Horsehead Man
Page 11
Tanya and I couldn’t see where we were going. But we could see out between the wildly swinging back doors. What a sight: mad horses, mad officials, gleeful TV camera operators, stunned punters. And Poldarski and his daughters. There was a look of real satisfaction on Poldarski’s face. He shouted something gleeful at us, but there was no way we could hear. One of the daughters was calmly blowing a bubble. And then the open road. Trees, fields, farmhouses, cows and the odd horse chewing grass in utter contentment. Staxa lay on the floor, his eyes closed, breathing in huge great rasping breaths. Tanya slid down beside him. She lifted his head onto her lap and stroked his nose.
Gazza found a side road. Then he found a side track that ran up a hill and into some trees. He stopped the van in the trees and we waited until it was dark. Staxa recovered a bit. But, as no one had brought a laptop, it was a bit hard to find out what he was feeling. He lay on the van floor, his head on Tanya’s lap. He didn’t seem to want to stand up. Gazza climbed into the back of the van and ran his hands over Staxa, then he climbed out and came over to where the rest of us were sitting on a log.
‘His leg’s broken,’ Gazza said. ‘He must have done it when he landed in the van.’
‘They normally shoot horses with broken legs,’ Rachel said. ‘The muscles are so strong they pull the leg out of alignment and you can never set them straight.’
‘Well, we can’t shoot poor Luis,’ Gazza said. ‘There are limits.’
‘Yeah, yeah,’ said Rachel. ‘We’ll fix him up somehow. Alex will know what to do. But where are we going to go now? I don’t think we should take Staxa back to the farm. The place will be crawling with cops and stewards and television crews, and investigative journalists. I could live without that sort of publicity. I’m a respectable neurosurgeon.’
‘Staxa will want somewhere nice and quiet too,’ said Mrs Chandor.
‘If Alex is going to set his leg,’ he’ll need a major veterinary surgery,’ Gazza said.
‘Deadsville,’ I said. ‘Nice and quiet. Nobody knows it’s there. Plenty of gear for doing operations.’
‘We’d never get Staxa down the stairs with a broken leg. Look what happened last time.’
‘Last time he really was a horse,’ I said. ‘This time he’s Luis. Luis will be a bit more co-operative. Even on three legs.’
So we waited until dark and then spent half the night sneaking the furniture van down to the cryonics lab. It’s a bit hard to go sneaking around in a huge van marked HERE TO THERE REMOVALS, ASK DRIVER FOR QUOTE but Gazza stayed on the back roads and we didn’t get stopped. Tanya and I rode in the back with Staxa. Poor horse. Poor dentist. He wasn’t well. He rolled his eyes a few times. Then closed them. I wished we’d brought a laptop. That way we’d have known what his last words were. As it was he seemed to establish some sort of wordless communication with Tanya.
‘Yeah, I know, mate, I know,’ Tanya said to him, as if she were replying to something he’d said. She stroked his neck and said, ‘It’s just the great race of life, Staxy. It’s better to have had a bloody go, than never to have done nothing. Have a bit of a sleep.’
The horse opened his eyes once more, looked at Tanya and sighed. A couple of minutes before we reached the City of the Provisionally Dead, Staxa himself really was dead.
Three minutes after we arrived, Alex and Easter turned up. Easter had hot-wired Rachel’s car. They’d been driving around looking for us. They’d had enough sense to realize we wouldn’t go back to the farm. The two men looked remarkably gloomy. I don’t think they’d been talking to one another. Easter was still covered in mud.
‘How’s Luis?’ Alex asked.
‘Dead,’ Rachel said.
‘How?’ said Alex.
‘Dunno,’ said Rachel. ‘Died of wounds, died of shock, died of organ rejection, died of exhaustion, died of grief, died of something — take your pick.’
‘Existential angst,’ Tanya said.
‘What?’ Alex said.
‘The poor horse died of existential angst. I was with him. I could see it in his eyes. See, I used to get this weekly magazine, right? One Hundred Great Ideas Made Simple. They did one idea every week and you put them all in this two-ring binder and at the end of two years you knew all about it.’
‘All about this existential angst?’ I said.
‘Naw. That was just week thirty-two. There was lots of other stuff as well. Reincarnation. The Wisdom of the Ancients. The Rainbow Serpent. Turning Base Metal into Gold …’
‘Tanya, dear,’ said Rachel. ‘Do be quiet. There’s a love.’
‘I suppose I could do an autopsy,’ Alex said. ‘See what he did die of.’ He didn’t sound very enthusiastic.
‘No way,’ Rachel said. ‘I’m not having you messing around in poor Staxa’s guts. They’ll want him in the best possible condition.’
‘Who will?’
‘The nano-technicians. The whizz kids of the future. This here is a cryonics lab, if you’ve forgotten. We’ll just stick poor old Staxa in the nitrogen and bingo, in a few hundred years’ time, they’ll bring him back to life again. And if they’ve really got their act together by then, they can even grow a new body for Luis and stick his brains back in it. You get one DNA molecule, turn off the genes for the brains, grow the rest, and there you are; new home for Luis’ old grey matter. Or they can use his old body — that’s in the vats as well.’
‘I’m not just bankrupt,’ said Alex gloomily. ‘I’m a few million dollars in the red. Who’s going to pay for the nitrogen?’
‘Oh, stop whinging all the time,’ said Rachel. ‘You win some, you lose some. That’s life, buster. You’ll think of a new scam. Maybe the next one will work. You’ll bounce back. You could even try something honest for a change. Come on, let’s get Staxa into the nitrogen before brainrot sets in.’
‘The nano-technicians are going to reverse brainrot,’ Alex said.
‘That’s the theory, but don’t bet on it. Move.’
Moving a dead horse isn’t that simple. But we did it. We backed the furniture van into the warehouse and managed to winch poor Staxa onto the forklift. Then Alex backed the forklift down the concrete stairs. The machine bumped and swayed, but it didn’t tip over. Once we were inside the steel forest, Alex drove the forklift up to the jumbo-sized tank they called the Pets’ Pool.
‘Okay,’ he said. ‘Who’s going up?’
‘Up where?’ I said.
‘Up on top of the tank. These things have lids, you know.’
Fool that I was, I volunteered. I climbed onto the fork lift beside Staxa.
‘It’ll take more than one to lift the lid,’ Alex said. ‘This tank’s got a horse-sized lid.’
Fools that they were, Gazza and Rachel climbed onto the forks beside me and Staxa. Alex gunned the motor and pushed the up lever. We began to ascend. The cold, gleaming side of the tank slid past. The fluorescent lights in the ceiling approached. We reached the limit of the machine’s reach and stepped onto the top of the tank. There was a broad rim and then a removable centre section. I looked down to the concrete floor. Easter, Tanya and her mum were leaning back against one of the normal-sized cylinders, craning their necks to look up.
‘Don’t dive in,’ Tanya yelled.
‘Not us,’ I shouted back. ‘We can’t swim.’
With a bit of difficulty we got the lid off. It was half a metre thick and weighed a ton. We balanced it on the side of the tank away from Staxa. I looked down into the tank. I’d half expected to see ponies and cats and dogs and other dead pets bobbing about like icebergs. But all I could see was mist, great swirling clouds of cold white mist. It rose up out of the tank and froze our ankles. It cascaded down the outside of the tank and slid along the concrete floor. I saw Tanya jump out of its way and climb onto the driver’s perch next to Alex.
‘Come on,’ Gazza said. ‘Let’s not stand around up here all day.’
‘I rather like the view,’ Rachel said.
‘I’ve seen better,’ Gazza said.
/>
‘Stop bickering,’ I said.
We started to push Staxa off the forks. He wouldn’t budge. We pushed harder. He still wouldn’t budge. Under the cold fluorescent lights the cold mist swirled and eddied.
‘Put a bit of effort into it,’ Rachel said. ‘One god-almighty shove should do it.’
We gave Staxa one god-almighty shove. Suddenly he budged. He shot off the forks and into the mist. Gazza overbalanced and began to follow him. I grabbed Gazza’s arm, but I had no grip on anything else. For a second I was teetering. Suddenly Rachel was hanging onto the forklift with one hand and grabbing my collar with the other. But it was no use, I was over the edge, gone. I was pulling her in.
‘Let go of me,’ I yelled.
‘I’m coming too,’ she said and let go of the forklift.
The three of us entered the mist.
Epilogue
The funny thing about cryonics is that you’ve no sense of time. None at all. Normally when you wake up from a night’s sleep or a nap, you’ve got some idea of what time it is. You know it’s the morning after the night you went to sleep.
When I woke up from my snooze in the nitrogen, I thought I’d just blinked my eyes. One moment I’d been falling into the cold, smoking cylinder, the next I was lying in a nice warm bed with brass knobs on the rails. There was a patchwork quilt on the bed. The room was cosy, with pictures of famous buildings on the walls: the Sydney Opera House, the Eiffel Tower, that old ruined coliseum in Rome where the lions ate the Christians. There were lace curtains on the window, fluttering in a warm breeze. I found I was wearing a new pair of flannel pyjamas, but my old clothes were placed neatly on a chair by the bed. Someone had washed and ironed them.
I had no idea where I was. But it didn’t look much like the future to me. I got dressed and went for a bit of an explore around the house. There was nothing very unusual about the place. The kitchen was just a normal kitchen with a gas stove and a refrigerator. In fact, some of the things looked a bit old fashioned. Upstairs there was a living room with a really ancient black and white television set. I switched it on. It took a bit of time to warm up. It seemed to be showing a film about the first moonwalk in the 1960s. You know, that bit with the flag and the astronaut hopping about. I thought for a terrible moment that I’d somehow been transported into the past. But that was impossible. It was just old footage.
Rachel came dancing into the living room. She was wearing a white, quilted dressing gown and bare feet. She looked as fit as a fiddle and very beautiful.
‘Hello, Spud,’ she said. ‘Where do you reckon we are?’
‘Dunno,’ I said. ‘I feel I’ve only been asleep for five minutes.’
‘Me too,’ she said. ‘Gazza’s still snoozing like a baby. What’s outside?’
We pulled up the floor length sash window and climbed out onto the upstairs verandah. We seemed to be in an old, sandstone terrace house. There was green iron lace under the railing. We leant on the railing and looked down into the street. It was an ordinary inner-city street. But there was a very odd mix of new cars, old vintage cars, BMX bikes, penny farthings. The street was made of cobblestones and had tram tracks down the middle. If this was the future, some of it looked pretty ancient. A cart and horse came clip-clopping down the street. The cart was being driven by a joker in old coachman’s uniform. He was wearing a silly three-cornered hat and waving a long whip. Above his head was a board with old-fashioned lettering: Ye Olde Rag and Bone Man. But there was no rotting pile of rag and bones on the back of the cart, just a party of kids sitting on straw. The kids were all in fancy dress: full-length frocks, daggy trousers with braces, old hats and bonnets, baseball hats, and footy jumpers. A tram came rumbling down the street. It too was full of kids in funny clothes. They all hung out of the windows and yelled and catcalled at the kids on the cart. The cart kids all whooped and pointed and fell about in the straw. You’d think the tram was the funniest thing they’d ever seen. Suddenly I noticed the horse — it was Staxa Fun.
‘Hey Staxa,’ I yelled. ‘Hey, Luis!’
Staxa turned his head and looked up at me and Rachel with a mournful grin, showing his huge teeth. Then he turned round and plodded on. The kids on the cart looked up too. They saw me and Rachel and waved and cheered. I waved back at them. They yelled out to us. They were talking English, but it sounded real odd.
‘You understand that?’ Rachel said to me.
‘A bit,’ I said. ‘I reckon they’re foreigners.’
‘I wouldn’t be so sure,’ Rachel said. ‘I reckon English is their mother tongue.’
‘Bulldust,’ I said.
‘Just look at that,’ she said and pointed at the disappearing cart.
We could now see the other side of the board that had said: Ye Olde Rag and Bone Man. In the same funny old-fashioned lettering it said:
Heritage City circa 2000
‘Bloody hell, Spud,’ Rachel said, ‘we’ve been in that nitrogen for thousands of years. We’re exhibits in a theme park.’
About the Author
Rory Barnes is the author of several novels for both adults and teenagers. Zones, which he wrote in collaboration with Damien Broderick, was short listed for the Best Young Adult Science Fiction in the 1998 Aurealis Awards. Horsehead Boy, the first volume in the Horsehead Trilogy was short listed in the same section in 1999, and was listed as a Notable Book in the Children’s Book Council of Australia Awards 1999.
Rory has an Arts degree, has held the Australian Fellowship at Stanford University’s Creative Writing Centre, California, and has held a Literature Board Senior Fellowship. He has worked in teacher training and educational research and has taught creative writing.
Rory lives in Adelaide with his wife and two sons. He has a web site at:
www.adelaide.net.au/~rbarnes
Other Books by Rory Barnes
The Bomb-Monger’s Daughter
Horsehead Boy
written with Damien Broderick
Valencies
Zones
Stuck in Fast Forward
The Book of Revelation
written with James Birrell
Water from the Moon
Copyright
Angus&Robertson
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers, Australia
First published in Australia in 2011
This edition published in 2013
by HarperCollinsPublishers Australia Pty Limited
ACN 009 913 517
A member of HarperCollinsPublishers (Australia) Pty Limited Group
http://www.harpercollins.com.au
Copyright © Rory Barnes 1999
This book is copyright.
Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of private study, research, criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright Act, no part may be reproduced by any process without written permission.
Inquiries should be addressed to the publishers.
HarperCollinsPublishers
Level 13, 201 Elizabeth Street, Sydney NSW 2000, Australia
31 View Road, Glenfield, Auckland 0627, New Zealand
A 53, Sector 57, Noida, UP, India
77–85 Fulham Palace Road, London W6 8JB, United Kingdom
2 Bloor Street East, 20th floor, Toronto, Ontario M4W 1A8, Canada
10 East 53rd Street, New York NY 10022, USA
National Library Cataloguing-in-Publication data:
Barnes, Rory, 1946– .
Horsehead man.
ISBN 0 207 19833 0.
ISBN: 978-0-7304-9886-5 (epub)
I. Title.
A823.3
filter: grayscale(100%); " class="sharethis-inline-share-buttons">share