"Crissel was used to servitors, so accustomed to their presence that he scarcely noticed them under normal circumstances. Yet these machines did not move like ordinary servitors. Their motions were quick, with something of the speeded-up, slapstick quality of insect activity. As a whole, their efforts were coordinated and deliberate. Individually, it was chaotic, with some machines getting trampled under the relentless march of the others or even flung aside when they proved too slow or clumsy. They had no weapons in the usual sense, but every limb, manipulator or pro ble now served an aggressive function. Some of the attachments even appeared to have been modified to make them more effective: claws sharpened to glinting edges, arms terminating in vicious curved scythes or impaling spikes. It was a killing army. And yet the machines still carried the cheerful colours and logos of their former duties; a domestic machine here, a gardener, or indly medical servitor there. A beetle-backed multi-legged nursery supervisor even had the red and black shell of a ladybird, with a happy face painted on the front... It was only when he saw two headless bodies tumble into the open space between the ironwork sculptures, jetting banners of blood from the open circles of their neck rings, that he knew the servitors had begun to murder."
Alastair Reynolds.
We were occasioned to alarm, predictions of the end, an apocalyptic world view. In the house where he grew up, the world was originally going to end in 1972. Perhaps he wasn't convinced, but his mother stored water in the cupboards and kept stores of food, and waited, full of prayer and foreboding, for the end time. The time when they would have to flee. When God would protect them alone, as they fled under the cover of darkness through the collapsing streets, when the sinners finally got their come uppance and God smote them all. It was the time of the Rolling Stones and the Beetles, and clearly their devil music was another sign that society had collapsed, entirely.
There were no morals left, if people could dance in mass hedonistic throngs to the devil's beat, and men could grow their hair long like girls, and socialists and non-believers kept winning elections. "No one knows the time and the date," they kept saying. But at the same time all the signs were there, it was 1972, and they were told to prepare. In the late 60s, when we were growing up on that fear filled street, when his father used to bash him for almost nothing, for being him, when he buried his head in books and nonetheless was still bashed, when the evil dark of the gum trees bashing in the wind all around them, when they dressed and travelled long distances to the services, and heard the predictions in person, it did feel as if the world was turning on its access, and all was doomed.
Chaotic, screaming, dislocated, punished for their sins, they woke screaming and waiting, for the punishment of their flesh, for the guidance of where it was they were meant to flee. Petra, in Jordon, his mother said, was the sacred place where they would all be led. But how you got there from here, these remote, early-suburban houses on the outskirts of the city, was never explained. All was lost, all was lost, he cried as he was beaten, and in turn he shrank and retreated and hid, away from the belt and the pain and the injustice, the unforgiving, unforgivable cruelty. This hurts us more than it hurts you, they said once, as they chased him around the house with the belts; and that was the final bitter joke of it all.
No wonder he fled, both physically and mentally, retreating, at first, into the only place that showed him any kindness, the Enid Blyton books where everyone had nice families and adventures just happened. Where all in all, out there in the concrete world, the cruelty was beyond measure. To a place where people were pleople, not cringing fractured messes, where personalities were whole and people were good, and friends shared kindnesses between them. That was the only place he could find any comfort, or any hope of survival, the only place of decency in his pain wracked, brutalised world.
And then the years came, when he turned 15, and grew stronger, and withstood the beatings with more equanimity, came home on Fridays from school, changed out of his school uniform and fled down that long winding street, fled into town to wild parties where boy lovers made sure he was the centre of attention, where he was the subject of more attention, perhaps you could even call it affection, than he had ever known. Just another boy seeking love out of the great coldness, troubled, chaotic, fabulous, but at least it wasn't the cruel snake of the belt, the hard, piercing, psychotic brutality of the man behind it.
On that long bus journey into town he would seek the ancient wisdoms as he sought to touch his spirit guide, he would explore his own astonishing clairvoyance, he would reach out with his mind and feel the universe at large, he would tell people to turn their heads and they would, he could hear their thoughts, uncannily could hear them thinking. It was the days before mobile phones and wall to wall trash culture, and people's minds were echo chambers full of slow thoughts and intimate concerns, his own lofty prognostications strange for someone so young. He watched the Sydney of the late sixties pass by the bus window, and was entirely enamoured. He would soon be his own person, he would soon be free. If God was going to smite him, just like his father, then he would have to do it somewhere else, in a late night bar, at a wild party, in a back alley where he passed out unconscious from the drink. But he wasn't going to do it here, in the dark winding streets, amidst the wild winds and the creaking gums. He would have to seek him out, and punish him for having dared to live.
THE BIGGER STORY:
http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2008/07/01/2291053.htm
The New South Wales Bar Association says new regulations for World Youth Day undermine basic rights and are an affront to freedom of speech.
Under the new regulations, people who refuse to stop engaging in conduct that causes annoyance or inconvenience to pilgrims can be arrested and fined up to $5,500.
The same provision did not apply during last year's APEC Summit in Sydney.
The association says the terms are too vague and the penalties are excessive.
It says if existing laws are considered sufficient to regulate conduct at events like the Mardi Gras or the Rugby World Cup, they should be good enough to cover World Youth Day.
The Bar Association has also accused the Government of avoiding public scrutiny by creating a criminal offence by regulation, rather than making it an Act of Parliament.
It says the NSW Government is trying to restrict freedom of speech.
http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2008/07/01/1214678021931.html
The policewoman whose young children were killed in an axe murder in Cowra yesterday was glad to have escaped the "rage" of Sydney, and dreamt of writing plays and poems and playing the saxophone.
Friends, relatives and police officers from the Cowra region are keeping a vigil at the 31-year-old's hospital bedside today.
She is in a stable condition after being attacked with an axe yesterday and was sitting up in bed with her blond hair covered by a large white bandage, talking to fellow police officers before going in for surgery this afternoon.
NSW Police Commissioner Andrew Scipione visited the officer in hospital for an hour today and said she had a fractured skull but her injuries were not life-threatening.
"She's about to go into an operation for a fractured skull," he said. "She's going to be put into an induced coma for 24 hours and after that her recovery can begin.''
He said she was "still coming to grips with what happened''.
http://www.smh.com.au/news/national/hospitals-choked-with-admissions/2008/06/30/1214677946051.html
PUBLIC hospitals are under "severe strain" with the rate of admissions increasing by 3 per cent - twice that of population growth, the federal Health Minister, Nicola Roxon, says.
The State of Our Public Hospitals June 2008 report - a snapshot released yesterday of activity and performance in the 2006-07 financial year - shows that almost a third of emergency patients were not seen within the recommended time.
The number of patients presenting to emergency departments between 1998-99 and 2006-07 increased by more than 34 per cent.
Across Australia in 2006-07, there were 6.7 million presentations to emergency departments. Of the emergency patients, 70 per cent were seen within the time recommended for their triage category and half were seen within 24 minutes.
No comments:
Post a Comment