Kilima Lift

FFrom the top deck of the number 111 matatu, at six in the morning, you could see the thread.

Mara had seen it every day for three years. Everybody in Nairobi had. It went up from the Ngong Hills, south-west of the city, where the land rose in its long blue humps against the sky, and it went straight up. Not like a tower. Not like a building. Like a line somebody had drawn on the sky with a ruler and a very fine pen, from the top of the hills to the top of the sky, and then kept going. At dawn, when the sun came up behind the city and caught it, before the light reached the ground, it shone. A single bright vertical scratch of gold on the pale blue, rising out of the dark hills, thinner and thinner, until your eyes lost it somewhere high up where the sky went deep.

The Kilima Lift. Africa's road to space.

The matatu was full, as always, with people going to work, music thumping from the speakers, a screen on the back of every seat playing adverts. Half of the adverts were for the Lift. Six weeks, said a smiling woman in a white flight suit, against a background of stars. Six weeks to the first crewed climb. Kilima. Built here. Going up. The man in the seat next to Mara snorted and changed the channel to football.

Mara did not change the channel. Mara was looking out of the window at the thread, the way Mara had looked at it every morning for three years, and holding, in one pocket, very tightly, a plastic pass on a lanyard that said KILIMA LIFT AUTHORITY — INTERN — ANCHOR STATION ACCESS.

Seven hundred people had applied. Seventeen- and eighteen-year-olds, from every county in Kenya, and Uganda, and Tanzania, and further. Twelve had been chosen, for a twelve-week placement at the anchor, working with the engineers in the last weeks before launch. Mara had read the email nine times before believing it. Mara's mother had read it once, and sat down on the floor of their two rooms in Kawangware, and laughed until she cried, and then gone out and bought a cake she could not afford, and made everybody on the corridor eat some.

The matatu dropped Mara at the last stop, at the bottom of the hills, where the city ran out. From there, a shuttle ran up the new road to the anchor, past the checkpoints, past the high double fences, through the trees, climbing, and the thread got bigger, and bigger, and was not a thread at all.

It was a ribbon. That was the first surprise. From the city it looked like a line, but close to, it was flat: a band about a metre wide, dark grey, thinner than paper, so thin that when the shuttle came round the last bend and Mara saw it edge-on, it vanished completely, and then, as the angle changed, came back, a dark grey stripe going straight up into the sky from the top of the hill, perfectly still, perfectly straight, humming. Mara could hear the hum through the window of the shuttle. Low, deep, steady, almost too low to hear, more like a feeling in the chest. The sound of a hundred thousand kilometres of ribbon, pulled tight between the Earth and the sky, singing in the wind.

At the bottom of it was the anchor station.

It sat on the very crest of the hill, a great white ring of concrete and steel, as wide as a football stadium, rising in tiers, and in the middle of the ring, on a round platform, the ribbon came down out of the sky and went into the ground. Into a huge dark housing of metal, as big as a house, bolted into the rock of the hill. Around the ring were sheds, and cranes, and power stations, and a great white dish pointing at the sky, and roads with trucks on them, and hundreds of people in orange and white overalls, moving about, very small. And on a long rail beside the platform, gleaming silver, sat a thing like a train carriage standing on its end, with a ring of wheels around it that gripped the ribbon on both sides.

A climber. The thing that would go up.

Mara got off the shuttle with the eleven other interns, at the gate of the ring, in the cold of the morning, with the hum in her chest, and stood and stared up the ribbon until her neck hurt. It went up, and up, and narrowed to a line, and then a thread, and then nothing, a place in the blue where your eyes gave up.

"You get used to it," said a voice beside Mara. A woman, in her forties, small, with short grey-streaked hair and reading glasses pushed up on her head, in orange overalls with a name on the chest: W. KAMAU — STRUCTURES. She was looking at Mara, not the ribbon. "Everybody stares, the first day. Then you stop seeing it. Then one day, after a year, you look up and it scares the life out of you all over again." She held out a hand. "Wanjiru Kamau. You're mine, I think. The list says so. Structures. Do you know what that means?"

"It means keeping the ribbon in one piece," said Mara. "Doesn't it?"

Wanjiru tipped her head and studied Mara over her glasses for a moment.

"Hm," she said. "Near enough. Most people say building. Structures isn't building. The building's done. Structures is the bit after, that never ends." She looked up at the ribbon. "Every bit of that, every metre of it, from here to the counterweight, is my problem. If it sags or creaks or shivers in a way it shouldn't, I want to hear about it first. Keeping it in one piece. Yes." She almost smiled. "You'd be surprised how few people put it that simply."

She turned and walked towards the ring, and Mara followed, because there did not seem to be anything else to do.

"Six weeks," Wanjiru said, without looking round. "Six weeks to the first crewed climb. Four people in that tin can, going up the ribbon for eight days to the station at geostationary orbit, with the whole of Africa watching and half the world waiting for us to fall on our faces." She swiped her pass at a door, and it slid open, and a blast of cold air came out. "So for six weeks, nobody here sleeps much, and everybody shouts, and the coffee is terrible. Welcome to the Lift."

Inside, it was all screens. A long, low, cold room, curving with the curve of the ring, with windows on one side looking out at the platform and the ribbon, and on the other side, a wall of screens, floor to ceiling, covered in numbers and graphs and lines, all moving. Dozens of people sat at desks in front of them, talking quietly into headsets. Nobody looked up. On the biggest screen, in the middle, there was a picture of the ribbon, a long thin line drawn from the bottom of the screen to the top, with the Earth at the bottom and a tiny dot at the top for the counterweight, and all along the line, hundreds of little green lights. A few were yellow.

"Every light is a sensor," said Wanjiru. "Strain, temperature, vibration, every few kilometres, all the way up. Green is good. Yellow is look again. Red is wake me up." She pointed at a desk in the corner, piled with old coffee cups. "That's yours. Sit down. Look at the lights. Tell me tomorrow what you see."

Mara looked back once, before the door closed, at the ribbon going up into the morning, humming.

It was the most beautiful thing Mara had ever seen. And Wanjiru Kamau, Mara thought, sounded as if it frightened her to death.