Ian McDonald - Chaga

I’ve just heard. Message from Team Red. They say there are figures, moving down there in the mist.

Gaby McAslan ejected the disc from the PDU and rested her chin on her arms on the Landcruiser’s steering wheel. The letter had come through to Tinga Tinga at five-thirty that morning, after ten days lost in the limbo of Operation Final Frontier Control. She had requested the communications people to alert her at any time if anything came through. Good people. They used to bang people out of bed in the old game lodge days for an arthritic elephant scratching its ass against a tree, she thought. How much more so, then, for news from another world?

The track had been rough but easily followed, even in the dark. Glittering pairs of eyes had fled from her headlights. Gaby could not say why she had to go alone up to the ridge to watch the disc. Sense of ritual. Sense of propriety. Sense of the romantic. Sense of the spiritual, of connectedness with the land, and the huge sky that hung close over it, and Shepard, above it all.

An edge of light lay across the eastern half of the world. New day. Always a miracle. The moon was already down. The brighter stars and planets still shone in the softening indigo. None challenged the BDO, a brilliant oval of light just past the zenith. A pair of binoculars would resolve it into a half-shadowed cylinder. Two moons is gorgeous, Shepard.

The sky brightened. Gaby fiddled with the car radio, found Voice of America. Early morning music. She poured coffee from the flask the woman on Tinga Tinga’s out-dock had given her because it got cold out there on the high savannah. She sipped the gift and watched the land open up in front of her. Down these bluffs and across the valley was the Chaga, never sleeping, never ceasing, drawing closer to her at fifty metres every day. Today she would embark on her expedition into the unknown country; down the valley, across terminum, into the land of the Ten Thousand Tribes and the beautiful, startling, wonderful, bizarre nation they were growing in there. There were faces she wanted to see, in there.

All the room to be all the things we can be. All the things we have the potential to be. The door to the nursery was open. Two million years of childhood was over. Now would come the storms and changes of puberty, the struggles for identity and self-hood and mastery of adolescence. How long they might endure, what the maturity that would come when they had passed might be like, Gaby could not conceive. She did not imagine it would be as long a childhood – certainly, it would be harder – but the teenage millennia would be dazzling.

The coffee was mighty good.

The PDU queeped. A call, from Tembo, back at Tinga Tinga. He looked and sounded poked out of bed and wondering what the hell she was up to out there in the wild. Word from the Miyama orbital telescope, via T.P. Costello in Zanzibar. Phoebe, the eighteenth moon of Saturn, had just disappeared.

Gaby laughed long and hard at that good joke by the powers in the sky. Perhaps they had come to Earth to learn irony. Nice one, all you bright stars. And here’s a better one. The good news from Earth. She sat back in the Landcruiser’s seat and rested her fingertips on her belly. It was three days since she had tested positive. It had been much quicker than she had planned. Already she imagined she could feel the life budding in there, turning over and over in the freefall waters of conception. What a world you’re going to live in, kid! What a future you’re going to have.

She was glad the conception had been so stunningly sudden. She could go down to the Chaga with Tembo and the UNECTA team without fearing that its spores might change it.

She was not sure whether that would be a good or bad thing in this new world.

The darkness was almost gone now. Light filled up the land, spilled down the sides of the bluffs into the valley, touched the tops of the tallest hand-trees and pseudo-corals of the Chaga. It was changing in there too, losing its shape and structure as it grew closer to humanity’s needs and societies. Symbiosis. Growing together. Hugging in the big, big dark.

The upper limb of the sun touched the horizon. Only the BDO could rival it now, and it would soon fade. The sky was a high, deep blue, clear and clean. Gaby emptied the rest of her coffee out the window of the car and made to start it. She stopped herself.

A lion had come out of the thorn scrub down the bluffs and was working its way up the hill to the crest. It was an old female, sag-jawed, sag-bellied, strong and scarred. It sniffed at the Landcruiser’s tyres. Gaby sat, not moving a muscle, hardly breathing. The old lioness moved to a slab of smooth rock beneath a big baobab overlooking the valley. She sniffed the rock and sat down. Gaby watched her, lying under the tree, looking out across the brightening land.

After a time, a second lion came and lay down beside her.

‘In science fiction, everything should be mentioned twice, with the possible exception of science fiction.’