5
The flight back to Australia was quiet. The wren, still in its thermos, was buried in a suitcase, stuffed round with clothes. It hadn’t stopped shuffling so I’d killed the power, and when still it looked enough like a sculpture to pass for artwork. “It hasn’t seen sunlight for days,” George had grumbled when I disconnected the solar battery using tweezers from my make-up kit. “When’s the stupid robot going to die?” He’d insisted we take the first flight we could. I hadn’t even had time to shower.
I had more to concern myself with than hygiene, or solar batteries. The Andersen was in the overhead locker. I wanted to take it out, hold it on my lap and trace the swollen pages with my fingertips. Although tactile sensation sometimes aided understanding, I didn’t believe that this time it would have helped. The book was a symbol, that was all — not even a universal one. Fully half the stories I’d propped myself up with since I’d left home were found in the pages of other story books entirely, for all fairy tales were a linking theme. What had been left beneath that holographic kettle hole wasn’t any kind of road map. It was a calling card, the leavings of a woman I’d known, once, who had turned into someone fundamentally unknowable. For so long, I’d told myself that Grief was an aspect of personality instead of all of it, thinking that the vestiges of Marjorie that I’d seen surface and sink in the sustained mourning of the Sea Witch’s mind meant that she was still there, at least in part. That was always the hardest part of Grief — the realization that the absence, and the loss, was total.
The Marjorie I knew had been playful, but games like this weren’t for her. They were too cruel in their ambiguities. And now I had to face the fact that the Sea Witch might exist, still, using the body of my friend as a conduit. It was a little too much like resurrection, again — the raising of the dead for purpose, because the loss of those dead was too great.
If the Sea Witch did exist, it meant that the scene at the pool had been nothing but farce. For what purpose, I didn’t know, but the farce would have been extensive. Holographic, perhaps? With the water real, and the appearance of jellies rising up beneath me, so that I was never in it with them, so that I never broke through the layers of pretence to see it for what it was. If so, it required more engineering knowledge than Marjorie had ever possessed. It also required a certainty on the Sea Witch’s part that I would let her go, and that my actions would not interfere enough to break the illusion. It required that others not break it as well. The rising body count of Grief had led to less investigation by doctors — a diagnosis was thought to be enough, and rarely did any medical examiner require an autopsy of those whose suicide came from Grief. Even so, I’d called emergency services, and they’d come, and the body had been extricated and examined, prepared for funeral. It had been buried. I’d attended the service. For all those things to come to pass, the Sea Witch would have to be dead.
Or she’d have to be treated as dead, by those who knew enough — who had privilege and access enough — to cover for her, to make the appearance of her passing solid and undeniable.
If that were true, Grief had spread further than I had ever guessed. Worse, those who helped her had passed — were passing — as unaffected. Tasmania had taught me that was possible. Granny had been able to retain an appearance of trustworthiness long enough to exploit the research project she was involved in, and to destroy what she no longer needed when she left it. Darren, smiling for photographers and celebrated by the public for his restoration of the rock wren, had managed to deceive everyone around him when he’d reprogramed the wren and released it on the mountainside. And I had no idea who was recreating kettle holes in landscapes, but clearly they had access to sophisticated technology or they wouldn’t have been able to simulate the kettle in the first place. There was no way to predict how they’d use those resources in the future.
It was the ambiguity of it all that disturbed me the most. I’d seen at the museum how willing people were to be enraptured by the return of the dead. I’d felt the fascination myself, in Tasmania. It was the reason George and I were both still reluctant to contact authorities. Even if they did show up, suspicious of Grief in us if not in others, there were such easy explanations, and no evidence we had amounted to any sort of proof that the recreations we’d seen were hostile. For most, our recent encounters with the resurrected dead were something to be celebrated. Even if the wren we’d taken was found to have poison seeping from it, all Darren had to say was that the poison was meant for rats. He’d probably be feted for it.
The only path forward was to do nothing. I’d like to say it was a decision that came hard, but the truth was a life spent glorying in the now-abundant jellyfish was good practice for looking away. The things I loved survived climate change. They flourished in it. That other species did not was regrettable, but not undermining. I’d managed to distance myself from loss.
The divorce was my doing, or so I told myself. True, the differences were irreconcilable, but we might have staggered on longer, content if not actually happy. I’d seen the coming schism and anticipated, pushing away because I could, and because it
