Triton (Trouble on Triton) (11 page)

PLANT YOUR FEET ON IT FIRMLY! THIS ONE
AIN’T
GREEN CHEESE!

Below it clumsy arrows pointed to the ground. (In black chalk, someone had scrawled across one side of the slogan: “that’s a bit difficult if they keep cutting the gravity” with several black arrows pointing toward the last, day-glo exclamation point.)

“Believe me, in Pittsburgh, that’s
just
how they do.” (Enforcement-agents at Tethys had, fifteen years ago, been almost all women, hence the “e-girl” nickname. With changing standards, and the migrations of the recent decade and a half, by now the force was almost a third male. But the name persisted, and, as Chief Enforcement Officer Phyllis Freddy had once explained on a public-channel culture survey to a smiling interviewer, and thereby cooled the last humor out of a joke that had never been more than tepid:

“Look, an e-girl is a girl, I don’t care if she’s a man
or
a woman!”) “Really. I mean, I know what I’m talking about. Now put it away or give it here, huh?”

Bron glanced at Miriamne again (who was watching quietly), then handed over the flyer. It followed the others into the sack.

‘Thanks.” The black-clad agent pushed the papers down further. “I mean, you come out here to the moons and you take a job as a girl because it’s what you know how to do, it’s what you’ve been trained for—and believe me, it’s a lot easier here than it is in Pittsburgh ...
or
Nangking. I know ’cause I’ve worked in both—I mean you take the job because you want to
be
a girl—” He stepped by Bron, bent down, and swept up another handful from the papers fluttering along the ground—“and what do you end up? A garbage man!”

Miriamne started walking again, arms still folded. Bron walked too.

Blowing paper (and papers crumpled and crushed) echoed in the underpass.

On the dark walk, beside the rail, Miriamne turned left.

Right, bright, melding colors caught Bron’s eye:

An ego-booster stood by the gritty wall some dozen feet down. Something was wrong with it.

“Excuse me,” Bron called. “Can you wait up a moment?”

He walked toward it.

Someone had defaced it—probably with the same aerosol spray that the “green cheese” slogan had been written with on the underpass tiles. Against the normally melting hues, it was hard to tell which was booth and which was defacement; the only thing that made him sure was the legend above the entrance (only “your” and half of “society” showed), splotched out with red splatter. The canvas had been yanked loose from its runners at one end; he pushed it back. Inside was streaked scarlet. Had some religious cult-ist chosen this booth in which to perform self-mutilation—?

It was only vandalism.

The screen was caved, the red too bright for blood. The token slot was plastered over with half-chewed Protyyn, or worse. The lips of the card slip were pried.

“I guess,” Bron mused, “last night just made people a little more annoyed about these things ...”

Miriamne, somewhere just behind his shoulder, said, “That’s been like that four months. You just noticed it?” Then she said: “Look, I don’t mean to be impolite. But one reason I wanted to leave a few minutes early is that I’d like to try and catch a friend of mine at the co-op—it’s rather important to me.”

She smiled. “An affair of the heart, if you will ... ? If you don’t mind, I’ll just go on—”

“No—” Bron said, turning. “I mean, I don’t mind. But I—”

Miriamne had already started walking.

Bron caught up. “I mean, I thought I might stop by and see if Spike—the Spike was there. I’d wanted to ... well, tell her how much I liked her theater piece—unless of course they’re out somewhere performing ... ?”

“No,” Miriamne said. “Not tonight. They may be rehearsing though.” She uncrossed her arms, hooked one chrome-nailed thumb on her chrome waist-cinch. “From a couple of things she said, I wouldn’t be surprised if she was rather glad to see you,” which, as he hurried on (sometimes silently beside her, sometimes silently behind), made him bubblingly happy.

Dark streets, here and there slashed by a sodium light-tube set upright in a wall-holder (the bottom few inches of most of them were completely grimed over), gave way to narrower alleys. The glowing red coordinate numbers and letters, in their little frames above him, by now had so many superscripts and subscripts you’d really need a wrist calculator to figure out exactly where you were. They went up some ringing metal steps between two walls maybe twenty inches apart, into a tunnel that was dead black, cool, damp, and whose roof (Bron knew it was filthy) kept brushing his hair.

“This way—” Miriamne said, muffled by dark walls—“I know I’m taking you by a pretty grim shortcut. But I’m in a hurry.”

He went ‘this way,’ bumped his shoulder on the corner of the turnoff; while he rubbed it, ahead a line of orange light opened beside Miriamne, sweeping her into broad-hipped silhouette.

“In here—” which was a circular room with a single light-pole in the center, floor to ceiling. “This is Three Fires’ visitors’ lounge. I know it’s pretty bare—” Bunk beds against the wall with blue plastic sleeping pads; a few floor cushions; some low shelves, on which were books. (How quaint, he thought. How u-1.) There was a reader beside the bed, but nothing like a file drawer for a library. (Which was also, he reflected, very u-1. The books, of course, would all be poetry.) “We don’t have many visitors,”

Miriamne explained. “I’ll go send the Spike down—you’ll excuse me if I don’t come back. But I really do want to catch my friend ... If she’s still here. If the Spike’s not in, someone will come up and tell you. I’ll see you at work tomorrow.” She nodded.

“Thanks.” Bron nodded after her, sitting on the bottom bunk, only now realizing with certainty that

“her friend” was not the Spike after all. The orange plastic door, clicking bearings, closed on an image of her rocking waist-cinch, wide hips below and bare flesh above. Behind Bron’s smile, a haze of hostility, with him since they’d entered the underpass, broke up, and drifted away.

He let out his breath, sat back on the air-filled pad, considered it again now that it was gone, and thought:

I can’t have that crazed lesbian in my office. Look how she makes me feel even knowing she lives in the same
co-op
with her! Bron (like most people) thought of jealousy as an irrational emotion. But it was also a real one. And he felt it infrequently enough to respect it when he did. I’ll ask Audri (or Philip? No, Audri) to
get
her transferred to another department ... She catches on quick and I could use someone with a brain to get that Day Star-minus nonsense into shape. But that’s not the point, he decided. A transfer. Yes. I’ll—

“Hello!” a familiar voice said, directly above him.

He looked up. Inset in the ceiling was a speaker. “Eh ... hello?”

“I’m on my way—”

“You don’t have to rush for—” but, hearing clicks, he looked down as the bright orange door finished rolling into the dull orange wall.

“Oh ...”

“Hi, there!” She walked into the room. “What a surprise.” Loose, red pants flapped at her bare ankles. From her waist, black suspenders crossed between her breasts (there brass clips hooked a large, red, plastic R ... he had no idea why) and went up over her shoulders. She stopped with her hands against her thighs, nails clean of gold now, slightly dirty and endearing, lips unrouged and charming. “You could have knocked me over with an eyelash when Miriamne told me you were here—I was all set to spend the evening going over forty-six micro-scenarios that I know, without looking, are not our kind of thing at all. People keep giving us things that are minute-long gimmicks, instead of minute-long theater ... you know what I mean? That’s why we end up creating most of our own works. But I always feel I have to consider unsolicited material, anyway, just in case. My mistake was telling the endowment people I would devote a certain amount of energy to it. Some weeks you just feel less like considering them than others. And this is one of them.” She sat down on the bed beside him—“We’ve been rehearsing a new piece all afternoon that goes into production tomorrow. We just broke off half an hour ago—” and placed her hand affectionately on his leg, little and ring fingers together, middle and forefingers together, with a V between, which on Earth, and the Moon, and Mars, and Io, and Europa, and
Ganymede,
and Callisto, and Iapetus, and Galileo, and Neriad, and Triton, in co-op and commune, park, bar, public walk and private soiree, was the socially acceptable way for men, women, children, and several of the genetically engineered higher animals to indicate: I am sexually interested.

“Would you like to come back to my room?” she asked.

For the third time that day his heart started to thud. “Urn ...” he said. “I mean ... yeah. I mean, if you

... sure. Yeah. Please ...”

She clapped her knees.

He almost grabbed her hand back.

“Come on, let’s go.” She stood up, smiling. “I share the room with Windy—our acrobat. And Charo—that’s our guitar player. It probably wouldn’t bother you, their being there. But it would me—I’m a bit peculiar. I asked them to brave the steely-eyed glances of the commons room for a couple of hours. These single-sex unspecified-preference co-ops are like living on top of an iceberg!”

“Yeah,” he said, following her through the orange doorway, through halls, down staircases, along corridors. “I live in one too.”

“I mean,” she said, stopping by a room door, and glancing back at him, “it’s awfully nice of Three Fires to take us in at all—the company’s got men and women in it, of all persuasions. But wow! The psychic chill!” And then: “You do? Well!” She pressed her thumb against the circular I.D. plate on the door (which seemed as quaint as the books in the visitors’ lounge). “I mean—” she said, in a tone that told him she was politely picking up another thread of thought—“if Windy and Charo just sat around and read, I suppose it wouldn’t be so bad. But they’re always practicing. Both of them. I just find it distracting.”

The door opened.

She stepped in.

He followed.

The bed was triple-sized and rumpled.

“Really, when Miriamne told me that
you
were her boss ...”

He laughed, completely delighted. “What did she say about me?”

She glanced back at him, considered—with her tongue a small knob in her cheek: “That you tried hard.” She turned before the bed, unsnapped a suspender that flopped down against the red pants. “I took it as a recommendation.”

Stepping toward her, he wondered fleetingly if something terrible might happen. It didn’t.

They made love.

Afterward, she made lazy suggestions about getting back to her scripts. But, with one thing and another, they made love again—after which, to his astonishment, he broke out crying. Tears still brimming, he tried to laugh them away, ultimately rather proud of himself for the openness of his emotions—whatever the hell they were ... Obviously moved, she cradled his head in her lap, and asked,

“What is it? There, there, what’s the matter?”

Still laughing, still crying, he said: “I don’t know. I really don’t. This doesn’t happen to me very often. Really.” It had happened to him exactly twice before, both times when he was twenty, both times with short, dark, small-boned, broad-hipped women at least fifteen years older than he was. They made love again.

“You know,” she said at last, stretching in his arms, “You really are quite lovely. Where—” and one arm went out over the side of the bed—“did you learn to do that?”

Bron turned over on his stomach (quite recovered from his crying jag) smiling: “I told you once, actually. But you’ve probably forgotten.”

“Mmmm?” She glanced at him.

“Now
you’re
probably the type to hold it against me,” he said, not believing it a moment. These wholesome Outer Satelliters were desperately accepting of any World-bound decadence; it supplied some sort of
frisson,
he suspected, ordinarily missing from their small-world lives.

“Dear heart—” she rolled against him—“everyone’s a type.”

Raising his eyebrow, Bron looked down at the hollow between her neck’s ligaments. “From the age of ... well, on and off between the ages of eighteen and—oh, about twenty-three, my sexual services could be purchased at a place in Bellona called—I kid you not—the Flesh Pit.”

“By who?” She cocked her head. “Women?”

“Yes. Women—Oh, it was a fine, upstanding, highly-taxed, government-approved job.”

“Taxes,” she said. “Yes. I’ve heard worlds are like that—” Suddenly she threw an arm over his shoulder. “What was it like? I mean, did you sit in a cage and get selected by prowling creatures with dilated pupils, silver eyelids, and cutaway veils?”

“Not quite.” Bron laughed. “Oh, we got a few of the cutaway-veil set. But they’re pretty much restricted to old movies and ancient Annie-shows. Not all, though—my gold eyebrow used to really turn some of them on. But then, they knew what it meant.

“What does it mean?”

“Nothing pleasant. Come on. Give us a snuggle.”

She snuggled. “Living on a world always sounded so romantic to me. I grew up on the Gannymede icefields. I’m practically a provincial bumpkin compared to you. Was it awful—being a prostitute and paying taxes and things? Awful to your psyche, I mean?”

“No ... Sexually, at any rate, after a couple of A-seventy-nine forms, you just got a pretty good idea of who you really were.”

“Did you have to go with
any
woman who would pay?”

He began to suspect the idea turned her on and considered beginning an erotic monologue he had actually employed with various women out here that (actually) contained only a few fantasies of omission: it ended with his being mauled by a dozen women in a locked room, where he’d been unwittingly lured, and leaving bruised, exhausted, drained; it could usually be count—

ed on to incite more lovemaking. But he was curious about her curiosity. “For all practical purposes I did. But the Pit was there for its customers, so they were pretty efficient about the guys they hired. When you apply for a job like that the first time ... well, you fill out a lot of performance forms, take a lot of response tests and what have you. I mean, it wouldn’t really do to send a woman to a guy who just couldn’t get it up for her—assuming that’s what she was into; and a good quarter of the clients weren’t, really.”