Somebody else stumbled against him.
And somebody else.
The green slip was already in. There was nothing he could do for Miriamne ...
Five minutes later, he found the smaller of the sex shops on the southeast corner and, well-muffled in his cloak, asked for the reserved package of ointment that had already been credited. There! The sense of moral obligations already slipping from his encumbered soul
(and the tubular package in one of his cloak’s numerous, secret pockets), he walked out onto the (almost deserted now) Plaza of Light.
Ten minutes after that, with his heart thudding slowly, he entered the greenlit tiles of the underpass, passing unheeded the admonitions from chalk, paint, and poster, scrawled left and right.
High and dim on the dark, one scrolled, archaic hand pointed to six, the other to seven. (Decimal clocks, he thought. Quaint.) He crossed the tracks, the gritty paving. He passed the high supports of an overhead walkway. Through the rails above, lights cast down a web of shadow.
At the next steps—on a whim—he turned up, pulling all his rustling clothes about him.
Bron gained the top.
They stood at the opposite rail, backs to him, looking out at a darkness that could have been a wall ten feet beyond or a night stripped of stars light years away.
He recognized her by the blonde, feathery hair, the high shoulders (no cloak now), the long curves of her back going down to a skirt, low on her hips: a ground-length swath, where brown and red and orange splotched one another like something from a postcard of an autumn hillside on another world.
Bron slowed, halfway across the walk. The cloaks and veils and sleeves and cuffs that had billowed behind him collapsed around his gloves and boots.
The other—?
Matted hair held a hint of blue (or green?).
Except for fur strips bound around one thick, upper arm, and one stocky thigh, he was still naked.
He was still filthy.
Bron stopped, ten feet away, frowning inside his mask (which, somewhere just beyond the underpass, he’d finally gotten to sit right), wondering at their quiet conversation.
Suddenly she looked back.
So did the man. Within the scarred and swollen flesh the sunken spot (even this close he was not sure if it could or could not see) glistened.
“Bron ... ?” she said, turning fully to face him. Then: “That is you behind that mask ... ? Tethys is a small city! Fred here—” (Fred turned too; the chain necklaces hung down the grimed, overmuscled chest with its sunken, central pit.) “—and I were just talking about you, would you believe?”
The nails visible on Fred’s black-ringed and fouled fingers were quick-bitten. How, Bron wondered, could you bring yourself to bite them if your hands were that filthy—for which answer Fred raised one hand and began to gnaw absently, his visible, bloodshot eye blinking.
“Fred was just saying to me that he’d lived for a while on Mars. And on Earth too. You even spent some time on Luna, weren’t you saying?” (Fred gnawed on, regarding Bron from under shaggy brows and over blackened knuckles.) “Fred was saying he knew the Goebels—wasn’t that what you said the red-light district in Bellona was called, Fred? Fred was telling me what your gold eyebrow meant: That’s really amazing!—Well ... not only is it a small city. It’s a small universe!”
Fred gnawed. Fred blinked.
And Bron thought: The things people will do to their bodies. Just as those outsized muscles were conscientiously clinic-grown (No profession in light-gravity labor gave you those ballooning thighs and biceps, those shoulders, that stomach, with all heads evenly ridged), so the filth, the scars, the sores, the boils that speckled the grimed arms and hips were from conscientious neglect.
And no one had genitals that size, other than by disease or (surgical) design.
The Spike said: “... it really is odd, just standing here, talking about you and suddenly there you are, right behind—” Then Fred, still gnawing, suddenly stepped forward (behind the mask, Bron flinched), crossed in front of the Spike, and started down the walkway: a gentle thud of footsteps, a jangling of chains.
Bron said: “Your friend isn’t very communicative.”
“It’s his sect,” the Spike said. “He was telling me the Beasts are having quite a bit of trouble, recently. They’ve just reformed, you know, from an older sect that dissolved; and now it looked like they may dissolve again. Dian—do you remember her; she’s in our company—used to belong to the Beasts. She dropped out from them last month. Perhaps I’m biased, but I do believe she’s happier with us. The whole problem, I suppose, is that any time some piece of communication strikes poor Fred, or any of the remaining Beasts, for that matter, as possibly meaningful—or is it meaningless? It’s been explained to me a dozen times and I still can’t get it right—anyway, his religious convictions say he has to either stop it or—barring that—refuse to be a party to it. You can imagine how difficult this must make ecumenical decisions during a religious council. Shall we take a walk ... ?” She held out her hand, then frowned. “Or am I being presumptuous presuming you came to see mel”
“I ... came to see you.”
“Well, thank you.” Her hand closed on his. “Then come.”
They walked by the railing.
He asked: “Was Fred part of your theater piece too? That whole, opening gambit when you first froze me in—” which was ice farmer slang that had passed, by way of the ice opera, into general use: but, a moment out, as he recalled her origin, it seemed an affectation, and he wished the phrase back.
“Ah ... !” She smiled at him. “And who’s to say where life ceases and theater begins—”
“Come on,” he said roughly, his own hesitation gone before her mild mocking.
So she said: “Fred?” And shrugged. “Before that afternoon, I’d never seen him before in my life.”
“Then why were you talking to him here?”
“Well, because ...” She led him down some steps. “—he was there. And I mean, since he’d punched me in the jaw once, and at that most delicate moment in the production, when initial contact with the audience is being established, I thought that might stand in place of a formal introduction. Apparently, he’d observed some of our pieces already—he told me he liked them, too. I was trying to discover how he fit that in with the mission laid on him by his sect. That led, of course, into Bestial politics, and thence into his life story ... you know how it goes. I’d known something about it before from Dian, so I could make some intelligent comments; that naturally prejudiced him toward me; we started talking. As you might imagine, people with such commitments aren’t the most socially sought-after individuals. I think he misses civilized conversation. I really found him quite an astute fellow. The metaphysical trouble with Fred’s position, of course, is that communication involves minimum two people—more or less. Now,” as they reached the ground, “two people may be talking, intensely, eloquently, or anywhere in between. But at any point, what’s meaningful for one of them may become empty chatter for the other. Or the situation may reverse. Or the two situations may overlap. And all of these may happen a dozen times in any given five minutes.”
“Poor Fred,” Bron said dryly. (They turned into a narrow alleyway. The red street sign slid its miniaturized letters, dots, and dashes across her corneas watching him.) “Well, I’m glad he wasn’t part of the whole circus.”
“And I, as they say, am glad you’re glad. I was thinking about asking him if he wanted to join the company. You have to admit he’s colorful. And his performance, when I picked you up, certainly added a certain je ne sals quoi. If his sect does go bust, it would be tragic to let all that dedication just drift away! If I could only determine what his position was vis-a-vis theatrical communication itself—does he think it’s meaningful or not? Whenever he—or Dian—talks about it, they get terribly abstract. Perhaps I just better wait until he’s out of it. And you can tell he could use the job, just by looking at him.” Bron w
as about to release her hand, but suddenly she smiled at him. “And what brings you here, interrupting my theoretical reveries on your person and personality with, as it were, the real thing?”
He wanted to say:
I came to tell you that no matter what that crazed lesbian says, I am not responsible for her losing her job—no matter what kind of louse she thinks I am! “I came to find out about you, who you were and what you were.”
The Spike smiled up from under lowered brows. “All masked and veiled and swathed about in shadowy cerements? That’s romantic!” They entered an even narrower alley—were, he realized, actually inside. “Just a moment—” She stopped in front of what was, he recognized, her co-op room door—“and we’ll see what I can come up with to aid you in your quest. Out in a minute,” and she was gone inside: the door clicked closed.
Over the next six minutes, Bron listened to drawers sliding, cupboard doors clacking—something overturned; a man’s voice (Windy’s?) protested gruffly; a guitar tinkled; the same man laughed; more drawers; then her own voice saying in the midst of a giggle (that made him sway back from the door, then touch it, then let his gloved fingers fall again, still moving), “Come on now, come on! Cut it out! Cut it out now—don’t spoil my entrance ... !” Then silence for a dozen breaths.
The door opened; she slipped out; the door clicked to behind.
She wore white gloves.
She wore white boots.
Her long skirt and high-necked bodice were white. Full white sleeves draped her wrists. She reached up and pulled the white cloak around her shoulders. Its paler than ivory folds swept around.
Over her head was a full-head mask: white veils hung below the eyes; the icy globe was a-glitter with white sequins. White plumes rose above it, as from some albino peacock.
“Now—” The veil fluttered with her breath—“we can roam the labyrinths of honesty and deceit, searching out the illusive centers of our being by a detailed examination of the shift and glitter of our own, protean surfaces—” She turned back to the door and called:
“Don’t worry, I’ll be back in time for the performance.”
A girl’s muffled voice: “You better be!”
The white mask turned to him, with a mumbled, “—really ... !” A settling breath, and veils settled. “Now, proofed in light and light’s absence, we can begin our wonderings—” Her gloved fingers fell from her white-scarved throat, came toward his.
He took them.
They walked along the corridor that, once more, became high, roofless street.
“Now. What do you want to know about me?”
After moments, she said: “Go on. Any way you can.”
Moments later, he said: “I’m ... not happy in the world I live in.”
“This world—” She moved a white glove across the darkness before them—“that is not a world, but a moon?”
“It’ll do. They ... they make it so easy for you—all you have to do is know what you want: no twenty-first-century-style philosophical oppression; no twentieth-century-style sexual oppression; no nineteenth-century-style economic oppression. No eighteenth-century-style—”
“There was philosophical oppression in the eighteenth century and sexual oppression in the twenty-first. And they’ve all had their share of economic oppression—”
“But we’re talking about our world. This world. The best of all possible—”
“An awful lot of people who live around here are wasting an awful lot of chalk, paint, duplicating paper, and general political energy trying to convince people that it is nowhere near the best. Bron, there’s a war on—”
“And we’re not in it—yet. Spike, there’s a lot of people around where I live—and the sky is a very different color over there—who honestly believe if the people you’re talking about would mind their own business, it would put us all a little closer to that world.”
Her grip on his hand loosened. “I live in the u-1 sector. You don’t. We won’t argue about that now.” It tightened again.
“And what I’m talking about is the same both places. If you’re gay, you find a gay co-operative; if you’re straight, you go find yourself one of the male/female co-operatives where everything is all gemiltlichkeit and community consciousness; and there’s every combination in between—”
“I’ve always thought the division we use out here of humanity into forty or fifty basic sexes, falling loosely into nine categories, four homophilic—”
“What?”
“You mean you never punched Sex on General Info when you were ten? Then you were probably the only ten-year-old who didn’t.—Oh, but if you grew up on Mars ... Homophilic means no matter who or what you like to screw, you prefer to live and have friends primarily from your own sex. The other five are heterophilic.” (Of course, he knew the terms; of course he’d punched sex; frankly, the whole theory had struck him as clever first and then totally artificial.) “I mean, when you have forty or fifty sexes, and twice as many religions, however you arrange them, you’re bound to have a place it’s fairly easy to have a giggle at. But it’s also a pretty pleasant place to live, at least on that level.”
“Sure. If you want to manacle eighteen-year-old boys to the wall and pierce their nipples with red-hot needles—”
“They better be red-hot.” From veils and glitter, her voice projected a smile too intricately mysterious to picture. “Otherwise, you might start an infection!”
“They could be ice-cold! The point is, after work, you can always drop in to the place where the eighteen-year-old boys who happen to be into that sort of thing—red-hot needles on the second floor, ice-cold ones on the third—have all gotten together in a mutually beneficial alliance where you and they, and your Labrador retriever, if she’s what it takes to get you off, can all meet one another on a footing of cooperation, mutual benefit, and respect.”
“And the kennel’s on the first floor?”
“And there’s one here in your unit, and one in mine, and probably a dozen more throughout the city. And if you’re just not satisfied with the amount or quality of eighteen-year-old boys that week, you can make an appointment to have your preferences switched. And while you are at it, if you find your own body distasteful, you can have it regenerated, dyed green or heliotrope, padded out here, slimmed down there—” Another intersection put them on another elevated walkway. “And if you’re just too jaded for any of it, you can turn to the solace of religion and let your body mortify any way it wants while you concentrate on whatever your idea of Higher Things happens to be, in the sure knowledge that when you’re tired of that, there’s a diagnostic computer waiting with soup and a snifter in the wings to put you back together. One of my bosses, at the office, he has a family commune ... out on the Ring.”
“Sounds elegant ... Did you say in the Ring or on the Ring?” because the Ring (which was not a ring, but a sort of scalloped endocycloid along the outer edge of the city), comprised the most lavish communal complexes in Tethys. (Tethys’s governing families, when elected, traditionally moved to the Ring’s London Point.) The venerable serial communes that had grown up with the city for nearly ninety years were located on the Ring’s outer edge—rather than in the Ring, which was the amorphous neighborhood extending an urban-unit or two inside, but still posh by proximity.
“On.”
“Super-elegant!”
“And he’s the type who wouldn’t give a presover-eignty franq for all your slogan-writing, pamphleteering malcontents. There’s a guy in my co-op who’s actually in the government, and on what I’m sure you would consider the wrong side, too: he probably thinks more of the malcontents than Philip does.” Over the railing, to their right, far away in darkness, a transport trundled. “Last Sovereignty Day, Philip had a big party out at his place—”
“That was patriotic!”
“—with all his colleagues, and all the colleagues of all the others in his commune. You should have seen it—”
“A couple of tim
es I’ve been blessed with friends in the Ring—which is only a street or so away and that was pretty stunning.”
“There’s thirteen in his commune—”
“A regular coven!”
“—not counting children. Three of the women and two of the men—one, a really obnoxious faggot named Danny—are in the absolutely highest credit slot.”
“I’m surprised all thirteen of them aren’t.”
“Philip is three slots higher than I am and is always talking about what a bum the rest of the family thinks he is. They’ve got at least two dozen rooms, half of them great circular things, with sweeping stairways and transparent west walls looking in among the city’s towers with the shield ablaze overhead, and transparent east walls looking out over the ice-crags, with real stars in the real sky—”
“Shades of the place I called home—”
“Duplex recreation rooms; garden rooms; swimming pools—”
“You did say pools, with an V ... ?”
“Three that I remember. One with its own waterfall, splattering and splashing down from the pool upstairs. Their kids are so damned well-behaved and precocious—and a third of them so obviously Philip’s you wonder if they have him around for anything else. And people drinking and swimming and eating all over the place and asking, ‘Did you hire any cooking craftsmen to help you with all this?’ and some very sleek lady of the commune in lots of pearls and very little else saying, ‘Oh, no, that’s not the way we do things on the Ring,’ and, with this amazing smile; ‘That’s how they’d do it over there ...’ nodding in the Ring’s direction. And a gaggle of seven—and eight-year-olds being herded around by a little buck-naked oriental and someone says, ‘Oh, are you their nurse?’ and, with this big, oriental smile: ‘No, I’m one of the fathers,’ which, I suppose, if you’d looked twice would have been as obvious as Philip, and this one’s into interstellar graviat-rics—”
“The other top-slotter?”
“You guessed it. And just to try being rude, you ask another lady of the commune, who’s been introduced to you as an Enforcement Commissioner in the Executive Department, if she’s in the top slot too—”
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