“No—” Bron said, turning. “I mean, I don’t mind. But I—”
Miriamne had already started walking.
Bron caught up. “I mean, I thought I might stop by and see if Spike—the Spike was there. I’d wanted to ... well, tell her how much I liked her theater piece—unless of course they’re out somewhere performing ... ?”
“No,” Miriamne said. “Not tonight. They may be rehearsing though.” She uncrossed her arms, hooked one chrome-nailed thumb on her chrome waist-cinch. “From a couple of things she said, I wouldn’t be surprised if she was rather glad to see you,” which, as he hurried on (sometimes silently beside her, sometimes silently behind), made him bubblingly happy.
Dark streets, here and there slashed by a sodium light-tube set upright in a wall-holder (the bottom few inches of most of them were completely grimed over), gave way to narrower alleys. The glowing red coordinate numbers and letters, in their little frames above him, by now had so many superscripts and subscripts you’d really need a wrist calculator to figure out exactly where you were.
They went up some ringing metal steps between two walls maybe twenty inches apart, into a tunnel that was dead black, cool, damp, and whose roof (Bron knew it was filthy) kept brushing his hair.
“This way—” Miriamne said, muffled by dark walls—“I know I’m taking you by a pretty grim shortcut. But I’m in a hurry.”
He went ‘this way,’ bumped his shoulder on the corner of the turnoff; while he rubbed it, ahead a line of orange light opened beside Miriamne, sweeping her into broad-hipped silhouette.
“In here—” which was a circular room with a single light-pole in the center, floor to ceiling. “This is Three Fires’ visitors’ lounge. I know it’s pretty bare—” Bunk beds against the wall with blue plastic sleeping pads; a few floor cushions; some low shelves, on which were books. (How quaint, he thought. How u-1.) There was a reader beside the bed, but nothing like a file drawer for a library. (Which was also, he reflected, very u-1. The books, of course, would all be poetry.) “We don’t have many visitors,” Miriamne explained. “I’ll go send the Spike down—you’ll excuse me if I don’t come back. But I really do want to catch my friend ... If she’s still here. If the Spike’s not in, someone will come up and tell you. I’ll see you at work tomorrow.” She nodded.
“Thanks.” Bron nodded after her, sitting on the bottom bunk, only now realizing with certainty that “her friend” was not the Spike after all. The orange plastic door, clicking bearings, closed on an image of her rocking waist-cinch, wide hips below and bare flesh above. Behind Bron’s smile, a haze of hostility, with him since they’d entered the underpass, broke up, and drifted away.
He let out his breath, sat back on the air-filled pad, considered it again now that it was gone, and thought:
I can’t have that crazed lesbian in my office. Look how she makes me feel even knowing she lives in the same co-op with her! Bron (like most people) thought of jealousy as an irrational emotion. But it was also a real one. And he felt it infrequently enough to respect it when he did. I’ll ask Audri (or Philip? No, Audri) to get her transferred to another department ... She catches on quick and I could use someone with a brain to get that Day Star-minus nonsense into shape. But that’s not the point, he decided. A transfer. Yes. I’ll—
“Hello!” a familiar voice said, directly above him.
He looked up. Inset in the ceiling was a speaker. “Eh ... hello?”
“I’m on my way—”
“You don’t have to rush for—” but, hearing clicks, he looked down as the bright orange door finished rolling into the dull orange wall.
“Oh ...”
“Hi, there!” She walked into the room. “What a surprise.” Loose, red pants flapped at her bare ankles. From her waist, black suspenders crossed between her breasts (there brass clips hooked a large, red, plastic R ... he had no idea why) and went up over her shoulders. She stopped with her hands against her thighs, nails clean of gold now, slightly dirty and endearing, lips unrouged and charming. “You could have knocked me over with an eyelash when Miriamne told me you were here—I was all set to spend the evening going over forty-six micro-scenarios that I know, without looking, are not our kind of thing at all. People keep giving us things that are minute-long gimmicks, instead of minute-long theater ... you know what I mean? That’s why we end up creating most of our own works. But I always feel I have to consider unsolicited material, anyway, just in case. My mistake was telling the endowment people I would devote a certain amount of energy to it. Some weeks you just feel less like considering them than others. And this is one of them.” She sat down on the bed beside him—“We’ve been rehearsing a new piece all afternoon that goes into production tomorrow. We just broke off half an hour ago—” and placed her hand affectionately on his leg, little and ring fingers together, middle and forefingers together, with a V between, which on Earth, and the Moon, and Mars, and Io, and Europa, and Ganymede, and Callisto, and Iapetus, and Galileo, and Neriad, and Triton, in co-op and commune, park, bar, public walk and private soiree, was the socially acceptable way for men, women, children, and several of the genetically engineered higher animals to indicate: I am sexually interested.
“Would you like to come back to my room?” she asked.
For the third time that day his heart started to thud. “Urn ...” he said. “I mean ... yeah. I mean, if you ... sure. Yeah. Please ...”
She clapped her knees.
He almost grabbed her hand back.
“Come on, let’s go.” She stood up, smiling. “I share the room with Windy—our acrobat. And Charo—that’s our guitar player. It probably wouldn’t bother you, their being there. But it would me—I’m a bit peculiar. I asked them to brave the steely-eyed glances of the commons room for a couple of hours. These single-sex unspecified-preference co-ops are like living on top of an iceberg!”
“Yeah,” he said, following her through the orange doorway, through halls, down staircases, along corridors. “I live in one too.”
“I mean,” she said, stopping by a room door, and glancing back at him, “it’s awfully nice of Three Fires to take us in at all—the company’s got men and women in it, of all persuasions. But wow! The psychic chill!” And then: “You do? Well!” She pressed her thumb against the circular I.D. plate on the door (which seemed as quaint as the books in the visitors’ lounge). “I mean—” she said, in a tone that told him she was politely picking up another thread of thought—“if Windy and Charo just sat around and read, I suppose it wouldn’t be so bad. But they’re always practicing. Both of them. I just find it distracting.”
The door opened.
She stepped in.
He followed.
The bed was triple-sized and rumpled.
“Really, when Miriamne told me that you were her boss ...”
He laughed, completely delighted. “What did she say about me?”
She glanced back at him, considered—with her tongue a small knob in her cheek: “That you tried hard.” She turned before the bed, unsnapped a suspender that flopped down against the red pants. “I took it as a recommendation.”
Stepping toward her, he wondered fleetingly if something terrible might happen.
It didn’t.
They made love.
Afterward, she made lazy suggestions about getting back to her scripts. But, with one thing and another, they made love again—after which, to his astonishment, he broke out crying. Tears still brimming, he tried to laugh them away, ultimately rather proud of himself for the openness of his emotions—whatever the hell they were ... Obviously moved, she cradled his head in her lap, and asked, “What is it? There, there, what’s the matter?”
Still laughing, still crying, he said: “I don’t know. I really don’t. This doesn’t happen to me very often. Really.” It had happened to him exactly twice before, both times when he was twenty, both times with short, dark, small-boned, broad-hipped women at least fifteen years older than he was.
They made love again.
“You know,” she said at last, stretching in his arms, “You really are quite lovely. Where—” and one arm went out over the side of the bed—“did you learn to do that?”
Bron turned over on his stomach (quite recovered from his crying jag) smiling: “I told you once, actually. But you’ve probably forgotten.”
“Mmmm?” She glanced at him.
“Now you’re probably the type to hold it against me,” he said, not believing it a moment. These wholesome Outer Satelliters were desperately accepting of any World-bound decadence; it supplied some sort of frisson, he suspected, ordinarily missing from their small-world lives.
“Dear heart—” she rolled against him—“everyone’s a type.”
Raising his eyebrow, Bron looked down at the hollow between her neck’s ligaments. “From the age of ... well, on and off between the ages of eighteen and—oh, about twenty-three, my sexual services could be purchased at a place in Bellona called—I kid you not—the Flesh Pit.”
“By who?” She cocked her head. “Women?”
“Yes. Women—Oh, it was a fine, upstanding, highly-taxed, government-approved job.”
“Taxes,” she said. “Yes. I’ve heard worlds are like that—” Suddenly she threw an arm over his shoulder. “What was it like? I mean, did you sit in a cage and get selected by prowling creatures with dilated pupils, silver eyelids, and cutaway veils?”
“Not quite.” Bron laughed. “Oh, we got a few of the cutaway-veil set. But they’re pretty much restricted to old movies and ancient Annie-shows. Not all, though—my gold eyebrow used to really turn some of them on. But then, they knew what it meant.
“What does it mean?”
“Nothing pleasant. Come on. Give us a snuggle.”
She snuggled. “Living on a world always sounded so romantic to me. I grew up on the Gannymede icefields. I’m practically a provincial bumpkin compared to you. Was it awful—being a prostitute and paying taxes and things? Awful to your psyche, I mean?”
“No ... Sexually, at any rate, after a couple of A-seventy-nine forms, you just got a pretty good idea of who you really were.”
“Did you have to go with any woman who would pay?”
He began to suspect the idea turned her on and considered beginning an erotic monologue he had actually employed with various women out here that (actually) contained only a few fantasies of omission: it ended with his being mauled by a dozen women in a locked room, where he’d been unwittingly lured, and leaving bruised, exhausted, drained; it could usually be count—
ed on to incite more lovemaking. But he was curious about her curiosity. “For all practical purposes I did. But the Pit was there for its customers, so they were pretty efficient about the guys they hired. When you apply for a job like that the first time ... well, you fill out a lot of performance forms, take a lot of response tests and what have you. I mean, it wouldn’t really do to send a woman to a guy who just couldn’t get it up for her—assuming that’s what she was into; and a good quarter of the clients weren’t, really.”
“So you could choose just to go to bed with attractive women if you wanted—”
He shook his head, wondering if she were kidding. “Look, if you were the kind of guy who could only get it on with the nubile nymphs on the daytime video romances, really, you just wouldn’t be too likely to apply for the job. When I got hired, I was down for all women with physical deformities. For some reason, a scar or a withered arm or leg always gets me off; which made me quite useful. And older women, of course; and dark skin; and big hips; I was also down for what they called second-level sadism.”
“My Lord,” she said. “What’s that? No, don’t tell me! Did women prostitutes get the same, deluxe treatment—performance forms and the like?”
“Female prostitution is illegal on Mars—oh, of course there was a lot of it around. Probably as much of it as there was the male kind, just in numbers. But because it was pretty harried by the e-girls ... eh, e-men, if any single-establishment got near the size of one of the male houses, it was raided, broken up, and closed down. So you just couldn’t get things quite to the same level of organization. But I got special credit exemptions and preferred ratings on standard government loans for each uninterrupted six-months period I worked—of which, incidentally, in three and a half years there were only two. It’s the kind of job you take vacations from a lot.” He put his hand on the back of her neck, rubbed. “Now, on Earth, female prostitution is government-licensed in most places and male prostitution is illegal. The oddest thing: some of the big men that ran the Flesh Pit—and about half the other houses in the Goebels—went to Earth and set up Earth-licensed houses of female prostitution in various cities there, using the same techniques they’d developed on Mars for the male houses—screening the prostitutes, getting their performance charts and preferences. Apparently, they’ve cleaned up! Earth’s oldest profession was also one of its most shoddily run, until they came along—or so they tell you on Mars. I worked with a couple of guys who’d free-lanced various places on Earth, illegally.” He sighed. “They had some peculiar stories.”
“Worlds must be very peculiar places.” She sighed. “Sometimes I wonder if that isn’t really the only reason we’re at war with them.”
“Or about to be at war with them. Triton, anyway.”
The Spike’s head came up. Her hair feathered the edge of his hand. “Small dark women with big hips and withered arms—” She glanced at him. “Someday you must tell me what you see in a big-boned, scrawny blonde like me.”
“They’re mutually inclusive areas, not mutually exclusive. And they include quite a bit more ...” He nuzzled her shoulder and wondered much the same thing she’d just asked; his mind, used to such meander-ings, had only been able to come up with a sort of generalized incest, or even narcissism, the denial of which was the reason for those other tastes, now (interestingly), broken through.
“Of course,” the Spike said, “the whole thing sounds terribly bizarre, being a prostitute and all.” She looked at him again. “What did your parents think?”
He shrugged; she had broached an uncomfortable area; but he’d always thought honesty a good thing in matters of sex: “I never talked about it with them, really. They were both civic constructionist computer operators—light laborers to you folks out here. They were pretty glum about everything, and I guess that would have only been something else for them to be glum about.”
“My parents—” she said, yawning, “all nine of them—are Ganymede ice-farmers. No cities for them. They’re good people, you know? But they can’t see further than the next methane thaw. Now they’d be quite happy if I’d gone into commiters, like you—or Miriamne. But the theater, I’m afraid, is a little beyond them. It’s not they disapprove, you know ... it’s just ...” She shook her head.
“My parents—and they were only the two—didn’t disapprove. We just didn’t discuss it. That’s all. But then, we didn’t discuss much of anything.”
She was still shaking her head. “Ice-sleds, checking vacuum seals on this piece of equipment, that piece, always looking at the world through polarized blinkers—good solid people. But ... I don’t know: limited.”
Bron nodded, to end, rather than continue. These u-1 folk would talk about their pasts, and, more unsettling, nudge you to talk. (The archetypal scene: The ice-farm Matriarch saying to the young Earth man with the dubious past [or Patriarch saying to the equally dubious young Mars woman]: “We don’t care about what you done, just what you do—and even that, once you done it, we forget it.”) In the licensed area of the city, this philosophy seemed—within reason—to hold. But then, what was the u-1 for, if not to do things differently in? “Now you see,” Bron said, “that seems romantic to me, growing up in the untamed, crystalline wilderness. I used to go to every ice-opera they’d run at the New Omoinoia; and when they’d rerun them on the public channels, a year or so later, I kept an awful lot of clients waiting downstairs
while I found out how Bo Ninepins was going to get the settlers out from under another methane slide.”
“Ha!” She flung herself on the bed. “You did? So did my folks. They loved them! You’ve probably seen part of our farm—the ice-opera companies were always using our south acres to do location shooting. It was the only farm within six hundred miles of G-city that had any place on it that looked like it could have been in an ice-opera! Maybe hanging around the shooting company was where I got my first prod toward the theater—who knows? Anyway, we must have burrowed down to the Diamond Palace once a month from the time I was twelve, the whole lot of us. Like going to a religious meeting, I swear. Then they’d stay up till one o’clock in the morning, drinking and complaining about the details that the picture people had gotten wrong this time. And be right there for the next one next month—now that’s what my folks think of as theater: noble old loner Lizzie Ninepins saving the settlers from the slide, or virile young Pick-Ax Pete with his five wives and four husbands carving a fortune out from a methane chasm ...” She laughed. “It was a beautiful landscape to grow up in—at least the south acres was—even if you never saw it without a faceplate between you and the vacuum. Now if I ever directed an ice-opera, my folks would think I’d arrived! Government subsidized micro-theater, indeed! I suppose I’ve had a secret urge to, ever since my name day ... I chose the name of a mother of mine I’d never known, who’d got killed in an ice-slide before I was born.” The Spike laughed. “Now I bet you’ve seen that one in a dozen ice-operas! / certainly had.” (Bron smiled. In the Satellites, children were given only a first name at birth—about half the time the last name of one of their genetic parents, government serial numbers doing for all official identification. Then, at some coming-of-age day, they took a last name for themselves, from the first name of someone famous, or in honor of some adult friend, workmate, or teacher. Naming age was twelve on the moons of Saturn, fourteen on the moons of Jupiter; he wasn’t sure what it was here on Triton, but he suspected it was younger than either. On Earth last names still, by and large, passed down paternally. On Mars, they could pass either paternally or maternally. His father’s last name was Helstrom; if, as by now he was sure was pretty unlikely, he ever joined a family out here, Helstrom would be the [first] name of his first son.) The Spike laughed again, this time muffling the sound in his armpit. Then her head came up. “Do you know what Miriamne really said about you?”
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