'Well yeah, but none of it is right. I had to look at the past. Combine archaeological thinking with physics.'
'You've lost me,' he says patronisingly.
'No, I haven't. Don't be ridiculous. You picked it up straightaway.' She sits down at the table opposite him. 'Stone and Bronze?'
'So?'
'The Ages, you ninny!' Her tired eyes twinkle with the maternal humour of knowing more.
'Now, I wish I'd asked for the jargon,' he comments as he responds to the knock on the door and lets the busboy place the tray on the bench by the kettle. Silence until the hotel employee is out of earshot. Meghan is at his shoulder as he works making the perfect coffee.
'It's the mind-set, not the facts, that gave me the break-through. Well, not exactly. The future was a dead duck, right?, so the past. In the dictionary I read that in classical mythology the Iron Age, definitively human, is considered "the last and worst age of the world". It follows the Stone and Bronze.'
'This, plainly, is not your area of expertise, Meghan. How do you have it?' He indicated the coffee. 'Black?'
'Whatever,' she sighs, changes her mood as if offended. She pulls her briefcase out from under the bed. 'The molten layer under the earth's surface is an indication of how hot the centre of the earth is, but it cannot be hollow.'
He laughs. 'Show me that.'
Meghan hands him more of her work. 'Rutile, ilmenite, zircon, valuable, but not interesting.'
'What's this? Substance X?' He sips his coffee delicately.
'An inexplicable biospheric medium,' Dr Meghan Featherstone replies nonchalantly, opening the fridge door to cool down her coffee with milk.
He speaks, 'Should, of course, the glass have come from outer space, a bit of meteorite, perhaps, would that prove, or go some towards proving there's life, or was life, on Mars for instance?'
She shakes her head then nods. 'The first poser, for me, was it was too geometric. A perfect circle. What is truly round, Sol? To be accurate, a perfect half-sphere. Like a cut ball, five metres in diameter?' Meghan is paid well to teach him, so she is patient.
'How can we find the other component?' He examines the written material, intelligently. 'That would be a start.'
Meghan heaves a noble sigh. 'The only substance I know that eats glass is hydrogen fluoride, but its incredibly toxic.'
'So we eat away the glass and find the biomatter?' Sol is a can-do man with resources at his finger-tips on his touch-phone. 'Is there a possibility that it's a fossil from earlier earth-life?'
'Use your brain man!,' Meghan scolds. 'Too integrated. Iodine vapour might work, if we find methane…'
'If not space-craft, what about earth-craft?' he interrupts.
Meghan snorts, 'I hadn't considered that.' She tosses a lump of greenish-white quartz in the air and catches it. 'About the weight of a cricket ball.'
'Methane cannot exist very long in the presence of oxygen without a biological source. Meteorites do not leave a perfect circle, nor do fossils or other dead relics of life as we know it,' he says, not taking any notice. Geologists always fiddle with bits of rock.
'I do not know about you, but it is pretty much proved to me that spaceships do not land on and take off from the earth's surface at will, although, a direct vertical rocket emission of nuclear-fuelled jet propulsion could explain, a, the glass, and, b, the circularity.' Meghan examines the uncharacteristic smoothness of her quartz.
'You're right, we'd know about rogue, non-government activity in that area. Private enterprise is shooting up satellites all over the place but we've got them all taped.' He closes the folder of geological data. Slaps it on top of the ream of the columns of mindless, brilliant calculations of computer software and wonders, again, where the hypothesis that set them running came from, and says. 'What's this gobbledegook about the Stone Age?'
Meghan takes a big breath, catches his eye before she says, 'What about Hell?'
'What about it?' He lifts himself off the chair.
'Beings living in fire at the centre of the earth,' Meghan grins. 'Very, very heavy guys. And so small you can hardly detect the carbon.'
'This is too outrageous! I know we live in a time of degeneracy and wickedness, but.'
'Exactly, beginning with the Iron Age,' Meghan posits triumphantly.
'I'm thirsty.' He flips a grapefruit juice out of the bar in the fridge, and offers her a drink with a gesture. 'I love it. You can properly say I am bamboozled!' He is sarcastic, 'Love it.'
'So,' Meghan doodles a circle. 'A bubble.'
'A bubble? As in blowing soap bubbles?' He looks at her drawing as he places the glass of juice beside the stone of similar colour.
'Yep. Of incredibly pure heat. Most of it, vapour. Think. Cross-section.' She drinks his juice.
He sighs and gets another one. Then sits next to her. 'Okay,' he admits doubtfully.
'How come it appeared?' She scribbles in a few desert oaks and the horizon line of the desert. 'Did Atlantis have warning of its disappearance?' She drafts the crust of the earth with the different levels of strata in lines on a list, cross-hatching, dots, waves. 'We assume that the heavy nature of the centre of the earth is dead metal. Have you considered the possibility that life, not as we know it, could be heavier than matter as we do know it? This thing, Sol, has the structure of an excrescence from inside.'
'Heavier. Than black holes for instance?' He is sceptical.
'Oh no. Exactly calculable,' she reaches over and taps on the print-out. 'The centre of gravitation. The basis of magnetism. Mankind has only ever drilled down eight kilometres. We do not know that we do not have biological essences beneath that.'
'Run that by me again,' he requests, getting the picture.
'Do we know the chemical essentials of mentality, fully?' Meghan moves her hands in the air grasping for a concept. 'The material basics of—ah—soul?'
'Uh uh. I'm with you,' he assures her.
'The hypothesis suggests that a bubble, a pimple, has erupted from deep within,' she shows it with her pencil.
'Volcanic?'
'No, Sol,' Meghan says tiredly, 'I checked that initially, naturally.' She catches his attention with a serious stare. 'In your search for proof of the existence of god, how would you like to prove the devil?'
'Wow,' he leans away from the beam of her stare. 'This iodine vapour? Even, possibly, hydrogen fluoride can isolate this Substance X, right?'
'If we can incontrovertibly verify its bio-fossil component or pith, we can make a giant leap in the search for our reason for being,' Meghan says simply.
'My mind is blowing, girl,' he admits, reaching his arms up into a complete stretch. 'This is great. We may find a life force even more destructive than man!'
'Personally,' Meghan, having delivered her findings, seems suddenly bored with the whole business. 'I think that men came from one of the solar systems outside the Milky Way and invaded this planet. Whether or not for their own survival. Like Superman-Clark Kent,' she hesitates. 'However, they're rather like the cane toad, randy and poisonous, with no natural predator. A real exotic, extraterrestrial. Or like the domestic dog who interbred with the dingo, and made something worse than a wolf when it's at home. An out-of-control pest. With no predator, man is searching for an enemy, killing everything else.'
Her Solieri is greedily collecting the papers, including the doodled drawing. 'I'm not interested in your wacky personal beliefs, Dr Featherstone. What I want is Substance X, substantiated, named (I'll name it), identified, patented, organised, analysed. Carefully protected, knowledge of it cautiously marketed, and, when you're ready, open to authenticity tests by colleagues of world renown. Do I make myself clear?'
Meghan, the stressed and relieved consultant, acquiesces obediently. 'You'll find the test sample and the top-secret paperwork in a locked bag in my wardrobe in the living quarters of our Darwin base laboratory.' Meghan makes a bowling action with the weighted stone in her hand, then puts it down, crunches some paper into a ball and actual
ly throws it with a stiff arm windmill at the wastepaper basket. Picks it up and does it again, loosening her shoulder muscles. He is packed up and ready to leave.
She grins. 'Now, Boss, I think I deserve some rest and recreation.'
'Sure, I'll ring you from Darwin. When I have had a good look at all this,' he feels for the doorknob.
'Just be careful who you show it to,' Meghan cautions. 'You don't want to be taken for a fool.'
'No way José! I'll be in touch.' He opens the door onto the plush corridor. She bowls a paper ball through it and acts silly. He shakes his head. 'Get some sleep. And have a holiday.'
45
…threatened to rape me…
The big black and tan dog greeted me with a wag of its behind. It had no tail. I smiled. As she had seemed pretty self-sufficient to me, I raised my eyebrows when Chandra asked me to lift her into the car. Sort of vulnerable in my arms, her upper-body strength carefully spread her weight evenly across my shoulders. She swung herself into the passenger seat like a pet monkey. Chook-feed in a bucket on her hip, Tilly waved us off with an arc of seed, knee-deep in a flurry of feathers.
This time, on the highway, I knew where I was going. A huge box of fresh produce topped by glossy silver beet leaves and bright red organic tomatoes sat in the bottom half of my rear-vision mirror. Every now and then, the human-sized head of the canine filled the reflection to look at the road ahead and catch my eye. We talked about odds and sods, asking each other personal questions in a way dykes have of getting to the essentials. Easy chatter in sweeping brush-strokes. My Achilles tendon injury somehow connected to my work on the death of a mother's son.
'"He was his mother's only joy",' I quoted.
'Thetis couldn't save her son.' Chandra inspired trust like a counsellor.
'Penny's devastated. I just wish whatever I do eases her grief,' I said. 'She wants answers.'
Chandra's smile creased the tanned face beneath the high cheek-bones and hard broad forehead. 'You've got a pretty good instinct in your investigations, Margot. What makes a good detective, lateral connections?' Chandra fished.
'All logical and linear with me,' I fibbed, omitting to mention the huge part hunches play in my work.
She laughed outright. 'You beguile with your sunflower looks. Here is the cliché incarnate! Margot's Achilles heel is an Achilles heel.'
'Yep. What you see is what you get!' Not exactly true.
'We both have secrets,' she said, as if she read my thoughts. On safer ground, Chandra gave her opinion of classic Greeks. 'Dionysus is like hippie men are now, wearing sarongs, exploring their femininity, dancing, playing the flute and driving women mad with their pretence, and Apollo is like the military, pure might. Achilles is definitely Dionysian, dressing up as a girl, Mummy's boy, but he is more of a poofter than your regular sensitive New Age guy, even though he fathered children when dressed as a maiden. They never give up sexual rights over women. They hang on to patrilineal descent. Achilles is vermin. Misogynist arsehole.'
My modern Greek-Australian mate was the macho man, but I didn't mention Pip to Chandra.
'And worst of all he killed and did despicable things to the body of the Queen of the Amazons, Penthesilea,' she remarked, viciously, reminding me of Rory and her guests last time I went to Lesbianlands. Also the word 'vermin' echoed in my head, said equally warmly by Vanderveen, the righteous environmentalist: if you believe something is vermin it is easy to kill.
'I have an old aggro Apollo to the north and wimpy greenie Dionysus to the south of my house. Who does that make me, Artemis?' I grinned at Chandra.
'Adonis was ripped to pieces by Artemis' dogs,' she said as I changed down gears to take the turn-off to the National Park.
Along the dirt road at a slower speed, I said, 'Speaking of pretty boys, do you think in a full-blooded matriarchy, the women in power had their fill of the most gorgeous youth of the land in springtime? For the rest of the year male adolescents were despatched to the desert to find their manhood through difficult initiations designed to let off their excess testosterone. I guess, a few lads wouldn't survive.'
She asserted, 'Men were not given free access to children or women. But they had to conceive,' Chandra affirmed. 'How do you think women would exercise power over other women? I don't think motherhood was as rampant as it is today.'
'That's a funny way of putting it.' I pondered the idea. 'Not all women are maternal, that's for sure.'
'What do you think about Lesbian separatism?' she probed.
'Separatist movements are a worry in this world where ethnic cleansing is the dreadful excuse for atrocities. Human rights violations—' I stopped because she wasn't listening. A mob of cattle sheltering in the shade of a gum on the flat of the road caused me to press my brake pedal sharply, bringing us up with a jolt. Myself and a cow gazed at each other. Then I turned to my passenger, mystified by what I must have done wrong. She had a closed mouth grin, a grimace, which she held a second before she met my eye with a twinkle in her own.
'Trust,' I finally answered. 'Power without oppression needs faith.'
The cows decided to move. I accelerated forward in a different, more cautious, frame of mind. Although my gut told me she didn't trust me, I felt the heart in my chest healthily beating. Happily.
Rory was ready to meet us in her Land Rover Guntractor, looking as pseudo-military as ever. The kelpie moved like a darting otter on the tray-back. Rory allowed me to take the boxes of food and the clothes bag while she carried Chandra to her truck. Chandra plainly wanted to be on the ground. Chemistry changed in the atmosphere. The divisible number two became the prime number three, an integer of a different colour. Unity or what? Fractions? The air was charged, fractious. Suddenly feeling discomforted I almost jumped back in the Suzuki to escape down the highway to the safety of the coast and a swim in the sea. I yearned to yell, 'Put her down, you stupid butch.' Irrationally irritated, I stood separately for a few moments, sorting the intense triangle. Rory fancied me, I fancied Chandra, and Chandra would probably go with Rory because she was politically up her alley, and that apparently mattered heaps.
The Rottie leapt onto the back of the truck with surprising agility. I pulled myself up beside Chandra and slammed the rattly door. The mood between the other two was sombre.
Rory addressed me. 'If you were surfing the net on your favourite subject, Margot, and you came across a site, say, called Cybergrils, what would you think?'
'Um, spelling mistake?' I replied.
'Okay. And?' she continued. 'Would you click in? And if you did, what would you expect to find?'
'A bunch of teenage geeks,' said Chandra helpfully.
'Right.' Rory kept the conversation rolling. 'Supposing, it was a spelling mistake, but then, it took on another meaning that was there all the time. Well? What do you reckon?'
'Steak and chops,' I joked. 'Q and A sessions at the cop shop. Truckies' meals.'
'Not a laughing matter,' Chandra risked her tongue and motioned towards plants, saying, 'Look at all that stinking roger.' The weed looked to the untrained eye like marijuana.
Rory had a point to make. 'Well, it has have something to do with girls. Lesbians?'
'Girls claiming their space in the technology revolution,' Chandra put in, lightly.
'What's the point of asking me? I know bugger-all about cyberspace.' I got out to deal with a gate.
By the time I was back in the vehicle they were exchanging information with so much mutual knowledge that clarifications did not need to be said. While I was madly curious, I kept mum. Explanations would come in their own good time. Once I let it go without trying to interfere, I quite enjoyed being bounced along next to Chandra, not having to socialise. When we passed the gate of Lesbianlands I sensed a change in nature. Chandra fell into me and let me right her back into position. On the fence was a sign NO MEN ALLOWED. TRESPASSERS PROSECUTED. Then SHOT ON SIGHT was added on a piece of cardboard lower down.
'Wilma must have been through recently
.'
'Which Wilma?' I asked facetiously.
'Not Wilma Woods, Wilma Campbell,' Rory fired, not offering an explanation of what gave her the impression that Willy's wife had been through.
Rory hardly addressed a word to me during the jaunt towards her place, although she was not impolite. Rory is a direct, no-nonsense person. She did not try if she didn't have to. Chandra stared straight ahead. I had the definite feeling that I was supernumerary; that they had business with each other which could not be conducted while I was in earshot. I tried to probe, suggesting lightly that secret women's business via the superhighway must be pretty dangerous, so many phonies and hackers lurking. I was shooting in the dark, but their rigid reactions, an emphatic freeze, gave me the feeling I may have hit the spot.
At the new bridge, I said 'Let me out here. I need to interview some gurls. Lesbianlands' problem doesn't seem to be your priority right now. I guess it's mine.'
Rory stopped her cumbersome truck immediately. Chandra told me that food would be on the table in two hours max. I waited for her smile, or even that spark of mischievous humour, but her eyes were shaded, dark pools. Still water running deep. Taking my notebook and pen, I slammed the creaky door closed. They rumbled off. I took the downward path. It forked at a creek. I walked beside it for a while.
Instead of easily finding someone to ask questions of, I heard accusatory passion splitting the murmuring ambience of the bush. I stayed hidden, sitting with my back resting against a tree trunk, my notebook in my lap. Trying to repress my own resentment, in the weird character of this place, my anger was expressed by other voices.
'You're a liar!' I idly took dictation.
'It is beneath me to explain the plain and bloody obvious,' someone said.
'There's nothing I can do if you don't believe me, is there?'
'When a liar says she's a liar, she is lying.'
'I'm not lying,' the voice pleaded.
A gurl I did not know came through the trees, stopped, turned and shouted. 'Get fucked, you're breaking my heart,' Then they resorted to shrieking obscenities which you wouldn't have had to be nearby to hear.
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