New Worlds 4
Page 29
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April ‘93 (letter)
... I was talking with David Bellamy at a faculty supper. Apparently on the island of Tasmania there’s a swathe of forest that no lumberjack will touch, or even go near. These are hard-assed, hardwood-hating, moneyseeking, western, ‘exploitation-vegetation’ (as we call the logging companies). But they won’t access Gordon Valley for love, money, or even more money! And the place is riddled with archaic Corylus, seeded there in ‘82, and now widely spread. Each Corylus hazel seems to create a circle of protection among the native trees, which include mahogany and the so-called Dragon trees with their huge buttresses, a circle about four hundred yards in diameter. Bellamy said he’d heard these called Charisma Zones. To go into them was either frightening or awe-inspiring. He said he’d wanted to stay in the valley for ever and had to forcibly control what he called an emotional-overload in order to get out. But - loggers unwilling to cut the trees? Odd, to say the least.
At the same supper, listening to the same conversation, was Jack Cohen, an embryologist and science-fiction fan, I think. Do you know him? He apparently goes to sci-fi conventions and gives crazy, right-on lectures about alien biologies. He’d heard that the Corylus avellana seeded in Tasmania are transgenic, he’s not sure how, and will arrange for me to meet Crick’s assistant in the Botany department. They’re playing with all manner of genetic matchmaking, as they call it, of plants.
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May ‘93 (letter)
...It’s human DNA! I can hardly believe it. The Corylus avellana archeotypes have been ‘infected’ with twenty gene-sequences selected from various human chromosomes (I was told which ones, but it didn’t mean a lot to me), complex sequences that between them contain some, though not all -but enough - of the coding that combines to create the chemical and behavioural attributes we call charisma; the effect that some people have when they walk into a room, or talk to you - you feel drawn to them, you feel in their shadow, but you’re content, it’s a form of nurture - you can’t touch, but they can hold you so close. They can elicit fear, or respect, but mostly well being - what Americans are increasingly calling the feelgood factor, as Hollywood’s own charisma cuts through the neural networks of the American psyche, leaving only sentimentality and redemption as the Theme of Life.
Charisma!
They ‘ ve apparently set up small intrusions of transgenic hazel wood in fifty forest locations, each with the Group-DNA-sequences from a different charismatic individual.
The way it works is to do with the trehalose sugar-glass. The hazel tree exudes the charisma factor, which is protected in fluid glass and contained in molecular tubes of Buckminsterfullerine, a complex of hexagonal and pentagonal carbon rings that form together like a football but which can also link to form incredibly resistant, single-molecular thickness tubes, theoretically with no limit to their length! Each breeze in the rainforest, or temperate woodland, carries millions of these charisma packages to the foliage of the native trees, where they’re absorbed through pores into the leaves, and disseminated through the sap system to individual cells. The ‘bucky-tubes’ seem able to enter the transport systems of each plant cell through the exits in the cell membrane from the reticular system, which accumulates and pumps out cell products. Everything is in reverse, then - the human genes, linked with Corylus avellana’s reverse transcriptase and a so-called ‘seek and find’ gene that targets the nuclear membrane, enters it, and allows for the stitching into the cells of the tropical hardwood (or whatever) of the viral DNA, thus allowing a gigantic and long-established hardwood to produce some of the thousands of human pheromones that can combine to create the aura of charisma.
By the way - you remember the refugium in Wycome Wood? When you hugged and kissed the trees, and called them ‘wonderful’ and ‘so, so precious’ and ‘my special luvvies’?
They were carrying the pooled DNA of five years of British Oscar winners!
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September ‘93 (letter)
... It’s not easy getting details of the charismatic Corylus intrusions. The original requests for DNA were made surreptitiously, but the ‘Charisma Set’ got to hear of it, through the grapevine, in no time at all. There were thousands of applications to donate DNA - from politicians, actors, explorers, religious leaders, ex-hostages, painters, writers, newspaper moguls, athletes, comedians, TV presenters - it’s astonishing how these people define their own charisma. How many believe the fake charisma of public notoriety is somehow to do with them.
Of course, money talked in its own persuasive dialect, as has politics, which is to say ‘blackmail’.
But on the whole, the charisma - which of course is to be used to protect and preserve the woodlands - has been acquired by general agreement.
A notable success, for example, is the Clint Eastwood Corylus pinewood up in Montana. They call it Make-My-Day wood, and it’s flourishing - mainly because no one dares go near it.
The various GellerGroves - using Uri Geller’s DNA - are also having a remarkable effect. Although his spoonbending was probably a trick, his ability to stop wrist-watches seems to have been genuine. But inside a GellerGrove, time doesn’t just stop, its accumulated events vanish, facilitating peace meetings between enemy states that can be undertaken without the burden of history.
The hugely promoted Papwoods of Madonna have been successful too -they’re so tacky and forgettable, nobody bothers with them.
Not all the Corylus refugia are working as well as these. The so-called Ed Kennedy copses in New England have deteriorated into shallow lakes and marshes, now used by the locals to dump their old cars. And four hundred miles from Manaus, in the Caruari region of the Brazilian rainforest, the charismatic Corylus intrusion actually seemed to encourage the loggers and drug companies in the mindless exploitation of the local flora, causing much suffering. After several years of such abuse, however, the Corylus were suddenly found strangled with creeper; Thatcher wood has now been deemed a failure and will be cut down.
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November ‘93 (scrawled letter)
... I can’t bear it. I’ve been hysterical with rage for a week. I should have written to you at once, but sometimes I’m not strong enough to face my own despair.
Phil is in hospital, very badly hurt. He went back to Hockley Mere to take a second core, to try to establish if the charcoal feature that was discovered when you were with us was the result of human clearance by a Sapiens group, closely related to Sapiens Neanderthalis, remains of which have recently been found in abundance in Spain; it’s a human group which might have spread over the fabled landbridge between Brittany and Dorset that we now know existed 80,000 years ago.
The Nighthawks must have been waiting for him, or perhaps he disturbed one of their digging operations. They threw him in the shallow mere, tied up with oiled motorcycle chains, and his skull cracked by a blow from a flint hammer, which they discarded. They’d stuck a red-kite’s carcase on an ash-pole by his unconscious body, carved with - can you believe it? - early Latin. The words meant ‘Finding is keeping. If you spy, you die.’
The arrogance, the confidence in this display of territoriality, seems to confirm what Phil always suspected - it’s the millionaire collectors, the black market, the art world that is behind the Nighthawks. And our government gets a nice little earner in tax to deny it’s happening, because questions aren’t asked, and objects don’t have to be catalogued, just so long as the monetary transaction in ‘sale of art’ appears on the simplest of tax forms. We’re so obsessed with the fine details of select committee reports, rulings, debates and decisions on our heritage, that we forget how easy it is to bribe the establishment to ignore the question of what is being traded, or exploited, by simply being honest about the amount of money its being traded for~
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Late February ‘94 (fax)
... You remember the woods near Hockley Mere? Three sets of men’s clothes - leathers, underclothes, masks, boots, chains - plus metal det
ectors were found in a Corylus grove, strung to branches with ivy, just last week. No sign of bodies, or signs of a struggle. And it turns out it’s a Charisma wood too! But there’s a certain cageyness about exactly whose charisma. There are five ‘closed files’, according to Jack Cohen. Five woods, world-wide, that are ‘outside’ the main experiment. Cambridge is completely silent on the nature - even the location - of those five. Hockley Mere has ‘leaked’ - in part at least - but I hear already that the army is moving in.
What happened to the Nighthawks? Charisma can’t kill, can it? It can’t be the trees tying the clothes up... Can it? What happened to the bodies?
~ * ~
Later note by post:
I just found out Phil was down there at the time, went there after discharging himself from hospital. But he wasn’t around when the discovery of the discarded clothes was made, or at least no one saw him. He’s not been seen for several days, in fact. I’m seriously worried, now. I’m going down to Hockley Mere to take a look - I’ll call you tomorrow if all’s well.
~ * ~
March ‘94 (handwritten notes on lined paper)
...The whole area around Hockley Mere has been sealed off: lakes and woods, fields and farms, the army and police are everywhere, and rangers, and paramilitaries. It’s like a scene from a movie. Army trucks are in and out along the main road in a constant stream.
I caught up with Phil in the Dancing Poachers. He’s managed to dig in, at Hockley, a sort of hide, close enough to the woods to see the activity at closer hand, but it’s risky.
The main thing he’s observed is that a stretch-limo arrives every day, driving slowly into the cluster of lorries, portacabins and tents that have been erected at the lake-side perimeter of Hockley wood. Always a cluster of people around the limo, and much activity out of sight, moving towards the woods.
Who’s inside, Phil hasn’t seen or managed to find out yet.
Meanwhile, locals talk about the two lost kids, both in their teens, both keen on fishing in the scatter of ponds around the main lake itself. They’d gone missing three days before. Just their clothes found, neatly packaged at the woodland edge ...
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March ‘94 (postcard)
Two army privates, who came into the Poachers for a drink, were talking about ‘missing’ friends. They were getting scared of the Hockley Mere duty, talking about asking for a transfer. They clammed up when Phil came and sat down nearby, but the landlady, an easy-going woman, got talking to them later. Five of their unit have gone missing, it seems, and the rest are badly affected by going anywhere near the trees - a dizzying sense of dislocation, void, emptiness, a feeling of being far flung, helplessly travelling towards a strong, guiding light.
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March ‘94 (postcard, same post)
Out of body experiences? Or maybe that odd experience during near death when you seem to be going down a tunnel towards an ‘angelic’ light? Who knows? I can’t get close enough to find out. Rumour in the ‘scientific’ world, by the way, is that the charisma is Billy Graham’s, but I’m sure Praise-The-Lord wood (the trees wave their upper branches in unison) is in the USA somewhere.
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Early April ‘94 (fax)
… Curiouser and curiouser: a constant stream of experts on what I hear is being called ‘Imaginative Time’ are being bussed in from around the world. Many of them stop off at the Poachers’. By all accounts they are as confused by the happenings at the Charisma wood as the locals.
You’ll probably know some of the writers among them: they’ve been brought in because of their expertise in the relationship between time and imagination: Aldiss to advise on the Jurassic; Priest on the Edwardian; Moorcock and Silverberg on the End of Time itself; Kushner and de Lint on time as it runs in the realm of Faerie; Tuttle on lost futures; Bear, Baxter, McAuley on Big Science. Several others. There are musicians - Birtwhistle, Chris Dench, Laurie Anderson, the younger Taverner, folk singers plus pipes and hurdy-gurdies, Aboriginal musicians plus flutes and drums, Hawkwind.
All of them go into Hockley wood, near the shallow lake, and sometimes you can hear music. On their return they are debriefed at length before being bussed to their hotel, exhausted and frightened, and sworn to secrecy.
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April ‘94 (postcard)
Two of the writers have vanished: just their clothes found, oddly intertwined, plus a few frantically scribbled sentences from each, nothing coherent, although in the man’s case, startlingly enigmatic. They’ll be greatly missed by their fans.
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Late April ‘94 (scrawled letter)
... A great deal of consternation. Rumour has it that something in the charisma of the wood is functioning in a way that was not expected. Each day, the stretch-limo brings the Charisma Source, the only man who can control his inadvertent creation. Master of the Id! In the Dancing Poachers, the talk is all of the stars ‘spinning and swirling above Hockley, like a heavenly whirlpool’ a phenomenon witnessed by several local - and sober - people, although the effect lasted for just a few seconds.
A friend in the department of paleontology at Cambridge, someone who’s always on the case in his quiet manner, has slipped me a note: new studies of bone fragments, collected in Victorian times from pits and excavations in the Hockley area that probably reached, during the digging, to levels representing fifty to one hundred thousand years Before Present, seem to be of modern man. Something about the teeth: lacunae in two molars show signs of having been produced by a metal drill! Sounds like one of those urban myths, doesn’t it? But there’s a real buzz of activity in the department. Someone’s taking it seriously.
By the way, I see you’ve been invited to participate, along with others on the new list. Let me know when you’re coming to Hockley.
~ * ~
May ‘94 (letter)
... It’s Hawking’s! The charisma DN A, I mean. The Cambridge mathematician who has visualized so much of the beginning of the universe. It’s Hawking himself who arrives each day in the stretch-limo. He’s trying to reverse the defensive field of the charisma trees at Hockley, to make them bring back the lives that have been set adrift in time!
It was so obvious, I suppose. Hawking’s charisma is substantially related to his imagination, and his total engagement with Imaginative Time, an expression that turns out to be his coinage. The hazelwood has formed a tunnel from the beginning to the end of the universe as it exists for the wood, and they use it, as do all the Corylus woods, to protect themselves, not understanding - how can they? They are not sentient - that they are destroying life.
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May ‘94 (postcard)
One of the writers who disappeared three weeks ago has returned, grotesquely naked and dishevelled, aged by many years, his flesh hanging from him in fatty rags. He stumbled from the wood clutching a strange flower, and was hastened away to the interview rooms to tell his story. I hear that he is insisting on ‘going back’ - he’s met someone - but he will not say to where. Something has happened to him and he no longer belongs in his own time. But he has been through the tunnel and survived! I hear talk that it is the trees themselves that have brought him back and sent him as an envoy, an emissary, to communicate with Hawking about what must be done to protect human life, while the imagination is allowed to access the views of past and future inside the hazelwood. Perhaps sentience exists after all!
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June ‘94 (scrawled letter on back of manuscript sheet)
Rob - This may be my last letter - not sure - Phil has found a way through the military fence. We’re going into Hockley wood tonight. It’s an opportunity that we have to take - I can’t explain it except to say it feels right. I’m drawn to Hockley. Charisma? Of course. But I don’t want to think too rationally at the moment, I just need to hold Phil’s hand and enter the flow of time. I know you’re coming up soon, but I really can’t wait for you. I have to go now into the flow.
By all the signs, that flow
is backwards, and to that time of the intriguing forest fire, which I now think was probably started by the first unwilling travellers, the Nighthawks. I want to come back, of course, but... well, there’s no guaranteeing. How to communicate with you from so far in the past I haven’t a clue, unless I scratch a letter on ivory. I’m prompted to suggest this by something Phil heard from the Nighthawks, way back, when they tried to kill him. They’d been over the Hockley area pretty thoroughly, but mostly Bad Finds: and the Bad Finds included a stack of bones with what looked like writing on them, which they assumed were some ‘freak show’ and were disposed of.
If you ever locate Bad Find Pit, search among those bones for a letter from Rebecca.
I hope you don’t get asked for postage!
~ * ~
Rob Holdstock’s penultimate words to me were: ‘I’ll be in touch in July.’ I’m still waiting to hear from him.
Somehow or other.
David Garnett