The Disestablishment of Paradise (15 page)

‘He meant a lot to you, this Shapiro, eh?’

‘He did. He was a great teacher. A great man. He taught me a lot of things. I have not met his like since.’ Hera’s manner, as she spoke, had undergone a slight change, a
withdrawal. Mack sensed that his question had crossed some threshold, but he was not sure what. ‘Well, I suppose I’d better get going,’ said Hera, brisk again. ‘Thank you
for your help.’ She stood up and Mack placed the book carefully in the wooden box and closed the lid. ‘Thank you for being so thoughtful with the sandwiches, they were . . .’

‘Herring and ham.’

‘You finish the wine.’

‘Can I give you a hand carrying anything?’

‘No. I am capable. I have to begin to depend on myself.’ She picked up the box with both hands.

‘Well, let me at least carry the torch, unless you want to hold it in your teeth.’

She let Mack carry the torch.

The door of the SAS flyer slid open when she touched the lock plate, and all its lights came on. Mack stood well back and watched her climb aboard. His instincts told him that if he came too
close she might again feel . . . not threatened, but exposed a bit. In the flyer Hera turned and waved. ‘Thanks again, Mack,’ she called. ‘Will you give Captain Abhuradin a call
and remind her to let me know the day the last shuttle will be departing? I want to be there to see it go.’

He nodded. ‘Sure. Hey, do you want me to give you a call? I’ll be on the last shuttle.’

‘OK. Yes, that’d be good.’

The door began to close. Mack called, ‘Oh, and one thing. Not that it matters, but I’m vegetarian.’

A week later, Hera was in a stony valley deep in the Chimney Mountains. She was sketching a pod of red Valentine poppies that had settled there after drifting high over her
shilo. The tinkle of water on stone and the moaning of the wind through the high passes – sounds she had come to enjoy as much as any of her music – were suddenly lost as the alarm on
the SAS ululated. It was Abhuradin. The schedule had changed. The last demolition shuttle would depart at midday. The evacuation part of the Disestablishment was complete. If Hera wanted to see the
shuttle leave and bid it farewell, she would have to hurry.

She did.

Even as Hera packs her books and small tent into the SAS, Paradise is preparing to say farewell in its own way.

Already, as Hera guns the SAS through the mountain passes and sets course across the sea for New Syracuse, the sky is darkening.

A cold wind is stirring on the high plateau, lifting dust and grit.

Whether they be the broken temples of antiquity or the submerged follies of our recent ancestors, buildings, when no longer cared for, quickly fall into ruin, achieving thereby
a melancholy beauty.

As on Earth, so on Paradise.

This shuttle port to which Hera is winging with such speed is typical. When first built it was the model of its kind. Carefully positioned among picturesque foothills, it was provided with its
own shelter belt, its own power station and social amenities. The shilos and gardens which surrounded it were the best then available, and those who lived there were proud to call Paradise
home.

Once upon a time, friendly house lights glowed amid the tall Verne palms. There was music and the flicker of tri-vid programmes on the curtained windows. When the breeze came from the coast, you
could smell the baking of bread and the brewing of beer, for Paradise had its own brewery located on the road to New Syracuse. In the evening, when the bugle notes of the forest trees announced the
setting of the sun, you could also hear the sharp cries of infants protesting at bedtime. Were you to have seen all this in its prime, you would have exclaimed, ‘How like Earth!’ And
you would have been right.

That was, of course, the intention, for many who came here tried to create their own vision of what Earth had once been like in happier times. As we now know, that was one of our first and one
of our greatest mistakes: for Paradise, despite appearances, was never anything like Earth; not like Heaven either, I suppose.

Now, abandoned, the shuttle port has become a windy place of grit and ghosts.

Just a few months earlier it was from this very port that the teams of demolition workers, summoned for the Disestablishment, spread across the surface of Paradise. Soon their green and blue
uniforms were everywhere. They flew out to the distant communities, to the isolated homesteads, to the processing stations, to the mines (for there were still a few) and to the research stations.
They stood by while angry and grieving people made their last farewells to the planet which had been home to them for three generations. Some settlers preferred to burn their houses, tossing a
blazing rag through a broken window and then watching as the flames licked and leaped up the walls. It did not take long before the framing timbers fell with a crash and sparks billowed into the
sky. Then gradually the flames got smaller, until finally all that was left was a smouldering ring of ashes, which, within days, would be overgrown and obliterated by the ever pressing vegetation
of Paradise.

The green and blue demolition angels helped people pack. They shifted crates of personal possessions, and then, when the families had moved out, they began their real work – ripping down
the public buildings, re-coiling the miles of irrigation tubing, disconnecting the pumps, scuttling and sinking barges that could no longer be serviced, greasing and vacuum-sealing any machinery
that could be re-used, disassembling bridges, reclaiming buoys from the running tides and packing in hermetically closed crates the entire contents of the New Syracuse Library, the Distance
Education Studios and the ORBE HQ. The temples, mosques and churches were picked apart and sent off world. So too the sheds, shops, restaurants, amateur theatre studio and the whorehouse on the
waterfront. The Settlers’ Club had its roof, walls and floors plucked away, revealing its secret wine cellar. The Settlers’ Museum was pulled down and its contents, documenting the
hundred and fifty years since Paradise was first occupied, were sold off to private collectors, dispersed to whichever universities expressed interest or burned.

Snapped up immediately was the quarter-size statue of a
Dendron peripatetica
, extinct now for over a generation. The tall sculpture was carefully cut into pieces, each piece numbered
and crated and the whole assembly shipped out to end its days as the sole inhabitant of a crater on the dark side of the moon: bizarre but appropriate.

This demolition took only a few months, for Paradise, despite the aspirations of the first colonists, had never become more than an agricultural world. ‘We only scratched the
surface,’ was the official assessment of the impact of Earth on the planet. Even so, those scratches went deep. The first fifty years during which Paradise was the exclusive territory of the
Mineral and Natural Resource Development Company left their mark.

The planet’s face was scarred by strip-mining for an aromatic gum which brought a fine price, and for a grey oily substance that burned dirty but hot and was used for local smelting. Some
dams were built and rivers diverted in an attempt to make the deserts fertile. Many miles of forest were burned or defoliated to make room for the farms which were planned but never planted.

There were other effects too, invisible ones that could not be remedied, such as the extinction of plant species, the pollution of waterways and radioactive contamination from a misplaced power
station. Records were few and no one knew where refuse was buried, or how many drums of unwanted and unnamed chemicals had been weighted and dropped into the deep blue trenches of the sea. Without
records showing time and place, such things did not officially exist – and memories fade. Perhaps most grievous, however, was the unknown and unsuspected impact of the human mind on the
invisible, passive and slowly awakening sentience of Paradise.

What the demolition workers could remove, they did. What they could not, they burned. And what they could not burn, they broke and left behind for time and the weather to dispose of. Official
policy: nothing of use was to be left intact. Why? Well, no one was quite certain any longer. Originally, when the forces of Earth made their first moves into space, there were fears that an alien
species might somehow be able to derive advantages from the refuse of earth. But in the time that Earth had been able to explore space beyond the solar system no evidence of a rival technological
civilization had been found. Life? Yes. Diatoms in tepid pools, microbes in sulphur ponds, ferns. Just occasionally tantalizing evidence of civilizations long dead was detected under frozen seas or
entombed in lava flows. But, of the hostile monstrosities that had peopled the popular imagination since Wells put pen to paper, there was no sign.

Nevertheless, the demolition workers were very careful, for strict legislation had been passed by the Space Council that any spillages must be cleaned up, and any damage they caused to the
environment put right. It was curious legislation, the legal equivalent of slamming the stable door when the horse was already a galloping speck on the horizon. As the various conservation agencies
kept pointing out, most damage to a planet was done during the first years of its exploitation, when the adventurers from Earth, the commercial companies which sponsored the exploration, were
gaining a foothold. That was when the legislation was needed. But it was never enforced. The war between those who wished to protect and conserve and those who wanted to expand and exploit never
ended, and the no-man’s-land between them was littered with dead legislation.

Now this work of demolition and cleansing was complete. Plants were already crawling over the concrete, reclaiming every damp corner and niche. The army of men and women shipped in to do the
pulling down, packing and handling had gradually shrunk from thousands to less than fifty. Those that remained were small professional teams, specialists in the last phase of Disestablishment
– razing, burning and burying.

Today being the final scheduled work day, they had hoped to be finished by noon, off planet smartly, into the showers and then into the long boozy party which always followed the safe arrival of
the historic last shuttle. And they might have done so too, except that one of the half-track Demo Mules out on a final scavenging run threw a track and the repairs caused a delay.

From Hera’s point of view, the delay was fortunate, for she was late.

The day wore on.

The wind came.

The sun, which had shone so brightly in the morning, gradually dimmed to a pale disc, which finally disappeared in the deepening haze.

Steadily, the wind strengthened until it reached gale force. It became heavy and brown with sand and grit stripped from the high plateau. It howled and swirled round the remains of the lonely
buildings. It shrieked in the broken gutters and tore at the roofs, lifting the few remaining corrugated panels and sending them wheeling across the compound like playing cards. It tore up the few
straggly plants of Earth, all that remained of the kitchen gardens. It drove before it huge tumbling balls of Tattersall weed, that shallow-rooted ubiquitous plant of Paradise. It made sad music in
the tall perimeter fence which surrounded the shuttle port with its rusting barbed wire and ceramic insulators.

Standing alone in the middle of all this, solid and squat on its launch pad, was Supply Shuttle P51, the last demolition craft. It was the only source of light amid the gloom – a single
yellow beacon at its apex blinked on, off, on, off. The shuttle was awaiting the return of the disposal team stranded in New Syracuse when its Mule broke down. The damage had been repaired and the
Mule was on its way back. As soon as it was safely stored inside P51, a small ceremony of flag lowering would be performed, and then the last shuttle would lift.

Meanwhile, the sand flowed round the squat shape like water round a rock. It teemed down its scarred and pitted sides. No human creature could live outside now. Only iron and stone and concrete
could survive – and the omnipresent Tattersall weed.

But yet there was one human creature.

Upwind of the shuttle port, and moving unevenly, a light appeared out of the gloom. Gradually a human figure could be seen beneath the light. It was helmeted and enclosed in a
survival suit. Occasionally it stopped, crouching to avoid being knocked over by the fierce wind. Finally, the figure reached the perimeter fence which it gripped tight. It was at a place which
overlooked the soon-to-be-abandoned port.

Secure now, with no danger that it could be sent cartwheeling by a sudden gust, the figure began to move along the fence working from handgrip to handgrip. It was heading towards a place where
two lines of reinforced perimeter mesh met. Here an iron gate stood open, its frame twisted from a collision with a demolition truck. Just beyond the open gate stood the remains of a curved
concrete wall, all that was left of a fuel depot. The wall deflected the wind and created a small haven. Cautiously the figure reached the twisted gate and was about to move through when suddenly
it ducked. A massive ball of Tattersall weed came bounding out of the gloom behind, struck the perimeter fence so that it shook and sang, hung for a few moments and then tore loose and rolled on.
It banged against the P51 shuttle, caught briefly against one of its stubby legs, and then barrelled away to be lost in the murk.

Cautiously, the figure stood up, looked into the wind to make sure that no further dangers were bearing down, and then crossed quickly to the safety of the concrete wall.

Dr Hera Melhuish pressed her back against the wall and breathed deeply. Much as she disliked concrete, on this occasion she was glad of its solidity. But even had the wall not
been there, she would have coped. She would have found a place somewhere to hunker down out of the wind and flying debris, for she was not tall, could imitate the mouse if she had to, and was very
determined.