Strange Attractors (1985)

by Damien Broderick

  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

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  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:

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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