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
