Chaga

by Ian McDonald

  We all carry around a box of snapshots of our loves. Riffle, shuffle, deal them again.

  Two figures running down the surf-line, running for the joy of using their bodies to push at the limits of their selves; the dawn coming up behind black thunderheads out of India and the world waiting in indigo, waiting to be reborn. They make love in the shower, licking the salt sweat from each other’s skin.

  An ebony bed, brought down by dhow from Mogadishu for the Sultan of Mombasa’s pleasure. After centuries the wood had not lost its perfume.

  Sudden, savage rain beating on the palm thatch.

  The moon, huge on the seaward edge of the world. The call of the moonpath: to the sea! to the sea! the man and the woman burst from the water like creatures newly created, like drops of fire from the fingers of God, before they sink again into the amniotic embrace and each other.

  Still life, she absorbed in her book with the moths butting softly against the globe of the oil lamp; he is in his wicker chair, watching. Just watching…

  Then all things were a prelude to sex. Respighi’s symphonic poems among the trees at batflight. Wading thigh deep through the blood warm ocean. Hands lovingly oiling me against the sun…

  After, in that black Arab bed, he would explore his land of heart’s desire, the high, white tableland beyond the clouds.

  ‘Who are they? A day doesn’t dawn that I don’t ask myself that question a dozen times; who are they? The satellite cameras have looked through the clouds to show us the things that are up there; amazing things; forms and systems more complex than any we’ve yet discovered, entire tracts of forest that seem more like animate cities; why? For whom? When? Are they already abroad in their living cities, have we seen them and not recognised them? Have we indeed seen the faces of the masters of the Chaga in those satellite photographs and not recognised them?

  ‘Or then again, it may be the time is not yet right for them: all is prepared, the stage set, but the principal performers have yet to make their entrances—how could they have put an entire world into something not much larger than this room? Will they make themselves known to us; one day will our survey expeditions go to the edge of the Chaga and find them waiting; will they come soon, will they wait until their grip on our world is more secure; are they delaying so that they may deal with us as equals, or is that moment centuries distant, when the whole earth is changed into their likeness? Who are they? Most of all, that question; every day, every minute, that question casts its shadow over everything else; who are they?’

  I would turn away from him, staring at the tracks the beetles left on the wall.

  With the morning he would be gone. I was not woman enough to hold him, the mountain had a more primal claim on him. I knew in the end he would have to decide. I knew how he would choose, I knew he would leave me, at the last, for that other love. I almost told him to go, rather than bear the pain of having him leave me. To love someone so much you will give him away rather than lose him, does this make sense? Yet every time that 4×4 cane swinging through the palms, I would throw myself on him and drag him down, into that Arab bed.

  I could smell it in the wind, the day the houseboy from the tourist hotel half a mile up the beach came panting to my veranda to tell me there was a telephone call for me, most urgent. I followed in a daze of numb serenity. When Dorothy Bazyn regretted to inform me that Peter Langrishe had failed to return to the Oloitiptip Research Facility after a microlyte survey of the North Western Sector of the Chaga, I experienced a colossal sense of guilty relief, of a kind I have not felt since my mother finally surrendered to the cancer that had taken six years to kill her. I almost laughed, but a preventing hand around my heart restrained me, like a mailed glove. That same glazed calm accompanied me home on the train until I saw T.P. waiting for me amid the porters and taxi drivers at Nairobi Station and all restraint fled. I was shattered like a soapstone pot, the interior emptiness it had shaped was lost in the greater emptiness without. I cried for an hour all over his pure silk suit.

  I sank into a deep, dark depression. Weeks, months, disappeared behind me. The book sat three-quarters complete on my desk at 224b Tom M’boya Street. T.P. was always there, to listen when I wanted to talk, merely to be when I could not talk. He preserved me from some of the more disgusting excesses of self-pity: stopping me drinking myself stupid, flushing the cocaine I had bought from an American consular official down the choo; I think he would have slept with me if that would have helped the healing.

  Strange, that I never once considered that he might be dead. I knew him, the bastard.

  Over tea at a questionable Chinese restaurant tucked behind the Kenyatta Conference Centre, I asked T.P. why it hurt so much, still. He said it was because I was in love with Langrishe, still. We toyed with the mottoes from our fortune cookies, pretending all manner of things.

  ‘T.P.’

  He lit one end of his motto in the candle flame.

  ‘You’re right. I still love the bastard, so bad I know I will never, never be free from him. God, I love him; I am going mad without him; what’s the line from that old song?’

  ‘“I can’t live, with or without you?”’

  ‘T.P., I have to find him.’

  ‘You know for certain that he is alive?’

  ‘The heart knows, T.P. The heart knows all manner of things. He has gone in search of his aliens, in their living cities up among the snows. T.P., will you help me find him?’

  I think that was the only time I ever succeeded in surprising him.

  The very next day: ‘I have a little something for you. Out back, if you would care to take a look?’

  I don’t know how he had managed to put the thing up in the postage-stamp backyard; certainly his office staff looked very pleased with themselves. The microlyte was black and green, like a proud and beautiful dragonfly. I could not speak, merely run my hands over the wings, the struts, the power unit; appreciating it by touch. ‘T.P., it must have cost a fortune.’

  ‘It did. Presuming that, as a typical romantic, you haven’t the least idea about how to bring your plan to fruition, I took the liberty of engaging in a little logistical thought: great amusement, by the by. You can dismiss immediately any thought you might have entertained of obtaining a security clearance from Oloitiptip—Dorothy Bazyn does not want a second Missing in Action on her quarterly report—and I presume you have enough wit not even to think of trying to make it past the perimeter patrols on foot; the odds of you ending up in a bodybag, that is, after the soldiers gang-rape you, is in the region of 98 per cent. However, if you were to find a secluded spot, say, fifty kilometres from Kilimanjaro, and fly in just above ground level underneath the radar net, the odds are a little more favourable. At least, if they open up with twenty-millimetre cannon you won’t feel anything. So, I made a few, ah, purchases?’ I almost kissed him.

  We worked fast, furious, we did not stop to consider what we were doing; the face of our madness might have turned us to stone. Deep dark truth in the mirror. ‘The Last Safari,’ T.P. christened it, but I told him that had been a film with Stewart Granger. ‘That was King Solomon’s Mines,’ he said. ‘With Deborah Kerr.’

  We drove down to a place on the road south, just outside of Ilbisil township; a bend, a baobab and much, much sky. T.P. unpacked the microlyte—he had borrowed the Irish Ambassador’s Range-Rover for the occasion (‘He owes me, the Garibaldi affair’) and assembled the aircraft under the watchful gaze of a dirty, gawky Masai kid, materialised out of five hundred square kilometres of nowhere, as they tend to. All three of us were most impressed when the propeller actually turned.

  ‘Well, aren’t you going to give Deborah Kerr a kiss for luck?’

  Hands in pockets, T.P. contemplated the landscape. ‘Among the Dinka tribesmen of Sudan,’ he said, ‘the baobab is known as the Tree Where Man Was Born. In Kenya there is a common belief that the baobab disobeyed God by growing where it wanted to, in punishment for which God uprooted it, turned it upside down and thrust it
back into the earth again. I think there may be a moral in that somewhere, Moon. What is there?’

  ‘A moral, T.P.’

  ‘That’s correct.’

  I kissed him anyway.

  Five minutes later, I was airborne.

  In the cloud forest we face the final confrontation, the ultimate consummation. An appropriate enough theatre, this high shoulderland of Kilimanjaro; in this season the clouds hang unbroken for weeks on end. A landscape of moral ambiguity, all shades of grey…is this the Cloud of Unknowing? The Daliesque geometries of the Chaga, the ripples and veils of fog; suitably Macbethian for a Scot like Langrishe.

  I came upon the clearing at the end of a heavy day’s climb; the air was thin, every footstep was a shard of migraine exploding through my brain; when I found myself on the edge of the small, rocky defile that cut a jagged gash through the ubiquitous Chaga, I knew instinctively this was to be the place. As I made camp the fog capriciously swirled and dissolved; I found myself looking through a tree-lined window over the cloud-speckled plain of Amboseli. To be able to see! The many-coloured land sweeping away beneath me to merge almost imperceptibly with the tawny earth shades of Kenya. Those winks of light, that scattering of antiseptic white like spilled salt, the new facility at Oloitiptip (those Masai names, names the earth speaks to itself), those plumes of dust, vehicles, perhaps aircraft taking off from the dry lake-bed; those specks of black moving through the middle air: Army/Airforce helicopters.

  It is not good for the soul to look down from the mountain too long: I lingered until nightfall and the more I looked the more I felt myself despising the monotonous, starved landscape beyond the mountain; the more I rejoiced in the colour and diversity of the Chaga. I did belong here.

  He came that night. I was expecting him.

  ‘Moon.’

  No doubt, no uncertainty this time. I was already reaching to shake my biolights into luminescence.

  ‘No. No light.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘No light. Or I’ll go…’

  ‘No! Don’t go. Langrishe, where are you? Don’t hide from me…’

  ‘Moon…oh, Moon. Don’t make this difficult for me. I want to come to you; more than anything, Moon. Just to see you, here…why did you have to come, why could we not have left it where it lay and let it wither?’

  ‘Langrishe, I couldn’t leave you. I couldn’t let it wither and die; it isn’t like that, you know. It won’t die, it can’t die. Langrishe, listen to me…’

  A silence. Alone, in the dark, with the whole forest listening, I sat and hugged my knees to my chest. After a time, he spoke again.

  ‘Those living cities among the snowline that we have seen in the satellite photographs—I’ve been there, up among the snows, Moon, I’ve explored those cities; the word “city” barely describes what is up there, I’ve seen things that beggar the human imagination, things far beyond my comprehension; but one thing I understand, there is no race of aliens waiting buried in the soil to step forth and inhabit them. In a sense, we were right when we hypothesised that we might not be able to recognise the aliens; we do not recognise them because, Moon, we are the aliens…’

  I waited the rest of the night for him to return; shaking, and shaken, in my protective circle of biolights. The clouds were low and cold and drizzling the next day. Miserable hours; wrapped up in my sleeping bag in my hammock I picked and pecked at Thomas Merton but my mind was too full of birds and doubts to mirror the Benedictine’s tranquillity of solitude. Too long since I last read him; the vinyl cover of the book was a nauseating mash of pulpy crystals and froth. I ripped it off, threw it away, read the master in the nakedness of his own pages.

  He came at nightfall, in the dripping freezing twilight.

  ‘Evolution, Moon, catastrophic shifts to new levels of complexity, do you understand? You must understand, it’s vitally important that you understand. Evolution does not plod through history one steady gene at a time; evolution dances, evolution leaps, from level to level; on the biological clock the second hand does not move continuously, it clicks from one instant to the next. Changes occur simultaneously throughout an entire population; within one generation a population may shift to a higher level. Do you understand? Moon, you must understand!’

  ‘Langrishe!’ Empty, dripping darkness. I dreamed about his eyes all that night, terrible, terrible eyes without a face.

  Washing in the lukewarm waters of a cistern next morning, I heard my name in the mists.

  ‘Go away, Moon. Before you there were never any choices to make, never another consideration; and when I left to come here, it was that way again. I knew what I wanted, what I was searching for, and now you have turned everything inside out again. I want to be with you, I want to run away from you, I love you, I am terrified of you.’

  I turned around slowly, scanning the grey silhouettes of undergrowth.

  ‘Langrishe…where are you?’

  ‘Here, Moon.’ Shadow among the shadows, a man-shaped patch of mist. ‘No. No nearer. Please. Listen. I can’t stay long. This is important. Fire will not burn it, poisons will not kill it, it thrives on our wastes and pollutions and can provide technological man with his every need: is the Chaga the next evolutionary step forward? Technological man fouls his nest with glee; will the nest reject him, or will the nest adapt itself so that he can live there without destroying it and himself?

  ‘The protein life has had its day, now the new life has come and is sweeping it away. The wave, Moon, the wave.’

  As he spoke I had closed the distance between us, one cat-cautious step at a time. I was within a handful of metres of him when he awoke from his self-absorption and noticed my proximity. He gave a cry as we saw each other, face to face. Then in a flicker of movement he was gone.

  My heart pounded. Black phosphenes exploded noiselessly in my retinas, my blood roared. Langrishe was still human.

  That night, in my hammock, a touch on my cheek, a kiss. Mumbling like a great contented cat, I turned over and looked into his face and the soft sensual mass of his body pressed upon mine. Mouths parted, lips met, I unzipped the sleeping bag to welcome him within, lifted my hands to touch him. ‘No,’ he said. ‘Please. Don’t touch. Promise me that, Moon.’

  ‘But why?’

  ‘Because of you. Because I don’t understand what it is about you that drives me mad. I’m mad even to think of doing this…mad, mad. What is it about you, woman?’ I laid a finger to his lips, one second later our mouths met and before I was even aware he had slipped inside me. I gasped in surprise, his tongue was at my nipples, his breath hot on my skin. He smelled of Chaga, musks, essential oils, the intimate perfumes of the orifices. His hands held mine above my head, sexual surrender as we plunged and pulsed in the absolute darkness of the senses. As his thrusts grew more frantic, his pace more urgent, his fingers released mine and my hands automatically fell to stroking his body, over the thighs, nails lightly raking the buttocks, tracing little spider-feet along the flanks, onto the gentle syncline of his back.

  At my scream the song of the Chaga fell silent for a minute.

  My fingers were entwined in a holdfast of veins and tubes rooted in the base of his spine; a throbbing umbilical that bound him to God knows what out there in the darkness. He leaped away from me, naked, shivering, dripping; I vomited endlessly, emptily.

  ‘Oh God oh God oh God oh God…’

  ‘I told you I told you I told you not to touch…’

  ‘You bastard you bastard, what have you done, oh my God…’

  ‘Why did you have to come here, why did you not go when I asked you, why did you have to reawaken all the things I had forgotten, why did you have to make me human again?’

  ‘Human?’ I screamed. ‘Human? My God, Langrishe, what are you?’

  ‘You want to see?’ he screamed back. ‘You want to know? Look. Look well.’ He pointed a quivering finger at me. A ponderous crashing from the night-forest, something huge, that knows it can take for ever to get where it w
ants. ‘Look!’ screamed Langrishe again and suddenly the ravine was bright with biolights. ‘I can do anything with it I like. Who do you think fed you, watered you, watched you, guided you?’ Into the amphitheatre of light came a great mound of flesh, taller than a man, wider; ribbed with veins and arteries and patches of scabrous yellow mould. Clusters of organs swayed as it advanced on two massively muscled legs. Lacy antennae feathered from barnacle-like warts along its back; it turned towards me, raised itself up on its clawed feet and extended an array of mandibles and claspers. Its belly was an open vagina, connected to Langrishe by the umbilical cord.

  I knew I had gone mad.

  The umbilical retracted, drawing Langrishe into the raw red maw. It closed around him, advanced another step towards me. Langrishe’s face regarded me from a cowl of red flesh.

  ‘I tried to tell you, Moon, but you refused to understand. Evolution. The future, Moon. The future man. Homo symbioticus. The orthobody. A completely self-contained environmental unit. Imagine an end to sickness and disease, bodies that will heal our every illness, that will repair and regenerate our bodies; why, I am effectively immortal. Imagine no pain, no war, imagine the ability of one human to cause another human pain abolished; we can have that, the orthobodies have a system of neurological checks that make it impossible to translate a violent thought into violent action. Imagine, no more want, no more hunger, for the orthobody lives on sunlight, air and water like the plants, and every man will be able to draw what more he wants from the endless resources of the forest. Imagine, a world without ignorance; my brain is linked with the orthobody’s brain that can process information with the speed of a computer; what is more, it can link into another orthobrain, so that the total of all human knowledge is accessible by every man, woman, and child; knowledge is no more the privilege of an educated class, the heritage of humanity is the right of all humanity. Imagine, the richness of experience and emotion of a Shakespeare or a Michelangelo the birthright of everyone; imagine eyes that can see into the infra-red and the ultraviolet, new spectrums of hearing, the ability to taste, smell, touch things you never conceived of before, in addition to new senses, new awareness that I cannot even begin to describe to you, Moon!’