by Jerry
Out in the dark beyond the floodlights, trees fell, brought down by the Chaga, dissolver of illusions. The wooden piers of the hotel creaked and clicked. The celebrities glanced at each other, afraid.
The knock came at 1:27 according to the luminous hands of the bedside clock. Gaby had not long gone to sleep after dictating commentary. Noise from the upper decks; the party would gradually wind down with the hour until the soldiers came with the morning to clear everyone out. One of the guests, high and hopeful? A second polite knock. The politeness told her.
She could see from the way Prenderleith stood in the corridor that he was a little drunk and that, had he not been, he would not have done this. He was carrying his gun, like an adored child.
“Something you should see,” he said.
“Why me?” Gaby asked, pulling on clothes and boots.
“Because no one else could understand. Because of those seven minutes you stared at that bloody thing out there and nothing else existed. You know the truth: Nothing does exist, apart from that. Make sure you bring whatever you’ve been recording on with you.”
“You guessed.”
“I noticed.”
“Hunter’s senses. Sorry, I should have told you, I suppose.”
“No matter to me.”
“You’re the only one here has a story worth telling, who will actually lose something when this comes down.”
“You think so?”
The light was poor in the wooden corridor. Gaby could not read his expression right. Prenderleith led her to a service staircase down to ground level. Stepping onto the dark surface between the piers, Gaby imagined setting first foot on an alien planet. Close to the truth there, she thought. Prenderleith unslung his rifle and led her out from under the hotel into the shadows along the edge of the floodlights. The night felt huge and close around Gaby, full of breathings and tiny movements. Her breath steamed, it was cold upon the shoulder lands of Kirinyaga. She inhaled the perfume of the Chaga. It was a smell you imagined you knew, because it evoked so many memories, as smell does more powerfully than any other sense. But you could not know it, and when you realized that, all the parts that reminded you of other things collapsed together and the spicy, musky, chemically scent of it was nothing you could remember for no one had ever known anything like this before. It pushed you forward, not back.
Prenderleith led her toward terminum. It was not very far. The Chaga grew taller and more complex as the floodlight waned. Looming, like the waking memory of a nightmare. Gaby could hear the groan and smash of trees falling in the darkness. Prenderleith stopped her half a meter from the edge. Half a meter, fifteen minutes, Gaby thought. She curled her toes inside her boots, feeling infected. Prenderleith squatted on his heels, rested his weight on his gun, like a staff, hunting.
“Wind’s right,” he said.
Gaby squatted beside him. She switched on the recorder, listened to the silence, and watched the Chaga approach her, out of the shadows. Terminum was a grid of small hexagons of a mosslike substance. The hexagons were of all colors; Gaby knew intuitively that no color was ever next to itself. The corners of the foremost hexagons were sending dark lines creeping out into the undergrowth. Blades of grass, plant stems, fell before the molecule machines and were reduced to their components. Every few centimeters the crawling lines would bifurcate; a few centimeters more they would divide again to build hexagons. Once enclosed, the terrestrial vegetation would wilt and melt and blister into pinpoint stars of colored pseudomoss.
On a sudden urge, Gaby pressed her hand down on the black lines. It did not touch flesh. It had never touched flesh. Yet she flinched as she felt Chaga beneath her bare skin. Oh she of little faith. She felt the molecule-by-molecule advance as a subtle tickle, like the march of small, slow insects across the palm of her hand.
She started as Prenderleith touched her gently on the shoulder.
“It’s here,” he whispered.
She did not have the hunter’s skill, so for long seconds she saw it only as a deeper darkness moving in the shadows. Then it emerged into the twilight between the still-standing trees and the tall fingers of pseudo-coral and Gaby gasped.
It was an elephant; an old bull with a broken tusk. Prenderleith rose to his feet. There was not ten meters between them. Elephant and human regarded each other. The elephant took a step forward, out of the shadows into the full light. As it raised its trunk to taste the air, Gaby saw a mass of red, veiny flesh clinging to its neck like a parasitic organ. Beneath the tusks it elongated into flexible limbs. Each terminated in something disturbingly like a human hand. Shocked, Gaby watched the red limbs move and the fingers open and shut. Then the elephant turned and with surprising silence retreated into the bush. The darkness of the Chaga closed behind it.
“Every night, same time,” Prenderleith said after a long silence. “For the past six days. Right to the edge, no further. Little closer every day.”
“Why?”
“It looks at me, I look at it. We understand each other.”
“That thing, around its neck; those arms . . .” Gaby could not keep the disgust from her voice.
“It changes things. Makes things more what they could be. Should be, maybe. Perhaps all elephants have ever needed have been hands, to become what they could be.”
“Bootstrap evolution.”
“If that’s what you believe in.”
“What do you believe in?”
“Remember how I answered when you told me the Chaga was taking my Africa away?”
“Not your Africa.”
“Understand what I meant now?”
“The Africa it’s taking away is the one you never understood, the one you weren’t made for. The Africa it’s giving is the one you never knew but that was bred into your bones; the great untamed, unexplored, dark Africa, the Africa without nations and governments and borders and economies; the Africa of action, not thought, of being, not becoming, where a single man can lose himself and find himself at the same time; return to a more simple, physical, animal level of existence.”
“You say it very prettily. Suppose it’s your job.”
Gaby understood another thing. Prenderleith had asked her to speak for him because he had not been made able to say such things for himself, and wanted them said right for those who would read Gaby’s story about him. He wanted a witness, a faithful recording angel. Understanding this, she knew a third thing about Prenderleith, which could never be spoken and preserved on disc.
“Let’s go in again,” Prenderleith said eventually. “Bloody freezing out here.”
The soldiers came through the hotel at 6:30 in the morning, knocking every bedroom door, though all the guests had either been up and ready long before, or had not slept at all. In view of the fame of the guests, the soldiers were very polite. They assembled everyone in the main lounge. Like a slow sinking, Gaby thought. A Noh Abandon-ship. The reef has reached us at last. She looked out of the window. Under darkness the hexagon moss had crossed the artificial water hole and was climbing the piles of the old hotel. The trees out of which the elephant had emerged in the night were festooned with orange spongy encrustations and webs of tubing.
The main lounge lurched. Glasses fell from the back bar and broke. People screamed a little. The male Hollywood stars tried to look brave, but this was no screenplay. This was the real end of the world. Prenderleith had gathered with the rest of the staff in the farthest corner from the door and was trying to sow calm. It is like the Titanic, Gaby thought. Crew last. She went to stand with them. Prenderleith gave her a puzzled frown.
“The punters have to know if the captain goes down with his ship,” she said, patting the little black recorder in the breast pocket of her bush shirt. Prenderleith opened his mouth to speak and the hotel heaved again, more heavily. Beams snapped. The picture window shattered and fell outward. Gaby grabbed the edge of the bar and talked fast and panicky at her recorder. Alarmed, the soldiers hurried the celebrities out of the lounge and
along the narrow wooden corridors toward the main staircase. The lounge sagged, the floor tilted, tables and chairs slid toward the empty window.
“Go!” Prenderleith shouted.
They were already going. Jammed into the wooden corridor, she tried not to think of bottomless coffins as she tried to shout through the other shouting voices into the microphone. Behind her the lounge collapsed and fell. She fought her way through the press of bodies into the sunlight, touched the solidity of the staircase. Crawling. She snatched her fingers away. The creeping, branching lines of Chaga-stuff were moving down the stairs, through the paintwork.
“It’s on the stairs,” she whispered breathlessly into the mike. The wooden wall behind her was a mosaic of hexagons. She clutched the recorder on her breast. A single spore would be enough to dissolve it and her story. She plunged down the quivering stairs.
Heedless of dangerous animals, the soldiers hurried the guests toward the vehicles on the main road. The news people paused to shoot their final commentaries on the fall of the Treehouse.
“It’s coming apart,” she said as a section of roof tilted up like the stern of a sinking liner and slid through the bubbling superstructure to the ground. The front of the hotel was a smash of wood and the swelling, bulbous encrustations of Chaga-stuff. The snapped piles were fingers of yellow sponge and pseudocoral. Gaby described it all. Soldiers formed a cordon between the spectators and the Chaga. Gaby found Prenderleith beside her.
“You’ll need to know how the story ends,” he said. “Keep this for me.” He handed Gaby his rifle. She shook her head.
“I don’t do good on guns.”
He laid it at her.
“I know,” she said.
“Then you’ll help me.”
“Do you hate this that much?”
“Yes,” he said. There was a detonation of breaking wood and a gasp from soldiers and civilians alike. The hotel had snapped in the middle and folded up like two wings. They slowly collapsed into piles of voraciously feeding Chaga life.
He made the move while everyone’s attention but Gaby’s was distracted by the end of the old hotel. She had known he would do it. He ran fast for a tired old white hunter, running to fat.
“He’s halfway there,” she said to her recorder. “I admire his courage, going gladly into this new dark continent. Or is it the courage to make the choice that eventually the Chaga may make for all of us on this planet formerly known as Earth?”
She broke off. The soldier in front of her had seen Prenderleith. He lifted his Kalashnikov and took aim.
“Prenderleith!” Gaby yelled. He ran on. He seemed more intent on doing something with his shirt buttons. He was across the edge now, spores flying up from his feet as he crushed the hexagon moss.
“No!” Gaby shouted, but the soldier was under orders, and both he and the men who gave the orders feared the Chaga above all else. She saw the muscles tighten in his neck, the muzzle of the gun weave a little this way, a little that way. She looked for something to stop him. Prenderleith’s rifle. No. That would get her shot too.
The little black disc recorder hit the soldier, hard, on the shoulder. She had thrown it, hard. The shot skyed. Birds went screeching up from their roosts. Otherwise, utter silence from soldiers and staff and celebrities. The soldier whirled on her, weapon raised. Gaby danced back, hands held high. The soldier snapped his teeth at her and brought the butt of the gun down on the disc recorder. While he smashed it to shards of plastic and circuitry; Gaby saw the figure of Prenderleith disappear into the pseudocoral fungus of the alien landscape. He had lost his shirt.
The last vestiges of the tourist hotel—half a room balanced atop a pillar; the iron staircase, flowering sulphur-yellow buds, leading nowhere, a tangle of plumbing, washbasins and toilets held out like begging bowls—tumbled and fell. Gaby watched mutely. She had nothing to say, and nothing to say it to. The Chaga advanced onward, twenty-five centimeters every minute. The people dispersed. There was nothing more to see than the millimetric creep of another world.
The soldiers checked Gaby’s press accreditations with five different sources before they would let her take the SkyNet car. They were pissed at her but they could not touch her. They smiled a lot, though, because they had smashed her story and she would be in trouble with her editor.
You’re wrong, she thought as she drove away down the safe road in the long convoy of news-company vehicles and tour buses. Story is in the heart. Story is never broken. Story is never lost.
That night, as she dreamed among the doomed towers of Nairobi, the elephant came to her again. It stood on the border between worlds and raised its trunk and its alien hands and spoke to her. It told her that only fools feared the change that would make things what they could be, and should be; that change was the special gift of whatever had made the Chaga. She knew in her dream that the elephant was speaking with the voice of Prenderleith, but she could not see him, except as a silent shadow moving in the greater dark beyond humanity’s floodlights: Adam again, hunting in the Africa of his heart.
THE MONITORS
W. Gregory Stewart
THEY SHOULD HAVE MET CUTE—OH YES OH YES—NOT LIKE they did at all. They met ordinary is how they met. And tired, and maybe a little off, a little out of sorts the each of them.
And what they should have done was met cute.
If it had been cute, they might have shrugged it off later on; it wouldn’t have been the way it was. And maybe things would have been different; or maybe wouldn’t have meant so much, would have happened differently or could have changed. And maybe not. But if not, and even so, then they would at least have had having met cute. They would have had that.
This is maybe how they should have met: Out to dinner, each alone—which is how it often is anyway—alone and out to dinner. And then some one of them would have, should have, tripped and fallen laughing across the other’s gazpacho or grits or whatever, and. . . . Wait—let it happen to her. Let him fall across her meal, and let her look up, smiling to him and the maitre d’ beyond, and say, “Waiter, there’s a guy in my soup.” And everybody laughing all fall down—not how it was, but could have been.
Or walking dogs (if there had been dogs to walk and such as they would have had dogs if there were) and then the tangling of one and another in leash and light conversation as their dogs went round about in friendly sniff. Then all huddling together, barking and laughing, say, as the rain came up and it all fell down—not how it was, but could have been.
How it was, was ordinary, though. How it was—it was accidental and laughless, a thing no memory would fondly mark. She had gone, and he had gone, tired and alone to their local commissaries; and it happened that these were the same commissary. And they shared a table, because it was crowded, and that was the way things were done in a crowded commissary.
“May 1 sit here?” It doesn’t matter who said it. No one remembers now anyway. It was a courtesy of form and not of true intent; an announcement and not a real request.
It’s how it was.
Maybe someone nodded. Or maybe they each looked at the other. . . . Wait, they did. They did look at each other—yes—and, in their weary ways, liked what they saw.
He saw brown hair—dark brown, nearly black—and brown eyes, round and large, and just now red and nearly weeping-weary. A gentle face, he saw, and lips on which a smile might have been nice and more.
She saw blue eyes and a high, high forehead leading to brown hair that tended to blond highlights, and to gray. She saw red behind the blue eyes and the blue of the eyes. She saw a twitch in thin lips that might have been anything but seemed to be smile. And she saw his blue, blue eyes—ice blue, sky blue, sea-blue deep. She saw these.
And one nodded, and one sat, and each ate. Alone.
BUT THEN, and over the weeks and the months—between their separate shifts, when their Primaries are off-line, when they aren’t psynched, when they can at all—they chance, not so much by chance as slow intent, each one upon
the other eating. Or waiting to be joined to eat. In the minutes they can muster.
For she is, and he is, the same. They do the same thing, and spend much of their days and nights as MediCorps Monitor Units in psynch with Primaries who would rather not think about them. Lift her hair—or his—and look behind the left ear there are the plugs for the psynchro-monitor. Each has a Primary, and each spends all day mostly in psynch with and almost that Primary: watching, learning, living from a distance; action from the field.
She sees what her Primary sees; she monitors that. And she tastes what her Primary tastes. And he hears what his
Primary hears, and feels the same things, and smells as well what his Primary smells. They shake the hands that their Primaries shake, and make love as their Primaries make it—and with whom they make it. Far and distant and unseen, observers on the outside, inside. They know what they know, and how. They are monitor units after all, after all. It is their job, and more than a job—a way of life, and a life itself. So we suppose, here and now and on our own side of things, not really knowing and not wanting to.
But wait—we move along.
He is a monitor; she is a monitor. And the only free time, off time, them time they have is when their Primaries sleep and they have whatever time they have: to unpsynch and clear their heads wearily, wearily and worn; to shake off the workwebs; to sleep themselves and find some tiny place of their own; to be themselves. Just to be. It is a demanding life, if you call it a life at all, and we do, whether they do or not. We do, not knowing.
They don’t.
“Oh,” she says, “you’ll never guess what I did today,” meaning her Primary, what her Primary did today. And of course he doesn’t guess, not usually anyway. But sometimes, maybe. Usually not. “Oh, this. Oh, that,” she says.
