Valencies: A Science Fiction Novel

by Damien Broderick

  “...so it will be necessary for the rolls to be updated after calisthenics as well as before leaving the grounds, which means that the staff taking isometrics will have to blah blah know that this means more work for those concerned blah blah blah blah the only way....”

  So that’s what it’s all about, those kids from Karry’s group pissing off early and spending the afternoon in the open-market autocafes playing the starwar machines, in preference to building vim and grit. A commendable value judgement, used to do the same class of thing myself, zinging off with my muse.

  A voice: “But maybe the kids are occupying themselves better in the cafes.”

  General laughter, increasing noticeably as Grey joins in, the solid phantom, giving his seal of approval to the jest. Has anyone ever seen the man in the flesh? Perhaps he’s just a computer simulation, the rule-book leavened by gracious optional subroutines.

  “Education in the school of life, eh Mr. Ponchard? Do you think we could make it a semester credit? I’m sure the proprietors would award diplomas.”

  More laughter. Nothing like a bit of repartee to liven up a moot. With evident anger Kael settled back into his cramped chair. Does he think my laughter a betrayal? She saw him sit forward again to spell it out:

  “If we’re going to provide a learning situation in which the kids are able to get some experience in making decisions that actually affect their lives, instead of just coughing up data and canned conclusions from their peptide inlays, then maybe we ought to allow them to choose between playing phiz-ed games and playing strategy machines.”

  Anla felt a spasm of genuine alarm. For a moment it seemed that he would start proselytizing for free cognitive exploration. There’s a time and a place, Kael.

  Only a few smiles. Grey moving in quickly; enough of this nonsense. “They are meant to be at calisthenics and they are deliberately breaking an explicit rule; we cannot be seen even tacitly to condone that.”

  “Then maybe it shouldn’t be a rule.”

  “It’s a Department Regulation, enforced throughout the Empire.”

  Kael collapsed back. Sorry kiddo, no possible answer to that. You’ll learn, as I did.

  “And now I think it’s time for tea.”

  §

  Kael, depressed and tired, sipped his beverage. Anla over there in her red knitted dress; something worth looking at anyway. Did she really think I was joking, at first, or just that my little statement of policy was tactically ill-advised? A fine wench, Anla. What would she really be like in bed? If she ever leaves Ben properly I suppose I’ll find out. Oh, the stupid, stupid shits.

  2.

  Ben and Catsize strode through the supply district, Ben swinging a foil-filled bag, Catsize expounding, gesticulating, a new satire forming in his fevered brain, a new outrage. Abruptly the poet turned gray and dropped to a slouch, his torso hanging like a sack. Ben stared in horrified alarm. From his sagging mouth, Catsize said, “Just seen the man from the labor exchange, he thinks I’ve got peripheral neuropathy.”

  “He thinks you’ve got what?’

  “I bugged their core. It’s impossible for me to work, due to my endogenous peripheral neuropathy.”

  “Shit, mate, how long do they give you to live?”

  “Not long if that bugger Schafschank sees me jumping around on the common.”

  “But I thought they employed you as a poet?”

  “Not this month, they haven’t. I’m a central emergent genetic malfunction this month.”

  “Versatile little fellow, aren’t you?”

  Catsize and Ben slipping into a store. The sick man revived sharply, running and jumping between appetizing holos, dodging the honest shoppers. “As I was saying, this provocative little piece is based on that ludicrous assertion advanced by some pundit in the Imperial Musicology Division when everything was bellyaching about the propriety and decadence of training sperm whales to sing Gregorian chant at a hundred fathoms. While you’ve got your arm extended I’d rather fancy some scowl eggs.”

  “The yard is littered with scowl eggs.”

  “No, it’s not, Anla’s beast is bloody roosting again. Well, I won’t go into it all now, it was a cretinous argument and the pundit got pummeled a bit by other windy bladders and the whales kept on wailing and it’s obvious from your attentive face that you’ve never heard of this important contribution to our on-going transgalactic culture.”

  “It’s not so much that,” Ben said. “What are whales?”

  “Ah shit. Adrift in the data entropy vortex again. Well, all that’s by way of background, anyway, and I’m not sure yet how I’ll get it across, but I’ve no doubt it’ll be full of poignant pathos and aggravating hubris and the bittersweet pang of success and failure in a flawed universe. So, this—”

  A girl with ancient, demented eyes and a wicker basket caught his arm.

  “My dear?” Catsize was gallant.

  “Excuse me, young man, you remind me of my father.”

  “Eh?”

  “Yes, he’s Old King Cole.”

  “Not the merry old soul?”

  “Yes, that’s right, he’s a secret libertarian agent and every time he goes to Chomsky he comes back with a beard.”

  “Good grief.”

  “Yes, especially in winter.”

  They had halted before an elevator shaft. The doors opened. Ben guided the dazed, pinkcheeked, pretty old woman into the elevator. Oddly, there was some resemblance to Catsize.

  “Well, goodbye father, it’s been nice talking to you.” The doors closed.

  Ben and Catsize looked at one another and ran home, lobbing a carton of scowl eggs back and forth between them.

  3.

  “Shit, it’s cold.”

  The swirling water called for a quick impromptu dance. Toes chilled, gasping, they made for higher ground, establishing a camp in a seaward hollow of the dunes.

  Ben cut the skite out of the cybernet and dropped toward the coast. The sea appeared through thinning wisps, mottled by the winter sunlight. The gray angle of the horizon cleanly undercut the confused jumble of clouds and pale sky.

  Low walls of sad scrub hedged the sunken dropspace, combed to a scruffy conformity by the prevailing winds. Only one other vehicle stood in the area, a scarlet sportskite with a decorative skeleton jigging in futile vulgarity.

  Ben and Theri ran up the slope to the deserted beach, jumping, arms outstretched, in the wind, slithering to a spread-eagle on the loose sand. A strong, insistent surf was breaking, glass-green and hollow, the spray driven back in slow, high, tearing sheets.

  Kael and Anla followed with the support equipment: a couple of filament blankets and a heavy foil of food. By the water’s edge the sand was cold and hard. A powerful arctic wave, migrating to the equator for the season, hissed up the beach, soaking bare feet, catching the hem of Anla’s black velvet cloak.

  Anla sat in the redoubt and looked at the sea. Above the horizon the silver pinpoint of a freighter danced. Rather closer to shore, but beyond the farthest line of breakers, the black stick-figure of a body-skier skimmed on his jets. He turned for the beach, hovering amid spray, propitiating the heaving water.

  The ocean brought him slowly landward, ahead of a swelling wave. The skier flattened, his laminar field extending to form a lifting body. The wave reached him, angled his torso to its steepening front. He caught the swell, continuously falling along the uprising face of the wave.

  The skier seemed now to be riding smoothly on his feet, standing poised and languid, effortlessly shearing away to his right, cutting a long, sloping swath through the gray-green water.

  A crest of shattering crystals, the top of the wave started to disintegrate in the wind, white and fragmented. The structure of the wave broke in two places, before and behind the racing skier, the hollow water folding slowly over upon itself, trapping a tunnel of air which exploded in the aftermath of foam, throwing up plumes of spray. On his unbroken section of the wave the skier continued to slide to the right
, hounded from behind by the curling break, rushing like a lemming toward the other flank of confusion.

  Half a second before engulfment he shifted his center of mass, flicked his torso round to speed toward the other break. The gap in the double avalanche narrowed mind-wrenchingly; the skier turned again, trapped. The two breaks met in a tempest of foam.

  Under for a second, lost in the freezing melee, the skier emerged almost instantly, his extended field visible in the white confusion. Head first, he cleared the wave, shuddering slightly on the flat surface of its forerunner. Like a black projectile he shot straight towards the shore.

  The wave diminished, crossed a deeper channel, mutated into a bonsai version of its former magnificence, broke again and rushed forward for its final fling up the beach.

  With bravura insolence the skier came to his feet again, the jet gusting at his back.

  Twenty meters from the abrasive sand he flipped through 180 degrees, deserting the wave, dropped to his belly and started to skim with delphinian ease toward renewed battle with the incoming surf, making for the quietness beyond the first line of breakers, preparing for the next run.

  Theri turned from the spectacle and rolled herself in a filament, starting to vid the ageless sonnets:

  They that have power to hurt, and will do none,

  That do not do the thing they most do show

  Kael and Ben left for a walk along the empty beach, searching for edible shellfish, a more acceptable solecism than roast foddle flesh. Only Anla sat, hunched in her cloak, watching the lonely body-skier pressing ahead with humanity’s immemorial struggle against the elements.

  §

  Theri looked up from the sonnets. Anla, some brooding bird of prey, continued to watch the skier, who was now plodding across the white sand. His jet rig was nowhere in sight, presumably already locked in the tasteless sportskite.

  The black heat-suit that covered his torso had a groin flap sealed at his pelvis, no doubt for greater ease of whipping it out and whipping it back in again. Theri stifled a snort; it bore a strong resemblance to the romper suits recommended for incontinent infants.

  She watched the man laboring up the slanting sand to their hollow. His face still held traces of summer tan. Theri reactivated the sonnets, flicking them to auditory. An actor’s fruity tones came softly from her library, a barely comprehensible rendition of the original phonemic values.

  She silently mouthed the inevitable request to herself: You women wouldn’t have a spare buzz by any chance?

  “Hello, I couldn’t bot a hit from you two, could I? I must have left my stash at home, I’ve been dying for a buzz all day.”

  Theri turned the sound up slightly. “You don’t look too dead to me. Don’t Skyhogs have dispensers on the panel?”

  “It’s seized up.... To tell you the truth I’ve had nothing but trouble from that crate ever since I got it. I’m crediting it on a new Zinger next week.” He squatted in the sand beside them.

  “Good for you, I hope the new dispenser’s well stocked.”

  Theri returned to her poems. Anla silently produced an intoxicant from the food foil and offered it to the skier. She shot one herself, while Theri grunted a gruff refusal, keeping her filament-warmed back to the man.

  Unperturbed, Anla and the skier looked bright-eyed at the long lines of breakers, curving gently along the shallow crescent of the beach, erupting in high, slow-falling spasms on the rocks of the promontory. The skier turned to Anla, ignoring Theri, obviously finding the silent woman in the cape the better bet—better looking, too, no doubt.

  “They’re breaking well today,” he announced.

  “Yes.”

  “They always do that with a southerly blowing, gives them a nice slow break.”

  “Don’t you ever fall through?”

  “Zee-gee. Cods, I’ve had some zee-gees all right. Field dephased once.”

  “Take in any water?”

  “For a few seconds. Trouble is, I can’t swim. Bloody near drowned.”

  “It sounds awfully dangerous.”

  “Yeah, well there’s risks involved, of course. That’s part of the fun really. Not that I’d deliberately do anything stupid, mind you, not with the rest of bloody eternity ahead of me, but I reckon if a thing’s worth doing you’ve gotta be prepared to take a bit of a gamble. Know what I mean?”

  “What about jaws?”

  “Ah well, you see them cruising about occasionally, but they never touch you if you’re in a field. Must reckon you’re one of them.”

  “Are you?”

  “Eh?”

  “A jaw?”

  The skier looked nonplussed for an interval, and gazed out to sea. At length his neck stiffened and he laughed meaningfully.

  “Might have a bit of it in me.”

  Theri, having taken as much as she could stand, unrolled from her cocoon, turned off her library and walked slowly down the beach in search of Kael and Ben.

  The men stood on an exposed rock shelf, their feet washed by the odd wave larger than the rest. Theri watched them bending over something in a pool, silhouetted against the ocean and the clouding sky.

  She picked her way across the shelf; the rocks were spiky with crustaceans, the hollows flat and slippery with olive-green seaweed. Torpid, the thick tubular trunks awaited the incoming tide to swirl them alive again. The raped remains of bivalves clung in clusters, their inhabitants taken years ago by ecological competitors.

  Ben and Kael were examining a small native polyp trapped in a pool. Ben was explaining the niceties of sea-food preparation:

  “And then you peel off the tough outer skin and marinate it for two days in white grape wine and lemon juice, something citric anyway.”

  Theri considered the little animal; its tentacles were coiled loosely over each other, the three unblinking eyes in its bulbous head steadily regarding the aliens. “We’re going to be hard pressed to eat that thing.”

  “Its amino acids are compatible.”

  “I realize that.”

  “The colonizing Million did, and they had no wine.”

  “They also ate jaws, if they weren’t eaten first.”

  The little nest in the dunes was deserted, a lonely dump of filaments and still-bulging foils. Ben shrugged, unconcerned: “She must have gone for a walk in the other direction.”

  Theri made no mention of the oaf but started to help Kael unpack the prepared food modules. She twisted the tags, setting off the rapid chemical catalysis which had the vegetables steaming by the time Kael ripped the foils open. Ben gathered firewood: scraggy roots of dead scrub and driftwood.

  “Can you see Anla yet?”

  Theri rose, licking her fingers, and examined the empty curve of the beach, the desolate jumble of dunes. Coming over the scalp of a long, bald dune, Anla and the cretin appeared.

  A confusion of mutinous velvet in the lee of her body, Anla’s cloak clung skin-tight to windward. Her hair floated, a black flag above black sails. The laminar loon plodded beside her, a fish out of water.

  Chariots almighty, Theri thought, aghast, she hasn’t been having it off with that dimwit already! She can’t have, it’s too cold anyway. Hope the men scare him off.

  Anla caught sight of Theri and raised an arm in comradely salute. She started down the slope of the dune with her doggie. Theri slid down to the smoky fire Ben was building.

  “Anla’s coming. She seems to have struck up a friendship with the skier.”

  Kael, guilelessly: “That’s good, maybe he’ll lend us his rig.”

  Ben said nothing.

  Anla and the body-skier arrived. Theri looked at the man’s feet sticking scowl-like out of the slick legs of his heat-suit. Several toes were missing. Munched by jaws, with any luck, or had he carelessly left them at home?

  “Hello, this is Liff. This is Ben, my pair-bond, Kael and Theri.”

  Kael clasped hands, offering the skier a buzz, inviting him to eat, starting a conversation about wave mechanics. Theri sat on the s
and and regarded them both with scornful ire. She detected a note of triumph in the confident argot of the skier.

  If he hasn’t scored with Anla already, she told herself, he bloody thinks he’s going to. Christ in Britain, why does Kael have to chat up the sod? Why does Anla have to contract some sordid little affair with him? Why doesn’t bloody Ben tell him to piss off? Sick, that’s what they are, bloody sick. They’re just scared. Kael’s scared of making enemies, of unpleasantness, of admitting that sometimes people just hate each other on sight. And Ben, bloody Ben’s scared of being seen to compete for Anla, even though he knows he could only win. Too bloody proud to be seen to fight for his spouse. And Anla’s just playing games for the sheer stupid fun of it. To prove to herself she has the power no one else doubts for a minute.

  Why are my friends such bloody fuckwits?

  §

  The responsibility for discord resting lightly on her becaped shoulders, Anla gazed after Theri’s dwindling figure; gone off in some childish huff because of Liffbabes here. We must all give our undivided attention to our own kind twenty-four hours a day apparently.

  And Kael, over there, repressing his jealousy under a load of old bonhomie. He can’t even pilot a commuting skite without total cybernet control, what’s all this bullshit about sports models? Silly bugger, I’d trade fifty skiers for him any day.

  As for you, my dearly beloved husband, it’s about time you realized that this long suffering retreat into the black hole of your self-sufficiency will get you nowhere.

  §

  Ben poked the fire’s smoldering ashes with a stick and told himself that he had been through it all so many times before. “I’ve been through it all so many times before,” he muttered inaudibly.

  He looked at himself from a distance. Here we have Ben who has known only Anla who has known so many. He ceased his mumbling and silently observed the usurping prickbearer who favored a certain rare class of wave, endorsed and actively pursued the individual acquisition of exchange-value, and would shortly be trading in his sportskite on a faster one. That exhausted Liff as a topic.

  A sad dilemma, Ben thought. For he understood well enough the fascination Anla must feel for the differing contours of the athlete’s muscles.