Joel nods and squints at his wife as if making a nautical calculation. ‘It’s like seeing the tip of an iceberg?’
‘Yes. And with an old artefact there’s also the sense that it came out of a culture of superstitions, one which committed dreadful crimes out of ignorance. We feel that we’ve advanced, that we’ve superseded the culture that produced that carving; that our everyday technology would be miraculous to them.’
‘Right,’ Joel says.
‘What I mean to say is that I felt I was an ancient carving in his hand.’
Joel turns back to the camera, and sucks in air through gritted teeth. He nods.
32
‘The sterile suit’s a major fucking mistake, Garrick! Think about it for a second, will you? Sam’s not wearing one and I’ll be all covered up. It won’t look like a meeting of two worlds but an interrogation.’
‘No, Bill.’ The producer’s voice is infuriatingly calm in his ear, as if the fact of Sam sitting up in bed in the next room, reading and waiting, means nothing. ‘The suit’s part of your identity in this narrative. We can clearly see your face in the bubble helmet and always have. It’s who you are. It’s progress. Your white suit signifies caution and care. The feather cloak on your shoulders will convey the importance of the situation much more than any suit-and-tie in your collection.’
‘Feather cloak?’
‘Yes. The pöwhiri will begin any second. You will enter when the official Mäori welcome has been completed.’
As Bill is led gently by the elbow to a sink, the first wail of the karanga comes to him through a wall, or walls. The fervour in the woman’s voice sends a chill up and down his spine. It’s happening. It’s really happening! But the speckled, veiny hands he holds under the tap don’t seem to be his, as if they’re on loan to do his will, or something near it. He begins to wash the hands in hot water. They disappear in lather. He scrubs and scrubs. Rinses. But the pink hands still aren’t quite right. He lathers up again.
Garrick’s voice floods his ear: ‘Okay, Bill, that’s fine. They’re clean enough.’
Bill’s knee brace makes donning the sterile suit awkward. With his leg straight, he can’t reach his feet. He needs help. He gets it. Five minutes later, they’re done. They leave the zip for him to do up himself. The emphatically yanked-up zip runs off its teeth at the last microsecond. ‘Fuck it!’ He must struggle out of this suit and into another one. ‘I can do it!’ he tells an assistant, but he can’t and has to sit down with his bad leg out straight in front, and submit to being touched and bothered all over again.
Not long ago he’d have gladly worn ten sterile suits and done anything for anyone, so vast and bountiful was his joy. Powerful painkillers had lifted him high, suspended him in a fluffy throne of cloud miles above all earthly concerns and problems. Lift-off had occurred while stuck on the overgrown track where he’d fallen while holding Solangia. She’d been taken from him and powerful painkillers injected. As they kicked in, Bill learned that the late-night work calls had been to inform him of the alien’s recovery. He sat, his pants wet with dew and his face wet with tears. Simon had forgiven him for attempting to abscond with Solangia. Samantha, the courier, had dispensed the painkillers from his bathroom cabinet and supervised his move from the dewy slope with great efficiency, drawing on skills from her primary career as a caregiver.
Bill couldn’t remember feeling more blissfully happy than he did in the back of the van. His knee was thermal-packed, strapped and raised, no problem. He could even walk on it. There was no pain of any kind. His veins flowed with glowing benevolence, pumped with light and peace. He felt in excellent hands. Travelling in the Wiz van was the quickest way to Wellington, and meant he could be with Simon and his granddaughter as well. He hugged and held on to Simon and Samantha when they helped him or drew near. Alright, they said. Got it. He smiled and blinked. He would have liked to throw his arms around the world.
As they sped southward together in profound peace and the dark countryside crowned with twinkling stars scrolled past beyond the van’s window, a sense of purpose and occasion had come over him, as if his destiny was finally being fulfilled. ‘I feel,’ he said, ‘like one of the wise men approaching Bethlehem.’
Samantha looked over her shoulder. ‘Yeah, the fourth one. The guy running late, with no gift, flat on his back and as high as a kite.’
The assistant takes the zip this time, and Bill takes a deep breath. With great care it is drawn upwards. Part of him hopes it will break. It doesn’t. He is sterile.
‘Have you eaten an egg in the last 12 hours?’ It’s the third time he’s been asked about eggs. The alien had an acute anaphylactic shock when presented with an informal whitebait fritter. He’d very nearly died.
‘No.’
Bill puffs into a breathalyser.
‘Clear. No egg.’
The assistant is back. ‘Bill. I’m going to put this cloak on your shoulders.’
The brown feathers are glossy and thick. The cloak is magnificent.
‘Fine.’
At some point the karanga had ended. Bill hears faintly the formal speech of welcome in Mäori. To calm himself he thinks of Sam 60 years ago, of his concentrated silence. A presence so powerful he felt he could lean against it and be safely held.
Garrick, in his ear: ‘Righto, Bill. After this song.’
The waiata soothes him. Two voices in unison. A kind of peace is gathering in him when the barrel of a TV camera is thrust into his face. Bill’s red eyes, reflected in the lens, glint back at him with unexpected intensity through puffy, powdered lids. They’re the eyes of an insomniac psychopath.
‘Dark glasses.’
‘Pardon me, Bill?’
‘I need dark glasses. I’ve been awake for two days.’
Garrick doesn’t appear to have heard. ‘Bill, this is the moment the world’s been waiting for. You’re the cue to getting him to communicate. This is it.’
‘Uh.’
Bill is steered forward by the elbows. The feather cloak is unexpectedly light. Is it plastic? He rounds a corner. And another. Into silence.
‘Remember. This is humbling.’
Bill’s nose is against a door. A producer at his shoulder nods and it slides open.
Lantern-jawed and gaunt, the alien, engrossed in a book, is very clearly not Sam, but of Sam’s world. In his clear plastic tent, propped up on a bank of white pillows, he tracks a finger back and forth across the page of the large book opened on his lap. The finger moves quickly. The arm isn’t much thicker than the tubes running into it. The alien stops reading and lifts a spoon to his mouth with his other hand. Vanilla ice cream. He has a bowl of it. How black his hair looks, Bill thinks. The finger resumes tracking.
The alien’s strange charisma unlocks Bill’s joints and draws him in to the room. Bill is in the presence of true greatness—again—greatness unlike anything he’s experienced since the first Sam disappeared, nearly a lifetime ago. Bill Clinton, David Lange, Will Smith, Bill Gates, Beyoncé, Barack Obama, the Dalai Lama; who on earth could turn the simple act of reading into an act of communion? Sam’s tracking finger stops. He looks at the ceiling.
Halfway across the room, Bill freezes.
One eye is not lazy, as he was briefed, but independent. Chameleon-like, it rotates while the other remains still. The alien takes the bowl of ice cream from his lap and places it on the mattress next to him. He looks at Bill. Extends his thin-fingered hand. Beckons.
Bill can’t see. Blind with tears he somehow makes it to the bed, locates the portal and grasps Sam’s hand. It’s become warm, exuberantly alive. It’s like returning home. Like reclaiming the lost tenderness and innocence of youth. The hard shell of habit and knowledge calcified over decades dissolves. The best of himself, uncomplicated and joyous, is returning. Flight and freedom are possible again.
At some point a glimmer of self-consciousness returns, along with Garrick’s irate voice in his ear: ‘Bill, Bill, look up! Look up! Can you hear me? L
ook-at-Sam!’
Bill opens his eyes and tastes a trail of snot running across his lips down to his chin. He can’t wipe it away because of the bubble. The lights are bright. The alien’s chameleon eye comes down from the ceiling. As both brown-black orbs take him in, Bill understands that this alien knows him through Sam. But the alien doesn’t just know of him—full knowledge has been passed on of every second he spent with Sam 60 years ago.
Garrick is triumphant. ‘We’ll go with the snot!’ And then, ‘Bill, say something!’
Bill clears his throat. ‘Welcome to Earth. I’m very happy to see you looking better.’
The alien releases Bill’s hand, picks up a screen, rests it on the big leatherbound book he was reading, taps into it two-finger style for a few seconds and turns the screen around. It reads, Thank you, Bill. Sam let you be known. You also look better.
Garrick shouts, ‘Eureka!’
Better than when I walked in the door, Bill thinks.
The alien takes his hand and resumes reading, pausing occasionally for a spoonful of ice cream. The flow of energy thrums and peaks, subsides and flares.
‘Bill, ask him a question.’
‘You’re reading the Bible?’
The alien stops reading and shows the cover. It is the Bible, an old King James edition. On the dresser next to his bed is a stack of books. The spines Bill can read reveal subjects ranging from physics to religion to Venture Group’s shareholders’ report. There’s science fiction, too, and other novels: classics, mysteries, thrillers.
‘No e-reader?’
The alien lifts one from his mattress and then resumes tracking a pale finger over the Bible. He’s somewhere in the middle, at the end of the Old Testament or beginning of the New. Bill feels a renewed flow of energy course through the hand he holds. A tingling sensation runs up his arm, spreads through his shoulder and wraps his skull. The tingling pulses in quick, thick waves. It was like this 60 years ago. A question comes to him: Am I being prepared for something, or is this communion in itself the point?
The alien’s face is hollow and waxy. Almost shiny enough to reflect light. His black hair is like a vagrant’s after a reality show makeover, plastered down in place and still slightly disreputable. His thin arms are bruised by the tubes feeding into them. Yet despite being so fragile, he exudes measured strength.
In his ear, Garrick urges, ‘Bill, say something to the camera.’
‘I, um…’ Looking into the camera opposite them, he says, ‘I feel the energy from… his hand here. A remarkable transfer of energy. Er, no. Not a transfer, actually; it’s a one-way flow.’
‘Great, Bill. Great stuff. Now talk to us about your feelings.’
‘I was overwhelmed before, when I walked in—you might have noticed—and I’m not sure exactly how much time passed before I opened my eyes.’
‘Ninety seconds,’ Garrick tells him. ‘We took an ad break. It was perfect.’
‘I feel a lot better now. It’s a bit of a cliché but I feel as if the sun’s come out after a long time. I feel that many years have fallen away. Sorry, it’s hard to articulate.’
‘That’s been 30 seconds of silence, Bill. Ask him a question.’
‘Excuse me. What’s your name?’
The alien stops reading the Bible, takes his hand away, types a few words and turns the screen for Bill to see. Call me Samuel.
‘It’s an honour to meet you, Samuel. Can I just say…’ He drops his voice. ‘I’m sorry about… er…’ He realises he can’t drop his voice far enough to apologise for faking Samuel’s consciousness and allowing Venture Group to release advertisements and propaganda in his name.
Garrick’s voice carries a note of warning. ‘Sorry about what? What are you apologising for?’
‘Uh.’ Bill searches the alien’s brown eyes for forgiveness.
They strongly advise silence.
Samuel begins to type. A longer message. Bill is at a disadvantage because everyone else in the room can see the words relayed onto a large screen above the bed, but from where Bill sits the angle is too acute. He will have to wait until Samuel finishes and shows him the text on his personal screen, the original, as it were. But that’s more than okay. Even while Samuel types, the tingling passed on by his recent touch remains and continues to sweep up and down Bill’s body, from the crown of his skull to the tips of his toes and back up again.
The dozen suited medics have stopped whatever important function it is that usually demands their full attention and gathered a couple of metres back from the foot of the bed. Eyes focussed intently on the screen directly above Bill, and Samuel’s heads, they read the message as it’s written. Bill reads the faces of these highly trained professionals through their clear visors as he waits. Their initial smiles give way to brow-furrowing.
He’s telling the world I lied. Bill bows his head and clasps his hand before him. Tears begin to roll again. It feels just. To be judged feels right. Cleansing. Please forgive me, he asks. Forgive me.
Time passes. More than Bill expects would be necessary. He peeps through teary lashes. Samuel’s typing has gathered pace. He’s using four fingers now. Must be putting everything around the fake messages into context.
The eyes of the watching medical staff scan along the screen above him and jump back, scan along and jump back. Confusion appears to be the dominant reaction.
It won’t last long, Bill thinks, as the silence continues. Soon the faces will grimace and contort, teeth will grit and angry judgment fall.
‘What the hell?’ crackles Garrick’s voice in his ear. ‘We’ll take another ad break. Where is this going, people?’
It’s not about him? He reads the faces at the foot of the bed again. No, it’s not. They don’t look at him, they don’t care about him. It’s another problem. A bigger problem.
The divided and angry world returns to Bill. The lack of everything. The extinctions, the fires, the battles, the savagery stoked by the realisation that no one can win in the long-term. Not even the super-rich. Everything is too far gone.
‘What the hell is that supposed to mean?’ Garrick crackles. ‘This is head-injury stuff, people. We’re not sending this out. Run the recap while we take a ten-minute delay and get some analysis.’
33
Brandon Adams, chief medical officer, 127 years old. The light is dim and somewhat orange. Frail in a baggy suit, with an open collar and Hurricanes cap to communicate informality, he is supported in an ergonomic, powered rocking chair. His face is a record of discontinued cosmetic procedures. The 20th-century mistakes have been plastered over with more recent partially successful synthetic skin grafts. Beneath the watchful mask, muscle and fat has wasted and leeched away. Bone structure is lost in doughy, reconstituted flesh. His eyes glint in pits of plastic. His mouth cracks open.
Flora Adams, student, 19, sits forward on an ergonomic recliner. Her milky face positively flings out sweetness and approachability. Her long, golden-brown hair sits in an impressively high spiral knot. When she turns to Brandon Adams, it becomes apparent that her nose is natural.
‘I was in a state of, like, delirious excitement for a week. Wasn’t I, Poppa?’
Adams’s mouth shuts and he nods.
She turns to the camera. ‘And everyone was so jealous that Poppa chose me. And now it’s over. So fast. I… Oh, excuse me.’
Brandon Adams’s hand lifts from the rocking chair and moves out towards Flora, as if in slow-motion. His mouth cracks open. Wider.
Flora is wiping her eyes with deft adult efficiency and doesn’t notice the hanging, mottled hand.
There’s a cut. Adams’s hand rests on Flora’s.
‘It was…’ Adams wheezes, ‘a little… overwhelming. We had questions… for the alien… but…’
Flora blinks. ‘My mind went totally blank. It was like I was erased. No one but us had that experience. Why should we get nothing?’
Adams pats Flora’s hand. His expression remains arrested but his voice softens and s
tretches. ‘It wasn’t just forgetting—I didn’t know anything. Anything. Anything was possible. It felt wonderful.’
Flora looks wounded.
He pats her hand. ‘Just an age thing, dear,’ he adds. His mouth shuts and cracks open again.
34
Samuel’s burst of four-fingered typing ends. His chameleon eye rolls up to the ceiling and he sinks back into his bank of pillows. He’s done.
The medical team frown and squint. Some return to their monitors. Bill understands that he should reach into the plastic tent through the hand portal and turn the screen around himself. Nobody stops him.
Garrick tells him, ‘Read it out loud. Slowly.’
Bill coughs. The plastic visor steams very briefly. ‘Right. I will now read aloud the message that Samuel has just written:
One. And it came to pass that the people became abundant, and smoke from their continuous fires filled the sky, and the lands grew hot and water scarce. The ice in high and distant places melted away, and as the sea warmed the water column rose, and many lost their homes in the flood. And the poor and homeless were trafficked.
Two. Now the people fought for what fresh water was left. Many died. And disease did multiply and the fish in the seas became scarce, and the prices went up and great civil unrest spread. For few had much, while most had little. And still carbon was extracted and released and the world grew ever warmer and the extinctions increased.
Three. And so it happened that the ice melted on the great southern land of Antarctica. Grass grew in its place and great lakes formed. Yet the sun was kinder there, so the starving multitudes wanted to go south to that great untouched wilderness where prairie grass grew high on land that was once encased in ice.
Four. And though the new land was vast and abundant, there was not room for all the world’s struggling billions.
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