The Quiet House
By Merri Andrew
Tommo touches the living branches of gum and the dogwood stems, stepping into the brightness and back out like a needle sewing a loose seam. He doesn’t cut live wood anymore, and there is no fallen branch with the right curve. All afternoon he has zigzagged along this strip of thinner bush, almost to the far ridge, and now, as the cold air lifts from the ground with the scent of crushed leaves, he sees that it is an old road.
Back at the hut, his saw rusts beside the tilted step. Tommo reaches into his shirt pocket and takes out one half of a pale blue eggshell the size of a cowrie, still warm from his body. He balances it on the outside windowsill with the tiny marsupial skulls.
Maybe it’s an old road used by woodcutters, overgrown now. He thinks of a black and white photograph: heavy draught horses, thick cut logs, men in collarless shirts not smiling, towered over by the remaining trees. Or perhaps it is even older. The first people to live here, did they make roads? Tommo thinks perhaps they did.
#
The land comes up quickly over the heaving sea. They’re flying low and Mary can see the foam and wet rocks glimmer in the moonlight. Lee pulls the nose of the plane up to clear the cliff and keeps them lifting, higher above the land. They have a grid to follow and only five nights worth of fuel.
They rest through the daytime, the plane covered in grass-colored canvas, the three of them sleeping under it too, in a remote paddock in the north-east of the island. Now, as dark falls again, they are folding the canvas to pack away.
Torven grumbles, “There are no more than one or two, surely.”
He wipes his long hands on his almost creaseless trousers. He has slept fully clothed, outstretched and stiff.
“Well, let’s find out,” Lee says, standing to shake out their arms and legs. They pace off to set out the guide-lights for the take-off.
“I don’t know, Torven,” Mary says quietly. “A lot of people used to move here, trying to escape.”
There had better be more. The Southern Fire Season was only weeks away and the Visitors would not extend the Habitat Zones in southeast Australia unless they received more details.
“Fuck!” says Torven. “What does it matter if a couple of hundred people are missing from the dataset? If they need more, they should come down themselves.”
Mary doesn’t bother to point out that the Visitors’ bodies make that impossible. She has heard plenty about Torven’s views on that topic. Privately, she agrees with the Visitors: it matters. Even if people don’t want to be found, it matters that they exist, and it matters who they are.
Mary opens a new page of her thick black logbook, carefully pressing the red ribbon into its creamy groove. She is the Recorder. She tests her pen on the back of her hand, then wipes the mark off with spit.
#
Tommo’s sister had come to find him, a few years ago, before the restrictions on air travel. How smooth she’d looked. The material of her clothes, her hair, her skin, slightly damp from struggling on foot up the steep road that was now barely wide enough for his old ute. Her voice, as well: smooth. Even puffed and panting, she spoke too fast for his slow mind.
“Tom,” she said — no-one had called him Tom for more than a decade — “you don’t have to stay out here.”
“Don’t have to,” he repeated, the words empty of meaning like over-chewed meat.
“When did Julie leave?” His sister used Amber’s old name, bringing back to him in a rush the suburban house, the smell of cooked lamb and the close chug-chug of her dad’s Holden on the other side of the weatherboard wall. Exotic, ancient: a lost world.
“A few years ago.” He couldn’t remember. He should have kept track of the time somehow. “Back to Melbourne, I think.”
His sister had left food, paper, soap — no alcohol. Quiet filled up the space again under the blue lid of his clearing.
When he is drinking and drawing, he feels that something might come of his squiggles. There might be some bigger design he is working towards. He feels the shape of it, immense behind the walls of the hut. But when he wakes, they disgust him: elven faces and gnarled trees, caves and suns and moons all aimlessly, endlessly spreading over the paper like mold, empty of the force that bears down with the hot sun onto the corrugated iron above him, the crackling hum and chirp of the bush around him.
#
It is their third night. They have only recorded two so far and already Torven is in pain from the heavy goggles that the Visitors sent down. Mary gets the headaches too, but Torven’s are worse. Her goggles only allow her to see the golden lights of the unrecorded: the simple fact of their existence. Torven sees the people themselves; briefly, at least, he knows them. He tells their stories to Mary, and she writes them down to trade with the Visitors, for survival, for protection.
One is a woman living on the flanks of the Great Western Tiers, so deep in a fold that they almost miss her light. They have to double back to be sure, and there it is, gleaming gold out of the dark. Torven tells and Mary records: the woman spends her days following animals, watching them, and if one is injured or sick she takes it home and nurses it. She is trained in some kind of medicine, but she has no money for proper materials or instruments. She uses what she can find in the bush, and in the little general store in the nearby town.
If an animal dies in her care she buries it and marks its grave with a river stone. Torven says the ground near her hut looks like a dry riverbed.
Mary used to envy Torven’s job. But she has grown to prefer her own work, her pen-strokes that mark down their longitude and latitude, her careful handwriting that captures people’s details, always neatly despite the shuddering of the plane. Torven gets to see them as she can’t, but he doesn’t cherish them like she does.
Sometimes Mary thinks she would be at home among the Visitors. She dreams of finding a way to their colony above the Earth, where they remain stranded without the fuel they need to return to their planet. She fantasizes that once the Visitors complete their dataset and use it to catalyze enough fuel, they might let her leave with them.
The other one they saw last night was a young man. Through the goggles they spotted his light immediately, very strong in the blackness of the Midlands. He lives in an old stone cottage, dotted by holes he has patched with grass and mud. There is a stand of thick reeds overgrowing a dam; he makes flutes from the reeds, tiny high ones and larger ones that sing low and sweet like a long breath across the top of an empty bottle. He puts them out on the highway in a sheltered wooden stall, with a jar to collect coins. There are almost no cars passing any more, but still, he leave his flutes for whoever will take them.
Tonight, there are no golden lights. When the sun rises over the east coast, the small plane will return to its daytime nest.
#
Tommo goes to the little library in the Oken Community Information Centre. He knows he could ask the volunteer librarian but spends twenty minutes searching instead, and finally lifts down a copy of The Aboriginal Tasmanians. Under ‘Roads’ in the index he finds several entries, but no maps. The colonial history is easier to find; it’s displayed next to a vase of flowering wattle near the entrance. He reads it all and makes photocopies. Some chemical in the photocopier smells like alcohol. He heads home with his pages, thinking about rewarding himself with a drink.
As the ute struggles up the washed-out, overgrown track, it starts to rain, hard. Clay-colored rivers stream down. Rain comes in through the gap where the passenger-side window won’t close, spattering richly onto the photocopied pages. The sound cheers him. He reaches over and feels the cool drops spread on the smooth paper, then brings them onto his lap, out of the rain.
#
Rain makes their work harder, but not impossible. Lee flies low, relying on the instruments and charts, sticking to the grid. Torven and Mary can see but not hear Lee singing, concentrating, headset transmission switched off. It reassures Mary to see them sing, especially when it’s rough, like tonight.
It is hard to see the ground through the drifts of mist and rain. Mary and Torven watch through their goggles for the gold lights, but the dark and the clouds only reveal the ordinary white lights of the small remaining towns: the people whose stories are already in the Visitors’ caches.
Most people self-recorded within months after news spread about the Habitat Zones, once they realized they didn’t need to give their names or dates of birth. Some told everything, eager to be known; others gave just a few sentences. The Visitors did not seem to mind, as long as the details were specific to that person. And they knew, somehow. People tried sending fabricated entries early on, but these were instantly returned to Earth with a repetition of the original request.
Flying over the dark ground, Mary thinks again about what the humans’ stories look like to the Visitors. She imagines their dataset as a vast array of white lights, gradually turning golden, spilling bit by bit towards the completeness that will tip some switch and power their ship, allowing them to go home. She would like to go home too. But she no longer has a clear sense of where that would be.
At 4am they start to think about heading back, cramped and stiff from hours hunched over in the cabin, finding nothing. Lee has stopped singing. Torven sits with his elbows on his knees, long limbs folded like a praying mantis, not even bothering to look out the window.
Only Mary still hopes. She rests her forehead on the cold glass and tries to focus on the bush below the mist, through the wobbly streaks of rain.
There: a tiny fleck of gold in the dark. Gone. She switches her headset to transmit and tells the others. Instantly they swing their heads down to look, the plane tilting to double back. They take it seriously; a full minute passes before either of them answer.
Torven’s voice crackles in her ear: “I don’t see anything.”
“Me neither,” says Lee.
“Okay,” Mary agrees, “let’s rest.”
She puts away her pen. But she takes out a pencil and writes the coordinates in her book. Only one more night of fuel left.
#
Tommo wakes the usual way, preparing himself for the sick disappointment that generally comes with daylight. He keeps a plastic bottle of water beside his bed for the dryness of his mouth and throat, so that he doesn’t have to panic with choking for too long. Next to that, a flask of brandy, but he doesn’t need it this morning. His eyes come to rest on the pile of photocopied pages. The top one is dimpled by yesterday’s raindrops. His gaze slides over to the window. Outside it is a mild, overcast day. The leaves of the tall gums still flash silvery wet in the sunbeams that come and go. A few heavy drops plonk irregularly onto the hut’s tin roof.
He limps out with his water bottle to sit on the front step. It’s a good day for burning off.
When he and Amber first cleared the block for the hut and the garden, they made a big fire. It was winter, drizzling. They cooked potatoes in foil as the blaze died down, burning their tongues and laughing, wishing they had salt. Monique and Alain had come up, the French couple from the next block down. Monique wore a bright purple jumpsuit that reflected the firelight in metallic ripples. Tommo thought it looked beautiful.
“Real silk,” Amber said later, “totally impractical. They won’t last out here.”
She was right; they’d moved on a year later, once they had their baby girl. Amber only stayed another year herself.
Tommo goes back into the hut and brings the photocopied pages out onto the step — “...a system of well-defined roads or lines of communication which were kept open by firing.”
When he and Amber had arrived, the block was regrowth forest, some big trees taken a long time ago now, the spaces between the gums filled with bracken, dogwood, some tree-ferns, some old sleepers and bricks where a hut had once stood, moss, and sun coming down through the high branches. They wore sandals; the bracken prickled their bare legs. They sat on a massive decaying stump and drank wine and talked about the silence. Thinking back, he knows it was not really silence; it was just the absence of human sounds.
Now, he listens to the birdsong and spattering of rainwater from the shifting branches. It is the quiet of a house without people. He takes a swig of water and goes to check out the back for petrol or kero.
#
Torven is stretched out, sleeping or trying to ignore them, but Mary and Lee can’t sleep. They sit away from the plane under a sheet of dun-coloured canvas strung up between two small eucalypts.
It is milder here in the highlands of this southern island, but the mainland is baked brittle. Things are cracking constantly there; things they hadn’t known could crack: irrigation pipes, shade shelters, skin on the backs of toddlers’ hands.
When people in their Habitat found out they’d be going to Tasmania, some begged to come. But they couldn’t afford the extra fuel. They promised they’d be back, that they wouldn’t abandon them, that they would do their best to get the stories they needed to trade for fresh air, for water, for relief from the scorching winds.
Mary breathes in the cool, moist air and glances at Lee’s face. It is solemn, looking out over the paddock, over the tawny grasses with droplets still quivering on their stems, over the dense short trees that border the flat. A sudden birdcall startles them both and the two of them share a fragile smile.
#
There isn’t much fuel in the jerry can. Tommo has to space it out, splashing a bit every three paces or so, making sure it falls on dry pieces of branch, tufts of brown grass, things that should catch nicely. After about five hundred meters he runs out of fuel. A few steps later he loses the path, the dense branches closing in.
The air is still. No breeze. The smell of rain and leaves comes up from underfoot, as the insects start their sun-loving dances in the upper boughs.
He walks back, following the smell of petrol as well as the path. He can see the path clearly now: more dogwoods, fewer ferns, fewer big gums, more grasses, his own marks of stepped-on leaves, the slide of the shoe exposing wet soil.
He could just walk back and forth a thousand times, he thinks, open it up that way. The matches rattle pleasantly in their box. He slides it open, looking at the precise angles of the little creamy-colored sticks, the tiny red bulbs of their heads.
#
They’ve slept in, tacitly giving each other permission as one after the other they open their eyes in the dim light of the solar lamp, see the others’ eyes still closed, and roll back over to sleep.
It’s because they don’t expect to find anything now, on their last night. Torven has even suggested flying back to the mainland early, giving the last night of scanning a miss. But Mary doesn’t feel that way. She loves being out here, loves the night scans. Even when they don’t find anyone, she feels reverent, elated above the velvet deep stretches of dark, the sweet and lonely lights of the ordinary people unaware of the small glow they cast. She pulls herself out of her sleeping bag and rouses the others.
After two hours on the grid, Lee looks around questioningly at them. Torven nods, motions with his hands — wrap it up. But Mary leans forward with her logbook open, pointing to the pencilled note from last night: the coordinates of the golden light she thought she’d seen. Lee glances down to check the clock and the fuel meter, the chart to their left.
“OK,” says Lee through the headset. “But we’ll only have time for one fly-over.”
In two minutes, they’re there. They fly low and the first thing they notice is the smell of smoke, filtered very faint by the plane’s air system, but they can see nothing. Then they come up over a sharp rise and they see it: a glowing red-orange line in the black, no more than half a kilometre long, tracking along the side of a hill.
Mary’s heart beats hard. She remembers the bushfires on the mainland, last fire season, the danger and harm so extreme it could not be comprehended except as a kind of malice. But as they fly over, she sees this fire is different, stable. She thinks of the belated efforts to learn from the elders, sending crews out to burn the right way with cool fires, trying to give the land a chance to regenerate.
“What would the wind be like down there, Lee?” she asks through her mouthpiece.
“Almost nil. Very light south-westerly, if anything.”
She looks over at Torven. He is watching the bright patch of gold like a button strung on the orange thread of fire, almost touching it, but not quite.
Mary turns to the next blank page in her book, picks up her pen and waits for Torven to speak.
#
Bathed in the smell of smoke, Tommo climbs back up to his hut, turns and looks. He hasn’t eaten all day and he’s shaking a little. He can see nearly the whole glowing stretch from here. The fire’s burning down now; it has done its job.
When he hears the thin droning sound, he thinks at first that it’s coming from inside his ears. Then he looks up and sees the red and green wing-lights, holding between them the invisible bulk of a plane.
The day and night after Amber left, he had watched every plane that passed over from south to north, wondering which one carried her and whether she would be looking down. This one is smaller, he thinks, and not so far away. Whoever’s up there now will see.
#
The next morning, as they fly north, Mary watches the sun come searing up over the edge of the Tasman Sea. Above, where the deeper blue of the sky still holds some of the night’s coolness, she can see the translucent cells of the Visitors’ craft, white as a daytime moon, and shaped like honeycomb. They will be gone soon, she thinks, and she will be stuck here. She grieves for what humans could have learnt, what she could have learnt, if they were not just surviving.
The dusty red of the mainland comes into view, the shimmering dome of the Habitat balancing like a huge waterdrop on the dry soil. In reality, Mary knows, it is only slightly wetter inside the dome. Children still cry from thirst, but in the Habitat their parents can give them water: not all they want, but enough.
Mary sees the colours of the new dry-zone food gardens – olive and gold and brown – planted outside the Habitat, on the parks and ovals that used to be kept luminously, lushly green. They all know the Habitats are not going to be enough, even once the Visitors extend them and more people can be rotated inside. They are not utopias; they are a base, a chance, a breath.
Nearby, Mary can see smoke from where people are guiding low-temperature fires through the bush. The fires suck the danger from the banks of dry fuel, spitting it up into plumes of ash that whip across the plane’s windshield.
The plane falls silent and they sink for a second before it grunts and clamors back to life, grasping at the last vapors of fuel. Lee calmly brings it around to face the runway, and Mary finds she is gripping Torven’s knee. She laughs, and lets go, as the plane floats towards the hard earth.
THE END
Author Bio: Merri Andrew writes poetry and short fiction, some of which is published or forthcoming in Strange Horizons, Daikaijuzine, Antipodean SF, and Baby Teeth. She lives on Ngunnawal and Ngambri Country in Canberra, a city hiding in the sub-alpine bushland of Australia. Merri can be found on Twitter @MerriAndrewHere