Another light-line shot overhead: It pulsed and diffused color across the dark like a molten rainbow.
“They’re flying so low—” That was Sam, calling from near the roof’s edge—“that their ion output is exciting a portion of the shield into random discharge: that’s not really their trail you’re seeing, just an image, below it, on the—”
Someone screamed.
And Bron felt suddenly light-headed; his next heartbeat reverberated in his skull, painful as a hammer. Then, at a sudden blow to the soles of his feet, his stomach turned over—no, he didn’t vomit. But he stag-geied. And his knee hit someone who had fallen. Somewhere something crashed. Then there was a growing light. His ears ceased pounding. The wash of red dissolved from his eyes. And he was on his feet (Had he slipped to one knee? He wasn’t even sure), gasping for breath.
He looked up. The shield’s evening pastels, circled with a brilliant blue Neptune, were on again. People on his roof (and the roofs around) had fallen. People were helping each other up. His own hand, as he turned, was grasped; he pulled someone erect.
“... back inside! Everybody get back inside!” (Still Sam; but the surety had left his voice. Its authority tingled with a slight, electric fear.) “Everything’s under control now. But just get back mside—”
They herded into the slant corridor, spiraling down into the building; anxious converse broiled:
“... cut the gravity ...”
“No, they can’t do ...”
“... if the power failed! Even for a few seconds. The whole atmosphere would bulge up like a balloon and we’d lose all our pressure for ...”
“That’s impossible. They can’t cut the gravity ...”
Back in the commons, the strain (if, indeed, the city’s gravity had faltered for a second or so) had shattered one of the skylight’s panes. No pieces had fallen (it was, apparently, “shatter-proof”) but the glass, smithereened, sagged in its tesselations.
Chairs were overturned.
A reader had fallen, file drawers spilled; fiche cards scattered the orange carpet.
The astral cube had come loose from its holder and leaned askew, its god-faced markers fallen out onto the gaming board among scuttled ships and toppled soldiers.
Sam was saying to those who stood around them: “—no, this doesn’t mean that Triton will have to enter the war between the Outer Satellites and the Inner Worlds. But the possibility’s been a clear one for over a year. I doubt if the odds on it have changed one way or the other—at least I assume they haven’t. Maybe this incident has just made the possibility a little more clear in your minds. Look, pull up some chairs—”
“Now you explain the gravity thing again,” Freddie said, a little nervously. He sat cross-legged on the floor, one bright-ringed hand on his father’s knee (Flossie sat in the chair behind him, both hands a-glitter in his naked lap): “You explain it very slowly, see? And very clearly. And very simply.” Freddie glanced up, then around at the others. “You understand now how you have to do it?”
Someone else said: “Sam, that’s terrifying. I mean, if it had been cut for even fifteen or twenty seconds, everyone in the city might be dead!”
Sam sighed, leaned forward with his elbows on his knees, and patted two sides of an imaginary question. “All right. I’ll go over it once more for those of you who still don’t understand. Think back to your old relativity model. As a particle’s speed in a straight line approaches the speed of light, its volume decreases in the direction of the motion, its time processes relative to the observer slow down, its mass increases and so does its gravity. Now suppose the acceleration is in a curve. This all still holds true, only not at the rate governed by Fitzgerald’s contraction; suppose it’s in a very tight curve—say a curve as tight as an electron shell. Does it still hold true? It does. And suppose the curve is tighter still, say, so tight its diameter is smaller than that of the particle itself—essentially this is what we mean when we say the particle is ‘spinning.’ The relativity model still holds: it’s just that the surface of the particle has a higher density, mass, and gravity than the center—a sort of relativistically-produced surface tension that keeps the particle from flying apart in a cloud of neutrinos. Now by some very fancy technological maneuvering, involving ultrahigh frequency depolarized magnetism, superimposed magnetic waves, and alternate polarity/parity acceleration, we can cause al the charged nucleons—which is theoretically only protons but in actuality turns out to include a few neutrons as well—in certain, high-density, crystalline solids, starting with just their spin, to increase the diameter of their interpenetrating orbits to about the same size across as the nucleus of an atom of rhodium one-oh-three—which, for a variety of reasons, is taken to be, in this work, the standard unit of measurement—while still moving at speeds approaching that of light—”
“You said before, Sam, that they didn’t really circle,” someone else said, “but that they wobbled, like off-center tops.”
“Yes,” Sam said. “The wobble is what accounts for the unidirectionality of the resultant gravitic field. But I’m trying to explain it now for those who couldn’t understand the last explanation. Actually, it isn’t even a wobble; its a complex vertical gradient wave-shift—the thing to remember is that all of these terms, particle, spin, orbit, wobble and wave, are just highly physical-ized metaphors for processes still best understood and most easily applied as a set of purely mathematical abstractions. Anyway, all the particles in a bunch of tri-layer iridium/osmium crystalline sheets, spaced about under the city, are madly orbiting in tiny circles of one point seven two seven the diameter of a rhodium one-oh-three nucleus. The magnetic resonance keeps the crystals from collapsing in on themselves. The resultant mass, and the gravity set up, is increased several hundred million-fold—”
“—in one direction, because of the wobble,” Flossie said, slowly.
“That’s right, Floss.” (Freddie, visibly relaxed, dropped his hand from his father’s knee—and slid two glittering fingers into his mouth.) “The result is that anything above them is held neatly down. This, coupled with the natural gravity of Triton, gives street-level Tethys point nine six two Earth-normal, at-sea-level-on-the-magnetic-South-Pole, gravity.”
“You mean Earth has one point oh three nine five the normal bolstered gravity of Tethys,” someone said from the back of the room.
Sam’s black brow wrinkled above a smile. “One point oh three nine five oh one ... more or less.” He glanced around the group. “The cold-plasma atmo—
sphere-trap works by similar magnetic maneuvering, though it has nothing to do with the gravity. The thing to bear in mind, with all of those twelve hundred thousand trilayer crystal sheets, is that each group of ten has its own emergency power supply.”
“Then they couldn’t all go off at once,” Lawrence said. “Even for a few seconds. Is that what you mean?”
“That’s what I said.” Sam put his chin on his dark knuckles, looking up at the men from under lowered brows. “What I suspect is far more likely: some synchronous overtone in the magnetic resonance was induced—”
“Induced by whom?” someone asked.
Sam raised his chin about an inch from his knuckles. “—was induced in the magnetic resonance, that caused the gravity field—remember, the magnetic field that controls the particle’s spin is alternating at literally billions of times a second—to list: all the wobbles wobbled to one side at once. Not even for a second; perhaps as much as a hundred-thousandth of a second, if that long. Yes, we got a sudden bulge in our atmosphere. But I doubt if we lost more than a pound or three’s pressure; and it settled back in seconds. Sure, it was a big shock, but I don’t think anything really serious—”
“What was it—!”
They turned to the balcony.
“What happened}. I didn’t ...” Alfred (who was seventeen, had the room directly across from Bron, and was the third person in the co-op Bron, from time to time, thought of as a friend) stood naked at the rail.
A blood bubble burst in one nostril. Blood ran down his neck, across his bony chest. He reached up with a hand, already smeared, and wiped more blood across a bloody cheek. “I was in my room, and then ... I was scared to come out! I didn’t hear anything. Except some screaming first. What ... ?” A trickle crawled his belly, reached his genital hair, built there for three, silent breaths, then rolled on down his thigh. “Is everybody ... ?” With terrified, green eyes, he blinked about the common room’s assemblage.
Somehow, twenty minutes after that, the pieces had been rearranged on the vlet board; some dozen people were back at the various readers around the room, and several others (among them Sam) had taken Alfred to the console room where the co-op’s outlet for the city information computer would give him a medical diagnosis and any necessary referrals. Then someone came back to report, with astonishment, that there would be a seven-to-ten-minute wait for processing of all medical programs due to a city overflow! “I guess a lot of people sprained a lot of ankles ...” was someone’s dubious comment. Bron decided to go down and see for himself. Downstairs, he crowded into a room with several others. Between two shoulders, he could see the screen flashing: “There will be a three-minute delay before we can ...” Now that was unsettling. But other than a bloody nose and scared, Alfred seemed all right. While Bron was there, the delay sign was replaced with the usual: “Your diagnosis will begin in one minute. Please prepare to answer a few simple questions.” So while Alfred, one knuckle pressed against his upper lip, was sitting down to the console, Bron and several others had come back to the commons.
He lost the astral battle seven to one.
“What,” Lawrence said, sitting back in his chair, “were you ever thinking of?”
Bron reached out and removed his own, overturned, scarlet Assassin and slid Lawrence’s green Duchess into the square by the waterfall’s bank, to threaten the caravan preparing to cross the river less than three squares to the East. With the piece still in his fist (he could feel its nubs and corners), he picked up his cards and surveyed his depleted points. “That woman.” Only one meld was possible and he was three away from his most recent bid.
Lawrence laughed, sat back, and turned his own cards down on his bony knee. “You mean to tell me, in the middle of all this excitement, you’re thinking about some woman? If you’re that kind, what are you doing in this co-op? There’re plenty of places set up for you oversexed, libidinous creatures. Most of them, in fact. Why do you want to come here and let your nasty id mess up our ascetic lives?”
“The first time I ever saw you,” Bron said, “you lumbered into me in the upstairs corridor, drunk out of your mind, and demanded I screw you on the spot.”
“I remember it well.” Lawrence nodded deeply. “The next time I get drunk, I may do the same: There’s life in the old pirate yet—the point, however, is that when you refused, saying that you just weren’t (as you put it so diplomatically) all that turned on by men, I did not immediately drop you from my acquaintanceship; I did not snub you in the dining area next time we passed. I even, if I recall, said hello to you the next morning and volunteered to let the repairmen in to fix your channel circuit while you were out at work.”
“What is the point, Lawrence?” Bron looked back at his cards. Several times in his life, people had pointed out to him that what friends he had tended to be people who had approached him for friendship, rather than people he’d approached. It meant that a goodly percentage of his male friends over the years had been homosexual, which, at this stage, was simply a familiar occurrence. “You’re the libidinous one. I admit it, my relationships with women have never been the best—though, by the gods of any sect you name, sex itself never seemed to be the problem. But that’s why I moved in here: to get away from women and sex.”
“Oh, really! Alfred rushing his little girl friends in here after midnight and hustling them out again before dawn—it may be screwing, but it isn’t sex. And anyway, it doesn’t bother anyone, though I’m sure it would just destroy him if he found that out.”
“Certainly doesn’t bother me,” Bron said. “Or you hustling your little boyfriends in and out—”
“Wishful thinking! Wishful thinking!” Lawrence closed his eyes lightly and raised his chin. “Ah, such wishful thinking.”
“If I remember correctly,” Bron said, “that evening in the corridor, when I said ‘no,’ you called me a faggot-hater and demanded to know what I was doing in an all-male co-op if I didn’t like to go to bed with men—”
Lawrence’s eyes opened; his chin came down. “—whereupon you politely informed me that there was a gay—you know, politically that has, from time to time, been a very nasty word, till that silly public-channel series denatured it once and for all back in the Seventies, the same one which reestablished ‘into’ into the language—men’s co-op two streets away that might take me in for the night. Bastard!”
“You kept on insisting I screw you.”
“And you kept on insisting that you didn’t want to go to bed with anybody, in between explaining to me, in the most sophomoric manner, that I couldn’t expect this kind of commune to be more than twenty percent gay—where you got that dreadfully quaint statistic from, I’m sure / shall never know; then you went on to explain that, nevertheless, due to your current disinterest in women you felt yourself to be politically homosexual—”
“At which point you said you couldn’t stand political homosexuals. Lawrence, what is the point?”
“And I still can’t. The point is merely—” Lawrence returned his eyes to the board: in the Mountains of Norhia a situation had been developing for some time that Bron had hoped would turn to his advantage, if Lawrence would only keep the transparent screens of Egoth and Dartor out of it: the Mountains of Norhia were where Lawrence was looking—“that my feelings toward you, later that night as I lay awake in alcoholic overstimulation, tossing and turning in my narrow bed where you had so cavalierly dumped me and left, were rather like you have been avoiding describing your feelings toward that woman.”
“I thought you passed out—” Bron’s eyes went from the board to Lawrence’s. “Pardon me?”
“I said, right after you so considerately put me to bed—I mean I suppose you could have left me lying on the hall floor; passed out? Ha!—I felt about you rather like you feel about her. I hated you, I thought you were hardhearted, insensitive, ungenerous and pignoli-brained; and quite the most beautiful, dashing, mysterious, and marvelous creature I’d ever laid eyes on.”
“Just because you wanted to ... ?” Bron frowned. “Are you suggesting that / want to—... with her?”
“I am simply noting a similarity of reactions. I would not presume to suggest any of my reactions might be used as a valid model for yours—though I’m sure they can.”
Bron’s frown dropped to the micro-mountains, the miniscule trees, the shore where tiny waves lapped the bright, barbaric sands. After seconds, he said: “She gave me one of the most marvelous experiences of my life. At first I only thought she’d lead me to it. Then suddenly I found out she’d conceived, created, produced, and directed ... She took my hand, you see. She took my hand and led me—”
Lawrence sighed. “And when you put your arm around my feeble, palsied shoulders—”
Bron looked up again, still frowning. “If we all had died this evening, Lawrence, I wouldn’t have died the same person as I was if I’d died this morning.”
“Which is what your initial comments about the whole thing seemed to suggest—before you began to intimate how cold, inhuman, heartless, and untrustworthy this sweet creature obviously was. I was only trying to remind you.” Lawrence sighed again. “And I suppose I did, at least that night, love you in spite—”
Bron’s frown became a scowl. “Hey, come on—”
Lawrence’s wrinkled face (below the horseshoe of white furze surrounding the freckled pate) grew mockingly wry. “Wouldn’t you know. Here I am, in another passionately platonic affair with an essential louse.�
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Seeing her, Bron said: “Lawrence, look, I do think of you as my friend. Really. But ...” Lawrence’s face came back, wryness still there. “But look, I’m not seventeen. I’m thirty-seven. I told you before, I did my experimenting when I was a kid—a good deal of it, too. And I’m content to stick by the results.” The experiments’ results, confirming him one with eighty percent of the population, according to those “quaint” statistics, was that he could function well enough with either sex; but only by brute, intellectualized fantasy could he make sex with men part of his actual life. The last brutal in-tellectualizing he’d done of any sort was his attendance at the Temple of the Poor Children of the Avestal Light and Changing Secret Name; brutality was just not what he was into. “I like you. I want to stay your friend. But, Lawrence, I’m not a kid and I’ve been here before.”
“Not only are you a louse. You are a presumptuous louse. I am not thirty-seven. I am over seventy-three. I too have been here before. Probably more times than you have.” Lawrence bent over and contemplated the board again, while Bron contemplated (again) the phenomenon by which, between some time he thought of as then (which contained his experiments with both sex and religion) and the time he thought of as now (which contained ... well, all this), old people had metamorphosed from creatures three or four times his age to creatures who were only two up or less. Lawrence said: “I do believe it’s your move. And don’t worry, I intend to stay your friend.”
“What do you think I should do, Lawrence?”
“Whatever you think you should do. You might try playing the game—hello, Sam!” who had come up to the table. “Say, why don’t you two play together against me. Bron’s gone quite mushy over some theatrical woman in the u-1 and can’t get up nerve to go back and find her, which is fine by me. But it’s shot his concentration all to hell, which isn’t. Come on, Sam. Sit down and give him a hand.”
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