‘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.
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.’