The Disestablishment of Paradise

by Phillip Mann

  Never receiving any formal education, she nevertheless learned to read and write. Logging camps were the only social life that the young Sasha Malik knew, and her language and attitudes reflect this. She had access to tri-vids of course, but the texts she preferred were the magazines and books brought in by the woodsmen and miners. Lonely men may have their own kind of literature, but it would be a mistake to think that just because they had chosen a rough life they were unlettered or ill educated. Far from it. Men who seek solitude have questions to ponder, and it is to the classics of their language they often turn.

  Sasha read widely and indiscriminately and acquired her own small library, which included Homer’s Iliad, Everybody’s Home Medical Encyclopaedia, Volume 2, Salome by Oscar Wilde, the Contemporary Poetry Mars Collection, Romeo and Juliet by Shakespeare, Teach Yourself to Draw Animals, Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë and Elementary Mathematics, as well as a selection of brightly illustrated erotic works. Traces of all of these can be found in her writing. A photograph of Sasha at the age of twelve shows a serious-looking girl with an oval face and large eyes. She is holding a book to her chest. However, it was the eyes which were most often commented on, both for their green colour and because they seemed to belong to an older person.

  We must imagine young Sasha in those days, sitting beside a campfire at night, cross-legged in cut-down dungarees, a blanket around her shoulders, lighting her father’s pipe of calypso from an ember and handing it to him, unobtrusive but alert, unregarded but all ears, listening, wide-eyed and missing nothing while the men tell stories and boast. At some point she wrote down their yarns, their songs and their scary superstitious stories. She also wrote about the things she had seen and done. She did not have exercise books, and so she wrote on whatever she could find: the backs of old invoices, the linings of tea packets, which she found she could open and press, and in an unlined notebook given to her as payment by a freshly shaved MINADEC inspector. Many years later, these pages were discovered and published under the title Tales of Paradise.

  As already revealed in the autobiographical story ‘Getting Your Man’, Sasha ran away with Big Anton at the age of fifteen, and it was after his death some three years later that she became a ‘bush lady’, living alone and surviving on what she could forage or what she was given if she happened to be close to a camp. Her reputation as a healer spread and stories grew up about her. It was considered lucky if you saw her. There are several accounts of her being met on paths, dressed in clothes she had made from Crispin, and of her handing over hybla letters to be delivered to her father on Anvil. None of these letters survive.

  Sasha travelled the full length of Chain and out to the Blue Sands Bluff – the very place where Mayday and Marie Newton were later to establish their homestead. According to legend, Sasha crossed the Blue Sands Straits to Anvil riding on the back of a Dendron.

  Eventually, after a year of wandering on Anvil, she showed up one night at her father’s camp. She just walked in and sat down at the fireside and spoke the oft-quoted line, since known as Sasha’s Hello.

  ‘Any food in that pot?’

  Sasha went back to a life of healing and cooking, like when she was a girl, but she also made it known that she intended to go off planet and write about her adventures in the wilder reaches of Paradise. While she would rarely talk about those times, she clearly had something she wanted to set down and something that troubled her. Sadly, this was not to be, and we can only speculate on the stories that might have been, and the insights they would have brought to Paradise.

  The following is Sasha’s account of ‘shunting’ a Dendron – a Rex, as she called them. Although the incident occurred when she was nine, she probably did not write this account until she was nineteen or older. The ape nuts she refers to are the buds from monkey trees. Hollop is a word of Sasha’s own coining to describe the characteristic motion of a Dendron when agitated.

  Shunting a Rex

  The shunt I want to tell you about happened when I was nine. Father and me were at the log-drop jetty when we heard shouting. It was Redman and Wynston, out in the log lake and paddling their little boat as fast as they could. They beached and came running into the camp, shouting that a Rex was on its way down the rapids. It had got a steam up. Redman reckoned it must have come hiking over from Horse and had worked its way up the gullies on the other side of the Staniforth Mountains. He was excited. Redman enjoyed a fight like he enjoyed danger, and that was why he was a tops cutter. But Wynston, he was new, fresh in from Moon college, only been with us a month, still earning his blisters and he had never seen a Rex before. His eyes were so big that the whites were like a ring-round-the-moon cake, and I thought they would pop out of his big face, and he just kept saying ‘Stamp me blacker than the ace of spades, you see that mother?’ till finally father told him to shut it.

  ‘How long before he hits us?’ That was Father.

  ‘Ten minutes. Fifteen at outside. He’s coming fast. Straight down the rapids. Big fucker.’ That was Redman.

  ‘You on for scout?’

  ‘Anyone else offering?’

  They banged fists like lumber men do, and Redman set off to get some Molotovs. We could hear the Rex by now.

  This was not the first time we had been attacked. It had happened once before, and so the men knew what to do, and so did I. I didn’t wait for father’s eye but just ran back to our shilo and started gathering up whatever I could of our possessions and piling them into cone baskets. Clothes, razors and scissors, the solar stove that Father brought from Mars, my dolls, some of Mum’s bits and pieces that I knew Father treasured. Everything went into the baskets. Big Anton came and helped me. He carried the baskets while I scrambled up the rock bluff above the camp and ran round to the diving ledge over the dark green pool of the Nylo. When I threw the rope down, Big Anton tied the baskets on and I pulled them up.

  The diving ledge was the safest place. Father and I had discussed it, in case there was an attack in the night and we got separated. It was high above the log lake, and no Rex could get up there – like a man can’t climb a sand dune while holding a sack of stones on his shoulders. And there was a cave up there, and at the back of the cave was water. The diving ledge was also the best vantage point from which to see what happened, and that was what pleased me.

  Other men brought baskets of their things and I pulled them up and stacked them neatly. We could hear the Rex getting closer, and everyone spent as much time looking over their shoulders as they did hefting the baskets. When its flags appeared over the trees, the men stopped bothering with the baskets and got to their fight positions.

  Now there you see is a funny thing. A Rex on the move always makes a shagger of a noise with trees pushed over and the stamp of the stool crushing everything. But yet they always seem to catch you by surprise. Forests are strange places for noises. One minute it can be quiet and all you can hear is the pop of the seed pods or the rattle of leaves. Then suddenly the trees shake and fall, the earth shakes and rumbles, explosions like when a rock splits in the fire batter your ears – and suddenly a Rex appears round the corner of the stream, heaving along and nothing can stop him, and his shadow is over you before you can stand, and it’s curtains bon-bon unless you can climb a sunbeam.

  And what was Father doing while I was protecting the home and our wealth? He was preparing a firewall round the big equipment – the diggers, the saw crane, the tractors and scuffers. In those days we used to build a wall made of a plant we called poor man’s coffee. We wove it with lawyer-and-hang cord, which will tighten but never release. The perimeter wall was kept clear every couple of days by sending the tractor round it. Two of the men – Terry and Sanch – were detailed to maintain the wall so that if need arose, like now, they could run fuel into holes cut in the PMC and set it alight. Fire is the only weapon against a Rex when you are in the forest. That is the only thing they respect. Some places have a cannon that can shoot incendiary shells, but there have been a lot of accidents.
If you fire a cannon in the forest, you’d better be sure not to hit a tree nearby.

  Some people don’t believe this, but when you are in the deep forest, well it is like being in a deep green fog. I have been places where, if you reach out a hand, you won’t be able to see it when you spread your fingers. Mother speaks whereof she knows! There’s men have put down their rifle and taken a leak and not been able to find it when they turned round. They’ve blamed their cobbers, thinking they were joking them, and sometimes fights have broken out. And yet there it was all the time, under the leaves, waiting till next time someone stood on it and maybe shot a foot off.

  The other thing Father was doing was kitting up Redman with Molotovs – Redman liked being front scout. He reckoned that the only reason he’d been born was to fight, and that was all that he was any good for anyway. To be a front scout you had to have guts and smarts, and give Redman his due, he never faltered. He would go down towards the Rex shouting and swearing at it – although I don’t think the Rex could hear, still less understand – and he would stand in its path with a couple of Molotovs held above his head. When it got very close to him he would throw the Molotovs under the Rex and try to burn its codds – not that it had a cock and balls of course, this is just what we called the big thing it had there. If it worked, it was a way of slowing the Rex down. Course, if you tripped or fell over because the ground was shaking so much, or a tree hit you, or you dropped the Molotovs before you could chuck them, well it was your own codds got scotched, and your goose too. Your best hope then was that the Rex would step on you and put you out of your misery with a couple of hundred tons of stamp.

  Father was also distributing arrows and bows. I kid you not, an arrow can get through leaves and branches that baffle a laser. But he had a laser torch too, and only he or big Anton ever handled it since the time that One-Eye dropped it and burned half the camp down, including all the washing on the line.

  So, I know that most of you will never have seen a Rex on the rampage. Many of you will have seen that famous tri-vid of the Rex crossing the Taff Straits with its flags waving in the wind, or that still picture of the Rex stopping to steep at Big Fella Lake in South Chain. Well, what I will do is tell you what I saw and what I know and you can use your imaginations, because as Jim Bury used to say, there’s no way a picture can show you. ‘You’ve got to be there.’

  But first I want to tell you a bit about the Rex.

  When a big Rex rips out its roots and goes walkabout, well, the earth shakes. I don’t know how heavy they are, but they carry a lot of water and when that stool comes down it usually sinks a good metre or so into the soil with its stamp, and that shock makes everything tremble. Me, I love it. It used to make me shiver and go tingle just thinking about it. But I have heard my teeth chatter so loud when a Rex was near that you’d think they would bust at the gum. Your Rex don’t like raw rock, but they don’t mind a riverbed, and that is where they cause landslides if the banks are unstable. If they are walking through the forest they just barge their way through, and where they have passed, you could drive two tractors side by side without touching. Except your tractors would probably get stuck in the stool holes. I kid you not. If it doesn’t happen on Mars, it happens on Paradise!

  One laddo, a soft kid from Luna way, tried to make a tri-vid of a Rex approaching. Soft fucker climbed into a tree to get a good angle. Starts filming and making his spiel about how magnificent the Dendron carburundum is when the tree he’s perched in starts shaking. Shook his camera to bits, it did. Five hundred solas that camera cost, and all he had left was the handle in his hand and a dribbly bit of mike cable strung round his neck. And meanwhile this Rex is getting closer and finally it pushes his tree over as if it was a shyris reed by the river. No one knows how the laddo escaped. Like Father said, he must’ve dug so bloody fast his mother was a mole, either that or he was God’s stablemate. Up he popped when the Rex had passed and he started running. They reckon he ran straight across Anvil, jumped the Ditch, straight across Hammer, straight up the shuttle spout and he didn’t stop running till he was back in bed in Birmingham.

  But to return. You can smell a Rex, especially when it’s running and its pores are open and steam is rising from it. I’ve never eaten a pineapple, but those that have tell me it smells like that. It also has what I call a green smell, the smell of water with sun on it and bubbles rising. Not a smell of decay, but a sweetish smell. It is the smell of Paradise that everyone notices when they first arrive. That is the smell of a Rex. Quite different from your blue waltzer or your ape nuts or the baby-needs-changing stink of the umbrellas. A special smell, and it gets stronger as the Rex gets close.

  We could smell this one and it hadn’t even reached the foot of the rapids.

  So there I am on my ledge. The first thing I see are the tips of the Rex’s twin horns, high above the trees, and with all its flags flying. They were flexing back and forth like a stiff whip as it walked, and the cherries and tears were banging together, sounding like rattles and bells. It paused when it reached the bottom of the rapids. And then lurched and moved on.

  I watched as it came round the bend in the river and began to heave its way towards us. I saw the horns bend forward as though to reach out for us, like those things an insect has. But this was an appearance only. The Rex was making life easy for itself as it waded through the water.

  It paused in midstream, and the current churned and eddied about its legs and splashed its stool and its codds too. Its size was wonderful. It towered above us and above the logs that bobbed in the water. It was like a giant cockerel, red-crested and black and green and gold. But it was nothing like a cockerel either. It was a proud horse rearing up, with flanks that shivered, or a pack-shouldered bull bellowing at the moon, and the movement of its horns would have scratched the black sky. But it was nothing like a horse or a bull either. It was raw life, like I see in my dreams, free and dangerous. But I was not afraid. I would have swum to it. I would have clambered up its rough wet sides until I could perch between those horns, sitting on the hump, knees spread and gripping with my thighs. I would have looked up through the spread of its horns to the black cherries and red flags and cried with joy. And would it have noticed me? You betcha! Like your elephant knows the ant on its back and the sequoia the dove in its branches.

  Then, as I watched, this Rex started to unfurl its crest. Oh, so slowly, like Salome lifting a veil when she was getting serious.

  Let me tell you, when you see a Rex walking it usually has its crest hidden. If you look at the pictures of a Rex you will see a ridge along its back. Well, that is the crest when it is folded away. The crest is a branch really, similar to those you find on a fern, and it unfolds slowly like a baby’s hand opening. On one side it has a range of silver thorns. I call them thorns but they are more like sword blades as they are very sharp and slightly curved and can be up to two feet long. As the crest rises the thorns unfurl too and become like teeth, like the tines of a newly sharpened saw. It is a fierce weapon, but it is not a weapon in the way we understand, and its unfurling had nothing to do with us.

  By this rising, I knew that the Rex had sex on her mind. She was looking for a mate to carve her, for calve she must, perhaps had already sensed one in the hinterland of Anvil that was answering her cry for service. And this call had brought her on her journey, perhaps from distant Horse, and we were just in her way. Our Rex was dangerous simply because she didn’t even know we were here. Or even if she did know, we were not of her being and of no concern.

  From my perch I could see how the men had fanned out, facing the bank. Redman had climbed round the rocky shore and now stood holding up his Molotovs and shouting out a challenge like Achilles at the walls of Troy. When he saw the crest rise, he gave out a whoop. He knows sex when he sees it. Up on camp level were Father and the rest, all armed, all waiting to see whether the Rex would keep on up the river and pass us by, or whether she would turn in towards our small camp. Stanch was holding a burning torch
ready to light up the firewall if the Rex went that way. Big Anton was over near the cabins and Father had given him the laser.

  The Rex began to move. The tall horns twitched as though sensing, smelling the wind. And then she stopped in mid-pace, seeming uncertain. Perhaps she smelled fire. The crest closed and opened again with a ringing sound and sent a shimmer across the log lake. No one moved. Men waited to see what she would do. The Rex then turned completely round on her stool in the middle of the lake, her two front legs stamping like pistons, and again stopped. They don’t breathe or anything, Rexes, not like a horse or a bull or a cockerel, they just stop. They set down the two front legs and settle back on the stool. Nothing moves except maybe the flags, which flap in the breeze and the cherries, which rattle and ring. Here’s a problem for the human. Your Rex might settle down for an hour, for a day, for a week, for a year. No one knows. I don’t think the Rex knows, because a Rex doesn’t think about things the way we do.

  So Father waits, watchful. And then the men get a bit fidgety, like they are looking at a bomb or something. Redman wades into the stream until he’s just a few metres from the Rex. He’s moving like a cat now. Millennia ago men moved like that when stalking a mammoth or walrus. Without taking his eyes off the Rex, he shouts to Father, ‘You want me to rouse it? Throw a Molotov between its horns? Give it a wake-up call?’

  Father thinks for a moment. Then he says, ‘You fellas be ready. Light your arrows now. If it rears and turns this way fire for the base of the horns. Don’t wait for orders.’ The men did as told, but they didn’t want to take their eyes off the Rex in case it moved. ‘OK, Redman. Try your arm.’

  I see Redman light the fuse on a Molotov, and then he brings his arm over like an overhead chop with an axe, and the Molotov sails high and smoky and passes right between the horns and falls into the river on the other side.