There was a polite cough from outside the door curtain. Gaby put down her pencil, closed the diary. The curtain rolled up on its drawstring.
‘Got a moment?’ Jake Aarons asked. He came in anyway. ‘I think I have a sane explanation for the voices.’
‘Not the voice of the Chaga.’
‘Yes, the voice of the Chaga. But not mystically or magically or divinely. Scientifically. The Chaga can synthesize organic circuits; you’ve watched goddam organic satellite television soccer. If it can build out there, why not in here?’ He tapped his forehead with a finger. ‘What’s this stuff in here but the cellular circuitry for an organic computer? From the moment I crossed terminum, the Chaga’s been building an organic modem in my head out of my own protein, molecule by molecule, cell by cell, strand by strand. Networking me into this immense data storage and processing system. That’s why it’s getting louder and clearer: the connections are spreading. It’s not just voices now, Gab. It’s visions – pictures, images, like snapshot memories; glimpses for the briefest second of the utmost clarity, then gone.’
‘Pictures of what, Jake?’
‘Other lives, Gab. Other worlds. Other ways of being. And of this world as well. Peter Werther was right. They’ve been here before. At the very start of humanity, and the very start of it all. Those things we have recorded in the Burgess Shale; the incredible diversity of life in the pre-Cambrian, like never before or since…’
‘They did it?’
Jake shrugged. The wind billowed the fragile room. Gaby was very conscious of the great gulf beneath her.
‘Jake, why don’t we all hear the voices and see the visions? Why is it just you?’
He grimaced painfully.
‘I have a theory about that too. I’ll not mince words: this circuitry, this organic modem growing in my head, it’s a mutation. Something is causing the cells of my body to grow in such a way as to receive electromagnetic signals from the Chaga, and trigger my own neurons in response. Something is reprogramming the DNA in those cells to grow that way. Now, that is a very difficult thing to do in a developed organism. Easy enough in the sex cells of your parents so that the offspring will express the mutation, but to get into all the necessary cells, and change their programming, then switch it on: that’s difficult.
‘Unless something is already present in the body, in the cells, in the DNA, that acts as a host. A vector. A mole on the inside of the genetic firewall to open the way for the DNA hackers.’
‘The HIV 4 virus.’
Jake grimaced again.
‘Every day during the desert campaign in World War Two, Field Marshal Montgomery would study a photograph of Erwin Rommel he kept on his desk. Not say a word, just look at it. Know your enemy was Montgomery’s motto. It won him the desert war. I know my enemy, Gab. I’ve studied all his strategies and tactics; his surprise offensives, his tactical retreats and regroupings. He’s tough – tougher than me – but I know how he works. I know what his weapons are, and on what terrain he likes to fight – right down in the chromosomes, street fighting in the DNA strands – and what camouflage he uses to outfox my immune system. But maybe I have overestimated him: maybe he isn’t the undercover death squad, maybe he’s just the Trojan horse that gets taken into the city and opens the gates to let in the real invading army. And, maybe, it isn’t an invading, destroying army out there, but foreign industrialists and investors. Maybe they don’t want to put everyone to the sword, but set up a shop here, a factory there, a resort someplace else, do a little urban renewal, stick in some new infrastructure, and by the time they’ve finished you’re a little colonial outpost of some biochemical superpower.’
‘I’m getting a little lost in analogy, Jake. You think the HIV 4 virus is some kind of catalyst that allows the Chaga mutagenic agents to work on developed cells?’
‘Catalyst,’ Jake said. ‘That’s exactly the word. That doesn’t react in the process. It fits, Gab: all the secrecy around Unit 12 and the HIV 4 victims who should have been dead year ago. All exposed to the Chaga. All entered into some kind of symbiotic relationship that stops the HIV 4 virus from developing into AIDS.’
‘You were fishing from Henning Bork at dinner.’
‘He didn’t deny it.’
‘Jesus, Jake, you said you had a sane explanation.’ The hovering biolights flared up at Gaby’s raised voice. ‘You know what this implies about HIV 4?’
‘It’s a made thing.’ Jake nodded. ‘I’ve thought of that. It certainly predates humanity, maybe most of life on earth. It’s the Chaga-makers’ engine of variation, and a hideously effective one: only those infected individuals who expose themselves to the mutagenic agents survive. Maybe it wasn’t an asteroid impact that eradicated the dinosaurs, or habitat depletion: maybe they had progressed into an evolutionary dead end and the Chaga-makers undertook a little winnowing.’
‘Jurassic AIDS?’
‘Maybe. Maybe the SIVs and HIV 1, 2 and 3 are degenerate variants of the original virus. Given the virus’s ability to switch sections of genetic material, maybe there are millions of variants of the HIV 4 virus. Scientists have always had a chicken-and-egg problem with viruses. Maybe they all came from someplace else.’
‘Lots of maybes, Jake.’
‘Are you telling me that I believe it because I want to believe it? You were the one handed me this magic bullet in the first place.’
The wind gusted up from below, bringing with it the chiming calls of unseen, unimaginable creatures. The balloon-silk walls flapped and swelled. The captive lights globes gusted around the little fabric room, casting sudden strange shadows.
Hubert climbed like an animal. Gaby’s heart almost stopped when she saw him go straight up the bole on the edge of the moat. ‘He’s born to it,’ Henning Bork assured her. That sentence means more than it says, Gaby thought. As they moved through the high canopy toward the escarpment where the Treetoppers maintained their watch post, Gaby could feel the child, up there in the dense overgrowth, stalking the slow, clumsy adults. Hidden eyes, watching. The disturbing thing was that even when the boy was back with them, she could still feel them, watching. An hour up the valley in which Treetops rested brought the small expedition to the observatory. It was a cupola of spars and silk scavenged from the wreck of the Tungus, perched on the scarp where it fell sheer to the Breeding Pit below. Henning Bork, Yves Montagnard, Jake Aarons and Gaby McAslan fitted into it like segments of an orange. Gaby tried to unsling the camcorder without injuring anyone.
‘Where’s Hubert vanished to now?’ Jake asked.
‘He’ll be playing somewhere,’ Yves Montagnard said. Gaby thought she would not be so unconcerned if it were her flesh and blood playing around such sheer drops and pitfalls. But Jake had found her something to video.
She remembered the land beneath her from the microlyte flight. She had thought it looked like a Willow Pattern plate. Now she was on the very edge of it, and it did not look like that at all. She slowly swung the camera across the spars and swelling spheres and thought it looked like something flayed and festering, all blue veins and gas-bloated, suppurating flesh straining at skeletal ribs. It looked fleshy and obscene and intimate, like a laparoscopy of a cancerous ovary.