The Disestablishment of Paradise (50 page)

On the morning after the final call to the shuttle platform, without it ever really being discussed, they found themselves packing up and loading things into the boat. A keen wind was coming off
the sea and rain clouds were building against the mountains when they closed up their house. Mack had mended the window he had broken, and he had found the key to the door. So they locked it and
hung the key where it could not be missed – a symbolic gesture. They knew that they were the last people who would ever warm the beds and clean the dishes and do their washing in the old
house. Every step was now a kind of retreat and everything became symbolic.

Their plan was to sail west, round the shores of Horse, stopping if they found somewhere that took their interest, but as soon as they left they began to race. Mack was the most ill at ease. He
could not explain why, even to himself. He sat in the cabin with a bucket and a towel as the boat dipped and rolled in the heavy swell. And when his head was up he watched the coast slip by.
Occasionally they saw the swirling patterns of the Michelangelo-Reaper, not just marked by Tattersall weeds, but shaping the entire contours of the hillsides with tall trees.

On the morning of the second day they were sailing past cliffs. Hera kept them well out to sea, but the swell from the ocean was great, and at times when they were in the
troughs they couldn’t see the land, though they were only a mile offshore. Riding the crests, they saw the waves hit the rocks at the base of the cliffs and the foam climb high.

Hera was looking for something. They rounded a headland and came into calmer water, and there she spotted an opening in the rocks with a narrow passage of water between. ‘You in the market
for a bit more magic, Mr Mack?’ she said. ‘If so, shut your eyes while I steer us through here. In fact keep them shut anyway, cos you’re not going to like this bit.’

He did so, and a moment later he felt the boat lifted on a surge and heard the waves echo all about them as they passed through the channel. Then, after a few seconds, Hera cut the engine and
let them drift. ‘Open sesame. This is called Valentine Bay. Can you guess why?’

The inlet was about a mile across and formed almost a complete circle between the shore and the rocks. On the landward side, gentle hills sloped up to the mountains. Several small streams
entered the bay, tumbling white down rocky valleys. But that was not what held Mack’s attention. All the shores, and the sides of all the river valleys, were covered with the bobbing red
spheres of Valentine poppies. There were millions of them, stretching as far as the eye could see. They rippled like waves in the wind and occasionally a single balloon would break its stem and
lift into the sky trailing its seed pod.

‘Can you imagine that once a lot of the bays on Paradise were like this? The
Scorpion
logbook mentions bays filled with red flowers – we think it was these. This is the bay
Sasha Malik mentions where Valentine and Francesca landed on their bed of osiers. The flowers took them here, you see. And, historically, a young couple lived here in MINADEC times. They’d
run away from one of the camps and set up their own homestead just in that valley there. It happened a lot in those days – people just heading off into the wild, a bit like us, really. Well,
when the ORBE project started there was not a single Valentine poppy here. Not one. They had all been harvested and sent off planet to make lampshades or something. So this was one of our first
projects and one of the most successful. What do you think?’

Mack was nodding. ‘It’s beautiful. You can imagine lying down, can’t you, on the ground, with all those red globes bobbing above you. It would be impossible to be sad in a
place like this.’ And then he added, ‘I wonder where their minder is?’

‘Minder?’

‘Mm. Their Michelangelo. Isn’t that right, that all gatherings of plants like this have their own minder?’

‘That’s a strange thing to say.’

‘Is it?’

‘I don’t know what you mean. How do you know about this?’

Mack looked at her and there was something confused about his look. ‘Sorry. I thought you must have told me. But it is right, isn’t it?’ For a moment Hera had the uncanniest
feeling that he was not talking to her. Then he looked back at the bobbing flowers and she saw him smile again his normal gap-toothed smile.

‘No. I never mentioned a minder before,’ she said. ‘I’ve always thought of the Michelangelo as being a more selfish and solitary plant. From the stories . . . from the
little evidence—’
¹²

‘Oh no,’ interrupted Mack, ‘I don’t think they’re selfish. They like to play, that’s all, and they play a bit rough sometimes. They don’t understand us,
you see. That’s my impression, anyway, from all the patterns we’ve seen.’

‘Would you . . . like to go ashore?’ Hera asked slowly. She was looking at him closely. There was something different, a bit strange . . . something in his manner. She’d seen
this before, she realized. Several times. An abstractedness. Then he turned and smiled and put his arm around her. ‘Thanks for bringing me here. It’s lovely. And that story Sasha wrote
is special to me. You planned it all along, didn’t you?’

‘No, I just suddenly remembered as we came down the coast. But I knew you’d like it. The next time I get to speak to Tania I must get her to contact Rita Honeyball. This was part of
her parish. She used to give us Valentine poppies when we had a birthday, just when they were about to swell, and tie messages to them. She’ll be pleased to know how lovely it is.’

They stood gazing for a few more minutes. Mack seemed to be looking for something and then, satisfied, he nodded. ‘Time to go, Hera,’ he said. ‘You’ll have plenty of time
to walk down memory lane when you’re back on the shuttle off planet.’

And that remark, too, bothered Hera. She brought the engine alive and took
The Courtesy of MINADEC
on a circuit of the bay, and then headed out through the narrow channel and into the
open sea.

They were about half a mile down the coast when Mack looked back and pointed excitedly. ‘Look. Hera, look. There’s a message for you.’ Rising up into the air above the hills
was a cloud of Valentine poppies. There were millions of them, and as they caught the wind they flowed with it like a red carpet and passed high over Hera and Mack. And still they came. Hera cut
the power and they turned in the swell and watched in silence as the balloons flew before the breeze and spread out.

‘So what was the message, Mack?’

‘Just saying hello, I think.’

She knew he was lying.

In the afternoon the wind slackened and for a time the sun came out. But it was a silver disc at best, and Hera watched as the high cloud gathered about it. Gradually the sky became heavy and
leaden. They felt the temperature drop. When Mack asked what she thought the weather would be, she told him that the indications were inconclusive. ‘Somewhere between bad and
dreadful.’

That evening they reached the place where the southern tip of the big island called Lennon approached the coast of Horse, creating a channel between them. This, at its nearest approach, became
the notorious Royal Straits where our story began.

Apart from the weather, Hera had been observing the tides and the moons. Without an almanac it was difficult for her to be certain, but she was pretty sure that sometime soon they would reach
one of the periodic tides for which this channel was famous. She did not want to be bobbing about in mid-channel when the great waves came flooding through. The choice was simple – either to
make a dash now while the tides were big but not too dangerous, or find a nice safe anchorage for fourteen days.

She explained this to Mack.

‘It’s too long, Hera.’

‘Blame Paradise.’

‘I say we make a run for it.’

‘OK. I think so too. We’ll rest the night here and make a start at first light. I don’t want to navigate through here in the dark. Reefs.’

That night they lay together quietly, listening to the boat creak and the waves slap. Hera tried to sound casual. ‘You seem quiet, Mack. Is something worrying you? Is the
swell making you feel sick? Tell me.’ She stroked his brow where worry lines had formed. ‘Are you a bit frightened? I know you don’t like the sea. Or have I done something
wrong?’

‘It’s not the sea. And it’s not you either. It’s just . . .’ His voice trailed away.

‘Tell me. You can tell me anything. I love you so much.’

‘It’s just . . . it’s just this place. It’s got a hold on me. I don’t want it to.’ There was a long pause and then he began again. ‘I’ve never
been happier in my life. I never believed I could be so happy. Since I met you my life has opened up and got some daylight in it. God knows it needed it. For the first time since I don’t know
when, I began to look forward to the future. And now this.’ He sighed. ‘You do know. Don’t you?’

‘I know you love me. For the rest you’ll have to tell me. I’m afraid I’ve become wonderfully ordinary since we saved the Dendron.’

‘Why did it have to happen here? Meeting you. Why not somewhere else? Somewhere normal.’

‘Like Birmingham?’

He laughed. ‘Yeah, like Birmingham.’

‘So what’s normal, Mack?’

‘I mean the kind of place where people can just rub along, get on with their lives, squabble a bit, make love a lot and grow old easily.’

‘Perhaps it could only happen here.’

‘I don’t want to believe that. I want it to happen in the world I know, not here. I don’t want magic; I want a wife. I want a place in the sun with people I know. I want to
build memories. I want to be “young and easy under the apple boughs”. Like my granny used to say.’

‘Are you afraid that when we leave here, we’ll come apart? Is that it? That the love won’t last?’

‘I hadn’t thought of our love not lasting. I hadn’t got that far. Oh, I’d thought you might get bored with me. I mean I’m not—
Ow!
’

She had nipped him, hard. ‘And I’ll do that again, and really hard, and in a place where it really hurts, if you start that talk again.’

He sat up. ‘That really hurt.’

‘Good. Now you were saying that you’d never thought about our love not lasting. Go on.’

‘That’s grounds for divorce, for a start.’

‘Shut up. Or I’ll do it again. Now get on with your story.’

He lay back. ‘Well what I meant was that I knew, deep inside me, that no matter what happened – apart from nipping – I’d still love you. I just couldn’t help it.
That’s the way I am. But I’m afraid I’ll never leave here. And I feel that this place is driving us both now. I can’t explain it any better. Like the other day, after
we’d talked to the people up top, I felt this great urgency to run. To get moving before it was too late. It was as though someone had said, “OK, Mack, you’ve had your holiday,
now get back to it.” Do you know what I mean?’

She did know what he meant, about the compulsion to move. She’d felt it too. The golden time had ended. ‘That was because we both felt guilty,’ she said. ‘Here we were
enjoying Paradise the way it ought to be enjoyed, and they were sweating it up top.’ But it was his other words that had chilled her. She said, ‘Why do you feel you’ll never leave
here?’

There was a long pause during which Hera did her best to keep perfectly still. Finally Mack said, ‘Will you stroke my face, like you did that time before?’ Hera propped herself up,
adjusted his arm so that she was not leaning on it too heavily, and rested against his chest. She began to stroke from the centre of his forehead, moving out to the sides.

‘I’m going to tell you a little story,’ he began. ‘When I was a kid, just three or four, I used to have dreams, terrible dreams that frightened me, and my granny used to
stroke my forehead like that, and it always calmed me down. You’ve got the same gift she had. And then I’d find a way to tell her the dreams and she’d listen and sometimes
she’d explain what she thought they meant. And sometimes she didn’t, and that worried me. Anyway, I often used to dream there was something trying to smother me, not like with a pillow
on the face or anything, but something within, something that grew up inside me. And it stopped my eyes so that I saw differently, and my mouth so I tasted strange tastes, and I used to hear this
sound like a great rushing black wind. I suppose something happened to my nose too but I can’t remember that. Probably just as well. And then this thing, whatever it was, crept out of me
through my eyes and ears and out of the place just where your finger are now, right in the middle of my forehead. And that was when I used to wake up. And I knew that if I hadn’t woken up, I
wouldn’t have woken up or I would have woken up different. And the funny thing is, sometimes I wanted to let that thing come out, but I was very, very afraid. And I still am.’ He paused
and said quietly, ‘You can stop rubbing now. I’m OK.’

Hera stopped, kissed him very lightly, and then snuggled down with her arm across his chest. ‘So how does this affect you now?’

‘Several things have happened. A lifetime ago you asked me whether I thought the future could cast shadows. Well that shook me, because that was something I’d realized when I was a
boy, and I had passed them off as hunches. I could feel things before they happened. I could, but my brother couldn’t. And I know that because I’d ask him. It wasn’t knowing the
future, like picking winners, but personal things, and even though they might be bad, I couldn’t always prevent them, but I could feel them coming. As I grew up the dreams became less
frequent and so did the hunches. But when they did come, they were irresistible, like a command. Like when you’re taking down a dangerous building and your mate says, “Stop!” you
stop. You don’t think about it because thinking about it takes too long. You stop, or you jump or you hold steady or whatever. That was what it was like when I was coming down to save you. It
was like someone had said, “Run!” and boy did I run. You think I had a choice? I didn’t have a choice. It was you I was responding to, your pain, your need. You talked to me once
about resonance. You don’t need to talk to me about resonance. My bells and cherries were ringing for you from the first time I saw you all bandaged and full of fight on the shuttle down to
Paradise.