Valencies. Damien Broderick

He was laughing in apparent astonishment. “What a curious word to apply to the Imperium. My dear, it’s a simple matter of historical necessity. Do you find the law of gravity ‘glorious’? My goodness.”

      “It’s very pretty but shouldn’t you put it away before someone treads on it?”

      “Anla, you raised the topic. I merely wish to prove the elementary facts of life to you before your stubbornness drives me quite mad. Now look at this.” He addressed the machine. “Display the number of habitable planets in the universe.”

      Instantly: 2.51 1017.

      “It’s in decimal notation,” the gene-sculptor said. “All right, display the current estimated human populations on those planets.”

      The numbers twinkled: 1 1027.

      Anla tried to think of a one followed by twenty-seven zeroes, but her concentration was not up to it.

      “There you are, my dear. Those are the fundamental and irreducible substrates of our civilization. Ten to the eleven galaxies in a variety of fetching shapes and sizes, chockablock with a round octillion human souls. A seething statistical gas of political pressures and competing macromemes. It’s a self-organizing stochastic entity, which is just as well for all of us, and the Imperium is its structure.”

      Anla clutched at the jutting-out portions of her face to stop it flying off, or at least to retard its acceleration. After an interval, during which she concentrated as hard as she could on the ends of her feet, she was able to say in a muffled voice: “Descriptive mumble.”

      “I beg your pardon?”

      “Hang on a bit.” She spread her hands and waved the fingertips vigorously. “You see, I knew you were still there. That’s a piss-weak line of argument and you ought to be ashamed of yourself. It’s illicit to slide from description to valuation. Most of Earth’s empires were based on unabashed slavery. Ours started that way. I don’t imagine you’d endorse that, structure or no structure. You like to see slavery?”

      The gene man roared with delight. “Of course I do. How else do you suppose a pre-industrial culture can get its resource-surplus to takeoff point? Not much fun for the slaves, I dare say, but quite essential in the big picture.”

      I won’t feel a thing, she thought. Or perhaps I’ll feel ten times as much as usual, and it’ll go up over the pain threshold. There seemed to be a circle of passive intellectual spectators gathered around them now, the last of the barely conscious.

      She moved over to the couch and leaned heavily against the sculptor. “Empire,” she told him, “is always the master-slave relationship of a coercive hegemonial state to the affinity-complexes under its dominion. The only justification for an empire comprising the entire universe is that such a structure permits the exercise of your damned predictions. If we all went our own way, your nice little trained bugs could bite each other’s bums from now until doomsday without—”

      “They’re not bugs, my dear, they’re memetic hypercycles. Tailored genes in a specified ecology. Surely you’re not denying that imperialism is the highest stage of socialism?”

      “Oh, I’ve no doubt you’re a good, flag-waving Leninist. But if you want to trade old saws, I can go you one better. Have you ever read any of the early proleptic poems by Asimov? Pre-diaspora, about two thousand years ago.”

      “Child, I make it a firm rule never to vid the classics. The only Asimov I’ve ever heard of is the fellow who directed the compilation of the rather arrogantly titled Asimov’s Encyclopedia Galactica.”

      “That’s his clone. I can’t see why you think it’s arrogant, he wrote the bloody thing.”

      The gene-sculptor jerked violently, and managed to get his hand up her skirt. “What, all five thousand volumes?”

      “Easy with those fingernails. Yes, he’s a demon for work, poor old bugger. There’s nothing much else for him to do, he was eighty-nine when they perfected the immortality process. If you’re interested, he has a retrospective called Opus 6000.”

      “I’m not. What was the point?”

      “The point was that the original Asimov was the first person to posit the sort of civilization we turned out to get. Most of the details were wrong, of course. He didn’t know about the Aorist Closure, so he figured we’d get around in spacecraft—you know, like the starwars the kids play. And his Empire only had about as many people as we’ve got inhabited planets.”

      “Those figures would have been pretty close to the mark a thousand years ago—”

      “But then your dear little bugs wouldn’t have had enough to go on, would they? Where he really screwed up, he thought a whole galaxy could be governed with one office clerk for every ten million people. The mind boggles. A neat little team of two thousand nine-to-fivers for each planet. Chariots, I’ve forgotten the important bit, and I only did the search on this with the kids last month. Here, how do you turn this thing on?”

      “Just talk to it. My dear, fascinating as all this is, I’m sorry I ever opened my mouth. Why don’t we just go—”

      “Hello, look I’m after a reference to a poem by, mark, Isaac Asimov, that’s uh A-Z-I-M-”

      A pop-up in the index was activated, and the machine began to bellow at her, “No, no, no, you benighted imbecile, it’s S! S! A-S-I-M—”

      §

      Just at the point where Theri was starting to entertain genuine qualms, of which she was notified by cramps in the stomach and coolness of the skin, Catsize admitted that there was almost certainly not the faintest chance of their being incinerated.

      “It’s been abandoned for decades, centuries more likely. There’ll be no one there except foddles and a few dull machines.”

      “What, they don’t care if you just whip up and nick some of their foddles?” Ben was scandalized.

      “Debased currency, my lad. You don’t suppose that they still pick the ruth out of foddle-shit, do you, molecule by molecule? They make it, you foolish fellow. Our recent host would be most offended if he thought you thought his thought, or his practise at any rate, wasn’t up to synthesizing the odd tonne of immortality promoter.”

      Now that the satellite was under them instead of in the sky, Theri saw that it was just the standardized crater-and-rill-scape of any other moon. Or was that dark stuff grass? In a single mind-eroding wrench the skite went across the gravity shear of the sanctuary mascon, and they were gusting aerodynamically down to the surface, with the bubble off and warm fake wind in their faces.

      “Well, why do they leave them here, then?”

      “Why not? Someone else put the gravity in, it’s all been amortized, the search for large-scale production of the fabled longevity secret proved to lie in a direction other than the voidings of foddles, and bureaucrats don’t like to be disturbed.”

      Catsize cut the field. The skite, its lights romantically if unnecessarily extinguished, thumped down to a halt.

      Two hundred meters away a vast red-box tree provided world-shade to the sleeping dollops around its trunk. Kael and Catsize dropped to the grass. Ben stumbled and swore. Reluctantly leaving her filament, Theri followed the pale flash of the knife.

      They ran across the grass away from her, bent over as low as possible, like an eidetic reconstruction of Kurd or Unilever. Whatever for, they’re not going to be mown down by lasers, might as well run completely upright.

      One old shag raising her head: the predatory horde freezing, kids playing statues. Three grown men with nothing better to do. The motherly shag, suspicious, coughing consumptively (the name of the ancient disease popping up from a hygiene inlay); fuzzy heads rising; knees creaking; the flock lumbering to its feet.

      “Bloody hell!”

      Foddles crepitated off in twos and threes, fat littles and old shags scattering to