Valencies. Damien Broderick
this with his own bare hands,” the lout said resentfully. He placed the guitar on the table in front of him. Red and green glistened from the veneer, caught the scratches in its polish.
“It’s a beauty,” Catsize agreed. He left his arms folded. “You play it real good, zinger.”
The fellow’s lips twisted. “Yeah, well, it’s a hobby of mine. The fuckin’ imperials don’t like it, see?”
Catsize was impressed, widening his eyes in the dim light of the swig bar. “You know any...seditious songs?”
Now all of them were looking at him, hard and suspicious. He gazed from one to the other, mild, slightly dopey, and saw them relax.
“Give him a go, Scums.”
“Bit of a laugh, anyway.”
The big fellow hesitated, then abruptly shrugged and thrust the instrument across the gap between them. “Treat it with respect, zotter. My gran—”
“Made it, yeah.” Catsize hefted it. Not too bad, balance was okay. He tightened the strings. Clear notes rang like ice.
“Sing us one of those songs. You know,” the interested woman said.
“Well, okay.” With a last quaff from his jar, Catsize sounded a run of notes that turned every head in the bar. “This is a real old one, I’m told. From some place so far away you need to take a hundred Aorist trips to get here.” He sang, then, in his cracked, angelic voice:
“’Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
“Did gyre and gimble in the wabe;
“All mimsy were the borogoves—”
When he came up for air, exultant and flushed with the joy of it, they clicked their fingers, and someone on the far side of the bar hooted in approval.
“Cool, man.” The lout was impressed. “Was that about...?” Scums lowered his voice, looked around furtively. “Kurd?”
Catsize gave him a knowing look.
“What’s it mean, man?” the woman asked. She left her bench at the other table, came to sit beside him.
“It’s Creole,” he told her. “Man probably shouldn’t, you know....”
“No,” she said, nodding, then shook her head. “No.”
“Sing us something else, zinger.”
“Aw.”
“Go on.”
“My throat’s dry.”
“Get the guy a drink, Marty.”
Catsize leaned back, the large bulk of the antique instrument fitting against his body like a lover.
“This is a dude from Old Earth. Yeats.” He closed his eyes and sang:
Under the passing stars
Foam of the sky
Lives on this lonely face—
As he drew to the end of the ancient ballad, tears leaked from his meshed lashes.
Finally he handed back the guitar, head ringing, fingers numb. He went to the lavatory out back, under the white fragrance of some mutant vegetable from earth, the scent of salt and kelp, listening to the sound of the ocean beyond the pub’s high walls, and when he came out into the night the woman was waiting for him. She took his arm and drew him into deeper shadow. Voices played like mantras within the bar, enriched with bursts of laughter. He allowed himself to follow her into shadow. She kissed him, deeply, like a besotted girl, placing his right hand on her full breast. For the first time in years he felt aroused. She pulled away, then.
“They want you back, Commander.”
He sighed. She was beautiful, but they were all beautiful now.
“We’ve been looking for you for a very long time.”
He found a waist-high garbage container, hopped up on it, the painted metal chilly under his buttocks, and pulled the woman close to him. Into her ear he said, “Chomsky is closed.”
“Yes. Interdicted. But we won’t stay closed forever, Commander.”
“Open the gates again and the Imperials will be all over us like swarming rats.”
“Not if those of us on the outside do our jobs.”
“The Revolution, ah yes.” Catsize sighed. A perfumed Newstralian wind blew across the buzz garden, and the sea hushed and retreated. The woman leaned back against him, solid, alive, yes, still somehow alive.
“You are sardonic, sir.” Her voice came crisp through the haze of her long hair. She turned her face sideways, to him, allowing any spy who chanced to be watching them to assume a kiss. “But yes, the revolution. We need you back with us.”
Two thousand years blew through his small body like stale incinerator smoke.
“I find it cold out here, my dear. My poor old bones, you know.” Catsize kept his hands on her for balance and for the memory of it, pushed himself down off the trash container. His feet crunched in sand. She was a good head taller, her hair in his lips. “I’m expecting some friends. It was pleasant to meet you.”
“Sir—”
“Tell them I fought the good fight. Tell them I’m retired.” In the half light, Catsize rubbed his aching eyes with the heels of his hands, then smiled up at her. “No, nobody would believe that. Tell them I have my own way of doing things.”
The woman’s mouth twisted. “Commander, I’m disappointed. We’ve been searching for you for more than century. Am I supposed to report that you’ve become nothing better than an...adventurist?”
“Tell them that I wish them well, as always.” He reached up, drew her down in an embrace, kissed her lowered forehead as one might kiss a child’s head, a child one loves, a child one must leave now. “Tell them— Well, you could tell them that the mome rath outgrabe.”
“The— Sir, what the fuck does that mean?”
He beamed at her, delighted. “There, I knew you were an anarchist at heart. ‘Sir’, indeed. Good grief.” He bowed. “Good evening, and farewell,” and took himself back to the thick fuggy air of the swig. Kael and Theri had arrived. They waved, beckoned him to a table. Through the heavy timber doors from the dropspace out front, Ben and Anla entered, arguing ferociously. Catsize beamed. His children. His wonderful innocents.
“Drinks!” he cried to them, capering. “Buzz! Poetry and song!”
Everyone smiled.
2.
“Banal tinkering?” Putting his spasm of outrage to best advantage, the DNA sculptor indolently slipped lower on his couch. “Surely you’re confusing my profession with the vulgar craft of cosmetic genetics.”
Anla lifted one knee a trifle. Recklessly, the sculptor told her, “Why, if it weren’t for our work the entire logistics of Empire would be inconceivable, you silly, pretty little foddle.”
Instead of punching him on the nose, Anla clapped her thighs together, skidding him down the spine of a snake to totter dismayed at the foot of a ladder he’d begun to ascend an hour earlier.
“I’ve picked up a fact or two during my meager span, doctor,” she said. “I certainly don’t want a lecture on gene promoters and repressors at this point in the evening. It’s the tune your fiddling produces that I object to.”
“But now I’ve offended you!” Reluctantly he sat higher and seized her hand. “There’s no call for formality. Ralf’s my name and you must use it, for I’m sure we’re meant to be firm friends.”
“What, a man of your considerable caliber interested in a silly little female, a funny wee muffin,