Our Future is in the Air

by Corballis, Tim

  When they returned to the house, they looked anew at the land that it sat on and that they had terraced and planted. The spirit of the march filled them, made them enthusiastic—but the house remained, stubbornly occupying its land. It became a concrete reminder of the difficulty of things.

  ‘The Māori Affairs Amendment Act 1967, as almost all Māori understood, enabled further land alienation—it required much freehold Māori land to be placed under general title; it strengthened the ability to force “unproductive” Māori land into use. The repeal of the latter clause in 1974 was a victory, as was the passing of the Treaty of Waitangi into law for the first time. It was necessary to build on those victories—and there was fear of a change of government.’

  ‘There was a huge amount of work in this action—not just the walk, but all the discussions held before and throughout it. We achieved a large degree of unity among the different tribes. That was very important. It was what we had been arguing for a long time.’

  ‘[…] Were there already doubts about how long that unity might last? Were there doubts about the status of the Treaty itself, and about whether it was appropriate to recognise the legitimacy of Parliament in the first place?’

  ‘That was all a matter of strategy as much as principle. We knew we’d have to keep pushing. There was no question. It was a bit disappointing that things fell apart after the hīkoi. Who knew how much or how little could be achieved with the Treaty? It was possible it might even be used as a means of dividing Māori by dealing with tribes separately, as separate legal entities.’

  ‘Each victory raises as many questions as it answers. That’s what it means to be part of a movement, part of a struggle.’

  ‘Our perspective at the time was a radical one. Actually that hasn’t changed. I am not Māori but I was fully supportive of that cause. The movement against the dispossession of Māori land was part of the most radical movement possible: the movement against property as such. The struggle over the ownership of any single piece of land is just one of countless local struggles that take part in this great question: Who can own land? Who can own the means of survival? Life itself rises up in anger at the thought of its being owned.

  ‘Not every one of the marchers would have agreed with our way of thinking—perhaps none of them. We supported them completely. The absence of flight meant that no way of thinking could claim to be above the others. There is no map. Maps—the world seen from above—mean the dispossession of what is mapped.’

  Peter had begun to complain about pain during the day, and sometimes to favour the other leg. The specialist at the hospital was unsure what was wrong. He agreed that it might be a form of arthritis, possibly Still’s disease—though in that case he would have expected Peter to present with intermittent rash and fevers. They were to return in some months’ time, or earlier if the symptoms became much worse.

  Marcus said, ‘He didn’t seem very worried.’

  Janet said, ‘No.’

  Peter himself was cheerful—they sat with him out in the sunshine while he worked his way through an ice cream. When he stood, he showed no signs of limping. Through all this—the weeks since Peter had first complained about his pain—Marcus and Janet had each dwelled on the same possibility, without mentioning it to each other. Were they aware of this COMMON THOUGHT? Lilly had voiced it on that morning after the first meeting: ‘He’s been crying at night because of his leg.’ So how much, after all, was Pen present through his absence? Did Peter miss him at all? This pain and the crying coincided with Pen’s disappearance, but what relationship could they have to each other? The pain a symptom of a missing father, as if he were holding grief only in that part of his body? Of the three of them, only Marcus could quite believe that. But, rather, through the coincidence, was the grief buried under pain? Or, under pain, there was nothing, no great loss, but just a child’s forgetting, his acceptance of how things were and how they could change—his acceptance of the world’s flow of life. What could they know? And more: the house as it was, its small community that included Janet and Peter, had a sort of foundation in the loss of Pen. But if he had disappeared even from Peter’s mind, how long before they also would forget him? And, if that happened, would the house fall into its petty disputes, the experiment break down, the community fracture?

  Weekly meetings continued. There were, as far as the interim functioning of the community was concerned, few things to decide. Instead, increasingly they discussed questions of principle or questions with a longer time frame. It was agreed that it was too much to expect a party line—the house was open to people of different motivations and beliefs, from Lilly’s vision of a feminist collective to Leonard’s and Karen’s versions of anarchism, and the vaguer motives of the rest, who enjoyed the sense of community and the hope for a new society. They would eventually have to address the question of money in a more serious way: whether all of their resources should be held in common; whether it would be possible, or even desirable, to have common ownership of the house—and the question of whether legal ownership meant anything in any case. In the meantime then there were divisions, ones that seemed so intractable they could hardly be raised with any seriousness: owners (Marcus and Lilly) and the rest; but also parents and the rest, those who ‘owned’ the children and those who didn’t. There was no question but that they would go to school—and the opinions of the non-parents about formal schooling were never raised. What did that mean about the house, about its community?

  The children did find themselves increasingly close to all of the adults. They would spend time in Karen and Sandra’s room, talking or playing with whoever was there or taking the spare mattress down from where it leaned against the wall and jumping on it. Sarah especially, who was not yet at school, found she could attach herself to whichever adult was at home and available, moving from one to the next, keeping them company, helping them, playing with them.

  ‘The Land March was a major event, and women’s movements—whether feminist or women’s lib reformism—were very visible. No one could forget that there was also an election coming up. All of this was tied up in people’s minds: the question of Māori, women’s and other representation, of politics and activism more generally. No matter what people thought of the electoral process, it seemed to crystallise many of the questions.

  ‘So the election was, as always, the occasion for a good deal of debate among activist and countercultural groups. There was the question of whether to vote or whether to withdraw from the electoral system. In many cases they had to agree not to let this question become too heated—ultimately everyone consulted their own conscience on whether to vote. Did a vote for Labour still represent a belief in the working class? Was the liberal environmental consciousness of the Values Party just a response to middle-class anxiety? Anarchists, with a few exceptions, took a distance from the electoral system as a whole.

  ‘It seemed obvious, though, that the Tories would win. No one could agree on how worried to be about this future. What did it mean? The Labour government under Norman Kirk had made concessions to the protest movement, and if these meant anything, then it must mean something that a new government might come to power and reverse them. Muldoon, the leader of the opposition, seemed to be heading for victory on the basis of a populist campaign of superannuation provision and anti-communist paranoia. Would he be our Nixon?’

  ‘The election was like some heavy object, something inevitable, a sign of some great inertia all around them. In New Zealand and in the world. It was part of the dwindling—the slow ebbing away—of the initial euphoria of the times, the growing sense of the deep, established conservatism around them, and the questions that remained unanswered.

  ‘It was hard for them to make radical changes in their daily lives and in their households. The changes had seemed easier, only five or seven years ago. They now seemed to go against the spirit of the world.’

  ‘Hello?’

  ‘Hello.’

  ‘Grey?’


  ‘Yes.’

  ‘… Just a minute. There’s another phone upstairs.’

  Janet’s footsteps as she ran up, then down to put the downstairs phone on the hook again, then up. What looks from the others in the house?

  ‘Was that you calling and hanging up?’

  ‘Yes.’

  A laugh. ‘You could have just asked for me.’

  ‘Oh. Could I? Yes.’ A pause. ‘How is your commune?’

  ‘You know about… of course you do. Have you been watching us?’

  ‘Nothing official. It struck me as a way to help find Pen.’

  ‘By watching our house?’

  ‘Um.’

  ‘You could have talked to me. I know what goes on here. I thought you were on my side.’

  ‘I want to help you.’

  ‘That’s not the same thing as being on my side?’

  ‘What side are you on?’

  ‘Oh, God. Well, did you find anything out by spying on us?’

  ‘Your friend—Marcus? He’s also looking for Pen. He’s not doing much about it, though.’

  ‘I knew that.’

  ‘He talks about it?’

  ‘Not lately. Have you got the house bugged?’

  ‘No. Like I said, all off the books.’

  ‘You’ve been sitting outside in your car.’

  Silence.

  ‘You creep. You couldn’t think of any other way to help?’

  ‘I’ve made some investigations. I’ve found out where one of the Fedorovists is.’

  ‘Someone who knew Pen?’

  ‘I’m not sure.’

  ‘Did you park your car outside this… person’s house?’

  ‘No. She doesn’t live in a good place for covert ops. She’s on a commune up the coast. You should go and talk to her.’

  ‘Who is she?’

  ‘She was romantically involved with their leader. I don’t know where he is now. He’s vanished. Well, I can’t find him.’

  ‘Even you?’

  ‘Not that I have much time to conduct a real investigation.’

  ‘Not in your lunch hours, no.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Would you stop spying on us? It’s ridiculous.’

  ‘Okay.’

  ‘Will you?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I’ll keep a look out for you.’

  ‘Okay.’

  Under the pretext of visiting an old friend, Janet took Marcus’s car on the following weekend and drove north to the commune. It was some way up a valley, on sloping land kept damp and cold by the hills and forest. A small geodesic dome, already looking old, was next to the farmhouse, and another cottage or shed had also been built there too. Horses grazed behind the buildings. An idyll? Janet felt the cold creep into her. The woman walked with her, and they sat on a bench on a small rise overlooking the buildings. Her name was Marianne. She had brought blankets, and offered Janet one to put around her shoulders.

  ‘You don’t seem like a spy.’

  Janet laughed. ‘Well, I wouldn’t, would I? No, I’m not a spy.’

  ‘You said you wanted to ask questions.’

  ‘I’m trying to find my husband. He disappeared. I heard that yours did too.’

  Marianne said, ‘I don’t know what you mean… you wanted to know about the Fedorovians, didn’t you?’

  ‘Didn’t your—’

  ‘You mean Kim?’

  ‘I don’t know. I heard that you were with someone in the Fedorovians, and he vanished.’

  ‘Ha! Yeah, that’s Kim. Kim Denby. He was never my husband. He’s certainly gone from my life.’

  ‘What happened to him?’

  ‘Don’t know. I mean, nothing. We split up, that’s all.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘But you—you lost your guy?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  Janet said, ‘Thanks. I’m kind of used to it. It’s been a while.’

  ‘Doesn’t mean you don’t want him back, though.’

  ‘That’s true.’

  ‘You not so sure?’

  A laugh. ‘I’m getting along without him.’

  ‘Yeah.’

  Janet said, ‘I think he was involved in the Fedorovians. That’s what I want to ask you about.’

  ‘Okay.’

  ‘Pen Evans.’

  ‘I don’t know… I don’t remember the name. But there were a few people who kind of came and went, and the membership was a little vague.’

  ‘Are they still around? The group?’

  Marianne said, ‘I don’t know. I haven’t seen any of them for a long time.’ A shudder—she looked uncomfortable.

  ‘What were they?’

  ‘Just a few people. I don’t know how many—we didn’t ever get everyone together in the same room. Not that I remember anyway. Maybe ten people? Maybe twenty?’

  ‘It was part of an international movement. Right?’

  ‘Yeah. One of those things that kind of flashed up. It was all to do with HCF, and with making a new world. TCF.’

  ‘An activist group?’

  ‘Nah. We didn’t go on protests or anything. We were pretty secretive.’

  ‘How involved were you?’

  ‘I believed in it. I was involved. I met Kim there. I wasn’t there just because he was my boyfriend—I joined because someone told me about it, I liked it, and I met him afterwards.’

  ‘What did they do?’

  ‘Oh, nothing that I know of.’

  Could the Fedorovians be described as a CULT? What might a secret organisation get up to, and what could Pen’s role have been? Thoughts of the Manson Family. Janet felt a growing anger at Grey, both for sending her here to talk to this woman rather than going himself, and for what he might have sent Pen into. She wondered whether secrecy necessarily meant violence, and whether Pen might have been the victim of something, the perpetrator of something, or both.

  ‘What did they want to do?’

  Marianne said, ‘We wanted to change everything. We thought we could do it. We thought HCF could do it—that it was the key, you know, the beginning of a new relationship between humanity and time. Humans in control of time, for the first time ever.’

  ‘How? What do you mean? What were they planning?’

  ‘That’s just the problem. Sometimes our plans frightened me. They wanted to try all kinds of things with HCF, and I thought we needed to be more careful. I mean, really research the possibilities.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Oh, so they thought it was possible to go backwards in time too, and forward to other times. There was a whole group of physicists working on it, but they were all overseas. The people here—’

  ‘Kim?’

  ‘Yeah. They wanted to go ahead with things even without the results of the research. Well, they wanted to try it without the tracing fluid, to start with.’

  A pause. ‘What would that do?’

  ‘You don’t know? The tracing fluid is what brings you back.’

  ‘I thought it was supposed to be dangerous in some way.’

  ‘Yeah. The Korngold period. I studied the physics a bit. I understood it better than any of them here. It’s supposed to be the maximum time a mass could be temporally displaced without causing some kind of physical catastrophe—a chain reaction or something. But you know, no one ever said exactly what was supposed to happen. Like an atom bomb? Why would that only happen after twenty minutes? No one had an answer to that. Even L, the Harvard guy? He was supposed to be into crossing boundaries, king of the hippies and all that—but he was really conservative when it came to the Korngold period. If you went too long—boom!’

  ‘It’s not true?’

  ‘You don’t think someone, somewhere in the world would have tried pushing it by now? And has the world ended? Is the future still there for us to visit?’

  ‘You do it?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘You mean… ’

  ‘No, I travel s
ometimes. I don’t push the Korngold period.’

  ‘So there’s some kind of conspiracy?’

  ‘Think about it. It’s okay to give us glimpses of the future. Pictures are okay—especially all the happy pictures, keep people believing, get people to forget about those Russian ones. But they don’t want people going and really learning about the future, really understanding it. They try to keep travelling illegal—but just to make sure, they make up this time limit. It just reinforces this idea that messing with time is dangerous, that you’ve got to be careful. They want you hopeful and terrified, just enough of each. Too terrified and you won’t go shopping. Too hopeful and you won’t need to go shopping. Someone, somewhere, thought that twenty minutes would be about enough.’

  ‘Korngold?’

  ‘Ha! I don’t know. I doubt it. Though, maybe. I mean, who is he? He’s not known for anything else. He’s probably not even a physicist—sorry. I’m ranting.’

  ‘No, it’s okay. I want to know.’

  Marianne was looking even more uncomfortable, hunching as she talked. Now she straightened and smiled, self-conscious but suddenly beautiful. She said, ‘Oh, well.’

  Janet said, ‘Did they go, without… ’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘They wouldn’t be able to get back.’

  ‘No. Well, unless there was something in the future.’

  ‘You mean—’