A printed clock glowed on the wall. Holos invited Catsize to be a man with a mission. One of these missionaries, arrayed in full battle order, a transduction helmet over his face, gesticulated at him with a virus vector.
The neighboring poster forewent images in favor of a tersely worded declaration that all citizens with the appropriate modulus birth date would be library notified of their induction into Imperial Service. The carrot and the stick.
Schafschank finished interviewing a dull man with a drooping moustache. The fellow left, clutching doubtfully at his handwritten introduction to a prospective employer. Shit, surely they could handle all this rote through the datanet. But no, the psychology of it had no doubt been run out by a thousand handcrafted memetic bugs.
One of the callow youths was beckoned; he shuffled over and dropped into the pod in front of Schafschank’s screen-choked desk. Smeeth summoned the other baby.
Catsize viewed a cartoon on the joys of becoming a plasma-welder. Schafschank’s youth slouched back to the bench and sat waiting for his friend. She too now clutched an introduction, passport to the socialist dignity of labor. Schafschank gestured to the bonded women who both hurried around to huddle at his confessional.
Smeeth released his baby and addressed Catsize in a friendly professional manner:
“Welcome back, had a good time on Newstralia?”
“Not bad.”
“Any luck with work up there?”
“No, there was a couple of good jobs going but it’s me age, see, they discriminate against over-experienced people.”
“Yes, it must be difficult, I can’t imagine why they don’t give you a pension. Bad precedent of course. I’ll see what we’ve got,” he said in a loud brisk tone, “I’m sure we can fix something up for you.”
“Jeez, it’d be real good if you could.”
Smeeth busied himself with a phatic scan, tagging an occasional file, studying it and flicking on. A flush was rising in his cheeks. He glanced over his shoulder at Schafschank’s booth.
The bonded women were confessing their sins to the sour pastor of work. Bow five times to the Emperor’s holo and work four hours a day for the rest of eternity at a polymerizing machine.
Smeeth dialed his chair forward, leaning over the desk, switching the displays off. Catsize leaned over from his pod. The brown fibrous partitions curving up from the sides of Smeeth’s desk provided furtive cover.
“Get much written?”
“A few good poems.”
“Got one with you?”
The left hand pocket. Catsize murmured, hardly needing to glance at the fax in his hands, the words of truth, beauty, turmoil and resignation that Smeeth so longed to hear.
“It’s the Nightingsnail Canto, see, got the idea on Newstralia. Here’s how it goes:
Ah, sheet, beast, you hear me? I’m blocked. My skin’s tight, hands and feet flying somewhere else: dissociated, Nightingsnail, stonkered on the toxic narcotic of projective empathy. You’re okay, that’s no hassle. I’m ripped by your singing, man. Lucky sod, symbiotic with your green shadowy beeches, singing it up about summer, no repressions. Actually I could do with a glass of Old Earth wine, snail, some vintage that’s been lying a long time in a cool cellar, with its tangs of grape, green country vines, French peasants at dance and song, sunburnt bastards hooting and falling about in some fucking drunken fertility riot. A cold glass from the warm fields, instinct with true, delicate inspiration, with beaded bubbles winking at the brim, claret-purple at the mouth. I’d knock it back, snail, and be right up there with you in the night forest.
Smeeth was breathing. “Listen, that what was it ‘wine’, can you get that on Victoria?”
Catsize regarded him mysteriously. “Mate of mine was picking grapes up in the tropics a few years back, I reckon the vintage’d be just right now.”
“I shall order a liter. I’m sorry, go on, it’s marvelous.”
“Okay.” Catsize read in his louche, graveled voice:
§
Yeah, I’d let it all go, piss off the mind-fucks you fine shell-wings never heard of, all the weary, feverish, fretful crap that’s bringing us down. In the final analysis all we can do is sit round listening to each other’s groaning: the poor old buggers in their twitching, endless boredom, the kids with borrowed memories in their bones, facing forever. Brains? Nothing there but grief and despair. Beauty? The babes’ wet eyes soon dull over, and their puppyfat heartaches turn to vapid bitching two days after they’ve declared their love.
Ah crap, I’m just feeling sorry for myself. I don’t need booze or buzz to get the snail-trip on. My brain might be knackered, but the old lyric rave always turns the trick. Ahem:
The night’s sweet and warm; somewhere up there, in a cluster of stars, there’s a foddle moon, though you’d never know if it weren’t for the odd breeze pushing aside the dark heavy leaves that hang down over the mossy winding footpaths.
There are flowers underfoot, and a soft incense of blossom from the boughs, but it’s too dim to see anything much. I can identify them fairly well by their scents, though, the air’s so still: all the summer flora: grass, thickets, wild fruit-trees, white hawthorns, those succulent briars you find out in the pastures, fast fading violets covered up in leaves; and the earliest of the summer flowers, musk-rose blossoms, full of dewy wine, where the humming bees hover on summer evenings—”
Blinking damp eyes, Smeeth interrupted with an apologetic cough. “Um, I hope you’ll forgive me if I mention that to the best of my knowledge the flora and fauna you itemize are not known on Newstralia, I think. I’ve made a minor study of—”
“No, it’s Old Earth ecology,” Catsize said with some irritation. “Poetic license, mate.”
“Oh. Yes I see that now. Please continue.”
“‘On nights like that’,” Catsize read,
I stand there listening to the murmuring insects, often enough half persuaded of the virtues of death, quite relaxed, rather wishing my lungs would pack it in. I’ve got that number heavy on me now. No offense, snail, but hearing your ecstatic rave, death seems, well, attractive. A painless death at midnight. On you’d sing, to my dead deaf ears. Getting into death, with your plainchant for my requiem.
But there’s nothing about death or ruth in your DNA program, is there? Snail, you’re just the momentary cross-section of an endless cloned continuum. No awareness of brutalized generations to bring you down, sport. Exactly the same voice I’m hearing now was heard millennia ago by the Charioteers; it’s a stamped-in piece of phylogeny.
The furtive words spun their web of joy, sorrow, life and forgotten death while Smeeth fiddled blindly with his scanning system. Catsize finished his tolling fugue and sat back, a lotus conspirator. Smeeth looked dazed.
“Well, I’m sorry, there doesn’t seem to be anything on file really suitable for you, perhaps something will turn up next week.”
“Oh, jeez, righto then, see youse later.”
Catsize slunk out of the offices of the Department of Labor, unemployed, unemployable, the unwilling recipient of the Empire’s credit. He sloped through the business quarter, revived slightly at the sight of a pub, walked briskly across the lawn and entered the fuggy dark of the saloon. He ran his finger down the list of available comestibles, pressed his order, and shot a light buzz. A professional working poet taking luncheon at his club.
3.
Voices came indistinctly up from the lawn: Catsize expounding, Jard laughing, Anla dry and ironic—words without, hum of insects loitering on the margins of the screen, crackle of roasting protein in the kitchen. Theri heard Sofy open the oven door and add something from the garden, rich odors entering the air, smothered as the door clicked shut.
She walked around the room picking up symphonic crystals, putting them back.
The peace she should have felt evaded her. The setting was at least as conducive to peace as usual: this good room, the late autumn day, Jard and his guests drinking Catsize’s whimsical wine under t
he genecopied trees, the prospect of three days away from that bloody apt she shared with Kael. By rights, it all should have induced a relaxed good humor.
The back of Jard’s old house fitted into a ledge cut in the hillside. Here at the front it tottered out into space on a line of crumbling concrete pillars.
Wattle engulfed most of the durobond walls and a continuous silt of gum leaves and twigs clogged the run-offs. At night the native grundles scratched in the roof and pissed on the ceiling, discoloring the plastic.
Jard made an occasional effort to deter the beasts with pheromones, but his fortifications degraded after a week at best. Anla said he was secretly fond of the grundles and would be upset if they didn’t regain dominion after a token exile.
The living room was long, low, untidy. A random selection of prints, hand-wrought paintings, engravings and maps—not a holo, in sight—covered most of the wall area that wasn’t plants. It stood for Theri as antithesis to the anonymous pale apt she had left that morning, bowling up over the urban sprawl in Catsize’s skite. God, what a disgusting, soulless place.
She thought of the apt with suppressed rage: bloody little box, stacked with the other little boxes for existing in. All that is necessary to sustain life, provided by the Empire’s minions. Conapt.: f-furn.: lib.: bd.rm.: dn.rm.: kitch.: dp.sp.: no pregs. The table we eat from, the chairs we sit in, the library we commune with, the bed we sleep in, the bed we make love in, the squeak it contrives to make, duplicated in every other cheap, mechfab box of tricks in the condominium, right down to the bloody technically impossible squeak, no doubt.
Nine identical squeaks from nine identical beds neatly arranged in a pre-stressed plast frame. Three by three; not less than nine and rarely more than thirty people-units, iron filings in the stochastic field, squeaking out their miserable lusts when the day’s toil is done and the night’s begun:
squeaksqueaksqueak
squeaksqueaksqueak
squeaksqueaksqueak
She walked to the view wall. Under the trees Jard was bouncing the baby on his knee. Alleles shuffled courtesy of Mother Nature, none of your mechfab clone rubbish there, mate, a one-off special.
Catsize, Anla and the star-hopper woman, who was apparently in more or less permanent residence at the moment, lay around in the middle of a small collection of wine flasks. Jeanine, that’s right; funny name. Came from some galactic cluster to hell and gone out of this sector. Probably over a thousand years old, restless with wanderlust.
Kael and Ben were nowhere in sight. Theri presumed they had gone for a walk.
Bloody hope it does him some good—all those animals and birds running around the bush doing their animal things, might give him a clue, be good for the gonads, get his mind off that bloody Basic Inlay crap. Maybe he’ll screw me better out here, maybe being the second squeak in the top row is secretly sapping his virility.
Would he like to lay the star-hopper? She certainly looks as if she could do with some herself. Does lust go with wanderlust? Doesn’t seem to say much, just pouts around the place looking sexy in a sluttish sort of way. Wonder how many kids she’s had? Scores, probably. Would Kael be interested?
For an instant, a sickening image entered Theri’s mind, iconography from her parents’ Christer Revival shrine: the moist, bovine eyes, the slimy, pulsing heart held out like a bait in the pierced hand.
Theri shuddered. If Jeanine could bring out half a gram of aggression in old gentle Jesus down there she’d be doing society a favor.
Jard looked up and waved to her. Theri waved back, but remained in the room, calling a Databank thing he’d recommended. She heard Jard bring the infant in to be spruced up by the tending autonomics.
He came silently to where she sat, gave her a glass of the grape stuff and, leaning over her shoulder, read the title of her program: Hector’s Equestrian Journal. He quoted some of it verbatim, resting a hand gently on her bare shoulder as he spoke, the stanzas flowing with a rich, familiar cadence. Placing the half empty flask by the chair, he went down again to the group under the trees.
What would Jard be like in bed? An improvement on old Am-I-hurting-you.
Chariots almighty, all I was doing was moaning a bit and he has to stop in mid-fuck and enquire about the state of my health. “Am I hurting you?” If only he bloody had of been.
If I said “Stop!” to that nut two seconds before his orgasm he’d pull up short and ask with infinite concern what the matter was.
And if I said I’d decided I was no longer in the mood for sex, would he curse me? Would he hit me? Would he hell, he’d just stroke the hair from my eyes and tell me in a voice squirming with compassion and love that he quite understood and maybe I’d feel better in the morning. Kael’s warm and loving, but he’s feeble, poor shit, nice but feeble.
Jard with his silly flight-from-Trantor mystique and heroic universe (Good and Evil, Authority and Autonomy, locked in mortal combat, giving symbolic values to quite ordinary events) would not be feeble. She envied Sofy the year to be spent with Jard in Isaacville on Trantor—a better bet than hanging around bloody Bolte with Kael.
§
The group dispersed. Kael decided to stay with Sofy to clear away the lunch, while the others drifted up the hill. Ben had suggested that the tree cut down three years ago ought, in fact, as planned, be made into a bridge. Jard had acknowledged that the wood was probably well enough seasoned by now.
Kael incinerated the plates, handing the cutlery to Sofy. Tussey, truant from her tending machine, played under foot, naked and brown. Kael launched an inquisition about the baby: how much did she weigh at birth, when would she start to walk, did Sofy favor early booster inlays, how many times a day did she need to be fed?
The child in question started to grizzle, and Kael picked her up. This started her crying in earnest. Twisting in Kael’s arms, she leaned toward Sofy; he relinquished her.
Sofy went out to the verandah, sat in one of the floaters, depolarized her shirt and maternity uplift. The baby gave a final wail and fastened hungrily onto the proffered nipple. Kael sat on the verandah floor, his back against a strut, watching the child sucking blindly at her mother’s milkheavy breasts.
If Kael’s three homosexual fathers had been present, they’d have turned away in delicate disgust; they regularly denounced this atavistic practice, adducing the purest value-free medical evidence.
Who knew what heinous infections Sofy might be carrying? Without ruth, the baby was in appalling danger.
She looked healthy enough. Miniature fingers clutched at the soft flesh, the crooked ridge of a vein moving elastically under the insistent massage.
Sofy smiled at her sucking child and winced slightly, transferring the clutching hand from her breast to her middle finger.
“Her nails are too long, they’re like little blades.”
Kael covered his eyes with his right arm and felt under the palm of his left hand the rough wood of the verandah floor.
Afternoon noises blended with Sofy’s humming. An occasional bird sounded from somewhere near the creek. The baby gurgled.
The air was thick with the scent of eucalyptus and the heavy, sticky smell of Sofy’s milk. Kael pressed his forearm more tightly across his eyes and watched the whirling spots of light changing from red to a radioactive indigo. Like insights erupting from inlayed peptide chains.
Voices punctuated by the hiss and pop of wood-trimming came from the hill above the dwelling. Sofy’s bare feet came down onto the floor. Tussey’s weight descended to his chest.
Kael took his arm away from his face and held the swaying infant with both hands. Crouched beside him, Sofy closed her garment.
“Play with her till she burps, then she can go back to the tender.”
Kael glanced from the now smiling infant to her mother. Sofy was a big, quiet woman; like Anla, he realized, on the rare occasions when Anla wasn’t throwing her weight around and telling everyone what to do—a sort of relaxed, maternal Anla.
He won
dered what kind of mother Anla would make and decided she would be terrible, for the first century at any rate, giving her children strict instructions to obey no one, conscripting them to the ranks of the libertarians.
Tussey laughed at the faces he pulled and burped a frothy glob of milk onto his chest.
Together, they put the infant into her autonomic cocoon, waited a few minutes above the darkened bubble until she was properly asleep, and walked up the hill to join the tree trimmers.
§
“Put that damned marvel of science aside, there’s only one authentic way to trim a log.”
Amazing Catsize came bounding into the clearing waving a formidable slab of edged steel from which jutted a smooth, slightly curved length of wood. Charioteers, Anla thought, it’s a frontiersman’s axe. He handed it to Jard with an ironic bow. Prerogative of the host to maim himself first.
“It’s wonderful, Catsize. Where did you get it?”
“They haven’t all been recycled, you know. Planet used to be littered with them. You can clear a world with defoliant bugs, but the first Million’s got to have something to work with before they get their technology to the electronic stage. No, you dolt, treat it cybernetically: gravity provides the energy, you only use your muscles to guide the stroke.”
Anla sat against a tree watching her clone swinging the axe. So now he’s off to pacified Trantor for a Sabbatical with Sofy-kitten and my new hemi-sister.
Back to where, bright young man from the Dominions up at the regional datasink, he met my X-donor. Got off with the daughter of an Autonomist lawyer. Took her up the river on summer evenings in punts.
Some feat in those days—hard enough to contract a liaison at all, what with all the pre-action paranoia of the place. Off for an ambiguous lay in the flat fields outside Isaacville gold and brown with the corn and swallows in the twilight and brown cigars in little smoky pubs.
Very Old New York. And is summer still a golden sea? and so on and so forth. Standing in the back of the punt in massive turned-up boots and open fronted blouse like every other budding eighties poet.
Sensitive fresh-eyed baby with his colonial strine accent rapidly submerging under a dry Trantor twang. Did he really know what was going on? How well did he understand his lawyer’s daughter as she lay in the bottom of those punts in her plain virginal dresses, kicking off her clodhoppery sandals and trailing her long white feet in the water?
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