Drongo

The heatstruck man kept on insisting that the stars were wrong, to anyone who would listen. Except, of course, that at first, when he staggered into a small roadside diner, nobody would listen to him say much more than that.

One concerned waitress dialed the emergency number, and soon, the wail of the ambulance as it ate up the miles of empty highway grew louder and more insistent, until the vehicle pulled up outside. This man appeared to be about thirty-five, Caucasian, in good health, but he had been through the wars, all right. He was sunburned on his face and his arms, he confessed to suffering a powerful thirst, and he had neither money nor a mobile phone on his person, only the clothes (short-sleeve shirt, a scarf tied around his neck, knee-length short pants, and hiking boots) he wore. He didn’t even have a knife or a gun; what he did have was a rather nasty, purpling bruise to his forehead.

His accent was “def-o” Australian, if he wasn’t simply a gifted mimic, which made consulting any foreign embassy unnecessary, if it were his true accent. Just before he collapsed into unconsciousness, his ambulance driver elicited his name: Ceallach (“kell-awk”) Lynch.

“So what’s the ‘John Dory’ on this customer?” Ashley Quigg asked, a few hours later, from her house, a few kilometers distant from the hospital employing her. “Was he just sniffing about for gold, or did he oversleep in his tent? Sounds like you believe this is more than simple disorientation, brought on by exposure to elements — heat prostration.” She had good reason to inquire, being a trained psychiatrist who lent her talents and expertise to the hospital, when she wasn’t consulting with patients in her private practice. This did not appear to be that interesting a case.

Joshi Korrapati held a much higher esteem for her professional input. He was a neurologist, who had been one of the first attending physicians to examine a dazed and confused Lynch. He had discovered, through a brief conversation, a similarity he shared with the patient: they had foreign roots — Lynch’s were in Scotland, wherein his parents had married, just before emigrating to Oz, while the M.D. who took his MRI scans was an Indian émigré to the island continent that was their adopted home, the home — and birthplace — of Quigg.

“You may soon whistle a very different tune, my friend,” her colleague claimed, wearing a wry smile. “Mister Lynch believes he’s on a different planet from the rest of us — literally so! Must be great, not having to pay bills, like we do here.”

“Oh, really? How so? He certainly looks human enough. No antennae, pointed ears, or odd number of limbs or sensory organs. Wait.” Her grin softened the intensity of her gaze. “Does he have an extra, you know —”

“No, nothing of any sort, to… validate his claim. Besides, he’s never claimed he is not human, just that he’s… not from around here. ‘Here’ being, this world.” He was used to his much younger colleague’s cheeky witticisms.

Before dawn the next morning, she was no longer in her own home, but in the office down in the neurology department. Korrapatti assembled the magnetic-resonance scans he had taken of Lynch’s skull and showed them to a frowning, skeptical Quigg.

“I admit, you’ve got my attention,” Quigg admitted. “Or maybe I should say, the ‘extraterrestrial’ in room 209-B has gotten it. What did your scans show?”

“No signs of trauma,” Korrapatti said. “He took a smack, of course, but that’s to be expected, stumbling around in the bush, in total darkness. He said he is camped out… was camped out, just beyond Six Point. That’s a tough slog, even for experienced bushmen, as I believe you know, Ash.”

He’s such an urban person, Quigg mused. “If you mean, me… my brother, and his mates… then yes, I do know what you mean. Well, I’ll have to speak with this bloke. Maybe he can ‘take us to his leader’?”

^^^^

Lynch was expecting a visit from the psychiatric profession. After all, he made a number of “impressive” claims when he had stumbled back into civilization. He was being held, “for his own protection”, in an isolation ward.

“I hope we can get to know each other a bit,” he said to the Aboriginal woman in her late thirties, who had turned up to get her first taste of working with him. “Have a productive conversation, Doctor Quigg.” He smiled, at the sound of her Scottish name — or was it Irish?

“That’s my hope, as well,” she claimed, taking out a pen and opening a notepad to commence the interview. “I’m pleased to report you seem to be on your way to mending nicely from your injury. Still can’t recall how you got it?”

“I think," he guessed, with a rueful shrug, "I must have been stargazing. Would explain why I know so much about the constellations. They’re all wrong.”

“Yes, so you said before.” She leaned in, studying him for telling signs of either distress or deception. Lynch appeared collected — almost blithe. “Can you give me some idea of what you mean by that? You know… Indigenous Australians, we were the original astronomers.”

“It was in the pictures I took,” he said. “I checked it on the internet, at the local library. You’ve heard of the ‘Emu in the Sky’? Well, that’s not a fair dinkum constellation — it’s bits of other constellations. It’s got the Southern Cross to its right, Scorpius to its left, and the Coalsack Nebula forms what passes for its head.”

“I’ll defer to your expertise on this particular one,” Quigg admitted, though she had heard of the Emu in the Sky; she needed to get gain his confidence so that she could find a way past his delusion, if such was what he was suffering. “I’m still not sure why you think — ”

“That’s just it,” she said. “I look at the sky, and it doesn’t match the ‘Emu’ that I recall, not even a hair in place. I looked at books and Web sites, until my eyes just about bled. “The ‘Emu’ up there looks nothing like the one I remember.” He handed her a crude drawing he had just done, showing what he called a “correct” edition of the stars under discussion.

“And you conclude from this, what, precisely, Mister Lynch?”

“That we’re not on Earth,” Lynch forced himself to say aloud, knowing it might cost him. “That the records have been, I don’t know, adjusted to… to keep the people here feeling ‘at home’. What does that mean, Doctor?”

“Well, it’s working,” Quigg admitted. “I have felt right at home here, nearly my whole life, starting back when I was just a skinny little sandgroper, out West.”

Their discussion unfolded over the following week. Lynch displayed no signs of violent or self-destructive behavior; he was quite resigned to needing time to recuperate from his ordeal, whatever it was. Not even a brief visit from the local police force seemed to rattle him; they could find no indications that he was currently wanted by the authorities for any offences in the area. Even in terms of local ties or employment, he appeared untethered, isolated. Where could he go?

On the other hand, the diner’s owners did not wish to file any charges. Lynch was free to go, once he was discharged from the hospital. “That’s beaut,” the man said, not explaining why this seemed to please him so. “Gotta get back to the Concordance,” he added.

^^^^

Two days later… Korrapatti had conducted medical scans of his medical colleagues before, so this was not unprecedented. It was only when he discovered just who wished for him to subject them to an MRI that he experienced surprise —and one of them was his colleague and friend.

Ashley Quigg, M.D., did not seem to be injured, or even, shaken. She was conscious, in full possession of her memories and her medical knowledge, when she was presented to him as a subject for a neurological workup. “I need to know,” she said, “whether I experienced…. that. Would you mind, Joshi?”

“Not if you need it,” he said. “We’ll have to check you out first, cover the basics. Then, we can begin, unless the officer wishes to go first. Does this have to do with your mysterious patient?” he asked, sensing her answer would be in the affirmative.

Lynch had left the hospital, the previous night. Quigg and local patrolman named Roy Hearn had been the last ones to see him, or so Korrapatti was informed. Quigg waited for him to run her through the paces of a standard neurological scan, before she divulged her reasons for wanting this specific procedure: she had just seen an amazing thing; so amazing, in fact, that she did not believe it had happened:

“Mister Hearn suggested, when he was visiting yesterday, that we ought to try, maybe one time, to retrace Mister Lynch’s trail in the bush. Mister Lynch had a fine answer: he remembered what it was, and we could find it if we hurried — the sun was getting low in the sky by that time.”

“And this whole time, did you think Mister Lynch was trying to… get away, to a location where he could be — I don’t know. Where Mister Hearn could not find him?”

“It didn’t feel like that,” Quigg confided. “Sure, in the bush, after dark, he could have pulled a ‘Harry Holt’, for sure, vanished; but I did not sense he was trying anything like that. He was saying… how he had felt like a right drongo, having left his campsite with all of his equipment behind. Hearn got a funny feeling, told me he thought we needed to keep an eye on the bloke, so he agreed to take us to where Lynch said he thought his campsite was.

“I take it that’s when you had your… experience?” Korrapatti nudged.

Quigg nodded, sipping from a full water glass that became about half-full in a few hefty swigs on her part. “We were turning off of the main road, to where a fellow or a sheila would have to get out, you know, walk up the trail, when the most intense light just washed over us, and we saw…

“I never used to believe, you know, in yew-foes or astrology, anything like that. Not a good fit with my profession, you know, even though there are times I so wish I could dream-walk home, to the West Coast, when the pressures build. I know you can relate, my fellow physician.” Korrapatti nodded sympathetically as she continued, “Well, there was this metallic thing, it was kind of teardrop-shaped, looking like no sky-gator I had ever seen, swooping down to where we were, which was not even within a cooee of town. I can see how a bloke might get lost in the dark there, but Lynch seemed quite pleased by this weird thing, landing near us. Just long enough, mind you, for him to hop on board.”

“Ashley, if I hadn’t known you so well, I might accuse you of… You’re saying it picked him up, and flew him off?”

“Well, yes, after we saw a couple of his mates in the… doorway? Hatchway? In any case, they’re waving him on, and he wants to go, but before he does leave, he points up at the sky, because it’s growing dark, and says, ‘That one — that’s my Australia, the first one. They’ve got the right constellations and everything a fella needs.’

“Thats when I checked with an old school chum of mine,” she added, afire with rising excitement. “I showed her the star map he drew me, the one of the Emu in the Sky, and she said she would do a computer scan. Turns out, after doing a couple of computer simulations, she was able to figure out that his version of the stars would be correct, if we were located something like fifty light-years away from here.

“So, of course, I have to know more about this fascinating belief, but clearly, his friends don’t want him sticking to us like a flea on a dog. He tells me, ‘Was the time when the Earth started the whole colonizing bit all over again, this time in the sky. One of the planets turned out to be a ripsnorter that looked enough like Earth that folks wanted to do it up right, begin again.’ So they came in star ships, he tells me — like the ones on the telly, only these are real.

“Funny thing is, once the mob arrives, they decide they want to take it slower, like if it was old times, before these star-people arrived. They chose to name everything after whatever they’d left behind, but they kept their technology two hundred or more years behind the times. After a couple of generations, none of the local folks would remember.”

Korrapatti marveled at the fantasy being presented. “So, this, our planet, he’s saying, we’re like a museum piece. Australia as it was. India as it was.”

“Too right, only with different continents beneath us, constellations above us, and of course, a different history. What do you think of that, Joshi?” Quigg grinned — like she had only grasped the joke as she was explaining it. “I wanted to learn more about his ‘Concordance’, Joshi, and — I still do.”

Korrapatti found the whole idea incredible, and easy to dismiss, except for how sincerely Quigg presented it to him. Obviously she was suffering from overwork: an emotional transference, from her patient. Perhaps a vacation would do her some good. The neurological scans, though, showed her and Hearn to be in good health, so…

He collected his papers. He had a lot of work to do. But once he got a break, Korrapatti realized, he was going to step outside and do some stargazing of his own. He invited Quigg to join him at that time; she accepted, of course.

© Eric Wolf 2021.

[Explore the Concordance of Worlds: https://vocal.media/fiction/curtains-uqh68r0imb.]