View from Ararat

Since 1989, Brian Caswell has written 31 books including the best-selling A Cage of Butterflies. His work has received numerous awards and shortlistings, including the Children’s Peace Literature Award, the Vision Australia, Young Adult Audio Book of the Year Award, the Aurealis Award, the Australian Multicultural Children’s Literature Award, the Human Rights Award, the NSW Premier’s Literary Awards (four times), and he has been included in the prestigious International Youth Library’s ‘White Ravens’ list four times. All his published novels have been listed as Notable Books by the Children’s Book Council of Australia.

He also researches and designs ‘cutting-edge’ educational and personal-development programs, listens to all kinds of music (usually far too loud), watches ‘an excessive number’ of movies and DVDs, and reads ‘anything with words on it’. Brian lives on the NSW Central Coast with his wife, Marlene, and his dog, Indy. He has four children and 13 grandchildren.

Also by Brian Caswell

Deucalion Series

Deucalion

The Dreams of the Chosen

Young Adult

Merryll of the Stones

Dreamslip

A Cage of Butterflies

A Dream of Stars (short stories)

Asturias

Double Exposure

Loop

By Brian Caswell and David Phu Au Chiem

Only the Heart

The Full Story

Younger Readers

Mike

Lisdalia

Maddie

Relax Max!

Alien Zones Series

Teedee and the Collectors or How It All Began

Messengers of the Great Orff

Gladiators in the Holo-Colosseum

Gargantua

What Were the Gremnholz Dimensions Again?

Whispers from the Shibboleth

To Barbara, Felicity, Isobelle and Ray for your important input during the writing and rewriting of this, my most difficult project. Thank you for your support and your willingness to share your special talents.

And, of course, to Marlene, my wife, who is learning to appreciate the world and her husband – at 3am.

As long as the generations continue,

the memories must live.

As long as the memories live,

so the generations must continue.

The Lastsong of the Tellers

Prologue

Before the Telling . . .

Plaza Complex

New Geneva (Central)

Deucalion

10/12/213

NATASSIA’S STORY

Words. I’ve lived my entire life surrounded by them.

My first clear memory is of my mother reading to me from a small hand-held book-screen – a kid’s story about the Elokoi hero Gaita, who led her people on the Great Trek across the desolation of the Central Desert, in the time before Time.

I loved the pictures – 3-D renderings of famous Elokoi history walls, animated (in a culturally inappropriate way, of course) especially for human consumption.

Naturally, I was too young to appreciate the fact at the time. I just remember the experience: my mother, her gentle voice rising and falling; the way she wet her lips with the end of her tongue when she stopped reading to show me something.

And the words. Always the words, weaving their spell over me. Painting their own pictures on the wall of my tiny imagination.

I think I was the only kid in my kindergarten class at the Edison central edu-centre who actually knew the stories. The Tellers, who visited the edu-centres three or four times a year, taught the older kids (at least, they tried to) about the Elokoi ways, but the ankle-biters were considered too young to benefit from such ‘cultural extension’.

I guess my family was always a bit different. From the beginning, we were a clan obsessed with words.

Two hundred years ago my ancestor AJL Tolhurst was probably Deucalion’s most famous early-colonial historian. Some say he was Deucalion’s only early-colonial historian, because he was the only one who bothered to tell the story of the colonisation and include any real understanding of the Elokoi, and our effect on their way of life.

He lived for a long time with the Naashti Clan in the far north, near what is now Elton, learning what he could of their culture, and documenting the disaster that the arrival of the offworlders represented to their traditional way of life.

He was a great man, universally acknowledged.

But it was his granddaughter, my great-grandmother, who had the most significant influence on me, and on the course that the rest of my life would eventually take. If I hadn’t been so fascinated with her story, I might have gone into Research at an early age, instead of spending my life defining and redefining my world in words.

Her name was Rachael. Rachael Tolhurst. But everyone called her RJ. I guess it had something to do with the books. There were eighteen in all, mostly politics and socio-political history, especially her two-volume autobiography, Memoirs of a Teenage Revolutionary, which was by far her most famous work.

She was a pretty amazing woman, RJ.

She died in her sleep in 186, just two weeks after I was born. She was a hundred and one years old Standard. About a hundred and twenty-four in Old Earth years. Which is old by anyone’s reckoning.

But that wasn’t what made her amazing.

It was what she did with her life when she wasn’t writing books that was so impressive. I mean, for most women being an author with so many works in the Archives, and being married to one of the heroes of the Revolution of 101, might have been enough.

Then again, for most men being one of the heroes of the Revolution might have been enough. You could easily dine out on it for the rest of your life.

But it wasn’t enough. For either of them.

My great-grandfather’s name was Daryl Newman.

Newman . . .

Even as a kid I remember thinking it was funny, one of the fathers of the new democracy having a name like that.

They were pretty unique, the pair of them.

After the Revolution and the Second Great Trek, when the Elokoi set up their own independent state, Vaana, around the eastern shores of the inland sea, my great-grandparents lived with them.

Daryl died in 155. Right up to the end he was working with the Elokoi, overseeing the workings of the cooperatives that traded Capyjou and Ocra tea with the human government in New Geneva and with the Deucalion Export and Import Board, which oversaw all trade between the Republic and Old Earth.

RJ worked with him, writing when she could, but spending most of her time helping to coordinate the trade.

The pair acted as the main link – commercial and diplomatic – between Human and Elokoi for the best part of half a century. And they were an essential link, for trade was not a concept that the Elokoi found easy to relate to in the early years.

For a culture which owned everything communally, the idea of giving one thing in return for another held no meaning. And as for giving in return for money, that concept was as alien to them as . . . war.

Before the coming of the offworlders, the Elokoi had only ever cultivated the crops for their own use, and they could probably have returned to the old ways entirely, except for the fact that Vaana was about the most inhospitable place you could ever wish to settle, and the cost of the massive irrigation and desalination programs necessary to make it habitable – even for the hardy Elokoi – was far beyond the resources of the new state.

It had to develop some way of generating income.

The government of the new Republic, recognising the problem, did offer to fund the programs, but the Elokoi refused the offer – which is understandable.

After a century of having their heritage and culture eroded by human interference, they were unwilling to take the risk a second time – no matter how well intentioned the offer was.

But Daryl was nyassa – kin – an honorary clan-member. They trusted him completely, and when he suggested the cooperatives and trading in the two valuable plantation crops, they saw the sense in a small compromise. They borrowed the funds from the New G government to begin the irrigation program, and seeded the first plantations. Then they used the considerable profits from the early crops to repay the loans and fund the next stage.

By 150 or so Vaana was already being called the ‘Garden of the West’. The demand for Capyjou and Ocra was growing – especially from Earth – and the Elokoi state was economically self-sufficient. But apart from the technology necessary for maintaining the fertility of their new state, the Elokoi lived as simply and communally as they always had, and, apart from the activities of the travelling Tellers, they maintained very little direct contact with their human neighbours to the east.

Of course, all that was years before I was born.

The first time I considered the possibility of following in the Tolhurst family writing tradition, I was . . . what, ten? Eleven maybe. I remember watching Taal, the Elokoi Teller, standing there in front of our entire year group, sharing one of the sacred Stories with a crowd of human ‘cubs’, who sat there, totally rapt, listening to the words weaving their spell into the air around them, and into their imaginations.

My mother had read me most of the Stories, of course. RJ herself had translated many of them, and we had the original reader-disks. But my mother had also explained how little true understandings could be communicated by words alone.

Elokoi Thoughtsongs were so much more than words could reproduce, she said. Beautiful and moving as the Stories might seem in wordspeech, they were nothing compared with what an Elokoi could experience in a true Telling, mind to mind. Which was something we were forever shut off from.

Our words, she said, were like the surface of the sea, stretching away to the horizon. We could experience the reflections, the movement of the waves, even the chill of an onshore wind, but the ocean depths, with their currents and their hidden secrets – they were forever a mystery.

I was thinking of that as the Teller spoke, and I remember looking at him and feeling . . . not jealous, but determined. Even if words could never match a shared Thoughtsong, they were the best that we humans could do, and even if I could do no more than make people feel what I was feeling at that moment, then maybe words might be enough.

Of course, I was young. As I grew up, I became less of an idealist. I became a journalist after all. But I never lost that love for words.

And so I await tonight’s Telling with mixed emotions.

Me, a creature of words, a floater on the surface of the ocean, contemplating my first dive beneath the familiar surface. What will I see there, feel there?

Will words ever be quite enough again?

It’s not such an idle question, when you consider what tonight promises.

Or what it commemorates.

The Crystal Death.

The Creeping Apocalypse.

The End – and the Beginning.

For ten years I have lived with it, turned it over and around, tried to come to terms with the enormity of it. I have even used my precious words to write a book about it, to try to make sense of it.

But I know, in my heart, that there are depths I do not have the words to show. For if ever a story needed more than words, this is that story.

It is in the nature of words to make connections. It is in the nature of a story to find its own voice.

But when we die – we who lived it, we who ultimately survived – who will really remember? For all the volumes written, all the minutely researched accounts of events, deep down at the core of their understanding, who will know?

The terror of the riots. The staring eyes of a dying child. The smell of death. The racing of the pulse.

The overwhelming fear.

Who will even remember how it all began?

PART ONE

THE SINS OF THE FATHERS . . .

Is there no balm in Gilead?

Is there no physician there?

Why grows not new flesh over the wound?

Jeremiah xii. 22

No doubt but ye are the people,

and wisdom shall die with you . . .

Job xii. 2

1

Child’s Play

JMMC Ore-Shuttle lo Trader

in elliptical orbit around Jupiter

December 31, 2331

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MAC

‘This is it, boys and girls. Paydirt . . .’ McEwan Porter wipes the visor of his helmet with a gloved hand and moves carefully forward towards the disabled airlock of the doomed ship.

For the better part of a month they have been homing in on the weak and intermittent distress signal of the lo Trader, a large ore-carrier, missing, presumed lost, for twenty or so Earth years, somewhere in the vicinity of Jupiter’s notorious ‘garbage belt’.

The miracle is not that the signal beacon is still working after two decades, but rather that Cindy managed to detect it against the white noise of the radio static streaming outwards from the Red Spot, the huge, eternal storm rotating in the atmosphere of the giant planet, only a few hundred thousand kilometres away.

It is little wonder the dead ship has remained undiscovered for so long. If they had missed its faint receding whisper, the lo Trader could have spent the rest of eternity orbiting the king of planets. Just another piece of flotsam in the garbage belt. A mystery, buried deep in the archives of the Company – an entry of unfortunate proportions in the debit column of some accountant’s twenty-year-old profit-and-loss schedule.

Turning awkwardly in the airlock entry, he looks back towards the Ganymede Horizon and waves. Then he pauses, before making his way inside.

A month of painstaking pursuit, chasing echoes and faint traces of the radio-beacon’s signature transmission. A month of living for this moment. He runs his gloved hand across the metal of the hull, possessively, almost lovingly.

After a near-fruitless tour of duty on the storm-lashed equator of Ganymede, the largest of Jupiter’s moons, the discovery of the ghostly signal on a now rarely used bandwidth was like providence for the crew of the mining drone.

Salvage rights on the ore-shuttle’s cargo of heavy metals will make the whole frustrating trip worthwhile, after all. The company pays thirty per cent for the recovery of lost cargo. Thirty-five, if any of the crew are saved.

Thirty for the cargo, five for the crew . . .

Porter shivers slightly inside his temperature-controlled pressure suit.

The hulk of the lo Trader has been drifting among the debris of the garbage belt for longer than half his crew has been alive. And judging by the size of the hole in the primary starboard bulkhead, it has almost certainly been a ghost-ship for all that time.

Two or three metres across, the jagged tear in the metal of the ship’s skin looks like the path torn by a giant fist, punching through from the inside out.

Explosive decompression. The space-traveller’s most vivid terror. The nightmare that most ore-jockeys live with constantly. The one that wakes them, cold and sweating and screaming silently in the vacuum of their fears, on more nights than they would ever admit to anyone.

One small fragment of rock, probably no bigger than a baseball, perhaps even smaller. One tiny, insignificant, suddenly lethal fragment moving through all the infinite vastness of the universe, following its own preordained trajectory. Keeping its own counsel on the cataclysmic events that gave it birth and fatal momentum.

Just one small fragment.

But one is all it takes. In almost four hundred years of manned space-flight, no solution has been found to the deadly inevitability of basic physics. No construction material known can withstand the force of anything much larger than a grain of sand, when it is travelling at a velocity of thousands of kilometres per second. And once breached, the strongest alloys are as useless as tissue paper, for inside the vessel the air pressure is a little over one atmosphere, while outside the vacuum waits, hungry to be filled. And the outrush of the air tears apart the film of metal skin, peeling it outwards, until in seconds the vacuum has claimed everything within.

Mac Porter sets the charge on the inner door of the airlock and moves carefully outside. He is tethered to one of the rings once used by the maintenance crew when they worked on the outside of the ship, and he swings himself out of the direct line of the blast, before depressing the button on the remote which hangs around his neck like a medallion.

There is no sound in the vacuum, of course, but the metal of the hull vibrates beneath the soles of his magnetic boots, as the lock of the inner door is blown apart by the tiny charge. A small stream of metal particles shoots out of the disabled airlock, shimmering in the light of the distant sun, and spreading out in a tiny cloud, each particle following its own path into eternity . . .

Into eternity . . .

He looks out into the vast emptiness, and feels its seductive call. Again . . .

It would be so easy.

He tests the coupling that tethers him to the ship.

Get a grip, man . . .

He closes his eyes and breathes deeply, concentrating on the faint hiss of the respirator, shutting out the siren-whisper of the distant stars.

Finally the feeling passes, but still he feels the memory of it deep in his gut.

The echo of the explosion has stopped vibrating in the hull beneath his feet, and he forces himself to focus on the job at hand. He swings himself around and enters the airlock again. This time he can see into the main cabin through the neat hole that the charge has blown in the inner door.

And what he sees brings the bile rushing into his throat.

With an effort he forces it down and slides the door open. It moves with surprisingly little resistance.

‘Mac?’ The voice in his headset is Cindy’s.

She is young. It is her first trip, and despite the hardships they have shared over the past year she hasn’t yet developed the hard shell that characterises the rest of the Ganymede Horizon’s experienced crew. ‘You OK, Boss?’

‘Fine, Cindy.’ He smiles to himself. A half-smile. ‘Just fine . . .’

The meteor struck without warning, of course, and the decompression was so sudden that there was no time for the computer to react and activate the airtight doors. Which was probably a disguised blessing for the doomed crew, because before they were really aware of the danger they were already dead.

There are worse ways of buying it.

He allows the thought to form, before he realises where it is heading.

Like having just enough time to clamber into a pressure suit, then waiting among the dead for the air to slowly run out . . .

A quick death. A blessing for the crew, but a waking nightmare for the poor jerk who lands the job of finally discovering them – which is the reason he has chosen to come alone onto the crew-deck of the ore-shuttle.

For all their bravado and all their hard-won experience, apart from Cox and Avram the crew of the Ganymede Horizon is young. Deep-space mining is a young person’s sport. Few last at it beyond thirty, if they survive that long.

They are young, and none of them has seen what happens to a human body when you introduce it to the vacuum and absolute cold of deep space, totally unprotected.

How every individual cell in that body disintegrates, as the pressure inside ruptures the delicate membranes. How blood and fluids explode from the distorted mass in a red cloud that freezes instantly into minute floating crystals, spreading gradually to fill the surrounding space. Crystals that stick to the static field of your pressure suit and to the visor of your helmet, until you stare at the horror through a shimmering, red haze. While you wait for the end to creep up on you . . .

None of them has seen it, but Mac Porter has.

And it is the memory of that long-suppressed horror which turns his stomach as he floats across the airless cabin among the grotesque remains of the lo Trader’s crew.

JMMC Mining-Drone Ganymede Horizon

in elliptical orbit around Jupiter

December 31, 2331

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CINDY’S STORY

‘Face it, Cind, when it’s your time, it’s your time . . .’

Elroy Cox leaned back philosophically in his gravity couch and sipped his drink, holding my gaze like one of the tutors at the Institute. I noticed a few drops had dribbled from the end of the straw. They hung unmoving in the air in front of his bearded face.

‘When it’s your time, it’s your time,’ Avram shot back, mimicking. ‘And did you work that one out all by yourself, Einstein?’

The trip had been too long, and the mutual dislike the two older miners had shown in the first weeks had grown into a constant game of one-upmanship.

I had kind of a soft spot for Cox. In spite of his ‘act’, he wasn’t half as tough as he made out. I’d hacked into the confidential personnel files on the third day out from Earth, before we went into stasis for the sub-light acceleration. Cox’s wife was dead, and he was supporting four kids and an old mother. Which explained why someone his age was still out in the Jovian sector jockeying ore when he should have been riding a desk – on Earth or on Lunar.

Avram, I couldn’t stand. He was bitter and sarcastic, and sexist, and all he was supporting was a massive gambling habit, which ate all his earnings, and then some. But far worse – at least from the point of view of the crew – he could be bone-lazy if the mood took him, which it did, far too often.

‘I was just saying . . .’ I persevered, in another attempt to ride over their constant interruptions. As the ‘rookie’, I was still fighting to finish a sentence, even after the best part of a year. ‘I was pointing out that it was just such incredible bad luck. Half a second difference in trajectory in either direction and the meteor would have missed them completely. It hit them almost head-on, ruptured the hull in the forward starboard quadrant, and travelled on through the bulkheads, the cabin and the sleeping quarters. But look at the computer mock-up. No exit hole. The decompression ripped the ship apart at the point of entry, but there’s no other damage to the hull. Which means—’

‘There’s an extra piece of rock in the cargo hold,’ Cox cut in. ‘Mind you, it probably disintegrated on impact. It wouldn’t matter how fast it was travelling. Nothing that size has got the momentum to punch a hole through 10,000 tonnes of high-grade ore.’

‘Really high grade.’ Without removing his gaze from the screen in front of him, Mac entered the conversation for the first time. As usual, he was running some kind of diagnostic on the ship’s data frame.

He might have been a couple of hours into his ‘down time’, but one thing you learned very early was that McEwan Porter was never really off duty.

His confidential psych-profile – which I’d also accessed – mentioned mildly compulsive tendencies, but that was a bit of typical bureaucratic psycho-babble. He was just a dedicated human being who took his work very seriously. OK, it wasn’t exactly brain surgery, but let’s face it, take away the work and he really didn’t have anything else.

He’d been riding the ore-shuttles and the mining drones since he was eighteen – which by an amazing coincidence was how old I’d be turning on my next birthday – if I made it that far.

Personally, I couldn’t see myself sticking at anything for that long. But impatience has always been part of my problem. You should see my confidential psych-profile.

Anyway, Mac pushed another button and the screen switched to a 3-D multicoloured bar-graph. ‘I’ve just finished the ore-sample analysis,’ he went on. ‘These guys must have hit the mother lode. Big time.’

‘Yeah, and a lot of damned good it did them,’ Avram