Strange Attractors (1985)

by Damien Broderick

So I got up early, cooked coffee, adios’d long tall quiet O rry now

  tangled in blankets next to sleeping Fiorm aria — O rry grunting

  ‘Bye’ without unlidding his big eyes — and headed for Pororak

  Space Centre. In the mono I watched a man’s face, warm, folded,

  eyes open but flat and not awake, and felt pity for him riding to a

  day of labour in some place thick with the boredom of its own

  familiarity. But you can’t tell ’em. Outside the sky paled to lemon

  beyond endless miles of Dourisburg’s black business towers, and

  paling towers flashed by above us, and dark canyons still quiet

  beneath.

  From the mono dropping me in the passenger terminal I was

  walking through to the amenities block used by staff and ship crew,

  and this uniform stopped me.

  ‘You a pilot?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘No you’re not.’

  ‘Sure I’m a pilot. Brought the Santos in from M eriam yesterday.’

  But he didn’t believe me. ‘On your way,’ he said pointing a fat

  finger at the floor then at my knees with a little wag. Give a floor

  sweeper a uniform and that’s the way he gets. I beat it back towards

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  the transit hall.

  The night before, Orry, his lady Fiormaria and I had monoed a

  hundred kilometres down the coast and sat on the end of a spit of

  white sand that stuck out into the gentle sea. We drank a carafe of

  spritzig from the vineyard of Phec, we listened to the tiny dark

  breakers silk-swishing up the sand, we lay on our spines, dark

  shapes of cypress trees back up the spit looming in the edge of sight,

  and we felt our minds flow out among the deep silent loving stars.

  ‘W hen ya gonna jag again, Orry?’

  ‘Ah . . . ’

  ‘Yeah,’ Fior, too, asking him, ‘when we gonna jag?’

  ‘They do pull,’ he said, ‘they do pull, the old stars. Look at em

  twinklin away up there — ’

  ‘An you down here — dirtfoot!’

  ‘Twinklin away,’ said Fiormaria, ‘twinklin away — ’

  You could hear the spritzig stroking through her veins, stroking

  out warm into her voice.

  ‘Ah, you’re a lucky jack, Bandy, jagging tomorrow.’

  ‘You could be too.’

  ‘Ah no, not yet, not yet. I’ve things to do. And the dreaded ennui

  is still hidin in the woods — not so, Fior?’

  ‘Well,’ she said judiciously, ‘just about.’

  ‘Ready to come leapin out like a tiger,’ I said.

  ‘Yeah, yeah.’ She laughed.

  The stars twinkled and beckoned.

  ‘Just up there in them cypresses,’ I said, ‘stirrin like a tiger wakin

  from sleep, stirrin an stirrin an stirrin, an gettin ready to leap out

  an rip yer throats.’

  ‘Aaaaahhh,’ she shrieked, laughing. ‘Aaaah! The dreaded ennui.

  Once a jagger always a jagger. We’ll go again, we’ll go again.’

  O rry said, Just let me finish my paintin, and drink some more

  nights down at Baba’s pickin up on that Ja n ’s mento fragmento

  musico, and finish learnin the old Firensieh jabber and read all

  their litratoor, and finish teachin Benniman to play the karinga,

  and talk to Stefanos some more about his peekoooliar phee-

  losophies . . . ,’ lying long beside me while he said this with his

  gentle head stretching way up the sand above mine and his gentle

  feet going way way down the other way almost into the sea or

  perhaps right into the sea with the silky waves swishing over them

  and kissing them because he is so good a man.

  But I just said ‘Dirtfoot!’ which he took in good part and

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  chuckled.

  ‘You’ll wish you were stayin and takin in all the sociability an

  kultoor tomorrow when you get out to damned and benighted

  Pororak,’ he laughed.

  I could almost believe, now, that he had prophetically said ‘to

  Pororak with all its uniformed floor-sweepers’. But I was not much

  bothered. I knew what to expect, I’d been in a hundred Pororaks, so

  I just retreated and went outside onto the endless desert apron of

  concrete with a few metal beetle tractors moving slowly and the

  ships tall under the bright fanfare of dawnlight that now conquered

  the sky.

  And made my way to the staff and crew cafeteria through a side

  door that a deep entombed computer without hum an resentments

  opened for me without question.

  Getting a coffee I said to a pilot with crescents of bone beneath

  his eyes, and long lips, ‘Ya know anyone going up?’

  ‘Yeah brother, I know me, I’m going up and I don’t want no dead

  weight.’

  H alf an hour and several pilots later I was alone at a table in the

  cafeteria, the cafeteria getting busier, and there were sad stains on

  the shiny surface, scratches and old burn marks, there was dirt

  under my nails, the keyslip was worn, my coffee cup was empty and

  dirty, a light panel in the ceiling was flickering forlornly and all the

  pilots in their uniforms or their stiff dungarees or their grease-

  polished leathers looked right through me. Once, I remembered, I

  hung around a rotting space port for two weeks while its tables became dirtier, its walls more cracked, its tin roofs more rusty, rotting towards the inevitable heat death the cinder plain the ash heap the

  dust the broken bones of everything cooling and falling to dust the

  graveyard of the universe. A squirt of coffee belched into the back

  of my throat sour with last night’s rotting wine.

  ‘Jagger?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Where to?’

  Leathers, this one, well worn. He dumped his bag on the floor

  and his coffee on my table.

  ‘Otzapoc. Bennet-Kenny system.’

  ‘Got your sleezy?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘I’ll put you in orbit. I’m going to Jaxon’s, the other way.’

  And me out onto the wide free concrete running in the wide

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  bright morning to open the locker so light shines in on my slcezy

  which is like a crab-armoured empty iron red and black dwarf, but

  ten feet tall, garaged in a metal nest, its back open and empty. I

  load my bag into a pocket on its monster thigh. I climb in through

  the back, seal in, power up, bringing my big red and black iron

  man to life — I’m a monster red and black iron man now. I back

  out, metal-bear-swipe the locker door shut, stride over and hand in

  the keyslip to the tired clerk at the window, me wide-grinning down

  at him through the wide wide glass faceplate then striding off with

  seven league iron power boot strides feeling ten feet tall because I

  am ten iron feet tall to the sun-glinting ship where the pilot is waiting to lift with a cargo of ivory and apes and peacocks, sandalwood, cedarwood, and iron man me.

  Twenty minutes later I was beyond morning and night lolling

  weightless on the edge of space’s dark ocean in the silence of a billion years. The island planet Greenball lay ten thousand kilometres away, diametered ten thousand kilometres, Dourisburg and all the

  other burgs with all their tired faces shrunken to invisible specks in
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  the perspectives of the universe. The ship was receding above, below or beside the worldball — its pilot hadn’t said a dozen words.

  Down in the rabbit hole of the sleezy arm my fingers played the

  radio buttons and his face ghosted up on my faceplate drawing my

  focus, though stars still blurred beyond.

  ‘Thanks again,’ I said.

  ‘No trouble.’ The voice briefly shared my helmet where there’s

  room for a cat to walk and stroke your face — and was a jagger once

  who used to take his cat with him right there in his sleezy which

  must have been a beautiful friendly sharing of warmth and fur and

  solitude (solitude as I had now) except that there were jokes about

  catshit on the faceplate — he used to feed it something to bind it

  before a trip, except once when he was in a hurry . . .

  The pilot almost smiled, then vanished, joining a host of others

  winked from my faceplate about their business — company pilots,

  astrogators, owner-lighters, work-trippers, richies, patrolmen

  (sometimes), and those without faces — tinskippers and disembers

  — all percolating along their own capillaries through the great

  dark heaving breathing sighing semi-sentient microbic metropolitan lifemass of the universe. Gone. G’bye. Goodluck to you and to me.

  His ship was tiny now, burning off for the jum p to Jaxon, and the

  stars jewelled at me from a million years of serenity.

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  I was cruising oh maybe thousands of kph in orbit around

  Greenball but it felt as though I lay on my mother’s breast. Oh glad

  now that I had worked like an animal for a whole unending dogged

  year in the mines on Gargantua’s filthy seventh moon — worked

  like a gorilla, like an ox, like a hog tusk-tearing from the rock a

  mountain of cred to spend on my darling baby ten-foot-tall Space

  Life Support System mother of mother’s womb in which I now lay

  in mother space — this iron baby fit to weld up the glaring heart of

  an orbital powerhouse, fit to tear the salvage from derelict fortresses with its laser claws, fit and fitted to mother me for a month then comet me down through deep dense atmospheres and baby

  me into the arms of planetary seas. Oh great Sleezy my Sleezy —

  and I wave my arms and metal-baby-fat legs picturing myself like a

  leg-waving beetle of red and black metal.

  Serenity.

  I fluffed a jet and rolled to float up down sideways — my back to

  Greenball and face open to the loving stars that look distant but are

  near to a jagger, and lay in space flowing out among the stars and

  hearing the swish of eternal seas or of my blood and contented

  body noises and the muted life of the sleezy mothering me, smiling

  a little at the floor-sweeper, the keyslip clerk, the coffee girl —

  though she, young, probably made it with some sweaty youth last

  night bursting the membrane of her life, when his phallus burst in

  her flesh, flowing out when his hot seed lava flowed, flowing out

  into the veiled protoplasmic bejewelled intergalactic teeming

  dreaming lifemass.

  The Jaxon pilot hadn’t said a dozen words but three were ‘revolution on Otzapoc’. Okay, so a quiet affair — Berlit gently removed from office by the firm minions of Jahenry, bloodless, civilised —

  Berlit given a villa in Terengay, in the hills, to live quietly gentlemanly until his years closed or the quietly crazy political tide changed — hardly a ripple reaching the streets as the ostensible

  nominal self-supposed leadership of the Otzapocan local cell of the

  socio-economic natural biologic evolutionary intergalactic lifemass

  changed, hardly a ripple touching the white tree-hidden suburban

  hospital where recovered Kolissa worked and waited. Ah Kolissa I

  see your intergalactic jewel eye swelling sweet glass living lens shining back the light of the universe — soon soon now we’ll be together and jag jag jag the dark lovely highways between the stars hand in

  hand in iron sleezy waldo hand then down to tropic seas a hundred

  thousand lightyears distant and caressful sand no iron between

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  flesh and flesh sweet my lovely Kolissa.

  The loving stars shone back at me from far, hard and dying.

  Stars die. Birth life decay and death and decay the wheel of life

  and death. Stars dying. Booted helmeted black-goggled storm

  troopers rushing from Berlit’s rent blood-smoking body to the

  white hospital to spatter its walls with red and rage, Kolissa glaring

  disbelief at the open red mouth across her arm drooling blood from

  open tubes of arterial channels, Kolissa head-lolling sense-battered

  beyond perception of the open red mouth between her thighs,

  helmeted booted black-goggled iron gun-wielding rapists laughing

  pounding laughing raping with guns of flesh and guns of iron.

  H ard and dying stars laughed at me.

  And sneak picked up nothing, no data flashed on my faceplate,

  no luminous ghostly figures veiled the arrogant jewels of dying

  stars. No ship rose from Greenball to burrow through chaos to

  those stars.

  I called Greenball’s Data Central knowing the laughing fat

  Buddha computer would nothing know of revolution on Otzapoc,

  no news service torpedo having been allowed down its black nonspace rabbit hole yet while the new government was still buttoning its pants.

  The taciturn Jaxon pilot had said no word to turn me aside and

  his silence supposed no danger to fellow travellers, angels of space

  keeping their own counsel. Yet I saw the hard stars die with no love

  left for specks of hum an flesh adrift upon savage tides of radiation

  and vacuum and mindless history.

  No ship rose but one making lightplus to the other side of the

  universe as if fleeing benighted Otzapoc. And perhaps they all

  knew, knew more than I, more death desolation and destruction,

  more blood flowing in smoking freedom and white hands half

  closed on severed arms and white faces half closed in raped oblivion

  — perhaps no ship now would ever jum p to Otzapoc where final

  chaos had broken into the universe from the black Outside and the

  seeds of universal perdition germinated at this moment.

  W hen I slept I dreamed we were going skiing but the heel clip

  was broken and I couldn’t get my ski to stay on. Kolissa, Albion and

  the others started to move off, laughing. I cut my finger on the clip

  and the end joint fell off, lying there on the snow, sunshine glinting

  on the nail and three bloodspot flowers in the snow beside it.

  Kolissa and the others had gone. Black storm clouds piled behind

  the mountains and flowed across the sky. I woke gripped by huge

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  Anthony Peacey

  rage against Kolissa.

  Two bottomless days I fell around Greenball before my jag came.

  As soon as sneak picked up something, I would send: ‘Jagging to

  Otzapoc, Bennet-Kenny system. Jagging to Otzapoc, Bennet-

  Kenny system,’ along with my everloving face. And this strange

  jack came ghosting up on my faceplate with eyeglasses that I’d

  never seen anyone actually wearing — ‘Yes, I can give you a ride,’ he

  said. Then, ‘I take it you are in orbit — whereab
outs?’

  I sent my path definition.

  ‘How do I find you, then?’

  ‘Your computer will have accepted this data already. Just tell it to

  latch onto my sneak and they’ll close us.’

  ‘Your what?’

  ‘Sneak — Sensory, Navigation and Communications — it’s a

  little computer.’

  ‘Oh yes. Let’s see —

  ‘Problem?’ I said. He was looking at something.

  ‘I was just checking the instruction codes.’

  He must have had them pinned up beside his console. I was a bit

  tickled in my despair over entrusting life and limb to this oddball.

  But we closed, I got into his can, got out of sleezy feeling tiny and

  stick-limbed like an ant on the metal mesh floor while sleezy

  hunkered into the sleezy bay and burbled, beginning to flush itself

  and tank up with expendables.

  And walked light-footed with the coveralls brushing my skin past

  aloof machinery cabinets to the dark control cabin where instrument displays burned green and red and the stars burned cold through vertiginous glass.

  ‘There,’ he said dangling a finger towards a rag hung over the

  couch lieback stick, ‘I spilt coffee on the seat.’

  I started to wipe the sticky black upholstery.

  ‘No, no, just spread it under you.’

  I glanced up: his other hand tangled in the attitude controls over

  his head — head with a reflection of an instrument glow on baldness between strands of hair.

  ‘Oh all right,’ he said.

  But I was an animal, dumb, introverted, incapable of making

  civilized conversation. Destination? Origin? Name?

  ‘Bandy Spiragel,’ I told him.

  ‘Bandy . . . ’ He was a thoughtful old jack. ‘Would that be from

  Pantopash, with voicing of the p and t£’

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  ‘No. As far as I know I’ve no ancestors from that arm. It’s short

  for Bandito. My old dear got it one day playing with the library

  keyboard — it means outlaw or robber in one of the early Earth

  languages.’

  ‘Fascinating.’

  ‘Yeah, she thought it was sort of romantic.’

  ‘Does she think catching rides around the stars — jagging, you

  call it? — is romantic?’

  He knew the word all right, it was just his learned other-worldly