“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,
