Chaga

balloon-silk walls flapped and swelled. The captive lights globes gusted around the little fabric room, casting sudden strange shadows.

~ * ~

Hubert climbed like an animal. Gaby’s heart almost stopped when she saw him go straight up the bole on the edge of the moat. ‘He’s born to it,’ Henning Bork assured her. That sentence means more than it says, Gaby thought. As they moved through the high canopy toward the escarpment where the Treetoppers maintained their watch post, Gaby could feel the child, up there in the dense overgrowth, stalking the slow, clumsy adults. Hidden eyes, watching. The disturbing thing was that even when the boy was back with them, she could still feel them, watching. An hour up the valley in which Treetops rested brought the small expedition to the observatory. It was a cupola of spars and silk scavenged from the wreck of the Tungus, perched on the scarp where it fell sheer to the Breeding Pit below. Henning Bork, Yves Montagnard, Jake Aarons and Gaby McAslan fitted into it like segments of an orange. Gaby tried to unsling the camcorder without injuring anyone.

‘Where’s Hubert vanished to now?’ Jake asked.

‘He’ll be playing somewhere,’ Yves Montagnard said. Gaby thought she would not be so unconcerned if it were her flesh and blood playing around such sheer drops and pitfalls. But Jake had found her something to video.

She remembered the land beneath her from the microlyte flight. She had thought it looked like a Willow Pattern plate. Now she was on the very edge of it, and it did not look like that at all. She slowly swung the camera across the spars and swelling spheres and thought it looked like something flayed and festering, all blue veins and gas-bloated, suppurating flesh straining at skeletal ribs. It looked fleshy and obscene and intimate, like a laparoscopy of a cancerous ovary.

At the limit of her zoom, at the foot of the Citadel, a bubble burst in a spurt of milky liquid and powder. Something darted from it, too far and fast for the camera to follow. She panned up the dark green rampart of the Citadel, to the clouds that hung over Kilimanjaro. Peter Werther had been brought there and set down, ass-naked as Adam in Eden. He had walked away from Eden, and the price of it was a disinfected white suite deep under Kajiado Centre, and multinational doctors measuring the advance of his own private Chaga across his body. Anything that comes out of it is theirs, Dr Dan had said. She looked at Jake, talking excitedly with Henning Bork. He fulfilled their criteria. They would claim him. They would take him down into their circular corridors and locked doors and never let him see the light of day again. She looked at Jake and feared for him. But he was not stupid. Many things, some sins, but never stupid. He knew all this as well as she, and he had made his decision.

He wasn’t coming back.

‘Some of the larger bubbles contain whole ecosystems in miniature,’ Henning Bork was saying, scanning the Breeding Pit with binoculars. ‘Like little, what is the word? dioramas, of life on other planets. Of course, it is one of our many frustrations that we cannot reach them in time to sample them; they only last a day or so before they are reabsorbed. Before we ran out of disc space, we videoed many hours’ footage of these dioramas. Frequently we cannot comprehend what we are seeing. Sometimes we cannot recognize it as living at all. Occasionally we have seen things so alien as to be horrifying. Ah! Luck is with us!’ .

He pointed over the rail. Gaby followed in on to a huge bubble a mile to the west. The skin was painfully distended against the hoops of blue ribbing. Gaby thought incongruously of sex toys an old partner of her had liked to sport. The bubble rippled, as if kicked from inside and split. White dust sprayed from the rent. The skin tore in a dozen places and collapsed. Behind the camera, Gaby now thought of ancient newsreel footage of the destruction of the Hindenburg. But cold. Without fire.

Even at highest magnification, Gaby could not tell if the thing inside the bubble was natural or artificial, organic or inorganic. City, forest; forest, machine. It looked like a city, or a forest, or a handful of stone fingers. Each was the height of a small skyscraper: the proportions of the Breeding Pit could have reduced Manhattan to a toy town in a plastic snow storm. City, Gaby decided on the basis of the regular geometric patterns on the sides of the stone pillars. They were in the shape of three-dimensional fractals of ever diminishing tetrahedrons. Terracotta red. Some of the larger formations were fifty feet in diameter, stubbled with smaller arrays of tetrahedrons. Gaby cursed the camera’s lack of resolution: the surfaces of the tetrahedron formations seemed in motion.

‘You’re right.’ Henning Bork answered her puzzled frown. ‘It’s a living fractal. Each generation of tetrahedrons grows out of the surface of its parent. Some are in the process of sporing – when the tetrahedrons reach the molecular level, they leave the parent body and migrate across the rock surface to a new seeding zone. This is a diorama we have recorded several times before. We believe it is a kind of living clay that uses chemical energy to reproduce itself from the minerals of its parent rock. A parasitic living clay, perhaps. There is evidence that terrestrial clays were a matrix for early forms of RNA molecules. Perhaps this is the end-point of a different geological RNA-based evolution.’

A warning flashed in Gaby’s view-finder. Disc change. Last disc.

The Chaga’s reconstruction of a living clay it encountered somewhere on its travels,’ Yves Montagnard added.

‘Buckyball golems,’ Jake whispered.

~ * ~

Hubert rejoined the little expedition on the trek back to Tree-tops. Whatever he had found out along the escarpment ridge, it had made him remember what it was to be a boy. But in her diary that night, Gaby still made insidious comparisons with Fraser and Aaron Shepard. It was not just that they were Shepard’s kids and they had been part of one of the great times of her life. Hubert was too much a child of his environment. His strangeness seemed almost genetic. Gaby closed her diary and tried to sleep, but found herself continually waking with a powerful sensation of not being alone in her little canvas cell. Each time, the only presence was her own. She would force herself back into sleep and dream of things that had watched her unseen in the Chaga canopy, followed her back to Treetops and come flapping across the air moat to smother her with flopping skin wings.

She woke with a cry.

In the room. It was in the room.

At the sound of her voice, the bioluminescents woke and filled the fabric cube with a green glow. By their light, something moved. Gaby rolled out of her hammock on to the spongy floor and grabbed her Magnum from her pack. The red seed of the laser sight wove across the billowing walls and came to rest on the forehead of a four year-old white girl with hair as black as the night outside. Her face was as thin as famine.

‘Light!’ Gaby shouted. The bioluminescents brightened. Crouching on the floor, Gaby and the girl stared at each other, tied by a thread of laser. Then the girl gave a cry, ran to the window and before Gaby could catch her or stop her or warn her, dived out into four hundred feet of moat. Gaby screamed and lunged for the window. By the dim light from the tier forest, she saw a thing very like a very large, very pale bat ghost across the gulf. It flew on webs of skin stretched between wrists and ankles. Gaby saw it light on a branch and turn a dark-eyed, black- haired smiling face to her.

44

They were arguing again in their private patois of French, English and Russian. Gaby banged a plate hard on the table. It broke cleanly along across the middle. They all looked at her.

‘Your daughter?’ she demanded.

Nothing slept soundly in Treetops. Gaby’s cries had roused the colony in less than a minute. Fearing assault, Lucius and the Black Simbas had armed themselves. There had been potentially fatal misrecognitions as the hives of bioluminescents warmed up. Order had inhered at the centre, on the bridge, around the Scandinavian calm of Henning Bork. He had given Gaby the floor to tell what she had seen. Then the arguing had started.

‘My daughter, yes,’ Yves Montagnard said. ‘Hubert’s twin. Little Nicole.’

‘If you’re Papa, then who the hell is Mama?’ Jake asked.

‘Never mind whose baby or whose twin,’ Gaby interrupted, ‘she’s fucking Batwoman. I saw her fly, for God’s sake. Peter fucking Pan.’