by Ian McDonald
Black Simbas and Wa-chagga sit down to trade. The weapons are swiftly agreed; Sugardaddy, the Black Simbas’ chief negotiator, takes an order for ammunition. The computer software, sealed in metal cases, is taken after animated bargaining in Swahili between Sugardaddy and Lucius, who seems to be a boy of some authority. The cigarettes are set aside while their merits are weighed. The flasks of Coca Cola concentrate provoke great excitement. Sugardaddy personifies superior aloofness while fingers are dipped in the flask and sucked to make sure this is the real thing. If any people are experts on cola, it is Africans. Words are exchanged, hands slapped; all the cigarettes are accepted and the deal is sealed. The Coke, I learn, is a one-off trade; once the Chaga picks its molecules and synthesizes it, the forest will be raining Coca Cola. Will it do Diet too, I wonder?
In return, Sugardaddy gets two steel vacuum flasks. In the first vacuum flask is a powerful all-purpose antibiotic that will kill even penicillin-immune bacteria. In the second is a cure for cholera. The Chaga synthesized both. Lucius tells me that none of his people have been sick since they escaped from the camps and returned to the mountain.
‘You cannot get sick,’ he says. ‘Not with counter-agents to every disease blowing on the wind. You take them in by the million with every breath.’
Including, it seems, something that stops HIV 4 dead in its tracks.
~ * ~
(Later)
I rather think Lucius is trying to come on to me.
The rest of the men are sprawled around the microvision watching women’s kick-boxing relayed from Bangkok and drinking native beer. They mutter doubtless obscene comments at the screen and laugh. The women are sitting in a ring by themselves, talking in Swahili and laughing and clicking their fingers. I sit apart to write, and Lucius comes and sits himself down beside me.
‘They are crass, boorish men,’ he says, looking at the group around the television. ‘You are like me, you are intelligent, sensitive, educated.’
I ask him how intelligent, sensitive, sophisticated college boy becomes gun-toting, camouflage-wearing freedom fighter.
‘Loyalties are long and strong in Africa,’ he says. ‘When I heard what was happening to my family’s farms up on Kilimanjaro, I could not stay away, not while I might have some power to help them. I could do nothing against the Chaga, but when my people escaped from the camp at Moshi, I went with them, because I knew they would need all manner of abilities to rebuild the nation.
‘We found the Chaga at the minimum level of habitability. We were not wise to its ways, we did not trust it to feed and shelter us. Some died, the young, the very old, the vulnerable, and from their bodies the Chaga learned the needs of humans and grew them. From their flesh came the meat we eat, from their blood the water we drink, from their skin our shelters, from their bones our towns and settlements, from their spirits the light and the heat and the electricity that powers them. I say it like religious scripture. It is almost a prayer among us. You are thinking we have made the Chaga our God? Yes, in an African sense; gods who are petty, and practical, and ask you questions like, Lucius, which would you rather have, a perfect soul or a new Series 8 BMW? and do not get upset when you say a BMW. The Chaga gives us both: it weaves outside things into itself and makes them more than they are. And in doing itself, it makes itself more. Outside the Chaga is life. Inside the Chaga is life times life. Life squared.’
I press him on what he means by the Chaga making things more than they are. It echoes Jake, when he said, on the night of the storm, about the Chaga being the gateway into new ways of being human. Lucius is evasive. It is getting late, he says. The others are calling him. No they are not. What they are doing is peering in tense concentration at the Asian Babes All-Action Topless bout. But at least I won’t have to stop him trying to chat me up. Jake takes his place beside me. Topless All-Action Asian Babes hold limited appeal for him, I suppose. Getting bitchy, Gaby. Hot news. While the guys’ brains have been be-fuddled by oiled Asian titties bouncing in extreme close-up, he’s been working on them to let us visit one of their settlements. They would not agree to that under any circumstances, but he did wheedle the promise out of them to take us deeper into the Chaga to see something that they will not specify, but they think will interest us greatly.
‘When do we go?’ I ask.
‘First thing in the morning. Lucius will guide us.’
The women are talking among themselves with great animation, laughing and hiding their faces behind their hands. They must be talking about sex.
~ * ~
Day Five
We made our farewells in the early mist. Rose, Bushbaby, M’zee and Dog are staying to conclude business with the Wa-chagga.
We ascend steadily for about an hour. There are ways between the levels; swooping catenaries of plaited piping that anchor tiers to piers like the cables of a suspension bridge. Lucius runs up them with the cocky ease of one of these spider-men who build the Manhattan skyline. He’s trying to impress me. What it makes me want to do, encumbered by ordnance and acrophobia, clawing for every finger- and toe-hold, is knee him in the nuts. Lucius educates me in Chaga-lore: anything red will always be edible, orange is water, blue electricity, white information. Green and yellow are heat and cold; black is drugs, both pharmaceutical and recreational.
We come across a moment of lost history tangled up in the cables between worlds: the overgrown skeletons of three helicopters, trapped like insects in a web and sucked transparent. Jake rubs away the crust of pseudo-lichens and discovers Tanzanian army markings. The cockpits are a writhe of tendrils and yellow spines: I imagine picked-clean skulls, greenly grinning. Or do I imagine?
Upwards. By noon break I want to lie down and die and let the Chaga grow over me, like that lost helicopter squadron, and suck my soul up into the Crystal Monoliths that I can just begin to glimpse through the forest roof. At least Lucius can clear up a mystery before I die. I ask him if he or his people ever encountered a white woman travelling inwards alone, three, four years ago. Yes, he has. She was . . . Irish, like me? Yes, but not red, like you. She was dark, in complexion and spirit. A woman like this you remember. She ran into one of the foraging parties from Rongai village. They brought her in - this was when Webuye was chief, before the new regime moved for a more reclusive policy toward strangers in the forest. She asked everyone if they had seen a white man pass that way some months before. She would not stay for more than one night before she must move on inward, in search of her man.
There is another way, Lucius says, in which I am like her. We both spend hours writing in journals.
I know, I say, taking the Liberty book from my pack. This is that diary. I lay it on the cable between us. Lucius looks at it suspiciously: does it say anything about the Wa-chagga, and Rongai village? he asks.
All references to humans living in the Chaga have been cut out, I tell him. With a sharp knife.
The Wa-chagga did not do this, he says, flipping through the yellow pages.
I ask him if he knows if Moon ever found the man she was searching for. Yes, Lucius says. He was in the patrol that met her, many months later, wandering in the chaotic terrain at the foot of the Citadel. She had been near exhaustion, and deeply mistrustful. She had asked the Wa-chagga to take her to Nanjara settlement, where the people had been kind to her before, and then toward terminum. She would not speak about what she had experienced up in the high country beyond the Citadel, but it was clear that it had changed her.
After she had collected her things from Nanjara, the Wa-chagga patrol took her through the tier forest to Lake Amboseli, where they would give her into the protection of a Tactical squad, but she had broken away then and fled into the fastnesses of the Discontinuity.
So, T.P. This is how it ends. Paranoia and disillusion on the white mountain, and a love that was not so strong nor so deathless as Moon thought. Those who love too big lose too big. If it’s any consolation, Langrishe couldn’t keep her either. Funny. Sad. Terrifying: how it all keeps c
oming back to that one word: changed.
I’m frightened for Jake.
Upwards.
I hadn’t thought we were so high. All of a sudden we come up through the canopy on to the top of the forest. I can see. I have a horizon. I can feel sun on my skin. I have a landscape once again.
The Crystal Monoliths rise over me, as high above me as I am above the deep root forest. Their facets sparkle sun diamonds across the canopy. Before me, the web of branches and spars runs between the splayed fingers of the ridge country I glimpsed that morning Shepard took me up in the microlyte. Beyond the canyonlands, clouds rip softly on the upper ramparts of the Citadel.
The canyon country looks easy walking. It lies. The ridges are made of a porous, crumbly substance that sinks under your boots and disintegrates between clutching fingers. It took an hour to make it on to the nearest ridge top, whereupon Lucius told us with sadistic pleasure that our way lay across the forest valleys between.
Bastard.
If it’s tough on me, it’s hell on Jake. We have to stop every ten minutes for him to rest. He still hasn’t spoken to me about what I told him on the night of the big storm. I’m not pissing you, Jake. I wouldn’t. Not you.
Lucius promises we’ll be there before nightfall. We’re not. It’s nightfall by the time we start on the final valley traverse, close to midnight before he tells us we can stop, we’ve arrived.
At first I can’t see there is anything to have arrived at. Then, after a time, listening to the nights sounds of the Chaga, I realize it’s a seeing trick, like Foa Mulaku before it came to the surface. I begin to make out a pattern among the biolights in the branches, like a luminous join-the-dots picture. Suddenly they resolve and I am standing on the edge of a colossal drop looking across at walkways, staircases, rooms, gantries, houses, platforms built into an island of Chaga rising out of the deep dark root country.
Someone has built a town in the tree-tops.
~ * ~
42
His name was Henning Bork. He was from the University of Uppsala. With Dr Ruth Premadas, Dr Yves Montagnard and his sister Dr Astrid Montagnard, he was all that remained of the UNECTA expeditionary dirigible Tungus. They had constructed and lived and continued their work in this arboreal settlement they called Treetops for five years. They had also produced Hubert, age four. Looks four, acts four hundred, Gaby described the child in her diary. This was what happened when boffins mated; Yves Montagnard was Hubert’s father, but Gaby’s hypothesis as to the mother either flew in the face of the evidence - Ruth Premadas was a very dark Tamil - or contravened the fundamental taboo of almost every human society.
Could explain why he was such a mutant, Gaby thought.
New faces were a novelty in Treetops. Resurrecting social niceties, Henning Bork hosted a dinner party for his guests. They sat around a long, narrow wooden table on a balcony overlooking the big drop that was Treetops’ main defence. The food for the meal all came from the Chaga. Some of it Gaby could not tell from its terrestrial original; some of it tasted of this but with the texture of that, and some of it was unlike anything in her experience but, after the shock of unfamiliarity, was very good to eat indeed. Dr Premadas handed around a dessert fruit that looked like turd-on-the-cob and tasted exactly of lazy summer evenings when you do not have to go to work the next day.
‘This could be as big as chocolate if the food combines ever got their hands on it,’ Jake Aarons said
‘We discover a new food crop every week,’ Astrid Montagnard, the botanist, said. ‘We have catalogued over two hundred Chaga staples that could have a major impact on global nutrition. This is many times the number that were introduced into the Old World from the Americas.’
‘The Chaga synthesizes foodstuffs from the human DNA template,’ the Frenchman at the opposite end of the long table had said. He was a molecular biologist. ‘Nothing you find out there will ever be poisonous, or even mildly harmful. The better it knows us, the more finely tuned to our needs its provisions for us will be. I am sure our Black Simba guests have been approached by representatives of biotechnology corporations to smuggle samples through the security cordon.’
‘We have taken samples, yes,’ Moran said. ‘But I have heard that they cannot make them grow.’
‘Of course they cannot,’ Yves Montagnard said forcefully. ‘It cannot be separated from the Chaga. It is all one thing, one system. Every part needs every other part: it is a true symbiosis. Maybe they can splice the genes into a terrestrial species and get some hybrid that will grow in a field, but that is the complete antithesis of what the Chaga is about. They want another agribusiness product; out there is the end of agriculture. The end of the slavery of the plough. The end of markets and subsidies and surpluses that mean grain mountain here, famine there. Everything may be had here just by taking. It is the return of the hunter-gatherer society, which is the best nourished, healthiest and culturally adventurous on earth.’
‘You must excuse Yves,’ Henning Bork said. ‘This place reinforces idealisms, but takes away people on whom one can vent them.’
Ruth Premadas brought coffee, or what the Chaga passed for coffee. The wind gusted, stirring the hovering globes of bioluminescence, swaying the branches of the big tree that upheld the community. Gaby gripped the table as the decking shifted. Dr Premadas poured Chaga coffee without spilling a drop.
‘Do not worry,’ Henning Bork said ‘We built it to stand far worse than this. And it has stood far far worse than we ever expected. The Chaga has grown into it, made it strong.’
‘How does it come to be here at all?’ Gaby said, asking the question that the guests most wanted answered.
Henning Bork pressed his palms together as if he had been eagerly anticipating this opportunity to practise the art of after-dinner story telling.
‘The last flight of the Tungus. This is the tale.’
The Sibirsk airship Tungus had been sent out from Ol Tukai Lodge early in the second year of the Chaga’s expansion, when the mass of alien life began to differentiate into separate zones and speculations about it being a product of alien design began to solidify. Aerial photography had shown complex formations developing far beyond the reach of UNECTA’s foot expeditions. The Chaga-makers themselves might inhabit them. Aliens had been big that year.
The idea had first been used in the Brazilian selvas in the 1980s. It was very simple. A lighter-than-air transport flew in a large, lightweight folding raft, set it down on the top of the forest canopy and quickly unfolded it to distribute its weight over as large a surface area as possible. Scientists used the raft in the tree-tops as a secure base from which to study the attic ecology. When they were done, they could pack up the raft, call in the LTA and float on to another location. Now, with Western can-do and Eastern wealth, UNECTA planned to do it bigger and better. The lifting power of the Siberian logging dirigibles could transport an entire research laboratory on to the roof of the Chaga. Regularly re-supplied by airship, it could remain there indefinitely, a scientific community in the canopy.
Tungus lifted from Ol Tukai with a crew of two and four scientists equipped with accommodation, plant and supplies for five weeks, bound for a predetermined location on the northern slopes of Kilimanjaro. The airship crossed terminum and was never heard from again.
‘We did not know that the envelope of Chaga spores reached so high above the canopy,’ Henning Bork told his dinner guests. ‘We lost the first gas cell fifty metres up as we were coming in to land. We were heavily laden. When the second blew, we knew we could not make it back. Captain Kosirev was trying to soft-land the airship on the canopy when we lost all lift and came down.’
‘It was by sheer grace that no one was killed or badly injured,’ the Swede continued. ‘It was obvious that the ship could not be made airworthy again. Nor could we signal for help, the radio had been consumed by the Chaga. Of course, we did not know then that the Chaga reconstitutes what it consumes; the radio, and our experimental and analytical equipment as wel
l.’
‘So you could call for assistance now,’ Jake Aarons interrupted.
‘Yes,’ Henning Bork said. ‘But we do not wish to. We have a self-contained, self-sustaining research community; we are constantly making new discoveries, delving deeper into the secrets of the Chaga. There is always something more to discover. This Treetops of ours is on the very edge of the Chaga’s major zone of morphological experimentation; the sector beyond this ridge country, we call the Breeding Pit. You should see it: it is the evolution engine of the Chaga; the place where all its stored genetic information is made flesh and varied. You could observe for a hundred years and never see the same thing twice. We have an observation platform up there; I will take you there tomorrow to witness it for yourselves. Maybe then, you will understand why we do not wish to leave. Why should we go back to the outside world, only to have all this taken from us and given to someone else?’
‘Professional possessiveness?’ Gaby said. That is not the reason, she thought. There is some other thing that keeps them clinging to this raft of tents and platforms in the tree top, and they have made a compact between themselves to keep it from us.