Valencies: A Science Fiction Novel

by Damien Broderick

  “Theri, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to sound so—”

  “Oh Christ, so now you’ll get all contrite and conciliatory so you can win me back to your...to your soft little peptide world where everyone is so sane and sensible, just how you’d like them to be, and nobody upsets you because they all behave as you’d like them to behave.”

  Theri had sniffed, suddenly, violently. She was going to cry. A man with a pet on a leash walked toward them, staring at Theri as he passed, smug half-concealed glee on his face. Nothing like a domestic scene in the common to liven up a drab evening. Kael felt like punching the man’s head in.

  A commuter’s skite had dropped down to the common. Theri stepped quickly across the grass, holding up her winking library. Kael thought he recognized the same smug, vicarious grin on the half-seen pilot’s lips.

  Theri clambered in; she twisted into a spare web, looking at the far side of the common, her hair completely shielding her face. The skite rose swiftly, its lift-coil glowing, and re-entered its flight corridor.

  Kael had started to tear at the grass with his toe. Instead, he’d sworn and begun to walk home alone.

  §

  Thinking about that episode now, trudging through rain and wind, Kael suddenly recalled the moment when Theri had started to speak in the meeting. Had he stifled her, cut her off, at the very moment when she needed encouragement most?

  But the dialectic of the meeting had been poised at a delicate turning. It had been necessary to place Anla’s simplistic emotional challenge in some sore of realistic perspective.

  Ah, fuck it. Fuck it all.

  §

  He was awake, lying in their squeaking bed, when Theri arrived at 0300 in the morning. She entered the bedroom without activating the lights. Kael heard her taking her heavy clothes off, quickly but without haste. She slid into bed and lay with her back to him.

  “Where have you been?”

  “You could have asked my library.”

  “Yes, but I didn’t.”

  “Talking to Catsize.”

  Her voice was friendly and relaxed. Kael put a hand on her shoulder. She resisted the pressure for a second, then turned quickly, kissed him on his mouth and returned to her original position.

  “I’ll screw you in the morning, Kael, go to sleep.”

  She was still asleep when he left the apt, with Anla, for Curringal Basic Inlay. An ambiguous entry to the real world.

  PART FOUR

  1.

  Kael slumped in the passenger web. The ruffles around his neck choked him. He loosened the ludicrous ornamentation slightly but it was his blouse that was too tight.

  Anla went manual and jumped lanes. She flew the skite with skilful arrogance, knowing perfectly well that the failsafes were in order; she’d run the diagnostic herself. Anla the competent, taking me high through the morning’s traffic to the fields of gainful employment.

  Commuter man now. Times for the rising. Times for the breaking or the gloomy continuance of my fast. Time bracketed by the autonomics of the Department’s Big Board.

  “Are you with the Department?” the little girl at the orientation dance had asked him. “So am I, I’m going to inlay the History of Ideas.”

  So were we all, dear, a whole 1400 days to cover five thousand years, a fair whack of thoughts per unit day. Fresh from the teaching machines to the peptide pumps, to the brave new tertiary arenas of durobond and force-field, with baby-grant credit to sustain us in our unfolding.

  And so here we are, little girl. Are you, now suitably qualified, hurrying to some ghastly crèche the like of which you had only just left that night four years ago? Presumably not, since I didn’t see you around after the Poststructuralist Heresies.

  Got a menial job, or pregnant, went mad, choked to death while overshooting in the Aorist Closure, living on a bureaucrat’s wirehead asteroid in the Crab Nebula, who knows? I could trace your name and code on my library and give you a surprise call, but who can be bothered with additional lunacy at a moment like this?

  Instead: tell me, Anla, hard at the controls, educer of two years standing, card spindling member of the Revolutionary Alliance, haranguer of hole-in-corner meetings, not a woman to make a foolish move outside the bedroom, tell me, does it fulfil your life, this Socratizing?

  Aye, we’ve heard tell of them, haven’t we, the few with their wits still about them, fresh with enlightened inlays, eager to destroy the dragons of innate and conditioned stupidity. If the system is oppressive, all the more to fight.

  A hundred days, two hundred, a year and the fight dying within them. The pressure from their colleagues, the cafard of schemes run to seed, the cosmic solid weight of the thing....

  And me, conceding defeat before I’ve even darkened the door of this dark inquisition. Forewarned is disarmed and the battle has yet to sound.

  “Feeling deliciously sorry for yourself, Kael?”

  “You know me too well, Anla petal.”

  “Bloody wish I did.... Get your pissy little bat off the beam, Shithead.”

  The skite fell, slotted between two other vehicles. Anla locked the systems with the bleak sound of a terminal file closure.

  Kael regarded his place of work. An exemplar of Revived New Paedoarchitectonics: 3991 (orth. date)—a good year for insights, that—great vulgar dodecahedrons in silver, copper, gold, sparkling diamondoid, perched on spindly stilts in a sea of leveled lava, temporary mechfab grouprooms with an air of pre-dating human settlement, and all set to outlast time itself. Kael and his friend (now colleague) Anla entered by the staff slide en route for the staff room.

  A horde of kids surged past.

  “Morning Madame Griffith.” “Morning Maam Griffith.” “Good morning, educer!” “Nice day, eh?” “Mornngrff.”

  “Good morning, Rio. Good morning, En. Good morning, Luigi. Morning, all.”

  A kid knocked Kael’s library. “Sorry, sensei,” bundling past.

  Staff quarters was a box serving the functions of common room, study and store room. Mugs of some nameless beverage stood etching brown rings on piles of resource crap; gazetted advertisements tried conceptually to brighten the place up. Fly away from the ice to work where it’s nice. If I was down on the glaciers that’s just what I’d do, mate, if I had the seniority. Happily this is where the machines posted me, near my buddy Anla, with a little nudge from Catsize the data king.

  The Emperor stood askew in his holo. In a corner an urn bubbled steam. And my fellow workmates, colleagues and cronies-to-be, boasting of their vacations under alien stars, slurping down ersatz. A hearty man greeting Anla, with a flourish of his educer’s library.

  “Hello Anla, back for another season on the loop? Must rush, I’ve got your lot from last year.”

  Kael found a place and sat down, slightly ill. Anla introduced him to various people, some harassed, some resigned, some efficient, some cynical. They milled around, all of them, they milled. Lights blipped. Noise from the isometrics playground slowly eased. Kael heard someone echoing through a repeater system, a harsh disjointed sound. The staff room eddied and drained. The three or four other virgin educers were led away by their appointed superiors. Tramping feet in the corridor. A voice shouted: “Don’t run!” Alone. Kael sat and looked at the job vacancies, and the art work. Adhesion had been lost from a corner of Jerusalem the Golden; a minaret curved and went through the wall.

  A secretary appeared: “Are you Mr. Ponchard?”

  “That’s me.”

  “If you wait here, Mr. Grey will vid you and direct you to your class.”

  “Good.”

  Grey eh? The co-ordinator himself. Star treatment. Kael, alone again, studied the display boards; hard bright machine script. Playground duty; Control of Entry Implementation Plan Phase One; Tea credit Arrears. There was a knock on the door.

  Silence.

  Another knock.

  Kael shouted: “Come in.”

  Silence.

  Another knock.

  “Come
in!”

  Silence.

  Another knock.

  Kael got to his feet and walked to the door. A small boy with earnest black eyes looked up at him.

  “Please sensei Mr. Trott wants the nucleotide fractionator, sensei.”

  “Do you know where it is?”

  “In the staff room sensei.”

  “Yeah, but do you have any idea where?”

  “No sensei.”

  Kael looked at the jumble of lockers, panels, desks, winking lights. Hopeless.

  “Well, you’d better help me look for it.”

  The child shuffled his feet and looked down the corridor.

  “Come in, there’s no one else here.”

  “It’ll be all right sensei.”

  “But don’t you want the fractionator?”

  “I’ll come back when there’s another educer here sensei.”

  “Suit yourself.”

  The small scuttled off down the corridor. Kael closed the door, crossed back over the territorial boundary to the land of us, where us means what four years ago was them. Some distance you’ve come, Socrates me old fruit—a good three meters and the width of a door.

  His library chimed. He opened the comm circuit. A man he’d never seen in his life looked up at him.

  “Ah, you must be Mr. Ponchard.”

  “Mr. Grey?”

  “Somebody has interfered with the staff-room controls of the holo projector. Will you activate it please?”

  Oh shit, here we go again. Kael stared about him without much optimism.

  “The black panel behind the door, under the lavatory-block monitors.”

  He located the toggle and activated the internal line. A gray man appeared behind him: gray toga-top and trousers, gray skin, gray hair. Kael’s eyes went at once to the color settings. No, nicely balanced. Not a ruth immune, surely, with such a post. Cosmetics, then, a little reversible gene work. For the effect. Wisdom, the sanction of the ages. Bugger me.

  “How do you do, sir.”

  “Welcome to Curringal Inlay Basic. You’ve met Olp Scrancher, the math comptroller?”

  “No, I’m a historian.”

  “Ah yes, but we are a bit understaffed on the math side of things at the moment. I’m sure you’ll manage. Plenty of substantial stochastic math in history eh? Now if you’d like to follow the blue arrow to 3C, I’ll introduce you to your charges. We’ll pulse a proper time table though to your library after break.” He vanished, and the guidance system flashed imperatively. The co-ordinator’s voice lingered in the empty air. “And see that the 3C projector is turned on when you get there?”

  Charioteers, it’s all true. Everything that was ever wailed by stoned novices in noisy parties. Galactic historians educing math, stochasticians dragging out the elements of aesthetics, artists instructing in physics, people with no training at all educing anything that came into their heads. A man might expect to be shifted around a bit during training sessions but this is the real thing, kid.

  Kael followed the bright blue arrow through corridors dull with the odors of synthetics distinctive as the frozen tang of cryoparlours. A door slid up. Thirty-five unformed faces; thirty-five kids dazed with pre-medication. The holo projector came on without any prompting from Kael as the arrow faded.

  “Good morning 3C.”

  “Good morning Sensei Grey.”

  “This is Sensei Ponchard who is joining Basic today—”

  2.

  Catsize trod the decaying pedestrian pavement.

  All this wrought by the unaided hand of man and beast, just two brief centuries ago. Every founding city a time machine, Jericho to gleaming Utopia. This the midden end of the scale.

  Glo-panels swung from their posts like remnants of a public hanging. Old datafax and discarded foils lay in sodden drifts against the fences.

  Crazed bastards, will they never learn about nonrenewable resources?

  The universe is bulging at the seams, ready to come unstuck. You’ve sustained your pig’s garbage economy for an extra two thousand years, by the grace of God and the Charioteers, but where will you be a century hence?

  Rotten habits reinforced in stale immortal minds. Fucked. We’re all fucked.

  The solid bit of overstated gothic revival that housed Anla and Ben stood back from the grimy common behind a well-integrated lawn bordered by a thin orange line of flamebuds, a firm bulwark of order against the creeping sloth of the neighborhood and the impending crash of the Empire.

  The original design for gracious living had suffered rude surgery some decades earlier, front split with clinical precision from back. Forward dwelled a batch of young insurance hustlers, proud cultivators of the flower beds. In the lobotomized rear half lived Anla and Ben, unfashionably married.

  From their rearguard windows could be seen a small jungle breached only by a short track, the relatively safe passage (through knee-high grass, rampant whisk, man-eating thornglee) to the Cathouse, final outpost of civilization.

  Around its crumbling brick walls, built by the first Million on Victoria, alien weeds had total dominion. Here no writ of Empire ran. Above its patched slate roof strange birds looked askance. Once the manual laundry to the original pioneer establishment, it was now the home and castle of Catsize the people’s poet.

  The poet’s narrow bed lay along one wall; a purple chest, on which rested a large force-field-fed urn to fuel the poet with beverages, took up another.

  In the place where the copper had once rested Catsize had constructed a makeshift fireplace. Less efficient than the right sort of machine, and so a minor sin, but cozy as all get out.

  On the marble draining board stood his ornate library, a data treasury rivaling the City Fathers, listing slightly on the board’s gentle slope.

  One of the twin zinc tubs had been filled with soil, from which sprouted a number of vigorous seedlings, adding a tasteful touch of greenery to these otherwise austere quarters.

  A heavy fall of hard-fax covered most of the horizontal surfaces of the cell, piling up in the corners. For all his thaumaturgic command of machines, the poet liked to seize words in his hands.

  Catsize entered his laundry. He entered a Medbank url of terrible puissance, pushed the library aside and sat at the draining board lost in contemplation. A cargo vessel hummed low overhead. The seedlings at his elbow were doing well, the autonomics he’d rigged to feed Anla’s molt-feathered scowl while they had been away on Newstralia. had done a good job watering them. Still, it was the wrong time of the year to plant them, and they were getting too big for the sink. He decided to throw most of them away and keep just a couple as indoor pot plants. Catsize turned his attention back to the library, and illegally called a private subroutine.

  Physicians’ names lined up in a long column on the right hand of the display, their zips and surgery hours on the left. Kael’s fathers were listed; he’d avoid those.

  He had purchased the code from a disgruntled junkie who had become accustomed to entering his own prescriptions. The zips had been changed after his arrest and no pharmacy in town would respond to them now, but labor deployment appeared to be more tolerant. There was much to be said for Imperial insistence of departmental independence.

  The poet reached down and pulled a foil baggie from under the draining board, rummaged through it, found the list he needed and kicked the foil back again. Thistlethwaite and Crosby: The Text Book of General Medicine (London, 1913). He’d inlayed the mnemonics on this in an Earth library—the original kind—over a century ago, hard-copied it here, and cleared it. Its categories would be a mystery to physicians on fifth millennium Victoria.

  Catsize flicked through it: chronic sleep inversion, tertiary syphilis (a sort of educational disorder ha ha), peripheral neuropathy. That last sounded good; it sounded bad. The class of endogenous ailments which ruth couldn’t touch. It might take years of genetic therapy to cure.

  He certified himself as unfit for toil due to congenital emergent peripheral neuropathy, cro
ss-indexed one of the medico’s zips, added yesterday’s date, pulsed the package through to Medbank and anchored it.

  The library printer gave him an authoritative hard reference card. He put it in the right hand shoulder pocket of his flack jacket. He extracted a blood-stained handkerchief from one of the purple drawers and stuffed it up his sleeve.

  Taking a bundle of fax from the draining board he retired to his bed to read. He selected a few sheets, folded them, placed them neatly in the left hand shoulder pocket and slipped from the Cathouse on dying feet.

  §

  Catsize the unemployable entered the offices of the Department of Labor at the gentlemanly hour of zenith and took his place on the bench.

  Four others sat ahead of him, two bonded women in purdah and a pair of callow pre-ruth babies. With any luck he’d be out within the hour.

  Behind their over-mechanized counter Smeeth and Schafschank dragged themselves through the life-affirming round of their daily tasks. Schafschank was the right hand pocket man, Smeeth the patron of the left. To each his due.

  Smeeth was fussing about with a filing program. Getting Smeeth’s eye was half the battle; between them they would wangle it so that when Catsize’s turn came Schafschank was occupied with someone else. A couple of months ago he’d clumsily got stuck with Schafschank for the first time, a miserable pinched-up centenarian gone sour on life, given to innuendoes about the color of Catsize’s hair, the state of his dress.

  Catsize had slouched in his pod and regarded Schafschank through rheumy eyes, breath wheezing from his lungs in gasps and snorts, fingers going unsteadily to the right hand pocket. Schafschank had banged the code into his device, and the testimonial of disability lit up to quiver under his nose. Liver fluke. He’d moved back a bit at that one, and coughing into the blood-stained rag hadn’t been remotely necessary.

  Liver fluke had kept him going for a time, the peripheral thing ought to be good for rather longer, but still there must be a limit to Schafschank’s credulity. Better to trust in Smeeth and the left hand path.