The boy could not have been more than eighteen. Apart from a complete lack of hair, he was quite normal down to the base of his rib cage. It was below there that the changes had been worked on him. He had no lower torso, no legs, no feet. In place of these was an extra pair of shoulders, arms and hands. He gripped the rungs with his upper and lower right hands. He was dressed in a blue ribbed high-neck bodysuit that allowed all his hands to move freely. Russel Shuler asked him in Swahili if he would come down and meet the Commission of Enquiry. He stood on all four hands on the floor. Gaby thought of a sleek black animal, and feared she was being racist or sexist or change-ist. The boy heaved himself onto his lower arms and stood upright, shifting his weight from hand to hand. He stood as tall as Gaby’s shoulder. He extended an upper hand in greeting to one of the legal aides. The woman danced away, then remembered her position and gingerly took it.
‘Please,’ the boy said, in faltering English. ‘I am so bored. Can you make him make them take me up there? I want to be up there. It is where I am meant to be. I am learning myself English. It is what they talk up there.’
‘Up there?’ Gaby asked, and understood in the same breath. ‘Christ.’
‘Unity space station,’ Russel Shuler said. ‘We’ve approached NASA about transferring him. Juma is adapted for life in freefall. His legs and hips began to atrophy soon after we took him into quarantine – like gangrene. We had to amputate. At the same time as the lower arms started to grow, the internal organs were reconfiguring themselves. The things that have been done to the boy’s body are terrifying. He’s a tough kid.’
‘Please,’ Juma said again, to all the Assemblypersons. ‘I am so bored.’
Gaby could not shake out of her head the image of the legless beggar who had pushed himself on his trolley, past Miriam Sondhai’s house, with wooden blocks strapped to his hands.
‘Let him go,’ Dr Dan said with vehemence in his soft deep voice. ‘Let them all go. This is no place for them. You have no right to keep them here like animals. Even my cattle are more free and respected than these people.’
And as the Masai bleed their cattle, the UN bleed their herd for their HIV-infected blood, Gaby thought.
‘Where would they go?’ Russel Shuler said. ‘Back to their people? Back to the townships and camps? Their own mothers wouldn’t recognize them as human, let alone once having been their children. How long do you think they would last, even the ones that don’t need special environments? How long before some Islamic fundamentalist mullah or apocalyptic Christian evangelical preacher condemns them as abominations of Satan and starts the purges? Your National Assembly Commission of Enquiry may have already sown the seeds of that Holocaust. All those newsmen camped out there are going to want to know what you found down here. Maybe it’s safer if the world doesn’t find out.’
‘If not now, then when?’ Gaby said. ‘Time’s against you. Time’s against all of us, because that big green machine down there is getting closer and we are all running out of options.’
‘Please,’ Juma called from the high ledges among which he had taken refuge from the arguing. ‘This is not my place. I am so bored. Take me up there.’
Russel Shuler passed the next doors. He stopped the party by a curtain of heavy plastic strips that hung across the corridor.
‘You’ll remember what I said back on Level Two about the alterations having spread to the environment. That area is beyond this curtain. There’s still a chance to go back if you want to.’
He stepped through the hanging strips. All the Commissioners followed.
The smell was almost physical in impact. It was not that it was vile or fetid; it was that its complex esters and ketones punched deep into the hind brain and touched awake memories that had slept for decades. Gaby recalled the baobab on the curve of the Namanga Road where she had first seen the Chaga, and the fragments of memory its perfume had stirred in her. Spicy sexy sweaty seductive magical mysterious Chaga perfume. There was Chaga growing down here, deep under the earth. A bluish glow, like television-light, shone from around the curve of the corridor. Russel Shuler led his guests toward it.
Gaby cried aloud. It was every child’s dream of Jules Verne’s giant mushroom forest at the centre of the Earth. The corridor was over-arched by ribs of pseudo-coral, from which hung bioluminescent fruit and clusters of red honeycomb. Fingers of damp yellow sponge dripped from the ceiling; stumps of the same material reached toward them from the floor. Organic stalactites and stalagmites. The floor beneath Gaby’s bare feet seemed to be glazed, fused bone.
‘It’s expanding,’ Russel Shuler said. ‘About fifty centimetres per day. We have a month and a half before we abandon this level. Eventually it’ll take over the whole facility. You were right, Ms McAslan. Time is not on our side.’
He placed his hand on an orange-like extrusion from a puckered mouth of muscle in the corridor wall. The lips opened with a sigh.
‘It’s all right, it won’t eat you,’ he said.
The room beyond was huge. UNECTA had never designed it this size. You could comfortably fit the SkyNet offices on Tom M’boya Street under this roof.
‘It’s been working on the rock,’ Russel Shuler explained as Gaby followed the fluted columns and cables up and up to the ceiling of bioluminescent balloons. ‘Thank God it hasn’t hit any vital systems yet.’ From the roof Gaby scanned down the piles of slumped spheres (profiteroles, she imagined) and the fifty-foot-high multi-headed florets (broccoli, she thought) and the fingers of the ubiquitous land corals, to the white man with long blond hair and a pale beard and liquid blue eyes standing at their feet (Peter Werther, she knew). Dressed in surfer shorts.
‘Good afternoon,’ he said in his soft south German accent. ‘I’ve been expecting you. Would anyone have a cigarette?’
‘Peter Werther,’ Gaby McAslan whispered.
‘Gaby McAslan.’ Peter Werther warmly shook Gaby’s and then the hands of all the Commissioners.
‘Peter,’ Gaby said cautiously. ‘When I interviewed you back at What The Sun said, you had a mark, a sign of your time in the Chaga. A piece of it growing over your body. It isn’t there any more.’
‘Tell her,’ Russel Shuler said.
‘It is still growing on my body,’ Peter Werther said. ‘It will never stop growing on my body. You see, this,’ he touched himself lightly on the chest and bowed shortly, ‘is not my body. This is only an extension of my body. Peter Werther is this room, and the next room, and the one beyond that, and the corridor from which you have entered, and the molecule machines working their way through the solid rock toward the light and the air. This is no more my body than that land coral or this light balloon, and no less. They are all aspects of me, grown out of me. My body, my mind, my personality, are all around you.
‘Are you sure you don’t have a cigarette?’
Gaby realized she had there and then quit smoking.
‘We couldn’t decontaminate him,’ Russel Shuler said. ‘Not without killing him. We’d been observing him on Zone White for ten days when the thing started to run wild.’
‘You asked me how long, do you remember? Back at Lake Naivasha,’ Peter Werther said to Gaby. ‘Not long. Twelve hours, until my skin was completely covered.’
‘We took him down to Red Three, where we had a clean medical unit.’ Russel Shuler took up the story. ‘He was comatose by then. Vital signs were going mad: it was like that thing was playing games with his physiology, testing to the edge of destruction.’
‘Russel refuses to believe me when I say that I was not in a coma,’ Peter Werther said. ‘I was dead. Again. Like I died up there on Kibo in the snow when the Kilimanjaro package came down. The Chaga brought me back then, it brought me back again. I have died and lived twice, and now, I am quite sure, I will not die a third time.’
‘They came out of the soft orifices first,’ Russel Shuler continued. ‘Eyes, nose, mouth, anus: the seeding tendrils. Then the spore fibres burst through the skin, everywhere. We had to evacuate. He was starting to absorb the bed and the monitoring equipment.’
‘Something wonderful, that is what I told you.’ The conversation was between Peter Werther and Gaby. Russel Shuler, the Commission of Enquiry, were distant spectators. ‘Is this not wonderful? How can I begin to tell you what it is like to return to consciousness, not as a man, but as a forest, a mind spread through many parts, many bodies at once? I do not think it can be told, only experienced. But I missed the sensation of being a body, of being able to move and relate my senses to direct action. So, I built this body that you see, the body I remember
