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
