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

anything yet.’

Outside, two houses away, I could have blown the whole discovery. I met Alvez and Trill, two balladmakers from the Songfabrik who had just played in a bridal. Alvez shook spittle from his flute

and said: ‘W hat’s on at the Mack heap then?’

‘Nix,’ I said. ‘I was out of time for a homecoming.’

I saw the old man fifteen times over a period of half a year. Besides

Dag Raam, the sea captain, I was his only.outside visitor. Sometimes I came away from the garden house singing, sure that this would be the greatest tale since Flip Kar Karn arrived in his hot-air

balloon. Yet it was slippery, disappointing work. I was no mind-

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.

120

Cherry Wilder

‘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