The Disestablishment of Paradise

by Phillip Mann

  And do you know what he did, Olivia, this big dumb lovely man of mine? He had me sit back between his legs with my back to him, and his legs were tucked up under mine so that his heels were touching my bottom, and I was sort of floating upon him, my arms on his thighs. And then he let down my hair and he started to comb it out with just his finger, and that is the most sensuous and intimate thing, I think, that anyone has ever done to me. I was water to his cup, and I felt his tears on my neck.

  So have I answered your questions, Olivia?

  What is the matter, Olivia? Why are you crying?

  A surprise was waiting for Mack and Hera as they made their way down the shingle banks beside the river and turned right and so up into Moonshine Bay. Standing back from the shore was a cabin. It was a bit old-fashioned-looking but otherwise seemed in good condition. The windows had not been broken and the blinds were all down. Mack tapped at the door, perhaps thinking that someone might have been at home, or perhaps he was just warning the ghosts. In either case there was no answer and so he punched out a window, released a catch and climbed in. With the blinds up and the doors open, he could see he was in a luxury cabin, a retreat for the executives of MINADEC, a place to bring friends and girlfriends for a quiet weekend of R & F beside a clear blue sea and with a view of islands. The cabin was dry and clean and more or less as the last occupants had left it a hundred years earlier.

  When MINADEC ruled Paradise, there was a small settlement at Moonshine Bay. It did not figure on any of the maps, hence, when MINADEC withdrew, the cabins were left intact. The ORBE project knew of them and had had some plans to use them for an outstation, but these plans remained on the drawing board. A few of the cabins had survived the seasons. They were, as Hera once described them to me, ‘like a display in a museum panorama’, and one wonders if there was more than chance involved in their survival.

  The remains of a concrete landing pad – now rendered useless as it had lifted and twisted – could be seen in the foothills; the supports for a jetty, looking like so many broken teeth, could be seen stretching out from the shore.

  Though other and more luxurious cabins might have been habitable, Hera and Mack liked the cabin they had first found because it was right on the shore. Ten seconds from bed to bathing.

  They made themselves at home. There were big soft double beds – one each if they wanted – and showers which still functioned, after a bit of coaching, despite not being used for a long time. Everything needed airing so they simply carried the mattresses, cushions and quilts outside and left them in the sun.

  It was Hera who found the wine. Some bottles were ruined, but enough were not. And she found some clothes that were the height of fashion during the MINADEC days. For Mack she selected a dinner suit with wide shoulders, flexible waist straps and a vivid red plastic carnation sewn in. For her, she chose an evening dress with low cleavage and lots of feathers in strange places and perfume from La Boutique de Paris. They moved the table out onto the beach and ate their simple meals while the sun set over the sea. And when it was dark, they lit candles.

  ‘This is decadent,’ said Hera, opening another bottle of wine, her eyes sparking. ‘Do you want a cigar? I found some in a vacuum chest. Should still be OK? I’ll get you one.’

  ‘Later,’ said Mack. ‘For the moment, would you like to see some magic? If so, turn your back and close your eyes.’

  ‘I love surprises,’ said Hera. She poured herself a glass and turned her back. She heard a scratching sound.

  ‘OK. Turn round now.’ Hera did, quickly, and was in time to see a rocket fizz into the air. ‘This is for the Dendron,’ said Mack, and the rocket exploded into a sparkling crown of gold and red. ‘And this one is for Shapiro.’ The second rocket described a spiral as it shot upwards before bursting into blue sparks which fell like rain. ‘And this is for us.’ Two rockets shot high into the air. There they exploded and crackled in silver and red balls of sparks. They hung there for a moment before dropping and dispersing in the breeze.

  It was a golden time. But nagging in the back of their minds was the awareness that it was borrowed time. The problems of the platform, far overhead, were a constant worry, despite frequent radio contact. Mack in particular felt that he should be ‘up there’ helping his team – though Polka, who had become the main contact, insisted they were coping and that the situation was ‘not so bad’ since the Dendron had been divided. Hera found herself torn between her enjoyment of the present moment and her knowledge of how far they had still to journey. She felt a strange kind of guilt in being happy.

  When they went for walks beside the sea, they always carried matches because occasionally they found bodies, dried and shrunken, cast high on the strand during a storm. These they burned and watched thoughtfully as the smoke rose and the bones burned bright as phosphorus. They found old boxes and crates, and if they picked them up, none of the sand of Paradise clung to them. Mack shook his head. ‘It wants nothing to do with us, does it?’

  Lots of Dendron stools stood in from the beach and in the rivers. Some had decayed right down to ground level. Others still stood tall, and Mack hoisted Hera up so that she could stand on one of them and look down the margin. ‘They go on and on and on’, she said. ‘Thousands of them.’ They also found where the young trees had been cut down, sometimes with an axe, sometimes with a chainsaw. ‘Your maths works in reverse too, Mack. Too much of this kind of thing and numbers soon reduce. But can you imagine the mighty carvings that took place here? And look at the size of some of these stools. These were real giants. We were lucky. Ours was small by comparison.’ She lifted up one of the tines from a crest and it was taller than her. ‘Imagine this in full swing. Now that’s the stuff of romance.’

  Hera found books in the house: novels and some technical works, as well as books for children, among which was a spelling book. Mack began receiving lessons every day, and it was a sight that touched her heart to see the big man sitting on a towel on the beach and picking his way through the words, repeating them to himself and then drawing them in the sand. His favourite text was one of Sasha’s shorter tales, ‘Getting Your Man’.11

  Mack being Mack, he spent time exploring. So while Hera read and drew and prepared interesting meals, Mack checked out some of the houses. One had lost its roof and the wind and rain had done the rest, but most were in amazing condition. All had an unreal cleanliness, a lacquered patina, for, like the crates and the corpses, they were insulated from Paradise. He also searched through all the sheds, and in one he found something which he kept hidden from Hera. It was a boat, an old-style cutter, with a solar panel, a small fluid-core engine and a mast lying flat with meshlite sails furled round it. It was standing on a set of solid rubber wheels. He cut back the plants impeding the double doors of the shed and prised them open. Minutes later, with the help of a lever at the back and grease on the axles, he had moved the cutter out into the sunshine. Mack was no connoisseur of boats, but to his eyes it looked very comfortable, with bunks down below and a galley and lifebelts. He knew Hera liked boats and so this would be his present to her.

  Each day he found an excuse to go off and each day he worked on the boat, checking the engine and the solar panels and the batteries. These were flat, but to his joy, since they were dry cells of the type developed for use in space, they soon began to pick up and hold a charge.

  And then one day while Hera was busy trying to prepare something complicated and spicy from what remained of their rations, he trundled the boat down to the sea and manoeuvred it into the water. It floated. No leaks. He started up the engine. It took a while for the fluid core to warm before any moving parts could function. But he watched the temperature guide, and he watched the shore too, hoping against hope that Hera would not come out before he had it running.

  The needles passed from the black to the green. He heard the engine turn and the torque plate take up the strain. Gently he eased the engine to forward. It coughed once – he had no idea what caused that – and then
it engaged and the boat surged away from the shore. About a mile out, having heard no worrying torque squeals, he took it to full power and had the shock of his life. The boat sat back and then lifted and planed. The speed was frightening to one not used to such things, but he took it in a wide arc and headed back to shore. He had located the horn and now he sounded it. Three times. Moments later he saw Hera come running out onto the beach, wearing a bikini she’d found in one of the cupboards. He saw her hold up her hand to shade her eyes, for the sun was behind him, and then she ran back and seemed to be calling. He could not hear, but he guessed she was calling for him. She ran back onto the beach. This time he was close, and he cut the power and drifted in to the shore.

  ‘Dr Melhuish, I presume.’ He jumped down onto the shingle, took the painter in his hand and gave it to Hera. ‘Here you are, sweetheart. It’s all yours.’

  Hera was breathless with astonishment. ‘But it’s . . . it’s beautiful. Where did you find it?’

  ‘Bought it from a friend in Birmingham. Do you like it?’

  ‘Mack it’s . . . O, Mack. What’s it called?’

  A name had been painted on the front and on the stern in Mack’s new, careful handwriting: The Courtesy of MINADEC.

  29

  Round the Head of the Horse

  The Courtesy of MINADEC made their lives even more interesting. They could now sail out to the islands, not using the engine when the wind was fresh but scudding over the clear water and tacking home. Hera was in her element with the dashing spray and the buffeting, but Mack was content to sit and steer and sometimes he was sick. He was never at ease on the water, and though he learned to swim, it was more of a wallow and he was nothing like the graceful minnow that darted beside him.

  But both were aware that time was passing. The situation on the shuttle platform had again worsened. They had to field questions about where they were exactly. Had they been attacked again? Were they coping? They were very vague in their answers, but when the contacts were over they felt guilty because those who cared for them were having a hard time on the shuttle platform. The backlog of barges was being cleared slowly, but they were hampered by the media interest the broadcast on the Dendron had generated. To make matters worse, there were occasional inexplicable breakdowns leading to blackouts. Sometimes the fractal gate would close down completely. This happened most noticeably if something native to Paradise was being shipped out, so strict checks were made, and anything, whether it was a piece of carved wishbone or a painting on stretched-and-dyed hybla or a Venus tear, was removed. A whole cargo bay was now filling with the artefacts.

  As Dickinson explained to Mack, ‘The feeling here is that the whole place is breaking up, so the sooner you get yourself and your missus up here the better. There’s talk in the team of coming down to get you. I know what you said about that, but we might just have to withdraw from the shuttle if things get worse. Captain Eiderdown looks like she’s ready to quit. I’m not being too subtle for you am I, Mack?’

  Descartes was more direct. ‘I’m frightened of that place down there, Mack. It’s creepy. And Polka and me are having the shittiest dreams of our lives, not to mention pains at the end of the month. So the sooner you and your sweetheart get your big arses up here the better, and the sooner we shift out. Otherwise we’re leaving you, Mack. We love you dearly and we always will, but Polka and I can’t stand it.’

  Captain Abhuradin was putting a brave face on things and confided to Hera that the only thing that kept her going was that she was pretty sure she was pregnant. She now only wanted to get the job done so she could concentrate on that. She wanted Hera to say how long she thought it would be before they reached the old shuttle port, as she had to think of scheduling. She wanted to know where they were and Hera had to be very vague. So, while Hera and Mack were happy in themselves, that happiness began to feel selfish. But there were other things too. Tattersall weeds, hitherto conspicuous by their absence, began to appear on the high hills. They saw three of them scatter seeds in one morning. The invasion had started.

  On the morning after the final call to the shuttle platform, without it ever really being discussed, they found themselves packing up and loading things into the boat. A keen wind was coming off the sea and rain clouds were building against the mountains when they closed up their house. Mack had mended the window he had broken, and he had found the key to the door. So they locked it and hung the key where it could not be missed – a symbolic gesture. They knew that they were the last people who would ever warm the beds and clean the dishes and do their washing in the old house. Every step was now a kind of retreat and everything became symbolic.

  Their plan was to sail west, round the shores of Horse, stopping if they found somewhere that took their interest, but as soon as they left they began to race. Mack was the most ill at ease. He could not explain why, even to himself. He sat in the cabin with a bucket and a towel as the boat dipped and rolled in the heavy swell. And when his head was up he watched the coast slip by. Occasionally they saw the swirling patterns of the Michelangelo-Reaper, not just marked by Tattersall weeds, but shaping the entire contours of the hillsides with tall trees.

  On the morning of the second day they were sailing past cliffs. Hera kept them well out to sea, but the swell from the ocean was great, and at times when they were in the troughs they couldn’t see the land, though they were only a mile offshore. Riding the crests, they saw the waves hit the rocks at the base of the cliffs and the foam climb high.

  Hera was looking for something. They rounded a headland and came into calmer water, and there she spotted an opening in the rocks with a narrow passage of water between. ‘You in the market for a bit more magic, Mr Mack?’ she said. ‘If so, shut your eyes while I steer us through here. In fact keep them shut anyway, cos you’re not going to like this bit.’

  He did so, and a moment later he felt the boat lifted on a surge and heard the waves echo all about them as they passed through the channel. Then, after a few seconds, Hera cut the engine and let them drift. ‘Open sesame. This is called Valentine Bay. Can you guess why?’

  The inlet was about a mile across and formed almost a complete circle between the shore and the rocks. On the landward side, gentle hills sloped up to the mountains. Several small streams entered the bay, tumbling white down rocky valleys. But that was not what held Mack’s attention. All the shores, and the sides of all the river valleys, were covered with the bobbing red spheres of Valentine poppies. There were millions of them, stretching as far as the eye could see. They rippled like waves in the wind and occasionally a single balloon would break its stem and lift into the sky trailing its seed pod.

  ‘Can you imagine that once a lot of the bays on Paradise were like this? The Scorpion logbook mentions bays filled with red flowers – we think it was these. This is the bay Sasha Malik mentions where Valentine and Francesca landed on their bed of osiers. The flowers took them here, you see. And, historically, a young couple lived here in MINADEC times. They’d run away from one of the camps and set up their own homestead just in that valley there. It happened a lot in those days – people just heading off into the wild, a bit like us, really. Well, when the ORBE project started there was not a single Valentine poppy here. Not one. They had all been harvested and sent off planet to make lampshades or something. So this was one of our first projects and one of the most successful. What do you think?’

  Mack was nodding. ‘It’s beautiful. You can imagine lying down, can’t you, on the ground, with all those red globes bobbing above you. It would be impossible to be sad in a place like this.’ And then he added, ‘I wonder where their minder is?’

  ‘Minder?’

  ‘Mm. Their Michelangelo. Isn’t that right, that all gatherings of plants like this have their own minder?’

  ‘That’s a strange thing to say.’

  ‘Is it?’

  ‘I don’t know what you mean. How do you know about this?’

  Mack looked at her and there was someth
ing confused about his look. ‘Sorry. I thought you must have told me. But it is right, isn’t it?’ For a moment Hera had the uncanniest feeling that he was not talking to her. Then he looked back at the bobbing flowers and she saw him smile again his normal gap-toothed smile.

  ‘No. I never mentioned a minder before,’ she said. ‘I’ve always thought of the Michelangelo as being a more selfish and solitary plant. From the stories . . . from the little evidence—’12

  ‘Oh no,’ interrupted Mack, ‘I don’t think they’re selfish. They like to play, that’s all, and they play a bit rough sometimes. They don’t understand us, you see. That’s my impression, anyway, from all the patterns we’ve seen.’

  ‘Would you . . . like to go ashore?’ Hera asked slowly. She was looking at him closely. There was something different, a bit strange . . . something in his manner. She’d seen this before, she realized. Several times. An abstractedness. Then he turned and smiled and put his arm around her. ‘Thanks for bringing me here. It’s lovely. And that story Sasha wrote is special to me. You planned it all along, didn’t you?’

  ‘No, I just suddenly remembered as we came down the coast. But I knew you’d like it. The next time I get to speak to Tania I must get her to contact Rita Honeyball. This was part of her parish. She used to give us Valentine poppies when we had a birthday, just when they were about to swell, and tie messages to them. She’ll be pleased to know how lovely it is.’