The Miocene Arrow

by Sean McMullen

  Another remarkable finding of hers is that the sea-call loses its grip if one is very, very deep underground. She has moved her equipment into the Jenolan caves to guard against the next attack. The woman is a fantastic leader, I really long to meet her.

  2 January 2023:

  As I write I can see the remains of OBU Theta dispersing among the stars like a strange little mobile constellation. Someone in North America managed to destroy it, but I can’t say how. According to the BBC, Takahashi responded with at least six EMP bombs detonated in orbit after trashing the launch site on the ground. Not one piece of equipment with a circuit in it will be working from Canada to Mexico, unless it was shielded. He has EMP cannons aboard those OBUs as well, to pick off anything electrical that emerges in the aftermath. Now the BBC has gone silent. Is he going to knock out every electrical circuit in the world? That would include all cars and trucks. Maybe I should get moving.

  There was a sea-call from December 27 to December 30, so I presume that there will not be another for some time. What I must do is take my life in my hands, cross the parkland to the suburbs, and find a car. No, make that a truck. I need to load everything that I can move before leaving for the caves. A new dark age is descending, nothing high-tech will be built for another thousand years, if ever. Can I do it, I wonder? I live in fear of being in the open with that psychic Sword of Damocles suspended above me. Will I ever have the courage to cross the park? The beach is lined with whitening bones and putrid flesh. I am reminded of that crust on the edge of the ocean with every breath that I take.

  15 January 2023:

  So much has happened in so few days, I scarcely know where to begin. OBUs Delta and Epsilon have been destroyed now, but an EMP bomb has been detonated above Sydney as part of Takahashi’s retaliation. Fortunately I had sealed all the equipment that I really need into EMP-proof metal cases and drums. I suppose it was my way of putting off my walk across the parkland. That was on January 7. The next day another sea-call swept over, and I did not awake until January 14. Even though I was starving, dehydrated and exhausted, I grabbed a backpack of tools and provisions and started jogging across the park. I was reduced to a shuffle after about a hundred steps, for I am neither young nor fit, but I made it. I tried to start a car, but its electronics had been fried. Instead I took a mountain bike and rode five miles to an army depot, and there I found a big, lovely diesel truck with mesh-shielded lights and electronics.

  As I write the truck is in the Miocene Institute’s parking lot, with my equipment, data, computer gear and video records. I also took some automatic weapons: two heavy machine guns, a trajectory mortar and several boxes of ammunition. I am dressed in combat gear too, with the rank of captain. Somehow I always fancied myself in the army. Tomorrow at first light I shall set off for the Jenolan caves. There I shall present Doctor Landini with my truckload of gifts. Provided that I get there, of course.

  In case I do not get through, I must trust that some day someone will attempt to reach the Miocene Institute. After all, it is the gate through which the deadly arrow from the past entered our world. If and when they do, they must find my full and honest story, because it is the key to understanding the sea-call. Indeed, I suspect that I was the subject of the original experiment by which it was tuned to work on land mammals. Okay then, for better or worse, here is my story!

  When I was at university I was a shy, withdrawn and inhibited sort of dork, but before that I had been a bright and outgoing kid. The change came when I became a regular on a children’s TV show in the 1960s. It was called the Miss Wonderful Show, can you believe it? Well, Australian television was still in its first decade and some pretty crass programmes were able to make it to air. As I said, I was only a kid at the time, and I was really approval-conscious as well. I adored Miss Wonderful, and she was a really sophisticated, beautiful, fairy godmother figure. I don’t know the woman’s real name, but she would have been in her early thirties.

  One night us regulars were on camera and live to air, trading riddles with Miss Wonderful. One of the girls asked:

  “Why did the tomato go red?”

  “I don’t know, Kerrie,” Miss Wonderful replied sweetly.

  “Because it saw the salad dressing,” the girlie replied rather smugly.

  “Why Kerrie, how embarrassing for the tomato,” replied Miss Wonderful after giving a gasp.

  I had overheard my brothers exchanging a version of this joke the day before, and they had laughed until one had had a coughing fit I did not understand their answer, but it just had to be better than Kerne’s.

  “Please Miss, I thought it was because it saw the beetroot,” I interjected.

  There was instant pandemonium. Miss Wonderful and some of the more knowledgeable children shrieked with shock, the producer tried to shield us from the camera with his body, and off in the background someone was shouting “Cut to commercials! Cut to commercials!”

  Of course I was now aware that I had unwittingly said something unspeakably rude, but I was too frightened and confused to even apologize. Just before I was dragged away to the tumbril by my father Miss Wonderful came up to me, bent over, put her face very close to mine and said “You dirty, dirty little boy!”

  I was at university before I could even bring myself to watch a television again, so great had my mortification been. I was soon told by my brothers that ‘beetroot’ was really ‘beet root’ for the purposes of the riddle, and that root was one of the many euphemisms for sex. What is sex, I asked, fearing the worst. My elder brother explained, aided by an illustrated pamphlet that he produced from under the cabinet of his record player. My sense of horror and self-loathing now went into free fall, and from that day on I went from being a bright, brash little boy to being a shy, studious little boy.

  During my first year at university I met up with a girl named Jillian. She was a bit of a prude and had no dress sense at all, so she probably suited me at the time. She was very like me, in that she had enough pride to want to be seen holding hands with someone and to have someone to eat lunch with in the cafeteria, but as for going back to her room for a bit of privacy? No way.

  Now why, you may ask, am I telling you all the sordid details of my childhood mortifications and lack of undergraduate sex life? The truth is that in 2014 I began to have luridly vivid recollections of them. At that time I had been involved with the frozen cetezoid for a decade. In 2004 an echolocator survey working a patch of trapped, ancient ice in Antarctica found the body of a small whale. It had been frozen since the Miocene, for nine million years, and was a species known as Zipiidae or beaked whale. It was fourteen feet long, weighed about a ton and a half, and had the characteristic two fighting tusks of the males of its species. It also had an unusually large brain.

  Scientifically it was a sensation. Some very fancy genetic engineering techniques were used to make male clones from its tissues, and some even fancier techniques involving DNA from modern beaked whales produced sister /daughters from the tissues as well. There was no hope of reviving the frozen body, the freezing process would have damaged its tissues beyond hope of recovery, but then someone came up with the idea of doing a section-by-section scan of its brain and mapping that in turn into one of its clones. The idea was to revive a whale with the memories of the original, and then study how it had been using that huge brain in the Miocene oceans.

  By 2014 our groundbreaking experiment was showing signs of success. The male cetezoid was displaying signs of intelligence and language, and was teaching things to a female companion. It either wouldn’t or couldn’t communicate with us, but then we were probably rather daunting to it—or so we thought. If only we had known.

  I began to have utterly vivid recollections of my past life, particularly of incidents that were excruciatingly embarrassing or stressful. The Miss Wonderful show played itself through several times as I sat at my desk, trying to work, and then one night I drifted away into a fantasy-recollection about a girl named Rosie.

  It had
been the end of the academic year, and one of my labwork partners invited me to his post-exam party. Jillian had been still studying for some honors component of a subject, but I was done for the year. I was not such a prude that I did not drink at all, but I limited it to two beers per hour and timed myself with my watch. Whatever my hangups, I did like to fit in with those I had to work with. It was only later that I discovered that someone had spiked all the open beer bottles with vodka. I was not a sufficiently seasoned drinker to tell the difference.

  Rosie had just graduated as a student teacher. The night had been hot, just like this one, and she was wearing a short cotton dress that showed off her figure to the best possible advantage. It was a really great figure, and her legs were more closely shaved than my cheeks. Jillian, by contrast, wore checked flannel shirts and jeans like a uniform. Rosie had homed in on me soon after she arrived, by which time I was just sufficiently drunk to relax a few of my defenses and inhibitions. She had a tanned and flawless skin, and was very pretty. While the party raged around us, she gave me all of her attention. I had had no experience dealing with charming, pretty women, and I was easily swept away.

  She led me outside, supposedly to get away from the noise, and in the hot, dark air beneath the gleaming stars I realized that I could touch and fondle whatever I liked without any rejection. She caressed and fondled too, and I knew that I was already totally out of control by the time her tongue licked my ear and she whispered that her place was only a few streets away. We slipped out through the back gate and walked quickly, furtively, through the narrow streets and lanes.

  The first time was across her bed, with my jeans around my ankles. Coins, keys and ballpoint pens went jingling onto the carpet. She was soft, she was marvellous, it actually felt good, better than my tethered imagination had ever dreamed possible.

  That was an accident, I told myself the next morning as I walked home with my hangover in the bright sunlight. I rumpled my bedding to make it look slept in, swallowed aspirins and coffee, then tried to think things through. After even resorting to flowcharts to work out how Rosie had relieved me of my fidelity to Jillian so easily, I concluded that my inexperience was to blame rather than myself. I had been drinking, I was relaxing after months of tension, I had limited experience of the paths to seduction. Jillian dropped in for morning coffee, and innocently talked of nothing but her exams and what the questions might be.

  Normality came screaming around my head, desperate to take me back into the fold. The night before had been a tipsy aberration, nothing more: I had to explain that to Rosie. I had to swear her to discretion, because if Jillian ever found out …

  I had left a bag with my notes and books at the party house, and I called in at noon to get it back. Big Ed, my lab partner, still had a hangover as he answered my knock at the door. He guiltily told me about the vodka in the beer, then remembered something that he had been meaning to ask me.

  “Jamie Brennan … I remember that name from somewhere, long, long ago. Been meaning to ask you about it.”

  I cringed inwardly, wondering if Ed had been a fan of the Miss Wonderful Show, and assuring myself that he could not possibly have been.

  “That’s it, the Miss Wonderful Show, back in the sixties! You told that joke about the tomato going red and she nearly wet herself. Hey, I laughed so much I fell off the chair.”

  “That was a long time ago,” I began, but Big Ed slapped me on the back.

  “Nuts to that, I thought you were great. I only watched the show because my older sisters hogged the TV and wouldn’t let me watch Superman reruns. I always wanted to see that stuck up bitch of a Miss Wonderful get hers.”

  “You—you did?”

  “Yeah! Man, that must have taken real guts. You were just a little kid and yet—oh wow!”

  “My old man took the hairbrush to me for it.”

  “Hey, what did Miss Wonderful say?”

  “She only called me a dirty little boy, but she was really pissed off.”

  “Great, great,” laughed Big Ed, slapping his knee. “Let’s have a beer to celebrate. No vodka this time, I promise.”

  “Thanks, but let me pop the can myself.”

  “Hey, how was Rosie?”

  “What? Oh no—I—er, didn’t …”

  “You didn’t? Don’t try that one on me. You get her half peeled in my backyard, you sneak out the back gate with her so fast that you forget your bag, then you come back and try to tell me that you didn’t even prong the woman! Hah.”

  “I, I—”

  “Lucky bastard! I put it to her earlier and she poured a beer down my fly. Hey Jamie, you’re up there with the winners. You know what else?”

  “I’m not sure I’m strong enough to know.”

  “She phoned here this morning and got your address. She left her phone number too, and wants you to call her.”

  Discovering that I had been a hero for over a decade without knowing it came as quite a shock. As I left Big Ed’s place and went looking for the discretion of a public phone I felt curiously elated. For the first time ever I could think back on the Miss Wonderful incident and laugh. I did not stop to reflect that my moral underpinnings had moved from rock-solid foundations to a thin plank over oblivion. I dialed Rosie’s number, and she arranged to meet me for lunch at Poynton’s Bar and Grill.

  It was a hot, sweltry afternoon. Rosie was already there when I entered, at a table for two by the window. I sat down. We drank some wine and talked about minor details of our backgrounds, including my age. She bought us lunch, two juicy, underdone steaks with French salad. We drank more wine. The conversation kept trailing away into long silences. If I say nothing, maybe this will all go away, I thought, yet I needed to tell her about Jillian.

  “You were just super last night,” she said, her voice a silky contralto, barely more than a whisper. We were sitting at right angles, her legs now pressed against my knees.

  “Don’t get much practice,” I replied, staring into the pale fluid cradled by a film of glass between my fingers. Such a thin, frail barrier, but not as thin as the cotton dress that exposed so much of her breasts and which ended at mid-thigh. “Things between me and my girlfriend, Jillian, are, er, not like that.”

  Be firm with her, my subconscious cried in despair. Last night could be excused, but to do it again would be the end of everything: my self-respect, my good name, my very self as I knew it. Tell her how sorry you are, my inner voice clamored. Tell her you love Jillian too much to betray her like that again.

  “So there’s trouble with Jillian?” Rosie asked, stroking the back of my hand. An occasional hand under the shirt was as far as I ever got with Jillian, and even that was a big concession for her.

  “No trouble, things are always quiet with Jillian.”

  I let the words hang in the balance, yet did I hope that they would tip the scales in Rosie’s direction?

  “I know that you love her, I accept that,” she answered. “She must be a really nice girl, and I do envy her in a way.”

  Now she turned her gaze to me, and lifted my face to hers with a fingertip. The words said that she would go, yet her smile said ‘follow.’ She was like the steaks we just had eaten … succulent. Grilled meat as a proposition! The rate of my pulse shot up again at the idea.

  “Look, it really was nice, with you. Nicer than … well anything. I just can’t explain it.”

  “Jamie, I’m sure it was better than it ever could be with Jillian, and do you know why?”

  I was taken off guard. I opened my mouth to protest, then closed it and shook my head instead.

  “Because it was naughty, it was just a little wicked. You need a little guilt for something to be really nice. Jamie, I’ve had a lot of boyfriends, but they tried to hold me down, take me over. Now I’m my own boss, yet I like a bit of steady company with some spice thrown in. You’re nice, you’re really bright, and you’re a good screw as well. Too good to hold back. I bet you’re getting nothing from Jillian, that’s what you m
eant before, isn’t it?”

  “Rosie, it’s not that sort of—”

  “Yes, I know, but I’ll tell you what: keep your true romance with her, but come over to my place for a night or two every week and let the animal out to have a run.”

  This was my watershed, this was where the battered knight could polish his armor as bright as the sun itself, or slip from his saddle and wallow in the mud. This was the difference between a hero redeemed and a filthy betrayer. I was on the balance. If I did nothing for long enough her composure would crack. She would cry, or get annoyed, or flirt with the barman. All you have to do is nothing, shouted my inner voice.

  I slowly raised my hand … and as it descended the scales tipped, and I tumbled from my saddle. My hand came down on her thigh, with my thumb on bare flesh and my fingers on cotton fabric.

  “Can the animal have a run on afternoons too?” I asked, aware that I was falling freely, irredeemably, yet savouring that lush and heady moment of surrender that stretched into hours. She nodded.

  It was my second seduction by Rosie. No, I had done the seducing that time, because she had made it very clear that I had to ask—even though the answer was an assured yes. We walked from Poynton’s Bar and Grill to her place without holding hands, and at a brisk pace.

  We were not at all like lovers.

  That moment, that hand descending to that thigh, was a turning point in my life. The fairytale relationship with Jillian dragged on for a few months more while I indulged in a great deal of sex with Rosie at every opportunity. On the surface it was an ideal way to have things, and when it finally became unstuck the parting was amicable.