The Second Cure

by Margaret Morgan

  A splash of colour in a corner of her vision jolted her back to the present. There, outside a grocery store, plastic buckets, stuffed with flowers. Purples, yellows, oranges, blues … and reds. Red roses, red daisy-looking things, red tulips! There was not a white petal to be seen. Clearly not a ‘reputable’ place, Brigid thought with glee, and she bounced into the shop. Behind the counter, a forty-something man with a greying ponytail was doing a crossword. He looked up at her entrance and she saw the scarring on his forehead.

  He’d had a tattoo removed, almost certainly the eye of a thete. He’d taken the Cure, tried to erase the evidence on his skin. But they hadn’t crushed him. After buying a larger bunch than she needed, she toyed with ordering some to be delivered to Juliette in Sydney. She decided not to jinx things, though, by over-enthusiasm. She would try to take things slowly, against every instinct she had. They hadn’t spoken since the party. She would hold off for a couple more days.

  As she left the shop, she didn’t bother looking for the street camera peering down at her. Some things were a given.

  Brigid didn’t have long to wait for the flowers to do their job. Two days after she’d arranged the daisy-looking things in front of her bedroom window, contact was made again.

  The modern political right is largely driven by people who lack any sense of social responsibility, any sense of empathy or compassion. These are people who believe utterly in individual rights, with no conception of social duty or communal commitment. The mere idea of these entirely eludes them, like the colour-blind in a world of magnificent hues. As I will show in this book, these traits, far from being based in mere personality, are rooted deep in brain structure. An incapacity for empathy is not a symptom of right-wing political extremism. It is the biological cause of right-wing political extremism.

  Such folk have long been a social minority, for obvious evolutionary reasons, given that we’re a social species. We’re talking simple game theory here. A society that has only a few such self-interested, narcissistic types will thrive, because in small numbers they do little damage. These people won’t die out because, while they’re a minority, they have a social advantage and they will reproduce and pass on their characteristics. They can con and exploit others, and it will pay off. But if a society has a substantial proportion that behaves in this way, that society will collapse because the social weal is dependent on communality.

  What is entirely lopsided and doomed to chaos is when these people, the self-centred, the lacking in empathy and compassion, the sociopaths and the narcissists, impose their pathology on the rest of the community. Of course they will try. They believe they are right; they believe that those who care are the deviants. They cry ‘bleeding heart’, as though having a heart is a moral deficiency. But the human brain, when the species thrives, is both rational and compassionate. Both logical and empathetic. Both evidence-based and humane. That is the synthesis of millennia of human achievement and human mutualism. Our culture cannot survive without both. Our species might, but you really wouldn’t want to live among us.

  Zinn, Shadrack, The Neuroscience of Belief: politics, gods and perception, L Bell Press, New York, 2010

  33.

  Greenvale, Capricornia

  A decade in the past, governments across the world started giving up on coal, both as a commodity and a power source. Some did so because of a blunt assessment of the science of climate change. Some did it to avoid pariah status internationally. And a few, grudgingly, did so because the bottom had fallen out of the price of coal and it was no longer viable. Effenberg’s government was among the most grudging in the last group. He viewed renewables like wind, solar and tidal with grave suspicion: the idea of an energy source that, infrastructure aside, was freely available to all simply stank of socialism. Old habits dying hard, he wasn’t ready to give up on the idea of Capricornia as quarry, and he didn’t see why he should. Its land, after all, was rippled with other resources: gold, platinum and heavy rare-earth elements – yttrium, zirconium, hafnium, niobium, tantalum – that would feed the world’s hunger for electric vehicle batteries and super-conducting magnets in its much-touted green electron economies. Effenberg had no time for the technologies, but a lot of time for making money from them. And, of course, there was the uranium. Aboriginal land rights repealed and environmental groups outlawed, there was nothing to stop Effenberg from exploiting these riches and filling his nation’s coffers. One of his first acts as Premier of Queensland had been to revitalise uranium mining. One of his first as Premier of Capricornia was to commission three nuclear power stations. And today, as President of the Republic of Capricornia, he was presiding over the opening of the first. Greenvale Nuclear Facility was Effenberg’s proudest achievement.

  Brigid made the five-hour drive to Greenvale, south-west of Cairns, with a sense of intruding into enemy territory. Here, support for Effenberg was at its strongest. A formerly small town that had made its living from local nickel mining and which had largely collapsed when the mine closed, it was now growing fast, with a community and commerce drawn to it by the uranium mine and the power station. Today it had polished its boots because the president, sundry ministers and flunkies, along with much of the country’s media, were coming to town. Brigid arrived in good time, giving herself an opportunity to drive around town and take in the sights. A brand new school, sports field, shopping complex, a housing development. Effenberg looked after those who helped him realise his dreams. And on every street corner there were surveillance cameras to ensure that they were suitably grateful.

  She’d subvocced for details on the town’s history and was bemused to find its Three Rivers Hotel had been immortalised in a ditty sung by Slim Dusty. It told of the building of the railway to carry ore to a processing plant north of Townsville in the 1970s. Now as she looked at the hotel, spruced up with new paint but clearly retaining its original structure, her vocomm asked if she’d like to hear the song, but she declined. Smoky jazz was more her style. She wondered if she should go over and have a quick wee. The bottled water she’d been downing on the drive there had reached her bladder, and she thought she might be in trouble if she waited until after the ceremony. But then, across the road, she saw activity as locals started emerging from the hotel. They peered down the main drag and, from their excitement, Brigid gleaned that the dignitaries were arriving. Sure enough, sleek limos with darkened windows were soon gliding along the freshly tarmacked road, preceded and followed by military motorbikes, and bedecked with the Republic’s flags. The locals also had flags, and waved them frenziedly at the passing motorcade, cheering and calling out Effenberg’s name. He was a hero to these people. He’d saved their town from a slow death. Every one of them was white.

  Brigid climbed back into her rented four-wheel drive and followed the entourage. They were going at a fair clip and she didn’t want to miss their arrival at the power station. The route took them out through the other side of town, past the outlying houses and into the flat, dusty grasslands beyond. Olive-leaved gums punctuated the faded fields. In the wet season, this land would be lush, even flooded. Now it was as dry and raspy as sandpaper. They turned a bend and the power station loomed ahead, the vast hemisphere of the reactor containment building and the concave cylinders of the cooling towers gleaming white against an unsullied sky.

  The boom gate opened for the official party and closed again before Brigid reached it, but a CSSA agent scrutinised her face and her ID, scanned it, consulted the read-out, and lifted the boom for her. While Effenberg’s convoy had slid behind the main buildings, Brigid was directed to a car park by another CSSA guy, this one armed to the back teeth. To be expected, she thought. Any public appearance by Effenberg entailed massive security, and this was, after all, a nuclear facility, open – for the first and no doubt last time in its existence – to the public. But still, her response to the CSSA was visceral. She’d seen enough violence at its hands to be hypervigilant whenever they were around. She parked her rental and popped the
tailgate. Her videodrone was the latest model and, picking it up, she was amazed again at its lightness. These things just got smaller and smaller. She carried it across to the main entrance, where more agents were checking IDs and feeling important. She could, of course, have let it fly there next to her, hovering at shoulder-height and requiring only the occasional subvocced instruction, like an airborne pet dog. But that would have been showing off.

  The voice in her head told her that there were five minutes until kick-off, so she set herself up with the hemisphere behind her and did her to-camera intro.

  ‘A decade in the planning and construction,’ she told her audience, ‘today, the first solution to President Effenberg’s quest for energy independence goes online: the Greenvale Nuclear Facility. The first of three nuclear power stations, Greenvale will power two million houses, generating five gigawatts.’ After a few more anodyne comments she thought that’d do for talking-head stuff. She recorded some voiceover, and sent the videodrone upwards to get some aerial shots. It had already communicated with the CSSA’s system to obtain clearance within boundaries defined to the centimetre. If it breached them, it’d be shot out of the sky.

  The formalities were predictable and unremarkable, and the videodrone, having behaved perfectly during its flight, recorded them dutifully. Effenberg’s family were there, Marion wearing her customary white robe, purity mask and serene gaze, standing with the fruit of the Effenberg loins, Seth, now Minister for Health and Foreign Affairs. No doubt the nepotism that gave Seth his two ministries extended to a double salary. He had come a long way since his Grunge-Jesus days. Now he was clean-cut, neat of hair and conservatively suited. Where once he was thin and energised, now he was heavier, with a sullen, thuggish air. Harvey Alexander, Minister for Nuclear Development, spoke first, outlining the benefits of the facility to Greenvale and to Capricornia. He praised Effenberg for his vision, guidance and determination, and praised God for giving Capricornia a president of such calibre. When he handed over to Effenberg, the carefully selected audience applauded, whooped and hollered. He mouthed some platitudes and it was all over. No questions from the media. Really, Brigid shouldn’t have bothered making the trek. It was just routine, something every news outlet would cover, but there had been the lurking thought that something dramatic might happen, like a protest or security breach. But, no, nothing. And now her bladder wouldn’t be ignored any longer, and she subvocced to see where the nearest loo was, one that wouldn’t require an impossibly high-level security clearance to access. She was relieved to find it was in the main foyer, an area not off-limits to common folk like herself. She sent the videodrone off to hover safely above the 4WD and to transmit the footage and audio for editing and uploading, and set out in search of relief.

  She was sitting in the cubicle, musing that one of life’s great pleasures was to relieve a really urgent need to piss. In front of her on the rear of the door was the usual government mandated sign: ‘DON’T SPREAD THE PLAGUE! Wash your hands every time. Heavy penalties apply.’ It hadn’t changed in years, and, for some reason she’d never fathomed, the text was in Comic Sans. Your spying, authoritarian government has its friendly, chirpy side, even as it prosecutes you nine ways till Sunday.

  A voice from the next cubicle interrupted her.

  ‘Sorry,’ the voice said. ‘I should have checked before, but there’s no toilet paper in here. Do you have any spare in there?’

  ‘Oh, um, yes,’ replied Brigid. ‘Not a whole roll, but here …’

  She spun the roll beside her and liberated ten or so sheets, then bent down to pass them to her neighbour under the cubical wall. ‘Hope that’s enough?’

  ‘That’s great, thanks,’ the woman replied, but instead of an empty hand beneath the cubicle divider, she saw a white envelope being proffered. Brigid hesitated briefly, then took it and handed over the toilet paper, having the presence of mind not to say anything that might be picked up by the bugging devices she’d come to assume were everywhere. Her mind worked fast as she considered the possibility that she was being set up somehow. Would she be arrested as soon as she exited, charged with possessing state secrets, or whatever was in the envelope?

  ‘Any time,’ she said vaguely, wondering what the hell this was about. Should she open it now, or wait until she was in the car? The cistern next to hers flushed and the door opened, far too quickly for its occupant to have actually used the ten sheets of loo paper. Nor, by the sound of things, did she wash her hands before leaving the room. Brigid shoved the envelope inside her shirt, tucked into her bra between her breasts, before following.

  She drove back through town and didn’t pull up to read the contents of the envelope until she diverted to Conjuboy, a town that seemed to consist of little more than a sole roadhouse, outside of which semis and the caravans of grey nomads congregated. It was a single sheet of paper. On it was a red flower (badly) drawn in coloured ink. With a little imagination, it could be interpreted as one of the daisy-looking things. As she’d guessed with growing excitement since the interaction in the loo, it was a message from Deep Throat. Beneath the drawing was a series of printed numbers.

  ‘Oh, great,’ she murmured. ‘You haven’t written it in bloody code, have you?’ Numbers were not Brigid’s friend, and the concept of some sort of encryption was as dispiriting to her as walking into a Year Ten maths exam. Twenty-four digits in a single line. What the hell was that meant to mean? Was she going to have to find someone to unscramble it for her? Who did she know who could? Who she could trust?

  She turned back to the main road, headed towards Cairns and thought about the woman in the toilet. Was she Deep Throat? There was no real reason to assume that it was a man. But if that really was Deep Throat, why didn’t she just find a way to talk at the opening, instead of all this silly number business? She glanced back at the piece of paper lying on the seat next to her. Eyes back on the road, she picked it up and held it against the steering wheel. Another glance, and that’s when she spotted the last four digits. They were the year, this year. And the two digits in front of them, zero and nine, this month, September. And before those, two and four: the date, four days from now. And a time: twelve-zero-zero. Midday. If this was encryption, Brigid was a mathematical genius. She wondered about the first seventeen digits, ‘17003486145342379’, but then realised: it must be the place. Latitude and longitude. 17°00’ 34.86’S, 145°34’ 23.79’E. Yes! She was a genius! Brilliant! She would have loved to subvocc to find out what that location was, but would have to wait until she got home and found her dead-tree-style map. Analogue, analogue, always analogue.

  Four thoughts then occurred to her. First, thank the goddess she didn’t go and ask at some bloody university brain-box numbers department and make an utter arse of herself.

  Second, this meant her Deep Throat wasn’t nearly as sophisticated as she’d been fearing. He or she just wanted to get the message across in a way that might, if intercepted, have simply looked to the casual eye to be a password or software key.

  Third, someone must be watching her movements. They didn’t just know where she lived, which room her bedroom was, and that she had a vase by the window. They were following her, maybe intercepting her communications. She hoped to hell they were on her side.

  And fourth: ‘The game’s afoot!’ she announced to the passing terrain. ‘And you, Mr or Ms Deep Throat, have a date!’

  Cairns and the hinterland, Republic of Capricornia

  Marion had plans for Tricia. She told her as much over one of their regular lunches in Marion’s suite: salad sandwiches and freshly made lemonade delivered by the kitchen staff. Initially, Tricia had eaten with the other Daughters, but Marion had soon decided that she should join her for working lunches. They rarely worked as they ate, though. Usually, they chatted about trivialities, or Marion quizzed her about her past.

  ‘May I ask something?’ Tricia was feeling emboldened by Marion’s offer. Normally, she’d only speak when spoken to, but she was beginning to accept
that her position here really was elevated above the other Daughters.

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘Why me? I don’t know what I’ve done to deserve this.’

  ‘You don’t want it?’ Marion’s tone was almost teasing.

  ‘Oh, I do, of course I do. It’s just that … I’m nobody special. I don’t have any qualifications …’

  Marion put her lemonade down and reached across the table for Tricia’s hands. Her open gaze into Tricia’s eyes was so intense, so powerful, Tricia forgot to breathe.

  ‘I see you as you are, Tricia. I see deep into your heart. You are like me. Your love of God is so strong, his presence is within you, it’s part of you. I could tell the first time we met. This is your destiny as much as it is mine.’

  She released Tricia’s hands and picked up a sandwich. Tricia’s skin was still tingling from her touch. It was true, she thought. Her faith and devotion were growing by the day. To God. To the Mother. She hadn’t believed it was possible to feel closer to God and deeper in her belief. Marion had given her that.

  So it was that now she was arriving at her first raid, or Intervention. She would be doing regular Interventions over the next month, familiarising herself with processes and the role of the Daughters. Today she was accompanying the delegated CSSA officers to a tattoo parlour, one of the largest in Cairns, dating back to when it was still part of Queensland.

  The CSSA ran the logistics and provided the muscle. She was there to represent the authority of the Song of Light, and it was a great honour, as well as nerve-wracking. What if she forgot the words? She knew her performance would be reported to Marion. The sergeant in charge advised her to keep back until it was safe for her to enter. The armoured vehicles had surrounded the building by the time the officers stormed the entrances. But where was the media? If they weren’t there to show footage on the state broadcast, half the purpose of the event would be lost.