by Ian McDonald
The officer was angry, but I think a little impressed. What did we think we were doing? There were vultures everywhere. Only last week an entire bus had been massacred, five kilometres from here. Not one escaped alive. Two girls alone, they would rob us and rape us, hang us up by our heels and cut our throats like pigs. All the time he was preaching, a soldier in the turret swept the countryside with a big heavy machine gun.
‘So, what the hell are you doing here?’
I told him. He went to talk on the radio. When he came back, he said, ‘In the back.’
The carrier was horribly hot and smelled of men and guns and diesel. When the door clanged shut on us I thought we were going to suffocate.
‘Where are you taking us?’ I asked, afraid.
‘You came to see the Chaga,’ the commander said. We ale our lunch meekly and tried not to stare at the soldiers. They gave us water from their canteens and tried to make us laugh. The ride was short but uncomfortable. The door clanged open. The officer helped me out and I almost fell over with shock.
I stood in a hillside clearing. Around me were tree stumps, fresh cut, sticky with sap. From behind came the noise of chain saws. The clearing was full of military vehicles and tents. People hurried every way. Most of them were white. At the centre of this activity was what I can only call a city on wheels. I had not yet been to Nairobi, but I knew it from photographs, a forest of beautiful towers rising out of a circle of townships. That was how the base seemed to me when I first saw it. Looking closer, I saw that the buildings were portable cabins stacked up on big tracked flat-beds, like the heavy log-carriers up in Eldoret. The tractors and towers were joined together with walkways and loops of cable. I saw people running along the high walkways. I would not have done that, not for a million shillings.
I tell you my first impressions, of a beautiful white city—and you may laugh because you know it was only a UNECTA mobile base—that they put together as fast and cheap as they could. But there is a truth here; seeing is magical. Looking kills. The longer I looked, the more the magic faded.
The air in the clearing smelled as badly of diesel smoke as it had in the troop carrier. Everywhere was engine-noise. A path had been slashed through the forest, as if the base had come down it. I looked at the tracks. The big cog wheels were turning. The base was moving, slowly and heavily, like the hands of a clock, creaking backwards on its tracks in pace with the advance of the Chaga. Little Egg took my hand. I think my mouth must have been open in wonder for some time.
‘Come on then,’ said the officer. He was smiling now. ‘You wanted to see the Chaga.’
He gave us over to a tall American man with red hair and a red beard and blue eyes. His name was Byron and he spoke such bad Swahili that he did not understand when Little Egg said to me, ‘he looks like a vampire.’
‘I speak English,’ I told him and he looked relieved.
He took us through the tractors to the tower in the middle, the tallest. It was painted white, with the word UNECTA big in blue on the side, and beneath it, the name, Nyandarua Station. We got into a small metal cage. Byron closed the door and pressed a button. The cage went straight up the side of the building. I tell you this, that freight elevator was more frightening than any stories about murdering gangs of vultures. I gripped the handrail and closed my eyes. I could feel the whole base swaying below me.
‘Open your eyes,’ Byron said. ‘You wouldn’t want to come all this way and miss it.’
As we rose over the tops of the trees the land opened before me. Nyandarua Station was moving down the eastern slopes of the Aberdare range: the Chaga was spread before me like a wedding kanga laid out on a bed.
It was as though someone had cut a series of circles of coloured paper and let them fall on the side of the mountains. The Chaga followed the ridges and the valleys, but that was all it had to do with our geography. It was completely something else. The colours were so bright and silly I almost laughed: purples, oranges, lots of pink and deep red. Veins of bright yellow. Real things, living things were not these colours. This was a Hollywood trick, done with computers for a film. I guessed we were a kilometre from the edge. It was not a very big Chaga, not like the Kilimanjaro Chaga that had swallowed Moshi and Arusha and all the big Tanzanian towns at the foot of the mountain and was now half-way to Nairobi. Byron said this Chaga was about five kilometres across and beginning to show the classic form, a series of circles. I tried to make out the details. I thought details would make it real to me. I saw jumbles of reef-stuff the colour of wiring. I saw a wall of dark crimson trees rise straight for a tremendous height. The trunks were as straight and smooth as spears. The leaves joined together like umbrellas. Beyond them, I saw things like icebergs tilted at an angle, things like open hands, praying to the sky, things like oil refineries made out of fungus, things like brains and fans and domes and footballs. Things like other things. Nothing that seemed a thing in itself. And all this was reaching towards me. But, I realised, it would never catch me. Not while I remained here, on this building that was retreating from it down the foothills of the Aberdares, fifty metres every day.
We were close to the top of the building. The cage swayed in the wind. I felt sick and scared and grabbed the rail and that was when it became real for me. I caught the scent of the Chaga on the wind. False things have no scent. The Chaga smelled of cinnamon and sweat and soil new turned up. It smelled of rotting fruit and diesel and concrete after rain. It smelled like my mother when she had The Visit. It smelled like the milk that babies spit out of their mouths. It smelled like televisions and the stuff the Barber Under the Tree put on my father’s hair and the women’s holy place in the shamba. With each of these came a memory of Gichichi and my life and people. The scent stirred the things I had recently learned as a woman. The Chaga became real for me there, and I understood that it would eat my world.
While I was standing, putting all these things that were and would be into circles within circles inside my head, a white man in faded jeans and Timberland boots rushed out of a sliding door on to the elevator.
‘Byron,’ he said, then noticed that there were two little Kenyan girls there with him. ‘Who’re these?’
‘I’m Tendeléo and this is my sister,’ I said. ‘We call her Little Egg. We’ve come to see the Chaga.’
This answer seemed to please him.
‘I’m called Shepard.’ He shook our hands. He also was American. ‘I’m a Peripatetic Executive Director. That means I rush around the world finding solutions to the Chaga.’
‘And have you?’
For a moment he was taken aback, and I felt bold and rude. Then he said, ‘come on, let’s see.’
‘Shepard,’ Byron the vampire said. ‘It’ll wait.’
He took us in to the base. In one room were more white people than I had seen in the whole of my life. Each desk had a computer but the people—most of them were men dressed very badly in shorts, with beards—did not use them. They preferred to sit on each other’s desks and talk very fast with much gesturing.
‘Are African people not allowed in here?’ I asked.
The man Shepard laughed. Everything I said that tour he treated as if it had come from the lips of a wise old m’zee. He took us down into the Projection Room where computers drew huge plans on circular tables: of the Chaga now, the Chaga in five years time and the Chaga when it met with its brother from the south and both of them swallowed Nairobi like two old men arguing over a stick of sugar cane.
‘And after Nairobi is gone?’ I asked. The maps showed the names of all the old towns and villages, under the Chaga. Of course. The names do not change. I reached out to touch the place that Gichichi would become.
‘We can’t project that far,’ he said. But I was thinking of an entire city, vanished beneath the bright colours of the Chaga like dirt trodden into carpet. All those lives and histories and stories. I realised that some names can be lost, the names of big things, like cities, and nations, and histories.
Next we went down several flights of steep steel stairs to the ‘lab levels’. Here samples taken from the Chaga were stored inside sealed environments. A test tube might hold a bouquet of delicate fungi, a cylindrical jar a fistful of blue spongy fingers, a lank a square metre of Chaga, growing up the walls and across the ceiling. Some of the containers were so big people could walk around inside. They were dressed in bulky white suits that covered every part of them and were connected to the wall with pipes and tubes so that it was hard to tell where they ended and alien Chaga began. The weird striped and patterned leaves looked more natural than the UNECTA people in their white suits. The alien growing things were at least in their right world.
‘Everything has to be isolated.’ Mr Shepard said.
‘Is that because even out here, it will start to attack and grow?’ I asked.
‘You got it.’
‘But I heard it doesn’t attack people or animals,’ I said.
‘Where did you hear that?’ this man Shepard asked.
‘My father told me,’ I said mildly.
We went on down to Terrestrial Cartography, which was video-pictures the size of a wall of the world seen looking down from satellites. It is a view that is familiar to everyone of our years, though there were people of my parents’ generation who laughed when they heard that the world is a ball, with no string to hold it up. I looked for a long time—it is the one thing that does not pale for looking—before I saw that the face of the world was scarred, like a Giriama woman’s. Beneath the clouds, South America and South Asia and mother Africa were spotted with dots of lighter colour than the brown-green land. Some were large, some were specks, all were precise circles. One, on the eastern side of Africa, identified this disease of continents to me. Chagas. For the first time I understood that this was not a Kenyan thing, not even an African thing, but a whole world thing.
‘They are all in the south,’ I said. ‘There is not one in the north.’
‘None of the biological packages have seeded in the northern hemisphere. This is what makes us believe that there are limits to the Chaga. That it won’t cover our whole world, pole to pole. That it might confine itself only to the southern hemisphere.’
‘Why do you think that?’
‘No reason at all.’
‘You just hope.’
‘Yeah. We hope.’
‘Mr Shepard,’ I said. ‘Why should the Chaga take away our lands here in the south and leave you rich people in the north untouched? It does not seem fair.’
‘The universe is not fair, kid. Which you probably know better than me.’
We went down then to Stellar Cartography, another dark room, with walls full of stars. They formed a belt around the middle of the room, in places so dense that individual stars blurred into masses of solid white.
‘This is the Silver River,’ I said. I had seen this on Grace’s family’s television, which they had taken with them.
‘Silver river. It is that. Good name.’
‘Where are we?’ I asked.
Shepard went over to the wall near the door and touched a small star down near his waist. It had a red circle around it. Otherwise I do not think even he could have picked it out of all the other small white stars. I did not like it that our sun was so small and common. I asked, ‘And where are they from?’
The UNECTA man drew a line with his finger along the wall. He walked down one side of the room, half way along the other, before he stopped. His finger stopped in a swirl of rainbow colours, like a flame.
‘Rho Ophiuchi. It’s just a name, it doesn’t matter. What’s important is that it’s a long long way from us…so far it takes light—and that’s as fast as anything can go—eight hundred years to get there, and it’s not a planet, or even a star. It’s what we call a nebula, a huge cloud of glowing gas.’
‘How can people live in a cloud?’ I asked. ‘Are they angels?’
The man laughed at that.
‘Not people,’ he said. ‘Not angels either. Machines. But not like you or I think of machines. Machines more like living things, and very very much smaller. Smaller even than the smallest cell in your body. Machines the size of chains of atoms, that can move other atoms around and so build copies of themselves, or copies of anything else they want. And we think those gas clouds are trillions upon trillions of those tiny, living machines.’
‘Not plants and animals,’ I said.
‘Not plants and animals, no.’
‘I have not heard this theory before.’ It was huge and thrilling, but like the sun, it hurt if you looked at it too closely. I looked again at the swirl of colour, coloured like the Chaga scars on Earth’s face, and back at the little dot by the door that was my light and heat. Compared to the rest of the room, they both looked very small. ‘Why should things like this, from so far away, want to come to my Kenya?’
‘That’s indeed the question.’
That was all of the science that the UNECTA man was allowed to show us, so he took us down through the areas where people lived and ale and slept, where they watched television and films and drank alcohol and coffee, the places where they exercised, which they liked to do a lot, in immodest costumes. The corridors were full of them, immature and loosely put together, like leggy puppies.
‘This place stinks of wazungu,’ Little Egg said, not thinking that maybe this m’zungu knew more Swahili than the other one. Mr Shepard smiled.
‘Mr Shepard,’ I said. ‘You still haven’t answered my question.’
He looked puzzled a moment, then remembered.
‘Solutions. Oh yes. Well, what do you think?’
Several questions came into my head but none as good, or important to me, as the one I did ask.
‘I suppose the only question that matters, really, is can people live in the Chaga?’
Shepard pushed open a door and we were on a metal platform just above one of the big track sets.
‘That, my friend, is the one question we aren’t even allowed to consider,’ Shepard said as he escorted us on to a staircase.
The tour was over. We had seen the Chaga. We had seen our world and our future and our place amongst the stars; things too big for country church children, but which even they must consider, for unlike most of the wazungu here, they would have to find answers.
Down on the red dirt with the diesel stink and roar of chain-saws, we thanked Dr. Shepard. He seemed touched. He was clearly a person of power in this place. A word, and there was a UNECTA Landcruiser to lake us home. We were so filled up with what we had seen that we did not think to tell the driver to let us off at the next village down so we could walk. Instead we went land-cruising right up the main road, past Haran’s shop and the Peugeot Service Station and all the Men Who Read Newspapers under the trees.
Then we faced my mother and father. It was bad. My father took me into his study. I stood. He sat. He took his Kalenjin Bible, that the Bishop gave him on his ordination so that he might always have God’s word in his own tongue, and set it on the desk between himself and me. He told me that I had deceived my mother and him, that I had led Little Egg astray, that I had lied, that I had stolen, not God’s money, for God had no need of money, but the money that people I saw every day, people I sang and prayed next to every Sunday, gave in their faith. He said all this in a very straightforward, very calm way, without ever raising his voice. I wanted to tell him all the things I said seen, offer them in trade, yes, I have cheated, I have lied, I have stolen from the Christians of Gichichi, but I have learned. I have seen. I have seen our sun lost among a million other suns. I have seen this world, that God is supposed to have made most special of all worlds, so small it cannot even be seen. I have seen men, that God is supposed to have loved so much that he died for their evils, try to understand living machines, each smaller than the smallest living thing, but together, so huge it takes light years to cross their community. I know how different things are from what we believe, I wanted to say, but I said nothing, for my father did an unb
elievable thing. He stood up. Without sign or word or any display of strength, he hit me across the face. I fell to the ground, more from the unexpectedness than the hurt. Then he did another unbelievable thing. He sat down. He put his head in his hand. He began to cry. Now I was very scared, and I ran to my mother.
‘He is a frightened man,’ she said. ‘Frightened men often strike out at the thing they fear.’
‘He has his church, he has his collar, he has his Bible, what can frighten him?’
‘You,’ she said. This answer was as stunning as my father hitting me. My mother asked me if I remembered the time, after the argument outside the church, when my father had disappeared on the red Yamaha for a week. I said I did, yes.
‘He went down south, to Nairobi, and beyond. He went to look at the thing he feared, and he saw that, with all his faith, he could not beat the Chaga.’
My father stayed in his study a long time. Then he came to me and went down on his knees and asked me to forgive him. It was a Biblical principle, he said. Do not let the sun go down on your anger. But though Bible principles lived, my father died a little to me that day. This is life: a series of dyings and being born into new things and understandings.
Life by life, Gichichi died too. There were only twenty families left on the morning when the spines of the alien coral finally reached over the tree tops up on the pass. Soon after dawn the UNECTA trucks arrived. They were dirty old Sudanese Army things, third hand Russian, badly painted and billowing black smoke. When we saw the black soldiers get out we were alarmed because we had heard bad things about Africans at the hands of other Africans. I did not trust their officer; he was too thin and had an odd hollow on the side of his shaved head, like a crater on the moon. We gathered in the open space in front of the church with our things piled around us. Ours came to twelve bundles wrapped up in kangas. I took the radio and a clatter of pots. My father’s books were tied with string and balanced on the petrol tank of his red scrambler.
The moon-headed officer waved and the first truck backed up and let down its tail. A soldier jumped out, set up a folding beach-chair by the tail-gate and sat with a clip-board and a pencil. First went the Kurias, who had been strong in the church. They threw their children up into the truck, then passed up their bundles of belongings. The soldier in the beach-chair watched for a time, then shook his head.