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

photograph, to holograph, to X-ray, to pierce with monomolecular needles, to contour scan, to smell, to taste, and to plot interferographs between all

these channels. This was good, good yeah, but their first and finest

function was to extend tall rods from flat acranial heads like those

insect fishes of the lightless depths to hang out lamps that lit the

chamber like day. And lit the rout of poison fogs at the onset

throughout my being of a great nebula of wonder over . . . well,

everything — even the shirtbuttons were exotic, subtly anciently

different, and the buckles, a wrist m irror of silver polished like

liquid, a tiny filigreed eyebrow comb of gold, the pine-forest-on-a-

mountainside theory of interior architecture (Syrian Gothic)

realised in fairytale marble manufactured beneath the protostar

pressure of Bubutap’s thousand-kilometre-deep ammonia storms,

a dodecahedral chest of Bast ebony inlaid with mother-of-pearl

from the seventeenth stomach of a Lagorni cow, a panel cut with

relief scenes of the progress through a world of monsters of a heroic

winged mesomorphic child of kings that was only the sliding door

to a wardrobe that a whole gang of servants — hum an servants —

could walk inside, the weird archaic tessellations of the floor we

stood upon, the strange slender non-Cartesian furniture, the silken

cushions embroidered with unclad women stylised as I had never

seen, their skin calling to my mind the interiors of seashells . . .

The minds of these people, yes, called to me across lost and silent

years, minds that had encompassed pine forests, star-pressure

technology, multidimensional chair design, minds that had loved

eagle-winged men and pearlshell women (as well as bat-winged

men and bearded women), minds that had produced dainty silver

mirrors, vain golden combs, and produced too the philosophies,

laws, dogmas, the superstitions, fairytales, nursery rhymes — all

the uncounted ideas and objects that furnished the grand mansion

of empire — The minds of men, think! there is no end to it — the

minds of workers on the dawn mono across Dourisburg chained to

time but with their dreams of hot sour coffee, the place between a

woman’s thighs, and monsters; the mind of — say — O rry swimming in wine and nailed out on the white sand by the white stars but accented with knowledges of all the places he’s been, the talking

he’s done, and the pressure of karinga on lip; the mind of a jum p-

beacon keeper exiled for years in the black between stars by the

220

Anthony Peacey

anger of his childhood and the religion of his race that says

automatics are the devil’s work — all these minds living in the

weird landscapes of themselves composed of that greatest article of

faith of all time, the outside world, to which belong those creatures

magnificent in their caprice, other people, and then the more certain regions of scheme and intent, and then the indisputable savage brilliant continents of dream surrounded by the endocrine oceans

of emotion.

So here I was, but I forgotten, mind in mind like foot in boot

with Sesemene (or the creators of that chamber) — marble forests,

the weight of Bubutap’s methane streams, skewed insect chairs,

winged heroes and seashell women supplying the harmonics to the

thrum of the now-jewel that pierced and pierces and was and

is . . .

Sesemene Sesemene Sesemene — conqueror, builder, warrior,

commander, butcher, appointer, condemner, lover, rapist, con-

ceiver, slayer, artist, posturer, dancer, priest, king . . .

Hushed, white-eyed, we moved from room to room, chamber to

chamber, workshop to laboratory to stable to wardrobe of many

rooms and took in wonder upon wonder in this rockbound city-

palace-tomb. ‘Ooooo’ and ‘Aaaaa’ and ‘Eeeee’ whooped Limini and

Pixr. They ran from toy to toy looking, touching, turning, rapt in

what could be seen, touched, turned in their invisibly gloved

hands. We adults maybe lost, because we were lost in vision but

there was no way else to take in all this —