Ao Toa

by Cathie Dunsford

  “Ka pae. We need to do something about this locally now.” Cowrie talks to the members of TEA – Te Kotuku Eco Action – who gather around the computer screen to see the hikoi live. “So far, we’ve found out that there’s a GE experiment going on at Pratt’s farm. It involves inserting the DNA from pine trees into kauri seeds to increase their growth, along with an added dose of growth fertiliser marketed by – you guessed it – International Seed Corporation. The intention is to have instant kauri forests and to produce large species like Tane Mahuta within a few years instead of centuries. But as you know, Tane Mahuta is God of all forests in Aotearoa and this must be seen as an assault on our culture and spirituality as well as our natural heritage under the protection of Te Tiriti o Waitangi. The Crown cannot sign a treaty with us for land and grant us protection of our natural resources and then let these eco-vandal scientists have free rein.”

  “Too right! Let’s break in and rip up the plants!” Moana is furious at Tony for allowing this to happen on their farm.

  “Tai hoa, Moana. If we do that, then we may release the seeds into the surrounding forest by mistake. We need to really plan this move carefully.” Irihapeti is always wary when it comes to working with plants and making sure they do it properly.

  “Yes. And I suspect from what Maata has managed to find out that, as gruesome as this experiment may be, it’s probably a cover for something even worse. She and Waka followed one of the scientists down to the Maori burial caves. They got as far as the entrance and saw that it is lit up inside and wired for security and there is video surveillance. They hid in the bushes and waited. On following nights, men went in and out on schedule and it may be that they are doing some kind of cloning there.”

  “Oh, no. Not in the caves. They are sacred to my whanau and all our ancestors,” groans Moana, shocked to hear this news for the first time. “That he could defile Tane Mahuta is one thing, but to desecrate our sacred burial caves and use them for unholy experiments is unforgivable. There is a tapu on the caves. Anybody who defiles them will be held accountable by sources higher than us.”

  The group nods in assent. They all know stories of things that have happened to people who have defied ancient taboo and reaped the results of their acts. Some have been poisoned, others withered away from unidentifiable and incurable diseases. Some have fallen from cliffs or been swallowed up by the sea.

  “I need to warn Tony that he could be harmed also. After all, he is the father of my children.” Moana pleads with the group to let her talk to him, but they feel it is too early, that they should discover what is really happening inside the caves before acting in ignorance, then make a considered plan about the best way to handle this.

  “How can we find out, though, if there is so much surveillance up there? There’s no way we will get any closer than Maata and Waka have, and that’s because they already have clearance and an excuse to be on the land.” Koa voices her concerns while putting on the kettle for a cuppa.

  “Just a minute. Didn’t there used to be a rear entrance to those caves? I recall going up there as a kid and finding a tunnel that led into the smaller caves beyond the main ones.”

  “Ka pae, Cowrie. You’re right. My kuia took me into the tunnel when we were kids and there is one leading right up behind the main cave. Let’s go and check it out. I know the way to it, and we could use the old track, cut across the back paddocks and enter the tunnel at dusk. That way, they’d never catch us, and we could monitor their activities without being seen.” Moana is pleased to be of use to them because they have all looked after her and her tamariki so well since they returned home to Te Kotuku. She has grown to love these eco-activists whom she’d have given a wide berth when she was still with Tony. They are just like all the other wahine – only perhaps a bit braver. And they do not care what anyone else thinks. Even when some of the older ones feel threatened or say they do not follow politically correct protocol. They live with passion and they believe in their heritage and the causes they embrace. What’s more, they are willing to do something about it. That’s enough for Moana to embrace them as sisters.

  “Right. Let’s form a core group to go to the caves and suss out what’s happening. Who’s up for it?” Cowrie counts the hands. “Looks like Moana, Kuini and I. That’s enough to get help if we get stranded. I think you should stay out of it and keep your nose to the ground around Tony, Maata. You’ve done brilliant work in befriending that spade-wielding murderer, Mike – and, since you’ve gained his trust, you will be invaluable to our operation later. We may need you for evidence.” Maata is disappointed that she will not be in on the main action, but pleased her efforts have been rewarded with praise.

  They continue discussing the breach of their wairua regarding the interference with the seeds of the kauri tree and what legal redress might be available as well as political action. It is decided that Mere will get on the net and find out what she can about the legal issues involved and co-ordinate with Iri on this. Irihapeti will make sure all goes well back at base camp, Te Kotuku nursery, in case the others get stranded or captured at Pratt’s farm. Koa will relay the news to the Wild Greens as a support group, if they cannot get into the barn enclosure and destroy the plantation successfully and safely when the time comes for this action.

  Korero continues on the vital importance of GE-free groups working as necessary within their own areas of concern as well as in the wider frame of Aotearoa. This takes them late into the night, and several brews of kawakawa tea are needed to send the wahine to sleep after their activist energies have been excited.

  As Cowrie lies in bed that night, she recalls a story told her by Monoloa, a student from the Marquesa Islands she met while protesting. She remembers the gist of her words.

  We of the Tuamotu talk of Atea, God of Space, and Tane, God of Men. Originally, they lived in divided realms layered within the wide open space of the sky. After their tribes quarrelled, Tane fled for safety to earth. But he vowed revenge. With the help of Ru, the turtle, and Ru, the humpback whale, they waged a war of potent chants and warrior action against Atea. Finally, he was defeated when Tane stole flames and set fire to the heavens above them, causing lightning to rain down on Atea, killing him. But Atea’s mana did not die. It lived on in the islands and was handed down through ancestry.

  But why has this come to her now? Maybe it’s telling her they should set the barn alight? Or maybe attach a fuse to the wires leading into the cave? No, this cannot be so. Then they could broadcast the contaminated seeds. The Koori tribes of Australia set the plants and trees alight in order to spread seed, not to contain or destroy it. No, fire and lightning cannot be the answer here. She drifts off to sleep, forked lightning spiking her dreams, fusing her spirit, urging her on as Pele rages over the mountains of her ancestral mindscape, the fiery volcanic activity sparking the edges of her consciousness, urging it to flow toward the waiting waters at the foot of Kiluaea, to sizzle and be consumed by their oceanic embrace.

  Cowrie wakes with a thud as a bird hits the window of her bedroom and slumps down the wall. She gets up to see if she can help and leans over to notice it has landed on a rock in the garden, its neck twisted and broken. A tui, whose white-throated cry will never be heard in these forests again. One sacrifice too many for an earth laden with too many deaths and devastation by human will, altering the balance of nature, the pattern of survival. Even building a cottage in their territory is an invasion of their land. We have all caught this disease of colonisation, she thinks. But now we have to learn how to deal with it. And live together peacefully. As tempting as it is to want utu – to call for revenge on Pratt and his eco-vandals – we must not be as stubborn and brutal as George Bush and his Conscripted Murderers in Afghanistan. I’d love to see the Taliban nailed to the cross for their treatment of women, but not more innocent Afghan men and woman and their tamariki murdered in the process. Enough is enough. Cowrie worries she is losing her spirit, her will to fight these issues. She slinks off to bed and e
nters a dreamless sleep.

  It is a full moon and Hina guides the wahine across the fields towards the tunnel leading to the caves. Moana is in front and they manage to walk the overgrown clay track without using torches. But once they enter into the tunnel, they need their caving caps, borrowed from Tipo’s boys. The caps are fitted with lights, and the one Cowrie is wearing has a video camera. The rock slopes downward and they come to what looks like a solid wall. Edging up to it, there is a vertical drop of about twenty feet.

  “Shit! I never banked on this. Dunno if my turtle body will fit into that hole. Whad’ya reckon?”

  “I’ve come prepared for this.” Moana drops her back-pack and pulls out abseiling ropes. “Got these from our shed when Tony was at the pub. He used to take us out climbing in the good old days just after we first met. Comes in handy now, eh?” She grins at them.

  “Great work, Moana. You’re a beaut.” Kuini winks at her. “Okay, let’s strap it around Cowrie and she can clamber down first and help us when we arrive.”

  “Dunno if I’m up to that,” mumbles Cowrie, still tired from her disturbed sleep the night before.

  “Sure you are, Turtle. Here, lean on me and then edge down. I’ll tie you up to this rock and ease you down gently. Trust me.” Kuini helps Moana secure the ropes as Cowrie teeters on the edge, hardly daring to look into the wet cave below. Bit by bit, she eases herself down, her hand tight on the clasp below her body, just taking out as much rope as she can handle for each stage of the drop. Just as she is about to land, a twig scrapes the side of her face that is nearly touching the cave wall. She brushes it away, but it clings harder to her face, as if gripping onto her for dear life. Suddenly she realises it is no twig, but a giant cave weta, so large that it covers the entire side of her face and its barbed legs are hanging onto her lips and the edge of her nose and her eyebrows. She wants to scream but knows the scientists could be on the other side of the wahine right now. She has no idea how far away they might be. She cannot blow their cover now they have come this far.

  Cowrie is terrified of wetas and this might be her one moment of bravery in a lifetime. She grits her teeth and winces, praying the weta will dive off once she reaches the rock floor of the cave safely. But it digs its sharp legs into her face even more strongly. She can see its jaws out of the corner of her eye. Jaws, she knows, that are capable of biting through manuka trees, let alone soft facial flesh. The weta is moving, doing gentle push-ups as they slide down the rope together. Its body is shivering. It’s then that Cowrie realises the creature is as frightened as she is. That they are bound together on this strange journey into Hades, the descent to the bowels of the earth and beyond. For the first moment in her life, she feels strangely connected to this creature. It is actually as frightened as she is, and she hopes she will bear it safely to the rocks below. As the weta grips onto her face, Cowrie grits her teeth again and lets out another length of rope. This time her feet bounce off the wall of the tunnel and touch hard rock. She carefully balances herself on the ledge, just as in the sea cave, and remembers to stay calm. As she steadies herself, the weta leaps from her face gratefully and into a dry rock crevice. It slinks into the rear in the dark.

  Her tug on the rope alerts the others that she is safely down and they pull the rope back up for Kuini’s descent. Cowrie hopes another weta is not waiting for her, but is touched by this moment of connexion she had never expected might happen in her lifetime. She has always had a terror of these creatures, said to be so strong they would survive a nuclear holocaust, along with some fellow cockroaches. Cowrie vowed she would not want to be a survivor at that rate. Now she may reconsider. Then again, a few million weta might be a different proposition. Within minutes, Kuini has joined her at the foot of the drop, and then Moana. Cowrie does not have time to share her experience before they are crawling on their bellies through the next passage in the tunnel, about as wide as a sea turtle within the curve of a wave.

  By the time they reach the far cave, they can hear voices. They remain still, listening to the sounds and trying to locate their source on the other side of the rock wall. Kuini spies a slit in the rock near the top, just over a ledge. They climb up and peer into the room. The sight that meets their eyes defies belief. The large cave they remembered as kids has been turned into a laboratory. It’s as light as a McDonald’s restaurant and about as gaudy. But apart from that, it looks like a regular science lab. So why go to all the trouble to place it out here, hidden from everyone? Well, nearly everyone. The two women had dreaded to see hideous malformations, kunekune pigs wandering about with duck heads or fish flailing in shallow water, not able to hold up the weight of their own heads. But the scene was nothing like that. It was so prosaic, so hygienic, so normal – nothing but test tubes and lab reports, files and containers of frozen embryos.

  Kuini fixes her binoculars on a filing cabinet and reads the label Frozen Embryo Files, and her breath stops a moment. She notes: “Frozen Embryos. Pigs. Sheep. Lambs. Humans: Male; Female. Eggs: Human: Female.” She whispers to the others. “What the hell are they doing with human embryos? I thought that was illegal?” Suddenly, an alarm rings through the cave. The sensors have been alerted to a foreign presence. The lights go out automatically and they are left in pitchblack darkness.

  The wahine switch off their head lanterns, so that they do not shine into the cave and give away their presence. They remain, frozen, on the rock ledge, as immobile as the frozen human embryos waiting their turn to change the course of civilisation, sitting innocently within an ancient cave in Aotearoa, a cave still inhabited by the spirits of their ancestors. The ancestors do not approve of their fate, and they will not shrink from taking their revenge, as surely as Tane stole flames and set fire to the heavens and threw lightning at Atea to kill him. They will avenge Tane just as he sought utu on Atea. And like him, they will win, perhaps destroying everything in their path along the way, like revenge on the Taliban is doing. Women have always been caught in between the warring actions of men seeking utu throughout the ages. And now, in these dark times of terror.

  “The lights have gone out. It’s totally black in the cave, but I can hear their voices.” Irihapeti watches the computer screen where the digital video pictures are being relayed back from the camera inserted into Cowrie’s cap.

  “Whad’ya reckon’s happened?” replies Koa, edging up to the screen to see for herself.

  “Dunno. Can’t be a power failure or we wouldn’t be able to see them. Maybe they switched off the lights because they heard voices? I heard Kuini whisper something about human embryos.”

  “You’ve gotta be joking. D’you really think those fellas are playing about with human cells?”

  “Yeah – like as not they’ll cover their tracks with that spin about stem cell research to help modern medicine, but we know they are all after the same thing – to clone the first super human – and then they are on their way to infinite riches, for sure.”

  “But that couldn’t possibly be happening here in little old Aotearoa, could it?”

  “Sure,” Iri answers. “Why not? We’re already leading the world in genetic engineering in the development of forestry gene research. We were the first country to give women the vote. The first to be nuclear-free. Why not be the first to clone a human being?”

  “Because there are ethics involved in giving women the vote and becoming nuclear-free. It’s different.”

  “Sure is, but where’s the ethics in the genetic forestry research – and where’s the ethics in cloning human beings? Once you begin down that path, where do you stop? That’s precisely why we should not start in the first place.”

  “I agree with you there, but others argue that we’d still be in the Stone Age if we thought that way.”

  “Who says we wouldn’t have been better off there?”

  “Well, you’d miss some of your modern comforts, my love, that’s for sure. Like your hot tub at night and your Marae programme on Sunday television!”

 
“The hot tub is lit by fire, and if telly never arrived, we’d probably be sitting discussing the same issues on the marae that the Marae programme is doing on the telly.”

  “You’re incorrigible, Iri! But yeah – we need to get real about this now or it will be too late. Don’t worry – I was just being devil’s advocate for a while.” Koa rubs her shoulders, still watching the empty screen in case one of their friends might suddenly appear magically from the blackness.

  “So long as we can hear their voices, then I don’t think we need to get too worried at this stage. They will think to speak directly into the camera once they remember it’s there and alert us if anything is wrong.”

  “Yeah, I s’pose so. D’ya think we should tell Mere and Maata though?”

  “No way. Not after the last time. We’ll handle this until we know there is a true emergency, then alert them. Otherwise we’ll have half the community of Te Kotuku, plus the cops and medics and tohunga, out there before we even get a chance to find out what is truly happening.” Iri tries the focus on her computer to see if she can zero in on the scene and pick up any more light or detail. 120, 140, 160, 180, 200 per cent … no luck … it’s just more of the same. She changes the screen and scrolls through the emails.

  “Hey, Koa. Check this out. A response to the so-called war on terrorism by Arundhati Roy, remember, God of Small Things and The Cost of Living?”

  “Great. What’s her take?”

  Iri scrolls through the words and hooks onto the last few paragraphs. “She sees Osama bin Laden as a kind of dark twin of Bush and draws analogies between the actions of Bush and Bin Laden. Brilliant stuff.” She reads on.

  At the end, Koa replies. “I see us faced with the same kind of dilemma with GE. We might not just be murdering embryos by cutting out their stem cells – and far be it from me to play into the hands of the right-to-lifers – but we may be committing a larger mass murder by altering the blueprint of life as we know it. We may be committing ourselves to endless cycles of reproductive disasters just as we are enduring endless cycles of revenge and warfare at the hands of madmen like Bush and bin Laden. It’s not just a matter of win or lose, of revenge or not, but it’s ultimately a question of how we want to live our lives now and in the future. And in asking these questions, making these decisions, we are carrying all our ancestors before us and our descendants after us along for the ride. We are changing the nature of life as we know it and have known it, not just for this decade, but forever.”