Eden, p.10
Eden, page 10
Aaron was watching Selina draw, and for a second Dylan considered signalling him to move away. He knew how Selina liked her own space. But Selina seemed to have finished. She sat back on her ankles, smiling, her eyes alight.
“You get a lot from that,” Aaron said.
“Sketching slows the world down,” she said. “We usually move so fast through these beautiful places.”
“With us, that’s sort of the point.”
“Your point, maybe.” It wasn’t often that Selina differentiated herself from the rest of the team. “When I’m drawing, the world in the drawing moves at my pace.”
“You could smuggle a camera in. I’ll bet Lucy could’ve sourced you one of those fancy new contact lens cams.”
She held up her pad and a fistful of pencils, but said nothing.
“But a drawing isn’t…”
“Real?” Selina asked.
“Proof,” Aaron said. “You could be drawing made-up plants and animals and landscapes, but a camera never lies.”
“What makes you think this pad is for anyone other than me?”
“You’re a scientist,” Aaron said.
“Yeah, but I’m with you guys, not other scientists.” She glanced at Dylan, and he saw the shadow of memory behind her eyes. “And it’s not only because you know about surviving in these places. It’s about keeping it pure. It’s enough for me to see all this. Amazing. Beautiful. This creeper, for instance. I can’t identify it, haven’t seen its like before. It’s a parasitic orchid, but I’ve never seen these colours and such a profusion of blooms.”
“New to science?” Dylan asked.
“Sure, quite possibly.”
“You could name it after yourself,” Aaron said. “Orchidus Selinius.”
Selina smiled. “And if I did that, took photographs and shared them, more people would want to come and see. That’s the last thing Eden needs.”
“And if and when we set a traverse time, more people will come to beat it.”
“People like you,” she said. “Like us. Not people who’ll want to cut and chop, collect and categorise.”
“So you’re a scientist who doesn’t put the science first?”
Dylan noticed that everyone was listening now, even Gee, chewing the last of his muffin as he crouched down close by.
“Sure I do. But I have a particular vision, and an understanding that the world is moving on.”
“Not all of it, surely?”
Selina looked surprised. “You don’t think so? Humanity’s finished, Aaron. We’re hanging on by the skin of our teeth, and these places are what’s going to be left behind. Coming here, we see the future.”
Dylan blinked, shocked. He’d never thought of it like that. He’d always believed that inside the Zones, they were experiencing areas of the planet given back to the past, not catching a glimpse of the future of the world without them.
“Wow,” Gee said. “Deep. I guess they’ll allow her in your hotel, right, Dylan?”
“Right,” he said.
“Yeah, sharing your master suite.”
“Definitely time to head out,” Selina said, standing and packing away her sketching materials in her rucksack. Dylan caught a couple of smiles between the others. He and Selina had never been secretive about their relationship, but neither had they talked about it in front of the group. He only wished she was open enough to talk to him about what it might become. He wished he was, too.
Maybe Kat stood in the way for both of them. Selina had known her, and had accompanied them on a couple of earlier expeditions when Jenn was a teenager and he and Kat were still together. Perhaps the ghost of Kat’s presence troubled more than just Dylan.
“Dad,” Jenn said, and her voice brought him back to the present. She was standing and staring back the way they’d come, past the warehouses and leaning cranes. “There’s something watching us.”
13
“People think we’re lying. The United Zone Council, man, they’re just blind and full of shit. We tell them we need more boots on the ground, they tell us we shouldn’t be in there anyway. But they’re not here, on the ground, fighting the sort of bastards we’re fighting. People traffickers, illegal loggers, hunters, drug smugglers, every sort of human scum you can think of, making their home in the Cape York Zone. And why? Because they feel safe in there! Because they know the UZC can’t admit to another one of their little projects having failed, not after the Dead Zone fuck-up! And it’s tragic, man, so fucking tragic. The things I’ve seen in there… the beautiful things, like nature’s rebooted itself and has found a new freedom. All of it’ll go to waste. The scum will sweep it away. I guess just like they have for the rest of the old world, huh?”
Cape York border guard interviewed online (identity withheld)
Whatever Jenn had seen watching them followed them out of Naxford. It kept to the trees as they left the open area around the old oak, a fleeting thing, a hint of movement. Then when they entered the woodland she kept glancing back at the shape flitting behind them. It might have been leaves or branches moving in the growing evening breeze, or shadows shifting at the behest of the sinking sun, but she couldn’t shake the conviction that they were being followed.
None of them could see what it was. If they paused to look, it stopped to hide. Jenn felt as if her own shadow was stalking her.
“Coyote, maybe,” Aaron said.
“Or one of Selina’s wolves.”
“Huh.”
The shape kept melting back into the trees, as if aware that she’d seen it and eager to hide.
She wasn’t sure a wolf would do that.
As they left Naxford shadows began to flood the woods around them. Jenn usually liked the way darkness fell in a forest—light losing its battle to penetrate the tree canopy; shadows seeping from low down and rising, hauling themselves out from undergrowth and up tree trunks; the air growing heavy and still, and the visible world drawing in close. Today, dusk seemed to fall with a wry smile.
She found herself jogging with Selina, the older woman falling in beside her. It wasn’t often they moved together, and when Jenn glanced sidelong, Selina offered her an awkward smile.
“I knew your mum pretty well,” she said.
“I know. I’m sorry about—”
“Don’t worry,” Selina said. “I’d have done the same. I just wanted to talk about me and your dad.”
“Oh.” It felt awkward. She knew about her dad and Selina, but he’d never spoken about it, and to Jenn it appeared distant, cool. Maybe just a convenience for them both. It was odd thinking of her dad having a fuck buddy.
“It came as a surprise to us both,” Selina said. “And only recently, maybe the last year or two. Certainly not when your mum was still around.”
“I never thought that for a moment,” Jenn said, and she wasn’t lying. The idea of her dad and Selina being together before her mother left had never crossed her mind.
“Good, I didn’t want you to think…” It was rare to hear Selina so lost for words, so uncomfortable.
“I want him to be happy,” Jenn said.
“Yes, so do I,” Selina said. “Truly. And I think we will be. We’re getting… closer. It’s taking time, but sometimes that’s for the best.”
“Don’t worry about Mum.”
Selina glanced at her, eyebrow raised.
“She hurt him too bad. I don’t think he’d ever want her back. But that doesn’t mean he doesn’t still love her.”
“I’d think less of him if he didn’t,” Selina said, smiling, and for a while the two women ran together, both of them looking ahead at Dylan.
* * *
Twenty minutes later, making their way up onto the wooded slopes, Lucy called a halt.
“Something weird,” she said. She had been on point, and now she raised and lowered her feet, walking slowly on the spot and making a crunching, metallic sound as each foot fell.
“What the hell?” Cove crouched and ran his hand across the ground, shoving aside pine needles, old leaf fall and trailing bramble stems. He picked something up. In the fading light it was difficult to see, so he held it up and turned it this way and that. “Some sort of nut. But hollow.”
Aaron pushed past Jenn and knelt beside Cove. He took the object from his hand and rubbed it against his tee shirt, then held it up to the dusky light.
“Shells,” he said.
“Seashells?” Dylan asked.
“Bullets.”
“But there’s…” Lucy stepped back and forth, using her feet to brush aside more forest debris to reveal the carpet of objects that lay beneath.
“Hundreds of them,” Aaron said. He stood motionless as Lucy circled him and uncovered more and more.
Jenn looked at the surrounding trees, searching for scarred trunks, stripped limbs. There were no obvious signs of gunfire.
“Someone had some pretty hefty firepower,” Aaron said. “Automatic weapons, and there must have been a good few of them. A stand was made here.”
“A stand against what?” Selina asked. No one replied.
“There’s thousands of them,” Lucy said.
“Dad?”
“How old is this?” Dylan asked.
“Looks old to me,” Aaron said. “Shells are buried, mostly. Caked in mud and degraded.” He held one up close to his face, sniffed it, turned it this way and that. “Yeah, old. Long before Kat and her team might have come this way, I’m pretty certain of that.”
“Dad?”
He turned to Jenn at last.
“This isn’t good, Dad,” Jenn said. “What happened to the people who were shooting?” No one had an answer to offer.
“We should turn around and go back,” Lucy said. She was no longer kicking at the shells. Standing beside Aaron, she was their focus of attention. She looked at Jenn. “You should never have dragged us in here.”
“I didn’t drag anyone, Lucy,” Jenn said. “If you’d known about Mum, you’d have still come.” Lucy lowered her eyes.
“This could be anything,” Dylan said. “Smugglers. Drug gangs. Poachers. I don’t know.”
“Anything involving massive firepower is bad,” Gee said, serious for once.
“What if they’re still here?” Jenn asked.
“Aaron said the shells are old,” Dylan said. “We’ve seen and heard nothing to indicate that whoever fired them is anywhere close. So whoever was doing the shooting is either dead or gone.”
“Comforting.” Jenn looked around, into the shadows beneath the trees. The sense of something following them had faded away. Perhaps whatever it was didn’t like this place. Perhaps it remembered something.
“We’ve heard about stuff like this,” Selina said. “Remember Cape York?”
They all knew about Cape York, used by illegal people-smugglers bringing cheap labour into Australia. One of the remotest Zones in the world, it was also the most compromised. The humans who’d compromised it had made it deadly.
“Okay, come on, we’re a team,” Dylan said. “We’re strong together. Let’s make camp, think on it, decide what to do in the morning. We can’t go far in the dark.”
“If we had to we could,” Lucy said.
“We don’t have to yet.”
* * *
They had intended travelling much farther on their first day, but by the time they found somewhere to camp they had still made twelve miles from the border. It felt good leaving the site of the bullets, and also the derelict town. Jenn found Naxford a strange place. Haunted by shadows of the past, it had fallen back into the land like a corpse, allowing nature to grow around and through it and reclaim everything. The evidence of humankind that still remained was rotting, rusting and sad.
Jenn often thought about what might be left behind if humanity finally wiped itself out. Selina’s comment that these Virgin Zones were glimpses of the future, not the past, had made her view them in a different way. She’d always believed that they were racing through areas that had been given back to nature, not places that nature itself had taken back. It was a fine distinction, but a revealing one.
They found a clearing protected by an overhang on a low cliff, and Cove and Lucy went about building a fire. They both tried to spark the first flame. Jenn smiled at her friends’ silent competition. Sometimes the air between them simmered, but right now she couldn’t make out whether it was love or hate. Probably a volatile mixture of the two. They had a tempestuous relationship, one which seemed at present to be on the rocks. But they’d been there before and recovered. Lucy often confided in her, and Jenn hoped she would again, given time. Her friend might still be angry with her, but she found that the wilderness often took the sharp edges off damaging emotions.
“Few hours,” Dylan said. “Soon as dawn touches the hills we’ll be gone again. A good, full day tomorrow.”
While coffee brewed on two stoves, Aaron came to sit beside her.
“We’ll go further tomorrow,” he said. “You feeling okay? How’s the knee?”
“Fine. And yeah, feeling good,” she said. She nodded up at the sky. “Look at that. Somewhere like this you almost expect to see different stars.” The sky had cleared and away from any light pollution the emerging starscape was staggering. He sat close to her for a while and stared, but he could read her like a book.
“Whatever happened back there was a long time ago.”
“So what do you think?” She looked at him, probing. She knew he’d have formulated some ideas, even if he hadn’t aired them.
Aaron sighed. “This one time just outside of Eilat we were sent to track down a border control squad who’d stopped transmitting. They’d been attacked from across the border, hit and run, but they’d put up a good…” He sighed heavily.
“Aaron, you don’t have to—”
“It’s fine. You asked. They’d been pinned down in an old house, and by the time we got there the battle was over, and all but three were dead. The fight had gone on for almost a whole day, and the shells scattered around… we waded through them. They sounded almost musical.”
“A siege,” Jenn said.
“They were fighting for their lives.”
“And that place today reminded you of that.”
Aaron smiled and hugged her close, trying to cast light on his story. “Hey, your dad is right, it could have been anything.” But the darkness remained in his eyes.
“That’s what worries me.”
“It’ll be better tomorrow, in the daylight. We’ll get moving again.”
“I guess we’ll go further if Eden lets us.”
“Huh.” He broke a banana in two and opened a sachet of peanut butter, and they ate together in silence. After a while he leaned in close and whispered, “Maybe we’ll share a sleeping bag tonight.”
“Oh sure, with my dad here and everyone else around.”
“Wouldn’t be the first time.”
“Huh.”
“I’ll be quiet.”
“I know you’ll be quiet.” Jenn was smiling now. Aaron could always make her smile.
“Yeah, it’s you who’s the problem,” he said.
“I can’t help it. You make me moan.”
“That’s the nicest thing I think anyone’s ever said to me.”
“Love you.”
He sat upright again, picking a chunk of peanut from his teeth. “Yeah. Whatever.”
Jenn slapped the back of his head and he jerked forward. “Ouch!”
“Ha!” Gee said. He was with Lucy and Cove by the small fire they’d started, piling on snapped twigs. “That’s what you get for trying it on with a hardass like Jenn! Right, Dad?”
“Right,” Dylan said. “My daughter can look after herself, Aaron.”
“Oh, I know that, Pops.”
Jenn snorted laughter. Dylan feigned anger, but she knew he liked Aaron’s joking about him being his father. They’d never seriously talked about marriage, but they skirted around the idea like wild animals circling a camp fire.
“Spade,” Jenn said, holding out her hand.
“And there I was trying to be all romantic.” Aaron took the folding tool from the webbing on his rucksack and slapped it into her hand. “Watch out for poison ivy.”
Jenn grinned and walked away from the fire, looking for somewhere quiet and private close by. She was soon away from the others, and she paused to look around at the shadowy woods, then up past the canopy at the starry sky. Scattered clouds high up caught silvery moonlight, and the waxing moon hung low to the south east, inviting her back the way they’d come.
There was no sense that anything was watching her from the darkness. No longer any feeling of threat. At the end of their first, strange day in Eden, Jenn allowed herself to be excited about the journey to come.
14
“Virgin Zones? Fine idea, but unsustainable, because people always screw up anything like this. And the planet’s going to be just fine once we’re gone. Though I guess establishing these places has given nature a glimpse at what it can look forward to, eh?”
Anonymous environmental scientist, Greenpeace
She stands on top of an isolated hill. The slopes are gentle, falling away towards a wide, endless plain, obscured here and there by drifting early-morning mists. There on the hill she is at the centre of things, and everything is more massive than her…
The weight of the hill beneath her feet drawing her down with a terrible, crushing gravity. The smothering vastness of the vista all around, nearby features discernible, those more distant offering mystery and fear in landscapes she does not know or understand. The endless sky, so wide that it seems to drown her senses, far wider than the horizons should allow. She has never seen a sky so huge, hinting at infinities that would swallow her forever if only they knew she was there. The weight of strangeness bears down upon her, and as she feels herself crushed towards nothing—
She is on a hill she knows, but this time she is on her own. Before her lies an abandoned town she has seen before, the ruins heavy with climbing ivy and other plant growth, the slumping cranes solid and threatening as they fall forever, a constant promise of pain and destruction, as if this moment is a blink between long-ago order and impending chaos. She is the pivot between states, and the pressure is immense. It crushes the breath from her, compresses the atoms of her body towards an awful singularity that will haul her in and down forever.
