River of Blue Fire (72 page)

As the boat began to drift away, the wolf god threw back his head and began to bay out another hymn to his own godliness.

Orlando clutched his head in his hands. “Oh, God. We're locked, now.”

“I told you we should have killed him.” Fredericks looked more closely at Orlando and saw his misery. “Hey, it's not that bad.” He patted his friend's shoulder. “We'll just make another boat. There are palm trees and stuff like that.”

“And cut them down with what? Chop them up how?” Orlando jerked away from Fredericks' attempts to soothe him. “He took my sword, remember?”

“Oh.” Fredericks fell silent for a moment. The sun was clearing the eastern mountains now, the sands beginning to burn red. “How far do you think we have to walk before we get to another whatever you call those things . . . another gate?”

“Through a thousand miles of desert,” said Orlando bitterly. It wasn't, he felt sure, much of an exaggeration. The shocked expression on his friend's face didn't make him feel the least bit better.

CHAPTER 26

Waiting for the Dreamtime

NETFEED/NEWS: “Data Terrorists” Broadcast Manifesto

(
visual: three human figures sitting on pile of toys
)

VO: At noon yesterday, GMT, a brief and bizarre manifesto broke into most commercial net channels, from a group calling itself the Dada Retrieval Collective
.

(
visual: trio wearing animated Pantalona Peachpit masks
)

DRC 1: “The sea squirt is a marine animal that starts out with a rudimentary brain, but once it stops moving, affixes itself to a rock, and begins simply to filter seawater, it doesn't need its brain anymore, so it digests it
.
”

DRC 2: “We have formed the Sea Squirt Squad to commemorate, protest, and celebrate this fact. We will dedicating ourselves to the destruction of telecommunication wherever possible.”

DRC 3: “No dupping. S3 is real. We're going to kill the net. You'll thank us someday.”

S
TAN Chan stuck his head around the partition. “Got something for you. Woman out at UNSW with the rather fabulous name of Victoria Jigalong. She's supposed to be first-rate, top of the field, like that. I sent you the name and number.”

“So why are you standing there, bouncing around like a jack-in-the-box?”

“Because I wanted to see the shining look of gratitude on your real, live face. I'm going to get lunch—coming?”

“No, thanks, I'm having a no-lunch day. Girl has to watch her figure, you know.”

“And you call
me
old-fashioned.” He disappeared; she heard him joking with a couple of the other detectives on his way out.

Calliope Skouros called up Stan's memo and settled back to read through it, wondering if discipline could be relaxed enough to allow for the packet of biscuits stashed in the bottom drawer. After all, starving yourself was not the way to diet properly. On the other hand, if she wanted to keep her already broad-shouldered, wide-hipped figure in what she considered reasonable shape, she had little margin for indulgence.

She scowled and left the biscuits where they were. It was all about “looking like a police officer,” wasn't it? Which, if you were a man, could include a gut and a fat behind. But if you were a woman fighting for promotion, and queer to boot. . . .

Chan's hasty dossier on Jigalong did make her sound like a good source. She had several degrees in Aboriginal Folklore and Comparative Anthropology, and had served on more commissions than Calliope could imagine without a shudder. She also seemed to have involved herself with quite a few specifically woman-oriented causes, which seemed like it might be a good sign.

The call to the University of New South Wales, after an endless series of facades, eventually presented her with the Anthropology Department associate. He had been offline for a few moments when the picture suddenly changed.

Calliope's first impression of Professor Jigalong was that she was very, very dark-skinned, almost literally black, so that until she surreptitiously adjusted the contrast of her screen, there was only a mask with unnervingly white eyes in the center of the display. The woman's head was shaved, and she wore vast hoop earrings and a necklace of chunky stone beads.

“What do you want, Officer?” Jigalong's voice was smoky and deep, her entire presence quite overwhelming, even over telecom lines. All Calliope's thoughts of appealing to sisterhood had evaporated. The woman was . . . well, witchy.

In her best professional manner, and trying to show proper respect (for some reason she thought that might be an issue) Detective Skouros introduced herself and quickly explained that she was looking for information on the Woolagaroo and any related myths.

“There are many collections of myths suitable for beginners,” the professor replied, cool as a misty morning. “They are available in several media. I'll be happy to have someone send you a list.”

“I've probably seen most of them. I'm looking for something a little deeper.”

The woman's eyebrow rose. “May I ask why?”

“It's a murder investigation. I think there's a possibility that our killer may have been influenced by Aboriginal myths.”

“In fact, you think the murderer is probably a black man, don't you?” The professor's tone remained flat and unbending. “It has not occurred to you that he might be a white man imitating something he has seen or heard or read about.”

Calliope felt a flare of irritation. “First off, Professor, I'm not positive that the killer is a
he
at all. But even if it is a man, I don't care what color he is, except so far as it helps us catch him.” She was angrier than she'd realized at first. Not only didn't this woman want to acknowledge sisterhood, she saw Calliope as just another white cop. “In fact, the most important thing here is the poor girl he killed, who happens to have been Aboriginal herself—a Tiwi—not that it makes her any more or less valuable. Or any less dead.”

Victoria Jigalong sat silently for a moment. “I apologize for my remark.” She didn't sound exactly sorry, but Calliope had her doubts this woman could manage such a thing. “Why do you think this has something to do with native myths?”

Calliope explained the condition of the body, and the remark the reverend's wife had made.

“Mutilations of the eye are not uncommon in other countries, in other cultures,” the professor said. “Places where they have never heard of the Woolagaroo myth.”

“I realize the Aboriginal folklore angle is only a possibility. But someone killed Polly Merapanui, and someone did that to her, so I'm going to follow up any lead I have.”

The dark face on the screen was carefully quiet for several seconds more. “Is this going to be one of those tabnet field-days?” she asked at last. “You know, ‘Cops Seek Abo Myth-Killer'?”

“Not if I can help it. It's a five-year-old murder, anyway. The sad truth is, no one cares but me and my partner, and if we don't come up with anything soon, it's going back into the
Unsolved
file, probably for good.”

“Come to my office, then.” Having made up her mind, she spoke briskly. “I'll tell you everything I can. Fix a time with Henry, the one you spoke to first. He has my schedule.”

Before Calliope could protest her own busy calendar, Professor Jigalong had ended the call.

She sat staring at the screen for half a minute, full of useless frustration, then called back the associate and arranged a meeting. Furious at her own malleability—she, the one her father had called “Ox” because of her stubbornness—she scrabbled in the bottom desk drawer for the biscuits. Diet, hell. She would eat herself huge, until the Jigalong woman quailed at the sight of her.

What she found at the bottom of the drawer, after a long and fruitless search, was an IOU from Stan Chan dated two days earlier, a chit for the packet of biscuits he'd stolen.

The biscuit thief was doing legwork for another case, so Calliope went to the university by herself. She missed the shuttle from the parking lot, and decided to walk across campus instead of waiting for another hoverbus.

The students seemed uniformly well-dressed—even the clothes that imitated gutter fashion were expensive and finely tailored; Calliope was more conscious than she wanted to be of her decidedly unglamorous suit and flat, practical shoes.

Most of the young people she saw were Pacific Rim Asians, and although she had already known that many mainland Chinese were enrolled at UNSW (one of the school's nicknames was “BUSX”, which stood for “Beijing University, Sydney Extension”), it was still a bit startling to see it in person. The entire country was really half-Asian now, she reflected, although most of the Asians, like Stan, whether their grandparents had been Chinese, Laotian, or Korean, were now as Australian as Waltzing Matilda. They had joined the mainstream—or rather the mainstream had broadened. Funny how that happened. But, of course, not everyone was part of it: some, like the Aboriginal peoples, remained largely excluded.

Professor Jigalong's earlier reaction reminded Calliope that only a few generations ago, her own Greek immigrant ancestors had been the funny foreigners, the butt of jokes and sometimes the target of uglier treatment. But in fact, if you looked at it from the Aboriginal point of view, Calliope and her Greco-Australian forebears had never been that different from any other whites.

Victoria Jigalong's office was no bigger than most academic holes-in-the-wall. What was surprising about it was its austerity. Calliope had been expecting to find it filled with Aboriginal art, but instead, except for a cabinet with several shelves of old paper books, and a not completely tidy desk, it was as stark as a monk's cell. The professor's shapeless white dress, revealed as she stood up from behind the desk, its muslin length emphasized by her height, suddenly seemed a kind of ecclesiastical garment. Calliope exited the firm, dry handshake and lowered herself into the only other chair, caught between hops again.

“So.” The professor donned a pair of almost antique spectacles. With the lenses over her eyes, and with her shiny, hairless head, she now seemed a thing entirely made of reflective surfaces. “You want to know about the Woolagaroo myth.”

“Uh, yes.” Calliope would have preferred at least a bit of humanizing small talk first, but was clearly not going to get it. “Is it well known?”

“It is one of the more common. It appears in different forms in the story-cycles of quite a few Aboriginal peoples. Most have the key elements in common—a man takes it into his head to build an artificial man and give it life. He constructs it from wood, and gives it stones for eyes, but his attempts to breathe life into it by magic fail. Then, when he has walked away in disgust, he hears something following him. It is the Woolagaroo, of course, the wooden devil-devil man, and it chases him. Terrified, he hides, and the Woolagaroo continues on its way, over stones and thorns and even walking on the bottom of rivers, until it disappears.” She steepled her fingers. “Some folklorists do not believe it is truly a myth from the Dreamtime. They think it is more recent.”

“I'm sorry, slow down for a moment, please.” Calliope pulled her pad from her bag. “Do you mind if I record?”

Professor Jigalong looked at the device with distaste, and for a bizarre moment Calliope thought she was going to be accused of trying to steal this very modern and impressive woman's soul. “If you must,” was all the professor said.

“You said ‘the Dreamtime.' That's a myth, too, isn't it? That there was a time before time, when all the Aboriginal myths were actually true?”

“It is more than that, Detective. Those who believe, believe that it can be accessed. That in dreams, we still touch the Dreamtime.”

She had spoken with a peculiar emphasis, but Calliope did not want to get embroiled in some kind of academic crossfire. “But you said some people think this Woolagaroo myth is, what, modern?”

“They believe it is an allegory of the first contact with the Europeans, and with their technology. It is a myth, they say, that warns the native people that machines will destroy their makers.”

“But you don't think they're right.”

“The wisdom of so-called primitive people runs deeper than most of those who call themselves civilized can understand, Detective Skouros.” The harshness of her tone seemed almost automatic, the fossil rigidity of an old argument. “One does not have to have seen a gun or a motorcar to think that humanity should not rely too greatly on that which it makes, as opposed to that which it
is
.”

Calliope did her best to draw the woman back to specifics; the professor, as if realizing that the detective in front of her was not part of the debate she herself felt so strongly about, relented. She filled up fifteen minutes of the pad's memory with citations of different versions of the folktale, and of various expert commentaries written about it. Professor Jigalong's gestures were concise but subtly theatrical, her deep speaking voice almost hypnotic, and even her casual conversation gave the impression of being long-considered. Once more Calliope had the sensation of being overwhelmed by the professor's peculiar magnetism. At first she had thought it was sexual—Professor Jigalong was a handsome and very impressive woman—but more and more it seemed she was fascinated by the woman's sheer presence, her own reaction more like the awe of a potential devotee.

Calliope didn't like that. She didn't see herself as a fan, let alone a cult follower, of anyone or anything, and she couldn't imagine changing that for a professor of folklore with a chip on her shoulder. But it was hard not to react to the woman.

As she was listening (or half-listening, in truth, because the wealth of detail was beginning to overwhelm her), Calliope let her gaze drift around the office. What had seemed a monastic blankness to one of the walls was now revealed to be a very large—and, it appeared, fairly expensive—wallscreen, resting now in a neutral flat white tone. And there was a single ornament too, which she had missed against the multicolored spines on the bookshelves.