by Liz Grzyb
But as my new colleagues well know from hard experimental lessons, these birds, whether captured or handled or even just escorted, however gently, whether with gloves or tags or drones or satellites, are harmed, transformed, doomed to a humanised life. Their cortisol spikes, their egg layers thin, their resilience declines. Maybe even when described in a journal, when known conceptually, when simply thought about, who knows, their ears burn red with scientific groping . . .
Whatever. On our planet, as it is now, they fucking die.
And here I am. What is this strange desire in me? This creaturely love that cannot be reciprocated? And what shapes its opaque exigencies?
To be with them, near them, to be among them as they drift off towards death, I would have to be invisible. Unsmellable. Imperceptible. To be nothing.
That too, I think I can do.
But who am I that I should get to disappear, and leave behind this unravelling anthropocene?
I am the artist, of course. They may never receive my report, but I won’t be asking for money again from that or any other institution. In justifying this project’s significance, I proposed not to mourn, ceremonialise, memorialise, certainly not to publicise. I proposed to accompany them to the other side.
“I want to come with you.”
It is Peter, behind me, his voice gravel.
I had expected him to find me, to try to talk me down, to set the undeniability of his reason against my perceived artistic caprice. He just stands behind me for endless beats, endless glides, and says, “I want to go with them.”
How could he know? But what else have I been scheming this entire impassioned trip? I have my one line, now a mantra. “If science is harmful and art is useless, it will have to be magic,” I tell him. “Know any?” But of course he does, as do I, as do all our colleagues and comrades. His head fizzes with avian rites, his hands twitch with interspecies knacks. And I realise—how could I ever have thought to achieve it without such specialised spells? It would indeed have been a whimsical suicide, a hysterical, skull-cracking flop. But with his telemetric trickery, alongside my virtuoso virtues, we might just make it.
We fly with.
* * ** * ** * *
For Hugo
The Scent of Betrayal
Jane Routley
As soon as I woke up that evening, and before Mum could catch me to do chores, I ran over to the sentry tower. Rama and Ash were already up there. We kids had never seen any real live One Percenters—we’d seldom even seen helicopters—and we wanted to get the best view. Shin-Hua, who was sentry that night, let us stay. He even shared some of the dried locusts from his meal bag before he turned back to scanning the horizon for raiders and dust storms.
The light had taken on the brownish haze of dusk as the heat leaked out of the day. Kangaroos had come out of their hiding places and were feeding in the scrub on the river bank. Crickets and desert doves called and the wheat in the dry riverbed shushed in the warm evening wind from the north. The air was spicy with the scent of hot dust and salt bush.
On the hillside below us, people were coming out of their dugouts and getting ready for the night’s work—strapping on their lamps, pulling the cloths off their wicking beds so that the vegetables could catch the night dew and the early morning sun, and letting out their chooks. Everything looked so normal I was worried that it had all been called off while I’d slept.
But a couple of folks were carrying solar lamps across the river bed and as the sun dipped red into the west someone set alight the pile of dead wood that had been piled on the opposite river bank. The blaze leapt up—a beacon to guide the way.
“Watch those roos,” said Shin-Hua, over his shoulder. “They’ll hear ’em first.”
Sure enough, a short time later, the roos looked up, peered away down south and suddenly all took off into the hills.
“They’ve run! They’ve run!” we cried, jumping up and down so much the whole tower shook.
“Settle down!” yelled Shin-Hua. He reached up and rang the bell and on the hillside beneath us everyone started rushing about.
This time we were selling to Melbourne 5, a crowd we hadn’t dealt with before. They’d insisted on meeting with us directly rather than through a middleman. One Percenters leaving their luxurious Arcologies on the coast—tall shining towers where everyone was rich and could eat and drink as much as they wanted—was strange behaviour, but from reading on the Internet, Melbourne 5 never traded any other way. They had a reasonable rep on the ‘Net and they’d offered us infrared goggles as well as money, so the Co-op had decided to take a chance. But with One Percenters it was better not to have or be anything they might want. One Percenters had the power to do anything they liked. Several of the more timid folk had taken their kids to hide in the hills with the livestock. Just in case.
Gramma didn’t think they had anything to worry about. “We don’t have anything they want and most of us are not pretty enough.”
She knew all about the Arcologies, having been in the camps in Melbourne when they were being built.
As the ringing of the bell died away, we heard engines thrumming. Against the browny-black sky, two black blobs came sweeping over the line of sun-baked hills at amazing speed.
“Choppers!” breathed Ash, who was only six and had never seen one before.
“They look like big blowflies, don’t they? Appropriately . . . ” said Gramma as she came up the ladder. “Come on, kids. Time to come down now.”
“You’re not going to make me hide, are you?” I asked.
“Nah! But who knows what those bloodsuckers will decide to do? Best to be on the ground so you can run if things go wrong.”
Gramma never had a good word for the One Percenters.
Which was strange because she’d made a life finding the good in people. Most of the folks living in Tatooine had once come to steal or beg from us and had been turned into friends and helpers by her and Grampa. “We just offer them a better life than they’ve had. And most of them see the logic of it,” she always said.
What had once been a dried-up riverbed running along a line of hills was now full of fields. Dugouts and moisture farms dotted the hillside. Seventy–six people lived at Tatooine. Seventy-six people who shared most of what they grew and collected. It meant people got enough water to stay hydrated, the certainty of at least one meal a day and the promise of schooling for themselves and their children during the long boiling summers when we cowered inside all day and it was too hot to grow anything.
With everyone making decisions together and working and fighting raiders and sharing produce, the times when we only got one meal a day were getting rarer and rarer.
Ash and Rama ran down the hill to the river path, but I stuck with Gramma. She didn’t see so good anymore and the village was in darkness to hide its size from the One Percenters. Head lamps were all the light we had as we picked our way down the hillside and across the riverbed.
We lacked a lot of things at Tatooine but one thing we were never short of was energy for light and heat. In the days before the Big Fires, this had been a busy valley full of little towns and dairy farms. We’d scavenged every unmelted solar panel and bit of wire for fifty k’s around, and there were drought killed trees and half burned bits of timber everywhere to use for firewood.
Gramma used to say all this heating and lighting was ironic considering what had got us here. Something to do with the Changes which had been caused by a shortage of heating and lighting. I was hazy on the details. It was hard to get the old folks to talk about the Changes. They would start dwelling on the time of plenty before and get gloomy and boring.
Apparently once upon a time, back in the days when the weather had still been our friend and rain had happened all the time, everyone had had as much to eat as the One Percenters. Ever notice how, with old folks, the past is always better than now?
“Back in the day anyone could travel by helicopter if they liked,” Gramma said now as we climbed out up of the
river gully.
“When did you travel by helicopter?” I asked, hoping to unearth a story.
“A few times,” she said absently, as if it wasn’t very interesting. Typical. Stories of the time before always seemed to be full of exciting chances missed.
“You ready, Julie?” Gramma called out to Mum who came running up the river bank behind us.
“They’re just getting the goods out now.”
“I want you taking the lead with these bloodsuckers,” said Gramma. “The money’s negotiable but get the infrared glasses and as much pipe as you can. OK?”
“Are you sure? Why didn’t you tell me earlier?” Mum looked anxious but pleased as well.
“I didn’t want you getting nervous,” Gramma’s voice began to rise into a shout as the thunderous sound of the helicopters filled the world. “I’ll stay in the crowd unless there’s a problem. You’re ready. You’ll be fine.”
After that, no more talk, because the helicopters were hovering overhead, louder than the loudest thunder in the world. I clapped my hands over my ears but I could feel my breast bone shuddering in my chest from the sound and pressure of them. I was so busy gawping at the way they just hung in the air, their rotors going so fast, that my mouth was full of grit by the time I thought to pull up my dust mask. The power of them making a dust storm like that! And the lights. I’d thought our lights were bright but these blazed bright as the sun, turning the clouds of dust red-gold. I felt like a rabbit in the hunters’ glare and clung to Gramma as the lights played over us.
Then the lights were gone as the helicopters landed. I felt the thump of their wheels through my feet.
The propellers slowed and stopped. The dust cloud settled much more slowly.
“Bloody, bloodsucking One Percenters,” muttered Gramma, shaking out her dust mask. “Always making a mess of things.”
You might ask why—if we hated and feared the One Percenters so much—we had invited them into our village. But they had money and for once we had something we were prepared to sell them.
The product was being carried on a litter towards the paddock now. Two big lumps of rock and a whole heap of little ones.
Fossils!
Col, who taught all us kids reading and maths in the summers when it was too hot to farm, had been an archaeologist in the time before the Changes and he could tell when a rock contained the bones of some long dead animal. Mostly they just looked like rocks to me.
And would you believe it? The One Percenters in the Arcologies paid big money for such things. Big, big money. For stuff that we would have thrown away.
“They’ve got money to burn,” Gramma had said once when I’d asked her why. “They reckon they’re keeping science and culture alive.”
“Bit bloody late,” her friend Old Jack had grunted.
We’d got some fine new solar panels and most of our irrigation pipe out of selling fossils to the One Percenters. These days every time someone dug out a new place to live, Col would go in with them and check out all the rocks. A month ago we’d got another lucky break when my sister Ingrid and her boyfriend were digging out a home for themselves and came upon a jawbone.
It had taken more time for us to get onto the ‘Net and put up our wares for sale than it had to dig the fossils out. Days and days of having the connection drop out and having to start again.. But patience always paid off. Now the buyers were here and this time they were real live One Percenters themselves coming by helicopter instead of the usual boring traders who came by horse train. The older folks were nervous. I’d heard them muttering all week about this being a scouting mission for a take-over. But the promise of money meant that the crowd gathering around the cow paddock were happy as well as nervous. After they had gone, we’d roast a couple of ’roos on the signal fire and have a meat feast to celebrate.
Ingrid and Sandor moving in together had made me think about my own future. I wanted to see more of the world before I settled down to grow crops.
I’d heard Col telling Gramma I had a good mind for figures and would have made an engineer or scientist in the old days.
“Pity we can’t send her down to Melbourne,” he’d said.
“They only have one use for people like us in Melbourne,” snorted Gramma.
Sure enough, the easiest way to get down to Melbourne was to go sex trading. The One Percenters would be bringing a recruiter with them. It was a given.
I’d used to think that when I got old enough I could do that. Adventurous young folks did. Just to see the world a little. But some of those people never came back and often those who did were sick or broken in some way. A couple of months ago Sandor’s sister, Jeannie, had come home from hooking with some kind of horrible disease that gave her running sores and made her shrivel up slowly into a dry yellowed corpse. Now no one was keen to go sex trading.
“It’s hard, dirty, painful work,’ said Mum, who’d been lost in the refugee camps after the Big Fires swept through Melbourne. She’d had to sell quite a bit of sex in those days. “It means doing sex with grubby old men with bad breath like Wilderness Frank. Only hunger made me do it.”
Not appealing. Not at all.
I had different story in my head. Just earlier that day I’d asked Mum if my dad was a One Percenter and she’d smiled sadly and kissed my forehead. “Oh Shell, honey. Even I don’t know who your father is. Back during the Changes, I used to service five or six men a night. But I don’t think any of them were One Percenters. They had much prettier people for sex up in their Arcologies.”
But I still dreamed. It would be so easy if my father was a One Percenter. There was this stuff called DNA that could prove you were someone’s kid and maybe one day someone rich and important would come and find me and take me away to live like a princess in the big shining Arcologies and go places by helicopter.
By now everyone who hadn’t hidden was gathered along the cow paddock fence.
One of the helicopters banged open and ten people in black got out. Even though it was full dark now, all of them were wearing dark glasses so you couldn’t see their eyes.
“Infrareds, like the way snakes see in the dark,” said Gramma. “They’re security guards. They said they’d bring ten.”
The guards were big, solid people. Men and women. They didn’t seem to be carrying weapons.
“Don’t be fooled. They got ’em,” whispered Gramma. “Don’t get too close to them. Or move suddenly.”
We had weapons hidden in the bushes all along this side of the river and there were almost four times as many of us as them, but I felt no doubt that they could fight us off. They looked like people who always got three meals a day. Their neatness made them even scarier. When Mum and Col went out to greet them, they looked so skinny and scruffy against the guards’ big, confident vigour. How amazing must the One Percenters be when even their guards looked so fine!
Mum and Col shook hands with some guy who was clearly their captain. They showed him the fossils and where the negotiations would take place. The rest of the guards quickly formed a cordon around the meeting site, standing gazing out as expressionlessly as fence posts in all directions.
Only then did the door of the second helicopter open. Six bright shiny people got out. The first one was as thin as one of us, but much, much neater. She had a little hat on her head that didn’t seem to have any use, but looked as cute as a baby rabbit. She turned and made sure the others got safely down the stairs. Later she served the One Percenters a tray of glasses and what seemed to be little things to eat. She offered them to Mum and Col too, but everyone knew you didn’t take anything from the One Percenters. They always expected something in return.
The rest of the people were even lusher looking than the security guards, but thick at the waists instead of the shoulders. But what I noticed most was how smooth and pale they were, their hair short and neat and not full of dust. Their pale skin shone with cleanliness.
Their clothes were thin and flat on their bodies. How did they
bear to wear so little with the night chill coming down? I turned to ask Gramma but she was gone.
So I asked Old Jack who was standing in the press of people around me.
He grunted and said they had special materials and that those thin clothes were even warmer than the roo skins we had on our beds—and softer too.
“Never thought to see that bastard again,” he muttered, as their bossman shook hands with Mum and Col. The bossman seemed to glow with kindly pleasantness. I wondered how Jack knew that he was mean.
Mum led them over to where the fossils lay on a table. Some tree stumps and our three precious orange plastic chairs had been set out so that the guests could inspect the fossils in comfort. As the guests settled down on our chairs, they pulled faces. In some way our efforts to accommodate them seemed to amuse them.
“Ha! Think yer too good for us, do yer?” muttered Old Jack beside me. “It isn’t clothes that makes a man, yer bastards.” He took a pull on the flask of moonshine he always carried.
Mum stood a little apart, allowing them to inspect the goods. I could see her looking round for Gramma too. Briefly, I wondered where she was.
I snuck closer to where Rama and Ash were standing with Big Pete.
“Do you think they like ’em?” hissed Rama to me.
I shrugged. All the grownups were doing the silent faces they did when negotiating. They might be really excited and we would never know. Col and a One Percenter woman were turning the rocks this way and that. She was brushing them with a beautiful little brush. They were taking forever. I began to get bored.
One of the One Percenters stood up. He nodded at the security guards and as if called by magic, two of them left their places by the perimeter and came to his side. He spoke to Mum and she nodded and beckoned to Sanjeet, one of the other Elders. Sanjeet switched on his torch. The One Percenter put on a pair of infrared glasses and he and his two security guards and Sanjeet came out of the cow paddock.
