The Disestablishment of Paradise (34 page)

‘It’s all breaking up, Inez. All part of the Disestablishment. And Paradise is playing its part. But listen, Inez. Don’t worry. When the time comes to lift off I’ll
– or we’ll – be there. And for the rest, the official stuff, just pull out a form, write Mack’s name on it, call him a research assistant or something, stamp it official and
stick it in the folder. I mean, who the hell is going to care what we did in a hundred years? Think of your painter man. Think of the life you want. Think of life beyond barges and the rest.
I’ll keep in better contact now. I promise. I promise. And I’ll find time to tell you about things. Mack is a good man. We’re working as a team now.’

‘A team! Hera, do you know what you’re—’

‘Don’t worry about me, Inez. Take care of yourself. We’re both fighting on the same side. Remember?’

Captain Abhuradin nodded and then her expression changed. ‘Hey, I was trying to warn you about danger, not looking for counselling.’

‘Take help where you find it,’ said Hera. ‘Look after yourself. Don’t send anyone down. Let things ride. I’ll be in contact. I promise.’

‘Do so.’

The line went dead. Inez’s face contracted to a point of light – and vanished.

What are we to make of them? This pair, unparalleled?

She already over fifty and he just a year or so younger, so not young.

Those of us who are compelled to live in the conventional world can but stand and wonder as he outruns Romeo for foolishness and she, not as chaste as Desdemona, but with something of that
lady’s fierce honesty, makes plain her feelings.

I suspect that in their naive approach to love, they touch the heart of Paradise. However, neither Hera nor Mack were social beings. Their walls did not come down easily. They had to dismantle
them brick by brick.

In deciding to speak about herself, Hera was matching honesty with honesty. Mack had come to her in an honest and uncluttered way. She was offering her own vulnerability to balance his. In so
doing, she felt she had said enough for a lifetime. It was vastly more than she had ever said to a man. It was more than she had ever said about herself to any fellow human being, with the possible
exception of Sister Hilda. She was surprised at herself, and pleased too, for the opening-up did wonders for her. A light had been turned on inside her, and it lit all parts of her being. She
gained a deeper sense of herself. She could actually feel herself regaining her health and she took walks in the forest alone, pondering these things in her heart and exploring the knowledge inside
her.

That knowledge! I have mentioned it several times but have never explained it. Nor can I explain it fully. The sculptor who moves round his block of marble or wood, cutting and chipping,
thinking in three dimensions, following his instincts . . . he has a million and one possibilities, and from these he makes one decision. His knowledge of exactly what to do – that was the
kind of knowledge she received. It was also an awareness of her own mind – that great resonator (to use Hera’s word) – alive, responsive, reaching beyond the confines of herself
and engaging with Paradise.

For Mack, Hera’s speech had rocked him and freed him. The gamble he had taken in coming down to Paradise had been right. Now, as he accepted he was there for the long haul, he found an
outlet for his need to protect and nurture. It gave him an opportunity to put his great big male body at the service of his most tender and delicate sentiments – and I am not talking about
making love. He was never happier than when he found something that needed to be mended, or straightened or bent. And he felt he had purpose too, something much deeper and more satisfying than
‘the next job’. He liked the idea of riding the bigger circle, of being needed, of helping a poor dumb Dendron. And this perky and prickly, bright and beautiful, mysterious and sensual
woman would, he knew, provide him with more than his fill of delight – should she be willing, and he live that long.

If you had been down there on the planet with them, you would not have noticed much difference in their behaviour. Mack slept in the SAS. Hera kept to the shilo. They contrived not to get in one
another’s way but to give each other space. When they met during the day they were polite and pleased – a bit like children who keep looking at the presents waiting to be opened at
Christmas. They also explored tangible ways of showing their pleasure. Hera, who was adept with needle and thread, adapted some overalls to fit Mack’s height and broad shoulders. What matter
if the bottoms of the legs were of a different colour to the top? They fitted, and they gave Mack a change of clothes. For his part, Mack made Hera a set of hairpins from the thorns of a
Tattersall. Mack had discovered that if he boiled the spines briefly, they hardened and did not lose their structure. He could then shape them with a file.

Mack also became hungry for knowledge. He had seen still pictures of a Dendron – there was a permanent exhibition up on the shuttle platform – but for the life of him he could not
work out how it moved. He needed to see one, and he turned the shilo upside down looking for tri-vids, but all had been packed and removed before the Disestablishment. And so he sat on the stone
terrace with his legs dangling over the edge, staring across the lake. He was trying to imagine what it had been like when the first Big Fella came crashing its way down to the lake and had
wandered out into the water. Then he took a hybla leaf and stretched it on a frame and tried to draw one.

Hera, on her way to explore beyond the monkey trees, saw this and stopped. She approached quietly and then, seeing it was a Dendron he was sketching, she tiptoed back to the shilo and returned
with Sasha Malik’s little book, open at the story ‘Shunting a Rex’.
³
She handed it to Mack, who had put his drawing down quickly. He held
the book for a moment and then handed it back.

‘Read it,’ said Hera. ‘This young woman knew the Dendron well. She rode on one.’ Hera wondered what she had said that was wrong, for she saw Mack’s face change.

‘I can’t read it,’ he said finally. ‘I can’t read.’

‘What do you mean you can’t read? Every—’ Hera stopped herself in time. ‘Oh, Mack,’ she finished. ‘That’s terrible. Oh, I am sorry.’ Hera
knew as well as anyone that there are always people who slip through the net, often very gifted people. ‘But I saw you—’

‘No, you didn’t. Polka does the accounts and Dickinson does my reading for me. I can spell things out if I have time, but I can’t read like nor—’

‘Don’t you dare say “normal people”. I’m going to teach you to read.’

‘Dickinson tried.’

‘Dickinson isn’t me!’

‘True.’

‘But now I’m going to read you Sasha’s little story, and then you can do a drawing.’

This she did. She sat down beside Mack. She leaned partly against him. And she read the famous words, ‘The shunt I want to tell you about happened when I was nine.’ She imitated
Redman shouting ‘Now move, you fucker’ and bright young Sasha saying ‘It’s curtains, bon-bon, unless you can climb a sunbeam.’ And when she had finished, she shut the
book with a snap and left it with him. Mack’s eyes were shining, for he liked a good story as much as the next man. Then out of the blue he said, ‘I love you.’ And Hera (God
forgive her) pretended she hadn’t heard, and so Mack pretended he hadn’t said it, and life went back to normal.

That afternoon, walking in the forest, Hera found two graves, the bodies – shrunk and dry and peacefully exhumed – lying on the surface. She called Mack and
together they burned the corpses.

The same force that was making the fractal gate unstable and causing Captain Abhuradin so much trouble was accelerating change on the planet. The increasing reappearance of corpses was just one
manifestation. But it was not only bodies. Anything that had been buried was brought up: barrels, concrete foundations, old bottles, old kettles, bones, broken cans, scraps of paper . . .
Everything. One must just imagine, if one follows the logic of all this, that every pound of turd, every pint of piss, every gobbet of phlegm and every dribble of blood found its resting place
somewhere on the surface of Paradise; there not to rot but be embalmed. Unmoving. Unloved. Derelict and redundant.

A kind of resurrection was undoubtedly taking place. A movement that had begun years ago when a Paradise plum became toxic was now gathering momentum. A planet that had dozed, happy since its
first oceans formed, was asserting itself, and cleaning itself. For humans this process had sinister implications.

Though Hera’s body had healed, her mind was more troubled. As the smoke rose from the funeral pyre she said, ‘I’m glad you’re here. I’m glad you can share it with
me. I get these funny ideas. This afternoon I thought,
I wonder if events are casting their shadow backwards in time? So we hear them before they happen
.’

‘That’s what hunches are,’ said Mack. ‘Shadows from the future.’

‘Do you ever get frightened of your . . . hunches?’

He thought for a moment. ‘Well, I used to accept them. Never thought they were strange until I grew up. But now, here on Paradise, I can’t read the future so I’m taking things
as they come. “And how can a man die better than facing fearful odds,/ For the ashes of his fathers, and the temples of his Gods”.’
⁴

‘Where did you learn that?’

‘My granny. Always spouting poetry, she was. Couldn’t shut her up.’

‘You are amazing.’

At that time, while they were aware of external changes, they were more preoccupied by the changes happening inside them. They were like people learning a new language who
gradually realize that the words are starting to make sense without having to translate them. But other forces were at work.

Some days after Hera’s conversation with Captain Abhuradin, after Mack had talked to his team and told them he would not be coming back until Hera did, and after the good Captain A had
simply granted a retrospective licence for Mack to remain on Paradise, giving him the honorary title of research assistant, the sky suddenly darkened over Hera and Mack, as though a giant bird had
flown over the sun.

At the moment when the sun seemed to flicker, Mack was working on the roof of the shilo, pegging back the Tattersall weed that had become rampant since having its flowers
stripped. He straightened and looked up. There was nothing wrong with the sun and nothing flying either. It was Mack’s optic nerve that had, for a moment, been pre-empted. He blinked, shook
his head and then, as though a door had opened in the sky, found himself engulfed in a thunder of ringing. The sound knocked him down to the ground, where he knelt, head down, while a wave of
nausea made him gasp.

Hera, deep in the bush behind the monkey trees, being more attuned to the changing ways of this planet and therefore more able to ride them, let the sound wash through her. Keeping her eyes
closed, she concentrated and was able to distinguish the presence of the Dendron from the background roaring. The feeling it conveyed was vastly more of pain, panic almost, certainly a cry for
help. But not directed to her especially. Broadcast to whoever could hear, anywhere.

The fractal gate high above hiccoughed at that moment, and a freighter vanished.

Hera had been preparing another funeral pyre. She had come upon two more graves, a man and a woman. They had lain beneath the soil for over a hundred years but had now been
returned to the surface with considerable disturbance and lay, shrivelled and dry, on the dark soil. Their skin was tight and brown and shiny and the clothes they had been buried in were leached of
colour and stiff as boards.

Hera left the bodies without striking the flame and ran back to the shilo.

‘Did you feel that?’

‘My stomach did. I fell off the roof. Is that the voice you talk about?’

‘Yes. No. Similar. What you felt just now was a cry for help, Mack. We have to go. We can’t ignore it. You can’t stop a baby coming once it starts.’

‘A baby?’

‘No. Sorry, that’s misleading, but the same idea. The Dendron needs to divide. Fission!’

Some minutes later it was Mack who applied a flame to the small pyre. The bodies burned quickly, like paper dolls, like old parchment, and the bones glowed white before collapsing into ash. Even
the skulls burned, turning to roaring balls of fire which flared up and died. Mack watched thoughtfully and then shook his head and made his way back to the shilo.

Hera had already brought the SAS out of the hangar and was ticking things off verbally. ‘Larder’s fine. Water’s fine. Power’s at max. I’ve restocked the medi-kit. I
see you’ve made yourself a nest in the control cabin. Very comfortable.’

‘Only place I can stretch out.’

‘There’s a spare berth.’

‘I’m OK where I am. Now I know something you won’t have thought of.’ He ran back to the shilo and emerged moments later carrying his tool belt. ‘If you want to make
a demolition man feel naked, take his tool belt off him.’

‘Thanks, I’ll remember that.’

The SAS came to power and Hera took them spiralling up into the sky.

High above the monkey trees, she looked down. The last of the smoke from the pyre was curling above the trees. The SAS flew in a circle. ‘So which way?’ asked Mack.

Hera looked at him blankly. Then she looked out of the windows as though for inspiration. ‘I . . . I don’t know.’ She looked at him. ‘Mack, this is silly.’

‘Well try. Just relax and do whatever it is you do.’

Hera leaned back and closed her eyes. She thought of the Dendron arching above her. With the image came emotion but it was everywhere, and nowhere, and shapeless. She opened her eyes. ‘I
can’t, Mack. I get no sense of direction.’

He looked at her a bit hesitantly and then said, ‘Can I try?’