The Dreaming Dragons Part 1

The Dreaming.

by Damien Broderick.

For Emilly McLeay who with her trusty scanner helped renew the words The melodramatic imagination is, then, perhaps a way of perceiving and imagining the spiritual in a world where there is no longer any clear idea of the sacred, no generally accepted societal moral imperatives, where the body of the ethical has become a sort of _deus absconditus_ which must be sought for, posited, brought into man's existence through exercise of the spiritualist imagination.... The melodramatic mode of utterance is a victory over the repression and censors.h.i.+p of the social reality principle, a release of psychic energy by the articulation of the unsayable. One might say that the gothic quest for renewed contact with the numinous, the supernatural, the occult forces in the universe, leads into the moral self.

-- Peter Brooks

*One: The Cyclone's Edge*

*1. Central Australia*

He hated the desert sun, and he kept coming back to it.

In the tangled DNA-spaghetti of his cells sat a bundle of genes selected by fifty thousand years of hostile light, maybe a hundred thousand, light hard enough to peel you to the bone. From childhood, these genes had layered the surface of his flesh with a skin potentially the colour of charred firewood.

Alf Dean Djanyagirnji snorted, the steering wheel jouncing his palms. Under the inherited mask, his fallible city flesh was eager to pop and blister mockingly between the raised welts that the old tribal men had scored on his body. Six months of indoor research and the senior lecturer's podium were sufficient to bleach him back to the modest dusty tan of an immigrant Sicilian peasant, or a dedicated weekend surfer.

'Bunyips to the right of them,' Alf declaimed, for something to say. 'Rainbow Serpents to the left.' No comment from the kid.

One of the forms taken by the Rainbow Serpent, the bunyip was said to relish human meat. It was not choosy about skin colour. White or black, straight down the hatch. Fair enough of course. (And _that_ was an irritating turn of phrase to run through your head. _Fair enough_, indeed!) The beast's own appearance varied rather freely, depending on your informant. Stout as a wallowing hippo, or lean and crabby, emu-necked. A fat belching seal, or elongated and sinewy as a python. With its feet on backwards. Alf had always liked that optional touch. The bunyip would watch him, as he pursued it, without the need to turn its horrid head.

Arms and shoulders p.r.i.c.kled already with sunburn, though his makes.h.i.+ft repairs to the Land Rover's holed radiator had kept him outside the cabin for less than fifteen minutes. Surely bunyips were safe from sunburn. Yet at the end of your valorous quest, Alf thought ironically, aren't you supposed to find that the object of your ghastly tribulations was, mysteriously, from the outset ... yourself?

You betcha, boss. I am the bunyip. Hurray for insight. Half man, half daemon, half plain b.l.o.o.d.y monster. More than half sheer imposter. Reflex anger clenched Alf's pale-nailed fingers on the wheel. Over a century ago the white invaders had caustically dubbed their jumped-up social elite 'bunyip aristocrats'. So even in heartfelt gibes at their own kind, the Europeans had contrived to disparage the black man's truths.

For to the aboriginal tribespeople the beast had been as real as the pouched kangaroo, as tangible as the seasonal waterholes where the mythic bunyip was said to sport, certainly no less important and alarming in its own way than today's post-millennial surveillance satellite stations inside their secured perimeters in the vacant places of a country where a couple of centuries previously the most awful menace was a booming, feather-naped superst.i.tion.

Yet Alf's self-imposed treacherous role was to cap the white man's job, to blow the Serpent in all its incarnations finally out of the salt lakes, the evaporated swamps. No more feathered snakes, yowies, dongus, tuntabah, bunyips, sacred custodians: only ancient dried bones. No more dragons.

Would anyone care? Hardly. He was guilty only before the blind eyes of a defunct history, or the tattered remnants of a patchwork reclaimed black culture. Still, like the bunyip itself, he was an impostor. Fake white man in a sunburnt skin, apostate to a creed he'd learned at no one's knee but cobbled together from scholarly footnotes and the scabby memories of drunken sots. How splendid to specialise in dynamiting the idols of extinct faiths. What courage.

Alf uttered a loud booming noise as he drove. 'Keep a strict watch-out for fraudulent dragons, Mouse,' the anthropologist said.

The strange child sat motionless at his side, gazing raptly through the Land Rover's grimy window into the appalling Australian desert. A kind of subliminal vibration, a tranquil excitement, radiated from the boy. He fits into this place, Alf realised with surprise.

The midday sun took barrenness into its fists and shook it. The horizon danced. Directly ahead, a forbidding jumble of stone and boulders reached forty metres into the bright sky. If you looked too intently at it, it seemed to shudder.

Alf s.h.i.+fted his itching arm, opened and closed one hand on the bouncing vehicle's steering wheel, tugged at his singlet where it stuck to chest and back in a damp relief-map of the Burrkan initiation scars festooning his upper body. 'Christ, it's _b.l.o.o.d.y_ hot,' he grumbled. Even the conditioned air was tepid. The temperature gauge flickered over again into the red. Inside the wounded radiator, with its poached egg sealant, the water was boiling.

He glanced again at the immobile boy. With sudden peevishness he thought: Why don't I save my breath? The child was like some eldritch radio telescope, attuned only to messages from the empyrean, broadcasting nothing but an empty carrier signal.

At once he experienced a rush of remorse. It was hardly the child's fault. Besides, his a.n.a.logy was faulty. Something moved in the boy's curious brain. Perhaps Mouse gambolled there in an interior landscape of vivid flowers, drifting on his toes like the fey autistic children of his special school.

There were no flowers in the Tanami desert. With the minimal exception of a few hardy, stunted saltbushes, some patches of lichen clinging to the rock, no living thing was visible. It was plain why white men had not bothered combing the place. The Land Rover's st.u.r.dy wheels thrummed and thumped on broken stone. Alf let The Beast roll back a few metres to a level stretch of rock and cut the ignition.

For a moment he closed his eyes, pressing forward on the steering wheel. His irritation with the boy, he knew, was a bid to deny his own central emotion. Up there, in that grotesque pile of ancient rubbish, was a dinosaur fossil. If his luck held. Alf Dean felt a tremor in his muscles ... dread, intoxication. You're waiting for me, Kungmanggur, he thought. He was close to a state of superst.i.tious invocation, like a particle physicist calling up the spirit of a favourite hypothesis in the gigavolt cracking of a nuclear proton. Be there, you son of a b.i.t.c.h. The Road-maker, one of his filthy old teachers had named it. They had crouched in the dust, and the man had doodled symbols old before Sumer. The Rainbow Serpent, the BabyMaker. Alf raised his dark head and stared into the explosive light. You b.a.s.t.a.r.d, he thought, quivering. I'll nail you to the wall.

He climbed out of the vehicle and stretched his cramped limbs. From every side heat thrashed him, bright from myriad fragments of rock crystal. Even through his heavy boots the scorched earth burned at his flesh. Hastily, he reached back inside for his bushman's hat, for the protection of a s.h.i.+rt.

Abraded desolation. In the early Cretaceous, a hundred million years before, all this pitiless waste was sunk beneath vast seas. How astounding. And long before that, during the Lower Ordovician. Half a billion years. Yet the land endured, Alf thought. It persisted to be bleached and scarified, not once, but many times. The time before the Dreaming.

'Poor black b.a.s.t.a.r.ds,' he muttered. His mouth quirked at the unconscious posture of ironic objectivity. His own broad nostrils, thick chiselled lips, wavy hair were pure Australian Aborigine. Sometimes he thought he detected a trace of the Buramoingu dialect in the crisp phonemes of his bourgeois accent. Unhealthy fantasy. He swiped uselessly at the bush-flies bl.u.s.tering at his eyes. Even here. G.o.d d.a.m.n it, he thought. You'd imagine science could do something definitive about the great Australian pest, and b.u.g.g.e.r the ecological ramifications, if there were any.

'It really is the a.r.s.ehole of the universe,' he said aloud. After a moment the boy turned in his seat and smiled his shy, winning smile. He hears us, Alf thought. Dr Fish is right, Mouse responds. In ways we cannot comprehend, true, but he feels the love, the giving we offer him. Even without Fish's pompous apologetic jargon of 'socialising facilitation' I'd talk to him, he thought. He opened the boy's door and squeezed his shoulder.

Mouse scrambled out beside him and peered in dazzlement at the cliff face, the shadowed caverns. 'Caves,' he said with excitement. 'Bunyip.'

'You bet.' Alf grinned. 'But we probably won't find anything much today. Like to help me get out the rucksacks?' Today, tomorrow. How utterly meaningless such terms must be for the child. One of the deficits of his condition, as Fish had been at pains to stress, was a failure to 'bind time', to perceive sequences of cause and effect. Still, the boy seemed genuinely to be antic.i.p.ating the prospect of the caves. Carefully, Alf rechecked the contents of his rucksack, examined the First Aid kit, tried the flashlight batteries. He locked The Beast and hoisted the rucksack on his back.

They stood for a moment gazing up at the ancient cliff. Vaguest hiss of dry wind from the desert. Slight movements at the edge of audibility, as stone expanded and s.h.i.+fted under the sun's baking onslaught. Yet that nearly total silence was itself a kind of sound: a vast distant hum which filled the head without touching the ear. It was a presence of solitude more profound than Alf Dean had ever known, even in the open country to the north. Strangeness touched his spirit; he understood why even the nomads who had dwelt in this desert had found the place sacred and terrible -- as sacred, perhaps, as Uluru, the prodigious stone monolith which Alf's adopted white culture had called Ayers Rock, 600 kilometres to the south. There, the rains of the Cretaceous had returned. Uluru was drowning in a freak of storm weather which cynics attributed to the supposed presence of an experimental military base. Once again, the blacks had been hounded away heedlessly from their cathedrals. Alf grunted with sympathy.

And yet ... that was exactly what he proposed to do himself. Tear at the abandoned b.u.t.tresses of a faith that had been stable for tens of millennia and now was all but dead in any case. He would not merely denounce the mystery of the Rainbow Serpent, but would prove it no more than a misconception of savages, a sacred delusion built on the ossified bones of an extinct reptile, a dinosaur from the age of floods. Not that anything was ever that transparent. Neither the wellsprings of the numinous, nor the impulse of a man's motives.

Alf Dean felt his obsession coil and tighten in his belly. The Ngularrnga tribe, from which his natural mother had been abducted to the racist compounds of the Darwin Mission, called the BabyMaker Wedarragama. Yet neither the Ngularrnga, nor the Murinbata of the Daly River reserve where Alf had done his graduate work, nor any other of the hundreds of linguistically and culturally discrete tribes possessed rites exclusively honouring the Rainbow Serpent. The Earth Mother had the grandeur of Kunapipi, a corroboree cycle steeped in cosmic and mundane significance, a liturgy patterning six months of each year in its ornate embrace. But not Wedarragama. Merely his face and his name, inscribed on stone and bark and human memories...

Here, though, in this small section of the Tanami desert, there had been Serpent rites. The tribe was long gone, smashed by disease, drunkenness and the theft of dignity, and their singular rite had vanished into extinction with them.

He moved suddenly, clapping the boy on the back. 'Come on, kid, let's go. Before we spook each other.'

Mouse uttered a little cry of delight and bounded ahead to clamber up the dusty slope. Seeing his agile grace, Alf remembered the group of damaged children at the Monash centre, bouncing like spider monkeys on trampolines, wholly in the dimensions of tactual and haptic s.p.a.ce.

The first four shallow openings they found led nowhere. Wind had scoured indentations, and s.h.i.+fting pressures had split stone -- even in this most stable region of a stable continent -- but there were no promising caves. The hints Alf had compiled in field work and archival research suggested a series of deep caverns, cutting far into the cliff. He halted briefly to catch his breath, sipping sparingly from the water container.

The boy looked back piercingly. 'Tired old man,' he said without scorn or impudence. He skidded down the incline, dust and pebbles tumbling ahead of him. Alf allowed him a modest drink. Mouse sighed with pleasure and sat on a rock, leaning his head against his uncle's knee.

How normal he looks, Alf thought. Healthy, even strong for his age. The ruin was hidden inside the boy's curly head: neural nets incomplete, transmitter proteins deranged and malformed. If Fish was right.

Alf spied a series of almost invisible gouges in the sandstone. 'See these marks, Mouse?' The boy's fingers drifted across the impressions. 'I'm almost certain they're the remnants of a religious design. Must be immensely old. Maybe we're on the right track.' He had seen just such marks in the Ngama and Lukiri caves. By custom, ceremonial insignia were located out of view of the uninitiated. He peered at them searchingly. Nothing remotely like the Rainbow Serpent motif.

But he's up there somewhere, Alf told himself. His huge palpable bones are locked into stone, even if his acolytes are dispersed and lost.

They resumed their climb. Dust caked in messy paste on sweating skin. Mouse began to forge ahead again. Once, the boy jumped back in alarm from a flash of blue-grey scales. It was only a lizard, startled from its nest into the sun.

Because he was above and ahead, it was Mouse who found the entrance.

The cavern's jaws were partially hidden by two great slabs of rock, positioned with enormous effort hundreds or even thousands of years earlier to forbid entry. Time had allowed one of the slabs to slip grindingly aside. Alf saw the boy wriggle through the narrow gap.

'G.o.d d.a.m.n it, get back here!'

Convulsively, he propelled himself to the entrance and stared into a void, jamming his sungla.s.ses into a pocket of his s.h.i.+rt. Mouse stood motionless just inside the opening, head c.o.c.ked to one side as though listening; the flashlight was clutched against his chest. Alf seized it, thumbed on the beam. 'Christ knows what's in there, Mouse.'

The black place was a horizontal cone, extending wide and deeper the farther back it went. Where the pale electric beam splashed the far wall, it made the ancient drawings dance: red, white, smoky yellow.

'Paintings,' Mouse stated confidently, and started toward them with the stride of a statesman. In furious alarm Alf caught him, spun him around.

'b.l.o.o.d.y stay _put!_' The boy flinched. 'Look, you know I don't like shouting at you. We'll both view the nice pictures _after_ I've checked.'

It was impossible to know if the boy understood, but he stayed where he was, with that indefinable quivering in his tense body, while Alf moved away. Testing his footing with each step, the anthropologist sent the circle of light darting from wall to floor to roof, probing for fractures which might be triggered by some minor unwary movement. He returned to the mote-dancing blur of the entrance.

'Okay, kid.'

The paintings were a sour anticlimax. Alf studied them closely for several minutes, checking absently to ensure that Mouse did not damage them with his floating fingers. He unsnapped his Leica, took a series of flashlit exposures.

'Bad luck,' he said. 'Couple of centuries old at most, very similar to other recent work.' They were undeniably of sacred ceremonial significance, but he failed to detect any reference to the Rainbow Serpent. 'I don't see why they went to the trouble of blocking up the cave.' Raspingly, he rubbed at his jaw.

Mouse gazed at his uncle's face in the wan light of the flashlight. His arm wafted up in the direction of the entrance. 'Old,' he said. 'Old.' His high voice reverberated.

'Yeah. Old's right. Maybe a later bunch did all this. Let's see if there's any more to this place.'

Slowly they paced the cavern's chipped perimeter, beam cavorting ahead. The curved wall was marred by splits and vertical crevices. Mouse pressed at the raddled surfaces with spread hands, as though his dreaming mind expected a secret floor to open, admit them to some world more clarified and radiant than he'd ever known. Sorry, kid, Alf thought. We never got around to inventing the hinged door.

Mouse gave a little shriek.

'Moved,' he said.

Alf was instantly beside him. One of the great splits in the rock wall trembled ever so slightly at the boy's touch. Alf brought his flashlight close to the vertical fault line. Carefully, he pressed against the edge. For a brief moment it felt as if a great portal had begun to open. He chided himself for his fantasy, but steadily increased his pressure. This is ridiculous, he told himself. I'm responding to the suggestion of an imbecile.

And the solid stone swung into deeper blackness, pivoted at top and base, swung with ma.s.sive noiseless force until it stood at right angles to the rock wall proper.

'Jesus!' The anthropologist leapt back, dragging the child with him. He stared incredulously at the new opening. A door, he thought, astounded. The slab was perfectly balanced. Hewn with flint tools. The human effort contained in the concealed entrance staggered him.

He shone his flashlight along the rock tunnel. Mouse crouched next to him for a better view. Unlike the pivoted door, the tunnel was plainly a natural formation. Like the cavern, it was evidently of the variety created by abrasion rather than evolution; it possessed none of the outlandish lime carbonate deposits, the icy crystal stalact.i.tes of the notable tourist attractions on the distant Australian east coast. It sloped gently upward, continuing back into the stony hill until the flashlight's beam was lost. Apparently there had been no subsidence, no crash of rock from above to block the tunnel. The air was dry and choking.

'By G.o.d,' Alf said softly, 'I do believe we've found it.'

Several metres in from the entrance the rock was vivid with inlaid, engraved patterns. Alf knew them at once, though they differed in detail from the Murinbata diagrams he was most familiar with. Here were 'X-ray' portraits of black hunters, bones and princ.i.p.al organs sketched with conventional abstraction within the outlines of their flesh. Here were kangaroos, perentie goannas, lily roots -- the Lesser Dreamings, the totems. And here, in its bold, blatant glory, was the Rainbow Serpent himself, the old BabyMaker, the FireStealer, the Whirlwind Man, his great eyes huge as an owl's, his skull radiant with spokes of light flamboyant as any Native American chieftain's feathered headdress, the sinuous double outline of his body with its tiny vestigial limbs, its bifurcate tail...

'It's a warning,' Alf said at last. 'Initiates Only. Do Not Pa.s.s Go. Here' -- he laughed foolishly, the tension of discovery gusting from him -- 'Be Dragons! The dinosaur fossil must be embedded further up the tunnel.'

Mouse smiled angelically, and tugged at his sleeve. 'See the bunyip.'

Alf sobered. 'Not just yet, old son. I don't trust that -- '

But Mouse had darted past, dashed several metres up the tunnel. The boy stopped dead, waiting placidly.

'f.u.c.k it, Mouse!' Fists clenched in a spasm of dread, Alf stepped in after him. 'You haven't got the _sense_ of a mouse. Get back here.'

Somehow the boy had been slipping into the absolute blackness as Alf advanced with the skittering light. As the anthropologist lunged, he jumped away and began to run on his toes.

Alf hurled himself in pursuit, shouting with useless anger. The flashlight beam swerved like some mad white moth. Their footsteps clattered and crashed. Stale, musty air stung Alf's throat.

The boy kept running, knocking against rough stone outcroppings. The tunnel turned abruptly, diverted by a seam of harder stone. Alf smashed bruisingly, careened off; the flashlight spun to the ground. Raging, he retrieved it, blundered on. Mouse loomed. His hand came down with harsh force on the boy's shoulder.

'Can't I trust you for a moment?' The child's blue eyes, struck by light, filled his gaze like the sparks of glimmering stars. 'Haven't you learned anything at that place? How -- '

And he stared over the boy's muscular shoulder, releasing his s.h.i.+rt. Phosphor glow had entered the darkness. Head ringing with confusion, Alf was captivated and aghast. A large rectangular metal frame stood at the tunnel's sealed end. Soft violet light pulsed like a living membrane within the burnished metal bars.

Vaguely he heard Mouse say, without resentment, 'Nice. Pretty, Alf.'

Violet intensified, fled through dazzling blue, green, brilliant yellow. It could not be there. They were hundreds of metres into a sun-scorched hill in northern Australia, scores of kilometres from the nearest human beings, many hundreds from industrial civilisation. It's a movie set, he thought, absurdly. The base of the thing was embedded in thick dust. It's _old_, he told himself.

He started back to Mouse and the shock became too much sustain. He began to laugh, great yells and howls of mirth; the boy joined him with high, beautiful peals; they leaned against one another, pounding ineffectually with loose fists, and Alf's laughter became shrill. Mouse stopped laughing, withdrew himself delicately and tugged at Alf's arm until they both sat, legs sprawled in front of them, on the cold misty ground. Alf leaned against rock, wiped his streaming eyes, gasped for breath.

'Sorry,' Mouse said.

'Yeah.' Alf blew his nose noisily; he was trembling. 'I'll bet you are, you wilful little b.a.s.t.a.r.d. But tell me, great explorer -- what the f.u.c.k _is_ it?'

They stared in silence at the pulsing golden light. After a moment Mouse said, 'Bunyip?'

'Bunyip's right. Jesus.' He climbed to his feet but maintained a decent distance from the impossible, extraordinarily lovely object. One thing was patent: if any Australian aboriginal tribe had built the thing, Alf might as well tear up his doctorate and start from scratch, along with the whole Anthropology Department.

_This_ is the Rainbow Serpent, he told himself incredulously. Origin of a myth so old that it has no living relevance, if you judge relevance by continuing ritual. Back to the archaic Dreaming. The source and ground of reality. His thoughts skidded sideways. The tribes employ the English word 'dreaming' for _ngak.u.mal_ and _ngoiguminggi_, their totems and totem-sites, but that's an adaptation to the language of their conquerors. They never use _nin_, the word for true dreaming sleep. Yet the borrowed elision was superbly deft. The dream-experience, after all, is recognised by them as part of the continuum of authentic reality. Agentive and prophetic, he thought, recalling Professor Stanner's monograph. An ontological embodiment of the entire totemic universe. The Dreaming. The wily old phenomenologists, he thought admiringly.

Fear started to break in again through his barriers of abstraction. This brilliantly illuminated frame before him was a machine, he knew. Presumably a device planted by visitors from the stars, Christ knew how many thousands of years earlier. It's homeostatic, he thought. We triggered it by coming in here. But what does it _do?_ His vanished cousins had placed signs of prohibition at the entrance to the doubly sealed tunnel. Skull and bones on a bottle of lethal poison.

Silently, yellow radiance rippled in hypnotic moire. Abruptly the field of colour turned pure, dazzling white. The light vanished. And they were looking _through_ the grid at a flight of steps that started at a slightly lower elevation than the cavern floor and extended up out of sight.

Alf walked forward a metre, stopped, shook his head. He moved right, left. He lit a cigarette.

'This is fantastic,' he mumbled. 'Three-dimensional display. A hologram. You can actually see into the picture. Why would it show us _steps_, for Christ's sake?'

With great a.s.surance Mouse said, 'For climbing.' Alf grinned at him. A breeze ruffled the boy's light, fine hair. 'Wind.'

Skin crawled on the anthropologist's scarred back. 'It's just blowing in from outside. Up the tunnel.'

Blue eyes gazed at him. Mouse twinkled his fingers. 'Smoke.'

Oh my G.o.d, Alf thought. He's right. The streamer of smoke from his cigarette was blowing away from the grid. No, he told himself. It's an optical effect. Just what you'd expect with holograms. But he trod slowly to within a metre of the grid, watched his exhaled smoke drift gently back at him. Dry-mouthed, he took a match from the box and threw it toward the grid.

The match sailed through the bars, fell on the third step, bounced, lay there.

Wiping his sweating face, Alf backed carefully away from the device and squatted before it. 'We're in this up to our necks, kiddo,' he said. 'It's an interstellar artefact. Or maybe it's the remnant of some primeval human civilisation, so old there's no other trace left of it. No, that's nonsense. Mr Von Daniken will be pleased. No wonder the locals were scared s.h.i.+tless of the place.'

Teleportation, he thought. This is Captain Cook, or was it Kook? Kirk? Beam me up to the Transporter Room. Aye, Captain.

Maybe the stairs were not even on Earth. In for a penny, he told himself, in for a pound. But the logic fell apart on that. Presumably the air was identical on both sides, though the pressure over there must be slightly higher. Even so, there'd be some diffusion. And we'd be choking on methane, he concluded, or whatever vile gas they breathed. No, if it were methane, lighting his cigarette would have set off an explosion. Still, the odds against the atmosphere of another world matching ours were overwhelming. So it's probably somewhere else on this planet. Where? Why hasn't it been found?

Alf knew suddenly that he was going to climb through it. All caution was lost in the unarguable necessity of seeing at once where the steps led. He turned to his charge.