Chaga

by Ian McDonald

  He shook his head, and started to pull chin-ups on the shower rail.

  On the television news, the anchorman reported that the Swarm’s new position fifteen thousand kilometres behind the BDO and inactive status were now confirmed. ETTEO was now one hundred and twenty-two hours twenty-seven minutes.

  They ate that night at the Starview Lodge, because the food was great and undersubscribed and there was no better place to watch the Ursula K. Le Guin come down out of orbit. The space-junkies were soft people and gave Aaron a place right at the rail. As they watched the landing lights come on block by block, Shepard said, ‘I’m sorry about the Unit 12 thing, Gaby. I did my best.’

  ‘I know. T.P. told me that you’d leaked it to Dr Dan. You didn’t have to resign for me, though. It scared me. Shepard; that’s why I was so insane that night. For the first time, I was utterly helpless. I couldn’t do anything to stop them. I was disappeared. I was annihilated. I was an un-person. Nothing. It was like being dead, Shepard.’

  The spectators all began to cheer as they caught sight of the black delta of the orbiter in the clear yellow evening sky that had come behind the storm.

  She knew that would be the last evening. They called him at midnight for the pre-flight medicals, tests, briefings. Gaby and Aaron said all the goodbyes they needed to say in the hotel lobby. The mission co-ordinator was getting ratty because they were taking so long to say them.

  ‘Mind Aaron.’

  ‘Aaron can mind himself.’

  ‘I never asked; where do you go after AEO?’

  ‘Back to Tanzania. T.P. Costello has talked UNECTA into taking me on one of your deep patrols. I’m going in to see these Ten Thousand Tribes, meet the people of the future, get their faces on television.’

  ‘I’ll be in touch when I get back.’

  ‘And how long will that be?’

  Shepard shrugged. ‘Ask the Evolvers. But when I do, I’d really like to see Ireland with you; the places you talk about; the Watchhouse, the Point, and your people too.’

  ‘Go with God, speed-skater.’

  ‘I’ll write.’

  ‘Ha ha.’

  ‘Watch me.’

  The minibus door slammed.

  Gaby and Aaron ate and drank and talked in the hotel bar until they could see dawn streak the sky outside the glass lobby. There was no Heineken, but Gaby reckoned Aaron would be all right on Miller. It was the right kind of drink for a kid whose father was about to rendezvous with an alien artifact. They found some time just before dawn that they got on fine for a son and a lover.

  In the morning they talked with Shepard in the White Room on a videophone. Both agreed that he looked petrified. They did not repeat the farewells of the night before. Farewells did not carry over videophone, and anyway, to them he had already left the planet.

  Shepard had got them complimentary passes to the Executive Viewing Area inside the Space Centre. Gaby fought with a NASA official about access for Aaron’s wheelchair and intimidated him into giving them seats next to the Presidential box, which today was occupied by Ellen Prochnow. Gaby noted this, and also the neat NASA binoculars everyone was given. She wondered how many pairs they expected to get back.

  It was a good day for a launch, hot and clear. High pressure had come in on the tail of Hilary. Some pools of rainwater still stood on the grass beside the taxiway but the main strip had been dried during the night by special vehicles. Heat haze boiled off the concrete. The HORUS was a dark, predatory shadow, as improbably elongated as a hunting insect, moving within the shiver of the haze. It glided from the big hangar, along the taxiways to the end of the main runway and turned.

  At T minus sixty seconds on the big count-down display, the tractor unit disengaged and dashed like a photophobic beetle for its blast-proof bunker. The digits clicked down on the big counter. Everyone resisted the temptation to count along with the final five. This was not New Year. The clock reached zero.

  A mile and a half down the runway, nothing happened in response to this.

  Then Gaby screamed because it seemed to her as if the spaceship had exploded in a ball of smoke and flame. Then she saw a black shape hurtling out of the fire towards her. The tricks of the heat haze were dispelled. It was big. It was fast. It was riding on a tail of fire, coming right at her. Gaby’s heart leaped as the carrier body passed in front of the stand and, quite unexpectedly, quite improbably, quite magically, lifted into the air.

  The noise was louder than anything she had ever heard in her life. She could scream her head off and no would know. She did. She watched, roaring in exuberance, the launcher go up, and keep going up, in a beautiful asymptotic curve, the HORUS orbiter clinging to its back like a thrilled child. The smoke blew away on the wind from the south, but the space ship kept climbing, over the artificial peninsula of the launch runway, over the tide water waders and the gulls and the big crabs, over the space-freaks and the rocket-fetishists down in Trailer Park, over the day-trippers in the jolly boats, over the green water of the Gulf Stream, still climbing. Nothing could bring it down now.

  ‘Ten miles out, fifty thousand feet,’ said the fat, bearded man with the ugly hat in the T-shirt with Fort Lauderdale in ’10 on it.

  ‘Carrier body separation in mark twelve minutes,’ said the other fat bearded man, with the equally ugly hat and the T-shirt with the old-style shuttle on the front.

  In the executive viewing stand the people who had seen all this before were leaving for their corporate hospitality suites, but Gaby McAslan’s face was still turned to the sky. She watched the brilliant speck of the rocket exhaust until it disappeared into the high blue.

  ‘Fucking hell!’ she shouted to Aaron. ‘Bloody fucking hell! Wasn’t that the greatest thing you ever saw?’

  ‘Are you crying?’ Aaron asked.

  ‘Of course I am,’ Gaby said. Then she saw Ellen Prochnow gather her entourage around her and head to the door of the presidential box. Fumbling in her handbag, Gaby ran along the row of seats, tried to get over the low partition wall.

  ‘Hey! Excuse me! Ms Prochnow! Could you spare me a wee minute of your time?’

  The Tree Where Man Was Born

  66

  Hi Gab.

  I said I’d write.

  I’m sorry my face is so puffy—you’re going to be seeing a lot of it; there isn’t much to look at in this little confession booth they call the Personal Communications Space—that’s freefall for you. Everyone ends up looking like a Bond villain. Three hundred Ernst Stavro Blofelds, hurtling round in their mad space station eight hundred miles above the Earth.

  This is Space, Day One. If I shift the camera a little, there, can you see it? Mother Earth, up there above us. That’s the orientation I seem to have chosen. Most others orient themselves the other way up; feet down toward the Earth. I’m probably heading for vertigo and even more nausea than I’m feeling right now: everything you eat sits right on the bottom of your oesophagus and won’t shift. Also, everyone else is metric and this down-home hayseed is still in yards and miles. I’m trying to adjust, but I just can’t feel a kilometre.

  See that? There goes Baja California. It’s always Baja California, isn’t it? I could watch the planet turn above me all day, which is why they limit you to ten minutes in here. It’s a major recreation, Earth-watching. They’ve got a fully-equipped Gaiaist contemplarium out in number two hydroponics tube. Hover in lotus, listen to whale song and watch the great green mother of us all spin before you. A Jodo Tendai chanting group time-shares it with a freefall yoga class. I promised myself before I left that I would not turn into one of these astronaut-mystics who find being beyond the envelope of atmosphere and gravity a religious revelation, but it would be very easy to succumb to a Zen state of disconnectedness with worldly things. Never could manage lotus, though. Something wrong with my left shin.

  What you once told me about airline booking computers is doubly true for space shuttles. They put me next to a cetologist—God knows why they think they need a whal
e expert at the BDO; I suppose they want to cover every possibility—who was even more shit-scared than me but was damned if he was going to show it. He talked all the way through the pre-launch checks about how mutations were appearing in the whale populations that had responded to the Foa Mulaku call and that this was clear evidence that the cetaceans were at least as intelligent and worthy of species-vastening as humanity. When they actually lit the engines, he put his hands over his head and yelled all the way up to carrier body separation. His exact words to me were, ‘Well, that was more fun than Magic Mountain.’ I don’t think he meant the Thomas Mann novel.

  The real story, according to Shepard. It was like being strapped into a windowless tube that suddenly accelerates and doesn’t stop and all those things they teach you about puffing your breath and not fully collapsing your lungs and pulling your belly muscles and tightening your sphincters all go straight out of your head because you cannot see where you are going, you have no idea where you are, you don’t have a clue what the hell is happening and you want it to be over like you’ve never wanted anything else to be over but at the same time you don’t because what happens next may well be worse. It seems like forever until carrier body separation, and that is like the bottom falling out of an express elevator leaving you clinging to the walls. The gees drop off a little, so it’s only a linebacker sitting on your chest and not a sumo wrestler, but that’s worse, because you feel underpowered, that you don’t have the speed to make it, that at any minute this blacked-out bus on wings is going to fall out of the sky.

  And that’s exactly what it does. The words ‘throttle back’ do not appear in the HORUS pilot manuals. They give it full thrust until they’ve burned every drop of fuel in the tanks, and then they switch to glide. You go from multi-gees through HESO to freefall. Emphasis here is on the word ‘fall’. Everyone screamed. We all thought the engines had failed and we were plummeting to earth. Burn and crash. Quite a lot of barfing. Some had already shat themselves in fear when Clarkie launched. You’re sitting strapped into your seat trying to dodge globes of floating puke with the place smelling like a sewage pit and the pilot tells you that Arthur C. Clarke has achieved earth orbit and is moving into a transfer trajectory that will bring it to Space Station Unity in forty-nine minutes.

  They say it’s worse going back down.

  You’d think that at however many billion these things are apiece, it wouldn’t burn the budget to put in a few windows.

  Got to go now. Next soul due for video-confession. I love you, Gaby. I miss you and Aaron like hell and it’s only nineteen hours. It’s a real temptation to touch the screen and ask you to touch it back and pathetic saccharine stuff like that. More tomorrow. See ya.

  Space, Day Two.

  Ernst Stavro Blofeld here.

  The beautiful spiral of cloud above my left shoulder is Tropical Storm Hilary, spinning off across the Atlantic in the general direction of Ireland. It’s rapidly filling, so our weather watchers say; the far south-west should get a couple of inches of rain and a few tiles off the roof. You’re from the north-east, isn’t that right?

  Space, I am discovering, is like camp. You don’t sleep enough, you don’t eat right, you don’t wash, you feel tired and puffy and constantly wondering where the hell you are. The cocoon bag they give you to sleep in is comfortable enough—weird, weird dreams, Gaby, I didn’t know I had them in me—and would be positively cosy for two, but two minutes after you tumble out, someone else tumbles in. We’re so overcrowded we’re running a hot-bagging system. Three shifts of eight hours in the sack. I hope the woman before me doesn’t have any nasty little habits for me to discover. Likewise, I hope I don’t leave any for the guy who comes after me.

  It’s bad enough that everything looks stupid in freefall—eating, sleeping, talking, excreting, exercising with those dumb rubber bands, but in Unity it’s stupidity at close range. Intimacy is a necessity, privacy an inconvenient aberration. Going to the bath room; not only can you hear every grunt and groan and ah! but everyone has his or her own personal coloured nozzle for the cock-sucker, as we guys call it, and God help you if you use someone else’s. This is much worse than using another person’s toothbrush. There have been serious fights, I hear. Everything and everyone is in your face all the time. I’m surprised there are any faces left uneaten.

  There’s a guy, he’s been here about a month longer than me, a Team Red boy; he has a Grateful Dead disc he just has to play at full volume at every possible occasion. Winning converts to the One True Music, he says. One True Music up his ass, if I get the chance. I’ll have to wait in line, there are fifty others want to throw him out the airlock, no questions asked, or, if they can’t get him, his disc will do. In space, no one can hear the Dead.

  The Japanese team members cope with this best. I suppose all their lives are lived so close to others they want to bite faces off, but etiquette forbids.

  Unity is strange, in that it’s a place with an inside but no outside. You don’t see anything as you go through the pressure link from the HORUS; it’s just a big tube after a tiny tube after a middling size tube. We could as easily be at the bottom of the sea, or the centre of the earth, as eight hundred miles up in space. It’s a hard place to envision whole—you get a much better idea from the television, where it looks mightily impressive, this mile-and-a-half tangle of construction beams, solar panels, tanks, environment modules. From the inside it’s the odd boom, or a bit of a solar array, or a manufacturing core glimpsed from a tiny window. It’s very easy to get lost in; the passages seem to move around and reconnect while you’re not looking. There is a grain of truth in this, every shift you wake up to find the engineers have bolted on a new section or opened a lock into a pressure body you never knew existed. Ironic, that it takes the advent of the BDO to push space exploration into a renaissance. This place, the HORUS shuttles, High Steel, the intra-orbit tugs; these would have been intolerable budget leeches fifteen years ago. We could go to Mars right now, if we didn’t have more interesting places to go. The BDO giveth us our reason to go into space, and it taketh away.

  Someone’s coughing politely outside. One last impression, which was actually a first impression. On arriving at Unity, the first thing that hits you. It smells of fart. Three hundred people in a space designed to take one hundred and seventy-five at a pinch, an overstrained air-conditioning system and all that high-protein, high-carbohydrate food? Someone’s dropping one every second of the day—you are not going to believe this, but over in Hydroponics One they hold see-who-can-fart-themselves-the-furthest contests. Fart, feet and piss. They never tell you this on the television.

  More tomorrow. Love you.

  It’s me again, Gaby. It’s Unity. Day Three.

  I’m just back from a BDO-watching party down in Remote Sensing. Direct feed from Hubble and our own, smaller, observatory. The orbital telescopes can achieve such fine detail you can see Gaia’s shadow passing over the bright end, like a flea on Mount Rushmore. It brings home what a big mother that thing out there really is. We can see the mountains on the outer skin, watch the shadows lengthen and shrink as the object spins away from the sun. What’s most amazing is the sense of colour. This thing makes Jupiter look dowdy. Bright as a beer can thrown into space.

  I’m not afraid of it. It won’t send plagues of destroying angels across the earth, or open its vial of plagues, or smash the planet apart into crumbs. It’s come here for us. For humans. And while this gift from the powers in the sky draws ever closer, we cling to the walls of our little cocoon, hairless apes squabbling about the Grateful Dead and who’s doing it with whom, and when, and where, and in what position, and who’s using whose pissing-tube. I find this tremendously reassuring. The Evolvers have come eight hundred light years to learn the concept of irony. It only took us Americans two and a half centuries.

  There’s a cunning caste system in operation up here. It’s based on the length of your stubble. The smoother your pate, the lower down the order you peck. Top of
the tree are the Swedes, with about three or four weeks of growth all over. It’s pernicious; I found myself acting like an old sea-dog, handing out unhelpful tips and scornful looks to the virgins up off the Jules Verne and the ESA HOTOL that docked yesterday, keeping to myself anything that might be useful or important. It’ll end in hazing rituals. I hope not to be around for that. Herd instinct and team-bonding are survival tactics in as extreme an environment as this. Space stations and jails. Even within groups, it’s shape up or ship out. I get waves of hostility from the rest of Team Green because I refuse to adopt the same spatial orientation as them in group exercises. My ‘up there’ is their ‘down here’ and vice versa. Unity Thought Police. This beef will get back to them, and I’ll be in real grief. The grapevine up here violates Special and General relativity.

  There’s another kind of caste division, more deeply rooted, and that’s between Spacers and Passengers. Spacers are the crew of Unity, its construction workers, system engineers, tug and shuttle pilots, anyone who works with space as their raw material. The rest of us are Passengers. Grunts. Breathing their hard-worked-for air, pissing out their expensively recycled water, leaving our skin flakes floating in their pods and passages. They swing through the tubes like you’re not there, push in front of you when you’re in the line for the food dispenser or the John, talk over you when you are trying to record a private letter, pull you up on any one of a hundred imaginary violations of space routine that of course threaten the lives of every soul aboard, and are complete militarist Nazis who are jealous because all they do is drive the taxi, we’re the ones who get to see the show.

  There’s a place I’ve discovered—I won’t call it private, because nothing is in this shell of fools—but it’s undercrowded, and it has a window on the docking area. There is a lot of free time when you’re a Passenger. With mine, I like to watch spaceships. Didn’t your friend Oksana once tell you that time spent watching airplanes is time exceedingly well spent? That goes double for space craft. There is seldom an hour that you don’t find something moored to the docking unit. Mostly they’re those brutal little SSTO robot freighters—our lifeline to the mother world, without which we really would be eating each other’s faces. I watch for the HORUSes and HOTOLs as they come out of the atmosphere blur at the edge of the world. They’re beautiful things. They seem to fly on space, surf on it, like the old Silver Surfer; that it happens in absolute silence and the slowness of Zen drama makes it all the more beautiful. To me, the tugs are the most interesting. Nothing to look at, except, I suppose, a certain fitness-for-purpose aesthetic in the ungainly agglomerations of engines, tanks, construction beams and heavy grappling arms. What fascinates me is that they’re deep space creatures. The space planes, the freighters, they’re Earth things, their job is purely to get through that layer of air. The tugs could never exist in gravity and atmosphere; they are absolutely designed for space. They interest me primarily because in a very short time I’m going to know one—or rather, the environment pods they pick up—a whole lot more intimately. They’re moving us out. Teams Yellow and Green are being rotated up to High Steel. We leave tomorrow at twenty-thirty, in two pods. I’m in the second ship. I may not have time to talk to you tomorrow—there’s quite a lot of prepping needs to be done before the flight, you spend the fifteen hours muffled up in an air bag and they reckon it’s best to knock you out for it. So it’s likely the next time I’m talking to you will be from High Steel.