Walking to the Stars (5 page)

"When you said you could fix things, I thought you meant you could fiddle with motors. How did you learn to do this kind of thing?” Nick asked.

"I'm an electrical engineer,” Samuel said quietly.

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The road out to the camp was rutted and pot-holed, and the van lurched and bounced its way slowly over the corrugations. They drove through farmland, all the paddocks either dark red with the freshly turned over soil or lush green with lupins or green clover pasture dotted with fat sheep. Then the farmland ended, and was replaced by an area of previously cleared land that had been abandoned, and the fences had either been dismantled or had fallen over. Kangaroos grazed the overgrown paddocks, and birds circled overhead.

"Wedgetails,” Nick said pointing up and through the windscreen at black dots in the overcast sky.

One swooped down into a paddock, and flew up again with something furry in its claws. Samuel realized that wedgetails were eagles, and were a couple of meters across the wingspan, huge and black and beautiful.

"Wow,” Samuel said.

They drove through a tall forest, where the trunks of the trees were pink and silver, the undergrowth was thick, and bird calls filled the air.

Screeches and squawks, deep and high, filled the air, and the most gorgeous birds began to swoop down the road ahead of them, pink and grey birds that looked like parrots, larger black birds with a dash of red under their tails, little red and green birds that flitted in and out of the trees.

A big boulder beside the track loomed dark and wet out of the undergrowth, and Nick brought the van to a halt in front of the rock.

"Get out,” he said, and he opened his own door and came around to hand Samuel his crutches.

Samuel expected someone to come out of the forest to greet them, but Nick merely leaned forward and pressed his hand against the boulder.

A deep sound rumbled, like thunder heard from a long way off, and Nick looked around at Samuel and said, “You too."

Samuel knew about rocks. The planet was just a rock with attitude and its own biosphere, and he knew that rocks were hard and rough and, well, rock-like.

So this obviously wasn't a rock. It felt warm, and not just sunshine-warm, with a give in its surface, and he could just plain feel the life pulsing through it. This rock was undeniably alive.

He must have stood there a while, hand on the rock, trying to rearrange his world view, because Nick put a hand on his arm and said, “Samuel? You right there?"

Samuel lifted his hand off slowly and blinked at Nick. “Think so,” he said, and he found that when he tried to hobble back to the car his leg didn't deep-down ache as much.

They bounced and thudded in the van, down a hillside, where the trees grew taller and taller, different types now, not just the pink and silver trees of earlier. The track ended at a large clearing, where huts made of scrap metal huddled around a collection of ancient cars. Scores of little children swarmed out of the bush, shouting and jumping up and down beside the van and big yellow dogs ran around, yipping sharply.

The children were all colors, from darkest black to fairer than Nick, and they all had the same shining eyes and loud voices. When Nick got out of the van he bent down and scooped one of the smaller children into his arms.

Adults began to appear, from down the hillside, carrying buckets on their shoulders, and from inside the huts, and the sun was shining even though it had been overcast and grey and damp when they'd left the farm.

Samuel opened the van door and eased himself out, and the children around his side shouted with excitement, possibly at his crutches and leg cast.

Nick's hand steadied him. When Samuel glanced up from the curious hands patting his leg cast and the cut-off leg of his trousers, an old man walked toward them, pushing his way through the gathering crowd.

"Nick!” the old man said, toothless grin surrounded by a bushy white beard against dark skin.

Nick and the man spoke for a while in a language that was rich and rumbling and reminded Samuel of nothing so much as the feel of the rock he had touched, then Nick said, “This is Samuel. He can fix things."

"Samuel?” the old man said, and he smiled and held out his hand for Samuel to shake. “You're a black fellow? Where's your mob?"

Samuel shook the man's gnarled hand. He felt like the rock, and Samuel had no idea what his question meant.

Nick said, “Samuel isn't a black fellow, he's a whiteman, and he's from a long way away, in South America. Samuel, this is Ed."

Samuel found himself entranced by the man's face, it was like looking back through time. Ed had the solid brow ridge and forward slung jaw that spoke of an uninterrupted genetic descent from the earliest people, with an explosive shock of white hair against his black skin, and eyes that could see the end of eternity.

"South America, unna?” Ed said, grinning. “You've seen the Amazon? The mighty river, eh?"

"I have,” Samuel said. “It was so big that I couldn't see the other side."

"You come from the Amazon, and you fix our camp?” Ed said, nodding. “You, Jeeditch, and you, Benji, help Samuel."

Nick opened the back of the van and took out the box of tools that Samuel had scrounged from the sheds at the farm, an eclectic collection of woodworking equipment, fence wire cutters, and even, thankfully, an old-fashioned soldering iron that Samuel would be able to heat up in a fire if he needed it.

Two of the larger children peeled away from the crowd and took the box, and Nick picked up the carry bag of medical supplies from the van.

"What should I fix first?” Samuel asked, looking at the small water tank on a stand and the solar panels that covered it. “Does the water pump work?"

"Water first, then have a look at the generator,” Nick said, and he walked over to stand beside a heavily pregnant woman and feel her belly.

Climbing the water tower to check the photovoltaic panels, even just the couple of meters of rusted ladder, wasn't an option, so Samuel settled for sitting inelegantly on the red gravel at the base, after checking for snakes, and prizing the top off the bore cover, all while dozens of children watched in awe.

He could see spiders down there, in the bore casing; redbacks and plain black spiders, big ones, little ones. Lizards scurried around, and one of the dogs couldn't resist the temptation and scrambled over Samuel in an attempt to catch one of the lizards.

The lizard hissed and spat, startling the dog into jumping backwards, and the inside of the lizard's mouth was bright blue.

The kids swatted and splatted the spiders, clearing them away from the bore pump, while Samuel pulled on a pair of gloves that Josh had found for him and began to move the dried leaves and debris away from the pump.

It was actually pleasant, sitting in the weak winter sunlight, listening to the children chatter amongst themselves in their own language, and Samuel's focus narrowed down to the task at hand; to disconnecting the pump, undoing rusted solid bolts, then scraping away the perished gaskets.

He'd been doing this kind of thing all his life; taking to pieces broken machinery from before the Collapse, finding out how it worked and how to fix it, and this was no different. He had no spare parts here, and no equipment, but that didn't mean he couldn't improvise.

He interrupted the chatter to ask the biggest boy, Jeeditch, “Do you have an old tire? Or a piece of fibreboard, like fences used to be made out of?"

Jeeditch scampered off, and Samuel levered the strainer compartment lid off. The strainer compartment was full of gravel, dried on sediment and slurry, baked in long ago no doubt, and Samuel chipped it out with a hammer and screwdriver, then cut new gaskets out of the worn out and perished car tire that the kids brought him.

Once that was bolted back together again, he moved onto the controller unit. It was burned out, as far as he could tell, so he just disconnected it, peeled back the ancient insulation from the wires and reconnected the drive unit for the pump directly to the photovoltaic circuit.

Whirring and grinding noises came almost immediately from the barrel of the bore unit, and then above him the distinctive gurgling of water hitting the dry tank.

He bolted the cover back onto the bore unit, tossed his tools back into the box, then used his hands on the tank stand to pull himself back upright.

The drain spigot on the side of the tank was out of his reach, so he gave Jeeditch a hammer and said, “See that valve? Think you can climb up there and hit it hard, so the water comes out?"

It took two of the kids to undo the spigot, with a fair bit of hammering, and by the time the valve opened, a crowd had gathered.

Water, red and muddy and sandy, but undeniably water, splashed out of the valve and onto the ground, and Samuel could hear the pump picking up speed, whirring away. It seemed that while he'd done some exciting things in his time, this might be the best ever.

Samuel sat awkwardly on the long grass beside the generator, surrounded by bits of generator motor and too many small children, so Nick shooed the smaller and more inquisitive of the children away and squatted down opposite Samuel.

"How's it going?” he asked, and Samuel looked up at him, eyes gleaming.

"You can't run a diesel generator motor on linseed oil,” he said, as if he was stating the obvious. “It cokes up the injectors."

"Oh?” was all Nick could think of saying. “Is that bad?"

"It's catastrophic,” Samuel said, and he yanked hard at the generator motor and a bit of it come off in his hands. “But I'll take it back to the farm and have a go at cleaning it up and getting it running."

He handed the part up to Nick and then used the side of the humpy that sheltered the generator to pull himself upright.

Once he was steady on his crutches, Nick said, “You ready to go? I'd like to be home before dark, since Josh has been seeding all day, and he probably needs a break for a few hours."

Across the camp, in the stream of water that was gushing out of the tank and creating a rivulet down the hillside, kids splashed and shouted while an adult poured buckets of water over them, also laughing.

"I've told Ed not to let anyone drink the water or turn the spigot off until tomorrow. Then there'll be water available in the camp for the first time in years,” Nick said.

"Is it safe to drink?” Samuel asked as he pointed at tools for Benji to put back in the tool box.

"Definitely not,” Nick said. “But neither is the creek water they've been drinking, so it probably doesn't matter. Either someone invents, builds and installs a water purification system here, or the community builds real housing with rain water catchment tanks. Neither is going to happen."

Samuel had a faraway look in his eyes, and Nick said, “Samuel?"

"Just thinking,” Samuel said. “Wondering how hot I could get a solar magnifier to run."

It was raining again, thankfully, when the van pulled up outside the house fence. Nick left Samuel stoking up the stove and started on his chores.

Harold wasn't sitting on the verandah, so he must be out riding the tractor with Josh, keeping him company, but Nick filled the dog's water and food bowls ready for him.

He fed the chickens and geese and collected the few eggs that had been laid during the day. When he took the eggs inside, Samuel had the fire roaring, so Nick tossed the leg of hogget he'd been given as payment for Sue's sutures in a pan and shoved it in the oven.

Samuel followed him back out to the garden, and sat on the verandah out of the rain while Nick dug potatoes for the night's meal, then found some silverbeet and cabbage to go with them.

Nick checked his herb patch next, before the light was completely gone. He grew the essentials; feverfew, poppies, marijuana, comfrey, rue; mostly as insurance against a deterioration in the weather, the roads, or the economy cutting off his supply of pharmaceutical drugs from Albany. He probably had the most wasted snails in the district.

Comfrey was rioting, the poppies were dead winter stalks. The marijuana was lagging behind too, not thriving in the cold. It would die off completely with the first frost. The feverfew was robust, and would keep going strong.

It wasn't completely dark, so Nick swung the axe a few times, splitting mallee roots from the mountain beside the shed. It was one of the problems with farming mallee country, the damned roots, but at least they never had to go looking for firewood.

Samuel was back inside, candles lit in the kitchen, when Nick took the veggies inside, and he had the bits from the generator spread out on the hearth. Nick left him there, muttering under his breath at the blackened bits he was tinkering with.

Nick took one of the candles and went through the dark house to his study. He kept detailed notes of everything, trying to make sure that none of the putative knowledge he had was lost forever as the memories of before the Collapse faded in the community, and he wanted to write about the stranger that was with them now.

He heard Josh come in, stomping mud from his feet on the verandah, talking to Harold, then the plumbing in the house thudded and gurgled as Josh ran himself a bath, so it was time to put the potatoes on to boil.

Samuel was still sitting in front of the stove, candle beside him, plastered leg stretched out across the floor, and he didn't look up from his work when Nick took the lid off one side of the stove and put a pan of water on to boil.

Josh was singing in the bath, no doubt sloshing water everywhere, too. Nick rinsed the dirt off the potatoes, and the rain drummed against the roof. He'd been happier, certainly, back when his wife, Fineen, had been alive, but he felt a kind of happiness in this, in having enough food, knowing that a crop was going in, and that maybe things would get easier, if it just kept on raining.

Josh came into the kitchen, damp from his bath, grinning cheerfully. “Cold front's coming through,” he said. “Can't seed tonight."

"Sheep going to be all right?” Nick asked.

"I moved the second mob up to the Tree Paddock. There's not much feed there, not yet, but they'll have some shelter under the gums."