The Dark Between the Stars: Speculative Fiction

by Damien Broderick

  Despite his intensity, and my apprehension, I was dying for a leak. I hopped about edgily. ‘It doesn’t seem like a very important difference.’

  ‘By itself it’s not. But it segregates the Ainu from those bearing a different genetic makeup. Suppose a strange and terrible plague arose which discriminated its victims according to which fingerprint gene they possessed. Then you might find the matter more than trifling.’

  ‘Is there a disease like that?’

  ‘In the ancient days there were many—malaria was one. But I am trying to make a more general point, boy. Mother Goddess, I wish they’d get you started on science a couple of years earlier. Do you know about blood type?’

  ‘For accident transfusions? Of course, I’m type B.’

  ‘Good, good. Well, my small, the Ainu as a group have a blood-type signature unlike any other people. Twenty-eight per cent are like you, bearing the gene for type B. Five per cent less have mine, for type A. None at all have type A2. There are four per cent with Rh-negative, and we have the highest recorded level of NS combination. Never mind what that means: the point is, a map of the Ainu people would show gradients for a million characteristics of this kind in proportions singular to us alone.’

  ‘Uh, sir,’ I said with some desperation, ‘may I be excused for a moment? I gotta take a leak.’

  ‘Saucepan, why didn’t you say so? Get the hell out of here, then. I don’t want you piddling all over my nice new floor.’

  I bolted out the door. The weather had eased, but the sky hung over me like a grey hand. I ripped open my garments and poured a hissing, smoky stream into the snow, sagging with relief. The spark arced in my mind, ripping away the blissful emptiness, and I jerked, spraying my boots.

  I slammed the door. My uncle looked up in exasperation.

  ‘You weren’t talking about disease, you meant magic,’ I said with horror.

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘And the triangle—the balls falling into that pattern. It works the other way too, doesn’t it? A magus got his power from his own kind, channelled through his kin. And if he wished, he could aim it in the same way. He could make a map, a symbol map of his enemies, and blast all that power straight into their bodies, and their own genes would act like a . . . like an antenna tuned for exactly that frequency.’

  ‘A selective effect,’ the tusu-guru said gravely, ‘and no way to avoid it if it’s aimed at you. The old galactics used it for ecological control, thinning out animal populations on a scheduled basis. They needed neither fences, nor domestication, nor cultivation. And they employed the same techniques, handled with infinite delicacy, in breeding their trillions of human slaves. They sculpted the genome as easily as I carve a fetish from willow.’

  He picked up a bird’s oracular skull and turned it slowly, his fingertips skimming the empty sockets.

  ‘Saucepan, when you leave here I would like you to meditate on the fact that you immediately interpreted your insight in lethal terms. That is one of the reasons why the old magic is forbidden. We are a peaceful people, we Ainu, but we have a legacy of war. Today we are hunters and scholars: once we were ferocious soldiers, and we could be again. The risks are too great.’

  He sighed. ‘We are hostages to our own symbols, too often the symbols written with the four letters of the primeval code. When we sicken, our bodies are in rebellion against some symbolic statement our cells repudiate. I might heal the sick with antibiotics, or with whale bristle and deer horn powder, but in both cases I am waging a war of propaganda. There are certain bacteria, Saucepan, which wear embroidery on their attushes, graffiti which enrage our flesh. These lipopolysaccharides are harmless in themselves, but the moment we read their slogans our white blood corpuscles become hysterical. They swarm together in the blood vessels, blocking the body’s fuel. They gush pyrogens, igniting fever. A normal activating hormone from the adrenal medullae begins literally to kill the tissues it encounters. Serum fractions in the blood holler for more leucocyte reinforcements. In the worst cases, the victim goes into haemorrhage, high fever and shock. And all of this crazy runaway self-destruction has been provoked by an automatic response to endotoxin symbols which by themselves do not damage at all.’

  I gaped. Until that moment I suppose I’d always regarded myself as on perfectly cordial terms with my own body. Abruptly, I saw it as my potential assassin.

  Struggling, I asked, ‘Do you mean that old galactics could, could trigger this kind of sickness in people, by magic? Make their bodies destroy themselves?’

  ‘That’s exactly right, Saucepan.’ The fragile skull cracked, with a sharp sound, in his hands, and fell into two uneven pieces. ‘They did it when culling animals. There is no reason why they could not have done the same with human beings. Fortunately, to our knowledge, they never did use it in war. The Neanderthals, after all, had left Earth originally because of their nation’s loathing for the violence of the New Humans. But they could have culled the barbarians. They could have slaughtered every single one of them.’

  My uncle rose and took me to the door. A freezing gale was blowing up again, in the black, splattered night. He put his arm about me as I left. ‘Saucepan, meditate on what we have discussed. And ask yourself, until the answer is clear and without qualification: Do you think that you would trust yourself with such power?’

  I slogged off through the snow, and felt the burden of manhood on my shoulders.

  ~ * ~

  A reprise of that emotion took hold of me, as I stood out of the way in the corner of the palace hut, destroying the last remnants of my professional composure and detachment. I was in the grip of an acute anxiety attack. My situation was unprecedented, after all. I should have been a ghost, intercepting a shadow reality. Instead, that phantom realm had chatted to me and tugged at my whiskers. Far from my practised role as observer par excellence, I had become a participant. At a level of unconscious self-perception deeper than my training—and that buffer of educated response, in turn, now abruptly irrelevant—I had introjected the reality I saw and heard.

  Unlike the youth of memory, though, discussing the theory of psychic genocide with his shaman, I was spared the pressure of my bladder. But without the renal dialysis unit of my Liss, rubbing on my cramped belly muscles, I’m sure I would have pissed my pants.

  Clarity returned. Only then did I realize how close I’d been to passing out. My face was icy cold, and my limbs trembled. Roger, monitoring my vital signs, had reorganized my endocrinal balance. Tranquilizers have their place.

  Lyric Music, the comical savage whose act of will could blight a world, stood facing his wife. She had not moved. The enormity of her demand had shaken her, I suspect, almost as much as it had shaken me, but she was not cowed.

  ‘I have never been in any doubt that you despise me,’ he told her. She did not deny it. A professional eavesdropper, I nevertheless felt uncomfortable. The ticking of the holofield’s public notification seemed unnaturally loud. ‘You can doubt my wisdom to your heart’s content, madam,’ he said more sharply, ‘but I hope you do not dispute my knowledge.’

  ‘I do not. But we are not discussing your unparalleled access to the collective memory of my ancestors—’

  ‘They are my ancestors too, Early Bird.’

  ‘Only in the diminished degree.’

  The Emperor took a deep, harsh breath. ‘Your patrician regard for heraldry is quite stupefyingly beside the point, madam. Do you think I entered your gene-line because I was hungry for personal prestige?’

  ‘Why else?’ Her voice was as dry and parching as a desert wind.

  Coarsely, Lyric Music Stirs Too Fierce the Heart said: ‘When the entire universe is blowing itself to buggery, the only prudent course of action is to be Emperor of the whole goddam shebang. As Emperor, I’m the sluice-gate for the energy of a galaxy of minds. As Emperor, I’m the custodian of the psychic records of my predecessors. You wish me to use the first to cull the barbarians. I’ll draw on the sec
ond instead to prove why your suggestion is an abominable stupidity.

  ‘Twenty-eight thousand years ago, there was an Emperor named Every Cloud Has a Silver Lining—’

  ‘We do not speak of him,’ Early Bird said with, I swear to you, a sniff.

  For the first time, the filthy old man laughed. His eyes rolled under their jutting brows.

  ‘I suppose you don’t. He died insane, after all. But I have his memories. It comes with the job, madam, and I can’t prune them off your mythic tree in the interests of neatness and convenience.’

  ‘Lyric, this is in the worst possible taste.’

  ‘By God, woman!’ He seized her frail, birdlike jaw in his blunt fingers, and I waited for her skull to shatter. The blood left her crumpled brown paper face, and she gave a thin shriek. ‘You demand a Great Culling of human beings, and you find your black sheep ancestor too ignoble a topic for polite soiree. This is what your fucking mad disgraceful ancestor did:

  ‘Silver Lining took himself off to the solitary moon of a gas giant world ten thousand light years from other human company. There he skulked for the decades from his middle age to gibbering dotage, in the company of fanged slugs and insects huge as clouds, not all of his own imagining. He had fathered three children, daughters all, and they stayed behind and multiplied his genes.’

  The Empress jerked her bruised jaw out of his clutching grip, and covered her face with her own bony hands.

  ‘At last, SilVer Lining’s spiritual disease populated even this bolt-hole with enemies and lurking wizards,’ Lyric Music said inexorably. ‘A solution occurred to the lunatic, finally. If he could not out-run his ill-wishers, he could at least hold them at bay. He issued a decree for a festival of poets and artists ...’

  ‘I do not wish to hear this.’

  ‘He summoned to his gloomy moon a hundred thousand of the finest, most refined men and women of enhanced sensibility in the galaxy. Our nation’s numbers were much fewer then, madam, but the highest flower of its talent was no less distinguished.’

  The old, old naked woman was bent double, and she keened with an almost inaudible register of distress. My own fear was gone, now, and my skin prickled with the strangeness of it. Lyric Music was speaking to her with more than words, I was sure; perhaps he was evoking in her consciousness the demented phantasmagoria of his monstrous borrowed memory. And the words themselves were enough to fix my attention utterly.

  ‘He brought them to his thin-aired world, and disposed them one by one on every range of hills, beside the seething lakes, on islands and places rimed with ice. And he set them to the making of their arts: the weavings of colours and textures, bright songs like lonely, lovely birds, the meditation of exalted philosophies. And when he judged that the moment was right, when their fears were soothed and their souls opened to the whisper of eternity, he gathered in the power of the worlds beyond number of our nation and he fashioned ten thousand burning sunlets in the void—’

  ‘No! No! Too bright!’

  ‘—plasmas from a fusing star-heart, and he cast the flame upon them, a small piece of hell for each man and woman scattered across his moon, and as they blazed up in their private infernos like insects shrivelled in a campfire—’

  Early Bird screamed, and fell onto the floor.

  ‘—the magus wove their agony into a shield that locked his world away from humankind forever.’ Without pity, the Emperor regarded the naked crone writhing at his feet. The fall had been too much for her decalcified frame; her left arm had bent sideways, fractured at the humerus, and there was something badly wrong with her clavicle. Possibly her pelvic girdle had cracked as well. Keening, Early Bird brought her knees up and her bony buttocks pointed at me. With a blend of profound shame and clinical fascination, I noted that the poor bitch had long ago suffered a prolapsed uterus, and massive piles stood out like a fist of greasy knuckles. Early Bird had earned her pride and her dignity. The old galactic bred their star gene-line dams well into their ninth decade.

  Lyric Music knelt down carefully beside his moaning wife. Cerenkov radiation flared in his palms as he straightened her broken bones. Obviously there was nothing he could do for the tissues which nature had ruptured. He helped her to her feet, but his expression remained stony.

  ‘There will be no Great Culling, madam. If you wish to kill barbarians, you must use their own methods. I doubt, though, that they will be terribly eager to sell you weapons.’

  Holding herself away from his touch. Early Bird stared at him with detestation, ‘I shall never forgive you for what you have just done.’

  ‘It was necessary to make you understand. Do you understand?’

  She refused to reply. Her hatred was palpable.

  ‘You are all the same,’ the Emperor said dismally. ‘You use power with no concern for its source or its laws. Silver Lining turned an entire world into a pustule of poison we can never lance, and you would have me do the same to the galaxy. Magic is not a tool you can use and discard. It is ourselves. It casts back our actions upon ourselves, like a barbarian mirror reflecting the light from our faces. Our nation,’ he said, sharpening each word like a blade, ‘is rotten through and through. It is time to dismantle it. Now go.’

  The Empress vanished. Lyric Music sat with his legs spread, elbows pressing his knees, kneading his fingers. After a moment he vanished as well, and I stood alone in the sweat-stinking hut.

  My telephone rang.

  ‘This is Roger, your Life Support System. I didn’t think you’d want to be interrupted; I figured the bell might throw our subject off his stride.’

  ‘Yeah. Use the microwave link if anything big blows up while Lyric Music’s here. Roger, I could really use a drink.’

  ‘Won’t be much longer, the Earth fleet has just entered planetary orbit. Bowsprit, something has come up. The robots must have tuned their detectors. They’re aware of our presence at an interactive level. Smith has been nosing around the bear pelt. Oh shit, he’s picked it up.’

  ‘Fire Goddess!’ I yelped, and ran for the exit.

  ~ * ~

  That bear had been with me, you understand, almost from the beginning. How well I recall capturing him, a snuffling cub, and toting him home triumphantly to the village. He was the last of the animals our people ever sent on the great pilgrimage, and I still believe that the abandonment of that tradition has been a grave impoverishment of our way of life. No doubt you think me an incorrigible fogey.

  I was twenty-four then, and our village had shifted to the mountains of Hokkaido after our ancestral home in Sakhalin cracked into three pieces and sank, spewing lava and superheated steam into the ocean. A terrible year for fishing. The Okhotsk Current went crazy. Lustrous and I were on the slopes of Fujiyama at the time, where I was taking accelerated courses in the new meron physics. My eldest son had not yet been weaned, and when we flew back to help settle the survivors Lustrous’ breasts were still rich with milk. My village had lost their bear in the disaster, and I chivvied the men into coming in search of another.

  Fiercely cold was the snow, and the bamboo gaunt and flattened. We clambered blindly through territory none of us had hunted before, carrying only bows for arms. When I saw the yellow marks in the snow, the breath-spoor of the hibernating bear, I called the others to a halt and dispersed them to their posts. I wrapped my head in thick cloth, fingers frozen and heart thumping, and crept into the beast’s den with my knife. The animal was dormant, and there were two cubs curled against her. I rousted her out of her hole with cries which terrified me as much as her, booting her in the arse as she turned blindly to find me. Once started, she went out like a locomotive, dogs yapping around her, arrows thudding into her hide, the men bellowing like a gang of yahoos. One cub jolted after her, tumbling in the snow; the other I captured with little enough complaint. He was a biddable creature, my adopted son.

  Lustrous loved him. She took Woodchip off the teat as quickly as it could be managed, but for a time my son and
the cub shared her breasts. I will not tell you the name we gave the cub; he has travelled ahead of us, and it would be impolite. He was a sturdy little fellow, with his baggy skin that seemed a fur coat in all truth, small eyes gleaming with the promise of wisdom in his broad head. He quickly knew us for his family, and I do not think his sharp teeth ever bothered my wife’s long nipples.

  We had two more children by the time he’d grown large enough for the cage. Or was it only one, my eldest daughter? That must be it: two children, one bear. You have lost so much, my smalls, in giving up that rite. He ate at the hearth with us, taking the lid delicately from the millet pot and scooping up as much as his appetite called for. I taught my youngsters that he was the mirror of Aeoina, the ‘Person Smelling of Man,’ who came among us in the times of fable and bore back to the gods a human attush.

  When the Feast of Sending Forth came at last, the Iomande maratto, my beautiful Lustrous lingered for a time on the edge of a psychotic break. Perhaps you are right, my sproggies. Perhaps the price of our message was too great. As the bear waxed fat, squatting cheerfully in his cage, poor Lustrous lost her taste for food. I lay beside her in the nights of that September, while she shivered and wept, and I traced the tattoos of her mouth. There I had gashed her skin with an obsidian knife, and rubbed in soot to complete her passage into womanhood; now, it seemed, it was her very soul which had been lacerated. I told her of the honour this meant to her adopted child. I took her to the cage where every day we praised our bear and passed him wine to drink and begged him to carry only good reports of our hospitality. It did no good. Lustrous bit her tongue and redoubled her tears, wresting herself from my grip and fleeing home, throwing herself before the lilac inua fetish in the north-east corner of the hut.