Chaga

by Ian McDonald

  All the room to be all the things we can be. All the things we have the potential to be. The door to the nursery was open. Two million years of childhood was over. Now would come the storms and changes of puberty, the struggles for identity and self-hood and mastery of adolescence. How long they might endure, what the maturity that would come when they had passed might be like, Gaby could not conceive. She did not imagine it would be as long a childhood—certainly, it would be harder—but the teenage millennia would be dazzling.

  The coffee was mighty good.

  The PDU queeped. A call, from Tembo, back at Tinga Tinga. He looked and sounded poked out of bed and wondering what the hell she was up to out there in the wild. Word from the Miyama orbital telescope, via T.P. Costello in Zanzibar. Phoebe, the eighteenth moon of Saturn, had just disappeared.

  Gaby laughed long and hard at that good joke by the powers in the sky. Perhaps they had come to Earth to learn irony. Nice one, all you bright stars. And here’s a better one. The good news from Earth. She sat back in the Landcruiser’s seat and rested her fingertips on her belly. It was three days since she had tested positive. It had been much quicker than she had planned. Already she imagined she could feel the life budding in there, turning over and over in the freefall waters of conception. What a world you’re going to live in, kid! What a future you’re going to have.

  She was glad the conception had been so stunningly sudden. She could go down to the Chaga with Tembo and the UNECTA team without fearing that its spores might change it.

  She was not sure whether that would be a good or bad thing in this new world.

  The darkness was almost gone now. Light filled up the land, spilled down the sides of the bluffs into the valley, touched the tops of the tallest hand-trees and pseudo-corals of the Chaga. It was changing in there too, losing its shape and structure as it grew closer to humanity’s needs and societies. Symbiosis. Growing together. Hugging in the big, big dark.

  The upper limb of the sun touched the horizon. Only the BDO could rival it now, and it would soon fade. The sky was a high, deep blue, clear and clean. Gaby emptied the rest of her coffee out the window of the car and made to start it. She stopped herself.

  A lion had come out of the thorn scrub down the bluffs and was working its way up the hill to the crest. It was an old female, sag-jawed, sag-bellied, strong and scarred. It sniffed at the Landcruiser’s tyres. Gaby sat, not moving a muscle, hardly breathing. The old lioness moved to a slab of smooth rock beneath a big baobab overlooking the valley. She sniffed the rock and sat down. Gaby watched her, lying under the tree, looking out across the brightening land.

  After a time, a second lion came and lay down beside her.

  Post face

  ‘In science fiction, everything should be mentioned

  twice, with the possible exception of science fiction.’

  Samuel R. Delany, Triton.

  Toward Kilimanjaro

  To every book its inscription. I have written my name in black ink inside the cloth cover but the syllables are harsh and clashing in this land of whispered sibilants and strong consonants. How much better the name Langrishe gave me: Moon, generous, looping consonants, vowels like two eyes, two souls looking out of the page. One half of T.P.’s final gift to me, this journal, clothbound and intimate in Liberty print; I treasure it, hug it to me, companion and confessor. T.P.’s other gift I treated less kindly: black dragonfly wings shredded by the impact, struts snapped like the bones of birds. Already the forest is at work on it, converting the organic plastics into dripping stalactites of black slime.

  It is over an hour since I lost the beat of the helicopters in the under-song of the Chaga; my crash-landing must have looked sufficiently convincing for them to abandon the hunt. Forgive me, T.P., but you would understand: skimming across the tree-tops towards the looming edge of the Chaga with two Kenyan Army/Air Force Nighthawks behind me, expecting at any second to be smashed into nothingness by a thermal-imaging StarStreak missile; one’s options are somewhat limited. Sorry about the microlyte, T.P. But I will be good to the diary, I promise.

  I look again at those four letters: Moon. How much of life is a search for our true names, the jumble of ideograms that spells us as we truly are? Some, like T.P. Costello, attain true personhood in being reduced to their initials. Some intimate, cosy souls never become more than their Christian names, to others that name is a useless appendix, their true identity lies in their surnames, like you, Langrishe. And some only find personhood in the names they attract to themselves. Moon. They cannot see themselves, it takes another to tell them what they are. Moon. Langrishe. T.P. Our players. No, I have omitted one vital addition to the dramatis personae: the mountain.

  ‘Wide as all the world; great, high, and unbelievably white in the sun’: Hemingway described it. To the Masai it is Ngajé Ngai, the House of God; but most simple and striking is its Swahili name: Kilima Njaro, the White Mountain.

  You never forget your first view of the mountain, as you never forget your first, nervous, thrilling view of a lover’s body. When I flew in to the Ol Tukai that first time, the clouds were hanging low across the mountain but still its presence could be sensed, like God at Sinai. Interviewing Langrishe in his office my attention was increasingly distracted as beyond the window the final rags of cloud dissolved and dispersed and that astonishing white tableland caught and kindled in the African twilight. Spellbound: I watched the shadows move up across the uncanny geometries of the alien forest until the final red glow was extinguished from the snows. You never forget; like that first, electrifying exploration of love, you keep it secret and warm in your heart.

  Again, my name, inscribed in black ink inside the front cover of the clothbound journal. I have given much thought to what kind of journal I should keep. A neo-Victorian almanac of wonders and horrors, each neat copper-plate entry headed, Day the –th, Year of Grace 20–? Tempting. But my choice of travelling companions dictates otherwise. T. S. Eliot. Joseph Conrad. Thomas Merton. Not so much an expedition to the interior as a pilgrimage through the darklands of the soul. Langrishe as Holy Grail? The comparison would please him, arrogant bastard.

  Early in the afternoon I came upon the remains of the old Ol Tukai Research Facility. Subtle transubstantiation: I had been picking a path between the vegetation-shrouded bones for some minutes before the nagging tingle of familiarity became recognition. The voracious forest life had long since converted the organic materials to its own matrix of tubes and fans and flows of blue lichen. All changed, changed utterly. It is less than a year since the line of advance engulfed the centre; now only the concrete and steel skeleton enforces some form of human geometrical discipline to the biological anarchy. I paused awhile in the memory of Langrishe’s office. Kilimanjaro was lost behind wave upon wave of forest, the mood strange, and I uncertain of my own feelings. From out of the wilderness came a twittering, chiming music, like a child’s experiments with a synthesiser, uncanny and alien. I never saw what it was sang that song.

  I will not spend the night there. Memories too big.

  Wide-eyed and clueless in the pick-up bay at Nairobi airport: I’d been in Kenya a whole half-hour and was still reeling from the African-ness of it all. Stepping off the plane into the sour grey predawn drizzle, I’d almost kissed the tarmac; it was surely destined for canonisation, the place where the astonishingly talented girl writer from Dublin town who wrote the book on the phenomenon of the century first intersected with the surface of Africa. Now, two bags on the concrete, waiting and waiting while all around me taxis hire cars limousines shuttle buses were speeding my fellow passengers off to Sheratons Hiltons Intercontinentals Ramadas PanAfrics, the African-ness of it all was beginning to pale a little. Another flight came in, another disgorgement of travellers into the hinterland. I watched my own flight take off, onward bound, into a huge sunrise. The sun was well up and about its business by the time a dirty white Peugeot pick-up with what looked like a small greenhouse bolted to the back swung into the
parking bay. The window rolled down, a face like an angst-ridden owl looked me up and down from behind immense spectacles and finally bellowed in dearest dirtiest Dublin, ‘Bags in the back. You in the front. I’ll get a ticket if I hang around here much longer; what’ll I get?’

  ‘A ticket?’

  ‘That’s correct.’

  T.P. Costello: East African correspondent of the Irish Times; liaison, contact, mentor, in the end, best friend; the only man in Kenya who was fool enough (or impecunious enough) to be prepared to share an office with me. And the worst driver I have ever known. Some people are born to bad driving. Some aspire to it; to T.P. it was a major social accomplishment. As we took a roundabout at a speed that left rubber on the blacktop, he asked me, ‘What kind of underwear have you got on?’

  Wondering just what kind of a pervert I had saddled myself with, I told him.

  ‘Throw them out,’ he said. ‘Nothing but cotton. Nylon traps moisture. You can get fungus. What can you get?’

  ‘Fungus?’

  ‘That’s correct.’

  Howling down the wide boulevards of downtown Nairobi I noticed we were passing by shining skyscrapers with names like Sheraton Hilton Intercontinental Ramada PanAfric.

  ‘Just where are we going?’ (An explosion of hooting as the Peugeot pick-up pulled out to overtake a lumbering green and yellow municipal bus straight into the path of an oncoming Nissan van: I’d never actually seen an expression quite like the driver’s before.)

  ‘The Kenyan Island Mission Guesthouse. It’s comfortable, it’s clean, it’s central without you getting a noseful of diesel fumes every time you open your window, it’s quiet—most of the guests are missionaries on R ’n’ R—Mrs Kivebulaya, the proprietrix, thinks Irish girls are polite, quiet, charming and well behaved—please don’t disillusion her—and, above all, it’s cheap. Given, the meat can be a bit chewy, but you can afford it.’

  We swung up a steeply curving drive and lurched to a halt in front of a relaxed red tile-roofed building, a genial mongrel of colonial and clinker-block ethnic. T.P. Costello busied himself in the back of the Peugeot and appeared with my cases and three chickens strung together at the feet, swinging.

  ‘My compliments to Mrs Kivebulaya,’ he said handing cases and chickens to a geriatric porter dressed in a jacket of almost inspirational vileness. T.P. screamed the engine, preparing for another ballistic leap into the traffic. ‘224b, Tom M’boya Street!’ he shouted, and hurled himself into the streets.

  I had never eaten chicken gizzard before—apparently it is something of a local delicacy. I enjoyed it much more than I should have.

  Impressions from my notebooks: pen-sketches in that early light when we see clearest.

  Woodsmoke, shit and diesel, street perfume; sweated from the red earth like a pheromone.

  Wonderful incongruity: Colonel Saunders’s patrician features intimidating the intersection of University Way and Koinange Street. Do all the black faces make him feel back on the ol’ plantation again? Must order chicken gizzard with fries and buttermilk roll.

  A man dressed Arab-style pushing what seems to be a small dog kennel on wheels along Kenyatta Avenue. The creeping horror when I glimpsed inside, the glitter of human eyes: a woman, wrapped in Muslim black, save for her hands, and eyes…

  The Hilton is extravagantly proud of its English fish and chips served in a copy of the London Times. T.P. tells me of a certain journalist who goes there every day to order the delicacy, throw away the fish and chips and read the newspaper.

  The city of the dance: the people move like liquid in the streets, as if to the mental beat of drums and wires.

  The casual bribery of the police: T.P.’s KitKat tin in the glove compartment of the Peugeot where he keeps the bribes for motoring offences. The next best thing to a totally honest police force is a totally corrupt one. Dame Market Forces…

  For a city under siege, Nairobi is remarkably cavalier about the fact. Since the package came down in the Nyandarua National Park last year, opening a second front, I reckon Nairobi has about a thousand days left before the advancing walls of vegetation close. But life goes on with a blithe disinterestedness that amazes this European girl, who would be running round like Chicken-Licken announcing the imminent fall of the sky. Disinterest, or African fatalism? Too much like a metaphor of death for this white girl, this m’zungu.

  To every city its municipal obsessions: Dublin’s is finding somewhere to park the car, Nairobi’s is coin-in-the-slot photo booths.

  T.P.’s office was three rooms above the Riff Valley Peugeot Service Depot on Tom M’boya Street where he was apparently offering asylum to an entire family of Asian refugees: mother on the telephone, daughter one on the typewriter, daughter two in reception, father book-keeper, number one son file clerk, number two son runner, honoured grandmother chai-maker. What amazed me was that they were so infernally busy all the time. I suspect that they were terrified of T.P. turfing the lot of them out onto Tom M’boya Street; certainly he ran his office with the self-assured smugness of a minor, benevolent dictator.

  For my thousand shillings per month I had use of what T.P. called a ‘Captain Kirk Chair’, a desk, a telephone, a photocopier, a time-share of an asthmatic word-processor, the occasional privileged glimpse into the specially darkened room where the fax machine sat like a presiding deity, unlimited chai and biscuits and the pleasure of T.P. Costello’s wit, wisdom, and virtually continuous bitching about his immediate superior, one so-called Jacobellini.

  And while I sat drinking chai, engaging in dubious battle with the word-processor and spending entire afternoons waiting for the operator to connect me with some minor cog in the great quizzical machine of scientists and researchers, humanity’s first encounter with an alien life form was advancing towards me one hundred steady metres per day.

  Sometimes I felt it would be easiest just to sit and wait for it to come creeping along Tom M’boya Street, up the stairs and into the office.

  Even the professional imagination falters before the face of the Chaga. Description fails, only analogy can convey some impression of this landscape through which I am travelling. The experience that comes closest is the time with Langrishe on the coast, when I was working on the book; our explorations of the reef in snorkel, mask and flippers. Crucified on the surface tension, peering down like vacationing Olympians into the underworld. God, how I burned! That night in the banda; the wind in the palms and the rattle of the thatch; Langrishe’s hands slicing lemons, rubbing the juice into my skin… The gentle, painful, almost hallucinatory love-making, me riding him—was that the boom and crash of the surf on the reef, or the roar of my own blood and bone, or the song of Langrishe, inside me?

  Shape yourself into some long-legged chitinous arthropod picking across a coral reef and you will have the feel of it. There is a submarine quality to the light that reaches you through the canopy of balloons, bladders, fans, umbrellas; submarine, and ecclesiastical, a cyclorama of colours like the light in a drowned cathedral. Analogy again.

  I am beginning to wonder if my supplies will be sufficient, I had provisioned for twenty days, it may take that long just to reach the lower slopes of the mountain. The riotous Chaga-life confounds my sense of time and distance, I cannot judge how far, how fast I have come. I was so certain, then, now my stupidity at thinking that I can find one man, who may not, if I am honest with myself, which I rarely am, even be alive, in five thousand square kilometres of, literally, another world, astounds me. The sense of isolation is colossal.

  Thank God for faithful fellow travellers! Conrad, brother explorer into the heart of darkness; Eliot, cartographer of the desert in the heart of man; Merton, pilgrim into the cloud of unknowing on the dawnward edge of faith. They know what it is to venture into an unknown region, into the utter subjective darkness of the interior wilderness.

  Some spore is attacking my copy of Seeds of Contemplation, the vinyl cover is breaking out in tiny red warts. Amazing, the tenacity of these almost invisi
ble flecks of life; despite my rigorous efforts to rid myself of all plastic and petrochemical based materials, they still managed to bring the little acrylic aglets at the end of my spare pair of laces out in sulphur yellow blossoms. Ironic that, after three years of the most intense scientific scrutiny anywhere on the planet, all the researchers can conclude is that the pseudo-vegetation (their word, not mine, please) of the Chaga is a carbon-based form of life grouped around long chains of what seem to be polymers as opposed to the amino-acid/protein axis of terrestrial life. The phrase ‘Plastic Forest’ entered the world vocabulary despite the protests of the researchers that really it wasn’t plastic at all, rather a kind of long-chain self-replicating carbohydrate pseudo-polymer. Doesn’t have quite the same snap, though.

  Popular imagination perfumes the place like a decommissioned oil refinery. The reality is quite different: essential oils and musks, spices and incenses that seem maddeningly familiar though the memory can never quite place them exactly… Sex. The Chaga smells like sex.

  The industrial/chemical analogy may be very near the truth. The Chaga is only partly photosynthetic (and that part which it seems to operate by a system quite different from, and more efficient than, the green green grass of home); some exploit temperature differentials, others make use of catalytic chemical reactions, some employ wind power, others remarkably efficient heat pumps, others still generate electricity directly from what can only be described as solar panels. Some, like the corals they closely resemble, feed off aerial bacteria, some literally eat rock. All are linked together in vastly complex hierarchies of symbiosis. Benumbed biologists I interviewed for the book maintained that it might take decades to unravel just one symbiotic system. The most recent theories, which will form an appendix to the finished book, extend the factory analogy to the microscopic; at the cellular level, the organisms resemble machines more than biological entities.