Triton (Trouble on Triton) (17 page)

Over the next six minutes, Bron listened to drawers sliding, cupboard doors clacking—something overturned; a man’s voice (Windy’s?) protested gruffly; a guitar tinkled; the same man laughed; more drawers; then her own voice saying in the midst of a giggle (that made him sway back from the door, then touch it, then let his gloved fingers fall again, still moving), “Come on now, come on! Cut it out! Cut it out now—don’t spoil my entrance ... !” Then silence for a dozen breaths.

The door opened; she slipped out; the door clicked to behind.

She wore white gloves.

She wore white boots.

Her long skirt and high-necked bodice were white. Full white sleeves draped her wrists. She reached up and pulled the white cloak around her shoulders. Its paler than ivory folds swept around. Over her head was a full-head mask: white veils hung below the eyes; the icy globe was a-glitter with white sequins. White plumes rose above it, as from some albino peacock.

“Now—” The veil fluttered with her breath—“we can roam the labyrinths of honesty and deceit, searching out the illusive centers of our being by a detailed examination of the shift and glitter of our own, protean surfaces—” She turned back to the door and called:

“Don’t worry, I’ll be back in time for the performance.”

A girl’s muffled voice: “You better be!”

The white mask turned to him, with a mumbled, “—really ... !” A settling breath, and veils settled.

“Now, proofed in light and light’s absence, we can begin our wonderings—” Her gloved fingers fell from her white-scarved throat, came toward his.

He took them.

They walked along the corridor that, once more, became high, roofless street.

“Now. What do you want to know about me?”

After moments, she said: “Go on. Any way you can.”

Moments later, he said: “I’m ... not happy in the world I live in.”

“This world—” She moved a white glove across the darkness before them—“that is not a world, but a moon?”

“It’ll do. They ... they make it so easy for you—all you have to do is know what you want: no twenty-first-century-style philosophical oppression; no twentieth-century-style sexual oppression; no nineteenth-century-style economic oppression. No eighteenth-century-style—”

“There was philosophical oppression in the eighteenth century and sexual oppression in the twenty-first. And they’ve all had their share of economic oppression—”

“But we’re talking about our world. This world. The best of all possible—”

“An awful lot of people who live around here are wasting an awful lot of chalk, paint, duplicating paper, and general political energy trying to convince people that it is nowhere
near
the best. Bron, there’s a
war
on—”

“And we’re not in it—yet. Spike, there’s a lot of people around where I live—and the sky is a very different color over there—who honestly believe if the people you’re talking about would mind their own business, it would put us all a little closer to that world.”

Her grip on his hand loosened. “I live in the u-1 sector. You don’t. We won’t argue about that now.”

It tightened again.

“And what I’m talking about is the same both places. If you’re gay, you find a gay co-operative; if you’re straight, you go find yourself one of the male/female co-operatives where everything is all
gemiltlichkeit
and community consciousness; and there’s every combination in between—”

“I’ve always thought the division we use out here of humanity into forty or fifty basic sexes, falling loosely into nine categories, four homophilic—”

“What?”

“You mean you never punched Sex on General Info when you were ten? Then you were probably the only ten-year-old who didn’t.—Oh, but if you grew up on Mars ... Homophilic means no matter who or what you like to screw, you prefer to live and have friends primarily from your own sex. The other five are heterophilic.” (Of course, he knew the terms; of course he’d punched sex; frankly, the whole theory had struck him as clever first and then totally artificial.) “I mean, when you have forty or fifty sexes, and twice as many religions, however you arrange them, you’re bound to have a place it’s fairly easy to have a giggle at. But it’s also a pretty pleasant place to live, at least on that level.”

“Sure. If you want to manacle eighteen-year-old boys to the wall and pierce their nipples with red-hot needles—”

“They better be red-hot.” From veils and glitter, her voice projected a smile too intricately mysterious to picture. “Otherwise, you might start an infection!”

“They could be ice-cold! The point is, after work, you can always drop in to the place where the eighteen-year-old boys who happen to be into that sort of thing—red-hot needles on the second floor, ice-cold ones on the third—have all gotten together in a mutually beneficial alliance where you and they, and your Labrador retriever, if she’s what it takes to get you off, can all meet one another on a footing of cooperation, mutual benefit, and respect.”

“And the kennel’s on the first floor?”

“And there’s one here in your unit, and one in mine, and probably a dozen more throughout the city. And if you’re just not satisfied with the amount or quality of eighteen-year-old boys that week, you can make an appointment to have your preferences switched. And while you are at it, if you find your own body distasteful, you can have it regenerated, dyed green or heliotrope, padded out here, slimmed down there—” Another intersection put them on another elevated walkway. “And if you’re just too jaded for any of it, you can turn to the solace of religion and let your body mortify any way it wants while you concentrate on whatever your idea of Higher Things happens to be, in the sure knowledge that when you’re tired of that, there’s a diagnostic computer waiting with soup and a snifter in the wings to put you back together. One of my bosses, at the office, he has a family commune ... out on the Ring.”

“Sounds elegant ... Did you say
in
the Ring or
on
the Ring?” because the Ring (which was not a ring, but a sort of scalloped endocycloid along the outer edge of the city), comprised the most lavish communal complexes in Tethys. (Tethys’s governing families, when elected, traditionally moved to the Ring’s London Point.) The venerable serial communes that had grown up with the city for nearly ninety years were located on the Ring’s outer edge—rather than
in
the Ring, which was the amorphous neighborhood extending an urban-unit or two inside, but still posh by proximity.

“On.”

“Super-elegant!”

“And he’s the type who wouldn’t give a presover-eignty franq for all your slogan-writing, pamphleteering malcontents. There’s a guy in my co-op who’s actually
in
the government, and on what I’m sure you would consider the wrong side, too: he probably thinks more of the malcontents than Philip does.” Over the railing, to their right, far away in darkness, a transport trundled. “Last Sovereignty Day, Philip had a big party out at his place—”

“That was patriotic!”

“—with all his colleagues, and all the colleagues of all the others in his commune. You should have seen it—”

“A couple of times I’ve been blessed with friends
in
the Ring—which is only a street or so away and that was pretty stunning.”

“There’s thirteen in his commune—”

“A regular coven!”

“—not counting children. Three of the women and two of the men—one, a really obnoxious faggot named Danny—are in
the
absolutely highest credit slot.”

“I’m surprised all thirteen of them aren’t.”

“Philip is three slots higher than I am and is always talking about what a bum the rest of the family thinks he is. They’ve got at least two dozen rooms, half of them great circular things, with sweeping stairways and transparent west walls looking in among the city’s towers with the shield ablaze overhead, and transparent east walls looking out over the ice-crags, with real stars in the real sky—”

“Shades of the place I called home—”

“Duplex recreation rooms; garden rooms; swimming pools—”

“You did say
pools,
with an V ... ?”

“Three that I remember. One with its own waterfall, splattering and splashing down from the pool upstairs. Their kids are so damned well-behaved and precocious—and a third of them so obviously Philip’s you wonder if they have him around for anything else. And people drinking and swimming and eating all over the place and asking, ‘Did you hire any cooking craftsmen to help you with all this?’ and some very sleek lady of the commune in lots of pearls and very little else saying, ‘Oh, no, that’s not the way we do things on the Ring,’ and, with this amazing smile; ‘That’s how they’d do it over
there
...’

nodding
in
the Ring’s direction. And a gaggle of seven—and eight-year-olds being herded around by a little buck-naked oriental and someone says, ‘Oh, are you their nurse?’ and, with this big, oriental smile:

‘No, I’m one of the fathers,’ which, I suppose, if you’d looked twice would have been as obvious as Philip, and this one’s into interstellar graviat-rics—”

“The other top-slotter?”

“You guessed it. And just to try being rude, you ask another lady of the commune, who’s been introduced to you as an Enforcement Commissioner in the Executive Department, if she’s in the top slot too—”

“Two down from the top, I’d guess—”

“And she says, ‘No, I’m two down from the top. What slot are
you
in—’”

“What slot
are
you in?”

“I’ve never been any higher than fifteenth from the top, and I don’t see any reason to be higher. Only she’s already asking me if I wouldn’t like to go for a swim with her? The heated pool’s wpstairs; and if we want a chilly plunge we can just fall in right here. And is the music hired? No, it’s by their two oldest daughters, who’re just terribly creative when it comes to things like music and cooking and automotive physics. Then you meet another beautiful woman with two children—one of them obviously Philip’s—calling her ‘Ma’ and playing together in the sand so you ask, ‘Are you part of the commune too?’ and she laughs and says, ‘Oh, no. I used to be, a few years ago, but I’ve separated. I’m out now, on Neriad. But we just came in for the party. I wouldn’t have
missed
it! The kids were always so happy here!’ It was all so healthy and accepting and wholesome and elegant you wanted to vomit—I did, actually, on about my tenth glass of something awfully strong; and all over some weird-looking art object I figured would be difficult to replace and the worse for it. And sure enough, there’s Philip, a kid on his shoulders, with his saggy left tit and one of his women, Alice, with a kid on hers—she’s the nigger with the tattoos—smiling and holding my head and saying, ‘Here, take this pill. You’ll feel better in a minute. Really. Oh, don’t worry about
that!
You’re not the only one.’ I mean, after a while, you
want
to be the only one—some way, some form, some how ... Tattoos? / had tattoos when I was a kid. And I had ’em removed, too.

The hard way. Toward the end I guess I fell into the pool and about five people pulled me out and I suppose I was just angry—not to mention drunk again-Just do something really outrageous—there was one woman there named Marny who was really nice—I started talking about how Fd fuck anybody there for five franqs; just five franqs, and I’ll show any one of you here heaven—”

“Mmmmm,” the Spike said.

“Only who should be there too but that Danny character; with a big grin, he says; ‘Hey,
Vm
into that, from time to time. Five franqs? I’ll take you up!’ I just looked at him, you know, and I said, ‘Not
you,
cock-sucker. What about one of your women?’ I mean I just wanted to break through,
some
how. You
know
what he say’s to me, with this very concerned look, like you’ve asked him to play one of his old thirty-three recordings, but he knows it’s got a scratch? ‘Well, I don’t really think any of our women are into that, right now—except
possibly
Joan. If you’ll just wait a moment, I’ll run and ask,’ and goes dashing up one of those incredible stairways with the incredible view of the ice outside. Of course Philip is already back by this time, and I’m trying to tell these women, I mean I
am
a good lay. A
really
good lay. Professional quality—I
was
a professional. You don’t even
have
any professionals out here! I mean, I could make it
work
for me. And Philip, who must be almost as drunk as I am, is saying, ‘Yeah, I was into hustling—Marny and I both were when we were kids and hitchhiking around. First time she was on the Earth and I was on Luna we did it for a few months. The illegal kind, I think. Only I can never remember on Earth which kinds
are
illegal. It’s great for the body. But it’s a little hard
on
the mind.’ He said it was like it was playing tennis all the time and never getting a chance to talk to anybody except over the net! I mean, can you imagine that? From Philip? If I hadn’t been so drunk, I probably would’ve been surprised. As it was, I guess I realized it was just one more annoyance I was going to have to live in the same world with, maybe chuckle at from time to time. No matter how much puking I did.” The walkway led them around a gentle curve. “After that, I
had
to leave. No logic or metalogic could have made me stay. It was all perfect, beautiful, without a crack or a seam. Any blow you struck was absorbed and became one with the structure. Walking back from the Ring—Philip had asked didn’t I want to wait for Joan and, when I said no, he made me take another pill; they work—I kept on wanting to cry.”

“Why?”

“It was beautiful, whole, harmonious, radiant—it was a family I’d have given my left testicle—hell, both of them—to be a daughter or a son to. What a place to have grown up in, secure that you are loved whatever you do, whatever you are, and with all the knowledge and self-assurance it would give you while you decided what that was. But the great lie those people hold out, whether they’re in a commune or a co-op—and this, I suppose, when all is said and done, is why I hate them—even the ones I like, like Audri (who’s my other boss), is: Anyone can have it, be a part of it, bask in its radiance, and be one with the radiating element itself—oh, perhaps not everyone can have it at an address within shoulder-rubbing distance of London Point, but somewhere, someplace, it’s waiting for you ... if not in a family commune, then in a work commune like your theater company, if not in a commune, then at a ... well, a heterophilic co-op; if not at a heterophilic co-op, then at a homophilic one. Somewhere, in your sector or in mine, in this unit or in that one, there it is: pleasure, community, respect—all you have to do is know the kind, and how much of it, and to what extent you want it. That’s all.” He had almost cried coming back to his licensed sector co-op that morning. He almost cried now. “But what happens to those of us who
don’t
know? What happens to those of us who have problems and don’t know
why
we have the problems we do? What happens to the ones of us in whom even the part that wants has lost, through atrophy, all connection with articulate reason. Decide what you like and go
get
it? Well, what about the ones of us who only know what we
don’t
like? I know I didn’t like your Miriamne friend! I know I didn’t want to work with her. I got her kicked out of her job this morning. I don’t know how
any
of those things came about. And I don’t want to know. But I don’t regret it,
one bit!
I maybe have—for a minute—but I don’t now. And I don’t want to.”