Later, in her dream, it is never anything like the truth.
They go down the gaunt pillared solitude of a European
cathedral, Rirette lost in a drift of years and incense. They stand in
the arc of the altar’s great stone tracery. They move into a pew and
kneel. H er heart soars. She recalls, in her dream, the aunt and
mother perfumes and the rustle of dresses and the crisp prayer
books of childhood. The golden voices, the smug faces, the hurt
and soft hands and hatred. The hatred. There is no hatred here, in
her dream, only a tired age and an echoing silent blessing in stone,
and Ki-in-jara.
The sun strikes through the new, heavy clouds, strikes hot despite
them. A kangaroo lopes in the distance, golden as a coin. She hears
the caw of a magpie. Can this be the Dead Heart? At the edge of the
world the snow-capped Hogan runs forever, and the drum m ing of
the turbines comes to her shoeless feet through the hard ground.
‘A giving,’ she says.
He stands naked, made for the desert. She removes her light
garments, stands as he gazes on her.
‘And the longing to be wanted,’ he agrees. ‘Here, you’ll get
burned.’ He reaches into his pouch, sprays her shoulder, her
breasts, her flanks, her trembling limbs with sun-screen. The
insect repellent in the spray bites her nostrils, makes her sneeze and
laugh. Beads of spray glisten in her blonde pubic hair. T heir gaze is
a deep, shared pool, mysterious as the place he will take her.
He gains from me, she thinks in revelation.
She runs after him, the new grass prickly under her bare feet.
The place of stones lies ahead. They will dance there, in the ways
ancient to the land, if he shows her how.
In her dream she could not recall it, not in its reality. Shimmering
The Interior
233
white lace of stone. The strong dark beauty of the man beside her.
‘It is here,’ she says. ‘I feel it. How strange . . .
Ki-in-jara’s face, looking at her, flames with the imagined
colours of stained glass, with the reflected radiance of the old, old
wall paintings.
‘I . . . love you.’
And the bull-roarer: ‘H hhhrruuuuum m m m , thhhhhhhrrrhhh-
uuuummm.’
And the didgeridoos: ‘Booooonnnnnmmmm, ggggarrrrooo-
mmmmm.’
Oh, the dreams they have, the people of Restitution and the other
forty-seven cities of the inland.
All their dreams come true here, if they work at it.
This is Laurie Hogan’s epitaph, written in letters of gold recycled
from the Roxby Downs plant, written on the titanium slab high in
the snow above the Bight, gazing down toward the useless icy
wastes of Antarctica. (We’re melting them.) Laurie taught us the
way to go:
Sure, it’s a Utopia thing.
But if we’re capable of building it,
why don't we build it?
Notes on contributors
Carmel Bird teaches CAE courses in short story writing and the
continuing relevance of the Folktale. She was a founding member
of the now defunct feminist performance collective Faceless
Woman. Fler short fiction collection is Births, Deaths and Marriages;
her novel is Cherry Ripe, and is about blood.
Russell Blackford, a Ph.D. in English, is an authority on the postmodernist fiction of Barth, Vonnegut and Pynchon, and is currently an industrial advocate for the Commonwealth Public Service Board. With D r Van Ikin, he is writing a scholarly history of Australian sf. His novel is The Tempting of the Witch King, an
avowedly deconstructed fantasy.
Damien Broderick is a writer, editor and caustic reviewer. His
chief work to date is the still-incomplete The Faustus Tentacle
sequence, comprising The Dreaming Dragons, The Judas Mandala,
Transmitters, The Black Grail, and a fifth novel in progress.
Timothy Dell, a prize-winning new writer who studied creative
writing at Victoria College under Gerald M urnane, is a trainee
computer programmer.
Greg Egan, a computer programmer recently transplanted to
Sydney from Perth, has written a surprising num ber of films, short
235
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Notes on contributors
fiction and novels, not all of them published. An Unusual Angle appeared in 1983, when he
