The Disestablishment of Paradise (14 page)

‘I’ll bear that in mind,’ said Hera. ‘But you get to know what to look out for when you are working round them all the time.’

‘And you want to be down here alone! Hell, Doc, you must be one very brave lady, or off your perch.’

‘Bit of both, probably,’ said Hera. ‘Welcome to Paradise.’

The demolition men left in the evening with Mack guiding their lumbering demolition bus up into the sky. The cargo doors were open and some of the men sat with their legs
dangling out, drinking beer and waving to Hera.

As they disappeared noisily across the lake Hera felt, for the first time, lonely. She had enjoyed their banter, their sly digs at her, their comic-book lust for the shapely Captain Abhuradin,
and their general sense of fun. They, if no one else, were enjoying this Disestablishment. And they had certainly made a big difference to Monkey Terrace. The place was cleaned, tidy and the doors
didn’t squeak.

Hera was misty for a moment, but then her practical mind asserted itself. She’d been lonely before and she’d be lonely again. She was here by choice. So get on with it.

During the week following Abhuradin’s visit, Hera received a handful of farewell calls from some of the ORBE staff who were heading off planet. These were sad calls
filled with hearty and well meant promises to meet up at some date in the future. Hera felt the planet emptying of all the people she had known and cared for, and she felt sad too, for many of the
people she had thought of as friends neglected to call and just left.

Last to leave was Hemi. He’d accepted a job with the Space Council as part of the Office for Economic Planning. That made them both laugh. ‘So I’ll be able to keep my eye on
you,’ he said. ‘Kia ora, Hera.’

And his was the last of the calls. But then . . .

Ten days after Hemi’s departure Hera received a radio message from Mack saying sorry for the delay but they were about to start packing up the Shapiro Collection. If she wanted to be part
of it she’d better get back to New Syracuse as soon as possible.

Hera was airborne in her new flyer within minutes.

She came in low over New Syracuse. Most of the prefabricated buildings were gone. All that remained were a few walls, still being unbolted and then hoisted onto giant carriers ready to be
transported to the shuttle port. The little two-storeyed Shapiro Museum was still standing, though its doors and windows had been removed, giving it a vacant, bombed-out look.

Mack was already there. He was looking up, ear protectors on, and he waved briefly as the SAS circled overhead and landed. But he was not smiling.

‘Not pleased to see me?’ said Hera as she stepped out of the flyer.

‘No, it’s not that. Some bugger got in here before us. Hell of a mess up there. Sorry. Oh, and I brought you these.’ He handed her a pair of heavy gloves. ‘There’s
a lot of broken glass and widowmakers. Be careful where you tread. Follow me.’

And it was a mess. The entire building had been ransacked. Burn marks on one wall showed where someone had tried to light a fire. Upstairs entire shelves of books had been tipped over.
Glass-fronted cases lay shattered. Drawers were pulled out and their contents strewn over the floor. Someone had sprayed red paint on the walls and there was a smell of urine.

‘Hope you find what you wanted.’

‘I can cope,’ said Hera.

‘OK. Well, I’ll be back in the evening with a Demo Mule. We’re way behind schedule. See ya.’ Mack left her to it.

Somewhere among all this mess was a wooden box with a label attached saying
SHAPIRO MEMORABILIA
. This was all that interested Hera. Methodically she began to lift and
clear the books and papers, working slowly from room to room.

When evening fell she had still not found the box. Inside the library, single lights blinked on and began to glow. She worked on, dragging aside filing cabinets that had been tipped over and
shelves that had fallen. Some time later Hera heard a transport mule in the distance. She knew that Mack would need to start clearing the library soon. She didn’t have very long.

She pushed a door, trying to open it wider, but something was trapped behind it. A coat. And there, under the coat, on its side but still intact, was the wooden box she was looking for. Hera
lifted it carefully and carried it to a small table. The catch which secured the lid was still intact and closed, but the label had gone.

Carefully she opened the lid. Inside, wrapped in plastic, she found Shapiro’s journals, field books, some handwritten speeches and a few letters. It was Hera who had packed them when
Shapiro died. There also was his edition of Baudelaire and a small polished box which contained a few personal items: his dissection kit wrapped in a stained blue cloth, a tape measure, a pipe
still with fragments of burned calypso in it and a couple of tri-vid tapes.

Hera repacked the box and was about to load it into her satchel when the lights failed. They just went out. No noise. No flicker. Just out. The darkness was total. It took her a moment or two to
realize what had happened. With her hands up in front of her, Hera felt her way over to the wall. She had to climb over the boxes she had sorted and stacked. Finally, she found the light switch and
flicked it on and off. Nothing.

So now what? She stood for a moment. She remembered she had left the radio control link to the SAS flyer in the shilo. Worse, she had disabled the voice link during the journey and forgo en to
reinstate it. Here was a lesson. Alone on Paradise she could be in trouble if she did that, especially if she fell and hurt herself. OK. Nothing for it but to work her way outside and over to the
flyer and find one of the beacons.

Feeling round the walls, Hera finally reached the stairs. To get there she had to tread on tri-vid cubes and books, something which she hated to do, for she could feel them shift on their spines
under her feet like fish. She had just negotiated her way round a pile of boxes on the landing when she saw a Demo Mule approaching outside. Moments later, there was a beam of light. It raked
across the building and flashed through one of the downstairs windows. She heard Mack’s voice: ‘Hey, Doc. You still in there?’

‘Yes,’ she called. ‘Is it a general blackout? I forgot to bring my torch.’

Mack reached the front entrance and shone the light up the stairs, forcing Hera to shield her eyes from the glare. ‘Sorry.’ He shifted the light to the wall. ‘This is happening
all the time now. We rigged a cable up to the shuttle port, but it keeps shorting out. Bloody plants – worse than mice. Did you find what you were looking for?’

‘Yes. Everything was intact.’

Mack shone his torch on the steps and started to come up. ‘I’ve brought some candles. Amazing isn’t it? Able to reach the stars, but we still need a candle in an
emergency.’

‘You need matches too, or are you going to rub a couple of sticks together?’ said Hera, retreating into the room.

‘Enough of the smarts from you, Captain Doc,’ said Mack as he joined her. ‘You’re as bad as my lads.’ A match flared, was touched to a wick and a moment later the
wavering but strong light of a candle shone out. The candle was lodged in a hole drilled into a flat piece of wood. ‘We come prepared.’ Mack put the candle down on the table.

Slung round his shoulders was one of the tough canvas bags that the demolition men used when they were clearing sharp rubbish such as broken bottles. ‘Now, the only thing is to be careful
we don’t set the whole bloody place alight. So what did you find, Doc?’

Hera pointed to the wooden box. ‘Some of Shapiro’s private notebooks and journals. That’s all I wanted. Towards the end he stopped publishing as he was getting such a hostile
reception, but he kept his notes. Now I want to use them. I’ve set myself a project for while I’m down here, Mack. I want to try and find out what has really gone wrong with Paradise. I
think Shapiro knew.’

‘So how do you plan to do that?’

It was on the tip of her tongue to say, ‘You wouldn’t understand,’ but she bit back the words in time. Instead she said, ‘I’m going to try to relate to this world
in a more personal way. I don’t know
how
exactly, but I think I can find a way. Shapiro had some ideas.’

Mack nodded. ‘That’s sort of what I do when I have to take down a difficult building. I talk to it. I use a pendulum. Tell it to show me the dangerous places. It works. The lads
think I’m a bit daft. But hey, I’m still here and I haven’t lost a man yet. Talking of which, I bet you haven’t eaten today, have you?’

She hadn’t and confessed as much. Mack shook his head in mock severity. ‘I don’t know how you’re going to cope down here on your own. You haven’t a clue how to look
after yourself. Just as well you have a guardian angel.’ He fished in his bag and produced a small bundle which, when he unwrapped it, contained sandwiches, a chunk of cheese and some apples.
‘And don’t ask what’s in the sandwiches, cos if you’re a vegetarian, you don’t want to know. Just eat the bread. It’s all I could find in the canteen.’

‘I’m not a vegetarian. What gave you that idea?’

‘Just thought you might be. You have that look about you.’

‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

‘Nothing. Don’t get your feathers in a twist.’

‘We tend not to eat meat down here simply because . . . well, meat is in short supply,’ she said, sounding more prim than she had intended. ‘Once they brought in cows and
goats, but they never thrived and the idea of livestock was abandoned. Except for chickens. The chickens did all right for a while.’

‘Well tuck in then.’

‘What about you?’

‘I’ll have an apple. Oh, and I brought this . . .’ He produced a bottle of wine. ‘Courtesy of that mad bugger – what’s his name?’

‘There are a lot of mad buggers, Mack.’

‘The one who tried to kill you with a chair.’

‘Proctor Newton. He didn’t drink.’

‘Well, when we pulled the Settlers’ Club apart we found a cosy little cellar underground. There were racks where they kept their bottles – imported stuff, mark you, not local
rubbish, and expensive too – and one of my lads spotted Newton’s name on one of the racks. So we liberated everything. And before you ask . . .’ He produced a corkscrew and a
pottery mug and set them down. ‘Shall I open it, or are you against drinking too?’

‘What do you . . .’ She saw she was again being teased. ‘Do I always seem so . . . cut and dried about things? No, on second thoughts don’t answer that. Open the
bottle.’

Mack obliged and Hera settled and began to eat, realizing that she was very hungry indeed.

‘Can I have a look at one of the notebooks?’ asked Mack suddenly. And before she could say anything he displayed his hands to show they were clean.

‘Yes, sure.’ Hera opened the box and selected one of the field journals. It was the book that had accompanied Shapiro during a long journey up to the northern polar continent called
Ball. Mack held the dog-eared and work-stained book as though it was made of porcelain. He turned the pages delicately. There were lots of drawings and he studied them closely in the light of the
candle.

‘What’s that?’

‘The miners called it a Crispin lily – but it’s not a lily at all. A proper taxonomy is one of the things we were working on before all this.’

‘Oh.’

‘Native of the far north. Those petals are luminous at night. The miners used to sew them together to make slippers. Sometimes they used to put petals in their boots. They said it helped
ease blisters. I know the petals look delicate, but they are as tough as pigskin.’

Mack nodded, and leafed on. ‘What’s this?’

‘Fart in a trance.’ She watched for his reaction.

‘What? But it’s pretty. Look at those little flowers.’

‘Yes, but can you see the small bulb under the flowers? If you tread on one of those, they explode and the smell . . . Well, if you have ever smelled one you always watch where you are
putting your feet in future.’

‘Why do they smell so bad?’

‘They don’t really. Just to our noses. Plants don’t have noses. The sap, because that is all it is, is a very good growing medium, except none of us could ever bear to use it
without a mask.’

He turned more pages. ‘What the hell is that?’ He was looking at a drawing of a giant plant similar to an aloe vera. A man lay beneath it and a human skull hovered above.

‘That’s one of Shapiro’s whimsies. Have you ever heard of the great Michelangelo – used to be called a reaper?’

‘No.’

‘I have never seen one, but the MINADEC men and a few of the first settlers did. They were frightened of them and so they burned them or bombed them. We think they might be extinct now. No
one has seen one for over sixty years. You see, despite all the hype about how fertile this world is – and it is fertile, make no mistake – the ecosystem is fragile, and interlopers
like us cause a lot of damage very quickly.’

‘So what did it do, this Michelangelo, that was so bad?’

‘We don’t know exactly, but according to the old tales it was a plant that could steal your spirit. They said it could create images, hence its name. But whether they meant images in
the mind or real images was never clear. People who encountered one of these plants just lay down. They didn’t always die immediately. Sometimes they just lay there, but if they weren’t
found in time, they did die and shrivelled. People thought the plants must exude some kind of drug that took away people’s will . . . and so they destroyed them.’

‘And you are really going to stay down here on your own? What if you meet a Michelangelo?’

‘Most unlikely. But I’d love to. That and a
Dendron Rex peripatetica
and a few others. That would be wonderful, but like I say, a lot of things have gone for ever.
They’re with O’Leary.’

Mack pointed at the drawing with his blunt finger. ‘Do you all do drawings like this?’ he asked.

Hera thought for a moment. ‘I suppose we do. It’s a bit like you said about candles. Cameras and tri-vid cubes can break, but it takes a lot to destroy a pencil and a notebook. You
can learn how to sketch plants quickly and when you’ve had a bit of experience in the field you know what to look for. Don’t look so surprised. Of course, some people draw better than
others. Shapiro’s sketches are beautiful. My drawings aren’t so good.’