One of Jard’s guests, a poet named Jacko, developed his own theory and started to burn the tree in a completely different place. He gave up after a few minutes and handed the laser to Theri who took it back to the original cut, using the beam like a photonic battering ram.
It took at least two hours to sever the thing. It fell in the only direction possible, following the big branch that jutted out halfway up the trunk. After a few minor branches had been trimmed from the log, Jard decreed that enough toil had been done for the day.
Kael the historian pointed out that by Homeworld reckoning the next day was Sunday, and Jard announced that it would be sacrilege to work.
“We will all have a day for the Consort.”
“Don’t tell me I’ve fallen among ardent imperialists.” It was the first remark Ben had volunteered; he hoped it had the right spirit of outrageous banter. Jard put his hand on Ben’s shoulder:
“The Empress of heaven, my dear Ben.”
Odder still to have fallen among deists, but he didn’t say anything.
§
Jard and Anla had their argument on “Sunday” night. Anla had told Ben that every time she saw her clone they had the argument. It was a family ritual, a reaffirmation of the para-sib bond or somesuch.
The argument was about ancient Russia. Anla held that life in Mother Russia had been no better than life today under the Universal Revived Leninist Imperium, which everyone agreed was not much chop. Jard said she didn’t know what she was talking about. Anla called him a recidivist. Jard called her a halfbaked romantic. It was all very languid and friendly. A lot of buzz was shot.
Anla started on about Chomsky, the rebel planet where they were still trying anarchism in the face of Imperial objections, but Jard didn’t appear to know very much about it. He said, though, that Noam was on to a good thing. Anla agreed with him.
§
For the first time he could remember, Ben was impotent. Anla consoled him in a rough, slightly incredulous manner and turned her back to him and went to sleep. When it happened the second night she swore, made Ben get dressed, and took him for a long walk. In the small light available he blundered through the bush after her, branches striking his face, fallen moldy logs tripping him up. Anla marched on, saying nothing. She led him by a circuitous route back to the house. As they passed Jard’s skite—parked in a tumbledown shed by the side of the bush track—she suddenly opened the vehicle and pulled Ben inside. Plastic upholstery, and no Jak rapping too soon at the window.
He experienced a remarkable recovery of his powers.
§
They were pair-bonded by a sociobiologist, with the sanction of the Imperium and the laws of Victoria. All Ben’s relatives were there in rebuke, and a motley collection of Anla’s friends turned up. Ben’s clan-kin appeared still to be in disbelieving shock, and his ex-fiancées wailed. Some of Anla’s friends stood with raised clenched fists as the happy couple did a formal mating dance. The party afterwards was widely considered the best ever held. The groom collapsed in a dead stupor at four in the morning; the bride held out to 0530.
§
Three months later Ben realized that Anla was having an affair with one of the demonstrators in the Tachyon Institute, a man he had introduced her to at a party.
His wife defended herself by saying that it wasn’t anything that you could call an affair—she doubted, in fact, if people had “affairs” these days—the demonstrator was far too dreary a man for that anyway, she’d just screwed him a few times because he was lonely and neurotic and in need of a boost to his ego. She presented the whole exercise as a slightly tedious act of charity.
Otherwise, life with Anla assumed the rigor of a fattening diet. She fed Ben script-codes, ideas, opinions, art exhibitions, avant garde feelies and friends in much the same way she served up his dinner. Finding that Ben had never heard of Warschauer, the fax would run hot with her poems. That done, The Aesthetics of No-Time or The Zeitgeist Machine or Clone Symbologies or Discords VIII would be presented for consumption.
And Ben vidded them all, and listened to the crystals, and argued with her friends, and overcame his prejudice against people who guerrilla the authorities and was almost arrested himself for singing a seditious song in a public place.
The only noticeable effect he had in return on Anla was that she abandoned her transduction helmet after he told her it looked adolescent. The muse languished of its own accord and was eventually turned in for credit.
§
A Clan moot, shocked into action by Flo’s abrupt defection two months after the wedding, agreed on a motion taking cognizance of shifts in community attitudes, accepted Ben back into their collective bosom and periodically sent representatives round for tea.
On these occasions Ben was always uneasy. He would tidy the dwelling immaculately before their notified arrival and beg Anla not to swear while they were present. His feisty spouse would threaten to subject his kin to every obscenity she could lay her tongue to; in fact, her language remained a model of socialist respectability for as long as her kindred-in-law were in the house.
She plied them with tea and cakes she would purchase specially for the occasion, invariably the most revolting, sugary, bauble-encrusted abominations she could find. Once she brought out a pack of absorbent doilies with pastel-colored foddles impressed on them.
If she gave them coffee it was always synthetic, despite the fact that she had real beans in the kitchen. She maintained a flow of bright, amiable, mindless chatter. At no other times did Ben hear her talk like this.
I felt resentful but couldn’t really say why. She was clearly sending my cognates up, but then I had rejected their values as well; why should Anla’s satire worry me?
Sitting over my ersatz, I’d feel my antagonism rising equally toward wife and kin. Anla seemed to harbor no antagonism at all; in fact she appeared genuinely fond of the dads and uncles.
She would talk to them about the difficulty of keeping a lawn healthy with the ecology still in transition.
She discussed the ethnic enclave policy without shouting, agreeing with them that the one thing to avoid was the sort of situation that had developed on so many open Teleport worlds, with their riots and hatred. But, she would suggest modestly, surely the Victorians—with their reputation, famous throughout the Empire, for equality and calling a spade a spade—ought to set an example to the rest of the universe.
She proposed, in line with Imperial decrees, a civilization in which all races and sexes might live together in harmony and peace without discrimination based on tint, gender, creed or tongue.
It was all very cozy but Ben could hardly escape the feeling that not only was the whole performance an elaborate private joke but that the joke included him. When he mentioned this, Anla replied that if his Clan-kin couldn’t understand her the least she could do was try to understand them.
By devious means she identified and singled out his biological parents (though his paternity was, in the nature of things, a trifle uncertain, and Ben put his foot down when she asked him to run a genescan for her information).
Her rapport with Ben’s putative father increased with every meeting. She called him by his first name, Hari, and occasionally “mate” or even “cobber”. He seemed delighted; rather, Ben thought, like a child who has finally been accepted for advanced inlays.
During one particularly convivial conversation Anla asked Hari if he fancied some buzz-dust in his coffee. To Ben’s and his mum’s surprise, the Griffith jovially agreed that endorphins in moderation were no bad thing. Ben could remember only twice seeing an uncle fixing before; both times it had been to celebrate a Clan espousal. Anla produced the stash and shot a good blast into Hari’s cup, then her own. Ben’s mother refused with the voice of an outraged rabbit. Ben declined.
Anla and her new relative got through three quarters of the stash between 1630 and 1700 in the afternoon.
After that session the visits became less frequent, and alternative emis
saries were detailed. When Hari did appear he was just as amiable, or seemed to be, but Ben thought his jokes and bonhomie a bit forced.
The mums and aunts talked mainly to Ben, favoring the outsider with bright, chilly smiles and, if obliged to address her, spoke patronizingly, using the tone Ben could recall from the playroom when one of the children had asked a question nobody could answer. Anla simply took to ignoring the Griffith women.
What Ben sensed without being able to pin it down was a new tension that existed between the sexes on these occasions. The air seemed to hum with it, at a pitch just beyond human hearing. Yet he knew it well: the holding frequency of stations temporarily shut down but ready to resume transmission the moment the possibility of third-party eavesdropping could be discounted.
At length the visiting roster once more threw together Hari and Ben’s biological mother. Incredibly, Anla fetched out the buzz-dust again. Hari rather apologetically refused; it seemed he needed a clear head that evening. He glanced quickly at his spouse but she was fixing Anla with a wintry stare.
Even a casual onlooker could not have mistaken the two youthful couples as coevals.
Anla continued discussing the habits of babies. Hari said the feelie stars were to blame. Anla said that most feelie stars were all right but she had to admit that some of them led less than exemplary lives. Hari said that some of the kiddies emulating the behavior of these feelie stars were pre-pubescent. Anla said yes, that was a bit young to start. Hari wondered how they could have any respect for themselves, but Anla felt the trouble was that half these kid’s nurturers hadn’t got a clue about life and so were in no position to give thorough-going advice. Hari strongly denied that a universal community some of whose members were 2000 years old didn’t know anything about life; to hear some of the babies today talking you would think they knew everything; you would think they had invented sex.
At explicit mention of this phenomenon, Ben’s mother spilt her coffee.
Her eyes were bonded on her husband but Hari, who was talking somewhat faster than usual, looked only at Anla. And Anla looked back at Hari with an amused, interested and very slightly mocking smile, sipping her horrible drink with gentle, feline fastidiousness.
How, she wanted to know, could members of a Clan be well-informed about life? After all, most of them had dwelled in their ziggurats until they were Millioned, and then as soon as they could they started new ones. And most of the true oldsters were beaten down by their centuries of raw frontier-world deprivation, the immortal women laden by endless pregnancies.
Here Hari produced his trump: he had fought more than once in Imperial wars.
Ah yes, Anla had to admit, guerrilla war, where anything goes.
A roguish glint came to Hari’s unwrinkled eye. He had been on recreation leave on Siderea Lux. Lux eh? Anla was visibly impressed.
At this stage Ben’s mother stated loudly that it was time to leave, stood up, retrieved her towering hat—she had not taken her furs off—and all but frog-marched Hari out of the house.
§
In fury, Ben accused Anla of leading his progenitor on. Anla happily admitted this obvious fact, and went on to speculate that Hari had probably reached the high point of his sexual life on the rampage with his mates in some Luxian brothel.
This thought shocked Ben more than he cared to admit. The idea that Clan elders ever had sex with anyone at all was hard enough to credit. Presumably they must have done so once, and indeed must be compounding the offence—witness himself and his sister, and the fact that half the mothers were pregnant right now. No matter how many centuries old they were.
It did not occur to him for a long time, despite his coaching in psychodynamics, that this revulsion was the expression of an inlayed incest-aversion, a structured and calculated syndrome. You could see the sense in it, though. After all, in physical terms at least, his mothers and aunts were desirable, nubile women in the peak of bloom.
Still, this vision of his dads and uncles as drunken, whoring troopers, evoked so casually by Anla, unsettled him for days. And when Anla with equal nonchalance articulated what he had so valiantly repressed, that Hari’s interest in her was basically carnal (“He thinks I’d be a good lay”), he was appalled.
Yet his anger was without focus: all that Anla said was probably true, was undoubtedly true, and Good Reason knew he was no disciple of his Clan’s mealymouthed, soul-sapping respectability. Breaking out of that prison, that polished pyramid echoed and reechoed on a billion worlds beyond the Aorist Discontinuity—its wall to wall obsessions, its segregated apts, its babbling hollies—had been the best thing he’d ever done. If Anla had excoriated his cognates with the violence he himself sometimes felt, that wouldn’t have mattered; it was this amused, tolerant acceptance and dismissal in the same breath he couldn’t swallow, the private joke in her unhelmeted eyes as she handed those loathsome pink squares of cake around.
§
After the Siderea Lux episode, the Clan quit their pervert’s nest for good. In the couple of years since, Hari had dropped in four times by himself. He always appeared uneasy and did not stay long. Ben had responded dutifully by going to tea at the ziggurat every few weeks, unaccompanied. At first he found going home alone (“going home”!) far more bearable than receiving rostered kin. This way he was meeting them on their own ground and Anla wasn’t there to upset him. Jin and Soo and some new ones kissed him on the cheek, as a brother.
His biological mother took once more to attacking the way he and Anla lived, but he replied with spirit that this was the way they both liked to live and it was no longer the concern of anybody else.
The menfolk sided with his mother in such disputes, but Ben believed he held his own. The adrenalin of contempt tingled in his fingers, but the overall effect was cathartic—liberating, he felt sure.
He related a couple of these arguments to Anla. She wasn’t impressed.
“What are you going to do when the women finally announce that basically you’re all right, you’re just being led astray by that black haired slut you’ve married?”
“She won’t say that.”
“Yes she will, Ben, and the rest will support her. That’s what ghetto women always say about shiksa girls.”
“You know it all, don’t you.”
“I know that much.”
§
But the next time Ben sat at the high table his mother started to complain specifically about Anla.
“You can tell by the way the house isn’t cleaned that she can’t care less about our boy.” A murmur of approval around the long table. “No woman can look after a man on her own, it’s simply not natural. It mightn’t be too bad at the moment but what’s going to happen when you have children? It simply isn’t natural.”
Ben gazed into his soup bowl.
“Really, what sort of nurturer will Anla make? Babies need constant care and attention. They need cleanliness. There’s no ruth for infants, never forget that. It is all very well for Anla to keep her home like a beast’s pit if you can tolerate that, Ben, but a child’s immune system—”
The harsh accent rising and falling. Other women chipped in with agreement, corroboration and reprise, the men moodily spooned their soup.
Ben sat listening to his mother driving the wedge, denigrating Anla, every word confirming Anla’s glib, confident assessment and prognosis. The woman really was amazingly pretty, he thought, looking at her clearly for the first time in his life. Why did she need to stoop to this?
Betrayed on all fronts.
And bloody old Hari—now that Anla wasn’t actually present, crossing her long legs, smiling her cool, mocking, sexy smile—seemed to have lost his former regard for her. Weak-kneed bastard, currying a bit of cheap favor, as if the evil-tongued bitch couldn’t do the job herself.
Maybe the whole performance would have had less effect on me if my relations with Anla had been smooth and secure. Surely I could have sat placidly through a thousand of these tirades secure in the k
nowledge that I would return to a warm, constant love. But the current escapade with the intern (successor to the tachyon demonstrator) was straining things almost to breaking point.
The whole thing was intolerable; he dropped his spoon with a clatter into the bowl, got up and walked out.
§
He went from the foyer into the lifeless, deserted public dropspace—any kids still up were sequestered in the playrooms—past the sickly, bespotted lawns, vivid hollylight spewing on to beds of repressed little shrubs.
He heard a Clan skite whining down from the roof, hovering level with him. Jak’s voice came muffled from inside the vehicle. “I’ll give you a lift, mate.” Ben marched on.
Jak started to shout, telling him not to be a drongo, that he’d upset the elders.
I’ve upset them! Chariotfuckintears!
A grass path led between two service structures adjacent to the pyramid, barred to all but pedestrian traffic. I hesitated, turned toward the skite. Hari was sitting forward, silent, beside Jak. Violently, I swung away, crossed the dropspace and entered the lane.
The skite hesitated, then lifted angrily back to the roof.
§
I said nothing to Anla of this tribal invective, nor of the subsequent denunciations I learned to sit through in surly silence. Our life has continued after this fashion. Hooray fuck. Is my refusal to accept Anla’s infidelities, as I accepted all her other values, simply fear of losing her? Without her, with the Clan a poisoned well behind me, who am I? What use her blase assurances that she doesn’t mind if I, too, screw where I will?
He had swallowed everything else in the diet she prescribed. Why shouldn’t the bill of fare include her sexual ethic? Why gag on this little morsel?
3.
And coming down out of the dark dark dark, the vacant interstellar spaces, the vacant, yeah, out of the vacant, falling out of the Empire’s arsehole, the statesmen and the rulers and Ben. Victoria again. Home and work. And the Permanent Revolution.
Valencies: A Science Fiction Novel Page 7