Samuel R, Delany tables were always grouped alone), no people—although, as the little redhead took evident delight in explaining, if you took the time they had spent on mechanical transportation and averaged it out at even a hundred fifty K’s an hour, they could be as much as two thousand kilometers from their point of arrival—quite a distance on a moon, but not so long considering they were on Earth.
It was a sumptuously pleasant and totally edgeless time—indeed, its only edges were provided by those moments when he could reflect on how edgeless it was.
One morning (at least he thought it was morning), wondering if he could hunt up anyone else who had also overslept for a late breakfast, Bron came out of his room and was crossing between a lot of lush vegetation under a high, mirrored ceiling, when he saw Sam hurrying toward him, looking worried.
And two strangers in red and black uniforms were coming toward him from where they’d apparently been waiting by a thick-trunked tree. The woman grabbed Bron’s shoulder. The man said: “You’re a moonie, aren’t you? Come on!”
And twenty feet away, Sam froze, with a perfectly shocked expression.
5. Idylls In Outer Mongolia
We may note that, in these experiments, the sign “=“ may stand for the words “is confused with.”
—G. Spencer Brown, The Laws of Form
He started to say: “I am a moonie. But I doubt if I’m the moonie you’re—” But they led him, roughly, off through the imitation jungle.
Rusted metal showed through the door’s gray paint: the amazing lock contraption actually had a hole for a key; bright red letters spelled out exit.
They pushed through into a cement stairwell. He protested once and got a shove for it; they hurried him up. The walls and steps and banisters were grimed to an extent for which neither youth on Mars nor maturity on Triton had prepared him. More apprehensive each flight, he kept thinking: Earth is an old world ... an old, old world.
They pulled him, breathless with the climb, out on a narrow sidewalk as a good number of people hurried past (who, in the less than fifteen seconds he got to see them, must, he decided, have only three basic clothing styles the lot); only one glanced.
Above irregular building tops (he had never seen irregular building tops before), the air was a grainy gray-pink, like a sensory shield gone grubby (was that sky? With atmosphere in it ...?). A warm, foul odor drifted in the street (equally astonishing). As they pushed him to the vehicle, a surprising breeze (it was the first breeze he’d ever felt not produced by blower convections from some ventilator grate within meters)
carried with it a dozen, clashing, and unpleasant smells.
“In here!”
They opened the vehicle door and shoved him down into a seat; “sky”—colored ticking pushed from one open seam. The two uniformed strangers (some kind of e-girls) stalked around the other side, leaving him momentarily alone with clambering thoughts (I could run I could run now ...!), but the unfamiliarity of everything (and the conviction that there was some mistake) paralyzed him: then they were inside too; the doors slammed: the vehicle dropped straight down, and was caught up by, and bounced into, a subterranean stream of traffic with the jerkiest acceleration and, save for the Earth-landing, the strongest, he’d ever felt.
Ten minutes later he was yanked (“All right! I’m not trying to resist! I’m coming. I’m—”) and yanked again from the car and hauled past towering buildings and finally marched into one that might have been eighty, a hundred eighty, or eight hundred years old (the oldest extant structure in Bellona was a hundred and ten years old; in Tethys, no more than seventy-five). He had not even noticed this time if there were sky outside or not.
A lift with a grimy brass gate took them up three floors (which seemed silly, as they had just walked up at least eight in the hotel): he was led across a hallway and shoved (one of his sandals slipped and he went down on one bare knee; he was wearing only shorts and a light V-shirt) into a cement-floored room with paint-peeled plaster walls. The door shut behind him; as he stood up, rubbing his knee (yes, the one he’d sprained last year), there were loud clicks and clashes as bars and locks and catches were thrown. The window was too high to see out, even if you (which he didn’t because his knee hurt) jumped. The metal door was dull-gray, with scuffs and scratches at ... kicking level! The room was maybe ten feet by eight.
There was no furniture.
He stayed in it almost five hours.
Getting hungrier, getting thirstier, finally he had to go to the bathroom. Beside the door, set in the corner of the cement floor, was a green, metal drain. He urinated in it and wondered where he was supposed to do anything else.
He was sitting in the corner across from it, when the door, clattering its sunken locks, pushed open. Two red and black uniformed guards stepped in, yanked him to his feet, and held him flat against the wall, while a portly, bald man in the least comfortable-looking of the three basic styles came in and said: “All right. What do you know about these people?”
Bron really thought he meant the guards.
“The moonie delegation!”
“... nothing—?” Bron said, wonderingly.
“Tell us, or we’ll fish it out of you—and the places in your brain we fish it out from won’t ever be much good for anything again: because of the scar tissue—that’s assuming you ever get a chance to use it again, where we’ll be sending you for the rest of your life when we’re finished.”
Bron was suddenly angry and terrified. “What ... what do you want to know?”
“Everything you know. Start at the beginning.”
“I ... I just know it’s a political mission of ... of some sort. I really don’t know anything else about it. Sam is ... Sam just asked me to come along as part of the ... the entourage.”
“It’s funny,” one of the guards said to nobody in particular. “The moonies always sit in the corner soon as you leave ’em alone. Marsies and Earthmen always sit at the center of the wall. I’ve always wondered why.”
The portly man looked askance, muttered, “Shit ...” and suddenly one of the guards punched Bron, hard, in the side, so that he crumpled down the wall, gasping and blinking—as they left.
The door slammed.
Locks clashed.
Both guards had been women.
Three hours later the locks clashed again.
As the two guards marched in, Bron struggled to his feet (from the spot in the center of the wall he’d fi—
nally, after much pacing, chosen to sit). They grabbed him, pulled him up the rest of the way, flattened his back against the wall. (The guards were both men this time.) Another man, less portly and with more hair, came in and asked Bron the identical questions—verbatim, he realized at the same time he realized (and began to worry that) his own answers were at least worded slightly different. At the end, the man took something out of his side pocket that looked like a watch with fangs. He came over and jabbed it against Bron’s shoulder—Bron twisted against the pain, not that it did much good the way the guards held him.
“Don’t wince!” the man said. “It’s supposed to hurt.” Ridiculous as the order and explanation was, Bron found himself trying to obey.
The man jerked the instrument away and looked at it. “Wouldn’t you know. He’s telling the truth. Come on.”
Bron looked down to see twin blood-blots on his V-shirt. Inside, something dribbled down his chest.
“It’s funny,” one of the guards said to nobody in particular. “The moonies always sit in the center of the wall as soon as you leave them alone. Marsies and Earthmen always take the corners.” And when Bron turned to protest, because that seemed just the last, absurd straw, the other guard punched him in the side: he crumpled down the wall, gasping, blinking.
The man opened the door, left; the guards followed. The one who had hit him paused, a hand on the door edge, and frowned at what time and fear and the pain in his gut had forced Bron to leave on the floor by the corner drain.
&
nbsp; “Jesus Christ ...” He looked back at Bron. “You moonies are really animals, aren’t you?” Shaking his head, he slammed the door after himself.
Forty minutes later, the same guard came back, alone. Bron’s shoulders stiffened. He pushed back against the plaster.
The guard walked over, took Bron by the arm and pulled him up. “Friend of yours is down the hall waiting for you. It’s all over, boy.” Bron was a head taller than the guard, who looked, Bron realized now, like a somewhat orientalized and beardless Philip.
“What will they ... ?” Bron began.
“Sorry we have to beat up on you guys like that every time we leave. It’s just routine—to get out safe, you know? But then, if you were even connected with what we thought you might be in the middle of ...” He shook his head, chuckled. “Let me tell you Just two guards in here? I was one scared son of a bitch.” He pulled at Bron again, who finally came away from the wall. “You were in the meat market on Mars for a while, weren’t vou?” The guard held Bron firmly as he got his legs going at last. “Me too—when I was too young to know better.” He shook his head again. “I told them, us meat-men just aren’t the type to end up in what they thought you were into. / told them not to even bother with you when the report first came in. But I’m a marsie. On Earth nobody listens to marsies. On Mars, nobody listens to earthies. Makes you wonder what we’re doing fighting on the same side, don’t it?” He looked at the feces beside the drain. “Really, you are animals. All you have to do is read the goddamn instructions; they’re printed right inside the—Now I know you didn’t behave like that on Mars. You just pull it up by the ... but then, maybe moonies just aren’t used to the same amenities we’re used to here, huh?” They walked into the hall. The guard’s voice was friendly, his grip firm. “Well, I’ve hosed worse than that off that goddamn floor. And those goddamn walls. And that goddamn ceiling.” He made a face. “And that goddamn ceiling is goddamn high.” He guided Bron through another door, into a large, nondescript office, with several desks, several chairs, and some dozen men and women sitting, standing, walking about, some in red and black, some not.
Sam stood up from one of the chairs. His face seemed to be just recovering from the expression Bron had last seen on it thirteen hours ago.
“Here he is,” the guard said: and to another guard: “Larry, let the nigger sign for him and get him out of here, huh?”
While Sam leaned on the desk to sign, Bron kept waiting for the proper moment to ask what was going to happen to him next. He and Sam were halfway down the hall, when it dawned on Bron he’d been released in Sam’s custody. There was relief, somewhere, yes. More immediate, the sensation of fear descended into the apprehensible from the numb heights it had risen to, to settle finally, like something poisonous, on the back of his tongue, hindering the hundred questions that tried to dart out. In Bron’s brain a hundred broken blue lights flickered.
Pushing open the tiled lobby’s glass door, Sam finally asked: “Are you all right?”
Out on the stone steps, Bron took a deep breath. “Do you know what they did to me! Sam, do you know what they—”
“I don’t know,” Sam said softly. “I don’t want to know. And if you care about either my life, or your own freedom, you will never describe any of what’s just happened, to me or anyone else, so long as this war is on. In fact, just make that a flat never.”
The fear—some of it, anyway—curdled; and became anger. But there was still fear. Finally he got out, as poisonously as he could (they left the bottom of the steps and turned toward the corner): “I guess the government was just wrong again.”
Sam glanced at him. “Our government was right. Theirs was wrong.” At the corner, Sam paused, looked at him. “No, we didn’t foresee that. I’m sorry.”
Lights glittered in glistening darkness off in four directions.
The street was wet, Bron realized. Had he been incarcerated through one of the fabled rains various areas of the Earth still underwent from time to time?
Suddenly that seemed the most incredible aspect of the injustice. He felt, through the weakness and the hunger and the thirst and the fear and the rage, that he might weep.
Rain ... !
Sam, one hand on Bron’s shoulder and leaning close, was saying: “Look, even without knowing the details, I know it’s been hard on you. But it’s been hard on me too. There were forty-five reasons why they might have arrested you, for any one of which—if they’d turned out to be the case—you’d be dead now: simple, fast, perfectly illegal, and with no questions. I had to go running around from our people to their people and back, trying to find out how to get you out of each one of those forty-five situations while avoiding finding out if any of them actually happened to pertain. Or anything about how they might if they ever should. They’re things I’m not supposed to know about. If I should learn about them, I become useless here and the whole mission is a failure. That’s why I don’t want to hear anything about what they did to you or said to you. Even if it didn’t mean anything to you, it could very possibly mean something to me—in which case we might just as well throw in the towel and the bunch of us go home—assuming they let us. Your life, my life, the lives of everyone we brought with us, and a good many more, would be in grave danger from then on. Do you understand?”
“Sam,” Bron said, because he had to say something, “they checked everything I said with ... with some kind of //e-detector!” He did not know if he’d chosen that because it was the greatest outrage or the most miniscule. In memory, he clawed back over the hours, trying to fix exactly what the others were. His throat was hoarse. Something kept catching in it, nudging him to cough.
Sam closed his eyes, drew breath, and bent his rough-haired head still closer. “Bron, they check me with one about five times a day, just as a matter of routine. Look—” Sam opened his eyes—“Let’s try and forget it happened, all right? As bad as it was for you; as bad as it was for me, from here on, we just forget it.” Sam swallowed. “We’ll go someplace—just take off from the group, you and me. I’ll call Linda when we get there. Maybe she’ll join us with Debby. Maybe she won’t. There’s no real need to stick around with the rest, anyway. We’ll reconnoiter later.”
Bron suddenly took hold of Sam’s wrist. “Suppose they’re listening to us now ... !”
“If they are, so far we haven’t said anything they
166 Samuel R.Delany don’t already know I know. Let’s keep it that way ... Please?”
“Sam ...” Bron swallowed again. “I ... I have to go to the bathroom. I’m hungry. I can’t walk too good because my right side still hurts ... my knee, you remember where I sprained it last—But I’m not supposed to say ... and my shoulder’s sore ...”
Sam frowned. Then the frown fell apart into some unnameable expression. Sam said softly, “Oh, my—”
They took care of the first in a doorway down an alley (like an animal, Bron thought, squatting in the half-dark, swiping at himself with a piece of discarded paper. But apparently there were no public facilities in this particular part of this particular city); the second they remedied at a cramped place whose grimed, un-painted walls reminded Bron of the stairwell he’d first been bustled into. The food was unrecognizable, primarily fat, and when Sam took out his tourist vouchers, the counterman gave him a look Bron was sure meant trouble; but the voucher was accepted.
Outside, they walked for a few blocks (Bron said he felt a little better), turned up some metal steps into what Bron had thought was a ceiling between the buildings; but it turned out to be the support for some archaic, public rail-transport.
On the gray-black above them was a bright, white disk which, Sam explained, was the full moon.
Bron was amazed.
First rain.
Now a full moon. And rain ... ? That would make a story! Coming out of the old building into the warm (or were they cool?), Earth rains. Then the moon above them ...
They took the next transport, rode in it a while, made severa
l changes in stations so dirty the brightly-lit ones were more depressing than the ones in which the sodium elements were just purple flickers through the sooty glass. His impression of Earth as a nearly a-populous planet suddenly reversed (on one leg of the journey, they had to stand, holding to ceiling straps, pressed against dozens of earthies) to nothing but gray/green/blue/brown clothed crowds. Bron was ex—
hausted. His last articulate thought was a sudden realization, in the drifting fatigue, that of the three basic styles, one was apparently reserved for women, the other for men, and the third for young people and/or anyone who seemed to be involved in physical work—most of which seemed to be men, and all of which seemed so arbitrary he just tried to turn his mind off and not consider any more aspects of this pushy, unpleasant world. Any time he could, he closed his eyes. Once, standing, and three times, sitting, he slept. Then they were in another large, crowded lobby, and Sam, at a counter, was buying more tickets. He asked where they were going now.
Onto a plane.
Which turned out to be a far more frightening procedure than the space flight—possibly because it was so much smaller, or possibly because the only drug available was alcohol.
Even so, while he stared through the oval window at the near-stationary cloud layer below, with dawn a maroon smear out in the foggy blue, he fell asleep again. And did not fully revive until Sam had herded him into some racketing land vehicle with seats for two dozen: besides the driver, they were the only passengers.
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