Upstream

"Everything finishes up downhill of wherever you left it. That is not a rule about water. That is the only rule there is."

With Karen gone back down the line and no seed left in my pocket to put in anything, I went on upstream, because there was nothing else to do with myself and because I had not finished with the ground.

The river changed as I went. It narrowed and picked up speed and the bed came up under it, and the smooth belts out in the middle broke into standing waves over rock. The bank went from that fine drifted stuff to loose stone and then to slabs, and the walking got easier and the digging got a great deal harder, and I put three more holes in and got the peg through twice and gave up on the third.

And then it forked.

The main channel carried on the way I had been walking, up into country I could not see the end of. The other one came in from the left, narrower and faster, cutting down between two shoulders of rock, and where the two of them met there was a proper confluence with a spit of stone standing up in the middle and the water going round both sides of it.

I stood at the junction a while working out which was the parent and which the tributary, which I would have settled in a minute at home and could not settle at all out there, because I had no idea what either of them drained. On volume the near one ran about a third of the far one. On the angle it came in at, it had been coming in a very long while.

I wanted to go up the left-hand one and I could not. The water was too wide and too quick to cross, and I was on my own, and nobody knew within five hundred metres where I was, and I was forty-five years old and had spent thirty years telling other people not to do exactly that.

So I turned round.

And that was when I saw the light.

Something up in the rocks off to my right, catching and going out and catching again. In a whole world made of dust and stone, with the same orange running away in every direction I had looked since I got here, there was a hard bright flash coming off something that had been machined.

I went up that slope faster than my legs wanted to take me.

"A shovel?"

I said it out loud, to nobody, standing over it.

A shovel. A long-handled round-mouth digging shovel, blade driven into the stony dirt at an angle and the handle lying back against a rock, and the light getting in under the shoulder of the boulder and finding the polished part of the steel where it had been in and out of ground.

It had been used. Not heavily — the edge was still square and the paint was still on the back of the blade — but enough that the face had come up bright, and there was a smear of dark dirt dried along one side of it that had come from below the crust and not out of the dust.

And it was, without a shadow of a doubt, a bloody good shovel.

What the hell is a shovel doing out here?

Then the breeze came round off the rocks and I got the whole of it in one breath, and I put the back of my hand over my mouth and gagged into it.

"What the hell!?"

I had spent my life around dung. Sheep, cattle, wallaby, possum, chook, horse. Every one of them had its own smell and every one of them told me what the animal had been eating, and not one of them smelled anything at all like that. Herbivore dung smelled of fermented grass. It was never a pleasant smell and there was never anything personal in it.

This was human shit, and I knew it before I had finished breathing in.

I got hold of the handle and hauled the shovel out of the ground and went up onto the nearest rock and round to the far side of it, upwind, and stood there with my eyes running.

From up on the rock I could see the whole arrangement. There was no pit. No trench, no cover, no ash, no lime, nothing. There was a rough scatter of it in among the stones over an area maybe five metres across, some of it a week old and gone grey, some of it a great deal fresher than that. And no flies. Not one. The absence of them made it worse rather than better, because it meant the stuff was simply sitting there, going nowhere, waiting on something that was never coming.

And there was something green growing in the middle of it.

I came down off the rock to have a look and my left boot went out from under me in the fine dust at the base and my right came down hard to catch me, and there was a give and a squelch under it that I felt right through the sole.

"For fuck's sake!"

I got the foot up and turned it over. Right across the sole and up over the welt.

I scraped it off on a stone, and then again on a second stone, and then took the shovel and used the edge of the blade to get the last of it out of the tread, and flung the lot at a rock four metres off, and stood there breathing through my mouth.

"Seriously!?"

Then I paced it.

I did not decide to do that either. I went down off the rocks to the water's edge counting, and it came out at eleven paces. Call it nine metres. Ten at the outside, from the nearest of it to the river.

And then I turned and looked downstream, and everything in me went very cold and very quiet.

The camp was that way. Every step I had walked that afternoon had been upstream. The line of holes, the coriander, Karen's back going away between them — all of it downstream of where I was standing. And the camp beyond that again.

Five hundred metres at a rough guess. Perhaps six.

They were shitting ten metres from the water, and they were doing it five hundred metres above the place where they lived.

I sat down on the rock.

There was nothing complicated about it and nothing modern about it either. It was the oldest piece of public health knowledge there was, and it had been killing people for as long as people had been putting camps beside rivers, and the whole of it went into one sentence: you do not shit upstream of where you drink.

Distance from the watercourse. Depth of cover. Position relative to the flow. Three things. I had stood in front of a room of Collective volunteers and gone through those three with a whiteboard marker more times than I could count, for a weekend of tree planting, where the very worst outcome available to anybody was a rough Tuesday.

And I had lain down on my belly at that river and drunk out of it until my teeth ached.

Karen had as well. I had watched her go down and do it.

Glenda had said the lagoon's water. She had said the lagoon's water and then she had said the soil, and neither Karen nor I had the first idea what a lagoon had to do with anything, and I did not know where the lagoon was or who had drunk out of it or when.

What I did know was that there was a young man lying in a tent five hundred metres downstream of where I sat, and that he was ill enough that people went quiet when his name came up, and that nobody had offered to introduce us to him.

I was not a doctor. I said that to myself out on that rock, in those words, because there were half a dozen reasons a young man ends up on his back with a fever and most of them had nothing whatever to do with me.

But water, and ground, and what travels between the two of them, was the only work I had ever done. And the route from a scatter of human waste on a bank down to a mouthful of river water five hundred metres below it was not a theory. It was a slope and a flow rate.

Giardia. Cryptosporidium. Any one of a dozen coliforms. Something a good deal worse if somebody had brought something worse through with them. They had been in this place about a week, which was about right for the patient ones.

And I could not prove a word of it. No plate, no slide, no reagent, not a thermometer between the lot of us. I could not even have told anybody whether that boy had drunk from the river at all.

What I could do was walk back into that camp and stand in front of five people I had met that morning and tell them, on my first afternoon, that they had been doing the most elementary thing in the world wrong since before I arrived.

The man who does yard work.

"They don't even know how to dispose of their own shit correctly," I said, to the rocks. "What hope do we really have of establishing a real civilisation."

It came out flat and mean and I did not much care for the sound of my own voice saying it.

The plants!

It came in the way the others had. Not through the ears. Sitting in with my own thinking, level and unhurried, in the place where my own voice sat.

And I went, because I had nothing better on.

They were in between two boulders, in a pocket of ground about the size of a laundry basket, out of the worst of the light for most of the day and sheltered from the breeze on three sides. Half a dozen of them at various stages, the biggest already up past my knuckles and putting out its second pair of true leaves.

I got down beside them and had a leaf between my finger and thumb and knew what they were before I got it up to my nose.

Tomato plants.

I grinned at that, on my own, in the middle of all of it, and then the grin went off my face as I worked out how they had got there.

Somebody had eaten tomatoes. Somebody had come up here a day or two later and squatted between two rocks. Tomato seed went through a person entirely intact. It was built to. That was the whole purpose of a fruit and had been the purpose of a fruit a great deal longer than there had been people around to eat one. So it had come out the far end and landed on ground that would germinate a dry seed in under a minute.

Six healthy tomato plants growing in a stranger's shit, and they were the second-best thing I had seen since I came through that door, and the best was still standing in a hole beside the river with two leaves on it.

I sat back on my heels and thought about a long-drop.

Down, cover, distance. Six hundred millimetres of hole at the absolute minimum and a metre if the ground would give me one. A seat over the top. A tin of dry material beside it and a rule that everybody put a scoop in after themselves. Sited fifty metres back from the water at the least, and — this was the part I would have to say twice, and probably three times — downstream of the camp. Below where we lived. Below where we drank. Below anywhere we were ever likely to want to live.

I could build that in a day with this shovel. Half a day with somebody holding the other end of a string line. There was not one part of it that needed anything I did not already have in my hands.

And I got a good deal calmer thinking about it, which was what work had always done for me.

That was when the beetle came out.

Something moved inside my left cuff, against the skin, and it went straight through me — because I had checked for that beetle. I had checked with Karen two feet away and her hand out to a dog, and I had run my eye along the cuff and down the shirt front and over my knees and found nothing at all, and I had stood there and given it up for gone and had a small private funeral about it.

What I had not done was undo the button and roll the sleeve back, because Karen was right there and I would have had to explain what I was looking for.

There was nobody within five hundred metres of me now.

I put the shovel down and undid the cuff and turned the sleeve back twice, and there it was, sitting in the fold where the fabric doubles over, with its feelers going.

Six or seven millimetres. Dark, with that oily green coming up through the wing cases wherever the light got onto them. It had been in there since some time before we walked into that camp. It had been through a hole in a wall, across a desert, down a riverbank, into a hole in the ground and back out of it, and it had spent the whole of that afternoon riding on the arm of a man who had already buried it.

I got it onto the back of my finger and carried it over to the tomatoes.

There was nowhere else. That was the entirety of the reasoning and it took about a second. Six plants and a patch of soil in a shaded pocket between two rocks — the only green in this world that I had not put there myself, and the only place I knew of where a beetle might get a feed.

I put my finger down against the stem of the biggest one and it went off my knuckle onto a leaf and stopped, and worked its feelers over the surface, and then went on up.

And I stayed down on my heels and watched it a good deal longer than I needed to.

Nothing was going to eat it. That was the first of it. There was not one bird, not one lizard, not a wasp or a spider or an ant anywhere in that country, and I had walked a fair bit of it by then and looked hard. Whatever became of it, nothing was coming for it.

And it was never going to breed. There was not another one of its kind within a universe. It could feed, and it could walk about on a tomato plant in the shade, and it could live out whatever a beetle gets, and then it would stop, and that would be the finish of the entire species in this place.

A body in perfect working order and nothing whatever to use it on.

I got up and picked the shovel back up, and I did not follow that any further, because I knew exactly where it was heading and there was nothing useful at the end of it.

The shovel changed everything.

I had spent hours getting through crust with a bent tent peg and bleeding for the privilege, and now I had a metre of hickory and a proper blade. I put it into the ground on the way back down and it went through the loose stuff and struck the crust and I put my boot on the shoulder of it and the crust simply gave. First time. No kneeling, no swearing, no more skin off my hands.

I dug as I went. Every twenty paces or so — down through, look, smell, on. Same soil. Same everything. Two hundred metres of it up in the rock country and it was still one single unit with a lid on it, and by then I was less surprised than I wanted to be.

Then I came to a bit of a rise with the dust drifted deep against the base of it, and I rammed the shovel in low, and about an inch down it went into a buried rock and stopped dead.

The jolt went up the handle into my elbow and out through my shoulder. The slope let go above the blade and a good barrowful of fine stuff came down over my boots and up around me in a cloud, and I got a mouthful of it and stood there coughing and swiping at the air.

And through the settling of it, something small came sliding down the face of the dust, catching the light, turning over as it came.

I got down on my knees.

Two of them, lying on the surface where they had come to rest. I picked one up and turned it in my fingers, and then found the other.

Small. Round. About the size of a ten-cent piece and a good deal heavier for the size of it, and cold in the hand out of all proportion to how long they had been under that dust. Copper, or a copper alloy — a green bloom down in the low parts and a warm brown polish across the raised parts. Copper did that when it had been through a great many hands for years and then left alone for a great many more.

Struck, not cast. The edges were milled. There was a rim.

One face carried a number and a word. 20 cliv. The letters were worn down to soft shoulders where thumbs had been across them.

I turned it over.

A tower. A round tower standing up inside a wall that ran the whole way round the edge of the coin, with the courses of stone in the wall picked out one by one, and a gate in the near side. And underneath, along the bottom, in the same worn letters:

Chewbathia.

I sat down in the dirt with one in each hand.

Somebody had struck these. Somebody had cut a die and run a press. Which meant an alloy, and an alloy meant ore, and fuel, and a furnace, and somebody who knew the proportions and had them written down. Somebody had thought it worth the trouble of milling the edges, and milling was never decoration — milling was there to stop people shaving metal off the rim, which meant people had been shaving metal off rims, which meant these things had been worth enough to somebody to be worth stealing from.

20. Which meant there was a ten, and a fifty, and something these were twenty of.

A wall with the courses picked out in it. A wall was not decoration either. Nobody had ever gone to the trouble of building one without something on the far side they wanted kept out there.

And a name. A place with a name on it.

I had been told that morning, by something inside my own head, on a rock beside this same river, that there was a mountain with six peaks on it and that I was to go and find it.

I had spent every hour since being told by every single thing I looked at that this world was empty. No tracks. No birds. No wrack line. Nothing living in the river and nothing living in the ground.

And here were two coins out of a bank of dust with a walled town on the back of them.

"Chris!"

Karen's voice came up along the river and reached me thinned right out.

And I did not think about it. My hand was in my pocket and the coins were in after it and my fingers were shut round them before I had assembled a single reason.

The reasons came afterwards, and there were several, and they were all perfectly sound, and I have never entirely believed any of them. That I did not know how old they were or how they came to be there. That I did not know whether they made us safer or a great deal less safe. That there was a young man in a tent and a doctor talking about the water, and quite enough going on in that camp already without me walking in and putting two pieces of somebody else's money down on a crate.

Keep your mission secret. Secrecy will protect you.

That one I did not have to go looking for. It was already sitting there.

I got up and took the shovel and put the corner of the blade against the big rock beside me and dragged it hard, and it screeched and threw a few orange sparks and left a bright scar in the stone. Then I did it again the other way across, and stood back, and there was an X on that rock a metre wide that I would be able to pick out from the water.

Which was the entirety of my record-keeping for the day. A man who has kept a notebook since he was six years old, standing in another world, scratching a cross into a rock with a stolen shovel.

I set off down the bank at a decent clip, and I thought about my own hands the whole way, and about how easily that pocket had happened.

Karen was standing at the top end of my line of holes with her arms folded.

"Where have you been?"

Her eyes were narrow and there was more concern in it than temper.

The rocks were behind me and the smell was behind the rocks and the coins were against my thigh through the cloth.

"I had to piss," I said.

It came out easily. That was the part I noticed. Not that I said it — that there was no gap at all between deciding and saying, and that I did not have to do one single thing with my face.

Karen's forehead came down. She had never liked that word and had been losing the argument about it since 1997.

"I found a shovel," I said, and got it up before she could start.

It worked immediately, the way it always had.

"Where'd you find that?"

"I believe I've stumbled across a toilet site."

Both eyebrows went up.

I laughed, because there was nothing else on offer. "Where did you think they were going to go when nature called?"

She did not answer that. She turned her head and looked out at the whole of it — the dunes going away pale, the rock country, the river running past with nothing in it — and I watched her arrive at the same place I had arrived at an hour before.

"Yeah," I said. "We'll need to do the same."

"I suppose it's no different to our camping trips, really."

"No." And then I thought about eleven paces to the water, and five hundred metres of river between there and the tents, and a young man on his back in the dark. "Well, maybe a little."

She gave me the look that meant there was more coming and she intended to wait for it.

"Come take a look."

She took a breath and nodded and came after me.

I brought her round the upwind side of the rocks and stood her in front of the tomatoes without saying a word, and let her get there on her own.

She was down on her heels inside a second. Then her hand went halfway out toward the biggest one and stopped, and came back, and I watched the whole of it cross her face — a woman looking at six healthy plants and working out exactly what they had come out of.

"This isn't a phenomenon we want to adjust to," Karen said.

"I know." I leaned on the shovel. "But it gives a good indication of the soil's strength."

She nodded and said nothing for a bit.

Then, "May I?"

She tipped her head off toward the rocks.

"Of course."

I held the shovel out to her, handle first, and she took it, and neither of us said one word about why.

Then I turned and walked twenty paces the other way and stood looking at the river with my back to her, with my hands in my pockets and one coin under each set of fingers.

"Makes sense while we are here," I said.