Changa

by Ian McDonald

  They could not comprehend it, but they knew what they were seeing. They knew where they had seen this before, but they did not dare say.

  At T-0 Tolkien released its surface impact probes. As Bilbo, Frodo and Sam fell toward Iapetus, Tolkien spun on its axis and raked the satellite with a fan of single-shot X-ray lasers. Spectrum analysers read the light from the wounded moon while atmospheric, gravitic and electromagnetic data streamed back from the artillery-shell sized surface probes. Then Tolkien went into occultation behind the moon and the stream of information was temporarily halted. At T-240 the probe emerged from the radio shadow and began to bit-cram full data download earthwards while there was still power in its batteries. Transmission time was twenty-nine hours, seven minutes. On the third planet out from the sun, Tolkien’s masters sifted and analysed and interpreted the information from Saturn and wondered whether to tell humanity what humanity had already guessed. The stuff, the black stuff covering Iapetus. It was Chaga.

  Then the voice spoke one final time and Tolkien went silent as Saturn’s gravity whipped it like a top and spun it out of the solar system. The good and faithful angel fell faster than any human-made object toward the galaxy clusters in Virgo. By the time it felt the tug of another gravitational field, the earth would be a sterile cinder pressed close to a bloated red sun. Any voice that woke Tolkien from its Big Sleep would not be human.

  ~ * ~

  15

  The sun was high. The day was hot and clear. The sky was cloudless, an intense hot blue that confounds sense of distance. The rain had passed into the hot dry north. The steady wind had sucked the brief rains dry and returned the earth to dust. Today, as every day, the road was crowded with refugees. Fifty thousand people were moving on it, whole tribes were going north at the speed of a Nissan pick-up, or a cattle truck, or a donkey cart, or their own hard, bare feet. Some slapped emaciated cows on with sticks. Some tried to keep their goats from straying under the wheels. Stripped, fire-blackened hulks of vehicles littered the verges, abandoned when they broke down or simply ran out of fuel. The Kajiado road was a fifty-mile wrecking yard. Bands of thin, tall youths in T-shirts advertising fertilizer scavenged the wrecks. The little that was left they piled in the backs of only slightly less decrepit pickups. Dark specks in the heat haze that shimmered up from the open lands beyond the road were refugees striking cross-country for the highway. A tall, narrow plume of dust was a vehicle. A wide low plume was livestock. No plume at all was people on foot with all their possessions rolled up in mats carried on their heads.

  White military humpies with stars-and-stripes fluttering briskly from their whip antennae hurtled as fast as they could along the road. They had no care for other road users, on foot or hoof or on wheels. They threw the dust of their passage over all equally. Every mile or so an armoured personnel carrier was pulled over onto the soft shoulder. Blue-helmets in RayBans watched indolently over the lines of refugees and rested their bare arms on their hideously powerful weapons. Far less frequent were the aid stations of the UNHCR: a couple of Landrovers and a canvas awning under which old men with big eyes and big teeth looked you in the face and hairless dusty babies fumbled for their mothers’ withered teats. If you told them humans had sent machines to the moons of Saturn they would have laughed painfully and slapped their thin thighs.

  It was a fine and beautiful day, and Gaby McAslan was driving down the road south to Kajiado. Ute Bonhorst was beside her. The top was down and the radio on. The radio played a western rock classic, as it did sometimes between the African music. The two women sang along with it. The music and the big expensive car insulated them from the epic misery of the road. Gaby’s was not a profession renowned for its compassion, and Africa had begun to brutalize her.

  Past Isinya, a party of young men stood by the side of the road grouped around a dead lion.

  Kajiado had grown out of the intersection of the road south to Tanzania with the railroad to the soda flats at Lake Magadi. John Wayne riding high in the saddle would have felt right at home; for its high-plains spirit, and for its vernacular architecture. The town’s shops and businesses were set back behind wooden boardwalks that followed the slope of the main street in a long shallow flight of steps. At the Masai stores at the top of the town all things needful to human being, and many things not, could be bought. A few Masai could still be found lingering in the porch; tall and beautiful and satanically arrogant. The spears they carried had each cost a lion its life. The hot wind from the plains blew their ochre robes up around them, baring their lean thighs, buttocks and genitals. Such was their pride, they did not care. At the bottom of the hill was the transit camp. There was no community in southern Kenya that did not have a transit camp attached to it like a mutated Siamese twin. Kajiado’s was smaller than most, and shrinking every day. The Chaga was too close. Townsfolk and camp people alike would be dispossessed soon. The wealthier landowners and professionals had already moved out. Every day a store would board up or shutter down, never to open again. Last week Kajiado’s only automated teller machine had been yanked out of the wall of the National Bank by a rope attached to a Peugeot matatu. There were no longer enough police to investigate the crime.

  UNECTA was the only business in town that was thriving. For a while; then it would have to put up its boards and shutters and go like all the others and leave Kajiado to the Chaga creeping across the railroad tracks and up the sloping main street and in through the door of the Masai stores. Until that time, Southern Regional Headquarters Kajiado was the advance position for UNECTA’s administrative arm, co-ordinating the mobile bases spaced at the four cardinal points around Kilimanjaro.

  Unlike Kajiado town, the regional headquarters had been designed to be abandoned. Architecture varied on themes of pre-fabricated units, inflatable domes and the ubiquitous Kenyan cinder-block. It sprawled. Land is cheap when it is going to be taken away from you. The military had built a big, expensive base; there was a well-equipped small airport and servicing facilities for the research division’s field equipment, from Chaga-proof cameras to the tractor units that carried the mobile laboratories.

  The guard on the perimeter wire fence checked Gaby’s and Ute’s identities on a PDU and sent them around the back of Kajiado’s only building to exceed two stories; a massive, windowless fifty-foot block marked Unit 12. It was a object of some significance: it had been painted olive drab and ringed round with razorwire concertinas. Kajiado Centre’s conference hall was the disused town cinema. There were still posters for the last picture show, a double bill of The Ten Commandments and Jackie Chan in Streetfight in Old Shanghai. The interior was a lurid red, which, with the curved roof and walls, made Gaby think of an open mouth. There were cigarette burns on the flip-down seats. Many of the rows were already filled. Gaby knew enough faces to recognize them all as junior staff. The major players were up at Nyandarua getting their faces on the pale blue screen.

  A big UNECTAfrique horns-and-mountain symbol hung where Charlton Heston had once held up the tablets of stone. On the stage beneath it was a long table with three chairs, three notepads with pens, three carafes of water with glasses upturned over them and twenty microphones parcel-taped to the edge of the table.

  Three people entered from the side of the stage and sat down. The murmur in the cinema ceased. On the left sat a Mediterranean woman in a smart suit that would very quickly get sweaty and creased in the stifling heat of the cinema. On the right sat the token Kenyan, who knew it, and said by the bored, distant way he played with his notepad and pen that he was fucked if he was going to answer any questions from the wazungu. In the middle sat the man who had come running up to Gaby McAslan at the cashpoint on Latema Road, kissed her on the mouth and thus saved her from being conned out of five hundred shillings on her first day in Nairobi.

  ‘The one in the middle, who is he?’ Gaby whispered.

  ‘Dr Shepard,’ Ute Bonhorst answered, ‘Research Director of Tsavo West.’

  Gaby rested her chin on the back of
the empty seat in front of her and closely watched this man pour himself a glass of water, take a sip, and look to his associates.

  ‘OK. If everyone’s here, we’ll make a start,’ he said. She remembered the Jimmy-Stewart Mr Middle-America accent. She remembered the luminous blue eyes. ‘There will be press releases at the back later with full technical specifications. Can everyone hear me all right? At the back?’ Ute Bonhorst shouldered a U-format camcorder with the SkyNet logo on the side. Gaby checked the battery levels on her disc recorder. ‘Good to see so many of you. Typically, we’ve been upstaged by the Chaga deciding to pull a PR coup up at Nyeri. And the Tolkien probe gave us more than we’d bargained for. So thanks for coming to see the sideshow.’ There was a murmur of polite laughter. He introduced himself and the people on either side of him. They spoke briefly. Dr Shepard then outlined the substance of the press conference.

  Each of the four ChagaWatch bases fulfilled a different purpose. Ol Tukai, twelve miles to the south-east, specialized in taxonomy and classification. Tinga Tinga, retreating at fifty metres per day over the Engaruka plains towards the Ngorongoro, attempted to unravel the Gordian knot of Chaga symbiotic ecology. South of the mountain, Moshi base moved across the great empty Lossogonoi Plateau and studied the climatic and environmental effects of an alien biosphere on East Africa, and East Africa’s adaptations to it. And Tsavo West crawled through the great game reserve from which it took its name toward the fragile Nairobi-Mombasa road and rail line and delved into cellular and molecular biology. It was there that the discovery was made, down among the atoms in the country of quantum uncertainty.

  There was a bridge between terrestrial and Chaga-life. It was the chemistry of the carbon atom, but the Chaga was not built on the chains and lattices of earth-bound carbon forms. Its engineering was that of the sixty-atom sphere of the Buckminsterfullerene molecule; its organic chemistry a three-dimensional architecture of domes, arches, cantilevers, tunnels and latticed skeletons.

  ‘The molecules are immensely complicated, hundreds of atoms in length,’ Dr Shepard said, waving the red dot of his laser pointer across the screen where wire-frame spheres cannoned off each other and convoluted molecular intestines twined and wriggled.

  I bet that is the only suit he has, Gaby McAslan thought.

  ‘Locked into hollow cylinders, they become essentially machines for processing atoms. Molecular factories. This is the mechanism by which the Chaga absorbs and transmutes terrestrial carbon - in vegetable form, mostly, but as you all know, it’s not averse to the odd juicy complex hydrocarbon or polymer. The fullerene worms break the chemical bonds of terrestrial organic components into the equivalent of short peptide chains - analogies tend toward the biological, for obvious reasons. We’re talking, in a sense, about a form of life on a smaller scale than the fundamental units of terrestrial biology; each of these smart molecules is the equivalent of a cell. The fullerene molecules pass the broken-down terrestrial molecules through their guts, for want of a better expression, in the process adding new atoms, realigning molecular bonds; building copies of themselves, imprinting them with information. In a sense, it’s a kind of alien DNA, processing basic amino-acids and inorganic compounds into the pseudo-proteins of Chaga biochemistry.

  ‘Essentially, the Chaga is one mother of a buckyball jungle.’

  Gaby wrote that on the back of her hand. Dr Shepard sat down. The Mediterranean-looking woman stood up. She had a French accent. Gaby did not hear one word she spoke in it. She was watching the way Dr Shepard sipped his water and inspected his fingernails and doodled on his notepad and folded little scraps of paper into origami frogs and flapping birds. She watched him scan the faces in the auditorium. His Paul Newman blue eyes met hers for an instant and passed.

  You don’t know me, but I know you, Gaby McAslan thought.

  After the token Kenyan had said his few words, Dr Shepard asked if there were any questions. Gaby was first on her feet.

  ‘OK, at the back, red-haired woman with the interesting T-shirt.’

  ‘Gaby McAslan, SkyNet on-line.’ Ah, maybe you do know me now, or at least wonder whether you might know me, but you are not certain. ‘From what I understand of fullerenes, they’re the dominant molecular form of carbon in deep-space hydrocarbon clouds. Does this astronomical fact have any relation to what Tolkien showed us out at Iapetus?’

  If the face does not help you remember, will the voice, the accent? She did not know why it was so important for him to remember. But she wanted deeply to impress him.

  ‘As far back as the Kilimanjaro Event, speculative connections were being made between the Chaga and the Iapetus Occupation. It may have been a shock seeing the images that came back from Tolkien, but, to the scientific community at least, it wasn’t a surprise. What our research has proved is that we are encountering a highly adaptive and successful organism, one which, by virtue of its ability to engineer molecules, can create an ecological niche for itself anywhere it can find raw materials. The fullerene worms are quasi-stable and can rapidly switch molecular structures. In non-technical language, they can reprogram themselves to change with their environment. So, theoretically, there is no objection to them having evolved a form that can colonize the moons of Saturn, or, if they can adapt to as inimical an environment as that, anywhere else in the universe, for that matter.’

  ‘So the Chaga is not native to the Saturnian system?’ Gaby asked, beating a dozen raised hands by not having sat down while Dr Shepard answered her question.

  ‘Certainly not Iapetus. And we would very much doubt that it originated in or around the Hyperion Gap, either. If we’d an unlimited budget and our own HORUS orbiter, or even a spare SSTO, we’d very much like to send a probe for a sneaky look under Titan’s cloud-layer, not because it may have evolved there, but because it may have used it as a way-station on the way to Iapetus, and ultimately, Earth. There’s barroom speculation about Saturn; if not the planet itself, perhaps in the ring system. The planet pumps out a lot of energy, though personally I’m not convinced it’s enough to power up so complex and energy-heavy a chemistry. Off the record, my private theory is that it does not originate from our solar system.’

  Journalists were on their feet, fingers raised. Gaby sneaked in a parting shot.

  ‘Could this have evolved naturally?’

  ‘Are you asking me are the Iapetus and Earth Chagas artefacts of an alien intelligence?’

  Their eyes met across a crowded Kajiado cinema.

  ‘Are there aliens in spaceships with lots of windows in them?’

  She made him smile. It was a major triumph. He was one of those men whose smiles so utterly transform their faces they seem like two people.

  ‘On the strength of the evidence to hand, I’d give a reluctant “no”. No UFOs landing on the White House lawn. Well, that kind of depends on where, and whether, the Chaga is going to stop. Have you heard of Von Neumann machines?’

  ‘Machines that move from planet to planet building copies of themselves.’

  ‘The Chaga may be a highly sophisticated Von Neumann machine. Starships the size of molecules. In a sense, what is a living cell but a Von Neumann machine programmed by its own DNA? And we said earlier that the Chaga “memes”, as we call them, can be thought of as living molecules. As to whether there is a guiding intelligence behind it - I’m blue-skying here - Von Neumann machines can easily outlive the civilization that produces them. The designers of the Chaga - if they exist at all - could have become extinct a million years ago. But is there any reason why our particular brand of behaviour and problem-solving should be the sole criterion of “intelligence”? Our intelligence may be so particular to us that we cannot recognize that something truly alien may be “intelligent”. We’re all thinking in terms of little men with big heads and glowing eyes. Anthropomorphic chauvinism. Perhaps the aliens are the Chaga, or have become the Chaga, over aeons of travel. Then again, as you said, the first fullerenes were deduced from the profiles of interstellar molecular clo
uds, so perhaps the Chaga, or, I should say, the Chaga-memes, the fullerene-machines, are a form of life that has evolved in interstellar space. But there may be another level of chauvinism: we assume that within any sufficiently complex system, there must be intelligence. That’s how God got invented, I suspect. The Chaga may just be dumb, fecund life, with no more intelligence than the lilies of the field, or a condomful of sperm.

  ‘Thank you for asking that. I enjoyed your question. OK, Jean-Marie Duclos.’

  Gaby did not hear the French television journalist’s question, any of the questions that followed. She had what she wanted from Dr Shepard. After the press conference, when the others were filing out and picking up their hard-copy technical releases and blinking in the bright sunlight outside, she came cantering down the steps to the front.