Cenotaxis (11 page)

One of us will have to back down, eventually.

I lean back against the cold stone and wait to see what opportunities my days will bring for peace, and an end, at last, to pain.

"Cenotaxis" (Greek
kenos
empty +
takis
order) is a stand-alone story. It does, however, also sit between the first two novels in my Astropolis sequence, following the events and some of the characters of
Saturn Returns.
It is able, therefore, to pick up certain themes and run further with them than I had originally hoped to. Anachronism is one such, permeating every layer of this story, from its broad structure to the literary references that pepper the text.

The latter come from almost a thousand years of the written word. One such is Edward O. Wilson's keynote address to the OECD Forum, "Future of Life," delivered on the 14th of May, 2001. "The Skeptic" is another, by eleventh-century poet and mathematician Ghiyath al-Din Abu'l-Fath Omar ibn Ibrahim Al-Nisaburi Khayyami (better known as Omar Khayyam), in the Edward FitzGerald translation.

Jasper's full name, mentioned only once, was an early pseudonym of nineteenth-century gothic author Robert Charles Maturin. The Persian name "Jasper" is sometimes said to mean "guardian of the treasure."

I remain deeply grateful to Gary Numan for permission to use his lyrics in Render's dialogue. Seek elsewhere in this book for the official credits.

Henry Lawson's "When I Was King" was published in a volume of the same name in 1906, exactly one century before this story was written. Each section of "Cenotaxis" takes its title from the same poem. The opening quote comes from the penultimate verse, and the emphasis on the last two lines is Lawson's.

Here's the final verse. It strikes me as a resonant note on which to end this story, and to start the next.

"I rose again—no matter how —
   A woman, and a deeper fall—
I move amongst my people now
   The most degraded of them all.
But, if in centuries to come,
   I live once more and claim my own,
I'll see my subjects blind and dumb
   Before they set me on a throne."

Sean Williams' first book was published in 1994, a chapbook called
Doorway to Eternity
containing two short stories and a novella. Since then, he has delivered three more collections and twenty-two novels aimed at adult, young adult and child readers around the world. His work has been published in numerous languages, on-line, and in spoken word editions, and has appeared more than once on the New York Times-bestseller lists. Multiple winner of Australia's speculative fiction awards, in the science fiction, fantasy and horror categories, he also works in the Doctor Who and Star Wars universes and has a long list of collaborations with friend Shane Dix behind him. He is a former winner and now a judge of the international Writers of the Future Contest.

He lives with his family in Adelaide, which Salman Rushdie described as "an ideal setting for a Stephen King novel" and Jules Verne once claimed was the prettiest city in Australia.

You can access more information and his LiveJournal via
www.seanwilliams.com
.