“... the song was written by our guitarist, Charo ...” (who’s guitar face flashed in Bron’s eyes as it went into its case; Charo grinned at the swingers.) “... props and murals are by Dian and Hatti, with help from our tumbler, Windy. This production was conceived, produced, and directed by our company manager, the Spike,”—who nodded, waved, and went to help Windy tear down the wheel—”... with special appearances from Tyre, Millicent, Bron, and Joey—all of whom were our audience too, at one time.”
“Oh ... !” the young woman said, and looked down at Bron and the others indicated.
Bron looked around, surprised, remembered to smile up at the swing.
“Thank you again for being our audience. We really appreciate a responsive one. That was our final performance on Triton. Shortly, our endowment will be taking us on. We’ve been on Triton eight weeks now, in which we’ve given over two hundred and twenty-five performances of ten works—three of them never performed before—to almost three hundred people—” Someone picked up the pole Bron had thrown down, took it away—“Thank you again.”
“Oh, thank youl” the tall young woman cried. “Thank you ... !” The swing began to rise into the dark, by creaks and starts, wound up on a rackety pulley. “Thank you all! I mean, I had no idea, when you just suggested that we sit down on this thing that, suddenly, we would ... Oh, it was just marvelous!”
Heads, hands, and knees, they jerked up into the shadow, away from the decimal clock, dim and distant on the dark.
The Spike, head-mask still under her arm, was talking to the woman who held the little girl now in her arms. All three were laughing loudly.
Still laughing, the Spike turned toward Bron.
He pulled off one of his gloves and tucked it under his arm with his own mask, just to do something. He was trying to think of something to say, and already the anger at not finding it was battling his initial pleasure.
“You did wonderfully! I always like to use as many new people in the performance as possible. In this kind of thing, their concentration and spontaneity lend something to it no amount of careful rehearsal can give. Oh, how marvelous!” suddenly taking his hand and looking at it (his nails, newly lacquered that morning when he’d decided on the dark attire, were, like Windy’s, multihued and iridescent): “I do love color on a man! I make Windy wear it whenever I can.” She looked down at his mask, at hers. “The only trouble with these things is that unless you break your neck, you can’t see anything more than five feet off the ground!”
“What’s this about your final performance?”
“That’s right. Next stop—” Her eyes rose to the ceiling dark—“Neriad, I believe. And after that—” She shrugged.
Bron felt it through their joined hands. “Why didn’t you tell me?”
“Well—you were so busy finding out about me I didn’t get a chance.” A few syllables of laughter surfaced over her smile. “Besides, / was so busy trying to figure out how to get you here in time to go on, I wasn’t really thinking about anything else. Did you enjoy it?”
“Yes.”
“I’d hate to think what you’d have said if you hadn’t! You just sounded like you were agreeing to supervise your own execution—” at which point painted arms, with iridescent multihued nails, flapped around her shoulder. Long red hair fell forward over her satin tunic; a bass voice growled from under it: “Come on, honey, let’s go make this a night to remember!”
She shrugged Windy away (Bron unclenched his teeth) with: “I remember too many nights with you already. Cut it out, huh?”
The head nuzzling in her neck came up, shook back the red hair (it was the first time he had seen it right side up for more than a second at a time: good-natured, pockmarked, scraggy-bearded) and grinned at Bron: “I’m trying to make you jealous.”
You’re succeeding, Bron didn’t say: “Look, that’s all right. I mean, your friends are probably having some sort of cast party to celebrate—” Somehow one handful of multihued nails were now hooked over Bron’s shoulder, the other still on the Spike’s:
Windy stood between them: “Look, I’ll leave you guys alone. Back at the co-op, they’ve said we can party in the commons room as late as we like.” He shook his red head. “Those women want us out of there in the worst way!”
Both hands rose and fell at once. Bron thought: That’s politic.
“See you back at the place—”
“We won’t be using the room for the whole—”
“Sweetheart,” Windy said, “even if you were, I got invites to several others.” And Windy turned and bounded off to help someone carry away what the exercise wheel had collapsed into.
The Spike’s other hand came up to take Bron’s; his eyes came back to see them, one bare with colored nails, three gloved (two in white, one in black). “Come,” she said, softly. “Let me take you ...”
Later, whenever he reviewed those first three encounters, this was the one he remembered most clearly; and was the one that, in memory, most disappointed. Exactly why he was disappointed, however, he could never say.
They did return to the co-op; she had put her arm around his shoulder, their capes had rustled together; bending toward him, as they walked through the streets, she had said: “You know I’ve been thinking about those things you were saying to me, about your boss. And everything—” (He’d wondered when she’d had time to think:) “All through the performance, actually. I just couldn’t get it out of my head. The things you seem to have confused to me seem so clear. The arrows you seem to be assuming run from B to A to me so obviously run from A to B that I tend to distrust my own perception—not of the Universe, but of what in the Universe you’re actually referring to. You seem to have confused power with protection: If you want to create a group of people, join a commune. If you want to be protected by one, go to a co-op. If you want both, nothing stops you from dividing your time between the two. You seem to have making a family down as an economic right denied you which you envy, rather than an admirable but difficult economic undertaking. Just like Mars, we have antibody birth control for both women and men that makes procreation a normal-off system. You have free access to birth pills at a hundred clinics—”
“Yes,” he said, to be shocking: “I’ve taken them once—for a fee.”
And in typical satellite fashion she did not seem to register any shock at all. Well, they were in the u-1, where the shocking was commonplace, weren’t they.
“You only have two decisions to make about a family,” she was going on. “Somewhere around name-day, you decide if you want to have children by accident or by design; if by design—which well over ninety-nine percent do—you get your injection. Then, later, you have to decide that you do want them: and two of you go off and get the pill.”
“I know all that—” he said; and she squeezed his shoulder—to halt him speaking, he realized. “That,” he finished, “at least, is the same as in Bellona.”
“Yes, yes. But I’m just trying to spell the whole thing out to see if I can figure out where you got off the track. With it set up this way, less than twenty percent of the population chooses to reproduce.” (That was not the same as Bellona; but then, Mars was a world, not a moon.) “In a closed-atmosphere city, that’s just under what we can tolerate. In the satellites we try to dissolve that hierarchical bond between children and economic status Earth is so famous for—education, upkeep, and social subsidy—so that you don’t have the horrible situation where if you have no other status, there’s always children. And no matter how well you perform, I haven’t the faintest idea what you’ve got sex confused with. On the one hand, you tell your story in a perfectly coherent way—only I’ve been to parties at family communes in, if not on, the Ring. I’ve been to parties at nonfamily co-ops, where, among forty or fifty adults there were always two or three one-parent families. I’ve been to parties given by adolescent family communes who, for religious reasons, lived in the streets. They’ve all got the same basic education available; and ba
sic food and shelter you can’t be denied credit for at any co-op ,..” She had gone on like this, pulling him closer every time he began to wonder what she was trying to say, till he stopped listening—just tried to feel, instead. They were already at the party by now. One of the first things he did feel was the faint hostility (Windy, who was really a pretty nice guy he decided, and Dian, who by the end of the evening was the nicest person, as far as he was concerned, in the company—with none of the Spike’s brittleness and a gentler way with her equally astute insights—pointed a few subtle examples of it out) between the women who lived at the co-op and the commune who were leaving the next morning. “Though I suppose,” Dian said, leaning arms as hairy as Philip’s on equally hairy knees, “it would try anybody’s patience to have a bunch of strolling players parked in your cellar, carrying on till all hours, while rumors of plague are flying ...” and she nodded toward a modest Triton with the Alliance Now poster on the wall.
He talked to some of the other “audience” who’d been frozen into the last production—various people whom the troupe had performed for, and with whom various members had made friends. Yes, they’d been as surprised by it as Bron had been. From this discussion he looked up to see Miriamne in the room. For ten minutes he desperately wanted to leave, but could think of no way to effect it smoothly. Then, to his em—
barrassment and astonishment, he was asking her, across a conversation group that somehow they’d both become part of, how her job situation was going. She explained, in a friendly enough way, that she was going to work as a transport mechanic at an ice-farm not too far from Tethys. It wasn’t cybralogs, but at least it was working with her hands. He expressed his relief and felt something sink still further inside, something invalidated, something denied.
He turned away to listen to an intense, polysyllabic discussion of the vast difficulty of performing pre-twen-tieth-century theatrical works for a twenty-second-century audience:
“You mean because of the length?”
“There’s that. Primarily, though, it results from the peripitea’s invariably pivoting on sexual jealousy; that’s just so hard for a contemporary audience to relate to.”
“That’s silly,” Bron said. “I get jealous—oh, maybe not specifically sexually. I know you—” to the Spike, who was leaning, affectionately, against him, “and Windy, and that woman who plays the guitar, must have something going. I mean, I’ve seen the bed—”
“He’s even slept in it,” the Spike said, still leaning.
“It would be silly to be jealous of that; but as far as attention goes, I’m as possessive of that in people I’m having a thing with as it’s possible to be ... I guess.”
“So we’ve noticed,” said that woman who played the guitar, with a slightly mocking smile (reminiscent of the Spike’s) that bothered him slightly because, till then, he hadn’t noticed Charo was holding the Spike’s other hand. And somewhere else in the room Windy was laughing.
The Spike had been paying amazing amounts of attention to him, of the silent and unveering sort (Had she been once out of physical contact with him since they’d entered the room ... ?) that made him feel relaxed, secure and, also, practically oblivious to her presence. (The three of them had probably discussed it the previous night and decided he was “that type”—which, though it did not break the relaxed security’s surface, drove the unsettling wedge beneath it deeper.) He wished there was overt reason to dislike the gather—
ing. But there was none of the plastic good will that crusted a gathering at Philip’s, that you wanted to break with a sledge. Parties this side of the license-line were simply going to be more relaxed, more informal, more at ease. There was nothing you could do.
Over the next half hour he mulled over plans of asking her (whom he could just see out of the corner of his eye, but whom he could feel, tucked warmly under his arm) to abandon her life with the commune and come away with him to—what? He did want to do something for her. Finally, he contented himself with evolving a sort of sexual cadenza, a series of caresses, acts, positions, of mounting intensity, to perform with her when they should return to her room—and in a lazy moment when no one was talking to her, he turned to mouth against her ear: “Come ... let me take you.”
“What—?” she murmured.
“Come with me. Follow close. Do what I do ...” and led her into the hall.
The lovemaking was splendid—though only halfway through the list, she implored him to stop. “It’s marvelous,” she whispered. “It’s wonderful. But you’ll kill me!” He had, he realized, let his imagination run away. Minutes later, he too was exhausted. Wrapped around each other, the arms of each straining around each other’s gasped breaths, Bron waited for sleep ... floated up toward it, a bit jerkily (like that inane trapeze, rising into the dark), each gasp.
And still the disappointment—certainly they were both physically satisfied. Was it just that he hadn’t completed his scenario? Was it all some silly, essentially aesthetic flaw, some missed cue, some flubbed entrance, some inessential malfunctioning prop no one in the audience could possibly be aware of? But the audience was only one—And what had she done that he was able to see her less and less clearly, while he thought of her more and more in terms from her work, in words his own tongue had tasted first in her mouth?
He took another breath and was engulfed in sleep, immobilizing as methane ice—and woke from it two hours later, manic with energy, incredibly anxious to leave (he had to get home to change; you couldn’t wear a get-up like this to the office two days in a row), which was all right with her, she was explaining while he pulled on his gloves, put on his mask, pulled the cloak around his shoulders, because she wanted to get ready before—
But he was at the door, wishing her Good Luck on her trip. And she was still in bed, laughing her smooth laugh, and wishing him Good Luck on his.
Bron hurried through the quiet, unlicensed streets.
On the torn, rubber floor-mat of the vandalized booster booth (why had he stopped to look inside it again? He still wasn’t sure) lay pieces of paper. Already knowing what was on their undersides (the print just showed through), he picked one up, let the curtain fall and stuffed the flyer into one of his secret pockets (where, through his glove, he felt the package he’d been carrying around for Alfred all evening), entered the green-lit, scrawled-over tile, and stepped out under green (for licensed) street coordinates, onto pink, licensed pavement.
Between the high roofs the sensory shield, dark blue, blushed here and there with silver. He tried to remember what they had said on parting and found it oddly fuzzy—which was when he realized how clearly he remembered everything else, starting from the performance and ending with that moment when, entwined, they had slept.
The Spike was going. Today. So it was stupid to mull on it.
But each incident of the night, with its disappointment still intact, as well as its security, its relaxation, its almost unbearable pleasure, came back with such clarity something caught in his throat at each image. (Only smells usually returned memories to him that vividly.) Three times, on his way to the all-night Transport Station in the Plaza of Light, he stopped still on the street. And four times, as he sat, staring out of the window at Tethys’ galaxy of predawn stars, drop—
ping behind into the blue (like some flight to Neriad, and then on ...) he came near tears.
“... to bother you at this hour, but I just wanted to get you your stuff as soon as possible, while it was still on my mind, you know? In case you ... well, you’ve got it now.” Up the inch-wide door-crack ran a flesh colored ribbon. At the top of it was tousled hair and a single, green, red-rimmed eye. At the bottom, after various mottlings, modelings, and creases, were thick veins and dirty toenails. “Okay.” The door clicked closed.
Bron turned in the quiet hallway, walked across to his own room, pulling off his gloves—for a moment he looked at his own, colorful, well-cared-for fingers—took off his mask, and shouldered inside.
4. La Geste D’helstrom
/ think that a philosophical gnat might claim that the gnat society is a great society, or at least a good society, since it is the most egalitarian, free, and democratic society imaginable,
—Karl R. Popper, Objective Knowledge
The melancholy left after three more hour’s sleep.
The energy (and vividness) remained all the way to work, till, by three o’clock (he’d skipped lunch), when he was going over the Day Star’s preprogram specifications yet again, it hit him: P would have to intersect less than half of Not-P (as well as pieces of Q, R, and S, while cleaving T); also it must surround more than half of it; and be tangent to it at not less than seven (which had been self-evident) and not more than forty-four (which had been the bitch!) points. That was getting somewhere.
Immensely pleased, he marched to Audri’s office with his find.
“Great,” Audri said, looking up from her desk. “For a reward you get a two-week vacation.”
Bron said, “Mmmm?”
Audri leaned back and put her hands behind her head. “I said you get two weeks off, starting tomorrow.”
“I don’t under—” Suddenly he remembered some vague thing she’d said yesterday about “threatening”: “Hey, look, now! That girl got another job. I mean, I saw her, later, and she’s all right!”
Audri frowned. “What girl are you—Oh, for crying out loud, Bron! Don’t give me any of your hard-time crap.” Her hands came down on the desk. “I can’t take it today. People are being laid off all over the whole hegemony. If you’d been at lunch, you’d’ve heard!”
“Well, I didn’t want lunch,” he protested, automatically. “I wanted to work. That’s how I got the—”
She stopped him with lightly closed lids. “Look.” They opened. “You can either take a two-week vacation with eight percent reduction in credit for the duration—”
“Eight percent!”
“—or quit. Half a dozen people have. I’ve got to take ten days off myself. And, I’ve got to think of something to do with the kids.”
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