“Not at all, you’re going to have to pay for it personally.”
Anla neatly rolled Kael to the floor. In the silent struggle Kael, by virtue of his strength, gained the advantage. He sat astride Anla, holding her shoulders to the rug. Anla relaxed, perfectly at ease in defeat.
Her hair lay black on the rug’s black and red. The dark green of her jump-suit opened in a long, sharp triangle at her throat. Her skin was smooth and olive brown, even in winter. Happily, submissively, she smiled up at Kael. He relaxed his hold. “Look, Anla, it’s not that—”
With an animal deftness she caught him around the neck with her left leg and bent him violently backwards. He thought she had broken his windpipe. Anla sat over him, dominant. Kael, totally limp, closed his eyes and turned away from the plasma glare centimeters from his forehead.
Anla sat looking down at him for a few seconds. Putting a hand to his chin, she turned his face to hers, bent forward with a sigh and kissed him gently. She rose and walked to the door.
“Sorry, Kael petal, I’ll race you off some other time.”
§
Theri, Ben and Jard, at liberty, sat drinking and eating nutrients rudimentary but welcomingly hot with their comrades of the night. Through Lonek’s kitchen wove a varying number of people, recounting grievances, adding their own judicial sentences to the sundry tally: obstruction, resisting arrest, seditious or indecent language, disturbing the peace. News came of arbitrary “leaders” being held in the city for incitement to riot and riotous assembly, and one unheard charge of malicious wounding.
Jard et al had been convicted and let out at 0400, Theri with bruises on her arm, Ben with a piratical black eye, into the custody of a deputation from Jard’s Committee.
Someone switched Lonek’s holly to an early ‘cast of the morning news. Grim media faces spoke of Riot During Petition Assembly, and of Anarchy At The Teleport. Miniaturized scuffles reprised in the holly comer: figures trapped by dull red force-walls, cowering in confused huddles, cops hurling back anarchists, arrests.
The room cheered in good humored derision at night-flying Ben, flailing at the cop skite.
An earnest editorialist faced the gathering:
“When a minority of citizens on a democratic world tries to force its views on others by disrupting the civil order, that minority can succeed only in imperiling our Imperial privileges, and encouraging the rabble element that....”
Lonek bared his teeth savagely:
“Meanwhile back on a cinder called Chomsky—”
§
Kael paced around his apt, a somber inhospitable hulk anchored in a cold inhospitable city. His own spotplasma gave out its beam of directional heat, toasting the skin and leaving the bones to freeze. He looked at his library: 0711. An absurdly early hour to be awake.
He walked to the cold-field. It contained an uninviting collection of bits and pieces. He took out an opened foil of milk and a scowl egg. A thin film of half dried milk clung to the upper half of the foil. Kael drank it and seared the egg, setting the timer at random. He looked out into the dismal morning light. He felt foolish and hungry. It had been a bad night: visions of Theri fighting the fuzz; of Anla, tall and laughing.
Part of the white was still a liquid translucent blob. He ate the tepid thing in three quick bites as the door opened.
Radiant, happy Theri clattered in.
“Hello, love, just been convicted for offensive behavior. Shit, the cops are creeps.”
Kael watched his mistress, her hair tangled and knotted, a flush on her face, squatting in front of the plasma warming her hands.
“Ben went for obstruction and damage,” she told him cheerfully. “Have you watched the news?”
“Briefly.”
“They showed Mart and Ris being arrested.”
“Really.”
“What’s the matter with you?”
“Nothing.”
“You don’t seem too happy. We’re planning a lightning raid on the Teleport now they’ve removed the force-fields. Roar overhead in a couple of skites with the cybernet repeaters suppressed—Con says he can fix it to last thirty seconds—pelt the place with grenades, and roar away. Going to come?”
“No.”
“Don’t be so bloody dreary.” She foraged for something to eat.
Kael sat in a chair, and thought about memetic hypercycles capable of predicting the mass movements of an octillion human beings. He looked at Theri: alive and happy in the revolutionary morning, hot from the fray and in the mood for more, the fire of purpose in her veins, the warmth of comradeship in her words.
“I don’t think you ought to go.”
“Why the fuck not?”
“Because there’s no point in it and you’ll probably be arrested again.”
“Oh, fucking Chariots, Kael, just because you’re so pissweak there’s no need for everybody else to be.” Theri, contemptuous, turned on Kael, slumped in his chair about to speak, and forestalled him: “I know exactly what you’re going to say, Kael. You’re going to say that rattling the Teleport windows with grenades won’t do anything to put Chomsky back. You’ll probably say we’re father-fixated with the authorities.”
“Something like that.”
“Well, I’m just not interested.”
Theri stood up quickly from the table, pushing the plate away, and left the room. Kael continued his study of plasma heaters.
They were said to be more resources-conservative than central heating, a feature admired in energy mechanisms by Catsize. The poet had held on more than one occasion that despite the methane reserves locked up in the gas giants the universe was finally on the verge of fucking itself. The spot-heater Kael and Theri rented was altogether a classier job than Anla’s and Ben’s, with two separate magnetic bottles, one for each of the plasmas, providing the potential for a lewd, flushed-cheek buttock effect. But then, only one of the plasmas was actually operative these days, which was a point against it.
In the bathroom, Theri was singing above the shower’s hiss.
§
The poet kicked brutally at the rabid thornglee as he picked his way to the Cathouse. Coming down. Soon he would weep. When your rooster crows at the break of dawn
He closed the door, activated his library. He brooded for a time, and started to enter a poem into temporary store. Once he giggled. Goodbye, Smeeth. Groaning at what he saw on the display, he started a second stanza:
God’s umbreller is made of air
keeps the nasty vacuum out.
God, it’s said, has air to spare
enables us all to sing & shout.
One fine day in the winedark spaces
between the stars where god’s hidden face is
the Charioteers got restless
left with a space-hiss
bumped into god
upset his umbreller.
Space poured in like coal to a cellar.
The final stanza was worse. It was evident even to Catsize that he was hysterical with grief. He beamed. It was a terrible poem. At the end he keyed:
For services rendered
Catsize added the name Smeeth knew him by. He accessed Smeeth’s work code, mailed the poem to the office system of his patron. He switched off the library and lay down on his bed. On the road again. Nowhere to go. No vengeance, no saving fantasy, no faith, no hope, no caritas. He had owned these gifts for a thousand years but when he turned about they had gone. And for another thousand he had possessed despair merely.
I met a young girl, she gave me a rainbow
Tears began to leak from his meshed lashes.
Then I’ll stand on the ocean until I start sinkin’
...Plangent, ancient, angry dirge, like a voided promise of flame.
ABOUT THE AUTHORS
Damien Broderick is an award-winning Australian science fiction writer, editor and critical theorist, with a Ph.D. from Deakin University. Formerly a senior fellow in the School of Culture and Communication at the University
of Melbourne, he currently lives in San Antonio, Texas. He has written or edited some 60 books. His 1980 novel The Dreaming Dragons (revised in 2009 as The Dreaming) is listed in David Pringle’s Science Fiction: The 100 Best Novels—and with Paul Di Filippo, he has published a sequel to Pringle’s book, Science Fiction: The 101 Best Novels, 1985-2010. Post Mortal Syndrome, written with his wife Barbara Lamar, was serialized online by Cosmos science magazine, and later published by Borgo Press in the USA. His recent short story collections are Uncle Bones, The Qualia Engine, and Adrift in the Noösphere. In 2013, he collaborated with Grand Master Robert Silverberg on the novel Beyond the Doors of Death.
Rory Barnes has written six novels with Broderick, beginning with Valencies and most recently their short novel Human’s Burden. A widower with two adult sons, he lives in Adelaide, Australia. He has also written the novels The Bomb-Monger’s Daughter, Water from the Moon (with James Birrell), the very funny Horsehead trilogy for young readers, Night Vision and The Dragon Raft for young adults, and Space Junk, a futuristic novel inspired by the saga of the Asian refugee boat people imprisoned or turned away by the Australian government.
Valencies: A Science Fiction Novel Page 20
