Chaga

by Ian McDonald

  This was the pattern of time in Unit 12. Door opening and either Russel Shuler or the birthing chair; door closing; numb, foetal sleep; well-prepared food that could have been dog shit for all that Gaby tasted of it, fiddling with the television controls, staring at twenty-year old re-runs on Voice of Kenya of Remington Steele or Oprah Winfrey. From time to time she realized that behind that screen should be news channels: CNNs, SkyNets, Foxes. Instead, she found herself looking forward to the Venus de Milo beauty cream ad. One fix was enough to have her rocking back and forth for hours in her nest of quilts, quietly singing ‘Venus de Milo, Venus de Beauty.’ It made her stop wanting a cigarette. She wanted a cigarette more than she wanted out of this white room, with its shower cubicle and steel pissoir and camera eye watching her rocking gently in her nest, singing. Sometimes she thought that whatever they gave her in the needle must be very good, that she worried so little about wanting out of Unit 12. It was life. She would adapt. She was doing very well already. Russel told her so in his debriefing sessions. But a cigarette would be perfect.

  And then she would wake in the dim night light and feel the full weight of Unit 12 press down on her and she would know that the stuff had worn off, because she could recall where and what and who she was, and what had been done to her, and how long it would go on for, because they had absolute power here. Then she would beat her fists bloody on the place where the door had disappeared until the white scrubs came and she would wake wondering what she had done to her hands that they were bandaged, but not too worried, because it was almost time for Santa Barbara.

  And she woke.

  And there were two silhouettes in the door.

  ‘Ms McAslan?’ said the nearer of the dark figures. Gaby frowned in her nest of quilts. The figure spoke in a Kenyan accent. ‘May I come in?’

  Gaby nodded. The figure entered. He was a tall, very black black man in a pale brown suit. His tie was very neatly knotted. He carried a briefcase. He set the case on Gaby’s bed. She backed away from it into the corner.

  ‘My name is Johnson Ambani,’ he said. ‘I am a lawyer. I am very happy to find you in passably good health, Ms McAslan. Could you please sign this document?’ He spread two pages on his briefcase and marked where she should sign with black Xs. He offered Gaby his stainless steel ball-pen. She stared at it as if she had been offered a snake.

  ‘What am I signing?’

  ‘Documents seconding you as consultant to the National Assembly Ministerial Special Enquiry into human rights violations on Kenyan and foreign nationals by the United Nations,’ said the second figure, a big, broad black man. In silhouette his ear-lobes were loops of stretched flesh.

  ‘Dr Dan?’ Gaby said, in a voice she had not used since she was six.

  ‘In person, Ms McAslan,’ Dr Daniel Oloitip said. ‘Now, if you would have the world see what is being hidden in this place, you will sign the papers Mr Ambani, my legal advisor, has prepared for you.’

  Questions could wait. Not long, for they were very huge questions, even under the chemical smog in her head, but long enough to scribble Gaby McAslan at the black Xs without reading the print. Johnson Ambani fastened a plastic badge on Gaby’s soiled white sweatshirt. It had her SkyNet pass photograph on it and read National Assembly Ministerial Commission of Enquiry: Special Consultant.

  Her hair was long and beautiful in the photograph.

  ‘Dr Dan,’ she said. ‘Could someone get me a cigarette?’

  48

  The curving white corridor was full of black men and women in dull suits. They followed Dr Dan like the tide the moon as he swept past all the white doors that were identical but for the numbers on them. Barefoot and vertiginous from the tranquillizers, Gaby kept at Dr Dan’s shoulder by momentum alone.

  ‘Things move slowly in this country, and they go by devious routes, but they get there,’ the big politician said. ‘Two years I have been pressing for a government enquiry into this place, but all happens in God’s time.’

  ‘You knew?’ Her brain had been lagged with roof insulation.

  ‘About what the UN is doing here? Something. We all have our sources; I would not wish to compromise mine so close to its centre. You!’ He turned, pointed at whichever one of the UNECTA followers-on in white fell beneath his finger. ‘Fetch Ms McAslan a cup of very strong black coffee. You were my trump card, Ms McAslan. My finger of God. When I found out that the UN were detaining a Western journalist in contravention of the Kenyan Constitution, and the UN’s own convention on human rights, it was very easy to swing the international media behind me. They are all up there, behind the wire, howling for you, Ms McAslan.’

  The Unit 12 staffer brought the coffee. Gaby tried to sip it as Dr Dan wheeled his political circus on down the corridor.

  ‘They wouldn’t let me see any television news. You don’t know what it’s been like down here, Dr Dan.’

  ‘You are the lead story on all the channels. Even then, Mohammed al Nur tried to invoke UN immunity and dismissed my writ of habeas corpus.’ The Egyptian Chief Secretary was a leading advocate of the United Nation’s suzerainty over national government. ‘However, for a good Muslim, Mr al Nur shows a regrettable interest in women having sex with dogs.’

  ‘Allegedly,’ Johnson Ambani said.

  ‘Allegedly. But I am still sure that he would not like the video we made of him in the room in the Hilton with the Giriama woman and the Doberman to find its way into the hands of the prurient and corrupt western press. I am told it was quite a technical challenge getting him, the woman and Doberman in focus at the same time.’

  Gaby suppressed a guffaw. Not even Unit 12 Level White was sealed and aseptic enough to keep out the infectious bizarreness of everyday African life.

  ‘They made a bad mistake in trying to disappear you, Ms McAslan. But it would have been a worse mistake to let you go, having seen what you have seen.’

  ‘The camera!’ Gaby shrieked. The strong black coffee had burned away the dope like the sun the morning mist. ‘They took my camera; it’s all on it, everything, about Jake and the Treetoppers and the Wa-chagga and the Breeding Pit. Everything.’

  Dr Dan nodded to Johnson Ambani who opened his briefcase and took out another paper.

  ‘This is an authorization to sequester material evidence,’ he explained as Dr Dan signed it without reading. He gave the paper to one of the woman lawyers in the entourage. ‘Could you take this to administration and have them find and give you Ms McAslan’s camera?’ She ran off, ungainly in tight skirt and heels.

  ‘And the diaries,’ Gaby shouted after her. ‘Mine and the Moon diary, they’ve got them both.’

  ‘That is already taken care of, Ms McAslan,’ the lawyer Ambani said. He went into his magic briefcase again and produced two plastic bags stamped with biohazard symbols and UNECTA’s crescents-and-mountain. ‘We found these with the rest of your personal possessions.’

  Russel Shuler the anti-Shepard was waiting at the top of a wide ramp that curved down to the zone below White Level Three.

  ‘Turn about is fair play, Russ,’ Gaby said tapping the badge on her dirty sweatshirt. ‘This time I get to do the debriefing.’

  ‘It’s too big for you,’ Russel Shuler said to her. ‘It’s too big for anyone. We’re not ready for it yet. Believe me, I am not the enemy here.’

  The Zone White workers remained up above as Russel Shuler led the delegation down the ramp. The wall colour changed to red half-way down.

  ‘Zone Red is our maximum isolation and observation area,’ Russel Shuler said. ‘While I understand that all parts of this complex are to be made open to you, and that my staff here are to render you every possible assistance, I must advise you to consider hard the implications of making public what you see here.’

  ‘Dr Dan,’ Gaby whispered as Russel Shuler led them along the musky, mouldy-smelling red corridor. ‘Shuler’s right. The Chaga, it changes people. Not just mentally or emotionally: physically. It uses the HIV virus as a vector into cells to repro
gram the genes. It can change living tissue.’

  Warm air spiralling up from deep in the coil of tunnels rattled the Enquirers’ identity badges.

  ‘Nevertheless they are our people down here, whatever changes have been done to them,’ Dr Dan said. ‘Whatever they look like, whatever they have become, we shall see what is to be seen.’

  Russel Shuler circled the politicians and lawyers around him outside a door that had been painted, Gaby thought, exactly the colour of hell.

  ‘Ladies and gentlemen, you are now on Zone Red Level One. This is the area in which we hold those HIV-altered patients whose adaptations are largely neurological. In many cases, their faculties and abilities seem quite superhuman; in almost all, they are impossible to explain or quantify.’

  He opened the hell-coloured door.

  The room was furnished as lavishly as a luxury hotel. A radiantly beautiful Nilo-Hamitic woman was sitting cross-legged on the king-sized bed, cats-cradling with the laces of her training shoes. She smiled to her visitors but did not speak.

  ‘Sarai is a manipulator of probabilities,’ Russel Shuler said. ‘We’ve tested her using electron tunnelling quantum effect experiments; somehow—God knows how—she can affect quantum world-line collapse so that the outcome is always in her favour.’

  ‘Excuse me, but I do not understand,’ Dr Dan said.

  ‘Put crudely, in quantum theory, if you flip a coin, it is not either heads or tails, but a state of both heads and tails until the act of observing the face of the coin collapses those possibilities into a single certainty. Either heads or tails. What Sarai does is make sure that it is always the side she calls. The outcome is always in her favour.’

  ‘She makes her own luck,’ Dr Dan said.

  ‘Like us coming to this place, now,’ the Assemblyperson for Nanyuki said.

  ‘Everything serves her purposes,’ Russel Shuler said.

  Sarai smiled powerfully and folded her cat’s-cradle inside out.

  In the next room, a very thin man was sleeping in foetal position. The rise and fall of his chest was so slow and shallow Gaby doubted for a time that he was breathing at all.

  ‘He goes into sleep at the start of the October rains,’ Russel Shuler said. ‘He wakes again at the start of the March rains. His metabolism slows to a crawl. Like hibernation, except that in low-energy sleep the aging process is suspended. From our point of view, his life-span is greatly expanded.’

  From his own point of view, it is as short and fragile as any of ours, Gaby thought. Too few sleeps and wakings.

  She read the name on the next room.

  ‘Here,’ she said to Russel Shuler. ‘I want to see who is in here.’

  William Bi was the name on the door.

  ‘Please excuse me,’ a voice called over a rhythmic creaking. ‘I will not stop because you won’t be staying very long, and if I stop I will not come third.’

  William Bi sat on an exercise bike, pumping the pedals hard. He was dressed in stained red sweat shorts and cropped sweatshirt. On a flat wall screen a garishly animated cyclist raced across a poster colour road toward an ever-receding horizon.

  ‘Hello, Gaby,’ William said without taking his eyes off the screen or breaking his rhythm. He was as thin and young and androgynously beautiful as Gaby remembered when the dirigible lifted them from the burning Nissan ATV on Chaga’s edge. ‘I thought I’d be running into you here.’

  ‘William, I’m sorry. I never meant this to happen.’

  ‘Sarai is the only one can make happen what she wants to happen. But I can see what she makes happen, so I am content.’

  ‘William’s time sense has been altered,’ Russel Shuler. ‘He lives in a longer present moment than we do. What we perceive as the present is about six seconds. William’s present is about three and a half minutes, both forward and back, with limited pre- and post-cognition up to about half an hour.’

  ‘I think you should call the maintenance people,’ William said, leaning over the handlebars of the exercise bike. He had overtaken the first computer cyclist, and was coming up on the rear wheel of another. ‘The air conditioning plant is going to give you trouble again in about ten minutes.’

  Russel Shuler took an intercom from inside his Nehru jacket and made a call.

  ‘He’s almost always right,’ he said when he had finished talking to the engineers. ‘We’ve had to stop members of staff getting racing tips off him, or lottery numbers.’

  ‘He can see into the future and the past?’ one of the Assemblypersons asked. ‘All at once?’

  ‘Simultaneously, yes. I don’t think our short-time-frame minds can ever properly conceive what it must be like. Perhaps a state of permanent déjà vu for both the past and the future.’

  ‘She will not thank you for it,’ William said abruptly, pumping hard at the pedals. Sweat rolled down his forehead. ‘The diary. Reminds her too much of things she would like to forget.’

  He passed the animated cyclist and crossed the finish line. As he had predicted, he was third.

  At the top of the next down ramp, Russel Shuler said to the commissioners, ‘Down on Zone Red Level Two are the moderate physical adaptations. You may find some of them disturbing, but please do not display any negative emotion in front of the patients. Many of them are experiencing great difficulty in coming to terms with what the Chaga has done to their bodies.’

  The colour of the walls in Red Level Two was several shades deeper than the corridor above; blood rather than sheer hell.

  In the first room, a woman reclined on a wooden beach lounger under a ceiling of dazzling white light. She was naked, but for a polka dot bikini bottom. Her hair, her eyes, her skin were dark green. Russel Shuler told the Enquiry that she was a photosynthete. Her skin and circulatory system had been infected with complex molecules that bonded to the cells and enabled them to draw food and energy directly from sunlight, like plants. The full-spectrum tubes in the ceiling approximated normal African daylight. In the dark she would wither and shiver and die.

  The woman turned her back to the National Assembly Commission of Inquiry and picked up the copy of Viva! she had set down on the floor.

  Dr Dan picked the next door at random. Behind it they found a middle-aged woman on a chair with a monkey grooming itself on her shoulder and her hands on her knees. At her feet a cat sat licking its crotch. A bird bobbed on top of the dressing table mirror. The dressing table top was smeared with white bird shit. The woman had no eyes. Blank skin covered her eye sockets. She had no ears. Her skull was a smooth curve of flesh. Yet when the people came into her suite she turned her head toward them, as if seeing and hearing, and welcomed them warmly.

  ‘It’s the animals,’ she told them. ‘I see through their eyes, hear through their ears.’ She lifted the monkey on to her lap. ‘But they have such short little spans of attention.’

  Russel Shuler explained that the woman had neurological grafts into the nervous systems of her animals. She could switch her point of view between them, and was learning to multiplex: cat sight, monkey smell, bird hearing.

  ‘I’ve seen this one,’ Gaby said. ‘In the Chaga: Hubert, the Treetoppers’ kid; he can share his consciousness with other creatures in the forest.’

  ‘Indeed?’ Russel Shuler said.

  ‘I must look out for him,’ the woman with the animal eyes said.

  ‘What is it all for?’ a woman lawyer asked as they hurried onward down the corridor, past doors they did not have time to look behind, towards the ramp to Zone Red Level Three. ‘What is the reason for these transformations?’

  ‘Evolution, ma’am,’ Russel Shuler said. ‘Just ways of being human. No more reason for it than the eyes on butterflies’ wings or a peacock’s tail. Every reason and no reason: it works. It’s right for its place and time.’

  He addressed the Enquiry in general.

  ‘Before we go down to the third and final level, I must warn you that this is where the most radically changed are housed. What you see may provok
e repugnance, shock, even fear. Remember that they are human. They will not harm you, they are not dangerous. They are just people; experiments in ways of being human. If any of you don’t want to come with us down to Level Three, you can get straight up to the reception area by going a couple of hundred yards back along this corridor and taking the service elevator. I’ll give you a few seconds to make up your minds.’

  Mine is made up, Gaby McAslan thought. I have found only one name on my list of the disappeared. The other two are down that ramp, whatever they have become, and so I will not go back.

  Russel Shuler waited his few seconds. No one turned back.

  ‘OK,’ Russel Shuler said. ‘One final thing. If you have anything plastic that you particularly value, you’d be advised to leave it here. In some cases, the alterations have spread beyond the individual to the environment.’

  ‘What does that mean?’ Dr Dan said, unfastening his badge and digital watch.

  ‘You’ll find out.’

  They went down, leaving a small pile of identity badges, watches and pens behind them.

  The first door opened on to an antechamber into which the Commissioners fitted with much jostling. In the facing wall was a long, curtained window and an airlock door. Russel Shuler picked up a microphone plugged into a socket underneath the window.

  ‘The temperature and CO2 levels are too high for human tolerance in there,’ he said. ‘But I’ll get Kighoma to say hello to you.’ He spoke into the microphone in good Swahili. ‘Pray this is one variation that doesn’t take,’ he said as he drew back the curtains.

  The room beyond was quite conventional. The young man who waved from the chair in which he was reading a football magazine was not. His skin was such a flat black that he seemed to have no facial features. His hair was bone white. His eyes were milky, as if afflicted with cataracts. His nose was very large and broad, his chest wide and deep. While Russel Shuler and Assemblypersons spoke with him in Swahili, Gaby observed him more closely. The dead black skin was thick and waxy; hairless, almost poreless. The milkiness of the eyes was caused by a membrane like a cat’s third eyelid that flickered back and forth between blinkings.