“They don’t want you. I want you. They just don’t mind my taking you along.”
“But—”
“Suppose you do find out something—though what that could be I don’t even know. What could you do with it? Run shrieking through the streets of Tethys, rending your flesh and rubbing ies in the wounds? I’m sure there’s a sect that’s into that already. We simply live in what the sociologists call a politically low-volatile society. And as I think I said: the political volatility of people who live in single-sex, nonspecified sexual-preference co-ops tends to be particularly low.”
“In other words, given my particular category, my general psychological type, I’ve been declared safe.”
“If you want to look at it that way. You might, however, prefer to express it a little more flatteringly to yourself: We trust most of our citizens in this day and age not to do anything too stupid.”
“Both sets of words still model the same situation,” Bron said. “Metalogics, remember? Hey, you know, before I left Mars and came to Triton to be a respectable metalogician for a giant computer hegemony, I was a male hustler in the bordellos of Bellona’s Goebels. But then I got these papers, see ... What does your government, out here where both prostitution and marriage are illegal, think about thatV
Sam pushed his soft-soled, knee-high boots out into the space between the empty seats. “Before / came to Triton, I was a rather unhappy, sallow-faced, blonde, blue-eyed (and terribly myopic) waitress at Lux on Ia-petus, with a penchant for other sallow, blonde, blue-eyed waitresses, who, as far as the young and immature me could make out then, were all just gaga over the six-foot-plus Wallunda and Katanga emigrants who had absolutely infested the neighborhood; I had this very high, very useless IQ and was working in a very uninspiring grease-trough. But then I got this operation, see—?”
Bron tried not to look shocked.
Sam raised an eyebrow, gave a small nod.
“Did you find it a satisfactory transition?” Sex changes were common enough, but since (as Bron remembered some public channeler explaining) some of the “success” of the operation might be vitiated by admission, one did not hear about specific ones frequently.
Sam gave a dark, thick-lipped leer. “Very. Of course, I was much younger then. And one’s tastes shift, if not exactly change. Still, I visit the old neighborhood ...” (Bron thought: Family man, high-powered, big, black, and handsome Sam ... ?) “The point is: the government,” Sam went on, in a perfectly reasonable tone (in which Bron now found himself listening for the lighter overtones in that security-provoking bass), “is simply not interested in my rather common sexual history or your rather peculiar one. And you had told me about your whoring days. I admit, I was surprised the first time. But shock value diminishes with repetition.”
“You hadn’t told me,’9 Bron said, sullenly.
Sam raised the other eyebrow. “Well ... you never asked.”
Bron suddenly didn’t feel like talking any more, unsure why. But Sam, apparently comfortable with Bron’s moody silences, settled back in his (her? No, “his.” That’s what the public channels suggested at any rate) seat and looked out the window.
They sped through the dim, glittering landscape of green ice, gray rock, and stars.
Perhaps a kilo away, Bron saw something he thought was the Space Port that Sam said wasn’t. A minute later Sam pointed out at something he said was.
“Where?” Bron couldn’t see.
“Over there. You can just catch a glimpse of the edge, right between those two whatyamacallits.”
“I still can’t tell where you’re—” at which point they plunged into covered tunnel; lights came on in the car. The engine whine intruded on Bron’s awareness by lowering pitch. They slowed. They stopped. Then it was green, pastel corridors and opulently-appointed waiting rooms that, while you had a drink and were introduced to people—the rest of Sam’s entourage—trundled quietly along invisible tracks, were hauled up unseen lifts—people laughed and glanced down at the geometrically patterned carpet when, once, the floor shook—and you were guided to the proper door by the little colored lights and the people in the party who were obviously old hands at this sort of thing. (There was no one resembling a steward around; but Bron wasn’t sure if that was “standard tourist” or just “government.”) He was enthusiastically telling someone who appeared to be enthusiastically listening about his own emigration trip to the Outer Satellites twelve years back, which “... let me tell you, was a different matter entirely. I mean, the whole three thousand of us were drugged to the gills through the whole thing: and what fa in this drink, anyway—” when he realized, in the midst of laughing, that six months ... six weeks from now, he probably would never think of any of these affable George’s and Angela’s and Aroun’s and Enid’s and Hotai’s again. I mean, he thought, it’s a political mission: nobody’s even mentioned politics! I haven’t even asked Sam what the mission fa! Is that, he wondered as they walked along another corridor (some of the group were riding smoothly on the moving strip down the corridor’s side; others ambled beside it, chatting and laughing) what Sam meant by politically low-volatile?
In one of the larger, more opulent, mobile rooms, with luxurious reclining chairs on its several, carpeted levels, there were more drinks, more music, more conversation ...
“This is all marvelous, Sam!” someone called out. “But when do we get on the ship?”
Someone else lifted their ankle to check a complex chronometer strapped there: “I believe we’ve been on it for the last two minutes and forty seconds,” which drew a group Ooooo! and more laughter.
“Take off in seventeen minutes.” Sam came down the scroll-railed steps. “This is my cabin. Just take any couch you want.”
Over the next ten minutes Bron learned that the blonde, blue-eyed woman on the couch next to Bron’s was part of Sam’s family commune, and that the tan, plump girl, going around saying, “Drugs? Drugs, everyone?” and clapping her hand to the side of the neck of anyone who smiled and nodded, was their daughter.
“You mean you really can do it without drugs?” someone asked.
“Well, Sam means for us to watch the take-off,” the blonde woman said, lying back on her couch and craning around to see the speaker. “So I’d suggest you take them—it can be a little unsettling, otherwise.”
“That’s exactly why I asked,” the other speaker said.
When the plump girl got to Bron’s couch, on an impulse he smiled and shook his head. “No, thank you ...” But her hand clapped him anyway; then she jerked it away and looked distressed:
“Oh, I’m dreadfully sorry—You said ‘No’—!”
“Urn ... that’s all right,” Bron mumbled.
“Well, maybe you didn’t get very much—” and she darted off to the next couch.
A buzzer sawed through the cabin. A lot of the more opulent things—lighting fixtures, wall sculptures, shelves, ornamental tables—folded up or down or side—
ways into walls, floor, and ceiling. Several of the couches swung around so that they were all facing the same way in the now rather institutional-looking space. The wall before them hummed apart. What had been a corridor before was now a wall-sized window on star-speckled night, cut with a few girders, the tops of a few buildings visible at its bottom.
From the ceiling a screen folded down, its face a-flash with myriad numbers, grids, and graphs.
There has never been a spaceship accident more than three seconds past take-off less than 100 percent fatal, Bron recalled—which probably meant he had not gotten much of the take-off drugs.
“I always find these trips so exciting—” someone said—“no matter where or how many times I go. I have no idea why ...”
Blue numbers (which were becoming more and more prevalent across the screen) he knew were the final navigation check figures. Red numbers (and a whole bunch went from blue to red) meant those figures had been approved and fed into the take-off computer.
“There’s no
turning back now,” someone said solemnly.
“I hope the swimming pool cover is on tight,” someone else said (and everyone chuckled). “I’d hate to have to take a swim too early.”
Bron settled against the padding. Something began to roar—rather far away—on his right; then something else—much closer—on his left. There were only two blue numbers now, amidst a full field of red: and they were flickering oddly, which made him suspect they were broken.
Someone said: “I don’t think those blue numbers are right ...”
Someone else said: “Sam, I told you, you should have gotten a government cabin. The government’s never wrong.”
People chuckled again.
Then the building tops and the girders were gone. And the stars were moving.
The cabin lurched.
“Whoopsy-daisy!” someone called.
People laughed again.
Down had suddenly and disconcertingly established itself in some direction near his feet. Bron felt himself slip on the pad. The stars jerked to the side on the panoramic window; a moment later they were wiped away by landscape, moving too fast for Bron to tell if they were ten meters or ten—therel A web of lights and more lights swept by: Tethys itself. Every one Oooooed again.
They were at least ten kilometers up.
Stars now. Now landscape ... but moving more slowly—at least forty. When the pitted horizon passed again, Bron could make out a distant curve. Then the cabin rocked grandly backward ... or rather, “down” reestablished itself under the floor.
The screen, its two, broken, blue numbers still flickering (all the others were out now), folded into the ceiling.
Was it the drug—or that he hadn’t gotten enough of one of the several drugs, or too much of another? ... he stayed on his couch for quite a while, gazing at the circling stars. Ancient Earth men had tried to pick out pictures on those blue-white points. He tried to superimpose her face; but neither the stars, nor his memory, stayed still enough.
When he finally got up, people were already walking around. On the upper level, at the top of the stairs, the pool-cover had retracted. A few people were already paddling about. Light fixtures, bar, sculptures, and tables were once more out; and a trap had opened up with steps down into the cabin’s free-fall section: a drum as big as this one just “below” it, with “real” (that is, only when accelerating) gravity (“Guests are requested not to take liquids from one level to the other,” said the sign on the stand beside the ladder, in whose white plastic rings already stood four or five unfinished drinks.) Completing his circuit of the pool, Bron walked back down the carpeted steps, with a drink now, as three people came up, laughing hysterically about something inane.
His acceleration couch turned out to contain endless interlocked and interleaved cabinets, compartments, and crannies, which a bony, garrulous redhead, almost short enough to be a midget, took great delight in demonstrating to him. It was a bed, of course; just pull that handle there and a soundproof privacy-bubble—well, almost soundproof—will swing over the whole thing. You can have it opaque or clear with that switch there. And that’s a timer, preadjusted to help you rearrange your sleeping schedule over the ninety-hour trip so that you won’t suffer too hugely from space-lag—though nobody ever follows it on a junket like this, anyway. There’s your reader, though the selections in the file drawer—mark my word—will be monumentally uninspiring. I woulnd’t even look through it, unless you just want a good snicker. (Though I once found one just jammed with twentieth-century science fiction—ever read any? Fascinating stuff!) Swing that half of the sleeping-pad up and you’ll find a place for ablutions; that half, for defecation. And under there—just a second; there you go!—is your luggage.
Which Bron had packed, at Sam’s suggestion, in a small, plastic bag. Sam had said don’t take much; they’d all be pretty informal. But, wandering around the cabin, catching an occasional glimpse into the other luggage compartments when one or another guest was hunting around for some personal effect, he saw that at least three people had brought huge numbers of sacks, packages, bags, practically overflowing their couches. It made him feel slightly apprehensive at first. But as the hours went on, no one seemed about to dress.
He spent a lot of time “down” in the dimly-lit free-fall chamber, looking through the window there at the stars.
“Hey,” Sam called through the trap to him, sometime during the second day out. “Come up here a minute. You have to see this.”
Bron unsnapped the lounge net he’d been floating in, pushed off toward the ladder, pulled up, emerged into the weighted chamber—an odd experience, having your head, then your shoulders, then your arms and chest go all heavy (like getting out of the swimming pool, only very different; he’d compared them a couple of times on this trip, just see)—and came up by the pool.
“Come on, take a look at this.” Sam doffed a drink in one hand, guiding Bron’s shoulder with the other. “Come on.”
By the poolside, at one of the wall tables, sat the bony, little redhead; across from him sat an equally diminutive oriental woman with irregularly-clipped, black hair. Between them was a vlet board. It was only a quarter the size of Lawrence’s. (A small traveling version?) The landscape was simply a laminated 3-D photograph, not Lawrence’s animated holographic surface. The pieces were not carefully carved and painted but merely raised symbols on red and green plastic markers. The astral cube did not have its own stand. But Bron could see, in the deployment of the gods, the detritus of a vicious astral battle that green (the redhead’s side) had evidently won.
Five melds were already down.
The woman threw the dice and, in a rather surprising way (a rather clever one too, Bron thought as soon as the move was completed), managed to bring her Guards in from the right, just as green’s caravan crossed the forge, to pull it out of the influence of the scarlet Magician, substantially multiplied by three reflecting screens.
The redhead tossed the dice, discarded a low Flame, dispersed the screens to the corners of the board in one move (which left Bron, among the game’s half-dozen spectators, frowning) and turned to rearrange a matrix on the astral board. That’s clever! Bron thought. The woman would have to answer it, pulling some of her powers from the Real World, which would leave some of her strongest pieces unprotected.
The edge of the playing board, the table, and the woman’s cheek flickered with reflections off the pool.
Sam nudged Bron and grinned. “I was thinking we might challenge them to a game of doubles, you and me. But I guess they’re a little out of our league.”
The woman won the battle in three moves.
Some time later they did play a game of doubles—and were wiped off the board in twenty minutes. While
Sam was saying, “Well, we may not have won, but I bet we’ve learned something! Lawrence better watch out when we get back, hey Bron?”, Bron, smiling, nodding {her memory deviling him in every flicker on the mosaic ceiling above), retired down into the free-fall chamber, determined never to play that stupid game again, with anyone, on any world, or in between, in or out of any league!
He was going hundreds of millions of kilometers to forget her: he zipped himself into the lounge net and rolled himself up in the idea. The stars drifted by the darkened chamber.
“Do you want to try some of this?”
“Oh, no, I can never eat on these trips ... I have no idea why ...”
“You know I never mind synthetic food as long as they aren’t trying to make it taste like something else—algae or seaweed or something.”
“I think the reason the food is so terrible on these flights is because they expect you to drink yourself to death.”
“Did you ever think of Sam as a drinking man before? Lord, is he putting it away!”
“Well, this is supposed to be a political mission. He’s probably under a great deal of pressure.”
“What are we supposed to do after we get there?”
“Oh, don’t worry. The
government takes care of its own—are we decelerating?”
“I think so.”
“Isn’t some light or something supposed to go on down here so that we know to get back upstairs when that happens? I’m surprised this whole cabin just doesn’t fall apart. Nothing seems to be working right!”
“Well, there is a war on.”
Over the ninety hours, Bron was on the edge of, or took part in, or overhead ninety-nine such conversations. He was in the free-fall chamber when the lights did come on. “I think that means we better go upstairs.” Around him, people were unzipping their lounge nets. “We make Earthfall in about an hour.”
“Why didn’t they come on when we were doing those turns out by the Belt?” someone asked.
“I think they only come on when we’re going to accelerate or decelerate over a certain amount.”
“Oh.”
The wall rolled closed across the window for landing (on the screen, descended once more, the two blue numbers still flickered), customary, everyone said, with atmospheric touch-downs.
He was swung from side to side on his couch, bumping and thumping in a way that would really have been unsettling if he hadn’t taken his full compliment of drugs. But world landings were notoriously rough.
There was some not very serious joking about whether or not they were still in the air; or in the ship for that matter, as the trundling began.
Then the window-wall rolled back: no glass behind it now—And some of the company were visibly more relaxed, laughing and talking louder and louder: some, unaccountably, were more subdued (which included Sam); they wandered out into another, green, pastel corridor. (Bron was wondering about the Taj Mahal—but then, this was a political mission.)
“Do we get any scenery on this trip?” someone asked.
“I doubt it. The government doesn’t believe in scenery for moonies.”
“Ah! But which government?”
Over the next few days, though they went to sumptuous restaurants, took long trips in mechanical conveyances through endless, dark tunnels, even went to several symphonic concerts, and spent one afternoon at a museum in which they were apparently the only visitors (the collection was a private one; they had come up from some deep level in an escalator; at night they returned down to their separate, sumptuous rooms by different escalators), Bron had the feeling that they had not really left the Earth space-port complex. They had seen no sky. And, outside concert audiences (their party always had a private box), or other diners (their
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