Although Bron liked Audri, he didn’t like her three children. When, from time to time, they came to the office, he found them precocious, presumptuous, and obdurate. She lived with them in a gay, women’s co-op (not a commune—room, food, and work arrangements were friendly but formal) in an unpretentious spiral tower a unit from Bron’s own squat, blocky building. With none of the laminated ostentation of Philip’s mul-tisexed, on-the-Ring dwelling, nor the insistently tatty quaintness of a u-1 sector domicile, it was the most comfortable home he had visited on Tethys. All three visits, in fact had left him strangely relaxed and, strangely, depressed—but it had taken him three visits to realize they were two reactions.
Bron swallowed (and forgot) his next protest.
“We don’t have to get hysterical yet, I suppose,” Audri said. “It’s only eight percent—this time. And just for two weeks. They want to make everything look like its working at full capacity, only that people just all happen to be off doing something else.”
“What sort of logic—or metalogic—is that?”
“I have three degrees in this subject and am in the midst of getting another one—which is three more than you—and / don’t have the foggiest idea.” Audri leaned her palms on the desk edge. “Look. Just get out of here. If you come up with any more on Day Star this afternoon, shove it under Phil’s or my door. But don’t bother us. Okay? And don’t come in tomorrow.”
Wonderingly, he said (he hadn’t meant it to, but it sounded a little belligerent): “Okay ...” and returned to his office.
He thought many confused thoughts, and didn’t even bother to open the Day Star folder again.
The energy was gone by the time he returned to Serpent’s House. Sitting in the commons, alone in a conversation niche, he reread the flyer picked up that morning from the booster-booth’s floor:
“THESE THINGS ARE HAPPENING IN YOUR CITY!!!”
But, as he absorbed each political atrocity, he kept thinking of other things not happening in the city: like the performances of the little micro-theater troupe; and its director, who was no longer a resident. In a way he would not have dared define, it made the atrocities worse.
“You want to continue from where we left off?” Sam put the case up on the table and sat. “Lawrence said to set up the pieces as best we remembered, and he’d come down in ten minutes and make corrections.” Sam thumbed back brass claws, opened out the board.
Bron said: “Sam, how do you reconcile working for the government with the appalling political situation on Triton?”
Sam raised an eyebrow.
Between them micro-waves lapped, micro-breezes blew, micro-trees bent, and micro-torrents plashed and whispered down micro-rocks.
“I mean, there you are in the—what is it? Liaison Department? Political commitment isn’t a perimeter, Sam; it’s a parameter. Don’t you ever wonder? Don’t you ever doubt?”
“What great metaphysical crisis have you just been through that’s suddenly gotten all your angst up?”
“We’re not talking about me. I asked you a question.” So as not to face the answer, Bron opened the case’s side drawer, removed the transparent plates of the astral cube and began to assemble them on their brass stilts. When he did glance up, Sam was regarding him seriously, the cards in his dark fingers halted in midshuffle. A corner of the White Novice showed, curved against Sam’s darkly pinkish palm.
“Yes.” The White Novice fell. “I doubt.” Fifty cards fell, riffling, after it. “Frequently.” For a moment, a little laughter shook, silent, behind Sam’s face; Sam’s eyes went back to the cards. He parted the pack, shuffled again.
“Come on. What do you doubt?”
“I doubt if someone like you could really be asking me a question like that for purely autonomous reasons.”
Bron pulled out the other side drawer of velvet-cradled ships, warriors, horsemen, herdsmen, and hunters. “There are no autonomous reasons. Whatever makes the question come up in my mind, the fact that it is in my mind is what makes it my question. It still stands.” He picked up the screen showing the horned head of Aolyon (cheeks puffed with hurricane winds) and set it, on its tiny base, upon the waters—which immediately darkened about it; green troughs and frothing crowns rolled about the little stretch of sea.
Sam put down the pack, reached into the control drawer and turned a survey knob. From the side-speaker came a crack and crackle over rushing wind, followed by a mumbling as of crumbled boulders. “That’s quite a storm ... were there any sea-monsters in there? I don’t remember—”
“What do you doubt?” Bron picked up his own scarlet Beast and set it on the rocky ledge, where it lowered over at the narrow trail winding the chasm below.
“All right.” Sam sat back to watch Bron set out tiny figures. “One thing I’ve been worrying about since the last evening we all played this game—”
“—the night of the gravity cut.” Bron thought: The night of the day I met her. He picked up green pieces and set them by river, rock, and road.
“At the Department, we knew something was going to happen that night. The cut wasn’t a surprise. I guess it was pretty clear to the rest of you, too, I wasn’t surprised ... But they told us only a few people would go out to see.”
Bron glanced up: Sam was turning a transparent die between dark forefinger and thumb.
“They had it all figured—statistics, trends, tendencies, and a really bizarre predictive module called the ‘hysteria index’ all said that practically no one would want to go out to see the sky ... As far as they can tell, eighty-six percent of Tethys’ population was outside within a minute and ten seconds, one way or the other, of the cut.”
“What’s to doubt there?”
“They were wrong.” Sam got an odd expression. “I don’t suppose I have any illusions about our government’s being a particularly moral institution. Though it’s more moral than a good many others have been in the past. Nor do I think for a moment that any of the accusations in that piece of trash you were just reading—” He nodded toward the leaflet, which had fallen to the orange rug; somehow the table leg had worked onto (or the paper under) it at the corner—“are particularly exaggerated. The worst you can say is that they’re out of context. The best you can say is that they are emblems of the political context that gives them what meaning they have. But up until now—and this probably strikes you as quite naive—it never occurred to me that the government could be wrong,.. about its facts and figures, its estimates and its predictions. Up until now, when a memo came down that said people, places, incidents would converge at set times and in given ways, they did. The last memo said less than two percent of the population would go out. They’d be too scared. Over eighty percent went out. That’s more than a ninety-five percent error. You may say it wasn’t an error about anything important. But when you’re on the edge of a war, a ninety-five percent error about anything just doesn’t bolster confidence in your side. So I’ve been doubting.”
“Sam, Earth has committed major atrocities on Luna, and allied herself with Mars for the all-out economic domination of Jupiter’s and Saturn’s moons, big and little alike. Neriad has already said she’ll go with us; and Triton stands on the edge of the whole business, waiting to plunge into one of the most sense—
less and destructive conflicts in human history—we’ve been splattered with gore and filth in a hundred ways already: the night of the gravity cut may have been the most flamboyant splash—I doubt if any one of us, even you, can assess the damage compared to—”
“Well,” Sam said, one sparse eyebrow lowered, one corner of his full mouth raised, “it’s not as if anyone were using soldiers,” and let his expression break into a mocking, voiceless laugh.
“Some of your best friends are probably Jewish too,” Bron said. The cliche about soldiers had been devalued rather like (an eccentric elderly woman Bron used to visit in the u-1 had once explained to him) “law and order” had been devalued two centuries before. “So this one is all
buttons and spies and sobotage, and only civilians get killed—those that aren’t thrown out of a job by the economic wangling, or don’t fall off the roof during a gravity cut—because that’s all there are.”
“You know—” Sam came forward again, to set scarlet’s caravan, one piece after the other, on the jungle trail—“one of the reasons I moved into this place was so I wouldn’t have to put up with six hours a day of political interrogation.”
Bron fished out the last cargo ship from the drawer and positioned it at the edge of the storm—immediately it began to doff and roll. “Yeah? The government told you that you had a ninety nine point nine nine nine percent chance of only finding nonpolitical types in this type co-op? Well, maybe I’m just that odd and inexplicable point oh oh oh oh oh one percent they call an individual—”
“No. You’re a type like the rest of us.”
“—or maybe the government’s just—” Bron turned up his hands and shrugged—“wrong again ... ?” He meant it be annoying.
But Sam was apparently finished with being annoyed. He laughed out loud. “Maybe—” and began to place the screens.
“Hello, Alfred.” Lawrence’s voice came loudly and cheerfully from the middle of the room.
Bron and Sam looked up.
Across the commons, Alfred hurried toward the balcony stairs.
“I said, ‘Hello, Alfred,’” Lawrence (who had apparently been on his way to join the game) repeated. One wrinkled fist rested on his parchment-pale hip.
Alfred, at the steps’ foot, a hand on the banister, twisted around. On his black suspender straps large, red letters sagged, behind and before. “Urn ...” he said. “Oh ... Ummm ...” He half-nodded, then darted up, ‘Q’ scarlet between his shoulder blades.
Lawrence came over. “The horrible thing is, he’s improving. I’ve been going through this every day now for—what is it? Four months? If you speak to him twice, now, loudly and distinctly, he’ll actually look at you. Pauses even. Sometimes even grunts a little. And the general behavior syndrome is no longer that of complete inarticulate terror. The first thirty times, by count, he just pointed his nose straight ahead and ran faster. At this rate, I estimate, he may reach the state of acceptable human animal—not outstanding, mind you: just acceptable—in, oh, perhaps two hundred and fifty years.” Lawrence came around the table, regarding the board. “Even with regeneration treatments, he won’t last that long. Mmm ... I see there’s a war on.”
Bron sat back. “Why don’t you just lay off him ... leave him alone.”
Lawrence grunted and sat next to Sam, who moved over for him. “Sam and I are the best friends either of you two ambient social disaster areas ever had. By the way, when are you going to break down and fuck me?”
“Do you proposition Alfred in the same, warmhearted, friendly manner, from time to time?”
“Heaven forbid!” Lawrence turned a switch; the grid flickered over the board. “That’s at least three hundred years off. / may not last that long!” which cracked Sam up, though Bron didn’t think it was so funny. Lawrence pulled at the wrinkled folds under his chin, then reached out and adjusted two Queens. “I think those were there, actually. Otherwise, the two of you seem to have done pretty well. All right, now—Get away from me! Get away—!” That was to Sam, who was still laughing. “You’re both playing against me now—don’t think by sidling up like that you’ll get any advantages.” Bron found himself remembering the Spike’s comment on political homosexuals ... Sam changed his seat.
Lawrence picked up the pack and dealt. “With all the girls Alfred is constantly sneaking into his room—and why he feels he has to sneak, / shall never know—he should give up that ridiculous computer course his social worker’s had him training at for the last two months—I mean, he doesn’t like it and won’t finish it—and go to Earth, or someplace where it’s legal, and become a prostitute.” Lawrence nodded knowingly toward Bron. “Doing it on an accepted basis for a while might be exactly what he needs, don’t you think?”
It was the first Bron had heard of the computer course, which was annoying. On the other hand, there were some things about Alfred Lawrence didn’t know (if Lawrence thought Alfred could possibly go professional), which pleased him. Annoyance conflicting with pleasure produced a noncommittal grunt.
“You know,” Sam said, fanning the cards, “you are a patronizing bastard, Lawrence.”
Which increased Bron’s pleasure.
“I guess Mars is the only place where it is legal on the scale he’d need,” Lawrence went on, oblivious. “And of course he can’t go to Mars or Earth or anywhere like that, because of the war.”
Bron looked at their joint hand, reached over and reversed two of the cards.
Sam said: “Lawrence, I have to make an official trip to Earth; I’m leaving tomorrow. Do you want to come along? It’s on government credit: you’d have to share my cabin.”
“Lord!” Lawrence protested. “You mean be shut up in the same five-by-five with you while we fell into the sun, with the hope that a very small ocean on a very small world just happened to be in the way? No, thank you! I’d be crawling the walls!”
Sam shrugged and glanced at Bron. “You want to come?”
“Not with you.” Bron was thinking about work, actually—when, with a sting, he remembered that, for the next two weeks, he didn’t have any work. A trip away from this whole, mean, depressing moon? What better way to wipe her out of mind. “You could always take Alfred.” He wished Sam would ask again.
“Ha!” Sam said, without humor. “Let Lawrence work on him for another two hundred and fifty years. No ... the experience would be good for the kid. But I’ve got an entourage quota this trip—and there is the rest of the party coming along to consider. I need somebody fairly presentable, who can be at least vaguely sociable; and can also entertain themselves if they have to. You two, yes. Alfred, I’m afraid—” Sam shook his head.
“Why don’t you go, Bron?” Lawrence asked.
“Why don’t you?” Bron asked back, trying to sound sociable; it had a vaguely sullen ring.
“Me? Cooped up together with that body?” Lawrence studied the board. “It’s bad enough just trying to keep my self-control watching it loll around here in the commons. No; masochism no longer interests me, I’m afraid.”
“Well, it’s not—” (Sam had separated three cards out, apparently having decided on the first meld)—“as if I were born with it.”
“No, you go with him, Bron,” Lawrence said. “I’m just too old for hopping around the Solar System. And in time of plague to boot.”
“If I go, who’ll play your silly game?”
“Lawrence can teach Alfred,” Sam said.
“Perish the thought ... there’s as much chance of my teaching Alfred vlet as there is of Sam’s taking him to Earth. I think our objections are about the same.”
“We’ll be leaving tomorrow morning,” Sam said. “We’ll be back in twelve days. You’ll still have a couple of days back here to do nothing in, before you have to get back to work at—”
“How did you—?”
“Hey!” Lawrence said. “You don’t have to knock the board onto the floor!” He reset two pieces that Bron, starting, had overturned.
Sam, still looking at the cards, had that mocking smile, “Sometimes the government’s right.” His glance flicked up. “You coming?”
“Oh, all right.” Bron reached over and pulled out the four-car4 meld in the high Flames Sam had overlooked; which, for the first half hour of play, at any rate, gave them a decided advantage—before Lawrence, by adroit manipulation of all the gods and astral powers, regained his customary edge.
It was as if someone suddenly turned off the sensory shield.
To the left, jagged methane faces made scenery wild as that of some thousand ice-operas.
To the right the gritty rubble, which made ninety-six percent of Triton one of the dullest landscapes in the Solar System, stretched to the horizon.
They sped between, inside the clear conveyer tunnel. London Point dragged away behind. Sharp stars pierced the black.
Settled in his seat, with the two curved canopies of clear plastic over them (the stationary one of the car, and the tunnel above rushing backward at one hundred seventy-five kilometers an hour), Bron turned to the left (Sam was also sitting there), thought about ice-farmers, and asked: “I still wonder why you decided to take me.”
“To get you off my back,” Sam said affably. “Maybe it’ll lead you to some political argument that seriously challenges my own position. Right now, though, yours is so immature there’s nothing I can say to you, except make polite noises—however much those noises might sound to you like ideas. This way you’ll have a chance to see just the tiniest fraction of the government close up and check out what it’s doing. The government usually is right. In my experience that ‘usually’ is ninety-nine percent with lots more nines after the decimal point. I don’t know: maybe seeing a bit of the real thing will waylay your fears and shut you up. Or it may send you off screaming. Scream or silence, either’ll be more informed. Personally, with you, I’ll find either a relief.”
“But you have your educated opinion which direction I’m likely to go, don’t you?”
“That’s your fmeducated guess.”
Bron watched ice-crag pull away from ice-crag, kilometers beyond Sam’s shoulder. “And the government really doesn’t mind if you take me along? Suppose I find out some confidential top-secret information?”
“The category doesn’t even exist any more,” Sam said. “Confidential is the most restricted you can get; and you can see that in any ego-booster booth.”
Bron frowned. “People have been smashing the booths,” he said, pensively. “Did the government tell you that?”
“Probably would have if I’d asked.”
Broken glass; torn rubber; his own face distorted in the bent chrome slip: the image returned, intense enough to startle: “Sam, really—why does the government want someone like me along on a trip like this?”
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