The Year of the Fruit Cake Read online

  This is one of those cases where all the knowledge in the universe doesn’t necessarily lead to wisdom.

  “I know,” said Leanne.

  “What?” Janet was quick to want that change of topic.

  “I’ll bring you all scones next time. Scones will help.”

  “Help us trust?”

  “Well, maybe. I was thinking more that we can talk about food if things go funny. We did until now, only—”

  “Only,” said Diana, “we’ve exhausted the menu here. And their hot chocolate’s not as good as it used to be.”

  “We could also try other places. They won’t be as friendly,” said Trina, “but it gives us something safe to fall back on if one of us has a bad day. You don’t have to make scones, but the fallback is a really terrific idea.”

  “I like making scones.” Leanne was obdurate. “I do it to support friends. And it doesn’t have to be scones. I make a mean slice, and there’s no-one at home who’ll eat them anymore. I need an excuse to make them.”

  “And we need something to talk about, as backup. You’re entirely right,” said Antoinette. “I’ll bring something too, from time to time, but it won’t be food. I’m OK at cooking, but it doesn’t give me any joy.”

  “And I’ll keep bringing flowers,” suggested Janet.

  “Yes, to flowers. And food settles me right down. Cooking for a mob is calming.”

  “And we’re definitely a mob,” admitted Trina. “Although, if you want a different focus just today, we could talk about my amazing new footwear. Have you ever seen a heel as nice as this one?”

  The next time they met up, Leanne brought an almond cake. “I’ve always wanted to try one of these,” she explained, “and it’s gluten-free, Antoinette.”

  Antoinette seemed surprised that Leanne had remembered. Diana seemed surprised that Antoinette was surprised. The whole group bought takeaway coffee and then they found two park benches and sat in the sun, munching on cake.

  “At this moment,” Antoinette declared, “I am Marie-Antoinette.”

  “I’ve always thought it was brioche they were told to eat,” suggested Janet.

  “Doesn’t matter,” said Trina. “It’s cake now. In this moment, we have the Queen of France among us. I could enjoy getting fat this way.”

  “I get fat any way,” admitted the newly-discovered late Queen of France. “It doesn’t worry me.”

  “You’re not fat, though,” said Leanne as she squizzed her friend closely. “Just round in a really feminine way. I always wanted to be like that. I’m all bones and lines and sharp elbows”

  A smile emerged from deep within Antoinette. A silence engulfed the group, as they sat enjoying their solidarity.

  “I brought you something,” said Janet, to change the subject. She handed out files, to the puzzlement of the others. “You don’t have to give comments or anything. I just thought you’d like to see them.”

  “They’re stories,” said Diana, first to open the folders.

  “I’m no good at cooking, and I can’t do all the crafts and things, but I write a little. I thought you’d like to read a little.” There was a silence. Janet was obviously used to the eventual next question and didn’t wait for it. “I’ve had two of my stories published. There are copies of them at the back. Don’t worry, I’m not plaguing you with horrendously illiterate garbage.”

  There was another silence. While each of the women had wonder­ed what secrets the others held, they hadn’t expected this. Janet looked far too ordinary to be a writer.

  Trina found a way of saying this. “You don’t look sufficiently Bohemian,” she said. “And you have a day job and a husband and three children.”

  “Are you saying I’m too ordinary to write?” Janet wasn’t at all offended. In fact, she repressed a grin.

  “You camouflage,” Trina responded, her dignity intact.

  “It’s my second-biggest secret,” admitted Janet. “I don’t write under my own name. I don’t generally talk about my writing. It just seemed proper to share it with you, now. I don’t really want to talk about it at all, but I thought you’d like to know.”

  “This is a great honour,” said Diana, very seriously. “I’ve never had a writer for a friend before.”

  “I’m still the same person, you know.” Janet’s voice sounded almost edgy. “It’s just part of who I am. If it makes you uncomfortable, don’t read it. And I’d rather you didn’t give me literary analysis—it feels really wrong from my end. I wrote it; I don’t need to hear a dissection.”

  The angles on Antoinette’s face broke up and met in wholly different angles, as her smile overtook them. “That makes it all a lot easier. I’d love to read your writing, but I really don’t feel confident about making an opinion aloud.”

  “It suits both of us, then,” said Janet, finishing the subject by snapping the last words out. “You’ve no idea how much courage it took me to show you my work. There are people who can talk all day about their writing, and there are writers who create email addresses that say “Billisawriter”, but me, I’d rather not talk about my writing.”

  “Interesting,” said Diana, “and perfectly fair. Thank you.”

  That was the highlight of the meeting. After that, conversation descended into current events, and there was no joy in the world. The only brightness came from the flowers Janet had brought.

  “Thank goodness we found each other,” said Leanne. “Or rather, thank goodness Diana found a table and Trina screamed until Diana heard her.”

  “That’s not quite how it happened,” said Trina. “I never screamed. You don’t want to ever hear me scream, either. I merely spoke at a reasonable volume.”

  “Effectively,” said Antoinette, “and in a join-me-I-am-fun tone. You’re right, Leanne, it makes everything much more able to be dealt with. I would still rather that innocents weren’t murdered in gun battles in the US, and that we didn’t have explosions in Oz, but if the world must come to an end, at least we have the very best people to end it with.”

  They toasted their very-bestness with coffee and tea. Solidarity twice in an afternoon wasn’t a bad thing at all.

  The Observer’s Notes

  The children sang and chased each other.

  “Round and round the mulberry bush, the monkey chased the weasel. The monkey stopped to pull up his socks. ‘Pop!’ goes the weasel.”

  —overheard in a park

  My friend writes two kinds of stories. Only two. Her published stories all appear to be these two kinds of stories perfected. When my friend showed us her first two published stories, she showed us one of each. Will I ever get used to saying “my friend” with this kind of pride in the term? Ever since the memory started coming back, I’ve doubted this and that and the other, but some friendships are not to be doubted.

  The first (for I am being rational and non-emotional today, and quite capable of creating a simple list) is about ghost children. These children trap other children and carry them off to somewhere mysterious. Happy lives end suddenly. They’re not cruel stories. Dark, and nasty, but not cruel. The bad dreams they give me are not malicious.

  She writes this tale in twenty different ways but the results are always the same. The story is always the same. Evil children create lost children.

  The other type of story is not dissimilar. Dark, but not cruel.

  She writes so many stories about a child who has been shunned. Every child has a different personality. Some are nice, some are noble, some are warped, and some are woeful. Society gives each and every child a set of promises. The child might read stories that promise that Cinderella will find her prince and the Ugly Duckling will become a swan. They are presented stories on film that promise great futures. Their dreams are developed through these stories and they plan many plans and live complex lives. They always end up alone. Always. Alone
.

  I wonder why she lets me read them. They give me nightmares.

  I don’t dare tell her. Thankfully, she doesn’t want to hear my opinion.

  Notes towards an

  Understanding of the Problem

  I’m damned if I know how it all went wrong. I’m going to have to go back through the whole thing, chronologically, with all the identified moments and all the interpretations and just try to work it out. Not working it out isn’t an option, given that the effects are still piling up. To put it in simple terms, how the fuck did it happen?”

  That single event changed everything, and it stymies me. I’ve spent years researching it just to get where I am now, being chief handler of the critical project that will help us understand and that will allow us to move on. I ought to have an answer already, given those years. What’s the problem? Why am I stuck having to start yet again?

  I need to make this moment a fixed point. A constant. Not a var­iable. Right now there are too many variables.

  I need a name.

  There’s no term in English that comes close to summarising what happened. No formal term, and no informal one. It’s a change, but calling it “the change” or even “the great change” makes the whole thing sound menopausal and whatever-deity-these-people-trust knows, I get enough of that in my source material. I can’t keep calling it it. “Armageddon” is too long and ugly. “Collapse of all we hold dear” is too depressing and too long and not quite right. “Damn humans” is accurate, but doesn’t really describe an event in English, which is a strangely limited language. I might call it “fruitcake”.

  This time round, I have full access to all the archives. Yay, me. The perks of power.

  This is a good language for sarcasm. I should stop noting things like this so that my account is interpretable literally. So that all human studies are misinterpreted in different ways, with mine being misinterpreted subtly and the Hitler study misinterpreted coarsely. That wouldn’t solve a thing, but it would cheer me up. Today I need cheering up. Fruitcake, even with full access, is depressing.

  This full access thing isn’t full access at all, to be truthful.

  I get to see what happens in the vicinity of the critical incidents. It’s very full access in that sense. I can see the emotional reactions in faces and the physical reactions through the bodies. I can hear the speech. I can even rebuild the feel of the table the drinks sit on when the group sits down to coffee. Mood is extrapolated, but I have a lot of material to base the extrapolation on.

  The technology behind it all is extraordinary. If all I wanted to do was browse through private lives in the year of fruitcake, it would be perfect. That’s what the tech was designed for: entertainment back home. What one of my subjects might describe as “porn for aliens”.

  There is a different issue with that, I think, and it emerges from the technology used in the interactions with Earth. It wasn’t an important place—the newest and greatest technology wasn’t ever bought to bear in the study of it, just the tech from which we could get the most…ah…interesting…results. There was a time when the anthropologists downloaded all their sensations, and those down­loads were mined for profit of various kinds.

  This issue isn’t that. It’s related, but it’s less ethically dubious.

  There were poor choices by those who recorded, and those who selected the equipment for recording and so on, back to the discovery of the planet and its population. Some of those choices were guided by the desire for titillation.

  This means that the types of data to which I have access are limited. The amounts of material are wonderful, but it’s primarily of the style we used to call “alien observer in a strange land”, and doesn’t look into the peoples and cultures outside small circles.

  We have amazing information on several branches of English language culture, for instance, some information on other branches of English language culture, secondary information on those linked to English language culture and bugger all on the rest. This has been the case since the beginning. Even the Hitler study was mainly undertaken through the English language. If Hitler were a god in Kurdistan (which I seriously doubt, but bear with me on this), we wouldn’t know. English ignores any views that the Kurds might have on Hitler.

  Why English? Because of English language distribution as either primary or alternate language in our location of choice. Why Australia? Because we like the neatness of an island continent. An underpopulated island continent without too many human buildings messing it up. Because the ground and the climate are suitable for our homes, which are always considerations when we examine a species, because it means that we can settle in a place for which we already have an affinity. We don’t like inhabiting cultural wastelands or adjusting terrain to suit us.

  I’m quibbling. All the work of these last years points to this group at this time in this place. The equations point to critical moments and causation, and these are them. It’s the Earthlike justificatory narratives that are so damned messy, and I only fall into them in places like this, where I’m using English.

  I trust the earlier work, for I’ve already been through it and inquisitioned it rigorously. Fruitcake happened because of this place and these people.

  But…I feel very uncertain about the project. On top of all my doubts, it has such great importance that it could make or break my career, and that makes me want to walk delicately in the world of these far-too-dead humans.

  I will call it “irksome fruitcake”.

  Now I have a clear term, I want to go back to the language issue. Spelling everything out, as if I were thinking it for the first time, is how I understand within the language. This means there is a lot of repetition here, but I need it if I’m to push past the obvious.

  Earlier studies were imperfect. We knew what happened from them, but not how. The maths is wonderful, but it’s not the story, and I think, for this, that the human reliance on stories might give enlightenment. I would have anyway, to be honest. Normally I don’t write this many notes, and normally I am not so explanatory. Embedding is not a luxury this time round: it’s critical.

  We are trained to work in the language of the people we’re studying because we need to be able to interpret nuances. Translation happens after conclusions are drawn. Old hat. Worth documenting here that I’m doing it according to these standards. This means that there’ll be a lot of stuff that won’t be in the final report. And, as I just said, I’m pushing the traditional right to the edge. This is partly because I have to: no-one has made sense of it at all. Maybe human language will work when a real language fails? Maybe the solution is at the interface between the two?

  Just because I can, however, I translate back into Standard, I make my report a thing of beauty. Not only standard practice, but it means I can play silly buggers with content and get the daftness of this culture and language out of my system. This is one reason why it’s standard practice, of course, but if I’m stating the obvious, I might as well state that.

  This particular note, then, is for those that encounter my notes after it’s all done and want to know why I wander off on tangents so often. It’s because I am old-fashioned to the core, and these wanderings are part of process. They do not enter my final report. They are a way of keeping tabs on my feelings, so that my feelings won’t bias the report. And they’re a way of finding my way out of the mess I’ve been left.

  Sixty-one years without a solution. Sixty-one years of suspended policy on planetary settlement. Sixty-one years of public humiliation for our species.

  For irksome fruitcake, right now, I need to think like a human being. Specifically, an Australian, preferably female, in the approach to life. Preferably a mature female. No worries. No problems at all with this, in fact. Except that I’m not talking like just any human being. I’m talking like one particular person (initially, it will fade in and out), and that’s intentional, but it
’s also worrying. The idea is that it will help me unravel what happened. How everything irksome fruitcakeish changed all of our lives.

  It’s ironic that getting into heads helps us explain a crazy culture where everyone is individual, where no-one communicates fully. Not once in their lives. Never. It’s terrifying.

  It’s changing me, this level of individualism, and being alone. Already. Maybe humanity corrupts. That’s one of the theories out there. I don’t think so, however. What I think is that I’m missing something critical.

  I know why the decision to send a Judge was made. Of course I do.

  Humanity was on the brink of sending people into space. Had been for years, but something in the technology made it look imminent. Our test messages had been seen and we did the tally of the lives of those on Earth, and found they were destroying the planet. We did the Hitler study and that reinforced everything concerning our early ideas about Earth and its humans. One can’t Judge a species on environmental destruction or on a short period of historical madness, but one can certainly use this material as a basis to send a Judge in to do a fair evaluation. We Observed and analysed and generally tried to make sense of one of the messiest species I’ve ever encountered. Also one of the loneliest. We did this for sixty years before we sent the Judge in.

  It wasn’t as if we went, “They saw us, oops, better kill them all.” We don’t do that.

  I say this defensively, don’t I? This is because one of my teachers suggests there might have been an instance where this actually happened. A long time ago. I’m certain we don’t do that any more. It’s only happened once, anyhow (and that’s only if my teacher’s right—it hasn’t ever been verified or examined or definitely proven), and it’s not my problem. Someone else can handle that possible, putative, previous ethical breach. Someone else can find a way of not talking about it when it has to be referred to, also. I’ll just leave this note here for that someone else to handle, shall I? Thank you, someone else.