Hindsight (57 page)

‘Is that so?’ She frowned, already suspecting that Lockman hadn’t taken off enough masks yet to reveal his true identity, but he only answered with a long awkward silence, then gave her a slender plastic box, gift-wrapped the same as the one he’d given her once before from the two docs.

Laying the first two things aside in her lap, she opened it cautiously to find the familiar sleek shape of sunshades with small controls built into a dainty rose pattern on each side, which made them much prettier to the touch than her first set, while also disguising their true functions.

‘New improved model,’ Lockman said. ‘Stylish too, especially on you. Only this time, General Garland commissioned them — and before you worry if the docs betrayed your confidence about supplying the first set behind her back, they didn’t. Garland is only replacing the set you lost. It’s not like she couldn’t guess who made the first pair. She certainly took a close look at them while you were unconscious at the airbase. But these are better, she said, because she’s also guaranteed funding to ensure they can be repaired or replaced, whenever you wish.’

‘And that’s when the strings come in?’

‘Still no strings. The extra warranty is an added courtesy — just a simple reminder, she said, that her door is always open for you.’

‘Yeah, I’ll bet it is.’ Mira closed the box and pushed it back to him. ‘I’d rather be stuck with yesterday or last century than let her hooks into me.’ After losing her last pair in the water, all she had were the normal pairs Ben had bought her.

‘Can you blame her? I wouldn’t mind attaching a few hooks myself.’

Mira laughed. ‘That’ll pass. It took Ben less than a day.’

‘Hey, to be fair, he had the sense and sensibilities knocked out of him. Give him a few weeks in that beachside paradise of his, and he’d be nuts not to come beating your door down — unless …’

He let the silence hang again until she wondered if he knew something else that might be stopping Ben from forgiving her. ‘Unless what?’

‘Forget it. There’s no chance you’d give up on him. You can’t be alone five minutes without thinking about him.’

Mira closed her eyes, wishing that part wasn’t true, but it was, and the longer Ben shut her out of his life, the more she longed to be with him. Time with Lockman had provided the only distractions, and even then during the most intimate moments, she’d still been thinking of Ben.

‘You’re doing it again.’ He brushed her cheek with a finger that somehow seemed even gentler than Ben’s. ‘I should leave,’ he said. ‘I’ll drop you anywhere you want — or pay for a taxi if you can’t stand to be with me — but there’s still one more thing you need to see.’

‘And you expected this to take only five minutes?’

‘Where we’re going, I expected Ben to be the one with the privilege of taking you.’

He didn’t say anything else, and she didn’t ask — until long after they’d left the ferry and travelled north on the main coastal highway. The alternative was returning to Serenity all the sooner. Still, it didn’t take long before the scenery became familiar, and their silence morphed gradually from awkward to electric as she realised where they were headed. He took the exit for the secluded end of Halls Bay and followed it until the road narrowed to a single lane that led into stunted coastal forest, where the sealed road ran out and the sandy gravel began. Over the next hill, she smelled the familiar mix of rainforest and roadside milkweeds. Then they splashed through a shallow creek into cleaner and taller rainforest.

Curiosity got the better of her. ‘Is this car loaded for camping?’

‘Would you be glad if it was?’

She couldn’t answer that easily. Part of her feared the idea of a night alone with him. She understood herself a lot better now, and knew how easily he could turn her longings for Ben into intimacy with him. His real motives remained elusive. It scared her to know he could read her weakest moments so well, and that she could succumb to him so easily. Locksmith indeed; he had a way of opening her heart and dissolving her emotional barriers with little more than the warmth of his skin — how safe she felt each time he wrapped his strong arms around her and held her against his chest. And he made it feel so natural and right, despite the guilt that warned her of crossing lines that could only ruin her future chances with Ben. There was also a certain intrigue that tempted her to ask more about his past life.

Part of her also longed to relive the simple magic of the last camp-out — the smell of the fire, the sparkle of the ghostly stars — the first camp-out of her life, yet the last night with Ben. Through the new yester-shades, she’d be able to see it, if nothing else. The music, the laughter …

‘Did you bring marshmallows?’

‘You need to ask?’ He chuckled. ‘Put them on,’ he said, nudging the new glasses into her lap. ‘You know you want to.’

She did, telling herself that she could take them off again whenever she wanted; that they hadn’t really come from Garland, since they’d originally come from Zhou and Van Danik. Their idea. Their work. And their gift, originally.

She slipped them on and her world turned violet.

Lockman slowed for a dip and drove through another shallow sandy creek, where Mira saw the ghostly sign for her parents’ old bird sanctuary, rusting violet into the roadside vines. Ahead, she saw the gate at the end of the road, also buckled and rusting violet.

Adjusting her shades quickly forward in time, she found the pummelled tracks of trucks and heavy machinery leading up to and through a chain — bumped the shade control a little further accidentally, and found the ghost of a tall, solid security gate, topped by curls of razor wire and marked by a large sign that warned trespassers against entering a federal government reserve.

‘What’s going on here?’ she asked.

Lockman slowed their vehicle to a crawl on approach to the large gate, until Mira heard a clunk and an electric motor engage, then sounds of the gate opening.

‘It’s automated,’ Lockman explained. ‘This is your place.’

‘Was,’ she argued. ‘I’ve never seen security gates that strong before, not even at the strictest psychiatric prison.’

Without coming to a complete stop, Lockman rolled through the gateway onto a newly formed road, and as the gate closed almost silently behind them, Mira hovered over the threshold into her childhood property — an open field of wildflowers blooming in all shades of violet, but not overgrown and ramshackle as they had been for years before the bulldozers. Each plant now seemed young, vibrant and trimmed as if fresh from a nursery, and tamed into rows that would disappear only after more growth.

‘I don’t understand.’ The inside face of the fence had been painted around three sides of the perimeter to look like it was part of the surrounding rainforest, and camouflaged so well, the boundary on the furthest side of the field, if it was there, seemed almost invisible.

‘Look downhill to your left,’ Lockman said, and when she did, she saw the towering centrepiece of the gardens — not quite blocking as much of the view of the placid bay as the original centrepiece had for most of the past century. The new cluster of Moreton Bay fig trees and silver-trunked ghost gums seemed a lot less leafy, and a little more anorexic. Still, they rose from a small circular orchard and vineyard, just as they always had. Against the early morning sun, the tree line even reminded her — as it always had — of the lacy cuff of an old woman’s sleeve, with three taller skeletal fingers stretching up to tickle the remaining stars out of the sky. Blunt stubs on the main trunk suggested that a much larger tree had been trimmed to resemble the original.

It seemed impossible, but she could see it with her own eyes.
Her home!
Resurrected in detail.

In the centre of the biggest circle of trees perched a crown of timber rooms, all linked by rope bridges. Not just a treehouse, but a whole nest of them, each with its own balcony.

‘Did they get it right?’ Lockman asked.

‘I’m fenced in! How did this happen?’ She felt torn, and swept up like a tornado, spun about and dizzy, with nothing left in her world to cling to. Yet she could see her childhood home resurrected so magically around her, and part of her longed to be that carefree child again.

Tears filled her eyes, blurring her sight — too fast to stop herself — and despite the piercing white pain that always came from distorted light, she couldn’t look away. She saw through the white veil of sharper time as her tears thickened, blurring her sight even further. Colours appeared, and for the briefest instant, she glimpsed her own body inside the car with Lockman beside her.

He looked so handsome, and he was looking back at her with such a worried look on his face — then white pain stung her eyes, piercing deeper into her brain as she saw through another threshold. Clarity vanished, replaced by a rich golden light that grew so bright, it blinded her. She blinked, and when she reopened her eyes and strained to see through the golden haze, she saw her home as it would be eventually in a few centuries, lush and overgrown again — everything as it should be, except for the broad sweeping view of the golden bay, where the foamy trails from strange hovering watercraft were being made by golden ghosts on fat skis.

Wiping some of her tears also wiped away some of the pain and changed her world from a rich golden haze to a shade much paler. She saw her own future ghost appear on the breezy balcony in a billowing sundress, with long curls flowing freely about her shoulders — just as she’d always imagined during her darkest hours at Serenity. Yet her future Mirage didn’t seem happy. Behind her, Mira noticed something new; in place of her parents’ bedroom, her favourite tree now hosted the head of an elevator shaft that seemed to vanish down into the main trunk. Doors opened, and she saw General Garland emerge with Lockman on one side of her, Ben on the other — and Ben was the only one in army uniform!

Dizzy with shock, she gripped the invisible seat to stop herself falling off it. She shook her head, unable to believe it. Tears fell and her world darkened to the muddy shade of yester-violet.

‘Can’t be real,’ she said as he drove downhill to the trees; still so magical despite the brief illusion, or perhaps because of it. Nothing good ever lasted for long in her life and it seemed that her mind could now react so quickly to betray her as her body had once reacted to a ghostly seagull.

The road swerved to avoid a table-shaped tree stump — not quite as large as the one that her great grandfather had cut down while her father was still a little boy, but still such an unbelievable detail for anyone to recreate. The original stump had been too big to dig out with picks and oxen, so he’d carved it into a picnic table and chairs; overgrown eventually until visited more recently by the developer’s dozer.

The replica shared none of that history, but a small vine planted beside it promised to blur the lines between past and future, and probably also hide the fact that the stump had no roots to hold it in place. Yet such a small detail paled to insignificance as Lockman passed the restored vineyard. The road turned again at the lower end of the new orchard, where she saw the large arched gap in the aerial roots of a strangler fig.

‘This
can’t
be!’ Mira gaped in astonishment. She’d never seen trees so large that were so denuded of leaves and small branches — except after the worst of hail storms — and although the biggest tree in the neighbouring orchard was again a huge mango tree, it would take another year or so of growth from both trees before their branches once again mingled and tickled each other in the breeze.

‘I don’t understand,’ she repeated, staring at the strangler fig. The trunks and roots were huge and twisted together into the shape of a large hollow tree. ‘That fig looks as big and old as the one I grew up with, but strangler figs are only big vines that take decades to grow up around huge trees that have already grown for decades themselves — and then it takes decades or more to kill the central tree and digest it. So how did it get here? It’s hardly the kind of sapling you can find at a nursery. It’s just as rotted out and hollow as the original, and by the size of it, the tree it ate had to be at least a century old too. I don’t get it.’

‘You will.’

He drove through the natural arch at the base of the twisted hollow fig, and parked inside the central crown of timber rooms, just as Ben had done when he’d brought her to visit the originals — except these weren’t the originals. Still no roof over the car space but the natural canopy served almost as well — or it would, when all the leaves unfurled from their buds.

Gone were the silvery threads of spider webs that grew nightly like a magical castle gate in the tree’s archway. Gone too were the tendrils of large surface roots in the inner circle. Instead the groundcover was much thicker; for years just a light scattering of leaves and twigs at the edge of the canopy, since the trees themselves were fierce competitors for nutrients, but now the ground was mulched heavily with a soft pad of straw and a mattress of other leaf litter. The great trunks were also stayed up in all directions by a web of steel cables to guard them from high winds until the soil packed down and their roots stabilised. Many of the branches betrayed differences too, but such details seemed insignificant compared to the whole picture.