The Disestablishment of Paradise (68 page)

If You Go Down to the Woods Today . . .

Long time ago, before I was born, there were two gum miners called Norris and Morris. They became mates because their names sounded the same, and they always worked together. They were what
Father calls a double act, meaning that what one began to say, the other would finish, and they were always cracking jokes. They could keep their cross-talk up all day and it used to amuse the men
in the camps to hear them. They’d begin in the morning as they were loading up their mechanical digger.

And so they went on. Making it all up. It doesn’t look so funny when you write it down, but when they got going they could stop the whole camp and I hear that men fell
down laughing.

The way they worked it in those days, the MINADEC surveyors would come in first and prospect by flying over the valleys and gullies. They had lots of ways of measuring things, and if they
thought there was a chance of minerals or gum or anything under the soil, they’d whistle up a digger team of twenty or so grubbers and in they’d go like robbers’ dogs.

Well, this was a gum dig where Morris and Norris were working. A big one. The camp was in the middle of a couple of thousand hectares of the tall silver-barked trees they used to call girl in a
trance. Good name that, because in the spring the long trailing leaves turn blonde as straw. When the wind blows they swish and bob like hair. Not like my hair. I’m black as Tess
O’Leary, but the leaves are beautiful and clear-looking.

Beautiful or not, in they’d go and cut down the trees as near to the ground as they could and drag the lumber away. They cut it short like that as the stump was a good solid foundation for
the digger. And then they would dig until they’d turned up all the roots round the tree. It was the roots they wanted as the gum was inside them, little hard yellow veins of it, and they
would cut the roots off as they went. Then they’d move on to the next girl in a trance and make her shake her head. They’d bulldoze a track as they went, so that they could send the
roots back to the factory on Kossof Island.

Well, this was a good dig where Norris and Morris were working, and they were happy as they were finding lots of gum and making big money.

So, one morning, off went Morris and Norris in their old steam-driven half-track with the big auger sticking out the back like a tail and the root snips riding high. They were working at the
bottom end of the stand of trancers and come midday they wanted a rest. There was a dark valley nearby with a little stream coming out of it. So Morris says to Norris, ‘Where there’s a
stream there’s –’

And Norris says, ‘– a place to swim.’

And Morris says, ‘And a cup of tea with whisky’.

So in they went, up the valley, following the stream. And they came to a lovely deep pool with the sunlight falling on it and the water so clear you could see the sunshine on the bottom and the
shadows of bubbles turning with the flow over the smooth round stones. Without a word, Morris dived in and Norris followed. And when they bobbed up, mouths open as if they’d been drinking
like fish, Morris pointed and said, ‘What’s that, Norris?’

And Norris looked and said nothing. For the first time in his life he didn’t have a word to say.

They were both looking at the cauldron bulb of a Reaper – but they didn’t know that. They had never seen one. It had big blue knotty veins standing out round the bulb so you could
tell it was an old one, and the background was a misty green.

And this Norris did. But when he got back there was no sign of Morris. But the air was filled with this perfume like almonds and lemon. And the plant had changed too. It had
closed up so you couldn’t see its cauldron. ‘Mr Morris,’ he called, but there was no reply. He got frightened then, because he saw the big clusters of balls moving above and
descending. When he stepped back, he fell right into the pool.

He was in the water thrashing about when he bumped into something and, thinking it might be a piece of wood, he hung on. But it had clothes on and a little screwed-up face like a puppet and
hands like little paws. No mistaking who it was. Mr Morris.

Mr Norris let out a great big scream and swam downstream as fast as he could. He swam over the rocks and through the pools until he got to where they had left the half-track and he revved it up
and shot back to camp.

He rang the fire bell, and the men came roaring and running back from where they had been working – all except Lucky Dip, who had chopped a toe off the previous day when an axe went
through his boot, and he hobbled up on crutches.

Norris gabbled out his story. No one understood what he was talking about, but they all broke out their weapons and set off back to the ravine – all, that is, except Lucky.

Not one of them came back.

And that is the end of the story.

Finally, in the evening, Lucky raised the alarm. Next day some of the MINADEC ‘specials’ arrived – the big ugly ones they send in if there’s been a
slugging between camps. They found the ravine. They found the stream. They followed it up until they came to the pool. They found the Reaper too. It had changed. It was all open and on show like a
fairground, all colours and with growths like big blue rubber hands coming up out of its cauldron. And the black cherries were bobbing about on the end of their stalks like bees on a string.

The specials also found the men. They were hung up in the trees like kippers, all dry and shrunken, with eyes like buttons and their muscles turned to white strands of Crispin. They had little
black marks on them like someone had spattered them with black paint. The specials cut them down and retreated. One or two of them had started to feel funny with the collywobbles and wanted to lie
down on the spot, saying they were tired. Dumb fuckers! They probably would have too, if the others hadn’t kicked them down the stream.

They called up an incendiary grenade launcher, the type they use when they want to start a forest fire. Long silver body with a big black warhead. And they fired it up the gully and right into
the Reaper. They say the bang could be heard up on Tonic, where it rattled the glasses on the MINADEC bar. And the smell came like a shock wave. I’ve never smelled a cow’s stomach when
it has lain dead in the field for a week, but I’m told this smell was worse. I’ve heard of latrines in the badlands of Byzantium that could stun an ox at forty paces and fell a man like
a flying brick. But this I’m told was worse.

So you make your own idea up, Jemima. They said the smell stuck to you like tar and no amount of washing could get rid of it, and that I can believe, because what a Reaper does isn’t
on
you, it is
in
you once you have breathed its perfume. And it will come out through your pores until your last kiss – I mean the kiss of death.

So that is why you don’t go down in the woods, Jemima, leastways not without your Auntie Sasha. Sasha knows how to talk to Reapers so they smell sweet as honeysuckle and won’t hurt a
moonbeam like you.

End

•

COMMENT: Events such as this spread as stories. No one knows how many men and women were actually killed by Michelangelo-Reapers, but disappearances were common, and if someone
went wandering off into the trees and did not come back, then they would say, ‘The Reaper’s for him.’

I think men rather like to have an enemy waiting out there in the dark when they’re gathered round campfires, and the Reaper fitted the bill for the MINADEC workforce. It’s a shame
Reapers couldn’t uproot and wander like Dendron! Then the MINADEC specials would have had a real nightmare to deal with, but the end would, I think, have been the same.

A mysterious thing about the Reaper was that it could disappear quickly. Once spotted, even a big Reaper would often vanish overnight. When this happened, it would leave nothing behind it except
the large clearing where it had lived. This was usually a wide boggy depression in the ground, where it had sat and, in the middle of this, a knobbly root-end like a big black carrot. Obviously
that was all that was left of its main root. There were no side roots and no parasitic roots trailing in the trees. It might take a hundred years to grow, but it was gone in a night. No one ever
saw this happen, or if they did, left no record. This too added to the mystique of the Michelangelo-Reaper.

Official MINADEC policy was to destroy Michelangelo-Reapers whenever found. They were declared a noxious bio-form, which meant that a bounty was paid for each one destroyed. When a survey team
encountered a Reaper it would deploy what was called a STET (specific target extreme temperature) bomb. These generated terrific heat for a brief period but had only a small explosive charge. They
were quite heavy and had a sharp point at the front. STET bombs were regarded as environmentally friendly weapons, as they did not damage the nearby flora. A STET bomb could be dropped from about
fifty feet above a Reaper and so was extremely accurate. It cut through the upper part of the bulb, which Sasha calls its cauldron, and then, when inside the Reaper, it was detonated by a radio
signal.

The Reaper put on quite a show, evidently, for despite its fleshy appearance it burned easily. A common belief was that this was caused by combustible gases contained in the cauldron. In effect,
the small bomb triggered a private and devastating explosion.

‘Child Spared Grim Fate’ by Wendy Tattersall,
News on Paradise 27

Not all manifestations of the Michelangelo-Reaper were fatal. Here is a brief account published by Tom and Wendy Tattersall in their irregular round-up of events called
News on Paradise
.

•

We have all done it at some point: looked away while the children are playing or become absorbed in a book. Or perhaps we thought,
Tom’s there
or
Sulia’s on guard
, and closed our eyes for five minutes too long.

So it was when we visited Sulia and Tewfic Rokka’s beautiful homestead, to help celebrate the birthday of their youngest daughter Krisima. It was a good time too, for a reunion with others
from the first ship, the good ship
Figaro
. Among those gathered were Gerda and John Pears and their children Petra and Benji, and the ‘Plum’ Newtons and their offshoot Tycho
(and another offshoot to be, unless Marie has put on a lot of weight). Also present were Eugenie and Estragon Lermontov, who came with their three boys Sergei, Fyodor and Vsevolod. The Lermentovs
were wearing the same clothes as the day they stepped off the
Figaro
(some of us are not so lucky). Lastly, we were pleased to see Tania and Sean Lysaght and their daughter Cathleen, who
is shooting up like a rocket. It was a two-day party, and on the second day we went up the coast in the cutter to Mad Miner Falls. (For the origin of this name see
News on Paradise
No.
11.)

It was an ordinary day on Paradise. You know the kind of thing. Bright sunshine. A light breeze offshore. The wind scented. A clear sea. Dipper palms rising and falling on the headland. First
vintage plum wine, and plenty of it.

Some time in the previous week a Dendron had come past and had left a big stamp in the sand which the children could hide in and which Mayday kept falling into, pretending he had had too much of
his own vintage.

After lunch, Tom who-can-never-sit-down-for-longer-than-five-minutes Tattersall suggested we climb the falls to see if we could see the Dendron, as it would have wandered out to sea somewhere
nearby and might be steeping. This we did, each of us carrying a child on our shoulders and taking another by the hand.

At the top there was no Dendron to be seen. The party split up. The ‘adventurers’ set off to explore, while the ‘squatters’ settled down in the shade to entertain the
little ones more interested in playing with the kite seeds blowing down from the hills. The split-up was where the problem began. I was a squatter, and I thought Cathleen Lysaght had gone on with
her mummy and daddy. But Tania and Sean thought she had stayed with me.