Chaga

red arrows with tails of varying lengths. The arrowheads were slowly converging on the blue star of Foa Mulaku. ‘The map only shows the Indian Ocean population, but we have evidence of migrations among Balaenoptera musculus pods in the south Atlantic and Pacific. Fragments of Foa Mulaku sound have been appearing in recordings of blue whale songs as far as Hawaii: the pods are communicating it to each other along the cold current channels. At current estimates, eighty per cent of the world blue whale population will have moved into the Carlsberg Ridge/Mid-Indian Basin region within three months, and the object is still calling.’

‘Yes, but what is it saying?’ Paul Mulrooney called out. ‘And why is it saying it to them and not to us?’

R.M. Srivapanda shook his head and pursed his lips.

‘At least Greenpeace will have something to do,’ Paul Mulrooney said. ‘All those whale burgers to protect.’ The comment did not get as big a laugh as planned.

‘Very well. That is all we have to say.’ R.M. Srivapanda looked at his colleagues. They nodded. ‘So, are there any questions?’

Three hundred voices clamoured at once.

32

She saw the light of the fire and walked toward it along the beach. Crabs scuttled around her feet, always that sufficient second quick enough to avoid destruction. The moon and tide were high. The ocean ran far up the soft coral sand. She climbed over the trunks of slumped palms.

There were four of them sitting around the fire on tube steel and canvas beach chairs up close to the tree line. Marshmallows toasted on sticks over the driftwood embers. One was a dripping blob of blazing goo. Cool- boxes held the full bottles; the empties lay careened in the soft sand. Three of the people wore white T-shirts with Foa Mulaku Sun’n’ Surf Club printed on the front. The fourth had a picture of a masturbating nun.

‘Gaby!’ Shepard surged to his feet. He looked a little drunk. ‘Press conference over?’

‘Reception said you would be down here,’ she said coolly. ‘I was expecting to see you back there.’ She would be angry with him later when there were no witnesses- She rubbed the palm of her hand against his chin stubble. Purr.

‘Come. Sit. Have a beer. Sorry we’re out of chairs.’ He introduced the white T-shirts: Depak Ray, Director of UNECTAsie’s Kavieng base on New Ireland; Mariella Costas from UNECTAmerique headquarters in Quito; Dave Mortensen from UCLA Riverside’s nanotechnology unit. ‘We’re blue-skying. What if-ing. Probing the outer limits. Entering the twilight zone. Opening the X-files.’

‘So, what have you found out in the Twilight Zone?’ Gaby asked.

‘That maybe the stars are not our destination,’ Depak Ray said. ‘Human intelligence evolved as a response to a set of environmental challenges which are specific to the environmental niche we inhabit. Those whales out there swimming toward Foa Mulaku are a different solution to a different set of environmental problems. The Chaga-makers are an interstellar civilization because wherever they come from, their niche demanded that they develop space-faring. We, with our ape’s hands and ape’s eyes and our ape’s brains and our ape’s obsessions with individuality and sex, are not evolved to make that jump. If the Chaga-makers were ever individual intelligences like us, they are not now; if we ever match their achievements, neither will we be.’

‘The Chaga-makers are the Chagas?’ Dave Mortensen said.

‘Our research at Kavieng seems to support that,’ Depak Ray said. ‘For the Eastern Pacific entities – we are trying to have the word “symb” adopted as the official term, “Chaga” is too specific to Africa – we have found that all the many thousands of seemingly different species are genetically linked to each other. They are all – to borrow a term from physics – isotopes of each other. The symbs are essentially one species with many dependant variants.’

‘Isogenes?’ Dave Mortensen suggested. ‘Like dogs: cocker spaniels, greyhounds, beagles, borzois.’

‘That closely related, yes, but the variations are very much more greatly differentiated.’

‘A clade,’ Mariella Costas said. ‘Genetically related to a common ancestor.’

‘More subtle than that,’ Depak said. ‘More like a watermark in paper than a family tree.’

The beer and the tiredness were beginning to work on Gaby now. The sand looked soft enough to curl up on and throw over herself like a sheet.

‘I can’t go for this all-nurturing life-mother goddess thing,’ Dave Mortensen said. ‘These people are engineers. They can dismantle the fundamental units of the universe and build anything they damn well like out of them. The Chagas – symbs, whatever – are made things. Technology. Machines.’

‘I have a problem with such a mechanistic view of the universe,’ Mariella Costas said. Gaby could not take her eyes off her moustache. ‘In my country we believe in community; that in our coming together we become stronger than our sum as individuals. The symbs are like families, communities, clans, tribes if you will. Corporations, perhaps: they have all come together to a common purpose that could not be achieved individually, and, in a sense, they all wear the company uniform: in their genes.’

‘But if, as the name symb implies, the thing is symbiotic, then it can’t be totally self-sufficient,’ Dave Mortensen was saying now. ‘Perhaps it needs humanity to be able to move on from this star system.’

‘The Big Dumb Object seems an effective enough way to propagate the Chaga through the galaxy,’ Mariella Costas replied.

‘Perhaps there are quicker, more efficient ways,’ the American said. ‘Worm-holes, tachyons, all that spooky stuff at the edges of quantum theory.’

‘You Americans, you must always have your dreams of the frontier,’ Depak said. ‘The place beyond that draws you on. “The Stars Our Destination”: the nobility, no, the superiority, of humanity over all possible species, and of homo americanus over all other humans.’

This is what it is all about, Gaby thought. UNECTAfrique/Asie/ Amerique. It is intellectual colonialism. The white boys telling the rest of the world what to think and how to think it. All the poor and the dirty and the over-crowded and the funny-coloured. Shovel-wielding Paddies included.

‘The Chaga-makers don’t need human Big Science,’ Shepard said. ‘They’ve got plenty of their own. Do you know how they made Hyperion disappear? A quantum black hole. So JPL reckon, based or gravitational profiles just before and after the blast. Something with the mass, say, of this island, compressed into a singularity smaller than an atomic nucleus. Out in space it’s innocuous enough, maybe twinkling a bit in the high gammas as it sucks in the odd stray hydrogen molecule. Feed it with ice satellite, and in point seven five of a second it blows in a blast of very hard Hawking radiation and super-heated accretion disc plasma. Ninety per cent conversion of mass to energy. Makes comet Shoemaker-Levy’s megatonnage look like indoor fireworks.’

Gaby thought of Mariko Uchida of UNECTAsie’s Space Sciences Division; how excited she had got thinking about the BDO. Slam-dunking micro black holes was more than soft and hot and wet. It was hog-tied and gagged and crocodile clips on the nipples: total submission to the powers in the sky.

They were debating now about what humanity could hope to offer entities who manipulated the fundamental units of reality. All we can offer the Chaga-makers is what it is to be human. But that is enough. And I think that is what the Chaga-makers have come for.

She flicked off her shoes and went down to the sea. She needed to connect with the reality of water. She walked a little into the tide line, feeling the run and suck of sand under her soles. The surf on the reef was a tremor in the water. Are there sharks out there, under the moon? Gaby thought, come in with the high tide through the gaps in the reef, casting their moon-shadows over the soft marl floor of the lagoon? Do they sense me, am I a tickle of electricity along their lateral lines? There had been little sharks in the waters around the Watchhouse, and once she had seen from the Weather Room the silhouette of a great basker off the rocks around the harbour entrance. If they ever stop moving, they die. They need a constant passage of water over their gills or they drown. A drowned fish. Oksana’s totemic creature was the wolf. I should have a shark tattooed on the upper slope of my left breast, Gaby thought.

She felt his presence as a vibration in the water before he spoke.