Adrift in the Noösphere (25 page)

“Horseshit,” my father says, forcing his lips to shape the syllables.

Behold, a pale horse, the gray doctor tells him without the slightest trace of humor: and his name that sat on him was Death.

Deems is shown the customary storm of visions. The world is consumed in nuclear fire. Great chasms open in its soft, ripened skin, and all the numbers of humankind tumble into the burning depths. Air sours, foully poisoned, an acid-rain storm that blights every flowering plant and tree and crop in the world. Maggots eat at lambs and babies. Transparent demons move like wraiths at the center of the earth among the last of the living, tormenting them eternally. It is a terrifying spectacle, disturbing as a nightmare one cannot awaken from. But Deems has been this way before. He is too frightened to laugh, but it is preposterous. This has to be the unadulterated noise of the unconscious, the cheese sandwich he ate before turning in, a mask or screen for something else.

“Pull the other one,” he croaks, “it has bells on it.”

A little girl comes forward, thin as a Bosnian refugee, pale and gaunt, limbs like a foal's. Her hair is thin and straggly, and she looks at him without fear or expectation.

Take her in your arms, Klar-2 tells him. Give her your human warmth. Kindle her into life. This is your daughter.

“Why do you have doorways and ramps if you can take us through walls and fly us in the air,” skeptical Deems insists, exhausted and scratchy. “Why must you torment us with crude surgery when a painless scraping of cells from the inside of the mouth could give you more genetic material than you'd ever need? After all this time, Christ, two thousand years, ten thousand, why are you still tampering with our poor bodies? If you can calm us and heal our hurt, why do you continue to bring such torment to your victims? If we have no souls, why do you terrify simple village children with visions of eternal damnation?”

His throat is dry, hoarse, and the mouse dropping stench is making him feel sick. He tries to turn his head, to look Klar-2 and the others straight in the eye, and they stir uneasily and shift like shadows, like candle smoke in the candle flame's heat.

The little hybrid child gazes at him, arms hanging desolate at her sides. She wears a kind of white shift, and her limbs are painfully thin.

He struggles in the air, struggles for purchase on nothingness, with immense effort brings his heavy feet over the edge of the operating table and down to the tepid warmth of the floor. They rustle and move aside, withdrawing into the shadows, into the light. The girl child stands dumbly, fatherless, motherless, aching, alien, human.

Daimon Keith, my father, reaches out his own arms, then, at last, and enfolds me within them.

Acknowledgments

“Time Considered as a Series of Thermite Burns in No Particular Order” was first published at Tor.com, May, 2011. Copyright © 2011 by Damien Broderick.

“All Summer Long” (as “Serf”) was first published in
Winners Are Grinners,
ed. by Paul Collins and Meredith Costain, Pearson, 2000. Copyright © 2000 by Damien Broderick.

“The Beancounter's Cat” was first published in
Eclipse Four,
ed. by Jonathan Strahan, Nightshade Books, 2011. Copyright © 2011 by Damien Broderick.

“Under the Moons of Venus” was first published in
Subterranean
, ed. by Jonathan Strahan, Spring, 2010. Copyright © 2010 by Damien Broderick.

“Luminous Fish” by Damien Broderick and Paul Di Filippo appears here for the first time. Copyright © 2012 by Damien Broderick and Paul Di Filippo.

“Coming Back” was first published in
The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction,
December, 1982.
Copyright © 1982 by Damien Broderick.

“Walls of Flesh, Bars of Bone” by Damien Broderick and Barbara Lamar was first published in
Engineering Infinity,
ed. by Jonathan Strahan, 2010. Copyright © 2010 by Damien Broderick and Barbara Lamar.

“All My Yesterdays” was first published in
Chaos
, 1964, and revised slightly in
Glass Reptile Breakout,
ed. by Van Ikin, Center for Studies in Australian Literature, 1990. Copyright © 1964, 1990 by Damien Broderick.

“The Womb” was first published
Dreaming Down Under,
eds. by Jack Dann and Janeen Webb, HarperCollins Australia, 1998. Copyright © 1998 by Damien Broderick.

About the Author

Damien Broderick is an Australian science fiction and popular science writer. He lives in San Antonio, Texas, with his wife, tax attorney Barbara Lamar.

Five of Broderick's books have won Ditmar Awards; the first,
The Dreaming Dragons
, was runner-up for the John W. Campbell Memorial Award for Best Science Fiction Novel, and was listed in David Pringle's
Science Fiction: The 101 Best Novels, 1949-1984
. He has also won the Aurealis award four times. In November 2003, Broderick was awarded a grant for 2004-05 by the Australia Council to write fiction exploring the technological singularity. In 2005 he received the Distinguished Scholarship Award of the International Association for the Fantastic in the Arts. In 2010 and 2011, he was a finalist in the juried Theodore Sturgeon Award for best sf short story of the preceding year, and at the World Science Fiction Convention received the A. Bertram Chandler Memorial Award for 2010.

His science fiction novel
The Judas Mandala
is credited with the first appearance of the term “virtual reality,” and his 1997 popular science book
The Spike
was the first to investigate the technological Singularity in detail.

Broderick holds a Ph.D. in Literary Studies from Deakin University, Australia, with a dissertation relating to the comparative semiotics of scientific, literary, and science fictional textuality. In 2012, he published
Science Fiction: The 101 Best Novels, 1985-2010,
the successor to Pringle's famous survey, co-authored with Paul Di Filippo.