraséo’s taught me yoga techniques to help me relax: they’re great out on the deck, but the moment I feel that stuff rising over my belly…
Then there’s the philosophical problem. With birds or animals there are analogs for every part of my body: paws for feet, feathers for fingers. But a cha-plastic tank the size of a house that looks like an over-ripe fruit crossed with a diseased heart: no fingers, no toes, no hands or head. No analogues. I feel like a woman in a fairy story, trapped inside a tree by angry spirits. Anitraséo is patient with me. Open your eyes and see stars. I open my eyes and see nothing.
When I’m not learning to have a spacecraft for a body, I’m practising tactics with Ofé. The theory is she sees it three minutes before it arrives, and I get us all out of harm’s way. I link into her extended time sense. Simple. Wrong: Ofé’s perceptions freak me almost as much as the tank. I lose it every time and we end up spread all over geostationary orbit.
Running is my special space and time; sea on one side, on the other, climax Chaga with the white shell shapes of the Space Flight Centre rising out of the palms and hand-trees, the beachfront bandas and bungalows. The place has been designed so that when the American spysats look down, they think, beach resort and fly on. Like they’ll look at the launch sites and say, huh, coral island and fly on, never imagining there’re silos with rockets in them grown right down in the roots of the island. On a clear day, you’re supposed to be able to see the site on Nosy Mitsio. I never have. I never will, this beach is as close as I’m going to get to it. This is what I think most in my running time: I can’t do it. And no one will believe me when I tell them that. They think I’m not trying, or I just have to learn something; they can’t see that this is as good as it’s ever going to get. Sometimes I think I would’ve been better taking my chances with the Hound. I cannot do this.
June 22
I can do it. I can do it. I can do it. And it’s simple. It’s so simple.
They podded Ofé up and then I went in. The cap sealed and I was in the dark and it was like I had died and been buried. The gel came up and this time I didn’t fight it, I wanted it to rise up over me. I wanted it to be water, and drown me so I wouldn’t have to have another day of doing this. But it wasn’t, and I didn’t, and you can yell and scream and the gel takes your words away.
I wanted to be dead.
I opened my eyes. And I saw stars. I saw stars. There was no pod, no module, no systems and engines and tanks. I was naked to the sky. I was Ren-ship, I could walk among the stars. I didn’t have to visualize an action, will a hand to be a jet cluster, or think ‘run’ for my legs to start main engine burn. I just did it. And it was so simple, so easy, I couldn’t see how it had been so difficult, what it was I couldn’t understand.
Anitraséo asked me, ‘Are you all right?’
That just broke me.
Maybe you have to be as low as you can go before you can come up again.
She runs the simulation. I take us up in one big beautiful burn from booster separation to transfer orbit. I bring us to I-point, join the Fifth Group, get behind Ofé’s eyes, look up through the layers of futures to the one two minutes thirty seconds from now when the US Death Stars acquire lock-on and charge up their lasers. Down in the present, I link into the escorts’ AIs, set them on target for this future, and watch them scatter into dozens of sub-munitions. Eat smoking buckies, Death Stars! Up into the future again: the second wave of orbital artillery is charged up and rolling in on combat orbits to cut me apart with million-degree scalpels. Hold it. Hold it Ren. The pain… They are taking off my breasts with razor blades. They are sawing me in half from pube to skull… And into the present. I move my hands, we roll away from their predicted targeting arcs. Two minutes thirty seconds later, lasers rip apart empty space. I’m not there. I’ve flown away. I deploy the inflatable mirror: a passing shot reflects off into space. Before the first wave can recharge, my missiles reduce them to blobs of bubbling slag. Group Five hits I-point. The big burn takes us into cis-BDO orbit. The second-wave Death Stars have recharged and are reacquiring targets. No point looking into the future now, we haven’t enough fuel to evade them. We can only trust our second-level escorts. Seven gigawatt EMP capacitors discharge at once. Earth Defence Battlegroup, as well as much of the North Eastern quartersphere, crashes and burns.
And out.
When I came out, I sat on the gantry for ten minutes, shaking with energy. It was like all the fear and failure and depression was dark heavy fuel in my tanks, and some unknown spark had caught it, and it was burning hot and hard and holy, pushing me into places I’d never been before. Anitraséo brought a thermal sheet; she did not even need to touch me. ‘You’re burning up, girl.’ I couldn’t even nod. She had me brought a cup of cold chai: she’s not allowed to handle food herself, and all I could think was, I can do it. I can do it. Ofé was towelling down, and she said, ‘What happened?’ I just burst into tears.
I never knew I had such tremendous, tempestuous highs inside me. I feel like I want to hug all the people I meet and tell them what happened. I’m in love with everyone. Anitraséo warns me, half-joking: love is not an accessory you need on a space trip.
July 22
Toatéu. Pronounced: Toe. Ah. Tay. Oo. Meaning: Transcendental Object At The End of the Universe. And what is that? Anitraséo’s not sure. No one’s sure. No one can be sure: it’s a singularity, so you can’t know anything about it. Like a black hole? I ask. Yes, but historical and psychological, rather than physical. Meaning that it’s the end and the beginning of the world. An alpha and omega point. Control of Toatéu means control of reality. Whatever that is. Anitraséo thinks it’s a kind of evolutionary boot-strapping machine; that somehow, in some far future or incredibly remote past time, we are the Chaga-makers, and have sent the BDO to engineer our own uplift.
Magic, I say. Magic, Anitraséo agrees, given that anything that operates outside the laws of physics is by definition magical.
This is pretty trippy stuff. And it gets trippier. Toatéu’s existence was deduced by Aldabran isopaths linked with whales migrating through the Diamond Reef. The Reef was a giant molecular computer, using whale song as a kind of computing language to draw this map of history that all focuses on Toatéu, the beginning and end of the world. This is just like, whoa, but now I know why the Merina and the Harambee were so keen to get their hands on Aldabra. And why the Americans are so keen to keep the BDO to themselves.
And now we’re going to steal it from them.
My diplomatic past is a source of amazement to my team sisters. ‘Your mother’s a what?’ Irya asked.
‘A Harambee information officer.’
‘My mother taught French in a Christian School,’ Irya said. ‘You should have seen what happened to her faith in Jesus when I came out of her womb.’
Of all the team, I think I’m closest to Irya now. I admit it, I was wary of her at first, I was hesitant of her gesture of friendship. All those hands, those arms. She freaked me, pure and simple. Isn’t this a terrible thing to say? I must have hurt her a lot, she was only trying to be friendly, she was as scared and on her own and wanting someone as me. More, probably. I’m only different on the inside.
Funny. It takes one tiny shift of the light to change how you see someone. I was coming back to the unit house after a swim, and I heard a voice singing an old-time Christian song that Gab used to sing for me: she’d learned it from her sister, who’d had this Christian phase. ‘I know His Name, I know His Name, His Name is Wonderful, It’s everything to Me.’ It was Irya singing it, lying in her hammock on the verandah. And for the first time I saw her as a person, with a past, and things she liked, and songs she knew. And now she does the best neck massages ever—you haven’t been massaged until you’ve been worked over by a spacer’s lower hands—and she’s very into body painting. She envies me my white skin: fresh canvas. I envy her hers: charcoal black, matt, magnifique. She wants to do an apocalypse on my back: God and his angels versus the Yankee Death Stars. Turn all my freckles into constellations. I’m willing. But she still won’t come with me for a swim, though I tell her water’s the nearest thing to freefall until we actually get into space. She says she’s not built for it, it’s her enemy, it’ll drown her.
Actually get into space. The simulations and the combat runs and the training schedule are all so exact, so real, that they mask the fact that we won’t be the ones fighting their way past the Death Stars to reveal the secrets of Toatéu and gaze at the naked singularity at the beginning and end of time. We’ll be sitting on the verandah barbecuing fish, watching the smoke trails go up from Nosy Mitsio as sonic booms roll across the lagoon. If you think about this too much, it knocks the spirit right out of you. All that energy, that epiphany I had in the tank, flickers like a candle flame in the night. What’s the point of it? There’s only going to be a point if someone gets hurt, or dies. Or there’s some kind of disaster.
It’s bad when you start hoping that people have nasty accidents.
Our exemplars think we need a morale boost. So this morning we’re going to go and see a rocket. Not any old rocket. Our rocket. The one we’ll be flying, if…
Reserve Silo 1 is on Iles Glorieuses, which is way too grand a name for a chip of cha-coral halfway between Madagascar and fuck all else. Nothing to see on the surface: a bare patch in a spine forest was the landing pad. The site crew threw a light-scatter net over the tilt-rotor before the fans stopped turning. A spysat was due over the horizon in five minutes. Underground: fast. First thought: maybe flight training is not so bad. These people live like coral, squeezed into tiny tunnels and cells so small they fit like segments of orange into its skin. They crawl everywhere, you have to bend double to get through the doors. They sleep hanging up. I don’t think the word ‘upright’ exists in their language. Grubbing round underground, hardly ever seeing the light of day, or feeling the wind, or the water. I think I’d die of claustrophobia, but Irya feels right at home.
But they’ve got the spaceships. Our guide—an army Major in shorts, beard, luck bangles and BO—squeezes us through this heavy blast door so tight it’s like being born, and we’re there. On the edge. Wedged on to this rickety gantry on the side of a launch silo. Fifty metres up, fifty metres down.
Never mind the silo. That’s just empty space. In front of me is the machine that’s going to take me to the stars.
‘Touch it if you like,’ the cool Major said. I reached out my hand to the white plastic, and jumped back.
‘It’s warm,’ I said. ‘I can feel a pulse. It’s like it’s alive.’
‘It is,’ the Major said.
I knew all the facts. Liquid fuel, high thrust aerospike engines, two stages: booster and orbiter. We’re taking the fast track. At lift-off we’ll be pulling eight gees. Thus the acceleration gel. Facts, data, specs: the briefing buckies were hardwired into my blood. But standing skin to skin with the big launcher I was overwhelmed by the sheer physicality of the thing. It was like it was there just for me. Waiting for a bit of me to be put into it, so it could wake up, and burn. I knew that the next time I went into the simulator, a big, hungry part of me would be in that aerobody orbiter up there, white as an ocean gull.
‘I come and look at it every day,’ the Merina Major said. I would too, just to make sure it was still there, that it hadn’t flown in the night without me. Well, Major with the BO, you’ve got a rival now. It worked, Anitraséo. I want more than anything to ride that big fucker.
August 8
The exemplars are in a huddle again.
Bad sign on bad sign. The flight crews are shipping out. Two, three times a day, a tilt-rotor comes in across the lagoon. Half an hour later, it goes out again and there are empty seats in the refec at dinner. The rec is a mausoleum. You can’t get a volleyball team together. It’s difficult even finding someone to shoot pool. Nosy Bé feels empty, and strangely scruffy, like it’s all going to fall apart if there’s no one left to look after it. Except the Amazing Left Behind Sisters, picking up the trash, cleaning the weed off the beach, dusting the rooms and making the beds.
The thing about having a precog on the team is that sudden meetings can be bad news but you aren’t going to die of shock. So before we go in we know that the United Nations has ratified a motion for a full emergency summit between North and South at the end of the month. But our exemplars still have to tell us this, otherwise Ofé couldn’t have foreseen it.
We’ve all got questions.
Infana: will iMerina send a delegation?
It’s inconceivable that a major nation like iMerina would not be represented in Helsinki. Ambositra is assembling a high-level negotiating team.
Ofé (though she already knows the answer): what happens to the mission?
The mission continues as planned. We go to launch-ready status on September 15th. Launch is still confirmed at twelve hundred GMT October 3rd.
Irya: The Northerners are going to say, we gave them what they wanted and then they stabbed us in the back.
You think Helsinki is going to give the South anything? exemplar Soanierana says.
Me: what about us?
What about you? Anitraséo says. Back sitting on the verandah watching the monsoon clouds pile up on the horizon and the tilt-rotors scurrying beneath them, that’s what.
Little grace note. Irya and I are sitting around watching CNN. Now that reporting bans’ve been lifted, it’s like the news nets are making up for seventeen years pretending only the top half of the planet exists by suddenly taking an interest in every tiny detail of life in the South. Hey! Look! We’ve got this whole new world right on our doorstep, and you should see the cool things they do! What’s sickening is how eagerly we go along with them. Smile and answer their stupid questions. Some woman from Great Zimbabwe’s just made a fool of herself talking about great aspirations and hopes for a new world order and unifying the whole family of man. Now it’s a spokesperson from the Harambee.
Irya tilts her head to one side, then to the other. She frowns, says, ‘Ren, that woman has freckles, same as you.’
I say, ‘That woman has red hair, same as me.’
Irya says, ‘That woman…’
‘Is my mother.’
54
Look out the left, the captain said, it’s right below us. The big Airbus banked. Gaby looked down on a clutch of summer-brown islands nestled in an ultramarine sea. Sketched-in fortifications, diagrams of barracks and drill grounds, geometrical bastions and revetments. Bridges linked the islands; incongruously oriental to Gaby in this high north. A big ship, tall as a skyscraper, negotiated a strait channel between tree-covered shores. The island fortress disappeared under the wing.
The captain announced three minutes to landing. The cabin staff moved to check seats, seat-belts and upright position seat-back tables. The aircraft slid down over microwave masts and oil refineries and apartment blocks. Gaby prodded Faraway awake.
‘You missed it.’
‘I’ll be seeing quite enough of it.’
‘You’ve drooled.’
While he got the seat-thing checker to fetch him a microwaved towel, Gaby called up Dr Dan on the earphone.
‘How was it for you?’
‘Unspeakably tedious, my dear.’
‘We’re going in now.’
‘I can feel it.’
‘Word is there won’t be a press call at the airport. They’re going to transfer us straight to the conference site.’
‘Anything that gets me out of this crate sooner is a good thing.’ The cabin staff took their seats for landing. ‘It’s a bit different from the last time we flew together, Gaby.’
She laughed.
‘What is the old goat saying to you?’ Faraway asked.
‘Last time we were on a flight together, Dr Dan said he’d never visit an aeroplane toilet again without thinking of me.’
She watched Faraway think up a dozen Faraway comments. He didn’t make them. Jesus, we’ve moved a long way, Gaby thought. But part of the thing was the dirty innuendoes, the single entendres. The wheels went down and locked. The diplomatic charter hit the runway. On its way to the secure stand discreetly distant from the paying traffic it taxied past an aircraft with Cyrillic on its belly and tail. Gaby closed her eyes at the black throb inside. Air travel is travel outside time; it all connects, one after the other, like Christmases, and sex. In aeroplane time, it’s only moments since you sat in the cockpit of Dostoinsuvo on the strip at Wilson while your new friend Oksana Mikhailovna Telyanina showed you her beloved Antonov and you tasted her burn of pride like an old whiskey.
