Valencies. Damien Broderick

you happen to be mistaken about stochastic biosis.”

      Smiling faintly, Anla uncrossed her legs, and allowed her knees to begin once more their slow tectonic drift. “Suppose we give politics a miss,” she said, with every semblance of conciliation. “No doubt you deem my views puerile, as I consider yours senile.”

      A hovering toff, resplendent in codpiece and chiffon, threw himself down beside her and let his dark hand fall on her bare calf. “Oh I say, my sweet, that’s rather unsporting. I’ve known Ralf since he was a babe in arms. He’s no older than your father.”

      “I haven’t got a father.”

      “Oh.” The toff blinked. “You’re a clone?”

      “No, they found me under a cabbage patch. Of course I’m a clone.”

      “I’m sure we didn’t mean to put you in a state. Can I get you a stimulant?”

      “How kind.” Most of the gathering had subsided to the floor, or retired to privacy. Anla could spot none of her friends. As the toff glided away she caught a glimpse of her glowering husband, propped stiffly on the far side of the room. Bugger him, she thought irritably. What’s wrong with the man, the place is crawling with it. Next to him swayed a bountiful woman of Dravidian extraction, eminently available, with a spangled cleavage as big as all outdoors. Thrust your hand in to the wrist, lad. You’re supposed to be a tit man, aren’t you? But all Ben did was scowl pitifully back at her before turning clumsily and shaking off the dust of his heels. Take that, you harlot. Oh shit, toujours gai.

      A touch on her shoulder proved that the bloody toff had not been ambushed in the pursuit of his duties. Anla shot the stimulant buzz and ignored him in favor of Empire’s manifest destiny.

      “Ralf,” she said, “did anyone ever tell you that you have beautiful eyes?”

      §

      “And just what do you propose doing when we’ve captured the little bugger?”

      “Kill it,” Kael said. “And then eat it.”

      “Hmm.” Catsize brooded. “Killing it is just the kickoff. Then we’ve got to skin it and take out its guts.”

      “Half the inhabited universe once dined on meat,” Kael said. “Our ancestors throve on it. You were there, Catsize, I’m sure you remember it well.”

      “All right.” Catsize stood up. “You find the instrument, I’ll bring the skite around.” He nimbly hurdled outstretched, drunken legs, crossed the patio and jumped for the shadows; out and away, up the track to their hired skite. Kael went the other way, toward the kitchen.

      Ben waited for them with Kael’s Theri on the moonlit gravel, watching the waters of the river run black and well-polished between matched banks. Summer night, holiday world: dull gleam of vehicles, murmur of failing party. Only Anla’s voice, precise and intelligent, rose distinctly, in debate with the gene-sculptor. And then the sculptor’s laughter, overhearty, self-satisfied, across the blurred conversations of the other guests. Ben, surly, kicked at the gravel, pretending he hadn’t heard.

      They’d met the gene-sculptor in a waterside pub. He had bought Anla a buzz and put his arm around her shoulder, called her “my dear” and said he could tell by the karyotonic lines on her hand that she was impulsive and generous. An invitation to the party in the scrub had been issued with the second buzz, an invitation that could hardly exclude her friends—could hardly exclude, for that matter, her lawful bonded husband. Not that the sculptor could have inferred her unfashionably dyadic status: no antique sentimental ring constrained Anla’s impulsive and generous hand.

      Ben turned his back on the dim glow of the studio and the sound of his wife’s familiar sexiness, stared at the reconstructed elms holding out their white arms to the travelling local moon. Celestial lair of foddles, safe under Imperial decree from human hands. He lowered his gaze and glared at what he saw. Fucking expensive, pretentious place. The bastard probably has a dacha like this on a hundred worlds, or a thousand. You can’t take it with you, but you can find one just like it waiting at the other end if you’re rich enough.

      A neat peptide-schema on intergalactic monetary equivalents bounced up unsought into Ben’s consciousness; he slapped it back down again. What must it be like after a thousand years of data inlays?

      He squinted in the darkness. Granite and sandstone, ageless centenarians in doublets, their twittering girl crones, their toad-like sportskites cluttering up the dropspace. So low on the ground, some of these overpowered heaps of plast, that a well-aimed fusillade of gravel ends up on the webbing.

      A fly-screen flared and Kael came silently from the dark end of the house, steel in his hand: a half meter of freshly sharpened carving knife. “What the hell are you up to?”

      Ben, not bothering to reply, kicked another shower of gravel at a yellow coupe.

      “He’s just giving them a bit more ballistic ballast,” Theri explained. “They need it for going round clouds.”

      “Ah.”

      The skite’s light sliced down, made them blink. Kael and Theri clambered aboard and sorted themselves out astern. Ben slumped beside Catsize. The lift-field spurted gravel and the safari swung aloft, drive grumbling, lights tunneling across the mangy bush of the planet Newstralia. Bloody holidays.

      §

      Theri lay under the filament blanket, head on Kael’s lap. The wind swirling over the open skite dried the sweat of the party from her face. Trees flickered below, branches webbing the soil. She wanted bed and sleep, not this midnight madness, this molesting of innocent foddles in the pastures of the night.

      The whole exercise seemed slightly contrived, anyway. Kill an animal and eat it—the sort of jolly fantasy one floated at parties or during stoned evenings in pubs, not something one actually went out and did. Not someone like Kael, at least.

      Probably he only pushed the plan along to get Ben out of the place. Give the lad something to do. Anla was obviously in no mood to leave her conversation with the gene-sculptor. So Kael hatched this absurd scheme, trying a little too hard to be carried away by the madcap spirit of the thing.

      It was really only when Catsize decided to adopt the plan that it got off the ground. She thought: Poor old Kael’s just slightly too rational, not quite manic enough for the exploit. She heard Catsize endit the illegal program; he caught her eye and winked.

      “Heads and elbows in,” he said, and energized the bubble. “Going up.”

      §

      The skite trudged up the gravity well, sliding a bit off its programmed trajectory, the corrugations of the geofield barely diminished by its rudimentary autonomics. Kael ran his hand under the blanket, found Theri’s fingers and interlocked his own. The atmosphere ended and the skite bounced into open fields of clumpy stars, arctic in the night sky.

      “I’d have thought that sanctuaries would be guarded,” Ben said grumpily. “We’ll never get through its operational envelope. We’ll be arrested. Our loved ones will never hear of us again.”

      “I know a thing or two.”

      “You’ve been around, haven’t you, Catsize,” said Kael. “You’ve seen a thing or two that’d shock us.”

      “My oath.”

      “Catsize, how old are you?”

      “Don’t be obscene.”

      §

      “You miss my point.” The rowdy team of endorphins partying in Anla’s brain-tissues were kicking up their heels and knocking the furniture about. Somehow this sportive chemical behavior had the effect of lengthening the room, giving everything she saw and heard a piercing clarity. Her amplified voice rang wearily down the enormous hall. “If we must go back to basics, what the hell do you find so glorious in the idea of Empire?”

      The boring fellow was wrestling with his library.