by Ian McDonald
Hubert climbed like an animal. Gaby’s heart almost stopped when she saw him go straight up the bole on the edge of the moat. ‘He’s born to it,’ Henning Bork assured her. That sentence means more than it says, Gaby thought. As they moved through the high canopy toward the escarpment where the Treetoppers maintained their watch post, Gaby could feel the child, up there in the dense overgrowth, stalking the slow, clumsy adults. Hidden eyes, watching. The disturbing thing was that even when the boy was back with them, she could still feel them, watching. An hour up the valley in which Treetops rested brought the small expedition to the observatory. It was a cupola of spars and silk scavenged from the wreck of the Tungus, perched on the scarp where it fell sheer to the Breeding Pit below. Henning Bork, Yves Montagnard, Jake Aarons and Gaby McAslan fitted into it like segments of an orange. Gaby tried to unsling the camcorder without injuring anyone.
‘Where’s Hubert vanished to now?’ Jake asked.
‘He’ll be playing somewhere,’ Yves Montagnard said. Gaby thought she would not be so unconcerned if it were her flesh and blood playing around such sheer drops and pitfalls. But Jake had found her something to video.
She remembered the land beneath her from the microlyte flight. She had thought it looked like a Willow Pattern plate. Now she was on the very edge of it, and it did not look like that at all. She slowly swung the camera across the spars and swelling spheres and thought it looked like something flayed and festering, all blue veins and gas-bloated, suppurating flesh straining at skeletal ribs. It looked fleshy and obscene and intimate, like a laparoscopy of a cancerous ovary.
At the limit of her zoom, at the foot of the Citadel, a bubble burst in a spurt of milky liquid and powder. Something darted from it, too far and fast for the camera to follow. She panned up the dark green rampart of the Citadel, to the clouds that hung over Kilimanjaro. Peter Werther had been brought there and set down, ass-naked as Adam in Eden. He had walked away from Eden, and the price of it was a disinfected white suite deep under Kajiado Centre, and multinational doctors measuring the advance of his own private Chaga across his body. Anything that comes out of it is theirs, Dr Dan had said. She looked at Jake, talking excitedly with Henning Bork. He fulfilled their criteria. They would claim him. They would take him down into their circular corridors and locked doors and never let him see the light of day again. She looked at Jake and feared for him. But he was not stupid. Many things, some sins, but never stupid. He knew all this as well as she, and he had made his decision.
He wasn’t coming back.
‘Some of the larger bubbles contain whole ecosystems in miniature,’ Henning Bork was saying, scanning the Breeding Pit with binoculars. ‘Like little, what is the word? dioramas, of life on other planets. Of course, it is one of our many frustrations that we cannot reach them in time to sample them; they only last a day or so before they are reabsorbed. Before we ran out of disc space, we videoed many hours’ footage of these dioramas. Frequently we cannot comprehend what we are seeing. Sometimes we cannot recognize it as living at all. Occasionally we have seen things so alien as to be horrifying. Ah! Luck is with us!’ .
He pointed over the rail. Gaby followed in on to a huge bubble a mile to the west. The skin was painfully distended against the hoops of blue ribbing. Gaby thought incongruously of sex toys an old partner of her had liked to sport. The bubble rippled, as if kicked from inside and split. White dust sprayed from the rent. The skin tore in a dozen places and collapsed. Behind the camera, Gaby now thought of ancient newsreel footage of the destruction of the Hindenburg. But cold. Without fire.
Even at highest magnification, Gaby could not tell if the thing inside the bubble was natural or artificial, organic or inorganic. City, forest; forest, machine. It looked like a city, or a forest, or a handful of stone fingers. Each was the height of a small skyscraper: the proportions of the Breeding Pit could have reduced Manhattan to a toy town in a plastic snow storm. City, Gaby decided on the basis of the regular geometric patterns on the sides of the stone pillars. They were in the shape of three-dimensional fractals of ever diminishing tetrahedrons. Terracotta red. Some of the larger formations were fifty feet in diameter, stubbled with smaller arrays of tetrahedrons. Gaby cursed the camera’s lack of resolution: the surfaces of the tetrahedron formations seemed in motion.
‘You’re right.’ Henning Bork answered her puzzled frown. ‘It’s a living fractal. Each generation of tetrahedrons grows out of the surface of its parent. Some are in the process of sporing—when the tetrahedrons reach the molecular level, they leave the parent body and migrate across the rock surface to a new seeding zone. This is a diorama we have recorded several times before. We believe it is a kind of living clay that uses chemical energy to reproduce itself from the minerals of its parent rock. A parasitic living clay, perhaps. There is evidence that terrestrial clays were a matrix for early forms of RNA molecules. Perhaps this is the end-point of a different geological RNA-based evolution.’
A warning flashed in Gaby’s view-finder. Disc change. Last disc.
The Chaga’s reconstruction of a living clay it encountered somewhere on its travels,’ Yves Montagnard added.
‘Buckyball golems,’ Jake whispered.
Hubert rejoined the little expedition on the trek back to Tree-tops. Whatever he had found out along the escarpment ridge, it had made him remember what it was to be a boy. But in her diary that night, Gaby still made insidious comparisons with Fraser and Aaron Shepard. It was not just that they were Shepard’s kids and they had been part of one of the great times of her life. Hubert was too much a child of his environment. His strangeness seemed almost genetic. Gaby closed her diary and tried to sleep, but found herself continually waking with a powerful sensation of not being alone in her little canvas cell. Each time, the only presence was her own. She would force herself back into sleep and dream of things that had watched her unseen in the Chaga canopy, followed her back to Treetops and come flapping across the air moat to smother her with flopping skin wings.
She woke with a cry.
In the room. It was in the room.
At the sound of her voice, the bioluminescents woke and filled the fabric cube with a green glow. By their light, something moved. Gaby rolled out of her hammock on to the spongy floor and grabbed her Magnum from her pack. The red seed of the laser sight wove across the billowing walls and came to rest on the forehead of a four year-old white girl with hair as black as the night outside. Her face was as thin as famine.
‘Light!’ Gaby shouted. The bioluminescents brightened. Crouching on the floor, Gaby and the girl stared at each other, tied by a thread of laser. Then the girl gave a cry, ran to the window and before Gaby could catch her or stop her or warn her, dived out into four hundred feet of moat. Gaby screamed and lunged for the window. By the dim light from the tier forest, she saw a thing very like a very large, very pale bat ghost across the gulf. It flew on webs of skin stretched between wrists and ankles. Gaby saw it light on a branch and turn a dark-eyed, black-haired smiling face to her.
44
They were arguing again in their private patois of French, English and Russian. Gaby banged a plate hard on the table. It broke cleanly along across the middle. They all looked at her.
‘Your daughter?’ she demanded.
Nothing slept soundly in Treetops. Gaby’s cries had roused the colony in less than a minute. Fearing assault, Lucius and the Black Simbas had armed themselves. There had been potentially fatal misrecognitions as the hives of bioluminescents warmed up. Order had inhered at the centre, on the bridge, around the Scandinavian calm of Henning Bork. He had given Gaby the floor to tell what she had seen. Then the arguing had started.
‘My daughter, yes,’ Yves Montagnard said. ‘Hubert’s twin. Little Nicole.’
‘If you’re Papa, then who the hell is Mama?’ Jake asked.
‘Never mind whose baby or whose twin,’ Gaby interrupted, ‘she’s fucking Batwoman. I saw her fly, for God’s sake. Peter fucking Pan.’
&nb
sp; ‘That is the nature of her change,’ Henning Bork said. ‘That is why we hid her from you. But she is a wild thing, and very curious. She would not be hidden.’
‘She’s not living in the jungle on her own, not at her age,’ Jake said. ‘Someone else is out there. You lied to us about the crew of the Tungus.’ All investigative journalists are frustrated master detectives, Gaby thought.
‘Only half lied,’ Ruth Premadas said. ‘Ludmilla is Nicole’s and Hubert’s mother. She was the airship’s co-pilot. When we learned outsiders were coming, we had her take Nicole up to the Breeding Pit Observatory.’
‘I thought my room felt lived in,’ Gaby said. ‘No wonder Hubert was so keen to come up to the Observatory with us, and go running off into the trees.’
‘But the Captain,’ Jake insisted. ‘What was his name? Kosirev? Did you tell the truth about him? That he tried to make it back, and got lost?’
‘We did. It is true. But it was worse than lost,’ Henning Bork said. ‘Changed.’
Gaby saw Jake follow his curiosity to the brink of disclosing undisclosable things about himself. Careful, friend.
‘Like Nicole, do you mean?’
‘No.’ Henning Bork sighed. ‘How can I say it? A new body, I suppose. A symbiote, a parasite? We do not have the language for what the Chaga is doing to flesh.’
‘Obi-men,’ Sugardaddy said. ‘That is what you are trying to say. I have seen them, but briefly. They move fast, for such huge things, and so silently. It is as if they command the forest to let them pass, and to close behind them and conceal their tracks.’
‘What have you seen?’ Jake asked.
Sugardaddy shook his head like an old man who finds the world has surpassed his extraordinary stories.
‘So many things that they could not all be from the same creature. Hair. Skin. Organs in transparent sacks. Great clawed feet, thighs bigger and stronger than an ostrich’s, but the finest, thinnest fingers. More like hair than fingers. The faces; I remember those best. You see the faces, in those folds of flesh…’ He shook his head again.
‘Yet they are all the same creature,’ Henning Bork said. ‘We call them orthobodies: they seem to be symbiotic organisms that can take the human body into them and mesh with the nervous, digestive and cardiovascular systems. They seem to enhance human faculties in many ways: improved health and immunity from disease, great strength and speed, extended sensory range, the ability to interact with the Chaga environment.’
‘I have seen them walk free,’ Sugardaddy said. ‘They opened up like a woman’s thing, and the people inside walked out, like they were being born. I say that because they were connected to those things by birth cords. This is what happened to your captain?’
‘Does this happen to everyone who is lost in the Chaga?’ Jake asked. You are scared, Gaby thought. You are right to be scared, if this is the price of your deliverance. No wonder UNECTA keeps those poor bastards locked up where no one can see them.
‘Not everyone,’ Yves Montagnard said. ‘The Chaga is the place of perpetual change and transformation, but the changes take many forms. For some it is attracting an orthobody—it seems that the attraction is essentially sexual between human and symbiote, the merging voluntary, almost an act of love. For others it is to be changed in the womb, by changing the genes of the parents, like Nicole and Hubert—oh yes, my son is changed, but it is not an outward change like Nicole’s gliding membranes. And some are changed in their own bodies by the symbiosis of Chaga virons with terrestrial infective viruses.’
‘HIV 4,’ Gaby said.
‘Utilizing retroviruses as carrier bodies to insert molecular information into genes had been a trend in genetic engineering research long before the Kilimanjaro Event,’ Ruth Premadas said. ‘When Ol Tukai’s taxonomists noticed mutations occurring in fully differentiated monkeys that had adapted to the Chaga environment, it seemed a fruitful line of inquiry. I was on the team set up at Kajiado centre to investigate relationships between Chaga virons and genetically hypervariable retroviruses. Just before the Tungus mission, we made the breakthrough into the SIVs—Simian Immunodeficiency Viruses—and were hypothesizing similar interactions with the human immunodeficiency viruses.’
‘The Chaga is an engine of evolution,’ Yves Montagnard said, in his Big Ideas voice. ‘It has come to move us forward as a species, perhaps as many species. Our technology has brought us to an evolutionary dead end. Biotechnology allows us to evolve in the directions in which we wish to be evolved: taller, stronger, healthier, higher IQ, more beautiful. We imagine this will be the future humanity. Absurd. If a tribe of Australopithecus had sat down to design the next evolutionary breakthrough, they would have planned something that could run faster, see further, smell better, have sharper nails to grub out insects and roots. They would not have planned talking, thinking, tool-making homo sapiens.
‘Out there is an environment as alien to us as Paris would be to Australopithecus, an environment that changes to demand new responses from us, that can generate a thousand habitat niches. We do not know what we will need to expand into the universe, so the Chaga give us the gift to diverge into a thousand, ten thousand, a million sub-species: a million seeds of humanity cast into the dark.’
‘“And say which seed will grow, and which will not”,’ Jake quoted.
‘Yes,’ the Frenchman said fiercely. ‘And maybe, because there is enough room out there, all the seeds will grow. Transhumanity. Posthumanity. Panhumanity. Any of these, all of these. On these East African plains humanity was born; it must be more than cosmic coincidence that it is on these same plains that the new humanity; the thing that comes after us, that we cannot see, will arise.’
Gaby thought of the legend of the tree where man was born, and all the races of earth returning to that ancestral baobab, with its roots in earth and its branches among the stars, to be dissolved in its hoarded waters and made anew. Sweet, seductive Big Ideas. How long their legs are, how easily they stride over us. Look, they are already over the horizon while we plough our way through the mud. How many centuries it has taken us to learn to see that people whose skin is a different colour from ours are as human as we, and now you are asking us to hug these winged children and hybrid obi-men and changelings to us. Things we may not even recognize as human, we must call brother and sister.
‘I am an uneducated working man,’ Moran said unexpectedly. ‘I do not understand these things well. I do not know about Australopithecus and evolution and what you call transhumanity, posthumanity. All I know are my people, my home, my cartel, my family. I know my country. I know my children. I know this.’ He drew a long-bladed guerilla knife from the leather sheath on his thigh. The blade was beautiful. He was a man who could care for an edge. Moran set the knife on the commons table. ‘Tell me what this means to me. Tell me what this means for my family, my children, my nation.’
For the first time, Gaby felt some measure of admiration for Moran. He was African. He could stare into the headlights of Big Ideas, Big Science, Big Dumb Objects, without being dazzled, and ask the only question that had any meaning: what have you done for me lately?
‘Be thankful for the children you have now,’ Lucius said quietly. ‘If you believe in a god, pray for the ones yet to be born, that you may learn to love them as you love the ones that are already yours.’
‘The mutations are happening to you too,’ Jake Aarons said. ‘Just like here. That’s why you didn’t want to take us to your town.’
‘Yes,’ Lucius said. ‘This is what these ideas you barely understand mean for your family, your children, your nation, Moran. Learn from us, that they will not destroy you as they are destroying the Wa-chagga nation, by setting us against each other. In my town, Kamwanga, and in Nanjara and Usarangei and Mrao; Ngaseni and Marangu Gate too, we say that change is the nature of the Chaga, but it is never harmful or destructive, and these children who are born different because of it are to be cherished and valued just like those who are normal. It is no sin or shame
or sign of the disfavour of God or the anger of the spirits. It is the way of this place.’
‘But that is not the case among the other settlements.’
‘They take the changed children as soon as they are born and expose them.’
‘Jesus,’ Gaby whispered.
‘Institutionalized infanticide,’ Jake said.
‘Yes,’ Lucius said grimly. ‘It is destroying the Wa-chagga nation. We are abominations to each other. People from Kibongo will not speak to people from Usarangei; the people of Marangu and Marangu Gate are enemies because of this. Soon, I fear, we will kill each other.’
‘The children,’ Gaby said.
‘We have asked the councils of the towns who oppose us in this to let us take the changed children, but they fear that we are breeding an army of monsters to annihilate them. So we follow the men who leave the children in the forest. If we cannot bribe them, we wait until they have gone and take the baby. But we do not save them all. We cannot save them all. We trust that the Chaga is as kind to them as to all others who have to rely on it for their lives. But it is a hope, nothing more. Of the ones we save, and of our own, there are many that do not survive. They are too deeply changed. You would tell me that they are victims of evolution, Dr Montagnard; that they are variants that do not adapt and are weeded out. I cannot be that sanguine.’
The blimp cloth curtain that hung across the doorway twitched aside. Moran and Sugardaddy drew weapons.
‘You do not need to do that,’ the figure in the door said. It spoke in a woman’s voice, heavily accented with Slavic. ‘We are no danger to you, unless you are of the party that thinks that children are abominations of God.’ A small, sandy-haired white woman dressed in cut-off combat pants and a tattered T-shirt entered the long room. A child clung to her legs; a girl child, white, naked, agonizingly thin. She had the luminous eyes in a filthy face that turn favela urchins into angels. The child stared at the alien bodies in the common room and pressed closer to her mother. Flaps of skin were stretched taut between wrists and ankles. Follicles puckered into gooseflesh.