The Dark Between the Stars: Speculative Fiction

by Damien Broderick

  What inkling could the machine-folk have of our reward, when the tribulations are behind us, and the chubby thighs of the infant are slashed and stuffed with fungus mycelium? They are barren of mystery, locked in their time, heeding only caesium clocks, endlessly visiting apocalypse upon the endless worlds of the old galactics.

  ~ * ~

  Despite her immense age (she was certainly old enough to have been Lyric Music’s grandmother, and conceivably his great-great grandmother), the Empress The Early Bird Catches the Worm struck me as formidably impressive. Out from the ranks of her chamberlains and serving women she stepped, bald high and low as a lizard, skin translucent and creased infinitely fine as oiled brown paper folded and unfolded by centuries of archivists, and her breasts, too, like brown paper bags emptied of their goods and discarded; right eye turned inward and useless, the other glaucous with antiquity but alive and raging. All her lineaments, in truth, made up a catalogue of sublethal recessive defects, yet a kind of absolute power and self-conviction was instinct in her.

  ‘You foolish man,’ she cried, quivering, as she stood before the Emperor of the galaxy. ‘Do I find you loitering in this absurd place built by your abominations? Have you nothing better to do as the foe hurtles toward our world?’

  The old man glanced up to meet the eye of the old, old woman, and from my position in the hut’s corner I could just make out the pixie smile which transformed his huge mouth.

  ‘My dear, you come at an auspicious moment. Come, come, sit down here with me. Look,’ and he held up the purple-and-white vegetables, ‘I have just this minute grown a wonderful novelty, a plant known as “turnips,” and I expect them to be precisely as tasty as they look. Don’t you find them elegant?’ Lyric Music offered them to his wife courteously, holding them by the stalks.

  ‘Imbecile!’ Early Bird snatched the turnips from his hand and cast them on the floor. They winked out of existence. ‘You have become a doddering child, Lyric. What next! By my ancestors, I am ashamed. Wife to the High Magus? Wife to a village gardener! You are a pollution to my honourable bloodline, Lyric, a curse and a disgrace ...’ Her breath failed in a rattling wheeze, and instantly women held her by the waist and elbow, helped her down to the palliasse despite her objections; their glances at the Emperor were venomous.

  ‘My good wife,’ said Lyric Music, with a touch of acerbity, ‘I find your slurs on the craft of the gardener offensive and short-sighted. Competent agriculture is the wellspring of society, and inspired horticulture its highest art. Nourishment for both body and soul is—’

  ‘Lyric!’

  ‘—both the supreme end and the finest means—’

  ‘Sire, I beg you!’

  Gently, Lyric Music took her crippled hands in his, and fell silent for a space. One of them wordlessly expressed a command, and the hut was empty. Neither took any notice of me in the corner.

  ‘Early Bird, sometimes you forget yourself.’

  She was weeping, but she had not softened. ‘I apologize, Sire.’

  ‘Oh, crap. Madam, you’re a stiff-necked old bird and all your children are the same.’ He stroked her fingers. ‘Do you think that a genotype like ours will be disturbed one whit by the antics of barbarians from a single world?’

  Whipping her head up and around, Early Bird stared at him. ‘The New Humans are not a comic troupe.’ With patrician decorum, she insisted on giving the earth people their proper designation. ‘They are murderers, Lyric. They have slaughtered their own kind for half a hundred millennia, and now they mean to slaughter us. Something must be done to stop them. Their leader is only hours distant. When his abominable machines arrive he will have this world put to the torch. It is their way. Our nation will be utterly destroyed. It is your duty to prevent that holocaust.’

  My own excitement, my smalls, was extreme, and I could not suppress a shudder. Here was history! Here were the principals of the fall of empire, and I was privy to their debates. Lyric Music toyed with what were left of his turnips. The only sound in the hut was the ticking of my holofield recorder, lapping up the actuality. The Emperor looked my way, then, one swift penetrating flick of his eyes, and away again. I have listened to that recording a hundred times since, children, and I am morally certain that his next words were meant as much for us as for his wife. How could he have known? I can only say that Lyric Music was the craftiest man I have ever encountered.

  ‘My dear,’ he said, rising to his feet and striding back and forth in the long hut, ‘are you reminding me of my duty to history?’

  The ancient woman laughed with some bitterness. ‘To history, Lyric? What else is our nation if not history?’

  ‘Indeed. It is written in our genes, and the genes of our children. You and I, Early Bird, are the custodians of thirty-seven thousand years—’

  ‘You,’ she snarled, ‘by right of purchase.’

  ‘Because my gene-line strayed from the path of psychic purity?’ Lyric Music sighed, and ran his fingers down the wonderfully woven straw of the wall. ‘Because my ancestors discerned value in talents other than the single vampiric ability to suck off the mana from countless human cattle?’

  The Empress was on her feet, trembling and bloodless. ‘Guttersnipe! How dare you? With every word you muddy and defame the nation at whose pinnacle you loll like a drunken slave. You showed enterprise enough toadying to the machine-mongers, buying your way into eminence.’ Beside herself, she lifted an earthlight luminator and dashed it on the floor. It bounced several times without breaking, and rolled against a rush wall, casting strange shadows. ‘All your power you owe to me and our children, and you dare to defame us as parasites.’

  ‘Sit down, madam.’ His voice rasped with authority and anger, somewhat belated in my opinion. ‘The means by which I obtained this post were legal and time-honoured. I would remind you that I am your liege. Your behavior is disgraceful. For one who despises the barbarians so strenuously, you remind me distastefully of their arrogant women. Now,’ and his voice regained its gruff blandness, if you see what I mean, ‘we are speaking of history, and its demands.’

  Thinly, the Empress told him: ‘There will be no more history when the New Human warriors land.’

  ‘You astonish me. History is the record of events. It has no favorites. You make time a myth.’

  ‘And so it is, Lyric. We see time with different eyes, Sire. Yours is the dew which evaporates from the drenched earth, leaving no trace. Mine is the rain which smites the topmost leaves of the forest, runs from twig to branch to trunk to root, fecundating the earth. And its fruit is the tree itself, older than that transitory time which gives drink to its roots. The history of our nation is the myth of the tree, Lyric, with its infinite fragile branches in a thousand million worlds. And its Emperor is the trunk. They will hack you down with their barbarous instruments, and hurl the tree of our people into the fire. Then,’ she said, with a voice as lost and elegiac as her words, ‘time for both of us will be a thin smoke dispelled by the breeze, and a handful of dying ashes.’

  ‘I see.’ The Emperor turned away from her and crouched on his haunches, tracing with his right index finger the scars on his left biceps. Perhaps the blue glow danced at his fingertip. ‘You speak for the Women’s Mysteries?’

  ‘I speak for the nation entire.’

  ‘Do you understand what you are saying?’

  I could hardly hear her voice. All the snappy verve and choler was gone from it. ‘I ask for a Great Culling.’

  A tremor passed through Lyric Music’s shoulders. ‘You are prepared to destroy a whole people, to the last man, woman and child, to preserve your own culture?’

  ‘What choice do we have? They are savages. They will not rest until they have laid waste our nation.’

  I felt sickened. My head reeled. Some hint of this moment, this swinging balance, had passed into the later apocrypha, but no one believed it. No one had doubted that the thing was feasible, but who could credit the cold proposal to m
urder twenty billion human people? We can imagine the barbarians making such a calculation, but not the old galactics. My body was cold, my smalls, and my bowels like water.

  But I see that some of you do not understand. Let me explain how that ancient witch had planned the death of old Earth.

  ~ * ~

  In coldest winter, the year I became a man, my uncle the tusu-guru, he of the ‘double life,’ sought me out one day beside the hearth, under the dark sooty rafters, and led me through the frigid sleet to his brightly-lit study. I had never been within that code-locked place before, and I shivered more to see the yellow bears’ skulls and willow fetishes and other arcana than I did from the blustering walk there through snow halfway to my knees. He took from a tall shelf a curious artifact of lovingly polished wood and glass, as wonderful and powerful, I thought, as any fetish, and perched it on his lap. It was an elongated triangle (not unlike the sail-hut palace of the Emperor, in fact), and behind its glass face a thousand small buttons spread across a velvet backing in an array as regular as Pascal’s Triangle. I could not conceive any mundane use for it, but its simple elegance bespoke an instrument of some kind.

  ‘Saucepan,’ my uncle said (for in those days I was not yet Bowsprit, and certainly had not dared to hope for that lofty role as the bear-messenger’s proxy), ‘have you been taught anything yet about the old galactics?’

  ‘A little, sir,’ I admitted, looking at my feet and the cork tiles they stood upon.

  ‘You have heard that they were wizards?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’ Was it a trap? I glanced at him quickly. ‘But their magic was not like our magic’

  ‘No.’ My uncle moved the instrument, opening a lever recessed into its apex. ‘Their magic was the old, forbidden kind, harnessing the stored power of a million minds to the benefit of one magus. Do you know the binomial theorem, Saucepan?’

  I assumed it was mathematics. ‘No, sir. I am studying hunting, training the dogs.’

  ‘Well and good, my boy. You seem agile enough in the snow. Still, I wish they’d give you children an earlier start with numbers. It doesn’t matter, my little engine here will make the point well enough. Look closely, lad. At the top, here, is a chute giving access to the board within.’ He took up a canister from his bench, and I saw that it was filled with hundreds of small perfect metal balls. My uncle fixed this container to the open chute by means of a narrow valve at its base. ‘When I release these spheres, they will rush down the chute and dispose themselves at the bottom of the triangle. As they fall, they will strike the buttons and suffer deflection, some this way, some that. Can you tell me, boy, what the pattern will be when all have fallen to the lowest available point?”

  I gazed at the machine and puzzled over the problem. The gap between velvet and glass seemed hardly greater than the diameter of each ball, as did the distance between adjacent buttons. As the tusu-guru had said, each sphere, in falling, would hit numerous buttons on its path. I became slightly dazed, trying to picture the pattern. Some of you laugh at my naïveté, but the matter is not immediately apparent if you are innocent of statistics.

  ‘I suppose they’ll pile up in the middle and spread out evenly,’ I hazarded.

  ‘Let’s see,’ said my uncle, and released the spheres. With a rattling, glinting rush, the balls cascaded into the triangle. It was impossible to observe their paths as they batted and caromed from button to button. In a moment the activity stilled—and the balls could be seen as a silvery bell-shaped mass at the instrument’s base, few at the extremities of the triangle, most mounding upward at its centre. I was dazzled by the demonstration. I think that moment was the beginning of my life-long love of mathematics: the latent order in random things.

  ‘We call that curve the normal distribution,’ said my uncle. ‘Few interactions in this complex world are as neat and clear as the carefully designed workings of my little toy. Still, the underlying principle can be found in most things which are the result of a multitude of small influences, none of them connected.’

  ‘And this is the secret of magic?’ I guessed.

  ‘On the contrary, Saucepan. This is the secret of science. We cannot predict the path of any particular ball in that maze, but we know quite perfectly the end-state of all the balls together. Magic works like this.’ And with a deft flick, he inverted the instrument. Spheres scurried and jostled, whirling miniature worlds, and drained back into the canister. ‘The psychic force is generated at random within the human brain. Some of us are more powerful emitters than others, but psi is always sporadic and unpredictable. It can only be directed usefully, and put to work as magic, under strict social conditions.’

  ‘Like an orchestra, you mean?’

  ‘Exactly, Saucepan. But an orchestra playing powered instruments, with the current cut off from any given instrument ninety-nine per cent of the time. To obtain music from such an ensemble, you’d need thousands of instrumentalists, maybe hundreds of thousands, none of them sure if his keyboard was alive but obliged to play as if it were. Well now, imagine how crucial is the role of the conductor in such circumstances.’

  In fact, I knew almost as little about orchestral music as I did about stochastic analysis. I’d heard holos, but that is sound detached from its root. I tried to bring the analogy back home, to the night gatherings where we played our tonkori zithers, striking the open strings with both hands, adding our voices in the ancient guttural polyphonies. And the image no longer conveyed my uncle’s meaning; magic is centrally totalitarian, an elixir distilled from the dross of masses. Our music, even our shamanistic rapture, was too personal for that, too earthy and immediate.

  I stared at the canister, and all the little globes of silver crammed together. They reminded me of salmon, the divine fish, piled gleaming in the sun ready for drying. ‘The conductor—the magician—he, he sucks out the psychic force from other people?’

  ‘You could put it that way, lad, but the truth is more horrible. The forbidden magic of the old galactics gained its power from the willing co-operation of a race bred like cattle. To be a magus, a psi-focus for that confluence of force, required in its turn a very special genotype. Magic, like language and mathematics, is a sort of machine which transforms energy through symbols.’ My eyes must have glazed over; he added, ‘Well, never mind. The important thing is that the brain of a magus has a special structure, refined by careful genetic selection through many generations. When it taps the random blurts of psychic energy from ordinary brains, it acts as a rectifier, a transformer. Nor is it the brain of the magus alone which channels this force, but the brains of all those whose genetic constitution most resembles his own. And archetypal symbols, in their turn, are all-important. The Emperor of the old galactic order stood at the peak of an immense psychic pyramid, confirmed in his role by a tradition of untold thousands of years, and his children were the most vital circuit in his psychic amplifier.’

  ‘Yes, sir,’ I mumbled. I desperately needed to take a piss, but I was much too awed to say so. And the pressure on my bladder was acting as an erotic stimulus; I had arranged with another young person to meet under the furs that afternoon, and it began to seem that I would miss my appointment. How little we value the truly important things of life, such as the opportunity for pure learning, when we are young. Ah, smirk if you will.

  Nevertheless, what my uncle told me next cooled my ardour.

  ‘Saucepan, listen carefully. We have come to the point where the dogs drive the catch to shore.’ He smiled. ‘I’m sure you would rather be back beside the fire, under the covers with your little friends. But I wish you to fix this in your thoughts, engrave it there, for your manhood rites are very close now and this is one of the great truths every man must know well and fear.’ He paused until, in my sudden fright, I nodded. His friendly tone was in shocking contrast to the portent of his words, more effective than any ranting might have been.

  ‘The psychic force, like poetry, operates at the level of symbols. And the
fundamental symbolic structure in our bodies and minds—and in the bodies of all living creatures—is the architecture of our cells, and within our cells the DNA of our genes. In the antiquity of our species, it was believed that knowledge of a man’s name conferred control over his person. That was a mistaken belief, my small, but it hinted at the greater truth; for knowledge of the phenotype does indeed yield authority, in psychic operations, over the genotype. The ancients of all nations employed dolls adorned with a man’s name, hair and nail-parings, but the magus used true gene-linked symbols. A race of men or animals is defined by those symbols, even the most superficial.’

  My uncle leaned forward intently, his hazel eyes regarding me over his snubbed nose, and grasped my left hand, turning it upward.

  ‘Look closely at the shape of your fingerprints. See the loops, like a buffeted wave curling under its own rushing force? That shape is typical of our people, scribed in our DNA. The fingerprints of the old galactics were predominantly whorled, like the rings across a tree stump.’