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

trellis covered with climbing lilies in white and blue. Rayner was

about to open a gate in the trellis when I clutched his arm and we

stood still. The sound was as strange as anything 1 had heard, a

thin, purring hum that meandered up and down some scale of its

own. It was a giant insect, a fiddle string teased with a broken bow,

the wind sighing through the bones of the Vail.

‘I told you,’ said Rayner, ‘mad as a rutting dry-hog . . . ’

But the sound held him too; he opened the trellis gate very

quietly. An old man sat on the grass beside a palm-thatched garden

house; one leg was bent under him, one held out almost at right

angles to his body. He was thin, wrinkled and burnt dark brown

from head to foot; he wore nothing but a breech clout and his feet at

least were very dirty . . . big, ugly feet, splayed, black and filthy

with mud. He was holding his right hand cupped before his face

and I saw his rubbery cheeks bulge out as he made the queer hum ming sound, his music. The strangeness did not go away at the sight of the old man, it became worse. He gave off not so much a

stink as waves of eerie isolation. Old Billy was in another world,

alone in his dreams.

‘Where was he found?’ I whispered to Rayner.

‘Bellfar, at the fish-drying plant.'

I still had my hand on his arm and I felt him tremble. He was

afraid of the old man and it took away all his artifice.

‘My M a sailed on a cruise with a party of ladies,’ he went on,

whispering. ‘They came to the harbour at Bellfar and this old

creature claimed that he recognised her. She took pity on him, like

I said, and brought him back, right in the hold of the cruise ship. A

drifter, of course, a real old sand-crawler from the back of beyond.’

I felt the whole set-up crawl on my skin and I was ready to run

for it, hand the whole scoop to Jupiter Star. Rayner really did not

know who the old man might be. Then there was the strangeness of

the old man himself and above all Bellfar . . . furthest eastern outpost of the Rhomary land at the tip of that narrow grey lake called the Billsee.

Beyond Bellfar there is nothing except one last oasis called, just

fancy, Last Chance. There is the sandy desert, the howling wilderness that borders the Rhomary land in the east, just as it is

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bordered by the stony desert in the north and the blistering heat of

the tussock plain in the south. The only way out of our settled areas

lies west, over the Long Portage, a semi-desert dotted with oases

and salty springs, to the river Gann and the Red Ocean. Explorers

have, as you might say, gone west. Gline’s first great feat was the

transportation of his ship, the Seahawk, over the Long Portage;

then he sailed in the Red Ocean to the edge of a map he made him self and swore that he had discovered another ocean. He did not live to sail on it. And fifteen years ago Hilo Hill had sailed with

Gline. There was something here so enormous that I did not dare

put it into words.

Suddenly I wanted nothing more than to talk to the old man and

hear his story. I was ready to push Rayner Mack out of the trellis

gate. He went at last and I stepped not too quietly over the grass. I

spoke once or twice but the brown figure did not stir. I sat down on

the grass three metres away and plucked a few chords on my guitar.

The music stopped; the old man lowered his hand and blinked

slowly several times in my direction. His eyes were brown and clear

but without much expression. He reached out, picked up a cotton

poncho that lay nearby and shucked it over his head. He used his

right hand only and I saw that his left hand lay clenched oddly in

his lap. His movements were quick and smooth. I