by Barry Klemm
“Now, Joel, sweetie-pie. I’m gonna tell yer how things are gonna be.”
“Bitch,” he seethed at her. “Fucking two-faced bitch.”
“Such language, Sugar.” she smiled. “Maybe I ought call Gordon back to cuff your ears, or are you gonna attempt a smidgin of self-control.”
Joel Tierney, a weedy little insect of a man, contented himself to sit and sneer. She had, for some time, been telling him how it was going to be.
There had been a long series of telephone calls, followed by a number of visits, which brought them to this meeting. At first he had raged, calling her names and expressing his general regret at allowing the joint access to their wealth.
“You mean, lettin’ me spend some of my own hard-earned?” she asked.
“I kept it because you woulda blown it all on dope in five minutes.”
“Well sorry to disappoint you, Joel-baby. Ah am off the hook and lovin’ it. Bumpy ride, but I’m startin’ to get a kick outa bumpy. Whacha think of that?”
It wasn’t only Joel who had been amazed. For all that time, he had controlled the flow of uppers and downers and on-ers and off-ers into her system by which means she kept herself alive and able to perform. Now she had kicked the lot. Well, not actually. There were sleepers at night and one upper before performances, just to maintain the balance.
But all the rest, gone for good. It was as if she had replaced the chemical drugs with a stimulant of a new kind, one entirely mental. It was called belief in herself. And it was working.
“Looks like you’ve blown it on a luxury lifestyle instead.”
“No point having success if you don’t enjoy it, Joel.”
“You got your success from me!”
“No. I got it because I’m a right talented girl, Joel. You just managed the bookings.”
“Well, now you’re gonna have to manage without me,” Tierney had raged. “See how long ya last.”
She got herself a gig at the Melbourne Casino and two engagements on television, and booked into this hotel overlooking the Yarra and its ramparts of skyscrapers.
“I’ve decided to keep you on, Joel. If you learn to behave.”
Each time he telephoned, he was arranging bookings in places a little closer to Melbourne. She refused them all. As soon as he resorted to abuse, she hung up. He was learning.
“I told you, Joel. I’m not available between the 10th and 30th of May. You’ll have to cancel it.”
“But why?”
“Because I’ll be in hospital, Sugar. I told you.”
“Put it off! This is the Sydney Hilton, god-damn you! Biggest gig in the country.”
“Not available, Joel-baby. Sorry.”
“You fucking bitch, why...”
She hung up. It was so satisfying.
Finally, he brought himself to Melbourne. Each time he tried to invade her hotel or her latest venue, security threw him out. He was a slow learner. But worth it, she knew. Joel Tierney might have been a lowlife germ and a minor drug pusher, but he was basically honest. It would take her such a long time to train a new manager, and time, of course, was running out.
“All right, bitch. We’ll do it your way. What do you want me to do?”
“Behave, Joel. Learn a few manners. And buy yourself some decent rags. Spend some of that brass you’ve been pimpin’ off me on yourself.”
All along she had continued to pay him his thirty percent.
When it finally came down to this visit, she had employed Gordon, the security guard, to be present and make sure he behaved. Joel Tierney, a beaten man, looked just as downtrodden and weedy as when he was a winner. But it was going to be a fine arrangement, she was sure of it.
“Look, Joel. I’ve made all these plans. You’re getting thirty percent and I’m doing your job for you.”
“What is this shit?” he protested. He hadn’t really looked at it.
“My new image, Joel. Great, huh.”
It wasn’t particularly great just yet. She had done the designs herself on a computer the hotel provided. There was a photo of herself in a glittering dress, in full song with arms wide-spread, and a few stock images of the Earth photographed from outer space on which she had superimposed herself by means of Photoshop and printed it on a nifty little ink-jet. It was rough but it would do the job.
“What’s fucking Gay-yah?” he asked. He didn’t want to admit that it wasn’t bad.
“Gaia, Joel. Goddess of the Earth. See the list of numbers?”
She had written down the name of every song she could think of that had something to do with extolling the beauties and wonders of the Earth. Only Carol King’s: I feel the earth move under my feet was in her regular repertoire and even that was really called Tumblin’ down but soon many others came to mind. Joan Baez songs, Dylan, Kate Bush. Great stuff. She was already practising all of them.
“Jesus, you’re turning into a fucking greenie.”
“Get with the program, Love-child. It’s just the two matters usually go together. Anyway, I’m writing a couple of songs to link them all together.”
“Bloody hell. The Songs of Gaia! Who’s gonna buy ‘em when they can’t even pronounce the name?”
“It’ll be a name on everyone’s lips in no time at all, Joel. We’re riding the crest of a wave here.”
He groaned. The image was good, he could see, and suited her. The songs all had a bit of guts to them and she was at her best when belting ‘em out. She looked like a Goddess. To all this, Joel was slowly succumbing, in the manner of sinking into quicksand.
“So where’d you get all this from?”
She didn’t want to attempt to explain Thyssen—there were no adequate words to do so anyway. When she had asked, before they departed Kyabram, he had given her a list of books—one on mythology, one on the geological history of the earth, and the one by James Lovelock that carried the whole idea.
“Gaia (Gaea) the mother-goddess, first and oldest of all Greek goddesses, deep-breasted giantess, whose soil nourishes all that exist and whose blessing brings forth the fruits of the earth. The one supreme goddess, worshipped not only by all men but by the gods themselves. Gaia was not just the Goddess of the Earth—she was the Earth itself.”
When she read this to him, Joel Tierney nodded. “Giantess, okay. Deep-breasted, yeah you got that. Boss goddess—got it all. So fine, I can see it, but will they? The punters. Sure it ain’t too high-falutin’ for `em?”
“They will learn, Honey,” Andromeda smiled. “I will show them the way.”
“It’s a great image,” Tierney conceded. “Yeah, it suits you. So, if you want to play at her, okay. Fine.”
“I won’t be playing at her, Joel,” she said determinedly. “I am her.”
*
Extreme! The Max! Rip into it! He had to be tested all the way, in every way. Kevin Wagner worked his body furiously, manipulating every muscle daily. It was the only way forward. Use it or lose it. He could allow no part to fail him.
He established himself in King’s Cross in Sydney where he knew all the weirdest and most extreme people lived. There he took a flat from which he could range out, trying everything, doing everything. Money was no problem. He had sold off his house and other interests in the States, and of course there was the insurance…
At first Lorna Simmons, that silly girl, tagged along with him rather like a stray dog, but he was already bored with her. She seemed to be taking the relationship at rather a slower pace than he, and was anyway a very conventional girl. She wanted monogamy without the slightest regard for the fact that he was no longer a family man. He had placed pictures of his dead wife and children everywhere for her to see.
“You have to get over it,” she told him.
Insensitive little bitch, seeking domestic attachments in a purely sexual relationship.
“I’ve got over it,” he answered. It wasn’t really true. He had never for a moment mourned them. It was rather that he had died with them, and reawakened in a new dimen
sion, a new life, from which they were absent. The universe they belonged to went out of existence. He hardly even remembered them, and only thought about them in unguarded moments.
But Lorna was sure he needed to grieve, and that they needed to be replaced. Her persona as a sexual adventuress was a lie. One day she was gone and he hardly even noticed. His daily regime was by then completely established and he was absorbed in it. He needed to prepare himself for what was to come in every way.
Each morning he rose and went to the gym for a three hour workout. He had a map of his body and worked every muscle systematically, discussing himself with the trainers to the most intimate detail. He took himself to the speedway where, he learned, you could pay crews to allow you to take the cars out for training runs. He joined a parachute club and jumped every Sunday. On Mondays he sought out a new peak to scale up and abseil down. On Tuesdays he went sailing on the harbour in every kind of craft in every sort of conditions. On Wednesdays he ran over places—The Razorback and all sorts of rugged places in the Blue Mountains. Thursdays he relaxed with a bit of bungy-jumping from increasingly high places. Friday was diving day, at places further and further up the coast. Saturday he liked to join teams of those people who enjoyed running rapids down through steep chasms with their broiling cascades.
He found a rugby team he could train with on Tuesday and Thursday evenings and although they pleaded, he never turned up on Saturday for the game—there was a limit. It made him feel cowardly for all that body-armour he had worn when he played American football in his youth.
His diet never varied and every calorie and vitamin was carefully counted. Once Lorna was discarded, he soon attracted fit young women to test out his sexual skills. His body grew hard and spectacular and he allowed them to admire it. They traced their fingers along his scars and asked about them. He told them he was injured in various war zones—no one doubted it. He didn’t forget his brain—there was a forced two hours every day at the library, reading on the latest scientific and technical subjects, and current US and European politics and social conditions in Third World countries.
He needed to become the perfect man in body and mind, or as near to it as he could humanly manage. If he was participating in the next great step in the chain of evolution, he wanted to give it the best possible circumstances in which to flourish.
“You’re crazy, Kevin,” Lorna had told him, sometime shortly before she left. “You’re absurdly self-obsessive.”
So he told her his plan.
“You’re just running away from your grief,” she deduced as a result.
It was disappointing, but still he told her what he believed.
“Is that all you think this is,” she said, shaking her head sadly. “That this is just evolution in action.”
“It’s all around us, all the time.”
“And we are some sort of superior humans in development?” she chided.
“It has to happen sooner or later. And you have to admit...”
“There was a bloke called Adolf with similar delusions, Kevin. They thought they were the Master Race but they were really just stodgy old Germans.”
“Not Master Race, Lorna. Master Species.”
“The result could be the same. The Germans needed to prove their superiority. They needed to conquer the world and kill off the competition. Really, they were insecure and afraid.”
“Forget about goddamned Germans,” Kevin muttered grimly, sorry he’d started this.“A superior breed of human wouldn’t have to prove a thing. They wouldn’t need to conquer the goddamned world. They would have nothing to fear. They would take control simply because they were best people for the job. Just a simple natural progression.”
Lorna stood her ground, the flaming hair a match for the fire in her eyes.
“You aren’t taking me seriously, Lorna. I knew you wouldn’t.”
“I don’t have anything to prove, Kevin. I don’t need to feel superior to anyone. I’m afraid your argument runs up its own arsehole.”
Come to think of it, that was the last time he saw her before she left.
*
It was the most amazing thing she had ever seen. To witness the initial eruption of Ruapehu was a remarkable achievement, but the stygian vista that lay stretched out before her now was almost impossible to grasp. Yet grasp it she must. She sat on a boulder on the top of a hill that had no name, her lap-top perched on her knee as she tried to describe the scene to Glen which she would soon dispatch by email, if she could find somewhere in this godforsaken place to plug in her modem.
She was rugged up like an Arctic explorer from behind where a chill wind bit into her but in front she had unbuttoned her parka and jacket and dragged the scarf from her face and neck. The effect was like sitting too close to a fire while a fan blew iced air on your back, goosebumps behind, sweat bubbling at the front and maybe blisters too. Yet that fire was more than three kilometres away.
The valley below was a vision of hell, mostly in varying shades of black. Here was a volcano without a mountain—a rare sight indeed. The lava had spread freely across the valley floor and solidified while still in the form of giant waves such that it reminded her of the lake that had once occupied this place in a moment frozen in time. The actual lake—Oz Baykal, once five hundred kilometres in length although somewhat shorter now—was visible on the horizon, the water black as crude oil, hazy with a fog that was really seething steam. To left and right in the distance, low mountains rose in orderly fashion, their tops and slopes still green with tundra—the blight that had destroyed the valley had not quite reached that far.
But the valley was an astonishing scene. The waves of basalt lava with the crests running in long rows seemed to have polished sections but that was just where the heat had melted it in the form of hot mud. Everywhere, pockets of red glowed but mostly it had encrusted except in three main sections. Each of these were wide bands of lava, flowing outward in fine red and orange ribbons while down the middle, straight as a rail, was a line of fire bursting upward, looking rather like the spines along the back of a dinosaur. The fire seethed up out of the fissure, belching white smoke into the sky which mostly dissipated as the wind carried it off toward the mountains. The crest of each black wave, she knew, was itself a long, straight fissure, newly sealed over as the fire extinguished.
It wasn’t Mongolia at all. The border of that country lay about one hundred kilometres to the south and west, but the Buryat people who inhabited this region of the former Soviet Empire were culturally Mongolians. There was once a sizeable town down there somewhere—Slyudysanka on the banks of the southern end of the lake—now not a trace of it remained and the lake had moved ten kilometres away. Through here, the Trans-Siberian railway had passed—now they were already laying new track on the other side of the ridge for it would be a decade or more before the ground here would once more be hard enough to bear the weight of a train.
It was a nightmare scene of destruction, yet there was creation too. The lava that filled the valley would become the finest soil in the world in a few decades, once it cooled and eroded. In total, the lava bed stretched two kilometres across and ten kilometres long, dotted by fire-breathing fissures all the way.
The US Geological Survey sent a team of twenty in, of which she pretended to be a part. She knew this was not a country where it was wise to play at deception. The team busied themselves, setting up to study the effects, and this data Glen would be able to freely access. If she doubted why she was there, Harley made sure such doubt was quickly eliminated.
Bloody Harley. What the hell was he up to? The story made news everywhere, mostly as a novelty item. But Harley offered quotes and interviews and even, holy Moses, made predictions. There will be a new eruption on the 19th of May, give or take a day. Very brave, his colleagues declared. There were about 1500 eruptions on Earth annually, but usually an average of only eight big eruptions each year and they had already had four, before May began. Somewhere in the Indian Ocean or
thereabouts, Harley had boldly told the media, although that, unlike his date, was just a guess. He really was an embarrassing man to work for.
But she knew his madness. Obviously, he had made no impression in his mission to Washington and so went public to scare them into funding him. The prediction closed their options—he was the top expert in the world and they could not afford to ignore him, no matter how silly he sounded. And it did explain the lemmings of Gran Canaria.
She was being roasted alive, sitting there, and so turned away, walked away, immediately pulling her warm clothing about her. Off to follow Harley’s instructions and seek out the Red Cross folk and ask about sleepers, as they had come to be called. No one knew anything, but that was typical of this place.
“People who were in a coma for eight days and then recovered completely?”
The Red Cross people were frantically busy as always and in no mood for idiotic questions, but she had persisted. There were none that anyone knew of. But it was hard to tell.
“Half the population of the region have simply left, and will never return,” the Portuguese administrator told her. “And those that intend to stay have gone to the mountains until things quieten down. There’s over five hundred people missing for those reasons and most will stay that way.”
“But these would have been unconscious for the first eight days.”
“It was three weeks before they let us in,” the man said helplessly.
He promised he would let her know if he learned anything. But outside, a Turkish nurse caught up with her.
“It’s not official but some of the locals think there has been a camp established in the next valley and a lot of people were taken there under guard. But no one seems to know if it’s true.”
“How many people?”
“Two hundred maybe. But no one knows.”
Harley, she knew, hated it most when people didn’t know things.
`What made him think of the Indian Ocean?’ she typed to Glen.
`Sequential by oceans was your theory, remember?’ Glen replied.