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
