by Ian McDonald
‘Someone’s selling us,’ Meji said.
‘Wouldn’t matter. We pick one at random.’
‘Unless they’re covering them all.’
In the afternoon we began to dip down towards the Rift Valley and terminum. As we wound our way down the old hunters’ paths, muddy and slippery from recent rain, the helicopter came swooping in across the hillside. We scrambled for cover. It turned and made another pass, so low I could see the light glint from the pilot’s heads-up visor.
‘They’re playing with us,’ Hamid said. ‘They can blow us right off this hill any time they want.’
‘How?’ Naomi asked. She said only what was necessary, and when.
‘I think I know,’ Sean said. He had been listening a little away. He slithered down to join us as the helicopter beat over the hillside again, flailing the leaves, showering us with dirt and twigs. ‘This.’ He tapped my forearm. ‘If I could find you, they can find you.’
I pulled up my sleeve. The Judas chip seemed to throb under my skin, like poison.
‘Hold my wrist,’ I said to Sean. ‘Whatever happens, don’t let it slip.’
Before he could say a word, I pulled my knife. These things must be done fast. If you once stop to think, you will never do it. Make sure you have it straight. You won’t get another go. A stab down with the tip, a short pull, a twist, and the traitor thing was on the ground, greasy with my blood. It hurt. It hurt very much, but the blood had staunched, the wound was already closing.
‘I’ll just have to make sure not to lose you again,’ Sean said.
Very quietly, very silently, we formed up the team and one by one slipped down the hillside, out from under the eyes of the helicopter. For all I know, the stupid thing is up there still, keeping vigil over a dead chip. We slept under the sky that night, close together for warmth and on the third day we came to Tinderet and the edge of the Chaga.
TEN had been leading us a cracking pace, as if she were impatient to put Kenya behind us. Since mid-morning, we had been making our way up a long, slow hill. I’d done some hill-walking, I was fit for it, but the young ones and the women with babies found it tough going. When I called for a halt, I saw a moment of anger cross Ten’s face. As soon as she could, we upped packs and moved on. I tried to catch up with her, but Ten moved steadily ahead of me until, just below the summit, she was almost running.
‘Shone!’ she shouted back. ‘Come with me!’
She ran up through the thinning trees to the summit. I followed, went bounding down a slight dip, and suddenly, the trees opened and I was on the edge.
The ground fell away at my feet into the Rift Valley, green on green on green, sweeping to the valley floor where the patterns of the abandoned fields could still be made out in the patchwork of yellows and buffs and earth tones. Perspective blurred the colours—I could see at least fifty miles—until, suddenly, breathtakingly, they changed. Browns and dry-land beiges blended into burgundies and rust reds, were shot through with veins of purple and white, then exploded into chaos, like a bed of flowers of every conceivable colour, a jumble of shapes and colours like a mad coral reef, like a box of kiddie’s plastic toys spilled out on a Chinese rug. It strained the eyes, it hurt the brain. I followed it back, trying to make sense of what I was seeing. A sheer wall, deep red, rose abruptly out of the chaotic landscape, straight up, almost as high as the escarpment I was standing on. It was not a solid wall, it looked to me to be made up of pillars or, I thought, tree trunks. They must have been of titanic size to be visible from this distance. They opened into an unbroken, flat crimson canopy. In the further distance, the flat roof became a jumble of dark greens, broken by what I can only describe as small mesas, like the Devil’s Tower in Wyoming or the old volcanoes in Puy de Dome. But these glittered in the sun like glass. Beyond them, the landscape was striped like a tiger, yellow and dark brown, and formations like capsizing icebergs, pure white, lifted out of it. And beyond that, I lost the detail, but the colours went on and on, all the way to the horizon.
I don’t know how long I stood, looking at the Chaga. I lost all sense of lime. I became aware at some point that Ten was standing beside me. She did not try to move me on, or speak. She knew that the Chaga was one of these things that must just be experienced before it can be interpreted. One by one the others joined us. We stood in a row along the bluffs, looking at our new home.
Then we started down the path to the valley below.
Half an hour down the escarpment, Meji up front called a halt.
‘What is it?’ I asked Ten. She touched her fingers to her communicator, a half-eggshell of living plastic unfolded from the headset and pressed itself to her right eye.
‘This is not good,’ she said. ‘Smoke, from Menengai.’
‘Menengai?’
‘Where we’re going. Meji is trying to raise them on the radio.’
I looked over Ten’s head to Meji, one hand held to his ear, looking around him. He looked worried.
‘And?’
‘Nothing.’
‘And what do we do?’
‘We go on.’
We descended through microclimates. The valley floor was fifteen degrees hotter than the cool, damp Nandi Hills. We toiled across brush and overgrown scrub, along abandoned roads, through deserted villages. The warriors held their weapons at the slope. Ten regularly scanned the sky with her all-seeing eye. Now even I could see the smoke, blowing towards us on a wind from the east, and smell it. It smelled like burned spices. I could make out Meji trying to call up Menengai. Radio silence.
In the early afternoon, we crossed terminum. You can see these things clearly from a distance. At ground level, they creep up on you. I was walking through tough valley grasses and thorn scrub when I noticed lines of blue moss between the roots. Oddly regular lines of moss, that bent and forked at exactly one hundred and twenty degrees, and joined up into hexagons. I froze. Twenty metres ahead of me, Ten stood in one world… I stood in another.
‘Even if you do nothing, it will still come to you,’ she said. I looked down. The blue lines were inching towards my toes. ‘Come on.’ Ten reached out her hand. I took it, and she led me across. Within two minutes walk, the scrub and grass had given way entirely to Chaga vegetation. For the rest of the afternoon we moved through the destroying zone. Trees crashed around us, shrubs were devoured from the roots down, grasses fell apart and dissolved; fungus fingers and coral fans pushed up on either side, bubbles blew around my head. I walked through it untouched like a man in a furnace.
Meji called a halt under an arch of Chaga-growth like a vault in a medieval cathedral. He had a report on his earjack.
‘Menengai has been attacked.’
Everyone started talking asking question, jabbering. Meji held up his hand.
‘They were Africans. Someone had provided them with Chaga-proof equipment, and weapons. They had badges on their uniforms: KLA.’
‘Kenyan Liberation Army,’ the quiet one, Naomi said.
‘We have enemies,’ the clever one, Hamid said. ‘The Kenyan Government still claims jurisdiction over the Chaga. Every so often, they remind us who’s in charge. They want to keep us on the run, stop us getting established. They’re nothing but contras with western money and guns and advisers.’
‘And Menengai?’ I asked. Meji shook his head.
‘Most High is bringing the survivors to Ol Punyata.’
I looked at Ten.
‘Most High?’
She nodded.
We met up with Most High under the dark canopy of the Great Wall. It was an appropriately sombre place for the meeting: the smooth soaring trunks of the trees; the canopy of leaves, held out like hands, a kilometre over our heads; the splashes of light that fell through the gaps to the forest floor; survivors and travellers, dwarfed by it all. Medieval peasants must have felt like this, awestruck in their own cathedrals.
It’s an odd experience, meeting someone you’ve heard of in a story. You want to say, I’ve heard about you, yo
u haven’t heard about me, you’re nothing like I imagined. You check them out to make sure they’re playing true to their character. His story was simple and grim.
A village, waking, going about its normal business, people meeting and greeting, walking and talking, gossiping and idling, talking the news, taking coffee. Then, voices; strange voices, and shots, and people looking up wondering, What is going on here? and while they are caught wondering, strangers running at them, running through, strangers with guns, shooting at anything in front of them, not asking questions, not looking or listening, shooting and running on. Shooting, and burning. Bodies left where they lay, homes like blossoming flowers going up in gobs of flame. Through, back, and out. Gone. As fast, as off-hand as that. Ten minutes, and Menengai was a morgue. Most High told it as casually as it had been committed, but I saw his knuckles whiten as he gripped his staff.
To people like me, who come from a peaceful, ordered society, violence like that is unimaginable.
I’ve seen fights and they scared me, but I’ve never experienced the kind of violence Most High was describing, where people’s pure intent is to kill other people. I could see the survivors—dirty, tired, scared, very quiet—but I couldn’t see what had been done to them. So I couldn’t really believe it. And though I’d hidden up there on the hill from the helicopter, I couldn’t believe it would have opened up those big gatlings on me, and I couldn’t believe now that the people who attacked Menengai, this Kenyan Liberation Army, whose only purpose was to kill Chaga-folk and destroy their lives, were out there somewhere, probably being resupplied by airdrop, reloading, and going in search of new targets. It seemed wrong in a place as silent and holy as this…like a snake in the garden.
Meji and Ten believed it. As soon as we could, they moved us on and out.
‘Where now?’ I asked Ten.
She looked uncertain.
‘East. The Black Simbas have a number of settlements on Kirinyaga. They’ll defend them.’
‘How far?’
‘Three days?’
‘That woman back there, Hope. She won’t be able to go on very much longer.’ I had been speaking to her, she was heavily pregnant. Eight months, I reckoned. She had no English, and I had Aid-Agency Swahili, but she appreciated my company, and I found her big belly a confirmation that life was strong, life went on.
‘I know,’ Ten said. She might wear the gear and carry the staff and have a gun at her hip, but she was facing decisions that told her, forcefully, You’re still in your teens, little warrior.
We wound between the colossal buttressed roots of the roof-trees. The globes on the tops of the staffs gave off a soft yellow light—bioluminescence, Ten told me.
We followed the bobbing lights through the dark, dripping wall-forest. The land rose, slowly and steadily. I fell back to walk with Hope. We talked. It passed the time. The Great Wall gave way abruptly to an ecosystem of fungi. Red toadstools towered over my head, puff-balls dusted me with yellow spores, trumpet-like chanterelles dripped water from their cups, clusters of pin-head mushrooms glowed white like corpses. I saw monkeys, watching from the canopy.
We were high now, climbing up ridges like the fingers of a splayed out-hand. Hope told me how her husband had been killed in the raid on Menengai. I did not know what to say. Then she asked me my story. I told it in my bad Swahili. The staffs led us higher.
‘Ten.’
We were taking an evening meal break. That was one thing about the Chaga, you could never go hungry. Reach out, and anything you touched would be edible. Ten had taught me that if you buried your shit, a good-tasting tuber would have grown in the morning. I hadn’t had the courage yet to try it. For an alien invasion, the Chaga seemed remarkably considerate of human needs.
‘I think Hope’s a lot further on than we thought.’
Ten shook her head.
‘Ten, if she starts, will you stop?’
She hesitated a moment.
‘Okay. We will stop.’
She struggled for two days, down into a valley, through terribly tough terrain of great spheres of giraffe-patterned moss, then up, into higher country than any we had attempted before.
‘Ten, where are we?’ I asked. The Chaga had changed our geography, made all our maps obsolete. We navigated by compass, and major, geophysical landmarks.
‘We’ve passed through the Nyandarua Valley, now we’re going up the east side of the Aberdares.’
The line of survivors became strung out. Naomi and I struggled at the rear with the old and the women with children, and Hope. We fought our way up that hillside, but Hope was flagging, failing.
‘I think… I feel…’ she said, hand on her belly.
‘Call Ten on that thing,’ I ordered Naomi. She spoke into her mouthpiece.
‘No reply.’
‘She what?’
‘There is no reply.’
I ran. Hands, knees, belly, whatever way I could, I made it up that ridge, as fast as I could. Over the summit the terrain changed, as suddenly as Chaga landscapes do, from the moss maze to a plantation of regularly spaced trees shaped like enormous ears of wheat.
Ten was a hundred metres downslope. She stood like a statue among the wheat-trees. Her staff was planted firmly on the ground. She did not acknowledge me when I called her name. I ran down through the trees to her.
‘Ten, Hope can’t go on. We have to stop.’
‘No!’ Ten shouted. She did not look at me, she stared down through the rows of trees.
‘Ten!’ I seized her, spun her round. Her face was frantic, terrified, tearful, joyful, as if she in this grove of alien plants was something familiar and absolutely agonising. ‘Ten! You promised!’
‘Shone! Shone! I know where I am! I know where this is! That is the pass, and that is where the road went, this is the valley, that is the river, and down there, is Gichichi!’ She looked back up to the pass, called to the figures on the tree-line. ‘Most High! Gichichi! This is Gichichi! We are home!’
She took off. She held her staff in her hand like a hunter’s spear, she leaped rocks and fallen trunks, she hurdled streams and run-offs; bounding down through the trees. I was after her like a shot but I couldn’t hope to keep up. I found Ten standing in an open space where a falling wheat-tree had brought others down like dominoes. Her staff was thrust deep into the earth. I didn’t interrupt. I didn’t say a word. I knew I was witnessing something holy.
She went down on her knees. She closed her eyes. She pressed her hands to the soil. And I saw dark lines, like slow, black lightning, go out from her fingertips across the Chaga-cover. The lines arced and intersected, sparked out fresh paths.
The carpet of moss began to resemble a crackle-glazed Japanese bowl. But they all focused on Ten. She was the source of the pattern. And the Chaga-cover began to flow towards the lines of force. Shapes appeared under the moving moss, like ribs under skin. They formed grids and squares, slowly pushing up the Chaga-cover. I understood what I was seeing. The lines of buried walls and buildings were being exhumed. Molecule by molecule, centimetre by centimetre, Gichichi was being drawn out of the soil.
By the time the others had made it down from the ridge, the walls stood waist-high and service units were rising out of the earth, electricity generators, water pumps, heat-exchangers, nanofacturing cells. Refugees and warriors walked in amazement among the slowly rising porcelain walls.
Then Ten chose to recognise me.
She looked up. Her teeth were clenched, her hair was matted, sweat dripped from her chin and cheekbones. Her face was gaunt, she was burning her own body-mass, ramming it through that mind/Chaga interface in her brain to program nanoprocessors on a massive scale.
‘We control it, Shone,’ she whispered. ‘We can make the world any shape we want it to be. We can make a home for ourselves.’
Most High laid his hand on her shoulder.
‘Enough, child. Enough. It can make itself now.’
Ten nodded. She broke the spell. Ten rolled on to her side
, gasping, shivering.
‘It’s finished,’ she whispered. ‘Shone…’
She still could not say my name right. I went to her, I took her in my arms while around us Gichichi rose, unfolded roofs like petals, grew gardens and tiny, tangled lanes. No words. No need for words. She had done all her saying, but close at hand, I heard the delighted, apprehensive cry of a woman entering labour.
WE begin with a village, and we end with a village. Different villages, a different world, but the name remains the same. Did I not tell you that names are important? Ojok, Hope’s child, is our first citizen. He is now two, but every day people come over the pass or up from the valley, to stay, to make their homes here. Gichichi is now two thousand souls strong. Five hundred houses straggle up and down the valley side, each with its own garden-shamba and nanofactory, where we can make whatever we require. Gichichi is famous for its nanoprocessor programmers. We earn much credit hiring them to the towns and villages that are growing up like mushrooms down in the valley of Nyeri and along the foothills of Mt. Kenya. A great city is growing there, I have heard, and a mighty culture developing; but that is for the far future. Here in Gichichi, we are wealthy in our own way; we have a community centre, three bars, a mandazi shop, even a small theatre. There is no church, yet. If Christians come, they may build one. If they do, I hope they call it St. John’s. The vine-flowers will grow down over the roof again.
Life is not safe. The KLA have been joined by other contra groups, and we have heard through the net that the West is tightening its quarantine of the Chaga zones. There are attacks all along the northern edge. I do not imagine Gichichi is immune. We must scare their powerful ones very much, now. But the packages keep coming down, and the world keeps changing. And life is never safe. Brother Dust’s lesson is the truest I ever learned, and I have been taught it better than many. But I trust in the future. Soon there will be a new name among the citizens of Gichichi, this fine, fertile town in the valleys of the Aberdares. Of course, Sean and I cannot agree what it should be. He wants to call her after the time of day she is born, I want something Irish.