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 and like best. But I have other bodies, that I have built with special abilities for special purposes. They are not human bodies, these other Peter Werthers. Come with me. I shall show you this underworld I have become. Virgil to your Dante.’
Gaby thought of old Big Bwana White Hunter movies as Peter Werther – she could not think of him as an extension of the environment – led the Commission through his private jungle to a mouth door between balloon cables.
The second chamber was bigger than the first, and filled with dense fan vegetation. When Gaby glimpsed eyes peeping between the fronds, she asked Peter Werther if these were the other selfs he had told her about.
‘No, they are people. Victims of this place,’ Peter Werther said.
‘Arboreal adaptations,’ Russel Shuler said. ‘The most common form. There are so many of them they’re nearly a tribe.’
The parted fronds closed. Gaby heard movements, rustling in the coral canopy.
There were seven of them; three men, two women, two children. They were as agonizingly thin as winged Nicole Montagnard. Ribs visible under T-shirts. Faces of three decades of televised famine. Gaby could not bear to look at their collarbones. But they were not lethargic, painful, exhausted of life like the starved. They were healthy, energetic, quick of mind and body, right and fit. The adaptation had given them very long forearms, very long fingers, very long feet, very long curled skin tails. Holes had been cut in the backs of their football shorts to accommodate the prehensile tails. Some wore theirs coiled around their legs. The women favoured looping theirs over their arms. The children bound themselves close to their mother’s with their tails.
Tree people. Monkey people. A hundred childhood racist clichés bubbled up in Gaby’s mind. She tried to prick them with reason. Changed. Ways of being human. Old prejudices burst hard.
They had appointed the man who spoke English as the head of their small tribe. The changes had left enough of his face to identify him as Masai.
‘Dr Daniel Oloitip.’ He exchanged greetings with Dr Dan in Masai. ‘You are my Assembly Member. My elected representative. I voted for you in the last election. I am very glad to see you here, but I am wondering – we are all wondering – what are you going to do about us? When are you going to set us free?’
‘Soon,’ Dr Dan said. He looked at Russel Shuler before continuing. ‘Soon you will all be set free from here, to go back to your people, your families, your homes.’
The man laughed. It was the contemptuous laugh of the proud Masai.
‘My family will not know me, my people will not accept me, my home has been taken away by the Chaga. So we must go to the Chaga. That is freedom for us. Where else is there?’
Peter Werther took the Commissioners by another sphincter-door into the main corridor, and from there into a new Chaga chamber. This was the smallest of the rooms Peter Werther had excavated from the underpinnings of Unit 12. It was just big enough to take the ghost of a house. Gaby could think of no other likeness. The memory of a house, fleshed out of Chaga-stuff. Ghost walls of foam. Ghost floors of yielding sponge. Ghost windows of translucent yellow gauze that rippled in the air currents that blew through this underworld. Ghost door of hanging moss. Ghost curtains of creeper, ghost lights of bioluminescent bulbs. Ghost furnishings: chairs, tables, beds, grown from soft green coral.
And in the middle of the green ghost of a house sat the angel of media. This angel was a white woman, wearing a white sleeveless vest and red and purple Chaga-camouflage pants, kneeling on a meditation stool grown from the floor. Her wings were spread wide. They touched the soft walls of the ghost room. They were not feathered like the wings of Jehovah’s angels; these were sheets of iridescent gossamer, like a dragonfly’s wings, and they were full of faces. Faces of movie personalities. Faces of media celebrities. Faces of sports stars. Faces of actors in advertisements for Diet Coke and tampons. Faces of people from Africa and South America and the Pacific Rim and Europe. Faces of foreign correspondents and satellite news reporters. Gaby saw Jake Aarons’ face. Old photograph: sharp smile, sharper suit. Gaby saw her own face appear for a moment and fade into CNN’s European link man. Like the photograph in the badge she had left at the top of the ramp, her hair was long and shiny and beautiful. The angel wings flexed slowly, billowing in the media wind. The woman’s eyes were closed. Her chest rose and fell slowly, as if in contemplation. She had black, naturally curling hair that fell to her shoulders.