Chaga

by Ian McDonald

  The thing on Moon’s back was dreadful and wonderful in the same way. Through the transparent flesh, Gaby could see how it clung to the woman with a hundred red millipede legs, pushing neural connectors into her spinal cord, alien as a drowned sheep, feeling its way into places no lover ever could. It was an ally with astonishing capabilities: the furled wings were sheets of organic circuitry powered by light. They carried Moon through the planetary telecommunications networks: they could receive hundreds of terrestrial and satellite channels simultaneously, decode them and filter selected information into her consciousness. Television dreaming.

  The two women got into the back seat, dripping on the upholstery. Gaby combed back her savaged hair with her fingers. It would grow. It would be right again. She had the pictures. They would make everything right again.

  ‘We go,’ Dr Dan said to Johnson Ambani, who doubled as driver. The government Landcruiser drove away from the olive monolith of Unit 12. Kenyan flags stirred damply on the wing pennons. A second Landcruiser fell in behind. In it were Lucius and the Wa-chagga woman. They had no place either in this nation, among these people. They were going south too, back to the Chaga. The Black Simbas had already been returned to Nairobi, except for Moran, who had been remanded in prison charged with Bushbaby’s murder. If convicted, he could be hanged. Gaby’s horror of ritual execution struggled with her anger at Bushbaby’s death. Nobody had needed to die.

  She hated the stupidity of killing. She hated the fragility of human lives. She hated death.

  The media was waiting outside the wire. Hundreds of them, waiting in the red mud and the rain. Cameras, boom mikes, long lenses. Some had stepladders pushed up against the wire. Dr Dan had played the ace of trumps. Vanish a black African HIV 4 victim and it is another entry in the WHO’s databases. Vanish a white female European television journalist and the news vans are ten deep on the football pitch on the other side of the road. Gaby grimaced as she remembered T.P.’s cardinal sin: she was the newsperson who had become the news. As the government cars approached a few cameras flashed. A stampede began toward the gate. Blue helmets opened the gate a crack and pushed through to hold the reporters back.

  ‘Keep driving,’ Dr Dan said. ‘Do not stop. If you run one down, I will vouch for you.’

  Johnson Ambani did his best to obey his client, but the reporters overwhelmed the blue helmets and poured in around the Landcruiser. Lenses were shoved against the windows. Flashes bounced round inside the car. Voices clamoured, hands thrust microphones and disc recorders. Ms McAslan, Dr Oloitip, who what do you when will you how did you can you will you? Gaby glimpsed a SkyNet logo in the wall of technology and Faraway head and shoulders above the press. T.P. She saw T.P. She pressed her palms to the glass and shouted his name. Johnson Ambani inched forward until he had enough space to floor the accelerator. A few diehards ran after the Landcruiser. They must be freelances, Gaby thought. The car bounced over the railroad tracks at speed and turned left onto the Namanga road. The second Landcruiser emerged from the scrimmage and followed.

  ‘Moon,’ Gaby said. Time and space were running out. ‘I need to know. The story the diary doesn’t tell. Your story, yours and Langrishe’s.’

  ‘You don’t stop, do you?’ Moon said. ‘Professional unto the last. You get the exclusive.’

  ‘This is for me, and me alone. I need to know how the story ends. You owe me this. I can guess some of the bits that were cut out of the diary, but I don’t know how it ended. I don’t know if you ever found Langrishe.’

  Moon looked at the rain falling on the high savannah for a time. She could not sit straight in the seat because of the thing on her back.

  ‘Yeah, I suppose I do owe you. Found Langrishe? I suppose so. Found something that used to be Dr Peter Langrishe.’

  ‘Changed.’

  Moon laughed.

  ‘Most definitely. But not like those poor bastards in Unit 12. It wasn’t disease-engendered. Like this thing of mine, it was something the forest grew. Up there in the Citadel, there are things like bodies in search of souls. And when they join, they join forever. Can you understand what I am telling you?’

  ‘Obi-men. Orthobodies. Langrishe went into one of those?’

  ‘This a story or an interview? Yes. He hid it from me at first, when he came to me out of the cloud forest up on the mountain. He would come to me by night, or hide himself in the fog; never let me see him too closely. Just the voice, ranting on and on about evolution, about how he had found the aliens, how the Chaga was their tool for expanding humanity into a truly galactic species. He was right, he had found his aliens; they were him. He was them.

  ‘He showed me what he had done to himself. He thought he was glorious. Magnificent. I saw an abomination. A travesty. The denial of all my love for him; that he would do such a thing so lightly, without thought for anything but himself. All I had ever been was a donkey to nod at his theories on “the alien”, and a pair of ever-open thighs. Do you know what it is like to be betrayed by the thing that is the sum purpose of your life?’

  I am learning, Gaby McAslan thought.

  ‘I wanted to run from the sad, sick thing, back to my world, my people, my life. But I couldn’t leave him, not like that. I still loved him. You can hate the sin but love the sinner. He was a monster, but many women have loved monsters. Monsters on the outside and monsters on the inside.

  ‘He wanted me to become like him. I wouldn’t do it. He used all the old emotional blackmails: we could share a deeper love in new bodies, he could not love me fully in my baseline form. New humanity, same old bitchy tricks. He had an orthobody prepared for me; showed it to me, did everything short of physical force to make me go into it. When I refused absolutely, he drifted away from me. He turned to others like him; I went to live among the Wa-chagga at Nanjara village. I needed human faces, human voices. But I needed Langrishe too—I couldn’t leave him. Everything that I had loved was still there, intact, enclosed in that alien body. What’s the psychologists’ term? Approach/avoidance conflict? So when the foragers went out from Nanjara into the high forest, I went with them, to meet with Langrishe.’

  ‘Why?’ Gaby asked.

  ‘The ones back at Unit 12 all asked that same question. To have sex with him,’ Moon said. ‘Sex was all we had left. He could walk out of the orthobody—the thing had him on an umbilicus. Twenty feet of freedom. Freedom enough for a fuck. And all the ones at Unit 12 had that same disgusted expression, darlin’.

  ‘Then he trapped me. It was easy for him to do—the orthobody’s nervous system was an extension of the forest, he could manipulate the Chaga almost any way he wanted. That was how he had always been able to find me. We fucked, I slept like I always did afterwards, and the next thing I knew I woke in some Citadel wall bolt-hole bare-ass naked, completely hairless, two months of my life erased and something not at all nice hooked into the base of my spine.

  ‘He had the audacity to be furious. It was not what he planned for me. The Chaga had subverted him, diverted me away from the orthobody into which he had schemed to implant me. I knew then that I had been catastrophically wrong, so wrong I could not see how wrong I was. There was nothing left of Langrishe inside that atrocity, except obsession. That was all there had ever been, the need to sacrifice everything, even me, to his lust for the alien.

  ‘I knew I had to escape from the Chaga entirely; he would always be able to find me, defeat me, bring me to him. In time he would change my body as he wished. A hunting party from Kamwanga found me at the foot of the Citadel. I persuaded them to take me to Nanjara where I knew the people. I needed supplies, yes, but I needed evidence even more. I needed the diary. From Nanjara, the foraging party took me outward: they were headed to a meeting with a Tactical safari squad, for an extra cut on the deal, they could smuggle me through the UN military cordon around terminum. They didn’t understand that I wanted to be found by the military. I wanted to be taken to a UNECTA base. I wanted to be debriefed on what was going on up there in the Citadel. I
wanted them to read my diary, then see the evidence growing in the middle of my back and cut it off me with scalpels.

  ‘I left them before the rendezvous point, made my own way to terminum and through to the outside world. Of course, I got spotted and picked up by an airborne patrol. They took me to Ol Tukai, the base where Langrishe had worked. While I was bound up with his new incarnation up on the mountain, it had found itself a set of tracks, got up on them and gone mobile. I gave them the diary. I told them the things I had seen in the heart of the Chaga. I showed them the thing on my back. They did tests. They did scans. They drafted reports and told me that the thing was unlike any other living organism they had ever encountered and that it would be an offence against science to do what I wanted and cut it out of me. There was a medical facility they wanted to send me to, where there were scientists who would look into the thing more closely and see if there was any way of removing it without killing it and leaving me hemiplegic.’

  Moon laughed again.

  The Landcruiser had stopped at an army checkpoint. Johnson Ambani sighed and took the last piece of paper from his briefcase and gave it to a barely deferential soldier, dripping and miserable. He had North African looks, bored and bad-tempered in October rains. The soldier saluted and told Johnson Ambani how far south he could safely drive.

  The government car moved on, toward terminum.

  ‘You had to get away from Langrishe, but now you have to go back,’ Gaby said. ‘After all that he did to you, after all he would do to you.’

  ‘Not any more,’ Moon said. ‘I learned things about myself in Unit 12. It’s very good for that. They give you a lot of time for self-discovery. Years of it. About all there is to do, self-discovery. I learned to love this thing on my back. I have to. It’s not me, but it’s part of me. Like an eternal pregnancy: a piece of something separate but intimately connected; something that needs me. Like Langrishe needs me. That was why he wanted to change me: so that he would not have to make his journey into what he is becoming alone. It scares him; I realized that, down in Unit 12. He isn’t sure he can cope with what he is being made into. He needs me, he needs the solidity of a love that doesn’t have to be exactly as he is, but will walk with him wherever he goes. He needs me to anchor his humanity, to tell him he is still human, still capable of being loved.’

  ‘And do you love him?’ Gaby asked.

  The Landcruiser crunched on to the stony verge. The road here ran in a long straight slope, down into the valley of a seasonal river now boiling in spate. On the far side it climbed as long and as straight up to the top of valley. Half-way up that road lay terminum.

  The second government car pulled in on the opposite verge. Lucius and the Wa-chagga woman got out and stood in the rain. Sheets of water streamed down the cracked blacktop. The river was red with eroded earth.

  ‘Thank you,’ Moon said to Dr Daniel Oloitip. ‘I will always remember this.’ They shook hands over the back of the seat.

  ‘No doubt we will meet again some day,’ Dr Dan said. ‘The future seems to insist on it.’

  Moon and Gaby got out of the car. Gaby held out the diary to her. Rain drops crackled on the plastic seal. Moon closed Gaby’s hand on the book and pushed it against her chest.

  ‘Give it back to T.P. I promised him I would get it back to him. I don’t need it any more. A new story’s starting; what happens, how it unfolds, is for no one but me to say.’ Moon peeled off the UNECTA plastic rain cape and let it fall to the ground. Rain plastered her thin vest to her shoulders and breasts.

  The Wa-chagga had given their thanks and farewells and were half-way to the bridge. Moon sighed, lifted a hand in farewell and followed. Gaby watched her walk down to the river. She had gone a few yards when she paused, as if struck by an afterthought, and turned.

  ‘Tell T.P. I’m sorry. He’s lost out again. He can give up on me now,’ she shouted. The grey rain streamed down her face. ‘Gaby McAslan. Even if we had known each other longer, we wouldn’t have been friends, I think.’

  ‘You’re probably right,’ Gaby shouted back. But she watched the woman go down to the bridge and wade through the red flood waters and climb the long straight slope on the far side into terminum where Gaby could not see her any more.

  50

  T.P. Costello stopped the big SkyNet 4×4 outside the ugly house in the university district. It was late, dark. Even the reporters had gone home. Gaby could not see any house lights, but the Mahindra was in the drive beside her Landcruiser.

  ‘Go on. You need sleep. The edit can wait.’

  ‘Don’t want to,’ Gaby said. ‘He’ll be there.’

  ‘You have to face him some time.’

  ‘When I can look at a chair on castors without wanting to throw up or knife someone, that’s time.’

  ‘That bad.’

  ‘Worse. He left me there, T.P. He left me to fucking rot.’

  ‘Soonest done, best mended.’

  ‘That’s a load of fucking shite, and you know it, Thomas Pronsias Costello.’

  T.P. rested his wrists on top of the steering wheel and pursed his lips. Gaby knew that it was not because she had affronted him. He was trying to find a way for him to go into that house with her and face whatever must be faced. You stand by your friends, Gaby thought. You do not leave them in hell when it is in your power to save them. But this is not your fight, now. This is mine alone.

  ‘Why the hell couldn’t Jake tell me he had HIV 4?’ T.P. said after a silence.

  ‘Because you can’t stop yourself picking up others’ shit,’ Gaby said gently. ‘You did it with Moon, and she still left you. You just go on martyring yourself for people you care about.’

  ‘Ugly little habit. It’s a crashing cliché, but I can’t really believe he’s gone.’

  ‘He’s not dead,’ Gaby said.

  ‘I know that. Not dead but translated? Transfigured? What’s the religious expression? But it is death, of a kind. The Chaga, I mean. It’s there, it can’t be stopped, it draws closer every second of every day, it’s the end of all we recognize and understand. We can look at it and contemplate it when it’s far away, but when it starts to creep up on our lives and homes and work, when it starts to take things that mean something to us, it scares the living shit out of us. Go, get out of here. If the hacks come back and give you grief, call me. I know a policemen or two who owe me more than they owe anyone else.’

  ‘T.P.’ She held out the Moon diary to him. ‘She said I should give it back to you.’

  ‘Hell no. Complete the circle? I wouldn’t give her the satisfaction. I don’t want the fucking thing. You take it. Do what you like with it. Shred it. Burn it. Wipe your ass on it. Gaby!’ She had been about to slam the door. ‘One thing. Go easy on Shepard. He’s only a man.’

  The electronic lock yielded to her touch. She went into the dark living room and set the diary on the coffee table. She went back into the hall and up the stairs. The bedroom was dark.

  ‘Shepard?’ she said into the darkness. ‘I want to talk to you.’ No answer. He must be hiding from her up in Zaire or down in Tsavo. That would be good. A night, a day or two all on her own to get a perspective on what she felt, then she could see him without wanting to tear his eyes out. She went downstairs again to make herself a drink. She flicked on the living room light.

  Shepard was sitting in the ugly low-backed leather armchair. His feet were flat on the floor. His hands were flat on the arm rests.

  ‘Christ!’

  ‘Gaby.’

  Surprise became shock became anger, vomiting upwards like black bile. She could not stop it. She did not want to.

  ‘You fucker,’ she said. ‘Do you know what I have been through? Do you know what they did to me? Of course you know. You’re all in it together. You’re all one big happy family. UNECTA looks after its own, doesn’t it? Like the fucking Masons; huddling together, keeping your little fucking secrets from nasty, nosy bitches. Well, it’s out now. You thought you could keep it all quiet, keep tha
t nasty, nosy bitch locked away where no one could ever hear her. Do you know what they did to me down there? They fed me drugs. They turned my head inside out; then they strapped me into a chair and fist-fucked me. Did you laugh when they told you? Did you tell them it was no more than the bitch deserved? Do her good? Because I sure as hell didn’t see you breaking your balls to bust me out of there, Shepard. You let them have me. You let them do it all to me. You would have let me rot in there. So why didn’t you do anything? Cost you your Peripatetic Executiveship? The red-haired bitch an embarrassment to you now? Was that what they told you? On your way up the ladder, make sure you lose the Irish bit? Asks too many favours. Asking too big a favour, was it, for the man who purports to love her, to stop his good buddies ramming their rubber-gloved hands up the place he used to ram himself? Or did they beg you for a piece of the action too?

  ‘OK, OK. Maybe you had an excuse. Maybe it wasn’t that you wouldn’t; you couldn’t. Maybe you were over in Zaire or the Mountains of the fucking Moon and you only found out when you got back and the whole thing was blown. But you still lied to me. You deceived me. You made me think I could trust you, and then, like every other man, every other fucking man I have ever known, you betrayed me.’

  Gaby picked up the diary from the coffee table. Seeing him sitting there, immobile, emotionless, she wanted to smash that passionless face with it until blood flowed and bone cracked or he made some acknowledgement of her fury.

  ‘Give it to me just as you found it? The fuck you did. I know, Shepard. The dumb Irish girlie worked it out. So what did you do with the missing pages? Stuffed them into some little trinket box under the floorboards, in case this scene ever happened and you needed them to placate the Valkyrie? Or did you actually have the balls to burn them? No. No.’ She strode across the room and back. She stabbed at him with an accusing finger. ‘You wouldn’t do that. Couldn’t do that. Not Mr UNECTA Shepard. Those pages are filed neatly away somewhere, in case UNECTA ever needs them. Jesus, you gutless bastard. Did you think I wouldn’t work it out? Do you think that little of me? Or were you just blinded by this?’ She grabbed her crotch, pumped it savagely back and forth. ‘You lied to me. OK. Men do that. I should have learned by now. My fault for being naive and hopeful and expecting too much of five inches of erectile tissue. But what makes you an unforgivable bastard is that you thought I was a whore. You thought if you gave me this,’ she held up the diary, ‘I’d give you this.’ She rubbed her hand between her thighs. ‘And you kept paying and getting what you thought was your for-value-received, until one day the market bulled and the price got too high and you let the whore go. Isn’t that it? Of course it is, that’s why you aren’t saying anything. That’s why you won’t look at me. Because you’re scared. Because I’m right. Because you can’t face the truth. Well, come on, Shepard. Say something. Let’s hear it. Or am I not even worth a pathetic, half-hearted excuse? Come on, Shepard. I’m waiting. What have you to say to me?’