Chaga

by Ian McDonald

  By the way, I’ve been using your name as a blunt instrument to ward off undesired advances—I’ve had several, with a lot of spare time and free fall to experiment with, what do you expect?—and it seems opinion is divided whether you’re Christ or anti-Christ over the Ellen Prochnow thing. Paranoia breeds like thrush bacteria up here, no one believes her denials, but at the same time, no one wants to be checking their neighbours’ scalps for 666s or McDonnel Douglas Aviation. So we are a pretty congeries of mistrusts. Don’t worry, I’m not going accept any of the offers I’ve been given.

  Shit. Well over time. Love. Bye.

  Hi Gaby. It’s Day Five and this is High Steel.

  Another white plastic interior, with a rectangle of stars over the left shoulder. Space travel is very disappointing. You go from one white plastic tube to another, where you get gently pushed and shoved around a little, and then a timeless time later you are taken out of this tube and put into one exactly identical. Absolutely no sense of going any place. Thank God they knock you out. K-Mart Economy space-suits, air-bags. They’ll keep you alive in case the pod depressurizes or the tug lets go of it, and if the end gets torn off and you spill into space, they’ll broadcast distress calls so, theoretically, someone can come and pick you up. Though what they pick up after days in an inflatable mummy floating through space is one for the psychiatrists. If you die in space, where do you go? Nasty, nasty little thoughts like this creep into your head and will not creep out again.

  It’s a bad sign that after Unity, the first thing you notice about High Steel is the stink. Twelve accommodation modules, a mile of solar panelling arrays, an engineering plant and an APR on a boom, half-way to the moon. The Earth is frighteningly small and distant. It looks like a planet now, and that is not comfortable. The Moon is frighteningly big and close. It looks like a planet too. Biggest, closest and most frightening of all is the BDO. It looks like the fucking end of the world.

  BDO before me, Chaga below me. I can see Africa from here. Clouds cover much of the equatorial regions, I can see the path of the monsoon, curling up from Madagascar, across the Indian Ocean, beyond the horizon. Through breaks in the cloud I can see the outlines of the Chagas scattered across the continent; circles and clusters of circles, merging together. I can see you, Gaby. How are you, down there in Tanzania? Up here in my bubble of air and stink and plastic, I feel old, fragile, and scared.

  The main frame is shaking again. The tug engines must be firing. High Steel is being moved into a station-keeping orbit, ten miles above the bright end of the Big Dumb Object. From that distance it will look bigger than the Earth does from Unity. I am going to have to get my spatial orientation sorted out by AEO: hovering above, or floating in front of a three-hundred-kilometre-long cylinder should be psychologically survivable. What is not is to imagine that it is poised over you like the hammer of God.

  There is another link between you and me, Gaby, apart from visions of Africa. There are Changed up here: the freefall adaptations with four hands. They are incredible; I feel like a brick in an aquarium next to them. This is how the future is going to look? That’s scary too. There are four of them, three are South Americans, but one is the boy you found in Unit 12; Juma. I knew about him, Gaby. I knew about all of them; Peter Werther, the Moon woman. I lied to you. I’m sorry, I had no other choice. And you were right—funny how you can remember every word and nuance of the worst days of your life—I did give you that diary to get you into bed, and I regretted it the moment I had done it, because I knew you would pry into the mystery of the disappeared pages. It wasn’t until long after you left that I realized that I had done the right thing for the wrong reasons. The diary had led you to bust Unit 12 wide open, and reveal all its paranoid little secrets that I wanted to but could never disclose. Rather late for self-justification, you would say.

  I’m sorry I sound a little melancholy on this instalment; everyone is a bit down, nervous, tense, expectant. The BDO is sixteen hours from AEO and here we are, sitting in our tin can far above the Earth, realizing how pitifully unprepared we are. And I feel far from home. I miss gravity. I miss water. I miss air, and wind. I miss you. I miss Aaron. I’m not sure the BDO compensates for all this missing, but the next time I talk to you, it’ll be here.

  Day Six, Gaby. It’s here.

  AEO was two hours fifty minutes ago. You’ve seen the pictures. Everyone on the planet has seen the pictures. This is how it felt to be there.

  When you sized me up and seduced me with your question-and-answer that time in the Mara, you told me I was a thing of earth and plains and big skies and empty lands with not a lot of room left for God. Pretty astute, Gaby. Religion has never played a great part in my life. But the BDO was the closest I have ever come to a genuine religious experience. I told you I wouldn’t get mystical on you. I’m not. It was genuine awe of a God with real muscle and a hell of an FX budget.

  That tense, depressed feeling I told you about last time deepened as ETTEO decreased. High Steel hit its orbit first; we had seven hours of looking out at that thing coming down our throats. Half an hour before AEO we just quit whatever job we were meant to be doing and found someone to be with. You need someone to hold you when the sky falls. What little apes we are, clinging to each other in our tin can. I was with a woman called Clarissa from Team Yellow. We found a window, wedged ourselves into it, and just held each other and watched the thing keep coming. That’s what the pictures can’t convey, Gaby. It kept coming, and coming, and fucking coming, and you think, that’s got to be all of it, but it still kept coming. Floating there in twelve accommodation modules, a couple of solar sails, an air plant and three tugs, you felt like it was going to swat High Steel like a mosquito. What I said about the launch from Kennedy, that was nothing, Gaby. That was fear of something; that you are going to die. This was existential terror, the fear of you don’t know what could happen. People were praying, Gab. Some were crying, in fear, awe, love. Tears float in zero gee. I gripped Clarissa so hard I left bruises.

  And then I felt High Steel move. You’ve heard the theorists, that it got caught in a gravitational eddy from the mass-momentum drive as the BDO stabilized its orbit. What it felt like, Gaby, was every part of everything around you, and every part of yourself, down to the atoms, held by something and gently but firmly pulled. Like falling, with nothing to hold on to, except the human body next to you.

  I’m not asking your forgiveness for this, Gaby. You would do the same with the first human body that floated by.

  I thought we were coming apart; all that was happening was High Steel was being dragged into an orbit in line with the BDO’s axis and spun up to match its rotation. We’re turning in time with the BDO.

  So: the arrival of the BDO. What did it feel like? It felt like God had come. In every sense of the word, polite and impolite. The fearful depression that gripped us during the orbital approach has been burned away by a sense of quasi-spiritual euphoria and activity. We’re here, we’re alive, we’ve got holy work to do. It’s almost as if the BDO approves of us. We’re learning to live with the thing ten miles off the starboard bow. The way to look at it is that it’s a new moon for Earth. Isn’t that a gorgeous thought? Two moons rising. From High Steel you can’t see that it’s a cylinder, and by a trick of spatial perspective you can push it away from you so that it becomes a world far below you, and the mottlings and patterns on the facing end are continents and oceans.

  What they really are is Chaga. Vacuum-adapted Chaga, carpeting the hills and valleys of the forward end and cylinder sides. This close, you can make out individual details; some of the formations are thousand of feet high. They diminish in size toward the edge. In a way, I find this riot of alien life almost homely: I’ve spent much of my professional life looking out from high windows across vast discs of Chaga. It’s actually smaller than many of the longer-established terrestrial symbs—certainly much smaller than the Nyandarua-Kilimanjaro-Mount Elgon Chaga. That puts it into perspective.

  Our three
tugs are out mapping the exterior. Two are working the cylinder body—one has a specific mission to move along the windows and photograph as much information about the interior as possible but its view is largely obscured by clouds—and the third is hovering over the forward end, running full spectrum scans of the surface, probing for possible means of ingress. God, I am starting to sound like them. Good joke, though: it comes all this way and forgets to build a front door. I don’t think so, somehow. First Wave Team Red are out there in the tug pod, ready to go in if they find an entrance. Team Yellow is down in the airlock, preparing to en-pod for tug pick-up. We’re on Orange Alert, the call could come at any time. Horribly seductive, this style of talking.

  Hold on. What? Shit. Jesus Christ. All right. Sorry Gab. Got to go. Team Red just lucked out.

  No, Gaby. Your eyes deceive you not. Take a good look, Gaby, because nobody on the planet ever got a videogram like this. I could look at it all day, and day here lasts a week. Why didn’t they pack poets or writers or musicians on Operation Final Frontier, folk who could do justice to this place and not just measure it and analyse it and record it. I’ll put the camera up here so you can see the cylindrical land behind me. I really haven’t an awful lot of time; now we’re on the ground, there’s always something needs doing or reporting or observing. From Zen indolence to karoshi. But the Passengers are paying their fares now.

  The story so far. I got abruptly called away from my last note to you because Team Red out there over the forward end suddenly found a mile-wide section of spin axis opening up in front of them. It was the classic sci-fi cliché: ‘The door dilated.’ Like the aperture of a camera. After half an hour obtaining permission from Earth, they moved the tug into the opening. What they found inside, as you’ve doubtless seen on the television, was an airlock about three miles long—that’s what the cavities in the partitions are—and at the other end of it; is this. A cylindrical buckyball jungle, sixty kilometres deep, four hundred and fifty round.

  It’s a good thing, I suppose, that a lot of these Right Stuff astronauts have had imagination bypasses. If it had been me, coming through with the tug into freefall atmosphere, I’d still be there, turning with the world, blissfully out of my head. What they did do was dump Team Red’s pod down in the micro-gravity on the lip of the inner airlock door, and cycle out back to High Steel.

  We came through this morning. Just in time; High Steel was getting mighty stinky with Unity moving its troops up to the front as fast as it can get tugs turned around. I could have killed the stupid accountant who decided it was not economically viable to put windows in tug pods. You cannot see it on the television monitors. Did I say that to you once, back in the Mara? You used to video things all the time. I bet you never watched any of them.

  There’s an unexplored land down there, bigger and wilder than all the game reserves of Kenya.

  When you step outside and touch it with your eyes, that’s when you see it. You can do this, here. It violates every sensibility of space exploration: zero gravity, but atmosphere. Too thin to be breathable, but sufficiently warmed by the light through the five slit windows to allow an almost shirt-sleeves environment. Three layers, a breather mask, and a tether so that you don’t get taken away on the funny winds that get spun up by the Coriolis force. The pseudo-gravity well steepens quickly; seventy miles straight down gives you time to do a lot of screaming.

  What did I feel when I stepped out of the pod airlock? Unreality. Sheer human disbelief. A valley one hundred and fifty kilometres wide you can visualize—complete with rivers and couple of land-locked small seas—but the mind will not permit a cave the same size. It will not accept forests and rivers hanging over your head, and it categorically will not allow seas up there. The waters above the earth, wasn’t there something about that in Genesis? So you tell yourself that it’s all a stage set, a complex glass-shot for a Hollywood sci-fi movie; after all, here you are in sweatshirt and jeans, this can’t be an alien world. But then the details start to work on you. The lakes glisten. The clouds move in odd spirals around the curving land. You can see the shadow of rain falling on the buckyball jungle. If there were anything down there that made a noise you could hear over seventy-five kilometres, you could hear it. You want to tear off your breather mask and give a great shout and wait for the faint echo to come back to you from the partition wall sixty kilometres away. It is real. You are here. And that makes you feel very small, yet at the same time very big. Do you remember we talked about that feeling, the night they’d just discovered the fullerene clouds out at Rho Ophiuchi? You asked me if I’d ever stood under the stars and lost and found myself in their distance and vastness. That’s what I feel here: this cylindrical land so completely dwarfs me that I am virtually annihilated, but I’m here, I witness this, I interpret it, I express it, I am the reason it has been conceived and constructed from the ruins of Hyperion. I matter. The BDO is the product of a technology that looks like magic next to ours, but we made it. We’re here. We matter. Small, big. It’s like the angels, who, for all their divinity, are ultimately no nearer an infinitely high and holy God than humans are. This artifact may be an entire world, but measured against the stars, the spiral arms, the galaxies, the expanding universe which we share, it’s as small as I am. We’re both tiny bright beacons of sentience. We both need someone to hold us against the dark. And so we cling to each other. Symbiosis.

  So, here we are. Now, what do we do?

  They’ve brought new accommodation modules up from Unity—much bigger than the standard tug pods—and they’ve got windows. We’re building Camp One up here on the lip of the airlock. About a hundred metres inward, the land drops away on a cup-shaped curve to the main cylinder. Seventy-five kilometres, downhill. Team Red are about ten kilometres down-slope. Easy going in the light gravity; when it gets stronger, the slope decreases. We shouldn’t be surprised, this place was built for us. But it’s not too easy: no stairway to heaven, no elevator to hell. If we want to learn what the Evolvers have to show and tell us, we have to work for it. Team Red want to make breathable air before they set up Camp Two, just under the snow line. Tomorrow, they’ll go down through the clouds into the forest beneath.

  Tomorrow, I will follow them. Team Green is going down to the curving land. Love to you, Gaby. Wish me well, wish me a thousand things. Funny, I’m not scared any more. I’ve got land under my feet, I can draw strength from that. I’ve got to go now; as I said, there’s always something to do here, and there’s a tug going back to High Steel in ten minutes that can take this disc—there, can you see it? Holding station up there in the spin axis. Hope this letter finds you, wherever you are. Love to you, Gaby Mc Asian.

  I’ve just heard. Message from Team Red. They say there are figures, moving down there in the mist.

  Gaby McAslan ejected the disc from the PDU and rested her chin on her arms on the Landcruiser’s steering wheel. The letter had come through to Tinga Tinga at five-thirty that morning, after ten days lost in the limbo of Operation Final Frontier Control. She had requested the communications people to alert her at any time if anything came through. Good people. They used to bang people out of bed in the old game lodge days for an arthritic elephant scratching its ass against a tree, she thought. How much more so, then, for news from another world?

  The track had been rough but easily followed, even in the dark. Glittering pairs of eyes had fled from her headlights. Gaby could not say why she had to go alone up to the ridge to watch the disc. Sense of ritual. Sense of propriety. Sense of the romantic. Sense of the spiritual, of connectedness with the land, and the huge sky that hung close over it, and Shepard, above it all.

  An edge of light lay across the eastern half of the world. New day. Always a miracle. The moon was already down. The brighter stars and planets still shone in the softening indigo. None challenged the BDO, a brilliant oval of light just past the zenith. A pair of binoculars would resolve it into a half-shadowed cylinder. Two moons is gorgeous, Shepard.

  The
sky brightened. Gaby fiddled with the car radio, found Voice of America. Early morning music. She poured coffee from the flask the woman on Tinga Tinga’s out-dock had given her because it got cold out there on the high savannah. She sipped the gift and watched the land open up in front of her. Down these bluffs and across the valley was the Chaga, never sleeping, never ceasing, drawing closer to her at fifty metres every day. Today she would embark on her expedition into the unknown country; down the valley, across terminum, into the land of the Ten Thousand Tribes and the beautiful, startling, wonderful, bizarre nation they were growing in there. There were faces she wanted to see, in there.