He sighed back. After all, she was the actor.
She said: “I hope so.”
The bill was immense. But, true to his claim, Sam had given him enough to cover it several times over.
“I can see there won’t be any dishwashing for you tonight,” the woman waiter now attending the major-domo said cheerfully, as Bron counted out the money. Which the Spike didn’t understand. So Bron had to explain the woman’s hoary joke.
As they wandered down the grassy slope (“Can’t we take a long way?” the Spike exclaimed; the majordomo bowed: “But of course.”) the falls splashed the rocks to their left. To their right, at a stone-walled fire, an—
other scarlet-gowned waiter turned a spit where a carcass hissed and spat and glistened.
The Spike peered, sniffed. “When I think of all the things we didn’t try—”
The majordomo said: “You must bring madame back again, sir.”
“But we won’t he here long enough!” she cried. “We’re leaving Earth in ... well, much too soon!”
“Ah, that is sad.”
Bron wished the domo would just lead them out. He considered giving him an absurdly small, final tip. At the edge of the great, fanning columns he gave him an absurdly large one. (“Thank you, sir!”) The Spike had apparently thought the whole, excruciating evening wonderful. But hadn’t that been the point?
Bron was very drunk, and very depressed. For one moment—he had stumbled at the edge of the purple ramp—he thought (But this was his territory) he might cry.
He didn’t.
It was a quiet trip back.
The single footman who accompanied them sat silent at her little table.
The Spike said it was wonderful to be so relaxed. And suggested they land just outside the town.
“Really,” the footman said, smiling at Bron’s final gratuity, “that isn’t necessary. You’ve been more than generous!”
“Oh, take it,” Bron said.
“Yes, do!” the Spike insisted. “Please! It’s so much fun!”
Again they walked down the ramp.
Dawn?
No; near-full moonlight.
The shuttle rose, dragging its shadow across the great bite in the road from the diggings.
“You know—” The Spike’s arms were folded: she kicked at her hem as they walked—“there’s something I’ve been trying to work into one of mv productions since I got here ... I saw it happen the first day I arrived. That was right at the tail-end of some packaged-holiday company’s three-day tour, and the place was crawling with earthie tourists—be glad you missed them! Some of the kids on the dig had gotten together right there, by the road, and started working on a rock. I mean, it was just an old piece of rock, but the tourists didn’t know that—they were always out there, m droves, watching. The kids were going at it with brushes, shellac, tape measures, and making sketches and taking photographs: you would have thought it was the Rosetta Stone or something. Anyway, the kids kept this up till they had a circle of twenty-five or thirty people standing around gawking and whispering. Then, on signal, everybody stepped very decorously back, and one of the tougher young ladies came forward and, with a single blow of the pickax, shattered it!
“And, without a word, they all went off to do other, more important things, leaving a bunch of very confused tourists.” The Spike laughed. “Now that’s real theater! Makes you wonder what we’re wasting our time on.” At the rope, she looked at him. “But then, how could we present the same thing? Actors playing at being archeological students playing at being actors—? No, it’s one whirligig too many.” She smiled, held out a hand. “Come. Wander with me a while among the ruins.” She stepped over the rope.
He did too.
Dirt rolled from his boots, ten feet down into some brick-lined, lustral basin.
“A scar on the earth,” she said, “stripped down to show scars older still. I haven’t been walking in here since the first morning. I really wanted to take a look at it once more before we left.” She led him down a steep, crumbly slope. Sheets of polyethylene were pegged across the ground. Makeshift steps were shored up with board. “I love old things,” she said, “old ruins, old restaurants, old people.”
“We don’t get too many of any of them out where we live, do we?”
“But we’re here,” she objected. “On Earth. In Mongolia.”
He stepped over a pile of boards. “I think I could enjoy this world, if we just got rid of the earthies.”
“On a moonlight night like this—” She ran a thumb over the dirt wall beside them—“you should be able to think of something more original to say—” and frowned.
She ran her thumb back.
More dirt sifted down.
“... what’s this?” She tugged at something in the wall, peered at it, tugged again.
He said: “Shouldn’t you leave that for ... ?”
But was she scraping dirt and gravel loose with her fingers, tugging with her other hand. “I wonder what it could—” It came out in a shower of small stones (He saw them fall across her bare toes, saw her toes flex on the earth) leaving a niche larger than he expected for what she held:
A verdigrised metal disk, about three inches across.
Bron, beside her, touched it with a finger: “It looks like some sort of ... astrolabe.”
“A what?”
“Yes, that part there, with all the cutouts; that’s the rhet. And that little plug in the middle is called the horse. Turn it over.”
She did.
“And those are ... I guess date scales.”
She held it up in the moonlight. “What’s it for—?” She tugged at part on the back, that, gratingly turned. “I’d better not force it.”
“It’s a combination star-map, calendar, surveying instrument, slide rule, and general all-purpose everything.”
“Why, it must be millions of years old!”
Bron scowled. “No ...”
“Thousands?”
“More likely two or three hundred.”
“Brian said it was very alkaline soil here.” The Spike turned the instrument, its delicate inscriptions caked with green rime. “Metal will keep for—well, an awfully long time. I once heard Brian say—” She looked up at the mounds and heaps around—“that sometime in the past all this was mountain and crag and rock ... I’ve got an idea—!” She handed Bron the disk and began to work her gauntlet down over her hand.
“This is a sort of all-purpose everything too, in the slide-rule/calendar line. I’m going to make a trade. Where did you learn all about ... what did you call it?”
“Astrolabes?”
“Did you have them on Mars when you were a kid?”
“No, I just ... I don’t know. Shouldn’t you—?”
The gauntlet, with its calibrated rings, just fit the niche. She packed three handfuls of dirt after it.
“That doesn’t look very—”
“I should hope not!” She glanced back. “It wouldn’t be any fun if they didn’t find it.” She reached down, picked up a trowel leaning on a pail by his foot, and poked a few stones further in. “There—” She turned back to him. The trowel clattered into the pail—“now come with me ...” Once more she led him among the excavations. There was a conversation, far more complicated than the little labyrinth they wandered, in which she explained both that she’d had a marvelous time but that, no (when he put his arm around her shoulder), she wouldn’t go to bed with him that night; apparently she meant it, too, which made him angry at first, then guilty, and then just confused—she kept evoking motivations he couldn’t quite follow. He tried getting physical twice, but the second time (when he was really horny), she elbowed him in the ribs, hard, and left.
For three minutes he thought she was hiding. But she had really gone.
He walked back into town and up the narrow stone steps, blades of moonlight from between the small houses sweeping across him every twenty feet. The Taj Mahal, he kept thinking. And: sausages ... ? The Taj Mahal—
would he get to see it after all? He must ask Sam how far away it was—that was much more interesting than Boston. But though he knew all about the clay-pits to the south of it and the story of the queen who died in childbirth buried within it, he wasn’t sure which continent it was on—one of them beginning with “A” ... Asia? Africa? Australia? The Spike had said something, before they’d started to fight, about giving him the astrolabe ... ?
Thinking he held it, he looked at his hands, but (all the way back he’d assumed the moist knot in his left fist was a crumpled bill he’d been meaning to spread out and put back in his purse) they were both empty.
6. Objective Knowledge
When a man who knows the game watches a game of chess, the experience he has when a move is made usually differs from that of someone else watching without understanding the game. But this experience is not the knowledge of the rules.
—Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Grammar
“Did you have a good time last night?”
“Oh ... yeah. Sure.”
“Well, come on,” Sam said. “We’ve only got five hours to get back. I just spoke to Linda. They’ll be waiting for us.”
“Where?” he said sleepily.
“Nevermind. Just get dressed and come on. Remember, a world’s a little bit bigger than a moon, so you have to allow a little more time to get from one side of it to the other.”
Nevertheless, in the eating place near the town square, they spent a good half hour over breakfast; the single digger also eating there engaged them in a particularly inane conversation: “They’re always telling on the news about all those hundreds of political parties you have on each satellite, out where you guys are from.”
“There’re not hundreds,” Sam said, sipping his broth. “Only about thirty to thirty-seven, depending on which satellite you’re on.”
“And when you have an election, none of them ever wins?”
Bron watched Sam decide to laugh. “No. They all win. You’re governed for the term by the governor of whichever party you vote for. They all serve office simultaneously. And you get the various benefits of the platform your party has been running on. It makes for competition between the parties which, in our sort of system, is both individuating and stabilizing.”
“It sounds pretty confusing.” The digger, who was very dirty and probably about fourteen, grinned.
The only reason Bron didn’t say anything insulting was because he couldn’t think of anything.
Sam said: “Well, it’s nowhere near as confusing as some of the excuses for government you’ve got here.” But he was still smiling.
Ten minutes later they were walking along the road. Bron frowned at the archeological excavation. Some dozen diggers were clustered around one section (the sun was not the yellow disk on the blue it was always pictured, but a boundaryless, white-gold blot you couldn’t really look at), but not the place, Bron decided at last, where the Spike had hidden her gauntlet. In fact, there was a small earth-mover filling in that section.
Sun flared on the mover’s bubble.
“I believe,” Sam said, “this is going to be what is known, in earthly parlance, as a scorcher—a very hot day!”
“What’s the point of having the sun so hot and close if you can’t enjoy it?”
But Sam onlv laughed.
They walked up the rise.
Somewhere in last night’s conversation among the ruins, there had been discussion about when he would see her again. The Spike had given several answers, all negative, all evasive, and most beyond his comprehension.
They walked a while more.
Then they rode.
Then they flew.
Then they flew again; this flight did not quite end. Their compartment had been transferred to rail, now, and was speeding along underground.
Then they were instructed by a speaker to get into another compartment; and after speeding along for a while in that one, they were instructed to leave through door B, which put them into a long, low, green corridor, with a moving walkway along one side.
“I think that’s our party.” Sam nodded along the hall, where a group of some dozen ambled ahead. “We better hurry.”
Walking quickly along the moving walkway, it still took them another two minutes to catch up.
“Oh, hi, Sam!” Linda said with a smile much more surprised than Bron thought the situation warranted. “We were getting worried ...” She looked very tired.
So did most of the others. Some looked downright exhausted.
Was that why some of the people seemed so unfamiliar?
As they passed through the door into the opulent cabin, with its carpeted levels and reclining chairs, Bron realized that at least three people were, indeed, new.
Sam, looking pretty tired himself but, smiling, had an, arm around plump Debby’s shoulders. Someone handed him a drink, and Bron was left with the disconcerting question—since all the chairs were taken—which three people were missing.
Take-off was very rough. And it was a different cabin—or else the take-off’s screen broken blue lights had been fixed. There was conversation, laughter, gossip, all sounding somewhat strained.
Bron wondered if they all had secrets like his. His stint in the earthies’ cell had returned to him with pressing vividness the moment the doors to the room had rolled to. Ten hours out he found himself doubting if the people he’d spotted as new were new after all. Nobody had made particular reference to them, everyone seemed to know them. But five hours later, after checking down in the free-fall cabin, and then surveying the swimmers in the pool, he had definitely identified one of the missing persons.
After refilling his drink, Bron walked up to the redhead who had been so garrulous before.
The little man was sitting on his couch, his own drink hanging from his bony fingers.
Bron said: “By the way, whatever happened to that charming oriental woman you were playing vlet with on the trip out?”
The redhead looked up sharply. He frowned. Then his shoulder dropped, and the exhaustion Bron had become used to on the faces around him worked its way back among the features. “I suspect—” The little redhead looked down again, turned his drink—“the chances are overwhelming she’s dead.”
Which made Bron start. (Someone passing glanced at them, then glanced away.) Chills rolled up his back.
The redhead’s eyes raised. “This was a political mission.” His voice was strained and soft. “Many of us were in great danger. All of us were under pressure. And ... well, we are at war.” He took a breath, looked out at the stars, and then went on to talk about something else with entirely information-less anecdotes, a style that Bron had noticed twice before. This time Bron commented on it, a bit annoyed. The redhead laughed and explained that he had developed that style of small talk back when he’d been actually working for Intelligence—“That’s where everything you say is used against you.”—and then slaughtered Bron three games running on his small-sized, traveling vlet board; mercifully, no game took more than forty minutes. “But I think,” the redhead explained by way of aooeasement, “the next time you play someone else, you’ll find your own game much improved.” Bron had already recognized the beginning of another of those annoying friendships he was so frequently falling into when he fell into any friendship at all. The pattern was only confirmed when the redhead, in one of his anecdotes, mentioned something peculiar about life in some male homosexual commune that had something peculiar about its particular history. And the redhead, Bron realized, was one of those guys who wouldn’t even proposition you outright and give you the satisfaction of telling him to fuck off. Not that Bron ever said fuck off; he’d just say, as politely as the situation allowed, No. A couple of times, when he was a kid on Mars, someone had taken his politeness as an invitation to get physical, so that Bron once had to elbow someone in the ribs. (The image of the Spike, elbowing him that night, how many nights ago, in the ruins of Earth, came back to make him grin.) But the physical approac
h—especially if you were over six feet tall—gets rarer as you get older. (And somehow the obsessive feeling about her had begun to slip away ...) All these thoughts, of course, were not consecutive, but spread over the next seventy hours. Around them and in between them, Bron learned, from overhearing several other conversations and hovering about the edges of several more (trying to think of a leading question, terrified of asking a stupid one), that while Sam had been keeping him off out of harm’s way in Mongolia, indescribable atrocities had occurred, unspeakable retaliations had been committed, and that, though no one could really be surprised, the “we” who were at war now was, yes, Triton.
Sam was explaining to Bron, among half a dozen other, simultaneous conversations, that no, he wouldn’t be returning to the co-op today; he, Linda, and Debby were anxious to get back to the rest of the family in Lux. A voice chirped overhead, in astonishingly low fidelity: “Will Bron Helstrom please go to one of the blue courtesy phones. Will Bron Helstrom please . • J9
Bron excused himself.
“And say hello to the old pirate for me when you get home,” Sam called after him. “Hope you beat the fuzz off his balding pate—”
On the phone (“Yes, what is it?”) they told him there was a letter for him and—Oh, excuse me: apparently it had been already sent on to his co-op. In fact, it had come from Earth with him on the same rocket in which he’d—
“From Earth?”
That’s right, and they were terribly sorry; they were just trying to get it to him quickly, but apparently there’d been some mix-up—
“Well, then why call me all the way to the—?”
Was he on his way home now?
“Yes!”
Well, if it was an emergency and he was passing any postal outlet, if he would just present his identification card, he would be immediately presented with a government facsimile of—
“And what is the government doing with a facsimile of my private mail?” (The mail was a co-operative, not a government, enterprise.)
This is wartime, they explained testily. And besides, he had just returned from a High Surveillance Mission; as he no doubt knew, that surveillance would continue on High for at least seventy-two hours after his return, for his own protection. Now, would he like to take advantage of it and pick up his letter before he got home?
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