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

man, although he seemed hardly interested. I did not care about the

colour of my dust-jacket, but when forty years had passed and the

jacket had been torn away or lost and my book had been stored in a far

corner of a shop like his, I wanted the gold colour of its spine to stand

out among the greys and greens and dark-blues of all the almost-

forgotten books.

I told all this to the man while he went on gazing out into the sunlight as though it was still the same grey that he had gazed at when he told me about the books he could never forget. But this time the man

would not reassure me. He was the last of a dying race, he told me.

There would be no more shops like his in forty years. If people in those

days wanted to preserve the stuff that had once been in books, they

would preserve it in computers: in millions of tiny circuits in silicon

chips in computers.

The man lifted his hand. His thumb and his index fingers made the

shape of pincers, with a tiny gap between the pads of the two fingers.

He held his fingers for a moment against the light from outside and

Precious Bane

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stared at the crack between them. Then he let his hand fall, and he

went back to gazing in his usual way.

On the following Sunday I did not go on with the writing that I had

wanted to become a book with dark-gold covers. I sat and sipped and

thought about circuits and silicon chips. I thought of silicon as grey,

the grey of granite when it was wet from rain under a grey sky. And

I thought of a circuit as a grid of gold tracks in the grey. I saw that the

tracks of a circuit would have a pattern hardly different from the paths

of a monastery. The circuits I thought of seemed rather more remote

from me than any monastery. But the pattern was the same. I could

see only thin trails of gold across the grey, but I supposed the gold

came from close-set treetops on either side of the long avenues of the

circuit. The weather over the circuits would have been an endless calm

autum n afternoon, the best weather for remembering.

I still could not imagine what sort of people would walk beneath the

overspreading autumn-gold. But a few Sundays after I had first

thought about circuits, I began to write about a monastery where a

page of writing might have been buried deep beneath a stack of

manuscripts in a grey room but that page would never be lost or forgotten. As I wrote, I believed that my writing itself, my account of the monastery, would rest safely for ever in some unimaginable room of

books under gold foliage in a city of circuits. That monastery, I wrote,

was only a monastery in a story, but the story was safe and so, therefore, was the monastery and everything in it. I saw story, monastery, circuit,, story, monastery, circuit . . . receding endlessly

in the same direction as the lifetime that would have taken me

towards the Golden Age of Books.

But as I wrote I came to see that the monastery was not, of course,

endless. Somewhere, on the far side of the monastery wall, another

greyness began: the greyness of the land of the barbarians, the streetless steppes where people lived without books.

Those people would not always stay on their steppes: the Age of

Books would not go on for ever. One day the barbarians would mount

their horses and ride towards the monastery and turn backwards the

history I had so often dreamed of.

I stopped writing. I poured another drink and looked far into the

deep colour in my glass. Then I read aloud what I had written of my

story, pausing now and then to sip, and after each sip to gaze at the

red-gold sunset in the sky over all that I could remember.

The ballad o f Hilo H ill

©

CHERRY WILDER

My name is Gatlin Kells and I am a balladmaker at the Songfabrik

in Derry, on the shores of the Western Sea. O ur songs and tales

have spread far and wide throughout the Rhom ary land. We have

two presses now at this Derry branch and ten copyists; there is

hardly a boat that comes or goes from Derry town without bringing

us new work from the city or carrying our broadsheets. 1 am not

long out of my apprenticeship but M aster Jup is pleased with my

work. I sing, of course, and play guitar and blockflute but my best

efforts are in seeking out subjects and in writing texts.

Jupiter Star, the master balladmaker, comes from a musical

family; the Songfabrik was founded in Rhomary city by his grandmother, Leona Star. There are branches at Pebble, Silver City and Edenvale, the satellite branches, all run by grandchildren of the

Star family, but our own branch, run by Jupiter, the youngest, has

flourished out of all proportion. Derry is a young town, even by the

standards of this