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

entry held up indefinitely he had grown impatient and was

now going to take his family in to view the wonders of long-dead

kings. His family, and me. He wanted to take me, an outsider, but

the girls had heard him say ‘I will not take that drunken space

tram p in there’ and they figured that if I wasn’t drunk everyone

would be happy.

The next day everyone was happy — except me. Long-boned

Fainey-Juveh picked up the kids and tossed them in the air so they

shrieked. Praliya reflected the mood of those three and I tried to,

but failed. Stepping carefully on the ramp I misjudged my balance

and as I paused my outstretched hand reached short of the grip

near the flyer door. Praliya saw how that hand, gaunt in glove, was

shaking. The others w'ere already in the car. Her gentle smile

opened in me the abscess of my own worthlessness. In the funereal

glare of monstrous Bubutap we swooped nauseously up over the

flayed corpse face of Trivash, me seeing in the careering of these

two great globes beyond our crystal canopy only panoramic instants of the death dance of the universe as I struggled in the drowning consciousness of my coiling misused despairing entrails.

‘Ran-DEE,’ accused Limini, ‘your face is white.’

I could have wept to visit upon her and Pixr (who, sensing my

218

Anthony Peacey

despair, was woefully silent) this unhappiness of a-white face, a

wrong face, a vacuum where joy was concerned, a joyless hole in

the full bright universe.

‘Bandy doesn’t want to be bothered by you just now,’ said Praliya

and I could only silently thank her, turning to look out over slaggy

stumps of mountains but seeing little. Later I forced myself to talk

to Fainey-Juveh about the garden world that had been. To him the

conversation did not seem meaningless.

We arrived among businesslike transportable structures and

sighed to the ground. As the boots of my softsuit whispered in

ceramic gravel I visioned a hail.of congealed stone from furnace

clouds of flash-boiled rock in the final hours of the holocaust. Pixr’s

helmet light pierced my eyes like a surgeon’s knife.

He never said, big stooping Fainey-Juveh in his baggy clothes,

cynical/trusting when it came to the hum an community of which

he hardly seemed to feel himself part, baby-innocent before such

devices as sneak computers (or was he just hamm ing it?) — he

never said, but in his own game he must have been some big jack

himself. See, here he was single-handed, prying into the buried

culture of a whole world, at his command a heap of gear: ground-

cars, transportables, houses, workshops, laboratories, machinery

of all kinds, rock cutters and borers, specialised probes and analytical gidgets. I bet he knew how to handle the computers of archaeology.

And we walked down a mine hacked through rock whose frozen

writhings were imprinted for all time with the death scream of a

world — into a drop chamber suddenly flooded with brilliance so

we could cut our helmet lamps and climb onto the disc which

breathed us down the polished shaft; almost three thousand

metres, he said. Sesemene had hoped to make his final resting place

(or place of waiting) secure. Great in audacity, great in caution.

The archaeologist machines had taken a Trivashti year to sink that

shaft, for the silver angels of Fomalhauti vengeance had puddled

the moon’s crust halfway down to the catacombs of their conqueror,

but then the rock had hardened into an adamantine rind protecting Sesemene better than ever.

We walked through a short passage bland as a passage in an

army hospital or in a computer factory, through a cleanlock,

through a curtain which might have been a curtain of history,

through centuries, through centuries of centuries into a chamber of

the empire. Even Limini and Pixr were hushed.

Jagging

219

W ithinhelmetbubblesI sawthewhitesof theireyes. Fainey-Juveh’s

metal servants accompanied us to pry and probe what we might

find, to sound with microseismic pads, to