Even though I couldn’t see the title, I knew that book. I’d seen it before. The pages were rippled and mouldering, clumped together as if dried after long submergence, and I didn’t need to pry the covers open to see the signature of the Sea Witch inside it. Marjorie, before she came to Grief, had always marked her books with a please-return-to.
“Don’t say it,” I said. “I know what you thought of her. Just don’t say it.” He’d never seen the book, but he’d heard me talk about the disintegration of Marjorie into the Sea Witch, over and over, trying to make sense of what a friend had become.
George’s mouth shut with an audible click. “Right then,” he said, heaving himself up with a hand squeezed on my shoulder, part of him sympathetic even if all that sympathy was for me and none for a woman he’d never much cared for. More and more, I suspected he thought her guilty of indulgence, of not fighting hard enough against loss when so many others, for so long, had endured the terrible exhaustion of greater absences. “There’s got to be a power source around here somewhere, that’s keeping that projection going. Why don’t I go look?”
I’d not even thought of a power source. He was right: there had to be something portable, something small that blended in, that made lakes and mirrors of dry ground. The kettles were different from Reef or wrens or marsupial wolves. Vulnerable, yes, but in this part of the world they were still there.
I stared at the surface of the hologram. It was as beautiful as the museum wrens — finely crafted and reflective. Mirror, mirror, said the witch, in her search for self and the unchanging reality of her own aesthetic world. The disruption of that reality had led to temptation and murder, revulsion for the beauty of new generations. Snow White may not have been jellyfish, but if the Sea Witch could have destroyed them to bring back the beauty of the Reef, I’d no illusion that she wouldn’t have done it. That, too, was Grief — the inability to balance what was left with what was left behind. Who was to say, after all, that jellyfish lacked attraction and worth, that they didn’t deserve the world we’d made, the world they’d so efficiently adapted to?
I’d no illusions, either, that George’s dark words couldn’t reflect reality. This recreation of an ecosystem on the brink was the wrens all over again. It was opportunity wrapped up in regret, an attempt to absolve the shame of negligence and indifference by restoring as far as possible what had been lost. When I’d stuck my head under the surface, all I’d seen was a shallow depression, no more than a couple of feet deep and scoured down to bare soil where I knelt, below the only approach to the kettle that wouldn’t have crushed the delicate vegetation around it. I had no doubt that the scouring was done so that the book would stand out better. The rest of the depression was filled with tussocks, and that there were tussocks was a late and disorienting shock — but what else would there be, in a landscape so filled with them? My fingers went through the moss and flowers and felt the same trailing fringe of red grass that covered the rest of the ground. Maybe there’d once been a small kettle here and it had dried up and gone, or been so disturbed by invasion, the influence of farming and warming temperatures, that the vegetation within had been unable to withstand the change and withered as the kettle warmed itself to extinction. But the surface of the simulation was so perfect — so blindly, blandly unthreatening — that anyone would be fooled, and anyone who chose to swim in the kettle, even to wade in it, would be vulnerable to whatever lay beneath. For all I was thinking of mirrors, beneath the reflection was a coffin as well, and its sides were made of dirt and light that shimmered like glass.
I wasn’t a botanist. Kettle hole plants didn’t mean much to me on an intellectual level, or even on an emotional one. But this … this reminded me of a pitcher plant, and the bait wasn’t syrup to draw me in. It was stories.
“Not just stories,” said George. “Did you see what else was in there? You’re the scientist,” he said again. “You probably did.” But I hadn’t, too shocked by the absence of water, and so he showed me: took me by the hand and led me gently into the kettle. “Here,” he said, pointing. I’d missed them before, so caught up in the significance of those once-sodden pages, but there were two bones half-buried, behind where the book had been. The bones were history and high school science to him, having grown up in this country. To me, an Australian whose experience of stratification tended towards currents and invisible salts, the chemoclines of lakes and ocean, beneath which were dangerous waters, unfit for jellyfish, they had less meaning.
“Look,” he said, on his stomach and scraping at dirt walls. I pressed myself down flat beside him, because sitting up meant that my head came in contact with that holographic surface and it made me flinch as if it were razor-made instead of light.
“Do you think they’re real?” I said.
George shrugged. “I’m more inclined toward fake,” he said. “It seems a theme lately. But I wouldn’t swear to it.”
The larger bone was lower, and ancient. Even without George’s familiarity I knew what it was, in this land of birds — a moa bone, remnant of a bird who would have towered above either of us. The upper bone was smaller, a delicate skull with a long curve of beak. “I don’t know that one,” I said.
“Huia,” George told me.
