by Ian McDonald
CONTENTS
Title Page
Copyright
Introduction
Tendeléo’s Story
FIRST EDITION
Tendeléo’s Story
Copyright © 2000 by Ian McDonald
Introduction
Copyright © 2000 by Agberg Ltd
Cover artwork:
Copyright © 2000 by David A. Hardy
Published by PS Publishing
by arrangement with the author.
All rights reserved by the author.
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental
ISBN
1 902880 12 9 (Softback)
1 902880 13 7 (Hardback)
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Introduction
HE’S a brilliant writer who has produced some of the finest science fiction of the last dozen years. His inventive and challenging books and stories, pulsating with vivid imagery and superb verbal energy, carry tremendous emotional impact, and have given me much pleasure during that period. How inexcusable, then, for me to have kept mixing him again and again for much of that time into a sort of generic Celtic stew, conflating him with a couple of other Ian Macs who have also done much work worthy of praise. Silly careless me!
I can keep Kim Stanley and Spider Robinson straight in my head; I have never had the slightest difficulty distinguishing among Robert Heinlein, Robert Sheckley, Robert Sawyer, and Robert Silverberg; I can tell Ray Bradbury from Ray Cummings and William Burroughs from Edgar Rice ditto. Even so, I’ve had all sorts of trouble with the various Ians.
But mixing them up is a mistake I’ll never make again.
The problem is partly that I’m not paying as much attention to things science-fictional as I once did, and partly that the science-fiction universe has grown so huge that it’s a formidable task to keep track of everything.
There was a time when I knew just about every active science-fiction writer in the business. I have, after all, been close to the center of the science-fiction world for nearly fifty years as writer, editor, and anthologist, which has involved me in business dealings with almost everyone in the field, and, since I attend two or three science-fiction conventions a year, I’ve come to know most of my colleagues personally—E.E. Smith and Edmond Hamilton and Jack Williamson, Isaac Asimov and Robert Heinlein and Sprague de Camp, James Gunn and Algis Budrys and Frederik Pohl, John Brunner and Brian Aldiss and Roger Zelazny, and so on down through the SF generations to Joe Haldeman, Connie Willis, Greg Bear, and other star writers of the modern era.
But today’s science-fiction world is an immensely populous place, and I’m no longer doing much editing or anthologizing, and I’m beginning not to feel quite as closely in touch with the center of things as I once was.
When I enter a room full of science-fiction writers at a convention these days, I’m likely to recognize about one face out of five, whereas a couple of decades ago I’d have known just about everyone. And when I look at the contents page of some recent science-fiction magazine, most of the names are unfamiliar to me, and I have no idea what to expect from their work. Which is why I was guilty of such numbskull inattentiveness in regard to the work of that extraordinary writer, Ian McDonald. It was mainly a matter of being much too casual about bylines.
Ian McDonald is a British writer—he was born in Manchester in 1960, grew up in Northern Ireland, lives now in Belfast—whose work started appearing in the early 1980s in magazines like Interzone and Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction, and very quickly began to be reprinted in the annual Best SF of the Year anthologies. But there also happens to be a fine British writer of about the same age named Ian R. MacLeod, whose stories have appeared regularly in Interzone and Asimov’s, and quickly began to be reprinted in the annual Best SF of the Year anthologies. And then there’s Ian McDowell, yet another new writer of the 1980s, who—
Well, it was too many Ian Macs for the latter-day me, and I tangled them all up. Gradually it dawned on me that these guys were three different writers, and that one of them (McDowell) was an American. That helped me sort him out of the mix. McDonald and MacLeod remained hopelessly intertwined in my mind for a long time, since they were both British, published their excellent stories in the same places, and almost invariably turned up in Best of the Year collections.
What finally helped me get a fix on things was reading a book called Necroville—by Ian McDonald—that revisited in a dazzling way a theme that I had dealt with in a story of my own, ‘Born With the Dead’, about a quarter of a century ago.
After just a few pages, I sat up and took notice, even unto the author’s name. My story had dealt with the development of a technique for the revival of the dead, and the withdrawal of the resuscitatees into an insular culture of their own. Necroville made use of essentially the same subject, but handled it in a breathtakingly contemporary way, demonstrating (with considerable stylistic virtuosity and an expert use of the vocabulary of nanotechnology) the difference between a cutting-edge story of 1974 vintage and one written in the 1990s.
I was tremendously impressed, and from that time on I have had no difficulty remembering which Ian is which. When I met Ian McDonald at a party held in a botanical garden during the 1995 World Science Fiction Convention in Glasgow, I told him how much I had admired Necroville, and he reacted as though he was its actual author, so I’m quite sure I was speaking with Ian McDonald, not with Ian MacLeod.
And since then I’ve kept them clear in my mind.
One thing that helps is that MacLeod, though he’s had one novel published, works primarily in shorter lengths. He works so well in those lengths that in 1990 he appeared in three different Best of the Year collections with three different stories, a trick that had previously been turned only by, well, Robert Silverberg. And his superb novella, ‘The Summer Isles’, was among the finalists for the Hugo Award in 1999.
Whereas McDonald—it was you with whom I talked at that botanical-garden party, wasn’t it?—is a prolific novelist, though he has done a great many splendid short stories too, enough of them so that two collected volumes have been published so far. And it is Ian McDonald—not Ian MacLeod, nor Ian McDowell, nor Ian Watson, nor Ian Wallace, nor anyone else but Ian McDonald—who has written those beautiful and eerie tales of alien invasion that we can call, by now, the Chaga series.
There. If I ever confuse any of these guys again, I need only refer to this very essay on Ian McDonald, written by my very own self, to gel it all straight again.
McDonald’s career got going quickly: in 1985 he was a nominee for the John W. Campbell Award, which honors outstanding new writers, and four years later his book Desolation Road brought him the Locus Best First Novel Award. He followed it with a string of critically acclaimed books, among them Out on Blue Six, King of Morning, Queen of Day (Philip K. Dick Award, 1992), Sacrifice of Fools, and others, and the two story collections, Empire Dreams and Speaking in Tongues.
The Chaga sequence began with the novelette ‘Toward Kilimanjaro’ (1990), which McDonald expanded into the 1995 novel Chaga, published in the United States as Evolution’s Shore. He followed that in 1998 with a sequel, Kirinya. Now, in the present novella ‘Tendeleo’s Story’, he has returned to the Chaga material from a new perspective—two new perspectives, actually. It would seem, therefore, that he plans to examine the implications
of this strange and beautiful alien intrusion into the African continent from a number of different angles in the years ahead, perhaps with a group of short novels like this one, which will eventually aggregate into a new book.
These Chaga stories are marked by powerful insight into character, by a convincing depiction of near-future African geopolitics, and in particular by rich, striking imagery that has its roots, I suspect, in J.G. Ballard’s classic novel of three decades ago, The Crystal World. The Chaga stories remind me also of Ballard’s ‘Vermilion Sands’ stories in the way they return repeatedly to a single vividly imagined background but approach it from a different point of view in each visit. I find echoes of Clarke’s Childhood’s End and 2001 in them as well, and perhaps a hearkening back to John Wyndham’s The Kraken Wakes.
But this kinship with great science fiction of the past is a virtue, not a defect, of McDonald’s work. He is anything but a derivative writer.
There is not one of us, from Heinlein and Asimov on down, who has not drawn on the established body of science fiction in his own work, calling upon a range of concepts pioneered by others and in general deriving ultimately from that astonishing fountainhead of the whole genre, H.G. Wells. What matters, as Heinlein and Asimov showed us in their different ways, and Ian McDonald has been showing us lately, is not where one gets one’s ideas, but what one does with them, and what McDonald seems to be doing is reinventing for the new century a whole host of existing science-fictional concepts, transforming them through the power of his prose and the intensity of his vision just as the mysterious Chaga invaders have transformed the Africa of his stories.
He leaves us much the richer for his efforts.
Robert Silverberg
May 2000
I SHALL start my story with my name. I am Tendeléo. I was born here, in Gichichi. Does that surprise you? The village has changed so much that no one born then could recognise it now, but the name is still the same. That is why names are important. They remain.
I was born in 1995, shortly after the evening meal and before dusk. That is what Tendeléo means in my language, Kalenjin: early-evening-shortly-after-dinner. I am the oldest daughter of the pastor of St. John’s Church. My younger sister was born in 1998, after my mother had two miscarriages, and my father asked the congregation to lay hands on her. We called her Little Egg. That is all there are of us, two. My father felt that a pastor should be an example to his people, and at that time the government was calling for smaller families.
My father had cure of five churches. He visited them on a red scrambler bike the bishop at Nakuru had given him. It was good motorbike, a Yamaha. Japanese. My father loved riding it. He practised skids and jumps on the back roads because he thought a clergyman should not be seen stunt-riding. Of course, people did, but they never said to him. My father built St. John’s. Before him, people sat on benches under trees. The church he made was sturdy and rendered in white concrete. The roof was red tin, trumpet vine climbed over it. In the season flowers would hang down outside the window. It was like being inside a garden. When I hear the story of Adam and Eve, that is how I think of Eden, a place among the flowers. Inside there were benches for the people, a lectern for the sermon and a high chair for when the bishop came to confirm children. Behind the altar rail was the holy table covered with a white cloth and an alcove in the wall for the cup and holy communion plate. We didn’t have a font. We took people to the river and put them under. I and my mother sang in the choir. The services were long and, as I see them now, quite boring, but the music was wonderful. The women sang, the men played instruments. The best was played by a tall Luo, a teacher in the village school we called, rather blasphemously, Most High. It was a simple instrument; a piston ring from an old Peugeot engine which he hit with a heavy steel bolt. It made a great, ringing rhythm.
What was left over from the church went into the pastor’s house. It had poured concrete floors and louvre windows, a separate kitchen and a good charcoal stove a parishioner who could weld had made from a diesel drum. We had electric light, two power sockets and a radio/cassette player, but no television. It was inviting the devil to dinner, my father told us. Kitchen, living room, our bedroom, my mother’s bedroom, and my father’s study. Five rooms. We were people of some distinction in Gichichi; for Kalenjin.
Gichichi was a thin, straggly sort of village; shops, school, post-office, matatu office, petrol station and mandazi shop up on the main road, with most of the houses set off the footpaths that followed the valley terraces. On one of them was our shamba, half a kilometre down the valley. The path to it went past the front door of the Ukerewe family. They had seven children who hated us. They threw dung or stones and called us see-what-we-thought-of-ourselves-Kalenjin and hated-of-God-Episcopalians. They were African Inland Church Kikuyu, and they had no respect for the discipline of the bishop.
If the church was my father’s Eden, the shamba was my mother’s. The air was cool in the valley and you could hear the river over the stones down below. We grew maize and gourds and some sugar-cane, which the local rummers bought from my father and he pretended not to know. Beans and chillis. Onions and potatoes. Two trees of finger bananas, though M’zee Kipehobe maintained that they sucked the life out of the soil. The maize grew right over my head, and I would run into the sugar-cane and pretend that two steps had taken me out of this world into another. There was always music there; the solar radio, or the women singing together when they helped each other turn the soil or hoe the weeds. I would sing with them, for I was considered good at harmonies. The shamba too had a place where the holy things were kept. Among the thick, winding tendrils of an old tree killed by strangling fig the women left little wooden figures gifts of money, Indian-trader jewellery and beer.
You are wondering, what about the Chaga? You’ve worked out from the dates that I was nine when the first package came down on Kilimanjaro. How could such tremendous events, a thing like another world taking over our own, have made so little impression on my life? It is easy, when it is no nearer to you than another world. We were not ignorant in Gichichi. We had seen the pictures from Kilimanjaro on the television, read the articles in the Nation about the thing that is like a coral reef and a rainforest that came out of the object from the sky. We had heard the discussions on the radio about how fast it was growing—fifty metres very day, it was ingrained on our minds—and what it might be and where it might come from. Every morning the vapour trails of the big UN jets scored our sky as they brought more men and machines to study it, but it was another world. It was not our world. Our world was church, home, shamba, school. Service on Sunday, Bible Study on Monday. Singing lessons, homework club. Sewing, weeding, stirring the ugali. Shooing the goats out of the maize. Playing with Little Egg and Grace and Ruth from next door in the compound: not too loud, Father’s working. Once a week, the mobile bank. Once a fortnight, the mobile library. Mad little matatus dashing down, overtaking everything they could see, people hanging off every door and window. Big dirty country buses winding up the steep road like oxen. Gikombe, the town fool, if we could have afforded one, wrapped in dung-coloured cloth sitting down in front of the country buses to stop them moving. Rains and hot seasons and cold fogs. People being born, people getting married, people running out on each other, or getting sick, or dying in accidents. Kilimanjaro, the Chaga? Another picture in a world where all pictures come from the same distance.
I was thirteen and just a woman when the Chaga came to my world and destroyed it. That night I was at Grace Muthiga’s where she and I had a homework club. It was an excuse to listen to the radio. One of the great things about the United Nations taking over your country is the radio is very good. I would sing with it. They played the kind of music that wasn’t approved of in our house.
We were listening to trip hop. Suddenly the record started to go all phasey, like the radio was tuning itself on and off the station. At first we thought the disc was slipping or something, then Grace got up to fiddle with the tuning butt
on. That only made it worse. Grace’s mother came in from the next room and said she couldn’t get a picture on the battery television. It was full of wavy lines. Then we heard the first boom. It was far away and hollow and it rolled like thunder. Most nights up in the Highlands we get thunder. We know very well what it sounds like. This was something else. Boom! Again. Closer now. Voices outside, and lights. We took torches and went out to the voices. The road was full of people; men, women, children. There were torch beams weaving all over the place. Boom! Close now, loud enough to rattle the windows. All the people shone their torches straight up into the sky, like spears of light. Now the children were crying and I was afraid. Most High had the answer: ‘Sonic booms! There’s something up there!’ As he said those words, we saw it. It was so slow. That was the amazing thing about it. It was like a child drawing a chalk line across a board. It came in from the south east, across the hills east of Kiriani, straight as an arrow, a little to the south of us. The night was such as we often get in late May, clear after evening rains, and very full of stars. We all saw a glowing dot cut across the face of the stars. It seemed to float and dance, like illusions in the eye if you look into the sun. It left a line behind it like the trails of the big UN jets, only pure, glowing blue, drawn on the night. Double-boom now, so close and loud it hurt my ears. At that, one of the old women began wailing. The fear caught, and soon whole families were looking at the line of light in the sky with tears running down their faces, men as well as women. Many sat down and put their torches in their laps, not knowing what they should do. Some of the old people covered their heads with jackets, shawls, newspapers. Others saw what they were doing, and soon everyone was sitting on the ground with their heads covered. Not Most High. He stood looking up at the line of light as it cut his night in half. ‘Beautiful!’ he said. ‘That I should see such things, with these own eyes!’
He stood watching until the object vanished in the dark of the mountains to the west. I saw its light reflected in his eyes. It took a long time to fade.