Valencies. Damien Broderick

the sublime constraining force you sort of imagine the idea of moral obligation having just evaporates into self-serving circumspection.

      Admittedly there was that tricky number of Kant’s about us possessing a rational nature, and being noumena instead of brute phenomena, and thus not being able to act immorally without self-contradiction, but any fool could see that that went too far on the one hand and not far enough on the other, and anyway what was wrong with a bit of self-contradiction if you stopped when you needed eye implants?

      Anla giggled to herself, and wondered where Ben and the others had got to. He was probably off by himself gloomily hastening the day of the ophthalmologist. Well, was leaving Ben to his own devices a matter for moral self-rebuke?

      Shit, you’d think this bastard could do something to the genes in his nasal cavity.

      This man can see into the future. Fucking incredible, really, you just rip out a few million eigenvectors from your mathematical sketch of an octillion human beings, what’s that in hydrogen molecules, say three and a bit by ten to the twenty-three to the gram, into ten to the twenty-seven, shit, brothers and sisters, we’re statistically equal to three kilograms of hydrogen gas, yes, you plump for the major characteristics you think you’d like to play with and code them up into genes and build yourself a little memetic beastie that stands in for what you figure pushes and pulls thee and me and all our star-spangled relatives, and you breed the little buggers in a tasty itemized soup and watch the way the mutants go.

      Wonderful, Ralf. Bug-culture precapitulates bugged-culture. No way we can jump you won’t know about in advance, because the little bugs snitched on us.

      Have you ever wondered, Ralf, if we’re all just a big stochastic biotic projection for the Charioteers? See how we run.

      But you don’t let us mutate, do you, Ralf? That’s where you fumbled the ball, Dr A, in your ancient poems. The Empire will never fall. We will live forever, and the boring Empire with us.

      Anla lashed out viciously with her foot.

      “Will you fucking stop snoring!”

      §

      The skite shot across Ralf’s deserted dropspace, lights splashing the deserted studio. The party was well and truly over. One vehicle remained, snug under weather-shield. The sculptormobile presumably.

      “She must’ve got a lift back, Ben.”

      The shared lie would last them back to the alien, familiar city, would keep the certainty of Anla, lying low in the arms of the enemy somewhere in the dark dacha, at one remove from reality for another hour.

      Ben took the knife in his right hand, while his left continued to stroke the foddle’s reprieved neck. For a second the blade stood against the light-spattered sky (was it the same galaxy as home? he couldn’t remember), its point between his thumb and index finger. It spun twice, then, thudded into the timber door, and stuck there, quivering, above the star-like brass knob.

      3.

      Brisk G2 sunlight, slanting to the bed, woke Theri.

      Small bubbles had long since formed and burst in the durobond ceiling, and little shards hung like leaves ready to fall. A glo-panel, its adhesion waning like the gravitational constant, had broken away at one end from its induction surface.

      A fly circled through the sunlight, wings glinting, and shot suddenly to the panel. It hung upside down for a few seconds, cleaning its legs, before strolling across to peruse the horizon of its flat-earth world.

      Theri turned her face away from the sun and kissed Kael’s neck. It wasn’t often they woke in contact with each other, like this, though they usually drifted to sleep in some sort of embrace. Sighing, she resumed her catalogue of their holiday room.

      A collection of holograms smiled from the mantelpiece in random directions: cognates, presumably, or ancestors, of the people who’d rented them the house. From the largest frame an elderly youth in mortarboard and academic gown looked down, a slightly bewildered expression on his mustachioed face. He clutched a roll of paper to his chest.

      Strange how you could tell he wasn’t a baby. Some hint of desperation in his eyes. Must have worked for years at night for that thing, chasing the education he’d missed in his frontier youth. Earning enough in daytime drudgery to pay for his clan-kin or to meet his world’s amortization debt; hurrying to evening peptide shots, scouring his Databank, cudgeling his brains through the law of torts and the case of Imperator vs Boggs.

      And now caught by the laser on his final triumphant day, the image providing documentary evidence just as necessary and admissible as the rolled-up diploma in his hand and the numerical record filed forever with maximum precautionary redundancy in deep core.

      Maybe they ought to grant degrees carved on blocks of stone, something with a bit of substance to it, something to put you at risk of a hernia every time you picked it up.

      Theri sat up in bed, looked down at her lover: graduate educer now, due shortly to join Anla in her profession. If not in her avocation as libertarian revolutionary. He slept on his back with his mouth half open, showing his teeth. Strong, even teeth, one of his best features, giving a bit of firmness to the softness of his mouth. His mouth was weak, really, and small.

      The bristles on his face took the alien sunlight like unevenly worn sandpaper, growing thick along his upper lip and chin, patchy along his jaw. Theri occasionally persuaded him to grow a beard, but he always smeared it off after two or three weeks, finding some pretext for being clean cheeked. He might instead have used an enzyme boost, and flowered like a prophet, but that was hardly old Socrates’ style.

      She slid her fingers into his hair which fanned out, matted and leonine, on the pillow. Fine, light hair; her fingers caught in a knot and pulled at his scalp. Kael shifted a little, turning his head. Not wanting him to wake yet, she drew back.

      The hoot of a cargo-vessel, long and muffled, came from the harbor, warning swimmers and free craft of its impending set down. Someone clattered around in the back garden of the terrace. Ben or Catsize, up already.

      That Neanderthal scientist, Ben, she reflected, had produced a fine endogenous black beard after he’d married Anla. It lent him the look of a half-crazed frontier doctor. The sort of physician who loomed out of the midnight rain on a broken-down hack, delivered the badly breached baby in the nick of time, cursed the lack of trained midwives and civilized pharmaceuticals, revived the expiring mother with a quick whiff of pungents instead, conjured an ampoule of buzz from the soaked pocket of his frock-coat, shot half, passed the rest to the tribe, and disappeared into the rain again.

      The mad doctor probably hadn’t slept at all. Theri slipped from the bed and padded to the window. There was Ben, working his way along the garden fence, checking for chinks, securing the gate (no classy safe-fields at these rental prices), creating a haven for last night’s foddle.

      She could see the animal eagerly chewing the rented grass, its little teeth crunching rhythmically, its head nodding purposefully. Industrious little beast, building useless ruth precursors with every chomp.

      Christ, she thought, they can’t really be going to kill that thing, for all the forbidden delights of its nonsynthesized proteins. We’d look pretty stupid waiting around for Anla to come home and slay it for us.

      Pity about Anla and Ben, but that’s their style, here or on Victoria or anywhere. Anla taking off with some impossible man. Ben wandering around gloomily picking his nose, going for walks, competing without heart with a chessmaster program. Two days, three, never longer. Anla returning: triumphant, unrepentant, radiant.

      Lusty wench, our Anla, long black hair and long fingers, good at haranguing the masses and telling everyone where they get off and what’s what.

      Anla floating around the house as if nothing has happened. Ben almost catatonic with sullenness, vidding his library. Bright Anla coming and going through the rooms of the house with no interface to his gloomy world.

      Suddenly the recriminations, the real hurt out in the open. Anla flaring back. A day, a day and a half, of