I was once. They’re going to throw the change across a couple of the
best and hottest space-engineer judies who’ve been having a wild night
in the Telford Room. It’s gonna get wilder, judes!
Wish I was there, instead of ruining and re-applying my face-paint
four times in the one mirror. Sorry to get you involved, Vera-body.
Apology accepted, Lim-self.
But that’s the question: who-self? Remnants of Veraness must be
around, like the correct recording of her personal securicode. It’s not
just protective coloration, it’s me.
Will they get back in time? And can Kid really fly the Forcelaunch?
And will we be able to fold back the security nets and get to Ganymede? And will we be lovable enough to whore ourselves a Republic if we get there? And will we live happily ever after?
Can Vera and Lim live happily even after? Whaddya think, Lim?
Whaddya think, Vera?
Who said that? I can’t tell me apart.
I’ll show you mine if you’ll show me yours.
A bit hysterical, but rather keenly aroused, we laugh, and show us
ours. They’re fascinatingly different; that much is clear.
Precious Bane
©
GERALD MURNANE
I first thought of this story on a day of drizzling rain in a secondhand
bookshop in Prahran. I was the only customer in the shop. The owner
sat near the door and stared out at the rain and the endless traffic.
This was all he seemed to do all day. I had passed the shop often and
walked through the man’s gaze; and during the moment when I intersected that gaze I felt what it might be like to be invisible.
On the day of drizzle I was inside the man’s shop for the first time.
(I buy many secondhand books, but I buy them from catalogues.
Secondhand bookshops make me unhappy. Even reading the catalogues is bad enough. But the secondhand books that I buy do not sadden me. Taking them out of their parcels and putting them on my
shelves, I tell them they have found a good home at last. And I warn
my children often that they must not sell my books after I have died.
My children need not read the books, but they must keep them on
shelves in rooms where people might glance at them sometimes or
even handle them a little and wonder about them.) The man had
glanced at me when 1 came into his shop, but then he had looked away
and gone on gazing. And all the while I poked among his books he
never looked back at me.
The books were badly arranged, dusty, neglected. Some were
heaped on tables, or even on the floor, when they could easily have
been shelved if the man had cared to put his shop in order. I looked
over the section marked L IT ER A TU R E. I had in my hand one of what
I called my book-buying notebooks. It was the notebook labelled:
103
104
Gerald M urnane
1900-1940 . . . Unjusdy Neglected. The forty years covered by the notebook were not only the first forty of the century. Written ‘1940-1900’, they were the first forty years from the year of my birth to a time that
I thought of as the Age of Books. If my life had been pointed in that
direction I would have been, just then, not sheltering from rain in a
graveyard of books but inspecting wall after wall of leather-bound
volumes in my mansion in a city of books. O r I would have been at my
desk, a writer in the fullness of his powers, looking through tall windows at a park-like scene in the countryside of books while I waited for my next sentence to come to me.
I put together four or five titles and took them to the gazing man.
While he checked the prices pencilled in the front leaves I looked at
him from under my eyebrows. He was not so old as I had thought. But
his skin had a greyness that made me think of alcohol. The bookseller’s
liver is almost rotted away, I told myself. The poor bastard is an
alcoholic.
I believed, in those days, that I was on the way myself to becoming
an alcoholic, and I was always noticing signs of what I might look like
in twenty or ten years or even sooner. If the bookseller had pickled his
liver, then I understood why he sat and gazed so often. He suffered all
day from the mood that came over me every Sunday afternoon when
I had been sipping for forty-eight hours and had finally stopped and
tried to sober up and to begin the four pages of fiction I was supposed
to finish each weekend.
In my Sunday afternoon mood I usually gave up trying to write and
looked over my bookshelves. Before nightfall I had usually decided
there was no point in writing my sort of fiction in 1980. Even if my
work was published at last, and a few people read it for a few years,
what would be the end of it all? Where would my book be in, say, forty
years’ time? Its author by then would be no longer around to investigate the matter. He would have poisoned the last of his brain-cells and died long before. O f the few copies that had actually been bought,
fewer still would be stacked on shelves. O f these few even fewer would
be opened, or even glanced at, as weeks and months passed. And of
the few people still alive who had actually read the book, how many
would
