As for me, I watched old movies on television and tried to ignore everyone. They were doing all right without me anyway.
This was how much of the night had been spent, after we came back to Joanna's house. No one had had much sleep except me. I had nodded off soon after midnight, my work done in that my adventures had given everyone else much food for thought. But apparently in the wan light of early morn there were still no answers.
Heather had cooked breakfast, and it was the smell of ham and eggs and toast and coffee that drew the factions together in the back yard, where she had set up a table under the twisting boughs of the Poinciana tree. The rain of the previous day had vanished. Late Spring in Brisbane can be wet, but it's seldom wet for long. People emerged from various parts of the house, some (like Max) bleary-eyed and squinting in the sun, others (like Joanna) as fresh and immaculate as ever. We descended on the food.
They even ate in factions. I was a little disturbed by this. I had brought all these people together – admittedly without meaning to – and it would have been pleasant if they could be friendly to each other. But each faction drifted to its own side of the table, with me unconsciously gravitating to one end. Conversations continued, dulled only slightly by the necessity of eating at the same time.
David ate quickly, spooning egg into his mouth while at the same time talking about his hopes for the day. The clear sky excited him, and he was hoping that the split would occur again. But that would not happen until later in the afternoon, if at all. He was also keen to have the sausages analysed, to see if they really were meat and, if so, what kind. He had put half a dozen of them in Joanna's freezer. No one besides Bruno had yet dared taste one. Max, who seemed to be confining himself to toast at the moment, which he smothered in enough marmalade to cover half a loaf, had taken the times the split had occurred on the last two days, done some calculations, and worked out when it should occur today. A lot of telescopes all over the country would be looking at it, not to mention things like spectroscopes, infra-red satellites, the Siding Springs Observatory, the radio telescope at Parkes, and many, many pairs of eyes. Max had managed to film some of the sausages squirming, but had not been lucky enough to catch one in the act of coming into being. That was an odd thing about them: you never saw them come into being, you just looked and there they were. It had become a sort of challenge for Max, who was muttering dark things about multiple cameras set up around me and operating full-time. I didn't like the sound of that at all. In the meantime, he kept a camcorder running constantly. He was filming me right now, stuffing scrambled eggs into my gob. Charming. Joanna (no ham, but a small amount of scrambled egg and some slices of tomato) was also looking forward to seeing the split, mainly because she had missed it the last two times. The Maestro didn't eat or make any sound at all, except to lodge a piece of toast in the corner of his mouth and suck at it for a few minutes. He scared everyone. Heather simply ate everything everyone else didn't, and stayed quiet for the duration of this industrial-sized operation.
I mentally drifted away from the table talk. I was not very hungry, but Heather's coffee was as good as ever. I had a large cup of it and leaned back in my chair to stare up at the branches of the tree lacing against the blue sky. The many-fronded leaves wafted back and forth in a lazy way, thousands of tiny fingers in the breeze, surrounding the clumped red-orange flowers. I liked Poinciana trees: they had a certain charm, a way of being scenic without really trying. They were meant to look good.
Leaning back, looking up. Leaves.
I had never really looked at a Poinciana tree before, I realised. They were so weird: tiny fingerlets of spear-head leaves arranged symmetrically along two axes, the fiery red flowers, and those bizarre seed-pods that revealed a similar symmetry to the leaves when opened, the seeds arranged in a neat row. Why were they...
Hiatus
A crack in time/space.
The world disappeared.
The voices of the others faded.
There was a warm waft of breeze against my skin that died as soon as it began. Against all reason, against all will, I felt as if I was floating upwards.
I left the chair, drifted up into the branches among the leaves and flowers, which had either grown larger or else I had shrunk. I could not see the others: my vision was blurred by a green mist. Only the leaves and flowers of the tree were clear, and they were getting bigger. They were everywhere, spear-heads of green, filling my vision; broad, flame-coloured petals sharpening to a point where they met in the centre. The sky, the table, everyone, had gone, lost in a pale green light. The leaves had become enormous. I moved in towards one particular leaflet, which had expanded (or I had diminished) a thousand fold, a vast, growing green plain, rushing towards me (or I was rushing towards it), filling my vision.
I contacted the surface, landed on its face first, like a huge green bed. The leaf was large/I was small enough to see individual cells, globs of goo spotted with chlorophyll. I stood up, found the surface slightly sticky, clinging to me as I rose. I tried to walk, bouncing along as on a trampoline, the surface unyielding but nevertheless continuing to expand beneath me. Slowly, the leaf surface softened and I slipped in further, between the areas of resistance that had supported me. The size differential continued, and soon it was not many cells that were below me but just one cell, a gelatinous expanse of plasma. I slowly sank inside it, the cellulose wall closing over my head like a cool green ocean. There was light inside, light enough to see blobs of matter and strands of what might have been anything. I thought vaguely that I should have listened to my biology teacher more in school. Or perhaps not – what I was seeing was nothing like a diagram in a biology textbook. The actual experience was on a different level of perception: I was inside the diagram, and it was in three dimensions and very, very large.
(Let's say I was shrinking. But that is just putting a name to a process. I actually had no sensation of that. It really was impossible to tell whether I was getting smaller or the leaf was getting larger. It seemed more that we were simply coming together, and size was altering either way in order to accommodate this.)
The shrinking continued. i (small i now the world was a cell) sank into a vacuole and felt chill, like i was in water. There was no need to breathe and, in fact, i had ceased breathing some indeterminate time ago. i was actually respiring in some other way, taking in what i needed from the plant, like i was a cell myself, or at least a part of this one. i sank down further towards a dark blob that must have been the nucleus.
Like the tree and the leaf and the cell, the nucleus soon became all there was. Jumbles of long threads...flashes of light, darkness around and the sense of coolness continuing...
Where had i seen this before?
In a dream on the edge of a hangover, in the circle in my house: the light, the swirl of shapelessness in a dark universe. The nucleus of a cell and the colours at the edge of the universe: they were the same.
The quickening of fear started again.
Colours.
i drifted in further, the light fading.
DNA loomed up. A double helix, unmistakable. One twisted strand of DNA in one tiny chromosome in one cell in one leaflet out of the hundreds of thousands on the tree, one tree out of all the trees in the world, out of all the worlds in space, and i was there.
i touched it, or it touched me.
Nuclear forces. The slippery contact of individual atoms. Electrons buzzed in my ears like mosquitoes. My feet kicked against atomic nuclei. The shrinking/expanding continued.
Quarks. Everything was up, down, charm and strange for a long while. Darkness...
Bonded, locked. For a single quantum of time i was a fundamental particle, an inseparable, essential component of the chemistry of the tree. i was a part of the tree's DNA.
Then, instantly, consciousness expanded, so quickly it hurt. And i knew, but had no words with which to know.
I was the tree (large I again), the whole tree, and nothing but the tree.
; I had been here for years, growing quietly, drinking in the water that fell from the sky, absorbing carbon dioxide and nitrogen and giving shade, standing proud against storms. Ants crawled on me, birds sung in my branches, the wind stirred my leaves. I was life. In Spring I gave out my bright red flowers, fed the bees, let my flowers fall at my roots. I had stood and observed the ways of the world, a silent witness, always accepting. My foundations were buried deep in the good earth, the Gaia that would protect me from the time I had first burst forth from the soil, until it was time for me to die, neither too soon nor too late, but at the proper time, as everything died in its proper time, as everything was born, and the daily turn of the world around the sun continued. It was all so clear to me now: birth = life = death = infinity. My part in the universe, to be a tree. I had no consciousness, no human intelligence, and I needed none. My wisdom was the wisdom of the Earth, and that was enough. And that was everything it had to be.
Concepts, no words...
There were people near me, eating, drinking, talking. I did not see them, did not hear them, but knew they were there and what they did, for all their actions affected me. I could not find words to describe them, for I did not know language, but I was aware. Through the tread of their feet upon the ground, the vibration of the air against my branches, the chemicals that entered the pores in my leaves, I was aware of them, but was not conscious of my awareness. I formed no conclusions, made no judgments, merely accepted, and went on being a tree. That was all I could do, wanted to do, had to do. I did not feel happy, did not feel sad. I felt nothing but right and purposeful. But these were sensations without knowledge.
Time passed, as measured by a tree. The world changed and stayed the same. And I went on being.
Hiatus
...formed that way?
Light. Ouch. My irises were wide open and light pierced through them like a sword. I shut them again. Better, but now I could feel pain in the back of my head. More ouch, bigger ouch.
"Ouch," I said, in an attempt to convey my feelings to whoever was out there. Succinct, if a little understated.
"Somebody get a pillow," came Joanna's voice.
I opened my eyes.
Heather's face was in a strange position, sort of upside down and to one side, and far too close. I blinked as my eyes continued to adjust to the bright sun. I felt unable to move. I tried with my left arm. Nothing.
"Are you ok?" Joanna's voice again. She had appeared in my vision, not upside down like Heather, but still to one side, the other side. Her long hair fell close to my face. It smelled nice. Nevertheless, it disturbed me that she was hanging in mid-air like that.
"You fell off your chair and banged your head," said Joanna.
Something clicked in my brain: two neurons that had not been speaking to each other decided to kiss and make up. I realised it was not Joanna and Heather who were in the wrong position, but me. I could smell grass. My back was against a surface. I was lying on the ground, underneath me.
Sorry, I meant underneath the tree. We had parted spiritual company. It was a comforting thought, although I confess I felt a little twinge of regret.
I tried moving things. Better this time. Left arm: yes. I lifted it and looked at my hand. Did I expect to see twigs? Perhaps, but the act of moving had dispelled the paralysis that had enveloped me. Right arm: yes. It still gripped my coffee cup, although the coffee itself had spilled out.
"Guess where I've been?" I said.
***
Same scene, a short while later.
I was still lying on my back, but now with a pillow under my head and a blanket over me, listening. The others were out of my field of vision but within my field of hearing, if there is such a thing. I had asked not to be moved yet, for I wanted to stay there under the tree for a little while longer. But the others had at least tried to make me more comfortable. What they did not realise was that I was perfectly comfortable, lying on the ground. As a tree my roots had been deep inside the earth; now, just lying there brought that sensation back. I didn’t want to let go of it just yet.
Perhaps Joanna and Birgili would have understood. Perhaps Max and David would have scoffed. It didn't matter, it felt right for me.
Conversation from unseen people:
David said, "We have to get her to the lab. I don't have the equipment here that I need."
Heather said, "She doesn't want to be moved yet. You heard her."
Max said, "I think I've almost got it now." He was tapping on his iPad, had been for a while.
Joanna said, "Got what?"
Max said, "I'm using the data we took last night from the circle. Working out the orientation of the zero-gravity field from Emily's measurements."
Well I'm glad he found my measurements so useful.
David said, "Good."
Birgili said, "It is almost complete," in that exotic, slow way of his. Mysterious as ever.
David said, "What is?"
Five seconds of silence. Apparently, the Maestro chose to remain mysterious.
David said, "I'd better ring the uni and tell them we're coming."
Heather said, "You're not moving her until she wants to be moved."
David said, "But we need to make arrangements."
Heather said, "Over my dead body."
Max said, "I've got it. Interesting. Microscopium." He had stopped typing. "What the hell's in Microscopium?"
David said, "What the hell is it? A constellation?"
Joanna said, "You don't know that?"
David said, "I'm a physicist, not an astronomer."
Joanna said, "Yes, it's a constellation, one of those named by Nicolas de La Caille in the mid-Eighteenth Century while on an expedition to the Cape of Good Hope." A hint of superiority in her voice, there. There were not many astrologers, perhaps, who actually knew some astronomy as well.
Max said, "She's right. It's a small, perfectly rectangular constellation containing only a few very faint stars. But it doesn't have anything else in the least bit interesting. A few galaxies. Brightest star is only fourth magnitude. Quasar PKS 2000-330 is right next door in Sagittarius, and the M30 globular cluster in Capricorn."
I was pleased that I had actually understood a few of Max's words. This scientist stuff was starting to rub off.
Max had sounded a little superior too, just like Joanna, and he might have continued to enumerate the wonders of that particular constellation, and the several around it, but Heather said, "You're just reading that off your iPad."
Max continued quickly, "Anyway, Microscopium is where Emily's head was pointed last night when she was in the circle. The other objects did the same thing, remember: the ruler and the cube. All aligned along the same direction. I'd like to get back to the house and take more measurements, see if the direction has changed, if it's following the apparent motion of Microscopium across the sky. Microscopium is Latin for Microscope, by the way."
Heather said, "No, really?"
David said, presumably into his mobile, "We'll be there in about half an hour. I'll have some downloads for you from my iPad, so make sure Stuart's available."
Heather huffed in a very Heather-like way, i.e. loud and deliberate. Then, ostensibly for everyone's benefit, but no doubt also with ulterior motives, she took a moment to summarise the situation. She's good at that sort of thing. It must be part of her secretarial training. Her summary went something like this:
Emily is being influenced by some force, be it supernatural or otherwise, which appears to be focussed in the direction of the constellation Microscopium. This force is only felt by her in a small circle inside her house which has been – apparently – sucked clean of all contents except for Mike. This circle not only influences her but also inanimate objects placed inside it. In the meantime, she has been plagued by the random and accelerating appearance of sausages in her immediate vicinity, an accurate but weird horoscope that appeared in a unique issue of a newspaper, and periodic conversions to a star-like state that allows
her to pass through solid objects, as well as the ability to shrink down to sub-atomic size and assume the spirit of a tree.
There was silence for a little while when she had finished.
David said, rather uncertainly, "That sounds about right."
Max said, "I don't know if spirit should be used there. There's no scientific – ."
David said, "It's as good a term as any, I think. Until we know more about what happened."
There was another silence.
Joanna said, "Anybody got any ideas?"
Heather had done what the others couldn't. In a single speech she had managed to summarise the strange events that had been happening, demonstrate the basic lack of comprehension of all concerned, and show that neither faction had any better idea than the other as to what was causing all this or how it might be stopped. Plates of humble pie were passed around to all concerned and everyone had a large spoon. I smiled. I liked Heather.
Max said, "So what do we do now?"
David said, "Emily, we need to do some further tests on you, and on the circle. Would you be willing to help us?"
He had asked nicely, so I said, "Yes."
I was waiting for another huff from Heather but she was silent.
I added, "But not yet, I'm still feeling a bit wooden."
Ha-ha. A bit wooden! Unfortunately, the joke went over even worse than I had feared. Joanna gave a little chortle. No one else produced so much as a single ha. Why do I even try?
David said, "Thanks."
Joanna said, "The Maestro and I would also like to look at you, Emily. If you can spare the time." There was a slight strain in her voice, as if daring the scientists to say anything.
She had asked nicely too, so I said, "Sure, Joanna."
Heather leaped in to assume her position as my personal manager. She said, "I'm sure Emily can give you all the time you want for your tests, but right now she needs to rest. So perhaps if you've all finished breakfast, you can go inside and leave her in peace until she's feeling better."
Plato's Cave Page 8
