“Don’t you believe we have souls?” asks Sam.
The professor rearranges a pile of papers on his desk and groans. “I am a scientist. I’ve studied every cell in the human body but I have yet to see the slightest sliver of soul under my microscope.”
There’s a slight pause, then, as politely as she can, Sam interjects. “But just because we can’t see something doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist, does it? Perhaps it was a really cheap microscope.”
He reels back as if she’s slapped him in the face. “Not so! My mommy bought that microscope. She always bought me the best!”
He explains mournfully that his mother’s generosity was to compensate for the fact that she never visited him at boarding school or sent him cherry pie like the other boys’ mothers and that she’d even missed his graduation day.
Sam can only sympathize with him. “I’m sure it was a great microscope. Maybe it’s just that no one has made a lens powerful enough to see the human soul yet.”
“Until they do, I remain sceptical,” insists Professor Farthy. “I’m a scientist, I need scientific proof that the soul exists, which I truly doubt.”
He grabs a rack of test tubes from Lola, who is playing a tune on them, then flings himself back in his chair, eyes glazed, mouth gaping.
“I might have proof when I’m dead,” he drawls. “But as I intend to have myself cryonically preserved and cured of whatever vile disease carries me off, the truth will be a long time a-coming.”
The prospect of immortality cheers him up no end. He vaults out of his chair and asks if they’d like to visit his clients. They are preserved like human ice lollies out the back.
I hope you’re wearing a vest. It’s bitterly cold here in the Room of Temporary Rest. Although Lola removed her costume after she left the airport, she still has her slippers on, which provide much needed warmth. Sam and Kitty are shivering.
Beau Farthy draws their attention to a row of human-sized churns, dabbing the end of his nose before the drip hanging off it turns into an icicle.
“Each dewar contains one of my clients,” he exclaims, slapping the side of the nearest churn and chatting to the contents. “Howdy, Mr Dwight. Brought some visitors to see you.”
He undoes the lid. As a cloud of liquid nitrogen escapes, he encourages Sam to look inside. She isn’t squeamish, but she hesitates; she’s never seen a corpse before. Could it be a more scary sight than Aunt Candy first thing in the morning? She swallows hard then peeks at Mr Dwight.
“He looks very dead to me, Professor.”
Beau Farthy waves his arms wildly, shushing her and putting his finger to his lips. “I reject that observation; my patients aren’t dead, their lives are on hold. Their brains were still functioning when they arrived, which is more than can be said for some folks.”
He smiles sarcastically at Sam. She’s tempted to throw her voice and make Mr Dwight say something rude, but she desists; she doesn’t want him to lose his dignity any more than he already has, crammed into an ice box like a piece of pork past its sell-by date.
“Mr Dwight is not dead!” repeats the Professor, “He’s in a state of suspension, like a hibernating turtle. Before his brain stopped, I cooled him down to a temperature at which he no longer requires oxygen; breathing is not an issue for him. His organs remain as fresh as a daisy – have a sniff!”
Nobody wants to, so he closes the dewar lid with a bang and, rubbing his hands together, asks if they’d like to see his horses.
“Do you have stables, Professor Farthy?”
“No, but I sure do have a big refrigerator.”
Sam and Kitty are led to another room. Sporting a pair of mittens, Beau Farthy removes what looks like an ice-cube tray from a chiller cabinet. In each section there’s a translucent embryo no bigger than the snotty chick in an under-boiled egg.
“Race horses! Future champions. Say, would you ladies like to see my bulls?”
There’s no polite answer to that. Sam, Kitty and Lola are treated to the entire contents of the fridge, which contains not only bull embryos but endangered species from around the globe, including the Sumatran tiger and the giant panda.
“Only last year a wild cat was born after its frozen embryo was implanted into a domestic cat – a total success!” whoops the professor. “Which sure does give me hope for Mr Dwight. I see no reason why I can’t restore him to the peak of health some sunny day.”
Except that Mr Dwight wasn’t a wild cat; he was an insurance salesman – and he was a whole lot bigger than a kitten embryo. Sam finds it hard to share Professor Farthy’s optimism.
“Have you thawed out any patients yet?”
He avoids the issue by showing them what else he’s got in his freezer: three pots of yogurt, half a pizza and rack upon rack of individual human cells stored in frozen vials.
“Looky here now, skin cells! They were grown in my laboratory. Entire organs can be grown – here’s a kidney that I made earlier; so sleek, so shiny…” He rubs the kidney lovingly across his cheek then produces a liver. “I could transplant one organ after another, endlessly,” he enthuses. “Completely negating the ageing process.”
“Have you got any brain cells?” asks Sam.
He looks in the salad box as if they might be in there somewhere, but it’s empty.
“I’ll grow brain cells in jars and use them to replace the ones that die in my head. I’ll build nano-robots smaller than bacteria. They will float around my arteries repairing my body. Hot diggerty, I will be the immortal Professor Farthy!”
It’s a remarkable vision of the future, but it doesn’t appeal to Sam. She worries about Mr Dwight. If he were revived in a hundred years’ time, the world he knew would have changed beyond recognition. His friends and family would all be dead. Wouldn’t he be lonely? Beau Farthy leans against the chiller cabinet and refuses to catch her eye.
“Friends and family? Never had much to do with them. Too busy putting lives on hold.”
“Family is very important to me,” Sam tells him. “Did my father ever have an appointment with you? His name is John Tabuh.”
Beau Farthy keeps his records immaculately. He whips out his address book and dons a pair of white cotton gloves so that he doesn’t soil the pages.
“Tabuh?”
He drags his finger down a list of names, each of which has a list of appointment times against it. “Let me see now. Tabard … Tabbidge … ah, here we are!”
There it is, in black and white. John Tabuh had kept an appointment with Beau Farthy two years ago at three minutes past three, third of March. The professor closes his address book.
“Your daddy had an enquiring mind, but he couldn’t grasp the notion of cryonics.”
“He’s a magician,” explains Sam.
“That figures – he would keep producing frozen organs from behind my ear. He implied that I could never bring Mr Dwight back to life and I had to remind him that, as a scientist, I knew a whole lot more about life and death than he did – that’s when he said a strange thing.”
“What was it?” asks Sam. “Can you remember? It might be really important.”
Beau Farthy remembers only too well. “He said, and I quote, ‘Professor, in your opinion, would it be scientifically possible to bring a person back to life by using the power of the mind?’”
“Well, do you?” asks Kitty.
The professor thinks for a while then announces that, as the power of the mind has been scientifically proven to heal the body on occasions, he couldn’t rule it out entirely.
“But I sure hope it doesn’t happen too often, or I’ll be outta business.”
By now, Lola is bored. The conversation is of no interest to an orang-utan, so she slopes off unnoticed, back to the room full of dewars. Meanwhile, Professor Farthy has just mentioned that John Tabuh had been very keen to reserve a dewar for his father.
“He seemed mighty anxious that his daddy might die before he’d fulfilled some mission or other. If that situation occu
rred, he asked if I could freeze the old man until such time as he’d completed it and then defrost him. I turned him down, of course.”
“Why?” asks Sam.
“Your grandaddy would have to get here within an hour of his heart stopping. There’s no way he could travel all the way from New Guinea to Arizona in time.”
“Grandpa lives in New Guinea?” It’s the first she’s heard of it.
“Sure thing. John said the old man had lived there all his days and would never leave, not physically anyhow. He said his father could leave his body at will and travel anywhere he pleased. I call that poppycock but—”
“I call it teleporting,” says Kitty, who for once has remembered the correct word.
“Call it what you will,” replies Farthy. “Teleportation has no scientific basis whatsoever. Anyone who tells you otherwise is a crank.”
Sam doesn’t like to hear her father and Kitty dismissed as cranks.
“Aren’t scientists meant to keep open minds, Professor?”
He shakes his head in mild despair. “If you keep your mind open, why, it’ll let the flies in. Teleportation is a pretty thought and I concede that certain chanting and drumming has been scientifically proven to affect the temporal lobes, inducing feelings of floating outside of the body…” He pulls out a pen and draws a brain on the wall, marking the temporal lobe with a big arrow, then continues. “I’m telling you that teleportation goes against the laws of science. It’s just a hay-lucy-nation. A strong magnetic field can have the same effect, as can drugs. Under the influence, even sane folk claim to leave their bodies, visit unearthly places and converse with the spirits.”
“I converse with the spirits and I’m not insane,” Kitty pipes up.
Beau Farthy snorts loudly. “That is debatable, Mam. This is not: teleportation is an eye-lusion. Given that Grandaddy Tabuh is a doctor, I’m surprised he has any truck with such nonsense!”
“He’s a witch doctor,” protests Sam. “Don’t you dismiss my grandpa! You might be a scientist but you know nothing about magic.”
“Magic?” he scoffs. “Here’s five dollars. Go see a magic show. You believe in magic, you’ll believe in just about anything. Lookee, little lady, there’s a fairy!”
Professor Farthy might be a brilliant scientist but there’s no need for him to be so patronizing. He is much easier to bamboozle than he likes to think. Just before Sam, Kitty and Lola leave, he goes to the Room of Temporary Rest to inspect his clients. All is as it should be until he opens Mr Dwight’s dewar and finds him sporting a pair of ladies, fur-trimmed slippers on his frozen feet.
They weren’t there before; try as he might, Mr Farthy can think of no scientific explanation for them whatsoever and, for the first time, he begins to doubt his own mind.
AN EXCERCISE IN TELEPORTATION
Teleportation is the ability to move matter instantaneously from one point in time and space to another. Some psychics claim to be able to time travel by leaving their bodies. This is known as astral body teleportation. Objects can be teleported visually by doing the following:
1. Charge your physical body with energy and place an object in front of you.
2. Close your eyes and picture the object in front of you in your mind’s eye.
3. Visualize the energy around the object blending with your own energy.
4. Visualize the object disappearing.
5. Focus your mind on a new destination six feet in front of you.
6. Feel the object reappearing in that new position. Open your eyes.
Do not be disappointed if you can’t teleport straight away – it takes years of practice and it helps enormously if you’re a witch doctor, a midiwiwin or a child with paranormal abilities.
RUBY FEATHA
Sam wants to head straight to New Guinea. Maybe her father has completed his mission and gone home to live with her grandpa. Maybe they’re fishing together in the Sepik River while her mother sits in the shade in a pretty hat.
It’s a lovely thought, but that’s all it is. Kitty advises her not to be so hasty. “Imagine if you went all that the way and they hadn’t returned? What if your grimfather is no longer alive? You have to consider that.”
“He’s alive, Kitty. Whenever I hold his book, I hear his drum. If the drumming stops, I’ll know he’s gone – but when I read the list of names this morning, the beat was stronger than ever.”
Kitty adjusts her mask. “Where next then? Who does he want us to visit now?”
They must fly to Canada to visit Ruby Featha. I’d like to tell you that Professor Farthy offered to fly them in his private jet, but he refused. Although he had no scientific proof, he suspected they had something to do with Mr Dwight’s furry slippers and it had upset him no end.
The last pearl has to be sold. This time, the buyer is an old man, a resident in their hotel. At least, I think he’s a man. Old men often look like old women, and he is wearing a skirt. Maybe he has a skin condition and trousers irritate his thighs. But no amount of eczema can explain his enormous hat trimmed with blue-black feathers plucked from the rear end of a crow. The hat is attached to his head by a long pin which has lost its bauble; he wants to replace it with the pearl, or so he says. Who cares if he’s lying? They now have the money to catch a plane to Canada.
Rather than bore you with how dull the in-flight salad was and how Lola collected everyone’s lettuce leaves and used them to built a nest in the lavatory bowl, causing a desperate queue, let’s leap forward once more and join them all in the wilds of Canada, among the deer and the mighty redwood trees.
They ride to Moose Mount on skewbald ponies, and find Ruby Featha sitting in front of a totem pole with a horsehair drum on her knees. She’s wearing a modest headdress but an air of great importance. She is a midiwiwin – a medicine woman, a healer, a spiritual consultant.
It’s hard to tell how old she is; her skin is weathered but her posture is youthful. As the most powerful person in her tribe, nobody dares to ask her age. She might be nineteen – she might be ninety.
Sam dismounts and shakes her by the hand. “I knew I’d find you here, Ruby. Grandpa drew you in his book, only in his picture the carving on the totem pole looks like a guinea pig.”
“Dear Yafer,” laughs the medicine woman. “Art was never his strong point. He meant to draw a horse. The horse is my totem animal. She carries me to other worlds.”
Sam’s mare snorts softly. Everyone has a totem animal and a power animal, Ruby says. The totem animal links you to your tribe. The power animal represents a special strength or purpose. She moves her arm like a serpent. “My power animal is the snake, all wise, all healing.”
“Do you think Lola might be my totem animal?” asks Sam. “She’s the one who links me to my family and she’s my oldest friend.”
Lola removes the woman’s headdress and places it on her own head with great seriousness. It’s far too small.
Ruby laughs. “Yes, you’re right, she is. How lucky you are to have a totem animal with a sense of humour!”
How can Sam discover which is her power animal? Ruby says there’s only one way. “I would have to send you on a journey – are you willing to go?”
Sam sighs inwardly. They’ve only just arrived. “I’m not sure … is it far?”
“Only we’ve just got off the plane,” adds Kitty.
“Ah, but this is a very different kind of plane.” Ruby taps her handsome nose. “No tickets required, but before you travel, you will have to be smudged.”
It sounds like something that might be done to you by the school bully, but it’s nothing like that. Smudging is a ritual designed to purify and protect.
Ruby undoes her power bundle. It clips together with a clasp that looks like a crocodile’s claw but could be an eagle’s talon – it is hard to tell, they’re shrivelled. She removes a feather, a rattle and a seashell stuffed with incense, sage to protect, cedar to cleanse and sweet grass to summon the spirits. I shudder to think what else is in that power
bundle, but it isn’t a packet of mints and a hanky.
Ruby lights the incense and asks Sam to strip. She isn’t shy, but it does feel odd, standing in the prairie in her vest and pants. Take it as a warning: if you ever wish to be smudged, be sure to wear decent underwear.
How to be smudged:
1. Strip to your undies and stand with your arms horizontal and feet apart to form a star.
2. The midiwiwin smudges your right hand with soot and says, “Grandfather”.
3. She smudges your left hand with soot and says, “Grandmother”.
4. She passes her hand across your hips, down your right leg and says, “Creation”.
5. She passes her hand back over your hips and down your left leg.
6. She will say, “Great Mystery!” and wave incense smoke around your head. Try not to cough.
7. Finally, she will say, “Mitakuye Oyasin”, which means “All my relations, including stones and animals”, in the belief that everything in nature is alive and connected to the same cosmic web – in other words, that our relatives aren’t just people, they’re pebbles and bison and maple leaves.
8. You are now ready to go on your journey. I’d take a cardigan if I were you.
Sam is raring to go. “Will I see anyone apart from my power animal, Ruby? Only I’m searching for my mother and father.”
Ruby knows this already; she’s all-seeing, all-knowing. She takes Sam over to a red cedar tree and they sit beneath it. “You might see your parents. Or other relatives or ancient ancestors. People journey for many reasons: to retrieve a lost soul, to add to their knowledge or to divine answers from the spirits regarding future events.”
“How do I get to where I have to go?” Sam’s wondering if the tree she’s parked under is some kind of mystic taxi rank and that someone will eventually come along and offer her a lift.
Shamanka Page 19
