Chaga

by Ian McDonald

  ‘The most scared I have ever been,’ William whispered, ‘is going into the town with your camera in my bag. I felt that everyone could see it but had agreed not to tell me. I felt like I had a disease, or another face in the back of my head that was pulling ridiculous expressions and sticking its tongue out at people, but I could never see. When that white officer wanted to look into my bag, I did not know what to do. Every thought flew from my head. It is very frightening when you know that you must do something to save yourself but you cannot think what. But what is strange is that it was the most frightening thing I can remember, but it was also the most exciting, like all the people who could see into me and knew what I was really doing were jealous and wanted to do it too. Does this make sense?’

  ‘It does to me,’ Gaby said.

  ‘The most scared I ever was was the morning I woke up convinced I had Slim,’ Faraway said. ‘I met the woman in a club. She was a strange woman on a strange journey from somewhere to somewhere that went by way of me for a night. She had long ridged scars all over her arms and the backs of her hands. Scarification, you understand? But she was not of a tribe that thinks that sort of thing is beautiful. She had an interest in orifices. She loved to push things into body openings. There was a thing she would do with a champagne bottle. She could uncork one with her lower muscles. For a woman who can do a trick like that, I will buy as much champagne as she wants, provided it is that cheap stuff from India. She liked to do things with the corks, and the wire cages too. Ah! My poor foreskin! And other parts too. But it was worth it, for she made fiki-fiki like a animal, like something in heat.

  ‘When I woke in the morning I could not remember very much but there was a terrible burning pain in my f’tuba. And when I pissed, man! I thought I was going to die. It was pissing fire. What had this demon woman done to me? Of course, she was not there to ask. They never are, the women who are real demons. But the pain did not go away, and I thought it was some dreadful disease, maybe even Slim, and that no matter how many bottle of champagne she could uncork with her magic lips, it was not worth the death of the incomparable Faraway. That made me really afraid, so I went to my doctor because I thought that if I did have Slim, then it would be better to know so everyone could have a big party and tell me what a grand fellow I was before I died. So, the doctor looked up my dick with a fibreoptic thing and he falls over laughing and when he can talk again, he calls in his nurse, and she looks up my dick and falls over laughing and the next thing I know the room is full of doctors and consultants and nurses and porters and people who just heard a noise going on and wondered what they were missing, all looking up my dick and falling over laughing.

  ‘Do you know what they saw up there that made them fall over laughing? A sliver of red chilli pepper. That demon-woman! When I was asleep she had cut a tiny little slice of chilli and pushed it up my f’tuba. Orifices! Devil! It was a week before I could walk straight, let alone piss with pleasure. It is funny now, but at the time, I tell you, my friends, this Faraway was never so frightened. I thought I would die. Really, truly.’

  ‘Of course, you have learned nothing from the experience,’ Tembo said.

  Faraway grinned his huge grin. ‘I have learned never to leave chillis sitting around my home, and that is a very wise lesson for anyone.’

  ‘What happened to the strange woman?’ Gaby asked.

  ‘I saw her at clubs a few times, dancing with some other man, but she never came near me and I never went near her. Then I heard from a friend of a friend that she had died. She was playing a game in a hotel room with two men and a gun, but I do not know if it was an accident or on purpose. My friend of a friend said he thought there was a video, but the police were keeping it to sell around. But I never saw it. It is sad that her strange journey had to end that way.’

  ‘The most frightening moment of my life was caused by a pair of football shorts,’ Tembo said. Gaby hiccuped with laughter, but Faraway did not and he knew Tembo like a lover. ‘I was on the St Matthew’s Church in Shikondi’s under-18 football team, but my parents were poor and could not afford to buy me the team strip all at once. So for doing well in my exams I got the shirt, and for my birthday I got the socks and boots and when an uncle became a pastor and gave everyone gifts to celebrate the event, I got the shorts. Because they were poor, they bought things that would last: the shorts were the very newest man-made fibre that would never wear out whatever you did to it. This made me think. You could throw these shorts on the rubbish heap and they would never rot away to nothing. They would always be a pair of football shorts. I would grow up, and get work, and marry if God blessed me, and have children, and the football shorts would not have changed. I would grow old, my children would marry and have children, and, if God blessed me, those children would have children, and the blue shorts, small size would not change. I would die, and be buried, and decay to bones and hair and still not one of those artificial fibres would have rotted. And then I stopped thinking about football shorts and thought about me. This would happen. It was not an idea, a maybe, an if. It was a certainty. These football shorts were a measure of my life. This me, that wore football strip and played for St Matthew’s Under-18, would one day breathe out and not breathe in again, would go cold and dark inside, would stop thinking and seeing and hearing and feeling, and stop being. It could not be escaped or got around. The most I could hope would be to delay it. I saw this, and it scared me like nothing has ever scared me. And I would have to go alone. No one I knew could go with me, or go before me and come back and tell me what was on the other side. I would go alone, and blind. That is why I found Jesus. Because he was the only one could go with me, who had been there, and seen what it was like, and could tell me what would happen. Because I need someone I can call to in the dark night when my wife and my children are sleeping and the fear of it wakes me up like something very very cold in my heart.’

  Tembo looked up and out at the dusty horizon. He stood up. He stared. He shielded his eyes with his hand and peered. Gaby imagined it was Jesus he saw, coming across the dry land toward this borderland between worlds.

  ‘There,’ Tembo said. He pointed to the south-east. ‘There! See!’

  Gaby stood up and followed the line of his finger and saw the thing he saw. It was a wink of silver in the sky, a tiny heliograph of light that the eye lost as soon as it had found it. The cloud and the plains and the heat-haze together destroyed all notions of distance: the thing could have been miles away or hovering at the end of Tembo’s finger. But it was growing bigger, and assuming a definite outline. Tembo started to wave his arms. Faraway leaped up and down in an unconscious parody of the Masai jumping dance. The thing was big, the thing was approaching from a very great distance. The thing was near.

  Then Gaby knew she had caught too much sun, for the thing coming toward her out of the south east was nothing other than a classic B-movie sci-fi 1950s McCarthy-paranoia Flying Saucer. A big white flying saucer, with UNECTA written in blue on its belly.

  21

  It was when she was sure, absolutely sure, that the metal door was never going to open again that it did and the black woman with the French accent came into the cell with a cup of coffee with UNECTAfrique: Go: West! on the side of it and a pile of clothes. She was not wearing the isolation suit. The stuffs she had sucked out of Gaby in the night had passed their tests.

  ‘Do you have to watch me?’ Gaby McAslan asked, naked, sunburned, scratched and scraped and needled and furious with the high and hot anger that is really fear after her night’s imprisonment in the decontamination unit at Tsavo West.

  The magic of the flying saucer had failed close up. It takes a very strong magic to work at fingertip distance. It had just been a tired old logging dirigible with Sibirsk shining through the hasty UN white paintjob, with a world-weary crew-woman who had led them up the cargo ramp and then locked them in a windowless cargo bay because she and her comrades were afraid of catching terrible and disgusting Chaga-diseases off these flotsam
of the edgelands. And when they had come down a guessed thirty minutes later—no one’s watch was working—there had been no more than a glimpse of brilliant sunlight reflecting from the curve of the canopy above them as they were taken by the faceless figures in baggy white medical isolation suits across the landing grid with the mountain-and-crescents symbol of UNECTA painted on it, and down a flight of iron stairs into the fluorescent-lit corridors that smelled of hospital and thrice-breathed air. Gaby McAslan’s Tsavo West was a dead white cell with a door that melded into the wall when the woman with the French accent left. Before she went, the woman had explained that Gaby had been exposed to possible contamination by alien organisms; that she and the others, who were in adjacent cells, were undergoing the standard observation and decontamination procedure before they could be permitted into the Tsavo West biosphere.

  All night, as Gaby McAslan sat on her bed with her back to the eye of the lens, her knees hugged to her chest and her hair drawn around her like a cloak, she feared for the disc, and what would happen to her if the process of sterilization extended to the footage from Merueshi stored on it. She worried and watched the digits on the clock on the opposite wall click out the length of time UNECTA reckoned it might take for a new and virulent strain of Chaga-meme to melt an Irishwoman into a blob of plastic. One thousand and five clicks, that was how many. And then just as she had forgotten where the memory of the door was, the wall opened and let in air that did not smell of dread and body odour.

  ‘Admit it, you get some lesbo-sado-dominatrix thrill out of locking naked women in cells,’ Gaby said, pulling on the borrowed underwear, the jeans which belonged to a shorter-legged woman, and the sweatshirt. ‘Jesus, AC Milan. Is this the best you can do?’

  ‘Your friends are in the restaurant down on two,’ her erstwhile captor said. Gaby almost ran as she followed the woman’s directions along the corridor of featureless doors to the external elevator. Open air. The daylight was blinding. The little chain-drive at the bottom started to whir. Gaby McAslan was lowered down the face of a six-storey office block. She had a chance for a leisurely look at this place to which she had been brought. Across the twenty-yard gap in front of her rose a second, taller unit; a ramshackle affair that looked like dozens of portable cabins piled on top of each other and fastened together with gantries and swathes of power cable. UNECTAfrique was painted on its white flank in blue letters thirty feet high. Twenty yards beyond this second pile rose a third, smaller unit that was all heavy engineering plant, solar arrays and satellite dishes. It was connected to the main block by air-bridges and walkways and curving umbilical lines, as the main block was to the one down which she was moving. But the most extraordinary feature of this miniature city on the high plains was that each of the units stood on leviathan-tracked vehicles, like the monster flat-beds that carried pre-HOTOL space shuttles from the assembly buildings to the launch pad.

  Gaby hit the emergency stop button. The elevator platform jerked to a halt. It was not a trick of the elevator, everything was vibrating. If she focused at a point on the ground, she could just discern the motion, slow as the minute hand of one of her Swatchs. The tractors, the units, the moored dirigible, with everything in and on them, were moving backward in perfect synchronization with the advance of the Chaga across the Serengeti plain. Terminum was half an hour’s walk across a dry yellow plain littered with the abrupt white stumps of acacias felled to make way for the juggernaut. A group of zebras were cropping the sparse scorched grass. They looked dry and dusty, thirsty for the rains. Everything looked dry and dusty, the plains, Tsavo West, the hazy colours of the Chaga. Waiting for the rains.

  The refectory took up a full quarter of Level Two. It was bright and busy and smelled of breakfasts from diverse ethnic backgrounds. Tembo and Faraway were drinking coffee in a small booth under a window with monumental views of the station and the Chaga rising toward the cloud-hidden heights of Kilimanjaro.

  ‘Alas, I have missed my great chance,’ Faraway said. ‘An entire night of you without any clothes on. Of course, you know that they only do it so the women can look at Tembo’s f’tuba and pray and the men look at it and feel envious.’

  ‘Ignore my friend,’ Tembo said gravely. ‘How are you, Gaby?’

  ‘I feel like everyone in this place has been watching me but isn’t going to say.’

  ‘It is disconcerting, the first time,’ Tembo said.

  ‘When you have been into the Chaga as often as we have, they know all about you and you are in and out in under two hours,’ Faraway said.

  ‘What about the disc, Tembo?’

  The small man shook his head.

  ‘They did an internal examination.’

  ‘Shit. We have to get that disc before UNECTA looks at it.’

  ‘There is more, Gaby. I called my wife last night; UNECTA had already been in touch with her to let her know we were safe and well. They have also been in touch with T.P. Costello. I have been in contact with him: I have done what I can, but he wants very much to talk with you, Gaby.’

  ‘Fuck.’ No disc, no story, no car, no camera. No job, when she got back. Then: ‘Tembo; where’s William?’

  ‘I was hoping you would be able to tell me that, Gaby.’

  ‘He’s still in decontamination?’

  ‘When I asked, they told me they were carrying out further tests. They will not let me speak to him.’

  ‘What could he need testing for that I don’t? We were all together all the time, anything he’s picked up, we have too.’

  ‘Further tests, that is all I know,’ Tembo said. ‘Gaby, I am worried for my wife’s sister-in-law’s cousin.’

  The black lesbo-sado-dominatrix with the French accent who had released Gaby from solitary confinement came to the booth. Faraway brightened visibly. Flirtation was everywhere.

  ‘Ms McAslan, the director would like to see you, if you are ready. If you will follow me, his office is in the main unit.’

  ‘The director.’ Right. As if one headmasterial bollocking from T.P. Costello would not be enough. ‘Okay. Might as well get it over with.’

  ‘Gaby. William.’

  ‘I’ll try, Tembo.’

  ‘Gaby.’ This from Faraway. The disc, he mouthed.

  The black lesbo-sado-dominatrix with the French accent introduced herself as Celeste and took Gaby up the outside of the unit to a fourth-level walkway and across the gap into corridors marked with black and yellow biohazard warnings busy with people in colourful casuals who could not proceed more than a few feet at a time without meeting someone they had to tell something important. Facial hair, baggy shorts and friendship bracelets were de rigeur for the men; the women favoured hot-pants, halter tops and lots of silver. Gaby expected to see basketball hoops on the laboratory doors.

  ‘There are three hundred staff here at Tsavo,’ Celeste said, tormentor turned tour-guide, leading Gaby up a clattering iron staircase. Gaby practised the role of Hard-Nosed Journalist with Big Questions that Demanded Answers. She was not convinced. Oh God. T.P. Costello was going to fry her.

  The Director’s office was on the penthouse level. Celeste entered without knocking. There was no receptionist, just a carpeted room filled with collegiate clutter, the inevitable computer equipment, a picture window looking out over the Chaga, a battered leather-topped desk. And,

  ‘You!’

  ‘You.’

  ‘You.’ Hard-Nosed Journalist with Big Questions that Demanded Answers hissed out of her in a whisper.

  ‘Your choice of clichés: “Fancy seeing you here”; “What’s a nice girl like you doing in a place like this?” or “We can’t go on meeting this way”?’

  ‘What about: “You utter utter utter asshole, I have just had the worst night of my life?”’

  ‘I thought they taught you journalists about things like not using the same word more than once in a sentence. Celeste, any chance of you scaring us up some coffee and a bite to eat? If I remember decontam right, Ms McAslan won’t have had too mu
ch to eat.’ When the black woman had gone, Dr Shepard took a more conciliatory tone. ‘Decontamination is pretty scary, though. They’re a law unto themselves over there. Different division. Luckily, when I found out who they’d gotten hold of, I was able to get one of my team over there to keep an eye on you. I’m genuinely sorry you had a bad experience; but it is necessary. Back in the old days, before we got up on to our tracks, there was a contamination incident over at Tinga Tinga. Months of work down the toilet, not to mention a million dollars of equipment. So we have to be cruel to be kind. If it’s any consolation, we all have to go through it.’

  His apology seemed genuine. Celeste returned with coffee and a micro-waved cheese-bacon croissant. Gaby fell on it.

  When she could speak again, she said, ‘Shepard. I need to ask. One of my friends. His name’s William Bi. He’s still in there.’

  ‘In decontam?’

  Gaby nodded. Shepard frowned.

  ‘He shouldn’t be. Excuse me a moment.’ He swivelled his peeling leather chair to address the server. His frown deepened. He placed a call on the videophone. While he gave monosyllabic replies to the wheedling whisper on the handset, Gaby drank her coffee and studied his desk. A man’s soul is like his desk, she had found. Except when it is like his penis. Shepard’s desk looked like the result of much rummaging in Arab markets along the coast. The wood could be ebony. There were worn gold-leaf elephants embossed around the edge of the leather top. It said much about Dr Shepard—Dr M. Shepard, according to the name sign—that he had had it brought cross-country and manoeuvred up in all those vertiginous freight elevators and along the narrow, ship-like corridors and into this office with its God’s-eye view of the end of the world. Desk décor heavy on Africana: all fine wood. Probably genuine. Small: they invited you to pick them up and enjoy the feel of their grain against your nerve endings. Half-a-dozen coffee mugs with sad black salt-pans of dried grounds in the bottom. Framed photographs of two boys, grinning, displaying several thousand dollars of orthodontistry. One about twelve, the other nine, ten. Tousle-haired, freckle-faced. All-American kids. Could be the last of an endangered species. A photograph of the younger M. Shepard, in a pink-and-lilac speed-skating suit, with that yearning pose of ready-for-the-off peculiar to speed-skaters with twelve inches of steel on each foot. Shame about the colour-scheme, but check out the thighs. Those were thighs to coat with aerosol chocolate mousse and slowly lick clean. She tried to see if he had kept them in condition.