The Dark Between the Stars: Speculative Fiction Read online

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  The Dark Between The Stars

  Damien Broderick

  No copyright 2014 by MadMaxAU eBooks

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  CONTENTS

  Introduction

  All My Yesterdays

  A Tooth for Every Child

  Resurrection

  Coming Back

  Thy Sting

  The Ballad of Bowsprit Bear’s Stead

  The Drover’s Wife’s Dog

  A Passage in Earth

  The Writeable Text

  The Magi

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  INTRODUCTION

  Listen near to me, for this is a story wrapped around a story, and ten thousand more hidden away inside like shadows breathed in on clouded days, on hot afternoons of Antipodean summer and evenings of gusting winter, inhaled and biddable like sweet ghosts. In the days when the first satellites were thrown into the sky, when I was stretching like some gawky long-limbed thing emerging from its chrysalis, chalk dust and wood planings and hot turned metal in my nostrils, tumbled by the rush of hormones which make us giddy with dreams, I toppled like a besotted fool a billion years into the future:

  Like a glowing jewel, the city lay upon the breast of the desert. Once it had known change and alteration, but now Time passed it by. Night and day fled across the desert’s face, but in the streets of Diaspar it was always afternoon, and darkness never came. The long winter nights might dust the desert with frost, as the last moisture left in the thin air of Earth congealed—but the city knew neither heat nor cold. It had no contact with the outer world; it was a universe itself . . .

  Since the city was built, the oceans of Earth had passed away and the desert had encompassed all the globe. The last mountain had been ground to dust by the winds and the rain, and the world was too weary to bring forth more. The city did not care; Earth itself could crumble and Diaspar would still protect the children of its makers, bearing them and their treasures safely down the stream of time.

  That is the exultant lamentation which opens Arthur C. Clarke’s The City and the Stars, a novel based upon a tale with the even more evocative title ‘Against the Fall of Night’. Here is its ending, and the extraordinary coda that closes the book’s vision of vast futurity:

  The ship was now above the Pole, and the planet beneath them was a perfect hemisphere. Looking down upon the belt of twilight, Jeserac and Hilvar could see in one instant both sunrise and sunset on opposite sides of the world. The symbolism was so perfect, and so striking, that they were to remember this moment all their lives.

  In this universe, the night was falling; the shadows were lengthening towards an east that would not know another dawn. But elsewhere the stars were still young and the light of morning lingered; and along the path he once had followed, Man would one day go again.

  Clarke’s book was quite simply the most important novel I have ever read, will ever read. It stapled my ambition to a kind of mad hunger, guaranteed that I yearned to be a science fiction writer, of all benighted things, and nothing else. When I was fourteen or so, I sat in class in my infinitely tedious slum technical school with the fat Corgi paperback propped open under the desk and dreamed, and dreamed, until the stern Christian Brother whacked his cane down on my isometric projection and made the pencils jump.

  Later I found Clarke’s apocalyptic novel Childhood’s End, as I neared the belated end of my own. By then (as other children are turned towards painting, or composition, by some germinal encounter with a luminous canvas, compelling score) I knew that this wonderful blend of poignancy, aspiration, absurd adventure and odd beauty was what I wanted to create for myself, some day.

  I wanted to know what happens next. I wanted to carry forward the misty collective enterprise I seemed to detect in these tales that everyone else took for tasteless tomfoolery. It was as if I had been invited to join some secret masonry of dreamers, to partake of their Gothic vision of a world where science really is close to magic, when everything has been known and done, and forgotten, when the world, failing in entropy, is kick-started back to numinous ignition.

  But I don’t wish to be solemn. This is pleasure I’m talking about. I was an inward, asthmatic child, and liked nothing better than pedalling in the cool afternoon air to second-hand swap shops (they seem to be vanishing) to exchange tattered magazines and books, with titles like Galaxy and Astounding and Science Fantasy, trading over and again the four or five I could afford as my stake. In all this, it was some haunting overtone from Diaspar which fugued through my unconscious, and forced me to become an sf tale-teller.

  Fugued? Curiously, that musical image is no less significant in what it says about my life, and its governance by sf. I knew little enough of music until quite late. Reading in Arthur Clarke’s introduction to ‘Against the Fall of Night’ of the influence on Diaspar of Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun, I listened deliberately to Debussy for the first time in my thirties, and fell back baffled. I found no link with my internal sense of that glowing jewel lying upon the breast of the desert ... of the dying, reborn Earth turning on its Pole, a perfect Hemisphere …

  So I trusted what Clarke had written, and listened again, and again. And I discovered finally the dying falls, the romance of golden, reddened, purpled, darkened dusk. And at last I found also my own Diaspar: the Ravel of ‘Mother Goose’ and ‘Daphnis and Chloe’, Hoist, Elgar, Vaughan Williams’ ‘Lark Ascending’, Mahler and Delius and Sibelius ... Oceans of flowing impressions. Rapture and misery: you know the sort of thing, shockingly out of season in this hard-edged recess of the millennium—a fin de Steele fool drunk on fragrances.

  Not that you’d guess, meeting me. A sardonic and cynical fellow is what I see in the mirror, and in plenty of the stories in this book. We each contain, of course, as Walt Whitman boasted of himself, multitudes—many of them bitterly at war with the rest, or uneasy in their company. I hide my gasping heart inside my thin, bony chest, as is the custom, but in some others of these tales you’ll see the poor unguarded dope thumping away, dizzy with the stars and the calling dark between them.

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  ‘Our galaxy is now in the brief springtime of its life,’ Arthur Clarke wrote, two-thirds of my lifetime ago, in the closing passage of Profiles of the Future. With the lyrical melancholy that marks the finest scientific and science fiction writing, he had kept the strangest magic until last. It is not until these stars have guttered out, he told us, not until Vega and Sirius and the Sun have burned low, that the true history of the universe will begin:

  It will be a history illuminated only by the reds and infrareds of the dully-glowing stars that would be almost invisible to our eyes; yet the sombre hues of that all-but-eternal universe may be full of colour and beauty to whatever strange beings have adapted to it...

  They will have time enough, in those endless aeons, to attempt all things, and to gather all knowledge. They will not be like gods, because no gods imagined by our minds have ever possessed the powers they will command. But for all that, they may envy us, basking in the bright afterglow of Creation; for we knew the Universe when it was young.

  ‘When it was young . . .’ Science fiction is the anthem and cadence of the young, I think, hovering over unexplored waters which run with bright mystery, drenched suddenly with sadness inexplicable to the workaday realists, those damned grown-ups who’ve lost it; galloping out of misery, then, into frenzies of delight, the smells of the night, the arcana of lost pages opened in the back of the library, the amazed pleasure at meeting another human soul who shares the hunger and the dreaming.

  These stories, the ones that
follow, are the tracks in wet grass left by my own feet as I went into the forest of the night. There are tigers here, and the half-eaten dead, and with any luck some moments of crystal light. I invite you to follow my dark path between the stars.

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  ALL MY YESTERDAYS

  Like so many middle-aged people named Damien, not to mention middle-aged, angst-ridden Australian writers, I was raised a Catholic in the days when you went to hell and burned forever if you ate meat on Friday. So fervently was I raised in that manner, actually, that I sped off at fifteen to the Junior Seminary of the Blessed Sacrament Fathers in Bowral, New South Wales (pop. 5000). But as leading sociobiologists have shown, religion was merely prehistoric humanity’s first groping attempt to discover science fiction.

  When I arrived at Eymard College on a chilly summer’s day in 1960, the famous sf essayist John Baxter was an urbane, world-weary, apple-cheeked man of twenty-one, whose habit was to return from Sydney each weekend to stay with his Mum and Dad, just half a mile away down the highway from the monastery and round the corner. I cottoned on to this improbable fact after I found a letter of his in New Worlds magazine (reg. office, Great Suffolk Road, London S.E.1). From that point the sf genes had their way with me.

  It was not Baxter’s fault. How could I have chanced on his name in a British sf magazine, locked away as I was inside a monastery, unless I was already a helpless sf junkie?

  Such was my craving for sf that I’d reached an accommodation with Father Superior: by a special dispensation I was permitted the monthly purchase of New Worlds. Once I clapped eyes on poor Baxter’s imported sf collection I rather exceeded my prescribed dosage, escalating finally to the point where I secreted entire borrowed cartons of the stuff under my monastic bed.

  Can Anselm’s argument stand firm against temptation like that? I returned to the World, the Devil, and (eventually, but not nearly soon enough) the Flesh. A couple of years after my getaway I wrote the following fable. John Baxter, suitably enough, reprinted it in his 1968 collection Australian SF 1.

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  “My advice to you,” said the psychiatrist, tapping his fingers on the polished top of his desk while he stared at the voluptuous Tiepolo on the far wall, “is a stiff dose of fornication.”

  The small man shook his head.

  “I’m sorry, but I believe in God.”

  The psychiatrist injected a healthy trace of scepticism and a touch of contempt into his benign smile. He was a florid man with painted toes and he smoked a hashish stick in a manner at once debonair and disarming.

  “Are you sure you believe in God?”

  “Quite sure.” The little man was respectfully firm.

  Behind his desk, in his huge wicker chair, the psychiatrist seemed lost in thought. He gently stroked a large phallic symbol with his thumb.

  “Why are you sure?” he asked at last. “How do you know that your belief in God is not the result of childhood indoctrination, or perhaps a masochistic frustration symbol, or even an expression of every man’s hopeless yearning for happiness?” He was confident, brimming over with bonhomie, and the hook was twice as alluring in its naked openness. The little man was not deceived.

  “I have lived long enough to know there is a God. He stops me from doing things I want to do. He lets me do things I don’t want to do—His permission amounts to an order. Oh, I know He’s there all right and He has forbidden fornication.”

  The florid man had seized the cogent point, and clung to it.

  “Then you still insist that you are thousands of years old. Surely this seems odd to you. Other people live and die, and they never live much beyond a hundred. How many thousand years did you say you’ve been alive?”

  Agony marred the little man’s fine features and his composure swirled out of existence for an instant. He was a neat little man, and he did not look to be thousands of years old.

  “This is the problem, of course. I can’t remember. I can only recall flashes, not only déjà vu but genuine memories of times gone by. When I check my memories later against old records, I invariably prove correct. Sometimes more correct than the history books, as investigation has shown in a couple of cases. But I keep forgetting things. In a fortnight’s time I probably won’t remember coming to you but if I see another psychiatrist then I’ll have an uneasy feeling that I’ve done it before. To tell the truth, I have that uneasy feeling now.”

  He shifted more comfortably into the air cushions of the couch, and snapped his mouth shut. It was the florid man’s turn.

  The florid man’s turn was in the pregnant stage and it took several minutes to hatch. He did not waste the time. He sucked smoke out of the stick, dribbled it into the air, and ogled the Rabelaisian painting on the far wall.

  “Your problem,” he said, quietly, sanely, the wild good humour of a perfectly balanced individual skimming just beneath the surface of his words, “is sexual. Which is why I suggested a sexual remedy. You quite obviously hated your parents. This is nothing to be ashamed of. It’s part of the evolutionary progress. Indeed I believe your Saint Paul advises quite strongly to cast off the old man. In your case you have taken a path of least resistance and forgotten your parents, at the same time placing yourself in loco parentis by devising snatches of imaginary memories which would make you older than your parents.”

  A lesser man would have sat back with a beam of self-congratulation, but the psychiatrist merely shifted his gaze to a voluptuously painted breast and chewed on his hashish stick.

  The little man sighed sadly, and strangely enough the sigh did sound like a whistle of an ancient wind, dry and stale and sad across a couple of thousand years. He pulled himself to a sitting position, and was considerably buffeted in the process by the pneumatic couch whose internal stresses rippled the couch in an exhibition of dynamic forces. Heavier men had been ruffled in the past by the behaviour of the couch, and the little man was no exception. Flustered, he jumped on to the thick curdled-green pile of the carpet and waved his cheque book helplessly with one hand. The psychiatrist’s look was calculating, and a trifle tired, and he made no attempt to take advantage of the little man’s embarrassment.

  “All right, then, you’re the paying customer.” The hashish stick had vanished, and the florid man peered over plump joined fingers. “If you don’t agree with my diagnosis, that’s your privilege—and your loss. The only thing I can suggest if you really are set against fornication is a spot of fishing. It’s the second-best thing for washing away those nasty pent-up pre-natal emotions. The receptionist will take the cheque. Good - afternoon - and - a - cheery - fixation.”

  The polished maple door was open, the psychiatrist was standing beside it, teeth bared and hand extended, and in a scuttling moment the little man was borne into the receptionist’s office. Behind her desk she was wide and white-clad and motherly, and the little man almost waited to be picked up by the hind legs, smacked and deumbilicaled. His eyes closed, his throat moved convulsively, his signature formed on the blank cheque, and he fled.

  Outside in the street the bright sunlight baffled his eyes. Snatches of incredible memories jumped in his mind, shouting a loud negative to the psychiatrist’s forceful facile answers. The little man was tossed and pushed by the eddying currents of humanity about him, but he was oblivious to the smart people and their towering skyscrapers and their ephemeral worries. Pictures, visions, sounds and smells swirled in his mind as the crowd carried him to the subway. Automatically he dropped his coin into a dispenser, took the token it ejected, and passed through a turnstile. His feet took him to the 50-mile-per-hour strip and he stood submerged in the mass of people about him.

  But he was not longer in the bustle of the twentieth century. The myriad worlds of memory stood at his feet, and he trod them like a weary disillusioned god. Again, he walked along the great stone quays of Byblos, smelled the exotic smells of spices as heavy-limbed slaves unloaded them, caught his foot on a hu
ge roughly hewn plank of cedar from Lebanon, cursed as a sweating soldier butted him with the haft of a short spear.

  He gazed across the swelling storm waters of an unpredictable Mediterranean, sweltered in the flapping shade of a great white mainmast, fearful of the straining and grinding of the yard high above him.

  He sat at the crude table of a monastery refectory, daintily picking at his food while the vulgar oafs around him wolfed down their meat with their hands and belched after their swill of wine.

  He stood in one corner of a vast, elegant, over-decorated Victorian drawing-room, listening to a dandy sweep delicate white hands over ivory keys in a startlingly poignant evocation of Chopin’s Etudes.

  The memories brought little satisfaction. In the blurred world of frustration and anguish about him on the speeding, creaking slideway, the little man gazed in unseeing misery. Ennui is a terrible disease, and the little man had been incubating it for several thousand years.

  A large element of the little man’s misery was his feeling of being lost at sea. All around him the short-lived scurrying humans dashed in their search for material comfort, clogging their minds and pores with activity in the endless race to submerge their souls. They knew whence they came; they knew that the dust of the earth would take back their bodies in less than a century. Their lives were neatly packeted, their three score and ten deftly notched with a programme of sublimation which would carry them from first howl to last groan with the minimum of spiritual travail. But the little man’s world had no such handy parameters. It was a chaos of a hundred past lives, and a farrago of a million possible future ones.