The Disestablishment of Paradise

by Phillip Mann

  She laughed at herself, released her tight hands with difficulty and then sat back firmly in her chair and breathed deeply. Her heart was pounding in her chest, but she was alive. She could still think clearly. No harm, as far as she could tell, had come to her. Somewhere she heard a fan start up. Everything was normal. . .

  . . . except nothing was normal any more.

  Hera sat very still.

  The good news, she realized, was that there was now no doubt about there being a special consciousness on the planet: she had felt it, it had brushed her, she had sensed the might of its presence. At the same time, considered coolly, nothing very much had happened. A bit of fear, a bit of sensory deprivation. An enforced trip down memory lane. But there had been no revelation, no sudden leap in consciousness, no joining of mind and spirit with . . . with whatever it was. There had been no – she searched for the right word – no sense of divinity, no majesty.

  Is that what I wanted? she wondered. Is that it? She smiled at that, recalling the phrase from an earlier time. Well, perhaps I was lucky. Women usually die when gods reveal themselves. But that was not a god. No. No god worth his salt would come as darkness. That was a . . . that was . . . She had no word for what she thought it was. That was just a wake-up call, she concluded. But from whom or what, she did not know. Next time, I’ll be ready.

  Hera was aware that her thoughts were somewhat frivolous, and she put that down to a reaction. Better to be frivolous than morbid or mad. But she was also aware that her mind had retained a certain clarity of thought, as though the brush with the alien had increased her sensitivity and quickened her consciousness.

  She sat for a while with her knees pulled up and her arms wrapped around her, gazing out into the quiet night.

  Outside the flyer a light breeze stirred the distant Tattersall weeds and there was no strange darkness lurking at the perimeter. It had gone. Passed on. But the sky was not dark. The silver disc of Tonic was already high in the sky – full moon tonight. It was brightening the tips of the trees and casting shadows. With the rising of the moon, the phosphorescence of the plants had faded. The stars were out too, with their mysterious zodiac patterns that as yet had no history. A golden glow was strengthening beyond the rim of the plateau. It was the light of Gin, just rising. She turned and looked out of the window behind her. In this silver and shadowy green world, she could see the road down to the former shuttle port and even the fence where the strands of Tattersall weed hung limply. She knew she could walk there with safety, but yet she felt no inclination to move. The stillness was sweet. She thought, If I had my time over, I would do things differently – who wouldn’t? But now I will enjoy being a quiet woman for a change. Enough of planning and head stuff. Now I am going to let things just happen to me for a change – sit back, treat my time down here as a holiday and see if that makes more sense. And if called, I will be ready and patient. And if not, I’ll enjoy the swimming.

  She yawned suddenly and then sat up. She thought, I am a very lucky woman. I have got what I wanted. I have this place to myself now, for a while’ Then she spoke aloud. ‘I’m here,’ she said, speaking distinctly. ‘I’m here. Now.’

  ‘I know you are, Hera.’ The voice was a shock, and Hera felt the adrenalin rush in her arms and neck and her heartbeat leap. But it was the voice of Alan, the autopilot. ‘Have you been sleeping, Hera? Are you all right?’

  ‘Better, I think. God, you gave me a shock. Better than I was.’

  ‘You were upset before.’

  ‘Sorry.’

  ‘Were you speaking to yourself, just now?’

  ‘Yes, to myself. But no more questions, Alan. I’ve had enough questions for the moment. Now I want to sleep. Music, maestro, please.’

  ‘Very well.’ Softly, the music returned and Hera settled back in her chair. The great rhythmic ebb and flow of waves filled the small cabin. It was a long musical section, and when the words of the poem finally returned, the boy was far from the shore, and swimming.

  With every stroke he is growing older. He has swum with mermaids and dolphins and a strange dark creature that lolls on the surface between feeds. He has drifted by coral and iceberg. The long-dead of the sea have visited him and told their yarns. Now, finally, he is an old man, and he knows the time is coming when he must dive. To celebrate this moment Yvegeny adapted lines from a mystical old Irish poet he regarded as his master. The soprano has been changed for a bass. He sings while the accordion plays, ‘Winter and summer, and all the day long . . .’

  Hera stood up and stretched. She had pins and needles in her legs. And her arm ached. There was blood on her fingers. ‘My love was in singing, no matter the song.’ Hera padded across the cabin to the central stairwell. She paused and had one last look round. Then she went down the steps and into the cabin she used as hers.

  The music followed her, surging and falling: waves breaching a headland and dying noisily on a stony shore.

  Hera crawled under the duvet. The bed was already slightly warm. Comfort for a chilled worker on a lonely mission. She snuggled down and drew her knees up. Outside, the poem was coming to its end: ‘Now must I lie down where all ladders start/ In the rag and bone shop of my human heart.’

  So saying, the old man dived under the waves and found he could breathe water.

  But Hera did not hear those words.

  Hera was already asleep.

  Much later I asked Hera to explain what she now thought had actually happened to her during that first night. Here is her reply.

  I did not know it at the time, but that was my first encounter with a Michelangelo-Reaper. And I was very lucky, because it was more concerned with establishing its domain than in being familiar with an entity such as myself, otherwise I might have been in trouble. I was lucky it came when it did, as it gave me assurance.

  When it encountered me it paused because I was, after all, strange, and it examined me with the same casual interest that you or I might use when we find an interesting pebble. When it was satisfied, or because it had more urgent things to attend to, it put me back because, you see, it did not understand me.

  Had I stayed another night it might have come back hunting. And that could have been bad news for me.

  But that contact gave me a presence in the psychic world of Paradise, and at a deeper level than any other human has attained, except for those born on the planet like young Sasha Malik. By opening up my mind, it inadvertently ensured that my ‘scent’ was there.

  This explains why later, when the Dendron was in need, it was able to contact me. So that also was a lucky accident.

  There is a lot of ‘lucky’ in all of that.

  The fact is, Hera was there. She was IN, and the pace of change on Paradise was hotting up.

  10

  The First Day

  Foul becoming fair.

  That was Hera when she woke up. The euphoria of the previous evening had faded and she was aware of violation. For a while she lay there, examining the feeling, turning it around in her head.

  Memories, no matter how innocent, are private (she reasoned) and she did not know how much else of herself she might have revealed in those moments when she had hovered in the darkness with the alien presence wrapped round her. Memories, she reminded herself, are not like objective recordings but are shaped by our imagination and our emotions. In which case Hera knew she had probably revealed all – love and hate and the difficult bits in between. Moreover, her sense of violation was complicated by an awareness that she had hoped for contact and had actively sought it. Otherwise, what the hell was she doing down here, hanging about? Given what she already knew of Paradise, why should she be surprised that contact, when it came, took this mental form? Had she hoped that the alien mind, to whom telepathy might be as routine as breathing or sleep to us, would politely ask permission before barging in? If so, how would it do this? In any case the alien mind of Paradise, whatever it was, would be based on a wholly different set of sensory assumptions, and nothing of h
ers could have meaning to it beyond the fact that she was alive and different. No, if you play with fire, you get burned. If you play with aliens you will find your sense of dignity challenged, for better or worse.

  By the time she had worked her way through this chain of reasoning she found that she was more than a bit critical of herself. ‘I’ve got to toughen up. Not take everything so personally. And what is more,’ she added, ‘I’m fed up with everything having a sexual slant. Why do I do that? Violated? Ha! It didn’t mess me about. I took a chance. I could have had my mind scoured and left as empty as a seashell. But that did not happen. Instead I yielded up a few nice memories, and if they revealed the depth of me, well so be it. I have nothing to hide. I am what I am. And they can take it or leave it. Alan?’

  ‘Yes, Hera?’

  ‘Coffee!’

  She threw back the duvet, and as she moved heard the SAS respond to her being awake – the whisper of filters in the bedchamber, the shower system warming up, the priming of the coffee machine and the fluttering sound of a meteorological report being received. Significantly absent was the news bulletin normally broadcast from the shuttle platform over Paradise.

  Some time later, showered and dressed, Hera was conscious that her mind felt very clear and focused. Polished was the word she used. So perhaps the alien visit had released something in her. She felt a quick energy too, and wanted to be up and doing. Though doing what she was not yet certain. Her intuition told her not just to wait passively for a further communication, but to be active.

  Hera ran lightly up the spiral stairs and into the main cabin. It was a brilliant sunlit day and she had to shield her eyes from the light. Outside, a stiff breeze was stirring the flowers of the Tattersall weeds, making them nod in a curiously human way. The only evidence of the energy wave she had seen pass through them was broken branches and some trees which remained twisted grotesquely and were now losing their leaves.

  Breakfast was brief, and Alan signed his own death warrant when he said, ‘Good morning, Hera. I let you sleep beyond your normal pattern as you were so late going to bed and your schedule does not indicate any pressing duties.’

  ‘Thank you, Alan. Most considerate.’

  She replied evenly in a tone which would, had she been among her ORBE workers, have sent them running for cover. For some time Hera had wondered whether she should suppress the circuits which gave the computer its human voice and solicitude. She was aware of how easily she had begun to talk to the machine as though it was a human, and the last thing she needed was a surrogate male to distract her.

  ‘Alan?’

  ‘Yes, Hera?’

  ‘What do I do to change your presentation index?’

  There was a slight pause – how subtle it was, how clever the programmers! – and then Alan’s voice replied evenly, ‘A full range of possibilities can be found by speaking the moclay Alanstyle.’

  Hera pronounced the word Alanstyle clearly. Immediately a checklist of the ways in which Alan could be modified flashed up in the tri-vid screen in front of her. Within minutes, Alan was reduced to a silent but alert slave – his voice restricted to essentials.

  ‘Shall we depart, Alan?’ Hera asked, and waited. Normally Alan would have replied, but this time there was nothing. Not even a hum in the air. ‘Begin pre-flight procedures,’ she instructed.

  Immediately the SAS came alive.

  Pre-flight procedures were fully automatic. The SAS, in a soft neutral voice, announced the different systems as they logged in and became fully operational. Hera felt much more comfortable. She heard the magnetic bolts take hold throughout the whole SAS, anchoring charts to tables, dishes in the cleanser, clothes in closets, drawers and doors. There was a soft whine of hydraulics as the rotor blades came out of their protective cover, straightened and stiffened.

  Moments later the twin blades began to turn, slicing the sunlight. Hera slipped her hands into the pilot gloves and the machine became an extension of her body. A slight pressure with her index finger and the SAS begin to lift. Smooth and easy. She guided the ship in a tight spiral.

  Looking down, she could see the remains of the shuttle port dropping away beneath her. At 500 metres she held steady and then began to cruise towards the sea, following the supply road.

  The journey took little more than a minute. Hera guided the SAS down over Ben Haroun Park, where the whistle reeds would still be piping in the morning. She flew slowly over the remains of New Syracuse. It was not even a ghost town – only the roads and foundations of houses remained. Still intact, however, was the long curving sea wall constructed during the early, prosperous days of MINADEC to shelter a fashionable marina and its complement of tall yachts and pleasure boats.

  Hera followed the line of the sea wall and then flew low over the chessboard squares which were all that remained of the ORBE precinct. She looked at the burned dark space where her office and the Shapiro Museum had stood and felt no strong emotion.

  Moments later, the SAS kicked up a small sandstorm as it landed next to a concrete bunker. Hera left the engine running and the rotor blades turning slowly while she jumped down and went looking for Mack’s booty. As he had promised, there was a crate containing bottles of wine and a demolition sack into which he had stuffed a few luxuries – tinned salmon, perfume, preserved dates, a ripe round cheese, spare sunglasses, a book of poetry, candles, matches, a first-aid kit and anchovies – as well as a combination knife and corkscrew.

  The goods safely stored, Hera took one last look around. How still the scene – like the stage of a desolate theatre! Then, satisfied, she climbed back inside the SAS and closed the door, which hissed as it sealed. Seconds later the flyer hammered into the air and set a steadily rising course straight out over the sea.

  Hera had decided she would revisit some of the places that had been important to her when she first arrived on Paradise. Thus, half an hour later, she was far out above Dead Tree Sea and hovering. She had reached a place called Jericho Rise, where the seabed was close to the surface and gave an anchorage to many marine plants. Immediately below her was a large colony of yellow lip kelp, the individual plants moving slowly in the water like eels, sliding under and over one another, pushed by the wind and their own small water jets.

  Hera brought the SAS down in the middle of the feeding kelp, settling it gently on the surface of the sea. She opened the cabin door and sat on the extended steps with her feet in the water. Soon the small mouths of the lip kelp found her. The peculiar feeling as they nuzzled and fastened to her toes brought back memories.

  One day, shortly after she had joined the ORBE project, Hera had taken a cutter and, along with a few friends, sailed out from New Syracuse to the Jericho Rise.

  There she had donned an aqualung and slipped into the warm clear water. Her last adventurous swimming had been on Mars, where the water in the underground lakes was thick with salts, and visibility by headlamp was usually little more than a metre. Sometimes she’d had to climb over ice, trailing her lifeline. But here . . .

  Being a strong swimmer, she deliberately headed directly into the midst of the kelp and let the small hungry mouths pluck at her. Swimming steadily, she came to where several arms of kelp joined together. There she dived, pulling herself slowly down the plant, until she came to the main stem. The small mouths, being surface feeders, detached as she went deeper. She was about ten metres down when the water became suddenly turbulent, spinning her round, and she felt a powerful tugging on the stem she was holding. She gripped tight. Looking down, Hera could see where the stem curved away below her and how it was bending round in the water like a thick yellow snake. Faintly she saw a large dark shape gradually rising from the depths. Hera kept her nerve. There are no sharks or octopuses on Paradise, she reminded herself. And she told herself that repeatedly as the giant organism rose closer.

  Hera had read about this plant. She knew she was seeing the giant bellows of the kelp, the organ which drew water in and expelled it with force. It would ri
se until close to the surface, where it would bask for a while in the warm water before sinking again to the bottom, where it would pump steadily for an hour or so before rising again . . . and so on and on, in a cycle that would only end when the plant became too large for its foot to hold it in place on the seabed during a storm. Then it would tear loose and drift until marooned on a shore. The small individual yellow tubes would then detach and swim away to become, unless consumed, giant kelps in their own right. Hera knew all this. Even so, she was not prepared for the huge dark ventricle, twice the size of her own body, which opened in front of her face. When the ventricle closed there came a great jet of water which pushed her away, detaching her goggles and breaking her grip from the slippery stem. She tumbled in the water, and then let herself slowly rise to the surface, where again the small nuzzling mouths greeted her hungrily. She let them hold her and roll her on the surface before retrieving her goggles and swimming back to the cutter.

  Afterwards, she often wondered what the kelp must have felt as it filtered the cells from her human body. Exotic food indeed. Alien food to the kelp. And she had never quite rid herself of the notion that the heart of the kelp had risen to find out where the strange taste was coming from. Later, when she returned to ORBE HQ, Shapiro had pointed out that she had taken a silly risk. ‘What,’ he asked, ‘might be the consequences if the kelp has now taken a liking to human cell tissue? Can you not see the headlines? KILLER KELP STALKS THE SHORELINE’ He had given her his old-fashioned look. ‘Don’t be fooled by this place, Hera. It is not a kindergarten like Mars. Our interaction with Paradise is complex.’

  She had answered by pointing out that every time anyone breathed out, something of their organic nature entered the biosphere. ‘Not to mention the miners and loggers who piss and shit wherever they want.’

  ‘I know,’ said Shapiro. ‘That’s what worries me. Does Paradise learn as well as give? If so . . .’ He had never finished his sentence, preferring, in his irritating way, to be enigmatic.