The Book of Science and Antiquities

by Thomas Keneally

  I found him by his hut, staring at the children who were feeding roots into the incandescent morning fire. He saw me coming and called out that I was his good friend and should join him by his own small fire.

  I did. Drawing on the dust at my feet, I told him, “The Hero tells me I must eat the curse.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “The Hero says I must swallow the stone.”

  “No,” said Baldy, “that is too harsh.”

  “Well, there is no other way I can think of. Above all, no other way he can think of.”

  “Oh, brother,” he said.

  “I had thought of course that my Hero could think of another way,” I told Baldy. “But he sees it as I see it, and it is the only way. If I wrap my body in thick furs and potent emblems and take it into myself … That’s the way, dear person.”

  “I’ll call the other councillors,” Baldy promised me.

  “No. Some of the women are ready to drop their children amongst us. The councillors must accept this, in any case. They can’t exceed the Hero in wisdom. That’s the reason he’s the Hero.”

  “Oh,” he said, “if we could split the thing in two parts I would take the first one. If we could reduce the thing to powder …”

  “We lack a pounding stone adequate,” I said. “Even in the mountains they have no stone suitable to pound the thing and powder it.”

  Dear old Baldy began to weep.

  “It was made not to be pounded to powder,” I told him. “If it were possible to reduce a curse to powder, we would be in heaven. Instead we are at the Lake amongst our clan and the other clans, and all their gravid women.”

  “Even flint,” moaned Baldy, though not loudly enough so that others would be drawn to wonder what he was saying, “even flint cannot split it or powder it.”

  “That was what we always knew,” I consoled him.

  “You would do all this for the dear people?” asked Baldy in a way I did not have to answer.

  “Take me there,” I ordered Baldy. “And bring what we will need.”

  Watched by his silent wife, he began to gather thongs of dried bounder hides then wrapped himself in robust furs. I stood waiting for him, and then he was ready and we started out for the law ground. Would I come back here, to the huts, howling and not to be reconciled in the dead of night, looking for the utterance of my name, or for what of myself lay around the hut, a weapon, a knife of flint, a flensing stone, all a man might pick up and put down in the course of a day or a life? I could not promise myself that my ghost might not be discontented and lost in the middle air for a period of howling and anguish.

  As we walked, I said, “You and I have to do this quickly. No pausing, no long periods of thinking. The thinking and all the pronouncing has been done. We will get to it in good order, as if we were doing something we might do every day.”

  “But it is hard,” he insisted.

  “I know in my blood that what I’m planning for today has been done before. That it’s been done by someone in the past, a Hero, and that I’m just echoing.”

  “But don’t think that if you do it you will become a Hero,” he insisted as if I was suffering from vanity.

  “Don’t be a fool. I know I won’t become a Hero. Who said I would become a God and Hero? No one has even talked about it.”

  He looked forlorn.

  “Let’s get there,” I said with the irritability of one who is about to die.

  We began loping along then, as if we were chasing a wrongdoer and had great distances in our feet. We got to the place of the men’s law, and I sat down on the ground while Baldy went to the repository amongst the rocks. He took out the hardwood emblems of a number of Heroes and brought them to me.

  “Yes,” I said. “Good man.”

  He went back and found the crate of long stone that embodied the bounder ancestor, and he brought it to me.

  “Oh, my Father,” I said to it. “Make my journey merciful, both to me and to all.”

  I loosened the furs on my upper body and raised my arms, and Baldy began to strap the hardwood and the stone to my ribs, using the lengths of bounder hide to bind me in with power. I felt the cool divinity of the stone against my ribs. “Oh Heroes,” I wanted to cry, “it is happening!” I also thought, If I run free, no one can catch me. But where was the point of running free in the dying world?

  “Get the curse,” I commanded Baldy with ill grace, as if he were the one delaying.

  Baldy went and got the thing and brought it to me in its nest of fur. I saw the stolid yellow and blue and scarlet of its outrage and noticed that Baldy did not want to touch it in a direct way, with his own fingers.

  “Lay it there!” I told him, nodding to one side.

  He did so.

  It gleamed at me from its roost of skins. It was naked. It could not be appeased.

  I took it up in my bare hands, opened my lips wide, and placed it in my mouth. It was on my tongue before I knew it, occupying the space exactly as if honed to be mine. It felt too as if it was designed to be swallowed. Someone had swallowed it before me, or swallowed its brother. I was confirmed in the need for what I was doing.

  After a time it affected my gorge and I wished to vomit, but this was a fatuous response from the animal I was, and I was engaged with the tasks of Heroes. I was furious at it. Such silliness. I began to swallow it, and all was changed.

  At once I could feel the stone curse willing to take over my body and all its contrivances. I was gagging, and normal breath was gone for good, yet I was pleased in a way that it was in conspiracy with me, even if my purpose was to strip it of power. The stone indeed seemed to have an appetite for my throat, where it now lodged, and settled itself to destroying me.

  As I gagged and groaned and made panicked motions with my arms and legs, Baldy pulled his hair in grief and raised his knuckles to heaven, knowing there was nothing to be done.

  During the long afternoon the councillors turned up, Stark amongst them, and they solemnly lit a fire as Baldy told them what had happened, standing up a while, narrating the tale with stricken gestures. They looked on me with pity, but sang the songs of merciful death, for they could not argue with what I was doing.

  I could feel the stone lodged in me with the weight of the sky, which I had not known to possess a weight until now. It was descending on my inner parts and choking them. And if I was choked by the sky, I thought, what would not choke me, and where was heaven in that weight? Sometimes I cried out in misery, but I knew it was useless.

  My companions began to sing, “Oh, there he is, the man who took our suffering into him.” They sang like that as if they had always known that one of us would have to perish in this way. With the weight of that stone crushing his heart. “Oh, you are the most worthy of men,” they sang. “Oh, we will place you in the earth with honor.”

  But it meant nothing now that the stone was on my heart, crushing it like a little ripe pod. I must keep it in me, inside my rib cage. I must be put beneath the earth with it in me, so that if it was ever seen again, it would have been bleached of its color by the fluids of my body and would need to burrow its way like a little beast to the level of the earth. But it could not because I was taking its powers into me.

  I must have choked for half a day, my heart surging, my breath of no value to me. Eventually I found the means to call to Stark, “Put the bone sliver in me. Give me the bounder shinbone.”

  The men stared at each other. It would not be normal, it had not been done in their lifetimes. But this, what I was doing, had not been done either. Nothing seemed to happen, and they resumed singing. With streaky sight I beheld someone put more wood on the fire near where Baldy wept. One of them stooped by him and put both hands on his shoulders.

  Then I saw Stark go in the right direction, towards the stones where he and I kept it inside the hollow bone of a holy man—the blessed sliver. I saw him carry it secretively wrapped in its pelts towards me. He was howling, half joining in the others’ so
ng. “Oh, man who would ensure the birth of children …”

  Then he stepped aside from it and gave it with all its power to my Son Unnameable, who looked like the young man who had not been defaced by the slicer. I was able to tell them, then, “Take it out again after … so that anyone seeing my bones will not think me a wrongdoer.”

  My Son Unnameable was all merciful decision. He produced the polished bone. Better him. Then, with an august grief but at the same time humor in his eyes, he displayed the thing to me. He knelt over me. I felt it penetrate my collarbone. It was divinely cool as it descended into me. I felt a freezing deep alarm and such gratitude.

  “Aaaah! No pain. My Son,” I cry!

  Submarine

  I WAS READY FOR the esophagectomy now, and Professor Brown, the surgeon, assured me that if it went well I should return to normal life within a year. But just in case, I believed I must make another and most desperate attempt to reach the prime minister.

  Dear Prime Minister,

  I am scheduled to undergo a fairly serious operation for the removal of my esophagus. It will not necessarily cure the problem, and I have been warned it will present problems in itself. I can look forward to a long convalescence, even if no further cancer presents. I suspect it could come about that I will no longer be the Shelby Apple of old. I cannot bring myself to resent that, but it does place on me the need to talk to you without artifice.

  Forgive me if, given the circumstances, I speak directly, and say that in government you have appeared a mere shadow of the person you were when I first met you at Ted Castwell’s house. You don’t need me to say it, and it may be an unjust assessment, but that is the way it appears. In saying it, I do not parrot commentators. I express only my own assessment. You cannot even find the grit to progress us for fear of the gray neofascists of your right wing! Are you thus no more than a palace eunuch?

  There is something you can do—and when I say this, please don’t give me the usual constitutional excuses. The remains of Learned Man currently reside on a shelf in a repository of our National Museum and should be returned to the country of his people, in the spirit of healing between races and to the benefit of the traditional owners. The world could have a great center of healing in the Lake Learned country, a place of learning for some and of marveled fascination for all, an enterprise that succors the descendants of Learned Man and Learned Woman and puts paid to all mean argument about Aboriginals as the human initiators and owners. Ah, you say: we have to wait for the traditional owners. Of course we do. But what have you said to them? Are they aware that you have any vision on the matter, any intent to fulfill their desires?

  The man Professor Peter Jorgensen, my friend and an old man himself, found or was found by Learned Man, and the Man himself is an inexpressible wonder, and all you and your minions can do is erect a little shack and invoke the piety of waiting to hear from the elders and traditional owners. I believe inertia suits you, and most of your colleagues. You didn’t pursue the same nicety when it came to recently canceling native title in the Northern Territory. And what a pity we did not consult them in the nineteenth century before obliterating them with the Martini Henry carbine!

  This is a chance to do something of unambiguous wonder. Please do it! And forgive the exuberance of this letter, or whatever it is, in this letter. If everything I write is misled, I am not misled on the Mr. Learned proposition. It is a world imperative!

  Yours with closing respect,

  Shelby Apple, Officer of the Order of Australia

  And that was what I sent off.

  * * *

  Selfishly, I did not want Cath to become, after the operation, in the manner of wives of the sick, a health handmaiden. I hated, perhaps with some vanity, to have her reduced from calyx of desire to medical attendant. That is, I was loath to enter the final phase of the relationship, when the hands that once tore at the flesh become wielders of wet cloths, or holders of the puke or blood bowl. It was not that she wouldn’t be willing to do that or that she lacked the sturdiness of soul. She had all the sturdiness fit for deathbed nursing and widowhood. And she might need to be in the role as a means to distract herself from impending drastic separation. It was that I did not want her to be in that role, the last role I would see her in. I did not want my last glimpses to be of her as attendant, as nurse. But I knew I would not get my way on this. I was reaching the stage where you don’t get your way on anything.

  I had a sense even in the recovery room that this latest operation had not gone well. I felt diminished and remote, but somehow the surgeon had revived in me one memory. By the bones of Learned Man, there had been found the lump of milky hyalite. It came from far away, originally from the opal fields of Lightning Ridge. The cunning Dr. Brown had fetched it and, as I suspected, had implanted it in me. He had not told me so, and when he visited I said to him, “Cunning move, the stone.” He did not admit anything, of course. He could not. He did not have to. There was a law operating here that made him do it.

  The stone glowing in me, Learned Man’s stone. I spent a lot of time after the operation, though sometimes I was confused enough to think I hadn’t had it, on the Mir I submersible again. It had only taken up a few weeks of my life, filming the scientific vessel and its submersibles, and indeed, at the end, I had to make the most of the one long, long day in the darkness of the ocean floor by the hydrothermal vents off Costa Rica. Yet that dive recurred to me as if it was the model for all the days of my drugged afterlife.

  I was frequently sure I lay stomach down, and never comfortable, what with the glowing stone within my body, on a leather bench, with the monitor and the controls for the external cameras to the left of me and at face level and, to my right, an easy-rig steadying apparatus for the small Sony. With it I would shoot activities inside the capsule—Sergei’s brow bulging with Slavic intent, or Allan Trumball discussing the metabolism of the sea creatures, extremophiles, who had chosen to evolve at this inhuman depth and pressure. I could also shoot along the shaft of illumination from the Mir’s outer skin, radiating at depths that had never seen light, and amongst beings that had dispensed with the need of it. And I could shoot what that shaft picked up via my little tea saucer–sized window, 110 millimeters across. The cameras belonging to the ship (in pressure casings outside its shell) and my outer camera and its casing were not unrelated—in my delirium—to the incandescent rock within me, to its reach and its secrets. I could somehow sense it reaching its own focus in a dimension just beyond the limits of sight and working away at its own tasks. Because I could feel its sharp inquiry unreconciled to the rest of me.

  Sergei, pilot and navigator, had believed in bonds between men. But he could not be told that the stone had been transferred to me. He disliked things that were too subtle and too demanding in the metaphysical sense. He was a man’s man. He’d disliked female authority. He had designed this wonderful titanium orb as a place he could hide out with men, but these days there were too many women scientists for that to work. He had taken trouble to tell me and Trumball, the American who shared the orb of the Mir I with us, that he found it hard to tolerate bossy women scientists who filled his beautiful titanium orb with urgent requests and commands. Lifetime scholars of the hydrothermal vents at the bottom of the sea, they only had twelve hours or so, the limitations of our natural functions, in the Mir submersible to consider with their own eyes the clouds of bacteria emerging from the vents, and the creatures of utter dark who could live in their own way, without bladdery and collapsible lungs and cavities, at this murderous depth and in temperatures ranging from −2 degrees Celsius to 400 degrees. And Sergei, collecting samples at their, in his view, strident orders with the retractable arms of his machines. But he said that having got to know us in the ship’s mess and during the preparations for the dive, he considered Trumball and me brothers.

  Lucifers, light-bearers to utter darkness, we had on first reaching the bottom of the sea swept across a pavement of shining onyx. Newly coughed up and laid
down by the vents in the sea floor and dark brothers of Learned Man’s milky lump of stone.

  “Sergei,” I pleaded in a tone of Australian camaraderie, which—unlike the demands of the women scientists Sergei ranted about—pretended to expect nothing. “Mate, would it be possible to have the full halogens on?”

  “You want the probe lights?” he asked, but not in incredulity, more like an indulgent uncle. Because he liked me, you see. He had declared on no evidence that I was brave. I was uncomplaining, I suppose. He seemed to be impressed by my polite inquiry, my “Would it be possible?” I had also apparently hit the right note of disapproval the night before, when Sergei told the tale of Colin Banter, famed film director.

  Banter had always used the two Mir submersibles and their mother ship, the Akademik Nikolai Alikhanov, for his underwater features and documentaries. Indeed, Banter had discovered the Akademik and its Mirs in mothballs in the port of Kaliningrad after the fall of the Soviet Union, and brought them back into commission, his movies enabling them to pursue science again. But Sergei said he had begun to doubt Banter when the Mir Banter was in, with Sergei himself piloting, became stuck fast between the propeller and hull of the Bismarck, a sunken Nazi battleship, on the seabed of the North Atlantic, nearly five kilometers down. I thought Banter’s reaction, to show reasonable fear, absolutely reasonable at that depth and in an ocean which there exerts a pressure of five hundred atmospheres. Indeed, being crushed and achieving instant, bone-liquifying oblivion was preferable to suffocating there. Banter felt a certain panic? I considered it valid panic. It wasn’t as if they could call a tow truck. The Mir, with its inner globe of titanium, air pressured to an atmosphere of one, was in itself no guarantee of extended life if they were stuck there under the fathoms-deep hole or moved free but could not ascend. Sergei’s bloody-minded calm as he played with the controls, bucking his bright tensile steel against Hitler’s resonant old iron, would have made anyone sweaty with apprehension. So I secretly dissented from Sergei’s condemnation of Banter and hoped that no minor crisis would arise and cause me to betray myself as fearful to our exacting pilot.