The War of Immensities (15 page)

“Too many
people these days confuse truth with the facts,” Thyssen rambled.
What was happening? Was he drunk?

“They are
mutually dependent…”

“Not at all. A
fact is that which you can prove to be so. The truth is what you
earnestly believe is how things are. There is no necessary
connection between them. Consider a man—I know his name, so do a
lot of other people and we all agree on his address, who his
friends are, what he wears, his eye and hair colour, what mode of
transport he prefers, how his voice sounds—far more than adequate
evidence to prove the fact of his existence, but that existence is
untrue if he is Santa Claus or Sherlock Holmes. It is true that JFK
was killed by more than one assassin, even though the facts assure
us Oswald operated alone.”

“This
conversation isn’t about what I thought is was about, is it?” Jami
said warily. All of a sudden, it occurred to her that she was
receiving an insight into the mind of the true Harley Thyssen—the
one he was usually careful to keep well hidden.

“It’s a random
universe, you see—at least so they would currently have us
believe—and in a random universe, no amount of accumulation of
facts can ever possibly add up to the truth. All of the facts, and
the truth, are totally different things. Science is accumulation of
facts. Religion is nonsense. But where is truth? Picasso said: Art
is the lie that reveals the truth. So, here we are, both lying and
telling the truth. The trick is to believe everything, until you
know its a lie. But when you know its a lie, never believe it
again.”

“I’m not quite
willing to abandon the facts at this stage, Harley.”

“Neither you
should. But remember that Albert Einstein was horrified when he
realised that the logical conclusion of his discoveries was that we
live in a random universe where there is no order and nothing makes
sense. `I cannot believe that God plays dice,’ he declared. We
cannot believe it either. Things do seem to make sense to us, and
we cannot accept that the very idea of something making sense is
itself an illusion. And therein lies the answer. Einstein was
right: that things can make sense and that humanity strives to make
sense of them is the truth—that it is a random universe where
nothing makes sense is simply a result of the facts. There’s no
truth in it at all.”

“So how do you
explain the fact that the facts work for us, even though they don’t
exist? How do you explain the fact that there is order everywhere
we go, and we never encounter any of this randomness?”

“Maybe because
that’s the way we make it happen.”

“Are you
suggesting I should rig the facts and make the Shastri Effect
real?”

“Not at all.
No, definitely not. I’m suggesting you open your mind to the wider
possibilities.”

“You think that
is what’s happening here? That something truly random is taking
place?”

“Just think
about it, that’s all.”

She hung up,
realising he was no longer there. At least now she did know one
truth. In the night when he was all alone, weird weird things were
happening in the mind of Harley Thyssen.

Now that they
were being guided by the hand of God, things went far smoother. Her
newfound sense of purpose placed Chrissie in control and where she
took them was directly to the airport without any of the bewildered
meandering they had suffered when Lorna had been the prime
mover.

“Are you sure
about this, Chrissie,” Lorna did bother to ask. “I’m not sure our
budgets can stand two unnecessary trips to Australia in three
months.”

“The one good
thing cancelling a wedding does, Lorna, is solve all your cash-flow
problems.”

Bendigo had
been off-course—instead they took a train to a place called
Shepparton and then a bus to the town of Kyabram, where they
realised they had by-passed their mysterious destination. Another
bus took them out through open country until, about five kilometres
from Kyabram, they came to a place in open country where a dirt
road intersected theirs, and Chrissie was tapping the driver on the
shoulder.

“What’s down
that road?” Lorna thought to ask the driver, while Chrissie had
already jumped off and was hauling both suitcases.

“Nuthin down
there, luv. Just a few properties, then the creek and I think the
road runs out after that.”

“Okay. Thank
you,” Lorna said in her disappointment.

The bus pulled
away and they stood there, contemplating the dirt road before them.
It was really just a gravel track, leading through flat open fields
where occasional cattle roamed. Trees lined both side of the track
and otherwise dotted the landscape, all individual gums, mostly
fifty or so metres away from each other but the horizon was so flat
that they created the illusion of a forest way out there in all
directions. Behind them, they could see the shining iron of what
might have been a large shed, and there did seem to be a farm
further down their road, off in a clump of trees.

“Well, do we
walk or wait?” Lorna asked.

They were
dressed in jeans and light tops, Chrissie in joggers and Lorna in
sandals and both had hats and sunglasses. They could walk, or so
they thought. The grass was too long to leave the track and anyway,
barbed wire fences paralleled them on either side, the dirt of the
track was too soft and the gravel in the ruts too rough. They
hauled their suitcases about a hundred metres and then stopped and
sat on them.

“You sure this
is right, Chrissie,” Lorna protested. “There doesn’t seem to be
anyone down here.”

“You expect to
meet the saviour on a freeway?” Chrissie snapped back.

They should
have prepared better, brought water to drink at least. Instead they
lit cigarettes.

“Better watch
we don’t start a fire in this dry grass,” Chrissie warned.

“Get rid of the
snakes,” Lorna sighed.

This place had
the most ferocious bushfires and the most deadly snakes in the
world, both of them knew. It was hot, dry and alien—a fearful
place, unfriendly and forbidding. Neither would admit to the other
that they wanted to go home, now. But less definable urges thrust
them onward relentlessly.

Instead they
walked along the rough track, each trying to keep up the other’s
enthusiasm.

“Almost
there.”

“Yeah—I
know.”

But there was
nothing—no farm, no cultivation, nothing at all. And then. “What’s
that out there?” Chrissie asked. Lorna saw sunlight flashing off
something away to their right.

“Dunno,” Lorna
declared, staring with a hand shading her eyes. “Looks like a
truck. Big semi, without it’s trailer. What the hell’s it doing out
there?”

They stood by
their suitcases, contemplating the scene.

“I don’t see
anyone around,” Lorna said.

“Right place
though,” Chrissie smiled. “I know it is.”

The shining
truck was parked under a solitary tree about a hundred and fifty
metres off the track. Plainly, chariots weren’t what they used to
be, Lorna thought but didn’t say.

Chrissie was
already heading off that way, hauling the case with two hands,
heedless of snakes and everything else. “Come on, Lorna, come
on.”

They swished
through the long grass, following the path flattened by the truck
and advanced upon the vehicle boldly. At the foot of the tree, they
saw, a man lay sleeping with his hat over his eyes. He was lying on
a sleeping bag even though he had a tent and full scale camp set
up. He snored.

Lorna looked
over the heap of empty cans—Victoria Bitter and a few baked beans,
and many empty cigarette packets. Surely God was not going to
appear to them as the Jolly Swagman. Chrissie stood back, puzzled
by the normality of it all, looking around, wondering. But Lorna
went forward and lifted the hat from the man’s eyes.

“Hello, under
there,” she said sweetly.

Brian Carrick
blinked and stared—of them all, it was only he would have the
vision of angels.

“G’day,” he
said. “Who the fuck are you?”

Lorna smiled,
squatting and looking around at Chrissie. Chrissie shook her head
sadly. If it was God, surely he would have known who the fuck they
were.

This was the
place where they fell. Sixty-three men and eight women plunged to
their deaths from this precipice and two other similar points along
the nearby cliffs. Harley Thyssen tried to hold the scene of those
dreadful moments in his mind, to experience being there, amongst
the victims, to know how they were and what was happening inside
them at the time. They walked like zombies, he had been told,
possessed by demons. But still it was impossible to conceive, how
one man could fall, then the one behind him, then the next with his
hysterical wife clinging to his legs. Jonestown, he thought. Or men
going up out of the First World War trenches, scrambling over the
slain bodies of those ahead of them, or the redcoats marching
resolutely without breaking ranks as snipers felled individuals in
their ranks. Yes, something like that, but not exactly. His main
difficulty was that the Padre did not speak English and Thyssen had
to gather his picture through an interpreter.

He turned to
the Padre now.

“Did they
scream?” he asked.

Munro, the
geophysicist from the US Geological Survey, who had taken charge of
the site, frowned at the question. He was acting as interpreter.
Thyssen needed to raise his eyebrows to get the question passed
on.

No. The women
screamed but the men did not.

There were no
other witnesses to the event. The villages above the mission from
where the victims had come were now deserted, exorcised and burned.
All the boats were gone from the roadstead below. Things were so
quiet around the mission these days that Padre Miguel was thinking
of moving on.

“And they were
the same men? The same ones who were in the coma three months
earlier?”

Yes. They were
the same men. It was said the demons possessed them while they
slept.

“And none of
them survived, and no man who was not in the coma died here.”

That is so.
Except, of course, the women they dragged over with them.

Munro, a long
skinny Southerner with blonde hair and glasses, looked far more
convincingly a scientist than Thyssen, who might have more
resembled a pioneer mountain man, or the boss of a biker gang.
Munro was continually saying things to the Padre that Thyssen did
not ask, and mostly they were reassurances that Thyssen was to be
respected. Now that the wave of journalists and tourists had
passed, the Padre had settled into deep suspicion of all
strangers.

“How were the
boats arranged when the men were first found in the coma?”

Munro could
answer that himself, with a slight irritation.

“They were in a
circle as you would expect.”

“Expect?
Why?”

“The shockwave
would have pushed them all outward from the centre.”

“All of
them?”

“No. But those
inside the circle all perished, and those outside it suffered no
effects.”

“Interesting.”

Munro shook his
head. “Harley, we’ve already explored all those possibilities. We
tested for bacteria and chemical effects emitted from the caldera
during the eruption. As we expected, it was too deep for anything
like that to reach the surface.”

“But there was
turbulence. The shockwave that pushed the boats into a circle.”

“True. At eight
hundred feet depth, you wouldn’t expect that. But it was only very
slight.”

“Yet severe
enough to kill these men three months later.”

“We can’t be
sure there is a connection.”

“There has to
be. Sixty-three men are knocked unconscious in their boats during
the eruption—all of them at the same distance from the epicentre.
All sixty-three lie in a coma for eight days, all recover on the
same day and eight weeks later, all sixty-three take a casual
stroll to Kingdom Come at the same time. How can you imagine there
is no connection?”

Munro hissed
with exasperation through the gap in his front teeth. “I didn’t say
there wasn’t a connection. They are obviously linked by a common
series of experiences. What I mean is that there is no evidence of
a common cause. Not a trace.”

“You mean, none
that you’ve been able to find.”

“Oh, you
imagine that you can find something where thirty of your peers
failed?”

“No. I don’t.
Perhaps everyone looked in the wrong places. Or perhaps all trace
of the cause had been eradicated before they started looking.”

“There’s always
traces, Harley. You know that.”

Thyssen gazed
at him severely.

“Under the
circumstances, I’m not prepared to be convinced of anything that I
thought I knew, Munro. And you shouldn’t be either.”

They stood for
a time, in the sun and gentle breeze. Like its cause, there no
trace of the tragedy that had happened here. That was only in the
minds and memories of men. Then the Padre was speaking.

“It is time for
mass. The Padre asks if you have finished with him?”

“One more
question,” Thyssen said first and then thought of the question
second. “Of all of the people he had talked to about this, did the
Padre hear of anyone who had experienced anything similar.”

The translation
took some time and the Padre shook his head at first, but then his
face cleared of doubt and he spoke again.

“There was a
woman,” Munro translated. “A doctor, from New Guinea or somewhere.
She telephoned, apparently. Said she had treated patients with a
similar condition. She predicted they would recover in seven or
eight days with no ill effects. But there were language problems
and nothing much is clear.”

Thyssen nodded,
and then asked very directly. “Are you sure it wasn’t New
Zealand?”