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

So I had the end of the story and thought I knew the beginning,

the voyage with Hal Gline, but what lay between? Ruby Mack

civilised him a little; he washed under the garden pump, wore an

overall and sheltered in the garden house during stormy weather.

The holiday season was over and the young silverwings were ready

to sail back to school in Pebble or Rhomary City. I found Rayner

on the steps of the great house with his hair plaited and his hands

blistered; he had scythed the lawn.

The ballad o f H ilo H ill

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‘Back to school?’ I jeered.

He gave me a sorrowful look.

‘Not going back,’ he said gruffly. ‘M a needs help.’

I sat on the step, waiting, and presently he came out with it.

‘You knew all along . . . about the old man. About my

granddad.’

‘Yes, I knew.’

‘You’re prejudiced, Cat Kells,’ he said. ‘You despise rich folk. My

dad, Jon Mack, worked bluggy hard to build up his stable, and my

mother is a sailor’s daughter, even if she has had a place among the

ladies of Moon Lane. If this old man is Hilo Hill, I won’t turn up

my nose at him.’

‘I’m sure that he is Hilo Hill,’ I said.

‘W hat do you want with him, Balladmaker?’

‘M ore than he will ever tell us,’ I said. ‘I want the other side of the

world where no one else has ever sailed.’

‘You’ll kill him with your damned publicity!’

‘Not me!’ I said. ‘I’ve been with him since the beginning, rem em ber? I know his quirks and fears better than you do. This could be the greatest newsballad in twenty years, in a whole lifetime, but I

would pass it up to spare that old man a moment’s pain.’

‘I’m sorry . . . ’ said Rayner. ‘Look, Catlin . . . I took a great

wad of notes. I know you write down what he says.’

He had written several pages in a school-block, of new-fangled

reed paper. I expected some more queer stuff about Hilo’s dream

companions ‘the Gnai’, but this time it was something different.

Hilo Hill had taken a glass of melon schnapps with ‘Ruby’s lad’ and

it had loosened his tongue. He sang part of an old capstan shanty,

not specially printable but I knew it. Then his mood changed, and,

as Rayner put it, he stared ahead like a sailor steering into a fog.

‘Beyond the cape there are two headlands, a narrow channel between and a huge misty stretch of dead water, walled in with swamp forest. Gline thought this was the third ocean but others disagreed,

said there was nothing at all beyond it. They were all wrong. If you

press on as I did, rowing across that wide lagoon, and round a little

bluff, there it lies before you. Boundless. Not red but blue-green,

more the colour of our dear Western Sea. W hat will this one be

called? The Green Ocean?

‘Forty days I was hurled northwest in the longboat, the water

failed, was replenished with rains. I was out of sight of land for

ninety days all told but came to a floating mass of weed with

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Cherry Wilder

sea-birds nesting. Yes and I saw delfin, hailed them. They had

never seen a human; they were not our sea-brothers from the Red

Ocean. I looked always for the Vail, our lost sea monsters, or for

something like them, some intelligent creature that 1 could speak

to. I saw no large life forms, only shoals of fish.

‘I managed to get out of the eddy round those damned weed-

islands and I bore south, well-provisioned with boiled eggs and

dried fish. The weather was dirty but I saw a haze there to the south

that was land for sure. Came to it half dead. A tropic shore, something from a picture book of Old Earth, friendly and with a kind of low jocca palm that gave me food and shelter. I was in this place five

months or more, taking me into a new year.

‘I cut my name in the sandstone cliffs in letters a metre high and

struck inland for pure loneliness. The trek nearly cost me my life

for there were beasts in this paradise. Things that hunted at

night . . . something I might guess that was cat-like . . . a large

cat creature. I came back to the longboat where it was beached because I had found out one thing for