Valencies: A Science Fiction Novel

by Damien Broderick

  Ben and William trailed up El Cheapo: a kick for the worrying dog, a hard stare for the clucking shopper. Human and foddle turned into the park.

  Placing his back against an alien piece of flora, and his buttocks in contact with dirt and grass, Ben paid out the line. Ecstatically, William lifted his tail and poured forth a little steam of the celebrated stuff of legend. Ben wished a large amount of it on his faithless wife’s head. Whore.

  From across the park an official was approaching officiously, park-keeper’s tricorn on his waxed hair, spiked stick of office in his hand, imperial guardian of public decorum.

  Oh Anla, you bitch, what would I be if I’d never met you? She had made him what he was, she and that lunatic Catsize; Anla, with her ideas and visions, Catsize with his thousand personae and half-crazed fantasies.

  Ben roused himself from melancholy to the task at hand. It had to be admitted that the uses of mindfuck was one of Catsize’s more valuable contributions to his entity.

  “You can’t have animals in this park.”

  “It only says dogs.”

  “Most people don’t have, what is it, foddles.”

  “That’s just the point, isn’t it?”

  “What?”

  “This is a foddle sanctuary. It says ‘No Dogs’ to protect the innocent littles and their defenseless shags.”

  “You trying to be funny, mate?”

  “It’s hardly a laughing matter.”

  “Bloody right.” The park-keeper spied the small steaming pile and stared at it in outrage. “Anyhow, what are you doing with a foddle? They’re a protected fauna.”

  This was more tricky; it was a point which had not occurred to Ben. “Precisely my point.”

  “Well, where did you get it?”

  Ben allowed his arm to rise slowly until his hand, with one finger extended, had subtended a full quadrant of the sky.

  “This foddle is normally resident in the special sanctuary allocated to its kind on the nearby moon, which you see up there. Oh, it must have gone down. Now, in order for the creatures to maintain their health and keep in good general overall nick, they are obliged to return at intervals to the bracing rigors of a gravitational field approximately equal in strength to the one in which their species evolved. It’s a sort of holiday for them.”

  “That’s as may be, mate, but what’s this one doing in my park?”

  Ben regarded the strangled outburst with astonishment. “But this is a travelling stock reserve.”

  “Don’t try to put one over on me, mate, this is a municipal park and I’ve been working for the council for eighty-seven years this July.”

  “Then I take it you’ll be acquainted with the Lands Appropriation and Uses Act of 2853 (amended 3102)?”

  “Eh?” The man drew back a step, suddenly wary.

  “The provisions of the Act make it mandatory and binding on all councils to provide a stopping place for livestock of not less than two hectares and such stock as are watered there are to be adequately protected at the council’s expense. You can look it up if you don’t believe me.”

  “What are ya, a high court judge or something?”

  “I have a working knowledge of the law and I cannot too strongly advise you not to molest my animal. This planet was built on foddle dung, you know.”

  The keeper muttered off, a temporary respite at least.

  Ben’s good humor collapsed. Rotten, rotten whore.

  §

  The ferry slid on its modest laminar lift-field over the darkening water, the vast squat tower of the Teleport Authority swinging astern behind the rail’s scrollwork, blotting out a distant section of twinkling affluence in Rose Red, the margins of dormitory bureaucracy.

  After the long day’s humid swelter, the harbor was finally cooling. Waves slipped dark and oily under the ferry’s bows. The clang and rush of an autonomic cleaner emptying its foaming tank from the stern of a loading surface freighter came sullenly through the soupy air.

  Theri leaned her head against Kael’s neck and smelt the sand and salt in his hair, her shoulders burning slightly under the weight of his arm.

  Turning, hoisting herself up on the rail, she let her head fall back until she was peering into the gray whistling vault of the sky. It was thick with skites, neatly tracking their beams, lofty empyrean godlings with no part or interest in the nautical sphere which she and Kael skimmed.

  “Do you suppose Anla will be back yet?”

  “Tomorrow’s more likely.”

  “What are we going to do with the foddle?”

  “Take it back to the moon, I suppose.”

  If we can’t even murder a foddle, Theri thought, what chance do we have against an Empire? But surely that was to look at the matter from the wrong end. Or was it? It was easy enough to predict sweet-and-gentle Kael’s view of the matter, but she would rather hear Anla’s.

  The ferry docked tidily above the softly slapping wavelets at the foot of El Cheapo Street. They jumped ashore before the gap between vessel and wharf had quite closed. The utterly minimal potential for self-destruction in this act did not prevent phobic groans and tuts from several of their presumably much older fellow passengers.

  As the ferry pulled away once more, three leatherlace vested goons at the distant top of the hill activated anti-friction shields and hurled themselves head first and belly down in its direction, providing more ghastly thrills for the cautious centenarians on board.

  One of these louts slammed past centimeters from Kael’s leg, hooting the while. There was some satisfaction in seeing him overshoot at the wharf, zip briefly across the filthy water, and sink like a stone.

  White petals of some nameless fragrant tree hung over the rented terrace’s fence. A skite of similar hue crunched down angrily opposite the tree.

  “The sculptormobile?”

  “Probably. Uh-huh.”

  Anla tripped lightly across the pavement and entered the house ahead of them. The skite rose jerkily, going whence it had come.

  At the foot of the hill, the body-skier’s helplessly guffawing companions were guiding out a buoy.

  §

  Anla, Ben and Catsize formed an engaging tableau in the kitchen. Ben glanced up from his diligent library-vidding to note the arrival of Kael and Theri, grunted a form of greeting, returned to his studies. This was clearly a more expansive welcome than his wife had been privileged to receive.

  Anla threw herself into a chair with resigned aplomb. “Hello, you two.”

  “Hello, Anla petal, come back to us have you?” Kael, trying his hand at banter. “Thought you’d run away, did you? Our little holiday home wasn’t good enough for you, is that it? And after all we’ve done for you, Working and slaving to give you some of the things we could never afford ourselves. That’s your way of showing gratitude, is it? But you come back smart enough when you want a good feed, don’t you?”

  Anla smiled blandly, while Ben concentrated on his library display with the intensity of a recluse; the atmosphere clung denser than ever. Blithely unaffected by her spouse’s rejection, the unease of her friends, Anla continued her placid chair-sitting.

  Catsize filled a vessel with milk, placed it squarely in the center of the kitchen floor, opened the back door. The foddle uttered a glad ejaculation and fell on the liquid, lapping like a dog.

  “What the hell’s that?’

  “Allow me to introduce Mr. William Wool, our dinner.”

  “Charioteers, you go away for a day and they turn the place into a zoo.”

  Catsize caught Theri’s eye, gave Kael the nod. The three enskited, off for a buzz or two in a public house, to find a party, to stay clear of the house for some time.

  §

  Anla put her feet on the table and considered her Ben. Were she to go to bed first he would sleep in his chair, but if he preceded her it would be beneath his dignity to allow anything so insignificant as his spouse to cause him to move.

  She watched his somber bearded face as he bent over th
e tiny dancing sigils. He seemed set for the night. She listened to the steady hum of the old clock. The tired hoot of some night-embarking craft rose from the harbor.

  Anla stood up and silently made a pot of tea, placing a mug at Ben’s elbow, and returned to her chair. Ben let the tea cool, abandoned the library at length and walked to the cold-field. He poured himself a tot of chilled milk, picked up a hardcopy of some Sinese poems Catsize had left lying around, sat down at the kitchen bench.

  Anla started to doze. She tried to keep herself awake by thinking of the gene-sculptor. A fool really, kept patting his hair into place, even while he was trying to keep his end up. Macromemes, indeed.

  Ben rose slowly from his chair and climbed the stairs to bed. Ralf had a lift-shaft, of course: one floated in it like a leaf. Anla looked at the clock: 0320, about bloody time too, give him half an hour. She was wretchedly tired.

  When she slipped into bed, Ben was so fast asleep that he didn’t move his legs to make room for her. The planet pulled unremittingly at her bones. Now that she’d become accustomed to Ralf’s quarter gravity bed, she craved its costly comfort.

  §

  Catsize galloped up the stairs in the hot morning and gave the door a healthy kick.

  “You two want any breakfast?”

  “I do, but not this bloody whore.”

  “Don’t call me whore, you bastard. I’ll come down for mine, Catsize.”

  The poet bowed low to the dumb worm-chewed door. “As Madame and Monsieur wish.”

  He tripped lightly to the kitchen and gave Kael and Theri the thumbs-up. “Contact between our friends has, I judge, been established.”

  4.

  On the last evening of their holiday, Anla sent them all out of the house, Ben included. When they returned with prime buzz, melancholy and self-satisfied in the floral sunset air, the kitchen sang with mouth-watering deliciousness.

  Anla sat them down, and fetched soft lights, and brought out to the table a steaming rack of foddle, all brown without and pink within and spiced with herbs. It was the finest food they’d ever eaten.

  §

  Well pleased by the macabre feast, Catsize took a constitutional stroll in the Newstralian darkness. Licking one finger, he meditated on the semiotics of the event, on its vile, unthinking, utterly representative sexism, and on the curious species of rebuttal, implicit in it, of just that prejudice.

  How monstrously hard, he thought, how unfair, to have to tote two millennia of baggage in your head. Yet all good and bad was, in any case, decaying, degrading, disintegrating; every small gain was a mockery of things ineluctably lost.

  The poet squinted at the botched constellations, fancying that he might pick out Chomsky’s star. But the anarchists were skittish tonight. Yes, locked behind their defenses. He had little hope for them; as little, perhaps, as they held for him.

  §

  In the night, Ben and Anla sat on the dock steps watching the faint glow of energized yacht sails. The tide brought a procession of emblems: a log, a torn foil, a dead fish. The belly of the fish took the foddle moon’s light like a skull. Ben kissed his wife gently, running his tongue over hers. She held him at bay for a lingering moment before responding electrically, forcing his head back, thrusting her hand into his kilt. Ben broke free, probing at his lip. Blood.

  She looked unblinking at his face. “Standing up against the wall.”

  “Yes,” he said. They tore at one another.

  PART TWO

  1.

  There was no frontier roughing-it about the Imperial Teleport Authority’s facilities on Newstralia, you had to give them that. From the moment he and Catsize and Kael had seen the others of their party off at the Women’s Departure Lounge, they’d been processed with the deft efficiency of bytes in a sublime computer. Nevertheless, the officially ordained segregation from his wife caused Ben to chew at his lip.

  So far as he knew there had never been a failure on the part of the ancient Aorist Discontinuity to deliver body and soul safely from star to star. Well, provided, of course, that you sensibly adhered to the vector limitations specified in your rating. Briefly, a horrid image of arriving at the far end of the universe, gaunt and asphyxiated and dead, caused Ben’s guts to contract.

  That was stupid, in turn, because you’d run out of breath long before you perished of starvation. But it was precisely such superstitious anxieties that made separation from your women, sorry Anla, woman, so difficult to bear. It couldn’t be helped that you had to go through the Aorist gate alone, but it was inhuman that you were prevented on inane and arbitrary grounds from holding your loved one’s hand (unless you were gay, and even then it was frowned on as tasteless) right up to the last moment.

  But you have to go through...nude! he jeered at himself in a Clan mother’s voice. After all, men and women can’t be allowed to mingle freely where they might glimpse each other’s...parts.

  He considered Catsize’s small, droll, bare-arsed figure moving ten meters ahead of him on the slipfield, undergoing the inexorable scrutiny and pre-transit operations with the panache of a seasoned voyager. Ben attempted the same complacency while the clever machines plumbed his genotype, re-rated him, injected him with the memory proteins constituting the address co-ordinates of Victoria in relation to Newstralia, totted up the fiscal credit in his Creditbank account and coded that as well, inlaying the balance after service fees to a region of his hypothalamus tied to his respiration reflexes and tagged with the autonomic “tamper-and-abort” sequence.

  Not a human face to be seen during the process; too slow, too vulnerable, too...human.

  Again, one could hardly complain. With several billion transits through any given planet’s gates each orthoyear, and only, what was it, 128 Charioteer discontinuity centers on the planet, some of them lost long ago to plate movements, and 1024 gates in each of them.... Ben’s fingers plucked uselessly for his library, but he’d surrendered that hired instrument minutes earlier.

  Anyway, it was no wonder they bunged you through at the rate of one every two minutes. What must it be like at one of the Imperial Bureaux worlds? What must it be like on bloody old Earth?

  A machine spoke to him firmly, and he gave it his clothes. The air, naturally, was pleasantly warm and its humidity and ionization were judged to a nicety.

  He slipped out of the realm of instruments into the spiral holding pattern, his sanitized seat moving forward through a huge crowd of naked, circling men toward the entrance to anywhere.

  “Excuse me, may I walk with you a little?”

  Ben looked up in alarm. “Get back to your seat, dickhead, you’ll screw up the whole entry sequence. You’ve probably already lost your place—they’ll send you back to the start and charge you an indemnity.”

  “Oh no, I’m not a voyager.” Above his earnest eyes, anchored in the supra-orbital bulge, twin rosy tendrils waved. His hairless skin was pale green, and furrowed at the brow. A spot of cosmetic genetics, and less grotesque than some Ben had seen. “Tell me,” the pseudo-alien said solicitously, “do you have an interest in the spiritual life?”

  There were several ways of coping with this. “What are you, a sex fiend? just because I’ve got no trousers on doesn’t— I’m not budging my backside off this seat for anything, see?”

  Green skin blushes to a kind of dirty brown, an engaging effect. “Bless me, brother, I assure you I have only spiritual matters to discuss. Since you are about to undergo the Sacramental Translocation—”

  It had been a lame opening. Ben changed his tack, watching the hundreds of heads and shoulders ahead of him glide closer to the place where space held hands with itself. “Yeah, sorry cobber, can’t be too careful. But now I see by your outfit that you are a Chao boy.”

  “Certainly not!” Indignantly, the green man drew several items from a bag. “You mistake me for a communicant of the dissident Illuminatus faction. My faith is the faith of the Ubiquitous Christ, shortly to return with his angels the Charioteers and bear witness
to the good tidings.”

  Ben rubbed dubiously at his chin, pondering these facts. “Well.... Can’t say that I agree, can’t say I don’t neither. Wasn’t He supposed to come again in the year 4000?”

  “No, no, a common misconception,” the missionary said, without altering his lugubrious expression. “The date set down—and you’ll find that this is confirmed by leading scientists—is 4004 AD, at eight p.m. on October 22. Mere months away! Will you be with him, brother?”

  Ah Catsize, he should have chosen you. “Sir, you come close to persuading me. On the other hand—” Ben pulled judiciously at his lower lip.

  “Glory be, brother, the evidence is abundant.” The advocate of Christ Charioteer propped an unfolded holo against his chest and expounded glumly. “The teachings of our founder, the Sainted Irving Macher, in his scriptures Blinkie Heaven—”

  “What faith is that again?”

  “The Church of the Lost Tribes of Enoch in Britain, Earth,” the apostle declared with rapturous gloom. “As you can see, by utilizing the ancient wisdom of Gematria and Logomancy, the great Truths become instantly apparent.” In racy cerise script, the word CHARIOTEERS sparkled on his display. “Let me ask you this one question, brother. Is it a mere accident that the ancient and vanished race which built the Teleport network linked into it only those planets in this wide starry universe which are sufficiently like our home world to support human life unaided? Is it no more than a cosmic fluke that J. Peter White the great anthropologist stumbled on the first known Aorist Discontinuity while studying little known mysteries of the past? At the very moment in Humankind’s troubled history that population pressures were driving our species to the edge of extinction? Can you imagine, with your feeble mind—”

  “Here, steady on.”