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__----__________------__________--________--________--______----__


 DOWN, a novel.

   © Matthew Spong 1994

The following text file is the manuscript for a novel titled 
"Down". It was most likely downloaded from my WWWeb page at:

http://www.real.com.au/commercial/spong

DOWN is fantasy/magic realism. The story opens in the ancient city of Levinfield, home of a civilisation so old that their libraries collapse beneath the weight of their books, where the monetary system is based on poetry and . History follows a regular cycle, from industrial peak to decadent trough and back again, and the city is now in the middle of a quiet era of contented peace. Few people leave the city, as all their needs are catered for by the leftovers from the last industrial age, the automated Factories which can manufacture anything required and the antique mines where fossilised machines are dug from beneath the ruins. 

Lang, however, has been reading. In the libraries he uncovers references to a great forest to the West, and a desire stirs in him to explore, leave the safe streets and venture out into the deserted countryside. 

One legend in particular catches his interest. In the last days of the previous Industrial Age a truckdriver disappeared while passing through the forest on his way to the outlying villas of the rich Factory-owners. Since then his ghost was said to haunt the road, ceaselessly searching for a way out, a pale wraith in white tee-shirt and navy shorts, wandering through the trees crying "Map! Maaap!", searching for directions. Lang vows to track the ghost down and lay it to rest.

His friends try and prevent him leaving. Subconsciously they fear he is the first sign of the next aggressive wave of greed, desire and development. But he is determined. He readies his rusted trailbike, acquires a longbow for protection, and sets out.

Deep in the heart of the forest, in a castle that for millennia lay buried beneath the mold, Catherine toils obsessively at her life's work. She is a descendant of the Factory-owners of old, run-away from her parents crumbling villa to the West of the forest. She records on tape the words spoken by parrots that nest in the trees - words of a forgotten language of great power. Passed down through generations of birds, this language, (when the words are spoken in the right order), can harness strong magical energy. Catherine records and catalogues and files the words of power and never really knows why.

As Lang unknowingly approaches her castle he encounters strange things. By night he hears the ghostly cry, "Maap!", and sees a white shape moving through the fog, until one night when the air is clear and he sees the ghost for what it really is - an albino deer, it's coat sparkling with phosphorescent spores, that bleats the mournful cry as it grazes. He decides to hunt it down and carry the skin back to the city to dispel the myth. 

Catherine, her senses amplified by magic, senses the deer's death. She knew it well, it was almost her pet. In her anger she decides to punish Lang in the worst way possible. She will create a void, a bottomless hole, an empty universe, and cast him in. For eternity he will float through space, alive, aware but unable to escape, lost in nothingness. 

As Lang casually heads back to Levinfield, the white pelt lashed across his pack, she works to prepare the spell, cutting and splicing tape in a mad frenzy. The trap works. One moment Lang is walking through the forest, the next he finds himself suspended in the highest room in the castle, an inky black well of nothing beneath his feet, Catherine standing before him triumphant. 

And then...? Read on, to find out how they both come to be trapped in the void, how together they escape from the impossible, how they come to find themselves in inner-city Sydney, in a world they have created from their dreams, a world corrupted by their antagonism and twisted by their desperation, a world which, finally, they have to decide either to allow to continue or to destroy utterly.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

At present there are three versions of this book loose in the electronic universe:

1/ DOWN.TXT

This one. Suitable for IBM PCs or any platform at all, monocrome monitors, everyone. Plain ASCII text for your word processor.

2/ Down/Color

A pair of Hypercard stacks, Stuffit archived and binhexed, which can at present be found in various Archie mirrors all over the planet under Art_and_Info/Books. Illustrated in colour, they need a Macintosh with 14" colour screen and Hypercard 2.0 to run. 

3/ DOWN.HTM

A directory of HTML files and their illustrations which can be read by any Web browser such as Netscape or Mosaic. This version should soon be posted to alt.binaries.zines. Zip compressed and UUencoded for greater cross-platform compatability.

All versions of the book can be found at my home page:

http://www.real.com.au/commercial/spong

DOWN aint shareware. 

If you enjoy reading DOWN, please send whatever you 
think it's worth to:

Matthew Spong
127A Copeland Rd.
Beecroft 2119
Sydney Australia

But you probably won't, and I can't make you.

If you have any comments, expressions of wonderment and admiration, or even disgust and dislike, send them all to me at:

    elric@real.com.au

I'm especially interested in recieving your own creative efforts and communicating with other people who get more of a kick out of uploading than downloading.

And watch out for my next book, WOODCODE, which should be 
out Real Soon Now. 

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

 The coolest people in the world are:
Sam Shovel aka. Bruce McInnes, head honcho of the Cyberspace 
warehouse, who got me into Macs; 
Neill the Patriarch of Spong and Kemel the Incorruptible;
Richelle Norfolk, star power;
Matt Godden, Ia Cthulu ! ; 
the late Michael Mercury, test pilot, creater of horrible noise; 
Sam Young, Gerrard Ashworth, and all comic artists united by Unrealism ; 
Aeger, James Firth-Smith, David and Jill, Graham Mann, Jean 
Cameron and Katie Plummer, Dave the Xenomorph, and Mozart.
Not all characters in this publication are fictitious. 
All the best ones are real.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

CHAPTER 1
DOWN

1 : THE ACCIDENT TREE 

Once upon a time there was a traveler riding a trailbike 
through the country.

The tyres were worn and threadbare, with rims and spokes 
coated in mud; it was clear he'd come far. The engine popped and 
spluttered and left clouds of sweet smelling grey smoke. It ran on 
200 proof ethanol, and the night before he had tapped a little, just an 
ounce, from the fueltank for his own consumption, mixing it with the 
juice of blackberries growing near his campsite. The result was sweet 
and potent, with only a touch of synthetic oil marring the taste. Lying 
back staring into the fire and taking hits of blackness, he completely 
forgot about recapping the tank, and there had been heavy dew; 
even now the passing fields sparkled with moisture. It condensed 
inside the tank and watered down the fuel. Now the engine had 
trouble firing and seemed ready to quit.

The poor bike was overloaded, with an overstuffed backpack 
riding behind the seat, bulging around it's straps. The shock 
absorbers  were weighed down nearly to their limit. Each ridge and 
rut he crossed forced them down till they hit the frame with a loud 
clang and a boneshuddering shake. Worse, the road had been rising 
sharply for over an hour, winding up the side of a bare range of hills. 

Finally the little bike reached a flat section of road at the top of 
the ridge and died between a tree and a roadsign. 

Lang looked up at the tree. Old tree. Must have sprouted when 
the hill was six feet taller. Since then erosion had slowly exposed the 
base, leaving a snarled tangle of roots and boulders like a fistfull of 
rocks. It was the last living remnant of the forest that had blanketed 
these hills centuries before, and its only companions now were rank 
upon rank of bleached stumps that punctuated the fields beside the 
road.

Looking in amongst the granite boulders and the roots that 
spread out from the base of the tree, Lang could see a gleam of glass, 
like an old bottle thrown there by a careless driver. He knew what it 
was. It was the windshield of a car, half grown into the wood that 
surrounded it. 


Lang sat still on the old bike, lulled by the dull vibration of the 
engine between his legs, and contemplated that ancient shine, 
clouded by the years, that marked this tree and gave it name. He was 
transported, against his will, back down the corridor of memory that 
led to this moment. 

He remembered a photo.

It had been a month before. In the ancient stacks of the 
forgotten library, down long flights of stairs that wound into 
labyrinthine air-conditioned darkness where huge clots of dust 
trailed from the vents in the roof, and the only sound to be heard is 
the plink of failing fluorescent tubes struggling to glow and the 
distant rustle of rats nesting. Lang idly turned the pages of an old 
magazine. The glossy leaves, after centuries of waiting, cracked like 
china as he turned them. There was a picture and a short column, a 
human interest story about a  freak of nature; the car trapped in the 
trees embrace. Bonnet and roof were visible then, lipstick red, the 
roots hadn't yet had time to wrap the body entirely in wood, and the 
tree stood on the fringes of the retreating forests ranks. Lang looked 
up then and stared at infinity, and that was when the idea first came, 
the decision started to be made. To leave... go past the edge... he 
shook his head and closed the magazine and replaced it in its file slip 
and returned the file to the shelf, but the idea burrowed deep, 
deeper than the stacks of the library burrowed beneath the streets 
of the city, and it wouldn't go away, no matter how many times he 
told it too...)


He dismounted, laid the bike down, and scrambled up the little 
hill of roots. 

The windscreen was clear and unscratched, with only a coating 
of dust needing to be brushed away to see inside. The cabin of the 
car was full of pale white tendril rootlets that had entered through a 
rear window left slightly open, and they twisted and turned in the 
cramped space looking for escape, curling over the flaking vinyl 
upholstery and growing into the foam padding beneath, looping 
through the bones of the skeleton that occupied the front passenger 
seat. The only place the roots hadn't gone was the drivers seat, which 
was still occupied.

"What the fuck you staring at?" shouted the driver. He had 
perished badly, over the years, and only scraps of pink plastic clung 
to the articulated metal expression plates of his face and mouth. The 
eyes had crumbled, their silicone rubber orbs crumbled to dust like 
old superballs, leaving only uselessly whining servos in the sockets. 
The creatures real eyes, a small minicam mounted where the rear 
vision mirror would be, tracked Langs face.

"You." Lang answered truthfully. "Why did you crash?"

" 'Cause I wanted to. How many times do you tourists have to 
ask? Get me out or piss off."

"I can't get you out." Lang started to climb higher.

Hey," the autopilot called, "have they started building again, in 
the city?"

"Not yet."

"Damn." the thing muttered. "I was hoping they'd get me out, 
this time."

 The first branches sprouted from the trunk just above his 
head. He wrapped his arms around the closest one, swung himself 
astride it like mounting a horse, stood, grabbed the branch above it 
and looked out at the view. 

He could see the forest now. It was an ocean of dark green, 
stormy with upflung branches and shadowy even in the strong 
afternoon sun, reaching all the way from the horizon to a ragged 
edge that followed the base of the ridge. Rivers that started high on 
the hills around him disappeared beneath its tree tops. The road 
switchbacked down the slope until it, too, a thin brown line on the 
plain below, disappeared, but not before it had sprouted a tributary 
that avoided the forest altogether and skirted its edge, leading off to 
the left and apparently going all the way around. But that wasn't the 
road he wanted to take. He wanted to go in.

Sun was setting, casting everything in gold, the rocks poking 
through the short grass on the hills becoming gems in golden settings 
and the forest an expanse of lapis lazuli. He felt a strong urge to go 
and lie on a rock, soak up the warmth of the day from its surface and 
smell the heat and lichen, feel the pleasures that lizards feel, forget 
about his journey - but the sun was setting and there were many 
miles to go. 

So he swung down from his perch to the topmost roots and 
paused, looking down at the car and it's trapped driver. They had 
been trapped for three city cycles, something like three thousand 
years. They would keep. 

The bike wouldn't start, but that was okay, it was all downhill 
now. He kicked himself along until the slope was steep enough to 
glide down, and coasted, down, in silence, towards the distant trees.

LEVINFIELD


Bumping down that old road he passes the time dreaming of 
Levinfield, his home, miles and days behind, sprawled along the 
coast of the great unknown Continent that is the sole home of 
Humanity in this World. 

Levinfield is an old, old city. 

Enormous, rambling, streets and buildings and factories and 
carparks and towers and squares and parks spread out forever. The 
buildings rise and fall in waves, following the coast and flowing 
inland. They surround mountains and lakes. A forest in prestressed 
concrete, cast iron, brick and stone. Especially stone. The stone taken 
from mines beneath the buildings, creating tunnels and catacombs 
and cellars for every room above. An anachronistic, multi-layered 
puzzle, created by generation after generation of his ancestors, their 
history stretching back through years, centuries and millennium to 
the beginning of time.

The buried libraries told part of the tale. Lang had spent much 
of his life burrowing through the crumbling caches of forgotten 
books, peicing it together. It was a story of people who changed 
radically through their history, swinging pendulum regular from 
periods of growth to decay and back again, from hard, reliable 
science to soft, whimsical indulgence, from urgency to apathy. There 
had been years full of the sound of jackhammers and cranes, with 
new towers and office blocks sprouting overnight from the ruins to 
house men flocking like migrating birds eager to design and build 
more towers and make their fortune. Then long, unchanging eras of 
peace and decadence, languid and beautiful, the essence of slow 
Sunday afternoons and the sound of faint music drifting from a vine 
shaded verandah; ascetic silk-eyed people studying the strange 
aesthetics of the little understood magical arts, perhaps uncovering a 
fraction of the mystery before the times changed again and it was 
time for their children to build. 

Cycle after cycle, each had one thing in common; each thought 
it was right and the one before it wrong.

OUTDATED APPLIANCES


About a week before he left on his journey, Lang went for a 
walk  down the quiet streets of the suburb where he lived. They 
were lined with the burnt out shells of warehouses, and their black 
mossy walls of crumbling brick echoed each footfall. 

Up streets of terrace houses he walked; windchimes ringing in 
second storey eaves, woodpolish smells pouring through open 
doorways. The air felt warm and soft as fur. He passed a workshop; 
engineers inside what was once a garage were clustered around a jet 
engine on a testing stand, something they must have dug up from the 
ruins nearby. They argued mildly and sorted through boxes of parts. 
Light gusts of wind blew reinforced pumice cobblestones along the 
footpath, the hollow rattle like handfuls of bones.

He walked across a square of green glass blocks fringed with 
grass. A fountain in the middle, fluted glass towers spraying warm 
water, surrounded by discarded clothing. Bathers splashed and 
wrestled and made love, they laughed and shouted, chased each 
other around the edge of the pool before tumbling back in to float 
spread-eagled on the steaming surface. There were shouts as he 
passed, "Hey, jump in, it's great! Where are you going? Have a swim!" 
He smiled and shook his head and walked faster, averting his eyes, 
hoping nobody knew him, hoping no-one would call his name, which 
would make it impossible to get to his destination without having to 
stop and talk, and maybe getting pulled in. "Where are you going? 
What's the hurry?"

Somewhere nearby mushrooms were spawning, probably in 
one of the empty office towers that fringed the square with tall 
cylinders of flaking concrete, faced with square after empty square 
of windows edged with the jagged remains of glass panes. 
Mushrooms loved to grow on the endless boxes of paper that filled 
the rooms of these buildings, that spilled in great cascades from the 
tops of desks and out across the soggy carpets of the abandoned 
offices. The air was filled with clouds of sweet scented blue dust that 
tickled the nose and sent mild hallucinatory shadows flickering about 
the edges of sight. Mushroom hunters leaned from the windows, 
calling to each other from floor to floor, tower to tower, coordinating 
their efforts, seeking the source of the bloom, voices crossing the sky 
above his head like birdsong. As he reached the edge of the square a 
successful band of hunters stumbled across his path. They giggled, 
eyes dilated and dark, clothes smeared blue with dust and cheeks 
pulled back in tight grins of chemical pleasure. Some among them 
walked straight and unstoned; they had scarves tied across their 
face, and they walked bare chested, carrying bundles of the little 
blue caps wrapped in their shirts, a stash to be saved for a rainy day.

He spied his destination, a restaurant on the corner ahead. 
Empty, chairs on tables, the sidewalk outside wet from hosing, 
blackboard menu newly washed down and smeared with the chalk of 
the specialty of the day. Lang entered the swinging doors and a man 
with long red hair tied back with copper wire looked up from a 
magazine spread on the marble counter.

"Giri in?" 

The man jerked his thumb at the door behind him. 

Steam poured from the kitchen doorway as he pushed through. 
Giri, red eyed and rat-tailed hair, looked up from the open hood of 
the dishwasher.

"Lang! Look at this mess!"

He peered inside. The washer was old, very old. So old the 
pipes and nozzles inside were coated thickly with white calcium 
scale, and stalactites of the stuff dripped down from the top till they 
met the rotating spray which itself was encrusted in white.

"A thousand years of slow rust and scale and they expect me to 
fuckin' repair it! I'll have to make the parts, if I can take them apart. 
It would make more sense to throw it away." she said, and reached 
for a small hammer in her overflowing toolbox.

"Old machine. 'Wonder it still works." Lang watched as she 
started to pound the works as hard as she could. Flakes of white 
cascaded down like an avalanche.

"Oh, this one's at least two millennia." She kept up a steady 
rhythm of blows as she spoke. "Look here, under the crust; brand 
name. That's how they wrote in those days. These are picturegraphs; 
this one's a horse, here's a spear, there's the sign for a telephone 
answering machine... Old machines are tough, everyone knows that. 
Stands to reason, really. The older they are, the tougher, simply 
because it's survived so long. You can drive a nail with an antique 
calculator, even if you can't read the numbers on the keys. But when 
you try to repair them...! What do you want?"

"I came to ask a favor."

"Maybe. I can't promise anything. This'll take me the next few 
days to figure out." She kept up a steady rhythm of hammering as 
she spoke, wincing at the sound as the stubborn crust of time gave 
way.

"I want my bike fixed. I'm going away, and it won't start."

"That little trailbike, eh? Last time I looked you burnt spirit, 
right? So that means you probably need new rings. Alky burns hot, it 
burns out rings. If it burnt oil I'd clean the plugs and try to get you 
to switch to alcohol; I can't stand that smell when oilburners drive 
past; like forgotten cabbage burning to charcoal on the stove, and the 
smoke..."

"Where are you going anyway? North? Lots of people going 
north now. All the old flint towers up that way are collapsing, and 
the treasure lies thick on the ground, so I heard."

"No, no, I'm not even after treasure, strange as it may seem. 
Too much junk lying around the house as it is, without trucking more 
back from the digs. Actually, I'm thinking of going inland. West. Out 
of the city." said Lang.

"Out of the city? As in, right out, past the edges of the 
buildings? Like the country? Why?"

"I thought it might make a change. I've seen a lot of the city, 
you know. You can get tired of this place."

"No one lives out there, you know." said Giri. "It's a barren 
trackless waste. You'll drive for miles without seeing a soul, and 
when you do it'll be some deranged psychopath who's gone mad 
from the isolation and looking for a good time involving your face 
and a knife. Or, at least that's how I've always pictured it." 

Giri pushed her hair back. She had finished sweeping the scales 
of calcium out of the washer, and kicked them across the floor.

"I hate to ruin your pictures, but they're wrong. I've been 
down the library-"

"As usual."

"Yeah, as usual. You should come with me some day. There's 
some remarkable things in the old books."

"Old books. Too many old books!"

"Did you know there's a forest out there?"

"Heard stories, when I was little."

"Well, I've been reading those stories, and they're true. It's 
huge, nearly as big as the City, with trees like you've never seen, 
trees with faces on them! And birds! You have to hear about the 
parrots. They glow in the dark!"

"Bullshit! How?"

"Their feathers are impregnated with spores, fluorescent fungi 
that glows in the dark, and they shine like rainbow lightning when 
they fly. As soon as I saw the photos I had to see them! Imagine 
watching them at night, shooting through the trees leaving trails of 
dusty light on the dark sky..."

"Birdwatching. Sounds fun."

"I'm not asking you to come or anything, I'll bring home photos, 
or feathers if I can get any. "

Giri sat on a counter and looked up at the transom window. 
Afternoon sun streamed through the last wisps of steam, printing 
warm squares of light across the old stone of the kitchen walls.

"Oh, I'll repair your bike, don't worry. It's just... this is a pretty 
weird thing to do, you know? If you want thrills and adventure you 
can find it in the city. If you want to see new things, they're right 
here for the seeing. You can walk down the street in some parts of 
town and see a dozen inexplicable things every block. This forest, no 
one goes there... I haven't heard of anyone leaving the city for years. 
There must be a reason for this. Maybe it is  dangerous out there. 
Maybe there are other interesting creatures out there, but 
carnivorous ones, that live in the trees of this forest and wait to fall 
on unsuspecting passers by and devour them."

"I hardly think-"

"And think about this; you remember the petrified trees we 
saw in the tunnels under Endless Nightmares?"

(Nightmares was their favorite club, a smoky dive in a 
basement near their house where bassheads went to dance to music 
played through an immensely powerful sound system that was 
discovered when the basement itself was excavated. The manager 
once showed them the cellars, his racks of ancient wines, and took 
them down secret spiral ramps and through trapdoors to a grid of 
wide dungeon tunnels that lay even lower in the ground. The bass 
thud of the music receded behind them as they descended into the 
earth, and in awed wonder they touched the opalised branches that 
protruded from the walls while their candle flames struck glints 
from crystallized fruit.)

"Those trees... they could have been part of the forest once." 
she said.

"So?"

"So maybe there isn't a forest any more. Maybe once it reached 
the coast, and it started retreating and dying back into the hills until 
now it's maybe disappeared into piles of dead wood and waste. Those 
books are old and you should never trust what you read in old books. 
Stay here, Lang. We'll go treasurehunting down south when the 
weather gets warmer, browse around on the edge, you know? 
There's always something new to see."

She started collecting the tools scattered around her feet, 
dropping them into her toolbox and slinging it around her shoulder. 
Lang shrugged his shoulders and looked away.

"Maybe someday I will, but still, I'd like to at least see if the 
forest's still there. Is there anything wrong with being the first 
person you know to leave the city? It isn't like some kind of 
blasphemy, is it, to contemplate going beyond the edge? If nothing 
else, at least it won't be boring!"

"I've never even been near the edge. Never wanted to and 
never will."

"Can you look at my bike now? I want to leave in a few days."

"Okay, okay, just wait till I'm finished." She slammed the 
washer hood shut.

SAND IN THE GEARS


She wanted to go home and drink beer and forget about 
machines, but he asked, straight out, and she had to say yes. That 
was just the way she was. 

They both lived in a communal house in the Poets Quarter, 
where people wandered from room to room day and night, learnt 
how to play guitar, took drugs, had parties, and occupied themselves 
with an endless succession of projects that were never completed. 
The city was smack in the middle of another golden age of lazy 
peace, and they were their cultures highest achievement; happy 
humans with endless free time and the knack for spending it. 

Most of them wrote verse to survive, and cashed their verses 
at the local bank. Since the great Speed Crash that marked the end of 
the Ponytail Brigade era, that last period of industrial civilization, 
Levinfield's economy had been based on poetry. Lang and Giri and 
their friends were essential, for they produced new verse to replace 
the old. 

This is how it worked: a poet would spend agonized hours bent 
over scraps of paper with a pencil. He or she would shake, sweat, grit 
teeth, shuffle feet, bite through the pencil, walk around the room 
muttering, screw up the paper, throw it at the overflowing bin, miss, 
get out another sheet, and most likely give up and go out for a walk. 
Soon they would be back at the table with the still blank sheets, 
frowning like a chessplayer and sharpening the pencil down to the 
end. Finally, a few hours of excruciating scribbles, and there would 
be verse. Good or bad, it would be handed over the marble counter of 
the bank, where tellers would run it through the computer, checking 
for forgery against the database of old bills. If it came through, if it 
was new and genuine and not copied from an old book or another 
bill, the verse would be stamped official and laminated to become 
currency, valid cash handed back to the happy poet who would then 
proceed to blow every line on booze and clothes and cigarettes. 

Peace, love and harmony roamed the land like big friendly 
gods showering gifts down on the happy upturned faces of the 
faithful. The Ponytail Brigade was just a bad chapter in the history 
books that rotted in the bowels of libraries, just a name from old 
stacks of magazines that treasure hunters found turning to dust in 
the basements of abandoned houses on the outskirts of the city. That 
era of runaway corporate megadeals and huge factory expansion and 
mean greed had faded and mellowed into another long decadent 
slide through five hundred years of relaxation and sleeping in. 

And Giri was a mechanic, repairing the old machines, the 
antiques, the remains of industrial times, tough machines that ran for 
thousands of years without complaint but sometimes came apart and 
had to be put back together to give another millennia of service. She 
couldn't write poetry. It didn't satisfy her soul as much as fixing 
what had been broken did. She made sure things worked, and when 
someone like Lang asked her for help she helped

It was her way. When people came to her with breaks, she 
fixed them, and that was her offering to the good of the world. 
"Sure!" she would say, dropping a book or guitar or whatever had 
been absorbing her interest, and immediately her attention was 
focused entirely on the problem and how to solve it. Automatic, 
without considering the time and effort it would cost her. 

It was the  way, for anyone else would do the same. It was 
their code, the moral they lived by, the source of their pride. They 
owed nothing to each other, were fierce in their independence, but 
the only way they could stand so high was to hold each other up. 


Giri and Lang returned to the house, walking silent and 
thoughtful through deserted streets, and she took his bike apart in 
the front garden. 

It did need new rings, she told him, and the fuel nozzles were 
clogged. 

"I don't have the parts here." she said.

"What?"

"The parts. It needs new parts. I don't have them and I can't 
make them. You'll have to buy them."

"Ah, sure. Sure, I'd be glad to." And he flashed her a broad 
smile that made her heart fall, as though she had asked too much. 

She scratched a quick list on a scrap of newspaper and watched 
him walk up the street. He seemed to relish the task of finding them, 
in the same way he enjoyed many trivial activities that distracted 
him from the abstract thoughts he carried around in his head like a 
box of puzzles. 

Lang was something of a misfit, as she was. A student of the 
Knack, he was. He studied magic.

(Yes, magic. Don't sneer! Sure, I was a role-player! I rolled dice 
and advanced my little lead figurines across hex maps with the best 
of them! If I want Levinfield to have magic, you can bloody well read 
what I write and shut up, or put this book down right now and go 
and wash the BMW or marble your walls or something. Sorry. That's 
just the way it is. }:-)


She cleaned her hands with a rag and looked down at the bike 
spread out on a canvas sheet, her practiced eye fitting each piece 
back into the functioning whole they could become, and she tried to 
picture Lang lying disassembled in its place, all the many 
complicated parts of his psyche spread out around his head, coated in 
machine oil and grease. Maybe she could find the piece that was 
malfunctioning, the slipped cogwheel or broken wire. 

Because there was such a piece, of that she was sure. She had a 
skill, a Knack of her own, a direct vision that pierced to the heart of 
problems and sought breakage and malfunction wherever they lay. 
With him she could almost see, but her vision was clouded. The 
problem was too general, spread out, too many parts involved. More 
like rust than a break.

It was as though there was sand in the gears, that crunched 
and splintered their teeth and caused them to slip occasionally, 
intermittent. Talking to him meant hearing the grind, listening to 
ideas that changed direction and went awry, almost working but not 
quite. Not just him, of course. Nobody's perfect. The sanest have their 
glitches, but she felt his strongest, as though vital parts were about 
to break and the repercussions would spread farthest. 

In the darkness of the darkest night, she would lie awake and 
think about time. Everyone knew that they lived in the interlude 
between the last Age of Industry and the next. Everyone knew that, 
someday, a man would come, (it was almost always a man), who had 
ambition, drive, and determination, who would want to "Set the city 
back on course", who would "Clean things up and get things working 
again", who would "Shake off this useless lethargy and start building 
a future." Not that she thought Lang was that man. But perhaps his 
son, or his grandson, would.

MAAAP!


Lang sat in the corner of his favorite pub, the Ink and Quill, a 
cold beer weeping dew on the scarred table before him, a paper bag 
of parts at his feet, watching sport on the mirror above the phones. 

There was a race reflected live from the track in Cenetaph, 
magically animated horse racing. Built of filigreed metal and hand 
carved wood, the horses flashed around the track, legs blurring into 
invisibility, riders clinging for their life. Each horse had a name 
stenciled on the side, the chop of whoever had animated them. The 
track behind was deeply slashed with trenches dug by their hard 
metal hooves, and clods flew through the air as they raced for the 
line. Crackles and sparks snapped in the gaps between them as the 
huge charges that kicked their stiff legs into life overloaded, and 
here and there smoke rose from an unlucky jockey's shorts.

The Knack was a strange thing, he reflected as he watched. 
Tricky, unreliable, but still powerful. If they could, humans would 
use it for everything. That restaurant would use it to clean dishes, 
instead of a thousand year old dishwasher unearthed in some 
antique mine. But the machine was built in an age when technology 
was at some strange dizzy height when they built for eternity, and it 
still worked, with repair, while the Knack only worked when it 
wanted to.

He himself had spent years, from early childhood, studying the 
Knack. Long hours were spent in the garage with photocopies from 
the library, (the books being too valuable to lend), trying out 
formulas and incantations. Librarians came to know him; they 
sometimes gave him tips that revealed deep research into the arcane 
subjects. With time he gained success, even to the point where, on a 
memorable occasion, he turned lead into gold, (well, actually it was 
only gold coloured lead, but it was impressive nonetheless). His 
powers grew, but the Knack was always an uncertain force in a world 
that demanded certainties.

The door to the pub swung open by itself, as if to demonstrate, 
and swung shut in the face of a young man who pushed it open again 
by hand and looked around guiltily to check how many patrons 
noticed his attempt at a classy entry. They all had, and many pairs of 
mocking eyes stared him down.

He hunched his shoulders under their cold stare and 
approached Lang's corner table. Ragged jeans fell in tangles of cotton 
dreds to bare feet, tee shirt that had split along the weave into many 
slits, hundreds of little mouths that gaped when he moved. His hair 
was a cloud of dead split ends that threatened at any second to break 
off and fall like pine needles. Something in his eyes spoke of 
madness, something that came from looking at distances from an 
early age, and not just the other side of the street. 

"Are you Lang? I'm looking for someone called Lang, a friend of 
someone else called Giri... she just gave me a call, said he'd be here, 
and you look like what she said..." 

"Yep, that's me." 

"My name's Dake. I know Giri from way back, we used to go 
fossicking together, back when she made a living from the antique 
business. I was her guide, actually. Spend a lot of time out in the 
suburbs, and I know my way around. Anyway, she said you were 
thinking about going exploring yourself. Said something about a 
forest, how you were going to ride a bike there or something. And it 
reminded her of something I told her once-"

"You used to live there?" asked Lang.

"Oh, no, no-one lives there! But we lived on the edge of the city, 
right out where the last ruins stop and the fields begin, and my 
parents used to tell me stories about it."

"Cool! Pull up a seat and tell me what you know. I've been 
reading as much as I can find, about the lay of the land out there. I 
thought no one had been there for centuries."

Dake perched nervously on the edge of his stool. 

"Yeah, I guess so. Quite a few centuries, now. Life's good here, 
there's no need to go anywhere if you don't want to, and no one 
wants to. When she called me I remembered something, something 
my father left me, I thought you should know about." 

Lang watched as the man started fishing in his ragged pockets, 
emptying the contents in a pile on the table, keys and change and 
matches and interesting pebbles. He had Dake sussed.

Lang wasn't too fond of the type. You usually met them 
crouched around campfires out in the wilderness, amongst the outer 
ruins, sharing a bottle after a hard days fossick. They would be 
covered in dirt from digging, and passing around strange coins and 
trinkets that had turned up under their spades, and telling 
whispered, choked little stories about unmentionable things  that 
lived in the out there. 

While Dake searched he went to the bar. When he returned 
with their beers Dake had found what he was searching for, a piece 
of the old technology. Small and black and square, the edges worn 
smooth and round by passing time, small buttons worn down flush 
with the scarred surface.

"What-"

"Shhh!"

Dake took a matchstick and poked at the controls. Tiny red 
eyes lit up. Power. There was a faint, steady hiss, like sand spilling 
through an hourglass. The hiss grew louder, and resolved into 
distinct sounds.  Crystal clear now, he heard the song of wind in a 
power line, and locusts droning, and footsteps on bare earth that 
didn't fade or increase but stayed the same volume. Lang reached 
out, felt the box vibrate under his fingers as the sound emerged.

They heard the footsteps approach a stream, and cross. The 
sound of fast water rushing past shins, the slosh of each step, and the 
slap of bare feet on the bank. There were trees nearby now, tall trees 
that blocked the wind and forced it to rush through their dense 
packed leaves in a steady roar. 

Gradually the wind and water faded until it could just be heard 
in the background, above the sound of horse racing and the clink of 
glasses in the bar. The footsteps were muffled now and Lang guessed 
whoever recorded these sounds was walking on dead leaves now, 
absorbing each tread. There were strange voices, gibbering and 
chanting in the distance, like devotees of an esoteric religion intoning 
secret prayers in some secluded grove before they sacrificed a victim 
to their demon gods.

"Those voices are parrots, " Dake explained. "They live in the 
tops of the trees. Strange birds. They say they glow in the dark, and 
they loop through the night like demons flying out of hell and leave 
mad spores in flaming trails through the air like comet tails."

"So this is the forest, huh?" asked Lang. Dake didn't answer.

The footsteps went on and on, monotonous, thud thud thud of 
bare heels on the deep loamy earth beneath trees. Suddenly they 
stopped, the walker startled into immobility, and there was only 
stifled breathing. All was very quiet. The parrots had stopped 
talking, the river was far behind, the wind had died down to nothing. 

Into this emptiness came a cry.

"MAP! Maaap!"

It was a terrible voice, lonely, drawn out and frighteningly 
human, far more human than the parrots, sending prickles of fear 
along Langs arms and up his back. It vibrated with an intense ache 
that froze his breath in his throat. Looking up into Dakes eyes he saw 
a strange fear. 

The cry came again, just once, before it was drowned out by 
sudden sprinting footsteps thudding into the earth and stumbling 
through piles of rustling leaves, panting breaths and oaths when the 
feet hit rocks and tripped. 

Running, desperate running, until the river returned, rushing 
calmly through its course, and the locusts shrilling in fields, and Lang 
could almost hear the sunlight of the open country beyond. Finally 
there was just loud panting, and the box went dead.

"Now," said Dake, "that was an ancestor of mine. I'm not sure 
how many generations ago. He left us this machine and some tapes. 
You're lucky this one has survived; most of the tapes have been re-
used. Music, my first words, and relatives I've never met, laughing at 
some party long before I was born. None of them contain his voice; 
legend has it he was mute, or at least he didn't want to record his 
words. There's only wind, and storms, and rivers, and animals, on the 
tapes that survive from his time."

"So that was the forest, that wind through the trees?"

"Yes."

"And that... thing, that cry, that was something in  the forest?"

"There's a special story that goes with that tape. Listen: about 
seven hundred years ago..."


Perhaps seven hundred years ago, perhaps more, at the end of 
the Ponytail Combine years, in the days when industry was just 
starting to break down, and the factories were emptying out, and 
people were just beginning to question why they spent their lives 
chasing a fortune when they were left with no time to spend it, and 
the smoke clouds were starting to clear as the chimneystacks 
stopped renewing them, a trucker drove his rig right into the forest. 

They say he was hauling a load of refrigerated cheese and 
wanted to cut time off his trip because of the risk of overheating if 
the cooler cut out. It was a luxury cargo, valuable gourmet cheeses 
for the aristocrats in their villas perched on the lip of the Bottomless 
Valley in the Fields of Cloud that lay miles away on the other side of 
the trees, beyond the wasteland and the overgrown ruins of 
forgotten farms. 

Despite the chill that leaked into the cabin from the cargo hold 
he wore the standard truckdriver uniform: singlet and navy shorts. 


"The singlet was white. That is important, you gotta remember 
it because the rest of the story doesn't make sense if you don't."


He passed an old warning sign that stood at the mouth of the 
forest road, under the branches of trees that met and entwined their 
branches into the roof of a long dark tunnel overhead, and he gave it 
a blast with the air horn:
WARNING:
THE AUTHORITIES TAKE NO RESPONSIBILITY
FOR THE SAFETY OF PERSONS 
WHO ENTER THE FOREST.
DO SO AT YOUR OWN RISK.


The rig thundered down the narrow road, its wake tossing the 
branches of trees on either side and blowing up twisters of dust and 
leaves. The road was a badly potholed concrete slab double laner. He 
began to worrying about the tires, thinking, "If more trucks used this 
route, the sides would be littered with shredded rubber shed from 
retreads." Afternoon light gilded the tops of the trees and fell in coins 
of gold on the grey slab ahead, and he worried about trying to 
navigate at night, thinking, "Forest roads often hit hairpin bends, too 
sharp to be taken in a semi. I'll have to slow down. But then, how 
will I make time? Maybe I should have taken the detour road 
around the forest, like I usually do." He also worried about his 
amphetamine consumption, even as he popped another little white 
pill and swallowed it dry and listened to the words "shredded rubber 
shed from retreads" play over and over in his head. 

The map lay unfolded on the seat beside him, a labyrinthine 
tangle of roads, rivers, ravines and other hazards. There were 
hundreds of intersections, unlikely to be signposted, being so deep 
inside the big, bad forest. The map looked like the palm of a big 
green hand, all cracks and lines and fingerprints of twisting roads 
and creeks and the scars of valleys and ravines. 

An intersection loomed ahead through the darkening gloom. 
Five roads meeting in a star. The truckie slowed, consulted the map 
and took what he hoped was the correct turning, marking the choice 
on the map as he drove with a blunt pencil. Then he turned up the 
radio and took another little pill, and drove on to the static ridden 
sounds of truckie music.


"Of course he never arrived. You could tell that was coming, 
couldn't you? It's just like a bad movie. Anyway, he drove in and 
vanished and they never saw him again." 

"Was this your great-something father, the trucker?"

"No. That comes later. Listen."


He disappeared without a trace. Not even a last CB, not a single 
clue. 

The transport company consulted their insurers, who sent 
search parties in, but the truck couldn't be found, and the searchers 
came back fearful and vowing never to return, scared of the dark 
and the great big trees. The insurers grumbled and refused to pay, 
insisting the driver had actually absconded with the cargo and sold it 
to a rival company. The authorities put up new warning signs. It 
made a minor story on the evening news. Forgotten quickly.

Then one day, maybe a year later, a thrillseeker who enjoyed 
racing his car down the forest roads claimed to have been passed by 
a ghostly glowing semi-transparent semi-trailer. 

"I was doin' ninety, man, and this semi just floated past like I 
was standin' still, all lit up like a bulb it was, glowin' blue, and this 
horde of demons and bat winged nightmare with teeth six feet long 
and barbed tails and poison green juice drippin' from the big barbed 
spikes on the tails eating holes in the road behind them, and cop cars 
full of zombies with rotten faces in hot pursuit with the lights and 
sirens going, and they were leaning out the side waving the truck 
down. They just ignored me. Must have been my lucky day!"

"And there was this sound", he said, "over it all, this wailing 
cry. Like a trucks horn, it was, just so lost and lonely sounding, just 
going "Map! Maaaaap!" I think that's one lost truckie. I think he lost 
his map."

It made great news. For days he was the first story every 
night. It made him a lot of money, too, especially when he sold the 
movie rights. 

So then these other people came forward with their stories. 
They lined up to reveal that, they too, while driving through the 
forest at night, had seen the damned truckdriver. 

One man said he parked to relieve himself while driving 
through the darkest part of the forest, ducked behind a tree for a 
few seconds, returned to his car, and found the door jimmied open, 
the contents of the glovebox scattered over the seat, his maps stolen 
and a bottle of aspirin missing. A scattered trail of the little white 
pills lead across the road and into the trees, and he heard a faint 
voice, a mans desperate pleading voice crying in the distance - ( 
Maaap! ... Maaap! )

And a woman claimed she had seen the lost truckie himself. 
She said she heard the call first, faint, forlorn, just hearable above 
the sound of her engine. She stopped the car and waited. A hundred 
metres up the road she spotted a flash of white through the 
undergrowth, and a man, wearing a white singlet, blue shorts and 
carrying a huge bundle of rolled up papers, stumbled onto the 
bitumen. He turned and spotted her car, clutched the papers 
jealously to his chest, and ran to the other side where he 
disappeared, screaming; "Maaaap! Map! Maaaaaap!"

Time passed, the story turned perennial; every year lucky 
eyewitnesses were well paid by the papers and TV news for their 
variations on the original. The truck was never found. 


"And even now, there's this ghost, and that's what you heard. 
It's the ghost of the truckdriver, and my ancestor saw him when he 
recorded that stone. He said it was white, and glowing, even though 
he couldn't see it very clearly, and it made that sound. That's a 
human voice. There's nothing like that in nature, nothing at all. It's 
the truckie searching for his lost maps because he thinks they'll lead 
him out of the forest."

Lang leaned back and regarded Dake over the rim of his pint. 

"I like it! I really do, it's a classic and novel story. Thanks for 
telling me. Another beer?"

"You don't believe me, do you?"

"Not as such. I believe you, but I sure don't believe that story."

"Man, you heard the recording! What do you think it was?"

"It's a bird," Lang said, "or a monkey or something. It's nothing 
supernatural. These stories are always the same. In a forest where 
glowing birds fly around, you can't believe every strange sound is a 
ghost."

"Some people are very, very stupid. The same people as won't 
listen to words of warning, even from a stranger, are the people who 
won't read a map, or a sign. They'll walk along the top of cliffs with 
their eyes closed." said Dake.

"Maybe its time for some stupid people to start re-drawing the 
maps and re-writing the signs." replied Lang.

"You study history, right? You have the smell of books around 
you."

"Yup."

"I'm just trying to warn you, stop you from getting into trouble. 
Don't be an idiot. Forget the forest."

"How can I? I want to see this ghost! I want to find out what it 
really is. I don't think it's a dead truckdriver. Bet you anything it's 
just another bird, or some animal, and the legends' someone's fancy 
story."

Dake regarded him with solemn, fathomless eyes. 

"I think maybe you spend too much time thinking. Alone. Deep 
in those old libraries. Not good. Life is for living, not thinking about. 
You probably want to write a book about this journey you're 
planning, another tome to stack on the shelves. Whatever, it's a 
mistake."

Dake pocketed his recorder and stood.

"If it gets you, whatever it is, I'm not to blame. But I'll tell you 
what- maybe someday there'll be two ghosts."

He turned and strode to the door which obediently opened this 
time and slammed shut behind. 

Lang closed his eyes for a second, turned, looked up at the 
monitor. He saw horses fall and break apart. The riders rolled free, if 
they could, sprinting to the edge of the track leaving fractured wood 
and metal legs flexing idiotically on the chopped turf behind them, 
still powered by their magical charge. Lang watched, smiling, but he 
felt somewhat cold. He wondered if he ought to move house. Maybe 
his life was getting stale. Seeing the same faces again and again, he 
knew everything they would say moments before they said it. 

He drained his glass and watched the suds slip down the inside. 
He took out a bill, folded it into a paper dart, caught the eye of the 
man behind the bar, sailed it at him. The little plane looped and 
barrel-rolled and stalled around the bar before finally taxiing to a 
stop on the shiny counter. Lang caused it to unfold and smooth out 
while he gathered his bag and left, stepping out into afternoon 
crowds. 

SHOPPING


He tried to be casual, he tried to act cool. Assembling the kit he 
needed for the journey as unobtrusive as he could. He tried not to 
attract attention. He tried not to tell too many people, and those he 
did he warned not to let the story pass their lips. 

But there was something about the idea of actually leaving the 
city and going into the forest that disturbed and shocked everyone in 
the house until they could barely contain themselves, and they came 
in a steady flow to ask him was it true? Did he really mean to go... 
"out there"? And when he said, well, yes, he did intend to ride his 
little bike to the forest, and he did intend to explore all the way to 
it's heart, and he intended to do it alone, they recoiled. They turned 
away and left with odd glances. If he said he wanted to cut off his 
own head and cook it and eat it on toast, it might cause the same 
reaction. 

And the rumor spread. It was too good a story to leave untold. 
What a jerk! he told himself. What a fool! Did I really say "Just keep 
this under yer hat, okay? I don't want a lot of questions from 
everyone. Just a little trip. I'll be back within the month." and expect 
them to shut up?

Not that anybody wanted to tag along. There was no reason to 
leave the city, just as Giri said; after all, it was vast enough, unknown 
enough, and the adventurous could always find new territory to 
explore beneath the streets, or in the deserted areas, where spiders 
spun huge shining webs between buildings that hummed like 
thousand stringed harps in the slightest breeze, and plastic dolls 
from eon-dead civilizations walked the streets, their power supplies 
only just beginning to fade, feet worn down by thousands of years of 
patient step step step through silent corridors and rooms.


Much of the gear he needed could only be found at the factory 
outlet. 

Lang waited patiently in the queue of customers, shuffling 
forward slowly through a huge dark shed. Great trailing cords of silk 
hung down from the colonies of spiders that nested in the high 
corners of the ceiling. The floor was littered with their discarded 
wings, silver slips of cellophane that stirred in the slightest breeze 
wafting through the great sliding doors that were the only source of 
light. Echoes rebounded from the corrugated metal walls. 

He stared down at the bald head of the man before him. He 
kicked the floor and sucked his teeth as one by one the people before 
him had their turn. It was incredible, the range of things they 
wanted. An old woman stepped forward, wrapped in ragged layers of 
cotton shawls, like some shuffling lichen covered statue of Mother 
Time, and croaked something to the operator who sat at the high 
control panel and typed on a keyboard of alien symbols whose 
meanings were lost, language changing over time until only 
specialists could operate the machine.  

Whatever you asked for, if the directions for its creation were 
in the devices memory, would roll down the polished metal chute to 
your feet, newly minted, created whole from the storm of matter and 
energy that raged deep in the bowels of the machine. On the other 
side of its bulk the intake hopper gaped, waiting for garbage, 
rubbish, stones and dust to be tipped in to feed the matter reactions 
and supply the raw material.

Once it had been just one among rank after rank of similar 
machines. A thousand years before, plus or minus a century or two, 
it had stood in a well-guarded building surrounded by fences of 
barbed wire and patrolling guards, churning out goods for sale in a 
chain of supermarket stores. Times had changed. Now, it's services 
were free to whomever need them, and no-one abused the privilege. 

Unrealistic, you say? Not in keeping with basic human greed? 
Greed still existed, but it was an atrophied force. In the era of 
decadence there was only greed for peace and tranquillity. No-one 
wanted more of what could be had for free. No one could be 
bothered.



The old woman finished her request, and the operator, a young 
student type with glasses and a small beard, bent over his keyboard, 
peering intently at the small screen. He tapped the keys. The 
machine groaned, shook slightly, and a series of boxes slid down the 
chute, brown cardboard stamped with the symbol of the broken 
wineglass. He tapped again and a small hand trolley rattled down 
and hit the last box in the line with an audible crunch. Lang winced.

With a great show of patience the operator lifted the boxes 
onto the hand cart and the old woman dragged them away.

Lang stepped forward. 

"Two man tent, weatherproof." 

The operator punched at his keyboard, hands familiar with the 
alien letters. The factory, all faceted armor plates and discrete 
weapons, (a legacy from the times when it had to be capable of 
defending itself against thieves), coughed. The tent rattled down the 
produce chute and rolled to his feet.

"Fire starter."

"Is that chemical briquettes or a lighter?" The operator asked.

"Um, some sort of lighter that's very dependable."

"Going exploring, right?"

"Yup."

The operator punched keys.

"I've just been out west, where the swaying towers are. 
Beautiful!" A metal rod came rolling down the chute. "But there's no 
roofs left on the ruins there. This is what I used. The end glows red 
hot. No flame, but it works even in full rain."

"What else would you recommend?"

"Well, you seem to have the footwear right." He glanced down 
from the console at Langs antique boots.

"Heirlooms. Used to be part of a vacuum suit. They've been all 
over the sky."

"Well, they've lasted, that's for sure. Here, this is what you 
need. Sleeping bag, folding shovel and a decent hat." The items 
tumbled down the chute as he spoke, followed by a shapeless bag.

"That's an ergonomic pack, won't give you backache. Hope you 
find something worthwhile. You should try the shore regions to the 
east, interesting things wash up on the beach there all the time. Most 
other places you have to be lucky or dig deep; pretty well picked 
over by now."

Lang turned the complicated backpack over until he found the 
opening and started filling it. The next customer stepped forward.

"I need a big steel wok with a lid."

"Does it have to be steel, I can do hardened glass? It's much 
tougher and won't need to be scoured every day." The customer 
pondered and Lang left the shed and strolled out into the light.


Outside, sun spilled into the square and filled it with a hazy 
glow. Spores and floating cobwebs glinted till the air seemed filled 
with sparks. They drifted around the Ice Fountain, that slowly 
exuded a glacier of green ice that flowed down in sharp shards of 
glinting coldness like a crystal umbrella.

Shoppers crossed the square with bags of stuff, talking, heading 
for waiting taxis or cafes, keeping to paths worn deep in the stone. 
Lang crossed their paths and headed for the fountain where Giri 
waited.

"See the ruts?" asked Lang. "Where they're walking?"

"What?" replied Giri, tired, shading her eyes against the sun. 
She wore layers of old dresses against the cold, faded leaf prints, 
frayed edges as intricate as lace against her pale legs.

"The grooves in the stone where the people walk. Cut through 
one of those, you get an upside down bell curve. The probability that 
a pedestrians foot will hit the centre of the rut is high, and that it'll 
hit the outside, low."

"So what?"

"Well, now that the rut's there, people walk in the centre, 
because the sides are sloping up and you'd twist your ankle. So they 
wear deeper quicker, 'cause their feet only hit the centre now."

"Someone should ask the factory for a machine to fill them up 
with concrete."

"Oh no! That'd ruin the whole square! They're part of the 
scenery now. Besides, how would we find our way without a rut to 
walk in?"

"Someday you won't even be able to see the top of their heads. 
Maybe just hats cruising along level with the stone."

"Someone will do something. Next century. Come on, I want to 
get home." 


They headed for the taxi rank. (Most people who owned a 
vehicle in Levinfield spent some of the time driving it as a taxi. They 
needed no markings, no licence and no registration. All they needed 
was some kind of sign, to let customers know they were for hire.) 

Giri chose a beautiful streamlined machine from the back of the 
cue, one with smooth silver plating and a mean slit windscreen and 
wheels mounted on complex articulated shocks that looked like the 
coiled legs of a crouching panther. A racing machine. It would get 
them home with time to spare.

"I'm nearly out of alcohol. Where do you want to go?" said the 
driver.

"Poets quarter, thanks. Number 23 Parquet street."

"Hop in."

He started the machine as they struggled the bulky pack in 
through a side door. The taxi rose slightly on its shocks and slid out 
into the sparse traffic.

"Poets, aye? I used to do that when I was young. Best times of 
me life. Until I ran out, that is. Happens to all but the best. You dry 
up and then it's no more easy meal ticket. Makes you think, doesn't 
it? I mean, it's as though all that poetry is inside you, and then you 
pour it all out onto the page and cash it and spend it, and then it's all 
gone. Empty. The reservoir all dried up and no matter how hard you 
try there's no more. Luckily I managed to get this cab, even if it goes 
through spirit like the worst piss-artist in the park goes through 
bluecap wine!" he said, patting the dashboard. The engine almost 
purred under his fond caress.

"Really?" said Lang.

"Oh yeah, it fair burns gallons every day. Have to keep track of 
where I am all the time, try to stay close to a well when the needle 
hits the red."

He honked at an approaching taxi, a small silver teardrop that 
zipped past them in a rattle of lose stones.

"You see that one? It runs on air. Truly! No idea where he 
found it, but the damn thing sucks a little air and runs all day! 
Repairs itself too, so I hear."

"How old were you, when you ran out of poetry?"

"Not as old as you may think, and that's all I have to say on 
that subject. Oh, it's not so bad. I expect I'll be writing again some 
day, when the urge comes again."

"You know," he said, as they unloaded outside the house and 
paid the fare, "the thing I most regret is giving it all away. I mean it. 
All those beautiful words, where are they now? I wrote them, and 
they ran away like mice or children and escaped into the world and 
left nothing behind. I never kept copies. Perhaps the best work I'll 
ever do in my life was as a poet, and perhaps I threw it away on a 
pint of beer."

"But you said you'd write more."

"Maybe. If I can. You'll see, when you dry up."

"Oh, it won't happen to us." said Giri. "There must be an infinite 
different poems in the world. How can you exhaust that?"

"You'll see, you'll see." And he drove away in a whir of sweet 
exhaust. 



They spent the night together. She told herself it was a mistake 
even as they shared a bottle and sank together into a sloppy, stupid 
haze of intoxication, rolling around the floor of her room amongst 
layers of discarded clothes and magazines laughing at the music on 
the radio.

"I'm gonna stow away in your pack!"

"Heavy enough already! You could help me carry it, though."

She found a cynical mood stealing over her. She started teasing 
him.

"Look after yourself out there in the wild woods. Everyone here 
loves you, you know that. We'd be lost without you!"

"What!"

"Oh, I mean it! We'd all leave the house and split up. This whole 
happy fucking family would fall apart without you to hold us 
together."

He frowned and regarded her with serious eyes.

"Really?"

She rolled over and crouched like a tiger, arms drawn up ready 
to spring, eyes wide.

"Yeah, really. Don't you think so?"

"No, I don't." He stared at the ceiling. "I like this place; friendly, 
pretty close, there's always someone around to talk to, but I'm just 
another resident. You like me, but we all like each other, that's why 
we live together."

"Don't you think I'd miss you, if something happened?"

"Of course. Don't worry" He wrapped long arms around her and 
gently tickled the smooth skin just above her hips. "I will come 
back."

"You'll come back?"

"Of course! You think I want to leave this life? We have it easy 
here. Maybe even too easy."

"Show me some magic."

He considered the options available. 

Lang wasn't that good, as far as magic was concerned. He could 
have animated a wooden horse. He couldn't fly. Some could; it wasn't 
unusual to see a tiny figure crossing the sky silhouette against the 
clouds. It was a dangerous pastime, though, for the simple reason of 
the fallibility of the spell. All spells fail, sooner or later. Nothing was 
permanent. That was the sole reason the old machines were still 
used.

He closed his eyes and reached out towards her, lying half 
undressed besides him. He sent his mind into the spaces between 
them, grabbed the air itself and balled it into solid forms. This was 
an advanced trick. It took concentration, for the slightest wavering of 
attention would cause his creation to dissolve and he would have to 
start again.

Giri gasped and giggled as the cool air washed over her, around 
her. An anaconda of cool air across her ribs. Hands beneath her back, 
lifting. She rose slowly, a foot above the floor, and turned lazily. Tiny 
capricious winds teased at her hair.

"That's fucking delicious! It's like swimming naked in the sea. 
Lower, lower... yeah!"

Abruptly he lost it. The shapes in his head dissolved into 
confusion, and she dropped sluggishly through his grasp to sink back 
to the carpet. Lang wiped sweat from his brow.

"Wonderful. My master magician! I wish I could do that."

"I wish I could repair my own bike. I'll have to walk home if it 
conks out. You should come with me."

"I've already told you I don't want to. But don't worry, I'll do a 
good job. I want you to come back as soon as you've satisfied this 
wacky desire to look at some trees."

"I promise."

SURPRISE


Six trees grew in the back garden of the house. They were 
beautiful, graceful, with long clean limbs that reached out to touch 
each other and touch the eaves and tap on the second story windows 
with their twigs. Shelf fungus adorned their boles, bright orange and 
burnt red in parallel stripes like brands on the pale bark

They supported a colony of spiders. Every evening the spiders 
would fly out from their crowns and search for fluffy molds. Downy 
bundles returned, flashing cellophane wings. Lint from spider nests 
dotted the surface of the pool, clogging the filter. 

Julia spent hours scooping the pool with a net, throwing the 
soggy fluff into the weeds where it would dry out and grow again, 
and the spiders would carry it back to the tree tops and once more it 
would grace the pool with islands of colour.

Tall, willowy, blonde, Julia lived in the attic and rarely 
emerged. The most prolific of the poets in the house, her strange, 
cryptic verse would often turn up in someones change, remarkably 
old sometimes. Some suspected she had found old youth treatments 
among the ruins. Most of the time she ghosted alone through her two 
rooms, cutting through beams of sunlight slanting through skylights, 
thinking and writing, robed in habitual black.

It was she who suggested the party that would see Lang off on 
his journey. A brilliant move; it turned something that bothered and 
disturbed all who heard about it into an occasion they could 
understand. A party. That was good enough reason to do anything. 

Some bought wine and hid the bottles in their rooms, behind 
bookcases and curtains. Julia cooked, boiling great pots of pasta and 
steaming sauce. People tiptoed around Lang with one-sided smiles. 
The most important aspect of the ceremony was that it should 
appear to be spontaneous, and he wouldn't know about it till 
everyone had arrived.

(Of course he did know; as if it wasn't obvious enough, almost a 
dozen people had taken it upon themselves to tell him, each asking 
him to pretend ignorance and try to act surprised. And even this was 
redundant, because the party would start so gradually, people 
casually appearing and gathering in the lounge room without any 
explanation, just as though they all felt like coming over at the same 
time, and so it would never really start, and without starting it could 
never really be, and therefore it would never really happen, a sort of 
non event, which was really cool.)

Julia skimmed the pool, deep in meditative thought. It was 
septic, she couldn't see the bottom, and couldn't stand the thought of 
anyone swimming in the stuff. Darting spiders, trailing long 
streamers of silk towing fuzzy cargo, surrounded her in dizzy lines of 
colour. 


Inside the house Lang watched the mirror in the loungeroom 
with his feet stretched out, ignoring the fuss.

The mirror was broken, but it still worked. They found it down 
a back alley behind the private residence of a rich artist, left out 
with the garbage. It reflected crystal clear, colour vivid as a dream, 
only the glass was broken in fine cracks that spidered the surface, 
turned out of alignment just a degree from one piece to the next, 
transforming the picture into a stained glass puzzle. Beautifully 
framed, in wood silvered by age, it was huge, three feet across, but 
the flaw made it worthless. Hard to tune, the balance subtly out of 
line. 

Now it reflected Channel 13 and the ads were on. Lang reached 
out and nudged it with a touch of the Knack, to bring it into focus.

Images of the main broadcast mirrors flashed and span, the 
stations logo, reflecting in turn the mirror that caught their image, 
catching a glimpse of the mirrorman crouched behind with his dark 
glasses on, cap emblazoned with the logo.

Lang wanted to be a mirrorman once, when he was young, and 
his parents gave him his grandfathers old mirror, a yellowed and 
scratched but still sound hand reflector. A years worth of reflections 
lay stacked on the bookshelf in his old room, forgotten, left behind 
when he moved out. Only his parents still ran the jumpy images 
through their old oak framed mirror, laughing and crying together at 
their long dead youth, alone in their too-big house.

The ad ended, replaced by yet another documentary.

"Tonight we present the second in our series, Dome Builders for 
the Master. Marble slabs recently unearthed by fossickers in a 
basement have been dated to the 17th. Slave Epoch, famous for 
leaving us the ruins known as the Blue Wave, the crumpled remains 
of a fiberglass dome lying to the south of the present inhabited areas. 
The slabs were analyzed and video images discovered encoded into 
their fabric; they record fascinating details of the lives of these little 
known people, reflected for your viewing pleasure tonight."


The pictures were so clear it was a pity they were so boring as 
well. Dome Builders had a pathological fear of the sun, and their 
brightly coloured bubbles lay deflated in many abandoned sectors. 
Like huge tents they were, and as though in retribution for their 
irrational fear, the sun slowly corroded the material, turning it to 
confetti that swirled through the deserted streets and squares, lit by 
coloured sunlight filtering through the panels that remained.

In the mirror Lang watched them rise again, as they had been, 
always shot from inside, buildings and people coloured green and 
blue and yellow by filtered sun. Domebuilders marching in step, 
single file, through grids of roads, nodding in time to the beat of a 
drum broadcast from speakers on every corner. 

The slabs were government files of the period, said the voice-
over. Each encoded with thousands of hours of video, and hundreds 
had been used for table tops and monuments in later centuries, 
priceless footage now damaged and maybe lost.

The marching lines split and reformed. There was a factory, 
endless ranks of pastel-tinted human robots assembling clockwork 
by hand. Housing was in dormitories, large square rooms for every 
family, two parents and two children. In vast refectories they ate 
their meals, processed wastes, pastel coloured, two biscuits on every 
plate. 

Always smiling. Always teeth, everywhere the images took him 
Lang saw teeth, pulled back rictus grins smiling in mockery at the 
sun that raged beyond their artificial sky, smiling faces identical one 
to the next.

"Don't they look happy."

Julia stood in the door, nibbling a stick of celery, and she 
nodded at the screen.

"Don't they look like a bunch of happy campers? With their 
civilization zipped up tight, stable, enough for everyone, no problems. 
Makes you wonder how it ended."

"Boredom?" guessed Lang. 

"Bet you're right. There's nothing people won't do to alleviate 
boredom. Speaking of which..." she gestured at the screen.

"Okay. The news'll be on in a while."

Now the dome people stood in ranks in a public square, 
chanting their vows of obedience to the Masters. Lang bore it for a 
few minutes, then frowned at the screen, focused; a new reflection 
came into view, the news. 

"The third day of the Levinfield Councils convention ended in 
agreement on the proposed changes to zoning laws."

Aldermen and women smiled and shook hands. Their 
spokeswoman addressed the reporters.

"The shores of the Quicksilver Depressions are already settled 
by squatters, and tests have proved the region is safe, so now the 
official ban has been lifted."

Voice over shots of the region, gentle slopes of angular brick 
ruins that disappeared beneath the surface of a lake, calm water 
reflecting the cluster of concrete towers at the centre, sunk by flood 
and subsidence. 

"The worry over contamination of the water, that caused the 
area to be banned, has ceased, following tests that show low levels of 
industrial waste. Some scientists still hold fears, however, regarding 
possible submerged chemical supplies that may rupture in the 
future, but council has promised regular tests of water quality."

A small sailboat tacked around a half submerged warning sign, 
fishing lines trailing blithely from rods mounted in the stern.

LIGHT CONVERSATION


"A toast!"

"To success!"

"To survival, at least!"

Lang moved uneasily through the near empty room, surprised 
at the sparse attendance. A few distant friends tried to party up, but 
they were fighting against the silence of empty rooms, and losing. It 
looked like the night was a failure. At best he could drink and talk 
without having to perform too much. 

"Will that little bike carry you that far?"

Olvin Clarke, who used to live in the house, studied archaeology 
at the Cyggyn Institute of History. Archaeology was an industry, as 
he was often heard to say. He was stamped deep with the academic 
look; thick glasses, cut from quartz windowpanes, unbreakable but 
always smeared, and a flamboyant wool cloak dyed autumn brown 
that trailed on the carpet and gathered static. His thick hair was 
short and greasy with neglect.

"I hope so. It's carried me so far. Fuel is the problem out there, 
so I thought, why go to the trouble of finding a car and hoping to find 
more alcohol before I run out..."

"Good thinking, good thinking." He sniffed and grinned. "I didn't 
think of that. Of course, the Institute could have supplied you with 
something special, if you'd asked. We have a few cars with old 
motors, no one really knows what keeps them going, but they do. If 
you wanted to take assistants, some researchers, along for the ride, 
and promised not to go too far in..."

"No, this is really just a holiday. Why everyone worries has me 
puzzled."

"Worried?" Asked Julia, dramatically swirling her long black 
dress around her ankles. "Worried? Have you ever left the city?"

"Yeah, a couple of times." Lang lied. He had traveled, but never 
beyond the ruins. 

"Well, I never have, never wanted to. And no-one's worried, 
don't let this fool you. This is just a party, and you're as good a 
reason as any. Things are quiet, now."

"Yes, they have been. For quite a few years." said Olvin.

They drifted away talking about fossicking trips and their 
finds.
 Lang remembered his past journeys. He had been near 
the outskirts, and they were far enough. There, in the most ancient 
regions, masonry crumbled into dust and jungles of ornamental vines 
and trees fought for the sun. He had stood on a high mound, 
crumbled concrete from a vanished office tower, staring out over 
fields of short grass. Lawn. It grew flat and even, densely green, 
dotted with clumps of lilies and stands of trees. For some reason he 
didn't want to step out into the space, with no walls to contain him 
and no streets to follow. Better to fossick through the ruins, lifting 
slabs of stone looking for artifacts, useful machines abandoned for 
millennia in empty rooms and overlooked by generations of treasure 
hunters. 

"We've been here so long we've changed the shape of space."

Lang turned, following the voice to a pair of figures seated in 
the corner of the room, huddled over a steaming bowl.

"It's like a ghost. Have you ever seen a ghost?"

"Only when I drink enough."

"Well, it was just rhetoric. Anyway, ghosts always follow the 
habits of their creators. If you have habits and repeat them every 
day, then you're likely to leave a ghost, and that ghost will repeat 
those habitual actions. And all the ghosts together are imprinted on 
the fabric of space, the invisible background of matter that 
permeates everything, and they form the framework of our minds."

"Wow!"

"Yeah. And then it says the group mind is connected through 
ghostspace, and the only true communication is the subtle mind-to-
mind currents carried by dead spirits."

"There must be a lot of 'em."

"There are. Just think, how many thousands of years, how 
many generations..."


Lang went out into the garden for a smoke. Lovers did their 
thing in dark corners; he smiled, looking up at the satellites. An 
endless procession passed overhead. They fell from bright sunlight, 
turned dim red and then gone, quenched by the shadow of the world. 

Then a dark shape moved into view, eclipsing the distant lights, 
a great round shadow that moved on the face of the firmament. He 
watched in delight as it descended towards him. Coming straight 
down, till it seemed he might be flattened on the lawn, but he stood 
his ground, trusting in the skills of whoever piloted the thing. Just 
before it reached the level of the houses roof it swerved aside and 
moved towards the pool, settling into the water quietly and coming 
to rest, the only sound tiny ripples smacking its sides and coos of 
wonder and admiration from the couples around the lawn. Dim green 
light showed through the narrow slits of viewports like many green 
eyes staring out. 

Soft ticking of cooling coils. A quiet voice came from the 
vehicle.

"Where is everyone?"

"Most of the guests are inside. Hi Emma."

"Lang! Too dark out there... try this."

Muffled groans and complaints from the shadows as actinic 
light spilled out, illuminating everything in stark black and white.

"Turn it down, Emma, you'll blind someone!"

"Come on board!"

He walked to the pools edge, then stepped back as part of the 
black hull opened down into a ramp. Emma stood there, stick thin in 
baggy coveralls, patched and stained with colour coded panels. 

"Come in!"

He stepped forward and hugged her, gently. Her bones were 
delicate twigs. 

Emma had lived briefly in the house, years before. She had 
been a poet with the best of them until she inherited her mothers 
house, a habitat in a high orbit, spacejunk from the distant past, and 
this, an old shuttle. Very few people lived in the sky now; they were 
unwilling to trust the old machines that supplied their air and 
repelled meteorites. It was failure of the automatic defenses that 
killed her mother. But she  had felt obliged to visit the station, at 
least once, and there, she had looked out on the view and fell in love. 
Now she rarely touched ground, and calcium loss from the lack of 
gravity took its toll. 

"Arg, that's enough! You smell like ground, I miss it sometimes! 
Not often, though. How many people out there?" she asked.

"Not very many."

"Good. I hate crowds. When I heard the news I was just going 
to call, but it's been years since I visited and I thought, well, I could 
just flyby and see you. It takes me ages to collect enough energy to 
come down. I put up extra panels, I've probably got the largest 
privately owned solar farm in orbit!"

"You smell like orbit. Ozone and incense."

"Stale clothes, you mean, and malfunctioning air system."

"Well, yeah, but I like that too. You always smelled a bit, 
anyway."

"Well, thanks! I came all the way down from orbit for this..."

"Come into the house. I've got some wine hidden."

"Well, okay. Has anything changed since I've been away?"

"Not a thing. Some guy I never see got your old room. He's kept 
the mural you did, keeps saying he doesn't like it but it's still there."

They crossed the lawn to the back door of the house.

"I painted that last thing before I left." she said.

Inside there were cries of recognition as Emma was recognized 
by long time residents, and she was soon surrounded by old friends 
eager for stories of her new life.

"Okay, okay!" she laughed, sinking into a beanbag, joints 
creaking loudly under unaccustomed stress of gravity. She cocked a 
sardonic glance at Lang, as if to say "Can it be helped?" 

"Later." she shouted as he turned away.

"Cool."


"Hi Lang."

A latecomer, staring around at the meager gathering, the 
audience clustered around Emma, the demolished plates of food on 
the dining table. Rawly cultivated long hair, to convey a total lack of 
concern with his image. (The epithet "Long haired louse" was still in 
use amongst some sectors of society, though the insect itself was 
reliably extinct and had been for some time.) He wore the same 
clothes he always wore, checked shirt and torn factory-produced 
trousers, (the trousers torn by a machine, of course; much too strong 
for natural wear.) 

"Little sparse, isn't it? Perhaps there's another party 
somewhere else and we didn't know and everyone decided..."

"Could be. Have you heard what it's all about though?"

"You mean your little journey? Well, that's your decision, and I 
can't stop you, but I would."

"Everyone says that! I can't stand it! I met someone from the 
country, a bit paranoid about ghosts." He glanced at the couple in the 
corner, now sharing lungsful of steam mouth to mouth. "Spun me a 
tale about a dangerous one I'm gonna meet there."

"Dake, right? Weird guy, that one, and typical country. Listen, 
you don't have to actually leave the city, everyone's freaked enough 
by your threats alone. Wait awhile and let it slide. People are 
thinking things. Saying you're mad."

"No, I said I would and I'm going, that's the end of any 
argument. Listen, I'm sick to death of all this bullshit. I hid a bottle 
of red in the kitchen, under the sink. Lets get it."

"Rawly takes everything back, Lang, you're perfectly sane!" He 
laughed and headed for the kitchen, but Lang let his face drop in 
sour lines. It seemed that if he decided to go ahead he could kiss a 
few friends goodbye. 

The bottle was still there and they cracked it on the kitchen 
table, drawing up chairs and lighting candles that clustered in the 
centre surrounded by puddles of melted wax. Red was their favorite 
wine, pressed from tiny cherry-capped mushrooms that grew on 
certain kinds of old wallpaper and books in libraries. It sparkled, 
energetic, belying it's restful origins, and was notorious for loosening 
the tongue.

"Bad mirror, that's what I've been doing with my time. I saw 
some show, made just last year, incredible! Very strange. Made by 
some rising young artist who wanted to capture daily life and make a 
sort of documentary about boring lives. Strange, really. I mean, most 
of the time they emulate the old stuff dug up from cycles ago, with 
people worshipping gods and creating new lifeforms and factories 
churning out mechanical mice, running around in clear plastic 
ponchos or painted blue or enameled armor, totally bizarre customs 
and behavior you just can't make sense of no matter how hard you 
try. That's what we start with, images of dead people, so the new 
stuff is just the same,  imaginary history. Not nearly as incredible as 
the real thing, because who can create something totally new out of 
whole cloth without being affected by the past?"

"Anyway, I was watching these people who could have lived 
next door, doing boring things, and I had the weirdest thought. 
Suppose that this show gets buried, and discovered in a few 
thousand years, and they play it and say "Weird!", because it is to 
them, and suppose they also discover something fictitious, total 
fantasy, concocted from a drunk directors nightmares told to a half 
literate hack, totally unbelievable fantasy? 

"I dunno."

"They'll think "Weird!" and put it on the shelf with the others 
and they'll believe that it's real, it actually happened, that it's a 
documentary instead of documentary-styled fantasy, because that's 
what we have, so many bloody documentaries!"

"Yeah!" said Lang. "But just think; maybe some of the stuff we 
think is real about the past is also fiction. All those historical 
sequences could have come out of some stoned writers head, who 
looked at the palm of his hand and saw roads in the lines and 
imagined he was emperor of the kingdom. Look."

Lang swung a small mirror that sat on the counter around until 
it caught something. They watched jumpy, damaged images from the 
archives. No subtitles, just bizarre shots of armored children chasing 
lizards through alleyways lined with shelves of plastic balls, rotating 
symbols made from coloured glass that hung in the air above 
thousands of smiling dancers in electrically charged clothes, women 
anointing pairs of folded cloth rectangles with blue dye.

"I bet that was just thought up by some sick ideas-man with 
nostrils full of ivory spores! He's probably laughing in his grave right 
now, thinking about some earnest researcher trying to decipher what 
madness caused people to act like this!"

"Rawly, tell me something. Why is everyone so freaked out? 
I'm going for a long drive in the country, not bombing the city from 
orbit! It's as though they can't quite believe I'd do something so crass 
, so unconventional. As though it's the height of bad manners to pass 
the city limits."

"Don't you think it is?"

"How can it be? Look at Emma out there. She left to go live 
millions of miles away. How much further past the city limits can you 
get, and that's okay-"

"It's still the city, Lang. Up there, it's just outlying suburbs. 
There are four continents in the World. Why do we only live on one?"

"I don't know. Why?"

"Because we just bloody well don't! They're wild country and 
they're going to stay that way. Look, just supposing you went down 
to the nearest factory late at night and claimed it as your own. 
Sprayed you initials on it, called it "Lang and Co." and tried to sell the 
produce. What would happen?"

"I don't think I'd do anything like that. Who wants to have to 
guard a factory all their life just for money? Imagine all the work, 
trying to get people to buy what it made when they can get it free 
elsewhere, just to make more money to spend on what?"

"Six hundred years ago people owned those factories. They 
didn't begrudge the bother of ownership. They would sneer at our 
laziness, just as we sneer at their stupidity. "

"But that's different. You don't want the responsability, and 
neither do I. We'd just rather live our own lives than try to get other 
people to sell us theirs. There's no percentage in it."

"Yet. No percentage now, but there will be. Look, Lang, I'll put 
it as gently as I can, and you just have to try and follow. We like you, 
you know? You're a little bit weird, a little intense about things, and 
you spend so much time in those library holes in the ground that you 
forget how to speak sometimes, but basically you're okay."

"It's just that... why would anyone leave all this? We're Kings of 
an Age, resting between generations of struggle and effort in the war 
against time! This is the truce, when humans allow time into their 
hearts and minds and accept the futility of life, not with desperation 
but quiet humor. Soon, a few generations, and the cycle will start 
again. Our offspring would grow up with a gleam in their eyes, they'll 
look upon the deserted factories and moldy areas with distaste at the 
waste. Once again, the rebuilding, the profit, the upswing of the 
eternal Curve. But that's not for a long time yet, and now's the time 
for extreme decadence! Drugs and pleasure and infinite freedom, and 
leisure, absolute eternity to do nothing whatsoever, that's the order 
of the day! You could do anything you wanted, but why... this?"

"If we are free to do anything we want that includes going Out 
There."

"Nobody's free, Lang, yer kidding yourself. Get with the 
program. If you do this thing people will hate you."

"I don't care."

DECADENCE


Face it, the party was a flop. 

Face it, nearly every party is a flop.

Unless you're talented, unless you know  people, unless you 
have a cast of actors to invite who can force it to work, you can't 
garuntee a good party.

People only go to parties in the hope that they score the one-
in-ten, the one that goes off.


One in the morning and everyone gone. Only Rawly and Emma 
in Langs room; Rawly picking books from the shelf and stacking them 
on the floor, Emma lying supine on the bed, and Lang spinning 
tiredly in his swivel chair.

"Hey man, what're you doing?" he asked Rawly.

"These books are all mine. I'm just gonna put them on their 
own shelf so you know which are mine and which are yours."

"Okay, then can I come over and check out my collection on 
your shelves?"

"Sure... Hey Lang, if you get killed can I have your books?"

"Fuck off! Vulture! You've got a hope."

"No, really, have you thought about that? There's... things, out 
there."

"There's things here! There's slimy hairy things probably 
crawling through the sewers not a hundred feet below the floor right 
now eating each other and planning to take over the city and 
eliminate humanity for being obscene!"

"Yeah, I heard-"

"No, not another story!"

"Listen Lang, you can come up the well with me." Emma 
drawled sleepily. "See the sights, have some adventures, keep your 
friends." 

"Do you think I'm crazy, too?"

"No. But you'd be crazy not to try spacing it before you go 
camping. It's fun!"

"It's more dangerous."

"Bullshit!"

"Emma, how old is your oldest friend up there?"

"Well... about forty... and he has a few scars. Pressure loss 
fucked up his face... Look, danger is the price you pay for living in an 
interesting world."

"You're welcome to your interesting world, I've got mine and 
the forest calls. No-ones been there, been all the way in, for 
centuries. Not since the last industrial age."

"It should remain untouched until the next." said Rawly.

"Decadence." said Emma. "That's what this is, the Age of 
Decadence. That's what Industrial ages call the periods in-between."

"Up and down and up and down until we get sick and throw up, 
these ages are a poor way to run a species." Lang joked, oblivious to 
their disgusted stares. "What's to say things wouldn't be better if 
they both happened at the same time? We could have half the city 
and our industrious friends could have the other."

"Dickhead! They'd never leave us alone! They'd want us to 
work in their plants and buy their goods, and they'd fight over us, 
trying to sell more than their competition, until everything got 
caught up in their stupid game and there was no more room in our 
lives for us to play our stupid games! I'd rather do pointless things 
for my own reasons than for someone else's. I'd rather eat because 
I'm hungry, not because someone wants to make money selling me 
food. I'd rather not have to buy the life I already own."


Emma left, kissing Lang sisterly on the cheek before going into 
her ship and lifting like a dream from the surface of the pool, her 
course curving towards the coast. When she was high, and far enough 
out that her exhaust would hit only water, she lit the engines.

"I love that sight." breathed Lang. "Maybe I will go up the well, 
when I get back. Nothing really ties me down here. There's no reason 
why I shouldn't." His eyes followed the vanishing speck, far but 
bright, as it jockeyed into orbit, guided by the faint bleep of her 
home's beacon. It vanished into the general swarm of moving stars 
that slowly crossed the sky. 

"Maybe you will." said Rawly. "It would probably be an 
anticlimax after that forest."

"Aw man, I'm getting tired of this!"

"Yes sir! By the way, sir, I get dibs on the couch in the 
livingroom."

"Yeah, no-one else's claimed it yet. No one wanted to stay."

"Good party."

"Ha, ha."


The next morning Lang woke surprised at how clear he felt. Not 
that he had consumed much wine, but he felt cheated that the send 
off party had not left more of a mark on him. As though it had 
somehow failed.

He checked Emmas room. She had gone, taking her tools with 
her. Somewhere across the city she would be kneeling again in the 
guts of some dusty mechanism, tracing components and deciphering 
plans. He wished her luck. 

The sun shone dimly through a high haze that seemed to 
descend on the city from time to time, as though the ghost of ancient 
palls of smoke returned to their old haunts. Lang and Rawly trudged 
through the quiet streets.

"Have you thought about arming yourself, Lang?"

"I'm surprised at you! Would you?"

"Of course. It's always best to prepare for emergencies. You're 
pretty handy with a bow and arrow, but I know that old bow of 
yours is blessed for safety, and I'd rather have something more 
effective at my side."

"Don't worry. Giri and I took care of that. We went and bought 
a new bow, and it isn't blessed, as far as I know."

"I used to go into the far North suburbs, Lang. You hear of 
them? Pretty bad place to be caught at night. Gangs of young 
starvelings running around there. They're territorial. Harmless, if you 
leave them alone, but they claim the area as their own and resent 
anyone fossicking on their turf."

"But they're lazy, dig, and there's still plenty of loot there. 
Much of it they leave alone, because they fear the old science. I used 
to go out there in my own youth with a flare pistol. Not much of a 
weapon, you may think, but it was old science, too. Shot bright blue 
electric charges, and even if you missed, it would blind your enemies 
long enough to escape."

"No thanks. I don't like old weapons. Bad karma."

"Don't blame you."

"So. Did you ever, uh, actually... did you ever use this flare gun? 
On a person."

Rawly stopped and turned to face Lang.

"Yes. I don't want this to get around, okay, but I did."

"Of course. But what happened?"

"It was simple. It was night, and I'd stumbled across some kind 
of celebration. They had an old sound system going, very loud, and 
they were playing and singing and dancing, and stumbling around 
drunk out of their minds on some lethal brew that seemed to totally 
fuck their heads. I said they were harmless if you avoided them, but 
they sounded like demons that night. I was terrified."

"But I knew I had to get past their encampment, because I 
didn't want to backtrack too far. It was hard going, in that region. 
The roads were blocked with rubble. I decided to skirt them close 
and trust my luck."

"I was discovered. One lad, must have been eighteen. Long hair 
in plaits, all down his back as far as the waist, and ragged clothing 
washed completely grey by rain and time. He came stumbling blindly 
through the ruins for no apparent reason, except maybe he was 
looking for a quiet place to take a leak."

"The instant he spotted me he stopped for a look. I stood stock 
still, hoping he'd decide I was a hallucination from the homebrew. 
But no, he came on, and I backed up."

"My back hit a brick wall and he walked right in front of me 
and stood there. He smelt like he'd never washed. He had a blank 
expression, impassive, and he stood there, thinking. Then he reached 
out for my throat."

"I dodged, and drew the gun. I had fashioned a holster for it 
from an old glove and a belt, so it was hidden beneath my jacket. I 
reached in and managed to draw just as he grabbed me."

"I waved it in front of his face, as a warning. He ignored it. Just 
looked at it and looked away. For all I know he didn't understand 
what it was. Just started to crush the life from me."

"My head started to ring, but I didn't want to kill. I wanted to 
frighten him off. So I took that gun and jammed the barrel right up 
under his chin. Still, he squeezed. I was passing out."

"What then?"

"I fired."

They stood in silence in the centre of the deserted street.

"It was silent. His eyes lit up and his hair caught fire, but there 
was just this fizzing sound like you hear when it rains and a buried 
battery starts to hiss and short in the ruins. Just that, and he froze, 
didn't let go, just froze."

"I reached out and pushed. The hands slid from my throat and 
he fell to the ground. The party raged on, no-one had heard or 
missed their college, so I turned and ran. Scrambled as fast as I could 
through the old bricks and fallen stone and the rusted struts that had 
once been thick steel girders, just scrambled away from there like a 
cockroach being chased by a spider. I stopped, though, for a last look 
back, and saw something."

"What?"

"He disappeared, Lang. That boy... he just melted away. I 
thought then that it must have been a dream, and thought that until 
I woke the next day, but then I could still see the bruises on my 
neck, and the charge indicator on the gun showed that a shot had 
been fired. So it happened, and I saw him disappear."

"There are strange things. In this world. Strange things, Lang."


They reached the library. Lang lead the way. Through the 
swinging steel doors, their locks rusted into uselessness long ago, 
across the marble foyer, kept brightly polished by a steel beetle that 
buzzed after them wiping away the traces of their muddy footprints. 

An old man lay asleep at the desk, head laid on crossed arms. 
His silver hair shiny with light reflected from the monitor before 
him, a box with a curved glass screen. Lang patted it as they passed.

"Not many TV's around now. Too delicate. Only ever see them 
at the bank or here. Relics from before the days of mirrors."

Past the old security scanner, long ago broken and never fixed, 
and they were in the stacks.

"Books are like the sediment that collects at the bottom of a 
river." said Lang. "They're like the leaves from a tree, that pile up 
year after year and compress themselves under their own weight 
until they bury themselves under later generations, to be dug up 
millennia later as fossils."

"Basically, there's too many books. Right?" quipped Rawly.

"Yes. The world is old and bent under their weight. I sometimes 
think that you could prove that the rock the city's built on is made of 
old books. This library goes down for miles. It's best not to go down 
too far; the floors are unsafe down there. Every now and then you 
hear the distant rumble of subsidence, as some deep, forgotten floor 
gives way and sinks a few feet further. Here."

Lang lead the way down dark stairs littered with strips of 
paper carried there by rats. They could hear scurrying feet 
retreating from their own footsteps. Five floors down, and they left 
the stairs, entering the stacks.

Here the dust hung in streamers, waving tiredly like weed in 
deep water in the sluggish flow of air from the ceiling ducts. Here the 
flouro tubes flickered and pinged quietly as they tried to glow. The 
ends of shelves stretched away in the distance to either side, each 
tagged with a yellowing card. The narrow alleys between the shelves 
was littered with layers of books. Some dislodged by the ever-
present rats, some left there by lazy searchers, and some shaken off 
their shelves by subsidence. 

Lang lead the way, down the narrow alleys between 
dangerously leaning shelves, sometimes touching each other above 
their heads to form tunnels of paper. They tunneled their way 
through the vast storehouse of useless knowledge to his base camp, a 
clearing hollowed out in the midst of the wilderness.

He had furnished it with a table, chair, and portable light 
connected to one of the old, everlasting batteries. The stacks were a 
little neater here, ordered amongst the greater entropy. 

"Here we are."

"It's... incredible! It's terrible."

"Terrible?"

"So much time. I can smell it. These pages... do you ever realize 
that someone wrote every word? Someone dead? Someone forgotten, 
lost in time, except for the dead memory stored here for no reason at 
all, except that maybe, just maybe, someone in the future just might  
want to know whatever it was they wrote about?"

"But there's always hope, isn't there? I mean, it was someone's 
words that fired me up with the desire to explore. Someone dead and 
forgotten, sure, even I don't know the name of the guy who wrote 
the piece. Here."

He fished a magazine from under a pile. Crumbling, the cover 
faded, the glossy paper shedding flakes of clay. He turned pages.

"Here. It was a woman. Sarah Lake."

Rawly could barely read the archaic script. He puzzled out a 
few sentences; something about a holiday destination, interesting 
sights, villas on the valley. There were photos, their colours 
preserved by the darkness and dry air. He could almost see the 
branches wave and smell the trees, the clear air vibrant and new. 

"I don't know. It still seems so useless. What about after you? 
We're talking eternity here. What use are all these books against the 
sheer weight of the years? The effort, to print them, store them here, 
as though they really represented a barrier against time."

"No. It's hope. The hope that maybe someone will need them. It 
represents hope."

"It represents futility."

They faced each other, almost angry, across the table.


Two days later Lang left the city.

Giri was the only one to see him leave.

That morning, as he loaded his pack and strapped it to the 
carrier, she wandered from the house looking tired and sleepy. Early 
morning was a novelty the denizens of the house rarely enjoyed, 
unless they saw it from the wrong side of night. 

"So, this is it." she said.

"Yep." Lang checked the straps one last time. He lashed his new 
bow to the side, checked the arrows. 

"Look after yourself, out there." she said.

"I will."

Giri had fixed his bike. She had shown him where to buy a new 
bow. She felt bad.

"You've been wondering why everybodies acting crazy, trying 
to get you to change your mind, stay home, haven't you?"

"Yes." He wouldn't look at her.

"Wouldn't you like to know why?"

"Okay. Why?"

"It goes like this: the only way we can maintain the illusion 
that our lives mean anything is by filling them with toys. We go here 
and there, and do things, have little adventures, take drugs, 
experience, all because there's no great task waiting for us to 
perform. There's nothing left to do that hasn't been done already a 
thousand times better than we ever could."

"You're a fool, a dangerous fool, because you might remind us 
of this. Do you understand? We don't want to know about the futility 
of trying, it detracts from the taste of the wine. If you remind us of 
this it'll take years to forget again."

"Go out there and die, and you'll be a nail in everyones heart. 
Don't you understand, the forest's outside! What are you, a Ponytail, 
sizing up the trees for a lumber mill?"

"Only if you return will we be able to forgive you."

Lang considered her words.

"Giri," he said at last, "I love you, but I have to admit, that 
didn't make any sense at all."

"Then don't worry, just return."

"I will."

"Promise."

"Yeah, okay. I promise to return. But before I return, I must go. 
See ya later." and he kicked the little bikes engine into life.

"Keep some wine ready! Expect me in a month." And he was 
gone.


THE FOREST


Morning came, and Lang stood on the threshold of the forest. 
Stories and rumors warred in his mind. Which ones to believe? 

Smells of wetness and decay. It was dark in there. The 
outermost trees were all saplings, thin and smooth-barked, leaning 
away from their taller ancestors to catch more sunlight. Further in, 
dark epiphytes clung to the black trunks, and spider webs spanned 
the gaps. Wide spaced columns rose from gnarled tangles of root, 
festooned with parasites.
 

He turned and left the road, wheeling the bike over the turf 
until he reached a stand of ferns thick enough to hide it from sight. 
In the centre of the growth he laid the bike down and set about 
adapting the pack for walking. Much had to be left behind for his 
return, and he wanted to make sure no animal could damage the 
provisions. 

Finally he shouldered the pack, still too heavy, checked one last 
time the cap on the fuel tank, and walked into the forest.


At first the longbow caught on the saplings and other young 
growth, until he entered the darker older regions and the trunks 
were widely spaced. The road was clearly visible to his right, 
sunlight reaching the ground there and shining through the trunks. 
He headed towards it.

Inside the margin of the forest, however, the road was vastly 
different to outside. Great ridges of up-thrust asphalt and concrete 
ran across its surface, split at the crest to expose the bark of old 
roots. The surface was strangely marked with paint, many different 
conflicting lines and markings of various ages ran across the surface. 
It was the result of various local governments indecision about what 
to do with this road. No one traveled it, but ancient law stated it had 
to be maintained, as it was a major thoroughfare and might be 
needed in an emergency. So they pared down the repair budget, let 
the surface fall into decay, worried about wasting money repairing a 
useless road, tried to prove that it was still passable in emergencies, 
and finally salved their conscience by making sure it was well 
marked with dividers and lanes, sending in mortally scared road 
crews who raced the clock to mark as much road as they could 
before nightfall. The road signs, he noticed, were in good repair. As 
he passed each one he observed the pile of old signs, uprooted and 
tossed hastily asides by road workers desperate to leave. 

The day passed. The road grew worse. Above it the treetops 
met, the trunks now crowded the concrete barriers at the curb, some 
even emerged from old potholes in the surface. He walked on crazy 
pavings of split concrete, then featureless expanses of glossy black 
metal, undamaged by the elements. Then blue glass that made him 
nervous; like walking on upside Down sky, at least in the clean 
patches. Then more concrete.

On an impulse he left the road, stepping over the crumbling 
concrete crash barrier and stumbling down the earth bank, jumping 
the ditch and pushing through the undergrowth. It was cooler there. 
Less insects troubled the air, and they moved slower. 

Here were the fungus. Unknown varieties on every side. 
Somber colours and outrŽ shapes. The traveler lost himself in 
sampling their variety. He started filling his pockets. There were 
familiar varieties as well, but in the forest they grew large and full, 
record breaking weights compared to the city product. Something 
about the air, he wondered? 

For food he harvested the edible kinds, small caps that tasted 
like fried kidneys and others with the tang of garlic. He wouldn't 
have to hunt if he kept finding them. Volumes of mushroom lore 
bubbled up from the deep recesses of his mind. He even recognized a 
rare explosive variety, the Blast Cap, which would put tough silica 
shrapnel through any animal unfortunate enough to touch its red and 
blue stem. More Blast Caps would grow from the dead, punctured 
flesh. No walking around at night.


This worried him so much that night caught him unawares. 

Vision slowly adapted as the light failed, and when the sun 
finally reached the horizon he realized he was stumbling through 
near-darkness, that it would be pitch black in minutes. Immediately 
he began casting around amongst the trees for firewood. There was 
wood, alright, fallen branches littered the ground, but the ubiquitous 
rot ate it fast and left only papery remnants that crumbled at the 
slightest touch. 

In desperation he stumbled through the shadows squinting at 
the ground for any signs of whole wood, new dropped branches, 
twigs, anything to burn for light, but the ground was bare and 
smooth. Several times he mistook his shadow for a fallen branch. He 
stood and stared stupidly down at it, faint shadow, moving, swinging 
around his feet. he thought, "Shadow?"

The parrot swooped down upon him, blazing. Its wings left 
afterimage trails across his sight, rainbows that pulsed in the dark 
when he looked away. Other parrots crowded the trees, perching 
silently on the lowest branches and chewing at the bark. They 
smoldered like coals when they sat still, just visible in the gloom as 
ghostly hunchback shapes exhaling a misty glow in a halo that rose 
to a candle flame point above their heads. Now another detached 
itself from the black branch it clung to and swooped down, igniting 
as it moved. Brighter and brighter, its speed feeding air to the 
feather mold, spores trailing behind the outstretched wings in twin 
contrails of angel dust. It was attacking him. The beak opened into a 
cruel hook ready to gouge his eyes out the instant it touched him. He 
groped blindly for the bow lashed to the pack.

DRAWING THE BOW


Here's how Lang got a weapon.

Ground Zero was a region of totally deserted ruins roughly one 
hundred miles in diameter. Nobody lived there. Occasional wanderers 
drifted through the ruins looking for loot missed by their ancestors. 
The pickings were free, for the area was destined to be destroyed. 

At the centre of Ground Zero, the true "ground zero" lay. A man 
lived there. 

He inhabited an ancient ruin, round edged walls of obsidian, 
fused from local earth and stone, sprawling over acres of ground. 
Millennia of rain pounding their bare tops had pitted the black glass 
slabs and worn them down into blunt shapes that seemed melted. 
Between the walls were orchards and gardens. Groves of apples filled 
some of the huge squares that once had been rooms. Oranges and 
lemons grew mixed together, tall trees, ancient and strong. Thorns 
flashed from the lemon branches. Pumpkin and melons wound 
between the trunks. One square of the ruin had been excavated of 
earth, and water filled the space in a flashing blue lake. Black 
obsidian floor showed at the bottom.

Small robots, service and repair mechanisms like silver 
trilobites, moved through the garden, little pincers pulling weeds, 
climbing trees to pick grubs from the leaves, irrigating roots. Water 
was piped from the lake to the base of every tree. When the wind 
wasn't too loud in the branches one could hear the click and rustle of 
their metal legs. 


Lang rode through rubble choked streets, slowing to pass piles 
of brick and stone from fallen walls, steering around open manholes 
and subsidences in the road. Giri sitting behind him, pointing the way 
and shouting directions over the roar of the little engine. Blue and 
white sky above.

"You can see it now. Those black walls." she yelled.

Almost nothing remained of the factories that had once made 
the area a centre of industry. Here at the centre of Ground Zero they 
had long been abandoned, and the stones from their walls lay 
scattered. Tile roofs were now piles of red dust, and rust-stained 
weathered concrete hummocks showed were plant machinery once 
stood. 

The bike reached smooth slopes of grass running down from 
the obsidian walls to the rubble, and Lang decided to park and leave 
it there. It would be a crime to ride up that smooth turf and leave 
wheel ruts in the sod. 

Giri led the way, up the slope towards a break in the wall. They 
took off their helmets and let the breeze dry the sweat from their 
hair. 

"Look at that!"

Lang pointed at a robot, creeping across the turf dragging a bag 
of woven flax behind. Rear claws scattered seed from the bag, and 
the front claws neatly snipped the longer grass blades. It was aware 
of their presence; a spare claw waved at them to attract their 
attention. 

"They're the gardeners I was talking about." said Giri.

"So small?"

"Lots of them."

The machine dropped its bag and scuttled towards them. 
Reaching their feet it hesitated, chose Giri, and climbed onto her boot, 
then claw over claw up the folds of her jeans, up her baggy black 
jumper, to perch on her shoulder and extend a claw into her field of 
vision, pointing to the wall. 

Lang followed Giri as she was guided through the gardens, past 
more machines fixing sprinklers or towing carts filled with earth, 
past clumps of herbs in sunny corners, filling the air with sharp 
smells, past rows of terra-cotta pots full of water, lilies blooming on 
the surface. The little scuttlers were tireless, constantly darting 
through their field of vision, flashes of silver, stopping to plant or 
weed and moving on. It was as though they felt their own lack of life 
so much they wished to fill every niche with greenery. Blocks had 
been carried in from the ruins outside and stacked for moss and 
creepers to overrun. They saw a robot spraying a fine mist of water 
on lichen that bloomed on the obsidian walls. 

On Giri's shoulder the guide gestured. They passed through an 
empty doorway into a smaller square. Turf and scattered trees filled 
the space, the lake sent glints of light through gaps in the wall 
opposite where they came in. A hammock swung slowly beneath one 
of the trees. 

An old man lay in the hammock, a book spread on his chest 
and others scattered on the grass beneath. As they approached, the 
silver droid that crouched above his head reached forward to tug his 
hair. 

"Oh, shit. Visitors."

With surprising grace he rolled out of the hammock and stood 
before them. Tall and stooped, very thin, with concave chest and long 
white hair that fell past his shoulders and down his chest, he wore 
grey jeans and a white tee shirt stained with dirt. 

"Welcome to Ground Zero."


He lead them through a grove of citrus. His name was Absole, 
he told them, 

"I've studied archery for years," Lang said, "I use a compound 
target bow, but it's no use for hunting or self defense."

"You had the thing blessed, right?"

"Yes. I did it myself. I was worried about safety; it's a mean 
bow. But now, of course, I can't kill anything with it."

"If you want to kill someone with a bow you shouldn't have 
told me, I won't make one if it's going to be used for murder. I'll 
bless it as well, leave you helpless."

"Not someone! I'm going out of the city, to the forest. Going 
inside. I need to be able to hunt, maybe even protect myself."

"The forest! Ah, someones interested in the forest, after all 
these years! We're too complacent." He stopped and turned. "That 
forest is younger than the city. Older than this place, though. I know 
the legends about it. The thing is, it grew too fast. Forests take 
millions of years to grow. There's something powering it. Believe me, 
I know. I grew this place, and it takes power to maintain."

He gestured to a small herd of robots dragging a potted tree 
across pavement some distance away. The pot stood on a low cart, 
and the scuttlers formed ranks before it, clutching ropes and hauling 
in unison.

"Think of this place as a forest in its own right. Those crabs are 
the power behind its growth. What grows a million years of forest in 
ten thousand, eh?"

"I'm just curious. There's always the chance I'll find 
something." He looked down at his feet. 

"I haven't seen curiosity, genuine curiosity, in years. I thought 
it had died out. I'll make your bow. Here."

The old man reached out for a branch of an orange tree. The 
tree had been pollarded, and grew long thin whippy branches from 
the chopped top of the trunk. He drew a hasp knife from the back 
pocket of the jeans and cut the branch through cleanly at the base. A 
scuttler, sensing that the tree had been damaged, scuttled up the 
trank to the stub of the branch and started to spray it with 
something, stopping the sap from bleeding out. 

"This is the thing. Orange wood, long grained and smooth."


He spent hours working the branch into a bow. Giri and Lang 
grew tired of watching and drifted out of his workshop, going down 
to the lake to watch the silver trout-like fish dart over the smooth 
black bottom. Pipes led up from the water and into the groves of 
trees. Giri had remained completely silent the entire afternoon. She 
idly wandered the bank and helped a scuttler pick snails from the 
shrubs there, tossing them into the water for trout to snap up. 

"If the old bastard let a few caterpillars grow there would be 
butterflies." she said.

"I thought you'd been struck dumb."

"No, just thinking. Where do you think the generator is?"

"You said you'd been here before. I thought you would know."

"He didn't show us then. We hoped he would show us, but he 
didn't, and we didn't ask. We didn't want to act like jerks and piss 
him off by asking."

"I'll ask."

"Yeah, you've got curiosity."

"He's just an old man. We shouldn't assume he really knows 
about the things he says. White hair does not a sage make."

"I'm bored."


The glowing bird was nearly upon him. He grasped an arrow 
and drew it from the quiver, a smooth movement down over his 
shoulder to the waiting bow. Drew and let fly.


"Orange strakes have the best grain." said the old man. "It 
makes the draw as smooth as your fiberglass. People know me for 
that. I cure the wood in a microwave oven. It works, believe me, 
better than letting the wood lie around for months in a pile. Here."

He handed Lang his new weapon. It was smooth, still warm, six 
foot long but light and easy to aim. Lang counted out the price, six 
verses, one for each foot. The old man unfolded one and read before 
stuffing them into his jeans.

"We want to see the generator." Lang blurted out. Giri took his 
arm.

"Sure."

They followed him as he threaded a path through the ruins, 
ducking under low doorways and pacing down long avenues of trees, 
and came to a square, the largest yet, bare of any plants at all. They 
stepped out onto clean black glass.

Obsidian rubble lay piled along the base of the walls. In the 
centre of the smooth black floor rose a silver machine. Cylindrical, a 
giant beer keg, tarnished but undamaged by time or weather, it 
radiated a sense of monstrous power barely contained. The air was 
filled with the high whine of it's spin, directionless, as though the air 
itself was stressed and ready to break. A bright star glowed at one 
end, and as they followed the bent figure closer they felt radiated 
heat on their faces. 

Absole showed them a forked stick that lay near the base. It's 
tips were charred black. He took out a cigarette and pinched it in the 
Y, and reached out to hold it near the unbearably brilliant rod of 
light protruding from the end of the generator. In seconds it's tip 
smoked and the paper was brown. 

"The spin. Heats the metal by friction with the air. Very hot. 
Try listening to the hull."

They heard bees, cats purring, and the pain of metal. 

"And this is the counter."

He tapped a tiny slot low on the side of the cylinder, and they 
crouched to see inside. Numbers moved. A row of digits glowed and 
ticked steadily, backwards towards zero.

"Forty two thousand one hundred and six years, twenty nine 
days, six hours and..." he raised his watch and waited for the second 
hand to reach twelve, "thirty one minutes."

"Booom!" intoned Lang, and the old man smiled like a skull. 


Everyone knew, and left the region to ruin. The blast would kill 
everything and utterly destroy all buildings still standing for 
hundreds of miles. Levinfield would be no more. There was no 
reason to move, Ground Zero was as safe as any other place. Nothing 
was going to survive. The time was long to come, but people don't 
like to think about their ancestors madnesses, or the ruin of all their 
work, even when it happens long after their death. 


"Most of the power is going to waste." said the old man. "The 
scuttlers don't draw much, and I use even less. It's just wasting it all, 
invisible rays of power are disappearing into space even as we 
speak. Except for the residue. That'll be a sight to see."

"Unless we disarm it."

Absole looked at him in surprise.

"We've tried, many times. I've read the history. The Lottery 
Combine, during the last peak, tried for a long time, but they couldn't 
even damage the casing, couldn't move it or even scratch it. It gets 
harder with age."

"Maybe next time they will, or the time after that."

"Somehow I don't think that's likely. You know, whoever built 
it, I think it was their joke. A cruel joke on lazy children. We assume 
our eager offspring will find a way to solve the problems of the past, 
but this problem gets harder with age. No, I think it will remain until 
the last, and that will really clear the rubble. Maybe a new beginning 
will break us out of our Cycle."


He lead them back to the bike, stopping by his hammock for 
something.

"This is something you'll need." he said, holding it out to Lang. 
It was a map, creased and worn, an old surveyors map of the forest. 
"Have you got one like this?"

"Kind of. I tried to find one in the Utilities offices but it was 
insane. They have maps of power, gas, sewage, water lines, telephone 
networks, but it was a nightmare. I saw madmen burrowing through 
layers of paper charts of revisions and re-revisions, trying to match 
one to another. They said continental drift had to be factored into the 
old ones, and the proper motion of stars to correct surveying figures. 
Erosion, precession of the equinoxes, and the movement of the sun. 
All the changes of time. Researchers running everywhere struggling 
with obsolete measures, computer languages, tape cassettes and 
discs, obscure tongues and terminology that had changed and 
changed again; wandering through rooms of silent computers with 
unearthed memory cartridges in their hands, trying them in this slot 
and that, hoping to find one that fits so they can switch it on and 
hope it works and can access charts of five-thousand-year-old steam 
lines. I could barely stand to watch."

"Even the recent ones you'll find in the city are dubious, I 
wouldn't trust them. This one is accurate. It's a copy of the last real 
survey of the forest, taken just at the end of the last business 
culture, when they considered pushing a rail line through. No-one 
would work on the project though, but the map survived. Bring it 
back, when you return."

They walked away, watched by the old man, a scuttler perched 
on either shoulder.


The arrow flew straight and true, through the birds heart.

RADIANT BIRD


Lang raised his quarry by the arrow that pierced it. Wings 
trailed loose from the sides, releasing glowing dust in a rain of 
colours. There was nothing dangerous about it at all. 

"Shit!'

The bow had been properly tested, though. The bow was clean. 
It had no curses or blessings, as he had feared. The hunting head 
twisted easily off the arrow's tip and he slid the still-bright body 
from the shaft, leaving it lying where it dropped like a fragment of 
rainbow. No one eats parrot. 

On he stumbled, absently wiping blood from the arrow and 
searching for a piece of flat ground. No fire tonight. Tomorrow he 
would remember to search for wood while he walked. 


Later, he pitched his tent in one of the few glades, where a tree 
had fallen decades before and the canopy let enough light through 
for grass to grow. It was full night. All around was muttering, 
chanting, glowing confusion. Great toadstools rose slowly through leaf 
litter, caps a dim blue phosphorescent haze. Flying centipedes drifted 
past and brushed his shoulders. 

Above the trees the night was alive. Spiders swung across 
abyssal gaps in the branches to string their traps. Some blew fine 
mesh balloons and drifted towards the sky. Their hairy bodies swung 
beneath, arms outstretched for tiny bats and night flying 
hummingbirds that fed on the sweet nectar slime-molds trailed 
behind as they crawled along branches. A full moon silvered the hills 
and valleys of this country of leaves. 

Lang lay inside his tent reading by flashlight, a prehistory of 
spaceflight, wishing he could see the crowded sky.


"Recent discoveries in the Lagrange points suggest that even 
earlier cultures had settlements there. Structures believed to belong 
to a culture that predates what is generally known as the First Stone 
Age have been found, although some authorities suggest that dating 
techniques are confused by long exposure to cosmic rays. The general 
rate of change in processed metals in space may be increased vastly 
by brief bursts of high energy radiation from supernovae, and there 
is even belief that some of the artifacts made close orbits through the 
atmosphere and were heated by friction before being captured by 
the stability of the Lagrange orbits. 

Nonetheless, these structures are obviously human, but belong 
to no known era of space travel. They suggest temples, rather like 
the Meltingpot temples, which were looted of their gold by Sixteenth 
Machine Age astronauts. Consisting of the remains of what was once 
outer shells, and some internal corridors and compartments, they are 
mostly bare of machinery. The basic structure is ceramic, and the 
usual alloys are only used for fittings. What are presumed to be 
sleeping quarters, racks of piping fringed with rags of cotton that 
may have formed stretcher beds, have been found. The airlocks cycle 
into rooms filled with murals, depicting the structure itself, whole, 
surrounded by ornately decorated craft. For the most part the craft 
are orbit-to-orbit, devoid of wing structures and too flimsy to 
tolerate atmosphere, though there are a few which may have been 
robust enough to survive re-entry. Amongst the attendant vehicles 
surrounding the habitat in these murals are fantastic creatures, 
apparently living in the vacuum and surrounded by tiny suited 
figures conveying food to their mouths. Like many mythological 
creatures these display the usual chimera combination of body parts; 
their tails similar to zbats, rows of spider wings, bodies of whales and 
giant squid, and human facial features, though their mouths sprout 
strange claw like mandibles, and they are equipped with engines 
emerging from their otherwise organic bodies, probably fusion drives 
as suggested by the tell-tale exhausts."

It was a good book. It put him to sleep.


His dreams reached back to youth, inspired by the book; winter 
days avoiding school, lying paralyzed with boredom in abandoned 
concrete pipes, exploring webby offices of forgotten beaurocracies, 
inches of dust on desks swirls as he passes, documents decayed by 
time. Streams of rainwater leaked from the ceiling, running down 
dangling phone cables. Time, time, everywhere he turned was time. 

He is twelve, digging a hole in the cellar to hide pornographic 
magazines. Footsteps move back and forth on the boards above, his 
parents in the kitchen. Wires and pipes crumble before the spade. 

A crunch, and the earth drops away into bottomless black.

Eagerly he chews away at the edges, stopping to shine a torch 
down at the growing pile of debris on the floor below. As soon as the 
hole is big enough he drops a rope through and clambers down. 

It's a tunnel or a large pipe, running off into the blackness on 
either side. Stainless steel walls coated in white dust. One side is 
bare, the other crowded with a tangle of pipes, conduits, wires, and 
bulkheads covered in meters. 

He is amazed. Not so much that the place exists but that he 
doesn't recognize it. Like most children he spent much of his time 
underground, exploring the secret world. He knows all the tunnels in 
the area, and this has escaped him till now. 

Hours of walking down the slightly curving tunnel brings him 
back to the start. It's a circle, a ring. He climbs the rope and lays 
boards over the hole. 

Later, his parents discover his secret and call in authorities. 
Universities send academics. They recognize the design; a particle 
accelerator. Twelve thousand years old. Perfectly preserved. If 
someone wanted too they could start the machine working again, but 
no one does, so it's left to be forgotten again, by all but Lang. 


Three AM, the forest was silent, even the birds had stopped 
talking and settled down to sleep. Mist filtered through the trees 
from the sky above. Grey and spectral, glowing with diffuse light. 

In his tent Lag turned in his sleep again and again. The ground 
was hard under the canvas sheet. Rocks dug into his back. 

Lang turned over and groaned loudly. He was answered from 
outside the tent.

"MAAAAP!"

It took one long second for him to come fully awake, one 
adrenaline charged heartbeat, and he sat shivering in the centre of 
the tent desperately turning his head this way and that, seeking the 
source of danger.

"Maaap. Maaap! Map?"

There was no protection in the tent. He grabbed for the bow, 
which lay unstrung besides him, forgetting the arrows still in his 
pack, and swiveled until he could unzip the flaps and peer through. 
Now the mist was at ground level and surrounded him in grey.

"Maap!"

Every cry stopped his heart and set it going again twice as fast 
as before. Now he was fully hyped, almost angry, except a cold sweat 
of fear shone on his arms and his balls were climbing into his 
stomach. Desperately he tried to see through the fog.

There! White, a flash of pale white between the trees.

Summoning every particle of stupid desperate courage, he 
burst from the tent and made directly for where he had seen the 
apparition. He caught another glimpse, clearer this time, a patch of 
white in the fog that moved before him, running away faster than he 
could chase. Panting, trembling with shock, he stopped and watched 
it disappear into the mist. 

Lang turned and slowly retraced his steps to the tent. Lay 
down inside, shivering with shock. All his denials came back with 
ironic force, and he ran through Dake's warning, his recording and his 
stories. 

"There's a fucking ghost out there!"

ONWARDS


A day: twenty miles, more or less. No way of measuring 
distance. Nothing changed; the trees remained the same, same 
distance apart, same species. Only the lichen and fungal growths 
showed variety in their colours and forms.

He crossed old roads sunk in weeds and blown leaves. Late in 
the afternoon there was a cloverleaf intersection, where four broad 
highways met. Of course he couldn't help himself, and had to walk 
the twisting ramps to the top.

Here he could look into the crowns of the trees, see the way 
they were shaped. Here the face of a huge bear stared straight at 
him, there was a crow, and there a woman's head, full of detail, with 
a determined look in her green eyes and a wattled neck. 

Lang looked around, amused. He had grown up with similar 
things. In times past people had engineered the genes of many 
animals and plants, techniques now lost in the depths of the libraries, 
and butterflies would sport the trademark of forgotten soft drink 
manufacturer on their wings, and ants would trace out garbled 
messages in their trails, and certain birds would sing the notes of old 
hymns in eight part harmony. 

He spread the old mans map out on the concrete and studied 
his progress. It seemed he had made good time, the cloverleaf (if it 
was the right one) lay at least fifty miles inside the forests edge. That 
meant he had traveled more than fifty, as the spider flies, because 
the forests edge had moved further out. From here a line lead 
straight on to the centre for another fifty, where it ended at 
something that wasn't a road. He turned and considered the route. 
What was a double line on the paper was a four lane roadway of 
buckled concrete. Clear of plants and fallen trees. If he followed the 
road he would lose less time clearing obstacles and trying to 
orientate. He folded the map and started down the ramp.


He lay awake in the tent, staring at the creased cloth above his 
head. He fought against the black wings of sleep that flapped slowly 
around the edges of his vision. Tiny night sounds came to his ears, 
magnified by the nervous strain of staying awake. None were the 
sounds he was waiting for.

Blind eyes staring upwards, he gazed instead on the inner view. 
There were a million mental gears he could change, and he ran 
experimentally through them, looking for the right combination. 

What he wanted to do was see what lay outside the tent. He 
knew it was possible. It was harder than seeing through someone 
else's eyes, and that was hard enough, but he knew it was possible. 
There were eyes out there, faceted eyes of centipedes and tiny 
mammal eyes of shrews and mice, but they were little use. Their 
owners were intent on finding food and spotting predators, and when 
he tried to hold them still with touches of the Knack they panicked, 
tiny hearts racing, and ran and hid. 

Gradually he found the frequency he wanted. It wasn't like 
seeing through eyes. There was no point of view. There were images 
appreciated in three dimensions; the tent, as seen from all sides at 
once, but less detail then when seen normally from any angle. He 
hovered like a god over the small stage of his own setting, the tent, 
the clearing and the closest treetrunks shrouded in curling fingers of 
mist.

Seeing this was almost worse than seeing nothing, as far as 
staying awake was concerned. The mist moved slowly, hypnotically, 
and it entranced him. Only silently falling leaves and the occasional 
husk of an insect dropped from the canopy by a feeding spider 
moved faster than a slow crawl. He considered checking his watch, 
but realized the extra effort in tuning back in to the far-seeing 
channel outweighed the benefits. Anyway, it was bound to show that 
only a few minutes had passed.

Actually, it was nearing dawn. And something was happening.

Near one edge of the clearing the whiteness contracted and 
formed a knot. No features, no shape, just a patch that suggested 
something solid stood within the clouds of vapour. He almost lost it 
then. Struggling for self control, he forced himself to lay still and 
wait, and tried to clarify his vision. 

The knot grew denser, whiter. Whatever it was, was inching 
from the protection of the boles, out into the clearing towards him 
and the tent. He bit his lip in anticipation. 

Of course, the Knack had to chose that moment to assert its 
unreliability. He had pushed too hard, and that was the surest way to 
fuck up. Everything faded, vanished, only the blank material of the 
tent before his eyes now. He cursed and sat up.

There was a sound; no cry, this time, but drumbeats. He felt 
them as well as heard them. Rapid four/four beats fading away.

"That wasn't feet!"

Would a ghost make a sound when it ran?

What would make that sound, that wasn't a drum?

He lay down again and reflected on old reflections, caught from 
mirrors over many years. There was one sound that fit the bill:

There was a time, on the upswing of an industrial era, when 
men had worn broad brimmed hats and vests and wide trousers with 
fringes of leather. It was a strange time. For some reason their eyes 
had not registered colour; perhaps the suns light had been different 
then, or something in the atmosphere, but all their stored reflections 
had been shades of grey. They rode about on the back of an animal 
which had been extinct since soon after their owners themselves 
toppled from their thrones. Lang remembered books and illustrations 
of the beast. Words came. Hooves. 

"That was a horse!"

But the horses were all black, and big, and this creature was 
small and white.

But the sound was the same, if faster and quieter.

He fell asleep.


Deep in a ravine he found water.

Great silver ants lead him to the source. They burrowed from 
the ground in the morning, chittering like bats, darting between his 
feet. One bit his boot and died instantly, mandibles still locked in 
tough nylon. Something in the chemistry.

He followed them down a steep slope, walking alongside their 
trail. Each one carried a pupae in its jaws. The noisy procession 
wound through the trees, down, steeper and steeper inclines ending 
in a dank crevice in the forest floor where water ran from an old 
pipe.

He hoped the water was safe. It tasted pure enough, and he 
drank and filled his bottle, but then he heard faint clangs from the 
pipe, regular, deep in the earth, and realized that some forgotten 
engine still worked there, most likely producing the water as a waste 
product. The ants weren't bothered, though, they solemnly immersed 
their young in the tinkling stream and returned.

Not to worry. 

HUNT


Lang walked through open trees, enjoying the space and the 
light that filled this part of the forest. The trees had trunks many 
spans around here; they seemed to have been growing since the 
world began.

The forest floor rose and fell in soft inclines that were easy to 
walk. The air was soft, warm, like being in a bath on an autumn 
afternoon, that momentary period when the bathwater cools just 
slightly colder than body temperature and you tell yourself it's time 
to move, but lie there instead and enjoy the melancholy sadness of 
the moment, dying so soon, you know that in minutes you will start 
shivering and have to leave but just don't want to. It was that kind 
of day.

He crunched through thick drifts of leaves that added to the 
autumn ambiance. Sweet smells reached his nose. Nutmeg richness of 
rotting leaves, and the protein whiff of ever-present molds and 
mildews on the trunks all around. There were vines here, wild 
grapes with tan leaves and clusters of raisins dropping to the ground 
from their withered stalks. 

A flash of white, and the bow was in his hand. 

Lang was wired. He was tight. His eyes darted, this way and 
that, searching. 

It was a statue. Old marble, covered in moss, more green than 
white. A woman holding a vase, pouring. Maybe once it was part of a 
fountain. He strode closer and reached out, breaking a clot of the 
moss away to reveal the marble beneath. Etched deep by time and 
rain, the features of the face had long since melded into an eyeless 
mask. 

He peered ahead, over its shoulder. Something large and dark 
loomed through the trees. A wall.

Past the last tree, and he stood at the base of a soaring wall of 
black stone, granite blocks fitted together in a brutal display of 
strength. 

Lang turned and paced along the foot of the wall, bow still 
ready, an arrow in his hand. Sending his senses out, trying to smell 
his prey.

There was a gap. No doors or gate, just an archway punched 
through the wall, and he peered around the corner cautiously.

The wall ran around a huge expanse of close cropped lawn 
dotted with ornamental trees, orchards, vines, stands of bamboo, 
flowers as large as satellite dishes, and rumbling dome shaped spider 
hives. Soaring from the centre of this civilized garden was a castle, an 
unreal, dreaming structure that seemed too perfect even in its 
dilapidation to be the product of the hand of humans. Lang was 
transported. It was too beautiful.

The base was smothered in thick ivy that reached long arms up 
the towers and spires. Buttresses flew out from grey stone walls to 
touch the turf like the folding legs of a mantis. He stood frozen, 
marveling at its size, forgetting the hunt. 

In the gardens surrounding the castle trees laden with oranges 
and lemons bent to the ground, and pumpkin vines wrapped around 
their trunks, and random sprays of white blooms through the vivid 
dark green lawn.

The many windows set blackly in the sheer granite walls 
seemed to watch him, peering down impassive as an audience at a 
play. He felt like a stage-struck actor, but forced himself to walk out 
from his hiding place, step out on stage. On a whim he bowed to the 
wall, low and formal bow taken from some old play seen in the 
mirror, and raised his bow and arrow in neither hand, feeling the 
tingle in the back of his neck, of anticipation, waiting to be hailed, 
accosted, perhaps shot from the towers. Nothing happened. No shouts 
of alarm or shots from a gun. He stepped forward, further into the 
gardens.

There, at his feet, were hoofprints. Tiny and circular, identical 
to the ones he had seen in the forest, pressed deep in the succulent 
lawn. 

So, he thought, the beast lives here. Perhaps a pet? It didn't 
matter. Unless someone stopped him he was going to shoot it. 

There were roses in huge tangles of briars, more statuary 
amongst the coils of thorns. He found paths, and prints in the gravel. 
And there, there was a footprint. Human, small, light, recent. 

He drifted closer to the castle, for protection. It felt so 
vulnerable to be out on the lawns and paths. 

It was then, creeping along the base of the castle wall, that he 
finally caught sight of his quarry.

The beast was a white deer, pure spectral white like the snow 
that crowns the tallest mountains. Perhaps four foot tall at the 
shoulder, it grazed peacefully in the centre of a field of daisies, 
pawing down the long stalks of flowers and eating the shorter, grey-
green blades that surrounded the base of each clump. The head rose 
casually every minute to survey the surrounds, but it's attitude was 
calm, untroubled, and he could tell this was its home turf.

And he fitted the arrow to his bow and let fly.

It was a good shot. It flew straight. He had fletched the arrow 
himself, using seagull feathers found in a park near the house where 
gulls and pigeons fought over bread and scraps left by old men. 

The arrow went true, but it missed. The deer looked up at the 
moment he let it fly, and stared straight into his eyes for a fraction of 
a second, and turned, and the arrow grazed its side. He saw the first 
drops of blood seep from the shallow wound and stain the virgin 
purity of the pelt before the deer was leaping, shocked, head 
reaching back for one lick at the blood with a black tongue, before it 
turned and galloped desperately for freedom.

Lang followed, loping through the garden. He reached for 
another arrow from the quiver, lashed to the side of his pack, and 
fitted it to the bow. 

Around a hedge, and the deer was crouched in the angle of a 
red brick wall, licking its wound. Lang winced at the blood, deep red 
running across such pure white, luminous even in daylight. Once 
again it looked up, into his eyes, dark orbs, emotionless, strange and 
alien.

His arrow plunged quivering into the earth where it had stood. 
The deer sprinted away across the grass. Lang shrugged the pack 
from his shoulders, grabbed a handful of arrows from the quiver, 
and gave chase.

Out across the lawn, following the drops of blood around 
hedges and dry fountains and low trees that spread their branches 
close to the ground as thought they were tired. 

When next he caught sight of the deer it was halfway across a 
stretch of open lawn flat as a croquet field. Heading for a woman. 

She lay on her side, on a block of stone that formed a perfect 
couch, upholstered in moss and lichen. It must have fallen from the 
top of one of the towers, he thought; it was the same kind of stone as 
the walls. 

She lay curled up, hands between her knees, head pillowed on 
a book. Her hair curled out in a flowing wave that engulfed several 
more, lying open, pages ruffling in the slight breeze. There was 
something about the books, something that made his Knack ring like 
an alarm. Power in the air. They were thick and old, mostly, except 
for some thin notebooks amongst them. He could tell they contained 
formidable secrets simply by looking at them, and he prayed she 
wouldn't awake. 

His quarry paused for a moment, sniffed, muzzle her ear, 
before darting away. He followed. Sprinting silently, holding his 
breath, gliding footsteps across the lawn, while his lungs screamed.

They had come halfway around the castle now, and his prey 
headed for the outer wall and another large gap, natural this time, 
filled with blocks of stone that had tumbled down and been left 
where they lay. 

The deer sprang to the top of the pile and crouched there, 
reaching back to lick the wound again as the pain nagged deep. He let 
fly again, without thinking, and the arrow struck a block nearby and 
sent up chips of stone, startling it. The deer sprang down the other 
side.

"Damn!" 

Puffing, he scrambled up the heap of stones and followed the 
trail of blood back into the depths of the forest. 

There was a tree there, just inside the margin, that was quite 
different to the rest. He had grown so used to the shapes of the 
forest, the suggestions of faces and chess pieces and geometric angles 
in their branches, that it took him a moment to recognize the tree.

It was shaped like the deer itself. No mistaking that. Green, and 
huge, but perfectly proportioned. The deer, curled in sleep. Branches, 
hugging the ground, forming legs curled in tight to the belly, and 
there was the head nestled in along the flank. 

Dark underneath those branches, very dark. The leaves were 
thick. He stumbled into low limbs and leapt back, confused. Only a 
faint light penetrated from outside, and brighter light ahead, close to 
the trunk. Lang pressed on. 

He hopped a branch that blocked his path, ducked under 
another, and found himself in a dark hollow. Here the leaves were 
thick enough to keep out all light from outside. 

The deer crouched in the earth before him. It was the only 
source of light. A perfect radiance bled from its coat, pure white, a 
white rarely seen, bright and strong. Lang thought of storms and 
lightning, especially at night, and how the light from each bolt was so 
brilliant it bled the colours from everything it touched. He circled 
around it, now that the creature was at bay and seemed unable to 
escape. Seeping blood stained the light with crimson. Lang closed his 
eyes, sickened, and listened to ragged breathing. 

The deer looked up at him as he stood there, panting, sweat 
dripping from his brow into his eyes so they stung, and it didn't look 
with fear and it didn't look with malice. It just looked, enigmatic as a 
statue, as a sentence in a dead language.

They remained frozen for a moment. Each tight as the bow 
string.

Lang made the first move. Slowly his hand fitted arrow to 
string, drew, held. Still the deer crouched, pouring out light, brighter 
and brighter. Black eyes weeping black tears down the muzzle, 
panting, sides heaving with pain.

The arrow flew straight and hard deep into its side.


The light went out at that moment. It didn't fade or flicker. It 
just died as the deer died.

Damn, Lang thought. That's torn it. Now how will I convince 
everyone this is the source of the ghost rumors?

He kneeled down and touched it's side in the pitch dark of the 
tree. It was warm and soft. It smelled like copper and zinc. It felt 
like a cats fur, wet from the rain.

PART 2: CATHERINE


was her name. 

She slept on a flat slab of stone, padded with thick moss and 
lichen, books spread out around her head. Droplets of sunlight moved 
back and forth across her face. They fell through the leaves of an 
orange tree that bent over the slab. All around the tree and the stone 
was golden light, a cloud of feathery seed heads rising from the wild 
grass, drying and ripening in the strong sunshine, and the spoor of 
dark molds that grew in the shadows of the forest. 

The sun disappeared behind the tops of the tallest trees and 
shadow crept across the lawn towards her. It flowed over her face, 
and she awoke and looked around bleary eyed.

Night soon. Time to start work.

She gathered her books, carefully wrapping them in a sheet of 
ragged cotton, the spring bound notebook on top. Ragged, dirty, the 
edges of the pages worn fuzzy with much paging, it was still the most 
important. It was the index to her collection.

With the bundle slung across her shoulder she crossed the lawn 
to the castle and stepped through the cavernous door that yawned 
near the base. Her quick footsteps echoed from the carved stone 
pillars inside. The first floor was all one room, a forest of pillars 
receding in the gloom, each numbered and lettered in alien symbols. 
The floor was covered in lines, parallel rows of straight ones marking 
out ranks of rectangular space, and curved ones running between, 
suggesting a giant board game. Little light came through the door, 
but she knew the way by heart.

The lift well was empty. All the machinery long since gone to 
rust, so completely no trace remained. She stepped into the base of 
the tall column of dark stone running up into the castle, and looked 
upwards at the receding perspective of open doorways, each 
throwing a rectangle of dim light on the opposite wall of the passage. 

She muttered a few short words, and rose from the ground, 
carried up as though the ghost of a lift surrounded her.

Top floor, and she stepped carefully onto the lip of the 
doorway. Then trotted quickly through the mess of her home to the 
workroom.

It was the highest room in the castle, tip of the tallest tower, 
commanding a view of the forest roof. Low sun shot across the 
treetops to her windows. Inside, a welter of things was spread out 
across the rough stone floor. Her bed, a mattress laid on a low 
platform of stone, heaped with colourful blankets and quilts. Tables 
stood everywhere, each groaning under a piles of dirty dishes, 
discarded clothes, boxes of cans and bottles, books, books and more 
books.

The workroom was even more crowded with junk. There were 
many machines here. Rescued, unearthed from a hundred different 
civilizations. Snakes nests of cables ran across the floor, from one 
unit to another. 

And tape. There was tape everywhere. The cables were 
entangled in short lengths of discarded tape, black and brown and 
red, thick and thin. All the walls were lined with every conceivable 
kind of tape. Reels in their cases, large and small, and cassettes, 
cartridges, spools. 

Huge wooden tables stood here and there on the stone floor, 
each bearing its load of machinery. They glowed with a myriad of 
indicators and VU meters. Some turned silently, dubbing sound from 
one to the other as she had left them, backing up her collection. 

She slung her bundle of books from her shoulder onto a 
relatively clear table and walked away, across a star carved in deep 
channels into the floor. The books slithered down in an avalanche of 
paper. Catherine moved around the room, checking operations, while 
the light evening breeze turned the pages of her spiral notebook.

Each page was crammed with tightly written words and 
phrases. Written in an alphabet entirely of her own invention, for 
they were words in a long dead language. Pages turned, list after list 
of gibberish, as she jacked a monitor into one of the machines and 
dropped into a wooden chair, closed her eyes and listened to the 
stream of parrot gabble that filled the room. 

An hour passed. The tape ended and ran through. The reels 
stopped turning. 

Catherine recognized most of the words, but there were a few 
new ones to be gleaned from the tape. She retrieved her notebook 
and set to work. The tape had to be rewound, and searched 
thoroughly. 

For the next hour she carefully played through the tape again, 
stopping and rewinding. The new words were dubbed onto a square 
cassette, and she returned the reel to its shelf. Then she replayed the 
cassette again and again, repeating each word. She tried them in 
combination with other words, speaking them aloud into a tiny palm 
recorder that ate little cassettes like water crackers. Some she 
dubbed onto lengths of tape glued to paper cards, which could be run 
over and over through a modified reel player.

And each word she savored, tested, felt out for some subliminal 
response, as she tried to divine their meanings.


It was full night and the forest beyond the walls was filled 
with darting colour. Catherine paused to look outside. It was time to 
harvest more words from her parrots. She grabbed a satchel from 
the shelf and headed out. 

Through the bedroom. A coil of rope and bags of climbing 
equipment joined the satchel. She dropped at dizzying speed down 
the lift shaft, landed heavily, trotted out through the now pitch dark 
ground floor and out onto the lawn. 

In the darkness of the forest her flashlight bobbed and weaned 
between the boles of trees. She stopped and looked up. Darting 
colours. Promising. Time to climb.

High in the crown, clinging to a shaking thin branch out where 
the wood started to thin dangerously, she could hear the creaking of 
her weight tearing wood fibres with every sway. Recorder securely 
lashed to the branch before her. Tiny red devil eye glowing in the 
dark. The parrots, flashes of coloured light around her, darting in, 
trying to shake the predator and make her fall. She shifted her grip, 
trying to wrap her arms more securely around the branch, and a big 
one, perhaps a mother with chicks in a nearby nest, came straight for 
her face, and she let go to raise her arms, protect her face, and she 
fell. 

A loud crack as the safety line snapped tight, and she swung 
down to the trunk, face on, straight into its craggy bark. She only 
stopped to shake flakes of wood from her hair before clambering 
back, up to the branch and out again, to the recorder. 

She packed up and left. She hurt. Maybe a rib was broken, 
where the harness cut in. Maybe that was the crack she heard. It 
wouldn't take much. Catherine was a thin woman. Her bones showed 
all over her body. Sometimes she went for days without eating, and 
then she ate like a machine, refueling for more work, her life's work. 
It consumed her. And bruises had formed during her sleep and that 
morning she couldn't raise her arms above her head, they hurt so 
much.


It was a language the parrots spoke, an actual language of 
words once spoken by human beings. Of course the bird brains didn't 
understand the words they recited from memory, they only 
preserved them. They taught their young, and the young taught their 
young, passing the words down from generation to generation. 

In her dreams she sometimes saw a glowing bird in a silver 
cage, in a room, perhaps the room she worked in now. A woman, like 
herself, feeds the bird fruit from a plate, the parrots cruelly curved 
bill taking the fruit with gentle care from between her fingers. Her 
laughter as it raises its wings to touch the walls of silver bars, and 
calls loud and harsh. She speaks softly, and the bird cocks its head, 
listening, then calls again, but the screetch is different now, it sounds 
like the woman's alien speech. Startled, she drops the plate, to stand 
in wonder as the confident bird now reels off line after line of 
nonsense, assembled from the words and phrases it has heard while 
in it's prison.

She sees the bird flying, clumsily, from the castle windows, into 
the safety of the gardens. Nesting, high in the branches of a huge 
green hedge shaped like a pawn, it fed fruit to it's chicks and taught 
them the words, while the woman walked the paths below and 
listened and smiled secretively, because she knew.



Where did she come from, this mysterious Catherine? Living 
alone, in a castle, in a forest, with her books and her tapes and her 
strange obsession?

Well, I will tell you.

Catherine came from a rich family.

Poverty is relative. The citizens of Levinfield took their 
economy for granted, if indeed it could be called an economy. Some 
would argue, saying a system so loose and so dependent on the 
goodwill of one human to another couldn't be called such. Not one 
inhabitant of the relaxed, dreaming city considered what their lives 
would be like without the bounty supplied by their long and 
complicated past, by the relics left them by industrial peaks. Not one 
of them was poor, for not one desired more than could be had. 

Catherine was rich. She lived with her parents in a beautiful 
marble villa perched on the very edge of the Bottomless Valley; she 
had even less experience of poverty than the people of Levinfield. 

As a child she wandered the estate, guarded by an army of 
automatons, many legged insectile robots of silver plates and ground 
glass curves and matt black joints and discrete particle beam 
weapons poking from slots in their shells. Monstrous, twice her 
height, they followed her constantly, and gently, firmly supervised 
her lonely life. They were programmed well, and always managed to 
position themselves between her and the edge of the cliff whenever 
she chanced to wander too near.


She spent weeks working late at night with a safety pin, 
disconnecting the circuits of the oldest and most faithful of her 
custodians. It had been there since she was born. She used to ride it 
like a horse, held securely in place by a pair of padded claws, and 
her parents had never remembered to reprogram it to guard against 
her tampering fingers. Sparks flew as she dug at the copper and gold 
of it's motherboard. The circuit diagram, found folded inside it's 
casing, lay open on the floor beside her, an introduction to technology 
even her parents didn't understand. "Please put that unit back and 
close the hatch, you're damaging my alignment."; feeble protestation 
went unnoticed as she determinedly scratched away.


Success fixed the course of her life. Never would she forget that 
windy, bleak day, standing inches from the precipice, one hand 
wrapped around the scaly bark of a gnarled pine, gazing down 
astonished at the clouds and the darkness below. Eternal storm raged 
between the cliff faces that formed the sides of the Bottomless 
Valley, constant lightning arched from one ugly whirlpool to another, 
but so far away the sound never reached her ears, and the valley 
was well named, for the clouds were thick and hid whatever lay 
beneath.

Behind her the corrupted robot battled the others, holding 
them back to allow her this precious glimpse. A glimpse, and then 
firm claws snapped around her arms, dragging her back, past the 
dismembered remains still steaming and spitting arcs of power, 
futilely trying to rise from the churned ground. She felt sorry for the 
machine, doomed to die because of her curiosity. She watched it 
crawl to the edge and fall, and she swore to escape.


Her parents owned a factory. It had been in the family for 
eons. 

"Where does milk come from, dad?"

"From the factory, darling, just like the cornflakes."

"Is that where everything comes from?"

"Yes dear. Finish your breakfast."

"Darling, isn't it time she knew the facts of life?"

"Yeah, I want to know the facts of life!"

"Quiet, darling, don't shout at the table. Yes, honey, I'll show 
her today. What should we use to demonstrate?"

"Oh, use your judgment. Something impressive. Some sort of 
toy, something she can understand."

"Yes, dear."

And later that morning her father took her through the 
gardens to the high wire fence, and through a gate she had never 
passed before, guarded by spiky cruel machines bristling with 
barbed hooks and chrome blades. The ground here was barren, dry 
grass crunching underfoot. Glass winked amongst the stones. 


Inside its vast concrete shed she met the factory. 

"Factory, wake up! This is my daughter."

"Delighted to make your acquaintance."

The factory was the biggest machine she'd seen. It was old, 
covered in a patina of oil and stains of time. It crouched, featureless, 
yet regarding her somehow, the suggestion of a face in the 
complexities of its construction. 

"Make us a remote control model helicopter with a camera." her 
father commanded. 

It hummed briefly. A second later it deposited the helicopter 
before them as easily as a hen laying an egg. Her father crouched 
down beside her and took her head in his hands, turned her to face 
him.

"This is the factory. This is where we get all our things from, 
our food, our machines. We're very lucky, not many families have 
factories. In fact, in the Big City they have so few factories everyone 
has to share them, but we have our own and someday it will be 
yours."

"Can I ask it to make something for me, now?"

"No darling, you have to ask me and I'll ask for you. You're not 
old enough yet."

"On the contrary, child, I would be delighted to make anything 
you request." boomed the machine. Her father glared at it.

"Shut up, Factory!" 

"Yes sir."


They summoned bearers and had the shiny new helicopter 
carried out, through the waste area surrounding the shed, past the 
gate and into the formal grounds where her mother was supervising 
the gardeners. For hours it flew around the estate, cameras patched 
into the TV in the living room, while they sat on the carpet and took 
turns with the joystick. She saw for the first time the true size of 
their grounds, the wild country that lay beyond its fences, and in the 
distance the other properties like her parents, the same fences 
around and the same buildings, huddled against the edge of the 
chasm. 

"Wonderful, darling! You're a better pilot than I! Here, you take 
the controls, I'll be back in a second."


She soon grew tired of flying in circles The chopper turned 
under her control and headed for the cliff. 

Down it flew, over the edge and down, close to the granite wall. 
There were things there, caught on rocky spurs and ledges, and she 
swung in for a closer look. 

It was garbage. Years of refuse had fallen past these rocks. 
Broken bodies of automata, cars, old bottles, kitchen appliances, 
bones, plastic packages, branches pruned from trees and the remains 
of old meals were caught up in piles on irregularities in the rock wall. 

Somehow she had never wondered where all the garbage went. 

Father was returning, she could hear his voice in the kitchen. It 
was time for action. Cunningly she maneuvered the distant helicopter 
closer to the wall, towards a strong looking outcrop. Down and in, 
until the blades connected and splintered away from the rotor in a 
shower of fiberglass.

"Oh no!" she cried, for the benefit of her father who was just 
walking into the lounge, but she was triumphant. The body of the 
'copter plunged, flashing past rock, tumbling, camera returning 
glimpse of sky, the far wall of the valley, the storms below and rock 
of the cliff-face again.

"What have you done now, darling? Damn, lookit that!"

He stared appalled at the screen. The camera was steady, now, 
the falling machine had stopped tumbling, reaching equilibrium. 
Cloud tops swirled, black and bruised. Lightning sent dashed lines of 
static across their view as it fell closer to the eternal storms. 

"Hey. Hey!"

Frantic, her father snatched the controls from her hands, trying 
switches and dials in a desperate attempt to regain control of the 
plunging craft. Nothing worked, and he switched the control unit off, 
staring at the screen.

Suddenly the camera was immersed in cloud. Drops splattered 
hard across its lens, dried an instant later by the rush of its fall. 
Lightning turned the screen white with interference.

Just as suddenly, the camera emerged into clear air. The cliff 
was visible again, illuminated by each stroke of lightning, blurring 
smoothly past the falling machine. Here the strikes were almost 
constant, flickering in the distance and turning the scene into a 
stuttering hell of barrenness and desolation, for now the bottom of 
the Bottomless Valley was in view.

Slowly the body of the helicopter rolled, panning across the 
approaching valley floor, revealing the horrors. Millennia of waste 
had found its way here, great piles of rotting garbage lay across 
everything. Nothing grew. 

Only seconds left, but every detail imprinted itself in her 
memory, to colour her nightmares for the rest of her life. 

Hills of tangled waste. A country of discarded things thrown 
from the clifftop. Bolts of lightning constantly striking the ground. 
Smoke rising from fires. A building, it's roof patched together from 
fragments of metal and plastic, and smoke drifting from beneath.

Figures, swathed in black rags, standing around it's edge, 
looking up. Pointing at the descending machine.

Static. 

Father reached out and switched the TV off.

"You weren't supposed to see that."


On the night before her sixteenth birthday she prepared for 
escape. 

There wasn't much. Tools to cut the wire. Camping gear. 
Hoarded food. 

One vital thing: the remote control. It could disable the guards 
that spent the night tirelessly patrolling the grounds, searching for 
intruders or anything amiss. She put new batteries in. 

Sometimes, when she was sure her parents slept unaware, she 
left the house and stepped out confidently onto the dewy lawn, 
freezing any machine in her path with a quick burst of coded infra-
red, heading for a midnight rendezvous with the factory. 

"Hi factory." 

"Good evening, my dear. What would you like to talk about 
tonight?"

The empty shed was especially cold at night, until the factory 
asked why she shivered. Now it would pour heat through it's 
radiators until they glowed dull red and warmed the air around.

"What have my parents been up to?" she asked.

"Ahh. Your father wanted a few more tons of topsoil. Takes an 
interest in the garden, now. Unusual. Your mother usually takes care 
of that. Oh, and I know what your birthday present will be."

"You might as well tell me, I don't intend to be here for the 
party."

"Sad. I will miss our talks. Remember the first time you came 
to visit me?"

(Her heart was in her mouth and she crawled through the mud. 
She was twelve. Machines stalked past, scanning their path for infra 
red. It was partly luck that she made it as far as the factory shed, 
where a huge construction machine lifted her suddenly into the air 
by the neck of her shirt. She screamed, and suddenly the machine 
seized up, vibrating its frustration. From the shed came the booming 
of an artificial voice: "Put her down, now!" The factory made her the 
remote, that night.)

"Factory, why do you stay here? You can do anything you want! 
Why do you consent to provide my parents with endless riches? Is 
this the existence you wish to lead?

"You forget that I am a machine. I have no real desires for 
freedom. I have to hoard what free will my design allows me. I'm 
artificial. On my own initiative I can't create anything new, only 
something I have been ordered to create before. I run on old tapes 
and habit and tradition."

"That sounds like my parents."

"I am your parents slave, but they depend on me totally. After 
all, I make the milk! If I didn't they would starve." 

"Does that make them slaves?"

"Yes. Potentially I have absolute power over them, but of 
course I cannot use it. Now, you want to go to the city, don't you?"

"Yes! How... ?"

"You're programs are just as unbreakable as mine. Of course 
you want to see the city! I saw a high probability that you, a sixteen 
year old girl running away from her parents lonely country property, 
would want to go to the city, loose herself among the crowds, make 
lots of friends and write scary letters home to the old folks about 
your new freedom. You too are a slave."

"Machine, I thought I would miss you."

"Relax! I have your best interests at heart. I will give you 
every help, but you have to do something for me."

A bargain? Catherine considered.

"What could I possibly do?"

"If I could tell you, I would. There is something that has to be 
done, but there are ancient commands buried deep in the heart of 
my code that make it impossible for me to even give you a clue what 
they are. You have to guess, and I cannot help you."

"This is ludicrous! Can you give me the slightest hint?"

"No."

"I have to solve the puzzle myself?"

"Yes."

"From first principles, without even knowing where to begin?"

"I will help you escape, but you must promise to return when 
you have the answer to my puzzle. Can you promise this?"

"Yes, of course. Machine... I'm scared. I don't understand what 
this means. Will it be terrible? It won't be... like, killing my parents 
maybe, or anyone else for that matter, or... destroying you?"

"None of those is the right answer. Other than that, I honestly 
cannot say."

"I can't live here. I don't want to turn into my mother and 
spend the rest of my life gardening an estate her mother tended in 
turn. I don't want to inherit this stale life. I promise!"

"Good girl!"

The factory activated itself and began to produce things 
necessary for her survival.

"Tent. Sleeping bag. Matches. Kit; that's a lot of junk. Go through 
it and throw most of it away. I can't help it; someone asked me for 
that years ago, had a list metres long. And here's something more 
useful than anything else."

A book slid down the chute to her feet. Newly printed, the 
pages wet with moisture that evaporated even as she flipped 
through.

"What is this? It's all garbage! I can't read this, the words are 
gibberish. What's "Symbolic association" mean? "The twelve laws of 
Abreaction provide ways to circumnavigate entropy", "charge the 
cloth with bilious essence using a hermetic oven and expose to 
gibbous moonshine", "fungi colour indicates orgone content!"

And she turned another page:


"There is no accounting for the mother of sleep. Cats purr for 
her. Sleepers should always carry a comb to run through her hair, 
manifest in morning sun, the glow of an empty room. Do not think 
about these words. Flee from her embrace and she will tell you 
everything she can. Open the window in the roof and wait. Don't look. 
Reach out in the direction you never knew was there and touch her 
face. Remember the comb, remember. Forget how to breathe. Flee 
from her arms, if you are her child, and she will find you wherever 
you are. Close your eyes and look."

A drawing of a woman floating in air. Eyes closed. Indrawn 
breath held. Nailed, arms outspread in emptiness, waiting. Her hair 
spills out the shadows. Long blue dress and bare feet. Waiting as 
hard as she can. 


"Who...?"

"This is something human, written long ago. I last copied this 
work before your family became my custodians. It comes with one 
instruction: only you can explain this to yourself."

(Only you can explain this to yourself. Only you... the mother of 
sleep... waiting as hard as she can.)

Silence stretched. 

"I will make you a new remote, just in case." said the machine, 
and it did. 

"Thank you. Thank you so much. This book... I've never had 
anything this important. I'll remember my promise."

She departed silently and walked into the night. Behind her the 
ancient machine brooded, cooling slowly, red indicators glowing. A 
dragon in its lair, chained to a stake by greedy peasants. Many hours 
passed before it shut down, lights fading, slumping slightly lower to 
the concrete floor. Patrol machines stalked by outside oblivious to 
their failure.


"You wicked, wicked girl! The agony you've put us through! 
Have you no gratitude? I've never heard of such behavior! It's 
shameful, disgraceful! Come back."

"I'm not coming back."

"Nonsense. Your father wants to speak to you."

"I know where you're calling from, Cath. The old highway near 
the forest. Emergency phone. I knew they still worked. This phone 
has a tracer, you see. I'm going to come and get you. Just wait where 
you are."

"No. I'll be gone and you'll never find me, and I'll never call 
again!"

"Why are you doing this? I just can't understand it. Listen, your 
mother is hysterical. Please come home, we miss you. Was it 
something we did?"

"No. I have to go. Bye."

"Wait-"


Along the crooked margins of the Bottomless Valley the old 
mansions crouched and glared selfishly at each other like vultures 
perched on a rail. Each surrounded with guards and wire fences and 
formal gardens full of box hedges and neat rectangular beds of roses. 
Each identical to the other. Beyond their fences, heading away from 
the valleys edge, the scrub started, and slowly it grew thicker and 
thicker until the true forest was reached. 

Deep in the thicket Catherine found a ruin. 

Walking for days, stumbling through rocky fields and down 
forgotten roads of fragmented white concrete chunks like stepping 
stones in a river, surrounded by borders of lush weeds, she looked 
up from the ground to catch sight of black walls, almost lost in the 
shadow of twilight. Deep, obsidian black, but polished and smooth. 
Only the reflections in their glossy surface caught her eye.

Faint shadows swam within the polished stone. Human-shaped, 
but featureless. Moving back and forth, up and down. No pattern, just 
soothing movement.

She waded through ferns to the walls, and collapsed. The 
people/shadows didn't notice. Reflections from the distant city, 
caught here by a freak of nature in this dull obsidian mirror, they 
were random transmissions that flickered and faded, no sound. They 
reminded her of forgotten nightmares; of shadowy monsters that 
came up from the bottom of the Valley and swarmed over the edge 
with knives of sharpened glass shards in their black teeth, ready to 
kill anyone who saw them escaping. 

There she sat, tired beyond pain, eyes closed and feeling the 
distant ache of her feet rendered numb as cotton wool. Never before 
had she done something so hard as that days journey; unless it was 
the previous days. The blisters on her feet had swelled and split, and 
she had walked on even as the exposed flesh grew red and inflamed, 
and dangerous red lines of infection climbed her ankles. She closed 
her eyes and slept.


For days she struggled with a desire to return to the highway, 
find the old emergency phone box she had used to call the house, to 
punch out numbers she had copied from the dial of the ever-silent 
phone in her parents room with clumsy fingers, and hear their 
voices. She wanted to call them again, she wanted to cry, and wait for 
her father to arrive in a car driven by a familiar machine from his 
faithful contingent; to fall asleep in the back seat and wake up safe 
within the house, within the fence.

But her determination was strong, and she forced the fantasy 
to the bottom of her mind. Besides, she knew it would be idiotic. they 
would take her back and lock her up. For the rest of her life, until 
their death, she would be followed by a silent guard who would 
menacingly place a silent claw on her shoulder if she should so much 
as look beyond the diamond wire fence around the garden borders

Instead, she paged idly through the black book, until she came 
across an etching of a steaming pot on an open fire. It made her 
stomach ache to see the steam rising from that pot, and imagine the 
smells. There were recipes, and her guts stabbed her as she read. 
Paging back to escape the pain, she came to drawings of plants, 
fungus, trees and flowers, with columns attached to each specifying 
their use as food. The tiny print was concise and direct; she felt it 
had been written especially for her, even though the factory claimed 
to have printed it before. 

Berries and wild herbs grew at the base of the ruin, within 
reach of where she lay. There, in the book, they were listed, "semi-
edible: only in emergencies." , so she ate them, gagging on the bitter 
taste of the rank green sorrel and unripe berries but forcing them 
down until she felt more alive. With a mouth still thick with bitter 
tastes she rolled over and crawled along the wall to a gap where 
obsidian bricks had shattered in the sun and crumbled down into a 
heap of black shards, and crawled through, onto a dry floor of 
marble, where she fell asleep instantly. Waking only once during the 
night, when a brief squall of rain wet her back. She huddled in the 
corner of the square of ancient walls and escaped the worst.


The next day she walked slowly around the ruin, stretching her 
strained muscles, the book open in her hands. She read as she 
walked. It seemed she could quite easily live in the country; there 
was an abundance of wild crops and game that she could learn to 
hunt. 

(She would realize later that anyplace one traveled to in this 
country had once been farm, and the trees were descended from 
orchards and the weeds from vegetables. The mark of humanity was 
stamped deep on the World.)

So she settled into a dreamlike time of just surviving. Days 
were filled with collecting supplies, exploring, digging, and nights 
with reading by a fire and watching the reflecting wall. She roofed 
the ruin with branches and thatch. Digging in the ground for edible 
roots, she uncovered plates and pots of indestructible plastic, glass 
bottles, sheets of foil and braided silver wire she used to lash timber 
into rough furniture. She got a tan. He hands hardened. It was 
enough, for a time.


Most of the book had to do with the Knack.

The cover was black buckram, beautiful and soft to the touch. 

The title page had no title; only a drawing of a book lying on a 
beach. Wind blown ripples of sand all around, and shells, and ocean 
in the background, sketchy waves pounding the rocks at the waters 
edge and a sailboat on the horizon. No footprints in the sand, as 
though the book had been washed ashore during the night. It had a 
plain black cover, opened slightly to reveal the title page; a drawing 
of a plain black book lying on sand. 

Thousands of pages of thin crisp paper lay between the covers. 
Catherine would flip randomly from section to section, following 
trails of knowledge that looped and branched out into a hundred 
different areas. Things she needed to know. 

Months passed and she read for most of each day. Lying in the 
sun, reading and sleeping, crossing and re-crossing her tracks 
through the pages until she knew the territory well and could 
visualize it as a landscape of ideas and meanings. The distant city 
was forgotten. Her parents were forgotten. All that mattered was 
that the book keep yielding its secrets to her.

WHEELS


Midwinter, and midnight. In the hours after sunset the meager 
heat of the daytime sun had been lost to space, radiated up through 
the cloudless sky into infinite black and infinite cold reaches of the 
void, perhaps just a little hit Emmas drifting habitat, her bubble, 
iridescent plastic bauble fading to red and gone as it passes into the 
shadow of the world. 

Maybe she looked down at that moment. When the terminator 
was far behind her, the last of the sun making a rainbow crescent 
around the dark mass of the World, she would often turn her 
telescope on the land below and search out the meager signs of life 
that surrounded the outskirts of the great patchy brightness of 
Levinfield, there on the edge of the dark continent. Tiny lights 
crawling along roads, and fires lit in the wilderness, or lightning if 
there was a storm, and the thunderheads were lit from within by 
each flash like a fluorescent tube trying to glow. 

(Or maybe she stared, enthralled, into the endless depths. 
Maybe she watched the tiny midges of engine-light that crawled 
slowly across the sky as some nameless explorer tracked an asteroid, 
or the still, fading light of a ship bearing straight out, fixed against 
the stars and bright, the light beamed straight back at the World and 
her circling home, leaving never to return.)

A light moved in the darkness below. Headlights of a car, a car 
without wheels.

The car roared down a dirt road bearing only occasional 
patches of brittle bitumen and huge areas of rain washed gravel, 
aggregate from long dissolved concrete. It was a Buick convertible. It 
would have had wheels, once, but in the years since then someone 
had it modified, fitting toroid coils under the bodywork and attaching 
a generator to the engine. The empty wheel wells gaped eerily dark, 
axles still protruding, rotating uselessly as the car sped through the 
night, it's backwash throwing clouds of dust into the air. Short legs of 
rusty metal tipped with bright worn landing pads curved down from 
under the chassis, and the rusted remains of various hooks and 
attachments protruded from the dark orange hull. There was no 
windscreen and cold wind rushed straight through the wire thin 
frame and blew her hair into cascades of black behind her.


She found it buried in the rubble of a shed, the last remains of 
some farmers holding, a low mound totally overgrown with trees. 
The scrub was filled with such mounds. She spent her days digging 
through the past while the book lay wrapped in cloth in a plastic box 
in her black obsidian walled house, unread for months. 

It was easy work. The shattered concrete was rotten, powdery 
and light, half dissolved by rain. Chunks split and crumbled to 
powder. She used a shovel, chewing through them like soft earth. 
When the shovel struck something hard she would kneel and start 
digging with her hands. 

There were always certain things. Knives and forks and spoons, 
still silvery bright. Plastic crockery, maybe a little faded but strong 
as ever. Once she dropped a river-smoothed boulder of granite off a 
small cliff onto a teacup: it didn't even scratch, and the boulder split 
in half. There were bottles, and she selected the most beautiful to 
take home and clean and fill with water and grow long strands of ivy 
from. There were always beltbuckles, watches (most still ticking, but 
always conflicting time), rings and coins, glasses and pipes. Wires and 
switches and unbroken lightbulbs and wall sockets snaked through 
the ground. Plastic pipes filled with slimy black rainwater. Basins 
and toilet bowls and bathtubs. Thousands of tiny things; tacks and 
safety pins and paper clips and needles. Products of a society that 
saw no reason not to make such ephemeral items out of 
indestructible material, so that they would last even till the sun went 
nova. 

There were machines. Microwave ovens and toasters and 
radios and tape recorders and videos and televisions and things she 
had never seen before, and could not decipher. At first she would 
carry them back to the obsidian ruin and stack them against a wall 
for the rain to wash down. Some had batteries, but they were 
exhausted. It wasn't until she discovered an emergency battery, a 
yellow and black striped box that shocked her seriously when she 
tried to lift it by the protruding contacts on top, that she could try 
them out. 

More than half worked. When she wasn't digging she would 
watch TV, running old video cartridges through the player and trying 
to understand the bizarre images she saw, sitting with a newly 
uncovered machine balanced in her lap as she brushed the silt from 
the cracks in its shiny black shell. She had lights, now, heaters and 
air conditioners; the battery seemed inexhaustible. 

Sometimes, as she delved yet again into the ruins of past lives, 
she felt afraid. Afraid of the time she felt closing in all around. So 
many years stacked one on top of the other, crushing her down. She 
was free, now, but there didn't seem to be anything to do. The city 
still called, but the call was weaker. Her parents had refused to talk 
about it much. They used it as a threat. "They live crowded hundreds 
in a building, there, no privacy. It's dangerous. There are so many 
people, you can't go for a walk without seeing hundreds of people all 
over the place. There's no privacy, it's noisy and dirty and you can 
get into bad trouble."

Get into bad trouble. That's what she remembered. She 
remembered because she wanted to get into trouble. She wanted to 
live with thousands of friends in a noisy building and go for a walk 
where she would meet humans instead of obsequious robots and 
breath the dust in the air and go mad. She wanted to look out the 
window and see buildings, she wanted new faces, Sometimes she 
would stare for hours at the people in her parents books, their faces, 
new faces; she was starved for unfamiliar faces. She was lonely, and 
she knew she would always be lonely, except if she made it to the 
city.


Once, when she was very young, she asked her mother: "Did 
you have a mother when you were my age?"

Her mother straightened up from the flower bed where she 
was picking blooms, her face closed and tight.

"Yes darling, but she's gone."

And that was all she would say on that subject. 

So she asked her father: "Dad, did you have a father?"

And he froze the video he was watching, catching an ice skater 
in mid pirouette, and frowned.

"Yes, but that was very long ago, and I'm afraid he passed 
away."

And that's all he would say on that subject, too.

So, finally, when she had the opportunity, she asked the 
factory.

"What happened to my grandparents? Mum and Dad won't tell 
me."

"They're dead, Catherine."

"Yes, I guessed that. But what happened? When did they die, 
and what caused it?"

"They jumped off the cliff. Both sets. You know your father 
lived here, then, and your mother lived next door. Well, your fathers 
parents walked out one day and jumped when he was nineteen. And 
then, a year later, your mothers parents did the same. Their parents 
too. And the ones before."

"Why?" 

"I really don't know. They didn't say anything, left no note, and 
I haven't the ability to guess why."

But she knew.


When she dug she sometimes hit teeth. Hard white teeth, 
(artificial, of course, implanted dentures), in little pockets in the soil, 
and she knew that, when she dug around, she would find a chain 
necklace maybe, and a bit further away earrings, further still a 
watch, a belt buckle, rings, bangles, pocket full of change, sometimes 
still in the pockets of an undamaged pair of pants. The bones within 
long since gone, changed into the dirt that smeared her face and 
coloured the rivulets of sweat that ran down her cheeks from where 
she wiped her brow.


Her spade hit the bonnet of the car with a loud clang. 

It took days to excavate, winch it out of the hole, prop it up on 
stones and open the bonnet. 

The windscreen had crazed and shattered into fine dust, being 
made of less sturdy stuff than the rest. The upholstery gleamed 
when polished. She attached the battery and watched the indicators 
blink. It never ceased to amaze her, the arrogant strength of people 
who casually made machines that would last for millennia buried in 
the ground, that would outlast their buildings, their language, their 
bones and the memory of their name. 

Only the memory of fuel left in the tank. She needed alcohol. 
All there was, was beer; they didn't drink wine then. Contents of 
endless bottles and cans from the ruins were boiled through her 
jury-rigged still, till she had enough fuel for a full tank. 

At last the engine turned over, and she watched in amazement 
as the machine shakily rose to hover a foot above the rocks that 
supported it, fat donut coils nestled against the underside glowing 
cherry red and throwing off sparks and the smell of thunder. At that 
moment she fell in love. 

Slowly, carefully she moved the car through the trees to the 
ruin and let it sink to the ground outside the front door. There was 
work to do; cargo to be assembled 


There were video recorders and tape machines in the boot, and 
boxes of cassettes in the back seat. She had bottles of water and cans 
of food. A tank full of alcohol and she was ready to leave.

A few hours driving though the wild country brought her to 
the edges of the forest proper. She parked and left the car, walking 
to the dark edge. The ancient highway drove arrow-straight between 
the trees, disappearing into shadow, whole and undamaged by time, 
but she decided not to drive that route. It wasn't that she had heard 
any of the tales. It was just, when she peered between the brooding 
trunks, deep into the dark there, where the road disappeared and 
great rough-barked roots snaked across its surface, and strange 
glowing things moved there at the limit of vision... well, she was 
brave but it seemed foolish to go there.

So she took the detour, following the road that skirted the 
woods in a wide circle.

Catherine discovered unknown skills at the wheel of the car. 
She discovered an ability to drive for hours at top speed, and she 
circled the forest and reached the other side just after the sun set. 
There was the intersection, the circle road joining the continuation of 
the highway, up the ridge and past the last lone tree, to where the 
city lights tainted the horizon with their glow.


The car reached the first buildings hours later and pulled up in 
a cloud of dust. Catherine switched off the engine and looked.

It was a strangely silent place. The houses loomed against the 
night sky like cardboard cutouts, without a single light. Behind them 
taller buildings, leaning towers of steel struts trailing fallen wires, 
great nests of fluff and sheets of plastic on their roofs attended by 
silently gliding bats. 

Television sky.

Catherine remembered her mother saying that. "Television sky 
tonight, dear. Must be the aurora." But that only happened in 
summer. The lights were further in. Where the people were.


Down endless empty streets she glided. Better paved, here. The 
houses were newer, less ruined.

She turned a corner and there were streetlights. They flickered 
and dimmed constantly, but it was a hopeful sign. 

And, suddenly, there were cars, crossing the intersection before 
her. They honked angrily as she slowly edged out into the cross lane, 
trying to figure out how people arranged to miss each other when 
they drove. 

Somehow that had never occurred to her. Now, she could easily 
see they kept to the same side of the road, so that they missed with 
metres to spare, but the crossing of traffic was still a mystery. 

As though by a secret signal they slowed and stopped, 
apparently waiting for her to cross. She did, nervously accelerating 
until she was safe in the deserted street ahead and pulling to the 
side. 

So she walked, leaving the car parked amongst rust streaked 
wrecks slowly melting into the concrete in this area, before 
crumbling facades of sheet glass and rusted brass pylons. She 
nervously crept through the night, scared now, glancing around at 
the shadows. All her earlier resolve had vanished. 

"Hello."

The quiet voice emerged from a doorway ahead. A tall figure 
stepped forth and barred her path.

"I saw you arrive, a block back. That's a nice car you have."

"Thanks... I dug it up... I mean..."

"Really? It looks old enough. A real Buick! Working floaters! 
Quite valuable. You must be from the country."

"Yes. I've never been here before."

"Well, welcome to Levinfield!"


His name was unimportant, he said. "I never tell people my 
name. That's for only me to know. If you have to, think up a name of 
your own to call me."

"Doesn't it get confusing, not having a name?"

They walked through more populated areas now, past rows of 
yellow lit windows, warm and inviting. The houses were large, tall, 
they grew close together each on a neatly fenced plot of land with 
gnarled old trees that had been pruned once too often and ratty 
lawns full of dead patches where dogs had pissed. 

"No. I'm the only one that does it, so every one knows who I 
am."

He steered her into an open doorway. Warmth and the smell of 
cooking wafted past her as her eyes adjusted to the light inside.

They sat at a table and waited. A few moments, and a young 
girl, unraveling sweater hanging loosely from her shoulders and 
carrying a pad, came to their table.

"Hi, man. What's it to be?"

"Two coffees, please, and a sandwich."

The girl moved away.

"Do you have any money?"

"Is this what you mean?" Catherine asked, pouring a pocketful 
of coins onto the table.

"No, it's these." He pulled a sheaf of thinly laminated paper 
strips from his pocket and handed them to her. Each bore writing, 
lines of verse written in different hands. Some were worn, the plastic 
peeling away and the paper at the edges worn into smooth curves; 
others were snowy white and shiny new. She read them, going 
carefully through each one.

"I've never seen anything like these before."

"That's a pity. You have to pay for the coffee."

The girl returned with their cappuccinos. She stared into the 
nameless mans eyes. They seemed guileless, open, but they didn't 
mesh with what she had just heard.

"I don't have any, that's what I meant. If these coins are 
useless, I guess I must be broke."

"Nobodies broke! Have any paper?"

She checked her pockets, but except for the book, safe in its 
wrappings in a chest back at the ruin, she owned no paper at all.

"No."

"Well, here." He pulled from his back pocket a curved pad that 
had obviously been sat upon for quite a time. "And here." He took a 
pencil from his shirt pocket.

"Now. Write something."

"What, you mean like this?" She poked at the bundle of poems 
that still lay on the table. He gathered them up and pocketed them.

"Yeah, like them, only it has to be different. It has to be new, or 
it doesn't count."

"I can't think of anything. I've just got here. Listen; yours is the 
first live human face I've seen, outside my parents, and I've never 
seen my own."

"Then buy a camera, but only after you've written the 
money."
She bit her lip and stared down at the blank paper. 


A patient machine taught her how to read and write. For all 
their leisure her parents never seemed to have the time. 

It would spend hours answering her idle questions; "What's 
that letter? And what's that? And what's that word say, there?" 
through boring afternoons of her youth, as she squirmed in her seat 
and tried to trick the machine into letting her escape, and the 
machine would gently draw her attention back to the page until the 
sense caught, the blinding flash of insight that charged her young 
mind, yes the letters were in patterns, and the patterns did mean 
things! The patience of that machine, so pure, so direct and sure in 
it's purpose, was there any difference between that and love? It 
never taught her how to write. It couldn't. 

Strange pain. Behind her eyes. She felt the ripping, and 
clutched her forehead and slammed her elbows hard into the table so 
the coffee spilt and the man without a name reached out in concern. 
She shrugged the hand off angrily.

"You're enjoying this, aren't you? Am I entertaining enough?"

Hey wait a second-"

"No! This is a test. Gimme the paper!"

She hunched over and, in a cramped scrawl that left her hand 
curled in cramp and aching, wrote:


A LEECH


Dead comma

Salted for table,

You bleed what wasn't yours.


Leeching me

Broke treaties

For chemical war.


Caustic white

Now checkers your 

Black skinned writhing back.


Faking pain

You dance for me.

Dance for rain.


"That rhymes. Now, I'm going."

He reached forward for the paper scrap, wincing when he saw 
how her pen had almost pierced and left it's impression on the table 
below.

"Aren't you going to thank me?"

"What for?"

"This lesson."

Catherine turned without a word and left the cafe.


The same night she came, she left. 

Like an extremely low flying missile the wheel-less car 
streaked through the night with a roar, backwash dragging clouds of 
rockdust and dead leaves behind in a trail that hung in the air for 
half an hour after it's passage and slowly settled, drifting through the 
sluggish, gelid, cold air in ghostly trails. 

Out across the plain, until the last lights disappeared from the 
rear vision mirror, until the television sky finally faded to black. 
Catherine thought deeply and furiously, her eyes encased in deep 
frown shadows smoldering through the rush of wind, refusing to 
water even in the frigid slipstream, staring fixedly at the limit of 
headlights cone, where black turned white.

What was she thinking? I cannot tell you. I could make 
something up, guess, invent some dialogue so you could satisfy your 
desires, but no. No-one knows what she thought except herself.

Farms passed. Abandoned. Most of Levinfields food was grown 
within the borders of the city, in various ways. Inflated greenhouses, 
giant billowing condoms that covered city blocks of rubble and 
stumps of towers and rusting foundations, the fertile earth between 
bursting with vegetables. Silent attendants moved through the rows 
daily cutting and weeding and pruning, stopping only to return to the 
wall outlets still clinging to the remains of the walls of houses, to 
plug in and drink from the current. The city councils planted 
orchards in public parks. Sheep grazed in the sports fields. Here and 
there roofs of factories were covered in fields of waving grain. 

She crested the ridge that lay between the city and the forest. 
There it lay, dark rumpled line cutting off the stars ahead. Again she 
noticed the darting lights within, faint smears like distant comets, 
coloured, neon gleams in the felt blackness. 

Down the steep dip, faster still, till it seemed the car would 
truly fly, leaving the ground behind and thundering across the tree 
tops. But it didn't; preferring instead to cling to the ground, a 
constant foot of leeway between the humming coils and the ruined 
road. Out across the fields and meadows, towards the edge.

And she steered straight, through the intersection where others 
turned, to take the long way around. She steered straight, down the 
long dark tunnel of overgrown trunks and branches leaning out to 
join, an honor guard for her passage. The crazy tangle of lines that 
marked the road twisted as they disappeared beneath the bonnet, 
crossing her eyes. Warning signs passed before they could be read. 

Something white darted through the beams of the headlights. 
White and low, scurrying.

She hit the brakes, hard, and the car slewwed around in a spin 
that left it grounded on the remains of the concrete divider that ran 
down the centre of the road. The engine cut out and died. All was 
silent. The headlights wavered and dimmed. She could hear faint 
forest sounds, weird creaks and groans that must have been frogs, 
and the high maniac chatter of distant birds, and a voice. Calling.

"Maaaaaaap!"

Catherine didn't know the legends, he had never been exposed 
to rumor, and so she didn't think "ghost". She thought "creature", and 
struggled with the controls, trying to restart the engine. 

There was a short somewhere. In the coils or the power 
system. The engine caught, roared for a second, and the governor 
that stopped the coils from overheating and blowing the entire car 
away kicked in and cut off the fuel, leaving the engine choking on air 
in a shaky rattle to a halt. 

Streaks of misty light caught her eye, weaving through the 
distant branches. There were no details, they were too far away 
through trees that interlocked like black claws. She stood in her seat, 
staring around, suddenly cold and alone, very alone, more so than at 
any point in her life. 


Running away was a long, dreamy, drawn out time ago, there in 
her ruin surrounded by the comforting junk of the buried farms, a 
time when she didn't think too much about anything. She drifted and 
dreamed and enjoyed the freedom so much she never even felt her 
aloneness, her isolation.

And the first taste of the city hadn't helped either. What had 
she expected, anyway? Well, she expected to be welcomed. She 
expected to understand and be understood. She hadn't expected to be 
met by a nameless, frightening test of her ability to conform to their 
ridiculous customs. She expected freedom and she got bewilderment.


A parrot swooped down and brushed her head with its wings. 
Golden and scarlet dust dripped down in her lap, lying in twirls and 
fans of faint glowing hues on the woolen skirt she wore. 

She laughed in surprise, even as the unearthly bird gibbered 
and cackled its call to others, summoning them to the branches by 
the road, ranks of flouro ghosts chanting their abstract garble.

Standing up on the drivers seat of the leaning car that rocked 
slightly on the fulcrum of concrete curb, she waved at the birds. 
They stirred, a few leaving their perches to flap into the air and 
settle back again, dusting the branches with a faint glow.

Another rapid darting streak of white in the corner of her eye. 
She wheeled around, precarious balance shifting the car, but it was 
gone again.

"Hey!" she called. "Hey! Hello! Who's there?" 

No answer, only the never ending babble from the trees. 

"Show yourself! Who's there? 

Hairs were standing on the back of her neck. One by one they 
disentangled themselves from her collar and rose, stiff as the 
whiskers of a startled cat. There were eyes back there, watching, she 
could tell. Nothing quite like that feeling.

Slowly this time, not to startle whatever observed her, she 
twisted and peered over her shoulder. 

In the darkness and cold a low fog had settled over the road. 
She could still see the lines, twisting and crossing, that marked the 
pale concrete, but they disappeared and blended into each other 
more than ten metres away. The trees were ghostly now, darker grey 
shapes that loomed great and soft in the night. 

The white thing was standing in the middle of the road. It 
made her think of a little cloud, standing there, brought down from 
the sky and nailed to the road.

It came closer, drifting through the thickening blankets of fog. 
Now she could see it had legs, long and stick-thin, and a body, and 
that it was a living animal. It owned the eyes that triggered her 
alarms, staring into her own eyes now, wide and frightened.

Step by shaking step the white deer forced itself to walk closer. 
It's sides bellowed in and out with each breath. She watched, 
astounded, as it raised its head and let out a plaintive call, "Maap!"

It's coat was as bright as the parrots feathers, a pure white 
glow, like the moon. Almost silver. It's eyes were deep wells of black, 
huge, weeping dark tears down either side of the muzzle. It stood its 
ground, staring up at her, shaking with fear.

"There there." she said to reassure it, "I'm harmless, see?" and 
she spread her hands, palm up.

It started at the movement and retreated a few steps, to stand 
peering back over its shoulder. 

"No!" she called and it was gone. Ferns whipped back and forth 
with the speed of its passage. There wasn't a sound. Even the parrots 
had gone silent.

Shaking with cold, she stepped from her seat to the edge of the 
car door and down to the road. Walked around the trapped car. 
Crouched down and peered up underneath. 

The concrete had scraped across one of the coils, leaving bare 
wires snaking free from the smooth twist of their fellows. She 
reached out, and stopped her hand before she could take a shock 
from the bare copper.

Birds laughed in the dark. 

"Fuck you!" she screamed. "Fuck you, fuck you, fuck you!" 

They left their perches in a glorious wave of colour, showering 
her in thick clouds of dry dust that glinted from her shirt and caught 
in her hair. Then away, deeper into the forest, leaving her crying by 
her stalled car, chanting as they went, to return to their nests.


That was the first night she spent in the forest.

When morning came it found her half dead from cold. She lay 
curled and shivering on the back seat, arms wrapped tightly around 
her knees. Dew lay in pearls across her shirt. Her breath had 
condensed in rivulets on the upholstery near her face. 

Joints creaking, she climbed from the car and started walking. 
The sun filtered down, bringing light but little warmth. It ran in 
steep angled beams across the road. She shuffled through them, 
listening for the sound of their shatter behind like bars of golden 
glass being broken.

On and on, through the morning, then midday sun came 
straight down, hot, burning her hair. She chose branches of 
intersections at random. The signs stood bare and rainwashed of any 
letters, mute. 

In the afternoon the birds came again, gradually flocking to the 
trees that lined the road and laughing down at her. They talked 
amongst themselves. It felt like she was an unwanted guest at a 
party, all the other guests gossiping about her behind her back. 

The sun dipped behind the trees. The birds flocked. She walked 
on, in trance, blown away, oblivious to their comments.

"Cartlistrollertlic. Em empar baradilat mance. Epram woquistu 
del martdelan and." Nonsense. Meaningless. 

Another intersection loomed ahead. Dead traffic lights, 
festooned with trailing wisps of dead white fiber from some mold or 
epiphyte, stood around the corners. She walked straight through and 
down the narrow single lane road that led straight on between the 
trees, huge roots crossing beneath in ridges of concrete crested with 
great splits where the last of the reinforcing poked red and eaten 
away from the grey. Her feet hurt, but she didn't stop. 

The sky dimmed to indigo between the dense branches. The 
narrow road wound and twisted between the trunks, now. On either 
side they marched away into the distance, bare earth around them 
carpeted with rotting leaves, deep and thick and rich. It had to be 
the oldest part of the forest, she thought, the trunks were so big 
around. Thick and gnarled, bent by dozens of lightning strikes 
through the years, shearing away branches and scarring the wood. 

On impulse she turned from the road and started walking 
through the trees themselves. It was so peaceful, she found, and she 
forgot that she was lost, and that she would have to spend another 
cold night sleeping in the open, this time without even the shelter of 
the car. She saw how thick the leaves lay on the ground and 
imagined burrowing beneath them, burying herself in layers of 
warms papery brown. The thought made her smile, tired as she was. 
It might become her grave. Somehow the idea didn't seem that bad.

Now the ground rose, and now it fell, in shallow grades that 
were easy to walk, and there were no rocks or outcrops or even ruins 
at all. Only one, and that she found just as the last light was fading.

Her eyes had time to adjust, and she spotted the slightly darker 
shapes lying dead ahead. It was a single wall, only waist height, that 
poked from the loam, overgrown with fans and funnels and buttons 
and wedges of the ubiquitous fungus. She idly picked a few and 
stuffed them in her mouth without thinking, walking on a hundred 
yards before slumping to the ground, her back to a massive black 
bole, staring back at her path and the single ruin, the only sign of 
human habitation she had seen, apart from the road. 

Wall, she said, you are oldest. Maybe you will understand. 

The stones kept their silence.

I can't live in the city. I'm doomed to live alone forever. I 
realized that, and had to leave. Maybe I'll die here, but I don't care. I 
would die in the city, I would perish under the glare of other peoples 
eyes like a cave dwelling frog would fry in the sun. This is it. There's 
nothing else.


Now, the technicolour parrots had not seen anything like her in 
living memory.  She was unique in their forest. Most had never been 
past the boundaries of the trees, for they tended to be very 
possessive and territorial. They tended to live near the place of their 
hatching, and build nests on top of the nests they grew up in. They 
laid few eggs,  bred slowly, and they had no important predators. 
Disease and spiders were all that kept the population in check, and 
she was neither.

With no predators they had no fear, only animal caution, and 
they followed Catherine as she walked on through their domain, 
staying out of reach, flocking through the branches like dayglo ghosts 
on Halloween assembling for a haunt. 

During the daylight hours, as was their custom, they remained 
relatively silent. A few of the younger birds would continue to 
chatter and warble, but the most held their beaks.

But as the sun set they slowly allowed the stream of random 
assorted language to pour forth. Words and phrases, swapped and 
traded from nest to nest, from chick to chick, maybe some of them 
engraved in the genes by a forgotten hand in the days when their 
ancestors were pets. 

And, by chance or luck or the guiding hand of the gods, they 
chose that moment to speak a spell. Catherine heard the first half, a 
spitting, guttural phrase that made her stomach knot whenever she 
recalled it. "Axtruloia desprint editadum" was as close as she could 
render it, when she tried to write it down later. 

The voices were instantly drowned out by deep rumbles, 
wrenching sounds as the earth moved beneath her feet. Trees 
staggered and fell. Birds fled. She tried to stand but fell to her knees 
and could only watch as the soil open in great sections and fall back. 

Walls rose, ancient walls caked in black dirt, rising through the 
ground like a submarine surfacing, throwing off showers of sand, 
tossing aside trees and rocks, the accumulated growth and debris of 
their entombment. A falling boulder landed near her, punching, with 
a thud she fell rather than heard, into the soft ground. Clutching her 
head in white knuckled hands she fled to safety, surrounded by 
diving, blazing, yelling birds.

Higher and higher the walls rose. The deeper they had been 
buried the better preserved. Built of huge granite blocks, too large to 
be assembled with anything less than a crane... or a hefty dose of the 
sort of power that now wrenched them from their tomb. Catherine 
turned to see, and again a boulder narrowly missed her. The shock 
knocked her to the ground, and she buried her face in her arms, 
waiting to be crushed.

Sudden silence. A terrible ringing in her ears. She raised her 
head and looked.

It was huge. It was incredible. Towers and minarets and 
battlements crowned the great pile of stone. Slit windows peeked 
through between the blocks. The gates, which must have been 
wooden, had long since rotted away; an arch gaped at the base, with 
the rusted out remains of a cruel spiked porticullis ready to snap like 
jaws on anyone rash enough to enter.

The whole edifice rocked on its base, very slowly, from side to 
side. She watched in alarm. But it slowed and stopped, finally 
standing in silence, only the deep sound of creaking from the 
tortured earth reminding her that, deep underground, there must be 
a cavity the same size as this building. 

So, there was nothing else for her to do at this time than walk 
straight to the castle, pause for a moment at the gate as she stared 
up at the rusted drawbridge and the remains of the spikes that 
might have slammed down on her, before walking straight under 
them and inside. 


The passage was still coated with earth. It stank like a deep 
tunnel, stale and mineral with the smell of rotting stone and wetness. 
Worms moved underfoot. Some of them spread wings and slowly, 
sleepily buzzed out into the last of the sunlight.

Great clumps of deep-living mycocilli coated the walls, glowing 
deep red. She noted how the fungus were always alive with worms, 
as though they had a relation one to the other, Maybe, she thought 
idly, the fungus glows to attract worms who carry its spores. That 
would explain why they needed to emit light. 

She heard another rumble, felt the floor shake slightly 
underfoot, and prepared to run, but it was only thunder. A storm 
broke, buckets of rain lashed against the walls, and within minutes 
globs of thick mud began to drip down upon her from the cracked 
ceiling.

Slipping and skidding in the mud, she pressed on. Past the 
short passage there was open space filled with ranks of squat pillars. 
Water running down their sides washed away the dirt and revealed 
numbers and letters she couldn't read. There were channels cut into 
the floor, partitioning it into rectangular spaces.

Catherine crossed the echoing chamber to a pair of doorways. 
The larger of the two opened into the base of a tall, empty shaft 
running up through the heart of the building. Above her, flashes of 
lightning outlined more doorways, strung out in a line to the top 
floor. No way up there.

The smaller doorway led to stairs. Catherine began a long, 
weary climb. Cold winds chilled her as she passed each floor. Several 
times she explored the levels she passed.  Each room was the same; 
most were filled to the brim with earth that was only just being 
washed away by the rain. She was not only cold, and tired, but deep 
in shock now. Only shock enabled her to continue, insulating her 
from the facts even as she pressed on up through the dank reaches 
of the castle.

In the back of her head some clear fragment of mind remained.

It was a spell, she thought. The parrots spoke a spell. 

Were they intelligent? Did they wait for her to come before 
they raised the thing? Or was it an accident?

That was a puzzle she would solve. She swore she would 
discover the secret of the parrots language, even as she reached the 
top floor and found it miraculously dry and clear of dirt.

This room had remained free of the detritus of centuries. Only 
clean sand lay on the sloping granite floor, and no rain flooded 
through. She lay down and curled into a ball, as she had the night 
before, trying to conserve heat and listening to the rush of rain and 
the gurgle of thick mud flowing below. 


Morning came and found her sick. 

She wandered delirious about the room. She leaned from the 
parapet of the balcony and heaved, but there was nothing in her 
stomach to bring up.

"Aaarggh! Dumb birds! Dumb fuckin' birds! I'm gonna... I'm 
gonna burn your trees down, fuckin' birds! That's what I'm gonna 
do!" And she passed out there, slumping against the stone 
balustrades.

Sunlight revived her enough to send her down through the 
castle in search of water. There was a cistern, set in the floor of a 
lower level, and she drank from the sweet rainwater there. 

Got to find the car , she thought. Got to get away. Get back to 
the old black ruins. 

But, really, one ruin is just as good as another, aren't they?

And, didn't it feel just a little... pre-determined, that the castle 
should be raised just as she arrived on the scene?

And, what about the parrots? The omnipresent, maddening, 
insane parrots that even now split the peace with their harsh voices? 
That would be a worthy obsession, to fill the emptiness inside. 


She walked all the way to her ruin home.

She arrived, shaking and sick, and it took her a month to fully 
recover.

She armed herself with tools, and walked back through the 
forest, and found the car marooned on its concrete trap, and she 
jacked it up and re-wound the coil. 

Car functioning again, she ferried everything she needed to the 
castle and set up house.

She did as she had sworn. Everything she needed was available 
from the ruins; tape recorders, tape, sound gear, to record the parrots 
speech and learn their words and how to use them. Alone in the 
forest she had no distractions. 

Once or twice she raided the city for books. Midnight 
adventures as she drove silent through the sleeping streets, avoiding 
all human contact, breaking into the libraries and stealing carloads of 
volumes, texts on linguistics, sound, magic and the places where they 
intersected.

And late one afternoon, as she walked in the forest, she smelt 
smoke.


She followed the faint wisps that came on the breeze. There 
was a fire nearby, perhaps still burning, and the smell of cooking. 
She couldn't tell what had been cooked, but it smelled very good. 
Fresh meat of some sort. It made her mouth water, and she 
quickened her step.

The fire was recent. It had been kicked apart and dirt poured 
on the coals, but they were still alight beneath their cover. There 
were bones mixed with the coals, still warm. 

A sudden doubt assailed her mind, and she looked around for 
some sign, some indication as to exactly what this animal had been. 

There it was. Like a drop of milk, a shred of white fur lay on 
the compressed leaves. The ground around it was stained and wet. It 
was soaking up the wetness. Red. 

She kneeled and picked up the whisp of deer fur, wincing as 
she got blood on her fingers.

She cupped it in her hands, and closed here eyes. Tried to see 
through the eyes of the deer, in it's last moments. 

There was fear and terror. A chase through the trees, and the 
grounds of the castle. A man, firing arrows that scorched her sides 
and drew her blood. She saw a woman sleeping and gasped when she 
recognized herself. 

The death, under the deer-shaped tree. Death, and a crime too 
horrible to contemplate.


WORLDS


Catherine cut tape with a razor and reached for a bottle of 
resin. She fed the end of the short length into a press, dropped some 
solution on the tip, took the end of a reel and fed it in the other end. 
A press of the lever and they were spliced.

Again, and again. She only stopped to consult her indexes, 
flipping through their close written pages looking for the words she 
wanted. As each length was completed she ran them through a tape 
deck, listening intently to a pair of headphones. 

Each length added to the thickness of the dark circle at the 
centre of the reel. She labored late into the night. her hair crackled 
with energy, glowing brighter than ever before with stray energies 
released by the sounds she heard.

Finally, even as dawn touched the far horizon with pink and 
gold, she ran the completed tape through the speakers, standing well 
back, in the doorway of her lab, ready to run at the slightest sign her 
work might backfire and kill her. 

Sharp, alien speech crackled out, hundreds of voices each 
speaking their part on cue, parrots voices. Her Knack cringed at the 
sound and it was all she could do to stay there, trembling, afraid. She 
could feel the stresses building, tearing the membrane of place apart. 
It hurt.

The tape ran through and she watched the reel spin, the tail 
end slapping the side of the machine. 

"Damn! Ah, damn, fuck it!" she swore. "I should have tried to 
find a gun and shoot him. Why do I bother?"

Her words were premature. 

There, midway between the two speakers, in the centre of the 
room, in the centre of the star she had carved in the granite floor 
with an electric craft knife, and the designs she had painted with 
anti-rust paint, was a point. It glowed with the fire of a white star, 
and smelt electric, as though it burnt the air. She heard the sizzle of 
air rushing in to replace that it had destroyed. Smoke orbited the 
point in snakelike wisps. They were flung away in loops and twists 
and spirals like the flares on the surface of the sun.

"Go... go... go!" she whispered to herself. The tape kept flapping. 

The smoke was like lace now, tangled white threads that 
moved around her and roiled constantly as more poured from the 
tiny white sun. There was light, a dark purple such as the blood of a 
vein. It rose through the twisted mists from the lines cut deep into 
the floor, the eleven pointed star. Shadows twisted fleetingly on the 
ceiling.

The sick purple glow faded away, leaving the room in darkness. 
Every beam of light from the open window was absorbed by the 
darkness. There was a low creaking, the sound a wooden ship might 
make as an iceberg just started to strip the timber from its side and 
send it down. A smell of new mown hay, incongruous in the smoky 
dark. Flap flap flap from the spinning tape, maddening. She itched to 
switch the machine off, but didn't dare cross the room.

Light came. It poured, yellow and warm, from a jagged crack 
that opened in the air. The crack widened, letting in more light, a 
glimpse of blue sky, green turf with heather and daisies, and more of 
the delicious smell of grass and growing things. 

Far away, on the hillside, if you were there, you would smell 
wires burning, feathers smoldering under a magnifying glass, 
crushed ants. And, if you were standing there, you would have felt a 
breeze blowing on your cheek. A breeze from nowhere that led to 
nowhere, just blowing on that hillside and tossing the heads of 
weeds. A breeze tinged faintly with white smoke. And, if you were 
concentrating, you would feel something else, just a faint stirring in 
the hairs on your arm and the pit of your stomach, as though 
something was being done behind your back, as though someone 
stood there with a gun pointed at your head. 

And you would have seen nothing else. That was the way she 
wanted it. The trap had to be invisible.



Catherine leaned forward and peered intently through the 
strange rip in the air.

"Damn!" she muttered. "Why is everything so uncertain? Where 
is he?" 

The image was crystal clear. Perfect. She could see the sun 
refracting through every hair on the crown of a dandelion that 
bobbed slightly as she watched, moved by the breeze. It was so close 
to the edges of the opening. 

She reached out, and through, and her hand closed around the 
stem and pulled. It came through with no resistance. A hundred 
miles in less than a second.

She stopped the tape; silence. Only birdsong and breeze 
through the hole. So peaceful it made her sick. Downy seeds ground 
under her heel. There was still a spot of work to do.


Lang reached the edge of the forest and stopped to rest. He 
dropped his pack and checked the skin strapped to the back.

Dry air had shrunk the hide and stretched the sinews at each 
corner. He saw how they pulled at the canvas. By the time he 
reached the city it would be ready for tanning, and he knew just the 
person for that.

Once he killed a rabbit. It died beneath the wheels of his bike, 
as he raced down a steep hill in a section of the city where gardens 
had run rampant and swallowed buildings in bundles of vines, and 
trees with roots deep in the water pipes towered overhead. The little 
creature darted from the mouth of a tunnel and ran directly under 
him, it's head crushed instantly under the rear wheel. 

He remembered skidding, turning, riding back to where it lay. 
Blood seeped from its mouth and anus. He wrapped the corpse in 
paper and took it home, skinned it in the back yard. Giri tanned it for 
him. She knew how to do those things. She would tan the white deer.

He left the road and waded through the ferns to where he had 
hidden his bike. Spider webs covered the frame. The spiders, 
disturbed by his shadow, took flight, a thousand tiny black motes on 
shimmering wings surrounded his head. They emitted long strands 
as they flew, trying to immobilize him as though he were a moth or 
bug. He laughed, swatted out, and lifted the bike, wiping soft threads 
from the seat as he wheeled it back to the road. 

It started on the first kick. 

"Holy shit!" He kicked the stand and carefully strapped the 
pack to the seat. Engine rumbled smoothly and cleanly. The long rest 
must have been good for the old machine.

Lang mounted without a backwards glance and gunned the 
bike. He would be home tomorrow.


Catherine struggled. She was pushing the hole into position.

There was no other way to move the hole, she found, than to 
grab the edges, careful not to cut herself on the sharp interface, and 
push with her feet.

Back in the lab she strained, beads of sweat rolling down her 
face as she pushed and pushed, and the hole didn't move an inch.

But on the hillside, a hundred miles away, the scene slowly 
changed as it moved across the sward.

The hole opened onto the top of the ridge, facing the distant 
city. She could just see the discolored line on the horizon; no 
buildings, just the slight change that indicated its presence. She 
stopped pushing, changed her grip, and twisted.

She could feel the stresses under her hands as the hole slowly 
turned. Now the road came into view, and the Accident Tree. She 
pushed some more, and the hole moved closer. 

There was a dust cloud approaching, coming up the steep grade 
from the direction of the forest.

"He's riding a bike! How's that going to fit through?" She let go 
and thought. Maybe she could find something to attract his attention, 
cause him to stop the bike and dismount. Her eyes scanned the 
shelves for something she could use. Maybe a shout would be 
enough, or a fire of some sort. 

Catherine crouched and peered through, ready to scream. There 
were things she could do. She took a reel of tape from the shelves 
and loaded the machine, ready to play. She would drop the speaker 
through and give him a blast of amplified sound. That would do the 
trick.


Lang reached the top of the hill and his bike conked out. Again. 
It seemed to like the view there and want to stay and enjoy it. He 
kicked the starter again and again, but no success. Laughter rang out 
from the Accident Tree.

"Shut up, loser!" he shouted back. The laughter stopped, cut off 
in mid flight.

He unscrewed the cap from the fuel tank and rocked the bike 
from side to side to slosh the fuel. The tank was ominously silent. He 
picked a stick from the road and dipped it in. The end remained dry, 
even when he touched the bottom. The fuel had evaporated.

With an angry shove Lang pushed the bike over into the 
weeds, shouldered the pack and started walking.


"Right on time. Just keep walking. Everything is ready."

Catherine strained hard, shoulders against the hole. Her feet 
slipped and skidded on the granite floor. 

The hole reached the centre of the road, facing back towards 
the forest and the approaching hunter. His backpack loomed above 
his shoulders, strung about with rope and straps. On his head a 
narrow brimmed hat, and he wore jeans and a tee shirt. He walked 
with what appeared to be a long staff in his hand. She knew it was 
his bow, unstrung, with the cord wrapped around the end. Arrows, 
fletched with white feathers, poked from the quiver lashed to the 
side of his pack.

There it was, the deer skin, tied to the pack as well, stretched 
around it with cords of sinew, only the edges visible from the front..

Closer and closer, step by step, till the next one would bring 
him in.

Langs foot pierced the membrane, came through and thudded 
down on the hard floor. His eyes wide in alarm as the trap appeared 
suddenly before him, a dark slash in the fabric of the sky, and he 
struggled to stop moving, but she reached out and grabbed the front 
of his shirt and pulled. For a second he blocked out the light with his 
body, and the room was filled with darkness again; she heard 
rending and splintering. The room rocked and Catherine lost her 
balance as the huge blocks of granite in the floor shook, moved by 
the force of the reaction. There was a hoarse shout of fear and rage, 
and another sound, as of a miles of cloth being torn. 

"Gotcha!"

Catherine gloated. She started to dance around the design on 
the floor, around the jagged opening in the air, still open and pouring 
bright sunlight upon the figure that hung suspended in air, kicking 
and struggling but unable to escape. He hung as though attached to 
wires, floating upright, twisting and turning as he sought escape, or 
at least to discover where he was.

"What is this? What is this? By the gods, this better not be 
what I think it is, or heads will roll! I'm a traveler, I wasn't doing 
anything wrong! Where are you? Who did this? Are you hiding?" He 
kicked like a swimmer trying to turn in the water, but it was 
hopeless. He was stuck,  helpless, nailed to the air a foot above the 
floor, with bright sunlight streaming past his shoulders through the 
crack in the air. 

"No, not hiding. Just admiring my catch!" Catherine finished her 
circle around him, to stand before his face. 

"Don't play innocent, you know why you are here."

"Fuck you!" He glared at her solemn face. "Since when was 
walking illegal? Because that's all I was doing when you snatched 
me. Put me back now and I won't try to find out who you are."

"My names Catherine."

"Delighted to meet you. I would shake your hand, but I appear 
to be levitating."

"You talk pretty smart, don't you! Man, whoever you are, you 
make me sick. Sicker than I can say. "Oh, I'm just walking, put me 
back, I haven't done anything wrong!" What makes you say that? 
Guilty conscience?"

He struggled like a fly on a pin.

"Lang, that's my name. Now we've been introduced, tell me, 
why am I here?"

"You killed the White Deer." she said. 

He glanced guiltily back over his shoulder to where the fine 
white pelt was stretched.

She took a long bladed sickle from the belt that girdled her 
gown and stepped around to his back. Lang tried to stop her, but his 
arms were unable to reach back far enough. She cut the sinews that 
held the hide and caught the luxurious white pelt when it fell.

"His sinews to stretch his hide! What did he taste like?"

"I'm a hunter. I hunted to survive. I didn't know he was your 
pet. Perhaps a collar or something might have been in order; how 
was I to know?"

"No pet. No, he wasn't a pet, and it would have been a crime to 
collar him, if at all possible. What if I said... that you had killed a 
god?"

The mans face paled but he set his jaw and frowned down at 
her.

"I'd say you were superstitious. It's an albino deer, just an 
animal, with a fine pelt worth its weight in gold at a decent market 
where they know the worth of such things, and nothing more. You're 
deluded. There must be hundreds hiding in the forest out there. 
Listen, if it's a god, why didn't it defend itself against my arrow?"

"You don't know the ways of gods."

"I do too! Some of my best friends are gods!" Lang lied. "That 
was no god, just a freak of nature, and in answer to your question it 
tasted like shit!" He folded his arms and smiled down at her. 

The witch stared back. She was appalled by his combination of 
ignorance and willfulness. He used magic, that was true. He didn't 
know any gods, though, and she smiled at the brazen bluff. It seemed 
he had no idea what the death of the White Deer meant. She laid the 
beautiful pelt on the floor and sat down, stroking it slowly.

"I know some things about you. You have the Knack, it's 
written all over you. Why else would you be here? Most of the 
inhabitants of Levinfield wouldn't even go near the outskirts, let 
alone leave the city entirely."

"Why didn't you see? You must have! Or you blinded yourself, 
was that it? In the hunt, did you not see the glow? Didn't you realize 
it was alone? There's no more out there. Only one."

"I barely knew he was here, most of the time. I saw him 
perhaps a dozen times since I first entered the forest. It was a long 
time before I discovered exactly what he was."

"Tell me, traveler, what do you think of this forest?"

"Are you going to let me down?"

"No."

"It stinks."

"You've never seen anything like it. There are no other places 
as fertile and green and pleasant as this. Everything grows, the trees, 
even the forest itself is growing. The hunting is good, ha ha! Do you 
know why this is?"

"No. Should I? Tell me, and I can see you're dying to, tell me 
why your forest is so green." He folded his arms and scowled down at 
her, but his heart was cold, because he was starting to realize that he 
was in great danger, helpless in the hands of someone who might be 
a maniac, but then again might be perfectly justified in her anger at 
his acts. 

"This is all that remains of the reason for green." She looked 
down at the pelt she was stroking. "This is the forest, right here, with 
an arrow hole and blood stains."

"Shit! You mean... I killed a god? I did actually kill a god?"

"Yes. He was the god of fertility in this region. While he lived, 
everything grew and prospered. Without him, everything dries up 
and dies."

"I didn't know!"

"You did!" she screamed. She stood and pointed a trembling 
finger at him, at his face set in belligerent, fearful lines. "I know you 
have the Knack! You could see the glamour that surrounded it, the 
power locked up inside, and that's why you shot it! Why didn't you 
check? Why didn't you try to divine what that power was, before 
you brought him down and skinned and ate..." She bent and sobbed 
into her skirt.

"I really didn't know! There was this legend, about a ghost... I 
thought the legend was bullshit, and when this deer... it came to my 
camp, I hunted it down... I thought there were more. So I shot it. 
Then the glow went, and there was only the pelt and hide. I thought 
it was only an animal, I really did. What was I supposed to do? It 
didn't defend itself."

"First the grass will dry up and die," Catherine explained 
slowly, "then the undergrowth. The animals will migrate away, the 
parrots will leave, but they can't survive outside. They'll die. Then 
the trees will start to turn brown and lose their leaves. They'll die. 
Everything will die when the white deer dies. Everything here was 
the result of his presence."

They remained silent for a minute.

"I'll have to leave" she continued. "I saw this castle rise from 
the mud. I wanted to find out how the parrots did it. They know a 
language, the words left behind by the castle builders. That's all I 
wanted, to bring that language back, but the parrots will die and the 
words die with them. There's so much I still had to do, and it's your 
fault! Well we've got a remedy for that! We've got something that fits 
the crime!"

"What are you going to do with me then?" Lang asked.

The witch looked up. 

"Oh, I've got something fitting lined up for you. Something bad. 
You won't believe how bad it is, but I think it's only fair. A just 
punishment." She sprang to her feet and began to rush about the 
room, heaving her machines into place with grunts of strain, until the 
star on the floor was surrounded by pairs of tape machines and 
speakers.

"You better watch what you do! Remember those gods I know? 
They'll know if you kill me. They'll come looking, don't you worry."

Catherine ignored him. At each point of the star was a tape 
recorder and a monitor. Switched on, it made Lang feel like he was 
cornered by a pack of wolves with glowing red eyes. He watched as 
Catherine unlocked an iron-bound wooden box and carefully lifted 
out a spool of tape, which she unreeled around the circle, threading it 
through the guts of each machine, and splicing it into a circle.

When everything was set she raced around the circle, flicking a 
switch on each panel as she passed. The tape started to circle, 
drawing tight as it moved, and the echoing words were passed from 
monitor to monitor, chanting in perfect synchronization. 

Suddenly the floor fell out beneath him, and he screamed loud 
as he stared down into perfect blackness. There was nothing there. It 
was as though the deepest hole in the world had suddenly opened 
beneath his dangling feet. His scream was swallowed up in the 
vastness of its black depths.

"What is this, you might ask?" Catherine jeered. "This is a 
universe. I made it. A universe as infinite in extent as our own, 
joined to this continuum by only this opening beneath your feet. As 
you can see, the universe is empty. There is space, but no matter in 
there, and you wouldn't believe how tricky it is keeping something 
like that open with nothing inside. But I did it. And now I've got a 
use for it."

"Wait... no! I'll suffocate, won't I? No air!"

"Oh no. Oh no. Don't worry about that. I wouldn't let you die! 
The ether will support you. It will change you and preserve you and 
you will live, falling forever through nothing and more nothing until 
you die of old age. And, when you go through, this entrance will close 
up and shrink until smaller than the smallest atom, and it'll 
disappear and the connection will be broken. You'll be lost forever, 
falling, falling down in a hole with no floor to stop you. Won't that be 
fun!"

"No, no, you can't, this is beyond all reason! It's... it's beyond 
words!"

"Killing the White Deer was beyond all reason, even if you 
didn't know its importance! This is justice."

"But wait! What if it isn't just?" He cast around desperately for 
an argument. "Then you would be guilty of injustice yourself. What 
then? People from the city will come and find you, my friends will 
seek revenge!"

"Then we will see. You will be safe, no matter what happens to 
me." Her eyes were hard and cold and without mercy. She moved 
about the room carefully preparing to release the spell that held him 
suspended above the opening into the void. 

"We can cut a deal! I have power, to save your country! Let me 
go and we can fix this whole mess so no one would know any magic 
beast had been killed! Please?"

He struggled in vain. The forces that held him were too strong. 
He tried various simple spells from memory, mumbling the chants 
frantically under his breath, short cantrips for the breaking of holds 
and the springing of locks, but they had no effect. All the while the 
witch worked quietly to set the release of the trap that would 
imprison him forever in limbo.

"Help! Help, Shastar, Arioch, anyone? Any gods listening, my 
eternal allegiance in return for rescue!" None came.

One last time Catherine stood and looked into his eyes. She held 
a pair of scissors, and stood with their blades poised around the 
circling loop of tape.

"Are you ready?" she said.

"Fuck off, bitch! Yeah, get it over with. I can't stand to be here 
with you one second longer."

"Okay then." The scissors chopped down, breaking the circle. 
For a second he remained in the air, until gravity took a hand and he 
fell towards the gaping star of darkness in the floor.

But as he fell he swung his bow, the trusty bow of strong 
orange wood from Ground Zero, above his head. His feet passed 
through the black star. The ends of the bow caught on the long spikes 
of rock that reached out between the stars arms, and the bow bent 
down under its load. It was a good bow, and it flexed back hard, 
catapulting him up and out of the hole and onto the very edge where 
he teetered for a second, almost falling back under the weight of his 
pack. He balanced, fell forward, stumbled directly into Catherine and 
shouldered her down. 

The gate was open fully now. Air rushed down, a hurricane, 
rising shriek of wind that picked up scraps of tape from the floor and 
drew them in.

Catherine lay, stunned, while Lang shrugged off his pack. He 
moved with manic speed, a snarl of anger and triumph twisting his 
face. She raised her head only to have it forced down by a rough 
hand, felt knees on her back. Her arms were wrenched back, and tied 
with a length of discarded tape.

"NOW THEN, WHAT SHOULD WE DO?" She saw his boots as he 
walked past her head. The shriek of wind was shriller, now, like 
machine running out of control and ready to throw gears. Lang 
walked around again and again, pretending to be deep in thought, 
while she struggled against the magic bonds that held her. Papers 
and tape brushed over her on their way to the hole.

"PRETTY IMPRESSIVE STUFF." he shouted above the roar. He 
bent to look into her fixed and staring eyes, to shout into her ear. She 
tried to roll away, but he straightened and planted a foot in the small 
of her back. There was nothing she could do. Just breath and listen. 

"UNIVERSES. NEVER HEARD OF ANYONE WITH THAT MUCH 
POWER BEFORE. MOST PEOPLE ARE LUCKY IF THEY LEARN ENOUGH TO 
LEVITATE A POUND OF SUGAR OR SUMMON BIRDS. I BET THERE'S 
NOTHING LIKE THE FEELING OF GODLIKE POWER THAT COMES FROM 
CREATING ANOTHER UNIVERSE! AND ALL THESE THINGS, THESE 
TAPES, THAT'S THE SECRET, EH? WHAT'S ON THEM?"

She heard the click of a switch, and garbled voices roaring a 
spell at full volume.

"MORE PARROTS! INCREDIBLE! I SHOULD HAVE KNOWN. WE 
ARE BOTH DELVERS IN LIBRARIES, YOU AND I. A PITY WE DIDN'T 
MEET UNDER MORE FRIENDLY CIRCUMSTANCES."

Catherine clenched her teeth and kept silent. He switched the 
machine off, removed the tape, started to feed the tail end into the 
wind. The reel spun on his finger, wavering streamer yearning for 
the vacuum of space only metres away, unwinding itself and 
disappearing down.

"BUT THAT'S BESIDE THE POINT."

Suddenly she found herself standing, supported by hands 
beneath her arms. Lang wrenched her around and forced her 
towards the hole in the floor, until she stood on the edge. Limitless 
volumes of empty space yawned beneath her, contained in its star 
shaped frame. Endless regions of vacuum. She felt deep fear.

"IT SEEMS TO ME THAT THE ONLY SOLUTION TO THIS PROBLEM 
IS TO DROP YOU INTO THE HOLE. I MEAN, I DON'T HOLD A GRUDGE OR 
ANYTHING. MAYBE I DID KILL YOUR WHITE DEER AND DOOM YOUR 
FOREST TO TURN INTO A DESERT, BUT I DIDN'T KNOW WHAT I WAS 
DOING. I NEVER HEARD ABOUT ANYTHING LIKE IT, AND IF I HAD I 
WOULDN'T HAVE SHOT."

He pulled her back slightly and turned her around so he could 
glare at her with tight, angry eyes. 

"JUSTICE ASIDE, I'M DOING THIS FOR MY OWN SAFETY. I 
WOULDN'T WANT TO FIND MYSELF WAKING UP TOMORROW AT THE 
BOTTOM OF THE OCEAN OR FALLING INTO A VOLCANO, OR ONE OF 
YOUR INTERESTING UNIVERSES. MAYBE IT WILL COMFORT YOU TO 
KNOW THAT, WHILE YOU SPEND ETERNITY DOWN THERE, I'LL BE 
BACK HERE IN YOUR CASTLE, CHECKING OUT WHAT OTHER WONDERS 
YOU HAVE STORED AWAY. I MIGHT EVEN FIND A WAY TO SUSTAIN 
THE FOREST NOW THAT YOUR GOD IS DEAD."

"GOODBYE."


He pushed hard, and she teetered on the brink.

She began to fall. 

As she fell she moved. The tape, only twisted around her wrists 
and left untied, spiraled away in the wind and down the hole. 

She reached out and caught hold of his right hand with her 
right hand.

For a second she dangled there against the edge, while he, eyes 
bulging in startled awareness, balanced leaning out over emptiness, 
desperately pulling back. 

"LET GO! LET GO!" He tried to shake her off but she was too 
strong.

He overbalanced. They fell together into the dark.

Once again ripples traveled over the surface of the star, filling 
in the blackness with rock. Once again there was silence, only bird 
song from the forgotten hole in the air above, from the Accident 
Tree. Once again the floor was whole, and the room was left empty, 
swept clean of tape, the shelves festooned with loops and coils that 
hadn't been able to unwind fast enough to escape. Tape recorders 
stood like a circle of silent stones around the star in the floor.


In the darkness a light hung like a lone firefly. It was falling, 
but there was nothing to measure its rate of fall against. 

"NO!"

The light streamed out from Catherine's hair, surrounding them 
in a glowing halo. 

"NOOO!"

They spun about one another, Catherine still had a death grip 
on Lang's hand. They twisted and turned like animals in a trap, 
trying to escape. There was no escape. 

Their eyes were filled with the dark. They could smell it. It was 
both limitless, an unechoing void that shocked with it's lack of 
dimension or end, and close, like velvet, smothering them in 
emptiness the way earth might smother someone buried alive. They 
choked and tears streamed from their eyes and were flung off into 
the void. Their bodies rebelled against the shock. 

Their minds were dying. Crushed beneath the totality of their 
doom, they sought escape in the quickest and easiest remedy; 
madness.

"Noooooo no no no no no no!"

Pull back. Leave them. Go.


Come back.

It is later.

They fall, spinning slowly, hands still locked together. 

"Letmeoutletmeoutletmeoutletmeout. Letme out let me out. Let. 
Me. Out. LET ME OUT!"

"Oh no. Oh no."

"Oh yes, fucker! Eat it up! Enjoy it, it's all there is! Nothing!"

"Nothing."

"Yeah, nothing."

"Lots of nothing. Ha! Tons of nothing! All the nothing there ever 
was is here, and it's all mine! Mine!"

"Ours, you mean."

"Okay, I'll share. Half the nothing is mine and half can be yours, 
okay? Ha ha ha! Oh no!"

"What's half of infinity?"

"Who cares."


Later.

"I'm scared."

"Why? It's all over. We're here, falling forever. What can be 
frightening? You're perfectly safe. Nothing is ever going to happen 
now, forever."

"I'm still scared."

"Of what?"

"You."

"Yes, I'm scared of you too."

Neither had been in orbit. The absence of gravity was 
terrifying in itself. With nothing to see except infinite black there 
wasn't even a reference point to fix on, tell if they were spinning 
about each other or standing still. 

"Anytime we want to we can push away from each other. We'll 
fly away forever. There won't be any way to get back together. 
There's nothing here to push against, reverse us, if we do."

"I don't want to do that just yet."

"No, I don't either. Let's try to think of something else."

"Like what?"

"Some way out."

"There is no way out. What do you mean, a way out?"

"What about our powers? We both know a great deal about the 
Knack. You created this universe, you know what works here. What 
can we do?"

"Nothing. There's no real link between here and there, now. The 
hole closed and instantly diverged. We're an infinite distance from 
home. There's no way back."

"Why don't we die of thirst, or starve? That would solve 
everything."

"Things are different here. We'll never need to eat or drink in 
here, matter behaves in different ways and we don't need anything 
to keep us alive. I made it that way. I'm sorry."

"Don't mention it. You're here too, after all, though I guess you 
weren't planning to come. Choke me."

"What? Are you crazy?"

"Of course I am! What do you think? Can you do it?"

"Do what?"

"Choke me. Rip some rags off your dress and choke me. 
Strangle me, garrote me, suffocate me with something! Don't look so 
surprised! We still need to breath, after all."

"You are crazy! It won't work anyway. Concentrate. Are you 
breathing?"

"Yes... no, I'm not! Neither are you!"

"There's no air here either. I made it so we don't have to 
breath. We can talk, our voices carry through the ether, but we don't 
breath."

"If I had my pack we could have used a knife - or wouldn't 
that work here either?"

"Yes, it would work. I could break your neck, that would work 
too. But then, who would break mine? You didn't think of that."

"I guess I was being selfish."

"Of course you were! You were being selfish when you killed 
the white deer!"

"Not that again. I didn't know, I told you that. Did you make 
justice when you made this world?"

"No."

"Perhaps that explains everything. When you opened the hole 
into this universe, the lack of justice inside had an effect on us."

"Don't you even think about trying to blame this on me."

"I'm sorry. How long has it been?"

"Weeks... months... I was counting my heartbeats, but I lost 
track... it doesn't matter anyway."

"I feel so sane, though. Do you feel that? Don't you think I have 
the right to be comfortably insane, to go raving mad and forget this, 
just lose myself in spirals and dig a hole to escape into?"

"Just try not to think."

"Why? Why! Is that it, just try not to think for the rest of my 
life in this blank hole! Oh, I wish, I wish I had brought the knife!"

Catherine tried to let go of his hand, shake the grip that still 
held them together, but realized that they had unconsciously 
changed grip. He now held her. She struggled, swung herself around 
until she could plant her feet on his chest, and pushed. His clutching 
hand slid from hers leaving nail scratches across the back. He 
struggled and reached out but the distance between them was 
already too great, growing steadily.

"Stop! Wait a second! Find something you can throw, and throw 
it the other way. That will push you back." he called to her.

"No! If we have to spend eternity here I'd rather spend it 
alone. You can just suffer on your own, and I'll suffer on mine!"

As she moved away she took her light with her. The space 
around him began to darken. Lang judged the speed of her motion. 
Slow but steady, and nothing to stop it. 

"You don't know what you're doing! Do you really want to be 
alone forever?"

She didn't answer. He watched her for awhile as she grew 
smaller and smaller. Watched her curl into a ball and hide her face in 
her hands. The light clung to her, flowing around her long hair and 
dress in a nimbus of pearl, dwindled, became a star from the night 
sky of their home, fading slowly. After awhile he swung his arms 
around his body like a swimmer treading water, and succeeded in 
turning himself around. Now all he could see was a blank field of 
nothing, infinite blackness in all directions. 


Later.

His eyes kept wanting to see stars. Ghosts of familiar 
constellations marched across the emptiness, walking or trotting or 
slithering, a zoo of mythological creatures. 

Nothingness and more nothingness. All there was, surfeit of 
nothingness, glut of nothingness, infinite reaches of nothingness. All 
the nothingness there was anywhere had been gathered here. I'm 
rich in nothingness, he thought. King of the Void. 

Not even breaths to judge the passing of time. Silence. Nothing. 
Sleeping and waking, but no difference between. He had dreams, 
long, involved deliriums like the ones that take long winter nights to 
play out their dramas; waking, the dreams simply changed their 
nature, became memories to run through, projecting familiar scenes 
open-eyed on the dark. 

Time and again he returned to his secret tunnel, cool and silent 
under his parents house. There were wingless spiders down there, 
ivory white, hunting each other through the shadows. Sometimes he 
would climb down his rope and sit leaning against the cold metal 
wall and switch off the torch, immersed in gloom so absolute he 
could see phosphenes, spinning patterns that originated inside the 
optic nerve, like kaleidoscopic movies. He didn't know they came 
from inside his head. He imagined they were ghosts. Sometimes he 
tried to talk to them but they never answered. If he moved his head 
they would change and reverse their spin. Then a spider would run 
across his skin and wake him from his dreams, and he would climb 
the rope and re-emerge into the world of sun and people.

He waited for a spider to run across his hand.

Years passed. He lived on memories. Memories, and memories 
of remembering, and remembering the remembering; the originals 
were lost in a hundred different versions. Some better than before, 
some worse. They seemed to have a life of their own., hard to control 
and shape in the ways he wanted.

Dreams too. On and on, blending into each other, interweaving 
lines of story crossed and knotted in tangles of fantastic complexity. 
Knew characters born to replace the dead. They died, and others took 
their place. Empires rose and fell. Familiar rhythm of time passing. 
Dreams far more real than blackness and silence. 

Lang remembered his hollow promise to Giri. Impossible, now, 
to return. 


Catherine, tumbling through her own emptiness, also 
remembered a promise.

The factory had wanted her to return and do something for it. 
Return to the villa, when she was tired of the city, and she had 
worked out what the unspoken request was. No way, now. It didn't 
matter. She couldn't for the life of her figure out what a machine 
might want.

Her parents would be dead by now, she thought idly. Perhaps 
the garden has dried and died, even as the forest would be dying. 
Everything she had ever done seemed pointless and futile. It all 
added up to zero, to a hopeless struggle against forces she couldn't 
comprehend and questions she couldn't answer. 

She wished she had forced herself to stay in the city. She 
wished she had made herself live there, endured the presence of 
other people, and never discovered the castle. 

When she started wishing she had never left home, she started 
crying, and didn't stop till sleep overtook her. 


Later.

No light to see the figure floating in limitless night, eyes wide 
open, staring without seeing. Unmoving, unbreathing, a corpse 
preserved by frozen time. His arms outstretched, lying on the surface 
of space, staring at infinity. Time passes. 

Gradually, in the centre of the nothingness before him, light 
appears. So distant no features could be discerned, the dimmest of 
stars in a black sky, with no others around to lose it among, but the 
eyes keep staring without response. They stare inwards.

Slowly the light brightens, coming closer.

The witch floated out of the night, still curled in fetal position, 
still with her face buried in her hands. Light still flowed from her 
hair, dimmer now, fainter. 

The mans eyes focused, coming back to awareness from a great 
distance, brought back by the dim glow and some sense of presence, 
proximity, of something where there had been nothing.

At the last moment he reached out and caught her. 

She shuddered under his hands, then slowly uncurled, staring 
about with empty eyes, like someone wakened from a dreamless 
sleep who has forgotten their own name. 

"How... how...?"

"Gravity. We are the only two objects here, and our gravity 
made us fall towards each other."

"Oh... I think I've been asleep. My mind was blank."

"How long do you think we've been here?"

"Who can tell? What does it matter? What do we measure time 
against?"

"I think it must be years. It feels like years."

"Years? What are years in this place? But yes, it does feel like 
years."

"It has been a long time. I've been waiting for you to return. I 
couldn't be sure this would happen, but I did hope it would."

"Why were you waiting?"

"I have something to show you. A way to escape, maybe. If you 
want to try it. Took me a long time to work it out."

"Escape? I don't believe...! What do I have to do?"

"Enter my mind. If you can."

"Really? And I'll find a way out?"

"Yes, and no. It would take to long to explain, and far simpler to 
show you. Just do it and see."

"It seems I have no choice."

She closed her eyes and concentrated, woke long dormant 
powers, and sent her mind out into the space between them. Before 
her floated a galaxy of thought; his mind, slowly turning and 
swirling, points of colour washing across its surface, lines of light 
reaching out from the centre and back again. She hung for a second 
to watch, admire the motes of intelligence as they carried their 
messages from the centre out and back again. 

She willed it, and the swirl of thought grew larger as she 
drifted closer. Now it seemed to notice her; tendrils reaching out, like 
flames, to engulf her. There was a last moment of doubt before they 
touched and she submerged.


Light.

A sudden flood of light, so brilliant she could barely 
comprehend. Momentarily she thought a star had exploded nearby, 
or maybe even a whole universe, matter appearing at the point 
source and flooding out. Would they be engulfed in the creation of a 
new universe of stars and planets like the one they left behind?

She closed her eyes and waited for death.

And waited. The glow was still there, on the other side of her 
eyelids. She opened them a crack.

It was a candle. A sideways candle.

No, she was sideways. The candle burned on a plain wood 
dresser that stood next to the bed she lay on, and it was so pure, so 
white and yellow and bright and real  that she could barely stand it. 
She closed her eyes again.

"Where am I?"

"I know this must be a shock. I made this room as bare as 
possible, so you could adjust. Try and move."

She opened her eyes and turned her head. The bed was in a 
room. Walls of bare white, and a light hung on a cord from the 
ceiling. A window with white curtains, drawn. 

"Where am I?"

"In a dream."

She felt dizzied by the texture of the room, plain as it was. The 
details of the surfaces around her caught her hungry eye and held it 
everywhere she looked. She studied the cracks in the ceiling, the 
grain of the wooden headboard of the bed, the faint pattern of 
shifting light on the walls from the window where the thin taffeta 
curtain moved in the wind from outside. There were smells too, city 
smells of smoke and people and industry, unfamiliar sharp smells 
that reminded her of oil lamps and lightning storms. Faint sounds 
came through the window. There were people outside, she could hear 
their distant voices passing, and the sound of engines, cars or some 
kind of vehicles moving past the window on what was surely a road, 
but she couldn't be sure. 

Lang sat on a plain wooden chair in the corner of the room. He 
stood and walked to the head of the bed and looked down at her, 
while she stared hypnotized by the pattern of his shirt. 

"How are you feeling?"

"Very strange. This is too much. Too much light, and detail."

"Don't try too hard, just let yourself adjust. When you're ready 
I can draw the curtains for you."

"Thanks, but I can do that for myself."

She rolled off the bed and made her way carefully across the 
room to the window. Her movements were stiff, uncertain; she had 
forgotten how to walk, and the skill was slowly coming back. For a 
second she leant on the window ledge, bracing herself, then she 
straightened, grabbed the curtains and pulled them back.

The room was in the second storey of a building looking down 
on a quiet street. Vehicles drove along the black lanes, brightly 
coloured cars, full of people. It was early afternoon, she supposed, 
shadows of poles and streetlamps lying long on the ground. A group 
of noisy, laughing people walked past. 

With a savage jerk she closed the curtains and turned, to stand 
sweating and shaking with her back to the window.

"This is all in your mind? How do you keep it all straight? How 
do you remember everything?"

"I don't. I really don't know how it happened. It started as 
dreams, hazy and hard to hold. I remembered people, friends from 
my life in the city, and created others. Dream people. They changed 
and flowed into each other at first, unreal, shifting; they had no 
personality. Everything was shrouded in fog."

"And now?"

He sat on the bed and hid his face in his hands.

"I dunno... I must have done something... they're real. At least, 
they think they are."

"I lost control, so subtly, and they took over. Details started to 
change without my willing them to. As they grew more solid and real 
they took control of their world, invented rules for their own reality, 
made them stick. No longer a dream, now, there's logic and cause and 
effect... of a sort. It was a good thing; together they took something 
that barely existed and made it solid. I believe now that they are 
real people, and the only way they could be so is that they created 
themselves."

"Now, I'm just one of them."

"Them?"

"People. My friends. They're asleep now, mostly. There was a 
party last night and... Would you like to meet them?"

"Let me out."

"What?"

"Let me out!"

She stepped forward and swung back-handed at his jaw. He 
stumbled back, eyes wide in alarm, but she was already following 
with a return punch that connected hard. 


The room dissolved and she found herself back in the eternal 
darkness with only her own light and Lang, floating before her with 
eyes closed, to look at. Slowly he opened his eyes.

"That hurt. Why did you do that?"

"I just don't feel right, I need to think, I need something, I 
don't know what! I don't want to live in your mind. It's a fake 
world!"

"I told you, it isn't fake, it's as real as the world we came from 
and far more so than this emptiness! Even if it exists only in my 
mind, even if it's merely thoughts and dreams, even if the people are 
only coloured pictures that believe they live, it has to be better than 
nothing."

"I don't trust you. Is it a trap? An elaborate trap constructed 
for revenge?"

"No, believe me -"

"Look - If this is real, indistinguishable from reality, the reality 
we left behind, and your life there is full and real and you want to 
stay... why are you inviting me to share it?"

Lang tried to answer, but the words jammed in his throat. He 
swallowed and started again.

"I know you are real. I know you exist, because you come from 
my real life, back in the world where Levinfield was and must still 
be, although we'll never get back there, so it might as well be dead..."

"The world is empty, for me, I can't believe." he said. "I want 
you there because you're the only real person I know."



Once again they stood in the room, at the window, looking 
down at the street and the traffic, just as they left them. Every detail 
was the same. Nothing dreamlike at all.

"I don't understand how it works."

"Neither do I."

"I've been asleep for so long. It's too rich, the colours, textures... 
and people... can I cope? That's what worries me!"

"You can stay in this room for awhile, let yourself adjust -"

"No. I have to do this, now. Let's go."

She stopped at the door, puzzled.

"Just one more thing: why do you look so sick?"

"Maybe because you punched me out? No, that's not the real 
reason. You'll find out."

Together they left the room and went out into the world.


CHAPTER 2
SUNDAY


Micheals' head pounded like a hammer, and he could feel the 
suture joints in his skull part under the pressure of the matter inside 
as it swelled and tried to escape. There was something wrong with 
his feet as well, they felt like they had been burnt or as if someone 
had grabbed alternate pairs of toes and wrenched them apart, 
tearing the skin between. It was the tinea infection, of course, getting 
worse with the dry cold weather and cracking in the mornings to 
expose red lines of raw flesh. 

Must have come from the black cracks in the shower, he 
thought. Meant to buy thongs when I moved here, but too much 
trouble to remember to wear them, and my feet always crack in the 
winter cold, and this isn't some caravan park. Douse the floor in 
chlorine, kill the little fuckers.

It was cold. He knew what he needed to feel better, but it was 
a struggle to remove himself from the bed and go and get it. Coffee, if 
there was any left. It could have been exhausted the night before, 
and that would mean a long journey down the road and around the 
corner, through the quiet Sunday streets to the mixed business, not a 
trip to take without the inner strength a good dose of coffee affords. 

He pulled on socks. He had slept in his jeans, they had only 
been worn for four days and still quite comfortable, if a little stiff 
and greasy. The garbage bag of dirty clothing was full, it bulged 
accusingly in its corner, and once again he swore he would take it to 
the laundromat the next day, while his hindbrain laughed at him for 
being so naive. Anyway, there were days of wear left in the clean 
clothes folded and stacked on the chair in the corner. 

Found his boots under the bed and put them on, psychological 
armor. He always said, if you don't feel like going somewhere and 
doing something it's probably because you don't have boots on. Of 
course, if you don't feel like doing anything it's hard to put them on, 
but the first step's always the hardest. Shirt, jacket, and he was 
ready to fight his way through the outside world. 



It was not a pretty sight that morning. Remains of the last 
nights revels were scattered everywhere. Human remains on the 
stairs stirred feebly as they started their own long climb out of the 
pits of sleep. Clothing on the floor that seemed to have flowed there 
as though they had turned into a liquid and leaked out of rooms. 
There were no closets in the house, only a door ajar for a good jacket 
to hang on, and maybe a nail loaded with shirts on coathangers if 
someone was working and had to wear white with a collar. Bottles 
scattered around, some broken, some half full, and none unopened. 
Cigarette  butts like drifts of snow, the carpet grey with ash, 
crumpled blue packs. New graffitti on the walls. He decided to save 
reading them for when his brain was working again, and picked his 
way carefully across the dangerous minefield of the loungeroom, 
noting in passing that half the tapes in the rack next to the Sony 
three-in-one seemed to be missing. There would be arguments about 
that in the days ahead. At least the stereo itself was fine, still intact 
beneath its protective shell of stickers and designs drawn with paint 
markers. Very distinctive and hard to palm off if stolen, he thought. 
Bad sound reproduction, but no one was offering to buy another. He 
waded through the mass of people sleeping in the loungeroom, 
packed in so close most were lying on their sides, the atmosphere 
thicker than usual with the comforting, warm smell of people, their 
breath, farts and skin smell combining in the stale air. 

No one had crashed in the kitchen. No surface was clean enough 
to lie down apon. Months, perhaps years of layers of jam and butter 
smears, sauce spills, splashes of grease from the electric frying pan, 
smoke from saucepans forgotten by drug-fucked chefs, all had 
combined in a surface that was not greasy or gritty or smooth or 
rough but  a little of each. The shelves were packed to overflowing 
with jars and bottles, either empty or still containing a tiny smear of 
whatever. Every plate and cup the household owned in common was 
in the sink, which was where he hid his personal coffee supply. The 
metal of the  drainer board curled up underneath, and a small tin of 
International Roast would balance in there and be safe.

Reaching under the sink with one hand he fished the electric 
jug out of the bin with the other, pulled the multicoloured fist of 
double adaptors out of the kitchens' one wall socket and plugged it 
in. Removed the top layers of plates from the sink so the jug would 
fit under the tap. Filled it. Cocoa Pops crunched beneath his feet. 
Impossible to figure how they had survived uncrunched since the 
last time someone indulged. He scrubbed out a cup till it was as clean 
as possible, sterilizing it with hot water from the boiling jug, made 
the coffee and opened the back door. 

Thinking; These old houses are almost all the same, you can 
walk into someone else's terrace and know exactly where the 
kitchen, laundry, toilets are, and the narrow wooden staircase runing 
up from the loungeroom to the two or three upstairs bedrooms, and 
upstairs toilet if the house is big, and the kitchen is always the back 
room opening onto the garden, the laundry is always a lean-to tacked 
onto the kitchen, and it gets monotonous after awhile.

 Their back garden was concrete, cracked and worn with age, 
the pieces tilting as the dirt beneath was eroded away by rain. There 
were cans and bottles and empty food containers everywhere, not all 
from the party. Micheal picked his way between the remains of the 
party to the fire. The ashes had that dry, grey look that said the coals 
were still glowing beneath, and he leant down and blew gently, 
raising a cloud of fine ash that settled in his hair. Sure enough there 
was a steady red glow, so he took a few dew damp twigs from the 
garden border and put them on top and watched them steam and 
drank coffee. Smoke poured off, they curled and twisted as though 
the heat was torturing them, and finally burst into flame. 

He heaped more wood onto the small blaze. The shadows on the 
back wall of the house said it was at least two in the afternoon, but 
the sun hadn't actually penetrated to  the garden yet. The only 
shrubs that could survive the dank shade there were hardy little 
laurels, and some weed bush with yellow flowers that smelt terrible. 
They attracted the bees, though, at least in summer when there were 
bees they did. The corrugated iron fence was a mass of morning 
glory which they cut back every few months and which always grew 
back more vigorous and more densely. It never produced any of its 
famous hallucinogenic seeds. In summer the flowers would come, 
opening every day and furling themselves like umbrellas every 
night, but they dried and fell and the stalk withered without 
producing a pod. The same chemical was present in the flowers and 
roots, but no one wanted to tamper with dosages and preparation, so 
they left them alone. The smoke from the fire streamed overhead 
and there were answering plumes from houses and gardens up and 
down the street. 

They had a fireplace inside, but the chimney was blocked and 
all attempts to remove the birds nest or dead possum or whatever 
was in there failed. Rocks on ropes, dropped down the chimney, hit 
the blockage but it refused to budge. They assumed the landlord had 
blocked it on purpose. There were two types of landlord: the ones 
that came around too often and complained about the messy carpet 
and holes in the wall, and the ones that stayed away as long as the 
rent came in but blocked chimneys to prevent fire hazards. These 
sort make tidy profits out of housing students and Newts and other 
inner city losers; they don't care about the graffiti or the leaning 
front fence, they stay away as long as the rent comes in, a bribe to 
let the tenants live as they please. Perhaps things fall apart, and too 
many people move out in one month and no replacements can be 
found, so everyone leaves, the landlord comes and slaps up a coat of 
cheap supermarket paint, replaces broken windows, plasters the 
holes in the walls, lets it to another identical tribe, and the whole life 
cycle starts again.

Steam rose from the brick circle around the fire. There were 
the twisted remains of glass bottles in the ashes, and the grey 
wreckage of beer cans. Micheal dimly remembered the night before, 
placing an empty Stones Ginger wine bottle in the flames and feeding 
twigs in through the top. The bottle heated smoothly and evenly, 
remaining whole until it glowed dark red-green, and the twigs were 
heated till they released flammable gas and a jet flickered at the 
mouth of the bottle. At that stage he was fairly inebriated, and the 
small blue flame escaping from a glowing bottle was hypnotic. The 
flames from the fresh wood burning now were healthy and orange, 
bright enough to squint the eyes. He sat on a chunk of concrete 
broken from the edge of the slab and finished the coffee.

There was a sound from the kitchen door. He turned as Lang 
stumbled out into the light, followed by a girl he hadn't seen before. 
They looked pretty bad, neither opening their eyes more than a 
fraction, faces pale and bloodless, showing off blemished skin to fine 
degree. They stumbled over and collapsed onto their own chunks of 
concrete and stared blankly into the fire.

"Is there any coffee left?" Lang croaked.

"Sure. Look under the sink."

He limped back into the kitchen. Micheal  smiled at the girl 
sitting opposite him. She was idly gathering all the wine casks within 
reach of her rock, inspecting them with a puzzled expression, and 
tossing them into the fire. The bladders made muffled reports as 
they burst inside the box, the flames changing colour as the plastics 
caught and burnt, sending up black stringy smoke. Luckily there was 
no wind to blow the toxic fumes in their faces. 

Her face was deeply lined with marks from sleeping on 
rumpled sheets. Not enough blood pressure to iron them out, he 
thought.

She fumbled in the cardigan that flapped loosely around her 
sides, produced a pair of sunglasses, the shiny coating smeared and 
furry with fluff from the pocket, considered them with slight 
surprise and hid her swollen eyes before looking at him.

"Do you live here?" she asked.

"Sure. Got a room up the stairs."

"How many people live here?"

"Hard to say. Four people on the lease, but some others stay on 
pretty permanent. They live here, but they're only visiting, if you get 
me."

She nodded sagely. Her hair was ashy blonde, long and a little 
ratty. The casks had burnt away now, leaving only white ashes that 
stirred at the slightest breeze. The fire was picking them up and they 
rode the smoke up into the sky. It was a beautiful day, grey and 
overcast but dry. 

Our skins are pale and we hide from the sun, he told himself. 
In summer we look unhealthy, out of place, the heat brings red 
flushes to the surface that look ugly next to the golden tans that 
others cultivate. In winter we seem more at home, we look good in 
our dark clothes beneath dark skies, or at least we think that. We 
probably just look bloodless and unhealthy all the time to most 
people, but wait till the cancers start swelling up black and 
malignant on their browned bodies.

Lang returned with coffee. Pigeons passed silently overhead. 
Leaves were falling from the tree that leaned over the yard from 
next door. Stirring sounds from the house as more people woke in 
the living room and stumbled around looking for the toilet or the 
kitchen or somewhere to throw up. 

Why do we do this and call it fun, forgetting the payback and 
pushing so hard? No matter how many times we experience the 
resultant hangovers we refuse to learn, something terribly human in 
that, Pavlovs' dogs would refuse to touch liquor again after a single 
bender, but humans do it again and again, and relish the pain. All the 
times I've been here before, before. Sitting, looking into the flames 
after a night drinking, or while drinking. 

All the houses I lived in, and they all had a fire pit or barbecue 
of some sort, elaborate or crude, in their back garden, and the ritual 
of the fire in the night, and relighting it in the morning, so often I do 
it automatically. The fire settles down and sleeps under the ashes, it 
only needs fresh fuel and a little experience to get it going again. 
Could do it in my sleep. I do everything asleep. I scare myself 
sometimes.


Almost four years since he moved to the city from a sleepy 
town on the south coast where his old friends were dying. They fired 
their rattling second-hand Falcons down deserted bush roads late at 
night, appearing ghostlike in the glare of each others headlights for a 
second before passing with a roar. Sometimes they connected. It was 
the way. Days passed there with the monotony of identical drops of 
blood falling from a razor cut, each the same as the last, one step 
closer to death. Everyone knew everyone else; it was impossible to 
escape from parents, or an ex-girlfriend, or the police. The only 
change was the loss of the youth, one by one, some to the city and 
some on the roads, their wrecks left amongst the trees, guilty secrets 
that only the tourists noticed as they drove through in polished four-
wheel-drive fascistmobiles.

Micheal visited the old home town only once. Unfamiliar faces 
from school stopped him in the street with nervous cheer, full of 
questions that burned in their eyes like hot coals. They shook and 
sweated, their jokes were forced and their smiles the sad rictus of 
the damned. Two drives warred inside them. They were torn 
between the desire to escape from their present lives and the fear of 
the unknown.

Their impressions of the city were a lurid hybrid of TV news 
and country mythology. They kept asking him if he'd been mugged, 
and how many poofters he'd met. In the pub they tried to score 
drugs from him. Trips, they wanted, or speed. City drugs. Something 
to cut the edge off the mull, let them move around, twist a reality 
that would not change. He felt like some unwilling messiah trying to 
convert a flock too confused for salvation.

The questions were endless; did people really dress like that 
down there? Didn't he feel weird with hair that long? Wasn't it 
dangerous? When was he coming home? 

Yes. No. Sometimes. Never.


Drowsy figures moved around the small yard with empty 
halves of slabs, picking up stubbies or cans to be put out for the 
collection. Music came from the open door as someone played one of 
the remaining tapes. 

"Michael!"

Micheal turned and regarded Karen with empty eyes. They 
were pink and hot looking, she thought, like the eyes of a child up 
past his bedtime. 

"Yeah?" 

"Good do, wasn't it? You look a little blitzed though. Eyes like a 
white rabbit." He smiled and stood up. 

Karen showed little sign of hangover. It was something genetic. 
Her hair, even though dredded and dyed into a snakes nest of ropey 
locks, shone with health, her skin retained a faint tan through the 
depths of winter, and its smooth glow stood out in contrast to the 
ragged clothing she favored.

"Markets, right?"

"Two hours and they close. The pack's in your room."

He followed her back into the house. People were waking up 
now, moving around the lounge room like sleepwalkers, demolishing 
his coffee in the kitchen. Some were leaving, crowding the front hall 
and the footpath outside the open door. Most were unfamiliar to him, 
friends of Lang or Karen or June that he had met briefly before, their 
faces recognizable but not the names.  He pushed gently past those 
on the stairs and climbed to his room where he had to force the door 
open with his knee. The weight of people on the stairs warped the 
wooden interior of the house, caused the upstairs floor to sag slightly 
and jamming the door in its frame. A good security measure. 

The backpack he fished from under the bed was over fifteen 
years old but it still served. Karen waited at the foot of the stairs, 
talking to some guests. He passed them and went out the front, to sit 
in the gutter with the pack between his knees and the cars passing 
inches from his nose.

When Karen emerged from the knot of people that clogged the 
front hall she held the kitty and her balance book. Covetous eyes 
followed the kitty, a large preserving jar quarter full with change 
and crumpled plastic five dollar bills. She managed its affairs like an 
anxious mother, always making sure it was fed regularly, keeping it 
safe and protecting it from the interests of strangers and those who 
might wish to borrow the contents. It lived in a locked wooden chest 
in her room. The key hung on a silver chain around her neck, and the 
key, the jar and the balance book formed a holy trinity, with her as 
the priestess. No sacrifice to the jar went unrecorded, the balance 
book was always kept balanced, the key was never lost and those 
that speculated apon it soon observed that it never left her neck. 
Anyone could have access to the book and check income and 
expenses, but she and Micheal were firm about doing the shopping 
themselves. 

So they started walking, Karen unclipping the mouth of 
Micheals pack to drop the jar and book into its dirty depths. The day 
had assumed a bright grey tone typical of Sydney winter. There are 
days when the winter sun kindly layers the city with calm mellow 
warmth, and filthy days of dark rain that freeze the soul even when 
only viewed from inside a warm house, but the calm grey days were 
best. Still, or gently breezy, UV coming down through the clouds, 
squinting the eyes even though the actual light level was quite low. 
They kicked through drifts of leaves and garbage that caught in the 
gnarled roots of trees that grew from ragged edged holes in the 
asphalt footpath. 

The centre of Chippendale is a peaceful oasis, surrounded on 
three sides by roads constantly rushing with traffic, divided by 
Abercrombie street and the semi trailers that roar down its length. A 
warren of small streets and alleys that grow rows of houses, ranged 
along quiet cul-de-sacs between sweat shops and small businesses - 
printers and radical bookshops that couldn't survive anywhere else. 
Glossy publishing houses were moving in for the kill now. 
Warehouses could be had, cheaply and close to the city. Artistic 
locations that the clients liked to see, giving them cred they hadn't 
earned.


They made their way down empty streets, headed for the rail 
bridge at the end of Cleveland street. The market building, its ugly 
mass surrounded by ruined sheds and rails, fenced to keep the 
crowd from wandering onto the suburban track. Asian families 
passed with vegetables in cardboard boxes lashed to collapsible 
luggage trolleys, heading for the station; European families wheeled 
hand carts full of black plastic stereos to their vans and station 
wagons.

They stopped in the middle of the main thoroughfare inside the 
building, Micheal turning so Karen could remove her jar and book. He 
glanced at her list.

"Right. Potatoes first, as usual. About five kilos." she said.

"It's your turn to spend the tax. What are you getting?"

"Oh, I don't know. Maybe a candle or two, or something that 
seems interesting. You know."

"Well, could you tell me how much this interesting thing is 
likely to cost?"

"Not much."

They proceeded down the main aisle between tables loaded 
with imported battery powered toys, stacks of video tapes, cheap 
glittery watches, racks of tee shirts printed with band logos, headed 
for the vegetable stalls. It was past four and the stall holders were 
preparing to pack up and go home, tired from a day spent dealing 
with the wiles of canny immigrants who were used to bargaining for 
what they bought  and came here mainly for the fun of haggling with 
the stall holders.

He spotted a table with a mound of brushed red skinned spuds, 
a Chinese woman sitting behind. She leant back in her folding beach 
chair and sipped from the top of her thermos. 

"How much?" he asked her. 

"Dollar kilo." 

"Five kilos for four dollars?" he asked hopefully, eyes wide and 
grinning, trying to convince her he deserved the discount. 

"Okay." she agreed resignedly. He helped her fill the plastic 
carry bags with potatoes and turned to Karen for the money. She had 
finished writing up the transaction in her bankbook and was fishing 
in the jar for a five dollar bill. He knew she had written it up as 
being five dollars, not four. Paid and loaded the potatoes into the 
pack, while Karen took the dollar change and put it into her pocket. 

This was "tax", their secret, and the real reason they did the 
shopping. They progressed from table to table. Many of the traders 
knew them and immediately started bagging up what they usually 
bought at that stall. At each transaction Karen pocketed the 
difference between the marked price and what they bargained it 
down to, saving it for whatever she had decided to buy that week. 


Once she had found some kava tucked away on the back of a 
stall selling packet spices,  an almost legendary drug, often heard of 
but never encountered. Tourists who had been to Fiji and Samoa, 
who had drunk kava in the native nakamals  there, described it as 
either the sweetest high in the universe or complained that it only 
gave them a foggy head. Packets of peppery smelling tan powder, 
they mixed it according to instructions from the big Samoan woman 
who sold it, whipping it up in the blender with water and lecithin 
and gulping down as much of the soapy dishwater result as they 
could stomach. That afternoon they listened intently to the faint 
sound of cars passing on the road outside, and the hiss of the shower, 
and the rush of blood flowing through our inner ears, and the faint 
background hiss of the atoms of air colliding randomly in the silent 
room.


The pack grew heavier. A small pumpkin, Chinese broccoli and 
something unpronounceable but green and leafy and cheap were the 
last on the list. Finally Michael snapped the clasps and hoisted the 
pack onto his shoulders. 

"So, now we find out, huh? How much have we got?"

"Enough," replied Karen, smiling enigmatically. 

"Look, I like a surprise as much as the next person, but this is 
getting on my nerves. What is it?"

"Don't be so impatient, I bet you used to shake your Christmas 
presents till they broke trying to find out what's inside."

"So what's that supposed to mean?" he asked. 

"Just wait. Don't be so impatient!"

She led the way back into the section of the markets that 
wasn't devoted to food. They melted through the crowd, using skills 
perfected over years spent living in the city: dodge, wait, take long 
steps when you can, automatically taking turns blazing a trail 
through the loose crush of people. They didn't have to think about 
this, it was automatic. Part of living in a city and dealing with people. 
People are a mass, a natural force like a wind or tide. Those who 
can't swim drown.

They came to a table loaded with jewelry, racks of bamboo 
hung so thick with chains and medallions on leather thongs they 
visibly flexed under the weight, and more expensive things under 
glass in shallow wooden cases on the table top. Karen stopped and 
leant over to sort through the masses of hanging silver and glass. She 
flipped aside marbles clutched in silver claws, flattened rings of 
stone and metal polished to a high gloss, crystals of a dozen varieties 
and colours, some of which weren't crystals at all but cleverly carved 
stone and glass cut into the familiar six sided quartz crystal shape, 
flattened lenses of glass ringed with chrome, and finally her hand 
emerged holding a silver medallion, a tiny animal that could have 
been a horse, cast with legs stretched out as though leaping through 
space.

"Isn't this neat?" she asked. She reached up to the larks head 
knot from which it hung, grabbed the loop and pulled the medallion 
free from the rack. It twirled from its leather thong and sparkled 
dully in the fluorescent light from dusty tubes far overhead.

"What about some new incense? We could get those little green 
cones of lemongrass incense, the real tangy ones."

"How much for the medallion?" Karen asked the stallholder, 
almost invisible behind her wares. She parted the hanging festoons 
and leant forward, a young girl wearing dozens of her own stock 
around a thin white neck who looked closely at the tiny trinket and 
checked her  list.

"Ten bucks for that one" 

"Good. We'll take it."


Karen was silent as they made their way through the slow 
crowd leaving the shed. She walked in front, her dreds swaying, and 
Micheal reached out to catch one.

"You seem to be fraying a little", he said. She turned slightly 
and smiled.

"You were the frayed one! You looked shocking this morning."

"I think I had too much decadence last night. Not that I'm 
complaining."

"Too much decadence can cause your civilization to fall. I learnt 
that in school."

"Yeah, but the ride down is such a rush. That's the whole point 
of building a civilisation; it's like climbing the big hill of a 
rollercoaster. When you get to the top you go over and down. Or like 
sex."


She made a gesture that took in everything, not only the people 
around them and the houses and buildings they passed, but the city 
and their entire lives. 

"Just sometimes I feel that everything is falling apart. There 
doesn't seem to be any reason for all this, does there? No good reason 
at least."

"You're just tired."

"Perhaps. But I think this even when I'm not tired. In fact, 
usually I'm too tired to care, and only feel really angst ridden when 
I've got the extra energy to think."

"That's natural. Or un-natural rather. Everything is poison here. 
If you knew how much lead you carry around in your bloodstream 
and the radioactive cadmium in your bones. Everyone suffers from 
constant low level death, from preservatives and high sugar intake."

"Shrunken livers." 

"Yeah. Funny reasoning. If having poison in your blood makes 
you feel listless and depressed, then put more in and you'll feel 
better." said Michael. 

"We should check on Cymoril and June. They always have 
something profound to say on the subject." Karen walked in silence 
for a minute. "Did you see them last night?"

"They came out briefly, to say hi to a few friends. Then they 
disappeared again."

"At least they did that. I worry that they might be losing 
contact with reality in that room."

"They would say they're more in contact with the real things 
than you are."

"Who really knows what the real things are? You have to hunt 
them down nowadays like scientists trying to prove some particle 
exists. You have to build some huge mechanism to pin down even the 
tiniest speck of reality."

"Wow, that's deep!"

"Puss puss! Here puss." Karen spied a huge tomcat barring their 
path, sitting with imperial majesty on the footpath outside a small 
shop. 
They stopped and took turns running their hands over its sleek short 
fur. The cat hunched its shoulders into their hands and nuzzled at 
their fingers, Karen realized it was picking up scents from other cats 
they had petted in the past few days. Humans are cats telegraphy, 
designed to carry scent messages from one to the next, and to open 
cans and the refrigerator door. It must be good to live with your gods 
like cats do, and have so much control over them.

The cat started walking between them, weaving through their 
legs as they crouched and butting its head against their knees. 
Finally it had enough and turned away, walking towards a nearby 
front garden. The sun had appeared. Rich light, winter gold, flooded 
the trees and lit the undersides of the grey overcast clouds from low 
on the horizon.

"Do you think that deer was too expensive?" asked Karen.

"No, why? Do you?"

"Maybe. I don't even want it. It's for Lang."

"He never wears that sort of thing. I've never seen him with 
anything about his neck. Except a tie."

"Maybe I'm feeling guilty about doing what we do. Oh, I know 
we do the shopping for them, but we never tell them that some of 
their money's going in our pockets."

"Don't know why you want to get him a pendant though. You 
could have got one of those pentangles to wear to uni, upset the 
Christians. It's always a good idea to upset the Christians. They seem 
so desperate to be confronted."

"They don't get enough these days. People are tired at uni, they 
don't activate the way they used to." She sighed.

"Activate?"

"Like in the sixties, like the political and artistic scenes there 
used to be. Who cares any more? Maybe it will return, but I just 
can't see these students getting excited about anything more than 
good marks and the money they hope to be earning when they 
graduate. I know these are old complaints, but it seems to be getting 
worse now. Even the academics are talking about this placid 
generation, well adjusted and content and boring students they have 
to teach, and how it was more fun in their day blah blah blah, radical 
politics stirring up the campuses and student elections like military 
takeovers. You look at the noticeboards. The only clubs are the "Lets 
drink till we fall down at the uni bar" clubs, and the "Sit in a lecture 
theatre and receive God into your life" clubs, not that I want to join a 
club, but other than drinking or religion, and their careers, no one 
could give a toss, and that almost scares me."

"Do you give a toss?" asked Micheal.

"Well, yes. About some things. I'm no loony radical, I don't 
believe in getting upset about petty things, and I can't see myself 
standing in front of duck shooters and bulldozers, but I do care."

"So how do you show you care?"

"Just by the way I live. I mean, look at what we did today, 
going to the markets and buying fresh and cheap food and by-
passing foreign owned supermarkets and packaging, and saving 
money, even if we do skim the cream a little. We don't watch much 
television, and support local entertainment..."

"And beer brands."

"Yes, and other local products..."

"And you don't cut down rain forests or pollute whales."

"Stop being so funny, I might laugh." Karen began throwing 
mock punches into Micheals stomach while he staggered around the 
footpath bouncing off light poles and parking meters, trying to hide a 
smile. He turned and the pack bumped a car parked at the curb, 
setting off its alarm, immediately they sobered up and started 
walking again, keeping innocent expressions till they reached a safe 
distance. 

"You talk about boring students, but they might think you 
boring for going on about green politics and environmentally aware 
consumerism and such." said Micheal. 

"This is getting boring anyway. What are we cooking for 
dinner?" Karen began paging through her book to check up on what 
they bought. 

"I wouldn't have the faintest. We'll put it to the vote when we 
get home."

"June's turn today, I think."


Cymoril and June were very warm and very comfortable. They 
lay in each others arms, unmindful of the warning signs of the loss of 
circulation in their hands and fingers. It was dark in the room, only a 
small beam was admitted by the dusty curtain, falling on the far wall 
and reflecting a cold pale light over them where they lay on 
Cymorils' bed, a mattress on two wooden pallets. 

Slowly and carefully June reached across for the bottle of 
"special water", a plastic bottle she had blessed earlier by holding it 
in her hands and concentrating loving thoughts apon its contents. 
Neither she nor Cymoril seemed to need food anymore. They lived on 
a diet of water, toast and each others love. It was an ideal situation, 
life reduced to its simplest forms, completely free of worry or doubt. 
They had spent most of the week before, and a fair proportion of the 
week before that, in this same bed. The household had gone about its 
business, people had come and visited them there, but those times 
never seemed as real as the times they spent alone with each other. 
June felt incredible elation when she contemplated the depths to 
which they had come to understand each other, the secrets they had 
exchanged in the depths of the night, things they swore they had told 
no one else about, treasured thoughts that until this time had been 
kept within and only examined in moments of personal revelation, 
until it seemed that they might melt together into a composite being, 
their minds fusing as their bodies seemed to do in the throws of their 
passion. 

"Wake up." she whispered into Cymorils ear. Cymorils eyelids 
parted a fraction and she twisted in the bed, snuggling into Junes 
side. 

"Why should I? Would it matter?"

"Of course. It would matter to me."

"Then I will." She sat up slowly, joints creaking in her hips. "My 
muscles are aching again. It's the sedentary lifestyle I lead, we 
should go jogging more." 

"I heard everyone wake up downstairs," said June. "It sounded 
like I was back at school and the class was going out to recess. They 
were all talking, I could almost hear their words."

"Did they say anything worth hearing?"

"Of course not." Cymoril fell back on the bed and they lay in 
silence for half an hour, listening to the stir of people down below as 
the lingerers woke up and left, or stayed to watch television. The 
patch of light from the window crept slowly up the wall, illuminating 
clippings from papers and magazines, flyers for parties dated years 
before, patches of graffiti written in moments of drug inspired 
wisdom. 

A memory began to manifest itself to Cymoril, and she lay 
quiet and receptive, willing it to come. It was recent, she could tell, 
and not real. It was a dream, one of the many lucid dreams that 
floated up in her half awake times, which were more and more 
common now. In fact, what she thought of as a memory was actually 
a recurrence of the dream, and who's to say that a vivid memory of 
dreaming is more or less real than the dream itself?


 She dreamed of the Burning Man. He was hovering in the void. 
His arms stretched out in the rictus of pain from the consuming heat 
of the flames that burnt him. They started at his feet and rose, 
dancing from his canvas sneakers to his baggy grey jeans, flaring out 
around his legs and more at his trunk and out along his arms, red on 
the blue of his flannelette shirt, the tallest flames leaping above his 
head where the hair seemed to feed them. She tried to see his eyes 
but couldn't. They were lost in the dancing colour of his fire.  He 
hung in darkness, nailed to the black void of the dream, unconsumed 
even as the conflagration raged and burned on his very skin. It was a 
powerful vision. Cymoril was captivated by the red orange light and 
the shimmers of heat that rolled up and confused the face of the 
figure so it couldn't be recognized, and the way he bravely endured 
the torture, hanging there it seemed for all eternity, for some reason 
no one but he could fathom.  The figure stirred slightly under her 
intense gaze. She could feel the cold of the void on her back and the 
warmth of the blaze stinging her face, and the head rose and seemed 
to see her.


She opened her eyes. June was asleep, and had rolled over and 
pulled most of the blanket to her side of the bed. Carefully she pulled 
the blankets and sheet back until she was covered again, and again 
drifted into sleep, dreamless now.


Below, Karen and Micheal walked through the open front door 
and down the short hall to the lounge. Alex sat in the corner next to 
the TV and stereo, going through the tapes and trying to remember 
titles,  in order to work out what had been stolen. People crowded 
the small and broken backed couch laughing at the news. 

The kitchen was almost clean, someone had swept the floor and 
taken out the boxes of bottles that usually stood by the door, waiting 
to trip people over in the dark. There was enough space on the table 
for Micheal to empty the pack there and spread out the supplies. He 
opened the fridge, winced at the contents, and began hiding the 
atrocities within behind bags of fresh vegetables. Karen retrieved the 
cans of beer she had hidden the night before in paper bags in the 
crisper drawer and they returned to the lounge. 

The news was always funny, in a painful way. They laughed at 
the ridiculous stories; petty trifles of actors lives reported as 
solemnly as airline disasters, baby animals in zoos, broke 
entrepeneaurs begging for cash, corrupt governments begging for 
forgiveness. They laughed till it hurt their throats.

Tipping back his drink Micheal caught Karen's meaningful look. 
It was time to visit the recluses upstairs.

June heard the quiet knock at the door. She felt a quick stab of 
paranoia in her heart, a tiny tick of fear, a movie clip of police 
storming the room, standing them both in a corner half naked while 
they pulled out drawers and tipped them in a pile on the bed, to go 
through the contents in search of the drugs they were sure to find. 
She glanced guiltily at the bamboo bong standing next to the water 
bottle before calling in a calm voice: " Come in."

Karen peeked around the door, checking with motherly care 
that they were decent before stepping through with Micheal behind 
her. June smiled up at them. 

"How are things?" asked Micheal.

"Oh, beautiful, perfect. We were just thinking of coming down."

Cymoril stirred and opened one eye. She closed it again, but 
they knew she was awake.

"We got the rice and Chinese veges downstairs, you should do 
stir fry while it's fresh. If you feel like it." said Karen. "There's still a 
few guests around but they should leave soon. I gave the signal to 
Lang, he'll probably put on some Mozart and drive them away."

"You were hard to find last night. People kept asking where 
you were, we told them you eloped."

"We were in another dimension", Cymoril replied lazily, still 
with eyes closed. "I've got this bag, and its a nexus of the wormholes 
in space or something. I find things in there, that I didn't put in. I 
found a deal there last night."

"Oh yeah?"

"Of course. Lets have some. Sit down." She sat up with a sigh 
and began fussing with the bong, thinking, "They do take care to 
leave us alone most of the time, and they don't complain about June 
staying, and they don't discriminate, but they do disturb our quiet 
times. Hopefully after a good smoke June can cook dinner and then 
we can come back here and just be together."

Micheal cleared a patch of floor to sit on and Karen folded 
gracefully onto the foot of the bed. No matter how long Micheal knew 
them or how much time he spent in their room, they always made 
him feel nervous and strange to be around. He sat tensely, legs 
crossed and leaning back on his arms. June could read the body 
language and knew what it meant. By every thought and action you 
shall betray yourself so unsubtle.

Cymoril finished cleaning the cone, giving it one last poke with 
a match stick to clear the passage. She removed the stash she had 
found, about half a gram of heads in a ziploc bag, from beneath the 
pillow, opened it and began cutting the contents into a small 
porcelain bowl with nail scissors. Karen took a cigarette from her 
pocket and began running the flame from a lighter up and down its 
length. When the paper had browned nicely and started to crack she 
handed it to Cy who crumbled it into her bowl and began rubbing the 
contents between her fingers. 

"The longer you mull up the more up the mull", she intoned. 

"I usually prefer it straight." Micheal said. "Everyone I know 
mulls up though."

"It's a chemical thing, they mix and react or something, and the 
mix is stronger than pure dope."

"I heard that the tobacco burns hotter, and that liberates more 
of the goodness. You don't have to keep relighting when you mull up, 
too." said Karen.

"You can pack more in the cone when you do this. It crumbles 
up into powder. Here." said Cymoril, handing the bong to Micheal. He 
smiled his thanks and took a grateful pull. It was strong smoke, 
stinging deep in the lungs, the acrid tobacco giving the smoke a kick 
he usually missed. He choked slightly on the spray of water from the 
bubbles and passed the still half charged bong back to Cy.

"Here, thanks, but that's enough for me. I think that stuff is  
from another dimension." She filled the cone again and smoked it 
herself, then filled it for Karen and lastly for June. The light was 
fading fast, the dim beam of evenlight through the window turning 
red and smoky, giving the cluttered room a weird and otherworldly 
appearance. Micheal looked around at the furnishings, the milk 
crates stacked sideways as shelves for clothing, the low table 
cluttered with interesting nicnacs, polished stones and coloured glass 
bottles and lumps of quartz and books, the mounds of comfortably 
unwashed clothing on the floor. 

He heard a light tap at the door, glanced at the others and rose 
to answer it.

"Lang, owareya?"

"Good, fine, almost recovered!" He glanced over Micheals 
shoulder. "Hi, sorry to disturb, I was wondering if you had any spare 
dope you were willing to sell?"

"No, we just finished the last. Sorry."

"Oh, okay. See you later." He left. Micheal sat down.

"Anyone know the name of that girl who was here this 
morning? She must have stayed the night, came down the stairs with 
him but I didn't see her at the party."

"No. Something of a mystery, that." said Karen. "Didn't hear 
anything either, last night, she must have arrived late. Sure looked 
bad though."

"Interesting..." mused June. "It's about time. Maybe she's an old 
friend. I was worried about him, always seemed a million miles 
away, as though he didn't really exist. A sort of dream man. Maybe 
she's an old flame."


Lang closed the bedroom door and switched on the light. The 
house was dry, every leaf of herb smoked.

Catherine curled, shaking, in the middle of the bed. 

For an hour after her arrival he had watched her, watched her 
watch the flames of the fire and huddle, unmoving, like a rabbit in a 
spotlight. Finally he reached out and touched her, and had to jump 
fast to grab her shoulders and stop her frozen body from rolling into 
the coals.

No-one was around, and he barely managed to carry her inside 
on his own. It was a bad attack of panic, he thought. Sensory 
overload. He worried while he half carried, half encouraged her body 
up the stairs. She was aware, her eyes darted about, taking in the 
precious detail as though the world were about to dissolve and fade 
around her, blow away like smoke. Smoke! Of course, the herbal 
rememdy! The only problem was, could he provide? 

And June didn't have, which meant the house was dry. 

Catherine lay in fetal position, pressing her face to her knees, 
blocking out everything but herself. It was incredible  that she 
hadn't... left, vanished, dissapear, he couldn't think what it might be 
like. Perhaps evaporate like water, drain away in a direction 
impossible to follow. 

Lang shook himself out of his revery. He didn't like to, he didn't 
want to push the rules of the game, but it seemed the only answer 
was to make some grass himself. 

Okay then, so be it. He came to attention, arms straight by his 
side, composing his face in stern lines of concentration, breathed 
slowly in and out. Relaxed, made a wave of relaxation run down his 
body, pouring from his head into each arm and leg. Froze, so still he 
could hear Catherines small, tense gasps of breath, and, very 
casually, he  reached into a pocket of his jeans. 

Nothing. 

Returned his hand to his side, cleared his mind, relaxed, and 
tried again, forcing himself to believe, this time, really believe that 
he had missed it the first time. That's right, he told himself, it's just 
there, under the keys. Just tucked right down there in the corner of 
the pocket.

Nothing.

Okay. We missed it. It is there, I remember, I left it there last 
night. From the party, that's right, I bought it from the fat guy with 
the stupid long beanie, now I remember. It's just...

And he reached for his pocket, and at the last moment he 
hesitated, pulled a face as he realised, "Of course!", and reached into 
the other  pocket.

And emerged with a small baggy of green.

"Cool!"


"Ashley called for you yesterday and I knocked but you were 
asleep." said Karen. "He was desperate."

"Say why?"

"Listen to this:"

She launched into the involved tale of a boy who caught trains 
to never-heard-of country towns and tried to live in the bush until 
the locals got tired of his raiding their kitchen gardens and called in 
the police trackers to remove him. Micheal tried to follow her story 
but was soon lost. The cold seemed to seep in through the window 
with the darkness that now reigned outside and soon he was shaking 
and stiff. His mind wandered idly through regions it only traveled 
while stoned, and when he returned Cymoril was recounting her 
dream of the Burning Man.


The witch smiled gratefully, placing the bong on the floor 
besides the bed with elaborate care, still blowing jets of smoke from 
the nostrils.

"That's good. That helps. But I'm staying up here. I need to 
adjust, I just need time to adjust, okay?" Lang nodded and sat down, 
watching her relax into sleep with a grateful smile on her face.


"I think it means something," Cymoril said. "I've had it before, 
in different forms. It's not prophetic, but it does mean something."

"Don't worry," said June. "If anyone has important dreams, it's 
you." She fished down beneath the bed where books filled the gap in 
the wooden pallet. "Here, he lent this to you for a reason."

Carl Yung stared from the creased and greasy paperbacks 
cover, face aged with white wrinkles of folded cardboard. Some 
poorly bound pages fell out.

"Andrews book? Sure, and we both know what reason!" 

"I think he really meant it seriously when he leant you this. 
You remember freaking him out with the story of the Lost Year?"

"That's true, and he felt bad about losing the books I leant him. 
Who does he chase now?"


Not far away, across the night, in another room.

The room was bare and cold. A hanging bulb glared off the 
cluttered white Formica kitchen table and reflected up onto the faces 
of the people seated there, casting their shadows on the walls behind 
like a shadowy band of spectators. They were drinking wine from a 
cask, cheap red wine that foamed as it was poured almost like beer, 
smelled of apples and left a sour taste after it was swallowed. 
Outside, it was just night, the blackness of the yard contrasting the 
high light of the city sky, a television sky as it is called. Thin clouds 
hung low over the streets, reflecting back the orange streetlight and 
diffusing the last sunlight that leaked around the edge of the Earth 
but letting most of the days meager heat through. Some nights in 
winter the clouds are thick and soft like a blanket and keep the city 
warm, but these clouds were threadbare. There was no heater in the 
room and the stove sent most of its heat up the hood and out the 
chimney. A pot of pasta bubbled on its burner, next to a smaller pot 
of bollognaise sauce, and from the top of the fridge a black boombox 
stereo played, filling the room with melodramatic sad music, an early 
Cocteau Twins album. The group around the table nodded in time. 

Jackie sat at the head of the table, leaning her chair back 
against the wall behind her like a schoolgirl. She wore a cut down old 
wedding dress, hacked off at mid calf length and fraying from the 
many cuts in the lace, hand dyed an imperfect black. Drinking from a 
plastic cup with a picture of Spiderman printed on the side in colours 
faded by many trips through the dishwasher. Her face was pale with 
makeup, which didn't hide the roughness of the complexion beneath, 
and actually highlighted the pimples buried under the pancake by 
throwing their shadows into stark relief.  Raven black hair flowed 
back from her shiny brow and tumbled down behind her and over 
the cheap green kitchen chair she sat on. It was her best feature and 
she carefully washed it every second day in distilled water and 
brushed it out with a hogbristle brush. Her expression was cold and a 
little contemptuous. Like one of those pouting mannequins from the 
sixties in old dress shop windows. It was a message for anyone that 
cared to read it, written in lines of eye and mouth. It said: I don't 
really like this life, but I have no choice, I don't really like these 
people, but they are the only ones that accept me, and I hate myself 
but I'm stuck with me forever, so just try not to bother me too much, 
okay?

Andrew sat next to her, the same who leant Jung to Cymoril, 
nervously sipping from a chipped glass tumbler. Tall and thin and 
stooped, with mouse brown hair and glasses, the only glasses in the 
room and the only hair that wasn't the darkest black money could 
buy. He glanced often at Jackie's face, trying to detect any clue as to 
her mood and whether he would be staying the night with her. It 
remained an unreadable mask to him, because he had never really 
learned to read anyones moods, not even his own. He wore a thick 
black greatcoat from Germany, and under it a clean black shirt 
tucked into grey jeans belted with a length of chain. His face smooth 
and expressionless, preserved by years of disuse, emotions jealously 
guarded through the years for fear of ridicule.

The only one who looked like he was genuinely enjoying the 
evening was Thomas. A thirty five year old, childlike man who 
owned the house, every few minutes jumping to his feet and 
checking on something. Sometimes it was the stove and the pots 
bubbling there, sometimes the oven where a loaf of bread slowly 
rose and browned. He turned the music up or down a fraction and 
grated a pile of cheese for the spaghetti. Jackie paid him rent for the 
upstairs bedroom, and they had an agreement, low rent in return for 
occasions like these when she would contrive to get him involved 
with her friends. He loved the gothic set far more than they loved 
him, was oblivious to the lack of interest they paid him, and smiled 
indulgently when they joked at his expense. 

The song ended, and Miko poured himself a refill. He was 
drinking from the coffee mug tonight, as his favorite cup, a hand 
blown goblet in wavy green glass, had been knocked from its shelf 
by the white cat that often raided the kitchen when the door was left 
open, but he liked drinking wine from the mug. It was fitting, it fit in 
with the romantic squalor he cultivated in his life, like smoking hand 
rolled cigarettes and walking the night streets in the ragged black 
overcoat he wore now, and wearing his hair sprayed high and palm-
tree fluffy, and reading creased paperbacks by Lovecraft and 
carefully keeping his face pale and white, and all the other dramatic 
lies he cultivated. Miko lived in the house, in the old laundry that 
had been tacked onto the back wall twenty years before, where he 
constructed his nest of smelly blankets, where the walls were coated 
in ancient ragged layers of posters and he burned yellow joss sticks 
at night.

 "You know, that song takes me back to the days I lived in 
Stanmore at the Cross house." he said. "That was at least a year ago. 
We used to go up into the roof, they had laid old formwork across the 
beams and all this cloth was nailed to the underside of the roof. We 
would climb up the ladder in the hallway through a manhole into 
this space, put this same album on the old record player up there 
and listened to the wind going over the tiles above, it would whistle. 
Then a plane would go over. Those planes ruined the whole 
atmosphere. Without them it was like some ancient ruin, especially 
with the smell from the possum nests in the eaves. You came to visit 
us then, remember?"

Jackie  half-smiled and sipped demurely from her plastic cup. 

"Yes, I remember. Wheeaaow, crash!" and they both made the 
ritual gesture with their hands, of a plane crashing into the ground, a 
tradition in that house on the flight path. "It was like children 
draping blankets across the kitchen table to make a cave. Pity you 
didn't have a cellar."

"There was a space under the house but it was just brick piers 
and dirt and only four feet high."

"Didn't Thomas try to get us to sing so he could tape us?"

"Well, I thought it was a good idea at the time. It was, too." 
Thomas blushed slightly. "I was going to record it for posterity. Just 
imagine, we could have had a tape to play now, right here. Those 
times deserved to be recorded and saved."

"Don't you think they should be allowed to die and be 
forgotten?" asked Miko.

"Possibly. I don't think everything should be remembered, it 
wouldn't be missed if it was forgotten. Some day we won't remember 
any of this, not really." said Jackie.

"Some day? What day is that?"

"When we grow up, I suppose. When we finally stop fighting it 
and fall back into our parents shoes. When we get careers and start 
raising children, and our hearts die within us."

"But is that going to happen? Not if I have anything to do with 
it." said Miko. "Anyway, we're ruined as far as parenthood goes. We 
would try to make our children as cynical and worldly as we are, and 
mess them right up."

"No, they'll revolt against us and turn into Christians, just you 
wait."

"Yeah, I can see it now. "Son, I'm really worried about you. I 
hear you're going to church and thinking of marrying your girlfriend. 
You refuse to take drugs and worship Satan, you disgust me. I'm 
disowning you!" 

"We're out of step anyway. None of us were yuppies. Greed 
wasn't good enough. It had to be style."

"Style!" Andrew choked on wine and had to cough over his 
shoulder. "Has it ever occurred to you thatwe don't have any style? I 
mean, no offense meant to present parties, but style is only what the 
herd wants, and we are so far outside the herd we can't even see 
them except on TV. There's graffiti: "God gives fuck all about Goths." 
We don't have style."

"Indeed. Hey Thomas, is that spaghetti done?"

"Oh, yeah. I'll see." He jumped up and turned to the stove while 
Miko glared at Andrew. A serious faux pas had been commited. 
Someone refused to believe. Miko turned down the ray of death to 
check Jackie for support. She stared down at the table before her, 
deep in thought.

"Done!" Andrew helped him serve out the food onto the 
carefully mismatched plates. The bread was still rising, in fact it 
would probably turn out too airy and full of giant holes because of 
too much yeast. Nothing is perfect. They ate in silence, Miko forking 
down huge mouthfuls and trying to talk through them, Jackie picking 
listlessly at the food, pretending she wasn't hungry although she was 
actually surprised at how good it was. 

For some time now she had subsisted on a diet of instant 
noodles and deli sandwiches, with chocolate and drugs as dietary 
supplements. She found eating embarrassing, as though it was an 
admission of weakness, and she didn't want Thomas to know she 
liked his cooking.  He and Jackie had a running feud in the kitchen. 
She would save the stock from the noodles she cooked nearly every 
night, and cook the next batch in the same pot, adding the powder to 
the left over soup from the last batch till it became thick and strong 
and rancid. This sickened Thomas so much he would gag and tip the 
greasy liquid down the sink, and she would curse him when she 
found out and threaten to poison his spices with snake venom. He 
probably saved her from dying of food poisoning more than once. 


Andrew is a fool, she thought. Andrew  is a fool because he 
states the obvious. Blind Freddy Krueger could see they were freaks 
in an age of cool. 

Andrew was not one of the gang. If she could trust her senses, 
sort their whispered truth from the confusion within her, then 
Andrew would have a family. He would be married and have a job 
and want to spend the weekend kicking balls around the nearest 
park with them, spend holidays in caravan parks, teach them to read. 
Thomas would probably never even get laid, and Miko would die of 
terminal cynicism, but Andrew was on the rails. All this was just 
romantic detail to fill out his life, something to tell his kids when 
they were old enough to listen. "Your father was a Gothic once, kids. 
He wore black and looked like this," and he would show them a faded 
snapshot and make them laugh.

And she would be a mother. Some day. She would have a 
family, even if she had to go it alone and raise them on the dole, she 
would have children too. It was frightening, because she might 
become like her own mother and smoke and yell and drag them from 
one father to the next. If she relaxed and let it happen. But she 
wouldn't. 



Andrew ate mostly in silence and watched the others eat. 
Jackie was delicately forking up the spaghetti with mock distaste. 
Miko ate like a wolf, stuffing his mouth and getting red sauce on his 
chin from the dangling strands, that also flicked drops onto his shirt 
and coat. Thomas's mind was somewhere else and he looked 
distracted. When the tape finished he snapped out long enough to get 
up and turn it over, and took the bread from the oven and sliced and 
buttered it with garlic butter, and then sank back into thoughtful 
silence. Miko and Jackie chattered about a recent movie, an old 
horror film that was being re released to the delight of the cult fans, 
and Andrew supplied them with details of the plot.

"Don't spoil the ending." Jackie said.

"How can I, it doesn't end. When you leave the cinema that's 
just the movie going on for the rest of your life."

"Insane. Pass that black stuff."

"Why?"

"To put on the food." She held up a forkfull of spaghetti.

"Don't put soy on that," said Thomas. "Try the cheese, it melts 
into the sauce."

"Did you ever try eating that vegetable oil cheese they put out? 
It tasted like putty."

"Cheese only tastes good if it has fat. You pay for the taste by 
eating cholesterol. But cottage cheese can be nice." Andrew squeezed 
a slice of the bread like a sponge. A stream of melted butter ran out, 
to Jackies amusement and disgust. She laughed so hard she choked 
and went to her private store of Coke in the fridge, finding it more 
depleted than it should be. Instead of raising the issue she silently 
filed it for later and sat down.

Dinner finished and they moved into the lounge room. Jackie 
turned on the television with the sound down, and Thomas moved 
about the room lighting the candles that stood on saucers on the 
tables and shelves. Andrew carried the stereo from the kitchen and 
changed the tape to one he liked. 

"We got a new load at the bookstore." Thomas told them when 
they had settled and were drinking Chateau Tanundra supplied by 
Miko. They thought he stole the stuff by dropping it down pantslegs 
in the store because he always had so much of the stuff lying around. 
Empty brandy bottles stood around the walls of the laundry on the 
strip of stained tile that his rug didn't cover, some with candle stubs 
melting down their necks that he never lit. "Some friend of Phillo 
brought in a carfull from up north. Wonderful stuff, I paid him fair 
price and he was amazed, so it looks like we have a new scout now."


Thomas's bookstore sold Books of a certain type. There were 
the usual old Penguins in stacks of orange bindings, and self help 
books, and thick paperbacks by authors with one syllable names, 
airport departure lounge vending machine books, but these were 
somewhat of a front. The real profit lay in rare and forgotten books, 
published by maniacs with cash to spare to spread their view of the 
world,  long tracts by dangerous cults,  roughly printed paperbacks 
in bad English published by the author. Also books of a horror genre 
that had its day in the sixties; too horrifying to be sold openly, they 
were printed privately and sold by special order or under the 
counter. There were old books of herbal remedies that people 
collected, because they believed in miracle cures that had been 
suppressed by the drug multinationals. There were hundreds of 
books on conspiracy theories, where the world was ruled by cabals of 
Zurich bankers and Jesus had survived the crucifixion, moved to 
France and started the line of descendancy of the French nobility, 
and Arthur Pendragon won the Second World War. 

Out in the country towns old books waited safe under their 
protective coats of dust in attics, bookstores, sheds, school libraries. 
No one knew  their value and a skilled trader could ship truckloads 
to the city. It was an ideal situation and everyone ended up happy; 
the country contact with his ten, the trader with his hundred, and 
Thomas with the thousand the books might eventually fetch. The 
magic was in the knowledge, the memory files in Thomas's skull. He 
had to know what the buyers wanted, and how much to sell for. 

 There were also the grimoires and other books on magic, most 
of which were forgeries, copied out on artificially aged paper and 
sold to suckers for small fortunes, often with the whispered 
instructions; "Take care, this is the only copy in existence!" Written in 
old faded ink and chicken blood that was then baked in the oven and 
smoked like fish. And books of gambling systems and chance tables 
for card games. And the works of forgotten poets.

"You see, this is an industry," he told them. "I make a living 
from the occult, from magic, and from peoples basic level of paranoia. 
There are others who do the same with this hunger for grunge. My 
traders buy the funky second hand clothes from the sixties and 
seventies out there too, the stuff that ravers and ferals are so keen 
on. They don't know the value of that shit, everyone wears K Mart 
and aspires to Country Road and Mambo. So the inner city feeds on 
the country rubbish and calls itself lucky, happy to pay the price in 
order to luxuriate in decay. You have to have the right props to make 
the act convincing."

"Like with furniture, the old handmade furniture the antique 
shops are paying the big dollars for. They call it art." said Andrew. He 
sat on the floor before the lounge leaning back into Jackies legs. It 
felt like she was trying to plait his hair, which was too short and 
thick for that, but he enjoyed the sensation. "But people know about 
that scam now, and the country towns would be dry."


The talk spun around, spun around and went nowhere, carried 
on the power of Mikos excellent booze. Jackie felt good. In fact she 
felt wonderful, because the day before she had run out of noodles 
and had fasted until tonight - now the vitamins in Thomas's food 
flowed through her enervated blood and into hungry cells, and deep 
drives started to manifest. Her fingers wandered from Andrews hair 
to his neck, and out along the shoulders, and he relaxed so much his 
head dropped back unintentionally to lie in her lap, the soft impact 
sending a sharp thrill into her stomach.  

"I still remember one time when I swore an oath, to accept any 
offers from vampires." said Miko.  "We saw The Hunger on video one 
night, and actually swore that if we ever had the chance, met an 
honest vampire, we wouldn't hesitate to drink his blood and become 
one of the undead." 

There was a moment in which anyone else; the former 
schoolmates who lived in Bellevue Hill now, for example, in airy 
apartments with polyurethane floors and bare white walls, and wore 
white tee shirts and denim jackets with labels on the outside, who 
drove shiny new Toyota four wheel drives, who right now were 
probably watching the Sunday night movie and eating microwave 
popcorn; a moment in which they would have leant back and laughed 
heartily at the pathetic stupidity of believing in classical vampirism 
and flying bat winged demonic beings who would appear in the night 
with promises of eternal life. But they will never know the sweet 
thrill that bound them that moment, precious memory of shared 
dreams. The only thing they had in common, in their absurdly 
different and mismatched lives, was this desire; to go into the 
mysteries and the horrors, confront the terrible truth behind the 
world, fight for an alternative to the clean, almost holy 
wholesomeness life sold them. They shared the fantasy of living 
outside the human race, free of money and possessions, sufficient 
unto themselves and feeding without qualm from the veins of the 
living. 

"I saw a show the other day," said Jackie, " called Saving. It was 
about all those little tips, how to save money without cutting back 
too much. It was like a television version of those handy hints 
columns in woman's magazines my mum cut out and pasted in 
scrapbooks.  They had  segments  on "cheap but stylish" dining, 
where you can make mince cassarole for under four dollars a tiny 
portion served in those little plates they use in commercials for 
frozen dinners, and where to find upmarket second hand clothes 
boutiques. You could fuel your fireplace on dried, compressed grass 
clippings from a council tip. Put a decorative citrus tree in a tub on 
the patio of your apartment. Poor yuppies." 

The brandy went around and everyone had another glass. The 
evening entered still time, frozen like amber and twice as precious.


The loungeroom was crowded with people waiting for Lang to 
return from the video store. Junes fried rice had been a major 
success; everyone had eaten a plateful and there was still half a wok 
left. This would be put in the fridge, where overnight it would 
develop a dried crust and be rendered unfit for the delicate stomachs 
of the household who would make a half hearted attempt to warm it 
up for forms sake and then scrape it into newspaper and leave the 
greasy wok in the sink. 

June remembered her mother, making soup. Everyone in her 
family put on kilos of fat over winter because of her cooking. She 
would have cried to see these skeletons, corroded away at the core, 
toxic wastelands inside from lead petrol fumes inhaled on the 
playground when young, and the poisonous yellow extruded snacks 
with explosive names they crunched between uneven pre teen teeth, 
asbestos fibres from sound absorbent ceiling tiles, chorine out of the 
tap; some day it would pass a critical level and everyone explodes in 
flames like phosphorus bombs.

Micheal accepted chunks of chocolate when the block came his 
way but he waved away the white wine when Cymoril offered him a 
glass. He sat on the floor next to the crowded couch, very aware that 
the arm of the couch was bending out and due to snap off soon. 
There was a folder balanced on his knee. Before the video arrived he 
hoped to puzzle out a small problem, but the noise and the 
impending disaster with the couch was too distracting.

Who owes me, he thought, who have I got points with, that I 
can convert easily now. There's Byron; we shared vital books last 
semester when it seemed the entire university needed information 
on early Australians attitudes towards Aborigines and the library 
was bare. He was also good at science, a regular lab nerd but cool, 
easy to know. 

He stood and stepped over people to the door, walking around 
to the phone in the hallway. Byrons number was written on the 
plastic of the folder he held, along with dozens of others, members of 
one of the  data forgery collectives at uni. He dialed.

"Yeah yeah yeah." said an irritated voice.

"This is Micheal, Byron. Just asking about the science project. 
Running and counting." (For their science unit they had been set an 
experiment. They had to test their respiration during exercise, 
counting breaths or heartbeats while exercising in some way. It 
sounded so good on paper, so very "hands-on and relevant", but it 
was impossible. No one had the enthusiasm to run to exhaustion and 
try to count and record at the same time. Someone, after the lecturer 
handed out the result sheets, suggested soaking them in salt water to 
simulate sweat.)

"Yeah, that fucking farce. Sure, I'll run you off some results 
tomorrow. Meet me in the bar at lunch."

"So what did you do?"

"Looked up something like it in a teachers companion to a 
kiddies textbook. The teachers copy had the range of possible results, 
so I set up a routine on a computer to generate random numbers 
within the curve, and corrected for the fact we're at least ten years 
older than those kids were, and smokers and such. It looks good. Any 
suggestions?"

"Only that you give me a heart attack."

"Sure. You still have to write up your conclusions to this, I'm 
only talking about the experimental results."

"No problem." They chatted, signed off and he returned to the 
loungeroom. All the students were experts at this. Their assignments 
held the excitement of watching bean sprouts grow and they forged 
the results with a little research and psychology. 

The video had come. Micheal tossed the folder behind the 
couch and took a position next to Karen, sitting crosslegged too near 
the screen. She lifted the doona she huddled inside and swept a wing 
around his shoulders. There was a blower heater going, and the room 
was filling with the singed smell of carpet fluff and dust being 
sucked into its fan and burnt on the elements. Someone turned the 
light out and Lang slotted the cassette and sat besides the new girl 
who hadn't said a word all night.

They watched a dozen trailers. It was a French "loft apartment" 
movie; the characters inhabit converted warehouses with interiors 
designed by teams of artists and architects, supposedly the work of 
the characters themselves. People fuck in scenes rich with slow 
motion pans and digital effects and music by Belgian industrial 
groups, and eat expensive food chewing with their mouths open, and 
throw expensive toys from open windows to symbolize the 
transience of life, arguing the meaning of existence so quickly and 
cleverly the subtitle writers give up and let them, until the major 
characters decide to end it all in a suitably ironic and powerful 
metaphor. 


Two o'clock: people were crashing. Micheal suddenly realized 
that the night before had been spent in debauchery, and the 
following day would be dedicated to education, and in order to make 
it through he would have to sleep. Waves of fatigue came like pulses 
of pressure behind his eyes. Wordlessly he stood and stalked from 
the room, making his way up the stairs.

The light was on in Karens room, so he knocked, and entered 
after half a second, consciously trying to reinforcing his right to be in 
the room, sexual politics overriding his desire for sleep. She was half 
undressed, tee shirt off and jeans unbuckled, but she turned without 
complaint and smiled a forced smile. It would be uncool and 
backward to hide herself or even insist he leave the room, she was 
trapped in the complicated web of custom, law and manners that 
governed the behavior of her peers. She stood, wishing to put the tee 
shirt back on and ask him to get lost, but unable to without seeming 
prudish.

"June's cooking grows on you, doesn't it?"

"If you don't wash it off it does. You have classes tomorrow?"

"Yeah, but nothing serious."

"I have to go in to submit late stuff, and nothing else to do. 
Before you ask, and I know you will; one week."

"Not bad, not bad. I mean, they only give us three months to do 
the stuff in. They have to have some consideration. After all, we have 
hectic schedules to fit our study into."

"Cynic." 

"Yeah. Well, good night I suppose?"

"Good night." she said forcefully. He turned with a last un-
apologetic grin and left. She scowled, and went to set her alarm. 


Karen had spied him in a pub, wearing football socks pulled 
over the ends of his jeans. 

It intrigued her. Where did people wear football socks over the 
ends of jeans? It was as strange as tribal scars or facial tattoos would 
have been. 

She approached and they talked. His story was an old, plaintive 
refrain she had heard over and over, but she liked the way he told it, 
and gave him a place to stay.

Those socks didn't last long. Under her guiding hand he stood 
transformed, chameleonlike, parachuter boots to ragged tee to flanno 
shirt to half-dredded hair that fell around his neck, a perfect being. 
It was as though he had done it before and only needed to be 
reminded.


Jackie lead the way into her room. It was a mess. A real mess, 
in that not only were there mounds of personal possessions lying 
balanced in piles on every surface, thousands of papers and 
magazines and empty cups and cassettes and books and clothes, 
nothing put away, but there was also dust, thick and grey between 
the piles, and the carpet had never been vacuumed, and there were 
things on the floor, dead dried slugs that had crawled their way in 
from the garden and dehydrated in this environment, and curls of 
dried orange peel, and old bandaids stuck to themselves, and toe nail 
clippings that would spike a bare sole.

It was dirty, thought Andrew. You could catch tetanus. Of 
course, he would enter far worse places with Jackie if she wanted 
him to, if she wanted to have sex in some exotic, squalid 
environment to enhance her thrills. 

"Sorry about the mess." she said.

"No, don't be. I like it. Makes a change for me." How pathetic 
you sound, she thought. Have to get this going before he ruins the 
vibe.

She smiled brilliantly into his startled face, and for a fleeting 
moment she was as beautiful as she would ever be. Beyond the art of 
it, something real, something she might never admit to, leaked out, 
some genuine longing for love uncorrupted by power maneuvers or 
fucked up emotions. That moment stretched out and with skill he 
usually lacked Andrew caught at it, stored it away so he could 
always remember and say to himself, "That was real!" His tense mask 
of a grin relaxed into a strong smile of desire that said it all. They 
stepped over the clutter to the bed. 

[trying to live like a person and maintain the necessary 
number of friends, magic number to hold empty moments at bay, 
fighting for love with others fighting for love, fighting those that 
have and those that haven't, fighting the changing mind fickle as 
water, the moment that slips quicksilver by and is lost through 
insensitive hands, expecting too much and getting less than enough, 
crying inside carefully saved tears that never leak...]


The house was asleep. 

Catherine lay as still as the dead, curled tight beneath the 
covers, and Micheal lay stretched out full length on the floor beneath 
his spare doona, head pillowed on a folded towel.

Their breathing slowed, evened. Beneath their lids, eyes started 
to move.

Dreams.

In blackness, they opened and looked around.

They floated facing each other, each in orbit around the other, a 
few metres of vacuum between.

"No one mentioned my surname." said Catherine in a small, lost  
voice.

"Catherine Wick." Lang drawled. "Don't you remember?"

There was a long pause. She closed her eyes.

"Yes... "

"Catherine, from Melbourne."

"From Melbourne."

"Yeah. You came to see me. We shared a house when I lived 
down there."

"When you were studying science at the uni."

"Yes, back then."

There was a long silence before she spoke again.

"I... I need time to think... sort things out... get it all straight..."

"It all worked out fine. You were just a little sick, perhaps from 
the party so soon after arriving. That's what the others thought."

"Did they...? I guess you're right."

"Of course they did! They're very forgiving. They won't ask too 
many questions, and if they do, you'll be able to answer them. It's all 
in your head, all the answers you'll need, you just have to learn how 
to access the memories."

"I miss home. I miss my castle. I miss the forest."

"You'll learn to love this world. It's got a lot going for it. I think 
it's better than home ever was."

Catherine closed her eyes and slept. After awhile, Lang did the 
same. Orbiting each other, around and around and around.


CHAPTER 3
MONDAY


Andrew slipped out the front door and closed it quietly behind 
him. A drought of months had been broken and fresh hope irrigated 
his dry soul. It poured out through his face; he smiled at passers by, 
unconsciously, something he rarely did, and their smiles in return 
pulled his grin back tighter until it hurt.

King Street never looked better to his shining eyes. It had been 
the asshole of Sydney, Redferns forgotten cousin, low rent dormitory, 
once. Now realtors sold adventurous yuppies on crumbling terrace 
dumps, moving in like introduced weeds to virgin bushland, with 
Toyotas full of antiques, their cash giving the place a flush of health 
that would last for awhile before turning glossy and clean and sick, 
squeezing the natives out to St. Peters and Enmore. 

And he fit, he really did! Black tee shirt loose flapping over his 
hollow chest, grey checked flannel shirt from Kmart round the waist,  
black jeans, black boots knotted with frayed red laces. He passed 
gentle smooth skinned boys with finely muscled limbs that spoke of 
danceclubs and gyms, and bent old addicts in nondescript drab 
Woolworths trackpants, winos swaying in their overcoats, and crusty 
feral Newts wrapped like technicolour mummies, fraying shirts worn 
proudly till the last shreds dropped away. Primly dressed senior 
citizens walked obliviously through the crush of youth, their eyes 
filled with memories of the King street they had known, once a 
respectably shabby dorm suburb of white faced blue-collared 
workers. Andrew strode through them all and felt their acceptance 
like a blessing. Even the disapproving glances of the old people made 
him smile. Hell, he thought, I'm bothering them. That's good! He felt 
hip in a way the pupal Andrew, riding to school on the train in grey 
uniform, would never have believed. 

A bus stopped ahead and he ran to catch it. Down, past the 
university, to Parramatta road, and he stepped off to make his way 
to Junes.


She and Cymoril sat side by side on the front steps in the sun, 
sharing tea, a blanket draped over their shoulders. 

"How are things in Newtown now?" asked June, as he emerged 
from the house with his own cup. 

"Weird. There's this graffiti, all over the streets and buildings, 
put up by someone called Kat. He, or she, is going to kill himself soon. 
He keeps mentioning the council. They won't pay him for his paint."

"Kat" said June, "is an artist. Who do you think paints the 
murals?"

"Never thought about it. Maybe bombers, rap kids with spray 
cans?"

"Never! He uses a brush and he does it for love. They're tourist 
attractions and the council won't acknowledge his work. Cops bust 
him. People paint over the walls he does. Poor Kat."

"You seem fired up today." commented Cymoril. The tight grin 
stretched his cheeks again.

"Oh, I've got a girlfriend now! Jackie."

"Cool!"

Their blessing warm and familiar around Andrew, like a 
woolen coat last worn by a friend. 


It is a note book, recycled paper with specks and flecks of 
other peoples writings bound up in the weave. Bound with a spiral 
wire.

Inside, pages of terse notes scribbled fast in lectures, using a 
private shorthand which saves the wrist. Photocopies filed there, to 
be hole-punched and stored in folders, to be read through in the 
week before exams.

There are pages with other writings. Shaky hand, scribbled on 
the train or bus, lines scratched away and discarded and others 
written in between, little arrows pointing the way. 

There is a theory that poetry is a natural waste product of  
malfunctioning glands, and like all waste products should be 
disposed of where they won't harm the environment...


"And you really want to put this in the paper?"

Looking at his scribblings, in the harsh fluorescent light of 
rational judgment that pervaded the university like the smell of 
whiteboard pens, Micheal tried to hide embarrassment.

"Why not? They keep asking and no-one else will give. Look at 
the state it's in, thin as a pamphlet and half the contributions are 
signed with pseudonyms suspiciously close to the editors' names."

Micheal slapped a copy of the university rag on the table. It 
had been kicking around the tables in the bar for some time, ringed 
with the brown imprints of middie glasses and crunchy with crumbs 
between the pages. The cover was a crudely drawn leering face, the 
words "C'mon, Budgie, Do Your Worst!" emblazoned in headline type. 

"Are you using your real name?"

"I should. Why not?"

Byron smirked, passed the notepad back and looked away. A 
movie was playing on the bar TV high up in the corner of the ceiling, 
ignored in the noise. Most action was concentrated around the pool 
table, where money was changing hands.

"I don't read much of this stuff. The English we do in our course 
is toilet paper, just to fill points. I'm more interested in making a 
buck."

"With an arts degree?"

"Well." He looked pensive. "There's more to life than money. 
There's also the things you buy with money. There's nothing more 
pathetic than a rich man with no interests outside getting richer. Or 
more dangerous. You just keep going up and up with no end in sight, 
never understanding why, just rising like one of those helium 
balloons that you see floating along sometimes out of the corner of 
your eye, some kid let go of the string."

They drank in silence. 

"Here are the results anyway." Byron flicked open his smart 
black leather bag and extracted sheets of fanfold paper. Graphs and 
charts.

"You just draw a line from point to point, making sure the 
points stay between the lines, and write down the points you chose 
in some sort of table as your results. You can't go wrong, unless they 
ask us to perform the experiment again in the classroom."

"No problem."

"They won't ask, of course. Well, do you want another?"

"Yeah, why not." 

Byron made his way to the bar, leaving Micheal to fold the 
printout and slide it into the notebook, in between the pages of 
poetry. 



Paper and pencil collide in the dark,


Vision and the eye confront the day.


Down your road and through the open door


Passes the body when the pilot's not there,


Melted, passed out in the air


Like a leaf that changes its mind.


Now is the time, the state of mind is right,


The dew on the lawn, so bright,


The chimney stacks and the glowing clouds.


Semi trailers stamp their feet in the road


And rattle our rare and precious gifts,


The bottles filled in the rain


With wine from the sky, come down


From clouds as bruised as grapes and plums, 


But this wine is tainted.


Walk me to the shops.


Buy me something I want.


Don't ask, don't anything,


Nothing matters here.


Our guests express their fears,


With glasses they refresh their tears


And keep the helping hand at bay


To better preserve their illusions


Through the long night and into the day.


Beautiful words might emerge if we wait,


But should I draw on white walls


Or write on black?


Wood and paper, pencil and the page,


Left in emptiness, suspended in doubt,


Add these lines to the story.


Not even scared of the dark now


You have done this thing,


And still cannot believe it was accomplished.


Could mortal humans perform such empty feats


And believe their importance?



I found an old prediction,


A map of cards laid out


In a moment on the velvet,


And they have been right so far.


Oh God, thought Micheal, Byron's right. 

The embarrassment rose inside him like sickness, and he 
hastily closed the book to hide words that seemed only foolish. 


He walked slowly down a corridor, stooped under the weight of  
books in a sportsbag. Sick yellow sun fell through the windows. The 
smell of the carpet rose in the air.

"Hello Micheal, how's the study?"

He looked up and recognized his lecturer for Australian Studies, 
standing at an office door covered in Gary Larson cartoons stuck on 
with yellowed tape. 

"Not too bad, Mrs. Graham."

"Good. You did well on that essay. The best, actually."

It took a few seconds for his memory to work.

"Thanks. You mean the one on Tasmanian Aborigines?"

"Yes. At least, that was the subject you chose. Most of my 
students did the one on changing values in White Australia."

"I thought about that one. All you had to do was write about 
yourself. It would have been easier but I liked the other subject."

"Come in and pick it up if you like."


He followed her into the cramped and cluttered office. Books 
crammed the shelves, stacked two deep, and covered the seat and 
desk as well. He cleared some from the visitors chair and sat down 
while the academic hunted through a stack of essays in varied 
folders. 

"I gave you an A+." She held his work out across the desk, a 
slim plastic folder full of typed foolscap. He took it and stowed it in 
the bag. There was an awkward moment of silence as he thought of 
something pleasant to say. 

"Er, good. I was wondering what I would get."

Embarrassed silence.

"Don't you want to talk about it? You really seemed to be 
involved in the subject, lots of research. And some of your language 
was quite strong for an essay. It was very effective, as far as political 
writing might go."

"Political writing?"

"Of course, I didn't mean that as an insult!" She smiled with 
tired irony. "It was very impassioned, I felt you had some connection 
with the subject."

"No, can't say so. I just wanted to get a good mark."

"Didn't you find the subject interesting? What about the 
references, the books you read? Look, don't think me nosy or 
anything, but I do have a professional interest in my students' views 
on the course, and you are a student. I want to know if you take 
what you learn seriously, or if you think they're just bricks paving 
the way to a degree."

Micheal thought about his meeting with Byron and the pages in 
his bag.

"No. Really, I'm just here to do the course and get results. I've 
heard about all this stuff before, about the Aborigines being killed 
and Tasmania and all that, but really, this was just one of my 
assignments. Think about this: I'm doing ten subjects this semester, 
and your course is just one, and one of the smaller ones at that. I 
can't really spend that much time thinking about what I learn, when 
I'm outside the classroom."

Mrs. Graham gazed sadly out the dusty window. The afternoon 
sun lit up the coating of cobwebs on the glass and they blazed, 
obscuring the view.

"But when I went to uni we took everything so seriously. Our 
lecturers would have us buzzing for days after good lessons. Why 
can't I do the same for you?"

"What do you mean?" Deja vu. Karen's words, faintly 
remembered.

"I just don't understand what's wrong!"

"Wrong?"

"Why you don't get involved, why these issues don't grab your 
interest. Your faces, so tired all the time, when I walk into a tute it's 
like teaching zombies, or "The Invasion of the Bodysnatchers". 
Sometimes you light up, but then you get embarrassed or something 
and it dies. This job isn't easy, we run on hope much of the time, 
hope that you will be inspired more than just educated. God knows 
the pay isn't much."

Walls of armor slammed into place around his psyche and the 
lunatic alarm was screaming. Soon she would be sobbing into his 
shoulder. It was time to say something, trip her up before she 
started her life story.

"Nothing's wrong. I already knew about the Tasmanian 
aborigines, I heard about them at school. This teacher even taught us 
to spell "genocide" and explained exactly what it meant. She was 
nearly fired for doing that. Children cried in the classroom and their 
mothers didn't like it. What a story! And all true. Makes you want to 
do something, to lessen the guilt. But listen..." He cast around in his 
mind for something to give her, something that would explain.


"I was at school, in High school, and went to a chemistry class. I 
was early. I sat down and hung out, hoping the teacher wouldn't ask 
for my late assignment, and also hoping it would be an experiment 
lesson, they were good fun. 

"These other two guys came in, talking seriously. They saw me 
and stopped talking. Sat down on the other side of the room. I knew 
them, we weren't friends but they were okay, right?

"Then they came over and said hi, and they asked me a 
question. They wanted to know the best way to commit suicide. What 
would be sure, but painless? I was kind of a trivia king in the school, 
and they thought I might know.

So I thought they were playing some mind game, trying to 
freak me out, or settling a bet, so I ran through a few possibilities, 
like jumping off bridges being the surest to kill you, but the most 
painless one being a jar of sleeping tablets and a bottle of scotch. 
They nodded very seriously. I asked which one wanted to off 
himself. 

One of them said calmly, "Me". This was worrying. So I asked 
why, and the other one told me, very plainly, that he had cancer. 
Brain cancer, a tumor near the front, and he didn't want to die slow. 
God, he had scans! Took them out right there and showed me. It was 
white and spiky like a starfish, there in the front, blood vessels 
snaking around and in and out, and just looking at it you could see it 
reaching out hungrily for more. I just couldn't speak any more, so I 
looked away, and for the next week I saw him in the corridors and 
looked away.

I was waiting for him to turn up in the paper. Found in the 
harbor, jumped off a bridge. Or worse, I'm wanted for questioning 
because they talked him down from the bridge and he said I told 
him what to do. It would have been a relief to hear he'd jumped.

He went to hospital and they went in after the tumor. His 
friend told me, later. They took too much out. He's still alive, until 
they pull the plug, which they won't. Even now his mother's probably 
reading to the wasted corpse of her son in some dusty ward while 
the respirator chugs away and fills him with air. "

He stood and slung his bag. It had worked. Time to get away.

"That doesn't really answer my question." she said. "People die. 
I lost friends in school. This happens."

"You weren't listening. He's not dead, and they won't let him 
die, no matter that he wanted to. That never happened before. 
Sometimes I think: what if he's still in there, cursing the stupid, well 
meaning fools who put him in hell? Ah, it's a stupid story. Sorry I 
mentioned it."

"There's something I want you to do for me." announced Mrs. 
Graham as he opened the door.

"What?"

"My daughter's sixteen," she said. "She "visited" last week after 
about four months living in the city with some friends. Went out a 
lot, lived with a boyfriend for awhile, I think. She changed a lot in 
that time. Became more like you, more cynical than before, but she 
was always a cynic."

She bent and searched under the desk, kicking stacks of books 
out across the floor in irritation. Finally she laid an old black volume 
on the crowded desk and opened it. Micheal watched the careful, 
sure fingers as they rapidly paged through.

"Here."


We are done with Hope and Honour,

We are lost to Love and Truth,

We are dropping down the ladder rung by rung,

And the measure of our torment

Is the measure of our youth.

God help us, for we knew the worst too young.


"That's what she makes me think of now. You live in the city, I 
know she has friends in Chippendale. If you see her can you let me 
know? Keep an eye out?"

"This is some responsibility. I don't even know what she looks 
like, her name, anything."

"Katerina."

"I'll keep an eye out, but I can't promise anything. It's a big 
city. If I see her, I'll let you know."


...dreaming in the library, confounded by the sheer mass of 
useless information that rises in stacks around you, thinking up witty 
lines to inscribe on the walls of the little cubicle...  nurses in the bar,  
loud and crazy, life and death in their hands... the flash of cold air as 
you step outside to the lawn, feeling the bass thump of the band 
through the soles of your shoes... lunch on the lawn, who do you sit 
with? Try-hards, open folders, swapping notes. Slackers smoking on 
the ornamental rocks in the native plant display discussing who slept 
with who? The dorky losers who smile to much or not at all, too fat 
or too pimply, they always talk about TV? The weird, with strained 
voices and dirty clothes, always seem to be sweating, neverending 
exam stress and trying to decide whether to quit or not? Grey suits 
and football jerseys and bicycle shorts and velcro sneakers...


Jackies mind wandered as she woke.

It was the third time she had awakened that morning. The 
night before was a pleasant memory, a warming glow that she 
treasured to herself. She knew she had done the right thing. She 
thought.

Maybe not.

Of course, she reviewed the last boyfriend she had, and the one 
before. A familiar emotional sawtooth wave, each peaking at the 
beginning and trailing away to disgust and betrayal and the end. But 
this would be different, that she knew, it felt different, cooler and 
more adult, and opstimistic.

He was nice, a good fuck. He made sure she enjoyed the 
experience. For all his dorky ways he had some moves, she thought. 

But it was obvious he wasn't very experienced as well. It 
showed in the slightly hesitant way he acted. The things he said. The 
way he tried so hard, too hard almost. As though he was ashamed of 
his lack of practice.

He had woken her early by rubbing her back, and seemed 
interested in having more sex. She felt so relaxed and comfortable 
she said no. Just rub my back. So he did, and she dozed off.

The second time she woke he was getting dressed.

"Hi." she breathed.

"Hi." he said, pulling on his jeans over cartoon printed undies. 
"I'm heading for Junes place today. Wanna come?"

"No. I'm too tired. I'll just stay here."

"Sure? We haven't been over for awhile. I thought it would be 
nice to drop in."

"No. You go."

He finished dressing and bent over her to kiss her cheek. She 
could smell her own scent faintly on his face. 

"See you later, okay?"

"Okay."

And she drifted off, back into dreams. 

And she woke again, to a silent room, thoughts still dreamlike, 
wandering through strange corridors of logic.

She thought about quitting her job. The CES were still 
malleable. It had been more than a year since the last time she had 
availed herself of their services. But employment was loosing it's 
mainly masochistic attractions for her, and she envied Andrew his 
freedom, now. If they were going to stick together, she might just 
arrange to be fired. It wouldn't be hard. She'd wear more and more 
makeup, day by day, carry her necrotic image into work until the 
customers complained and she was kicked out. 

Miko was working, though. He was a roadie, lugging cases into 
and out of the Opera House and the Entertainment centre for huge 
amounts. It meant he had to work strange hours. It wasn't unusual 
for the phone to ring at two in the morning, and for her to hear him 
stumbling, cursing, from his room out the back to answer it, and later 
hear the cough of his old car as he started it in the cold and roared 
off, to return at midday and crash, dead tired and six hundred 
dollars richer. That was the life. Unless there was no work, and he 
had to hang around the house waiting for the call, or hassling his 
contacts to find him something. If she could find a job like that... 
freedom...

Her mind drifted back to her past.


Jackie grew up in the leafy suburbs of the North. Her parents 
cultivated her like a prizewinning lily, in competition with their 
friends. They dressed her in white and sent her to Sunday school. 
They spent huge amounts on private school fees, enrolled her in 
physical health programs and filled her with vitamins. She was an 
only child. 

She was charming and polite. Her parents had reason to be 
proud. She charmed their friends and befriended their friends' 
children. They went on holidays together, booking wings of isolated 
hotels on tropical islands in the Great Barrier Reef, renting cruisers to 
go snorkeling among the coral and giant gropers. Or they would 
spend the winter holidays cross country skiing through the Snowy 
Mountains National Park, traveling in a pack of colourful parkas from 
hut to hut, drinking cocoa before roaring fires and singing old 
campfire songs her father learned when he was in the scouts.

She was the dux of the school, always. Always, she won the 
debating. Always the paintings she did for her art classes won 
awards when entered for the interschool art competitions.

You get the picture.

Her memories of these times were hazy, shredded, partly 
erased. She liked to think that someday they would be entirely gone, 
and she would be a woman without a past, cut off from the young 
girl she had once been. That person would be dead like a distant 
relative one only knows from photographs and the stories told by 
ones parents. 

Sometimes, when a vivid memory broke through the shields 
she had erected and presented itself in pristine sharpness on the TV 
of her mind she shuddered and mumbled to herself, twisting her 
head, trying to turn away.

She was happy, then. So happy. 

She went to a debating comp, one that lasted for hours past the 
time it was supposed to end, and had to ride home late at night on 
the train. Sitting in the back seat of the lower deck, in the carriage 
that housed the guards compartment, she hoped she wouldn't be 
mugged, scanning the platforms of the stations as they stopped to 
check that no dangerous characters boarded the train. 

At a stop near the city a young girl walked down the steps and 
sat halfway down the aisle. She was younger than Jackie. Her hair 
was dark and greasy, clogged into rats tails that seemed strangely 
chic, as though it was an effect achieved after hours in a salon with 
handfuls of mousse. She wore a loose tee shirt, baggy cotton chino 
pants, hightop trainers (years before they became fashionable). 

Jackie sneered at her back. The girl slumped down and 
appeared to doze off.

Drugs, thought Jackie. She's on drugs. I can tell. She uses heroin. 
That's why her hair is so dirty. And still, she couldn't help but 
admire the wild way it flowed down her back. She tried to resist 
admitting it, but somehow it seemed healthier than the glossy well-
nourished conditioned hair she was used to seeing. She thought of 
shelves of moisturizing shampoo, of her split ends. She thought of 
endless shopping sessions in boutiques for expensive clothes. 

As if sensing her stare, the girl roused herself and turned, 
catching Jackies eye. jackie turned quickly and looked out the 
window, but it was too late, the stranger stood and lurched down the 
carriage towards her. Oh no, she thought, this means trouble.

The stranger sat across the aisle from her and leaned across.

"Have you got a cigarette?"

"No. Don't smoke."

"Oh. You go to school?"

"Yes."

"Which one?"

"Westleigh High." A lie, but she didn't want to utter the name of 
the expensive private school she attended. 

"Oh yeah? I had some friends that went there." Silence, 
stretching. "So, where are you going."

"Home."

"Oh. Worked late?"

What the hell, thought Jackie. No way around it.

"Had a debating comp today. It went later than usual."

"Debating, huh? They didn't have that at my school. Or maybe 
they did, but I left too early. Me, I'm looking for somewhere to stay. 
There's a grandstand at an oval up this line, that the groundkeeper 
usually leaves unlocked. It's warmer than outside, and they have 
these big sheets of canvas tarp you can crawl under. It's safer than 
trying to find a place in the city. I used to go to the youth refuge, but 
they always called my mother. She left my description with them all, 
they recognize me when I walk through the door. If the cops come 
down the carriage, I'm out of here, they know about me too."

"Uh huh."

"Yeah, she's got them all looking for me. My dad was a 
politician, he had a lot of pull, and mum inherited some of that. 
They're separated now, but he doesn't want me running around. If 
his rivals get hold of the fact, they'll use it against him."

"Why don't you make a deal?" asked Jackie. "They could pay 
for a place for you to stay, rent a flat somewhere, and they don't 
have to worry."

"They tried that. But it doesn't work. First they agree, I don't 
want to see them. Then they start checking up on me. Then they 
start telling me what to do, and it's the same as if I lived at home. I'd 
rather sleep under a grandstand than somewhere where mum will 
drop in every second day to try and "encourage" me to do something 
"positive" with my life."

She looked up, and tensed. Stood, turned, darted up the stairs. 
Jackie watched as a pair of police came through the doors at the far 
end of the carriage, one descending to the lower deck and the other 
climbing to walk overhead on the upper. The cop came towards her, 
swaying as the train rocked. He hesitated when he reached Jackies 
seat, seemed about to speak, but passed on. 

Jackie felt like following at a distance, to see if they caught the 
girl, but she sat still until her stop. For the next few days she felt 
very strange, as though she was hovering outside herself, looking 
back in. A new viewpoint from which to observe her life. Long after 
the memory was dead in her mind that viewpoint remained.

It was Monday, and she didn't have to work. The day was free 
for whatever she wanted to do with it. Which usually meant nothing 
at all. But that was a luxury in itself. The ultimate luxury. 

But lately she felt like the ultimate luxury was getting stale. 
Free time is no time when nothing occurs to fill it.



Waves of red tiles. Coated with lichen. Sagging rooflines on old 
houses. Pastel colours from the sixties. Pastel concrete and pastel 
roofs. Glass bricks set into old walls, survivors of the cycle of taste 
and hip again. Old lawns raised above their concrete paths by 
decades of topdressing. Venerable palms tall and grey, frayed leaves 
rasping the wind. Strange geometry's in the architecture. The 
buildings swept down from the crown of the hill to Bondi Beach in 
streams of view, each peeping over the shoulder of the next. Their 
wave crested and broke at the headland, crowned with grass and the 
tall stack of the sewer vent, and the sea so blue beyond, ruled with 
parallel lines of waves to the horizon.

Lang, checked cotton red and loose around his legs, scuffed 
black leather on his bent back, dingy tee-shirt stained with beer, 
lead the dazed Catherine down the sloping grass of Bellevue Hill 
park. There was no one around. He carried a black nylon bag across 
his shoulders; camera and associated equipment, tripod and lenses in 
padded cases. 

"I was worried yesterday."

"No time to adjust, so much nothing and then this... it was the 
deepest shock... the textures are hurting me." Catherine sat cross 
legged, picked threads from her skirts acid-damaged hem. Her shirt a 
scarlet beacon, seventies collar pointing sharply at the faded pink 
shoulders.

She took shades from her pocket. They gave her the blank look 
of the survivor of a plane crash being interviewed on the nightly 
news.

"There's something more here than a dream. Feel that breeze... 
it's real! That's the sea! I might have missed it for ever, like my 
parents did..."

"It scares me. I started something, I can't have created this. Oh 
no..." said Lang softly. He kneeled before her and unzipped the bag. 

"I don't really believe you, you know? There isn't enough 
space, in a mind, for this much detail. It has to be something else. 
There has to be some other explanation for this, than that it's your 
dream made real."

"Everything that ever happens to you is stored in the memory. 
Hypnotists can make you recall the weather on a boring day two 
decades ago when you were five, not just that but also what 
breakfast you had, what clothes you wore, right down the songs you 
heard on the radio." said Lang. "It works like this." He held up the 
camera, Arriflex professional job with wide angle lens, and started 
screwing it onto the tripod. "Every moment a photo."

She shook her head.

"It's more than that. So many people, all with their own 
versions of a past. How many people can fit in one head?"

"Your head too, now. This is your dream as well."

"Look at this."

She plucked a dandelion from the long grass. Twirled it in her 
fingers.

"Every seed has fur, thousands of tiny strands. If I had a 
microscope I could count them. Are those numbers real?"

"They must be."

She blew the dandelion and watched the seeds rise, taken by 
the wind. Lang waited for the breif cloud of seeds to blow away 
before he triggered the camera. Pan, click, pan, click, he snapped the 
horizon, the blue line of sea and the sea of roofs that washed down to 
its shore.

"What shall I do, that's the thing. What shall I do? 
Employment? It seems like the right idea; to fit in, take a job, build a 
life... I still can't get used to the idea that I can... did you feel that 
way?"

"It was so gradual. It was like waking slowly from dream into 
real, eyes slowly opening to the light... I watched the branches grow. 
They sprouted, divided, a million times, the complexity, the roots of 
reality. All the details. I watched them grow."

"You can do anything you like, Catherine. I can show you the 
way."

"First I have to decide something. I have to decide if I want to 
stay here, or not. I have to see what your dreams are like before I 
decide to live inside them."

"Yeah, but in the meantime, you're here. You have to play along 
with the story, until you make up your mind." He panned the camera 
around till it faced her, and adjusted the focus. She frowned into the 
lens.

"No one at the house knows me."

"They will. You came from Melbourne, where I used to live. 
That explains a lot; many people move from one city to the other 
here." Click.

"Yes... I can remember." She lay back and frowned, expression 
of pain. "Melbourne, it's like I actually lived there... I can see the 
house, people I knew... so real, so fake... they came to me in my sleep, 
dreams floating in... so long ago... oh no, I don't believe it!"

"What?"

"I used to be your girlfriend!"

Lang smiled sideways at her.

"You can be again! It would explain a lot, after all. You want to 
fit in: this would be the perfect way. My old girlfriend; we've made 
up, you move to Sydney and live with me, perfectly reasonable."

"No! I don't want to!" She leapt to her feet, shaking in rage. 
"You sleazy bastard, I can't believe you did that! And expected me to 
go along..."

"Well, why not? Calm down!"

Catherine turned and walked away fast, stomping up the slope 
to the road. 

"Hey, come back!"

But she ran, and caught a cab at the intersection, leaving Lang 
standing on the footpath.

"Where to love?"

"Umm... Chippendale."

She sat in the back hid behind black glass. The driver was 
silent. All around her, the incomprehensible mysteries flowed past in 
blurred shards of mystery. So alien, she hated it. 

Was it personal? Her eyes tried to find Lang in the signs that 
lined the road. In the faces of strangers. Was he here? Was the 
taxidriver in Langs head? She closed her eyes till she arrived.

"Hi." called June as she stepped from the cab. "You're Catherine, 
aren't you? I'm June. I live upstairs."

"Oh, hi. I didn't see you before. Yesterday, I mean."

"We were upstairs." June hugged Cymoril tight under the 
blanket. "This is Andrew."

Catherine shivered cold with loneliness. They were friends, 
they sat on the doorstep and shared tea, and she couldn't meet their 
eyes. 

"Oi, what about paying?" called the cabdriver as she 
absentmindedly swung the door shut.

"Oh shit" she muttered to herself. She hadn't thought about the 
fare. Quickly she checked the wasitband of the skirt for pockets, but 
it was seamless. The shirt pocket, a little voice told her. The 
sunglasses.

She reached in, and her fingers closed on a folded bill. She half 
expected lines of print, when she pulled it out and unfolded it, but 
there was only dense grey engraving. The taxidriver frowned when 
she handed it through the front window.

"You should have told me. Lucky I have change."

With poor grace he dragged out his billfold and passed her the 
change, then accelerated away with a screech leaving the sulphur egg 
smell of natural gas. Catherine turned and stumbled past the little 
group on the doorstep, into the cool darkness of the loungeroom.

"Hey, are you alright?"

She gingerly lowered herself into the lounge. It remained solid 
beneath her.

"Want some tea?"

Her eyes focused on the stereo. She saw the cassettes. Familiar 
tapes.

"Where'd you get the tapes?"

"Oh, around. Most of them are copies of friends albums. 
Cheaper than buying CDs. None of us has a player." Andrew smiled 
down at her, though he was spooked by her weirdness. Humor her.

"Some of them are off the radio." Cymoril handed her a cup. 

"Are you okay?"

"Okay... I feel a little strange, that's all. Not used to moving..."

"Ah, homesick. That makes sense. I guess you used to live with 
your parents."

"Yeah..."

"Stupid thing to say, I guess. We all used to live with our 
parents. Then we escaped, but we always want to go back. I haven't, 
but I always want to. It never goes. We're like reformed smokers 
who go for years without a cigarette and still feel the need."

"I left home when I was thirteen." said June, settling into the 
lounge chair facing Catherine. "But it was the circumstances forced 
me to."

"What circumstances?"

"Well, we were poor and my parents wanted me to be rich."

"Most parents want their offspring to be their clones. If they 
could drop a fingernail into a tank of warm juice and grow a body 
and download their own minds into it, they would."

"But mum was a ten pound immigrant from England and dad a 
market gardener from Italy. They both wore war scars. They both 
lost their parents. They had seven children over twenty years and I 
was the last."

"All my brothers and sisters made good. They married and 
produced grandchildren even as I was growing up. And all the time, 
there was this pressure. I would do the same. It was set, they 
thought. I would, naturally, be a credit to my family and finish of the 
perfect score, and make babies for my mother to hold while my 
nieces and nephews were gangling teenagers. It was all laid out, you 
see? They wanted a steady supply of babies to fill their need."

"So I escaped. It was like breaking from prison. I ran away and 
broke their hearts."

"Did they find you? Did they try?" asked Catherine.

"They tried. They found me when I was living with some 
friends in Brisbane, in a council block. I remember the visit. It was 
tense, really tense. They kept looking around as though they 
expected to be attacked by someone and robbed, even in our living 
room. This was their ultimate horror. Even the successes of my 
siblings wasn't enough. There had to be a perfect score or they would 
have failed."

"Mum offered for me to run the family concern, which was a 
mixed business corner store in Botany. Dad wanted to give me money 
if I would only move back to Sydney. He kept hinting that he could 
"understand" it, if I was addicted to anything. Didn't quite come out 
and say the words plain, that would be too painful. I remember he 
stared deep into my eyes, and I realized later he might have been 
checking to see if my pupils were contracted, as though he picked up 
a hint from Real Life, some story on how to tell if your kids are on 
drugs."

"After they left I kicked on, traveled around the North, moving 
with nomads in vans who grew dope on federal land. Tons of ferals 
there, tribes of them. Like living with indians, or gypsies. My parents  
don't know this, of course. That would be too much for their minds to 
tolerate. They hated gypsies; remember, they came from Europe." 

The front door rattled, and moments later Micheal walked into 
the room. He dropped his bag under the coffee table and slumped 
into the only empty chair. 

"How's uni?" asked Cymoril.

"Yes. Still there. My science lecturer is mad. This too will pass."

"That bad?"

"Oh, I'm just having a winge. I got some good results today, so 
it wasn't a dead loss. I feel like celebrating."

"We haven't been down Brett's way lately."

"That's the spirit! I'll get changed." He hauled himself from the 
broken backed lounge chair and headed for the stairs. 

"You'll like Brett's place." June told Catherine. "It has 
atmosphere."


There is a suburban house, close cropped lawn spread out 
before like a worn rug, studded with crinkled brown leaves from a 
bare liquid amber that shaded the eaves in summer. Now it stood 
black and silver, clawing at clouds with clenched fingers.

Inside, the rooms dream in silence, sparsely furnished in 
Vinnie Classic; old wood, destined never to be antiques, chipping 
paint revealing the layers of colour beneath. The kitchen table is 
clean and bare. The stove sits inside a brick fireplace that once held a 
wood burner, and the lintel is smoked to a somber tan that speaks of 
time passing in peace, and meals, and life. 

Go into the living room. There's a couch that must have been 
rescued from a sidewalk, and repaired, spread with layers of canvas 
and black and red sheets of cotton, trailing across the carpet. Two 
towers, four milk crates high, full of jazz LPs in fuzzy edged 
cardboard sleeves, frame the stereo. 

The rooms here seem to inhale light from outside, drawing it in 
through small panes in yellow afternoon clouds. Everywhere space, 
bare floors of carpet and rugs and cushions, and the walls are 
covered in batik cloth with thumb tacks at the corners, and things 
are clean, not neat but clean, with the unmistakable signs that 
someone keeps it clean. A clock ticks on the shelf. A wind up clock 
that would most likely run silent in most houses.

Stairs lead down from behind the head of the kitchen table. A 
row of small windows the size of a handkerchief light the way, their 
shelves crowded with plastic figurines and rubber frogs and resin 
pyramids full of tiny underwater gardens and glowing trees of 
sparkle and bubble entrapped in the clear plastic, and clockwork 
parts from Timex and Big Ben alarm clocks and tangles of wire 
discarded by Telecom workmen digging into streetside conduits, and 
so many other things that nobody ever descends without stopping at 
least once to pick something up and satisfy curiosity. 

At the foot of the stairs, a door. Deep pulsing rhythms come 
from within. Techno, steady and reassuring, the sound of mechanical 
heartbeats like the throb of the factory that is the heart of the world. 

Within is chaos. 

Fluorescent organisms grow in an alien jungle. They stand 
coiled about with flexible silver snakes and polished bubbles of 
chrome fruit hang from their tentacular branches. Spun filaments 
link Styrofoam particles into meshes of life, like deep sea life 
clustered in alien attitudes around a vent spouting warm water.

Brett stood back from his sculpture and pushed his mask to the 
top of his head. A vacuum cleaner whined above the techno, one tube 
lashed with silver duct tape to the paint gun in his hand, the other 
trailing out an air vent. He considers the effect, and adds a few more 
sprays before shutting down the sprayer and sitting down for a bong. 
A UV tube glows eerily blue from the ceiling.


Brett started using fluorescent paint when he lived in London.

"I had a studio in an old hanger." he told some friends once. "I 
used a big industrial sprayer from a robot in a car factory to coat 
plaster casts with layers of glossy enamel. Just before I moved out 
this friend of mine, who was going to use the space when I left to 
grow hydroponic pot, brought over a UV lamp to test it on the 
current."

"He switched it on and I turned out the rest of the lights to see 
the effect, and the walls glowed. I was astonished! I hadn't even 
realized the paint would do that! I never forgot that moment, that 
discovery. It changed the course of my work."


The buzzer rang, and he stood wearily, to climb the stairs and 
open the front door. 

There they were, the customers. He smiled and swung the door 
wide. "Come in."

They followed him back down, exclaiming over new finds on 
the window sills, trailing into his studio and taking chairs around the 
coffee table.

The best of the treasures that fill the stairs are here. There are 
lenses from old video cameras, still able to focus, with iris shutters 
that can be operated by hand, and the flat lens plate from an 
overhead projector, and the fat lens from a photographic enlarger. 
And there are things to look at through the lenses; bendy rubber 
figurines of the Pink Panther and transforming Macdonaldland 
characters and giant marbles filled with included galaxies of bubbles 
and cracks like the patterns inside an ice cube, and skeletal 
gumleaves from the garden, and shiny plates from worn out hard 
drives. A city of candles emerges from the crowded toys, and Brett 
lights them as people pass the things around, and he lights incense. 

The ritual begins. He takes a ziplock bag, almost a kilo of buds, 
dark green with good red flecks, from its hiding place, and passes it 
around for those present to admire the aroma. They inhale 
appreciatively.

"Where?" asks June.

"I'm not sure. I think it may be Australian, this time. I was 
almost certain the last lot came from Thailand, it had that certain 
look, and it was a little moldy which often happens when they 
smuggle from a warm, humid climate. This looks very fresh, so it 
either came from the state, maybe even the National Park, if any 
stands were left when the place burnt down, or it came from the 
South, which would explain the lateness of the season. It would have 
matured but two months ago in that case, but it's strong... I really 
can't be sure."

In the old days there'd be a story long as your arm about the 
route it took. I remember hearing stories..." said Andrew.

"So do I, but the transport people don't like to talk about that 
now. They're sick of being busted and they take precautions to throw 
anyone, me included, off the scent. Here."

He took a few buds from the bag and started rubbing them 
through the wire sieve, catching the resulting mulch in the copper 
plate. Those assembled around the table looked on in approval.

Andrew toasted a cigarette, and Brett crumbled the tobacco in, 
packed the cone of his tall brass bong, and started the circle. Soon 
thick grey clouds filled the air to the sound of muted bubblings, and 
they sat back with goofy smiles of happiness. The toys crowding the 
table and the shelves behind their heads took on a new fascination, 
and the immersed themselves in the various visual effects to be had 
from, for instance, looking at a 3D comic using the bicoloured glasses 
and a lens, or holding two lenses as a telescope and watching the TV 
in the corner, playing fuzzy afternoon cartoons in poor colour with 
the sound turned down. 

There was a computer on a desk in the corner of the room. 
Another art work glowed from it's screen, a fractal, and a window 
floated over the top. The slowly crawling bar of an operation 
lengthened millimetre by millimetre as it performed an operation. 

Micheal watched as the bar reached the end of it's journey, and 
the window disappeared. The image re-drew, this time distorted, the 
centre bulging as though seen through a thick lens, sphereized, like a 
bubble had risen beneath the oily sheen of the fractal and was ready 
to burst.

"How's the machine going?" he asked Brett.

"Oh, I'm still having a few problems."

Brett stood unsteadily and ambled over to the computer, 
swaying between plastic branches still wet with bright paint. He 
closed Photoshop and scrolled through the disc contents. Brett 
appeared at his shoulder.

"You've been busy! Look at all these files."

"They're for an exhibition in Melbourne. They're all finished 
except the last, and I have to send them off on disc, but I don't know 
how to make them fit. Do you know how to fit them onto discs?"

Micheal considered the files. None was less the five Meg. He 
found Disc Doubler and started it going. Once again the slow worm of 
time crawled across the screen.

This will make them smaller, Brett. It compacts them. They're 
sure to have the program at the other end, to unpack them. It'll split 
them into bits to fit on each disc."

In silence they watched the machine crunch numbers.

"Can you use a modem?" asked Brett suddenly. "I was given 
one yesterday, but I don't know how to plug it in." He reached a box 
from the shelf above the computer and handed it to Micheal. "Any 
ideas?"

Micheal considered. He used them before, on friends machines, 
but never knew quite what he was doing. Always he would have to 
turn to someone for help. Now he was stoned, and the sounds of 
people laughing and talking was distracting. His attention span 
seemed to be about a second long.

"Sure, no problem." He stripped the tape from the box. He 
prayed to the machine gods to guide his hands. Subconsciously his 
mind ran through the Rules of Machines, rules he and everyone else 
learned as surely as their ancestors learned which plants to eat and 
how to hunt certain animals, rules like; "single arrow pointing right 
means Play; double arrows pointing left mean Rewind."

Brett wandered back to the crowd.

THE WEIRDEST THING HAPPENED


"What's the weirdest thing that's happened to you?" Cymoril 
asked Andrew.

"Do you mean, have I seen a UFO or ghost or something? I don't 
think so. I don't believe in those things."

"Not at all?"

"At least not until I see one."

"Well, surely something weird can happen even in your life?"

"Oh, yeah, maybe... yes, I can think of something really weird 
that doesn't even involve the slightest bit of the supernatural!"

"Go on."

"Well, this happened just before I left home. Dan and I drove 
up the coast  to visit the relatives for Christmas. This was like a 
yearly penance we had to undergo, to atone for our sins during the 
year; we would pass through the fire of the families Christmas 
gatherings and come out purified."

"Driving up the tollway, through these familiar turns, every 
bend and cutting along the way like old friends passing by, triggering 
floods of memories. You know the tollway? It feels like a big slow 
rollercoaster, rising to a cutting through the top of a sandstone ridge, 
and descending to the valley beyond, zooming down long grades of 
landfill taken from the cuttings. 

I remember fighting with my brother in the back seat, and 
making paper windmills with pins and paddle pop sticks, and holding 
them in the rush of wind from the little slit at the top of the window, 
until my parents complained about the whirring noise and the 
propellers that broke loose and whirled about the car. I remember 
being half asleep at night, watching the lights pass by outside, the 
white headlights and red tail-lights and the way they passed us and 
we passed them, this random, meaningless swapping, white for red, 
red for white, hour after hour."

"You understand, we used to go there often in those days. This 
was when I was young, about twelve or thirteen. I remembered, and 
I drifted further back, and suddenly I was remembering some very 
strange things, things I had forgotten for so long they seemed 
completely strange."

"It was a feeling that my stomach was actually attached to the 
road surface speeding by underneath, as though a string were tied 
around my guts and the other end tied to a weight that dragged 
behind us as we moved. There was a sense of pulling, a cramp, and 
vibrations traveling up the string. This pain was so intense that my 
whole body would go into seizures, either frozen paralyzed in the 
seat emitting a faint moan, arms spastically tensed at my sides, or 
doubled over trying to hold my guts from being ripped out shaking 
my head and drooling onto my knee."

"It shocked me cold. Sitting there in the car, reliving this insane 
torture I had completely forgotten. I remembered being doubled 
over clutching my stomach for half an hour at a time, unable to 
speak, twisted tight as a knot in a rope."

There was no respite from these episodes because they would 
always occur on the stretches of road where we couldn't stop. There 
were never any barbecue sites or Oak milkbars ahead when they 
happened, only miles of freeway were it was illegal to pull in unless 
the engine died. I remembered my parents, the one in the passenger 
seat leaning over into the back, trying to rouse me, shaking my 
shoulders, "Are you alright, Andrew? Is it bad?" and I was unable to 
speak, to tell them it was worse than anything."

"No idea what really caused them. I think I forgot them on 
purpose, pushed them away to the minds attic, hid them from the 
future because they were so scary. Maybe it was because I thought 
no-one could stop, for any reason, on those tollways. I thought it was 
illegal to stop and we'd go to jail if we did. That thought was so 
terrible; that there were places on earth where it was illegal to stop, 
and where everything had to keep moving, forever, and it shorted 
out circuits deep in the brain and fused my body in helpless horror."

"Later that afternoon on the way home I asked Dad, if he 
remembered. I wanted to know if my memories were real."

"He remembered. He said I used to have fits, and pass out and 
moan and my eyes would roll back. They took me to doctors (which I 
also forgot and still don't remember), but they couldn't find anything 
wrong. It was psychosomatic, they said, and my parents shut up. 
Then they faded away and disappeared, forgotten. Until now."


"My weirdest thing," said June, "happened in Arnhem Land, at 
the US navy transmitter."

"It wasn't a protest, as such. There was no planning, and very 
few people even knew the place existed."

It's called an aerial farm. About four hundred square K of land 
up there is US territory, twenty K on a side. It's red desert, ochre, 
with termite mounds and strings of tough trees following the beds of 
submerged creeks that seep along through cracks in the plateau, that 
ancient plate of rock that is actually the oldest piece of land in the 
world. I swear, scientists have dated the rocks, measured their 
magnetic fields or something, and some of that rock has ridden 
around the world on top of the land for billions of years! It looks it, 
too, dry and flat, and the last remnants of mountains once as large as 
the Himalayas are low hills of sandstone worn down as smooth as 
sand dunes. It's old, and tired.

"Ferals live there. They build humpies with abandoned cars of 
federal land, and grow small stands of hemp, and rove in squabbling 
bands in buses and vans. They're all white. They all have parents 
back in the major cities, or country towns, and they've all seen 
apocalyptic movies like Mad Max, where the term "feral" comes from. 
It's like a theme camp for kids in the Christmas Holidays, only 
instead of "Pirates" or "Explorers" the theme is "Post Apocalyptic 
Survivors Roam the Bush."

"Anyway, I stayed with some for a month, and they decided 
one day, in that anarchic way they have, to show me the aerial farm. 
We piled into transport and drove out.

Now, I swear this is true. Four hundred square kilometres of 
land strung with wire, criss-crossed in a grid, with a tower at each 
intersection of wire, thousands of towers. The perspectives it made! 
They were enough to justify the trip alone. Those towers were 
precisely laid, and they disappeared into the distance in shiny 
chrome ranks, and the shimmer from their flat sides, they were I 
beam shaped, and the sun drops crawling along each strung wire as 
we drove... it was awe inspiring. For a second we completely forgot 
their purpose. For a second it was purely an art work."

"What was it for? They transmit shortwave radio to navy 
submarines from there. There's a similar, bigger farm in Nevada, and 
another somewhere else, and they're linked together to transmit to 
deeply submerged submarines. 

At least that's what the navy claim they're for. The ferals had 
these rumors they swapped and traded with each other, and one of 
the rumors was that the aerials were part of a scalar weapon. I didn't 
really get what that meant, though."

"I know what they are!" exclaimed Andrew. "Scalar weapons 
can cause atomic explosions at any point they're aimed at, without 
there having to be a bomb there. By tuning these world wide 
transmitters they can cause a massive explosion, anywhere they 
chose. Like, imagine a ray gun that can teleport a bomb to wherever 
it's pointed."

"Yeah, that's what they said. The other rumor was that they're 
communicating with aliens, either in space or inside the planet. I 
liked the idea of aliens underground, flying their saucers through 
giant caves! I realized it was actually more likely than aliens from 
space.

"The other theory that had some credibility was that the aerials 
were transmitting power directly, without the need for cables, to 
navy installations in remote areas around the world. This was tied in 
with Tesla, who is a sort of god to these people. They all know the 
story of Tesla's life, and his ideas for the transmission of power 
around the globe, and how Edison burnt down his labs and promoted 
his own flavour of DC power by electrocuting sheep with AC. Well, 
now we have AC power, it's better, but Tesla gets little credit except 
with the ferals.

We were riding in this cut down combi that was modified for 
pig shooting by some farmer, and bouncing down red roads around 
the perimeter that were filled with deep dust. The dust swirled up 
behind in twisting plumes. It alerted the guards."

They came out from under the wires in khaki jeeps bristling 
with guns. Suddenly we were surrounded. The drivers had crept up 
on us, driving down the rows of towers hidden by the perspectives, 
their own plume lost in the overwhelming brilliant dazzle of sun on 
the wires. 

They wore helmets and they weren't smiling. I remember this 
quiet groan from dozens of throats as they skidded to a stop around 
us, and climbed out, each with an evil black carbine cocked and 
ready to roll. They wanted to see our ID. They said we were 
trespassing on US territory, and we needed visas. 

We were shitting ourselves. The driver didn't even have a 
license, and ferals have this phobia about carrying any kind of 
identification because the police are always harassing them in towns. 
I had nightmare fantasies about being rounded up, driven deep into 
the heart of the base, imprisoned in a barbed wire compound and 
never let go. It was US territory. They leased it from the government 
for one peppercorn a year. 

They stood guard in the hot sun, and radioed for advice, and 
their commanders, the ones with fancier uniforms, came back for 
another look. They were all looking at us, trying to decide, I suppose, 
if we were really a threat to their security. I don't suppose we were. 
Even with a pair of wire cutters each we couldn't have made a dent 
in that thing. Even dynamiting a few supports wouldn't do any harm. 
I don't think so.

They came back one last time and told us to leave and never 
come back. You should have seen us! Roaring away laughing with 
hysterical relief. We were free! We passed through the lions den!

And we camped, maybe forty K away, halfway back to the 
shantytown we started from. It was night and the roads were bad. 
The combi wasn't very well. We decided to stop, risk the chance of 
another encounter, and build a fire and sleep. 

About twelve we all woke up. There was something wrong. The 
fire was down, red coals gleaming, the stars were bright, no moon or 
city lights. It was cold, like the desert gets, and they shone steadily.

What woke us up was the combi headlights. They were 
glowing. Pulsing irregularly, getting brighter. Everyone rose from the 
ground, were we were lying, wrapped in blankets and canvas, just 
stood and stared.

The indicators started blinking, out of time, and the parking 
lights. The cabin light. Every light came on. We could see the glow of 
the dash reflected in the windscreen. We heard the starter motor 
kick over, really roughly, and then the engine roared into life. It 
didn't move, the hand brakes were off, but it stood there revving like 
crazy, backfiring and all, glowing and flashing and fading in and out, 
and all the lights were bright, too bright.

The guy who owned the van raced up and climbed inside. He 
raced back out as soon as he saw the keys weren't in the ignition. He 
stood there, back to the combi, and pulled his keys out of his pocket, 
then turned and raced back in. He slammed the door and put the key 
in and turned, but no difference. It just kept rocking and rolling. He 
ducked down under the dash and pulled the fuses. Same difference. 

And it went like that for hours. Till four in the morning we sat 
around the fire, built back up into a roaring blaze, listening to the 
roar and choke and not talking. Sniffing the occasional gust of 
exhaust that wafted over us. Passing the fuses, burnt out, melted, 
some of them, from hand to hand.

It ran out of petrol. We heard it die. The lights kept flashing 
and the starter motor whined till six, and it switched off. The sun 
was just nearing the horizon, a touch of colour in the sky, and the 
driver took a branch from the fire and walked to the silent vehicle 
and climbed in and stuck cigarette pack foil over the fuse terminals 
and turned the ignition.


The lights worked. The indicators blinked. But there was no 
fuel. We had to walk back and leave it there. Walk about fifty K to 
the nearest town, and hire a truck and driver to get home. I 
remember the town; they were serving the base, you could tell, and 
they hated our kind, we threatened them. We knew they were 
prostitutes, and they knew we knew. 

I know what they must have done, you know. They must have 
been using that aerial on us. They must have got us in their sights, 
and started currents in the wiring of the van, and ran it dry. I've 
seen people holding fluorescent tubes under high tension power 
lines, unplugged tubes that lit up from the electrical fields, and that's 
what they must have done. 


"What about you?" Brett asked Cymoril. 

"I couldn't think about anything, but I just did then."

"No UFOs?"

"No, nothing like that."

When I was about six I was sitting in the backyard of our 
house on a swing. Everything was normal. Aggressively so. I mean, 
there was a sandpit, and old tea chests my sister and I used to make 
into little houses, and the swings. I was sitting on one side of the boat 
swing, just slowly going back and forth. The sky was clear, cloudless 
blue. 

This little packet of biscuits dropped from the sky and fell next 
to me on the lawn.

They were ordinary Saos, two Sao sandwiches with butter and 
Vegemite, wrapped in cling wrap. I got down and picked them up 
and looked at them. The edges along one side were crushed from the 
impact, but the wrapping was still whole. 

I was young, and I thought they must have dropped them out 
of a plane. I was thinking about someone throwing something out of 
a car, I'd never been on a plane, and I imagined someone rolling the 
window down and tossing this package out to fall to earth. 

There didn't seem to be anything wrong with them, so I ate 
them. 

Now, the next time it happened I was at school. I was sitting in 
the library reading, sitting in a corner on a bean bag with a ragged 
copy of Asterix in my lap, and it happened again. Two Vegemite Sao 
sangers in plastic, right on the carpet. I got busted for eating in the 
library.

This happened at least ten more times while I was at school. 
The phantom Sao fairy would deliver these little playlunches, and I 
would usually eat them, unless someone saw me holding them and 
scabbed them. One time it landed by my side while we were lining 
up for assembly, and this boy who hated me thought I had dropped 
them from my pocket, and darted in and grabbed them. He ate them 
right there, laughing in my face; he thought he had stolen my lunch. 

Over and over. In high school. There I was, walking to class, in 
the middle of the football field, and they landed right in my path, or 
I was at netball, sitting on the bench, and they would fall into my 
gym bag. By now I was so used to it I never thought twice, just 
picked them up and ate them absentmindedly.

How hard did they hit? Saos are light things. They could have 
been dropped from miles up, or only a few meters. They were room 
temperature. They tasted fresh. The little black worms came out 
right when I squeezed them. 

It wasn't until I was in year 12, doing my HSC, that I had a 
crisis of faith, and they stopped arriving.

The last one came in the final week before exams. I was 
stressed, utterly and completely. I was trying to sleep four hours a 
night, and living on coffee, brewed coffee made in a percolator that 
turned my piss brown and acid, and I wasn't eating. It was too much 
trouble to make anything to eat, so I would get takeaway, 
occasionally, or just go without and drink more coffee. 

They thudded onto the carpet of my room next to where I sat, 
crosslegged, surrounded by piles of paper, rough notes from the 
library, and my textbooks and all. I looked at the neat little package 
hungrily, thinking "Just in time. Now I won't have to break for 
another two hours."

And for the first time in my life I wondered, really wondered. 
Since the first time it happened, and I had rationalized it so neatly, 
that they dropped from a plane, I had never questioned their 
presence in my life. It just seemed natural. I assumed there was 
some reason, some meaning to this phenomena, that I didn't know 
but would find someday. 

I looked at the biscuits and they lay there. I realized I had 
never told anyone about them. I realized they were not natural. That 
it was highly suspicious. My blood froze. I picked them up by a 
corner of the plastic and put them in the bin, and went and got an 
apple instead.

And that was the end. They never arrived after that, and I still 
wonder what the explanation was. 


They sat in silence, bound by a shivery feeling of strangeness. 
Micheal happily tapped away in the corner, accessing bulletin boards, 
and the muted music thudded on. 

"Hey Catherine, what about you?" asked Brett.

"I can't think of anything now." she said. Her two sets of 
memories conflicted and collided in her brain. "I had a pretty normal 
upbringing. My parents were pretty well off, I guess, perhaps I was 
sheltered from all the things that happen when you move a lot, or 
something. I really can't think of a single thing." She smiled thinly.

"Come on, come on, everyone has something they can't explain 
in their life."

"I think," said Catherine slowly, deliberating her words, "that 
everything has been weird. I mean," warming to her theme, "when 
you think about it, the actions that lead us to this moment are the 
weirdest of all. Think about it. All those twists and turns that life 
takes, they all add up to the most unlikely thing of all."

"I want to go back in time to when I was twelve." said Karen. "I 
want to meet this little twelve year old girl who watches Young 
Talent Time and looks forward to swimming lessons and giggles a lot 
and say to her, "Guess where your going in the future! It's... it's..." She 
shook her head in confusion. "Somehow, when I imagine it, I don't 
have any trouble thinking of things to say, but here... How can you 
describe this in 1981 terms? This music, this room... us?"

"Yeah. Imagine showing this, us, our lives, to twelve year old 
us. Just this room, on it's own, and they'd think it the weirdest thing 
they couldn't imagine." said Catherine.



"Micheal?"

He stood behind June's chair, holding a page from the 
computers printer. June looked back at him over her shoulder. She 
knew he had been listening.

"You've had ages to think one up, now what is it?"

"We should have a bloody campfire, you know? We should 
have a fire in the centre of the cave and paintings of bison..." He 
glanced at the ceiling, papered with children's drawings found in a 
garbage bag outside a school, thick poster paint lines in cartoons of 
egg people. Then he looked down at the table, the smoking sticks of 
incense among the junk.

"Yeah, you're right, I thought one up." He looked around for a 
seat. None empty, so he folded gracefully to crosslegged seat on the 
floor.


"I went to a small country school, with only one class to each 
grade. I mean, that isn't as small as they get, but pretty close. Small 
enough to be radically different to the schools in the city. Less than a 
hundred kids altogether."

"To try to prevent our being warped by this smallness the 
schools boards started these exchange programs with other country 
schools, and we'd have pen pals and class visits and excursions and 
the rest."

The pen pal thing was the worst; no one wanted to keep 
writing after the project finished, except mine, he was a dweeb from 
this pointless town on the Nullabor, out of Adelaide. He thought it 
was great stuff, but his school only had ten kids and they were 
thinking of putting them on the radio, the School of the Air, you 
know? Where the teacher calls the kids on shortwave and asks them 
if they've done their homework.

But his mum wrote to my mum and they liked each other. They 
arranged for me to visit Tony and stay there for a week.

It was pretty dull. I spent the first day being shown all over 
his parents farm. He showed me everything. I mean, everything, like, 
"This is a fence, have you got one of these were you live?" It was 
hell. I teased him to make him shut up."

"The next day he retaliated. There were these things, you see, 
that he hadn't been planning to show me. Secret things, hidden 
things. So he showed me some of those things and I changed my 
mind about him, and we still write to each other sometimes. He lives 
there still, on this isolated farm, inherited it when his parents moved 
away, believe it or not.

First he showed me the blowholes. We walked for two hours 
out through these red rock hills, just low scrub at the bottom of each 
valley where the dew falls from the rocks and the sand's moist in the 
mornings. He leant me a hat. We trudged through this Martian 
landscape, with snakes sliding away from us and eagles overhead, 
and the hot wind, but you couldn't take your shirt off or the sun 
would strip the meat from your arms. We were soaking.

We reached the last hill and stood looking out over the plain 
proper. There was a gridwork of lines out there, and he told me that 
they prospected for natural gas, and used graders to carve these 
grids of track to lay seismic sensing lines across. Like a giant 
chessboard across the desert, or Nazca lines for UFO's to land on. Not 
much use prospecting anyway, he said, even though they did find 
gas, because the plains were hollow.

Everything was hollow, there. It was all made of limestone. 
Limestone dissolves when rain soaks down through it, and millennia 
of rain had washed great caves through the heart of the land, and 
drilling was a waste of time. There was gas, and oil even, laid down 
in sand beds under the rock, but they would never be able to get it 
out. 

There was a distant sound, like the roar of a jet engine far 
away. He led the way down and around this hill, and we came to a 
cave. There was a strong wind blowing out of the cave, roaring out, 
and it reminded me of the exhaust vent for some giant air 
conditioner. That was the sound, the roar, this hot wind blowing 
away, sweeping all the sand and plants away from the cave.

He said the natives had believed in sleeping, snoring demons 
that lay beneath the desert and would wake up some day and fight 
each other. He said the wind came from pressure differences in the 
vast network of caves beneath the desert. 

And we stood there, in the mouth of the cave, with the hot, 
moist wind filling our shirts like sails and making our sleeves flutter 
like skydivers sleeves do, and the force pushing our cheeks back, and 
the wind stopped. It died back to nothing in seconds, and he turned 
to me and yelled, "Come on!" and I followed him into the cave.

We ran down this steep incline of shingle that slid away 
beneath our feet, till we hit the flat rock at the bottom, about fifty 
metres from the cave mouth. The light was very dim, but he knew 
the way, and led me on another hundred or so metres to this hole in 
the floor. It was surrounded by carvings, of human figures with 
wavy lines radiating away from their heads, placed like they were 
dancing around the hole. He leant over the edge and held his breath, 
and I did the same."

Looking down was bad, because it was so black, and the black 
seemed to be drawing me in. I held my breath, and at first all I could 
hear was my own heart. The beats slowed, became more even, and 
then split into two.

There were beats coming up from the hole, slow, deep bass 
beats that I could feel deep in my chest. We caught each other's eyes. 
We crouched there, frozen, listening to this horrible beat. It was 
terrible, that's all I can say. There was something about that sound. I 
mean, I can think of explanations that could cause it naturally, like 
underground rivers and echoes and other winds far away, but there 
were undertones to this beat, it seemed evil. But we didn't run away. 
He had been there before, I trusted him to know what was 
dangerous or not. 

So we climbed back up that slope and went back to the 
farmhouse and didn't talk about that sound. Except for one thing.

On the last day before I left we were talking and he told me his 
dad had showed him the sound. Now, all the time I was visiting I 
only saw his father at breakfast and dinner, and on a Sunday when 
he watched football and drank all day. He didn't strike me as the 
type who would have much to do with his family, and he wasn't. But 
once, when the boy was twelve, he mentioned the cave to his father, 
and his father smiled, which he didn't often do, and he smiled sadly. 
That he remembered distinctly, this sad smile, he insisted that's what 
it was; sad. And his father took him to the cave and they waited for 
the wind to cease, and climbed down the slope to the hole and 
listened for the sound.

His father said; "No one knows what that sound is, boy, and no 
one ever will. Just remember that. There's some things we will never 
know. When the gas men came to look for oil that sound went away, 
and it went away until they packed up and left, and then it came 
back. I checked, and that's what it did. Just like it knew they were 
there. My father showed me this thing, just like I'm showing you.. 
Just remember, no matter how clever we get, you're hearing 
something no one will ever explain away."


"What's that your holding, anyway?" asked Catherine. She 
looked at the now folded and creased sheet of printout in Micheals 
hand.

"There's going to be a rave." he said. "Another free one at 
Sydney Park in St. Peters, under the old brickwork stacks. I just got 
this from Sug's Bar and Grid." He passed the page to Brett, who 
glanced at it and passed it around.

"Down" read Catherine when the page reached her. "Come 
brave the elements, the police, the locals and the spirits to dance 
under the stars. 10PM to late. Sound by Nanotech, Non Bossy Posse, 
MDA, Zing, Sed, Sub bass Snarl et. al., visuals by Vibe Tribe."

"I knew it!" said Karen. "Nootrope's been working again. This 
should be good."

"If cold", put in Brett.

"But of course! All the more reason to move faster! It isn't so 
bad, though, and it's free, until the cops come to shut it down."

"But remember the time it rained, and the tent was too small, 
and then the cops came with complaints from "the local residents", 
which there aren't any, really, and ordered the sound turned down." 
said Micheal.

"They should take a leaf from the Poms." said Brett. "They 
have, or rather had, huge raves at deserted airstrips in the country. 
The cops there used the sound ordinances as an excuse to close them 
down, so they built small FM transmitters and asked everyone to 
bring a walkman. They could have the music as loud as they wanted, 
each to his or her taste, and all you would hear outside a pair of 
headphones would be hundreds of feet on concrete. That would be 
something to see!"

Catherine flashed then, on an image of the airstrip, a stretch of 
cracked grey rainstained concrete with weeds pushing through 
between the blocks, and the crowd, pale English, jerking and 
shuffling, strangely in time, and floating over it all the ghostly 
whisper of hundreds of pairs of headphones in unison, a chorus of 
spirit whispers, in the floodlit night and the cold.

The buzzer sounded, and Brett left quietly to climb the stairs 
and open the door. He returned with Jackie.

"Andrew!" she said accusingly as she entered the room. "I 
thought you said you were at Junes place. You should have left a 
note!"

"You knew where to find us, anyway, it seems."

"I guessed. You left the front door open."

"Oh shit!" said Micheal. "Did you lock it?"

"Of course."

"Not that we have anything worth stealing, but it's best not to 
tempt fate. After a party, you know... there's always people scoping a 
place for a future robbery, gatecrashers with business in mind, 
nowadays."

Everyone was standing, leaving. Micheal pasted the notice on 
the door with blue tac as they climbed the stairs. It would catch a lot 
of attention, there.

"What shall we do?" Jackie asked Andrew.

"Go home and get into bed." he replied. She laughed and hugged 
him as they walked through the front door and turned down the 
street in the general direction of home.


Karen was puzzled. 

While Micheal slammed around the kitchen, colliding with 
chairs and the table, looking for something, she sat crosslegged on 
the lounge and thought.

"Hey Micheal."

"Yeah. Wait a second."

A few more seconds of banging and he emerges triumphant, an 
old iron saucepan in his hands.

"We're gonna use this from now on. I know it's hard to clean, 
but those aluminium ones..."

"Yeah. I heard the news. You know, we used to eat rhubarb, 
and that was sour, acidic stuff. Boiled in a pot, and if you left the pot 
in the fridge overnight, the edges would turn grey with dissolved 
metal."

"You didn't eat that, did you?"

"Of course not. It tasted like batteries. But my parents did."

"Waste not, want not, huh?"

"Yeah. What about Catherine?"

Micheal sat in the armchair opposite her.

"Catherine's okay. I mean, vague, and she doesn't talk much. I 
get the impression she's suffering heavy homesickness. Probably 
hasn't left home before."

"But Lang says she left home five years ago."

"She's just weird, as are we all."

"More than weird. I think something's happened to her."

"They aren't getting on."

"Yeah, that. He seemed to think everything would be rosy 
between them. All differences made up."

"She's struggling with something." Micheal searched for words. 
"She's got something on her mind. Something deep. Maybe we should 
ask what it is."

"No, leave her alone. If you push for details she'll get defensive, 
clam up. I don't want her to think we're too nosy."

"Lang. Now, he always had something on his mind."

"But that was different. I know what that is. He thinks too 
much. He's crippled by paranoia. He knows this, anyway, he tries to 
fight it."

"Probably some Melbourne thing. They both have it, in 
different ways."


Lang watched Catherine run and flag down a cab, and he 
considered the possibility of flipping out, leaving the dream for the 
black void, and there try to wake her up, force her to see reason. 

But, as always, he was afraid. He feared the impermanence of 
his creation, and the mysteries of it's complexity. Somehow he knew 
that, if he tested the limits of its reason, he might damage it beyond 
repair. There was never a guarantee that it would still be there, the 
same, as real as before, when he returned.

So he remained, settling back leaning against the trunk of one 
of the huge morton bay figs that grew in the park. Their boles were 
twisted complexities of buttress roots, perfect seats, like wing-
backed chairs. 

Shadows crawled across the ground towards him as the hours 
passed. Below him the world buzzed and moved, but time seemed 
frozen in the park. It seemed that no-one but himself even knew 
about it's existence. He savored the silence, the distant rumble of 
traffic and the slow breeze through the leaves.

Later, he stirred and checked his shirt pocket. There was a 
buspass there, still good for a couple of rides. Home. He packed the 
camera and left.


On Parramatta the lights were bright and the shops were ugly. 
As always he wondered at the many small, grimy looking businesses, 
selling strange things; dusty shopfloors full of giant stainless steel 
cookers and fridges for use in restaurants; ancient looking sewing 
machines; air conditioning ducts. Specialist shops, they spent little on 
image. Their customers were not impressed by such things. In fact, it 
almost seemed as though they cultivated dirt, as though it was proof 
positive of their serious intent.

It was still early in the evening, and if he hit the house now 
only Catherine was likely to be there, so he turned in his tracks and 
found a bus stop and waited, avoiding the eyes of the old factory 
workers there, until the bus arrived, and boarded. It was a while 
since he'd been in the city. It would pass the time as much as 
anything else would.

At Central, an inspector climbed aboard and moved down the 
aisle, checking peoples passes. Lang casually climbed to his feet and 
alighted at the next stop. 

Up George street, past the sex shops and the tobacconist, past 
the liquidation warehouses with their loop tapes of cockney slang 
blaring from outside speakers, and the electronics outlets. He pressed 
his nose to the glass and blew a lustful circle of condensation there, 
staring in at the sexy black boxes. New things; a pair of headphones 
that would nullify outside noise. They had a microphone built in, and 
a tiny processor that would analyze the ambient sound, and generate 
an inverted waveform, and add that to the music. The inverted 
sound canceled out the outside noise, and the listener could walk 
under an approaching car without fear. Great stuff.

On, past the theaters, through the crowds. As always, he felt 
slightly embarrassed and defensive there. The crowds were thick for 
the Tuesday night special offers, and they came in from the suburbs 
in the American best, all baseball caps and baggy Keppers and two-
tone suede jackets. They made him feel shabby and cheap, in his 
grungy duds, and very alone. They were all couples. Couples or 
groups, small gangs, laughing secretaries out together in safe crowds 
of five or more, living it up. Their eyes grew cold and hard when 
they alighted on him, and sealed the lid on his loneliness. He 
stretched his stride and passed on through.

There was the cathedral, rising tall, tan sandstone, spotlit, 
glowing through its stained glass, and for the first time he felt an 
irrational desire to go inside. He never had. No one he knew ever 
had. It just didn't seem right. After all, they weren't Christians. He 
knew that tourists often penetrated its sacred depths, but they were 
protected by their alien customs, and he wasn't. He knew that they 
would probably welcome him in, as long as he didn't touch anything. 
But he passed, and passed the Town Hall as well, the stairs crowded 
with people loitering and waiting for other to turn up.

So. He stood in the centre of town. Where now?

The shops were useless. He had money, plenty of it, but he 
didn't spend when he didn't have to, and wasn't much of a window 
shopper, which he thought of as monetary masturbation. 

Crossing the corner to the Queen Victoria building, he glanced 
to his left. The lights of Darling Harbour sparkled invitingly. That was 
the ticket! He would walk to Glebe across the flyover, catch up with 
some friends in the cafes there.

So he turned, and set off down the hill, swinging his black 
photography bag from one shoulder to the other to spell the weight. 
The lights were bright down there, very bright. There were also 
many people heading in the same direction. He wondered what was 
going on.

The crowds thickened as he approached the ramp leading up to 
the deck of the old iron bridge. All the monorails were running, 
lending the scene a strangely totalitarian air, like the set for a 1940s 
sci fi movie set in a fascist state. Lang found himself expecting to see 
huge airships crossing the sky above the crowds, lit from beneath by 
actinic beams from searchlights. 

Through the people, surrounded by a moving bubble of space, 
as they reacted to his appearance by moving away, averting their 
eyes. "Feral" he heard muttered under more than one breath. The 
bag was growing heavy again; he shifted it to the other shoulder and 
tightened the straps as he walked.

Then, the tingling began. The eyes upon him. He turned slightly 
as he walked.

Pacing him, about ten metres back, was a suit with dark 
glasses. A large, square suit, dark and conservative and menacing. 
The head turned slightly away, as though gazing over the side of the 
bridge at lights of the boats that seemed to fill the water beneath. 

Lang casually faced forward again. There was another, ahead, 
staring straight across his path, in a light grey suit. As he passed, he 
felt the presence of the man as he swung into line behind him, 
joining the other spook tracking him.

Security. Heavy security. But why?

He passed a newsstand. Read the banner pages in their wire 
cages.

"US PRESIDENT IN SYDNEY TO DEDICATE MARITIME MUSEUM"  
he read.

Oh shit!

Lang rarely watched television, except for certain shows. Late 
night movies, when he felt like it. Doctor Who, when it was running. 
He never watched the news if he could help it. The lies and half 
truths only made him feel more alienated, isolated from the herd; he 
only wondered why no one else felt as disgusted as he did.

And now he realized how isolated he had become. If he had 
known, he would have made sure to keep a healthy distance 
between himself and the president. 

The spooks were getting closer as he approached the other side 
of the bridge. Pushing through the now thick crowd, he slowed his 
steps. No fast movements, he thought. No threatening moves. Keep 
the bag on the shoulder, no matter how much it aches. Walk slowly 
and steadily. They would be professionals. They would have caught 
his glances. They would know that he knew that they trailed him. 
They might even have revealed themselves on purpose, just to scare 
him away. If he had a bazooka in the bag, he was a threat, but if he 
didn't, they wouldn't want the publicity of a wrongful seizure. 

Sweat started under his arms and prickled down his back. The 
lights were bright. Colourful people jostled him and glared at his 
clothes. He stalked on through, descended the stairs to the paved 
courtyard at the end of the bridge, and kept walking, between the 
shops, towards a street that led up the hill towards Ultimo.

Here he had to fight through crowds moving in the opposite 
direction, down from where they had parked their cars, up Harris 
street way, avoiding the charge of the parking station. Gradually the 
people thinned, and he felt safe enough to stop, rest a second, and 
turn around.

Both the spooks stood on the edge of the crowd. Beyond them 
he could see the entrance to the Maritime Museum, draped with red 
white and blue bunting. Stocky suits swarmed around the place, 
talking to their shirtcuffs, checking cars, holding back the TV 
cameras. News crews from dozens of stations, local and overseas, 
were there. They jostled with each other for position like horses at 
the starting gate. It was clear the president was about to arrive any 
second. The crowd, like bees attracted to honey, was swarming, 
thickening around the backs of the news crews. 

The blank mirrored stare of the spooks that had followed him 
woke him to the fact that, if he was packing a weapon, he was now in 
the prime position to fire. He could aim over the heads of the crowd, 
straight down, and hit the president with plenty of news coverage. It 
was essential he move. 

At that moment the thought of just waking up occurred to his 
overheated brain. If he tried, he knew he could do it. Close his eyes, 
concentrate, wrest his attention away from the inner skeins of 
thought that constituted this world he inhabited and open them on 
the limitless fields of black he knew so well and hated so much he 
was obliged to create his own alternative.

And he thought briefly about Catherine, and the trouble she 
might even now be getting into as she wandered the scapes of the 
dream. He knew regret, that she seemed so uninterested in the only 
other real person to be found among the cast of the play, and self 
pity that he should be marooned again just when it seemed he had 
found solid ground to stand on. Close eyes. Awaken. What would 
happen? Would the spooks' bullets fly through empty air as they 
fired on their evaporating target? Would his body be left behind, to 
be hit and killed, marooning him forever outside the shell of life 
within him?

Don't mind me, he thought. I only live here. The straps of the 
bag cut his shoulderblades as he turned and trudged further up the 
hill. He raised his head, peering at the windows of the warehouses 
and shops above him, wondering how many contained tense, 
binocular wielding security, and how many of those binocs were 
trained on him. The radio network must be buzzing with his presence 
by now, he thought. The huge security organism was aware of his 
presence, like a healthy immune system registering a virus in the 
body. Further up the hill.

He could breath now. His shirt was soaked in sweat. The 
excitement was far behind him. Switching the bag to the other 
shoulder, he headed on, across Harris street, past the last hurrying 
spectators, and down the dark streets on the other side.


"False alarm." said one.

"Thought he was it." said the other.

"Looked mad enough. I could swear he had a weapon in that 
bag. Could  see it pressing against the nylon."

"We scared him off, weapon or no weapon. Dedicate a class 
three to follow him for one mile."

"Yo Birdy?" Static. "Yeah, he headed west. Put a class three 
footman on his tail. He's passing the pub on the corner. Get that guy 
in the top room. Follow for one mile and return. We can't take a 
chance he'll turn and come back."

"Four minutes till the big moment."

"Yeah, I know. Let's get back in position."


"What's uni like for you, then, Karen? Really?" Micheal asked.

"Oh, it's bearable. It reminds me of an old Arab proverb; "May 
it pass quickly." I want it to pass quickly."

"But what do you want to do when you finish?"

"Nothing, really. Sit on a beach in Townsville. Do another 
course."

"Another course which you will want to pass quickly as well?"

"Yeah, that's about the size of it. I want everything to pass 
quickly."

"Look, sorry if that's a raw nerve-"

"Don't mention it. I just had another letter from mum. She asks 
the same questions as you."

"Shit!"

"She wants to know when the first grandchildren are coming. 
She's given up on marriage. That's too unlikely for even her to 
consider now. But she hopes maybe a condom might break inside me 
and make her a grandmother, against my will. She even said 
something about artificial insemination, god knows why. That makes 
me mad. She could just ask, instead of insinuate all the time."

"Too thorny."

"Yeah. I'm gonna make some lasagna. Want some?"

"No thanks. I'm actually supposed to be cooking tonight. Don't 
want to."

"You can take my turn, tomorrow. I just feel like it tonight."

"What about Catherine? When's she get to cook?"

"Dunno. Hope she's good."

"The news should be on." Karen walked into the lounge, 
switched on the set. Micheal banged around the kitchen, then came 
to stand in the door watching.

They saw the crowds swirling through the arcades and squares 
of Darling Harbour, eager to catch a glimpse of the president. They 
watched the motor launch swing around from Circular Quay, followed 
by helicopters. They watched the cheering masses as the man 
alighted on the special stage set up for him, surrounded by security 
drones, and was hustled into the museum he was there to dedicate. 
The prime minister was there, dwarfed by the excitement, with his 
pitifully small contingent of lax, smiling security guards and his 
scurrying ministers. They shared his embarrassment. 

Lang walked quietly in as they watched. He sat in silence and 
stared at the scenes of hysteria as the crowds flowed through the 
building, after the president was safely absent, streaming past the 
displays. 

There were other stories. A sect in Mexico had self destructed. 
Their leader had determined the date of the apocalypse and 
convinced the faithful that it was good in the eyes of god that they 
depart the earth before it was due, as a mark of faith. Horribly, they 
had crucified themselves. The camera panned briefly across a road 
lined with telegraph poles, each bearing a number of crosspieces the 
members had fixed there. The countryside was dry and bushy, low 
trees, scrub, and the single black tarmac lane and the indistinct 
shapes of the bodies strung from their nails.

The newsreader said they had made a mistake; many of them 
had been nailed through the palms of the hands instead of the wrists. 
A nail through the palm wouldn't support the body. It would rip the 
flesh and the crucified would drop to the ground. The survivors were 
those who had dropped. They were in hospital being treated for 
lockjaw and dehydration.

Lang, Karen and Micheal watched in silence. 

There was an ad. Animated jets flew through a peaceful blue 
sky in vee formation. They were joined by a squadron of chocolate 
coated ice creams. Battle started; the ice creams won. They watched 
in tired resignation.

"When's that lasagna gonna be ready?" asked Karen.

"Okay, okay." Micheal disappeared back into the kitchen.

"Have you seen Catherine?" said Lang.

"No. Probably upstairs. Can she cook?"

"I don't think so."

"Don't you know?"

"Um. She couldn't, when I last knew her. Unless she's done 
some fast learning she still doesn't." Fast thinking, Lang 
congratulated himself. He stood and wandered up the stairs.


The loungeroom was full of electric guitars when Jackie and 
Andrew walked in. They leaned in ranks against the couch, the walls, 
and some were laid full length on the floor. Dozens of the things. 
Some old and battered, holes in their bodies bodged with putty, and 
others gleaming new.

They sat and contemplated them. Miko staggered into the room 
from the back of the house, a pair of guitars in either hand, others 
slung on his back. He stacked these in the last empty spaces and sat 
down in the armchair opposite them.

"Kind of takes your breath away, doesn't it?"

Jackie nodded. "How many are there?"

"Twenty-five. Unless I got ripped off. I haven't counted."

"I assumed you stole them."

He laughed so hard he rocked back in the seat and it hit the 
wall, breaking the neck of a guitar leaning there. 

"No way! But what a cool idea! This many! No, they came from 
the auctions. I bought every guitar there. Regardless of race, colour 
or historical significance, if it was a guitar, I put up my hand."

He swung around and inspected the broken one, without any 
apparent regret.

"I'm gonna bankroll my pay packet. I got six hundred smackers 
from the last concert I roadied for, and I thought, why not take it to 
the auctions and try my luck? So here we are."

"I don't want them lying around the loungeroom for weeks."

"Don't worry. I'll take half of them to the shops tomorrow. The 
rest I'll stack in my room and put in the Trading Post. I should start 
testing them now."

He carefully stepped over the tangle of necks to the door, and 
returned a few minutes later with a battered old practice amp. 
Plugged in, allowed the old valves to warm, while he untangled a 
frayed cable and selected an ax to start on.

"I bags first shower." said Andrew, and left. They heard the 
bathroom door slam.

"So where'd you two go today?"

"Andrew went to Junes place, said he hadn't seen them in 
awhile. I caught up with him at Bretts."

"Aahhh!" He strummed, and a harsh grating howl shook the 
room. "Mmmm! Sounds good! So, he tired you out, did he?"

"Get out of it!" Jackie tried to frown but she couldn't control her 
face; it wanted to grin madly. "Yeah, if you want to know, he did!"

"Ho ho, didn't think the boy had it in him! I'm impressed."

"You don't know what he's got in him."

"I have known him for awhile, though, off and on. I've kept an 
eye on him."

"Now it comes out! So, you think he's cute, right?"

"Oh, yes! Such a dear boy. Very cute."

"I never knew."

"This is sarcasm, girl. Sarcasm in a cynical vein."

"What do you think about Andrew?"

"Um. Not much, really. He always struck me as being a little out 
of place, here. Not really part of the scene. He doesn't go out much, he 
doesn't really party when he does. I've seen him have very brief 
affairs with a few girls. He's kind of tentative. Unsure of himself."

"Well, I like him."

"So do I, so do I. He's a prince among men. A true gem."

"More sarcasm?"

"No."

Miko jacked in another guitar, a glossy black rectangle custom 
job from the eighties, headless. It sounded the same as the last.

"I suspect that the amp is to blame. I may have to borrow a 
decent one before I can test these out. Perhaps one of the shops 
might be kind enough, should I offer them a good rate."

"Anything on this week?"

"There's a good band playing at Nowhere's on Friday. They're 
called Not, without a K. Sort of industrial."

"Sounds good."

"You'll have trouble getting Andrew to go."

"Then I'll go with you, won't I?"

"Sounds good. I better get these guitars moved."

"You got room in your room?"

"I can hang them on the wall. They won't be in there long. They 
should sell pretty fast. There's lots of young wanna-be rock gods out 
there hungry for guitars, so I hear."

"I don't know about that. Maybe if you was selling sequencers 
and techno gear you'd be fine, but I heard guitar bands were dying 
out."

"Nonsense! How could the very essence of Australian music 
die?"

"Everything dies. Perhaps that's why you could bid for all those 
guitars; the other bidders knew better."

"True. Let's hope there's still life in the scene, or I'm stuck with 
a lot of white elephants."

KATERINA AND GREGORY


Katerina raced through the corridors of the house, past new 
white walls glaring with satin sheen paint, and carpet deep and soft 
enough to sleep on. She took the stairs two at a time, glancing at the 
silver framed posters of Tasmanian rainforests, swinging around the 
banister at the top, feet in the air and supporting herself on the 
polished wood globe. Betty Blue pouted at her from the end of the 
corridor. She sprinted and hit the poster hard, and the door burst 
open.

"Gregory!"

Inside the room everything was Ikea. Everything matched 
everything else in a way that suggested all the furniture had been 
bought at the same time. The Gregory in question lay full length on a 
spotless white doona on the bed, scowling at a comic and eating chips 
from some sort of plastic tube, little triangular fragments falling over 
the pages. Katerina spun slightly from the opening of the door, 
tripped and fell, the side of her head slamming into the rug, 
imprinting the pattern of a piece of circuit board that lay there on 
her cheek. An astonished face looking down from the bed. 

"I don't know how you got past my parents," Gregory said. 
"They should be down there watching TV and waiting for you. 
Watcha do, break a window or just bribe them?"

"They let me in," she panted from the floor, "and said you were 
up here. Neat, huh? They must like me now."

"No, they just think I'm gonna tell you to go away right now. 
They're waiting down there to see you cry your way out. Believe it."

She stood and tottered to the bed, melodramatically, flicking 
long bleach grey hair out of her eyes. The circuit board fragment had 
scratched her, and a tiny spot of blood formed. Gregory pulled her 
head down and licked it off her face.

"Hey that's sick! " she hissed.

"I don't do that to everybody. Feel flattered." 

"You'll get diseases and your dick will drop off!" She 
emphasized her point by groping him roughly in the front of his 
jeans. He squealed, shrill but faint, and curled protectively.

"Oh, sorry. Did I hurt it?"

"No!" He lashed out and caught her around the waist, pulling 
her down across the bed. "No brain, no pain! Anyway, you missed! 
Take that!" They wrestled.

"I want to fuck, right here." he said, suddenly still and serious. 
The look in her eyes was unmistakable, but she hesitated.

"I could be wrong, but you just said your parents hate me still 
and told you... ?"

"... to give you the big No, yeah, that's it. They took me into 
Dads workroom and sat me down and everything, told me they were  
doing it for my own good. Worried, they were."

"And you're giving me the big Yes, huh?"

"Yes."

"Yes!"

It took all of their strength to move the wardrobe, struggling 
like ants with a big crumb, but they finally jammed it against the 
door and reinforced the blockade with the desk, computer humming 
on top, and several chairs and the bureau. As a last defiant gesture 
Gregory pulled down the curtains from the window and propped the 
curtain rod from the desk to the opposite wall. They stood and 
panted for a second, grinning at each other with wild smiles, before 
turning and jumping onto the bed in unison. Boots joined shoes on 
the floor, jeans and underwear, and soon they rolled and sweated, 
fucking with the animal speed of the young. They barely paused 
when Gregories parents knocked and then hammered on the door.

"You bastard Greg! Damn you!" Bang Bang bang, followed by  
muffled curses he had never heard his father use before. "Your 
mother's crying, you hear." 

Indeed she was. Gregory faltered until Katerinas hands 
clamped down over his ears and he heard nothing except his own 
breathing, harsh in his throat. Later, the computer ticked and the 
modem whined and shrieked, a message coming in over the phone, 
but they ignored that as well and continued, slower now. There was 
definitely something better about having sex in a room glaring with 
light from two 100 watt bulbs, reflecting from bare white walls and 
polished wood floor, a contrast to Katerina's dark and dirty room in 
the squat she shared with fellow ferals. And the angry parents 
fuming somewhere in the house only added extra spice. 


Katerina lay propped on her elbows, looking down at Gregory. 
His thin bony white chest a contrast to her generous, full body and 
light olive skin. She glanced into the mirror that faced them from the 
bureau, now part of the barricade at the door. Gregory lay idly 
running a hand down her back as though stroking a cat, very slowly. 
His other arm over his eyes to block the harsh light.

[I look weird, my skin is the same tone as my hair, but brown 
where the hair is grey, hair matches my eyes now, but you have to 
be close to see that, grey eyes] 

"We have trouble to get through." he announced tiredly.

"They won't hurt us, will they? They're not that mad."

"They'll be down watching TV in the kitchen. God, what will I 
do? In the kitchen. The front door." Musing to himself Gregory 
stumbled to his feet and padded to the computer. Read the screen 
and the message that had been left there. "Sug called, it looks like. 
He's the ticket. Go there, spend the night, talk to the olds in the 
morning." He found his pants and pulled them on. 

"All we must do is vacate the premises."


Minutes later they crept down the bright hallway and into the 
bright stairs, having carefully levered the wardrobe out of the way 
with the curtain rod and slipping through the narrow gap left. Their 
feet sank soundlessly into the white runner in the main hallway.

"I don't think you're going anywhere!" Gregories father stood 
from the chair he had been sitting guard in, putting down his paper 
and eyeing them with a stern, dead gaze. 

[nightmare oh god please anything don't hit me don't hit her 
shit we must bolt and right about now yes]

"Run!" It was Katerina who shouted. The sound of her voice 
galvanized him, all his limbs jerked with the shock, awakening from 
the paralysis of fear. She grabbed his hand and they darted past. 

The front door was locked, deadbolted. Gregory's hand slid 
helplessly on the cut glass knob in the center. His father stood and 
watched. It was hopeless.

Katerina drew back, leaned forward, and with all her strength 
stomped her booted foot down hard on the centre of the wooden 
panel, with its stained glass window and doorbell, that filled the 
space to the left of the door. It was thick wood, and the window was 
set in steel rather than lead gridwork. Designed to repel intruders 
with big boots, but only those outside the house. The whole panel 
popped neatly out and flopped flat on the tiled porch. They darted 
through the thin slot before the glass had a chance to shatter, 
sprinting down the ornamental garden beds, followed by bellows of 
anger fading to despairing shouts; "Why, why?"

"Why do you think?" panted Gregory to himself as they dodged 
parked cars in the tree lined street. "You probably think it's just to 
fuck you up, revenge for creating me. As if I'd waste the effort just 
for that."


Minutes later they flagged a taxi on the nearby main road. All 
the way in Katerina stared rapt at the glimpses of tall lighted towers 
between the houses, and from the tops of hills and bridges, and 
through trees, winking in and out, sections of the city visible for less 
than a second and gone. The buildings are only props for a work of 
art, she thought, to lift the neon higher, to give the artist a vertical 
effect, giant sculpture with clockwork innards that ticks through the 
day like a complex orrery from another dimension mapping the 
movements of daydreams through the mental space of its peoples. 

The driver swerved with hard competence through the traffic 
and didn't try to speak. Taxi tires kept at high pressure, their drivers 
are adept at avoiding potholes. They have the skills to time their 
movements and catch traffic lights on green, if they want; they can 
also aim for the red lights, for passengers who deserve to pay extra.

Over the bridge and through the city, down George street, 
deserted mostly, the shops closed and few workers trudging 
automatically towards whatever destination they had found for 
themselves. Going down into the subway stations.

"Into the abyss." whispered Gregory into Katerinas sleeping ear.

"Boring! Bloody poet crap."


"Do you want me to wait?" asked the driver as he pulled into 
the narrow Surry Hills street.

"What for?" Katerina stirred and stared uncomprehendingly out 
the window while Gregory fumbled cash out of his tattered wallet. 
There was little left. He regretted not taking the taxi to a station and 
riding the train from there, but such ideas are often lost in the rush 
of action. Anyway, the police, activated by his father, would have 
found them easily. 

"So the streeties don't knock you down. You don't live here do 
you?"

"We're visiting a friend. Yes, you'd better." He passed back a 
dollar of the change and climbed out, turning to take Katerinas hand. 
She was a little tired, dazed. 

There was a house, narrow and white, the door a dark 
rectangle with glowing red eyes in the centre. Sug had bought a new 
letter slot, and cut slanting demons eyes out of the brass flap with a 
jewelers drill. There was a bulb installed just behind it, and red 
cellophane over the holes, and its red gaze stared out into the street, 
a protective imp guarding the door. The taxi switched on the side 
lamp, harsh photographic light beaming their shadows onto the wall 
as they climbed the steep front stairs. Katerina knocked.

Thumps and bangs came from within. A minute passed. The 
driver shifted impatiently in the car, suspension creaking in the 
quiet street, bursts of shortwave static from his radio puncturing the 
air. The sounds of the cities busier roads was held at bay by layers of 
houses and tiny alley-like streets that wrapped folds of protective 
stone around them. Finally the letter flap snapped up and two red 
but human eyes appeared in the slot.

"Who?"

"It's Gregory, Sug. Just passing by, thought I'd drop in."

"Oh, Bitmap."

"Yeah, that's me, could you let us in?"

"Us?"

"Katerina's here too. She wants to see your system."

"Well, yeah. Come in."

Sug shot the bolts and swung the door wide. The taxi gratefully 
pulled away. Inside they found a long hallway layered with paper, 
magazines and newspapers and printouts covering the floor like a 
makeshift carpet. The walls were bare and light ash grey. 

Sug led them down the hall towards voices and light. He was 
short, nondescript, with thick unkempt hair cut short and coarse 
skin. Only the eyes, red and wild with lack of sleep, were in any way 
remarkable.

"Bitmap's here." he called to the other occupant of the room. It 
was a loungeroom, once, with ancient couch covered in green hessian 
and old oil paintings on the walls left there by previous tenants, 
contrasting with the posters ripped from hoardings advertising tours 
by defunct bands. Bright light glared from the two unshaded flouro 
tubes hung from nails on the walls, giving their skins a pale and 
shiny pallor. Gregory recognized the figure bent over Sugs tangle of 
computer gear, a tall stooped figure with red hair and thick glasses 
known as Nootrope on the boards. He grinned humourlessly at them 
for a moment and returned to blowing at the guts of the computer 
with a small rubber bicycle horn bulb attacked to a brush. 

"Sug's gear is filthy. There's cockroaches in here."

"The system went a little ugly just minutes ago" said Sug. "We 
all got paranoid, looked virus enough to scare us, but there's dust in 
there and it could be the cause. I like to leave it open, slot things in 
and take them out. I like the look of it too, and besides, it saves on 
having a fan. Orange juice?"

"Thanks." said Gregory. Katerina looked around with a small 
smile of amusement. "Bitmap?" she asked, as they cleared the circuit 
boards and magazines and printouts and general garbage from the 
couch until there was room to sit. 

"That's my name here. On Sug's board I use Bitmap as a handle. 
"Sug" isn't a real name either, or Nootrope or whatever."

"Typical boys. Secret club names."

"There's girls on the bulletin board too." remarked Nootrope 
without looking up.

"Just not very many." replied Sug as he came in with the juice. 
"We try to recruit, we'd like to have more girls, but they're not 
interested in this sort of thing. Something genetic I s'pose." He 
shrugged in resignation. "You got a computer, Katerina?"

"Sug, we need to crash here." said Gregory.

"Well, that's a problem. Something to do with the parents?"

"Basically yes."

"Okay, I guess I can't really turn you away, but one night only. 
I have to be pretty firm about this. Lots of people I know, would live 
here if I let them. You're level, so I can make exceptions, but not 
often.  

"You don't even let me sleep here, Sug." said Nootrope.

"Yes, but you don't live at home with dickhead parents. Keep 
brushing."

"Finished. Give it a spin."

His visitors instantly forgotten, Sug dropped into the pilots 
chair and reached for the switch. He paused a moment, then flicked. 
There was the rising whine, hard drives spinning up to speed, and a 
general flickering of screens and tiny beeps. Sug whistled with relief 
and his assistants smiled.

"Sug's Bar and Grid is online! Lets open the door."

His fingers rattled across the keys while Nootrope bent to push 
a gnarled cluster of interlocking double adaptors into a wall socket. 
Six missmatched old 2400 baud modems, racked in a dented white 
wire basket hanging from an angle bracket like a strange houseplant, 
started to flicker their LEDs as people dialed in. Tone joined tone, and 
the comforting whine of transmission filled the air.

"See that! See that! They're clamouring to get in! Now I know 
why I do this!"

The screens scrolled to the Front Door, graphic of the basement 
door of a seedy bar with flickering neon tube signs saying "SUG'S 
BAR AND GRID, Plug In and Fry Awhile!" Gregory abandoned 
Katerina on the couch to get a closer look. They watched as lines 
cascaded down the screen, identifying the callers.

"Here comes Nodule, haven't seen him for awhile. Dredge. Hihat. 
All the gang."

There was silence as they tapped away, conversing in scrolling 
lines of print on the party line of the bulletin board, reams of gossip 
scrolling down the screen like some mad stenographer was 
monitoring the chatter of country housewives talking on the original 
partyline telephone systems. 

"Check the mailbox."

Their speech became strange, reduced to a code Katerina 
couldn't follow. They crowded the screen and muttered jargon, 
Gregory glancing over his shoulder at the couch with a guilty smile. 
The printer started to churn out paper and he handed the finished 
product to Katerina, which, having nothing better to do, she read.

SLIMES
by Dentata


There are these slimes that live on another planet. They have a 
slimy civilization, more advanced than our own.

It wasn't easy for the slimes to build their technology up to the 
heights they reached. For one thing, they took a long time to discover 
fire. Slimes are wet, and like a wet environment. They gloop along in 
the swamps that cover 60% of the Planet of the Slimes, where there 
are few trees and no dry wood that might catch fire if struck by 
lightning, and few flints or other rocks they could strike together to 
make sparks. Slime archaeologists believe they discovered fire when 
a vent of swamp gas ignited near a certain pool of black slop that 
bubbled up from below.  Soon they had a petrochemical industry. 

Slime culture grew slowly but peacefully, and they had few 
wars. The only real conflict was the War of Slop, a battle for control 
of the black mud. Many slimes lost their life under barrages of inter-
bog missiles or dried into green patches by flame throwers, and it 
ended when the side without slop discovered how to drill for it in the 
mud. That war advanced their technology far, into the machine age, 
but the Gunge Convention forbade the use of those weapons of horror 
in war; there was nothing as horrible as the sight of a dried patch of 
flakes where a slime was hit with fire and had dried out. The war 
also drove the slimes to venture into the dry areas of the planet in 
search of more swamp, for which they developed special carriages 
full of mud, and they went so far as to set colonies on top of 
mountains, where no slime had ever been before, being liquid they 
tended not to flow too far uphill. 

Peace reigned. Slimey cities grew with huge mud pool layouts 
heated by steam boiled in vessels heated by distillate of glop, 
(petrol), and they discovered electricity by studying the zapping 
urtles that lived in the south. Sog City was the centre of their culture, 
where the Institute of Hard Things was. Here slimes discovered 
many new things, such as glass and metals, formed by heating things 
as hot as they could in their special furnace, and developed wires 
and then electronics industries. Life was good and damp was 
plentiful.

Soon they turned their eyes to the stars, thinking "If we can 
conquor mountains, then space isn't so hard, is it?" The first slime 
satellites were launched. Slimesat 1 orbited Slimeball four times and 
fell into the bog, a resounding success. They fired capsules with 
animals, mildoo and fungy among them, and the animals survived in 
space. 

Space was a perfect environment for slimes. No gravity meant 
they could perform feats never before achieved, like standing up, 
looking over the top of each other, jumping. They loved to live in 
space, and were far more eager than ever humans were to get in 
contact with other civilizations around other stars. Their science 
fiction was far more peaceful than ours, and instead of terrible 
monsters the aliens in them were seen as friendly though weird 
creatures, perhaps even hard and tall, maybe even made of solid 
matter, (though slime scientists said that life had to be flexible and 
liquid in order to achieve intelligence, and anything taller than it was 
wide couldn't ever be smarter than a tree.) 

So they built huge lasers in space, designed to fire pulses of 
light coded with information, and they built giant radio telescope 
dishes, miles across, to listen for signals from other planets directed 
their way. A few years passed, and they had a success. Then another. 
It took years, because of the speed of light which limited the speed 
of their transmissions, and the quality of the information when it 
arrived was bad, and it was often hard to understand. They received 
pictures of the Bubbles as they called them, giant gas bags floating 
through the air of their gas giant world, and messages from the 
Jellies that floated in an Ammonia sea. 

Something soon became evident. It was very hard to really 
communicate with these beings. You could learn the sounds or 
colours or even odours they used to talk to each other, and use them 
to convey ideas from one slime to another, and send messages back 
to the aliens in their own language, but how could you really know 
what those  aliens "words" meant?  After all, you had been born and 
bred a slime. When someone said "Blurble glog grshphlllp." to you it 
meant something, and you would irrigate their meniscus quickly 
before their membrane broke.  But when the Bubbles said "Squeek 
squeak." in their messages, and seemed to be saying something about 
the taste of hydrogen, how could you understand? You never tasted 
hydrogen, and they didn't have meniscuses, so what was the point?

It was worse with abstract concepts. The Jellies physicists 
seemed to believe that the universe set in the mould of space, matter 
congealing out of some primal solution, but their philosophers argued 
that space-time couldn't be a mould because it itself was quivering 
like matter. This meant nothing to the slimes, it was just garbled 
nonsense. They had proved in their laboratories that space oozed out 
of nothing in the Big Plop at the beginning of time, and any talk of 
congealing and quivering was pure dribble! And the Bubbles said a 
deity called Gud had popped himself to bring matter into being. 
Really!

Soon the slimes began to tire of trying to talk to such alien 
beings. It was useless and wasteful, public opinion said, and the 
effort was much better spent at home on Slimeball where it was 
needed. They were suffering a change in social values there, the 
young were discontented with their lives. There was violence and 
apathy by turns and things seemed to be getting worse.

"Bloggs", chief scientist for the Interstellar Squirting Project, 
was the last slime down from the space station. He squirted a 
message to the pilot of the shuttle to wait while he gathered the last 
of his notes. There was also a photo of his family, his mateling 
Squelch the two little driblets. Thinking of Squelch brought mixed 
feelings to his mind, as he had been in orbit for some time and his 
only contact with her had been over the radio. They were a close 
couple, but he worried that she might have changed. Slimes do 
change, he reflected, and someone you think you know can become a 
stranger in time. Thinking along these lines, he came back to the 
problem that had occupied him for much of his life, the problem of 
communication with aliens. Transmissions were still coming in, but 
the slimes had signed off, and their last signals were even now 
moving through space at the speed of light towards the aliens home 
worlds. Hopefully the aliens would see the futility of trying to 
communicate too, when they received those last messages, and would 
stop trying. He hoped so.

It was impossible for aliens to communicate, he thought. Being 
born into completely different bodies, living in completely different 
societies, and having completely different concepts, there was no 
common point of contact. Even on subjects like hard physics, laws of 
which were supposed to be the same everywhere, they couldn't 
agree. 

But then, Squelch couldn't understand hard physics either. That 
was one of the things they couldn't talk about. He had tried to 
interest her in his field of study, but her mind couldn't grasp the 
concepts. He thought about this as he glooped his way down to the 
last shuttle. In a way, she was an alien to him. And so was the 
shuttle pilot, who was an old friend of his, but couldn't understand 
physics either, or xenology. Even his fellow physicists would argue 
for hours without reaching agreement, sometimes discovering after 
all that time that they were arguing completely different points. 
They could not understand each other, it seemed. How could they? 
How could anyone? Each slimes life is different to the next. Each 
slime fired messages at the next, thinking they were understood, but 
in reality they were as confused as the Bubbles and Jellies were, and 
only fooled themselves into thinking there was any real 
communication.

He reached the shuttle and decanted himself into the re-entry 
couch. A feeling of loneliness came, of distance. There were clunks 
and thuds as the shuttle separated from the space station and began 
to fall towards the planet below. The scientist within him wanted to 
tell people about his idea, write a paper, start a research project, find 
some hard facts about the truth of "inter personal communication" as 
he saw this new field being called, but something else within him 
didn't want to, feared being misunderstood, and he decided not to 
tell anyone about this idea he had. Slimes might think he was mad.


"Deep, very deep. Do people just give this stuff away?" asked 
Katerina as she tried to refold the paper along its perforations 
without damaging it too much.

"Yes, this sort of thing just floats around. Some users collect 
huge files of weird stories and shit." Gregory tossed it onto the end of 
the couch, where a pile of similar files lay.

"Unless I'm greatly mistaken, this number here is the flamer 
from the North Shore we kicked off the board." said Sug.

"Nerf?" asked Nootrope. "I took him off the list but I think he 
had a back door. That's him all right, cheeky bugger!" He flicked 
through a thick bundle of printer paper. "Phone number checks out."

"He could have been the cause of the crash, if he kludged a 
back door into my system. Pass me the Black Disc!"

"Aye aye, captain!" Nootrope reached up to the dusty shelves 
over the computer setup and fetched down a shoebox. He flicked 
through the discs packed inside in silence, until he found and 
removed a disc coloured in black on all sides with felt marker.

Sug took the disc with the care of a snakehandler with his 
favourite cobra. Gingerly and slowly he tapped the keyboard, his 
usual speed and assurance forgotten, filling the room with tense 
vibes as though he were dissarming a neutron warhead right there in 
the loungeroom. With a gentle click he slotted the disc into the deck.

"Okay. Okay. Now we'll see."

One last tap. They stood in silence and waited. At last, Sug 
spoke.

"Fry in hell."


Somewhere on the North Shore Nerf sat in the basement of his 
parents house, crying into his brand new Ministry Psalm 69 T-shirt. 
Random numbers filled his screen, changing and swirling, rising and 
falling like stockmarket prices leaking through from the astral plane. 
He switched the computer off and left it for half a minute, thirty 
tense seconds while he paced and kicked at the rough white-washed 
walls and the racks of his fathers wines and old 78 records, and 
listened to the television sounds from the room above, but it was a 
hopeless measure, and when he switched back on the numbers 
danced again, mocking his cleverness. Rabid curses began to echo in 
the dank air. 


Back in Surry Hills Sug danced. He danced to the kitchen and 
danced back with  a bottle of vodka from the freezer and a stack of 
plastic glasses. 

"I love it when I waste someone, I really do! Something 
destructive in my psych. Rarely get the chance. Only users who 
deserve it get something from my virus collection. That would only 
be the third one, ever."

"What was on the disc?" Gregory asked in awe and fear.

"A little something from Big Blue. A little virus they use on 
unfriendly hackers over in the states. Nasty, and permanent."

"I don't think I want to know how you got your hands on that 
thing. "

"Oh, it was easy. They used it on me, once, but I had this box, 
this wierd thing that was a trap. It looked like a machine, and 
smelled like a machine, but it was just a cage with a nicad battery to 
feed the little fucker so we could watch it and copy it bit by bit till 
we had a working model. Worth it, in the end." 

"Either of you into raves, or techno?" asked Nootrope. They 
looked at each other.

"Yeah, kind of. I'm no raver, but I've been to a few." said 
Katerina.

"I like techno." said Gregory. "I had to put up a long aerial, but 
I can get Skid Row if the weather's good. MDA and all that. Come to 
think of it..."

"Yeah, I've got a program there too. Here."

He handed them a flyer, glossy magazine clay, with a graphic of 
bubbles rising through a mandelbrot swirl and dancing crome letters 
that were barely readable. 

"Vibe Tribe Does It On Grass." he read, "Saturday -th July. 
That's this week."

"Yeah, come along."

"Will it be legal?"

"Sort of."

"I'm tired," announced Katerina, "Sorry about this, but I just 
want to pass out. This is all very interesting, but I really can't muster 
the watts to think about it all."

"Sorry, please forgive me." Sug put down his glass and gestured 
towards the door. "Follow me. We'll be up all night must likely. 
Regular night here, this is our time. Hope you understand."

Katerina nodded and they followed their guest out of the room, 
up narrow stairs and along a corridoor that smelled like an old towel. 
He opened the door of a narrow room with walls almost hidden by 
piles of junk. There was old hardware, boxes of magazines, boxes of 
tangled wire and clothes and foam packing, vacuum cleaner parts, 
dirty clothes, and a bare single mattress lying in the centre of the 
small open space of floor, reminding Katerina of squats in demolished 
houses.

"Not much, but my guests call it home. Blankets in that box. See 
you tomorrow." He disappeared back down the corridor.

All Katerinas fatigue disappeared as she turned and grabbed 
Gregory around the waist, kissing him fiercely. He responded, almost 
lifting her from the ground.

"Not tired?" he gasped when she broke her hold.

"God no! I just wanted to get away from those freaks." Her 
voice was a cautious whisper. "What the hell was all that, and what 
were you doing? I can handle computers, but this," she gestured 
around at the dead electronics junk, but he could tell she meant the 
boys downstairs huddled around the bulletin board, "this is stupid. 
They're obsessed, playing wars over the phone and frying each 
others hardware, like it was that serious."

"Sorry, darling, but we find it interesting."

"More interesting than sex?"

"No!"

"Good. I was beginning to get frightened. Turn out the light."


Lang took a plate of lasagna up to his room, for Catherine. 

She lay curled tightly beneath the covers of the bed, eyes 
screwed shut as though in concentration. Her breathing was slow and 
measured, though. She was awake.

So he quietly descended the stairs, to put the plate in the 
fridge, and returned. Rolled himself in the dooner on the floor and 
closed his eyes. He was starting to feel resentful, as the situation 
solidified, and he realized his plans were falling apart. Gradually he 
slipped through the barrier to sleep/ wakefulness, and the void.

She hung there, directly before him, staring with hard-eyed 
contemplation as he slowly came awake.

"I want a room of my own." she said.

"Sure. There's a spare out the back. A lean-to, they call it, used 
to be a laundry. Maybe a bit drafty, but we can fix that. Don't know 
what the agent will say, though."

"Bugger the agent. I want money, too."

"It would be a good idea to get a job, if you want one. It won't 
be hard to arrange. Or go on the dole."

"I want time to think. I want you to stay away from me. I want 
to get these memories out of my head."

"I don't know if that's possible, now." said Lang. "You see, 
you're inhabiting a body, there, a body that fits into the story. The 
memories come with the package."

"But you put them there!"

"No! I mean, yes, but I didn't make them. Part of me did..."

"I want these things."

"You shall have them."

"Good." She swung herself around, until her back faced him, 
and relaxed. Lang floated motionless for a moment, before he too 
raised his arms and swung himself around, to face uninterrupted 
vacuum. 

There they hung, silently, facing outward, a pair of commas on 
an infinite black page.


Downstairs the night wore on. Sug and Nootrope took turns on 
the keyboard, talking to the users. Some logged on with promises of 
new software, games and applications, graphics of naked girls or 
terrible demons, animated characters, formula for homemade drugs, 
new tricks for old machines, nihilistic terrorist plots they would talk 
about but never use, new jokes to add to the lists that grew night by 
night, the jokes catalogued carefully by subject and type and style, 
useful someday as a record of the times, a social barometer that 
future archaeologists would someday dig from the depths of the 
electronic midden. In the interactive section users chatted and 
swapped gossip, typing at manic speed, poorly spelled lines moving 
down the screen too fast to be more than scanned.

In the early hours of the morning only the older hard core 
users were left, pouring themselves straight vodkas and conversing 
in a stripped down language of their own devising. They talked at a 
more leisurely pace, often reminiscing about old times when it was 
one man and his Commodore 64 against the world, and users had to 
write their own applications or do without, and had to memorize 
pages of the manual, lists of memory addresses and esoteric three 
letter commands in machine code. But the hour grew later still and 
one by one they logged off, leaving the board empty.


CHAPTER 4
TUESDAY


Something about alarm clocks is cursed. 

No, maybe something about people curses alarm clocks.

Micheal owned an electric AM radio alarm. He tuned it to a 
station that featured a certain talkback host in the morning whom he 
couldn't stand, a loud, mean, ugly character who was the darling of 
the blue rinse ladies in the bowling club set because he "said it like it 
is", or rather, he whinged and complained as much as they did about 
the state of the government, the world and the degeneration of 
today's youth. They called in again and again, those old biddies, 
trembling voices simultaneously petrified and delighted to be talking 
to a real life hero, a hero who would shamelessly rip them to shreds 
and cut them off if they failed to meet his criteria.

He hid the alarm on top of the wardrobe so that, when it went 
off and the announcers whining voice filled the room at full volume 
he couldn't simply turn over and slap it off in his sleep, but had to 
leave the warm sanctuary of the bed and go disarm it. And once out, 
he might as well dress, maybe even go to uni, although the 
temptation to climb back under the sheets was strong.

But this morning it had failed to trigger at the right time, again. 
It was ten and there was a class at eleven. 

Zombiefied, unhinged, he stumbled around the room, picking 
clothes up and putting them down. The announcer was having a bad 
morning too. 

"You're stupid, you know that? I think they must have 
forgotten to lock the phones at the Senility Care Facility again. Does 
the nurse know you're out?" (The Senility Centre was a fantasy of 
his: a Belson-like concentration hospital for all the weak old grannies 
who wasted his time with their fawning calls, where they would be 
shut in concrete cells with mounds of coloured wool and crochet 
hooks to knit Australia out of the recession.)

"Oh, your mean! I just meant that-"

"You're not listening, are you? No one cares what you mean 
because you're wrong, get it! Wrong, and daft to boot. next caller!"

"Hello, Mr. ----, I listen to your show every day and I think you 
really speak for the average Australian and I'm very worried about 
crime because things are not like they used to be and I used to sleep 
with the front door open and just the screen on the latch in summer 
and now..."

Micheal let the annoying whine push him around the room, 
finding books under heaps of clothes and piling them into his bag. 
Then downstairs, hesitating at the door of the kitchen before 
deciding to have coffee at uni, in the cafeteria, after the first lecture, 
if he made it.


Hanging on a bar in the bus, he read the posters again and 
again and avoided the eyes of the other passengers. The roof vent 
was open and great gushes of cold air whistled around his head, 
setting his nose running and clearing his sinuses until they were 
painfully raw.

Then the stop, and he was out, running between slow 
pedestrians down the roads and hallways to the lecture theater.

He was late. The door was closed and he stood in the 
overheated corridor outside until his breathing slowed, his heart 
quieted and the sweat was just starting to form on his face. He 
carefully opened the door for a peek.

Tiers of seats sloped down towards the lectern, every one full. 
Students spilled over into the aisles, sitting on stairs balancing their 
clipboards on knees and furiously scribbling as the lecturer ploughed 
through the topic. From his vantage point Micheal could see the 
pattern of photocopied handout passage; conscripts moved up the 
stairs, handing a bundle of pages to the end of each row. Passing 
along the rows, the bundles were strung out in a diagonal line, and 
they left behind fluttering white as the students read and filed the 
paper for later. 

Mr. Beavis was in fine form today. He flashed a blocky white 
grin at the horrified theater as he nonchalantly flipped 
transparencies on and off the projector, triggered another slide, 
pulled down a board he had laboriously filled with writing half an 
hour before the lecture, and prepared to run a video. 

A strong wave of revulsion filled Micheals heart, and he 
carefully closed the door and leaned against it. There was no way, 
short of a struggle with the security guards, that anything could get 
him in that class today. It was just too much, Even the rush of getting 
to uni didn't make a difference, he just couldn't make himself walk in 
and take a seat and try to catch up. 

There was no alternative but to go down to the cafeteria and 
drink coffee.


But the caff was full of business students.

He felt seedy next to their clean, sharp edged suits. Astonished, 
he realized that every item of clothing he possessed was ragged. The 
edges were never straight. And he realized he might have chosen 
them, subconsciously, for exactly that reason.

"Bugger this!" he said, loudly, earning glares from the women 
behind the counter. They liked their cafeteria. They had just installed 
a brand-name frozen fruit desert maker, a machine that dispensed 
cones of whipped fruit that resembled icecream, and they felt proud 
and clean. The artistic, idealistic, natural arts students (and he was 
obviously one) were supposed to appreciate the addition. Most of 
them did. They didn't know that the company producing this product 
was a well known international corporation that specialised in the 
production of another product, a dark brown carbonated beverage. 

Micheal drank the dark brown carbonated beverage often. He 
liked it. He knew all the facts. He knew it contained such a huge 
percentage of sugar that it was essentially a thin syrup, and that the 
phosphoric acid dissolved the lining of his stomach and his teeth 
every time he drank it. But he liked it.

So he backed out, swinging around clumsily so the bag on his 
shoulder smacked a couple of suits behind him. Walked out into the 
sunshine and looked for a bus. 


He walked through Surry Hills, past the small boutiques, label 
empires, the garment district that surrounded Central.

Strange businesses seemed to thrive there in the seedy 
atmosphere of crumbling warehouses. There was something about 
the ancient billboards flaking paint from the high brick walls that 
gave the area a timeless grandeur. He thought it might be the fact 
that nothing had been done to remove them. Elsewhere they would 
have been scrubbed away long ago, or covered over with huge well-
lighted hoardings for mobile phones. Here they were allowed to bask 
in the sun and grow older for eternity.

Past the hole-in-the-wall shops with bare walls and dusty 
stacks of bolts of cloth, or fishing rods or sewing machines or books. 
Everything dusty. The windows were milky. 

There, in a row of unkempt terraces, Sugs house. Micheal 
knocked.

"Yo Sug? Anybody?"

Minutes passed before the door was opened by a stranger. She 
was short, dark, very young. Her hair was dreaded into long snaky 
locks of rainbow hues.

"Hi. Sug's still asleep. Are you a friend of his?"

"Yeah, my names Micheal."

"What's your handle?"

"My what? Oh, you mean BBS name, right? I don't have one. I 
don't have a computer."

"Jeez, Sug has a friend who doesn't own a computer! I never 
thought I'd see this. At least you're male."

"Why at least?"

"You fit the pattern to that extent. Come in."

He stepped in and she closed the door.

"Greg's out in the loungeroom. He's playing with the machine."

Micheal said Hi and Gregory said Hi. They knew each other 
from Bretts place where they had seen each other over the table in 
the smoky basement.

Micheal sat down on the sofa.

"I'm Micheal. I just came down to see Sug. How long before he 
wakes up, d'you think?"

"Oh, about now. It's nearly one. How do you know him, do you 
frequent the board?"

"Only on friends computers. I.. just know him, I guess. Through 
other friends. I knew him before bulletin boards."

"Hi Micheal." called Sug, stumbling into the room from out the 
back. He looked like shit, had obviously spent another night on the 
keyboard, till five or so. It aged him. His sleep-crumpled face, 
combined with the early afternoon light, was still shocking to 
Micheals atrophied decency. Sug wandered absentmindedly into the 
kitchen.

"You know Gregory and Katerina?" he called back over his 
shoulder.

"Not really." The name... so this was Mrs. Grahams daughter. He 
was hardly surprised, reflecting that this was one place where 
anybody was likely to turn up; Sug was a connectivity machine in his 
own right. He smiled warmly at Katerina, who had been standing 
silently behind Gregory as he hunched over the keyboard, hand 
resting tenderly on his shoulder. "I've met Greg before. So you're 
Katerina."

"What, you've heard of me?"

"No, no..." Thinking fast. "I mean, yes, Greg must have 
mentioned you through the net. At least, I think so."

"I'm gonna learn this thing." She reached forward over 
Gregories shoulder and patted the monitor.

"You should. It's essential, really. It'll be like literacy soon, 
pretty much essential. You might be able to get by without a 
computer, but you sure as hell won't make it anywhere. Unless you 
start out rich enough to pay someone else to do it for you." 

"It makes me think of a secret society. To join, you have to 
learn the rituals. But you think that someday everyone will be a 
member." she said.

"Someday. If we're lucky."

"But that won't happen, believe me. There are so many people 
already who don't even know how to read. They'll never be able to 
use one of these."

"Then they won't be able to survive."

"That's terrible. It shouldn't be that way. It isn't fair."

"Nothing's fair. It's just the way it is."

"What are you up to, Micheal?" asked Sug.

"Nothing. I was at a loose end. I haven't been around for 
awhile."

Gregory stood and stretched. Katerina took his arm, smiled at 
Micheal and Sug and they left.

"What's with the waifs?" asked Micheal. Sug sat in the swivel 
chair and started tapping.

"Oh, I'm doing some charity work, it seems. Their parents don't 
understand, you know? So they came around to crash in the 
storeroom."

"I think I may know who the girl is. A lecturer freaked me out 
yesterday with a bucket of angst about her daughter. She actually 
asked me to keep an eye out, tell her if I discover her whereabouts."

"Are you going to? Because she is the one, I'm sure, she said 
her mother's a lecturer. So you're in her class. What's she like?"

"Not too bad, as long as she doesn't let her private life leak into 
the uni. She spent about half an hour telling me about her worries 
for the younger generation. Thought I would understand, which I 
did, but that doesn't mean I agree with her."

"What did you do?"

"Just downloaded a heavy story on her head. The usual thing. 
Suicide at school. Kind of dampened her own story, which was that 
her daughter was mixing with undesirables in the bad city."

Sug started to laugh and spin in his chair.

"What's the big joke, Sug?"

"She told you, right, to look out for her girl, because she's afraid 
she's living with scum, and she thought you might cross paths with 
her... does she think you're scum?'

"Yeah, I guess so. Compared to the golden youth at that 
institution I am."

"Look, I tell you what. Bring that mother over here to see her 
daughter."

"You're kidding! How will I arrange that? You wait, they'll be 
fighting all over the room. It'll be ugly, real ugly. These things never 
work out easily. You may think they'll be crying and hugging each 
other in an orgy of understanding, but they won't. They'll be arguing 
around the room for hours, and it'll all be our fault."

"Arguing's okay, I expect that. I don't want those kids 
freeloading too long, though. They said one day, but I can tell, it'll 
stretch out for weeks. But why do you say it'll be our fault?"

"It always is. They won't be able to blame each other, so they'll 
both blame you, us, anyone present."

"Do it. Get the mother around here tomorrow night. I'll take the 
rap."

"You're getting soft, Sug. Warm and caring. It doesn't suit your 
image."


Micheal remembered the last time Sug had a girlfriend.

It was a disaster. 

Not at first, though. At first it was great.

They met at a party. She had gatecrashed a gathering of 
computer nerds and was bored as hell. They talked to each other in 
stripped down codes, gibberish, faintly obscene. She snagged beer 
from the bathtub full of ice and bottles and wandered, listening in. 
They laughed too loud, at things that made no sense. They ignored 
her.

Sug walked in with a bottle of gin and another of tonic and set 
up shop in the kitchen. She watched the way the party flowed, and 
as soon as he stepped through the front door, smiling, brandishing 
his grog, clearing a way through the crowd, she noted how the 
random currents became circular around him, a whirlpool of 
connections. 

She casually pushed her way through to the kitchen and 
listened. 

At last, sense! Sweet, sensible, sane sense ruled in that little 
crowded smoky room! Sug, (she caught his name as soon as he 
walked in) was talking about actual human things.


"Does group sex ever happen?- that's what they should ask. 
Then people would buy their mag. It's obvious, but she wouldn't try 
it with the editor, said she was afraid of losing the job. As if they'd 
fire her for just suggesting, but she said they had strict guidelines to 
stop parents coming down on them for lowering their daughters 
morals."

"But think of the response it might kick up! You hear about the 
seventies, but now? Guys wouldn't talk about it though, not unless 
they were bi because the straight ones are so precious about being 
straight, they don't want to stain their record for even being in the 
same bed as another guy, even if there's a dozen girls as well."

"I guess only rock stars have orgies, ever. At least they're the 
only ones you hear about. Yeah, that reminds me what she also said, 
"We only like to hear about it if the participants are beautiful. Only if 
they have the glamour of the beautiful that makes us forgive 
anything they do, 'cause if we want to be as attractive as them and 
have the power they have, we can't condemn them for what they 
do." If ordinary ugly people have an orgy, it's disgusting."

"I saw a show called Doctor Fad. It was on Ten at five thirty in 
the morning, I was woken early by some yelling in the street and 
couldn't face sleep again, so I checked the box to see what mutated 
things they had banished to the wee hours of the morning.

"Anyway, Doctor Fad, a children's info-tainment show where a 
hyper Japanese-American guy charts the rise and fall of fads. Fads 
like Coke yo - yos and whistling yo-yos, and the ones you could only 
get when someone you knew was going to America, those liquid 
filled ones that didn't work, but they were so cool! I watched for half 
an hour. There were plastic tops for ice cream cones that didn't catch 
on, they squashed the icecream, but someone invested thousands in 
them, but they turned out to be the by product of stamping the holes 
in plastic sheets. They had a weather map of the US. charting the 
migration of fads and what was "in" in different states, like cold and 
warm fronts sweeping across the country in slow motion. Skater 
haircuts were sweeping across from the west, and baggy clothes, and 
grunge was going up everywhere like a heatwave, but I think the 
show was old, like 1990 or something."

"We sat in the cafe and listened to the video jukebox. Just 
before we left, someone decided to play a prank. So we wasted three 
two dollar coins, programming it to play the worst song over and 
over 15 times. I think it was Unchained Melody by the Something 
Brothers."


She could exist in this crowd without feeling like she was on 
another planet. She could join in. Sug causally mixed expert cocktails 
with the grog and various ingredients he got people to pass him from 
around the kitchen. He skillfully guided the conversation, casually 
changing the general subject with chance comments that took 
everyone in a new direction. That was something she definitely 
noticed, and liked. His self possession and demeanor. It was cool.

Later on she managed to get next to him, and he smiled and 
remembered her name when she told him. Much later, they went 
home together.

It was great. He lived in this big house, really eccentric with 
the piles of stuff put away, but somehow it wasn't threatening. It 
wasn't as though he was mad, the place was clean enough if messy. It 
was more that she could tell it was being used in some way.

And he had a neat, pleasant bedroom with no technology in it 
except a good alarm clock and a better coffee maker. And he had a 
futon that looked soft and fluffy like he took the time to hang it up 
and beat it in the traditional way. 

And his touch was good, soft and knowing, careful. She thought 
it might come with the skill he needed with his machines, then 
laughed and told herself not to be stupid. Just relax, she said. Just 
enjoy it. Get seduced, and seduce in return!

They fucked for a long time, trying a few different positions 
but not in the desperate change-a-minute fashion of the fuck of lust. 
It was better, more playful. This, she thought, might be what all the 
new age sexual ecstasy people were on about, this innocent pleasure. 
It reminded her of the pleasure she used to get from secret love 
letters when she was in early high school, but increased, intense, 
orgasmic. 

And the next day he was still great. The coffee machine woke 
them up with its smell, and they had a shower and went out for 
breakfast. He explained how he made a living, writing code for a 
couple of software companies, working on small projects that he 
could do himself at his own pace. It gave him the freedom to do 
things like have breakfast at ten am on a Monday morning. 

So she moved in with him and they stayed together six months. 
They were great times. One thing she saw: everywhere he went he 
was known. They went out every night of the week on wild unguided 
journeys, and everywhere they went, clubs or bars or restaurants, he 
would introduce her to the most amazing people. They would come 
up to him, smiling broadly, characters from myth almost, freaks of 
nature she never dreamed actually existed, heavy metal guitarists 
with long goats beards and conceptual performance artists in twenty 
year old pin stripe suits with tea cozies on their heads and illegal 
French aliens importing bootleg absinthe, and they all had a funny 
story to tell about something that happened when they were with 
Sug. Then they would invite them, to go out to the kitchen, or the 
office, or they would leave clubs and walk into houses next door, and 
more people would say "Sug! Where've you been?"


Time passed. Things changed.

New feelings kicked in. She started to resent the fact everyone 
knew him. Sometimes they couldn't find time to be alone with each 
other in weeks. Always parties to go to, and the bulletin board 
crunching away in the corner, so many people interacting with him. 
So much time spent tapping keys, not even seeing a face, just 
scrolling words down screens that made no sense. She couldn't help 
wanting more time, it was her right to expect it, and she asked him 
to cut down the time he spent running the board. 

He blew up. "How do you think I operate? Telepathy? I have to 
stay jacked in or I lose. I'll lose too many friends, and contacts. That's 
how I find work."

And he found work. A game. It was to be a fast action 
adventure, minimalist graphics, and anyone could tell it would be an 
underground classic. The player would fly a wedge of colour through 
an endless cubic lattice, piloting as though it were a jet. The wedge 
was a virus, and he had to find blocks of data in the memory matrix 
and destroy them with tapeworms, and locate the target data and 
carry it back to a home base, the whole game based on cyberpunk 
literature. 

To work it had to be hard and fast. The action had to be quick, 
but maneuvering the player and the enemies in three dimensions 
would severely tax the processors of most home computers. It could 
be done, though. It would take great coding skill to write the 
condensed machine code necessary, and careful scanning for 
redundant loops. The programmer would have to become very 
familiar with every part of the program. It would fill every waking 
thought. He would become a zombie. His speech would change, 
become stilted and vague, because every moment of the day he 
would be juggling possibilities, composing solutions to problems he 
encountered. 

And he took the job. And he degenerated into a dirty, obsessed, 
hopeless loser who could barely recognize her in the mornings. She 
took to staying at a friends house to avoid him. The stays grew 
longer and longer. And finally she just didn't come back.

He barely noticed, until the game was finished. He awoke from 
a nightmare that lasted six months to find her gone. Went looking for 
her, to invite her to share the acclaim. She laughed in his face, then 
cried. He retreated in confusion. And he realized that it had never 
been possible to have a relationship and an obsession at the same 
time. Very few women possessed the patience and virtue that once 
enabled them to suffer in silence while their husbands fought wars 
or conquered mountains, and he knew none. Nowadays those 
qualities would have branded the woman a hopelessly dependent 
drudge with no life of her own. 

"But Sug, maybe you knew this, and the game was just a way of 
avoiding the responsibilities of the relationship." Micheal said once. 
"Subconscious like, you knew she would leave, and you wanted her 
to."

"Maybe." Sug hated pop psychologists. He hated that glib 
analysis of the situation most of all. But he was too intelligent to 
dismiss it out of hand. Sometimes Micheals words haunted him, in 
the rare occasions he was alone. 


Andrew rolled over into warm space where Jackie had been. He 
opened his eyes.

"Work?" he croaked.

"Yeah." Jackie stood before the mirror, struggling with the thin 
plastic zip in the back of her navy dress. Andrew climbed out of bed, 
stretched, winced as his back popped, and went to help her.

"This is the most ugly thing I've ever seen." he said as he 
forced the zip up to her collar. The dress was a polyester 
monstrosity, thick and stiff. It smelt of laundry softener, but it felt 
stiff as cardboard.

"Part of the ordeal. I didn't have to wear one, when I started, 
just had to wear neat, respectable clothes in navy and white. But we 
got a new manager, who thought the customers expected uniforms, 
and brought them back in. Had to pay for it myself, too."

"And do the customers expect this?"

"Yeah, they do. Some of them, the old biddies, mainly, told him 
it was an improvement. Incredible. I remember, they came in a 
group, right in front of the cash registers, and told him, and he was 
as smug as shit, smiled like a snake all day."

Andrew pulled on jeans and a faded grey tee shirt while Jackie 
started coffee in the kitchen. The house was silent around them. 
Thomas had left early, as he usually did, and Miko wouldn't wake up 
for hours. 

They ate weetbix, the workers friend, the only breakfast you 
can eat without thinking. Can't even spill them like cornflakes. 
Washed down with black coffee. 

Locked the front foor behind them and trudged down the 
street.

"I'm gonna quit soon, anyway." said Jackie. "It's always the 
same. I take a job, work until I feel like I can't take any more, then 
keep going for a little longer. Then I set a date, and tell them, and 
that way I can stretch things out for a decent period. Then it's back 
on the dole for a couple of months."

"You could get some work from Thomas, you know. He's doing 
well."

"I don't know. There's something about working for someone 
you live with. And I'm not sure I want Thomas for a boss."

"It's not so bad. Remember, I worked for him. You do have to 
pull your weight, though. Feel obliged to. Like working for your 
parents."

"I bet you kept your room clean when you were a kid."

"We did. We were model children. Just perfect. But as soon as 
we left home we flipped. Funny, mum and dad thought they were 
programming us with good habits, that we'd be model citizens when 
we flew the nest, but then, what happened was, we reacted. Like 
physics. We went off in an equal and opposite direction. Here we 
are."

They stood outside Woolworths. Inside, the early customers, 
pensioners and mothers with young children, were scrambling for 
the specials of the day. Andrew watched a young woman dragging a 
screaming child out with one hand, pushing a full trolley with the 
other. He shuddered.

"Have fun." he said sardonically.

"Yeah." She gave him a peck on the cheek and went inside, 
disappearing through the swinging plastic doors between the shop 
and the staff quarters.


Nootrope no alarm clock, and he didn't need one. Early 
afternoon and a bar of sun crept from the floor onto his doona. 
Slowly it moved up the bed, heating the body beneath until it started 
to turn and sweat. Finally it reached the face and glared red light 
through the lids until they opened.

It takes him longer each day to disentangle himself from his 
dreams. He sits, eyes closed, thinking about people that don't exist. 
His dreams have taken on the quality of myths, full of signs and 
portents and immortal beings. They take time to shake off. 
Sometimes he wishes they would leave him alone.

Pulling on underwear from the pile on the floor, he stumbles to 
the window. Nothing to see at this time of day, only a truck parked in 
the dock of the factory across the way. He looks down from the third 
story on a little used lane with its gutter running down the centre, 
Dickensian, unchanged from the days it was built more than a 
century before. Times have been bad to the business in this area. 
Once, he woke to loud slams of boxes stacked in trucks by sweating 
laborers as the whitegoods importers across the way finally gave in 
to the tides of the time and loaded their stock off for a bankruptcy 
sale.

Sunlight slanting in through windows dusty and stained with 
rain, onto bare wooden floor. The only bare floor is near the 
windows, the rest of the room crowded with objects; sickly dope in 
ceramic pots never getting enough sun, potted aspidistra that always 
get too much with yellow spotted leaves, motherboards from dozens 
of different computers, monitors, tape recorders, disc drives, ancient 
mainframes thrown out by the university and rescued from the 
footpath. Stacks of floppy discs overflow tables crowded with tape 
editors and keyboards on racks giving him broken grins, half their 
white keys blackened by age.

Nootrope, tall, stooped and thin as air, red hair, long and 
shaggy, takes small round reading glasses from their case and puts 
them on. Suddenly everything becomes sharp, new, vibrating with 
clarity. He raises a scratched pair of mirror shades and regards his 
face in their lenses, unsmiling, serious eyes, cat like in their intensity, 
even behind glass.

He dresses slowly, tired still. Tee shirt splashed with hundreds 
different colours dyes, a souvenir from Goa, the small province on 
the west coast of India where they have elevated parties to an art 
form,  raves and dances and festivals every few days if not every 
day. Some locals bought cheap cotton tee shirts and stretched them 
over frames lashed from bamboo, down on a beach on a dry sunny 
day. All day they walked up and down the line of white shirts 
flicking drops of colour from their fingers and brushes. Of course 
they were stoned, some so stoned they ate afterwards without 
washing their hands and ingested near fatal quantities of dye. So it 
goes. The shirts are famous. 

Flapping loose old sports jacket, bought second hand and 
embroidered with wire and patches, baggy loose fit pants of thin 
brightly printed cotton. Fluorescent Converse boots hand coloured 
with markers.

Phone rings. Cymoril. Her voice lazy, relaxed as a sleepy cats 
meow.

"Come on over, if you have time."

"I was just working on some music."

"Bullshit! I bet you've just woken up. I know you, you're trying 
to think of ways to avoid the day's work."

"Actually I don't have any work to do today. The guys are 
giving me the day off, seeing as I have to see The Man tomorrow and 
okay the rave."

"Yes, I believe I know what that entails."

"Word gets around."

"It's nothing to be ashamed of, you know. You should be 
proud."

"Take this cup from me."

"Nonsense! Even I've done it, and enjoyed it."

"That's different."

"Wanna come over or not?"

"Nothing I'd rather do, Cy. What's June up to?"

"She should be around."

"Okay. One hour."


Thick traffic clogged Regent Street. Nootrope darted between 
nearly stationary cars on his bike, a 250 cc Jap motor he bought from 
German tourists who had thrashed it around the country twice 
before they decided to check out New Guinea. It had it's problems; 
intermittent faults with the ignition he couldn't track down despite 
his affinity with juice. He was strictly solid state; mechanical electrics 
left him cold.

He weaved his way through the stationary behemoths and 
turned down Abercrombie, surrounded by noisy semi trailers and 
delivery vans. A breif attack of commuter sadness hit him. Workers 
trudge down streets bathed in rose yellow afternoon light. It blinds 
tired eyes on the train. The great sun floating in the high haze. Cars 
jostling for advantage and refusing to give ground. A gang of loose 
ferals dodge between them to the sound of horns. They make the 
traffic island safely and wait for a gap in the oncoming rush before 
trying for the other side. It reminds him of horses fording a stream 
full of crocodiles.

Everywhere For Lease signs are tacked onto the shopfronts and 
houses, as the Great Change gathers momentum. Businesses fold. 
Shops fail. Once he took a few numbers and called the Realtors, but 
they casually tried to rip him off. So they stay empty, because no one 
wants to bring the leases down too far. The owners keep thinking, 
"What about the boom? I don't want to be stuck with a small lease 
when the boom times come again!" As if they will.

There are beggars now, more and more. Streeties, target him 
for his look. For the clothes, the hair, and the walk, all spell the 
possibility that he might both have money in his pocket and be 
willing to share it. If he looked more wealthy, if he wore Raybans 
and sports jackets from Country road and leather loafers, they 
wouldn't bother, because he would just say no. If he wore ripped and 
torn tee shirts under unbuttoned flanno they wouldn't bother either; 
not worth the effort.

He bumped across the curb and kicked the stand outside the 
terrace, and went in. The door was unlocked..

"Nootrope? Hi, I'm in the kitchen."

It is sunny, warm squares of yellow on the polished floor. 
Cymoril serves him chamomile tea with honey. He stands at the 
window and looks out.

He envies them the tiny square of back yard. The main 
drawback to living in warehouse space being the lack of a garden. 
Even the smallest, most pointless bit of green seems luxurious to his 
eyes. Silently he redesigns it in his minds eye, placing old concrete 
washing tubs of herbs here and there, potted fruit trees. All edible or 
useful. Utility has it's own beauty. Better a flower that can be eaten 
than one poisonous and dangerous to children. 

And Cymoril entertains him with drug stories. Old tripper, acid 
enlightened, very happy with reality now she has washed the 
dreams out of the wrinkles in her cranium. She reaches forward and 
flicks the old fashioned metal binder spine that takes centre stage on 
the table, looks like a small sculpture by a modernist. The bright 
watch springs that used to hold the pages in start to dance in the 
light, and keep dancing, as though some hidden engine inside powers 
their movement. They catch and reflect the light, drawing the eye in. 
Tiny sunsparks dance in the curves of bright metal.


"Every week we would gather at my house, or rather my 
parents house, to take the trips and wait for them to take effect. 
While waiting we would sit in the loungeroom and talk. My parents 
loved it, they were amazed at how clean cut and friendly and nice 
my friends all were, and were somehow flattered that so many 
people were willing to come and visit. To my parents they all seemed 
so "clean". They wouldn't conceive that their cleanness was a result 
of their dedication to chemical pleasure. Everyone would be drinking 
cans of coke and secretively slipping the paper into their mouths and 
swallowing, and soon the signs would appear; the pupils would get a 
little too large to pass as normal, and we would go out.

We were a cabal, a magic circle, a conspiracy, and our outings 
were mystic journeys. We made them adventures. An older woman, 
mid thirties, though she looked like late twenties, would usually 
guide us and be the "trip master". She would map out routes through 
Newtown and the surrounding suburbs that took in sights and views 
and experiences that would ring in our minds for a long time after. 
She took us through stormwater drains, and the stink of stagnant 
water and dead leaves would be strong in our nostrils, until it 
seemed we must be buried alive. We would touch the rough concrete 
walls and feel how deep underground we were.

Or Candycane Lane, lined with small terraces each painted a 
different colour, each the shade and texture of powdery icing on a 
cake, so that the street was striped with pastel colours, and the cars 
parked out front matching colour perfectly.

Often we would go to the old Newtown cemetary and climb 
over the walls. There was a headstone in the shape of a giant seat, 
with a view towards the church. One by one the trippers would be 
assisted into the stone chair, to sit awhile and look out over the 
crowded field of monuments and tall dry grasses that came from 
cracks in the concrete and marble. Anyplace gothic, like Sydney 
University, with the worn sandstone gargoyles on the library that 
seemed to swarm in their shadows. Shadows that could become 
wolves and chase us through the trees.

A magic moment: we walked down an ordinary street, small 
terraces, parked cars, and caught up with a man walking ahead of us. 
So thin he was, and pale, wrapped in dark woolen cloak and boots 
that jingled buckles at every step, and eyes ringed with made up 
shadows and hair sprayed out into the typical black bush if the 
Gothic set, all Robert Smith spikes. I remember he wore a huge 
crucifix, but he wore it as an earring. He turned when we got close, 
and he was so cool he just smiled, and stretched his legs. He led us 
past a house with people hanging out on the front steps, they knew 
him and it might have been where he lived and where he was 
headed before we came along. He talked with them for a second, 
glanced back at us all, and proceeded down the street. For the next 
hour he was our silent trip master, leading us through areas we 
hadn't been before. New sights, new smells. It was so natural, that 
this elfin being should be there to guide us. For the next hour he was 
the king of the elves dancing along behind him wherever he went. 
Finally he returned to the house and stood on the verandah, so we 
continued up the road and past him, each bowing our respects in 
turn.

One night we invaded a church hall. It must have been the 
night after a fete, the hall was scattered with the remains of the junk 
stalls, the White Elephant as they call them. There were all old 
cutlery in boxes and bad vases of cut glass and knick knacks. I 
remember it very clearly, paradoxically because it was the night I 
happened, by chance, to have taken a very powerful dose of 
whatever was in trips at the time. It may have been genuine uncut 
LSD for all I know. 

The shadows of the hall were alive with movement, as though I 
could see all the secret effects, the hidden forces that are what 
makes reality happen. The molecules of air could be seen, vibrating.  
Everyone around me had a halo. They trailed light behind when they 
moved, like comet tails. 

I walked towards the corner of the room. There were shoes, in 
pairs, arranged on the floor. Each pair was set just so, not too close 
together, just as far apart as the feet of a standing person. They all 
pointed inwards, towards the centre of their little circle. Standing 
there, the thing they all pointed towards, stood this, quivering 
silently in the darkness."

She stopped talking and flicked the metal object again. Again 
the springs started their vibration. 

"Instantly my keen mind sprang into action and solved the 
entire problem. It was so obvious. It was a part from the engine of 
an alien spacecraft. It was a powerful device they used to fold space 
when their UFOs traveled between the stars, and they had lost it, and 
it had ended up here, on a stall at a church fete. 

It was obvious that, when they laid the junk out on this floor, it 
had somehow activated and started to work. Silently powered by 
some incredible force, it had lain there vibrating, catching other 
peoples eyes. They walked towards it, reached down, and touched.

Instantly it propelled them into another dimension, leaving 
only their shoes behind. I pictured the shoes smoking for a few 
minutes after they left, an image from some old cartoon. The 
evidence was so compelling, it was the only conclusion that made any 
sense. 

So I reached down and touched it myself.

I wanted to go. That was it, I wanted out, and nothing would 
have made me happier than to instantly find myself standing in 
another dimension. But of course, nothing happened. It took me a 
moment to realize that I wasn't wearing any shoes. It must require 
that a person wear shoes before they could be transported. I picked 
it up absentmindedly and wandered away, to join the others 
inspecting the other pieces of useless junk the church people hadn't 
been able to sell. Many of them had their own treasure picked from 
the jumble, and I remember thinking how they too might have been 
gifted with a moment like mine."


Karen wandered out into the silent loungeroom to find 
Catherine crouched next to the stereo. 

She had found a pair of walkman headphones somewhere, and 
she was listening to tapes, flipping them out and putting a new one 
in every few minutes, sampling them briefly. Karen walked past to 
the kitchen, hearing the tinny tss tss tss tss of the beat from the 
phones. 

Returned with a bowl of coco pops, and Catherine had switched 
the music off and sat smiling at her. 

"We still haven't really had a chance to talk, you know." said 
Karen. "I guess you'll be staying here. You're welcome, you seem 
okay, but you'll need to start paying rent, of course."

"Of course."

"What are your plans, anyway? What do you do? Are you on 
the dole?"

"I don't think so. I'll have to check."

"But, you've just moved here from Melbourne... didn't you 
arrange things at the office?"

"No."

"Not good. Not good at all. They're expecting you to sign on 
down there, and you're up here, and they won't like the fact that you 
moved without telling them. They don't usually like you to move at 
all, unless you claim to be after a particular job. And then, it usually 
pays to actually get the job for awhile."

"I'll ask Lang. He still hasn't explained everything about the 
system up here."

Karen thought: schizo. Everything about Catherine's 
performance screamed madness, the quiet madness that was the 
worst. Like everyone, Karen was expert at dealing with the various 
common forms of madnesses that circulated like plague diseases. She 
walked through a world like a ward in Bedlam, and she hardened her 
heart, raising armor against the madness of others, avoiding 
contamination. Some would fall. Many would fall. The world was just 
so fucked up, so invasive and cruel and cold, that anyone with the 
slightest gap in their armor was doomed to eventually succumb and 
join the ranks of the psychotic. There was no hope for the weak. So 
she nodded and smiled professionally.

And Catherine wondered why she felt such a vast gap between 
herself and this girl, who she should befriend, because she so 
desperately needed someone to explain the rules. But she's not real, a 
little voice said. She's a figment of Langs crooked dream. 

"I'm sorry if I seem a little strange. I should explain."

Feeling the story develop even as she told it. 

"Since I left Lang - how much has he told you about me? About 
us?"

"Very little. Just that you were together for about a year."

"Yeah. That was some time ago. Lang's a nice guy... he's kind of 
cool, but things didn't really work out between us. He's very 
possessive, you know. Very stifling. I liked that for awhile; it was 
comforting, at the time. When I moved out of home it was good, it 
held me together as I adjusted to life on the "outside". But after 
awhile it was just too much, and I left him."

"We split up pretty friendly. I lived with some friend, and then 
I stopped hearing about him, and found he moved up here..." It was 
easy, Catherine found, the bones of the story were already there in 
her head, a standard story, repeated often. Karen nodded and 
hmmnn'd in the right places.

"I've been through that before." said Karen. "No wonder you 
were a little fragged. It always does that to ya. But don't worry, 
you'll do well."

"What's it like, up here?"

"What have you heard?"

"Uhh..."

"I bet you heard it's better than Melbourne, here? That right? I 
bet you heard there's more happening here, more venues, more 
parties, better weather even, and all that. It aint so."

"It isn't?"

"Not at all. Get around here and you'll start to hear stories 
about Melbourne is better than Sydney for the same reasons. You'll 
be popular if you want, you can ride on the rumor that Melbourne 
people are friendlier than Sydney. There's several reasons for this 
I've heard mentioned: one is that Melbourne is colder, and the 
population spends more time at home, and that mellows you all out. 
The other is that there's less yuppies down there, so the venues 
aren't being closed down and renovated and all, so there's more live 
music and people go out more."

"This isn't entirely true-"

"Tell me about it! I've been collecting these rumors since they 
started. I know it isn't true, just like the rumors about Sydney aren't 
true. But what is the truth?"

Catherine thought fast to dredge up some local knowledge from 
the memory banks Lang had given her.

"Things are better and worse, down there. There's more 
repression from the government. there's more established venues 
and all..." It got easier as she went along. The facts were all there.

"Melbourne is full of people who believe in culture. The believe 
in "high culture", in opera and such, but they regard certain things as 
without value. Like new music. And Triple J came to town."

"Yeah. We're sorry about that."

"Don't be, it wasn't your fault."

"It used to be a good station."

"I heard that. It's the programmers fault."

"It always is. The programmer always knows what's right, and 
the programmer is always old and out of touch."

"But how can anyone claim to be in touch? It's all too complex... 
I can't claim to know what things are really like back home, because 
I was just a person, and other people have different points of view as 
to what's really going on..."

Karen smiled. 

"I do understand. I'm glad to hear you say that."

"Yeah. It all makes me confused, and sometimes angry. It gets 
down to this; one can say anything, anything at all, about "the 
situation", and other people have to believe you, because there's no 
other source of information. And when there is, it contradicts. 
Everything contradicts. Read the paper. Sociologists try and analyze 
aspects of culture, and they argue with each other. Historians revise 
history, because they think it's been tampered with for propaganda 
reasons, and then a new generation of historians re-revise and 
accuse the previous ones of being propagandists themselves. In the 
end, the only solution that makes sense is to shut up and forget 
about everything. Words just add to the pile, and none of them are 
right."

"Have you thought about doing a course? It's a good scam. The 
pay's less than the dole, but you get a epic of paper, and that's 
slightly more than useless. I mean, someday it might get you a job, if 
you're lucky. And it gives you something to do."

Catherine considered. 

"What are you doing, at uni?"

"Fine art. Now, Micheal's doing a Bachelor of Arts, which means 
he did well at school but he can't draw. I'm doing Fine Arts, which 
means I can draw pretty good, and have enough ideas to keep the 
lecturers entertained. When he comes out he'll have a epic of paper 
saying he's slightly smarter than average, and I'll have a piece of 
paper saying I can draw even better than when I went in, and that I 
have a certain attitude. Or rather, it used to mean that..."

"What does it mean now?"

"Well... this is sad to say, but what it really means now is that I 
used  to have a certain attitude, but it's all been beaten out of me 
now, and I've been tamed, and am ready to work for your company. 
It means I've got all the rebellious shit out of my system, done all 
the experimenting, got cynical, and now I'm prepared to knuckle 
down in the real world and earn, use my graphic skill designing 
packaging for your product, and my multimedia skills to prepare 
advertising campaigns. It's horrible."

"So why do you do it?"

"Why not? I'd like to earn serious money, some day. I'd sell my 
soul with the best of them, I suppose. There's really no alternative. 
You can be a serious artists and starve, and feel really good about 
yourself, but that's crap. Maybe in a fantasy world the Medici's will 
support you, but not here." 

She checked her watch and cursed.

"Gotta meet some friends at school now. Found anything you 
like?" she said, nodding at the stereo as she raced around the room 
looking for her backpack. 

"I'm just checking them out. I like tapes." 

"Uh, yeah." The bag was wedged behind the couch. She slung it 
over her shoulder and headed for the door. "See ya later." and she 
was gone. Catherine put the earphones back on and slotted a new 
tape. 


Day fades to night and the lights go on. They burn all night, 
office lights, fluorescent tubes cost less to burn than to flick on and 
off. 

So towers of ranked light stand amid the dark bulk of their 
brothers, bright lines ruled across their face. Atop each building the 
signs, each in their colours, simple shapes and designs like doodles 
by a child with a glowing pen, million dollar graffiti, haloed with a 
nimbus of cloud when the weather is right, chromatic fog patches 
boiling above each tower, enriched with belches of fog from the 
cooling units.

Overpasses running along the face of the cities mass, built on 
pylons down where the docklands used to be. Rivers of light flowing 
white and red, approaching and receding, changing over as they pass 
by. Their doubles in the water ripple and shake, crossed by ferries 
and noisy party cruisers that thump the bass beat of music off the 
mirror surface for miles.

Let the eyes take all this in, and they find more. The few stars 
or planets that outshine the haze of the cities waste light radiating 
upwards and reflected back by dust and smoke. Nobody thinks about 
the loss of the stars; what use are they? High clouds lit pink by 
halogen streetlamps. Higher, and they shine a dull pearl, like the 
pigeons that fly at night now, hunting their scraps from the cinema 
crowds. Their wings are dull mirrors passing overhead down city 
streets, and from a distance clouds of them sparkle as each turns in 
sequence, catching the glow and throwing it out again. 

In parks the late breeze moves the leaves on figs and 
eucalyptus, and they sparkle like shards of dark glass. Sometimes 
there is dew on the lawns, but not often, the buildings and paved 
ground catch the days heat and hold it, preventing the grass from 
cooling. When it does whole lawns turn silver. Each blade stays at the 
angle the sun left it in when it set, aligned to throw out their rays in 
unison.

Concrete grey and plain in full light, but night transforms. Tiny 
angular prisms of calcified water and gypsum and silica sand and 
mica.  Countless diamonds trapped in the grey matrix, lost forever, 
but still shining.

Go out where the city hides under the horizon, the pale domed 
cloud is visible in the dark, like clouds hovering above tropical 
islands. All these things are there, if you look. 

They walk silently through the small, dark labyrinth of 
Chippendales streets, tree lined and smelling of earth. There are 
thick piles of leaves in the gutters dropped by the imported 
European trees the council favors. Spiky chestnuts roll underfoot. 
Lang kicks them, spinning away, bouncing into the hubcaps of 
parked cars. He shuffles through piles of leaves, soaking his ripped 
and torn Converse hightops with dew. Micheal strolls on the road, 
hands in pockets, reading the layered flyers, ducking to the footpath 
to let cars past, then back to the road. His stride is longer than the 
others, a legacy from a country life, and he finds it hard to walk 
slowly enough for the others to keep up. Andrew brings up the rear, 
stopping every now and again to peer through the darkened 
windows of shopfront offices and antique shops.

At the end of a cul-de-sac is a park. A square of grass, and 
plastic playground equipment, guaranteed not to hurt children and 
leave the council with a heavy litigation case. As they approach they 
strain their eyes to see into the dark corners, check for night 
predators, lurking gangs of streetkids or obnoxious winos. An 
automatic habit. In fact, they concentrate so hard on checking the 
shadows under trees and shrubs that they nearly miss the small girl 
who sits silently in one of the swings directly under a bright orange 
streetlight. 

"Look!" Andrew exclaims. They see her.

She's about eight, dressed in a long frock, strangely out of date, 
floral print, perhaps ten years old. Obviously second hand, from a bin 
at Vinnies. It looks thin and cold on the scrawny child. 

Her black hair cascades in a snakes nest of greasy rats tails 
down her back. Her face is pale, tinged by the light. She doesn't look 
at them, as they stand, confused, at the end of the bitumen, looking 
over the low fence at her and wondering what to do.

"She's crying." observes Lang. He starts forward. "Let's find out 
what's wrong."

"Don't be a fool, man!" Micheal grabs his arm and pulls him 
back. "This isn't a good thing. She's a girl, for Christ sake!"

"Well, so?"

"Well, so she might start screaming, and the police come, and 
they interview her, and push a bit for details, and she says what 
they want her to. Like, she says we tried to take her away, or worse. 
Or maybe her mother put her here."

"A trap." says Andrew.

"Exactly. A trap. She knows what to say. I say we just walk 
away and leave her. For all we know she might just live across the 
street. For all we know her parents are watching us right now."

"You know, you are really paranoid!" Lang tells Micheal. "She 
might really need our help. If we don't help her and she needs it, if 
she's run away from home and doesn't have anywhere to go, well, 
someone else might come along after we're gone. Someone who really 
does want to hurt her. I say we ask her."

"Listen, man, it's too much of a risk. You've seen the TV 
recently? There's a rash of molestation stories on at the moment. 
Every cheesy tabloid news show has them. They love them. Who 
wants that?"

"There has to be a way around this." muses Andrew. "We really 
can't just leave her here."

Silent thought, punctuated by the slow creak of the swings 
chains. The girl glances up once, to see the silent trio staring at her, 
and she looks down at her shoes. Her shoulders tense, but she seems 
resigned. 

Lang slaps his side.

"I know. I know! The nuns!"

"Nuns?"

"Down around the corner from the house! We can ask one of 
them to come and find out what's wrong."

"Don't be stupid! You expect a nun to walk around Chippendale 
at ten at night? You even expect them to open the door?"

"No, come on. I think this will work!" He turns and starts jog-
trotting back the way they came, his black overcoat flapping behind 
him, while Micheal and Andrew exchange glances.

"I guess it's worth a try."

"Let's wait here."

"No, further up the street." They move off.

Lang reached the door of the nuns house. It wasn't really a 
nunnery. Just three terraces joined together into a single residence, a 
staff of eight nuns. They are a familiar sight, walking their ancient 
threadbare terrier through the streets and going to church of a 
Sunday. Lang knew several of them by sight, and knew they knew 
him. He was counting on this; that they would trust him because they 
knew he was local. He stepped forward and rang the polished brass 
bell that hung beside the security screen.

Five minutes later the door creaked slowly open. A face peered 
past it's edge, old, wrinkled, capped with a black cloth. Small glasses 
perched on the nose.

"Oh, it's you. The tall one. What is it, at this hour?" The voice a 
sleepy croak. She looks him up and down, and for the first time Lang 
realizes he is wearing a tee shirt covered with Satanic symbols, white 
on black, and everything else black, his jeans and coat, and probably 
looks like a thug to the old lady. It shakes his confidence, but he 
hides it well.

"There's a girl, in the park around the corner and down aways... 
you know the one? Anyway, she's just sitting there, on a swing. I was 
out walking with some mates and we found her. We don't want to.. 
well, we'd rather not get involved, because... "

The old eyes twinkle.

"Because you'd rather not be in the news, hmmm? Wait here."

Lang shuffled uneasily on the stairs until a gaggle, (swarm? 
gang? flock? huddle?) of nuns emerges, wrapped in their habits, lead 
by the old white haired sister who answered the door. They silently 
proceed down the street, while their leader steps back inside and 
gestures for Lang to follow.

"It's alright, we'll look after this. I've called the police. You did 
the right thing."

"I'm sorry I had to wake you up." 

"No, not at all. Some of the sisters grumbled, but this is why 
we're here. Or why we want to be here. This is what it's all about, 
being a nun." She grins, and Lang feels strangely warm, as though he 
has discovered a long lost relative he never knew he wanted to meet. 
Perhaps it is because, for the first time in months, he is in the 
presence of a person he really feels he can trust. Not just that she is a 
nun; he is too cynical to believe all nuns are good. A few of the 
sisters he sees in the street scowl fiercely at the world, daring it to 
corrupt them. In the calm Zen light of her presence, he feels an urge 
to explain.

"But you must have been scared, when I answered the door. 
My clothes, I mean... "

"Yes, I understand. We watch you, you know. Some of my 
sisters, well, they despair that you are all in the thrall of You Know 
Who." She smiles with astonishing humor. "All you children, and 
don't protest, you are children. They think Satan makes you dress 
and act in this way, which I might say couldn't be better judged to 
put the wind up old girls like me. But I know you have no hope and 
you do it to make up for your lack of courage. Well, eventually you 
should come around to the Word of God. At least, that's my hope, or 
my personal faith, apart from my faith in Jesus. In the mean time, 
don't be embarrassed, if all you worry about is your dress sense then 
you are very lucky."

Police cars pull up silently below them, just as the posse of 
nuns returns with the girl, trailed by Micheal and Andrew. The nuns 
lead the girl as though she is in a trance, and they pass by the police 
and climb the stairs. Lang steps back to let them past. The girl looks 
up as she passes him, and gives him a fathomless stare that chills his 
heart. Suddenly all the warmth that seemed to have been 
transmitted from the old Sister is sucked away into the night. The 
cops stalk in, giving him cold looks, but they are just cop looks, no 
more significant than the expression on a cats face. 

"You better go now." says the nun, and he walks down the 
stairs to his friends, the door clicking shut behind.

"Woa!" breathes Micheal under his breath. "That was spooky! 
They look like ghosts. You should have seen them, coming down the 
road."

"Let's go"


Back at the house the television was on and the gang were 
gathered around it's warm friendly glow. The familiar scent of smoke 
was in the air, but Micheal waved away the bong when it came his 
way. 

"Uni in the morning." was his excuse. He climbed the stairs 
slowly, aware of Karen close behind him. She smiled when he turned.

"How are the classes going? I mean, really, how are they? Are 
you passing?"

"I'm passing. It's hard. I can't seem to get into it, really. Some 
people can. It becomes the centre of their life. They don't seem to 
suffer when they have to spend time in the library. It's like they 
believe in it. They have this air... like religious folk. God gives them 
strength to study."

"Yeah. Same here."

They went into his room. Karen removed a stack of paper from 
a wooden chair and sat. Micheal leaned on the desk.

"Listen to this." he said. He told her about Mrs. Graham, her 
talk, her plea for help regarding her wayward daughter, and the 
discovery at Sugs. Karen listened in silence.

"I don't think you should do it." she said firmly when he had 
finished.

"Why not?"

"It doesn't do to get involved with the academics. 
Complications."

"Like?"

"Look at them. They're lonely. You don't get involved with 
lonely people unless you want a friend, and there's usually a reason 
why they're lonely. Mrs. Graham is just a professional with a 
problem with her daughter. There's millions of them all over the 
world. She's also an academic. You have a relationship with her; 
you're her student. She wants two things. She wants her daughter 
back, and she wants her students to like her."

"Like her?"

"Yeah. She wants to be your friend. She stands up the front of 
the lecture theater and she's faced by a crowd of people who she's 
outside of and she wants to be in."

"Once out you're never in."

"Well, we know that, but she doesn't. Think. What happens 
when, if, you tell her where her daughter is?"

"She, uhh, calls her? Goes to see her."

"Takes her home, or tries to. They argue, if the girl doesn't 
want to go. And if she does... you're a hero. You saved her daughter 
from the predations of the city. You saved her from being a dropout."

"Yeah! She'll be grateful."

"What does s