Chaga

by Ian McDonald

  ‘Superb adaptation to water retention,’ Russel Shuler said, observing Gaby observing. ‘The third eyelid holds in tears for recycling and keeps out dust particles and potential allergens. He doesn’t sweat, his urine is highly concentrated. He adjusts to the temperature of the environment. That skin also protects him from ultra-violet radiation and prevents ingress by airborne particles. Likewise, the nose filters and sinus mucus membranes.’

  ‘He’s a man for the end of the world,’ Gaby said. ‘Terminal humanity for a polluted, radiation-burned, greenhouse Earth. He can survive there, and live, and thrive. Jesus Christ.’

  ‘Yes, Mr Shuler, you are right, we should pray,’ Dr Dan said. ‘Pray very hard.’

  Kighoma waved goodbye and went back to his football magazine.

  Russel Shuler paused before opening the door of the next room.

  ‘You may find this one particularly disturbing. We keep the lighting low; he seems to prefer it that way, though he is adapted to wide fluctuations in light levels, as you’ll find out. It’s safest just to stand and let your eyes adapt. You may feel something move past you, very close and very fast: don’t be alarmed, Juma likes to play with his abilities, and he’s a bit of a practical joker. If you can, try not to flinch out of the way; his margins of error are very narrow.’

  The dark room felt full of unseen dimensions, like a cinema where the projector has broken down and everyone is afraid to move. It was big enough to keep its own little winds: Gaby felt air currents stir the fine hairs on her arm. She sensed massive objects poised overhead. Someone coughed. The big chamber returned odd echoes. Gaby relaxed her eyes and let them unfocus; an old astronomer’s trick her father had taught her. The masses she had sensed above her were rectangular shelves and blocks, piled on top of each other like the mother of all overhang climbing walls. Walls, blocks, ceiling were covered with steel rungs. The centre of the room was filled from floor to roof with girders and pylons. These too were covered in hand holds. Post-industrial jungle gym, Gaby thought. At the same moment, she saw something flip over the edge of a cube just under the ceiling, go down the wall at such speed it was more like a fall, dash past her and hurtle up one of the central pylons to flop on to the top of the cube opposite. A black face looked down at the people below.

  Hands. The thing had seemed all hands. Too many hands.

  Russel Shuler called in Swahili. The face frowned, nodded from side to side: maybe yes, maybe no. Then it flipped over the precipice, swung with dizzying speed down the wall, leaped to a girder and hung there.

  There were cries. There were gasps. Johnson Ambani crossed himself.

  The thing had looked all hands because it was all hands.

  The boy could not have been more than eighteen. Apart from a complete lack of hair, he was quite normal down to the base of his rib cage. It was below there that the changes had been worked on him. He had no lower torso, no legs, no feet. In place of these was an extra pair of shoulders, arms and hands. He gripped the rungs with his upper and lower right hands. He was dressed in a blue ribbed high-neck bodysuit that allowed all his hands to move freely. Russel Shuler asked him in Swahili if he would come down and meet the Commission of Enquiry. He stood on all four hands on the floor. Gaby thought of a sleek black animal, and feared she was being racist or sexist or change-ist. The boy heaved himself onto his lower arms and stood upright, shifting his weight from hand to hand. He stood as tall as Gaby’s shoulder. He extended an upper hand in greeting to one of the legal aides. The woman danced away, then remembered her position and gingerly took it.

  ‘Please,’ the boy said, in faltering English. ‘I am so bored. Can you make him make them take me up there? I want to be up there. It is where I am meant to be. I am learning myself English. It is what they talk up there.’

  ‘Up there?’ Gaby asked, and understood in the same breath. ‘Christ.’

  ‘Unity space station,’ Russel Shuler said. ‘We’ve approached NASA about transferring him. Juma is adapted for life in freefall. His legs and hips began to atrophy soon after we took him into quarantine—like gangrene. We had to amputate. At the same time as the lower arms started to grow, the internal organs were reconfiguring themselves. The things that have been done to the boy’s body are terrifying. He’s a tough kid.’

  ‘Please,’ Juma said again, to all the Assemblypersons. ‘I am so bored.’

  Gaby could not shake out of her head the image of the legless beggar who had pushed himself on his trolley, past Miriam Sondhai’s house, with wooden blocks strapped to his hands.

  ‘Let him go,’ Dr Dan said with vehemence in his soft deep voice. ‘Let them all go. This is no place for them. You have no right to keep them here like animals. Even my cattle are more free and respected than these people.’

  And as the Masai bleed their cattle, the UN bleed their herd for their HIV-infected blood, Gaby thought.

  ‘Where would they go?’ Russel Shuler said. ‘Back to their people? Back to the townships and camps? Their own mothers wouldn’t recognize them as human, let alone once having been their children. How long do you think they would last, even the ones that don’t need special environments? How long before some Islamic fundamentalist mullah or apocalyptic Christian evangelical preacher condemns them as abominations of Satan and starts the purges? Your National Assembly Commission of Enquiry may have already sown the seeds of that Holocaust. All those newsmen camped out there are going to want to know what you found down here. Maybe it’s safer if the world doesn’t find out.’

  ‘If not now, then when?’ Gaby said. ‘Time’s against you. Time’s against all of us, because that big green machine down there is getting closer and we are all running out of options.’

  ‘Please,’ Juma called from the high ledges among which he had taken refuge from the arguing. ‘This is not my place. I am so bored. Take me up there.’

  Russel Shuler passed the next doors. He stopped the party by a curtain of heavy plastic strips that hung across the corridor.

  ‘You’ll remember what I said back on Level Two about the alterations having spread to the environment. That area is beyond this curtain. There’s still a chance to go back if you want to.’

  He stepped through the hanging strips. All the Commissioners followed.

  The smell was almost physical in impact. It was not that it was vile or fetid; it was that its complex esters and ketones punched deep into the hind brain and touched awake memories that had slept for decades. Gaby recalled the baobab on the curve of the Namanga Road where she had first seen the Chaga, and the fragments of memory its perfume had stirred in her. Spicy sexy sweaty seductive magical mysterious Chaga perfume. There was Chaga growing down here, deep under the earth. A bluish glow, like television-light, shone from around the curve of the corridor. Russel Shuler led his guests toward it.

  Gaby cried aloud. It was every child’s dream of Jules Verne’s giant mushroom forest at the centre of the Earth. The corridor was over-arched by ribs of pseudo-coral, from which hung bioluminescent fruit and clusters of red honeycomb. Fingers of damp yellow sponge dripped from the ceiling; stumps of the same material reached toward them from the floor. Organic stalactites and stalagmites. The floor beneath Gaby’s bare feet seemed to be glazed, fused bone.

  ‘It’s expanding,’ Russel Shuler said. ‘About fifty centimetres per day. We have a month and a half before we abandon this level. Eventually it’ll take over the whole facility. You were right, Ms McAslan. Time is not on our side.’

  He placed his hand on an orange-like extrusion from a puckered mouth of muscle in the corridor wall. The lips opened with a sigh.

  ‘It’s all right, it won’t eat you,’ he said.

  The room beyond was huge. UNECTA had never designed it this size. You could comfortably fit the SkyNet offices on Tom M’boya Street under this roof.

  ‘It’s been working on the rock,’ Russel Shuler explained as Gaby followed the fluted columns and cables up and up to the ceiling of bioluminescent balloons. ‘Thank God it
hasn’t hit any vital systems yet.’ From the roof Gaby scanned down the piles of slumped spheres (profiteroles, she imagined) and the fifty-foot-high multi-headed florets (broccoli, she thought) and the fingers of the ubiquitous land corals, to the white man with long blond hair and a pale beard and liquid blue eyes standing at their feet (Peter Werther, she knew). Dressed in surfer shorts.

  ‘Good afternoon,’ he said in his soft south German accent. ‘I’ve been expecting you. Would anyone have a cigarette?’

  ‘Peter Werther,’ Gaby McAslan whispered.

  ‘Gaby McAslan.’ Peter Werther warmly shook Gaby’s and then the hands of all the Commissioners.

  ‘Peter,’ Gaby said cautiously. ‘When I interviewed you back at What The Sun said, you had a mark, a sign of your time in the Chaga. A piece of it growing over your body. It isn’t there any more.’

  ‘Tell her,’ Russel Shuler said.

  ‘It is still growing on my body,’ Peter Werther said. ‘It will never stop growing on my body. You see, this,’ he touched himself lightly on the chest and bowed shortly, ‘is not my body. This is only an extension of my body. Peter Werther is this room, and the next room, and the one beyond that, and the corridor from which you have entered, and the molecule machines working their way through the solid rock toward the light and the air. This is no more my body than that land coral or this light balloon, and no less. They are all aspects of me, grown out of me. My body, my mind, my personality, are all around you.

  ‘Are you sure you don’t have a cigarette?’

  Gaby realized she had there and then quit smoking.

  ‘We couldn’t decontaminate him,’ Russel Shuler said. ‘Not without killing him. We’d been observing him on Zone White for ten days when the thing started to run wild.’

  ‘You asked me how long, do you remember? Back at Lake Naivasha,’ Peter Werther said to Gaby. ‘Not long. Twelve hours, until my skin was completely covered.’

  ‘We took him down to Red Three, where we had a clean medical unit.’ Russel Shuler took up the story. ‘He was comatose by then. Vital signs were going mad: it was like that thing was playing games with his physiology, testing to the edge of destruction.’

  ‘Russel refuses to believe me when I say that I was not in a coma,’ Peter Werther said. ‘I was dead. Again. Like I died up there on Kibo in the snow when the Kilimanjaro package came down. The Chaga brought me back then, it brought me back again. I have died and lived twice, and now, I am quite sure, I will not die a third time.’

  ‘They came out of the soft orifices first,’ Russel Shuler continued. ‘Eyes, nose, mouth, anus: the seeding tendrils. Then the spore fibres burst through the skin, everywhere. We had to evacuate. He was starting to absorb the bed and the monitoring equipment.’

  ‘Something wonderful, that is what I told you.’ The conversation was between Peter Werther and Gaby. Russel Shuler, the Commission of Enquiry, were distant spectators. ‘Is this not wonderful? How can I begin to tell you what it is like to return to consciousness, not as a man, but as a forest, a mind spread through many parts, many bodies at once? I do not think it can be told, only experienced. But I missed the sensation of being a body, of being able to move and relate my senses to direct action. So, I built this body that you see, the body I remember and like best. But I have other bodies, that I have built with special abilities for special purposes. They are not human bodies, these other Peter Werthers. Come with me. I shall show you this underworld I have become. Virgil to your Dante.’

  Gaby thought of old Big Bwana White Hunter movies as Peter Werther—she could not think of him as an extension of the environment—led the Commission through his private jungle to a mouth door between balloon cables.

  The second chamber was bigger than the first, and filled with dense fan vegetation. When Gaby glimpsed eyes peeping between the fronds, she asked Peter Werther if these were the other selfs he had told her about.

  ‘No, they are people. Victims of this place,’ Peter Werther said.

  ‘Arboreal adaptations,’ Russel Shuler said. ‘The most common form. There are so many of them they’re nearly a tribe.’

  The parted fronds closed. Gaby heard movements, rustling in the coral canopy.

  There were seven of them; three men, two women, two children. They were as agonizingly thin as winged Nicole Montagnard. Ribs visible under T-shirts. Faces of three decades of televised famine. Gaby could not bear to look at their collarbones. But they were not lethargic, painful, exhausted of life like the starved. They were healthy, energetic, quick of mind and body, right and fit. The adaptation had given them very long forearms, very long fingers, very long feet, very long curled skin tails. Holes had been cut in the backs of their football shorts to accommodate the prehensile tails. Some wore theirs coiled around their legs. The women favoured looping theirs over their arms. The children bound themselves close to their mother’s with their tails.

  Tree people. Monkey people. A hundred childhood racist clichés bubbled up in Gaby’s mind. She tried to prick them with reason. Changed. Ways of being human. Old prejudices burst hard.

  They had appointed the man who spoke English as the head of their small tribe. The changes had left enough of his face to identify him as Masai.

  ‘Dr Daniel Oloitip.’ He exchanged greetings with Dr Dan in Masai. ‘You are my Assembly Member. My elected representative. I voted for you in the last election. I am very glad to see you here, but I am wondering—we are all wondering—what are you going to do about us? When are you going to set us free?’

  ‘Soon,’ Dr Dan said. He looked at Russel Shuler before continuing. ‘Soon you will all be set free from here, to go back to your people, your families, your homes.’

  The man laughed. It was the contemptuous laugh of the proud Masai.

  ‘My family will not know me, my people will not accept me, my home has been taken away by the Chaga. So we must go to the Chaga. That is freedom for us. Where else is there?’

  Peter Werther took the Commissioners by another sphincter-door into the main corridor, and from there into a new Chaga chamber. This was the smallest of the rooms Peter Werther had excavated from the underpinnings of Unit 12. It was just big enough to take the ghost of a house. Gaby could think of no other likeness. The memory of a house, fleshed out of Chaga-stuff. Ghost walls of foam. Ghost floors of yielding sponge. Ghost windows of translucent yellow gauze that rippled in the air currents that blew through this underworld. Ghost door of hanging moss. Ghost curtains of creeper, ghost lights of bioluminescent bulbs. Ghost furnishings: chairs, tables, beds, grown from soft green coral.

  And in the middle of the green ghost of a house sat the angel of media. This angel was a white woman, wearing a white sleeveless vest and red and purple Chaga-camouflage pants, kneeling on a meditation stool grown from the floor. Her wings were spread wide. They touched the soft walls of the ghost room. They were not feathered like the wings of Jehovah’s angels; these were sheets of iridescent gossamer, like a dragonfly’s wings, and they were full of faces. Faces of movie personalities. Faces of media celebrities. Faces of sports stars. Faces of actors in advertisements for Diet Coke and tampons. Faces of people from Africa and South America and the Pacific Rim and Europe. Faces of foreign correspondents and satellite news reporters. Gaby saw Jake Aarons’ face. Old photograph: sharp smile, sharper suit. Gaby saw her own face appear for a moment and fade into CNN’s European link man. Like the photograph in the badge she had left at the top of the ramp, her hair was long and shiny and beautiful. The angel wings flexed slowly, billowing in the media wind. The woman’s eyes were closed. Her chest rose and fell slowly, as if in contemplation. She had black, naturally curling hair that fell to her shoulders.

  She opened her eyes.

  ‘Well, lookee here,’ she said. She had a Dublin accent. You can take the girl out of Barrytown, but not Barrytown out of the girl.

  ‘Moon,’ Gaby McAslan breathed.

  The woman rose from her stool. Her wings folded and furled into a place
on her back Gaby could not see.

  ‘You are Gaby McAslan,’ Moon said. She sounded disappointed. ‘I know who you are. I’ve been watching you. Following you. I know all about you.’

  ‘I know who you are,’ Gaby said. ‘I’ve been following you, so long, so closely. I know all about you. This is how I know it.’ She held out the ruined Liberty print diary in its transparent, UNECTA-stamped sack. ‘T.P. sends his love.’

  49

  The October rains had come. From horizon to horizon the sky was a plane of grey cloud. The red dust of Kajiado had turned to watery mud. Gaby splashed barefoot through it to Dr Dan’s government Landcruiser. UNECTA had been unable to spare the women any footwear, but had lent them yellow plastic rain sheets. Gaby wrapped the camera with the last testament of Jake Aarons stored on its discs in hers. Moon draped hers over the thing on her back that the long lenses at the wire were not allowed to see. All the way up in the elevator, all the way through the legal wranglings in Reception, Gaby had stared in nauseated fascination at the thing that pulsed and glowed in the small of Moon’s back where she had cut the white vest top away.

  Once when she had been a kid, walking the dogs on the Point, she had come across the body of a drowned sheep that had washed up in a gully. It had been a long time in the sea; the wool had all fallen out, the body was swollen, lambent, eyes eaten out by crabs. It was not that it was that dead that had scared Gaby, it was that it looked so alien. She had come back, day after day to look at the rotting, disgusting, fascinating thing until the high tide took it out again.