officers.’
‘Doesn’t invalidate the experiment.’
‘I’ll ring. W hat’ll it be?’
‘Leave it to you.’
Only three men left from the Beowulf crew-list. This one has got to be
Blanchis. Ah, their bell.
Two bells. C’mon Vera. They want us both. Leave it recording.
I ll
‘Hey, you’re good!’ There’s a dolphin somewhere in the roaring ocean
of my right ear, but this voice is deeper, deep as the base of my neck-
bones. Kind of laugh in a gasp. I think we’re all gasping.
‘He’s supposed to be good, Slatecoat!’ T h at’s the bony nose across
the glowing pattern of the near wall, the plane of a cheekbone lit by
flowing lights out of the intricate ceiling. Never realised how underwater the Filigree Room is . . . The ceiling is an upsidedown coral reef. O f his bones are coral made . . . Coral and kif.
Blanc.his’ nose is still breathing hard, though it drowned dancing
with the dolphin just now. A pearl rolls out of his eye-socket, up his
cheek and away.
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Norman Talbot
‘W hat sort of contact was it, and where?’ You’re supposed to react
a lot in this game, and I’m reacting, but my game is a job. Both my
games are jobs.
‘Classified,’ groans the voice around my neck. ‘Tau Ceti. Satellite to
planet three. Can’t describe it.’ His breath carries kif.
‘Try.’ They should be loosened up enough. I’m so loose I’m shaking.
‘It gave all of you what you wanted. Right?’ Vera’s voice no longer
sounds like a dolphin. She —and the silence —have decided my
interrogation wasn’t sufficiently subtle.
‘If I explained, you wouldn’t understand.’ They both said that, in ludicrously perfect unison like in Oscar Wilde, except one of them had a ‘couldn’t’.
Secrets are very erotic. U nder the right kind of interrogation, the
Force always teaches us, the toughest punch or judy will let them go.
I stroke Slatecoat’s kelpdark skin. ‘Did the contact give you —’
U nder Vera, Blanchis says loudly, suddenly, ‘We got ourselves
crossed, Slatecoat and me.’
The kelp mountain sighs heavily and smells of hum an, but he
doesn’t argue, just says something about ‘kid’.
‘Crossed in love’, croons Vera. ‘And now you’re afraid the two of you
are becoming a crossing for your wives.’
‘Not afraid,’ Blanchis murmurs. ‘Certain’. He slaps something fleshsounding, that isn’t me. I twist over in Slatecoat’s arms, and he goes on. ‘And if that happened when we both tried so hard to turn it back,
what would happen if we helped it along, consciously?’
‘But doesn’t it get weaker?’ Vera does not ask this lightly.
‘Don’t think so,’ says Slatecoat, carefully kissing my eyes so I can feel
every word. ‘Everything the contact offered us has to keep on changing . . . ’ I give in and close the eyes. ‘Maybe all wishes do that, but they don’t go away.’ Somebody’s head pushes inside my thighs and
starts some kissing there. ‘The changes sort of mock whoever did the
wishing. Mostly.’ A hand on my throat. I stroke somebody’s throat,
and feel for vibrations. I feel a quick swallowing; it’s Vera.
‘Don’t worry, Geisha,’ says the voice between my legs.
‘Let me alone’. T hat’s my voice, panicky. You’re supposed to be
young for this job, and not too calm. ‘I don’t understand what you say
unless I shut my eyes, and then I can’t tell you apart.’
‘There’s no apart,’ says another voice from another direction. My
fear and all our fears are highly tumescent. Fear isn’t, usually.
‘Slatecoat?’ I open my wet eyes on the lovely cold and see the washes
of scarlet and pale green through the coral of the filigree depths we’re
A fter the B eow ulf expedition
101
all in. I’m all in.
‘Peter Pan,’ I find I’m saying. ‘He m ust’ve made a similar deal.’ I
don’t see the connection, myself, but it feels obvious just the same. ‘I
was always pretty good to myself as a kid. Bet one of you wasn’t.’
‘They used to call me Kid . . . ’Blanchis trails off his voice and
takes another draw of kif. Then begins again. ‘Don’t like the word.
Didn’t then. Still don’t.’ Now how did I know he was sucking in the kif?
I can feel him sucking it in.
‘Why, Slatecoat?’ whispers Vera. ‘Why are you pressing your
shoulder-blades up against his?’ Then her mouth is on mine, hard and
open, and her tongue morses on mine, E X P E R IM E N T . Experiment?
‘An experiment,’ rumbles Slatecoat from down there, chiming
perfectly.
Vera shakes her hair like heavy honey between me and the coral
light. ‘And will you report the results to Spaceforce?’
‘No more than you will to Lawforce.’ But was that Slatecoat too, and
was his voice coming from where Blanchis had been? ‘Let any of the
Forces know, it’ll be isolation for all of us for life. Ganymede at best,
or the bio-boxes on Poseidon.’
Asteroid prospecting.’ Kid plunges into Vera suddenly in a sort of
tantrum of resentment and fear. The mattress ripples with innocent
enthusiasm.
‘Couldn’t happen,’ I m urm ur into Slatecoat’s armpit, sipping a little
neighbourly sweat. Then I realise: I can map the position of us all, not
just in the mind but the way I can my own. He’s dos-a-dos with Kid,
and Vera’s trying to roll Kid away onto her, and I’m curled against
Slatecoat’s throat and chest, waiting to see if she’ll succeed, and knowing somewhere that I ought to be heaving them apart as well, and feeling all Romeo-and-Juliet because I can’t bear to part. We can’t bear to part. How sad and noble. I’m dizzying to Kid’s hookahful of kif, I’m
grinding poignantly into Vera, I’m being ground into poignantly by
Kid —though that isn’t going to last long, for sure. And I’m Slatecoat,
pressing back and turning me round on his front and wondering
whether to say he’s sorry he got the poor little damn Geishas into this.
We’re all well into Kid’s orgasm, and it’s echoing through all of us
with fourfold tragic thunder, when one of us realises that the eager
mattress so tidal beneath us all is recording the whole thing, and
knows all. At first we retreat into our individual kleinbottle selves, but
we don’t think some of us get the ones we started from.
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Norman Talbot
IV
The Rose Room, and, er, Filigree Room are my specialties. O r is it the
Bridal Suite and the Chameleon? I’m lost in my own backyard. I take
a long while just to unlock the JCN computerbank. And when I get
in, the cover-cancel devices don’t convince me for a moment.
However, they ought to hold that sardonic, single-minded O.C.C.
Aspinall and her attendant gnomes for a while. Grade 4 securicode
will relax them.
Then back to — I pick the Rose Room, but eventually find all my
gear in the Chameleon. What does the well-dressed me wear on a
body like this? Some useful gadgets and gear, but the dress just isn’t
right.
Then I go back to the JCN bank and put a HOLD CLASSIFIED on
; an earlier, schizoid-encounter episode; that will keep O.C.C. Aspinall
with her pants on the chair and her face in the phone for quite a while.
I’m dizzy and I want a bath. But I pack. One of them has taken off
to get the other’s wife to fly out to the first one’s wife to bring them all
back here. The other one’s with the Lim I was once, I mean the body
I was once. They’re going to throw the change across a couple of the
best and hottest space-engineer judies who’ve been having a wild night
in the Telford Room. It’s gonna get wilder, judes!
Wish I was there, instead of ruining and re-applying my face-paint
four times in the one mirror. Sorry to get you involved, Vera-body.
Apology accepted, Lim-self.
But that’s the question: who-self? Remnants of Veraness must be
around, like the correct recording of her personal securicode. It’s not
just protective coloration, it’s me.
Will they get back in time? And can Kid really fly the Forcelaunch?
And will we be able to fold back the security nets and get to Ganymede? And will we be lovable enough to whore ourselves a Republic if we get there? And will we live happily ever after?
Can Vera and Lim live happily even after? Whaddya think, Lim?
Whaddya think, Vera?
Who said that? I can’t tell me apart.
I’ll show you mine if you’ll show me yours.
A bit hysterical, but rather keenly aroused, we laugh, and show us
ours. They’re fascinatingly different; that much is clear.
Precious Bane
©
GERALD MURNANE
I first thought of this story on a day of drizzling rain in a secondhand
bookshop in Prahran. I was the only customer in the shop. The owner
sat near the door and stared out at the rain and the endless traffic.
This was all he seemed to do all day. I had passed the shop often and
walked through the man’s gaze; and during the moment when I intersected that gaze I felt what it might be like to be invisible.
On the day of drizzle I was inside the man’s shop for the first time.
(I buy many secondhand books, but I buy them from catalogues.
Secondhand bookshops make me unhappy. Even reading the catalogues is bad enough. But the secondhand books that I buy do not sadden me. Taking them out of their parcels and putting them on my
shelves, I tell them they have found a good home at last. And I warn
my children often that they must not sell my books after I have died.
My children need not read the books, but they must keep them on
shelves in rooms where people might glance at them sometimes or
even handle them a little and wonder about them.) The man had
glanced at me when 1 came into his shop, but then he had looked away
and gone on gazing. And all the while I poked among his books he
never looked back at me.
The books were badly arranged, dusty, neglected. Some were
heaped on tables, or even on the floor, when they could easily have
been shelved if the man had cared to put his shop in order. I looked
over the section marked L IT ER A TU R E. I had in my hand one of what
I called my book-buying notebooks. It was the notebook labelled:
103
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Gerald M urnane
1900-1940 . . . Unjusdy Neglected. The forty years covered by the notebook were not only the first forty of the century. Written ‘1940-1900’, they were the first forty years from the year of my birth to a time that
I thought of as the Age of Books. If my life had been pointed in that
direction I would have been, just then, not sheltering from rain in a
graveyard of books but inspecting wall after wall of leather-bound
volumes in my mansion in a city of books. O r I would have been at my
desk, a writer in the fullness of his powers, looking through tall windows at a park-like scene in the countryside of books while I waited for my next sentence to come to me.
I put together four or five titles and took them to the gazing man.
While he checked the prices pencilled in the front leaves I looked at
him from under my eyebrows. He was not so old as I had thought. But
his skin had a greyness that made me think of alcohol. The bookseller’s
liver is almost rotted away, I told myself. The poor bastard is an
alcoholic.
I believed, in those days, that I was on the way myself to becoming
an alcoholic, and I was always noticing signs of what I might look like
in twenty or ten years or even sooner. If the bookseller had pickled his
liver, then I understood why he sat and gazed so often. He suffered all
day from the mood that came over me every Sunday afternoon when
I had been sipping for forty-eight hours and had finally stopped and
tried to sober up and to begin the four pages of fiction I was supposed
to finish each weekend.
In my Sunday afternoon mood I usually gave up trying to write and
looked over my bookshelves. Before nightfall I had usually decided
there was no point in writing my sort of fiction in 1980. Even if my
work was published at last, and a few people read it for a few years,
what would be the end of it all? Where would my book be in, say, forty
years’ time? Its author by then would be no longer around to investigate the matter. He would have poisoned the last of his brain-cells and died long before. O f the few copies that had actually been bought,
fewer still would be stacked on shelves. O f these few even fewer would
be opened, or even glanced at, as weeks and months passed. And of
the few people still alive who had actually read the book, how many
would remember any part of it?
At this point in my wondering I used to devise a scene from around
the year 2020. It was Sunday afternoon (or, if the working week had
shrunk as forecast, a Monday or even a Tuesday afternoon). Someone
vaguely like myself, a man who had failed at what he most wanted to
do, was standing in gloomy twilight before a wall of bookshelves. The
Precious Bane
105
man did not know it, but he happened to be the last person on the
planet who still owned a copy of a certain book that had been composed on grey Sunday afternoons forty years before. The same man had once actually read the book, many years before the afternoon
when he searched for it on his shelves. And more than this, he still
remembered vaguely a certain something about the book.
There is no word for what this man remembers — it is so faint, so
hardly perceptible among his other thoughts. But I stop (in my own
thinking, on many a Sunday afternoon) to ask myself what it is exactly
that the man still possesses of my book. I reassure myself that the
something he half-remembers must be just a little different from all
the other vague somethings in his memory. And then I think about the
man’s brain.
I know very little about the human brain. In all my three thousand
books there is probably no description of a brain. If someone counted
in my books the occurrence of nouns referring to parts of the body,
‘brain’ would probably have a very low score. And yet I have bought
all those books and read nearly half of them and defended my reading of them because I believe my books can teach me all I need to know about how people think and feel.
I think freely about the brain of the man s
tanding in front of his
bookshelves and trying to remember: trying (although he does not
know it) to rescue the last trace of my own writing — to save my
thought from extinction. 1 know that this thinking of mine is, in a way,
false. But I trust my thinking just the same, because I am sure my own
brain is helping me to think; and I cannot believe that one brain could
be quite mistaken about another of its kind.
I think of the man’s brain as made up of many cells. Each cell is like
a monk’s cell in a Carthusian monastery, with high walls around it and
a little garden between the front wall and the front door. (The Carthusians are almost hermits; each monk belongs to the monastery, but he spends most of his day reading in his cell or tending the vegetables in
his walled garden.) And each cell is a storehouse of information; each
cell is crammed with books.
A few books are cloth-bound with paper jackets, but most are
leather-bound. And far outnumbering the books are tire manuscripts.
(I have trouble envisaging the manuscripts. One of my own books —
in my room, on the grey Sunday afternoon — has photographs of
pages from an illuminated manuscript. But I wonder what a collection of such pages would look like and how it would be bound. And I have no idea how a collection of such bound manuscripts would be
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Gerald M urnane
stored — lying flat, on top of one another? sideways? upright in ranks
like cloth-bound books on my own shelves? I wonder too what sort of
furniture would store or display the manuscripts. So, although I can
see each monk in his cell reaching up to his shelf of books from more
recent times, when I want to think of him searching among the bulk
of his library I see only a greyness: the grey of the monk’s robe, of the
stone walls of his cell, of the afternoon sky at his little window, and the
greyness of blurred and incomprehensible texts.)
There are very few Carthusian monks in the world — I mean, the
world outside my window and under the grey sky on Sunday
afternoon. But when I say that, I am only repeating what a priest told
me at secondary school nearly thirty years ago, when I was dreaming
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