IGMS Issue 39 Read online

  When her confinement was near Mahala made her announcement, to a minor flurry of astonishment, and suffered no lack of commentary arch, wry, languid, sardonic and scornfully droll.

  "Are you hermaphroditic, then, my dear?" inquired Maureen O'Darlene de Raylene y McYamamoto, a porcelain matron nimble enough in the raising of her own skirts. "We've heard not the faintest whisper of gentlemen at your bedchamber, and surely you were alone in the vastness of space?"

  Mahala regarded her coolly. Her ankles were swelling and an anguish of perplexed love frayed her nerves.

  "The children have a father, Madam."

  "More than one little piccaninny? How delicious." Mistress Maureen O'D. drifted away to the needless shade of a huge-leafed tree. The babies struggled, kicking, and my own darling child pressed her locked fingers on the drum of her belly. In the open compound Shaun and the hearties of his entourage were superintending the harness for their day's hunt. Autumn was well along, bright enough but smoky; soon the ground would be too cold for the vast gastropods. One of the fine men, chivvying his mount with an excess of vigor, slipped in a trace of the great snail's mucus and went ass over eyeballs, to the raucous glee of his colleagues. The beast's behemoth head swung down and its forward tentacles extruded, eyes moist and sad. The fellow's swagger-stick came up in a brutal stinging slash, and the snail recoiled into its richly textured shell. For all the mass it mounts on its mutated vertebral bracing, Helix horribilis is a timorous animal. Handlers came out shouting and cursing. The snail's master stalked off to restore his splendor, and Mahala watched from her isolation as the animal slowly came about and glided away, ten meters of damp leather and armor-plating skimming thick glistening slime. Shaun was waiting at her elbow as she withdrew. "Fine creatures, aren't they, my dear? Won't you change your mind and ride to the hunt? The experience is exhilarating -- nothing like it! -- and I promise you it's smooth as silk, can't possibly harm your . . . condition."

  "My lord, I do not approve the way you treat the animals -- these snails, and those you hunt. Besides, there is always the chance, no matter how remote, of an accident." Somewhere, fallen leaves were roasting in a fire, sweet to her flaring nostrils. And decision came upon her, crystalline, unheralded. Mahala touched the gloved wrist of the tall pale man and looked directly into his eyes, into a gaze equal to that poet's on the cold southern island. "The babies are your brother's children."

  There was no motion in his body. At last he said: "Shem's heirs?"

  "Yes."

  "Impossible." Then, "Do you understand? Now I must have you destroyed. If there is any chance," said he, "no matter how remote . . ."

  "My babies and I are safe," Mahala said with composure. "We have the protection of the cybersystem."

  In fury, he lashed his open hand across her face. "You stupid gravid bitch!"

  I waited, poised to kill him, and knew I must not, not yet, if ever. Wormwood. I watched as he stood there, regal in his martial kilts, as he spoke at once through his devices to men and machines deployed across the tamed globe.

  I watched as he looked into the image of that empty mirrored room.

  He took Mahala through a hushed, distraught throng to his throne room and showed her the millennial history that was there. She was not afraid. My darling child knew (and I knew she knew, through the anchored neural net that was part and not part of her) that she had stepped beyond history, beyond myth, into that dislocation which ends an age and sees another born. The babies kicked and kicked. Soon her labor would begin.

  "Ten thousand years!" Shaun roared. Yes, now he was roaring, now it was coming home to him authentically. The tapestries and friezes seemed to shake to his wrath. "A cycle fixed in eternity! Do you imagine that I rejoice through all those days of my thousand years of exile, through my mutilation and the envy that gnaws at my entrails? Is it easy to share this throne with my other self, with my father, my brother, my son Shem? It is not easy. I tell you it is not. But it is the way the world must be, it is ordained, it is duty, damn it, you swollen sow witch."

  Tones shrilled the air, lights pulsed, phantom figures came and departed without physical presence. Shaun's machines were hunting, scouring the earth.

  "Besides," he told her, his face mottled like bloody marble, "the thing is impossible. You have allowed his escape, but he cannot be the father of your bastards."

  He was here, an apparition told him. And later here, said another. There is furtive mobilization of men and weapons, reported a third.

  Nausea afflicted Mahala; panting, she found a chaise and lowered herself to its comfort, lifting her tired legs. Contractions began. She called out to me, silently, and I dropped from orbit like a bomb to wait for her demand.

  The interstellar vessel hovers above the palace, a phantom informed the lord of the world. We cannot bring it down. We advise caution with respect to the woman. Midwives are standing by in the anteroom. Her time is close at hand. He brushed them aside, insensate, prowling electronic corridors for his enemy brother.

  "This is why it is impossible," he explained in tight, bitten words. "He is sterile, as am I. It is a consequence of our joint nature." He took her jaw in the grip of his fingers. I began to burn through the roof and the defenses of the palace, careful not to damage the art. If he started getting really rough I had faster techniques at my disposal.

  "We are like the snails you viewed with such disdain today in the compound -- bred to a purpose, monstrosities outside and above nature, yes, but the end of our line. Our seed is defunct. I have had a million women; their wombs have never quickened. Woman, I say you are a liar."

  The lord Shem has begun his march, the shades cried in panicky voices. His war machines are bearing down on us, and we are caught unprepared.

  "The babies are Shem's," Mahala stated quietly.

  A spasm shook her, then, and she cried out. Fluids broke upon the ancient stone paving. I peeled open the Michelangelo ceiling above them and lifted her into my waiting body.

  There was blood, tearing, a gonging in the earth too profound for human ears. Blood there was, and lacerated flesh, and the lamentation of orphans. Shem came into the high places mounted on a giant lizard, his hands blazing with hot blue flame. Shaun stood atop his burning palace, in the stinking confusion, and his shields dazzled like the sun's face. I hung above it all, at the Moon's orbit, and wondered at the terrible duty I had discharged. I longed for the balm of Those Who burned without conflagration, there in the frozen dark at the occlusion of space.

  The babies howled.

  Mahala, my child, held them to her swollen breasts, hugged them to her, and wept with love and grief. The twins are girls. I saw to that.

  [Originally published in Rooms of Paradise, ed. Lee Harding, London: Quartet, 1978; New York, St. Martin's Press, 1979]

  InterGalactic Interview With Damien Broderick

  by Darrell Schweitzer

  * * *

  Damien Broderick was born in Melbourne in 1944. His early novels The Dreaming Dragons (1980) and The Judas Mandala (1982) established him as one of the leading talents in Australian science fiction. Some of his other novels include The Black Grail, Quipu, The White Abacus, Transcension, the diptych Godplayers and K-Machines, I'm Dying Here and Human's Burden (both with Rory Barnes), Post Mortal Syndrome (with Barbara Lamar) and Beyond the Doors of Death (with Robert Silverberg).

  He's done two volumes of radio dramas plus one movie script, Restore Point and Gaia to Galaxy.

  His popular science book The Spike (1997) is one of the first works to address the now very popular subject of the coming technological Singularity. He edited Year Million, a best-selling study of humanity's far future prospects.

  His awards include five Ditmar Awards and four Aurealis Awards. He was a runner up for the John W. Campbell Memorial Award and tied for second place for the Theodore Sturgeon Award.

  His critical writings about science fiction and other topics include x, y, z, t: Dimensions of Science Fiction (2004), Ferocious Minds: Polym
athy and the New Enlightenment (2005) and Unleashing the Strange (2009).

  He now lives in San Antonio, Texas.

  SCHWEITZER: Tell me something about your background, who you are, where you grew up.

  BRODERICK: If I tell you I was born in late April, what does this convey? The uncertain warmth of mid-spring? Here in San Antonio, Texas, just 70 years later, the weather has rather abruptly gone from near freezing nights to sweaty days in the Fahrenheit 100s. But in Melbourne, Australia, my birthplace, it is the cooling slope into chilled rainy winter, and the dry blistering heat of Christmas is months behind. The door into summer opens into its opposite, and winter frolics fill the middle of the year. So by the customs of the world I now inhabit, with my Texan wife Barbara, I'm alien as a Martian.

  Doubly-alien, though, since I grew up inside futures told and drawn and acted by Brits and Americans, a smorgasbord, a goulash of flavors that had nothing much in common with my dull working class Australian suburb, my dismal schools. I lived for the fantastical comic strip adventures in newspapers and radio serials (this being years before not only computer immersion but even TV): Mandrake the Magician, Brick Bradford, radio fare scarcely anyone alive now remembers, but rich with mile-long starships and travels into past and future. American kids got that in pulp magazines; Aussies didn't have such access to the universe of dreams (although, intriguingly, one of those radio serial starships was impelled by something called the Dream Drive). Those memories later helped fuel radio plays of my own.

  My father was a skilled toolmaker spared from the mayhem of war for "essential service" by his expertise and his flat feet, my mother a "housewife" (as the term went then) eventually with six kids in a cramped outer suburban house, having abandoned her first year of university due to some crisis. They were Catholics and ardent anti-communists but supporters of a kind of conservative social movement also skeptical of the virtues of capitalism. As a trade union organizer, my father spent much of his non-working time saving Australia from the Red menace, with occasional trips to the races, the football or the cricket with a few pals. So I grew up mostly in the company of my articulate and circumstance-throttled rather brilliant mother, and then one squalling brat after another.

  Neither parent had much time for reading, but I was allowed to join a somewhat distant library, and not quite forbidden to buy second-hand books, although there was a panic in the early 1950s that comic books might give you polio, then still an appalling threat. As it turned out, I'd already got rheumatic fever at 5, and spent months in hospital and an aftercare institution, seldom seeing my parents, bored and terrified: an experience not all that dissimilar to events in the early childhood of many sf readers and writers. It disrupted my schooling, and I never quite caught up. By the age of 12, I was regarded as too lazy, undisciplined and perhaps dull to warrant serious education, so was shunted off for three years to a slum trade school. I escaped that dreariness by finding a "vocation" to the priesthood (abetted by a state-implemented day-long IQ+aptitude test where I scored so ridiculously well that much hand-wringing ensued).

  Two years immersed in a near-rural monastery made a man of me -- and finding the sf fan John Baxter in the same small town (his name and address were in a letter to the imported British magazine New Worlds), and borrowing his stash of imported sf paperbacks, matured my imagination in the sf worlds and tropes I'd become devoted to via the derivative stuff available to me from ages 10 or 12 through 15 (the equivalent, for the 1950s, of Star Trek and Star Wars and all the other simplified worlds of mass consumption). But even that is too schematic: in the late 1950s, I'd already managed to borrow mind-blowing novels and story collections by Alfred Bester, James Blish, Leigh Brackett, John Brunner, Arthur Clarke, Robert Heinlein, Theodore Sturgeon, A.E. van Vogt . . . most of the usual culprits.

  But by then I'd also started writing in the same ecosphere of the imagination. What else could a bright kid do?

  SCHWEITZER: Did you always think you would be a science fiction writer? What got you started?

  BRODERICK: When I was a kid with most of my head inside spaceships and time machines, I doubt that I ever thought about what I'd be doing in that wondrous future -- maybe because I knew it was too remote to be plausible for me. I knew I didn't want to be on a process line in a factory, or a drone in the public service, or a school teacher. Eventually I had to sign up, though, to train as a teacher. That was the only way to pay for my degree in English and Philosophy and History. I quickly lost patience with that prospect, and wangled my way out of the contract that would have forced me to teach for several years.

  That left me penniless, so I did the usual stints in holidays, sold coffee in a campus nook, coedited the Monash university student paper Lot's Wife (which I'd named) for a pittance, and found I could dash off short sf stories for local men's magazines earning enough to scrape by. It was easy, I'd read so much by then that I could do it on my ear. I also tried some stories with a bit more ambition, and sold my first long piece to John Carnell when I was 19. I'd mailed it to him as editor of New Worlds but he'd just been replaced by Moorcock, so he bought my novella as the closing item in his original anthology New Writings in SF 1. It was as clumsy as you'd expect, but did prove to me that I could get published by a professional sf editor. My first short story collection came out when I was 21.

  And then I stopped, more or less. For about a decade. Weird.

  That's not entirely true. I kept selling stories and articles to Aussie magazines (and eventually took over editing one of them, for a few months). Some university friends started a pop music weekly and I joined in for a while. I tried to sell a somewhat New Wavy novel, The Judas Mandala. Fred Pohl wrote that he'd buy it, since he'd had success with other difficult books like Delany's Dhalgren and Russ's The Female Man, then followed that with a note rescinding the offer.

  What the hell. I cobbled together a few early stories into a complicated "time opera" I titled The Gestalt Machine, built on the kitchen sink principle. It went to David Hartwell at Pocket Books (in 1970 for Signet, he'd published my limping first novel under the odious title Sorcerer's World) and it became The Dreaming Dragons. Imagine my surprise when David Pringle included it in his list of the 100 best sf novels in English, and it was runner-up for the Campbell Memorial award. Thus, the start of the 1980s. I travelled briefly to the US, stayed in New York with editor John Douglas and his wife Ginger Buchanan rewriting Mandala for Hartwell, and it was published in 1982 just as the Pocket Books imprint Timescape sank like a deflated Zeppelin.

  What am I leaving out? Oh, scads of living, moving from Melbourne to Sydney and back, girlfriends and broken hearts, years researching parapsychology (hey, thanks, John W. Campbell, Jr.!), a belated PhD in the semiotics of science and literature (then turning the dissertation into three quite different academic books).

  So it goes. I kept writing, and editing, and the books piled up, so that now I'm edging into about my 60th book publication. I've had stories in Year's Best volumes, and won a number of Australian sf awards. But somehow I have an unsettling sense that almost nobody has heard of me, or read my stuff. It's eerie. Maybe it's because I'm as alien as a Martian.

  SCHWEITZER: It sounds like you must have felt a bit like a Martian in Australia too.

  BRODERICK: An outsider, certainly, in Camus's sense. I was a skinny, asthmatic kid before albuterol inhalers were invented, so I violated the social rules by playing no team sports and declining to march in the cadet corps. Being a bookworm didn't win many friends, either. Many years later, with effective medications available, I started running and weight-lifting, and put on muscles in places they'd never been before; but I remained a fairly introverted INTJ nerd, immersed in my imagination and the brilliant, endless cosmos of the sciences. Part of that is temperament -- I'm attracted to solitude, and since the arrival of the interwebs a lot of my communication with other humans has been electronic. Never had kids -- although since my marriage 12 years ago I do have a charming stepdaughter who lives, however, in
the wilds of Nevada with her geologist husband -- so I missed the whole PTA/sporting team parent/church sociality aspect of being an adult. Well, actively avoided being a father rather than "Oops -- I forgot to have kids!" My father and I had a deeply distrustful and antagonistic relationship, so I didn't want to risk replicating that into another generation. Curiously, quite a few of the Aussie sf fans I've known for years also chose to be childless. And being a sometimes impatient and scathing atheist can give one a rather Martian cast in a world of largely inherited belief and "sacred wisdom" handed down from the Stone Age . . .

  SCHWEITZER: Isn't this alienation the fate of any writer, anywhere? And obscurity. Unless you're George R.R. Martin, Neil Gaiman, or Stephen King, chances are nobody has heard of you, except a small circle of cognoscenti. I point out that in the US we have a population of -- what is it? -- 350 million or so, and a science fiction novel that sells 5000 copies in hardcover is pretty average. That suggests a reading public the size of that of Lichtenstein.

  BRODERICK: Dismal, isn't it? Then reflect that Australia has a population only one fourteenth that of the US. That's why most of my professional sf compatriots wrote for US or British markets, which imposed an extra layer of distance, since our voices and vernacular tend to be skewed into a parody of American accents, as is the case with most of our Hollywood-imported actors: Nicole Kidman, Cate Blanchett, Naomi Watts, Hugh Jackman, Mel Gibson, Eric Bana, Simon Baker, many more. I'd rather not be a fake New Yorker or Californian -- or even Texan. So the options narrow, even on Mars; you're inevitably a stranger in a strange land. The upside is a dangerous shift in the angle of vision, the tang of the strange, the curious lure of exogamy (as critic John Clute might put it) . . .

  SCHWEITZER: So, do you think moving to the US has made you more visible as a writer, or less?

  BRODERICK: I doubt anything has changed. In Melbourne (and Adelaide, and Sydney, and Perth) I was part of a community of writers and fan readers, but the country is as huge as the US and the sf audience vastly dispersed around the edges of a continent-sized desert. Coming to Texas mostly meant it was much cheaper to mail submissions to the magazines that wouldn't accept emailed fiction (Asimov's, in particular, a decade ago), but even that has changed now. We're all in touch wherever we are, all the time if we wish. The single aspect of the tyranny of distance removed by living here is the ease of getting to conventions and schmoozing with other writers and editors by flying halfway across the country rather than halfway around the world. But I rarely do that anyway. Much more fun to swap gossip and limericks on email lists like Fictionmags, where you and I and a hundred or so others hang out most days.