Dreaming Again

by Jack Dann

  One English couple give the boy a set of marbles. On the sunny deck the Tom Bowler streaks like a bee towards the yawning side. Too slow, he watches a canvas shoe descend, the glass circle lifting in calloused fingers. The sailor smiles slowly, holding it out to the woman in black, while across the deck his crewmates watch.

  The child slides past his mother’s waist to take the marble from the man’s hand. His voice is like the English lady’s finch, lonely and precise: ‘Thank you sir. Mama we need to go down now.’

  The sailor’s gaze slides down her dress. He doesn’t move as the boy tugs his mother away. Her hand is cold. Behind them the sailors’ voices rise.

  From the dark bunk he watches her stand by the tiny porthole. Orange light from the deck above flares beyond the spray-flecked glass. She lifts her hand to wipe away the room’s steam, and over the engine’s grumble he hears her breathing change.

  ‘Mama! Is there something there?’

  As she turns from the glass her eyes are strange. Her loose hair slides on her shoulders. ‘Yanni, just a dream. Go back to sleep.’

  Outside, the night sea shifts and surges.

  The boy leans at the side of the ship and imagines the drop …

  ‘What about women, you know, after the revolution?’

  ‘Everyone will be equal. All the people. All the workers together.’ He is standing at the edge of the pond, peering into the tea-dark water, ducks squabbling around his feet.

  ‘But it seems to me …’ I squeeze the last of the bread between my fingers, ‘doesn’t it seem to you it’s not just about money?’

  He stares at the scummy surface as if searching for something. ‘I say to you before, it is power, it is who makes the things.’

  I am thinking about the men on the building site just opposite, who shout at me. The man outside the cinema who makes strange smacking noises with his lips. Mick’s friends Steve and Gaz, who despise girls if they’re ugly, and hate them if they’re not. ‘Why didn’t you ever get married, Yanni?’

  He is quiet for a minute. ‘When I come here, there were not many Greek girls — not to marry an orphan with no family. And my English is not so good. Also … it is a hard life for women. My mother had a hard life in Greece, before she left. She ran away, I found out later.’ He looks at me across the muddy bank. ‘Not like you, Geenee. Here the women are very free.’

  I fold up the paper bread bag. It makes a forlorn crumpling noise. ‘I suppose.’

  ‘If I had met you when I was young, Geenee, I would have married you,’ he says, and gives me his sad, generous smile.

  … imagines the drop down the wall of the hull …

  The swell grows as Fremantle recedes. Rottnest Island slips past to the left, and the spray increases. A line of clouds blurs the northwest horizon, but here the sun still flattens itself on the white stretch of sail.

  Yanni is motionless in the bows. Mick slouches long-legged in the stern, singing the same three lines of a song over and over. Every now and then he gives me his sad-puppy look. I am thinking of his swagger, which mars his beautiful legs, smudges the gold of their outline in the sun. What scared me at the party was how many of them nodded, looked at him with sympathy as he sputtered out accusations. I wish again I hadn’t come.

  At noon the wind drops suddenly. Land is a purple blur behind us to the east as Mick rises to secure the limply flapping sail. ‘What now?’ he asks me.

  ‘The anchor,’ says Yanni, not turning his head. The back of his neck looks sunburned. Mick scowls and shuffles to let the sea anchor out.

  Yanni rises stiffly and moves over to where I’m sitting. His face is burned and tense. As he unfolds his crimson bundle I almost start to laugh. It is an old cape, braided at the shoulders — like something from my childhood dressing-up box. Only his stiff breathing stops me.

  Casting it over one arm, he makes his way back round the sail to the bow. He turns to the darkening northwest, shakes the red cloth in the sun, and calls out. I think his words are Spanish, not Greek. They sound dim and muffled in the still air.

  Mick is incredulous. He grabs my elbow and whispers loudly in my ear. ‘What the hell is he doing?’

  ‘Shhh. I don’t know! It’s a symbol or something. He’s afraid of the sea.’

  ‘Crazy old coot.’

  Yanni calls out again. His spine is straight. This time the words clang against the metal of the water — weird and archaic. I can’t move my eyes from his slight figure, tense against the shifting of the boat. I feel how small he is, how small we are, a tiny stick-and-bone bundle on the swaying desert of the sea.

  Yanni is breathing in to call again when Mick’s shout breaks across it: ‘What the FUCK is THAT?’

  Past Colombo the men in uniform search the ship. They toss about the child’s bedding. They jostle in the doorway and speak only to each other. One holds up a worn and embroidered petticoat, and shakes it in the dim cabin. The sun from the porthole softens it with light. His mother holds his shoulders hard. She is gazing out the round window.

  ‘You have more trunks?’ the leader says in English. The woman stares at the sun-filled glass, and her son shakes his head. ‘Where is your husband?’ asks another man, too loudly.

  This is what the child remembers: the long corridor of the lower deck, the taste of his own wrist in his mouth, the door closed behind him.

  When they leave, they drop the petticoat in the corridor outside.

  The boy leans at the side of the ship and imagines the drop down the wall of the hull; the sudden shock of cobalt, down, down through warmer currents to cold. Since the men came, his mother has locked her cabin door, and will not speak. When he talks of Australia she is silent.

  In Australia he will build her a house. She can sit under the olive trees in the sunlight and stare at the moving leaves. If strange men come to the house he will send them away. He will buy her a floppy hat to cover her hair. They will be happy.

  Later, in the new country, he will call it a dream, riven by the engine’s changing roar. The child climbs the steep below-deck stairs. Ahead of him the woman’s hair blows back, slowly, like seaweed: the soiled petticoat is trailing in her hand. She throws the scrap of cloth into the sullen orange of the wake, gleaming in the deck flares. She raises her arms. She is calling.

  Huddled by the wall, her son watches the sea divide. Watches immensity roll across the dark towards her. Sees her turn back towards him, turn away again.

  Wakes night after night in his Fremantle foster home, shaking and screaming at the harbour down below.

  … the sudden shock of cobalt …

  The clouds on the horizon are boiling suddenly, flattening into massive anvil shapes. I can see wind whipping across the sea, rushing towards us. And a wave, a cloud, a shoulder, heaves up from the water, impossibly high.

  Yanni cries out and flaps the cape high. The wave-mountain turns, and a last gleam of sun catches on green glass near its head: horns.

  The Bull slouches across the water towards the boat. It moves with a horrifying smoothness, and leaves no wake. Now only its knees are covered by the ocean below. It is huger than a dream.

  The red cloth flutters in the wind. Mick is clutching the tiller, mouth stretched wide. The monster lowers its head and charges. In the dark muscles of its shoulder I see fish, moving, but its eyes are hot and ancient. The yacht heels over as the wind of its passing flings the boom around.

  ‘Hai!’ cries Yanni, staggering against the mast, and he whirls the red banner again. In a world turned to grey and violent green it glows like a beacon. Behind us, the Bull turns ponderously and falls through the air towards it. I push liquid from my face to see the glass scimitar slicing for Yanni’s head.

  ‘No!’ I scream hopelessly at the shadow massed above us. ‘Get away!’ My shoulder shoves Yanni to his knees, and the tip of the horn snatches the red cape from his arm. But the Bull has already pulled its head up. It stands in the water beside the wallowing boat, swollen as a cloud, and sways its head slowly
back and forth. ‘Get away!’ Hysteria shudders my breath. ‘Get off.’

  The great mass heaves a step backwards. The wind is dropping. In the sudden silence I can hear Mick choking and retching in the stern.

  Yanni climbs slowly to his feet. He looks defeated. The cape spreads out in the water below us, sodden and sinking. He cranes his neck back up at the Bull and says something. This time I am sure it is Greek.

  After a long moment, the molten shoulder turns, and the immensity of back roils with movement. At the green joints of the knees seaweed swirls. The Bull lurches away, thrusting through the waves with enormous, muscular strides. Near the horizon it merges with the surface, and the returning sun glints green on the last gleam of horn.

  … down, down …

  After a while of silence, Mick moves to find the anchor. Yanni lifts his head from his knees.

  ‘Well I know now, Geenee,’ he says heavily. ‘I can go back to my country now. So I say thank you for this. And also to your friend.’ He rubs his prickly scalp, looking diminished and bitter.

  ‘But… Yanni…’

  ‘I see now. You must call him up. And even then, you can tell him to go.’

  Coughing the last of the salt from my lungs, I almost miss the rest.

  ‘And so she didn’t, my mitera. She didn’t tell him to go.’

  … through warmer currents to cold.

  Halfway back to shore the sea is a glinting plain again. A fresh westerly skips us across the surface like flying fish. Mick is concentrating on sail and tiller, and won’t speak to me — I wonder what he saw, and who he will blame. My own thoughts are circling through immensity, dark translucence, muscle.

  ‘Yanni?’

  He looks up from the last of the bailing.

  ‘Can you teach me the words?’

  ‘They’re Greek. In this country better you learn Vietnamese.’ His forehead furrows. He strips off his overshirt and passes it to me. ‘You should wear more clothes, Geenee.’

  His eyes are nowhere near my sodden T-shirt, but my skin flinches, pulling my arms across my chest. ‘I meant, those particular words.’

  In the afternoon light his eyes become curiously flat, rejecting. My grandmother had that look — the effect of cataracts on brown eyes, that’s all. We are both silent, listening to the cold sound of the wind in the cables.

  I trail my hand in the glassy water. The waves have edges like blades. I slide my gaze down their green sides, searching, hungry for the gleam of horns.

  AFTERWORD

  What’s the name for the thing that comes before a bigger thing? An outlier, a scout before the army, a harbinger, a herald …

  ‘Europa’ is a harbinger story for me — it heralded a novel project. Not that anyone in this story appears in the novel, but here are Greek myths, migrant ships, the Western Australian coastline. But in the novel, it is the maze’s prisoner — the bulhheaded Asterion — who is bundled into the hold with a sack over his head, bellowing desolation through the hull, then lost beneath our hard, bright, windy streets …

  ‘Europa’ is for my friend George Stathopoulous.

  — Cecily Scutt

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  RIDING ON THE Q-BALL

  ROSALEEN LOVE

  ROSALEEN LOVE is an Aurealis Award winner and one of Australia’s best short story writers. Her deliciously wry, funny, and ironic stories have gained her international attention. She writes about science in a variety of ways, from the academic study of the history and philosophy of science and future studies, to science fiction. Rosaleen has worked as a university lecturer in both the history and philosophy of science and professional writing and is currently a Senior Academic Associate in the Faculty of Arts at Monash University, Clayton, Australia.

  Her writing career began in 1983 when she won the Fellowship of Australian Writers, State of Victoria Short Story Award. Since then, she has published three brilliant short story collections: The Total Devotion Machine and Other Stories, Evolution Annie, and The Traveling Tide. Her stories have been included in mainstream as well as science fiction anthologies and magazines in Australia, Great Britain, and the United States. Her most recent nonfiction book is Reefscape: Reflections on the Great Barrier Reef. She is currently working on a collection of essays.

  The wild confection of a story that follows could have only been written if Rosaleen were channelling Isaac Asimov, R.A. Lafferty, Richard Feynman, George O. Smith, Agatha Christie, and Gertrude Stein.

  You’ll see…

  Mikey rang Lula whenever Earth was pointing in the right direction in the torsion field. ‘I’ll be quick. I’ve not much time before the field drive flips me over to the other side. I have to tell you something.’

  That was why, when Lula was a child and the phone rang, she rushed to be the first to pick up. Sometimes the calls were for her.

  With everyone else, Lula chattered away on the phone, but with Mikey she learned the value of listening. From call to call, Mikey taught Lula the principles of zero point energy, and what the view was like from the other side of the Milky Way.

  Lula grew up knowing all about dark energy, except nobody else had ever heard of it, and it was hard to tell people about Mikey’s calls from the other side of the galaxy. Lula absorbed the lessons of the torsion field, not knowing where and when they might come in handy.

  It is not surprising that Lula grew up to be a futurist, her mind open to the realities of life on other worlds, firm in her conviction that one day she would meet Mikey somewhere out there, if not in the flesh, then in an alternate mode of existence that might, conceivably, be better.

  One day Lula was summoned to the office of Creighton Trucking and Aerospace, her biggest client. She advised as a consultant, juggling the strategic plans, doing the vision stuff. Bread and butter work. Creighton was her favourite client. They were into transport, but wanted to be in aerospace. ‘That’s what I call visioning,’ said Lula whenever she dealt with them.

  Lula dropped by at the office of Lucille and Gaynor, assistants to the boss.

  ‘We called you in, Lula, because we didn’t know where else to go.’ Lucille dressed butch but girly with it, her name embroidered in pink roses on the pocket of her khaki coveralls.

  ‘We called you in, Lula, because we knew you wouldn’t laugh.’ Gaynor dressed girly but butch with it, her trucker’s T-shirt teamed with a layered purple skirt.

  ‘We think the company may be in some kind of trouble, but we don’t know what.’ Lucille prodded the numbers on the fax machine.

  Models of spacecraft, rockets, and landing modules hung from the ceiling of Creighton Trucking and Aerospace. A huge mural covered one wall, showing trucking, heading out from Earth towards the moon, Mars and beyond. The truckers wore spacesuits. The astronauts drove trucks. Rays from a benevolent smiling sun beamed down from above. A rainbow arced from one wall across the ceiling to the opposite side of the room.

  As Lucille poked the fax machine, it suddenly sprang into action. A sheet of paper chattered its way from one side to the other.

  Lucille froze. Gaynor jumped.

  ‘That fax,’ said Gaynor, ‘That’s part of the problem. Oh, Lula, it’s Hitcher! He’s disappeared. Here one minute, gone the next.’

  ‘Hitcher, he said this, “I’ve come to warn you …” and then, when I turned round to ask him what he was on about, he wasn’t there.’ Lucille sobbed. ‘He was standing right here, by the fax.’

  Gaynor said, ‘I suppose, it’s only part of the problem to say he’s disappeared, but then, he wasn’t meant to be here in the first place. So you could say the problem isn’t that he disappeared, it was that he was here at all.’

  ‘It’s like he came in one day, materialised, I think now, looking back on it, I think that must be what he did. You see, I’d been asking Gaynor for an assistant, when she went off on holidays, and Gaynor went off, and Hitcher appeared. So I thought she’d arranged it.’

  ‘But I hadn’t,’ said Gaynor.

  ‘He was s
tanding beside the photocopier when I came in, looking a bit shaky and I saw him, thought, well, he’s the temp, he’s been sent to help me through this busy patch.’

  ‘No way,’ said Gaynor, ‘I haven’t a clue who he is, where he’s come from.’

  Lucille said: ‘There were times … he was a bit sparky, you know, like he’d get near pieces of electrical equipment and sparks would fly? I did wonder about that, what he was wearing. He looked like he wasn’t really comfortable in his clothes. As if he wasn’t comfortable in his skin. But what he was wearing, you know, it was just like me. These coveralls, and his name, Hitcher, in roses just like mine, and I’ve never had any problem with static.’

  ‘I want to get this straight,’ said Lula. ‘There’s this guy, who’s gone now, who was a bit sparky and who didn’t fit his clothes, his skin, whatever …”

  ‘The first time I thought something was odd. I asked him to photocopy and he went across and did this thing he does, all sparky, and he gave me the photocopies, but then I realised I hadn’t given him the code to type in. But perhaps I’d left my number keyed in, it wasn’t cancelled, my number? And he was here all day, being helpful, you know, a whiz at filing and he checked out the computer and it works so much better now.’

  ‘Now, here’s the really weird bit…’ said Gaynor.

  ‘Then after about a week, Gaynor rang in, and I said it was great having help, I was getting the backlog all sorted out? And she said, I never sent anyone? And I said to Hitcher, where are you from, who are you, and that’s when he said, I’ve come to warn you, and I turned away because the fax machine went berserk, and all the phones rang at once, and there were sparks flying everywhere, and when I turned back, Hitcher was gone and there was an odd smell of burning nylon in the air.’