The Other Tree (18 page)

“How do you mean?” asked Chris.

“Holloway could work in any of the major pharma labs in the US. His discoveries have applications in every field of medical research, and his findings are nothing short of astonishing. But he insists on staying here, doing his research on borrowed equipment in an office the size of a walk-in wardrobe. He’s an eccentric, but mark my words, when they find a cure for cancer it’ll be because of his work.”

Chris felt a sudden pang in her chest, and for a moment, she had to struggle for breath. She swallowed hard and tried to push the surging thoughts away.

He would be sitting in the living room right now, watching a documentary on TV. Or he might be carefully frying a fish, making sure he hadn’t eaten more than two servings this week, for fear of mercury poisoning. Or maybe he’d be looking through old photos, family videos playing silently in the background. Or maybe he was lying on the floor—

Why wasn’t she there?

Luke glanced at Chris, and she turned her face away quickly, pinching the bridge of her nose discreetly.

“Where’s Professor Holloway now?” asked Chris.

“His office is at the end of the corridor. Take a left, and it’s the second door to the right. Good luck, and if you’re ever thinking about getting a degree, keep us in mind.”

Professor Fuller gave them a crooked smile, then disappeared into an office with the sign “Faculty of Biomechanical Engineering.” Chris felt a strange fluttering in her heart, like a sloshy blend of dread and excitement.

“I think I’d like to see him first. Just me,” said Chris. “Is that okay?”

Luke looked down the empty corridor, then out the window at the sunlight glaring from the opposite building.

“Sure,” said Luke. “Give me a call if you need anything.”

“Emergency word is ‘beanstalk,’” said Chris as she headed down the corridor.

“How are you going to work ‘beanstalk’ into a normal conversation?” called Luke.

But Chris had already disappeared around the corner. Luke sighed to himself as he tracked back along the corridor. It occurred to him that deep-sea fish with glowing lures dangling above ravenous mouths had evolved with people like Chris in mind. Oh, grandma, what big teeth you have. Can I count your molars and measure your canines, and maybe take a teeny sample of fur where you’ll hardly notice any missing at all?

Luke paused, a door plate catching his eye. Perhaps there were advantages to boutique universities after all.

* * *

Generic grey linoleum covered the floor, and the walls were the colour of old cream. This end of the university was silent, lined with cramped offices occupied by throbbing brains hunched over computers and microscopes.

Chris knocked softly on a wooden door with the tin nameplate “Prof. T. Holloway.” There was a shuffling sound, followed by a noise like a very small avalanche.

“Come in,” hollered a male voice, which sounded like it would have no trouble carrying across a mountain range.

Chris pushed the door open gently, feeling slight resistance as several large jars and boxes were shunted across the floor. She squeezed through the doorway into a small, cluttered office, and found herself standing in rather intimate proximity to a lean man in his early fifties. His mousey-coloured hair was shot through with grey, and his shirt sleeves were rolled up to reveal skin that had spent a good many years under outback sun.

He was sitting in a rolling student chair, the desk before him piled with papers and books. The office was lined with shelves that were heaving with folders, jars, and chunks of rock. The floor was covered with boxes overflowing with similar odds and ends.

“Professor Holloway?” asked Chris.

“How can I help you?” replied Marcus Flute.

A billion different questions plastered Chris’s brain, and almost every scenario ended with Marcus sprinting out the door, never to be seen again. Or possibly campus security being called and Chris being run out of town by the local law.

She reached into her jacket, pulling out the specimen bag containing the remains of the clown-faced spider.

“I was wondering if you could identify this?” asked Chris. “It’s some kind of arachnid, but like nothing I’ve seen before.”

Marcus pulled a pair of spectacles from a pile of dried sea urchins and pushed the plastic frames onto his nose. He inspected the squashed spider with fascination, and unzipped the bag.

“May I?”

“Go ahead,” said Chris, watching as Marcus removed the mashed spider from the bag with a pair of tweezers.

He pulled a battered light microscope from a nearby shelf and cleared a space on the cluttered desk. Adjusting the microscope’s concave mirror, he placed the arachnid corpse under the lens.

“Incredible,” said Marcus, face pressed to the eyepiece. “Very distinctive colouring, patterns still clearly visible.”

Marcus pulled back, adjusting his glasses.

“Not in great condition, though,” said Marcus. “You’re better off using jars.”

“It was actually like that when I found it. What is it?”

“It
was Mopsus fossor
. Sightings are rare and poorly documented. I’ve only ever seen sketches myself. No one even knows if they’re toxic, but I bet I could get a biochemical sample from this. Where’d you find it?”

“It was in my car,” said Chris. “In Melbourne.”

The temperature in the office dropped slightly, and she could see Marcus stiffen almost imperceptibly.

“Professor Holloway,” said Chris. “I’m Chris Arlin, Rana’s daughter.”

Marcus’s expression changed, turning razor sharp and defensive as his gaze darted expectantly to the door. When no one rushed in wielding guns or business cards, he turned warily back to Chris, his voice low.

“What do you want?”

“I want… I wanted to…” Chris faltered.

I want to know what my mother died for. I want to find out what my mother was trying to hide. I want to know why she left us. I want to know what was so important she was willing to die for it
.

Eleven years of pent-up questions and repressed resentment boiled through Chris, and she clenched her hands to stop them from shaking.

“I just wanted to talk to someone, about my mother,” said Chris, her voice tight.

Marcus studied Chris for a few moments, as though struggling to find some trace of Rana in her. Finally, he dragged a stool from behind a pile of fallen boxes, motioning for her to sit.

“I wanted to go to the funeral,” said Marcus, sagging back into his chair. “Too gutless, I guess. It was just too… strange and unreal.”

Marcus stared out a small side window, looking at a red dustbowl where several students were kicking around a soccer ball.

“Rana was always the sensible one, the one who knew how to make things happen,” said Marcus. “I was the eternal boy, hiking through the mountains with my bucket of rocks.”

“Everyone here seems to think you’re a genius.”

Marcus grinned wryly.

“Yeah, they said that about Beethoven. But they also said he stank and bit people.”

“I’ve never heard that,” said Chris dubiously.

“PR,” said Marcus, eyes sparkling. “It’s all about PR.”

“You don’t bite people, right?”

“No, just corporations.”

The smile faded.

“I’m not cut out for all this funding justification crap,” he said. “Politicking and campaigning and showing cause. Some days I feel like I’m standing on the deck of a burning ship, giving the finger to the Coast Guard. But after Rana… After she died, I swore I’d never work with the big firms. They chew you up and spit you out, and all the good work you could have done becomes grist in the profit mill.”

“What work is it that you do now?”

“Slime,” said Marcus, leaning towards Chris with a boyish grin.

“Like ectoplasm, or like protoplasm?”

He smiled with pleasure.

“Biologist?”

“Botanist,” replied Chris.

“Rana said you’d go into medicine, but I knew it’d be geology or botany,” said Marcus, eyeing Chris thoughtfully. “You’ve got perspective. Like looking at bands of light and shadow in the heart of a stone and seeing something that lived a hundred million years ago.”

“Or seeing the key to human cellular function in primordial slime mould.”

“Exactly!” said Marcus. “Independent amoeboid entities, capable of joining together to form a larger, multicellular plasmodium slug creature to achieve a common goal, with each amoeba acting like a single cell in an animal. Then, when the goal is achieved, they can separate again into single-nuclei amoeba and go their own way.”

Marcus seemed luminous with the indescribable passion of slime mould research.

“Like people,” said Chris.

“It
is
people,” said Marcus. “We just don’t separate back into individual cells.”

“That would be pretty gross,” said Chris, imagining people melting into masses of individual cells, all mooching away in different directions.

“And disadvantageous. Somewhere along the evolutionary track, it was beneficial for some single-celled organisms to remain in large communities, to become specialised and cooperate for the common good. Again, like people.”

Marcus glanced out the window as the students cheered an arbitrary goal.

“But the common good’s a tricky thing,” said Marcus. “It’s important not to lose sight of the individuals in a team. You shouldn’t forget that people matter, sometimes more than the outcome.”

His eyes fogged with painful, angry memories.

“Some people don’t understand,” said Marcus. “And some people don’t give a damn. They kick you in the guts and then wonder why you kick back when they come at you with money.”

“I know the feeling,” said Chris, staring at the floor.

“How’s your dad?” asked Marcus gently.

Why am I here?

“He’s not too good,” said Chris, swallowing the lump in her throat. “Lung cancer.”

Genuine dismay filled Marcus’s expression, and he bit back all the obvious questions.

“I’m so sorry,” said Marcus.

Chris nodded, resolve flooding her veins.

This is why I’m here
.

Chris looked at Marcus, her gaze clear and steady.

“Did my mother contact you, in the two months before she died?”

He saw it then, in her eyes. For a heart-stopping moment it was almost like Rana looking back at him through someone else’s face. It was that same look of unassailable purpose, of glorious confidence, that had always sent a thrill of delighted dread shivering through him. He still remembered so clearly the way she would look at him, her eyes full of joy at some new challenge, saying, “How about it, Marcus? Feel like taking it on?” And off they would go, pressing for some new vaccine, forcing issues onto the agenda of the ministers’ summit, implementing revolutionary health programs that always managed to kick sand in someone’s face. In spite of everything he knew as a scientist, he still found it difficult to accept that someone so
alive
could just…

His hazel eyes clouded with grief, caution, hesitation—old memories stirred up like silt at the bottom of a pond.

“About three weeks before she…she died…I got a call from Rana,” said Marcus. “She said she was on an expedition… She couldn’t say much, but she sounded… strange. She told me I…”

Marcus’s eyes glistened, and he blinked quickly.

“She told me I always did the right thing… She admired that I never compromised,” said Marcus. “She told me to stay true to that. She said she missed me—”

Marcus ran trembling fingers through his hair. You could bury the memories and turn them to stone, but a hundred million years later, they rumbled back to the surface, to be cracked open by some kid with a mallet and a bucket.

“That was the last time I heard from her,” said Marcus, taking a deep breath.

He fell to his knees suddenly, shoving the desk across the floor. Chris leapt to her feet, resuscitation protocols rushing through her head. Marcus’s fingers dug into the floor, prising up a linoleum tile which had been beneath one leg of the desk. Underneath the tile was a shallow space, containing a sealed plastic bag.

“Two weeks after she died, I got this in the mail,” said Marcus.

He held out the plastic bag to Chris.

Secrets and subterfuge. Mysteries and conspiracies. Chris wondered how much her mother must have changed, how the grief had transformed her into someone else altogether. Chris opened the bag and pulled out a brittle, brown envelope, sealed with string. Inside were three pale pages.

The first was a note in her mother’s handwriting, scrawled hurriedly on a leaf of hotel stationery. It read:

Dear Marcus
,

You were right
.

With love and admiration always
,

Rana
.

The second page was a very old piece of parchment, its border delicately illuminated with gold leaf. The right edge was jagged, as though torn from a book. It had a single line of calligraphy, written in Hebrew.

“I had it translated,” said Marcus.

Chris turned to the final page. It was a plain sheet of notepaper, with a series of words in spidery black ink.

The blood of the blameless man
.

10

Dusty texts dropped to the table in front of Luke like alien ships crash-landing.

“So what’s your major?” asked Sorakova, dropping another solid text onto the table, this one bound in green felt with silver embroidery.

Sorakova was Corrawong’s generally esteemed Professor of Obscure History. She had travelled a long and bumpy road to reach this point in her career, in a world where rarity brought ridicule more often than it brought prestige. She was a short woman in her mid-fifties, with bright blue eyes and a single plait the colour of marigolds.

“I’m not actually studying, I just have an interest,” said Luke, reaching towards a book titled
Pictograms for Beginners
.

He hesitated, then picked up
Advanced Pictograms
instead. White light flowed through the spotless office, and decorative fountains the size of goldfish bowls bubbled softly on ornamental stands. While Sorakova bustled happily in the background, humming Viking drinking songs, Luke leafed through densely filled pages crowded with stylised symbols.