Chaga

by Ian McDonald

  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 well.’

  ‘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.

  ‘You continue your mission by other means,’ Jake said ‘You seem well set up here; electricity, heat, food, water. But what happened to the dirigible crew?’

  ‘That is a bad thing,’ Henning Bork said. Gaby saw him look at his colleagues in the way that people do who need to get their stories straight. ‘A very bad thing. They tried to go back. They could not live here, they did not find in this place the intellectual excitement that ties us to it. They provisioned themselves with what we could spare from the wreckage of Tungus; which, as you can see, we efficiently recycled, and set off across the canopy. This was a long time ago, before we programmed in the defences. The Chaga was less, shall we say, busy? then.’

  ‘The Chaga was smaller too,’ Moran said, sensing the insult and returning it.

  ‘But much more dangerous,’ Astrid Montagnard said. Hubert was seated in her lap. He stared at Gaby. The brat never seemed to blink. ‘Strange, alien, dangerous. Now the Chaga is developing toward human norms, but then in those early days, everything was being tried. Everything.’

  ‘They didn’t come back,’ Gaby said.

  ‘Yes,’ Henning Bork said. ‘We do not know what became of them.’

  ‘The Wa-chagga know nothing about them,’ Lucius said.

  ‘But they could still be alive out there,’ Jake Aarons said. Gaby understood the reason behind the question.

  ‘They could,’ Henning Bork said.

  ‘The forest sustains you and the Wa-chagga,’ Jake continued. ‘It could also sustain them, couldn’t it? Could it do more than that? Could it somehow adapt them to live more closely with it? Enter into a kind of symbiotic relationship with them, change them? You said that this Breeding Pit was the Chaga’s engine of evolution, where life is varied. Human life, human flesh?’

  ‘What are you driving at, Mr Aarons?’ Henning Bork asked. The wind shook the great tree again. It felt wet and cold on Gaby’s skin, like secrecy.

  ‘Organic circuitry,’ she said, shifting the conversation from delicate subjects, like any civilized house guest. ‘Organic television?’

  ‘Yes,’ Henning Bork said.

  ‘Organic satellite television?’

  ‘This too.’

  ‘You can get SkyNet Sport? There’s a match I’d really hate to miss.’

  43

  ‘One nil,’ Gaby stormed at her diary. ‘Tragic. The Dagenham Girl Pipers could have put up a better defence. Bizarre, watching Alan Jeffers’ half-time analysis on a television that looks like a head of melting broccoli in what used to be the control cabin of a Sibirsk airship but is now part of a Lost Boys Fantasy Tree House in the deepest, darkest depths of the Chaga.

  ‘The room they’ve given me is a tent of poles and blimp skin about fifty feet down-trunk from the main centre, right on the edge of what they call The Moat. The view in the morning should be memorable, if I’m still around to enjoy it. The wind is getting up; the whole place flaps and sways like a ship in a hurricane. Full sail ahead for the heart of darkness, me hearties! A ship cast adrift in the tree-tops; like something out of your favourite childhood story. A ragged crew of bourgeoisie marooned on a desert isle, playing out their genteel rituals. Too few faces, too often seen, I sense an almost incestuous introversion. Perhaps literally. They tell much; they keep more secret, but they’ve grown naive at secrecy from too much intimacy. They make mistakes, they are clumsy with their misdirections. This room, for example. Why do I get the feeing I’m hot-bunking in someone else’s space? Someone who isn’t accounted for by Treetops crew manifest, spooky Hubert included. Something not kosher here.’

  There was a polite cough from outside the door curtain. Gaby put down her pencil, closed the diary. The curtain rolled up on its drawstring.

  ‘Got a moment?’ Jake Aarons asked. He came in anyway. ‘I think I have a sane explanation for the voices.’

  ‘Not the voice of the Chaga.’

  ‘Yes, the voice of the Chaga. But not mystically or magically or divinely. Scientifically. The Chaga can synthesize organic circuits; you’ve watched goddam organic satellite television soccer. If it can build out there, why not in here?’ He tapped his forehead with a finger. ‘What’s this stuff in here but the cellular circuitry for an organic computer? From the moment I crossed terminum, the Chaga’s been building an organic modem in my head out of my own protein, molecule by molecule, cell by cell, strand by strand. Networking me into this immense data storage and processing system. That’s why it’s getting louder and clearer: the connections are spreading. It’s not just voices now, Gab. It’s visions—pictures, images, like snapshot memories; glimpses for the briefest second of the utmost clarity, then gone.’

  ‘Pictures of what, Jake?’

  ‘Other lives, Gab. Other worlds. Other ways of being. And of this world as well. Peter Werther was right. They’ve been here before. At the very start of humanity, and the very start of it all. Those things we have recorded in the Burgess Shale; the incredible diversity of life in the pre-Cambrian, like never before or since…’

  ‘They did it?’

  Jake shrugged. The wind billowed the fragile room. Gaby was very conscious of the great gulf beneath her.

  ‘Jake, why don’t we all hear the voices and see the visions? Why is it just you?’

  He grimaced painfully.

  ‘I have a theory about that too. I’ll not mince words: this circuitry, this organic modem growing in my head, it’s a mutation. Something is causing the cells of my body to grow in such a way as to receive electromagnetic signals from the Chaga, and trigger my own neurons in response. Something is reprogramming the DNA in those cells to grow that way. Now, that is a very difficult thing to do in a developed organism. Easy enough in the sex cells of your parents so that the offspring will express the mutation, but to get into all the necessary cells, and change their programming, then switch it on: that’s difficult.

  ‘Unless something is already present in the body, in the cells, in the DNA, that acts as a host. A vector. A mole on the inside of the genetic firewall to open the way for the DNA hackers.’

  ‘The HIV 4 virus.’

  Jake grimaced again.

  ‘Every day during the desert campaign in World War Two, Field Marshal Montgomery would study a photograph of Erwin Rommel he kept on his desk. Not say a word, just look at it. Know your enemy was Montgomery’s motto. It won him the desert war. I know my enemy, Gab. I’ve studied all his strategies and tactics; his surprise offensives, his tactical retreats and regroupings. He’s tough—tougher than me—but I know how he works. I know what his weapons are, and on what terrain he likes to fight—right down in the chromosomes, street fighting in the DNA strands—and what camouflage he uses to outfox my immune system. But maybe I have overestimated him: maybe he isn’t the undercover death squad, maybe he’s just the Trojan horse that gets taken into the city and opens the gates to let in the real invading army. And, maybe, it isn’t an invading, destroying army out there, but foreign industrialists and investors. Maybe they don’t want to put everyone to the sword, but set up a shop here, a factory there, a resort someplace else, do a little urban renewal, stick in some new infrastructure, and by the time they’ve finished you’re a little colonial outpost of some biochemical superpower.’

  ‘I’m getting a little lost in analogy, Jake. You think the HIV 4 virus is some kind of catalyst that allows the Chaga mutagenic agents to work on developed cells?’

  ‘Catalyst,’ Jake said. ‘That’s exactly the word. That doesn’t react in the process. It fits, Gab
: all the secrecy around Unit 12 and the HIV 4 victims who should have been dead year ago. All exposed to the Chaga. All entered into some kind of symbiotic relationship that stops the HIV 4 virus from developing into AIDS.’

  ‘You were fishing from Henning Bork at dinner.’

  ‘He didn’t deny it.’

  ‘Jesus, Jake, you said you had a sane explanation.’ The hovering biolights flared up at Gaby’s raised voice. ‘You know what this implies about HIV 4?’

  ‘It’s a made thing.’ Jake nodded. ‘I’ve thought of that. It certainly predates humanity, maybe most of life on earth. It’s the Chaga-makers’ engine of variation, and a hideously effective one: only those infected individuals who expose themselves to the mutagenic agents survive. Maybe it wasn’t an asteroid impact that eradicated the dinosaurs, or habitat depletion: maybe they had progressed into an evolutionary dead end and the Chaga-makers undertook a little winnowing.’

  ‘Jurassic AIDS?’

  ‘Maybe. Maybe the SIVs and HIV 1, 2 and 3 are degenerate variants of the original virus. Given the virus’s ability to switch sections of genetic material, maybe there are millions of variants of the HIV 4 virus. Scientists have always had a chicken-and-egg problem with viruses. Maybe they all came from someplace else.’

  ‘Lots of maybes, Jake.’

  ‘Are you telling me that I believe it because I want to believe it? You were the one handed me this magic bullet in the first place.’

  The wind gusted up from below, bringing with it the chiming calls of unseen, unimaginable creatures. The balloon-silk walls flapped and swelled. The captive lights globes gusted around the little fabric room, casting sudden strange shadows.