The view shifts to a moving image, in fact to a tiny hummingbird-like dronecam, as Polansky enters the Quartier-General, scans her way through multiple levels of security, takes a high-speed lift to the seventieth floor office suite of UNSAC and is ushered inside by black and gold uniformed staff officers who smile at the reporter and her hovering dronecam as if jagged rods had been permanently inserted up their rectums.
As she waited for the Commissioner to finish an unexpected phone call, Dana tried to keep her emotions in check. She knew that her daughter Jana had assimilated and somehow wound up on a Frontier Corps ship involved in the Earthshield project. She knew the Herschel had been destroyed in a catastrophic explosion and that Jana was lost. But she also knew she was getting ‘visitations’ from Jana and she wondered: is it possible for an angel to survive such an explosion and somehow make its way back to Earth? She tried not to hope for too much… her logical side said this was all nonsense. And she did have a job to do.
Girl, just get a grip, already…
Komar rises from the vast expanse of her desk, smiles a political smile and gestures for Polansky to have a seat on a small settee next to a smoldering fire in a nearby hearth. Komar situates herself primly in an overstuffed wing chair opposite Polansky. Tea and coffee service appears and is laid out on a table between them.
“Good evening, Madame Commissioner. Thanks for taking the time to talk with us tonight.”
Komar offers the ‘UNIFORCE smile’ that Dana has seen on everybody’s face from the first floor security shack to UNSAC’s office. It’s an uncomfortable rictus-like leer, almost as if invisible pins were holding the edges of her lips back, as might happen in a dentist’s office. The more she saw the forced ‘grin,’ the more it made her shiver.
“Of course, Ms. Polansky…may I call you Dana? UNIFORCE wants to be as forthcoming with our citizens as possible, given the gravity of the current situation.”
Jeez, gravity doesn’t seem to affect your lips, lady.
“Madame Commissioner, let me get right to the point for our viewers. There are rumors and reports—have been for days now—that UNIFORCE is working with the Secretary-General to create a negotiating team for seeking some kind of accommodation with the...er, aliens, entities, that are moving into our solar system. Can you comment on this for our audience?”
Now, Komar’s smile faded slightly. The programmed arc straightened out into a more normal, almost thoughtful tightening of her lips.
“Ms. Polansky, I’m not sure what your sources are for this information but—“
“Madame Commissioner, my sources prefer to remain anonymous but they have always been reliable, even impeccable. Could you comment on these reports?”
Komar’s eyes narrowed and she regarded Dana as she might have regarded a bug to be squashed. Then a faint smile crossed her lips.
“Very well, Ms. Polansky…this news will be public in a few days anyway. Your sources are correct. A negotiating team is being formed, even as we speak. Not here. In New York.”
Dana swallowed an urge to fist pump her success. “Can you be more specific? Where will the negotiations be held? Who will represent us? And the aliens, the Old Ones…who do you expect to be negotiating with…after all, the scientists say this cloud, this formation, is nothing but a swarm of bots, from all analyses I’ve seen.”
Komar turned her chair slightly to be able to gaze out the window. It was late but the City of Light was ablaze with light and swarms of jetcabs and tourist flyers buzzed the Eiffel Tower like moths to a light.
“The meetings are to be held in Nairobi, Kenya. It’s near one of the Sanctuaries…the East Africa Sanctuary and we think Symborg himself will represent the other side. Nairobi’s still Normals territory but it’s close to Kipwezia.”
“Symborg? I thought Symborg was—“
Komar held up a hand. “So did we. He hasn’t been seen in a few years. UNIFORCE Intelligence believed he had returned to Kipwezia, that he had been absorbed or whatever it is they do, into the Config Zero formation…we don’t really know. But through our contacts in the East Africa Sanctuary, we’ve learned that Symborg will be the ‘face’, as it were, of the Old Ones. The face of our adversary.”
Dana’s head spun with questions. “And who will be representing the UN, the Normals?”
Now, Komar turned back and leveled an even gaze at Polansky. “I will. My team leaves for Africa at dawn tomorrow.”
Special Report Ends
Dana Polansky could not excuse herself and rush out of UNSAC’s office any faster than she did. The chittering dronecam could barely keep up and Dana soon forgot completely about the thing.
Nairobi? Symborg? The Church of Assimilation? The Sanctuaries? Somehow some way, she had to be there. This was going to be the greatest story of all time and Dana Polansky meant to be right in the middle of it.
And while she was there, she figured to do some inquiring about Jana. It was just possible, if she could get an exclusive interview with the character, that Symborg could help her find her Jana.
Dana told herself not to get her hopes up. Still as she threw piles of clean clothes into her luggage and then hailed a taxi to Charles de Gaulle Skyport , she couldn’t help but wonder.
If there was any chance to bring Jana back to the world of Normals, she meant to find it.
Nairobi, Kenya
November 16, 2155
0915 hours
To Dana Polansky, the city of Nairobi looked from the air like one of Jana’s cereal bowls, maybe from when she was five years old. There was a grid of streets and trees in the middle, arranged like soggy corn flakes in her mind’s eye. The bowl was a rim of mountains with the Ngong Hills to the west and Kilimanjaro and Kipwezi poking through the clouds to the south. The crack of the Great Rift Valley angled down from the northeast, right through the heart of the city…toast crumbs marching across the table. And to the east, the sere brown veldt country of east Kenya, scuff marks on the table from years of spoon and fork banging.
Dana smiled ruefully. Jana was down there somewhere. She knew it. She felt it. I’m coming, honey. I’ll find you and get you the hell out of here. One way or another.
The hyperjet bearing Dana Polansky and her foreign reporting team swung around for final approach to Jomo Kenyatta Airport. The jet kissed the tarmac of Runway 16 Left and whined to a halt at the jetway connected to the main concourse.
The first round of negotiations were set to open in a mansion located in a compound at Milimani, on the outskirts of Nairobi. The great green sward of Uhuru Park wrapped its manicured landscape around the mansion, where the President of Kenya, Julius Akamba, had lived ever since returning from exile on Mars. Through beveled glass windows of the airport main terminal and atrium, the great snowy slopes of Mount Kipwezi could be seen in the distance.
Dana and her crew, reporter Gary Leland and dronecam operator Lily Vogt, caught a taxi, called a matatu in Nairobi, and noticed a small vid was showing on the display in the front seat. The driver was a thin goateed Masai immigrant, but the matatu didn’t need drivers…it drove itself. The ‘driver’ was there only to answer questions and act as tourguide.
It was a feed from NKS, a newsdrone hovering over Uhuru Park, while a reporter named Julia Nyere narrated.
“…a big rally…lots of street people…Assimilationists have turned out…a new kind of fab….”
“What’s going on?” Dana asked.
“Some kind of rally,” the driver offered. “They’re showing off some new kind of fab, looks like—“
A newsdrone moved in for a close up. Dana heard Lilly smirk from the back seat at how jerky the image was.
“Must be a rookie,” she muttered.
The Uhuru Park bazaar was slammed with people and as the drone flew lower into the crowd, it made a series of dizzying stops and turns. It was like fighting swirling ocean currents to move anywhere. The bazaar was loud and chaotic, fi
lled with smoke and pungent smells—the high-octane odor of masala tobacco was especially strong at the Garden Street entrance—and the air was thick with loose nano, clouds of bots mingling with incense, opium and scores of cooking oil fires. Vendors hawked grapes and mangoes, bananas and fabricator shells of every type, vials of rogue DNA called twist hung from clothes lines strung up between light poles and dilapidated tents. Women in sarongs with black teeth from chewing betel nuts zipped and weaved through the labyrinth balancing huge baskets on their heads, baskets filled with everything from buffalo patties to rebuilt matter compilers for the fabs that were on sale everywhere.
Slowly, the drone made its way through the crowds, with reporter Julia Nyere right behind, narrating…across a jammed plaza thick with bikes, carts, cattle and donkeys. A large tent surrounded on three sides with tables and benches dominated the center of the park. Flat screen displays hanging from poles flickered down on the crowd, with images of Bollywood action pics counterpointed by plaintive plucking from a mandolin player nearby. In the center of a knot of yelling, shoving, jeering customers, a swarthy man in a turban and dark green kaftan pecked at a keyboard. All around the park, throbbing globs of nanobotic swarms swelled and gyrated to the music. Masala smoke was thick and acrid in the air.
On a makeshift stage at the edge of the crowd, a man with a microphone was exhorting the gathering, making his pitch to buy the newest and latest fabs.
“Isn’t that Kwame Kavaii?” Dana asked, studying the screen. She put a cursor over the image and an ID window popped up:
Nanobotic simulacrum of Kwame Kavaii…Kenya’s Ambassador to the UN
“An angel,” said Gary Leland. “And a damn good one. What the hell’s he doing at a rally at Uhuru Park?”
Lilly Vogt pointed to the display, noting some of the signs and banners draped around the gathering. “Assimilationists…see the signs?”
Below the stage with its gesticulating angel impresario, a turbaned vendor ran a demo in front of the crowd. He was a small man, desert burning in his eyes, as his fingers flew over the keyboard. Presently, he stopped and noticed a very young child, a small girl, standing shyly a few meters away from the stage, playing hide and seek in the folds of her mother’s loose sarong.
The vendor, who sported a thick black moustache, beckoned repeatedly to the young girl. After a few minutes, her mother relented and let her child go. The girl inched her way into the clearing and stood in front of the vendor’s table, to applause and approving shouts and chants from the crowd.
The vendor’s name was Samson Ndinka. The newsdrone overlaid a descriptor block about the vendor on the feed: Luo tribe, resides in Kibera, the world’s largest slum. Ndinka reached into a canvas bag and pulled out a trinket for the young girl. He handed it to her and she took it, shyly, turning the small cylinder over and over in her hand.
“You have a djinn in that cylinder, little one,” Ndinka announced, loudly enough for all to hear. “A very powerful spirit. He can grant you any wish you want. Make a wish, child, and the djinn will bring it to you, right here—“
The girl’s name was Menaka and she had huge brown eyes. Sad eyes, thought Dana. Behind her, Lilly, the Solnet dronecam operator, was appraising the visuals of the rally with a critical eye, imagining how she would do better.
Menaka twirled the cylinder as Ndinka had shown her and squeezed her eyes tightly shut. When she stopped twirling the cylinder, she felt it vibrate and was so startled, she dropped the cylinder to the dirt.
Instantly, the device was enveloped in a fine mist, a sparkling mist that billowed out and upward, swirling about the clearing in front of Ndinka and his tables like a miniature cyclone. Gasps and shouts erupted from the crowd, and the spectators shoved back against each other, to give this growing apparition greater distance. On the stage, Kavaii’s angel gave a showman’s flair to the spectacle.
“Now see what the young child has conjured for us—“
The mist gradually materialized into the faint outline of a man’s upper body, with a recognizable face, shoulders and arms crossed in front.
The ‘djinn’ then spoke out loud. “Little one, I have come from the clouds above to grant you a great wish. Make your wish now—“ The djinn’s voice was a deep bass profundo, so deep it rattled the beaded curtains that covered Ndinka’s merchant tent behind them.
Menaka stared wide-eyed, mouth open, at the apparition. She was speechless.
“Go ahead, child,” urged Ndinka. “The djinn wishes you to make a wish.”
Shouts of encouragement and support came from the crowd. Gradually, Menaka worked up enough nerve. Shy, haltingly, she asked for a new matatu for her father.
“His bus is broken down, Great One,” she murmured. “It’s the tires. They are bad. The bus is our livelihood. Father needs a new matatu to carry the tourists.”
The deep voice rumbled again, a little reverberation adding to the sense of barely contained powers.
“As you have spoken, child…so shall it be—“
At that moment, the swirling, twinkling apparition of the djinn dissolved into a maelstrom of churning, roiling clouds, streaked with flashes of light. It was like watching a thunderstorm in miniature, from the inside.
The crowd murmured and moved back uneasily.
When the storm began to subside, the barest outlines of a structure could be seen enveloped in the thick fog. The fog dissolved, slowly at first, then with speed, to reveal the front hood and doors of a new minibus. Its wheels dripped with moisture and sunlight shone from the supple leather seats inside.
The crowd was silent for a moment, then erupted into cheers and gasps. Menaka stared wide-eyed at the new matatu, inching her way forward to tentatively put a finger along the fender, tracing the smooth curve of the metal.
For fun, Ndinka reached inside the driver’s side window and honked the horn a few times, startling everyone. The crowd laughed.
“You see what a gift the great djinn has brought you, little one. The djinn I have in my possession can do the same for every one of you.” Ndinka pointedly stared at each face in the front row of the circle of onlookers. “Such a powerful djinn, such a powerful servant is available to you, today, right now, for a very special price. You will not believe the deal I can make for you. My friends, you cannot leave this bazaar without experiencing what this amazing servant can do for you—the Assimilationists have brought this wonder to Uhuru Park just for today--“
Dana Polansky clucked with reluctant approval.
“Not bad nano, if you ask me. Config changes were quick. He managed to hide some of the frizziness with smoke.”
Gary Leland nodded. “A little clunky in the conversion, if you ask me. But showmanship trumps everything. Like a magician…he kept their attention away from the nuts and bolts.”
Dana spoke to the taxibot. “Take us to Langata House. We’re covering a conference.”
The taxi sped off down Kenyatta Avenue and was soon pulling up in front of the mansion ensconced in its park-like setting. As they got out with their gear, they spied another vehicle, this one a black limousine, pulling into the circular drive between ornate stone gates. Bronze lions topped each gate. Langata House was a holdover from the colonial era of British occupation. Now it was a hotel and convention center. Two people got out and went inside, a man and a woman, both diplomats, Dana surmised.
For Nigel Mosely and Gabrielle Antonini, official duty in the city of Nairobi, Kenya was surely as close to paradise as either one was likely to get this side of the pearly gates. Both diplomats climbed out of the taxi at the front entrance of the Langata House and took a long look around, getting their bearings.
It was a perfect east African afternoon in the city under the sun. A huge fountain, the Nyere Falls, splashed spumes of water a hundred meters in the air, forming a rainbow of color that framed the old house in front of a small peninsula, jutting from the banks of the Nairobi River. Earl
y afternoon pedestrians sauntered along the quay and the waterfront behind the mansion, stopping at small cafes and art and book shops, while single-masted sail craft dotted the placid, gently burbling waters of the river. Behind the stacked pancakes of Times Tower at the Kenyatta Conference Center, the snow-capped summit of Kilimanjaro made a picture frame landscape suitable for any would-be painter.
But the two UN officials had little time to admire the scenery. They were nearly late for a luncheon meeting at the mansion. It was a critical meeting, critical for the UN and for the course of what the media had begun to call the Final War. Moseley and Antonini hustled inside the Langata House and were quickly seated in a private dining salon, an intimate room with a picturesque view of the riverside. There, they ran into UNSAC herself, in the person of Angelika Komar. UNSAC would be heading up the negotiations, if they could be called that.
Mosely checked the time. “Isn’t this conference supposed to start at noon? Where the hell are the Bugs?”
A nearby aide checked his wristpad. “Just arriving at the main entrance, sir. It…they…will be here in a few moments.”
Mosely sipped at some wine. “What do we call these bugs? “
Gabrielle Antonini was a severe woman, with a tight bun of hair and black-frame glasses. An eye-pad clung like a fly to one stem of her glasses. She was obviously studying something scrolling down her viewer. “Officially, we call them para-human swarm entities, ANAD-style nanobotic devices. “
Mosely snorted. “Bugs, if you ask me.”
At that moment, the entrance to the dining salon was filled with a buzzing sound. A thin fog seemed to fill the entrance, veined with sporadic pops and flashes of light. The fog curled and flowed into the room, vaguely resembling a human form, though it was translucent, like smoke. It drifted serenely into the salon and headed for the table.
In spite of himself, Nigel Mosely rose and stood at his seat.
A doorman made the announcement. “The Entities from Config Zero are arriving….”