Changa

by Ian McDonald

  Hold on. What? Shit. Jesus Christ. All right. Sorry Gab. Got to go. Team Red just lucked out.

  ~ * ~

  No, Gaby. Your eyes deceive you not. Take a good look, Gaby, because nobody on the planet ever got a videogram like this. I could look at it all day, and day here lasts a week. Why didn’t they pack poets or writers or musicians on Operation Final Frontier, folk who could do justice to this place and not just measure it and analyse it and record it. I’ll put the camera up here so you can see the cylindrical land behind me. I really haven’t an awful lot of time; now we’re on the ground, there’s always something needs doing or reporting or observing. From Zen indolence to karoshi. But the Passengers are paying their fares now.

  The story so far. I got abruptly called away from my last note to you because Team Red out there over the forward end suddenly found a mile-wide section of spin axis opening up in front of them. It was the classic sci-fi cliche: ‘The door dilated.’ Like the aperture of a camera. After half an hour obtaining permission from Earth, they moved the tug into the opening. What they found inside, as you’ve doubtless seen on the television, was an airlock about three miles long - that’s what the cavities in the partitions are - and at the other end of it; is this. A cylindrical buckyball jungle, sixty kilometres deep, four hundred and fifty round.

  It’s a good thing, I suppose, that a lot of these Right Stuff astronauts have had imagination bypasses. If it had been me, coming through with the tug into freefall atmosphere, I’d still be there, turning with the world, blissfully out of my head. What they did do was dump Team Red’s pod down in the micro-gravity on the lip of the inner airlock door, and cycle out back to High Steel.

  We came through this morning. Just in time; High Steel was getting mighty stinky with Unity moving its troops up to the front as fast as it can get tugs turned around. I could have killed the stupid accountant who decided it was not economically viable to put windows in tug pods. You cannot see it on the television monitors. Did I say that to you once, back in the Mara? You used to video things all the time. I bet you never watched any of them.

  There’s an unexplored land down there, bigger and wilder than all the game reserves of Kenya.

  When you step outside and touch it with your eyes, that’s when you see it. You can do this, here. It violates every sensibility of space exploration: zero gravity, but atmosphere. Too thin to be breathable, but sufficiently warmed by the light through the five slit windows to allow an almost shirt-sleeves environment. Three layers, a breather mask, and a tether so that you don’t get taken away on the funny winds that get spun up by the Coriolis force. The pseudo-gravity well steepens quickly; seventy miles straight down gives you time to do a lot of screaming.

  What did I feel when I stepped out of the pod airlock? Unreality. Sheer human disbelief. A valley one hundred and fifty kilometres wide you can visualize - complete with rivers and couple of land-locked small seas - but the mind will not permit a cave the same size. It will not accept forests and rivers hanging over your head, and it categorically will not allow seas up there. The waters above the earth, wasn’t there something about that in Genesis? So you tell yourself that it’s all a stage set, a complex glass-shot for a Hollywood sci-fi movie; after all, here you are in sweatshirt and jeans, this can’t be an alien world. But then the details start to work on you. The lakes glisten. The clouds move in odd spirals around the curving land. You can see the shadow of rain falling on the buckyball jungle. If there were anything down there that made a noise you could hear over seventy-five kilometres, you could hear it. You want to tear off your breather mask and give a great shout and wait for the faint echo to come back to you from the partition wall sixty kilometres away. It is real. You are here. And that makes you feel very small, yet at the same time very big. Do you remember we talked about that feeling, the night they’d just discovered the fullerene clouds out at Rho Ophiuchi? You asked me if I’d ever stood under the stars and lost and found myself in their distance and vastness. That’s what I feel here: this cylindrical land so completely dwarfs me that I am virtually annihilated, but I’m here, I witness this, I interpret it, I express it, I am the reason it has been conceived and constructed from the ruins of Hyperion. I matter. The BDO is the product of a technology that looks like magic next to ours, but we made it. We’re here. We matter. Small, big. It’s like the angels, who, for all their divinity, are ultimately no nearer an infinitely high and holy God than humans are. This artifact may be an entire world, but measured against the stars, the spiral arms, the galaxies, the expanding universe which we share, it’s as small as I am. We’re both tiny bright beacons of sentience. We both need someone to hold us against the dark. And so we cling to each other. Symbiosis.

  So, here we are. Now, what do we do?

  They’ve brought new accommodation modules up from Unity - much bigger than the standard tug pods - and they’ve got windows. We’re building Camp One up here on the lip of the airlock. About a hundred metres inward, the land drops away on a cup-shaped curve to the main cylinder. Seventy-five kilometres, downhill. Team Red are about ten kilometres down-slope. Easy going in the light gravity; when it gets stronger, the slope decreases. We shouldn’t be surprised, this place was built for us. But it’s not too easy: no stairway to heaven, no elevator to hell. If we want to learn what the Evolvers have to show and tell us, we have to work for it. Team Red want to make breathable air before they set up Camp Two, just under the snow line. Tomorrow, they’ll go down through the clouds into the forest beneath.

  Tomorrow, I will follow them. Team Green is going down to the curving land. Love to you, Gaby. Wish me well, wish me a thousand things. Funny, I’m not scared any more. I’ve got land under my feet, I can draw strength from that. I’ve got to go now; as I said, there’s always something to do here, and there’s a tug going back to High Steel in ten minutes that can take this disc -there, can you see it? Holding station up there in the spin axis. Hope this letter finds you, wherever you are. Love to you, Gaby Mc Asian.

  I’ve just heard. Message from Team Red. They say there are figures, moving down there in the mist.

  ~ * ~

  Gaby McAslan ejected the disc from the PDU and rested her chin on her arms on the Landcruiser’s steering wheel. The letter had come through to Tinga Tinga at five-thirty that morning, after ten days lost in the limbo of Operation Final Frontier Control. She had requested the communications people to alert her at any time if anything came through. Good people. They used to bang people out of bed in the old game lodge days for an arthritic elephant scratching its ass against a tree, she thought. How much more so, then, for news from another world?

  The track had been rough but easily followed, even in the dark. Glittering pairs of eyes had fled from her headlights. Gaby could not say why she had to go alone up to the ridge to watch the disc. Sense of ritual. Sense of propriety. Sense of the romantic. Sense of the spiritual, of connectedness with the land, and the huge sky that hung close over it, and Shepard, above it all.

  An edge of light lay across the eastern half of the world. New day. Always a miracle. The moon was already down. The brighter stars and planets still shone in the softening indigo. None challenged the BDO, a brilliant oval of light just past the zenith. A pair of binoculars would resolve it into a half-shadowed cylinder. Two moons is gorgeous, Shepard.

  The sky brightened. Gaby fiddled with the car radio, found Voice of America. Early morning music. She poured coffee from the flask the woman on Tinga Tinga’s out-dock had given her because it got cold out there on the high savannah. She sipped the gift and watched the land open up in front of her. Down these bluffs and across the valley was the Chaga, never sleeping, never ceasing, drawing closer to her at fifty metres every day. Today she would embark on her expedition into the unknown country; down the valley, across terminum, into the land of the Ten Thousand Tribes and the beautiful, startling, wonderful, bizarre nation they were growing in there. There were faces she wanted to see, in there.

  Al
l the room to be all the things we can be. All the things we have the potential to be. The door to the nursery was open. Two million years of childhood was over. Now would come the storms and changes of puberty, the struggles for identity and self-hood and mastery of adolescence. How long they might endure, what the maturity that would come when they had passed might be like, Gaby could not conceive. She did not imagine it would be as long a childhood - certainly, it would be harder - but the teenage millennia would be dazzling.

  The coffee was mighty good.

  The PDU queeped. A call, from Tembo, back at Tinga Tinga. He looked and sounded poked out of bed and wondering what the hell she was up to out there in the wild. Word from the Miyama orbital telescope, via T.P. Costello in Zanzibar. Phoebe, the eighteenth moon of Saturn, had just disappeared.

  Gaby laughed long and hard at that good joke by the powers in the sky. Perhaps they had come to Earth to learn irony. Nice one, all you bright stars. And here’s a better one. The good news from Earth. She sat back in the Landcruiser’s seat and rested her fingertips on her belly. It was three days since she had tested positive. It had been much quicker than she had planned. Already she imagined she could feel the life budding in there, turning over and over in the freefall waters of conception. What a world you’re going to live in, kid! What a future you’re going to have.

  She was glad the conception had been so stunningly sudden. She could go down to the Chaga with Tembo and the UNECTA team without fearing that its spores might change it.

  She was not sure whether that would be a good or bad thing in this new world.

  The darkness was almost gone now. Light filled up the land, spilled down the sides of the bluffs into the valley, touched the tops of the tallest hand-trees and pseudo-corals of the Chaga. It was changing in there too, losing its shape and structure as it grew closer to humanity’s needs and societies. Symbiosis. Growing together. Hugging in the big, big dark.

  The upper limb of the sun touched the horizon. Only the BDO could rival it now, and it would soon fade. The sky was a high, deep blue, clear and clean. Gaby emptied the rest of her coffee out the window of the car and made to start it. She stopped herself.

  A lion had come out of the thorn scrub down the bluffs and was working its way up the hill to the crest. It was an old female, sag-jawed, sag-bellied, strong and scarred. It sniffed at the Landcruiser’s tyres. Gaby sat, not moving a muscle, hardly breathing. The old lioness moved to a slab of smooth rock beneath a big baobab overlooking the valley. She sniffed the rock and sat down. Gaby watched her, lying under the tree, looking out across the brightening land.

  After a time, a second lion came and lay down beside her.

  ~ * ~

  Post face

  ‘In science fiction, everything should be mentioned twice, with the possible exception of science fiction.’

  Samuel R. Delany, Triton.