The Other Tree (15 page)

“You knew my mother?”

Griffith glanced quickly around the empty forecourt, and gestured them into the museum.

“Let’s talk inside.”

* * *

The hotel rose from the ocean like a coral spire. Sunlight shimmered on a calm sea, brilliant blue water sparkling under a flawless azure sky. Stace stood on the balcony of the suite in a pair of tailored board-shorts, looking out across a thin white ribbon of beach far below. He had an umbrella drink in one hand, while a throwing knife flicked casually in the other.

“You’re not being productive,” said Roman, the glow from her touchscreen reflecting in scarlet eyes.

“I’m just muscle,” grinned Stace. “Like Emir. We’re not professional eggs like you and Bale. Right, Emir?”

“Oil the climbing gear again, Stace,” said Emir, looking darkly through the archway to the smaller lounge.

He could see Docker passing by the doorway every so often, studying a printout or pressing a finger to his earpiece. Roman’s gaze flashed up periodically, checking that everyone was where she had left them. Bale examined sheets of glossy satellite photos spread across the floor, like a puzzle with no edges and an indefinite number of pieces. Emir finished cleaning his gun and snapped the magazine back into place.

This wasn’t exactly how Emir had imagined his life, but it did just fine. Plenty of free travel to exotic locations, a suspiciously generous pay package, no office politics, no career ladder, no Monday mornings at the water cooler, wishing you were young again. Just you and the job. Simple.

Lacking academic talent had closed many doors for Emir; drifting through his university years, the campus parkour club had been his outlet. It had been a loose association of people who shared a common love of movement and running: the sense that neither hill nor dale, fence nor rubbish bin, could stop, or even slow, you. Chris had hated it when he’d run courses through the library, vaulting trolleys and climbing shelves, barely ruffling a page. She’d complained about the sock prints on her books. But to Emir it had been freedom—just to run, leap, climb, overcoming each obstacle in a free-flowing line of motion, where nothing existed except you and your destination.

Emir had soon discovered there was considerable demand for such a talent. He had freelanced for a while in artefact recovery, and found it shockingly lucrative. At first, he had been rather suspicious of how often people misplaced priceless valuables at the bottom of the ocean, or deep inside mountain caves. But after a while, he had taken to asking only “where” and “what,” and for some reason, “why” no longer seemed so important.

He had worked with Docker on a few occasions before, on other missions bankrolled by SinaCorp. Docker remained a conundrum to Emir, clearly having an entire carousel of psychological baggage, but he had always been a reliable mission leader who got the job done. However, things were different now.

The job was the Tree of Life. But somehow Chris had gotten tangled up in it, like an octopus in a fishing net. Emir had the uneasy feeling that the only way to free the octopus was to cut loose the entire net, releasing all your fish, or else let the octopus stubbornly asphyxiate on your deck, cursing you with its last, bubbling squeak. Emir had no doubt which option Docker would take.

Docker strode into the main lounge, carrying a heavy, rectangular case with matte-black handles.

“I’m going to run some field tests,” said Docker. “I’ll be back tomorrow morning. Try not to start any wars.”

“That was Bale’s faul—” began Stace.

“Roman, you have command.” Docker left the room without a backward glance.

A few beats passed before Emir rose to his feet.

“I’ll be back in a minute,” he said.

In the marble corridors of the hotel, whorls of quartz were inlaid into the floor, giving the impression of rippling waves of light and water. Emir caught up to Docker at the lift, slipping inside before the elevator began its smooth descent.

“Do you want out?” said Docker.

“He said you tried to kill her,” said Emir, recalling the fury in the priest’s eyes.

“I didn’t. My time is valuable.”

The elevator doors opened onto the foyer, and Docker and Emir strode out into a towering atrium of air and light. The spiralling interior was adorned with hanging plants and balconies, stretching all the way up to the sweeping glass roof.

“You need to get your priorities straight,” said Docker. “Your goal is achieving the mission objective, and not letting down your team. Other people’s welfare and feelings, their mistakes and choices, are not your concern. If you don’t think you can do that, then now is the time to say so.”

Docker and Emir reached the front doors, stepping out into the dry heat. A valet in a sharply tailored suit stood by the Jeep, and Docker took the proffered keys.

“She chose to do this, regardless of how it might affect you,” said Docker.

Docker swung the heavy case into the back of the Jeep.

“How often did she call you after you dropped out of uni, Emir?” asked Docker casually.

Emir said nothing, but his jaw clenched slightly.

“Walk away now, and you keep the deposit,” said Docker. “Stay, and you commit to the mission. No questions, no complaints. What’ll it be?”

Emir thought of the octopus on the deck, waving its tentacles in angry defiance as heavy boots and fillet knives approached.

“I’ll see you when you get back,” said Emir.

* * *

Light filtered through the hall in dusty beams, shining like feeble spotlights through grimy windows. Cobwebs hung like airless sails, strung in morbid banners across the high ceiling.

The Stewart Burns Museum of Natural History had been a paragon of intellectual and educational interest almost a hundred years ago. Its collection of fossils, reconstructed skeletons, and preserved animals had been unrivalled on the continent. Even now, its beetle collection remained the largest in the Southern Hemisphere.

But funding had dried up as the public’s interest turned towards the excitement of sports and the glamour of television. National pride became tied to the fortunes of the country’s cricket team, rather than the obscure discoveries of academics knee-deep in bugs. Looking at pale corpses in jars grew to be perceived as creepy, while watching freshly butchered corpses on the silver screen was considered a sociable night out. Skeletons became passé, unless they were props at a toga party—and even then, they weren’t as popular as appropriated road signs.

People wanted new, exciting, interactive displays. They wanted loud noises and flashing lights, bright colours and fast sound bites. They wanted things that moved and entertained, that gave them reassuring messages about the world and their own importance in it. They didn’t want to stare into the skeletal face of someone who had died a hundred thousand years ago, wondering if that person had felt just as important and eternal as the viewer did now.

Chris and Luke followed Griffith through the main hall, past towering skeletons of rhino-sized
Diprotodon optatum
and giant kangaroo
Procoptodon goliah
, past delicately striped Tasmanian tigers staring glassily at eternally vigilant desert bandicoots. They passed through an adjoining hall filled with cabinets of glistening green malachite, discs of agate, smoky volcanic glass, and prickly chunks of lazulite. Neatly compartmentalised display cases boasted a rainbow assortment of chunky conglomerates, milky geodes, and glittering semi-precious stones, fogged beneath layers of fine dust.

They continued through yet another hall, passing shelves loaded with jars of curled-up marsupial mice, tiny golden tree frogs suspended in goggle-eyed surprise, frilled neck lizards defensively flared, and countless variations of geckoes, monitors, and agamid dragons, all faded in the formaldehyde.

Griffith finally stopped in a dimly lit hall which doubled as a storage room. Myriad tiny points of multicoloured light glimmered on the walls behind cabinet glass. The room was filled with beetles, tens of thousands, pinned and labelled, iridescent shells still catching the light. From giant, antlered beetles to tiny specks the size of pin heads—pinning those must have been a challenge.

Griffith walked to a filing cabinet sitting crookedly amidst several other pieces of abandoned office furniture. She pulled open a creaking drawer and shuffled through discoloured manila folders, finally pulling one from the file.

“Eleven years and three months ago,” said Griffith, leafing through the papers. “Death by a thousand funding cuts, but that was a deep one. We lost a lot of good people.”

Griffith’s gaze ran over the lines of type in grim remembrance.

“Marcus wasn’t just a talented classifier,” she said. “He was an exceptional biologist, a pioneer in his field. The discoveries he made in his tiny Melbourne office drove cutting-edge biomechanical and cellular research worldwide. When the museum let him go, his research went quiet. It all went with him, wherever that was.”

“Do you think something happened to him?” asked Chris.

Griffith shrugged.

“It all happened shortly after your mother passed. He lost a close friend, then his job, then his funding. He was very upset, and just before he left, he said a lot of goodbyes as though he never expected to see us again. We’ve heard nothing from him since, but I hope he’s well.”

“And the part you’re not telling us?” said Luke, watching Griffith’s hands as she gripped the file.

“Who are you, by the way?” She eyed Luke’s clerical collar with the slightest touch of hostility.

“He’s a friend,” said Chris. “He saved my life in Romania when I got bitten by a snake no one had seen before.”

“How…dramatic,” said Griffith.

“He’s helping me find out what happened to my mother in her last few months,” said Chris. “She left us two months before she died, and I think she was in contact with Marcus during that time.”

Griffith looked around at the walls of neglected beetles. You could almost hear the sound of slow decay.

“Shortly before Marcus lost his job, some people came looking for him. Legal types in a car that could have funded a year of exhibits. Marcus seemed agitated when they left. A few weeks after Marcus left, they came looking for him again, but none of us knew where he was. Then, six months ago, a man came by, asking about Marcus. Said he had a funding offer.”

Griffith shook her head.

“I don’t think Marcus wants to be found,” she said.

Chris could almost feel the ghosts of forgotten academics drifting through the halls. This was her future, if she stayed the course of public grants and independent research. A future of intermittent funding and eventual obsolescence. There were no shiny labs or cutting-edge equipment to be found here.

“I’ll be here a few days,” said Chris, ignoring Luke’s surprised expression. “If you do think of some way I could try to find Marcus, it would mean a great deal to me.”

Griffith nodded thoughtfully.

“Do you mind if we stay a little longer, and have a look at the displays?” asked Chris.

“Go ahead,” said Griffith. “The only regular visitor we get these days is an old gentleman who wears a raccoon on his head. We don’t normally allow animals, but it’s very well behaved.”

“Thank you,” said Chris.

Griffith gave her a subdued smile and left the hall. Chris stood quietly in the dim room, the walls softly glimmering with iridescent carapaces. There had been a time when beetles were the tanks of the animal world—indestructible, impenetrable, peak predators in the food chain. But the world had moved on, and outgrown them rather dramatically. An awful lot could happen in a hundred million years.

There would have been beetles in Eden
, thought Chris.
Munching away at grasses and fruit
.

Beetles. Fruit. A hundred million years ago.

“Luke—” said Chris suddenly, and raced from the room.

Startled, Luke turned around, half-expecting to see a giant beetle loosening itself from the wall and rampaging towards them. Seeing only silent cabinets, he followed the sound of footsteps hobbling urgently down the hall. He passed through corridors of shells and corals, past displays of teeth and claws belonging to animals which today had beaks and fins. Luke finally arrived back at the main hall, where he found Chris standing in the centre of the room, staring upwards.

A shaft of dusty light beamed in, illuminating a papier-maché globe the size of a log cabin, hanging from the ceiling by a thick wire. Coloured in faded shades of brown and cream, it depicted massive super-continents, adrift in unfamiliar seas. Pale script was printed across the globe in large copperplate.

Pangaea
.

Chris turned to Luke with a grin.

* * *

Late-afternoon light drifted into the library through marmalade-coloured windows, painting the sandstone walls in rich sunset tones. Chris piled another set of hardcover quarto books into Luke’s straining arms.

“Some people theorise that the events in Genesis occurred only about seven thousand years ago,” said Chris. “But from the description of the rivers running through Eden, we know there hasn’t been anything like it for far longer than that, if ever.”

Chris hauled another book the size and weight of a small child from the polished wooden shelf and dropped it onto the growing pile.

“If you look at it on a geological time scale,” continued Chris. “The face of the Earth used to be completely different, dominated by the single landmass Pangaea.”

“‘And God said, let the waters under the heaven be gathered together unto one place, and let the dry land appear,’” murmured Luke.

“As tectonic activity broke the land mass into smaller continents, they drifted apart, mountains rose and fell, seas opened up and were swallowed again, rivers flowed and then filled with dust. But we know Eden had fruit—it had flowering plants. But angiosperms didn’t appear until the Cretaceous period. The Permian era was dominated by ferns and conifers.”

“Do we really need all these books?” said Luke, arms trembling.

“We need paleogeographic maps of the Persian Gulf during the Cretaceous Paleocene period. And maybe some isopach maps.”