We may note that, in these experiments, the sign “=“ may stand for the words “is confused with.”
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.
“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 several 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.
They got down by a shack, with a lot of grass and rock stretching to a seemingly infinite horizon. Kilometers away, a gray wave was breaking above the world’s edge ... mountains? Yes, and the white along their tips must be snow! Other than the shack, rock and grass and brush just went on forever under a white-streaked sky.
“You know,” Sam said, “every time I come here—” (The bus rocked away, from gravel—crunching became hissing—to tarmac, rumbled down a road that dropped away into the landscape, rose, much thinner, further off, and dropped again.) “—I figure this place hasn’t changed in a million years. Then I look around and realize everything that’s different since the last time I was here six months or a year back. I know that path wasn’t there last time I came ...” Spikey grass flailed in the light wind at the shack’s baseboards, at the edges of the double ruts winding away. “And those great, shaggy pines you can just see off there—” (Bron had thought they were bushes and much closer; but, as it had been doing here and there with each blink since they’d gotten off the bus, perspective righted.) “Well, the caretaker informed me that they’re historically indigenous to the area—they’re Dawn Redwoods—but they were brought in just last year.”
Bron raised his eyes, squinted about the stuff that was nothing but sky. “Is it ... morning?”
“It’s evening here.”
“Where are we?”
“Mongolia. Outer Mongolia, this particular section of it used to be called. But that doesn’t mean too much unless you know which direction Inner Mongolia is, now, does it?” Sam took his hands from the pockets of his long, leather over-vest, breathed deeply, stretching the gold mesh beneath. “I suppose where you are doesn’t matter unless you know where you’ve been.”
“Where did we come from?”
With lowered eyebrows, Sam smiled. “From Tethys. On Triton.”
Bron reached into his collar, rubbed his shoulder under the bloodstains. “I’m tired, Sam.” It wasn’t very bloodstained.
“Come on inside,” Sam said.
In the shack, they sat at a scarred wooden table and were served a salty, brown, bitter broth in dented brass bowls.
The salty, brown, bitter man who served it (from a dented brass pot) wore a torn shirt and frayed apron, both of which were stained and splattered with—that was blood! From some ritual slaughtering or butchering of meat? Uncomfortably, with the warm bowl in both his hands, Bron drank more broth.
“The archeological diggings are over there. The town center is that way.” The salty, brown forefinger pointed vaguely toward a window missing an upper pane. “You can find accommodations over there.” The angle between diggings, center, and dwelling seemed to
Bron less than a second of an arc; which was resolved by: “Just hike along that road there a bit—” pointing in the same direction—“and it’ll take you past all three. There’s not much to do here, but you probably know that; that’s why you came—at least that’s what most of you tourist types tell me.”
Outside, they walked along the road’s shoulder.
“There’s so little here,” Sam commented happily, “and yet it’s so loud!”
The grass gnashed around them. An insect yowled between them. The breeze drummed at them and a covey of paper-winged things, blue as steel in half-light, broke silent about their knees and fluttered across the meadow—butterflies, he realized, from some childhood picture-strip, some adolescent museum visit. There were as many smells (and as strange ones) here as there were in the city. Most of them seemed to be various types of mild decay—products of slow burning, rather than the fast which he’d already learned to associate with more densely populous areas of this world.
Any place they were going must be pretty far away, since in all this open space, Bron couldn’t see it. (He was still deadly tired.) But the landscape contained dells and outcroppings and hillocks which, because he had never really walked among such before, he didn’t really see until he was upon, or under, or skirting one.
Two people were coming up the center of the road. From braided hair to crusted boots, they were the dirtiest people Bron had seen since Fred.
One kept digging a middle finger under the lens of some goggle-like things perched on her nose. (The dirt, however, wasn’t black or gray, but sort of brownish.) The other wore a hat, with a brim(!), pushed back on his head. “It was really funny,” Bron overheard him saying in a very serious voice. “I thought it was going to be all brushing and shellac. That’s what I’d heard about.”
“I’m afraid—” She scowled and dug—“this just isn’t that kind of dig.” (Glasses, Bron realized.) “You’ll be troweling till they close us down—” (Hadn’t glasses disappeared before man even reached the moon? Some—
where on Earth, people still wore glasses ... !) “—when you’re not pickaxing.”
“I guess if we turned up anything delicate enough for brushes, Brian would shoo us off anyway.”
“Oh, Brian’d probably show you how. It’s just at the strata we’re down to, nobody was doing anything that delicate.”
The diggers passed.
Bron, lagging steps behind Sam (the tiredness had gotten to his knee), came over a rise around a crop of furzy rock: what looked like a construction site stretched away some forty feet, after taking a good bite from the road itself. Striped posts had been set on yellow plastic bases, or driven into the dirt.
Some had cameras. Some had wheelbarrows. Many, mostly shirtless, wandered through carefully pegged trenches, examining the walls. Somewhere in all that sky, the gray had torn apart, showing great flakes of blue and letting down a wash of mustard light.
Sam paused at the ropes. Bron stopped beside him.
A woman carrying a carton came by. Bron glanced in—she stopped, grinned, and tilted the box to let him see: skulls and skull pieces stared this way and that. Bits of marked tape were stuck here and there.
“All,” the woman confided, nodding to her right, “from that part there, just in, or just under, Dwelling M-3 ... if it was a dwelling. Brian has been wrong, by his own admission, three times on that one.” She hefted the carton. “Maybe we’ll see you here tomorrow? Everyone’s knocking off now.” As she turned away, a clutch of diggers broke around her, stepping over the ropes, moving around Sam and Bron.
“Man,” one said, “if you don’t lay off me about that piece of tile, I’m going to small-find your headl”
Diggers ambled away down the bright, black road in the late, surprising sun, while Bron again mulled on images of the Taj.
On one of the heaps, a woman, bare back to them, sat on a crate playing a guitar. In the lulls between rushing grass and voices, the music reached them, slow and expert, lazily hauled from seventh to archaic sev—
enth. Her singing voice sounded as familiar as the music sounded strange.
Bron frowned.
He started to say something. But it wouldn’t mean anything to Sam anyway. Because he was so tired, it took him a full minute to decide: but suddenly he swung a leg over the ropes, started across the rubbly ground, almost collided with another group of diggers: One put a hand on his shoulder and, smiling through a dusty beard, said: “Come on ... on that side of the chalk line if you’re gonna walk around in here—which you shouldn’t be doing anyway!”
“Sorry—” Bron hurried across the loose earth; dirt was in his sandals. He came around the pile.
Small-breasted Charo sang, dreamily, looking down at her fingers, under the white and gold sky:
Hear the city’s singin’ like a siren choir. Some fool’s tried to set the sun on fire. TV preacher screamin’, “Come on along!” I feel like Fay Wray face-to-face with King Kong. But Momma just wants to barrelhouse all night long ...
Charo looked up from the strings, frowned at Bron’s frown, suddenly raised her head, laughed, nodded to him; and still played.
Behind him, a man said: “Is that you?”
Bron turned.
“That is you!” Scraggly-bearded Windy, dusty from labor, came up the pile, a pail with things in it held out from his thigh, his other arm waving for balance. “What in the world are you doing here?”
“I was ... I was just walking by. And I ... What are ... ?”
“The last time I seen you is on some damn moon two hundred and fifty million kilometers away. And he’s just walking by, he says!”
“What are you all doing?” Bron asked. “On Earth?”
“The usual. Micro-theater for small or unique audiences. Government endowment. Just what it says in the contract that brought us here.”
Bron looked around. “Is this one of her ... ?”
“Huh? Oh, Christ, no! A bunch of us from the company just decided to volunteer a hand with the diggings. They’re into some very exciting things.” Windy laughed. “Today’s biggest find, would you believe it, is a whole set of ancient digging implements. Apparently someone in the immemorial past was also trying to excavate the place.”
Behind Bron, Charo’s tempo brightened, quickened.
Windy went on: “Brian’s been trying to figure out if they found anything, or whether they just gave up and went away—not to mention just how long ago it was.”
Charo sang:
Yve been down to Parliament; I’ve been in school;
I’ve been in jail and learned the Golden Rule;
Yve been in the workhouse—served my time in those hallowed halls. The only thing 1 know is the blues got the world by the balls.
“But what are you doing here?” Bron asked again. Because it suddenly all seemed too preposterous. Flickering at the edge of thought were all sorts of Sam-engineered, arcane, and mysterious schemes, of which this was some tiny fragment in a pattern whose range and scope he would never know—on threat of execution or incarceration.
“Very highbrow program, actually. Very classical: a series from the Jackson MacLow Asymetries. The man wrote hundreds of the things. We’re performing from the whole range, and the final cycle of seven. The Sixties—that’s the Nineteen-Sixties—are very in around here. Given our head, you know, we’re much more into the contemporary. But—” Windy glanced about—“really, this planet must have the most conservative audience in the system. It’s incredible!”
Charo was singing:
Yve been in the Tundra and the mountain too;
Yve been in Paris, doin’ what the Frenchmen do.
I’ve been in Boston where the buildings grow so tall.
And everywhere you look the blues got the world by the balls.
“Is the ... the Spike here?” Bron asked, which seemed a very silly and, at once a desperately important, question. “I mean herel” meaning the dig, which was not what he meant at all: he hadn’t seen her.
“On site? Oh, she puttered around for a couple of hours yesterday. But those MacLows are a bitch, man. Besides, I think she’s working up another of her double-whammy-zowie-pow! specials—gotta show the locals what it’s all about.” Windy set his pail down. “That’ll probably be a unique audience number.” He smiled. “And you’ve had yours, I’m afraid. But if you’re around for a few more hours, maybe you can catch us in the evening performance of the MacLows. That’s open to whoever’s wandering by. You know—” Windy looked around again, picked up his pail—“Brian says that a millon years ago—I think it was a million—this place was all desert. Imagine, nothing but sand!”
You can catch ’em from the preacher, or from the pool shark, find ’em in the grammar of the socialite’s remark; or down in the washroom you can read it on the walls:
Everywhere you look the blues got the world by the balls.
The tempo changed again, slowing to the melody he’d first heard:
Sometimes I wonder what I am.
Feels like I’m living in a hologram.
It doesn’t seem to matter what’s right or wrong.
Everybody’s grabbin’ and comin’ on strong.
But Momma just wants to barrelhouse all night long.
The playing stopped, Charo stood, crab-walked down toward Bron, holding the guitar by the neck. “Do you have any idea where Boston is?”
“I don’t think there is a Boston any more,” Windy said. “I remember once, hitchhiking somewhere on this damn planet and someone saying, ‘We’re right near where Boston used to be.’ At least I think it was Boston.” Windy shrugged. “Hey, look. We’ve got to get going. We still have a performance to put on—” He did a little dance step; red hair and the pail swung; a breeze, and the hair blew; the pail rattled. “Sing a few songs, turn a few backflips: always happy and bright.” He ducked his head, grinned, as Charo took his arm, the guitar swinging from her other hand. They walked away.
Bron returned, wonderingly, to the ropes. As he climbed over, Sam asked:
“People you know?”
“Yeah. I ...” Momentarily Bron considered asking if Sam had any idea why the troupe was here. But that was silly, and ridiculous, and the paranoid detritus of his encounter with the earthie e-girls—or whatever they were called here.
“While you were talking to them, I struck up a conversation with someone named Brian, who was telling me, you know, about a million years ago, this place was all caves and quarries and canyons. Isn’t that amazing?”
Bron took a breath. “Where’s ... Boston from here, Sam?”
“Boston?”
Among the ambling diggers, Bron turned, with Sam, down the road.
“Let me see. Boston—wait till I picture a globe, now ... yeah, I guess it should be in about that—” Sam pointed toward the ground at an angle noticably off plumb—“direction—maybe a couple or three thousand miles ... if there still is a Boston.”
The town was as sudden as the digs.
One small house was built into the rock-face; they walked around it to find houses on both sides of the road. They turned another corner. Somewhere near a public fountain the street developed paving.
And steps.
“It’s up here a-ways ... But the view is worth it. We share a double room—that’s all they had.”
“Okay. But I think I may take a nap as soon as we get there. I’ll be up in a couple of hours. There’s something I want to catch in town.”
“Fine. We’ll go out and get something to eat when you wake up.” And (after they had mounted, and turned, and mounted again) entered a wooden door (in a white plaster wall) with painted green flowers on it, and real blue flowers growing beside it in a wooden box.
A woman who could have been the older sister of the man who’d served them at the shack led them up wooden stairs to a room where, at the foot of a bed with a blue cover, lay, next to Sam’s, Bron’s yellow plastic luggage sack.
He didn’t really remember laying down.
He remembered wondering, half asleep, whether or not he should enlist Sam’s help in searching out the company’s whereabouts, and if he should do it before or after they ate.
Then he woke, something soft under his chin. He looked down—at the rayon rim of a blue blanket, with white-gold light at the corner of his vision. He turned his eyes toward it; and clamped them against the brilliance.
He pushed the covers off and stood up, blinking. Through the room’s wide-swung shutters, behind the pulsing after-image, red-tiled roofs stretched down the slope. At the horizon, a wedge of sun blazed between two mountains.
Sunset?
He remembered thev’d arrived late afternoon. Much less sore, he felt as if he’d slept a good three hours.
Sam lay sprawled on the other side of the bed in a welter of twisted bedding, bare foot sticking over the end, bare arm hanging off the side, mouth wide and breath growling.
“Sam ... ?” Bron said, softly. “Sam ... we’d better get started if we’re going to get any dinner. Sam—”
Sam said, “Huh—?” and pushed up to one elbow, squinting.
“The sun’s going down ... I don’t know how long I slept, but you said you wanted to get some dinner and I’d like to—”
“It’s five o’clock in the morning!” Sam said and collapsed back on the pillow, turning and tearing up more bedding.
“Oh.” Bron looked out the window again.
The wedge of the sun’s disk was getting higher.
“... Oh,” he repeated, looked around the room, then got back into bed, dragging some of the covers loose from the inert body beside him.
He lay there, feeling very alert, wondering if he should get up anyway and explore the dawning town on his own.
And fell asleep wondering.
“In that one!”
They had been looking fifteen minutes, now, for a place to have late breakfast.
“Okay,” Sam said, surprised.
But Bron was already pushing in the wooden doors. Sky flared on the long panes. Sam followed him in.
At first Bron thought it was just because they were a theater company that, among the two dozen eating in the room, they seemed so colorful. But he (in his silver shorts, black shirt, and red gloves) and Sam (in his high boots and short blue toga) were quite as outstanding as the actors. Everyone else wore (of the three basic styles) the one that was (basically) dull-colored pants that went down to the ankles and dull-colored shirts that went down to the wrists ... though some wore them rolled up. Still, everyone seemed animated, even friendly. Most were workers from the ar-cheological site.
The Spike was raring back in her chair, her hands behind her neck, laughing. Black suspenders crossed her bare shoulders clipped with brass to the red Z. Abstracted from its environment, it was immediately recognizable: a red plastic letter from a u-1 strezt coordinate sign.
Bron saidr^’Hello ...”
The Spike turned. “Hi!” And the smooth laugh. “Someone said they saw you wandering around here yesterday. What’d you do? Follow me all the way from Triton, braving border skirmishes and the danger of battle to reach my side? Come on, sit down—you and your handsome friend—and have something to eat.”
A young woman (the one with the glasses he’d seen rubbing her eye on the road; face and hands were much cleaner, but her clothes were just as dirty) cupped her tea in both hands, dusty nails arched against the thick, white crock, and was saying to Charo, who balanced her chin on her knuckles: “I think it’s so wonderful that you people can come and be with us, in spite of this war. It’s an awful war! Just awful!”
“Well, at least—” (From the voice, Bron thought for a moment it was Windy: it was an earthie with a beard and lots of rings, in his ears and on his fingers) “—no one’s fighting it with soldiers.”
“Sit down,” Sam urged Bron from behind. And, to the people on the bench, when no one seemed about to make room, with his most affable grin: “How about spreading out and letting us in here?”
Three people turned their heads sharply, as though astonished. Hesitantly they looked at one another—one even tried to smile and, finally, slid over on the bench: two moved their chairs. It’s as though, Bron thought, their whole response, reaction, and delay times are different. Is that, he wondered, the seed of why they think we’re bumptious barbarians and we think they’re overrefined and mean-spirited? Bron sat on the bench’s end and felt very much an alien in an alien world, while Sam dragged over a chair from somewhere, fell into it, and rared back too.
“Are you going to be digging this morning?” someone asked the Spike.
Who said: “Ha!” That was the rough part of her laugh. She tapped the forelegs of her chair on the floor. “Maybe in a couple of days. But the company organization takes up too much time right now.”
“She’s got to work so the rest of us can go off and dig,” the hirsute Dian called from somewhere down the table.
The girl was saying to Charo: “... without any taxes at all? That just seems impossible to me.”
Charo turned her chin on her fist: “Well, we were brought up to think of taxes as simply a matter of extortion by the biggest crooks who happen to live nearest to you. Even if they turn around and say, all right, we’ll spend the money on things you can use, like an army or roads, that just turns it into glorified protection money, as far as we’re concerned. I have to pay you money so / can live on my property; and you’ll socially rehabilitate me if I don’t ... ? Sorry, no thanks. Even if you’re going to use it to put a road by my door, or finance your social rehabilitation program, it’s still extortion—”
“Wait a minute,” the Spike said, leaning forward with both elbows in the table. “Now wait—we’re not fighting this war with soldiers: there’s no reason to start using actors and archeologists.” She leaned around Charo: “We just have a far more condensed, and far more highly computerized system than you do here. All our social services, for instance, are run by subscription to a degree you just couldn’t practice on Earth. Or even Mars—”
“But your subscriptions are sort of like our taxes—”
“They are not,” Charo said. “For one, they’re legal. Two, they’re all charges for stated services received. If you don’t use them, you don’t get charged.”
“You’re supposed to have slightly less than one-fifth of your population in families producing children,” the man with the beard and rings said, “and at the same time, slightly over a fifth of your population is frozen in on welfare ...” Then he nodded and made a knowing sound with ra’s that seemed so absurd Bron wondered, looking at the colored stones at his ears and knuckles, if he was mentally retarded.
“Well, first,” Sam said from down the table, “there’s very little overlap between those fifths—less than a percent. Second, because credit on basic food, basic shelter, and limited transport is automatic—if you don’t have labor credit, your tokens automatically and immediately put it on the state bill—we don’t support the huge, social service organizations of investigators, interviewers, office organizers, and administrators that are the main expense of your various welfare services here.” (Bron noted even Sam’s inexhaustible affability had developed a bright edge.) “Our very efficient system costs one-tenth per person to support as your cheapest, national, inefficient and totally inadequate system here. Our only costs for housing and feeding a person on welfare is the cost of the food and rent itself, which is kept track of against the state’s credit by the same computer system that keeps track of everyone else’s purchases against his or her own labor credit. In the Satellites, it actually costs minimally less to feed and house a person on welfare than it does to feed and house someone living at the same credit standard who’s working, because the bookkeeping is minimally less complicated. Here, with all the hidden charges, it costs from three to ten times more. Also, we have a far higher rotation of people on welfare than Luna has, or either of the sovereign worlds. Our welfare isn’t a social class who are born on it, live on it, and die on it, reproducing half the next welfare generation along the way. Practically everyone spends some time on it. And hardly anyone more than a few years. Our people on welfare live in the same co-ops as everyone else, not separate, economic ghettos. Practically nobody’s going to have children while they’re on it. The whole thing has such a different social value, weaves into the fabric of our society in such a different way, is essentially such a different process, you can’t really call it the same thing as you have here.”
“Oh, I can.” The man fingered a gemmed ear. “Once I spent a month on Galileo; and I was on it!” But he laughed, which seemed like an efficient enough way to halt a subject made unpleasant by the demands of that insistent, earthie ignorance.
Another earthie Bron couldn’t see laughed too:
“Different kinds of taxes. Different kinds of welfare: and both emblems of the general difference, grown up between each economy, that’s gotten us into an economic deadlock that has made for—what did they used to call it in the papers? The hottest cold war in history ... Until they broke down and just started calling it war.”
“It’s an awful war,” the girl said again. “Awful. And / think it’s wonderful that in spite of it vou can be here, with us, like this. I think it’s wonderful, your showing us your theater—I mean. MacLow, Hanson, Kaprow, McDowell, they were all from Earth. And who’s performing their work on Earth today? And I think it’s wonderful that you’re here helping us with the dig.”
Bron wondered where you got food.
Sam, apparently, had asked, because he was coming back across the room with two trays, one of which he slipped in front of Bron, with a grin, and one of which he clacked down at his own place.
Bron picked up a cup of what he thought was tea, sipped: broth. The rest of the breakfast was pieces of something that tasted halfway between meat and sponge cake ... a sort of earthie Protyyn. He took another bite and said: “Excuse me, but—?”
The Spike turned.
“... I mean I realize you’ll be busy with the company, but if you have a few minutes, perhaps T could see you ... I mean we might go for a walk. Or something. If you had time.”
She watched him, something unreadable transpiring deep in the muscles of her face. At last she said: “All right.”
He remembered to breathe.
And turned back to his tray. “Good,” he said, which sounded funny. So he said, “Thank you,” which also wasn’t quite right. So he said, “Good,” again. He had smiled through all three.
The rest of breakfast was overridden by impatience for it to be over; the conversation, all tangential to the war, closed him round like the walls of the earthie’s cell where he had spent—but I can’t tell her about that!
The thought came, sudden and shocking.
Sam said I mustn’t mention that to anyone!
Of course, that must mean her too ... especially her, if she was here on a government invitation. From then on his thoughts were even more alien and apart. What was there, then, to talk to her about, tell her about, ask her support for, her sympathy in, her opinion of?
It was the most important thing that had happened to him since he had known her; and Sam’s crazed paranoia had put it outside conversational bounds.
Wooden chair legs and bench cleats scraped the planks; diggers got up to go. Bron followed the Spike to the porch, wondering what he would say.
Sam was still inside, still talking, still eating, still explaining—just like in the co-op.
The door closed behind them. Bron said:
“I just can’t get over the coincidence: running into you like this! What are there, now? Three billion people on Earth? I mean to have just met you in Te-thys and then, on the other side of the Solar System, just on a side trip to—where are we? Mongolia! To run into you ... just like that! The chances must be billions to one!”
The Spike breathed deeply, looked around the square, at the mountains beyond the housetops, at the cloud-smeared sky that, by day, was infinitely higher than the night’s star-pocked roof.
“I mean,” he said, “it could be a million billion to one! A billion billion!”
She started down the porch steps, glanced at him. “Look, you’re supposed to be something of a mathematician.” She smiled a faint smile, with faintly furrowed brows. “With the war, there’re only a dozen—no, nine, actually—places on Earth a moonie can officially go—unless you’re on one of those inane political missions you’re always reading about in subversive flyers and never hearing mentioned on the channels. All of those nine places are as out of the way as this one, at least five hundred miles from any major population center. Our company’s part of an exchange program between warring—or, in Triton’s case, nearly warring—worlds so that all cultural contact isn’t cut off: The first place they suggested we go was a cunning little village just on the south side of Drake’s Passage—mean annual temperature minus seventeen degrees centigrade. Frankly, I doubt if more than three of the specified areas are even livable at any given time of Earth’s year. None of the nine has a population of more than fifteen hundred. And in a town of fifteen hundred, it’s hard for two strangers who come into it not to learn of each other’s presence inside of six hours! Given the fact that both of us are on Earth at the same time, and that both of us are moonies of our particular temperament and type, I’d say the chances of our running into one another were—what? Fifty-fifty? Perhaps slightly higher?”
He wanted to say: But I’m on one of those political missions! And I have been taken prisoner, questioned, beaten, abused—
“What are you doing here, anyway?” she asked.
“Oh, I ...” Confusion rose as he remembered Sam’s injunction. “Well, I’m here ... with Sam.” More diggers came down the steps.
“What’s Sam here for?”
“Well, he’s ... I ...” He was oppressed with the thousand secrets he was not even sure he held, revelation of any of which might send worlds and moons toppling together in some disasterous, cosmic pinball. “Well, Sam’s sort of ...” What could he say about Sam that would not return them to the forbidden subject? Sam is a friend? A woman who’s had a sex change? A liaison executive in the Outer Satellite Intelligence Department—
“—with the government?” the Spike suggested. “Well, then, I won’t go prying around anymore into that! Every time you ask a question on this world—about anything—there’s always someone at your elbow to point out politely that, really, for your own good, you’d rather not know. There’s even part of Brian’s work that’s apparently not supposed to pollute delicate little moonie minds. And from what I can gather, it’s nothing more insidious than that, a million years ago, all this was under the edge of an inland sea. I like my first supposition better—that you followed me across the Solar System because you simply couldn’t bare to be without me. That’s certainly more flattering than that you’re an official agent sent to keep tabs. The nicest one, of course, is just that it really is a coincidence. I’ll accept that.”
Bron walked beside her, his head huge with phantom data, smiling and unhappy. “Well, whether it’s a billion to one or one to a billion, I’m glad we met.”
The Spike nodded. “I guess I am too. It is nice to see a familiar face. How long have you been here?”
“Here? Just since last night. On Earth? I guess a few days. It’s not ... well, a very friendly place.”
She hunched her shoulders. “You’ve noticed? They all seem to be trying so hard. To be friendly, I mean. But they just can’t seem to figure out how.” She sighed. “Or maybe it’s just that, coming from where we do, we recognize and respond to different emblems of friendship. Do you think that could be it?” But she was talking about something different from what he meant: black and red uniforms, furnitureless cells, small machines with fangs ...
“Perhaps,” he said.
“We’ve been here two days. We leave in a few days for Mars. Will I run into you there, perhaps?”
“I ...” He frowned. “I don’t think we’re going to Mars.”
“Oh. You’re from Bellona originally, aren’t you?”
He nodded.
“What a shame. You could have shown us around for an evening—though the clear areas are as out of the way on Mars as they are here. We probably won’t be allowed within seven leagues of Bellona, or any place like it.”
“Bellona’s the only place on Mars I really know,” he said. “When I was growing up, I don’t think I got out of it more than a dozen times.”
She mumbled something conciliatory.
“But Mars is friendlier than Earth. At least it was when I left.”
“That’s understandable. I mean, even if the government’s closer to Earth’s, the texture of life, just day to day, would have to be closer to life on the Satellites. The whole ratio, and type, of girl-made object to landscape must be nearer to what it is out on the moons.” She laughed. “With all that space they have here getting in between people every time you turn around—you’re going to be in for a small adventure when you try and find your friend again, by the way—I guess it’s understandable why people don’t know how to relate to other people here. Well, Earth’s the place we all came from. Remember that. Remember that, I keep telling myself. Remember that. A few times, at home, I’ve met earthies, even become pretty friendly with a few, especially before the war: they always struck me as a little strange. But I racked it up to the fact that they were in a strange and unfamiliar place. I think the oddest thing I’ve noticed, in the two days I’ve been here, is that they’re all so much like all the earthies I’ve known before! They pick up an object, and somehow they never seem to really touch it. They say something, and their words never completely wrap around their ideas. Do you know what I mean?”
He mumbled back appropriate m’s.
The Spike laughed. “I suppose this isn’t the best way to promote interplanetary understanding and good will, is it? Maybe if everything comes out of the sea and the ground and the air as easily as it’s supposed to here you just don’t ever really have to think. How do you like life under an open sky? Do you feel you’ve come home, returned at last to the old racial spawning grounds? Or are you as anxious to get home as I am?”
“I guess I am pretty anxious.” They turned a corner. “When will you be returning?”
She drew a breath. It was a comfortable, relaxed breath: He drew one too. All the tiny smells, he thought; if you like them, you probably liked life under the open sky. If you didn’t, you couldn’t. He doubted it was more complicated than that.
“Our trip to Mars,” she explained, 6iis sort of open-ended. When push comes to shove, thev’re a good deal more liberal there, especially in things like cultural exchange. And, from reports, the audiences have slightly more catholic tastes. I admit, I’m looking forward to it.”
“I wish I were going,” he said.
They rounded another corner.
She said: “This is where we’re staying.” The building was low, large, and shoddilv whitewashed. “The People’s Cultural Co-Operative. The diggers have most of it, but we have four rooms on the top floor.”
“You’re always getting stuck in someone’s cellar, or off in the attic.” Memories of concert halls, transport compartments, a verdigrized drain in a fouled cement floor, crystal gaming pieces on boards that were neither go nor vlet. “I still just can’t get over the coincidence, no matter how small or large it is, of—could I come in a while?” because she had stopped at the wooden door, painted yelllow and noticeably askew in its frame.
She smiled. “Really, I’ve got a lot of work to do this morning. Right after lunch I have to have interlocking part rehearsals planned out for the new work. Tt’s one of our most ambitious, and at least four seconds of it are still pretty loose.”
“I ... I ... wish I could see it!”
She smiled again. “It’s too bad you didn’t catch the last performance of the MacLow cycle last nieht. They were open to passers-by. It would be nice to do this one for you, but really it’s more or less understood as part of the conditions of our being here that we do everything we possibly can for the locals. Except for the MacLows, we haven’t even had any of the kids from the dig for audience. We’re trying to keep it to the indigenous inhabitants.”
Save the man at the shack and the woman at the guesthouse, Bron wasn’t sure he’d seen any indigenous inhabitants. “Well, I guess that’s ...” He shrugged, smiled, and felt desperate.
She offered her hand. “Good-bye then. Even if I don’t see you—”
“Could I see you again!” he blurted, taking her hand in both his. “I mean ... maybe tonight. Later, after your performance. We’ll go somewhere. We’ll ... do something! Something nice. Please. I ... I do want to!”
She regarded him.
The desperation he felt was heady and violent. He started to release her hand, then squeezed it harder. Movement happened behind the skin of her face.
Was it pity for him?
He hated it.
Was she searching herself?
What did she have to search for!
Was she considering things to say?
Why didn’t she just say, “yes”?
“All right,” she said. “Yes. I’ll go with you this evening. After our last performance.”
He nearly dropped her hand. Why didn’t she just say—
“Is that all right,” she asked, with that slight, familiar smile, “with you?”
He nodded, abruptly wondering: Where would they go? Back to his guesthouse? To her place? No—he had to take her somewhere. First. And he was a hundred million kilometers from anywhere he knew.
“Meet me here,” she said. “At nine. How’s that? It should be just about half an hour after sunset, if I remember correctly.”
“Yeah,” he said.
“And we’ll go out somewhere.”
He nodded.
“Good.” She pulled her hand away, glanced at him again, hesitated: “Till nine then?” She pushed open the door. “I’ll meet you here.”
“That’s awfully nice of you ...” he remembered to say.
“Not at all,” she said. “It’ll be fun,” and closed the door.
He stood on the narrow sidewalk thinking something was very wrong.
It was not exactly an adventure finding Sam again. But in the hour and a quarter it took him, he decided that whoever had laid out the village must have been certifiably insane. And while there were some jobs that the certifiably insane could do quite well, and while metalogics, as Audri occasionally used to joke at him, was one, city planning was definitely not:
There was a living establishment—the People’s Co-Op—and there, to its left, was some sort of shopping area; and around the corner from that was a small eating place. All fine. Wandering through the small streets, he found another collection of small shops: Was there an eating place around the corner to its right? No. Was there a living establishment—of any sort—to its left? No! He had been quite prepared to find the urban units arranged differently from those on Tethys, as Tethys’s were different from the units of Lux, or Bellona. (Indeed, Tethys employed seven different types of urban units—though for practical purposes you only had to be familiar with two of them to find anything you wanted in most of the city—and Bellona reputedlv, though only one was common, employed nine.) After half an hour it began to dawn that there was no arrangement to this city’s urban units. Half an hour more, and he began to wonder if this city had urban units. The onlv logic he could impute to the layout at all—after having walked up some streets many times and been unable to find others at all that he knew he’d passed—was that most of the shops and eating places seemed to be in one area, within three or four streets of the central square. For the rest, it was catch-as-catch-can.
He found the street with the stone steps just by accident.
In the backvard of the guesthouse, Sam sat at a white enameled table, by his elbow a tall glass of something orange with a straw in it and green leaves sticking out the top. He was looking into a portable reader, his thumb again and again clicking the skimming lever.
“Sam, what is there to do around here at night?”
Click. “Look at the stars, smell the clear air, wander out along the wild hills and meadows.” Click-click—
188 Samuel R.Delany click. “That’s what I’m planning to do, anyway. If you’re stuck in the far reaches of Outer Mongolia, even in this day and age, there isn’t much to do, except figure out more and more interesting ways to relax.” Click-click.
“Do with somebody. I have to take someone out tonight.”
Click; Sam reached for his drink, missed it, got it, and maneuvered the straw into his mouth. Click-click. “The woman you went running after, after breakfast?” He put the drink back on the table (Click); the edge of the glass was just over the side.
Bron narrowed an eye, wondering if he should move it. “I said I would take her someplace exciting. Tonight.”
“I can’t think of anyplace you could—” Sam looked up, frowning. “Wait a second.” He moved the glass back on the table.
Bron breathed.
Sam dug among the rack of pockets down the side of his toga, pulled out a square sheaf of colored paper, which he opened into a rectangle.
Knowing full well what it was, Bron said: “What’s that?”
“Money,” Sam said. “Ever use it?”
“Sure.” There were quite a few places on Mars that still took it.
Sam counted through the sheaf. “There’s a place I’ve been to a couple of times when I’ve passed through here—about seventy-five miles to the north.” He flipped up more bills. “There, that should be enough to take you, your friend, and half her theater commune.” While Sam separated the bills, Bron wondered how Sam knew she was in the theater. But then, maybe he’d found out at breakfast. And Sam was saying: “It’s a restaurant—where they still take this stuff. Some people consider it mildly elegant. Maybe your friend would enjoy it. If nothing else, it’s a giggle.” Sam held out the bills.
“Oh.” Bron took them.
“That’ll cover it, if I remember things right. It’s quite an old place. Dates all the way back to People’s Capitalist China.”
Bron frowned. “I thought that only lasted ten years or so?”
“Six. Anyway, it’s something to take a gawk at, if you’re in the neighborhood. It’s called Swan’s Craw—which I always wondered about. But that’s Capitalist China for you.”
“You say it’s seventy-five miles? I don’t remember quite how much a mile is, but I suspect it’s too far to walk.” Bron folded the bills again and wondered where to put them.
“By a bit. I’ll tell the landlady to make you a reservation. They’ll send a transport for you—you know about tipping and all that sort of thing?”
“In the circles I moved in as a youth, you picked up the etiquette of money along with your monthly checkup for arcane and sundry venereal diseases.” The bill showing was a thousand something—which he knew was as likely to be very little as it was to be a lot. “What is the tipping rate here?” he thought to ask. “Fifteen percent? Twenty?”
“Fifteen is what I was told the first time I went; nobody looked unhappy when I left.”
“Fine.” Bron had no pockets in this particular outfit, so he folded the money again, put it in his other hand, then transferred it back. “You weren’t planning to go there, were you? I mean, if you needed this for yourself ... ?”
“I was planning definitely not to go,” Sam said. “I’ve been half a dozen times before. I really do prefer the open rocks and grass, the night, the stars. I brought the scrip specifically to get you off my neck for at least one evening while we were here, hopefully at something you’d enjoy.”
“Oh,” Bron said. “Well ... thanks.” He looked for a pocket or purse again, again remembered he had none. “Eh ... Where do we go to pick up the transport?”
“Don’t worry,” Sam smiled slightly. “They pick you up.”
“Ah-ha!” Bron said, and felt knowing—“It’s that kind of place—” because there were no such places in the satellites.
“Elegant,” Sam repeated, putting his eyes back down to the reader. Click-click-click. “Hope you enjoy yourself.” Click.
In the room, Bron sat on the bed and wondered what to do till nine o’clock. Minutes into his wonder-ings, the landlady came in, carrying a tray on which was a tall glass filled with something orange, a straw, and leaves.
“You are going to the Craw this evening, with a friend? It is very nice there. You will enjoy it. The reservations have all been made. Worry about nothing more. If you, or your friend, wish to go in period dress, just let me know ... ? Many people enjoy that.”
“Oh,” Bron said. “Sure ...” with a dozen memories returning from his Bellona youth (as the landlady retired): He knew exactly the dress for an expensive, male prostitute, going to a similar, money-establishment on Mars. Certainly not period (the precredit period when money was in use) dress. That marked you immediately as one of those appalling tourists who visited such a place once, twice, maybe three times in their lives, who moved through leaving gentle smiles and snide chuckles. You went in period dress if you owned your own and were known by the establishment; anything else consigned you to that category of velvet contempt for those who did things Not Done. Also, the Spike didn’t know where they were going. Her own dress was likely to be something modern and informal. On the other hand, he didn’t want to go looking like one of those oblivious yokels who wander into such places with no sense that they were, indeed, in a historical institution. No matter how inappropriate the Spike’s dress, if his own, unthinkingly, merely emphasized it, even if she were not offended, she would certainly not be impressed.
And this was Earth—not Mars. His experience of such places was not only from another world: it was from fifteen years in the past. But, he found himself thinking, the essence of such places was anachromism. Even if styles themselves changed in such establishments, the structure of stylistic deployment remained constant. In fact, an elderly woman client (with silver eyelids and cutaway veils, who had once taken him to such a place, where she herself had been going for twenty years) had once said to him as much in Bel-lona. (Her veils and lids recalled, her name and face somehow escaped ...) With such ponderings and reveries, he occupied the rest of the morning: His own clothes, he decided, the ones he had brought, would provide his outfit, whatever he wore. He drank his drink, went out into the garden, looking for Sam—who was gone.
He went back into his room. Well, his own clothes and Sam’s; he was sure Sam wouldn’t mind. And he had gone looking for him to ask.
During the afternoon he spent at least two hours sitting in the garden trying forceably to relax. Each time, the landlady appeared with a drink. He’d assumed it contained some drug or other—caffeine, alcohol, sugar? But, from all effects, it was metabolically neutral. (Vaguely he remembered something about an Earth law preventing the administration of drugs of any sort without prior and complicated announcement and consent.) By eight he had laid out his clothing:
One silver sleeve with floor-length fringe (Sam had two in his bag, but only a prostitue would go to such a place so flamboyantly symmetrical: two would have been all right for breakfast, barely acceptable at lunch. But supper—?) and a silver harness (his own) rather like a Tethys e-girl’s, and the silver briefs that matched it: a black waist-pouch (Sam’s) for the money. No pouch at all (implying secret pockets) would have marked him (again) as a prostitute. His own pouch, with its inset mirrors and flashing lights, in such a situation would have identified him as a prostitute’s client. He agonized over the footwear for half an hour, till suddenly he had a brilliant idea: First his own, soft, black boots—then he rummaged Sam’s makeup kit out of the bottom of Sam’s bag and, with the plastic lacquer, carefully painted his gold eyebrow (occasionally stopping to brush at the shaggy real one with his thumb) black.
He had the lacquer-remover out, sure that he would have to redo it half a dozen times; he had never done it before (at least not in black) and was sure he would get paint all over his face. Crane and squint as he would at the magnifying mirror, however, he had done, with three strokes, a perfect job.
There!
Balance, he thought; a-symmetry, and coherence. All the ideals of fashion bowed to, yet none groveled at.
And it was ten to nine.
He pulled on the chosen clothes, hurried downstairs, out the door, into the deep-blue evening, and down the street’s stone steps (fringe a waterfall of light), thinking: Don’t think in urban units. Don’t. There aren’t anyl
First he hoped to arrive a minute or two before she came out; then that she would be already there so he would not have to wait.
As he rounded the corner of the People’s Co-Oper-ative, the yellow door opened; three people came out. Two were diggers. The person they said good-bye to, who waved after them, and who now leaned against the door jamb to wait, in something sleeveless and ankle-length and black, her short hair silver now as Bron’s (or rather Sam’s) sleeve fringe, was the Spike.
The diggers passed. One smiled. Bron nodded. The Spike, still leaning, with folded arms, called: “Hello! That’s timing for you!” and laughed. Smoothly. On one forearm, she wore a silvery gauntlet, damasked with intricate symbols. As he approached, she stood up, held out her hands.
Left arm a-dangle with silver, he took her hands in his, and chuckled. “How good to see you again!”—feeling for a moment that he was twenty and she was thirty and this were some assignation on another world.
“I hope,” she said, “that we’re not going anyplace where I’ll need my shoes ... ? If we are, I’ll dash up and get some—”
“We are going someplace where someone as stunning as you may wear—” There was a ritual completion to the line:—anything you can afford, including my heart on your sleeve. But he was not twenty: this was here, this was now—“anything you like.” Their hands joined in a fourway knot. “Actually, I had a little place in mind about seventy-five miles to the north of here—the Swan’s Crawl” He smiled. “No, don’t laugh. That’s just Capitalist China for you. It wasn’t very long-lived, so we have to be tolerant.”
She wasn’t laughing though; she was beaming. “You know—I had the slightest precognition that we just might be heading there.” She leaned toward him con-spiratorially. “I’m afraid I don’t have any money, though. And wouldn’t know what to do with it if I did. I’ve never been near anyplace that ever used it. Windy and Charo went the first night we came—I was busy with company matters—and though I’ve got plenty of credit, I’m afraid they used up the quota of scrip for the three of us.”
He thought fondly: You’d make a lousy whore: that’s the line you use afterwards. But she probably meant it, which made him, momentarily, even more fond. “The evening’s on me—Sam, actually. He’s government. Money? He’s got a limitless supply, and he’s invited us to enjoy ourselves.”
“How very nice of him! Why isn’t he coming with us?”
“Hates the stuff himself.” Bron turned, took her arm. They started down the street. “Won’t touch it. When he’s on the old racial spawning grounds, it’s all rocks and grass and stars for him.”
“I see ...”
“You haven’t been there before, have you?” He halted. “I’ll be honest, it’s my first time ...”
“No, I haven’t. And Windy and Charo were tantaliz-ingly vague in their descriptions.”
“I see ...” He frowned at her silvered hair. “How did you know where we’d be going, though?”
Her laugh (and she started him walking again by the gentlest pressure on their joined arms—as if he were twenty and she from another world) was silvery as her hair. “When you’re in Outer Mongolia, even in this day and age, I suspect they’re just not that many places to go.”
A whispering, which, for seconds, had been on the edge of consciousness, suddenly centered his attention.
Bron looked up.
Something dark crossed the paler dark between the roofs and, humming even louder, returned to hover, then to settle, across the road.
It was sleek, unwinged, about the size of the vehicle he and Sam had ridden in for the last leg of their journey here.
The side opened—let down like a drawbridge on heavy, polished chain, its purple padding held with six-inch purple poms.
“Why,” the Spike exclaimed, “that must be for us! How did thev ever find us, I wonder?”
“I believe it is for us.”—but, with a pressure just firmer than that with which she had started him walking, he held her back from bolting forward. “Someone once told me they worked by sense of smell, but I’ve never reallv understood it. How did your performance go tonight?” Nonchalantly, he maintained their ambling pace. “Was this evening’s fortunate audience appreciative? I gather you’ve been working prettv hard on this one, both from what you said and what Windy—”
At which point the Spike whispered: “Oh—!” because four footmen had come out to stand at the four corners of the lowered platform—four naked, gilded, rather attractive young ... women? Bron felt a moment of disorientation: on Mars, the footmen would have been male, usually themselves prostitutes (or one-time prostitutes), there for the delectation of the ladies paying the bill. But male prostitution was illegal on Earth. The women probably were prostitutes, or had been at one time or another; and were there for his delectation ... Well, yes, he thought, he was, officially, paying—which did not upset him in itself. But the reversal of roles was odd. After all, it was the Spike’s delectation he was concerned with this evening. And,
Charo aside, she had made it clear her lesbian leanings were rather intellectual. He said: “I’d be interested to know what you thought of Earth audiences now that you’ve had another performance.”
“Well, I ...” They reached the platform. “Urn ... good evening!” she blurted to the woman beside her, who smiled, nodded.
Bron smiled too, thinking: She’s talking to them! Which again (he realized, as a whole part of his youth flickered and faded) would be all right if she were paying and had known the young ... lady on a previous occasion ...
They walked across the plush ramp, entered the chamber with its red and coppery cushions, its viewing windows, its several plush hangings, its scarlet-draped walls.
As he guided the Spike to one of the couches, she turned to him. “Isn’t there someplace where you can find out what it all costs?”
Which made him laugh out loud. “Certainly,” he said. “If you’d really like to know.” Again, that youthful moment returned—the client who had first taken him to such a place; his own demand for the same importunate information. “Let me see—sit down. There ....” He sat beside her, on her left, took the arm of the couch and tugged. Nothing. (Is everything on this planet backward? he wondered.) “Excuse me ...” He reached across her, tugged the arm on her right. It came up, revealing on its underside, in a neatly-glassed frame, a card printed in terribly small type, headed: Explication de Tarif.
“You can find out there,” he explained, “about the salary of everyone we will have anything to do with this evening, either in person or by their services, the cost of all the objects we shall see or use, or that are used for us, the cost of their upkeep, and how the prices we shall be charged are computed—I wouldn’t be surprised, considering this is Earth, if it even went into the taxes.”
“Ohhhh ...” she breathed, turning in the comfortable seat to read.
The ramp was hauling closed. The footmen, inside now, took their places.
He looked at her shoulders, hunched in concentration. He suppressed the next chuckle. There was nothing to do: for the duration she simply must be the prostitute, and he must play the client. She was the young, inexperienced hustler, committing all the vulgarities and gaucheries natural to the situation. He must be charmed, be indulgent, assured in his own knowledge of the proper. Otherwise, he thought, I shall never get through the evening without laughing at her outright.
She was, he realized, reading the whole thing—which, frankly, was more like a diligent tourist. The real pleasure, of course, was in the amounts, and those you could get at a glance: they were printed in boldface.
The footmen, at the four corners of the chamber, sat at little tables that folded from the wall. Tables? Sitting? That was bizarre. What, he reflected, was a footman for if he (or she) did not remain on foot?
The chamber rocked. Ripples rained the drapes. He touched the Spike’s arm. “I think we’re on our way ....”
She looked up, looked around, and laughed. They rocked, they jogged. On a view window a darkness, either clouds or mountains, moved. “This thing must date back from when they first got gravity under control!” she exclaimed. “I doubt if I’ve ever been in a piece of transportation as old as this before!” She put her hand on his, squeezed it.
Moments later, they locked course; the jogging stopped. On cue, one of the footmen rose, walked toward them, stepping gingerly among the cushions, stopped before them, and inclined her head: “Would you like a drink before dinner ... ?”
And in one horrifying moment, Bron realized he could not remember the name of that most expensive of drinks! What leapt to his mind was the name of that one, indeed, tastier, but cheaper—and by which one always rated clients Definitely Second Rate (far and above the most usual type) if they ordered it, or even suggested it.
The Spike was reading the Tarif again.
Discomfort concealed—Bron was sure it was concealed—he touched her arm once more. “My dear, the footman would like to know if you wanted anything.”
Her eyes came up. Smiling, she gave an embarrassed little shrug. “Oh, I don’t—well ... really ...”
He’d hope the misremembered name had passed her eyes, that its huge price had caught them.
She blinked at him, still smiling, still confused.
It hadn’t. (She would make a lousy whore, he thought, a trifle less fondly.) He said: “Do you have any ... Gold Flower Nectar?” The small of his back moistened; but it was the only name he could remember. (His forehead moistened too.) “No—No ... I think we’ll have something more expensive. I mean, you must have something more expensive that ... well, don’t you ... ?”
“We have Gold Flower Nectar,” the young woman said, nodding. “Shall I bring two?”
A drop of sweat ran down his arm, inside Sam’s borrowed sleeve. Seconds into the silence, the Spike said, glancing back and forth between the footmen and Bron, “Yes! That sounds marvelous.”
The footman nodded, started to turn, then, with a quizzical expression, asked: “You’re from Mars, aren’t you?” Bron thought: She thinks I’m a cheap Bellona John and the Spike is a really dumb whore! A sweat drop ran out of his sideburn and down his jaw.
The Spike laughed again. “No. I’m afraid we’re moonies. We’re part of the cultural exchange program.”
“Oh.” The woman nodded, smiled. “We keep Gold Flower Nectar mostly for the Martian clients—it really is very good,” which went directly to Bron, with a wink. “Earthies hardly ever even know about it!” She bowed again, turned, and went back between the curtains behind her table.
The Spike took Bron’s arm now, leaned closer. “Isn’t that marvelous! She thought we were from a worldl” She giggled. For a moment her forehead touched his cheek. (He almost flinched.) “I know it’s all play-acting, but it really is exciting ... if only as theater.”
“Well ...” he said, trying to smile, “I’m glad you’ie enjoying yourself.”
She squeezed his wrist. “And the way you seem to know exactly what’s going on, you really are the perfect person to go with!”
“Well ... thank you,” he said. “Thank you,” because he could think of nothing else to say.
“Tell me ...” And once more she leaned. “Isn’t ‘footmen’ a masculine word, though—I mean on Earth?”
Though he was no longer perspiring, he felt miserable. Her attempt at distraction merely goaded. Bron shrugged. “Oh, well ... isn’t ’e-girl’ a feminine one?”
“Yes,” she said, “but this is Earth, where such things traditionally—I’ve been led to understand—matter.”
He shrugged again, wishing that she would simply leave him alone. The footman returned, drinks on a mirrored tray.
He handed the Spike hers, took his. “Why don’t you let me pay as we go along,” he suggested.
“It would be just as convenient if you paid at the end,” the footman said, still smiling, but a little less. “Though if you’d prefer ... ?”
The Spike sipped. “From what we hear at home, convenience is supposed to be very important on Earth. Why don’t we do it that way?” Then she glanced at Bron; who nodded.
The footman nodded too—“Thank you—” and retired to her table.
Bron sipped the drink, whose flavor was all nostalgia, all memory, all of which announced so blaringly that it was not fifteen years ago (when he had last tasted it), that this was not Mars: that there were footwomen here instead of footmen; that convenience was the tradition (Then why, he wondered, momentarily angry, indulge an institution whose only purpose was inconvenient extravagance?), and that he was an uninitiate tourist.
No!
Play-acting it may be!
But that was a role he could not accept Both temperament and experience, however inadequate and outdated, denied it. He turned to the beaming Spike. “You still haven’t told me how the performance went this evening.”
“Ah ...” she said, leaning back and crossing her bare feet on the cushions before her, “the performance ... !”
Three times (Bron sat, dreading each one) the other three footmen offered them (the Spike liked Gold Flower Nectar—well, he liked it too. But that wasn’t the point) another drink, the second with the traditional nuts, the third with small fruits—olives, which he remembered as the hallmark of the best places. They offered three kinds, too: black, green, and yellow. He was impressed, which depressed him more. The client’s job was to impress, not be impressed. It was the client’s iob to supervise effects, to oversee, to direct the excellent performance. It was not, at this point anyway, her (or his) place to be carried away. With the next drink, they were offered a tray of small fish and meat delicacies, served on savory pastrv bases. With the last, thev were offered sweets, which Bron refused. “Afterwards,” he explained to her. “they’ll probably have some quite incredible confections, so we can pass these up in all good faith.”
She nodded appreciatively.
Then, there was light through the view window. Excitedly, the Spike leaned across him to look. The chamber began to jog and jerk. Abruptly the jerking ceased: they’d landed. The purple-pommed wall-ramp let down on its chains. Outside lights blazed in the distance and the darkness. The footmen rose to take their positions at the ramp’s four corners.
As they were walking between the first two, Bron said (In his mind he had gone over just how to say it several times): “/ think it was presumptuous to assume we were from Mars—or the Satellites. Or anyplace. How should they know, just from what we order, where we’re from?” He didn’t say it loudly. But he didn’t say it softly, either.
By the end of his statement, his glance, which had gone with calculated leisure around the night, reached the Spike—who was frowning. With folded arms, she slowed at the edge of the plush (by the last footman). “I suspect,” she said, with one slightly raised eyebrow, “it was because you called them ‘footmen.’ On the Explication de Tarif they’re called ‘hostesses.’
‘Footmen’ is probably the Martian term.”
Bron frowned, wondering why she chose that statement to slow down on. “Oh ...” he said, stepping from the end of the ramp, his eyes again going around the rocks, the railing, the waterfall. “Oh, well ... of course. Well, perhaps we’d better ...”
But the Spike, walking too, moved on a step ahead.
Beyond the red velvet ropes that railed the curving walk, rocks broke away, broke away further. Floodlights, lighting this tree or that bush, made the sky black and close as a u-1 ceiling.
“Isn’t it odd,” the Spike said, her statement oddly tangent to Bron’s thoughts, “you can’t tell whether it’s endless or enclosed—the whole space, I mean.”
Bron looked over another rail, where the torrents crashed. Above, was the moon. “I think ...” he said (she turned to look too), “it’s endless.”
“Oh, I didn’t even see that!” Her arm brushed his as she stepped around him to the rope. “Why it’s—”
“Look,” he said, not meaning the scenery. She looked back at him. “I think, convenience or no, I must pay them now—if only for the theater.” And before she could comment, or protest, he went back to the purple platform.
Bron stopped before the nearest, gold-skinned footman, his hand on his purse. “You served us that last drink, didn’t you?—and it was certainly a marvelous one, considering my thirst and the exhausting day I’ve had till now. Whatever it says on the menu ... ten, eleven? Twelve ♦ .. ?” (It had said eight-fifty.) He fingered into the drawn, leather neck—“Well, your smile alone made it worth half again that much.”—and pulled out two bills, the top one the twenty he’d expected. “Do you want it—?”
The footman’s gilded lids widened.
“Do you ... ?”
Separating the twenty off from the other bill (which was a thirty), Bron stepped up on the platform, held the bill high overhead. “Here it is, then—jump for it! Jump!”
The footman hesitated a moment, bit at her golden, lower lip, eyes still up, then leaped, grabbing Bron’s shoulder.
He let go of the bill. While it fluttered, he shrugged off her hand and stepped toward the next footman, the next bill in his fingers. “But you, my dear—” He felt ridiculous engaging in such banter, however formalized, with women—“you provided the first one, the one that relieved the parching thirst we arrived with. That alone triples the price! Here, my energetic one—” He held the note down beside his knee. “Do you want it? There it is. Crawl for it! Crawl ... !” He let the bill flutter to the ground, and turned again, as the woman dove after it. “And you two—” He pulled out two more bills, one in each hand—“don’t think I’ve forgotten the services you rendered. Yet ... somehow though I remember, I cannot quite distinguish them. Here is a twenty and a thirty. You may fight over which one of you deserves which.” He tossed the two bills up in the air, and stepped over one of the women who was already down on her knees, scrabbHng after one of the others. Behind him, he heard the second two start to go at it.
Bron stepped from the platform (cries; scufrlings; more cries behind him) and walked toward the Snike. She stood with palms pressed together at her chin, eyes wide, mouth opened—suddenly she bent with laughter.
Bron glanced back to where, on the pommed purple, the four footmen scuffled, laughing and pummeling one another.
“That’s ...” the Spike began, but broke up again. “That’s marvelous!”
Bron took her arm and turned her along the walkway.
Still laughing, she craned back to look. “If it wasn’t so perfect in itself, I’d use it in a production!” Her eyes came back to his. “I’d never have thought money could still do that ... ?”
“Well, considering the mythology behind it, and its rarity—”
The Spike laughed again. “I suppose so, but—”
“I spent a spell as a footman myself, once,” Bron said, which wasn’t exactly untrue: he had once shared a room in Bellona with two other prostitutes who had; and had even been offered a job ... something’d come up, though. “It gets to you.”
“That’s really incredible!” The Spike shook her head. Tm surprised they don’t tear it to pieces!”
“Oh, you learn,” Bron said. “And of course, like all of this, it’s all basically just a kind of ... well, Annie-show.” He gestured toward the rocks, the sky, the falls, which ran under the transparent section of path they walked over (moss, froth, and clear swirls of green passed beneath his black boots and her bare feet) toward fanning columns of green glass that were the Craw’s entrance.
The Spike rubbed a finger on her gauntlet. “This—if you look closely—has logarithmic scales. The middle band turns, so you can use it as a sort of slide rule.” She laughed. “From what I’ve always heard, you needed a computer to figure almost anything to do with money. But I guess somebody used to it gets by on pure flamboyance.”
Bron laughed now. “Well, it helps to know what you’re doing. It is dangerous. It’s addictive, no question. But I think the Satellites’ making it illegal is going too far. And you just couldn’t set up anything on this scale in the u-1.” The columns, seventy or eighty of them he could see, rose perhaps a hundred feet. “Besides, I doubt it would even catch on. We’re—you’re just the wrong temperament out there ... I mean, I like living in a voluntaristic society. With money, though, I suppose getting your hands on a bit once or twice a year is enough.”
“Oh, certainly ...” The Spike folded her arms, glanced back between them again. Bron put his arm round her shoulder.
He glanced back too.
The ramp had closed; the footmen were gone.
There were other walkways, other craft, other people ambling among the rocks.
Another footman, breasts and hips and hair dull bronze, stood beside what looked like a green ego-booster booth, curtained with multi-colored sequins. Bron pressed a small bill into the dull bronze palm. “Please ... ?”
She turned, drew the curtain. The interior was white enamel. The man who stepped out wore the traditional black suit with black silk lapels, black cummerbund, and small black bow at the collar of his white, white shirt. “Good evening, Mr Helstrom.” He stepped forward, smiled, nodded—“Good evening, ma’am.”—smiled, nodded to the Spike, who, somewhat taken aback, said:
“Uh ... hello!”
“How nice to see you tonight. We’re delighted that you decided to drop by this evening. Let’s all just go this way—” They were already walking together among the first fanning pillars of marbled green—“and we’ll see what we can do about finding you a table. What mood are you in tonight ... water? fire? earth? air? ... perhaps some combination? Which would you prefer?”
Bron turned, smiled at the Spike. “Your choice—?”
“Oh, well, I ... I mean, I don’t know what ... well, could we have all four? Or would that be ... ?” She looked questioningly at Bron.
“One could ...” The majordomo smiled.
“But I think,” Bron said, “it might be a bit distracting.” (She was charming ... All four? Really!) “We’ll settle for earth, air, and water; and leave fire for another time.” He looked at the Spike. “Does that suit you ... ?”
“Oh, certainly,” she said, quickly.
“Very well, then. Just come this way.”
And they were beyond the columns. The domo, though pleasant, Bron decided, was getting away with only the bare necessities. Those little extras of personality and elan that individualized the job, the evening, the experience (“. , . that you can never pay for but, nevertheless, you do” as one rather witty client of his had once put it) were missing. Of course, they were something you got by revisiting such a place frequently—not by being a tourist. But Bron was sure he looked used to such places; and the Spike’s evident newness to the whole thing should have elicited some more humane reaction. They certainly looked like they might come back.
“Just up here.”
The domo led them onto the grass ... Yes, they were inside. But the ceiling, something bright and black and multilayered and interleaved, was very far away.
“Excuse me ... this way, sir.”
“Uh?” Bron looked down. “Of course.” It was, very simply, Bron realized, that he did not like the man.
“This grass ... !” the Spike exclaimed. “It feels so wonderful to walk on!” She ran a few steps up the slope, turned and, with an ecstatic shrug, beamed back at them.
Bron smiled, and noticed that the domo’s professional smile had softened a little. Which damped Bron’s own a bit.
“We roll it once a day and trim it twice a week,” the majordomo said. “It’s nice when someone notices and actually bothers to comment.”
The Spike held out her hand to Bron, who walked up, took it.
“It is a beautiful place!” she said; and to the domo: “Which way did you say ... ?”
The domo, still smiling, and with a slight bow—“This way, then.”—started up the slope, in a direction Bron noticed was not the one they’d begun in.
The waterfall crashing outside apparently began in here, several levels above. For almost ten minutes they could hear it. Between high rocks, they climbed—
“Oh, my ...” the Spike whispered.
—and saw it.
“Will this do?” The domo pulled out one of the plush chairs, moved around the table on the grass, pulled out the other.
They were practically at the top of the immense en-closure. Water frothed beside them, rushing away down the rocks, both in front and in back of them. They had a view of tier after tier of the restaurant.
“What a breathtaking location ... !” the Spike exclaimed.
“Some people don’t like to walk this far,” the domo explained. “But you seemed to be enjoying yourself. Personally, I think it’s worth it.”
Bron9s hand was on his purse, prepared to offer the ritual bill and the ritual request for a better table. But it was a good location. Really, he thought, you shouldn’t accept the first place they showed you—clients never did on Mars; besides, he wanted to make the man work.
“Sir ... ?” The majordomo raised an attendant eyebrow.
“Well ...” Bron mused. “I don’t know____”
“Oh do let’s sit here! It was such a lovely walk, after such a lovely ride. I can’t picture a happier destination!”
Bron smiled, shrugged, and for the second time felt the perspiration of embarassment break on the small of his back. The Spike was overdoing it. They should have been shown some other place first and this one second. That would have been the proper way. Who did these people think they were? “This is fine,” Bron said, shortly. “Oh ... here.” He pressed the bill on the domo—it would look ridiculous to hunt out a smaller one.
“Thank you, sir.” The nod and the smile were brief. “Would you like another drink while I bring you the menu?”
“Yes,” Bron said. “Please.”
“You were drinking ... ?”
And Bron remembered the name of that drink: Chardoza. “Gold Flower Nectar.”
“It is delicious!” The Spike dropped into her chair, put her elbows on the high arms and locked both hands, inelegantly, beneath her chin, stretched both feet under the table and crossed her ankles.
The domo’s laugh was, momentarily, almost sincere.
The metal leaves on the table’s centerpiece fell open. The drinks rolled out on marbled, green-glass trays.
Bron frowned—but then, the domo would have known what they were drinking before Bron had even summoned him from his cabinet.
Bron sat in his own chair across from the Spike and thought: She is totally delightful and totally upsetting. Somehow, though, the realization had crystalized: Play the client as he might, there was no way he could fit her into the role of his younger self. Her gaucheries, enthusiasms, and eccentricities simply had nothing to do with his own early visits to the Craw’s Bellona brothers—for one thing, she simply did not despise him the way he had despised those who had escorted him there, so that, in the game of dazzling and impressing in which he was busily racking up points, she was just not playing. What am I doing here? he thought, suddenly. Twice now he had been reduced to the sweat of mortification—and probably would be so reduced again before the evening ended. But at least (he thought on) I know what to be mortified about. Both discomforts and pleasures assured him this was his territory. The sweat dried. He picked up the cold glass, sipped. And realized that, for the duration of his thoughts, the Spike had been silent. “Is something the matter?”
She lifted her eyebrows, then her chin from her meshed knuckles. “No ...”
Smiling, he said: “Are you sure? Are you positive? There’s nothing about my manner, my bearing, my clothing that you disapprove of?”
“Don’t be silly. You know your way around places like this—which makes it twice the fun. You’ve obviously taken a great deal of time with your clothes—which I thoroughly appreciate: That’s why I didn’t go with Windy and Charo. They insisted on going in their digging duds, right after work.”
“Well, the joy of a place like this is that you can come as formal or as informal as you like.”
“But if you’re going to indulge an anachronism, you might as well indulge it all the way. Really,” and she smiled, “if I were the type to get upset over anyone’s clothes, Windy would have cured me long ago.” Now she frowned. “I suppose the reason I didn’t go with them is that I know, deep down, part of his reason for coming is to be scandalous, or at least to dare anyone to be scandalized. Which can be fun, if you’re in the mood. But I have other things to do, right now—The two of you, in your youth, shared a profession.”
“Yes. I know,” Bron said, but could not, for the moment, remember how he knew. Had she alluded to it? Or had Windy?
“He has some very unpleasant memories associated with places like this.”
“Then why does he come back?”
She shrugged. “I suppose ... well, he wants to show off.”
“And be scandalous?”
Her lower lip inside her mouth, the Spike smiled. “Charo said she had a fine time. They said I should really try and come if I could.”
“Then I hope you have an equally, or even finer, time.”
She nodded. “Thank you.”
The domo, at his shoulder, announced: “Your menu ... ma’am?”
“Oh!” The Spike sat up, took the huge, velvet-backed and many-paged folder.
“... sir?”
Bron took his, trying to recall if, on Mars, they gave the menu first to the man, then the woman; or was it first to the younger, then the older; or was it the client, then the—
“Perhaps you’d like a little more air than that?” The domo reached up, snapped his fingers. The interleaved mirrors (after their ten-minute, uphill hike, only a dozen feet above them now) began to rise, turn, and fold back from the stars.
A breeze touched them.
The tablecloth’s edge brushed Bron’s thigh.
“I’ll just leave you for a minute to make your choices. When you reach your decision—” A smile, a nod—“I’ll be back.” And he was gone behind a rock.
The Spike shook her head, wonderingly. “What an amazing place!” She turned her chair (the seat swiv-eled) to look down the near slope. “I mean, I don’t think I’ve ever been in an enclosed space this large before!” It was at least six hundred yards to the top of the slope across from them. Some of the intervening space was filled with great rocks, small mountains, hillocks of grass, artificial ramps, platforms and terraced surfaces where, here and there, another table stood, tiny with distance, with or without diners bending to their meals. They could see a dozen furnace-fires where, from the equipment ranged around, the more brutal cooking was done.
Other customers, singly or in groups, accompanied by their own, black-clad domos, ambled along the paths, over the ramps. The far rise, slashed in three places by falling water, looked like some battlefield, at night, lit by a hundred scattered campfires on the dark, green, and craggy slopes. The multimirrored ceiling, as soon as their eyes drifted away thirty feet, was endlessly a-flicker with a million times the stars in any normal sky.
“Out where we come from—” the Spike’s voice brought him back—“I guess we just never have this much space to waste. Well—” She opened her menu—“what in the world” and glanced at him, up from under lowered brows, with a half-smile that brought him the political significance only seconds later, “shall we have to eat?”
And while he was trying to remember the name of that dish he’d had on his first visit to this kind of establishment in Bellona, the Spike began to read out various selections, their accompanying descriptions, the descriptions of traditional accompaniments, the small essays on the organization of meals customary for various cuisines. As Bron turned pages, “... Austrian sausage ...” caught his eye; he stared at it, trying to recall why it intrigued him. But then she said something that struck him so funny he laughed out loud. (He let the page fall over.) Then they were both laughing. He read out three selections—all of which were hysterical. Somehow, with much hilarity (and another round of Gold Flower Nectar) they constructed a meal that began with a clear suomono, followed by oysters Rockefeller, grilled quail, boeuf au saucisse en chemise—sometime amidst all this, a steam-boat of fresh vegetables arrived at one side of the table and an ice-boat of crudites at the other; the wines began with a Champa-gnoise for the oysters, then a Pommard with the quail, and a Macon with the roast.
Bron paused with his fork in a piece of the tissuey crust that had chemisee’6. the boeuf. “I love you,” he said. “Throw up the theater. Join your life to mine. Become one with me. Be mine. Let me possess you wholly.”
“Mad, marvelous man—” Carefully, with chopsticks, she lifted a broccoli spear from the top tier of bubbling broth: the coals through the steam-boat’s grill-work glowed in her gauntlet—“not on your life.”
“Why not? I love you.” He put down his fork. “Isn’t that enough?”
Gingerly, she ate her broccoli.
“Is it,” he asked, leaning forward, “that I’m just not your type? I mean physically? You’re only turned on by dwarfish little creatures who can do backflips, is that it?”
“You’re very much my type,” she said. “That’s why I’m here. On the animal line—and I do think that’s to be appreciated—you’re really most spectacular. I think large, blond, Scandinavians are quite the most gorgeous things in the world.”
“But I’m still not a monkey who can swing through the trees by his tail, or who comes to places like this in his digging duds.” He’d realized he’d been offended by her remark only halfway through his own. “Or, for that matter, a long-haired young lady who sits around and tinkles folksongs.” He hoped the smile he put on now mitigated some of what, to his ears, sounded a bit harsh. “Alas, what can I do about these minor failings?”
Her smile was slightly reproving. “You have your own charm. And your numerous rough points ... But also charm.”
“Charm enough for you to come away with me forever?”
“Now it’s my turn to say, ‘Alas.’” She took the last of her broccoli between her teeth, drew the ivory sticks away. “No.”
He said: “You’ve never been in love, then. That’s it. Your heart is all stone. You’ve never had the heat of true passion melt it to life. Otherwise, you’d know I speak the truth and you’d surrender.”
“Damned if I do and damned if I don’t, huh?” She put down the chopsticks, picked up her fork, and cut at her beef. “Actually, I have been in love.”
“You mean with Windy and Charo?”
“No. With them I am merely happy—a state, by the way, I value very highly, ‘mere’ as it is.”
“Do you mean the lady you got refixated for, then?”
“No. Not even that. This was just a matter of the old, ordinary chemistry I was born with.” She ate another bite and, with foreknuckle, brushed away crumbs from her lower lip. “In fact, I think I’m going to tell you about it. I have, really, been in love. And what’s more, it was really and truly and dramatically unrequited. Yes, I am going to tell you. So just listen—I haven’t got it all rehearsed, now, so it’s going to come out very clumsily—who knows, even uglily. And I haven’t any idea if anything in it will mean anything to you. But I’m sure somewhere in it the right feeling, if not the right words, will be there. Like the Book of the Dead, or something: just read it once, and when you need it—when you can use it—you have to trust the necessary information will come back to you, if you just let it all flow through your ears even once. I used to teach—or rather, for the past few years because the company has been doing so well, we’ve been doing a sort of solstice seminar at Lux University. In theater. And I—”
The story was unclear. And clumsy. It had something to do with walking into her seminar room on the first evening, three years or five years ago, and seeing one student who was wearing only a fur vest and a knife—strapped to his foot; then there was something about a lot of drugs. He was either selling them or buying them ... Oh, yes, she had been struck practically inarticulate by him the moment she had walked into the room.
“Well, how did you teach the class then?’* Oh, she explained (in the middle of explaining something else), she was very good at that. (At what? but she was going on:) He and one of the other, older students, had asked her, after the class, to contribute a running credit draft to a beer fund. (They were making beer in someone’s back room.) Then, somehow, she was staying at his place. Then more drugs. And he was taking her, first with a group of friends who made candles, to hear a singer at an intimate club, then to visit a commune out in the ice—on his skimmer, which she sounded like she was more impressed with than she was with him, and then to see some friends of hers way away—the class had finished by now—and he was apparently the nephew of some famous naturalist and explorer Bron had actually heard of in connection with the Callisto ice-fields where there was an ice “forest” and the ice “beach” named after him; but this story had taken place on Iapetus, not Callisto—and “... when obviously it wasn’t going to work out, and I had spent two weeks—at least!—without being straight one minute, you’d think it was his religion]—really, it was like walking around with your skull all soft and your meninges stripped away and every impulse from every sensation in the Solar System detonating your entire brain—you understand, the sex had been absolutely great as far as / was concerned. But the physical thing just wasn’t him (he was one of your mystic types)—well, there was nothing for me to do but ... leave. Because I loved him absolutely more than anything else in the world. I slept the last night in the same room with him, on a blanket on the floor. Once I tried to rape him, I believe. He said fuck off. So I did, and later he said I could hold him if it would make me feel better, and I realized that I didn’t want that. So I said, thanks, no. Brunnhilde on her bed of flame could not have burned more than I! (He said I was too intense—!) I lay there, all night, on the floor beside him, completely alone with myself, waiting for a dawn I was perfectly sure would never come.
“And that morning, he hugged me; and then he took me to the shuttle. And he gave me a notebook—the cover was blue plastic with the most amazing designs running through. And I was so happy I almost died. And kept writing him letters till he wrote me back—you see, one of my friends had said: ‘You know, you’ve destroyed his life. He’s never met anyone like you before, who thought he was that important!’ And that was years ago. I just got a letter from him last week; he calls me one of the people he loves] You see ... ? If you really love someone, and it’s obvious that it’s impossible, you’ll do that. Even that. You see?” He had no idea what that was, either. While he listened, he found himself again remembering the occurrences back in the earthie cell. Whatever had that actually been about? Would the Spike have any suggestions? He longed to interrupt her monologue to ask. But Sam had said the subject was verboten ... a matter of life, death, and would bo so forever. Still, it made him feel rather romantic ... if he could just suppress the frustration. And somehow, she was back in what seemed like the middle of the story, explaining that, you see, he had been older than the other students, that she didn’t even like children as a rule, though one had to make an exception for Charo—who was nineteen—because Charo was, in many ways, exceptional. Then there was something about a lot of pictures taken on an ice-ledge, naked, in the skimmer with the Catherine of Cleves Book of Hours—who, he wondered, was Catherine of Cleves, and where did the ice-ledge get into the whole thing? Really, he was trying to follow. But during the last moments of her recounting, he’d noticed, just to her left, another group passing below, their majordomo leading them along on the paths and ramps toward their secluded table.
As he watched the four men and three women walking, Bron suddenly frowned, sat slightly forward. “Do you know,” he said “—excuse me—but do you know that out of all the customers I’ve seen here, there isn’t one wearing shoes!”
The Spike frowned too. “Oh ... Well, yes. That’s the one concession Windy made to fashion, when he came here with Charo. In fact, just before I left, he reminded me to take mine off, in case this was where we were going—but really ...” Suddenly she giggled, drawing her own feet back under her chair (In his boots, Bron’s own toes began to tingle)—“they are terribly informal here. Windy said bare feet are ... well, encouraged—to enjoy the grass—but they really don’t care what you wear!”
“Oh.” Bron settled back; the majordomo came to flamb6 the bananas Foster—one red-gowned waiter pushed up a burning brazier, another a cart on which were the fruit, the brandies, the iced crime brulei. The various courses had actually been served by these high-coiffed and scarlet-gowned women. (They had women as waiters, too! And in a place like this!) During his first months on Triton, Bron had gotten used to people in positions of authority frequently of an unexpected sex. But people in positions of service were something else.
Butter frothed in the copper skillet. The domo ran his paring knife around a ring of orange rind, of lemon peel: in with the praline, the sugar; then the deft stripping of the white bananas, peel already baked black; and, after a sprinkling of brandies and a tilting of the pan, a whoooshl of flame.
“You see,” the majordomo said, laughing, tilting the pan. “Madame ends up with fire, water, earth, and air nevertheless!”
The Spike beamed with wide eyes and clasped hands. “It’s quite a production.”
With his heels pressed tight together beneath his chair, Bron spooned among the tiny flames that now chased one another around his dessert plate and began to eat the most entrancing confection he had ever tasted, while the sweat rose again on his neck and back. What was so awful (the Spike was now blithely chatting to the black-clad domo and one of the scarlet-gowned waiters—of course ‘waitress’ was the word, but it seemed so out of place in a place like this—who were evidently amused by whatever it was she was saying), was that they knew exactly (for a second he searched the domo’s and the waiters’ faces for some sign, look, or gesture to confirm their knowledge; but no confirmation was needed: It was obvious from the entire situation’s play and interplay. Bron sank back into his chair), exactly what they were: That she was new to all this, which they found delightful; and that he was someone who, on another world, had probably been taken to some similar establishment a dozen-odd times under dubious circumstances but that he had not been near such a place for at least fifteen years. Miserably, he spooned up the tongue-staggering sweet.
There were cheeses to taper off. There was coffee. There were brandies. From somewhere he dredged up a reaction to the Spike’s resumption of her story about the affair with her student. What she had been telling him was important to her, he realized. Probably very important. But it had been unclear. And, what’s more, dull. There comes a point, Bron decided, where for your own safety you have to take that amount of dull for the same as dumb. Which, he found himself thinking, applied to most of the Universe.
“Do you see?” she asked. “Do you see?”
He said: “I think I do,” sincerely as he could manage.
She sighed, disbelieving.
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.