Valencies: A Science Fiction Novel Read online

  They’d met the gene-sculptor in a waterside pub. He had bought Anla a buzz and put his arm around her shoulder, called her “my dear” and said he could tell by the karyotonic lines on her hand that she was impulsive and generous. An invitation to the party in the scrub had been issued with the second buzz, an invitation that could hardly exclude her friends—could hardly exclude, for that matter, her lawful bonded husband. Not that the sculptor could have inferred her unfashionably dyadic status: no antique sentimental ring constrained Anla’s impulsive and generous hand.

  Ben turned his back on the dim glow of the studio and the sound of his wife’s familiar sexiness, stared at the reconstructed elms holding out their white arms to the travelling local moon. Celestial lair of foddles, safe under Imperial decree from human hands. He lowered his gaze and glared at what he saw. Fucking expensive, pretentious place. The bastard probably has a dacha like this on a hundred worlds, or a thousand. You can’t take it with you, but you can find one just like it waiting at the other end if you’re rich enough.

  A neat peptide-schema on intergalactic monetary equivalents bounced up unsought into Ben’s consciousness; he slapped it back down again. What must it be like after a thousand years of data inlays?

  He squinted in the darkness. Granite and sandstone, ageless centenarians in doublets, their twittering girl crones, their toad-like sportskites cluttering up the dropspace. So low on the ground, some of these overpowered heaps of plast, that a well-aimed fusillade of gravel ends up on the webbing.

  A fly-screen flared and Kael came silently from the dark end of the house, steel in his hand: a half meter of freshly sharpened carving knife. “What the hell are you up to?”

  Ben, not bothering to reply, kicked another shower of gravel at a yellow coupe.

  “He’s just giving them a bit more ballistic ballast,” Theri explained. “They need it for going round clouds.”

  “Ah.”

  The skite’s light sliced down, made them blink. Kael and Theri clambered aboard and sorted themselves out astern. Ben slumped beside Catsize. The lift-field spurted gravel and the safari swung aloft, drive grumbling, lights tunneling across the mangy bush of the planet Newstralia. Bloody holidays.

  §

  Theri lay under the filament blanket, head on Kael’s lap. The wind swirling over the open skite dried the sweat of the party from her face. Trees flickered below, branches webbing the soil. She wanted bed and sleep, not this midnight madness, this molesting of innocent foddles in the pastures of the night.

  The whole exercise seemed slightly contrived, anyway. Kill an animal and eat it—the sort of jolly fantasy one floated at parties or during stoned evenings in pubs, not something one actually went out and did. Not someone like Kael, at least.

  Probably he only pushed the plan along to get Ben out of the place. Give the lad something to do. Anla was obviously in no mood to leave her conversation with the gene-sculptor. So Kael hatched this absurd scheme, trying a little too hard to be carried away by the madcap spirit of the thing.

  It was really only when Catsize decided to adopt the plan that it got off the ground. She thought: Poor old Kael’s just slightly too rational, not quite manic enough for the exploit. She heard Catsize endit the illegal program; he caught her eye and winked.

  “Heads and elbows in,” he said, and energized the bubble. “Going up.”

  §

  The skite trudged up the gravity well, sliding a bit off its programmed trajectory, the corrugations of the geofield barely diminished by its rudimentary autonomics. Kael ran his hand under the blanket, found Theri’s fingers and interlocked his own. The atmosphere ended and the skite bounced into open fields of clumpy stars, arctic in the night sky.

  “I’d have thought that sanctuaries would be guarded,” Ben said grumpily. “We’ll never get through its operational envelope. We’ll be arrested. Our loved ones will never hear of us again.”

  “I know a thing or two.”

  “You’ve been around, haven’t you, Catsize,” said Kael. “You’ve seen a thing or two that’d shock us.”

  “My oath.”

  “Catsize, how old are you?”

  “Don’t be obscene.”

  §

  “You miss my point.” The rowdy team of endorphins partying in Anla’s brain-tissues were kicking up their heels and knocking the furniture about. Somehow this sportive chemical behavior had the effect of lengthening the room, giving everything she saw and heard a piercing clarity. Her amplified voice rang wearily down the enormous hall. “If we must go back to basics, what the hell do you find so glorious in the idea of Empire?”

  The boring fellow was wrestling with his library. Much more on this tack and I might as well go home and fuck Ben. Chariots, look at it, though, he must be rolling in exchange-value. Thing’s totally voice-activated, not a key on it.

  “Glorious?” He was laughing in apparent astonishment. “What a curious word to apply to the Imperium. My dear, it’s a simple matter of historical necessity. Do you find the law of gravity ‘glorious’? My goodness.”

  “It’s very pretty but shouldn’t you put it away before someone treads on it?”

  “Anla, you raised the topic. I merely wish to prove the elementary facts of life to you before your stubbornness drives me quite mad. Now look at this.” He addressed the machine. “Display the number of habitable planets in the universe.”

  Instantly: 2.51 1017.

  “It’s in decimal notation,” the gene-sculptor said. “All right, display the current estimated human populations on those planets.”

  The numbers twinkled: 1 1027.

  Anla tried to think of a one followed by twenty-seven zeroes, but her concentration was not up to it.

  “There you are, my dear. Those are the fundamental and irreducible substrates of our civilization. Ten to the eleven galaxies in a variety of fetching shapes and sizes, chockablock with a round octillion human souls. A seething statistical gas of political pressures and competing macromemes. It’s a self-organizing stochastic entity, which is just as well for all of us, and the Imperium is its structure.”

  Anla clutched at the jutting-out portions of her face to stop it flying off, or at least to retard its acceleration. After an interval, during which she concentrated as hard as she could on the ends of her feet, she was able to say in a muffled voice: “Descriptive mumble.”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “Hang on a bit.” She spread her hands and waved the fingertips vigorously. “You see, I knew you were still there. That’s a piss-weak line of argument and you ought to be ashamed of yourself. It’s illicit to slide from description to valuation. Most of Earth’s empires were based on unabashed slavery. Ours started that way. I don’t imagine you’d endorse that, structure or no structure. You like to see slavery?”

  The gene man roared with delight. “Of course I do. How else do you suppose a pre-industrial culture can get its resource-surplus to takeoff point? Not much fun for the slaves, I dare say, but quite essential in the big picture.”

  I won’t feel a thing, she thought. Or perhaps I’ll feel ten times as much as usual, and it’ll go up over the pain threshold. There seemed to be a circle of passive intellectual spectators gathered around them now, the last of the barely conscious.

  She moved over to the couch and leaned heavily against the sculptor. “Empire,” she told him, “is always the master-slave relationship of a coercive hegemonial state to the affinity-complexes under its dominion. The only justification for an empire comprising the entire universe is that such a structure permits the exercise of your damned predictions. If we all went our own way, your nice little trained bugs could bite each other’s bums from now until doomsday without—”

  “They’re not bugs, my dear, they’re memetic hypercycles. Tailored genes in a specified ecology. Surely you’re not denying that imperialism is the highest stage of socialism?”

  “Oh, I’ve no doubt you’re a good, flag-waving Leninist. But if you want to t
rade old saws, I can go you one better. Have you ever read any of the early proleptic poems by Asimov? Pre-diaspora, about two thousand years ago.”

  “Child, I make it a firm rule never to vid the classics. The only Asimov I’ve ever heard of is the fellow who directed the compilation of the rather arrogantly titled Asimov’s Encyclopedia Galactica.”

  “That’s his clone. I can’t see why you think it’s arrogant, he wrote the bloody thing.”

  The gene-sculptor jerked violently, and managed to get his hand up her skirt. “What, all five thousand volumes?”

  “Easy with those fingernails. Yes, he’s a demon for work, poor old bugger. There’s nothing much else for him to do, he was eighty-nine when they perfected the immortality process. If you’re interested, he has a retrospective called Opus 6000.”

  “I’m not. What was the point?”

  “The point was that the original Asimov was the first person to posit the sort of civilization we turned out to get. Most of the details were wrong, of course. He didn’t know about the Aorist Closure, so he figured we’d get around in spacecraft—you know, like the starwars the kids play. And his Empire only had about as many people as we’ve got inhabited planets.”

  “Those figures would have been pretty close to the mark a thousand years ago—”

  “But then your dear little bugs wouldn’t have had enough to go on, would they? Where he really screwed up, he thought a whole galaxy could be governed with one office clerk for every ten million people. The mind boggles. A neat little team of two thousand nine-to-fivers for each planet. Chariots, I’ve forgotten the important bit, and I only did the search on this with the kids last month. Here, how do you turn this thing on?”

  “Just talk to it. My dear, fascinating as all this is, I’m sorry I ever opened my mouth. Why don’t we just go—”

  “Hello, look I’m after a reference to a poem by, mark, Isaac Asimov, that’s uh A-Z-I-M-”

  A pop-up in the index was activated, and the machine began to bellow at her, “No, no, no, you benighted imbecile, it’s S! S! A-S-I-M—”

  §

  Just at the point where Theri was starting to entertain genuine qualms, of which she was notified by cramps in the stomach and coolness of the skin, Catsize admitted that there was almost certainly not the faintest chance of their being incinerated.

  “It’s been abandoned for decades, centuries more likely. There’ll be no one there except foddles and a few dull machines.”

  “What, they don’t care if you just whip up and nick some of their foddles?” Ben was scandalized.

  “Debased currency, my lad. You don’t suppose that they still pick the ruth out of foddle-shit, do you, molecule by molecule? They make it, you foolish fellow. Our recent host would be most offended if he thought you thought his thought, or his practise at any rate, wasn’t up to synthesizing the odd tonne of immortality promoter.”

  Now that the satellite was under them instead of in the sky, Theri saw that it was just the standardized crater-and-rill-scape of any other moon. Or was that dark stuff grass? In a single mind-eroding wrench the skite went across the gravity shear of the sanctuary mascon, and they were gusting aerodynamically down to the surface, with the bubble off and warm fake wind in their faces.

  “Well, why do they leave them here, then?”

  “Why not? Someone else put the gravity in, it’s all been amortized, the search for large-scale production of the fabled longevity secret proved to lie in a direction other than the voidings of foddles, and bureaucrats don’t like to be disturbed.”

  Catsize cut the field. The skite, its lights romantically if unnecessarily extinguished, thumped down to a halt.

  Two hundred meters away a vast red-box tree provided world-shade to the sleeping dollops around its trunk. Kael and Catsize dropped to the grass. Ben stumbled and swore. Reluctantly leaving her filament, Theri followed the pale flash of the knife.

  They ran across the grass away from her, bent over as low as possible, like an eidetic reconstruction of Kurd or Unilever. Whatever for, they’re not going to be mown down by lasers, might as well run completely upright.

  One old shag raising her head: the predatory horde freezing, kids playing statues. Three grown men with nothing better to do. The motherly shag, suspicious, coughing consumptively (the name of the ancient disease popping up from a hygiene inlay); fuzzy heads rising; knees creaking; the flock lumbering to its feet.

  “Bloody hell!”

  Foddles crepitated off in twos and threes, fat littles and old shags scattering to the limits of dim sight. The animals reformed at a safe distance, showing baleful pink eyes.

  Funny, Theri mused remotely, planetary populations were exterminated for possession of the mystery in the foddle gastrointestinal tract. Now the animals dozed in the weak light of a tourist world. Or these ones did. Or had.

  Ben sloped off to the north, if that was what it was, knife clutched purposefully. Kael and Theri waited beside the skite. At a signal from Catsize, all four moved to drive the beasts toward the gravity shear interface.

  The flock ambled to the invisible barrier and turned smartly left. Theri walked steadily on and glanced at Kael. Is he really so keen, she asked herself, to catch one? He’ll let it go after a face-saving struggle.

  A foddle broke from the shifting mass and started to canter, followed by two or three others. Kael threw himself at the hindmost shag, struck Theri as she sprang from her side, lost his grip, caught a leg and lay on the moon’s surface clutching a kicking foot. Theri took hold of the animal’s forelimbs and subdued it. Ten meters off, Catsize lay locked with a fat little.

  “Drop that stringy bundle of mange and lend a hand.”

  They released the frightened beast. By now Catsize was securely astride his little. Ben strolled up with the knife. In silence, all of them regarded the wide gray blade: its margin of sharpness, thinned at the point. A machine ideal in its consonance of form and function, though it was difficult to imagine what the gene sculptor used it for. Hacking up his vegetable protein, presumably. Ben handed the knife to Kael. Quickly, Kael put the blade to the little’s throat.

  “Not that way,” Catsize told him. “Drive the point in behind the windpipe and cut outwards. Two swift moves, the work of a moment.”

  Kael corrected his stance. Catsize held the foddle’s head firmly with both hands and tightened the pressure of his knees on its ribcage.

  The moment of truth prolonged itself.

  The foddle gave a pitiful bleat. Theri looked at the ground. In a few years, she told herself, the beast would die of its own accord. The longevity drug, ruth, latent in its body, afforded it no immortality. That was the staggering irony. She didn’t know if it made slaughtering the foddle more justifiable, or less.

  Without her particularly wanting it to, the relevant memory inlay disgorged an outline of the chemical process used to transmute foddle dung into life everlasting. It was closer to a benign infestation than a drug. For the host, the molecular outcome was a homeodynamic somatic equilibrium. Nothing changed except memory and aspiration. Destructive free radicals were obliterated before they could accumulate in cells and do their lethal work. Theri thought briefly of her revolutionary libertarian associates, and their relationship to the Imperial authorities, and smiled with a kind of suppressed fright at the analogy. She looked across to the trapped foddle, sensed the bodies of her friends caught in the immobility of terminal choice, breath held in their lungs, ready for release with the releasing of the creature’s blood.

  “Okay, Catsize. If you know so much about it, you do it.”

  Kael retired to stand beside Theri, putting his arm along her shoulder, but she stood closed again within herself and regarded the ground.

  “Damn it, I’m the pilot, not the bloody cook. Here.” The thing was proffered handle-first to Theri.

  Visions of lusty, contemptuous Anla. She’d take the knife and with clean efficient strokes cut the miserable creature’s neck, hand the limp, bloody carca
ss to her husband, walk off.

  “Not me, let it go.”

  Theri shifted her feet and looked at the sky. An edge of burning light on the world Newstralia. Clouds streaked the curve of its blue. She saw an elephant in one cloud-mass; in a minute it would be mounting the north pole.

  The situation had become altogether ridiculous; the buzz of the party was wearing off.

  “Well, let’s take it back to our little holiday home and work out how we’ll do it in the morning.” Compromise was Kael’s specialty.

  They straggled back to the skite, the foddle draped over Kael’s shoulders, all of them bearing their reprieved pride.

  §

  Beached and abandoned on the margins of sleep, Anla found once again that though many of her friends swore by this state of consciousness it had taken on for her the aspect of an anti-tsunami. Sleep’s enormous combers withdrew to the horizon without a glance over their shoulders. In the quarter gravity of the unlit sleeping chamber, excellent as it was for gymnastic screwing, or as presumably it would be given a competent partner, she was queasy and bored.

  Issues of metaphysical sturdiness came to her attention, as they’d been known to do, provisionally penned in the kennels to which she’d assigned them, whimpering for the final disposition she was fairly unlikely to make on their behalf.

  Morality was one. She was certainly no stranger to the problems of axiology.

  Lovely word, that. Axiology: theory of value. It seemed to contain its own solutions: axe your way through the Gordian knot, acts of piety, access to truth.

  Ralf was proving to be a snorer; she kicked him peevishly, and he rolled lightly on the webbing without waking.

  Why should Ralf’s profession seem to her so self-evidently odious, while he happily accepted it as the epitome of a right-thinking life? Calling him a dull shit, and adducing his ineptitude at fornication as ad hominem evidence, was hardly exhaustive, not to a midnight philosopher. Ah no, she’d been this way before. It kept coming back to that silly question: “Why should we be moral?”