Bad Cow
Page 74
Most interesting, among other things, was that the New South Wales Police Force was apparently massively corrupt in 1990. It wasn’t until a few years later that the Royal Commission swept in some big changes and things began to improve. If I have painted the police in a bad light in the single tiny chapter I talked about them at all, it was only because I was looking at them through a keyhole to a very specific and unhappy time.
I also did some research, though it’s sadly becoming unnecessary, into climate change and weather patterns. I’m aware that hurricanes are by geographical definition the disaster that afflicts contemporary North America, rather than typhoons. With the shift of climate to a monsoon-analogous tropical environment in the Floods, however, the terminology shift to the typhoon superclusters of the Twenty-Second Century made more sense. They are, after all, a different animal – but one we see evolving even now.
Last but not least:
I’ve dedicated this book to my nieces Lily and Ruby. Since I live in Finland and they live in Australia I don’t get to see them (or the rest of my family) as much as I’d like, but they’re never far from my thoughts. I don’t know whether they’ll even like the book, but…
Well. Here it is.
Andrew Hindle, Sotunki, Finland
26th October, 2017
Oræl Rides to War will continue in the second volume, Greyblade.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Andrew Hindle was born in Fremantle, Western Australia, a century before it became the Fremantle Archipelago. He grew up with the smell of the sheep ships and spent his early adulthood touring nightspots like the Bad Cow. Then he found love on the Internet before the Internet went bad (well, worse), and moved to Finland to raise a family. All things considered, it turned out pretty well.
He’s been writing since he learned how to write. He’s still learning, occasional bouts of referring to himself in the third person notwithstanding, and he wants everyone to know that he really is heading somewhere with all this.
OTHER BOOKS BY ANDREW HINDLE
Arsebook: My Rear In Status 2011
(The story of one man’s short, cowardly and dishonourable battle with cancer, told through the enduring medium of social networking status messages)
THE FINAL FALL OF MAN
Eejit
Drednanth
Bonshoon
Fergunakil
Blaran
Molran
Damorak
Human
TALES OF THE FINAL FALL OF MAN
Deadshepherd: Anthology 1
FOR YOUNGER READERS
Are You My Corpulent Brood Matriarch?
Notes
[←1]
Although it is certainly uncharitable to suggest he was going nowhere, figuratively speaking, and we are now skimming along the edges of bad taste. This could be considered the predicted course for this story, however, so it’s probably best to just get it over with.
[←2]
It actually happened on a Wednesday – Wednesday, April 6th, 1977 – but what the Hell is Tack-o-Matic Wednesday? Nothing, that’s what.
[←3]
Barry wasn’t exactly a wealthy heir-type, although his family’s estate did provide for his education and for the medical coverage enjoyed by both him and his aunt, so he could be considered one of the lucky ones. He still needed to work at Cullem’s to pay the remaining bills, though, not to mention the occasional night out with the lads. He did, however, die in spite of all this – so in the scheme of things, there were certainly luckier people. On yet another hand, everybody dies … and not to prematurely spoil the surprise, he didn’t die for long so in that respect he was extraordinarily lucky. Good news and bad news tended to be a matter of perspective and timescale.
[←4]
Alright, to some of his university friends he had been Creepy Hatboy because of his habit of wearing a battered old Coca-Cola hat and occasionally turning up to classes in his factory overalls, and to some of his factory friends he’d been Uni or Prof or Squid or Barold because of his nasty habit of pursuing a tertiary education, which some of them considered to be at least two more educations than you needed.
[←5]
The team was by no means an exclusive all-boys’ club. They’d had several female players over the years, some of whom had kept showing up for as many as three practice sessions. It wasn’t any particular unpleasantness that drove them away – some of the team’s most famously bawdy players had been ladies – it was just … statistically, men seemed less likely to eventually find something better to do with their time.
[←6]
None of them would ever condone driving drunk, but at the same time they would certainly take issue with the idea that three beers in an hour and a half could make you drunk, at least according to the soulless machines of the police. Taking the back-roads to avoid random breath tests was just the prudent course to avoid a lot of unwanted bureaucracy, judgement and, above all, hassle.
[←7]
The CSIRO (Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation) is Australia’s federal government agency for scientific research. They’re about as conspiratorial as a grocery store … or maybe that’s just what they want you to think.
[←8]
Beef, chicken, bacon, duck, venison and kangaroo meat, with some cheese and lettuce and tomato for colour. It has been argued that most farmers don’t farm kangaroos, and Old MacDonald certainly wouldn’t have had either deer or kangaroos on his farm because neither animal makes a readily-reproducible noise here, there or indeed everywhere. But it has also been argued that you could fit horsemeat and a filet of fish in there with only a negligible increase in the risk of heart attack and with only a moderate betrayal of the spirit of the song because some people did farm fish. The result would seem to be an impasse.
[←9]
Canon, naturally, preferred to think of it as a function of strong will, although if he was being honest he had to concede that it was probably just the luck of the draw. Luck was certainly aided by certain special tricks he had picked up over the years – a sort of ‘take care of yourself’ regimen for the Vampire who wants to maintain sentience – but unaided, as he had been … yes. It most likely came down to luck.
[←10]
This was what Barry called him, and so Seam did the same while at the same time not entirely certain it was correct. When an Angel calls a holy man Father, though, it tends to stick.
[←11]
The fact that Phil’s son’s nickname could arguably mean “Little-er than Little Phil” or “toey German cunt who made life miserable for a lot of people” was just testimony to the Sheepbreezers’ occasional brilliance when it came to nicknames.
[←12]
Seam had suggested that Barry should have taken some money from Canon’s place, since the guy had evidently been loaded. Since he’d failed to satisfactorily ransack the place, Seam had suggested maybe the Angel continue his work as a secret supernatural superhero by taking out some other bad guys with cash that could go to more deserving people, such as poor families unable to benefit from the Cullem’s Foundation, or destitute Angels whose mates weren’t particularly wealthy. Barry had been apologetic and promised to do what he could to Robin Hood himself up a bit in future. The simple truth was, Barry explained, these days he often just forgot to offer money for things he’d had to pay for when he was alive, and mortals just forgot to ask him for it.
[←13]
Also known as the Holden Conform-o-dore, the vehicle was the popular choice of school teachers and retirees everywhere in Australia.
[←14]
At least, Canon had to amend to himself, Fremantle glitzy.
[←15]
Gabriel had never flown in an aeroplane. It was simply too much of a sun-risk, and anywhere he could fly at night over short hops he could do with his own wings. Still, he was a steadfast – if not precisely keen – observer of human culture and he knew all the popular lingo.
[←16
]
Knee-high, flightless, with powerful legs and jaws. Quite fierce, but with a bark considerably worse than its bite – particularly the more ornamental urban model.
[←17]
Small colonies of semi-sentient genetically-enhanced insects generally shared between clusters of three or four interconnected Áea-folk dwellings, house-spirits dealt with waste, helped find lost items, and kept the pest population down.
[←18]
While the sunlight was constant, the long periods of darkness provided a roughly analogous diurnal pattern that the Áea-folk could adapt into the Barnalk Low clock they’d evolved with, using a varying artificial lighting schedule in their homes.
[←19]
The Corporation wasn’t a corporate business entity as such, although it shared some characteristics. The term was older and more conceptually pure, representing the idea of a union of disparate regions in a way that was recognisable to an optimal number of different psychologies and cultures. In simplified terms the Corporation was made up of the ten million Dimensions, or universes, immediately surrounding The Centre and this formed only an infinitely tiny sliver of the urverse as a whole … the complexity of urversal physics and cartography more than cancelled out the elegant simplicity of the Corporation’s branding.
[←20]
A crude variant of the Gróbi proverb grad-hablashta brabna brab – take in foolishnesses, filter out the wisdom.
[←21]
Molren, slightly shorter than Áea-folk on average, have two sets of arms one on top of the other and wide, flat-topped skulls with large articulated ears. These deviations from the so-called humanoid norm of the Elves earned them numerous nicknames of various vulgarity according to the age of the person giving the nickname. Flat-top was fairly tame, and indeed downright friendly for an Elf of Gyre’s generation.
[←22]
There had been vast numbers of human beings living on Earth, and a smaller but still significant demographic pie-slice of assorted other sentients. The data was somewhat sketchier about the population of Hell, and downright vague on the question of who or what had been living in Cursèd, but ultimately the multitudes of vanished mortals weren’t considered important to the faithful of Fade. It was the three Lost Disciples, and only the Disciples, who mattered.
[←23]
A harmlessly light-hearted joke, baLoi being a customary Gróbi greeting that one called into an open doorway or apparently-empty dwelling to announce I am a visitor, not an intruder, if there’s anybody home please speak up.
[←24]
An antique term in the Pinian language of the dominant nations of Heaven and the greater priesthood, it meant unintended.
[←25]
And yes, this piquant party delicacy is often used as a euphemism. Indeed, they’re usually baked to the suggestive ridged-and-pointed Áea-manhood shape to make their name even more hilarious.
[←26]
The house had always felt temporary to him, even though he’d spent the better part of a century living in it. He’d long since concluded that he just didn’t have the sentimental mind-set to ascribe emotional significance to a series of subdivisions and furnishings within a piece of shelter.
[←27]
The Gróbi equivalent, somewhere between lungs, gills and kidneys, designed to disperse oxygen and assemble exotic acids for the barandic system.
[←28]
Prophecy and interpretation was a discipline, and there were principles that could be studied and rules that could be followed, but it was by definition esoteric and fey. It was one part deep-level unphysics, one part super-subatomic sociological analysis, one part theological mass-psychology, and several parts completely unquantifiable artform. It was dependent on ambient environmental conditions that were difficult to assign values to, and its practitioners were required to perform actions that were functionally indistinguishable from killing people and fondling their innards while chanting mumbo-jumbo.
[←29]
The yachut was a standardised basic currency across the Dimensions of the Corporation. Like the Corporation itself the yachut was very much a fluid concept. Most civilised societies had trade- or contribution-value-based economies that allowed their members to build upon their own talents and passions within reason, and use their efforts as a form of currency … but when an appendageful of cold hard cash was required, generally speaking, it was the yachut.
[←30]
For certain regrettably ironic definitions of the term.
[←31]
The standardised urversal language and common tongue of the Corporation, with due consideration for the fact that even ‘tongue’ is often an inapplicable concept. Designed and popularised by the Molren, Xidh is formulated for optimal accessibility and communicative efficiency across the Corporation’s staggering spectrum of life-forms. Xidh was spoken as a second or third language in Fade, after the local New Pinian and the Áea dialects.
[←32]
Except, by the laws of that part of the universe, it was entirely natural.
[←33]
The suns of the Pinian realms, while they didn’t have much in common with the stars of neighbouring Cursèd’s Playground, were responsible for a lot of the heavy lifting, both figurative and literal. There were two – the stationary sun which hung above Heaven, and the one which swept around Earth, lighting Earth and Hell as it went and stabilising the stack of flatworlds. Cursèd, in many ways a forgotten work in progress, was unlit and clung to the Eden Road between Hell and the Rooftop. After the vanishing, of course, all that remained was Heaven and its sun. What, exactly, was holding them up in the apparent absence of the stairs was a matter of no small concern.
[←34]
1.4 million kilometres.
[←35]
940 million kilometres.
[←36]
4.9 billion kilometres.
[←37]
52,000 kilometres.
[←38]
While only referred to as an Angel in most Pinian gospels, Lucifer did hold the title and authority of an Archangel. He was not, according to a lot of inaccurate representations, a true enemy of God, the Pinians, or their mortal worshippers – he was de facto ruler of the greater Theocratic Republic of the Circles of Hell, and occupied a valued position in God’s extended court and the Angelic Chorus. Lucifer was a sort of deciding vote in governmental opposition, a voice of balance and counter-suggestion, an authorised legal entity put in place to occasionally question the Heavenly Archangels, the Pinian Disciples, sometimes even God. He was – yes – an official Devil’s Advocate … but had no connection of any kind to the Demonic representatives of Castle Void. Hell was, despite its reputation, part of the Pinian dominion.
[←39]
Ancient title for the Infinites, literally translating as all-God, Overgod or, more commonly, simply Infinite. Plural Ghååla, or Infinites / Infinitae.
[←40]
Thought to have been an element in the Potádi genetic code that suppressed a region-dependent reproductive inhibitor. Specifically, Potádi from different areas of their homeworld were able to interbreed and the Potádi was able to remain as a single cohesive species because of this factor.
[←41]
Wholly metaphorical, in many cases.
[←42]
A talent that came naturally to entities, of course, for which bodies were mere accessories.
[←43]
Because she was one, of the world-famous only-known-by-first-name variety.
[←44]
Because she was one of those too, the Vandemars were an ancient Dutch / Prussian / Baden-Württemberg dynasty with political or family connections to most of the remaining European royal families.
[←45]
The Association of Southeast Asian Nations.
[←46]
It wasn’t his real name, of course, any more than ‘butler’ was his real job – Silas Doncaster was in fact an independently-wealthy minor noble and playboy-on-i
ndefinite-sabbatical in his own right, good friend of the late Lord Conroy Vandemar, and had been executor of the family estate until such time as the girls reached adulthood. He’d so enjoyed playing butler, however, that he had completed a correspondence course and signed on as one, and by the time Ariel, Ashley and Roon were eighteen none of them could imagine Tumblehedge without him, and so he had stayed.
[←47]
The breeze that roared in from the Indian Ocean as regular as clockwork – and often about as harmfully as clockwork, when it carried debris with it – was affectionately known as ‘the Doc’, at least in summer. And it was really only a breeze in the most generous possible interpretation of the term.