“Class,” the teacher said, “I want to introduce you to our first bring-your-father-to-class guest. Spud, why don’t you introduce your father to the class?”
“Hey, Dad,” Spud said. “This is my class.”
The teacher waited, then with a circle in of his hand, gestured for more, but that was it from Spud, nothing more. The class laughed and the teacher felt forced to fill in the blanks. “Gerald Aiden works at the Tungatinah Power Plant and is here today to talk about power and electricity.”
Spud scooted his stool forward to within inches of Cessini’s. “What’s your name?”
“Shhh!” Cessini snapped back.
“Mine isn’t ‘cause of the shape of my nose,” Spud said as he leaned in. “I asked my dad where I came from one day. He knows a lot about electricity. He said one day he put some water to the ground, and I grew. He called me Spud.”
“I recognize some of you from last year. New faces, though, too,” Aiden said as he gaited stiff-legged around the front of the teacher’s table.
“Everybody calls me Spud,” he said even louder to Cessini. “I don’t mind the heat in the desert, neither, I guess. Alice Springs is in the desert. What do you do?”
“Spud, settle down,” Aiden said with a scowl.
The teacher raised his finger against his lips for the benefit of all. “Sorry to interrupt,” the teacher said, “but one other point we should note for the class is by way of introductions. We have a new face with us today all the way from the United States. Minnesota, I think. Joined our class just for the term.”
“Ah, good to know. Who’s that?” Aiden asked as he scanned the room.
“Cessini, would you mind raising your hand?” the teacher asked. Everyone already knew where to turn as Cessini locked eyes with Gerald Aiden.
“Do I know you?” Aiden asked with a squint.
“Yeah. Last week. We were there,” Cessini said.
“At the plant?” Aiden asked as he shifted his weight. “Okay, yes. I remember you. You came with your mum and dad, your family. Am I right? I can’t remember their names.”
“That’s all right. We were just visiting. We didn’t stay long.”
“Yes, obviously,” Aiden said as he shifted off his supporting hand on the teacher’s table, “Okay, then. Class, let me tell you about what I do. Three things. Control. Water. Power.” He tapped the upper corner of the smart-screen, and the respirocytes model and swimmer disappeared. He had a blank space to work with.
“You control the water, you have power,” he said, and drew the first two interlocking circles of a Venn diagram. “All the greatest generals already know, from them right down to me, control is power. And in my case, water, the juxtaposition of control and power, is the medium for fielding your whole winning army.” He scribbled a hasty third circle to form a misshapen group of three rings on the board.
The teacher couldn’t help but be amused. Aiden stomped and keeled with bravado.
Spud jabbed a finger into Cessini’s back. “So, you know me dad, eh?”
“Not really. He wasn’t very helpful. He was a jerk, actually.”
“Yeah, that’s me dad. He’s loose in the head. Don’t mind him. Got shot in the leg.”
“Was he in a war?” Cessini turned back to Spud.
“Yeah, with me mum. He couldn’t run away from the cow fast enough. She winged him good, eh? Didn’t she, right in the leg.” Spud cracked himself up.
“Spud!” Aiden smacked his palm to the side of his hardened thigh. “Settle down. I won’t tell you again.”
“Sure thing, Dad.” Spud saluted.
Cessini eased up as the teacher sat relaxed on the windowsill at the front, overlooking the river to the west. Aiden took his cue from the teacher. The teacher gave a warm gesture toward his crate.
“Today we’re going to make an electrochemical battery,” Aiden said with his first noted smile. He lifted and plunked the crate by the sink of the teacher’s table. Then he stopped mid-thought. He lowered his chin, eyes focused into narrow beams, and stretched his neck out toward Cessini.
“Wait a minute. I remember you,” he said as he lifted his pointer finger over a tightened fist. “You’re the water boy, aren’t you? Yes. That’s right. You are that sick boy. I remember you, now.”
Cessini’s shoulders sank. He snapped a look toward the windows. Home was so very far away.
“Well, you don’t have to worry about water now,” Aiden said as he continued over the crate. “For this part today, we just have the two, control and power. Water has nothing to do with them for today. All you have to take away now from me is control, power, and. . . .”
Cessini braced himself as the eyes of the class followed Aiden back to his scrambled Venn diagram on the screen where he filled in his two-eyes-with-nose, huge-cheeked caricature of—
“Spud. Potatoes!” Aiden exuded. “Yes. Power from potatoes.”
The class erupted. “Ah, Spud. Let’s plug him in. Fry the spud!”
Spud swallowed the brunt of his father’s mockery as best as he could. His smile only lifted so far.
“Quiet,” the teacher snapped, but he was overruled as Spud ran up in the face of ridicule to help his dad from the front. He tossed and bowled potatoes to adulations from front row to back, hiking long throws to his arm-wrestling friend and his color-banded, losing opponent in the southeast’s rear corner of the room.
Maybe, Cessini thought as he caught an overhand lob, just maybe if Spud could laugh, he could laugh, too. And when Spud’s potato crate was empty, he waddled importantly back to his seat. Cessini crossed his arms and giggled as he approached. Maybe he could even grow to like this place. He, too, could come out of his shell and live among the rest. And for whatever short time they had left in Hobart, he would give it another best try.
*
Cessini’s day-pack for water protection was provisioned and held at his side, with rain jacket packed and flashlight charged. He held the headrest of Meg’s front passenger seat as Daniel drove up the winding Pinnacle Road. They had left their house at 448 Treeline Drive just before noon and turned toward the hills, with two brand-new bikes strapped to the rear gate of the Jeep. Cessini ducked beneath the two front visors for a spellbinding view of the 4,000-foot flattened mountain crest. He slid aside in his rear bucket seat for a glimpse of their new world adventure. Hope fluttered free from a moss-covered forest.
He clambered forward. “Okay, so I figured it out. You ready?”
“Shoot,” Daniel said.
“You have to give Packet lots of imagination. Since imagination is the absence of code, you have to give it as little code as you can. One equation. So it has lots of imagination.”
Meg shook her head, but let Cessini roll as a car zoomed by between them and the upslope of the hill. Its halogens were on in the light of the day. Daniel clenched the wheel and banked the outer curve. Meg saw it, too. That car was far too close.
“Okay, so you know what else?” Cessini asked, alight with excitement.
“You’re on fire today, Cessini. Go ahead, what else?” Daniel looked up at the rearview mirror.
“Remember my bioship?”
“Yeah,” Meg said. “What about it? You still going out into space?”
“Definitely. I figured out its power.”
“Potatoes?” she asked.
“No. Space dust. It collects packets of organic space dust thrown off from the stars, combines it with quanta of water . . . I’m still working on that . . . and it pumps out unlimited bursts of energy.”
“Last I checked, it’s pretty frigid cold in space,” Daniel said, prodding the rearview mirror. “All that water isn’t going to turn to ice and crack the skin of your ship?” They passed a road sign for the head of a trail.
Cessini thought a moment then leapt forward in his seat. “The bioship’s whole body is filled with organic magnets, microscopic, nano-scale magnets, one in each cell of its skin. I’ll call them—dark magnetocytes. Right! All coils from electromagnets generate excess heat. But the ship’s magnetic cellular structure will generate its own heat. Like animals at the bottom of the ocean. But the ship’s not warm-blooded, it’s magnetic-blooded. And the heat that’s not used in the skin gets ejected out the back funnel of the ship. If you were out there, you’d see it as a vapor trail and a distortion of space.”
The deepening lines at the edges of Daniel’s eyes flexed up as he looked in the mirror. It must have been pride. Meg even turned around from her seat for a smile and high-five. “Nice. Way to go.”
“But all those individual magnetic cells are going to have voltage spikes,” Daniel said. “You’ll need a large microprocessor, a mainframe to control them. To direct all the magnets so the ship doesn’t spin out of control.”
Cessini sat back and crossed his arms. That was an invitation to victory. “Easy,” he said. “Like the bellows lamp by my bed. Colossal squid have a large torus or donut-shaped brain that wraps around their central spine. That’s the kind of mega processor you’ll find in my bioship.”
“Donut brain? Magnetic blood?” Daniel repeated, skeptical.
“But you want to know what the best part is?” Cessini added. “When the ship comes in for a landing, guess what?”
“It squirts out ink?” Daniel asked.
“Right! Before arrival, so the artificial gravity of the magnets don’t get mixed up by the gravity of the planet, the ship dumps all the magnets out of its cells like black goo.” He backslapped Meg on the shoulder and they laughed. “You’d love it, Dad. Donut brains and coffee for breakfast. Like black meconium in your cup.”
Daniel burst. A reinvigorated creative mind was infectious. “I take it you like your new school?” Daniel asked as he caught an infrequent, but open grin.
“I do,” Cessini said. “I think I really do.”
Daniel stopped the car at the gravel trailhead for the mountain path. “Then you know what that sounds like to me?”
“What?”
“A piece of a puzzle just fit.”
“Totally,” Meg said as she gathered her backpack gear, ready to bolt from the car.
Cessini grabbed the strap of his day-pack and pulled the handle of his door. He paused before his foot reached the gravel. “Dad?”
“What? Have a good time,” Daniel said. “Try to come back with some friends.”
“Are you sure you’re not still angry about the fire?” Cessini asked.
“You mean the one that ruined our lives as we knew it?” Daniel asked, then turned back and gripped both hands to the wheel. “Go on, Meg’s waiting,” he said, then threw the Jeep’s engine into reverse.
“Does that mean you still are?” Cessini asked.
“No, I’m just fooling with you. Actually, I was laughing about it just the other night. If you think about it, you did the same to me in my shop as I did to my father before you. Perspective, I guess. Kind of makes it all feel crazy okay.”
“I guess,” Cessini said. But somehow the hard truth in Daniel’s eyes robbed from his smile. Maybe the grant of his forgiveness didn’t quite last as long as it should.
Meg hollered from the curb, “Ceeme, you coming, or what?”
Cessini stopped at the side of the Jeep. His new Rockhopper XPS bike and Meg’s Trailmaster were mounted on the Jeep’s rear rack. The front wheel of his bike still spun from the drive up the hill.
Meg went to unstrap hers first, but Daniel jammed on the gas and sped out of their way. Cessini held her back by the arm. “It’s okay,” he said as the dust settled down. “We can walk, instead.” The staked wooden sign at their backs read, Low Impact Trail. She wasn’t quite ready to agree.
Cessini had seen the height of the mountain during his descent from the air only weeks before, and afterward from a distance through his classroom window at Rose Bay. But as he walked close through the bush, the mountain offered up two paths. Not trailheads, but a split for his mind. One path led to a veritable richness of Eden and another was in deliverance to a less fortunate hell. Taking one or the other all came down to which face of the mountain the water broke from the clouds that day. His rain jacket was packed just in case, and the chosen path of the more moderate eastern front ahead offered the lesser pain for those afflicted by the trouble of their own skin.
Future member of Spud’s bushwalking club or not, Meg was along for the ride, and so together, they walked side-by-side up the wood-chipped break through the trees.
A crisscross of trails under a canopy of eucalyptus rose from the lower slopes of the bush. So far they had it all to themselves. The driest of warming spring winds blew from the northwest over the organ pipes and columnar cliffs that brushed their faces fresh with awe. The low humidity of the air was foiled only by the specter of sound nearing ahead. A waterfall poured its deadly element somewhere up on the trail.
Meg glanced back from her few steps ahead. He was still good to go. The green was different from the trails of Minnesota, but the pleasure of the free-flowing organics of nature was the same. As rivulets trickled under light wooden bridges, he left a few more worries behind and hopped the odd tenderfoot stream.
Meg yanked the shoulder strap of his pack and pulled his more apprehensive gait along. “Hurry up. They’re going to be waiting.”
Ahead, a possible drenching persisted, but from where among the echoes?
“Don’t worry so much,” Meg said. “Keep telling me about your spaceship if it helps. Now come on, let’s go.”
He shifted the pack on his shoulder and skipped ahead to catch up. “Slow down. Don’t run.”
Meg turned and, running up backward, opened her arms wide apart from her chest and yelled, “Come on, I feel great. We’re fine.” She hooked a left through the trees, and then followed a signpost with its winding arrow for “Vale.”
He hurried to keep her in sight, running into the breach of the echoes.
She stood still at a clearing ahead. Her breath was labored. Two bicycles lay ditched on the ground. Their riders were already off and deep in their outdoor play.
The waterfall was upon them. Cessini stopped on sight. It was the two-story height of their old data center warehouse in Minnesota. But something was different, not so frightening up close.
Spud dropped his rock into a pool at its shore and came running. “You two see the Octopus Tree?” he shouted.
Only one other boy lumbered about. It was the arm-wrestler from class. Behind him, the fall’s cascade over moss-covered rocks was pure and without mist.