Stark (35 page)

170: THE SWORD OF DAMOCLES

W
hile CD’s heart was breaking in northern WA, not too far away, just off the coast, near a place called Shark Bay, something else was breaking, something that was going to make a broken heart seem small beer and even a broken neck a minor inconvenience.

171: SHARK BAY

T
he early Aussies, as was their unerring habit, had named Shark Bay after the sharks which were the bay’s most prominent feature; apart from water of course. Undeniably the most prominent feature of all in the bay was water and so for a while there was a strong movement amongst those tough, hard bitten and laconic men and women, to call it ‘Waterlogged Bay.’

The more sophisticated souls countered that if you started calling bays ‘Waterlogged Bay’ because they were waterlogged, then all bays would have the same name and it would be impossible to tell the buggers apart. And they got called a bunch of poofs for their pains.

‘If you can have a Great Sandy Desert, a Snowy Mountains and a Southern Sea, you can have a Waterlogged Bay,’ the laconics claimed.

‘But there’s only one of those things,’ pleaded the more sophisticated souls, ‘there are loads of bays.’

In the end, the logic of this statement had been grudgingly accepted and so it was decided to name the bay after its most prominent feature apart from water.

Somebody suggested that the fact that it was a bay was a pretty major feature, but ‘BAY BAY’ had been rejected as sounding too childish. ‘Horizon BAY’ had been considered for a while, it was a pretty name, but was eventually thought to have the same problem as ‘water’; i.e., that it could describe any bay (as could ‘wave’ and ‘tide’).

Eventually, after a fellow called Jim had come home from a fishing trip minus a leg, having been gored by a shark, it had been decided to call the bay ‘Shark Bay’ and to call Jim, ‘One- Legged Jim’. There had been a small group of poetic, erudite individuals who had lobbied hard for ‘Bay of the Bitten Jim’ but they were told to fuck off back to Sydney where their type were tolerated.

And so Shark Bay it became, because there were sharks in it.

Not everyone was happy of course. One-Legged Jim, for instance, was monumentally pissed off, but this wasn’t because of the name business. He was unhappy because he had been horribly mutilated and now he only had one leg. Jim’s pragmatic, no bullshit attitude to life was much admired by all.

Some of the citizens of Carnarvorn, the town on the northern tip of the bay, had wanted to call it Carnarvorn Bay and wandered around for weeks muttering under their breath that there were sharks in every bloody bay in Australia. None the less, Shark Bay it had stayed for a hundred and fifty years until the the thread broke on the Sword of Damocles and rendered life for a shark in Shark Bay utterly impossible.

172: THE SWORD

A
s the Domesday Group had constantly made clear to Stark over the years the ecological cause and effect syndromes which they had isolated as The Swords of Damocles were very different indeed from those which were categorized under the Avalanche Effect.

The actual story of Damocles and his monarch Dionysius is of no relevance here, except, that is, for the punch line, which left Damocles sitting at dinner beneath a naked sword suspended from the ceiling by a single thread. The moral of the legend being that a person’s situation in life is always chancy. Another moral might have been that if you find yourself at dinner with a sword hanging over your head, move seats.

And that was exactly the point made by the Domesday Group. Ecologically, the difference between avalanches and Swords of Damocles was that with avalanches you didn’t know about them until they fell on you; but Swords of Damocles were slightly less serious because the danger was there for all to see, and hence it was possible to do something about it. A typical example of the Swords that Domesday regularly put before Stark were the so called Leper Ships; ships so loaded with appallingly toxic chemicals that no country would let them enter their ports. Alone and virtually stateless, they roam the seas searching for a place to disgorge their vile load.

‘One of them’s going to sink one of these days,’ the Domesday Group would say. At Shark Bay the thread broke.

173: THE ATARIA C42

I
f Captain Robertson on his North Sea shit sludger thought he had a tough job, he should have tried carting the real crap around like poor old Captain Popplewell had to.

Captain Popplewell, the master of the Liberian registered Ataria C42, had three years of hell then died. It started when his ship was chartered by a company called Dispo Holdings, who wished him to ship a few barrels of ash and sludge to a toxic- waste disposal company in Britain — a country with a world reputation for taking on other peoples’ shit. Whilst at sea a scandal burst revealing the true nature of the load which turned out to be a horrifying cocktail of chemical and heavy metal poisons. A mix of aluminium, arsenic, barium, cadmium, lead and mercury, so potent that no port in the world would take it. At first Captain Popplewell was instructed to do what so many others had done before when faced with a cargo that cannot be offloaded. He was told to dump it in the Third World. For years, contrary to every legal and moral objection, Africa has been used as a dustbin for the impossibly toxic residue of the life-styles of the West.

Unfortunately for the Ataria C42, her cargo had become somewhat notorious and environmental activists were on to her — hence even Third World ports were barred to the ship. It was bitter gall indeed for Captain Popplewell to see other Leper Ships successfully slipping in and dumping their terrible loads and having wild leper ship parties, whilst he was forced to skulk about in mid-ocean like the pariah he was. Of course, he and the ship’s owners turned to the company that had chartered them, but, as happens too often in these situations, they had gone into liquidation. In fact Dispo Holdings might be said to have pulled off a brilliant business coup in the same way that Sly did by destroying healthy businesses with his corporate raids. Dispo had accepted a contract to dispose of large quantities of appallingly toxic waste. They had performed their duties by chartering a ship and putting the waste on the ship. When it proved impossible for the ship to find anywhere to sail to, Dispo had gone into liquidation. Brilliant.

Sly’s attitude would probably have been that business is a tough game; dog-eat-dog, and you had to admire their audacity.

174: THE FIRST OF MANY

D
uring the three years that the Ataria C42 drifted about, occasionally being allowed to take on more fuel or food, the seas became crowded with lepers. Slowly, as people began to wake up to the appalling danger of this stuff, fewer and fewer were prepared to even consider trying to deal with it. Unfortunately, the poisons still got made and so more and more ships found themselves floating about, sitting on enough poison to wipe out an ocean. These were the Swords of Damocles.

Just as CD was crying over Rachel, crying over the sort of small, human things that make life worth living, the sword fell for the Ataria C42. In a terrible storm just west of Shark Bay, the ship ruptured and fifty-five thousand gallons of the choicest contents of Pandora’s Box flowed into the Indian Ocean, and hence into all the seas of the world.

175: RACHEL AND SLY

W
hy are you doing this?’ Sly asked bluntly, once he and Rachel were installed in the lounge room of his private quarters and he had poured out a couple of gin and tonics.

‘Doing what?’ replied Rachel, wondering hard how to play the situation. ‘Pursuing me and my business. Don’t you have anything better to do?’ he asked.

‘We’re concerned citizens. You’re the sort of person who will have bribed and bought out all the usual restraining influences so it’s up to people like us to keep an eye on you,’ Rachel replied.

‘And what is it that you think I’m doing that is so very wrong?’ asked Sly.

‘Well, shipping in high-grade missile fuel disguised as petrol, for a start.’ Rachel was gratified to note that Sly was extremely taken aback by this bald statement. She realized that in making it she had removed a card from her sleeve and placed it on the table, but there seemed little point in concealing her knowledge. After all, he could not tell from it what else she knew. Rachel felt that Walter had been right, if inept, in his efforts to convince Moorcock that he was up against a formidable force. Rachel did not know whether her life was in danger or not, but she thought that if it was, Moorcock would be less likely to do away with her if it seemed likely that there would be others to follow on and avenge her.

‘What do you know about the rocket fuel?’ asked Sly. ‘I don’t intend to answer any more of your questions. Let me and my friends go, or you’ll be sorry.’ Rachel was well aware that this statement had a credibility reading of zero but she didn’t have anything else to say. She had absolutely no idea of how to handle the situation for the best and so had decided to shut up. She needn’t have worried, Sly was going to be doing most of the talking. For a moment he sat staring at her across the room. She was sitting cross legged on the sofa, holding her glass defensively, like a shield. She looked great.

Sly was preparing to throw caution to the wind.

176: CRUSH

N
ot everybody falls in love as impulsively as Sly had done. For some, love grows; it slowly dawns on them. One day they might think ‘mmm nice bum’ and leave it at that. Later, perhaps at the office party, whilst casually chatting, they discover a mutual interest in religious music. After that, dinner and a movie just seem like a logical step…

‘No way is it serious, I don’t even know if we get on, actually.’

A massively disappointing first-shag serves to cement a mutual sympathy and finally, about a decade later, comes the, ‘You know, I don’t know, but I think I might be in love with you, what do you think? Or is that stupid, I mean, if it is, forget it?’

But not everybody is so cautious.

Once, whilst driving along a country highway late at night, Sly had caught a seven foot Red Kangaroo in his head-lights and, seconds later, had slammed into it full across the ‘roo bars at a highly illegal hundred and forty kilometres. This is how some people fall in love. Sly had always wondered how the ‘roo must have felt. Now he knew.

The reason so many ‘roos get spread across bonnets is because they have an instinctive fascination for light sources. Unfortunately for them, when they get caught in head-lamps, they stop dead still and stare straight into the light; oblivious of the consequences; entirely captured by the magic of the beams. Sly was just the same, except of course that he didn’t have a huge long tail and a pouch with a baby in it. He was mesmerized by Rachel’s light.

It can happen. Especially to a man like Sly whose life-style meant that his experience of real people — straight, unaffected people — was minimal. Coupled with all this was the fact that Sly wanted to fall in love. For the first time in his life he was desperate to find someone, and quickly. He fancied Rachel; he thought her different and interesting; she was in the right place at the right time. Sly, a man used to making decisions, decided to fall in love. Of course at the time, Sly would probably have denied that the emotions he was nurturing were anything like that intense. He would have admitted to lust; he might even have conceded an objective interest in her strange personality, but he would not have admitted that he was falling for her.

None the less, he was.

177: SMALL TALK

W
hat did that long-haired guy who talks through a time warp call your group?’ Sly asked, breaking the silence.

‘EcoAction,’ replied Rachel defiantly.

‘And what’s that supposed to signify then,’ Sly asked with a slightly mocking tone.

‘It’s supposed to signify, mate,’ said Rachel, bridling at his attitude, ‘that if something isn’t done soon, the world is going to die, that’s what. It will die, you arrogant, smug, complacent…rich bastard.’ Rachel was, of course, a born again Ecofreak; a convert, and in any system of belief it is the converts who are the real zealots. If there was one thing that Rachel couldn’t handle it was people taking the piss out of the stuff she was into.

‘You’re wrong,’ said Sly quietly. ‘The earth isn’t going to die unless you stop it.’

‘Oh yeah well you would say that wouldn’t you,’ Rachel sneered. ‘You’ve got a vested interest in carrying on fucking it up.’

‘You’re wrong,’ continued Sly, ‘because it’s going to die anyway. It’s virtually dead already, and there is absolutely nothing that you or I or anyone else can do about it. The earth is going to die.’

‘Well that’s a bit sodding cheerful I must say,’ said Rachel, sarcastically. But none the less she was shaken by the cold certainty in his voice.

Sly gulped down his gin and tonic, poured himself another, even stiffer, and decided to go for it.

‘Rachel,’ he said, ‘do you know the story of Adam and Eve?’

He stopped himself, realizing that he was about to embark on the most monumentally naff tack he could possibly take. He decided to start again. ‘Forget that,’ he said. ‘Hot isn’t it? Let’s talk about the greenhouse effect.’

178: COMMUNICATION BREAKDOWN

B
y morning Tyron was getting impatient. He had never much liked the idea of waiting for the miraculous Moorcock powers of persuasion to convince the captives to divulge all that they knew. Now Tyron felt that his cynicism had been amply justified since many hours had passed and he had not heard a thing from Sly. He felt, as he did about everything in life, that he would probably do a much better job of interrogation himself. Besides, it was very difficult to sit still and do nothing, it was so bloody hot for a start. The night had brought a little relief but now it was morning again and he felt like he was sitting in a grill pan. It was definitely the worst summer Tyron could remember. The whole world seemed to be having it at once. He’d heard that there was no skiing at all in the USA and you had to be an eagle to try it even in the Alps.

Everything was getting so depressingly hellish. Everything seemed to be stinking and rotten. You couldn’t trust the water any more because unseasonal flooding had contaminated the supplies. What’s more, there were millions more bugs than usual, probably because of all the rank water that was lying around, steaming up into the clouds and then pissing down again almost immediately in torrential poisoned deluges. It was hot and horrible, and now besides that, Tyron had this smelly crew of blacks and hippies to deal with.

There was still no sign of the fugitive Zimmerman. Tyron was forced to accept the possibility that he was now outside the wire. Even more reason then for discovering where it was that this irritating little group had based themselves and hence where Zimmerman would be heading. Tyron decided to have a go at the prisoners.