The Other Tree (20 page)

“I didn’t know Australia had prairie dogs,” said Chris.

“It doesn’t have black-footed ferrets, either,” said Yvonne. “Although there have been sightings.”

“Late at night and close to pubs? Ow!” said Chris.

“Thanks, we’ll be heading to our rooms now,” said Luke.

Yvonne smiled, blinking slowly.

“The showers and facilities are at the far end of the cabin complex,” she called as they left the reception cabin. “Enjoy your stay.”

Chris and Luke walked along the leaf-litter path, the trail thankfully shaded by ghost gums and eucalypts. Fragrant, crescent leaves hung motionless overhead, while sap the colour of burnt toffee streamed down smooth, white bark.

“What was that for?” asked Chris, rubbing her ankle.

“You kicked me for making snide comments,” said Luke.

“Mine wasn’t a snide comment. It was a scientific query. It’s a clear statistical phenomenon that a majority of sightings of rare, extinct, and mythological species occur within several kilometres of a premises which serves alcohol, and within several hours of the said premises closing and ejecting all patrons into the mythically infested surrounds.”

“You seem terribly willing to believe in mythical plants,” said Luke.

“I’m not a sceptic, I’m a scientist. There’s a subtle distinction.”

“Sounds like an arbitrary distinction.”

“It’s like saying ‘I’m not gullible, I’m religious.’”

“I beg your pardon?” said Luke, an edge to his voice.

“To a judgemental outsider, there might appear to be little difference,” said Chris, forging on obliviously. “But to someone who is religious, there are numerous fundamental differences in philosophy, principles, attitude, understanding, motivation, and action. Like how convergent evolution can result in two species looking very much alike, even though they are vitally different in physiological structure, and arrived at their current state via extremely different paths. Like whales versus fish.”

As they approached the line of cabins, a flock of sulphur-crested cockatoos screamed raucously above them, wheeling around to settle in a nearby stand of gum trees.

The cabins certainly had an Australian flavour. No solid timber logs or tarred straw thatching here. Instead, the open space was lined with grey fibro cartons which had undoubtedly arrived flat-packed. Each boxy cabin had a small window at the front, and another at the back, with a sliding plastic pane. The door was thin woodchip, and the floor inside was the cheapest grade of linoleum—possibly made from old pizza boxes. A shadowy stain on the floor may have been a piece of preserved pepperoni embedded in the plastic.

Chris dropped her pack onto the floor, and the whole cabin wobbled disturbingly.

“I hope you’re insured for death by cheap accommodation,” said Luke as he closed the door, getting a splinter in the process.

Chris sat down on the bed, pulling out her laptop. Luke looked around forlornly for a chair, then resigned himself to sitting on the single bed, cringing as it creaked under the weight of two people.

“So what did Professor Holloway have to say?” asked Luke, trying not to move.

Chris shifted, pulling out a photocopied page. The bed swayed about two inches to the right with an alarming wooden creak. Chris held out the sheet of paper, the illuminated border instantly recognisable.

“The missing page…” said Luke, already sliding his electronic translator from his pocket.

His fingers jumped across the keys, his gaze flicking between the photocopy and the dull green display. After several moments, his hand stopped, and he stared intently at the screen.

“The blood of the blameless man,” said Luke softly.

The electronic translator clicked shut.

“We have all the riddles, now we just need the answers,” said Chris. “So, religious expert, any ideas?”

Chris had always hated riddles and lateral thinking questions. They seemed to fly in the face of good science, which was about fact finding and exploring possible hypotheses with controlled experimentation. Lateral thinking questions seemed to share more in common with religion—arbitrary questions with arbitrary answers. No testing, no gathering evidence, no entertaining alternative explanations.

To Chris, a typical lateral thinking puzzle went something along the lines of: A carton of milk is found spilled across the kitchen floor. How did this happen?

To which, the correct answer would be something like: the next-door neighbour’s cat shot the occupant of the house through the bedroom window, while aiming for his pet parrot. As the man fell to the ground, mortally wounded, he knocked over a chair, which dented his pet parrot’s cage. The bird then squeezed through the bars and flew into the kitchen, where the carton of milk was sitting because the man had been about to make pancakes. However, the bird crashed into the carton while aiming for the open window, its trajectory skewed because its wings were clipped, thus knocking the milk carton from the counter and spilling it across the kitchen floor.

All of which seemed, to Chris, ludicrous. Aside from the part about cats operating semi-automatic weapons.

“The blameless man,” murmured Luke to himself. “Absolution, the absence of sin, humanity in its purest form, the essence of man…”

The sum of parts
, thought Chris. Circles within circles, symbols within symbols. The problem with these riddles, these questions, was that they couldn’t be tested. You just had to make a guess, and you were right, or you were dead. Or possibly you were stranded in Iran without enough cash to get home. But sometimes, in science, you had to make a leap. You would encounter a gap, within which there was no data, until you landed on the other side. But you had to be pretty damned sure you knew what was on the other side, and that were was, in fact, another side.

Sometimes, you had to be the data point.

“Circles,” said Chris.

Luke broke out of his reverie.

“Are we back to crop circles and Von Daniken?” asked Luke.

“We have to find a hotspot,” said Chris, grabbing her laptop and running out the door.

* * *

Due to some obscure connection between a failed proposal for a coffee shop chain, an anarchic student group, and some missing university equipment, Corrawong’s only public hotspot was located in a half-finished stormwater drain beneath the local Chinese takeaway. The drain was accessible via a narrow manhole wedged between a sagging chain-link fence and the takeaway shop’s dehydrated vegetable patch, planted in the superstitious hope that the presence of a stormwater drain would somehow induce stormwater.

The Corrawong stormwater drain was possibly the driest in the Southern Hemisphere. It had been built by a local government which had taken an overzealous approach to contingency management, pouring funds into the construction of hurricane shelters and nuclear bunkers in areas where the overwhelming majority of natural disasters involved the air being so dry it sucked the water right off your skin.

So while the local farmers watched their cattle turning into jerky before their eyes, the Corrawong stormwater drain was drilled thirty metres deep, complete with ladders, grills, and winding passages. The drain had reached about three hundred metres long before the mayor was overthrown, and resources were subsequently turned towards trying to extradite him from Barranquilla.

The drain did, however, as with most prohibited places, become a haunt for certain groups with a natural affinity for confined, lightless spaces.

Chris climbed down the steel ladder, the air hot and humid in the suffocating dark. Her flashlight swung from her belt, spinning a dizzying ball of light down the concrete shaft.

She finally touched down in a low passageway that turned sharply to the right. Only metres to the left, the floor dropped away into another shaft.

She opened up her laptop, searching for a signal.

“Are you sure there’s something here?” asked Luke, following Chris as she shuffled forward.

“You think the townsfolk sent us into a trap?” said Chris, only half-joking.

“Don’t you feel they’re all a little creepy?”

“The black-footed ferret woman was creepy. The guy at the takeaway shop was just…friendly.”

“He wouldn’t let go of your arm,” said Luke.

“He was just…lonely,” said Chris, watching the wireless connection icon on her laptop blinking vainly.

Luke conceded that the man at the takeaway shop had seemed lonely more than anything else. Corrawong was a small, quiet town, four hours’ drive from the nearest major hub. Small towns always ran the risk of becoming somewhat peculiar, although this ranged from being endearingly eccentric to hillbilly hell. In the nicer towns, it could be like living in one big family, never short of a helping hand. Or it could be the loneliest place in the world.

Luke grabbed Chris’s arm suddenly, and she turned to see him with a finger to his lips. The soft echo of voices bounced down the concrete walls, coming from further ahead. A side passage branched off to the right, and from this opening came the faintest flickering of blue light.

Chris edged slowly forward, glancing at the laptop propped in her arms. The wireless signal blinked, held, blinked again. She crept a little further, and the signal glowed steady on the screen—connection established. A smile spread across her face, then froze awkwardly as she looked up through the glowing doorway. A dozen faces stared back at her, each illuminated by the ghostly glow of a laptop screen.

“Woot,” said one.

The doorway opened out onto a concrete platform suspended over a chasm, the ceiling disappearing into the darkness above. Grills covered the walls, dreaming of a day when they would gush forth with rain, cascading into the channel far below. As it was, the platform was occupied by buzzing tower cases, steampunk hardware, and enough energy drinks to resurrect a plesiosaur. The sound of swords and roaring monsters piped from someone’s laptop speakers.

“Hi,” said Chris.

“Lawful, Neutral, or Chaotic?” demanded an olive-skinned young woman with a chestnut ponytail and a tribal tattoo above her left eye.

She fixed Chris with a cool stare, her laptop screen depicting a battlefield of vanquished skeletal warriors.

“Uh—” said Chris.

“I’m Neutral, she’s Chaotic,” said Luke.

The woman with the tribal tattoo looked at Luke with measured appraisal.

“Good, Neutral, or Evil?” she asked.

“Uh, Neutral,” said Chris. “I mean Good. We’re both good.”

The woman considered the responses.

“Everybody’s Neutral Good these days,” muttered another gamer.

“You may pass,” said the woman, turning back to her laptop.

Luke stared at the chasm beyond.

“Or go back. Whatever,” said the woman.

“Uh, thanks,” said Luke, backing into the main passageway again.

Chris and Luke shuffled down the concrete canal, pausing in an alcove where the passageway kinked.

“I think there’s enough of a signal here,” said Chris.

She settled onto the dusty floor, the laptop balanced on her knees.

“Is this important, or am I just hanging around while you check your email?” asked Luke.

Chris punched the Enter key and turned the screen to face Luke. His gaze took in the image on the screen, while his expression remained impassive.

“Da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man?” asked Luke.

“I was going to refer to it as that guy etched on the space probe.”

The screen displayed the instantly recognisable sketch of a man standing spreadeagled in a circle, on a square, fingertips just touching the intersection of geometric lines.

“Da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man,” repeated Luke. “Based on the Roman Vitruvius’s proportions of a man. The length of a foot is the width of four palms. The width of four palms is the measure of a cubit…”

“Da Vinci was a genius; some would say almost a prophet. He drew schematics for working helicopters in the fifteenth century and he was fascinated by anatomy. Da Vinci believed that the human body was a representation of the universe. Like how some believe Eden was a world within a world. As above, so below.”

“That’s actually the
Tabula Smaragdina,”
said Luke.

“The man in the world. And the world in the man.”

She ran her finger across the trackpad, dragging the image of the Vitruvian Man over a scan of the Sumerian map. With a click, she rendered the top image partially transparent, the two circles perfectly aligned. The two pictures merged into a diagram of a man splayed across the Persian Gulf, arms outspread as though on a cross.

“A sign to light the way,” said Chris, her eyes reflecting the glow from the screen. “The sign of the cross. Head, heart, and Holy Spirit. They’re coordinates. It’s a triangulation!”

“Actually, it’s a cross hair. But the crucifix, the sign of the cross, is from the New Testament. How could events from the New Testament appear in texts written thousands of years before it happened?”

“I think that’s how prophecies work. Hence, the difference between a prophet and a historian.”

“Now you believe in prophecies?” said Luke critically.

“That’s actually
your
job. My job is to assess the probability of there being a rational justification for apparently supernatural coincidences.”

Luke’s face scrunched up with scepticism as he looked at the composite image. Was it even possible that a humanity more ancient than conventional science comprehended had foreseen the unfolding events of the future, and left cryptic clues threaded through history? Luke wasn’t entirely certain where the divide lay between faith, foolishness, and mental instability.

“I suppose they all have circles in common…” said Luke.

With a few deft drags and clicks, Chris superimposed the Vitruvian Man composite onto a scanned image from the atlas, which had been modified with paleogeographical markers.

“Head to heart,” muttered Chris, drawing a vertical line from Vitruvian Man’s forehead to just left of his sternum. “And Holy Spirit.”

Chris drew another line from shoulder to shoulder, passing through the vertical line somewhere near Vitruvian Man’s left clavicle. On the atlas, the cross hair intersected in the middle of a large expanse of rocky desert.