by Ian McDonald
‘Here he is, here he is!’ the children clamoured. ‘Peter! They’re here! We’ve got them!’
‘Leave the talking to me,’ Gaby whispered to Ute Bonhorst.
The bus door opened. Peter Werther emerged.
This was what a man come back from the heart of darkness looked like. His face was tanned that dark brown peculiar to Teutons gone native. His hair was blond, long and worn in the community style; shaved at the sides, plaited at the back. Pale stubble made him look younger than Gaby knew him to be. He had the palest eyebrows she had ever seen. He did not affect the white-boy ethnic chic of the Sun-Saiders. He was dressed in a relaxed linen suit over a simple white T-shirt. No jewellery. No tattoos or ritual scarifications or body-piercing. His only idiosyncrasy was a leather biker’s glove on his left hand.
He greeted them with his right hand. Ute made the introductions in German.
‘Gaby McAslan. I know your work,’ Peter Werther said. His English was comfortable, softly accented with south German. ‘We get all the on-line services here: SkyNet, CNN Direct, News International Online. I liked your story about the genitals thief very much.’
‘I’m hoping to branch out.’ A swirl of warm wind set the black pods hanging from the trees swaying into Gaby’s peripheral vision.
‘They are into rebirthing,’ Peter Werther said, observing Gaby’s distraction. ‘Spiritual metamorphosis.’
‘There are people in those things?’
‘In sensory deprivation. They let them out after three, four days. The thing seems to be that they don’t tell you how long they are going to leave you hanging, or even if they are going to come back at all. Face the fear and pass through is the experience. I think that after three days upside down in this heat, you will believe anything you are told about yourself. There are always willing volunteers, and not just from the community.’
Ute had unfolded the camcorder and was videoing the cocoons.
‘Background,’ she explained.
‘Can we talk?’ Gaby asked Peter Werther. A fly darted at him and abruptly veered away, as if repelled.
‘Sure. That is why I have asked you to come here. But private, yes? They are private, personal things I have to tell you. Please come with me.’
Sun-Saiders waved to Peter Werther as he took the two women down to the lake side onto a wooden jetty that had been built out twenty yards through the reeds into the open water. At the end was a small wooden gazebo. Ute Bonhorst videoed flamingos. Gaby set up her recording equipment on the floor and checked levels. Water sparkled in the gaps between the boards. Peter Werther lit a cigarette.
‘Also, this is the only place they will let you smoke,’ he said, offering the pack. Ute did not smoke. Gaby declined. It would be easy to smoke too much in this job. ‘I am sure you are wondering, why this place, why these strange people with their strange rituals? Well, they are a good people, it is a good life they lead, but the real reason is simpler. They were the first people I met when I came out of the Chaga. I walked, you see. I was brought to the edge, and told I must leave now, and I just walked north. They do not ask questions, you see. They accept. If I had walked into an army patrol, or a UNECTA base, I do not know what would have become of me, but these people, in their months of travel, gave me the time and space to learn about myself, and what I have been changed into, and what it is I must do. And now I think I know, and I am ready, and these people have let me bring you into their peace and calm because they agree with me that the world needs to hear what I learned, back there.’ Peter Werther smiled. ‘I know what you are going to ask. Why am I not dead? After all, UNECTA says no one who goes into the Chaga ever comes out. I am not dead because the Chaga kept me alive. It kept me alive because that is its nature. I could have stayed there forever, in the cloud forests up on the mountain, but it would not let me stay. Someone had to come out and tell the truth about what is in there.
‘And what have I seen and experienced?’ He put a foot up on the wooden railing and contemplated the pink flamingos and the silver-blue lake and the high dark ridge of the Mau escarpment beyond. ‘Wonder and horror. Beauty and terror. Paradise, I suppose, but at the same time a . . .’ He struggled for a word, spoke briefly in German.
‘Insidious,’ Ute suggested.
‘Yes, an insidious hell. Monstrous, wonderful. I could pair off adjectives all day and not have communicated to you anything of what it is truly like in there. It is alien, it cannot be understood; much of it is so strange that it cannot be seen; yet we know it, we have always known it, deep in here.’ He cupped the back of his head with his gloved left hand. ‘The hindbrain, the medulla, the brainstem; the roots of primal consciousness.’
‘The heart of darkness?’ Gaby suggested.
‘The beginning of all light,’ Peter Werther corrected. ‘In there are things that I can only call organic cities, but like no city you or I or anyone would design. Cities of our dreams: kilometres and kilometres of pods and clusters and things for which there are no names, on avenues that no one has ever walked but me. A million people could be fed and sheltered; and they are waiting for us. We know it, it knows us. Once before, a very long time ago, so long we have forgotten it except in dreams, we met and parted. But it has not forgotten us.’
‘The lies UNECTA tells! It is not hostile to humanity: it supports life, whatever life comes into contact with it. Symbiosis: that is the way of the Chaga. It feeds and shelters you and you become a part of it. If it was alien, it could not do that: there would be no point of contact between us. That is why I say it knows us, and has known us for a long time.
‘It thinks. At night you can hear its dreams in your dreams, like a song that has been sung for a million years. It learns: in the early days they tried to poison it: defoliants, systematic herbicides. The Chaga analysed and put together counter-agents to neutralize them within minutes. It defends itself: fire will not burn it, poison will not kill it. There was talk of dusting it with powdered plutonium waste. The Chaga would have filtered it and made it safe. Not even a nuclear strike would kill it now. As long as one molecule remains, it will grow back again. It’s smart. The trees talk. The roots connect, like the cells in your brain. They touch, they share and they think, but it is not any kind of intelligence we can understand.’
Peter Werther smoked the rest of his cigarette in the self-conscious silence of a man who has said too much of something personal and unique to him and fears that people think that he is not sane. The screams of playing children came across the water from What the Sun Said. Drums started up. Tribal life for people brought up in the great western cult of the individual. Peter Werther has been further into the heart of darkness than any of them would ever dare, Gaby McAslan thought, and so he does not need to play dress-up-and-pretend and stick feathers through his nipples.
‘Could you tell us about the Kilimanjaro Event?’ she asked. Ute changed disc on the camcorder. The acrylic wrapper blew around the floor of the wooden gazebo on a wind rising from the north.
‘I cannot add much to what the others have said. We had made camp up on Kibo at Elveda Point and were resting: the air is thin up there, it is hard to breathe, even when you are not carrying hang-gliders. We made radio contact with base camp at the Marangu Gate Hotel and said that we would begin flying the next day. It was just after midnight when the thing came down: all I can remember is a flash and roar and explosion. It is always difficult to describe things like this. Language does not have the words: it is like survivors of air-crashes. They have been through the end of the world and all they can say is boom! That was what I thought had happened; there had been an air-crash on the mountain. Then there was a sudden huge wind that swept away our tents and scattered all our things - that was when we lost Sabine, she went to look for the gliders. She never came back. I think she must have fallen. There are sheer drops along the Breach Wall. I never found her, afterwards. The Chaga would have taken away every trace of her.
‘Joachim tried to get in radio contact with bas
e camp and tell them there had been a major accident on the mountain. Lise, Christian and I went down to see if we could find any survivors. The night had been clear, with a good moon, but had quickly clouded up. It can do that, up on the mountain. The wind had risen to gale force. We found where it had ploughed up the land and followed it for about a kilometre downslope. It came in from the north east, you see?’ He mimed the arc of the package with his gloved hand. ‘It had come down on the edge of the Diamond Glacier, about a kilometre from our camp. There was no fire. If it had been an airplane crash, there would have been a fire, even on the icefields. You do not think about this at the time; all you think about is finding someone alive.
‘When we saw the site, we knew this was no air crash. The crater was about ten metres wide and thirty long. The thing itself was about the size of a bus. You have seen the mock-ups they have done on computer. They are pretty much as we saw it. What I remember is the heat - the thing was still dull red from re-entry. I could feel the warmth on my face and hands. I remember having two impressions. The first was of the terrible airline bombing, Lockerbie, do you remember that, or are you too young?’
‘I was four,’ Gaby said, ‘but I’ve seen it on nostalgia shows.’
‘The other impression was of that old sci-fi book: The War of the Worlds? H.G. Wells? I was expecting one end to unscrew and tentacles to come out. Lockerbie and The War of the Worlds: that is what I was thinking, standing on the edge of the crater. It looked scary. I know that sounds a funny thing; it was obvious that it had been made - this was not a rock that had fallen out of the sky - but not in the way people would make something. Do you understand this? All the proportions were wrong. They fitted together, but they looked strange. And it was not broken either, like an airplane would have been broken. We knew we were seeing the thing intact, as it was meant to be, and that this was what it was meant to do. It did not look like an accident.’
Across the lake a dusterplane was spraying the green circles of sharecrop orchard. Flamingos fled from it, peeling up from the water in a pink wedge of wings.
The storm was getting up by then; there was nothing else we could do that night. Lise suggested we come back when the weather had cleared. But I know that we all felt, no, we knew, that the storm had come out of the thing in the crater.
‘The storm closed in while we were returning to camp. I don’t know how we made it. A blizzard, in the tropics. Unglaublich. I know now there was more than snow in it, but I now know more about many things. We put our tents up and took shelter. We had no idea it would be so long or terrible. The first day our radio stopped working: we had no contact with our base camp. The second day the strange things started happening. Our tents began to fall apart. A little yellow patch about the size of a pencil-point would appear on the waterproof fabric and within minutes grow to the size of my hand. The same happened to our weather-wear; to anything that had plastic in it, which is almost everything in modern mountaineering. Of course, you know what was happening.’
‘The spores, the virons, whatever you want to call them, scavenge hydrocarbons to use as building blocks for Chaga life,’ Gaby said.
‘And plants and vegetable proteins too,’ Peter Werther said. ‘But never the living flesh of animals, never breathing, moving things. Strange, so? It knows us, you see.’ His gloved hand gripped the wooden railing. Weaver birds were building one of their hanging basket-nests under the roof. They came and went with stalks of grass and reed. Humans did not perturb them. They had more important agendas.
‘The story is well known. Lise and Christian and Joachim stayed to wait for Sabine. Because I had the most experience in the mountains, I tried to go down to get help. Their stories end with me walking out into the blizzard and disappearing. That is where mine properly begins.’
He offered cigarettes. This time Gaby took one.
‘I was a fool. No experience could have prepared me for what I found out there. It was total white-out, but at the same time, strange shapes were looming out of the snow, like nothing I had ever seen before. Coming out of the ground under my feet, before my eyes. As I watched! In twenty steps I was lost. But I stumbled on, not knowing if my next step would take me over the edge of a drop, my weather-proof clothing rotting and falling apart around me. Rotted through, like . . . what is the word?’ He said something in German.
‘Mildew?’ Ute Bonhorst suggested.
‘Ja. My only protection against the storm was coming apart in my fingers. At that altitude, in such a wind-chill, you develop hypothermia within minutes. All you want to do is give up and lie down in the snow and let it all stop. That is what you want most of all, for it all just to stop.’ He looked out at the patterns the crop-duster wove on the sky. A thin coil of smoke rose from his cigarette. ‘That is what I did. It was all I could do, do you understand? I was too cold, too confused, too afraid. I lay down. I went to sleep. And I died. I know it, in here.’ His gloved hand tapped his breastbone. ‘I died up there on that mountain. And the mountain brought me back to life.
‘There is no time in death. There are no dreams. That is how you know it is death and not sleep. But you do not awake from death, and I awoke. It seemed like an instant, though I have worked out since that I was dead for over a year. When you wake from death, it is all the terrible things about being born again. You are forced from a warm, comfortable womb of flesh into a world that you cannot understand. I woke in darkness, kicking at the bubble of soft skin into which I was curled. It unfolded around me like the petals of a flower, in speeded-up film, ja? You have seen pictures of the things they call hand-trees. There are thousands of them, millions probably; all pure white. In one of those I came back to life, half-way up the face of a huge reef of Chaga growing out of the mother-mass. It must have been five hundred metres high; the top was always covered in that damn fog. The forest would not let me see too far, so that I would not try to leave it. It did not want to lose me. Every time I tried to escape, it would bring me back. I would have to fall asleep in the end, and I would wake in a hand-tree back where I started, on the side of that damn sky-reef. It stole time from me - whole years were lost in sleep. I imagine myself passing through pipes and tunnels and tubes underneath the earth, like the veins and arteries of the Chaga.
‘I woke naked except for a few scraps of metal: buckles, a zipper, the remains of my Rolex. You owe me a Rolex, you hear me? Everything had been digested by the Chaga. Even my hair, my eyelashes, eaten by the Chaga. I was naked high on the side of a mountain, but I was not cold. I do not know what it had done to me but I never needed clothing while I lived with it. I had been changed. And I could breathe the thin air as easily as if I were down on the coast: another change. It did something to my sweat glands: have you noticed how insects never seem to bother me? I am a natural insect repellent. Mosquitoes avoid me: that was one gift the Chaga let me keep.
‘It fed me, it sheltered me, it gave me water to drink. There are things like huge flowers up there; when it gets dark they open up and you can shelter inside and they will close around you and protect you. And when storms blew and the rains came, the reef would provide little soft caves - like pores in your skin - where I could curl up and listen to the sound of the wind across the high forest. Sometimes when I fell asleep it would move me to another place, another time. How I knew was that all my hair would disappear again.
‘The Chaga is full of ghosts. On the journeys I was allowed to make, I found traces of humans - abandoned game lodges, skeletons of cars and buses. Once I found a cache of old photographs still in silver frames - the glass had preserved them from the Chaga. They became my family, the people in those photographs. I felt that while I had been dead up there in the snows, the world had ended and I was the last man on earth. No, that is not quite right. I felt more like the world had just begun and I was the first man. I was Adam, alone and naked in a new Eden.
‘But there are not just the ghosts of the past up there; there are the ghosts of the future. I see you do not understand m
e: I will try to explain to you how I felt. In places the Chaga has memorized the shapes of the buildings that once stood there and stored them as, ah?’ He said a German word Gaby could not catch.
‘Templates,’ Ute Bonhorst said.
‘Exactly. Templates that time would one day fill in with wood, and brick, and concrete, and in the end, people. Ghosts of things to come. One day I found a tree of human skulls - it had grown from an old Wa-Chagga cemetery, but they did not seem to me to be the skulls of the dead, but of the yet-to-be-born, waiting for flesh and skin to grow and thought to fill them. There was a place, high up on the reef - a good two hours’ climb - where the Chaga had grown a television tree. It was like a baobab with screens set into the trunk, each tuned to a different channel. It was my eye on the world. From it I learned how long I had been dead and what had happened to those I had left up on Kibo, and what had happened to the world to which they had returned. I learned how deep I was within the forest and what a difficult journey it would be if I were to return to that world and my friends who did not know that I had been brought back from the dead.
That was the first time the Chaga stole me and took me to someplace else. It had made a mistake in showing me the world beyond. It is not God, you see. It can make mistakes. But it would not let me go. It needed me too badly.’