Valencies. Damien Broderick

Theri mused remotely, planetary populations were exterminated for possession of the mystery in the foddle gastrointestinal tract. Now the animals dozed in the weak light of a tourist world. Or these ones did. Or had.

      Ben sloped off to the north, if that was what it was, knife clutched purposefully. Kael and Theri waited beside the skite. At a signal from Catsize, all four moved to drive the beasts toward the gravity shear interface.

      The flock ambled to the invisible barrier and turned smartly left. Theri walked steadily on and glanced at Kael. Is he really so keen, she asked herself, to catch one? He’ll let it go after a face-saving struggle.

      A foddle broke from the shifting mass and started to canter, followed by two or three others. Kael threw himself at the hindmost shag, struck Theri as she sprang from her side, lost his grip, caught a leg and lay on the moon’s surface clutching a kicking foot. Theri took hold of the animal’s forelimbs and subdued it. Ten meters off, Catsize lay locked with a fat little.

      “Drop that stringy bundle of mange and lend a hand.”

      They released the frightened beast. By now Catsize was securely astride his little. Ben strolled up with the knife. In silence, all of them regarded the wide gray blade: its margin of sharpness, thinned at the point. A machine ideal in its consonance of form and function, though it was difficult to imagine what the gene sculptor used it for. Hacking up his vegetable protein, presumably. Ben handed the knife to Kael. Quickly, Kael put the blade to the little’s throat.

      “Not that way,” Catsize told him. “Drive the point in behind the windpipe and cut outwards. Two swift moves, the work of a moment.”

      Kael corrected his stance. Catsize held the foddle’s head firmly with both hands and tightened the pressure of his knees on its ribcage.

      The moment of truth prolonged itself.

      The foddle gave a pitiful bleat. Theri looked at the ground. In a few years, she told herself, the beast would die of its own accord. The longevity drug, ruth, latent in its body, afforded it no immortality. That was the staggering irony. She didn’t know if it made slaughtering the foddle more justifiable, or less.

      Without her particularly wanting it to, the relevant memory inlay disgorged an outline of the chemical process used to transmute foddle dung into life everlasting. It was closer to a benign infestation than a drug. For the host, the molecular outcome was a homeodynamic somatic equilibrium. Nothing changed except memory and aspiration. Destructive free radicals were obliterated before they could accumulate in cells and do their lethal work. Theri thought briefly of her revolutionary libertarian associates, and their relationship to the Imperial authorities, and smiled with a kind of suppressed fright at the analogy. She looked across to the trapped foddle, sensed the bodies of her friends caught in the immobility of terminal choice, breath held in their lungs, ready for release with the releasing of the creature’s blood.

      “Okay, Catsize. If you know so much about it, you do it.”

      Kael retired to stand beside Theri, putting his arm along her shoulder, but she stood closed again within herself and regarded the ground.

      “Damn it, I’m the pilot, not the bloody cook. Here.” The thing was proffered handle-first to Theri.

      Visions of lusty, contemptuous Anla. She’d take the knife and with clean efficient strokes cut the miserable creature’s neck, hand the limp, bloody carcass to her husband, walk off.

      “Not me, let it go.”

      Theri shifted her feet and looked at the sky. An edge of burning light on the world Newstralia. Clouds streaked the curve of its blue. She saw an elephant in one cloud-mass; in a minute it would be mounting the north pole.

      The situation had become altogether ridiculous; the buzz of the party was wearing off.

      “Well, let’s take it back to our little holiday home and work out how we’ll do it in the morning.” Compromise was Kael’s specialty.

      They straggled back to the skite, the foddle draped over Kael’s shoulders, all of them bearing their reprieved pride.

      §

      Beached and abandoned on the margins of sleep, Anla found once again that though many of her friends swore by this state of consciousness it had taken on for her the aspect of an anti-tsunami. Sleep’s enormous combers withdrew to the horizon without a glance over their shoulders. In the quarter gravity of the unlit sleeping chamber, excellent as it was for gymnastic screwing, or as presumably it would be given a competent partner, she was queasy and bored.

      Issues of metaphysical sturdiness came to her attention, as they’d been known to do, provisionally penned in the kennels to which she’d assigned them, whimpering for the final disposition she was fairly unlikely to make on their behalf.

      Morality was one. She was certainly no stranger to the problems of axiology.

      Lovely word, that. Axiology: theory of value. It seemed to contain its own solutions: axe your way through the Gordian knot, acts of piety, access to truth.

      Ralf was proving to be a snorer; she kicked him peevishly, and he rolled lightly on the webbing without waking.

      Why should Ralf’s profession seem to her so self-evidently odious, while he happily accepted it as the epitome of a right-thinking life? Calling him a dull shit, and adducing his ineptitude at fornication as ad hominem evidence, was hardly exhaustive, not to a midnight philosopher. Ah no, she’d been this way before. It kept coming back to that silly question: “Why should we be moral?”

      A surprisingly large number of people thought that you should be, and even considered it to be a moral obligation. Ha ha, boom boom. But suppose you used the word “should” as an evaluative and motivational expression, instead of a normative one? If you wish to climb to the top of the mountain, you should walk up rather than down, or stumble round in circles.

      Of course last time she’d come along this track she’d detected a snag with “evaluative”, too, but that was on the next level up and you had to start somewhere.

      All right, take Ralfo as your representative simple unreflecting man. Persuade him of the vileness of imperialism. Crisis for Ralf. Echoing voids of doubt, disillusion and guilt. Never again, as the poet said, will he be certain that what he imagines are the clear dictates of moral reason are not merely the ingrained and customary beliefs of his time and place. Anla allowed herself a fanfare of trumpets, bowing graciously.

      Okay, so then he might ask himself what he could do in the future to avoid prejudices and provincial mores, or, more to the point, almost universally accepted mores—and thus to discover what he really ought to do.

      That was merely another normative enquiry, though; the tough one was “show me that there is some form of behavior which I am obliged to endorse.”

      Moral constraint seemed to mean either that you should pursue good ends and eschew bad ones, or that you should be faithful to one or more correct rules of conduct. Greeks and Taoists versus Hebrews and Confucians, yeah, yeah.

      Chariots, it was incredible to think that they’d been chewing on this for upward of four thousand years without coming to a definitive, intuitively overwhelming conclusion. But then the imperial ideologists thought they had, didn’t they, with their jolly old stochastic memetic-extrapolatory hedonic calculus or whatever the fuck they were calling it these days. The least retardation of optimal development for the greatest number, world without end, or at least until the trend functions blur out. So they managed to get both streams of thought into one ethical scholium without solving anything. After all, why obey a rule like that? And who gets to define as “good” those magical parameters making up the package called “optimal development”?

      The besieged libertarians on Chomsky, she thought darkly, might differ from Ralf on the question of the good life.

      Anyway, even if we all agreed that certain parameters were good, why should that oblige us to promote their furtherance? It might be prudent good sense to do so, and aesthetically pleasing, and satisfy some itch