Valencies: A Science Fiction Novel
Page 6
The long, sad Latin words rose and fell; another couple entered the room; a girl came and went from the kitchen bearing bowls and sticks that she left piled on a low table. A flask of red wine circulated. So they have grapes on Newstralia too.
Ben passed it to Julia; he didn’t have a glass and anyway he didn’t like liquid intoxicants. He noticed Anla leave for the kitchen. She came back with a glass, filled it and handed it to him.
Knees to her chin she sat on the cushion, hands around her glass as if it were a fruit she was squeezing. Ben relaxed, happy to sip at the wine she had brought him, happy that she was content to sit silently beside him. The traumatic day had all but dehydrated him.
How many of these people actually lived here? It struck him as a bizarre parody of the Clanhouse. The monks switched themselves off as the girl from the kitchen fetched a huge dish of curry to the table.
They ate more or less in silence. Red ruff, who had the air of chief inhabitant, finished his meal and made for the door. As he passed their cushion he said in a matter of fact tone, “There’s a spare bed in the room on the stairs.”
A bed, one bed. Did these people think he was sleeping with Anla? Should he explain that he’d only just met her? That would be best, he’d do that at the first opportunity.
No, better leave it to Anla, they were her friends.
Then, like a blow in the stomach: did Anla expect him to sleep with her, to make love to her?
He glanced sideways. Joking across the room with the girl who’d cooked the meal, she was finishing the last of her vegetable curry. How old was she? Without her eyes it was impossible to guess. A couple of years or a couple of centuries?
The really elderly ones sometimes went this way, he’d heard. Long past conscription to their Million, tired finally of the rigors of settling a raw untouched world and bearing children and building cities and starting industry and watching their kids and the kids of the kids of their kids booted out to open up other worlds again, they tore up their roots and became wanderers.
Exhaustion took him by the throat; he’d had about four hours sleep in the desert and then been hurled into circadian lurch. Could he plead tiredness and find some neutral place to lie down and sleep in? That would solve the problem of Anla as well.
But someone suggested a pub.
§
Suspended up here in the crystal clarity of Aorist no-time, he remembers walking in a group to the pub which stood in a mess of decaying plast domes and even older stone and durobond dwellings. Incredible noise. Anla buying him a buzz, him trying to pay for it, fumbling for his library. Very clearly he remembers Anla laughing at him. “Don’t be so bloody clannish.”
Did she mean obsessively responsible?
Lots of talk about somebody’s exhibition and somebody’s muse. Buzz synergized alcohol; unsteady on his feet he looked for somewhere to sit down; all occupied. Everyone standing and shouting at each other. He felt nauseated.
Everyone pouring at once, without warning, into the cool night air.
He recovered slightly; Anla had her arm around his waist. A skite fell from the sky. Sitting in the front with Anla on his lap, his arm around her, his hand on her thigh. The skite was overloaded with human flesh. The bubble was off and wind blew against his face.
Anla rested her head against his shoulder and the cool curve of her helmet pressed his cheek. He suddenly remembered something a mother had told him: drug addicts affected transduction helmets to disguise the fact that their eyeballs swell up. Or did they need them because their optic pathways had burnt out?
Chariots, she was a junkie! They were going to hear someone playing zam. Everyone knows zam players are all wireheads, it goes with the music.
He tried to reach up to wrench the thing off her head but she twisted in his lap and kissed him full on the mouth. Oh Jin! He felt startled and sick. She was sitting on his bladder and he wanted to piss.
They passed the scene of an accident: two crumpled skites embedded in a high rise roof. One rested upside down, its liftcoil in the air—a squat little animal, bloated in death.
It was impossible, didn’t these maniacs use multiple autonomics? A stochastic universe: somewhere, eventually, even all the time, everything fails at once.
Lights pulsed: red from the cryoteam, blue from the cop skites.
Central routing took them past the catastrophe in a wide curve, but Ben had time to see the frost-smoking vault of the ambulance close on a bright, clinical tableau.
§
They sat in the zam club drinking more alcohol. The discordant music was very loud, and heavy in the subsonics, and the olfaction specialist was a fat man with sweat running down his face.
And that is all he can remember, even in the chilled light of the Aorist Discontinuity. Memory proteins scrambled.
§
What happened that night? In the week that followed, and in the intervening years, Ben has often thought about it. Sometimes he’s almost brought himself to ask Anla, but for some reason he has always remained silent.
I woke in bright sunlight. No polarization: it blasted my eyes.
Ben turned over. He was lying on a filament on a bare durobond floor in the incessant glare. He was naked. Someone lay next to him. She was naked as well.
Lenin, he was lying naked on a sleeping filament next to a naked woman!
He looked at her face; he’d never seen her before.
Yes he had, it was the girl he’d met yesterday, Anla, but without the sensory helmet. Holding his head in his hands, Ben groaned quietly to himself.
The girl Anla lay on the marble-veined inflated filament, dead to the world. He looked at her for some time, seeing through his nausea the way her breasts swelled slightly to each side. He put his hand over her near breast. It was much softer than he had expected, softer than Jin’s or Soo’s, but then he realized that there had always been, except for that ultimate grope, at least two layers of clothing between him and his fiancées.
Anla stirred and he felt her nipple fill under his palm. Then saliva was running down his throat and the contents of his stomach were rising to meet it.
The experience was unspeakably shocking. He had never been ill in his life, nor had anyone he’d ever met, except maybe the poor bloody ethyl-drinker with the ruth immunity. Ben got to his feet, almost fell over as the blood drained from his head, staggered and made it to the door.
He was on a landing—static stairs going up, stairs going down. He half fell down the stairs, blundered along the passage, guts heaving, degraded, charged through a room, through a kitchen and into the open air.
Again the sun blasting down, hotter than Victoria’s glacial star. His whole body was betrayed by nausea and he threw up on the sparse brown grass. Some of it, bitter and stinging, went up his nose.
He fell to his knees, head in hands and guts spasming. For some minutes he knelt like that, eyes closed, the taste of yellow muck in his mouth.
When he knew that the final outflow was done, that his stomach contained nothing more, he crawled away and cowered, feeling slightly better. Ruth would heal it, but the repair process would take time.
Dully, he realized that he was naked. He forced himself to take stock: only the back garden. Not that he’d have cared much, truth be told, if it had been the middle of the People’s Plaza.
A non-recyclable towel hung in the sunlight. He wrapped it around himself to cover his knowledge, and lay on the grass, a fallen innocent in a strange garden.
§
Or was I? Had I fucked Anla that night or was I so drunk I’d flaked out a virgin yet? Or had the wine, the tranks and fatigue rendered me impotent, the spirit but not the flesh?
§
Ben lay a long time in the garden. The sunlight seemed to lessen until it was just warmth defining the surface of his body. Still in red ruff, the man from last night found him, spoke gruff, friendly words of commiseration, and shot something into his neck. His skull was full of furious helium atoms. He slept.
Despite the helmet, Ben thought he detected a gentle irony in her smile; it was hard to be sure, and it took a few seconds for the colors to come right in his blinking eyes. When she spoke it was softly-tenderly, he thought.
“Feeling better?”
“Much.”
“Can I get you anything?”
“Wonderful.”
“Coffee?”
“Thank you.”
“A boiled egg? They only have nightingsnail spawn.”
Even this failed to revive his nausea. “I’ll try.”
“Keep your eye on my axe.” Anla rose slowly and walked towards the terrace. Sun in the leaves of a curious tree filtered through in a subdued, vagrant pattern. Anla returned with a pair of black, rubbery, glistening eggs, and two mugs of some hot beverage. It didn’t taste much like coffee.
“What’s the time?”
“Early afternoon, I imagine.”
After a while he stood up and found his way back to the room’s deflated filament, pulled on his hired garments over fresh paper underwear from a dispenser, and went back down to Anla.
They took a walk, demurely holding hands, and answered one another’s questions. Ben was nineteen; he’d been at tertiary for a year, inlaying and educing data genetics. He planned to specialize in econics. He lived with his clan-kin, and was pledged to marry a handful of nonentities.
Anla, to his surprise, was only a year older. She was training to be an educer, and would finish next year. She did not live with her parents; indeed, strictly speaking, she had never had any. She was neither fucking nor not-fucking anyone in particular.
They both lived in Bolte, the major conurbation on Victoria. Anla said Bolte was the arse-hole of the universe. Ben said it probably wasn’t as lively as Trantor, the world of her birth. Anla laughed. “A planet where puns are considered by law the highest form of human activity. It was founded by a Million under the philosophic guidance of that old poet, what’s his name?”
Ben didn’t have a clue. He had never even heard of the relevant galaxy.
“It’s named after an imaginary place in some ancient poem the guy wrote.” She shrugged.
Anla spoke of her clone, talking about him with a detached narrative air, as one might describe a well-meaning but slightly naive character in a play one had taken in some time ago.
Her clone had met her X-donor on Trantor during an Imperial guerrilla police action. Anla had been grown there. The woman had stayed when Jard was Millioned.
These days the deportation draft wasn’t such a hassle, she said. Ben knew that much; a century ago they’d run out of authentic frontier worlds where you had to start from scratch. The entire universe’s stock of Earthlike worlds was now settled by humans.
Her clone taught Language at the creative level, had composed a couple of huge Bankable poems in the eighties, and he’d been working on another one for the past fifteen orthoyears.
“It’s about the fall of Estrildinae, he’s been living the Trantor thing ever since,” Anla said. “He left the Movement in eighty-seven of course.”
Which Movement, Ben wondered, why in eighty-seven, who was Estrildinae?
§
In the bay a couple of dozen pleasure boats hung listlessly on magnetic beams, and further out a line of racing skiffs made the best use they could of the meager breezes available. Ben had never seen externally powered craft before, and the sight appalled him; it brought back images of the broken skites and the dead, frozen bodies.
A small park curved to the water. Anla and Ben sat on the grass, and his fears retreated. After a while they lay and kissed.
At the Arab restaurant Anla knew, she ordered highly spiced food they ate with their fingers. Ben wasn’t sure that he liked it, but he said nothing. They walked back to the terrace through twilight; no one was home.
§
For the first time I can remember I made love. It was better than I’d imagined it would be, more sweat and smells, altogether more effort and less spiritual adventure.
Those cant words spiritual adventure had occupied an honored place in his private world. No longer.
For five days and nights (longer than on Victoria, and more exhausting) Anla and Ben did little more than wander amid alien familiarity and screw each other in the room off the landing. On the sixth day Anla teleported back to Bolte and Ben trudged to the Griffith ziggurat.
§
Aunts and uncles on detail fed him cakes and cookies and gave him a bed in the unmarried youths’ dormitory, where the rough companionship was the same as ever and the odor of farts hung on the air and Anla was a galaxy away.
The front office arranged a seat at the all-live musical, and three sexless motherly souls rode with him up a lift-shaft to the top of a monstrous spire so that he might marvel at the splendor of the city below.
His new buddies pumped him for the dope on hot little pieces on Victoria and what your chances were, and offered to suck his cock on a turn and turn about basis, but he was through with all that, corroded inside.
Representatives of Clan Griffith expressed disappointment that he could stay on Newstralia only two days; there was, they assured him, much of an educational nature to see and do. They dispatched him to the Teleport in a clan skite, and charged him nothing for the entire treat. Families have to stick together, that’s what they’re for. None of this touched more than the surface of Ben’s being. Soon he would be with her again.
Anla, Anla, Anla, oh Charioteers, Anla, I loved you then.
§
In Bolte, Ben had the tissues of his brain stuffed with more knowledge. He moved out of the Clanhouse and went to live with Anla. His parents all disowned him. Jin cried and said he had become a disgusting pervert. He was late getting his memetic bugs to breed and they mutated into nonsense. He asked Anla to marry him on a pair-bond basis. She laughed a lot but agreed quite happily, agreeing with Jin and finding the notion delightfully perverse.
Of Anla’s friends the two he liked most, the ones they saw most frequently, were Theri and Kael, also at tertiary, also living a deux. Kael’s parents were a troika, whom he described as “white liberals”. Theri’s were an unfashionable couple, bound by maniacal doctrinal tenets.
The threesome, medicos with a joint practice in one of the more affluent subzones, didn’t exactly delight in their son spending his student days in co-habitation with Theri but certainly didn’t object. “Heterosexuality is something you have to work out of your system,” one of his fathers had told him tolerantly, and they backed their judgement by supplying him with generous handouts of credit to supplement his baby grant.
The sole source of friction was Kael’s refusal to educe medicine, plainly the only possible road to status and professional security. They viewed the study of galactic history in much the same light as the study of basket weaving.
Taking no chances, though, they insisted on removing the operative portions of Theri’s gonads and putting them on ice, a fact that would have incensed her Christer-revival tech father had he been capable of facing the fact that his daughter was living with Kael in the first place.
The fiction existed that Theri dwelled with two other girls in a purdah block (as she had done, in fact, for the first six weeks after leaving her nuclear nest). Her father never visited his daughter’s alleged place of residence, run by a cynical old bird who took her exchange-value where she found it; there, uneasily, the matter rested.
Shortly after Ben and Anla had started living together, a few months before they were formally pair-bonded, all four had spent a couple of days with Anla’s clone. Ben had been apprehensive about meeting Jard. Confronting the man with whose female replica you are living i
n sin was not, he told himself, everybody’s idea of a merry outing.
When they reached Jard’s home—a hundred klicks or so from Bolte and almost engulfed by the uncleared scrub that covered the side of the gully—there was Sofy, no older than Anla and talking about the baby she and Jard did, in fact, conceive almost two years later.
To Ben’s surprise, Jard looked nothing like Anla; it would take months before he recognized that they looked exactly alike.
Jard’s soirees were relaxed, languid and full of food and buzz. The indeterminate number of house guests drifted around between meals, occasionally extending themselves to scenic walks, or swimming in the creek at the bottom of the gully.
Jard had been pleased to see Anla, although he seemed to have little idea of what she’d been doing for the last three months. He wasn’t sure if she was still taking inlays or had started educing others. He told Ben that if the Imperial guerrillas had been as well armed as the insurgents they would have won in half an orthoyear. Ben wasn’t perfectly certain of the moral embedded in this estimate, or even which police action Jard had in mind. There were so many, bubbles in the stochastic stew.
On the first afternoon, Jard proposed building a bridge over the creek. There existed a perfectly serviceable series of stepping stones, but Jard thought a proper log bridge would be handy in times of flood.
They cut down the biggest tree they could find, taking turns with an underpowered laser, everyone having a go except Sofy, who had remained in the house.
Those not burning sat under the trees fixing. Jard had an unlimited supply of buzz. There was a lot of high-level discussion about the way the tree would eventually fall: people drawing diagrams on their libraries of tree-trunks with bits burnt out of them, calling up recondite functions, modeling vectors, making allowance for those movements in the top boughs attributable to the alien intelligent life-forms held by common agreement to be hiding from humanity on Victoria, and for any abrupt Milankovic reversals in the ice caps.