Chaga

have to tell you. Please come with me.’

Sun-Saiders waved to Peter Werther as he took the two women down to the lake side onto a wooden jetty that had been built out twenty yards through the reeds into the open water. At the end was a small wooden gazebo. Ute Bonhorst videoed flamingos. Gaby set up her recording equipment on the floor and checked levels. Water sparkled in the gaps between the boards. Peter Werther lit a cigarette.

‘Also, this is the only place they will let you smoke,’ he said, offering the pack. Ute did not smoke. Gaby declined. It would be easy to smoke too much in this job. ‘I am sure you are wondering, why this place, why these strange people with their strange rituals? Well, they are a good people, it is a good life they lead, but the real reason is simpler. They were the first people I met when I came out of the Chaga. I walked, you see. I was brought to the edge, and told I must leave now, and I just walked north. They do not ask questions, you see. They accept. If I had walked into an army patrol, or a UNECTA base, I do not know what would have become of me, but these people, in their months of travel, gave me the time and space to learn about myself, and what I have been changed into, and what it is I must do. And now I think I know, and I am ready, and these people have let me bring you into their peace and calm because they agree with me that the world needs to hear what I learned, back there.’ Peter Werther smiled. ‘I know what you are going to ask. Why am I not dead? After all, UNECTA says no one who goes into the Chaga ever comes out. I am not dead because the Chaga kept me alive. It kept me alive because that is its nature. I could have stayed there forever, in the cloud forests up on the mountain, but it would not let me stay. Someone had to come out and tell the truth about what is in there.

‘And what have I seen and experienced?’ He put a foot up on the wooden railing and contemplated the pink flamingos and the silver-blue lake and the high dark ridge of the Mau escarpment beyond. ‘Wonder and horror. Beauty and terror. Paradise, I suppose, but at the same time a…’ He struggled for a word, spoke briefly in German.

‘Insidious,’ Ute suggested.

‘Yes, an insidious hell. Monstrous, wonderful. I could pair off adjectives all day and not have communicated to you anything of what it is truly like in there. It is alien, it cannot be understood; much of it is so strange that it cannot be seen; yet we know it, we have always known it, deep in here.’ He cupped the back of his head with his gloved left hand. ‘The hindbrain, the medulla, the brainstem; the roots of primal consciousness.’

‘The heart of darkness?’ Gaby suggested.

‘The beginning of all light,’ Peter Werther corrected. ‘In there are things that I can only call organic cities, but like no city you or I or anyone would design. Cities of our dreams: kilometres and kilometres of pods and clusters and things for which there are no names, on avenues that no one has ever walked but me. A million people could be fed and sheltered; and they are waiting for us. We know it, it knows us. Once before, a very long time ago, so long we have forgotten it except in dreams, we met and parted. But it has not forgotten us.’

‘The lies UNECTA tells! It is not hostile to humanity: it supports life, whatever life comes into contact with it. Symbiosis: that is the way of the Chaga. It feeds and shelters you and you become a part of it. If it was alien, it could not do that: there would be no point of contact between us. That is why I say it knows us, and has known us for a long time.

‘It thinks. At night you can hear its dreams in your dreams, like a song that has been sung for a million years. It learns: in the early days they tried to poison it: defoliants, systematic herbicides. The Chaga analysed and put together counter-agents to neutralize them within minutes. It defends itself: fire will not burn it, poison will not kill it. There was talk of dusting it with powdered plutonium waste. The Chaga would have filtered it and made it safe. Not even a nuclear strike would kill it now. As long as one molecule remains, it will grow back again. It’s smart. The trees talk. The roots connect, like the cells in your brain. They touch, they share and they think, but it is not any kind of intelligence we can understand.’

Peter Werther smoked the rest of his cigarette in the self-conscious silence of a man who has said too much of something personal and unique to him and fears that people think that he is not sane. The screams of playing children came across the water from What the Sun Said. Drums started up. Tribal life for people brought up in the great western cult of the individual. Peter Werther has been further into the heart of darkness than any of them would ever dare, Gaby McAslan thought, and so he does not need to play dress-up-and-pretend and stick feathers through his nipples.

‘Could you tell us about the Kilimanjaro Event?’ she asked. Ute changed disc on the camcorder. The acrylic wrapper blew around the floor of the wooden gazebo on a wind rising from the north.

‘I cannot add much to what the others have said. We had made camp up on Kibo at Elveda Point and were resting: the air is thin up there, it is hard to breathe, even when you are not carrying hang-gliders. We made radio contact with base camp at the Marangu Gate Hotel and said that we would begin flying the next day. It was just after midnight when the thing came down: all I can remember is a flash and roar and explosion. It is always difficult to describe things like this. Language does not have the words: it is like survivors of air-crashes. They have been through the end of the world and all they can say is boom! That was what I thought had happened; there had been an air-crash on the mountain. Then there was a sudden huge wind that swept away our tents and scattered all our things – that was when we lost Sabine, she went to look for the gliders. She never came back. I think she must have fallen. There are sheer drops along the Breach Wall. I never found her, afterwards. The Chaga would have taken away every trace of her.

‘Joachim tried to get in radio contact with base camp and tell them there had been a major accident on the mountain. Lise, Christian and I went down to see if we could find any survivors. The night had been clear, with a good moon, but had quickly clouded up. It can do that, up on the mountain. The wind had risen to gale force. We found where it had ploughed up the land and followed it for about a kilometre downslope. It came in from the north east, you see?’ He mimed the arc of the package with his gloved hand. ‘It had come down on the edge of the Diamond Glacier, about a kilometre from our camp. There was no fire. If it had been an airplane crash, there would have been a fire, even on the icefields. You do not think about this at the time; all you think about is finding someone alive.

‘When we saw the site, we knew this was no air crash. The crater was about ten metres wide and thirty long. The thing itself was about the size of a bus. You have seen the mock-ups they have done on computer. They are pretty much as we saw it. What I remember is the heat – the thing was still dull red from re-entry. I could feel the warmth on my face and hands. I remember having two impressions. The first was of the terrible airline bombing, Lockerbie, do you remember that, or are you too young?’

‘I was four,’ Gaby said, ‘but I’ve seen it on nostalgia shows.’

‘The other impression was of that old sci-fi book: The War of the Worlds? H.G. Wells? I was expecting one end to unscrew and tentacles to come out. Lockerbie and The War of the Worlds: that is what I was thinking, standing on the edge of the crater. It looked scary. I know that sounds a funny thing; it was obvious that it had been made – this was not a rock that had fallen out of the sky – but not in the way people would make something. Do you understand this? All the proportions were wrong. They fitted together, but they looked strange. And it was not broken either, like an airplane would have been broken. We knew we were seeing the thing intact, as it was meant to be, and that this was what it was meant to do. It did not look like an accident.’

Across the lake a dusterplane was spraying the green circles of sharecrop orchard. Flamingos fled from it, peeling up from the water in a pink wedge of wings.

The storm was getting up by then; there was nothing else we could do that night. Lise suggested we come back when the weather had cleared. But I know that we all felt, no, we knew, that the storm had come out of the thing in the crater.

‘The storm closed in while we were returning to camp. I don’t know how we made it. A blizzard, in the tropics. Unglaublich. I know now there was more than snow in it, but I now know more about many things. We put our tents up and took shelter. We had no idea it would be so long or terrible. The first day our radio stopped working: we had no contact with our base camp. The second day the strange things started happening. Our tents began to fall apart. A little yellow patch about the size of a pencil-point would appear on the waterproof fabric and within minutes grow to the size of my hand. The same happened to our weather-wear; to anything that had plastic in it, which is almost everything in modern mountaineering. Of course, you know what was happening.’

‘The spores, the virons, whatever you want to call them, scavenge hydrocarbons to use as building blocks