Chaga

‘That is the nature of her change,’ Henning Bork said. ‘That is why we hid her from you. But she is a wild thing, and very curious. She would not be hidden.’

‘She’s not living in the jungle on her own, not at her age,’ Jake said. ‘Someone else is out there. You lied to us about the crew of the Tungus.’ All investigative journalists are frustrated master detectives, Gaby thought.

‘Only half lied,’ Ruth Premadas said. ‘Ludmilla is Nicole’s and Hubert’s mother. She was the airship’s co- pilot. When we learned outsiders were coming, we had her take Nicole up to the Breeding Pit Observatory.’

‘I thought my room felt lived in,’ Gaby said. ‘No wonder Hubert was so keen to come up to the Observatory with us, and go running off into the trees.’

‘But the Captain,’ Jake insisted. ‘What was his name? Kosirev? Did you tell the truth about him? That he tried to make it back, and got lost?’

‘We did. It is true. But it was worse than lost,’ Henning Bork said. ‘Changed.’

Gaby saw Jake follow his curiosity to the brink of disclosing undisclosable things about himself. Careful, friend.

‘Like Nicole, do you mean?’

‘No.’ Henning Bork sighed. ‘How can I say it? A new body, I suppose. A symbiote, a parasite? We do not have the language for what the Chaga is doing to flesh.’

‘Obi-men,’ Sugardaddy said. ‘That is what you are trying to say. I have seen them, but briefly. They move fast, for such huge things, and so silently. It is as if they command the forest to let them pass, and to close behind them and conceal their tracks.’

‘What have you seen?’ Jake asked.

Sugardaddy shook his head like an old man who finds the world has surpassed his extraordinary stories.

‘So many things that they could not all be from the same creature. Hair. Skin. Organs in transparent sacks. Great clawed feet, thighs bigger and stronger than an ostrich’s, but the finest, thinnest fingers. More like hair than fingers. The faces; I remember those best. You see the faces, in those folds of flesh…’ He shook his head again.

‘Yet they are all the same creature,’ Henning Bork said. ‘We call them orthobodies: they seem to be symbiotic organisms that can take the human body into them and mesh with the nervous, digestive and cardiovascular systems. They seem to enhance human faculties in many ways: improved health and immunity from disease, great strength and speed, extended sensory range, the ability to interact with the Chaga environment.’

‘I have seen them walk free,’ Sugardaddy said. ‘They opened up like a woman’s thing, and the people inside walked out, like they were being born. I say that because they were connected to those things by birth cords. This is what happened to your captain?’

‘Does this happen to everyone who is lost in the Chaga?’ Jake asked. You are scared, Gaby thought. You are right to be scared, if this is the price of your deliverance. No wonder UNECTA keeps those poor bastards locked up where no one can see them.

‘Not everyone,’ Yves Montagnard said. ‘The Chaga is the place of perpetual change and transformation, but the changes take many forms. For some it is attracting an orthobody – it seems that the attraction is essentially sexual between human and symbiote, the merging voluntary, almost an act of love. For others it is to be changed in the womb, by changing the genes of the parents, like Nicole and Hubert – oh yes, my son is changed, but it is not an outward change like Nicole’s gliding membranes. And some are changed in their own bodies by the symbiosis of Chaga virons with terrestrial infective viruses.’

‘HIV 4,’ Gaby said.

‘Utilizing retroviruses as carrier bodies to insert molecular information into genes had been a trend in genetic engineering research long before the Kilimanjaro Event,’ Ruth Premadas said. ‘When Ol Tukai’s taxonomists noticed mutations occurring in fully differentiated monkeys that had adapted to the Chaga environment, it seemed a fruitful line of inquiry. I was on the team set up at Kajiado centre to investigate relationships between Chaga virons and genetically hypervariable retroviruses. Just before the Tungus mission, we made the breakthrough into the SIVs – Simian Immunodeficiency Viruses – and were hypothesizing similar interactions with the human immunodeficiency viruses.’

‘The Chaga is an engine of evolution,’ Yves Montagnard said, in his Big Ideas voice. ‘It has come to move us forward as a species, perhaps as many species. Our technology has brought us to an evolutionary dead end. Biotechnology allows us to evolve in the directions in which we wish to be evolved: taller, stronger, healthier, higher IQ, more beautiful. We imagine this will be the future humanity. Absurd. If a tribe of Australopithecus had sat down to design the next evolutionary breakthrough, they would have planned something that could run faster, see further, smell better, have sharper nails to grub out insects and roots. They would not have planned talking, thinking, tool-making homo sapiens.

‘Out there is an environment as alien to us as Paris would be to Australopithecus, an environment that changes to demand new responses from us, that can generate a thousand habitat niches. We do not know what we will need to expand into the universe, so the Chaga give us the gift to diverge into a thousand, ten thousand, a million sub-species: a million seeds of humanity cast into the dark.’

‘“And say which seed will grow, and which will not”,’ Jake quoted.

‘Yes,’ the Frenchman said fiercely. ‘And maybe, because there is enough room out there, all the seeds will grow. Transhumanity. Posthumanity. Panhumanity. Any of these, all of these. On these East African plains humanity was born; it must be more than cosmic coincidence that it is on these same plains that the new humanity; the thing that comes after us, that we cannot see, will arise.’

Gaby thought of the legend of the tree where man was born, and all the races of earth returning to that ancestral baobab, with its roots in earth and its branches among the stars, to be dissolved in its hoarded waters and made anew. Sweet, seductive Big Ideas. How long their legs are, how easily they stride over us. Look, they are already over the horizon while we plough our way through the mud. How many centuries it has taken us to learn to see that people whose skin is a different colour from ours are as human as we, and now you are asking us to hug these winged children and hybrid obi-men and changelings to us. Things we may not even recognize as human, we must call brother and sister.

‘I am an uneducated working man,’ Moran said unexpectedly. ‘I do not understand these things well. I do not know about Australopithecus and evolution and what you call trans-humanity, posthumanity. All I know are my people, my home, my cartel, my family. I know my country. I know my children. I know this.’ He drew a long-bladed guerilla knife from the leather sheath on his thigh. The blade was beautiful. He was a man who could care for an edge. Moran set the knife on the commons table. ‘Tell me what this means to me. Tell me what this means for my family, my children, my nation.’

For the first time, Gaby felt some measure of admiration for Moran. He was African. He could stare into the headlights of Big Ideas, Big Science, Big Dumb Objects, without being dazzled, and ask the only question that had any meaning: what have you done for me lately?

‘Be thankful for the children you have now,’ Lucius said quietly. ‘If you believe in a god, pray for the ones yet to be born, that you may learn to love them as you love the ones that are already yours.’

‘The mutations are happening to you too,’ Jake Aarons said. ‘Just like here. That’s why you didn’t want to take us to your town.’

‘Yes,’ Lucius said. ‘This is what these ideas you barely understand mean for your family, your children, your nation, Moran. Learn from us, that they will not destroy you as they are destroying the Wa-chagga nation, by setting us against each other. In my town, Kamwanga, and in Nanjara and Usarangei and Mrao; Ngaseni and Marangu Gate too, we say that change is the nature of the Chaga, but it is never harmful or destructive, and these children who are born different because of it are to be cherished and valued just like those who are normal. It is no sin or shame or sign of the disfavour of God or the anger of the spirits. It is the way of this place.’

‘But that is not the case among the other settlements.’

‘They take the changed children as soon as they are born and expose them.’

‘Jesus,’ Gaby whispered.

‘Institutionalized infanticide,’ Jake said.

‘Yes,’ Lucius said grimly. ‘It is destroying the Wa-chagga nation. We are abominations to each other. People