Bron rolled to his side. “She didn’t say I was trying hard?”
“She said that you were a first-class louse but that you were trying hard. She told me this terrible story about how you—” She stopped. Her eyes widened. “Oh dear! I forgot ... you’re her boss—she’s not yours. The last job she had, she was a production fore—
man for a cybralog manufacturing compound ... Well, now I’ve done it!” She shook her head. “I’ve never worked in an office, and I ... forgot.”
Bron smiled. “What was the horrible story she told?”
“As she was running out of here, she blurted out something about you making some personnel receptionist’s life miserable on the phone just to impress her as a first step to getting in her pants.”
Bron laughed. “I guess she had my number!”
“If that’s what you were doing, you mustn’t hold it against her.”
“Oh, I wouldn’t.” He nuzzled again, closing his arms around her. “You know about the prostitute’s heart of gold, lying around underneath it all?”
“Ah, but gold can be a very cold, heavy metal.” Her head turned on his shoulder. “Do you think being a prostitute was helpful?”
He shrugged, cradling her. “I think it makes you surer of yourself when you’re actually in bed—not necessarily a better lover—but a more relaxed one.”
“You have,” she said toward the ceiling, “a certain pyrotechnical flair that, I admit, I admire the hell out of.”
“On the other hand, I don’t know if it does anything for the relationship part of a sexualizationship. Maybe it’s having so much sex right there, and not having to walk further than downstairs to the client lounge to get it, and it’s paying the bills to boot—I guess when you finally gQt out into the real world and find that people are as interested in you as they are in your technique—and expect you to be interested in them too—it takes some adjusting to. Maybe I never have. Lasting sexualizationships just aren’t my strong point ... no!” He looked down at the top of her head. “That isn’t the way I feel at all! Isn’t it funny how we always say the cliche thing, even if we don’t believe it! No. I don’t think it hurt me in any way, at all. Some of it was pleasant. Some of it was unpleasant. And it was all a long time ago. But I learned a hell of a lot, about myself, about people. Perhaps I never had much of a bent for relationships, even as a kid; which is why I went into prostitution in the first place. But it’s certainly made me a lot more tolerant of a lot more different types of people than most ordinary Martians—say most of my clients. What I learned there is probably the only thing that made it possible for me to adjust—however badly I’ve done it—to emigrating out here to the Satellites ... where you—how do they put it?—can’t make a redressable contract across either a sexual or a sectarian subject.”
“That’s right,” she mused. “Marriage is legal on Mars too. For some reason, we only think of that in terms of Earth out here.” She nodded thoughtfully. “Though if what you said about relationships not being your forte is true, the other thing you said still makes sense, even if it is a cliche. Well, what does any type of life really fit you for today? I’m damned if I know what life in the theater has done for—” The door flew in, crashing against the wall. Bron jerked up on his elbow to see two bare feet, with frayed cuffs fallen away from red-haired calves, waving in the air. The acrobat (Windy?) walked in on his hands. In the hall, somebody was playing the guitar.
Bron was about to say something about knocking first when a little girl (perhaps six? perhaps seven?) on very thick-soled shoes and draped in a trailing, tattered veil of sequins, ran into the room, leapt on the bed (her knee bruised his thigh), weeping, and flung herself into the Spike’s arms; the Spike shrieked, “Oh, my goodness ... !” and, to Bron’s astonishment (he was sitting on the bed’s edge now, both feet on the warm plastifoam floor), began to weep, herself, and cuddle the grubby-fingered creature.
“Hey, I was just wondering if you—” That was the hirsute, half-blind woman with the mastectomy, leaning in the door. Astonishment bloomed over her scarred face. “Oh, I’m sorry!” As she pulled back, two more women—one carrying a ladder, the other a tool case—pushed in.
“Look,” the one with the case said, clanking it on the floor and pushing the catch up with one, very pointy-toed boot, “we’ve got to get this done now. Really. I’m sorry.” The cover clacked open.
“Hey, what—” Bron said (he was standing, now, near the wall) to the knobby ankle waving near his shoulder—“I mean is this just one of your damn micro-theater pieces? Because if it is ...”
“Man,” the head said (which was down at about his knee, a waterfall of red hair all around it sweeping the floor, between splayed, hammy hands), “don’t ever live in an all woman co-op unless they’re all straight, or they’re all gay, every last one. It just isn’t worth it, you know what I mean?” The hair shook aside enough to see an ear. “I mean, really!” The hands shifted. The feet swung.
The little girl, sitting on top of the ladder now, sniffled.
The last two women who had come in were making marks across the wall with black crayons.
The Spike, on the edge of the bed, was pulling up her baggy red trousers, standing and turning (on her back, fastened with the same brass clips, was a red Z, as mysterious as the R in front) and pulling her black suspenders up over her shoulder. She turned back and, knuckling her tear-wet eyes, came over to Bron. “I’m sorry about this, really, I am ... But I just tend to anthropomorphize everything!”
One of the women swung a small sledge against the wall. Cracks zagged out from the blow. The little girl on top of the ladder burst out weeping afresh.
So did the Spike: “... Oh, go on Please, go on. Really!” She gestured behind her with one hand. Tears ran, in three lines, down one cheek, in one down the other. Suddenly she hit at Windy’s foot. “Oh, stop sulking and stand up!”
The acrobat’s feet swayed wildly, kicked violently, regained balance. From knee level came a torrent of exotic and specialized profanity that brought back to Bron, with incredible clarity, the face of one particular earthie he had worked with in the Goebels: If Windy had not spent time on Earth as an extra-legal, male prostitute, he’d certainly spent a lot of time with men who had!
But the Spike had seized Bron’s arm and was pushing him toward the door, in which the guitarist (Charo?) stood, her instrument high under her breasts, her head bent pensively, her left hand, far up the neck, clutching chord after chord; the outsized muscle between thumb and forefinger on her right hand pulsed as her nails rattled notes into the corridor.
“By eight o’clock—!” The Spike turned back to the room and called, tearily, with a sweep of one arm that sent her staggering against him, “I promise! Really! By eight o’clock, I will know what I’m doing!”
The hammer smashed against the wall.
The Spike pushed past the guitarist—“No, not that way—” which, Bron realized, was to him, not her. She made a great, head-clearing snuffle—“This way!”—grabbed Bron’s arm again, and tugged him into the hall.
In rakish imitation of Sam (which he indulged about once a month) Bron had gone to work that day wearing nothing. Still, he would have liked a chance to wash, or, failing that, at least to sleep for twenty minutes more, cuddled against her rather bony back. But he followed her around a corner, where the hallway went completely dark—and collided with her; she had turned to face him. Her arms closed around him. Her cheek, still wet, brushed his. “This isn’t very hospitable, I know. Shall we just stand here and hold one another a few moments? Really, it’s just that our company is the co-op’s guests—noncredit guests, too; one has to put up.”
He grunted something between annoyance and assent; and held her and was held by her; and, except for the plastic letter against his chest, felt more and more comfortable.
People, from time to time, passed.
After the fifth, she disengaged. “Let’s go outside and take a walk. I feel I’ve been just d
readful.”
He grunted again, took her hand; she squeezed, and (to the sound of her brushing pantaloons) they walked along the corridor. “I was going to ask you,” he said, getting the idea the first time that moment, “if you took all your ‘audiences’ to bed with you—as a sort of encore?”
“I don’t even take most of them to bed. Why?”
“Well, I ... it’s just that I have difficulty, with you, sometimes, deciding what’s real and what’s theater.”
“Do you?” she asked; she sounded surprised; and intrigued. Then she laughed. “But all theater is reality. And all reality is ... theater!”
Bron grunted again, annoyed at something other than the ironic triteness. After a silent minute’s walking, he asked: “When do we get outside?”
“We are outside.”
“Huh?” He looked at the walls (a dull, doorless brown), at the ceiling; there was no ceiling. The walls went up and up and disappeared in unlicensed blackness. He brought his eyes down; ahead, red, luminous letters of the street coordinates glowed. “Oh.”
“I liked you,” she said at last, in answer to the question he’d asked over a minute ago; “What you looked like, first. Then, the way you ... well, responded to our work. I mean, we know it’s good. We’ve done that one for perhaps a dozen people so far, and all of them have liked it. But your response was so open and ... well, ‘rich’ is the way Dian—that’s our set designer—put it when we talked about it later.”
“I got talked about later?”
“Oh, we always discuss each performance afterward. That’s just part of the backstage (as it were) work the audience never sees. Presumably, however, the next audience gets the benefit. I mean, basically we’re concerned with leading people gently into a single moment of verbal and spatial disorientation—I say disorientation: what I mean, of course, is a freeing, to experience a greater order than the quotidian can provide. A moment of verbal, spatial, and spiritual energy in resolution. That’s so necessary in a world that’s as closed in as life in any satellite city must, of necessity, be. Especially—” She looked up the high, blank walls—“in someplace as claustric as the u-1 sector. Maybe wanting to be able to break out, even through art, is my ice-farm heritage working again. Yes, I spent my childhood scooting up and down plastic corridors from bubble-hut to bubble-hut, or in ice-treaders that were a lot more cramped than this. Still, the point is, those corridors and huts were transparent. And beyond them—” She took a breath—“was the sky!”
From last night, Bron remembered the disappointing stars.
“But what I was saying: You’d be surprised how many people do fight that moment of freedom, even with the drug boost, for the whole minute and forty-nine seconds the piece takes to perform! You didn’t fight it; you went with it. I liked that. We all did—then, of course, there was just something engaging about your personality: despite its rather blunt side. Most people, unless they follow the theater seriously, don’t even remember my name—I don’t even bother to tell most people; even when they ask ... you can’t imagine how surprised I was when Miriamne brought you back with her.”
They reached a wider thoroughfare; tracks curved along the far side, two red glints pointing the rails where they neared a street sign.
“You’re really in charge of the whole company?” he asked. “You write, produce, act, direct ... the whole thing?”
“I’ve even been known to sew costumes.”
“Oh.” The discomfort made him rummage through the other discomforts of the day. The most accessible was: “Do you know, all the way over here, I had the craziest notion that you and Miriamne were involved. Sexually, that is.”
“Why?”
“Guess I was projecting.” He laughed. “I live in an all-male, unspecified co-op over on the other side of the Great Divide. There’s a friend of mine there, see, who’s this perfectly crazed, seventy-four-year-old, un-regenerated character who, whenever he gets drunk, is always making futile attacks on my tired, pale bod; then he sort of revels in it when I reject him. I think it gives him some sort of masochistic solace. Actually, though, he’s a pretty great guy—In fact, why don’t we go to my place now and I’ll get old Lawrence looped and he’ll regale you with adventures from his long and checkered career? You’re the type—I mean being in the theater and all—who’d probably really enjoy him.”
“We are all—” she began. “But I said that before. I don’t think I’d necessarily like him. I have very little sympathy with political homosexuals.”
Bron laughed. “That’s what Lawrence said to me first time I met him.” Then he frowned. “Why do you call him a political homosexual?”
“I mean if, one) he isn’t happy with it and, two) he keeps going around pushing his affections on people who don’t reciprocate, I just wonder why he doesn’t do something about it? I mean not only do we live in an age of regeneration treatments; there are refixation treatments too. He can have his sexuality refixed on someone, or thing, that can get it up for him. And, as they are always saying in the brochures, the older you are, the better they work.”
“Oh, sure,” Bron said. “But I think Lawrence is just trying to prove a point.”
“Which is why I called it political. And why I don’t have much sympathy for him. Sexual point-proving is such a waste of time. Especially if you’re seventy-four. And the refixation treatments are very effective. I know. I’ve used them.”
Bron frowned over his shoulder at her. “You used to be a gay and gave it up?”
“No. But there was a very marvelous woman once who was very fond of me, spiritually and sexually, and wanted me very badly—an ‘actress of the old school,’ as she used to call herself. You know, she’d actually directed a handful of ice-operas—some of the better ones too. Anyway, I had a refixation—it takes five minutes and you’re asleep through it all. We were very happy together. And when it was over, I had another one that got me back to tall, curly-haired blonds with high cheekbones—” She cocked an eye at him. “I swear by them. Anybody who is concerned about sex-ualizationships who doesn’t take advantage of them, from pure prejudice—and it’s nothing more (Your Lawrence friend sounds like he’s from Earth.)—is a fool.”
“You are opinionated!”
She shrugged. “Only when I’m right. You can be opinionated too if you want. With your experience—” She looked, blinking—“I would imagine you should know more about refutations than I do!”
“You mean back when I was a working man—? Well, sure, some of the guys used them. I never did.” Bron shrugged. “I never had to. I don’t particularly enjoy sex with men. But, when I’ve done it, it hasn’t been difficult. So I always figured I could perform if I ever had to.”
“Ah,” the Spike said, with raised forefinger. “But re-fixation is a matter of desire, not performance. And I assure you, as one who is also a fair performer, desire is something else again. No—” She shook her head once more—“I don’t think I would really enjoy your Mr Lawrence.”
“He probably has his reasons ... which is probably why he’s living where he is—You’re a pretty cold and inhuman type,” he said, suddenly. “You think you’ve got everything figured out from the start.”
The Spike laughed. “And who is it who has called me a type three times in ten minutes? You seem to have done your bit of figuring.”
Bron grunted again: “Lawrence is always saying everyone’s a type, too.”
“It’s conceivable,” the Spike said with mock deliberation (Or was it deliberate mocking?), “that we may both be wrong. But I doubt it.” Then, suddenly: “By the Dark Ring ... !” which was an exclamation till now he had only heard in ice-operas, though he’d once expected it to litter the conversation of all Outer Satellites: he could not tell if it was heritage or affectation. “It’s five minutes to eight!” She released his hand, clutched her forehead. (With dim, yellow numerals and scrolled arms, a clock hung high above in the black.) “Do I know what I’m going to do ... ? Yes!” She faced him
with wide, beating eyes, clasped his cheeks between her palms. “I’ve got to run! The company’s waiting for me. You’ve been a love, really. Good-bye!” She turned. And ran. Red pants fluttered into the dark.
Bron stood, naked and confused, on the empty, unlicensed street, where anything, anything could happen.
He stood there quite a while, thinking about what had, looking down at himself, looking up at the clock, or off into the darkness where she’d gone.
Across the tracks, with shuffling steps, came two mumblers. One, eyes tight, head bent, swung a blue plastic bowl. She led the other, a much older man, by the hand: his eyes were bound with rag.
Their voices, dull and fluttery, wound and twisted, apart and together. The woman’s mantra was a lengthy one, of interlocking say able and unsay able sounds. The man’s, on a single note, in a rasping voice ... Bron had to hear it through five times before he would let himself be sure: and, by then, they had nearly reached the opposite alleyway; and the woman’s voice kept obscuring it, here at the third syllable, there at the seventeenth:
“Mimimomomizolalilamialomuelamironoriminos ...”
Alfred’s fingernails (and toenails) were long and dirty. So was Alfred’s hair. He leaned forward from the conversation chair, a red plastic K clipped with brass to the black suspenders (What in the world ... ? Bron wondered: What in two worlds and twenty worldlets could they stand for?) hung loosely on his bony chest. “I just don’t know, I really don’t.” Alfred shook his head, his voice low, raspy, and intense. “I don’t know ....” The suspenders held up scarlet bikini briefs, ludicrously too large for Alfred’s bony hips—but in the type of places Alfred probably frequented, that was, probably, the point. “In a week, I pick up two, three, four women and it’s fine. Then, the next night—I’m horny as hell and the woman I get is a real knockout. But we come back here ... and I’ve got the limps! Can’t raise it no way! And that goes on for sometimes, three, four, five weeks, till I can’t even do anything with it by myself, you know? And I’m still getting women and they’re just being as cooperative as hell! Which makes it worse. Then, finally, when I start to get it back together, and score with another one, and get her to come back here ... and this always happens with the one you really want and you really had to work your tail off to get—we get goin’ and—Pow!” Alfred bounced nearly to his feet, then sagged back in the chair. He shook his head. “Three seconds, four seconds ... maybe ten! If I’m lucky!” He blinked green eyes at Bron. “Then I gotta go through a week of that, before I can get it on for a decent two or three minutes, over the next couple of times. I mean, that’s why I live here, you know? I bring a woman back here, if I mess up I can say, Thanks for comin’ by, ma’am. Sorry I wasted your time. See you around,’ and get her out of here! Those mixed co-ops, where the guys and girls live together, makin’ it with each other all the time—? I tried six of those when I first got here (and they had some nice women there ... Wow!); you mess up more’n a couple of times there and the first thing you know they want to talk about it! And then you got to talk about it some more. The next thing you know, you have to have a damn encounter with all the other men and women who messed up that week—When / mess, I don’t wanna talk. I wanna go to sleep! If I talked about every time I messed up with some woman I wouldn’t have time to pee! And that’s another thing—you ever try to pee in the sink with some woman you just messed up with lying in the bed staring at you? I mean, even if she ain’t looking!” Alfred sat forward again, leaned on his knees, shook his head. “I just about given up. On peeing, I mean.” The green eyes came up again. “Hey. I ordered this ointment from one of those shops down at the Plaza of Light, one that sells them magazines—?” Alfred leaned closer, his tone suddenly confidential. “I checked it out with the computer and it said there wasn’t anything wrong with using it ... It’s credited to me already. But they said they don’t get much call for it so they don’t keep it in stock. They’re gonna have it in tomorrow—only tomorrow I have to start these vocational aptitude tests. My social worker says I have to—You pick it up for me, Bron. The shop’s on the southeast corner—not the big one. The little one, two doors to the left.” Alfred paused, blinked. “You pick it up for me, Bron ... okay?”
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