Just inside the cafeteria’s double doors stood the Seven Aged Sisters (four of them were women, anyway) in their green, beaded cloaks and silver kerchiefs. A year or so ago they had come to work at the hegemony; rumor had made them, for a few months, something of a hegemony myth. They were the last survivors of some sect they had all joined at three or four years of age, which, for the last eight decades or more, had shunned all literacy, bodily regeneration, and the acquisition of mathematical skills. (What the sect did do, Bron was not sure.) A few years back, however, under the necessity of token devaluation and rising credit demands, there had been a change of sect policy. Using only the General Information drills and instruction programs available through the console of any co-op computer, the seven octogenerians had, in a year and a half, mastered not only basic reading and writing and a grounding in mathematics, but several rather advanced para-math design techniques: they had applied for work, passed proficiency tests, and been hired. Their sect still forbade their partaking of food with nonbe-lievers, but, from some sense of social decorum, they came each lunch hour and stood along the wall, smiling, nodding, exchanging the odd pleasantry with their fellow workers coming in to eat.
Bron nodded to the nearest, then looked across the busy hall. A dozen people were gathered around (yes, of course it was) Tristan and Iseult, the twelve-year-old twin sisters who, six months back, had been promoted to managers of the entire Tethys wing of the hegemony (... more proficiency tests, more phenomenal scores). Tristan, naked, stood scratching her left foot with the big toes of her right, looking very uninterested in everything. Iseult, swathed in diaphanous scarlet from face to feet, was chatting animatedly with the dozen at once. After three months, the girls had asked to be relieved of the taxing executive positions. They said it interfered with their other interests. They were now, again, working as credit technique assayers. But, so the rumor went, they’d retained their quadruple-slot credit rise.
As Bron looked from the vegetarian counter on the left, across the busy room, to the special diet line on the right, he experienced, for the boring, hundred-thousandth time, that moment of discomfort and alienation: most of these people, as reasonable and as happy as he was, lived in the mixed-sex co-ops he had once tried, but found too tedious and too annoying to bear. Most of them—though not necessarily the same most—lived in co-ops where sex was overt and encouraged and insistently integrated with all aspects of co-operative life ... fine in theory, but in practice their most annoying and tedious aspect. (A very few [slightly less than one out of five] like Philip—who was standing on the other side of the hall, rubbing his beard on his wrist and talking to three, junior programmers, whose sex Bron could not even distinguish [though one of them was naked] for the men and women passing between—lived in complex family communes.) Philip was the boss Bron definitely did not like.
Where was Miriamne anyway?
During Bron’s first year in the Satellites, in Lux, he’d thought he might like a physical job, working with his hands, with his body—after all, he’d come from a physical job on Mars. He’d trained, he’d studied, he’d tested; and had gotten work at a large light-metal refectory (heavy metals were rarer and rarer as you got further and further from the sun). He’d hated the job; he was totally frustrated by the people. From there, he’d spent three weeks at a training program at a Pro-tyyn recycling combine—that was so unpleasant it had decided him to forsake the moons of Saturn for the moons of Neptune. (Jupiter was on the other side of the sun; they were discouraging emigration to Ganymede that year.) Then there’d been the public-channel job.
Still, just to stand around the cafeterias in any of the four places for an hour, watching the people come and go, overhearing snatches of conversation, reviewing the emblems of their quotidian concerns, really, save for the fact two were on Iapetus and this was Triton, you could hardly tell them apart.
Miriamne, with her tray, was coming off the vegetarian line.
He started for her, among the workers moving here and there.
“Hello,” she said. “You changed your mind?” Then she looked over his shoulder.
Bron looked too.
Philip, barefoot as Tristan, in an antiseptically white jumpsuit, walked toward them. A red plastic V was pinned, with brass clips, to his chest.
“Oh, hey, Phil ... ?” Bron turned. “This is Miriamne, the new assistant Audri brought me this morning. Philip’s my other boss, which sort of makes him your boss, too ... or did you two meet before already?”
“We met,” Philip said. “As I told you before, if
Bron treats you badly ... I’m repeating this now because I don’t like saying things behind people’s backs—you kick him—” Philip raised his foot and swung his toe lightly against Bron’s calf (Philip’s ankle was incredibly hairy)—“right here. Bron sprained his knee earlier this year—” which was true—“and I don’t believe he had it attended to properly. It should cause him a great deal of pain.”
Bron laughed. “Philip is a real comic.” No, he did not like Philip at all.
Miriamne said: “I overheard someone say those two kids over there were head of this whole operation a few months ago ... ?”
“Yeah,” Philip said. “And it ran a whole lot smoother than it does now. Of course, that could just be all the pressure from the war.”
Miriamne glanced at the group still gathered around the twins, shook her head with a little smile. “I wonder what they’ll be doing in ten years.”
“I doubt they’ll even stay in business,” Philip said. “That kind never do. // they do, by the time they’re twenty-five, they’ll probably have started a family. Or a religion, if they don’t. Speaking of families, some of our kids are downstairs and waiting for me. Will you excuse me?” Philip walked away. To his back was pinned, by brass clips, a red plastic N.
Frowning after him, Bron said: “Come on, I’ll get some lunch. You go find a booth.”
There were booths all around the hall: for eating and reading, for eating and talking, for eating and silent meditation, private booths for anything you wanted—if she’d chosen one of these, Bron, with that little gesture of the hand, would have made his intentions clear right then.
But she had chosen one for conversation.
So, for the rest of the lunch-hour (he realized what he’d been doing two minutes before it was time to go back to work), he asked her about the Spike, the theater commune, some more about the Spike—not really, he pondered as they rode down the escalator to the Metalogics Department in the second subbasement, the way to get things off on the proper foot. Well, he had the rest of the day.
The rest of the day continued in the same wise, till, when she asked could she leave ten minutes early because, after all, there wasn’t really anything to do today and she would make up the time once she got more into the actual work, and he said sure, and she mentioned she was walking back to her co-op, and Bron, remembering that after all he was trying to start an affair with her, asked if she minded his walking with her and, no, it wasn’t out of his way, he took a roundabout route through the u-1 frequently: she frowned and, a bit sullenly, agreed. Fifteen minutes later, when they turned off the Plaza of Light, down the deserted alley toward the underpass, he remembered again that he was trying to start an affair with her and put his hand on the gray shoulder of her cape: perhaps this was the time to openly signal his intentions—
Miriamne said: “Look, I know it’s a lot of pressure on you, having to teach somebody to do a job they’re not trained for or even very interested in, but I also get the feeling, about every half an hour, when you can get your mind back in it, that you’re coming on to me.”
“Me?” Bron leaned a little closer and smiled. “Now why ever should you think that?”
“I’d better explain,” she said. “The co-op where I live is all women.”
The Spike’s laugh returned to him, pulsing with his heartbeat which, for the second time, began to pound. “Oh, hey ...” He dropped his hand. “Hey,
I’m sorry—it’s gay?”
“Ifs not,” she said. “But / am.”
“Oh.” Bron took a breath, his heart still mangling blood and air in his chest. “Hey, really, I wasn’t ... I mean, I didn’t know.”
“Sure,” she said. “That’s why I thought I ought to say something. I mean, I’m just not into men in any way, shape, or form right now. You understand?”
“Oh, sure, of course.”
“And I don’t feel like getting yelled at later for leading you on, because I’m not. I’m just trying to be pleasant with somebody I have to work with who looks like a fairly pleasant guy. That’s all.”
“Really,” he said. “I understand. Most people who live in single-sex, nonspecific co-ops aren’t into men or women that much. I know. / live in one.”
“You got it.” She smiled. “If you want to go back to the Plaza, now, and catch your transport—?”
“No. Honestly, I do walk home this way ... a lot of times. That’s how I met Spike—the Spike—yesterday.”
Miriamne shrugged, walked on, but at a distance that, as they neared the arch, widened. It’s not sullen-ness, he realized suddenly: She’s as preoccupied as I am. With what? he wondered. And, heaving into his mind, oppressive as a iceberg and bright as a comet, was the Spike’s face. No (he narrowed his eyes at Miriamne, who was a step ahead), she said the Spike was just her friend: Like me and Lawrence, he thought. Then, the sudden questioning: Does she feel about the Spike the way Lawrence is always saying he feels about ... ? His eyes narrowed further at the gray-caped shoulders ahead. I’ll kill her! he thought. I’ll make her sorry she ever heard of metalogics! Miriamne, staggering, drunk, in the co-op corridor, grasping at the Spike, caught in her arms, falling down soused on the corridor floor ... He thought: I’ll—Miriamne glanced back. “You’re looking preoccupied again.”
“Huh?” he said. “Oh. I guess I am.” He smiled: I will kill her. I’ll kill her in some slow and lingering way that will hurt amazingly and unbelievably and continuously and will seem to have no source and take years.
But, with her own preoccupations, Miriamne looked away.
Out of the archway, papers blew across the asphalt—a dozen printed flyers swirled their shins.
One pasted itself to Miriamne’s calf. She tried to sidestep it, couldn’t, so finally bent and pulled it up. As they passed into the green light, she examined the paper. A quarter of the way through, with a wry smile, she passed it to Bron.
So as not to look at her, he read it:
THESE THINGS ARE HAPPENING IN YOUR CITY!!!
the broadside proclaimed in askew, headline letters.
Smaller letters beneath announced:
“Here are Thirteen Things your government does not want you to know.”
Beneath that were a list of numbered paragraphs:
1) The gravity cut that threw a blanket of terror over the entire Tethys Keep last night is not the first to rock the city. A three-sheet area in the unlicensed sector near the outer ring, that included the C and D wings of the Para-med Hospital Wards, was hit by a two-and-a-half minute, total gravity failure, which, while it caused only a half-pound drop in atmosphere pressure because the area was comparatively small, produced gale-force winds in the peripheral area of the u-1 whose peak force was never measured, but which, five and three-quarters minutes later, was recorded to have dropped to a hundred and thirty miles an hour! Damage figures still have not been released. There are twenty-nine people known to be dead—among them four of the seven “political” patients (inmates? prisoners?) at the C Annex of the Para-med. We could go into this in more detail, but there are too many other things to list. For example:
2) We have a copy of a memo from the Liaison Department between the Diplomatic Department and Intelligence, with a 4:00 P. A. issue circulation stamp, that reads, in part: “... The crisis tonight will be brief. Most citizens will not even notice—
“Excuse me,” a hoarse voice said. “You better let me have that, sir.”
Bron looked up in the green light.
Miriamne had stopped too.
“You might as well hand it over ... sir.” The man was burly. Grizzled hair (and one diminutive nipple)
pushed through the black web across his chest. He wore a black skullcap, black pants, shoes open in the front over hairy, hammered toes. (They would be open in the back too, Bron knew, over wide, horny heels.) He held a canvas sack in one hand (that arm was sleeved in black), and in the other (bare except for a complicated, black gauntlet, a-glitter with dials, knobs, small cases, and finned projections) he clutched crumpled flyers. “Some bunch in the u-1 printed up about fifteen thousand of these and dumped a batch at every goddamn exit. So all the e-girls have to go and turn pollution controllers!” He looked at Miriamne, who, with folded arms, now leaned one shoulder against the green tiles. Her sullen, preoccupied look had gone; it had been replaced by one of muted, but clear, hostility. “I mean you can’t have junk like this just blowing around in the streets.” His eyes came back to Bron’s. “So come on, let a girl do his job and hand it ...” His expression faltered. “Look, if you want to read it, just put it in your pocket and take it with you. There’s no restriction on having as many of ’em as you want in your own room—but we’re supposed to get ’em cleaned up off all publicly licensed property. Look, / don’t care if you read it. Just don’t leave it around in your commons, that’s all ... this isn’t some goddamn police state. Where do you think we are, Earth? / come from Earth. I used to be an enforcement-girl—well, we called ’em enforcement-boys, there—in Pittsburgh, before I came out here and got on the force. In Pittsburgh you could get hauled off for resocialization just for something like that—” He nodded toward the tiled wall where Miriamne was leaning. Someone had painted across it in day-glo red (which looked thoroughly unappetizing under the green light-strips):
PLANT YOUR FEET ON IT FIRMLY! THIS ONE AIN’T GREEN CHEESE!
Below it clumsy arrows pointed to the ground. (In black chalk, someone had scrawled across one side of the slogan: “that’s a bit difficult if they keep cutting the gravity” with several black arrows pointing toward the last, day-glo exclamation point.)
“Believe me, in Pittsburgh, that’s just how they do.” (Enforcement-agents at Tethys had, fifteen years ago, been almost all women, hence the “e-girl” nickname. With changing standards, and the migrations of the recent decade and a half, by now the force was almost a third male. But the name persisted, and, as Chief Enforcement Officer Phyllis Freddy had once explained on a public-channel culture survey to a smiling interviewer, and thereby cooled the last humor out of a joke that had never been more than tepid: “Look, an e-girl is a girl, I don’t care if she’s a man or a woman!”) “Really. I mean, I know what I’m talking about. Now put it away or give it here, huh?”
Bron glanced at Miriamne again (who was watching quietly), then handed over the flyer.
It followed the others into the sack.
‘Thanks.” The black-clad agent pushed the papers down further. “I mean, you come out here to the moons and you take a job as a girl because it’s what you know how to do, it’s what you’ve been trained for—and believe me, it’s a lot easier here than it is in Pittsburgh ... or Nangking. I know ’cause I’ve worked in both—I mean you take the job because you want to be a girl—” He stepped by Bron, bent down, and swept up another handful from the papers fluttering along the ground—“and what do you end up? A garbage man!”
Miriamne started walking again, arms still folded. Bron walked too.
Blowing paper (and papers crumpled and crushed) echoed in the underpass.
On the dark walk, beside the rail, Miriamne turned left.
Right, bright, melding colors caught Bron’s eye:
An ego-booster stood by the gritty wall some dozen feet down. Something was wrong with it.
“Excuse me,” Bron called. “Can you wait up a moment?”
He walked toward it.
Someone had defaced it
—probably with the same aerosol spray that the “green cheese” slogan had been written with on the underpass tiles. Against the normally melting hues, it was hard to tell which was booth and which was defacement; the only thing that made him sure was the legend above the entrance (only “your” and half of “society” showed), splotched out with red splatter.
The canvas had been yanked loose from its runners at one end; he pushed it back.
Inside was streaked scarlet. Had some religious cult-ist chosen this booth in which to perform self-mutilation—?
It was only vandalism.
The screen was caved, the red too bright for blood. The token slot was plastered over with half-chewed Protyyn, or worse. The lips of the card slip were pried.
“I guess,” Bron mused, “last night just made people a little more annoyed about these things ...”
Miriamne, somewhere just behind his shoulder, said, “That’s been like that four months. You just noticed it?” Then she said: “Look, I don’t mean to be impolite. But one reason I wanted to leave a few minutes early is that I’d like to try and catch a friend of mine at the co-op—it’s rather important to me.” She smiled. “An affair of the heart, if you will ... ? If you don’t mind, I’ll just go on—”
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