Chaga

members of staff getting racing tips off him, or lottery numbers.’

‘He can see into the future and the past?’ one of the Assemblypersons asked. ‘All at once?’

‘Simultaneously, yes. I don’t think our short-time-frame minds can ever properly conceive what it must be like. Perhaps a state of permanent deja vu for both the past and the future.’

‘She will not thank you for it,’ William said abruptly, pumping hard at the pedals. Sweat rolled down his forehead. ‘The diary. Reminds her too much of things she would like to forget.’

He passed the animated cyclist and crossed the finish line. As he had predicted, he was third.

At the top of the next down ramp, Russel Shuler said to the commissioners, ‘Down on Zone Red Level Two are the moderate physical adaptations. You may find some of them disturbing, but please do not display any negative emotion in front of the patients. Many of them are experiencing great difficulty in coming to terms with what the Chaga has done to their bodies.’

The colour of the walls in Red Level Two was several shades deeper than the corridor above; blood rather than sheer hell.

In the first room, a woman reclined on a wooden beach lounger under a ceiling of dazzling white light. She was naked, but for a polka dot bikini bottom. Her hair, her eyes, her skin were dark green. Russel Shuler told the Enquiry that she was a photosynthete. Her skin and circulatory system had been infected with complex molecules that bonded to the cells and enabled them to draw food and energy directly from sunlight, like plants. The full- spectrum tubes in the ceiling approximated normal African daylight. In the dark she would wither and shiver and die.

The woman turned her back to the National Assembly Commission of Inquiry and picked up the copy of Viva! she had set down on the floor.

Dr Dan picked the next door at random. Behind it they found a middle-aged woman on a chair with a monkey grooming itself on her shoulder and her hands on her knees. At her feet a cat sat licking its crotch. A bird bobbed on top of the dressing table mirror. The dressing table top was smeared with white bird shit. The woman had no eyes. Blank skin covered her eye sockets. She had no ears. Her skull was a smooth curve of flesh. Yet when the people came into her suite she turned her head toward them, as if seeing and hearing, and welcomed them warmly.

‘It’s the animals,’ she told them. ‘I see through their eyes, hear through their ears.’ She lifted the monkey on to her lap. ‘But they have such short little spans of attention.’

Russel Shuler explained that the woman had neurological grafts into the nervous systems of her animals. She could switch her point of view between them, and was learning to multiplex: cat sight, monkey smell, bird hearing.

‘I’ve seen this one,’ Gaby said. ‘In the Chaga: Hubert, the Treetoppers’ kid; he can share his consciousness with other creatures in the forest.’

‘Indeed?’ Russel Shuler said.

‘I must look out for him,’ the woman with the animal eyes said.

‘What is it all for?’ a woman lawyer asked as they hurried onward down the corridor, past doors they did not have time to look behind, towards the ramp to Zone Red Level Three. ‘What is the reason for these transformations?’

‘Evolution, ma’am,’ Russel Shuler said. ‘Just ways of being human. No more reason for it than the eyes on butterflies’ wings or a peacock’s tail. Every reason and no reason: it works. It’s right for its place and time.’

He addressed the Enquiry in general.

‘Before we go down to the third and final level, I must warn you that this is where the most radically changed are housed. What you see may provoke repugnance, shock, even fear. Remember that they are human. They will not harm you, they are not dangerous. They are just people; experiments in ways of being human. If any of you don’t want to come with us down to Level Three, you can get straight up to the reception area by going a couple of hundred yards back along this corridor and taking the service elevator. I’ll give you a few seconds to make up your minds.’

Mine is made up, Gaby McAslan thought. I have found only one name on my list of the disappeared. The other two are down that ramp, whatever they have become, and so I will not go back.

Russel Shuler waited his few seconds. No one turned back.

‘OK,’ Russel Shuler said. ‘One final thing. If you have anything plastic that you particularly value, you’d be advised to leave it here. In some cases, the alterations have spread beyond the individual to the environment.’

‘What does that mean?’ Dr Dan said, unfastening his badge and digital watch.

‘You’ll find out.’

They went down, leaving a small pile of identity badges, watches and pens behind them.

The first door opened on to an antechamber into which the Commissioners fitted with much jostling. In the facing wall was a long, curtained window and an airlock door. Russel Shuler picked up a microphone plugged into a socket underneath the window.

‘The temperature and CO₂ levels are too high for human tolerance in there,’ he said. ‘But I’ll get Kighoma to say hello to you.’ He spoke into the microphone in good Swahili. ‘Pray this is one variation that doesn’t take,’ he said as he drew back the curtains.

The room beyond was quite conventional. The young man who waved from the chair in which he was reading a football magazine was not. His skin was such a flat black that he seemed to have no facial features. His hair was bone white. His eyes were milky, as if afflicted with cataracts. His nose was very large and broad, his chest wide and deep. While Russel Shuler and Assemblypersons spoke with him in Swahili, Gaby observed him more closely. The dead black skin was thick and waxy; hairless, almost poreless. The milkiness of the eyes was caused by a membrane like a cat’s third eyelid that flickered back and forth between blinkings.

‘Superb adaptation to water retention,’ Russel Shuler said, observing Gaby observing. ‘The third eyelid holds in tears for recycling and keeps out dust particles and potential allergens. He doesn’t sweat, his urine is highly concentrated. He adjusts to the temperature of the environment. That skin also protects him from ultra- violet radiation and prevents ingress by airborne particles. Likewise, the nose filters and sinus mucus membranes.’

‘He’s a man for the end of the world,’ Gaby said. ‘Terminal humanity for a polluted, radiation-burned, greenhouse Earth. He can survive there, and live, and thrive. Jesus Christ.’

‘Yes, Mr Shuler, you are right, we should pray,’ Dr Dan said. ‘Pray very hard.’

Kighoma waved goodbye and went back to his football magazine.

Russel Shuler paused before opening the door of the next room.

‘You may find this one particularly disturbing. We keep the lighting low; he seems to prefer it that way, though he is adapted to wide fluctuations in light levels, as you’ll find out. It’s safest just to stand and let your eyes adapt. You may feel something move past you, very close and very fast: don’t be alarmed, Juma likes to play with his abilities, and he’s a bit of a practical joker. If you can, try not to flinch out of the way; his margins of error are very narrow.’

The dark room felt full of unseen dimensions, like a cinema where the projector has broken down and everyone is afraid to move. It was big enough to keep its own little winds: Gaby felt air currents stir the fine hairs on her arm. She sensed massive objects poised overhead. Someone coughed. The big chamber returned odd echoes. Gaby relaxed her eyes and let them unfocus; an old astronomer’s trick her father had taught her. The masses she had sensed above her were rectangular shelves and blocks, piled on top of each other like the mother of all overhang climbing walls. Walls, blocks, ceiling were covered with steel rungs. The centre of the room was filled from floor to roof with girders and pylons. These too were covered in hand holds. Post-industrial jungle gym, Gaby thought. At the same moment, she saw something flip over the edge of a cube just under the ceiling, go down the wall at such speed it was more like a fall, dash past her and hurtle up one of the central pylons to flop on to the top of the cube opposite. A black face looked down at the people below.

Hands. The thing had seemed all hands. Too many hands.

Russel Shuler called in Swahili. The face frowned, nodded from side to side: maybe yes, maybe no. Then it flipped over the precipice, swung with dizzying speed down the wall, leaped to a girder and hung there

There were cries. There were gasps. Johnson Ambani crossed himself.

The thing had looked all hands because it was all hands.