are sitting in a ring by themselves, talking in Swahili and laughing and clicking their fingers. I sit apart to write, and Lucius comes and sits himself down beside me.
‘They are crass, boorish men,’ he says, looking at the group around the television. ‘You are like me, you are intelligent, sensitive, educated.’
I ask him how intelligent, sensitive, sophisticated college boy becomes gun-toting, camouflage-wearing freedom fighter.
‘Loyalties are long and strong in Africa,’ he says. ‘When I heard what was happening to my family’s farms up on Kilimanjaro, I could not stay away, not while I might have some power to help them. I could do nothing against the Chaga, but when my people escaped from the camp at Moshi, I went with them, because I knew they would need all manner of abilities to rebuild the nation.
‘We found the Chaga at the minimum level of habitability. We were not wise to its ways, we did not trust it to feed and shelter us. Some died, the young, the very old, the vulnerable, and from their bodies the Chaga learned the needs of humans and grew them. From their flesh came the meat we eat, from their blood the water we drink, from their skin our shelters, from their bones our towns and settlements, from their spirits the light and the heat and the electricity that powers them. I say it like religious scripture. It is almost a prayer among us. You are thinking we have made the Chaga our God? Yes, in an African sense; gods who are petty, and practical, and ask you questions like, Lucius, which would you rather have, a perfect soul or a new Series 8 BMW? and do not get upset when you say a BMW. The Chaga gives us both: it weaves outside things into itself and makes them more than they are. And in doing itself, it makes itself more. Outside the Chaga is life. Inside the Chaga is life times life. Life squared.’
I press him on what he means by the Chaga making things more than they are. It echoes Jake, when he said, on the night of the storm, about the Chaga being the gateway into new ways of being human. Lucius is evasive. It is getting late, he says. The others are calling him. No they are not. What they are doing is peering in tense concentration at the Asian Babes All-Action Topless bout. But at least I won’t have to stop him trying to chat me up. Jake takes his place beside me. Topless All-Action Asian Babes hold limited appeal for him, I suppose. Getting bitchy, Gaby. Hot news. While the guys’ brains have been be-fuddled by oiled Asian titties bouncing in extreme close-up, he’s been working on them to let us visit one of their settlements. They would not agree to that under any circumstances, but he did wheedle the promise out of them to take us deeper into the Chaga to see something that they will not specify, but they think will interest us greatly.
‘When do we go?’ I ask.
‘First thing in the morning. Lucius will guide us.’
The women are talking among themselves with great animation, laughing and hiding their faces behind their hands. They must be talking about sex.
Day Five
We made our farewells in the early mist. Rose, Bushbaby, M’zee and Dog are staying to conclude business with the Wa-chagga.
We ascend steadily for about an hour. There are ways between the levels; swooping catenaries of plaited piping that anchor tiers to piers like the cables of a suspension bridge. Lucius runs up them with the cocky ease of one of these spider-men who build the Manhattan skyline. He’s trying to impress me. What it makes me want to do, encumbered by ordnance and acrophobia, clawing for every finger- and toe-hold, is knee him in the nuts. Lucius educates me in Chaga-lore: anything red will always be edible, orange is water, blue electricity, white information. Green and yellow are heat and cold; black is drugs, both pharmaceutical and recreational.
We come across a moment of lost history tangled up in the cables between worlds: the overgrown skeletons of three helicopters, trapped like insects in a web and sucked transparent. Jake rubs away the crust of pseudo-lichens and discovers Tanzanian army markings. The cockpits are a writhe of tendrils and yellow spines: I imagine picked-clean skulls, greenly grinning. Or do I imagine?
Upwards. By noon break I want to lie down and die and let the Chaga grow over me, like that lost helicopter squadron, and suck my soul up into the Crystal Monoliths that I can just begin to glimpse through the forest roof. At least Lucius can clear up a mystery before I die. I ask him if he or his people ever encountered a white woman travelling inwards alone, three, four years ago. Yes, he has. She was… Irish, like me? Yes, but not red, like you. She was dark, in complexion and spirit. A woman like this you remember. She ran into one of the foraging parties from Rongai village. They brought her in – this was when Webuye was chief, before the new regime moved for a more reclusive policy toward strangers in the forest. She asked everyone if they had seen a white man pass that way some months before. She would not stay for more than one night before she must move on inward, in search of her man.
There is another way, Lucius says, in which I am like her. We both spend hours writing in journals.
I know, I say, taking the Liberty book from my pack. This is that diary. I lay it on the cable between us. Lucius looks at it suspiciously: does it say anything about the Wa-chagga, and Rongai village? he asks.
All references to humans living in the Chaga have been cut out, I tell him. With a sharp knife.
The Wa-chagga did not do this, he says, flipping through the yellow pages.
I ask him if he knows if Moon ever found the man she was searching for. Yes, Lucius says. He was in the patrol that met her, many months later, wandering in the chaotic terrain at the foot of the Citadel. She had been near exhaustion, and deeply mistrustful. She had asked the Wa-chagga to take her to Nanjara settlement, where the people had been kind to her before, and then toward terminum. She would not speak about what she had experienced up in the high country beyond the Citadel, but it was clear that it had changed her.
After she had collected her things from Nanjara, the Wa-chagga patrol took her through the tier forest to Lake Amboseli, where they would give her into the protection of a Tactical squad, but she had broken away then and fled into the fastnesses of the Discontinuity.
So, T.P. This is how it ends. Paranoia and disillusion on the white mountain, and a love that was not so strong nor so deathless as Moon thought. Those who love too big lose too big. If it’s any consolation, Langrishe couldn’t keep her either. Funny. Sad. Terrifying: how it all keeps coming back to that one word: changed.
I’m frightened for Jake.
Upwards.
I hadn’t thought we were so high. All of a sudden we come up through the canopy on to the top of the forest. I can see. I have a horizon. I can feel sun on my skin. I have a landscape once again.
The Crystal Monoliths rise over me, as high above me as I am above the deep root forest. Their facets sparkle sun diamonds across the canopy. Before me, the web of branches and spars runs between the splayed fingers of the ridge country I glimpsed that morning Shepard took me up in the microlyte. Beyond the canyonlands, clouds rip softly on the upper ramparts of the Citadel.
The canyon country looks easy walking. It lies. The ridges are made of a porous, crumbly substance that sinks under your boots and disintegrates between clutching fingers. It took an hour to make it on to the nearest ridge top, whereupon Lucius told us with sadistic pleasure that our way lay across the forest valleys between.
Bastard.
If it’s tough on me, it’s hell on Jake. We have to stop every ten minutes for him to rest. He still hasn’t spoken to me about what I told him on the night of the big storm. I’m not pissing you, Jake. I wouldn’t. Not you.
Lucius promises we’ll be there before nightfall. We’re not. It’s nightfall by the time we start on the final valley traverse, close to midnight before he tells us we can stop, we’ve arrived.
At first I can’t see there is anything to have arrived at. Then, after a time, listening to the nights sounds of the Chaga, I realize it’s a seeing trick, like Foa Mulaku before it came to the surface. I begin to make out a pattern among the biolights in the branches, like a luminous join-the-dots picture. Suddenly they resolve and I am standing on the edge of a colossal drop looking across at walkways, staircases, rooms, gantries, houses, platforms built into an island of Chaga rising out of the deep dark root country.
Someone has built a town in the tree-tops.
42
