Chaga

by Ian McDonald

  Jake laughed. It sounded very loud in the silent tier forest.

  ‘I have to be optimistic, don’t I? But it’s more than wishful thinking. What I’m going to say will sound to you like classic schizophrenic paranoia, but the voices, the ones inside, I know whose they are.’

  ‘Don’t tell me it’s God, Jake.’

  ‘Hell no. It’s the voice of the Chaga.’ He held up his hands, begging time to explain. ‘Don’t “Jesus, Jake!” yet. You believed Peter Werther when he said he could hear the Chaga thinking to itself. Look at this place, what is it? A web of nodes and connections, a neural network, for Christ’s sake, on the macro and micro scales. Everything connects in here. Everything thinks. Do you know what the latest theory about the Crystal Monoliths is? They’re the Chaga’s primary memory storage system. Bevabytes of information stored holographically in a crystalline matrix. Hard drives the size of skyscrapers. Somehow I’m plugged into the system too. I’m the watekni on-line cyberpunk fantasy. Direct neural connection to the data net.’

  ‘Jesus, Jake.’

  ‘Don’t try to tell me it’s all a fantasy of a sick man who will make any deal with any devil to beat the Big 4, Gaby.’

  ‘I’m not going to, Jake.’ Now. She had to tell him now. She took a deep breath. ‘Jake, do you remember the day I came to your place, when I learned about you from the hospital files. I learned something else. All those people in Unit 12, all the HIV 4 sufferers who have been exposed to the Chaga: Jake, they’re all still alive. They should have died years ago—you told me, the thing kills in six months, tops—but these people are still alive. There’s something in here, in this place, this jungle, that stops HIV 4. That’s why you hear your voices; it’s working its way into you.’

  Jake looked at Gaby. She could not read his expression. He got up from his high place and walked away through the dripping forest. Gaby called his name but he did not look back.

  41

  Gaby’s diary

  Day Four

  Contact.

  M’zee has the senses of a hunting animal. We are on the high paths, moving through a thickening fog. M’zee stops, looks up, raises a finger and circles it. The Black Simbas unsling their weapons. Safety catches click off. We are not alone. M’zee takes point with the heavy machine gun they call m’toto: The Baby. Moran covers his right flank, Sugardaddy his left. I am behind Moran, Jake behind Sugardaddy, with orders that if anything happens, to get down, stay down, keep out of fields of fire and shoot anything that comes at you. Bushbaby and Rose back-mark. Rose lets Dog off his leash to run ahead.

  Every few seconds we turn and check that the faces beside and behind us are the ones we saw last time. The fog grows thicker. My shorts and top are silver with dew, but I can feel the sweat running down my sides. My saturated pack feels like it weighs eighty tons. My blisters are bleeding into my boots. My calves are wrenched with cramp from yesterday’s climb. At any moment, two hands may reach out of the fog and take my head off with a monofilament garotte. I have never felt more afraid. I have never felt more alive.

  When I used to go out with Private Pete the Soldier, I would parade my offended Political Correctness when he hoped that his unit would get transferred to Bosnia because he wanted to see some action. I understand him now. My God. This place is turning me into a War Bore.

  M’zee holds up a hand. Dog is standing five feet in front of him, hackles raised, lip curled.

  I am in cover before Moran can wave us down. I roll into a water-filled channel where two strands of branch twine over each other. Something oozes from under my thighs. I don’t think about it.

  M’zee and Moran go forward. Dog trots after them. They disappear into fog. I lie in the cold water listening for gun fire. It doesn’t come. I grow chilled. It must come. It doesn’t. It feels like hours, down in the cold ditch. A rustle of movement. I roll onto my back, grabbing for the Magnum,

  ‘If I were your enemy, you would be dead now,’ Bushbaby says. ‘Get up. We are moving.’

  On Jake’s signal I unholster the camcorder and follow him in.

  We find them in a small amphitheatre of dwarf hand-trees. The men have been crucified on the white fingers of the hand-trees. The women have been hung by their heels. The bodies have been stripped. All have been killed by a single bullet in the head. The bodies have been mutilated. The men’s penises have been cut off and stuffed in the women’s mouths. The Chaga has started to claim the corpses. The men hang like images from Medieval plague crosses: high-relief crucifixes half-fused into the flesh of the hand-trees. Gaping mouths, eyes staring out of the melt of flesh and forest. The women’s trailing fingers have elongated into tendrils that weave seamlessly into the web of cables and branch fibres.

  Flies, and things like green thistle-down, rise in clouds as Moran examines the dead. He finds a tattoo on the ball of the first woman’s shoulder: an outline of a cube, the sign of Sheik Mohammed Obeid’s Children of the Hajji Cartel. He reckons they have been dead for four or five hours. It looks like they were surprised setting up an ambush for us. They were undoubtedly killed after they were strung up.

  My berserker adrenalin burn has gone cold in my blood. War sickens me. There is nothing glorious about it, nothing noble. Just cruel and sad. This is a terrible place to speak your last word, think your last thought, breathe your last breath and know absolutely that the last thing you will see is the figure standing over you with the gun.

  I keep thinking back to a boy in my class at uni. We were never friends, our social circles did not intersect. I only got to know him by the manner of his death. He had the worst death I can imagine. He was into cave diving; which is insane at the best of times, let alone the suicidal solo dive he made against all advice into the flooded tunnels under the Marble Arch cave system. He didn’t even learn when the piece of grit jammed a valve and blew all his air supply away and he only just made it back to atmosphere. He was certain there was an undiscovered major cavern at the end of the narrow tunnel he had been squeezing through when he got into trouble. He went down the next day to find that cavern. He never came back. They reckon the same thing happened again, but he was too far along the pipe to make it back. He died alone, under miles of rock, in the cold and the dark, knowing his air was bubbling away, knowing that he wouldn’t make it, knowing that the last, the very last thing he would ever see would be his headlamp beam shining on limestone tunnel.

  The body’s still down there. It’s too dangerous to recover it. In water that cold, that far from light, it could remain intact just about forever, floating trapped under those miles of rock.

  I had nightmares for weeks after I heard how he had died. It’s the scariest story I know, because it’s true.

  I think of those three men and two women, dying alone, helpless, where no one will ever find them, where no one will ever know, and a shaft of ice drives deep into my soul.

  Before we leave them, M’zee pauses to rip out a tremendous fingers-in-mouth whistle and yell ‘Wa-chagga!’ at the top of his voice. As we advance, he repeats the call. Eventually I distinguish an answering whistle out of the forest sound-track of unearthly whoopings and chimings and twitterings. M’zee returns a long monotone blast; a complex twitter replies. We’ve given the passwords and crossed the firewall. What wrong note, what incorrect response, did those poor bastards back there give?

  The Wa-chagga await us in a large natural atrium encircled by curtain walls of woven tendrils drooping enormous folded flower buds. They number nine: six men, three women. But for the colour of their combat pants, which are Chaga purples, crimsons, lilacs, they are indistinguishable from the Black Simbas. I am a little disappointed, I had been expecting Noble Savages. One of the women’s T-shirts has a picture of the Brazilian international striker Arcangeles printed on it.

  They all look very young. They all carry very big guns. They all have red-green things looped around the backs of their heads, with one tendril that goes into the ear and another that brushes the upper lip. They are a
combined defence patrol/ trading mission, like the armed merchant adventurers of the age of the navigators. They are all the Tacticals are permitted to see of the Wa-chagga nation and its organic towns scattered across the foothills of Kilimanjaro. I pull the camera out to video this historic moment.

  Everything goes horribly quiet.

  A Wa-chagga boy with straight-bobbed dreadlocks suddenly exclaims, ‘I know who you are!’ His English is almost accentless. ‘You are from television: Jake Aarons, SkyNet News! And you are Gaby McAslan. You did all these funny end of the news stories.’

  And we are deluged with hands wanting to be shaken and smiling faces and voices welcoming us and asking for an autograph and will they get on the satellite news?

  Later, Mr Natty-Dread, whose name is Lucius, an Economics graduate from the University of Dar Es Salaam, shows me how it is that we are such big stars among the Wa-chagga. It may have been designed as a Daewoo microvision, but then someone ripped off the casing and half the electronics and shoved in a slab of Danish blue cheese with half a pound of fettucine verde and not only is it somehow working, it can pick up pictures from as far away as Zimbabwe. Organic circuitry, Lucius says. The Chaga can analyse any electronic circuit board and synthesize a smaller and more efficient organic equivalent. The things runs on nuts. Nuts particular to a certain plant; peel them and you have a handful of five-volt batteries. The headsets I noticed are more of the same: organic two-way radios, though most of the time they’re switched to Voice of Kenya. Lucius lets me try his. He has it tuned to the pirates along the north Tanzanian coast, who do radical dance music.

  Black Simbas and Wa-chagga sit down to trade. The weapons are swiftly agreed; Sugardaddy, the Black Simbas’ chief negotiator, takes an order for ammunition. The computer software, sealed in metal cases, is taken after animated bargaining in Swahili between Sugardaddy and Lucius, who seems to be a boy of some authority. The cigarettes are set aside while their merits are weighed. The flasks of Coca Cola concentrate provoke great excitement. Sugardaddy personifies superior aloofness while fingers are dipped in the flask and sucked to make sure this is the real thing. If any people are experts on cola, it is Africans. Words are exchanged, hands slapped; all the cigarettes are accepted and the deal is sealed. The Coke, I learn, is a one-off trade; once the Chaga picks its molecules and synthesizes it, the forest will be raining Coca Cola. Will it do Diet too, I wonder?

  In return, Sugardaddy gets two steel vacuum flasks. In the first vacuum flask is a powerful all-purpose antibiotic that will kill even penicillin-immune bacteria. In the second is a cure for cholera. The Chaga synthesized both. Lucius tells me that none of his people have been sick since they escaped from the camps and returned to the mountain.

  ‘You cannot get sick,’ he says. ‘Not with counter-agents to every disease blowing on the wind. You take them in by the million with every breath.’

  Including, it seems, something that stops HIV 4 dead in its tracks.

  (Later)

  I rather think Lucius is trying to come on to me.

  The rest of the men are sprawled around the microvision watching women’s kick-boxing relayed from Bangkok and drinking native beer. They mutter doubtless obscene comments at the screen and laugh. The women are sitting in a ring by themselves, talking in Swahili and laughing and clicking their fingers. I sit apart to write, and Lucius comes and sits himself down beside me.

  ‘They are crass, boorish men,’ he says, looking at the group around the television. ‘You are like me, you are intelligent, sensitive, educated.’

  I ask him how intelligent, sensitive, sophisticated college boy becomes gun-toting, camouflage-wearing freedom fighter.

  ‘Loyalties are long and strong in Africa,’ he says. ‘When I heard what was happening to my family’s farms up on Kilimanjaro, I could not stay away, not while I might have some power to help them. I could do nothing against the Chaga, but when my people escaped from the camp at Moshi, I went with them, because I knew they would need all manner of abilities to rebuild the nation.

  ‘We found the Chaga at the minimum level of habitability. We were not wise to its ways, we did not trust it to feed and shelter us. Some died, the young, the very old, the vulnerable, and from their bodies the Chaga learned the needs of humans and grew them. From their flesh came the meat we eat, from their blood the water we drink, from their skin our shelters, from their bones our towns and settlements, from their spirits the light and the heat and the electricity that powers them. I say it like religious scripture. It is almost a prayer among us. You are thinking we have made the Chaga our God? Yes, in an African sense; gods who are petty, and practical, and ask you questions like, Lucius, which would you rather have, a perfect soul or a new Series 8 BMW? and do not get upset when you say a BMW. The Chaga gives us both: it weaves outside things into itself and makes them more than they are. And in doing itself, it makes itself more. Outside the Chaga is life. Inside the Chaga is life times life. Life squared.’

  I press him on what he means by the Chaga making things more than they are. It echoes Jake, when he said, on the night of the storm, about the Chaga being the gateway into new ways of being human. Lucius is evasive. It is getting late, he says. The others are calling him. No they are not. What they are doing is peering in tense concentration at the Asian Babes All-Action Topless bout. But at least I won’t have to stop him trying to chat me up. Jake takes his place beside me. Topless All-Action Asian Babes hold limited appeal for him, I suppose. Getting bitchy, Gaby. Hot news. While the guys’ brains have been be-fuddled by oiled Asian titties bouncing in extreme close-up, he’s been working on them to let us visit one of their settlements. They would not agree to that under any circumstances, but he did wheedle the promise out of them to take us deeper into the Chaga to see something that they will not specify, but they think will interest us greatly.

  ‘When do we go?’ I ask.

  ‘First thing in the morning. Lucius will guide us.’

  The women are talking among themselves with great animation, laughing and hiding their faces behind their hands. They must be talking about sex.

  Day Five

  We made our farewells in the early mist. Rose, Bushbaby, M’zee and Dog are staying to conclude business with the Wa-chagga.

  We ascend steadily for about an hour. There are ways between the levels; swooping catenaries of plaited piping that anchor tiers to piers like the cables of a suspension bridge. Lucius runs up them with the cocky ease of one of these spider-men who build the Manhattan skyline. He’s trying to impress me. What it makes me want to do, encumbered by ordnance and acrophobia, clawing for every finger- and toe-hold, is knee him in the nuts. Lucius educates me in Chaga-lore: anything red will always be edible, orange is water, blue electricity, white information. Green and yellow are heat and cold; black is drugs, both pharmaceutical and recreational.

  We come across a moment of lost history tangled up in the cables between worlds: the overgrown skeletons of three helicopters, trapped like insects in a web and sucked transparent. Jake rubs away the crust of pseudo-lichens and discovers Tanzanian army markings. The cockpits are a writhe of tendrils and yellow spines: I imagine picked-clean skulls, greenly grinning. Or do I imagine?

  Upwards. By noon break I want to lie down and die and let the Chaga grow over me, like that lost helicopter squadron, and suck my soul up into the Crystal Monoliths that I can just begin to glimpse through the forest roof. At least Lucius can clear up a mystery before I die. I ask him if he or his people ever encountered a white woman travelling inwards alone, three, four years ago. Yes, he has. She was… Irish, like me? Yes, but not red, like you. She was dark, in complexion and spirit. A woman like this you remember. She ran into one of the foraging parties from Rongai village. They brought her in—this was when Webuyé was chief, before the new regime moved for a more reclusive policy toward strangers in the forest. She asked everyone if they had seen a white man pass that way some months before. She would not stay for more than one night before she
must move on inward, in search of her man.

  There is another way, Lucius says, in which I am like her. We both spend hours writing in journals.

  I know, I say, taking the Liberty book from my pack. This is that diary. I lay it on the cable between us. Lucius looks at it suspiciously: does it say anything about the Wa-chagga, and Rongai village? he asks.

  All references to humans living in the Chaga have been cut out, I tell him. With a sharp knife.

  The Wa-chagga did not do this, he says, flipping through the yellow pages.

  I ask him if he knows if Moon ever found the man she was searching for. Yes, Lucius says. He was in the patrol that met her, many months later, wandering in the chaotic terrain at the foot of the Citadel. She had been near exhaustion, and deeply mistrustful. She had asked the Wa-chagga to take her to Nanjara settlement, where the people had been kind to her before, and then toward terminum. She would not speak about what she had experienced up in the high country beyond the Citadel, but it was clear that it had changed her.

  After she had collected her things from Nanjara, the Wa-chagga patrol took her through the tier forest to Lake Amboseli, where they would give her into the protection of a Tactical squad, but she had broken away then and fled into the fastnesses of the Discontinuity.

  So, T.P. This is how it ends. Paranoia and disillusion on the white mountain, and a love that was not so strong nor so deathless as Moon thought. Those who love too big lose too big. If it’s any consolation, Langrishe couldn’t keep her either. Funny. Sad. Terrifying: how it all keeps coming back to that one word: changed.

  I’m frightened for Jake.

  Upwards.

  I hadn’t thought we were so high. All of a sudden we come up through the canopy on to the top of the forest. I can see. I have a horizon. I can feel sun on my skin. I have a landscape once again.

  The Crystal Monoliths rise over me, as high above me as I am above the deep root forest. Their facets sparkle sun diamonds across the canopy. Before me, the web of branches and spars runs between the splayed fingers of the ridge country I glimpsed that morning Shepard took me up in the microlyte. Beyond the canyonlands, clouds rip softly on the upper ramparts of the Citadel.