The Disestablishment of Paradise (64 page)

Mash the pith with a fork and add a herb of your choice. Hybla berries provide a nice contrast to the flavour of the plum. Spoon the mashed pith back into the cavity from which it came. Heat an
oven to 200°C and place the plum halves in the centre. Watch as they froth up and change colour. When the liquid pith has firmed and the skin of the plum is reddish brown, they are cooked. It
never takes more than five minutes.

Serve immediately with fresh warm bread. Each part of the plum has its own flavour. This can be an appetizer or a dessert – or a complete lunch. It tastes especially good with one of the
range of Tattersall teas.

Enjoy.

‘Plum Crazy’, from the private notebook of Professor Israel Shapiro

According to the date, and Hera’s testimony, the following entry was probably written only a few weeks before Shapiro died. This would explain the sombre and apocalyptic
tone. It shows the effects of addiction to the juice of the plum.

•

To dinner with my sister and her husband in Cambridge. Tonight we heard the Cantata Romana sung by the full choir of King’s College. Proceeds to go to the relief fund for
Rome. Afterwards we walked through the lovely grounds of Clare while a frost made the air dry and pure.

They will have to move before the year is out, I fear. Their lovely stone house is sinking! Oswald showed me the cracks in the cellar and muttered grimly about the lack of endowments.

Fortuna came home while we were sampling the fruit of the cellar. She was wearing a peacock-blue outfit and had been out fund-raising. She said to me, conspiratorially taking my arm, ‘I
have a special treat for dessert,’ and my heart sank. How hard it is when people mean well but do the very thing that hurts.

So at dinner there it was. As I feared. After the wine and before the liqueur. Ushered in with trumpets.

This ‘plum’, as they call her, what am I to make of her? She sits on my plate like a giant damson, inviting my fork and knife, her perfume rising like a vintage port – but I
would rather plunge the fork into my arm than eat this innocent creature, which contains more knowledge than I do. Yet I do not.

Being one for whom politeness is like spelling, a cornerstone of civilization, I reason: my host, Oswald, will have mortgaged his pension to pay for these – retained in the caves of Mars,
close to freezing, say 34.5 degrees of the old Fahrenheit, varying by less than point five of a degree, week in, week out. I should feel honoured. And they mean it as a treat for me, for they know
I have had a hard time of late.

Fortuna and I both once had a cache of plums, an inheritance from our spendthrift father. Fortuna gobbled hers with her paramours. I, being the sober conventional one, ate some of mine, sold the
rest to get research funds, and I doubt if Papa would ever forgive me for that or would ever understand. A few I kept back. Three remain. One is for H, whom I love. One is for me when I am dying
– not to eat or drink, I have my own supply of liquor for that, but to keep by my ear like a shell, and I will whisper to it as I fade. The last is for Fortuna when I am gone, and I hope she
guzzles it with the same generous gusto she has guzzled her life.

For I am an addict and both love and hate my vice. A kind of hypocrisy here. ‘Nous alimentons nos aimables remords. Comme les mendiants nourissent leur vermine.’ This Baudelaire mood
confirms my worst fears. I am moving on, away, off, losing the thread somewhere. The hunter may come home from the hills, but this ship will find no haven. I need a sip to ‘shuffle the
deck’, as we say.

That’s better. We were in Cambridge. Eating. Yes.

Fortuna is deft. Her twin-tined fork vertical in her hand and the sharp knife between the prongs, she slices like a conjurer and, lo and behold, the slit fruit splays as the fork withdraws.

She says, ‘The seeds are bitter. Such a waste to discard. I am told they are good for lovemaking.’ Oswald pales, poor sod! ‘But better in the compost,’ she adds
kindly.

I think to myself,
The small dark distillation of matter we call seeds are its wisdom. They are its salt. Hold them on your tongue for as long as you can, until the blue honey fills your
mouth and turns bitter. Then swallow swiftly
.

But I don’t say this. Fortuna would try it. She would go out in a blaze of glory, knowing her. You have to build up slowly to achieve my stamina. I would have a bad conscience, and
besides, I wish to die first. So, I obey convention and put the seeds to one side. They are not dead yet, I observe. That fine blue secretion tells me they are still viable, not as seeds but as
centres of sense. Fortuna has been coy in her cooking, perhaps believing that a plum done rare becomes a rarer plum. They are not dead, that is what I want to say, for if they were, they would not
bleed their blue knowledge. They would congeal like vile jelly.

But revulsion and addiction are at war. On the tip of my knife I lift a pale morsel. I apply it to a sliver of toast, and, like the addict I am, like all lovers, delight at the rush: salt and
honey, guilt and pleasure.

Despite my knowledge I am no better than the rest, my nose in the trough, gobbling.

But a few days later I am back in my laboratory on Paradise. Tonight I will not sleep but I will dream. Before me is Prunella, the entity that has been my companion for fifteen years. Her roots
pass through my floor and down, through the caverns of Paradise. With instruments I have traced that pale cable through sixty feet and it gets thicker and stronger the more it descends. It
‘raps’ with all the other roots of Paradise.

There is a prunella fruit – a ‘plum’ – which hangs before me, over my desk. It is large (say the size of one of H’s breasts). There is a cut in this fruit I have
kept open since first I had it brought here as a straggly vine. All I need to do is insert my scalpel and move it slightly. Moments later I am rewarded with a few drips of blue nectar, which I
catch in a spoon and drink. Nine times a day – as often as I cast offending Adam out.

Does this operation hurt the vine? I think not. In fact I am sure not, as I would be aware if it did and it would by now have contrived some means to stop me. Perhaps poison me, and the truth is
I have sipped enough juice to kill a regiment. No, it does not hurt any more than I hurt when I produce acid in my stomach or semen in my balls.

There is a parallel here, of course, and we will come to that. But for the moment I am still an ace of spades short of drunk, and want to lay some falsehoods while I can. How dangerous is
popular wisdom! Estelle it was who first called this a plum, and anyone can see why. But if we called it the Paradise testicle, or the Paradise ovum, or the Paradise cerebellum or thyroid, people
might not be so keen to eat it. If we likened it to a fleshy chakra – a node of energy made solid, a halo that rings like silver crystal when you tap it with a fingernail – we would be
closer, though still far from the truth. These beautiful red pendulous shapes, sometimes perceptibly warm to the touch on a cool morning, are of course its main organ of sense and feeling –
but again language is betraying me, for what they sense or what they feel is beyond me, though maybe bright H will untie the mystery.

How I wish I could have been on the
Scorpion
! Would that there were more like Sasha or lovely, daft Estelle Richter, whose naked body splashing in the sea was the first knowledge this
world had that there was a world beyond Paradise. Is there wisdom in innocence? I think there is, but there is a cult now of drab men and women for whom the world, and even life itself, is a kind
of commodity. These critics, having eaten, now study their excrement to see what they consumed. On this they base certain conclusions. Their ignorance is uncompromising. Let us rather stand before
the unknown in very humble, quiet observance and wait while it reveals itself.

Sadly, we have tended to export the fears of Earth to space. My dying hope is that the exportation will not be accepted, and just as the corpses of Earth are slowly delivered back to the surface
of this world, there to lie and dry and never fester, so the madness of Earth will be exhumed before it can take root.

I am sorry for lovely H and the rest. It is not their fault – but it is our fault, the whole damn lot of us. Once I was a scientist, and a good one, but I never quite believed in science.
In my prime I could see alpha and omega as glorious echoes of one another. Great resonating gongs beneath a sea whose waves brought rapture. But now I am a happy mystic, happy to be cryptic and in
love with my Prunella, which I tease with my knife and which teases me with her knowledge. He who knows will understand what I say. He who does not know will not be enlightened.

I do not mean to be difficult, but if you men of the future wish to understand, you must make as a big an effort as I have, and pay as big a price as I have, and taste failure
as I have. The sad truth is, everything you need to know is there before you, and always has been, on the lovely Earth we once called home. It is all in the asking. It is all in the seeking.
Perhaps if I had read more poetry I would have known this sooner.

Now I drink my blue nectar and lie down in the soil and seek the peace of God which passeth all understanding. Good night. Oh my sweet love . . .

‘Shunting a Rex’, from
Tales of Paradise
by Sasha Malik

To begin let us recall that, as a girl, Sasha Malik ran wild on the hills of Kithaeron while her father chopped trees. She danced, swam, dreamed and invented games as the mood
took her. She was a clever girl with a quick eye, and soon it was Sasha who kept a tally of the logs sent down the Mother Nylo – both their length and their volume. And it was Sasha who kept
the receipt books. By the age of twelve she was more or less running the household, and that included brewing batches of beer, cooking meals, mending wounds and cutting hair and beards – all
for a price.

Never receiving any formal education, she nevertheless learned to read and write. Logging camps were the only social life that the young Sasha Malik knew, and her language and attitudes reflect
this. She had access to tri-vids of course, but the texts she preferred were the magazines and books brought in by the woodsmen and miners. Lonely men may have their own kind of literature, but it
would be a mistake to think that just because they had chosen a rough life they were unlettered or ill educated. Far from it. Men who seek solitude have questions to ponder, and it is to the
classics of their language they often turn.

Sasha read widely and indiscriminately and acquired her own small library, which included Homer’s
Iliad
,
Everybody’s Home Medical Encyclopaedia, Volume 2
,
Salome
by Oscar Wilde, the
Contemporary Poetry Mars Collection
,
Romeo and Juliet
by Shakespeare,
Teach Yourself to Draw Animals
,
Wuthering Heights
by
Emily Brontë and
Elementary Mathematics
, as well as a selection of brightly illustrated erotic works. Traces of all of these can be found in her writing. A photograph of Sasha at the
age of twelve shows a serious-looking girl with an oval face and large eyes. She is holding a book to her chest. However, it was the eyes which were most often commented on, both for their green
colour and because they seemed to belong to an older person.

We must imagine young Sasha in those days, sitting beside a campfire at night, cross-legged in cut-down dungarees, a blanket around her shoulders, lighting her father’s pipe of calypso
from an ember and handing it to him, unobtrusive but alert, unregarded but all ears, listening, wide-eyed and missing nothing while the men tell stories and boast. At some point she wrote down
their yarns, their songs and their scary superstitious stories. She also wrote about the things she had seen and done. She did not have exercise books, and so she wrote on whatever she could find:
the backs of old invoices, the linings of tea packets, which she found she could open and press, and in an unlined notebook given to her as payment by a freshly shaved MINADEC inspector. Many years
later, these pages were discovered and published under the title
Tales of Paradise
.

As already revealed in the autobiographical story ‘Getting Your Man’, Sasha ran away with Big Anton at the age of fifteen, and it was after his death some three years later that she
became a ‘bush lady’, living alone and surviving on what she could forage or what she was given if she happened to be close to a camp. Her reputation as a healer spread and stories grew
up about her. It was considered lucky if you saw her. There are several accounts of her being met on paths, dressed in clothes she had made from Crispin, and of her handing over hybla letters to be
delivered to her father on Anvil. None of these letters survive.

Sasha travelled the full length of Chain and out to the Blue Sands Bluff – the very place where Mayday and Marie Newton were later to establish their homestead. According to legend, Sasha
crossed the Blue Sands Straits to Anvil riding on the back of a Dendron.

Eventually, after a year of wandering on Anvil, she showed up one night at her father’s camp. She just walked in and sat down at the fireside and spoke the oft-quoted line, since known as
Sasha’s Hello.

‘Any food in that pot?’

Sasha went back to a life of healing and cooking, like when she was a girl, but she also made it known that she intended to go off planet and write about her adventures in the wilder reaches of
Paradise. While she would rarely talk about those times, she clearly had something she wanted to set down and something that troubled her. Sadly, this was not to be, and we can only speculate on
the stories that might have been, and the insights they would have brought to Paradise.