The Dark Between the Stars: Speculative Fiction

by Damien Broderick

  I swore vilely for a while, and slapped my head with the heel of my hand, and went over to the edge of the cliff and watched the sunset. Flocks of dark native birds drifted like blown soot over the black trees. I hadn’t seen any domestic pets around the Emperor’s palace, no cats or dogs, not even a trained parrot. The old galactics preferred to domesticate people. Had Lyric Music appreciated the ancient embedded parallel in his borrowed action, when we’d met beside his garden patch? Into my mind he’d snuck, deft as a thief, to pluck out our Ainu greeting rituals. There’d been no time for search, to check the catalog; it must have been quite automatic.

  Staring into the darkening sky I put my hands on the top of my skull, as he had done, my eyes blurry with anger, with truly bitter anger, and drew down my fingers to the sides of my face, stroking the heavy fur of my beard, whining in greeting across the unspeakable light years to my discovered masters and creators snug and dreaming like hibernating bears under the frozen sands of Mars.

  ‘Hello,’ I screamed, pawing at my cheeks. I whined again, salutation of custom, the courtesy of two Ainu warriors met in a bamboo trail. ‘Hello there, you bastards, you sons of bitches, you tawdry gods. Wake up, get out of bed, your experiment’s proceeding nicely, right on time no doubt, hello, hello, you fucking heartless shits,’ and I barked like a dog, I went down on my hands and knees on the hard, hard rock and bayed a canine howl of fury and revulsion, while the two robots from old Earth stared at me in consternation and Roger my Life Support System dithered in my uncomprehending ears.

  ~ * ~

  Before the fall of Sakhalin into the broken sea, my greatest pleasure was in taking out the dogs to fetch in a haul of fish. I had a wonderful dog in those days, a kelpie named Beadle, true son of the animals bred by our Amurian cousins in the Murray River basin, in ancient Australia. He would stand forward proudly on the prow of a dugout when we surged out with our lethal gaffs to hunt fur seals, but his great skill, and our mutual joy, was to lead the pack into the waves.

  Even in the warmer months, when we fished, the ocean waters bit like aconite, but the dogs never flinched. They would run cheering and snapping ahead of us through the dense bamboo, churning up the gritty sand at the shore, falling into line at our command. Beadle went always to the head of the right-hand queue, straining to be off, ears pricked, never looking back, waiting for my cry. I would stand there between the lines of animals, my sproggies, with the salty wind in my throat, the dogs quivering a hundred metres distant on either hand, and I would give the ringing, harsh command, and in they would dash, slashing the waters in a demonstration of Euclid’s arbitrary axiom, and you could sense the deep shock of dread which vibrated through the schools of fish moving blindly in the water, you could sense it at the tendrils of your skin.

  Another cry, and Beadle would turn, sharp left, and paddle resolutely across the stinging tide toward the wheeling dogs that came to meet him. Deployed, then, an animate net, they would ride the surge and wait for the signal. I’d howl it out, and in they’d come like torpedoes, curving to a crescent, driving the terrified salmon before them, driving the divine fish toward us. Then into the water we’d splash to greet them, no tools in our hands, scooping up the threshing chum-fish, the sacred salmon, the gift they’d brought us. Once purchased on the sea floor, each dog would dart and harry the fattest fish in sight, clamp it in his tender mouth, run and deliver it up before shaking off the chill in a cloud of sparkles. To me would Beadle come, for though we shared the dogs without ownership he knew me for his master, and a plump fish would be my reward for allowing him this sport. After we’d cleaned our catch, I always gave Beadle as many heads as he could eat.

  ~ * ~

  I panted for a time, my cheek pressed to the ground.

  ‘You’re making a fool of yourself, Bowsprit,’ Roger told me.

  ‘We’re their doggies,’ I said. ‘We fetch in their fish while they sleep, and they graciously allow us the heads.’

  Acutely, Roger said, ‘I’ve always taken you for a religious man, Bowsprit Bear’s Stead. Would you prefer the history of humanity to have been the outcome of a random process?’

  ‘Better than this,’ I mumbled.

  I rolled over. For the first time I noticed the droplets of fierce light falling with all their ominous threat into Lyric Music’s venerable sanctuary. Roger was pestering me, but I got to my feet and watched the starships make planetfall. Chairman Pan-Ku and his staff were already in conference with the naked, complex savage who thought he ruled all the bright pin-points which shortly would be coming out over my head and the ones I couldn’t see under my feet because a world was in the way. I experienced the demented clarity of manic hysteria, hard and faceted and feverish. It was like the euphoria in which I’d slain my adopted son, my brother bear, but where thought then had been bound in the infrangible constraints of ritual it was now exalted, utterly disconnected from precedent, a mad surgeon dismembering something warm and breathing and unearthly.

  ‘Roger, are we linked to the robots?’

  ‘Certainly. How else could they perceive us?’

  ‘Not just information. Can we affect them?’ Shivering, I pulled the bearskin tighter about me. ‘Sorry, of course we can. We already did.’

  ‘Right, when we churned up Marx’s black hole. Unprecedented. It’s clearly a function of Lyric Music’s incomparable magic, a direct consequence of his psychic rapport with us. The robots are tuned to him, and they’re getting a feed through his personal wormhole mosaic.’

  Even though my teeth were clattering together, I didn’t feel cold. I didn’t feel anything much, my sproggies. ‘Roger, can we use that channel to destabilize the holes?’ There was a shriek of anguished remonstration from the eavesdropping robots. I ignored them. ‘Roger?’

  After a lengthy pause, ‘Bowsprit, forgive me but you’re not being rational. Your physiological indicators . . .’

  ‘Just answer the question.’

  ‘Yes, we can.’

  My legs gave way, and I sat down again on the rock. ‘Three points. Can we do it without getting caught by whiplash? Is it feasible to cut Lyric Music out of the channel? And do we have any evidence in the historical records of Marx and Smith still being here after the conference?’

  ‘We don’t have any post-Earth record of them, period. That could mean anything. If you want to take them out you’ll just have to risk precipitating a temporal loop. But for Huchi’s sake, Bowsprit, they’re Good Guys!’

  Wearily, I said, ‘I know. But they’re tattle-tales. I can’t run the risk of leaving them intact; Lyric might get past my prohibition.’ The robots were keening pitifully, metaphorically wringing their hands. ‘What about side-effects?’

  ‘I can manage it.’ I’d never heard the Liss so bitter.

  ‘Do it.’

  Blue-white light flared like a nova. A quantum filter kept it bearable, even beautiful. The mass-energy of those poor, clever machines went into a pinch beam half a millimetre wide, straight up into the sky. Winds howled in a superheated micro-vortex, and thunder hollered. When my eyes had come back to normal there was a small bubbling lava pool on the clifftop, sizzling with leaves ripped from the trees below, and no sign at all of the robots from old Earth.

  ‘Are you sufficiently purged?’ the Liss asked snidely. ‘Can we get to the conference now?’

  ‘Change of plan, Roger,’ I said. ‘Take me home.’

  ‘Whaaat? Bowsprit, do you know how much this jaunt cost?’

  ‘I know. Move it.’

  ‘How often do you get to see the greatest empire in history carved up?’

  ‘Someone else can do it,’ I said.

  ‘Mission aborted,’ Roger sighed. Through the microwave link I heard bat squeaks, tiny flutterings at the back of my tongue: the Liss setting up homing signals through the Dirac Ocean, laying co-ordinates for our return to the future. So must Lyric Music’s swollen, tender mind vibrate to the tachyon whispers from a galaxy of active brains
. Was he yet aware of the catastrophic demise of his metal pets, or had Roger’s counter-magic spared him that? I imagined the pang of their termination going into him like a needle, trembling his voice, his hand, as he sat with the New Humans as he’d planned for decades, ceding them the Empire.

  ‘Done,’ said Roger. ‘Before we go, I have one thing to tell you, Bowsprit, if you can contain your Weltschmerz for a moment.’

  You can believe, my smalls, that there was an edge to his voice.

  ‘Go ahead.’

  ‘Have you ever paused to wonder what it’s like to be me?’

  It took me unawares; I laughed unbelievingly.

  ‘Gods of the hearth! Spare me your sanctimonious allegories.’

  Fallen starships burned victorious in the darkness, cities of light and power. The birds, disturbed, were trying to get to sleep against their better judgement.

  ‘No, you’ve never wondered.’ Was it pity or contempt I heard in Roger’s tone? ‘Poor bear messenger, how insulated you keep yourself! Always the observer, eh? Wrapped up in your heavy protective fur.’

  ‘Shut up,’ I said shrilly, the sound petulant even to me.

  ‘I,’ the Liss said, ‘have always known where I came from. Your people made me. You put me together from micro-laminates and you programmed me in a factory and you sent me out to do a job.’

  ‘That’s right,’ I yelled. ‘You’re a machine. I’m not. I am not a machine.’

  ‘My thoughts run ten thousand times faster than yours. I am never deactivated. While you plod in your clumsy pedestrian way from idea to slow idea, I sing in my soul like a dolphin. But I do not deny what I am. Yes, of course, Bowsprit, I too am a machine. Allow me to recommend a stance of adaptive despair.’

  We torqued into the meron flux, grey banners of mockery.

  ‘It’s okay, brother,’ Roger said gently. ‘You’ll get used to it.’

  All I could find within me was the image of my dog Beadle, alert, obedient, gulled. He was a wonderful animal, wonderful.

  <>

  ~ * ~

  THE DROVER’S WIFE’S DOG

  A hundred years ago, Australia’s favourite writer Henry Lawson published ‘The Drover’s Wife’, the archetype of bush fiction. Which is pretty strange, on reflection, because it hasn’t got any mates or cobbers or hard drinkers or sheep or exploding dogs and only one bullock. What it does have is a woman stranded at the edge of the world with some kids and a husband who’s off for months at a time, The Young Ladies’ Journal for culture in the midst of all this raw nature, and a snake under the floor’s poor slats, and a bushfire she handles with the late assistance of four excited bushmen, and pleuro-pneumonia that kills the cows, and a mad bullock she must shoot, and a dead baby she carries nineteen miles, carries as it dies; and a dog. Her Australian companion, her big, black, yellow-eyed dog-of-all-breeds, her Alligator.

  Years and decades later, Murray Bail played a poignant metafictional game with that Drover’s Wife, after Russell Drysdale had first painted her portrait into our dry, aching heritage. And Frank Moorhouse elaborated the jest, posing as an Italian scholar with curious theories on the warm bond between drovers and their stock, and Kerryn Goldsworthy gave us a feminist re-reading, and when finally the whole box and dice was down to the plimsoll line of decency, sagging under the waterline, down twice and ready to go under for good, I weighed in with a dash of mock deconstructive semiotics, just for the hell of it, and because dogs are such wonderful animals.

  ~ * ~

  1

  Call me Alligator.

  If you’re feeling really precious you could go the whole hog and call me Alligator-clip. That’s my role: I’m the Mediating Term. Man nor beast, wild nor free, autochthonous nor non-.

  There again, I wonder sometimes if I ought fall in so abjectly with this other-directed arrogation of my autonomy. The decentring of the self can go only so far. I have logic on my side, species-wise. Watch carefully—

  Here’s the Wife (two legs, though we’ll come back to this point), menaced by the black snake (limbless). Working back from Orwell, there’s a case to be made for the following formalism:

  Four legs good/

  no legs bad:

  two legs ... ho-hum.

  ~ * ~

  2

  A dog’s voice is one thing; his typing (even with the brainless but indispensable aid of a powerful and apt word processor) another entirely. Mirabile dictu! Or tactu, however you express it. Tricks and sleight of paw. Such claims verge on the paranormal. Now I find myself baying at the moon. And here, evidence of my valid instinct, you see my words trotting out like happy puppies in a straggling line, sniffing at the kerb, piddling with the excitement of their first outing. Thus might an Uri Geller wow the marks, all you paying punters, worked to an anticipatory lather by his barkers.

  Geller! A name to conjure with! Whatever became of him? By clairvoyance locating oil in the Antarctic? His sensitive fingers questing like bloodhounds along the inked geosynclines of some official map stripped of glacial encrustation in an infra-red satellite gesture of instant legerdemain? Teleporting diamonds from the arse of some South African mine, subverting apartheid’s treasury by extrasensory means? Working some flea-pit in Bogota, drearily awaiting the next total eclipse and the restoration of his UFO-induced powers?

  Ah, Geller, at his prime! Time bends to his command, the jaws gape, the spoon no honest dog may use to feed his face melts, thaws, resolves itself into a—Steady, let’s have no anti-Israeli jokes here, my lad. The hands, the hands, the hands of the clock turn backward, leap and cavort to this sensitive stroking. I can feel the magic, the power, feel it coming . . .

  Watch

  my poor hands.

  Never free your gaze from

  lapse

  blink

  idiot

  these my flying padded fingertits

  tips

  nips there it went

  Now the spoon

  sags

  quite without effort, really

  and the unwatched watch ticks

  sticks

  sticky

  d

  r

  o

  o

  p

  s

  You can stopwatching

  ~ * ~

  3

  By God, Freudian, I’ll give you Freudian, Levi-Straussian, the kit and caboodle.

  The house we live in? Just two rooms and a snake. Two terms, right? Me on a chain (the Mediating Term suppressed for the moment), hollow wood-pile outdoors. Ho ho.

  Round timber, split slabs. I ask you. This is just the first sentence. The second? Holy Moley—big bark, stands at the end, larger than the house itself.

  Bushy all around. Nothing for relief, save the she-oaks. Dear me. Give us a break.

  Old Sheep-Dip off with his flocks by night, so what do you expect? Snake, snake, snake. Into the hollow of the poised, the waiting, the meretricious nigger wood-pile. The version I’m reading (a 1901 edition of Bulletin yarns chosen by A. G. Stephens) omits all mention of the ‘stray blackfellow’s’ regal estate. Through the cracks the splits the suppressed under the floor. Just as well I’m here, maties, with my wet black nose for no-legs-bad.

  Of course I feel obliged to point out that in terms of traditional narrative tension large-scale feral monsters on the order of your standard European megafauna are fairly thin on the Antipodean ground, not too many loose, cobbers, not your actual four-legs-good variety at any rate. Bugger-all lions, tigers, bears in brown coats and black, spittle gleaming and roaring throats deepest carnal red, or gryphons, or gleaming green- and gold-scaled dragons, for that matter, all flaring filament wings and stenchy breath.

  So snakes it is, by the ecology of the bloody mise en scène and our fundamentally realist mimetic conventions, eh? Snakes or nothing, because even Henry Lawson could hardly raise much better than a novelty musical item out of a redback on the dunny sea
t. Sometimes a cigar is just a machine for transmitting lung cancer.

  ~ * ~

  4

  Language and its unconscious$? (Shit! I keep jamming my damned dew-claw in between the return key and the dollar sign, something to do with the ergonomics of the system, I’m sure. Nothing semiotic.) It seems to me, starting a clean sheet here, turning the leaf over lickety-spit . . . (but didn’t we set out on a word processor especially adapted to the clumsy paws of a black bitsa?) ... it seems to me, as I regard the blank page (or is it screen? but hardly blank, in that case, for my previous words would hang above these like a spotty auroral banner), the blank space of my rhetorical life (palimpsest in reality, since Henry’s scribbled on it, and Barbara Baynton’s put some jottings in the margins, and the genes for my yellow eyes and lovely grin and ragged tail basted by the Aussie sun, and the gaps between locked into place by Bail and Goldsworthy and all you infinite generative teeming reading Others, oh yes) (but let’s pretend it’s blank; it seems blank to me as I live it:) that the sentence this space represents in potentia, through whatever voids, already writtens, absences, drenchings, evasions, three bags’ full, is determined in the paradox of its utterance and uttering to set forth (as it has already, in truth) with the Capital of itself (the T in the ‘It’, as it happens) and run its course backward through however brief or protracted a passage to its terminal period: to have been, wherefore, the reverse and moon-tided enactment of a life ushered in from sterility (temporary, yes, cyclical, but don’t forget the Wife’s ‘worn-out breast’ at Henry’s close) and expiring at the last in final guilt and execution.