Valencies. Damien Broderick

as his spouse to cause him to move.

      She watched his somber bearded face as he bent over the tiny dancing sigils. He seemed set for the night. She listened to the steady hum of the old clock. The tired hoot of some night-embarking craft rose from the harbor.

      Anla stood up and silently made a pot of tea, placing a mug at Ben’s elbow, and returned to her chair. Ben let the tea cool, abandoned the library at length and walked to the cold-field. He poured himself a tot of chilled milk, picked up a hardcopy of some Sinese poems Catsize had left lying around, sat down at the kitchen bench.

      Anla started to doze. She tried to keep herself awake by thinking of the gene-sculptor. A fool really, kept patting his hair into place, even while he was trying to keep his end up. Macromemes, indeed.

      Ben rose slowly from his chair and climbed the stairs to bed. Ralf had a lift-shaft, of course: one floated in it like a leaf. Anla looked at the clock: 0320, about bloody time too, give him half an hour. She was wretchedly tired.

      When she slipped into bed, Ben was so fast asleep that he didn’t move his legs to make room for her. The planet pulled unremittingly at her bones. Now that she’d become accustomed to Ralf’s quarter gravity bed, she craved its costly comfort.

      §

      Catsize galloped up the stairs in the hot morning and gave the door a healthy kick.

      “You two want any breakfast?”

      “I do, but not this bloody whore.”

      “Don’t call me whore, you bastard. I’ll come down for mine, Catsize.”

      The poet bowed low to the dumb worm-chewed door. “As Madame and Monsieur wish.”

      He tripped lightly to the kitchen and gave Kael and Theri the thumbs-up. “Contact between our friends has, I judge, been established.”

      4.

      On the last evening of their holiday, Anla sent them all out of the house, Ben included. When they returned with prime buzz, melancholy and self-satisfied in the floral sunset air, the kitchen sang with mouth-watering deliciousness.

      Anla sat them down, and fetched soft lights, and brought out to the table a steaming rack of foddle, all brown without and pink within and spiced with herbs. It was the finest food they’d ever eaten.

      §

      Well pleased by the macabre feast, Catsize took a constitutional stroll in the Newstralian darkness. Licking one finger, he meditated on the semiotics of the event, on its vile, unthinking, utterly representative sexism, and on the curious species of rebuttal, implicit in it, of just that prejudice.

      How monstrously hard, he thought, how unfair, to have to tote two millennia of baggage in your head. Yet all good and bad was, in any case, decaying, degrading, disintegrating; every small gain was a mockery of things ineluctably lost.

      The poet squinted at the botched constellations, fancying that he might pick out Chomsky’s star. But the anarchists were skittish tonight. Yes, locked behind their defenses. He had little hope for them; as little, perhaps, as they held for him.

      §

      In the night, Ben and Anla sat on the dock steps watching the faint glow of energized yacht sails. The tide brought a procession of emblems: a log, a torn foil, a dead fish. The belly of the fish took the foddle moon’s light like a skull. Ben kissed his wife gently, running his tongue over hers. She held him at bay for a lingering moment before responding electrically, forcing his head back, thrusting her hand into his kilt. Ben broke free, probing at his lip. Blood.

      She looked unblinking at his face. “Standing up against the wall.”

      “Yes,” he said. They tore at one another.