by Ian McDonald
Beyond the Discontinuity the terrain changes as abruptly as those old Tarzan movies where Johnny Weissmuller runs from Sahara sand straight into tropical jungle. The Crystal Monolith zone isn’t just one Chaga. It’s a whole department store of them, stacked on top of each other. Each level is a separate biosphere, with its own unique flora and fauna. The way forward is up.
Dog’s unfailing nose leads us right to the climb, a hundred or so steel pitons hammered into the main column of what looks like a Fassbinderesque Fitzcarraldo-fantasy of an oil refinery lost in Amazonia. Sugardaddy unpacks a couple of hundred yards of old-fashioned hemp mountaineering rope and body harness and goes up the pitch. It’s beautiful. Rock dancing. He hauls up Dog, who swings slowly in his harness, like a canine Foucault pendulum.
The only thing holding me to these steel pitons is the determination that I am not going to be hauled up like a side of meat. Don’t look down, they say. I have no problem with that. Rose comes up after me with almost as much style as Sugardaddy, Uzi dangling under her ass.
There’s an old American slave expression I can’t get out of my head: the Way in the Air. We are pilgrims on that Way, toward holy Zion; Ngaje N’gai, the House of God in Masai. Up here, you see that it is not so much a level as a web of spans, buttresses and branches. Imagine the organic equivalent of an LA freeway interchange and you’ve something of it. The branches are as wide as freeways. Where the spans join, you could host a full-size Cup Final with all the supporters and car parking. It’s easy to be blasé: most of what surrounds you is empty space. Get careless, and it’s four hundred feet straight down. Dog goes snuffling along the thinnest tendrils with heart-stopping nonchalance.
Only a little light filters down through the higher levels. I stop a moment to savour a rare beam of sunlight on my face. Looking up it, I see a handful of blue sky scratched by a jet contrail. This level is Monkeyland, with a few tribes of chimps (is that the proper collective noun?) thrown in. The chimps seem to rule the roost and have absolutely no fear of humans. They hoot at us from their enclaves high on the trunks, throw shit at us. Some of the bigger chimps carry the thigh-bones of large animals.
Are chimps supposed to do that?
M’zee smelled the storm coming before the first gusts drew spooky sobbings and moanings from the tier forest. We make it to a flange and set up Camp Three as the gale hits us. A big wind in the Chaga is a mighty scary thing. Everything moves. Everything tosses and sways and creaks and groans and every moment you think, Oh Jesus, it’s all going to fall apart, we are all going to die. You look for something strong and secure to hold on to, but everything is moving with you. And the wind really howls, like it is after your soul, and if it can’t get that, your body will do. It would have blown us, in our little thermal quilts, clean off the level and into four hundred feet of screaming death, were we not buttoned up. Bushbaby, Rose, me and Dog, who is lying proudly licking his erection, are bundled up in something like a cross between a secret cave and a sleeping bag that opened in a tree trunk when Moran licked it. Inside, it’s a spongy tube lit by bioluminescent patches that stretches as you push at it until there’s enough room for three women (in somewhat close proximity) and a dog. Bushbaby showed me the teat in the floor you can suck for a supply of nutrient sap. Tastes like piña colada, she says. I’m not that desperate. Yet. Above the slit door through which we squeezed, like birth in reverse, is a tennis-ball sized bud that Rose stroked to seal the membrane against the rising storm. The same trick will open it. All a tad parturitional for my liking. Peter Werther, the Chaga Adam, spoke of being sheltered in things like these. Who then was the Eve from which the Chaga learned womb magic?
Some unseen mechanism keeps us supplied with fresh air, otherwise we should all smother from a combination of sweaty, unwashed woman and dog dick. Enough for today. Bushbaby says Rose is wondering what I’m always writing writing writing at. I’m wondering too.
~ * ~
She woke and remembered how she knew this moment. It was the memory of winter storm nights in the Watchhouse, when the rain rattled the bedroom windows and the wind gibbered under the eaves and you curled up in your duvet, cuddled by cats, enjoying being so warm and safe and enclosed. You would wake in the hourless hours the clock did not measure to find the storm passed and, in the huge silence behind it, you would creep downstairs and into the porch to stand and lose yourself in the tremendous stillness lying across the land.
Not even Dog twitched as Gaby slipped through the door lips into the cool, clean air from the high country. The only sound in the tier forest was the patter of raindrops dripping from level to level to level, running down to earth. The slow rain glittered as it fell; the night forest shone with ten thousand bioluminescent lights. Gaby felt she had been set to walk among the stars. Exalted. Chosen. Invulnerable. She walked out along a high-arching bridge, drawn irresistibly into the mystic. At its far end, the arch joined with others in a tangled boss of cords, tubes and organ pipes. In a covert between two human-sized racks of panpipes, Gaby did a thing she had not since was ten years old, in the secret places of the Point known only to herself. She took off her clothes. She laid them in a neatly folded stack, found footholds in the pipes and climbed until she came to another arch. She found a safe roost at the edge and sat with her feet hanging over the star-filled abyss. She listened to the drip of water through the tier forest. She felt the Chaga on her skin.
She could disappear here. This arch would lead to another, and that to yet another, and take her far beyond any hope of return to the human world. Eden again. Return to animal awareness; the eternal Now, before the Fall armed humanity with consciousness and care. She did not wonder the Western industrials wanted it ring-fenced. The Chaga’s Grace Abounding was the denial of consumer capitalism. But it is an insidious Eden where everything may be had by reaching out to take. It is the determination to push your hopes and dreams through the relentless material world that makes you human. If you were to get up from this place and walk in there and never come back, the Gaby McAslan that you have made yourself become would evaporate.
She shivered, suddenly cold and naked. She got up from her pitch, climbed down through the vox humana and vox angelica and put on her clothes. As she crossed back to Camp Three, she saw a figure seated on the edge of the drop, in the same position, legs over abyss, that she had sat.
She froze.
‘You too?’ Jake Aarons’ voice said. ‘It is sacred, isn’t it?’
‘And scary,’ Gaby said. She sat cross-legged beside him, a little back from the brink. ‘It’s beautiful, it’s awe-inspiring, it’s the closest I’ve come to a religious experience, and it’s the end of everything it means to be human.’
‘Or a gate into new ways of being human,’ Jake said. ‘What the Chaga says to me is, now you don’t need to compete for resources, now all the rules of supply and demand are torn up: there is enough here for everyone so now you can experiment with new ways of living, new ways of interacting, new societies and structures and sociologies, knowing that you have permission to fail. Screw it up and it won’t cost you and your children your lives. Like America was, back in the pioneer days when all the religious communities came over from Europe because there was space for them to follow their beliefs without interference. Continual experiment.’
‘Or stagnation.’
‘Pessimist.’
‘Fuzzy-minded pinko.’
Jake laughed. It sounded very loud in the silent tier forest.
‘I have to be optimistic, don’t I? But it’s more than wishful thinking. What I’m going to say will sound to you like classic schizophrenic paranoia, but the voices, the ones inside, I know whose they are.’
‘Don’t tell me it’s God, Jake.’
‘Hell no. It’s the voice of the Chaga.’ He held up his hands, begging time to explain. ‘Don’t “Jesus, Jake!” yet. You believed Peter Werther when he said he could hear the Chaga thinking to itself. Look at this place, what is it? A web of nodes and connections, a
neural network, for Christ’s sake, on the macro and micro scales. Everything connects in here. Everything thinks. Do you know what the latest theory about the Crystal Monoliths is? They’re the Chaga’s primary memory storage system. Bevabytes of information stored holographically in a crystalline matrix. Hard drives the size of skyscrapers. Somehow I’m plugged into the system too. I’m the watekni on-line cyberpunk fantasy. Direct neural connection to the data net.’
‘Jesus, Jake.’
‘Don’t try to tell me it’s all a fantasy of a sick man who will make any deal with any devil to beat the Big 4, Gaby.’
‘I’m not going to, Jake.’ Now. She had to tell him now. She took a deep breath. ‘Jake, do you remember the day I came to your place, when I learned about you from the hospital files. I learned something else. All those people in Unit 12, all the HIV 4 sufferers who have been exposed to the Chaga: Jake, they’re all still alive. They should have died years ago - you told me, the thing kills in six months, tops - but these people are still alive. There’s something in here, in this place, this jungle, that stops HIV 4. That’s why you hear your voices; it’s working its way into you.’
Jake looked at Gaby. She could not read his expression. He got up from his high place and walked away through the dripping forest. Gaby called his name but he did not look back.
~ * ~
41
Gaby’s diary
Day Four
Contact.
M’zee has the senses of a hunting animal. We are on the high paths, moving through a thickening fog. M’zee stops, looks up, raises a finger and circles it. The Black Simbas unsling their weapons. Safety catches click off. We are not alone. M’zee takes point with the heavy machine gun they call m’toto: The Baby. Moran covers his right flank, Sugardaddy his left. I am behind Moran, Jake behind Sugardaddy, with orders that if anything happens, to get down, stay down, keep out of fields of fire and shoot anything that comes at you. Bushbaby and Rose back-mark. Rose lets Dog off his leash to run ahead.
Every few seconds we turn and check that the faces beside and behind us are the ones we saw last time. The fog grows thicker. My shorts and top are silver with dew, but I can feel the sweat running down my sides. My saturated pack feels like it weighs eighty tons. My blisters are bleeding into my boots. My calves are wrenched with cramp from yesterday’s climb. At any moment, two hands may reach out of the fog and take my head off with a monofilament garotte. I have never felt more afraid. I have never felt more alive.
When I used to go out with Private Pete the Soldier, I would parade my offended Political Correctness when he hoped that his unit would get transferred to Bosnia because he wanted to see some action. I understand him now. My God. This place is turning me into a War Bore.
M’zee holds up a hand. Dog is standing five feet in front of him, hackles raised, lip curled.
I am in cover before Moran can wave us down. I roll into a water-filled channel where two strands of branch twine over each other. Something oozes from under my thighs. I don’t think about it.
M’zee and Moran go forward. Dog trots after them. They disappear into fog. I lie in the cold water listening for gun fire. It doesn’t come. I grow chilled. It must come. It doesn’t. It feels like hours, down in the cold ditch. A rustle of movement. I roll onto my back, grabbing for the Magnum,
‘If I were your enemy, you would be dead now,’ Bushbaby says. ‘Get up. We are moving.’
On Jake’s signal I unholster the camcorder and follow him in.
We find them in a small amphitheatre of dwarf hand-trees. The men have been crucified on the white fingers of the hand-trees. The women have been hung by their heels. The bodies have been stripped. All have been killed by a single bullet in the head. The bodies have been mutilated. The men’s penises have been cut off and stuffed in the women’s mouths. The Chaga has started to claim the corpses. The men hang like images from Medieval plague crosses: high-relief crucifixes half-fused into the flesh of the hand-trees. Gaping mouths, eyes staring out of the melt of flesh and forest. The women’s trailing fingers have elongated into tendrils that weave seamlessly into the web of cables and branch fibres.
Flies, and things like green thistle-down, rise in clouds as Moran examines the dead. He finds a tattoo on the ball of the first woman’s shoulder: an outline of a cube, the sign of Sheik Mohammed Obeid’s Children of the Hajji Cartel. He reckons they have been dead for four or five hours. It looks like they were surprised setting up an ambush for us. They were undoubtedly killed after they were strung up.
My berserker adrenalin burn has gone cold in my blood. War sickens me. There is nothing glorious about it, nothing noble. Just cruel and sad. This is a terrible place to speak your last word, think your last thought, breathe your last breath and know absolutely that the last thing you will see is the figure standing over you with the gun.
I keep thinking back to a boy in my class at uni. We were never friends, our social circles did not intersect. I only got to know him by the manner of his death. He had the worst death I can imagine. He was into cave diving; which is insane at the best of times, let alone the suicidal solo dive he made against all advice into the flooded tunnels under the Marble Arch cave system. He didn’t even learn when the piece of grit jammed a valve and blew all his air supply away and he only just made it back to atmosphere. He was certain there was an undiscovered major cavern at the end of the narrow tunnel he had been squeezing through when he got into trouble. He went down the next day to find that cavern. He never came back. They reckon the same thing happened again, but he was too far along the pipe to make it back. He died alone, under miles of rock, in the cold and the dark, knowing his air was bubbling away, knowing that he wouldn’t make it, knowing that the last, the very last thing he would ever see would be his headlamp beam shining on limestone tunnel.
The body’s still down there. It’s too dangerous to recover it. In water that cold, that far from light, it could remain intact just about forever, floating trapped under those miles of rock.
I had nightmares for weeks after I heard how he had died. It’s the scariest story I know, because it’s true.
I think of those three men and two women, dying alone, helpless, where no one will ever find them, where no one will ever know, and a shaft of ice drives deep into my soul.
Before we leave them, M’zee pauses to rip out a tremendous fingers-in-mouth whistle and yell ‘Wa-chagga!’ at the top of his voice. As we advance, he repeats the call. Eventually I distinguish an answering whistle out of the forest sound-track of unearthly whoopings and chimings and twitterings. M’zee returns a long monotone blast; a complex twitter replies. We’ve given the passwords and crossed the firewall. What wrong note, what incorrect response, did those poor bastards back there give?
The Wa-chagga await us in a large natural atrium encircled by curtain walls of woven tendrils drooping enormous folded flower buds. They number nine: six men, three women. But for the colour of their combat pants, which are Chaga purples, crimsons, lilacs, they are indistinguishable from the Black Simbas. I am a little disappointed, I had been expecting Noble Savages. One of the women’s T-shirts has a picture of the Brazilian international striker Arcangeles printed on it.
They all look very young. They all carry very big guns. They all have red-green things looped around the backs of their heads, with one tendril that goes into the ear and another that brushes the upper lip. They are a combined defence patrol/ trading mission, like the armed merchant adventurers of the age of the navigators. They are all the Tacticals are permitted to see of the Wa-chagga nation and its organic towns scattered across the foothills of Kilimanjaro. I pull the camera out to video this historic moment.
Everything goes horribly quiet.
A Wa-chagga boy with straight-bobbed dreadlocks suddenly exclaims, ‘I know who you are!’ His English is almost accentless. ‘You are from television: Jake Aarons, SkyNet News! And you are Gaby McAslan. You did all these funny end of the news stories.’
&nbs
p; And we are deluged with hands wanting to be shaken and smiling faces and voices welcoming us and asking for an autograph and will they get on the satellite news?
Later, Mr Natty-Dread, whose name is Lucius, an Economics graduate from the University of Dar Es Salaam, shows me how it is that we are such big stars among the Wa-chagga. It may have been designed as a Daewoo microvision, but then someone ripped off the casing and half the electronics and shoved in a slab of Danish blue cheese with half a pound of fettucine verde and not only is it somehow working, it can pick up pictures from as far away as Zimbabwe. Organic circuitry, Lucius says. The Chaga can analyse any electronic circuit board and synthesize a smaller and more efficient organic equivalent. The things runs on nuts. Nuts particular to a certain plant; peel them and you have a handful of five-volt batteries. The headsets I noticed are more of the same: organic two-way radios, though most of the time they’re switched to Voice of Kenya. Lucius lets me try his. He has it tuned to the pirates along the north Tanzanian coast, who do radical dance music.