Changa

by Ian McDonald

  Camp One is five miles within terminum at the foot of the sudden lift of forest called the Great Wall, in a zone of transition where terrestrial life is dismantled and incorporated into Chaga life. The chaotic terrain of land corals and rotting acacias makes it a good place to hide from the spy satellites, Moran, our leader, says. Tomorrow we will go in under the canopy. That is, if it doesn’t come to us first. The Great Wall is on the move. We are camped among beige barrel-shaped objects like straw mushrooms three times my height. Every so often one will split and extrude a slender dark red bole. You can see them grow before your eyes. Some go up a hundred, a hundred and fifty feet without any sign of stopping. I wish I could have brought the visioncam. So much more easy to show than describe, but Jake guards the Chaga-proofed camera’s limited stack of pre-loaded discs jealously.

  If I’ve learned anything from Moon’s diary - which I carry with me in my pack - it’s the importance of knowing where to start. So I won’t begin with the lies I told Shepard about the reporting jobs or the surreptitious gathering of my gear – the canvas back pack, the hand-tooled all-leather boots, the metal canisters for water, toiletries, sun-block, cigarettes - even the Chaga-proof steel toothbrush; or the meeting above the shop on Kamukunji Street where I was introduced to Moran and M’zee and Sugardaddy and Rose and Bushbaby.

  I’ll begin with the fire-fight, because it marks a definitive transition from the familiar to the alien. We’ve been walking south towards Terminum, from the place where the Black Simbas’ humpy dropped us. M’zee; who, as his name suggests, is the oldest and most experienced in our team - sees a plume of dust south of us that is moving against the general direction of the willy-willys that blow across the Amboseli plain. M’zee glasses it and confirms: a scavenger patrol in a recycled 4x4 they’ve fitted with a heavy machine gun. We’re pinned between it and the spy satellite coming over the horizon in ten minutes. On Moran’s orders, we take cover in a dry gulch under our thermal profile quilts. These are amazing pieces of military technology: they draw body heat from the inside and redistribute it to match the average profile of the environment outside. You’re effectively infra-red invisible. My chief concern is not scavengers or satellites, but finding a scorpion creeping over me. I wait. I sweat. I dread. Then I hear the helicopters and freeze. The satellite is up, has spotted the scavengers and alerted the military. The Air Cav come right over the top of us, hover, and move off into the south. They cannot possibly hear anything but themselves, but I hold my breath until red spots balloon in front of my eyes. Just as I am on the verge of self-inflicted anoxia, the helicopters move off into the south. A few moments later, there is the distant stutter of heavy machine gun fire, the turbine shriek of helicopters taking evasive action and then the snapping, staccato rattle of Gatling fire. I feel the ground shake to a dull explosion and no more gun fire. The helicopters pass over us once again and swing away into the west.

  When the satellite is down below the horizon, we roll up our thermal quilts and move quickly before ground troops come in to secure the area. I know from experience how far a column of smoke is visible in this country. Our course takes us close by the wreck: Jake begs a photo-opportunity. Moran agrees, sends Sugardaddy with us, for protection. Sugardaddy does not expect survivors, but death in the bush attracts a dangerous wake. I take shots of the smouldering shell of blackened steel and the corpses scattered on the charred ground. I’ve never seen a killed human being before.

  The fire has burned the upper parts to the bones; the parts in contact with the ground are intact, down to the scraps of blue denim and cotton T-shirt. Jake says that is the way bodies burn in war. When a jackal more courageous than its packmates darts in to tear at one of the bodies, I scream, kill it, just kill the fucking thing, can’t you? Sugardaddy calmly lifts his Kalashnikov and blows the bastard thing into the bush in a shatter of bone and gut.

  Moran is angry that Sugardaddy has risked security with a shot, but Sugardaddy is a Luo, like Faraway, and, like Faraway, satanically vain. Calling on the respect due his age and experience, M’zee keeps the peace between the two men, but the day will soon come when Sugardaddy and Moran will fight to the death, like pack animals. We are all jackals, out here.

  We were on such high alert watching for the dust trails of soldiers coming to investigate that I only noticed we had crossed terminum when I felt a crawling sensation on my left wrist like I used to get when I was a kid and the cats slept on the bed and I imagined their fleas were creeping all over me. My Swatch was breaking out in orange pimples. I had been so careful about everything else and forgotten about the plastic watch. I dropped it to the hexagon-cover just as the strap rotted into rags and drips of digested polyethylene. My last connection with the human world was broken: time. There is no time in here; no history, no future, only the eternal now. Present, and presence: the sensation of the Great Wall at my back is that of an almost sentient mystery, crawling toward me on a billion red millipede legs.

  ~ * ~

  40

  Gaby’s text diary

  Day Two

  Time for a line while they get the boats ready

  All morning we have marched through the Great Wall. If the edgelands taxed my powers of description, the Great Wall staggers me. The slender red trunks rise for five, six hundred feet before dividing and re-dividing into hundreds of branch-lets, each of which supports a single enormous hexagonal leaf. These leaves all lie in a horizontal plane so that they form a more or less continuous surface: the impression is not of being in a forest, but among the pillars that hold up the roof of the world.

  ‘Ecclesiastical . . . like being in a drowned cathedral’, my forerunner described this place in her diary. I hate to have to use another’s analogy - especially her’s - but it best conveys the feel of this place. The roof-leaves are translucent and colour the light that falls through them in a cyclorama of ancient lights, interspersed by edges of white where the sun shines through the gaps between plates. About thirty, forty feet from the ground, the trunks split into enormous aerial roots and buttresses so that we walk through an architecture of vaults and arches and piers.

  Things move up in the canopy; some so fast you cannot be sure you have seen them, some so slow you cannot be certain they are moving at all. A long way off, something is twittering. Nothing earth-born ever made a noise like that.

  How do I feel, moving through this cathedral-like place? Spooky: exalted. Unbelieving, as if it has all been painted by Hollywood set designers and will fall down with a crash when the wind blows strong enough. Wishing it to be real, hoping to glimpse again that thing I saw gliding between the smooth trunks that looked the size of a microlyte, but at the same time impatient to see what novelty the Chaga will reveal to me next.

  We move like small, fierce vermin through this colossal landscape. As befits El Macho Honcho, Moran goes first, his trusted deputy M’zee behind him; next comes Bushbaby, then the other woman, Rose, who has not cracked one word to me since we started, then Jake, me, and bringing up the rear, Sugardaddy. Seven of us. I’m sorry. Once it got into my head it just wouldn’t go away. How could you resist the temptation to sing ‘heigh-ho, heigh-ho’?

  Not forgetting the dog. Which is a shit-brown mongrel that you see hundreds of sniffing around in the townships and pissing on things and being driven off with stones. But out here, its pariah nose triumphs where man-made navigation devices fail. It’s led us straight to the cache where they have buried the canvas boats. That is because he isn’t any old pariah, Bushbaby says proudly. He’s been bred to this work. By the silent Rose, her cousin. She breeds and handles Chaga-hounds. None better, she says. I believe her. While the boys snap the boats together, I sit and moan and groan and try to ease my blisters and nipple-rub. My collar bones are rasped raw. Rose reaches up to this thing that looks like a red honeycomb growing on the root buttress under which we are sheltering. She squeezes a brightly coloured blob from one of the cells. She offers it to me and, for the first time, speaks.

  �
��For you,’ Bushbaby translates from Kalenjin. ‘Eat it. It will make you feel better. It is quite safe. It is forest food. Anything that is red in the Chaga will always be edible.’

  Better death than nushing out, as Fraser and Aaron Shepard would say. I pop the thing in my mouth. It is the size of a finger banana, the texture of a jungle slug and tastes of cinnamon, whisky and leaf mould. Two minutes later a glow starts in my belly. As I write this, I feel I can march straight up the trunk of one of these roof trees carrying everyone on one hand. Plus the dog. I feel good, da-na da-na da-na da. It grows all over the Chaga, this stuff. The market potential would be incredible, if I could get some out. Doesn’t keep, Bushbaby tells me. Like the manna of the Israelites. Didn’t their holy food come down from heaven too?

  But I notice a thing about Rose. When she gives me the forest food, I see that the little finger of each hand has been crudely amputated.

  Moving out now. More when I get the chance.

  ~ * ~

  (Later)

  Moon can’t have come this way. I can’t find any reference in her diary to these swamps and waterways that meander through this incredible, terrifying terrain. But she wrote years ago: the Amboseli swamps would have been outside terminum. The ruins of the old Ol Tukai game lodge she describes must be days ahead of us. When you are in the Chaga, you forget that as you move inward through it, it moves outward past you.

  There is a sky again. The ceiling of the Great Wall has broken up into isolated roof-trees (how hard it is to give names to things, to describe them as they are, not how they seem!) rising sheer out of what Moon describes elsewhere ‘drained coral reef’. Yes, but on the mountainous scale: The finger-corals are hundreds of feet high, the brain-corals the size of houses, hand-trees almost as tall as the parasol-sequoias, miniature Foa Mulakus, all stilt legs and horns. Most of what we pass through I can only describe by listing their mundane counterparts. Cornucopias. Organ pipes. Mug-trees. Bubbles. Light bulbs. Frozen chickens (really! About the size of a truck, and exactly that morbid shade of factory farm chicken skin). Cathedrals. Mixer taps. Windmills. Cheese graters. Pantyhose. Watch springs. Candelabras. Scramble nets. We follow the narrow, twining watercourse through a Disneyland of kitchen paraphernalia. FX by Hieronymus Bosch. Our boats are eerily silent, powered by truck-battery engines. We leave hardly a crease on the water as we move between the overhanging pipes and frills. Jake is in the lead boat with Moran and M’zee. Mere women and dogs follow, with the untrustworthy Sugardaddy’s hand on the tiller.

  We are in a state of armed vigilance. The Chaga seems to suit everything that comes into it very well. Hippos are public enemy number one. They could easily capsize these snap-together canvas assault boats. Bushbaby and Rose have Uzis: the only satisfactory way to stop a hippopotamus is to put the maximum number of shells into it, in the minimum amount of time. Personally, I’d feel much happier with something with the firepower of half a regiment rather than this fifty calibre Magnum they’ve given me, even with the dandy little Chaga-proofed laser sight that I mustn’t use too often because we can’t change the power pack. Go ahead, hippo, make my day. Did I fire five shots, or did I fire six?

  Some of the birds I’ve seen hunting in the shallow water seem to be carrying strange parasites like autonomous, mutated body organs.

  About ten minutes ago, Rose, through Bushbaby, asked if she could braid my hair for me. I’ve been admiring hers since I met her at the pick-up point: plaited and wrapped with threads, string and wax, strung with tiny Indian bells and amber beads. Bushbaby says they’ve both been admiring my hair for as long. They can’t get over the colour. Rose unpacks her threads and wires and beads from her pack, sits behind me and sets to work. She lifts my hair. I grasp her hand, turn to face her.

  ‘Posse?’ I ask, holding up the maimed hand.

  She nods her head. ‘Mombi.’

  You see the pink Cadillacs and the zoot suits and the girls cute and pouting in nylon and leather. You never see the deputies and the law they enforce. For the first infringement, the left little finger. For the second, the right little finger. To keyboard users, this maiming is symbolic as well as functional.

  They lose their patience when it comes to the third offence.

  I kiss the back of Rose’s hand, never taking my eyes off her.

  She’s doing a fabulous job on my hair. The beads swing and click at every move of my head. It’s more than just a pass-time or sign of personal affection. It’s a ritual. A marking. I’m one of the tribe now.

  Moran is shouting back from the lead boat. We’ll camp tonight at the remains of Ol Tukai Lodge where this snow-watered swampland runs out of Lake Amboseli and we enter the Loolturesh Discontinuity. I am back in her footsteps again: Moon, Niamh O’Hanlon, my Arne Saknussen.

  ~ * ~

  (Later)

  Moran says he thinks there is somebody else out there.

  ~ * ~

  Day Three

  M’zee agrees. We are not alone in here. It’s not the Wa-chagga: their country is on the far side of the discontinuity. UNECTA explorers are a possibility. The Black Simbas have no quarrel with them, but UNECTA reports to the military, with whom all the Tacticals are unilaterally at war, so contact is best avoided. The only thing the Tacticals hate more than the military are their cartel rivals. A lot of wealth and power crosses terminum into the camps, some are realizing later than others, so they send combat teams to follow the safari squads to their source, kill everything that breathes and claim what they find for their cartel. They’re scary. The Wa-chagga nation have a treaty with the Black Simba Cartel, they will protect us from claim jumpers. But they are a day away across Lake Amboseli in open canvas boats and the first and last you will know about claim jumpers is the itch of a laser sight on your forehead and nothing ever again. Fabulous. Apocalypse Now in the Loolturesh Discontinuity.

  There are things scarier than claim jumpers. Obi-men. Forest wanderers. People who have found their way into the Chaga, become trapped by it, and changed.

  Changed? I ask.

  No one answers.

  Jake is with us in the women’s boat today. He wants footage of the lake crossing and feels he should direct the shots so we don’t waste space on our limited supply of discs. He’s never been this deep. Lake Amboseli had once been seasonal, fed by subterranean springs drawing snow melt from the mountain, evaporating in the heat of the dry season. Now it is permanent, sealed under the transparent roof of the Loolturesh Discontinuity. The roof is made of balloons fifty metres in diameter, stuck together somehow, moored about three hundred metres up on lines and gnarled hold-fasts gripping the floor of the lake. Thousands, probably millions, of balloons, as clear as glass. Shot: a receding perspective of the still waters of Lake Amboseli with infinite regress of vertical lines. Steering through the hold-fasts makes slow passage, especially when you do not know what you will find around the next knot of cables and roots.

  There are things moving in the balloon canopy; things that cling to the curved undersurfaces, feeding off the occasional veils of translucent blue moss; and other things that float like animate zeppelins, steering themselves between the cables by languid ripplings of gossamer tail membranes. Jake has to tell me to stop shooting. But they’re there, they’re real. I have them.

  Monkeys have colonized this vertical landscape. They run up and down the cables, fingering morsels out of the crevices between the plaited strands, cramming their faces as they watch us pass beneath. Many of them carry elegantly obscene deformities: antlers of green coral, mottlings of green and purple mould, extra sets of red arms and hands.

  Changed.

  She saw this, I remember. She noted this. But she draws no conclusions about whether these are pre-natal deformities or the Chaga somehow manipulating the flesh of the grown animal. No conclusions that I have read. Maybe they, like so much, are in the vanished pages.

  This landscape breeds paranoia.

  Jake. I am learning not to treat him as a folio of clichés. He is mor
e alive here, with death so strong inside him, than I have ever seen him before. He manages to maintain his sartorial crispness - God knows how, I look like Jana of the Jungle after a heavy night. Even his sweat rings are precisely circular. His spirit is strong, but I fear that his body is beginning to betray him. He tires easily. And his sleep is troubled - several times a night he will cry out loud enough to wake the camp. Jake tells me he hears voices in his sleep. Mutterings in his hind brain, like someone talking in another room, loud enough for the voice to be heard but not the words it is speaking.

  She wrote about spirit voices, calling her deeper into the heartlands. She imagined them to be lost, crazy Langrishe’s. Did she ever find him? Is he still out there in all those thousands of square miles of the alien?

  ~ * ~

  (Later)

  Camp three. Well into the weird now. I should do that doo-de-doo-doo, doo-de-doo-doo from the Twilight Zone, except everything up here does it naturally.

  Up here.

  Ha ha.

  We’re on the far side of the Discontinuity, in the land of the Crystal Monoliths. The Land of the Wa-chagga. We hope it was their turds Dog found close by the landing where we stashed the boats. Fresh turds. About an hour or two old. Nothing lasts too long here. If they aren’t Wa-chagga, they mean that the ones who were following us are no longer following us. They’re in front of us.