by Ian McDonald
We move like small, fierce vermin through this colossal landscape. As befits El Macho Honcho, Moran goes first, his trusted deputy M’zee behind him; next comes Bushbaby, then the other woman, Rose, who has not cracked one word to me since we started, then Jake, me, and bringing up the rear, Sugardaddy. Seven of us. I’m sorry. Once it got into my head it just wouldn’t go away. How could you resist the temptation to sing ‘heigh-ho, heigh-ho’?
Not forgetting the dog. Which is a shit-brown mongrel that you see hundreds of sniffing around in the townships and pissing on things and being driven off with stones. But out here, its pariah nose triumphs where man-made navigation devices fail. It’s led us straight to the cache where they have buried the canvas boats. That is because he isn’t any old pariah, Bushbaby says proudly. He’s been bred to this work. By the silent Rose, her cousin. She breeds and handles Chaga-hounds. None better, she says. I believe her. While the boys snap the boats together, I sit and moan and groan and try to ease my blisters and nipple-rub. My collar bones are rasped raw. Rose reaches up to this thing that looks like a red honeycomb growing on the root buttress under which we are sheltering. She squeezes a brightly coloured blob from one of the cells. She offers it to me and, for the first time, speaks.
‘For you,’ Bushbaby translates from Kalenjin. ‘Eat it. It will make you feel better. It is quite safe. It is forest food. Anything that is red in the Chaga will always be edible.’
Better death than nushing out, as Fraser and Aaron Shepard would say. I pop the thing in my mouth. It is the size of a finger banana, the texture of a jungle slug and tastes of cinnamon, whisky and leaf mould. Two minutes later a glow starts in my belly. As I write this, I feel I can march straight up the trunk of one of these roof trees carrying everyone on one hand. Plus the dog. I feel good, da-na da-na da-na da. It grows all over the Chaga, this stuff. The market potential would be incredible, if I could get some out. Doesn’t keep, Bushbaby tells me. Like the manna of the Israelites. Didn’t their holy food come down from heaven too?
But I notice a thing about Rose. When she gives me the forest food, I see that the little finger of each hand has been crudely amputated.
Moving out now. More when I get the chance.
(Later)
Moon can’t have come this way. I can’t find any reference in her diary to these swamps and waterways that meander through this incredible, terrifying terrain. But she wrote years ago: the Amboseli swamps would have been outside terminum. The ruins of the old Ol Tukai game lodge she describes must be days ahead of us. When you are in the Chaga, you forget that as you move inward through it, it moves outward past you.
There is a sky again. The ceiling of the Great Wall has broken up into isolated roof-trees (how hard it is to give names to things, to describe them as they are, not how they seem!) rising sheer out of what Moon describes elsewhere ‘drained coral reef’. Yes, but on the mountainous scale: The finger-corals are hundreds of feet high, the brain-corals the size of houses, hand-trees almost as tall as the parasol-sequoias, miniature Foa Mulakus, all stilt legs and horns. Most of what we pass through I can only describe by listing their mundane counterparts. Cornucopias. Organ pipes. Mug-trees. Bubbles. Light bulbs. Frozen chickens (really! About the size of a truck, and exactly that morbid shade of factory farm chicken skin). Cathedrals. Mixer taps. Windmills. Cheese graters. Pantyhose. Watch springs. Candelabras. Scramble nets. We follow the narrow, twining watercourse through a Disneyland of kitchen paraphernalia. FX by Hieronymus Bosch. Our boats are eerily silent, powered by truck-battery engines. We leave hardly a crease on the water as we move between the overhanging pipes and frills. Jake is in the lead boat with Moran and M’zee. Mere women and dogs follow, with the untrustworthy Sugardaddy’s hand on the tiller.
We are in a state of armed vigilance. The Chaga seems to suit everything that comes into it very well. Hippos are public enemy number one. They could easily capsize these snap-together canvas assault boats. Bushbaby and Rose have Uzis: the only satisfactory way to stop a hippopotamus is to put the maximum number of shells into it, in the minimum amount of time. Personally, I’d feel much happier with something with the firepower of half a regiment rather than this fifty calibre Magnum they’ve given me, even with the dandy little Chaga-proofed laser sight that I mustn’t use too often because we can’t change the power pack. Go ahead, hippo, make my day. Did I fire five shots, or did I fire six?
Some of the birds I’ve seen hunting in the shallow water seem to be carrying strange parasites like autonomous, mutated body organs.
About ten minutes ago, Rose, through Bushbaby, asked if she could braid my hair for me. I’ve been admiring hers since I met her at the pick-up point: plaited and wrapped with threads, string and wax, strung with tiny Indian bells and amber beads. Bushbaby says they’ve both been admiring my hair for as long. They can’t get over the colour. Rose unpacks her threads and wires and beads from her pack, sits behind me and sets to work. She lifts my hair. I grasp her hand, turn to face her.
‘Posse?’ I ask, holding up the maimed hand.
She nods her head. ‘Mombi.’
You see the pink Cadillacs and the zoot suits and the girls cute and pouting in nylon and leather. You never see the deputies and the law they enforce. For the first infringement, the left little finger. For the second, the right little finger. To keyboard users, this maiming is symbolic as well as functional.
They lose their patience when it comes to the third offence.
I kiss the back of Rose’s hand, never taking my eyes off her.
She’s doing a fabulous job on my hair. The beads swing and click at every move of my head. It’s more than just a pass-time or sign of personal affection. It’s a ritual. A marking. I’m one of the tribe now.
Moran is shouting back from the lead boat. We’ll camp tonight at the remains of Ol Tukai Lodge where this snow-watered swampland runs out of Lake Amboseli and we enter the Loolturesh Discontinuity. I am back in her footsteps again: Moon, Niamh O’Hanlon, my Arne Saknussen.
(Later)
Moran says he thinks there is somebody else out there.
Day Three
M’zee agrees. We are not alone in here. It’s not the Wa-chagga: their country is on the far side of the discontinuity. UNECTA explorers are a possibility. The Black Simbas have no quarrel with them, but UNECTA reports to the military, with whom all the Tacticals are unilaterally at war, so contact is best avoided. The only thing the Tacticals hate more than the military are their cartel rivals. A lot of wealth and power crosses terminum into the camps, some are realizing later than others, so they send combat teams to follow the safari squads to their source, kill everything that breathes and claim what they find for their cartel. They’re scary. The Wa-chagga nation have a treaty with the Black Simba Cartel, they will protect us from claim jumpers. But they are a day away across Lake Amboseli in open canvas boats and the first and last you will know about claim jumpers is the itch of a laser sight on your forehead and nothing ever again. Fabulous. Apocalypse Now in the Loolturesh Discontinuity.
There are things scarier than claim jumpers. Obi-men. Forest wanderers. People who have found their way into the Chaga, become trapped by it, and changed.
Changed? I ask.
No one answers.
Jake is with us in the women’s boat today. He wants footage of the lake crossing and feels he should direct the shots so we don’t waste space on our limited supply of discs. He’s never been this deep. Lake Amboseli had once been seasonal, fed by subterranean springs drawing snow melt from the mountain, evaporating in the heat of the dry season. Now it is permanent, sealed under the transparent roof of the Loolturesh Discontinuity. The roof is made of balloons fifty metres in diameter, stuck together somehow, moored about three hundred metres up on lines and gnarled hold-fasts gripping the floor of the lake. Thousands, probably millions, of balloons, as clear as glass. Shot: a receding perspective of the still waters of Lake Amboseli with infinite regress of vertical lines. Steering through the
hold-fasts makes slow passage, especially when you do not know what you will find around the next knot of cables and roots.
There are things moving in the balloon canopy; things that cling to the curved undersurfaces, feeding off the occasional veils of translucent blue moss; and other things that float like animate zeppelins, steering themselves between the cables by languid ripplings of gossamer tail membranes. Jake has to tell me to stop shooting. But they’re there, they’re real. I have them.
Monkeys have colonized this vertical landscape. They run up and down the cables, fingering morsels out of the crevices between the plaited strands, cramming their faces as they watch us pass beneath. Many of them carry elegantly obscene deformities: antlers of green coral, mottlings of green and purple mould, extra sets of red arms and hands.
Changed.
She saw this, I remember. She noted this. But she draws no conclusions about whether these are pre-natal deformities or the Chaga somehow manipulating the flesh of the grown animal. No conclusions that I have read. Maybe they, like so much, are in the vanished pages.
This landscape breeds paranoia.
Jake. I am learning not to treat him as a folio of clichés. He is more alive here, with death so strong inside him, than I have ever seen him before. He manages to maintain his sartorial crispness—God knows how, I look like Jana of the Jungle after a heavy night. Even his sweat rings are precisely circular. His spirit is strong, but I fear that his body is beginning to betray him. He tires easily. And his sleep is troubled—several times a night he will cry out loud enough to wake the camp. Jake tells me he hears voices in his sleep. Mutterings in his hind brain, like someone talking in another room, loud enough for the voice to be heard but not the words it is speaking.
She wrote about spirit voices, calling her deeper into the heartlands. She imagined them to be lost, crazy Langrishe’s. Did she ever find him? Is he still out there in all those thousands of square miles of the alien?
(Later)
Camp three. Well into the weird now. I should do that doo-de-doo-doo, doo-de-doo-doo from the Twilight Zone, except everything up here does it naturally.
Up here.
Ha ha.
We’re on the far side of the Discontinuity, in the land of the Crystal Monoliths. The Land of the Wa-chagga. We hope it was their turds Dog found close by the landing where we stashed the boats. Fresh turds. About an hour or two old. Nothing lasts too long here. If they aren’t Wa-chagga, they mean that the ones who were following us are no longer following us. They’re in front of us.
Beyond the Discontinuity the terrain changes as abruptly as those old Tarzan movies where Johnny Weissmuller runs from Sahara sand straight into tropical jungle. The Crystal Monolith zone isn’t just one Chaga. It’s a whole department store of them, stacked on top of each other. Each level is a separate biosphere, with its own unique flora and fauna. The way forward is up.
Dog’s unfailing nose leads us right to the climb, a hundred or so steel pitons hammered into the main column of what looks like a Fassbinderesque Fitzcarraldo-fantasy of an oil refinery lost in Amazonia. Sugardaddy unpacks a couple of hundred yards of old-fashioned hemp mountaineering rope and body harness and goes up the pitch. It’s beautiful. Rock dancing. He hauls up Dog, who swings slowly in his harness, like a canine Foucault pendulum.
The only thing holding me to these steel pitons is the determination that I am not going to be hauled up like a side of meat. Don’t look down, they say. I have no problem with that. Rose comes up after me with almost as much style as Sugardaddy, Uzi dangling under her ass.
There’s an old American slave expression I can’t get out of my head: the Way in the Air. We are pilgrims on that Way, toward holy Zion; Ngaje N’gai, the House of God in Masai. Up here, you see that it is not so much a level as a web of spans, buttresses and branches. Imagine the organic equivalent of an LA freeway interchange and you’ve something of it. The branches are as wide as freeways. Where the spans join, you could host a full-size Cup Final with all the supporters and car parking. It’s easy to be blasé: most of what surrounds you is empty space. Get careless, and it’s four hundred feet straight down. Dog goes snuffling along the thinnest tendrils with heart-stopping nonchalance.
Only a little light filters down through the higher levels. I stop a moment to savour a rare beam of sunlight on my face. Looking up it, I see a handful of blue sky scratched by a jet contrail. This level is Monkeyland, with a few tribes of chimps (is that the proper collective noun?) thrown in. The chimps seem to rule the roost and have absolutely no fear of humans. They hoot at us from their enclaves high on the trunks, throw shit at us. Some of the bigger chimps carry the thigh-bones of large animals.
Are chimps supposed to do that?
M’zee smelled the storm coming before the first gusts drew spooky sobbings and moanings from the tier forest. We make it to a flange and set up Camp Three as the gale hits us. A big wind in the Chaga is a mighty scary thing. Everything moves. Everything tosses and sways and creaks and groans and every moment you think, Oh Jesus, it’s all going to fall apart, we are all going to die. You look for something strong and secure to hold on to, but everything is moving with you. And the wind really howls, like it is after your soul, and if it can’t get that, your body will do. It would have blown us, in our little thermal quilts, clean off the level and into four hundred feet of screaming death, were we not buttoned up. Bushbaby, Rose, me and Dog, who is lying proudly licking his erection, are bundled up in something like a cross between a secret cave and a sleeping bag that opened in a tree trunk when Moran licked it. Inside, it’s a spongy tube lit by bioluminescent patches that stretches as you push at it until there’s enough room for three women (in somewhat close proximity) and a dog. Bushbaby showed me the teat in the floor you can suck for a supply of nutrient sap. Tastes like piña colada, she says. I’m not that desperate. Yet. Above the slit door through which we squeezed, like birth in reverse, is a tennis-ball sized bud that Rose stroked to seal the membrane against the rising storm. The same trick will open it. All a tad parturitional for my liking. Peter Werther, the Chaga Adam, spoke of being sheltered in things like these. Who then was the Eve from which the Chaga learned womb magic?
Some unseen mechanism keeps us supplied with fresh air, otherwise we should all smother from a combination of sweaty, unwashed woman and dog dick. Enough for today. Bushbaby says Rose is wondering what I’m always writing writing writing at. I’m wondering too.
She woke and remembered how she knew this moment. It was the memory of winter storm nights in the Watchhouse, when the rain rattled the bedroom windows and the wind gibbered under the eaves and you curled up in your duvet, cuddled by cats, enjoying being so warm and safe and enclosed. You would wake in the hourless hours the clock did not measure to find the storm passed and, in the huge silence behind it, you would creep downstairs and into the porch to stand and lose yourself in the tremendous stillness lying across the land.
Not even Dog twitched as Gaby slipped through the door lips into the cool, clean air from the high country. The only sound in the tier forest was the patter of raindrops dripping from level to level to level, running down to earth. The slow rain glittered as it fell; the night forest shone with ten thousand bioluminescent lights. Gaby felt she had been set to walk among the stars. Exalted. Chosen. Invulnerable. She walked out along a high-arching bridge, drawn irresistibly into the mystic. At its far end, the arch joined with others in a tangled boss of cords, tubes and organ pipes. In a covert between two human-sized racks of panpipes, Gaby did a thing she had not since was ten years old, in the secret places of the Point known only to herself. She took off her clothes. She laid them in a neatly folded stack, found footholds in the pipes and climbed until she came to another arch. She found a safe roost at the edge and sat with her feet hanging over the star-filled abyss. She listened to the drip of water through the tier forest. She felt the Chaga on her skin.
She could disappear here. This arch would lead to another, and tha
t to yet another, and take her far beyond any hope of return to the human world. Eden again. Return to animal awareness; the eternal Now, before the Fall armed humanity with consciousness and care. She did not wonder the Western industrials wanted it ring-fenced. The Chaga’s Grace Abounding was the denial of consumer capitalism. But it is an insidious Eden where everything may be had by reaching out to take. It is the determination to push your hopes and dreams through the relentless material world that makes you human. If you were to get up from this place and walk in there and never come back, the Gaby McAslan that you have made yourself become would evaporate.
She shivered, suddenly cold and naked. She got up from her pitch, climbed down through the vox humana and vox angelica and put on her clothes. As she crossed back to Camp Three, she saw a figure seated on the edge of the drop, in the same position, legs over abyss, that she had sat.
She froze.
‘You too?’ Jake Aarons’ voice said. ‘It is sacred, isn’t it?’
‘And scary,’ Gaby said. She sat cross-legged beside him, a little back from the brink. ‘It’s beautiful, it’s awe-inspiring, it’s the closest I’ve come to a religious experience, and it’s the end of everything it means to be human.’
‘Or a gate into new ways of being human,’ Jake said. ‘What the Chaga says to me is, now you don’t need to compete for resources, now all the rules of supply and demand are torn up: there is enough here for everyone so now you can experiment with new ways of living, new ways of interacting, new societies and structures and sociologies, knowing that you have permission to fail. Screw it up and it won’t cost you and your children your lives. Like America was, back in the pioneer days when all the religious communities came over from Europe because there was space for them to follow their beliefs without interference. Continual experiment.’
‘Or stagnation.’
‘Pessimist.’
‘Fuzzy-minded pinko.’