by Barry Klemm
Lorna had never really worked out whether she was Irish or a Kiwi—certainly her red hair, freckled complexion, accent and determined preference for green clothing, made her seem the former; in fact she had never been to Ireland.
But if she thought she was of confused origins, it was nothing compared to Chrissie who, apparently, had first appeared on Planet Earth in an orphanage in Lyon. Nothing was known of her parentage except that they were probably Vietnamese refugees. She was called Christine because a crucifix was her only worldly good, and Rice because that was all they could get her to eat at first.
Chrissie’s aptitude for languages got her through and spoke several fluently. French, English, Italian, several Germanic variants and Old French but oddly—perhaps because she had never experienced nor felt her Asian origins—she had never bothered with oriental languages. She did not know a single word of Vietnamese.
Chrissie had come to New Zealand for a ski-ing holiday and met John Burton and decided to stay. She soon got a job with a Government Interpreter Agency and was fully prepared to settle down to married life when she took the fateful trip to Ruapehu.
But it was actually Lorna and Chrissie who were the instant mix, for they found they had everything in common—except anything in particular, Chrissie liked to joke. Sisters of contradiction, was the way Lorna put it. Anyhow, they had done everything together since—did the rounds of pubs and parties together, met for lunch most days, they experienced a volcanic eruption and a helicopter crash together, died together and came back to life together. Together they originally met John Burton who worked in Lorna’s office. They were getting married together, Lorna joked.
And now sharing an abominable nightmare together, although it was plain that Chrissie was getting the worst of it. Finally the airport signs swept overhead and they were there when it seemed they never would be, and Lorna dragged Chrissie from the car, gasping with anxiety as much as effort. But—fortunately—the car park lay to the east of the terminal and almost as soon as they started to walk toward the welcoming lights, both began to be restored.
“God, what are we doing to ourselves?” Chrissie murmured. She looked a wreck and no doubt Lorna did too.
“It’s okay,” Lorna breathed. “We made it.”
But she knew it wasn’t over yet.
Inside the terminal, they were recovered enough to go to the loo and wash the awfulness they felt away, hide their pallid faces behind make-up, brush their hair and generally make themselves presentable again.
“This is crazy,” Chrissie was saying, fiddling with her hair, chewing the end. “Maybe we should have stayed at the beach,”
“No. It wasn’t far enough,” Lorna insisted.
“But we can’t just fly off anywhere.”
“Why not? Where’s your spontaneity? Just bung it on the plastic fantastic and it’ll be terrific.”
“I was saving for the honeymoon.”
“If you don’t take a holiday right now, there won’t be any honeymoon.”
Out on the concourse, Lorna was all charm and sweetness as she boldly approached a man in a uniform that suggested he was a pilot. The man immediately forgot whatever he was rushing off to. “Can you tell me which direction—exactly—in degrees—this is.”
She indicated the direction very precisely. The man frowned playfully as he consulted his mental compass. “Oooo, that looks like about 275—maybe 280 to me.”
“Good. Real good. Can you show us on the map?”
There was a map of the world over the cocktail bar and they looked that way.
“Over to Australia. Towards Melbourne, I should think. Maybe a little above Melbourne but below Canberra. Yes, definitely below Canberra.”
“Good. That’s wonderful,” Lorna radiated.
The man knew how to handle flirts. “Do you mind if I ask why you want to know?”
“We don’t know...” Lorna said dubiously.
“It was a bet,” Chrissie came up with in desperation.
“Yes, that’s right. A bet. I thought maybe Sydney but Chrissie said...”
The maybe pilot remembered where he was hurrying to and hurried off toward it.
Lorna stood before the Departures Board. “Qantas 505. Leaving in fifty minutes. Direct to Melbourne. That’ll be perfect.”
“What do we do when we get to Melbourne, Lorna?”
“Beats me. Know anyone there?”
“John has friends at Bondi.”
“Half the population of New Zealand lives at Bondi. That isn’t Melbourne.”
“This is really silly, Lorna. I’ve never heard of anyone who just up and offed to Australia.”
“We’ll be the first. Wait until everyone hears about it. They’ll all say ‘wow!”
“What a pair of loonies, you mean.”
*
After he put the billy on the campfire, Brian Carrick rolled a cigarette and squatted by the fire, smoking it to the end and throwing it down. The wide brim hat and squatting posture made him look like a character from a Lawson story, the ultimate bushman. For a night and a full day he had camped here, sleeping overnight in the cabin of the truck. Nothing had happened. No one had come. Not even a farmer to inquire about this stranger camped in the middle of his paddock.
It was silly really. He had waited because there was nothing to do but wait—patient, wandering about, taking great time over his meals, reading from a browned and tattered paperback book one of which he always carried in his back pocket—usually science fiction. The truck had a full array of camping gear and the casual observer might have thought he planned his stay carefully—no such thing had happened and there was no casual observer either. From time to time, he had felt another presence, he suspected, and would shiver and study the horizon and the sky. Nothing at all. He settled down to wait it out, sure that sooner or later, something must happen.
He sat with his back propped up against the only tree in this section of the paddock—not really a tree but the ghost of a dead gum, its only branches two snapped limbs that rose out of the top of the leaning trunk in the shape of a man who had just been shot.
He was reading what had somehow become his favourite book—not science fiction although Isaac Asimov wrote it. A Choice of Catastrophes, it was called, describing and assessing the likelihood of all the possible disasters the planet faced, starting with the gigantic—cosmic catastrophes like entropy and Armageddon, ranging downward through lesser disasters like the death of the Sun or the collapse of the galaxy, through collisions with asteroids or other free-range malevolencies, to man-made disasters like Global Warming and Nuclear Winters. There was something in this that fascinated him and it was the third time he had read it since his rehabilitation began. There was something about it that continually enticed him back to its pages—something that perhaps he had missed or forgotten—something that mattered.
He settled down to read, knowing that it would come eventually, that it was just a matter of being patient, that he had all the time in the world.
*
It had come down to the cockroach—a creature so simple in its anatomy and habits that even nuclear war would not affect it. Jami was beginning to feel a bit like one herself, scuttling into the shadows when the light came on, hiding forever in dark corners and basements.
Well, they had put her in a corner of the basement in the Earth Sciences Building which, Harley had said, would keep her nice and inconspicuous for a while. He didn’t want anyone asking her what she was doing until the funding came through.
She broke the task down. The effect, she knew, happened in advance of the eruption and therefore the first body of research she needed to explore was the business of predicting volcanoes and earthquakes. And, as Harley punned, a shaky business it was.
The interesting thing was that volcanoes and quakes were always predictable, the movement of tectonic plates in subduction zones effected the volcanoes along the andesite line and told geologists what to expect. When the water suddenly disappeared f
rom the wells, the peasants in earthquake prone regions knew it was time to pack up and get out. Volcanoes invariably bubbled and shook for months before they erupted.
Satellites scanned with infra-red and could detect new hot spots below the surface of the earth. The presence of changes in regional magnetic fields or radioactivity or chemicals in the lakes and rivers warned that trouble was on the way.
The only time that volcanoes ever erupted unexpectedly was as a result of a massive earthquake, one momentous enough to disturb their magma chambers. But even then, the changes in the geostructure that precipitated such a huge quake was sure to activate any nearby volcanoes in advance as the internal pressures and tensions built toward their climax.
Upheavals had been successfully predicted, but more often scientists had failed to do so when in fact there had been sufficient evidence to say, with hindsight, that they should have known. The most persistent and reliable predictions were made not by humans but animals, who, folklore at least had it, seemed to know disaster was impending when none of the other signs were present.
Here, Jami decided, her first real parallel lay. Was the momentary warning she received something similar to the sensation that caused dogs to howl and chickens to go off laying and fish to jump out of the water and cows to refuse to enter the barn in the way that farmers and peasants had reported they did a day or two in advance of the first tremors.
All of this was unsubstantiated evidence—the stuff of legends and myths—but it was so universal that several major research teams were heavily involved in exploring the behaviour of animals in unsteady environments. And so it came down to cockroaches.
Here was the most successful creature in evolution, unchanged for 250 million years, which with its elementary nervous system and simple, well known habits, was at the centre of such research. It was also the cheapest laboratory animal imaginable both to feed and keep, and they did seem to be able to detect earthquakes in advance. Not that they needed to, for they usually survived them anyway, as they did all other ecological disasters. Jami explored the cockroach research until she came to a dead end. They still didn’t know how the cockroaches—nor other animals—did it, but at least it proved it could be done somehow. They would keep her posted.
She was thinking that at the very moment when the e-mail indicator flashed on her screen. Desperate for any distraction, she checked immediately—the red indicator said it was urgent anyway. The message was from the laboratory upstairs and from Pepe, who was on duty.
“We got a hit! Canary Islands. 1342 hours. Single shock at 6.5. Details follow.”
The details never followed. Jami was already out the door and bolting up the stairs.
*
Beneath the cliffs on the western side of Isla Gran Canaria, the fishing fleet wheeled in wide arcs as they hunted for the shoals of pilchard swept southward on the current. At Las Palmas, the capital, there was a large trawler fleet that hunted Hake and bulk catches of Sardines, but here on the rugged west coast of the island the villages went out trailing nets from their small sailboats as they had before the Spanish came, while above the cliffs the women and old men tended the crude vineyards and tomato plantations. In groups of several dozen, these fleets rode the cold waters of the current, hardly ever out of view of the rugged headlands that usually towered above the waves.
Today the sea was calm, flat, and the air breathless, as if waiting for the disaster to come.
Forced to their oars, the fishermen were unhappy, for they had noticed that the flocks of sea gulls that daily escorted their boats were missing, as if there was no air up there to support them. The fishermen looked about anxiously, and some, disturbed by voodoo demons, had refused to sail, and others went back disgruntled. Those that remained watched the signs, unnerved but unable to identify the warning signs. The day was all but over when the sea began to boil.
The turbulence rapidly expanded outward from a single point as if a vast maelstrom was forming and the panicking men turned their boats landward as the huge ripples surged by them. Then the fish that had evaded their nets began to float to the surface belly up, and steam started to waft from the water until they were engulfed in a sauna-like fog. Deep down, some thought they saw the red glow, and then there was no more, then the surging sea was upon them.
Those fishermen further away first noticed the waves rise and then saw the mysterious fog emerging rapidly far out, and they rowed furiously to safety, if safety it was. In the villages along the coast, the earth shook and houses tumbled, landslides blocked roads and then the fog doused them all in black rain.
*
It was like someone had crept into his camp and punched him, in the stomach and the head, and Brian rolled frantically, ignoring the pain and nausea, to strike back and defend himself. But there was no one there.
*
In a room at the Shamrock Hotel in Bendigo, which was as far as the train could take them that night, Chrissie awoke with a scream as a blinding flash struck her eyes so violently that it sent a sharp pain coursing though her bloodstream.
In the bed across the room, Lorna was also doubled up in sudden pain. “Bloody airline food,” she muttered.
*
Kevin Wagner’s unconscious disturbance came to an end with such a violent convulsion that it set off the alarms and brought the crash cart team running, only to find him normal, and at peace for the first time in thirty-five hours.
*
At Fairhaven, Joe Solomon had been sedated and there was no monitoring equipment to record his disturbance, nor its sudden cessation.
*
And neither was there any telling which of Andromeda Starlight’s hallucinatory dreams suddenly stopped being about moving and instead became about being still.
*
Padre Miguel, who ran the mission station in the hills above Playa de la Nieves, felt the tremor and prepared to move the patients outside but already it was over. He walked out and saw the strange cloud rising over the sea. In fact at first he felt relieved—the entire island was a massive extinct volcanic cone but that wasn’t the direction from which the cloud arose. It was plainly over there, far out to sea—where there was nothing but the Atlantic Ocean. The sisters flapped about him in a panic but he spoke calming words to them. Sister Anna, his head nurse, came to stand beside him.
“Is it over?” she asked in French because the fear tricked her into using her native language.
“I’m sure it is,” the Padre replied in Spanish. “Just a slight tremor.”
But he was looking at that cloud of steam climbing steadily upward.
Over the next hour, people with broken limbs or other minor injuries were brought to the mission until it was overcrowded, but apparently no one had been killed. He knew, though, that the disturbance of the water table might cause typhoid or plague if they were not careful and asked each visitor about the wells and rats.
By nightfall, most of the victims had been released and the cloud had turned to rain, a profoundly unseasonable deluge that left dark stains on the clothing. We have known worse, the Padre told himself. But two hours after dark, and three after the tremor, the word came to the mission that most of the fishing fleet from the three villages above the mission had failed to return.
Fear and superstition gripped the villagers, who were now all gathering on the rocks below the cliffs, gazing out into the strange green twilight that hovered over a sea of dead fish. Many of the boats could be seen bobbing on the water out there but it took some time before the braver amongst the fishermen could be persuaded to go and investigate.
“Take me out there,” Padre Miguel said to Rogelio, who he regarded as the bravest of the fishermen.
“It is a graveyard of men and fish,” Rogelio replied coldly. “You ask me to throw my net on men already in hell.”
“Then I will take your boat,” the Padre snapped.
“You will make my boat accursed. My net will be empty for eternity,” Rogelio complained, but his options were
narrowing.
“What does it matter?” Miguel answered cruelly. “As you see, all the fish are dead.”
They made their way to the roadstead and took Rogelio’s skiff and rowed out of the anchorage where usually two hundred such craft were moored. Rogelio rowed strongly, while the Padre stood in the bow, holding a battery lantern high, calling directions. The smell was indeed the sulphurous odour of hell and the dead fish glowed like evil eyes upon the surface of the dark water.
Soon they came upon the body of a man floating face down, and the Padre tried to snare the body with the pole and at least turn him and identify him but he lacked the skills.
“It is Pedrico,” Rogelio said. “See, there is his boat.”
Padre Miguel raised the lantern high and saw the belly of the capsized boat looking like a giant fish, and another further over and two other bodies floating.
But he could also see at least thirty boats floating, apparently empty. Or was that an arm hanging over the side of that one?
“Leave him,” Miguel said. “Take me over there.”
“You would leave our friends to the sharks?” Rogelio asked mercilessly.
“The sharks are all dead too,” Miguel said as if he knew. In reality, he was remembering that he had forgotten the habit of a lifetime—to pray for the dead.