Chapter Forty-Five
THE DARK SIDE
1
The following day, the surf was all blown out by the early north-easterly wind. Everyone congregated around the breakfast table. On Earth it was May 28, 2005. Adam got an invitation from Zeke to spend an old-fashioned session with him in his hut.
‘We oughta catch up,’ he said.
Everyone knew what that meant, except for Adam. He hadn’t smoked Marijuana for nearly six years. Liberty laughed,
‘If you boys are going to spend your day getting stoned and catching up on old times, I might do something with mommy.’
‘I thought I’d go collecting wild honey today, and then I’m baking bread,’ said Ada.
‘Great. I love collecting wild honey.’
‘Why don’t you bring your lev-pack, Adam, we might wanna do some flyin.’
‘Sure, Zeke. I’ll go and get it.’
After breakfast, they walked out the back of the house and through the magnificent gardens along a path out to Zeke’s hut. Adam noticed a number of people, wearing levitation suits, tending to the gardens. Zeke explained to him that they were the gardeners and that they traded a few hours of work every few weeks for their flying suits.
‘For life?’ Adam asked.
‘That’s generally how it goes,’ replied Zeke. ‘They just see it all as doin favours for each other. It’s a good deal.’
Zeke’s hut was located a few hundred yards to the north of the main family home. It sat nestled in a small clearing about a hundred yards back from the edge of the escarpment. There were two main buildings there, a smaller one, which was his hut, and a larger one, a sizeable, low-slung, tin shed, which was his workshop. Between them, and off to one side, was a small vegetable garden. Adam noticed the similarity immediately.
‘It looks a lot like your place back on Earth, Zeke.’
‘Yeah, ain’t it a treat? They built it for me exact after I got here. Brie organised everythin.’
‘Gosh, Zeke, it’s even got the chimney and the old wooden door.’
‘It’s the same, but it’s a lot neater inside an I got better furniture. You wanna see me workshop?’
‘I’m just a passenger here, Zeke. You lead the way.’
‘Let’s go see the workshop.’
‘It’s just an oversized version of your old shed on Earth, Zeke,’ observed Adam surprised. ‘It’s even made of the same corrugated iron that your old shed was made of and the double-wooden doors and the small window look the same as well. What gives?’
‘They brought heaps of stuff over from Earth. They got huge ships for carryin cargo. You wouldn’t believe it, mate.’
They stepped into the workshop.
‘Is that your old workbench? And are those your old speakers?’
Zeke laughed, ‘Yeah, they wanted me to feel at home when I arrived. They said that a planet change can have profound psychological after-effects an that they wanted to make me transition as smooth as possible. I gotta say it worked cause it does feel a bit like home around here, don’t you reckon?’
‘Totally.’
‘You can hang your pack on the wall next to mine if you like.’
Adam did so and asked,
‘So, what is the Zekester up to these days?’
‘I design stuff for non-telepaths. Everythin on this planet is mind controlled. It’s useless for us.’
‘Wow.’
‘I did the packs an now I’m workin on a disc. I’ve designed a bunch of manual shaft turners for pumps an generators. A lot of that stuff gets brought over from Earth. Hardly anythin gets manufactured here, other than sails, suits, ships, saucers an the shaft turners … oh, an bloody surfboards an boats, but that’s mainly the coastal folk. Most everythin else is imported.’
‘Amazing.’
‘Come, let’s stretch out in the hut an have a puff.’
They emerged from the shed and walked across unmown grass to Zeke’s hut. Zeke clanked open the heavy, cast-iron latch and they stepped inside.
‘It’s the same. Zeke! Everything is the same!’
‘You reckon? Me chair is new, but the lounge is the same.’
Adam looked around.
‘The walls, the fireplace, and the whole place … it’s … it’s … like a time warp.’
The walls were rough-sawn boards, brought from his hut on Earth. Even all the old hang-gliding photos were there and in the centre of the small room was the low, wooden coffee table, the same one Adam, Doyle and Zeke spent so many hours lounging around.
They sat down, Zeke in his chair and Adam on the ratty old lounge. Zeke leaned over and retrieved his bowl and pipe. He pried open a rusty old paint tin and extracted a small pinch of sticky Marijuana out of it and placed it in the bowl. He then retrieved another tin and took a small portion of tobacco leaf from it. He proceeded to cut it up with a pair of scissors.
‘It’s all homegrown. Coffee?’
‘Coffee’d go down a treat, Zeke. I see you’ve still got your music. Can I pick something?’
‘Sure, help yourself.’
Adam flicked through Zeke’s extensive record collection. He came to Van Morrison’s Astral Weeks and stopped. He sighed,
‘God this takes me back. I love this album.’
He removed the vinyl disc from its jacket and placed it on Zeke’s turntable. He cleaned it with the special record-cleaning cloth and placed the stylus down. The room filled with rich, soul-illuminating rhythms of acoustic guitar.
‘That’s a great sound, Zeke. Where is it coming from? I don’t see any speakers.’
‘That’s cause there ain’t none. It’s holographic sound. It’s made by all the air molecules. They all vibrate. See the small aerial on top of the amp?’ he pointed at the amplifier.
‘Yeah?’
‘That’s what’s transmittin the signal. It’s locked into the molecular frequencies of the air molecules. It was a gift from the family.’
‘It sounds insane!’ Adam sat back down and put his feet on the coffee table. He began to reminisce. ‘God this takes me back.’
‘Back to Rose Bay and a girl called Nancy, I bet.’
‘How did you remember that?’
‘You tell me about her every time we play this record.’
‘Do I? What a time that was. She used to play this for me.’
Zeke handed Adam a loaded pipe and lighter and said,
‘Welcome to Rama, Adam. This stuff grew under twin suns.’
Adam had a toke and asked,
‘Is it indigenous?’
‘Naah, I brought me own stuff when I came over an it was full of seeds. Technically, it’s still good ol Illawarra Gold.’
‘Ooh, it’s good stuff, Zeke, I can feel it already.’
‘We better go easy.’
‘Oh yeah, I’m all for going it easy. I don’t want to end up on the bathroom floor thinking that I’m going to have a heart attack.’
They both laughed as Van Morrison sang,
If I ventured in the slipstream
Between the viaducts of your dreams …
2
After a couple of pipes each and a couple of sips of their coffees they both marshmallowed into a stoned melancholy as they became immersed in the futuristic heaven-dreaming of Sweet Thing. After an interlude of not saying anything, Zeke began to speak.
‘I love it up here.’
‘Yeah, it’s nice.’
‘The place is so natural. They live their lives but they don’t cut into the wilderness.’
‘Yeah, no roads.’ Adam thought for a while, then said, ‘I thought you were dead.’
‘Naah. They time shifted me one day into the future. They timed it a fraction of a second before the gravity sail went through the roof. I popped up in me backyard twentyfour hours later.’
‘Libby told me all about the time chip.’
‘Good. Saves me from havin to explain it to you. How is Doyle?’
‘Oh, that’s a whole other story. I’m sorry to tell you, but Doyle is dead.’
‘Dead?’
‘Yeah. He got a bullet between the eyes from this really crazy guy that escaped from a nut house. Apparently, the guy was a serial killer that Doyle caught some twenty years before. It was like a revenge killing.’
‘Jesus!’
‘I have had the odd strange thought about it though.’
‘How strange?’
‘Well, you know how we always wondered about Doyle, how no one ever knew anything about any of his connections?’
‘Yeah?’
‘He knew an awful lot. Maybe more than the Rama were comfortable with.’
‘You think that they might have had somethin to do with him gettin carked?’
‘They certainly had the ability to get into the crazy guy’s head. It’s possible.’
Zeke’s intensely-blue eyes pierced deeply into Adam’s as he said,
‘Hmmm … we venture into darker thoughts. You know, I’ve been thinkin about the whole comet thing. Eight billion people are gonna die. I was wonderin if the Rama could deflect that comet if they wanted to.’
‘You’d think they could.’
‘They’re not gonna, though.’
‘No.’
They both stared at each other.
‘Why should they?’ Zeke asked.
‘I don’t know. Nobody talks about it.’
‘No, they don’t. Here comes the bloody dark side, mate.’
‘It is dark, isn’t it?’
Zeke began to whisper in hushed tones. He speculated,
‘If you look at everythin really objectively, from a distance …’ He sat up and leaned forward, closer to Adam. ‘You’ve found a planet that’s a mirror image of your own, an you’ve got intergalactic travel an time shiftin, an nine-hundred year lifespans. An you love goin to that planet but you’ve got to keep it secret because there are so many crazy people there, an they’re all non-telepathic Neanderthals. Then you discover that this planet’s gonna get whacked by a comet. An you figure out the exact day an place where it’s gonna happen. Then you figure that after about a hundred years, post impact, the planet’s gonna revert back to wilderness an become habitable again. It’ll probably turn into some sort of paradise with no people on it. It ends up that the planet becomes perfect for colonisation.’
The conversation stalled while Zeke loaded them both a couple more pipes. Adam blew the smoke out and suggested,
‘You are hinting at an alien invasion here, me thinks, Zeke.’
‘Them’s big words.’
‘An alien invasion of Earth … where all indigenous life is rendered extinct.’
‘Nearly all.’
‘Where the comet is used as a super weapon, an annihilation bomb, that takes everything out.’
‘More big words.’
‘It could be planned thousands of years in advance. Everything would revolve around the impact day. They choose who and what they want to save.’
‘An they time shift em all a hundred years into the future, into the wilderness.’
‘Libby told me that they have been time chipping as many species as they can. They’re even doing insects. She said that the plants and the oceans will take care of themselves.’
‘So, with nothin but the Rama an a few Earthlings there, it’ll end up like here.’
‘To tell you the truth, Zeke, and I haven’t seen that much of Rama yet, but from what I’ve seen so far, it might not be such a bad thing.’
‘As long as you’re not one of the people that’s gonna get extincted.’
‘That’s for sure.’
They had another pipe and were getting quite stoned by now. A smidge of paranoia began to creep into the conversation.
‘Do you think they’ll be able to tell what we’ve been talking about, Zeke?’
‘I’m pretty sure. To them we are completely transparent.’
‘Maybe we shouldn’t think about it.’
‘I don’t think it matters. They are super-cool people. They don’t interfere with anyone. They really make me feel free. Everyone’s been like family to me an any dark thoughts I have only come an go, an usually don’t come back.’
‘Well they came back today.’
‘It’s cause you’re here.’
Zeke was partially right. No one ever hinted at knowing what Adam and Zeke had spoken about, or thought negatively about, but as the months and years passed, those thoughts evaporated into nothingness and were finally completely forgotten. They both became immersed in the family, and the grand plan and its execution.
From the point of view of the Rama, it was Ambriel’s responsibility to telepathically manage Adam and Zeke’s thoughts and memories. She loved them both very much and was extremely patient and careful with their manipulation. She took plenty of time to make the adjustments in such a way so that neither of them was ever aware of the fact that they had been ‘telepathically corrected’.
3
Zeke made them another cup of coffee and suggested that they have a fly in their lev-packs.
‘I’d like to see what you can do, Adam.’
‘Well, I won’t be as good as you, Zeke.’
‘We could go for a fly around the valley an up the mountains,’ suggested Zeke. ‘Have you got your suit?’
‘Yeah, it’s in the bag with the pack.’
‘You’ll need it cause it gets pretty cold up in the mountains.’
They dressed in their Neoprene-like, matt-black, flying suits. The suits’ main function was to keep them warm, or cool, in the temperature extremes often experienced during flight. The material’s billions of micro-pores reacted to the outside temperature. The hotter the temperature, the more the material between the pores contracted, causing them to enlarge and cool the wearer. In sub-freezing temperatures, the micro-pores almost completely closed, and with the booties, gloves, hood and goggles in place, the wearer became completely insulated from the cold. Unlike the flying suits that the Rama wore, their suits were passive and not mind controllable. They were designed to be used with a manual levitation pack. Besides shielding the eyes from the wind, the goggles also provided enhanced vision.
The suits acted like a second skin, which is why the Rama called them ‘second skins’ or ‘skins’ for short. The Rama skins were mind-controlled flying suits with the gravity sails embedded within the chameleon material.
Adam really noticed Zeke’s fine physique through his body-hugging suit. He was tall and straight with broad shoulders. There was not an ounce of fat on his body and his muscles showed with sculpted definition. The cripple was gone. ‘What amazing stuff that Fish is,’ he thought to himself.
‘You’re looking pretty fit, Zeke,’ he commented.
‘Yeah, I’ve finally come good, an that Mana that I’m smokin, Brie reckons that me life span’s stretched out to four hundred years by now. You’ll be up to a couple of hundred, I reckon.’
‘I’ve still got to come to terms with all of that, but it certainly takes the pressure off for getting anything done.’
Zeke laughed, ‘Yeah.’
They strapped on their lev-packs and tested the hover outside in Zeke’s backyard.
‘You’ll want 100 percent hover,’ instructed Zeke.
They floated a few feet above the grass, traversing to and fro and turning a few circles. They then both landed.
‘I’ll give you a bit of an overview of the local geography,’ said Zeke. ‘An I wanna show you me favourite launch site. It’s just over on the edge of the escarpment,’ he pointed in the easterly direction.
‘Lead the way, sire,’ said Adam with his spirits rising. As they flew low and slow across the wavy grass, he quipped, ‘God, we look like two bloody flying ninjas in these black outfits.’
‘Can’t see em at night,’ was Zeke’s reply.
They flew for some hundred yards and landed on a large, flat slab of rock, right next to the cascading falls.
‘Stay back from the edge,’ warned Zeke, ‘this rock hangs right out into free space.’
‘Wow, this is so spectacular, Zeke. The valley always takes my breath away.’
Spread before them, and two thousand feet beneath them, was the lush Eos Valley.
‘You know, I just realised that I’m ripped out of my tiny little brain, Zeke.’
‘Yeah, it’s good dakka, ain’t it?’
Zeke carefully walked them to the edge of the overhanging rock. They were right next to the wall of outpouring water. The rock was soaking wet and there was spray everywhere. The whole space boomed with the sound of rushing water. They were getting wet and Zeke explained,
‘The skins are waterproof.’
Then he pointed straight down to the base of the falls,
‘That’s 2000 feet straight down. First time, I’d pull out at about 500. I usually take it down to about 200 these days.’
Adam had no idea what Zeke was talking about, but he was about to find out. Suddenly Zeke laughed and said, ‘See ya out there, mate,’ and turned and leapt off the overhanging rock, in the direction of the falls, without engaging his lev-pack. Adam’s jaw dropped as he watched Zeke freefall down the front of the Eos Falls. His brain suddenly fused like it had just received a powerful electric jolt, and without even thinking, he yelled at the top of his voice and leapt into open space and freefell down the front of the towering vertical cliffs chasing after Zeke.
Adam was very good at judging altitude. He derived it from his old hang-gliding days. In his day, there were still no instruments around and one needed to hone one’s senses. As he plummeted through the spray, he got the occasional glimpse of Zeke freefalling 500 feet below him. He pulled the right trigger early, as soon as he saw Zeke pull up into a hover just above the massive boulders at the base of the falls. He braked to a hover about 400 feet above Zeke. He took a deep breath as he realised that he hadn’t taken a breath all the way down. He saw Zeke, down below, cruising out above the river. He put gentle forward pressure on the right trigger and glided down to him.
‘This whole valley was carved out by the Eos,’ explained Zeke. ‘It gets fed by the glaciers in the mountains. If the Eos wasn’t here, this whole place would be desert. Let’s fly up to five grand.’
‘OK.’
They squeezed the right triggers and shot skyward, climbing-out at nearly 2,000 feet per minute. Three minutes later, they hovered 5000 feet above the centre of the valley. Zeke continued,
‘This is the tallest mountain range on the planet an all the weather comes from the south, so this side doesn’t get any rain. But we’ve got the Eos an the valley, an because of the water, the valley is lush an fertile. Also, an this is amazin, you’ve gotta see this when it’s happenin, in the right wind conditions the spray from the falls gets carried all over the valley an comes down like gentle rain. You get a rainbow all day. It’s the most beautiful place I’ve ever seen.’ Zeke paused for a moment while Adam absorbed the majestic vista. He then turned and said, ‘There’s nothin but desert to the north.’ Adam turned and faced over the vast, high desert. ‘There are these deep gorges out there, an caves, an the desert people live there. Because of the mountains an the desert, the Eos valley is virtually inaccessible by land. Let’s go to ten.’
Adam understood what Zeke meant. They climbed out at a more leisurely 1000 feet per minute and parked themselves 10,000 feet above the river mouth of the Eos. Zeke waved his arm across the mountain spine and explained,
‘The mountain chain sinks into the ocean here, but continues on over the horizon as the Pearly Islands. Great sailin country. There’s a lot of sailin done by the coastal people. Takin trips to the Pearlies is priceless. Ben’s got a mate with a boat. I’ve been on two trips. The sailin … maaate …’ For a moment, Zeke was lost for words, then he continued, ‘Ben’s mate’s got a Polynesian-type cat, about a forty footer, with like a double wishbone-rigged setup. There’s plenty of shelter on the lee side of the islands for anchorin.’
‘It’s beautiful, Zeke, and I understand the micro-climate now. Hey, there’s Cesar’s. I was there yesterday.’
‘You want an apple?’ Zeke asked.
‘Where you gonna get an apple up here, Zeke?’
‘I know a tree. Follow me.’
They swooped out of the sky to ground level, to an apple tree growing by the stream. They hovered around the canopy as Zeke said,
‘Look for a ripe one.’
They grabbed an apple each, landed under the tree and sat down in the shade. They removed their goggles and balaclavas and proceeded to enjoy their meal.
‘Boy, you’ve certainly got the lev-packs worked out, Zeke. Mine feels totally intuitive.’
‘Designin those packs was the most excitin time of me life.’
‘And they work so well.’
‘Thanks. Hey, I’ll show you the Miller’s house. Everybody gets their flour from there. Then I’ll show you the poultry farm from where we get eggs an sometimes a chook or two. There are a few fishermen we get our fish from. I’ll show you where they live.’
‘I’ve never enjoyed a day of flying more.’
‘This apple ain’t bad either.’
They gazed down the valley.
‘She looks pretty, don’t She?’
‘She sure does, Zeke, She sure does.’
…….