Striped Holes

by Damien Broderick

Genres: Science Fiction

Synopsis

A COMIC SCIENCE FICTION MASTERPIECE! In the spirit of Monty Python, Arthur Schopenhauer and Douglas Adams, Striped Holes is science fiction with a sense of humor. Sopwith Hammil might be the nation's top chat-show host but his peace of mind is shattered when a time traveling bureaucrat lands on his couch. To save his life and the human race ( They're turning the Sun off!), Sopwith must find a wife inside three hours. Turns out it's not that easy, Soppy. Meanwhile, popular astrologer and certified lifesaver O'Flaherty Gribble, a favorite guest on Sopwith's show, has discovered the Callisto Effect and how to build striped holes. And in a future that makes Nineteen Eighty-Four look like Brave New World or vice versa, beautiful Hsia Shan-Yun is about to have her brain scrubbed for knitting one of those striped holes, with frightful consequences. But luckily, O'Flaherty finds himself seated on a plane next to God. Tighten your belt, it's that kind of novel.

Release date: May 19, 2020

Publisher: Gateway

Print pages: 163

Sample

The time machine that materialized in the middle of the living room of Sopwith Hammil’s rather nice bachelor apartment looked like a two-meter loaf of sliced bread.

As a trained television anchorman, Sopwith had no difficulty in estimating its size (unlike those luckless dupes who mistake distant re-entering nuclear-powered spy satellites or flights of quail for fiery UFO mothercraft) because the time machine was jammed neatly into the sofa of his stitched leather suite, which he’d measured quite precisely with an engineer’s metal spring-retracted tape only four months earlier in the exclusive Town & Country Shoppe.

The alien driving the time machine, and the machine itself, were wrapped in brightly printed wax paper, tamped over and glued at the ends.

The whole package looked just like one of the loaves of bread Sopwith had so enjoyed as a child, before the supermarket chains forced breadmakers to put their wares inside plastic bags.

Despite all the foul chemically active preservatives they inject into bread these days, as Sopwith knew to his cost, if you keep it more than forty-eight hours the inside of the bag starts to sweat, kick-starting the mold.

You can twist the end of a newly opened bag of bread. You can nub it shut with a plastic tie. You can put it in the refrigerator and hope for the best.

Next day you plunge your hand trustingly into the slimy plastic envelope, and find the filthy green fungus off and running halfway down the loaf. Before you’ve had a chance to eat more than three or four slices, the packet’s a pulsing mass of indigestible flora.

Greenish white and ill-looking at the edges.

Nasty little spores, spreading and taking over.

You can empty the fridge and wash it out. You can scrub the trays, sponge them with vinegar and lemon. If you’re desperate (and Sopwith often felt utterly desperate at this stage) you can rush to the supermarket and buy aerosols and powders, spray-ons and wipe-offs, each guaranteed to kill the insidious infestation.

It never works, of course.

Cockroaches won’t inherit the world when human beings are gone, taking their cleaning agents with them.

Mold will. Purulent and festering, lurking and sly. Mark my words.

This loaf was not like that. Even as Sopwith watched it, agog, the top unzipped and a single slice of bread rose like some magical animation in a television commercial.

The slice of bread was crusty wholemeal, with a warm heavenly kibble odor.

The sight of it would have made Sopwith Hammil’s mouth water if he hadn’t already been stiff with terror.

He did not know the thing was an alien emerging from a time machine. Like everyone else in his culture he had been trained by what people ignorant of True Science Fiction Nomenclature called “sci fi” movies to expect aliens to emerge from spaceships.

Consequently, there was no doubt in Sopwith’s mind that the thing jammed into his expensive crushed-leather sofa was not a loaf of bread but actually a spaceship from another world.

Even though he was wrong in detail, Sopwith was on the right track. This was hardly because he possessed piercing and unusual intelligence. Unkind critics of national television current affairs program often intimated that Sopwith’s intelligence was a commodity not in great demand. If his program had the highest Sunday night ratings in the country, it was probably due to his wonderful blue eyes, his muscular but deft physique, his voice like the thick, heavy liquid that rolls in endless waves at the hot core of the earth, and most of all to the devastatingly effective research background prepared for him by his gnomelike assistant Mariette Planck.

The reason Sopwith guessed that the alien device and its tempting crewperson was not a loaf of bread was because the aliens had made a typical dumb mistake.

The bread was sliced lengthwise.

I think we should pause here for a moment. There’s really little point in telling you any more about this singular occurrence without some preparation.

Could Ptolemy have discovered that the Earth goes around the Sun if the ground (so to speak) had not first been explored by Galileo and his telescope?

I tell you he could not, nor in many other cases of similar kidney. And if you’ve never heard of these people, do please relax; you’ve just confirmed the necessity for a short but pithy lead-in.

For a start, you need to know that the sole reason the alien time travelers paid the slightest attention to Sopwith Hammil was a momentary glitch in the operation of their staggeringly powerful but overweening Symbiotic Computer.

This terrible machine was actually a hive mind made up of 1096 tadquarks, the smallest but nimblest life form known in that epoch. As you might guess, an organic machine of such complexity and speed gets bored quite a lot of the time, and as part of its research into the time knots tied around a series of Striped Holes (we’ll get back to that), it had watched all the Star Wars movies ever made, all the Roger Corman movies ever made, all the science fiction and horror movies ever made, all the Spanish Main movies, both in black-and-white and in color, ever made, and indeed all the movies of any description ever made, even mini-series for television, even The Thorn Birds.

Later, it was to be alleged in its defense that it was precisely because the Symbiotic Mind had recently watched The Thorn Birds that its central processor became briefly unhinged and confused Sopwith Hammil with his fourth-degree cousin Mark Hamill, the swashbuckling but sensitive boyish hero of the first trilogy of the Star Wars saga, which of course means the second trilogy. It has to be admitted that they looked remarkably similar.

Sopwith, though, was no film star.

He would have been affronted by the comparison, and was, whenever it was drawn, as it was for a time before the word got around that he was affronted by it. He viewed himself as a media personality in his own right, and in fact in better than his own right.

Not only was his person admired by hundreds of thousands of sighing and swooning grandmothers, mothers, young women living more or less permanently but without benefit of clergy with young men, girls in puberty, and an entire cross section of the male gay community, but he was (so it seemed to Sopwith, and few people cared to tell him anything to the contrary) admired equally for his hard-hitting fearless interviews with the great and near-great, with the bosses of crime and the elected officers of the state, with Princes, Presidents, Prime Ministers, Popes, Potentates and, on sentimental holiday occasions, dear little aged polio victims with kittens.

As it happened, the interest of the being in the time machine had been no less piqued on the evening in question by Sopwith’s audience-warming aperitif.

You know how it works. While the big pre-program advertising teasers hit hard on some appalling item of political chicanery, or sexual corruption in orphanages, or drug abuse among media personalities on competing channels, you generally bounce on with one or two frothy soufflés. Get a grin on their faces and a song in their hearts. This time it was a five-minute burst from O’Flaherty Gribble, the astrological Renaissance Man.

Gribble was the perfect patsy. “You have a Ph.D. in—how should I put this? in poop technology—”

The audience snickered in naughty delight. “Dung recycling, yes, for energy conservation. Very important, you know.”

“Worm poop, to be precise.”

“We call it worm-cast ecoculture, actually, Sopwith.” Behind his thick glasses, O’Flaherty’s eyes beamed with happiness. He loved being on television almost as much as Sopwith Hammil loved being on television. There was nothing self-aggrandizing in this pleasure, however. As a genuine twenty-first century Renaissance Person, the thaumaturge (we’ll come back to that, too) felt it his ordained duty to reach the maximum number of his fellows with the latest word from as many of the sciences and meta-sciences as he could lay his eager little hands on. He possessed three doctorates, two diplomas (one, surprisingly enough, in surf lifesaving), and a licentiate.

“Hmm. You seem to have a thing for worms, O’Flaherty. Your first best-seller was a study of wormholes. Just let me get one thing clear,” Sopwith said rapidly in his wry, deeply liquid voice, riding over the astrologer’s muttered interjection, “are these the holes the worm travels through the poop in, or the holes the poop travels through the—”

His audience, blue-rinsed matrons and shaven-cheeked chartered accountants, moussed girls and their louts, roared.

“Neither, you see. Different subject entirely. That’s cosmology.”

Sopwith turned a look of droll dismay into a waiting camera. “Cosm— You’re using worms to make cosmetics?” His eyes widened at the further implications. The audience were beside themselves. “No! You can’t mean you’re making cosmetics out of worm p—”

“Black holes and white holes in space,” O’Flaherty shouted, relishing the sport. “But that was years ago. I’d prefer to talk about—”

“You’re a Pisces, I believe, O’Flaherty. Is that what makes you a universal genius?”

“All nonsense, I’m afraid.”

“You’re not a genius?”

“Of course I’m a genius. No, those Sun signs. Pisces, the rest of the constellations. Don’t you want to hear about my marvelous discovery?”

“In a moment, O’Flaherty. The astrological signs are nonsense? I’m shocked. How can the nation’s most famous astrologer say such a thing?”

“Well, it’s true—for those of us living here in Australia.”

Ah, yes. That startled you, I suppose. The thing is (and I realize you’ll find this hard to take in) not everyone lives in London and Los Angeles, you see. Or even Birmingham, England, or Birmingham, Alabama. Sometimes a few quite important things happen in Dar es Salaam and Melbourne.

What comes to mind? Test tube babies, say.

That’s in Melbourne, of course. In Dar es Salaam they make quite a lot of babies without any help from science.

Dar es Salaam, in case you’re wondering, is the largest city in Tanzania. That’s a country in Africa.

The National Museum in Dar es Salaam holds the skull of Australopithecus boisei, thought to be the skull of a pre-hominin living in Olduvai Gorge about one and three-quarter million years ago.

Admittedly, the experts in question at the National Museum in Dar es Salaam did not know that aliens in time machines roamed back and forth through history. If they had, they might have thought twice about the skull of Australopithecus boisei.

As it chanced, Sopwith Hammil and his guest were sitting not in Paris or New York, let alone Dar es Salaam, but in the austere studio of Channel 8 in the city of Melbourne in the State of Victoria in the Federal Commonwealth of Australia on the planet Earth, and neither of them felt himself to be hanging upside Down Under. In their funny old chauvinist way, they took it for granted that their hometown was the center of the universe.

Not that this was ever spelled out consciously. But it’s what each of them thought. I suppose they did. Don’t you, wherever you happen to be living?

In any case, as O’Flaherty Gribble was to learn within a few hours (somewhat discomfitingly), in thinking themselves at the center of the universe they were indisputably correct.

“Traditional astrology is based on northern hemisphere seasons, which have to be reversed here,” O’Flaherty was explaining.

“But not the constellations, surely.”

Gribble lurched excitedly in his seat. “Naturally not. But their meaning gets shifted forward six months, you see. It’s the symbolism. How can December ice symbols work when it’s forty degrees Celsius in the shade?”

Sopwith glanced at the prompt that Mariette Planck had prepared for him. Good old reliable Mariette had it down to three bite-sized sentences. Smoothly, he said, “So a nebulous Australian Pisces, born in February like yourself, is really an intelligent, critical Virgo?”

“That’s the idea, though you’ve neglected the precession of the equinoxes, which moves everything back one step. Actually I’m a Leo, with a bent for creativity.”

“Gotcha. So astrology needs some of its cogs tightened.” He glanced again at his prompter. Mariette had highlighted one point with a bright red box. “Tell us about the forthcoming Callisto Effect alignment. Should stir up the ether?”

Nobody had ever before seen Gribble flustered. It was doubly surprising, therefore, to find his face abruptly drained of color, his spine stiffened, his lips drawn back.

“Too soon to talk about that,” the astrologer said in a voice like ground pepper rubbed into rare steak. Desperately he sought to change the subject. “Listen, my big news—”

Sopwith’s nostrils dilated with the bloody scent, indistinct as it was, of the chase. He leaned forward tautly, one eye on the prompter. “But haven’t leading astrologers ridiculed your claims that the influence of Jupiter’s moon Callisto will cause—”

“Striped holes!” O’Flaherty cried in a strangled voice.

Sopwith frowned, headed off at the pass. The audience hung, breathless.

“Striped? You can’t be serious. Striped holes?”

“Not black. Not white. Not even pink, like Hawking’s. No, I’ve discovered a completely fresh class of gravitational anomalies.” He licked his lips and forged on with a torrent of words and symbols nobody except himself could possibly understand, but everyone loved to hear. Striped holes. Dear God, Sopwith thought, checking with the clock. One and a half minutes to the commercial break. Let him run. This was science as sorcery, science as entertainment, science as weird mystery, strange and enchanting as a Druid’s ancient runes. It was pure magic.

Sopwith was wrong. It was pure science.

In his home laboratory, O’Flaherty Gribble spent the hours of the day hunched over an Extropian Technology computer cluster. Using quantum dot memory instead of random access photonics, it was blindingly fast.

Gribble in the privacy and safety of his own study made an entrancing picture.

Doffing his business suit and polished leather shoes, O’Flaherty favored a neck-to-toes sky blue robe embroidered by his sainted moth. . .