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

He iearned all that was available, from biology to bio-topology in two

months. How do you measure an IQ like that?

Now —

where did he live while he used another man’s library facilities and

mugged the local fauna to pay the bills with such curious honesty? Or is

honesty not 'curious’ to a genuine intelligence? The publicly disseminated picture was of a hunted creature, friendless and alone, cowering in back rooms, furtively haunting the public terminals in the dead hours of night.

Nonsense. He was not 'friendless and alone’. It has always been obvious to

me where he went, though Dad said it was out of the question. Young Feller

had the acquaintances he was born with, whether they could stand each other

or not.

7 The genius who harboured a super-genius

Call me Mayflower; it’s my professional name and everybody uses it.

Better than Jesus Bloody Christ perhaps. Oh, you poor man, is that

what they did to you? Pushed you from one to the next, denying all

knowledge, making silly suggestions. T hat’s us B Group all over, fine

perceptions and a sophomoric sense of humour. A Group are worse;

we gave up talking to them when we could no longer understand their

language. Who wants trial solutions of Fermat’s Last Theorem at

breakfast? The As think we artists use language to smudge reality and

our art to subvert it; to them our work is meaningless because we don’t

know precisely what we are doing. No artist ever did, but how explain

that to a mathematician?

Lady, how you gush! If I couldn't see your cool eyes or didn’t know that your

mind nudges the top levels of measurable IQ, I might accept you at face value.

Instead, I accept that you are deciding what and how much to say.

How much will I understand? Your pictures certainly mean nothing to me.

184

George Turner

What is the symbolism of a flayed man with a flayed rat in his stomach, and in

its stomach a plucked fowl laying an egg?

N o t symbolism? A clear statement? I shouldn’t have asked. No two of these

pictures seem to be in the same style; there is no theory of art here - that I can

see. Is this why B.Group made such a splash in its first years, then faded out of

sight?

We didn’t fade out of sight; we made our money and withdrew. It

was shameless on our part, but we had done what was asked of us.

That is, we had demonstrated that great artists can be created in the

laboratory, produced our exhibitions of masterpieces on a level slightly

advanced over the contemporary and then got on with our real work.

Which has no acceptance. Much too advanced.

We used hypnotic techniques for quick acceptance. It’s no secret,

though the critics don’t care to labour the point. We used line, form

and colour to lure the brain into looking where we wished, then be led

from point to point of one substantially meaningless area to another,

allowing it to create interpretations. We weren’t fakes; we introduced

new techniques and people did find genuine aesthetic-pleasure in the

works. And we made the money we needed for following our own

bents. Nobody likes what we do now because they can’t see it whole;

they think in terms of historical aesthetics, and appreciations come

only when minds are sufficiently developed to look past their own distractions. Aesthetes aren’t, on the whole, a clever bunch, only a mass of sensitivities.

Group B is superior, but that in itself is nothing to be proud of. The

greatest artists and most of the lesser have created themselves out of

desire and need, but we were created by a computer. Self-expression

is in our genes but we aren’t fools enough to take credit for it.

That? Yes, go and look at it. Tell me if it means anything to you.

It may not, but I must look because — Because for an instant you betrayed

interest in m y interest in that picture. Well, now. . . parallel verticals composed

of jumbled geometric forms —

squares, circles, triangles, rhombs - the space

between the verticals speckled with pastel colours, very pale, so that the

canvas —

no, not canvas, I think it’s glass with a rippled surface —

looks like

bars on a background of tinted snow, very deep, three-dimensional - the hypnotic technique?

I move my head and the thing changes like a kaleidoscope; the bars bend

in a left-handed spiral, the speckles between them fall into patterns linking the

spiralling bars while blotches of colour come forward to impinge on the bars

and to move up and down between them as I look up, look down. I look from

the other side and the spiral becomes right-handed, all the effects reversed.

On the nursery floor

185

S pirals?

I peer more closely and have a sensation of tipping forward into the painted

surface, of being led down a weli of coiour to a particular point where the blazing blotches hover in space, marking off collocations of the tiny geometric figures which form the spiralling bars... in groups of three.

Mayflower shakes my arm, vigorously, while she laughs. Hypnotic, and how!

I have been practically inside the thing. Meaning? Such pure fascination needs

no meaning. But it has one.

I painted that for Young Feller. He told me what would please him

in a picture and I painted it for him. So there was one talent not

programmed into him.

Yes, as you guessed, he sought us out. For practical reasons, not for

friendship. He had no feeling for the A and B Groups. Why should

he? For heaven’s sake, man, we are literally three different species. We

have no thoughts in common, no needs, no perceptions . . .

The A Group physical scientists were to him simply bores, as they

are to me and my sibs —