"Broderick, Damien - The Dreaming (The Dreaming Dragons)" - читать интересную книгу автора (Broderick Damien)

Alf Dean felt his obsession coil and tighten in his belly. The Ngularrnga tribe, from which his natural mother had been abducted to the racist compounds of the Darwin Mission, called the BabyMaker Wedarragama. Yet neither the Ngularrnga, nor the Murinbata of the Daly River reserve where Alf had done his graduate work, nor any other of the hundreds of linguistically and culturally discrete tribes possessed rites exclusively honouring the Rainbow Serpent. The Earth Mother had the grandeur of Kunapipi, a corroboree cycle steeped in cosmic and mundane significance, a liturgy patterning six months of each year in its ornate embrace. But not Wedarragama. Merely his face and his name, inscribed on stone and bark and human memories...
Here, though, in this small section of the Tanami desert, there had been Serpent rites. The tribe was long gone, smashed by disease, drunkenness and the theft of dignity, and their singular rite had vanished into extinction with them.
He moved suddenly, clapping the boy on the back. 'Come on, kid, let's go. Before we spook each other.'
Mouse uttered a little cry of delight and bounded ahead to clamber up the dusty slope. Seeing his agile grace, Alf remembered the group of damaged children at the Monash centre, bouncing like spider monkeys on trampolines, wholly in the dimensions of tactual and haptic space.
The first four shallow openings they found led nowhere. Wind had scoured indentations, and shifting pressures had split stone -- even in this most stable region of a stable continent -- but there were no promising caves. The hints Alf had compiled in field work and archival research suggested a series of deep caverns, cutting far into the cliff. He halted briefly to catch his breath, sipping sparingly from the water container.
The boy looked back piercingly. 'Tired old man,' he said without scorn or impudence. He skidded down the incline, dust and pebbles tumbling ahead of him. Alf allowed him a modest drink. Mouse sighed with pleasure and sat on a rock, leaning his head against his uncle's knee.
How normal he looks, Alf thought. Healthy, even strong for his age. The ruin was hidden inside the boy's curly head: neural nets incomplete, transmitter proteins deranged and malformed. If Fish was right.
Alf spied a series of almost invisible gouges in the sandstone. 'See these marks, Mouse?' The boy's fingers drifted across the impressions. 'I'm almost certain they're the remnants of a religious design. Must be immensely old. Maybe we're on the right track.' He had seen just such marks in the Ngama and Lukiri caves. By custom, ceremonial insignia were located out of view of the uninitiated. He peered at them searchingly. Nothing remotely like the Rainbow Serpent motif.
But he's up there somewhere, Alf told himself. His huge palpable bones are locked into stone, even if his acolytes are dispersed and lost.
They resumed their climb. Dust caked in messy paste on sweating skin. Mouse began to forge ahead again. Once, the boy jumped back in alarm from a flash of blue-grey scales. It was only a lizard, startled from its nest into the sun.
Because he was above and ahead, it was Mouse who found the entrance.
The cavern's jaws were partially hidden by two great slabs of rock, positioned with enormous effort hundreds or even thousands of years earlier to forbid entry. Time had allowed one of the slabs to slip grindingly aside. Alf saw the boy wriggle through the narrow gap.
'God damn it, get back here!'
Convulsively, he propelled himself to the entrance and stared into a void, jamming his sunglasses into a pocket of his shirt. Mouse stood motionless just inside the opening, head cocked to one side as though listening; the flashlight was clutched against his chest. Alf seized it, thumbed on the beam. 'Christ knows what's in there, Mouse.'
The black place was a horizontal cone, extending wide and deeper the farther back it went. Where the pale electric beam splashed the far wall, it made the ancient drawings dance: red, white, smoky yellow.
'Paintings,' Mouse stated confidently, and started toward them with the stride of a statesman. In furious alarm Alf caught him, spun him around.
'Bloody stay _put!_' The boy flinched. 'Look, you know I don't like shouting at you. We'll both view the nice pictures _after_ I've checked.'
It was impossible to know if the boy understood, but he stayed where he was, with that indefinable quivering in his tense body, while Alf moved away. Testing his footing with each step, the anthropologist sent the circle of light darting from wall to floor to roof, probing for fractures which might be triggered by some minor unwary movement. He returned to the mote-dancing blur of the entrance.
'Okay, kid.'
The paintings were a sour anticlimax. Alf studied them closely for several minutes, checking absently to ensure that Mouse did not damage them with his floating fingers. He unsnapped his Leica, took a series of flashlit exposures.
'Bad luck,' he said. 'Couple of centuries old at most, very similar to other recent work.' They were undeniably of sacred ceremonial significance, but he failed to detect any reference to the Rainbow Serpent. 'I don't see why they went to the trouble of blocking up the cave.' Raspingly, he rubbed at his jaw.
Mouse gazed at his uncle's face in the wan light of the flashlight. His arm wafted up in the direction of the entrance. 'Old,' he said. 'Old.' His high voice reverberated.
'Yeah. Old's right. Maybe a later bunch did all this. Let's see if there's any more to this place.'
Slowly they paced the cavern's chipped perimeter, beam cavorting ahead. The curved wall was marred by splits and vertical crevices. Mouse pressed at the raddled surfaces with spread hands, as though his dreaming mind expected a secret floor to open, admit them to some world more clarified and radiant than he'd ever known. Sorry, kid, Alf thought. We never got around to inventing the hinged door.
Mouse gave a little shriek.
'Moved,' he said.
Alf was instantly beside him. One of the great splits in the rock wall trembled ever so slightly at the boy's touch. Alf brought his flashlight close to the vertical fault line. Carefully, he pressed against the edge. For a brief moment it felt as if a great portal had begun to open. He chided himself for his fantasy, but steadily increased his pressure. This is ridiculous, he told himself. I'm responding to the suggestion of an imbecile.
And the solid stone swung into deeper blackness, pivoted at top and base, swung with massive noiseless force until it stood at right angles to the rock wall proper.
'Jesus!' The anthropologist leapt back, dragging the child with him. He stared incredulously at the new opening. A door, he thought, astounded. The slab was perfectly balanced. Hewn with flint tools. The human effort contained in the concealed entrance staggered him.
He shone his flashlight along the rock tunnel. Mouse crouched next to him for a better view. Unlike the pivoted door, the tunnel was plainly a natural formation. Like the cavern, it was evidently of the variety created by abrasion rather than evolution; it possessed none of the outlandish lime carbonate deposits, the icy crystal stalactites of the notable tourist attractions on the distant Australian east coast. It sloped gently upward, continuing back into the stony hill until the flashlight's beam was lost. Apparently there had been no subsidence, no crash of rock from above to block the tunnel. The air was dry and choking.
'By God,' Alf said softly, 'I do believe we've found it.'
Several metres in from the entrance the rock was vivid with inlaid, engraved patterns. Alf knew them at once, though they differed in detail from the Murinbata diagrams he was most familiar with. Here were 'X-ray' portraits of black hunters, bones and principal organs sketched with conventional abstraction within the outlines of their flesh. Here were kangaroos, perentie goannas, lily roots -- the Lesser Dreamings, the totems. And here, in its bold, blatant glory, was the Rainbow Serpent himself, the old BabyMaker, the FireStealer, the Whirlwind Man, his great eyes huge as an owl's, his skull radiant with spokes of light flamboyant as any Native American chieftain's feathered headdress, the sinuous double outline of his body with its tiny vestigial limbs, its bifurcate tail...
'It's a warning,' Alf said at last. 'Initiates Only. Do Not Pass Go. Here' -- he laughed foolishly, the tension of discovery gusting from him -- 'Be Dragons! The dinosaur fossil must be embedded further up the tunnel.'
Mouse smiled angelically, and tugged at his sleeve. 'See the bunyip.'
Alf sobered. 'Not just yet, old son. I don't trust that -- '
But Mouse had darted past, dashed several metres up the tunnel. The boy stopped dead, waiting placidly.
'Fuck it, Mouse!' Fists clenched in a spasm of dread, Alf stepped in after him. 'You haven't got the _sense_ of a mouse. Get back here.'
Somehow the boy had been slipping into the absolute blackness as Alf advanced with the skittering light. As the anthropologist lunged, he jumped away and began to run on his toes.
Alf hurled himself in pursuit, shouting with useless anger. The flashlight beam swerved like some mad white moth. Their footsteps clattered and crashed. Stale, musty air stung Alf's throat.
The boy kept running, knocking against rough stone outcroppings. The tunnel turned abruptly, diverted by a seam of harder stone. Alf smashed bruisingly, careened off; the flashlight spun to the ground. Raging, he retrieved it, blundered on. Mouse loomed. His hand came down with harsh force on the boy's shoulder.
'Can't I trust you for a moment?' The child's blue eyes, struck by light, filled his gaze like the sparks of glimmering stars. 'Haven't you learned anything at that place? How -- '
And he stared over the boy's muscular shoulder, releasing his shirt. Phosphor glow had entered the darkness. Head ringing with confusion, Alf was captivated and aghast. A large rectangular metal frame stood at the tunnel's sealed end. Soft violet light pulsed like a living membrane within the burnished metal bars.
Vaguely he heard Mouse say, without resentment, 'Nice. Pretty, Alf.'
Violet intensified, fled through dazzling blue, green, brilliant yellow. It could not be there. They were hundreds of metres into a sun-scorched hill in northern Australia, scores of kilometres from the nearest human beings, many hundreds from industrial civilisation. It's a movie set, he thought, absurdly. The base of the thing was embedded in thick dust. It's _old_, he told himself.
He started back to Mouse and the shock became too much sustain. He began to laugh, great yells and howls of mirth; the boy joined him with high, beautiful peals; they leaned against one another, pounding ineffectually with loose fists, and Alf's laughter became shrill. Mouse stopped laughing, withdrew himself delicately and tugged at Alf's arm until they both sat, legs sprawled in front of them, on the cold misty ground. Alf leaned against rock, wiped his streaming eyes, gasped for breath.
'Sorry,' Mouse said.
'Yeah.' Alf blew his nose noisily; he was trembling. 'I'll bet you are, you wilful little bastard. But tell me, great explorer -- what the fuck _is_ it?'
They stared in silence at the pulsing golden light. After a moment Mouse said, 'Bunyip?'
'Bunyip's right. Jesus.' He climbed to his feet but maintained a decent distance from the impossible, extraordinarily lovely object. One thing was patent: if any Australian aboriginal tribe had built the thing, Alf might as well tear up his doctorate and start from scratch, along with the whole Anthropology Department.
_This_ is the Rainbow Serpent, he told himself incredulously. Origin of a myth so old that it has no living relevance, if you judge relevance by continuing ritual. Back to the archaic Dreaming. The source and ground of reality. His thoughts skidded sideways. The tribes employ the English word 'dreaming' for _ngakumal_ and _ngoiguminggi_, their totems and totem-sites, but that's an adaptation to the language of their conquerors. They never use _nin_, the word for true dreaming sleep. Yet the borrowed elision was superbly deft. The dream-experience, after all, is recognised by them as part of the continuum of authentic reality. Agentive and prophetic, he thought, recalling Professor Stanner's monograph. An ontological embodiment of the entire totemic universe. The Dreaming. The wily old phenomenologists, he thought admiringly.