Valencies: A Science Fiction Novel

by Damien Broderick

  Clumsy bloody barges, shoveled along with those great phallic poles. They took great pride in their style, shoving the pole in the water, heaving away. It’s all a matter of balance and rhythm, he once told me—quite seriously.

  Was he really screwing her then, in those fields or in the furtive beds of his pure college? They prided themselves equally on their purity and their puns, that lot, if reports are to be believed. Little wonder they couldn’t raise an effective army.

  It’s unlikely that he got his end in, then. Surely if he had he would have brought her away to the Dominions while there was still time. Or did the psychology of the thing work the other way?

  Anyway, she was a sturdy anarchist, would have boxed his ears.

  So he went underground with them like some knight errant, exchanging his barge-pole for a neutron rifle left over from the last action.

  Then it was finished; they were out-programmed by the Empire’s memetic bugs, and she refused to leave when the visiting colonials were Millioned. Gave him an X-chromosome to remember her by.

  Tearful remonstrations, no doubt, but he had me grown before he left. I’m the living intersection of banality and sensitive courage. And now he’s going back with his new lady and his new baby: off to regain the innocence of youth, it’d make a good short poem, old revo coming home to the world of his dreams.

  “Hey Theri, I’ve thought of a good poem.”

  “What about?”

  “Well, there’s this academic who’d seduced his first girl on a punt near Isaacville, and two hundred years later he goes back to the place with another girl. They take a punt on the river, but he’s misread the rain schedule and the poor bugger can’t manage the pole properly and the boat keeps running into the bank. He gets the pole tangled up in thick weeds.

  “The rain get worse and the girl gets soaked and the man falls into the river and the whole thing is a total disaster. So they eventually get the boat back to the landing stage, by which time the girl is furious and the bloke is moody and depressed. So he takes her to a pub he used to know.

  “He thinks it will be warm and old with a roaring log fire and full of baby graduates arguing about the road to autonomy, but it’s been tarted up and due to forestry restrictions the open fire has been replaced by a muse randomizer and it’s full of purple-haired yobos talking about zam.

  “So the man buys two cigars and gives one to the girl who refuses to light it and demands a buzz. So the old boy smokes both of the nasty things himself and the girl starts to flirt with one of the horrid yobos, has a quarrel with the academic and leaves in the yobo’s skite.

  “So he starts buzzing and by the time the pub closes he’s good and blasted. He decides to walk to Isaacville, because that’s what they used to do when he was a baby—climb out of their purity cells and walk to Isaacville through the strange shadows of the moons and stare up reverently at the famous claustropod where the Sensei was hammering away unceasingly at his library.

  “But the trouble is, there are all sorts of new multilevels, and the commons have been changed, and he loses his way. He can’t find the hitching bleep code on his library so he staggers about half the night and ends up heading towards the local Teleport.”

  Theri was smiling like a loon, egging her on with eager little grunts and nods. Some of the others had drifted up and stood listening, smirking or puzzled, depending on how well they know her.

  “He finds a transport autocafe and collapses into a seat and orders coffee. He sits there brooding until a freighter pilot asks him where he’s going. He says he wants to get back to Isaacville, so the trucky gives him a lift. And because he looks so done-in the trucky give him a couple of adrenergics to shoot. By the time he gets back to Isaacville he’s quite fast.

  “And as he walks among the deserted buildings it seems to him that Isaacville is filled with the companions of his youth. Codswallop and good old Sprogget appear walking arm in arm across a cobbled common. His old tutors and professors go creaking past on ancient frontier bicycles. And there’s his dear friend Snod with his cigar in one hand and his library in the other. But as he rushes up to speak to them they disappear.

  “And then suddenly the clouds break and the moons come beaming down in great multihued shafts of light and the front of his old college shines before him, all ghostly and timeless. And he knows what he must do.

  “He runs toward the college and clambers through the monitors and starts to climb the face of the computer complex. He climbs like a man possessed, which he is.

  “At times it seems to him that he’s not alone on the face, but on a climbing rope with Sprogget and Codswallop. At one stage he comes to an impasse, but he knows what to do, he reaches up and finds the gleaming plastic piton that he and Sprogget hammered in all those centuries ago, and with a great effort he pulls himself over the impasse and climbs on.

  “His drugged heart is pumping away fit to burst, nothing ruth can do to combat biochemical self-abuse, and he’s gasping for breath but he’s so delirious he doesn’t feel it.

  “Finally he get to the top of a spire and stands there hanging onto the ionizing nipple and the moons blazing out again and all Isaacville is spread below him, city of scholarly detachment, ornate and enchanted. He knows he has come back where he belongs and a great peace floods over him.

  “Then an Imperial militia skite hoves alongside and plucks him off, threatening to charge him with seditious trespass. But after one look into his old, tame eyes they release him with a warning, and he remembers that he forgot to turn the infant’s tender on and the kid’ll be all covered in poo from head to toe, and he gets out quietly and trudges home.”

  Anla took a drink of wine and grinned back at Theri.

  §

  Hot with confusion and guilty mirth, Theri looked at Jard still hacking at the tree. His youth’s face was red with exertion and lined with sweat, his dashiki flapping. She watched him take a last swing at the contused branch; he passed the barbaric implement to Ben, who took over the amputation. Probably he hadn’t heard a thing.

  Jard sat down on a log vacated by Ben and drank a glass of wine in one mouthful. Some of it went up his nose. The sweat had dampened his abundant hair, which lay on his scalp in a thick black mat. Theri stood up and went for a walk.

  §

  Squatting on his heel carving a stick with his knife, Catsize watched Anla watching Theri. He wondered how valid Anla’s perception really was. She had only spoken to him with complete candor two or three times since he had known her. Normally they maintained a dry, sparring relationship, continually maneuvering for position without engagement.

  Now she joined him as he tried, with little success, to turn a piece of fibrous native wood into a figure of a horse. Anla sat on the ground.

  “It’s like a bloody levee-en-masse poem.”

  Catsize raised the roughly shaped bit of wood in his hand and, regarding it, nodded. “That was the main thrust of my artistic intention. A touch more off at the pointed end and I imagine that even a purist will readily mistake it for the Imperial Conclave in High Session.”

  “All these people, Catsize.”

  “They just look like a bunch of Victorian yobos cutting up a tree to me.”

  “Listen, fuckface, what we have here is a small group of interrelated people milling about in a sexual force-field.”

  “Sexual force-field? How uncouth.”

  “Catsize, stop being deliberately thick, you know as well as I do. Theri and Jard are attracted to each other. Kael and Sofy are all over each other with that little bundle. Ben would like to lay Jeanine and Jeanine would lay any one of us.”

  “And you think this is going to happen?”

  “No, nothing is going to happen. Unless you make it.”

  He recoiled theatrically. “What madness is this?”

  “Look, you’re always getting people to do things. The first bloody time we met you, you got Ben and Kael to kneel down on the common in the middle of Bolte. People are always ge
tting caught up in your little psychodramas; the moment you walk into a room people start reacting to you—you can tell by the way they start talking, the phrases they use. And you know as well as I do why they do it. People want to act out their fantasies and you provide the means, you turn life into a scenario and let the script take over the people. Everyone expects it of you, it’s your style, it’s what you do in your composition and your mode of living. It would be so easy for you. I wouldn’t mind betting Theri is secretly hoping you will anyway. Everyone is half-smashed as it is, they don’t know how to handle wine, which you must have known when you brought it up here. By tonight they’ll be supersaturated. And you’re the crystal.”

  Catsize’s knife slipped and sliced the embryo tail from his horse. He threw the chip of wood away.

  “I can’t remember your ever getting taken over by a character role, Anla.”

  “Maybe that’s because I’d rather live life straight without repressing all my desires.”

  “You’ve vid too many poems.”

  “I haven’t vid half the poems you have. That you’ve written, probably.”

  “Well, what the hell do you expect me to do with this little levee? Get them all to pretend to be the inmates of a frontier bawdy house or something?”

  “Something like that. More subtle I imagine.”

  “Why?”

  “It’d be good for them.”

  “You rather fancy yourself as the Charioteer, don’t you? The dark lady brooding unseen over her subjects, the omnipotent chess player with her human pieces.”

  “Look, don’t come the analytic program with me, Catsize, you might be Theri’s confessor, you’re not mine.”

  “And what about you, Anla, what’s going to be your place in this proposed bawdy house? What are you going to be doing while Ben is screwing Jeanine?”

  “That’s up to you, you’re master of ceremonies.”

  “But my dear Anla, it has hardly escaped my attention that in the elementary paired scheme of things you’ve provided, the only couple left unaccounted for is you and me.”

  She looked demurely at the leaf-strewn ground.

  “Anla, look at me.”

  Anla held Catsize’s gaze, neither laughing nor serious, neither superior nor subject. After half a minute Catsize put an end to the contest. “And this is to be my fee for providing you with your bawdy house, the body and soul of Madam Anla Elsbeth Griffith for the space of one night?”

  “Catsize, I can’t wait.”

  “You won’t have to, I’m not going to do it.”

  Anla remained silent for a minute. She stood up, then, and bent over Catsize, kissing him quickly on his mouth, and walked at once to the tree. She relieved Ben of the axe and started to cut at the branches with sure, easy strokes, in marked contrast to the way her husband had been slogging at the battered limbs.

  Catsize watched her for a while, then went in search of Theri, whom he found sitting by the side of the creek, ineffectually throwing rocks at the brackish water.

  PART FIVE

  1.

  The inquisitorial element was holing up in the lounge bar. Kael duly lounged in a plast web spun out from untenably frail tetrahedral supports, and looked with distaste at the vigor-giving mash lumped on his plate.

  Insidious melodiazam oozed from a ubiquitous point-source mosaic into his ears. The chatter from those of the staff already present stifled his thoughts. The prospect of a whole afternoon given over to a marathon staff moot filled him with frustrated gloom. It was an event one could not afford to sleep through; nor could you conceivably manage to pay attention for more than half a minute at a time.

  Kael felt his buzz ebb and made his way to the bar for another. The least a man could do, he decided, get pleasantly scorched.

  He brought the buzz back to the curried mash; Olp Scrancher had arrived and settled heavily into the opposite web.

  A professional, Scrancher, an old hand at the game. Liked by the kids—those who’d developed a taste for sarcasm anyway. Liked by the staff—those who wanted a nice smooth progression through the educing ritual, which was all of them.

  Well, I like you too, Olp, you’re a good bloke under all that time-wearied cynicism, but you’re not getting me with your traditional certainties.

  “How are you finding educing?”

  “All right.”

  “Not like you thought it would be?”

  Kael shrugged. “Not much different.”

  “Funny thing—when I first met you I thought, ‘Hello, here’s one of those weirdies that believes in letting the kids do what they want, random data play and fondling each other’s genitals in the isometrics room.’“

  “You thought that?”

  “We do get them, you know.”

  “I suppose it takes all sorts to make a world.”

  “You’re dead right there, Kael my boyo, but why they should all go educing I don’t know. The coding error bucket, I suppose, nowhere else for them.”

  “What happens to them?”

  “Either come to their senses or go mad. Stark staring bonkers. Strip them down for enzymes.”

  Scrancher wolfed his mash and lumbered off to the tea dispenser. Kael contemplated the pattern crawling across the mauve carpet.

  He leaned confidentially over his steaming mug of tea to the subsiding Scrancher: “Tell you what, Olp, I did have a few screwy ideas about pedagogy.”

  “See, what did I tell you?”

  “Yeah, I thought all you had to do was treat kids as if they were human beings and the little buggers would behave like human beings.”

  “Some hope.”

  “I thought if you got them interested in the substance of their inlays they’d set their own problems and find the answers just popping into their heads, and there’d be no need to keep levering it out.”

  “Dangerous paradigm, Kael old son, you were confusing them with mature adults. Half our job is to stop them pulling the wrong data out of latent memory and running riot.”

  “Yeah, but Olp I was into autonomous evocation, that sort of thing precisely. I genuinely felt that if you let the little dears run their own affairs, and form their own hypotheses on the basis of their life-experiences, and test them against the data from their inlays and in the labs over here, there’d be no need to medicate them and keeping on shouting all the time.”

  “The iron fist in the velvet glove, Kael, it’s the only way.”

  Kael leaned closer, confidential. “It only took me a couple of weeks of shop floor experience to show me that I was absolutely right.”

  Scrancher reacted sluggishly, studying Kael’s deadpan face. “Come again?”

  “It was dead right, Olp, everything I ever thought.”

  Scrancher laughed, a friendly shared-joke laugh, but Kael caught the edge of nervousness, the momentary suspicion of a flaw in the armor.

  “Charioteers, Kael, I thought you were serious for a minute.”

  Kael laughed guilelessly.

  “You’d believe anything, Olp.”

  Anla and the twitchy aesthetician arrived. The conversation turned to the rising incidence of pair marriages.

  §

  If inertia is indeed equivalent to gravitational mass, Anla thought apathetically, and time in the vicinity of a great enough mass is dilated, stretched out, slowed down, this would help to explain my ennui.

  The staff moot dragged on, time winding down by the minute. The heating system was in an overproductive phase and the radiator near Anla announced its presence with the verve of a small but feisty star.

  This was the biggest room in the complex and hence appropriated for such occasions. The desks were childsize, too low for the forty-odd adults they now accommodated, but the inbuilt libraries were handy, permitting the sly exchange of witticisms by other than vocal means. Humor is nothing more than the continuation of war by other means. Syntactic-semantic loops, old seesaws.

  Anla looked around the open corral of desks: what’s meant to be
achieved by the whole jamboree? Lethargy pandemic. Kael over there looking attentive; clever the way he’s picked that up, taking in even less than I am, probably. Scrancher getting ready to say something. Cold insects outside droning to their deaths in the window screen, much the same noise as the gray man. Would have been good to stay in the pub with Kael; buzzed too much as it is, almost asleep.

  Anla dozed off at the back of the room, woke with a start and tried listening to the gray words

  “...seems to be a final year group who are the main offenders and at their age they can only set a bad example to the younger children....”

  Wish I was still at tertiary like Theri, drinking coffee at leisure, arguing with her tutors, firing away at her library, while we’re stuck here listening to this bullshit.

  Poor old Kael, he’s started to fidget, he’s even less cut out for this work thing than I am. Doing this for a thousand years. The mind cringes. Let’s all follow in Catsize’s gypsy path.

  Out the window she could see a couple of small girls from 2B walking across a common, a sight to put our co-ordinator’s blood pressure at risk: holding hands and talking non-stop, gladly forsaking an afternoon’s noetic dredging so that this important meeting could be held.

  Anla punched through a message to Kael’s desktop: And the dead are many. Kael looked up and smiled; her screen danced to his fingers: According to leading authorities there’s only one moldering in the soil for every quadrillion still on the go, even if you count in all the police actions. A Friend.

  Anla punched for the time: 1525. We must have a tea-break soon, even old grayness needs oiling occasionally. The brew that cheers but does not inebriate—pity.

  A slight change in position from the more attentive of our crew; must be something that directly affects us. It might be a merry jape to invert the color values on his holo-projector.