Ian McDonald - Chaga

What they really are is Chaga. Vacuum-adapted Chaga, carpeting the hills and valleys of the forward end and cylinder sides. This close, you can make out individual details; some of the formations are thousand of feet high. They diminish in size toward the edge. In a way, I find this riot of alien life almost homely: I’ve spent much of my professional life looking out from high windows across vast discs of Chaga. It’s actually smaller than many of the longer-established terrestrial symbs -certainly much smaller than the Nyandarua-Kilimanjaro-Mount Elgon Chaga. That puts it into perspective.

Our three tugs are out mapping the exterior. Two are working the cylinder body – one has a specific mission to move along the windows and photograph as much information about the interior as possible but its view is largely obscured by clouds – and the third is hovering over the forward end, running full spectrum scans of the surface, probing for possible means of ingress. God, I am starting to sound like them. Good joke, though: it comes all this way and forgets to build a front door. I don’t think so, somehow. First Wave Team Red are out there in the tug pod, ready to go in if they find an entrance. Team Yellow is down in the airlock, preparing to en-pod for tug pick-up. We’re on Orange Alert, the call could come at any time. Horribly seductive, this style of talking.

Hold on. What? Shit. Jesus Christ. All right. Sorry Gab. Got to go. Team Red just lucked out.

No, Gaby. Your eyes deceive you not. Take a good look, Gaby, because nobody on the planet ever got a videogram like this. I could look at it all day, and day here lasts a week. Why didn’t they pack poets or writers or musicians on Operation Final Frontier, folk who could do justice to this place and not just measure it and analyse it and record it. I’ll put the camera up here so you can see the cylindrical land behind me. I really haven’t an awful lot of time; now we’re on the ground, there’s always something needs doing or reporting or observing. From Zen indolence to karoshi. But the Passengers are paying their fares now.

The story so far. I got abruptly called away from my last note to you because Team Red out there over the forward end suddenly found a mile-wide section of spin axis opening up in front of them. It was the classic sci-fi cliche: ‘The door dilated.’ Like the aperture of a camera. After half an hour obtaining permission from Earth, they moved the tug into the opening. What they found inside, as you’ve doubtless seen on the television, was an airlock about three miles long – that’s what the cavities in the partitions are – and at the other end of it; is this. A cylindrical buckyball jungle, sixty kilometres deep, four hundred and fifty round.

It’s a good thing, I suppose, that a lot of these Right Stuff astronauts have had imagination bypasses. If it had been me, coming through with the tug into freefall atmosphere, I’d still be there, turning with the world, blissfully out of my head. What they did do was dump Team Red’s pod down in the micro-gravity on the lip of the inner airlock door, and cycle out back to High Steel.

We came through this morning. Just in time; High Steel was getting mighty stinky with Unity moving its troops up to the front as fast as it can get tugs turned around. I could have killed the stupid accountant who decided it was not economically viable to put windows in tug pods. You cannot see it on the television monitors. Did I say that to you once, back in the Mara? You used to video things all the time. I bet you never watched any of them.

There’s an unexplored land down there, bigger and wilder than all the game reserves of Kenya.

When you step outside and touch it with your eyes, that’s when you see it. You can do this, here. It violates every sensibility of space exploration: zero gravity, but atmosphere. Too thin to be breathable, but sufficiently warmed by the light through the five slit windows to allow an almost shirt-sleeves environment. Three layers, a breather mask, and a tether so that you don’t get taken away on the funny winds that get spun up by the Coriolis force. The pseudo-gravity well steepens quickly; seventy miles straight down gives you time to do a lot of screaming.

What did I feel when I stepped out of the pod airlock? Unreality. Sheer human disbelief. A valley one hundred and fifty kilometres wide you can visualize – complete with rivers and couple of land-locked small seas – but the mind will not permit a cave the same size. It will not accept forests and rivers hanging over your head, and it categorically will not allow seas up there. The waters above the earth, wasn’t there something about that in Genesis? So you tell yourself that it’s all a stage set, a complex glass-shot for a Hollywood sci-fi movie; after all, here you are in sweatshirt and jeans, this can’t be an alien world. But then the details start to work on you. The lakes glisten. The clouds move in odd spirals around the curving land. You can see the shadow of rain falling on the buckyball jungle. If there were anything down there that made a noise you could hear over seventy-five kilometres, you could hear it. You want to tear off your breather mask and give a great shout and wait for the faint echo to come back to you from the partition wall sixty kilometres away. It is real. You are here. And that makes you feel very small, yet at the same time very big. Do you remember we talked about that feeling, the night they’d just discovered the fullerene clouds out at Rho Ophiuchi? You asked me if I’d ever stood under the stars and lost and found myself in their distance and vastness. That’s what I feel here: this cylindrical land so completely dwarfs me that I am virtually annihilated, but I’m here, I witness this, I interpret it, I express it, I am the reason it has been conceived and constructed from the ruins of Hyperion. I matter. The BDO is the product of a technology that looks like magic next to ours, but we made it. We’re here. We matter. Small, big. It’s like the angels, who, for all their divinity, are ultimately no nearer an infinitely high and holy God than humans are. This artifact may be an entire world, but measured against the stars, the spiral arms, the galaxies, the expanding universe which we share, it’s as small as I am. We’re both tiny bright beacons of sentience. We both need someone to hold us against the dark. And so we cling to each other. Symbiosis.

So, here we are. Now, what do we do?

They’ve brought new accommodation modules up from Unity – much bigger than the standard tug pods – and they’ve got windows. We’re building Camp One up here on the lip of the airlock. About a hundred metres inward, the land drops away on a cup-shaped curve to the main cylinder. Seventy-five kilometres, downhill. Team Red are about ten kilometres down-slope. Easy going in the light gravity; when it gets stronger, the slope decreases. We shouldn’t be surprised, this place was built for us. But it’s not too easy: no stairway to heaven, no elevator to hell. If we want to learn what the Evolvers have to show and tell us, we have to work for it. Team Red want to make breathable air before they set up Camp Two, just under the snow line. Tomorrow, they’ll go down through the clouds into the forest beneath.

Tomorrow, I will follow them. Team Green is going down to the curving land. Love to you, Gaby. Wish me well, wish me a thousand things. Funny, I’m not scared any more. I’ve got land under my feet, I can draw strength from that. I’ve got to go now; as I said, there’s always something to do here, and there’s a tug going back to High Steel in ten minutes that can take this disc -there, can you see it? Holding station up there in the spin axis. Hope this letter finds you, wherever you are. Love to you, Gaby Mc Asian.