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most prosperous, just using the things people had around them.  It even started to go a little to his head, and it was Sarah who told him he was in danger of becoming the next Davenport, from Rudyard Kipling’s The Man Who Would Be King .  That was how they met.  She was travelling through doing assessments of the refugee camps in the region for the International Rescue Alliance and she had crashed for a week at their guesthouse.  He had fancied her and hated her in equal measure, in part because she immediately called him on a heap of bullshit that he was beginning to form into his own personal throne.  But the next time she’d come through, they’d gotten drunk together on Cameroonian moonshine and danced like drunken monkeys to Zangaliwah in the African moonlight.  You become fast friends in the field.   When he next went to the Capital, Khartoum, he sought her out; partly because he wanted to, and partly because Asefa said he was ‘too much of a lady-boy white-boy to look up that beautiful NGO woman who was totally out of your league’. 
    They’d met for a ‘quick catch-up’; tea, baklava and shisha at a little Moroccan place down a side street, but it had turned into an all-afternoon affair and then they had wound up at some Embassy party with unlimited alcohol via a diplomatic bag.  By the end of the night they were together.  They hadn’t been apart, except geographically, since.  He hoped she made it OK to Juba, he always worried about her when she went away on her trips, even though she was at least as worldly as he was. 
    The car bumped along the road.   Asefa was singing along to Zangaliwah, rather well; he had a back up career right there if he ever decided to stop helping poor people and start helping himself.  Asefa was a remarkably cheerful and optimistic fellow for someone who had seen so much tragedy in his life.  His first child had died from malaria when she was four and six months later his wife died from complications while pregnant with his second child.  That was before Tim had met him, since then both Asefa’s parents had passed away and his sister – his last remaining relative - had disappeared while working as a nurse with the UN in Congo.  Asefa had gone to the war torn country and spent six months trying to find her, calling in every favour and spending everything he had saved.  Some said they thought the Lord’s Resistance Army took her, but Asefa liked to believe that her car had gone off the road on some remote jungle pass and she died quickly.  The hard part for him was coming to terms with the fact that he’d never know what really happened.  That must have been the case for so many in Africa, never really knowing what happened to family, friends or loved ones that got separated by famine, drought or war.  Little government, few records and poor communications could make tracking down the missing or the dead a life’s work; at some point you have to decide to give up and live.
    “How long until we get there Asefa?”
    “If you were driving, three hours.  At Asefa speed, make that two – we’ll be down the mine before nine.”  Asefa pushed the peddle to the floor and the dust cloud behind them grew larger.  “Don’t worry, no people on these roads. Just slithering black mambas – and they can eat my black wheels.”
     

Chapter 10
     
     
    The coffee at S.E.T.I. was weak but hot.  Hat Creek Radio Observatory, his home away from home.  The array of disks that spanned the horizon turned a thousandth of a degree to scan a hugely different expanse of cosmos for any hint of a radio signal that might indicate intelligence beyond the Earth.  Machines bleeped and packages of data were sent out and retrieved from the myriad of networked home computers, laptops, licit and illicit corporate servers, all sifting through gigabytes of space noise as part of the S.E.T.I@Home project.  Five hundred thousand silicone minds whirring away as one; the processing