Strange Attractors (1985)

  personality’ bit is a barrel of laughs. Three husbands and a doubtful acquittal

  of murder and ‘sedate she tells me! No wonder the psychs never understood

  the children; we human beings don't even understand each other. And our

  punishment for it is the world we deserve. Yet she looks the part - fattish, garrulous, the clumsy kind who knocks ornaments off tables but whom neighbours say is ‘marvellous with children; She probably is. Why not?

  C Group were kept apart from A and B. Oh, you know that? They

  were less developed physically and the A and B kids were apt to be

  rough, besides which they didn’t like the Cs. Said they were snotty.

  The Cs weren’t talking but we could tell they just weren’t interested in

  the others, as though they didn’t matter enough to be recognised.

  As for not speaking, they had a whole language of little signs

  between themselves, so little that for a long time we didn’t recognise

  communication. A shift of the eyes, the barest flick of a gesture, a

  change of breathing, things like that. But with us nurses they used big,

  extravagant gestures to tell us what they wanted; they’d throw their

  little arms around our necks and nuzzle, tug the way they wanted to

  go, mimic drinking a glass of milk or playing with a toy. The psychologists said they were bilingual, using theatrical gestures for us and a

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  more subtle system between themselves.

  Then you’d see them asleep, sucking their thumbs like ordinary

  kids; at other times you’d catch them watching you with the most

  peculiar expression, intent, as though you were a study that had to be

  mastered. The look would go as soon as you caught it; they would

  laugh and want to play and you’d wonder if you’d really seen anything

  strange.

  Anecdotes? Oh, lots. I can tell you one about Conrad — he was the

  one who caused all the trouble later — that will show you what they

  were like. You’ll have to excuse some of the words I use, which in the

  normal course I wouldn’t, but I am only quoting, remember.

  And loving it. You don’t get much opportunity to use them these days, what

  with the neighbours and all.

  It was the day he lost his temper with me. He was just four. He was

  alone on the verandah, looking out through the wire, watching Derek,

  the new gardener. I knew it was Conrad by the little tattoo behind his

  ear. Not that it m attered because all four of them behaved exactly

  alike.

  I came from behind and he cert ainly heard me because their senses

  were sharp, much sharper than ours, but the hunch of his shoulders

  told me that his eyes would have that look, as if his mind was taking

  Derek to pieces and putting him together again. Learning him. It could

  be creepy. But it was mealtime and it had been one of those mornings

  and I suppose I was a little sharp. Anyway, I said, ‘Come on, Conrad,

  upsy!’

  He didn’t let on that he heard me, and that was unusual. Normally

  they would come to life and fall all over us with love and fun. ‘Keeping on the right side of us,’ the psychologists said, and it turned out there was something in that. This day I was in no mood for holdups,

  so I said, ‘Dinnertime, Conrad! Come on, now!’

  I took him under the armpits and lifted him and tossed him because

  he liked that, and turned him to face me and found a little animal in

  my hands, throwing its limbs about and struggling and screaming at

  me the first words it had ever spoken.

  ‘Fuck off, Blaikie! Can’t you tell by now when I’m thinking!’

  I don’t know whether it was shock or what, but I put him down on

  the floor and my hands over my mouth and absolutely squealed with

  laughter. It seemed the funniest, wickedest thing I had ever heard.

  After a minute he saw the joke, too, but he saw it like an adult and

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  his laugh was intimate, as though we shared a secret. But we didn’t

  and he knew it, because he toddled across to one of the bugged pillars

  that he wasn’t supposed to know anything about and said right into the

  microphone spot, ‘Now I suppose we’ll have to waste time answering

  your bloody questions!’

  And so they did, but it seems that what the psychs learned was Group C’s

  ability to hear no question they didn’t see fit to answer. The teams were loath to

  use coercion because they didn’t know what they were dealing with and might

  have distorted the personalities. They learned just what the kids allowed them

  to.

  3 Derek, the gardener among other things

  All we outside staff at Project IQ_ were Special Services men. I did

  three stints there, so I knew the Group C kids over a period of sixteen

  years off and on, and Conrad fastened on to me from my first days,

  when he was only four.

  With hindsight it’s easy to say that the kids played us all for fools and

  never had the slightest feeling for any of us, but it isn’t true. I know that

  Conrad liked me in his fashion. It’s nothing to be proud of because it

  didn’t mean that we were friends, only that he had some sort of feeling for me. I love dogs and horses, and that is more or less the way he felt about me. So I think. There’s no way of being sure.

  The other kids noticed me sometimes, but only in passing. I think

  that Young Feller adopted me as his study and-the others recognised

  priority. I called him Young Feller and he took it for his name. Said

  Conrad sounded like gears clashing. One of the B Group girls opted

  for Jesus Bloody Christ because she said it suited her personality, but

  that was discouraged. We never knew whether it was a joke or not. I

  think it was.

  But you want to know about Young Feller. I can’t tell you much that

  isn’t in the literature.

  You already have. Nobody else has described what being liked by him was

  like. Devastating to discover that he was all fagade, as penetrable as a dog

  might find its master? But a dog never realises that he is not a loving equal.

  Derek is strong enough to ’know his place’ without rancour. That takes a lot of

  strength.

  The most I can do is confirm what happened at the Project site. The

  official versions of the breakout are mostly face-saving because

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  nobody wanted to admit to being so easily fooled. It’s ridiculous, looking back on it; the teams devoted their lives to producing genius and then were ashamed to admit that their proteges out-thought them. We

  blur every reality with emotions and vanities.

  I’d been eighteen months on my third tour of duty when it happened. The Group C kids were twenty years old and nobody knew what to do with them. A and B Groups had gone out into the public

  world four years before. Those Groups weren’t failures but neither

  were they so intelligent that the simple human world was beyond

  them; they were capable of fitting in. I believe they did very well in

  their particular lines once the publicity had died down.

  An understatement. A Group revolutionised the theory of logic and turned

  half of philosophy on its rational ear, but not to the point of being incomprehensible. B Group have been iess prominent as artists becaus
e their work is harder to grasp, but not so hard that a few can't see where they are heading. They are

  successes, but the kinds of successes we halfwits can cope with. Group C was

  too successful. A complete failure.

  The breakout followed a simple, obvious pattern and none of us saw

  it forming. The two girls started their escape attempts when they were

  eighteen, which was when their menstrual periods began. They were

  all physically retarded and looked about thirteen. They were silly attempts, bound to fail, and their rebelliousness and general cussedness

  — they could make the place hell when it suited them — were put

  down to menstrual tension.

  They never meant to escape. They were only testing the security

  points until they knew as much about them as the designers. When

  they knew enough, they recovered from ‘menstrual tension’ and let the

  staff settle back into routine. M eaning complacency.

  I was there and never suspected a thing. They knew how to distract

  us in simple-minded ways. That was how they rated our mentalities.

  And they had the patience to wait on a long-term plan. Their opportunity came in twenty-twenty-four, their twentieth year.

  You’d be too young to remember but that was the climax of the

  decade when the greenhouse effect really made itself felt, when summer stretched through autum n and the weather patterns began to frighten us. The northern half of Australia drowned in tropical rainfall

  while the southern half baked in twelve years of near drought.

  How they do run on about the drought years, like old soldiers showing their

  scars. So it was terrible. So they suffered. So what’s new in history?

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  I was playing at head gardener that time and the job was heartbreak. We had had just a little winter rain, enough to let the grass get up twelve or fifteen centimetres, so there were two hectares of pasture

  round the Project buildings. We intended to let Farmer Tebbutt’s prize

  herd in rather than cut it but the hot spell caught us wrong-footed. In

  a week all we had was grass drying out and hot west winds blowing to

  melt the ground.

  We don’t know which of the kids started the grass fire but we know

  how it was done — with some broken bottle glass and cleaning fluid

  filched from the Maintenance Store. Simplicity again, when we were

  alert for cunning. It started on the west side of the complex, where the

  wind would fan it, just far enough back to be sure it would sweep right

  round the buildings. They were safe with their internal sprinklers,

  stone construction and surrounding driveways, but of course we all

  turned out to fight the grass fire — with old-fashioned beaters because

  we had nothing else.

  All of us except the four kids. They went into hysterics of fright.

  They had never been in danger before and their reactions were

  extreme.

  So we thought. Afterwards, we saw how they had managed to

  hinder us until a couple of small outrushes became walls of flame racing over the grass. It reached the eastern perimeter hedge, moving so fast that one of my gardeners, who was coming on duty and taking a

  short cut from the guardhouse, was caught by it as he ran.

  It hit the eucalypts round the guardhouse and they exploded the

  way they do when the sap catches. The guardhouse went up and the

  whole of the perimeter hedge on that side. The power to the concealed

  fence was cut as the terminals melted free and the whole security system was exposed. It was easy to penetrate when you could see it.

  There was an offiduty soldier in the guardhouse, sleeping; he burned

  alive. The fire leapt the road and raged into the tinderbox pasture

  round the Tebbutt homestead and burned his small herd of tortured

  cattle before the Country Fire Authority could do more than reach the

  scene.

  In the middle of it all Young Feller strolled to freedom through the

  west perimeter, walking at his leisure.

  The other three went into crocodile lamentations, but by this time

  we were putting ideas together and they knew it. And mocked us. Not

  openly, but the cool contempt was there. They had what they wanted:

  one of their num ber out in the world. A vanguard observer of the

  savages in habitat. They knew their value; they knew nothing puni­

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  tive could be done to them. But they were wrong about that.

  The staff had long ago stopped loving their charges and now they

  hated the young bastards who pretended remorse for the dead men

  and the holocaust of cattle. The psychologists said objectiveness was

  essential, that the kids were the product of a pragmatism designed into

  them, however unwittingly. But they were willing enough when finally

  given permission to make an all out assault on the superhuman

  minds. They went at them with drugs and sensory probes, trying to

  discover what they had made, at the risk of destroying it.

  I never found out much about that because I was recalled to barrack

  duty.

  So why mention it? Why, indeed, when this little carnival of cruelty is n o t a

  matter of public record? The thin end of a secret? A sop to lure me on? Hist, I

  am observed! Eleven interviews and at last a stirring of the enemy.

  Dangerous? Undoubtedly, but I am like Childe Roland, whose road

  vanished behind him. Nowhere to go but forward.

  C onrad’s feeling for me? There is evidence, but it isn’t really my

  story; I didn’t know much about it when Conrad showed how he

  thought. You’d do better to ask Jilly, if you can find her. She has a

  husband and kids somewhere in the city.

  And thus, smoothly, am I directed to the next in line!

  4

  The farmer’s daughter

  Hum an interest, Mister Newshound? Should I tell you to keep your

  nose out of my private life? O r should I ask, how much it it worth?

  And what makes you think it will be worth anything at all?

  Because you are primed to make it worth. Educated, poised, disillusioned

  and poor; grateful for a couple of hundred. A lady' who has, as they say, ‘seen

  better days’. Heroine moves to window - thirtieth floor - holds drape aside to

  gaze pensively over great, heartless city; pauses for me to name a sum. Her

  husband looks uncomfortable at the blatant demand but doesn’t protest. Has

  his orders from script director. All right, then, a small offer, just to play along.

  I suppose you’ve seen Derek, because I never told anyone about

  meeting Young Feller. It wouldn’t have helped the hunt. Also, Derek’s

  wife had to be considered. I don’t know what my husband will think;

  I’ve never told him about it.

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  George Turner

  He has been told what to think, Jilly. Out with it, girl!

  Did Derek tell you that our homestead was burned out by that filthy

  kid? We were lucky not to lose our lives. We lost the herd, which was

  all Dad had, and it broke him. T hat’s why —

  Nearly let out an unscripted bit then. Something like this: 'That's why I had

  to marry, for survival, and why I’ve come to this musty husband in this musty

  hole.'

  I made a fool of myself over Derek. Masculinity, muscle and Special

  Se
rvice glamour — and little snippets of information to make me

  think myself privy to secrets. And dreams of romantic marriage.

  Derek told me no lies; he just failed to mention a wife and a teenage

  family.

  We used to meet at The Willows. That was a picnic spot at a bend

  in the creek at the bottom of our Long Paddock. There were half a

  dozen big old trees, weeping almost to the ground; in the heart of them

  you could not be seen from the further bank. It was one of the Long-

  Drought years and the creek was almost dry, just a trickle, but the trees

  were still sturdy and Derek would meet me there of an evening.

  When the house was burned out and friends were putting us up, I

  made excuses to get away because I needed desperately to see him. I

  thought he’d surely propose now that I was literally homeless. So I

  went there in the late afternoon, knowing he would come as soon as

  he had handed over to the evening watch; there were still a couple of

  hours of daylight.

  I pushed the long, drooping fronds aside, and there was the boy! I

  knew at once that he must be the one who had escaped the previous

  afternoon. The description was out — dark, crop-haired, whiteskinned, apparently about fifteen though he was five years older. He half lay, propped against the trunk of the willow, gazing at me without

  any expression at all. Eerie! You’ll have heard of expressionless faces

  but have you ever seen one? It could have been a mask he wore.

  I know I made some sort of frightened noise and stood still, panicking. Then I turned to run, to call the police or Derek or anyone I could find, but I didn’t get two paces. He was on me like a snake. From

  reclining he crossed five metres while I turned and began to run, spun

  me by the arm and threw me down under the tree. He seemed

  tremendously strong. He sat down beside me and gripped my wrist

  and hit me, not very hard but hard enough to stop me struggling, and

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  he said — I’ll never forget him saying it, like a remark about the

  weather — If you call out I will kill you. I have no inhibition against

  killing.’

  It was like being addressed by a mechanical doll, programmed to