Valencies: A Science Fiction Novel

by Damien Broderick

  The slide-field seized him and bore him into the light. A factory line of naked men. Catsize, still one jump ahead of him, turned and gave a cheerful wink. Ben found himself smiling. What did he really have to worry about, after all? Only the perpetual crisis of his marriage and the insurgent undermining of an absolutely entrenched empire.

  Ben pursed his lips and whistled an illegal melody.

  PART THREE

  Theri jumped to the ground, waved thanks to her casual lift, picked her way through the drifting crowd to the pavement. Her hair blew past her eyes and she gathered it together, running her hand along the back of her neck, and tucked it under the collar of her fur. Cold night for seditious talk. She turned and walked quickly towards the Death Shop.

  Ris was sitting gingerly on the radiation-hungry floor of her shop, right hand fighting a pitched battle with the Left Alternative.

  Above the racks of defensive guns, holos of mortal heroes looked down, twice as large as death: geneborne eidetics of a score of recent Imperial actions. Thoroughly ambiguous works. There was nothing to tell the impartial observer which side you were cheering.

  Ris glanced up as Theri entered the windowless shop. On the chilly surface the Alternative was fighting back, its teeth scraping the besieged wrist, little needle teeth going for the skygrey veins, raccoon ringed tail thrashing the floor. Ris stood up, scooping the Alternative from its battle ground and threw it across the shop.

  The grundle gave a convulsive twist and homed in on Theri, all claws extended, found purchase on the vertical wall of her fur jacket and scrambled to her shoulder. Theri put her hand up and stroked the Alternative’s filmy ears. An impression of gravel being shoveled into a bucket came from the grundle.

  “Hello Ris, Kael here yet?”

  “Underneath with Anla.”

  Theri propped on a container-cell table covered with pheromone repellents. The Alternative jumped from her shoulder to the trestle, bounded to the floor and scuttled across the dense mat to ambush his halfbrother, Madam Brown, asleep on a stool. Madam Brown retaliated with spirit. The Alternative leapt for a display of force-filters and made a soaring bound to a shelf of sonic grenades. Madam Brown followed, centimeters behind. The Alternative came to an abrupt halt as the shelf ended in a solid upright, and turned, trapped with its tail to the wall. Madam Brown sprang: a fierceness of teeth and claws fell to the floor, together with a flat, blister-sealed spybeam heterodyner.

  “All bundles out! Now!”

  The animals made a dash for the door at the rear of the shop. Ris replaced the communications hazard and followed her grundles into the domestic realm.

  Theri remained on the honeycombed table and considered the meeting scheduled in the cellar beneath her feet. She and Kael were, at best, fringe members of the Revolutionary Alliance, a group composed mainly of tertiaries, a few educers and junior academics, the entire “North Thing Street True Leninist Revolutionary Commune”, and a couple of multicentenarians. The only enthusiastic member she and Kael knew well was Anla.

  In private, Kael expressed a faint, slightly patronizing contempt for the narrowness of vision of the other militants. “What exactly do they think life would really be like in their postrevolutionary universe, what do they think the fall of the Empire would enable people to be?” he had asked Theri once.

  Even more privately, Theri agreed that the cant of the militants lacked on the whole any undercurrent of human kindness and joy in life, but Kael’s mothersmilk love of peace and quiet repelled her equally.

  It was really only Anla, articulate and scornful, who seemed to Theri to combine anything approaching a genuine lust for the richness of life with a proper contempt for those who would smother life in its cradle. She envied Anla her fiery words as much as she resented the ease with which her friend slid into the bed of whoever wanted her.

  Theri rarely spoke at these meetings although her attendance was far more regular than Kael’s. When he did turn up, Kael would say his cool rational piece and leave early, walking home alone. She would return to their apt, having said nothing all evening, but full of political purpose, to find Kael vidding in bed and far more interested in talking about the latest quasar expedition than the creation of post-imperialist consciousness.

  Sitting on the table of faux-weapons, Theri resolved to say something at the coming meeting, to clash with Anla, openly and publicly, if only for the good of her self-respect. Anla, after all, would be sure to say something debatable.

  The bolt-door in the corner cycled slowly open and Anla, Kael and a couple of other fraternals emerged from the cellar. She joined their number, and they made for the Sinese-style restaurant around the corner.

  §

  They returned to find Catsize trying to sell a soft bomb to two yobos in wire trousers and simulated shrunken skulls. Ben, Ris and a few others were scattered around the shop, ostensibly examining armaments from the shelves.

  “Listen, zinger, Unarmed Love Defense is recommended for centies who are either amputees or promiscuous, but soft detonation is where it’s at when it comes to neo-transmortal transfiguration and the conservation of souls. Zinger, it’s freezy.” Catsize’s voice was super-freezy. “It’s on a lateral meaning-plane. It’s sidewise, zinger, parallel.”

  The boy in blue wire looked doubtfully at the proffered sub-lethal and turned to his companion:

  “Wha’ d’ yer reckon?”

  Green wire reached over and took the bomb, armed it without enthusiasm. “What if it goes off by accident and hurts you?”

  Catsize regarded him with amazement. “What, a dangerous bomb? Do you think the Imperial police would permit the free sale of anything so tasteless? No, my son, these weapons are all guaranteed hyperstable. See, it says here on the side, it can be activated only by the malicious EEG intention waves of a would-be assailant or traitor. The defense of the individual is the defense of the State, you know.”

  Green wire turned to blue wire:

  “Wha’ d’ yer reckon?”

  “Maybe we ought to ask the Oracle.”

  They bent over a library, looked up in dismay. “Hey, zing, what the fuck?”

  Catsize glanced quickly at Ris, who shrugged.

  “Sorry, zinger, the shop is shielded. What’s your sign?”

  “Taurus.”

  “Taurus eh? You wouldn’t want to hesitate too long, zinger. Like things can get pretty nasty for Taurans that pissfart about. No bull, zing.”

  Anla groaned under her breath; Kael picked up a grundle and buried his face in its fur. Blue wire shot a suspicious glance around the shop, catching the half-controlled grins.

  “Yeah, well, we’ll access the Oracle someplace else, zing.”

  “You do that, zotter.” Catsize conceded defeat, taking the bomb back and disarming it. He added a contemplative parting shot: “I knew a Taurus who pissfarted around once...he’s in cryo, now, freezy Deadsville.”

  The two uneasy customers left the toy shop, mumbling goodbyes. Catsize gave the sub-lethal back to Ris:

  “What we need in this place are a few skulls and body-skis and good-luck charms, instead of all these psychodynamically approved hostility vectors. Frankly, I thought they looked a bit old for this sort of thing anyway.”

  §

  After Theri and the others had gone down into the cellar, and Catsize had made off on some private mission, Kael sat by himself for a while in Ris’s living area.

  Painstakingly, he sought the pressure seams on a mobile energy gun. Its packaging declared it a ninety thousand cycle unit, fitted with the standard ethical circuits permitting it to fire only in self defense.

  A tantalizing problem in volitional psychology, that. How would such a thing be proof against a sociopath or, say, the generalized pre-emptive attack of self-protective paranoia? His fingers probed at its barrel without conscious direction.

  More to the point, why do the Imperial psychodynamicians consider such a sales pitch desirable in hostility toys?

  Surely the aim
was to cathartize improper impulses through fantasized enactment. And most violent impulses were improper precisely in the degree to which you wished to inflict undeserved punishment on the innocent, or at any rate to act aggressively beyond the limits established socially as your role.

  So the rubric constituted a piece of denial, of repression, embedded in the very tool of displacement. Hardly made much sense, on the face of it.

  There was a tiny click; the toy’s indicator lights died, and Kael’s fingers found a crevice in the plast surface.

  That was the point, though, wasn’t it: none of these vectors were self-evident until you’d studied the field in depth. Manipulative psychology was simply too vast, its principles too arcane, to find expression in intuitively satisfying tags and slogans.

  The toy slipped apart with a dry pop. Its molded hull was hollow. Oh you fools, I know e = mc2, but you’ve left the m out. I’m a dead duck.

  Voices rose from the open bolt-door, arguing as usual over priorities and first principles. Kael stopped sniggering at his own joke and rested his head tiredly on his arms.

  Why had he bothered to come? To keep Theri company? To prove something to Anla? Because of some genuine conviction?

  I have a passionate concern for freedom, he told himself, but the Revolutionary Alliance hardly seems the tool for battering down the Empire’s colossal gates. If we counted for anything they would have closed us down long ago, dispersed us to planets right across the sky. Not for the first time it occurred to Kael that the local authorities tolerated meetings of this kind on the same grounds that they encouraged the sale of hostility toys. Yet that was the final gamble one must take: that freedom was not wholly gone, that thought and action were not utterly impotent.

  Listen to the silly buggers. How much history do any of them know?

  Lonek has been through the fire, but did the horror of confrontation leave him with anything more than trauma, desperate courage and a good deal more respect for the enemy than the rest can muster?

  Kael’s mouth moved in self-irony. My training as an educer has made a prig of me.

  He did not really believe that.

  He sat up and began reassembling the energy gun. Putting the toy together again was more difficult than taking it apart. How do you take an Empire apart? A trillion trillion feedbacks, incomprehensibly redundant, self-rectifying, updating itself on the basis of mutating bug projections.

  I’d start by giving these buggers a lecture on how we got where we are. All they have, most of them, is post-adolescent misery and scraps of ideology. Their heads are stuffed with data-peptides and no one is asking them the right questions to get the facts out and structured into consciousness. Put any number of discrete inquiries to them and the figures’ll pop out, but they add them together with all the dexterity and intellectual command of infants juggling bright blocks.

  Kael pulled out his library and did some sums. Well folks, it’s now 3528 orthoyears since the fall of the Roman Empire, if you count the transfer of formal sovereignty from west to east as the clincher. Stout work, Odoacer.

  The British Empire fell apart 2057 years ago, and the Russian Empire got the coup de grâce 2015 years back. Then there were the Americans and the Sinese and the Nihonese and so forth.

  Fell my arse. Civilizations transform, they don’t fall.

  Technology and ecology corrode them, inflation and taxes and military adventures and polygenic infusions warp and buckle their structures, macromemes mutate and radiate explosively, classes rise to pre-eminence and their power wanes, and the only way to graph it all is on parameters of your own choosing. Flip the axes through 180 degrees and change the signs and a pitiable decline becomes a heartening climb.

  Is that all bullshit? Liberty is the only yardstick: autonomy for the individual and his or her chosen affinity group.

  Sophomore ethics—is the starving, uneducated freeman freer than the well-fed, cultivated slave? The bushman in his multiplex, stationary society or the wage-earner trapped to narrow skills in a tremendous high-energy culture?

  Members of the Revolutionary Alliance: We live and have our immortal being in a stupefyingly complex civilization born from the dialectic collision of two realities—a technocratic order incapable of coping with the consequences of exponential growth, and the Aorist Closure, gift of the unknowable Charioteers.

  You there with the gold hair: what was the first impact of the opening of the Teleport Gates?

  Uh, all the dissidents and special interest affiliates and competing nations and all that pissed off, didn’t they? Grabbed their piece of real-estate in the sky and sought the meaning of freedom after their own lights?

  Wrong! Check his peptide stock, doctor, I think the memory molecules must be destabilizing.

  But sensei, isn’t that what we learned in civic—

  Very likely, but if you’d think a bit instead of vomiting up the glib drivel they pump in, you’d see the holes in that little fairy tale in about a minute and a half. And aren’t you forgetting our little fuzzy friends?

  Our little- Oh, you mean foddles. The longevity drug! Oh well, if it hadn’t been for the Charioteers leaving foddles scattered from hell to breakfast I don’t suppose we’d have developed immortality with the technol—

  Exactly. The Diaspora would have gone ahead, because those people were choking on their own garbage, but it would have been conducted as a fascist operation only one degree less appalling than global nuclear war.

  But sensei, I thought you were arguing against the Empire?

  Indeed I am, but there are levels of coercion. With the isolation of the ruth antimorts, people could be bribed to leave Earth for worlds lacking even the most primitive elements of civilization. Had the Aorist Closure permitted the transportation of anything but mammals high up the phylogenetic tree, matters might have been even more liberal.

  It was obvious that Earth would be the industrial base to the universe for centuries, before the first colonies got from root-grubbing to integrated circuits, but the prohibition on transporting armed troops insured that central control got structured in right from the word go.

  Sensei, you’ve lost me.

  All right, my dear, I’ll try not to tax your tiny brain too much.

  You don’t talk like that to the girls.

  Look, Fred, just keep your ears wide and your mouth sealed.

  Kael shook his head in the empty room. This was no way for a diploma’d educer to conduct a fantasy. Draw the knowledge out, show don’t tell, and so forth.

  As usual, the complexity of it all defeated him. He doodled on his library, sketching flow charts and expunging them as the lines looped into meaningless scribble. The voices from the boltdoor were droning on.

  Where the hell did you start? With “human nature”? The drive-to-power of authoritarian personalities?

  Neither of these, for they were contingent, mutable before the demands of each culture. It wasn’t that certain men or women were obsessed innately by the lure of outrageous authority; rather, technologically stratified cultures required it. Tribal hunter-gatherers had the same genes, but, since disproportionate power could serve no end, those with a lust for it were contained by their peers.

  Should you start, then, with the imperatives of technology?

  Certainly the ruling elites and their advisers had been quick off the mark, all those long twenty centuries ago. Lacking memetic analog proleptics, they had possessed nevertheless the formidable instruments of linear programming, catastrophe and complexity theory, hard computers capable of running elementary trends. Resource scarcity had already hurled them into supranational rationality, the long view of technological monopoly.

  When the Aorist Closures had been found, they had seen swiftly enough that the flight to freedom could not be countenanced.

  Let the last Aborigines of central Australia pass naked to the world of their choice, en masse, and that world was lost to technological civilization. No matter that worlds beyond counting waited out
there: in a few thousand years they would be filled, and the Dreamtime planet would have been long since barricaded. The poisoned flour and diseased blankets of an earlier century’s empire could no longer be relied upon, because the appalling mechanism of the Closure edited out the viruses carried by its passengers.

  And thank Good Reason for that! It could hardly be otherwise, of course. Kael’s mind cringed, briefly imaging a universe of slightly differing ecologies, each world with its feculent viral and bacterial pests linked by virtually instantaneous doorways. No inbuilt barrier to disease. Cosmic epidemic.

  Some specialists theorized that the Charioteers had perished that way, slain by some gene-embedded virus too subtle for even their puissant defenses. If it ever happened to humanity, those theorists would have little time to enjoy the validation of their conjecture.

  Yet those ancient bureaucrats, two millennia ago, had foreseen all this; it was difficult not to admire them.

  An army could penetrate a world’s perimeters, but it would be an army barehanded and bare arsed. If weapons awaited them at their destination, yes.... Guerrilla warfare, covert munitions works.

  Viruses could be carried, but only in fragmentary form, coded as introns into genes by sculptors, neutral and harmless until respliced and reborn in a genomics laboratory.

  A world of several million tribal Aboriginals, deliberately and coolly eschewing machines, barren of laboratories, could be defended by a ring of fire and spears around each Aorist locus. To the bureaucrats and their wealthy masters, that possibility was intolerable and abhorrent; when the Earth’s population was bribed to the stars with immortality, it went in fragments of fragments.

  Each Million held a hundred or a thousand dissidents, families shattered from their tribes, ideologists thrown among their enemies. And in the back-breaking labor of opening a universe, the seeds of autonomy were smashed, ten thousand years of history obliterated.

  New coalitions had emerged, of course: the Clans, linking real and imagined heraldries in a fraternal masonry of transgalactic scale. Others, defused by overlays of real and imposed memory, had been permitted to reform.