Changa

by Ian McDonald

  ‘My daughter, yes,’ Yves Montagnard said. ‘Hubert’s twin. Little Nicole.’

  ‘If you’re Papa, then who the hell is Mama?’ Jake asked.

  ‘Never mind whose baby or whose twin,’ Gaby interrupted, ‘she’s fucking Batwoman. I saw her fly, for God’s sake. Peter fucking Pan.’

  ‘That is the nature of her change,’ Henning Bork said. ‘That is why we hid her from you. But she is a wild thing, and very curious. She would not be hidden.’

  ‘She’s not living in the jungle on her own, not at her age,’ Jake said. ‘Someone else is out there. You lied to us about the crew of the Tungus.’ All investigative journalists are frustrated master detectives, Gaby thought.

  ‘Only half lied,’ Ruth Premadas said. ‘Ludmilla is Nicole’s and Hubert’s mother. She was the airship’s co-pilot. When we learned outsiders were coming, we had her take Nicole up to the Breeding Pit Observatory.’

  ‘I thought my room felt lived in,’ Gaby said. ‘No wonder Hubert was so keen to come up to the Observatory with us, and go running off into the trees.’

  ‘But the Captain,’ Jake insisted. ‘What was his name? Kosirev? Did you tell the truth about him? That he tried to make it back, and got lost?’

  ‘We did. It is true. But it was worse than lost,’ Henning Bork said. ‘Changed.’

  Gaby saw Jake follow his curiosity to the brink of disclosing undisclosable things about himself. Careful, friend.

  ‘Like Nicole, do you mean?’

  ‘No.’ Henning Bork sighed. ‘How can I say it? A new body, I suppose. A symbiote, a parasite? We do not have the language for what the Chaga is doing to flesh.’

  ‘Obi-men,’ Sugardaddy said. ‘That is what you are trying to say. I have seen them, but briefly. They move fast, for such huge things, and so silently. It is as if they command the forest to let them pass, and to close behind them and conceal their tracks.’

  ‘What have you seen?’ Jake asked.

  Sugardaddy shook his head like an old man who finds the world has surpassed his extraordinary stories.

  ‘So many things that they could not all be from the same creature. Hair. Skin. Organs in transparent sacks. Great clawed feet, thighs bigger and stronger than an ostrich’s, but the finest, thinnest fingers. More like hair than fingers. The faces; I remember those best. You see the faces, in those folds of flesh . . .’ He shook his head again.

  ‘Yet they are all the same creature,’ Henning Bork said. ‘We call them orthobodies: they seem to be symbiotic organisms that can take the human body into them and mesh with the nervous, digestive and cardiovascular systems. They seem to enhance human faculties in many ways: improved health and immunity from disease, great strength and speed, extended sensory range, the ability to interact with the Chaga environment.’

  ‘I have seen them walk free,’ Sugardaddy said. ‘They opened up like a woman’s thing, and the people inside walked out, like they were being born. I say that because they were connected to those things by birth cords. This is what happened to your captain?’

  ‘Does this happen to everyone who is lost in the Chaga?’ Jake asked. You are scared, Gaby thought. You are right to be scared, if this is the price of your deliverance. No wonder UNECTA keeps those poor bastards locked up where no one can see them.

  ‘Not everyone,’ Yves Montagnard said. ‘The Chaga is the place of perpetual change and transformation, but the changes take many forms. For some it is attracting an orthobody - it seems that the attraction is essentially sexual between human and symbiote, the merging voluntary, almost an act of love. For others it is to be changed in the womb, by changing the genes of the parents, like Nicole and Hubert - oh yes, my son is changed, but it is not an outward change like Nicole’s gliding membranes. And some are changed in their own bodies by the symbiosis of Chaga virons with terrestrial infective viruses.’

  ‘HIV 4,’ Gaby said.

  ‘Utilizing retroviruses as carrier bodies to insert molecular information into genes had been a trend in genetic engineering research long before the Kilimanjaro Event,’ Ruth Premadas said. ‘When Ol Tukai’s taxonomists noticed mutations occurring in fully differentiated monkeys that had adapted to the Chaga environment, it seemed a fruitful line of inquiry. I was on the team set up at Kajiado centre to investigate relationships between Chaga virons and genetically hypervariable retroviruses. Just before the Tungus mission, we made the breakthrough into the SIVs - Simian Immunodeficiency Viruses - and were hypothesizing similar interactions with the human immunodeficiency viruses.’

  ‘The Chaga is an engine of evolution,’ Yves Montagnard said, in his Big Ideas voice. ‘It has come to move us forward as a species, perhaps as many species. Our technology has brought us to an evolutionary dead end. Biotechnology allows us to evolve in the directions in which we wish to be evolved: taller, stronger, healthier, higher IQ, more beautiful. We imagine this will be the future humanity. Absurd. If a tribe of Australopithecus had sat down to design the next evolutionary breakthrough, they would have planned something that could run faster, see further, smell better, have sharper nails to grub out insects and roots. They would not have planned talking, thinking, tool-making homo sapiens.

  ‘Out there is an environment as alien to us as Paris would be to Australopithecus, an environment that changes to demand new responses from us, that can generate a thousand habitat niches. We do not know what we will need to expand into the universe, so the Chaga give us the gift to diverge into a thousand, ten thousand, a million sub-species: a million seeds of humanity cast into the dark.’

  ‘“And say which seed will grow, and which will not”,’ Jake quoted.

  ‘Yes,’ the Frenchman said fiercely. ‘And maybe, because there is enough room out there, all the seeds will grow. Transhumanity. Posthumanity. Panhumanity. Any of these, all of these. On these East African plains humanity was born; it must be more than cosmic coincidence that it is on these same plains that the new humanity; the thing that comes after us, that we cannot see, will arise.’

  Gaby thought of the legend of the tree where man was born, and all the races of earth returning to that ancestral baobab, with its roots in earth and its branches among the stars, to be dissolved in its hoarded waters and made anew. Sweet, seductive Big Ideas. How long their legs are, how easily they stride over us. Look, they are already over the horizon while we plough our way through the mud. How many centuries it has taken us to learn to see that people whose skin is a different colour from ours are as human as we, and now you are asking us to hug these winged children and hybrid obi-men and changelings to us. Things we may not even recognize as human, we must call brother and sister.

  ‘I am an uneducated working man,’ Moran said unexpectedly. ‘I do not understand these things well. I do not know about Australopithecus and evolution and what you call trans-humanity, posthumanity. All I know are my people, my home, my cartel, my family. I know my country. I know my children. I know this.’ He drew a long-bladed guerilla knife from the leather sheath on his thigh. The blade was beautiful. He was a man who could care for an edge. Moran set the knife on the commons table. ‘Tell me what this means to me. Tell me what this means for my family, my children, my nation.’

  For the first time, Gaby felt some measure of admiration for Moran. He was African. He could stare into the headlights of Big Ideas, Big Science, Big Dumb Objects, without being dazzled, and ask the only question that had any meaning: what have you done for me lately?

  ‘Be thankful for the children you have now,’ Lucius said quietly. ‘If you believe in a god, pray for the ones yet to be born, that you may learn to love them as you love the ones that are already yours.’

  ‘The mutations are happening to you too,’ Jake Aarons said. ‘Just like here. That’s why you didn’t want to take us to your town.’

  ‘Yes,’ Lucius said. ‘This is what these ideas you barely understand mean for your family, your children, your nation, Moran. Learn from us, that they will not destroy you as they are destroying the Wa
-chagga nation, by setting us against each other. In my town, Kamwanga, and in Nanjara and Usarangei and Mrao; Ngaseni and Marangu Gate too, we say that change is the nature of the Chaga, but it is never harmful or destructive, and these children who are born different because of it are to be cherished and valued just like those who are normal. It is no sin or shame or sign of the disfavour of God or the anger of the spirits. It is the way of this place.’

  ‘But that is not the case among the other settlements.’

  ‘They take the changed children as soon as they are born and expose them.’

  ‘Jesus,’ Gaby whispered.

  ‘Institutionalized infanticide,’ Jake said.

  ‘Yes,’ Lucius said grimly. ‘It is destroying the Wa-chagga nation. We are abominations to each other. People from Kibongo will not speak to people from Usarangei; the people of Marangu and Marangu Gate are enemies because of this. Soon, I fear, we will kill each other.’

  ‘The children,’ Gaby said.

  ‘We have asked the councils of the towns who oppose us in this to let us take the changed children, but they fear that we are breeding an army of monsters to annihilate them. So we follow the men who leave the children in the forest. If we cannot bribe them, we wait until they have gone and take the baby. But we do not save them all. We cannot save them all. We trust that the Chaga is as kind to them as to all others who have to rely on it for their lives. But it is a hope, nothing more. Of the ones we save, and of our own, there are many that do not survive. They are too deeply changed. You would tell me that they are victims of evolution, Dr Montagnard; that they are variants that do not adapt and are weeded out. I cannot be that sanguine.’

  The blimp cloth curtain that hung across the doorway twitched aside. Moran and Sugardaddy drew weapons.

  ‘You do not need to do that,’ the figure in the door said. It spoke in a woman’s voice, heavily accented with Slavic. ‘We are no danger to you, unless you are of the party that thinks that children are abominations of God.’ A small, sandy-haired white woman dressed in cut-off combat pants and a tattered T-shirt entered the long room. A child clung to her legs; a girl child, white, naked, agonizingly thin. She had the luminous eyes in a filthy face that turn fa vela urchins into angels. The child stared at the alien bodies in the common room and pressed closer to her mother. Flaps of skin were stretched taut between wrists and ankles. Follicles puckered into gooseflesh.

  ‘You scared Nicole. She came to see why she had to be taken away from her home and came rushing back to me to tell me that a strange woman had pulled a gun on her. You do not need to hurt her, she will not hurt you. Why should you want to hurt her? Because she is different from you? So I have brought her back here for you to see that she is not a monster or a freak or an example of evolution in action or the first generation of the new humanity,’ the Russian woman said. ‘She is just a little girl, and Hubert is just a little boy, and they find themselves in a strange world with new and frightening abilities, and they are trying to find out how it all works and how they can live in it. They do not contemplate the mysteries of the universe or solve the Grand Unified Field equations. They sulk. They fight each other. They have tantrums. They do not like to go to bed, and they spit out their food and will not eat what we have made for them. Just a boy and girl. So, the girl can glide on her wing membranes; so, the boy can link with the thoughts of the Chaga and in his dreams pass his consciousness into animals and birds and the creatures that the forest has made: but they are not offences against God or Allah or the holy church. Nicole will say hello to you, but first you men must put your weapons away, because they are frightening my daughter.’

  ~ * ~

  45

  They left Treetops the next morning. Gaby was dazed from lack of sleep and too much wonder. Her sense of disbelief was gorged, like a snake that has swallowed a goat. The progress through the canopy to the rendezvous point with M’zee, Bushbaby and Rose was slow. Jake constantly fell behind and the party would have to wait while someone went back to bring him along. Moran was growing impatient with the delays and halts. The next time it happened, Gaby volunteered to be the one who went back. She found Jake several minutes down the branch, seated in a dip of cable that swept up to anchor points at the base of one of the Crystal Monoliths.

  ‘I reckon you’ve got ten, fifteen minutes clear before they start to look for us,’ Gaby said.

  Jake Aarons smiled his sophisticated Thorn Tree Bar-smile.

  ‘What will you tell them?’

  ‘That I never found you.’

  He thought about the implications of the lie for a few moments.

  ‘Yes, that should do it. I don’t like you having to lie to them; they’re good people.’

  ‘Moran is a jerk.’

  Jake laughed.

  ‘Got a cigarette?’

  Gaby did.

  ‘I didn’t know you smoked.’

  ‘At theatrically appropriate moments I do.’

  He was not a comfortable smoker, but he seemed to enjoy the Camel.

  ‘Traditional last request,’ he said.

  ‘For a while I thought you’d chickened out of doing it,’ Gaby said.

  ‘For a while I had. They spooked me with that orthobody stuff. That’s worse than dying, that. Like a walking iron lung made out of meat. Rather take my chances with UNECTA and Unit 12 than that. What convinced me was that kid, Hubert. He was born with it, I caught it, but we’re both the same in here. We hear it. We see through its eyes. We dream its dreams. We share the same circuitry, in here, and so maybe it isn’t some desperate old faggot’s final fantasy to wave in the face of death like a karmic press card. I know that if I stop to look at it too closely, it’s insane, what I’m planning to do. But we’re humans, Gab, we can adapt to anything. We can triumph anywhere. They wrote operas in Auschwitz, for Christ’s sake. Yves Montagnard was wrong. There is only one way to be human; in here. What we wear over it doesn’t matter.’ Jake glanced at his steel Rolex. ‘Couple of minutes before the natives get restless. When it really comes down to it, Gab, what matters is that I’ll be in it. I won’t be watching, I won’t be an outsider looking in, recording, reporting, commenting. I’ll be in it. I’ll be a part of whatever story is being told here. All the rest of the world can do is watch: watch the Chaga, watch the BDO, watch the stars, watch the screen to see the television news watching it too. But I will be what is being watched. I will commit T.P.’s cardinal sin. I will not report the news, I will be the news. And if you don’t understand what a mighty, mighty temptation that is, you’re no bred-in-the-bone journalist.’

  Jake exhaled the last of Gaby’s cigarette and carefully crushed the stub under his heel.

  ‘T.P. should know, though. I know it’s a heap of shit to hang on you, but tell him, Gab. Tell him everything. And Tembo too, because he’s a good man and I can trust him not to shoot his mouth off to some woman like Faraway would. Tell them. No one else. Oh yes. One last thing I owe you, Gab. That diary Shepard gave you. Haven’t you guessed?’

  ‘Humans living in the Chaga. Moon met the Wa-chagga.’

  ‘Gaby, Gaby, Gaby.’ No one could ever do the look of professional disappointment like Jake Aarons, that was not disappointed in your limitations, but in your failure to live up to your talent. ‘It’s not what, or why; it’s who. Who would give you an obviously maimed diary, which you were bound to investigate, when it would have been so much easier to deny it ever existed?’

  ‘Shepard?’

  ‘He’s a man. I’m a man. We do it with different targets, but down here, we’re all the same.’ He clutched his groin. The gesture was disturbingly undignified. ‘Where dick takes over, mind leaves off. He was so mad keen to get you into his bed he sure didn’t care about the consequences. Hell, he probably couldn’t even see there would be consequences through the fog of testosterone.’

  ‘Shepard.’

  ‘Time to go, I think.’ Jake stood up, offered Gaby a hand. Just like the last goodbye. These things are best done
quickly. They say short, sharp pain is better than years of nagging numbness.

  ‘Jake.’

  ‘Don’t say anything, because even one word might make me not do it, and I wouldn’t want to hate you for that for the rest of my life. Don’t say anything, don’t try to follow me, don’t call out my name, don’t look at me. Just kneel down and close your eyes.’ She surprised herself by doing what he asked. ‘You’ll know when you can open them again.’ She felt his fingers lightly touch her eyelids in blessing. Someplace wonderful was a breath against her cheekbone.

  She opened her eyes. He was gone. She screamed his name ten times. The Chaga did not answer. She cried a time for him, but not too long, for she must get back to the Black Simbas before they came to look for her.

  ~ * ~

  46

  They came down through the roof of the singing forest. The men had not believed Gaby’s story about being unable to find Jake and fearing he had fallen any more than she did, but they were male and proud and would not allow themselves to recognize that a women would dare to lie to them. Gaby blindly followed Sugardaddy through the tier forest. Her inner view-finder framed an immaculate Jake Aarons climbing the final ridge, to stand a moment to look upon the distant ramparts of the Citadel and steel himself for the descent to the mad lands below. The tension and guilt mounted to near sexual intensities. She would turn around and go after him. She would find him. It would be easy, because it was meant to be. Several times this happened. Each time, the kick inside was less brutal and in the end she knew that she could live with him gone. It was a kind of dying. That was the way to feel it. Life is made up a million small dyings and rebirths. She turned that thought over and over in her head as she came down the swooping cable.