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

gardener among other things

All we outside staff at Project IQ_ were Special Services men. I did

three stints there, so I knew the Group C kids over a period of sixteen

years off and on, and Conrad fastened on to me from my first days,

when he was only four.

With hindsight it’s easy to say that the kids played us all for fools and

never had the slightest feeling for any of us, but it isn’t true. I know that

Conrad liked me in his fashion. It’s nothing to be proud of because it

didn’t mean that we were friends, only that he had some sort of feeling for me. I love dogs and horses, and that is more or less the way he felt about me. So I think. There’s no way of being sure.

The other kids noticed me sometimes, but only in passing. I think

that Young Feller adopted me as his study and-the others recognised

priority. I called him Young Feller and he took it for his name. Said

Conrad sounded like gears clashing. One of the B Group girls opted

for Jesus Bloody Christ because she said it suited her personality, but

that was discouraged. We never knew whether it was a joke or not. I

think it was.

But you want to know about Young Feller. I can’t tell you much that

isn’t in the literature.

You already have. Nobody else has described what being liked by him was

like. Devastating to discover that he was all fagade, as penetrable as a dog

might find its master? But a dog never realises that he is not a loving equal.

Derek is strong enough to ’know his place’ without rancour. That takes a lot of

strength.

The most I can do is confirm what happened at the Project site. The

official versions of the breakout are mostly face-saving because

On the nursery floor

173

nobody wanted to admit to being so easily fooled. It’s ridiculous, looking back on it; the teams devoted their lives to producing genius and then were ashamed to admit that their proteges out-thought them. We

blur every reality with emotions and vanities.

I’d been eighteen months on my third tour of duty when it happened. The Group C kids were twenty years old and nobody knew what to do with them. A and B Groups had gone out into the public

world four years before. Those Groups weren’t failures but neither

were they so intelligent that the simple human world was beyond

them; they were capable of fitting in. I believe they did very well in

their particular lines once the publicity had died down.

An understatement. A Group revolutionised the theory of logic and turned

half of philosophy on its rational ear, but not to the point of being incomprehensible. B Group have been iess prominent as artists because their work is harder to grasp, but not so hard that a few can't see where they are heading. They are

successes, but the kinds of successes we halfwits can cope with. Group C was

too successful. A complete failure.

The breakout followed a simple, obvious pattern and none of us saw

it forming. The two girls started their escape attempts when they were

eighteen, which was when their menstrual periods began. They were

all physically retarded and looked about thirteen. They were silly attempts, bound to fail, and their rebelliousness and general cussedness

— they could make the place hell when it suited them — were put

down to menstrual tension.

They never meant to escape. They were only testing the security

points until they knew as much about them as the designers. When

they knew enough, they recovered from ‘menstrual tension’ and let the

staff settle back into routine. M eaning complacency.

I was there and never suspected a thing. They knew how to distract

us in simple-minded ways. That was how they rated our mentalities.

And they had the patience to wait on a long-term plan. Their opportunity came in twenty-twenty-four, their twentieth year.

You’d be too young to remember but that was the climax of the

decade when the greenhouse effect really made itself felt, when summer stretched through autum n and the weather patterns began to frighten us. The northern half of Australia drowned in tropical rainfall

while the southern half baked in twelve years of near drought.

How they do run on about the drought years, like old soldiers showing their

scars. So it was terrible. So they suffered. So what’s new in history?

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George Turner

I was playing at head gardener that time and the job was heartbreak. We had had just a little winter rain, enough to let the grass get up twelve or fifteen centimetres, so there were two hectares of pasture

round the Project buildings. We intended to let Farmer Tebbutt’s prize

herd in rather than cut it but the hot spell caught us wrong-footed. In

a week all we had was grass drying out and hot west winds blowing to

melt the ground.

We don’t know which of the kids started the grass fire but we know

how it was done — with some broken bottle glass and cleaning fluid

filched from the Maintenance Store. Simplicity again, when we were

alert for cunning. It started on the west side of the complex, where the

wind would fan it, just far enough back to be sure it would sweep right

round the buildings. They were safe with their internal sprinklers,

stone construction and surrounding driveways, but of course we all

turned out to fight the grass fire — with old-fashioned beaters because

we had nothing else.

All of us except the four kids. They went into hysterics of fright.

They had never been in danger