Valencies. Damien Broderick
like me and the sleeping Socrates, but at least each of them knows what the other thinks.
What have you been thinking about, Kael, as we’ve drifted through this holiday? Eating and drinking our way around Newstralia. Relaxed and expansive in the cafes and restaurants, feeding your face with garlic crustaceans cooked in oil, with crisp-skinned nightingsnail, with felafel, with ednafish in puce-bean sauce. And in the long afternoons in the buzz gardens of half-deserted pubs and in the garden of this house and this strange bedroom?
Kael, what goes on behind your blue eyes, your warm sleepy words? Are you happy with me on those littered beaches, among the bodies and the crushed cups, or in the crowds under the garish lights, making fun of the vulgar feelie come-ons with their neuroinducers limited by law to a zone no greater than three-quarters of the width of the sidewalk so that prudes of both sexes blanch at the tingle in their loins; what do you think of me at times like that?
A good man at keeping your own counsel, not one for the claws of argument, the knives of passion.
Kael, sweet Kael, what goes on in your head? What do I know about you, or you about me? All we’ve really done here is put on mass in the wrong places and celebrate a mutual languid happiness, an absence of tension. We’ve got nothing to be tense about. I really mustn’t eat so much, neither of us must.
§
In silence, barely awake, Kael watched through half closed eyes his Theri spread her elbows like wings.
Standing by the window, she ran her hands over her stomach, straightened her back and tightened the muscles of her abdomen. Her hair flowed down her back almost to her bum—a nice bum, white from the kini.
Kael felt, even if he did not see, her splayed fingers pressing from her pelvic arch, across her belly, up over the jut of her ribcage, passing to right and left of her breasts. Theri stretched, crucified on the morning (nice image, that, he thought; at least the Christers’ fifth millennial comeback has done some small good, even if it’s turned Theri into a masochist), and she pivoted with the sunlight on her face and shoulders, and padded barefoot to the door. Funny toes the girl’s got.
She reached for her sombrero, breasts silhouetted. Sweet tits for the holding. Theri under the black sombrero drew an imaginary weapon, took steady aim at the helpless Kael.
The invisible flash would have blinded him if he hadn’t had his eyes nearly closed.
Theri spun the gun nonchalantly on her index finger, slid it easily into a holster low on her hip, and left, sombrero aslant, for the shower.
Kael lay back and looked at the autumnal ceiling in the summer’s light. Resurrected, he too was now well-armed. Get her when she comes back from the shower, her skin moist, teach her some real shooting.
Bang!
“Charioteers!”
Kael leapt from his bed, hot-footed it to the amenities. Theri stood affrighted against the farther wall, sombrero resting upside down in the open stillcell. The faintest mist of warm moisture drifted to the charged lining of the cell. Efficient Kael glanced at the readout panel, adjusted the field, reset the failsafes. He turned and stared at her.
“It’s almost impossible, what you just did,” he said mildly.
She stamped her foot. There were goosebumps on her skin. “Don’t start.”
“It’s not hard to understand how to operate it, little, really it isn’t. You must put a terrific lot of effort into not understanding, actually. Still, what I don’t understand is how you managed what you just did.”
“I mean it, don’t start. Piss off and let me wash myself in peace.”
“It’s quite an old invention, petal, though not as old as, say, the wheel. They designed it to conserve water, my dear Theri, because a lot of Newstralia is a dune planet. See, there’s this pulsed spherical forcefield that gulps in a lot of air and squeezes it very hard to wring the water out of it, which also heats the aforementioned liquid to the desired temperature. What you did, my bundle, was make the field expand instead of contract before it switched off, and all the air rushed very fast into the vacuum and made a big noise.”
“I can’t hear you, shithead,” she said from within the still-cell. “Anyway, that sounds like a lot of garbage to me. What happens when the field is contracting and a new lot of air is coming in, eh? answer me that. Why doesn’t that create a vacuum, smartarse? And what makes you assume it was my fault, there are five people in this house, all I did was turn it on, after all, so the statistical likelihood that I caused it to happen is one in five, hardly overwhelming odds as I think even you will be obliged to agree.”
“Ah, but you were the proximate agent, and this is not the first such occasion. Indeed, if we multiply the number of times such baffling technological failures have taken place in your immediate vicinity, I imagine we’d come closer to figures of, oh, say one in several millions, without straining our memories. And if you can’t follow the simple train of thought involved in my lucid description of the principle involved, there’s no doubt in my mind that an unprejudiced jury of your peers would take this as prima facie— Umph. What are you— Stop that at once, my girl, what would your parents—”
§
Theri and Kael at screw in the still-cell. A warm rain, the hidden pulsing field doing its job discreetly and well. Gentle Kael meek and mild holding back his loved one’s face. Purple horseshoes on Kael’s shoulders. I meant it to hurt, it’s not enough. Theri coming gently, with frustrated tenderness, in the exploding shower of a rented terrace on an alien world.
§
They strolled later down El Cheapo Street, favorite address of babies here on vacation, the spine of a fairly fetid slum still clinging to a distinctive identity from the most primitive years of the planet’s initial colonization.
It was a jumble of old stone and rusting iron, wrought and heaved into place by human and animal muscle-power. Warped lanes twisted to the waterfront, open balconies transformed into enclosed living space by sheets of buckling durobond.
A flamboyant ornithopter, vividly striped in applegreen and red, flapped low overhead, making for the more opulent surf beaches away from the harbor. Kael held Theri’s hand loosely.
Catsize and Ben emerged from a free-enterprise commissary, Ben carrying a box of food, foils and loaves and a stick of salami visible at the top. Catsize labored under a rather large crate of lettuce or some vegetable resembling it.
“What the hell do you take us for, a colony of rabbits?”
“Not at all, my good man, these are William’s rations.”
“Who?”
“William Wool, our fuzzy little foddle friend from last night’s woeful expedition, now at play in our garden.”
“But he’s meant to provide us with food. And what’s wrong with grass, anyway?”
“Not enough, and of an inferior quality.”
“Some foddle rustler you are.”
“No less than certain others. Good day to you both.”
§
The handouts of lettuce were devoured in seconds. Ben opened the door and summoned William Wool. The beast dashed at once across the newly desolate garden. Never entirely convincing as a garden, now it was a doleful sight: grass chewed to the quick, shrubs mere tattered remnants, bark frayed to kindling.
The foddle hurtled past Ben’s legs and stood in the kitchen babbling for milk. He removed its ribbon and tinkling bell—pilfered on its behalf by Catsize from the untenanted cage of some domestic or decorative bird—and outfitted William Wool to face the world. A heavy leather collar ferocious with studs replaced the ribbon, a length of almost invisible monomer providing the requisite contact between man and client.
Ben and William trailed up El Cheapo: a kick for the worrying dog, a hard stare for the clucking shopper. Human and