Damien Broderick - Strange Attractors

her? Didn’t you smile and
smile for her when we were talking about Earth?’ Clouis would not
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Anthony Peacey
be diverted, and the fact that Bernheddin did not readily lose his
temper inflamed him the more. Bernheddin neglected him, Bernheddin did not love him, had dragged him away from Desousa to exile on a planet of reclusive self-interested heterosexuals. Bernheddin’s preoccupation with the time chair was dragged in —
Clouis jibed again that he was seeing some beautiful youth of a
decadent past age. And back to Ilena, for he had sensed something
between his lover and the Earthian girl.
Finally enraged, Bernheddin shouted, ‘She is a woman, yes, and
a m ature human being, which cannot be said for you. I kissed her
and she has gone. A kiss to her did not mean I have to tell her every
time I want to blow my nose now.’
Clouis was shocked silent.
Then said, almost whispering, ‘You kissed her? Oh you obscene
. . . obscene . . . obscene . . .’
It was a bad quarrel.
Ilena was the first woman Clouis had ever seen.
At last Clouis and he made up. In the night, after their passion
was spent, Bernheddin tried to explain his fascination with the
Rhynia, invader of land virgin and desert since the beginning of the
world; he tried to explain about the alternation of sexual and
asexual generations throughout the entire Earthian plant kingdom, through the ranks of the thallophytes, the bryophytes, the pteridophytes, the gymnosperms and the angiosperms; and he
tried to explain his vigil over the ripening sporangia. But Clouis fell
asleep.
Unable to sleep himself, Bernheddin slid from the sheets of the
low bed. He moved silently through the dark and alien house, feeling ahead for each step, touching the side of an arch. The time chair sat in the darkness awaiting him, uninvolved but sympathetic. He sank into its embrace, inhaled quietly in anticipation, touched the contact pads.
Night had passed from the sea and the lagoons. The newly risen
sun shone through an elongated window in strata of molten cloud
sprinkling wavelets and mudshoals with gold. The air over the
brown lands was dusty with light and the tiny thicket of Rhynia,
warmly lit, laid long stick shadows on the flat mud. Bernheddin sat
comfortably in his baggy pyjamas, letting the difficulties of a distant future drain away, letting the peace of the morning of the world fill him. His quarrel with Clouis seemed unim portant now.
The sun warmed him. That quarrel and others were past and gone;
Tim e andflowers
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a new quarrel and probably a parting would come. He was tired.
The world was very still, dreamlike in the sunlight and the
absence of sound; there was not even a whisper of breeze and the
estuary lay glassy before him.
After a time he tried to stretch his bare feet from the chair-step
down to the damp-looking earth. Toed the cool earth; it was a sweet
sensation but awkward for his body.
Truculent, he sat back. He would leave the chair, he dared do it
— and what need had he of the future?
Then he was standing on the cool earth, one hand behind gripping the chair arm. He inhaled deeply, took a step. His heart was beating hard. Sunlight lay beautiful upon the enormous empty
shorescape. He was a mote between earth and sky. From half a
dozen paces he beheld the time chair with new eyes. It had a metallic functional rightness, and in a way completed the landscape like a tree in the corner of an empty Zen painting. The chair remained;
sun glinting on its back and head-rest. Clouis, sleeping several
hundred million years up ahead, after the rise and fall of the C arboniferous pteridophyte forests, after the birth and death of the dinosaurs, after the advance and recession of the great Pleistocene
glaciations, had not wakened, panicked and recalled it. But Bern-
heddin’s resolve, his determination to examine the Rhynia growth
closely, almost crumbled. He walked down quickly, feet in clasping
mud, mud squeezing between his toes, squatted by the plant, gazed
at the clustered stalks, noticing minute hairs upon