Strange Attractors (1985)

by Damien Broderick

doctor but a balladmaker, eager for plot, rhythm and reward. If I

  learned anything from the old man it was to listen. To listen and to

  play my music carefully, like a song-therapist, watching its effect on

  him.

  For instance on the third visit I took along my blockflute, Cap

  Raam was there, sitting on a folding chair in the enclosure. He gave

  the old man a chew of sea-cane and I played a simple old piece

  ‘Pearl M oon’. The old man began to sway back and forth; he vocalised in a falsetto, a clear head-voice. He followed the melody of Pearl Moon and then struck out on his own, a new song with a few

  soft words repeated. When the sound died away Dag Raam said

  quietly: ‘Where did you get a song like that, Hilo?'

  The old man answered: ‘They sing to the moon, Dag-boy. The

  young ones sing a moon song.’

  He gave a long sigh.

  ‘I shouldn’t speak of them,’ he said. ‘A ghost can’t speak. The

  trouble is that I’m dead.’

  Cap Raam didn’t break the mood; he shifted his own quid of

  sea-cane and went on chewing steadily.

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  ‘How can that be, Hilo?’ he asked. ‘You’re here in the sun with me

  and young Gatlin . . .

  Hilo Hill whistled and hummed under his breath in soft gibberish . . . I thought we had lost him. Then he began to speak:

  ‘I was honoured. When I came down with my first and last sickness they sang over me, sewed me into a death-husk, and brought me all that long way into the canyon. It took a long time, five days

  at least and the last part of the journey had to be done at night because the canyon is hallowed ground. No one should look at the place, see the hallowed dead lying about.

  ‘But I could not die. They sang a last farewell and left me alone. I

  was ready to set sail clear up to the safe camp of Ha-Hwoo-Dgai

  but I could not die. The sickness was all sweated out of me. I was

  not acceptable. I lay there a long time, freezing in the desert night,

  crisping in the sun, then I came out of my husk, took the water-

  bottle and the grave-fruit and went off, walking westward. I had

  failed the last test. The sickness and the death-song had no power

  over me. I was a man after all. I walked west and kept on walking

  after the water in my bottle had run out. I still could not die. I saw a

  shape on the dunes and it was a parmel rider coming around by

  Last Chance. He brought me into the oasis and then I came to

  Bellfar.’

  ‘But who was it brought you into this canyon . . . this

  cemetery?’ asked Dag Raam softly.

  The old man’s face was a brown mask; he unclenched his left

  hand and I saw for the first time that it was maimed. The middle

  finger had gone.

  ‘They are the Gnai,’ said Hilo Hill, ‘the Children of the Broken

  Snake.’

  I repeated the new word and the old man flickered his eyelids.

  He drumm ed on his knee with the fingers of his sound right hand

  and I understood. I put the flute to my lips and played a rondo, one

  of Ju p ’s own tunes, and Hilo Hill listened but said no more that day.

  So I had the end of the story and thought I knew the beginning,

  the voyage with Hal Gline, but what lay between? Ruby Mack

  civilised him a little; he washed under the garden pump, wore an

  overall and sheltered in the garden house during stormy weather.

  The holiday season was over and the young silverwings were ready

  to sail back to school in Pebble or Rhomary City. I found Rayner

  on the steps of the great house with his hair plaited and his hands

  blistered; he had scythed the lawn.

  The ballad o f H ilo H ill

  121

  ‘Back to school?’ I jeered.

  He gave me a sorrowful look.

  ‘Not going back,’ he said gruffly. ‘M a needs help.’

  I sat on the step, waiting, and presently he came out with it.

  ‘You knew all along . . . about the old man. About my

  granddad.’

  ‘Yes, I knew.’

  ‘You’re prejudiced, Cat Kells,’ he said. ‘You despise rich folk. My

  dad, Jon Mack, worked bluggy hard to build up his stable, and my

  mother is a sailor’s daughter, even if she has had a place among the

  ladies of Moon Lane. If this old man is Hilo Hill, I won’t turn up

  my nose at him.’

  ‘I’m sure that he is Hilo Hill,’ I said.

  ‘W hat do you want with him, Balladmaker?’

  ‘M ore than he will ever tell us,’ I said. ‘I want the other side of the

  world where no one else has ever sailed.’

  ‘You’ll kill him with your damned publicity!’

  ‘Not me!’ I said. ‘I’ve been with him since the beginning, rem em ber? I know his quirks and fears better than you do. This could be the greatest newsballad in twenty years, in a whole lifetime, but I

  would pass it up to spare that old man a moment’s pain.’

  ‘I’m sorry . . . ’ said Rayner. ‘Look, Catlin . . . I took a great

  wad of notes. I know you write down what he says.’

  He had written several pages in a school-block, of new-fangled

  reed paper. I expected some more queer stuff about Hilo’s dream

  companions ‘the Gnai’, but this time it was something different.

  Hilo Hill had taken a glass of melon schnapps with ‘Ruby’s lad’ and

  it had loosened his tongue. He sang part of an old capstan shanty,

  not specially printable but I knew it. Then his mood changed, and,

  as Rayner put it, he stared ahead like a sailor steering into a fog.

  ‘Beyond the cape there are two headlands, a narrow channel between and a huge misty stretch of dead water, walled in with swamp forest. Gline thought this was the third ocean but others disagreed,

  said there was nothing at all beyond it. They were all wrong. If you

  press on as I did, rowing across that wide lagoon, and round a little

  bluff, there it lies before you. Boundless. Not red but blue-green,

  more the colour of our dear Western Sea. W hat will this one be

  called? The Green Ocean?

  ‘Forty days I was hurled northwest in the longboat, the water

  failed, was replenished with rains. I was out of sight of land for

  ninety days all told but came to a floating mass of weed with

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  sea-birds nesting. Yes and I saw delfin, hailed them. They had

  never seen a human; they were not our sea-brothers from the Red

  Ocean. I looked always for the Vail, our lost sea monsters, or for

  something like them, some intelligent creature that 1 could speak

  to. I saw no large life forms, only shoals of fish.

  ‘I managed to get out of the eddy round those damned weed-

  islands and I bore south, well-provisioned with boiled eggs and

  dried fish. The weather was dirty but I saw a haze there to the south

  that was land for sure. Came to it half dead. A tropic shore, something from a picture book of Old Earth, friendly and with a kind of low jocca palm that gave me food and shelter. I was in this place five

  months or more, taking me into a new year.

  ‘I cut my name in the sandstone cliffs in letters a metre high and

  struck inland for pure loneliness. The trek nearly cost me my life

  for there were beasts in this paradise. Things that hunted at

  night . . . something I might guess that was cat-like .
. . a large

  cat creature. I came back to the longboat where it was beached because I had found out one thing for my pains: I was on a large island. I could not have crossed it in months but from a treetop on a

  high hill, a mountain almost, I could make out a distant coastline. I

  sailed half round this place, Palmland, and went on again, due

  west, along its shore.

  ‘Then a bad blow sprang up and the longboat nearly foundered.

  I was done for this time. Water gone and food. I lay there, helpless

  as a baby, wallowing westward. I don’t remember being picked up.

  I lost track of the days of the new year that I had notched on a

  board. My luck still held; I was found. They found me and knew

  me for some kind of a fellow creature. I came to a far, far distant

  shore, a third continent, the edge of another landmass . . . who

  knows? I woke up in the country of the Gnai.’

  So there it was, one of the longest tales he ever told, something

  over a year out of his life. He brought us Gline’s ocean, uncharted,

  narrowed down to the scanning vision of one man in a ship’s longboat, I walked with Rayner in the garden and we saw the old man burning off a little heap of dried grass by the tall palms. He used

  the smoke from his bonfire as a screen; we saw him, then he was

  gone, quick as a ferret.

  He worked in the garden but he never pottered like other old

  men. Hilo Hill was quick and deft; he was very shy; he never came

  to the front of the house. M orning and evening he sat in his

  enclosure behind the trellis and sang his songs.

  The ballad o f H ilo H ill

  123

  I had nothing to offer Jup Star at the Songfabrik but a few of

  these tunes, harsh and delicate as a gecko chirping. I turned to with

  all I had and launched into a ballad. A salty number. Bold and

  simple. Tune: ‘Rolling Home’.

  ‘When the Seahawk broke and foundered

  On the verge of seas unknown,

  One bold sailor bore on westward:

  Hilo Hill sailed on alone.’

  Then a catchy phrase for the chorus: ‘Sailing on . . . ’ or ‘Far

  beyond . . . ’

  ‘Far beyond, Far beyond,

  Far beyond the sight of land,

  Sailing westward to the sunrise . . . ’

  Tcha . . . where’s a rhyme? Sand, strand or a mermaid waving

  her lily-white hand. It all rang false as a cracked bell. The old man

  was vague; he could not be led back to speak of ‘Palmland’; he

  juggled days and years. The beginning of his journey was a mystery

  now. There was nothing to link Hilo Hill’s tale with what was really

  known of Gline’s expedition. How had he come to sail off alone,

  westward, in the longboat? Many of his shipmates were lost in the

  wreck of the Seahawk, others, including Gline himself, died of

  injury or privation on a grey strip of beach in the distant reaches of

  the Red Ocean, hard by Cape Gline.

  I read the ballads, burrowed into the old reports and interviews

  at the Songfabrik and at City Hall. I wondered if the Dator of

  Rhom ary had some records gathering dust that no one else had

  seen. A single direct question, a few names from this time would

  make the old man tremble and fall silent for days. He was often

  afraid: vengeance was pursuing him. More particularly he was

  afraid of an avenging female.

  ‘W here’s she? Still about? Not a word. Hilo’s dead, you can say.

  Blown away . . . forgotten. . . ’

  I asked Cap Raam.

  ‘Who is it, Captain? Who is this woman he is afraid of?’

  ‘You must hold your tongue, Cat Kells,’ he replied. ‘These are

  dark waters.’

  ‘Who is it?’

  ‘The ranking officer after the wreck was the second mate, Vera

  Swift.’

  I knew the name, who didn’t? She had done wonders. This

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  sturdy sailor woman, ‘Tall and fine with hair of flame,’ as the ballad-

  maker would have it, patched up the Rover, Gline’s supply cutter.

  She came off the death beach and through a howling gale with

  three of the strongest survivors. They came up with the trader

  Dauntless hard by the Six Seven Isles and browbeat its master into

  a rescue mission.

  ‘Where is she now, Captain?’

  ‘Still sailing in the Red Ocean,’ said Cap Raam. ‘H er trader is

  called the Seahawk, after Gline’s ship. She comes to Derry on her

  lay-off.’

  ‘Why would he fear her so long?’

  Cap Raam frowned.

  ‘She’s a hard sort. Rules her crew and drives a hard bargain.’

  I had checked the records: Hilo Hill was last seen on the grey

  beach, then ‘missing’. Some had died on the beach and their deaths

  were recorded, but a few of Hilo’s companions came into this other

  category, saved from the wreck of the Seahawk but lost afterwards,

  never loaded onto the trader Dauntless. Had they wandered back

  into the swamp forest? Slipped back into the sea? They went from

  ‘missing’ to ‘missing believed dead’, Hilo Hill among them.

  The real, the historic Hilo Hill had been a cheerful, well-

  rounded fella, more popular than a ship’s cook had a right to be. He

  had a sweet wife Janie, a beautiful daughter married to an up and

  coming stable-boss, and a baby grandson. Young David Raam was

  like a son in his house. When Hal Cline made up his expedition

  Hilo Hill the sea cook was forty-six years old, hale and hearty, but

  one of the oldest members of the crew.

  From this jolly ghost we came to a thin creature, brown,

  wizened, uncommonly odd, with a trick of dabbling his hardened

  bare feet in a mud puddle especially made for the purpose, with a

  repertoire of songs in quarter tones. M orning songs, moon songs,

  songs for gathering and for new skin. Fifteen years of songs which

  he assured us were ‘the unchanging songs’. ‘There are no new'

  songs, only new singers.’ A proverb. The content of an hour-long

  whistling chant to be sung in spring when the new moon set. The

  Gnai were very long-winded.

  I took down or memorised hours of this crazy stuff before they

  became real to me. Rayner helped with the drumbeat, I plucked

  the strings of the guitar or added flute notes. We pretended it wras a

  game; we pretended we might heal the old man of his fantasy by

  going along with it.

  The ballad o f H ilo H ill

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  Question from Dag Raam What do they look like, Hilo?

  AnswerT&W enough, Dag-boy. Upstanding, y’know. And with the

  crest (passage untranslated) . . . good hands or handlers. Every

  colour, the young, from green through grey, but the elders brown.

  (After pause) Looked like bluggy great lizards, didn’t they. I used to

  laugh, seeing’em shuffle past, outside the lean-to . . .

  Session Twelve. Question from Rayner: Did they live in a village,

  Hilo?

  Answer: More or less. It is the ‘moving camp’, closest I can come

  to it. Ring of earthworks and lean-to huts made of leaves and bark.

  Depends where you are and what season.

  Question You moved about then?

  Answer Always on the
move. North for the grasshoppers, then

  back to the rivers for the mud-fish. Always on the move. M ust have

  done thousands of kilometres. You let the rhythm take you . . .

  moon of plenty, moon of new skin, moon of dust . . . (begins to

  sing, indicates five/eight rhythm for drumbeat).

  I asked about his maimed hand. Hilo Hill laughed and covered

  his face for a moment.

  Ah’, he said, ‘it’s the custom.’

  He held up his skinny left wrist and patted the area below his

  thumb.

  ‘They had a big fold of skin hanging here, more or less. Come the

  moon of plenty the Elders do a peeling . . . strip off this skin with

  their teeth. Sharp, useful teeth.’

  He smiled and squirmed.

  ‘Well, I had no fold, had I? But I had to be peeled before I could

  take a smoother.’

  ‘Do you mean a mate, Hilo?’ asked Dag Raam, grinning.

  ‘Not exactly, Dag-boy. The young ones mated. I was old, anyone

  could see that, I was even the right colour. The old are-brown, the

  young are this grey-green. Their family life is pretty queer. An old

  peeled one can take one or even two young things as smoothers.

  Part servant, part lover. I had to be peeled and I figured I could

  spare this linger, the middle one. It had been a mighty long time

  since anyone smoothed me. The Elders agreed; took the finger off

  clean as a city doctor. I was a fully-fledged member of the camp.

  And I chose a certain green female creature I liked the looks of.’

  Hilo Hill hummed a song we could all recognise as a love song.

  For the first time a tear stole down his cheek.

  ‘That was a sweet, friendly being,’ he said. ‘I was not allowed to

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  say her true name. I called her Jade. For the first time in her

  embrace I let myself think of home. O f Derry town, of Ruby’s poor

  Ma, my long-lost Janie . . . Dry hell, I knew how those first poor

  castaways felt, coming from the stars with no way home . . .

  I had given up all hope of a news ballad by this time. I could offer

  nothing about the Gnai . . . it was pure legend. If I came to Hilo

  Hill it was out of friendship and yes, I’ll admit it, because I liked to

  walk with Ray Mack in the garden. During the winter I kept an eye