Fire Fire (25 page)

He curled up on his mattress and tried to keep his eyes shut.
After two weeks of absolute despair in which he could only find the
milky glow in troubling dreams, he found himself staring up at the
black screen on the desk in the corner. He didn't know the town. He
had only ever been to the deli and the Centrelink. When there were
grapes on the vine or plums on the plum tree, he didn't go out for a
fortnight at a time. Faced with the blank screen, he could see himself
already, computer in his backpack, descending the winding footpath
into the city for help. He shut his eyes again.

He had a bad feeling as he unplugged the modem, the power
supply and the printer and packed the computer into its special carry
case. His world, his spaceship, packed into a small square of plastic
then stashed on his back. He turned to face the world outside.

Just out the door and everything was going well. He shared his
street with several slowly composting old weatherboard houses and,
twenty steps past them, a glass-fronted Centrelink and a Past-The-
Use-By-Date, his favourite sort of deli. He was at the top of the street
and beginning the descent down the gorge-side footpath before he
knew it. The gorge stretched to his right, looking wild and glorious.
The distant water looked like a sheet of silver, a glittering screen of no
colour. The sky was that refracted glaring white which is neither
clouds nor clear. He knew a bit about weather and noticed things with
quiet satisfaction. The path descended sharply into trees, ferns and
mossy rocks, and a general profusion of the spill-over from gardens
run wild down the cliff side. The water was a long way down and
soon vanished, glimmering only now and then through the thick
greenery.

He knew the map of the city pretty much off by heart. He made
a point of knowing exactly where he was and had bookmarked the
map of the CBD months before. He knew that at the bottom of the
gorge path there would be a bridge and he would have to turn right.
He was not completely sure where he would find a computer service
centre but had a fair idea, from his knowledge of the layout of cities
and business districts, where, according to maximum need density,
there should be one.

The descent was much longer than he had anticipated. His initial
triumph at finding the path gave way to a sense of unease and his
body heated up. He was almost sure the path could not have been this
long. A picture he had used as a screensaver in grape season leapt
into his mind. Inspired by it, he had learned quite a lot about
Japanese painting. It was of a wild and rocky mountain painted in
black and red ink, bigger than the frame of the screen. A Japanese
mountain that could have extended indefinitely up and down. In the
centre there was a figure, bent over a staff, carrying an aged parent
down a craggy and treacherous mountain path.

He cheered up and forgot the screensaver when he came upon a
cherry-plum tree laden with fruit. The ground under it was spattered
with the flesh and blood of fallen fruit and the strange yellow skulls
of pips. He had had no idea that it was plum season. In fact he was
sure that it wasn't. Some trick of the gorge-side shelter and the water
and light catchment. He picked one cautiously and popped it into his
mouth. It was full and tight, sweet, tart and juicy. He had never had
one like it. He stood and ate several kilos of fruit, spitting the pips this
way and that. His hope rose, although he could smell a strange smell.

A little further down the path, he saw something. He cut short his
soft whistling and held his breath. Something had moved. Just then a
life form he had never seen darted into the pathway and smashed a
bottle at his feet. It was gone again in a second, screaming in abusive
tones something that sounded like ‘Christmas cake!' but could not
have been. He had not really seen much but had a vague impression
of a biped mammalian type, a little bandicootish. He was very shaken
and stared around fearfully. He wanted to go home but the pressure
of the increasingly heavy black case against his back pushed him on.

He felt an ugly anxiety pick up his heart and toss it back and forth.

The smell was stronger.

The first time you see an alien life form in the flesh is one of those
dizzying moments which is followed by considerable self doubt and
the resurgence of other often more plausible fears. Arno hurried down
the steps, driven by images of aliens and cyborgs which he had
enjoyed on-screen, comfortable then, even admiring. He became
worried about inner space, outer space and cyberspace. He'd read
Sean Williams' latest. He knew quite a bit about aliens and
speculative worlds, was impressed by them because they were
imaginary. He felt ill.

He tried to tell himself that it was someone in fancy-dress who
had indeed said something loudly about Christmas cake.

He came upon a sign that said City, and above it another word
in marks he could just recognise as a font of some kind. He hurried
past it. His mind couldn't work smoothly. He shook as if he had a
virus. Something had happened. His skin was so pale! His hair was
so long! Something had happened in time and space. His backpack
pressed into his damp back. Why wasn't it on the news? He had
scrolled through the news religiously every morning. Always the same
server.

What if he had been watching the wrong news?

He suddenly found himself at the bottom of the gorge-side path.
To his right was a wide bridge spanning the river. Sweating, he went
over to the parapet and looked down. He was almost unsurprised.

The water was a translucent yellow.

He could still smell something.

He started down the street, noticing everything. The pathway
was cobbled with a springy green material he didn't recognise. His
heart still lurched sickeningly but Arno wasn't stupid. Life was
obviously happening all around him pretty smoothly. He would keep
to himself, make a beeline for the CBD, hope his estimations were
correct, get the computer fixed, race home and sit down and find out
exactly what had happened. He crossed the bridge with his head
down, only just registering that he had two shadows.

Something was really not right but he would think about it later.

He had to start looking up to avoid bumping into aliens.

There were no humans on the crowded streets. Everyone stared.

It was like the first day at a new school. Arno blushed deeply and
twined his fingers in his backpack straps. A young female biped with
wild hair above an indescribable face strode towards him, towing an
extraordinarily ugly quadruped. She brushed Arno and whispered in
oddly accented English into his ear as she passed, ‘Seeya later.' Arno
turned to look at her lithe form just as the quadruped looked back
and stuck its tongue out at him.

By the time he reached what he supposed was the CBD,
furtive glances had allowed him to begin classifying the creatures
around him by type. Unless they used English, which was rare,
he could not catch even the sound threads of their language; but
it was clear that there were many more bipeds than quadrupeds
and that the latter were perhaps enslaved. There were equine, ovine,
even elephantine types among the bipeds. He almost laughed to
himself at the paucity of his own imagination: he had to fall back on
the known in order to observe the strange world he had found himself
in. He was not exactly enjoying himself but he did feel that tingling
rush one feels upon discovering a new and splendid website hidden on
some remote server in Greenland.

He was finding the scrutiny of strange creatures acutely embarrassing.
Deep in the CBD, buildings towered over him, glinting red and
yellow lights from stacks of faceless reflective windows. Shops lined
the street in an oddly familiar fashion. Perhaps commerce forms the
same arrangement anywhere, Arno thought sagely. He didn't
recognise most of the shops. He couldn't read most signs and the
displays were more often than not unfamiliar. He found a computer
retailer easily enough, however, relief washing through him as he
recognised from some distance the gentle call and the soft glow.

Praying to himself that retailers also serviced, he entered shyly and
the shop fell silent except for the mellifluous hum of whirring drives
and screens. Six bipeds stared at him. Flushed and fumbling in an
agony of embarrassment, Arno slipped his backpack off, slid the case
out, clicked the catch open with sweating thumbs and lifted his sad
square of plastic onto a counter behind which a hirsute and swarthy
creature, a porcine, was waiting. An awful silence ensued. Eyes to the
floor, Arno whispered the word ‘Crash'. The creature inclined its head
suddenly and took the computer, disappearing behind a silver wall.

The other creatures began whispering, eyeing Arno now and then. In
the still air of the shop, he realised with surprise that the smell was
him. He sniffed his bare arm. Arno began to have a very bad feeling,
surrounded here by whispers he couldn't quite hear, by a smell that
was him, and by blue glows and hums none of which would ever be
his. He felt suddenly bereft.

The bristling porcine type had returned. It snorted, not unkindly,
‘Motherboard's fucked.'

Arno stared down at his sunburned arms. He had four shadows,
forming a faint X marking the spot on which he stood.

He knew that he would never be going home.

Lilo read the other two, giggling while Ursula sobbed and whimpered as though unmasked.

Lilo sighed blissfully. ‘Choizus! ‘Now, THAT is a Christmas joke.' She turned on Ursula, eyes glinting. ‘Why you? Hmmm?

Why's he got it in for you?'

Ursula didn't answer. There were some things she had never told Lilo, and she was suddenly glad. Yes she had told Lilo about herself. But in this one thing she had been loyal to Gotthilf. She had told no one, not even Lilo, not even when she and Gotthilf had seemingly drifted out of each other's lives.

But the last lines stung and rang on with her all afternoon. Arno's obsession with computers was well known. The rest of it was about all of them, Acantia buried so deep that she would never recognise herself. The last lines were a message. She went quiet, reached for the papers and reread all three pieces for other messages, but there was nothing that stood out beyond the obvious.

Later that night, alone in crisp clean sheets folded over her mattress for her by Lilo, she thought more calmly, more brutally over it all.

What had really happened to her and Gotthilf that made him pick her, blame her for his airy, laughing genius? They had fucked the same slick old predator, or rather been fucked by him. She had curled up while her brother had flourished, pinching her name. She was jealous. She was relieved. She was delighted, flattered, hurt, heartbroken. But above all, accused. There was so much love in his treachery, and so much betrayal in her loyalty.

How could
she
, of all of them, have forgotten Gotthilf?

Ugolini had made her feel the seductress, made her think she was the one who chose.
You are so beautiful that you are like
the idea of purity. Your body can be given, a great gift, ennobling you
in the giving. Would you give it to me?
And after. After. She hadn't fully grasped that he really meant sex while he undressed her. She had thought during the nightmare that sex was the initiation, not the end. When he fell asleep he looked like a dead body. He had strange blotches on his bare skin, and his open mouth was pallid. She waited for something beyond the vague terror of being alone after sex with Acantia due home soon. Nothing came, only sobs.

Gotthilf's face the day she realised. She had not warned him when he was sent away to stay with Ugolini. She remembered being jealous, feeling discarded.

It was disgust that had kept her unloving. Disgust at innocence. At being duped. At knowing that her secret was shared. Disgust that it was just swindle and appetite and the way of the world.

But she never knew that Gotthilf had known. And she couldn't bear it.

She had not once called Acantia to account for Gotthilf. She had not once really questioned the beatings that kept his skin broken and the bruises on his ribs. Perhaps she had wanted him beaten. She had done nothing because there was nothing beautiful or noble about Ursula if snivelling, scrawny, flinching Gotthilf got fucked too.

She needed his book, sure now of what it would contain. Hoping that it forgave her. She got up at midnight, turned on the computer and began to write it.