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them.
Two other jets were parked unattended on the tarmac, and a trio of
helicopters.
Beyond the perimeter fence, some way off, women walked by with baskets on
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their heads, while trucks of farm produce - some solar-powered, others drawn
by bullocks - trundled by at various speeds towards the centre of Dakar. I
caught a faint reek of fish from ,an articulated truck driving the other way.
But there was nowhere in particular for us to go; we were fenced in. All we
could really taste of Senegal was the thick air. How barren plane travel
actually was. I felt sorry for Sam; I admired him for putting up with a life
in the sky, for the sake of the smooth running of Bardo's affairs.
Maimouna's skin was milk chocolate. Her lips pouted, her eyes were sullen - or
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Ian Watson - Alien Embassy sultry, I suppose. Her head was shaved bald and her
eyebrows plucked to match.
She was a wooden carving of Beauty. Her pout seemed to be an inbuilt part of
her features. In other respects she had about as much facial, mobility as a
carving. She seemed all image; as though she thought it vulgar to be less than
an ideal image of herself.'
Suspended from her pierced ear-lobes hung yellow glass globes encased in
filigree wire nets, which bobbed about like miniature fishing floats.
Personally, I
thought these made her look as old-fashioned as though she had her lips
pierced and great wooden plugs stuck in them; but obviously she thought highly
of them.
When the twins danced up to her irreverently, and clicked them with their
fingernails, and cried, 'Ping!' 'Pong!' she looked highly offended.
'Why don't you 'two boys wear something, so people can tell you apart!' I
laughed. 'One of you could get your left ear pierced, and the other your
right.'
'We could wear haif a tunic each!' one twin said, giggling.
'And half a hat!'
'And half a set of chromosomes!'
Maimouna just shrugged and marched on board the jet.
Back inside, after refuelling, I found her sitting in the seat where I'd been,
by the window. I sat down beside her.
'Do you speak English?' I asked her,a little irritably. Then, for good
measure,
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Ian Watson - Alien Embassy
'
Unasema Kiswahili
?'
She looked cool. 'Maimouna speaks English, French, Wolof and Chinese.
Actually, I had hoped to be sent to Lhasa to communicate with the Rakshasas.
You see, I had a Chinese Teacher, so I took the trouble to learn his language.
Of course, you don't speak Chinese, so you'll never see Lhasa, will you?'
'How do you know I don't speak Chinese?'
She said something to me in Chinese and smiled faintly.
'It's a complex language, dear.'
'Are you from the coast? I'm from the other coast - the other side of Africa!
I've been watching the whole continent go by-'
'I'm sorry, do you want to sit by the window? Did Maimouna take your seat
perhaps?'
From across the aisle, Hamidou-A poked me in the ribs.
'Watch out. First class bitchsnob.'
'Why should I care about the view?' I said. 'I'm not a sightseer. Are you?' .
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'All that you mean is, it's all ocean from now on.' She yawned. 'Quite
monotonous and dreary.'
Sam finished piling cartons into the rear seats and scrambled back to the
cabin, stopping to tell Maimouna to fasten her seat belt. We others already
had.
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'No point in wearing the thing, till one's ready for takeoff, surely?'
'Just be co-operative, will you?' Sam said, leaning over to buckle her in.
'Maimouna always co-operates,' the girl purred. 'A selfish attitude absolutely
ruins one for Bardo flight.'
'How fortunate for you, having a Chinese Teacher,' I said sarcastically. 'What
a pity it's all been wasted, as they don't speak Chinese in Miami.'
Closing her eyes, she ignored me.
Soon we were flying out over sea, more sea, then more sea again.
Later, Sam announced: 'There's a hurricane building up in the Gulf of Mexico.
Miami airport's closing, so we're going to land at the Cape.'
'Cape Canaveral?'
'The space port?'
'That damned place,' scowled Sam.
SIX
And so, on a fitful evening, with a storm brewing and red sunlight lancing low
from brawling, accelerated clouds, we flew in over the abandoned launching
sites. It was a flat, abstract place criss-crossed polygon-style by broad
roads
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Ian Watson - Alien Embassy linking the launch pads, which looked very much
like a set of gargantuan yantra mandates pointed at the stars. As though the
old space administration had built the right shapes, but done the wrong things
with them! If they only could have unlocked the powers residing in the shapes
they paved the earth with!
A few steel gantries still stood erect and one gantry in particular still held
a tall rocketship in its clasp, unlaunched these twenty decades: a magnificent
penis-
lingam. How almost right, yet how utterly wrong!
'See,' cried the Hausa twins, 'it's a stupa!
'
Yes, it looked like that too: the spire from an Indian temple, hugely
magnified.
And of course the spire of an Indian temple is intended as a penis-lingam.
'An American stupa!
Stupendous!' laughed Abdoulaye-H.
'What a shame they were in such a stupor that they didn't realize what it
was!'
'
Stupid astronauts.'
The black mass of storm clouds was piling up fast. Raindrops smeared across
the windows. As we landed, on what must have been the longest runway in the
world, fat bobbles blurred the glass; against the boiling darkness of the
horizon I
could still see a monolithic building, half a kilometre high at least, that
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