Chaga

by Ian McDonald

  ‘Good afternoon, ladies. Could you show me some identification, please?’

  He passed the driving licenses and SkyNet accreditations to an officer sitting at a camp table on the verge, eating his lunch. While the officer studied the documents, the soldier walked slowly around the car, looking at trivial things in a vaguely intimidating way, as bored soldiers at checkpoints do.

  ‘Can I ask where you’re going?’ the soldier asked, growing tired of the game of vague intimidation.

  ‘Oh, south.’ Gaby waved her hand in the general direction of Tanzania. ‘We want to have a look at the Chaga.’

  ‘Sightseeing?’

  ‘You could say that.’

  The officer wiped his mouth with a bush-camouflage napkin and came over to the Vitara. He and the soldier spoke briefly in Xhosa.

  ‘Can I see your pass authorizations, please?’

  Gaby opened her bag and with one hand folded a thousand shilling note in the way Faraway had taught her was best for bribing policemen. She slipped it palm down to the South African officer. He glanced at it and passed it back to Gaby.

  ‘That is not a pass authorization.’ The officer looked up into the sky, then at Gaby. ‘Excuse me, but could you tell me what time it is?’

  ‘You’ve got a watch on your wrist,’ Ute said.

  ‘The officer’s may be broken,’ Gaby said, unfastening her Swatch. ‘Mine keeps good time, see?’ She passed it to the officer.

  ‘Very good time indeed.’ He slipped the Swatch into a button-down breast-pocket. ‘I would give you a word of advice. For your own safety, we do not recommend that you go any further down this road than the Mile 70 marker post.’ The officer saluted and smiled beautifully. Gaby put the Vitara into gear, waved and drove off.

  ‘You bribed that officer.’ Ute Bonhorst’s innate Teutonic respect for authority was outraged.

  ‘Certainly did,’ said Gaby McAslan, child of an ungovernable people.

  Beyond the checkpoint the road dipped down into a river valley and climbed abruptly. At the top of the valley side it swung to the right. The car took hill and bend easily.

  And there it was.

  Gaby pulled in under a great baobab. She got out of the car and went to the edge of the road where the land fell away to the Amboseli plains. She squatted on her heels and looked at the Chaga. The Zeiss-Leica optomolecules bonded to her corneas darkened.

  In her summer on the west coast of the United States, she had detoured to the Grand Canyon. The bus had left her at the door of one of the lodges. In the dark, low-beamed interior she had found a sign, quite small, easily overlooked, that read ‘To canyon’. Prepared for an anti-climax, she had followed it through a small door and found herself on the very brink. Twenty cubic miles of airspace gaped at her feet. She had stood, gripping the rail, for ten minutes, stunned motionless.

  The Grand Canyon had confounded all her cynicisms and exceeded all her expectations.

  The Chaga did the same. Nothing she had seen or heard or learned about it could prepare her for the physical reality. It was too real, too big. Too close.

  She felt as if she were at the edge of an ocean. There was a nearer shore but no further one. To Gaby under the baobab tree, it went on forever. The difference between the Chaga and the dry acacia scrubland in its path was more than the difference between savannah and rainforest. It was the difference between land and ocean, between sun and moon.

  The satellite photographs had shown her the Chaga on the geographical scale but they could not capture the sense of vastness and inevitability you felt when you stood before it, not looking down with the eyes of God, but out with the eyes of humans. From space it was a dark, insanely patterned roundel painted on to the map of Africa. From a baobab tree two miles from terminum, as the line of advance was formally known, it was as if a window had been opened to an alien planet. If you were to walk down this ridge and through the thorn bush and cross that line, you would be transported instantly to some terrible place galaxies away.

  When you stood in its path, you understood how completely alien it was to everything you knew. Its colours were alien. They mixed and matched with each other, but they strained the eye. They did not seem as if they were meant to be seen lit by tropical sun and set against the earth-coloured landscape of this southern land.

  Its shapes were alien. Its skyline could never be mistaken for the canopy of a terrestrial forest. It piled too high, too sharply, too steeply, as if a different gravity applied there. No growing thing was that flat, that wide, that bulbous, that angular, that convoluted. Its line offended the eye. There was something of the coral reef in it, and something of the tropical rainforest, and something of the polar berg-scape; there was something architectural and something industrial, planned and unconstrainedly chaotic. The Chaga was all these, none of these, more than these. Gaby recalled what Faraway had said on chicken-gizzard night on Tembo’s verandah. You could not see it, because there was nothing in it you could recognize. All you could see of it was what reminded you of what you already knew.

  Its smells were alien: unfamiliar musks and ketones and esters and complex lipids; the pheromones of the Chaga’s long, slow copulation with itself. It smelled of aromatics more exotic than any from the spice gardens of Zanzibar. It smelled of the fruit of Eden. It smelled of the sun-seared rocks of Mercury and the ice-floes of Triton. It smelled of the body secretions of the lover of your darkest dreams. It smelled of the birth of stars, the death of galaxies and God’s armpits. It smelled of the ocean of unknowing.

  Like the sea, it had a tide. The coming in of that tide across the Amboseli plain was too slow to be seen from Gaby’s perspective, but she observed the secondary effects of the advance. Terminum was not a sharp demarcation but a zone of transition. Only what was within and without were definite. On the line, Earth and Chaga were superimposed, like some metaphysical derivation of wave-function theory. At the very edge patches of olive, purple and crimson mottled the yellowed grass. As you moved inward, the patches merged into a multi-coloured carpet interrupted by occasional clumps of grass, scrub or trees. Further still and the first Chaga forms appeared: spires and lingers of pseudo-reef emerged from the mosaic of carpet-growth and terrestrial vegetation. A mile beyond terminum only the trees remained, holding their umbrella-rib branches above the squawling mass of Chaga-life. Gaby watched tall acacias sway and fall, undermined by the voracious alien growth. A mile beyond the felling zone, only the greatest and oldest baobabs resisted the Chaga. With distance they too were lost, enveloped in swathes of tendrils and stands of pseudo-fan corals. Three miles beyond terminum an abrupt transition took place. The reef-growth exploded into smooth columns that rose sheer three hundred metres before unfolding into a dense canopy of burgundy feathers. Only the white palms of the hand-trees rose higher, opening begging fingers to the sun.

  Gaby could not see what lay beyond the great uplift of forest. It was a bright blur. Nothing more. The Chaga rose gently toward the foothills of Kilimanjaro, forty miles away. The summit of the mountain was hidden by a cap of cloud.

  It was still there. It had waited for her. She had been faithful to it, and it had heard, and been faithful to her. Her star. Her Chaga. She felt tears swell and spill down her face. Two, no more. She wiped them away and reached for the visioncam in her bag. She framed Chaga and distant, cloud-hidden mountain in the screen.

  ‘Gaby’s videodiary, May 2, 2008,’ she said. She swallowed down the tremor of emotion in her voice. ‘Well, I’m here.’

  Buckyball Jungle

  17

  The house was older than the country, and very beautiful. A missionary doctor had built it strong and sound as a ship; low, square, with big windows that let light flood into the airy colonial cream and mahogany rooms, and wooden shutters to keep out the heat and the dust. The rooms held hidden delights; little cubbyholes in which newspapers from a century ago lay forgotten; niches and locked cupboards that were rumoured to contain morphine, or heroin. A deep porch enclosed the
house on three sides so that there was sun on it, or shade according to your taste, at every time of day. There were red bricks steps up to it, and a red brick drive that was wide enough to take a span of oxen, which was how the doctor and his family had first come to the house.

  Now a woman called Miriam Sondhai lived in the house. She was a virologist with the Global Aids Policy Unit, unravelling the molecular matrix of the HIV 4 virus. It had been the most important work in the world, until the Chaga came. Scientists had deserted to UNECTA in droves; biochemists and virologists foremost among them. Miriam Sondhai had not been seduced. She was a woman of commitment. Her skin was the colour of sun-bleached earth, her face was the fine-featured, heart-shape of the Nilo-Hamitic peoples, who are among the most noble and beautiful on Earth. She had the height and grace of a Somali or a Masai, but she was a woman of no tribe, which to an African is to be stateless, homeless, rootless. She had walked with her mother out of the chaos of Somalia, leaving behind a father and two brothers, in shallow stone graves.

  Now she lived in the house and loved it as it deserved to be loved. But it was too big and expensive for her on her own, so now Gaby McAslan was parking her brand new this-year’s-model Nissan All Terrain Vehicle on the brick drive that was wide enough to take a team of oxen and putting her clothes in the mahogany closets and her beer in the refrigerator and her precious little things in the missionary doctor’s nooks and corners and the eight foot tapestry of the Zodiac her sister had sent her on the living room wall.

  After four months in a single room, it was release. Gaby spread her life with wide abandon through the big, light-filled rooms. She turned the morning side of the verandah into an outdoor office. On hot nights she opened the French windows of her bedroom and pushed her bed with its soft ivory linen into the open air. She ran around the place in her underwear or less, she played her music too loud too late, left newspapers and footwear scattered where she had finished with them, blocked her landlady’s car with her Nissan ATV, ate voraciously and without regard for whose cupboard the food came from, entertained Oksana and friends with alcohol that was not hers and generally fell in love with the house too.

  She did not know how close Miriam Sondhai came to throwing her out in those early weeks. Gaby had never considered that she might be difficult to live with. Self-unknowing being the besetting sin of motherless girls, Gaby blamed it on the lofty aloofness of her host. There was a deliberateness in the woman’s intense beauty, as if she had cultivated it to deflect attention from her heart. Even when she went out running in her simple red onepiece in the cool of the evening on the tree-shaded avenues, she displayed that focusedness of purpose. Everything was directed into the beautiful act of putting one foot in front of another. Nothing else mattered. She was as intense and single-minded in her work.

  ‘If we had one tenth of the resources the West is pouring into UNECTA, we could end the HIV 4 epidemic,’ she insisted. Gaby argued that press coverage of the Chaga focused world attention on the wider issues of Africa. ‘HIV 4 is not a wider issue of Africa. It is a central issue of Africa. Twelve million cases in East Africa: twelve million deaths. Two complete holocausts in a single generation. There are villages up north around Mount Elgon and over into Karamoja in Uganda where there is no one alive over the age of twelve. Entire villages of orphans.’ She would laugh then. She laughed like a Frenchwoman, knowingly and bitterly. ‘It is an African problem in that the West does not want to get involved because it sees Slim as a Malthusian check on African population growth. We exceed the carrying capacity of the land, so the angel of death must pass over us and divide the taken from those who are cursed to stay. It is an African problem in that it is African scientists trying to save African people from an African pandemic. It is not a gay plague here, Gaby. It is an everyone plague.’

  When she spoke thus, in her beautiful, deep whisper of a voice, no one could argue with her. It would be like trying to argue with a Madonna in an icon. When she was beautiful and righteous and untouchable like this, Gaby McAslan would tell herself that all Miriam Sondhai needed was a good hard cock up her. It was because of the frictions, rather than despite them, that the two women became friends. So when the van delivered the dress, Gaby asked Miriam to help her try it on, knowing she would think it decadent.

  The dress arrived in a cardboard case with rope handles and folded in yards of tissue paper. Gaby held the sensuous green silk up against her and Miriam Sondhai softened in admiration. It had come complete with shoes, underwear, hosiery and a clutch bag: Kenya’s watekni fashion-pirates prided themselves that not only were their products faster and cheaper than originals from the Chanel programs they stole, they came with the full range of accessories. The US Ambassador’s Independence Day Hootenanny demanded nothing less than a dress that would turn every head that looked Gaby McAslan’s way. If it did not make people ask, who is that red-haired woman in that dark green dress? it would be a waste of nearly a month’s salary. Given that she was not on the guest list. Given that a junior On-liner had no right to expect to be on the guest list.

  Fuck protocol. Networking mattered. Haran would get her there, by the rocket’s red glare. He had promised when she asked him, her first returnable favour. What she would say to T.P. Costello, that was something he could not help her with.

  Miriam helped her up with the zip and adjusted the waist so that the claw-hammer skirt swung back and the short front-piece fell between her thighs to emphasize the long lean lines of her legs. Longness and leanness was what heredity had dealt the McAslan females. They made the most of it. She caught her hair in a bow and flicked it over her left shoulder.

  ‘You look wonderful, for a m’zungu,’ Miriam said. ‘I hope you do not come off those heels.’

  A car hooted in the drive. Gaby frowned at her reflection in the mirror, grabbed her clutch bag and dashed for the taxi. All the way to the ambassador’s residence she kept asking herself, what if, what if, what if they do not let you in? Then you get back into this taxi and go to the Elephant Bar and get drunk with Oksana. It will not be the end of the world. Oh no it bloody won’t. So why are you doing it? It will earn you nothing but a world of trouble. Because there are people there it might be good to be remembered by some day. Because where there are people like that, and free alcohol, there are stories and where there are stories there is news and where there is news there is Gaby McAslan zooming in on Extreme Close-up. Networking. You probably won’t even have time for a drink, let alone talking to Dr Shepard from Tsavo West with the Paul Newman blue eyes.

  Self-unknowing, Gaby McAslan.

  The cars were lined for a quarter of a mile down the road. Monkey jackets from corporate hospitality had the door-open meet’n’greet to perfection. Gorgeous frocks and rented tuxes went up the stairs to the double doors.

  Do not even think of the theme from Gone With the Wind, Gaby McAslan ordered herself. Fiddle-dee-dee to that. The earth is even red, like the strong red earth of Tara.

  The meeter’n’greeter slipped her a thick, gilt-edged invitation card.

  ‘From Haran,’ he said. Gaby passed him a discreet hundred. He touched gloved forefinger to brow. At the door a frock-coated security person scanned the bar-code on the card and checked the on-screen guest list.

  ‘Gabriel Ruth Langdon McAslan,’ he read. Haran had even got the hated family name right.

  ‘Gaby,’ she corrected and swept in. She passed through the cool, spacious residence with its slow-turning ceiling paddles and went through the French windows on to the patio. Fairy-lights and stars-and-stripes bunting were strung between the trees. Garden candles taller than Gaby had been spiked into the grass and attracted knots of people. The first of the evening’s bands were opening their set on the staging in front of the shrub azaleas, a handy trio of electric guitar, accordion and sax. Gaby felt sorry for them. It was too early, the guests too sober for their brand of vivacious shamba-dance. By tradition, the beer was kept in tin baths of ice; All-American, diplomatic-bagged in from Mi
lwaukee. Gaby lifted a bottle. A waiter appeared and uncapped it with an opener.

  ‘Ms McAslan!’

  ‘Dr Dan!’

  He shook her hand enthusiastically. Somewhere he had found a tall mint julep.

  ‘How good it is to see you, Ms McAslan. You have been much in my thoughts since our interesting night together.’

  ‘And how was the wedding?’

  ‘Alas, my forebodings were proved right. He was a worthless man. He abandoned my daughter after six nights for a woman wrestler. A Kikuyu woman wrestler, indeed. I fear my chances of getting my cattle back are remote; the rude boy. He has undoubtedly sold them. My daughter is pretending to be distraught but I think she is secretly relieved. She is one who likes the idea of marriage more than the state of being married. Now she has the chance to do it all again.

  ‘But you, my friend. You have been making a name for yourself. I very much enjoyed the “And Finally…” stories. I could tell you one myself that I have from the very best authority, about a magical condom tattoo that protects the recipient from all known sexually transmitted diseases.’

  ‘I’ve moved away from my source, Dr Dan, and I’m working on more mainstream, investigative material now.’

  ‘Ah yes. The Werther interview. Most illuminating. It is a pity that his disappearance was not considered as newsworthy as his appearance.’

  ‘What do you mean? I know he’s hiding from the media.’

  ‘Is that what they have told you? Peter Werther did not disappear. He was disappeared.’

  Guests pushed past to the bar, inspired by Dr Dan’s mint julep. Gaby recognised Der Spiegel’s On-line editor. She nodded curtly to him.

  ‘Disappeared by whom?’

  Dr Dan smiled, shrugged.

  ‘UNECTA?’

  ‘Remember where you are, Ms McAslan.’