Birgili said: "You should read this."
He came into view, holding a newspaper and tapping his finger against an article on the front page. He must have fetched it from the front lawn.
Joanna said, "Oh yes, that photographer yesterday."
They passed the paper down to me. I read it out, after first cringing at the photograph of me on Joanna's back veranda. Not a good one. I had my head thrust forward and my mouth slightly open. I looked buck-toothed. It must have been the first one he took, whilst hiding in the bamboo. After that I became star-like and, just as Max had found with the video cameras the night before, I was unphotographable.
The article under the photo was as follows:
"Psychic" link to sky phenomena
Psychics have claimed a Brisbane woman is the cause of the mysterious sky appearances over Australia and New Guinea in the last two days.
Emily Branwell, a university student, is believed to be linked to the appearance of the "black sky" of Monday and yesterday.
Whilst the exact connection is unexplained, she has apparently been the subject of paranormal occurrences at her Annerley home in the last few days.
These occurrences have taken the form of showers of stones, unexplained lights in her house, and mysterious "visitors" who have predicted strange futures for those around her.
Professor Henry Montgomery of the University of Queensland's Department of Space Science has discredited any psychic connection with the black sky.
"There is no reason to suspect any causal link,"
he said yesterday.
"The so-called 'black sky' has been identified by scientists as a natural phenomenon, possibly caused by a large cloud of interplanetary dust or gas through which the Earth is currently passing."
"To regard this woman as being in some way connected to the current astronomical oddity is ludicrous," Professor Montgomery said. "Psychic powers are a nonsense."
Ms Branwell is a known friend of leading Brisbane psychic Joanna Clifford, who yesterday refused to comment on the bizarre occurrences surrounding Ms Branwell.
"Showers of stones?" said Heather.
"There's no dust cloud," said Max.
"That just proves they don't know what they're talking about," said Joanna. "I'm going to kill Bob Kirke. He's got the last horoscope he's going to get from me."
"Who's this Professor Montgomery?" asked Heather.
"Dean of Science at the university," said Max. "The paper must have thrown this article together pretty quickly. Ordinarily, they would have come to me." He ran his hand through his hair as he said this. Grooming himself for television? He was too late, it no longer worked for me. "But I've been unavailable since yesterday."
The paper had been stuck for a story, so they invented a few things, or relied on conjecture. The Trumpet was a bloody awful newspaper.
"Montgomery's a good scientist," said David. "But he's as much of an astronomer as I am. Emily, you'd better get over to your house right away. It's going to get crowded. Give me a call when you get there, if you can get the phone to work."
"What's the problem?" asked Heather.
"'Paranormal occurrences at her Annerley home'," quoted Joanna. "I'm afraid, Emily, your house is going to be a Mecca for the curious."
She was right. That article would draw to the house everyone even slightly interested in ghostly and unexplained happenings and who knew how to look up an address in the phone book. It gave me cause for concern. Even though the place was an empty shell, it was still home, and I didn't want anything to happen to it.
"In that case," said Heather, "I'd better get out there. Are you going to be all right, Em?"
Silently I said Don't call me Em. Out loud I said, "Sure. Thanks, Heather."
I defied anyone, no matter how intent on probing the mysteries of the house, to get past Heather once she reached the front door.
David gave her his car keys, and Heather set off, neglecting – wisely – to explain to David that although she did have a licence, she rarely used it. But if he was happy to hand over his car to her, that was his business.
I sat up. The Poinciana tree rustled its leaves slightly. My head felt a little light, but I could move everything again.
"You ok, Emily?" said Joanna.
"I'd kill for some coffee."
Joanna had brewed a fresh pot and we all indulged. I sat at the table again, holding a cup in both hands, sipping slowly. It was good and strong. It may have been my imagination, but I fancied that for a fraction of a second I could feel the atoms of the liquid bouncing against my lips.
"I envy you," said Max. He moved his chair nearer to mine, and leaned in close. He slurped his coffee loudly.
"Really?" I said. "That's a first."
He smiled so widely he must have missed the sarcasm. "While I don't understand what happened to you, it's obvious you experienced something peculiar. It may have been an hallucination on your part. I have no comment as yet whether you truly did go sub-atomic, or become a tree. Nevertheless, something happened to you, even if it only affected the creative centres of your brain."
"Of course, I have no doubt she really did enter the tree's spirit," Joanna butted in.
"But what did you see?" I asked her.
"Nothing," said Joanna. "You fell off your chair. One minute you were leaning back, looking up at the tree, the next you were lying on the ground. Came down rather hard, I'm afraid. It was all over in a second."
"I didn't turn into stars or anything?"
"No," said David. "This was something new." He picked up the camcorder Max had been filming with and flipped open the viewing screen. "Take a look at yourself."
I looked at the screen and David pushed Play.
There was me from Max's point of view, in my chair, leaning back and staring up at the tree. I could see right up my nose. Suddenly there was a flash of light, so sudden as to be almost subliminal, and then I had vanished below the table. I watched as Max had stood up, circled around with the tape still running, and focussed on me lying on my back, coffee spilled, saying "Ouch."
"What was that flash of light?" I asked.
"I don't know," admitted Max. "We should get some professional audio-visual people in on this. We're just playing at the moment. Perhaps they can analyse it. Probably just a glitch in the tape."
Joanna had been replaying the scene for herself. "You don't really believe that, do you?"
"Did you see a flash of light just before Emily fell over?"
"No. But that's beside the point. I wasn't looking at her."
David nodded. "I was. No flash."
"But the camera recorded something."
"More of that electromagnetic interference," said Max. "Possibly there's an electrical storm around here somewhere."
I sighed. Just what I needed: one more inexplicable thing. "What's happening to me is impossible, right?" I said.
"Nothing is impossible," said Birgili. "There are merely degrees of improbability."
"Probable impossibilities are to be preferred to improbable possibilities," said Joanna. "Aristotle."
There was an uncomfortable silence. No one had ever met anybody who could quote Aristotle. It was a bit of a shock.
"The Poetics."
More silence.
David looked at me over his coffee cup. His eyes were a very nice shade of sepia, sort of like an old photograph. I recalled the strand of DNA I had seen in the leaf: David's eyes were the product of an inherited combination of atoms in his genes, yet the end result was beautiful. How did that happen? Maybe Joanna was right, maybe there were other forces going on behind the physical laws.
"Interesting man, Aristotle," he said. "Poor scientist, but interesting nevertheless."
"He was curious about the world he lived in," said Joanna. "Curious enough to think hard about it. Maybe he got a few things wrong, but – ."
"He got just about everything wrong," butted in Max. "He used no scientific method whatsoever."
"Th
at's because it hadn't been invented in his day," said Joanna a little icily. She always went like that when discussing science with her cousin: one more reason I hesitated to question her beliefs.
"You don't 'invent' scientific method," said Max. And they were off. It sounded like they would be gone for some time. I turned to David.
"What happens now?" I asked.
David glanced at Birgili, who was absorbed in the cartoon page of the newspaper, then smiled at me. His smile matched his eyes perfectly. Just the right size, just the right amount of teeth. Now that was not a chance combination of chromosomes.
"Finished your coffee?" he said. "Let's go for a walk."
***
We walked; he talked; I listened, for the most part.
"I'm full-blood Aboriginal," he said. "My tribe lives in Arnhem Land. I spent most of my early years with my grandfather, since my parents died when I was young. Grandfather was very wise, taught me a lot about the world. How to survive, find water, find food, sing the songs that would maintain the land."
"In other words, a real education," I said. "One worth having."
He smiled. "Spoken like a true undergraduate. Actually, I had a great time. He inspired my interest in science. He would take me on long walks in the desert, living off the land. We ate goanna, snakes, witchetty grubs."
"Yuck," I said. I had actually tried a witchetty grub once, at a folk food festival. It made me sick. Purely psychosomatic, I'm sure. My mind somehow had a problem sucking down an insect larva.
"Well," he said, "I admit that nowadays I prefer Chinese food, or rigatoni and a glass of Chardonnay. But back then I liked the bush food too, for totally different reasons. We dug for water. Made fires at night and stared up at the stars. He taught me the stories of my people. He taught me respect for the land."
"And that made you become a scientist?"
He nodded. "I learned a lot with him. Not from him, you understand. We learned together. All the time. I liked to find things out. I was very interested in stories, especially about the Dreamtime and the origin of things. In contrast, I didn't learn a lot in school, but I did learn basic science, and that peaked my curiosity as well. I became interested in seeing if there was any way of reconciling the truth of physical laws and the ‘truth’ of mythology."
We came to the corner of the street and turned. He was walking beside me, hands behind his back, pacing slowly, like he had all the time in the world. He had sent Heather rushing off to do things; he waited, watched, and thought. Rather like a tree.
"You see, I believe mythology is true, but in a different way to strict scientific laws. The stories of my people are just as valid as the law of gravity. They are the product of human beings, and human beings can do nothing that physical laws do not allow them to. So if someone imagines a story about how the sun came into being, for instance, it's only because their brain has taken what they have seen and felt and understood and converted it into something that has meaning for them."
I frowned. This didn't sound scientific at all. Not as I understood the term. I was about to interject, but he seemed to sense my problem, like a good teacher should.
"What I mean is, people's brains function along strict scientific laws. For example, as a scientist, I know that the sun is a ball of gases undergoing thermonuclear changes and producing light and heat as a result. Simple. But it is no more complicated to say, as aboriginal legend does, that the sun is a fire being carried by a woman across the sky every day. Of course, one could ask, where did the fire come from? Who is this woman? How can she stay up in the sky? But with the real scientific explanation, one also has to ask questions. Where did the gas that forms the sun come from? What first started it shining? Every answer poses more questions. Physicists are constantly finding more questions hidden in even the simplest answers. However you believe the sun was created, the result is the same: heat and light, and ultimately life on Earth. And as far as the person who believes the myth is concerned – in his or her particular circumstances – the myth has served its purpose."
"I think there's a lot of scientists who would disagree with you," I commented. - A lot of normal people too, I added in thought, if I can be forgiven the use of the word in this context.
"Of course. My students rip into me constantly; I encourage them to do so. And I disagree with myself often. Healthy skepticism must be reflective. But I think every scientist needs a little myth sometimes. Keeps things in perspective. When people thought the Sun went around the Earth, it was the most natural belief in the world, and there was no reason to think otherwise. The farmer struggling to grow crops in the field had no use for the truth about the Sun. Most people don't. They can live full lives without knowing the real situation. Of course, we never would have reached the Moon without knowing it, or have a calendar as accurate as it is. But your average human being can live without either of those things."
He smiled and shook his head. "But I'm starting to lecture. I'm off my point, which is to answer your question: what happens now?
"On those long walks with my grandfather, we would light a fire each night and sit beside it, and he would tell me stories of the Dreamtime. And I would ask him questions about this and that. Why was that range of hills there? What makes a kangaroo jump? Why is the sky black at night, instead of some other colour? What is the wind? And he would sometimes answer me, and sometimes sit staring at the fire. He would stare for a long time, until I would eventually ask him what he was doing. I thought perhaps he had fallen asleep, or could not answer my question. And he would say he was reading the flames.
"The flames could tell him everything. The fire contained all the truth of the world. It was the primal aspect of creation: fire, light, heat. He would find the answer to my question in them. He was a very good physicist, my grandfather. Not what we would call a physicist, you understand, not a physicist like me. He had no knowledge of string theory, say, or differential calculus, or relativity. But he was curious about how the world worked, he was always trying to deepen his understanding of it, and he constantly asked questions. All desirable qualities for a physicist, or any scientist. Only instead of looking for answers in a laboratory or in mathematics, he found them within the flames of his campfire. Not literally, of course, but somehow he could use the flames as a focal point for his mind, and his mind could work out anything once it ceased to think about it."
"So you're not just a physicist," I said. "You're a philosopher-physicist." That was not only interesting; it was also hard to pronounce. Try it. Perhaps they were two words that were not normally supposed to go together. "You sound more like Aristotle than Einstein."
He shrugged. "Never thought of it like that. Of course, I could come up with a strong argument as to why what my grandfather did was simply a fallacy. So could Max. So could anyone who thought about it for a moment. But it was a valid reality within my grandfather's frame of reference. And therefore it worked."
"So everyone has their own valid frame of reference?" I asked. "The truth is different for everyone?"
"There is only one truth," said David. "But many, many ways of arriving at it. The truth remains the same. What differs from person to person is their means of discovering it. As a scientist, I look at reality to find the truth behind it. But that's not the only way to do it. Just remember, everything is possible."
"Like Aristotle said?"
He nodded. "All the things that have happened to you in the last two days are possible."
I smirked a little at that. "Everything? What, the sausages appearing out of thin air? Possible?"
"Of course. They appeared, didn't they? They must be possible. They're just unlikely. Take that gnome in the garden there." He pointed at the garden of a house we were passing. An ornamental gnome stood in the centre of the yard, squatting like he was taking a crap, holding his little fishing rod. "I could calculate the chance that in the next five minutes that gnome will spontaneously roll three metres to the left. Not a very likely event, I grant you. B
ut it is possible. Perhaps there will be a minor earthquake. Or water leaking from the drains will cause a subsidence of the ground. Or a strong gust of wind will send it rolling. It's even possible that every atom in the gnome will simultaneously move in the same direction. A long shot, of course, but mathematically calculable."
"Or I could go and give the hideous thing a good kick," I said. "Which would be far more likely."
"That too. That's the reality. That's pure physics. We just have to find the link between these things that are happening to you, find out why they are happening. That will help us arrive at the truth."
We had circled the block now and stood outside Joanna's house again.
"I don't know what will happen to you, Emily," he continued. "Not yet. But you asked what happens now. Well, now, we do what my grandfather would have done. We find out the truth by reading the flames."
As we walked up the garden path to the front door, I asked: "So, have you ever been able to realise your boyhood dream? Have you been able to reconcile science and mythology yet?"
"No, not yet" he said. Then he reached out and touched me gently on the shoulder. "But maybe you're the means I've been looking for."
***
Joanna and Max had apparently agreed to disagree on Aristotle. At least, they had stopped arguing. As we cleaned up the breakfast things and brought the table and chairs inside, David said it was time we went to the lab. Joanna said she wanted to come along. Max seemed a little put out by this, but David nodded.
"I'll follow you in my car with the Maestro," she said. "He wants me to drop him off at the shopping mall. He says there's something he needs to do."
That was good to hear. So far, in my opinion, the Maestro had done very little except be mysterious. He was very good at it, I'll admit, but something a little more practical was in order, despite Joanna's apparent faith in him.
So David, Max and I climbed into Max's car and the Maestro and Joanna into hers. I was in the back seat. I like being in the back seats of cars. It gives me an air of being chauffeured somewhere, like I was a famous movie star. Unfortunately, the back seat of Max's car was as messy as his desk. There was something soft under my feet that might have been a random sausage but probably wasn't. I dared to glance down and saw the remains of what had probably been last Wednesday's lunch. I shifted my feet to a pile of papers and buckled up.
Plato's Cave Page 9
