The Dreaming 1.2
By Asynca
Thanks again to Maro.
If we'd had Sam's way, we've have ended up at Gatwick with about five minutes to check-in our luggage, pass through security and clear passport control. Then we'd have sprinted down through the gates while our names were called over the loud speaker and Final Call flashed on the departure information screens.
Fortunately we had my way, which meant that after we'd made it through to the gates we had two full hours to relax and look forward to our holiday.
"I could have slept two extra hours," Sam complained as she sat down opposite me and hunched over her coffee as if it was a small furnace. "I love sleeping in when it's snowing."
The bedroom could have doubled as a fridge, so we'd taken our pillows and the duvet downstairs and slept in front of the fire. I hadn't done that since I was ten years old. It had been a shame to get up in the morning, but it was going to be much warmer where we were headed so I figured it would be worth the sacrifice.
While we were seated across from each other in the departure lounge, I looked furtively around us. We were in one of those rare moments where no one had any idea who we were. Everyone was too bleary-eyed from hauling themselves out of bed at the break of dawn so as not to miss their flights. I smiled faintly. It was nice to feel invisible again.
Sam finished her coffee and stood up with purpose. When I looked quizzically at her, she said, "Duty free!" and fished her purse out of her carryon.
As she strode off in the direction of the shops, I chuckled to myself. Taking my phone out of my pocket, I texted, "That's fine, I'm happy to mind your bag for you and no, you can't get me anything but I appreciate you asking."
My pocket buzzed while I was searching through my backpack for the iPad. After I'd found it and sat back with it balanced on my knees, I glanced at my phone again. Sam had replied with a photo. I opened it and zoomed in; it was of a fifties-style polka-dot bikini and it was too big for Sam.
I made a noise and texted back. "No."
After a second she replied, "Too late. Hope they don't accept returns. ;)"
I sighed and unlocked the iPad.
I'd changed my personal email after the fiasco with all the journalists, but I had to confess it was a little depressing having no unread messages. It reminded me that I wasn't in the middle of any projects and, actually, I had nothing to do. Without Yamatai to obsess over, I felt oddly useless. I wasn't working and I wasn't studying. I was in a limbo where I had time to go on indefinite holidays and I didn't have anything really to worry about. I should be happy about having all this free time, shouldn't I?
Since I had the iPad open, I logged on to Cambridge's online library. After meeting Professor Chamberlain on Natla's team in Peru, he had been kind enough to grant me access to it despite the fact I wasn't a student. As much as I hated charity, I had to concede it was far superior to the one on UCL's database. I downloaded a few volumes about the history of and ancient cultures in Australia, figuring I'd read them on the plane.
In the meantime, there was that email from Prof. Chamberlain that I'd been procrastinating about replying to that I really should do something about. I went back to my inbox and opened it. He was just so wordy in all his emails to me, I felt as if there would be an exam at the end of them.
"Good to speak to you again, Lara," it began, "As I mentioned on the phone, we have some great opportunities in the department that I would really like to offer to you before we advertise. If you click the link in my signature and follow it through to 'open tenders' you'll find all the project details. I encourage you to look at them because there's only a couple of other archaeologists who I think would be suited to this sort of work and they are already working on large projects." I followed his advice and downloaded the four tender documents. I didn't feel like reading them now, though. I'd worry about that after we got back from holidays. I tabbed back to the email. "I did watch that movie you were in, and I must say it's absolutely fascinating. I'd like to have a discussion with you at some point about where you drew inspiration from for some of the details. Particularly this 'Natla'– genius using that CEO as the character, by the way – were you following the Aryan-Norse connection to Atlantis by Blavatsky?" He went on and on about his theories about Blavatsky, actually giving some weight to them. I skimmed over it, not having much interest in spending too much of my time thinking about Natla and everything that had happened as a result of her. I still dreamt about Larson.
Towards the end of the email was a comment I thought was rather interesting. "I've been arguing with the fellows here that research papers are such an out-dated way of presenting historical theories. No one is interested in reading twenty thousand words of research anymore; the world has moved on and so has technology. It occurred to me while I was re-watching Tomb Raider that you have pioneered the best possible package to deliver archaeological theories to the public. You're entertaining them and as a result they are learning about ancient civilizations. Of course, many people disagree with the view you have presented. I'm sure if I argued it was literal I'd be laughed off the lectern. The fact of the matter is that is the new frontier of reporting research. You are treading new ground. Your father would have been so proud of you."
I sat back and digested that idea, feeling a smile grow across my face. It was a huge compliment so naturally I wanted to believe it was true. Was it, though? Had Sam and I accidentally stumbled onto cutting-edge methodology? I hadn't really been focusing on the academic aspect of any of the places we'd visited in the footage, but Sam had made sure to cut in some video of me with the artefacts. I had recorded audio explaining the basic features of the art and statues we'd filmed, too. I supposed there had been some educational value in the final product, but I wasn't sure I'd go so far as to say it was the new media version of a research paper on Atlantean mythology. It was mostly just a narrative in several historical settings.
I wasn't removed enough from it to be able to analyse it in any useful way, either. It was times like this that I really wish I did have my father to discuss this stuff with.
I had been completely stuck on that thought when Sam returned, bags in tow.
I snapped out of my internal monologue as she dropped one of them in my lap. I opened it, expecting the scandalous polka-dot bikini that she implied she'd bought for me, but inside there was a taupe two-piece. I lifted the parts of it out to examine them; the briefs were reasonably modest and the top was a full-length tank that would cover my stomach and the twisted scar on it. I looked up at her and she winked, but she didn't say anything about her ruse. I wanted to throw my arms around her.
"You had that look again," she told me as she sat down and lined the bags up at her feet. For a moment I thought she meant the look I must have given her when I was thinking about hugging her. "You know," she continued as she put her purse back into her backpack. "The look you used to get when you were thinking about Yamatai. You'd just stare off like that and then suddenly you'd say something random like, 'What if Aoki was wrong about the time-dating on that artefact?', or something else I had no idea about." I hadn't noticed I'd done that.
Sam showed me various accessories she's bought, leaving a small black bag until last. "And," she said, ceremoniously lifting a handful of fabric out of it, "something else for you."
Before I realised exactly what she was doing, she'd draped a lacy negligee across her chest. I supposed it was nice, but I'd never cared much about lingerie. What I did care about, though, was that she'd whipped it out in public and was grinning mischievously at me in a crowded departure lounge.
I happened to glance beside us and made eye contact with a middle-aged man who looked just as uncomfortable about Sam's negligee as I was.
I blushed furiously. "Sam," I hissed, "put that away!"
She didn't. "What you don't like it? Maybe if you had a better idea of how it would look…" She pretended to be about to take her jacket off.
The middle-aged man cleared his throat and his wife glared at me. They probably couldn't hear her and I didn't think they knew who we were, but it was still horribly embarrassing. I put a hand over my eyes. "Sam…!"
"Okay, okay," she said, scrunching it up and tucking it back into the bag. "We're going to have a lot of fun down under, though," she said, sounding pleased with herself.
Oh, God. I didn't know if I was more angry at her for the teasing or for her awful double-entendre. "I don't know whether to love you or hate you sometimes," I told her. "I'm beginning to think you picked Australia specifically so you can tell people that we went south together and it was really hot."
Something occurred to her. "Two seconds," she said cryptically and then slowly pulled an item out of her bag. It was unmistakable: her camera. She switched it on and unfolded the LCD. "Care to repeat that?"
I leaned across and snatched the camera off her, holding it right up in front of my face. "We haven't even left England yet and already I want to kill Sam."
She laughed and accepted it back from me, aiming it at herself. "She's lying," she said. "And check out the blush, by the way." She turned the camera back toward me. Drawing attention to my red cheeks only made them even darker.
I couldn't help but notice that our antics, especially with the camera, had caught the attention of other people waiting in our departure lounge. I saw whispering and then a girl tugged on her mother's arm and pointed excitedly at me.
I winced. Goodbye, invisibility. I just couldn't have any sort of fun in public without people eventually figuring out who I was. I wondered what the magazines would say, this time.
Sam noticed and turned to look where I had been. It was a really obvious movement and all the people who had been watching us suddenly pretended to be very busy doing other things. She looked back at me and held the camera up. "The paranoia's starting again," she said, mock-seriously. "Everyone is watching you. Watching, and judging."
This, I didn't really want to joke about. "It's not paranoia, Sam."
She looked at least slightly guilty. "Okay." She closed the LCD and put the camera on her lap. "You want to go hide in the member lounge or something? Those places are usually pretty deserted."
As much as I hated to be one of those famous people who couldn't even sit with everyone else, it turned out to be a great idea. Sam smooth-talked her way inside without us having to pay a cent and we spent at least an hour in the complimentary massage chairs until our backs and legs were numb.
While the chair's leg extension was squeezing the life out of my calves, Sam had given me a copy of our itinerary to look over. I'd always likened Sam's planning of our holidays to the way she'd edit videos; we'd brainstorm a list of places we wanted to go and then Sam would spend a week or two figuring out how to string everything seamlessly together so it worked. It had been more difficult with Australia, though, because aside from Uluru I didn't automatically know of any historic places I wanted to see. I'd ended up spending half a day on Cambridge's online database quickly putting together a list of archeologically significant places for us to visit.
True, I had taken a history unit that contained several classes on Australia, but it was nearly four years ago and I could hardly remember any of it. I'd always been more interested in Asian rather than Australasian history, and I'd never managed to drag myself through all the optional reading that our lecturer had assigned.
That memory reminded me of what Prof Chamberlain had said about long-winded papers being outdated. I wondered what Sam would think of his theory.
"Can I show you something?" I asked Sam while she fiddled with the settings on her chair.
"You haven't even told me what you think of the itinerary," she said. "But sure."
I took the iPad out and opened Prof Chamberlain's email. I scrolled down to the part where he'd theorised that Tomb Raider was the way forward for presenting research.
I could see her read it a few times. She thought about it before she spoke. "I knew it would make archaeology interesting to the general public," she said eventually. "But I never thought of it actually affecting other archaeologists. I'm kind of biased on this one, but I think he's right. The way to make this material accessible is to present it in a way that entertains the audience. It's not to compete with your peers over who can use the longest sentences with the longest words in some obscure periodical," she said, and then added, "no offense."
Despite the fact I'd written some of those wordy articles, I wasn't upset by her assessment of them. "I knew you'd do something good with the footage, but I didn't think you would end up potentially changing the face of my industry." I looked up at her from the iPad. There was such a keen mind hiding under that perfectly shaped haircut, I thought. She was just brilliant, brilliant and beautiful. If only people knew.
She noticed my expression and waited for me to explain it.
"You're not just a pretty face," I said to her, mirroring something she said occasionally herself.
She snorted, locking the iPad and handing it back to me. "I love how you say that like it's totally new information."
I put it in my bag. "You know that's not how I meant it."
"Yeah," she said, giving me that coy little smile of hers. "I know."
She reached out and put her hand over mine. Her eyes were darting from mine to my lips. I glanced over my shoulder; there was a suited professional sitting on the other side of the lounge with his laptop out. He looked engrossed in it, but I didn't really want to take any chances. I shook my head. "Not here."
She sat back her in chair and drew a slow breath.
Why did I feel guilty about making that request? "I'm sorry, Sam, I just don't feel comfortable."
She nodded. "I know, you don't have to apologise," she said, looking away from me. For a moment it seemed like she was going to say something else, but she changed her mind. Instead, she took her phone out and checked the screen. "We have to board in like ten minutes anyway."
Sam was quiet and uncharacteristically well behaved as we boarded. I'd insisted that we not fly first class which was always Sam's preference, but luckily we had no one seated in the aisle seat next to us in economy, anyway.
Once we'd settled in and taken off, I took out the iPad to start reading the papers on Australian archaeology that I'd downloaded. I'd actually almost finished one of them before Sam managed to decide what she wanted to watch on the in-flight entertainment system.
She showed me. I leaned over to the screen and read, "Steve Irwin: Crocodile Hunter," I gave her a look. "Old times' sake?" She used to play it loudly on our shared telly when I was trying to study at boarding school.
She pressed play. "You bet." She thought for a moment. "I want to get some footage of you wrestling a crocodile at some point."
I remembered the crocodile in St. Francis' Folly and Egypt and didn't relish the thought.
I'd made my way through two or three more papers about various sites in Australia when Sam got sick of watching without me. When she didn't have anyone to discuss direction and cinematography with, I'd discovered she had quite a short attention span.
She leaned on my shoulder. I re-read the sentence I was trying to understand. The more I laboured through these dissertations the more I decided Prof Chamberlain had a point about needing to reconsider how information was presented.
"What are you reading?" Sam asked me, looking at the screen. "…'the Wanjina-Wunggurr people of the northwest Kimberley which includes the language countries of the Worrorra, Ngarinyin, Unggumi, Umida, Unggar—'" she tried to pronounce it again, "'Unggarrangul'… Oh, whatever. Did I come close?"
"I have no idea."
She laughed. "It's so weird to hear you say that. I'm so used to you reading history articles and correcting the information in them. What's it about?"
That was a good question. I tried to think about what I'd just read. "It's just discussing the differences in creation stories between all the different Aboriginal peoples in part of Australia." I paused. "Using as many words as possible."
"Can you give me the abridged version?"
While I was trying to think of where to start, Sam continued to read over my shoulder. "'The Dreaming'?" she read, "Okay, that's one story I could totally get invested in."
"That's just what they call their version of Genesis," I said, and then I frowned. I wasn't sure that was right, exactly. I had a feeling it was more complex than that. I scrolled back up to try and find where I'd read about it. "I'm sure there was something here about it being non-linear. Like… an ongoing and continuous process that people are still part of today."
Sam was watching me with the same appraising expression she had when she was watching documentaries. I stopped scrolling to look at her. "I have an idea," she said, and then stopped.
Well, that was clearly a prompt for me to ask her about it. "You do?"
She looked sheepish. "I know this is our holiday and we're not supposed to be working. But listening to you sorting through this historical stuff is way more interesting than what I was reading earlier."
I waited for her to get to the point.
"You don't know too much about this, yeah?" I shook my head. "So, what if we do a kind of educational reality-TV-type documentary? You can explain what you're finding out and seeing to us as we visit these places," I assumed by 'us' she meant the audience, "and we can learn along with you."
"I don't think it's going to have the same appeal as Lara Croft: Tomb Raider," I said. "There's not much mortal danger in looking at cave paintings."
Sam shrugged. "Let me worry about how to make it appealing," she said. "Besides, there's plenty of mortal danger in Australia. Come on, Steve Irwin was a professional and he still got killed on the job." I must have looked unconvinced, because she asked gingerly, "Would you prefer we just had a nice holiday, though?" She looked terrified I might tell her I would actually rather just that.
I always had trouble saying no to Sam when she was really excited about something. To be honest, I didn't even want to turn her down this time because I liked her idea. I kept thinking about what Prof Chamberlain was saying about new frontiers and I wanted to find out if I could convince myself he was right. Sam's suggestion seemed more like prime-time telly fodder than anything else, though. Then again, who was to say that entertainment-style shows couldn't have sophisticated themes? I wouldn't put it past Sam to be able to subtly present ideas if I asked her to.
Sam was about to explode by the time I finally answered her. "Let's do it," I said with resolve.
She threw her arms around my neck, nearly accidentally choking me. She apologised as she retrieved her camera out of the bag at her feet and pointed it at me. "Let's start now," she said. "Tell me the most interesting thing written in that paper in front of you."
"The most interesting?" I asked her, and she nodded. I tabbed through it. "Well, all Aboriginal peoples agree that the Rainbow Serpent – an enormous mythological deity – created most of the features of the landscape by slithering across the earth."
Sam snorted. "Okay, I'm going to say it. Rainbow serpent? I think I saw a float like that at the Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras once."
I grinned. "It gets better," I said. "It's sometimes portrayed as a female and bisexual."
"Oh, my God," Sam said, looking up over the LCD. "This is way more interesting than reading the paper. What else have you got there?"
I went through some of the other themes. Most of them were comparable to many of the other ancient cultures I'd come across, and all of them eventually came back to children, sex and death.
"Well, nothing has changed," Sam noted. When I asked her about it, she said. "People are still obsessed with that stuff. That's what gets viewers: porn, violence and cartoons." I laughed at her synthesis as she continued. "I'm not even going to have to try and find ways to make people watch this. Did you say there's a whole cave full of drawings of female genitalia?" I nodded. "Gold. This is going to be awesome. I totally love these guys already." She stretched. "Let's take a break, though. There's some other stuff on here I wanted to watch." She switched on the in-flight entertainment system and put her camera away.
We had settled back to watch a documentary on Australia's deadliest snakes, when Sam lifted her head off my shoulder and asked casually, "You want to join the mile high club?"
I gave her a look.
She sighed and rested her head again. "Oh, whatever. It was worth a shot." Unlike in the lounge, however, she was smiling.
