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

hospitable, but I didn’t like to say anything which might offend

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Anthony Peacey

him. We were silent for a long time. When I voiced my fears for

Kolissa he snapped at me, said I was stupid, she would be all right

along with all the other little nurses. Kolissa isn’t a nurse. Perhaps

he really didn’t want me along anymore, or perhaps he thought

anger would drive home reassurance, or perhaps I had struck too

close to some fear of his own.

He sent a call to Trivash. First he asked me about Svend transformations. Sure, I said, his sneak would have agreed a set with his home computer long ago, and he could ask the sneak for the instruction codes. Yes, he had thought so. But I suggested he didn’t use transformations, as what Jahenry’s mob couldn’t crack might

arouse suspicion. In some ways he was like a little kid. He had

nothing political to say, just didn’t want them listening in, but

finally he sent the call on open beam. H alf an hour later his wife’s

reply came in. She was worried too. Some archaeological big jack

coming to see the opening of the tomb had been shot out of the sky

leaving Otzapoc. It was supposed to have been a mistake, but the

big jack was dead anyway, dead beyond hope of reconstruction.

After that it was a long trip, Fainey-Juveh catatonic with rage

and gloom, me unable to cheer him spinning slowly down into my

own black vortex of nightmare where Kolissa was torn from me

and torn apart, me torn apart as she was torn apart in the black

bottomless vortex of space, those stars mocking through the falling

falling glass, our can falling falling spinning slowly down the vortex

to nothing. I . . . I . . . 1 . , . Couldn’t think I. Couldn’t without

Kolissa think I, without Kolissa I am not whole, I am already torn

apart and the mist of her blood, my blood, our blood freezing in

black iron microscopic droplets clouds of invisible black glass

microdrops lost in the mocking hollows between the stars. Severed

like pitiful disgusting halfshell Fomalhauti by Jahenry’s steel wall

which jerking clipped black moustaches drop like a guillotine

blade. Severed and spinning . . .

On Trivash I started to drink. I should have known better but I

spent two days lurching from hour to hour with hours lost between,

from m orning to noon, from stupor to lucidity, loathsome to myself

with alcoholic sand beneath my eyelids and the skin of my arms,

my hands heavy and hot wdth thick blood from my drunken heart.

Hateful to myself (lying in my closed room) for caving in like this in

front of Fainey-Juveh’s lovely brow'n angel wife. His second wife —

‘I got rid of the other one,’ he had said, then amended that: ‘Well, we

no longer suited each other when it came to it, and we agreed to

Jigging

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part. It was very civilised, really.’ And married this brown angel

many years younger than himself. But she already had her two

daughters and he, childless before, loved them and her — loved

with passion, loved with joy, where before he had been able to love

only his dead dust empire. So that when we circled pocked and pitted dark savage ravaged airless Trivash greater than I had imagined but me seeing nothing, no sign of scratching humanity, only his

camp, beneath rolling Bubutap more huge than I had dreamed, the

star-sky and the rest of the universe making way for him, and when

we squeezed down (me squeezed in the coffee-stained couch),

squeezed, cushioned, lightly stood then walked through the tunnel

to the camp sitting partly above ground like frogs’ eyes and partly

below, his three angels met him (the only three people on Trivash I

had discovered and was surprised) and dragged his soul up out of

the black horrors into mere burning and abiding anger — while I

was more alone because he was made whole hand in hand with

Praliya, with Limini and Pixr clinging and jigging around them.

Limini and Pixr, eleven and nine years old, with teeth, such palisades of