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

planet, barely fifty years old. It did not get going

as more than a way-station until the great drought drove the Vail

out of the Western Sea: our ancestors were wary of those sea m onsters even if they had a friendly relationship. Derry, from the moment it was settled at all, became a place for news and legends.

The Vail, the overland explorers, the iron prospectors, the expeditions to the Red Ocean, all passed through Derry and were written up by our Songfabrik.

The Star family possess off-world music books and a great

112

The ballad of H ilo H ill

113

register of tunes collected from the memories of the people. A

melody is a frail thing but it can live almost forever. We are stingy

with our tunes and for the News Ballads we stick to well-known

sing-alongs: Godsave, Botbay Variants, Henshen, Otchi, Yellsub.

I’m sure you would know all of these melodies if I sang them to you

or put down the solfa. But all stories cannot be told and all music

cannot be transcribed. Every balladmaker has one or two of these

hidden tales and mine is one of the strangest.

I am an orphan; I was raised by my Auntie Fan Kells, who is a

skin artist; we moved to Derry from Pebble fifteen years ago and

she opened the Old Glory Tattoo Parlor at Third Wharf. Seven

years ago, when I was still in apprenticeship she sent me a tip-off.

News is a precious commodity, first come, first sung. I went down

to the Old Glory as soon as ever I got Fan’s message and found her

working on a big sailor girl who favoured scrolls and naked musclemen. The customer lay and groaned in a lather of blood, sweat and colour and Fan said, hardly raising her eyes from the needle:

‘Dag Raarri was here. He thinks he has found an old friend.’

Dag Raam is a dour captain who plies the Western Sea. In those

days he was captain of a trimaran freighter out of Derry. His old

friend didn’t sound very promising; Fan laughed at the way my face

fell.

‘Look by the file chest,’ she said. ‘I dug out a tracing for him.’

Fan keeps perfect records. Identity is important in Rhomary.

Every design, from the simplest star to an aerial combat of starships

and dragons in three colors, is noted on a slip of jocca paper or a

kelp transparency and laid in the file chests. She had taken out two

old jocca slips, brown with age; both showed the same pattern, a

star in red and blue; both had been made twenty years before. The

name on one slip was David Raam, on the other Willem Hill. With

a nickname in brackets: Willem (Hilo) Hill.

I felt my knees grow weak as if I were starting a song show at a

street corner before a huge crowd. Hilo Hill was dead. He had been

dead for fifteen years. Hilo Hill had sailed with Hal Gline aboard

the Seahawk, furthest west in the Red Ocean. I knew the names of

every sailor who had been brought home alive when the expedition

foundered. We had written up these brave boys and girls at the

Songfabrik until they were practically household words. But Hilo

Hill had not come home.

‘Where?’ I asked shakily.

‘Moon Lane, four and twenty,’ said Fan. ‘Hold steady, there’s a

114

Cherry W ilder

good girl. Nearly done with the torso.’

I was ready to rush off without another word but I realised this

was just the hot-headed reaction old Ju p had warned against in

news-gathering.

‘Whose house?’ I asked. ‘This is a fine address.’

‘Daughter of the customer,’ said Fan. ‘Ruby Hill Mack. Widow of

Stablemaster Mack.’

The present customer turned her head with a stifled groan and

peered at me with a gap-toothed smile.

‘Smarts a little,’ she said. ‘Play us a tune, little one. Take me mind

off the suffering.’

So I played a shanty on the guitar and sang a few verses and

earned half a credit. It turned out to be one of the songs about the

Seahawk, Gline’s ship. Tune of Troyzar.

‘The wild red waves they bear no sign

To mark the grave of bold Hal Gline . . .

I set out for Moon Lane with beating heart.

Number four and twenty was a big white daub palace like the other

houses in the street. Moon Lane is built up on one side only so that

the residents