Five. Now the rulers of the world gathered and decreed there should be a lottery; and that the lucky 300 million should go forth and prosper on that great southern land. And billions of tickets were issued and a televised draw held.
Six. And so it came to pass that the chosen ones made their way to Antarctica in all manner of ship and vessel from all parts of the globe; and the Southern Ocean raised not once its walls of water all the weeks of that long and trying passage.
Seven. And the chosen people stepped from their boats upon the rocky shore. And some had been blown off course, far from their half-acre lot marked by sat-nav, and yet were thankful to place their feet on that good earth.
Eight. And so some settled near the coast as decreed, and many more carried their few possessions far inland on foot.
Nine. And so the 300 million spread out across the land, and it was spring and the prairie grass grew and the streams flowed clear in the gentle light. And truly the chosen people were grateful.
Ten. And at their decreed lots they built thick-walled mud huts orientated north, and laid solar panels, raised wind turbines and tilled the earth.
Eleven. And their ploughs struck metal. And beneath the soil they thought virgin lay vast and ancient ruins.
Twelve. Great was their surprise at the sophistication of the ancient empire that once had thrived there. And the people cried.
Thirteen. Others have come before us. And they built great cities here and they have perished.
Fourteen. And the people dug deeper and found that beneath one city was another, and beneath that another.’
The room remains silent. The medics are all back at their workstations. Bill scrolls down the page to see if there’s more. There’s not. That’s it. He looks to Samuel for an explanation. The alien snores softly. His bowl of ice cream has melted and sits on an angle against his leg, perilously close to tipping.
Garrick lends his verdict. ‘Yeah, harmless enough. Quirky. We’ll send it out? Yep. And Bill? Take his hand and we’ll fade out. You’ve done superb work. The axe to the frozen sea. Thank you.’
35
‘Could you pull over just here,’ Jeremiah asks. ‘Please, darling?’
They’re on the Avenue of Triumph, the great tree-lined approach to the Golden Gate. It’s been such a fun morning that Karen doesn’t even ask why. There’s nothing coming behind but she indicates anyway, enjoying her brand new SUV’s functions. It was a gift from Jeremiah this morning; he’d cleared his schedule and flown up from New Hokitika for the day to surprise her.
She parks in the shade of one of the two-hundred mature Canadian elms lining the avenue. The big car stops on a dime.
Aluminium bodied, with a carbon-fibre secure core, a liquid cooled powertrain producing 800 kW (380 from the front electric motor, 420 from the rear) charged by two 130 kWh lithium-ion batteries, it delivers 1600 nanometres of torque and reaches 100 kilometres per hour in 2.9 seconds. Despite being so large, it takes off like a rocket—in driver mode. She wonders why anyone would want to select dreary driverless mode and sit like a sack of potatoes behind the leatherbound wheel of a car like this. She can’t imagine ever giving up control.
Jeremiah opens his door and jumps down.
‘What’s up?’ she asks.
Standing on the ground, looking through the front passenger window at her, only the top half of his head is visible—the car is big. She likes his hair slicked back and tinted red. It fits this new phase of theirs.
‘There’s a tax on luxury goods at the Golden Gate,’ he tells her. ‘We’ll have to bury half of your shopping here.’
‘Ha!’ God, she thinks, thrilling at the thought of her haul from Featherston’s Glass and Wood Quarters, as the boutique and artisanal centres are known. The very best garments come straight from the West Coast of the United States on the Very Fast Plane. They’re in Glass before they get to Brooklyn. It’s incredible to actually hold a dress, feel its weight and texture, and turn it in the light while the rest of the world is still looking at holograms. Deep satisfaction courses through her at the thought of the treasures she just bought, the beautiful clothes and accessories she will wear and be inspired by.
‘Come on, Manny,’ Jeremiah says. ‘I want to show you something.’
‘Can you help me down, Daddy?’
‘Sure.’
Karen opens her door and soaks up the countryside from her high seat. Silence, sun and greenery. It’s a beautiful day. Even the farmlets and lifestyle blocks in the vicinity of the Golden Gate are idyllic. The hedges and rows of poplar and cypress trees, the stone walls, boxy adobe and cob mansions topped with their jumble of red tiles: beautiful. She smiles. The days of functional wood and iron are well gone in the Wairarapa. It really is like historic pictures of Tuscany.
‘Like climbing down from a rocket,’ Jeremiah tells Manny. The top half of his face appears again opposite her. He grins. ‘God, it’s a beast.’
‘Thank you. I officially love it.’ She blows him a kiss.
She doesn’t know how much the car cost. The best thing is that it doesn’t really matter because they’re so rich. Rich, meaning free. The days of drudgery and financial worry are over. Anything is possible!
As she climbs down from the cab to join Jeremiah and Manny on the verge, she makes a mental note not to wear a short skirt when going out in the car.
Jeremiah rests his hand on Manny’s shoulders. ‘Look that way, son. 10, 9, 8…’
‘Ah.’ She removes her shoes and wiggles her toes in the grass.
The faint sound of a radio comes from the team of arborists down at the entrance to the avenue. They work constantly up and down the rows, never stopping. It reminds her of the Auckland Harbour Bridge being continually painted.
She admires the dimensions of the boxy houses again, the cut of their small windows, how their simple lines are enhanced by the textured pile of heavy red roof tiles. Dimension and texture. She wonders how those elements might translate to a garment for a bigger person. Could the pleasing ratios coded in the buildings throw up something counterintuitive? Worth a try, she thinks. Holder, at Flux, would be the guy to talk to. It’d be fun, if nothing else. She feels grateful that those relationships have opened up again. The problem with Flux was never about her move to the Mount, as she’d thought. The problem was of rhythm. Once she got it back, through the unforced inescapable contacts required by everyday work, the relationships all became easy again. Everything’s got easy. She feels replete with ideas, a step ahead of the game, full of energy and good wishes.
‘… 3, 2, 1, blast off!’
A second passes before the deep-throated roar reaches them. The air quivers as smoke boils up from the airport, five kilometres away. Karen half-expects trees to bend and stone walls to topple as the fat, winged booster with its short tail of fire vapour lifts into the air on a 45-degree trajectory. On its back, clinging like a baby to its mother, is the plane itself, consisting mostly of a pair of wide swept-back wings. A vehicle for glide and descent, it’s a different creature entirely from the booster muscling its way upwards, burrowing higher and higher into the sky.
‘Ten minutes from now,’ Jeremiah yells, ‘that will be going 25-times the speed of sound.’
‘Huh?’
Karen puts her hand on Jeremiah’s shoulder. ‘Wow.’
He smiles. ‘It’ll be across the Pacific Ocean in less than an hour, Manny. Runs on liquid hydrogen and oxygen. Water, in other words. It’s clean.’
The VFP is already a diminishing point in the sky. Jeremiah can speak normally.
‘The plane’s engines fire at 20,000 metres and take it to the edge of space. From there it glides down.’
The roar rolls, fades. The plane becomes a silent speck. Birds cheep. A bee buzzes.
‘A bee,’ Mandela says. ‘Look! It’s alive!’
They all look at it. A survivor.
‘Are you leaving on the rocket tonight, Daddy?’
Jeremiah ruffles Mandela’s hair. ‘No,
son. Just a normal plane to New Hokitika. I’ll go on the rocket next month, though, to America.’
The thought makes Karen uneasy. Suborbital flight is not yet wrinkle-free. And large swathes of the United States are no longer under federal control. The southern states have been overrun by refugees from Central and South America. It’s an ‘evolving situation’, evolving ever more rapidly because of the high rate of personal gun ownership over there, by far the highest in the world.
Jeremiah sighs deeply and stretches in the sunny silence. ‘And we’re back in Tuscany again.’
Karen slaps a mosquito.
‘There’s the Golden Gate, Daddy. It’s a gate with no walls.’
‘That’s right, son! It’s a gate with no walls. Does that feel good?’
‘There is a wall, darling—you just can’t see it. Anything that tries to pass through gets zapped.’
‘It keeps out the bad guys, Manny.’
‘And the native birds.’
‘They’re working on that, Karen.’
She smiles. Feels the warm silence. The presence of her hulking new car. ‘I’m sure they are.’
‘Actually, did you know that security for the Golden Gate was based on the local Mt Bruce bird-sanctuary model? They trap predators in the surrounding farmland and make series of moderately protected zones radiating out around the sanctuary, rather than relying on a little secure cage in the middle of a dense predatory environment.’
Karen snorts. ‘Outers aren’t predators.’
‘I know, but…’
It’s been a great morning, with ice creams and laughter and surprises, and Karen doesn’t want to spoil it, but she’s irked. ‘I don’t want Manny brought up to think about people like that.’
‘Yes. Right.’
‘Are you going to see the alien, Daddy?’
‘No, son. But he’s started communicating so I need to be closeby.’
To cover up what he says, she thinks. No, she tells herself, leave it. Not in front of Manny. Not now.
As she climbs into her new car, the space and height, blackness and chrome of it thrill her again, and a question strikes her. She wonders if the alien will change anything or everything. It’s not a new question, by any means, but it has a strange new visceral charge.
‘What if he’s a socialist?’ she asks Jeremiah, as he buckles Mandela into the back seat. ‘Or an anarchist? Or a communist?’
Jeremiah climbs up into his seat, frowns and puts his seatbelt on. ‘This isn’t official yet, Karen, and must go no further, but it looks like he might be from a hunter-gatherer society. His world is so abundant with food that they could remain hunter-gatherers and still build cities, study science and build a high-tech civilisation. We had to have the Neolithic Revolution, you know—invent agriculture and run it with slaves before we had time to even think about building a civilisation. It could be apples and oranges. Everything on his world might actually be free.’
The wheels spin on the grass before they grab, and the car is slung down the avenue. Their heads back are pressed back. She lifts her foot. They coast fast towards the Golden Gate. Trees flash past. She brakes.
‘Wow.’
She changes from the Sport setting to Family.
‘Okay, so the alien studies our “slave-based civilisation”, as you call it. What if he doesn’t like it? What if he aligns with the Greens? Or what if he tells us to distribute wealth through higher wages and tax on capital?’
Jeremiah shrugs. ‘It’s possible. It’s more likely that he has the technology to solve many, if not all, of Earth’s problems without tampering with our embedded systems.’
She stops for the Golden Gate. It looks like a pair of broad-standing stones covered in beaten gold. Two monoliths. It needs a visible wall either side of it to make it look like a gate.
Stopped, waiting for security sensors to identify and clear them, she remembers the rumour that beneath the gold plating lie many arcane and mysterious symbols.
She turns to Jeremiah. ‘What if he wants to change things?’
The gates swing open, as if by magic.
Stone walls, lines of healthy trees, green grass, large boxy houses with red tiles. Everything just like charming old pictures of Tuscany.
Jeremiah doesn’t reply.
36
Astrid Lowe, usability analyst, 122, illuminated by dim red light. Her straight black hair has a severe fringe cut halfway up her forehead. Her deep-set eyes are small and heavily lidded. Her mouth and jaw are locked and thrust forward, highlighting the thick rubberiness of her lips.
Mark McLuckie, knowledge curator, 87. Messy blond-tipped hair, a six-finger forehead, eyes notched deep into a heavy, pasty face. His fat sits clumpily, as if all his life until very recently McLuckie has been as thin as a rake and the fat hasn’t had time to bed in properly. His thick black polar-necked jersey appears to support his overlarge head. He sports a Venture Group diamond pendant.
‘Well,’ McLuckie says.
Astrid blinks.
‘I don’t think I have any particularly… novel impressions to add. Do you?’
‘No. Not novel.’ Astrid’s large lips don’t move much when she talks.
McLuckie gasps, arches his back and clasps his large head.
Astrid calmly locates her handbag and opens it.
New shot. The couple sit still on their respective chairs. Astrid’s blouse has changed colour.
‘The important thing… in a case like this,’ she mumbles, ‘is not to give in to… mass hysteria and try to outdo… everyone else’s superlatives.’
‘I prepared myself to be unimpressed.’
‘It wasn’t hard to … view this meeting as… a production-line ritual.’
‘You must not fall prey,’ McLuckie tells the camera, ‘to the…’ He coughs dryly. ‘To the lure of…’ He coughs again. ‘To the lure of the… uh-hum… merely exotic.’
‘Fascination with the other,’ Astrid says, ‘whatever its merits or shortcomings. Leading to deference and then… self-abnegation. No matter how… attractive that might be.’ She looks at McLuckie.
He closes his eyes. It seems they will never open. ‘Objectively speaking, there were 83 seconds… of sustained, silent eye contact… with the humanoid. Any claim beyond those two facts… must be treated with scepticism. However, if such claims exist… they should be heard.’
The interviewer’s poorly miked voice breaks in. ‘Wait, you had more than 60 seconds?’
‘Pardon me?’
‘He asked us if we have anything to add.’
McLuckie’s features bunch slightly. ‘Nothing novel. We’ve been through this.’
‘No, I—please, bear with me.’ Clump. The interviewer’s voice comes through clearly. ‘You had more than 60 seconds with the humanoid?’
McLuckie grits his teeth. His hands travel up to his head and hold it.
‘He must’ve liked us,’ Astrid mumbles through her rubber lips.
37
Bill wakes in a small and unfamiliar room. Gloomy daylight. A wet concrete wall fills the window across from him. It’s raining. Death, he thinks, will be not waking up in a strange hospital room.
Yet it’s barely a hospital room. There are no flowers or cards, no visitors, no nurse, no life-support system or tubes, and he feels good: clear-headed and rested. His knee doesn’t hurt at all. He’s clean and the pyjamas are fresh.
His last memory is of getting in to a taxi after seeing Samuel, and feeling very, very tired. Samuel. Pain has been laid to rest. A most unusual serenity fills him.
For a moment he wonders if he’s in heaven.
Raindrops run down the wall with familiar Earthly monotony. Exhaustion and dreamless sleep—he’s sure that’s what happened. As he watches the rain he becomes aware of a subtle energy. Samuel? He must be nearby.
The memory of the alien’s strange Antarctica story creates a discord in Bill. He sits up and searches the dresser for his screen.
The door opens. A nurse. He
smiles. ‘Good afternoon, Mr Peters. You’re awake.’
‘Afternoon? How long have I been asleep?’
‘Twenty—’ The nurse looks at his wristwatch. ‘—one hours. Plain old-fashioned physical exhaustion.’
‘Drug and alcohol-fuelled exhaustion. You don’t have to spare me.’
‘I was about to say exhaustion exacerbated by alcohol, combined with painkillers. In any case, it provided us an opportunity to clean up your knee.’
‘You’re very kind. I remember a taxi. Getting into one, anyway.’
‘It brought you back here. They couldn’t wake you at the hotel.’
‘Snoring, I suppose.’
‘Yep.’
‘How embarrassing. I’ll get out of your hair.’
‘No, no. It’s quite understandable given the circumstances. The knee’s okay, you’ll just need to use those crutches for a few days. I came to wake you up, actually. You have a couple of visitors. You’ve had a lot of visitors but we didn’t want to disturb you earlier.’
‘Who is it?’
‘Venture Groupers. A young, solidly built guy and an older man. Could be your brother?’
‘Jeremiah and Radley. I’ll meet them in the café downstairs.’
‘Sure. I’ll let them know. Your stuff’s all in the wardrobe and dresser-drawer there. Don’t forget the crutches. Here you go. Do you need help?’
‘I’m an expert on these things.’
‘I’ll leave you in peace, then. Push that button if you need me.’
‘Thanks. I’ll be fine.’ Bill’s optimism is justified. He can sit up and hop without pain. Slung between the crutches, he tests the knee and finds it can support his weight. The marvels of nanotechnology. Still, he’ll have to be careful.
The wardrobe reeks of cigarette smoke, sweat and alcohol. His clothes are to blame. Oddly, they hang neatly on coathangers, rather than lying strewn on the wardrobe floor. He touches the oily fabric and sniffs his fingers. It’s as if he’d been on a bender.
The suit is a relic of the past, he decides. It’s a shed skin, a husk spun from anger and confusion that has been shucked off for flight.
Star Sailors Page 38
