Читать книгу Valencies - Damien Broderick - Страница 7
ОглавлениеPART ONE
1.
He was two thousand years from home, lonely as only the ancient can be lonely, sick at heart.
“Matey,” he called to the lout murdering the guitar at the next table, “lend us your axe for a mo?”
The fellow gave him a contemptuous glance, smacked his fingers clumsily against the strings. Catsize leaned forward on his timber table-top, expectant, undeterred. One of the young women at the other table glanced back over her shoulder.
“You play?”
“Bit.” He shrugged. “You know.”
“My gran made 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, a fluff-brained baby chicken, a double-X chromosomed foddle, a twat—”
“My dear, of course it was a clumsy thing to say and I do apologize. I acknowledge your intelligence. I like women. But you happen to be mistaken about stochastic biosis.”
Smiling faintly, Anla uncrossed her legs, and allowed her knees to begin once more their slow tectonic drift. “Suppose we give politics a miss,” she said, with every semblance of conciliation. “No doubt you deem my views puerile, as I consider yours senile.”
A hovering toff, resplendent in codpiece and chiffon, threw himself down beside her and let his dark hand fall on her bare calf. “Oh I say, my sweet, that’s rather unsporting. I’ve known Ralf since he was a babe in arms. He’s no older than your father.”
“I haven’t got a father.”
“Oh.” The toff blinked. “You’re a clone?”
“No, they found me under a cabbage patch. Of course I’m a clone.”
“I’m sure we didn’t mean to put you in a state. Can I get you a stimulant?”
“How kind.” Most of the gathering had subsided to the floor, or retired to privacy. Anla could spot none of her friends. As the toff glided away she caught a glimpse of her glowering husband, propped stiffly on the far side of the room. Bugger him, she thought irritably. What’s wrong with the man, the place is crawling with it. Next to him swayed a bountiful woman of Dravidian extraction, eminently available, with a spangled cleavage as big as all outdoors. Thrust your hand in to the wrist, lad. You’re supposed to be a tit man, aren’t you? But all Ben did was scowl pitifully back at her before turning clumsily and shaking off the dust of his heels. Take that, you harlot. Oh shit, toujours gai.
A touch on her shoulder proved that the bloody toff had not been ambushed in the pursuit of his duties. Anla shot the stimulant buzz and ignored him in favor of Empire’s manifest destiny.
“Ralf,” she said, “did anyone ever tell you that you have beautiful eyes?”
§
“And just what do you propose doing when we’ve captured the little bugger?”
“Kill it,” Kael said. “And then eat it.”
“Hmm.” Catsize brooded. “Killing it is just the kickoff. Then we’ve got to skin it and take out its guts.”
“Half the inhabited universe once dined on meat,” Kael said. “Our ancestors throve on it. You were there, Catsize, I’m sure you remember it well.”
“All right.” Catsize stood up. “You find the instrument, I’ll bring the skite around.” He nimbly hurdled outstretched, drunken legs, crossed the patio and jumped for the shadows; out and away, up the track to their hired skite. Kael went the other way, toward the kitchen.
Ben waited for them with Kael’s Theri on the moonlit gravel, watching the waters of the river run black and well-polished between matched banks. Summer night, holiday world: dull gleam of vehicles, murmur of failing party. Only Anla’s voice, precise and intelligent, rose distinctly, in debate with the gene-sculptor. And then the sculptor’s laughter, overhearty, self-satisfied, across the blurred conversations of the other guests. Ben, surly, kicked at the gravel, pretending he hadn’t heard.
They’d met the gene-sculptor in a waterside pub. He had bought Anla a buzz and put his arm around her shoulder, called her “my dear” and said he could tell by the karyotonic lines on her hand that she was impulsive and generous. An invitation to the party in the scrub had been issued with the second buzz, an invitation that could hardly exclude her friends—could hardly exclude, for that matter, her lawful bonded husband. Not that the sculptor could have inferred her unfashionably dyadic status: no antique sentimental ring constrained Anla’s impulsive and generous hand.
Ben turned his back on the dim glow of the studio and the sound of his wife’s familiar sexiness, stared at the reconstructed elms holding out their white arms to the travelling local moon. Celestial lair of foddles, safe under Imperial decree from human hands. He lowered his gaze and glared at what he saw. Fucking expensive, pretentious place. The bastard probably has a dacha like this on a hundred worlds, or a thousand. You can’t take it with you, but you can find one just like it waiting at the other end if you’re rich enough.
A neat peptide-schema on intergalactic monetary equivalents bounced up unsought into Ben’s consciousness; he slapped it back down again. What must it be like after a thousand years of data inlays?
He squinted in the darkness. Granite and sandstone, ageless centenarians in doublets, their twittering girl crones, their toad-like sportskites cluttering up the dropspace. So low on the ground, some of these overpowered heaps of plast, that a well-aimed fusillade of gravel ends up on the webbing.
A fly-screen flared and Kael came silently from the dark end of the house, steel in his hand: a half meter of freshly sharpened carving knife. “What the hell are you up to?”
Ben, not bothering to reply, kicked another shower of gravel at a yellow coupe.
“He’s just giving them a bit more ballistic ballast,” Theri explained. “They need it for going round clouds.”
“Ah.”
The skite’s light sliced down, made them blink. Kael and Theri clambered aboard and sorted themselves out astern. Ben slumped beside Catsize. The lift-field spurted gravel and the safari swung aloft, drive grumbling, lights tunneling across the mangy bush of the planet Newstralia. Bloody holidays.
§
Theri lay under the filament blanket, head on Kael’s lap. The wind swirling over the open skite dried the sweat of the party from her face. Trees flickered below, branches webbing the soil. She wanted bed and sleep, not this midnight madness, this molesting of innocent foddles in the pastures of the night.
The whole exercise seemed slightly contrived, anyway. Kill an animal and eat it—the sort of jolly fantasy one floated at parties or during stoned evenings in pubs, not something one actually went out and did. Not someone like Kael, at least.
Probably he only pushed the plan along to get Ben out of the place. Give the lad something to do. Anla was obviously in no mood to leave her conversation with the gene-sculptor. So Kael hatched this absurd scheme, trying a little too hard to be carried away by the madcap spirit of the thing.
It was really only when Catsize decided to adopt the plan that it got off the ground. She thought: Poor old Kael’s just slightly too rational, not quite manic enough for the exploit. She heard Catsize endit the illegal program; he caught her eye and winked.
“Heads and elbows in,” he said, and energized the bubble. “Going up.”
§
The skite trudged up the gravity well, sliding a bit off its programmed trajectory, the corrugations of the geofield barely diminished by its rudimentary autonomics. Kael ran his hand under the blanket, found Theri’s fingers and interlocked his own. The atmosphere ended and the skite bounced into open fields of clumpy stars, arctic in the night sky.
“I’d have thought that sanctuaries would be guarded,” Ben said grumpily. “We’ll never get through its operational envelope. We’ll be arrested. Our loved ones will never hear of us again.”
“I know a thing or two.”
“You’ve been around, haven’t you, Catsize,” said Kael. “You’ve seen a thing or two that’d shock us.”
“My oath.”
“Catsize, how old are you?”
“Don’t be obscene.”
§
“You miss my point.” The rowdy team of endorphins partying in Anla’s brain-tissues were kicking up their heels and knocking the furniture about. Somehow this sportive chemical behavior had the effect of lengthening the room, giving everything she saw and heard a piercing clarity. Her amplified voice rang wearily down the enormous hall. “If we must go back to basics, what the hell do you find so glorious in the idea of Empire?”
The boring fellow was wrestling with his library. Much more on this tack and I might as well go home and fuck Ben. Chariots, look at it, though, he must be rolling in exchange-value. Thing’s totally voice-activated, not a key on it.
“Glorious?” 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 the limits of dim sight. The animals reformed at a safe distance, showing baleful pink eyes.
Funny, 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 we all have, and save us from being raped in the common, but then 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 hot angry words. Reconciliation. All’s well for another couple of months. Been going on for four orthoyears now, Theri thought, funny way to live. Not 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 foddle turned into the park.
Placing his back against an alien piece of flora, and his buttocks in contact with dirt and grass, Ben paid out the line. Ecstatically, William lifted his tail and poured forth a little steam of the celebrated stuff of legend. Ben wished a large amount of it on his faithless wife’s head. Whore.
From across the park an official was approaching officiously, park-keeper’s tricorn on his waxed hair, spiked stick of office in his hand, imperial guardian of public decorum.
Oh Anla, you bitch, what would I be if I’d never met you? She had made him what he was, she and that lunatic Catsize; Anla, with her ideas and visions, Catsize with his thousand personae and half-crazed fantasies.
Ben roused himself from melancholy to the task at hand. It had to be admitted that the uses of mindfuck was one of Catsize’s more valuable contributions to his entity.
“You can’t have animals in this park.”
“It only says dogs.”
“Most people don’t have, what is it, foddles.”
“That’s just the point, isn’t it?”
“What?”
“This is a foddle sanctuary. It says ‘No Dogs’ to protect the innocent littles and their defenseless shags.”
“You trying to be funny, mate?”
“It’s hardly a laughing matter.”
“Bloody right.” The park-keeper spied the small steaming pile and stared at it in outrage. “Anyhow, what are you doing with a foddle? They’re a protected fauna.”
This was more tricky; it was a point which had not occurred to Ben. “Precisely my point.”
“Well, where did you get it?”
Ben allowed his arm to rise slowly until his hand, with one finger extended, had subtended a full quadrant of the sky.
“This foddle is normally resident in the special sanctuary allocated to its kind on the nearby moon, which you see up there. Oh, it must have gone down. Now, in order for the creatures to maintain their health and keep in good general overall nick, they are obliged to return at intervals to the bracing rigors of a gravitational field approximately equal in strength to the one in which their species evolved. It’s a sort of holiday for them.”
“That’s as may be, mate, but what’s this one doing in my park?”
Ben regarded the strangled outburst with astonishment. “But this is a travelling stock reserve.”
“Don’t try to put one over on me, mate, this is a municipal park and I’ve been working for the council for eighty-seven years this July.”
“Then I take it you’ll be acquainted with the Lands Appropriation and Uses Act of 2853 (amended 3102)?”
“Eh?” The man drew back a step, suddenly wary.
“The provisions of the Act make it mandatory and binding on all councils to provide a stopping place for livestock of not less than two hectares and such stock as are watered there are to be adequately protected at the council’s expense. You can look it up if you don’t believe me.”
“What are ya, a high court judge or something?”
“I have a working knowledge of the law and I cannot too strongly advise you not to molest my animal. This planet was built on foddle dung, you know.”
The keeper muttered off, a temporary respite at least.
Ben’s good humor collapsed. Rotten, rotten whore.
§
The ferry slid on its modest laminar lift-field over the darkening water, the vast squat tower of the Teleport Authority swinging astern behind the rail’s scrollwork, blotting out a distant section of twinkling affluence in Rose Red, the margins of dormitory bureaucracy.
After the long day’s humid swelter, the harbor was finally cooling. Waves slipped dark and oily under the ferry’s bows. The clang and rush of an autonomic cleaner emptying its foaming tank from the stern of a loading surface freighter came sullenly through the soupy air.
Theri leaned her head against Kael’s neck and smelt the sand and salt in his hair, her shoulders burning slightly under the weight of his arm.
Turning, hoisting herself up on the rail, she let her head fall back until she was peering into the gray whistling vault of the sky. It was thick with skites, neatly tracking their beams, lofty empyrean godlings with no part or interest in the nautical sphere which she and Kael skimmed.
“Do you suppose Anla will be back yet?”
“Tomorrow’s more likely.”
“What are we going to do with the foddle?”
“Take it back to the moon, I suppose.”
If we can’t even murder a foddle, Theri thought, what chance do we have against an Empire? But surely that was to look at the matter from the wrong end. Or was it? It was easy enough to predict sweet-and-gentle Kael’s view of the matter, but she would rather hear Anla’s.
The ferry docked tidily above the softly slapping wavelets at the foot of El Cheapo Street. They jumped ashore before the gap between vessel and wharf had quite closed. The utterly minimal potential for self-destruction in this act did not prevent phobic groans and tuts from several of their presumably much older fellow passengers.
As the ferry pulled away once more, three leatherlace vested goons at the distant top of the hill activated anti-friction shields and hurled themselves head first and belly down in its direction, providing more ghastly thrills for the cautious centenarians on board.
One of these louts slammed past centimeters from Kael’s leg, hooting the while. There was some satisfaction in seeing him overshoot at the wharf, zip briefly across the filthy water, and sink like a stone.
White petals of some nameless fragrant tree hung over the rented terrace’s fence. A skite of similar hue crunched down angrily opposite the tree.
“The sculptormobile?”
“Probably. Uh-huh.”
Anla tripped lightly across the pavement and entered the house ahead of them. The skite rose jerkily, going whence it had come.
At the foot of the hill, the body-skier’s helplessly guffawing companions were guiding out a buoy.
§
Anla, Ben and Catsize formed an engaging tableau in the kitchen. Ben glanced up from his diligent library-vidding to note the arrival of Kael and Theri, grunted a form of greeting, returned to his studies. This was clearly a more expansive welcome than his wife had been privileged to receive.
Anla threw herself into a chair with resigned aplomb. “Hello, you two.”
“Hello, Anla petal, come back to us have you?” Kael, trying his hand at banter. “Thought you’d run away, did you? Our little holiday home wasn’t good enough for you, is that it? And after all we’ve done for you, Working and slaving to give you some of the things we could never afford ourselves. That’s your way of showing gratitude, is it? But you come back smart enough when you want a good feed, don’t you?”
Anla smiled blandly, while Ben concentrated on his library display with the intensity of a recluse; the atmosphere clung denser than ever. Blithely unaffected by her spouse’s rejection, the unease of her friends, Anla continued her placid chair-sitting.
Catsize filled a vessel with milk, placed it squarely in the center of the kitchen floor, opened the back door. The foddle uttered a glad ejaculation and fell on the liquid, lapping like a dog.
“What the hell’s that?’
“Allow me to introduce Mr. William Wool, our dinner.”
“Charioteers, you go away for a day and they turn the place into a zoo.”
Catsize caught Theri’s eye, gave Kael the nod. The three enskited, off for a buzz or two in a public house, to find a party, to stay clear of the house for some time.
§
Anla put her feet on the table and considered her Ben. Were she to go to bed first he would sleep in his chair, but if he preceded her it would be beneath his dignity to allow anything so insignificant as his spouse to cause him to move.
She watched his somber bearded face as he bent over the tiny dancing sigils. He seemed set for the night. She listened to the steady hum of the old clock. The tired hoot of some night-embarking craft rose from the harbor.
Anla stood up and silently made a pot of tea, placing a mug at Ben’s elbow, and returned to her chair. Ben let the tea cool, abandoned the library at length and walked to the cold-field. He poured himself a tot of chilled milk, picked up a hardcopy of some Sinese poems Catsize had left lying around, sat down at the kitchen bench.
Anla started to doze. She tried to keep herself awake by thinking of the gene-sculptor. A fool really, kept patting his hair into place, even while he was trying to keep his end up. Macromemes, indeed.
Ben rose slowly from his chair and climbed the stairs to bed. Ralf had a lift-shaft, of course: one floated in it like a leaf. Anla looked at the clock: 0320, about bloody time too, give him half an hour. She was wretchedly tired.
When she slipped into bed, Ben was so fast asleep that he didn’t move his legs to make room for her. The planet pulled unremittingly at her bones. Now that she’d become accustomed to Ralf’s quarter gravity bed, she craved its costly comfort.
§
Catsize galloped up the stairs in the hot morning and gave the door a healthy kick.
“You two want any breakfast?”
“I do, but not this bloody whore.”
“Don’t call me whore, you bastard. I’ll come down for mine, Catsize.”
The poet bowed low to the dumb worm-chewed door. “As Madame and Monsieur wish.”
He tripped lightly to the kitchen and gave Kael and Theri the thumbs-up. “Contact between our friends has, I judge, been established.”
4.
On the last evening of their holiday, Anla sent them all out of the house, Ben included. When they returned with prime buzz, melancholy and self-satisfied in the floral sunset air, the kitchen sang with mouth-watering deliciousness.
Anla sat them down, and fetched soft lights, and brought out to the table a steaming rack of foddle, all brown without and pink within and spiced with herbs. It was the finest food they’d ever eaten.
§
Well pleased by the macabre feast, Catsize took a constitutional stroll in the Newstralian darkness. Licking one finger, he meditated on the semiotics of the event, on its vile, unthinking, utterly representative sexism, and on the curious species of rebuttal, implicit in it, of just that prejudice.
How monstrously hard, he thought, how unfair, to have to tote two millennia of baggage in your head. Yet all good and bad was, in any case, decaying, degrading, disintegrating; every small gain was a mockery of things ineluctably lost.
The poet squinted at the botched constellations, fancying that he might pick out Chomsky’s star. But the anarchists were skittish tonight. Yes, locked behind their defenses. He had little hope for them; as little, perhaps, as they held for him.
§
In the night, Ben and Anla sat on the dock steps watching the faint glow of energized yacht sails. The tide brought a procession of emblems: a log, a torn foil, a dead fish. The belly of the fish took the foddle moon’s light like a skull. Ben kissed his wife gently, running his tongue over hers. She held him at bay for a lingering moment before responding electrically, forcing his head back, thrusting her hand into his kilt. Ben broke free, probing at his lip. Blood.
She looked unblinking at his face. “Standing up against the wall.”
“Yes,” he said. They tore at one another.
