Chapter 13

Asparagus & Honeycomb

Like the previous night, I managed to fall asleep without warning. I woke well after daybreak, sprawled across the floor beside the chair I’d been sitting in while surfing, incongruously comfortable apart from chilly bare feet.

Narcolepsy? In a dream?

Narcoleptic dreams?!

Dreams aren’t necessarily sequential. Or logical. They miss whole slices of events.

Maybe just a way of progressing.

Whatever was happening, I had little option but to accept it, grudgingly. Morning rituals of toiletries and breakfast followed, events distinguished only by the difficulty of choosing a new shirt from Ernest’s collection, and the surprise I felt when disrobing at finding Toby’s black device still adhered to my chest – light and subtle enough not to be noticed since its attachment. My injury too surprised me: my toes were blacker than ever, yet without pain and no longer swollen; I could flex them and move about comfortably, barefoot or wearing shoes, with essentially no impairment. It was as if a week of gradual recovery had occurred overnight. Toby’s injection was a wonder.

As I finished breakfast, true to his word, Wilbur returned.

“Hard to believe you’re really an alien,” I said. “Or did I dream that part?”

“You’re dreaming all of it, aren’t you?”

“Right. Silly question. Here’s another? How come I’m getting the guided tour of 2065 from you, an alien, rather than from a local?”

“Shouldn’t you ask your subconscious that?”

“You are evasive today!” I said, standing to wash my bowl. “I’ve already asked it, and it didn’t know. It was also as curious as me to know how you know so much about an alien world.” A sudden realisation. “Alien to you and to me.”

“Yes, I can see how you might think it a bit like the vision-impaired leading the vision-impaired.”

“Blind,” I corrected, patiently. “Leading the blind.”

“The vision-impaired leading the blind,” rehearsed Wilbur, with a mildly uncertain expression.

I bit down my frustration, and returned to my question. “So? Why you? And how come you know so much? Or have you just made it all up?”

“It’s my area of interest. My hobby, you could say. I’ve been studying Earth customs for many years – and its history. That’s how we met. And I must say your historical insights have been invaluable.”

“Ernest the historian’s maybe. But you and I met by the side of a road if I remember correctly.”

“If you remember correctly – a moot point.”

I ignored him. “I still don’t understand why? Did you stumble across me by accident? It didn’t look like it. You had some device you ended up pointing at me, as if you’d used it to find me.”

“That’s exactly what I’d done. It was a tracking device.”

“But how did you know to find me?”

“Because you’d gone missing.”

This made things no clearer to me, and Wilbur must have recognised it in my expression, or perhaps he was employing his Orlanian skills at picking up mood shifts. Whatever it was, he continued. “In your terms, Ernest had gone missing, and I went looking for him. I thought I’d found him too, as did the tracking device. Neither it nor I could tell you two apart.”

I studied him, looking for some sign of deception, but found none. I decided to let the matter rest and move on. “So what’re your intentions for today?” I said. “Memory-jogging or question-answering?”

“I thought we might exterminate a plurality of avians with a solitary large pebble. How would you like to meet an old friend?”

“I’d like that a lot, if only I had any old friends here.”

“An old friend of Ernest’s then?”

“Will he tongue-kiss me?”

“I doubt she will – she’s happily married.”

“O.”

“Her name’s Dianne Knight, Jibilee’s plurocrat.”

“Plutocrat?”

“Plurocrat.”

“What’s that? A plutocrat with a split personality?”

“A plurocrat is the colloquial name for an elected plurocratic representative.”

“Plurocratic?”

“Plurocracy is the participatory form of democracy I mentioned. I called Dianne yesterday and filled her in on your… situation. She’s agreed to spend some time with you today. You’ll find her more than able to answer any questions you might have about plurocracy, or pretty much anything else for that matter. And with any luck, she may even do something to revive your memory.”

“Never give up hope do you?”

He did not answer but gave me a timid smile.

We left soon after, but not until I’d shaved – Wilbur, at my request, identified the shaver as a battery-driven cylinder barely larger than a forefinger; I’d mistaken it as possibly a marital aid.

While walking to Dianne’s house, I asked, “How come you’ve never taken me to Ernest’s parents? Judging by the prominent photo in his lounge, they’re important to him – potential memory triggers.”

“Possibly. Though not as likely as Mattie. But they moved north some years ago, and it’d be impractical for you to meet them in person. A teleconference might work, but I’d rather not trouble them over your condition. The likelihood is, you’ll have your memories back in the near future without them needing to know. Your mother, in particular, is something of a worrier. Or so you’ve said.”

On the road, an elderly man on a bicycle whizzed past us at great speed. Surprisingly fit, I thought, until I noticed he wasn’t pedalling. There was a small box near the gears, a battery-driven motor according to Wilbur.

As we walked, I couldn’t resist raising the subject of Wilbur’s behaviour towards Laura the day before. “You seemed keen. Are human-Orlani relations possible?” I jolted to a momentary halt as some of the possibilities of sex with a shapeshifter came to mind.

“Extremely possible,” said Wilbur, without expression.

Name your fantasy. All sizes available. Try our Yum Cha.

“But reproduction cannot occur. In any case, with Laura, I was merely trying to behave as a typical human male would around a female widely regarded as attractive and desirable. It helps me understand your species if I try to get inside your skin, so to speak.”

“I thought you were trying to get inside Laura’s skin.”

Soon after, we encountered a pre-schooler sitting on the ground in a house’s front yard, his back against a tree trunk, sobbing uncontrollably. Wilbur did not hesitate to kneel next to the boy and try to placate him. Asked the source of his distress, the boy could not force out words between sobs, but instead pointed upwards at a kite lodged high in the tree’s branches.

“Don’t worry,” said Wilbur, soothingly, “I’ll get it.” He held up his arm so that his wrist bracelet was directly in front of the boy’s eyes, which widened almost at once, just as his sobbing suddenly stopped.

Wilbur stood, lifted his arm to point at the kite, and with little apparent effort, gradually elongated it. I was reminded of a fire truck’s ladder as Wilbur’s arm stretched many metres, thinning as it went, until his fingers grabbed the kite. Then, just as casually, he retracted the arm to its normal length and handed the kite to the boy, whose tearful demeanour was now replaced by a mixture of awe and relief.

Instant giraffe, I thought to myself. Like a Marvel comic had come to life.

“Handy ability, this shape-changing of yours,” I said soon after, having left a now much happier child behind us. “Must be particularly useful in crowded trains.”

“Not to mention police line-ups,” said Wilbur, smiling enigmatically.

“You’d never need to diet, would you? Just make yourself taller.”

We walked in silence for a few minutes, before turning into a street I hadn’t seen before. It made all the others seem ordinary. There were the same types of houses (though the opposite side of the street was undeveloped bush), but footpaths were all painted with idiosyncratic designs, and nature strip bushes were crafted into three-dimensional flower sculptures augmented by wooden and metal figurines, and smaller objects: garden gnomes, elves, fairies, hobbits, dragons, other mythical beasts. Paper lanterns and mobiles of many materials hung from tree branches overhanging footpaths. In the nature strips of some houses were brightly painted seats and benches, one next to a large tree occupied by a young child talking quietly to another dangling from a sturdy low branch. And there were other more subtle features I could not quite sort out in my head. Part landscaping, part construction, part art, it was both striking and charming.

“Hello, Jeff,” said Wilbur, looking across the road. There, near one wooden sculpture like a Native American totem pole but with faces of different ethnicities, was an odd thin fellow with chisel and hammer in hand, wearing paint-strewn coveralls. His hair and beard: wild and thin. His eyes: gleaming with disarming intensity, but his expression unmistakably one of deep absorption. At Wilbur’s words, he looked up briefly, waved perfunctorily, then returned to his work.

“He did this?” I asked Wilbur quietly.

“Yes. Something of a success story. Jeff is a loner and a difficult personality. He’s tried many jobs but he simply can’t work with others. Too difficult, obstinate, opinionated. For a few years, he gave up, didn’t even look for work. But I think it must have bored him to distraction, because one day he started painting the driveway of his home – doodling. When his surprised neighbours and others complimented him, he extended the painting to the footpath, and eventually to this.” He beckoned to the streetscapes. “He still socialises minimally, but at least he waves to people now. And he looks happier, especially when working.”

A small gnome-like sculpture reminded me of a scene from a movie I saw not long before with my kids: an animated version of ‘The Wizard of Oz’, complete with yellow-brick road and computer-generated munchkins that looked more real than those of the Judy Garland version. It resurrected an earlier theory I’d briefly entertained, or a variation of it. Could I be trapped in a virtual reality? Was this a hoax after all? If so, it was too elaborate to be real, but could it all have been programmed? Was I on something like the holodeck of the USS Enterprise? I wasn’t aware that virtual reality technology was this sophisticated and life-like, but maybe that was ignorance on my part. I found I could not dismiss the possibility.

I dwelled on the idea for the rest of the walk to Dianne’s, scanning hopefully but vainly for signs of a flaw in the design, an extremity with missing pixels. But Dianne’s was only a few doors down and my search too short for me to think it conclusive.

When she greeted us at her front door, I was not surprised she did not seem familiar. Probably in her thirties, she was short, unprepossessing, with a round face, close-cropped brown hair, a slight cleft above her wide chin, a straight nose and freckled skin. Her eyes, however, were striking: wide and of an intense green I could not remember seeing before – made even more striking by their frequent bouts of rapid blinking. She wore a plain pale tan shirt and ordinary blue denim jeans, the very opposite of Ernest’s garish tastes.

Wilbur showed no reaction when I failed to recognise Dianne. Instead, while still on the doorstep, he explained that he was going to leave me with her, so he could attend to some pressing concerns of his own. He headed off before I could inquire further, adding that he would drop by my (Ernest’s) house at eleven o’clock the next day to accompany me to the hospital for the scheduled tests.

“Come in,” said Dianne, as Wilbur left. “Make yourself comfortable. I have Gino with me at the moment, fixing the washing machine. You’ll have my full attention as soon as he’s finished.”

“Ah-hah!” came a muffled voice from another room. “Stone.”

I started. Someone’s recognised me at last, I thought.

I followed Dianne into a laundry, where a short white-haired middle-aged fellow in coveralls, lying on a large towel on the floor, was studying the base of a washing machine tipped on its side. He had a small component in one hand, and was prodding it with a screwdriver. A large box of tools was on the floor nearby.

“See?” he said, standing quickly and pointing at a tiny stone lodged within the component. “Won’t drain with this. Stuck between rotor blades and casing.” He passed the component to Dianne who studied it. Then he noticed me for the first time. “Hello, Ernest,” he said, a Mediterranean accent apparent. “How you going?”

My sudden hopes evaporated. “Hi,” I said, without enthusiasm.

“So it was a pump failure like I thought,” said Dianne.

Gino shook his head. “Pump is fine, I think, just jammed because of pebble.” He directed a wry smile at Dianne. “Not covered by warranty.”

Dianne shrugged, and handed the component back to Gino, saying, “So much trouble from so small a thing.”

“What my wife often says about me,” said Gino, removing the stone.

I stood idly by, stewing about the loss of my false hope, as Gino put the washing machine back together. Dianne watched intently the whole time, never still for a moment – in keeping with her rapid blinking, her fingers tapped, rubbed, flexed, almost constantly shifted in seemingly random movements. And she periodically stepped to one side or the other, nervous energy abounding.

When Gino put the machine upright again, and tested it, water gushed into the sink. “There,” he said to Dianne, “pump is fine. You followed enough to handle it next time?”

“Think so,” said Dianne, still fidgeting. “Can you trust me?”

“Can you trust yourself? You could have got schematics off the Net and tackled it. You have before.”

“Yes, well,” said Dianne, looking uncomfortable, and suddenly rigid – even her fingers were still. “After my last effort on the fridge, I didn’t dare. A horrendously botched attempt, you called it.”

Gino gave an abrupt laugh. “No. I said the aftermath looked like something by Hieronymous Bosch. A joke. But you learned a lot, right? You’re good at DIY repairs. Keep at them – save me trouble.” He closed his toolbox and started to move out of the laundry. “Your computer?” he said to Dianne.

“Of course,” she replied, following him, her fidgeting movements returning.

I followed them both like a lost dog. The thought crossed my mind that although Dianne’s house, like Ernest’s and Wilbur’s, did not display obvious conspicuous consumption, neither did it suffer a lack of appliances and consumables. All houses I had been in had washing machines for instance, which one might have thought a future like this would have shared, one for every few houses perhaps. But then I remembered what Wilbur had explained about energy production and how goods were built to be efficient and durable. A washing machine in every household then seemed less odd (although I assumed anywhere that had denser living arrangements might well involve some shared goods).

In the living room, Gino started recording on Dianne’s computer what I could see was a description of the work he’d just performed. He went into considerable detail. He asked Dianne to verify that all was in order, then she pressed an icon marked ‘Pay’.

“See you,” he said, as we followed him outside. After the usual thanks and responses, he left, toolbox in hand. He put his toolbox on a bicycle’s carry-rack and cycled away. Presumably, he lived close by.

“Was all that recording of his work necessary?” I asked Dianne, as I followed her back into the house.

She seemed stunned by the question, and stopped in her tracks. Then she must have remembered my supposed amnesia. “Absolutely,” she finally said. “It’s needed for next year’s CAPE-planning. After all, the time required to make all necessary repairs is a fairly hard thing to anticipate, especially with goods becoming more durable and reliable. Planning tends to err on the side of caution, though, so repair work is often over-budgeted. This makes the working week and prices higher than really needed, but the difference usually isn’t much, provided we keep good records of the repairs actually done.”

“Does that mean Gino works less than seven hours a week?”

“Most weeks, I suspect. Especially when people like me try to do the work for him.” Her fingers and eyelids, I noticed, now fidgeted to the rhythm of her words.

“I don’t understand why that doesn’t worry him. He actually seemed keen for you to do his work. How safe can that make his job?”

“His job is safe, as long as he does it – however long it takes. More to the point, his income isn’t affected by how much others know. Teaching others to increase their self-sufficiency doesn’t deprive him of a living, it just reduces his workload, which contributes to a shorter working week for all.” She began walking again. “I hope you don’t mind, but I just remembered I have to do something urgent in the garden. You can join me if you like, or else you’re welcome to wait here until I’m finished.”

“No, I’ll go with you.”

We passed through the house, into the back yard. It was similar to Ernest’s, with screening bushes on all sides, but there was no vegetable garden.

A small detached building stood near one hedge. Through its windows, I could see a short, wiry, balding man hovering over a workbench and tinkering with something resembling a small motor. He saw us approach and waved. Growing accustomed to greetings from complete strangers, I waved back.

“Am I supposed to know him?” I asked Dianne, as we continued to walk toward the back of the yard.

“Yes,” she said, smiling widely. “You went to school with him. David, my husband. Working, as usual, on the phase transformation engine.”

“An engineer?”

“He’d like to think so, but it’s really just a hobby. He says he’s making progress.”

Approaching a corner of the yard, I realised the screening bushes ended here just as I thought they did at Ernest’s: there was a gap we could walk through before another row of bushes started a metre or so behind the first. The second row only barely overlapped the first, but extended in the other direction to fully screen the neighbour’s back yard.

Behind both rows was a new shock: a vast vegetable garden, with fruit and nut trees, a large pond full of water lilies and ducks, and a sizeable chicken coop, all tended by several people. One old gent had a fishing line drooping in the pond.

It was like a small farm, but surrounded by rows of screening bushes, and interspersed at strategic points with tall native trees – an odd hybrid of natural bush and intensive small-scale agriculture.

Yvette probably would have been in seventh heaven, but I found it daunting. It was like I’d been thrown back into a distant time. It reminded me of nothing so much as an elaborate form of the Second World War’s victory gardens I had read about long ago at school. “Whose is this?” I asked, as we made our way to what looked like a large tool shed near the centre of the garden.

“Ours,” said Dianne. My face must have betrayed my lack of comprehension. “The thirty houses that border the garden,” she added. “The neighbourhood.”

Something in the way she said those words made it clear to me: “It’s part of the city design, isn’t it?”

“Yes. Most areas of Chord have a neighbourhood garden in every block.”

As we neared the tool shed, one of the people tending the garden – an elderly man in a cane hat turning soil over with a large garden fork – noticed us, stopped his work, and began to approach.

“Uh-oh,” said Dianne quietly. Her fidgeting ceased. “I know what this is going to be about.” She waved to the man approaching us, and said more loudly, “Morning Shane.”

He stopped a generous distance from us, and leant lightly on his fork handle. He ignored me and fixed his gaze on Dianne. “The asparagus will not last forever.”

“True,” replied Dianne, “but with a lifetime of twenty-five years, it’s as close as most vegetables get to immortality.” With that, Shane’s humourless expression grew more stern. Dianne relented. “I’m just about to pick it now,” she said. “That’s why I’m here.”

Shane stared at her. “You said that yesterday,” came his eventual reply. “If you are not interested, I will do it.”

“No,” Dianne responded politely, “I’ll do it. I want to – really.”

He continued to stare at her for several icy seconds. Then: “If they are still there tomorrow morning, I will pick them,” Shane warned, moving off. “I will not see them wasted.”

Dianne shook her head, then moved towards the tool shed.

“Property dispute?” I said, following her inside.

She gave me an amused smirk, then, resuming her presumably unconscious accompaniment of blinking and finger-fluttering, said, “Of course not. You know the harvest is shared. O, right, you don’t remember. Let me remind you. Last year, I was so busy with representative duties, I forgot to pick the asparagus. Just before they were too far gone, but still past their prime, Shane did it for me. He’s very fond of asparagus, and he’s never trusted me since. I suppose it’s fair enough. I mean, they are about the most trouble-free vegetable in the whole garden – they need almost no attention for two thirds of the year, and only a few minutes of harvesting every few days for the rest. It isn’t like it’s anything onerous to interfere with my work. One reason the neighbourhood decided I could look after it. It’s just I forget to do it sometimes.” She took a basket and a small knife from the well-stocked tool shed shelves (which must have held five to ten of nearly every tool imaginable) and moved outside.

“So you have to take on some work in this garden?” I asked her as we headed toward the asparagus plot.

“O no,” she said with a wide grin, “there’s no onus on anyone to take part. But few households don’t have at least one member who wants to. I mean, there’s the oddbod like Wilbur who insists on having his own vegetable garden and not working in the neighbourhood one, but most families are keen to take part.” She moved her forearm in a narrow arc, indicating the garden. “A few even have their own backyard garden as well. Fresh food is hard to resist once you get a taste for it.”

My heart skipped a beat. Dianne’s last sentence was one of Yvette’s favourite sayings, word-for-word. What was my subconscious doing to me? Was it trying to tell me I should take more notice of my wife?

I looked about us, astounded by the abundance of food. I was also surprised by how close the pond was to the vegetable plots, and wondered what would happen in a heavy rain. “How do you stop the pond overflowing into the vegetables?”

“It’s linked to the underground water reserve. Like the street drainage system, any excess feeds into larger city and regional water reserves. Of course water tanks make most houses more or less independent anyway.”

“I didn’t notice any tanks in your yard.”

“You wouldn’t – they’re underground.”

I looked about at the vegetable plots. They were dense and productive, dauntingly so. “Are there any real farms left, or is this enough to survive on?”

“We can be self-sufficient, at times, at least for some fruit and vegetables, but mostly the garden just supplements farm produce. Farms are indispensable, not just for crops like wheat, but for vegetables like these too – especially for areas that can’t grow specific crops. You won’t find many bananas or mangos around here, for instance – most come from farms up north. And then there’s the meat-vat manufactories.”

I barely halted in time as a chicken crossed my path, racing past and clucking loudly as it tried to evade a rooster not far behind it. I sighed deeply, then waved vaguely at the vegetable garden. “And is this – this arrangement – typical? In other cities?”

“In the newer ones, yes, and increasingly in older ones as they are re-designed. But of course there are limits. You can refurbish the more crumbling eco-insensitive houses and add neighbourhood gardens, or turn central business district skyscrapers into residences full of hydroponic gardens. But there are some old manufacturing and industrial buildings beyond help. Just not cost-effective to do anything with them except tear them down and start again.”

“I—you mean…” I wasn’t sure I understood, but I was struck by a faint glimmering of the possible ramifications of what she was saying, and of what I’d heard already about old boundaries no longer existing and new names being adopted for new areas. “Are you saying population centres like Melbourne are being completely re-made?”

“More or less.” She stopped at the extensive asparagus plot, knelt down, began cutting spears and placing them in the basket. “Instead of urban sprawl blanketing the landscape, the old metropolises are being turned into something like a honeycomb structure – like Jibilee and Chord – at least as far as possible: buildings mixed in with natural spaces. Land outlying the boundaries of the metropolises and well beyond into rural areas is progressively being refashioned into networks of smaller, semi-independent and largely self-sustaining new cities. These provide homes for people from the least habitable areas of the metropolises, as their buildings are cannibalised and materials recycled – the vacant land that results is either redeveloped for sustainable living or turned into farms, parklands, natural bush, or other soothing spaces. The same thing is happening worldwide: metropolises and megalopolises in developing and developed nations alike are slowly and creatively disintegrating. And just in time, too. They were clearly breaking down, too unwieldy and monstrously over-sized to function properly. Now we have more modest sized cities. Optimally sized cities. And we no longer impose ourselves on the environment, but blend in with it, cohabitate.”

“It must be a massive task,” I said, not believing a word of it. “To renovate entire cities.”

“Yes, it is. We might have a one-hour working week otherwise. But in previous centuries, entire metropolises have been built in just a few decades – and at the same time as a lot of other genuinely useless work was done – if that’s possible, thorough renovation is hardly beyond us.”

That kept me quiet for a while. I just watched her gather asparagus, and looked about me. Was that a koala in one of the trees?

How much longer was this impossible dream going to continue? Although Dianne looked nothing like Yvette, she reminded me of her. It was more than her use of one of Yvette’s favourite sayings – perhaps her ecological consciousness or understated optimism. Whatever it was, it was beginning to make me more conscious of Yvette’s absence. And the kids. And my real life.

To distract myself from burgeoning homesickness, I attempted more conversation. Remembering why Wilbur had left me with Dianne, I asked, “So which party are you?”

She looked at me in obvious confusion, before suddenly brightening. “O, you mean political party!” She grinned widely and resumed her asparagus cutting. “I’m not a member of any.”

“You’re an independent?”

“You could say that. All representatives are independent. There are no political parties.”