The Dark Between the Stars: Speculative Fiction

by Damien Broderick

  Sometimes the little man thought he might be God.

  Only sometimes, of course. He knew he was not God, because God was outside him and pushed him around. His thoughts of God were not bitter, though perhaps he had every right to be bitter about God. On the contrary, he was quite fond of Him. In the little man’s colossal boredom, the only pleasure remaining was to try to sneak a swift move past God’s eyes.

  It hardly ever worked, though, and the little man came reluctantly up from his sea of memories to look about him for an opportunity to put one over God. A man sat a few feet from him, on the floor, lost in a celibate intellectual orgasm. Mescaliners were becoming more common as the mass mind endeavoured to lose itself in the disguise of looking for itself. Further along the strip a tart in an orange and purple striped bedouinnighty caught his eye. She wriggled her thin body, and when the little man nodded imperceptibly she sauntered up to him.

  The little man derived a sad beaten masochistic pleasure in the anticipation of what would happen. God had forbidden fornication and if God was on the ball as He invariably was— there, with a look of frightened non-comprehension, the little tart backed off suddenly and disappeared in a swirl of translucent colour. Something in the little man’s face, something in the world, but certainly not of it, something an earlier age might have associated with burning fingers or floating Grails, something threw her back in terror. The little man followed her with his eyes, unhappily, and saw her break her leg as she stepped backwards on to a slow strip.

  By the time the little man had left the strip and was making his way up an afternoon-lit suburban road, he had forgotten the psychiatrist and the thin tart had faded from memory. He walked up a quiet hill, a peaceful street of browned grass and old houses and ancient Scotty dogs. There were no children here to disturb the heavy meditative senile air, and the little man was grateful for that if nothing else. The great gables hung heavy, and ivy crept up the walls.

  The little man was tired, tired to death, tired of life and the endless futile childish round of food and activity and sleep. He thought of the gilded Florentine palaces where he had slept, the nasal tones of Lorenzo de’ Medici, the nickering rapier which had taken off his left ear and made him look lopsided before the ear grew back. He thought of the dust-ridden Californian ranch which he had helped to build, when only a handful of white men had seen the Pacific from an American beach. He thought, and he thought, and he remembered the beer he had not been allowed to drink, and the women he could not touch because they walked away afeared, and the money he could never keep enough of to be rich, and he was tired.

  Finally, his feet were still, and he pushed his key into the front door lock and with a slight click the door opened. The house was musty, cool, empty and heartbreaking. The little man paused at the refrigerator for a glass of lemonade, went to the back room and brought in to the kitchen a fine hemp rope. Between his fingers it felt good, rough and strong, and an inch thick. He looped it, tied the loop carefully into a hangman’s noose, and held it out proudly to survey it.

  The kitchen was roofed with waxed boards, and a great cross plank stretched above the little man’s head. Carefully, he moved a chair over and stood on it. The other end of the rope went over the huge beam and the little man knotted it with delicate precision. He pulled it, swung on it, and the rope calmly held. He slipped the noose over his head, arranged the knot carefully behind the base of his skull, and peered for the last time around the room. But he was tired, bored, and unless he put an end to his thousands of years of life soon, he would be too bored to do even that. With a sigh of gratitude, he kicked away the chair and the rough fibres of the rope cut shockingly into his throat as he fell.

  The rope broke, of course, and Lazarus skinned his knee.

  <>

  ~ * ~

  A TOOTH FOR EVERY CHILD

  Is speculative fiction complacent or subversive? Stanislaw Lem, watching the pre-glasnost Gulag realtors marching up and down outside his window in Cracow, penned sf of a more sardonic cast than his American rivals, who usually could be seen tossing a bar of gold in one hand and a cattle prod in the other. Here in Australia? When we’re out of the direct lovely light of the sun we brood on our microchips and frozen embryos, and wait for the Earth to turn right-side-up for a change.

  I began writing ‘A Tooth for Every Child’ in Florida, after reading some intriguing medical reports in Australia, added pages and details in Baltimore, Atlanta, New York, and finished it in Milford, Pennsylvania. At the time I was pretty nearly as poor as a church mouse can get without being clapped into the workhouse. Yet no Storyteller to the King of the Orient could have voyaged through time and space with the agility of the pages of this tale, dashing from one borrowed typewriter to the next.

  I like the future, even when it’s terrifying. I think I’ll stay here.

  ~ * ~

  As the sun comes up, some automatic energy saver lowers the lights and turns off the heating flow, and a note of melancholy grey enters the high windows that no one can see anything through, seeps blurrily down the opposite wall of the drab Right To Life Maternity Hospital. My father comes back from his talk in the corridor to the doctor and sits down next to me, taking my hand. It is the first physical contact I’ve had with him since my adolescence. He tries to utter my name, get the sentence started.

  ‘Take it easy, Dad,’ I say, and squeeze his fingers. ‘They told me.’ Fatalistically, I’ve expected it anyway. It was a change-of-life pregnancy, and the risk factor was high. But in my guilt I know that isn’t what killed my mother.

  ‘First Jane.’ He makes a sound that combines mucus and grief, and it tears me up, it reaches into my own throat and pierces my chest. My father coughs blindly into a handkerchief, swallows until he can speak. ‘First Jane, now your mother. And the child is a—’

  ‘Don’t talk about it, Dad.’

  ‘I’m glad you’re here,’ he tells me. ‘I’m truly glad.’

  I find myself hunched, shivering, and when the old man gets up to visit the lavatory I finally start to go to bits, spastic jolts, subliminal feedback lags up and down my limb muscles, and cold, horribly cold in the centre of my body. I squeeze my arms into my invaded abdomen and try as hard as I can to pull myself together.

  A staff orderly, a nun, is speaking loudly to me, shaking my shoulder. ‘It’s not serious, but we’ve popped Mr Berger into bed.’

  I stare at her. ‘What?’

  ‘He collapsed for a moment in the toilet. We gave him a pill to help him sleep for a few hours.’

  ‘Shock,’ I say, nodding. ‘He’s just emotionally burnt out.’ I stare at my hands.

  ‘You should go home now yourself and get some rest,’ the orderly says. ‘Someone can phone you when he’s ready to come home. Probably sometime this afternoon.’

  ‘No. I’ll wait here.’

  She looks doubtful. ‘If you’re sure—’

  I’m sure, all right. I need to be awake so I can check on the baby. I need to stay awake so I can get close to the vile little bitch and kill it.

  ~ * ~

  After a sick, grieving grey time, another voice speaks my name. ‘Dr Berger?’

  I assume this is the registrar, in charge of running the ward and sizing up the patients for the specialists. She holds a hard-copy file card in her hand. I regard her with absolute blankness. She starts to straighten, letting her glance shift to the other weary figures sprawled on maroon, uncomfortable vinyl benches. I catch her sleeve. ‘Uh, yeah, me.’

  She smiles quickly. ‘You look as if you need some breakfast.’ Her eyes go once again, quickly, to the card. I know precisely what has caught her interest. Even a registrar in a busy major gynaecological hospital would have little enough opportunity to see Security Interdiction blanks on an official machine printout. ‘Does “Dr” stand for “medical practitioner”, or are you the kind with a Ph.D?’

  ‘I’m a hacker,’ I say.

  The registrar laugh
s with spontaneous warmth. ‘That doesn’t really count as a definitive answer. What is it you hack, Dr Berger?’

  I do what I can to grin back. ‘Data is what I hack, doctor. And I’m the kind with a D.Sc. My doctorate is in computer science.’

  ‘You look as if you’ve been up all night. Come on, I’ll get you something to eat.’

  ‘I have been. Thank you.’

  We go out of the waiting area and she puts me at one end of a moth-eaten couch in a cubicle while she asks a nurse to bring us some sandwiches from the machine in the lower foyer. She pours me a cup from a small electric drip percolator she must have smuggled in for her private use. The thick, black, overwhelmingly sweet Turkish coffee strikes me like a bolt of amphetamine.

  ‘I didn’t catch your name, doctor,’ I say. Her surname and initials are written clearly on a plastic lapel tag but I want things a little more even between us.

  ‘Susan,’ she says, sitting carefully at the other end of the couch, touching my knee in little taps with her fingertips. ‘Dr Dwyer, if you need to reach me through the switch. But make it Susan.’ That printout has certainly excited her interest.

  I’m twanging. When I bite into the soggy tomato sandwich I feel sick, literally nauseated. So it is finally getting to me. Genuinely reaching me. I want in all my gutted bereavement to let go, to howl with grief and rage. Until this moment my hostile misery has been a rippling cerebral thing, chilly and flaked with blue and silver. Now it corrodes through the retaining wall and gathers there, ready to burst, ready to shriek and avalanche down the slopes and chew to shreds whatever it finds in its way, smash everything into brown froth and bloody foam, including me. I sit at the end of the couch and watch Susan Dwyer’s plain modest face and do what I can not to throw up on her vinyl tiles. The discomforts of my pregnancy don’t help.

  ‘I’d like to talk about your baby sister,’ she says. ‘When you’re ready. More coffee?’

  ‘Is it human?’

  Certainly that shocks her profoundly. You’re not supposed to say that. It renders useless her bland prepared script. I can feel her scrutiny zip about my face like a scanning microwave beam. Sunlight dashes itself against the wall to my right, her left. All the grumbling sounds of the place. An odour like surgery, another of cleanliness amid a thousand rotting things. Very faintly, I fancy, the scorched stench of sawed bone. My jumping muscles lock in place.

  Dr Dwyer looks at me without any expression at all. ‘You’re upset. The baby is ... special. She’ll get the best possible care.’

  I put down the half-eaten sandwich and take up the coffee cup and drink some of the shockingly caffeinated slurry and regard the sun-streaked wall and then I vomit monstrously all along the top and back of the plaid insect-molested couch, while Dr Dwyer frowns with sympathy even as she leaps for cover and comes back to hold my shoulders as my diaphragm convulses with bile and all the songs of a Sabbath of Witches sing gruesome whining jingles to my ringing ears.

  I spend a lot of time crying after that, and Susan Dwyer keeps dropping back from her complex unceasing duties to talk to me, paid angel of mercy. (She isn’t the registrar, of course. Psychotherapy and hand-holding on the battlefront.) The morning blurs into hours of semi-conscious fugue. In her one fall from intelligent grace, Susan tells me: ‘They’ll see the child is cared for.’

  Because I still retain some measure of self-control, I do not tell her what I think about that. We did not bring Mum to the Right To Life Hospital for its ideology, but because the swine have the most advanced maternity life-support equipment in Melbourne. But they have not been able to save her. As they will not be able to save me. The knowledge eats at my belly, at the place where my own child is growing, like a spill of acid.

  ‘What’s happening to Mother’s body? What are the authorities doing with it?’

  She looks shocked, as if my question implies the existence of some covert and disgusting rite. I suppose it does. ‘Why, there’ll be a funeral, of course, when you and your family are over the worst of it. You’d be surprised,’ she tells me with a wan smile, ‘how quickly you’ll be able to cope. It will recede. Become more manageable.’

  ‘Suppression of the unconscionable.’

  ‘I sincerely hope not. That’s not a very fruitful way to deal with any problem, you know. A sure recipe for fester.’

  This kind of blunted cut and thrust is not stupid. It is meant to jolt me, and does; it is purgative. Susan Dwyer still has not said anything about my pregnancy. Perhaps she doesn’t know. The census computer file must have interdicted her access to a great deal more than my academic and professional details. Surprising: I have always assumed that high level hospital personnel would be cleared automatically for any medical information it pleases them to ask after.

  ‘I had an abdominal implant two months ago.’

  ‘Oh shit.’ She gets off the couch, goes to a stool beside the desk, runs her fingers over a touchboard and views the display. By this time the sun has gone right down the wall. I feel anaesthetised. Maybe I am. Perhaps she juiced up my coffee with floaters. ‘Keith, why didn’t you mention that earlier?’

  I look at her as people do on sitcoms in such circumstances: with my mouth slightly compressed, ironic rue, my brows slightly drawn in and crunkled. (How did anyone know how to communicate before the mass media told us the codes?)

  ‘Susan, I’d just about OD’d on grim news. And I was trying to, you know, concentrate on Mum.’ When I married Jane last year, Mum’s jealousy knew no bounds. I was her prince, and I had betrayed her with this terrible rival, so she paid us all back by throwing away her contraceptive pills and pulling Dad onto her angry menopausal but still fertile belly. I say nothing of this to the nosy doctor.

  A slightly disfiguring patch of purple skin on Susan’s right arm, above the carpus, has been hidden by the flat patch of her watch decal. It becomes visible as she nudges the decal around her wrist, teasing up an edge and tugging, letting it fall. She sighs.

  ‘I won’t bullshit you, Keith. There’s bound to be a risk. This . . . unhappy phenomenon . . . appears to have some hereditary aspects.’

  Instantly, with passion, I say: ‘Abortion is out of the question.’

  ‘Dr Berger,’ she tells me with a note of reproof, ‘abortion has never been an option at this hospital.’

  Annoyed, I say, ‘I’m not talking about your damned dark age garbage. There are other hospitals, other States. Anyway, that’s all beside the point. What I’m telling you is that I want this child I’m carrying. My wife Jane died six months ago.’ My throat hurts again, as it always hurts, but I say it: ‘I was driving the car. They saved the embryo. Even if the risk—’

  She seems genuinely moved. ‘I’m sorry. How terrible.’ After a silence she says: ‘Your new sister—you can set your mind at rest on that score at least. They’re—’

  ‘—properly cared for. So you mentioned.’ I squeeze my eyes shut. I’ll care for the sucker. I’ll tear its throat out and throw it to the dogs to eat.

  The pulse of adrenalin dizzies me; I am not a violent man, I do not harbour terrible impulses, but my mother’s victimization and my own hormonal confusions have me on an emotional big dipper.

  The pre-maternity unit insists on giving me a thorough checkover (myographs, EEG, haemodynamic, others I’ve never heard of) and, when Dad regains his feet, sends me home with the assurance that at least my foetal implant is fully cushioned and thriving, placenta well along and nourished from my abdominal blood supply. I wish it were possible to check the foetus with an ultra-sound body scan, or even an X-ray, but no one dares risk invasive sensing any longer, after the Adolescent-Onset Leukaemia horror.

  At any rate, the implant wound has healed completely. No scar tissue, outside my mind. Susan Dwyer squeezes my hand as we leave and wishes me well.

  When the taxi drops Dad and me at the Queens Way apartment (the Albert Park runners all sweaty along Lakeside Drive and skimmers blithe on the flat banal water of
the lake and summer drought taking colour out of the trees and the golf course greens) I arrange for the retired broker up the hall to pop in during the afternoon and keep an eye on him. I just can’t cope with the thought of the poor old bastard blundering through the empty rooms. Not that Dad is really all that old. Hardly over fifty. Twice my age. And, when I go back down south, all alone, alone, alone.

  I put him to bed with another pill and the moment he falls asleep I boot my terminal.