Valencies: A Science Fiction Novel

by Damien Broderick

  Ben looked at his wife. “I thought you said they wouldn’t dare ‘cast anything about this?”

  “I was wrong wasn’t I?” Anla put her mug down with a jolt, spilling coffee. “Shit, of course. It’s the Legation. This is a sort of lesson in miniature. They must be more worried than we’ve hoped for.”

  “Shhh!”

  A brief clip from the cartoon’s most innocuous segment was cavorting through the holly field. It was cut smartly, and the corner of the living room took on the semblance of Curringal’s mechfab grouprooms viewed at a distance. Kids rushed out of the doors, noticed the out-of-field media skites, pointed and stared.

  The angle changed. Educers stepped out wearily, faces averted. Two of them were Kael and Anla. They walked into the field, Anla quickly muttering something inaudible. Madam Hewson appeared, doing her emotional number. The scene cut to the Coordinator’s office. Grey sat behind his enormous console, stern and parched.

  “We asked Co-ordinator Grey what steps would be taken to ensure—”

  Kael felt the muscles of his shoulders relax. He tousled Theri’s hair. “Well, they censored that bit. Must have decided it was slanderous.”

  The segment closed with a long shot of Con and his fellow conspirators being marched out of the grounds. It was impossible to make out their features. Not a word had been heard from them.

  Kael closed his eyes. Grey would hardly let the matter rest there. “Let’s find Catsize and get stoned,” he said.

  PART SEVEN

  The spaghetti bar was almost deserted. Another table held half a dozen people wearing jaunty Imperial colors, also stoking up for the coming exercise in participatory democracy.

  “What’s going to happen, Kael?”

  “Don’t know. If they’re worried enough they’ll be bound to schedule a downpour to dampen enthusiasm. Bit rough on the loyalists though.”

  Theri tore at her roll. “This thing’s only got a millionth of a centimeter of marg on it.” They both laughed. She speared her spaghetti, twisting a little whirlpool in the tangled sea of veggie sauce and pasta, and watched Kael finish his lurid green lasagna. He seems happy and relaxed, she though, but then he always is in restaurants and autocafes and pubs. He ought really to live on one of the old worlds, where they go in for the civilized thing in a big way.

  Kael ordered coffee and started doodling on his library.

  “What’s that?”

  “Design for a house.”

  “Who for?”

  “I don’t know, just thought I’d design a house.”

  Theri watched Kael sketching in the walls and doors of his house, while the CAD program rectified the stresses and tensions and pointed out ergonomic defects. She wondered if he was hoping for a full scale downpour so that they could abandon the event and go visiting instead. But of course everyone else would be at the Teleport.

  “What do you want to do?”

  “Eh? Aren’t we going to the assembly?”

  “Yes, but what would you really like to do?”

  “Go to bed with you and a stash of stone.”

  Theri smiled, gripping his knees with hers under the bench. Kael expunged his architecture and authorized the tab. He helped Theri into her fur jacket.

  The sky lay across the urban buildings like a wet rag. Spruced up for the occasion, the grass of the common bounced under their feet. They walked in step up the hill towards the Gardens, arms locked around each other.

  Theri glanced sideways at Kael. He was wearing a black oilskin over a dusty-red jumpsuit. A warning drizzle began. His hair slowly turned darker, starting to cling to the up-turned collar of the oilskin. She thought he looked like a frontier fisherman.

  He ought to be wearing sea-boots, she thought. Those soft things of his will soak up the water like salt.

  They crossed to the Gardens. Drizzly haloes circled the glo-panels and the trees reflected a wet green light.

  §

  The crowd was still in its formative stage, a scatter of groups: threes, tens, scores, serving as nuclear clusters for odd individuals or pairs to attach themselves to, or to wander off from, free electrons, to be reabsorbed into other groups. Only the covert cops stood around singly—inert atoms, incapable of the chemical bonding that was building the crowd up around them.

  It would be depressing, Kael thought, to arrive alone in this crowd, knowing nobody, whatever the strength of one’s sympathy with its numerous causes. Presumably even the militia must have their own network of comradeship, the shared cold-eyed cop glance.

  Kael told himself that his perspective was getting slightly paranoid. Most of these people were sturdy loyalists, here as much for the spectacle and pageant as for the phatic expression of their sectional interests.

  He and Theri walked between the clusters, exchanging salutations with citizens they’d never seen before and might never see again, agreeing that certainly somebody must have botched the weather and there’d be hell to pay. They resisted absorption until they sighted the Alliance.

  The group stood under a dripping tree, shielded by a portable rain field. Anla was laughing at something with Mart. Theri greeted everyone warmly, engaging Dav in a playful bearhug. Dav lifted her clear of the grass, gave a final squeeze and dropped her to the ground. Theri passed easily into the group’s compass.

  Kael felt the pull, the blind chemical valence. Dav slipped him a sonic grenade. Bemused, he handled the thing for a moment, then nearly dropped it. It was not a toy. This thing could rupture ear-drums, and worse.

  He caught Anla’s eye; she was watching him quizzically.

  “Ready for action, Kael?”

  He handed the low-level weapon to her.

  “You can have it, Anla, I’m off to find my friends the underdogs.”

  He left the Alliance, his accelerated pulse beginning to slow, and went in search of banished Con and the conspirators.

  The crowd had started to congeal. It was getting harder to pass between the laughing groups, and the groups swelled. In the festive mood, the drizzle was discounted.

  Was this, in turn, some ploy of the psychodynamicians, a soupcon of adversity to anchor memories of the Emperor’s emissaries and a vital, wonderful evening? Do you know, Mavis, one of my group actually spoke to one of them, really, from Earth!

  Well, not that exactly; if the Legates did turn up at Bolte on the 1-in-128 roulette spin of indeterminate targeting, Kael knew, they’d come out in an ambulance, with the tatters of their artificial cloned support organs hanging like soiled cloth from their bodies. They would hardly be in a fit state to talk to anyone, let alone grant their petitions. But the ceremonial circumstances would have done the job for them. Everyone loves a parade. Everyone loves a facade.

  For a moment, Kael found himself wondering, with horror, what it would be like to teleport halfway across the universe in a single jump. Fifteen days of total sensory isolation, metabolism eating your own flesh, mind locked into metatime hallucination.

  Not much fun, fellas. I guess you earn your keep at the Emperor’s table.

  Theri at his side, Kael found himself on the outside of the crowd. Under the thin soles of his damp shoes he felt the rough surface of a road, remnant of the great thoroughfare laid down by the first Million on Victoria. Across the road uniformed police were assembling: vans and riot wagons, just in case, and rough lines of blue-flickering personal rain shields.

  Artificial light gleamed on the silver-encrusted transduction mask of an officer efficiently organizing his men and women on a subvocal command circuit. Kael doubted that there were more than a hundred of them, but then the balance of the troops were probably still dining and would be airlifted in.

  He stood on the edge of the merry crowd and studied the cops.

  The officer with the silver trim directed a thin line of militia onto the steps of an old government building that fronted the Gardens.

  A contingent of augmented commandos arrived; each had a synaptic goose hanging at his belt.

 
More petitioners were arriving in steady streams from various quarters. All were on foot; private skites were banned for the night.

  Kael caught sight of Con, the red-haired girl and a dozen other kids passing behind the main body of police. They skirted a gliding van and crossed the road in a straggling file, holding up the free passage of another van for at least ten seconds. One of the cyborgs, loomed out from the pavement, admonishing them to move faster.

  The kids reached the farther pavement and stood watching the monster return to his original post. Kael noticed, with a smile, that his rump now bore a sparkling advertisement that carried, no doubt, the slogan Support Autonomy.

  A cop on foot, seeing the sticker, approached the trooper from behind, reached across and tugged it free. As he did so the commando’s autonomics over-reacted. The goose flew to his metal hand, and his powered legs brought him around with appalling speed. The cop jumped nervously sideways and slipped to his knees.

  Theri laughed.

  Con’s crew dissolved quickly into the crowd.

  Kael made his way through the throng, sidling between two men who were arguing acrimoniously about some matter presumably unconnected with the current proceedings. “...and the child’s starting to stutter because of the way you treat him,” one of them whined at Kael’s face.

  “Because of the way I treat him? I suppose all that namby-pamby daddy’s little lovey....” The other man’s petulant voice faded out as Kael and Theri moved on.

  The crowd around them turned, thickening and focusing on the steps of the Imperial Monument, now illuminated by the glare of powerful media lasers. The Mayor of Bolte emerged, glazed with the blue of her rain shield.

  Her speech of welcome was precisely as vacuous and boring as one might wish. At the moment it tailed off into half-hearted applause, the sound of pipe and drum came from a pirate multipoint source. Heads turned this way and that.

  Catsize, dressed in red and black, jester’s jingling bells on his masked head, sprang up from the crowd on a floater. His amplified voice, strangely mellow and resonant, announced a modest drama in honor of the Emperor’s distinguished envoys.

  His floater sank again and he was gone.

  A shaft of pure yellow light rose in the midst of the assembly, soft as moonlight in the mist. The dispersed point sources began the Victorian anthem; a number of patriots stiffened their arms in salute. Slurring, the dull melody segued into the heroic strains of the Imperial Anthem, and slurred again into silence.

  Someone near Kael grumbled, “Bloody amateurs. Even the bloody Mayor’s better than this.”

  The yellow pillar brightened, and a soughing sigh passed again and again through the crowd. No, wrong on both counts; a tech, or an autonomic intensity regulator, had dimmed the media lasers for a better view of the glowing shaft. And the sound was the sighing, enormously amplified, of a single human being.

  Two great black circles had pierced the shaft, gleamingly reflective of the upturned faces of the crowd. Color coalesced about them, larger circles concentric, striated, blue as a placid sea, surrounded by white ovals.

  A pair of eyes was regarding the crowd with gentle, maternal acceptance, clear whites veined delicately with a hint of blood vessels, long dark lashes closing and opening gravely once more to behold her children.

  For it was a woman’s face, not beautiful but warm, tranquil, beneficent: a mother, a madonna. She parted her lips and sang a single note. In the vast hologram field projected above the crowd she rose on her toes, and her tender hands reached to touch the unborn child in her swollen womb.

  The plaintive note was taken up by stringed instruments, and carried in an elevation to make the skull vibrate by a chord of electronic tones. Kael found that his eyes had filled with tears; he glanced quickly at Theri, and she squeezed his hand.

  The melody emerged—making the muscles of Kael’s mouth smile in sudden relief—as a buoyant, jolly kindergarten song. Now the mother lifted her toddler high into the air and spun him around. A hostility toy came into the child’s hand; he was older now, a wild haired kid drawing a playful bead on his mom.

  There was not a sound from the crowd. New arrivals drifted into vacant spaces, watching the holo. If the official party had thought to move against the scattered pirates, the mood of the assembly held their hand.

  The young man, tall and adolescent-wary, stood at his mother’s side; as she turned with absent-minded love to kiss him he moved away, and did not see the moment of hurt in her eyes.

  A martial note brought briskness to the melancholy melody. Clad in formal military grays, the young man bent over a simulation console, searing imaginary targets with imaginary bolts of stellar radiance.

  The holo-drama had shifted to cartoon schema, Kael realized; a brooding element intruded on the sprightly melody, almost subsonically, a merest shading of disquiet. The cartoon soldier stood in blank ennui. The hues had deepened to dull browns and cool blues and grays. All trace of the mother’s harmony was leaching from the image.

  The soldier dwindled; in his place, an officer reached like an automaton to vid the instructions punched for him by a cadaverous bureaucrat stationed beneath a portrait of the Emperor. The officer took a fax of the message, walked alertly to the soldier, held the words before his face. The soldier dumbly mouthed them to himself. An identical soldier stood at his side, and another behind him, a horde of dehumanized puppets.

  The music rose to a hearty, rollicking cadenza for muse; the troops vanished with a sickening lurch into an Aorist Discontinuity.

  A disgusted voice muttered near his ear: “The fucking proctors.”

  Kael took his eyes from the reeling, nauseating mnemonics Catsize had contrived. Con and the redhead were standing beside him. “What?”

  “The proctors, they’re as dumb as that soldier.”

  “Some of them aren’t too bad,” Kael said lamely.

  “Come off it. Is your mad friend here?”

  “Anla Griffith? Yes, she’s here.” He felt a pang of tension in his gut. Get on with it, Catsize, they’ll cut you off any moment now. You’ve gone outside the limits of inferential drama, this is blatant statement. Yet the faces around him still stared up at the holo without patriotic outrage, puzzled and locked on.

  “Tell her to get properly arrested tonight, will you?”

  Kael shuddered slightly. The troops were arrayed in total incineration battle order, running through a scorched place of sagging trees and shattered buildings. A famous patriotic Imperial song from the Estrildinae action on Trantor boomed to the crash of their heavy boots.

  He said: “If you wish.”

  A woman appeared from a flaming doorway, her face hidden by a futile anti-virus mask. The soldier stopped in front of her and took up a defensive stance, laser pointed at her belly. The two figures went to crimson cutout, then frozen black outline in a pitiless white shaft of light. The music stopped utterly.

  A poisoned wind whined in the formless rubble. A single plaintive note sang across the crowd; Kael’s skin tightened on his cold back, on the soft flesh under his arms.

  Full holographic realism exploded back into the field: the woman stumbled forward, the soldier screamed in fear and triggered his weapon. A single searing pulse went into the woman’s unprotected belly.

  Her clothing puffed and volatilized. Steam gushed from her scorched, perforated womb. She fell in silence.

  The trooper stood dully, his face and body abstracting once more to schema. After a moment he knelt beside the fallen woman and carefully removed her virus mask. The woman was his mother.

  §

  Kael eased his way through the assembly, Theri following. Con and his girl had disappeared as unobtrusively as they had come. A well-known dignitary, caught in the reactivated media lasers and gazing about in confusion, stepped forward to the Monument’s podium. His amplified voice fought a losing battle with the babble of the crowd.

  The assembly had been virtually mute during the wordless mime; now it seemed that ea
ch man caught his neighbor’s sleeve and hollered in his ear.

  The drizzle eased, and the crowd made it clear that they were impatient with speech-making and baffling holos. The politician bent, murmured to an aide. He stepped down.

  Someone gasped. Heads craned. Through the thin, weeping cloud, petals of light unfolded in the night sky. Wind gusted over the Gardens. High above, invisible force fields swept the remaining clouds away. The luminous flowers grew brilliant, prismatic. Beyond Victoria’s shadow, stupendous filament fields were being generated from orbit, catching tomorrow’s dawn and throwing it ahead in all the shifting hues and glory of official celebration.

  Unwatched, the politician was back on his podium. “And when you march, march with joy in the name of your Emperor,” he cried to the dazzled crowd.

  Kael pushed on, using elbows and knees where necessary, toward the Alliance. He wondered if the politician intended to march and decided he didn’t; the “you” had been too well accented, a definite if unconscious stress. The bugger’d be lifted to the Bolte Teleport by official skite.

  As Kael reached his friends the crowd started to move, forming into a carnival column ten and fifteen people wide. Children rode the shoulders of adults.

  Bad luck, Catsize. A good try, but it’d be hard to whip this lot into insurgent fervor.

  Kael reached behind, found Theri’s hand, clasped it tightly. The free people of Victoria passed out of the Gardens and gained possession of the old road. A ragged, cheering mass stretched in front of the Alliance and behind it.

  The chemical reaction had taken place, the molecules had bonded, and he was now at one with the strolling body of people. And this despite the banality of the evening’s agenda, the irrelevance of the whole exercise—even if Anla’s covert plans for agit-prop destruction came off—to the pain of any infant screaming to death on one of the rebel worlds at whatever monstrous number of degrees Absolute an antipersonnel laser burns.

  Water squelched in his shoes. Theri’s hair hung in a single tress to the matted fur of her jacket; her face glistened. To their rear Anla and Ben, he noticed, walked arm in arm. Somewhere else in the crowd Con and his action group were doubtless planning mischief. Kael called over his shoulder to Anla: