Damien Broderick - Strange Attractors Original (pdf) (novels to read in english .TXT) 📖

Teniki X X V II noticed nothing.

The Trivashti cycle of seasons was the classic Four. W inter

sparkled and reddened the cheeks. Spring breathed sweetly over

tiny swords of grass and unfolding leafblades. Summer cast a net of

heat, coarse enough for a lordly dozing and dreaming in the afternoons, then the sensuous plunge into lake or river. Autumn was ripe with a treasury of fruits. Tiuark IV lost her imperial temper

Jagging

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one time — she had forgotten her gloves and her fingers got cold —

!I will have summer!’ she said. H er Lord and Most High Slipper-

man (her biggest bigjack errandboy, that was) who was riding on

the next hippogryph heard her and within a couple of hours the

snows were melting and the summerfoxes in their dens beneath her

forests waking up. Believe it! — the snows melted — hibernating

animals awoke — the meany great iron cold trees started pumping

up their buds till they burst and the leaves unfurled! The sellers of

gloves and mufflers — oh, those boys cursed the great legend that

was their emperor, and the sellers of ice-cream blessed her!

She made those mostissimo winged horses herself — that was her

passion: breeding, engineering, gene-chopping and constructing

weird animals. All the creatures of all the myths of all the worlds of

all history lived in the flesh in her home-made menageries. Strange

and cruel and like a woman wearing a man’s beard was this arrogant Tiuark, lord of a thousand worlds. All of the twelve (some say fourteen) women who at various times ruled with the full powers of

emperor, and called themselves emperor, wore the emperor’s

beard. Some even had their chins cell-tailored to grow genuine

whiskers, and Maiken the Fat grew her own completely naturally

while still a young woman. Tiuark IV had dozens of lawfully

married queens and hundreds of concubines by whom she

produced a host of children — breeding them to the favoured

among her male relatives. There were ritual and economic reasons

for this.

In a great vision as I swam through space in the darkness of the

control cabin beside this long faced Fainey-Juveh with Bennet-

Kenny now a star beacon before us but still not quite a sun, as I

half-heard his strong monotonous voice now rising as he was

reminded of yet another jewel of interest in the history of the

Trivashti empire — in a great vision I saw the ancient barbaric

city-large ships ghost past, I rode a snorting hippogryph beside

Tiuark as she changed the season of a world with a wave of her

hand, I sat downtable from foppish Sesemene III when annoyed

with the supreme commander of his Instrumentality of Peace he

said, ‘Take me Fomalhaut,’ as you might say, ‘Pass me a nut,’ and the

commander went white to the gills. Years later that commander, his

body ruined beyond the wits of a now decadent imperial science to

repair in the last awful battle over Fomalhaut IV, yet by rigid will

still walking erect — that commander received Sesemene on the

bridge of the limping imperial flagship and presented him with an

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Anthony Peacey

iron mace removed for the first time in a thousand years from the

great Assembly Hall of Zianziohc saying, ‘Lord, Fomalhaut.’

‘Lord, Fomalhaut,’ he said, and died. Did he really say just that?

Answer ‘Take me Fomalhaut’ with ‘Lord, Famalhaut’, hand over the

mace and die? Yes, oh yes. I knew that then, riding there in Fainey-

Juveh’s little modern-day can just cut from Greenball and the tired

romanceless faces on the early mono to graceless Pororak — I knew

that then, listening to Fainey-Juveh’s magic-monotonous voice.

‘Lord, Fomalhaut.’

And I had seen — jostled and deafened in the monstrous crowd,

stifled by the stewy scent of the jostling roaring crowd — I had seen

eagle-featured Sesemene, foppish no longer, but eagle-featured

with terrible eyes and the skin of his face dyed blue and all his robes

glaring with a weight of gems riding a winged clawed elephant

(long had Tiuark’s art survived her) down the Avenue of Palaces in

marble carved Orlasc as the first expedition of conquest to Fomalhaut began — and upon opposing marble pillars that lined the way chained the naked halves of all