We come across a moment of lost history tangled up in the cables between worlds: the overgrown skeletons of three helicopters, trapped like insects in a web and sucked transparent. Jake rubs away the crust of pseudo-lichens and discovers Tanzanian army markings. The cockpits are a writhe of tendrils and yellow spines: I imagine picked-clean skulls, greenly grinning. Or do I imagine?
Upwards. By noon break I want to lie down and die and let the Chaga grow over me, like that lost helicopter squadron, and suck my soul up into the Crystal Monoliths that I can just begin to glimpse through the forest roof. At least Lucius can clear up a mystery before I die. I ask him if he or his people ever encountered a white woman travelling inwards alone, three, four years ago. Yes, he has. She was… Irish, like me? Yes, but not red, like you. She was dark, in complexion and spirit. A woman like this you remember. She ran into one of the foraging parties from Rongai village. They brought her in – this was when Webuye was chief, before the new regime moved for a more reclusive policy toward strangers in the forest. She asked everyone if they had seen a white man pass that way some months before. She would not stay for more than one night before she must move on inward, in search of her man.
There is another way, Lucius says, in which I am like her. We both spend hours writing in journals.
I know, I say, taking the Liberty book from my pack. This is that diary. I lay it on the cable between us. Lucius looks at it suspiciously: does it say anything about the Wa-chagga, and Rongai village? he asks.
All references to humans living in the Chaga have been cut out, I tell him. With a sharp knife.
The Wa-chagga did not do this, he says, flipping through the yellow pages.
I ask him if he knows if Moon ever found the man she was searching for. Yes, Lucius says. He was in the patrol that met her, many months later, wandering in the chaotic terrain at the foot of the Citadel. She had been near exhaustion, and deeply mistrustful. She had asked the Wa-chagga to take her to Nanjara settlement, where the people had been kind to her before, and then toward terminum. She would not speak about what she had experienced up in the high country beyond the Citadel, but it was clear that it had changed her.
After she had collected her things from Nanjara, the Wa-chagga patrol took her through the tier forest to Lake Amboseli, where they would give her into the protection of a Tactical squad, but she had broken away then and fled into the fastnesses of the Discontinuity.
So, T.P. This is how it ends. Paranoia and disillusion on the white mountain, and a love that was not so strong nor so deathless as Moon thought. Those who love too big lose too big. If it’s any consolation, Langrishe couldn’t keep her either. Funny. Sad. Terrifying: how it all keeps coming back to that one word: changed.
I’m frightened for Jake.
Upwards.
I hadn’t thought we were so high. All of a sudden we come up through the canopy on to the top of the forest. I can see. I have a horizon. I can feel sun on my skin. I have a landscape once again.
The Crystal Monoliths rise over me, as high above me as I am above the deep root forest. Their facets sparkle sun diamonds across the canopy. Before me, the web of branches and spars runs between the splayed fingers of the ridge country I glimpsed that morning Shepard took me up in the microlyte. Beyond the canyonlands, clouds rip softly on the upper ramparts of the Citadel.
The canyon country looks easy walking. It lies. The ridges are made of a porous, crumbly substance that sinks under your boots and disintegrates between clutching fingers. It took an hour to make it on to the nearest ridge top, whereupon Lucius told us with sadistic pleasure that our way lay across the forest valleys between.
Bastard.
If it’s tough on me, it’s hell on Jake. We have to stop every ten minutes for him to rest. He still hasn’t spoken to me about what I told him on the night of the big storm. I’m not pissing you, Jake. I wouldn’t. Not you.
Lucius promises we’ll be there before nightfall. We’re not. It’s nightfall by the time we start on the final valley traverse, close to midnight before he tells us we can stop, we’ve arrived.
At first I can’t see there is anything to have arrived at. Then, after a time, listening to the nights sounds of the Chaga, I realize it’s a seeing trick, like Foa Mulaku before it came to the surface. I begin to make out a pattern among the biolights in the branches, like a luminous join-the-dots picture. Suddenly they resolve and I am standing on the edge of a colossal drop looking across at walkways, staircases, rooms, gantries, houses, platforms built into an island of Chaga rising out of the deep dark root country.
Someone has built a town in the tree-tops.
42
His name was Henning Bork. He was from the University of Uppsala. With Dr Ruth Premadas, Dr Yves Montagnard and his sister Dr Astrid Montagnard, he was all that remained of the UNECTA expeditionary dirigible Tungus. They had constructed and lived and continued their work in this arboreal settlement they called Treetops for five years. They had also produced Hubert, age four. Looks four, acts four hundred, Gaby described the child in her diary. This was what happened when boffins mated; Yves Montagnard was Hubert’s father, but Gaby’s hypothesis as to the mother either flew in the face of the evidence – Ruth Premadas was a very dark Tamil – or contravened the fundamental taboo of almost every human society.
Could explain why he was such a mutant, Gaby thought.
New faces were a novelty in Treetops. Resurrecting social niceties, Henning Bork hosted a dinner party for his guests. They sat around a long, narrow wooden table on a balcony overlooking the big drop that was Treetops’ main defence. The food for the meal all came from the Chaga. Some of it Gaby could not tell from its terrestrial original; some of it tasted of this but with the texture of that, and some of it was unlike anything in her experience but, after the shock of unfamiliarity, was very good to eat indeed. Dr Premadas handed around a dessert fruit that looked like turd-on-the-cob and tasted exactly of lazy summer evenings when you do not have to go to work the next day.
‘This could be as big as chocolate if the food combines ever got their hands on it,’ Jake Aarons said
‘We discover a new food crop every week,’ Astrid Montagnard, the botanist, said. ‘We have catalogued over two hundred Chaga staples that could have a major impact on global nutrition. This is many times the number that were introduced into the Old World from the Americas.’
‘The Chaga synthesizes foodstuffs from the human DNA template,’ the Frenchman at the opposite end of the long table had said. He was a molecular biologist. ‘Nothing you find out there will ever be poisonous, or even mildly harmful. The better it knows us, the more finely tuned to our needs its provisions for us will be. I am sure our Black Simba guests have been approached by representatives of biotechnology corporations to smuggle samples through the security cordon.’
‘We have taken samples, yes,’ Moran said. ‘But I have heard that they cannot make them grow.’
‘Of course they cannot,’ Yves Montagnard said forcefully. ‘It cannot be separated from the Chaga. It is all one thing, one system. Every part needs every other part: it is a true symbiosis. Maybe they can splice the genes into a terrestrial species and get some hybrid that will grow in a field, but that is the complete antithesis of what the Chaga is about. They want another agribusiness product; out there is the end of agriculture. The end of the slavery of the plough. The end of markets and subsidies and surpluses that mean grain mountain here, famine there. Everything may be had here just by taking. It is the return of the hunter-gatherer society, which is the best nourished, healthiest and culturally adventurous on earth.’