That was the first time the Chaga stole me and took me to someplace else. It had made a mistake in showing me the world beyond. It is not God, you see. It can make mistakes. But it would not let me go. It needed me too badly.’
‘Needed you?’ Uninvited, Gaby took one of Peter Werther’s cigarettes. The smoke was normality. The crop-duster, circling in the shadow of the Mau Escarpment: normality. The children wheeling about on their battered bicycles in the dust and flies of What the Sun Said: normality. They anchored her against the grand insanity of this pale-eyebrowed man’s experience of the Chaga.
‘I believe that while I slept, the Chaga read my DNA,’ Peter Werther said. ‘I know that every time I woke, the Chaga had changed in subtle ways. Some of the fruit I normally ate now contained meat that tasted something like the way I smell. The Chaga had spliced my genes into the fruit. It made me eat myself, can you understand that? The flower pods began to absorb my wastes and recycle my water: I shat in the forest, food-plants would sprout. At night among the trees I was accompanied by flocks of little bioluminescent balloons keyed to my scent. Through me, the Chaga was programming itself for human habitation. But in another sense, it needed me. It came to me.’
‘You mean sexually?’ Gaby asked.
‘It became my lover. That is what I mean. In the big sleeps it had known me as intimately as any one thing may know another. It gave me the chance to know it as intimately as it knew me.’
Gaby exhaled smoke in that slow trickling way that people who smoke can say, I do not want to believe you, but I have to.
‘Ours was a mystical union as much as a physical one. It was more a symbiosis – that is the way of the Chaga, to join with things not of itself and draw them into it. This was the time I began to understand the voice of the Chaga. Do you remember what I said about the song that was a million years old? I believe that my nervous system was adapted to tap into the neural circuitry of the Chaga. I could hear, but I could not understand. It was too fast and too slow at the same time.’ Peter Werther directed a sentence in German to Ute.
‘Sequencing and synthesizing,’ she said. ‘You mean, the speed with which the Chaga read and translated DNA and used it to re-program itself was too fast to be comprehended.’
‘Ja.’ The crop-duster had drawled away to the north. Rafts of flamingos descended from the wheel of birds to resume feeding in the lake shallows. ‘As fast as a computer. Maybe faster. Certainly bigger. If you imagine what a computer a hundred kilometres across could process. But also slower: the intelligence behind it – the mind, the spirit, yes? – works on a different scale of time from us. We are too fast for it: it is a huge, slow, profound vegetable consciousness.’
‘Did you ever find any evidence of the intelligence behind the Chaga?’ Gaby did not want to say the word aliens. It was not a word for a place as open and filled with light as this. Peter Werther did not have any problem with it.
‘Aliens, you mean? No, I never saw anything that made me think there was an intelligence behind the Chaga other than its own. Those cities I found up there; they are not waiting for the alien masters to step from the soil and inhabit them, they are for us, on the day when we learn we cannot run away from the Chaga any more and come to it as a friend rather than an enemy. We are the aliens. This is the message I was sent out from the Chaga to tell. It knows us, it has known us for a very long time. It is not alien and hostile. It may be unfamiliar, sometimes shocking, but it is ultimately human. It has come from the stars to show us our destiny is out among the stars. That is our rightful place, our destiny. But not as we are now: that is why the Chaga has come, to join with us, and change us into new forms that can live among the stars.’
Ute exchanged glances with Gaby. Peter Werther saw the raised eyebrows.
‘Ah, you are thinking, another idiot with a mad theory about the Chaga. It has fried his brains, all that hot sun and thin air and years of solitude: he has gone quietly insane, I can understand that. There are so many people with messages about the Chaga: mine is by no means the maddest. Or the sanest. It was anticipated that I would not be believed – you may even be doubting that I was lost for the five years since the Kilimanjaro Event, that I am Peter Werther at all. Well, I have something you should see.’
He held out his left hand, palm up. With his right hand he removed the leather biker’s glove.
‘Look closely,’ Peter Werther said.
At first Gaby thought it was an intricate tattoo covering all the upper surfaces of his left hand from fingertips to wrist. Fractal pattern tattoos had been briefly fashionable among her fellow students in London. Then she thought that it was a strange and terrible birthmark, a complex meander of skin pigments. There was something familiar in the very alienness, like those photographs you see of parts of things in close up.
‘Oh dear Jesus,’ Gaby McAslan whispered, seeing.
It was Chaga. The legacy of the alien rainforest was a piece of itself imprinted in the palm of Peter Werther’s left hand. Trees, pseudo-corals, mosaic-cover: complete, perfect, a million times miniaturized.
Peter Werther slipped off his linen jacket.
Amongst Gaby’s father’s library of home-videoed old movies was a tape of The Illustrated Man. Five hours a day, it had taken to make Rod Steiger up for the role. The most complex skin-job in cinema history, but the effect had been breathtaking.
Behold the man, Gaby McAslan. Peter Werther’s left arm up to the sleeve of his T-shirt was covered in Chaga. He pulled the white T-shirt off over his head. The mottled infestation stopped at a clearly defined circle halfway across his pectoral – he was in good shape for a late thirtysomething, Gaby noted in that trivia-gathering way of those who do not want to believe the evidence of their eyes. The Chaga closed across his shoulder, down his scapulars and looped under his arm at the third rib.
‘It’s growing,’ he said. Ute Bonhorst mapped the geography of his body minutely with the video camera.
‘Doesn’t it, ah?’ Gaby wallowed for questions.
‘Hurt? No. There is no pain at all. That’s the marvellous thing about it, it’s quite painless. And you need not worry, it is not infectious. Let us say, no one in What the Sun Said has caught it off me. It is personal to me, my sign, my stigmata.’
‘How fast?’ It repelled Gaby, yet was morbidly attractive. She wanted to touch it, but did not know if she could bear the feel of it beneath her fingertips.
‘Oh, very, very slow. A few millimetres a day. But it moves in time with its mother, if you understand? To scale. And, like it, this cannot be stopped.’
‘You’ve tried?’
‘I know.’
‘How long have you got?’
‘It is about nine months since I woke in a flower pod at the very edge of the Chaga. Then it was just a spot in the middle of my palm. So, you can work it out. What do you think? About another year or so? Maybe two? It seems to be avoiding my face: that, I think, will be last to go. It knows how important the face is to us.’
‘What then?’
Peter Werther smiled.
‘Something wonderful, I think. I know that I require less food and water and sleep than before. Even now, I sometimes forget to breathe for several seconds, and have not yet come to any lasting harm.’
Ute spoke in German.
‘Perhaps,’ Peter Werther said. ‘She is asking me if maybe I am becoming, ah?’
‘Photosynthetic.’
‘Ja. And recycling my own water. Becoming a self-sufficient, sealed unit. Perhaps. I do not know. Perhaps I will live forever; whatever, I am not afraid of it. There is nothing to be afraid of; it is not death, it is not disfigurement. It is being changed into a better thing, a fitter thing. I am not the future, but I may be a future.’