Damien Broderick - Strange Attractors by Original (pdf) (no david read aloud txt) 📕

fishmen, birdmen, high-G dwarfs, methane breathers, leaf-

crowned UV sugar-builders and other strange types. In its long

long lightning-and-rainbow history of empire the sovereignty of

Trivash was scarcely threatened, for in its most careless, its most

benign, its most decadent moments Trivash kept savage control of

the making and distribution of specific environment life support

systems without which these diverse humankinds could not live

away from their appointed places. Just like me.

Yet the empire breathed like the sea, its tides alternately enfolding the far corners of the system and retreating, leaving them silted and naked to self-generated flocks of predators. And quinquiremes

of space plied between stellar Ninevehs carrying ivory apes peacocks, steel coal iridium, hard vacuum and a couple of fluorescing atoms in snailshell glass bottles (souvenirs from the Trifid Nebula),

soldiers, slaves, silk-painters, dog-catchers, data-merchants,

doom-sayers, governors and grocers, lawyers and lumberjacks,

prostitutes and priests. All that the crazy hearts of women and men

have ever desired travelled in those ships, all that their eaglesoaring minds have dreamed, brought from the edges of known space and beyond back to the savage-gentle heart of empire. The

ships docked in vast glittering cities of space whose steel was ripped

from the entrails of a thousand moons, whose metabolism rested

upon the thunder of giant forges, the wind-ocean roar of induction

pumps, the incandescent love of atom for atom eternally consummated in radiant energetic union.

All this Fainey-Juveh told me, his eyeglasses reflecting twin

groups of instrument lights. And I was caught up in his living

breathing rolling bopping crazy empire — caught like a lucent

little sea insect in the warm lucent limitless ocean — there was no

disjunction between his gorgeous vast empire and me — in my

vision I was part of it. And surely it was a glorious place for a space

jagger, surely.

We cut sometime then. One bunch of razor-bright constellations

and soft glowing nebulae instantly gone, a new bunch before us as

if they had been gazing through our reflectionless glass shields for

208

Anthony Peacey

hours. The space between the stars, the original mother of black

night, of which the darkest planetary darkness is a clowning

imitator, remained itself, arrogant, perhaps amused.

The empire lived on. Plated warships threw the fire of suns down

upon rebellious worlds, or stung the insect craft of raiders into

clouds of expanding glowing gas. They even swam in shoals to

other systems and for a brief half millennium brought Fomalhaut

and Angk with all their worlds under the barbarous-benign heel of

the emperor.

Trivash, the imperial world, like old legendary Earth, was a

garden. After the first couple of thousand years of empire the entire

ball became the emperor’s demesne. The seas were his fishponds,

the sierras his rock gardens, the forests his hunting parks. Each city

was a palace: each palace a city. Furnished and equipped for every

business known to man, for every lustful lust and joyous joy, the

halls stables laboratories workshops, and their staffs, eternally

awaited the moment when the emperor should chance their way.

Teniki X X V II of the fourth millennium was a flyer. He flew in

balloons, in sailplanes, in single jets; he flew on G-discs and under

hangwings; he flew rockets and stratoscoops and slept all his long

life suspended between heaven and earth (or anyway between

chrysoberyl floor and azurite ceiling studded with diamond stars)

in a founting whispering cushion of warm air. Maybe he took his

favourite folded hangwing into this zephyrous bed with him instead of noble lady empress wife or plum-smooth little concubine, maybe. But wherever he went he found the sky vehicle of his whim

ready. Until one day, suddenly tiring of the air, he asked for a freedive suit. They were in the smallest, remotest of his cities at the southern tip of his coldest land. The dive suit for those waters was

unusual, requiring a special heating system, and insulation, and

the emperor, only a week before, had allowed his arms and fingers

to be modified so that now he had wings like a bat. Even so the suit

was straightway brought — and found to fit perfectly. Smiles of

approval appeared on the faces of