He finished his last Wall a few days before he died. I think it was important to him that he did. He told me once that there was only one Wall that he didn’t finish, but he never told me the reason. But this last Wall, he said, was special, and I was to visit it after he was gone.
I followed his wishes, and after Saebi had sung him Beyond, and after I had said my own private prayers, I set out for the Cave, high in the cliff overlooking the beach where we landed on our way to the island all those years ago.
I made my way inside. I had to crouch to enter, because the entrance was Elokoi height. Inside, the roof curved up into shadow, and my torchlight looked weak and insignificant. I played it around the dark interior, until I found what I was looking for. The Wall, an unbroken record from the start of Elokoi history, through the Great Trek to the last pictures, which were Cael’s own creations, depicting the Journey of Returning. Four years of hardship and slow progress through the harshest country on the planet
If I live forever, maybe I’ll begin to understand the minds of the Elokoi. When Gaston was exposed, Denny spoke to Cael and Saebi. He told them things would be different now. That there would be no opposition to their new ‘state’, which they would call Vaana. He also said that the Trek back was unnecessary, that whoever won the new election would arrange for transportation to take them all home.
But they refused. They didn’t discuss it with the Elders. They didn’t say they’d consider it. They just thanked him, and said it was impossible.
Poor Denny. He loves them like family, but he doesn’t understand them any more than I do. He kept on at them, asking why they wanted to go through with it, but they just looked at him and quoted Rael: Don’t ask why. Is just . . . is.
Years later, Saebi explained it to me. I think she understood my offworlder thick-headedness by then. ‘Tellers almost gone,’ she said. ‘Trek important time. To Teach. To learn. Important things. Share Dreams. Learn to be Elokoi again.’
For once even I understood.
I remembered that conversation as I stood in front of the Pictures on the Wall. I had reached the end. I knew it was the end, even without looking. I had seen almost every one of Cael’s Walls.
Only this time, I was wrong.
As I turned to go, I caught a small flash of colour at the very edge of the ring of torchlight. And as I swept the beam on a little further, the light dropped from my hands. For there on the Wall, beside the history of his people, Cael had left a final gift. To me. A panel filled with strange creatures, painted in bright colours, framed with a pattern of circles and lines. Childish pictures, but painted with the touch of a master. And they spoke to something deep in me that I had thought was lost forever.
As I bent down to pick up the fallen torch, I paused. Because over the sound of the distant waves, beneath the silence of the Cave, I thought I caught the echo of an ancient Song.
Carmody Island
Inland Sea (Eastern Region)
29/15/149 Standard
ELENA
I return to the island often, though my work here ended years ago. The school still runs without me, and the new generation still learns what it means to be Icaran. But I love to come here and watch them play. The greatest gift we can give our children is childhood. And that is the main reason they are here.
In some ways, the island is as secret as it was half a century ago. Oh, everybody knows it is here, and everybody has a theory about why so many parents send their children to a boarding school so far from civilisation. But they don’t know.
Just as they don’t know that there are any of us with the mind-powers.
In the first few years after the events of 101, there were rumours. But the evidence was gone – even from the hard-files, and the rumours starved to death.
Jane’s first great-granddaughter, Rhae, arrived this year. I wonder how she will find the island. What she will learn. She will learn the use of her mind, of course. From teachers of her own kind. But she will, we hope, learn more. From the Teller.
Saani, Saebi’s eldest daughter lives here on the island with the children for five months of every year, as part of her haaj. From her, the children learn the Songs, and the Stories that are as much a part of their heritage as the history of the Republic of Deucalion. But they also learn the meaning of ‘the way’. One day, our numbers will have grown. One day, we will have the potential to rule. Only if we understand the way of the Elokoi will we be able to resist the temptation to try.
Jane, of course, remains as obsessive as ever, but we love her. They granted her a lifetime lease on one of the labs at the Genetics Facility, so she can continue her work on hybrid fruit trees. I guess being the wife of a former Congressional Leader carries certain privileges.
I asked Denny once why he chose politics, when he could have gone into geology. After the Revolution, Research Funding was opened up, and he could have walked into a research position. He just smiled and said, ‘Politics is a lot like seismology. You listen to the rumbles, and try to work out what they mean.’
I haven’t heard from Daryl in quite a while, but that’s not surprising. People who live with the Elokoi usually forget how to write. Of course, that didn’t happen to Rachael, his wife, but then writing was in her blood. Her grandfather was AJL Tolhurst, the historian. He was years ahead of his time, learning the Elokoi word-speech, and trying to educate the world to understand what they had to offer.
RJ met Daryl when she was interviewing him, doing research for her grandfather’s book on the Deucalion Revolution. She finished it herself, after his death. I’ve met her a few times, but not recently. Daryl moves around a lot. He’s still advisor to the plantation committees of the Elokoi cooperatives. They export Ocra tea and Capyjou to Earth. The Old Earthers still pay a fortune for the tea. They don’t eat the Capyjou, of course. Even on Earth, they aren’t that desperate. But they do feed it to their cattle, and the results in milk yield and meat quality more than outweigh the importation costs. So I guess Daryl got his farm in the end, after all.
And me? I’m sitting here on the north beach, watching the waves wash onto the sand, and I’m thinking that this island must be about the most unconfined place in the universe.
EPILOGUE:
THE SONG OF THE HEART
(Extracts from the works of RJ Tolhurst transcribed to Archive Disk with the author’s permission, 12/14/165 Standard)
From: Memoirs of a Teenage Revolutionary (Chapter Thirteen)
. . . In the end, though the history books refer to ‘The Deucalion Revolution’, from where we stood, it was really no more than a Unilateral Declaration of Independence. In a few short minutes of air-time, a hundred years of colonial rule was brought to an inglorious end.
Dimitri Gaston, the illegitimate ‘first President’ of Deucalion, was never seen again. His lieutenant, Denham Kennedy, when he was arrested a few years later, shed no light on his whereabouts, claiming that they had gone their separate ways on the night of the ‘disaster’. He did say one strange thing, however, when he was an old man in prison. I never saw it reported, though it ‘did the rounds’ in Security circles.
One of the guards asked him if he thought his old boss was still alive somewhere. Kennedy turned to him and shook his head. Then he leaned close and whispered, ‘Some people you don’t let down. If you do, there is nowhere in the universe you can hide where they won’t find you.’ My source swore it was true, but Security people are known for their tall stories.
Matthias DeGroot, Deucalion’s most infamous assassin, was finally captured in 107. He was teaching school in a township in the Northern Fringes. Most of the townspeople were surprised. He didn’t look like a monster, they said. In fact, he was the best teacher the town had ever had. You never can tell.
Unlike most revolutions, the ‘Revolution of 101’ brought a new era of prosperity to Deucalion. The owners of the DMC were tried in absentia for crime
s against the Electoral Act, racketeering and bribing public officials, and when the penalty imposed – two hundred billion credits, payable within fifteen Standard months – was not forthcoming, the state confiscated all properties and assets of the Corporation on Deucalion as payment for the outstanding fines, cancelling all leases and options granted under colonial rule.
Trade with Earth continued virtually unchanged, however. Regardless of political differences, they were heavily dependent on supplies of Deucalion minerals and raw materials. Of course, with the profits returning to Deucalion instead of remaining off-planet, the standard of living over the past decades has risen to equal that of Earth in the golden age of the twentieth century. Payment is demanded in finished goods, as the concept of ‘paper profits’ was never as popular on Deucalion as it always seemed to be on Old Earth.
An interesting footnote to this development is that the boom in manufacturing prompted by this increased demand has actually had a positive effect on the employment rate in some regions of the mother-planet.
The state of Vaana (which, in Elokoi, means Vaana – there simply is no Standard translation) thrives on the shores of the inland sea. Desalination plants, and a monumental irrigation program, with thousands of kilometres of pipe, pumping water from huge floating catchments anchored in the centre of the mid-ocean rain belt, have turned the desert into what has become known as the ‘Garden of the West’.
As we approach the one hundred and fiftieth anniversary of settlement, we do so with some pride. The C-ships still arrive at the rate of four or five a year, and the shuttles at the rate of four or five a month. Life is good.
And the future?
My friend, Saebi t-Aiby-el-Rhae, in her famous transcription of Thoughtsong of the Returning, wrote:
Who can see the spring,
Beneath the desert sand?
Who can tell the stories
Of the unborn generations?
Who can know?
Knowing is a leaf on the wind,
A tear in the deepwater.
All understanding
Is the Song of the Heart,
The Dream of the Soul.
A glimpse of eternity
Through the eye of the Eternal
We do not choose
We are chosen.
We do not own the Dream
We borrow it from the Universe.
Next year, the first C-ship sets out on a journey from here to the third (as yet unnamed) planet in the Casia system, another fifty light-years out into the galaxy. Perhaps there they will find a world more inviting than Deucalion.
Perhaps they won’t . . .
CHRONOLOGY
Earth standard/Deucalion Standard
One Earth standard year = 0.82 Deucalion Standard year
One Deucalion Standard year = 1.24 Earth standard years
ad: anno domini, Earth Calendar
bs: before settlement, as: after settlement, Deucalion Calendar
2019ad / 104bs
Escalation of the Trade and Subsidy Wars between the European Bloc and the AmeriPacific Confederation; beginning of the Hundred Years’ Depression in Europe and the Americas.
2021ad / 102bs
Establishment of Asia/Southeast Sphere of Economic and Social Cooperation (including the Republic of Australasia).
2022ad / 101bs
Publication of DiBortelli’s Grand Theory of Sub-Dimensional Physics, including details of the ‘sub-dimensional warp’.
2025ad / 98bs
Initiation of first successful ‘warp-jump’; beginning of unmanned ‘warp-shuttle’ exploration.
2040ad / 86bs
Amendment of United Nations Charter, which led to the establishment of a World Government, with responsibility for international and interplanetary affairs, but no control over the domestic and economic affairs of individual nations.
2075ad / 58bs
Discovery of Deucalion.
2097ad / 40bs
Launch of first C-ship to Deucalion.
2101ad / 36bs
World Government Charter extended to incorporate the oversight of the domestic economic affairs of all member nations; establishment of the Grants Council to oversee all aspects of Funded Research.
2145ad / 00as
Date of arrival and first settlement on Deucalion.
2169ad / 20as
Introduction of the Native Species Protection Bill – outlawing, in part, the forced expatriation of intelligent species from their planet of origin, and the mistreatment of indigenous species.
2193ad / 39as
Return of first C-ship with two Elokoi on board.
2195ad / 41as
Beginning of top-secret and illegal Icarus Project.
2199ad / 44as
Discovery and dismantling of Icarus Project.
2269ad / 100as
Deucalion Centennial.
2270ad / 101as
‘Phony’ elections on Deucalion; Elokoi ‘Long March’ from Edison to New Geneva.
2272ad / 102as
First free elections on Deucalion; landslide win to PCP; beginning of Second Great Trek; ‘Unilateral Declaration of Independence’, commonly known as the Revolution.
2277ad / 106as
End of Second Great Trek.
2281ad / 112as
Proclamation and establishment of the State of Vaana.
NOTES
On Elokoi pronunciation: Elokoi wordspeech is basically phonetic. Vowel sounds are always ‘soft’ except in the case of the dual vowels ‘ae’, ‘ie’, ‘aa’ ‘ea’ etc. which are always pronounced as two distinct sounds, the first being the short, ‘hard’ vowel, the second, the longer, ‘soft’ sound. There is no diphthong in Elokoi. In multi-syllable words, the stress is always on the first syllable.
It is worth noting that Elokoi wordspeech, like Old Earth German, employs many compound nouns, so that, in translation, the adjective and the noun it modifies are often fused, as in firstmate, moonlife, Thoughtsong, etc.
On the Deucalion clock and calendar:
Dates: The Deucalion year has a duration of four hundred and fifty days, divided into fifteen months of thirty days each (thirty days being the period between the occurrences of the ‘hunter’s sky’ when both moons, Pyrrha and Pandora, are full). The calendar uses the day/month/year configuration: 30/15/100, for example, represents New Year’s Eve of the year 100.
Dates are measured from the date of settlement, 1/1/00. Years prior to the landfall of the first settlers are designated bs (before settlement) and dates post-landfall, as (after settlement). It is common practice, however, to omit the designation as, unless the omission would tend to lead to confusion.
Time: Deucalion operates on a metric time-system. The day is of approximately the same duration as that of Earth (23.976 hours, Earth standard), but it is divided into ten hours, made up of one hundred minutes, which in turn are divided into one hundred seconds, expressed in the form hour:minute:second. So midnight is 00:00:00 and midday is 5:00:00. In official records, and for the purpose of historical consistency, all times for places in time zones other than that of New Geneva are automatically converted to Standard (Eastern mean time).
The metric system was introduced at the foundation of the settlement, as it was deemed unnecessary to cling to the archaic, arbitrary and clumsy system of time measurement employed on Old Earth.
On the use of the word ‘Standard’: Other than when applied to time (see above), the use of the adjective ‘Standard’ following a noun indicates that the noun being modified is specifically Deucalion. A lower-case ‘s’ (for example Earth standard) implies an origin other than Deucalion, and is always modified further by indicating the place of origin.
The most common use of the term ‘Standard’ is in relation to the official human
language of Deucalion. ‘Standard English’ is based on a dialect of Old Earth English, originally spoken in the Asia Southeast Region, specifically the Republic of Australasia. It has long been considered the purest form of the original tongue, differing significantly from both Amerenglish and Euroenglish, both of which degenerated markedly during the Hundred Years’ Depression which followed the Trade Wars of the early twenty-first century.
So common is this usage of the word that ‘Standard English’ is universally referred to simply as ‘Standard’.
This novel was born in December 1994, when I was invited to write a short story for the CBC anthology Celebrate! That story was “Centennial”, and what it had to say was important to me, but I realised immediately that the history of Deucalion still remained to be explored.
The planet, its inhabitants and all they had come to represent for me, during the writing of “Centennial”, were the genesis of the novel, and I would like to thank sincerely Anne Hanzl, Margot Hillel and Suzanne Wilson for allowing me to be a part of their celebration, for giving me the chance to discover the hidden secrets of Deucalion and for giving me something to occupy my time over the subsequent months.
Thanks too (as usual) to my soon-to-be-canonised family, who bore with me (as usual) through those months of exploration, put up with the (occasional) blaring music and the (even more occasional) bad moods, and almost never forgot to call me for meals.
First published 1995 by University of Queensland Press
PO Box 6042, St Lucia, Queensland 4067 Australia
Reprinted 1996, 2003
This edition first published 2013
www.uqp.com.au
© Brian Caswell 1995
This book is copyright. Except for private study, research,
criticism or reviews, as permitted under the Copyright Act,
no part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system,
or transmitted in any form or by any means without prior
written permission. Enquiries should be made to the publisher.
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