Chapter Forty
RAMA
1
Adam awoke to a perfect, crystal-clear sunrise. There was not a cloud in the sky. It was Thursday, April 21, 2005, the day after Ben’s arrival. Adam’s first task of every morning was to unlock all the doors of the house and open them. Ben chose to take up residence in the separate granny flat. It had a sizeable bedroom, a lounge room, a bathroom, and a separate toilet. It was joined to the main part of the house via a gazebo, as was the garage. The gazebo was a large, wooden structure, which was shaped like a pyramid and covered by a translucent roof. This allowed shaded light into, and kept the rain out of, the otherwise open, central courtyard. The courtyard perimeter was decorated with a myriad of potted palms. Golden Cane featured heavily. It was one of Adam’s tasks to keep the palms alive by watering. The courtyard opened out onto the pool area. This was behind the outer wall, so was totally private, although it did afford a view of the canal across the veranda. All around the outer wall, within the property, was an exquisite, landscaped garden. Adam’s friend, Tom, the local landscape artist, kept it looking in top shape with his bi-annual visits. The house was surrounded with exotic plants and established palms, and living there felt altogether like living in a garden by the water.
On the opposite side of the courtyard was a large fishpond. It was full of water plants and goldfish. Adam used to say,
‘I’m bloody married to this house. I’ve got all these living things that depend on me to keep them alive. I can’t go anywhere.’
At night, the whole garden glowed warm in dimmed spotlights.
Adam heard the splash from the kitchen. He walked out to the pool and found Ben swimming in it.
‘I love a swim first thing in the morning.’
‘I hope you’ve had a shower, Ben. It’s not a bath, you know.’
‘I’m clean, dad.’
‘So, what do you want for breakfast? I usually have oats.’
‘Oats is fine, dad, and mum told me that you make a pretty good cup of coffee.’
‘Coffee’s a natch, Ben.’
2
They sat around the bench in the kitchen, on the high stools, sipping their coffees and talking about whatever came to mind. Adam decided that the first thing he had to do was make an appointment with Andrew, his accountant. It usually took a few days to get in to see him, so Adam figured that they might get a few days of free, catch-up time.
Ben expressed a desire to go and see their old house in Stanwell Park. The ten blissful years he lived there left a deep impression on him. Adam wanted to have another fly with the levitation pack. Ben cautioned,
‘Best you use it at night, dad.’
‘No, I’ll just stay inside the house with it. No one will see me.’
He raced upstairs to his room and retrieved his lev-pack.
‘I can fly this without the suit, can’t I?’
‘Yeah, sure, no problem.’
Adam noticed that Ben seemed very casual about it, so he strapped on the pack and squeezed the control into 95% hover position. Suddenly he just floated there, lightly supporting the last 5% of his weight on his toes. He picked up his coffee mug, took a sip and quipped,
‘Who needs barstools?’
Ben laughed, ‘You’ve taken to it like a fish to water.’
‘This is so insane, Ben, it’s so insane!’
Adam hopped a foot in the air and gently floated back down. He turned and hopped ten feet into the central courtyard. He hopped around the whole house, even upstairs, taking ten steps at a time on the way up and the whole twenty on the way down. He settled back down in the kitchen and floated in his lev-pack like he was sitting on an invisible barstool.
‘This is the craziest thing,’ he exclaimed, ‘and so well designed. I’ve got to hand it to Zeke … and you.’
‘Oh no, not me, dad, it was mostly all Zeke.’
Adam turned around, levitating in his pack, and looked out the window over the water and said,
‘You know, Ben, the swell should still be around today and look at that sou’west wind. It’ll be perfect offshore. It’s been the cleanest swell. It’ll be smaller today, so we could go in the boat.’
This was Adam’s daily routine. Set the surf-session window and organise the rest of the day around it. These days he mostly went surfing by boat. He mainly drove and walked when the surf was too big to get the boat through the bar. He owned a 4.2 metre, Quicksilver, heavy-duty, inflatable boat, which was powered by a 25hp, Yamaha, tillersteered, two-stroke, outboard motor. It was a quality craft, made of red Hypalon, however it did have one major drawback, that being its inflatable keel. Adam had to pump it up before every trip, and it shifted position when battered by side chop. Apart from those minor irritations, the boat, being quite fast, served Adam well. In the just over two-year period that he had owned the boat, he calculated, by the amount of oil he had used, that he averaged about 150 trips to Granite each year. And most of the sessions were quality.
Ben brought out a small, intricately-carved, gold box and a small, white, ceramic pipe.
‘Before we do anything, dad, let’s smoke the Mana.’
Adam looked at the gold container resting on the bench and exclaimed,
‘Ooooh, is that the same stuff your mum had?’
‘The very same. It’s called Mana. It is for health and longevity.’
‘I’m all for them, Ben.’
Ben loaded the pipe and handed it to his father. As he lit it for him, he said, ‘Live long, my father.’
And as Adam smoked the pipe it was almost like he suddenly knew what to do. When he was finished, he reloaded the pipe for Ben, handed it to him and lit it up for him, saying,
‘Live long, my son.’
That was to become a daily ritual, and a kind of toast to their life together.
Unbeknownst to Adam, at that time, was the fact that his lifespan was already approaching 200 years. Most of that was due to the Mana he had smoked with Liberty. The more Mana he smoked, the longer his lifespan became, until it levelled out at around about the 900-year mark, give or take a century. So even at this stage, Adam was still only a quarter of the way through his life, being 57, and was in reality more like an eighteenyear-old with most of his life in front of him. Learning of his ‘life elongation’ changed Adam profoundly. There became less urgency for anything as there was so much more time to get it all done. ‘Laid back’ was an understatement when describing the future Adam.
3
After breakfast, they decided to hit the surf. As Ben’s board was in his ship, and his dad owned a fine quiver of surfboards, he opted for Adam’s 9’1” Tolhurst. Adam took his 9-foot, Dragan Diamond Quad. He imagined it fitting perfectly into the head-high, long, fast-breaking, hollow walls they would encounter in Granite Bay. They loaded up the boat, cruised through all the canals, passed through the lock and sped off down Noosa River towards the river mouth and its treacherous bar. Low tide was mid-afternoon, so they were nice and early. This meant some water over the bar and a safer shot through it.
When they turned the last bend in the river, what confronted them were thick lines of white water crashing right across the bar, closing out right across the whole river mouth.
‘It’s all right, Ben, I know where the channel is.’
Ben was hanging onto his side of the boat thoroughly enjoying the experience. They slowed as they arrived at the white water.
‘Here comes another set. I’ll just go around,’ said Adam as he carved the nimble inflatable through a 360-degree turn. He parked the boat in the deeper channel just behind the white-water line and waited for a lull between the sets. There seemed to be no end to the crashing waves and they began to wonder if they were ever going to get out that day, when, all of a sudden, there was a break in the swells.
‘It’s a lull!’ Adam exclaimed as he shifted the gear lever into forward and throttled up the motor. The boat sprang from its stationary state with the bow high in the air. They hopped over the remains of the last set-wave and shot through the break at lightning speed. Just when they thought they were through, unscathed, the first big wave of the next set loomed up in front of them.
‘I got it,’ Adam said calmly.
He full-throttled the boat and aimed directly at the wave. Just before reaching the feathering, six-foot monster, he dramatically slowed, but still not slow enough to prevent the boat from launching three feet into the air off the back of the near-vertical wave. Other big waves followed, but they were easier to get over. Once out, Adam stopped the boat and re-arranged everything that got tossed out of place. He then took off across the magical, mystical waters of Laguna Bay to his favourite break in the whole world.
Unbeknownst to Adam, Ben made sure that Slater wouldn’t be there that day.
4
That evening, they spoke about visiting the old house in Stanwell Park.
‘We can take the ship,’ Ben suggested.
‘Won’t that be a bit conspicuous?’
‘We’ll go camo-mode.’
They left at three o’clock in the morning. Ben remotely flew his ship over from its hiding place in Laguna Bay and parked it inside the jetty.
‘Don’t worry, dad, nobody can see. Everybody’s asleep.’
Ben suggested that his dad bring his lev-pack because he had an idea.
They entered the ship, settled into their seats and relaxed. Adam watched the ramp smoothly flip up and seal the upper hull. The inside of the ship was softly lit and Adam noticed, for the first time, how there were no windows of any kind.
‘There are no windows, Ben?’
‘None. The ship seals into a one-piece, solid shell.’
Adam watched the spherical display materialise all around them. They could, again, see everything outside. As the interior lights dimmed to darkness, the screen solidified to full opacity and became totally lifelike.
‘Music?’
Adam, who was in a state of high excitement by now, turned to Ben and replied,
‘Music? … Sure, what have you got?’
‘I’ve composed some stuff. Would you like to hear it?’
‘Wow, now my son is also a musical genius. I would love to hear it. What are you going to play?’
‘I call it Streamers. Listen.’
Adam heard slender, echoing chords of synthesized music begin to emanate from far out in the universe, approach him from all sides, like snaking streamers, pass right through his body and recede away in the opposite direction.
‘This is only the hearing version, dad, the telepathic version is a thousand times better.’
‘It sounds like hundreds of people playing. Where is the sound coming from?’
‘The whole interior of the hull is one giant speaker. Any part of it can vibrate sound.’
‘So how is it stored? Is it digital?’
‘Actually, this isn’t stored. I’m playing it live. The ship is one huge, mind-controlled, musical instrument, like a synthesizer, and I can play it.’
Adam’s amazement only grew as he became surrounded by a rich surge of spherical sound, highlighted with myriads of Mandelbrot rhythms and Fibonacci chords.
The ship rose slowly to three hundred feet. Its exterior was darkest matt black and it made no sound. They flew over Noosa, just above all the poles and wires, and looked at all the streetlights pass silently beneath them. The music softened in volume but continued to play. They flew over a Harley Davidson and heard its iconic exhaust rumble as clearly as though they were sitting outside the ship.
‘You can really clearly hear the outside sounds, Ben.’
‘True-volume, fracto-spherical, live sound, dad; crystal clear. The whole exterior of the hull is one microphone. There is a direct transference of audio code from the outer hull to the inner. So, we hear it clear as a bell from the direction the sound actually comes from.’
They flew slowly out above Laguna Bay and along the five points, which were silhouetted in a sea of shimmering-silver, moon crystals. They were doing about 50mph at about 300 feet. As the ship flew across Granite Bay, it made a 90-degree change of direction to the south and picked up speed to about 110mph. Ben flew low above all the moonlit beaches of the Sunshine Coast and said,
‘You know, dad, this is my favourite kind of flying; early morning, slow and low.’
‘How can you play music and fly the ship, all hands free, all at the same time?’ ‘Easy.’
They flew low over Brisbane, at about 300mph, then down to the strip of lights that was the Gold Coast. As he crossed the Tweed River, he rose to about 1000 feet and shot down the coast at about 500 miles per hour.
‘This is like being in a Stanley Kubrick movie, Ben.’
‘Yes, I like his style.’
They slowed down to about 100mph and dropped low as they crossed the Hawkesbury River. They skimmed above the northern beaches of Sydney, hopping each headland as they encountered it, and flew under the Harbour Bridge, ‘just as a joke’. They picked up speed as they crossed Botany Bay and flew down the coast to Stanwell Park.
Ben approached the deep gap in the coastal escarpment from the ocean. He slowed to 20mph and dropped to 200 feet. The black disc glided silently over the beach and into the sleeping valley. It came to a complete stop hovering at about 200 feet in the centre of the valley. Although dark, the Park could plainly be seen from the light of all the streetlights. The music faded out. As they listened, they began to hear the sounds of the Park. They could hear the sounds of life waking up.
‘This is the Park, dad, the place I grew up.’
‘There’s our house over there.’ Adam pointed into the darkness.
‘It’s still too dark to see anything,’ said Ben, ‘but it will be dawn soon and we better hide the ship before it gets daylight.’
They rose vertically, out of the Stanwell valley, to eleven hundred feet, crossed the edge of the 1000-foot escarpment with a hundred feet to spare and proceeded to track the road heading west. Adam noticed it first.
‘There’s Zeke’s place, Ben, … with nothing on it.’
Suddenly Zeke’s patch of land brightened up in a circle of light. A green cross appeared on the ground in the back of the property.
‘Are you shining a spot on it, Ben?’
‘Not full-spec light, just UV. Nobody can see it. This is where we park the ship.’
Ben hovered the ship into position in the back of the vacant field. He landed next to a low tree in front of a line of moderately-high, bush scrub. The ship was about 100 yards back from the road and fairly much in plain sight.
‘Won’t they spot the ship from the road, Ben?’
‘Not in camo-mode, and anyway, this site has been researched and it has been designated a natural blind spot. For the whole time since Zeke’s been gone, no one has ever looked at this spot. If you’re passing by on the road, it is counter-intuitive to look in this direction. There are hundreds of natural blind spots all over the Earth. They come in quite handy.’
The interior light of the ship faded up and the screen faded out. A panel opened in the lower hull and lowered as a ramp.
‘Are you doing all this with your mind, Ben?’
‘Yep, all of it. I can play music at the same time if you like?’
‘Oh, that’s OK, not that there’s anything wrong with your music.’
They stepped out into the icy chill of an autumn, top-of-the-escarpment dawn.
‘Look, dad, the horizon is lightening. It won’t be long till sunrise.’
‘You know, Zeke would be having a raging fire on a morning like this.’
There was no wind. In the purple twilight they marvelled at the glistening dew on the grass and the fog lingering in the shadows between the trees.
‘I thought we’d fly there from here,’ said Ben.
‘Fly?’
Ben smiled, ‘Yeah, fly. That’s why I got you to bring your pack. Let’s go and get dressed for flight and take off.’
‘Can I just wear my jeans and jumper?’
‘Sure, dad, we’ll be flying low and slow.’
They re-entered the ship and changed for flight. Ben dressed in his levitation suit while Adam strapped on his lev-pack. Adam got the feeling to fly barefoot, so that was what he did. When Ben noticed it, he kidded,
‘A real nature boy, are we dad? You’re so from the seventies.’
‘Don’t knock the seventies, Ben.’
They stepped outside again and stood back as the panel closed and the ship melted into the background.
‘Wow,’ exclaimed Adam, ‘the ship is almost invisible.’
‘That’s camo-mode. The ship mimics whatever’s behind it and melds with the background. Even as you walk around it, it adjusts itself to your point of view. It’s uncanny but ancient technology.’ Ben stepped up to his father and handed him the right control. ‘You might want to adjust your hover setting to 100% because you won’t want to be floating to the ground all the time. You’ll want to be hovering close to the ground.’
Adam adjusted the round knob until he felt all his body weight being supported by the pack. He now had to use the control to go up or down, otherwise he hovered in the same place.
‘We’re staying at ground level all the way, dad. Slow hover, just like in the house.’
There was enough purple light in the sky to the east of them for them to sufficiently make out the foggy path between the trees and shrubs. They floated through the tree trunks, snaking, hopping and ducking past obstacles as they went along. They followed the contours of the ground, remaining about two feet above it, and proceeded at approximately a jogging pace. They carefully crossed a couple of streets. No one saw them. After about ten minutes,
‘I can’t tell you how much I’m enjoying this flying, Ben. This flying through the trees is insane, and I have so much control. Good old Zeke. The cables really work. He never liked anything fancy.’
‘Here comes the edge of the escarpment, dad. Remember, you’ve got 100% hover. Here we go over the edge.’ They went from being two feet above the ground to being three hundred feet above the ground in one second.
‘Let’s fly down into the trees,’ Ben called out.
Adam had to push his control lever slightly forward of hover to begin gently floating into the treetops below. As they got down to ground level and began the steep descent below the trees, Ben observed,
‘You know, this is the really handy thing about a levitation device, this being able to breeze over ground that can’t even be traversed on foot. We can go places no one can go.’ ‘Definitely! No one could go down here where we are going, but for us it’s easy.’
Looking through the trees, they could see that they were descending towards the Stanwell Park train station. Ben spotted a few people waiting for the train. Adam warned, ‘There’ll be a few walking up the road to the station as well.’
They crossed the tracks to the north of the station and traversed the hill above the line of houses in the lower part of the valley. They hopped a couple of fences and landed in their old backyard. Ben said,
‘There’s no one home. There’s no one around except for the old lady in there,’ he pointed at the neighbouring house on the east side, ‘but she seems pretty medicated.’
‘That’s Mary, my neighbour. She moved in just after you left.’
‘I think that we got here without being detected, dad.’
‘Bravo, Ben, that was the best flight I’ve ever had.’
Ben’s suit changed colour. It had been black up to that point in time. He went for a very blending-in, leafy-olive look. He pulled his goggles off his eyes and the balaclava off his head and let them hang behind the back of his neck. Adam removed his pack and placed it on the back veranda.
‘It looks a lot better than the last time I saw it, dad. Look at all the palms, and the landscaping; it’s fully landscaped.’ Ben pointed at the second bedroom, ‘There’s my room.’ He turned around and sighed, ‘God, I had a lot of fun in this yard. This is where I spent the first ten years of my life … and you’ve made it look so nice.’
‘The people that bought it are doing a fine job of keeping it nice. See all my rock walls and cobblestone paving?’
‘Yes, dad, and did you do all this yourself?’
‘On my own, with no power tools.’
They walked around to the front of the house and immediately noticed the spectacular view of the south coast. They then turned and faced the house from the front. ‘I remember so many happy days here.’
‘Me too.’
‘Hello, Adam,’ came a whiny voice from over the fence.
‘Oh, hello, Mary,’ replied Adam. ‘It’s been a few years since I’ve seen you.’
‘Doug’s dead, you know. He died a couple of years ago. I’ve been on my own ever
since.’
‘Oh, I’m sorry. I didn’t know.’
‘I have to get help with the garden nowadays.’
‘We just dropped in for a bit of a reminisce. We thought we’d remember the old days. Er, this is my son, Ben, who I believe you’ve never met.’
‘I can’t bring up my shopping anymore. I’ve got to get them to bring it up for me.’
‘We’ll just look around before anybody shows up, OK, Mary?’
‘OK, boys, you enjoy yourselves.’
As she walked away, Adam said,
‘Don’t erase her brain, Ben. I would like her to remember me. Who’s going to believe anything she says anyway?’
‘OK, I’ll leave her alone.’
‘Remember how we sat on that veranda in the afternoons, in the sun, like time didn’t exist?’
‘Those are my best memories, dad.’
‘We got ten years, that’s not bad.’
‘Not bad at all, dad.’
‘I’m really missing your mum right now.’
‘Me too, dad.’
‘We were a family.’
‘We still are, dad.’
Adam began to cry. This house also represented a whole lot of pain for him, the kind of pain that comes with the loss of one’s loved ones. Ben consoled him.
‘Sorry, dad.’
‘It was just so hard, Ben, so hard. The emptiness was the worst part. But I kind of got used to it. And that Doyle kept distracting me.’
They sat around the house for about an hour and remembered mainly the good times. The house was there, and it was well maintained, but something was missing. There was a ghostly emptiness about it. Then it dawned upon them that the thing that was missing was them. It was just a house now, but whatever part of it they looked at, they saw it wallpapered with memories.
Adam heard the sounds of his young family and remembered all the people who spent an evening with them there. He remembered Libby and the first time she came up for dinner, and how they fell in love that night. He remembered the flying adventures and the heroic pilots, who were all personal friends of his, and he remembered Zeke, the big guy, who became his best friend. He remembered late afternoons in the park, sitting on the grass in the midst of a dozen colourful hang gliders, cheerfully listening to all the flying stories going around. He remembered how he particularly enjoyed the tranquillity of the sunsets there, when the whole valley was in shadow except for the pilots and their gliders. The filtered light made the gliders glow fluorescent in many bright colours, and made the pilots look like they were sitting in the midst of the warm, orange glow of a cosmic spotlight.
When they felt satisfied that they had soaked up enough ambience of the old, Stanwell Park house, Adam strapped his lev-pack to his back and said,
‘Where to, boss?’
‘You’re not really dressed for any speed or altitude,’ Ben replied, ‘so we might go back the same way we came.’
They glided out of the bush, over a barbed-wire fence and into Zeke’s old backyard. The ship remained in camo-mode as they entered it and undressed from their flying paraphernalia. Comfortable, they sat in their chairs, sealed the ship, materialised the screen, dimmed the inside light and took off straight up and instantly froze to a hover at 4000 feet. One second later, they were doing 10,000mph on a heading straight for Noosa.
It was the middle of the morning on Friday, April 22, 2005, and the sun was shining as Ben registered as a 10,000mph blip on every radar screen along 800 miles of the east coast of Australia between Sydney and Brisbane. They tracked him all the way up the coast. The whole trip took about eight minutes. He disappeared off their screens around about Caloundra. The hop from Caloundra to Noosa took the blink of an eye. They suddenly ended up in a silent hover above the jetty.
‘We’re in full camo-mode, dad. If we stay still, or move very slowly, we are almost invisible. People don’t look where there is nothing to look at.’
The ship, rendered in lifelike, point-of-view camouflage, was perfectly blended into the background as it slowly descended to the water. There was no noise or fuss to attract any attention.
They stepped onto Adam’s terrace and walked up the stairs into the house. 5
It took over a month to re-arrange Adam’s affairs. They surfed most of the good days and flew on many of the nights. Ben explained to Adam how they had to be careful not to bump into Slater, ‘because I want him to think that you are already gone. He won’t speak to anyone about it, though, because he is keeping it a secret.’
Andrew was briefed and told that Adam’s son was taking Adam on a big trip lasting many years and that afterwards he would live with Ben’s family in their house.
They began preparing for their departure.
‘What do I take, Ben?’
‘Well, everything you want to have on Rama. Take all your favourite clothes and footwear. The climate around our house is warm, although the evenings and nights can become cool because it’s perched right on the edge of a two-thousand-foot escarpment.’
‘I’ll need a couple of suitcases. I’ve got them.’
‘I figured a couple of suitcases, dad.’
‘What about my music?’
‘We already have all the music ever recorded on Earth, so, ah, you know, I doubt that you have anything that we don’t already have. Bring your boards though.’
‘What about my bike?’
‘You won’t need your bike. There is nowhere to ride it on Rama because there are no roads, because everybody flies. Everyone takes a ship, a disc, or wears their levitation suits whenever they go out. They wear normal clothes at home. You can’t imagine how frustrated Zeke was before he made his first levitation pack.’
It was early evening on May 25, 2005 and all was tranquil around the canals of Noosa Waters as they silently stowed Adam’s luggage into the ship. Adam locked the house and hid the keys in a prearranged spot.
They sat in their chairs, the panel sealed the ship, the screen appeared and the inside light dimmed to darkness.
‘Getting out of here is a three-stage process, dad,’ Ben began. ‘First we get above the atmosphere, then we get just outside moon orbit, then we get past the edge of the solar system, past the Kuiper Belt, and then finally we get to kick it into overdrive and fly lightsquare speed all the way to the edge of our solar system.’
The spherical, holographic display, which surrounded them, glowed with crystal intensity as they softly lifted into the evening sky. Adam had a last, longing look at his beautiful house, with its boat up on the slipway, and declared,
‘That was the nicest place I’ve ever lived in.’ He turned to Ben, ‘You know, I’m starting to get a bit nervous about seeing your mother again after all this time, not to mention her family. I’m nervous as hell about meeting them.’
‘Don’t be, dad, they’re just normal people. And they’re just as much your family as mine.’
‘Do I look OK?’
‘You look fine, dad.’
‘I’ve aged. I look older.’
‘Here we go, dad. This is going to seem pretty quick even though I’m going to cruise it. I could go a lot faster but you wouldn’t see anything.’
‘I’m all for cruising it, Ben.’
They rose rapidly to 200 miles above the Earth. Ben took about 10 seconds to do that. They then flew straight towards the moon. At 8,100,000mph they got there in two minutes flat.
‘Wow, Ben!’
From there they zig-zagged from one planet to the next, taking about a minute between each, and hovered there for a few minutes admiring the view. Adam was getting quite excited.
‘This is so amazing, Ben, so insane. It’s like a bloody Stanley Kubrick movie on some kind of an acid trip. Is that Jupiter? It’s a big bastard, isn’t it?’
‘And in a very handy location for the inner planets. It scoops up a lot of floating debris. Unfortunately for Earth, though, it doesn’t get it all.’
They flew above an ocean of floating rocks and boulders, which was known as the Kuiper Belt. They flew with such speed that it appeared like wavy sheets of foggy cloud glistening in the distant sun as it streamed by b