Ian McDonald - Chaga

The thing had demolished outer and partition walls and had wedged itself into an office adjoining the stairwell. From tenth to eighth floors the stairs did not exist. Sulphur yellow flowers were already breaking out across the concrete walls; the carpet of the shattered office was bubbling into a stew of pseudo-fungi. Slimy ropes of Chaga stuff hung down the stairwell. Already it would be working on the elevator cables. There was no other way down. She was trapped.

Towering un-ferno.

She thought that was a pretty good joke to think up when you are climbing for your life from voraciously devouring Chaga. Up. It was the only way. The only hope. By twenty-two, her legs were screaming. She stumbled into an office that looked over Parliament Square. The cordon of soldiers were running to their carriers. The convoy of trucks was forming up and moving up. The helicopters had started their engines. She picked up a tube steel chair and smashed the window. No one looked up. She threw the chair out. No one saw it fall.

‘You cannot leave me here!’ she yelled. ‘Shepard, you cannot do this to me!’

He had seen her. He knew she was here. He would be watching to see who came out of the foyer. He would not abandon her. What would he do? He could not come up the tower to rescue her. Helicopter.

She climbed, delirious with exertion and pain. The top. To the top. Top of the world, Pa. Girl Reporter In Skyscraper Rescue Thriller. She could not remember how many floors there were in the Kenyatta Conference Centre.

The stairs ended on her and she opened the door. Sun. Light. Wind. Heat. Altitude. Vertigo. She was in the centre of the central flower at the top of the tower. Steel petals inclined away from her. Don’t look at the edge. Don’t look up. Don’t look down. Then what do you look at?

A helicopter lifted past, close enough for her to feel the down-draught. It turned to the west, toward the airport. Gaby took off her orange press jacket and waved it over her head.

‘See me, you fuckers! It’s me. I’m still here. Come and get me. Come on, Shepard, don’t let me down now.’

Gaby waved her orange jacket and shouted and shouted and shouted.

The crab ran along the tide line, hunting. It scuttled in and out in time to the gentle run and flow of the foam-edged water. Its legs left little pin-point prints in the white sand. The sand was not native to this place. It had been brought, like the rest of the long, narrow peninsula, by truck from another place. It was part of the contract that the builders environmentally enhance the two-mile strip of land-fill trash. Between the white sand and the edge of the grass, you could see the bones of the thing: the cans and the cars and the twenty million black plastic refuse sacks. That was what made it such a good place for the crabs, and the gulls, and the waders in the shallow water between the peninsula and the shore.

Nothing on the tide today. Not even a rotting condom washed up from the resort hotels down the coast. The crab ran up the beach to clamber through the trash line. It was a big bastard; its shell was the size of your hand, and the colour of a hard dick. It wore its fighting claws the way a punch-drunk middleweight gone to fat wore his gloves. The crab gobbled with its feeding mandibles and tasted it. It darted sideways and tugged at something wedged under the creased black belly of a trash sack. A rat had died here and rotted. The crab tore and tore. It tore a leg right off with its battle claws.

The gull had been watching the big crab from a hover twenty feet up, waiting for its moment to swoop and steal. It saw the crab wave the rat leg in its claws. It dived. It crawked in its throat at the crab, flapped its wings, stabbed with its beak. It was bigger, smarter, meaner; all the crab had was a thick shell and dumb obstinacy. It held on. The gull danced after it, pecking. The crab backed all the way up on to the grass. The crab could go as easily backwards as forwards or sideways. The gull did not let up. The crab led the gull across the tough, salt grass. At the edge of the concrete it made its stand. The gull stabbed and weaved. The big crab held up its fighting claws and circled.

Suddenly all the birds in the tide water flew up at once in a clatter of wings. The crab fought his corner. The gull paused in its assault and put up its head. It sensed the disturbance that had made the others take to the wing. It gave a fuck-you caw and jumped into the air. The crab was too dumb and too greedy and too short on senses to learn from what had spooked the gull. It chewed its rotting rat leg. It was only when it felt the rumble through its legs that alarm penetrated the dumbness. It ran, chewed leg held high. It looked for crevices and crannies. There were none in the tough grass of the artificial peninsula that would hide a crab this big. It reversed on to the concrete. It was that dumb.

The wheels missed it, but the fire got it. Three thousand degrees of liquid hydrogen combining with liquid oxygen cindered it: the blast bowled the wisp of chitin ash down the runway.

The circling birds came down, flock by flock, into the shallow water in the lee of the peninsula. In the big trailer park a mile to the south, the people whooped and cheered and applauded as the vapour trail of the HORUS carrier body curved skyward.

‘Ten miles out, fifty thousand feet,’ said a fat man with a beard in an ugly hat and a T-shirt with Fort Lauderdale in ‘10: World SF Convention printed on the front. He was watching the sky with a pair of binoculars.

‘Carrier separation in mark twelve minutes,’ said an equally fat, bearded man wearing an equally ugly hat. His T-shirt had a picture of an old-style space shuttle and the words National Astronautics Society: Per Ardua Astra. He had a radio jacked into his ear.

The people followed the HORUS upward. There were five thousand of them in the trailer park this day. Thousands more watched from other approved viewing areas, or the beaches, or the off-shore pleasure cruisers. But the serious ones, the true BDO freaks, were at the trailer park. It was like a festival. There were licence plates from forty-eight states of the Union and beyond on the ass-ends of Winnebagos, RVs, trailers greater and lesser, station wagons, pickups with tents in the back, monster trucks, motorcycles. A nomad village of tents had grown up along the dune side of the park. Family-sized trailer tents, one man pup-tents. Folding gas barbecues, sterno stoves, camp-fires of scavenged driftwood carefully ringed with stones. Boots set outside for the night. Terracotta beer coolers evaporating in the shade. Awnings, wind breaks, sun-shades.

It was a festival of space. Like all the best festivals, it was free. The acts up on the big stage were the daily HORUS launches, but like any festival worth going to, it was down in the tent and trailer town, among the sex and drugs and booze and free philosophy and easy conversation, that the real action was found.

The people were moving away from the viewing stage. The chase planes were coming in to land on the two-mile artificial peninsula jutting out into the ocean. The hyperbola of smoke was blowing away on the breeze from off the sea. Clouds clung to the horizon; a tropical storm was moving out there in the Atlantic. The meteorological satellites were tracking its progress up the Gulf Stream. The odds were slightly over evens that it would come ashore. Heavy weather warnings were in force from Fort Lauderdale to Daytona Beach. If it hit Kennedy, it would shut down the HORUS launch program for days, and the free festival down in the trailer park. The name of the tropical storm was Hilary.

‘Launcher separation successful,’ the man with the ear radio said. ‘Isaac Asimov is climbing into transfer orbit. Unity rendezvous in twenty-seven minutes.’