Chaga

did not have any problem with it.

‘Aliens, you mean? No, I never saw anything that made me think there was an intelligence behind the Chaga other than its own. Those cities I found up there; they are not waiting for the alien masters to step from the soil and inhabit them, they are for us, on the day when we learn we cannot run away from the Chaga any more and come to it as a friend rather than an enemy. We are the aliens. This is the message I was sent out from the Chaga to tell. It knows us, it has known us for a very long time. It is not alien and hostile. It may be unfamiliar, sometimes shocking, but it is ultimately human. It has come from the stars to show us our destiny is out among the stars. That is our rightful place, our destiny. But not as we are now: that is why the Chaga has come, to join with us, and change us into new forms that can live among the stars.’

Ute exchanged glances with Gaby. Peter Werther saw the raised eyebrows.

‘Ah, you are thinking, another idiot with a mad theory about the Chaga. It has fried his brains, all that hot sun and thin air and years of solitude: he has gone quietly insane, I can understand that. There are so many people with messages about the Chaga: mine is by no means the maddest. Or the sanest. It was anticipated that I would not be believed – you may even be doubting that I was lost for the five years since the Kilimanjaro Event, that I am Peter Werther at all. Well, I have something you should see.’

He held out his left hand, palm up. With his right hand he removed the leather biker’s glove.

‘Look closely,’ Peter Werther said.

At first Gaby thought it was an intricate tattoo covering all the upper surfaces of his left hand from fingertips to wrist. Fractal pattern tattoos had been briefly fashionable among her fellow students in London. Then she thought that it was a strange and terrible birthmark, a complex meander of skin pigments. There was something familiar in the very alienness, like those photographs you see of parts of things in close up.

‘Oh dear Jesus,’ Gaby McAslan whispered, seeing.

It was Chaga. The legacy of the alien rainforest was a piece of itself imprinted in the palm of Peter Werther’s left hand. Trees, pseudo-corals, mosaic-cover: complete, perfect, a million times miniaturized.

Peter Werther slipped off his linen jacket.

Amongst Gaby’s father’s library of home-videoed old movies was a tape of The Illustrated Man. Five hours a day, it had taken to make Rod Steiger up for the role. The most complex skin-job in cinema history, but the effect had been breathtaking.

Behold the man, Gaby McAslan. Peter Werther’s left arm up to the sleeve of his T-shirt was covered in Chaga. He pulled the white T-shirt off over his head. The mottled infestation stopped at a clearly defined circle halfway across his pectoral – he was in good shape for a late thirtysomething, Gaby noted in that trivia-gathering way of those who do not want to believe the evidence of their eyes. The Chaga closed across his shoulder, down his scapulars and looped under his arm at the third rib.

‘It’s growing,’ he said. Ute Bonhorst mapped the geography of his body minutely with the video camera.

‘Doesn’t it, ah?’ Gaby wallowed for questions.

‘Hurt? No. There is no pain at all. That’s the marvellous thing about it, it’s quite painless. And you need not worry, it is not infectious. Let us say, no one in What the Sun Said has caught it off me. It is personal to me, my sign, my stigmata.’

‘How fast?’ It repelled Gaby, yet was morbidly attractive. She wanted to touch it, but did not know if she could bear the feel of it beneath her fingertips.

‘Oh, very, very slow. A few millimetres a day. But it moves in time with its mother, if you understand? To scale. And, like it, this cannot be stopped.’

‘You’ve tried?’

‘I know.’

‘How long have you got?’

‘It is about nine months since I woke in a flower pod at the very edge of the Chaga. Then it was just a spot in the middle of my palm. So, you can work it out. What do you think? About another year or so? Maybe two? It seems to be avoiding my face: that, I think, will be last to go. It knows how important the face is to us.’

‘What then?’

Peter Werther smiled.

‘Something wonderful, I think. I know that I require less food and water and sleep than before. Even now, I sometimes forget to breathe for several seconds, and have not yet come to any lasting harm.’

Ute spoke in German.

‘Perhaps,’ Peter Werther said. ‘She is asking me if maybe I am becoming, ah?’

‘Photosynthetic.’

‘Ja. And recycling my own water. Becoming a self-sufficient, sealed unit. Perhaps. I do not know. Perhaps I will live forever; whatever, I am not afraid of it. There is nothing to be afraid of; it is not death, it is not disfigurement. It is being changed into a better thing, a fitter thing. I am not the future, but I may be a future.’

Gaby shook her head in disbelief. Not at what Peter Werther had told her, and whether he could be believed or not, but that she had been given such a gift as this. This was syndication to every on-line newsnet on the planet. This was the centre spread of every lumbering folding paper Gutenberg dinosaur. This was prime-time broad-and narrowcast news: this was half the industrialized world choking on their microwave TV Chow. This was Time and Le Monde and Stem. This was lead-lines on magazine covers from stands on Times Square to the Gare du Nord.

This was Gaby McAslan in front of a camera lens.

‘They’ll never leave you alone once this gets out,’ she said.

‘We can always move. What the Sun Said has been good to me. There is a lot of country for us to disappear into.’

‘They’ll find you. They won’t give you space like we have. They won’t let you say what you want to say, they won’t respect your message, or your story, or where you’ve been, or what you’ve seen. They’ll be asking you how you think the world has changed in the five years you’ve been away and what you think of the latest fashions and the latest music and the latest supermodel and what the three things are you missed most while you were in the Chaga. They’ll do articles on your sex life, they’ll run features on the contents of your bloody refrigerator. They’ll ask you a million things, but they won’t listen to you. They’ll make you into a celebrity.’

‘I know this. But people must be prepared. People must understand. Even one word of mine may be enough. Prophets are never honoured in their own countries. Even if they do not listen to what I have to say, it may be enough to see that a man can go into the Chaga and return.’

But as what? Gaby thought.

The voices of the children grew louder. They came running along the shore and out onto the wooden jetty, shouting for their Brother Peter. Peter Werther hastily pulled on his protecting garments.

‘They are my family, my friends. Even if no one else will, they believe me.’

The children spilled into the wooden gazebo. The weaver birds fled from their clamouring voices and restless bodies. The children tugged at Peter Werther’s sleeves and hands, implored him to come and look at what they were doing.

‘Their future too,’ he said. ‘Ja?’

A great cloud, dark, flat-bottomed, rising to a peak of curdled cumulus ten miles high, edged over the eastern escarpment and cast its reflection into the lake.

11

Gabygram 8

April 24

from: GMcA(a)136657NAI:EAFTP.

Hi Reb. A million thanks for the tapestry. It got here relatively unplundered by Customs and Excise, except for the inevitable wee hole they snip off the corner so they can stick an endoscope in to sniff for cocaine. It’s a