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

Later, in her dream, it is never anything like the truth.

They go down the gaunt pillared solitude of a European

cathedral, Rirette lost in a drift of years and incense. They stand in

the arc of the altar’s great stone tracery. They move into a pew and

kneel. H er heart soars. She recalls, in her dream, the aunt and

mother perfumes and the rustle of dresses and the crisp prayer

books of childhood. The golden voices, the smug faces, the hurt

and soft hands and hatred. The hatred. There is no hatred here, in

her dream, only a tired age and an echoing silent blessing in stone,

and Ki-in-jara.

The sun strikes through the new, heavy clouds, strikes hot despite

them. A kangaroo lopes in the distance, golden as a coin. She hears

the caw of a magpie. Can this be the Dead Heart? At the edge of the

world the snow-capped Hogan runs forever, and the drum m ing of

the turbines comes to her shoeless feet through the hard ground.

‘A giving,’ she says.

He stands naked, made for the desert. She removes her light

garments, stands as he gazes on her.

‘And the longing to be wanted,’ he agrees. ‘Here, you’ll get

burned.’ He reaches into his pouch, sprays her shoulder, her

breasts, her flanks, her trembling limbs with sun-screen. The

insect repellent in the spray bites her nostrils, makes her sneeze and

laugh. Beads of spray glisten in her blonde pubic hair. T heir gaze is

a deep, shared pool, mysterious as the place he will take her.

He gains from me, she thinks in revelation.

She runs after him, the new grass prickly under her bare feet.

The place of stones lies ahead. They will dance there, in the ways

ancient to the land, if he shows her how.

In her dream she could not recall it, not in its reality. Shimmering

The Interior

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white lace of stone. The strong dark beauty of the man beside her.

‘It is here,’ she says. ‘I feel it. How strange . . .

Ki-in-jara’s face, looking at her, flames with the imagined

colours of stained glass, with the reflected radiance of the old, old

wall paintings.

‘I . . . love you.’

And the bull-roarer: ‘H hhhrruuuuum m m m , thhhhhhhrrrhhh-

uuuummm.’

And the didgeridoos: ‘Booooonnnnnmmmm, ggggarrrrooo-

mmmmm.’

Oh, the dreams they have, the people of Restitution and the other

forty-seven cities of the inland.

All their dreams come true here, if they work at it.

This is Laurie Hogan’s epitaph, written in letters of gold recycled

from the Roxby Downs plant, written on the titanium slab high in

the snow above the Bight, gazing down toward the useless icy

wastes of Antarctica. (We’re melting them.) Laurie taught us the

way to go:

Sure, it’s a Utopia thing.

But if we’re capable of building it,

why don't we build it?

Notes on contributors

Carmel Bird teaches CAE courses in short story writing and the

continuing relevance of the Folktale. She was a founding member

of the now defunct feminist performance collective Faceless

Woman. Fler short fiction collection is Births, Deaths and Marriages;

her novel is Cherry Ripe, and is about blood.

Russell Blackford, a Ph.D. in English, is an authority on the postmodernist fiction of Barth, Vonnegut and Pynchon, and is currently an industrial advocate for the Commonwealth Public Service Board. With D r Van Ikin, he is writing a scholarly history of Australian sf. His novel is The Tempting of the Witch King, an

avowedly deconstructed fantasy.

Damien Broderick is a writer, editor and caustic reviewer. His

chief work to date is the still-incomplete The Faustus Tentacle

sequence, comprising The Dreaming Dragons, The Judas Mandala,

Transmitters, The Black Grail, and a fifth novel in progress.

Timothy Dell, a prize-winning new writer who studied creative

writing at Victoria College under Gerald M urnane, is a trainee

computer programmer.

Greg Egan, a computer programmer recently transplanted to

Sydney from Perth, has written a surprising num ber of films, short

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Notes on contributors

fiction and novels, not all of them published. An Unusual Angle appeared in 1983, when he