Two hours later Jed was reluctantly impressed.
One kitchen, stainless-steel benches, a washing-up machine powered by water, needing no detergent. Then a laundry, where a gigantic washing machine tossed clothes with twice the power of an ordinary one.
‘That’s why most of our clothes are made of linen,’ explained Mark. ‘Linen is tough enough to be boiled or washed vigorously, so we don’t need to pollute with washing powders or detergents.’
A big well-lit room filled with looms, soft music with a rapid but gentle beat, six people weaving what looked like carpets and woollen cloth.
‘This is one of our chief sources of income. The wool comes from our sheep — they’re Tukidales, carpet wool sheep. Australia has more merinos than human beings, but few carpet wool sheep, so we get a high price per kilo for what we don’t use ourselves.’
Jed gazed at the workers, five older women and an older man. The man mumbled to himself. The smiling woman next to him reached over and wiped off a dribble of spit with a white handkerchief.
Mark followed her gaze. ‘That’s Mark 48. He’d had a stroke, couldn’t even stand up when his wife met Ra Zacharia last year. He’s still improving every day.’
‘So cures aren’t immediate then?’ demanded Jed.
‘Of course not. Not for everyone.’
People did recover from strokes, thought Jed. Like Tommy had. But the body’s natural recovery from a stroke helped with careful diet and therapy, was far different from growing a new spine for a girl like Scarlett.
And each person in that room too had that faint but ever-present smile.
They moved along the corridor to a room that Mark said was a chemistry lab, but which looked more like a kitchen or perhaps a medical stillroom, with bundles of dried herbs hanging from the ceiling, although the benches were stainless steel and the vessels were test tubes and glass beakers instead of cauldrons. No sign of a nursery, as they had at Walden Two. ‘No kids?’ she asked.
Mark hesitated. ‘Not for a couple of years yet. Kids take time, break up the focus. But there’ll be a kids’ wing one day. This is the sleeping area.’
A wing of single rooms, each with a single white quilted bed. No wardrobes. No bookshelves. And no privacy, thought Jed. ‘No double beds?’
Mark smiled, a deeper smile than the Chosen’s almost permanent one. ‘If you want to sleep together, a single bed is all you want. But afterwards, people need privacy. Silence, stillness. You can’t have that if someone else is with you.’
‘Why no cupboards?’
‘We share whatever we need. The clothing room is just in here. Anyone can help themselves. That’s the “where does this go?” room, for anything that doesn’t quite fit in the work rooms. And this,’ the pride was clear in his voice, ‘is the library.’
Jed whistled, which would have had Matilda giving her the dragon eye. The longest room she had yet seen, laid out like a proper library, with moving shelves of books, tens of thousands of them.
Somehow, someway, Ra Zacharia controlled a lot of money.
‘And here we are in the refectory again.’
‘What’s in the other wing?’
‘That’s astronomy and medical. Ra Zacharia is in charge of those.’
‘Can we see them?’
‘I don’t have access, but I’m sure he’d be happy to show them to you another time.’
‘Why don’t you have access?’
‘Oh, of course I go there if I’m sick. But when you live together you need rules so work doesn’t get interrupted. I’ve shown you the areas where I work . . .’
‘You don’t have one single job?’ Scarlett had been surprisingly quiet.
‘Of course not. It wouldn’t be fair to have someone clean toilets forever. Each job is assessed at so many units per hour. Cleaning the toilets — they’re composting ones, by the way, Clivus Multrums from Sweden — gets ten credits per hour; cooking gets three; weaving gets three too; general cleaning is six. We each need to work thirty units a day.’
Like Walden Two indeed. ‘And you are gaining credits from showing us around?’ For that had been what the guide in the book earned.
Mark grinned. ‘Two credits only, because it’s fun.’
Had he earned two credits an hour for picking up Scarlett too? ‘What were you doing in the bookshop the other day?’
Mark looked startled.
‘You have that enormous library. Is one of your jobs to get books to add to it? Or did you go to the bookshop to meet Scarlett?’
‘Jed!’ Scarlett’s mutter was accompanied by a dig from her elbow.
‘Um . . .’ Mark glanced at Scarlett, obviously unwilling to reply.
So he had been there to meet Scarlett, who was almost always at the bookshop on Friday afternoons while Jed helped at River View. But he didn’t want Scarlett to know. Nor was he prepared to lie about it. Which, rather than turning Jed off, made her like him more. He might have been told to meet Scarlett, but he understood it would hurt her to hear that.
The white-clad kitchen staff — both male and female, and no aprons, thought Jed, all seemingly in the best of health except one woman with the faint suggestion of a limp — were putting out more platters of bread, and what looked like fruit purées rather than jams. Afternoon tea, but without the tea?
‘Would you like —?’ began Mark.
‘We need to go,’ said Jed. Which was true. She had to digest this, try to make sense of it. And Scarlett had been too quiet for too long. Could she possibly be hoping that the order and discipline of this building, the seeming serenity of the lives within it, might conceivably mean that Ra Zacharia’s promise could be true?
They walked towards the front door. ‘I hope you’ll come again soon,’ said Mark. ‘There’s a lot more to show you. The shearing shed, the greenhouses —’
‘What do you do in the chemistry lab?’ As Mark hesitated, she added, ‘You must work there, as you showed it to us.’
‘Mostly wash test tubes.’ She heard the truth in his voice, as well as the wish he could claim something more important to impress both her and Scarlett. ‘Miss Kelly?’
‘Jed.’
‘Jed. I . . . I was in a bad way before I came here. Most of us were. I truly believe this community is the best place on earth. For everyone.’
‘Maybe you’re right.’ Jed Kelly, millionaire, even if a reluctant one, had choices, comfort, security. Few were as lucky as she was — and it had been luck, not hard work, that had given her all she had now. The community of the Chosen of the Universe seemed to truly offer its inhabitants a better life than they might have elsewhere. But at what cost — and to whom?
Jed nodded at the jar of money on the side table by the door. ‘Should I add to that?’
‘You don’t understand,’ said Mark quietly. ‘Anyone who passes through these doors can help themselves to as much as they need. It’s a pot for taking money from, not putting in.’
And yet someone must fill it. At, presumably, so many credits per hour. ‘Thank you,’ said Jed. She hesitated. ‘Are you allowed to visit other people?’
‘Of course.’
He seemed so surprised by the question Jed felt even more relief. Everything she had read about cults had emphasised that a true cult kept its members segregated from the world, imprisoned within a small circle of belief. Ra Zacharia must either feel extremely confident, or so eager to target her money, that he allowed Mark not just the freedom to visit her and Scarlett, but to feel that he was free.
‘Come to dinner some evening.’ She’d like to see what Matilda and Nancy made of Mark.
What would Matilda make of the Chosen of the Universe? It seemed slightly similar to Matilda’s own scheme during the Depression, the original River View, where the unemployed worked to build their own homes and grow their own food.
Those who worked — and kept Matilda’s rules — had comfort and security. But that settlement had faded with World War II as the inhabitants found lucrative jobs as me
n went off to war or joined the armed forces themselves. Only one family returned to their small house at the end of the war. They’d been given jobs at the new therapy centre, in the kitchen and garden.
Would Matilda approve of the community of the Chosen? She should. Jed should too. But aliens . . .
No, Jed realised. Aliens didn’t really bother her. Even otherwise quite sane people believed in aliens — those millions who’d bought von Däniken’s book. Her unease came from a community based on gratitude to one man, the one who had ‘healed’ them. The one they must obey if they were to stay healed, and in the quiet refuge of this community.
Neither gratitude nor dependence had been part of Skinner’s utopia.
Mark hesitated, then bent and quickly kissed Scarlett’s cheek. ‘See you soon,’ he said, obviously waiting for them to go. Equally obviously, he had forgotten that Scarlett and her chair could not get down the steps.
Jed evaluated the stairs, then quickly took the handles of Scarlett’s wheelchair before Scarlett was forced to ask for help. She could manage taking it down, Scarlett and all.
Probably.
Mark flushed as she began to heave the chair down the stairs and ran to help steady it. They had just reached the car park when Ra Zacharia appeared. He ran down the steps and held out his hand to Jed. ‘It was good to meet you again.’
The proper response would have been, ‘It was good to meet you too.’ Or even, ‘Thank you. It was an interesting tour.’ Jed simply nodded.
Ra Zacharia held out his hand to Scarlett. She shook it too. ‘Thank you,’ she said, then added the words Ra Zacharia was obviously waiting for. ‘It was fascinating.’
And that, thought Jed, was all too true.
Ra Zacharia looked at Jed again. ‘I know what you think, Miss Kelly. You think this is all too good to be true. But may I ask just one thing? Go outside tonight. Stand in silence under the sky. Look towards Alpha Centauri and just breathe. Breathe the night air. Breathe silence. Feel the universe about you. Feel you are part of it as well.’
It was strangely like Fred’s advice that first rain-soaked night she’d come to Gibber’s Creek, when the swaggie had saved her life, not just with his sausages but with his advice to push away the terror she had lived with for so long, push it back enough to stop and see and hear the world around her.
‘I’ll do that,’ she said slowly.
Zacharia smiled. Not a charismatic smile, but a real one. Perhaps, thought Jed, a man can use his charisma as a tool for good. Perhaps a charismatic man did not necessarily mean a bad one.
Perhaps.
‘Next time you visit I will give you the coordinates so you can translate the spacecraft’s message to humanity yourself. Though if you gaze up long enough, you may find it yourself, once you know that it is there.’ He turned to go.
‘Ra Zacharia?’ Jed said impulsively.
He turned back.
‘There’s a girl who lives at the commune by the river, Halfway to Eternity. Her name is Leafsong. She can’t talk. Could you heal her too?’
‘No,’ said Ra Zacharia gently.
‘Why not?’ demanded Scarlett. Jed was glad to hear a small note of anger in Scarlett’s voice for her friend.
‘I’ve met the girl in town, several times. And yes, I sought her out, because I had been told she couldn’t speak. But she can speak. She simply doesn’t wish to. Perhaps I could convince her — yes, Miss Kelly, I am very good at persuasion. It is a skill, like any other, and I use it for good. But it would be deeply wrong to make Miss Leafsong speak. She is who she is, and needs no changing.’
Scarlett glanced at Jed. Jed nodded. This man was right. And insightful. But no con man was ever successful without insight. And if this was a con, it was very successful indeed.
‘Thank you,’ she said.
Mark waved as Boadicea rode over the immaculate bitumen towards the gravel road. The car bumped across the track beyond the high gates before Scarlett spoke. ‘Well?’
‘Well. Well. Well.’
‘Don’t go all Shakespeare clever on me. You know what I mean.’
‘No, I don’t. Are you asking what I think of Mark? If he really likes you, or is using you to get to me, and me to get to the Thompson money? Or what I think of the Chosen of the Universe?’
‘All of those. And I know Mark is using me to get to you. But . . .’
‘Yes,’ said Jed gently. ‘There is a but. I think Mark was probably sent to the bookshop to meet you. I think he also likes you. Really likes you.’
‘Living there would be . . . easy,’ said Scarlett. ‘Even if Ra Zacharia couldn’t cure me.’
A grown-up version of River View, which Scarlett had so recently escaped.
Did Scarlett realise that? Would she subconsciously want to return to security or be repelled by it? Impossible to tell from the girl’s face. And possibly Scarlett herself didn’t know. Scarlett was far too intelligent to make a judgement without data. And neither of them had enough. Yet.
Where had the money come from to set up the community, to keep it going? Surely not from hand-woven cloth. And there was that promise that Scarlett would be able to walk. Skinner’s book had no miraculous cures for its Walden Two members. But then Walden Two had not had a doctor in charge. Were there possibly medical advances that even the experts at River View like Matron Clancy didn’t know about? Or, Jed admitted, didn’t speak of, in case they raised false hopes?
She’d like to see the X-rays that showed Ra Zacharia’s brain tumour, and ones that showed it was no longer there. She couldn’t ask, but Dr McAlpine might be in a position to. ‘How about asking Mark to dinner one Saturday night?’
Scarlett glared at her. ‘Don’t you dare invite Matilda and Nancy and Michael and Dr McAlpine to dinner with Mark.’
‘Why not?’
‘Because I don’t want him inspected —’ Scarlett stopped, blushed.
Did Scarlett hope that Mark might become a boyfriend? Or was she just protective, as Mark had been protective of her? ‘Just you and me and Leafsong at dinner then,’ said Jed softly. ‘How about that?’
‘That is acceptable,’ said Scarlett. Jed ached at the hope in her voice. For a handsome young man to find her desirable, lovable? Or for the chance to walk?
Jed wished she knew. And tonight, she was going to look towards Alpha Centauri and try to find that Morse-coding star, or spacecraft. And, just possibly, feel part of the universe once again.
Chapter 37
London London London!
1 May 1973
Message to Ms Jed Kelly, Deadsville, Australia
I’m an assistant editor!!!!! Assistant editors do not make the tea. I’m going to splurge on meat for dinner, a treat that you cannot imagine in your world with fifty million sheep.
Love and hugs,
J xxx
PS Have just discovered how handsome a man can look in a kilt. And out of it! Must fly. Will tell you more next time!
RA ZACHARIA
The wooden path along the river was open to anyone, though it had been built for the River View children. And a fishing line was the perfect excuse to sit there. No one looked at a man with a fishing line. But Ra Zacharia could look at them.
He had been afraid from 40’s description that the baby might die before he could make use of it. Already they had had to use the respirator, clear its throat of mucus. But there it was, as Matron Clancy crossed from her office to the refectory, clasped in its sling against her chest, her hands automatically caressing it, no respirator needed.
He relaxed. If the child had been close to death, he’d have had to kidnap it — easy enough to do, for who would think anyone would want a damaged child? But once it had vanished there would be a search. A baby was hard to hide, even one who didn’t cry. Far better that it should stay here, cared for, till he needed it.
Ra Zacharia stood and stretched, and gazed across the river, delighting that his sight was clear and even, no sign of the haze and zigzags of the horror mont
hs before the Elders had made contact.
The tumour was still there. Oneness with the universe meant you knew your body. He knew his extremely well indeed. The tumour might be smaller, but it lurked within his brain. Only when the Elders had the Sacrifice they demanded would he be free, whole and clean, eternal as the universe.
Forever.
Ra Zacharia picked up his fishing rod and strolled back along the river as the woman vanished into the refectory with the baby.
Chapter 38
Gibber’s Creek Gazette, 12 May 1973
Bigger and Best Budget?
Has any budget sought to change Australia more than the first Whitlam budget? Raised aged and invalid pensions, higher widows’ pensions, more generous unemployment and sickness benefits as well as abolishing the means test for those aged over seventy on the age pension may mean that no one lives in desperate poverty in Australia.
The four new social security benefits are still more radical. Critics claim that the Supporting Mother’s Benefit for single mothers is going to mean the breakdown of society, as young women may now bear children knowing the taxpayer will support them. But few can criticise the benefit payable to ‘lone fathers’, the Double Orphans’ Pension payable to the guardian of a child who has lost both parents and the Handicapped Children’s Allowance for guardians of severely disabled children.
Matron Clancy of River View stated, ‘I have seen hundreds of families who desperately wish to care for their disabled children, yet are unable to do so because they also need to work to support them. This new allowance will not only help care for the children we must love and protect, but will give their families the chance to stay together.’
JED
Jed held Gavin in her right arm, the bottle tilted ever so slightly in her left hand, letting the baby’s slow suck gradually empty it. Four years ago she’d thought she’d never hold a baby again without pain. But Tom and Clancy had been a joy, and now this small one too.
She looked up to find Nancy watching her. ‘He seems to be putting on weight.’
Nancy nodded. ‘Five kilos since he’s been here. I suspect the nursing home where he was before just didn’t bother feeding him for long enough.’
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