by Ian McDonald
‘A principled journalist,’ Shepard said, not believing her either. Gaby wished she had not lied to him. She wanted to be Ms Valiant-For-Truth to him. She also wished he had not told her the dirty things about UNECTA. She wanted him to be a rescuing angel, without ulterior motivations. ‘Could you give me SkyNet’s teleport number?’
She wrote it on a yellow sticky notelet. Shepard turned again to his computer, called up a screenful of icons. The processor accepted the disc and released it a few seconds later. It was sent. It was safe. But it was raw: the tale needed to be well told.
‘Shepard, is there anywhere in this place I could borrow a camcorder and a couple of discs for a few hours? I need to get a final report done.’
‘I think that could be arranged.’
Do this, and she might be more than safe. She might be able to win one. But one more thing needed doing first.
‘You don’t know if anyone here is a Manchester United supporter, and if so, whether they have any gear? I can’t make the most important face-to-camera of my career in a sweatshirt with AC Milan on the front.’
~ * ~
22
Gaby’s videodiary: supplemental.
July 16 2008
Not only did Shepard find me a camcorder, he’s let me borrow it for the duration of my visit. Tembo and Faraway have gone back on a shuttle flight to sweet-talk T.P. with the report. I’m staying - officially - until William gets out of decontam. Unofficially, because Dr M. Shepard, Station Director, thought I might like a look at the cutting edge of Chaga research. He’s assigned me an empty cabin on Tractor Two, Level Two: there’s always someone off-base on R’n’R or at a conference. At least this woman has something approaching a make-up kit. Borrowing cosmetics is like a starving man stealing food: it’s not a sin, it’s survival.
I like it. This is a good place. Ironic: it’s the nearest inhabited place to the Chaga, but it feels the furthest. I can see terminum from my porthole, but it doesn’t feel inevitable the way it does in Nairobi, or immediately threatening, as it did in Merueshi. It’s because this mobile community is one place on Earth the Chaga is not drawing any closer to.
Tsavo West. It’s like a New Age pirate ship: not for having a porthole in my cabin, or being a-sail upon a sea of grass, rigged with gantries and radio masts and satellite-dish crow’s-nests, or that Tsavo West is aggressively self-contained: the processing plant over on Tractor Three recycles every drop of water, dry sewage waste is processed to the rooftop gardens where apparently they grow killer gene-engineered hemp. It’s the people. They have a joyous single-mindedness, like surfing communities; a deeply engraved subtext that informs everything they do. I can understand why the military hates them. There is no formal structure, no imposed discipline, no uniforms - there is no need. Discipline, community, efficiency come from within, from this credo.
So, me hearties, run out the Jolly Roger, set sail for the Chaga, and be thee the Governor of Panama’s lovely red-haired daughter, ah-har-har-har?
For all the hippy chic, Shepard’s got a pretty tight set-up. Tractor Two is mostly biochemistry and molecular engineering labs and the equipment is state of the art. A guy with beads woven into his beard showed me the remote handling facility. Custom built. Nothing like it anywhere else. The virtual reality manipulators can take Chaga-stuff apart down to the component molecules and let the operators walk through the atoms. No wonder they’re so manic about contamination. The knowledge they have backed-up, but they’d never be able to replace the equipment.
Speaking of decontamination, they still won’t let me talk to William. The closest I can get to him is a woman’s face on the other side of a thick glass panel in a steel door, and she says they are awaiting the results of further tests on the poor kid’s viral symptoms. All that stainless steel and blinding white: it’s like a Douglas Trumbull movie in there. Tractor One, which is the main ingress/egress port to Tsavo West, is designed to blow free in case of a major incident, while the rest sprints away at its top speed of three miles per hour. Tractor One is virtually a city within a city. Up on the other side of the level from the place where they kept me there is a facility for Away Teams; the ones who actually go into the Chaga and bring samples back. They’re totally isolated, like divers on oil-rigs who live in decompression tanks for months on end. I suppose they make their own entertainment, like Oksana on those long, cold Siberian winter nights. One night was enough for me. The thing that impressed me most about Tractor One - and this says a lot about my mind - is that it’s the first tee on Tsavo West’s one-hole golf course. You drive from the landing grid over to the sun-deck on Tractor Two and then it’s a five or seven iron to the astro-turfed green on the service platform three-quarters the way up the side of Tractor Three. If you hit it into the Chaga, it’s out-of-bounds, but you have to buy everyone a drink. I suppose golf balls in the Chaga are no stranger than golf-balls on the moon, though my heart agrees with Mark Twain: golf is a good walk spoiled. Except at Tsavo West it’s a good abseil spoiled. Which they do as well, after climb-racing each other up the sides of Tractor Two. You can watch them from the rooftop hot tubs. Presumably while taking a jot or two of home-grown weed.
The good ship Tsavo, and all who sail upon her. The ironic thing is that her Captain, the good Dr Shepard, seems quaintly out of place in all this. All around him things are doing, becoming, while he simply is. That’s all. He is. Separate, yet without him, none of this would be. The still centre from which all energy emanates.
He’s dinnering me tonight; tomorrow I am promised a treat. Something unforgettable. Please, Shepard! I’m too old for all that not being able to sleep at night and finding my food doesn’t taste right and I’m not hungry anyway and my mind wandering to visions of his face and discovering whole irreplaceable chunks of my day have vanished. I don’t want to let myself fall in love again, I’ve outgrown that, really, God, I don’t want to write him love letters and knit him sweaters and all that stuff in songs because it makes you feel like for a few moments in your whole life you are the most alive thing on this little blue planet.
Oh God. He’s here. Already?
~ * ~
23
When she saw the treat in the morning, Gaby McAslan said, ‘No way, Shepard. You are not getting me up in that thing. Never.’
The big two-seater was parked off the main strip in front of the portable cabin that was Tsavo West’s air-traffic control centre. The microlyte was a delicate, beautiful insect of spars and wires, spreading its iridescent solar wing to soak in the savannah sun.
‘You deserve to see the Chaga as it ought to be seen,’ Shepard said. ‘With the eyes of God.’ He jumped into the rear seat and fastened the helmet. ‘Once-only offer, never to be repeated.’
‘All right, all right,’ Gaby shouted. Better death than disgrace before Shepard. ‘I’m coming.’
The propeller became a silver blur behind Shepard as Gaby wiggled into the cockpit, fitted safety harness and helmet.
‘How long have you been flying?’ she asked as the microlyte rolled on to the main strip.
‘Since yesterday,’ Shepard said. The engine hum became an irate hornet drone. ‘Old joke. I’ve had my licence two years. Honest. You’re safe with me.’
Yes, but not too safe, Gaby thought.
The little aircraft bounced over the rough airstrip and quite unexpectedly was airborne.
‘Oh shit,’ Gaby moaned as she saw directly in front of her a few centimetres of green and black GRP fuselage and a lot of bright morning sky. Shepard took the microlyte up to a hundred metres.
‘Elephant!’ he said in Gaby’s ear-phone. Twelve of them, moving out of heavy scrub: three bulls with their attendant females and calves, dusted with the red earth of the Serengeti plain. The microlyte’s solar-powered engine was so silent their over-pass did not even disturb the white ox-peckers from the elephants’ backs.
‘Chaga’s the best thing ever happened to them,’ he said, circling for a better look. ‘Poachers won’t come within twenty m
iles of terminum. Elephant and rhino numbers have been increasing steadily since the Kilimanjaro Event. Our Away Teams have even found family groups as deep as five miles beyond terminum, on the edge of the Great Wall formation. Paul Orzabal up at Ol Tukai started a study of terrestrial species adapting to the Chaga, but it got dismantled along with the rest of the station.’
They passed over Tsavo West. People in the roof gardens waved. Sunlight glittered from the hot tubs. A Tai Chi class was practising on the Tractor One landing platform.
‘What’s this about dismantling Ol Tukai?’ Gaby asked.
‘They need a station to monitor the Nyandarua Event but the budget won’t run to a new base, so they’re airlifting what’s airliftable and taking the tractor units north by road, going cross country along the line of the Ngong hills to avoid Nairobi. Tinga-Tinga and Moshi are all being relocated to one hundred and twenty degrees of separation. We began course corrections last night.’
The green and black microlyte crossed terminum. Eddies of warm air spun out from the hidden heart of the Chaga buffeted the wing. Shepard took them down. Gaby gripped the cockpit coaming, telling herself she was too enthralled to be terrified. The fractal tessellations of the mosaic-cover bubbled into reefs of pseudo-coral and the open white fingers of the hand-trees. The Great Wall rose sheer before them.
‘Shepard!’ Gaby shrieked as the microlyte bounced on a rising thermal and hopped over the edge of the Great Wall in a single bound. ‘You bastard, don’t you ever scare me like that again.’
Shepard chuckled in the way that men do to themselves when they have done something they think impresses a woman.
‘There’s always an updraft along the edge of the Great Wall,’ he said. ‘You can rely on it. All kind of strange and useful vortices above the Chaga.’
‘Strange vortices killed Denys Finch-Hatton at Voi,’ Gaby said.
‘Voi’s notorious for them. Ask any UNECTA pilot.’
They flew on toward Kilimanjaro over a plateau of dark crimson hexagonal tiles the width of the microlyte’s solar wing. Gaby glanced over her shoulder, past Shepard smiling behind his pilot’s shades, but it was not the reassurance of his face she was seeking. She could not see the comforting, man-made cubes of Tsavo West. She could not see anything of the human world, but a horizon of tarnished gold.
The roof of the Great Wall broke up into chaotic terrain of land-reefs and pseudo-corals, piled hundreds of feet high on top of each other, spilling like melted ice-cream; strawberry pink, chocolate, honeycomb-pistachio-piña-colada. From this they passed abruptly into a zone where the vegetation was translucent and formed a roof of glittering bubbles. Dark shadows hinted at massive formations far below. The line of transition was exact, as if a circle had been inscribed with compasses on the Chaga.
‘The Loolturesh Discontinuity,’ Shepard said. ‘It’s about five miles wide and goes all the way around the mountain.’
‘What is it?’ Gaby asked.
‘We don’t know. It’s on the edge of our Away Teams’ range. But it’s expanding outward with the rest of the Chaga. Fifty metres every day.’
The outer edge of the discontinuity was as sharply defined as its inner. The land on the far side was a many-coloured forest canopy; like flying over a Persian carpet, Gaby thought. A very old and moth-eaten carpet, riddled with holes which permitted intriguing glimpses of another carpet-canopy beneath. Analogy, she thought. Our languages do not have the names for what these things are, so we are forced to speak of them in terms of what they seem. The unrolling magic carpet was lifted up and torn in many places by conical mounds pushing through from beneath. Gaby thought of the Devil’s Tower, or the inselberg rocks of the sub-Kalahari. The scale and suddenness was about right, but these up-swellings were dark-red, striped with burnt orange meanderings like dead Martian watercourses. Shepard banked around the nearest mound. Light glittered at the summit: a single crystal protruded from the peeled-back Chaga-flesh. The crystal was perfectly transparent and the size of a Unit at Tsavo West.
‘They’re an emerging feature,’ Shepard said. ‘Within the last six months. Some taxonomist at Ol Tukai christened them Crystal Monoliths and unfortunately the name’s stuck. And before you ask, no, we have absolutely no idea what they are or do.’
‘Shepard.’
‘Yes?’
‘Shepard, don’t talk. You don’t have to talk. I don’t have to know.’
Gaby did not want to hear voices speaking names. Names cut this precious thing of hers into pieces and parts and functions and hypotheses. While it was one unspoken thing it was the undivided mystery that had drawn her from the summer night on the Point to this front seat in a UNECTA microlyte. Dismembered by names, the mystery bled out of it.
To the sound of the electric engine and the wind over the wires, they crossed from the land of the Crystal Monoliths into a land of knife-edged ridges standing above the forest roof that meandered crazily, twining around each other like mating snakes until they fused in a knot of arretes and canyons. On the far side of this escarpment was a zone unlike any they had yet seen. The microlyte flew above a terrain of ribs and spars and buttresses. Grasping at similes, Gaby thought of the intricate girder-work of the new architecture, or again, microscope photographs of the structure of human bones. Even analogy could not describe this Chaga: it was like this, but it was also like this, with a seasoning of that too, but in the end, none of them.
The cells between the spars and piers were filled with bubbles, some an indistinguishable froth, others large enough to have swallowed the microlyte. Their skins strained painfully against the rib-work. Bubbles were white, skeleton was blue. A Wedgwood landscape. They were flying over an enormous Willow Pattern plate.
This was one of those things you see only because you are looking for an instant in the right direction. She saw a dirty white bubble down to her right swell and split. The ripped skin wrinkled back and released a puff of dusty vapour like the smoke of mushroom spores in dry autumns. Things moved in the dust that looked like spindly insect-octopi clinging to silver balloons. They chilled her in a way that the alien landscapes unfolding before her had not. These incomprehensible landscapes were their place. They knew no other. Gaby McAslan was the alien here. Then the wind from off the mountain carried them away. Outcrops of straight-boled trees with domed tops appeared in gaps in the lattice where bubbles had burst and seeded. As the microlyte flew on, the stands of trees joined together into the now-familiar chaos-patterned forest canopy. A few minutes flight ahead a wall of pseudo-coral lifted above the canopy of domes. Its top was hidden by the raft of clouds that clung to the mountain. They were on the slopes of Kilimanjaro now.
After long silence, Shepard’s voice whispering in Gaby’s earphones was a shock.
‘That’s the Citadel. We think it’s where your friend Peter Werther was kept.’
‘And beyond the Citadel?’
‘Beyond the Citadel we cannot go. This thing doesn’t have the ceiling.’
The microlyte banked across the face of the wall of tubes and pipes and fans. I’m glad the microlyte doesn’t have the altitude to penetrate those clouds, Gaby thought. They are the Cloud of Unknowing that hides God who, like the Chaga, is beyond the power of language to describe. I’m glad that the aliens - if they exist in any form we can recognize - remain hidden in their fortress from the cameras of humans.
She remembered an old sci-fi movie from her father’s video library. At the climax, the huge luminous starship of the aliens had floated in across the mountain to meet humanity’s representatives. It had touched the earth, and opened its doors. In a glow of light, the aliens had come out. And it had killed the movie. Run a spear into the side of the sense of wonder and let out gasoline and Diet Coke. There had been wee ones with oval eyes and no noses, like aliens in abduction magazines, that ran around twittering. Then there was a big long spindly one with arms and legs about eight feet long. He had to bend to get under the door. Gaby McAslan had thought that was most pathetic.
They negate gravity, cross entire galaxies in city-sized starships filled with light, and they can’t design a door that opens wide enough.
Show us miracles and wonders, but not the little man behind the curtain pulling the levers and shouting into the microphone. If they ever penetrate the mystery up there, I hope there is another behind it, Gaby thought. And another beyond that, and beyond that, so that we never dispel the Cloud of Unknowing.
Shepard had set a different course back to Kenya, one that took them close to a ChagaWatch balloon, many miles lost beyond terminum. Shaggy lilac moss had colonized the bag so that it looked like some imaginary hairy air-monster. The ground cable was crusted with growths like paper wasps’ nests, though far larger than any wasp Gaby had ever fled from. As Shepard banked the microlyte around the blimp, Gaby noticed flickering activity around the hexagonal cell mouths. What ever they were, they shone with the iridescence of humming birds, but moved with the mechanical buzzing dart of insects.
‘Good to see Ol’ Faithful’s still with us,’ Shepard said. ‘But I don’t think she’ll last much longer. The cable goes and they drift away into the Chaga.’