“Called it by her peers, certainly,” said Rosemary. “But you know as well as I do that the general population found her music too difficult. Oh, they were fond of her, certainly, and her early work especially. But the later pieces . . . ”
“You didn’t like them?”
“If you must know, I didn’t,” said Rosemary. “I found them a little too ponderous, a little too depressing. I’ve always preferred the lighter pieces. She said I had music hall taste, but you like what you like, and my grandmother’s later work . . . ”
“Gave you a headache?” said Netro.
“Let’s just say I can admire the craftsmanship, if not the finished product,” said Rosemary.
“And now you want it back.” A voice like a scalpel, probing for weakness. Predatory in its way, Rosemary felt, although she could not yet justify characterizing it as such simply from tone and timbre. That level of dissection was beyond her.
Hard hats and gas masks. Rosemary had never held either of these in small hands before—the hat she chose was yellow, the child-sized versions available in a range of bright colors. She practiced with the gas mask, putting on the smell of plastic and rubber and glass, getting used to the weight on her face when she strapped it on, the way it made her feel as if she was falling forward, as if gravity had shifted slightly about her.
“I have more use for it now than I did before,” admitted Rosemary.
“I wasn’t aware that music was a particularly useful thing,” said Netro.
Rosemary snorted. “Everything’s useful if someone else thinks it is, if someone else wants it.”
“If someone else wants it,” Netro repeated. “It’s a question of desire, then. I want it. You want it
back.
What will you give me for it?”
“I will of course return the sapflower coin in exchange,” said Rosemary.
“Yes, yes,” Netro interrupted, dismissively. “But what else? There’s a question of the inconvenience, you see.”
“I understand,” said Rosemary. “I do not ask for the return of all the coins I gave you—you could keep the rest as profit.”
“Useful, as I’ve already spent them,” Nero observed. “But what if I too wanted them back? What would happen then?”
Sulphur crystals, yellow and white and furry like moss; fumaroles boiling and twisting, steam bubbling up and the air moist and humid around them, the tiny edge of pressure against her chest with the wet air and the heat and the smell, and how it felt breathing it all in, and
Nana, it’s like being on another planet!
Rosemary looked at him in amusement. “Are you going to tell me that the desire to keep hold of what you have will lead to the ruin of society?” she said. “Because, charming as that view may be, it won’t change my mind.”
“I’m not trying to change your mind,” said Netro. “I’m trying to tell you my price. You traded me nine coins for the sapflower. I have kept one—your grandmother’s—and traded the rest to other collectors. I can tell you where they went, and I’d like for you to get them back.”
“I’d say you shouldn’t have sold them if you wanted to keep them, but I fear that would be hypocritical,” said Rosemary. “But if I may ask—why do you want them back?”
“I don’t have any daughters that need bribing, true,” said Netro. “And I don’t particularly want them back. It’s what you’re going to do to get them that I want.”
“And what would that be?” said Rosemary, levelly. “Understand I may choose not to do it.”
“Then you won’t get what you want,” said Netro. “This is my only offer. I’m not open to further negotiation—you are the one that wants something from me. It’s a question of desire, you see. You have it. So do I, of course, but yours is more pressing.”
“What I want,” he continued, “is for you to trade your own memories—single copies; you won’t retain the originals—for those eight coins. Trade the coins you make for them, not the coins you have. And when you return with those eight, you will add a ninth—the single experience of your journey. That is the coin I really want.”
Rosemary looked at him silently for long moments, then looked at the rest of the room. Looked at the photographs and cameras and instruments, the mechanisms and lenses and outputs of sight, and then she smiled, very softly.
“And now I know what you want,” she said.
The remnants of mines from a time when sulphur was dug out of the steaming earth. Stone buildings, their cobbled walls crumbled, were open to the sky and giant wooden beams, their surfaces corrugated and corroded with salt, lay as if carelessly thrown. But what Rosemary liked best was the giant cogs, some fallen flat on the ground and some still suspended, or balanced upright like giant mirrors with the glass smashed out. The teeth were orange iron, rusty and rough, blunted by the elements and the iron’s own decay. Rosemary pressed her palms over them, scratching her skin and turning it orange.
“Yes,” said Netro. “I like to watch. That is
my
desire. Do you think that your knowing this puts me at a disadvantage?”
“I think that is what you would like me to think,” said Rosemary.
“I think I would like to tell you a story,” said Netro. Carefully, he poured Rosemary a cup of now-cool tea that had been steeping as they talked. The porcelain of the cups was translucently fine.
“Some years ago, not long after I had left school, I was out in the field, monitoring a volcano that was somewhat intermittently active. I was part of a small team at the field station, and on that team was another young doctor. She wasn’t beautiful, not really, but her back had a lovely smooth curve to it and I liked to look at her. She didn’t realize how much until I left a recording of what I could see on her bed.”
“I imagine she was just thrilled with you,” said Rosemary.
“She never knew it was me,” said Netro. “She left not long after.” He smiled at Rosemary; a sweet cold leer.
“That’s what I want from you,” he said. “I want you to do this thing for me, I want you to sell yourself to do it, and I want you to know that I’m watching as you do.”
The walk up to the crater, holding tight to her grandmother’s hand, passing giant mounds of earth from a long ago landslide. Passing yellow chimneys of crystals; passing steaming, acrid vents and discreet instruments and peering over the crater walls down into the lake.
Just look at that, honey
, said Nana, her grip tight and sweaty with excitement.
Have you ever seen anything like it?
“Are you going to tell me I’m a lecher, now?” said Netro. “Stamp your feet, refuse to work with me?”
Rosemary took a sip of the cool tea, willing herself not to react. “Don’t be juvenile, dear,” she said, in as bored a tone as she could manage, feeling an inward twinge of satisfaction as he stiffened slightly in his chair. “I get enough of the amateur dramatics at home.” She placed her cup back on the table, a precise, quiet movement. “Neither of us are children, and if you think you can manage to shock me, you might consider that there are dusty corners of my library that are significantly more shocking than you can ever hope to manage. I’ll admit there is some originality in your approach, but the base desire, such as it is, is a very common one.” She gave him a slow once-over, rejoiced internally at the slight coloration of his cheeks. “
Very
common.”
“Too common for you, I take it?” said Netro, and his tone was sulky.
“We all deal in commonalities when we must,” said Rosemary. “Including me, so—very well, I consent.”
If she wanted the coin, she had little choice.
Can you hear it?
said Nana.
The way the earth sounds, the hiss and bubble and crunch of it all? The way the sea sounds, the way the wind blows, the sound of the iron and the sulphur and that warm lake? Can you hear the petrels and the gannets and what they’re saying to each other? Can you hear what the miners said, Rosemary, and the echoes of the muttonbirders?
And Rosemary, small and stolid, answering,
No, Nana, of course I can’t. The miners didn’t have coins, not like us. Poor things.
Three brothers, triplets: the keepers of the least of the coins that Rosemary was to retrieve.
“And you want three coins, summing to the total of the one you have?” she clarified. It was a fair request, and one she was quite happy to accommodate. Three less valuable memories would likely leave her less impoverished than one valuable one, and given that there were three of them, it would be easier to tailor their requests than to try and produce a single expensive coin that they could all agree on. They had told her, chuckling, of how long it had taken them to agree on the coin they had traded off Netro, and she was not inclined to experience that for herself.
“Yes,” said the youngest, his body twisted and confined in a bright yellow wheelchair. “We don’t get out much, and those buggers won’t share.”
“Bitch, bitch, bitch,” laughed the middle brother, round and jiggling, from the sofa. “Never happy, he is. Give him something to complain about, will you?”
“I can do that,” said Rosemary, smiling.
The road up to the bluff was steep and rocky, and Rosemary dawdled her way up, breaking off regularly to look down over the lake. It was the only view she was to have as by the time she reached the hut at the top of Panekire, fog had rolled in, leaving the air misty and wet and thick with the promise of rain.
She made her way down the other side of the bluff, through muddy paths and slippery streambeds of rocks that could turn an ankle. Rosemary slowed, picking her way crouched over, crablike, with the pack on her back affecting her balance. She was so relieved to have navigated the rocks that when, some ten minutes later, she came to a muddy stretch between tree roots she did not expect disaster. Rain had washed away the layers of leaves and humus, scouring mud and gouging at the surface of the track, leaving it pockmarked and treacherous. One of Rosemary’s boots skidded in the mud, sending her towards the edge of the track.
“I felt it give way beneath me,” she was to say later. “It just
crumbled.
And down I went, arse over tip, over the edge of this steep bank and rolling down the hill until I slammed into a beech tree. And all I remember thinking was
shit, shit, shit, shit, ow
!”
Rosemary had never had a broken bone before, and had never felt the urge to experience one by proxy. Yet the feeling was quite unmistakable—a sick numb throbbing from deep within her arm that quite overshadowed the pains besieging the rest of her scraped and bruised body. She lay in the mud, clutching her arm and sobbing. The track was a steep climb above her, the bare mud of the bank slick-grained and silky and studded with tree roots.
Climbing the bank while dragging the pack behind her was a long and painful experience. She had to do it one-handed—putting the slightest weight on her arm was agony, shafts of white hot pain curled her fingers and left them weak and useless. Dizzy, she crawled and clutched, desperate not to fall again, not to slide back down the unstable slope. When she reached the top, she was so covered in mud that her clothes were hardly visible. Rosemary examined herself, and concluded she was so filthy that trembling in the fetal position on the same muddy path she’d fallen off could hardly make her any grubbier. She curled around her arm; found that a firm grip with her other hand around the worst band of pain made it more bearable.
Her pack had an emergency beacon, but pride discouraged its use, and Rosemary kept the small yellow mechanism in her pack. A broken arm was an inconvenience, not an emergency. After a while, she managed to stand and began walking again.
It took her until the next day to get to a hospital, the hand beneath her broken arm swollen twice the size of normal and cold to the touch. But the cast that was applied was a pretty green, like sunshine on five-fingered
Pseudopanax
leaves, and whenever Rosemary looked at it she felt a slight and curious smugness.
“I like it,” said the youngest brother, simply. “What do the two of you think?”
“Rather you than me, mate,” said the middle brother, as the coin was passed between the three of them.
“I think I’ll imprint it permanently,” said the youngest brother. “Give myself delusions of competence, it will.”
“We could always haul your arse up there in a helicopter, tip your chair over an edge somewhere.”
“So thoughtful.” He turned to Rosemary. “See how generous my brothers are? Always willing to lend a hand, or a foot. I’m sure they’d offer a brain, if they had one between ’em.”
“He’s got a penchant for the outdoorsy stuff,” his brother said. “I like it too—without too much of the inconvenience, understand. I’m more a marshmallows and ghost stories about the campfire type. Something exciting, but not too much of a strain. That’s what I want.”
“I might have something suitable,” said Rosemary, “from when I was in the Hunua Ranges.”
Nausea and cramping and vomiting, her mouth filled with stringy saliva and her legs unable to carry her more than a few meters without spasms gripping her from knee to hip. Rosemary had had to drop to all fours more than once. Her knees were filthy, and there was leaf litter under her fingernails—strong black crescents that stood out even in the half-light.
Rosemary knew it would be impossible for her to reach the campsite before night fell. The track was too treacherous to navigate in darkness, but she found a relatively flat patch just off the path and erected her tent, head spinning. She lay on her stomach, sweat coating her face, and stared out of the tent, up at the green faces of the trees. They’d grown arms and heads and the two in front pointed down at her, waving for other trees to come look. It seemed they were talking to each other, wondering about the small pink unshelled thing that lay at their feet.
What is it?
said the branch arms to one another.
What is it?
It occurred to Rosemary, briefly and from a distance, that she might have been sicker than she thought. It was a feeling that skipped across the surface of her fevered brain, for how could she feel anything but small when the trees were walking around her?
Sleep came in short bursts, and she woke screaming every time. There was an animal in the tent with her that perched behind her left ear and growled—Rosemary screeched and thrashed and threatened, waiting in creeping horror for the weight of padded feet between her shoulder blades, pinning her to the ground.