Only by fucking up and being killed. I bought a minijeep from a used car lot in cash under a false name and headed north.
From Cairns International Airport to Yirlandji country is a long day’s drive, about 800 kilometers as the crow flies—and stoned are any crows who ever flew like that. The road up the coast, looking out toward the Great Barrier Reef, is exquisitely beautiful, one of the greatest scenic drives left on Earth—and consequently winds and bucks like a snake caught in an accordion. Driving on the left side of the road for the first time in decades, I did well to average 60 kph. Even ignoring the scenery and banging straight along it would have been a thirteen-hour drive. But it was winter in Queensland, which means, just cool enough to stand it, and that beach constantly beckoning from the right got irresistibly inviting, even to a monomaniacal apprentice secret agent. The water had “cooled” to a temperature Canadian surf will never reach, maybe 26°C, which meant, the nice Beach Club lifeguard explained to me, that the box jellyfish (or sea-wasps, the deadliest things afloat) had all gone away for the season. It was the most glorious swim I’d ever had in my life, and the buoyancy of the water was so near to and yet far from zero gee that I wept salty tears into the sea, and gave serious thought to seeing if I could swim the forty or fifty kilometers out to the Reef. Finally I literally crawled ashore like some primordial ancestor, and baked for an hour before trying to walk again.
I stopped for directions in the Aboriginal Reserve north of Cooktown, and again the next day at the one north of Coen, where I left the main road and struck west toward the Gulf of Carpentaria. In mid-afternoon I met an Aboriginal at a gas station, Thomas Tjarndai, who agreed to guide me to Yirlandji country. I followed his ancient yammering motorbike through an hour of bad road, then followed him on foot through the bush for another hour, wondering darkly whether Yirlandji ever ate whitefella tourists. My back had been aching for days now. At least the knee was not acting up. When we reached the Yirlandji encampment, Thomas brought me to an elder named Billy Huroo, no more than five hundred years old and sharp as a Chinese pawnbroker. I gave him my right name in spite of myself, and told him a little of why I had come. In the distance, a child sang. To my shock I recognized a passage from the Song of Top Step. My eyes stung. At dusk Billy Huroo led me to the campfire of the witch woman Yarra and left me there.
She was ancient and thin, her skin like wrinkled black leather. Like Kirra’s, her teeth were gleaming white. She wore only shorts and a knife. Her eyes made me think of Reb, decades older and female. She bade me welcome, gave me tea from a billy. I can’t describe the taste, but it was very good. I told her my real name, started to tell her why I was there, and she cut me off. “You knew my badundjari,” she told me. “My beloved dream spirit. Kirra, the Singer, who makes Walkabout among the stars. You were her friend.”
I nodded, and started to say that I was here to tell her of Kirra’s last days. She cut me off again.
“You are here to ask me if you should kill her killer.”
I dropped my jaw.
The fire crackled, the sparks flew upward. At last I sighed and said, “How can you know that?”
“From the way you sit. From your voice. I do not hear your words so much as the song of your voice. It is a song of blood rage.”
“Yes.” There was nothing else to say.
“You know who killed my badundjari?”
“I think so. I may know for sure in a day or two. If I am right…it was the blackest of betrayals.” I explained as carefully as I could my suspicions.
“You believe he gave her a poison that became a bomb, this Symbiote to destroy. And he gave her this poison in the act of love?”
“I hope to know for sure in a day or two,” I repeated, then blurted, “Oh, but what will I do if it’s true?”
She grimaced at me, and slowly shook her head. “No one can tell you that. Not I. Not Emu, or Goanna Lizard, or Kangaroo, not a Rainbow Serpent nor a Sky-God nor any of the Ancestors who were here in the Dreamtime. Not even Menura, the lyrebird of the gullies, who was Kirra’s totem. You must decide.”
I closed my eyes and sighed again. A didgeridu was playing in the far distance, like a mournful dragon. “Yes. You’re right.”
“But tell me his full name and where he lives,” she said. “When you have done whatever you decide to do…if he still lives…perhaps I will decide I need to do something about him.”
“I’ll tell you the moment I’m sure,” I countered, knowing that I might be dead seconds after the moment I was sure. “If you have not heard from me within a week, then I was right and he has overcome me. In that case, and only then, call Top Step and ask Reb Hawkins who my lover was there. You can get access to a phone?”
She took one from a bag at her side. Of course. She’d probably first heard Kirra’s space Songs on it. I recalled suddenly, with sharp pain, that I had never carried out my final promise to Kirra, to send her last song-fragments home to that very telephone. “You have my number?” she asked.
Yes I did. In my personal memory node in Teena, up in Top Step. I had not yet downloaded it, and didn’t want to access it now for fear of leaving a trail to where I was on Earth. Yarra gave me the number again, and I memorized it rather than write it down. I gave her my personal security code, so that she could get at that last Song of Kirra’s if I failed to live through what I was planning.
I slept beside her campfire that night. Nothing bit me.
Chapter Thirteen
Canst thou draw out Leviathan with an hook?
Forty-eight hours later I was back in my hotel room in San Francisco and my skin was its normal colour again. If anyone was following me, they were too good to be spotted. I was getting close to broke, but treated myself to the finest dinner the hotel could provide. I gave them fresh roasted coffee beans I had bought the day before from an unlikely madman named Gebhardt Kaiserlingck, who ran a wonderful screwball coffee plantation outside of Daintree, and insisted that the kitchen drip-brew them for me. I drank four cups with dessert and wanted more. It was the finest coffee I had ever tasted. A good omen, I felt.
The next morning I had three more cups with breakfast, and adjourned to the ladies’ room. There I changed into male drag, using much the same makeup I had used for drag roles on stage in years past, and left without causing any apparent notice (well, it was San Francisco). I spent some time re-learning how to walk like a male, and knew I was remembering it correctly when a stewardess gave me the eye as I was passing through the lobby. An hour later I identified myself to a taco vendor as a client of the Bay City Detective Agency; he insisted on a thumbprint, did something with it under the counter, squinted at it and then at me, and passed me an envelope containing a report on one Chen, Robert. I read it on the city’s last remaining cable car, holding it close so the passengers on either side could not have read it even with Ben’s trick glasses.
The top sheet mostly recapitulated what little I already knew about Robert from the things he had told me; most of the new information was irrelevant, except that he had in fact been observed to be living at the address I had for him. For the first time since I’d left Top Step I began to seriously wonder if the whole thing wasn’t only a grotesque figment of my overheated imagination, a psychosis manufactured by my mind to distract me from a series of traumas.