“If it is,” Lawrence said, “let’s go the other way.”
Bron started along the street, and Lawrence caught up a moment later.
“ Audri lives down here,” Bron said.
“Who’s Audri?” Lawrence asked.
“My boss—one of my bosses. The other is some credit-dripping bastard whose commune lounges in luxury out on the Ring.”
“If she lives down this way, I doubt she’s dripping much more credit than you are.”
“Oh, she’s not. Just him. She’s got three really unbearable kids and lives with a bunch of dykes in a gay co-op.”
“Oh,” Lawrence said. And then, three steps later: “Going through all this nonsense is bad enough on your own. I can imagine what it must be like with children!”
Bron grunted.
“The instructions that came through for evacuation were so garbled,” Lawrence said. “I wonder if they got theirs properly?”
Bron grunted again.
“If they had the same sort of interference around them that we had ... and with children!” Lawrence shrugged his cloak around him. “Oh, dear. That would be just terrible.”
Bron felt uncomfortable.
Lawrence was slowing down.
“Do you think we should go down and see if they’re still there and need a hand?”
Lawrence said: “The instructions came in so garbled ... I mean, Wang was the only person to figure out that we were supposed to evacuate in the first place.”
“There was an enforcement cordon around the area when I came in,” Bron said. “I had to break through it.”
Lawrence said: “With gravity going up and down at random all over the place, it’s pretty dangerous. I’m sure it’s safer out in the open than it is inside. On the other hand, if even the tiniest fragment of cornice fell on yow head at three hundred gravities, you might as well have the whole wall come down on top of you.”
“What’s a cornice?” Bron asked.
“To be sure,” Lawrence said. “The child doesn’t know what a cornice is. Which way does your boss live?”
“Right across the street from us, one unit over.”
“That should be over there,” Lawrence said. “What’s that—”
At which point there was an explosion somewhere to the left.
Bron pulled in his shoulders. “I don’t know—”
“Not that,” Lawrence said. “That—” which was a man, shouting, somewhere at the end of the block, in Audri’s direction.
Curious (and even more uncomfortable), Bron turned down the street: Lawrence, beside him, let his cloak swing open again.
They were on the same side of the street as Audri’s co-op.
The man—Bron could see him now—shouted again. In the voice Bron heard edges both of hysteria and rage. (Why, Bron wondered, am I walking down a street toward a strange, angry, and possibly crazy man, in the midst of a war. It’s neither a reasonable nor a happy situation.) But Lawrence hadn’t stopped, so Bron didn’t either.
He was a big man, in a maroon jumpsuit, with a slashed shoulder.
“Let me in!” he bawled. “Goddamn it, let me in! Or send them out!” His voice tore at things in his throat. “At least send the goddamn kids out if you’re too stupid to—” He staggered. “Will you send out my damned kids or I swear—!” He staggered again. “I swear I’ll tear the place down with my own hands, so help me Jesus!” He rubbed his stomach, bent unsteadily, then threw back his head. “You send them out here, or I swear I’ll come in there and—” Suddenly he rushed forward, up the steps, and pounded on the door (yes, it was Audri’s co-op) with both fists.
Bron had been about to whisper to Lawrence that they step into a doorway, to give them time to check this madman out, when the man—he was backing away from the door, his fists and his face raised—glanced at them, turned:
“Oh, Jesus Christ ...” He shook his head. His face was dirty and tear-stained. What shocked Bron was that the slash in the shoulder of his jump-suit was not something put there by a design house. The skin beneath it was badly scratched ... “Oh, for ... Jesus Christ! The goddamn bitches just don’t understand. They just don’t under—” He shook his head again, then turned back to the building and bellowed: “You just give me my goddamn children! I don’t care what you do with any of the others, but you just send mine out here! Now! I mean it! I—” From each cuff dangled a wire cage that apparently could swing up over his paint-flecked hands. Another cage (Bron realized he had seen him before, but couldn’t remember for the life of him where, which added to the discomfort) bobbed at the man’s shoulder. “The goddamn bitches just don’t understand about a—” He coughed violently, backed away, his wrist at his mouth, his eyes tearing—“a man and his children!” Again he turned to shout at the building, but the shout failed. Suddenly he turned, lurched off, reached the middle of the street, stopped, swayed, lurched on. He reached the head of an alley and started down it.
Bron and Lawrence frowned at each other, then looked again.
The craftsman was twenty feet along the alley when a lot happened, very fast: First, he went down on his knees, then fell flat over on his face, but not like an ordinary fall. It was as if he had been metal, and a magnet, suddenly turned on under him, had snapped him flat. Also, the entire right-hand wall of the alley, and some of the left, poured—or rather shot—down on top of him.
Bron squinted. His hair snapped at his head. Lawrence’s cloak whipped back, then forward about his legs, tugging the old man a few steps with it. Bron had to lean against the wind to keep from moving.
After a second or so the dust, which till now had only made low, rounded waves, thick and fast as water, suddenly shot up, swirling, as if—but not “as if,” Bron realized: it was what had happened—it had become a hundred times as light; as light, again, as dust.
The alley was heaped with ten feet of debris.
Dust drifted.
Bron looked at Lawrence (who coughed), at Audri’s building, at the alley, at the building, at Lawrence. “I guess no one’s inside,” Bron said as the dust passed. Then, because that had sounded so inane, he said: “Maybe we better check, though.” He hoped Lawrence wouldn’t suggest checking in the alleyway too. Alfred had been bad enough; this could only be worse.
“Can we get around the side?” Lawrence asked, and obviously (and blessedly) meant the co-op.
Between the co-op building and the building next to it, there was a narrow gate, which, when Bron reached through and lifted the hasp (“Now / never would have thought of that,” Lawrence said), swung open.
“Maybe we can find a window or something and get a look inside.” Bron’s skin tingled with memories of the alley he had just watched collapse. But Lawrence came in right after him, so,he had to keep going forward: there wasn’t room to squeeze back around him. He was wondering who would have a window facing out on a two-foot-wide alley when he came to one, with two, astonished faces in it—which were suddenly pushed aside by three more.
While heated conferral began among the women behind the glass, another woman pushed between them to look: and that was Audri, who grinned, nodded at him quickly, then turned away to join the conference.
Bron made come-out gestures.
They made helpless gestures back.
Bron made open-the-window gestures.
They made more helpless.
Someone carefully mimed something Bron thought must mean the front door was locked.
Bron made stand-back motions, took off his sandal, then thought better and got Lawrence to give him one of the green shoes, and made to hurl it at the window. Some of the women inside looked distressed. Others laughed. They all stood back.
So Bron hurled it, heel first.
The glass shattered into an opaque web—that hung there. It was backed with plastic film so that he had to throw the shoe several times more, and than finally tear it away with his hand, nicking his fingers several places.
“Come on, you’ve got to get out!�
�
“What?”
“You’ve got to evacuate this area,” he shouted into the shadowed room full of women. “Audri? Hey, Audri, you have to get out of here.”
“I told you those were evacuation instructions,” one of the women was saying loudly to a group at the back of the room, “before the public channels went dead.”
“Audri, you better get your kids and—Audri?”
But she had left the room with several others.
Bron climbed through the window (a woman he hadn’t seen helped him down), while Lawrence went around to the front, and Bron more or less figured out from overlapping snippets that they hadn’t wanted to open the front door because of the man Bron and Lawrence had seen shouting. At which point a dozen children came into the room with several mothers, among them Audri (who was wearing a bright scarlet body-stocking with a lot of feathery things trailing from her head-band). “Hey!” He made his way to her side, took her shoulder. “You better get your kids together so we can get out of here—”
She blinked at him. “What do you think we’re doing? You said we had to evacuate, didn’t you? Everyone will be down in a second.”
“Oh,” Bron said. “Oh, yeah. Sure.” More kids came in.
Two women were calling out instructions.
“Urn ...” Bron said. “Hey! They better all wear shoes. There’s lots of junk in the street.”
Three children dashed out of the room to get them.
A woman who seemed to be in charge turned to Bron. “It really was something, your coming to tell us.
Nobody’s quite known what was going on since the retaliation this afternoon. And then with Mad Mike outside—well, he seems to be gone now. But we didn’t know whether he’d done something to interfere with our channel reception or whether it was just part of the general confusion. With gale-force winds going on and off, nobody wanted to go out anyway, especially with the kids.” Freddie and Flossie were the only one-parent family at Serpant’s House; but at a sexually specified co-op, straight or gay, you would expect a few more. Also, of course, this was a woman’s co-op. And, as a public-channel survey had once put it: As long as women bore 70 percent of the children, you couldn’t be surprised that nearly 60 percent of the one-parent families had a woman at their head.
As they were leaving the building (one of Audri’s boys had glommed onto Lawrence, along with another kid Bron had never seen) Bron asked: “Who was that Mad Mike character?”
Audri glanced around, checking, then said, confidentially: “He used to live with John—” She nodded toward a woman, in something flimsy, cream-colored and diaphanous, who, till now, he’d just assumed was one of the older children.
“She had two children by him. He’s some sort of very eccentric craftsman, but what kind I don’t know.”
“Why didn’t you let him in?”
Audri humphed. “The last three times she did, as soon as he got her alone, he beat her up; then sat her down for the next hour and explained why it was all her fault he’d done it. Really, John’s sweet, but she’s not very bright. We were trying to get through to the e-girls, but communication was out both in and out of the place.”
“Oh,” Bron said. “Yeah ... well. I guess, maybe because they were his children—”
Audri humphed again. “This sudden revitalization of interest only started a year back when he became a Christian. He apparently wasn’t very interested in them back when she was having them, or in the two years right after.” Audri scanned the group as it turned the corner. “I mean, if he wants kids of his own, there are ten ways he can go about getting them—here, that is. And at least twenty-five over in the u-1.”
Bron followed the herd of women around the corner. “I thought he might have been a Christian.” They were heading back toward the Plaza of Light. “From some of the expressions he used.” He looked up at the unfamiliar and unsettling night. “You know, they’re almost as much trouble as the Jews?”
Audri said: “Hev, come on, you kids. Stop horsing around. This way. Where did he go, anyway? He usually hangs around a good deal longer when he decides to make a nuisance of himself. He was getting to be quite a neighborhood character.”
“Oh,” Bron said, feeling uncomfortable again. “Well, he saw Lawrence and me and then he ... went away.”
Audri glanced at him. “You scared him off? You get a vote of thanks for that! Character or not, he was getting to be a pain.”
A child came up to ask Audri about something Bron didn’t understand, to which she returned a (to Bron) incomprehensible answer, while Bron wondered when he would tell Audri of Mad Mike’s fate. No matter how uncomfortable it made him, he had to do that.
Audri said: “It was downright heroic of you to come around and give us a hand like this. We were all pretty scared. Some of the sounds coming in from outside—and I just don’t mean Mike’s carrying on ... Well, they weren’t the sort to encourage you to take to the streets.”
Bron was preparing to sav, Mike is probably dead, when the skv (or rather the shield) came on.
The children cheered—which brought some dozen e-girls charging from the next alley:
What did they think they were doing in a restricted area?
Trying as best thev could to get out of it!
Didn’t they know that there was serious gravity derangement all over this sector of the citv? Over a hundred and six people had been reported dead already!
That was just why they were trying to leave! Which way should thev go?
Well, actually, the sensory shield’s going on was the official signal that it was all under control again. They could go back home if thev wanted.
Which brought more cheers, and laughter from the women.
Already other people were appearing in the street.
Bron turned to sav something to Audri, only to find Lawrence at his shoulder.
“Let’s go home,” Lawrence said. “Please? Let’s go home now.”
Bron didn’t want to go back to Serpent’s House. He wanted to so back to Audri’s, and have the women give him coffee and a meal and talk and smile and laugh with him, joke about his breaking the window and make much about his coming to rescue them and his scaring off the crazy Christian. But there would be the kids. And alreadv women were—
“... at work next week!” Audri was calling across lots of heads and waving.
“Oh, yeah!” Bron waved back. “I’ll see you. At work.”
“Come on.” Lawrence said. “Please?” Bron started to sav something angrv. But it failed. “Sure.” Bron sighed. And after thev had walked through two and a half units: “This has been some vacation!”
The Spike’s (nonfacsimile) letter was waiting for him on his table.
In his clean room (the cupboard door was still open, but he was too tired to close it), he sat on his bed and reread it. Then he read it once more. Halfway through he realized he wasn’t even hearing it in the Spike’s voice, but in the voice of the woman at Audri’s co-op who had been calling instructions to the other women. He started again, this time hearing the accusations in the electronically strained tone of the hegemony’s Personnel receptionist. He read it once more, finally in the voice of the e-girl who’d been hallooing that he could not pass the cordon, and whom he’d tricked by joining the mumblers.
“Hey,” Lawrence said, shouldering through the door, once more naked, carrying his cracked vlet case in both hands. “I’ve found almost all the pieces! Only four of them got stepped on, and I’m sure I can get another astral board from—”
“Lawrence?” Bron looked up from the black—and gold-edged flimsy. “Lawrence, you know, he was right?”
“This isn’t too bad, is it?” Lawrence ran a yellowish nail over the cracked inlay. “There used to be a marvelous craftsman over in the unlicensed sector who specialized in games. I’m sure she could fix this one good as new—if her place is still up. The public channels were saying that the u-1 got hit the hardest. But then, isn’t that typical?”
/>
“Lawrence he was right.”
“Who?” Lawrence looked up.
“That Christian—the one we saw out in front of Audri’s co-op. Mad Mike.”
“Right about what?”
“About women.” Bron suddenly crumpled the letter between cupped hands. “They don’t understand.”
“You mean thev don’t understand youl Some of us, my dear, get along smashingly with women. Even me, from time to time. No misunderstandings at all: just pure sympathy and sympatico riffht down the line. Of course with me it doesn’t last. But does it ever, all the time, with anvone?”
“They don’t understand about men—Not vou, Lawrence. I mean ordinary, heterosexual men. They can’t. It’s just a logical impossibility. I’m a logician and I know.”
Lawrence laughed. “Mv dear boy! I have observed you intimately now for six months, and vou are a sweet and familiar creature—alas, far more familiar than six months should make vou. Let me tell vou a secret. There is a difference between men and women, a little, tiny one that. I’m afraid, has probablv made most of your adult life miserable and will probably continue to make it so till you die. The difference is simnly that women have only really been treated, by that bizarre,
Derkheimian abstraction, ‘society,’ as human beings for the last—oh, say sixty-five years; and then, really, only on the moons; whereas men have had the luxury of such treatment for the last four thousand. The result of this historical anomaly is simply that, on a statistical basis, women are just a little less willing to put up with certain kinds of shit than men—simply because the concept of a certain kind of shit-free Universe is, in that equally bizarre Jungian abstraction, the female ‘collective unconscious,’ too new and too precious.” Lawrence’s brows knitted; he frowned at Bron’s knotted fists. “Why, I bet that’s a letter from a lady—I confess, when I was checking for corpses, I had a peek in here and saw the name and the return address. Your problem, you see, is that essentially you are a logical pervert, looking for a woman with a mutually compatible logical perversion. The fact is, the mutual perversion you are looking for is very, very rare—if not nonexistent. You’re looking for someone who can enjoy a certain sort of logical masochism. If it were just sexual, you’d have no trouble finding a partner at all—as your worldly experience no doubt has already informed you. Hang them from the ceiling, burn their nipples with matches, stick pins in their buttocks and cane them bloody! There’re gaggles of women, just as there are gaggles of men, who would be delighted to have a six-foot, blond iceberg like you around to play such games with. You can get a list of the places they frequent just by dialing Information. But, though she is a religious fanatic like Mad Mike, who believes that the children of her bodv are one with the objects of her hand, or a sociopath like poor Alfred, who doesn’t quite have a model for anyone, correct or incorrect; be she nun or nymphomaniac, a loud political pamphleteer running around in the u-1 sector, or a pillar of society living elegantly on the Ring, or anywhere in between, or any combination, the one thing she is not going to do is put up with your hurry-up-and-wait, your do-a-little-tap-dance-while-you-stand-on-your-head, your run-around-in-circles-while-you-walk-a-straieht-line, especially when it’s out of bed and simply has no hope of pleasurable feedback. Fortunately, your particular perversion today is extremely rare. Oh, I would say maybe one man out of fifty has it—quite amazing, considering that it once was about as common as the ability to grow a beard. Just compare it to some of the other major sexual types: homosexuality, one out of five; bisexuality, three out of five; sadism and masochism, one out of nine; the varieties of fetishism, one out of eight. So you see, at one out of fifty, you really are in a difficult situation. And what makes it more difficult—even tragic—is that the corresponding perversion you’re searching for in women, thanks to that little historical anomaly, is more like one out of five thousand. Yes, I have a—believe me—platonic curiosity about both male and female victims of this deviation. Yes, I exploit the attendant loneliness of the unfulfilled by offering friendship. Psychic vampirism? Believe me, there’s as much of the blood donor about me as there is of Vlad Tepes. I don’t know anything about the woman responsible for that—” He nodded toward the crumpled letter—“other than her public reputation. But I’ve lived a long time. I can make a few speculations about her. Bron, in your terms, she simply doesn’t exist. I mean, how can she? You’re a logical sadist looking for a logical masochist. But you are a logician. If you redefine the relation between P and Not-P beyond a certain point—well, then you just aren’t talking about logic any more. All you’ve done, really, is change the subject.”
Triton Page 27
