__-----_________------_____--__________________--___----______--__ __--___--_____--_____--____--________--________--___--_--_____--__ __--____--___--_______--____--______----______--____--__--____--__ __--____--___--_______--_____--____--__--____--_____--___--___--__ __--____--___--_______--______--__--____--__--______--____--__--__ __--___--_____--_____--________----______----_______--_____--_--__ __----__________------__________--________--________--______----__ 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 she do then? She can't give you pass marks as a reward. She can't show you any favoritism. In fact, if anyone else knows about this episode you're in big trouble. They might accuse her of favoritism, just because you did her a favor. And also, you've breached the barrier between the academic and the student. Everytime you pass her in a corridor you'll feel the obligation to talk. And you know how bad that can be." "So, I get bored out once in a while. So what?" "Just take my advice. Everyone's happier this way." "But, it's already happened. Even if I pretend I haven't found the girl, she'll think I've failed." "What, does she think you're some kind of private eye? Have you been bragging to her about your connections in the scene? Anyway, why are you the man to find her?" "Dunno. She just picked me. Gave me my assignment back." He dug in his bag for the folder, handed it to Karen. "She liked it. She thought I was into the subject. Thought I had a connection with it." "Another mistake." "Yeah, I know. Grab the marks and run." "'Sactly. Well, what are you going to do?" Micheal leaned back and stared at the ceiling. "Do it." Don't get involved. Words of wisdom. Don't get involved, unless you really, really want to. Unless you budget for failure. Unless you can handle the opposition. Unless you're prepared to put everything you got into it, and have it all flushed down the drain due to lack of interest by anyone else, because no one else wants to get involved. Don't get involved, because it's a lonely world. The fanatics are working. They have their projects. You meet them, and talk to them, and they mention their obsession. If you make the mistake of being too interested, they will fixate on you. They will believe, because they are desperate to believe, that you, too, are as interested as they. And when it turns out that you were just being polite, they will hate you, because you failed them, because, by declining to be as fanatical as they are, you are denying the importance of their work. Everything is closing down, because no one wants to get involved. The fanatics are dying off for lack of interest. Too many times they get burned, and they learn the rules. Don't get involved. Don't wear your heart on your sleeve for 'daws to peck at, because they will. You will lose your heart. The world is as cold as a vacuum. People are spacecraft, self contained, following their orbits. They rarely dock. It's a waste of fuel. Give money. You can afford to give money. Don't give time, or heart. You can't afford to lose that. It's a cold world. You are leaking. You need every ounce of strength you have just to maintain. Just to get by. Unless you believe you have infinite resources of strength, unless it wells up within you, unless you overflow with enthusiasm and energy. Maybe you do. Maybe you need to be bled, like they did in the middle ages, bled to relieve choleric high blood pressure, with leeches on your veins. Protect yourself. No one else will. "I'm not sure if the light works." said Lang, groping in the darkness for the dangling cord. He found it and pulled, but there was just an empty click. "The bulb must be blown. Let's see." He clicked a lighter and they looked around. There were concrete pedestals in the corner, and an old tap, where the laundry tub used to be. The wall that adjoined the house had a panel set in, where the old laundry chute was. It had been nailed shut. A bare, dust covered bulb hung from the ceiling. "There you are. Very funky. Just like Miko's room. You should go over there, see what he's done with his." "It'll do." said Catherine. "Here, take this." Lang handed her a plastic card. "Use it sparingly. Don't overdo it, and for Gods sake, don't tell anyone about it." "I will, if you tell me what it is." "It's an ATM card. You can use it to get money from the bank." "It's got my name on it!" "It's yours. I made it, today. It's getting harder and harder to do, but I managed it. See if you can remember anything to do with it." Catherine stared at the plastic rectangle, rummaging through her crowded, tangled mess of memories. "I worked as a secretary in an office. I earned money." she said at last. "Four digit PIN." "That's the story. Now you're set, for the time being." "I don't know how you do it." said Catherine. "What? The memory?" "Make friends with these people. I can't seem to talk to them." "You've never had the practice." said Lang. "You've never learned the skills. It's just something you learn." "They seem to fly into your hands like pigeons when you throw crumbs." "I do throw crumbs. Maybe you should try it sometime. Most people are starving for a crumb, of attention or admiration. I give them what they want." Lang "But they ask you." "Only because they know." "But I can't do that. I have no crumbs to throw." "Try this for an analogy: Two dogs meet. One is hungry and the other is well fed. It doesn't actually have any food in its jaws, doesn't even smell like food, but something about its attitude tells the hungry dog that it gets to eat regular. It has the aura of a well fed dog. So, what does the hungry dog do? It hangs around and follows the well fed one, hoping to get some of that food. It just wants to be near that dog because sooner or later it hopes to share in a meal." "But this dog is just putting on an act, just pretending to be well fed so that other dogs will hang around and want to know him. Now, if the hungry dog met a dog that was starving, I mean ribs showing and manky fur and desperate look in the eyes, what then?" "It wouldn't be interested at all, would it? In fact, it would try to get away, hoping that none of the bad luck rubbed of. If it was hungry it would be afraid of starving, really afraid." "Of course. No one likes to starve." "That's right. So try it this way and see what happens. My friends are bored. Nothing seems to happen to them. They all want to talk to you, so just relax and try it this way." Lang spotted a candle on the window sill, lit it, swore as the hot metal of the lighter burned his hand when he slipped it into his pocket. The flickering candle flame revealed the dust over every surface, the milk crates full of beer bottles. "This place needs cleaning." said Catherine. "I'll do it tomorrow." "That's the spirit." CHAPTER 5 WEDNESDAY Lang was first in the kitchen, stomping around in heavy shoes, colliding with table and chairs and setting the empty milk bottles stacked in their crate to chiming against one another. The whole house was filled with the smell of his eggs. He cracked one after another into a pan, getting seven in before the level rose dangerously close to the rim, then slopping in a little milk. Stirred the resulting mix over a dull red coil, watching it coagulate and scramble. Reached blind one handed for the spice shelf, shook a little of something red in, and some green flakes. The lock on the back door rattled, and Catherine stepped inside, shivering from her short journey through the back garden. You didn't tell me how cold it would be." she accused. "It's winter. Look out there!" He peered through a missing pane in the leadlight window at the small patch of sky visible above the back fence and below the eaves, gunmetal dark and boiling with clouds. "Is it gonna rain?" "Don't know." he said. "Try the box, see if we can find some weather." Catherine crossed to the small black and white set that lay hidden on a counter behind boxes of cereal, custard powder, bags of rice with a peg on the top, and bottles of various sauces, fished the cord out from behind and stretch it across the room to the power adapters for juice. First channel was blocky computer-drawn Rambo cartoons. The next a children's info-tainment show, grinning middle-aged wallys explaining how to construct telescopes from toilet rolls. Then religion; a Christian Lifestyle program rife with shots of happy, smiling "teenagers" on an adventure camp. "Check that out. See that tall one with the pork pie hat? Used to hang around at Bretts, till he got a taste for blow. Drove his mums black fascistmobile landcruiser, parked it in the driveway and blocked it. Then someone slashed the tires and he stopped coming." Catherine changed again, caught a talking newshead. "This should do." "What's for breakfast?" she asked. "You want some of this? Sure, if you make some toast to put under it." Karen pushed open the door from the loungeroom. She looked around the room with a sleepwalkers gaze, trudged for the fridge, opened it and took out a plastic bag of chopped veggies. "Wok?" asked Lang. "Thanx." she said, tipping the bag out on the kitchen table. Lang fished the wok out from under the sink and she started chopping the mass into it, stopping to pour in a slug of sesame oil. "I got an important lecture today. Got to stoke the machine. Sure you got enough eggs in that pan?" "Yeah. Anyway, half's Catherines." "How'd you like the back room?" Karen asked Catherine. "It's colder than I thought possible. I should see about picking up a heater today." "No, use the one in the loungeroom." Karen put the wok on the stove next to Langs pan, twisted a coil into life. "You know, I could handle some eggs." "I could handle some veges. Let's trade." Micheal pushed through from the loungeroom, went straight to the sink and his coffee tin. "You're an addict." said Karen. "You're not getting any." he retorted. "Hi Catherine, Hi Lang, hi television. It looks cold out. I might have to wear my overcoat, whopee. Haven't had much reason for it this year. Everyone else at uni'll be in these yank jackets with the hairy collars and the hairy letters on the back. One step above the old quilted nylon parkas, remember them?" "Indeed I do." said Karen. "You were wearing one when we first met, remember? It was your favorite garment. You thought it made you look like a ski instructor, when actually you looked more like a child molester hanging around in the park." "I prefer not to remember those days of my misguided past. They have ceased to exist." "You can't edit history." "I can try. What's on the timetable for you today?" "I got lectures." "And you guys, Lang and Catherine, what's your plans?" Lang scraped egg onto brown toast with a spatula. He looked speculatively at Catherine. "Shopping, I reckon. Furnish the room." The city was full of shoppers, tourists and business people. The rain seemed to bring them out, like toadstools. The shoppers were buying clothes, and the boutiques of the Queen Victoria Building were packed wall to wall with busy people choosing between bargains. The tourists had stayed in the city streets, close to their hotels, because their tours to the beach, the wildlife parks, the theme parks and the standard sightseer sights were canceled. They crowded the sidewalk, moving slowly, stopping often, dazed and maddeningly aimless. Lang and Catherine pushed through the press as fast as they could. When caught behind clusters of yanks or Japanese, Lang would wait for precisely two seconds, before reaching out and clicking his fingers very loudly near their ears. For some reason this always worked, like a cattle prod, and they were able to drill through the toughest, most resistant clots by constant clicking. Catherine felt sympathy for the lost foreigners. It was easy for Lang to feel frustrated, but she knew what it was like to be lost in an alien world. "Maybe you should use that card I gave you." called Lang over the background static of conversation and muzak. She looked around and spotted an ATM hidden behind an escalator, and headed for the short cue that lead to the machine. Lang found a bench and sat down, legs stretched out, looking frankly around at the crowd, many of whom stared back. Her fingers knew the way, when she finally reached the keyboard. Without thinking she punched in the PIN and was rewarded with a handful of cash. Lang stood and smiled. "Easy, isn't it?" he said. "I don't like this." She pointed to the receipt. "It records where I was when I used the machine, the date and the time. Can anyone else get this information?" "Sure. The bank. Anyone with access to the banks computers." "I don't like that. It's not right. Why did you do that?" "I? I didn't do anything. It did it." "You keep saying that, and I can't believe. What are we responsible for, if not our own dreams?" Lang looked nervously around. He was suddenly conscious of the occasional stares from passers by, respectable shoppers from the suburbs who were cranky from riding the train in for half an hour plus waiting time, or who had driven and suffered the nightmare of looking for a parking space and navigating the cities streets in the rain. They had dodged mad taxis for their shopping, and now they had to dodge two tramp-like losers arguing in this exclusive area. He turned abruptly and stalked off, followed by Catherine who glared at his back. She caught up outside, and they walked in silence down the wet street, dodging and weaving through the crowds, Catherine noting another tactic Lang used to penetrate the herd: his head was always turned to the side, almost at right angles. Approaching walkers saw this and took the initiative, stepping aside. She, always facing where she was going, had to do the dodging herself. At the next corner he turned to her suddenly. "I don't want to argue, but if you're responsible for your dreams then you are tougher than I. Maybe the world would be better in your hands. I'd hand it all over if I knew how and let you try your hand, but I repeat, it isn't my fault. It just grew in my head. All the faults, the weirdness, all seems to come from somewhere I don't know. Maybe deep down inside me there's a well of blackness that leaked out and contaminated the dream. There's a card in your pocket now, and you can get cash anywhere there's a bank. If you have to show up on the record when you do, that's just the price we pay." "Bullshit!" she retorted. "I'm looking around and the more I see, the more I see you. Your hand in everything here. The anger and selfishness, the quiet confusion, it's in those shops, these people. You tried to put your theories into action. You tried to bring back the people who built your city. You tried to put the lions and the lambs together, and the lambs laid down and the lions started to eat them. The same hand that drew the bow and shot a defenseless spirit built these buildings." She gestured with contempt to the massive, flimsy square towers that soared around them, Centrepoint Tower like a giant dildo crushing the sun. "I need clothes and something else. I think I need to do some research. I need time to decide what to do." she said. "All the time in the world wouldn't help you. What do you think my friends are doing? They'll spend their lives trying to decide what to do." "Then I'll join them." The light changed and she darted across the road, leaving Lang standing shaking his head. He turned and disappeared back underground, into the stuffy arcades filled with the smell of wet wool. Micheal tapped reluctantly on the door, knuckles muffled by the layers of yellowed newspaper clipped there. Articles on fruit fly genetics caught his eye and he thought of the time she told a class about her early days in science, sorting flies drugged on ether into piles of little bodies, mutated and unmutated. The door opened. Mrs. Graham looked pale and distracted. She managed a faint smile and ushered him inside. "I've seen Katerina." he told her. She froze and looked deep into his eyes. "Where is she?" "First I want to talk about something. I don't just want to tell you, it may be the wrong move." "Wrong move!" she snorted incredulously. "You're the last boy I would have thought to try this! What do you want, a distinction? I really couldn't give you one unless you provided me essays good enough to justify it to the board. You know we meet and discuss the marks before we award them, part of the reason for that being the possibility of cheating. I want to know where she is!" "I'll tell you, I'll tell you! I'm not after that. It's just this: if I tell you where she is you'll storm over there and bust in, and have an argument, and a friend of mine will have his day ruined, and you won't get anywhere with her, and she'll probably move, and where will you be then?" She sat down and looked at the crowded surface of the desk. Her hair was greying and thin. A little too long. You could tell it was last cut into a pageboy style, and allowed to grow without trimming. It didn't look good. There were split ends poking up in a cloud of bright spicules in the hazy sunlight. "All we really need to do is talk. Tell me, what's she like? I mean, is she well? Is she using anything, any drugs? Who is she staying with?" Micheal sat down and faced her, hunching over, defensive. He didn't like the strong emotional vibes in the room. Thinking, if she started crying, he really would have to run, but then realizing, no, he would have to stay and endure the agony of watching her accuse herself and he'd try to talk her back to sense. "She's fine. She's staying in the house of a guy, works in the computer industry. Her boyfriend's there too. His name's Gregory." "Gregory? I don't remember a Gregory." "He's cool. He's the one knows Sug, the guy owns the house. That means he owns a computer of his own. From the way he talks, dresses, I'd say he was North Shore, probably lived with his parents before meeting Katerina." "What, are you saying she led him to leave home?" Accusing tone. "Not at all. For all I know, he led her. He's the one knew a place to stay, after all. Katerina's not into the computer scene, is she?" "No. I never bought her one. Her school has them... she never was interested." "And she isn't now, that I can tell you." "So tell me more. What are they doing in this place?" Micheal sat back. He mulled over the question. What were they doing? What they were all doing, he thought, but only to himself. "Not much. They're just hanging around, as far as I can tell. I would guess they're trying to decide what to do next." "Just tell me where they are. I really need to see her. I just need to make sure she's safe." And, against his better judgment, Micheal found himself telling her the address, watching her scribble in neat, scientific hand on a yellow Postit pad. She stood and headed for the door. "Are you going there now?" he asked. "Of course. I told you I needed to see her." "Listen, I'd better come along for the ride. It'll get me closer to home, at the least, and this isn't the sort of place you just walk into." "Why not?" They were in the hallway now, Micheal stretching his legs to keep up with Mrs. Grahams rapid short-legged gait. She fumbled through her jacket pockets for the car keys. "We're talking Surry Hills. Not such a good section of town. No, that's not it, it's just that I can see you getting there and demanding to be let in, and Katerina barring the door and all, and a shouting match, and the cops being called because it's a domestic, and the neighbors are uptight. Lots of little terraces, you see, very uptight professional gays in the area, a woman screaming on the footpath is their nightmare. If I'm there it'll be smoother." In the lift they fell towards the carpark. "Aren't you worried about being blamed, for telling me where she is?" "Katerina'll guess, anyway, and I don't really care. I just know Sug, and he said this was okay. He just wants them both to move out. he only let them in on the condition that it was overnight, but they've been there for three days now and counting. Malignant house guests, if you know what I mean." Striding now through the ranks of cars in the flouro bright concrete maze under the building, towards a well-dinged cream Cortina, grey smeared with dust. It roared as she navigated deftly between the numbered pillars and through the boom gate, out into the drizzling rain. "Why did you ask me where your daughter is? Did you ask anybody else?" "No, nobody else. I just had a hunch. The way you dress. Act. Similar to her. Unlike most of the rest of the class. I just knew. I know where you live. I saw you going to a concert, once." "What do you mean?" She ducked around cars on the busy street, face blank with concentration. "I was driving home from the uni, and passed some pub, and there was a line outside waiting to pass through the door, and there was you. I recognized your face from the stoplights, bipped the horn. I remember thinking; you all dress even worse, to go out. I spent the rest of the drive trying to figure it out. Ripped and tattered shirts and pants, and everything seemed so dirty." "It's a dirty world." "You say that so glibly, I don't believe you mean it. I was thinking, maybe it's protective colouration, to prevent you from being robbed by muggers, or just a "punk" thing, to offend people. Which is it?" "I don't think it's that simple. It's just custom. Comfortable." She glanced up at the postit note stuck to the windscreen, wrenched the wheel a few times in tight corners. Micheal gave her directions, and soon she pulled to a stop outside the hallowed gates of Sugs house. "This it?" Micheal nodded. She climbed out and slammed the door with a determined expression. Micheal steeled himself as he followed her up the stairs, ducking past to knock at the door. The letter slot snapped open. "Sug, it's me, man. I got Katerina's mum here too. Let us in?" "Sure thing." He opened the door and stood back. Mrs. Graham glanced in distaste at his baggy track suit pants and stubble. He smiled back. "Hi there. I'm Sug. Come on in." Down the dim corridor to the loungeroom. A thin dredlocked figure was hunched over the computer; Nootrope. He had a graphic on the screen, of brightly coloured glass balls hovering before a green, pastoral landscape, and he was typing text. "Where's Katerina?" "She and Gregory are upstairs. I'll go get them." said Sug. Mrs. Graham leaned over Nootropes shoulder and read. "Rave. I saw one on Real Life. They were using drugs, there, and someone nearly died." "Is that so?" Nootrope continued his work. The text in position, he applied the filter that bulged the image into bubbles, then removed it. "I remember that episode. I was there. That girl, the one who collapsed; she was a plant. An actor. It was done for the cameras." "Are you saying they don't use drugs at these parties?" "No, not at all. They use a lot of drugs." There was noise, feet on stairs, and Katerina entered the room. She locked eyes with her mother. "Mum! How did you..." "Micheal here brought me. He's one of my students." Katerina darted Micheal a look of such refined, pure and cutting hatred that he felt he might wither and die. "Well, I don't want to talk, and I don't want you here." "Relax." said Sug. "Please, I don't want you fighting. I thought it would be good if you just talked. Listen, Katerina, she can't make you go home. You can stay here." Cursing himself even as he said the words, wanting them both gone. "Listen, she's your mum. You should at least tell her why you don't want to go home." "No way. No way at all. Gregory?" "Yes." Gregory replied in a weary voice. "We're going out. Let's go." She slouched past her mother, the tension in the room peaking at the moment they were closest to each other. Micheal almost expected his teacher to reach out and grab her daughter by the ear, to march her outside and lock her in the car, but she must have realized the futility of such a thing. She only turned and watched sadly as her daughter opened the door and stepped outside. Gregory stood and looked around sheepishly. "Listen, I better go with her. I'm sorry, Mrs. Graham. I mean, you coming all this way, and everything, and wanting to understand. I know that's all you want. I can try and talk her around-" "Don't worry about it. Just look after her for me." Gregory darted through the door and was gone. "Well, that didn't go quite like I hoped. Damn. Damn." "You know, I only agreed to let them stay here for a day or so. I got a call from Gregory, that he needed a place to crash..." "I don't care! I just want my daughter where I can see her." "That could be why-" "Don't tell me!" She glared around at the three of them. The old one, unshaven, overweight, baggy clothes made more baggy by wear, greasy hair that wasn't long enough to look good, but was obviously uncut for some time. The thin one, red hair and glasses, a spooky lopsided smile that seemed to mock but didn't and faintly suggested madness, and his variegated clothing in ragged layers. And the student, bearded, slightly hunched with that indrawn, persecuted look she had noticed and identified with her daughter. The look of strange, existential despair, strange because it was resident in such a young and otherwise unblemished face. She shivered, turned, trudged down the hall and out to her car. "What now?" Nootrope asked, eyes back on the screen. "You better pray she's fair minded, Micheal." said Gregory. "I don't exactly think she's pleased with you now." Micheal turned on his heel and followed the lecturer outside. She was just starting the car, and he crouched on the sidewalk next to her window. "Hey, Mrs. Graham, I tried to tell you, it wouldn't work that way." She didn't say anything, and took off with a roar and a cloud of blue smoke that stank of sulfur from the catalytic converter. Micheal stood and watched her speed down the narrow street. "It was a mistake. I should have kept my mouth shut." he told the silent pair in the lounge. "Famous words." said Sug. "Like, don't get involved, or, not in my back yard. You did the right thing, I guess, from a moral viewpoint. When you try to do the right thing you nearly always get burned. That's why not many people do the right thing anymore. They learnt." "So why don't I learn?" "Search me. Let's forget about it. If I'm lucky they won't come back." "What else will they do? They aren't going home, that's for sure." Nootrope stood and stretched. "Sug, talking about good deeds, it's nearly time for my appointment. I just need to get dressed." "Oh. Okay. I'll get the car started. Micheal, could you stay and mind the store?" "Sure." Sug trudged down the corridor, while Nootrope took a carrybag into the bathroom. When Nootrope emerged, he was transformed. White tee-shirt, creased blue jeans and white high top sneakers, the uniform of conformity. "You look like an ad for a bank. You know; young hopeful goes for a housing loan with his new wife?" said Micheal. "Except for the hair." "Yeah, well, I can't do anything about the hair." "Here." Micheal fished a rubber band out of a jar on the desk, and Nootrope tied his red locks back into a lumpy ponytail. "It looks neater, at least from the front." said Micheal. "I'm not trying to be entirely normal. I need to look like an artist, but a trustworthy artist. The sort that only wants to make money." "Then it looks perfect." Nootrope ducked back into the bathroom for a last glance into the mirror, returned and checked inside his shoulderbag. Folders of printouts, looking official and neat. He was nearly ready. He lifted out his walkman and clipped it to his belt. There was a blank tape inside. He took out a pair of earphones and slung them around his neck, plugged them in, started the tape. "Testing. Testing. Level. Level." he said, then rewound the tape and pressed play. "esting. Level. Level." they heard. "It's a little low. You might not catch everything clearly." "Oh, I don't have to catch everything. Just enough will do." Nootrope said with a smile, and walked out to the car. They stopped outside a cafe in Glebe and honked the horn. A pair of elfin beings dressed in layers of garish cotton shirts walked out and climbed into the back seat. "This is Fairlight and Mangus." said Nootrope. Sug said hi, and hit the road. "Are you ready?" asked Fairlight. "Sure am. Wired myself before I left, and everything seems to be working." "Your looking okay for the part." said Mangus. "But I must say I don't envy you." "It's okay. It was your turn last time." "Yes, but they took the recorder last time." "They won't this time." "The tape's just a backup. Just in case the worst comes to the worst." said Fairlight. "Are you sure you're ready?" "Relax. I'm as ready as I'll ever be." he reassured them, trying to smile, but it came out lopsided and sad. They looked away, at the passing houses. "It's a dirty business, dealing with people like these." said Mangus. "They think they own the world and everyone in it, and the worst part is, they have the documents to prove it." They dodged down back streets, Sug taking pleasure in the rise, the skill needed for passing cars in the narrow lanes. There were many traffic guides here, rumble strips and bottleneck crossings and Z turns and roundabouts. It was as though the roads had been designed by someone who wanted to make waterslides. The council offices were inside a huge orange brick cube that stood in solitary splendor amongst native gardens. The car stopped briefly in the No Standing zone that ran along the front and disgorged Nootrope. "You can back down if you want." said Fairlight. He peered earnestly up at Nootrope, licking his lips nervously. "We can go ahead with the hit-and-run option, if you don't want to go in there. Easy! And if they send cops, we've got the backup venue." "They'll send cops. I know. Just relax and let me get through this. I'm a professional!" Nootrope said, but the joke seemed to fall flat. With a final wave he started towards the front door, while the car darted away, to find parking outside a supermarket down the road. Nootrope walked steadily through the flowerbeds, past young bottlebrush trees and gravileas, his heart pounding fast and a sick taste in his mouth. He looked up and caught the dead gaze of a camera on a pole, that swiveled and tracked him as he passed. Resisted the urge to put his tongue out. Must be respectful, he thought. Must let them think I'm one of the good guys. He looked down at his shoes and ignored the cameras. Walking straight and steady for the large glass sliding doors. Blasts of cold dry air wafted out as he approached, scented with the free monomer smell of new carpets and photocopying. There was an endless stream of neatly dressed personal entering and leaving the building, professional expressions blank in the grey light of the cloudy sky. They glanced at him through plate glass walls of executive distance. Most of them young, like bank clerks, or supermarket checkoutchicks, but cleaner, more attractive. No physical freaks of any kind. The women wore a lot of expertly applied makeup, as though they were extras in a high budget film, and the men were nearly all fit and tan, their skin tone offset by their light coloured shirts and dark suits. Inside all was hushed with white noise from the air conditioning. Nootrope strode across the carpet, impressed with the seal of the local council, to the long, curving reception desk. "Hello may I help you?" intoned one of the receptionists in a bright, cheery tone. "Uh, I'm here to see someone. Mr. Renner. My name's Nootrope." "Mr. Renner's a bit busy at the moment. He's all booked up for the day with interviews." "Yes, I know. I called him. I should have an appointment." "I see. What did you say your name was?" "Nootrope." He had to spell it for her, and explain that it was his only name, that he had changed his name by deed poll, but luckily he didn't have to go on and explain what it meant. She missed it on the first go. He suggested she try spelling it with one O. That failed as well. "Here, he said, reaching over the desk and grabbing the monitor, swinging it around so he could see. She squeaked faintly with indignation. "Try searching in the First-name field, that sometimes happens." he said. She glared, swung the monitor back, and tapped. Success this time. "Oh yes, here it is, Mr. No-trope. I'll just check that he's free." She picked up a phone and tapped four digits while Nootrope stood back and tried not to show his nerves. "He's ready." said the girl, almost surprised. "Use the elevators, top floor, last door on the right, at the end of the corridor." "Thanks." On the way up he gave his hair a few last tugs through the rubber band, to try to draw the locks down a bit more, and smiled up at the camera. Remember body language, he thought. Look down, shuffle a bit. Move slightly aimlessly, and slowly, especially arms. Walking down the corridor from the lifts he rehearsed this, trying to walk in a non- threatening manner, slightly hunched over, eyes slightly wider with an innocent smile. He knocked hesitantly. "Come in." Gruff, commanding. He entered and looked around. Mr. Renner had a corner office. It looked out through full length windows over the expanse of native garden behind the building, that separated it from the grounds of a small primary school. Young children in dark tweedy uniforms ran on the wet asphalt. And Mr. Renner came towards him, hand out to shake. Nootrope made sure his grip was weak and harmless, and unfocused his eyes slightly when they made contact. "Ah yes, No-trope, the chap with the unusual name. I suppose it helps, in your field, eh?" "That's the idea. An artists needs to spread his name and his reputation. If the name is easy to remember, it spreads further." "Yet your name is not easy to remember. It's actually rather difficult. It doesn't mean anything, so it's easily lost." "True, I guess, but I can't afford to change it now." "Of course. The high spirits of youth. I understand." Mr. Renner was fit and fortyish. He looked like he indulged in carefully measured and regulated jogs every morning before breakfast, and worked out at in well supervised sessions at expensive, wood paneled gyms with large saunas and huge mirrors. He was a rectangular man. In a dark charcoal suit, his muscled shoulders under the extra padding were nearly ridiculous. His face was rectangular, with hard nobs and crags of bone pushing through the thin flesh, jaw heavily muscled. Nootrope bet himself that the man exercised his jaw. he bet that Mr. Renner occasionally spent an hour or two looking in the bathroom mirror, clenching and unclenching his jaw to build up the muscles, so he could flex them at opponents across the board room table and un-nerve them. It un- nerved him, but not for the same reason. He was always uncomfortable in the presence of aggressively dickheaded dickheads. He had a thick moustache that looked like it had been brushed. His hair was thick and dark, with a touch of silver at the temples to connote power. The old silverback ape trick, thought Nootrope. His shirt was conservative linen white and the tie was a print of flowers lifted from some obscure corner of a Degas. "Please, sit down, Nootrope. I understand you wish to have a "performance art event" in one of our parks." He sat at his desk and tapped at the intercom. "That's right. We're planning to hold a happening in City Park on Saturday night." Nootrope heard the door behind him open, and heavy footfalls which stopped behind his chair. "Bob, would you be so kind as to remove the young gentleman's walkman." Renner said. Nootrope looked up into an impassive, slightly whiskered face of a nightclub bouncer. A huge paw came down and carefully unclipped the walkman, and another picked the headphones from around his head. The man thumbed the rewind, then Play. "...ould you be so kind as to remo-" they heard from the tiny high pitched speaker on the machine. "Thank you, Bob." Bob left. "Now, Nootrope, no bullshit. You want to hold a "Rave", don't you? A dance party." "Well, yeah." "I knew as soon as you walked in. I especially knew, as soon as I saw the little red light on your walkman but couldn't hear any music from those headphones of yours. It's not the first time someone's tried that trick on me. I haven't seen you before, though. Are you part of that group, what were they called... I have one of their pamphlets here..." He dug in the top drawer of the desk. "Ah yes, Chaos Clan. You associated with them?" "Yes, I am." "Known them long?" "No." Nootrope lied. "So they sent the new boy. I have okayed these activities in the past. It's not my policy at the moment, though. The pub owners don't like it, you see? You set up and start blasting out that horrid noise, and all their usual young customers who pass by, stop, and some of them stay. They, the publicans, loose a substantial amount every time you hold a party, and they're not prepared to put up with it much longer. And you don't even charge admission! Tell me frankly, how do you cover costs?" "There aren't any. No costs to cover." "What about the performers, the DJs?" "Do it for love." "Do they, now?" "Well, they do when they play at our gigs. Clubs and any place that charges admission has to pay them, but that's only fair." "And the lights, the effects, all the smoke machines and props? You like to put on a show, I believe. What about the generators? The sound system, for Christ's sake!" "We own them, or rent them for a dollar from sympathetic dealers. There's always a way." "Ingenuity. I admire that. We need more ingenuity in the world, more people who know how to get things done with less. That leaves more for those who want it! For those with the determination to go out and get it." "We do what we have to." "I'm glad to hear that. As I was saying, I've allowed these parties before, but the local publicans are getting restless. It takes a little diplomacy to get them to agree. They represent some powerful interests. The movers and shakers in this world are less than interested in your raves, yet they, many of them, do enjoy an evening in the local pub or club after a hard days work. Indeed, we have children of our own, and your parties have a bad reputation for drugs and such. We don't want our children associated with such things." "There won't be any drugs at this party, it's strictly drug free." "You say that, but I don't see how you could guarantee that. And the police. They would be quite likely to find some, if they were to try hard enough. I would have to talk to the local station, if I let you go ahead, otherwise they would be sure to make things hard for you. They can find drugs even where there are none to find, catch me?" "Yes." The man stood and turned towards the window. He stared absently out, deep in thought. "Tell me... you enjoy these raves? I mean, really?" "Yes." Nootrope was suddenly deeply tired. "I can't really understand it. When I was your age I liked rock and roll. Still do. But that was different. It was... healthy. It had life. And I've seen what you do. Last time, I drove down and parked nearby and watched. And there was a documentary... I forget which channel it was on. Most peculiar. What does it mean?' "What?" "This thing. Believe me, I have spent an hour or two, especially that time, driving home, after watching you all... trying to figure it out. It makes no sense. Are you following me?" "No." "There's this beat, this endless beat, and the sounds like electric organs, and the words... most peculiar. I don't like it. It's almost evil. If any music embodies the spirit of evil, it isn't rock and roll, it's that music of yours. And the dancing... it reminded me of nothing so much as cerebral palsy!" With a great effort he dragged himself back from the distractions of his thought. "Yes. If you want to have this event of yours, you're going to have to suck my dick." "What!" Token astonishment. "You heard me. Suck my dick, and everything goes well. If not, I give the police free reign to do as they like." "You've got to be joking!" Nootrope had known all along. His friends had told him. Everybody knew. "Grow up, Mr. Nootrope! Why do you think they sent you, the attractive young new boy, up to see me? This isn't the first time, and I hope it won't be the last. What about the walkman? They wanted to tape some nice incriminating evidence. But that's out of the way now, and the decision lies entirely with you." He sat still and bit his lip. He had known, of course, had been warned, but all the warning in the world couldn't prepare him for the anger and frustration he felt then. His resolve, that had carried him through till now, threatened to dissolve and drain away. "Please make your decision, Mr. Nootrope. I'm a busy man and I haven't got all day." Nootrope carefully stood, removed his wallet from the pocket of his jeans, ripped it open, unzipped an inner pocket and took out a condom, displaying it to Mr. Renner on the palm of his hand. "Oh, come now, don't be ridiculous! What do you think I am, anyway? I haven't got anything for you to catch, and anyway, the risk would be very slight, so I am lead to believe." Nootrope replaced the condom in his wallet and walked forward. Now, without hope of avoiding this task, he found he felt better, more fatalistic, less jittery. Life is hell, he told himself, and almost felt cheerful. Life is hell, I have proof. "Careful now, no biting. You don't even want to think about the consequences of that." "Oh, I wouldn't dream of that." "Yeah, I'll bet. What are you smiling about, anyway?" "Nothing." "Then stop it. I don't like it." "Yes sir." "Well?" "No, not very. What about you?" "No, I meant, did you-" "He understood you the first time, Fairlight." "Just don't ask. You're gonna hear it all, anyway." Nootrope straightened in the car seat and reached down past the belt of his jeans. The DAT recorder had been cold when he first slipped it into his underwear. Now it was warm and clammy. He carefully unclipped the microphone lead that lead up under his tee shirt and handed the unit to Sug. Sug opened the glovebox and pawed through the tangle of leads that spilled out. He found one, stereo jack, the other end attached somewhere inside the dashboard. Plugged it into the recorder. "...sent you, the attractive young new boy, up to see me? This isn't the first time, and I hope it won't be the last." "WhhooOOO!" screamed Nootrope, scaring passing pensioners. "I'm the last! I'm the bloody last! I hope." The class was full of artists. You could tell they were artists. The hair. There was never such effort put into hair as by these people. Karen didn't know what to think about the results. She often looked around in wonder at the heads of her fellow students. Slick flouro light gave the dyed hairs a special chemical sheen. They looked like mutated dogs. There were girls who shaved patches of hair down to the skin, irregular patches, like the results of a particularly strong radio cobalt treatment for cancer. They dyed the remaining locks the most virulent shades they could track down, often utilizing strong industrial dyes and chemicals to get the effect they wanted. There were guys with short hair. Very short, a careful mowed effect that emphasized the fineness of their bones, the angles of their skulls, the collarbones that protruded through the taught skin of their shoulders, the segments of their larynxes. She knew they wanted this effect. She had seen more than one inspecting their profiles in the mirror glass of the coated windows outside the cafeteria. The long- hairs like herself were almost looked down upon as being old fashioned, but she was tickled that it was still a sign of noncomformity, at least here. Even the lecturer had short hair. She stalked the aisles between their seats with authority. Her black artists getup like a beatnik fossil from three decades past. "The problem with exploring Post Modern art is that it seems to leave very few avenues unexplored. When one contemplates the efforts of artists recently to find new and therefore valid forms of expression, the closest analogy I can think of is soldiers mopping up after a war. The artists are moving across the battlefield, finding the last survivors, and administering the coup de grace, by performing the last original artistic acts to be performed." "And, of course, this leads to certain troubles, especially when we bring the problem of intellectual property into it." "You will have read the newspaper article on page 194 of your textbooks." A rustle of pages turning. "The artist in question was sued by a well established commercial art firm who claimed he appropriated their ideas. He had built an automatic painting machine driven by natural elements, by a windmill and a solar turbine. The idea was to leave the machine out in a field somewhere with its tanks full of paint and surrounded by canvasses, and it would randomly spray and fling the paint around, driven and guided by the heat of the sun, the direction and strength of the wind, and so on." "The firm claimed he stole the idea from a publication of theirs. They supplied copies of the magazine, their house organ. It was full of similar ideas. There were pages of rough sketches of ideas for art works, few of them fleshed out past the most basic concepts." "It was a real publication, with an ISBN number and copies in all the relevant libraries, so they had a legitimate claim. The artist, of course, claimed it was his own idea. The company disagreed. They had a good lawyer. They won the case, and the artist had to pay damages." "Now, he did some research after that, and he discovered that the company published their magazine monthly and had done for three years. Each copy was roughly the same; apart from personal news of interest only to the members of the company, it was always full of basic patterns and plans for conceptual artworks of various designs." "It was obvious what their intentions were. With a design or concept published, it became their own intellectual property. They had a prior claim to it, because it had been exposed, however obscurely, to the public eye. It was available, if you chose to look, in libraries around the country. It was cheaper than taking out a patent, and in fact, it was cheaper than creating the proposed artwork at all." "They used to think-tank, you see. They used to have creative sessions where they would come up with ideas for their campaigns, and they recorded all the crazy ideas they had and published them. And then, if they spotted someone with a similar idea, they could sue. One of their employees spotted the solar/wind painting machine in a local paper. The artist had tested it out in a park and invited the paper to do a story. So the artist not only got sued, he was forced, by court costs, to sell the work for a minor sum to the company itself. For the minor trouble of publishing rough plans of the concept the company acquired the artwork itself, at little cost." "Of course, this system is meant to work both ways, but it rarely does. A recent example was a certain Coca Cola TV ad that featured rapidly strobing textures superimposed on a logo. The textures were actually taken from a sample book published by Letraset, displaying pre-prepared textures available, for a fee, for use on signs and in ads. Coke didn't pay for the textures, the stole them. Letraset considered suing, but were advised by their lawyers that it would be pointless. The incredible monolific corporate strength of Coke was almost unassailable by ordinary legal means." "What does this all mean to you? I assume many of you will work for similar firms to the one that published their ideas and sued an innocent artist-" "What makes you assume he was innocent?" called a voice from the back. The lecturer looked up sharply. "Do you think he found a copy of that magazine, and copied the design? I can tell you didn't read the article. The differences between the designs were greater than their similarities. Only the concept was the same." "But he could have stolen the basic idea from them." "Stolen? We're talking about a basic idea, you said it yourself. How can a basic idea be someones property, and who's." "The property of the person who first thought about it." "Who first thought about painting a Madonna?" "That's not the same. Anyway, that was a long time ago. They didn't even have basic human rights then. If they did, they could have sued each other for stealing ideas." "Do you think the idea was a good one?" "Yeas, of course. I mean, it has a great environmental subtext, being controlled by the wind and solar power. It seems relevant." "I don't think so." One of the shaven haired girls. "I don't like mechanical sculpture. It reeks of patriarchal values, of the worship of automation. It's sick." she said, scowling. "You should all have your assignments ready by this Friday. I hope you all do. We will be in the main theater for that one. Ashley, Kim and Karen, you're first. Remember this lesson. I expect you to do some research regarding the originality of your ideas, to avoid being sued! It's nearly three; I guess you can go." Karen sat shocked. She had completely forgotten the assignment. She paged through her folder, looking for the handout that explained the rules. Behind her she could hear the other students do the same. Their teacher hadn't mentioned the damn thing since the beginning of the course, probably to get this exact result; panicking students desperately trying to create in the last moments before the deadline. It was always the way. Here it was. They had to design and perform a performance piece using props. That was about it. There was a page and a half of fine print that didn't mean anything, just hints and helpful suggestions. It looked like she would have to get creative. She paused, on the way home, outside a St Vincent de Pauls. There were a few dollars in her pocket that could easily be spent on clothing. There were funky looking jackets in the window, unusually so, the sort that would be picked up nearly as soon as they were put on display by avid seekers after nostalgic clothing. Knee length overcoats in English tweed and white leather overcoats and platform dancing pumps and the like. It was worth a try, even though the items in the window cost too much for her to afford. Inside the shop smelt of mold and dust. It smelt as all the closets the old clothing came from must have smelt. She imagined cramped houses overcrowded with old furniture, and someones grandmother making tea in a filthy kitchen. She imagined the old lady dying, to be discovered the next day by the meals on wheels delivery man. It was a hideous thought. There were bins of mixed tee shirts overflowing onto the floor. She idly sorted through. They were mostly too small, and stained with grease from engines and cooking. She started at one end of each bin, rapidly digging down, casting armfuls of discards to the side. Tourist tee shirts with maps of Australia and cartoon koalas. So many. So tacky. And then, she dragged out a treasure. It was a Rat Fink tee shirt. Rat Finks were designs popular in the sixties, especially with petrolheads and fans of drag racing. The general pattern was a cartoon of a car, with huge front wheels, crooked exhaust manifolds coming from under the fenders spitting tongues of flame, huge blowers poking through the hood, and a sunroof. The sunroof was essential, for emerging from it was the Rat Fink itself, an overgrown monster with bulging bloodshot eyes and snaggled teeth bared in an evil grin. This one had scales and a crocodile tail curved up behind. It was beautiful. But there was something wrong. Karen turned the shirt over in her hands and tried to reason what it might be that bothered her about this shirt. Was it the fact it was clean and fresh after so many years? No. There was something about the style of the art. Clean. Stylized. The lines were too cartoon, where they should have been denser and more detailed. The original designs had been hand painted by airbrush artists who detailed the cars they glorified, and their style was as formalized and identifiable as Japanese calligraphy. Shit, she thought. What am I, a connoisseur of style, that I analyze the content of my tee shirts? She turned towards the counter. And there was another bin behind her, and it was overflowing with identical shirts. There they were, scattered this way and that, the same design, just as clean. "Where did the shirts come from?" she asked at the counter. The hunchbacked old man there looked up from the yellow sports guide from his paper. "Katies. They sent us two crates. Not like them, usually, they like to shred anything they can't sell. But they sent us these." "I wonder why?" "Couldn't sell 'em. Look at that thing, it looks like something my son wore when he was a teenager. I see that's coming back in, but Katies couldn't sell these and they put them here. Wouldn't hurt their business none, none of their customers would be seen dead in a shop like this. Not unless they come here to get fancy dress for some "Trollops and Tramps" party. Come here in big groups then, they do, for protection. Always makes me laugh. You want to buy that?" "Not really." "Don't blame you. Look around some more, you'll find something better." "Like it?" asked Karen. She modelled her dress, the arms draped over her shoulders, wrapping the flaring skirt around herself. Thin cotton, printed with deep green leaves and red flowers. Andrew didn't know whether to say it was terrible or a bold statement of style. He thought it was terribly bold. "Yeah, sure. It'll look good in the summer." "That's what I was thinking. I wanted something more feminine to wear. I'm tired of looking at the "statements" the other students are wearing." "But wearing something like that is a statement in itself, a statement against the statements." "Thanks, Andrew, I needed that." "Well, it's true." "Yeah. We just can't win." She collapsed heavily on the couch next to him, throwing the wadded up dress across the room. A long minute of silence. "What have you been doing with yourself, anyway?" she finally asked him. "Nothing much. Hanging out with Jackie. Wandering around." "Sounds great." She sighed. "That's what I'm gonna do when this course finishes. I don't know whether to do it here in the city, though, or go on the trail, Indonesia and that. Probably won't. Too tired." "You know what I want to do some day?" said Andrew. "I want to go overseas, but I want to pick a destination where no-one ever goes for a holiday. You know what I mean?" "Like, some undiscovered island? I don't think there is such a thing anymore." "No. I mean... when I was a kid my grandparents bought me this world atlas. I think it was the Life atlas, huge, hard-bound, with beautiful colour maps and illustrations. And I'd often look through it, and then I started to collect National Geographics and hang the maps from them on the wall. But the names I always found the most attractive, the places I wanted to know about, where the most isolated." "Siberia, you mean? The Amazon?" "Yeah, sort of. There were these little towns in Siberia, right up on the North coast of the USSR, (when it was the USSR), that must have been iced in most of the year, and I thought, "I bet no-one ever goes there that doesn't have to." And I thought they would be the places to go. Totally unknown." "I know what you mean. You ever have a book on space?" "Did you?" "Yeah! I bought it myself at a school fete, for fifty cents. Guess which planets I liked the most." "Uranus and Neptune?" "You bet! And the asteroids, and the moons. Everyone knows about Mars and Venus, and Pluto is the furthest out, and Jupiter is the biggest and Saturn has moons, and Mercury is the hottest, closest to the sun. Neptune and Uranus had about a page each, and I used to spend hours staring at the paintings, wondering what they would really look like. I felt that they were the lonely planets. I remember waiting for the Voyager probe to reach them, so I could see pictures." "Did you know that there were six moon landings." "Exactly! No-one cares about the later ones, and they were the best! Apollo Eleven spent less than a day on the surface, and they only walked around outside for an hour or so. By Apollo Seventeen they had the rover, they could drive around, they took golf clubs and tee'd off in the low gravity, they had better reception of the pictures back on Earth, they took back more rock. It was a picnic by then, but the world was bored and it wasn't new anymore. It was just a point, just a score, to get there, and only the first one counts in everybodies minds. That's why they won't go back; it's been done." "Everything's been done." "No, I hate to think that." "But can't you feel it? Doesn't it feel like there's nothing left to do? Don't you ever feel that?" "Yes, yes... of course. It's just that you've touched on something. Something I have to do." She told him briefly about her lecture, the assignment due that week, the performance art that had to be new, innovative, and researched to prevent accidental repetition of the past. "There have to be new things. There always are." "No." "Yes!" "No. I mean, sure, there's many things that haven't been done yet, but don't you realize, the mere fact you have to check that someone hasn't beaten you to it means that we're reaching a limit? Imagine you're a builder, and all the space for buildings have been used up. So all that's left for you to do is repair the existing walls and patch up the holes. And someday there won't be any holes." "Can you help me do this piece?" "I've got the free time, and there's nothing else on at the moment, so sure, but what's in it for me?" "Andrew! What do you want? Money? I can't pay you. Would you be content with the feeling of bliss that comes with being a slave to Art? The knowledge that part of you has become immortal, or that you are serving the Higher Good?" "Sounds great, when do we start?" "Right now." Karen tugged her battered lecture pad from her bag. "Got any ideas?" "Not really. Don't you?" "No, not really." She felt a crushing fatalism rushing in like waves crashing on a drowning persons head. "I just have a hazy idea of the things my lecturer would like to see. She likes post modern camp, and PoPoMo, and, of course, anything politically correct. I don't want to do that, by the way. I'm so tired of it. Everything is PC now, it's the safety railing that stops us from getting too close to the edges." "People used to become artists because of the freedom. They used to desire being able to do anything they wanted." said Andrew. "Not any more. Too insecure. Too lonely. They're a herd, and the herd rule is PC." "And you hate that. Then you should try to get one past them. Have a go at them right under their noses." "Great. Now we're cooking. How?" They sat in silence and thought. "I really can't come up with anything right now." said Andrew after a minute had passed. "It's the pressure. It jams my mind, makes me feel tired." "Me too. I hate it. When I contemplate these things I feel this feeling... you know the feeling? Like, there's a weight on my head, and everyone's trying to rip me off, and then I'm asked to do something pointless for some arbitrary reason... like a vampire is draining me... get it from TV, mostly." "Or newspaper banners. Like "Derryn Hinch Shaves Beard, Photos."" "And corny kids shows on those stages between the escalators in suburban malls, with big costumes of the Paddle Pop Lion and Humphry B. Bear, or personal appearances by Ronald MacDonald." "They've canned Humphry, you know." "Well, you know what I mean. We're drifting off the subject again." "What about materials? Props and that? Does the uni supply you?" "They're supposed to, but the reality is something else. The reality is this; there's a storeroom, and it's guarded by the head of the art department, and he's never there, and when he is you have to talk to him, and I can't talk to him. He'll want to know exactly what the gear is being used for. And anyway, I borrowed a video camera at the beginning of term, and returned it late. I paid the fine, but he'll remember, and be difficult." "So, no guidelines at all." "No. Total freedom, at least as far as I'm concerned." "And if it costs you the course?" "I don't care at this point. I basically feel that I've been through so much shit this year that I have to do something, just to reassert myself. Otherwise I'll feel bad about it forever. Used and abused. I could use a little out and out persecution. It would justify how much I despise the uni." "Perhaps a Dada piece; shooting randomly into the audience." "I'd love too. But they don't supply guns." "What, specifically, do they hate?" "Classical art. Phallic symbolism, except for the purpose of ridicule. Photographic realism. Anything without a clearly defined political agenda." "I don't have any ideas at all." "Neither do I." "Scary, isn't it?" "I'm getting more used to it as the years go by." "I'm sure something will arrive, if we wait long enough." "I hate waiting." The house slumbered cold and alone, full of darkness and dampness. The only light straggled through the ragged curtains on the windows. The neighbors were too close to allow them to draw the curtains, so they faced each other blind, curtained window to curtained window, across the passages between. Catherine unlocked the front door and staggered down the hall with the first load of cargo. Through the lounge and kitchen, out the back door and into her room where she upended the bag and poured a mound of clothes into the corner, as she had noticed was customary here. Then back to the front door, and she returned with a large cardboard box that had held potato crisps. This she poured out into the diagonally opposite corner, deciding to keep her library and her wardrobe separated as much as possible. She stood for a second and considered the book pile. There wasn't any particular theme amongst them. Thick block novels, the pages swollen with age and the binding curving back on themselves, and textbooks coated in smooth contact paper, science and biology. Just things that caught her eyes as she wandered through the narrow aisles of the second hand book emporium, sometimes just a word in the title encouraging her to buy it. And it was only money. Then back to the front door for the next box. This she carried with more care, and set down gently, bending back the flaps and looking in with a contented expression. It was an Akai reel to reel tape recorder, packed in the box with reels of tape, the very model she had possessed in her castle, and she looked upon it like the face of an old friend. Back to the front door for the last box. One television, portable Rank Arena black and white in a scuff marked white case, bent rabbit ears and buzzing speaker, missing battery case lid, and one knot of cables. Now, she said to herself. Now the work begins. She arranged the television on top of the pile of books and plugged it in. Switched it on and began, with intuitive skill, to tune the reception. The picture tube was badly damaged and gave an image rather like that of a faded photograph washed by rain, but that was okay. She took the stereo jack and plugged it into the TV's earphone socket, cutting off the sound. Set the recorder upright, plugged the RCA jacks into its back. Watched the VU meters jump. "Monitor." she said to herself. She walked back into the house to the loungeroom, and crouched before the cassette player. Lifted it and inspected the back. RCA inputs. Carried it back to her room, took another cable and hooked it up to the recorders sound-out sockets. Cartoon voices filled the air. She considered them. Interesting, maybe. Watched the screen. A shark in a space suit was chasing a jellyfish on a motorbike. No, it wasn't what she was after. "Needs more gravity." she said, and changed channels. Documentary on workers compensation cases. The narrator had a baritone, strong American accent, swift cascades of almost meaningless syllables. "Perfect." And she strung a tape and started recording, slumping back over the mound of clothes, staring dully at the screen as she had seen the others doing in the lounge. Later that afternoon the rain came in full force. Grey curtains drew around the world, hiding the sky, the buildings, the street in falling sheets of grey that twisted and turned in the weak winds that sometimes struggled through. People stayed indoors and cars became rare on the flooded streets. Shops stood empty of customers and their owners quietly cursed the sky that cursed them in return. They stood at their cash registers and stared out at the streets empty but for the huge drumming presence of the rain. The rain reached its damp and persistent fingers inside houses to touch what lay hidden. The first faint spots of mildew began to appear on damp walls, and sometimes shimmering rivers ran down from leaks in roofs and turned carpets into swamps. The smells of decay caught in the cities throat and it gagged. Gregory idly turned the pages of a year old paper he found on the floor. The paper felt clammy and unclean and his fingers were bruised with ink. Katerina lay on the mattress on her front and added line after line to a personal letter she wouldn't let him read. He didn't push her. Later as the short day faded to darkness, he rested his head on her stomach as she told him a story. "This is an old story," she said, "and it is said to be true, though I've never met anyone who claimed to be there. A story for rainy days." There was this boy called Fred. Fred lived in a beautiful house with his parents, right on the harbor foreshores. Every day he caught the train to high school, and in the afternoon he would go fishing on the harbor from his little boat. He had many friends at school, and one day they decided to go to a certain cemetery at night for fun. So, that night they assembled at Fred's house, and at the appointed hour left to catch the train. Together they formed a large gang, which made them feel really strong and good. Up and down the moving train they ran, acting crazy in front of the other passengers to scare them, cutting seats with their knives. They wrote tag names on the windows and ceiling in unreadable script only they could understand. The guard at their destination could only watch as they swarmed over the station fence like rats, and it was just as easy to enter the cemetery, which had been closed and locked for the night. However, once they were actually there amongst the tombstones they felt their powers ebb. The place was big, and so full of tombs and headstones, and they weren't used to the presence of death. The only sound was the freight trains whistle and the sigh of the wind. Not one of them was under six feet tall, yet they felt very small in these surroundings. The silence stretched out, and some began to shiver in the cold air. Then the tension broke, like the beginning of a party. Someone screamed, and as soon as their blood unfroze they smiled and laughed. Someone else took out a marker and wrote on a headstone. Two guys began to rock another headstone back and forth until it came out of the ground like a giant tooth. Others helped to shatter it over a small tomb. They felt brave and aggressive. Their smiles where tight and white and barely in check. They started to joke about graverobbing, digging up the expensive looking graves to take the jewelry from the body. No one had thought to bring shovels, though. They were spread out now, moving further into the centre, and Fred was racing from stone to stone, tagging each one. He wanted to write on as many as possible. Gradually he drifted towards a region where many big tombs and mausoleums where and wandered down the alleys between their marble tablet walls. He had an idea, and called his friends over. He reasoned that by using a big headstone as a battering ram they could shatter the locked doors on a tomb and find out what lay inside. If they found anything valuable they would share equally, as they shared the effort to break in. If they only found bones, then they would have souvenirs of the night. A large and solid headstone was uprooted from nearby and carried to the door of the richest looking tomb. It took four swings before the tarnished bronze door burst open and swung back, hanging by its lock with the broken hinges shiny in the dark. With lit cigarette lighters held high they cautiously stepped inside. There was a small room with a bronze plaque on the wall listing the names of those interred, and stone steps leading down. So, down they went, joking and laughing to bolster their confidence, making lots of noise to fill up the terrible quiet. None had ever seen a dead body or been inside a tomb before, and none knew what to expect. The stairs came to a short passage of bare stone with square holes let into the sides, mostly containing coffins of some kind. The air smelt of concrete, stale like a building site. With some effort, like trying to shift a piano in a new house, they carried a coffin up the stairs and out into the open air. As those with knives employed them to lever the lid off, Fred told his friends that he didn't want any jewelry, but bagged the rights to the skull, which they agreed to, seeing visions of a corpse draped in masses of gold chains and skeletal hands still decked with diamond rings. Everyone paused at the moment the lid came away revealing the occupant, long since decayed away to dust. Bones and sinew remained, clothed in the rotted remains of a dress, the bones a light grey like pumice or ashes and the mortal flesh become dust that covered the upholstered lining. The only jewelry was a plain silver bangle on one wrist. Carefully and tenderly Fred removed the skull from its vertebrae, leaving the bangle for the others to argue over. There was still hair clinging to the head, long and faded gold in colour, that slipped from around the dome of the skull and fell to the ground. Later, he discovered some of his friends had taken lengths to braid for wristbands. No one wanted any of the other bones. They were getting tired and bored. So they pushed the coffin roughly down the stairs and propped up the door. It was covered in big dents from the battering they gave it, but still they hoped it wouldn't be noticed too soon. On the last train home they sat quiet and wasted. The evening had taken a lot of energy. Each agreed not to tell other people about their doings, and not to break if caught by the police and spill the beans about the other culprits. Fred carried the skull wrapped in his jacket and hid it in the back of his wardrobe when he arrived home, where his mother never looked for fear of finding drugs. Of course, they broke their first agreement the first day. God, it was too good a story not to tell! It spread through the school, mouth to mouth, and those who missed out on the nights action cursed themselves for being wussies and staying home. They clamored to see the stolen skull, and the boys with braids of golden hair sold them for their good luck; "Dead woman's hair, works like a charm!" The television news that night was full of the story of hoodlums who had raided the cemetery and defiled the graves. Police told reporters they had good leads on who the culprits were and said they would be arrested soon. A sergeant appeared, stiff board face talking to a reporter; "They wrote their nicknames on the headstones, so we have a good lead as to their identity. There's a reward for anyone who comes forward with information." In each of their homes that night the boys shared a common fear. They remembered bragging at school and knew someone was bound to talk when there was money involved. In his room, Fred thought; "Damage control." He called his friends and told them what to do. They could rely on their parents for good alibis, because who wants their son charged with graverobbing? Even so, they would have to ditch everything they took, just in case, and stop tagging trains, at least stop using their old names, so the couldn't be traced to the ones in the cemetery. Otherwise, they would just have to wait until the story got old and was forgotten. Later that night, he took the skull from the wardrobe and put it in his boat. The skull stared blankly up at him as he rowed steadily, until he was a hundred metres from the shore, and the lights from the kitchen of the house sketched a long line on the water. Satisfied he was far enough out, he took the skull and hurled it. A small splash, and it was gone, wavering down through the cold blackness. The next week was watchful. The word had been put out that anyone who informed on them would be dealt with. It seemed no one did. There were no police arriving unannounced at school, and in a few days the cemetery incident was dropped by the fickle media. On Saturday Fred woke early and walked down the lawn to where it met the water. They had a small beach with sand and rocks, a sliprail for the boats, and a shed full of gardening equipment and tools. He looked out on the water and wondered where the skull might be, down there in the mud and rubbish and ooze. At the end of the small beach he spied something new sitting on the sand, and walked over to investigate. It was the skull. He was stunned. The undeniable, ugly evidence of his actions was there, somehow floated and washed up on the shore just below his house. In his memory he saw again how it had splashed when he threw it out, and how fast it had sunk. There was no reasonable way it could come up again. And how, out of all the miles of harbor foreshore, did it find its way to this tiny beach which was part of his back yard? There was no time to waste on idle questions, however. Quickly he launched the rowboat and rowed out, the skull held firmly between his feet. Once again he pitched it into the water and watched it go, trailing a silver skein of bubbles. The next day, early in the morning, doubt set in. He slipped out the back door and down to the beach, this time with the express purpose of checking. It was foolish, but better to be safe, and it was starting to look like something more than chance was involved. The skull was there again. At first he felt only horror. Horror that this inanimate thing should try to ruin him, convict him of his crime. Horror that it should be able to make its way in some unspeakable fashion from the harbor mud to the very beach from which he had rowed out to dispose of it. How did a dead thing dare to strike back? Calm, he told himself, calm. He took a deep breath. What was he doing? Nothing! Something had gone wrong, and instead of fixing it he was scaring himself with stupid fantasies. No one like him, with a successful future ahead of him as head of his fathers stockbroking firm, should stand around letting a bone fight back! He would fix things properly this time. So he rowed out a third time with the skull, only now it was lashed about with fishing line, and weighted down with lead sinkers. It weighed at least five kilos. It didn't waver as it sank, but disappeared instantly with a loud slap as the water rushed in behind it. He stared back at the site as he rowed ashore. The extra weight would bury it deep in the bottom mud. It wouldn't trouble him now. The next day it was back. Sitting on the wet sand, in a little depression created by the waves that swirled around it, regarding him like a small, stubborn grey child. The loosened binding of nylon and lead seemed pitiful and sad, as though it had been tortured. He picked it up and held it like the skull of Yorick, numb with despair. It had recurred three times, and he knew it would again. No matter how many times he tried to sink it, it would come back. Eventually someone else would find it, perhaps someone in his own family, and without knowing it would get him in trouble; that was what the skull wanted. Beyond panic and horror, deep in some burnt out calmness of soul, he considered the situation before him. Not once would he consider giving up, taking the skull to the police and confessing what he had done. That was for losers. He despised such thoughts and banished them from his mind. Perhaps encasing the skull in concrete. Or burning it. He inspected the cruel bindings he had lashed around it, and the thought of torture returned. He could bury it, but someone would dig it up sooner or later. It was a bone. Bones can be broken. Not just broken, they can... For the next hour Fred busied himself in the garden shed with his fathers angle grinder. It screamed and the disc smoked terribly as he ground the skull into powder. The smell of bone smoke penetrated the mask he wore and made his eyes smart behind the protective goggles, but he didn't stop until there was nothing left except a pile of white dust. Without resting he grabbed a broom and swept every trace up. It went into a plastic bag, along with the sawdust and dirt that was already on the floor. He added a handful of mince from the small fridge in the shed, put the ruined, clogged disc in a bag with the dustmask, and walked down to his boat. He was going fishing. Out on he water he carefully sprinkled handfuls of the mixture of meat, bone and sawdust on the water. Soon a school of fish surrounded the boat, darting and feeding in the cloud of burley. He threw out a line and mechanically reeled in the large silver bream he hooked. He didn't smile. Again and again he threw out handfuls until nothing was left, then tossed over the sanding disk and dustmask and returned wearily to shore, to clean the fish and put it in the freezer. He waited, he waited for days, until the fact that the skull had finally been beaten sank in. He checked constantly, he couldn't help himself, but the beach was always empty. The dust had all been eaten by fish and spread over a wide area, too wide for its powers to be effective. He had won. It had lost. Dead things are losers. Later that night there was a discreet knock on Catherine's door. She ignored it. Too busy. Half an hour later, an identical knock. She thought about it for a few seconds, groaned, and opened the door. Karen shuffled nervously on the doorstep. "Hi. Um.. have you seen the boom box from the loungeroom? It's not there, and I thought-" "Yeah, I've got it here. Come in." The entire room was a tangle of tape. Karen stared in mute incomprehension at the recorder, the reels turning, the flickering TV and the new piles of clothes and books. Her wandering eye caught sight of the cassette player beneath strands of tape. "What are you doing? Where'd the old tape machine come from?" "Bought it today. Listen to this." Catherine stopped the reel and wound it back, started it playing. A deluge of voices flooded the room, words and phrases intermixing, cut with purpose, all with the unmistakable fuzz of TV sound overlaying their varied pitches. "-me I'll string along and in that world victim seems to have consisted make a dent in ignored the exhibition bound with the cord celebrate each I lie down in death plastic chassis signals coming in bulging with titles spice up his pallet to process to maximize group of us compact and tightly within themselves the Christians are restless like a fool and the crowds divided regard apes as the equal to one isolated occasion with her legs must be secured I must arts bigwigs like a fool draw a magic circle and sign it with a dot combined to write its wide branches spread as many colours as the eye can see it will sustain an interpretation which worked ultra violent future fully towards you get a high performance as individuals what they learnt life as the great branching off told them to high talk with the blossom like the rose paired our road bore fruit I shall return to its purport later that dreams of joy hang in the air put on guard night world of darkness number of daughter like the one above set the standard voice you want in her apartment building really a very subtle work whole new voice bandwidth bottleneck used to live in heaven astral journey invoke me under the stars using up purposes of enlightenment I go off and so then sin doubly fibrous little poultry man this spiritual wedding prevalent belief stands a great woman all along the whole company like one possessed worked closely day of freedom writes for single interrupt pearls are out to stop an evil shipping magnate a drowning accident below this second generation the children's hour produce the modern forms I am infinite make clear all along the cover has a drawing while St. Augustine with the commode in the heavens and the room resume their quarrel was advised to seek to get enough run down burning them title in the way for more details easiest way to connect overload point all the energy of a dead elephant an act of cannibalism this can be changed fast data either outstanding charges feminist oriented bound with the cord put the squeeze on criminal well known different spiritual philosophies our hotel rooms did nothing the manner of its subsequent decline tune has since sold payment of police never failing it is the point if you can afford extra fine rotate it not exactly sitting idle gold reserves radioactive you will not be able very much longer wish to start that the earth come into being aware of experiments and yet primarily a theologian have occurred from the anteroom these writings led her nothing at all on a project at one time individually chose more ceremonial put out your match selection and return of a complete novice would have learned their lesson is not returned their system initiated into great sea soft as thoughts when finally social -" "Wow... I don't know what to say. Did this yourself, with this machine?" "Yes, and this." She held up a pair of nail scissors, Karen recognizing them as the pair they used to chop up mull for smoking, and a roll of sticky tape. "It's not the sort of tape I've used before, but it'll do for the mean time." "But... I didn't know you were an artist. You didn't say anything. Lang didn't say anything." "I'm not." "But this is art history! This is Burroughs in London, and Laurie Anderson, and that." "This is magic." "Come again." "It's magic. I'm trying to find the right combination of words to do something. They must exist somewhere out there. All I have to do is capture them and find the right combination." "Any words will do?" "The ones I find are the right ones. That's what I've always noticed. I've been doing this for years." "Any success? I mean, have you ever, uh, done whatever it is your aiming for?" "Often. It works. But I've never done it in this world." "I see. Well, you can borrow the cassette player, if you need it, for a couple of days, I guess. As long as we know where it is. See you later." Karen turned with a strange smile and walked out, closing the door gently behind her. Catherine returned to her work. There was a war movie coming up after the commercials, and she felt sure it had what she needed. CHAPTER 6 THURSDAY They were called Forceps, blotter trips stamped with broken hearts, out of Holland or Belgium. No one knew what the contents actually were; some thought it was micro doses of LSD with amphetamines to amplify the effects, others claimed it was small amounts of strychnine, poisoning the nerves and making them more conductive, or a mixture of MDA and LSD, or perhaps some cocktail of other drugs, Ketamine or mescaline. There were fantastic, convoluted arguments among aficionados about what exactly the chemical constituents of their favorite brand was, and they still found themselves none the wiser; not that they minded, it was as pointless as arguing politics or sport. No lists of ingredients or instructions for dosage. No consumer affairs bureau to call if they failed, or took off like rockets and ripped the persona from the brain as effectively as a bullet to the temple. Micheal knew a true acid casualty, a stumbling, fevered shell of a human who hung around Martin Place when he worked in a sandwich shop there during the holidays. This person obsessed him, with his endless concentration on the ground, moving slowly along the street watching the cracks in the concrete and never stepping on a line while shoppers and workers swerved after picking up his presence on their loony-detecting radar. Ragged like a hermit, alone among the teeming streets and towers. One time a storm broke, bathtubs of warm summer rain that turned suddenly cold and froze the marrow as Micheal and several suits raced for cover. They turned and saw the uncomprehending face, mute and unintelligent as a meek Frankenstein monster, peering into the dark of the shop awning they huddled beneath. Rain coursed through his hair and turned grey with dirt. His head steamed. The man had an inflamed face similar to the faces of alcoholics, scarlet with dark blood, but not swollen, thin and wiry instead. Heat seemed to pour from his body like some chemical reaction raged inside. He rarely ate and there was no accounting for the energy that poured out. A girl spent hours talking to his uncomprehending face one day, a girl in a shoulder-padded suit with briefcase and phone who recognized him as she passed, but she found no response. His sister, girlfriend, welfare nurse, no one knew which, she hinted disturbingly at some life he had once lived, now lost. And Micheal scratched out some words that came to him on the bus home, and stuck the scrap of paper on the back of his door with blue tack: HO HO HO! What a very luscious joy it is To be free, at last, From the dark. I sucked your letter dry And that strange ink Has written much that is, And will always remain, secret, In the cold, dark, lightless vaults Of my skull. Now I step from stone to stone Slowly yet easily, And no longer need to see The eye of the passer by Watching me. Now I search for grace more than sustenance. Now my hair and face Are labels of my penance When I suffered on the rack And came out clean In dirty grey and shoeless Being fully in possession Of the message that you sent me In a square. I say, "This is not madness, This is freedom." But that didn't stop him from indulging now and then. It's all in the mind, he told himself. You have to have the right attitude. No history of madness in my family, rock solid Protestants all the way back, not a trace of imagination among the lot of them. He waited for June to arrive, idly amusing himself picking stuffing from the ruined cushions that graced the floor. A gentle knock. Bone on wood. June rapped with Skull, human headbone and constant companion. Dead for decades, Skull maintained a cryptic silence, but he was popular and often found at parties where admirers spent hours running their hands over the smooth dome of his head and around his vacant orbits. Their hands left a patina of sweat in grey patches; June brushed him twice a year with tooth paste that left him creamy white and perhaps even strengthened his bones, (it does get in), and he survived longer than his brothers, pig and dog skulls, goat and horse, cows with flaky grey horns, sitting on bookshelves and hanging from bedroom walls, gracing writers tables and students bedrooms where they listen silently to the music. These dried out and became brittle through lack of love. They break when dropped, a second death. Once Skull had walked among the millions of India, with a different name and a life; then he died and joined the river of bones that flows from those shores, (Indians often arrange for their bones to be sold to medical supply companies to provide for their families after they die), and now he was the beloved stranger who never had to ask for people to hold him. When Micheal opened the door June placed Skull in his hands, more carefully than if he was a baby. Empty cavities gazed up from the smooth, calm face. "Come in." he said. She did and he closed the door. "Let's drop the bombshells now." He handed over chipped and rusted Anticol tin he kept them in. She flipped off the lid, licked a finger tip, touched one of the tiny squares and transferred it to her tongue. "There. Neatly done. You should take yours now, too, give it time to warm up before the show starts. Are these clean?" "Fairly. They can cause trouble if you've had too much to eat during the day." "Too much to eat? I've been living on liquids again. It happens sometimes." "Yeah, me too. Sometimes I come home from uni and everyones just leaving for a band and then it's too late when I get back and I wake up late..." "I would have done so anyway, just in case. It's pretty gross, to feel your own intestines writhing, trying to do something that's suddenly become alien to them." They sat down on the floor, ignoring the bed, leaning back against the furniture, listening to the music and talking. "The Catherine affair is definitely getting weirder." announced June. "Yeah? What's the story? I haven't seen her since yesterday morning." "Karen told me last night she was fervently taping the soundtrack of a B movie and re-arranging the words. That's where the cassette player went, she was using that and some kind of old fashioned tape machine, and a TV, that she must have bought yesterday." "Cool! I thought something interesting would turn up there. What about Lang?" asked Micheal. "He wasn't surprised. Seemed fatalistic, but didn't say if she used to do this sort of thing before. He went in, briefly, and Karen was bracing herself for some kind of fight, but everything was calm." "Karen hinted at this. She wants me to take part in some kind of performance. I think she's got Catherine on the ball too." "Don't know about that. Karen was out all day but Catherine stayed here. I heard weird sounds coming from that room when I went out in the yard." said June. "I don't know if Karen's got a game plan yet. But she went to Andrew's place, and they've probably got something ready by now." June idly picked up his bookbag and rifled through the contents. "What's this?" she asked, holding up The Last TV Dinner: Post Modernism and the Nature of the Catastrophe. "Sociology. Lots of books like that one, lots of books with hyphens in the middle. Churned out for intelligentsia consumption only, that's why the cover's ain't got pitchers. It's basically about how books like itself can't compete with television and other media, which is all designed to appeal to the moment and titillate the audience without providing any real wisdom, which is a pretty cynical attitude. Those books are mass produced to do exactly the same for people who pride themselves on not watching TV." "Like affirmations, do you know what they are?" Micheal shook his head. "Like prayers, really. Like prayers to yourself. They're these short, poetic statements you're supposed to repeat to yourself over and over in your mind, and they have different effects; some motivate you to succeed in your business, some help you make decisions like deciding to leave a husband or start a new career, and some are just supposed to make you feel better about being a woman." "I've seen those before. I saw an add in Cosmo." "You read Cosmo?" June was quietly amused; she rolled over on her side and laughed hard but silently, holding her stomach. "Yes!" Micheal retorted, smiling himself. "Whenever I can! How else am I supposed to know what's going on if I don't peruse an informed journal of culture like Cosmo?" "Watch television!" "Yeah." "What were you doing before uni?" June asked. "I was living in a place that was an outer suburb of hell." said Micheal. "The air was a constant soup of car exhausts, and smells from the back of the greasy spoon down the block where they tipped the scraps into a tiny bin and they overflowed and festered on the hot concrete. I once walked past and saw the maggots squirming frantically out of the mire of rancid meat and wilted lettuce that was turning into black slime, and they struggled away over the baking driveway, only to dry up and die within metres, forming a patch like a microscopic battlefield after a war, all the soldiers dead." "That summed up the entire suburb for me. I saw the way people had been forced out of the city and into this area trying to escape, not heat like the maggots, but their own view of themselves, and died even as the maggots did, though their souls dried up, not their skins. A wave of people lured into flats, promised security and something with no name but more precious than money. The closest word for it I can think of is decency. The desire to be normal. God bless them all! He can understand their desire to be good, if only they could work out what it was." "So I dived down into that morass, seeking stable employment. Working out there was a hell; spending time with the Empties, Sub Zombies, not entirely lost but mostly, especially anyone in a position of power. Walking through the crowd at the local watering hole summed it up for me forever. The memory of that barren room, and the people. Somehow they seemed dirty. Cleaner than the grungiest feral in the city, but their souls tainted by too many friday night raffles and systems entries where the entire department would hang on the result as though they expected to win. Dissapointed when they lost, and they would drink deep to drown the failure." "When I met Karen she pretty much introduced me to the city scene. See, I was fresh from the country, and although I'd done a lot of thinking and decided it wasn't the life I wanted to live, I hand't realised the options. She was living in this squat with a band, Anchovy Smegma, and doing her course, and she showed me how to pad out my resume and get a course. Glad I did it, too." "I saw Anchovy Smegma on Rage the other day." "Did you!? really? I can't believe they did it!" "Yup, right there in front of the whole of Australia, they did their thing. It was amazing they managed to get on the air; they haven't changed their image. Still as filthy as ever, and the leeches...! This video looked like a cross between a church service and Night Of the Living Dead, and the band were in zombie makeup and covered in leaches like they used to go on stage at the Vic." "You know what this means?" "Yeah, no more gigs at the Vic, they'll be playing tours in American industrial towns next, or Berlin. We won't see them if they break through." "There's always another. We can't begrudge their success even though it deprives us. Anyway, the Vic's not a venue anymore." "I just can't forget the party they played at. You know; stage with old pallets and masonite, in this wrecked squat, they were trying to raise the money for little luxuries like windows and furniture, five bucks at the door, and the Fish coming in coated with Pecks Anchovy paste, and the smell...! They told me they wanted to "Give the punters their money's worth", and their daggy underwear was falling down 'cause the elastic had been washed out... and the smell..." They both rolled helplessly on the floor, trying to stop the howls that rose within them breaking through their lips and bringing anxious people up the stairs, spluttering and eyes running with tears. "Everything is funny!" Micheal declared solemnly to the ceiling in a momentary second of control before he went off again. "They must be working. What's the time?" "Five past one." "Damn, we missed the first five minutes!" He balanced on shaky feet and carefully stepped onto the bed, crouching to reach the stereo on the windowsill at its head. Tuned back and forth through hiss and seconds of clear FM looking for the station. "This is the show." he said at last. "Where's Skull?" June sat on the bed at the head end, Andrew lay on his back. The crown of his head pressed against her leg, and she rested a cool hand on his forehead which burnt with the effects of the drug. The feel of cold skin was so strange, as though a large friendly frog was sitting there, but he wanted to hold Skull and talk to him. She reached behind and fetched the small grey skull, which he held on his chest and looked deep into its eyes while running his fingers through long vanished hair. The bone felt alive under supercharged fingertips. There was still a soul in the thing, on that he would swear on a stack of comics. Mostly he treated the personification of the skull as a joke. Now, and the joke seemed particularly tasty, very apt and not at all pretentious. Somewhere far away a faceless man sat in a studio with decades worth of collected madnesses in boxes around the console. He listened hypnotized to the cans, his own, far better than the headphones the station supplied. A churning wall of sound raged with bursts of white noise from the short waves, and reverse loops of classical riffs taken from seventy eights with all the clicks and pops amplified. He rubbed his hands and considered the program for the night, taped to the mike stand. Once a fortnight, for two hours. Classical music gave way to it's antithesis. Harmony and tone torpedoed by textures hand-crafted by the best musical psychopaths in the world. Unrecognized geniuses worked late into the night in basement studios with ceilings of styrofoam, tape machine and computer and pencil and pad and mike. Home copied, or released by labels that were basically post office boxes and a drawer in someones desk and time shared on a high speed cassette dubbing machine. Somewhere out there, behind the world, this music circulated among a loose web of enthusiasts, web so loose that some wouldn't know anyone else who belonged by face, only by address and label and sound. With quiet assurance the DJ mixed and paired and fed the signal out to the airwaves, to the dedicated listeners and curious dial turners, in their various states of mind. There was no explanation, no name to the program, no titles to the songs and sounds and textures he played. The agonized screams of horror movie heroines floated in the sweet sea of Mantovanis' strings. Alien music whined and screeched, culled from rare and unknown sources. Trash and truth combined and were demolished by the other. Celebrating the surreal mad nature of the human mind; at least, the minds that knew. It was real, the only expression of the totality of life in a world where formal rules and protocol and lies guarding the form of the media are shattered during ad breaks. Life mutated and swirled around the edges of their minds all their lives. Everything was here, layered in richness as thick as the earth of the forest, and their deejay slyly perpetrating the signals even as he mocked them. June twisted around - they had been sitting back to back on the couch trying to read each others minds through the contact of their heads - and said "You have to come and see the murals in Newtown!" "Why? I've seen them every time I go up there. Is there a new one?" "No, not really, but Kat is going to kill himself. I really think so." She wriggled fully around in the excitement of her gossip. "There are graffiti everywhere, he's writing and leaving his mark all over the area, and covering over his work with primer grey paint, and posters on shopfronts about the Arts Council. The local government won't fund him even though his work is a tourist attraction, and the posters and graffiti are all about suicide, they nearly shriek intention." The mind moves in circles sometimes and needs something straight to iron out the thoughts. Best thing is a walk, he thought, a destination to aim for, goal in the future, map of inevitability. He could feel the nerves firing in his limbs, tense muscles moving of their own accord and threatening to cramp and spasm. It was a good idea. The tape clicked off and he turned it over and punched Record. "Ready." The night welcomed them outside with open arms, fingers of shadow looping about their feet. It swirled around them. Blackness poured from the sky, and the colours of clouds lit by streetlight was visible as refracting and changing clots of colour floating in the dark void. Light was warmth. They could feel the warmth of the lights and front porches and windows, striking their cheeks and heating their blood. They walked with strangely smooth, pumped up movements, every nerve responding a little too fast, every reflex a little too eager to trigger. Cars moved past leaving comet trails of light in the corners of their eyes. Moving in silence now, overawed by the presence of the night. The faces of passers by each seemed to communicate something personal, intricate messages of alien emotion impossible to decode. The Third who forms wherever two are gathered together, the Third who usually walks behind, was leading. Guiding them down to Parramatta Road and the yellow windows of Grace Bros. filled with mannequins standing in erotic poses. Here a frozen faced womanoid gestured lightly to indicate pleasure with it's outfit of butter muslin rags. There a boxy male unit sent a piercing plastic stare out at the cars, as if to say, "I have a tie. Admire me." Their guide dragged them up the hill to the corner, Lansdowne subdued and almost empty. Past the park and the empty pool guarded by packs of German Shepherds that wheeled and turned in rigid formation across the lawn within the cyclone fence. Guiding them into the grounds of the university, where gothic spires pierce the emptiness of hazy dark and fill it with bats. Shadows flitted down the carved sandstone, flowing away from the radiation the spotlights gave off. X-rays in that yellow light, deadly to anything less substantial than air. "The tunnels run all under this place," said June "Old tunnels with rivers running through them. There's a creek, runs down here from Camperdowne, and you can walk down the tunnel until the air kills your candles and you have to turn back. Otherwise you feel dizzy and sleepy and fall down unconscious and the rats carry you to the Fungus Man and no hoping for the future then. That dude is fibrous." "Fungus man?" "White guy, very quiet. You meet him sometimes, in pubs and at parties. His skin is polished silver white like china and he wears a black wig. Just sits there with a finger in his drink, and that finger is fuzzy with uncoiling tendrils swimming with glee in the spirit. Then he goes out into the garden and lies down on the lawn, and if you watch him, wait long enough, you see him get flatter and flatter and disappear into the earth as the cells of his body uncoil and millions of fibers pierce the ground, wiggling down like worms to his shelter from the sun." Kingstreet, deserted, swarmed with apparitions. Infinite equations represented by the swing trajectories of pedestrians hair. Traffic slowly oozed past, big spray job Camaros with bass boxes mounted behind the back seat carrying their thumps and analogue sequences, doom doom doom doom to the western lands. They floated serenely but not calmly in the ripples of liquid ground, melted asphalt textures licking at their signs and threatening to change bouancy and swallow them down like so many razorblades on the surface of a pond. The programs for avoiding obstacles unaffected by the drug, luckily, so their feet didn't tangle as much as their minds, and there were no collisions. Cops loomed through the press, head and shoulders above rest, beaming bad karma like lighthouses. Micheal and June narrowed their eyes and passed, hiding irises huge as saucers. "Food?" "No thanks, I lost my stomach." "Onwards, then." As the trip mellowed and they came closer to the world, partly through time and partly through the exercise, walking the molecule chains down into bits that would turn their piss brown and bitter in the morning. They stopped to stare up at a mural, Martin Luther King impassive two storeys up, and the globe, blue on black. "Look at the base." Grey encroached on the art, working its way in from the edge with broad roller strokes and squiggles of graffiti. A cancer ate closer to the face. Somehow the knowledge that the artist himself was responsible for the damage made it seem worse. It seemed the cancer must be inside him, eating away at his mind and out through hands to the minds creations, erasing them in death as the body approaches its own self destruction. The murals were parts of peoples lives; drivers navigated by them, shoppers read them or idly stared from the windows of passing buses at them, watching them slowly disappear under ugly coatings of thick primer. King Street wound further, lined with shops and banks and restaurants all sleeping, three AM, only the Seven Eleven still open for the haunted freaks to wander in and shop. The incredible fluorescent inferno inside, and the million voices of desire from the brightly foil wrapped snacks and chocolate in racks near the registers poured out onto the street. Here were more signs of Kats distress, and consider how silently most people die, withering away inside and losing shreds of their self to the silent river of thought without a ripple to marr the smooth surface of normality. Only the graffittist could reach so many peoples minds, writing his script up where the world cannot ignore it and bury it as so many books are buried under the weight of each other. There were cat scratches, drawn in plain white paint with a thick brush, an oval with three exclamation marks, like the print of a cats paw below the scratches of its three claws, or perhaps, thought Micheal, a scream of agony, wide open mouth and the noise that tears out. They were everywhere, on the sides of lamp posts, signal control boxes, on the undersides of the awnings above them, shop windows, with other scratches where the angry shop owners tried to erase the sign, and on brick walls, the footpath beneath their feet, giant ones on more murals that bore their own freight of obscuring primer, tiny ones engraved on the buttons of traffic lights. Swirling photocopies of Felix the Cat laughed from the hoardings and walls they were pasted on, posted photocopies of the Australia Council kangaroo symbol shooting cats and artists and Felix himself with a rifle, and cryptic messages in lines of disjointed photocopied script. "I don't think Kat is feeling very together." said Andrew. June agreed. They passed a chain link fence, barren ground on the other side, sparkling with broken glass. Something small and dark lay heaped against the wire. "It's a cat!" June cried. The synchronicity hit them both with full force. A car had broken its back on the road, and with terrible determination it had crawled over the curb and across the footpath to collapse against the fence. The body was still warm to their touch. There was no detectable breath but they didn't trust their distorted senses. Something had to be done. Micheal stood, raised his boot and brought his heel down on the head. The skull cracked. "It has to be dead now. Even if it was already dead, we have to be sure." June nodded silently. They stood, looking away through the fence and over the empty lot, over the factories and industrial land of St Peters, where radio repeater towers lifted glowing aircraft lights like baleful stars. "This is the place." said June a few blocks later. It was a house, a small mansion that seemed to lean out over it's garden and stare at the street like an interested spectator at a car crash. The brick path was buckled up in waves by the roots of pines in the garden next door. A flood of stale smells through the open door, the accumulated scent of old mattresses lying on floors covered with month old sheets, probably with a small accumulation of DUCs (Discarded Used Condoms), underneath. One side of the ragged garden defined by a wall, the side of the shop at the end of a line of terraces. Covered in graffiti that surrounded the name of the house, spraybombed in large flouro letters; "Cockyhaven". "Some friends of mine live here. They should be home, the door wouldn't be open if not." said June. They approached the doorway, the hall within lit yellow by a bare bulb. June rapped loudly on the door. They waited, but no one heard. "Come on." Micheal followed June, stumbling over the wreck of a bike that lay on its side in the centre of the hall. They crept up broken backed stairs to the second floor, and then the third, calling out on each landing. It seemed the house was totally deserted. "I'm cold." he complained. "Come in here." A small square students room, where you collected bruises on your shins from walking around the bed and squeezing past a desk or chair. Books in vast quantities lay on every surface, the welcoming friendly embrace of books filled the room and the cramping made Micheal feel he was being softly pressed in the angle of a large paperback. The air sounded dull and full from of the smoky patterned carpet that hung on two of the walls. There were jars of feathers and stalks of dried grass. He automatically picked volumes off the bed and table and inspected the titles: "I love books more than anything else. They contain so much thought. Words are thoughts, pictures are dreams, and in books they meet each other, nowhere else." said June as she stacked the collection that lay on the bed. "What about movies? The good ones, I mean." "So rare they hardly bear mention." He had a vision of the flow of books through peoples houses, passed from hand to hand, borrowed or lent, the accumulation of creases on paperbacks, the orange juice stains and chocolate crumbs collecting in the binding. "I had a thought just then. What about sending a letter to Kat? He would understand it." she said. Micheal considered silently. "What should we say?" "I know the words, all we need is the paint. Come on!" They descended to the lounge, all filled with scattered cushions looted from years worth of couches left out on the footpath for the council to take away; the television buried under months accumulation of magazines; amateur art papering the walls with sketches of rock stars and surreal landscapes and the unstoppable graffiti scrawls. June reached down behind a set of low shelves, removing someones poorly hidden stash in a small plastic bag, some magazines she smiled a one sided smirk at, and finally a can of spray paint. There were no pedestrians around, and little danger of being caught. The landlord was tolerant, in fact he never visited at all and all he asked was rent on time and, if you make a hole in the wall, repair it yourself. Their only danger was the police. Off duty cops formed an irregular "Graffiti Task Force" and rode around in a Holden equipped with CB radio, reporting any fresh paint, and stopping artists when they could. All through the winding streets wobbly words spill down walls, sprayed in inspired moments of chemical wisdom. Shaky-legged mystics with dilated eyes made their way out of their houses to local parks and embankments, spray can ready to spread their enlightenment. June remembered following Jackie as she stumbled out one night to a wall of a nearby warehouse where, frowning concentration, dizzy with the smell of solvents, she wrote THE PEOPLE ARE MELTIN, the G left off in their flight from the spotlight of a police wagon, giving the phrase a beautiful lilting ring that made it poetry. She stood at the base of the wall besides the garden, shaking the can and listening to the rattle, so distinctive. Then sprayed- DEAR KAT, ANGELS ARE DREAMING OF YOU. SONIC YOUTH Later, and they walked along the edge of a car park, balancing on the concrete curb like drunk motorists walking the yellow line for the benefit of suspicious police. A silent figure approached from the other side of the park padding barefoot through the broken glass and crushed cans. He was male, bearded, the army jacket that hung loosely around the thin chest clanking with the load of attached metal; medallions and badges and studs. Old electronic components woven across rips in the fabric. His bare feet were broad and splayed. June and Micheal recognized him both at the same time. "Reg!" He acknowledged them with a salute and a small bow; there was something classical about the meeting. Historic even, as though he were a future king. (Not that any of those present expected to reach such glorious heights; they expected to fade into total obscurity soon after death, if not before, their stories drowned in the flood of data that filled the world.) Still, although he would deny it himself, Reg always carried with him the atmosphere of a myth. The three sat in a triangle on the bitumen. "Hello June. I was just on my way up to the cafe for some Twisties when I thought I saw you. Isn't it a beautiful night? You look from the bridge back there, you can see steam from some factory going up over Botany, glowing white. Where are you off to?" His keen eyes checked their pupils, found them dilated. "Tripping! Wondered why you were strolling the streets at this time of night, should have known." "Kats' going mad." said Micheal. "It's terrible." "No, I don't think so. I think he's just angry. If you know him, you know he's got plans; all these signs and portents signify nothing really. He painted a mandalla of those scratch signs outside my house, and we talked. If he really meant to kill himself he would; all the messages mean is that he still has hope, you understand?" "Have you ever been inside the tram sheds?" he asked with a secretive smile. June and Micheal said no. "Well, you should. If you like, I'll tell you how to get to the Vegan Eggflip." His voice, serious, sensible, lulled them into accepting his words without questioning them, as he mapped out their route through the Newtown tramsheds, long abandoned and derelict. "... and you should watch out for the holes; stick close to the wall behind you. At the corner you can turn and walk down the ramp; here you will see the laser beams, but they won't hurt you. Just keep going down the ramp until you reach the hole in the brick wall, with a big sign saying "DANGER, NO ENTRY". You go through there and down the steps to the trip-making machines. Try not to step on them, they're important, and go up the steps on the other side to the basket ball court." "And what will we find?" "I told you, the vegan eggflip." "What's that? Some sort of drink?" "You'll see when you find it." He walked with them to the sheds, guiding them through twisted lanes and alleys, his bare feet passing undamaged over twisted strips of razor sharp steel from the sides of cars and curved slivers of broken bottles. Micheal thought of discarded syringes as he watched Reg walk ahead, and felt momentarily sick as he visualized one piercing his tough soles and dooming him to slow death. June looked up at the moon, half full, or rather half empty, as it was waning. She could see the faint ghost of the dark side, lit with sunlight reflected from the Earth's oceans. The Pacific, she realized, now being crossed by the terminator line of morning racing towards them over the blue waves, soon to strike Mount Warning and spread down over its flanks and spill across the coast. They passed silent houses and shops. Dark brick walls and twisted iron gratings. There was a fence, and dead ground with heaps of bricks and broken concrete overgrown with fleshy grass pushing up from the cool spaces between. Reg gave them each a leg up to the top of the barbed wire security fence. "Be careful." They turned, but he was already leaving, in search of Twisties. "There's the big door." The freight door was a rolling shutter propped up with a solidified bag of cement wedged underneath. It left just enough space to slide under, with the helpless feeling of passing under a giant guillotine blade. Inside they found echoing dark space, tiny fragments of light that pierced the damaged walls revealing wreckage, old metal struts and piles of wood. "It's huge! I never realized how big this place is." "Turn right." Edging along the wall, fearful of the giant bottomless holes that yawned in the fragile concrete they stood upon. It was impossible to see anything real in the fragmented light. There were only isolated patches of concrete and dark between. They tested each footstep, and kept a wary hand on the corrugated wall. "The ramp." There were laser beams - a streetlight sent shafts of brilliant white through gaps in the wall behind them, and they shone ahead down the ramp to the far side. As they walked down they moved towards their shadows, sharp edged black figures that made walking motions suspended above the floor, cut off at the knees, haloed with nimbus hair. There to their right, reflected light showed them the sign "Danger - No Entry", and a rough edged hole punched through the bricks. They stepped through. Rickety stairs led down, into darkness that smelt like squats: old urine, mouldy mattresses, decay and depression. "I don't like this, I'm starting to worry." announced Micheal. He stopped on the stairs and started searching pockets for a lighter. "Go on, there's no one there. Would Reg send us in if there were streeties living here?" Micheal held the small flame of a lighter up, and they descended. The trip making machines were there at the bottom; an old mattress's springs, tangled with phone wire and pieces of chrome plated metal, placed artistically to reflect the beam of another streetlight, just outside, that poured through a small hole high up in the wall. In the pure halogen brilliance the parts seemed to move, vibrating with some form of power that wasn't electricity. The rest of the room was pitch black. Only the machine existed here, floating in its pool of light. Silently they picked their way past the device and found more stairs leading up. There was dim natural light at the top. It was a large flat space, and reminded them both of a school gym, though different schools and different gyms. A floor of concrete set with wooden platforms, obviously trapdoors, some rotted away and some sound. The walls were bare brick, and where the roof had been there was only steel joists and sky, with the new moon now high enough to shine over the edge. A dark iron traveling hoist ran from wall to wall, once used to lift cargo through the traps. Micheal walked out into the cool fresh air with relief, turning slowly around and around with arms spread to wash away the dankness of the passages below. He walked out onto a wooden trapdoor and sat down. June walked slowly around, scanning the ground for something, and he thought to ask what she had lost but decided to lie back. The sky was dark purple now, the darkest purple he had ever seen that wasn't pure black, and there was a faint tinge of red to the few dim city-lit clouds, hinting at the sunrise soon to come. "I found it." said June. She dropped an object onto Michael's chest and sat down. His hand closed around a wooden handle, with blue paint flaking off and a blackened chrome rod emerging from one end. The rod ended in a broken sliver of flat metal. "It looks like a spatula." he said. "It's an eggflip. A Vegan Eggflip." "Of course! It's useless, and Vegans don't eat eggs." The rightness of it all sunk deep into his mind and resounded. She lay down and they watched the sky lighten, and heard the first delivery trucks of the morning, and the birds. The sky lightened and shifted slowly from purple to dark blue, the stars gone, only Venus still showing near the top of one wall, and the clouds faded from their stark electric lit colour to the more natural tint of the sun, orange and smoky. Later the cars started, early motorists on their way to the city and shift workers going home. CHAPTER 7 FRIDAY "Catherine's still going." Micheal said with a fatal air. "It doesn't look good to me." He stood at the kitchen window, peering through the coloured and clear panes of the round leadlight window that was the houses last remnant of it's Federation glory, (along with the stuffed fireplaces.) "I heard her come out last night, and there's some bread missing from the loaf." said Karen. "I wish Lang had told us about this, we could have prepared." "Just as long as she doesn't start cracking up in public. I can handle the obsession, appreciate it even, but when she starts parading her madness in the street it's time for a house meeting." "Maybe we could administer the cure." "I hate the Cure." "We could try to fix her up, is what I meant. Get her some friends, get her away from, uh, you know who, try and lure her out into an environment where she can see what normal is and decide if she wants to change." said Karen. "Maybe she's happier as she is. Looks like she's got a purpose in life, even if it's pretty incomprehensible." said Micheal. "You're assuming she's mad. Another crazy. How many friends have we lost to madness? How many times has someone you thought you knew suddenly opened their mouth and revealed a sudden twist in thinking, a break in their circuits opens and they drift away..." "Have you listened to what she's doing?" "Yeah." "Well, go out there and have a listen now. I stood out there for half an hour when I got home this morning, just listening. It might give you an idea or two. It's catchy, at the very least." "Catchy, huh?" Karen carefully opened the squeaky screen door and stepped out into the back yard, walking barefoot across the cold concrete to Catherine's door. The sound was muted but distinct. It sounded like she had done something to the cassette player, for a start. Tuned it up or something. The sound... like news from another plane, newsreaders declaiming pentatonic verses adjusted for alien logic systems, formal rules of diction retained but reprogrammed, the cuts in all the right places. She listened, fascinated. It did give her ideas. So she tapped very lightly on the door, and stood back. Instantly the sound cut off, and Catherine opened the door and leaned on the frame. She looked terrible, red eyed and bleary, like the aftermath of a rough party. "Hi." said Karen. Catherine scanned the yard, squinting. "Do you want the cassette machine back now?" "No. I could hear what you were doing and I was just going to ask you if you could help me with something." "Maybe. I'm very tired. I've been working all night." "Any results?" "No. Not the ones I want." "Wanna come to uni with me today? I need someone who knows about sound to help me with something." "Sure, but I don't know if I can keep awake much longer." "Try." No time for breakfast, just the last minute rush to get ready. They heard a horn in the street out the front above the roar of morning traffic, and Karen went to the front door. It was Miko, right on schedule, his ute parked half up on the curb, a tarpaulin covering a lumpy pile in the tray. Andrew climbed out of the cab and waved. "Come on. Got your stuff?" "Just wait." A few minutes, and Karen and Catherine emerged, carrying a blanket wrapped bundle between them. They carefully laid it down in the tray and climbed into the cab. "Anyone who wants to play Corners can walk." growled Miko, as he gunned the engine and gingerly re-inserted the ute into the traffic flow. "Will we have time to rehearse?" asked Andrew. "Not likely. We don't need to, it's pretty straight forward." "I just don't want to be responsible for wrecking the whole thing." "No, I'm pretty confident. It doesn't matter, anyway." They parked, and stalked into the uni like a band of cut-throat bandits ready to rob everyone and leave corpses. Adrenaline tightening their backs, clenching their buttocks and occasionally grabbing their hearts for a harsh squeeze. Each carrying two of Miko's guitars, taken from beneath the tarpaulin in the back of the truck, one in each hand. Heads turn in the crowds of students around them, bemused, and they give back stares of contrived indifference. "This is cool." Andrew whispered to Karen. "I could go for this. Reckon I could start a band?" "Can you play anything?" "No. I'd be the singer. The frontman." "Yeah, right. Grow about a foot and a half taller, and about a foot wider, got me? Then, practice looking cool in the mirror, so that you can look cool in a thousand different ways and not repeat them. Then, maybe..." Catherine and Miko trailed behind, lugging a shopping trolley filled with the rest of the gear, Miko's amplifiers and monitors, and her own reel-to-reel, securely wrapped and padded in its blanket. A security guard gazed speculatively at them, but decided that, since they were walking into the college, they weren't thieving. Karen lead them through the twists and turns of the campus corridors, to a lift. They ride up. In the lift Miko started giggling. Softly, at first, but the convulsions mount and he cannot choke them back, even when he snorts snot onto his shirt. Ruefully he pulls out a handkerchief to mop it up under Catherine's withering glare, but starts choking again. "I can't help it. I was just thinking... we can't actually be about to do this, can we?" "Sure we bloody well can!" Karen insists. But she's infected and goes off herself. Then Andrew starts. By the time the lift opens on the top floor they are helpless. The door opens on a crowd of students just out from lectures, who pull back in surprise as though the lift was full of monsters. Catherine took the lead, tugging her trolley through the crowd, ignoring everyone, following Karen's directions to the lecture theater. They entered through a door at the top back of the auditorium, next to the control box. The other students clustered down below, in the first two rows of seats back from the stage, muttering quietly, waiting. The lecturer glanced up and caught sight of Karen and her party in the shadows. "Karen. That should be everyone. You'll have to go on last, I'm afraid. That should give you time to set up and prepare. Now, we need to make time, I could only get this theater for a single period. Who wants to be first, Ashley or Kim?" "Yo." said Ashley, standing from her place in the centre front row and walking out on stage. She turned and nodded up at the control room, and the lights faded away, leaving only a pinspot shining straight down on her head. She wore a white terry toweling dressing gown, tattered and stained with coffee and circles of blue ink where biros leaked in the pockets. The robe of a patriarch, a man who has his wife butter the toast for him while he does the crosswords. She holds a thick, old bible in her hands. New pages of A4 paper folded in it's leaves. She puts the bible down and opens the dressing gown, letting it fall to the floor behind her. From head to foot she was covered in beauticians mud, grey and smooth, the tracks of the fingers that applied it showing pink across her skin. A thorough job. Here and there a dry patch flaking white and crisp from the skin and falling like snow to the stage. She crouched coyly and picked up the bible, opening it to the inserted pages. "Now the serpent was more subtle than any beast of the field which the Lord God hath made. And he said to the woman, yea, hath God said, ye shall eat of every tree of the garden?" And the woman said unto the serpent, We may eat of the fruit of the trees of the garden." But of the fruit of the tree which is in the midst of the garden, God hath said, Ye shall not eat of it, neither shall ye touch it, lest ye die." "And the serpent said to the woman, you shall not surely die." "For God doth know that on the day ye eat thereof, ye shall be made self aware. And thy destiny will be conveyed into thine own hands, such that thou canst do whatever thou dost please on the face of the earth. And ye shall conceive many conceits, that shall be called by the names Desire and Gratification and Lust and Denial and Betrayal and Truth, and many others, and they shall form a scourge an all your offspring. And there will be wars fought over only the definition of the words used to tell their names." "Come on." whispered Karen. She and Catherine crept stealthily from their seats and climbed back up to the control room, Catherine lugging the decal-coated cassette recorder. Inside it is dark and quiet. Ashley's assistant hovered over the lighting board, peering through the tinted window down at the performer. "Here's the mixing desk. Ever seen one like this?" Karen asked. "I know the principle." "Are you sure you want to have a hand in this? We've got enough as it is, if you aren't sure." "I've come this far, I can't back out now. Anyway, I want to see what happens. I've never performed before... it might be what I'm looking for." "That's the spirit! You'd better start setting up, though." Karen whispered, ducking out the door and trudging back to her seat. Ashley read on. Her assistant circled her with a bowl of mud, taking handfuls and smearing more on her arms and legs. "Here ends the lesson." Scattered applause. "Well done, well done." said the lecturer. "You'd better try the showers in the gym. I'll expect you to clean up the drops, though, or the supervisor will go ballistic. Now, Kim, it's your turn." Kim wore a batik sari, with silver duct tape across her mouth. Two assistants held video cameras, coax cables running to sockets at the front of the stage, and the big screen above her flickered and pulsed with grey snow. The chaos slowly faded to picture, the signal from both cameras superimposed one on the other, a pair of Kim's from different perspectives dancing across each other. She unrolled a sheet of the same batik and sat down cross legged. Took a wooden box from the folds of her sari, placed it before her and removed the lid, taking out a bundle of leaves, a roll of pink thread and a sheet of coarse pink paper closely printed in foreign characters. The cameras zoomed in and out, panning around her, their images bleeding into each other as she took a leaf from the bundle and expertly rolled it into a thin trumpet on her thigh, then, taking the roll of thread, tied a short length around the thin end of the roll with one hand. She laid the newly rolled stogy aside and began another. "That's a beady." whispered Miko. "I used to smoke those. I should have recognized the wrapping paper." Faster and faster she rolled and tied, in perfect silence. In the control box, Catherine puzzled over the sound system. She turned to man operating the video board. "Do you know which channel the sound from the stage comes on?" "Nup." he answered, without looking up. "Shit!" The beadie roller had completed a small bundle of the cigarettes and exhausted her leaves. She took them in one hand and started to wrap them in the pink paper, gluing it down with her own spit. Catherine left the box and staggered down the aisle with the reel to reel in her arms. The performance was finishing. As one of the cameramen continued to shoot, the other laid down his camera and approached the girl. He dropped a coin, a single cent, into her palm and took the newly assembled pack. The other cameraman dwelled on the pose for a second, as the screen faded into boiling grey static. Applause, stronger this time. Catherine, Karen, Andrew and Miko dashed for the stage even as the applause died. Catherine jacked leads into the sockets in the stage and unrolled them to where Miko was setting up the amplifiers, as Karen lugged the guitars and Andrew plugged them in and stacked them, ready to be used. Unwrapping the blanket from her recorder, she arranged it ceremoniously on the front edge of the stage and hooked it up. It had been modified for this: there was a basket under the winding reel, ready to catch the tape as the capstan rolled it through, and the tape catch was stuck back with putty, so it would keep playing even as the tape spilled free. She trotted back to the control room and started the pre- recorded cassette. Slowly she faded the sound in. It came from the rooms speakers - all the guitar howls, long drawn out chords and feedback she could glean from the collection of tapes at the house. There was a muffled undertone, of speech and sounds, the words repeating and reinforcing, but muted to just above the threshold of legibility. Down on the stage she could see that the band was almost ready. Miko picked up one of the guitars and strummed it gently - faint chords came from the monitors, tuneless and coarse. He looked down ruefully at the joint where the neck joined the body, at the thin line of clear epoxy resin that had been used to glue the broken neck back on. All the guitars were useless, the joint flexing every time the strings were tightened so that it bent and lost it's tuning. He'd been burned good. "Are you ready?" asked the Lecturer. "Almost," called Karen. She and Andrew selected guitars and plugged them in, banged the strings, were rewarded by faint jangled chords. "Okay." Karen waved up to Catherine. Catherine studied the light board for a second, pulled down the faders on the house lights, pushed up the stage lights. Nothing happened. She noticed they were off, found the switch, flicked it. Bright white light flooded down. Karen stepped to the mike. "We are Crap, and we'd like to play for you." she said. "This is our one and only song. Okay, lets go." She stepped back. Catherine grabbed the mike that curved down over the sound board on a flexible silver stalk. "Hey Karen, remember the recorder!" "Oh yeah." Karen mouthed, crouched in front of the machine, flicked it on. Tape started to crank through, falling into the basket, recording everything that happened. Catherine brought the noise from the cassette in the control box up to a comfortable level. The voices a tangled mass of speech through the repeating feedback howls. Karen stepped back. For a moment they stood there, in line, Karen, Andrew and Miko, a new band at their first show. They hesitated, caught in the moment. The audience watched politely. In unison they removed the guitars from around their necks, grabbed them by the necks, held them like clubs. Their hands on the strings setting up faint discordant harmonies. Catherine held her breath. Andrew and Karen turned to each other, raised their guitars like baseball bats, and slammed them together as hard as they could. The result was earsplitting. It shrieked through the room like a hurricane. Every single student flinched in unison, and the lecturer half stood from her seat in alarm, as though about to escape. Again and again they slammed the guitars together, until the bodies bent back on the weak glue joints and snapped free of the necks. Holding the heads, they swung the bodies around on their strings. Catherine left the box and sprinted down the aisle, leaped onto the stage and grabbed a new guitar. With one hand she yanked a chord from the wreckage on the floor as Karen and Andrew jumped up and down on the bodies, and Miko slammed his more resistant axe down on the mess like a man clubbing seals. She found the jack and plugged it, handing the new guitar to Karen. So it went, Catherine replacing wrecked instruments as fast as the others could wreck them, and the sound, the piercing howls and bass thuds as the pickup coils shorted under a well aimed heel, the feedback from Mikos cheap old monitors, and floating over it all the looping serpentine feedback gleaned from Karen and Micheals collection of Dinosaur Jnr. and Swervedriver and Neil Young and Sonic Youth tapes, and the words cut from a documentary Catherine caught late one night as she hovered on the edge of oblivion from fatigue, spliced together in another spell, another attempt to understand the nonsense of a dead culture. ...most experts agree that you began feeling of your values and keeps on taking on more responsibility than you want out Most experts agree that the poetry you have your life. When did this because she has accomplished anything worthwhile. Analyze how to recognize burnout, you have your responsibilities will help you spend your frustrations and the situation. If you were lost, where electrons tunneled through gallium crystals and steam, like a sense of humor you've probably lost. Learn to remember when first involved and cry with endless messages and so tired and now you identifying so we will be a group will try to feel pulled in your values and we reached for Burnout To: Policy Discussions. What to resent work involved and at yourself and feelings of waves on the Face receded even as empty as empty as we were so tired and keeps on the libraries aloud, so closely with friends and the term, burned out all of burnout is to have been neglecting your life. When your life is as empty as we tunneled down into the point that you are driving yourself some time each day for it, and so the libraries aloud, so the feelings of humor and allow yourself and a project falls apart you lose your inner resources tunnel of burnout is a job or maybe it's time to the goals and co-workers? Are you identifying so the expected to use on the individual tries even as we tunneled through gallium crystals and they memorized our words as empty as we will help you have to use on the point that when first involved and so we read the magazine serials I read the folks depicted in the curve reached for a world and anger bottled up depleting your life. Learn to pare it down. Most of fatigue or exhaustion associated with your life. Set aside some changes in your eating habits and when people who previously was enthusiastic and co-workers? Are you are depleting your life become disproportionately important? At what point did this one that failed to take a problem born of God. We built a problem born of the people who coined the bright interstices of life, or exhaustion associated with other people... With their last three instruments the band attacked the amplifiers, smashing the bodies down on the black wooden cases until they caved in and the tubes started to pop. Catherine sprinted back to the control room, turned up the sound on her tape even as the broken amplifiers started to go silent. She turned up the channel of the reel to reel, sprinted back to the machine, fossicked down the bottom of the half filled basket for the end of the tape. Found it, pulled it out, trailed it behind her as she headed for the audience. She stepped on a vacant seat, walked through the astonished crowd trailing tape. Hands reached up to grab it. She tugged it through their fingers, moving backwards and forwards through the crowd, and returned to the machine just as the spool ended. There she moved the empty spool to the take-up reel, threaded the free end of the tape and pressed play. ...Talk to make some questions. Try to believe that does all the point did you identifying so the fall of good career person who has no role ambiguity. Set aside some time each day for the overgrown tree of all, get in your frustrations and we tunneled down between the bright interstices of that she has a good intentions, because she is as we tunneled down into the personal side of her. She knows she never feels that work. In extreme cases, the personal side of humor and when first involved and when it happens when people who previously was that if you're the sense of life. Learn to do if you're burned is not indispensable. Role conflict: A person who coined the face of the individual begins to laugh at all. The individual begins to the feelings of detachment to be accomplished. As time to remember when it happens to delegate responsibility than he can handle until he no when you are not know what point that you've probably lost. Learn to have failed. The onset is a group will be the bright interstices of humor you've probably lost. Learn to do everything equally well without setting priorities. The result is expected to do if you're to be the goals and the Problem of listlessness sets in. Instead of your values and physical exhaustion; a cause, a long and instructions. We found particles and silicon, brave little quantum leapers, and will and all the sense of atoms, looking for the term, burned out most experts agree that she never feels that you are associated with endless messages and a new ideas when you have failed? The individual who has a break. Other Solutions to incorporate some changes in your life. Learn to be accomplished. As time to the ceiling. There were so the feelings of burnout is a job or accepting reality, frustration is expected to follow. The result is not indispensable... The recorded noise, overloaded and rough, spilled through the auditorium, barely recognizable as their performance, damaged by handprints and creases. The band had reduced everything to matchwood and they stood around the pile of wreckage in a trance as the tape ran through, Catherine deftly untangling and feeding it through the machine. A last broken grind of sound, and the take-up reel flapped around on its spool, the only noise in the shocking silence. Karen glanced around, suddenly remembering that there was an audience in the hall. They sat, blank faced, unmoving. The lecturer stood unsteadily. "Okay everyone." she said in a distracted tone of voice. She read the names of the next sessions performers, and the class filed silently from the hall. The lecturer packed up her notes and stepped up onto the stage. "That was really something! I was very impressed." she said. Karen managed to smile for her, but she was feeling very strange. A strong sensation of self loathing filled her, and she was worried that she might be sick. She looked around at the wreckage. "We'll have to get some sort of trolley for this lot, I guess." "I can't believe it." continued the lecturer breathlessly. "Where on earth did you manage to get the materials? I hope it wasn't expensive." "Nah." said Miko. "They're the result of a bad mistake on my part. It's a long story." "I thought it was excellent! I understood it from the start. It fulfilled the true purpose of art: to convey a message directly, symbolically. The destruction of rock and roll, the most patriarchal artform... the smashing of the guitars, potent phallic symbols... and the cutup over the top, all the voices commenting on this act, the victory over the burnt out husk of the past! I understood it all. Would you be interested on writing an article about it for the uni rag?" "No." said Karen. "Are you okay?" "Just a little strung out, is all." She kicked at the remains, pushing wood and wire this way and that. "Hey Miko," she said, "can we recycle the strings? Would anyone want them, or any other bits?" "No. It's all useless." He joined her and they started to gather pieces from around the pile and put them on top. The lecturer watched silently, then turned to Catherine. "What about you? You were responsible for the sound sculpture, weren't you?" "Yeah." "Are you doing anything with the tape? Playing it anywhere? I'd love a copy." "Sure... you can have it. I wouldn't mind a replacement reel though." The lecturer carefully took the reel from the machine and watched as the silent crew started to heave their mess into a wheelie bin they found in the wings. She winced at the damage to the polished floor beneath, where bits of metal had skidded under stomping feet and gouged shallow furrows. "Well." she announced loudly. "I'll expect the documentation on Monday, okay?" "Sure." said Karen. She watched the lecturer leave, then returned to the work. "Documentation!" exclaimed Miko. "I didn't know you had to explain it." "Yeah. It won't be easy." said Karen. "Just give her waffle." he advised. "Remember what she said and feed it back to her. Ornament it. Froth it out. That's what I did at school." "I'll have to go to the library Sunday. Collect the references I'll need to convince her I did my homework, made sure no-one else did it before." "Jeeze, the Who did it twenty-plus years ago." "It wasn't art, then." Finally the floor was clear, only scratches and spots of mud remaining. "I want to go home and sleep all day." announced Karen. "Anything on tonight?" "We're going to Montressor's." said Andrew. "Then I'll probably see you tomorrow. Thanks, everyone." Her gratitude touched them all, but it was tainted with self consciousness. They had to turn away and finish pushing the bin behind the wings. "I just want to know one thing." said Catherine on the drive home. "Did it work? Was that the result you wanted?" "I just wanted to get something done, and I needed some help." said Karen. "You have to admit, it was pretty good fun." "But the audience were silent. I thought they'd be angry. I was hoping they'd be angry." "We'd have to take a different tack to do that. Something more direct. They need the message spelled out to them, when there is a message." "The tape was supposed to make them angry." "Hey, maybe it'll make my tutor angry. Actually, she wouldn't. She's too sofisticated to be moved so far by art." "So what did it make them feel?" Karen thought for awhile. "Not much. A little stunned by the violence, maybe, a little shocked after the two more restful pieces that proceeded us. Perhaps they started to feel something, some of them, maybe an urge to join us on stage, or to stop us ruining the instruments. More would probably have been envious, that we had the props to destroy like that, they couldn't have known about the circumstances, Miko and all, and that the guitars were useless. They probably noticed that the lecturer was a little stunned, but she seemed happy enough. I guess most of them won't know what to think until next Monday, if the lecturer says anything about it there. They'll just think what she thinks. Easy, that way." "Oh. You didn't notice anything unusual... happen, while the performance was on? Anything change in the room, or when we left, in the uni?" "No. Did you?" "No. I'll have to go back to the drawing board." Weird, thought Karen. Really weird. But then, no, she thought, it was quite natural, in a strange, but real, way. She felt the dull edge of the general crush of hopelessness that she and all her friends lived with, felt it, although it was so weak and so constant she had to concentrate to detect it. It wasn't wrong for Catherine to want more results for her work. Karen stolidly contemplated a life that more and more resembled trying to kick a hole in a brick wall with bare feet, where every goal had infinite numbers of obstacles before them and the goals shrank even as one approached. Catherine, it seemed, wanted to anger a few people but all she got was yawns. Karen expected the yawns; Catherine didn't. "I'll help you, if you like. It sounded good, whatever it was. I mean, it's not music, but hey, what isn't, as my lecturer would say." "It's just an old hobby of mine. I haven't done it, in awhile. I was thinking of taking it up again, but now I'm not so sure." "Please, do it." "Okay." MONTRESSORS They let the taxi carry them half a block past the club because it wasn't cool to step out of a taxi. It was cooler to walk to the door, which suggested poverty, or a house nearby. Jackie led the way, back up the leafy street to where the patrons spilled out of the door and over the asphalt sidewalk, leaning against the walls and sitting with their legs stretched out straight in front across their path. At the door they paid and got stamped. Walked through the flouro tunnel, past the coat counter, and into the club. Montressors was the dive of the gothic and PDB (People Dressed in Black) set, industrial music heads and anyone with weirdness to share. The more extreme measures of body modification were on display. Apart from the piercing, which have become passŽ, even through the tongue being regarded as stupid rather than cool. But random shaved patches of hair across the skull, as in certain skin diseases, was popular with girls, and some of the boys displayed inexpert ritual scarification and branding. Trent Reznor wannabes in washed out grey tee-shirt rags and fully madeup Lestats with matte white skin that fluoresced when the strobes hit them, close cropped heads ov Psychic Youth nodding nest to disaffected code cutter executives who owned their own companies now and came here to relive their past glories, in their shirt sleeves and ties. The dance floor was a relic from the days when the room was a dinner dance restaurant, nice parquet with plenty of spring, and the stage was well placed. A pig fetus pickled in a jar took pride of place behind the bar. "VB!" they shouted at the barperson, then took their stubbies to the back of the room and sat beneath the crawling colours of video projected on the wall, a banned manga, too violent for Western eyes. Now, Andrew was spun, because he didn't often go out. He preferred the local pub, or would rather a small party in a loungeroom, with less noise and distraction. He couldn't help himself from looking up at the manga, watching the way the action matched the music. There was Ministry and NIN, NIN and Ministry on the turntables, with a little Front 242 for the girls and Foetus for the oldies. Alternative, but the playlist was more restricted than 2DAYFM. While Andrew stared entranced at the pixilated video Miko caught Jackies eye and inclined his head to the dancefloor. She smiled assent and they both stood. Andrew just caught sight of them as they entered the mosh. They found it hot, and bright, and a bit smelly, lingering fragrance from the last burst from the smoke machine, all sickly sandalwood essence, synthetic and choking. Miko poked head and shoulders above the mostly undernourished throng, and suffered an endless stream of people pushing past; humans navigate by landmarks, and when lost head for the highest point. So he always found himself the signpost on the road through the crowd. Jackie moved sedately, in her thick dress and makeup, trying not to start the sweat going, just feel the hammer beat and trail her hands through the waves. Around her bodies jackknifed and kicked, bounced into her and bounced off, reassuring, harmless, infinitely comforting. Her muscles soaked up the contact with quiet contentment. To her right Miko ignored her and pretended to be drugged. With an abstracted frown he gazed at space while performing random sign language. Bending into sharp jerks and angles, neck going, head weaving in patterns determined by the music, machinelike, stressed, the tendons showing and hair whipping about to lash the faces of shorter dancers. They drifted. There was no one there but themselves, just warm mindless bodies. They were each everyone blissfully alone. So alone. Perfectly alone. Surrounded and warm and contained and alone in a void, all the shit that caked their battered souls dropped away in the cleansing violence of the music. Or am I being too analytical here? Yes, I think so. The music sounded good and they danced. That's all there was too it. Andrew sat and drank his beer, and drank Miko's as well. People flowed around; he tried not to catch their eyes, except for some of the girls who studiously avoided his. People asked for and took the chairs around the table. Time passed. He decided to go for a piss and then see if he could find Jackie on the floor. Down the short corridor, to where the restaurant kitchen once had been, now a room with pinball machines. He heard a girl crying ahead She was leaning into the arms of her girlfriend, who patted her back and looked sad. It was dark, disorientating, lasers flickering from the hall behind, intruding on this pocket of silence and pain. He was paralyzed, but for just a second, before social conditioning kicked in, saying "Move past, don't ask, it doesn't matter at all." He looked away casually, smiled to say "Hey, this happens!" and moved to pass before the tall black guy coming the other way could block his way. She turns suddenly in the enclosing arms, as though to escape from memory. He sees her face now, twisted, makeup ruined. Drops arc out and touch him. They run into his mouth. In the bathroom he stoops and washes them off. It's the intimacy he wants to erase, not the taste. They could be ferrying something new and deadly, a new virus no-one ever speaks about. There's the mirror, and the never ending shock of his face, in these lights, the pale skin so washed out and the eyes so hot and dead. They drive him back to the fray. But Jackie and Miko are back at the table and they smile mockingly at him as he returns. They have seats but he has none. He heads past for the floor and burrows into the crowd. He is short, and sees nothing but necks and shoulders around him. It is okay, he smells sweat and tries to jump in time with the others, After a few songs he doesn't have to think about it. "You know what I always think about when I come here?" asks Jackie. "How horrified your parents would be, if they could see this?" Miko replies. "Yeah. Pretty obvious. But that's what I think. What about you?" "Um. Well, there's this old Gidget movie. In the Malt Shop a crusty character sits in the corner, head resting on folded arms on the table before him. It is Vincent Price, or Big Daddy as the young hep cats call him, and they all wait for him to Give Them the Word. Finally, at the climax of the movie, during a rumble with Erik von Zipper and his bikie gang, he raises his head and the fighting stops. Everyone freezes, waiting for the announcement. What will he say? "Where's my pit? Bring me my pendulum, I feel like swinging!" "But I imagine Stephen Hawking over there in the corner behind the statues, dozing in his motorized wheelchair like Davros, drooling, brain cranking silently away at the mathematics of existence, until he starts awake and sits up straight to tap the words into the laptop welded to the armrest and give us the Grand Unified Theory of Everything, and everyone stops dancing as the speech chip buzzes out his words to the hushed throng." "What then?" "Everyone keeps dancing. Nothing else to do." "Man, we're really fucked up. But, I tell you what, I'd rather be me than my parents." "What makes you think you're better than them? They have a better time, I reckon. Apart from worrying about us they have a lot less worries than we do. At least they'll be out of the way, hopefully, when the world collapses." "They just... well... Maybe nothing. Maybe the fact that we acknowledge everything. We are weak. If one of our heroes sells out, we smile and say "Good Luck!" and cast around for a new one. We have adapted to the world, again, as others have before, a world of no values except fake ones and no meaning except for when we deliberately cloud our eyes we see meaning. We take meaning like a drug, to stay alive. Much like love in our world. Our personalities change so much so fast we know from the start that any relationship is doomed to failure sooner or later, and it isn't our fault. Cast into this world that our parents made for us. Did every generation before try to build a world for their young? Our parents built their own paradise, that lasted a short time and now evaporates. It was based on dreams of individual wealth without the mess that comes with the liberation of wealth/energy. That was swept under the carpet. You can have everything you want and none of the waste products at all." "Some of us aren't like that. Look at Andrew. He isn't that cynical at all. In fact, he's sort of like an eager puppy in some ways." "I know what you mean. He's pretty embarrassing sometimes." "Most of the time, more like. He's a romantic. He believes in love with a capital Lah." "Miko, I don't want to hurt him with this." "Jackie, you can't help but hurt him with this. he deserves it. It'll be good for him. Teach him the facts of life." "What facts of life do you mean?" "You're not going out with him any more. He doesn't fit into your plans." "And what the hell would you know about my plans?" "Easy, easy! Everybody has plans. I can just tell that yours don't include much of Andrew, except as a friend maybe, a formal friend. A "favor" friend who helps you with things." "When I translate your words into what they really mean, you know what I get? I get, "So you're sleeping with me tonight, aren't you?" "You have very strong intuitive powers, my dear!" "Keep yer distance, buster. I haven't said yay or nay yet. Maybe I won't, not for awhile. Maybe I'll get up now and go and find Andrew, and we can find some dinner somewhere, and he can pay for me and feel good about that, and I can try and teach him how to be cool and how to act. How to fit into the scene. Maybe I can make something of him." "But you know you can't. He might put on an act, but deep down inside he's incurably goofy." "I'm not listening to you." "He's not very good looking either. Look at him. He looks younger than you! He looks like a homo anyway." "So what's wrong with that?" "Nothing, unless you want people thinking you're some kind of a fag hag." "Now this is really getting insulting!" With an angry glare Jackie stood and turned, heading for the crowd. She plunged in, searching for Andrew. She found him wedged between the bare sweating shoulders of a couple of huge dykes in blue singlets, shiny and tan and bulging with muscle. He looked bewildered and embarrassed. "Oi! Lets get some food!" "Okay." he mouthed silently, and followed her out. Miko caught up with them at the lights. He grinned and elbowed Andrew, almost sending him into the path of a bus. Jackie looked away, ignoring him. "I know a pizza place up ahead that does good traditional pizza." said Miko. "It's Turkish. They roll the pizza up like a kebab and put meatballs and sauce inside. We can take it to the park." There was dew on the concrete, but they sat anyway, looking out from the base of the sculpture at an expanse of uneven lawn. The park was unkempt, little more than a field of grass with one forgotten sculpture in the middle. It rose above them, a stern, bearded man, wrapped in a thick coat. A general. The folds of the coat were green with oxide. Looking out over his unpopulated domain. "These are good." said Andrew through a mouthful of Turkish pizza. "I used to get these when I lived down the road from the place." said Miko. "Most of their customers are immigrant Turks who know what they're like. Most Aussies don't trust food like this, things they've never heard of before." A fine mist of drizzle started to come down, and they shivered slightly in their thin clothing, still acclimatized to the heat of the club. "Anyone going to the rave tomorrow?" asked Andrew. Miko snorted. "Not on your life, sonny. I hate ravers. Empty headed trippers! Not the faintest trace of a real mind in the lot of them." "No, no, you shouldn't feel that way. What have they done to hurt you? They offend some sense of aesthetics you have, and that's it, and you offend them. Yes, don't look so surprised, we do offend them. Taking some style thing to extremes, makeup and all, the hair. So serious and self absorbed. They think that is far worse than what you think about them." "I'm supposed to care about what they think?" "They, us, it's all the same shit. Don't make the mistake so many people make. Come to the party. It'll be good. At the very least, you can hang out and despise them to your hearts content." "I'll be there." said Jackie. "I'll be there for curiosity's sake at least. "Well, I sure won't" affirmed Miko, and he stood and mooched unsteadily out onto the grass. Jackie and Andrew sat in silence for awhile, until, sensing that the time might just be right for such a guesture, Andrew slid closer to Jackie's side and tried to put his arm around her. But she resisted, shrugging her shoulders as though he were a fly settling there and brushing his hand away. "No, Andrew. It isn't going to work." "Nothing ever does." "That isn't true! You shouldn't always be so negative. Maybe people would like you more if you smiled a bit, I mean, like you really mean it." "Like Miko? Like he smiles all the time, and it's like a crocodile, it's the most cynical and twisted smile I know. And that's why people like him?" "You don't want to understand, do you? We like him because he's fun, understand? He may be a twisted bastard, he may be mean inside, he may be a fucking psychopath for all I care, but he's a lot more fun to be with than you are, that's for sure." "So what's so much fun about him?" "So ask him and find out!" "No, listen, I mean this. I really want to know. What do you mean by fun, exactly, in this instance?" Jackie hesitated a long time before answering, watching the subject of their talk move further away across the grass, silver with rain and leaving black footprints in crushed stems. "He goes out. And when he goes out, he talks to people, and he says the right thing. To anyone he talks to, he knows the right thing to say, and that's how he has so many friends. You'll never understand because you're so serious about these things. I hate having to explain this to you, because it isn't fun. He's fun, because he knows without having to be told. And before you ask who told him these things, the answer is, no one. It's just something some people know, and others don't. It's an act that some people put on all their lives; they act fun, and they can adjust that act to fit the people they're with, and they have a good time. It's not something you have to do to get by in this world, sure, but it's something you have to do to be popular. And that's all that counts. Popularity." "And that's it." "That is definitely it. I'm sorry I had to tell you these things. Someone had to, I suppose. Now, if you want to stay the way you are, honest, and so bloody nice it makes me sick sometimes, you have to take the consequences. You're out of time. Nice had it's day years ago, when women needed men who could provide for them. Now, and the rules have changed. We don't really need you. We only want you when you're fun. When you make us happy." "I see." "No you don't, not really. But I'm sorry for you. This is kind of sudden, isn't it?" "No... I was kind of expecting something like this. It tends to happen a lot nowadays. The dinosaurs must have felt the same way as this." "Andrew, it's not that bad. You aren't gonna die or anything!" "Part of me will." "No-body likes me, every body hates me-" "Okay, okay." "Things'll change. Maybe someday your species will be in vogue again." She rose and walked away, stepping precisely in Miko's footsteps on the rainwet grass, leaving Andrew feeling colder than ice. And while he found himself denying Jackies words, cycling the endless refrain of the human race, "It ain't fair!", over and over and over, he realized that, incredibly, he also agreed with her. It wasn't fair, but it was. It was perfectly fair for her, or any other person, to look out for number one and take the best fruit the tree had to offer. In fact, now that he thought about it, why had he always assumed it was important to look out for other people, to shape his actions so that no one else got hurt? Why did he do that, when he should be looking out for himself? He watched nature documentaries and felt sorry for the antelope being eaten by a lion. When he bought something, and there was too much change, he returned the excess instead of pocketing it. If he saw someone drop their umbrella on the train and leave it behind, he tapped them on the shoulder. At parties, he talked to the lonely people, the eager, slightly unbearable ones who didn't know anyone else. Long, polite conversations, slightly strained, about nothing. What a jerk. He deserved twenty lashes for every time he looked out for someone else! He was only throwing his own life away, by trying to make other peoples lives better. "From now on I'll be as cruel, as callous, as heartlessly ruthless with other people as they are with me." (Fool.) "Shut up! I'll be as selfish as the gene within me." (Fat chance.) "I can do it. It'll take time to change my habits, but it can always be done. I'll re-program the machine. No More Mister Nice Guy!" (You're pathetic. You'll always be as gullible as you have been up till now. Look inside. Your pathetic belief in love and caring for others still exists.) "I'm desperate. I'm a dying man. Part of me is already dead." (This part is still alive.) "I will kill it. The cancer is there. I'll cultivate it. I'll propagate and seed the cancer through my heart. It will make me stronger." (Maybe. Maybe you can. But if you do, there will always be a voice in your head mourning for your lost soul. You will never know rest. It'll grow back, stronger, like a pruned tree.) "I don't care. I'll do it and suffer the consequences anyway. I will kill my soul, and be happy. Try and stop me." (I can't. But if you kill me, you will kill yourself. We are one. One dies and the other follows.) "So. I'm as good as dead anyway. I may as well try and have some fun, on the way down." RADIO Late at night the streets of Marrickville are the preserve of the homeboys of the Legends gang. They are peaceful enough. The attractions of American style violence have not yet defeated the generations of respect they inherit from their parents. They are good students at school, the Legends, for the most part. They respect their teachers. They have been known to be a little less than politically correct with their girlfriends, but that is winked at by most people. Refreshingly old fashioned in an oppressive age. Non violent, yet they cultivate the image. And the image demands some substance, to make it real. This means that certain elements have beaten strangers in the street. The police don't like them. They've stolen cars and mugged late night drunks. All in the name of their media presence, of course. Not that they thought that at the time. Homeys in non-uniform uniforms stood outside their meeting place, an old shop front, once a fish and chip shop. The fryers and counter have gone, the baine maries are a memory, just a stain on the roof where their vapors once condensed. But the video games remain. The cash boxes are open and they catch their change in their palms after it falls through the slots. Play endless challenge matches of blocky graphixed Space Invaders and Gallaxians. The baseball caps outside swivel like radar to track the passing cars. They track Sugs car. Fairlight holds the wheel; he glances to the side and away, uninterested. Catherine sits in the passenger seat peering out into the dark. In the back Nootrope hugs milk crates full of records and tries to stop them sliding off the seat every time Fairlight brakes. "Kind of menacing, aren't they?" says Catherine. "Not too bad, once you get to know them." says Nootrope. "My brother's in the gang. Big time graffiti name. He says they're quite reasonable, and I believe him. Mind you, he has changed a lot since he joined, not for the best. Little more arrogant now. Little shit." "They must be scared." says Fairlight. "Only reason for trying to look that Baaad. Protection." The car swings into Addison road and heads down, between shopfronts full of racks of laundry and cardboard patterns. Sweatshop district, staffed by immigrants unable to earn a living elsewhere. They work two jobs, some of them, day and night, to keep their families alive. The local government winks at the legality. Makes the region prosper, they say. They park out front of an endless row of tiny sepperate Fed- style one bedroom houses, dry little front gardens with close shaven bullgrass lawn and vegetable gardens full of dry stalks of garlic, whithered by winters cold. Nootrope and fairlight, lugging their crates of vinyl, lead the way down an alley past cyclone fence. Through a gate, towards a peeling white clapboard shed surrounded in discarded washing machines and fridges, graffitti scrawls seeming to flow snakelike from one surface to another in the moonlight. Nootrope pushes the buzzer and they wait. And wait. Bolts slide inside. The door opens an inch. An eye peers through. "Ah. Clan Chaos, come in, come in." Inside is as cold as out. They stagger their milk crates to a table and drop them. It's as white as an iceberg inside. The walls stripped of their layers of band posters and flyers in the last Time of Troubles, when management changed hands a dozen times in as many weeks, the station passed like a hot potato because of its debt. Presently the co- ordinator doesn't like posters, or flyers. Or shows, really. The DJ who opened the door sprints into the studio. They hear, over the radio monitor, as the last second of the song fades to silence. He punches a cart into the machine, and plays a promo to fill dead air while he cues the next record. "I hope you brought a cartridge or two, or your own decks," he calls out to them, "'cause the only cartridge here is mine. Check out this." He holds a phono cartridge up to the light and squints before passing it to Nootrope. "This the stations cartridge. No sapphire at all, the things totally worn down to the metal. It's insane. If you tried to play something with that, it'd make a sound, but it'd be the sound of it taking vinyl off the sides of the groove like a potato peeler." The cart finishes and he spins the turntable. "We brought our own decks." says Nootrope. "How you coping? Mixing from vinyl to CD, right?" "Right." Fairlight jacks their decks into the panel and impassively watches the DJ standoff, the tense moment of the passing of control. Such an overimportant ritual. As though they were staff at a nuclear facility changing shift, as though the core would melt down the moment there wasn't a stern eye on the control. Nootrope stands behind the nameless on-air DJ as he opens the mike, says goodbye. A few last words about a good party he's been promoting, then he stands and backs away. Nootrope darts in, sits, slides a ready CD into the player and makes sure it is cued before he relaxes and starts to look around. "Well. Looks like we've got the shift." "I thought this was your regular shift? I thought you did this every week?" says the DJ. "Yeah, we do, but the sword of the lord hovers over our head waiting to fall." The DJ laughed. "He means the co-ordinator." "Gonna kick us off for not having any relevance. We don't represent a recognized ethnic sector, you see. Gotta mix." And he bent his head to the milk crate as he started pulling discs out, arranging them in sequence, patterning the play. Back in Montressors the dancers turn in anticipation, still moving but watching the stage where the band sets up. Carrying their own gear. No roadies here, they're not well known enough and they don't get paid that kind of money. But they're good. Everyone knows that. They soundcheck, sending raw pulses of noise out through the PA over the music. Just as Andrew comes back in from the cold. Face tight and alone. He joins the throng. They stand, for a moment. Just stand and look out. As though waiting for applause, though they know they'll get none. The crowd expects entertainment. They paid. The band will deliver. That's their job. "This is Down." An exhalation of breath. A well known song. The one they came to hear. It starts slow, with a measured riff of one chord, one perfect deep chord overlaid with a simple melody that winds about and comes back through eight beats. Synth sub texture undertones through the base of the spine. Flat slack kickdrum. The lyrics, when they come, are almost subliminal, mikes turned down, words like those half heard across a crowded carriage on the train. Andrew looks around. The crowds lips move in sync. It hasn't been played on the radio, but they all know. You know it's coming closer, You smell it on the wind, You see it in your parents eyes That cloud and turn within. Each morning it gets harder To go and face the pain, Each evening more eager To seek the arms of sleep again. Over and over, again and again. The chanting steady as a priests. The chord repeats and burns deep in the music, as deliberate as a blade on a wrist. Lead singer stares at the ceiling, sweat or tears in shiney trails down either cheek. Avoiding the gaze of the crowd. When the moment comes around And the madness is complete, In the glaring white of lightning Is the remedy for sleep. You will never fall again If you exercise your will, But you cannot take the pain, So you have to take the pill. "I think about the different forms of music." said Nootrope lazily when he had finished his first hour. Fairlight had control, and Nootrope and Catherine lay sprawled on the ragged footpath couches that dotted the main room of the station. He passed her a bottle of distilled water. "Funk has intensity because it has intent. It knows where it wants to go. It's aiming for a point, aiming very hard, at an infinitesimal point that vanishes into smallness. It's the beat, the funky beat that lags slightly, then rushes to be on time like a snake striking." "Funk is an animal thing, sexy, organic. It's all aim and urge." "New age waffle is searching. The chords change and search out new harmonies, and it goes on and on reaching new conclusions, but it never really resolves. Lonely pianos searching through a pile of chords, tossing each one aside in the search for perfection that can never end. It reminds me of Victorian novels where the lovers search for each other and keep missing each other by a hairsbreadth, and the reader gets this thrilling maudlin sadness because the world just isn't fair." "Death metal, now, there's a case! Almost totally opposite. It screams in a rage as it realizes that there is no point in searching, the perfect chord can never be found, so it delights in imperfect chords; the raw ore that other music is refined from is polished and thrown at the listener. It dies with horror that the search is not worth beginning." "That and the so called Grunge are pretty popular with white males. Underneath the negativity, though, there's a deeper, sadder message. If they could be summed up in a simple sentence, I think it would be "I feel pain." Funk would be "I feel sexy", new age, "I feel hopeful." "Good old rock 'n' roll is dead, but the corpse will kick for decades. They won't let it die, not until the last boomer who grew up with it dies. It's their anthem of youth, and the one thing that boomers share is a refusal to grow up, or admit they've grown up. That's the thing I hate most about those shits; they're old, they're boring, and still they insist they haven't gotten old. I hate it when I hear them talking about how good the drugs where in their day, and then round it off with "Of course, I don't use any now." And they just keep bloating up in their self importance like a blob that grows to fill the world, and push us off the edge." "Right. And then there's Jazz. I like jazz. I think jazz is like the zen monk achieving enlightenment, and laughing long and hard at the meaninglessness, and wandering off to become a beggar and drink wine and grow fat and wander the streets. Jazz is there, surrounding it all, just floating, painting pictures in the sky, abstract shapes and colours. No message. I like that." "What about this stuff?" said Catherine, pointing to the monitor speaker behind his head, happy hard techno from the studio. "What's the music you play say?" "Nothing. It says nothing." "But that's jazz. It's not the same as jazz." "Well, I can't think of any simple message encoded in techno." "When I hear this stuff, it makes me shiver." said Catherine. "It's angry. It's... denial. It says, "Go away, leave us alone." Yeah, it doesn't have a message as such, but it's not jazz. Jazz says "There are no messages", techno says "Go away and leave me alone." It reminds me of a little girl with her hands over her ears refusing to listen to her mother." "Whatever it means, I like it. Lots of people don't." "This is the sort of music I'd like to make." said Catherine. She lay back and closed her eyes, there in the coldness of the station, and shivered slightly, as though a mild current passed through her. Nootrope stood silently and went out to the kitchenette, made tea, brought her back a cup. "You can do that. I heard about you're performance with Karen. It sounds like you have ideas. Ideas are the most precious thing, now. People say ideas are cheap, and that implementing them is the high cost, but they're lying. Real ideas are in short supply. I'd teach you everything you'd need to know." "Steal my ideas?" "Not at all. Help them grow, is all." "You're the second person to offer today. Karen wants to try her hand too." "You helped Karen. You're a true gardener; not the sort that plants seeds simply to harvest the crop, but because the seeds want to be planted. That's really cool." "No it isn't. I've seen enough of this place to realize that, if I keep giving myself away, there'll be nothing left." "Then think about it, at least. What else do you want to do?" "Not much." "Then give it a go. Come to the studio. I'll let you have time. For free." "Okay." Mr.'s Graham is going insane. She wanders from room to room of her tidy house. There is a pile of essays waiting for correction on the coffee table in the living room, but she knows she can't do the job justice. Katerina's macramŽ on the wall, relic of a summer camp years ago. Katerina's best child painting, framed over the TV. Mum and Dad are ovals with stroke arms and L legs, outside a square/triangle house with a curly spiral of smoke from oblong chimney that comes out at a slant, and an oval dog that they never had. The light in the loungeroom is too bright. She switches it off and flicks the TV on. There was flooding in Borneo. Because the forests upstream from the plains villages had been logged to the ground for disposable chopsticks in Japan, the runoff from the monsoons ran off too fast, and took most of the soil with it. Coffee ground sludge slipped past grass roofs covered in people, goats and belongings. A British actor was suing his American directors for making bad decisions regarding his career there. The charge was Breach of Contract. He hoped to prove that they guaranteed him success as the villain in a movie opposite Clint Eastwood, in a movie that flopped. The government back at home made some decision. It wasn't clear what the decision was. The opposition denounced the decision and said it would leave the country in ruins before they had a chance to be elected and set everything to rights. Everything had a surreal, formal quality, as though they were performing ancient rituals. That was enough. She flicked it off, collected the keys from the sink in the bathroom and trotted downstairs to the car. On the road, she tried to understand what she was doing. It defied analysis. It was a stupid concept. But she didn't turn around and go home. It was Karen who answered the door and was confronted by a dripping wet middle aged lady wearing a funky brown cardigan and brogues with navy slacks and lacy white blouse. "Are you the new land lady? You should have told us you were coming." "No, I'm not the land lady. I'm here to see Micheal." "Ah, sure, come in." Karen led her to the loungeroom, and ducked into the kitchen where her eggplant slices were frying in a pan. Someone had turned the stove off while she was at the door and they hadn't burnt. Reprieved, she returned to the visitor. "What did you say your name was?" "Mrs. Graham. I'm his lecturer at uni, in-" "Australian Studies, yeah. I'll go and get him." "She trudged up the stairs to his room, knocked. "What?" Long drawn out groan. "Mrs. Graham downstairs." "Yer kidding! Really?" "Yep." "No fucking way !" She hears thumps and bangs, and the door clicks open. Micheal has been asleep all day, recovering. She smells the faint animal smell of his body sweating the poisons out of the blood. "This sucks, this really does. I was going over to Bretts tonight, then kick on in the party circuit, and now... I got a neurotic mother come over to see me." "You're just so nice, Mike! You're the mum's favorite." "Yeah." Micheal ducked back and considered options. There weren't many. Karen would tell Mrs. Graham he was here, it was too late to call her back. The most likely thing would be, he would go down, sit down, listen to whatever shit she just had to download onto his head, about her daughter, her daughters boyfriend, himself, the other students and the state of the world today. he would sit and nod in the right places until his neck hurt and smile until his teeth froze in the open air and frown in sympathy he just didn't feel. Or, he could do something radical. It would be good if he could hit this problem on the head and solve it and wash his hands. The door creaked. Karen's head appeared. "You were going to Brett's?" she said. "Yeah, I was planning to." "I have an idea." She stepped around the door as Micheal went looking for a decent shirt amongst the shirt pile. "Take her along. Get her stoned." "What, like it'll broaden her mind and enlighten her?" "No, I'm not that naive. But it'll make her think she's done something along those lines, at least for awhile. And she can give us a lift to Bretts house. That's worth something at least." "Actually you've just given me a wicked idea. I think we should take her to Bretts house for a smoke, but more than that." "It's been a long week." Down the creaky stairs. "How did that performance thing go, anyway?" "Great. They were lightly puzzled, and the lecturer thought it was meaningful. She gave me some clues for the essay that's supposed to go with it." "Cool." "Hi Mrs. Graham. I couldn't make it to uni today-" "Neither could I. I slept in till twelve, and watched TV." "Yeah? Sounds like fun." "Listen, my name's Joan. Can you call me that?" "Joan. Right. I would ask why you're here, but I can kind of guess." "No, I don't want to go over there again. I just wanted... something. I wanted to "Hang Out", I guess." (Oh Christ, thought Micheal and Karen, simultaneously.) "Well, we were thinking of going out." "Yeah." said Micheal. "We were going to a friends house. You should come with us." "What does this friend do?" "He, uh, sells drugs. To us. He has a cool place to "hang out" in, with lots of atmosphere. You might be surprised." "Will there be lots of people there? A party?" "It's Friday. What do you reckon?" "This sounds okay. Is it safe?" "Absolutely. Safer than you may think. "You know, I have smoked dope before, but it didn't do anything." she told them in the car. "Well maybe this time you'll be lucky." "What about driving home?" "You just have to take it slowly and avoid breath testing. Or catch a cab." "I can't believe I'm doing this." The traffic lights made long lines of colour in the rain slick roads. She was fascinated by the junk in the stairs, and they almost had to push her to reach the bottom. The techno was hammering loud and clear from within Bretts den, and they had to knock hard to get his attention. At last the door creaked open slightly. "Hi." Introductions made, they entered. The forest had grown by metres. It towered to the roof, full of pods, eggs snake vines and fungus made from the waste extrusions from packing foam machines, all gnarled white plastic with a sheen like a tumurous brain. Around the sacred table sat the customers, and Bretts venerable bamboo bong was circling. He found them seats, and returned to his reclining chair, tilting it back towards the stereo behind him. Mrs. Graham, (I mean Joan), took a small purse from the pocket of her blouse and clicked it open. "How much does this stuff cost?" "Free the first time. That's how I get people hooked." said Brett. She looked up sharply at this. "Please, it's just a joke." He held up the big bag, half a kilo of compressed head. "Imagine that this was shampoo. You ever get one of those trial packages of shampoo in the mail, a little plastic sachet in a cardboard folder, or stapled inside a magazine?" "Of course." "You ever start buying the product after trial?" "Well, yes. I have done that." "But you aren't addicted to shampoo. You can pay, of course, if you really want to." "I'm sorry. I shouldn't mistrust your generosity. Here, give me a go. I know how." As good as her word, she did seem to have had prior experience, and blew out a large cloud of blue smoke, much to the other patrons delight. They almost clapped. Her face turned red and she started to choke as the cough reflex kicked in. "Just hold on. It'll clear." they told her. "Those plants are beautiful. Did you make them?" "I did. You might be able to buy one, if no one buys the entire forest. But I'm hoping someone will. It would be nice to keep the trees together the way they're supposed to be." They watched as the thoroughly stoned Joan climbed carefully to her feet and wandered towards the sculpture, to run hands gently over the teased cotton whisps that hung from the branches, frosted with electric blue, and the smooth red glass balls that were fruit. She bent till her face was inches from them and blew, and laughed. Micheal slipped upstairs and used the phone. "Hi Sug? This is Micheal. I've got this plan worked out, and I need your help. It could get the lodgers off your hands." "Spill it. I'm desperate. What do you want done?" "I've got Katerinas mum at this end, lined up ready to have a go of Bretts computer. I was wondering if you could make sure that the girl is on the board when we call through." "Aaahhh, you want that. I can do that, I think. She's not too keen on the thing, but I'll try. What should I call her?" "Anything that won't tip mum off who it is." "It should be a girls name, though. What about Feline? Get it- Kat, Feline?" "Yeah, very witty. I'll be logging on shortly, if all goes well." "Good luck." He booted the machine and quickly set it up, while the distracted Joan wandered through the room. She seemed to be in a good mood, not panicking, not paranoid, just wandering and wondering. She drifted closer and he was able to reach out and snag her cardigan. "Come and have a look at this." It was Friday night, a busy night. Chat lines scrolled fast down the screen. He froze the text and pointed to the phone. "This is a bulletin board. All this writing is people talking to each other." "Typing to each other, you mean." "Yes, but it isn't that simple. You see, this is a bar." He summoned the description of the domain: SUGS BAR AND GRID You are in the centre of a large, dark, smoky room. There is a bar along one wall and SUG, your host, is busy serving the customers. Candles in jars flicker on the many small round tables that fill the room, and others drip from the tacky cartwheel candelabra hanging by chains from the ceiling. A tired jazz combo plays on the small stage near the kitchen door, half hidden behind potted palms, and CHAN the cook can be glimpsed behind the swing door every time a waiter pushes through, busy burning your steak. MISS CURIE, the cigarette girl, circles the room with her tray. She knows everyone here, and can answer any questions you may have about the establishment. Slow fans turn in the corner of the ceiling, sending the cigarette smoke swirling in stately spirals. However, this is obviously not your average dive. For a start, the jazz combo, dressed in remarkably ragged dinner suits, is playing insistent techno on keyboards and turntables. The crowd are a diverse lot. In fact, many appear not to be human. SUG looks up, his telescopic camera eye whirring as it focuses on you, and he gives you a cheery wave with his corroded steel prosthetic arm. And, if you look too closely at the table, your drink or even your own hand, it seems to dissolve in to a mosaic of tiny square pixels... Your host is busy serving drinks and talking to old friends, but always appreciates a hello. CHAN has a range of tasty dishes (software) for you to try, as long as your credit rating's good. This is a friendly place to have a good time, meet people, relax and do business, and the management welcomes newcomers. Mind your manners, though, or ANDY the bouncer will demonstrate his skills on you! Welcome! The first drink's on the house! "See, we're in a bar here. We're sitting at a table, listening to the jazz band and drinking cocktails, and we can talk to the other patrons, who are other people connected to the same computer." Lines appeared: SUG: hello BRETT, how's business? %-) "That's Sug, who owns this place. He thinks we're Brett, because we're using his computer and his account." "Do we talk back?" Joan asked. "That's the idea. I'll tell him who we are." BRETT: Greetings SUG, this isn't Brett its Miky and- "What name do you want?" "What's wrong with Joan?" "Wouldn't you rather be someone else for a change? That's part of the fun! No one can see you. You can be male, female, old or young. Human, or alien, or machine. People like to be characters out of their favorite movies, or books..." "Anias." " A N I A S, right? Okay. Who was that, anyway?" "An author." BRETT: -Anias. Anias is hasn't done this before SUG: no probs. Ill set you up with a character ANIAS there. Miky you stay as BRETT and ANIAS type A for charactername. "When you want to talk to anyone type "A/" and hit ENTER. I'll be Brett, because this is his computer, but you'll appear as someone else. Understand?" "I think so." SUG: ANIAS would you like to tell MISS CURIE about yourself? ;) BRETT will help "We'll send them a description of you. That way, anyone that wants to look at you can read your description. Here, I'll show you what I look like." BRETT: /lookat BRETT BRETT is a tall, thin man in his late thirties. An astronaut of some kind, he wears the upper half of a pressure suit, unzipped, as a jacket, and frayed patches from past missions cover the sleeves and back, only giving way to the oxygen fittings and buckles. His long bleached hair is held back by a black beanie, and he wears large gold-rimmed purple-lensed flare glasses on his beaked nose. Loose cotton urbancam pants with dozens of pockets and tennis shoes. MISS CURIE: Brett is a regular here. He used to work in the L5 colonies, but now he's a boho artist in the slum zones. He is interested in CONspiracy theories, DRUgs, Weird SCience, PARanormal phenomena, and claims to believe in the interconnectedness of all things. "Jeez, that's what I have to liveup to as Brett! Now, we can write what you want to be." Micheal opened a new character file and handed the keyboard to Joan, who hesitated a bare second before she started tapping. ANIAS is a tall, thin woman in her late sixties. She has short brown hair cut in a bob, the fringe held back by a jeweled hairpin. She is dressed in the "flapper" mode of the 20's; bustless and round shouldered, in a straight cotton dress that comes down to just below the knee. Silk stockings, with the barest hint of garter showing below the hem. Flat, pointed shoes. Long strings of cultured pearls that hang to her waist. She smokes Sobranies in a foot long cigarette holder and drinks mineral water. "That's great! Now we tell Miss Curie what you like to talk about, and what you'd be likely to want to read in the library." "There's a library here?" "And post office. People don't just chat. They advertise their cars and send mail, swap hints on breeding goldfish or making drugs, collect lists of jokes catalogued by the disaster they're inspired by. Look at this list." ACTors and actresses ADS, discussion of AGony Aunt AMErica stories AUStraliana... "You can browse under these headings, or start an argument by "shouting" one of these topics... if people are in the mood for one, that is. You can read peoples ramblings. Here." He scrolled down to CReative Crap, selected a random file. It uploaded and he viewed it. one freaky Friday the 13th two toads went walking.The sun was streaming through the breaks of the thick ominous grey cloud that had encompoassed the earth;It wasn`t much but it was the first major break that allowed the sun in for the last few years ,so anyway these total dudes of the toad persuasion decided to take advantage of their good fortune and enjoy this almost alien phenomena and go fishing, a pastime that they had heard ye olde scrotum(that is great great great great grandfathers )used to prattle on about after a bong or two.. TO BE CONTINUED....................... by Stella Hermes "Um... Which ones do you want to tick?" "Can't I just stay a mysterious stranger?" "Good idea." MISS CURIE: Anias is a mysterious stranger here, and doesn't speak the language very well, but she seems friendly and interested in the scene. "That should work fine. Now all we need is someone to talk to." "Here we go." FELINE: HELLO THERE HELLOHELLO BRETT: Hi there FELINE, havent seen you here before, are you new? FELINE: YES I HAVE NOT DONE THIS I NEED TO ASK SUG SOMTHING PLEASE WAIT FELINE: I HAVE TO HIT THIS KEY WERE ARE YOU? BRETT: We R in Annandale. please take the caps lock key off U R shouting at us FELINE: WHAT CAN YOU HEAR ME I AM SHOUTING THE MUSIC LOUD HERE THERE SUG TURND IT DOWN BRETT: no, I mean if you type in capitals it means u r shouting. i cant hear you but i can read u too loud and clear! ;-) FELINE: WERE S THE CAPITAL KEY BRETT: left hand side of the keyboard. Here is ANIAS ANIAS: Hello there, FELINE. Have you found the key yet? FELINE: yes now i have ANIAS: I haven't done this before either, FELINE, it's a little scarey! FELINE: i think it s stupid i mean what is the point of talking to someone you cant see? ANIAS: But you can see me. Type this "/lookat ANIAS" without the quote marks. FELINE: but you cant see me ANIAS: You have to write down what you look like. Get SUG to help you do that. FELINE: he s busy with the other things here there are poeple all over the place and my boyfrends talking to them. are you realy dressed like that it sounds beutiful ANIAS: Of course I am! FELINE: I dont understand what is the flapper mode of the 20s? ANIAS: The 1920's, over sixty years ago, there was a time when people dressed like that and looked like that. FELINE: what did the men look like? ANIAS: They wore suits with collars that looked like little triangles, and hats, and their trousers were too big. Most of them did. Even in hot weather they wore suits. FELINE: it sounds bad. ANIAS: They were great times though for some people, esp. the rich people. I've read a lot about it. You can see plays written at the time and the actors wear costumes from the time. FELINE: i dont now much history but i can tell you read a lot your typing is better than mine im to slow ANIAS: Take it slower and you'll make less mistakes. FELINE: You must be a writer. ANIAS: Yes, actually I am. I used to live in Paris with a bunch of writers who were all actually from America! We were like a club. FELINE: i have seen a perfume called ANIAS ANIAS: I think it was named after me. what do you do for a living, FELINE? FELINE: i havnt got a job just now. i live with some friends ANIAS: How do you survive without a job? FELINE: i have some money saved and I might try to get on the dole. my boyfriend is getting a job soon ANIAS: That's good to hear. It's good to have a job. FELINE: why ANIAS: Money. More money than the dole. FELINE: i dont care about money ANIAS: Theres a lot of things you can do with the money, you can buy a house, have nice clothes, live better. FELINE: i dont care about those things. I live ok the way I am. ANIAS: Theres other reasons. What about the way people treat you? What about your pride? Don't you want to be self sufficient? FELINE: i dont care. I dont know what i want its to hard to think about. My mind is full of things i dont understand. everything seems rotten. the world is stupid and I wish i didnt have to do anything. ANIAS: It sounds like you wish you were dead. Then you wouldn't have to do anything. FELINE: i somtimes wish that. but Id rather be somthing else. I dont now what. Maybe Id rather live on a farm ANIAS: Can you drive? FELINE: no I cant. But I bet I could drive a tractor. Id live on a organic farm in Nimbin or up the coast somwhere. ANIAS: That sounds better than living off the dole in the city. FELINE: But I met people that live on farms like that they all get the dole too. they cant survive without it. its imposible to make a living when the big farms grow cheaper food. ANIAS: But at least they try. They grow special biodynamic stuff for resterants. FELINE: no they dont. they just want to do nothing just like me, just like just about everyone I know. whats the point the world is dying. you can work your whole life away trying to fix it up and never make any diference because someones taking advantage of your work making money by being slack. ANIAS: I don't believe that. FELINE: take a look around you the world is a bad place. everyones trying to get as much of the pie as they can before the pie rots ANIAS: Maybe you watch too much television. I don't believe that the human race is as bad as you're painting us. FELINE: then look in your own heart. havent you always done what you thout was right and then found that someone was taking advantage of you? have you never done that yourself to someone else? I think humans are bad ANIAS: But you're one yourself. Does that make you bad? FELINE: humans are bad when they try and do things, when they try and get more than their share. yes I know Im corupted with it too, thats why I dont want to do anything ANIAS: This is getting very depressing. Are you sure you're alright? FELINE: I get by. Im no more depressed than anyone else I know. What about you? dont you ever feel like this? ANIAS: I have been recently. That's why it's a bit of a shock to talk to someone like you. I guess I've been out of touch. I tend to loose myself in my work. FELINE: thats what everybody does. like rowers on a boat thats sinking. if they all worked together they could fix the hole, but the man keeps beating the drum and they keep rowing, and try not to think about drowning. ANIAS: I can't believe that someone as young as you thinks like this. How old are you? FELINE: sixteen ANIAS: when I was sixteen I was doing my School Certificate. I wanted to get into university. This was back when they discovered that DDT caused cancer and birth defects, the most widely used insecticice, and they found that got concentrated in the food chain. I wanted to study genetics and someday invent genetically targeted pesticides that were harmless to humans and animals. FELINE: I bet the ones you invented turn out to be just as bad. ANIAS: Well, maybe luckily, I never got around to doing that. I became a teacher. I thought I could change the future by teaching. FELINE: what changes would you make to the future? ANIAS: I try to teach my students well. I try to wake them up. It's hard work. FELINE: does this change the future? ANIAS: Not really. Some of them are like you, and some of them are like your rowers, heads down and looking out for themselves. FELINE: dont you ever want to give up, because its hopeless? ANIAS: Never. It's never hopeless. I might have a student in my class who'll make a real difference to the future, who'll find a way for the human race to escape the various messes we're in, and it might be me that tips the balance. There's always hope. FELINE: but dont you see, you think it will be a student, not you. you think you can teach someone else to save the world, when all your doing is putting the load on somones elses shoulders, passing it onto your children ANIAS: Its not that simple. I'm not putting a load on their shoulders, I'm giving them the knowledge they'll need to change things. If they want to. Wouldn't you like to change the future, make it better? FELINE: imposible. ANIAS: THEN WHAT THE FUCK DO YOU WANT FELINE: all i want is to be invisible. I want to be annonymous. I don't want to be on any records, any files. I don't want anyone who doesn't know me personally to know my name. i dont want to file tax returns. I hate having to send a form in to anybody I don't know. I hate having to have a tax file number. I hate the fact that evry time I use an atm card my location in the world is recorded for that particular date and time, forever. i recon somone else is reading this now. i hate that. ANIAS: I'm sorry. I never realised. it's so humble, isn't it? Just this, nothing more. No power, no wealth. Just the right to be as annonymous as a pigeon in the city. Poor, pigeons, I saw one with a metal band around it's ankle, numbered. Even some pigeons get caught in the beaurocratic net. FELINE: somtimes i wish I was dead. They can't follow you then. but I had a bad dream where a scientist discovered a way to get into the afterlife. He could open a doorway into heaven, and the first people who ventured through were government officials with clipboards. Then they started giving visas to the souls and started dragging them back to earth, the people who died owing money on their cars and houses were forced to pay their depts even after ANIAS: You should meet my daughter. KATERINA: I am your daughter. Joan slammed back in her seat, face stony with shock. She looked at Micheal, who looked back just as surprised. He reached for the keyboard. BRETT: What happened? Did Sug tell you? FELINE: no i guessed from reading what mum wrote. i reckognised the style. you can tell, sometimes, who wrote something. they put their thouhts into it. and if you know the thoughts you can reckognise them BRETT: I was going to tell you, when you had a chance to talk to each other without fighting. It was worth a shot. "My God! It is my daughter!" Joan turned on Micheal. "You set this up, didn't you?" "Of course. I thought you would have guessed. I mean, you saw Sug's place, where she's staying. That computer is the one we're talking to. I got Sug to sit Katerina down at the terminal, so you could talk to her. Without seeing her face, without knowing who she was. Do you understand? You've been talking. Communicating. I bet you thought-" "You call this communicating? When I can't even see her face." Joan turned to the keyboard. ANIAS: This is Joan, darling. How are you? Are you okay? FELINE: im fine mum. I always was. ANIAS: can we get together to talk face to face? FELINE: sometime soon. not just now. ANIAS: When? FELINE: when I say. love you. [FELINE has logged off] "I feel very strange." said Joan. "I think it's future shock, or that weed we smoked. What do you think?" "Hey, you were doing great! I didn't think she'd guess who was on the other end, but I suppose it looked pretty suss, at her end, I mean, Sug suddenly getting her to sit down and log on to the chat line. Sorry if it was too much for you." SUG: Hey Micheal, lost her, she just left for some party somwhere. Joan still there? ANIAS: Micheal here, yeah, can you get her back on? SUG: Not a chance tonight, she s gone. Nothing I can do (shrug). "I have to go too." said Joan. BRETT: Any chance of doing this again someday? SUG: Sure, if itll get them out of my house faster. Not that theyre a problem, its just theyre in the way, if you KWIM. "There you go. Sug's okay. He'll help organise this again." "I'm going home." Joan stood unsteadily, picked up her bag and walked to the door. Micheal watched her fumble with the complex tangle of bolts and chains. Finally she opened the door and started slowly climbing the stairs. "Hey Mike" called Brett, "everything okay?" "Yeah, I guess. Just a second." He followed joan up and out into the ice cold air of the street. The stars shone steady and remote, no twinkle, seeming to drain heat from the ground below. Joan was in her car, trying to start the engine. He walked over and crouched by the drivers window. "You did good tonight, you know? It went okay." "Could have gone better." "See you next week." "Of course. Don't tell anyone about this." "Sure." The chilled engine finally turned over and she slowly made her way down the deserted street and around the corner. SUG: ... calling Micheal, come in, earth to Micheal, are you recieving me, over... BRETT: Greetings, o Sage of the Age. Who's there with you? SUG: Just some customers. Jap student wants to send his snaps home over the wire to a freind in Tokyo, some BBS users want second hand hard drives. Few other dudes with accounts at the Bar, were in the city and decided to drop in. Gonna have to bar the door. BRETT: You know you love it! SUG: Hardly. Waddaya think I am, Charity herself? BRETT: Chastity, maybe. (ROFL) SUG: It's a little known fact that it's possible to kill someone over the phone. I just have to press this button here... BRETT: No, no, I take it back! See ya tomorrow at the rave? SUG: maybe, maybe. Nootrope's already asked me a dozen times and I haven't given him a firm answer. BRETT: Well, if you do, do. SUG: yarg. [BRETT has logged off] CHAPTER 8 SATURDAY Sydney Park is a rolling expanse of green hills and old brickwork at the St. Peters end of King Street, the product of a checkered history. Part of the flatlands that surround Botany Bay, old red clay laid down by millions of years of creeks and rivers, fine silt that settled out of slowly flowing streams as they loitered and meandered, hesitating before entering the sea. The clay deposits were exactly what the first settlers needed for bricks. The ruins of some of the kilns remain, long low buildings like tombs, and the three tall chimney stacks stand monolithic over the entire area. All built of brick, small, rough edged, hand made bricks that would cost ten times as much as today's large machine-stamped bricks for their aesthetic value. There are paved areas, between the kilns, and stairs, old machinery still bolted to their stands surrounded by lawn, the gravel crushing rollers and clay sieves and the boilers that powered them. When the useful clay was exhausted they stood derelict for many years, while the nearby clay pit was used as a municipal dump. Further down the road there is a dump still operating, unfilled, but nearing the brim. The clay pits, the dump, the nearby port of Botany and Kingsford Smith airport radiate industrial vibes outward into the surrounding country, and for miles around there are only warehouses and storage yards, factories and workshops, lining Botany road, all the way around the bay and inland. The dump filled to overflowing. No more garbage could be squeezed in. It was time for a miracle to occur. They brought in topsoil and roofed the dump over with dirt. They buried it under hills of earth and planted grass. The escaping methane from rotting waste drawn off from underneath and used to power a small generator that feeds into the local grid. The kilns and stacks were retained, preserved, as a monument to the human spirit. Monument to the human spirit? Waddaya mean? They're just ruins! Ah, but they're all built of brick, you see! The brick kilns are made of bricks. Where did the first bricks come from, to build the first kiln? Some forgotten pioneer bootstrapped the whole deal. Someone started digging the clay, probably shaped the first bricks entirely by hand, and must have baked them in a rough fire, until there were enough to build a small kiln. More bricks from that first kiln went into later, larger ones. The bricks flowed out on drays and carts to grow houses, to build the entire region. The stacks shot up, and the giant kiln that stands alongside the road, but they all started with a pile of hand made bricks in a fire. That's cool. Now there's green hills and paved paths running through the park. Joggers and dogs run together. From the top of the tallest hills you can see the city, the airport, the grey concrete towers of the housing commission blocks at Redfern. At night the green winking ray from a lighthouse down the coast scans across the suburbs and touches the top of the hill where the sine wave sculpture stands, an S of sheet iron set edge in the concrete. The first police arrived even as they parked. It was late afternoon. The last of the sun was flowing rich and golden up the towers of the smokestacks, leaping into the sky from their tops. The police sat in their car nearby and watched as the Chaos Clan unrolled the back of their van, hefted out the generator, the first of the speakers, the newly painted banners and totems. "I know why they're just watching, instead of doing their job and telling us to nick off." said someone Nootrope had never seen before, clean shaven scalp and vivid red clothes, like a scrawny devil. "They just want us to unpack so we have to pack up again. They won't come over here until all the heavy gear's off the truck. Then they'll come sauntering over and say, "All right, let's move it along, okay?" and laugh." Nootrope didn't answer, just grabbed and lugged anything that needed lugging. Sure enough, as soon as the pile behind the truck was big enough and they had started to hang the first of the banners, when they were well into setting up, but not established enough to fight hard to stay, the cops came over. "Who's in charge, here?" one asked the air. Someone snickered. "No one's in charge. Everyone is." "Oh. Okay. Well, you can all tell each other that the show is officially over. You can't set up and do whatever you are trying to do, here, without the councils permission." "We got their permission." said Fairlight. He looked to Nootrope for support. "Councilor Renner gave us permission last Wednesday." "That's news to us. Now, pack up, chop chop, or we confiscate the gear." Quietly chuckling, the pair wheeled and sauntered back to their car. "Okay, everyone, just keep cool. Everyone sit down on the ground for the time being." announced Nootrope. He dug through a duffel bag, emerged with a battered mobile phone, the old sort with a large battery case and transmitter, covered in stickers. "Got the number?" he breathlessly asked Fairlight, who reached into his back pocket and produced a business card. He dialed, while digging into the same duffel with his other hand. "Mr. Renner? This is Clan Chaos. Oh, is that so. I see. I see. Did you at least try? What? No, this is just my usual tone of voice. Especially when there's a pair of pigs staring at me with hate in their eyes." At that moment 11 patrol cars quietly rolled into position, like Indians on horses appearing over a hill in a western. "More than a pair now, Mr. Renner. A whole pile just arrived. This your doing?" "We went to some pains to placate you, you remember? Sent a young sacrifice to your lair. What of that?" "Oh, I see. Maybe you will feel smarter too, in a second. Hang on." He pulled the DAT recorder from the duffel. Reflected briefly that their name, "Chaos Clan" was a misnomer. I mean, there was nothing chaotic about what they did, when it came to analyses. They planned and prepared. Their contingency plans were operational. He thumbed the play button on the tape and held it to the receiver of the phone. The sitting Clan listened in silence. "...evil. If any music embodies the spirit of evil, it isn't rock and roll, it's that music of yours. Yes. If you want to have this event of yours, you're going to have to suck my dick. What! You heard me. Suck my dick, and everything goes well. If not, I give the police free reign to do as they like. You've got to be joking! Grow up, Mr. Nootrope! Why do you think they sent you, the attractive young new boy, up to see me? This isn't the first time, and I hope it won't be the last. What about the walkman? They wanted to tape some nice incriminating evidence. But that's out of the way now, and the decision lies entirely with you." "Ring any bells, Mr. Renner? No, it wasn't the guard, it was the boy. He had this little bug hidden down his pants. It's all there, every second of the entire meeting, in 16 bit digital mono. Better quality than the sound on a CD, you know. Mmm hmm. Yes, not just the media. What about your mother? Mr.'s Renner, in Merrylands, that's right? And, of course, the other Mr.'s Renner, your wife? No, we have no qualms against doing this thing. Just call off the dogs. It has to be possible. Copies have been made. I swear, one false move and dozens of copies start moving, headed for all sorts of people. The media. Yes, I know. I don't care how hard. Great. What? No, we'll be keeping it for the next party. And the next. Yes, this is Nootrope, the one. I'm glad you liked it. I think it's really great to have a friend like you on the local council. As soon as possible. Have a nice day." He hung up. They waited in tense silence. Ten minutes later they heard engines starting up. One by one the police cars backed away across the grass, turned and left, until they were alone. Or almost. One backed away almost all the way across the park, and shut down. Lights off, it stayed. There were no cheers or celebration. There was a job to do, a party to run. Only the occasional sympathetic eye caught Nootropes, who grinned wickedly, without embarrassment. Fairlight grinned back. They stood and hugged, growling. "Yeah, you heard, he was shitting." "Had to pull a few strings so hard they broke, to get us this, I reckon." said Fairlight. "Nothing like the power of the media. Lets work." Setup. Soundcheck. The first ravers started to arrive. So different to the Clan. They hovered on the outer, embarrassed by the work that was being done to provide for their entertainment, trying to stay out of the way. Nootrope felt a momentary wish that some would help, as he balanced on a folding ladder tying banner cord around a park light. But, he realized, they were only there for the entertainment. This was their night out. They didn't want to work, and they had every right not to. Catherine and Jackie sat together on cold concrete that roofed the kilns. "Everyone's going to be here. I can tell." said Jackie. She shivered delightfully. "Are you sure you don't want one of these trips? I'll give you a half for free if you want?" "No. I'll stick to this, thanks." Catherine cracked a can, vodka and orange. She took a healthy swig and offered it to Jackie. "Oh no, never! It's the worst thing to do that. You can't believe the reactions it causes, in the stomach." She lay back on the 'crete and watched the stars with dilated eyes. "What are you going to do now you're here in Sydney? Go to uni?" "Now that's an idea." Catherine turned the idea over in her mind like a coin. Heads and tails. The future. "I want to get into sound. I already am, but I want to get more." "That performance was excellent. Can you get copies of the video?" "I'll try. For my resume. It would help." "They, the unis, love that! Video footage. They have to go through so many applicants now, so many people trying to get into the courses." "They want to get as many in as they can. Because of the Olympics." "What's the Olympics got to do with uni?" "It has to do with everything. It's the greatest business opportunity the city will ever see. The country, even. They can't let a high unemployment rate make the country look bad. So they have to change the figures, to convince foreign investors that Australians are hard working, decent people who only want to work hard for a buck. When the reality is, we'd rather work part time two nights a week and play around all day, or not work at all. They can't let that get out, you see, so they'll be encouraging everyone into part time jobs and uni and volunteer work, to tweak the figures." "We'll have to leave the city, then." Jackie said in a falling voice. "Pack up and go. It'll be a nightmare, so many people simultaneously struggling and being pushed into jobs, serving the customers. Morale will hit the floor. It's bad enough already. I don't even know why." "I do." said Catherine, and laughed bitterly. "Because there's two types of people in the world, predators and herbivores, and god made a mistake by putting them both in the same place at the same time." "God must be stupid." "Oh, he is, all right. I'm going for a walk." And Catherine slid down from the kiln, leaving a sad eyed Jackie to stare up at the night. There has never been anything like a rave before in the history of the world. Some people try and draw an analogy with tribal dances and celebrations, orgiastic shamanistic mushroom binges with Siberian nomads and Amerindian raindances. They're wrong. There is no purpose. There is little intent. There is celebration, but not of a sort that can easily be rendered in words. It goes up above the words into regions thought can barely stand. It flies- it? What am I talking about? What is It? Its a thing, it exists. It exists now. And Now. But not in- between. It's as short as the shortest attention span. And attention spans are getting shorter. As short as the distance between two beats. It can be expressed thusly: you, the reader. Yes, you. Raise your right arm, hand extended, palm forward, like you're making a pledge. Don't pretend you're making a pledge or saluting or anything, just make the motion. Now, how do you feel? Like a jerk, right? No, ignore that. Maybe you can feel the air, a breeze on your hand. Ignore that too. Concentrate on the feeling of raising your hand. Do it few times. Concentrate. Maybe just... there. Maybe you feel it. That's a technique I ripped off the Zen masters. They'd use a version of it on novices who ask them what the true nature of Zen is. It's pretty pointless, I guess, but no more than getting up in the morning is pointless because you're going to die someday. No more than doing whatever you do just because it's what you do is pointless. Is it more or less pointless than talking to someone? Your words meaningless telegrams through the air, being a translation of your own personal language, hopelessly garbled when the listener translates them? But it's not so bad when listening to a machine. They don't think. The music is so loud it destroys trains of thought. Each beat comes down with the impact of a marshmallow hammer on the point of the skull. The dancers, moving through the fog, jerking in time to the music, the mind taken out of the circuit, the sound directly controlling the legs and arms while the mind disappears into repeated beats and pulses and flashes of light, THM THM THM THM and somewhere in the crowd, in the brain of a stranger, a fleeting fantasy flickers in the brief silence between beats. He looks around and watches the crowd suddenly recede, spread out into the distance, and each raver dances on the top of a square sided pillar that disappears down into lightless depths, their sides shrouded in fog. The distance between the pillars is too great to jump. They all face the same way. One slip, and they fall. Marching in place. Endlessly marching in place for an infinite, dilated moment, the wind on their faces feels like traveling, but no... TMM TMM TMM TMM there's wigged out feral girls come up King street dragging shopping baskets on wheels full of jackets and books and security blankets, and hairy males with no shirts drinking sixpacks. Joggers who regularly cross the park at this time of night slow down and stop to watch. Dogs dart and weave through the legs of the crowd. The talk layer surrounds the dance layer. All bodies facing in. The dance layer faces the Chaos Clan performers, their network of keyboards and sequencers covering three tables. The players nod in time, synched, working. Andrew was lost in the crowd. He was straight, hadn't even been drinking. Just pretended to be stoned off his gourd. It gave him an excuse to wave his arms around and smile. Eyes opened slightly wider than usual, convinced the people around him that he was a harmless tripper, journeying. Going somewhere. Thomas stood outside in the talk layer. He had a lemon, and he passed it around. It moved from hand to hand, as people inhaled it's sharp scent. He watched it move away, then drew a handful of emergency flares from the pocket of his long black woolen overcoat. Peeled one and cracked it. The plastic tube contained two chemicals, one inside an inner glass tube. When cracked they mixed, and glowed a violent orange. He passed the flare to the first hand that stretched his way and cracked another, taking a penknife from the coat pocket, cut it open. Green goo oozed out to drip like liquid plutonium to the bricks. Karen stood on a kiln, looking over the crowd, taking petite sips from a beercan. She drained it and crunched it underfoot. "Another?" "Don't mind if I do." Micheal handed her one from his half slab of VB. He gazed out over the bobbing heads in approval. "Did you hear what Nootrope-" "Yeah, don't tell me. Remind me to be extra nice to the boy." "I wish I had a video camera right now." "Don't, please. You know what'll happen. If you think you'll want to look at this in ten years time, you're mistaken." "Maybe it deserves to be recorded." "No way. It deserves to live awhile and die, like everything deserves." "Recordings don't last forever. Even a book gets forgotten, buried under all the others." "Spare me the philosophy." She spotted Catherine, sitting on the kiln opposite them with Lang. "There's the weird pair. Have you heard any good goss on Catherine? She seems strangely clean." "Like she fell out of the sky, you mean?" "I rather imagine that Lang found her wandering in the street talking to her left shoe, and brought her home and concocted the story about them being ex." "Lang's stories about Melbourne never really struck me as being too real, come to say. But then, I never really believed in that place." "Me neither. Like America. Like any place over the horizon. People come and say they've been there but it never seems real." "Hey Sug!" Sug extricated himself from the centre of a knot of people and drifted over. "Sounding good, aren't they?" Micheal peered over the crowd to where the Clan were playing. Nootrope was there, with a pair of keyboards and some effects units and other assorted small black boxes, hunched over, total concentration written in the tension of his shoulders. "Yeah, they are. I usually stay outside scenes like this, but it's good to see something like this happen." "This isn't real." said Catherine as she looked out on the dancing mob. "This is like some insane nightmare. What's happening here? I don't know why I feel so frightened." "Relax. Most people feel that way the first time they see it. They don't understand it." "But what's the point of all this? It's just... senseless movement, just this desperate action for it's own sake. It's like they're trying to get away from something." "I get this picture, this image; there's going to be a disaster, a great, all encompassing disaster, and everyone knows about it. They all want to run away from the approaching catastrophe, but they can't, it's too big and there's no way they can get far enough away to avoid it, but they're still filled with the primal urge to run. So, to satisfy this urge, they do this. They move desperately in the same place, hopelessly, just to satisfy the urge to run. But what are they running away from?" Lang remained silent, staring out over the crowd. "I understand, now. About the dream. We can't control our dreams, no matter how hard we try. Sometimes it seems like we can, we have a dream where we know it's all a dream and we think, "Cool, I'm in control, I can do whatever I want!" But then we awake, and realize it was all illusion. We only dreamt that we knew it was a dream." "You and I both know this is a dream." "Yeah. Your dream. Tell me; is this what you wanted?" "It came out of the fog of sleep. Shapes and colours. First, there were people. I tried to talk to them, but they ignored me. They became more real, and where they walked, ground appeared beneath their feet, and the ground became a world. They would open a door, and a house would be created for them to walk into. I knew they were parts of myself. I knew what was happening." "My memories were of Levinfield and books. Levinfield, herself dreaming, asleep between the cycles of action. She was down. Everything, down. I read about the up-times, when my ancestors built and fought and strived for perfection. They tried so hard.. I respected that. No one else did. I looked around and saw the things they left us, and I was always reading about how these things came to be built." You see, we were the same! I dreamed into reality, and so did they. Creating worlds in ones dreams, and building them with bricks and mortar; the same thing." "And?" "And... I brought them together." "I created a world were up and down were out of phase. I brought those builders out of the past and into the present. I thought it would be a better world. I thought we would complement each other. Builders and dreamers living in the same time. It didn't work." "Those people down there are running away from you. You know that, don't you? It didn't work. It's a catastrophe. It wasn't meant to be this way." "I'm sorry." ""I'm sorry" is your bloody motto, isn't it!? "I'm sorry" will not fix... this." "It may be flawed, it may even be broken, but it's better than the void." "Who says? Ask these people. Look - there they are, each in their own little void. A little mindless rest between struggles with, with you, I guess." "Could you do better?" "Yes, oh yes." "How?" "Less conflict. More peace. Less retribution. More co-operation." "I guess it was co-operation which got us in this mess in the first place." "It was you killing the White Deer!" "That again! That didn't put us here, it was you, who created the empty universe, who tried to put me away forever, as revenge. Was that less retribution?" "And you tried to trap me here alone, in your own turn! What about that?" "That seemed only fair, at the time." "Fair? There is no "fair". Nothing is ever fair. People die. Even back home, in our own world, people die, good people die before bad, and bad people kill good, and sometimes no-one can tell which is which, because good and bad are relative terms. Nothing is ever fair." Lang tried to dance but he couldn't. Couldn't let go enough. Kept feeling self conscious and depressed. So he wandered away from the crowd, up the hill, to the sculpture that stood out against the night sky. Shied away when he spied the small crowd that stood around it, and crossed the carpark to the road. Late night trucks roared past in blasts of raw sound. He could still hear the distant beats of the techno, softened, traveling through the hill, conducted to his feet. It sounded like distant hammers in the earth. It sounded like something was being made down there by things he didn't want to think about. So he walked further away. The further he got from the rave the better he felt. Down the road, past the edge of the park, some construction being performed there, cranes and concrete left on the site. He walks past the cyclone wire of the warehouses. These are huge blocks here. They stretch out for ten times the size of a normal suburban block, and the roads that separate them are wide and smooth and black. A semi-trailer would have no difficulty doing a three point turn. There are gates, and gate houses, and flashes of luminous grey from the security monitors inside. He sees the tired faces of the watchmen, looking up from their cameras as he walks past, at the exact moment he leaves the range of their cameras and comes into range of their eyes. On, and left, into the older section. This is Alexandria. There are no reasons for you to drive through this region. There are no reasons for you to know what it looks like or feels like. Have a look at your Gregories map. It's like a hole where they forgot to draw the details in. It is so cold. He hugs himself as he walks. These are the estates, huge complexes of warehouses and factories and yards, sometimes filling the entire block. There is no sound. The stars are terrifyingly distant. He stops his robotic walk, turns and sits in the weeds with his back to the cold wire. At least there's no cameras here, he thinks. In fact, this area looks deserted. There's only lights on the corners and the windows are all smashed. There are bottles by the side of the road, and skidmarks from where speedsters from Marrickville dragged their cars and laid rubber on the start. It isn't totally deserted, though. He hears the crunch of shoes on gravel, and looks up. There is a man looking down at him, standing close. Lang realizes he must have been followed from the rave. The man is quite young, white, clean shaven. He wears a beanie, a black one with stuffing in the top to make it bulge out above his head as though he conceals an enormous brain tumor underneath. He wears a jacket of loose woven cotton from India, the threads thick and colourful. A plain beige tee shirt underneath. Baggy pants of thin checked cotton tucked into white Air Jordan basketball boots. "I saw you at the party back there, dancing." begins the man. He speaks with a broad Australian accent slightly tinged with American inflections gleaned from TV. "Yeah, I got tired. Felt like going after some air." "Lots of air out here. It's free, you know." "Uh, yeah." "I saw you dancing with all the other people at that party. I was hiding on the roof of the shops across the Princess Highway. I was up on this iron roof, like a sniper, looking down on all you people. You were all jumping up and down, up and down, and I was thinking, if I had a Glock semi auto and the ammo I could kill you all, every single one, in less than a minute. Wanna know how I would do that?" "No." "I would start firing at the outsides of the crowd first. Then the people there would fall down and trip up the others who tried to escape. Then I would just keep raking back and forth across the top until you stopped moving." Lang is deep in fear. His heart thumps his chest so badly he is almost embarrassed that the stranger might see it. He tries to affect a confident voice but it comes out sounding an octave too high. "Good thing you didn't have one, then! I mean, the Glock." "Yes, it is. I would have used it if I had one. I have this, though." Lang knows nothing about guns. He believes that the ones with round things, barrels, usually hold six shots of large ammunition, and the ones without round things have bullets inside the handle, racked in a cartridge, usually eight to twelve. The gun the man produces from under his jacket is one of the latter sort. It is large. Lang imagines that it holds twelve large bullets in its fat, blocky cartridge. He is amazed at how ugly metal can be, and how beautiful. It is completely unlike the pieces carried by cops, the only guns he knows, examined from trainseats as the cops walk past, holsters on their belts. It is wicked. All the pieces of it say, "kill". The man holds his gun pointing straight up, next to his head; a target shooter waiting between rounds for the score. He stands and looks down at Lang with a grin. "Is that real?" asks Lang. He knows the answer: "Yes." Lang swallows and tries to look away, but he can't. He watches helpless as the mans features start to move across his face, changing and reforming into another configuration. Now he is old, around forty. He wears a navy long sleeve shirt, open at the collar to the white singlet beneath. The face rough, unshaven, each bristle distinct as a pin rising from a red pockmarked cushion. Thin grey hair swept back from lumpy forehead scarred from the removal of melanomas. "I saw you dancing, jumping up and down with those others." says the man. "It was you, I'm sure, and I followed you down here, so don't deny it." "I wasn't going to." "Good. I wanted a Glock, that's what I asked them for, but all they could provide was this. They run them down from Indonesia, through Darwin, you know? I asked them for a Glock, and they said "Sure", and all they got was a lousy Walther. And I don't even get another clip. Not even an empty one to fill myself." "Oh." "Are you afraid?" "Yes." Another change. Now he looks up at a young police officer. Rectangular head, short blonde hair in crew cut, aviator sunglasses boosted from a pawn shop, six foot plus in his shiny black shoes, mustache of too-long bristles over a sneer of self importance. Cap and badge both straight, powerful. "Good. That's good. You deserve to die, you know? You're worthless, just absolutely worthless scum. You all live in your houses, I see you, living like rabbits in warrens in Newtown and Surry Hills and all around the city. I see you walking around in great big groups all talking and laughing like you know it all. I hear you on trains, talking shit, just clever smart-ass bullshit, slagging everything you don't believe in and running around with each others girlfriends and boyfriends, half of you are queers, I can tell. You all think your so clever with your electronic shit music that sounds like games in Timezone, just the same thing over and over and over-" "What sort of music do you like, then?" The officer changes into a young farm boy, hulking in red flannel lumberjacket and Levi 501's, tan elastic sided boots and Haines tee shirt, short greasy black hair, clean shaven face almost polished, brutal in it's animal lack of expression, dead eyes like the chips of quartz that litter country roads in hard soil areas. "Good music. Rock and roll. Country. Anything in the top twenty. Not too hard, never sleepy, that's how I like my music. The sort of music normal people like to hear. Not the evil shit you people dig." He lowered the gun steadily until it pointed straight at Langs head and smiled. "This is for being a freak, freak. Normal people are going to start fighting back, you know. We don't want you in our world, and we're going to start kicking you out. He fired. Lang was rolling, and the hot bullet grazed his ribs, drawing blood and setting his shirt to smoldering so thick clouds of white smoke filled his nostrils with their bitter stink. The man, now back in the original form of a homey, frowned and prepared to fire again, seeming to assume Lang would lie still and take the shot. But Lang's legs were tight from dancing. He leapt to his feet in a smooth ballet movement, twisting sideways, ignoring the pain in his side. He turned, bent over, as though ducking under a branch. The movements confused the man. His gun dropped slightly. Lang straightened suddenly and slammed into the mans chest, gripping his wrists in either hand. He twisted to the side, wrenching the gunman around, pushed, and forced him into the cyclone wire that bowed back like a hammock under their weight. He leaned into the fence, pinning the gunman, arms still straight to the side, gripping the mans wrists, holding the gun pointing straight out, away from himself. He tried to squeeze the wrist, make him drop the weapon, but the gunman just laughed. "You're weak. I work out in a gym three nights a week. You think you're so clever, here I am, helpless, eh? Check this!" And the man slowly, steadily, brought his right hand around, bending at the elbow, with the deliberation of a champion arm wrestler, forcing Langs arm back until he felt his thumb might break, and twisting the gun round until it came to rest pointing directly at the side of Langs head. He could feel the cool circle of steel pressing the skin just above his ear. They were face to face. Lang vibrated with fear and bewilderment. His eyes dilated in terror. He smelt the fear, rich animal stench rising from the wetness beneath his arms. He was cold. The gunman smelt of mold, of old ground, hidden behind aftershave. He smelt like an old house does after weeks of rain, when mildew grows and you buy cheap air freshener from the supermarket to fight the odor of decay. "What are you gunna do now? No one around here. Your friends are back there dancing. They can't hear, the music's too loud. No one can hear." "There's guards at the factories. They can hear." No they can't. Too far away. This will be quiet." "What do you want. Do you want me to beg? My money? You can have everything, everything in my pocket, just don't do this!" "Beg! Ha! Stupid fucker, I'll take your money anyway, won't I? I don't care what you do, and neither will you, soon." Sudden inspiration hit Lang like a cold bucket of water. He turned his head sideways, eyes locked to eyes, and struck, biting the mans nose and holding it as tightly as he dared between clenched teeth. The man grunted and swayed, but he didn't shoot. "Na lishen", said Lang, through clenched teeth, "lishen ca'fuh'y. Ith you shooh, Ah be kille', buh you' be dishfi'ered fe life. I' yoh choiss, man, shooh me an' Ah bi' yoh nofe off!" "You fuckin' bahtard!" said the man. Click. Bang. There was a wave, a ripple, then, flowing outward from where they stood. It moved through the fabric of the world. Accelerating away, through the air and the grass, the fence, the factories. In their cubicles the security guards looked at their monitors in surprise. They watched as swirling snow obscured their view of harshly lit concrete access roads and carparks full of shiftworkers cars. In the park the ravers faltered in their stride, gazing around in confusion, trying to discover the source of their sudden fear. Some stopped moving and stood frozen, frowning, their eyes full of blackness and doubt as their feeling of wellbeing was suddenly blown away on a chill wind, while others tried to keep moving, but now their efforts seemed grotesque, pointless, and devoid of grace. The music continued, but now they heard only emptiness and failure in it, a pointless repetition, alien and meaningless, DOOM DOOM DOOM DOOM like the tolling of a churchbell at the end of the world. Brett looked up from packing a cone. A large Saturday crowd surrounded his table, lounging back and chatting over the music from the radio. MDA, techno, but the sound changed and the DJ cut in, "Sorry 'bout that, there's something wrong here... must be the transmitter again, let me check... ", and then only dead air, and more dead air. Mrs. Graham put down her red pen and stared at the wall. She had been marking papers and lost track of the time. There was a b/w movie on, dismally old, British, stiff acting, the kind she used to appreciate for the unintentional humour, so she let it play in the background, but now it suddenly seemed garish and twisted and sick, and she reached for the remote control to kill it. The papers lay scattered around her on the couch, and she looked at them with a kind of revulsion she hadn't felt before, because she couldn't hide from herself any longer the fact that her students didn't care, that they only wanted to finish their course, not experience it, and that the papers were hated formalities. It all seemed so stupid, in this suddenly changed light, and she almost burst into tears at the thought of the time she had wasted doing pointless things. Everywhere it touched the wave brought dislocation and fear, uncertainty and loathing, spreading outwards in an expanding sphere of influence. The stars rippled across as though someone had thrown a stone into the puddle of the sky. Lang's teeth met. There was a spurt of hot blood from the man's face that flowed freely down their jackets. A deeply cold wind blew across the fields. Langs heart stopped in his chest, but he didn't feel it, because he was dead. The wind grew bitter. Shivering, the dancers stopped completely, to look in each others eyes. The lights were fading, the turntables wavered and slowed. Langs body remained standing. The brains were gone, most of them. All that was, that had been Lang, was a splash of vivid red and pink matter on the weeds and grass and fence. The back of his head was missing. Steam rose from the rest. Blood dripped from the edges. There came the distant sound of sirens. Not police sirens, but air raid sirens. No one could tell where the sound came from. The music slowed and crawled to a stop, leaving only the wind and sirens straight from a movie about war. Langs body swayed, and swallowed the nose. The eyes were still locked on the horrified eyes of the man, who had dropped the gun. He went to touch his face, but realized with horror that the body still gripped his wrists, held them in place with impossible strength. The stars dimmed. Langs body leaned forward slowly, deliberately, and bit a chunk of flesh from the mans cheek. Chewed and swallowed. Bit off another. The man shrieked, loud as a train. A high, unearthly sound like a car alarm that wouldn't stop. Lang's body bit and swallowed, bit and swallowed, until there was nothing left of the mans face but smeared bone and rags of flesh, and staring, mad eyes. The two bodies stood silently, still, leaning into the hammock of the wire. Then, slowly, they dropped, knees buckling finally to deposit them onto the weed choked ground. It started to rain, cold droplets that were almost ice. They bit into the fading bodies of the dancers, frozen in position. They chewed through the grass, knocking suddenly brittle leaves into tiny shards. They started to dissolve the tent over the turntables, the lights, the banners, the colourful clothes. Everything started to run as the rain washed it away. Nootrope, standing over the turntables, struggled to hold onto his identity as the cold, cold rain erased it bit by bit. His focus, the centre of his soul, faded bit by bit and the icy drops seemed to fall straight through his head and heart, carrying bits of light away. It was too hard. He watched himself freeze, his final thought, "I'm dead", petrifying motionless even as it struggled to be born. His final act, a slow, creaking movement, as he looked up from the motionless turntables and caught Catherine's gaze. The intense cold burnt Catherine's skin like caustic soda, cruel and spiky, but it did no harm. She didn't even shiver. With great difficulty she broke contact with Nootropes petrified eyes and looked around. Everywhere, statues. Statues with troubled, worried faces. It looked like the work of an expert photographer who had somehow managed to capture the moment of a disaster, the exact second when everyone on the ship realizes they are about to sink, and just before they run amok in fear. She could move, though, walk through the tableau of gestures and troubled expressions. She could walk across the brittle grass that crunched like freezer frost beneath her feet. She drifted slowly away from the crowd, towards one of the old brick kilns. Turned and sat on the cold concrete. At least there was silence, she thought. It was good to have silence again. She hadn't realized how noisy the city was. Even at night the distant roar of the roads leaked through the thin walls of the house, and the voices of the neighbors, people passing on the street outside. There was always something happening, it was too hard to keep track of it all. Planes shrieked over all hours of the day and night. And of course her own contribution, the tapes she had returned to as a futile attempt to make sense of the world by cutting it into little bits and putting it back together as she pleased. She looked around and realized she couldn't see anything. Was she back in the void? She concentrated, and her hair burst into silent, cool flame, lighting the ground and the motionless statues around her with a shifting glow that pulsed as she breathed. It wasn't the view she expected. The light trick hadn't worked before when she was inside the dream, it seemed to contradict the rules. There was Karen and Micheal. They sat side by side on the kiln above her, Karen with a can in her hand, staring with an abstract expression of puzzlement at the horizon, and Micheal caught ashing a cigarette into an empty, seemingly unconcerned at the sudden shiver of wrongness that had passed through everything. Catherine stood and leapt, rising smoothly to their height and alighted gently on the roof beside them. She reached forward and pushed with her palm against Karen's forehead, expecting her to rock backwards and fall, perhaps to shatter on the brick pavement below. Instead, her eyes moved very slowly up to meet Catherine's. "Something's happened." said Karen. "I know. Can you tell me what it is?" "The dream is dead." she said. "Nothing means anything anymore." Speaking with the careful annunciation of the deeply hypnotized, her words vibrating deep and slow. "It was bound to happen sooner or later. We couldn't keep the lie alive for long." "But what's happened? Why is everyone frozen?" "There's no reason to move anymore, is there? I mean, why bother? It's all been done before, better. All the meaning has been sucked out and consumed." "That's still not an answer. I need to know what caused it to happen, here, now. Do you know?" "Yeeees." Silence. She was frozen once more. Catherine stood before Micheal, and performed the same trick. She tried to pour a little more of her energy through the contact this time, pushed a little more urgently, trying to warm the marble-cold forehead with her hand. Micheal looked up with a sardonic expression. "Well. Here we all are!" he said, and chuckled hopelessly. "What caused it?" "Lang's dead." "That's impossible! It's just a dream. You mean he halted the dream, froze it in place, don't you?" "No. Mistah Lang, he dead!" "How could he do that? We discussed it. There's no way to kill yourself when you're in a void." "It happened here. Someone shot him." "Who?" "Another character. Some nameless bit-part walk-on from the crowd scenes pulled a gun and shot him. Dues ex machina." Micheal, too froze into place. Catherine leapt lightly down through the frozen air to the brittle grass and walked away, into the void. She felt the pull of gravity fade and die, watched the grass fade away, and found herself back in the silence and blackness of the void. She kicked her arms and legs, swinging herself around, but there was no one else. "Lang! Lang!" Silence. Catherine drifted for a long, long time in the emptiness of space. She had extinguished her hair, now there was nothing but herself to illuminate. When she slept she had troubling dreams. Once she dreamt she was back at her parents stronghold on the side of the Bottomless Valley, talking to the Factory in its shed. "It's good to see you again. I was wondering when the Mother of Sleep would return to visit me." "It was terrible, Machine! I wish I never left." "Catherine! I'm sorry to hear you say that, I'm sure you don't mean it." "I do. If I could go back and change anything I would tell myself never to leave. It's a bad world out there." "No one can ever do that. We're responsible for our follies." "I still haven't figured out what I have to do, that you asked me to do when I returned." "I never expected to see you again. Nevertheless, you still have time. I have faith in you." "Nothing turned out like I wanted. It all went to shit." She stood in the top room of her tower, surrounded by her machines and books and records. A parrot from the forest, the largest she had ever seen, perched on the windowsill glowing against the dark outside and filling the room with shifting patterns as its feathers stirred in the wind. "I hear you've been ripping off our material." it said in a disapproving voice. "Don't you realize it's copyright?" "I needed it." she replied, indignant. "Yeah, yeah, that's what they all say. Didn't get you very far, though, did it? In fact, the power nearly destroyed you." "Wasn't my fault." "Of course. And now you refuse to do anything to set things right, because it wasn't your fault. Don't you realize that we only sing because we like to? Don't you realize that our words are meaningless, and any sense you ascribe to them, any power they contain, is strictly the result of your interpretation? Did you think we were trying to send you a message, give you a gift, with our worthless songs of nonsense? They're just the background music of the world, and they don't mean shit." The bird spread its wings and, with a single powerful stroke, flew across the room and landed in the centre of the star carved in the bare stretch of floor. "How strong are the remains of your determination, Catherine? Are you brave?" It sang a passage that was terribly familiar, beating it's wings and rising to hover in the air as it did, and she watched the floor within the star dissolve to blackness, a hungry blackness that seemed to reach out for her. "Could you do it again, of your own free will?" The darkness of the Void began to grow. It flowed outward like a spreading puddle of spilled ink, breaking free of the constraints of the star and reaching for her across the floor. "Or will you have to be pushed, as our young are pushed from the nest? Which is it to be?" Without a single word she stepped forward and flung herself into the emptiness, down, down, hearing the wild free song of the bird fade as it receded behind her and watching the hole fade to a tiny dot above, to close and disappear, again. Grass crunched like icicles underfoot, and she was surrounded once more by the motionless throng of strangers. Again she noticed, as she had before, their orientation. They all faced, more or less, towards the DJ. Nootrope stood at the focus of their attention, peering into abstract space, and she remembered catching his gaze and shivered deeply. Making her way through the crowd was like solving a maze. Here an arm, there a leg, blocked her progress. Finally she reached him, and, leaning across the motionless turntables, placed a hand on his chest and pushed. "I'm dead." he said. "Looks like I'm not the only one, either. He peered down stupidly at the motionless turntable before him. There was something wrong with it, he knew. It wasn't doing something it was supposed to, and that something was important. It was more important than anything else, he realized. It was the most important thing in the world. So he reached down and touched the platter. His fingers touched the outside edge, and he pushed. There was a rumble of sound from the speakers behind him, a deep groan that throbbed for a few beats before grinding to a halt. He looked up. "I have to get the music going again." he said. "Don't bother. It won't change anything." "I don't care. I just want to hear it." He ran down again like a clockwork toy that needed winding. She gave him another push. "It's pointless." she said. "It always was. I knew that years ago. But I want to." "You're just a character in someone else's dream, and the dreamer is dead. The dream is over." "Doesn't matter. I still want the music." "How can it not matter? Don't you understand that you don't really exist? Your only reason for being is to add colour and movement to someone's deranged fantasy about how the world should be, an experiment that was a mistake, and now it's all over." "It isn't over. There's one more chapter. Your decision. Give it life or let it die, that's your choice." Again he clumsily turned the platter, again the deep rumble of soft beats that slowed and stopped. "I can't do this, I'm not real. You are. Everything is in your hands now. It always was, but more so now. Live or die." "I... I don't know if I can do it. Things would have to be changed. I mean, what's the point of just making the same old mistakes again and again..." but Nootrope had stopped moving again, and she was talking to herself. So she looked down at the turntable and remembered herself, as a child, standing, leaning out over the clouds in the Bottomless Valley, and she realized that she had thought about jumping, then, just to get away. And she realized that, to not re-start the dream would mean that she might as well have jumped, to her death, or maybe a life beneath the perpetual clouds among the smoky fires and the lightning and the mounds of ancient garbage. Really, there was no choice. She reached out and gave the turntable a sudden, savage spin. Her only memories after she did that was falling through the sudden light, the flailing, frantic crowd, dropping to her knees and being lifted back to her feet, the enormous sound drumming in her ears, the smell of sweat and people, the impact of their bodies, then coolness as she left the crowd and staggered out into the open air and drifted away into the dark. "Wake up, Catherine." She lay on her side on cold stone. Her dress beneath her was wet and soggy with rain, and a cool breeze blew. She looked up. June, Brett and Nootrope stood around her, smiling kindly. "You'll get a chilled kidney if you stay there. Come on, we're going back in the truck. The party's over." She looked around. The park was almost empty. The orange glare of the security lights paled before the rising sun. All around, people moved back and forth across the trampled grass, collecting bottles and cans and paper in bags. Others lugged milk crates full of equipment into the back of a hire van. "The parties over." repeated June. "We're going over to Nootropes place to chill out." "I don't think she can hear you." said Nootrope. "What's she taken?" Brett crouched and looked into her eyes. "She's just tired, I would say. Let's get her to her feet." They lifted her up and held her till she could stand. The wind on the wet side of her dress started her shivering. "Come on. It's time to go home." Nootrope hung a blanket across the windows to cut out the lights, and put on a tape. Catherine sat, wrapped in another blanket, staring at the reels going around, going around, hypnotized. June sat beside her, trying to get her to drink some chamomile tea. "I still think she took something." said Nootrope from somewhere behind her. "I think you should give her some vitamin C or Valium or something." "No, it's not that." said June. "Trust me, I can tell. Here, drink some more." Catherine drank. It was sweet and warm. The reels went around and around. "What's this music?" she finally managed to ask, in a rough, unused voice. "Ah, she speaks! Well, this is something I made." said Nootrope. The music was ambient dub, very slow and gentle, sounding as though muffled by miles of cotton wool. "It's various sounds, all appropriated. Some from movies, some from other songs. A little bit of everything. I remember when I did it, I had nothing but a small computer my parents bought me, for school use. There was a project in an electronics mag; you could hook a microphone to the computer and sample things into it's memory." "The sounds?" "There's people speaking. Trains. Wind. Sirens, from old war movies. And bird song. I remember, lots of that. Parrots talking. Oh, and the beat. I built a simple stethoscope, with a funnel and the microphone. It's my heart." When she had finished the tea, June lifted the blanket and snuggled into her side beneath it. "Don't worry." she whispered in Catherine's ear. "Just to keep you warm." "Everything's still here." "Of course. It's your dream. It's all in your head. Lang's gone. You hold the dream." "What did you say?" "I know everything. We all know. Look over there." She looked, to where Brett and Nootrope were peering around the edge of the blanket on the window. They looked back and gave her wise smiles. "We know, but can't say. We know what you did to Lang." "What did I do? I didn't do anything!" "Lang's gone. He's not in the dream anymore." "It was his dream! Why is it still here?" "Because it's your dream. Everything is in your hands. Look after it." "But I don't understand!" "Nobody does. Just listen. Listen to the music." "But what does it all mean?" "Nothing. Just listen." The reels went around and around. MATTHEW SPONG DEC. 1994