Forever Shores (20 page)

Hermione sometimes thought about that sampler with its tiny faded stitches resembling spider's marks worked in figures of dried blood. The right place, Hermione realised one night, as she strolled in The Basin looking up at the twinkling of a few stars, was quite possibly located in dreams and hopes and fears. She had nursed the theory of the Genetic Unconscious Deciding Factor for a long time, but nobody would take her seriously. It comes down to funding, of course. Hopes and fears are such insubstantial elements, and research is generally funded for something that can be seen in test-tubes or at least in computer images of various kinds. The GUDF hovered at the front of the back of Hermione's mind.

The Part of Fate

One night Hermione and her father the philosopher attended a performance of The Enlightenment company, playing at The Mineshaft Theatre in The Archive which is the area in The Tunnels where you can find the arts. Hermione followed Norma's career, always hoping for some hint, some clue to all the mysteries of Variation. Fate Can Perhaps Sometimes Play a Part. (I am just telling you that. You probably won't see it on a sampler anywhere.)

Fate placed Hermione and Professor Uhu in seats next to Belinda and Gustav Tillyard.

Although Hermione obviously knew who Norma was, she did not recognise her parents. It was the hand of Destiny at work. Norma was dancing in a short sequence titled ‘The Lion in the Desert Eats the Stars', inspired by a painting of the desert at night, a sleeping gypsy in a striped costume, a guitar, and a golden lion. Norma portrayed the part of the Lion, and she received a standing ovation. She was absolutely brilliant, no question about that, so graceful and yet so utterly and savagely convincing. Hermione and her father were on their feet clapping and beaming, and beside them was Norma's father, vivid with joy and pride. But Belinda, when she tried to stand up, fainted dead away, collapsing into the red velvet theatre seat.

Hermione turned to her at once in professional concern, and as the patient was coming round—it was all too much for her—overwhelmed by Norma's great success—mother of a prima ballerina—Hermione heard Belinda say, ‘Daphne, Daphne. I am so afraid, so afraid. The lions. I am so afraid of the lions. Don't make me look at the lions. My baby. I hate the lions. Daphne! All cats. I hate all cats. All cats. All cats. Lions, oh good God. Oh, so scared. There was a little grey cat and it looked at Daphne. Slipping, slipping, slipping.'

Hermione held Belinda's hand, and she listened.

‘So, are you the mother of the little star?'

But Belinda said only, ‘The poor baby's hands looked like kitten's paws. Kitten's paws. Paws. Paws!'

‘She's delirious,' Gustav said.

And Hermione Uhu, almost delirious herself, slipped quietly away and returned home, inspired by all that had happened.

‘I wonder,' Hermione said to herself as she rested in a huge brown leather armchair, sipping her vodka and Sirop de Violette, ‘I wonder if there really is anything in the fact that the mother suffers from what amounts to a feline phobia.'

And she smiled her special mysterious smile as her incredible mind elegantly put the facts together, one by one by one: Childhood trauma fear of cat. Deep repression of the fear. Breeding of the fear in the profound imagination. Resolution of the fear in physical form in offspring.

The power of the imagination to direct genetics. The idea that GUDF might prove valid was almost too exciting, and Hermione felt a little faint herself.

The Recording of Dreams

She had of course the power to put in motion an Order of Isolation for Belinda. This was fairly routine. Belinda's dreams must be completely documented, and so Belinda was placed in an investigative coma, the decoction of monkshood farina and strawberry juice was introduced into the sockets of her eyes, and all her dreams from her own birth up to the present day were then recorded in moving images on a computer, using a program developed by Hermione. All our dreams are imprinted on us, stored in our profound imaginations, and can be retrieved and read by the use of MUSH (Maximum Unconscious Spirit Hallucination), after the inexplicable stimulation of the monkshood and strawberry decoction.

And sure enough, there it was, a DDI, or Dominant Dread Image trawling through the history of Belinda's unconscious, slicing through all narratives just as commercials slice through the narratives of television, and permanently swimming through Belinda's bloodstream, washing over her ovaries trillions and zillions of times. The jaws of the leopard. The bloody flesh of the prey. The paws of a kitten. The eyes of a cat. The strange image of a lion opening its great mouth to swallow all the stars of the Milky Way. Then there came the birth of a perfect child with perfect furry paws. Criss-crossing with the DDI was another image, that of a beautiful child in a brown dress, lace at the throat and wrists, slipping down a long green slope, sliding, forever sliding, disappearing from sight, and reappearing and slipping, and sliding, sliding.

‘The key lies in the unconscious mind. There is no longer any question of that. The answer is in the imagination of the subject, in the memory, in the traumatic events of the formative years. Mutation is linked to imagination in a most intimate and complex and elegant way,' Hermione wrote. ‘The junction of herbal medicine and the new technologies has brought to light the secret of the link between the content of the unconscious mind and the genetic codes of the subject.'

The Death of Belinda

It is a very sad fact that Belinda Tillyard never woke up from the ordeal of the strange sleep that provided such a scientific breakthrough. She drifted away as great red tears of monkshood and strawberry juice dribbled from the corners of her eyes.

‘Your mother has died in her sleep,' Gustav told the family, himself understanding almost nothing of what had happened. After a time he found himself strangely attracted to Hemione Uhu but, without some intervention such as Belinda's mother's cinnamon cookies, nothing would ever come of that. Hermione was utterly dedicated to her work, blinkered, almost part of her own computer systems, or so it seemed. She received many accolades for her work, and in her acceptance speeches she always paid humble tribute to the sampler made by her great-grandmother, and to the wisdom of the ancient herbalists. People generally took this reference to ancient wisdoms as a little eccentricity for which the great scientist must be humoured and forgiven. She received funding for the establishment of a huge Imago-Genetic Research Institute, and although there remained, as there always will remain, old-fashioned thinkers who tut-tutted philosophically and ethically about privacy and human rights, the IGRI went ahead in leaps and bounds. The name of Belinda Tillyard drifted away, but her legacy is in fact alive wherever two or three are gathered together to marvel at the work of Hermione Uhu, and the miraculous isolation of the Genetic Unconscious Deciding Factor.

Queue Jumping
Tim Richards

Big Skies (Bob Higgs)

No matter how often calls came in—and through March there'd be ten a night—someone had to be sent out to investigate the sighting and collect particulars. All the high-ranked detectives in Bendigo refused to deal with alien business. You'd never get promoted by locking up Blobs, or getting them to piss off back to Planet Wank. That's what Connies were for.

If something really interesting came up, you were better off bringing in a specialist from the city. Jack Carter would get on the blower to Bob Higgs, a big bloke who had a reputation for getting to the crux of what aliens were after.

Higgs lived by the motto that the most obvious explanation is never the correct one. Extra-terrestrials are nifty at covering their tracks. The trick was to find the obvious answer and go lateral as buggery. Having seen Higgsy in action, the police in Clonard and Koorook sharpened up their left-field thinking about alien motives, but they still deferred to an expert.

Once the boy from the future made his presence felt at Mintook Secondary, it was only a matter of time before the administration contracted Bendigo, and Jack Carter had Bob Higgs choofing up the Calder Highway in his metal-green Statesman to see what the fuss was about.

Rooting Out The Beginning of The End (Raymond)

When Mrs Peng asked Raymond where his parents lived, she was told her question couldn't be answered. He'd been sleeping rough at the cemetery, and would be comfortable enough there till his job was done. While he appreciated the difficult situation the Principal was in—no school could take kids who didn't have a home address or legal guardians—he wanted her to make a special exception in his case. The sooner she let Ray get on with whatever he had to do, the sooner he'd be out of her hair.

Life at a small country high school can get very samey, so new kids become overnight celebrities. Not only did Raymond have a sophistication of manner that other kids who'd come from the city didn't have, he had no fear of sleeping in the cemetery. If this boy had claimed to be a vampire, he couldn't have raised more of a stir than he had by claiming that he was a visitor from the future.

Department guidelines weren't very clear. When Mrs Peng was Vice-Principal at Kerang several years earlier, there'd been a minor outbreak of this kind of thing. Two girls and a boy, third formers, claiming to be from the future. Each was running a separate but connected errand intended to redress a genetic fuck-up. They'd given home addresses, telephone numbers, all the usual details, but their nearest and dearest were fictions. In that instance, the School Council decided to be tolerant and let the matter run its course. Though the trio vanished after a few months, they'd caused a shitload of disruption, and Peng—Killer Penguin to students and staff alike—wasn't keen to repeat that with Raymond.

Raymond could stay until someone came up from Melbourne to sort it out, but he couldn't assume that he'd be going the distance at Mintook. In the meantime, he'd be boarding with Kim and Narelle Tyler, a young couple who taught Maths and Science in the upper-school.

The boy from the future gazed at Narelle's spare toothbrush as if he'd never seen one. Even the idea that teeth decomposed frightened him. Narelle was also in the habit of flouncing through the house in just a blouse and panties, and Kim noticed Ray's eyes testing their sockets. ‘You'll have to excuse me,' the boy apologised, ‘where I come from, women are more demure.'

Kim was shocked that a fourteen-year-old could use a word like demure in ordinary conversation. It added weight to the boy's claims. He was not like them.

As Ray tried to come to terms with his quiche and mixed vegetables, Kim asked whether he could elaborate on the precise nature of his mission. If the visitor's plan was to suck their brains during the night, they'd like to know about it.

Though wanting to be polite, there wasn't a lot Raymond could say. Agents were seldom given assignments. They were chosen as types. Ray's behavioural inclinations would make the necessary intervention inevitable. According to Ray's understanding, interventions tend to be undramatic and imperceptible. By engineering a small change, the agent forestalled a cataclysm further down the line. In all likelihood, Ray would disappear as soon as his mission was accomplished, possibly to return to his own time, possibly to become one of the annulled.

The annulled were destiny's martyrs. They were agents whose very agency had the effect of rendering themselves historically superfluous.

‘No shit?' Narelle said. ‘Wouldn't you be better off making sure you fucked up?'

‘Everything's factored in,' Raymond told her, before requesting advice on how to eat quiche.

The Age of Specialisation (Bob Higgs)

After settling in to room 5 at the Railway Hotel, Bob Higgs arranged to meet Mrs Peng and Inspector Jack Carter in the downstairs lounge. Big Higgsy was inclined to hold off interviewing the boy till he had a clearer understanding of the stranger's disposition.

The expert was already pissed off with the Inspector. Carter had given Higgs to believe that this was uncomplicated alien business. Higgs now saw that it was nothing of the sort. Aliens were annoying bastards but few were so devious as temporal infiltrators. Time-travellers were a different bottle of sharks altogether.

But Jack Carter hadn't become Inspector without knowing how to rationalise a stuff-up. Sure, this kid was claiming to be from the future, but this was most likely an alien swifty. And not even the expert could summarily dismiss that possibility.

Though Bob promised to do what he could, he didn't like the sound of it. He had no sympathy for time travellers. Self-satisfied bastards the lot of them. He'd nearly chosen to take his work down that line when there'd been an explosion of demand a couple of years back, but everything he heard about ‘slingshot investigations' promised certain job dissatisfaction.

‘When blobs wander in from outer space, it's just a matter of working out what they're after, and whether you can spare it. If it's dirty books or a few gallons of sperm, big deal. But if it's something like human braincells, you might have to get rough. Cause, effect, intervention … These mongrels from the future are slippery. They can't tell you what they're after because they don't know. And then they fuckin' vanish without you ever knowing what they've done, why they've done it, or whether it's something you could have stopped.'

Mrs Peng was keen to emphasise the boy's view. So far as Raymond knew, he was here to make an intervention crucial to the future of civilisation.

The man from Melbourne wasn't having a bar of it. The future couldn't be trusted. Bob Higgs swigged the last of his gin and tonic, and called to Stan the barman for a refill.

‘That's what they all say. They're here to stop X meeting Y, or to prevent someone's death. It's some huge fuckin' deal for the future of the planet,' the big man growled. ‘And maybe that's what scientists intended when they first got the capacity to time travel—Hey, shit, this is going to let us take control, and all that … But ten, fifteen years down the line, all the classified stuff is so public domain that virtually any cowboy can use it. Suddenly you've got ordinary fuckwits zooming through time, selling this bullshit about having the destiny of the planet in their hands, when they're just a bunch of motherfuckers and grandmotherfuckers.'

Mrs Peng paused to compose herself before asking big Bob exactly what he meant by the term motherfucker.

Higgs meant his description to be taken literally. These blokes were acting out the last taboo.

‘Nobody really knows whether these guys come from twenty years down the track or two thousand. It's all on their say-so. What if it's only thirty years? You've got some pervert thirty years from now getting his hands on a machine that's going to let him meet his mother when she was fourteen. You don't need to be Sigmund to figure out what's going on. Cut out the middle-man, skip dad, and go straight to Go. Not so much Oedipus eat your heart out, as Oedipus eat your mo …'

Always ahead of the game, the Inspector pulled Bob up before he could further offend Mrs Peng. ‘I'm not sure that I get your argument,' Carter told his consultant. ‘Surely, if you do something that stops your mother meeting your father, you run the risk of annulling yourself.'

Higgs agreed. Logic said that'd be the case. ‘The thing is, Jack, these motherfuckers don't see things the way we do. Maybe they'll annul themselves. But maybe they always get away with the sick shit they do, and just keep doing it on a loop.'

Whether or not she followed the sad intricacies of this, the school Principal looked distressed.

‘If what you say is true, Mr Higgs … If this capacity for ordinary people to zoom back in time becomes a possibility, then we wouldn't be able to trust anyone. Some of our best friends could be sleepers, or motherfuckers, as you call them. I couldn't be certain that Mr Peng wasn't one of these depraved men.'

Higgs nodded. ‘Give me an alien any time. You know where you stand with an alien.'

The Future Lies in Education (Raymond)

As Mrs Peng discussed Raymond's future with Big Higgsy in the lounge of the Railway Hotel, the boy from the future sat in the back of Miss Murray's Year 10 English class, doing his best to fit in. This meant staring out the window when his class was required to follow the text the teacher was reading out loud. When finally, the teacher asked whether she was doing this for her own benefit, none of the dreamers could answer.

‘Raymond, since you come from the future, maybe you'd like to tell this lot how
To Kill a Mockingbird
ends?'

Several of the more studious girls objected to her invitation to ruin the ending for them, but young Ray pointed out that he'd never read the book. In the future, no one carries knowledge about with them in a way that might tax their memory. You slipped a chip in whenever you needed to know something specific. Raymond was struggling to make sense of the deficient Boo Radley, and he figured that scientists must have found a way to genetically correct Boo-ism. Or else the future had worked a more sinister solution.

Having made the mistake of turning her class's attention to Ray's predicament, Miss Murray now had little hope of shifting them back to Atticus and Scout.

Karen Bolitho was sobbing. She couldn't bear to think of a time when everyone she loved, Pony especially, would be dead. Ray was someone's idea of a sick prank. Why send people back into the past if they hadn't got the whole mortality thing sorted? Even in the future, they were still making
ad hoc
repairs. The fuck-ups would just go on and on forever.

Many of the Year 10s refused to buy Raymond's sketchy story. If he really was from the future, he wouldn't be fart-arsing around in Year 10 English at Mintook Secondary. He'd be making contact with a kid destined to become President of the United States.

A hand went up at the rear of the classroom. Melissa Torok wanted to remind the class that she was born in Minnesota and had Presidential ambitions. She had no idea how she would get back to America to realise them. Maybe that's where Ray came in.

Ray would disappoint her. In the future, America would be no big deal. Things were going to get a lot more complicated. Kids didn't get that many chances to be adventurous, and when authorities suggested that he might be of some use, he volunteered for the mission. Ray was selected from more than ten thousand volunteers. All knew there was a real chance they'd annul themselves, or return to the future as mutant entities with no idea who they were or what they'd done. Adventure was worth the gamble.

When Gavin McGibbon told Ray that he wasn't his idea of Vasco da Gama, the visitor conceded that in most respects he was unexceptional. It was likely that he'd been chosen for a disposition, or a reflex, rather than a talent. When the time came for Ray to do whatever he was expected to do, he wouldn't have a choice in the matter. Ninety-nine times out of a hundred he'd go whatever way the boffins expected him to go. His choices were factored in.

Amy Williams was troubled by a more general issue. Mr Davis in Biology taught them that most people chose their partners for subconscious reasons that have nothing to do with romantic love. We're pre-programmed. You might never know that the true reason you were drawn to a boy was some small way in which he reminded you of your father. Women almost invariably choose taller men who look like they'd be faithful hunter-providers, while boys drawn to women with big breasts or broad hips were largely unaware of the part that fertility-assessment played in their selection. Darwinism was all about giving your offspring the best chance to carry your attributes into the future, to secure an on-going role for your own genetic inheritance.

Amy's concern was simple. If Raymond actually came from a distant time in the future, he had to constitute the best bet. Even if Ray himself was annulled, the future would still have an investment in seeing your issue get through.

The new boy then noticed the class pausing to appraise him in a very calculated way. It was difficult to imagine Ray's superhumanity, but maybe the young man had qualities that any bright girl should want. This troubled the sensitive boys quite as much as it excited the girls.

Mostly very quiet, Jodi Everett was a bright, pretty girl who drew a lot of male attention. She'd clearly given the whole matter of Raymond, partner selection, and genetic transmission serious consideration.

‘Ray's got it all over us in a way,' Jodi observed. ‘I mean, I'd find it very flattering to think that I had a special purpose by virtue of the man I mated with … Virgin Mary and all that. But you'd never know whether Ray was taking advantage of his situation to have it off willy-nilly, or whether the future was choosing you.
You specifically.
'