ROSALEEN LOVE
ROSALEEN LOVE is an Aurealis Award winner and one of Australia’s best short story writers. Her deliciously wry, funny, and ironic stories have gained her international attention. She writes about science in a variety of ways, from the academic study of the history and philosophy of science and future studies, to science fiction. Rosaleen has worked as a university lecturer in both the history and philosophy of science and professional writing and is currently a Senior Academic Associate in the Faculty of Arts at Monash University, Clayton, Australia.
Her writing career began in 1983 when she won the Fellowship of Australian Writers, State of Victoria Short Story Award. Since then, she has published three brilliant short story collections: The Total Devotion Machine and Other Stories, Evolution Annie, and The Traveling Tide. Her stories have been included in mainstream as well as science fiction anthologies and magazines in Australia, Great Britain, and the United States. Her most recent nonfiction book is Reefscape: Reflections on the Great Barrier Reef. She is currently working on a collection of essays.
The wild confection of a story that follows could have only been written if Rosaleen were channelling Isaac Asimov, R.A. Lafferty, Richard Feynman, George O. Smith, Agatha Christie, and Gertrude Stein.
You’ll see...
* * * *
Mikey rang Lula whenever Earth was pointing in the right direction in the torsion field. ‘I’ll be quick. I’ve not much time before the field drive flips me over to the other side. I have to tell you something.’
That was why, when Lula was a child and the phone rang, she rushed to be the first to pick up. Sometimes the calls were for her.
With everyone else, Lula chattered away on the phone, but with Mikey she learned the value of listening. From call to call, Mikey taught Lula the principles of zero point energy, and what the view was like from the other side of the Milky Way.
Lula grew up knowing all about dark energy, except nobody else had ever heard of it, and it was hard to tell people about Mikey’s calls from the other side of the galaxy. Lula absorbed the lessons of the torsion field, not knowing where and when they might come in handy.
It is not surprising that Lula grew up to be a futurist, her mind open to the realities of life on other worlds, firm in her conviction that one day she would meet Mikey somewhere out there, if not in the flesh, then in an alternate mode of existence that might, conceivably, be better.
One day Lula was summoned to the office of Creighton Trucking and Aerospace, her biggest client. She advised as a consultant, juggling the strategic plans, doing the vision stuff. Bread and butter work. Creighton was her favourite client. They were into transport, but wanted to be in aerospace. ‘That’s what I call visioning,’ said Lula whenever she dealt with them.
Lula dropped by at the office of Lucille and Gaynor, assistants to the boss.
‘We called you in, Lula, because we didn’t know where else to go.’ Lucille dressed butch but girly with it, her name embroidered in pink roses on the pocket of her khaki coveralls.
‘We called you in, Lula, because we knew you wouldn’t laugh.’ Gaynor dressed girly but butch with it, her trucker’s T-shirt teamed with a layered purple skirt.
‘We think the company may be in some kind of trouble, but we don’t know what.’ Lucille prodded the numbers on the fax machine.
Models of spacecraft, rockets, and landing modules hung from the ceiling of Creighton Trucking and Aerospace. A huge mural covered one wall, showing trucking, heading out from Earth towards the moon, Mars and beyond. The truckers wore spacesuits. The astronauts drove trucks. Rays from a benevolent smiling sun beamed down from above. A rainbow arced from one wall across the ceiling to the opposite side of the room.
As Lucille poked the fax machine, it suddenly sprang into action. A sheet of paper chattered its way from one side to the other.
Lucille froze. Gaynor jumped.
‘That fax,’ said Gaynor, ‘That’s part of the problem. Oh, Lula, it’s Hitcher! He’s disappeared. Here one minute, gone the next.’
‘Hitcher, he said this, “I’ve come to warn you ...” and then, when I turned round to ask him what he was on about, he wasn’t there.’ Lucille sobbed. ‘He was standing right here, by the fax.’
Gaynor said, ‘I suppose, it’s only part of the problem to say he’s disappeared, but then, he wasn’t meant to be here in the first place. So you could say the problem isn’t that he disappeared, it was that he was here at all.’
‘It’s like he came in one day, materialised, I think now, looking back on it, I think that must be what he did. You see, I’d been asking Gaynor for an assistant, when she went off on holidays, and Gaynor went off, and Hitcher appeared. So I thought she’d arranged it.’
‘But I hadn’t,’ said Gaynor.
‘He was standing beside the photocopier when I came in, looking a bit shaky and I saw him, thought, well, he’s the temp, he’s been sent to help me through this busy patch.’
‘No way,’ said Gaynor, ‘I haven’t a clue who he is, where he’s come from.’
Lucille said: ‘There were times ... he was a bit sparky, you know, like he’d get near pieces of electrical equipment and sparks would fly? I did wonder about that, what he was wearing. He looked like he wasn’t really comfortable in his clothes. As if he wasn’t comfortable in his skin. But what he was wearing, you know, it was just like me. These coveralls, and his name, Hitcher, in roses just like mine, and I’ve never had any problem with static.’
‘I want to get this straight,’ said Lula. ‘There’s this guy, who’s gone now, who was a bit sparky and who didn’t fit his clothes, his skin, whatever ...”
‘The first time I thought something was odd. I asked him to photocopy and he went across and did this thing he does, all sparky, and he gave me the photocopies, but then I realised I hadn’t given him the code to type in. But perhaps I’d left my number keyed in, it wasn’t cancelled, my number? And he was here all day, being helpful, you know, a whiz at filing and he checked out the computer and it works so much better now.’
‘Now, here’s the really weird bit...’ said Gaynor.
‘Then after about a week, Gaynor rang in, and I said it was great having help, I was getting the backlog all sorted out? And she said, I never sent anyone? And I said to Hitcher, where are you from, who are you, and that’s when he said, I’ve come to warn you, and I turned away because the fax machine went berserk, and all the phones rang at once, and there were sparks flying everywhere, and when I turned back, Hitcher was gone and there was an odd smell of burning nylon in the air.’
Lula listened with mounting excitement. It was something she’d been waiting for all her life, without knowing quite what it would be. Hitcher was her kind of man. Materialising. Spontaneously combustible. Here one minute, gone the next.
‘And we’re like, an aerospace company. Was he some kind of spy from, I don’t know, some of the big guys, like, Lockheed? Boeing?’ Lucille sat down.
Gaynor stood up. ‘Except, you know, Lula, we’re not really yet into aerospace. It’s just we want to be, when it happens. We’re really just truckers, but we want to truck to space.’
‘I know,’ said Lula, ‘Most forward thinking of you.’
‘Should I tell the boss? What can I tell the boss? Hitcher got through security somehow. He got through the usual checks, and then he said I’ve come to warn you. And he looked so sad, just before he left.’ Lucille stood up.
Gaynor sat down. ‘It’s not like we’re big time, like NASA. It’s the boss’s baby, this rocket. He wants to send it to the moon. It’s a new kind of propulsion he’s into, but it’s not like it’s going to run Boeing out of business. Or Lockheed. It’s just a prototype, a model just two metres long. I don’t know anything more about it. It’s the guys in R&D who do that stuff.’
‘He came to warn us, Lula,’ said Lucille, ‘as if something is about to happen. We’ve got some consultancy money left over, enough for a day. Take it. Spend the rest of the day looking round. See what you can find.’
‘Do something, Lula, we need your help. So we can go to the boss and not look so stupid,’ Lucille pleaded.
Lula took the job, not knowing what it was, and feeling way in over her head in either industrial espionage, or fraud, whatever. All she knew, she wanted to find out as much as she could, and fast. She wanted to meet Hitcher. If it wasn’t already too late.
‘We do have a photo. There’s a camera in the corridor, and we got Charlie from Security to print one off for us.’
Hitcher was dark, serious, unsmiling, as if the weight of the universe lay on his hazy shoulders.
Lula took the photo and asked around. She soon found everyone knew Hitcher. To Ross in the law department, he was Mitch, the consultant sent to sort out intellectual property issues. To Bill in trucking, he was Pitcher, an IT whiz with the rosters. To Fletcher in finance, he was Pushka, the tax expert invited to tidy the year’s returns. At the factory site, he was Hutch, the spot welder.
Ross, when pressed for more information, got a bit huffy. ‘What do you want to know about Mitch for? That stuff’s commercial-in-confidence. I’ll tell you one thing though. Loved his suit. Armani three-button pinstripe flat-front... to die for.’
It was with the engineers that Lula found her first lead. George said, ‘I want to use the rules and get the right answer. I want this rocket to stay in the air, go where I want it, and come back.’
‘It’s this guy, you know him?’
‘Hutchkin? He was great. He’s this physicist sent from head office. Hutchkin said, when I showed him what the problem was, “It won’t work, that way, not like that it won’t.” All that torsion field stuff was like way above my head.’
‘Torsion field?’ Lula made a note.
‘Yup. Never heard of it till then, but now I do. It wasn’t rocket science, it was quantum physics. The wave function of the universe? Never heard of it. But the way he explained things, it made sense. He gave me rules to follow.’
‘What rules?’
‘The law of conservation of energy, for starters. I mean, I know all that, but the way Hutchkin put it, it’s the law of conservation of dark energy that you’ve got to take into account, and when I did that, and I tell you, we’re the only rocket company in the world working on dark energy as rocket propellant, then a few things clicked into place, and the next rocket we launched was a right zippy little sparkler.’
‘Did you happen to notice what he was wearing?’
‘Blundstones. Plaid shirt. Jeans.’
‘Like you?’
‘Just like me. He’s an engineer.’
At the end of the day, Lula reported back to Lucille and Gaynor. ‘Multi-skilled. He’s been all over. Hitch, he turns up when and where he’s needed, as if he knows he’s needed. Then he leaves, but people aren’t too puzzled, because he was only a temp, or a consultant.’
‘He knows all about the business?’ Lucille asked. ‘We’ve got to tell the boss. Big Charlie won’t like it.’
Hitcher, Pushka, Mitch, whatever, came when he was needed and fixed things up. He went where he wanted, no passes, no keys, no passwords. He appeared. He disappeared. Lula felt a prickle on the back of her hands, the thrill of the chase. Hitcher was her kind of man. If indeed he was a man. Could be, he was more like a collection of molecules brought together by the torsion field, so that now you see him, now you don’t, as he dissolved and vanished into the ethereal wind.
* * * *
I’ve come to warn you, said Hitcher — and then he was gone. What he meant to say, in the moments following the moment he wasn’t there any more, was this: I’ve come to warn you, it’s not a good idea doing what you’re doing in R&D, creating a bubble universe in a jet propulsion stream while that fax machine in Lucille’s office is sparking with sleptrons and neutralinos because of this trapped O-type Q-ball I’m trying my best to free. Only minutes from now the gravity lens will be in full refractory mode, and all hell will break loose. Furthermore, Lucille, as a friend, I have to say with that fax machine of yours, the reason why half the faxes you send never arrive is because in its inner workings six laws of your universe (though not of mine) are being violated with every pulse of the ink jet feed.
And if he’d managed to say all that, Lucille would never have taken it all in, except for the bit about the fax machine, which, intuitively, she would recognise as true.
* * * *
Hitcher’s story: What Lucille can’t yet know, is, I’m inside the fax machine, looking out. It’s what I came here to fix — this Q-ball that’s been the problem with the fax machine. Q-balls — they’ve been roving round the universe since the Big Bang, and mostly, they’re no problem. They just zip though materials like these machines and out the other side, and straight through the centre of the Earth, and off to the edge of the universe, much the same now as when they were first created. This Q-ball though, it’s been warped a bit, got its O-field in a Mobius knot and it’s stuck here. Playing up.
When I say I’m looking out from the edge of the Q-ball, it’s only in a manner of speaking. I’m more tweaking the space-time continuum, twisting the geodesic warp drive, and throwing a gravity wave round a corner and behind. All to keep this Q-ball stable. For as long as I can.
Time to send a fax.
Fax: For Lula
From: Hitcher
I have come to warn you . . .
The fax machine burst into flames. A piece of paper, singed at the corners, flew out of the machine and clear across the room, scattering sparks as it went.
Lucille tugged the electricity cord from the socket.
Gaynor poured coffee on the flames.
Lucille picked up the fax by an unburned edge. ‘Hey, it’s from Hitcher! For you, Lula.’
‘How’s he know about me?’ asked Lula.
‘I’ve come to warn you,’ said Lucille. ‘It’s what he said to me.’
‘That fax machine’s a write-off,’ said Gaynor.
‘Forever,’ said Lucille.
As the instant coffee with its dose of artificial sweetener hit the flames, the dark energy from the rogue Q-ball made a break for it. The entity known as Hitcher was ready. Taking advantage of the instability in the space-time sub-axis, Hitcher thinned his consciousness one slepton thick and spread it round the inside surface of the Q-ball. He went with the flow, then sucked himself back, one squark at a time. Then Gaynor picked up the fire extinguisher and threw foam on the caffeine-slepton mix. That was it. That did it. The bulge redoubled its efforts, the dark matter inside the Q-ball not quite meeting the matter outside. The O-field tightened the Mobius knot and caught a ride on the gravity wave.
The Q-ball sphere expanded to embrace first the coffee, then the foam, and then Lula, Lucille, and Gaynor.
‘Aarrkkk,’ said Gaynor, as the room fell away and expanded outwards in a sphere of light. ‘Uh Uh Uh.’
‘That fax machine, it always was big trouble,’ said Lucille, as she slipped into a new state of being.
‘So this is what it’s for, dark energy and such.’ Lula opened her mind to the bright new world.
The sphere expanded rapidly. Squarks co-exist with quarks, sleptons with leptons, each occupying their own space in the universe of spaces; dark matter occupying, as it does, the interstices within un-dark matter. Q-balls are the stuff of dark matter. It’s not like matter and anti-matter, where the two meet, but in explosion, Boom! A new black hole. More, matter and dark matter actually co-exist within the framework of the universal laws of nature, violating only those laws that were meant to be broken. Faster than light travel becomes possible, though technically not so. Conversion of matter to dark energy, and (possibly) back again may happen, depending on the proportionate implosion of cosmic anarchy.
Hitcher did his best to stop the inside getting to the outside and the outside getting to the inside. On the outer surface of the Q-ball the conscious entities that were Gaynor, Lucille and Lula found instantaneous transformation. They are the creatures of quarks and leptons. Hitcher is the stuff of squarks and sleptons. Matter encounters dark matter, and the universe is forever changed.
— Welcome. We are Hitcher-Mitch-Pitcher-Pushka-Hutch-Hutchkin. Hitcher.
— We are Lula-Lucille-Gaynor.
— Gurgle. Glug. Waark.
— Not Gaynor. Not talking yet. What’s happened? What have you done?
— It wasn’t me. This O-type Q-ball, it’s bad news. I’m trying to get rid of it.
— Hitcher, Lucille here. You weren’t truthful. You said you were a temp.
— I never said I was.
— You let me think you were.
But you would never have believed me, if I told the truth.
The entity that was Hitcher strained at the seams, doing its best to keep a tight grip on the edges.
Lula looked out on the office where she has just a few minutes before been standing, upright, possessed of her usual two arms, two legs, body and head, then a normal regular human woman, now, what was she? Now it was as if she was looking at the world from the perspective of a consciousness smeared atoms thin over the surface of a rapidly growing sphere. She couldn’t see her arms or legs, or Lucille or Gaynor, though she sensed them close to her, and Hitcher, if that was really Hitcher, the voice coming from within her head — her brain, no her mind, whatever it was. Hitcher appeared as an extra sense, something that gave her access to a consciousness above and beyond her own, incorporating those close by, Lucille and Gaynor, in the one expanded entity. She sensed the office ceiling looming closer, its spacecraft models swaying in the ethereal wind, until she whooshed up through them, through the roof and into the sky. The building of Creighton Trucking and Aerospace was left behind, and — It’s true, thought Lula, the future truly is a river bearing us away. But this is just not possible.
— In your world, yes, but certainly not in mine. It’s happening.
— Where are we? What are we? Why are we, where we are, what we are? Lula sensed herself leaving the world behind. She saw mountains, rivers and oceans in rapid retreat below.
Oblivious to the panorama, Hitcher continued. — There’s this point now, and from this point, a whole heap of things are possible, might happen, but only some do — only some seem to happen. But what if they all happen, but we don’t know, because we’re caught on this time line here, and not that one over there?
— Like the future is a quiver full of arrows?
— We’re at this point from which the possibilities diverge, but we’ll know only one future that will come of it. But there are others.
Lula watched the Earth shrink in size to a sphere as seen from space.
— I did try my best to fix things before they got to this stage, said Hitcher. — But if you will use dark matter as rocket propulsion at the same time you’ve got a O-type Q-ball stuck in the fax machine, while Ross is trying to patent the intellectual property on stuff he can’t begin to understand, forcing George from R&D to confine the bubble universe in the jet propulsion stream; and as for the income tax complications, you are aware that making mistakes there can make the space-time axis throw a wobbly and — there’s more. Later. Let’s fix this mess first.
— How could we know?
— About Creighton? That it’s a centre for the flux of synergistic energies, on the cusp between the universes of matter and dark matter? You know now.
— Uh Uh Uh.
— It is? But what’s this? Hitcher, is that our Earth down there? And the moon, so tiny ?
— You’ve got it.
— Why are we here? Where are we going?
— Got to go. Can’t stay. The Sun will go neutronic.
— Is that the solar system, Mercury, Venus, Mars?
— Got to get going. We’re heading for a small hole, over near the edge, the containment facility for rogue and errant Q-balls. We’ve got a choice, see? The future here’s like a forked path. The choice is — do nothing, and the Earth explodes. Do something, we get to save it. Some choice. Don’t want the Sun to be a neutron star, no way. Slurps up the sleptons like you wouldn’t believe. No, we’re taking this O-type Q-ball to the cosmic dustbin.
— There’s something you’re forgetting. Us. We didn’t ask for this. It’s like you asked us to step into a cab, and when we do, the driver is wearing a blindfold, and can’t see a thing, and it’s out of control and nobody knows where we’re going. The next thing we do is we all crash together.
Then Lula realised that it’s like she’s always been told: the moment of transition, of transformation, no one ever sees it coming. Change is sudden, sharp and discontinuous. The old gives way to the new. Everything seems clear until the moment when nothing is clear, when the people that once were people, the entity that once was Hitcher, the fax machine that was once a fax machine, become entangled in a mutually transformative experience.
Hitcher says, and he’s the boss of this world, this conjunction of worlds, he knows more about it than they, the collective consciousness of Lula, Lucille and — well not Gaynor, she’s lost her voice in the Ughs and the Erks and the experience has been a bit outside her comfort zone and she’s not coping as well as ...
— Yuk yerk yikes.
Leave her out of it, then, the merging. Lula-Lucille has come to feel it’s perfectly natural somehow to be riding a transparent Q-ball at faster-than-light-speed, on the way to save the planet from destruction.
As a futurist, Lula always followed Dator’s dictum — any useful idea about the future can often appear ridiculous, at least when it is first suggested, before it takes flight. Doors that open all by themselves? Crazy. Rockets that fly to the moon? Impossible. Lula, Lucille and Gaynor riding a Q-ball, on a mission to save the universe from destruction? Totally ridiculous.
Except it was happening.
— I’m a futurist, said Lula of Lula-Lucille, introducing herself properly to Hitcher. — I don’t believe we met, not as the old me, the old you.
— Lula, it’s Lucille here, tell Hitcher we want to go home. Gaynor’s not feeling so good.
The Q-ball grows as it bounces through the universe. Inside the ball two universes co-exist. One is the creation of dark matter. The other, both within and without, is the everyday world of un-dark matter, where on the edge Lula-Lucille and Gaynor exist in a higher state of excitation. Plop, plop, plop, the bubbles of dark matter rise up from under.
— Lula again. Hitcher, we seem to have picked up one of the rings of Saturn.
— Whoops. Give it a wriggle and a shake. Can’t go taking one of the rings of Saturn with us, not where we’re going.
— There it goes. Now about this future, this straight line stuff, past-present-future, even past-present-multiple futures, isn’t that a bit too simple? Aren’t things more intertwined, more like the future already exists in the present, bubbling up from underneath like mud baths in Rotorua or Yellowstone, plop, plop, plop. Ripples spread out and they bump into each other and become all interconnectedy.
— Hitcher here. Interconnectedy? There’s this time here, and the lines go off and diverge and there’s no going back. But what if you can go sideways? Get interconnectedy that way? That’s the Oort cloud down there, by the way.
— We’re starting to get a tail, like a comet.
— Lovely, isn’t it? They’re proto-comets. They can tag along.
— I’d be enjoying this a lot more if I knew where it was going to end.
— Simple enough. Here we have divergent futures and we are jumping between them. Just because it sounds impossible doesn’t mean it is.
— True, said Lula, that’s Dator’s Dictum, to which I adhere, as a principle of my profession.
— It’s not impossible. It is in agreement with the law of the conservation of mutually inconsistent futures.
— Of course, said Lula. I was forgetting what Mikey told me.
— That’s why Mikey thought of you, Lula, because you’d understand.
— It is my kind of thing, said Lula.
* * * *
In the state of cosmic anarchy, exotic matter rules. The solid stuff of hands, faces, legs, arms, eyes, ears is left behind, mere appearances cloaking a deeper quantum reality. Inside the Q-Ball, the O-type energy surges, seething with plopping goo, on a mission to draw the non-Q universe into itself.
— Where are we going? What’s this hole?
— Just a small one.
Inside the Q-ball, Hitcher mobilises his squarks and sleptons. Outside the starry skies whiz past, blurred like in spherical time lapse. Lula-Lucille gets her act together. — This hole, it’ll be the end of the journey?
— As always. But I always think the journey matters more than the end.
— Hitcher, we don’t want to just end. Pfutt. Pfoot. Phut. We didn’t want to come on this trip. You dragged us along. Once you get sucked into a cosmic containment facility, that’s it? End of journey? End of life? We want to go home.
— Hang on here. I have to renormalise the group flow to a fixed point for the emergence from the Galilean substratum.
— Hurk Hark Hirk.
— You mean, to the point where Ohm’s quantum potential acts instantly?
— How’d you know?
— Mikey told me.
— Mikey sent me to you.
— I had this friend, when I was little, Mikey, and he used to send me messages from space, but I never told anyone about him, or I tried to, and nobody believed me.
— Arwvkk Orrkk Warrkkk, Gaynor cries to the void.
Lucille joins in. — Uh Uh Uh Urk.
— We’re talking about the same Mikey, I take it: the multitudinous integrated K-type energy ying thing?
— To me, he was just a friend called Mikey, someone who rang me up from far away, whenever Earth was pointing the right direction in the torsion field. He taught me the principles of dark energy, and that’s why I’m not as surprised as I might be at being here, now. What about you? You know Mikey too?
— We are all aspects of Mikey in the eyes of the universal observer without whom the quantum universe would not continue in existence. That is how I see it. And Mikey sent me to find you. As if he knew you’d help.
The Q-ball is a dark nutshell universe on its way through the larger-scale universe that is the universe of ordinary matter. Q-balls have existed from the beginning of the universe, their dark gravity distorting the paths of visible stars and galaxies. But a rogue and errant Q-ball, just one can hit a neutron star and blow it to pieces.
— Not that your sun is a neutron star, yet, but this Q-ball, this one from your fax machine, why, it only takes one like this to turn rogue on you and guzzle up all the protons and neutrons in the vicinity of Earth. Then before you know it, it spurts out streams of pions and muons, and the resulting Cerenkov radiation will dazzle you all to death. So, got to get to that hole before the end of your universe.
— Do we have to go all the way with you? Can’t we just wait till the torsion field flips us over to the other side. You go visit the hole by yourself.
— We’re getting close.
— We want to go home! Lula now speaks for Lucille and Gaynor, both, for the moment, totally out of it.
— There is another future, you know, in which you never left Creighton Aerospace. You want it back? Time lines diverge, there are many possibilities for many futures. We’re the creatures of an eternally existing self-reproducing multiverse, and this is not the only way for possibilities to be realised.
— We want that part of the multiverse we used to call home.
Lula knew what to do. She had to let Hitcher go. Such a pity, when she’d only just met him, and he seemed a nice enough guy, for a cosmic entity. He was cute, but dead serious, and not a whole bunch of fun, but then, you wouldn’t be, if you had an entire universe to save. But not for nothing had she learned the lessons of the torsion field. All it took was a tweak of the space-time sub-axis, and a twist of the ying co-ordinates thing, and ...
* * * *
In the office of Creighton Aerospace, Lula reported back to Lucille and Gaynor. ‘This is what I’ve found out about Hitcher. Seems he really was sent here to help you. He knows a bit about everything — Renaissance Man. Mate of Big Charlie. Seems Hitcher met the boss on a plane when they sat next to each other in First Class. They got talking and one thing led to another. Hitcher turned up. Did his various jobs. Now he’s gone.’
‘He was a bit of a philosopher, for a temp,’ said Lucille. ‘He was different. I liked him, even if his clothes didn’t fit, and when he spoke he crackled a bit. It’s so hard to find good help, and he was good.’
‘Didn’t something just happen to that fax machine? Some kind of fire?’
* * * *
Lula’s career went from strength to strength. Her mind was truly open. How well she knows the secrets of the universe, that out there in the cosmic void there are dark matter earths and dark matter suns. There are dark matter people and plants and animals and bacteria and viruses. She and her Earth-kind are the stuff of quarks and leptons. Others beyond are the stuff of squarks and sleptons.
So it was that Lula could ask just the right questions at planning meetings to get people sparking off each other. Afterwards, they might wonder what it had been about, as they reached a consensus that was often too whacky to be reported back to the boss. The group statement that came from the meeting would be a pale shadow of the cosmic breakthrough they achieved, together with Lula, where the solution to where the company would be in the future was totally wild and far out of this world. The journey was what they remembered, not the end point, lost in some cosmic generality that was, at the time, both deeply felt and known to be a glimpse of the eternal truths, the essence of which they could never quite remember but which they knew to be the most important thing that had ever happened to them in their lives.
* * * *
AFTERWORD
I’ve long been brooding about the prospect of writing a short story sequence about a futurist detective. I love the feng shui detective short stories of Nury Vittachi, whose detective, C.F. Wong, solves crimes through the logical application of the allegedly scientific principles of feng shui. I wanted to create a character who solves problems using the principles of Futures Studies. For a few years, I moved in futurist circles, and found them a diverse, whacky and congenial group of people. I wanted to write about futurists at work, just as Vittachi fleshed out the work of the geomancer. I’ve made a number of attempts at creating a story sequence, but, as I write, I find it’s either my futurist detective, or, in this case, her sidekick, who speeds towards the far edges of the galaxy on a one-way trip. Perhaps I could try a prequel.
— Rosaleen Love