Wake (28 page)

The monster had whirled inside Sam, sucking the heat out of each memory till Sam forgot why—why she cared that she'd been left alone, left to explain things she didn't see happen, and things she hadn't done. She forgot why she cared. And then she was in her childhood bedroom again, and the air was white. Sam went away. The man in black must then have thought that the monster had broken her—because when she went away he'd been left with the
other
Sam, the frightened and incapable woman who couldn't remember a thing of all he'd just told her.

Sam walked out of the sea, sat on the dry sand and let the sun warm her reddened feet. She looked around Kahukura. By daylight she could see the brilliant greens on the trees of the arboretum. There had been no heat yet to dampen down the colours. It was late November. The last time she'd been out—and outdoors—the air was perfumed by blossom and it was early November.

Sam was always coming back to note the changes. This was the only scale she had to measure time—the time of other people, those with continuous daily lives. She was always looking hard at nature, and admiring it, the surprises it played on her. The loneliness in that was wistful. The monster couldn't have made use of it. It used the other sort, the loneliness of being left—over and over—without a plausible story to stand on. ‘What happened here?' and ‘What happened to you?' were questions that filled Sam with rage.

There had been a time when it was easier to explain. From early on she and Fa had had a system and could cover for each other. When they first learned to read and write—as soon as they went to the first of their four different primary schools—they devised their system. They were clever and able, and by then were used to the practical material loneliness of their lives. For in another way they were never lonely. They were each other's treasured secret. They would swap in and out, day by day, to lovingly examine each other's little notes about Uncle, the cat, about schoolmates and teachers. About who got the most medals on School Sports Day, and how Annette had pinched Colleen under the desk. Notes detailing what happened last week in
Doctor Who
—and Sam always liked her sister's explanations more than the programme itself on the occasions when it was her who was out and got to watch it. Fa was always there, in Wa's thoughts, the first person she had to tell everything to. And she loved to think that, when she was gone, Fa would be reading her letters, laughing at her jokes, wondering at her stories, and solving the puzzles she'd left. They'd bring double the energy and interest and character to any project. They'd make things twice as good. Their poncho-wearing teacher always told their art class, ‘Leave no white space on the paper', and that's what they did—together they coloured right to the lines, they filled up their time, and filled each other's shoes. Sam's sister warmed her bed for her; she warmed her clothes.

All that came to an end when Sam was twelve. They had just moved to Hataitai, in Wellington. On an afternoon when Uncle was out, Sam went down to the bottom of their section and was exploring the wilderness where the garden ended. She was on a hillside looking out over the little isthmus of Wellington airport and she thought, at her absent sister, ‘Take a look at this.' There was the familiar trusting lassitude of letting go. Then she came out again suddenly to find herself lying head down on a slope at the foot of a steep bank. A little avalanche of stones was pouring around her, and a boulder was still bouncing away into the bushes. She went back to the house to look for Uncle, and then wandered around the neighbourhood looking fruitlessly for someone, anyone, who seemed trustworthy. There was no urgency to her search, and she could well have sat down and simply waited for Uncle to turn up and make decisions. But her need to know what had happened pressed upon her, urging her on. She checked in the phone book, and walked though the noisy Mount Victoria tunnel, and all the way to Newtown, and the hospital. She walked into Accident and Emergency and told the woman behind the sliding glass door in the reception area that there had been an accident. Then she willed herself away again.

When she finally returned she found herself back in Kahukura. Uncle told her she must be gone again by this coming Tuesday. He tapped the calendar on the kitchen wall, and Sam saw that it was
months
later. He said, ‘You have to be gone by Tuesday because I have to drive your sister to Nelson for her physical therapy.' Sam agreed. They ate dinner in silence. Then Uncle said, ‘Stay indoors until I tell you you can go out again. We are going to have to work out how to handle this.'

Sam went to her room and looked for a letter from Fa. There were no letters. Uncle didn't know about the letters so Sam couldn't ask why the other Sam hadn't written to say what had happened, how she was, what hospital was like. She got their pyjamas out of the pyjama dog and put them on. She stood before the mirror and thought of questions, then wrote her own letter. She hid her letter in the place they always hid them. She went to sleep in their bed, enveloped in her sister's smell, and was obediently gone by Tuesday morning.

When she next came back she looked for a letter, and found her own, unopened.

Uncle never bothered to explain. When Sam asked, he only said, ‘She's alive. Everything else is immaterial.' Sam didn't know how her sister was, but she deduced from the way that Uncle seemed—of all things—more relaxed, that the changes in her sister somehow made it easier to cover for the fact that they were both younger than they should be. They had been sharing a life and were not walking in step with children their own age. That's why Uncle would always say to people, ‘Sam is small for her age.' It was why they were always moving schools and houses. Now Uncle told Sam she was done with school. And if anyone asked she was to say she was seventeen—a runty seventeen.

Months later Fa finally did write. She wrote that she didn't understand Sam's letters. She wrote that she couldn't write much—she was still learning how to again. The letter wasn't in Fa's handwriting. Fa's subsequent letters showed some improvement, but they remained
different
. And life was different too—the life they'd shared. People now spoke to Sam slowly and gently, and looked at her with smiling patience, or frowning practicality. They stopped including her in conversations—instead their talk would part around her as if she was a stone in a stream. She had lost her life. Her sister, and her life. Ever since then she'd been lonely—lonely and responsible, lonely and thwarted.

At noon Sam spotted Bub and William across the bay, on Matarau Point. It was only when they stopped to speak to Curtis that she realised he had been there the whole time, facing her way.

Sam lay down on the sand. She made herself small. She watched Bub and William head back towards Haven Road. Once they were out of sight she retreated along the shoreline track till she could no longer see the town and point, only the large empty expanse of Tasman Bay and the far off Richmond Range.

Myr had explained to Sam why he was in Kahukura. And, although his explanation was strange, dislocating, and in translation, it was also at first oddly comforting. It gave Sam comfort because it made sense, and encouraged her to stop thinking of the monster as
hers
. The monster was Myr's; he was its keeper, its jailer. It had a provenance, and Myr had protocols for it. He might be an alien, but provenance and protocols were the world Sam knew.

Myr untied her, and then, as she sat ostentatiously rubbing her wrists, he settled by the fire and started to talk. He spoke slowly, choosing his words carefully. Sam listened and understood that he was taking pains in explaining to her, and that all his facts appeared to her detached from words and terms that were important to him. Using Sam's language, Myr told her about his monster. The Wake.

‘I will begin in the traditional way,' he said. ‘Once upon a time, my people had things—devices and ideas—which, for the purposes of this story, I will call Finders. These Finders were the glory of our civilisation. For, although our lives are short, too short for what your people would call “a life's work”, we have always been able to do a great deal. If we had been confined to the culmination of many short lives of labour, then our civilisation wouldn't have progressed much further than a village existence, raising gardens, planting orchards, for—think—how much is studied, digested and reflected upon by any of
your
people within their first thirty years? Thirty years is an average lifespan for us. However, when my people sleep—which they do fifteen hours out of any twenty-four—they dream.'

‘Oh,' said Sam. ‘That's why we haven't been able to find you. You've been asleep most of the time.'

‘Yes.'

‘Sorry,' said Sam. ‘I interrupted you.'

Myr drew breath to go on. But Sam had another thought, and interrupted again. ‘So how old are you?'

‘I don't know,' Myr said. ‘But I haven't entered my late-flowering. You see—we have several years of brilliance before we die—then go quite abruptly. Our whole system collapses within a few days.'

‘You must have some very strange traditions,' Sam said. ‘And here you are indulging me with “Once upon a time”.'

Myr gave a respectful nod. ‘I am pleased to indulge you if it helps me persuade you to trust me with your own special knowledge,' he said, then continued his explanation. ‘Insights would come to my people in their dreams. Understandings, formulas, and plans for devices that could “find” whatever we might want or need. Whatever we lacked, our dreams supplied. And what we came to believe about ourselves was that the universe was giving us gifts. That the universe came into our dreams like a loving mother coming in to kiss her sleeping children.'

Sam said, ‘Sorry, I'm not quite getting these Finders.'

Myr gave examples. ‘My people have water Finders that pull abundant clean water out of thin air—or, in fact, from some other part of the universe. We have energy Finders that open gaps through to some pure energy entity—a latently sentient thing that seems only to want an invitation in order to flow through and act kinetically and make things work, an entity that seems simply to delight in making things run in a solid material world.'

‘All right,' Sam said. ‘But my people only know about energy without a brain in its head. So this is hard to imagine.'

‘Is it?' said Myr. ‘Even though you have felt your energy leaving you when you walk into my quarantine field?'

He meant the No-Go. ‘Your quarantine field isn't an entity, is it?'

‘It's powered by one.'

‘Oh,' said Sam. She was beginning to get an itch of understanding—and it frightened her.

‘Then one day,' Myr said, ‘someone by accident made a Finder that invited a monster to come through to them, a monster that worked on minds, and drove people mad, and fed on the resulting chaos. The monster killed almost all of my people—all but those who for some reason were undetectable to it. It seemed not to know they were there. These survivors were, for the most part, people who'd never been able to find things in their dreams, people who were, in the terms of my world, disabled.'

‘You?' said Sam.

Myr nodded. ‘We survivors, the disabled and the very few surviving able, might have chosen to go on as we had, making gardens and purposely playing away our lives, following dreams and finding further treasures. But, instead, we decided to locate the monster—which we named the Wake. We chose to find the Wake, follow it, and make sure it didn't do any more damage, didn't come back to finish what it had begun, or go somewhere else and do to other people what it had done to us. For my people understood that though the Wake had gone, it had
gone on
, making its way through all the invitations we had sent throughout our history. Invitations we made to a supposedly wholly beneficent universe.'

‘So this happened in your lifetime?'

‘No. I say “we”, but I wasn't there. I'm a descendent of survivors. Many generations removed.'

‘Your people have been following this monster for generations?'

‘These monsters. Plural. My ancestors' decision to send volunteers out after The Wake to help other people on unknown worlds was less altruism than a religious response. The way they saw it was this—if for all those years they had been chosen and nurtured, then they should show gratitude by at least trying to mend their mistake. That's our mission—to mend our mistake. Only it has turned into damage control. The original Wake was almost impossible to stop. And, of course, there were other Wakes with the same singular vicious practices—monsters slipping through every opening my people had made.'

Myr paused and waited for Sam to meet his eyes. Once she had, he went on. ‘Some years ago I relieved another of my people from the task of following this Wake. I pursue it, catching it up as it alights and begins to feed, and keeping it corralled so that it can't spread from its entry point to engulf a whole world—as its kin engulfed our world.'

Sam bit her bottom lip and stared at him.

‘You have something to tell me,' he said.

‘You were here before. We've seen the rock drawings. We know that you were here before.'

Myr nodded. ‘This monster, my Wake, is moving through a string of linked worlds in the mathematical and material regularity that your people call “space-time”. Or, more accurately, the Wake doesn't move its whole self between worlds, since only part of it touches down. The rest of it remains where it belongs, out in the “between”, a place where there is no time, or possibly where there is
all
time. My people aren't sure which it is—no time or all time—because though we follow these monsters, or their incursive bits, from world to world, we aren't conscious in the between, and can't make observations.'