Ella Falconer leads Rick off in the other direction, telling him that her people are camped out in one of the big houses on the hill there, amazing place with a goddamn garden underground if you can believe it.
“Sure. I used to live up there, once upon a time.”
The old woman grunts, as if she thinks that Rick is kidding her. “What are you going to do,” she asks, “now it’s all over?”
“Find some place to settle down. I’m married, you know.” Lena. He wonders what she is doing, as she wonders about him.
“There’ll be plenty of territory for everyone.”
“Jesus, I’m not thinking of that. Push out past the Trackless Mountains with my wife and kids and a cow? I guess I’m not brave enough for that. There are some trees I’d like to look at, though, real old trees high in the mountains. Maybe there are fossils to be found, too. I’ll count growth rings and put the fossil record in order and think about weather systems.”
“Funny thing to want to do with the rest of your life. Pardon me for saying so.”
Rick hefts the case. “Oh, I have this to look after, besides. I have to go to Freeport anyway, one of my friends came from there, you understand, maybe it’ll take me in, give me a place to set up a library, a place where people can come to find out what they need.” The Agricultural Institute that Rivington ran, they might help. He sees it as a kind of memorial, for David de Ramaira, for Jonah Rivington. Maybe even for Earth.
The old woman says, “Well, good luck to you, mister. But watch out you don’t start up a religion by mistake. All that learning, it’s dangerous stuff.”
“You don’t have to tell me,” Rick says.
They start up the path that winds widdershins around the hill. Gravel glints in the circle of Rick’s lamp; stripped tree branches mesh overhead. Night.
Miguel can scent the sea now, as he nears the crest of the last ridge, feeling his way in darkness amongst slender leafless trees. All around, the vast quiet countryside. The trail widens and he walks in moonlight across the bare ridgetop and sees a wide sandy beach curving below. A huge bonfire is burning down there. Orange flames throw the shadows of the people who stand around the fire far across pale sand. For a moment his old instincts reassert themselves and he halfturns, ready to retrace his steps.
—Things have changed, Miguel. Everyone is a dingo now.
It is the ghost of a familiar voice.
The man looks around and then remembers, and walks to the edge of the ridge looking down at the bonfire on the beach. Out to sea, Cerberus is setting. Its mottled face, not quite full and thus seeming to be shyly averted, kisses the joint of sea and sky. Its light defines the horizon line. Maybe the people down there are from the city, maybe from the settlements; anyway, they won’t know much about living in the Outback. He thinks of the wire he has. He can show them how to make snares to catch rabbits, teach them which plants are safe to eat. He could do with a blanket and maybe a good pair of boots. It would be a fair exchange. “A new world, huh?” he says, and starts on down the trail, toward the people.
“Hell,” Ella Falconer says, breathing hard from the climb, “willya look at all those fires!”
“En’ of the worl’,” the dog comments.
They have come around the hill to face the city from a higher vantage. It stretches under the fitful moonlight, no lights along the gridded streets but the flicker of scattered fires, a hundred at least. There is a huge fire burning along the waterfront, flames mirrored in black water.
Rick and Ella Falconer stand and watch it for a while. The dog settles at the old woman’s feet, indifferent. It is not interested in the future, knows only the everblooming present moment, overlapping frames that seem only to rise out of an undefinable chaos. But Rick understands the processes of chaos, knows that in any dynamically unstable system—climate, the flow of blood through the heart, human society—there are butterfly points when the smallest motion can tip it into a new cycle. A word, a breath, the faintest stir of a butterfly’s wing. Even nothing at all. The femtowatt signal that never came: and now the burning city.
“If we don’t move it tomorrow,” Ella Falconer says at last, “we’ll have nothing but ashes to take back. Well, it’s the end of an era we’re seeing down there. Something to tell your children about, young man.”
“I don’t think of it as an ending,” Rick says. “The way I look at it, it’s a beginning.”
L’ENVOI
A Wreath of Stars
The aborigines walk down the forest path two by two, tall and slender and limber as saplings. Eight, ten, twelve, fourteen of them. It is late summer. Wan orange sunlight slants in dusty lanes between the trees and the dappled hides of the aborigines glisten as they pass through pool after pool of light. Each carries on its shoulder a small parcel wrapped in a tight weave of grass-stems, the centre of a cloud of furiously dancing insects.
Two by two, the aborigines pass a ragged section of ruined wall, so smothered in moss that only its straight line shows that once there was a building here. Once, there were many buildings here.
After the aborigines have passed, a little emerald green lizard slithers from a crevice and, finding a pool of sunlight, erects gossamer thin membranes along its back to catch the warmth, puffs up its throat ready to sing. But something else is coming along the trail, noisier and less certain than the aborigines. The lizard’s membranes deflate as suddenly as burst soap bubbles; then the patch of sunlight is empty again.
A moment later, two humans push through the fat vines which overhang the trail there, a woman and a small boy of ten or so. “But how do you know they are going there?” the boy asks. He is barechested; his chest and back and hands are stained with earth and green smears from tracking the aborigines through the forest. A wreath or chaplet of the glossy white flowers of quaking vine is woven into his elf-locked blond hair. There is a knife thrust through the belt of his jeans.
“Because they go there every year at this time,” the tall young woman says patiently.
“Why?”
“That’s what we’re going to see.” The woman pulls on the strap of her semiautomatic rifle. “Come on, Davy. Keep asking me questions, it’ll be over by the time we catch up.”
The track widens, grows straighter. Here and there, slabs of the old concrete roadway tilt up, covered with webbed tree roots or the big orange or red circles of stonewort. The walls of ruined buildings can be seen through the trees, sketching the perspective of a street swamped by green boles, climbing creepers, banks of moss.
The woman leads the boy through a press of trees to the edge of a wide clearing where a lake reflects the cloudless indigo sky. On the far side, a huge building rises out of the forest, white and square-edged, twice, three times the height of the tallest tree.
The woman presses the boy’s shoulder, kneels beside him. “There, Davy. You see them?”
The aborigines squat on a shelf of concrete that juts over mirror-smooth water, their double-jointed knees higher than their heads as they bend to the task of unwrapping the woven grass coverings of their parcels. Just beyond the slab, poles rise crookedly from the water. Each bears a long animal skull which has been daubed with a stripe of red pigment.
The woman pulls the boy down beside her in the tall grass at the edge of the tree, puts a grubby finger to his lips (she is as dirty as he is, her sleeveless shirt and loose cotton trousers sweat-stained besides) when he begins to frame a question. “Just watch,” she whispers. “We can talk about it afterward.”
The boy nods, suddenly solemn. He had known that there was to be a test, one in what seems like him to be an endless series of tests, and now here it is. He settles himself as comfortably as he can, and watches.
The aborigines have all finished unwrapping their parcels; no, one squats a little way from the others, his parcel still tightly bound. One by one, the others pick up the pieces of bloody meat they have carried all this way, walk to the edge of the slab and with a strange twisting motion sling t
he meat far out into the water. As each walks back to its place, the next steps up until they are all done, all but the one with the still wrapped parcel. Out in the lake, the water boils furiously as thousands of tiny fish swarm through a spreading slick of blood.
All of the aborigines are watching the one with the still-wrapped parcel. It rises, and despite the distance, the boy can see the scarring at its crotch which shows that it is a shaman. It leaves its fellows and crosses the clearing, disappearing into the forest.
The boy whispers, “Is it over?”
“Not yet, Davy. Watch.”
The aborigines stand motionless on the slab. Behind them, the surface of the lake smooths itself, dark as the dark sky. Watching them from the tall grass, the boy fidgets, brushing at tiny insects which keep landing on his forehead to sip his sweat. Then he sees the shaman returning to the clearing, and is still again, intent.
The shaman carries a green pole twice its own height, a sapling trimmed of its branches. The other aborigines fall back as it stoops and unrolls the woven covering from the animal skull. Swiftly, stepping high as if in distaste, the shaman wades out with skull and sapling to the clustered poles. In one smooth continuous motion it plants the sapling deep into the muddy bottom, sets the skull on top and wipes a hand over it, leaving a glistening swathe of red. As it wades back to the shore, the other aborigines begin to drift away from the lake, scattering across the clearing and plunging into the forest. The shaman is the last of them. Then the clearing is empty. Beyond the concrete shelf, the new skull nods on its pole among its fellows.
The woman stands, slinging her rifle over her shoulder. The boy asks, “Are you going to tell me why they did that, or is that the test?”
“First you must answer my questions, Davy. Then we’ll see if you want to ask yours again.”
They cross the clearing to the shelf. The woman pulls off her boots and sits at the mossy edge, dabbling her toes in the cold water. The stubby barrel of her rifle sticks up by her ear. There is an ossifrage—wings curled back and talons widespread, in the moment of plummeting on its prey—tattooed in black on the smooth ball of her shoulder. She did it herself on her thirteenth birthday, with a sewing needle and lampblack and a mirror.
The boy sits beside her, looking up at the building on the far side of the water. Ten, eleven, twelve storeys, twice as tall as anything in Freeport. A few spindly trees grow on its flat roof, catching the light of the sun.
The woman says, “Tell me why the aborigines are intelligent, Davy.”
The boy says quickly, because he has been expecting to be questioned about the aborigines ever since he and his aunt began to follow them through the wooded ruins, “They use tools. Spears to kill animals, stone knives to butcher the carcasses. They weave containers to carry water, build huts to live in. They communicate with each other, sing of the land and the way it changes. In each village, one aborigine gives up the right to reproduce so that it can pass knowledge from one generation to the next. The making of each new shaman is marked by a ceremony for which a mire boar is especially killed, its skull lifted on a pole, just like those.” The boy points at the cluster of skulls lifted on their poles above the black water.
“Good. Now tell me why the aborigines are only animals.”
The boy smiles. He is used to this kind of turn and turn again questioning, cure for the arrogance of certainty. “Many kinds of animals use tools. Hive rats set stakes around the entrances to their burrows; certain birds use thorns to dig insects out of rotten wood. Weaverbirds use grass just as the aborigines do, in building their nests. Humans can improvise tools, but like animals aborigines always make a tool in the same way, and always use it in the same way. Humans use fire, to keep warm, to cook meat so that parasites are destroyed. Aborigines have no fires and devour their meat raw, like any beast of prey. In many social animals, individuals sacrifice reproduction for the good of the whole, as in hive rats again, or in the lookouts of Muir oxen, which draw predators from the young of the herd but never give birth themselves. The activities of the aborigines which we call ceremonies are no more complicated than the ritual behaviour of many animals; because we want to think that the aborigines are intelligent we see meanings in their behaviour that are not really there. And although the aborigines have a high degree of vocal skill, just as we do, the difference is that we try and talk to the aborigines, but they never talk to us.”
“All right, Davy. But we’re not quite done.” She paused. This is the test which her niece, Davy’s sister, failed. If Davy doesn’t pass the library will pass out of the direct lineage for the first time in its history. She says, “We have to suppose that you have charge of the books. Someone comes to you and asks of a way to kill aborigines. Would you tell him?”
“No. Killing aborigines is against the law of the Council of Fifteen.”
“Another person comes to you, someone you only suspect may want to harm aborigines, perhaps the wife of the first. She asks for a way to make a poison which will kill hive rats. Knowing that the same poison will kill aborigines, do you give her the knowledge?”
Davy rubs slow circles in the dirt with one finger, thinking hard. At last, he says, “I have to tell her, don’t I? I’m not allowed to judge whether someone is going to use knowledge in a good way or a bad way, if they don’t tell me. Otherwise the library would become an arm of the law, and we would set ourselves up as judges of everyone who comes to use it. That’s what this city did, aunt, yes?”
“More or less. Do you still want to ask your question, Davy?”
“Oh. About why they threw the meat to the fishes, you mean? I don’t know. I guess not. I mean, we can’t know for true why they do things can we? It isn’t fair on them to guess…it would be like wishing they were like us.” He looks sideways at the woman. His wreath of quaking vine flowers has slipped over one ear. “Is that right?”
“Yes, Davy.”
“And is that all? Have I passed?”
She smiles. “Yes, Davy. You have. This test, at least.”
“I hoped there wouldn’t be any more, but I guess I’ve a long way to go.” Then he grins and flings his arms back and shouts, “I passed!”
When the echoes have died away, his aunt says, “You know that we can’t truly understand why the aborigines come here every year, but if you want I can tell you a story which might help you understand, a little.”
“Is this about great-grandfather, the time when the city fell?”
“Uh-huh. You already know some of it. You know about his friend, from Earth.”
“Sure.” The boy lies back on sunwarmed concrete, lifting the flowers from his hair and setting them on his bare chest.
His aunt looks down at him fondly, and with relief. “Listen,” she says, and as the sun sinks, and the lake grows darker and the shadow of the tall building lengthens toward them, she tells Davy about the computer that was too proud to serve, of its plan to rule people fallen from grace, of how that plan was frustrated and how the machine was drowned deep in the lake, with the Earthman and the stolen children and eggs of the aborigines.
When she is done, the first stars are pricking the sky, quiveringly reflected in the calm black lake. Charon’s textured fleck of light has lifted above the tall building, visibly climbing the sky in its hurtling retrograde flight. A breeze has sprung up, and the empty-eyed skulls nod on their poles, making notched ticks like so many erratic clocks. The woman leans over the edge of the concrete shelf and drinks a handful of water to ease her aching throat. It is a long story, and not yet over, never over unless the library should fail.
The boy sits up, gazing at the building. Its empty windows seem to stare down at him, like vertical lines of skull eyes. The garland has dropped to his lap and he turns the loop of waxy flowers in his fingers. “Do you think the aborigines know, about their children?”
“I don’t know, Davy,” she says and picks up her rifle. It is time to go. Davy’s mother waits anxiously among the ruins of the city’s suburb
s; the need to tell her the great good news flutters like a bird inside the woman’s breastbone.
“I suppose only they really know.” Davy stands too, looking around at the ruins. “Do you think there will ever be a ship from Earth again, one day?”
“I don’t know. But it’s nice to think so, isn’t it?”
The boy says, as if he’s just thought of it for the first time, “That’s why the library is so important. So when if people do come here from Earth we can meet them as equals, we’ll know they’re only people like us. Not gods, like that machine wanted to be.”
“It’s late, Davy. Come on, your mother will want you to tell her how well you’ve done.”
But the boy pauses for a moment. He stoops and picks up the garland and with a quick motion throws it out across the lake before turning away to follow his aunt. Behind him, the constellation of white flowers floats apart across the mirror of the stars.
Secret Harmonies Page 33
