Ian McDonald - Chaga

By the way, I’ve been using your name as a blunt instrument to ward off undesired advances – I’ve had several, with a lot of spare time and free fall to experiment with, what do you expect? – and it seems opinion is divided whether you’re Christ or anti-Christ over the Ellen Prochnow thing. Paranoia breeds like thrush bacteria up here, no one believes her denials, but at the same time, no one wants to be checking their neighbours’ scalps for 666s or McDonnel Douglas Aviation. So we are a pretty congeries of mistrusts. Don’t worry, I’m not going accept any of the offers I’ve been given.

Shit. Well over time. Love. Bye.

Hi Gaby. It’s Day Five and this is High Steel.

Another white plastic interior, with a rectangle of stars over the left shoulder. Space travel is very disappointing. You go from one white plastic tube to another, where you get gently pushed and shoved around a little, and then a timeless time later you are taken out of this tube and put into one exactly identical. Absolutely no sense of going any place. Thank God they knock you out. K-Mart Economy space-suits, air-bags. They’ll keep you alive in case the pod depressurizes or the tug lets go of it, and if the end gets torn off and you spill into space, they’ll broadcast distress calls so, theoretically, someone can come and pick you up. Though what they pick up after days in an inflatable mummy floating through space is one for the psychiatrists. If you die in space, where do you go? Nasty, nasty little thoughts like this creep into your head and will not creep out again.

It’s a bad sign that after Unity, the first thing you notice about High Steel is the stink. Twelve accommodation modules, a mile of solar panelling arrays, an engineering plant and an APR on a boom, half-way to the moon. The Earth is frighteningly small and distant. It looks like a planet now, and that is not comfortable. The Moon is frighteningly big and close. It looks like a planet too. Biggest, closest and most frightening of all is the BDO. It looks like the fucking end of the world.

BDO before me, Chaga below me. I can see Africa from here. Clouds cover much of the equatorial regions, I can see the path of the monsoon, curling up from Madagascar, across the Indian Ocean, beyond the horizon. Through breaks in the cloud I can see the outlines of the Chagas scattered across the continent; circles and clusters of circles, merging together. I can see you, Gaby. How are you, down there in Tanzania? Up here in my bubble of air and stink and plastic, I feel old, fragile, and scared.

The main frame is shaking again. The tug engines must be firing. High Steel is being moved into a station-keeping orbit, ten miles above the bright end of the Big Dumb Object. From that distance it will look bigger than the Earth does from Unity. I am going to have to get my spatial orientation sorted out by AEO: hovering above, or floating in front of a three-hundred-kilometre-long cylinder should be psychologically survivable. What is not is to imagine that it is poised over you like the hammer of God.

There is another link between you and me, Gaby, apart from visions of Africa. There are Changed up here: the freefall adaptations with four hands. They are incredible; I feel like a brick in an aquarium next to them. This is how the future is going to look? That’s scary too. There are four of them, three are South Americans, but one is the boy you found in Unit 12; Juma. I knew about him, Gaby. I knew about all of them; Peter Werther, the Moon woman. I lied to you. I’m sorry, I had no other choice. And you were right – funny how you can remember every word and nuance of the worst days of your life – I did give you that diary to get you into bed, and I regretted it the moment I had done it, because I knew you would pry into the mystery of the disappeared pages. It wasn’t until long after you left that I realized that I had done the right thing for the wrong reasons. The diary had led you to bust Unit 12 wide open, and reveal all its paranoid little secrets that I wanted to but could never disclose. Rather late for self-justification, you would say.

I’m sorry I sound a little melancholy on this instalment; everyone is a bit down, nervous, tense, expectant. The BDO is sixteen hours from AEO and here we are, sitting in our tin can far above the Earth, realizing how pitifully unprepared we are. And I feel far from home. I miss gravity. I miss water. I miss air, and wind. I miss you. I miss Aaron. I’m not sure the BDO compensates for all this missing, but the next time I talk to you, it’ll be here.

Day Six, Gaby. It’s here.

AEO was two hours fifty minutes ago. You’ve seen the pictures. Everyone on the planet has seen the pictures. This is how it felt to be there.

When you sized me up and seduced me with your question-and-answer that time in the Mara, you told me I was a thing of earth and plains and big skies and empty lands with not a lot of room left for God. Pretty astute, Gaby. Religion has never played a great part in my life. But the BDO was the closest I have ever come to a genuine religious experience. I told you I wouldn’t get mystical on you. I’m not. It was genuine awe of a God with real muscle and a hell of an FX budget.

That tense, depressed feeling I told you about last time deepened as ETTEO decreased. High Steel hit its orbit first; we had seven hours of looking out at that thing coming down our throats. Half an hour before AEO we just quit whatever job we were meant to be doing and found someone to be with. You need someone to hold you when the sky falls. What little apes we are, clinging to each other in our tin can. I was with a woman called Clarissa from Team Yellow. We found a window, wedged ourselves into it, and just held each other and watched the thing keep coming. That’s what the pictures can’t convey, Gaby. It kept coming, and coming, and fucking coming, and you think, that’s got to be all of it, but it still kept coming. Floating there in twelve accommodation modules, a couple of solar sails, an air plant and three tugs, you felt like it was going to swat High Steel like a mosquito. What I said about the launch from Kennedy, that was nothing, Gaby. That was fear of something; that you are going to die. This was existential terror, the fear of you don’t know what could happen. People were praying, Gab. Some were crying, in fear, awe, love. Tears float in zero gee. I gripped Clarissa so hard I left bruises.

And then I felt High Steel move. You’ve heard the theorists, that it got caught in a gravitational eddy from the mass-momentum drive as the BDO stabilized its orbit. What it felt like, Gaby, was every part of everything around you, and every part of yourself, down to the atoms, held by something and gently but firmly pulled. Like falling, with nothing to hold on to, except the human body next to you.

I’m not asking your forgiveness for this, Gaby. You would do the same with the first human body that floated by.

I thought we were coming apart; all that was happening was High Steel was being dragged into an orbit in line with the BDO’s axis and spun up to match its rotation. We’re turning in time with the BDO.

So: the arrival of the BDO. What did it feel like? It felt like God had come. In every sense of the word, polite and impolite. The fearful depression that gripped us during the orbital approach has been burned away by a sense of quasi-spiritual euphoria and activity. We’re here, we’re alive, we’ve got holy work to do. It’s almost as if the BDO approves of us. We’re learning to live with the thing ten miles off the starboard bow. The way to look at it is that it’s a new moon for Earth. Isn’t that a gorgeous thought? Two moons rising. From High Steel you can’t see that it’s a cylinder, and by a trick of spatial perspective you can push it away from you so that it becomes a world far below you, and the mottlings and patterns on the facing end are continents and oceans.